Trump’s incredible shrinking tent (Zachary Basu/Axios) — Trump is alienating nearly every group in the unlikely coalition that voted him into office, even white voters without college degrees. “A new CBS News/YouGov poll found Trump’s approval among white voters without college degrees — the backbone of his movement — has swung from +36 early in his term to underwater at -4, a 40-point collapse.”
April 13, 2026 (Heather Cox Richardson/Letters from an American) — CPAC was funded by Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which is a vassal state of Russia. Until this week, Orbán’s Hungary was the Republican model for the US — run by oligarchs and governed by right-wing extremist Christian values and massive corruption. With Orbán out in Hungary, we’ll see where that goes.
This is not a new thing in the US — time and again, wealthy men have decided the country would be better off if the oligarchs ran things. Oligarchs tried to take over in the 1860s — we fought the Civil War over it — 1890s, 1920s and 2000s.
“Establishment Republicans who wanted a smaller government liked Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, but they did not like the threat of government intervention in their business decisions to force them to adhere to right-wing moral values. They are also not keen on Trump’s rejection of Europe and destruction of the rules-based international order under pressure from Putin. That order facilitates international trade.
“In an op-ed in Fox News online [Monday], Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the old leader of the establishment Republicans, tried to sideline the MAGA Republicans when he wrote: ‘Watching this from Kentucky, it is hard to understand how some on the American right thought that staking U.S. influence on the outcome of a parliamentary election in a small, central European country was putting America’s interests first. To the extent that what happens in Hungary matters to America, it is a question of whether its actions on the world stage—not its social policies—align with America’s strategic interests.’
“Just as there is a blueprint for destroying democracy, there is also one for rebuilding it. ‘Let us now and here highly resolve to resume the country’s interrupted march along the path of real progress, of real justice, of real equality for all of our citizens, great and small,’ New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 1932 as American democracy struggled to resist fascism.
“‘Out of every crisis, every tribulation, every disaster, mankind rises with some share of greater knowledge, of higher decency, of purer purpose,’ FDR said. ‘Today we shall have come through a period of loose thinking, descending morals, an era of selfishness, among individual men and women and among Nations…. Let us be frank in acknowledgment of the truth that many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon, that the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old barricades. To return to higher standards we must abandon the false prophets and seek new leaders of our own choosing.’
“‘I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people,’ FDR concluded. ‘Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.’”
Sam Altman profile misses the mark— Manton Reece: “I think talented journalists like Ronan Farrow had a chance to do some new reporting on where AI is now, what impact it will have on the economy and society, and they instead wrote an article about personality quirks and office drama.”
In praise of (some) compartmentalization — Cory Doctorow on how he gets so much work done, living with chronic pain, living with global anxiety, flow, Derek Thompson’s theory of familiar surprises, AI and its fundamental conservatism — “… by definition, AI tries to make a future that is similar to the past, because all it can do is extrapolate from previous data” — “passive flow”/“shitty flow”/“zombie flow” and “social media scroll-trances.”
Cory: “These are anxious times. I don’t know anyone who feels good right now. Particularly this week, as the Strait of Epstein emergency gets progressively worse, and there’s this January 2020 sense of the crisis on the horizon, hitting one country after another. Last week, Australia got its last shipment of fossil fuels. This week, restaurants in India are all shuttered because of gas rationing. People who understand these things better than I do tell me that even if Trump strokes out tonight and Hegseth overdoes the autoerotic asphyxiation, it’ll be months, possibly years, before things get back to ‘normal’ (‘normal!’).
“Any time I think about this stuff for even a few minutes, I start to feel that covid-a-comin', early-2020 feeling, only it’s worse this time around, because I literally couldn’t imagine what covid would mean when it got here, and now I know.”
Dish’s bad behavior leaves property owners in the lurch (Fierce Network) — Outstanding reporting and writing by my colleague Monica Alleven about how Dish’s exit from the wireless industry leaves small, family-owned businesses on the hook for crippling property damage. Monica talks to small business owners left struggling after Dish’s maneuvers.
Amazon to acquire Globalstar for $11.57 billion (Monica (again)/Fierce Network)
Data center construction is moving to the midwest in search of power (Diana Goovaerts/Fierce Network)
Two Visions: Politics of love, or politics of fear? — Hamilton Nolan writes about a labor rally in New York and the underlying ethic of solidarity.
“Your fight is mine, and my fight is yours, and we will stand together. We are all family. We will support one another. More simply, it is a vision that rests on love. Love as the guiding force in our interactions with one another. The solidarity, and the organizing, and the political action, and the policy choices are all downstream of the foundation of love. If you decide that you will love humanity then the choices that follow will make themselves.
“This is one of two fundamental ethics that give rise to the politics of the world. The other one is fear. If fear is your guiding principle, your dominant emotion, your primary motivating force, then your interactions with mankind will follow a separate but equally understandable path. You will barricade yourself from others, you will guard what you have, you will protect your own people from other people that you perceive not as comrades but as threats. You will build walls and buy guns and hire soldiers and hoard money and close your fist instead of open your arms. You will seek to dominate others as a way to get ahead of them dominating you. If fear is the basis of your vision, then all of these things become common sense, and the things that are motivated by love come to be seen as silly, utopian, unrealistic, openings to be exploited by the more steely-eyed people like you who understand how dangerous this world really is.
“Starting from a place of love produces one set of politics, and starting from a place of fear produces another. You can recognize the two sets of policies that arise just by looking at the world today.
“It is worth noting that which one of these starting points you choose is not an observation about how the world is—it is a choice about how you want the world to be. To settle on a politics of love is not to deny that the world can be a scary place. It is to decide that the way to make it better is to love one another rather than to kill one another. Solidarity does not arise because nobody is rude, selfish, angry, or annoying. It arises out of the understanding that we are all that way. The fact that people have bad qualities does not have to mean that our entire orientation towards life must be guided by those qualities. It can mean instead that we adopt the opposite qualities, and watch the force of the good unravel the bad.
“This is not a modern quandary. Wise people for thousands of years have understood these dynamics.”
