More than 600 flights have been delayed at Heathrow and Gatwick, many due to stormy weather south of the UK.

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After two successive women lost the race for president — and with the GOP increasingly claiming the testosterone-fueled “manosphere” — a lot of Democratic insiders are starting to worry the party is a bit too low-T. Even its successful new faces, like Jon Ossoff and James Talarico, might still be too soft. (This might explain why a recent Instagram post from @Democrats showed Talarico gnawing on meat.)

They’re racked with anxiety: Where are the masculine Democrats? They believe American voters need a manly man, someone who isn’t “smoothgroined,” who can drink beer and watch video games and eat a hamburger and have sex without a condom, who “has the solid physicality of a man who makes his living outdoors,” who will bring young men back into the Democratic fold. They want a bro.

But wait: Actually, the newest icon of Democratic power fits that bill almost exactly. He’s a Carhartt-wearing, marathon-running, fully bearded dude who loves to chow down. He’s obsessed with the Knicks and recently made a basketball-themed campaign ad. When he was campaigning last year, he toured the edgy “manosphere” podcast world and easily traded riffs about bench pressing and shitposting. Analysts describe his politics using testosterone-forward metaphors like “muscled,” “power broker,”  and “kingmaker.”

This is, of course, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — who’s able to go one-on-one with President Donald Trump, wears the hell out of a suit, and channels the populist energy of Bernie-bro politics more effectively than anyone else under 80. “His vision, whether you like it or not, is incredibly bold and in your face,” which is a traditionally masculine attribute, says Pawan Dhingra, a sociologist at Amherst College.

“Zohran’s a good hang,” streaming star and certified bro Hasan Piker said of Mamdani in a 2025 interview with the New York Times. “He’s just a dude, and it’s good to be a dude sometimes.”

So, why isn’t Mamdani the Democrats’ new icon of masculinity? 

Instead, the pro-masculinity discussion has mostly held up Graham Platner, the controversial Democratic nominee for Maine’s Senate seat, as the butch future of the party. Ken Klippenstein approvingly described Platner as “tatted up, ex-Marine riff-raff” in contrast to the “asexual, Harvard-educated McKinsey consultant” he feels represents the classic Democratic machine candidate. Sebastian Junger wrote that Platner “doesn’t scan ‘Democrat’” (a good thing, in Junger’s estimation) because he “might be the only Democratic candidate or congressman I wouldn’t want to mess with.” James Carville, who has been vocal in his belief that Democrats’ image is too feminine and naggy, mused that while Platner might be “fucked up” from his time at war, perhaps “we need a combat veteran right on that Senate floor who is fucked up.”

But while Platner hasn’t yet proved he can win in a general election, Mamdani has. What’s more, he’s achieved that misty goal Democrats are always chasing: He’s proved he’s able to connect with men and with Trump voters while also energizing the Democratic base. In the 2025 New York City mayoral election, registration surged, general election turnout hit a 50-year high, and exit polls showed that he picked up a solid half of the male vote — more than any other candidate — as well as 9 percent of 2024 Trump voters. Earlier this week, Mamdani’s get-out-the-vote effort helped push three Democratic Socialists of America allies through their primaries, in a clear demonstration of his political might. 

Mamdani and Platner are both highly masculine figures. They both have populist platforms. And they’ve both run as party outsiders (and one of them has won a general election). So why does only one of them keep showing up in think pieces about why Democrats need to embrace and appeal to men?

The real issue, Dhingra says, is that when people talk about getting men to vote Democrat, “there’s a male vote and there’s a masculine vote.” Those are two different things.

The male vote is what we can confidently say Mamdani won in 2025. The masculine vote is what pundits are talking about when they say Democrats need to win over men, and that is a lot more vibes-based. 

“We have a notion of masculinity that’s kind of white, middle-working-class, muscular, patriarchal to some degree,” Dhingra says. When they’re talking about the masculine vote, political commentators and strategists look for evidence of that specifically white masculinity, even if they don’t say that outright.

Platner, with his military background, his embrace of guns, and his career in manual labor, fits that white working-class image, despite having a wealthy family. Cosmopolitan Mamdani, who attended a private liberal arts college and was a campus activist and a comedy rapper in his youth, does not. Even his love of sports is a little off, Dhringa says. Mamdani is a soccer guy, and in the United States, soccer is coded as suspiciously European. “The fact that it’s sports but it’s not like that is a metaphor,” Dhringa says. “He’s getting the male vote, but he’s not masculine.”

Dhringa, the author of the forthcoming book Success Won’t Save Us: How Asian Americans Can Fight White Supremacy, sees this issue as part of a bigger pattern. “We’ve consistently reduced masculinity to white maleness and femininity to white femaleness,” he says. Outside of politics, conversations about the crisis of masculinity tend to focus on the problems affecting white guys, like high rates of suicide. “We’re only talking about the plight of white men,” Dhingra says. “Does anyone even know about the friendship experiences of Black men? No. We know that white men suffer from this.”

Dhringra points to mass incarceration, which disproportionately affects Black men and is overwhelmingly talked about as a race problem. “It was not a crisis of manhood,” he says of these discussions. “But now that more white men are ending up in jail or showing these other negative social indicators, now we have a crisis of manhood.” 

It’s certainly possible that at least part of this disconnect is about Mamdani and Platner’s policies. To some of the commentators who are deeply concerned about Democratic masculinity, especially Carville, support for Israel is a requirement. But Mamdani has repeatedly reiterated his belief in Israel’s right to exist, and Platner, who opposes sending US aid to Israel (and wore a Nazi tattoo for years), is not exactly Israel’s staunchest ally. And Carville’s concerns are not universal: Klippenstein, another Platner fan, has been enthusiastic about Mamdani’s “magic” — just not necessarily about his dudeliness.

And while Mamdani’s criticism of Israel might trouble some Democrats, it speaks to the younger generation of voters Democrats are theoretically trying to woo. In contrast, Platner’s campaign has been plagued by one scandal after another, including allegations of “unsettling” behavior with ex-girlfriends. His partisans argue that such a grimy past adds to his real dude cred — but it remains a weak spot for a party that still relies on women to power its voting bloc, regardless of how much effort it’s putting into courting men. 

Calling all political weaknesses (generously) even, it’s more likely that race is playing a role in the Mamdani paradox. But Dhringa says Mamdani’s mysterious absence from the masculinity conversation has more to do with his general not-whiteness than with his specific Indian heritage and Ugandan upbringing. Dhringa says that 20 years ago, South Asian American men were overwhelmingly stereotyped as nerdy and effeminate, but their image now is more complicated. He cites a plethora of powerful South Asian American CEOs like Google and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, as well as political figures like Mamdani for the Democrats and Kash Patel for Republicans. 

“Twenty years ago I had a pretty simple answer I would give” on how Americans view South Asian men, he says. “Now I don’t.”

Vox reached out to Carville and Klippenstein for comment and did not hear back from them. Junger declined to comment. 

Ultimately, the manliness conversation has other downsides: It also flattens masculinity into one violent, unintellectual stereotype. “Masculinity has different dimensions to it, and one person never embodies all the dimensions,” Dhringa says. Manly men don’t have to be as solitary and withholding as John Wayne in an old Western. They can be leaders who use their masculine charisma to connect with and protect other people. 

That’s the kind of manliness Mamdani represents. Democrats have the opportunity to embrace him as an avatar of the party, to try to leverage his confidence and swagger to boost other candidates, to learn from the strategies he’s employed to connect with the base they’re looking to cultivate. They have the opportunity to look for and cultivate talent in other Mamdanis: men who might not fit the white working-class profile, but who do know how to hang with the dudes when they have to. 

From Hannibal Lecter to Dolores Umbridge, do you know your cinematic bad guys?

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During a historic heat wave, air-conditioning has become the linchpin of an intensifying political debate in France.

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President Donald Trump can be unpredictable. He changes his mind based on who last talked with him. He has no real interest in the day-to-day work of running the federal government.

But beneath the chaos, he does have a governing philosophy.

The ongoing debacle of the Reflecting Pool has been a helpful distillation of his approach: Make a big promise, use it to reward your allies, blame setbacks on your opponents, criminalize dissent and then attack the press.

The first three steps are fairly common in politics, especially among populists with little experience in government. But it’s the last two that turn Trump into something more than just a run-of-the-mill incompetent politician.

Authoritarianism often begins with the habit of treating ordinary problems as criminal conspiracies. A court strikes down his policy, and he calls the judge “crooked” or “corrupt.” A protest escalates, and he calls the protesters “paid agitators.”

If an authoritarian government cannot accept criticism, then it has to label critics enemies. If it cannot admit a mistake, then it has to blame sabotage. And if it cannot accept failure, then it has to find someone to punish.

The fact that Trump used these tactics on the Reflecting Pool may be comical, but it’s also ominous.

Earlier this week, federal officers arrested multiple people at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after Trump blamed “vandals” for damage to the newly renovated monument.

So far, the only one we know is facing charges is a former Olympian who says he simply stopped during a bike ride, reached down and touched a piece of blue coating that had already peeled away from the bottom of the pool.

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Olympian arrested after touching Reflecting Pool speaks out

June 22, 2026 / 09:53

The framers of the Constitution understood that those in power have a tendency to see critics as enemies. That’s precisely why they built a system designed to restrain power rather than indulge it. That concern was not theoretical then and it is not theoretical now.

That’s why this story does not end with an algae-filled Reflecting Pool. It ends with ordinary Americans in handcuffs, extra fencing around a Washington landmark and National Guard members standing nearby, as though they were protecting a target of terrorism. 

And that is the progression that should concern us all.

Once ordinary politics is treated as criminality, the machinery of government inevitably follows. It does not stop at protecting a president’s narrative. It begins policing the people who challenge it. 

We’ve already seen this administration deploy troops against protesters. We’ve seen federal law enforcement increasingly drawn into political disputes. We’ve heard journalists cast as enemies rather than watchdogs, and political opponents portrayed as criminals in need of investigation and prosecution instead of as competitors.

The Reflecting Pool is simply the latest reminder that, in Trump’s Washington, the line between politics and criminality is growing dangerously thin. That’s because the common thread is not just inflammatory rhetoric. It is the growing weaponization of government against ordinary political activity and the ordinary people who engage in it.

When a president begins treating ordinary politics as criminality, it does not stay rhetorical for long. 

Eventually, someone gets investigated. Someone gets detained. Someone gets arrested. 

Trump spent years warning Americans about the weaponization of the government. The Reflecting Pool is the latest suggestion that we should take those warnings seriously — just not in the way he intended. 

The real warning was not about the people he accused. It was about how he would act when he got back in power.

Don’t forget to subscribe to “MS NOW Presents: Clock It,” Symone Sanders Townsend’s new podcast series with Eugene Daniels on the latest political news, the catchiest cultural moments and how they converge. Listen to the latest episode here.

The post The Reflecting Pool shows Trump’s warnings of a weaponized government were really threats appeared first on MS NOW.

For half a century, Watergate has been the quintessential American scandal, so much so that we frequently affix “-gate” to new episodes of official wrongdoing in an attempt to make it sound significant and sinister. 

But what if, asked Vice President JD Vance, we consider Watergate no big deal? Or even better, why not decide that former President Richard Nixon, our pre-Trump model of corruption and abuse of office, was not the perpetrator of Watergate but its victim?

“I’m actually fascinated by Nixon as a character in history,” Vance said at an appearance this week at the Nixon Library in California. “I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so. As I joked with Robert backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

Vance continued: “And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump and the first Trump administration. There is a parallel.”

Rewriting history is a longtime hobby of American conservatives, both to absolve them of their sins and reshape the American mind to align with their values. For instance, the “Lost Cause” counternarrative of the Civil War, which portrays the Confederacy’s treasonous slavery advocates into noble men simply defending their homes, continues to this day, with the Trump administration renaming military bases and erecting statues to honor those traitors. And Trump has convinced much of his party to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that the Jan. 6 insurrection was merely a largely peaceful protest carried out by true patriots.

Watergate has been part of this revisionist project since the day Nixon resigned the presidency. Nixon’s legal arguments against having to hand over Oval Office tapes to investigators, though unsuccessful at the time, became crucial to the development of the unitary executive theory, championed by former Vice President Dick Cheney, and the Roberts court’s conservative majority holds. Most recently, prominent figures on the right, including Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon and Christopher Rufo, have argued that Watergate was all a set-up by the “deep state” to frame Nixon, who was innocent. Vance has now joined their number. 

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‘30 Watergates happening weekly’: Rep. Ansari blasts ‘corrupt’ Trump White House

June 26, 2026 / 08:25

Remember: Watergate was far more than just a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Washington office/apartment complex that gave the scandal its name. The burglary merely led to the exposure of the rot within the Nixon administration: a mountain of criminal acts from money laundering to obstruction of justice to multiple additional break-ins to a shocking abuse of government power.

At one point, White House counsel John Dean, who later located his conscience and told the public what he had seen and done, penned a memo for other White House officials exploring “how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” The White House tapes recorded Nixon personally committing criminal acts, including making a plan to order the CIA to quash the FBI’s investigation of the break-in at the Watergate (the so-called “smoking gun” recording).

In the end, dozens of people in Nixon’s administration and political orbit pled guilty or were convicted of crimes. Those sent to prison included the attorney general, the White House chief of staff and the president’s chief domestic policy adviser.

In a twisted sense, Vance is almost right about the “deep state,” since he and other MAGA figures use that term to refer to civil servants who are loyal to the country rather than to whatever corrupt scheme President Donald Trump wants to recruit them for. But they didn’t frame Nixon; they exposed him. During Watergate, the president and his top aides pressed multiple government officials, including some appointed by Nixon himself, to do things they knew were illegal or unethical. Those officials simply refused; some, like Dean, went public. 

That is similar to what happened in Trump’s first administration: Again and again, officials refused to go along with his corrupt schemes; some of them testified before Congress in his first impeachment or before the Jan. 6 committee. But in Trump’s second administration, the president and his closest advisers have ensured that no one with any integrity will be around to object. 

Congress passed a raft of post-Watergate laws and set up new systems intended to restrain the presidency and make government more transparent, less corrupt and more accountable. Trump has systematically set out to destroy them, firing inspectors general, weakening civil service protections, defying the laws he doesn’t like and turning the Department of Justice into his personal machine of political revenge. 

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WH CRIME? JD Vance’s UNHINGED Trump defense embraces NIXON’S illegal WATERGATE?! 

June 26, 2026 / 08:49

After Watergate, we were told that “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” It wasn’t actually true — the cover-up was appalling, but it was preceded by a whole series of atrocious crimes.  Trump, however, decided not to even bother with the cover-up. If you don’t try to hide your corruption, lawmakers won’t be as shocked. And if your own party controls Congress, they’ll be too terrified of your voters to hold you accountable.

So when Vance says Watergate would be a one-day story today, he isn’t just observing; he’s boasting. He’s saying: Look what MAGA has done to American politics and media. Look how we have normalized corruption and degraded systems of accountability. We can do whatever we want. 

For now, they can. Which is why we’ll need a raft of post-Trump reforms beyond even what Congress passed after Nixon slinked away in disgrace. The most corrupt president in history and his contemptible cronies are trying to justify their own misdeeds by rehabilitating the image of the second-most corrupt president in history. We can’t allow it to succeed.

The post JD Vance’s stunning Watergate revisionism says the quiet part out loud appeared first on MS NOW.

The U.S. population was already aging and tilting toward decline. After the Supreme Court confirmed Trump’s power to deport hundreds of thousands of foreign migrants, population decline could accelerate.

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