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Serve America Movement

We are a citizen-driven, voluntary group of people who believe America can be, and should be, a country where level-headed views work to find compromise and consensus. We are ordinary people. Our sounds radical right now because it is increasingly uncommon. We don't think a belief in moderation and cooperation are radical. We think these approaches are ideal. Our party's origin and leadership includes moderate policymakers, politicians and proposed reforms that originated from both major parties.


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Trump’s second term is a murky, embarrassing and costly spectacle

U.S. President Donald Trump displays a graph entitled "Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers" as he speaks on his renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during an event in the Oval Office of the White House on June 3, 2026, in Washington, D.C.

(Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images/TNS)

Trump’s second term is a murky, embarrassing and costly spectacle

Every time I get asked by a TV anchor what I think about the drama of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, my favorite “historical” headline from the Onion comes to mind: “World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg.”

And every time I do, I hear from defenders of the Trump administration complaining about the disproportionate media coverage of what should be a very minor story in the grand sweep of things. They have a point. President Trump has done some good work rehabbing Washington, D.C., where I live. But the Reflecting Pool has bedeviled him. Algae keep returning to the pool, despite the administration’s best efforts, and attempts to remedy the problem have yielded further problems.

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A New Path to Depolarization: Media That Brings Us Together
Political polarization
Polarization and the politics of love

A New Path to Depolarization: Media That Brings Us Together

As we face ever-growing partisan polarization in American society, the need for large-scale action becomes increasingly urgent. As James Coan and I have written about in the Fulcrum during my time at More Like US, there are approaches grounded in a significant body of social psychological research that can help address this rapidly growing problem, namely different variations of social contact theory, especially vicarious contact. Until recently, much of the research and thus much of the basis for our articles has been focused on applying social contact theory to other problems facing society: prejudice against members of the LGBTQ community, individuals with autism, and immigrant schoolchildren, among other examples.

It was therefore exciting when last fall I saw the publication of an article in Political Science Research and Methods titled "Content That's as Good as Contact?: Vicarious Intergroup Contact and the Promise of Depolarization at Scale." The study, conducted in 2022 in conjunction with YouGov, finally attempted to measure the effectiveness of indirect contact as a path to depolarization, primarily through the vicarious experience of productive political conversation. Encompassing over 2,000 participants gathered from a nationally representative sample recruited by YouGov’s online panel, the study looked to test affective polarization, measured attitudinally, and interest and investment in depolarization, measured behaviorally. To this end, the study tested multiple media interventions, namely a 50-minute Braver Angels documentary featuring a “Red-Blue” depolarization workshop; a 50-minute placebo nature documentary about wildebeest migration; a 5-minute version of the Braver Angels documentary; a second 5-minute version that emphasized partisan misperception correction; and a pure control group, with no treatment.

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Only Trump doesn’t care about housing

A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.

(AFP via Getty Images)

Only Trump doesn’t care about housing

It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.

It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.

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