Astead Herndon | Vox

The progressive plan to reclaim the working class

2026-05-08T16:31:47-04:00

Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) speaks during a news conference outside the US Capitol on April 29, 2026. | Tom Brenner/Getty Images

For years, one of the bedrock adages of electoral politics was “it’s the economy, stupid.” The quip, coined by former Bill Clinton strategist James Carville, warned party leaders that economic concerns will always outrank other issues in the mind of voters

But recently, Carville’s iconic advice feels like it’s been forgotten.

In President Joe Biden’s administration, social and cultural concerns rose on the Democrats’ priority list. Policies like a $15 minimum wage and addressing price gouging in grocery stores were not front and center to Vice President Kamala Harris’s short presidential campaign (or at least, not as front and center as other issues).

Under President Donald Trump, who won partly on a promise to lower prices for consumer goods, prices have nonetheless gone the opposite direction, driven by his punitive tariff strategy and a war with Iran that has disrupted the energy market.

Because of this, concerns about the economy — and specifically the cost of living — have never been more important to voters. That reality has led both parties’ candidates in the 2026 midterms (as well as prospective candidates in the 2028 presidential election) to adopt a new focus on “affordability.”

The A-word just might be the buzziest thing in politics right now. It’s in policy papers and television ads, and on the campaign trail after it was popularized by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, whose successful 2025 campaign was laser-focused on the issue. At its heart, the idea is not that different from Carville’s: A candidate must show credibility on “kitchen table” issues before anything else, especially at this moment.

That being said, affordability means so many things to so many people (including to Trump, who has called it a “hoax”). I wanted to spend this week on America, Actually breaking down the buzzword and getting a sense of the policy positions that inform this new focus.

So I talked to Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, about the group’s recently released “New Affordability Agenda.” It’s a 10-point policy proposal outlining in more concrete terms what progressive Democrats mean when they say affordability.

I think the timing of the proposal is particularly interesting, with Democrats out of power in both chambers of Congress and Trump still in the White House. Why are progressives releasing this now? And how many of these proposals do they believe can garner bipartisan support?

Read on for an excerpt of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

Why release this agenda now? Democrats are obviously not in the congressional majority. Why at this moment?

The new affordability agenda is the Progressive Caucus’s 10-point plan to bring down costs for everyday people, especially by taking on the big corporations and the ultra-rich that are screwing you over and making their money jacking up your prices. And the reason that we put this agenda out now is because we want candidates campaigning on this agenda in their primaries.

We want people to win their elections by going and connecting with their voters about driving down costs. Here’s the radical part: If we take the majority, I want us to pass these kinds of policies to bring down your utility bill by $500 next year, to cap your childcare cost or reduce that prescription drugs cost, and then dare Donald Trump to try to block it.

If they pass it, great. If they block it, then voters will know who to blame. But right now, the idea I hear from a lot of voters is, okay, they know who Trump is. They might be really pissed off at his lies and how he is, but they want to know what Democrats stand for, especially when it comes to these day-to-day economic issues.

Congress hasn’t necessarily gotten itself a reputation for passing big bills over the last couple years. How achievable is this stuff?

Voters are so upset and rightfully pissed off right now at the way their costs keep going up and up and up. And so I hear from elected officials all over, but especially my Democratic colleagues, that we’ve got to do something about this. And so I think this is a key opportunity to finally beat Big Pharma and start producing tons of our own generic drugs as a country and collapse the prices of so many of the drugs people rely on for their healthcare.

Right now is a moment to finally take on these super PACs that are trying to buy politicians and elections and policies. And so I smell blood in the water in this moment, while voters are upset, to forge a new consensus in the Democratic Party.

It sounds like you’re saying some of this agenda should be seen as a signal to fellow Democrats in 2026 and 2028, saying, “This is what affordability means to us.”

As a progressive in a progressive district, I could put forward an economic agenda that polls really well in Austin, Texas, but maybe has more trouble, say, in some rural parts of the country. We chose strategically not to do that and instead put out an agenda that polls very well with two out of three Trump voters, seven out of 10 independents.

We did that because we want to get this agenda passed. This is a no-excuses agenda. It plays well in every district and helps voters with the thing we hear every day, which is how damn expensive life is getting in this country.

To that point, is that the reason that I don’t see things like climate change or even Medicare for All listed among these planks?

As a progressive caucus, we have things called our flagship agenda. That includes Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. We keep on fighting for those flagship bills and to bring more parts of the party together around those ideas.

But these are not our flagships. This new slate are our battleships in addition to our flagships. These are the kinds of issues where we’ve got, in some cases, 80 percent support of voters, not just right now, but consistently. And so let’s move that stuff, since we can have consensus on it while still pushing for the big ideas.

It does feel a little bit, though, that Democrats are talking about climate less. Is that true?

What we need to make sure we do in the climate movement is connect it to everyday people’s lives. The moment that Republicans tried to make it seem that tackling the climate crisis was about buying more expensive products or was kind of an elite luxury, we took a big hit.

And so I think that it’s very important, if we care about having a livable climate agenda, that we need to talk about how electrification is gonna make things cheaper.

Let’s get this restarted by taking on the insane price of your electric bill, earn people’s trust, and then show folks how an agenda on climate can actually make your life more affordable instead of more expensive.

I wanted to also ask about the ban on surveillance pricing. I know you introduced a bill on that policy, and your bill would prohibit the use of surveillance-based pricing and wage setting. It would also prevent the use of AI to set wages.

This all makes sense to me, but it feels downstream from a bigger question of tech and AI regulation that we’ve heard from members of the House who have called for a moratorium on data centers overall.

Why isn’t something like that on this list, and it’s instead a focus on surveillance pricing?

We need AI regulations big time. But let’s get started with, in my view, taking on the AI lobby on something that makes sense to basically everybody.

Let’s just talk about surveillance pricing for a second because it rightly pisses people off. We had the other day somebody on Twitter tweet at JetBlue, “I’m trying to get to a funeral. Somebody just died, and in the last day, the price on this flight has gone up like $250.” And the customer service rep responded from JetBlue saying, “Clear your cache. Clear your cookies.”

And this is the thing that people know is going on. You’re getting your private data scooped up, they run it through AI, and they figure out how to set a price for you. That is the kind of thing that should unite Democrats, but also tons of independent and Republican voters to say, “Yeah, these folks are using AI to screw us.”

Part of the premise of this episode is we want to break down buzzwords like affordability and even progressive. We talked about the former, but I think the latter matters as well as it’s one that can be misdefined.

What does being a progressive mean to you in 2026, and how would you distinguish it from just being a Democrat?

For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse, whether that is oppressing you on a civil rights issue or jacking up your costs like we just talked about. It’s about bringing the everyday person, who may not have [financial] power but should have political power, together to take them on.

Second, I think being progressive is an essentially hopeful enterprise. I think that the world can be much better, that we don’t have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo.

Heather Cox Richardson grades America

2026-05-01T16:46:16-04:00

American flags flying near the US Capitol Building on March 10, 2026. | Al Drago/Getty Images

How would you grade America’s first 250 years?

That’s the question I posed to historian and professor Heather Cox Richardson on this week’s episode of America, Actually — and a question I pose to myself.

All grades are subjective, and the rubric of whether America earns a passing grade is one of position and perspective, but the best I could come up with was a B-/C+.

The enduring model of multiracial democracy, however fragile it currently is, deserves some credit. So does the long list of American inventions and academic institutions, and the cultural impact of American music, film, and sports. With some demerits for the permanent underclass capitalism requires, injustices here and abroad, and preferring the wrong type of football, a passing grade seemed fair enough.

In our interview, Richardson said that she sees the country as entering a period of enormous change, particularly as President Donald Trump continues to reshape our government to serve his maximalist desires. And since we’re focused on America post-Trump, and our road to that point in these coming elections, I asked how responsive a democracy Richardson feels we truly have — and pushed on the question of the electorate’s commitment to preserving it, considering the results of the 2024 election.

Read on for an excerpt of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show — we write a new founding document for America’s next 250 years, listing out the values that will earn the country an A+ for the next grading period — so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

As I was preparing for this, I was reading about how you’ve argued that the country has basically reinvented itself every 80 to 90 years from the founding to the Civil War to the New Deal.

I wondered how you thought about those reinventions. What forces shaped them, and are we in a reinvention period right now?

I’m not sure I’ve ever used the words reinvention, because the way I think about it is that a country has to deal with new challenges all the time, and because we had set out at our foundation a series of principles that at the time were quite limited by who they covered, but were expansive in terms of what they could cover, we have managed through our history to address new challenges — like westward expansion, like industrialization, like globalization, like the advent of nuclear weapons — and to expand American democracy to more closely adhere to those foundational documents.

So are we in a moment like this now? Absolutely.

What forces shape these kinds of shifts in the country? If we think about those moments where we face new challenges, how do we muster up that kind of creativity and what are the seeds that we should be looking for right now?

There’s a whole lot embedded in that question. And one of the places that I want to start is that the seeds for reinvention, I think, come from the arts. They come from music, they come from art, they come from new languages and new clothing styles and sculpture, and all sorts of new ways to envision the world through our imaginations.

And we could talk about the late 19th century, for example, and how extraordinarily creative that time was, and so forth. Those ideas, I think, come from there, but that’s not enough. I think when you see reinvention, you see Americans reaching back for their stories, for their traditional history and the places that they can see other Americans having exercised their agency to make our best traditions come into law, or at least come into practice.

It’s an especially poignant time for us to be talking about this because on April 12, Hungarian voters put a supermajority of opposition figures to Viktor Orbán into power in their parliament, and they will, of course, have a different prime minister.

And one of the things that they appear to have done is to have reached back to Hungarian history and said, listen. We might disagree with each other about immigration and about finances and so on, but we can agree that we care deeply about our country and we must start there with people who are trying to build our country rather than tear it down.

And that really hit a chord for me because that is precisely what the Republicans did when they formed in the 1850s. It’s precisely what the populists and the Democrats did in the 1890s when they organized against the robber barons and then included the progressive Republicans. It’s certainly what we saw in the 1920s and the 1930s, what we saw in the 1950s, and I think what we’re seeing in the United States again today.

I wanted to ask about today. The premise of this show is to try to take Trump out of the center and to see the country beyond the lens of him, but baked into that is a question of whether he is an aberrant piece in American politics or reflective of a system and we’re going to have to live with Trumpism for longer than even the individual person.

Trump is very clearly the outcome of at least 40 years of right-wing rhetoric that has been adopted by the Republican Party, that laid the groundwork for a man to come in and essentially get rid of the dog whistles and call to the sexists and racist who had ended up sliding into the Republican Party after 1965 and the Voting Rights Act, to basically create sort of a libertarian, small-government elite in the Republican Party that depended on the votes of those racist and sexists to stay in power.

What he did was he sort of flipped the script. He nodded to the establishment Republicans who wanted the tax cuts, but he empowered the racist and the sexists and the America-Firsters and so on. And so he is very much a product of that.

But he is also something different because by empowering them, what he did is he turned a democracy not just to an autocracy, but to a personalist autocracy. It’s sort of, in a way, a step beyond fascism that we can talk about — the idea that wants all the power, but he also wants the power not for his party and not for even his cronies, but for himself.

Now there’s a bigger question, as I say, embedded in what you said, and that is, is the United States of America’s system so deeply flawed to begin with that we were waiting for a Trump?

And to that, I would say no. I say that many of us dropped the ball after the 1960s and the 1970s, and the idea that we had finally managed to create a new kind of American government that was premised on reality rather than on the previous images of American life.

By that I mean that it was a government that recognized the worth of individuals. It didn’t necessarily protect individuals the way the principles of that government suggested they should, but it recognized their worth in a way that the government before 1965 and before the Great Society under LBJ had not done. And so for a lot of people, they thought, oh, we’re on this trajectory toward a liberal democracy that is in fact going to recognize the worth of disabled Americans and elderly Americans and so on.

And as a result, we stopped focusing on the importance of liberal democracy. But what that did is it enabled the radical right to step in and give people a sense of a national narrative that made their agency feel deeply important to them — that they were the ones protecting America in a way that people like me weren’t.

Because the immigrants are taking your job, because folks are coming in and represent a kind of imminent threat.

That’s right. And you know, one of the things that always jumps out to me is Lauren Boebert, the representative from Colorado, on the morning of January 6, 2021, [tweeting] to people, “This is 1776” — the idea that they were the ones who were truly protecting America.

One of the things that I think Trump has done for us since his re-taking the oath of office in January 2025 was to make it clear that our democracy and the guardrails of our democracy that so many people believed couldn’t be challenged, Trump just tore ’em up.

And with that, a lot of people who sort of assume the guardrails were there are stepping into the fray and saying, okay, I didn’t think I was going to have to get involved in politics, but clearly I do, and here I am.

That kind of engagement in protecting American democracy is the sort of thing that we’ve seen in the past — in the 1850s, 1890s, and so on — to reclaim that democracy and crucially, make it adjust to new conditions that are currently challenging it.

Rubén Gallego on why he defended Eric Swalwell — and why he regrets it now

2026-04-20T18:26:14-04:00

Sen. Rubén Gallego in the US Capitol on October 23, 2025. | Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

This month, Rep. Eric Swalwell faced a flood of sexual misconduct allegations, pushing him to drop out of the California governor’s race. But the scandal’s blast radius has also ensnared Sen. Rubén Gallego of Arizona, a potential presidential candidate in 2028 and one of Swalwell’s close allies before the stories broke. Gallego had endorsed Swalwell’s gubernatorial bid, chaired his 2020 presidential campaign, and invested in Swalwell’s AI startup.

But now, Gallego is distancing himself from the Congress member and arguing that he had no prior knowledge of the allegations. Gallego has also denied that he heard any rumors of Swalwell’s alleged sexual misconduct.

Recently, I sat down with Gallego for an upcoming episode of America, Actually. The conversation focuses on themes that have made Gallego a national name: immigration reform, outreach to Latino voters, and his advocacy for Democrats to do more outreach to men of color. However, considering the flood of questions about his close relationship with Swalwell, and the fact that Gallego has now earned the ire of some of the voices who helped bring the allegations to light, I also wanted to ask him about his former friend and ally.

Here’s what he said. The full episode will air Saturday, April 25, but will be available earlier this week for Vox Members. Join now on Patreon and get notified when it publishes.

I don’t want to go too much longer without asking about the recent flood of sexual assault allegations against Congressman Eric Swalwell, who had called you his best friend.

You chaired his 2020 presidential campaign. You were financially involved in his AI startup. Did you have any knowledge of these allegations of misconduct or had you heard rumors of predatory behavior on the Hill? I wanted to ask you directly.

No. No clue, no knowledge of any of the allegations or predatory behavior. That was definitely not what any of us…and look, we’ve all been having conversations since we’re all actually going back…

Who do you mean by we?

Friends, members of Congress, other supporters. We’re all talking to each other to see: What did we do wrong? What did we not see?

I want to just follow up, though, because it seems as if the scale of the allegations makes that — I guess it causes a gut check on that, because it seems as if this was a known thing among some on the Hill. This seems as if, certainly, there was a community of women who were organizing around this. You hadn’t heard anything about any of that?

Not about the allegations we’re talking about, the sexual assault, the predatory behavior. You know, there is a culture in DC that certainly exists — where not just him, but many other politicians — we heard of someone that’s being, you know, flirty. But never inappropriate, never predatory, never toward staff, and things of that nature. But look, this is the kind of thing that makes all of us relook at what we have been accepting versus not accepting.

Part of the reason some of this has come back on you, though, is that you went out of your way to defend Swalwell just this month, writing recently on X that “Eric is a fighter.”

Considering now what you know, or considering that you’re saying you heard rumors about him being flirty, why proactively defend him?

Well, for two reasons: [First] because we had heard this, about him, about other politicians, for a long time, and nothing had ever surfaced, right? Number two, he knew exactly what to say to me, because I had just gotten off a very hard 2024 campaign, where I had some of the worst things said about me on commercials that my kids have to see.

And [Swalwell’s team] and some of his staff pushed that button on me. And it was a mistake. I mean, without a doubt, it was a mistake. Let’s be clear: Knowing now everything I know of, I would never have done it. But knowing now everything I know, especially of sexual assault, sexually predatory [behavior], we would not have had the relationship that we had.

There have been some that have said that this is also a question of your judgment. I wanted you to respond to that. I mean, you’ve been kind of openly embracing the question of a 2028 race. What do you say to someone who looks at this situation and sees it as a cause to question you?

To be a hundred percent honest, you know, I am more human first than a politician. And my judgment was off because of many reasons. But number one, because I knew this man as a family man, first. We weren’t just work colleagues. Our families ate dinner together; our kids were in camps together. And I have to learn from this, and I will learn from this.

But you know, for me, it’s not a 2028 question. It’s about what it means to be a better, first boss in my office, and also a better senator to my constituents.

How Americans really feel about immigration

2026-05-01T16:34:53-04:00

Construction crews install panels of the border wall near La Casita-Garciasville, Texas, on November 26, 2024. | Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images

Immigration enforcement was once one of President Donald Trump’s strongest issues, driving his victories in the 2016 and 2024 presidential contests. But these days, most Americans seem to hate just about everything Trump’s administration has done to actually address the issue.

Polls show Americans have shifted dramatically on immigration since Trump returned to office — and about half of all Americans now want to abolish ICE, the deportation force Trump has empowered since returning to office.

But what do Americans really think about immigration, beyond their feelings about the current administration? And as we build toward the 2026 midterm elections (and eventually the 2028 presidential elections), how will both parties wrestle with an electorate that has often seemed to agree with Trump’s diagnosis of a problem while also rejecting his proposed solutions?

In this week’s episode of America, Actually, I talk with two people with different perspectives on America’s immigration conundrum. Caitlin Dickerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The Atlantic, has reported on how both parties have helped build the immigration system that they now agree is broken. And Yana Kuchinoff, a reporter with Arizona Luminaria and corps member with Report for America, has followed how Trump’s actions have roiled local communities she covers on the Arizona border.

Here are some takeaways from the episode that stuck out, and read on for an excerpt from my conversation with Caitlin.

The data: Gallup found last year that the share of Americans who want immigration reduced had dropped significantly, from 55 percent in 2024 to 30 percent today. The same poll also found a record-high 79 percent of US adults say immigration is a good thing for the country, suggesting that Trump’s enforcement actions have had the opposite effect on the electorate.

The quotes: “Obviously there’s a lot that is novel that Donald Trump is doing on interior enforcement of our immigration laws right now. But if I think about your question, most of what we’re seeing and most of the issues, frankly, that the public is taking with the current system come from many, many presidents ago.” —Caitlin Dickerson

“When I was covering the election in 2024, the concerns about border security and people’s feelings about what was happening were really big, emotional talking points. But I think some of the enforcement in the Tucson-area communities is a lot less abstract.” —Yana Kuchinoff

What comes next: The shift in sentiment on immigration has already impacted the landscape for this year’s midterm elections. Trump’s approval rating with Latino voters has cratered since returning to office, and Democratic wins in special elections across the country (including recently in New Jersey) have capitalized on that vulnerability.

But the biggest tests for both parties on the issue will likely come next year, as the presidential race begins in earnest. Republicans have let Trump (and his adviser Stephen Miller) define their immigration policy for a decade, and have unanswered questions on where they stand on issues like H-1B visas, avenues for legal immigration, and ICE’s massive credibility loss among the general public. Democrats have big questions, too, which mostly center around finding a middle ground between embracing enforcement efforts and spearheading a broader immigration reform bill in Congress.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with The Atlantic’s Caitlin Dickerson, edited for length and clarity. You can watch America, Actually on YouTube or find it wherever you get your podcasts.

It feels like the Democrats’ one principle around immigration is: we don’t like what Donald Trump does. Why do you think this has remained broken for so long? I mean, why not fix something?

There are a few different theories as to why Democrats have really not shown leadership on this issue. One is this idea that you’ll hear Democrats talking about: They feel like the party is fighting scared.

Democrats are always susceptible to this criticism that they’re soft on crime, that they’re open to lawlessness, that they are prioritizing DEI and people of color over public safety. And so immigration very much falls into that kind of easy beating that they can take on a campaign trail.

And forces Democrats to have to—

Come from a defensive crouch.

Come from a defensive crouch and show this ability to have a [stronger] image.

I think another, probably more important and of course, more cynical issue is, it’s just politics.

Donald Trump saw a very clear upside in focusing on immigration for himself from his earliest campaign rallies, and he smartly intuited, these people are going to show up and vote for me if I keep talking about this. And he has continued to talk about it.

Look at the calculation on the Democratic side: Democrats aren’t sticking their neck out for a population of people who by nature cannot vote for them.

Not only can this constituency not vote, but Americans generally tend to really underestimate, I think, how interconnected we all are with the immigration system. That is being challenged right now.

What do you mean?

People are seeing that they personally are affected by this deportation campaign. Even if it’s not someone in their family who’s being arrested, because their kid is scared, because their kid’s friend got arrested, or their kid’s friend’s parent got arrested. People aren’t showing up for church. Their employees aren’t showing up for work. Their patrons aren’t showing up to buy things from them.

The interconnectedness is becoming more clear now, but generally speaking, I think what holds Democrats back is if you have two years or four years, or maybe six years, depending on how long you might have the advantage in Congress to push forward just a couple of priorities, why are you going to focus on one that Americans tend to think of as for those people over there?

Yep.

Not for us. Even if the public is sympathetic to the issue, it’s not going to be number one or number two on their list of concerns.

[Sen. Rubén] Gallego has talked about the need to embrace practical [reforms] rather than something like the dramatic step of abolishing ICE. I wanted to know, from your perspective as someone who has done kind of systemic work, what is the biggest gap you see in the political conversation about immigration that could be really tangibly impactful for folks’ lives?

Something that Gallego has been one of the few people to talk about, I think, is largely absent from the conversation and pretty key to how stuck we are. We don’t have a lot of legal pathways to the United States and we especially don’t have legal pathways to the United States for the jobs that we tend to rely on undocumented workers for.

Construction, restaurant work, hospitality, domestic work. These jobs are dominated by immigrant workers and by and large, do not have visas available to do them. I mean, we now have a couple hundred thousand guest worker visas for agriculture. We have millions of agriculture workers in the United States, and so [Gallego] actually has talked at different times about a need for legal pathways and balancing that with border security. I think that’s smart because historically, when you’ve seen these attempts at cracking down on the border, they’ve never been able to overpower the draw on the other side.

What does American politics look like beyond Trump?

2026-04-13T13:43:45-04:00

The only people with worse poll numbers than President Donald Trump are the political media that cover him. We, the journalists, are in a crisis: of trust, relevance, and being swamped by an attention economy that will either replace us with Claude or an influencer. The skills of traditional reporting: storytelling, man-on-the-street interviews, even the language of “investigations,” are the template for the modern TikToker. But it’s the process of journalism — fact-checking, waiting for comment, leaning into nuance over sensationalism, or even leading with curiosity generally — that is growing to be a lonelier pursuit, competing for attention from an audience increasingly inundated by hot takes.

I”m hoping my new show, America, Actually, will be different. As the country marches toward the 2026 midterms and the first open presidential primary in a decade, it feels like the first steps of a new story for a changing nation. Emerging communities, artificial intelligence, a rapidly shifting work economy, and growing risk of global conflict — all things that should have been front and center in the last presidential election — can now no longer be ignored. The question of “who do we want to be?” is open, and answering it will require the type of journalism that prioritizes the messy over the clean.

In a decade in political journalism, I’ve gone to 30-plus states and followed elections big and small, in hopes of doing just that. As a political reporter and host of The Run-Up podcast at the New York Times, I sought to expand the Times’ coverage of Black voters, Midwesterners, and evangelicals — communities I felt confident were underrepresented. I was the lead reporter for the presidential campaigns of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and then-Vice President Kamala Harris, exploring the values and limits of representation. I found a niche doing trend stories about Trump voters, either by attending rallies or going to community events (like Trumpstock; “Woodstock for Trump fans,” or Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point events) to hear from his voters directly.

And what I found most was a country that was more politically attuned than it’s often given credit for. Working-class people who did not need the latest revised figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to know that the economy was slowing. Voters who could not name gerrymandering — but intuitively understood that Congress had grown more extreme than ever. An electorate that more or less agreed that the mere prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024 was a reflection of a political system that had become completely untethered from the desires of its citizenry. The whole narrative of “polarization” came from the process of sorting those views into Team Red and Team Blue. It was not inherent.

By removing Donald Trump from the center of the political discussion, I think it gives space to see that new story more clearly. I have always believed this president, while a uniquely authoritarian actor with unique electoral traits, has exploited a political system whose distance from the concerns of most Americans made it even more vulnerable for exploitation. And it’s only in flipping our focus, from the concerns of elected officials and the elite bubble of industry and media that follows them to the voters at large, that we political journalists see that distance most clearly.

America, Actually will seek to see the country for that diversity of opinion. I joined Vox last year because I want to cut through the noise, amplify voices that political journalism typically hasn’t amplified, and help audiences understand the issues that really matter in American politics today. With this new show, we want to create a weekly space to think about the people and ideas who are driving the country’s post-Trump future — and prepare us for the 2028 election along the way.

Some of the questions I want to explore include: How large is the wing of Republicans against the Iran war? What’s the impact of growing social isolation on politics, which has long been a community activity? Is this the first Democratic primary where the Black vote won’t be determinative? How will Americans’ souring mood on Israel manifest itself in votes? Will it?

In our first episode, out now on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, pollster Nate Silver and culture podcaster Hunter Harris discuss the show’s premise — Is a politics show without Trump even possible? — and the political and cultural factors that will shape our post-Trump future. Later, the show will feature interviews with experts, elected officials, and local journalists, who will regularly appear on the podcast through a partnership with Report for America, the national service program that places emerging journalists into local newsrooms across the country to report on under-covered issues.

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The goal is to model something different: a new way to understand a country that the Trump era has distorted. Not because this president doesn’t reflect who we are, but because the political system inherently flattens it. And while the White House may govern without public opinion in mind, candidates don’t have that luxury. The American public is back in the center of the conversation. The 2026 midterm elections, and the 2028 presidential election, will force a reset that’s been avoided since Trump came down that golden escalator more than a decade ago.

There will, eventually, be a post-Trump future. Let’s write it together.

How one Democratic senator is tackling Trump’s corruption

2026-04-03T14:48:54-04:00

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) speaks during a protest at the US Customs and Border Protection Office on January 13, 2026, in Washington, D.C. | Jemal Countess/Getty Images for MoveOn Civic Action

President Donald Trump’s blatant, sometimes open corruption can feel disorienting. While other White Houses have made a point to show their administration is not for sale, this one has seemingly done the opposite — making a big show of their transactional relationship with corporations, Silicon Valley, and other governments, given the right price.

This kind of pay-to-play politics was the focus of a recent forum in Washington, DC, hosted by the American Economic Liberties Project, a think tank focused on corporate consolidation, breaking up monopolies, and accountability for rogue businesses. It’s also the focus of Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who has made this anti-corruption a focus of his message and policy proposals since the 2024 election.

I spoke with Murphy last week as part of the forum; in an extended conversation, I asked about the effectiveness of this message, what role the Democratic Party also plays in Washington’s current culture of open corruption, and if there’s anything the public can do to push back.

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can hear the full interview on Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, and you can also watch this episode on video at YouTube.com/vox.

If you enjoy our reporting and want to hear more from Vox journalists, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/vox. Each month, our members get access to exclusive videos, livestreams, and chats with our newsroom.

When I think about corruption, one thing that immediately jumps to mind for me is that when we think about the Trump administration, this isn’t happening in backroom deals. A lot of these things are happening right in front of us. Is corruption the right word to even use when it’s been broadly sanctioned by legal and governmental entities?

I think corruption is still a word that resonates. I think people understand that corruption is a bad thing, that it is something that we have broadly tried to expunge from our politics. And I do think that people generally understand corruption to be something that happens quietly behind closed doors.

Corruption is something you try to hide, and so I do think the most important piece of this moment is trying to understand what to do with the brazen public way that Trump is engaging in corruption, because simply by the very fact that he does it every day, that he does it openly, publicly and proudly, it is causing some people to question, Wait, wait, is this corruption? Because this isn’t what I learned corruption is. There’s no shame in this.

I don’t necessarily know if it means you change the word. He’s trying to change the very notion of corruption by doing it publicly. And so if you call it something different, then I think you’re playing his game.

You know, your Corporate Pardons Report documents over 160 companies that have had federal enforcement actions dropped.

As we know, corporate influence has been in Washington for a long time. How do you think this is a qualitatively different moment than the usual lobbying influence that we’ve seen?

It’s just so nakedly transactional right now. It’s an easy story to explain, whether it’s the donations that Boeing made that got them out of their trouble, whether it’s the Toyota donations, whether it’s the money that Zelle pumped into the administration,

It now doesn’t happen through slowly putting money into the political system, slowly building up connections. It’s literally just a million dollars for a corporate pardon. And that now happens within weeks or months. It’s put Eric Trump on your board, the lawsuit or the enforcement action is dropped, right? It’s so nakedly quick and transactional that it’s hard to hide.

What do you think is the impact of that kind of flagrant degradation of the process? What do you think is the consequence of its being in our face in this way?

Trump takes over at a moment when a lot of Americans were seriously contemplating giving up on democracy, right? And while that conversation may not be on the surface of kitchen table talks in our country, it’s right below the surface. People just don’t think that their voice matters any longer.

They, for a long time, have believed that the elites get whatever they want out of the system and the way in which Trump has chosen to do this so transparently, I think, is an effort to permanently shatter people’s faith in the entire enterprise and to transition the country to a kleptocratic oligarchy.

And so, yes, I think this is a particularly vulnerable moment for the country in which a lot of Americans are unfortunately ready to just say, Fuck it. This thing doesn’t work any longer. It now clearly doesn’t work, because we have an elected president who is just stealing from us. I’m just going to walk away from the whole enterprise.

And when people give up and retreat from public action, that’s the moment that the oligarchs seize power and never give it up. The reason that I have been raising the unacceptability of the corruption — that it is abnormal, that we should not normalize it — is because I think Trump’s core case here is, if he’s successful in normalizing it, it may be the death blow to people’s faith in the entire democratic enterprise.

Is there some form of a conflation between overt corruption and something like corporate consolidation? Or do you see those as one and the same when we’re talking about these monopolistic media companies [like Paramount]?

It’s all part of the same story. The only way that Paramount Skydance gets to be as big and as corrupt and as manipulative as it is is because of corruption, is because of an underlying deal that is done between the Ellison family and the Trump family.

I mean, [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth literally says it on stage: I can’t wait until my friends, the Ellisons, get control of CNN because then you’ll stop telling the truth about the war.

And again, back to how you message this: Yes, I understand that it’s a hard thing to break up that corrupt consolidation. Yes, I understand that by the time we get control of things here, the prediction markets will be even more mature, but by stating what you are going to do, you can actually bend reality by being bold in your claims about what you will do with power. People — and not just people out in the public, but members of Congress, right? — start signing up for the project the bolder it is.

The scope of Trump’s corruption can feel disempowering. The administration seems immune to public opinion at many times, undeterred by legal and institutional restraints.

It feels like we’re strapped in at the beginning of a roller coaster and you don’t know where it ends. Is that true? Are constraints coming?

It’s only coming if the Democratic Party, as we head into the 2028 election, makes the un-rigging of our democracy a tent pole for our party’s messaging.

If it’s up to me, our party’s message is unrigging democracy, unrigging the economy.

I’ll end here because you are right that people are feeling super discouraged and super powerless right now. We as a party have to start our analysis of what this moment needs through a diagnosis of the way that people are feeling like they have no agency. Both our economic and political messaging has to be about returning control to human beings and explaining to them, as we’ve talked about a few times, that it goes both ways: The corruption of our economy is downstream of the corruption of our democracy.

But also, the right way to end the corruption of our democracy is also downstream of the corruption of our economy. When our economy is an economy that only cares about profit and efficiency, it becomes this winner-take-all economy in which the folks who do well just grab it all. And we’ve normalized that because we’ve normalized the idea that that shared prosperity is not a value any longer in our economy.

When we normalize zero virtue in our economy, it’s really easy to say, well, maybe virtue shouldn’t matter in our politics either. And so that’s why the project is so big, right? There are cross currents between what has happened in our economy affecting our politics, what’s happened in our politics affecting our economy, which is why your willingness to confront this question of corruption in government and in our economy and recognizing how they flow back and forth is so critical.

Even John Bolton is against this Iran war

2026-03-28T08:26:19-04:00

How did President Donald Trump lose the Republican Party’s biggest Iran war hawk, John Bolton? And why? | Brandon Bell/Getty Images

For the past 20 years, there’s basically been one guy in Republican politics who was known as the Iran war guy.

For years, even decades, John Bolton has argued for regime change in Iran, and for America to take a proactive military role to make that happen. Bolton served as the US ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush and, later, as national security adviser to Donald Trump during his first term.

The partnership with Trump was fleeting, however. He did not leave the administration on good terms and has been a critic of Trump since. He’s even been indicted by Trump’s Department of Justice for the mishandling of classified documents. Despite that backstory, it is still a bit confusing to hear one of America’s foremost Iran critics break with the Trump administration on this war. How did Trump lose the Republican Party’s biggest Iran war hawk? And why?

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Bolton, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You’ve become known as one of the most prominent American advocates for military action in Iran over a set of decades. But in recent weeks, you’ve emerged as one of the sharpest critics of the Trump administration’s actions and how it’s conducting this war. I wanted you to walk me through your critiques.

What I support is a policy of regime change in Iran. And I’ve held that view for many years because I don’t think there’s any chance the current regime will change its behavior on two critical fronts.

It’s not going to give up its pursuit of nuclear weapons, which threaten Israel, the United States, really the whole world. And it’s not going to give up on its pursuit of terrorism, its support of terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Shia militia in Iraq and conducting terrorist operations around the world.

We’ve got decades of evidence that their behavior is not going to change. So when you’re confronted with that kind of threat, danger, and behavior isn’t going to change, the alternative is change the regime. I think the regime is in its weakest position since any time after it took power in 1979. The economy is a mess. The young people are, they can see they can have a different kind of life. Two thirds of the population is under 30. The women are enormously dissatisfied since the death of Mahsa Amini. Ethnic groups are dissatisfied.

Conditions are ripe for regime change as a policy to succeed. And the question is, what role can the United States play? And here, I think Trump has badly misplayed his hand from the beginning, unfortunately.

Tell me how.

Well, Trump initially did nothing to prepare the American public for the steps necessary to affect regime change. Normally, when a president is going to take a dramatic action like Trump has, you explain that to the American people.

You make the case why it’s in our national interest to seek regime change, to avoid the threat of nuclear weapons, to avoid the continuing threat of terrorism. You don’t have to say anything about what your specific plan is. You don’t have to talk about timing, but you have to be respectful of our citizens and make the case to them that this is in their interest. I think he could have done it. I think there’s a very compelling case he didn’t do it.

Yeah, that didn’t happen.

A corollary to that is you need to prepare Congress, certainly on the Republican side, to get their support, but on the Democratic side too. I think there are a number of important steps that Congress is going to have to take, instead of leaving them in the dark. It doesn’t mean they would agree with you necessarily, but at least you’ve stated your case to them and it’s part of making it to the American people.

The other aspect that Trump failed on was consulting with allies. Normally, you try and build an international coalition before the war starts, not after. And he obviously didn’t do that. I mean, we’ve got very close ties with Israel. I think our military planning and preparation has been seamless as far as I can tell.

But there are plenty of others, not just the NATO allies, but the Gulf states in the region who are obviously affected by this, our allies in the Pacific, Japan, South Korea, and others who get most of their oil from the Gulf.

As far as we can tell, he did no preparation of the opposition actually inside Iran. No coordination, no effort to see what they would do, no effort to support them, to provide resources, money, arms if that’s what they wanted, telecommunications, just no coordination at all.

There’s a sense that they want to make this around four to six weeks, not necessarily the timeline that a full regime change could take. Is it your position that if they aren’t willing to kind of see that all the way through, they shouldn’t have started this in the first place?

Right. Four to six weeks might have been a good estimate of the Pentagon’s initial campaign. But the military action alone was never going to cause regime change, or at least it would have been a lucky event had it done so. This has to come from inside Iran. It’s the people, the opposition, the ethnic groups, the young people, the women that have to have to figure out how to actually accomplish it.

“I think if you are going to go after the goal of regime change, you have to know what you’re getting into and be resolved to work your way through it in order to achieve it.”

And it’s clear they were badly intimidated in January when the regime killed 30 or 40,000 protesters, literally machine gunned them in the streets of Iran simply for protesting against the regime. That needed to be taken into account.

I’ve heard you say in other places that Trump is not a strategic thinker. From your perspective of someone who was in the White House, who was trying to strategize with the president, what was the impact of that lack of strategic thinking?

Well, it makes it very hard to carry through to achieve a given objective. One thing that Trump has done in the second term is all but eliminate the National Security Council decision-making process, which I’ll be the first to say is not perfect. But it’s a way of getting all the different agency and department views together to try and get the facts assembled that would permit a president to make a responsible, well-informed decision.

I’m hearing from you that we should see the lack of planning that has manifested in this war as a result of the change or the collapse in process from the first Trump administration to the second.

Yeah, I mean, making Marco Rubio both secretary of state and national security adviser is another piece of evidence there — with all due respect to Marco, these are two completely separate jobs.

I don’t blame that on anybody in the government other than Trump. He thought he was being constrained by the NSC, that somehow we were trying to — I speak for all these other Cabinet members — that we were trying to force him in one direction or another.

Obviously, each member of the the NSC has his or her own views, but it’s the clash of views that can benefit a president so he can see what the stronger case is, what aligns more with his preferences, what the better plan is, all of these sorts of things I think are generally enhanced by discussion. If you don’t have much discussion or it’s not well-informed discussion, you’re not getting the benefits.

The administration would say that Iran is weakened militarily fundamentally, that their leadership has been eliminated in a unique way, that they have sped up a succession crisis. Is that achieving the objective of regime change?

No, not at all. There’s a report that the regime has selected a new secretary of the Supreme National Security Council held by Ali Larijani, who was killed a few days ago. And this guy is reported to be an old-time Revolutionary Guard hardliner.

So if he’s the new National Security Council secretary, that’s an indication that he’s probably even more hardline than Larijani. To the extent the regime can rebuild, and that’s simply a matter of getting oil flows out through the Strait of Hormuz. I have no doubt they’ll be back to an assertive nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program, and lining up their terrorist surrogates again.

I think if you are going to go after the goal of regime change, you have to know what you’re getting into and be resolved to work your way through it in order to achieve it. And if you don’t think you can achieve it, then don’t start it. Try something else. And it’s clear Trump hasn’t done many of those things. And that’s why he’s in the conundrum that he is in now.

Today, Explained publishes video episodes every Saturday tackling key issues in politics and culture. Subscribe to Vox’s YouTube channel to get them. New episodes of Today, Explained drop every day of the week on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite listening app.

Nancy Pelosi tells us how she really feels

2026-03-19T18:15:14-04:00

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on March 3, 2026. | Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images

Nancy Pelosi’s record of impact is undeniable. Over more than three decades in Congress, the San Francisco juggernaut is frequently cited among the effective legislative operators of her generation — the person who held together the votes for the Affordable Care Act, who twice ascended to the House speaker’s chair, and who built a fundraising machine that reshaped how her party competes.

Last week, at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, I spoke with Pelosi about that record. In front of a packed crowd of innovators at the Vox Media Podcast Stage, I asked Pelosi about key moments in her career, her unshakable faith in the American electorate, and the outlook for November’s midterm elections.

Pelosi is preparing to leave Congress at the end of this term, and it comes at a time of profound uncertainty for the Democratic Party. Republicans control the White House. Her party’s polling favorability has reached historic lows, and a once solid liberal majority seems to be fraying on lines of age, race, and class. There’s no consensus about what went wrong or who should lead next.

Regardless, Pelosi told me she has absolute confidence that Democrats will take back the House this year. And it’s hard to argue with such a legendary vote counter. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You’ve been called the most effective speaker in history. I wanted to know, what is the skill or trait that you think made you so effective?

The thing about it is that when you’re a legislator, you have one, shall we say, dynamic at work. You have hearings, you have public comment, you do all those things, and so you have time to make a decision. When you become the speaker or the governor or the mayor or whatever — the executive position — you then have to act.

The reason you have to act is because if you don’t act immediately, people think, “Oh, she’s gonna think about it. And while she does, we’ll take this option away or that option away.” You just have to act. Then you get the reputation that it will work, and that’s that.

It is [also] really important when you go out to do these things to just make sure people trust your judgment — that you know what you’re talking about, you know how to get something done. And I have to give credit to the members who are so courageous to take strong votes, which will be mischaracterized by the other side no matter what you do.

The other thing is nothing really good happens unless you have outside mobilization. Inside maneuver, outside mobilization. And that is like President Lincoln said, “Public sentiment is everything. With it you can accomplish almost anything, without it practically nothing.” But for public sentiment to prevail, people have to know, you have to get out there and engage public sentiment.

Your story is built on faith in the American people and it seems as if that is kind of core. I wanted to kind of gut-check that. You’ve been set to retire in 2016 and 2024, and Americans elected a president that surprised you and many others and kind of forced you back into office.

There’s been some tough moments. I’m thinking about the horrible attack on your husband in 2022 or things like the January 6 riots where you were in the building. How are you retaining this kind of optimism in the American electorate when it doesn’t always seem as if that has been returned to you? I wanna ask about your trust in Americans.

Our founders were such geniuses. They were so remarkable in what they put together, a country that was more remarkable than anything that anybody had ever seen. They believed in the goodness of the American people. And that’s what gives me optimism. I do believe in the inherent goodness of the American people. If they know, in a public sense, if they know what all this means to them, they will make the right judgments.

There’s a lot of evidence of a backlash to Donald Trump as we speak, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that people would prefer Democrats as the other option. How are you so sure that Democrats take back the House and possibly win the Senate in November?

Not only are we gonna win, we’re gonna win substantially.

To win an election, you have to mobilize. You have to own the ground because we know: American people are good. We know that what we want to do is in their interest. They know what their interests are. We respect that.

And by the way, our whole democracy is at stake. Free and fair elections, independent judiciary, due process, rule of law, separation of power. We’re not a monarchy, we’re a democracy. But we save the democracy at the kitchen table. So what we’re talking about in terms of lowering costs, affordability of course, but in people’s terms, lowering cost of health care and groceries and education and whatever it is, it’s what they are telling us they are most voting on. [We need] message, mobilization, and money to get it done.

I think right now there’s a big question about trust in institutions, trust in elected officials. Considering just how much Congress has seemed to step back from its own authority, what do you think is the importance of these midterms? If you’re someone who’s kind of skeptical and says, “Okay, Democrats win the House, but Donald Trump’s gonna do whatever he wants to do.” What is Speaker Pelosi’s response to that?

Well, let me just say, first of all, that Congress hasn’t stepped back. The Republicans in Congress have abdicated — they have abolished the House of Representatives. They have just given the president free rein.

The Senate somewhat too, but they have a little different rules. In the Constitution, the House of Representatives is given very big power. Congress is Article One of the Constitution, but even within that, the House has the power of the purse, to declare war, issues like that that are fundamental to the Constitution. They’ve abdicated.

If Democrats take back the House, last time that you all had the House under a Donald Trump presidency, there were those two impeachments. Is that something you think, if Democrats take back the house this November, we should expect?

The only person responsible for the impeachment of Donald Trump — not once but twice — is Donald Trump. He gave us no choice. So I don’t think you go out and start with saying, “We’re gonna impeach.” Winning is about the people. It’s not about him. It’s about the people, meeting their kitchen-table needs so that they have confidence. And we have to restore that. And the best way to do that is to listen to the people.

You’ve said that Donald Trump is a “vile creature,” but you said that was a euphemism for what you really wanted to say. This is South by Southwest, I was gonna let you end on this note. Do you wanna tell us how you really feel?

If you’re president of the United States, you have a certain responsibility to live up to honoring the vision of our founders. The beauty of the Constitution, the exquisite beauty of the Constitution, is the separation of power. They didn’t want a monarch; they did everything in the Constitution to make sure we didn’t have one. So he’s smashed all of that.

In terms of one of my big issues coming to Congress — saving the planet — forget about that. [He has] his hand in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry. And so we’re taking so many steps away from clean air, clean water.

Be grateful for the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform who have fought for our freedom and other freedom in the world and not call them losers. When you’re at a cemetery for a deceased soldier, honor that.

And then, of course, the aspirations of our children. Forget about that, as far as he’s concerned.

But I didn’t come here to talk about him. He is what he is. We’re gonna win in November. You’re going to see a big change in how the separation of powers works. It’s about honoring the vision of our founders. It’s about ending corruption in this government, and that’s what I think of him.

Bernie Sanders explains his proposed billionaire tax

2026-03-14T08:02:02-04:00

Senator Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont and ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, speaks during a hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2026. | Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is no stranger to singling out the richest of the rich. Along with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), Sanders recently introduced the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, a 5 percent annual wealth tax on anyone in the US worth over a billion dollars.

The act would affect 930 people — the very tippy-top of the 0.01 percent. Elon Musk would owe roughly $42 billion per year. Mark Zuckerberg would owe $11 billion.

And what would this new wealth tax fund?

In its first year, according to the Sanders proposal, it would provide $3,000 direct payments to every American in a household earning $150,000 or less, with subsequent revenue used to address “the most pressing crises facing working families.”

While the bill has essentially no chance of passing Congress in the near future, it could become a litmus test for Democratic presidential candidates in 2028. Vox’s Astead Herndon sat down with Sanders for Today, Explained to ask him about how the tax would actually work, as well as about some of the other most pressing issues of the moment: how Democrats should navigate the AI landscape, Sanders’s call for a moratorium on building new AI data centers, and President Donald Trump’s recent strikes in Iran.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You can also watch the Saturday interviews this week and every week on the Vox YouTube channel. Subscribe at youtube.com/vox.

Most Democrats have condemned the US-Israel strikes in Iran, but Donald Trump is blowing ahead. Is there any recourse coming from Congress?

What we have got to do is pull the financial plug here. I think what we have got to do our best in saying is that not only is this war unconstitutional, not only is it illegal, [but] when we have so many strong domestic needs in terms of housing and health care and education, we’re going to be just throwing tens of billions of dollars into another endless war.

I think taking a look at how we finance wars is one of the areas that we have to move to. But the bottom line is we’ve gotta do everything that we can to stop Trump’s reckless foreign policy, which is not only unconstitutional, not having gone to Congress, [but] it is in violation of international law and will lead, in my view, to international anarchy.

You and Congressman Khanna introduced this bill that would add a 5 percent annual tax on wealth for anyone making over a billion dollars. And importantly, this is a wealth tax, not an income tax. Things like assets and stock accumulation are also in play. Why $1 billion?

We wanted to make very clear that today we have more income and wealth inequality than we’ve ever had in the history of the United States of America. We all read about the Gilded Age, right? Nickels and dimes compared to where we are right now.

We’re living in a moment where the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 93 percent, where one man, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom 53 percent of American households, where, while 60 percent of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, the billionaire class has seen its wealth increase by a trillion and a half dollars since Trump was elected.

The point is that at a time of so much inequality, we have to ask the wealthiest people to start paying their fair share of taxes. One way to do it is a wealth tax. I personally think starting off at a billion dollars is the appropriate way to go.

The goal of the revenue is to send $3,000 checks to every American in a household making $150,000 or less. Should I see this as a means of funding a kind of universal basic income?

No. It does two things: It says that at a time when the very richest people are becoming much, much richer, while ordinary Americans today are struggling to put food on the table or pay for childcare or pay for health care, the working class of this country needs immediate help.

On top of that, we make massive investments every year in child care, in housing, in education, in health care, in addressing the basic needs of working class Americans. And yet everything being equal, our kids will have a lowest standard of living than we will, and millions of families are struggling.

All of our people should have a decent standard of living, and we have to address the massive level of income and wealth inequality to do that.

France tried a wealth tax and repealed it. Sweden tried one, repealed it, and the European countries that have gone back have almost universally said that it was because capital left, or evasion meant that they did not see the necessary revenue returns. Why would that not be true in the United States?

I think we need to enact that legislation, and then we need a political movement to make sure that it is implemented.

That’s a pretty high standard.

One of the things that is really troubling to me is what you are saying is, Look, even if the American people want it, these guys will evade it one way or another. Is that what you’re saying?

Other countries have repealed the wealth tax because of that exact problem.

We have to deal with it.

I was out in California a few weeks ago where they’re dealing with a state wealth tax. The issue there is that 15 million people, including many in California and Vermont, have been thrown off the health care they have in order to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the 1 percent.

What the 1 percent are saying is, You want us to pay more in taxes so that working class people and children will have health care? If you pass that, you know what we’re going to do. We’re going to move to Texas, we’re going to move to Florida.

The time is long overdue that we stand up to that greed and say, no, that’s not the choice. You are in America, you benefited from America, you’re part of America. You don’t have the divine right to rule and you play by the rules, and if we pass this tax, you’re going to pay it.

You called for a moratorium on AI data center construction. I spoke with your ally Ro Khanna about this, and he disagreed about that point. Why do you think the time is now to put a moratorium on data centers?

I don’t think a moratorium is the solution to all the problems. I think it’s the right thing to do now, and here’s why. What I have been really stunned by is that I go out around the country and I talk to people and I say, well, what do you think about AI and robotics? Are you concerned about it?

I talk to mostly working-class audiences and they say, Bernie, we are really, really concerned. I come back to the United States Senate, and you know what? Hardly anything is being done about it. No legislation has yet been passed, so the disconnect is five miles wide.

Who’s pushing AI and robotics? The richest people in the world. Elon Musk. Zuckerberg, Bezos, Ellison, Altman, Bill Gates.

The very first question that we have to ask ourselves is, do you think these guys who are investing huge amounts of money in AI and robotics, transforming our economy? Are they staying up nights worrying about you and your family?

They want even more wealth and they want even more power. And at a time when these guys already have so much wealth and power, when they’re buying elections, I worry about that and what it means for our democracy.

Issue number two, people disagree because nobody really knows what the impact of AI and robotics will mean to our economy.

Some people say, look, you had the Industrial Revolution. People were farmers, they work in factories. No big deal.

I don’t agree with that. I think what you’re looking at now is going to move a lot more pervasively and a lot faster than other economic transformations.

Looking ahead to the next Democratic presidential nominee, I imagine your top priority may be Medicare for All, but are there two other policies that you want that next nominee to support?

First of all, we have to figure out how we remain a democracy. And it’s not just Donald Trump, who is an authoritarian and is undermining democracy. It is money in politics.

You talked about AI, right? You know why there’s no regulation of AI right now? It is because the AI industry is prepared and is spending hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. If you want to run for Congress, and you want to stand up and say, I have real concerns about AI, they will pour millions of dollars against you.

You have to deal with Citizens United in creating a democratic society. You need, in my view, public funding of elections. So maintenance of democracy is important, dealing with Trump’s authoritarianism is enormously important, and you have to deal with this issue of oligarchy.

In terms of the needs of the American people, why are we the only major country not to guarantee health care to all people as a human right? That takes you to Medicare for All. You have to deal with AI and its impact.

This is a very difficult and unprecedented moment in American history, and I think elected officials in many ways are far behind where the American people are in terms of their wanting action to protect them, and not just the 1 percent.

The “Epstein class,” explained

2026-02-28T11:23:54-05:00

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) speaks at a press conference outside the US Capitol on November 18, 2025. | Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The Trump administration says it’s done with its release of the Epstein files. But that doesn’t mean the issue is going away: Just last week, NPR and other outlets reported that the Justice Department may have withheld interview materials potentially touching on an allegation of sexual abuse by Donald Trump.

Congress is also continuing to hear testimony on Epstein’s crimes, including from former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And Democrats like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) are still calling for accountability.

Recently, Vox’s Astead Herndon sat down with Khanna for the Today, Explained podcast; an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.

There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Can you give us a status update [on the Epstein files]? How much is still out there?

At least 50 percent still has been hidden, covered up. But what has been released is shocking. [Rep. Thomas] Massie and I didn’t think we’d get this far.

They’ve released a fair amount. They’re keeping the worst stuff, but what they’ve released is not a good look at our elite class. It’s not a good look at the Epstein class.

These are powerful people in business and Silicon Valley and Hollywood who were visiting Epstein’s island, knowing young girls are being abused, knowing young girls are being raped. And every day a shoe drops.

Now other countries are prosecuting. They are prosecuting Lord Mandelson. They’re prosecuting former Prince Andrew and the former prime minister of Norway. We are seeing resignations of powerful people at law firms and banks, but we have not yet seen investigations and prosecutions.

I’ve also heard over the last couple of weeks increasing concerns about whether this has amounted to something of a witch hunt.

Do you have any concern that the kind of internet sleuthing of it all is painting a group of people that you call the “Epstein class” with too broad of a brush?

I’m more concerned about the predators who aren’t being prosecuted. If there was a balance, there are more people who have gotten away with things that were part of this Epstein class of men who are being branded in a witch hunt.

I don’t subscribe or want a witch hunt in any way, but the real issue here is the people who are being protected. The real issue is two tiers of justice in America. The real issue is people with power and wealth using it to be above the law and to escape even investigation or prosecution.

Now, do I think that if someone sent an email to Epstein before Epstein was convicted, or if someone showed up to an event before Epstein was convicted, that they should be ashamed? No, there always has to be context. But right now, what I’ve seen is far more on the end of no accountability than on the side of some kind of witch hunt.

How would you define the Epstein class?

Rich and powerful people, who feel entitled that they can use that wealth to be above the law.

That certainly rings true to the behavior we have seen from these files and what we know to be the facts of Epstein, Maxwell, and the people they surrounded themselves with. The question is: How is that different from billionaires or elites or whatever?

There are billionaires who do extraordinary things for the world. Warren Buffett has, by and large, done incredible things. I don’t believe that just because someone is a millionaire or just because they’re a billionaire, that that makes them suspect.

It is the use of your money and privilege to defy the law, to abuse the law, to think you’re above the law. That is what enrages Americans. Most Americans like people to build wealth and admire economic success. It’s the corrupting influence that is where we draw the line.

I was talking to a journalist last week about the Epstein files. I asked about why Democrats didn’t do this years earlier, and the quote was, it wasn’t politically beneficial for them.

I wanted to know how true is it that the reason why we didn’t get that push earlier is because the party itself was also wrapped up in it?

I believe the fact that there’s so many rich and powerful people coming out, and some of them were Democratic donors, certainly disincentivizes the political class from speaking up.

It’s one of the reasons [Donald] Trump and [JD] Vance ran on this, saying [Democrats are] protecting rich and powerful friends. Trump says this to this day. And there are a lot of Democrats in the files, let’s be honest. There are a lot of those friends that were Democratic donors.

I don’t think that there was some kind of conspiracy, but the political class wasn’t — let’s just say they weren’t rushing to come to the aid of these survivors. They weren’t rushing to expose all of this.