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What should we learn from Florida? What does money buy a campaign — and what doesn’t it? How did a candidate get outspent 16:1 and win? What about Alaska — can Mary Peltola flip a Senate seat there? And what under-the-radar downballot races do Reed think might surprise folks this cycle?

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Run for Something has helped nearly 1,700 young people to local office, with candidates focussed on the problems voters actually live with: housing, childcare, healthcare, schools, roads, and the general cost of living.

But this is bigger than one election. Edwin and Amanda dig into the long game of building political power and with young people demanding answers the old political guard don’t have, a new generation is stepping up with their vision of what politics can be. The new generation isn’t going to sit around and wait while Washington pretends to fix things. They’re getting involved where they live and building trust with local voters, laying the groundwork for a stronger Democratic future.

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Join Edwin Eisendrath and Amanda Litman as they discuss the future of democracy on It’s the Democracy, Stupid, right here on Lincoln Square.

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I saw an article earlier this week on the end of beauty, and the theme triggered something in me, an itch to write about it, but I couldn’t quite nail the approach.

Then I drove past a house yesterday on a road in one of Tallahassee’s old neighborhoods, the kind known for gracious homes set far back from a canopy road, live oaks arching overhead burdened with old stories and Spanish moss.

The street once housed a former U.S. senator, a dozen wealthy lobbyists, a scattering of doctors, and old money, with a sort of particular Old Florida charm sustained by an unspoken compact among the neighbors: a desire for beauty, for presence, a memory of a time when no one was ashamed to live in an older home, creaky floors, questionable wiring and all.

But one of the houses I loved on that road is gone, replaced by an enormous black-and-white modernist box with all the aesthetic grandeur of a stack of shipping containers dropped from a crane. A driveway the size of a carrier deck has been poured across what was a pine-and-oak-shaded lawn. The house it replaced wasn’t even the most spectacular home on the road, but I felt its loss.

This phenomenon is by no means exclusive to my town. Across America, old homes in soft, quiet, green neighborhoods are being replaced by soulless black-and-white boxes, stark, blunt, and unwelcoming. Inside, bright white walls and bright white lights feel like an emergency room, not a home, and cavernous spaces offer not a single spot of warmth or comfort. The culture that accepts them as beautiful has lost something in its soul.

We lost so much in this grotesque era that beauty and architectural grace may seem to some to be low on the list. The nation has been rendered like a hog, our politics turned into ugly butchery and filth. Our financial system is an extraction tool, milking the old middle- and working-class cow one last time.

But for some reason this week, I’ve wondered more than I have in the past about the loss of an appreciation for beauty. It isn’t just Trump’s natural vulgarity and tastelessness rippling down into the culture, though that’s a part of it.

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Meanwhile, internal divisions among conservatives, including Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie, could create an opening for a potential third-party movement to gain traction and challenge Trump’s influence over the Republican Party.

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SiriusXM Progress host Michelangelo Signorile collaborates with Lincoln Square and welcomes Heather “Digby” Parton of Salon to discuss the consequences of the Trump administration’s increasingly transactional approach to foreign policy and its growing alienation of both supporters and critics. And they also discuss his controversial aide, Natalie Harp.

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But that doesn’t mean no one’s fighting back. There are grassroots campaigns popping up all over the country not to mention the parents organizing against right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty. Despite the fear and intimidation coming from the Trump administration, regular people are standing up and fighting for the rest of us making it clear that the people still have power when we show up, organize, and refuse to be governed by fear.

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Since Donald Trump began doing dirty business alongside his father in the late 1970s, most Americans had the luxury of treating him the way you treat a jackass yelling into a Bluetooth headset at the airport: irritating if he happened to be near you, but otherwise somebody else’s problem. His deals could be shady, his ethics could bend like warm plastic, and none of it necessarily had to occupy much real estate in our heads. He was rich, loud, geographically distant, and—most importantly—politically irrelevant.

By the 1980s, though, Trump was becoming a national character. This was the era of Wall Street excess, conspicuous consumption, hostile takeovers, cocaine optimism, and enough shoulder pads to interfere with commercial aviation. Trump fit the moment almost too perfectly. He appeared on television, gave interviews, and popped up in films like Ghosts Can’t Do It, playing the role he had already spent years perfecting: Donald Trump.

But an eight-year-old kid like me growing up in South Central Los Angeles had no particular reason to give a damn about him. Trump could be as crooked, vain, tacky, or morally repellent as he wanted somewhere across the country, behind a velvet rope guarded by somebody named Chip. He was New York’s problem. I had cartoons to watch.

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What makes that period even more grotesque in retrospect is the contrast between the mythology Trump was building around himself and the experiences of people who had actually sacrificed something for the country. Plenty of Vietnam veterans were back home living ordinary lives while carrying trauma that America was still remarkably uncomfortable discussing. Trump, meanwhile, had avoided military service and would later go on Howard Stern and joke that navigating his sex life without contracting a sexually transmitted disease had been his own “personal Vietnam.” He described himself, remarkably, as something like a brave soldier for surviving the dating scene without catching anything.

Imagine having the historical Vietnam War available as a reference point and deciding the Tet Offensive was basically comparable to whether you remembered to use protection at Studio 54.

That tells you quite a bit about the man even before politics enters the picture. Men who had actually been shot at were carrying memories they sometimes could not talk about. Trump was on the radio comparing gonorrhea avoidance to jungle warfare and handing himself a Purple Heart for remaining asymptomatic. Yet even then, most of us still had the luxury of ignoring him. He showed up on Oprah, periodically teased a presidential run, and generally behaved like a man auditioning for a political future nobody had yet been reckless enough to give him.

By the 1990s, the mythology was fully operational. Trump was not merely wealthy; he was performing wealth. His public persona had become a commercial product—part businessman, part tabloid fixture, part self-authored legend, part guy who could lose money in a casino and somehow still convince people he had unlocked capitalism.

None of that made him harmless. In 1989, he took out full-page newspaper advertisements demanding the return of the death penalty as New York convulsed over the Central Park Five case, targeting five Black and Latino teenagers who were later exonerated. Trump has never meaningfully apologized for his role in inflaming that hysteria. It was ugly. It was cruel. It was evil. But for most of the country, it was still possible to process it as Donald Trump doing Donald Trump shit: a rich asshole saying something monstrous in New York while everybody else went about their day.

Then came The Apprentice in the 2000s, and the mythology acquired a weekly time slot.

NBC did not merely give Trump another television vehicle. It helped launder a deeply uneven business record into the image of an omniscient executive. Every week, millions of Americans watched contestants stand before a man presented as the final authority on competence, success, leadership, negotiation, and apparently whether somebody had arranged a cupcake display correctly.

The problem, of course, was that reality television was doing what reality television does: manufacturing reality.

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"I think what we're seeing is that a stripping away ... his cognitive decline is actually revealing who he's been all along."

— Mary Trump on her uncle, Donald Trump

If you missed this episode of Six Questions, you’ll want to tune in, as host Stephen Beschloss speaks with clinical psychologist Mary Trump who’s in a unique position to analyze Donald Trump’s mental state and its national impact.

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In Mary Trump’s opinion, he is experiencing accelerating cognitive decline and dementia, which amplifies his existing narcissism, lack of impulse control, and fear of humiliation.

“There’s no worst. He will always get worse,” Mary says.

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And in a special election in Pennsylvania, a Democrat flipped a Trump +18 state House district. Is this a sign that celebrated political author Joe Klein’s centrism is finally flexing its political might, or is Democratic strategist Joe Trippi right that this is still a change-wave election?

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What do you think? And who would you like to see the Joes interview next? Tell us in the comments!

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He also took a look at the growing national security risks surrounding Iran, questioning America’s military readiness especially with Trump pushing our servicemembers to the brink on the USS Lincoln.

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Turning to ICE, a proposed $20 million contract for electric shock gloves raises serious questions about the organization’s use of force and accountability. It gets worse when you remember ICE promised to equip all agents with body cameras, but has been delaying them for months.

With ICE calling on local police to help deportation efforts, it’s clear ICE needs to refocus their efforts into acting like an actual federal agency that serves the public instead of pretending they’re comic book villains.

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No. It is a simple word. A common word. No.

There was a time when Republicans used the word frequently. No, we will not hold hearings on an Obama nominee to the Supreme Court. No, we will not protect voting rights. No, we will not protect the environment. No, we will not fund healthcare, or break up monopolies, or tax the rich.

But now, when Donald Trump’s insanity has the country yearning for no, the Republicans can’t seem to remember the word.

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In the past few days, Donald Trump has switched sides on the Korean Peninsula, threatened to bomb Oman, and took another, possibly fatal, shot at an already wounded NATO. None of these make America stronger. None contributes to human freedom. All remain deeply unpopular. Taken together, these acts increase the chances of a global conflict of unimaginable consequence.

Yet Republicans can’t say no.

Worries that the United States is abandoning our Asian allies as the entire military apparatus heads to the Gulf are not new. But now it appears that abandonment is purposeful. Donald Trump ordered Pete Hegseth to back off long-planned joint military exercises with South Korea while simultaneously boasting of his relationship with North Korea’s dictator, whom he called “unthreatening and respectful.”

That is either a lie or a delusion. North Korea sent troops to fight against Ukraine, and it remains a major supplier of arms to Iran and to its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Not a single Republican Senator has said no.

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Oman is a small, peaceful and beautiful nation that sits between larger contentious neighbors Saudi Arabia and Iran. It has developed defense cooperation arrangements with both the United States and Great Britain. Before the current war, it played a mediator role. It has never threatened its neighbors. It is no threat to the United States.

Now, as the 60-day cease fire — a deal that proved false from the start — expires, Trump is threatening to expand the war and “bomb the shit” out of Oman.

When Richard Nixon illegally expanded the Vietnam War and bombed neighboring Cambodia, Congress cut off funding and brought that atrocity to an end. They knew how to say no.

This week, Pete Hegseth sent NATO allies a questionnaire. As former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Ivo Daalder reports, it does not ask about military posture, readiness, or similar matters. Instead, it asks whether each country is “publicly supportive” of Donald Trump. Hegseth sent the questionnaire directly to each NATO capital, not to NATO itself, in an effort to separate individual members from the alliance.

NATO, of course, has kept Europe free from Soviet, and then Russian tyranny. It continues to support Ukraine as the front line of this ongoing battle. Vladimir Putin has long hated NATO and worked tirelessly to undermine it. Republicans in the United States can’t say no, especially when Putin says nyet.

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But they must. These acts undermine peace and security on a global scale, making the possibility of a truly unthinkable global conflict more, not less likely.

Thank goodness American voters will have a say soon. Unlike Trump or his GOP, we are more than capable of saying no to tyrants.

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Despite her loss, Hong’s campaign demonstrated the power of grassroots engagement, sparking a broader discussion about how progressive Democrats can counter the Republican Party by exposing its billionaire donors and showing how their influence affects the general public.

Longtime Wisconsin journalist and former state legislator Pat Kreitlow joined Susan J. Demas to discuss big polling misses in the Midwest and what that means for the midterms. The Editor of UpNorthNews also noted that Democrats seem to be prioritizing defeating Republicans rather than fighting among themselves.

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Progressive. Centrist. Center-left. The message is we need to elect Democrats. Period. As Pat notes, Republicans have “diabolically” gerrymandered Wisconsin. That could change if Dems win a trifecta in November.

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McGrath, who has run for Senate in her native Kentucky as a Democrat, breaks down three ways this plays out: with Trump’s threats of a disastrous escalation targeting civilian infrastructure, a peace deal that hands Iran everything it wants, or a endless loop of volatile threats that leaves troops stranded in limbo and gas prices soaring — which is where we’re at right now.

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Tune in for an expert look at the Iran quagmire. And check out McGrath’s podcast, Truth in the Barrel, where she and fellow military veterans break down the biggest national security stories of the week.

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A lot of the focus in the midterms has been on new faces in the Democratic Party, particularly on the DSA and progressive side.

But Rick and Matthew agree that it’s not where candidates fall on the political spectrum — it simply boils down to the quality of their message, like how effectively they’re running on the economy and accountability.

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The Department of Homeland Security is about to put electric shock gloves in the wrong hands.

Last week, we learned that the various DHS alphabet soup agencies, including ICE, HSI, ERO and Border Patrol, will receive — from a no-bid contract, as much as $20 million worth of CTG-5 Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter “G.L.O.VE.” devices described in acquisition documents as “conductive distraction and de-escalation” tools. These gloves may look like typical tactical attire, but when activated by an agent who makes skin contact with someone, they inflict immediate and debilitating pain via 380 volts of electricity.

Based on DHS’s track record of violence, deception, abysmal background vetting, training, and oversight, deployment of these gloves is likely to make a bad situation worse.

During my 25-year law enforcement career, and still today, I’ve advocated for what police call “less than lethal” options aimed not only at reducing deadly shooting incidents but also at putting fewer officers directly in harms way. It’s true that shock gloves are less than lethal, but they are clearly also a use-of-force.

Nothing about today’s version of DHS convinces me it can be trusted with another use-of-force weapon in its arsenal. It strains credulity for Border Czar Tom Homan to claim that these gloves will be used as a “de-escalation” tool. De-escalation is all about slowing the pace, developing distance, communicating verbally, reducing perceived threat and trying to avoid physical altercations. A concealable pain-inducing gadget that police departments already describe as a “use-of-force” mechanism that they say triggers post-incident reporting and investigation, and that requires its user to be physically hands-on with a subject, is not de-escalating. Its very nature makes escalation easier, faster and less transparent.

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And back home, the damage is just as ugly. ICE is becoming a profit machine for private companies cashing in on detention, deportation, and new technology like shock gloves, while American sailors on the USS Lincoln endure long deployments and Trump just doesn't care. He said the deployments aren’t long enough. That’s what he thinks of our men and women in uniform.

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Accountability for this embarrassing chapter in our country can’t just stop with Trump and his administration. Susan argues that the companies profiting from his cruelty need to answer for it, too.

Check out more from Susan and Edwin right here on Lincoln Square.

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He knew that his protest might mean he would never again wear that uniform, but after everything he’d seen since January 20, 2025, he’d had enough.

He joined for a long conversation on the danger and the controversy behind his protest — not all service members stand behind his actions — and what real patriotism looks like with fascism creeping into the White House.

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But the threat goes beyond campaign finance. Frank and Line looked at Bible verses showing up in DHS recruitment materials, government agencies promoting Christianity, and a growing effort to frame Christian influence as religious freedom. As the midterms approach, the separation of church and state is being tested from every direction.

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Protecting religious religious freedom means protecting everyone’s right to worship, or not worship, without the government picking a side. Don’t miss this conversation and let us know what you’re seeing in your community.

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There’s a particular kind of quiet in Big Bend National Park that can be hard to find anywhere else in the Lower 48.

It’s the hushed Chihuahuan Desert at night where the Milky Way seems close enough to touch, the surprising breeze at the summit of Emory Peak, and the power of the Rio Grande cutting through limestone canyons that took millions of years to carve. It’s one of the least-visited, least-crowded, most genuinely wild places the National Park Service protects.

And that’s precisely why Donald Trump has been trying to blow it up.

Last week, bulldozers rolled into Big Bend to begin clearing land for more than 100 miles of border wall, part of a Homeland Security plan spanning the entire 517-mile sector. Former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem waived 28 environmental and historic preservation laws, skipping the pesky process that would actually review what they’re about to destroy.

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Conservationists warn the mountainous terrain will likely require blasting — the same “blasting in roads” tactic already used on similar wall segments in Arizona. Big Bend’s famous dark skies, one of the last truly unpolluted views of the stars east of the Rockies, will get construction floodlights. The wildlife corridors that make the park a vital ecological crossroads would be upended as crews descend to pour miles of concrete.

Amid intense local protests, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection head on Monday finally announced the agency is “pausing” the wall’s construction.

But here’s the thing about Big Bend: it barely sees any border crossings (beyond hikers who want to enjoy a bit of respite from the sweltering heat in the charming village of Boquillas del Carmen). CBP recorded just 734 people stopped in the entire Big Bend sector this fiscal year — under 3% of all southern border encounters nationwide. Ronny Dodson, the Democratic Brewster County Sheriff, says crossings in his county are already down roughly 90% since the border closure, and his office has caught exactly one smuggler in three months.

Even local Republicans think this is insane. Terrell County Sheriff Thaddeus Cleveland calls the canyons “a God-made barrier” and wants surveillance technology instead of concrete. County Judge Greg Henington put it more bluntly: “The terrain itself is a wall. We don’t have a problem with monitoring the border. The volume’s not very high.”

This isn’t border security. It’s a wrecking ball looking for a reason to swing, wielded by an administration that waived the law in hopes that no one could stop it in time (to that end there is a lawsuit, but the courts haven’t blocked construction). It’s the Trump regime’s governing blueprint that we’ve seen over and over again, from DOGE killing USAID to border agents slaying Americans in our streets.

And let’s be clear: you can’t separate the damage they want to do to Big Bend from the violence against those the wall is supposedly being built to keep out. Trump’s deportation machine has now killed more people in ICE custody than at any point in two decades — 29 deaths since October alone, breaking the previous record of 28 set in 2004, with detention numbers higher than at any point since the agency was created. One of those deaths at a facility in El Paso was ruled a homicide.

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These are not abstractions. They are people who died in mass cages. What should frighten us all is that Stephen Miller (and Trump’s other henchmen) have meticulously studied and learned from his first term, which was still a human rights horror show. So they’ve been able to carry out their cruel and violent anti-immigration agenda with devastating efficiency, often by bulldozing the law — just like they’re trying to demolish one of our most treasured national parks.

I’ve written before about what this administration is doing to the national parks system — how Trump swapped Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth off the free-admission calendar to make room for his own birthday, DOGE taking a chainsaw to ranger staffing, and a president who can’t be bothered to pronounce Yosemite correctly while gutting the agency that runs it.

Big Bend is the same story with bulldozers instead of budget cuts.

But it’s also the clearest illustration yet of Trump’s bigger scam. He doesn’t see the National Park Service as a public trust. He sees it as just another slush fund for his vanity projects and fascist agenda.

Look at where the money is actually going. Big Bend is on the verge of being dynamited and the broader Park Service has hemorrhaged roughly a quarter of its permanent workforce — close to 2,000 employees gone in a single year. But Trump has funneled $423 million into White House grounds and National Mall projects in 2026 alone, up from $7.5 million in 2024.

That’s not a typo. The 80-year-old president has rerouted taxpayer dollars from the agency that protects wild lands in Yellowstone, Yosemite, Zion, and Rocky Mountain (where I was just hiking for the last week) toward pet projects to stroke his ego, acting like a man running out of time. Meanwhile, the parks are languishing with a $30 billion maintenance backlog (per his own Interior Secretary) that Trump has shown zero interest in fixing. I thought about that a lot while waiting in massive lines to enter the park and get advice from rangers at the visitor center.

“The National Park Service is being used as a piggy bank for Trump’s vanity projects,” Tim Whitehouse of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility told Meidas Touch. “One man’s whims have usurped the nation’s legitimate priorities,” added Charles Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, “by creating risks at historically and culturally significant places that were not at risk and ignoring significant and irreplaceable places that are actually threatened.”

You can see exactly what that looks like at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, where a $16 million renovation has become a national embarrassment (the no-bid contracts predictably resulted in peeling blue sealant and algae blooms).

Trump’s response wasn’t to admit his hand-picked contractors screwed up, of course. It was to blame vandals. Federal prosecutors actually filed felony charges against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn before quietly dropping them on July 31 (and admitting the damage came from “bungled installation,” not sabotage). The feds also scrapped misdemeanor charges against three others, leaving Trump to fume that U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro “choked” and “folded like an umbrella.”

Meanwhile, park rangers who are supposed to be protecting wilderness are increasingly deployed as ornamental security for the National Mall and Reflecting Pool. They’ve been reduced to a taxpayer-funded honor guard serving the president’s megalomania, instead of fulfilling their duties as stewards of public lands open to all.

In a scathing column in the Denver Post, former superintendent Bill Wade declared, “Never — not once in decades — have I witnessed such systematic degradation of the National Park Service under the thumb of President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.”

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This comes down to what Trump believes the government is for. And it’s not about public lands, the rule of law, or even the border security he claims to care about. Government exists to glorify him, from his $600 million White House ballroom to the National Parks pass emblazoned with his image next to George Washington. And it exists so that Trump, his family, and his cronies can profit handsomely from it, while the functions Americans rely on — from our military to roads to national forests — are left to rot or blown apart.

Big Bend could be ravaged for a hideous wall that will stop almost no one from crossing over. The Reflecting Pool gets a botched $16 million facelift while rangers get pink slips. An innocent man was charged with a felony so the president can save face. This is what America is under Trump, where he repeatedly strips the public good for parts and dares anyone to stop him.

They’re betting most of us won’t notice until the Texas desert they destroyed is gone for good. Don’t let them be right.

It decreases the number of recommended vaccines to 11, removing hep A and B, rotavirus, influenza, COVID-19, and others. It splits the MMR vax — measles, mumps, and rubella — into three separate shots, and recommends that all childhood immunizations should be split into separate visits “to the maximum extent feasible.”

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It doesn’t change state law. It doesn’t create any new insurance rules. Every vaccine is still available. Coverage is unchanged. School rules are unchanged. And your pediatrician more than likely will ignore this altogether.

But Dr. Rob Davidson of says that the threat isn’t the policy Trump is presenting; it’s the skepticism he’s injecting into the minds of American parents. A 95% vaccination rate is the goal for herd immunity. Widespread doubt in the safety of immunizations will begin to peel percentage points off that target.

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Take measles. We’re in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in decades, and the kindergarten MMR rate hovers around 92.5%, well below the 95% threshold.

But measles isn’t all we have to worry about. Watch this episode to learn what’s happening, who’s doing it, and what we can do to stop it.

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Jess returns to The Weekly Assignment to discuss growing Republican voter dissatisfaction with the Trump administration and why Democratic politicians’ greatest strength lies in connecting with their communities’ concerns.

Jess, Susan Demas, and Sam Osterhout also examine how culture war issues and Republicans targeting marginalized groups like trans kids can serve as a smokescreen for economic problems and the expansion of government power.

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And our Weekly Assignment is contacting your members of Congress and telling them to keep the Trump administration’s hands off our public lands.

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