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President Donald Trump walks off of Air Force One at Newark Liberty International Airport on Aug. 7, 2026, in Newark, New Jersey.
(Eric Lee/Getty Images/TCA)
Donald Trump’s Third World presidency
Aug 15, 2026
In October 1980, then-candidate Ronald Reagan asked voters a very important question: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?”
It was during the only televised debate he had against incumbent President Jimmy Carter, whose presidency had been marred by one crisis after another, from record-high inflation and rising unemployment, to soaring gas prices and the Iran hostage crisis.
Reagan knew the answer to his question was a resounding “no,” and asking it helped propel him to a landslide victory. It also became a regularly-invoked rhetorical feature of presidential campaigns going forward.
No one knows the cautionary tale of Carter’s presidency more than our current president, who has repeatedly used it as a stand-in for presidential failure and American weakness. Although Carter’s legacy greatly improved in the years since leaving office, he ended his only term with a bleak 34% approval rating.
Donald Trump currently sits at an abysmal 32%, according to Quinnipiac’s latest polling, and likely for many of the same reasons Carter finished where he did, ironically — high inflation, rising gas prices, and a foreign policy crisis in Iran.
So, the question of whether voters are better off than they were two years ago isn’t hard to answer for most — in January of this year just 28% said they were better off than they were a year ago, and in July that number had dropped to 19%.
And it’s no wonder — when you move beyond the economic numbers, which are bad enough, the picture of Trump’s America gets worse and worse with every peak behind the MAGA curtain.
In fact, it can feel at times like America has become a Third World country.
Case in point, the U.S. is in the midst of a measles outbreak, with more cases than it’s seen in more than three decades, thanks to the administration’s vaccine misinformation. We are now at risk of losing our official measles elimination status, which we’ve held for more than a quarter century.
We’re also facing no fewer than 11 foodborne illness outbreaks, including two separate cyclospora outbreaks, as well as outbreaks of listeria, salmonella and E. coli, all since Trump downsized oversight agencies, dropped food-facility inspections, and stripped back mandatory reporting requirements at the federal Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network.
Trump’s dumb war in Iran has depleted American munitions significantly — up to 80% in some categories — straining stockpiles and raising readiness concerns. And there are new reports of sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln, deployed to the North Arabian Sea since November, desperately jumping overboard amidst poor conditions — from clogged toilets to mildewed showers, food supply problems to mental health concerns.
This is America — the superpower? Where college grads can’t find work, where housing is unaffordable for 75% of the population, where families must choose between paying rent or paying doctors bills? Where you can be shot dead for peacefully protesting? Where your government is shuttering important health agencies while spewing junk science about autism and Tylenol? Where our allies are skeptical of us and our enemies no longer seem to fear us?
While Trump fiddles with reflecting pools, golden statues and ballrooms, it feels like America is burning, becoming less and less formidable and functional with every passing day.
And Republicans are asking for two more years of control of it all. Who could possibly want more of this?
Upon the occasion of Carter’s 100th birthday in October 2024, Trump did what Trump does — and insulted him. But only to insult former President Joe Biden worse, saying Carter was happy because he “is considered a brilliant president by comparison.”
Just think what they’ll say about Trump — overseeing all of this chaos, destruction, corruption and incompetence. “Are you better off?” Are you kidding?
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
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The FDA’s changing drug approval policies raise concerns about political influence, scientific standards, drug safety, and the future of U.S. pharmaceutical regulation.
JHVEPhoto/Getty Images
FDA Turmoil: Political Interference Threatens Drug Safety Standards
Aug 14, 2026
Over the past three decades, drug development in the United States accelerated dramatically. Industry spending increased tenfold between the 1980s and 2019; the number of manufacturers grew; clinical trials became more sophisticated; and new technologies and precision medicines emerged. The Food and Drug Administration kept pace, building processes, standards, and a scientific culture that supported this rapid innovation. It offered pharmaceutical companies a predictable regulatory environment and a level playing field, producing substantial benefits for consumers and researchers alike.
In little more than a year, however, the Trump administration has upended many of these FDA norms. It has tied certain drug approvals to political considerations through a new, opaque program; imposed labeling changes without new scientific evidence; forced out experienced career scientists; replaced respected experts on advisory panels; and promoted unproven therapies. While some of these moves have drawn limited media attention, most have escaped public notice—even though they threaten national health standards and consumer safety. And legal guardrails may be too weak to prevent or limit their effects.
One of the most controversial changes is the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher (CNPV) program, announced last June and championed by FDA Commissioner Marty Makary, who resigned in May after a turbulent tenure. The program allows companies with products deemed in the “national interest” to obtain approval in as little as one to two months. Yet the FDA already had well‑established priority and accelerated review programs—authorized by Congress—that can result in approvals within six months or less. The CNPV program has no such statutory basis.
Critics argue that CNPV opens the door to political favoritism by failing to define selection criteria, allowing political appointees to decide who receives vouchers, and shifting approval authority from established experts to multidisciplinary teams that may lack subject‑matter expertise. Makary also suggested that pricing could influence priority status, even though pricing is absent from the statutory grounds for approving or rejecting applications and no criteria regarding pricing decisions appear in the statute’s list of prohibited acts.
Two scientists who briefly served as directors of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research expressed strong concerns. Dr. Richard Pazdur publicly warned that the voucher program lacked transparency and risked political influence over drug approvals. Dr. George Tidmarsh told The New York Times the effort would “basically change the entire paradigm of the legal underpinnings of drug approvals.”
These concerns resurfaced at a June public hearing on the CNPV program. Public health experts urged the FDA to abandon or revise the program to establish strict inclusion criteria and ensure political appointees are not making decisions. Several pharmaceutical companies that received fast‑track vouchers praised the effort but acknowledged that many operational details remain vague.
The administrative procedures used to initiate CNPV are also legally questionable. The FDA claims it did not need congressional approval because it has authority under the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and the Public Health Service Act to establish programs that promote public health. That argument is at least debatable. The expedited process created by CNPV may conflict with other congressionally mandated programs under well‑established principles of statutory interpretation.
Even if CNPV is permissible under those laws, its implementation must comply with the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the governing framework for regulatory action for 80 years. Under the APA, a binding rule that changes the legal status of private parties must undergo notice-and-comment: the agency must publish a draft rule, allow public comment, and issue a final version with a statement of “basis and purpose.” The same process is required to rescind or revise an existing rule—such as the FDA’s current priority and accelerated review programs.
Other recent FDA actions also pose risks to public health. The administration has replaced vetted medical and scientific experts on advisory committees with hastily assembled ad hoc panels, leading to dramatic changes such as altering boxed warnings for postmenopausal hormone therapy and discouraging antidepressant use during pregnancy—without new scientific evidence. Historically, the FDA required new data to justify labeling changes. Most recently, in what critics suggest is a conflict-of-interest, FDA added voting members who are peptide producers[AB2] to an advisory committee that subsequently voted to allow specialty pharmacies to produce and sell peptides.
The agency also ordered labeling changes for acetaminophen, warning physicians about possible pregnancy risks despite inconclusive evidence. In another unusual move, FDA officials overrode clinical reviewers to restrict indications for COVID‑19 vaccines, limiting use in adults under 65 and in children—again without new supporting data.
Over the past year, the FDA has also established new standards that appear rooted in opinion rather than science. These include requiring placebo‑controlled trials for established vaccines—affecting COVID‑19 and influenza vaccines—and relaxing requirements for new drugs by allowing approval based on a single study as the default.
HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. and some FDA officials have promoted unproven therapies, including Kennedy’s and President Trump’s suggestion that leucovorin, a cancer drug, could treat autism. A pharmaceutical company making such a claim would risk legal sanctions. It later emerged that the FDA had asked a company that discontinued leucovorin in the 1990s to submit an application to justify approval for a rare genetic disorder with autistic features—not autism. The FDA also removed a webpage warning consumers about dangerous or false autism treatments.
Some changes, while likely legal, appear to be driven more by politics than by science. One is the effort to discourage vaccinations by adding alarming information to vaccine safety labels without changes in benefit‑risk profiles—such as embellishing myocarditis warnings for COVID‑19 vaccines and adding febrile seizure information to influenza vaccine labels. Another is the FDA’s plan to offer monetary bonuses to reviewers who expedite their work to bring drugs to market more quickly.
The federal judiciary can strike down agency actions that circumvent APA procedures, including those implementing CNPV. Courts also review whether an agency’s explanation in its statement of basis and purpose is adequate and can invalidate rules deemed “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.” The Supreme Court has held that an action is arbitrary and capricious if it relies on factors Congress did not intend, fails to consider important aspects of a problem, or contradicts evidence before the agency.
Moreover, the Supreme Court recently adopted a more demanding standard for determining whether agency action is “not in accordance with law.” Federal judges must now apply what they believe to be the correct interpretation of a statute rather than deferring to the agency’s interpretation.
Drug companies could challenge the CNPV program if a competitor’s product is moved up in the queue due to political influence or is approved without sufficient evidence. But the public—the group most at risk from these policies—is unlikely to gain access to the courts because individuals cannot show “actual or imminent” injury. Public interest groups face similar barriers. They must wait until harm occurs, then undertake lengthy, expensive litigation with uncertain outcomes.
Regardless of how such lawsuits fare, it would be unwise to wait for them to wind through the courts—or for members of the public to suffer harm. Congress should reassert its authority over drug regulation and strengthen the role of career staff, who are being buffeted by the administration’s actions. And with the recent departure of the FDA commissioner, new leadership must reverse these harmful policies and rebuild an agency that was, until recently, widely regarded as the world’s premier drug regulator.
Dr. Michael D. Blum worked as a medical reviewer at the FDA nearly 40 years ago, subsequently spent over 20 years in the pharmaceutical industry, and returned to the FDA in 2016, where he served as Deputy Director of the CDER Office of Pharmacovigilance and Epidemiology. He retired from the FDA in 2023.
Edward L. Rubin is a professor of Law and Political Science at Vanderbilt University who specializes in government regulation and processes. This article was produced in coordination with the nonpartisan group Lawyers Defending American Democracy and edited by Lexie Verdon, who has worked at The Washington Post and KFF Health News.
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Discover how mathematics can help build fairer democracy through ranked choice voting, proportional representation, better districting, citizens’ assemblies, and AI.
Kenishirotie/Getty Images
American Democracy Needs a Mathematical Revolution
Aug 14, 2026
Democracy, we like to think, runs on ideals like freedom, equality, the consent of the governed. But look under the hood and you'll find something less lofty – mathematics.
The idea that democracy depends on math is not new. From ancient Greece onward, votes had to be counted and seats had to be divided. Mathematics even shaped America’s founding. The Declaration of Independence is, at its core, a mathematical document. It opens with axioms—that all people possess certain unalienable rights—and then asserts a theorem: the British rule must end. And because no theorem is complete without a proof, the Declaration supplies one: "To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
This was no accident. Jefferson and Adams studied Euclid and admired the formal architecture of the Elements. Eleven years later, the dominant influence at the Constitutional Convention was the Enlightenment, with mathematical and scientific reasoning at its heart.
Mathematics still underlies nearly every interaction we have with democracy. Tallying votes, allocating legislative seats, sizing legislatures, and drawing district maps all rely on complex mathematical ideas. More importantly, mathematics can tell us whether these mechanisms are fair, whether they produce meaningful representation and incentivize cooperation over polarization and gridlock.
But if the marriage of mathematics and democracy is old, the democracy it now serves is new. We live amid intense polarization, collapsing trust in institutions, litigation as political warfare, and eroding norms. Recent setbacks for voting rights and fair districting underscore democracy’s fragility.
These developments are changing not only the practice of democracy but the mathematics it demands. And mathematics is responding, aided by data science, computer science, political science, economics, and law, and by computational power that makes large-scale modeling possible.
New research on voting, for example, analyzes real-world data to reveal how voting methods behave in practice. Ranked choice voting (RCV), in which voters rank candidates in order of preference, emerges as superior to the plurality or “pick one” method used in most elections. Drawing on thousands of ranked choice elections from the United States, Scotland, and Australia, researchers have shown that RCV elects broadly supported candidates while reducing vote-splitting, spoiler, and strategic voting. Simulations calibrated to real survey data confirm RCV’s advantage even when voters abstain, cast partial ballots, or misjudge the candidates’ ideological position.
Recent research also scrutinizes single-winner districts, whose problems run deeper than the current gerrymandering wars. Massachusetts, for example, elects an all-Democrat Congressional delegation, even though some 30% of its voters are Republican but are spread so thinly that no district can elect one of their own no matter how the lines are drawn. Mathematical modeling shows multi-member districts, which are larger and elect several representatives at once, would fix this. Three Massachusetts districts electing three representatives each would let Republicans win about three seats, matching proportionality that most of the world’s democracies treat as a pillar of their electoral systems.
Remarkably, multi-member districts with a proportional version of RCV can disarm gerrymandering and produce fairer representation for racial minorities, even with race-blind maps. They make gerrymandering near impossible while automatically achieving the goals of the Voting Rights Act without consciously drawing maps for minority representation. This was confirmed in the 2024 multi-winner Portland, OR, city council elections.
Mathematics also helps with democratic decisions not reducible to a single election. Citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative mini-publics bring together representative groups of citizens to learn about public issues and develop recommendations. More than a thousand such processes have taken place worldwide. The lottery that chooses the participants is itself a deep mathematical problem of randomly selecting a panel that mirrors the public while different groups volunteer at different rates. New algorithms give every volunteer the fairest possible chance while hitting demographic targets, and now run real assemblies around the world through free, open-source software.
Even artificial intelligence, so often cast as democracy's next great threat, looks different through the mathematics lens. Democratic life happens largely in language — citizens explaining, objecting, proposing — and AI makes it possible to listen at scale. Mathematics is developing formal models and explicit guarantees that keep AI a translator between human expression and democratic decision, its workings open to inspection rather than hidden in a black box.
The founders believed self-government could rest on reason. Two and a half centuries later, that ideal remains as relevant as ever. Mathematics cannot replace politics or absolve us from the hard work of citizenship. But when nearly 80 percent of us worry about where democracy is headed, and its traditional guardians are absent or compromised, it matters enormously that rigorous, tested ideas for fairer systems exist.
Thinking mathematically is empowering. Math turns democracy from something that happens to us into something we can examine, question, and redesign. Once we understand how the machinery works, it loses its air of inevitability – and fixing democracy starts to look possible.
Ismar Volić is a Professor of Mathematics and the Director of Institute for Mathematics and Democracy at Wellesley College.
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President Trump has moved the GOP left on abortion right, trade and industrial policy over his two terms.
(Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)
The GOP isn’t always the best party for conservatives
Aug 14, 2026
I often get asked for my advice on how to vote. I’m the first to concede these requests come from a very niche slice of the electorate — that tiny remnant of people who know who I am, value my opinion and share my exasperation with both parties.
I am going to answer the question. But first let me explain why I don’t like it.
I think too many pundits on the left and right fall into the habit of confusing or conflating the fortunes of a party with that of their philosophy. Many come by this tendency honestly. As the parties have polarized ideologically, it’s a natural assumption to think that the GOP and Democrats are the sole vessels for conservatism and progressivism, respectively.
Add in the very human tendency to favor the politicians who return your phone calls and seek your approval, and that rooting interest can get even more intense.
One problem with this approach — and there are many — is that what is best for the GOP in an election year is not necessarily what is best for conservatism in the long run. The same goes for the Democrats and progressivism.
For instance, on many issues — abortion, trade, industrial policy, etc. — President Trump has moved the GOP leftward over his two terms. But just try telling most Republicans in 2016, 2020 or 2024 that a Republican victory would be bad for conservatism.
President Obama wanted a very progressive agenda, and he got some of it. He also cost his party roughly a thousand elected offices across his two terms, and left behind a political climate that made the Trump presidency possible (and which erased many of Obama’s executive orders). President Biden left his cause and his party in an even uglier ditch.
The point isn’t about political point-scoring. It’s simply to note that ideological and intellectual progress — however you define progress — doesn’t move in lockstep with electoral success or failure. In his 1996 State of the Union address, President Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over” and moved rightward on welfare reform. This was a victory for conservatism and a political loss for Republicans, because his triangulation got Clinton reelected.
Single-issue activists often understand this logic better than generic ideologues or partisans do. The last thing abortion rights activists want is for antiabortion Democrats to become a major faction, just as antiabortion advocates don’t want Republicans who support abortion rights to gain political traction. But the same activists would love to see the other party move in their direction — because the goal isn’t to use the issue of abortion as a wedge issue or for fundraising, but to forge a bipartisan consensus.
That’s how I think about the proper goal of the “conservative movement” — to move America’s center of gravity rightward, not just the GOP’s. Put simply, conservatives should celebrate when conservative Democrats are nominated, even if that’s bad for Republicans electorally.
I also believe that candidates who discredit or deform conservatism by claiming to be conservative should lose.
Which brings me to my advice. I think that voters should be more interested in rewarding good behavior and good character than in ideological or partisan purity. That doesn’t mean ideology and partisanship are irrelevant. I think these things can be balanced.
Take the Senate race in Texas. Democrat James Talarico is ideologically not my cup of tea, and he is quite far to the left for Texas. But his Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is in my view a corrupt gargoyle simply unfit for any office. I’m not here to debate that opinion, because the people seeking my advice generally share it.
So, if you’re a conservative who thinks Talarico is too left-wing and Paxton is bat-winged, don’t vote for either of them.
But you should still vote.
You can leave the Senate line blank while voting for other Republicans on the ballot (you can also select Libertarian candidate Ted Brown). Sending the message that your problem is Paxton, not Republicans, is one that Republicans and conservatives need to hear.
If I were a progressive, I would have the same approach toward candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America who will hurt either the party or the cause. Vote for all the other Democrats, just not the radicals who spout the sort of nonsense that turns off more mainstream voters than they attract.
One reason our politics are such a mess is that fringe candidates know they can count on the reflexive support of their parties — and their pundits! — the moment they get the nomination. Strategically voting to end that dynamic is not inconsistent with the best interests of your ideological cause or your party, because those interests are often in tension in an election year.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.
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