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In a post on X, Irish satirist and pro-Palestine activist Tadhg Hickey has called out Piers Morgan’s glaring double standard over online abuse: defending some targets from trolls while piling on others.

Hickey’s intervention came after Morgan posted on X defending Ariana Grande and rightly condemning the trolls “making her life a misery”. But, as Hickey points out, Morgan has shown far less concern for Greta Thunberg, repeatedly adding fuel to the abuse directed at her.

Patriarchal double standards

Morgan was absolutely right to call out the trolls targeting Ariana Grande with nasty and offensive comments about her appearance. But, as Hickey has pointed out, where is that same compassion when it comes to activist Greta Thunberg?

That double standard matters.

Personal attacks, condescending pile-ons and relentlessly negative commentary can have very real consequences for the people caught in the crossfire. We saw just how tragic those consequences can be following the death of Jason Arday, who faced attacks from powerful people who disagreed with his views and, more disturbingly, from those who were entirely unable to accept a Black man achieving academic acclaim.

And that is the problem. For some people, personal attacks and irresponsible commentary suddenly become acceptable when the target holds political views they dislike.

Within our neoliberal establishment, a hugely successful actress who makes big sums of money for corporate wealth will find her wellbeing being defended, but an activist fighting for a better world against corporate greed and neglect, will be demonised and ‘left to the dogs’.

Let us be clear: both women deserve far better than the way they are treated in the media.

However, you cannot condemn online abuse when it suits you and then choose to ignore abuse when the target is someone you disagree with. This exposes a deeply cynical double standard in parts of the mainstream media and Western behaviour more broadly.

It also raises an important question: if the media and social media pile-ons continue to cross the line, isn’t it time we had much stronger accountability and regulation?

This is the same soulless rodent who regularly says hideous, baseless things about Greta Thunberg – perhaps the most attacked young woman on the internet. pic.twitter.com/uHDAzNZDEn

— Tehran Tadhg (@TadhgHickey) August 18, 2026

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Morgan is a hypocrite

Thunberg often attracts the ire of white patriarchal men like Morgan, as she has long sought to challenge corrosive systems of power. This is both in relation to the climate crisis and in Western states’ failure to uphold international law in the face of a live-streamed genocide in Gaza.

This, unsurprisingly, has irritated people like Piers Morgan who seemingly believe they are the ultimate moral arbiters of what can and can’t be said.

Going further, Morgan has attacked Thunberg relentlessly for years, alongside other right-wing pundits, for the offensive crime of working to expose the irresponsibility, negligence and corruption at state and corporate level in the face of climate catastrophe.

After October 7th, 2023, Thunberg turned from a sole focus on the environment to speaking up against the genocide in Gaza which is still ongoing today. Pointing out the flagrant breach of international law by the occupying state of Israel, Thunberg has angered many pro-Israel pundits.

This drew the ire of Piers Morgan who showed a particular inclination to favour Israel’s ‘position’. He appeared to have quite the comfort in ignoring the brutal, murderous bombing campaign by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) on innocent Palestinian men, women and children.

Nevertheless, Morgan eventually couldn’t excuse Israel’s war crimes, and he finally began to challenge Israel (a little bit, anyway) – but he was no more inclined to look at Thunberg’s efforts without feeling compelled to diminish and deride her.

This is because, for people like Morgan, it is always about his arrogant superiority:

"This stunt has done absolutely zero to help any of the people in Gaza. Zero!"

Piers Morgan clashes with UN special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese on Greta Thunberg – watch more

https://t.co/64pOqfYq2R@piersmorgan | @FranceskAlbs pic.twitter.com/6O581NYeYM

— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) June 9, 2025

Derogatory abuse

Morgan’s cruel and diminishing rhetoric towards Thunberg has been longstanding and has sunk to deplorable depths in his attempt to diminish her critical work.

Back in 2019, in response to her advocacy for action on the climate crisis, Morgan attempted to suggest Thunberg was “unstable”:

Piers Morgan with Toby Young agreeing with him just said 'Greta Thunberg is unstable' on Good Morning Britain.

Fox sacked a contributor for saying Thunberg had a mental illness.

Should GMB sack Piers Morgan?

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— RJ (@robjeffecology) September 25, 2019

As in the interview with Albanese, Morgan does little to hide his hatred for Thunberg. Ironically, he declared her to be someone who is just out for their own ego who is a “self-obsessed narcissist”.

Plenty have pointed out his hypocrisy, which only lays bare this double standard even further:

Piers Morgan called Greta Thunberg a self obsessed narcissist.

Has he looked in the mirror recently?

There really is a massive one there.

— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) June 9, 2025

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Others have pointed out that Thunberg could seemingly do nothing which could possibly satisfy Morgan – or escape his cynical and damaging attacks.

if Greta Thunberg was doing nothing for Gaza except posting, Piers Morgan would call her a performative whiner afraid to take any real action. If she engaged in violent protest, he would call her an evil terrorist. If she does non-violent action like the freedom flotilla, she's… pic.twitter.com/UXWIEsTLo8

— (@zei_squirrel) June 9, 2025

The more likely reality is that Thunberg’s real offence is simply showing up – with no agenda beyond helping others, using her privilege and platform to challenge the most powerful and damaging structures of power.

5 minutes in the company of this f****** legend and you get why washed-up conservative white men like Piers Morgan are so hideous towards her on the internet, obsessively trying to find out what her 'angle' is: It's because there's no angle. She does what she does because she… pic.twitter.com/tM5YADifrX

— Tehran Tadhg (@TadhgHickey) August 9, 2026

Unfortunately, much of the media class is helping to uphold these damaging systems of power, as researcher Philip Proudfoot has pointed out on X:

It is clear we need a public inquiry into the British media, covering everything from its funding model that encourages harmful click-bait, to the over representation of nepo-elites.

Media is sick in Britain. It does not not “speak truth to power” — it upholds and defends it.

— Philip Proudfoot (@PhilipProudfoot) August 19, 2026

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Practice what you preach, Morgan

There have been resounding calls across the political spectrum for stronger regulation of the media. The British public deserves a media watchdog which actually has ‘teeth’ when it comes to holding powerful, influential people to account for the harms they have afflicted and contributed to.

This crucial issue has been brought to the forefront of public debate in light of the abusive, irresponsible and cruel treatment towards Jason Arday, seemingly for clickbait. Continuously, we see the mainstream media, politicians and journalists actively encourage quick judgement. So few encourage real understanding.

Before the far-right DEI-haters swoop in, or those on the left who have been all too happy to churn out content that undermines the very principles we claim to uphold, let’s be clear: understanding is not the same as agreement.

It means reaching a conclusion informed by the full picture – not by the most manipulated, inflammatory or salacious details.

It is time for all those in the media and those engaging in public debate to practice what they preach, the World has had quite enough of hypocritical double standards.

Featured image via the Canary / IG

By Maddison Wheeldon

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Here at the Canary, we’ve been very critical of the sort of people who run to become Reform UK councillors. Sometimes this has been because of their own actions; other times it’s been because the party they sought to represent is reprehensible. Given this, we’d generally praise someone for leaving the party. It is somewhat difficult to do that in this instance, though:

Reform councillor resigns, but sent their resignation letter to the wrong council pic.twitter.com/5MkFTfVMYa

— Harry Eccles (@Heccles94) August 20, 2026

Confusion

The Reform councillor in question is one Christine Duffy. Duffy has previously complained that she “received no training” around the councillor role, which is a fair enough complaint. It’s not surprising, either, as we know that Reform doesn’t even seem to vet its candidates. We also know that Reform councillors have complained about having the tow the party line over local interests.

As noted, Duffy sent her resignation letter to the wrong council. For whatever reason, she addressed her correspondence to Kidsgrove Town Council instead of Newcastle-under-Lyme. This is a pretty big mistake, and while we know she “received no training”, that can only excuse so much.

Adding further intrigue to the story, Duffy has since withdrawn her resignation. While a resignation cannot be withdrawn once received, Duffy claims she withdrew before Kidsgrove handed the resignation to Newcastle. She also said:

I am not resigning as the Borough Councillor for the Town ward and I remain committed to representing the residents who elected me.

Additionally:

I am appalled that a private letter, provided in confidence to the Clerk of Kidsgrove Town Council, has somehow been obtained by the Kidsgrove Independents and is now being exploited for party political purposes.

And also this:

My position could not be clearer.

It probably could be clearer, to be fair, but maybe this is the best she can do?

Not alone

Duffy isn’t the only Reform councillor to have resigned recently. John Bell resigned on 17 August following the announcement that Reform want to abolish Personal Independence Payments (PIP):

The big question about Reform's plan to remove PIP disability payments from two-thirds of claimants is whether it's politically sustainable.

PIP pays ~£4,500 a year, tax-free, to ~10,000 people in a typical Reform target seat. Big debate ahead. https://t.co/fi1SlusXE8

— Fraser Nelson (@FraserNelson) August 18, 2026

Abolishing PIP entirely is an extreme position for Reform to take – both because of the damage it will do to sick and disabled people, and the damage it will do to the party’s electability:

Reform UK PIP changes: Reform UK MPs vs Old Tory MPs

Farage, Pochin, Anderson, Tice,
vs
Jenrick, Braverman, Rosindell, Kruger

Having reviewed PIP data and mapped it against Reform UK constituencies, and weighted for working age claimants, it's clear that there is a divide… pic.twitter.com/fMhqMmdlxF

— Reform UK Exposed (@reformexposed) August 17, 2026

In Farage’s Clacton constituency, it’s more like one-in-five voters. And while Reform has done a good job conning PIP claimants into thinking they’ll only target the ‘layabouts’, it’s going to be hard to pull that same trick when the party is claiming every PIP claimant is a layabout.

As we reported on 16 August:

By proposing to abolish PIP while simultaneously shunting other costs on to businesses, Reform seems to have designed a policy which will be hated by everyone. Obviously, there are many Britons who don’t own their own business of claim PIP, but bear in mind there are:

• 4 million PIP claimants.
• 1.4 million staffed businesses.

In other words, most Britons will know a PIP claimant or a business owner. And through word of mouth, they’re going to hear very bad things about this policy.

Reform: Going, gone

As detailed above, there are many reasons for Reform politicians to resign. Some have gone to take a moral stand; others have gone following a series of farcical mistakes. We do encourage all Reform councillors to abandon the party, though, and we hope fewer of them get in with the next local elections. This is looking more and more likely too given the party’s bizarre decision to attack its own potential voters.

Featured image via the Canary

By Willem Moore

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The Palestinian city of Hebron has been the target of another Israeli military excursion. Occupation personnel flooded into the Old City to roll out the proverbial red carpet for “settlers tours” in the southern West Bank city — a coloniser gathering held on Shabbat that compounds the terror Palestinian residents experience in Hebron, one of the most heated fronts of colonial settler violence.

Israeli military presence is not incidental. It safeguards setters, offering them a carte blanche to overrun indigenous Palestinian territories. With the military on their side, they are answerable to neither local nor international law, acting with repugnant impunity.

Israeli system of Apartheid

The latest flood of alleged religious pilgrims — all of whom are illegal settlers — was not without violence. By the evening of the 15 August, the tormenting of Hebron’s Palestinian population had begun as the settlers playbook of intimidation tactics took a violent turn. Making their way towards nearby Kiryat Arba, colonists started attacking nearby neighbourhoods.

Meanwhile, Israeli occupation forces (IOF) forced shopkeepers to shutter their stores and businesses for the afternoon. Roads were also closed, severely restricting the movement of Palestinians in and out of the Old City.

A Palestinian who lives in Tel Rumeida tells the Canary that he and his wife felt ‘anxious’ and ‘fearful’ that evening.

“About 7.30pm, just before sunset, a group of settlers was roaming Tel Rumeida with the intention of attacking the Palestinian residents. They started throwing stones at our house. My wife and I were inside so, fearing we would be hit by stones and attacked, we had to lock ourselves in the house and wait.”

“They just wanted to kill the Palestinians”

By around midnight, settlers had reached Hebron’s Al-Ras neighbourhood, throwing stones and attempting to set cars alight. The Quds News Network, citing the Red Crescent Society, reported that it was treating 10 injured Palestinians that night.

Naser Jabari, 64, was shot in the back and hand, while his 40-year-old son, Fahed, was also shot and subsequently detained. Eight other Palestinians, including a 66-year-old woman, were beaten by settlers and soldiers. After shooting the two men, the IOF prevented an ambulance from reaching them for around 40 minutes.

A local neighbour, Alaa Jaber, describes these events to the Canary:

Two of my neighbours were shot by soldiers that night. The settlers turned up at midnight, and were intimidating people. The people were deterring them, and because of this the settlers started throwing rocks. The Palestinians then responded with the same. One of the rocks hit the Israeli settler’s car, so he then started shooting.

The soldiers heard this, and turned up quickly. They saw the two Palestinians, and maybe thought they had a gun, so shot them immediately. They made no attempt to see what was happening, but just wanted to kill the Palestinians. After that, the soldiers stormed the houses, defending the settlers.

Naser Al-Jabari was taken to a Palestinian hospital, while the IOF took his son to a hospital in Jerusalem, by military ambulance, and detained him.

No further information is known about their condition, or if Fahed Al-Jabari is still being detained. Jaber says:

The streets around this Restricted Area are closed off to Palestinian vehicles, so the only cars on the road belonged to Israelis. The Jabaris made a living repairing the settler’s cars, and even communicated with them in Hebrew. It’s sad.

There’s no stability here, the situation is so chaotic. The Israelis want everyone to leave. They used to get on well with the Muslims, and were treated well by them. But now they come in and do the same as what the Nazis did against them.

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Skyrocketing settler violence

Settler violence in the occupied West Bank has hit an all time high. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 3,000 settler attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties or property damage had been recorded from the beginning of 2025 through to the end of June 2026. Much of this violence happens in and around the Hebron area.

Last year saw record levels of settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, with over 63,000 housing units advanced or planned. Now, in 2026, the occupation has been focusing on formalising settlements, funding their expansion and building supporting infrastructure. This is so it can continue deepening its control over the territory and continue fragmenting Palestinian communities, and what is left of their land.

Medical Aid for Palestinians warns of a continuing escalation in attacks on healthcare workers in the West Bank. Two further serious incidents have occurred. A group of settlers attacked an ambulance carrying a patient from Hebron’s Tel Rumeida area to hospital.

Just northwest of Hebron, in the village of Sa’ir, settlers shot 26-year-old Palestinian nurse Muhammad Mutoor, in the back. The attack severed Mutoor’s spinal cord, leaving him paralysed.

Israeli holding patterns

In 1997, under the Hebron Protocol, Hebron was divided into H1 and H2. H1 covers around 80 percent of the city and falls under Palestinian Authority control, while H2 covers the remaining 20 percent and remains under ‘Israeli’ military control. It includes the Old City and several areas where ‘Israeli’ settlers live alongside Palestinian communities.

Tel Rumeida and Al-Ras are two Palestinian neighbourhoods within the Restricted Areas of H2, and are therefore subject to severe access and movement controls. Palestinian vehicles are prohibited from entering, while residents face numerous checkpoints and restrictions affecting access to their homes, schools, workplaces and essential services.

Featured image via the Canary

By Charlie Jaay

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Left-wing politicians, like Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El-Sayed and (to an extent) Andy Burnham, have found recent success by taking a fresh angle on selling their politics. The Economist, a stalwart institution of liberalism and opponent of leftism, refers to this new approach as “Gen-Z socialism”, which it characterises as a “me-first doctrine” embodying:

a form of retail politics that appeals not to notions of the common good, as in prior waves of socialism, but to people’s narrow self-interest.

The demands, according to the Economist, are:

Lower my rent! Cut my bills! Give me free buses!

It believes, furthermore, that this strain of leftism differs from earlier ones because, where past left-wing generations proposed broad-based taxes, now the expectation is that the money will come “by squeezing the very wealthiest.”

Populist or popular?

The Economist might simply be resenting that leftism is now popular. The philosopher John Gray laid out the liberal’s resentful framing:

‘Populism’ is a term used by centrist liberals to describe political blowback from the disruption of society produced by their policies.

That same reflex traces back further, to John Stuart Mill’s 1859 work On Liberty and his fear that:

the tyranny of the majority is now generally included among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard.

The same Mill, though, wrote elsewhere that a shared national identity was one of the background conditions a liberal order needs to survive, not a threat to it. What binds a nationality together, he wrote, is:

the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.

Liberalism kept the fear of the crowd and dropped the recognition that a crowd needs something holding it together. That gap is roughly where what Gray calls “hyperliberalism” lives – treating every inherited identity as something to be dismantled rather than relied on. Point that habit of mind at a politics that speaks in terms of an “us,” renters against landlords, taxpayers against billionaires, and it reads exactly like the tribalism that liberalism trained itself to fear.

The way that plays out today is more concrete: neoliberalism didn’t defeat mass democracy so much as hollow it out, moving policy out of democratic reach and into the hands of technocrats. More than eight in ten Britons want water and energy back in public ownership, for example, yet neither party that has governed for three decades has acted on it. That isn’t a fringe demand; it’s a landslide majority rejected by an unaccountable one. The reaction when a liberal figure loses to that backlash is consistent. Gray recalls David Cameron shrugging off an upset as simply “populism”, as though his own policies had nothing to do with it. Hillary Clinton did the same in 2016, telling donors Trump’s coalition belonged in a “basket of deplorables.”

Pothole politics

Beyond the Economist‘s liberal pearl-clutching about leftist populism, the observation that left-wing politicians are increasingly adopting a form of retail politics holds up.

In August 2026, outsider Abdul El-Sayed beat the DNC establishment-backed Haley Stevens to become the Democrats’ candidate for Michigan’s Senate seat. In many ways, El-Sayed’s campaign strategy was to present Stevens as the ideologue, specifically a Zionist one, rather than advance an ideology of his own.

Stevens had previously said that:

Israel comes to me in my dreams.

Her campaign received almost $30 million from AIPAC’s Super PAC, whereas El-Sayed told voters that:

the money that we should have to invest in our schools is being sent to foreign governments to destroy other people’s schools, instead of investing in our own.

El-Sayed wasn’t trying to make anti-Zionists out of Michiganders. He was signalling that his opponent was the ideologue, spending their tax money on that ideology, while he would redirect it into their retail offer. Asked what label he’d choose for himself, he said:

I choose the word ‘populist,’ because I’m for people, and I want people to have more power, versus the elites.

This week, Burnham launched a “cost of living tour” built around “everyday fixes”: subscription traps banned, a £2 bus fare cap, cheaper pub rates, a VAT cut on electricity bills. BBC Verify put the whole first-week tally at about £1.5bn, which RSM UK’s chief economist called roughly 0.1% of annual government spending – too small to alarm the bond markets or change the economic outlook. That’s not a flaw, it’s the strategy: symbolic, itemised proof that government still works, priced low enough not to spook anyone who matters.

The same instinct reshaped New York. Mamdani won the mayoralty on universal childcare, free buses, a rent freeze and city-owned grocery stores, a “public option for produce.” The record so far is genuinely retail: $1.2bn secured for childcare, the rent freeze approved, the first site for the city’s grocery programme confirmed in East Harlem. Free buses remain stalled, with the administration’s immediate focus shifted to faster buses instead, and the broader wealth and corporate tax rises he ran on needed state approval he didn’t get, landing instead on a narrower pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes.

That instinct also became a genuine social media phenomenon: in July, a New Yorker filmed two potholes on his street, then a follow-up hours later showing they’d been fixed, a clip that went viral. By his 100-day address, the city had filled 100,000 of them. As Mamdani put it around the same milestone:

How can you ask a New Yorker to believe in the promise of universal childcare if they look out of their window every single day and see the same pothole not being addressed?

Retail therapy

What has actually changed is not the ideology but the unit of persuasion. Mid-20th-century socialism argued in structural terms – nationalise the commanding heights, trust an entire theory of the economy before you see a result. What Mamdani, Burnham and the wider DSA slate are running instead is socialism itemised: not the abolition of landlordism, but a rent freeze for roughly a million rent-stabilised apartments; not the nationalisation of retail, but a network of five planned city grocery stores; not a reformed tax code, but a wealth tax pitched as the thing that pays for a bill cut on your account this month. The old method asked people to trust the whole system before they saw any of the parts, and that stopped working the moment trust in any system collapsed.

Retail offers succeed because they’re built for an attention economy. A pothole fixed on camera delivers a result you can check yourself; a promise to reform the tax base does neither. The deeper cause is a collapse in trust, in the age of the Epstein files as much as anywhere else. Just 12% of the British public trust governments of any party to put the country’s interests before their party’s interests – a record low. Just 17% of Americans trust the government in Washington to do what is right even most of the time – one of the lowest readings in almost seven decades of polling. Ask voters to trust a complicated new tax system, and you’re asking for something trust collapse has made almost impossible to give. Ask them to trust that a pothole gets fixed by Friday, and you’re asking for something they can verify themselves.

The honest answer is that retail politics is not zero-sum thinking dressed up, it’s what happens when politicians stop asking voters to take a fairer system on trust and start proving it one bill, or one pothole, at a time. What Mamdani, Burnham and El-Sayed have discovered is how to make collective action believable again. But a subscription-trap ban and a filled-in pothole are not, on their own, a wealth tax. Voters who were sold the small print will eventually ask what happened to the rest of the book.

Featured image via Axios

By Hugo Harvey

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During President Donald Trump’s first term, they were resistance stars. During his second term, they couldn’t survive primaries.

Alexander Vindman’s Senate primary loss in Florida on Tuesday is the latest stumble for Democrats who rose to prominence during the impeachment trials and accountability protests of Trump’s first term. Vindman, a former National Security Council aide who testified during the 2019 House impeachment inquiry, made standing up to Trump and other forms of corruption a centerpiece of his campaign.

His national profile helped haul in big money, but that wasn’t enough to stave off an upset loss to democratic socialist Angie Nixon, whose win showed the shifting politics of the Democratic base.

“Vindman is a hero, but memories fade and the focus of most folks is on the cost of living,” said longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod. “She made those issues her focus.”

Democratic voters clearly want fighters who will stand up to the president and the GOP. But the string of losses for resistance candidates from the first Trump term illustrates a new era for the restive Democratic base, where vocal opposition to the president through official channels and public remonstrations no longer guarantees success.

The political graveyard of Trump-resistance-fighter campaigns is growing by the week.

Two of the 2021 House impeachment managers, Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), are among them: DeGette lost her reelection bid to a democratic socialist this summer, while Swalwell dropped out of the California gubernatorial primary after a string of sexual assault allegations. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), the lead majority counsel in the first Trump impeachment inquiry, was ousted in his primary. Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer honored for his heroics on Jan. 6, 2021, lost a House bid in Maryland — his second unsuccessful run.

Other Democrats who built their profiles on Trump resistance flopped as well.

Tom Steyer, a prominent financier of the Trump resistance movement, failed to advance in the California gubernatorial primary. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a member of the Oversight and Intelligence committees during the 2021 impeachment, fell short in his Senate bid. Reps. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) and Al Green (D-Texas), both of whom led impeachment pushes against Trump, were ousted by younger challengers. And George Conway, a longtime Trump critic and Lincoln Project co-founder, won just six percent of the vote in a House primary in New York City.

“‘#Resistance’ was a very Trump 1.0 mood, and now we are in a different moment of anger,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president at center-left think tank Third Way. “They’re mad about the war. They’re mad about costs. They’re mad about the establishment not having delivered anything for them.”

Not all the races were defined by Trump accountability politics. Swalwell dropped his bid after multiple sexual assault allegations, several incumbents lost to DSA challengers in closed primaries, and in Goldman’s case, the debate over Israel was a major factor.

A Democratic operative who worked on one of the resistance races, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the throughline is that those candidates are “institutionalists” who argued the justice system was going to hold Trump accountable. But voters have lost faith in those institutions after he returned to office, and were sold by other candidates’ messaging that relied more on railing against those very systems.

“The prescription isn’t what they were looking for anymore,” the operative said.

If Democrats retake control of the House, they will have to confront their base’s appetite for holding Trump accountable. Republicans have long warned that Democrats will immediately move to impeach Trump should they regain a House majority in 2027, which Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) — the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee — has signaled openness to.

But some Democrats are more careful. “There are certain sections of people that definitely want Democrats to prioritize impeachment of the president. There are also other segments of people that want Democrats to prioritize bringing down the cost of living,” said Rep. Julie Johnson (D-Texas), who lost a runoff in a newly gerrymandered district. “You can’t just focus on one thing at the exclusion of the other.”

These electoral results, along with a growing list of Trump-endorsed candidates who have lost their primaries, suggest Americans are ready to move past Trump, argued Mike Madrid, who co-founded (and later disaffiliated with) the anti-Trump GOP group Lincoln Project.

“People are just tired of him, broadly. They don’t want to deal with him and the fights and the exhaustion and the never-Trump model, but also the sycophantic MAGA support model either,” Madrid said, pointing to the string of Trump-endorsed candidates who lost primaries on Tuesday, from Florida to Wyoming. “It’s Trump fatigue.’”

Some candidates are taking note — and adjusting accordingly.

David Jolly, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Florida and a former GOP House member, left the Republican Party in 2018 over disagreements with Trump. He was an independent after that and a regular MSNBC talking-head criticizing the president. He registered as a Democrat more than a year ago, before launching his bid for governor.

Despite Trump’s role in his political evolution, Jolly hasn’t made Trump central to his race for governor. “I’m not running the race about Trump. I rarely talk about him. But I am going to tie Byron to Trump’s economy,” Jolly told POLITICO after winning the nomination on Tuesday night, referring to his Trump-endorsed opponent, GOP Rep. Byron Donalds.

Former Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), who served on the House Jan. 6th Committee, is running for her old seat against Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.). She said in a statement that she was “proud of the work I did in Congress to hold Donald Trump and his Administration accountable,” but quickly pivoted into an attack focused more on pocketbook issues.

Some of the candidates who lost primaries say their resistance bona fides did help — just not enough.

Dunn, the Capitol Police officer, earned the Presidential Citizens Medal from former President Joe Biden for his heroism on Jan. 6, 2021 and became well-known for his outspokenness about that day. He said that had little to do with his primary loss — although he acknowledged that Democratic voters’ top priority this cycle has shifted to affordability concerns.

“While name recognition got me to be a formidable challenger, it didn’t put me across the finish line,” said Dunn, who finished third in a crowded primary in Maryland’s 5th District. “I just think it’s too nuanced to just drill it down to ‘people just don’t care anymore.’” The Democratic nominee, Adrian Boafo, is “strongly about holding Donald Trump accountable,” Dunn added.

Goldman, similarly, lost to former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who often highlighted how he put his “body on the line” to push back against the administration’s immigration policies.

Steyer, the billionaire who ran for California governor, lost to Xavier Becerra — who campaigned hard on his court fights with the Trump administration as California’s attorney general, but also leaned into unrelated sections of his resume like his time as Biden’s health secretary.

Months before entering the race, Steyer reminded voters of the Need to Impeach campaign he once funded in an ad supporting last year’s Democratic gerrymander in California. But those credentials — which he later stressed on the campaign trail — were too dated and too intangible to push him over the top, according to his former campaign spokesperson Kevin Liao.

“Tom Steyer led an impeachment movement almost 10 years ago now, and I think it’s hard to expect the electorate to hold that long of a memory on anything that happened almost a decade ago,” he said.

Adam Wren, Kimberly Leonard, Riley Rogerson, Blake Jones and Madison Fernandez contributed reporting.

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Somewhere along the way, we stopped designing Britain for childhood.

Not deliberately. No government ever announced that children should spend less time outdoors. No planner set out to reduce independence. No parent wanted their son or daughter to swap a bike ride for another hour in front of a screen. Yet, somehow, that is where we have arrived.

The latest report from the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health puts data to something many of us have sensed for years. Child health has stagnated or worsened across many of the measures that matter, from obesity to mental health to physical activity, and health inequalities are widening.

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Their verdict was blunt: Britain’s record should be a “national embarrassment”. It is hard to argue otherwise.

When I was growing up on Merseyside, my parents rarely knew exactly where I was. Like millions of children of my generation, I’d disappear on my bike after breakfast and return when it was time for tea. We walked to school, climbed trees, built dens, kicked footballs around until it got dark and explored the world under our own steam. None of it felt like exercise. It was simply childhood.

Looking back, I realise those ordinary freedoms quietly built my health, my confidence and my independence. We weren’t active because someone organised it but because the world around us made activity the natural choice. Today’s children are growing up in a very different Britain.

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Roads carry far more traffic; parents have understandable concerns about safety, and green spaces have slowly disappeared from many communities. Leisure increasingly happens indoors and for too many children, especially those growing up in more deprived neighbourhoods, movement has become something organised rather than something that simply happens. We didn’t choose to make children less active – but we built a society that has made it harder for them to be active.

Health doesn’t begin in hospitals; it begins years before anyone becomes a patient. It begins in the streets that children walk along, the parks they play in, the routes they cycle, the neighbourhoods they grow up in and the freedom they are given to explore them.

We spend endless time debating how to fix the NHS and far too little protecting the environments that stop people needing it in the first place.

That is why the Government’s decision to retain statutory protections for playing fields deserves recognition.

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On the surface, it is a planning decision. But it’s much more than that: it is a statement about what kind of country we want to be.

Playing fields are not simply pieces of undeveloped land; they are places where children discover movement without thinking about exercise, where local sports clubs create belonging, where friendships begin and where confidence grows.

One in three children now leaves primary school overweight or obese. Behind every one of those statistics is a child whose future could have been different.

Protecting playing fields alone will not solve Britain’s child health crisis and neither will another strategy, awareness campaign or report. But it points us in the right direction. In an age when loneliness is rising and childhood is becoming increasingly indoor-based, playing fields are doing far more than hosting sport. They are quietly producing healthier and more connected children and people, which has a profound social and economic impact: active lifestyles save health and care services around £8 billion annually and prevent 3.3 million cases of chronic illness a year too.

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The greatest gift we can give is a childhood where walking to school, riding a bike, climbing a tree or kicking a ball around with friends becomes unremarkable again. So if we are serious about creating the healthiest generation in decades, we need to start asking a different question. Not, “How do we persuade children to exercise more?” But, “How do we make movement an ordinary part of childhood again?”

Those are very different challenges. The first relies on changing individual behaviour, the second asks us to change the places we build and the choices we make. History suggests the second will always be more successful.

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Michael Cohen and President Donald Trump have apparently patched up their differences in private. Now, they can do it in public.

The president is scheduled to do a phone interview Thursday with Cohen on the New York City radio show that Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer” began hosting last month.

Cohen said in an interview ahead of the broadcast that he and his former boss have met privately three times and reconciled since a bitter and very public falling out during the president’s first term.

“I suggest you listen to the show. You may find it extremely interesting,” he told POLITICO.

Cohen, who made a stunning conversion from pro-Trump bulldog to fierce critic, said he wasn’t sure if during the interview he and the president would discuss presidential clemency for the conviction that landed him a three-year prison sentence.

He isn’t sure he will even push for clemency from the president.

“We’ll see,” he said. “Will I make that request down the road? I don’t know. Maybe maybe not.”

That the president’s erstwhile attorney is even considering asking Trump for a pardon is somewhat remarkable.

Cohen was the star witness in New York prosecutors’ 2024 hush money case against Trump, which saw the then-candidate become the first ever former president to become a convicted felon when he was found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records to keep word of an affair with former porn star Stormy Daniels from public view.

Cohen, who testified that he lied and bullied for Trump during his years working for the Trump Organization, later turned on his former boss. He told POLITICO in an April 2024 interview, for example, that the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was “grotesque” and predicted “there will never be another election again in America” if he was reelected.

Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 on charges related to hush money payments to help conceal his boss’ affair with a porn star.

He said he sent pardon applications to former President Joe Biden’s administration and the Trump White House but doesn’t consider clemency, which would enable him to recover his law license, critical to his life at this point.

“I’m turning 60 next week. What am I going to go start practicing law again?” he said. “What has the loss of my law license prevented me from actually doing? Though I do believe I’m deserving of it, that’s a whole nother story.”

Thursday’s interview will mark the culmination of a months-long effort by Cohen to get back in the president’s good graces. He told a New York radio station this summer that they had a text exchange that started their reconciliation.

Teasing the interview, Cohen said people will be “interested to hear two individuals that were friends for a decade and a half who have not publicly spoken in eight years” talk about their long shared past. “What could they talk about?” he said.

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