One early clash surrounded the “Salute to America 250” in Washington, D.C. The White House spent the months leading up to this year’s July 4 celebration promoting the administration’s National Mall festival as one of the grandest events in American history. “We are going to host the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all, a ‘TRIBUTE TO AMERICA,’ ” Trump wrote in a June 15 social media post.

Then came a directive from his own secretary of Homeland Security that the festivities, including Trump’s planned remarks and the massive fireworks show that followed, should be called off because of weather conditions.

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It’s a nice story, but the camera doesn’t lie. More than an hour into the proceedings, Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, exposed the stone wall strategy. He requested those in the audience to stand up if they had paid a professional, legal, or personal price for dissenting from Covid orthodoxies during the pandemic. The senator then asked Fauci to turn around and look at them. Fauci refused.

Then Moreno told the story of a family in Ohio who attended a high school football game in the middle of the lockdowns. “They went to the stadium. They sat alone, far from anyone else. They didn’t feel they needed to wear masks because it was stupid and they were outside. Dr. Fauci, do you know what happened to . . . that family?” Fauci responded with the line he must have repeated more than a hundred times in the hearing. “On the advice of counsel I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution,” he said.

Moreno went in for the kill. “They were dragged out of that stadium and arrested,” he said. “Those policies were put in place because you had moronic politicians that listened to the words of a megalomaniac who was more interested in having met a Kardashian than the suffering of the American people.” Fauci just sat there, stone faced, without emotion.

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Multiple mainstream outlets have reported on young conservatives’ admiration for the disgraced 37th president. Because this is the summer of 2026, the phenomenon has unfortunately been dubbed “Nixonmaxxing.”

This new push to rehabilitate Nixon isn’t so much about his actual record. There aren’t hordes of young conservatives posting about the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, or the decision to embrace the People’s Republic of China. Instead, Nixon’s comeback in recent months has been heavy on Zoomerfied social-media hype videos, many of them churned out by the Richard Nixon Foundation. One emblematic example shows Mad Men protagonist Don Draper noting his similarities to Nixon, then switches to Nixon footage as a Drake song blares in the background.

If you’ve seen these videos, you might be wondering what on Earth is going on. One answer comes from the writer and conservative activist Chirstopher Rufo. “The right’s rediscovery of Richard Nixon is not about particular policies—some good, some bad—but about the aesthetic, the attitude, and the narrative of the self-made man who won 49 states on behalf of the silent majority, and was taken down in a deep state coup,” he explained on X.

That “coup” is better known as Watergate, in which an inept Nixon White House goon squad tried to bug the chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1972 only to be caught by a security guard working the graveyard shift.

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The former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—and the government’s leading authority during the Covid crisis—Fauci led the call for lockdowns and school closures. Wrong. He said that it was “extremely unlikely” that people who had been vaccinated could transmit the virus to others. Wrong. He said that children as young as 2 should wear masks. Wrong. He argued that the virus had emerged from a “wet market” in Wuhan, China, jumping from an animal to a human—and shut down any suggestion that it could have resulted from a leak in a laboratory that was engaged in “gain of function” research.

As for those who disagreed, Fauci had an astonishingly arrogant response: “They are really criticizing science because I represent science.”

Back when both the public health establishment and the mainstream media hung on Fauci’s every word, Republican Senator Rand Paul was one of the few in a position of power willing to criticize him—going so far as to say that Fauci should “go to prison” for “his dishonesty” in dismissing the lab leak theory. Paul has long been convinced that the virus did indeed result from a lab leak, a position that is no longer viewed as heresy but is taken seriously by a number of officials in the intelligence community. And he has never stopped trying to get to the bottom of it. Paul has subpoenaed Fauci to testify at a hearing his committee is holding on Wednesday. Fireworks are guaranteed.

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It wasn’t only about winning elections. When the International Longshoremen’s Association threatened a strike in January 2025 that would have halted shipping along the entire East Coast, Trump backed the union, even though he no longer needed its megaphone and votes. American Compass, a conservative think tank formed in 2020, advocates for pro-worker policies and maintains ties in Congress and the White House.

Yet nearly halfway through Trump’s term, the pro-labor policy agenda has all but vanished. And the woman who Trump tapped to lead it is now sitting on the sidelines.

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These are the words of Evan Barker, writing for The Free Press on November 9, 2024. A lifelong Democratic operative from a working-class family in Kansas City, Missouri, she’d spent her career getting progressives elected. Then, as she put it, the Democratic Party “turned its back on me and my family.” At the time, Evan’s story captured a trend playing out across the country: The working class, once a cornerstone of the Democratic coalition, was drifting away from the party.

Now, with the progressive wing ascendant and the midterms approaching, that shift has only become more consequential. But how exactly did it happen? And what do Democrats need to do to win back the voters they lost? Evan is better positioned than most to answer those questions. That’s exactly what she does in her new book, Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, which hits shelves Tuesday. In today’s exclusive excerpt, she pulls back the curtain on the transformation of the modern Democratic Party, from a rare vantage point: inside the belly of the beast. —The Editors

The night Barack Obama won his first presidential race was one of the happiest moments of my life.

I was a campaign intern. I hadn’t finished high school, but I canvassed outside concerts, inside laundromats, in gas stations, and on college campuses, working more than 40 hours a week. I’d stay at the office past 8 p.m. on school nights, leading phone banks and teaching volunteers three times my age how to talk to voters. It felt like there was no mission more critical than electing Obama. I was changing the world.

Like most of my generation, I was angry at the George W. Bush administration. I looked at Obama as a new hope, someone who would end the senseless violence in the Middle East, fix the economy, and bring us out of recession.

But one issue made me willing to crawl over glass for Obama: healthcare. I spent my childhood in and out of hospitals with a severe respiratory condition. For years, doctors told my parents I had bad asthma that I would someday outgrow. At 15, they finally made the correct diagnosis. I had a rare, life-threatening genetic disorder called primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD). My disease wasn’t curable, and it was poorly understood. Going in and out of the hospital would be the constant rhythm of my life.

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He was asked point-blank, “How do you define the working class?”

Mamdani replied, “I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class.”

After some pushback from the interviewer, Mamdani said he would draw the line at “about a million dollars a year.” I have no idea how he can say that without any embarrassment, but that’s why he’s a politician and I’m not. Say what you will about him, but the man knows his base. These are the people who claim to be the champions of women, yet—and please forgive what has now become a hackneyed line—can’t define what a woman is, and they claim to be the champions of the working class, yet can’t define what the working class is. Or they redefine both terms to be so expansive that they could potentially encompass just about everyone.

This is where the luxury belief class has steered us.

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“What happened in Maine should serve as a clear message: The days of women being sacrificed at the altar of our elections are over,” she wrote of Platner, who was accused of sexual assault.

You may not have heard of Hunt, but you are almost certainly familiar with her work. A lawyer and progressive content creator, Hunt worked with Platner’s accusers to help orchestrate the media rollout that ultimately drove him to call off his campaign.

And he wasn’t Hunt’s first political knockout. In April, the lawyer-turned-influencer played an instrumental role in surfacing sexual misconduct allegations against Eric Swalwell, the Democratic congressman and leading candidate for California governor. The resulting backlash drove Swalwell, a seven-term lawmaker who has denied all wrongdoing, to step down from Congress and suspend his gubernatorial campaign.

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The Palestinian militant group Hamas’s terrorist attack on southern Israel a month earlier was breathing frenetic new life into the anti-Israel movement globally. And Chambers, now 41, wanted it known that he had established a financial vehicle through which to spend his millions on Palestine and other far-left causes.

“We are the Babochki Collective,” Chambers proclaimed on his Facebook page on November 9, 2023, giving a name to his investment fund. Babochki means butterflies in Russian, and he said it was “a cadre collective focused on revolutionary funding, propaganda and political education, direct action/legal support, and the open proliferation of a steadily stronger anti-imperialist united front.”

Joining Chambers that day was a coterie of young comrades, a number of whom would go on to make names for themselves by launching protests and sabotage operations against companies and institutions seen as aiding Israel. These associates included teenage activist Calla Walsh and Paige Belanger of Palestine Action U.S., a sister organization to the British group that the UK government designated as a terrorist entity last year. Also present were Mirah Wood and Jorge Rocha of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) International Committee.

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More races like these are coming. In Michigan, progressive Abdul El-Sayed is ahead in the polls heading into the state’s Senate primary in two weeks. If he wins the nomination in a swing state carried twice by Donald Trump, it will be the clearest signal yet that this movement can succeed beyond deep-blue districts.

On the Fourth of July, President Trump warned of a “resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” calling it “a mortal threat to American liberty.” Democrats, meanwhile, are divided over what to call it. Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York has unveiled a pledge opposing the party’s leftward drift, while others are wearing the socialist label proudly.

We have covered this story closely because the ground is shifting beneath American politics. Is this communism, as the president says? Or democratic socialism, as the rising candidates say? Or something else entirely—Third Worldism, generational economic grievance, an identity crisis?

We asked some important contributors to make sense of what we are seeing. Though they might not agree on a name for it, all of them agree that what’s happening now will define the Democratic Party’s future. Read on to see where they land. —The Editors

Natan Sharansky: Marxism, Rebranded

In his speech marking America’s 250th anniversary, Trump warned of the return of communism, pointing to the results of the Democratic primaries. At first glance, this may seem like nothing more than a cheap scare tactic. Yet, as Soviet dissidents used to joke: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that no one is following you.

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I was a member of the DSA from the 2010s until 2022. During that time, I witnessed a rise in extremism, ranging from an eagerness to collaborate with Leninist groups to a growing animosity toward the U.S. and the West. My final departure was prompted by a DSA statement that attributed Russia’s aggression against Ukraine to American “imperialist expansionism.”

So what does the DSA stand for? An answer to that question arrived last week in the form of a new platform. Among the DSA’s core aims are ending the presidency and Supreme Court. Abolishing prisons. Universal free housing. The elimination of all debt. Closing all U.S. military bases overseas. Lifting all sanctions from Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. And so much more.

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“They don’t work for me,” said Dan Osborn after a town hall in Seward, Nebraska, a small farming town near Lincoln. The independent Senate candidate, who has the official backing of the Nebraska state Democratic Party, is referring to Morris Katz and Daniel Moraff, two prolific young Democratic consultants who helped recruit both Platner and Osborn, among other nontraditional stars of the left. After Platner’s campaign imploded, a group of 15 Republican female Nebraska state senators had demanded that Osborn fire the campaign boosters.

“Daniel Moraff stopped working for me before all this happened in June,” said Osborn, a former industrial mechanic and labor leader who outperformed Kamala Harris by 14 points in Nebraska during his first run for Senate in 2024, which he lost. “[Moraff] was a minor consultant on the campaign and he just kind of outwore his worth to me. Morris [Katz] hasn’t worked for me since 2024. . . . He made ads for me. There’s a lot of people who make ads. I wouldn’t hire him again.”

Osborn was even more emphatic when he distinguished himself from his former counterpart in Maine. “I don’t share the same values as Graham Platner.”

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On June 9, more than 150,000 Mainers voted for Platner in the Democratic Senate primary—more than any Democrat had ever won in a Senate primary in the state.

Then came the final allegation—the only credible rape charge, to date—and on July 10, he was out.

But to Platner’s voters—to the disaffected, the livid—the fight had to go on. There were dragons to slay.

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Let’s look at the facts. First, in people’s daily lives, they typically interact with their state and local governments more than with the feds. And if you look at what state and local governments do, most of it is driven by voter demand, and I do not mean billionaire or oligarchic voters.

Most state and local government spending goes toward schools, roads, and increasingly, Medicaid. None of those reflect the agendas of most billionaires. For example, Medicaid dollars flow particularly to lower-income recipients. Hospitals and doctors receive income from this program, but reimbursement rates are relatively low, and many of the best doctors do not accept Medicaid patients and don’t make a living from the program.

Now look at the federal budget. The major components of spending are Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid (joined with the states), defense, and interest on the national debt. Those programs are a mix of popular and necessary, and they were not put in place, and are not kept in place, by billionaires or oligarchs.

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Of course not. All of the boasting was just a prelude to the big announcement. The Trump administration will be releasing long-suppressed intelligence “revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” Trump said. Our voting system is ripe for “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference,” he argued.

The details, as he presented them, were alarming. The Chinese government, starting in 2020, illicitly acquired election data on 220 million Americans. “This data loss presents an unprecedented election [data] security nightmare,” Trump said. It gets worse. The American deep state conspired to keep the Chinese meddling from the American public and the president himself, Trump claimed. China sought to influence prominent American journalists and business leaders to turn against Trump in 2020, Trump said the declassified documents showed. Raw intelligence collected by the FBI, Trump claimed, showed that China even tried to manufacture illegal ballots in 2020 for Trump’s general election opponent, Joe Biden.

Is this a real scandal? In 2021, Biden’s National Intelligence Council released an assessment that explicitly stated: “We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.”

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No, the real culprit behind the collapse of Vance’s deal with Iran is conniving Israelis who used their shekels to pay influencers to character-assassinate the vice president, all for the crime of seeking peace.

This is what the vice president implied Wednesday on The Joe Rogan Experience. Vance described the opposition he has faced for brokering what many Americans, including myself, saw as a humiliating deal that suspended U.S. military operations without securing any of the aims President Donald Trump laid out at the beginning of the war, such as a permanent end to Iran’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. The language of the deal also made clear the Iranians would not honor their pledge to let ships pass through the strait, which was their only major concession in the agreement. It was clear from the get-go that this “deal” was a capitulation by the greatest superpower ever to exist to a country with no navy and barely any economy. The agreement was worse than the 2015 agreement with Iran struck by President Barack Obama—which Vance spent years mocking—because unlike the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), it made clear that Iran now believes it has total control over the strait, through which 20 percent of the world’s oil travels. We decimated them militarily, but they won—thanks to the terms Vance helped hammer out.

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His dilemma worsened when Trump’s war blew up in his face, thanks to Iran’s asymmetrical warfare—not merely seizing the Strait of Hormuz but a willingness to go for the desalination and gas-refining jugulars of Arab Gulf States, and accept the catastrophic suffering of its own population. The president named Vance chief negotiator to try to extract the U.S. from the mess Trump made.

The June 17 memorandum of understanding (MOU) negotiated by Vance collapsed under repeated Iranian violations of its terms—which the Islamic Republic had never quite accepted in the first place, which became unignorable after Iran attacked Persian Gulf shipping on July 6. In short, Iran made a fool of both the United States and the vice president—but then, given the sinister nature of the Iranian regime, that was always in the cards.

Trump himself shrugged at the recent NATO summit, calling further negotiations “a waste of time.”

Meanwhile, the midterms are approaching, Trump’s approval ratings are in the basement, and the administration is increasingly blamed by the right, which accuses Trump of betraying voters who believed he would keep America out of “forever wars.” What is Vance, assumed to be looking forward to running as Trump’s successor in 2028, to do?

Surveying the dire political and geopolitical landscape, the vice president has decided that the real villain in all this is Israel.

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Whenever I’ve been asked to speculate upon Graham’s sexuality—and speculate was all that I or anyone else could do—I always answered the question honestly.

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Like seemingly almost everything in American politics this year, the conversation was all about Gaza. The interview with one of the most pro-Hamas outlets in U.S. media should have been a victory lap for Khanna, who last week grabbed headlines for a stunt where he claimed he was detained by the Israel Defense Forces after local settlers pulled over his entourage in a once-restricted area of the West Bank.

Khanna has reinvented himself during the last year to curry favor with the populist fringe of his Democratic Party, devoting himself to the cause of releasing law enforcement files on Jeffrey Epstein and casting himself a defender of the forgotten working class. Once a proud supporter of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Khanna is now one of the pro-Israel group’s leading opponents.

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This debate is playing out behind closed doors. Back in March, House Democrats gathered in Seattle for a policy retreat organized by the party’s campaign arm. At one point, Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, warned his colleagues that impeaching Trump again would be a mistake—and could backfire on the party politically. Most people in the room applauded, according to two people who attended.

For Smith, the political calculus is straightforward. Polls consistently suggest that Democrats will claim a House majority after this year’s elections and regain the power to launch impeachment proceedings. Yet doubters such as Smith believe that impeaching Trump a third time wouldn’t make him go away; it would only rerun a failed political playbook that previously benefited Republicans. “We impeached him twice last time; both times he got stronger after we did it,” Smith said in a recent interview with The Free Press.

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