Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, This is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the hour: Jews against Zionism: During the firs part of the 20th century, 100,000 Eastern European Jews joined a socialist organization we call the Bund, and they believed that Jews should fight for full rights wherever they were, not for a new homeland somewhere else. Adam Hochschild will comment. But first: the Democrats will still win the House, despite the Supreme Court’s actions last week: Harold Meyerson will explain—in a minute.
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Last week was one of the roughest since Trump won the election in 2024. You may remember: the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, and the Virginia State Supreme Court overturned voter-approved maps. So where does that leave us a week later? For comment, we turn to Harold Meyerson. He’s editor at large of The American Prospect. Harold, welcome back.
Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here, Jon.
JW: According to the Cook Political Report, about as sober as you can get, Democrats still have a clear path to winning control of the House this November. Of course, there are lots of possibilities and scenarios. The most realistic conclusion I have seen is that the number of districts currently held by Democrats that will become majority Republican is around five.
Now, the maximum that some people are looking at is 14 Democratic districts flipping to Republican. But that is based on the definition of a Republican district as one where Trump beat Kamala Harris in 2024, and their assumption, the people who say 14 districts will flip is that the vote in 2026 will be the same as it was in 2024, that nothing has changed in American politics in the last two years. That seems pretty unrealistic to me.
HM: Well, historically, even apart from the question of the performance of the party that won two years earlier and the performance of the president, even apart from that, midterm elections always favor the party out of power, because those voters tend to be more motivated to go to the polls to express their displeasure with the incumbent administration. Now that’s in the abstract. Concretely, Trump is polling in most polls well below 40% of approval rating. And the current state of the economy, which only in this week continues to get more ridiculously worse. Not so much due to fundamentals as due to Trump’s still inexplicable decision to go to war in Iran, which has caused the price of oil and gas to skyrocket. Therefore, the Cook assessment that the Democrats still are likely to win the House is a sound assessment.
JW: So, let’s look at what is a safe Republican district. For the pundits, a safe district is one that the winner got ten or more points more than his or her opponent. We call that a plus-ten district. How many of those districts are there in the House currently, and how many are there likely to be after November? Well, nobody is really sure about this. But since the 2024 election in state legislative seats that were up for the vote, Democrats flipped all 30 state legislative seats, winning in all the districts that Trump had won two years ago. And Republicans have flipped zero. And some of these, a substantial number of these, were districts that Trump won by ten points or more, plus ten.
I asked AI, what was the average Democratic margin of victory in the special elections of the last two years? The median was Democratic candidates beat Republican candidates by 10.4 points to 11.5 points higher than 2024, in those districts. Tthat’s the median. The median means half the Democrats did better than that. That seems to mean that safe Republican districts, a lot of them, aren’t that safe.
HM: Let’s keep in mind that it’s a profoundly different electorate that turns out for special elections and midterm elections than the one that turns out for presidential elections. The differing levels of motivation is the key factor here. And by looking at any poll, the number of Americans who strongly, strongly disapprove of Donald Trump’s presidency significantly outnumbers the number of Americans who strongly approve of it, which suggests a motivation gap that works entirely in the Democrats favor.
JW: Of course, we have six months to go, and in American politics, a lot of things could change. In six months, Trump could bring peace to the Mideast. Gas prices could return to normal. Trump could bring cheaper groceries, cheaper medical insurance, better health care. How likely is that?
HM: Well, I don’t play in prediction markets, but if I did, I wouldn’t make a bet on any of those prospects. I mean, the Iran war, to just take one example, is a war based on Trump’s whim, compounded with the needs of his buddy Bibi Netanyahu, for which there was never really a plausibly envisioned end game. That’s the kind of calculation that tends not to help the president who made it.
JW: The situation in Iran was the subject of a fascinating piece by the neocon foreign policy expert Robert Kagan in The Atlantic this week. He asked the question, Is the American defeat in Iran worse than Vietnam? And he said yes. He said “the United States is facing a setback so decisive that it will be a strategic loss that cannot be repaired.” Something that really hasn’t happened in our lifetime. In Vietnam, we were defeated. We killed lots of people. But it didn’t really matter to the world. The Iran defeat of the United States really is going to matter, because, he says, the Strait of Hormuz is not going to be truly free and open again in the foreseeable future. Iran has shown they have the power any time they want, by firing a few rockets to close the strait to shipping. That leaves Iran much stronger than they were a year ago. It encourages China and Russia to be bolder. It has substantially diminished the power and standing of the United States. What could Trump do here if he attacks Iran again? According to Robert Kagan, Iran could cripple the region’s oil and gas infrastructure by attacking facilities in other countries, and this would take years to repair. In some cases, maybe even decades. Do you see any way out for Trump?
HM: Not easily. And two factors here matter a great deal. The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz affects the entire world, which is dependent upon Middle Eastern oil. Our defeat in Vietnam really did not affect the entire world. Far from it. I mean, there was not even the domino theory projected by hawks in Vietnam that all the rest of Asia would go communist if we pulled out of Vietnam. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that this isn’t happening in vacuo in a vacuum. There’s a host of things Trump has done which has weakened America’s hegemonic power, which has existed at least since 1945: undermined our alliance with other democracies, particularly in Europe, by threatening Denmark; downgrading all of our alliances with other democracies, as a point of principle. Also, you know, weakening the kind of things that bolstered America’s hegemonic stature, like its lead in science and technology, which China now seems at least to have equaled and, in some ways, surpassed. So, by that metric of weakening the country, Trump is the greatest champion there is right now of 19th and 20th century technology.
JW: Yes.
HM: Trying to go back to coal, getting rid of electric vehicles, getting rid of any source of energy other than fossil fuels while the planet desperately wants to move on to a multi-source of energy condition, which China is adapting to, and we are moving in reverse. So, both by, the metric of who is more liable to destabilize life in my country, a lot of relatively neutral and even previously pro-Western, for lack of a better term, countries, think that China is less of a destabilizing power than Trump is. And by the metric of, simply the kind of national security that comes from a lead in science and technology, Trump is forfeiting that as well. So, the Iranian episode is kind of the icing on the cake of Trump’s war on American hegemony.
JW: Giving back to American politics: What we learned last week was, first of all, it’s the likely triumph of the Democrats that has led the Republicans into their all their current efforts to restrict voting and preserve Republican power, even though the majority of voters are against it. And the Supreme Court has proven itself to be even more so the key defender, the last line of defense for Republican power. So, the question is, what can Democrats do? They can win the House. They can win the Senate, in two years, they can win the presidency, but then they still need the Supreme Court to change. I understand it’s possible to change the number of justices to add justices to the Supreme Court without a constitutional amendment. Remind us how that could happen.
HM: That can happen simply by Congress voting to do that and the president signing that into law, and that’s happened before, the court at various times has had seven members, and it was expanded to nine members. It’s clearly not a constitutional issue. The hurdle to be overcome if you assume in 2029, we have a Democratic president, a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate will be to deal with the 60-vote hurdle in the Senate, which the Democrats can do. We’ve already exempted the confirmation of Supreme Court justices from the cloture hurdle and saying, you can do it with a simple majority. That having been done, I see no reason why the Democrats couldn’t and wouldn’t do the same. Dealing with the size of the Supreme Court and by increasing the number of justices on it.
JW: Another story that may reveal something significant about American politics. There’s some polls this week showing that most Americans are not sure the recent Trump assassination attempts were real. People say maybe they were faked. Maybe they were staged by Trump himself to get sympathy. For the White House Correspondents Dinner, only 45% of Americans think the assassination attempt was real. 24% told pollsters it was staged, 32% say they aren’t sure if it was staged or not. The numbers are similar for that assassination attempt in the campaign rally in Pennsylvania last in July 2024, where Trump was shot in the ear. Today, only 47% of Americans think that was real. 24% say it was staged. 29% say they aren’t sure. What do you make of the widespread skepticism about these assassination attempts, which I have to point out is not limited to Democrats?
HM: No. In fact, those same polls show that it’s a far greater percentage of Democrats who believe these events were staged than Republicans. And conversely, of course, it’s a far greater percentage of Republicans who believe that Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election than Democrats. I mean, so it’s illustrative of a couple of things. One is as the nation falls into a certain level of disorder, there’s a kind of tribal sensibility that emerges from that that can eclipse what you and I probably think is obviously what happens in situation X. And, Trump has so normalized lying, that to assume whatever goes on with him is a, is a is a fraud, is a lie, is a fiction is the way some people will respond to whatever he does. Just as you know, Republicans felt the same about Nancy Pelosi and so on.
JW: Meanwhile, in California politics, this week, a Democratic strategist has launched a campaign to repeal California’s top two primary system. Now, I think you’ve heard about this under the current system, it’s been there for 15 years, candidates of all parties run in the same primary. The top two finishers advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation. And that has meant, and it may mean now that two members of the same party end up the top two vote-getters, and then that party has a battle over their future. The new proposal filed Friday would end simply repeal the nonpartisan top two primary and revert to the system of the Democrats of a primary, the Republicans do, and so does any other legit party that wants to. If it gets enough signatures, it will be placed on the 2028 ballot, and it would take effect in the 2030 elections, including the governor’s race. Now, as I recall, this is an issue you’ve been complaining about even before the current gubernatorial situation in California.
HM: Well, when California backed into the system or was backed into this system, 15 years ago, I wrote this situation the Democrats are now encountering in the governor’s race. I wrote then that this could happen, that this was hardwired into the system. I wrote that in my magazine, The American Prospect. And if I recall right, I think I even wrote a piece in The LA Times pointing that out, but, here we are.
And in particular, what this sort of failed to anticipate was that the state, which was already heavily Democratic in 2008, 2009, when this went through, would become so lopsidedly democratic that when there was an open seat in almost any part of the state or statewide, there was a likelihood that many more Democrats would enter that race than Republicans. And that’s exactly what’s happened in this year’s gubernatorial contest. There are two prominent Republicans, and there are initially eight prominent Democrats, which has now been winnowed down to six. But that’s still about three too many to assure that a Democrat is going to make it into the into the final runoff.
JW: Who do you think is going to oppose this initiative once it’s gathering signatures?
HM: Well, not the partisans of any party. And that includes, you know, the smaller parties that are totally locked out under this system.
JW: You’re talking there about Peace and Freedom.
HM: I’m talking about Peace and Freedom. I’m talking about Libertarians, you name it. I think that it’ll get considerable support. I mean, this was put through because at the time there was still a vaguely moderate wing of the Republican Party, and at the time, to pass a state budget, you needed a two-thirds vote in both houses. Now, the Democrats currently have three quarters of each House, but they didn’t then, and they needed the vote of one moderate Republican state senator. He said, I’ll give you the vote–if we set up a jungle primary. And the then moderate Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, said, oh, that’s a good idea. And we’ve been saddled with it ever since. But, you know, since the middle of the political spectrum has sort of hollowed out in many ways since then. I think the proposed new ballot measure for 2028 will in fact, pass. I mean, the Democrats whether or not we have Chad Bianco or Steve Hilton as the next governor, the Democrats have sort of been viewing this as a near-death experience, and I’m sure they don’t want to go through that again.
JW: One last thing. It’s time for an update on the Trump phone. Thanks to Heather Cox Richardson for reminding us about this story. Back in June 2025, almost a year ago, Don Jr and Eric Trump announced the launch of a new gold plated Trump smartphone, which they declared would be “proudly designed and built in the United States.” They said it would be available in August 2025 and that it would cost $499. And they invited people to preorder the phone by depositing $100 towards it. Don Jr. said the phone would be built in America, but a disclaimer on the website said that the Trumps were involved only in the branding of the phone, they had nothing to do with the design, development, manufacture, distribution or sale of the phone. There’s a guy named Judd Lugum in Popular Information who explained that the idea of a superior, American made phone was always a fantasy. America doesn’t have the capability to manufacture cell phones, so within two weeks, the description of the Trump phone at its website changed from made in the USA to “designed with American values in mind.”
It has all the same features as every other smartphone. But what makes it different from every other smartphone is this one has never been shipped. And on April 6th, the people who follow the Trump mobile website found that their $100 deposit was not actually a deposit on a preorder. It was now “a conditional opportunity. If Trump Mobile later elects at its sole discretion to offer the device for sale.” It went on to say that the deposit “does not lock in pricing, promotions, service plans, taxes, fees, shipping costs or other commercial terms.” And that “estimated ship dates, launch times and anticipated production schedule are non-binding estimates only.”
As of today, there is still no release date for the Trump phone. Does the Trump phone remind you of any other products?
HM: Yes, this is classic Trump business. I mean, for one thing, many of the things that have the name Trump stamped on them are simply Trump branding. You know, this is in a long line of, Trump’s scams. By the way, I mean, really, we have Apple to thank and blame for the fact that smartphones are not made in the United States. They almost immediately shifted that to China. And that became a significant element in China’s rise in technological capacity. So, in the very broadest sense, there’s a range of culprits here, but in the specific sense of this being a scam, that’s all on the Trumps. And you know, this certainly sounds like a lawsuit in the making. Even if Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas would never sanction such a thing.
JW: Harold Meyerson – read him at prospect.org. Thank you, Harold.
HM: Always good to be here, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: In the first part of the 20th century, 100,000 Eastern European Jews joined a socialist organization that opposed Zionism. They opposed the idea that Jews needed a nation of their own. Their organization we call the Bund, and they believe that Jews should fight for full rights wherever they are, not in a new homeland somewhere else. Of course, there have been many distinguished Jews who were critics of Zionism, starting, I don’t know, with Hannah Arendt, but the Bund was the largest, the longest lived, and the most multinational Jewish organization to take that position. Their motto was “here, where we live, is our country.” And that’s the title of a new book by Molly Crabapple. Adam Hochschild has been thinking about that. Of course, he’s an award-winning historian and author. His most recent book is American Midnight: The Great War, A Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis. We talked about it here. He’s a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine. He writes for The Nation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the New York Review, where his review of Molly Crabapple’s book about the Bund appears. Adam, welcome back.
Adam Hochschild: Always good to be with you, Jon.
JW: You say that two catastrophes haunt our thinking about the Jewish socialists in Europe who were against Zionism. Please explain.
AH: Well, one of them, of course, is the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of some 6 million Jews. The other — and I very much credit the author of this very fine book, Here where We Live is Our Country, Molly Crabapple — she is somebody who takes very much to heart the plight of the Palestinians. As a journalist, she has reported from the West Bank, from Gaza. In writing this book, she tells you where she stands. She doesn’t try to disguise it. She says: “I was writing this book in the New York Public Library, and sometimes chance for Palestine sounded from the streets below. And sometimes I went down to join the demonstrators.” So I appreciate her concern for that long suffering people, as well as her concern for her relatives and many of the people she writes about who perished in the Holocaust.
JW: Now, you say there was a moment in American history where the toll of both of these disasters could have been greatly reduced. What was that moment?
AH: Well, this is a fanciful excursion on my part into alternative history. But sometimes I think it’s fun and interesting to do that just because it reveals things. And my candidate for a moment that changed, which would have eased both those catastrophes, not eliminated them, but made them perhaps less deadly, would be if the United States had never passed the 1924 Immigration Act. This was the act, of course, culminating a rising tide of nativism in the United States that basically slammed the door on almost all immigrants for the next 41 years. And it was this Act that kept out all but a relatively small number of Holocaust refugees in the 1930s, when there were hundreds of thousands of people in Europe who desperately would like to have come here.
So, imagine what would happen if we hadn’t passed that Act. I think we would have seen a lot more Jewish immigration to the United States from both Eastern and Western Europe. Remember, 2.5 million Jews had come here, including your ancestors and mine before 1924. The great majority of them fleeing Czarist Russia and its pogroms, but many coming from elsewhere as well. My ancestors came from Germany. And I think that flow would have continued certainly after Hitler came to power in 1933, Jews were desperate to get out of Germany. Many fled to Holland, which, such as Anne Frank’s family and actually some relatives of mine, but that didn’t give them much help. After Hitler invaded Holland, they would have loved to come to the United States, but it was off the table.
I think from Eastern Europe. There are many people who would have loved to continue coming to the US as their ancestors had done. Poland between the wars was an absolute cauldron of antisemitism. There were outbreaks of violence against Jews. There were severe restrictions. There were quotas in some schools and universities, various humiliations. This was something, I think, which added to the fervor of the Zionist movement, where, from the end of the 19th century on, there were people who said, “well, the only place we’ll be safe is in a homeland. We can make our own. And that has to be in the Middle East.”
But I think had there been an alternative to continue to keep coming to the United States after 1924, I don’t think it would have eliminated the Zionist movement, which had very strong roots, but it might have diminished its appeal. And the alternative history scenario that I played out a little bit in This New York Review of Books piece was suggesting, well, if the pressure for the number of Jews wanting to go to Palestine, which became Israel, had been less than a smaller number of people wanting to go there. And if we could magically reach back into history and give both Jews and Arabs in that part of the world leaders more inclined to cooperation and compromise, it might have been possible to work out a more equitable way to share that land in which both peoples have roots.
JW: Now let’s talk about the politics of the Bund, which was especially powerful and significant in Poland, especially in the 1920s and 1930s. What did it mean to be active in the Bund at that time?
AH: Well, this was something I learned a lot about from Molly Crabapple’s excellent and quite passionate book on the subject. Remember, Poland had the largest number of Jews in Europe, well over 2 million. And the Bund was sort of a combination of labor union and political party. They got the greatest share of the Jewish vote for Jewish candidates to the Warsaw City Council. A Cultural federation. It was all of these things, and it was very strongly anti-Zionist. They saw the Zionists as their rivals. They said, we need to make common cause with people on the left here. They were quite close to the Polish Socialist Party. Its politics were very socialist. Some of the leaders of the Bund had actually been involved in the revolutionary movement in the Tsarist empire. They said, “we have to make the new society, the good society here.”
JW: The Bund also was active in the United States for a while.
AH: That’s right. People who had been members of it in the old Russian Empire which was well, prior to 1924, when Jews in large numbers came from imperial Russia to the United States, they brought their sympathy for these ideals with them. And some of the prominent early leaders of the American labor movement, like Sidney Hillman, David Dubinsky both of whom were involved with garment workers in New York, had been activists in Czarist Russia. So, there were more than 50,000 Bund members in the United States and Canada prior to the First World War.
JW: And in the face of the rise of fascism in Europe, in Poland in in the ‘30s, what was the position of the Bund? Did they say, “we’ve got to get out of this place”?
AH: No. They were certainly profoundly opposed to fascism, but they wanted to stay there and unite with their allies on the Polish left, especially the Polish Socialist Party, and create the good society there. My guess is some of them sensed that they were at risk of being conquered by the Nazis. But of course, nobody really in Europe was fully prepared for the enormous land grab that Hitler made starting in 1939.
JW: So, this is a case where the verdict of history is hard to argue with. The Nazis killed 6 million Jews. The remnant that survived ended up creating the state of Israel. The Zionists seem to have won that argument. What do you say to that? What does Molly Crabapple say to that?
AH: Yes, in a sense, the Zionists won the argument in that they proved that Jews could survive by going to Israel, but at such tremendous cost. The cost of the total destruction of Gaza, mass murder in Gaza, this ongoing land grab in the West Bank, which proceeds daily with Jews seizing Palestinian villages, Palestinians forced into exile but not being able to go anywhere because Egypt won’t let people in from Gaza. Plus, you know, the strain of living in a part of the world that just seems to be perpetually on fire, a country divided by a war, by a wall. In a sense, yes, the Zionists won. They created a state in Israel. But what kind of state?
JW: One other thing you’re thinking about: All of this has been shaped recently by a trip you took to Ukraine that you wrote about for the American Scholar, a piece called “In the Presence of People No Longer Here.” So much of the history of Ukraine in the 20th century is just horrifying. Tell us about your trip and your engagement with the history of that place.
AH: Well, it was a fascinating trip, I felt privileged to make it. My wife and I were both asked to give some talks in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, which is, like many places in that part of the world, it was in many different countries during the 20th century. It was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then it was part of Poland between the wars. Then it was occupied by the Nazis. Then it was part of the Soviet Union. Today it’s part of Ukraine. And I got fascinated with the history of this place. It’s also sort of the that whole area is the epicenter of where the Holocaust took place. Everywhere you go, there are memorials to the Jews who were killed there. Almost all of them, unfortunately, are not by the people there, but by family members and so on who managed to get out to the West and who returned to put up a monument. So that whole history was very much on my mind as I read this very fine book about the Bund. And it is a part of the world that has seen mass death again and again and again. And of course, it’s seeing it right now as Putin is trying to seize Ukraine. And we were, I mean, the city was, is happily out of the range of most of the drones and so on, that Putin sends to places like Kyiv and Kharkiv.
JW: One last thing you write in The New York Review, this is a “the Israeli military campaign has left large parts of Gaza reduced to rubble, much as the Nazis left the Warsaw ghetto.” Of course, it’s hard to disagree with that. But saying that is defined as antisemitic under the laws of the state of California and 34 other states. This is the definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the IHRA, which includes as an illustrative Example of anti-Semitism. “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” And this definition of anti-Semitism has been adopted by the State of California, and 34 other states. And the Department of Education. By your school. Berkeley; my school, Irvine; UCLA, Harvard, Columbia and other places.
Students and faculty can be punished for saying what you said in the in The New York Review. This is not just the Trump administration. The Biden administration also endorsed this definition. It’s been proposed in a congressional bill. Right now, it’s just a policy of the Education Department, the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which passed the House in 2024 by a vote of 320 to 91. The only reason it hasn’t become law yet is largely because of Senator Rand Paul, who is on the Committee of the Senate that is in charge of taking up this bill. And he has pushed for an amendment that says, “criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic.” That’s supported by Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey, Chris Murphy and some other leading Democrats. So right now, it’s not the law of the United States, it’s just the policy of the federal government in 34 states. I think we should spend a minute just talking about the argument here of whether this is the right definition of antisemitism and whether it should be enforced on our college campuses.
AH: Well, I think it’s a nonsensical definition of antisemitism. Yes, there is antisemitism in the world, sometimes quite a lot of it. We have it in this country. But I absolutely do not equate it with criticism of Israel. I think Israel, like any other country, needs to be judged on what it does to the people who live there. And today, we have to judge it very, very harshly. Given especially what’s happening in Gaza, but also what’s happening in the West Bank, which we hear much less about. So, for me, that’s a very different thing than being antisemitic. And I have relatives in Israel. And, I’ve occasionally, like many American Jews, heard antisemitic comments directed at me or at other people I know here. But I actually think public opinion about all this in the United States is changing in a big way.
JW: In fact, there’s a poll of American Jews in 2026 regarding the Gaza war that found that 61% of American Jews say Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, and 40% of all American Jews say Israel is guilty of genocide. That’s a Washington Post poll this year.
AH: There were 40 Democratic senators the other day who voted for a bill that curbed some arms exports to Israel. Nothing like that has happened before. I think the war in Gaza has had an enormous effect on making people across the political spectrum in the United States say, “wait a minute, do we really want to be militarily allied with the regime that’s doing this kind of thing?” And I think there will be more and more doubt expressed on that subject.
JW: Adam Hochschild – you can read about his trip to Ukraine in The American Scholar. That piece is called “In the Presence of People No Longer Here.” And you can read his piece about the Bund in the New York Review. It’s about the book, Here Where We Live is Our Country, by Molly Crabapple. Adam, thanks for talking with us today.
AH: Thank you. Jon. It’s always a pleasure.
