Centrists should do a better job of recognizing that.
This article was originally published in Watchdog Weekly. Read it here.
Earlier this week, Nate Silver, the polling analyst/blogger/polymarket advisor, observed that recent Trump-related stories have been “boring and dumb […] or kind of funny,” drawing the conclusion that perhaps Trump isn’t the “central figure in American politics” that he once was.
This assessment struck me (and the many, many people dunking on him in the quote tweets) as a bizarre, plainly wrong diagnosis of the current moment. It’s beside the point, but how can one separate the war in Iran—the biggest ongoing story in American politics—from Trump’s centrality? The war continues only because of his own insistent hubris and is perpetually threatening the global economy.
But while Silver’s assessment is not correct, it does indicate an ongoing problem with both our media and our politicians: the most powerful elected officials and pundits that oppose the administration regularly fail to connect Trump to the plethora of harms he is actively causing. At the start of Trump 2.0, we were inundated with stories of the negative repercussions of Trump’s executive orders and DOGE’s rampage. But after Musk departed and OMB Director Russell Vought took over the kneecapping of federal agencies, many credulous people stopped paying close attention as the fanfare of DOGE waned, despite the continued material consequences for regular people.
This does not mean, as Silver claims, that American politics no longer revolves around Trump. Rather, it says more about Silver’s media diet and his personal experience living under Trump.
There are countless other stories where Trump is—or should be—the central villain that are neither boring nor dumb, but in fact have severe consequences for peoples’ health, safety, and economic well being. This is why RDP created our Trump Watch page with over two dozen trackers of the administration’s harms across issue areas. It’s why we’ve worked with groups like Public Citizen to document the corruption of Freedom 250 and the fossil fuel revolvers Trump has enabled to destroy both our environment and clean energy sector.
It is true, however, that both the media and the establishment ought to do a better job in framing these stories in a way that highlights Trump and his cronies’ direct culpability in causing the pain people are currently feeling. Indeed, coverage of the wildfires currently raging across the globe often fails to forefront the role of climate change and fossil fuel consumption that Trump and his lackeys are gleefully accelerating.
At the risk of being accused of having an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, it’s worth running through a few of the many stories where Trump is the central figure. If Silver is reading this, perhaps he can elevate these stories to his readers. After all, with three million twitter followers and 316,000 subscribers to his Silver Bulletin, Nate actually has some sway over who and what is in the news.
Food Safety Policy
The country is currently in the midst of its worst cyclosporiasis outbreak ever, and Trump’s administration has proven completely incapable of getting a handle on it. There are over 11,500 people across 41 states dealing with a parasite that causes weekslong bouts of explosive diarrhea.
While there’s ample opportunity for toilet humor here, I don’t think the people living with the symptoms of cyclosporiasis would put this in Silver’s “kind of funny” category. It’s a serious public health crisis caused by human feces contaminating our food or water—something the federal government is tasked with preventing, or at least mitigating.
The Trump administration has done neither. Prior to the outbreak, the administration gutted both the Food Safety Inspection Service and the very CDC taskforce that processes parasite samples in outbreaks like cyclosporiasis. They also removed cyclospora from the mandatory reporting list for its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network. Last November, a ProPublica report found that inspections of foreign food facilities had dropped to “historic lows” as a result of the Trump administration’s cuts to funding and staff; foreign food facilities are increasingly linked to foodborne illness outbreaks domestically.
The cyclospora case is one clear impact of this gross incompetence, but it also exhibits Trump’s signature cronyism. The FDA slow-walked naming Taylor Farms as the supplier of the tainted lettuce and sparked confusion after announcing a Taylor Farms lettuce sample tested positive for cyclospora, only to later announce it was a false positive. We can only speculate as to how much their million dollar donation to MAGA Inc., anti-food safety regulation lobbying, and meetings with the White House influenced their crisis management. Trump himself has responded to the crisis by floating tariffs on Mexican lettuce.
This is just one of many public health and food safety crises—measles, salmonella, screwworm—that this administration bears responsibility for. While many of his underlings have failings that got us to this point, Trump is ultimately responsible for appointing the unqualified, corrupted people across the federal agencies that haven’t kept Americans safe.
Punishing States For Voting Against Him
One of the guiding principles behind Trump 2.0 has been his unceasing desire to punish the people living in states that voted for Kamala Harris instead of himself in 2024. RDP has been tracking this for a while now, with my colleague Kenny Stancil mapping Trump’s disbursements of disaster aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). My colleague Aya Dardari has documented the numerous ways OMB Director Vought has weaponized childcare, Medicaid, and SNAP funding to punish blue state residents. This targeted retribution has been widely reported and remains ongoing—26 states sued the administration last week over the conditions the administration is attaching to disaster aid.
Just last Friday, the New York Times reported on a stunning admission from the Department of Energy: in October 2025, Russell Vought cancelled nearly 300 grants for clean energy projects “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state.” The admission came in a court filing in Thakur v. Trump where the parties agreed to cease further discovery if the DoE stipulated certain facts of the case, including the political nature of the grant cancellations, indicating there may be even more to this story if an enterprising Congressional committee with subpoena power chooses to further pursue this issue.
Moreover, it seems likely that both Vought and Wright lied to Congress about whether these grant decisions were made for political decisions. They did so in pursuit of a Trump administration tactic that began with DOGE but has never really stopped: using the administrative state to punish your perceived enemies (“blue states,” of course, contain millions of Republicans who are also hurt by these cuts.)
It has made plain a fact that we’ve long argued—DOGE’s mission is still in effect, it’s simply being operated in the shadows by Russell Vought. And, as many have pointed out, this politicization of grant making it poised to get even worse at OMB looks to implement a rule to force all federal grants to get approval by political appointees and align with Trump’s agenda.
ICE Killings
Silver’s list of top stories of the summer had another glaring omission: the fact that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) killed two more people in the span of a week earlier this month. A third person was killed a day later when he was hit by a car while fleeing ICE agents.
These horrific killings contained similarities that highlighted the many flaws and dangers of Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Neither Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the man killed by ICE in Houston, nor Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, the man killed in Biddeford, Maine were the targets of ICE’s operations. Both times, ICE shot the victims while they were in the car, with ICE claiming they were justified due to supposed threats to their own or public safety without providing evidence.
Further, the ICE agent who killed Duran had a history of violent behavior and mental health issues, but made it through an ICE vetting process that consistently misses such red flags.
Even Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin seemed to recognize that these practices were unnecessarily dangerous, ordering a pause on vehicle stops. Trump, however, ordered a reversal of the pause. His personal desire for mass deportations will not be deterred by mounting deaths at the hands of his agents.
Silver, however, dismissed these stories, claiming they were not a main focus of the media.
This, again, says more about Silver than anything else. Both killings were huge stories with ongoing developments still receiving national press coverage. I’m not sure who Silver is reading, but “partisan-leaning” outlets like the American Prospect and The New Republic have covered ICE extensively, as have virtually every national media outlet. If Silver’s social media and news feeds are only talking about “frankly kinda stupid” stories, perhaps he should seek out different sources of information! (Silver regularly bemoans “Blueskyism,” but he should reflect on how Elon Musk’s propagandistic Twitter algorithm is affecting his own worldview.)
In fact, Silver himself could use his massive platform—he has one of the biggest Substack’s covering US politics—to elevate these issues that do, in fact, show Trump and Vought as existential threats. I’d argue that’s more important than covering the demographic makeup of DSA.