Tuesday, June 09, 2026
Donald Trump given hostile reception as New York crowd boos and jeers president at NBA finals | NBA finals | The Guardian
Donald Trump given hostile reception as New York crowd boos and jeers president at NBA finals
Donald Trump given hostile reception as New York crowd boos US president at NBA finals – video
"Donald Trump was loudly booed when he was shown on the video screens at Madison Square Garden on Monday night before Game 3 of the NBA finals between the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks.
Trump was shown on the jumbotron while the Star-Spangled Banner was being sung before the game, and jeers and boos broke out around the arena. The president was shown for a little over eight seconds and held a salute the whole time with a smile on his face. A few seconds later, the video board showed Knicks players in line and the boos turned to cheers.
The US president, a longtime Knicks fan, attended as the guest of team owner James Dolan as New York hosted their first NBA finals game since 1999. Trump entered the arena amid a heavy security presence. He watched the game from the owner’s box above center court, while Secret Service personnel commandeered the neighboring suites on either side. Also in the box were Dolan, interior secretary Doug Burgum,
transportation secretary Sean Duffy and Trump’s granddaughter Kai. Later in Monday’s game, which the Knicks lost 115-111, Trump appeared to fall asleep.
The hostile reception comes as little surprise. NBA fans skew liberal and the Knicks play in a city that firmly backed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
Trump’s appearance added another layer of spectacle to a city already in the thrall of basketball fever. The Knicks entered the night carrying a 2-0 series lead over the Spurs and seeking to move within one victory of their first championship since 1973.
Hours before tipoff, fans encountered heightened security around Madison Square Garden. A 10-foot perimeter fence surrounded the arena, ticket holders were advised to arrive at least two hours early and the team implemented a strict no-bag policy.
By midday, dozens of fans were already queueing to pass through metal detectors manned by Secret Service agents to access the team store.
“He could have picked any other day. This night is for the fans,” said Joanne Cadden, 53, a Knicks supporter from the Bronx who has followed the team since the early 1990s. “You’re making people go away from the Garden. This wasn’t the time.”
Gesturing toward the fencing and checkpoints surrounding the arena, Cadden added: “This looks like prison.”
Not every fan objected to Trump’s attendance, but many said it had altered the atmosphere around one of the biggest nights in the team’s history.
Rich Becker, a 54-year-old Knicks fan from Queens who came to Midtown despite not having a ticket, said the president’s visit had changed the feel of the day, including the cancellation of the outdoor watch party that had drawn thousands of fans outside the Garden during earlier playoff games.
“It changed everything,” Becker said. “Should he be here? I don’t think he should, but he’s coming. He used to be a Knicks fan. He spent a lot of time at the Garden back in the day. But now it’s a little different. Just stay away.”
Becker said he worried the extensive screening procedures could affect the atmosphere inside the building.
“There is some concern,” he said. “Not everybody’s going to be in their seats by tip-off.”
Beginning at around 4pm, authorities sealed off several blocks around the arena, creating what NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch described as a “frozen zone”. The restrictions encompassed the area between West 30th and West 35th Streets and Sixth and Eighth Avenues, with police checkpoints limiting access to ticket holders, rail passengers, credentialed personnel and others with an authorized reason to enter.
The restrictions also led officials to cancel the outdoor watch party that had drawn thousands of fans outside the Garden during earlier playoff games, though city officials said other viewing events, including ones at Bryant Park and Central Park’s Wollman Rink, would go ahead as planned. The watch party outside MSG was expected to return for Game 4 on Wednesday.
The precautions echoed scenes from Trump’s appearance at last year’s US Open men’s final in Queens, where security bottlenecks produced lengthy queues outside Arthur Ashe Stadium. Despite a delayed start, thousands of fans were still filing into their seats well into the second set.
The heightened security followed massive celebrations around the Garden after New York’s Game 2 victory in San Antonio on Friday. Thousands of fans packed the surrounding streets, while police said multiple arrests were made after some supporters climbed light poles, blocked traffic and refused orders to disperse following the Knicks’ win.
Trump confirmed last week that he planned to attend the game after receiving an invitation from Dolan. His appearance on Monday night made him the first sitting US president to attend an NBA finals game.
While Trump has become a regular presence at major sporting events during his second term, including the Super Bowl, Daytona 500 and Ryder Cup, his appearance at Madison Square Garden carried particular resonance. Long before entering politics, he was a fixture courtside during the Knicks’ 1990s glory years.
Trump’s appearance also placed two of the city’s most prominent political figures under one roof. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani was also in attendance. He told reporters earlier in the day that he bought a standing-room only ticket from Madison Square Garden for about $1,000.
Other prominent names at Madison Square Garden on Monday included Knicks fans Spike Lee, Timothée Chalamet, Ben Stiller, Jon Stewart and Tracy Morgan.
For Tom Meade, 76, who attended Knicks playoff games during the franchise’s championship era and brought his son Tommy to Monday’s game, the fences, checkpoints and presidential motorcade were ultimately secondary to the occasion itself.
“This is amazing,” Meade said as fans streamed toward the Garden. “The only thing close to it was the Willis Reed and Walt Frazier years. Those championship teams [in 1970 and 1973].”
The heightened security was “a nuisance”, he added, “but we’re here to enjoy the game and the Knicks.”
Trump ‘inventing fraud’ in California, experts warn as president ramps up baseless claims | US news | The Guardian
Trump ‘inventing fraud’ in California, experts warn as president ramps up baseless claims
"Critics say president using well-worn playbook – with loyalists in key positions ready to amplify his message
Donald Trump is “inventing fraud” in California’s primary elections, and likely to ramp up unfounded allegations when more races go against him, pro-democracy experts have warned.
While the US president has used this playbook for years – from his loss at the Emmys as a reality TV star to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election – election integrity campaigners fear this time could be different.
“California’s election is not the problem here,” said Omar Noureldin, senior vice-president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, a pro-democracy watchdog group. “The problem is that we have a president in the Oval Office who continues to lie and sow doubt over elections instead of facing accountability from voters.”
Trump lost his cool after a journalist pushed back on his latest attempt to sow doubt in election results, storming out of a Meet the Press interview which aired this weekend.
The outburst showcased a feature of Trump’s approach if results don’t go his way: he quickly declares them rigged, rallying his supporters and rightwing media to spread similar messages. California is the latest – and largest – test of this technique in this election cycle.
This year’s midterms will serve as an example of how the president will wield the federal government’s power at cities and states in a crusade to ensure his party maintains power.
In contrast to 2020, when his false claims of voting fraud helped set the stage for an insurrection inside the Capitol in the wake of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory, Trump now has an administration stocked with loyalists – and election deniers – who may not stand up to an attempt to undermine election results.
He has few vocal detractors left among the Republicans in Congress to speak out against these efforts. He has a rightwing media ecosystem poised to advance his talking points.
“The president keeps inventing fraud in elections he loses,” said Edgar Lin, Protect Democracy’s deputy impact director. “Now he’s aiming federal power at California’s locally run vote. This is the same playbook he always reaches for, only this time he has the muscle and federal tools to act on it.”
Trump has repeatedly called the California results into question as ballot-counting continued in the country’s most populous state. In the governor’s race, Democrat Xavier Becerra is projected to advance to the general election, and Republican Steve Hilton is poised to advance over Democrat Tom Steyer.
California has a so-called “jungle primary” system, where the top two vote-getters advance to a general election regardless of party affiliation. Because it is a large state that favors voter access, its election results can take weeks to count – leaving a vacuum for misinformation to thrive.
All eligible voters in California receive mail ballots, and most voters vote by mail. The state also allows a grace period for ballots to arrive after election day, and it gives voters 22 days to cure any ballot errors, like mismatched signatures. The system is highly accurate, but can take time.
Trump claimed last week that the state’s elections were “under investigation by the US attorney’s office in Los Angeles”, though provided no details on what was being investigated. The justice department sent a federal prosecutor to observe ballot processing in Los Angeles late last week. Bill Essayli, Trump’s appointee for first assistant US attorney for the central district of California, claimed there are “multiple election fraud investigations under way”, though did not provide details.
In the LA mayor’s race, Trump said it was “not possible” that former reality TV star Spencer Pratt could have lost. Pratt, a registered Republican, was initially in second place behind Democratic mayor Karen Bass, but as more ballots were counted, Democrat Nithya Raman pulled ahead of him.
“3rd World Nation,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Monday. “Rigged Elections! Now they’ll be working on great guy Steve Hilton. Won’t have results for, possibly, TWO WEEKS, according to officials.”
California’s elections officials sought to explain the counting process in advance of election day, knowing voters would have questions about the lengthy time period to count.
“California has a large electorate,” the California secretary of state’s office said in a statement on Monday. “With more than 23 million registered voters across 58 counties, ensuring a thorough and accurate count takes time. Votes go through numerous verification steps including signature verification, tabulation, audits, and reporting of results to the Office of the Secretary of State.”
After Meet the Press journalist Kristen Welker pushed back on Trump’s claims about 2020 and the California elections, he said: “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid. You play right into their hands with this crap. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged.”
Trump has made election denial a central part of his political movement. After voters elected Biden in 2020, he unsuccessfully sought to overturn results in multiple states and pressured Congress not to certify the results as a crowd rallied at the Capitol on January 6 2021, culminating in the insurrection.
Among election advocates, concern for democracy – and about repeated attempts to undermine election results and voting access – has been persistently high since Trump retook the White House last year. They have “seen the different ways that the administration is trying to throw the kitchen sink at sowing doubt in our elections”, said Noureldin, of Common Cause.
The president who cried wolf
In his second term, Trump has used the power of the federal government in attempts to limit access to voting and to investigate his previous election fixations. The federal government seized 2020 ballots in Fulton county, Georgia. His administration has sought access to millions of voters’ data via the states, resulting in ongoing lawsuits. He has tried to assert federal dominance over election administration, a task largely left to state and local jurisdictions. He has prosecuted his political foes while attempting to create a slush fund for his allies who believe they were persecuted by the federal government under prior administrations. He has pushed for legislation to add barriers to voting and called for mail voting to be banned.
In the past week, in addition to his repeated unfounded claims about California’s elections and his outburst on Meet the Press, Trump suggested Bill Pulte, the newly appointed acting director of national intelligence, could investigate election issues. “You may find out some things about the rigged elections,” he told reporters of Pulte.
Stephen Richer, a former Republican county recorder in Maricopa county, Arizona, faced pressure campaigns from within his party to undermine election results. He lost his primary to retain his office in 2024. He called Trump going after California’s elections “utterly predictable”.
“He claimed the recent Virginia redistricting election was fraudulent. He claimed his loss to Ted Cruz in the 2016 Iowa caucus was fraudulent. He complained the Emmy awards were ‘rigged’ when The Apprentice didn’t win,” Richer said via email. “This boy has pathetically cried wolf scores of times. If it was your child, you’d tell him to grow up. But I guess as president of the United States, we tolerate it.”
Noureldin of Common Cause said there are a few ways to fight back against efforts to undermine elections. Republicans in Congress need to begin pushing back on their own party, he said, adding that the courts, and pro-democracy groups who file lawsuits against these attempts, should again serve as a bulwark. People can organize protests and voter education campaigns, he suggested.
And voters can turn out to vote against his agenda, registering their discontent, Noureldin said. While Trump himself is not on the ballot this year, Noureldin said his actions show he doesn’t want his party to lose control of Congress, because he doesn’t want to face accountability.
“Trump is kind of allergic to accountability,” he said. “He’s willing to throw out entire elections in order to make sure that no one can hold them to account.”
Richer, the former Maricopa county recorder, warned the problem could grow during the general election, where control for the US House could come down to a few competitive districts in California, providing ample inroads for misinformation.
“California needs to be prepared, and they need to do everything in their power – without fundamentally changing their voting model – to speed up their tabulation,” he said, adding that it should allocate more resources to election offices so they can have staff counting around the clock.
What Trump could do this year is a “wild card,” Richer said. “Unlike 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024, some key law enforcement positions are now occupied by people with questionable morals, a strong interest in pleasing Trump, and who accordingly indulge this stolen election nonsense.”
Derek Tisler, an election security expert at the Brennan Center’s elections and government program, said Trump’s election lies have not changed, but now his “megaphone for pushing them is bigger and offers a veneer of credibility”.
“Since 2020, election officials have been pushing back on these false claims and educating their voters on how elections work. They know that efforts to claim rigged elections will appear again any time President Trump and his allies see results that they don’t like,” Tisler said.
“It’s the responsibility of all public leaders to put democracy over partisan gain and stand up for the work that election officials do to run secure and accurate elections.”
Health Risks of Alcohol Accelerate After One Drink a Day, Study Finds
Health Risks of Alcohol Accelerate After One Drink a Day, Study Finds
"The alcohol industry has criticized the research, which found that even light drinking increases the risk of premature death.
A government alcohol study published on Tuesday concluded that the health risks of alcohol start at a single drink a day. The report was caught up in controversy after drawing the ire of the alcohol industry.
At one drink a day, the researchers found, there was an increased risk of premature death from an illness or injury directly attributable to alcohol, though it was small — one in 1,000 people. But the risk of premature death jumped to one in 25 for those who had two drinks a day, a level long considered safe for men, according to the study, which was published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
The Alcohol Intake and Health Study was one of two reports commissioned during the Biden administration to inform an update to the U.S. dietary guidelines.
The second report, from a panel appointed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, or NASEM, came to very different conclusions. It suggested that moderate drinking (up to two drinks a day for men and one for women) was healthier than not drinking at all, although it noted that moderate drinking was also linked to a higher breast cancer risk. Some of the panelists behind that report had financial ties to the alcohol industry.
The second report’s finding was more palatable to the alcohol industry, which had called the Alcohol Intake and Health Study ideologically driven and scientifically flawed, and said it had communicated its concerns repeatedly to government officials over a period of several years.
When the Trump administration finally issued the new dietary guidelines in January, they advised Americans to drink less for better health but omitted any recommendation for daily limits, in a departure from previous years.
“The new dietary guidelines say that consuming less is better for your health, but don’t say what consuming less means,” said Priscilla Martinez-Matyszczyk, one of the authors of the new paper and the deputy scientific director of the alcohol research group at the nonprofit Public Health Institute. “This paper does, and it says that having no more than one drink a day is best for health, and that drinking above that comes with significant risks.”
A standard drink is defined as 12 fluid ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine or 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits.
In an editorial accompanying the new paper, Robert M. Vincent, the former government official who commissioned the study, said he believed he was fired because the report produced evidence “at odds with commercial interests.” Mr. Vincent lost his job as associate administrator for alcohol prevention and treatment policy at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration during a reduction in force last year.
“It was going to cost the alcohol industry money,” Mr. Vincent said. “They didn’t like going from two to one for men, and they didn’t like the mention of cancer.”
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment about Mr. Vincent’s statement.
The new study, which relied exclusively on U.S. health data, assessed relationships between average alcohol consumption and the risk of disease or death from causes that were directly attributed to drinking.
Women who had one drink a day were more likely to die of liver cancer or breast cancer than women who did not drink. And at one drink a day, both men and women were at increased risk of dying from liver cirrhosis, oral and esophageal cancers and injuries, the paper found. The risks continued to climb with higher levels of consumption.
Consuming more than one drink per occasion was associated with progressively higher risks of breast cancer, cardiovascular disease and injury.
The report did find that one drink a day was associated with a lower risk of diabetes for women and a lowered risk of stroke for both men and women. However, occasional heavy drinking nullified the protective effects against stroke.
One reason the studies reached such different conclusions is that while the new study examined deaths from causes directly attributable to alcohol, the NASEM report commissioned by Congress looked at overall death rates of moderate drinkers, including deaths not causally related to alcohol.
Critics of the NASEM report say that people who drink in moderation often have other healthy lifestyle habits that contribute to their longevity. The moderate drinking group also included many people who consumed less than two drinks a day. Both of these factors could make the health effects of moderate drinking look less significant than they might be.
Dr. Ned Calonge, an epidemiologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus who led the NASEM study, said he stood by its conclusions.
“Alcohol research is complex and I am not surprised by different methods producing different results,” Dr. Calonge said, adding that modeling studies like the Alcohol Intake and Health Study, which use data to estimate the lifetime risk of diseases and deaths caused by alcohol, also come with potential biases.
At the same time, he added “I don’t believe anyone should start drinking for health reasons.”
Roni Caryn Rabin is a Times health reporter focused on maternal and child health, racial and economic disparities in health care, and the influence of money on medicine."
Monday, June 08, 2026
Opinion | Why Everyone Wants Jon Ossoff to Run for President - The New York Times
Why Everyone Wants Jon Ossoff to Run for President
Opinion Michelle Goldberg
"Kicking off his re-election campaign at a rally in Atlanta last week, Senator Jon Ossoff barely mentioned the two Republicans who are in a runoff to oppose him. Instead, speaking to a crowd of more than 1,500 at a downtown concert venue, he blasted the self-dealing of Donald Trump and his “Mar-a-Lago mafia.”
“He’s trying to put his face on the money,” Ossoff said. “Did you see that? He’s building a monument to himself. But see, Atlanta, he’s doing these things now because no one will honor him when he’s gone, because he’s a failed president and a national disgrace.”
The scale and reach of the Trump family’s self-enrichment is so astonishing it can test the limits of human cognition, so when Ossoff talks about it, he usually picks one example to zero in on. In that kickoff speech, he focused on tungsten mining rights in Kazakhstan. Ossoff described how the president of Kazakhstan granted a U.S.-backed company the right to mine the world’s largest known undeveloped deposit of tungsten, an element used in semiconductors, lightbulbs and warheads. Six days after a company backed by Trump’s sons Eric and Don Jr. took a 20 percent stake in an American mining group, that group’s parent company received $1.6 billion in federal financing. “One-point-six billion of your tax dollars to fund and finance their mining project in Kazakhstan, all the while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for health care,” said Ossoff.
As often happens with Ossoff’s speeches, clips from the one last week went viral online, where people from across the Democratic ideological spectrum have been buzzing about a possible Ossoff presidential candidacy. If Ossoff wins re-election, wrote the progressive journalist Mehdi Hasan, “he immediately becomes one of the favorites for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination.” Sarah Longwell, a former Republican strategist who now publishes the anti-Trump Bulwark, posted a photo of Ossoff with the words, “President-maxxing so hard.”
If you were cooking up an ideal 2028 candidate in a lab, he — and let’s face it, it’s probably a he — would look a lot like Ossoff. He’s young and handsome, with a picture-perfect family: a beautiful wife who works as an obstetrician-gynecologist and two small daughters. He’s a Southerner from a reddish state with a history of wooing Black voters. And he’s a Jewish critic of Israel who, as much as anyone in politics today, has the potential to bridge the Democratic Party’s agonizing divide over Zionism.
But the excitement Ossoff is generating is about more than demographics. It stems from his skill in eviscerating Trump’s gluttonous profiteering, his brazen attempts to turn this country into the most squalid sort of kleptocracy. In his bid for re-election in a state Trump won in 2024, some expected Ossoff to tack to the center; last year JD Vance predicted that he’d start praising Trump’s agenda. Instead, Ossoff is excoriating Trump and his systemic corruption in a way that transcends the Democratic Party’s progressive-moderate divide.
He couples that attack with an achingly earnest sort of patriotism. Ossoff’s recent speeches, which he says he writes himself, have two parts. First, he dissects the rot in America’s governing institutions, a rot that, he always notes, predates Trump and helped give rise to him. Then he lays out a liberal, pluralist version of American identity to challenge the Trump administration’s white nationalism.
“We’re bound together by the same great national spirit that passed civil rights laws, defeated fascism, and landed men on the moon,” Ossoff said in his kickoff speech. A bit later, he added, “This is what small men like Donald Trump and JD Vance and Stephen Miller will never understand. That our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but through our ideas.”
Movements that have defeated authoritarianism, most recently in Hungary, usually use precisely this formula: a sweeping denunciation of corruption with a reclamation of national mythology. “Across decades and continents, corruption has been the fatal weakness of authoritarian regimes,” the Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica wrote in an essay last year. Widespread outrage over corruption helped topple Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, Otto Pérez Molina in Guatemala and Najib Razak in Malaysia. “As democratic norms erode and elections become increasingly tilted, anti-corruption movements offer what partisan politics cannot: the moral authority to unite society against a rigged system,” wrote Bonica.
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Though he’s working within the strictures of partisan politics, Ossoff is trying to build that kind of movement. He helped popularize the phrase “the Epstein class” to describe the network of wealthy people — Democrats and Republicans alike — who enabled the sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein. When he talks about Trump’s shameless looting, he radiates righteous indignation, like a millennial Atticus Finch. I was in Hungary in April when Peter Magyar dislodged the strongman Viktor Orban with a deeply patriotic campaign centered on the regime’s gargantuan corruption. Ossoff’s indictment of Trump’s “Mar-a-Lago mafia” echoes Magyar’s condemnation of Viktor Orban’s “mafia state.”
More than any other politician in America, Bonica told me, Ossoff is following the playbook that’s worked against autocrats in other countries. Whether or not he runs for president, the party can learn something from his approach.
I first met Ossoff in 2017, when he was running for Congress in a special election in Georgia’s Sixth District, in the Atlanta suburbs, attempting to flip what had been a solidly Republican seat. It was the first major race of Trump’s first term, and Democrats were desperate to rebuke him. The contest became the most expensive special election in history, prefiguring Ossoff’s later Senate race, which also set spending records. Ossoff lost narrowly, but his race helped catalyze the creation of a new Democratic infrastructure in the district, which the Democrat Lucy McBath won the next year.
Back then, Ossoff was one of several young politicians — others included Josh Shapiro, then running for Pennsylvania attorney general, and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey — whose speaking style mimicked Barack Obama’s distinct preacherly cadence. “It almost seemed like he was doing Obama on a ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch,” the linguist John McWhorter said of Ossoff’s 2017 concession speech. These days Ossoff sounds less like an Obama imitator, but he still has something of the former president’s vibe, a cerebral cool inflected with the uplift of Southern Black churches.
When Ossoff was 17, he interned for Representative John Lewis, a hero of the civil rights movement whom he considers a mentor. He’s thought a lot about the way that movement grounded itself in American ideals.
“We have to be reconnecting ourselves and the public with the pluralist tradition in American politics and its roots in our founding documents,” he told me after his speech last week. “I have found that the tradition of civil rights politics rooted here in Georgia and the South — the lessons that I learned from Congressman Lewis — have helped me keep true north in sight in a time when the cynicism is so deep that trying to call us back to our better angels is sometimes dismissed as naïve.”
This high-minded sincerity can feel almost countercultural at a moment of such profound national debasement, when Democrats like Gavin Newsom are leaning into Trump-style trolling. “Obviously, he’s trying to win an election, but he also is trying to make a statement about what this country needs to be,” said Tré Easton, vice president of public affairs at Searchlight, a heterodox Democratic think tank. “And you know, I got to be really honest with you: I’m not seeing that from really any other political leader at that caliber right now.”
Ossoff vehemently insists that he’s not going to run for president in 2028. He’s called all the chatter about it a “curse” that distracts from the only contest he cares about: the midterms. “If we do not restore checks and balances in these midterm elections, I don’t know that we have a free and fair presidential election in 2028,” he told MS NOW’s Jen Psaki in April. “So, let’s keep our eyes on the ball, folks.”
Until recently, Ossoff was considered one of the more vulnerable Democrats, but he’s ahead in the polls. After a vicious primary, two Republican candidates remain locked in a runoff, and many of their voters are demoralized. In focus groups, Longwell told me, Georgia Republicans despair of their chances. Still, it would be malpractice for Ossoff to take anything for granted.
It is standard, of course, for politicians running for Congress or governorships to disavow any interest in the presidency. Obama, remember, brushed off the idea of a presidential bid when he was campaigning for Senate in 2004. Still, there are reasons to believe Ossoff means it.
He appears to be a bit of an introvert, and though he’s often been in the national spotlight, he doesn’t seem to relish it. Since his election in 2020, he’s mostly kept his head down, focusing much more on building his office’s constituent services operation than on his national profile. Though he’s usually happy to appear on local TV in Georgia, his staff has to push him to do cable news.
It’s become conventional wisdom among many Democratic operatives that a successful candidate must dominate the information ecosystem, mastering quick, vertical video updates and long, meandering podcasts. Ossoff shows little interest in either. Though he was only 33 when he took office — the youngest senator since Joe Biden was elected in 1972 — he’s not very online. His TikTok feed mostly consists of excerpts from speeches and snippets of him grilling witnesses in the Senate. On the relatively rare occasions that he appears on podcasts, he avoids talking about himself. In April, Tim Miller of The Bulwark tried to draw him out about his workout routine — Ossoff has noticeably bulked up since his first congressional campaign — but didn’t make much headway. At a time when many politicians are trying to be influencers, Ossoff has an old-fashioned reserve.
When he speaks, he’s slow and deliberative, sometimes pausing in the middle of a sentence to gather his thoughts. “Words matter and have power and are treated too cheaply,” he told me.
Obama, of course, was also an introvert. As David Axelrod, his former chief strategist, told me, Obama meant it back in 2004 when he said he wasn’t planning to run for president. After his blockbuster speech at the Democratic National Convention, Obama was the subject of public fascination, and feared his new Senate colleagues wouldn’t take him seriously if they thought he was using the office as a launching pad. “We made a big effort to stay out of the national spotlight,” said Axelrod. “We stayed off the Sunday shows.”
But Democrats, including Harry Reid, then leader of the Senate Democratic caucus, kept urging Obama into the race. “That thing was as close to a draft as I have ever witnessed,” Axelrod said. Obama was in demand because of his biography, but also because, unlike most Democrats, he’d had the courage and foresight to oppose the Iraq war.
Here, too, there’s a parallel with Ossoff. In 2024, Ossoff was one of only 19 senators to sign on to Bernie Sanders’s resolution calling for an embargo on certain arms to Israel, bucking pressure from Biden’s White House. In a sober floor speech, he said, “The American people are rightly horrified by the lack of sufficient concern for innocent Palestinian life that has left so many children unnecessarily dead in Gaza, without limbs or riddled with shrapnel.” A few moments later, he added, “We seem to have forgotten that we have the power to influence our ally’s conduct.”
At the time, Ossoff’s stance seemed politically risky. “His chances of getting re-elected in 2026 just became that much harder,” said the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. But today, much of the Democratic Party’s mainstream is where Ossoff was two years ago, with even the ur-centrist Rahm Emanuel, who once volunteered with the Israeli Defense Forces, calling for a cutoff of military aid. The moral position, in retrospect, was also the savvy one. Voters “want to believe that there are leaders out there who are willing to draw lines and who aren’t so obsessed with their own perpetuation in office that they’re willing to sacrifice all principles to get there,” said Axelrod.
Ossoff, who was sworn into office on the Hebrew Bible of Rabbi Jacob Rothschild, an ally of Martin Luther King Jr., is not an anti-Zionist. “I want the Israeli people to be safe and secure,” he told me. “I make no apology for opposing the reckless killing of noncombatants.” This position will not satisfy either AIPAC or the Democratic Socialists of America. But it would be hard for Ossoff’s opponents to tar him as either an antisemite or as someone who was complicit in the atrocities that occurred while Biden was president.
By the time Ossoff arrived in Washington, he’d been thinking about the ugliness of unaccountable power for years. Before he was a politician, Ossoff ran a company called Insight TWI that produced documentaries about international corruption and human rights abuses, several of which aired on the BBC. He oversaw an award-winning program about the mass rape of Yazidi women by ISIS and an investigation into an alleged Kenyan death squad. In one of his most high-profile projects, he worked with Ghanaian journalists exposing corruption in international soccer. A slew of officials, including the former president of the Ghana Football Association, were caught on camera taking bribes.
The exposé ran on the BBC in 2018, a few months after Ossoff’s failed congressional campaign. After its release, Ahmed Hussein-Suale, one of the Ghanaian journalists who worked on it, was threatened by some of the men who were implicated, and in 2019, he was assassinated. The police reportedly believed he was killed in retaliation for his work. Speaking at Hussein-Suale’s memorial service in Accra, Ossoff said it wasn’t enough to just arrest the killers. “Those who hold high positions, who threaten journalists, who call for violence against journalists, should also face accountability,” he said.
It’s easy to see the through line between Ossoff’s message then and now. “My belief that corruption is at the core of oppression predates my public life,” he said. Running investigations of “war crimes and human rights abuses in hostile environments, it was so clear how kleptocracy, corruption and authoritarianism so often go hand in hand.”
Today, Ossoff brings elements of his documentary background into his attempts at political persuasion. The first video released by his new campaign is a nearly four-and-a-half-minute spot that dives into Big Pharma lobbying to explain the corporate capture of American lawmaking and the high price of prescription drugs. Almost a mini documentary, it breaks most of the rules of traditional political advertising, getting into the weeds of a fairly wonky subject. “Drawing on my background in journalism, to make something comprehensible, it cannot be discussed merely in the abstract,” he told me. “You’ve got to break down how it really works.”
As much as he lambastes Trump, Ossoff always emphasizes that he’s more a symptom of a broken system than a cause. “Donald Trump is a demagogue who has exploited the underlying rot of systemic corruption, and the widespread disillusionment and cynicism that flows from the experience of life in a society where politics is so corrupted,” he said. “He has exploited that rot with a promise to unrig the system and then proceeded simply to re-rig the system for himself.”
Ossoff attributes much of what’s gone wrong in American politics to Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court decision striking down restrictions on corporate and union spending in American elections. Unlike many liberal Democrats, he’s not calling for expanding the Supreme Court. Instead, he wants to see a national campaign to amend the Constitution to get dark money out of politics, which he thinks could bring people together rather than further polarize them. “We have to be capable of imagining ambitious change,” he said. “Our politics is in such a bad place that I think an effort like that could energize people, inspire people, unify people who otherwise are at odds, and reshuffle the deck.”
He’s right that Americans broadly hate Citizens United, but changing the Constitution is a grueling process with almost endless choke points, and I suspect his position will seem, to many progressives, like a punt. Still, his approach could play well with those parts of the electorate that yearn for an end to American divisions and don’t trust either party to fix things. As Bonica notes, in many polls, Democrats are seen, unfairly, as being as corrupt as Republicans. It might be good politics, then, for Ossoff to champion reforms that aren’t seen as purely partisan.
“In polarized societies, the most effective opposition doesn’t fight on the traditional left-right battlefield where positions are entrenched,” wrote Bonica. “Instead, it creates an entirely new axis of conflict.”
That’s essentially what Ossoff is aiming to do, and it’s why so many are looking to him to lead. If he wins re-election, especially by a comfortable margin, “I’m sure people will come to him and say, you know, dude, we need you,” said Axelrod. Maybe Ossoff will say no. But it can only help him to look like someone who needs to be persuaded.
Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment."
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