2026-06-03 05:40:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is putting an unqualified loyalist in charge of US spy agencies.
What’s happening? On Tuesday, Trump announced in a social media post that he was appointing Bill Pulte, who is already director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, as acting director of national intelligence.
Pulte will replace former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard in the role after Gabbard announced her resignation last month, citing her husband’s cancer diagnosis. (Gabbard has a few weeks left on the job, though: Her resignation will take effect June 30.)
What does the DNI do? As acting director of national intelligence, Pulte’s job — ostensibly — is to oversee and coordinate the 18 agencies that make up the US intelligence community, including the CIA, the FBI, and the National Security Agency. It’s a powerful role, though one that has been sidelined for much of the second Trump administration because of Gabbard’s conflicts with the White House.
What’s the context? As my colleague Andrew Prokop reported last year, Pulte has spent his time in government to date freelancing as Trump’s attack dog, including digging up flimsy accusations of mortgage fraud against Fed governor Lisa Cook, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), and New York Attorney General Letitia James (only one of which resulted in an indictment, which has since been dismissed). He also pushed Trump to fire former Fed chair Jay Powell.
Why does this matter? Gabbard’s tenure as DNI was by turns bizarre, alarming, and ineffectual — but it could well pale in comparison to what Pulte might do with the role.
Pulte has no background in national security or intelligence, so his sole qualification for the DNI job is seemingly his relentless, bottomless loyalty to Trump. As FHFA director, that looked like trumped-up schemes to indict Trump’s enemies; at the head of the intelligence community, with power over domestic and foreign intelligence collection, it could be a far more serious threat.
Hi readers! Here’s a story from The Atlantic making the case for inviting people over on a spontaneous, low-stakes basis. It’s great advice — we’ve echoed it in the pages of this newsletter before! — and spending time with friends is a guaranteed way to feel better about the state of the world. You can read it with a gift link here. Have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!
2026-06-03 04:55:00
As global concern about an Ebola outbreak in central Africa grows, hundreds of Kenyans have taken to the streets to protest a plan by the Trump administration to send American citizens who have been exposed to the virus to Kenya, rather than bringing them back to the US. Two people have been shot and killed during the protests.
The outbreak started in the Democratic Republic of Congo last month and has since spread to Uganda. There are currently no confirmed cases in Kenya, which shares a border with Uganda.
Kenyans are demanding to know why the US wants to send Ebola patients to their country, and why their government gave the US the initial approval to build a 50-bed quarantine facility at the Laikipia Air Base in central Kenya.
For now, the plan is on hold after a court ruling in Kenya; on Tuesday, the court extended the suspension to at least June 23 and also ordered the Kenyan government to provide details of its arrangement with the Trump administration, including financial agreements and measures put in place to protect Kenyans.
Between cuts to American foreign aid in the region, the sheer aggressiveness of this strain of the virus, and conspiracy theories that threaten public health workers, many public health workers fear that this Ebola outbreak has become a perfect storm.
To understand what’s going on — and why the US is trying to involve Kenya — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke to Sabrina Siddiqui, a national politics reporter for the Wall Street Journal who helped to break the story. They discussed the reactions from Kenyans and public health experts and what would happen if Kenya continues to rebuff the administration.
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.
What is the plan?
The administration has been trying to set up a quarantine facility in Kenya at an air force base where they would essentially house Americans who have been exposed to Ebola and anyone who also tests positive.
They’re describing it as somewhat of a tent hospital. But there are various plans underway for also adding, if needed, isolation units and biocontainment units. That is, of course, if there are people who truly get sick or need further care.
I think they see this as an opportunity to have a place for Americans to quarantine while they’re evaluated, and they have deployed public health officers from the United States to assist with these efforts. They have also said that if Americans test positive, they would only perhaps stay at this facility for a couple days before being sent to another country. And they’re looking at facilities in Europe that could potentially accommodate Americans if they were to truly get sick.
What the US is saying is: We don’t want you coming back into the US. You look at the reaction to this here at home, and there’s a lot of shock. Ebola outbreaks have happened before. This is a very dangerous, dangerous virus. How does the US usually handle this when our citizens are affected?
That’s actually been very striking about the administration’s response to this particular outbreak. In previous outbreaks, Americans who had been exposed to Ebola or who had tested positive were allowed to return home and they were monitored and cared for at quarantine facilities here in the United States. And we do have biocontainment units as well. During this recent hantavirus outbreak, American passengers who were aboard the cruise ship where that outbreak occurred have been quarantining at one of those biocontainment units in Nebraska.
So it’s frankly been bizarre to a lot of public health officials and epidemiologists that Americans would not be allowed to come home. And it just appears to be the case that the Trump administration is taking a very hard line against letting anyone who is known to have Ebola to be allowed back here in the United States. What they’re saying is that they do not want any Ebola cases to exist in the United States during this outbreak.
So the plan is: send Americans to Kenya. And what is the status of that plan?
The Trump administration announced that the US and Kenya had reached an agreement to stand up this quarantine facility for Americans in Kenya. And then a Kenyan high court put a temporary hold on the Trump administration’s plan to set up that facility. So right now, the plan is very much in limbo. As of now, it’s not clear if the plan is even going to move forward.
How did people in Kenya respond when they were told the United States wants to send its citizens to you?
One of the lawyers who is part of the legal group that is arguing this case said, “Is Kenya being reduced to a dumping site?” I think that really captures the mood of many Kenyans who learned about this plan through news reports, and were critical of their government for agreeing to allow Americans who had been exposed to Ebola to be rerouted to Kenya when there are no known or suspected cases of Ebola in Kenya.
There are obviously a lot of concerns, including from medical groups in Kenya that there could perhaps be an outbreak in Kenya that stems from bringing Americans to the country who’ve been exposed to the virus.
Does anyone know why [the administration chose] Kenya?
The administration said that they were looking for somewhere in the region that is unaffected by the outbreak, where they don’t believe there is as high a risk of spread and that is not too far so that people could get there quickly. Obviously there are also politics involved and it seems like they were able to come to some kind of agreement with the government, even if it’s been halted by the courts.
Again, this is temporary for people who actually get sick. So it doesn’t even look like it was necessarily a long-term plan in terms of how they plan to actually use this facility, because at the same time that they’re saying Americans can quarantine in Kenya, they also said that anyone who truly gets sick would be evacuated to a tertiary care center and that they’re currently talking to partners in Europe to try and identify where sick patients can be taken.
These are just some of the questions that a lot of people have around the administration’s plans, which they haven’t been terribly forthcoming about, and which have drawn criticism not just from people in Kenya, but also from public health experts here at home who simply do not understand why they would not allow Americans to return to their home country.
Let me ask you what you’ve been hearing from public health experts, because there is, from the non-expert’s point of view, a knee-jerk sense in this. It’s: Ebola is dangerous, keep people where they are, or keep people elsewhere, so that they don’t bring Ebola into the United States.
You said public health experts say this does not make sense. Why doesn’t it make sense? What do they tell you?
I think there are a couple of things that are at play. One is that public health experts do say that it is the responsibility of the United States government to take care of its own people and to allow them to return home so that they could receive the highest quality of care and that they have these state-of-the-art facilities specifically designed for outbreaks and viruses like Ebola.
I also think that there is the component of mental health, and that, in addition to just needing to receive the appropriate care, that people should have access to their support system, that they should be allowed to be in closer proximity to their families if they were to get sick. And people see that as a moral responsibility that the United States has to afford Americans that opportunity.
There’s also just the fact that in previous outbreaks, Americans were brought home, and the Trump administration has not provided a medical rationale for why they’re so opposed to Americans coming back home other than saying that time is of the essence when someone has Ebola. Well, time was also of the essence in prior outbreaks, and the US did not stop Americans from returning home.
You’ve been covering the hantavirus outbreak as well. And I wonder whether you’re seeing a pattern here in the way this administration is responding to these public health crises where the public is inclined to freak out a bit and public health experts might have a different idea of what needs to happen.
Well, here’s what’s really fascinating about covering the hantavirus outbreak as well as the Ebola outbreak. The Trump administration has been willing to embrace these very aggressive quarantine and isolation measures despite the fact that this administration is full of people at the highest levels of leadership who were so critical of what they saw as heavy-handed social distancing and isolation guidelines during the Covid-19 pandemic.
And they’re going even further. There were a couple of passengers who wanted to leave the Nebraska facility where those who’ve been exposed to hantavirus have been quarantining. And the acting director of the CDC, Jay Bhattacharya, signed an order forcing them to stay there. And now, as those passengers are reaching the end of their quarantine period — these are those who are exposed to hantavirus, who have been asymptomatic and do not have hantavirus — they’re now returning to their home states. The Trump administration is essentially insisting on 24/7 monitoring and not allowing them to leave their homes.
So, oddly enough, it’s a very heavy-handed way that the Trump administration has responded to these outbreaks, even though they were the ones who used criticisms of public health institutions and of the scientific community during Covid as a way to appeal to voters who are frustrated by these exact kinds of guidelines and rules during that pandemic.
What are the stakes here? What happens if Kenya says, no, President Donald Trump, we’re just not going to allow this?
Well, that’s actually going to be a really interesting moment if it comes to pass because it is not entirely clear if the Trump administration has a plan B.
It just seems like this entire plan came together very quickly. Even the public health officers who were deployed to Kenya when they were called upon for this assignment only received about three days of training. And that’s something that some public health officials said simply isn’t enough for people who are going to go and try to staff a facility where you have this rare strain of a deadly virus.
When the Trump administration is talking about whether or not they would be able to send Americans to other facilities in Europe, they still haven’t identified where those care centers would be, which just signals that they haven’t really thought through what would happen if they are not allowed to stand up this facility in Kenya. And I suspect that while they’re still negotiating with the Europeans, it’s very likely that people in Europe would have the same reaction as those in Kenya: “Why are you sending potentially sick Americans here rather than allowing them to return home?”
2026-06-02 23:35:00
Allen v. Milligan, an Alabama redistricting case that is now before the Supreme Court for the third time, is a face-palm, wrapped in a head-desk, wrapped in some of the most incompetent legislative draftsmanship that has ever been presented to the justices. If Alabama Republicans have any sense, they will fire all of their lawyers.
About a month ago, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, gutting the federal Voting Rights Act’s safeguards against legislative maps that lock voters of color out of power in the process. Callais effectively repealed a 1982 amendment to the VRA, which prohibited many state laws that have a negative impact of nonwhite voters, even if those laws were not drawn with racist intent.
After Callais, a plaintiff challenging a state’s legislative maps on racial grounds may only prevail “when the circumstances give rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.”
As a practical matter, this is a very difficult bar for voting rights plaintiffs to overcome. Lawyers and judges are not mind readers. And state lawmakers normally aren’t foolish enough to state openly that they drew a particular map in a particular way because they wanted to maximize white power and minimize the voting power of nonwhite voters.
And yet, Alabama’s Republican-controlled legislature managed to enact congressional redistricting legislation that openly praises the European American character of much of the state.
Allen turns on congressional maps that the state enacted in a 2023 law, but which have never actually been used in an election. Much of the case turns on the law’s disparate treatment of two regions in the state: the Gulf Coast region of Alabama, and the state’s Black Belt.
While the Black Belt is actually named after the dark-colored soil in that region, it has a high African American population because many enslaved people were brought to the Black Belt prior to the Civil War. The Gulf Coast region, meanwhile, is predominantly white. As a lower court decision that struck down the 2023 maps explains, those maps keep “the Gulf Coast whole,” while simultaneously splitting the Black Belt in a way that shunts many of its Black voters into a majority-white district.
The mere fact that Alabama cracked up the Black Belt while keeping the Gulf Coast intact does not endanger its maps, at least under Callais. The decision is very favorable to gerrymandering, and permits states to draw maps that diminish Black representation so long as the state claims that it is doing so to dilute the votes of Democrats.
But here’s the rub: The 2023 law doesn’t just preserve the white-majority Gulf Coast region intact; it also praises the “shared culture” of that region which stems “from its French and Spanish colonial heritage.” France and Spain, of course, are European countries made up predominantly of white people.
The state legislature, in other words, didn’t just give the Gulf Coast more favorable treatment than it did the Black Belt. It explicitly referenced the Gulf Coast’s shared European culture when it did so. That sure gives rise to a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred!
Will that be enough to persuade this Supreme Court to rule against Alabama’s maps? Who knows? The Court’s most recent gerrymandering decisions appear designed to permit states to draw whatever maps they want, without any federal judicial oversight whatsoever. And a decision in favor of Alabama’s 2023 maps would also benefit the Republican Party.
Six of the Supreme Court’s nine seats are held by Republicans.
But, even after Callais, one of the few things that states should not be allowed to do is draw maps for the explicit purpose of favoring European Americans, while simultaneously disfavoring African Americans. And yet Alabama’s maps may not be able to clear even this very low bar.
2026-06-02 19:00:00
Clavicular says he’s been taking testosterone since he was 14 years old.
For the infamous looksmaxxing influencer, the hormone supplement is part of a regimen designed to give him the hollow cheeks, square jaw, and muscular build now coveted by legions of extremely online young men. Testosterone has helped him hone his appearance to the point at which — according to him at least — he can not only attract countless women, but also brutally shame other men with the power of his masculine beauty alone. It has also, he believes, made him infertile.
Lowered sperm count, shrunken testicles, and impaired fertility are known side effects of some kinds of testosterone supplementation. Doctors can help people manage or avoid these effects with the right dosage, but the rise of direct-to-consumer medicine — and gray and black market sources — mean more men are taking testosterone without close medical monitoring.
Some are likely unaware of the potential risks associated with the hormone. “I think a lot of men think that taking testosterone should not compromise their fertility and would probably actually improve it,” said Justin Dubin, director of men’s sexual health at Baptist Health South Florida and co-host of the Man Up podcast.
For others, however, fertility may be beside the point. Clavicular and other manosphere influencers are selling a version of masculinity that’s fundamentally divorced from procreation and even from having sex with women — it’s all about competition among men. And to “win” at this new form of masculinity, some men are willing to sacrifice not only their money, their mental health, and their relationships, but also their sperm.
All human bodies naturally produce at least some testosterone. The hormone helps drive male puberty, and in adult men, it plays a role in energy, as well as bone and muscle health, said Ugis Gruntmanis, a professor of medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth who studies male sex hormones.
Testosterone levels can decline with age, and doctors recommend testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) if men have low levels of the hormone combined with bothersome symptoms, like low energy or sexual dysfunction, Gruntmanis said.
When taken under the direction of a doctor, testosterone is generally very safe, Dubin said. However, taking it as a medication essentially tricks the brain into thinking the body is producing enough on its own, so it signals the testicles to stop producing more. “Your testicles tend to atrophy; they tend to stop producing sperm,” Dubin said. (When trans men take testosterone as part of gender-affirming care, the fertility effects vary based on what other procedures they undergo, Gruntmanis said.)
The effect is reversible once patients stop taking testosterone, but it can take time for sperm production to return to normal, Gruntmanis said.
A doctor should counsel patients on the fertility effects of testosterone, experts say. But today, many men get testosterone from direct-to-consumer clinics that proliferated at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dubin said. “With better access through direct-to-consumer, we started seeing more men who are younger on TRT coming with low sperm counts or zero sperm counts not being counseled appropriately,” Dubin said.
In one study, Dubin posed as a patient seeking the medication but interested in having children. Six of seven direct-to-consumer medical companies still offered him testosterone, and only half told him about the risks to fertility, he said.
Interest in testosterone therapy has exploded in recent years. Prescriptions for the medication have increased 154 percent since 2020, with the sharpest rise in men ages 35 to 44, according to market research data provided to the New York Times. About a third of men who currently have a prescription for the medication do not meet the medical criteria for testosterone deficiency, according to the American Urological Association.
With the rise of video platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels, young men are facing the kinds of pressures to “perfect the face and body” that women have long faced, said Jordan Foster, a sociology professor at MacEwan University in Canada who studies culture, media, and beauty. To achieve the muscular physiques prized on social media, many are turning to testosterone.
They’re taking inspiration from the many podcasters and influencers with large male followings who have spoken openly about taking the drug, including Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also takes it, and a Food and Drug Administration panel last year voted to loosen some restrictions on the medication.
But it’s a complicated moment for young men to take a medication that reduces their fertility. There’s some evidence that sperm counts are declining around the world, and some of the same people boosting testosterone therapy have sounded the alarm about sperm. Kennedy recently spoke of a “fertility crisis” in America, arguing that in 1970, “Men had twice the sperm count as our teenagers do today.”
He also spoke of the Trump administration’s efforts to address the country’s declining birth rate, a major bugbear of Republicans, Silicon Valley billionaires, and manosphere and manosphere-adjacent influencers alike. Huberman has discussed declining male fertility on his show; Rogan has warned of an impending “population collapse.”
Testosterone supplementation probably hasn’t contributed meaningfully to the falling US birth rate; experts say the decline in births likely has more to do with social changes, like rising women’s education, than with changes in sperm count.
Still, the popularity of testosterone therapy has led to some bizarre collisions of priorities. Looksmaxxing influencer Felix van der Heiden, for example, discovered the impact of his testosterone usage when he tried to participate in a “sperm race” hosted by a Silicon Valley men’s fertility startup. “Everything’s dead,” he told the New York Times, of the semen sample he provided. “Just rotten inside.”
It’s surprising to hear someone steeped in a hypermasculine online subculture casually admit that his sperm are “rotten.” After all, having lots of kids isn’t just theoretically important to manosphere influencers and their ilk; manosphere-adjacent figures like Elon Musk have walked the walk by fathering large numbers of offspring. And sperm themselves have long been a symbol of sexual potency, as anyone who’s watched Beavis and Butthead could tell you.
But for some male-dominated subcultures, masculinity has become totally separate from reproduction, Foster, the sociology professor, said. “There’s this kind of separate conversation men are having, divorced from fatherhood, divorced from marriage, that is more about sexual conquest and virility, and that conversation is almost by default unconcerned with fertility.”
In some cases, the conversation even becomes divorced from sex. Clavicular, for example, told the Times that knowing he could have sex with a woman is in some ways better than actually doing so. “It’s a big time-saver,” he said.
For a certain segment of looksmaxxers, and manosphere adherents more broadly, there’s a sense that “we’re not doing this for women,” Foster said. “We’re doing this for men, and to show other men how powerful or competent we may be.”
There’s always been an element of male competition in male-dominated online spaces — the pickup artists of the aughts, for example, were often trying to beat one another at the game of seducing women. But there’s something especially extreme about a masculinist ethos that demands aesthetic perfection above all else — and that’s willing to destroy the very gametes that carry the Y chromosome in order to achieve it.
There are, of course, plenty of problems with traditional masculinity — I don’t mean to endorse the idea that you need to have a lot of kids, or have a high sperm count, or have sex with women, in order to be a man. But we’ve had centuries to learn about masculinity in America, and decades of practice helping boys and men navigate it in a healthy way.
Now something new is on the horizon. Young men, and everyone who interacts with them, will need new tools to deal with it.
2026-06-02 18:45:00
After Abigail Spanberger’s landslide election win in Virginia last November, she’d hoped to govern as she’d campaigned — rising above the partisan fray and focused on affordability.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
She alienated the right early on by joining the national battle over gerrymandering that Republicans kicked off (after initially saying she wouldn’t), endorsing a map that would favor Democrats in 10 of Virginia’s 11 US House districts. It passed as a ballot measure, but was tossed out by the state’s highest court.
Additionally, when some enthusiastic Democrats in the legislature proposed a litany of new taxes and fees, Fox News rounded them up and the story caused a sensation as Republicans accused her of abandoning her focus on costs — even though Spanberger hadn’t endorsed any of those ideas.
So lately, the governor has tried to reestablish her moderate credentials — by saying no to Democrats in the legislature, with her veto.
In recent weeks, Spanberger vetoed major bills on retail marijuana sales, collective bargaining for state and local government workers, class action lawsuits, prescription drug prices, gambling, criminal justice reform, and more.
For that, she’s been met with fury from the left — denounced as a sellout betraying progressive causes. And with further battles over the state’s budget ahead, her relationships with key figures in the legislature have gotten worse.
To her critics, Spanberger is squandering what could be a short-lived opportunity for much-needed major change. To her defenders, she’s trying to make center-left governance actually work — preventing progressives from going too far in ways that would lead to poor governance and voter backlash in a state that is not quite solidly blue.
It’s a preview of challenges other states might face next year if a blue wave creates more new Democratic trifectas — and at the national level in 2029 if Democrats take the White House and Congress.
While Spanberger faces some Virginia-specific hurdles, her broader dilemma is a familiar one. Is it possible to play procedural hardball without angering the middle? When the base wants to pass the whole progressive agenda all at once, when should a governor or president push back? And if you’re already taking on fire from the right, can you afford to have the left mad at you too?
The early controversies and criticism from the right took a toll on Spanberger’s approval rating.
At the heart of it was the redistricting referendum, which required her to commit to what was by definition a partisan crusade — its only purpose was to hand Democrats seats, to make up for Republican redistricting gains elsewhere.
Though she had won election by a 15-point margin, by early April, Spanberger’s approval rating was down to 47 percent — and her disapproval was 46 percent. Her honeymoon had ended.
That was about the time she had to decide what to do with the 1,156 bills the legislature had sent her by the close of its session. During that session, Spanberger was “little seen or heard,” Virginia Mercury columnist Bob Lewis wrote.
This wasn’t entirely surprising: The legislature was used to taking the lead. In Virginia, governors are prohibited from running for reelection, making them instant lame ducks. “The joke in the legislature is, you don’t like the governor, just wait a couple minutes,” Richard Meagher, a political scientist at Randolph-Macon College, told me.
Powerful figures like L. Louise Lucas, the state senate president pro tempore and finance committee chair, call the shots. The 82-year old Lucas has served in the legislature for more than three decades; she’s recently gained national attention for her partisan combativeness and spicy social media presence. (When Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine raised concerns about her redistricting plans, she said their complaints were “coming from a cuck chair in the corner”).
After four years under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Democrats had a long list of things they wanted to do with their newfound control of state government — an agenda that amounted to bold progressive change, as well as the procedural hardball of the redistricting effort (since blocked in court).
Spanberger signed the vast majority of the bills sent to her into law — including measures on the minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, gun control, and reproductive rights.
But on other key measures, she balked.
There were some bills that Spanberger flatly vetoed — such as on gambling, criminal justice reform, and a new fee on mattress sales to fund mattress recycling.
On other bills, she took a different tack — initially proposing major amendments to what the legislature had passed, and only vetoing when the legislature rejected her suggestions. Here, she said, she remains committed to the goals of these proposals — but she simply believes the bills as written will work out poorly, and wants changes.
For Democrats’ long-awaited bill to legalize retail marijuana sales (recreational use was legalized in 2021), Spanberger wanted to add new tough penalties for public consumption and possession of large amounts. Her critics viewed this as a poison pill designed to kill the bill, since progressives in the legislature were ill-inclined toward making drug laws harsher.
For labor’s prized bill to let state and local government employees collectively bargain, Spanberger proposed delaying implementation for local government employees until 2030 — when, notably, she’d be out of office. (Some local governments had complained that, if the original bill passed, workers could negotiate higher compensation and squeeze their limited budgets.)
And for a bill creating a process to let people file class action lawsuits in Virginia (they’re one of just two states that has no formal procedure for that), Spanberger proposed limiting the bill to a few cities and Fairfax County, and giving judges a way to dismiss such lawsuits earlier.
There are a few common themes in her vetoes. She’s sensitive to perceptions that the Democratic Party is soft on crime or disorder — or that it’s too eager to impose new taxes.
Another concern is keeping businesses feeling good about the state. Virginia political analyst Bob Holsworth told me that the state’s politicians have long cared deeply about national ratings of their business climate, such as CNBC’s. Virginia often ranks No. 1 on such surveys (though they dropped to fourth last year).
To explain Spanberger’s veto of a prescription drug pricing board, for instance, Holsworth pointed toward recent investments by companies like AstraZeneca in bringing drug manufacturing facilities to Virginia.
Here too, there are echoes of Democratic tensions in other states: In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has found himself in a standoff with ultra-wealthy residents threatening to leave or abandon planned investments over his tax-the-rich proposals. In California, Democrats are divided over a proposed wealth tax that’s generating the same concerns and influencing the governor’s race. And more leaders could find themselves in similar positions as they try to manage their base’s populist backlash against the rich while trying to attract businesses and grow their tax base to accommodate new spending.
The business climate is a major factor in another huge fight currently splitting Spanberger from progressives — data centers.
Lucas, the senate finance committee chair, wants to eliminate tax incentives for data centers, and rely heavily on this for revenue in the state’s budget (which must be settled by June 30). But Spanberger argues that ending those tax breaks would effectively mean breaking a promise to businesses who chose to build in Virginia.
“Lucas came up with an issue that is really problematic for the Democrats, because on one hand you’re talking about a tax exemption that goes to the richest people in the world,” Holsworth said. “And then on the other hand, if the rug gets pulled out from under this exemption, Virginia’s rating among the best states for doing business in the country goes flying down.”
With data centers drawing populist opposition at the local, state, and federal level, and a broader AI backlash simmering in some corners of the left, other Democrats are likely to face these challenges as well. In April, Maine governor Janet Mills vetoed a proposed moratorium on data centers over concerns it would penalize a project that had already been planned.
As the battle over the budget stretches on, tensions between Spanberger and legislators have risen. Many of them view her as blindsiding them with her vetoes, and failing to engage in the process early enough.
Meanwhile, the relationship with Lucas keeps worsening. An interview this week in which Spanberger said the legislature might not respect her due to sexism didn’t go over well.
“You have gotta be kidding me!” Lucas posted on X Wednesday. “There is a record number of women in the GA and four of them are in leadership and a woman LG, yet you think this is all about you! Okay, you thought it to be a great idea but just remember, you started this mess!”
There’s bad blood behind the scenes too. In February, Spanberger’s chief of staff filed a defamation lawsuit against a longtime adviser to Lucas, claiming he was spreading scurrilous rumors about her.
But being at odds with Lucas could be risky. “Lucas has a little bit of the mob boss in her — which endears her to a lot of Democrats in the commonwealth,” said Meagher, the Randolph-Macon college political scientist. “Democratic voters, particularly when they look at the national leadership, are tired of tepid, moderate, mealy-mouthed leaders.”
Meanwhile, Lucas’s national profile could soon get bigger. Last month, the FBI searched her office and a marijuana dispensary she owns. Sources told the New York Times that the search stemmed from a corruption and bribery investigation opened during the Biden administration. Lucas has positioned herself as a victim of Trump’s retribution crusade, claiming, “I am not backing down.”
In theory, Spanberger is trying to appeal to her state’s median voter. But in between elections, the median voter is often disengaged and turned out. The loudest voices are partisans and ideologues; which leaves her with a right that’s already turned against her and a left that’s turning on her too.
And while some of Spanberger’s challenges are unique to her state, other incoming Democratic governors — or the next Democratic president — could soon find themselves in similar situations.
The party’s base and interest groups will demand a wish list of progressive agenda items they’ve long dreamed of passing, as well as hardball procedural moves to help counter perceived foul play on the right.
Picture a Democrat being sworn in as president with congressional majorities in 2029, and immediately being swamped with demands for filibuster abolition (which would uncork even more long-deferred legislative priorities) and court-packing. Meanwhile, activists are pushing for major new spending programs even as the deficit and national debt are worsening.
The executive will be the one tasked with weighing all the associated political and practical tradeoffs — and deciding when to say no. If Spanberger’s experience is any indication, there won’t be any easy answers waiting for them.
2026-06-02 06:10:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund is — maybe — done for.
What’s happening? On Monday, Axios reported that the Trump administration planned to drop its “anti-weaponization” fund — nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money set aside for Trump to dole out to whoever he and the fund’s board choose, free of supervision — amid legal challenges and growing Republican backlash.
The fund, announced in mid-May, was the product of a “settlement” between Trump and his own government over a $10 billion lawsuit Trump had brought against the IRS. A long list of Trump allies, including January 6 rioters, could have stood to receive millions from the fund.
What’s the context? On Friday, a federal district judge in Virginia temporarily blocked Trump’s fund from disbursing any money or taking any other actions until at least late next week, while another in Florida ordered Trump’s personal lawyers to justify the settlement reached with the Justice Department, raising the possibility that it could have been fraudulent.
What’s the big picture? It’s a little unclear what the fund’s exact status is, as of this writing; as one source told Axios on Monday, “The president likes the fund. … So nothing is final until it’s final.” Other reporters have pointed out that the court ruling that the Justice Department has promised to abide by is only temporary.
But the fund has also become toxic with some of the Republican senators whose votes Trump needs to advance a second reconciliation bill, enough so that concern about the fund delayed votes originally planned for last month. As Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman points out, when the bill does move forward, it could also include language explicitly blocking the fund.
In other words, there are still avenues Trump could pursue to try to bring back the fund. But all things considered, this looks like an effort by DOJ to save face and back away from the issue permanently.
Hi readers, happy June! Here’s a very cute dog to kick off the month. Have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!