Delaware Representative Sarah McBride at the Delmarva Central Railroad headquarters in Harrington, DE, August, 2025. Behind her is Senator Chris Coons. Photo credit: Office of Congresswoman Sarah McBride/Facebook.
We begin with a clip from a March 13, 2025 press conference, in which Representative Sarah McBride (DE-01) rebukes her Republican colleagues for focusing on culture wars rather than issues of critical importance to the American people.
In the news:
* Tuesday saw documents released in the defamation suit Smartmatic Voting machines has brought against Fox News. Text messages that emerged during discovery show that in the aftermath of the 2020 election, prominent hosts like Jesse Watters, Greg Gutfield, and Jeannine Piro (now a United States Attorney for the District of Columbia) sought to promote the network’s financial interests by supporting Donald Trump’s charges of election fraud, despite their knowledge that he had lost.
* On Wednesday, Judge Fred Biery in Texas’s Western District temporarily blocked implementation of a law passed last year by the legislature that mandates a large, visible display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom in Texas. The reasons for the order may be unexpected for some listeners.
* This week, President Donald J. Trump has intensified his attacks on The Smithsonian Institution and its director, historian Lonnie Bunch. This week, Trump ordered an investigation of all the museums attached to the Smithsonian and posted this to Truth Social: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” I’ll bite: How bad was slavery, Donald?
* James Dobson, founder of the Christian ministry, Focus on the Family, and a major figure in White evangelical Christian politics, has died at 89. Neil discusses his significance—and his advice that beating children was good for them.
Your hosts:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020). She is currently writing a biography of radical feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, an independent journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Today’s focus: Congresswoman Sarah McBride (DE-01)
* Sarah McBride is young—only 35—progressive, and has an extensive political biography. While still in college, she worked on numerous campaigns, including Governor Jack Markell’s 2008 run, and Beau Biden’s 2010campaign for Delaware Attorney General. She interned in the Obama White house in 2012, the first openly transgender person to do that, and she has worked extensively on LGBTQ issues.
* McBride, who came out in 2012, right before she graduated from college, is not the first transwoman to hold elected office. In 2022, voters put Zooey Zephyr in the Montana Legislature to represent House District 100—which includes Missoula and is solidly Democratic—with 79% of the vote. She was re-elected in 2024 by a 60-point margin.
* McBride has written a memoir about her journey in life and politics, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss and the Fight for Trans Equality (Crown, 2019). The same year the book came out, she ran for Delaware State Senate, and became the first transgender state senator in United States history.
Congresswoman McBride at a fundraiser last week in Provincetown, MA, with strategist and change maker Jessica Halem (left) and Amherst College historian Jen Manion, the author of Female Husbands (r.) Photograph reprinted with permission of Jessica Halem and Jen Manion.
* Almost as soon as McBride was elected to Congress in 2024 as the first out transperson to hold a seat in that body, Republican Representative Nancy Mace (SC-01), supported by Speaker Mike Johnson (LA-04), took steps to demean and insult her by authoring a bill limiting all transpeople’s use of restrooms at the Capitol to their gender at birth.
* In June, McBride appeared on Ezra Klein’s podcast, where she discussed her work in Congress, the setbacks to trans rights, and how the GOP was able to mobilize suspicion of, and anger about, transpeople so effectively in the 2024 campaign.
* McBride, while remaining an important voice for LGBT rights, has mostly worked hard on a variety of issues important to Delaware: In July, she passed her first bill—co-sponsored by one Democrats and two Republicans. H.R. 3339, The Equal Opportunity for All Investors Actopened the field of capital investment to people who have the professional credentials to do it. Previously, only people worth $1 million or more were eligible.
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What we want to go viral:
* Neil wants you to read about how the right came to distract the experts, in Daniel Immerwahr’s “R.F.K., Jr., Anthony Fauci, and the Revolt Against Expertise,” (The New Yorker, May 19, 2025)
* Claire wants you to watch “Apple Cider Vinegar,” a Netflix limited series made for our MAHA moment. It’s about Australian wellness influencer Belle Gibson, who launched on Instagram in 2012 and then on her Whole Pantry app in 2013. She was also a fraud, claiming for more than two years to be successfully treating multiple cancers, including the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma, with organic fruits and vegetables, juices, coffee enemas and apple cider vinegar.
Short Takes:
* Tressie McMillan Cottom looks at the Trump administration’s attacks on voting and asks: how do we know what matters and what doesn’t? We don’t. However, Cottom writes at The New York Times, “Patterns matter,” and when we look at them, Donald Trump’s strategy to win the midterms is becoming clearer—make voting harder. New federal and state rules do not rely on old methods such as “poll taxes or literacy tests. Instead, the most telling of them aim to make voting harder by making it more onerous for election offices to meet new rules, overwhelming them with expensive, laborious technical requirements,” Cottom explains. “This is how they catch both the bird in your hand and the one in the bush. Onerous oversight for a nonexistent problem makes voting harder. It also seeds a nasty undergrowth of doubt should an election tally not go their way.” (August 23, 2025)
* Donald Trump “has always backed brutal crackdowns on visible homelessness and disability, part of a lifelong pattern of hostility to poor people, disgust for disabled people, obsession with `good genes’ and cleanliness,” Julie Métraux writes at Mother Jones, “and a sense of Washington, DC—until fairly recently, a majority Black city—as a somehow fundamentally unsavory, unsightly place.” But as Métraux points out in a fascinating history of anti-homelessness campaigns, Trump is in good company. For generations, Americans have tried to wish poverty away by declaring it unsightly and criminalizing the act of being poor in public. (August 22, 2025)
* Does Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. simply not know that his stated goal to make food and drugs healthier and safer is being contradicted by massive deregulation that undermines food safety and puts harmful chemicals back in our bodies? MAHA leaders were recently dismayed to see “a draft of a forthcoming White House report on children’s health,” Jessice Winter writes at The New Yorker. “The paper—a follow-up to a MAHA `assessment,’ released in May, that was later found to have numerous made-up or garbled citations—mentions the scourge of ultra-processed foods only once, specifies virtually no concrete action on improving food safety and nutrition, and calls the E.P.A.’s existing regulatory process “robust.” And that research RFK, Jr. kept touting about the links between autism and environmental toxins? Ain’t gonna happen. The Trump administration cut that grant. (August 21, 2025)
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