Jim Crow is Back

What I'm Hearing - May 12, 2026

This is “What I’m Hearing” — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.

Jim Crow is back in America. Democrats don’t want to get “extreme.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court used its shadow docket to let Alabama Republicans swap in a new gerrymandered map mid-election. Robert Hubbell calls it Roberts and Alito “converting the midterms into a referendum on state-sponsored racial discrimination.” Hours later, Virginia’s Republican-controlled state supreme court threw out a voter-approved counter-gerrymander. South Carolina, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida are racing to eliminate every remaining Black-majority district. Bill Kristol notes South Carolina’s delegation is already six white Republicans to one Black Democrat in a state that is 26% Black. Rep. Ralph Norman’s stated case for carving up Clyburn’s district was that 47% Black is “too much.”

Tennessee Rep. Justin Jones told Robert Reich the new Republican map was drafted before SCOTUS even ruled, passed out of committee with the public physically barred from the room, and enacted in 24 hours, cracking Memphis (two-thirds Black, 610,000 people) into three majority-white districts and splitting Nashville into five. Jones is calling for a “new Freedom Summer” — a multi-racial voter-registration mobilization across the South.

But the more important story this week, per Brian Beutler, is what Democrats are choosing not to do. Virginia state senate majority leader Scott Surovell told The New Republic that overturning his own state supreme court’s ruling would be “an incredibly extreme step.” This is a terrible sign. If Democrats won’t escalate now, against Republican judges who openly picked a side mid-election, why would anyone believe they’d resist a real coup attempt over a five-seat House majority in November?

Extreme is a 4-3 state Supreme Court overturning an election result. Extreme is the Louisiana Republicans throwing out 40,000 votes already cast so they could suspend an election and redraw their map. Extreme is disenfranchising 610,000 voters along racial lines. Extreme is the courts violating their own rule − the Purcell Doctrine – stating that courts shouldn’t change election maps too close to an election.

Trump is historically unpopular. Democrats lead the generic ballot by double digits. And we are now staring at the genuine possibility of winning the popular vote by ten points and losing the House anyway.

Jim Crow is back in America. It’s time to get extreme.

Read more: Off Message, Robert Hubbell, Robert Reich, The Bulwark, Letters from an American.

Every Gallon Costs More Because of a War He Didn’t Have to Start.

In April, inflation rose to 3.8% year-over-year and 0.6% month-over-month. In February, the last month before Trump started the war in Iran, it was 2.4%. Rising energy costs are almost solely responsible. Gas now averages more than $4.50 per gallon, up more than 50% since the war began. The Dallas Fed’s math is straightforward: every additional month the Strait of Hormuz stays closed adds $10 to $15 a barrel, which is roughly 25 cents per gallon at the pump per month. The Pentagon disclosed in House testimony Tuesday that the war has now cost taxpayers $29 billion.

Trump’s approval rating on the economy hit 30% this week. That’s one of the lowest of his political career. Aaron Parnas reports that 77% of respondents — including a meaningful number of Republicans — say his policies are pushing prices up in their own communities. His response to CBS’s Nancy Cordes is to ask Congress to suspend the federal gas tax. Brian Beutler does the math at Off Message: that would cost about $500 million per week in revenue while temporarily masking the political damage just long enough to keep the war going.

Robert Kagan wrote in The Atlantic this week that the Iran war is “worse than Vietnam.” His argument: the Strait isn’t reopening, China and Russia have come out stronger, U.S. weapons stockpiles are depleted, and “the conflict has revealed an America that is unreliable and incapable of finishing what it started.” When the original architects of the forever-war consensus are calling your war a generational disaster, you’ve lost the argument.

The two issues voters care about most — gas prices and “are we at war” — are now the same issue. And they are both Trump’s. Iran has handed his presidency a permanent economic drag and a permanent foreign-policy humiliation at the same time. The gas-tax-holiday gambit is the tell. He knows it.

Read more: The Parnas Perspective · Off Message — Beutler · Robert Hubbell · Kagan / The Atlantic

They Sold 500,000 MAGA Voters a Phone That Doesn’t Exist. Trump Brings The Oligarch to China

Two stories, both about the rampant corruption in this administration.

On June 16, 2025, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump launched Trump Mobile and the T1 — a $499, “proudly designed and built in the United States,” gold-plated MAGA smartphone. Customers were asked to deposit $100 to preorder. According to the International Business Times, more than 500,000 did, pouring an estimated $59 million into the venture. Promised ship date: August 2025.

Eleven months later, no T1 has shipped. Judd Legum documents the timeline: “Made in the USA” silently became “designed with American values in mind” within two weeks. “Final assembly in Miami” replaced any actual U.S. manufacturing. Ship dates slid from August to November to December to January to “Q1 2026” — a window that quietly closed March 31. On April 6, Trump Mobile rewrote its terms of service to say the $100 deposit “is not a purchase, does not constitute acceptance of an order, does not create a contract for sale.” It is merely “a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale.” Andrew Egger calls it “1-800-Trump-Scammed-Us.” There is also a live conflict of interest: Trump Mobile operates on T-Mobile’s network, meaning a federally regulated carrier that needs spectrum approvals from the Trump FCC is the gatekeeper for whether the president’s family’s product can ever launch.

Which brings us to this week’s other Trump family business trip. Trump flew to Beijing with sixteen American CEOs in tow, per CNBC: Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Larry Fink, Kelly Ortberg, Stephen Schwarzman, Brian Sikes, Jane Fraser, Jim Anderson, Larry Culp, David Solomon, Jacob Thaysen, Michael Miebach, Dina Powell McCormick, Sanjay Mehrotra, Cristiano Amon, and Ryan McInerney. Tesla, Apple, BlackRock, Boeing, Blackstone, Cargill, Citigroup, Coherent, GE Aerospace, Goldman Sachs, Illumina, Mastercard, Meta, Micron, Qualcomm, and Visa. And per Zeteo’s reporting, this is the same Trump who, after reading a draft of his own National Defense Strategy that took a hard line on Beijing, told his team “we’re not fucking doing that” and personally ordered the China section rewritten. A senior U.S. official to Zeteo: “Donald Trump is a pussycat in many ways. He clearly respects Xi a whole lot… and he’s a lot rougher on NATO than [he is] on Beijing.”

The connective tissue between these two stories shows exactly who Donald Trump cares about. Half a million working-class MAGA voters wired $59 million to the First Family for a phone that the company now openly says it has no legal obligation to ever produce. That same week, the patriarch of that family boarded a plane to the country he campaigned on being “tough” with, accompanied by sixteen of the wealthiest men and women in America.

The base pays. The donors get access. This is Trump’s America.

Read more: Popular Information, The Bulwark, Zeteo.

The Cities Trump Wants to Occupy Are the Safest They’ve Been in 60 Years.

The Major Cities Chiefs Association just released its Q1 2026 report, covering 67 major-city law-enforcement agencies for January through March. Compared to the same period in 2025, homicide is down 17.7%, robbery down 20.4%, rape down 7.2%, and aggravated assault down 4.8%.

Judd Legum ran the numbers against Trump’s own quotes. Baltimore, which Trump called a “hellhole” and a “horrible deathbed,” logged its fewest homicides in nearly 50 years in 2025; robbery is down 21.6% so far this year. New York City, where Trump said federal troops could cut crime “70, 80, 90 percent,” just posted the fewest first-four-months murders in NYPD recorded history; homicides down 31.7% in Q1. Los Angeles homicides are down 23.3% this quarter on top of a 19% drop in 2025, the lowest LA homicide count since 1966. Oakland, which Trump called “so far gone,” is seeing homicides down 22% and robbery down 42.7%. Portland, the “burning hellhole,” is down 63.6% on homicides.

The stated rationale for floating National Guard deployments and federal takeovers of blue-city policing is that the cities are crime-ridden hellholes. The empirical reality, in the exact month he is making the argument, is that they are the safest American cities have been in two generations. Memorize these stats. Trump and the Republicans are desperate to portray blue cities as crime-infested and in need of federal deployment. They want to do this as a ploy to intimidate voters or even suspend the midterms. The facts don’t support their rhetoric.

Read more: Popular Information, Letters from an American.

That's your Tuesday. Gas is $4.50 and Trump's economy approval is 30%. Republican judges rigged the map and Democrats called fighting back "extreme." 500,000 MAGA voters got scammed on a phone while sixteen billionaires boarded a plane to Beijing. And the "hellhole" cities are the safest they've been since 1966.