Daniel G. Newman has been one of the more important drivers of the money-in-politics reform debate in the 15 years since he created MapLight — a sprawling database that quantifies the connections between politicians, the businesses and industries that finance their campaigns, the policies they support, and the votes they cast. He remains in charge but branched out his summer by publishing a graphic novel that seeks to explain the full range of fix-the-system challenges: "Unrig: How to Fix Our Broken Democracy" (McMillan). It's his fourth book; the others were about speech recognition, the initial focus of his career. His answers have been edited for clarity and length.
What's the tweet-length description of your organization?
We expose money's influence on politics and fight online political deception.
Describe your very first civic engagement.
For years, Brown, the college I attended, had been raising funds from each graduating class to support financial aid for low-income students. In my senior year, some student "leaders" sought to direct those funds to other purposes that didn't support equity. I recruited allies and generated lots of campus press to counter this change — and the funds continued to go to financial aid.
What was your biggest professional triumph?
When I started MapLight in 2005, the corrosive influence of money in politics was not on most people's radar as one of the most critical issues facing our country. Now that our news stories and data have been seen, heard or read by millions, we've helped make money's influence on our democracy a top political issue nationally.
And your most disappointing setback?
I spent two years organizing to pass a 2004 ballot measure for public funding of elections in my home town of Berkeley, Calif. But the measure didn't pass. I was dejected, feeling like a failure for more than a year. I tormented myself. If only I'd reached out to more people. Or made one or two fewer mistakes.
I started MapLight to expose money's influence and help other reform activists be successful. Over the next decade, the Supreme Court ushered in even more money in politics, generating more energy than ever to change our broken system — including momentum for another local effort in Berkeley. My desire for change was just as strong, but I was held back by my past feelings of despair. What if I attempted another campaign and it lost? I realized I needed to separate my success as a person from the success of the campaign. That new humility, in the face of the uncertainty of politics, allowed me to try again. And in 2016, we won!
How does your identity influence the way you go about your work?
Early in my career I taught high school math and physics. I continue to see myself as an educator. I'm good at explaining complex concepts and ideas in understandable ways — which helps in my work of explaining our democracy's problems and engaging people in the reform movement. My new book does exactly this — in 250 pages of comics!
What's the best advice you've ever been given?
Hire only people who are outstanding across all aspects. The cost and pain of hiring the wrong person is so great, leave positions unfilled until you find someone excellent. I got this advice a few years after starting MapLight, and that's what propelled the organization to take off.
Create a new flavor for Ben & Jerry's.
"Collective Action" — the more people eating it, the better it tastes.
What is your favorite TV show or movie about politics?
"The Candidate," the 1972 dark comedy starring Robert Redford as he seeks a Senate seat in California.
What's the last thing you do on your phone at night?
I'm big on boundaries between work and home, and between online and offline, so I aim for "airplane mode" a few hours before bedtime.
What is your deepest, darkest secret?
This may come as a surprise, given my profession, but I don't love reading books about democracy. Too often they are dry and pessimistic. I wanted to write a book that I would be excited to read myself. "Unrig" is that book.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.