We begin with a deposition from Nathan Cavanaugh, a twenty-something DOGE staffer on a team tasked with reviewing NEH grants awarded by the Biden administration in 2024 and to be paid in 2025. Cavanaugh and others cancelled grants based on whether, in their judgement, they violated Donald Trump’s executive order prohibiting any initiative that forwarded diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Today’s theme is Billionaires by LNDÖ.
DOGE staffer Nate Cavanaugh. Image credit: screenshot by author
In the News:
After a machine recount and a manual recount, Boca Raton, Florida has its first Democratic mayor in 30 years. Andy Thomson defeated 70-year-old Republican incumbent Mike Liebelson by only five votes. Liebelson may challenge the results based on his skepticism about what he calls a “last minute dump” of 109 mail-in ballots. A third Republican in the race, Fran Nachlas, split the GOP vote, in a town only 27 miles south of Mar-A-Lago that went for Kamala Harris by less than a point in 2024.
Illinois Democrats are getting their business done, sending Lt. Governor Juliana Stratton on to the general election as the party’s nominee to replace Richard Durbin. Her election—which is likely would be historic, both for Illinois and the Senate: she would join Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE) and Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD) as the first cohort of three Black women Senators to serve concurrently.
Another big winner in Illinois? Governor J.B Pritzker, who was not on the ballot but financed and promoted Stratton. AIPAC was engaged in open and dark money spending in the state, and emerged with mixed results, going three for three. It underlines a recent trend for the pro-Israel lobbying group: while they still do quite well supporting party moderates, in some districts their support can be toxic.
MAGA drama! Joe Kent resigned as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, accusing the administration’s of capitulating to Israel’s desire for war in Iran. Some Capitol Hill watchers describe Kent as groyper adjacent; a far-right conspiracy theorist, he was always a controversial pick for the job. Kent has amplified antisemitic MAGA influencers who blame the war on Israel, some linking Trump’s decision to Prime Minister Netenyahu’s February visit. But conspiracy theories have room to fester: there are no clear goals or exit plan for the conflict, and why the operation was launched remains a mystery.
Your hosts:
Claire Potter is a historian of politics and media, a writer, a podcaster, and the sole author and editor of the Political Junkie Substack. Her most recent book is Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2020), and she is currently writing a biography of feminist journalist Susan Brownmiller.
Neil J. Young is a historian of religion and politics, a journalist, and a former co-host of the Past Present podcast. His most recent book is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
Are you always thinking that you would love to read a book we have talked about? Then:
Image credit: DCStockPhotography/Shutterstock
News focus:
Here is a running list of attacks that the Trump administration has made on funding for the humanities, including the cancellation of NEH grants made by the Biden administration.
Several initiatives converged in the Trump administration’s aggressive campaign to remake the arts and humanities to support a certain kind of patriotic narrative. As one of his first acts as President, Trump signed an Executive order called the “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” That same day, Trump created DOGE, also by Executive Order.
On March 27, Trump issued an EO called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which reflects a longstanding conservative commitment to events, political actors, and historical myths that valorize conquest, whiteness, and masculinity.
In 22 days, existing grants for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Institute for Museum and Library services were canceled by DOGE operatives assigned to those agencies. Trump wanted the Republican Congress to eliminate these agencies; in January, 2026, Congress instead reaffirmed this funding.
Trump said he would redirect the funding to a “National Garden of American Heroes,” which would open in Washington D.C. as part of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Little progress has been made: there appears to be no definite site, while Politico warned early in that there were not enough artists in the country to complete such a mammoth project in a year.
On May 1, 2025, the American Historical Association, American Council of Learned Societies, and the Modern Language Association sued the Trump administration to restore the grants. You can read an up-to-date summary of the case and the damage done here; here is a list of specific grants cancelled.
Posted depositions of DOGE staffers Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox have become the face of MAGA contempt. A judge has ordered these videos taken down, but so far, no good. Neither appeared to know what they were doing: they could not define what DEI was, feed grants into ChatGPT to determine whether they were DEI projects. The DOGEys also admit that their work failed to balance the budget.
On March 6, 2026, the AHA, MLA, and ACLS filed a motion for summary judgement that would restore humanities funding.
How do we account for Cavanaugh and Fox’s contempt and hostility? Right-wing attacks on these fields that characterize them as inherently soft and pointless. Claire and Neil discuss the lack of men in college-level humanities courses, particularly those in STEM.
Cavanaugh and Fox seemed to have little knowledge of the damage they had participated in, conflating all the projects canceled with wasteful and fraudulent government spending. You can see Nate Cavanaugh’s deposition in a second suit against the NEH filed by the Authors’ Guild here.
Online commentary about these depositions has foregrounded the brand of masculinity Cavanaugh and Fox project: arrogant, diffident, and reckless. It points to the number of low-level Trump administration staffers steeped in the manosphere, as well as Elon Musk’s cult of masculinity.
Both men admitted that the terms they fed into ChatGPT were “gay,” “BIPOC,” “indigenous,” “Jewish”—because such work was inherently promoting minority viewpoints. But there are also a crosscutting themes put this incident in a larger culture wars context: the longstanding hostility of tech bros to diversity initiatives in their own industry, and reactionary intellectuals (for example, Jeremy Carl of the Claremont Institute, recently interviewed by journalist Ross Douthat) who see work about national diversity as inherently discriminatory towards white people, men, and Christians.
Attempts to rebrand the Kennedy Center have also failed. After programming was gutted by artist cancellations, Director Ric Grenell (a diplomat—but gay!) has been fired, and it will be closed for two years.
What we want to go viral:
Neil is a great fan of dogs, and wants you to read John Seabrook’s “How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour,” (The New Yorker, March 16, 2026) Poodle crossbreeds are all the rage—and as it turns out, these cuddly floofs have a social history.
Claire’s political imagination was captured by Thomas Friedman’s “How Minnesota Beat Trump,” (New York Times, March 15, 2026) a hopeful set of observations about how the idea of neighborliness knitted a diverse community together to protect vulnerable people against an out-of-control federal policing campaign.
Short takes:
Today’s big political news: Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has endorsed Graham Platner, who is running neck-and-neck with Governor Janet Mills for the right to knock off incumbent Maine Senator Susan Collins. “The intervention by Ms. Warren is her latest split with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the top Democrat in the Senate, whose polling numbers have sunk as the Democratic base turns on him for his handling of government shutdown negotiations,” Tim Balk and Reid J. Epstein write at The New York Times, noting that Warren is a formidable fundraiser who is expanding her endorsement across the country. “Ms. Mills’s campaign responded to Ms. Warren’s endorsement by noting that the governor was backed by several other prominent Democratic governors, including Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Maura Healey of Massachusetts.” (March 19, 2026)
Meanwhile, the House GOP leadership is backing Brandon Herrera, who is the proud owner of a copy of Mein Kampf and denies that Abraham Lincoln emancipated enslaved people, in TX-23. “Even without House leaders’ backing, Herrera emerged two weeks ago as the party’s de facto nominee after Rep. Tony Gonzales exited a Republican primary runoff with him in response to allegations that he had an affair with a staffer who later died by suicide,” Kadia Goba
and Teo Armus report at The Washington Post. “Several of Herrera’s videos show him reenacting historical assassinations, including testing the type of guns that killed John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln or were used in various historical wars.” Herrera has also re-enacted the assassination of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr. (March 19, 2026)
George Washington, meet the manosphere—AI George, that is, a bot created by conservative media tycoon Glenn Beck. “The founding era’s premier beefcake is uniquely adaptable to an alpha aesthetic. He was famous for his bearing—his height, musculature, and command,” presidential historian Alexis Coe explains at Vanity Fair, although not his teeth, which Beck’s programmers have repaired. They have also repaired Washington’s ideology to match the MAGA present. “AI Washington can be made to bless positions that the real Washington spent years warning against. His early presidency was dominated by the question of how a fragile republic survived infancy, and he made a call: profit, not war,” Coe writes. Yet, in Beck’s hands, Washington is “a non-interventionist turned Iran hawk, a deist recast as an evangelical, a man who dreaded partisanship now a guest on a culture warrior’s podcast.” (March 18, 2026)
You can get all audio content by subscribing for free on Apple iTunes, YouTube, or Spotify.
