I grew up in Indiana and later served as mayor of my hometown, South Bend, while Mike Pence was our governor. My upbringing and my time in local government showed me something that still shapes how I approach politics: that labels like “red,” applied to an entire community or state, tell us far too little about what the people there are really like. Worse, they can limit our imagination for what is truly possible through a better kind of politics.

Part of how I know this is that I saw what happened when we overcame those assumptions. For example, in 2008, I was there when Indiana voted for Barack Obama, the first Democrat to carry the state since LBJ. And as recently as last year, people from across the state and across party lines stood up to massive pressure and intimidation from Donald Trump and JD Vance, refusing to gerrymander Congressional districts any further.

A place can look politically predictable from a distance while, up close, you find something more dynamic and unpredictable - especially when people are frustrated with the status quo and ready for something different.

During my time in national public service, I’ve had the good fortune to visit every part of the country. In the last year and a half alone, I’ve been to more than thirty states, visiting big cities, small towns, swing districts, and plenty of places considered safely Republican. This year especially, everywhere I go I keep encountering the same thing: people who are tired of the chaos and corruption, tired of living with an economy and political system tilted toward the well-connected, and hungry to change directions.

Lately, we have witnessed a concerted strategy by the people running Washington to make the many Americans who feel this way think that they are isolated and powerless. The President and his allies in Washington are skilled in creating that illusion. But the truth is that, on so many of the basic things Americans want from our country, there is already a real majority ready for something different and better.

That’s what I wanted to talk about in this new video. There is an American majority forming around so much of what needs to get done, and over these next 80 days we have the chance to turn that coalition into a winning majority.

Please watch the video, and let me know in the comments what you think.

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In 1921, a mob in Tulsa, Oklahoma, burned forty square blocks of the Greenwood neighborhood’s famed Black Wall Street to the ground. Vernon AME Church was the only Black-owned property in Greenwood to survive the massacre, largely destroyed except for its brick basement (“the Refuge Room”). Three hundred people survived the massacre by hiding in its basement. The Sunday after, with no walls and no roof left, the congregation held church anyway, sitting on chairs salvaged from a local funeral home.

Earlier this year, I found myself on the hallowed ground of Vernon AME, with Pastor Keith R. Mayes Sr., Associate Pastor Francetta Lajuana Mays, and Kristi Williams, whose family lived through 1921. We talked about what was taken that day - not just the lives, but ambition, dreams, generational wealth - and how people lifted each other up in the aftermath to work toward a better future.

One thing was very clear about these extraordinary people and the tradition they keep: they don’t want Vernon known only as a place that survived a massacre. They want it known as a place that’s thriving, one that welcomes everyone, no matter their race, politics, or who they love.

That’s the story this place tells, if you let it: not just how a community survives its worst, but what it builds next, in the name of faith, hope, and love.

To get a sense of the incredibly moving experience of visiting this place, have a look at the video from our visit, and please let me know in the comments below what stayed with you.

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You’ve probably heard of “swatting.” It’s a cruel and dangerous kind of hoax that has started happening more frequently in recent years. Someone anonymously calls 911 with a false report of imminent danger, such as a hostage situation, at the home of a public figure. Law enforcement swarms the house, guns drawn, terrifying the unsuspecting homeowner and family and sometimes even leading to deaths or injuries in the confusion. It’s happened to dozens of lawmakers, judges, celebrities, and others. (When I was in the Cabinet, someone attempted to do this to our home, but fortunately the hoax was quickly detected.) It’s become enough of a problem that the FBI now has a dedicated database to track such incidents.

Now imagine the same concept, but with Child Protective Services instead of a SWAT team. Hadn’t thought of that? Me neither, until a few days ago when a police officer and a CPS worker showed up at our home and politely asked to speak with me.

I showed them in, invited them on the deck so that we could hear each other over the barking dog, and asked what was going on. They explained that there had been an allegation against me, that it concerned our four-year-old twins, and that a forensic interview had been arranged for the children the following day. I could not be present at the children’s interview, nor could any family member sit in. Afterwards, they would come back and interview me. And only then would they tell me anything about the nature of the allegation.

I was bewildered and troubled, but tried to stay calm. I’m used to any number of falsehoods, attacks, and serious problems being thrown my way. What I didn’t understand was what could have led to this kind of visit. Then, the CPS worker told me something that made my stomach turn: I was not to be alone around the children, at least until the interview took place the next day. They asked if I had relatives nearby or could perhaps stay at a hotel for the night.

The officer and the CPS worker wanted to see the children. I invited them to stay until Chasten, who was out running errands and preparing to pick the twins up from summer camp for the day, returned home. When he pulled up in the family car, the kids bounded into the house, looking curiously at the two guests. They were courteous and professional, inviting the kids to inspect the officer’s police car, which fascinated them of course, while the grownups talked in the driveway. We agreed that the kids would stay at their grandparents’ house after our family dinner that night. And then they left.

The twenty-four hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life. I tried to get my head around the idea that I had been accused of something so serious that I couldn’t be alone around my own children, and had consented to have them interviewed by strangers, without my knowing where the accusation had come from or even what it contained.

Many times over the years, I have been denounced, yelled at, protested, threatened, and heckled. I’ve been through political attacks in office, death threats in public life, and rocket attacks in war. But this is the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began.

After spending a sleepless night wondering what the hell was going on, and spending half a day anxiously picturing what our children were going through without their parents, I waited until the appointment time for my “interview” finally came. With the kids back at their grandparents’ house after their appointment in town, and Chasten having been asked to wait upstairs, the officer and CPS worker sat down at our kitchen table with me and my new lawyer.

Then, for the first time, the officer explained what the allegation actually was. An anonymous caller had contacted CPS. The caller said that he had spoken to a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama, where she said I told her that I had committed unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were still at risk.

That was all. The officer had a couple of obvious questions. He asked if I had been to the town where the woman claimed she had met me. I have not. Then the officer made clear that he believed this was politically motivated, and said it would not be referred to a prosecutor. Nothing in the forensic interview with the children, which was conducted by trained personnel, had led to concerns.

After the officer spoke, the CPS worker likewise indicated she had not found anything to substantiate the allegation, though her process would take a bit longer to be formally completed. I no longer needed to avoid being around my children unsupervised. Chasten was invited to come back downstairs and hear the same information that had just been shared with me. Then, per standard procedure, she verified that there was adequate food in our kitchen and asked to take a look at the kids’ bedroom.

After the officer, the CPS worker, and the lawyers all left, Chasten and I hugged each other as tightly as we have any time since the day our son was put on life support as a critically ill infant just weeks after the adoption. We went to get the kids, had dinner with them and their grandparents, brought them home and gave them the most normal bedtime we could - with a few more bedtime books than usual. Then we went and sat under the light at our kitchen table, trying to begin to process our feelings.

Everyone knows politics is ugly these days. It’s always been ugly, but now it feels more and more like bloodsport. Cruelty, lies, and even deadly violence have been directed at political figures across the ideological spectrum. Generally everyone agrees this has to stop, even as our country (and public figures) get all too used to it.

Even so, this is different. My in-laws had to explain to my children, whom we have taught to avoid talking to strangers, that they would need to have a conversation, one at a time and for nearly an hour each, in a place they’d never been, with adults they did not know, who would ask questions we weren’t allowed to know either. For twenty-four deeply distressing hours, we had no idea what I was accused of or what was about to happen. We could not understand someone abusing the system like this in order to hurt me and my family with an absurd and easily refuted allegation of a horrific crime.

The police officer, the CPS professional, and the forensic interviewers who spoke to my children were just following procedure and doing their jobs - admirable jobs that must be incredibly difficult every day, protecting the most vulnerable children from the most horrible threats. When a serious allegation is made, they respond. But in this case, their time and resources were wasted in a cruel, politically motivated hoax that harmed our family.

Now our family is left to deal with the aftermath. I worry about any unseen effects this had on our kids, on Chasten and me, and on the rest of our family. Even though the accusation was absurdly and obviously false, and was promptly rejected by law enforcement, I still worry about the harm it has done. Chasten and I worry about who else might try to do this kind of thing, to us or to others. And at the most basic level, I worry about how anyone, even in today’s world, could fail to respect the absolutely fundamental principle that whatever you think about someone in politics, you leave people’s kids out of it.

I am a reasonable man. I try to keep as calm and low-key as possible. But I cannot describe the mix of rage and sadness that I feel at the idea that someone brought our children into this. They are four years old. Four. They do not know or care what a Democrat or a Republican is. They don’t know how politics works. They don’t know about hate. They should be worrying about what kind of ice cream they’re getting this afternoon, not why they are being brought into a meeting with a grownup asking strange questions or why their Papa is suddenly unavailable to read them a bedtime story. For God’s sake, they are just kids.

I don’t know who did this, or exactly what prompted them to try. It’s not lost on me that this happened soon after we shared photos of our family on social media for Father’s Day. Or that this occurred during a month meant to make families like ours feel welcome and safe. We’re used to nasty, hateful, and sometimes violent things being said about us and even about our family. But this is the first time someone managed to invade our lives like this - and drag our children into it.

To be clear, making a false report of this kind is a crime. That’s as it should be, both to protect the innocent from false accusations, and to preserve the integrity of a process designed to protect children from harm. I don’t know how much we can do about it, but so help me God, if there is any way to press civil or criminal charges over this, we will. Not just for our own sakes but to draw a line that I thought everyone already recognized: do not mess with someone’s kids.

Meanwhile, we will continue to do our work, supporting and speaking out for causes we believe in, according to our values. I’ll continue to stand up against the cruelty and corruption of the people in power today, and I’ll keep making the case for a better future in our country through a better kind of politics. We cannot let American politics keep going in this direction. And we must not all go on as if it’s acceptable for this kind of thing to be part of the cost of entering public service.

Most importantly, Chasten and I will continue to pour ourselves into the joyful and demanding work of raising and educating our two children. Being their parents is the best thing in our lives. They are just children, kids who deserve the best upbringing that their parents can provide, who mean more to us than anything, whom we love beyond words and will do anything to protect, and whose right to a safe and happy childhood deserves absolute and unconditional respect.

To say “the system is broken” hardly qualifies as a hot political take anymore. Just about everyone running for federal office says some version of this.

The real question is what we’re going to do about it.

I worry about what I see as a false choice taking root in the political advisor class, with some arguing that we have to downplay our belief in structural reform so that we can put our emphasis on “kitchen table” economic issues. No doubt, we can and should lead with a strong economic message. But the truth is that if we are to solve the problems people face in their everyday lives, we also have to fix the shape of our democracy, which currently prevents us from getting done many of the bold, common-sense steps toward lower costs, higher pay, and fairer taxes - steps that most Americans already agree on.

Health care remains unaffordable for many. The median age of a first-time homebuyer has risen to 40. Americans are carrying record credit card debt. Families still lack paid leave, sick leave, affordable childcare, and eldercare despite broad public support for addressing all of the above.

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To tackle all this, we have to confront the reasons why so many popular and effective solutions never become reality. And that has to do with our system itself.

Money in politics has gone way, way too far. Gerrymandering has become absurdly extreme, allowing politicians to choose their voters instead of voters choosing them. The legitimacy of the Supreme Court is in free fall. Only a handful of our most important federal elections are even competitive, despite this being a supposedly fifty-fifty country. And we remain the only presidential democracy in the world where the person who gets fewer votes can become president instead of the person who got the most votes.

No one should expect a system that broken to somehow deliver excellent economic policy. It’s barely even capable of operating. And that’s why reforming our political system isn’t separate from addressing kitchen table issues; it’s a big part of how to do so.

If we expect government to lower costs, expand opportunity, and deliver for working families, we have to fix a political system whose weaknesses and flaws are standing in the way of a better everyday life for us all.

I recently visited Butte, Montana, for a town hall with citizens organizing around a ballot initiative to reduce the influence of corporate money in politics. We talked about why reform matters more than ever.

Watch the clip above on why democracy reform is a kitchen table issue - and let me know what you think should be priority number one.

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It’s Tax Day 2026: a date that makes plain some of the most basic facts about the relationship between our government and the people. In principle, the deal is simple enough: we all contribute something from our income, to fund a government that we expect to deliver things that we need in order to live well. We trust the government with a portion of our paycheck, expecting in return that it will provide modern services and a functioning society.

Of course, in reality, the deal is tattered at best, broken at worst. This is true in so many ways, some of which are discussed widely, and some not nearly enough. So I want to be specific about some of the realities of being a taxpayer in our country, laid bare this April 15th. The more we look, the clearer it is who the administration is working for: probably not you and your family.

The administration is actively making it harder than it needs to be to file.

Filing taxes is never fun. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Americans are far, far too accepting of a status quo in which the whole process is slower, more expensive, and more complicated than it should be. This country was actually well underway on a solution to that, making it less painful and more straightforward to file - but then the Trump administration killed it off.

The improved system was called Direct File, and it has already been built. It’s a free, online IRS tool that lets you file your federal taxes directly with the government. No middleman, no hidden fees, no spending hours and hours on something that most other developed countries have figured out how to make simple. For the people who used Direct File in a pilot program, it worked remarkably well: 94% rated their experience excellent or above average, higher than customers rate any major financial services company in the country. Its actual cost to taxpayers was $16 million (about one-thousandth of the total IRS budget). This year it was supposed to be rolled out further, reaching 32 million eligible filers across 25 states.

But when Trump regained power, his IRS shut it down - calling it too expensive when in reality it was one of the most cost-efficient innovations in modern government. Why eliminate a cost-effective, well-liked new technology that makes life easier for Americans? The answer is as simple as it is corrupt: a lot of people make a lot of money from the existing, unpleasant system, the kinds of people who get their calls returned by this White House. So the Trump administration chose to protect the revenue stream of tax prep companies that have spent more than $93 million lobbying Washington since 2003 (more, that is, than the entire cost of the Direct File system) to make sure a free government option never took hold. Intuit alone, the company behind TurboTax, accounts for more than $47 million of that.

And Direct File is only part of the story. The IRS has shed more than 25,000 employees over the past year, which means it’s easier for cheaters to get away with it, and harder for you to get help as an honest taxpayer. The division that processes your tax return hired exactly fifty people ahead of this filing season - missing their own hiring goal by 98%. The agency has lowered its telephone customer service targets. And the administration has paused or canceled the modernization efforts meant to move our most critical tax database off of COBOL - a programming language that predates the first moon landing.

None of this was inevitable. They actively made filing your taxes harder and more expensive. On purpose. And then insulted our intelligence by calling it reform.

Taxes are being cut for billionaires - at the expense of working people.

While you’ve been navigating that system, the tax code itself is being rewritten in real time - and not in your favor.

Many giant corporations paid zero in federal income taxes last year on billions in profits. The average billionaire pays a lower effective tax rate than the average millionaire, not to mention a typical teacher or a nurse. This isn’t an accident. It’s the result of a code successfully tilted - through decades of lobbying and legislative maneuvering - to make sure the status quo benefits those who are already best off.

And the administration’s signature legislative priority was to add roughly $1 trillion more in tax cuts, flowing overwhelmingly to the top 1%. Not to the family running a small business. Not to the nurse already paying a higher effective rate than her bosses’ bosses’ boss. Rather, the benefits went to the people who have the most, whose lobbyists have long had the upper hand in Washington and are having a field day in the Trump era.

Of course, if one hand gives, another takes away - from the rest of the taxpayers. The same budget that found $1 trillion for the wealthiest Americans is simultaneously cutting Medicaid and SNAP for the nearly 30 million people who rely on those programs to keep food on the table and doctor’s visits within reach. These are not separate decisions. They are two sides of the same coin, illustrating who this government really serves.

How a government chooses to tax - and whom it chooses to protect - shows you the priorities of its leaders. This administration’s priority could not be clearer.

Meanwhile, our tax dollars are going to things nobody voted for - leaving even less for what we actually need.

Let us also account for how quickly this administration’s professed concern for fiscal restraint disappears, depending on who stands to benefit. In addition to finding $1 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires, they have demonstrated repeatedly that money is never really the obstacle when the President feels like doing something expensive with our tax dollars.

The most glaring example right now is the war in Iran - launched without a clear objective or definition of victory - where they are willing to spend an estimated $1 billion a day of our tax dollars, with no end in sight. This from an administration that just put forward a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget request - thousands of extra dollars for every household in this country.

How do they pay for this? Cutting housing, cutting funding for local communities, cutting science, cutting public schools, cutting health care, cutting funding for roads and bridges…. In other words, your pocket is being picked twice to pay for this war - first your tax bill, then the loss of services you depend on.

This is where your money goes - and then, when Americans ask why we can’t have the services that other developed countries enjoy, fiscal restraint suddenly returns. We are told these are luxuries the government simply cannot afford. And the cuts, inevitably, land on people who do not have the means to pay dues at Trump’s private clubs or write a million-dollar check to construct his gilded White House ballroom.

This was never about how much money there is. It’s about how it gets spent, and who benefits.

But I didn’t write this to depress you. I wrote it to energize you for the work ahead. After all, while Tax Day illustrates our relationship with our government, so does Election Day. We have the last word, and it falls on us to ensure that the government works for the people. If you’re as upset as I am about how our taxes are collected and used, take it as propulsion to work for a different and better system, one that is actually fair.

That is not just a job for politicians; everyone owns a piece of this work. It means noticing what’s happening, naming it, discussing it, and organizing around it. It means rising up - as Americans have done by the millions over the last year - to demand that the administration and its enablers in Congress change. It means doing the math. It particularly means engaging people we know who may have voted for this president but are now having second thoughts - not to browbeat them but to welcome them to a new and different coalition.

Our job isn’t just to oppose what’s happening. It’s to show that it doesn’t have to be this way, and illustrate what we could have instead of what we’ve got. Americans deserve a government whose priorities actually reflect ours as a people - on Tax Day, on Election Day, and every single day.

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On Friday, I went to Chicago to join thousands of participants, ranging from current and former heads of state to ordinary worshipers from around America, gathering to pay our respects to the family and honor the memory of the Rev. Jesse Jackson at the House of Hope on the city’s South Side.

Watching his historic presidential campaign on television as a child, I never imagined that I would one day get to know Rev. Jackson personally. From the first time we met during my 2020 campaign, to the discussions and engagements we had on access to transportation and infrastructure jobs during my time as Secretary, I learned a great deal from him - and came in particular to admire his unflagging focus on the future.

Even though his place in history was secure by the time of his thirtieth birthday, and even as his body failed him late in life, he never tired in fighting to advance racial and economic justice, always pressing America to come nearer to its highest ideals. His example is especially important for us all in these times.

Of the personal memories of Reverend Jackson that I carry, some of the strongest come from walking at his side at the commemoration of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. That commemoration was held once more this weekend, and his spirit was on everyone’s minds as we gathered near the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Sunday.

First came the Martin & Coretta King Unity Breakfast, where I had the honor of sharing a few reflections. (You can watch my remarks or read the full text below.) Then, in the historic Tabernacle Baptist Church, words and prayers called us to do right by the memory of those heroes who put everything on the line in that historic struggle.

Later, on the bridge itself, where about six hundred civil rights marchers in 1965 faced down brutal violence with nothing to protect them but their unyielding faith and the justice of their cause, we marched and sang, in a throng that ranged from children participating for the first time, to some of the civil rights foot soldiers who were there themselves on that historic day.

Being in the presence of those moral giants was both humbling and inspiring. Their physical courage, and their irrepressible sense of hope and faith, leave our generations with no excuse to back down or check out in our own time. We have our work cut out for us, and will until America truly lives up to its promise of liberty and justice for all.

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Thank you. Dr. Griffin, good morning.

Thank you for the warm welcome. Thank you, Senator [Hank] Sanders and Faye Rose Touré for the invitation to be here and acknowledge so many great leaders here, including the mayor, my fellow mayor. So glad to see the work that you’re doing here in the city. Members of Congress, including Mr. Clyburn and Terri Sewell. And I’m mindful of the memory of Dr. LaFayette being with us as we gather.

It is fitting today, more than ever, that we hold in mind the events of 61 years ago that have forever linked the name of Selma with the struggle for civil rights and racial and economic justice in America. And we know that maintaining that memory is important today, partly because we are beginning to see how much effort has gone into suppressing the memory and the history of what has happened in this country.

From university courses about Black history to museums and National Park Service sites like the home of Medgar and Myrlie Evers and the Emmett Till National Monument, we are seeing the keepers of history being pressured to censor depictions of the struggle under the slanderous excuse that telling the truth about our past is, quote, “disparaging America.”

Nothing could be further from the truth.

When we recognize the struggle of the heroes of Bloody Sunday, we are honoring America in its best sense, because the best thing that has happened in America is the courage of those who saw America’s promise clearly enough that they could not tolerate the way things were.

The past and the present are always interconnected.

It’s part of why, when I had the honor of serving as Secretary of Transportation, I worked with Congresswoman Sewell to bring $36.6 million here for the Selma to Montgomery Trail. Now I wish I was just here mentioning that to take a victory lap about it, but that funding was canceled by the current administration in a budget that redirected those dollars toward tax cuts for billionaires and more federal agents on our streets.

But we will not give up on that project nor will we give up on the importance of recognizing our own history.

And in all of the work ahead of us we need to insist that things become better, not just better than today but better than before. And in this we can emulate those moral giants—not just their physical courage in standing up for what they fought against, but their clarity in what they were fighting for.

They were not just fighting against the long arm of the Confederacy, against the mockery of justice that was Jim Crow, against the way things were—they were fighting for the future that Dr. King envisioned and described.

They were fighting for what America ought to, and still might, become.

And so must we.

This is hardly the first season in which the wealthy have made themselves more and more powerful in collusion with the powerful making themselves more and more wealthy—all at the expense of political equality and economic opportunity.

Today, we use words like “unprecedented,” but the truth is our times are more precedented than we would care to admit.

So amid the abuses of this moment, we’ve got to be clear that we are not working to restore some old status quo. We are not trying to make America anything “again.” Because there is no “again” in the real world.

We are here to deliver something new, which means when we do look to the past, we recognize the quality of the heroes like Dr. King, and like John Lewis, and like Jesse Jackson and so many others—it was how focused they all were on the future.

And they counsel us not to give up.

They don’t just say “don’t give up.”

They say “don’t you dare give up.”

Knowing what they were up against, we do not have the right to give up on the struggle for voting rights.

We do not have the right to give up in the struggle for universal health care, or affordable child care, and affordable housing for everybody.

We have no right to give up in the fight for high-quality, fully funded public schools, or our demand that the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes, or our insistence that if you use deadly force on American streets, you must at the very least get a warrant and show your face.

We do not dare give up our work building what must be built for the future.

Sometimes we run the risk of looking at those moral giants of the past and ourselves shrinking a little bit, because how could we ever measure up.

But the other way to think about it is to look at those examples of the past and not be paralyzed, but propelled.

And Scripture has a little bit to say about this, because in the book of Hebrews, we are reminded of those great prophets of old, and they are called for us “a cloud of witnesses.”

Hebrews 12:1 tells us: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

The race is marked out for us in our time. And how dramatically so.

So are we ready to throw off everything that hinders and run that race marked out for us and do it well?

I know that we are.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here. Thank you.

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As I write, four Americans have now given their lives in this new war. We mourn for the patriots who raised their right hands and took an oath to put everything on the line, willing to go wherever their government said they were needed, sacrificing all for our country.

The President who sent them into harm’s way assures us that they will not be the last to fall. More Americans will lose their lives, he has said, because “that’s the way it is.” Today he has signaled that he would not rule out sending ground troops into the conflict.

We all know that the most serious, sober, and important job of a president is to decide whether and when to order troops into combat. Because American lives are on the line, and because of the dreadful cost of war, it is to be done only when there is no real alternative. A last resort.

But no one seriously believes that is what happened here. America is at war, and the President shows little interest in justifying it to the American people, let alone seeking a declaration from Congress as required by American law.

When he does try to state a reason, he cannot keep his story straight on why or what the objective is. Sometimes it’s regime change, which he’d promised he would not use American blood and treasure to pursue. Sometimes it’s a nuclear threat, which he told us last year had been obliterated.

What we know for sure is that the President and his wealthy friends will not bear the burden - they will continue to enjoy their enormous tax cuts, while telling us health care and food stamps must be cut because we can’t afford them. He announced these strikes from a private club for the extremely wealthy that he owns, as if to illustrate how little this has to do with what’s best for ordinary Americans.

And that’s who will pay the price. Americans know this war will do nothing to help - and will very likely hurt - when it comes to the biggest challenges we face, especially the cost of living.

Billions of taxpayer dollars are now flowing to the Middle East instead of going toward pressing needs at home. Prices will rise. The debt will grow. The economy will become even less stable, and Washington will be even less capable of facing urgent needs at home.

Here, as in so many other areas, the President is not an unstoppable force. After all, under this country’s Constitution, it is Congress that has the power to declare war. Now Congress must do its job and rein in the President’s recklessness — and at the very least require him to explain and justify his reckless course of action. If service members are putting their lives on the line in combat, the absolute minimum our representatives can do is put their name on the line to take an up or down vote on sending them there.

Repeatedly, especially in the past year, we have seen that this Congress and even the White House can be compelled to change course when the American people speak up loudly and clearly enough. We, the people, must be clear in demanding accountability from our leaders, never more so than in matters of war and peace.

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We know what we are up against right now, which makes it more important than ever to think in terms of coalition. The stakes of the moment, and the nature of our nation’s problems, should compel us even more than usual to reach out to others - including those who might not agree with us - and find new forms of common ground. That urgent necessity is also a kind of opportunity.

For example, libertarians have often been at odds with Democrats, and are sometimes lazily lumped in with conservatives as if they were the same thing, when principled libertarians have a distinct set of views that sets them apart in important ways from both traditional left and right in this country. And right now, whatever disagreements we may have with libertarians in some policy realms, we can surely agree that abuses of power and unchecked federal overreach are unacceptable.

Given so much of what we’ve seen from this administration over the past year - from ICE killing US citizens in our very own streets to expanded tactics of surveillance, intimidation, and control - I wanted to engage directly with libertarians to talk about how and where we could unite.

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That’s why I joined Reason, which is one of the longest-running libertarian news outlets in America, for an extended conversation about how we can find terms of coalition to push back on the Trump administration’s abuses. The point was not to minimize the differences that we might have - there are plenty, some of which emerged during the conversation - but to candidly and respectfully engage around the many areas where we can align at a time like this.

People and movements that don’t perfectly overlap can and must find common cause in defending our core American freedoms. And right now, if we’re serious about protecting the values we all hold dear, we need to build a broader alliance than any one party or side can do on its own.

Watch part of the conversation above, or catch the full discussion on YouTube.

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For a lot of us, the turning of the year brings a look back at one year’s worth of decisions, moments, and events - and a renewal of resolve for what to make of the year ahead. To put it mildly, 2025 brought a new volume of things to deal with, and learn from - and 2026 is approaching with a new kind of urgency.

I shared some in the video above - about all we’ve been through this past year as a country and, most importantly, what we have the opportunity to build next year. I hope you’ll take a moment to watch, and that you’ll share your own thoughts on how you plan to build hope through concrete action in the year ahead.

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Chasten and I are wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday season, and a very Happy New Year.

See you in 2026.

I’ve known for about two decades, dating back to when we were students. Back then, we could never have imagined all the ways we would get to work together - but what doesn’t surprise me is that he has pursued a life of public service, or that he has already made a major and positive difference through his leadership.

Yesterday, I had the chance to sit down with him for a conversation moderated by to discuss something that’s been on both of our minds - the disturbing trend of Trump using federal funds as a tool for political revenge, hurting countless Americans along the way through what Andy correctly describes as “mob boss politics.”

A recent, dramatic expression of this has come in the form of the President himself announcing that he has “terminated” one of the largest and most important construction projects in America today: the Gateway Tunnel Project. To him, this is just something that Chuck Schumer likes, and therefore an opportunity to punish Democrats. But to hundreds of thousands of commuters who pass through these tunnels every day - not to mention tens of thousands of construction workers delivering the new tunnels - this is about safety and economic strength.

This is the biggest, but far from the only, example of critical infrastructure – roads, bridges, tunnels, transit - turned into bargaining chips to reward friends or punish perceived enemies. But the worst impacts aren’t on political figures the President dislikes - they’re on Americans just trying to live their lives. When federal funding that’s already been secured is held hostage, the message to commuters, workers, and communities is clear: political games matter more than you do.

When I was funding and supporting projects around the country as Secretary of Transportation, we didn’t ask the question “how did this place vote?” We focused on how we could help, which meant we sent funds to conservative and liberal areas alike. We funded small street safety projects in thousands of locations around America. And we funded the Gateway Tunnel modernization because the loss or failure of those tunnels would have economic implications that we would feel as far away from New York as my Michigan home.

If this behavior by the Trump administration continues - and congressional Republicans who know this is wrong fail to stand up to it - then all of us will be worse off in the long run. No matter how you voted, you deserve better than to be treated as a pawn in the President’s political game.

I hope you’ll watch the full conversation above.

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Chasten’s been re-sealing the floor of the garage, which has meant emptying out everything that was in there, so things are resurfacing that have been in boxes for a very long time. One item that turned up in the resulting pile of “old stuff for Pete to sort through” was a tan, zippered case a little larger than a hockey puck. My old gun cleaning kit.

I opened it, probably for the first time since I returned from Afghanistan in 2014, and right away I was transported back to the day it was issued to me as a Navy lieutenant at Camp McCrady in South Carolina. One look at the contents of the case - the various metal brushes, the little tube of gun oil, the interlocking machined attachments to get the brushes into the right crevices of your rifle - and I saw myself back in training, asking the drill sergeant if the M4 rifle component I’d been scouring was clean enough to pass.

“Nope,” he answered, barely looking up at it.

“OK, how much cleaner does it have to get?” I said, trying to make out any sign of dirt at all on the shining bit of metal.

“Like, clean enough to eat off of.”

I was what they called an Individual Augmentee, the kind of Navy Reservist who does not deploy with his unit but instead mobilizes alone, to join some other unit underway that needs to fill a billet. In my case it was an Army billet, which meant I needed to learn a basic level of - well, Army stuff, like how to handle myself in a desert village. Accordingly, every few weeks the Navy gathered up a couple hundred “dirt sailors” like myself who were preparing to mobilize, and sent us to combat training at a facility that included a simulated area of the kind we might be navigating during our deployment. The place was just vague enough to plausibly be Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, or some other war-torn populated area. Our rifles and pistols loaded with blanks, we ran through situations from clearing a building to determining how to deal with a stranger unexpectedly approaching our vehicle. The point of training there, of course, was to learn how to stay alive and take care of your troops in foreseeable scenarios, to make your mistakes here first, while the stakes were still low.

Finding that gun cleaning kit was the second time in the past few weeks that I’ve thought back to that training, those days of simulations we went through before the deployment. The other time it came to mind was when I heard President Trump suggest that US cities should be “training grounds” for the military. Any war veteran can tell you exactly what a training ground for the military looks like - and it couldn’t be more different than an American city, full of American civilians going about their lives.

The most fundamental, obvious fact about a military is that it is for fighting and winning wars. And the great paradox of defense is that the better our military is at doing so, the less likely it will have to. And that makes all of us safer. This is, by law and by common sense, a completely different function from law enforcement in American cities. And outside of extreme situations like a natural disaster, it is a matter of law, as well as custom, that the military is not used for anything that even resembles domestic law enforcement.

Yet the President is determined to use the military as if its job were to patrol whichever corners of America are out of favor with him personally. Worse, he and his Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, have repeatedly used our service members as props in a partisan game, something that runs counter to the sacred principle that you leave politics aside the moment you put on your uniform as an American service member.

Uniformed troops are being deployed to communities whose leaders have made clear they are not needed - putting these service members in a terrible situation. To be clear, this has nothing to do with being able to quickly respond to legitimately dangerous situations. (For the administration’s true priorities on emergency response, look no further than Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision earlier this year to sit for 72 hours on urgent requests for help with Texas flooding, while search and rescue teams waited for her to finally authorize them to deploy and save lives.) If anything, this is intended to increase tension and potentially violence on the ground, turning ordinary protests into dangerous confrontations that can then be exploited after the fact to justify even more militarization. Nor is this really about crime - indeed, the same local law enforcement agencies that have driven crime down over the years in these cities could do even more if given even a fraction of the massive cost of these deployments to work with locally.

Worst of all, the President has repeatedly referred to Americans - not foreign adversaries, but Americans who criticize him - as “the enemy” and even as “vermin,” sending the message that he is more interested in crushing those who dare to oppose him politically than the actual enemy that our military trains to confront.

These actions have been so unrelenting and are executed with such faux confidence by Trump and his appointees that it would be easy to miss the simple and extremely important fact that Americans aren’t falling for it. A strong majority of the American people disapprove of these actions, knowing they do not make us safer and recognizing that the politicization of the military, and the militarization of policing, makes everyone worse off.

So what can we do about it? Between elections, one important answer continues to be applying political pressure on Trump’s enablers in elected office. Republican Members of Congress, many of them veterans, know deep down that this is wrong. After all, the specter of federal troops or masked federal agents being turned against Americans is the sort of image that conservatives used to invoke while making the case for restraints on federal power. Their constituents need to remind them that their job is to stop these kinds of abuses, and that they will be held politically accountable if they fail to do so.

And it’s not too soon to be thinking about what will happen to our military when Trump, inevitably, exits the American political scene. Those in uniform are continuing to show integrity, from junior enlisted personnel caught up in this madness all the way up to the generals and admirals who kept their military bearing through Pete Hegseth’s juvenile applause lines at the infomercial-like presentation they were recently forced to sit through at Quantico. Those in uniform are doing their best, consistent with their oath to the Constitution. The rest of us will have a responsibility to make sure they are never put in this situation again, for all our sakes.

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One of the biggest problems in our politics is that we seem to experience it as a kind of show - or, lately, a circus - crowding out the blunt reality that we all actually live politics, not as a show but as a process that shapes our everyday life.

The absurdity and drama of our politics, especially today, makes it harder to focus on the actual consequences of it all, the most important part: its very direct impact on our families, freedoms, incomes, homes, and health.

Consider the media coverage of the Trump administration’s most notorious appointees. From the judiciary to the arts, Trump is installing people who are spectacularly unqualified, extreme, and often bizarre - which, of course, draws attention toward their wild personalities and disqualifying views. Fair enough. But this can actually mean that not enough attention goes toward what is most dangerous about them, which is how they are using their new power to make our lives worse.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is perhaps the most glaring example of this. Much attention has rightly been paid to the sheer strangeness of this man. That’s why putting him in charge of public health was a darkly clever act of theater on Trump’s part, trolling the doctors and medical experts whom the president has taught his followers to hate. But this is about more than theatrics or trolling - we have reached the stage where you and I are finding our options, our freedom, and our health are directly worsened by the actions of this very powerful government official.

When you go in for a Covid shot this fall, as you have done the last few years, you might suddenly find that you can’t get one, because RFK Jr. has stripped eligibility for the vaccine from most adults under 65 years old.

If you are a parent in Florida in back-to-school mode, you have been robbed of some peace of mind, because the RFK Jr.-aligned surgeon general there has terminated the vaccine mandates that prevent so many diseases from running rampant in classrooms and playgrounds. In other words, your family is being denied a basic public health protection, the assurance of a vaccinated student body, which modern societies have long taken for granted.

And your future health just got worse too, in ways that are harder to predict but just as direct, because this administration has terminated $500 million in research to develop safe, effective immunizations using the same technology that brought us the Covid vaccine. Who knows how many of us might one day find that our lives are saved by such a vaccine - or at risk because it does not exist.

The problem with RFK Jr. isn’t just that he’s a quack who makes a mockery of the idea of science and medicine in public policy. The problem is that he’s a quack with power over your health, and he’s using his power to hurt you.

So what are we supposed to do about it? The answer we hear all too often is that “elections have consequences,” which is true - but most of us want to be able to address these harms without waiting for the next Election Day. So for now, the most important thing we can do is apply political pressure a little closer to home. That includes engaging your state and local health officials, who can either stand up against this damage or go the way of the Florida surgeon general. It includes getting the attention of Members of Congress who have oversight of RFK Jr. and his department (and tellingly, even Republican Senators are clearly becoming uncomfortable with their own support for him). And it includes speaking with neighbors, family members, and friends who may no longer trust what they hear in the media, no matter how reputable the source, but still trust their doctors, and just might trust you.

Whether it’s the Trump budget cuts to Medicaid or the Trump administration letting RFK Jr. wreck our nation’s defenses against disease, it’s clear that this administration is actively making America less healthy. But as with any democratic society - even our very troubled one - it is up to us, the people, to take responsibility for what happens next.

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I recently spoke with Dr. Jill McMullen, a rural health care provider in western Wisconsin. Over the course of her 30-year career - beginning in the Navy and continuing through her work today - she’s seen firsthand how decisions made in Washington directly affect the fragile health systems that so many communities depend on.

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Rural hospitals are, of course, essential to the communities they serve - and Dr. Jill made an important point that they’re also part of a broader, critical infrastructure that connects all Americans. Any one of us, or someone we love, could come to rely on them in an unexpected moment or emergency. When these hospitals are forced to cut services or shut down, it’s not just a local issue. It makes all of us less healthy and safe.

The reality is that Trump’s budget passed Congress and he signed it into law. But now we all have a role to play as citizens - to hold those who voted for this cruel and harmful bill politically accountable, and to lay the groundwork to deliver something better. It’s not too late to take action that would improve health care delivery, and secure enough funding to prevent clinics and hospitals from closing their doors in this decade.

You may have followed this issue closely, as I have. But many people in our lives have tuned out the political debates of our time, out of frustration or fatigue or just skepticism that any of this matters to them. We can do something about that too - and it’s why I want to keep having conversations like this. The best way to cut through the headlines and bring the statistics to life is to share the real, human stories that show what’s truly at stake.

I’m grateful to Dr. Jill for taking the time to talk with me and share what she’s seeing on the ground. I hope you find the conversation as informative as I did - and as always, please leave a comment below to join in.

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We talked about several of the major challenges Americans are facing, and I also shared the story of what first motivated me to run for office and how those campaigns still shape my work today.

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Fifteen years ago in Indiana, I saw a chance to stand up for the recovery of the auto industry against a political extremist who was trying to prevent its rescue - and mounted a long-shot campaign to offer a different vision for the future of the industrial Midwest. We didn’t win, but I learned priceless lessons about how to build bridges through politics, and about the stakes of our political struggles.

Hope you enjoy watching - and leave a comment below to join the conversation.

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Too many Washington policy debates are treated as if they’re just theoretical or purely political. But what really matters the most is what these decisions mean for people's lives.

This week, as the Senate was voting to cut Medicaid and kick more than ten million people off of their health insurance, I spoke with Stacy – a mom of twin girls who were born very premature, one of whom requires 24/7 care for a chronic lung condition to this day – focusing on how this bill will impact Americans outside of Washington.

The family’s employer-based health insurance only goes so far. And Medicaid is the only thing making it possible for Stacy’s daughter to live at home instead of in a medical facility - it is the bedrock of their everyday life.

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Policy debates sometimes become abstract or academic, but for families like Stacy’s, changes to Medicaid can have immediate and foundational consequences.

As the bill heads back to the House, I’m grateful to Stacy for sharing her story and using her voice to make sure politicians know exactly how much their choices matter.

If this bill becomes law - it will impact all of us in some way or another, and ultimately it will be up to every citizen to hold these elected officials accountable with our voices and our votes.

I often say politics matters because it’s personal to our everyday lives. In moments like this, telling our own stories is one of the most powerful ways each of us can have an impact. I hope you’ll watch our conversation, share Stacy’s story with your own friends and family, and let people in your life know just how much is at stake for you too.

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Our conversation was timely, with Senate votes on Trump’s budget playing out as we spoke. We talked about the major, harmful, and deeply unpopular pillars of this bill: trillions in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, massive increases to the deficit, and kicking millions of hard-working Americans off their health care.

I was glad to talk with Jon because he was a rare kind of Senator, unafraid to break ranks when he believed it was the right thing to do for the people he served. Much will depend on how many Republican Senators today are prepared to do the same.

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I’ve already had a lot to say about this bill - the harms it will do, and the possibility of stopping those harms now. Even if the passage of a GOP budget is certain in some form, the American people can and should stop the worst of the damage this bill would do, by demanding Congress do better than what they’ve come up with so far.

The bill is already unpopular, and for good reason. While working families are struggling to pay their bills because of the Trump administration’s policies, this budget would raise costs even further and make everyday life harder. The current version kicks millions of Americans off their health insurance, cuts taxes for the wealthy, and adds trillions to the deficit. This has been extensively covered, and it helps to explain why Americans have a dim view of this bill. Its three most well-known attributes are unpopular because they are terrible.

But there are other, quieter measures in the bill that are also harmful, and importantly, they could affect the bill’s fate… if more people learn about them. At best, we might be able to stop them from becoming law; and if they do get enacted, we can and must ensure a serious political price for the politicians responsible. Here are a few that I have learned about and that deserve much more attention:

New Requirements and Red Tape for the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC): The CTC and EITC are popular because they work. They have cut child poverty, increased household income, and strengthened America’s working and middle class. They are such successful policies that few politicians directly oppose them. But Republicans see a way to free up money for tax cuts for the rich by adding new and burdensome requirements to make it harder to access these tax credits. It’s yet another example of reverse-Robin-Hood tax policy, funding a wealth transfer toward the rich by taking resources away from lower- and middle-income taxpayers. Americans need to know that these changes could affect them or people they care about, and should insist Congress look elsewhere for cuts.

Blocking You from Directly Filing Your Taxes: Do you love doing your taxes, and find the existing IRS process easy to work with? Me neither. There’s a solution in the form of a new free tax-filing program that allows Americans to file their taxes directly - but Republicans are looking to kill it. This technology is already commonplace in other developed countries, and millions of U.S. taxpayers are already participating in the early version of Direct File, saving them time and money (the average American spends $270 and 13 hours filing their taxes using the old system). Over the next few years, this faster, better, simpler system could be the new normal for us all. But as you might imagine, tax prep websites and companies that profit from a complicated status quo are strongly opposed to it. And apparently, so is Donald Trump. Why would Congress block a free tax-filing program that saves us time and money? I suggest calling your Representatives’ and Senators’ offices to ask them.

Putting More Gun Silencers On the Street. House Republicans have even figured out a way to use this tax bill to worsen gun violence. Right now, there is a registration requirement and a tax associated with purchasing a silencer, based on laws we have had in this country since the 1930s. America has long regulated silencers as a matter of common sense. And the problems silencers create, especially by making it harder for first responders to do their job, has become even more serious in our era of frequent mass shootings. But the Republican megabill would eliminate this registration process altogether. Most Americans think that this proposal is a bad idea, when asked - but most Americans don’t know it’s in the bill to begin with. Which means all of us should be doing more to get the word out before it becomes law.

These are just a few examples. My broader point is that learning about these less-famous parts of the bill, alongside the blockbuster harms like the deficits and Medicaid cuts, is urgent. There are good resources available to better understand its contents, including here, here, and here.

Some might think this is depressing, that knowing about these additional harms just makes the big picture even more discouraging. I think we should take them as propulsion. This administration and its Congressional enablers are not the unstoppable steamroller they would like you to think they are. The truth is that they have repeatedly shown that they will, well, chicken out on a bad policy if they face enough public opposition. (To take an example from this context, the bill originally also included a tax break on indoor tanning services, but Republicans were so embarrassed when it came to light that they’ve since abandoned it.)

It matters that we get the word out about these provisions. It can change what happens next, not based on Congressional inside baseball but based on public opinion. That work falls to us, not them. We, the people, can make our voices heard on this - and if Representatives and Senators don’t listen, then it will be up to us to make sure they are held accountable.

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I’m always glad for the opportunity to talk with Reverend Barber - a prophetic voice and servant leader I’ve long admired, and whose moral clarity and sense of coalition-building seems to matter more with each passing year.

As Congress considers what Reverend Barber rightly calls Trump’s “Big Ugly Bill,” much of our conversation today focused on what that bill would do to poor and working people across this country. Every budget is a moral document. It shows, in dollars and cents, who you care about - and just as importantly, who you don’t. And in this case, it is a naked attempt to transfer wealth from the poorest to the wealthiest in our country.

Trump and his allies are counting on us to be lulled into believing all of this is inevitable. It’s not, and it’s up to us to stand up and speak out.

One way to do that is by participating in Reverend Barber’s Moral Mondays in DC, including a significant action coming up on June 30th. If you’re able, I hope you’ll consider joining them.

Thanks for watching. Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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By “we,” I mean American society in general, but also the political and policy world in particular, certainly including the Democratic Party.

And when I say we’re “underprepared,” I don’t just mean for the physically dangerous or potentially nefarious effects of these technologies, which are obviously enormous and will take tremendous effort and wisdom to manage. But I want to draw more attention to a set of questions about what this will mean for wealth and poverty, work and unemployment, citizenship and power, isolation and belonging.

In short: the terms of what it is like to be a human are about to change in ways that rival the transformations of the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution, only much more quickly.

I’ll have much more to say about this in the months ahead, but what I want to stress now is that we must learn to think of this less as a technology issue, and more as an issue of everyday life, requiring urgent political attention. I often say that doing politics and policy well means putting everyday life—not political personalities or Washington drama—at the heart of our thinking. Applying that kind of thinking to the issues surrounding AI makes it immediately clear that we will need to summon at least as much economic and political imagination today, as it took to handle the everyday impacts of the Great Depression, World War II, or the invention of electricity and later the Internet.

The enormous opportunities and terrifying challenges associated with AI, some of which are likely to materialize in the next three to five years, don’t just matter to a venture capital firm or the owner of a cornfield being turned into a data center. Our experiences as citizens, consumers, parents, employees, students, and more, will soon go through their biggest changes in generations. Each facet of life will become very different—and the biggest difference of all is that this time, the changes will play out not over the course of generations but rather in less time than it takes an American student to complete high school.

That raises the likelihood that soon, the number one leadership challenge for world leaders, including the President of the United States, will be to manage the changes that AI is bringing about, and to use the visibility of office and the tools of policy to ensure that this technology makes people better off and not worse off. Yet our president—and his opposition—have yet to make clear what their AI policies even are.

The coming policy battles won’t be over whether to be “for” or “against” AI. It is developing swiftly no matter what. What we can do is take steps to ensure that it leads to more abundant prosperity and safety rather than deprivation and danger. Whether it does one or the other is, at its core, not a technology problem but a social and political problem. And that means it’s up to us.

No technology is good or bad all on its own. What matters is how people use it, what it does for us and to us, whom it is used to help or to hurt, and who gets to decide. It’s time for that conversation to happen—quickly, and with much more depth than we’ve seen so far in our political world—and I’ll be doing my part to help develop our response while there is still time.

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We covered a range of topics, including how - even in the swirl of chaos and uncertainty we see every day - these challenges are not without precedent. Our conversation reminded me that amid the seriousness and pain of what America is now facing, historical context shows how we can face these moments with boldness and conviction.

Our moment is one not just of great upheaval but of historical importance. History offers warnings - but also guidance and proof that we can act to meet the test.

Thanks for watching. Leave a comment and join the conversation.

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