Moo Deng Is The New Grumpy Cat

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A Ukrainian drone, sent on a bombing run to kill a Russian soldier, instead provided aid for the enemy before taking him as a prisoner.

Eric Charbonneau/Getty ImagesMeghan Markle was a “demon” who had “psycho moments” as a boss, people who worked for her have told The Daily Beast.The former employees spoke out after a carefully curated crop of former and current staffers said she was the best boss ever, who gives her staff bundles of freshly cut flowers and home-produced eggs, and makes her staff feel like seeds being watered.The delightful portrait of Meghan’s management style was painted in Us Weekly on Tuesday, as Team Meghan launched a fightback against a report in The Hollywood Reporter that claimed Meghan was a “dictator in high heels” who reduced “grown men to tears.” Sources close to the couple denied that story as a “fabrication” to The Daily Beast last week.Read more at The Daily Beast.

A Yale poll found two-thirds of Americans say they're worried about climate change. Answer questions from the survey to see how your views compare to others in your area and the nation.

“I knew I was capable of carrying her down,” said Troy May, 20, a U.S. Airman who came across her on the trail.

X, formerly Twitter, released a formal global transparency report Wednesday for the first time since Musk took over the social media platform.

Voters created successful anti-recidivism programs 10 years ago, without borrowing or raising taxes, and they are working well. Proposition 36 will gut them.

Prep football: Week 6 schedule for Southland teams, Oct. 3-5.

The Dodgers open the postseason next week, with the same question hanging over them that haunted them the last three years.

Many of these important financial tasks can be done quickly — and make a big difference.

This week, Speaker Mike Johnson surrendered a spending battle that Republicans had hardly even fought. The House will vote on legislation today to avert a government shutdown without demanding any significant concessions from Democrats. In a letter to Republican lawmakers on Sunday, Johnson acknowledged that the bill “is not the solution any of us prefer.” But, he wrote, “as history has taught and current polling affirms, shutting the government down less than 40 days from a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”Johnson’s retreat highlights a strange, seemingly contradictory truth about the 118th Congress: It’s been extremely chaotic, and yet the dysfunction has barely affected most Americans. The GOP’s House majority proved to be too thin to govern, and Republicans spent at least as much time bickering over who would lead them as they did voting on bills of consequence. Electing Kevin McCarthy as speaker required 15 rounds of voting, and he was ousted nine months later; a few months after that, a Republican fraudster, George Santos, was expelled. Somehow, though, Congress has escaped catastrophe: The U.S. did not default on its debt. Lawmakers managed to approve $61 billion in new aid to Ukraine that House Republicans had held up for months. And the government stayed open—largely because Republicans seem finally to have grown tired of shutting it down.The GOP’s two speakers this term, first McCarthy and now Johnson, have each struggled to wrangle a divided party, placate former President Donald Trump, and confront President Joe Biden and the Democratic majority in the Senate. But both of them repeatedly avoided disaster. “They’ve taken the lumps and done the things they need to do to keep the place afloat,” Matthew Glassman, a former congressional aide who is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University, told me.[Elaina Plott Calabro: The accidental speaker]That’s not to say either leader deserves all that much credit. Ukrainians said the long wait for more U.S. assistance cost its forces lives and territory. Domestically, funding the federal government through temporary extensions known as continuing resolutions hampers agency planning. And neither McCarthy nor Johnson were able to turn Republican priorities into law.Johnson’s latest folly came last week, when he attached to a government spending bill a partisan proposal aimed at ensuring that only U.S. citizens vote in federal elections (which the law already requires). Fourteen Republicans joined with most of the Democrats to defeat the measure, leaving the speaker with little leverage in negotiations. The gambit had been doomed long before it came to a vote. Yet with his own future as speaker in doubt and Trump egging on a shutdown, Johnson made at least a perfunctory attempt to get it passed. “I think he had to put it on the floor to say, ‘Hey, I tried,’” Representative Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican who has been critical of the hard-liners in his party, told me.In his letter to lawmakers, Johnson cited the upcoming election as reason to keep the government open. But as plenty of Republican leaders have concluded over the years, shutdown fights have rarely turned out well for the GOP, whether an election is looming or not. “They never have produced a policy change, and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans politically,” Mitch McConnell, the party’s longtime Senate leader, said a year ago, when a similar surrender by McCarthy cost him his job as speaker. Last week, the senator said a Republican-orchestrated shutdown would be “politically beyond stupid.”[Russell Berman: Why Republicans can’t keep the government open]McConnell, who is giving up his post after this year, has played some part in all of the government shutdowns of the past 30 years—when Newt Gingrich was battling President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, when Senator Ted Cruz and his conservative House allies pressured a reluctant Speaker John Boehner to wage a fight over over Obamacare in 2013, and when Trump was demanding that Democrats fund his Southern border wall in 2018-19. Holding up federal operations to extract policy concessions has become synonymous with the party of smaller government, as Democrats are fond of pointing out. “Government shutdowns are in the DNA of the Republican Party,” the House Democratic leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, told Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic Festival last week.Johnson’s maneuvering this week suggests that Republicans might be evolving. “I think we’ve learned shutdowns don’t work,” Bacon said. “People feel good on day one [of a shutdown], and then you realize it’s stupid.”Republicans will face one more test this year, assuming the House and Senate approve (as is expected) the three-month stopgap measure Johnson unveiled on Sunday. This round of funding will expire on December 20. If Trump wins the presidency, the GOP will have little incentive to wage a shutdown fight only a month before he takes office. If Kamala Harris wins, Republicans’ calculus could change. But just as lawmakers are itching to leave Washington for the campaign trail now, they will likely want to head home for the holidays in late December. As Bacon said: “I don’t think there’s an appetite for it.”

The Duke of Sussex is in New York City to support several of his charities. The 40-year-old will then fly to London where he’ll attend the WellChild Awards on Sept. 30.

Saquon Barkley is thriving with the Eagles, but he had time to shout out Malik Nabers, the budding star rookie for his former Giants, but Big Blue fans were not having it.

When ex-New York Giants lineman Justin Pugh watches Malik Nabers, he cannot help but see his old teammate, Odell Beckham Jr., as the rookie receiver has shined with Big Blue.

A US F-22 shot the object, which was first tracked flying over Alaska eight days earlier, out of the sky on Feb. 11, 2023.

Joe Buglewicz/Getty ImagesConspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars will be sold for parts to pay towards the more than $1 billion he owes to families of the victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.A Houston bankruptcy court said Tuesday that it plans to approve auctions for the assets of Jones’ company Free Speech Systems, Infowars’ parent. Everything from lighting fixtures used on the far-right network’s broadcast sets to the company’s dubious vitamin and supplement store will be up for sale beginning in November.“FSS will now be sold at auction, meaning Alex Jones will no longer own or control the company he built,” Chris Mattei, an attorney for the Sandy Hook families, said. “This brings the families closer to their goal of holding him accountable for the harm he has caused.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Brandon Bell/GettyDonald Trump was given a briefing Tuesday by intelligence officials about “real and specific threats” from Iran to assassinate him, his campaign said.In a statement, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence informed the former president about the Iranian plots, which aim to “destabilize and sow chaos in the United States.” The briefing comes after the FBI foiled an alleged Iran-linked plot to kill Trump earlier this year that authorities said was not believed to be related to the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally shooting, which wounded the Republican nominee in July.Cheung said intelligence officials “have identified that these continued and coordinated attacks have heightened in the past few months.” It’s not clear if the briefing concerned threats already known to U.S. intelligence or if new plots from Iran have been detected.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty ImagesSean “Diddy” Combs and Kim Porter’s children have condemned a publisher’s claim that their late mother wrote a 60-page supposedly leaked memoir as “simply untrue.”The Daily Mail reported that Chris Todd, who is based in Los Angeles, published the memoir in early September after he had been given a flash drive of Porter’s writing by her “close friends.” The book, titled KIM’S LOST WORDS: A Journey for Justice, From the Other Side under the pseudonym Jamal T Millwood, has fuelled rumors about Diddy’s sex tapes and Porter’s sudden death in 2018.Christian “King” Combs, twins D’Lila and Jessie, and Quincy Brown, who is the son of Porter and singer Al B. Sure!, took to Instagram as they published a lengthy statement asking for more “respect” to be shown to their late mother.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Which was a total failure, even by the standards he set for himself.

There is one thing Donald Trump’s critics and fans can agree on: He is not an intellectual.  His politics come from the gut, a combination of his own instincts and an animalistic talent for reading his supporters’ emotions and enthusiasms. The idea that Trump is attuned to the debates roiling conservative intellectuals — arguments about Hungarian family policy and concepts with names like “postliberalism” — doesn’t pass the laugh test. Yet in Trump’s first term, his intellectual incuriosity opened up a curious avenue for ideas to matter. With the president in his own world, various senior staffers had the ability to build little fiefdoms, each working to turn their own beliefs into official US policy. In the past, that often meant old-school Republicans obstructing Trump or even slipping their own policies in under his nose.  A second term would likely be different. Since 2020, Trump has purged much of the Republican old guard. Trump-aligned institutions like the Heritage Foundation have put together vast lists of loyal staff who can come in on day one. A second Trump term would likely be a self-consciously revolutionary project: one in which Trump-aligned ideologues work to turn vague outlines of Trumpism into a governing doctrine.  With Trump-aligned ideologues running the show in the White House, the ideological debates inside the Trump movement would be far more than a matter of intellectual curiosity. The ideas that have captured the MAGA world’s imagination could well be shaping the future of the United States — and quite possibly the world.  The six thinkers below have developed some of these influential ideas. Their worldviews are diverse and heterodox, advancing political visions that sound extreme or even outlandish. One is a Silicon Valley monarchist blogger, another a retired Harvard professor who writes on the virtues of “manliness.” A third is a deceased proponent of state-run economies.   Despite their differences, it is impossible to understand the modern Trump-aligned right without appreciating their influence. Studying them closely will do more than clarify what the MAGA movement wants in the abstract; it will help us think through what its return to power might mean for all of us. Patrick Deneen, the regime changer In May 2023, now-vice presidential nominee JD Vance appeared at a book event in Washington for Patrick Deneen, a conservative political theorist at the University of Notre Dame. The book, Regime Change, received an enthusiastic response from the panel; Vance told the audience that he viewed his political mission as “explicitly anti-regime.” But what does that mean, exactly? To understand, it’s worth looking at Deneen’s ideas — and the broader “postliberal” movement he belongs to. Deneen’s first big book, Why Liberalism Failed, argued that the shared philosophy of the American center — a liberalism focused on rights and individual freedom — had produced a miserable world. While claiming to liberate people to pursue their own life plan, liberalism in fact cut them off from traditional sources of community and stability. Americans were depressed, lonely, and immiserated — and they had their governing consensus to blame. After the book’s success, Deneen would become a leader in the emerging “postliberal” movement: a heavily-Catholic group of conservative scholars developing a political vision of an America beyond liberalism. Their basic idea is abandoning liberalism’s core commitment to neutrality about the good life and instead proposing a politics in which the US government uses policy to foster Christian virtue among its citizens. Different postliberals have different ideas of what that looks like. Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor, argues for integralism — an old Catholic idea that essentially merges elements of the Church into the state. Other postliberals, like Gladden Pappin and Rod Dreher, have become champions of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s vision of “illiberal democracy” — literally taking posts in Budapest at government-aligned institutions. Deneen’s own path to postliberalism, presented in Regime Change, is, well, regime change: “the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order in which existing political forms can remain in place, as long as a fundamentally different ethos informs those institutions and the personnel who populate key offices and positions.” On its face, this is an exceptionally radical proposition. It would require, at minimum, hollowing out the US government by replacing most of its key leadership with dedicated postliberals. These people would then use their posts from within to promote a conservative Christian vision for governance without formally changing the foundations of the American system — in effect, a quiet, invisible overthrow of the government. When Vance declares himself to be a “postliberal” with “explicitly anti-regime” politics, this is the cause to which he’s dedicating himself. But what does that look like in more concrete terms? In Regime Change, Deneen himself doesn’t match his radical rhetoric with radical policy. Most of the specific ideas presented in the book are either widely discussed among the American elite (like national service for teens) or already implemented (like tariffs aimed to improve domestic manufacturing). Those handful that are truly radical tend to be unconstitutional (a total ban on pornography) or narrowly focused on higher education. So, for the most part, Deneen’s work shouldn’t be seen as a policy guide for a second Trump term. However, it can be seen as an inspiration for how some of its top officials see their jobs. Talk of an evil “regime” in Washington is now widespread on the intellectual right; Vance and other like-minded Trump officials will see their task in the second term as moving against it. Their task of rooting out the “deep state” is not merely revenge against Trump’s enemies but a revolutionary Christian act of laying the groundwork for a postliberal America. James Burnham, prophet of “managerialism” Silicon Valley is typically seen as a place obsessed with the new. But in the tech conservative set likely to influence a second Trump term — people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel — there’s recently been a renewed interest in a 1941 book by conservative intellectual James Burnham. The book, titled The Managerial Revolution, prefigured the current right’s concerns about “wokeness” conquering the American business world. Despite a series of almost comically wrong predictions, it remains an important guide to how a second Trump term might conceive of its role in waging culture war. Burnham’s book predicts a world defined by class war between the capitalist and “managerial” classes (the proletariat, in his view, are too weak and disorganized to seize power). He defines the managerial class as the people who supervise the key functions of a modern economy: “operating executives, superintendents, administrative engineers, supervisory technicians; or, in government … administrators, commissioners, bureau heads, and so on.” In Burnham’s view, a complex modern economy inevitably directs power away from capitalists and toward managers. Because the managers actually understand and direct the technical tasks involved in modern corporate life, they truly control the means of production. Their nominal bosses, the capitalists, only owe their power to little pieces of paper calling them owners; the managers can, and almost certainly will, figure out some way to seize full control. This, for Burnham, meant a future of state-controlled economies. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would prove that state-controlled industry, where managers didn’t have to deal with capitalist overlords, would be so efficient that they’d consign democratic capitalism to history’s dustbin. Today, we know Burnham’s predictions were wrong in basically every particular. So why his enduring influence on the right, and especially those conservatives in tech — the sector that singlehandedly has proven that technical experts can become capitalist titans? The answer is the culture war.  Silicon Valley’s conservative CEOs and venture capitalists often have to deal with an employee base with radically different politics. While these tech leaders may be all-in on Trump, your average engineer or programmer is much like other college-educated American urbanites: very liberal. Feeling besieged and hemmed in by their own employees, tech conservatives see Burnham as a prophet of their lived experience. “Most woke ‘labor’ scandals in tech are an entitled middle-management class at odds with founders.” writes Antonio García Martínez, an influential tech conservative. “What Elon is doing [at X] is a revolt by entrepreneurial capital against the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise everywhere dominates (including and especially large tech companies).” Inasmuch as the tech conservative sector wields influence in a second Trump term, we should expect a good chunk of their efforts to be directed along Burnhamite lines. They will want the administration’s assistance not only in slashing taxes and regulations but in ensuring their own control over unruly “woke” employees.  Curtis Yarvin, the monarchist Curtis Yarvin, a blogger also known by the pen name “Mencius Moldbug,” fuses many of the traits of our first two entries.  Like Deneen, Yarvin believes that the liberal American “regime” must be overthrown. He has also been cited by JD Vance as an influence — specifically on the question of seizing control over executive branch staff. And like Burnham, an avowed influence on his thought, Yarvin believes that society is defined by a struggle for power between competing elite groups. Yarvin is likewise widely influential among tech conservatives — he is, in fact, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur himself. But unlike either of them, Yarvin has advanced a clear vision for what 21st century America should look like. Democracy, he believes, should be toppled — replaced instead with a new kind of corporate monarchy. “A well-managed enterprise hires the right people, spends the right amount of money on them, and makes sure they do the right things. How do we achieve effective management? We know one simple way: find the right person, and put him or her in charge,” he writes. In Yarvin’s view, the United States has approximated this system under three presidents: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Because the country was either young or in crisis, these leaders wielded extraordinary amounts of power — which Yarvin believes was mistakenly taken from our chief executives. “These three Presidents, and to some extent a few more, were almost true CEOs of the executive branch. Their monarchical regimes then decayed into oligarchies, each of which was rebooted by the next monarchy. By the clock, we are about due for another,” he writes. Naturally, Yarvin has implied that Trump might be the man to turn the clock forward. In an interview with Michael Anton, a former senior official in the Trump National Security Council, Yarvin mused about the mechanics of a Caesarist takeover by Trump. This includes setting up an app, “the Trump app,” designed to get millions of supporters out into the streets to support a series of swiftly executed power grabs. At other times, however, Yarvin has expressed skepticism that Trump has the chops to execute this kind of audacious authoritarian coup. “He is who he is. His capacities are what they are,” Yarvin mused resignedly in a 2022 essay. In his mind, someone like Elon Musk would be a better choice for dictator/CEO. Yarvin’s not wrong about Trump’s unserviceability. Nothing that happened between 2017 and 2021 suggests that Trump would be able to competently execute the sort of swift and total fascist coup Yarvin envisions. But Yarvin’s work is still important for understanding how far a second Trump term might go. Here is a person who is openly musing about destroying democracy and who has built up a fan base among people like Vance and Anton in Trump’s immediate orbit because of this work. You can hear echoes of his generalized contempt for democracy in the litany of actual antidemocratic policies being contemplated in a second Trump term. Harvey Mansfield, student of manliness No discussion of intellectual influences on Trump’s second term is complete without a discussion of gender. It’s a topic that, as Vance’s pronouncements about “childless cat ladies” illustrate, has become increasingly central to the modern right’s ideology — and one where the right is rapidly evolving in a more radical direction. And when it comes to gender politics, few on the right command the intellectual influence of Harvey Manfield — a nonagenarian political theorist who recently retired from Harvard.  During his 61-year tenure at America’s most famous college, Mansfield became a conservative institution unto himself: a beachhead in enemy-occupied territory, an Ivy Leaguer who has been mentor to some of the movement’s leading lights. His former graduate students include Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), leading pro-Trump intellectual Charles Kesler, and the famous Never Trump writer Bill Kristol. Mansfield, an erudite Tocqueville scholar, disdains Trump — describing him as a demagogue and a vulgarian. Yet in a recent interview, Mansfield said he voted for said vulgarian in 2020 “with many misgivings” (Mansfield adds that he “crossed [Trump] off [his] list entirely” after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot). He has offered striking praise of Trump in one area: gender. Trump, he said in one interview, was “really the first American politician” to win office via “a display of manliness and an attack on political correctness.” He beat Hillary Clinton, per Mansfield, because American elections are “tests of manliness” — and “it’s difficult for a woman to do that in a graceful way, and to maintain her femininity.” Mansfield’s 2006 book Manliness attacks what he sees as the end goal of modern feminism —  a “gender-neutral society” — as willful denial of reality. Enduring inequalities, like women’s disproportionate share of home labor, reflect not discrimination but rather the essential influence of “manliness” on men. Manliness, in his account, is a kind of self-reliant commanding decisiveness — a willingness to blaze a risky path and lead others along it. While women can be manly — Mansfield cites Margaret Thatcher as an example — they generally are not. For Mansfield, “common sense” stereotypes about men and women are mostly true and validated by the evidence. “Women still rather like housework, changing diapers, and manly men. The capacities and inclinations of the sexes do not differ exactly or universally, but they do seem to differ,” he writes.  Mansfield here is giving voice to a bedrock conservative belief that the gender binary is an essential component of human nature. Men are generally one way and women are generally another; this, for conservatives, is an eternal truth about humanity that liberals deny at their peril. This idea doesn’t just shape the way that conservatives think about feminism: It is also central to the way they approach trans issues. So much of conservative rhetoric on the topic is about insisting on the illegitimacy of trans identity and being infuriated that they are now “expected to call a man a woman” because trans people complicated the division between what Mansfield calls the enduring “capacities and inclinations of the sexes.” If we want to understand how a second Trump term will approach hot-button issues surrounding gender, there are few clearer animating spirits than Mansfield-style insistence on the truth of the gender binary — and anger at the ways in which “gender-neutral society” devalues traditional manliness. Christopher Caldwell, the ethnic majoritarian Christopher Caldwell is perhaps the most highbrow right-wing populist in American media today. A New York Times opinion contributor with a literary profile — he is, among other things, on the editorial committee of a prominent French intellectual journal — few have been as successful at bringing Trump-friendly arguments to liberalism’s salons. Overall, Caldwell’s oeuvre is the mirror image of Yarvin’s. While Yarvin advances an openly antidemocratic rule by an elite minority, Caldwell has built an argument for unfettered majority rule. In his most recent book, The Age of Entitlement, Caldwell argues that the 1964 Civil Rights Act is responsible for much of what right-wing Americans find baleful about American culture today (such as “wokeness”). He writes that white people “fell asleep thinking of themselves as the people who had built this country and woke up to find themselves occupying the bottom rung of an official hierarchy of races.” This idea, that America is now a society that formally discriminates against white people, is a major influence on the Trumpist right today. Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration czar and leading adviser, has founded a law firm — America First Legal — that has dedicated much of its efforts to filing suits alleging anti-white discrimination. If elected, a Trump administration would almost certainly attempt to revamp civil rights law to center this alleged scourge. Of course, Caldwell hardly invented the idea of “reverse discrimination.” But he did break new ground in explicitly linking the problem to the very idea of federal civil rights protections itself, suggesting (albeit not outright owning) a radical remedy to the problem. This is especially important in light of his praise for elected authoritarians abroad. In my book The Reactionary Spirit, I looked at three examples of foreign heads of state who have taken a hammer to the democracies they govern: Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, and Narendra Modi in India. In each case, the evidence of their antidemocratic bent is damning, ranging from systematic attacks on the freedom of the press to attempts to undermine the independence of election administration officials and the judiciary. Caldwell has written essays defending each of these leaders from charges of authoritarianism. His work reads like prestige feature journalism but is weak on the merits — ignoring contradictory evidence to the point of dishonesty. What Caldwell seems to admire in these leaders is their ability to turn visions of right-wing ethnonationalist government into reality. He describes them (often misleadingly) as the voices of the true majority, fighting a decadent left that had been imposing its will on an unwilling populace for too long. This core commitment to ethnic majoritarianism is what links his work on foreign governments to his critique of the Civil Rights Act — and what makes Caldwell so important for understanding a second Trump term. He is hostile to civil rights law, and friendly to foreign ethnonationalists, because he believes that there is something fundamentally undemocratic about the enterprise of legally protecting minority rights. “We … like to pretend that protecting minorities always means protecting them against abuse and persecution by majorities. Sometimes it does. But just as often it means claiming prerogatives for minorities against the innocent preferences of democratic majorities,” he writes in his essay on Modi. This spells out, perhaps more clearly than Caldwell intended, the vision of “democracy” that animates Trumpism: The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must. Elbridge Colby, the China hawk Since World War II, American foreign policy has centered around maintaining its core alliances in Europe. We all know that Donald Trump has little interest in keeping those in good shape. But what would a more Trumpy alternative look like? Elbridge Colby, one of the brightest young(er) lights of the GOP foreign policy establishment, has a clear answer: Put fighting China at the top of the to-do list. In his 2021 book The Strategy of Denial, Colby argues that the rise of China has fundamentally changed the nature of international politics. Because of China’s extraordinary size and rapidly advancing armed forces, it poses a geostrategic threat to the United States unlike that of any state in recent memory. Were China to fully displace America as the dominant power in East Asia, Colby writes, it would be a dire threat to “Americans’ security, freedom, and prosperity.” In his view, Beijing aspires to attain dominance by exerting effective control over nearby states — beginning with Taiwan but expanding outward from there. The only way to stop China from doing so is to invest massive amounts of resources in the region, enough to prevent it from believing that it has a chance of simply running over its neighbors with relative ease. Colby’s “strategy of denial” depends on America being selective. In his view, China is so strong that the US must scale down its commitments elsewhere in order to concentrate all attention where it really matters. “Its first, overriding priority must be an effective defense of allies in Asia against China,” he writes. And, as such, “the United States should seek to have European states assume the greater role in NATO.” This worldview has made Colby into one of the most articulate skeptics about America’s ongoing commitment to Ukraine. Every dollar the United States spends on helping the Ukrainian war effort is a dollar less for helping Taiwan prepare to fight a Chinese invasion. We need to avoid “getting bogged down in Europe,” as he put it in a Fox News appearance, and begin pivoting to Taiwan. Colby has real pull in the GOP: He served in Trump’s first-term Department of Defense and, per Politico, currently has Vance’s ear. And his worldview is consistent with Trump’s on more than just Europe. One of the great misapprehensions about the former president is that he is an isolationist or even a critic of American empire. Neither is true: Trump used force aggressively during his first term, but did so less in the name of “protecting democracy” or other such lofty goals than in favor of American interests narrowly construed. In service of this vision, his administration oversaw bombings in Iraq and Syria that killed thousands of civilians. The Trumpian critique has never been that America should voluntarily weaken its military or retreat from the world. Rather, it’s that the United States should focus on its own interests, eschewing any of this “rules-based order” nonsense in favor of taking what’s ours.  In that general sense, Trump and Colby are a perfect fit. But it’s less clear whether Trump shares Colby’s assessment of China as a military threat.  As much as he loves to complain about Chinese trade practices, Trump has also repeatedly expressed admiration for President Xi Jinping — an admiration the Chinese have built up through aggressive flattery. So while Colby’s ideas are almost certain to play some role in shaping a second Trump term, there is a real question over whether they’ll play a dominant one.

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Supporters of former President Donald Trump watch as he holds a rally in the South Bronx on May 23, 2024, in New York City. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images Is Donald Trump on track to win a historic share of voters of color in November’s presidential election? On the surface, it’s one of the most confounding questions of the Trump years in American politics. Trump — and the Republican Party in his thrall — has embraced anti-immigrant policies and proposals, peddled racist stereotypes, and demonized immigrants. So why does it look like he might win over and hold the support of greater numbers of nonwhite voters than the Republican Party of years past? In poll after poll, he’s hitting or exceeding the levels of support he received in 2020 from Latino and Hispanic voters. He’s primed to make inroads among Asian American voters, whose Democratic loyalty has gradually been declining over the last few election cycles. And the numbers he’s posting with Black voters suggest the largest racial realignment in an election since the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. There are a plethora of explanations for this shift, but first, some points of clarification. The pro-Trump shift is concentrated among Hispanic and Latino voters, though it has appeared to be spreading to parts of the Black and Asian American electorate. Second, things have changed since Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket in late July. Polling confirms that Harris has posted significant improvements among nonwhite voters, young voters, Democrats, and suburban voters. In other words, Harris has managed to revive the party’s standing with its base, suggesting that a part of Trump’s gains were due to unique problems that Biden had with these groups of voters. Thus, it’s not entirely clear to what extent this great racial realignment, as some have described the Trump-era phenomenon, will manifest itself in November. Still, Democrats aren’t in the clear. That same polling suggests that, despite Harris’s improvements, she is still underperforming both Biden’s support at this point in the 2020 polls and the margins of victory Biden ended up winning on Election Day. These numbers, especially the results among Latino and Hispanic voters, should be worrisome to Democrats: Biden did rather poorly among Latino voters relative to other candidates from the current century, resulting in Trump posting numbers not seen by a Republican since George W. Bush ran for reelection in 2004, and Harris could perform even more poorly. Why? Putting aside environmental factors and shifts in the American electorate that are happening independent of the candidates, there are a few theories to explain how Trump has uniquely weakened political polarization along the lines of race and ethnicity. 1) Trump has successfully associated himself with a message of economic nostalgia, heightening nonwhite Americans’ memories of the pre-Covid economy in contrast to the period of inflation we’re now exiting. 2) Trump and his campaign have also zeroed in specifically on outreach and messaging to nonwhite men as part of their larger focus on appealing to male voters. 3) Trump and his party have taken advantage of a confluence of social factors, including messaging on immigration and cultural issues, to shore up support from conservative voters of color who have traditionally voted for Democrats or not voted at all. Theory 1: Effective campaigning on the economy Trump’s loudest message — the one that gets the most headlines — is his bombastic attacks on immigrants and his pledge to conduct mass deportations. His most successful appeal to voters, though, which he has held on to despite an improving economy under Biden, is economic. Trump claims to have presided over a time of broad and magnificent prosperity, arguing that there was a Trump economic renaissance before Biden bungled it. That pitch doesn’t comport with reality, but it may be resonating with voters who disproportionately prioritize economic concerns in casting their votes, particularly Latino and Asian American voters. Polling suggests that voters at large remember the Trump-era economy fondly and view Trump’s policies more favorably than Biden’s. Black and Latino voters in particular may have more negative memories about Biden and Democrats’ economic stewardship because they experienced worse rates of inflation than white Americans and Asian Americans did during 2021 and 2022. Those memories came up constantly on a recent Black Voters for Trump voter outreach swing this September through predominantly Black neighborhoods in Philadelphia. “We have got to get somebody in the White House that has been there, knows our economy, knows what a bad economy looks like, and will get us where we need to go,” Signa Griffin, who described herself as a Black Trump supporter living in Philadelphia, told me.  Sharita White, another Black voter planning to support Trump, said not enough people want to admit how much better life was when Trump was president. “They talk so bad about him, but they forgot what happened,” she said. “I don’t know too much about politics, but the only thing I know, my income changed, and if I need that man to get in here to fix my income, I’m all down.” Polling suggests Hispanic and Asian American voters are feeling economic concerns especially keenly, and Hispanic voters in particular seem primed for an economic pitch from Trump: More than half said they trusted Trump over Biden to “make good decisions about economic policy,” according to research conducted by the Pew Research Center this summer. It was the topic on which Trump had the biggest advantage. Of course, Trump has long inflated his economic record and conveniently ignores the economic devastation he presided over during the Covid-19 pandemic and recession. That deflection provides an additional point that further complicates the blame Biden has received on the economy. Presidents, in general, have limited ability to control the economy (or inflation), given the independence of the Federal Reserve and how interconnected our economy is with the world at large. But sour perceptions still helped drag down Biden’s approval rating and electoral support as a candidate.  And it hasn’t stopped Trump from making a big deal about the opportunities his administration secured for minority-owned small businesses — he talks about cutting regulations, providing emergency assistance during the pandemic, and keeping unemployment low. All of this resonates with Hispanic and Asian American communities, James Zarsadiaz, a professor of history and researcher on conservatism at the University of San Francisco, told me. “As [these entrepreneurs] feel the punch of inflation, fees, taxes to run a business in very expensive metro areas, the GOP is starting to look more attractive to them again because they’re seen as the party on the side of the small-business owner, as opposed to the Democrats who are seen as the party of protecting workers.” Once again, things have changed since Harris became the nominee, and polls specifically focusing on economic sentiment have tracked an improving national mood and growing trust in Harris’s ability to handle economic issues. But Trump is still benefiting from a sense of nostalgia and has tried his best to tie Harris to Biden’s economic record, asking voters routinely if they are better off today than they were four years ago. Theory 2: Direct appeals to nonwhite men The political realignment of women voters has been one of the major stories of 2024; the gender gap in American politics exploded in 2016, took a break in 2020, and seems like it’s about to be historic in 2024, with a huge pro-Democrat shift among women. At the same time, though, the rightward drift of men, including men of color, is a quiet undercurrent that may end up explaining what happened if Trump wins in November. Plenty of theories have been raised in the past about what kind of appeal Trump might have specifically to men and to men of color: Does his businessman persona resonate with upwardly mobile, financially aspirational men? Is there a “macho” appeal there for Hispanic men? Could his gritty, outsider, everyman posturing and brash rhetoric resonate with Black and Latino men, particularly those living in traditionally Democratic cities? All of those could play a factor, but more significantly, pre-Harris, Trump’s campaign and allies doubled down on reaching out to men, especially men of color, as part of an effort to exploit the growing gender gap and fuel disillusionment with Democrats. It’s the “Jamal and Enrique” strategy that the Trump campaign appears to believe in, that “for every Karen we lose, we’re going to win a Jamal and an Enrique,” as Trump allies explained it to the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta in July. That includes speaking to, campaigning with, and getting endorsements from TikTok stars, sports personalities, and popular Black and Latin musicians who have large young male audiences. Intentionally or otherwise, this strategy could exacerbate movement by traditionally Democratic constituencies that were already slipping. Among young Black, Asian American, and Latino men, loyalty to the Democratic Party has faded. Younger Latinos in general are more likely than older Latinos to identify as independents, and younger Latino men have tended to support Republican candidates at higher rates than young Latinas. An example: A Brookings analysis of the 2022 midterms found Latinos under the age of 30 “supported Republican candidates for Congress (40%) at nearly double the rate of young Latinas (21%).” And Pew Research has routinely found that younger Black men are more likely to identify as Republicans than older Black men.  Theory 3: Championing conservative social issues Trump and the GOP may also have found the right social issues to emphasize and campaign on in order to exploit some of the cultural divides between conservative and moderate nonwhite voters, and liberal white voters who also make up part of the Democratic base (in addition to liberal nonwhite voters). In 2021 and 2022, that looked like fearmongering on gender identity and crime, playing up concerns over affirmative action, and campaigning on the overturning of Roe v Wade. In 2023 and 2024, the Trump focus has shifted strongly toward immigration, an issue that has divided the Democratic coalition as hostility toward immigration has grown. That’s true even for Latino and Hispanic voters — long seen as being the voting group most amenable to a pro-immigrant, Democratic message — and it’s being used as a wedge issue by Republicans among Black voters as well. Though it was seen as a gaffe, Trump’s “black jobs” comment during the first presidential debate got to this tension — the idea of migrants taking jobs, resources, and opportunities from non-white citizens. Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, one of Trump’s go-to Black surrogates, explained the argument to me like this: “If you’re a Black man, Hispanic man, white man, you’re working hard every day, and the money you earn doesn’t go as far. That hurts your family, that hurts your kids. So they look at this situation, this immigration problem. People are saying, ‘Wait a minute. Why are illegal aliens getting food, getting shelter, getting an education, while my family and my child is struggling. It’s not right, and it’s not fair.’” And for Asian American voters, now the fastest growing ethnic segment of the electorate, immigration is also becoming a wedge issue, Zarsadiaz told me. “This feeling, ‘I’ve waited my turn, I waited my time’ — there’s long been Latino and Asian American immigrants who have felt this way. The assumption has long been that if you’re an immigrant, you must be very liberal on immigration, and that’s definitely not the case,” Zarsadiaz said. “Some of the staunchest critics of immigration, especially on amnesty or Dreamers, are immigrants themselves, and with Asian Americans that’s an issue that has been drawing more voters to Trump and Trumpism — those immigrant voters who feel like they’re being wronged.” Democrats are now moderating on immigration, but only after years of moving left. And that shift left has been true on a range of issues, contributing to another part of this theory of Trump’s gains: that Democrats have pushed conservative or moderate nonwhite Americans away as they embraced beliefs more popular with white, college-educated, and suburban voters. The political scientist Ruy Teixeira and Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini have been theorizing for a while now that a disjuncture over social issues in general — and Trump’s seizure of these issues — has complicated the idea that Democrats would benefit from greater numbers and rates of participation from nonwhite America. It may explain why conservative and moderate voters of color, who may have voted for Democrats in the past, are now realigning with the Republican Party. Don’t forget the non-Trump factors These three theories try to describe how Trump specifically has been able to improve his and the GOP’s standing among a growing segment of the American electorate. They place Trump as the central cause for the majority of this racial political shift. But would these dynamics still be happening if he weren’t involved? There are signs that some of this shift may be happening independently of Trump. It could be a product of the growing diversification of America, upward mobility and changing understandings of class, and growing educational divides.  For example, as rates of immigration change and the share of US-born Latino and Asian Americans grows, their partisan loyalties may continue to change. Those born closer to the immigrant experience may have had more of a willingness to back the party seen as more welcoming of immigrants, but as generations get further away from that experience, racial and ethnic identity may become less of a factor in the development of political thinking. Concepts of racial identity and memory are also changing — younger Black Americans, for example, have less of a tie to the Civil Rights era — potentially contributing to less strong political polarization among Black and Latino people in the US independently of any given candidate — and creating more persuadable voters in future elections. At the same time, younger generations are increasingly identifying as independents or outside of the two-party paradigm — a change in loyalty that stands to hurt Democrats first, since Democrats tend to do better with younger voters. Regardless of whether Trump just happens to be the right kind of populist at the right time of racial and ethnic change in America or if he’s a unique accelerator and contributor to the changes America is experiencing, November may offer more evidence that something has fundamentally changed in US politics. As America diversifies, it makes sense for its political parties to diversify too — and that poses a reckoning for Democrats in elections to come.

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