Right Now With Perry Bacon

Democrats in Congress and the broader public must signal their opposition to the Trump administration overthrowing the Venezuelan government or the president will feel emboldened to take other such radical acts, says Leah Greenberg , co-executive director of Indivisible. In the latest edition of Right Now, Greenberg says a major public backlash against Trump is essential to preventing him from tak...

President Trump’s decision to have U.S forces attack Venezuela and capture President Nicolás Maduro was one of the most radical of his administration, says Elizabeth Saunders , a Columbia University political science professor who specializes in American foreign policy. While the U.S. has deposed leaders abroad before, particularly in Latin America, Saunders argues that Trump’s actions in Venezuel...

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There’s a lot of commentary that Democrats are declining with the “working class.” Those analyses are usually grounded in declining Democratic support among voters without four-year degrees, particularly whites . But in the latest edition of Right Now, TNR’s Monica Potts explains why working class and college-educated should not be treated as synonyms. Many fairly well-off Americans, particularly...

Democrats are increasingly discussing affordability and blaming high costs of goods on President Trump. But Brian Beutler and Will Stancil, two liberal political commentators, say the Democrats shouldn’t be too confident about this messaging. In the latest episode of Right Now, they argue that affordability is a slippery concept. It’s not clear, in their view, exactly what Americans think costs to...

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President Trump started the year having won the popular vote for the first time, made significant gains with voters of color and consolidated the support of Republicans on Capitol Hill, on the federal judiciary, and in statehouses. Democrats were divided between a base that wanted a second resistance and a party leadership that was chastened by Trump’s victory and felt the need to try to work with...

With President Trump’s deep unpopularity and the traditional backlash against the president’s party, Republicans seem destined to lose the House. So last summer, Trump started insisting that state-level Republicans further gerrymander their states’ congressional districts to protect the GOP House majority as much as possible. This was a huge break with precedent, since congressional districts are...

A surprisingly close U.S. House race in Tennessee this week was the latest illustration that Donald Trump is increasingly unpopular , even in places that he was strong in 2024. Michigan is another place where the president’s support is softening, says Mallory McMorrow , one of the top Democratic candidates in the state’s U.S. Senate primary. (One of her rivals, Abdul El-Sayed, also appeared on Rig...

Is President Trump a lame duck ? Maybe. The president’s sagging approval ratings are emboldening Democrats and even some Republicans to increasingly challenge the president. On the latest edition of Right Now , Moira Donegan, a columnist at The Guardian , lists some of the many reasons why Trump seems diminished politically. She argues that he remains a threat to impose authoritarianism on the Uni...

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The Trump administration and the broader conservative movement is using anti-Black ideas and tropes to further their agenda, says Kimberlé Crenshaw , a renowned legal scholar perhaps best known for her work explaining the concept of intersectionality . A group Crenshaw leads, the African American Policy Forum , recently released a detailed report on the anti-Blackness of the Trump administration....

President Trump and his administration are cracking down on universities, trying to force schools to drop inclusive policies if they want to continue to receive federal funding. But there is a separate effort targeting students. As University of Iowa sociology professor Louise Seamster explains in the latest edition of Right Now , the administration is cutting financial aid and slowing programs to...

The Democrats need to become a party centered on fighting government corruption, oligarchy and other issues that don’t cut along traditional ideological lines, says Adam Bonica, a political science professor at Stanford University and author of the “On Data and Democracy” newsletter . In the latest edition of Right Now , Bonica argues that many voters don’t think in the left-right terms that polit...

Voters under age 30, Black voters, and Latinos were much more supportive of President Trump in 2024 than they were of past Republican presidential candidates. But exit polls conducted last week of the races in New Jersey and Virginia show that Republican candidates didn’t match Trump’s performance. The GOP lost overwhelmingly among all three voting blocs. Michael Podhorzer, former political direct...

The Democrats’ capitulation in the government shutdown seems to have been motivated by four factors, as TNR’s Monica Potts and Alex Shephard explain in the latest edition of Right Now . They were wary of Republicans changing the filibuster rules to end the shutdown. They didn’t enjoy watching the painful effects of the impasse, from flight cancellations to Americans losing their food stamp benefit...

Representative Ro Khanna, a prominent progressive and potential 2028 candidate , explicitly called for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to resign in the latest edition of Right Now . Khanna says that Schumer is ultimately responsible for Senate Democrats cutting a deal with Republicans that will likely end without enhanced subsidies for Obamacare being put back in place. He called the agreemen...

Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election despite an onslaught of commercials attacking him that were funded by New York’s ultrawealthy , including Democratic-leaning figures such as Michael Bloomberg. He also overcame very negative coverage from The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Post , three of the city’s biggest newspapers. In the latest edition of Right Now, Maurice M...

Democrat Abigail Spanberger handily won the Virginia gubernatorial race, as was expected. In something of a surprise , New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill, another Democrat, also won comfortably. Those two races were perhaps the most important in assessing the state of national politics in 2025. But the defining figure of this year’s elections has been Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayoral candidate....

Zohran Mamdani’s strong opposition to Israel’s military actions in Gaza is a critical element of his political success, according to Patrick Gaspard , a longtime Democratic operative who is advising the mayoral front-runner. In the latest edition of Right Now , Gaspard argued that Mamdani’s Gaza stances resonated with Democrats who were frustrated with party leadership over Gaza, the 2024 election...

Democrats are even more furious about the government shutdown now that President Trump is using the impasse as a pretext to stop tens of millions of Americans from getting benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Minnesota Senator Tina Smith, in the latest edition of Right Now, argues that Trump refusing to fund Obamacare subsidies and now food stamps has strengthened her party...

New Jersey Democrat Mikie Sherrill and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger haven’t received the attention of New York’s Zohran Mamdani and have run less engaging campaigns. But they still will likely win key governorships next week. As Decision Desk HQ’s Geoffrey Skelley explains, there is nearly always a backlash against incumbent presidents in their first year in office, boosting the opposite party in...

Several elite U.S. colleges, including Brown, Dartmouth, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have all rejected a “compact” with the Trump administration, in which the schools might have received additional federal funding as long as they implemented a number of conservative policies on campus, such as restricting the rights of transgender students. This is a marked shift from earlier th...

There were 2,700 No Kings events across the country , with at least seven million participating, according to Leah Greenberg , co-executive director of Indivisible, one of the groups that helped coordinate the protests. It was one of the largest single-day protests in American history, she said. In the latest edition of Right Now , Greenberg explained the importance of showing mass public oppositi...

Chicago is a city “under siege,” says Representative Delia Ramirez . In the latest episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon , she described a city where residents are terrified, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining anyone they want and using violence against those protesting their actions. She warned that the Trump administration is using the city as a test . If Chicago wilts, sh...