In this episode, Andre and Todd discuss their different views on the threat of racial violence, whether anyone is capable of being pushed to violence, what’s behind the caution that Andre brings to Black-white relationships, and how canceling each other’s views and experiences impedes our ability to have open, honest conversations about race.
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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky (L) speaks during a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump (R), and European leaders at the White House on August 18, 2025 in Washington, DC.
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Standing With Ukraine: How American Ukrainians, Poles, and Others Can Still Play a Role
Aug 20, 2025
Volodymyr Zelensky has to flatter Donald Trump. It’s for his country’s survival. Americans, including Ukrainian Americans and others from frontline countries, can speak the truth: Trump’s actions have undermined Ukraine from his first cancellations of military support to his validating Vladimir Putin’s claims to Ukrainian territory and refusing to press for a ceasefire.
Those of us who want to stand with Ukraine can do more than just play the role of passive spectators. Imagine if Ukrainian Americans organized a nationally coordinated rally—calling on Trump to support Ukraine, not Putin. These demonstrations should be led by Ukrainian Americans, whose families and futures are most directly affected. But they could also prominently engage other Eastern European communities—Polish, Latvian, Finnish, and others—whose homelands are also threatened by Russian aggression. And who recognizes that Ukrainians are fighting not just for themselves, but for everyone who believes in democracy.
These communities bring powerful stories, deep networks, and shared stakes in the outcome. Demonstration organizers should invite them to speak, co-create messaging, and amplify the call across media and social platforms. Broader outreach—such as to the networks that mobilized an estimated 5 million people for No Kings Day—could expand the size and impact. But the core message should remain rooted in the voices of those on the front lines of this geopolitical struggle.
The slogans can be simple and direct: Don't Abandon Ukraine. Stand Against Putin. Stand with Ukraine and Democracy. The goal would be to pressure once-supportive Republicans to break their silence and restore at least baseline levels of aid. It would be about making the political cost of inaction too high to ignore.
These rallies would also send a message to Trump himself. He’s refused to authorize new U.S. support, alternately halted and resumed the delivery of previously committed air defense systems and artillery ammunition, and lamented Russia’s expulsion from the G8 for its 2014 Crimea seizure. Despite tough-sounding words, he’s given Vladimir Putin far more leverage both on the battlefield and at the negotiating table. Ukraine may still prevail with courage, persistence, creativity, and increased European support. But Trump’s general abandonment makes the Ukrainian situation far harder, even as the war-burdened Russian economy faces 20 percent interest rates, 10% inflation, and key labor shortages.
Could these rallies and marches make a difference? Ukrainian and other Eastern European communities have historically leaned Republican, giving them unique leverage. When economic interests have pressured Trump, he’s reversed course on tariffs and on immigration raids targeting farmworkers and hotel workers. Nixon-era anti-Vietnam demonstrations helped halt bombing raids and accelerated troop withdrawals—even as Nixon claimed they had no effect.
There are no guarantees. But coordinated, visible action could help put Ukraine—and Trump’s enabling of Putin—back on the national radar. At the very least, it would give Ukrainians and their allies a way to speak out while the fate of their country hangs in the balance. Hope alone is not a strategy. But when people organize with a common voice, they never know what they might achieve.
Paul Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen, The Impossible Will Take a Little While, and three other books on social change, totaling 350,000 copies in print. He’s written for the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Miami Herald, and AARP Bulletin
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Anti-gerrymandering protest
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The Gerrymandering Crisis Escalates: Can Reform Stop the 2026 Power Grab?
Aug 20, 2025
The battle over redistricting is intensifying across the country, with bipartisan concern mounting over democratic legitimacy, racial equity, and the urgent need for structural reform. Yet despite years of advocacy from cross-partisan organizations and scholars, the partisan battle over gerrymandering is accelerating, threatening to fracture the very foundation of representative democracy.
The Fulcrum has been watching closely. In our August 8th editorial, we warned of the dilemma now facing the reform movement:
“At The Fulcrum, we’ve consistently amplified voices advocating for structural reforms: eliminating gerrymandering, fixing campaign finance, opening primaries, and advancing ranked-choice voting. The leaders of national reform organizations we regularly feature view these changes not simply as policy adjustments, but as moral imperatives essential to ensuring citizens have a meaningful voice and agency in their governance.”
These reforms rest on a foundational assumption: that we operate within a functioning representative, democratic framework where voters ultimately shape the system rather than being shaped by it. But what happens when that assumption collapses?
In our February editorial, we reaffirmed our commitment to avoid reflexive partisanship while telling the truth about real threats to democratic governance. We acknowledged the complexity of our moment—and the need to distinguish legitimate political debate from norm-breaking behavior that corrodes democratic values. That balance between clarity and complexity, truth and transparency, remains our editorial compass. But as democratic backsliding accelerates, the terrain we navigate grows more precarious.
Now two weeks after our August column the crisis has deepened.
Gerrymandering battles are escalating in at least six states, with Texas and Florida leading a mid-decade redistricting push that critics call a raw power grab. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott—backed by President Trump—is pursuing a plan to redraw congressional maps to add five Republican seats, bypassing the traditional post-census timeline. Democratic lawmakers fled the state to block the vote, triggering a constitutional standoff and national outrage. The proposed maps crack and pack minority communities, especially in Travis County (Austin), where five districts now dilute Democratic strength.
Meanwhile, Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature is launching a similar effort, despite the state’s Fair Districts Amendment banning partisan gerrymandering. Governor Ron DeSantis and House Speaker Paul Renner have formed a select committee to explore legal avenues for redrawing maps, potentially cementing GOP dominance ahead of 2026.
Other states are watching and preparing to retaliate. Democratic governors in California and New York have pledged to “fight fire with fire,” with plans to redraw their own maps to counter Republican gains. Indiana, Missouri, and South Carolina are also under scrutiny, as GOP leaders consider redistricting maneuvers to expand their congressional foothold. The result is a partisan arms race that threatens to destabilize electoral norms, with lawmakers representing ever-shifting districts and voters losing meaningful representation. Experts warn that without national redistricting standards, the U.S. could enter a cycle of perpetual map warfare undermining democratic accountability and fueling polarization.
And across the country reform leaders are sounding the alarm. As reported in the Fulcrum on August 18th Micahel Walman, President of the Brennan Center for Justice writes
“Voters should choose their politicians, not the other way around. The Texas gerrymander and the partisan war it has triggered signal an extraordinarily dangerous period for American democracy.”
In the writing, Walman calls for national redistricting standards and criticizes both parties for failing to act when they had the chance
Lee Drutman, senior fellow at New America a leading advocate for proportional representation, sees gerrymandering not as the root problem but as a symptom of a deeper structural flaw: the single-member district system. As long as congressional elections are winner-take-all contests in geographically drawn districts, politicians will have strong incentives to manipulate boundaries for partisan gain. Even independent commissions, he argues, are limited when the system itself rewards polarization and geographic sorting. Drutman’s solution is proportional representation which would allow multiple representatives per district and ensure that votes translate more fairly into seats. He frequently cites the Apportionment Act of 1842 as the moment that entrenched single-member districts, setting the stage for today’s redistricting wars. “The only way to end the gerrymandering wars,” he writes, “is proportional representation.”
In the coming weeks, The Fulcrum will be watching with laser focus as this battle intensifies. With President Trump openly backing mid-decade redistricting efforts in states like Texas, Missouri, and Florida, the stakes have escalated beyond partisan maneuvering into a full-blown campaign to consolidate power ahead of the 2026 midterms.
Reform advocates warn that artificially drawn lines are engineered to dilute the voting power of communities of color and entrench incumbents and threaten to turn representative democracy into a rigged game.
As protests erupt nationwide and governors from both parties prepare retaliatory redraws, the specter of “mutually assured gerrymandering” looms large. Citizens fear that Trump’s strategy, bolstered by executive orders and partisan commissions, could lock in minority rule and neuter electoral accountability for decades to come
The Fulcrum will continue to track these developments regularly. As partisan maneuvering intensifies and states test the boundaries of electoral norms, we remain committed to providing clear, nonpartisan coverage that distinguishes structural critique from political reaction. Our editorial compass remains focused on transparency, democratic integrity, and the evolving debate over how best to ensure fair representation in a rapidly shifting landscape.
David Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
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Rev. Laurie Manning shares her insights on speaking with political leaders about specific advocacy efforts. "Your senators' offices are waiting to hear from you," writes Manning.
Getty Images, Semen Salivanchuk
How To Rewire a Nation From a Single Seat
Aug 20, 2025
In politics, attention is drawn to spectacle. Cable news runs endless loops of red-faced lawmakers clashing in hearings, while pundits dissect every gaffe and polling shift. Every election season becomes a staged drama, parties locked in opposition, candidates maneuvering for advantage. The players may change, but the script stays the same. Those in power know that as long as the public watches the visible fracas, the hidden machinery of control runs quietly, unexamined and untouched.
We are told the drama hinges on which party controls which chamber, which map shapes the advantage, and which scandal sidelines a rising star. These are presented as the key moves in the political game, shifting the balance of power. Every election is declared the most consequential of our time. But these claims are, in reality, crude distractions—very much part of the performance—while the real levers of power turn behind the scenes, where laws and policies shift with the choices of a few hundred individuals, each capable of tipping the balance with a single vote.
That discretion is the engine through which corruption spreads. Party leaders seize it with threats and promises. Donors buy its flexibility. Mapmakers rig it toward predetermined outcomes before any votes are cast. Gossip corrodes it. Personal ambition spends it. Wedge issues pit neighbor against neighbor, fracturing coalitions that might challenge it. All these distortions rest on one premise: The assumption that a legislator’s vote is theirs to give.
Do away with that discretion, and the machinery that runs on it begins to collapse. Picture a representative with no personal agency over how they vote, their ballot nothing more than the precise reflection of their constituents’ majority position on each measure. In such an arrangement, the whip has no sting. In fact, the whip itself magically vanishes. The gerrymander becomes a joke if the mapped voters’ will is mirrored exactly. Smear campaigns waste their venom, for there is no “character” left to assassinate that could change the outcome. Lobbyists arrive with fat wallets and find nothing to buy. And wedge issues lose their power to split if the people’s views on one matter do not dictate their fate on another.
The elegance of such an intervention lies in its trifecta superpower: Its eminent doability, its disproportionate effect, and its robustness.
To become a reality, the intervention has no impossible hurdles to overcome. No constitutional overhaul. No sweeping amendment. No billion-dollar reform package. No term limit legislation. Just one person, elected on the simple promise to serve as a conduit rather than a decider.
Second is that power in this arrangement is not linear. In a closely divided chamber, even one such member could tip the balance of the national agenda. A handful could upend it entirely. A single vote, if placed at the precise intersection of forces, can redirect the course of legislation. And when it is done not behind closed doors but openly, with the explanation plain—“I voted this way because that is what the majority of my constituents told me”—it exposes the fragile justifications that traditional politicians hide behind.
Such clarity spreads. People watching this model in action will see not just a different style of representation but the fact that literal representation is possible at all. This is dangerous knowledge to those who thrive on the belief that politics must be an art of dealmaking, that governing is a chess game whose rules they alone understand. Once the illusion breaks, more candidates will emerge to run on the same premise. No billionaires needed, no party infrastructure—only the recognition that the game’s rules can be rewritten from inside the game, one piece at a time. And history shows that the system is not so impenetrable: The elevation of Lina Khan to chair the FTC under Biden—despite corporations fighting her nomination tooth and nail—and the 2025 victory of Zohran Mamdani in the mayoral Democratic primaries are proof. That said, Khan’s work is now being methodically undone, while Mamdani is receiving only tepid support from the DNC, with his win threatened by both Andrew Cuomo and incumbent Eric Adams, both Democrats. The change proposed here guards against such undoing and undermining.
And third, once in place, the arrangement resists reversal. To take it away, the establishment would have to strip a representative of the duty to mirror their constituents’ will, doing so in full view of the public. It would require saying, in effect, “We are removing your voice from the process so that your representative may again act on their own, without your consent.” Even the most shameless would hesitate to mount such an argument without fear of political immolation.
Yet, we remain stuck in the stale dialectic between grand revolutionary fantasy and meek mock incrementalism. But the truth sits elsewhere, hiding in plain sight. Complex systems—ecological, economic, political—are riddled with points where a precise intervention unravels entrenched arrangements. These points are not obvious. They are masked by the churn of surface events, by the noise of the spectacle. They require patience to locate, courage to act upon, and an indifference to the glamour of more visible battles.
Mine is not a call for purity or idealism. Instead, it is a call for political precision engineering. The engineer looks for the load-bearing beam, the point at which a modest force will achieve maximum effect. In politics, that beam is the individual legislator’s discretion over their vote. Remove it, and the structural incentives shift. Remove it in just one place, and others will begin to see the blueprint for removing it elsewhere. The change need not come from the center outward. It can start at the periphery, at the edges where attention is thinnest, where the establishment is slow to notice that something irreversible has begun.
Of course, those who profit from the current order will insist that such a model is naive, unworkable, or dangerous. They will claim that the people are too ill-informed, too distracted, too prone to whim to be trusted with direct input on every measure. But that is precisely the point: They are already trusted with electing the people who pass these measures. What they are denied is control over the substance of what those people do once elected. The change would not be in the level of trust but in the location of agency.
In the end, the proposal is disarmingly modest: Find one person willing to stand as a pure mirror, to forgo the seductions of influence and personal judgment in favor of perfect fidelity to their constituents’ will. Let them serve not as a leader, but as a conduit. Watch the shift in power ripple outward, the old incentives wither, the lobbyists circle in frustration, and the wedge merchants howl as their knives dull.
We often speak of butterflies in politics, the small moments that change the trajectory of nations—a debate line, a protest, a scandal. But here the butterfly is not a metaphor, nor is it an accident. It is deliberate, positioned exactly where the storm will begin, not to be carried by the wind but to direct it. A light touch in the right place, and the whole weather of the system changes.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.Keep ReadingShow less
Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker/ProPublica
Veterans’ Care at Risk Under Trump As Hundreds of Doctors and Nurses Reject Working at VA Hospitals
Aug 20, 2025
Veterans hospitals are struggling to replace hundreds of doctors and nurses who have left the health care system this year as the Trump administration pursues its pledge to simultaneously slash Department of Veterans Affairs staff and improve care.
Many job applicants are turning down offers, worried that the positions are not stable and uneasy with the overall direction of the agency, according to internal documents examined by ProPublica. The records show nearly 4 in 10 of the roughly 2,000 doctors offered jobs from January through March of this year turned them down. That is quadruple the rate of doctors rejecting offers during the same time period last year.
The VA in March said it intended to cut its workforce by at least 70,000 people. The news sparked alarm that the cuts would hurt patient care, prompting public reassurances from VA Secretary Doug Collins that front-line health care staff would be immune from the proposed layoffs.
Last month, department officials updated their plans and said they would reduce the workforce by 30,000 by the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30. So many staffers had left voluntarily, the agency said in a press release, that mass layoffs would not be necessary.
“VA is headed in the right direction,” Collins said in a statement.
But a review of hundreds of internal staffing records, along with interviews with veterans and employees, reveal a far less rosy picture of how staffing is affecting veterans’ care.
After six years of adding medical staff, the VA this year is down more than 600 doctors and about 1,900 nurses. The number of doctors on staff has declined each month since President Donald Trump took office. The agency also lost twice as many nurses as it hired between January and June, records viewed by ProPublica show.
In response to questions, a VA spokesperson did not dispute numbers about staff losses at centers across the country but accused ProPublica of bias and of “cherry-picking issues that are mostly routine.”
Agency spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz said that the department is “working to address” the number of doctors declining job offers by speeding up the hiring process and that the agency “has several strategies to navigate shortages,” including referring veterans to private providers and telehealth appointments. A nationwide shortage of health care workers has made hiring and retention difficult, he said.
Kasperowicz said that the recent changes at the agency have not compromised care and that wait times are getting better after worsening under President Joe Biden.
While wait times for primary, mental health and specialty care for existing patients did increase during Biden’s presidency, the VA’s statistics show only slight reductions since Trump took office in January.
However, appointment wait times for new patients seeking primary and specialty care have slightly increased, according to a report obtained by ProPublica.
As of early July, the average wait time nationally to schedule outpatient surgery appointments for new patients was 41 days, which is 13 days higher than the goal set by the VA and nearly two days longer than a year ago.
In some locations, the waits for appointments are even longer.
At the Togus VA Medical Center in Augusta, Maine, internal records show that there is a two-month wait for primary care appointments, which is triple the VA’s goal and 38 days longer than it was at this time last year. The wife of a disabled Marine veteran who receives care at the facility told ProPublica that it has become harder in recent months to schedule appointments and to get timely care.
Her husband, she said, served in Somalia and is completely disabled. He has not had a primary care doctor assigned to him for months after his previous doctor left over the winter, she said.
“He has no person who is in charge of his health care,” said the woman, who did not want to be named because of fears her comments might affect benefits for her husband. “It was never like this before. There’s a lack of staff, empty rooms, locked doors. It feels like something that’s not healthy.”
Kasperowicz said the VA is taking “aggressive action” to recruit primary care doctors in Maine and anticipates hiring two new doctors by the end of the year.
Nationwide, records reviewed by ProPublica show, the vacancy rate for doctors at the VA was 13.7% in May, up from 12% in May of 2024. Kasperowicz said those rates are in line with historical averages for the agency. But while the vacancy rate decreased over the first five months of 2024, it has risen in 2025.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who has been critical of Collins’ stewardship, has argued that the VA is heading in a dangerous new direction. He said that ProPublica’s findings reinforce his concerns about “damaging and dangerous impacts” from cuts and staffing reductions.
“Dedicated professionals are fleeing — and recruitment is flagging — because of toxic work conditions and draconian funding cuts and firings,” he told ProPublica. “We’ve warned repeatedly about these results — shocking, but not surprising.”
In the VA’s Texas region, which covers most of the state, officials reported in an internal presentation in June that approximately 90 people had turned down job offers “due to the uncertainty of reorganization” and noted that low morale was causing existing employees to not recommend working at the medical centers.
Anthony Martinez, a retired Army captain who did tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he has witnessed a downgrade in care at the Temple, Texas, VA facility. He said that the hospital has lost records of his recent allergy shots, which he now has to repeat, and he has to wait longer for appointments.
“Problems have always existed but not to this degree,” Martinez said.
Martinez, who runs a local nonprofit for veterans, said he’s heard similar frustrations from many of them. “It’s not just me. Many vets are having bad experiences,” he said.
Kasperowicz said the agency couldn’t discuss Martinez’s case without a patient privacy waiver, which Martinez declined to sign. He said wait times for primary care appointments for existing patients at Temple are unchanged over the past fiscal year. But internal records show an increase in wait times for new patients in specialties such as cardiology, gastroenterology and oncology.
Administrators there have expressed concern about the impact of staff losses, warning in their June internal presentation about “institutional knowledge leaving the Agency due to the increase of supervisors departing.”
It is not just the loss of doctors and nurses impacting care. Shortages in support staff, who have not been protected from cuts, are also adding to delays.
In Dayton, Ohio, vacant positions for purchasing agents resulted in delays in acquiring hundreds of prosthetics, according to an internal VA report from May. Kasperowicz said the hospital has recently cut processing time for such orders by more than half.
Some facilities are experiencing trouble hiring and keeping mental health staff.
In February, a human resources official in the VA region covering much of Florida reported in an internal warning system that the area was having trouble hiring mental health professionals to treat patients in rural areas. The jobs had previously been entirely remote but now require providers to be on site at a clinic.
When the region offered jobs to three mental health providers, all of them declined. The expected impact, according to the warning document, was longer delays for appointments. Kasperowicz said the VA is working to address the shortages.
Yet even as the agency faces these challenges, the Trump administration has dramatically scaled back the use of a key tool designed to help the VA attract applicants and plug gaps in critical front-line care.
The VA in recent years has used incentive payments to help recruit and keep doctors and other health care workers. In fiscal 2024, the agency paid nearly 20,000 staffers retention bonuses and over 6,000 new hires got signing bonuses. In the first nine months of this fiscal year, which started Oct. 1, only about 8,000 VA employees got retention bonuses and just over 1,000 received recruitment incentives. The VA has told lawmakers it has been able to fill jobs without using the incentive programs.
Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., said during a congressional oversight hearing in July that the Trump administration is withholding the bonuses because it “wants them to leave” as part of a plan to privatize services.
“It’s not that VA employees are less meritorious than they were under Biden,” she said. “They want every employee to be pushed out so they can decimate the VA’s workforce.”
David Armstrong investigates healthcare at ProPublica.
Eric Umansky is an editor-at-large at ProPublica.
Vernal Coleman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter based in Chicago.
Veterans’ Care at Risk Under Trump As Hundreds of Doctors and Nurses Reject Working at VA Hospitals was originally published by ProPublica and is republished with permission.
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