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Critics described President Trump's money-making ventures as "bribery" and "corruption." The White House denied any conflicts of interest.

Trump has fixated on making changes to the nation's capital in his second term.

President Trump has spent months waging an unusually aggressive campaign to reshape how states run elections.

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Historians say the nation's 250th anniversary has become a politicized spectacle, a celebration of an imperial presidency.

After a World Cup celebration turned deadly, Mexican officials vowed to strengthen safety protocols ahead of their team's Sunday match against England.

On Love Island USA, a show purportedly about pursuing heterosexual romance in an obnoxiously-lit villa in Fiji, the two biggest stories this season are not about sordid, spontaneous hookups; devastatingly hot bombshells in skimpy bikinis leaving broken hearts in their wake; or what scandalous behavior the night vision cameras have caught on tape. Instead, it’s an intimate friendship between two men and the girls sticking up for one of their own.   

Viewers this season are focused on the depth of Bryce and Zach’s friendship. Some fans believe that the pair’s platonic chemistry is deeper and stronger than any romance Bryce and Zach have found with their female castmates.

Friendship is also top of mind when it comes to the show’s women and how they’re moving through this game. They’ve essentially unionized, as much as any group can on Love Island. They yell “BOOOOOoooOOO!” at the men together. They call out bad behavior. They give each other pep talks — routinely delivering the kind of speech that could empower someone to run through a brick wall. And in the moments when they’re feeling rejected and scorned, they focus their ire on the men who dumped them, not the new women they’ve chosen. 

That friendship taking center stage on a famously depraved reality TV dating show feels a little shocking. It’s like serving up BLTs and having everyone rave about the bread — a welcome surprise, but not what we all came here for. 

But, to longtime viewers (and at least one psychologist), this turn toward platonic friendships isn’t so much an anomaly but a natural evolution.

The reason Love Island USA is as popular as it is now — and it is very, very popular — is because of how its young, hot cast members have subverted the will of the show. Instead of fighting each other for the attention of the opposite sex, the show’s contestants have decided it’s about the friendships they make along the way — even as they weather “sexy” “games” that might, say, simulate a strip show or require contestants to put on lacy lingerie and chef’s hats and, then, play musical chairs, cheeks bare, rushing to sit on stools that are topped with cakes. The cast is also made to sleep in one large bedroom (with multiple cameras) and share beds — a conceit that’s yielded spicy, shocking content in past iterations. 

But no matter how hard the show pushes them toward NSFW (and borderline not safe for life) situations and encourages them to compete for attention, the beautiful Gen Z guinea pigs of Love Island continue to turn the format on its head and play by their own rules. And viewers love seeing powerful friendships unfold. In that sense, this shift away from sex and coupling and toward platonic connections is a direct reflection of a lot of what we know about Gen Z’s dating habits. 

Do people really watch Love Island for…friendships? 

Love Island premiered in the UK in 2015 with a tantalizing premise: Watch these hot idiots hook up, try to forge a lasting romantic relationship while being periodically tempted to stray by new “bombshells” (cast members), and have an audience choose the most likable couple to reward with $100,000 in the end. Along the way, they will participate in challenges that almost always feature bikinis, lingerie, or underwear; gushing or squirting substances (water, whipped cream, slime); and some kind of make out, mounting, thrusting, or grinding upon the opposite sex. The show airs on Peacock in something close to real time, which keeps the cast in an isolated bubble and allows the audience to directly affect the twists and direction of the show through periodic votes on their favorite and least favorite couples and contestants.   

Being hot, having sex, and looking for love on TV isn’t new territory. Shows like Temptation Island (which premiered in 2001 and was recently rebooted) and Bachelor in Paradise are also based on the idea of finding sex and romance on a body of land surrounded by water. Newer franchises like Too Hot to Handle and Perfect Match have expanded and twisted the original Love Island premise into new extremes featuring monetary prizes and an Avengers-like assembly of past contestants. 

But Love Island USA has become a sensation, largely because its cast members have rejected the tropes of the genre. It’s not that the contestants aren’t looking for love, but the fact that they’re willing to put friendship on equal footing that makes the show unique. 

The most-talked about episode of this season aired on Friday and featured the show’s female cast members circling the wagons around their bestie Aniya and simultaneously laying into her partner KC after he dumped her for a woman he’d just met. Watching her friend get dumped in front of the group, Trinity tells her cast mates that “this dude is crazy.” 

Then she he tells him, directly, “You told her you didn’t want to explore…but the moment you get away from her and you can actually do your thing — that gives sneaky.”  

Later, when Aniya falls to her knees weeping over the outcome of a dramatic recoupling ceremony, Melanie is there to pick her up. “You’re a f****** grand-ass f****** woman, bro,” Melanie yells atAniya, speaking fire into her veins and creating a speech that’s since gone viral. “You’re not going to act a f****** fool in front of these weird-ass f****** people.”

And while the bromance of Bryce and Zach isn’t playing out exactly like this (it’s far more dopey than fiery), their friendship has arguably become a bigger story than the women these boys are paired with. They talk openly about the girls they like, encourage each other, and are secure enough to compliment each other’s various body parts. (They’re so comfortable, in fact, that some fans can’t believe they aren’t just a little bit attracted to each other). 

These friendship-oriented narratives are actually exactly what Love Island USA contestants continue to deliver — and what viewers like to see.

Anna Peele, author of Enter the Villa: The (Unauthorized) Reality Behind Love Island (an encyclopedic guide on the show) explained to me that friendship has been what’s turned the US version of the show into a breakout hit. Peele said that the ratings in season six quadrupled after Rob Rausch rejected his partner Leah Kateb, telling her that their hookups were awkward. “The real winners of the show were the PPG [Power Puff Gang],” Peele said, referring to the friendship alliance between Leah, Serena Page, and JaNa Craig. “[They] supported Leah through the pain of being rejected by a snake wrangler.”

Instead of fighting with each other over men, Leah, Serena, and JaNa subverted Love Island’s format and put each other first. That resonated with the show’s audience, which later crowned Serena and her partner Kordell Beckham as the winners. Peele also said that one of the show’s executive producers told her that Serena’s arc, in which she put equal weight on friends and romance, is a blueprint for winning. Viewers want to see someone who supports their other cast members as much as someone trying to find love. 

“Trinity being the fan favorite [to win the entire show this season] also makes complete sense,” Peele told me, pointing to Trinity’s loyalty to the aforementioned Bryce (who seems to be hopelessly in love with her) and her unwavering “girls girl” energy.  

What Love Island USA can tell us about Gen Z

If art reflects life, then even a show as heightened and unhinged as Love Island might be able to tell us something about how people, especially young hot ones, approach love. And the way Love Island USA’s contestants behave is in line with many of the things we know about Gen Z’s dating habits. 

There’s been study after study, report after report, showing that Gen Z is approaching love differently. They’re stuck in situationships. They’re afraid of rejection. They’re also having less sex. At the same time, experts have told me that research and surveys continue to demonstrate, year in and year out, that Gen Z wants to see social connections on screen more than they do romance. 

“What we found is that teens and Gen Z want to see friendships that better reflect their real lives,” Yalda Uhls, a developmental psychologist, told me in an interview about gender dynamics on reality TV earlier this month. Uhls is the founder of UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers, which studies young people’s relationship to entertainment. 

“Relationships where friends who actually communicate, support each other, and work through problems — I feel like TV shows are starting to reflect these things, and it’s happening obviously on reality TV,” she added. 

It makes sense that the generation whose initial taste of adulthood was social distancing and pandemic lockdowns would yearn for meaningful social connections, and it follows that the Gen Z contestants on Love Island would reflect this generational shift.  

It also helps explain why the show’s younger audience (50 percent of viewers of Season 7 were under 30 according to NBCUniversal) would connect to contestants with storylines that center connection, empathy, and communication, especially in the context of romantic rejection and platonic friendships. Conversely, those tuning into Love Island expecting fast and furious hookups and who are surprised that they’re not happening at a rapid pace might be the older viewers. 

That said, Peele explained to me that friendship on Love Island only works when there’s something to push back against. The reason that the bromance between Bryce and Zach works is the same reason that the PPG alliance is as beloved as they are and is the same reason why Trinity is the fan favorite — friends are needed as support for the romantic relationships, especially when they get rocky.  

“One thing that strikes me is that ‘Friendship Island’ is usually a pejorative term — it means people are just sitting around and not flirting or hooking up,” Peel said. “It works this season because it’s balanced by a ton of romantic drama.” 

But the direction those conflicts take might also be indicative of generational shifts. While the overall earnestness and emotional vulnerability of the male cast members is in line with the fact that a majority of Gen Z guys believe in equality, both KC (Aniya’s ex) and fellow cast member Corbin have been called out by the women on the show and fans for talking about their partners like they’re disposable. Rejection is baked in on Love Island USA, but the men’s tone has an edge of entitlement and misogyny to it this season. (At one point, KC calls Aniya a “grandma” for taking things slow sexually and implies that she’s not sexually attractive to him.) The way some of the male cast members talk and treat women might be a reflection of what studies have found: that Gen Z men tend to have more regressive attitudes toward women and their female partners than generations before them. 

Faced with men like this, one can’t help but lean on their friends — especially when you’re all on the same island. 

This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Temperatures on the ocean surface have hit a record high, raising fears of another burst of extreme heat this summer.

On June 21, temperatures outside the polar regions exceeded the extraordinary highs observed at the same time in 2023 and 2024, the Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Wednesday.

It warned the new peak would probably bring “consequences for weather patterns, global climate and marine ecosystems,” not least because it would coincide with the earliest phases of an El Niño event they forecast to be the strongest in decades.

When the previous ocean record for June was set in 2023, scientists described the trends as “worrying,” “terrifying,” and “bonkers,” because they were so far outside their expectations. That presaged an El Niño and a period of devastating global heatwaves, floods, and storms.

That 2023 record has now been surpassed, and much of the world is once again seeing an alarming rise in temperatures. Last month, the UK and many other countries in Europe sweltered amid new heat records, while Antarctica experienced unprecedentedly balmy winter conditions.

Although the focus is usually on land temperatures, oceans give a fuller picture of how much the climate is being pushed out of balance by human-caused warming.

Surface temperatures are affected by solar radiation, water currents, and the buildup of heat in the depths.

Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess energy in the Earth system, which is primarily caused by burning fossil fuels, such as oil, coal and gas. That imbalance hit a record 23 zettajoules last year, more than double the average of the previous two decades.

As a result, the oceans are warming at an accelerating rate. In 2020, the amount of heat being added to the oceans was equivalent to about five Hiroshima bombs a second. Last year, it was closer to 11 Hiroshima explosions a second. The UN’s secretary general, António Guterres, has warned “Earth is being pushed beyond its limits.”

Scientists said it was too early to say whether the sea surface heating would prove temporary or even worsen, because annual peaks are usually registered in July and August.

But Carlo Buontempo, Copernicus director at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, warned it could indicate the beginning of a new phase, leading, once more, to uncharted territory, “With ocean temperatures at these levels and El Niño on the horizon, we are likely to see more temperature records fall in the coming months.”

Copernicus is part of the EU’s space programme.

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.

A few summers ago, we signed our older kid up for a very outdoorsy camp. The organizers prided themselves on getting children comfortable with nature and the elements; they told us that kids would only go indoors if absolutely necessary.

Then, a punishing heat wave hit New York City. Our kid came home with a weird heat rash that took days to go away. Later that summer, smoke from Canadian wildfires forced the camp to take shelter at a nearby school. 

My kid did not enjoy the experience, but I don’t blame the camp. Organizers around the country have had to change their programs or even cancel camp in response to extreme heat, smoke, and other realities of our modern summer. 

The result is often a loss of outdoor time, which is critical for kids’ physical health and social development. That loss is especially troubling at a time when recess is dwindling, and school is becoming increasingly screen-based. Kids need as much summer as they can get.

It’s still possible to give campers the fun new experiences they need, experts say. But it takes a new layer of planning and adaptability as climate change, increasingly, factors into every decision.

“Our focus really should be not on less outdoor activity,” Allison Poulos, an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s College of Health Solutions, told me. “It’s just smarter outdoor activity.”

What kids lose when it’s too hot for camp

As I’m writing this story, extreme heat warnings are affecting more than 160 million Americans as a “heat dome” closes over the Midwest and Northeast. In some parts of New York state, “feels like” temperatures are expected to go as high as 110 degrees.

This is, sadly, our new normal. Higher average temperatures due to climate change are making heat waves more common and extreme. “When a heat dome or a high-pressure system sets up, it’s now starting from a hotter floor,” Ashley Ward, director of the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute, recently told NPR. “That makes the extreme heat more likely.”

As we’ve seen during recent heat waves across Europe, extreme heat can be dangerous. Kids are especially vulnerable because their bodies heat up more quickly and are less efficient at cooling off by sweating, said Harleen Marwah, a pediatrician at Mass General Brigham for Children who has spent her career working on the intersection of climate and health.

Children also don’t necessarily recognize when they’re getting too hot and may “push themselves to play to a point where they’re in an unsafe situation,” Marwah told me. “It really puts the onus on the caregiver to be monitoring closely.”

In the face of triple-digit heat, sometimes organizers have no choice but to cancel camp. The recent heat wave has already led to cancellations in the Midwest.

But calling off camp presents real childcare problems for parents, who typically have to work in the summer, no matter how hot it gets. It’s also not great for kids, who get real benefits from the outdoor playtime that camp can provide.

Being outside is “an opportunity for physical activity, which is good for overall health, and also becoming increasingly limited as people spend more time indoors and more time behind screens,” Marwah said.

Being in green spaces, especially, is good for kids’ mental and emotional wellbeing, Marwah said. “Outdoor play creates a space where children can learn about nature as well, and that’s an opportunity that gets missed out on if things have to be canceled.”

How camp can survive climate change

Whenever possible, camps should adapt to the heat instead of completely cancelling activities, experts say. It’s a process Kevin Martin, director of recreational sports at Texas A&M Corpus Christi, knows well. Known as “Jambalaya” to the hundreds of campers who come to the campus every summer, Martin said this summer has already been punishing.

“Man, it’s been hot,” he told me. “The mosquitoes have been biting.”

But Texas A&M camps haven’t canceled or reduced their hours. Instead, the heat “has made us be more innovative,” Martin said.

Even if other outdoor activities are canceled, the pool stays open, especially since swimming is “magnificent” for campers’ mental health, Martin said. But counselors enforce mandatory water breaks even during swim time.

That’s crucial, Marwah said, because playing in water, while cooling in the short term, can actually mask the signs of dehydration.

Beyond making sure campers get plenty of water, camps can also think about the design of their outdoor spaces, including using materials that heat up less quickly and creating space for shade, ideally from trees, Marwah said. 

That takes time and money, but one thing camps can do right now is structure their schedules with the forecast and heat index in mind, keeping outdoor activities in cooler parts of the day. 

When it’s just too hot to be outside, there are ways to keep kids active. Poulos and her team have found that playing in an indoor gym, with room to move around, offers some of the same benefits as outdoor play. At Texas A&M, campers retreat to the gym for dodgeball, Pop-A-Shot, and an introductory basketball game called Nukem. “I don’t know what is about Nukem, but they love Nukem,” Martin said.

His campers have the benefit of being on a campus with college-level athletic facilities. But even camps with fewer resources can use what they have to support play on hot days. Camps with smaller indoor spaces, for example, can rotate kids between inside and outside so that everyone gets to play and no one gets too hot, Poulos said.

All of this adaptation takes work — it’s one of the many burdens climate change is placing on communities around the world. But planning ahead is also an opportunity to help kids contribute to the solution.

Martin likes to get campers’ input on games they want to play — as a member of Gen Z, he already feels out of step with what they’re into. “When you get their buy-in and ask them, ‘What do y’all enjoy playing? What do you want to play?’” he said. “They are [so excited for] the camp at that point, because they feel valued.”

What I’m reading

A new report says that the Department of Education may no longer be able to do its job of enforcing federal education law after the Trump administration cut 40 percent of staff and terminated $2 billion worth of contracts and grants in 2025. The report was incomplete because department staff did not comply with interview requests, meaning even internal investigators were unable to assess the full scope of the damage.

The Texas State Board of Education has approved a required reading list for public school students that includes a Bible excerpt in most grades, sparking concern among teachers and advocates for the separation of church and state.

The latest viral squishy toy is a stick of butter.

My horror-loving older child enjoyed The Witch’s Wings and Other Terrifying Tales, a graphic novel based on that millennial mainstay Are You Afraid of the Dark?.

Also in throwbacks, my little kid is now obsessed with Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, a 1980s cartoon that predates even me. My older kid calls it “old-timey” and “ancient.”

America turns 250 this year. The celebrations are already underway — and so are the questions.

President Donald Trump has put himself at the center of the anniversary in Washington, DC, with hype-filled plans for festivals and fireworks. Nationally, the lead-up has turned into a roiling conversation about what America even represents these days — how we all grapple with American identity, politics, and competing visions for the country.

Vox’s journalists have been asking those questions, too, and turning up surprising insights about American history, smart ideas about our future, and even some unheralded good news about the present. The stories below explore America’s quarter-millennium moment from different angles, looking at the forces shaping American life at 250 and beyond.

• A very Trump July 4
• 5 books that define America — for better and for worse
• America’s housing was built for a world we no longer live in
• The US is better off than it was in 1976. So why does it feel worse?
• Will Trump ruin America’s birthday?
• Trump’s Freedom 250 fest crashout proves he’s the only true MAGA celebrity
• Heather Cox Richardson grades America

The World Cup is in full swing, and the vibes are mostly positive! Scottish tourists drank Boston dry, Mexico lifted a 40-year curse, and African teams have had a historic showing. 

But there is one pesky little thing that fans REALLY don’t like: hydration breaks, which are a new addition to the tournament this year. Players have complained that they break up the rhythm of the game, and fans believe they are nothing but a cash grab, offering broadcasters more time for commercials. 

Roger Bennett, founder of the soccer podcast and media network Men in Blazers, told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram that the hydration-break rule has “done something that I thought was almost impossible in the football world, which is to unite the entire planet in anger against its very existence.”

Bennett spoke with Sean about where the hydration breaks came from, why everyone hates them so much, and what makes the World Cup such a special event anyway.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How did hydration breaks do the almost impossible?

Football is, at its heart, a very simple game. It is two halves of 45 minutes. That is the way it is. It’s the way it’s always been. Crucially, it’s the way it is at the elite professional level, and it is the way it is at an under-seven game in Alaska.

It’s pretty critical to football that the game at all levels is exactly the same. That is, until the World Cup came to North America this summer. This is one of the hottest in global football history. And so Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA, just imposed a new rule where they would have hydration breaks, which he said was part of a focused attempt to ensure the best possible condition for players. He said they’re purely a sporting matter. 

Every half, it breaks in the middle now for an extended period, four minutes and 20 seconds per game. And what it does on Fox in America, as the players amble to the side, they now just talk about it as if it’s a routine part of the game. They say, “Oh, we’ve hit the water break! And then boom! We’re in commercials.”

The American football fans might be saying, what’s the big deal? There are constant commercials when I’m watching a game. But this has really triggered the football purists out there.

Football is a working-class game. Football is a game of fan devotion, connection. Football is deeply historic and there’s an authenticity to it. The heat is terrible in the United States, but many of these stadia are indoors, are air conditioned. 

You have this kind of ridiculous, surreal situation where footballers are taking a break in an air-conditioned stadium, ambling over to the side, and what it’s done is give coaches essentially a timeout in the middle of the game. You have players having a break. Exhausted players who are being run down by a superior opponent have a chance to catch their breath. We’ve seen game after game be utterly transformed by the momentum shift. 

When you see the figures that the broadcasters are making — said to be $250 million in terms of the commercials that they’re running in those slots — it’s a very odd moment in time where people are wondering: What is this? Why is this? And is this just for this World Cup or in dismal England in rainy November, will the Premier League start to take water breaks and we’ll cut to Coca-Cola commercials?

Does that mean that coaches and players like them, or are they complaining too?

Almost everybody hates them. A lot of the players talk about how hard it is to find a rhythm in a game, and then you’re stopping and going over to the sideline. 

By the way, at the beginning, the water break was just a water break and they would come back and often Fox at the beginning was caught in commercial and they’d come back to the game and it would be on, and people would lose their minds. And so what they’ve done, they’ve made it even more American. It’s almost like a TV timeout in the NFL now where the official keeps the players on the sideline until they know the commercials are run and then they let them on. 

Anthony Robinson, the US player, said he wanted to walk back onto the field and get back into his position. And one of the officials was like, “No, sorry, the commercials are still playing. Stay where you are.” 

A couple of the coaches have admitted that they won games because they were able to make complicated tactical changes and communicate. Germany were playing Curaçao, who just tied the game up — one of the most delirious moments of this World Cup. And the young German coach admitted afterwards that he was able to adjust to playing against the diamond midfield shape that he didn’t expect. And Germany ended up winning 7-1. If you watch the game it was like flicking over radio stations before the water break and after the water break.

Do you think they’ll keep them around?

This is the greatest fault line in football, Sean. I do not have prophetic powers, but ultimately the whole game of football is currently in a battle between its roots and the commercial imperative that comes from being as big as it is. 

The Super Bowl and American sports in general are brazenly commercial. But 5 billion people watched the World Cup. Two hundred million people watch the Super Bowl. It is the last megaphone which is faintly audible around the world. And when you have something that big, it becomes deeply desirous to make as much money as you can out of it. And that’s the tension.

So this is about capitalism and the American version contra, perhaps, the European version. 

This is a question about European vacation policies. And you sound like you may have been a European in a previous life. 

Born to be an American, Sean, so I don’t know if I can answer what you’re asking, but go on.

I’ve been noticing the Scottish fans, the Norwegian fans, the Dutch fans just traveling from city to city to city. And I’ve wondered, how much vacation do these people have?

We’ve always joked that part of the reason that football has taken off in this nation is because Americans love an excuse to daytime drink and cut work. GDP plummets seriously in Europe during the World Cup, at an enormous clip. These fans, many of them sell houses. They sell off everything. They save for this. Remember, the World Cup’s every four years. That’s why it’s such a powerful experience. 

It is the spine to my life. When I meet someone and they tell me they met me in 1997, my mind goes to the nearest World Cup, 1998, and I remember that so viscerally, and then I can locate myself in time and space and know exactly where I was. It’s the spine to millions of human beings’ lives. So it’s not a, ‘Should I go? Can I go?’ It really is a compulsion. 

I think it’s been the joy of this World Cup. When you look back in 40 years, any World Cup you can name people. “Oh, that’s the Pele World Cup!” “Oh, that was a Maradona!” This one will be remembered probably for Messi just defying Father Time. Please god, for the United States going deep. But it will be remembered for the Scottish fans… The joy, their wonder, the openness, the love that they brought to our nation. So thank God they take the time that they do. 

There is a funny story of a number of them, like being caught on camera at games and having their boss see them and being recalled to work. But I think the world is better for them cutting work, for the decrease in productivity, for the utter shamelessness in ditching their families, their occupational growth. And that’s the joy of the World Cup too, Sean.

The latest breakthrough for GLP-1 drugs isn’t scientific. It’s financial.

As of July 1, Medicare is providing coverage of GLP-1 medications for weight loss for just a $50 co-pay, potentially enabling millions more Americans to get onto this much-hyped new class of drugs. Medicare’s GLP-1 Bridge Program, as it is called, is technically a one-year pilot project authorized by the Trump administration. Medicare previously limited GLP-1 coverage to people who have diabetes, heart disease, or obstructive sleep apnea. 

Under the new program, Medicare enrollees will be eligible to receive one of three drugs — Foundayo (the new once-a-day tablet), Wegovy, or Zepbound — for weight loss specifically. Patients generally qualify if they have a body mass index of 35 or higher, or a BMI of 27 or higher with certain health conditions.

The new program could prove to be an inflection point for a class of drugs that has already generated so much excitement and interest. It is a story with enormous implications, not only for Americans’ health, but for the economy at large.

“We call [this drug] a physiological disruption akin to technological disruptions of our time like the smartphone. When the smartphone first came out, no one anticipated Uber or TikTok or Netflix streaming,” Alison Furman, partner and US consumer markets industry leader at PwC, said at Aspen Ideas: Health. “This is no different. You are going to see new brands, new products, new industries form around this ecosystem that this drug is already creating.”

The percentage of households with a GLP-1 user had already doubled from January 2025 to May 2026, per PwC. And that was before the launch of the Bridge program, which seems likely to act as an accelerant on several trends that are already underway.

A lot more Americans are about to start taking a GLP-1 drug

About 12 percent of Americans said in an August 2025 survey that they had taken a GLP-1 drug — equivalent to more than 40 million people. As of May 2026, one in five US households had at least one GLP-1 user, according to data from PwC — and those shares are probably as low as they will ever be. 

Millions more are likely to join them with Medicare’s coverage broadening under the Bridge program.

Exactly how many remains to be seen. According to one KFF estimate of the Medicare population, as many as 14 million people on the program are obese or overweight. A more recent KFF estimate using the Bridge program’s specific qualifications concluded that about four million beneficiaries could be eligible for the $50-per-month GLP-1 offer. 

Doctors are expecting an onslaught of new patients: As Axios reported in June, clinics are worried they may be overwhelmed by the increased demand that follows the Bridge program’s launch. It is expected to be one of the largest prescription drug rollouts ever.

And it’s not the end. Pharmaceutical executives say they are making inroads with the private employer-based insurance plans that cover about half of the US population; at Aspen Ideas: Health in late June, Laura Steele, group vice president of US cardiometabolic health at Eli Lilly, said the company has seen employer coverage increase significantly, from about 20 percent covering to 67 percent. Drug manufacturers have also gotten aggressive about selling prescriptions directly to the consumer at a reduced cash price, as have other DTC healthcare businesses like Hims and Hers.

Cost remains a barrier to uptake. According to a November 2025 KFF survey, more than half of GLP-1 users said the drugs were difficult to afford; 14 percent said they had stopped taking the weight-loss meds because of the cost. Even with millions of Americans already on a GLP-1, adoption could still grow exponentially as costs come down. About three-fourths of US adults are overweight or obese. Furman said that between 50 and 75 percent of Americans could be taking one of these medications in 10 years.

More widespread use could reduce the stigma around GLP-1 use

Millions more people going on GLP-1s could also alter one of the defining features of the recent weight-loss boom: the stigma that some people still experience for using one of these drugs.

The reality of such a stigma is undeniable. Reddit communities dedicated to these drugs and patients’ weight-loss journeys are filled with stories of people experiencing judgment or other negative reactions from people in their lives who find out they are taking a GLP-1. It’s not just anecdotal, either: One randomized experiment from researchers at Rice University found that people reported feeling more negative emotions when hearing that somebody lost weight using a GLP-1 drug compared to losing weight with diet or exercise, or not even losing weight at all.

But there are signs that stigma is starting to break down. According to PwC data shared with Vox, 23 percent of current GLP-1 users openly share that they are on the drugs, compared to the 2 percent who say they haven’t told anyone. And people who are considering going on a GLP-1 — the kind of people who may now take the leap with the Medicare Bridge program — are even more open-minded. More than half of those considerers (53 percent) say they would share their use with their immediate family members, versus 42 percent of current users. 

If the financial barriers were the No. 1 factor holding back GLP-1 adoption, stigma might have been the No. 2 reason. Now both of those are trending in the opposite direction: The drugs are becoming more affordable, and according to the data, the stigma around using these medicines may not be as stifling as it used to be.

As GLP-1 use expands, the economy will be permanently altered

And as GLP-1 use expands, the ripple effects already being felt in the US economy could turn into waves. A recent PwC consumer survey illustrates how dramatically people’s spending habits can change when they or somebody in their household goes on one of these weight-loss medicines. 

More than half of GLP-1 users said they were spending less at the grocery store on sweet snacks (including candy and baked goods) and salty snacks; 43 percent said they said they were buying fewer sugary beverages, and 12 percent said they were buying less alcohol. At the same time, 45 percent reported purchasing more fresh produce, 35 percent bought more protein-packed snacks, and 28 percent said they spent more on high-fiber foods.

The restaurant industry is in for a shake-up too: Spending on pizza, for example, dropped 22 percent among GLP-1 households, which also spent less on takeout chicken (down 12 percent), coffee and bakery items (8 percent), burgers (6 percent), and deli sandwiches (4 percent).

“When people are eating less, they tend to favor quality over quantity,” Furman said.

And the GLP-1 effect is felt beyond food shopping or dining out: Users also spend 10 percent more on apparel (specifically women’s jeans, swimwear, dresses, and jewelry) within six to eight months of going on the medication.

These weight-loss meds could ultimately change parts of the economy that go beyond consumer spending. One recent study suggested that women who go on a GLP-1 have an easier time finding a job. (Although we should still be cautious about interpreting the results of a single study, as one economist pointed out.) 

The point is, a massive weight-loss revolution that affects 50 percent of the US population or more is going to have huge consequences beyond a lot of people walking around looking slimmer. If current trends hold, we may eventually look back at the economy — and the United States as a whole — in pre- and post-GLP-1 terms.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Hi readers, happy Thursday! The Logoff will be off tomorrow ahead of July 4. But before I go in search of a hot dog, let’s talk about how President Donald Trump is celebrating America’s 250th birthday.

What’s happening? The celebration has been underway since last week, when the Great American State Fair kicked off on the National Mall. By and large, it’s not going very well: Reviews have ranged from merely underwhelming to “bleaker than expected.” On Thursday, a piece of the stage fell from the rafters, narrowly missing performers as they rehearsed.

The main event, of course, will be this weekend. Trump reportedly wants to set a world record with a 40-minute, 850,000-shell fireworks display, which is likely to cause “very unhealthy” air pollution in Washington. 

But the show will have to wait until some TBD time, likely late at night — or potentially very early in the morning on July 5 — for Trump to speak. On Wednesday, he boasted that “it’s going to be approximately 107 degrees out, and I’m going to go, and I’m going to make a really long speech just to show that I can do anything.”

Why does this matter? Trump’s monomaniacal focus on his version of America has come at the cost of a bigger, more inclusive celebration of the country’s semiquincentennial. As the news site NOTUS reported earlier this week, Trump’s DOGE initiative previously slashed funding for local celebrations — and is now refusing to dole out congressionally appropriated funds. 

On a national level, Trump has also channeled money meant for America250 — the bipartisan group created by Congress — into his own Freedom 250, a Trump administration-backed public-private group with a distinctly partisan slant. On Thursday, congressional Democrats also alleged that Trump misled donors who intended to support America250 by providing routing and account numbers for Freedom 250 instead.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Let’s end on an upbeat, patriotic note: As my colleague Bryan Walsh explains, for all of our troubles, the United States is by many metrics doing far better than it was on America’s bicentennial 50 years ago. And as Constance Grady argues, there’s plenty of good in America that Trump can’t quash. (They’re both gift links.)

Plus, a World Cup thing: The USMNT is heading to the round of 16 next week! In the meantime, I’m loving the team’s musical celebrations.

Thanks for reading, have a great holiday, and we’ll see you back here on Monday!

It was not the postcard-worthy aesthetics that prompted Greek islanders to first drench their cliffside-carved homes, churches, and pathways in a thick layer of pearly white paint. 

Much like wearing a white tunic on a hot sunny day, painting your house a shade of reflective white is a fine way to keep an ancient island cool, bouncing some of the sun’s heat back into space instead of absorbing it into the structure of the buildings themselves. Before air conditioning existed, people in warmer areas of the world often built with similar techniques in mind: Iran’s picturesque chimney-like badgirs or wind catchers have helped desert dwellers stay cool for millennia, for example, and in the tropics, Malaysians have long engineered their homes on stilts to avoid floods and let a breeze in. 

Many homes and cities in Europe are still living as if AC had never been invented, relying largely on their thick shutters, ventilated courtyards, and other strategies to encourage shade and airflow. But after a deadly, record-shattering heat wave tore through western Europe last week, killing at least 1,300 people, it has become increasingly clear that old-world buildings are not cooling enough on their own for our new world of heat. 

As a similar heat dome now pulses over the eastern US, a nation of AC aficionados faces the inverse of this problem. Since just after the end of World War II, the US has built its homes, schools, and hospitals so thoroughly with AC in mind that most buildings have no built-in defense against the heat at all. The air conditioner made possible America’s cavernous McMansions, megamalls, and frigid glass office towers, engineered like ectotherms, liable to soak up a heat wave like a cold-blooded lizard sprawled out on a rock on a scorching summer’s day. 

Clearly, climate change has, to some extent, vindicated America’s hyperreliance on the AC. Unlike in Europe, with its suddenly vulnerable passive cooling systems that kept things temperate back when weather used to be normal, the US can take the heat as long as the air is on. In the aftermath of the AC-enabled postwar housing boom, the likelihood of an American dying on a scorching hot day fell by a staggering 80 percent. 

But the roaring, life-saving success of the AC has also embedded a profound vulnerability: the moment the power goes out, as it’s prone to do in a heat wave — or that electricity bills get too onerous, which tends to happen when the AC is cranked — the nation’s cold-blooded buildings convert into furnaces. 

In most conventional American houses, if you “lose power in the middle of an extreme heat wave or in a blizzard, you’ve got hours before you need to get out,” said Alexander Gard-Murray, executive director of Passive House Massachusetts, a group that encourages the state to build naturally cooler buildings – or “passive houses” – from the start. Some techniques are state-of-the-art and technologically novel, others are ancient, and still many others are basic common sense: don’t build facing the sun, plant trees, add an awning, and replace heat-radiating asphalt driveways with gravel. 

Notably, none of these strategies involve shoving your AC unit out the window. But they can help your air conditioning work a lot less hard — which, by the way, could cut your electricity bills in half — at a time when America’s electrical grid is desperately straining to keep everything online. Most importantly, it ensures that “if something does go wrong, if the power goes out,” said Gard-Murray, “you’re still going to be okay.”

Air conditioning reshaped how America builds for heat

American homes used to reflect the cities they were built in. Cool air flowed beneath the floorboards of New Orleans’ breezy raised shotgun houses. Boston’s winter winds met the saltbox house’s long, sloping roofs, and Pueblo tribes used thick blocks of mud to build adobe homes that withstood the desert’s daily fluctuations.

But in 1947, an engineer named Henry Galson transformed how America builds with his invention of “the people’s air conditioner,” a low-cost AC unit — until then, a luxury item — snug enough to nestle into a residential window. With millions of service members, then returning from World War II, the nation needed more housing, and it needed it fast. Cheap air conditioning allowed builders more flexibility to mass-produce the suburbs that sprawled out as a solution to America’s post-war housing crisis — even in hot climates like the Sunbelt.

Air conditioning made large swaths of the country newly habitable, fueling the spectacular growth of many now-flourishing metropolises across the American South and Southwest. In less than a century, the AC transformed blisteringly hot Phoenix from a small desert town, population 65,000, into the fifth-largest city in the country.   

 At the same time, as the AC became ubiquitous in America, “many architects stopped designing buildings for their specific context,” said Sonia Chao, associate dean of architecture at the University of Miami and author of Calibrating Coastal Resilience. “What we have today are buildings in South Florida that look a lot like the buildings being built in California or Arizona” or more temperate climates, when in fact “we really shouldn’t be building in the same ways.”

Most homes in South Florida once sat atop crawl spaces that protected them against floodwaters and let in a breeze to naturally cool the rooms above, said Chao. But many local buildings are now built directly atop concrete, meaning that “as the earth itself gets warmer,” the homes above absorb the heat too. 

Of course, if you blast your AC high enough, you probably won’t feel it. And, for decades, that gave American developers tacit permission to pare down the elements like thick masonry, high ceilings, shaded porches, and window shutters that once naturally kept us cool in favor of cheap drywall and easier-to-construct boxy floor plans that helped them cram sprawling tracts of readymade starter homes across suddenly bustling desert cities such as Phoenix and Albuquerque. They cleared trees and poured asphalt, churning out decades’ worth of leaky, heat-absorbent neighborhoods. But it didn’t matter — so long as the AC kept running. 

The problem with America’s hyperreliance on the AC

AC proved transformational to American life in profoundly positive ways, stretching the boundaries of where one can comfortably live and greatly reducing extreme heat as a public health threat. The problem is, if for whatever reason, the AC is not running, many American homes now become immediately and extraordinarily exposed. “We all like to believe that the grid is safe and stable,” said Katrin Klingenberg, executive director of Phius, which sets standards for passive homes constructed in the US. “But it’s actually way more vulnerable than we all think.”

Researchers estimate that if Phoenix were to experience a two-day blackout during one of its regular heat waves — knocking out air conditioning citywide — it would quickly kill 12,800 people, or roughly 1 percent of the population, while a full half of the city would require emergency medical care. 

Arizonans will always need AC to stay safe from the heat, but they could be far more resilient to temporary lapses if their homes and neighborhoods were better designed to stay cool without it. If Phoenix planted enough trees to shade half of its streets — which would be enough to lower the city’s temperature by at least a few degrees— 27 percent fewer residents would die in such a blackout, according to the study. If every building installed a “cool roof” — simply painting it with a white material to better reflect sunlight — then the death toll would plummet by 66 percent. 

This is not just a thought experiment. Driven by extreme weather and an aging electrical grid, the number of power outages in the US has doubled over the past two decades. After Hurricane Beryl knocked out power for millions in Texas in 2024, at least dozens — and possibly hundreds — of people died from heat-related causes, meaning the outage may have been deadlier than the storm itself. 

“It overcomes you really fast,” said Patricia Solis, executive director of the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience at Arizona State University, which focuses on Maricopa County, where hundreds of people die from heat-related causes each year, many inside their own homes, their air conditioning broken, turned off, or unplugged.

One of them was Stephanie Pullman, a 72-year-old who died in Phoenix in 2018, a day after her electricity was cut off over a $51 unpaid bill. Another was Patricia Miletich, a 70-year-old with memory issues, whose busted AC was blowing hot 110+ degree air into her RV when she died in June 2024. Upwards of a quarter of Arizonans who succumb to heat inside their homes live in mobile houses, structures whose thin walls, poor insulation, and cramped concrete quarters make them especially expensive to cool with AC, and especially deadly without it.

Because this extreme heat is “going to happen increasingly to more and more of us around the world,” Solis warned, we have to “make it a part of the way that we build our environments, that we build our homes, that we rebuild our homes.”

How to build a home for the climate we actually have

It’s not as hard or expensive as you might think to build a cooler home, one that does at least some of the work needed to keep things more comfortable in extreme temperatures.

Something as simple as facing an RV away from the sun, adding an awning or garden trellis, or installing vinyl skirting around the foundation to prevent hot air from coming up through the floor, could make a mobile home safer to be in if the power goes out, says Solis. And even in less catastrophic conditions,  these age-old adaptations would make an AC unit cheaper to run. When she began her work,  some mobile home park owners sought to outright forbid residents from adding cooling features like a small window garden for purely cosmetic reasons. Solis and her team later helped pass a law outlawing such practices. 

Even earning the gold standard of building cooler buildings — a “Passive House” certification from Phius — isn’t “some space-age, super advanced crazy thing,” said Gard-Murray, of Passive House Massachusetts. “It’s not about doing extraordinary things; it’s about doing ordinary things extraordinarily well,” he said, like making sure your walls are airtight and thick enough to act as a buffer against outside temperatures.  

If most American buildings absorb heat like a plastic water bottle left out in the sun, a passive house is built like a thermos, keeping things relatively temperate regardless of the temperature outside. To illustrate that, a group of architects once built two miniature houses, one according to normal building codes and the other like a passive house, plopped them in a park in New York City, and filled both with 1,800 pounds of ice. One month later, the mini passive house had 40 percent of its ice left, while the other one had only 7 percent.

You can imagine how much safer that makes you if your AC ever goes out, and makes it up to 90 percent less energy-intensive to run — enough to cut your utility bills in half — when it’s on. “If we’re much more intentional about insulating the property, the heating and cooling systems have to do a lot less work,” said AJ Patton, founder of the Chicago-based developer 548 Enterprises, which is currently building Chicago’s largest-ever Passive House-certified affordable housing complex. 

“Too often we’ve used sustainable technologies as a luxury item,” said Patton, but the biggest benefits to these homes are for lower-income households who could really use the savings on their bills or are more vulnerable to having their power cut off. 

As of now, only about one percent of homes being built in the US are built according to passive standards. One might assume that building such a sensible, sustainable, and safer home must be prohibitively expensive, or else it would be much more common. After all, who doesn’t want a significantly lower utility bill, all other things being equal?  But in reality, at least in Massachusetts — where passive designs are now the mandatory norm in many cities — a survey found that such buildings only cost as little as two to three percent more than conventional buildings. 

Equally important in a country with a notorious housing shortage, the municipalities in Massachusetts that have opted into more stringent requirements continue to build new homes at a faster clip than those that haven’t, and they approved more new housing permits after the change. There could be a lot of factors at play in those differences, but at the very least it shows that requiring strict standards in this case might not, as some skeptics fear, “crash our housing production,” Gard-Murray said.

The real reason why these building techniques don’t happen more often comes down to a lack of awareness, experts told me, along with the fact that the biggest financial benefits are for whoever pays the utility bill, not the developer who has to pay the upfront costs. It doesn’t help either that the Trump administration has cut or let expire tax credits that helped defray the extra costs of energy-efficient buildings. Some projects like Patton’s lost out on $300,000 in expected incentives in real time. 

“The moronic government policies of the last 18 months are not helping us,” said Mark Ginsberg, a founding partner of Curtis + Ginsberg Architects, which has completed about 25 multi-family passive projects in New York City, most of them affordable or supportive housing. 

“There are too many people burying their heads in the sand and saying climate change isn’t real,” he said. That’s easier when the AC hides the worst effects of extreme heat from us. But on the verge of a heat wave poised to put 175 million Americans at risk, it may be past time to give our AC a little boost, too. 

The legal profession is much like a priesthood; both lawyers and theologians interpret a central text, be it the Bible, the Quran, the Gita, or the Constitution. We bury ourselves in canonical commentaries on that text. And we are all supplicants to beings much more powerful than ourselves.

Which explains why I’ve spent the past few years contemplating what happens when God goes mad.

The Supreme Court wrapped up its most recent term during a bizarrely haphazard celebration of the United States’ 250th birthday. And it has struggled to articulate a coherent vision of the Constitution no less than President Donald Trump has struggled to keep the National Mall’s reflecting pool clear during that celebration.

The Court isn’t just the most powerful institution in the United States — the only body capable of overriding both Congress and the president. It is supposed to be the caretaker of something sacred and eternal. As Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote, the whole purpose of a written constitution is “to prevent the law from reflecting certain changes in original values that the society adopting the Constitution thinks fundamentally undesirable.” 

That is, the Constitution fixes in place certain rights and governmental structures that are not supposed to change just because someone loses an election or because a few seats on the Supreme Court change hands. The right to free speech, the rule establishing that people born in the US are Americans, and the idea that all Americans, including the president, are subject to the same laws are abiding principles that should survive a change in administration or in the Court’s makeup.

But this Court does not simply overrule foundational precedents so often it is difficult to keep track; its work is increasingly illegible to people — even lawyers — who do not share the Republican justices’ values. I am grateful that I no longer practice law, because one of a lawyer’s primary duties is to advise clients on whether something they plan to do in the future is legal. And this Court’s interpretations of the law are often too opaque and unpredictable to allow lawyers to advise clients on what the law will be tomorrow.

One of the most prestigious writing assignments in the American legal academy is the Harvard Law Review’s annual Foreword. Last year, this assignment went to Richard Re, an insightful right-leaning scholar on Harvard’s own faculty, and Re spent much of his Foreword discussing why “America’s two competing legal cultures” have diverged. 

Re writes that, for many years, the Court was dominated by “swing” justices like Lewis Powell, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Anthony Kennedy who were “Republican appointees selected under conditions that facilitated the identification of moderates.” These justices were all moderate conservatives who weren’t particularly sympathetic to liberal causes, but they also tended to shy away from decisions that would alienate half of the country. As Re writes, Powell, O’Connor, and Kennedy had a knack for avoiding “results that would divide the nation and threaten the Court’s legitimacy or popularity.”

Just as importantly, these swing justices forced “judges, advocates, commentators, and students” to all seek “ways of appealing to those median jurists.” 

Because a moderate justice “held the key to major victories,” lawyers and judges across the political spectrum had to ask themselves “what would Anthony Kennedy do?” and not “what outcome would I prefer?” In Re’s words, this “shared mission effectively forced the two opposed ideological groups to adopt a common language and mode of reasoning, at least when arguing their cases.”

Today, by contrast, the Court is dominated by a coalition made up of two camps: very conservative Republicans and fiendishly conservative Republicans. Republican legal elites spend their time crafting legal theories that sound fantastical or even farcical to lawyers who do not belong to their tribe. And when the Supreme Court embraces these theories, they are often impenetrable even to other federal judges.

This legal divide is, of course, symptomatic of a greater rot. Democrats and Republicans are as polarized in Congress and in the broader electorate as they are in the Supreme Court. Consumers divide over whether to buy the liberal brand of blue jeans, coffee, or beer or the nearly identical MAGA version. America is so divided it can’t even celebrate its 250th birthday. As I write these words, the nearly empty Great American State Fair is eclipsed by our head of state’s hyperfixation on an algae bloom and his broader desire to turn our semiquincentennial into a celebration of himself.

But the country does pay a significant price for its bifurcated legal priesthood, above and beyond the broader costs political polarization imposes on us all. The decisions handed down by one faction of this priesthood are increasingly incomprehensible to people outside that faction.

As a result, lawyers cannot reliably advise their clients when the law is constantly shifting and incomprehensible to many of them, and lawmakers cannot know in advance whether the bill they spend years shepherding into law will be struck down by the courts. And ordinary Americans, who may rely on their attorneys for counsel and who relied on lawmakers’ promises that they could actually legislate, can easily lose faith in a system that even lawyers cannot understand.

Meanwhile, the biggest loser may be the Court itself. When the legal priesthood’s nine prelates are unable to explain their decisions in ways lawyers can understand — when the high priests refuse to tell us why they decided cases the way they did or seem to abandon their longstanding beliefs once those beliefs inconvenience their political party — those decisions become fragile. A few shifts in the Court’s makeup could bring even more disruption, as the new guard casts aside decisions they find repulsive or that they simply cannot comprehend. 

In the worst case scenario for this Court, Democratic lawmakers who believe that the justices have weaponized the law against them could retaliate in ways that the Court cannot defend itself against.

The Alitoification of Brett Kavanaugh

One apparent consequence of a polarized legal priesthood is that justices who previously displayed hints of moderation are being pulled deeper into their respective camps — a shift that is embodied by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

In the early years, when Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett were still newly installed on the Court, legal commentators often spoke of a “3-3-3 Supreme Court.” The three Democrats formed one bloc; Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch formed a far right bloc; and Chief Justice John Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett broke with the MAGA justices often enough that they appeared to be collectively more cautious than Thomas or Alito.

In 1st Amendment cases, Kavanaugh joined a six-justice coalition that voted to preserve free speech rights that the most reactionary justices wish to abolish. Kavanaugh ruled that the military, under then–Commander-in-Chief Joe Biden, could require service members to be vaccinated against Covid-19. And he joined the Court’s short-lived decision in Allen v. Milligan (2023), which required Alabama to redraw its congressional maps to include an additional Black-majority district.

Not long after President Donald Trump’s reelection, however, Kavanaugh started acting much like his most partisan colleague, Justice Alito. Shortly before the recent term began, Kavanaugh authored his infamous “Kavanaugh stops” opinion, which argued that a person’s ethnicity is a “relevant factor” that law enforcement may consider when deciding whom to stop, and which also claimed that ICE operations targeting US citizens and lawful residents are a minor imposition that are “typically brief” — words he wrote just a few months before immigration officers killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

While three of Kavanaugh’s Republican colleagues voted to strike down many of Trump’s tariffs, Kavanaugh did not. Kavanaugh also voted to throw out thousands of absentee ballots after the Republican Party asked him to, rejecting a majority opinion by Barrett that devastated the GOP’s legal arguments. 

And Kavanaugh even claimed that the Constitution no longer guarantees that nearly everyone born in this country is a US citizen — a provision that was written into the 14th Amendment in 1868 — because “significant illegal immigration into the United States is a new circumstance that was largely unknown as of 1868.” (Unlike three of Kavanaugh’s fellow Republicans, he did say that a federal statute protects birthright citizenship, even as he tried to rewrite the Constitution.)

Kavanaugh’s conclusion doesn’t just defy the text of the Constitution itself; it also defies Scalia’s principle that constitutional meaning is fixed — a principle that has animated Republican judges’ approach to constitutional interpretation for at least a generation. Republicans inspired by Scalia have spent decades railing against the “living constitution,” the idea that constitutional meaning changes with society. Anyone who has paid attention to how Republicans read the Constitution would have thought that living constitutionalism died years ago. But, apparently, living constitutionalism is good now, so long as it aligns with the Republican Party’s shifting values.

It’s not entirely clear why Kavanaugh made this shift and decided to emulate Alito. It’s entirely possible that he will resume his alliance with Roberts and Barrett once a different mix of cases reach the Court. But that uncertainty about Kavanaugh’s future behavior only adds to the illegibility of this Court.

The Republican justices also abandoned the moral high ground on Roe v. Wade

Another legal concept that Republicans opposed until very recently is substantive due process: the idea that two provisions of the Constitution that prohibit the government from denying people “liberty” without “due process of law” create individual rights that are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.

Substantive due process was used by economic libertarians in the early 20th century to strike down a wide range of workplace regulations, including the minimum wage, the right to unionize, and a law limiting bakery workers to 60-hour work weeks. Substantive due process also played a starring role in Roe v. Wade (1973), the Court’s now-overruled decision establishing a constitutional right to abortion. (The idea was that the right to abortion is such an essential “liberty” that no amount of “process” could justify taking it away.)

Many of the Republican justices have embraced the traditional arguments against substantive due process in their past opinions. Thomas, for example, called it a “dangerous fiction” that “invites judges to … “‘roa[m] at large in the constitutional field’ guided only by their personal views.” Gorsuch railed against “judicial misuse” of substantive due process “to dictate policy on matters that belonged to the people to decide.”

But now that Roe is gone, and Republicans firmly control the Supreme Court, they’ve decided that giving judges free rein to dictate policy based solely on their personal views is a good idea.

In Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026), the Court used substantive due process to declare that public school teachers have a constitutional duty to out transgender students to their parents, with all three Democratic justices dissenting.

The opinion was very short, and it was a temporary decision handed down on the Court’s “shadow docket,” so it is possible that the justices will revisit this issue. But, for now, the Court appears to believe that judges can dictate policy on sensitive questions like whether a high school student can trust his teacher with a secret that the student isn’t ready to share with their parents. The idea that substantive due process is a “dangerous fiction” is suddenly no longer on most of the justices’ minds.

Of course, the fact that the Court now often hands down brief or unexplained decisions on its shadow docket, a mix of emergency motions and other matters the justices decide on an expedited basis, is another reason why this Court is often illegible to outside observers. Before Trump became president, the Court rarely handed down shadow docket decisions, and it typically provided lengthy explanations for any matter it decided.

But, in the absence of an opinion fully explaining why schoolteachers must out trans students, lawyers and lower court judges can do little more than guess which other policies this Court will dictate while it is roaming at large in the constitutional field.

The Supreme Court’s 2nd Amendment decisions are illegible even to other federal judges

Perhaps the most illegible of the Roberts Court’s major decisions is New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), which governs Second Amendment disputes.

Bruen requires judges hearing these cases to ask whether the modern-day gun law that is being challenged in court is “relevantly similar” to a law that existed when the Constitution was written. While the Court has struggled to explain how similar the two laws must be, Bruen did suggest that modern gun laws are especially unlikely to survive if they address “a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century.”

This novel legal test confounded judges. In a 2024 dissenting opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted a dozen lower court opinions, some of them written by Trump appointees, which complained that judges cannot figure out how Bruen is supposed to work.

Bruen also led to absurd results right out the gate. That’s because one example of a general society problem that has persisted since the 18th century is violence between romantic partners — and the law generally ignored this problem until the late nineteenth century. In all 50 states, it was legal for married partners to beat their spouses until 1871, when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that husbands and wives “may be indicted for assault and battery upon each other.” 

And so, just months after Bruen, a federal appeals court struck down the federal law that bars individuals subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing a gun.

When this case, known as United States v. Rahimi (2024), reached the Supreme Court, the justices seemed to back away from Bruen. Though Rahimi did not abandon Bruen’s unusual test, it pointed to founding era laws that have nothing to do with firearms — laws that sometimes required “individuals suspected of future misbehavior to post a bond” that they would forfeit if they “broke the peace” — and deemed this law to be similar enough to the modern day domestic abuser law to survive.

This term, however, the Court heard a challenge to a much more sweeping Hawaii law that required gun owners to get permission from a business’s owner or manager before they could bring a gun on that business’s property. The Hawaii law was drafted this way because four states had nearly identical laws in the 1700s that, in the words of Pennsylvania’s statute, made it illegal to “carry any gun or hunt on the improved or inclosed lands of any plantation, other than his own,” without securing “license or permission from the owner of such lands or plantation.”

And yet, in Wolford v. Lopez (2026), the Republican justices concluded that these nearly identical 18th century laws were not sufficiently similar to Hawaii’s law because, Alito claimed in his majority opinion, the old laws were primarily concerned with preventing poaching.

As a policy matter, it’s easy to see why these two cases came down the way they did. Rahimi involved a narrow law targeting dangerous individuals who had already received a court hearing. The law at issue in Wolford, by contrast, would have effectively banned guns in nearly every public place in Hawaii — because few gun owners are going to enter a business unarmed, find the manager, obtain permission to carry, and then return with their weapon.

But there’s no legal basis for these two outcomes, at least so long as Bruen is good law. The old laws at issue in Wolford are obviously more similar to Hawaii’s law than the old laws at issue in Rahimi were to the ban on gun ownership by domestic abusers. Bruen is unserious. And its legal standard is incomprehensible. 

There’s a difference between an illegible Supreme Court decision, and one that is merely wrong

There are many other recent decisions that are poorly explained, inconsistently applied, or otherwise illegible. 

The Court, for example, has never explained where its “major questions doctrine,” a newly minted theory that it used to block several actions by the Biden administration, actually comes from. It has also never used this doctrine, which Republican justices first articulated in 2014, against any president who isn’t named “Joe Biden” — although the Court’s six Republicans did split 3-3 on whether to apply it to a Republican president in Learning Resources v. Trump (2026), the tariffs case.

Similarly, in Medina v. Planned Parenthood (2025), the Republican justices appeared to create a special carveout to its rules governing which federal laws may be enforced in court in order to ensure that an abortion provider did not prevail in that case. This term, when the Court was confronted with a similar legal issue in a case that did not involve abortion, the justices did not even cite Medina, much less explain why their special rule did not apply to the new case.

At the same time, not every recent Supreme Court decision that involves a politically charged issue, or that divides the Court along partisan lines, can fairly be critiqued as illegible. This includes transformative decisions like Louisiana v. Callais (2026), which effectively repealed a 1982 amendment to the Voting Rights Act that required some states to draw a minimum number of legislative districts that would elect non-white lawmakers.

Callais was rooted in a concept called the “colorblind Constitution” that should be familiar to any law student who has passed their first semester of Constitutional Law. Colorblindness is the idea that laws that seek to create a racial underclass, such as Jim Crow laws, are morally and legally identical to affirmative action and similar programs that offer a benefit to racial groups that have historically been subject to discrimination. And this idea has been a mainstay of conservative judicial opinions involving racial issues for decades. Chief Justice Roberts summarized the colorblind theory of the Constitution nearly twenty years ago in a pithy line: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Similarly, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC (2026), the Court’s latest decision striking down a campaign finance law, is grounded in the Republican Party’s longstanding belief that nearly all regulations of money in politics violate the First Amendment — a position that justices in both majority and dissenting opinions have advanced for decades. Trump v. Slaughter (2026), which gave Trump the power to fire nearly all leaders of “independent” federal agencies, also has a longstanding pedigree; the decision implemented a dissenting opinion that Scalia wrote in 1988.

Whatever else can be said about Callais, NRSC, or Slaughter, in other words, they were all rooted in ideas that have been part of legal debates for generations and that have been part of many law schools’ mandatory coursework for decades. Competent lawyers know how to advise clients on campaign finance law, even if they disagree with NRSC. Law professors know how to teach the concept of colorblindness, even if they think this idea is wrong.

That distinguishes these cases from decisions like Bruen, which require lawyers and judges to play an elaborate game of “why is a raven like a writing desk?” and guess how the justices will answer this unfathomable question. 

It is normal for whichever political faction controls the Supreme Court to implement controversial ideas that have long been endorsed by that faction. The current Court isn’t abnormal because it is conservative. It is abnormal because it frequently cannot articulate the basis of its decisions. It invents incomprehensible legal rules. It baffles judges. And, especially in its shadow docket decisions, this Court often provides no explanation whatsoever for transformative legal rulings.

The Court’s inability to explain itself makes it weak

Right now, as the justices pack up their chambers and get ready for their summer vacations, President Trump is preparing to give a long, droning speech to what has thus far been a barren celebration of America’s 250th birthday. It’s a terrible shame, because the semiquincentennial could have been a unifying event that renewed many Americans’ commitment to our nation’s foundational values. 

As Justice Gorsuch, of all people, said in a recent interview promoting his latest book, the United States is a “creedal nation.” We are not united by a single religion, a single ethnicity, or even a common culture. Instead, says Gorsuch, the American nation is defined by three values articulated 250 years ago in the Declaration of Independence: “all of us are equal,” “each of us has inalienable rights,” and “we have the right to rule ourselves.”

These foundational values are, of course, as much of a myth as the major questions doctrine, or as the idea that the architects of the 14th Amendment — who also created affirmative action programs like the Freedmen’s Bureau — believed in a colorblind Constitution. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, wasn’t just a slaveholder; he was the leader of early America’s Southern political faction that sought to preserve slavery.

But myths have tremendous power. Gorsuch’s theory of America is largely borrowed from the late historian Gordon Wood, who credited the Great Emancipator Abraham Lincoln as the first American leader to find in the Declaration “a solution to the great problem of American identity.” Frederick Douglass spoke of the Declaration as the “RINGBOLT to the chain of your nation’s destiny.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Declaration’s three principles a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.” 

From the pen of one of America’s most morally compromised early leaders came a narrative that inspired generations of Americans to build the world’s most successful liberal democracy.

Like any other priesthood, lawyers and judges also deal in mythology. The stories we tell about why the Constitution was drafted and what it sought to accomplish are sometimes fabricated, and they frequently rely on a selective reading of American history. But these stories are nonetheless powerful. And, when they are told by five or more justices, even Trump has yielded to them.

But the current Court’s inability to tell plausible stories has also weakened it considerably, and it’s causing some of the most prominent figures in US politics to question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. 

In a 2023 interview, Justice Alito complained that his Court is “being hammered daily” by critics of its decisions, and he claimed that lawyers have an obligation to close ranks around him. “The idea has always been that judges are not supposed to respond to criticisms,” Alito said, “but if the courts are being unfairly attacked, the organized bar will come to their defense.” 

Instead, Alito lamented, some lawyers have “participated to some degree in these attacks.”

Unlike Alito, I do not believe that I gave up my First Amendment right to criticize my own government when I swore the oath that admitted me to the bar. But even if I wanted to defend this Court’s behavior, I often do not know how. 

How am I supposed to explain a shadow docket decision that the Court hasn’t even bothered to explain itself? How do I defend justices who’ve abandoned principles that they’ve advocated for decades, and who, again, did so without explaining why? How can I even articulate an argument in favor of Alito’s position that the Constitution, which has guaranteed citizenship to nearly everyone born in the United States for 158 years, suddenly does not?

Nor am I the only one who is experiencing this discomfort and who is beginning to question whether this Court should continue to wield the enormous influence it has over hundreds of millions of people’s lives. 

Last May, former Vice President Kamala Harris joined the growing chorus of Democrats arguing that “the idea of Supreme Court reform, which includes expanding the Supreme Court” should be part of an “expanded playbook” that Democrats might use to defend against a Republican judiciary. Congress may, by enacting a new law, add seats to the Supreme Court that can immediately be filled by the sitting president, although this idea has long been considered too radical for mainstream politicians to consider.

I don’t know which way the winds of politics will blow next. But I do know that, in a world where Donald Trump can become president, many ideas that were once considered far outside the bounds of the possible are now entirely plausible. It’s actually very normal for the United States to elect a Congress and a president that agrees with an idea that was recently articulated by one of the two major parties’ last presidential nominee.

The Republican justices, in other words, are playing with fire when they hand down decisions that are illegible to people, including lawyers, who do not share their values. Many of the Court’s recent decisions seem designed to convince Democrats that the justices are acting arbitrarily, and that they are motivated entirely by partisanship. Those justices should not be shocked if the next time Democrats are in power, they do something about it.

The numbers are clear: President Donald Trump’s approval rating is cratering across the board, and he’s losing the most ground with groups that were key demographics to his win in 2024.

In that election, men under 30 broke for Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris by about a single point — not a lot, but a big improvement for Republicans, who have struggled with young voters. This year, Trump’s approval with that same group has collapsed. A recent CNN poll had him underwater by roughly 55 points with the same group. 

We wanted to understand what’s going on, so America, Actually headed to Washington for Trump’s June 14 UFC event on the South Lawn of the White House. It was a night practically engineered for the White House to speak directly to young men (plus Trump’s own love of combat sports like UFC). My question to attendees was pretty simple: Has their age cohort really turned on Trump, or is this just noise?

What I heard — from the guys standing in line and from Jack Posobiec, the far-right activist who has spent years selling Trump to this audience — is that the softening is real. Three things kept coming up as an explanation: 

1. The economy

Almost every person I talked to came back to prices. Trump’s election was built off the promise of cheaper gas and cheaper groceries — and the very literal receipts haven’t backed that up. As one young man put it to me: “[Trump] said he was anti-war. He said he was gonna lower prices, and we’re just not…That result is just not happening.” 

Another put it more bluntly: “Prices are ridiculous. Don’t even get me started on gas. I don’t even wanna fill my gas tank no more.” A third, who described himself as middle class, said the disconnect was personal: “I want things that affect my life. I wanna see change in my regular day-to-day, and I don’t see that.”

Even Posobiec, who still supports Trump, didn’t dispute that the economy has been a sticking point for young Trump voters who may be drifting away. “Gas prices are up,” he admitted, but “they are coming down.” He also offered the same defense the Trump administration has given: that higher gas prices are simply the price of Trump’s efforts to quash the Iranian nuclear program. (That might not get them very far, however. As of early July, according to an Economist/YouGov poll, 69 percent of young adults disapproved of Trump’s handling of Iran.)

2. Iran and Israel

That’s the second break — and for a lot of these young men, the deepest one. “We didn’t know wars were gonna start with other countries,” one man said. When I asked what single issue they’d want Trump to fix, the answer came fast: “Foreign aid to Israel. A lot less. People are dying, and it just shouldn’t be happening — and we’re paying for that as taxpayers.” His friend agreed: “We don’t want conflict. A lot of young people are on the same page with that.”

This is something Posobiec said that he also hears from young conservatives: “Young men saying, ‘Look, we want more focus on domestic than on foreign policy.’ We heard that a lot today.” 

Posebiec tried to mince definitions — “It’s a war, but it’s not a forever war,” he said — but that’s a hard sell to a group that took Trump at his word. And he conceded the two grievances are fused: “You cannot disassociate the war in Iran with the gas prices and the economic pain people are feeling.”

3. Epstein and the broken trust

The third reason is less about policy and more about a campaign promise betrayed. The Epstein files debacle, and especially the sense that Trump had promised transparency and then stalled, has curdled something with his younger voters. 

“After the Epstein files and everything, [things have] ramped up with how he’s been acting,” one young man said. “It was a lot more chill before that.” Another put it this way: “No one likes pedophiles. The way it’s portrayed, it seems like there’s trying to be some sort of coverup.”

Even Posobiec, himself an infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist who helped build the elites-versus-the-people frame in the first place, thinks Trump’s lack of transparency cost him. “Just rip the Band-Aid off. Throw all the files out there,” he said. His warning was that stonewalling costs Trump the exact connection that the UFC night was meant to celebrate. “It becomes a block between that relationship he’s always had with the average people. ‘We thought you were on our side. Release everything.'”

The takeaway

To be clear: None of this makes these young men Democrats. And most came for the UFC fight, not the president himself. But it’s clear that their support for Trump is much softer than the last election — and, on the economy, on Iran, and on Epstein, they’re telling anyone who’ll listen that they feel differently now. It’s a real shift, and one that could have implications not just in the midterms but for election cycles to come. 

As always, there’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.