Monday, August 03, 2026
It Wasn’t a Civil War. It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.
It Wasn’t a Civil War. It Was the Slaveholders’ Rebellion.
By Anthony Conwright
Mr. Conwright is a writer focused on U.S. history.
“In a written statement on the anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, President Trump described the Confederacy’s defeat in 1865 as the end of “four brutal years of suffering.” Rather than condemn the Confederacy’s treason or name slavery as the cause for which it fought, Mr. Trump quoted Ulysses Grant’s remarks to the vanquished army: “The war is over. The rebels are our countrymen again.”
Rebranding rebellion is nothing new. Americans take it for granted that the war between the Confederate states and the Union was always called the Civil War, but it was not. During the war and in its aftermath, it was primarily called an “insurrection” or a “rebellion.” Its current name is a result of decades of lobbying by Confederate heritage groups and white Southerners committed to rejuvenating the South’s image and ignoring its treason and slaveholding.
As Mr. Trump and his allies try to whitewash the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, we should return to an older and far more accurate name for the Civil War. We should once again call it the Slaveholders’ Rebellion. If a country unquestioningly adopts language that obscures its bloodiest crimes to absolve their worst perpetrators, how can we expect successive generations to remember the new assaults on democracy without deploying equally forgiving language?
In the war’s early years, the South’s rebelliousness was emphasized in part as a legal necessity. Congress was underlining the president’s constitutional authority to call forth the militia to suppress the Southern revolt. But in the decades after Lee’s surrender, Confederate heritage groups lobbied Congress, educators and the broader public to adopt a name for the war that avoided calling the Southerners “rebels.”
The use of “Slaveholders’ Rebellion” began early. Senator Samuel Pomeroy’s July 1861 bill to “suppress the slaveholders’ rebellion” was one instance. But the language was subject to debate. One senator who later defected to the Confederacy said it created “odium and prejudice against a particular interest” — that is, slavery.
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Conventions shifted only decades after the war, when white Southerners and their representatives in Congress collaborated to rewrite the history of the conflict. In 1899 one group pushed to expunge references to “rebellion” from historical and public discussion of the war. They preferred the misnomer “War Between the States,” freeing the Confederacy of the stigma of revolt. From 1905 to 1911, the campaign’s sympathizers in Congress moved to strike“War of the Rebellion” — the common name at the time — from legislation. “Civil War” became a compromise solution, mollifying Confederate nostalgics while being more acceptable to their opponents than “War Between the States.”
Other nomenclature followed. The Dewey Decimal System shifted its classification from “Rebellion, Southern” in 1876 to either the same term or “Civil War” two decades later. In 1895 the American Library Association directed its readers looking up “Rebellion” to instead search “U.S. History, Civil War.” In 1907, Congress declared a preference for “Civil War,” too. To this day, though, the U.S. Government Style Manual lists “Civil War,” “War of the Rebellion” and “War Between the States” as acceptable, a paper vestige of a hard-fought linguistic battle. One is an agreed-upon euphemism; one is accurate; the last is a lie.
American society’s use of “Civil War" to rhetorically veil the slaveholders’ rebellion has consequences. After the redemption of the Confederacy, ex-Confederates and their heirs helped create a regime of anti-Black violence by instituting a legal architecture of disenfranchisement and lynching. That is what makes confronting how we refer to the Civil War a civic imperative. The danger of rhetorical abstraction lies not only in its distortion of the past but also in its pre-emptive justification for future assaults on democratic life.
When Mr. Trump pardoned the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, he described them as victims of a “grave national injustice,” framing their release as an act of “national reconciliation.” It was a demonstration of the power clichéd tropes and evasion have to rewrite a country’s moral code, rendering treachery as justifiable as patriotism. Jan. 6 became simply “the events.”
Yet Mr. Trump’s obfuscation of the insurrection could not erase the character of the rebels he sought to absolve, many of whom returned to criminal enterprises after their pardon. In February, Christopher Moynihan, who was among those who breached police barricades at the Capitol, pleaded guilty to charges associated with threatening to kill Representative Hakeem Jeffries. Enrique Tarrio was serving a 22-year sentence for seditious conspiracy for his role in the insurrection when he received Mr. Trump’s pardon, only to be arrested a month later at the Capitol on charges of simple assault.
These pardons operate using the same logic of rehabilitation once used for the Confederacy, even if the consequences have not registered on the same scale. In both instances, moral laundering begins by changing the label applied to rebels. Mr. Trump’s use of “national reconciliation” in his pardon helps revise the meaning of Jan. 6, reframing insurrectionists as martyrs and violent attempts to suppress American democracy as acts of patriotism.
The linguistic whitewashing of the Confederacy is more than a manufactured myth of Southern redemption. It is a ritual of national forgetting, one in which American society participates every time we call the Slaveholders’ Rebellion against the United States the Civil War. “Civil War” is no name for a war waged by slaveholding traitors against the United States to hold Black Americans in human bondage. Now, 165 years since the war’s first shots, we should be honest about how we hold its memory.“
Sunday, August 02, 2026
Trump’s Medicare change comes at a curious time
Trump’s Medicare change comes at a curious time
“The Trump administration is ending a subsidy program for Medicare Part D prescription drug plans, potentially increasing costs for seniors. This move, aligned with the administration’s efforts to reduce social spending, contradicts Trump’s previous commitments to prescription drug affordability. The timing, just before the midterm elections, raises questions about the administration’s priorities and its impact on a key voting bloc.
Less than three weeks before the midterm elections, America’s most reliable voting bloc will receive notice of higher healthcare costs.
Sixty-one years after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare into law, the program has over 70 million enrollees and enormous support among the public. Medicare is so popular that the program and Social Security are considered the “third rail of politics.” Any lawmakers who threaten these programs are at risk of political death. Suffice it to say, announcing a reduction in Medicare benefits — even a fairly modest decrease — in the second half of an election year isn’t the traditional political path. And yet, the Trump administration is again rolling back access to seniors’ healthcare access. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced Tuesday that it will end a subsidy program to stabilize premiums of Medicare Part D prescription drug plans, in which nearly 25 million people are enrolled.
Medicare Part D was established through the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003. Unlike traditional Medicare, which does not cover most outpatient prescription drugs, Medicare Part D offers stand-alone prescription drug plans through private insurers.
The subsidy elimination also aligns with the administration’s broader efforts to reduce social spending.
Roughly 9 in 10 seniors take prescription drugs, and many of them take multiple prescription drugs. Given that Americans pay markedly higher prices for prescriptions than do people in high-income peer countries, promoting affordable prescription drugs is essential. Nearly a quarter of seniors report difficulty affording their prescriptions, and 7% of seniors ration or do not fill prescriptions due to their cost. Starting last year, the Inflation Reduction Act capped Medicare enrollees’ out-of-pocket drug spending. The subsidies, which the Biden administration set up to offset increases in premiums, were supposed to run through at least 2027, but CMS is now moving to end them early.
Though the average cost of a Medicare Part D drug plan is $36 per month, it varies widely by plan. What’s more, premiums are vulnerable to growing expenses for GLP-1’s and other specialty drugs. So, while the subsidies go to participating insurers, they are especially beneficial for seniors, who tend to have less disposable income. The subsidies work to shield Part D enrollees from larger increases, reducing the average premium by 40% in 2025.
The timing is nothing short of ironic. Open enrollment for Medicare Part D coverage begins on Oct. 15. Less than three weeks before the midterm elections, America’s most reliable voting bloc will receive notice of higher healthcare costs.
What’s more, this policy shift undercuts Trump’s expressed commitment to prescription drug affordability, the rare healthcare issue on which the White House has sought to claim the political high ground despite Americans’ broader trust of Democrats on health care issues.
To be sure, there is widespread skepticism as to whether the administration can deliver any promised substantial savings: Ideas like TrumpRx, a direct-to-consumer drug portal, and most favored nation drug pricing have shown little progress. But politically, Trump and his team acknowledged a genuine problem: Americans pay more for prescription drugs than do patients in comparable countries.
Eliminating the subsidies, however, moves in precisely the opposite direction. So, what is the White House thinking?
The administration argues that premium stabilization has already fulfilled its temporary purpose, such that, according to CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz, “this bailout is no longer needed.” The White House asserted to the Wall Street Journal that ending the subsidies will largely lead seniors to pay only up to $20 per month more for prescription drug coverage. However, researchers at KFF estimate that some Part D enrollees may face larger but unknown costs of coverage next year, part of a broader trend of Americans’ increased healthcare costs.
This is not Trump’s first puzzling health policy move that seems to fly in the face of public opinion.
The subsidy elimination also aligns with the administration’s broader efforts to reduce social spending, most notably through the historic Medicaid and SNAP cuts in last year’s “big, beautiful bill.” And like this broad retrenchment of the American safety net, this change is aimed at low-income seniors, who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. Though assistance with securing health coverage is a critical helping hand and not an unnecessary handout, the administration, marked by plutocratic leanings and personal responsibility narratives, may view this subsidy as yet another type of government intervention that should be pared back despite its popularity.
Of course, this is not Trump’s first puzzling health policy move that seems to fly in the face of public opinion. In a recent KFF poll, prior authorization (i.e. needing insurers’ approval for procedures, tests or drugs) ranked first among Americans’ healthcare challenges. Yet earlier this year, the Trump administration introduced new prior authorization requirements, administered through artificial intelligence programs, to traditional Medicare through the Wasteful and Inappropriate Services Reduction, or WISeR, model.
This policy shift, the pilot stage of which rolled out across six states in January, was troubling from its inception. As I wrote for MS NOW last year, prior authorization can operate as a key vehicle for delays and denials of health coverage, which are highly burdensome to appeal, and which may be especially onerous for seniors to navigate because they may have lower health literacy. These new prior authorization reviews may lead to more inappropriate denials, as opposed to appropriate guardrails on overprescribing. The WISeR model works with third-party tech companies that receive greater payment for issuing denials, and while they are evaluated on other metrics as well, this payment structure can fuel perverse incentives that exacerbate healthcare barriers.
The preliminary findings from the pilot program are alarming. In Washington, one of the six states participating in the pilot program, seniors are waiting two to four times longer for approval of prescribed tests and treatments. Concerns about these health barriers are so pronounced that last month, the House Appropriations Committee voted unanimously to block continued funding toward WISeR.
Before Medicare was enacted 60 years ago, its opponents, including the American Medical Association, decried the program as “socialized medicine.”But its progress in delivering needed healthcare for America’s seniors contributed to a decades-long political consensus that the program should remain largely untouchable. The White House’s new policies, however, suggest a willingness to expose Medicare enrollees to greater financial and administrative burdens in the name of fiscal restraint. In a critical election year, the Trump administration appears intent on testing whether this third rail still shocks.“
Saturday, August 01, 2026
Opinion | What Happens to America’s Political Parties After Trump? - The New York Times
What Happens to America’s Political Parties After Trump?
"Democrats have an anger problem. Republicans have a Trump problem.
What have Democrats learned from this season of primaries so far? “Their voters are so much angrier than I think they realized,” says the Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie in this week’s politics round table. He joins the Opinion contributors E.J. Dionne Jr. and Robert Siegel to discuss what the primaries portend for the 2026 midterms and beyond.
What Happens to America’s Political Parties After Trump?
Democrats have an anger problem. Republicans have a Trump problem.Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Robert Siegel: Hi, I’m Robert Siegel, and this is a conversation about politics with New York Times Opinion contributor and regular panelist here E.J. Dionne Jr.
E.J. Dionne Jr.: Great to see you, Robert.
Siegel: Welcome back. Good to see you. And joining us for the first time, Times Opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie. Hi, welcome.
Jamelle Bouie: Hello there.
Siegel: Good to see you.
Dionne: Joy to be with you.
Bouie: Yeah, looking forward to it.
Siegel: We’re coming to the end of a season of primaries, and I want to start by asking you what we’ve learned, in this season, about this country, particularly about the Democratic primaries. Jamelle, what do we know about ourselves today that, perhaps, wasn’t so clear a few months ago?
Bouie: I think for some of us, who are professional political observers, what has happened is clear. But maybe for establishment Democrats, they have learned something, which is that their voters are so much angrier than I think they realized. And so angry, in fact, that seemingly the currency for success in primaries is just whether you can credibly present yourself to be a full-blown opponent of Donald Trump and willing to reflect back — at those voters — the level of anger and discontent that they feel.
When I look at the relative success of progressive candidates, and the defeats of more moderate or centrist candidates, I actually don’t see a big ideological battle as much as I see a big battle about affect and attitude, and one’s orientation toward the administration and willingness to say “fight.”
And what’s interesting to me is that because this is so much of a fight-or-not-fight divide, it’s entirely possible to have moderate or establishment Democrats who can embody that, and they haven’t. And that, to me, really speaks to maybe a Democratic establishment class that’s a bit out of touch with where their voters are, and maybe where a large part of the country is, given the president’s sinking approval ratings.
Siegel: Maybe a little old, too.
Bouie: Right, right.
Siegel: Could be part of the problem. E.J., we have a big Democratic primary coming up next week in Michigan. It’s one of those seats we say is a must win for the Democrats, if they are to win a majority in the Senate. I wonder what you see as being significant about the Michigan primary.
Dionne: Yeah, I want to put Michigan in the context that Jamelle just put on the table, where I agree that a lot of this expression is more — or at least as much — about anger as it is about ideology.
And I recently wrote about how I think this debate between capitalism and socialism is a really stupid debate for Democrats to engage in, partly because neither side is really a pure capitalist or a socialist, if such a thing even exists, and because it’s about a lot of other things. I would say, though, that there were an awful lot of candidates out there — Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Mary Peltola, Sherrod Brown, James Talarico — all these folks, I think, embodied enough anger to sort of be fairly middle-of-the-road progressives and still win the nomination.
What I think is interesting about Michigan is the placement of this primary. If Democrats could redo this calendar, boy, would they not want to have perhaps the most divisive primary in the whole country happen this late in the process? Because I think what we’re looking at is two things in parallel: a lot of summer noise about Democratic division, which Michigan is going to bring home, and the fundamentals of the election continuing to move away from the Republicans.
I was really struck by a CNN poll this week that showed Trump’s approval down to 34 percent — as low as it was around the time of Jan. 6 in 2021. Seventy-three percent of U.S. adults said President Trump has not paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems. Seventy-three percent. That’s astonishing. And if the election is about the president, his policies and his party, as midterms usually are, this is a real nightmare for Republicans. Which is why their core campaign theme is going to be: Well, we may be terrible, but they’re worse.
And Michigan is the example, if there is any out there, of real ideological division, because you have Abdul El-Sayed, who is probably the better candidate of the two — in terms of performance in reaching audiences and the like, and a clear progressive with a very strongly anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian view — against Haley Stevens, who is a moderate, unapologetically moderate Democrat, supported by American Israel Public Affairs Committee — AIPAC — and that has been a real source of division in the party, and they are battling it out.
At the moment, it looks like El-Sayed is ahead in most of the polls; but then, on the electability front, there was one poll this week that showed Stevens beating the Republican who will be running against one of them, Mike Rogers, by a point, and El-Sayed losing by 10. We’ll see if that has any impact. And she’s trying to turn the fact that El-Sayed may be the most forceful and articulate into a kind of asset, basically saying: “Look, I sound like you. I’m not a fancy candidate, but I have done a lot of practical work.”
But however this turns out, I think the bitterness left by this primary creates problems for either of them if they win this primary.
Siegel: Jamelle, does the El-Sayed-Stevens matchup fit the paradigm of a demand for performative anger in the campaign?
Bouie: I think it does. I want to be clear that I don’t think performance here is a bad thing. I think part of politics is performing things, right?
Like showing people, in a public way, that you understand their concerns and understand their anger or whatever the emotion might be. And I think that when I’m looking at how Democrats have maybe fallen short according to their own voters, it’s been this sense that, “Oh, our job isn’t to perform. Our job is just to be workhorses, not show horses.” And this is something that I think a lot of Democrats take pride in. But to my mind, it’s political malpractice, right? You actually do have to be a show horse as well. You have to show what you’re doing. You have to perform what you’re doing.
I think that the divide on Israel is really critical in this primary. Although, as far as how divisive it is — I mean, the thing is that, when you look at public opinion polling of Democratic voters on their views of Israel, they’ve become starkly negative, right?
Most Democratic voters have much more sympathy toward Palestinians these days than they do toward the Israeli government. And this has been a sea change in opinion. So the Michigan primary might be divisive along this axis, maybe, but El-Sayed also represents where Democratic voters are going, right? Looking ahead to the 2028 presidential primary, I would be surprised if there are any candidates that sound like Stevens, that are willing to accept AIPAC money or any of that. That seems like a death knell for a Democrat.
Siegel: Yeah, let’s talk more about Israel, the Democratic Party and American Jews. Stevens — her campaign has got, I think, $30 million from AIPAC and AIPAC affiliates. And this is something that her opponent, El-Sayed, has used against her.
And, as you say, he seems to have the trend within the Democratic Party on his side. Does this mean that a unique relationship between American Jews and the Democratic Party, where you actually have a prosperous, white group of the public that votes 70 percent-plus for Democratic candidates — is their relationship with the Democratic Party conceivably on the rocks?
Bouie: I mean, you don’t see it in polling. If it’s happening, you don’t really see it yet. I would say that one has to consider as well that many American Jews also hold complicated feelings about Israel ——
Siegel: Yes, mixed feelings, yes.
Bouie: And mixed feelings about the Benjamin Netanyahu government. And so, to the extent that the larger Democratic Party turn against Israel is very much about Gaza — is very much about Israel’s conduct and not so much about Jewishness, but really about the conduct of this particular government — then I don’t imagine there’ll be that much change in terms of the relationship between American Jews and the Democratic Party.
Siegel: What do you think, E.J.?
Dionne: I think, first of all, that one of the difficulties for Democrats here is that, say, through Barack Obama, even the Hillary Clinton election, Jews and Muslims both voted overwhelmingly Democratic. American Jews, American Muslims — two-thirds or more — Democratic. And this has pitted, particularly in Michigan, where there is a large Muslim American population ——
Siegel: And a very large Arab American population.
Dionne: Arab American population. This has pitted two constituencies inside the Democratic Party, in a way, against each other. But I want to underscore something Jamelle said, which is that opinion on Israel, especially since Gaza, and even going back to the whole Netanyahu period, among American Jews, has gone very negative among more progressive Jews.
So there are roots to this. And A.P.-NORC had a fascinating poll: Forty-three percent of Jewish adults, including 58 percent of Jewish Democrats, say the U.S. is not giving Palestinians enough support. And one of the most fascinating findings: Forty-four percent of American Jews held a favorable view of Zohran Mamdani. Just 32 percent held a favorable view of Bibi Netanyahu.
So there’s something going on here that is true within the progressive parts of the American Jewish community; even though, I think, there are times when American Jews feel that some of this opposition is expressed in terms that start to barrel into antisemitism. So I get that reaction, but I think a lot of it is about the reality on the ground right now, and a feeling about this Israeli government and its policies.
Siegel: I wanted to return to the bigger view for a moment. When we look at what’s happened in the primaries around the country, and we see people like El-Sayed in Michigan — how many progressives like him do we think there are going to be in the next Congress? Are we talking about five more seats? Twenty more seats? Is it going to be a — if the Democrats have a decent year — big block or a few safe Democratic seats that have been won by a progressive?
Dionne: You know, I went back and did some searching around on this question. As best I can tell, there may be seven, possibly another one or two Democratic Socialists of America in the Congress. We talked a lot about D.S.A. They certainly won some important victories in the New York primaries; but still, their number is going to be around seven. So that’s something, and they can have a voice, but Democrats, if they win — let’s say, a small victory — they have 225 seats. Where are the rest of them going to be? Right now, there are 100 members of the Progressive Caucus. There are actually, last I checked, 116 members of the New Democratic Coalition, which is this more centrist group. If the Democrats gain seats, my hunch is they’re probably more likely to gain seats in districts where more moderate candidates will prevail, because the party will have nominated — in general, not everywhere — more moderate candidates in those seats.
So paradoxically, despite some of the gains D.S.A. will make, and despite all the talk about how the Democratic Party is moving left, you may have a mix in that conference, which is ever so slightly more moderate than it is today.
Bouie: And to that I would add, this is where I think it’s really important to not get so bogged down on the ideological debates ——
Dionne: Yes. Amen.
Bouie: Because besides policy differences, I think what’s really going to have an effect is, if there is a big victory, people are going to be paying attention to how Democrats — not what they did to win in terms of campaign strategy, but their general approach, right?
And so, you look at someone like Jon Ossoff in Georgia, who is likely to win a nice, comfortable re-election victory — and he’s running this very explicitly anti-corruption campaign. Talarico in Texas is also running on this anti-corruption line, also taking this, like, “they ought to be ashamed of themselves” kind of approach.
I think you’re going to see Democrats observe all of this. Like, how are these successful candidates speaking? How are they orienting themselves toward both other Democrats and toward Republicans? And that’s where the influence is going to show, right? That’s where, I think, you’re going to see the effect of the elections. Not so much on ideology, because, again, Trump will still be president, right?
So it’s not like anything’s getting done. But what will be viable are investigations, hearings or these sorts of things. And so, how are Democrats going to be approaching those questions? And if it’s a narrow victory, it might be a much more, you know: “The public barely wanted us here. We should cool our horses.” If it’s a big victory, it may be a much more aggressive, “Oh, they really want us to go after these people. Who is doing that, and who can I emulate?”
Dionne: Right. And I think the corruption issue — first of all, the polling shows it’s actually starting to grab some voters. One survey by Echelon Insights, 8 percent said that corruption was the most important issue in politics, back at the end of 2024. It’s up to 17 percent now. So this is starting to take hold among a lot of people. And I think the way corruption builds into policy is in two ways: One is, obviously Trump is looking out for his own interests, and the interests of the very wealthy, and not yours. And that has a lot of implications, where Democrats of a lot of different stripes can play with that to push policies that are more egalitarian. But it also creates the sense of a kind of kleptocratic country that is in danger of becoming more like Russia. Now, fortunately, we still have free elections and a lot of other good things that have not — we hope — are not destroyed, and — hope underlined several times — are not destroyed in this election. But this sense of the linkage between unfairness and a corrupt government, I think, has a lot of political potential going forward.
Bouie: That’s exactly right.
Siegel: We talk so much about the divisions within the Democratic Party that we overlook the not entirely harmonious Republican Party. When you look at the Republican Party, E.J., is the whole idea of MAGA and non-MAGA finished? It’s just a subsidiary of MAGA?
Dionne: You know, I think there are a couple things here: One is, the people who think of themselves as Republican now are not the same people entirely who thought of themselves as Republicans a decade ago. Trump has pushed a bunch of people out of the Republican Party.
And Jamelle alluded to this in his Times chat last week, that Gallup shows that 30 percent of Americans called themselves Republicans in 2024, and their latest average, for this quarter of 2026, it’s down to 25 percent. So you’ve got a Republican Party that, if you don’t like Trump, you are less likely to call yourself Republican than you used to.
And I think that explains a lot of these primaries we’ve seen. It explains why Trump’s approval rating among Republicans, even as it’s cratering among independents, it’s not cratering among Republicans. The question is, is MAGA sustainable without Trump himself? And it seems to me that he has particular gifts — if I may use that term about Donald Trump — in terms of appealing to people, certain habits of forcing people in his direction, intimidating Republicans in Congress, that I don’t see either JD Vance or Marco Rubio have. The other thing is, we tend to talk a lot about how the extreme left is given to sectarianism — you know, the Socialist Vanguard Workers Party splitting off from the Socialist Workers Party — and Janan Ganesh, a columnist for The Financial Times, made a great point:
You’re seeing this splitting on the far right. In Europe, you’re seeing it in Italy, where there’s a split. Now there are two parties on the far right. In Britain, where there’s a split, where the Reform Party is not the only far-right party, there’s a new one. You’re seeing it in Poland, where the formerly ruling Law and Justice Party just split last week.
So that, I think, on that level — absent Trump’s both iron hand and peculiar charisma — it’s not clear where this goes. And I guess the question is: Is there such frustration with Trump, at the end of his term, if it stays on the current trajectory, and will there be some Republicans who come along and say to the party, “You don’t want Rubio, you don’t want Vance, you want something different”? And that’s the only possibility I see of recreating anything that looks like the old Republican Party.
Bouie: Yeah, even in that situation, I’m not entirely certain if there is — in just a single cycle — the ability to recreate the old Republican Party. And certainly — I very much agree with you, E.J. — that people understate the importance of Trump’s celebrity charisma. The thing that has delivered him victories, or near-victories, in presidential elections is that he can turn out loosely attached voters, people who otherwise would not be voting, and, critically in some cases, don’t even vote down ballot. They just vote for Trump. And in doing so, they’ve delivered him these very narrow victories.
And I tie that explicitly to the fact that he’s a celebrity, first and foremost, to many, many Americans. They don’t register or read him as a Republican, which does two things: first, it’s hard to convince voters that he’ll do things that Republicans do that they don’t like, right? You can say, he’s going to cut taxes for rich people. He may have already done it, but precisely because he’s not associated with the Republican Party in this sort of intimate way, a lot of voters say, “Oh, well, you know, is he really? He signed the checks. Is he really going to be that bad?” So I think there’s no other Republican politician who had this decades-long pre-political career, where they essentially became a byword for wealth, right?
Trump was associated with wealth in pop culture. That doesn’t exist for anyone else, and I’m very skeptical that any of the people who seem to be presidential contenders have the ability to reconstitute, or pull together, anything like the Trump coalition. And the other thing is that, if you think of the Trump presidency as being this sort of like — I mean, there are three legs in the stool, but they’re awkwardly placed together, like a 2-year-old might do — kind of MAGA populist neocons, people who want an aggressive foreign policy, and then Christian nationalists, for lack of a better term. They’re able to come under Trump, because fundamentally, Trump just doesn’t care that much. Trump is in it for Trump, and this allows these other parts of the coalition to be under him as sort of a, “Well, he’ll do what we want him to do,” because he just wants to be able to make some money and stay out of jail.
Any Republican president, or Republican candidate, who comes after Trump is going to have a particular ideological vision they want to pursue. And will that have room for these other, more discordant elements?
Siegel: I’m really struck by the fact that in his exploration of the limits of presidential power, Donald Trump has imposed a tremendous number of tariffs — a policy that seems to have almost no constituency. If there is one, I don’t know who it is. Who argues in favor of tariffs?
Bouie: There have been plenty of people trying to manufacture, backfill some kind of rationale here, but I think you’re right. There’s ——
Siegel: It’s him. It’s what he wants. And he’s going to leave a party, at some point, that inherits this as a centerpiece of tax policy.
Dionne: Well, you know, interestingly, the coalition for tariffs used to be a working-class coalition.
Siegel: Yes!
Dionne: And the labor movement. I grew up in a town where tariffs were very popular. And the problem is, Trump has almost given tariffs a bad name, because Joe Biden had some tariffs, but they were strategic tariffs for particular purposes. And these have been so sweeping that they have ended up not delivering what he promised, which is more manufacturing jobs. But I think that Trump has begun to even blow apart what had been one of his greatest assets, which is turning the Republican Party into, significantly, a working-class party. Clearly, he won a lot of working-class whites. He had started converting a lot of working-class Latinos, and he even got a small share of working-class Black votes. And now, he has delivered almost nothing for them. I’m struck by this move that looks like a cut in the Medicare drug benefit. I cannot fathom ——
Bouie: I saw this headline that Trump wants to impose 100 percent tariffs on generic drugs, which, as I say it out loud, is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. And my first thought was, does he know who his voters are? Does he know who voted for him and his party? You’re telling me, in an election year, you’re going to raise drug prices on working-class seniors?
Siegel: Known as people who vote.
Bouie: Yeah. All of them vote, right? Yeah.
Dionne: And you’re seeing that, I think, in all of this polling. One of the most striking things is how noncollege-educated voters, who were part of his base, are actually fleeing. There’s a drop of 25 points or more. Without the working class, I don’t know what the Trump movement looks like. Now, a lot of those folks don’t like and don’t trust the Democrats, and that is going to be an enormous task for Democrats. And it’s going to be very interesting this year to see which of these Democrats who win have managed to recreate some of the Democratic Party’s appeal to the working class, which used to be the base of the Democratic Party. Is that over, or do they have a chance to start putting that back together? Because Trump seems to have abandoned them, and he doesn’t win any support when he says affordability is a made-up thing. That’s not how these voters feel.
Bouie: Yeah. I want to really underscore the extent to which this isn’t just standard-issue political malpractice. In the wake of 2024, I think there was this sense that that election was some kind of MAGA cultural victory as well as a political victory. But I think, at the time — and clearly looking back — what that election was, it was a narrow majority of voters saying: “This guy will lower prices. This guy will reduce inflation.” That’s what he was elected to do. And the extent to which he not only has not done that, but has made it worse — like, has sent things in the opposite direction, I would say — is the proximate cause for the total deterioration of his political support. I have the same question as you, E.J. I don’t know how Democrats begin to reconstitute their support with working-class voters, or at least begin to get their support with working-class whites, up from 30 percent to somewhere closer to 40 percent.
Dionne: That’s exactly the key, and especially in the swing states. If you look at the Obama and Hillary Clinton elections, 2012 to 2016, there was a drop in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania from the low 40s among white noncollege-educated voters to the mid-30s. They don’t need to win the whole group.
Bouie: They haven’t since.
Dionne: They haven’t for a long time.
Bouie: For a long time.
Dionne: Especially because the Southern white voting is largely racially polarized. But in those states, they need that, and Biden bumped it up just a little bit. But they really need to find a way to get back to those Obama levels. Ironically, for everything that’s said about him and politics, he spent a lot of time, Obama, on the white working class, white noncollege-educated vote and got it to the levels he needed.
Siegel: And the challenges facing the Republicans?
Dionne: Well, I think, No. 1: How to deal with two of their issues going south. One is prices. The other is immigration. Who knew that the president would lose support on immigration? Because, I think, that was the other key to 2024, which is to bring order to the southern border, and instead, he launched this massive campaign that went after so many people, including, by the way, people who were here legally, people who were citizens. There were killings involved. Nobody in the country wanted this. These are two big issues they have got to deal with. Go ahead, Jamelle.
Bouie: I just want to say that I totally saw this coming. I want to claim that I was very much on the. … Given what he is saying — mass deportations, we’re going to remove 20 million people — and given the reality that there’s about 11 to 12 million undocumented immigrants, that very few of them are the kind of criminals that Trump is describing. Any attempt to do mass deportations will inevitably involve deporting people who are here lawfully, people who are just working, living their lives, doing their jobs. And that the kind of militarization, expansion of ICE and Customs and Border Protection that he was calling for, was likely going to result in some pretty ugly stuff — I just want to say that, in 2024, I was like, “Yeah, that’s going to happen.”
And I think you’re right, that voters who do not have a particularly coherent view of immigration or the immigration system — I think that the typical voter probably thinks the immigration system is: You show up, there’s a line, you get in, and then you wait, and then once you’ve waited long enough, you can get some sort of legal status or citizenship. And the anger is that, “Oh, all these people are trying to skip the line.” And so, when Trump says that he’s going to bring order, I think what voters hear is that he’s going to make the line work better.
But in reality, there is no line. Our immigration system is nonsensical, and the number of people in the United States who are the kinds of folks that I think voters think, “Oh, you have to remove, dangerous criminals,” is low. And so, voters then heard a vision of immigration policy that was not going to be delivered, and then they immediately saw what was being delivered, and the reaction was, “Oh, I don’t like that.” And so, the reversal, Trump’s reversal in immigration, which I’ll note began last March — not March 2026, but March 2025 — with the controversy over Kilmar Abrego Garcia, that’s when you begin to see the inversion happen. And I think it’s 100 percent because that’s when the public began to understand that what they’re getting is not what they thought they were getting.
Dionne: Right. And I think the “I’m going to bring order to the southern border,” that’s popular. As soon as you say the words “mass deportation,” as you suggested, it inevitably leads to something like this. It doesn’t have to be this bad, but close to this bad. I think on your question about the Republican Party rebuilding, again, perhaps everything I have said is going to be wrong, and this Trump coalition is going to hold together better than I think. I just don’t see it without Trump. If you don’t have Trump, and you don’t have that same appeal to white working-class voters, or working-class voters more generally, the Republican Party is going to have to go back and try to win suburban moderates and moderate conservatives.
Because if you’re building the alternative party, I don’t see who else is out there who is likely to vote for them, but that would require a real revolution from what the Republican Party is now. It’s a party that George H.W. Bush would recognize, but that was a long time ago.
Bouie: The erosion Republicans have suffered among suburban voters — it’s stark and dramatic. You know, Virginia is now a state where a liberal Democrat can win by 15 points in an election, and that is 100 percent the complete collapse of the Republican Party in the kinds of suburbs that it used to handily win. I’m ——
Siegel: But as a resident of one of those suburbs, it’s still a state where a Terry McAuliffe could lose ——
Bouie: True.
Siegel: Statewide, it’s not a lock for Democrats.
Bouie: But you note that Glenn Youngkin was very much running, at least his campaign was, like, “I am the kind of Republican you recognize.”
Siegel: That’s right.
Bouie: Like, “I’m the kind of guy, you know; I work for a big corporate firm.”
Dionne: Even the way he dressed.
Siegel: “I wear a fleece."
Bouie: “I have a fleece. I’m not scary. You know that my actual social views are normal, right?” — that’s the whole vibe he’s going for. And I figure JD Vance is smart enough to see what the numbers are. I would expect that he would try to remake himself, once again, in this kind of way. But in the absence of that kind of effort, like E.J. said, it’s hard to see how the Republican Party begins to build back.
Siegel: I’ll just say that I can’t get rid of the thought — that MAGA and Trump are basically royalist and the successor in a royalist system would be a younger Trump and that’s over. Anyway, on that note, let’s move on to our weekly feature, when we talk about joy and the joyful experiences we’ve had since last we met. Jamelle?
Bouie: So I live right down the street from what was an old public housing project, built in the 1960s, and it’s not in great shape. Over the past year, the city where I live — Charlottesville, Va. — has been aggressively rehabbing and revamping and rebuilding that housing.
And so, basically beginning last summer, they tore down a lot of units. Prior to that, they built some new units for people who live there to be in, while they were doing this big rehab. And in basically a year, they’ve almost finished this project, and it’s remarkable to watch. Beautiful new homes that are going to be for public housing residents. Additional new units to further increase capacity, and this has been done in conjunction with public housing residents, so it’s been a collaborative effort between the city and residents. And they’re doing this work across all the public housing units. And at a time when there’s just a lot of cynicism about the government’s ability to just do anything — and I’m not going to raise up Charlottesville as like the most efficient government in the world — but it’s been really cool to see this come to fruition, and to see government producing things for people in a way that improves their lives.
Siegel: That is joyous. E.J.?
Dionne: Leave it to Jamelle to underscore how self-oriented and not socially oriented my joy is this month, because I wanted to talk about pure, entirely predictable, but deeply felt summer joy that last month has been about. It’s about Mary, my wife, and me kayaking on a quiet pond, beach walking and beach reading; and it’s like baseball, where I finally have a Red Sox team that you can actually root for, and they might win, and the great sound of the game on the radio. It’s a wonderful time of year, and so, I will try to sort of up the game of my joy by saying Shakespeare got it right when he said, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Siegel: Well, very good. My sources of joy were, first of all, a lot of time with family, with my daughters and grandchildren in New York, where we spent some time this summer. And also a surprise when we came home: My wife and I went to see “The Odyssey,” or “Odyssey,” I guess it is. And I was really very much taken by Christopher Nolan and Matt Damon’s take on “The Odyssey,” and found myself far more entertained and engrossed than I thought I would be. I recommend it heartily, if you haven’t seen it yet.
Bouie: I’m kind of curious to see if there’s going to be any uptick in classics majors after this, given its success.
Siegel: Jamelle Bouie, thanks a lot for doing this. And E.J., thank you, of course.
Dionne: Thank you.
Thoughts? Email us at theopinions@nytimes.com.
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Efim Shapiro. Video editing by Julian Hackney and Reshma Kirpalani. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Annika Robbins and Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va."
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