May. 23, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Watching Hunter Biden’s nearly two-hour interview with the antisemitic megastar podcaster Candace Owens was, as you might expect, not an intellectually rewarding experience. But that’s not to say it didn’t have some accidentally illuminating moments.

Despite Owens’ considerable talent for monetizing content that appeals to bigots and conspiracy theorists — a significant portion of the MAGA movement — she is not well-read, appears to have no principles that can’t be jettisoned at a moment’s notice and her body of work serves as further evidence backing up the scientifically documented link between racism and stupidity.

Hunter Biden, it’s hard to believe these days, was just a couple of years ago a very influential person by virtue of nothing more than being President Joe Biden’s son. He was a key voice in the Biden inner circle and infamously urged his father to continue his doomed re-election campaign even after his disastrous debate performance. That was absurdly inept counsel that proved to be a hugely important factor in returning Trump to office.

But that wasn’t the only way Hunter Biden was of great value to the Trump campaign. Although multiple investigations into his foreign business affairs found no evidence that the elder Biden did anything wrong, Trump and MAGA portrayed the Biden son’s alleged attempts at low-level influence-peddling as the ultimate examples in self-dealing and government corruption. People including Owens often said Hunter Biden was emblematic of the “Biden crime family.” (Owens also said in 2021 that Joe Biden was “an illegitimate President” and a “true dictator.”)

What a difference a few years makes.

The current president and his family have enriched themselves to the tune of billions of dollars since he’s been back in power, with investments in industries and cash-infusions from foreign entities with business considerations before the U.S. government. Meanwhile, Hunter Biden’s comeback tour has him playing the self-pitying sad-sack, whining to Owens that people think he’s just some “ne’er do well who never did anything in their life.” To his detractors, he says in the interview, “Go look at my goddamn resume!” He cited his Yale Law education and serving on “16 boards” among his accomplishments.

Much of the excruciatingly boring first hour focused on Biden’s struggles with addiction, to which Owens showed great sympathy — even if she advertised the interview as being poised to “crack the internet.” (Get it?) Biden explained, convincingly, why the cocaine found at the White House in November 2023 was not his, and there was a lot of vaguely pious meandering chatter about finding salvation in his Catholic faith.

Among the interview’s few revealing moments included Biden assailing what he described as Israel’s “wholesale murder of a population in Gaza.” That’s interesting, if only because there’s ample data showing that President Biden’s “bear hug” strategy (throwing the occasional criticism toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over his war on Gaza, but doing almost nothing to stem the brutality) was deeply unpopular among many Democratic constituencies and helped Trump win crucial swing states like Michigan.

Hunter Biden had his father’s ear when he gave him the horrible advice to stay in the 2024 race, but did he ever tell his father what a tactical, political and moral mistake he was making by rubber-stamping Bibi’s endless war? If he did, he didn’t mention it to Owens.

Owens, at one point, pointedly called out the Trump family’s shameless profiting off of the presidency, correctly comparing their galactic levels of corruption with the comparatively small potatoes of Hunter’s alleged chicanery.

Then came the truly unhinged portions of the interview, where Biden praised Owens’ supposed bravery “for asking questions” about the official narrative surrounding her close friend Charlie Kirk’s assassination in September 2025. Although the alleged assassin reportedly confessed to the crime and left a trail of evidence suggesting the killing was politically motivated, Owens has for months speculated that there was instead a conspiracy involving the Israeli government and perhaps even Kirk’s widow.

It’s worth noting that Owens’ rise was enabled by “anti-woke” critics of identity politics who nonetheless rarely skipped an opportunity to cite Owens’ identity for culture war street credibility. Bari Weiss praised her in a 2018 New York Times feature about the “intellectual dark web” as “a sharp, young, black conservative — a telegenic speaker with killer instincts,” and Christina Hoff Sommers wrote around that same time that Owens “is the pseudo-left’s worst nightmare: A formidable young black woman saying the emperor has no clothes.” Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire site also hosted Owens’ show for years.

She has since fallen out of favor with that crowd because of her antisemitism, but the damage is done: She’s a massively influential right-wing media star with nearly six million YouTube subscribers. And now she appears to be, at least superficially, pals with Joe Biden’s son.

The interview might not have “cracked the internet” as Owens promised, but there is something remarkable about the former Democratic president’s son chumming it up with an overt bigot, fabulist and purveyor of brain-rotting innuendos who relentlessly smeared him and his family for years. The whole thing has a professional wrestling kayfabe vibe to it — with heroes and villains regularly swapping roles amid performative shouting.

Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW.

May. 23, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Therapists across the country are seeing a surge in clients who say politics is taking a toll on their mental health, according to a new article in Blue Light News Magazine. One therapist told the publication, “This is the first time that we’re really seeing people initiating therapy because of political [anxiety].”

An American Psychological Association survey found that about two-thirds of Americans said politics was a significant source of stress in their lives in 2025. Blue Light News reports that psychological associations are holding workshops on addressing mental health problems tied to politics, and clinics are holding staff meetings on tackling the issue. Some therapists are even specializing in political anxiety. A friend who works as a therapist told me that he lists “climate grief” as an area of expertise.

I am not a therapist. But I have thought about and engaged with politics day in and day out for most of my life without going (entirely) crazy. When friends and acquaintances ask me, with increasing frequency, how to deal with the stress of paying close attention to a world awash in crisis, I share the following thoughts.

As many political thinkers on the left have argued, optimism is not just a temperament. It is a strategy and outlook that can be consciously cultivated, especially in concert with others. Even when it may feel pointless, focusing on what can be done is worthwhile. Expressing dissent, minimizing harm, notching incremental wins and building networks and ideas for the future are not just the right things to do — they build discipline and faith in action that can pay off in the future when better opportunities arise.

Many people’s instinct is to gorge on news in response to major — and often horrible — developments. But this can confuse political awareness with political involvement. A good citizen is broadly informed about what is happening in their society. But that doesn’t mean letting the hourly news cycle land blow after blow to your psyche.

A healthy media diet is not unlike a healthy food diet: It requires deliberate, moderate consumption and balance and variety. Rather than endlessly doomscrolling on social media or having thousands of notifications hold your attention span hostage, budget how much time you allow yourself to consume political news in a given day or week. Read weekly and monthly magazines that take a longer view and try to make sense of the daily mess. Read about issues other than politics — there’s a lot more neutral or good news in the science world, for example.

Books are even better for a big-picture perspective. Novels are great for many reasons but from a political perspective, they remind me that many of our social problems constantly recur in different forms and encourage us to consider them with empathy and nuance. History books remind me that while things can feel rough at the moment, humanity has overcome problems that dwarf many of the ones that plague us today — total global warfare, plagues that wipe out huge swathes of humanity, famines, slavery and many other normalized acts of cruelty and exploitation that boggle the mind.

Learning about the history of the left in particular reminds me to think of our contributions to society as part of a series of cycles stretching across time; no one person’s actions can change the world permanently, but those of us immersed in the struggle for progress are, at our best, helping create links between the best traditions of the past and the needs of the future. It might not sound relaxing to contemplate past catastrophes, but there is consolation in knowing you have good company across generations in facing off against the world’s problems and injustices.

Healthy consumption of information is only one way to build resilience. A huge source of political anxiety and depression stems from a feeling that one is helpless. But you’re not — there are always opportunities to get involved in civic, political and labor organizations. Problem-solving helps restore one’s sense of agency and purpose. And it is grounding to seek alignment between one’s values and one’s actions. Find your people, focus on a handful of issues and find a way to sustainably contribute to putting in work and problem solving in a routine manner. Plus, people tend to treat one another a lot better at political meetings than they do online, and it’s also a way to make friends and have fun.

Conveniently, this is both a way to feel better and to actually build democratic power. Particularly at a time when many people are realizing how our political parties are not up for the task of solving the scope of problems we face, it’s more important than ever for people to act in solidarity to advocate for the kind of world they want to see, instead of delegating it to empty suits.

Of course, nobody can — or should — be immune to feelings of uneasiness, despair and rage in response to oppression and devastation. I myself am hardly a picture of total equanimity. And when you yourself are facing the direct consequences of a harsh policy that is restricting your freedom, it makes perfect sense that it would be a blow to your mental health. But my intention is to try to flesh out how we can have at least some self-sovereignty and influence over our ability to be functional in the world in the face of a seemingly never-ending torrent of bad news.

It can also be helpful to draw from a spiritual tradition to renew one’s sense of the purpose of being and acting. For methat includes meditation that draws from Buddhist lineages and deliberate community-building. For you, it could take an almost infinite number of forms. This is not about withdrawing from the world, but connecting with it in a way that’s calm and unmediated by algorithms and alarmism or demagogues and doomsayers.

Lastly, I would note that one small thing we can do at the level of social norms is buck the ritualized doomerism that often prevails on the internet. The stance that “everything is bad and getting worse” is commonplace on social media sites, where many people are endlessly cynical and often vicious toward their fellow users. This blinkered view rewires people’s mindsets to constantly scan for a slow drip of bad news as proof of society’s endless freefall and lose perspective on what is working and worth cherishing.

And there’s another doomerist-adjacent custom that we should also discard. People will sometimes sheepishly offer a bit of good news — about the world or themselves — to others by prefacing it with, “I know things are terrible in the world right now, but….” I say: Drop the guilt-laden preamble! Say it boldly! Human experience is varied and complex, good things and bad things always coexist.

Hope is more essential than ever when things feel particularly dark. Don’t let tyrants and oligarchs ruin the pleasure of a good meal, a job promotion, a beautiful piece of art or falling in love. Don’t let them temper your pride in a burgeoning mutual aid group or small garden or tiny ragtag neighborhood patrol to protect immigrants in the community. Savoring that, which is pleasurable or encouraging — or just simply working OK — is going to help us get through this mess. Celebrate life when you can. It’s all we’ve got.

Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.

May. 23, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

President Donald Trump sure is making it hard to be his friend. Despite having more members firmly in the MAGA camp, House Republicans have spent most of his second term squabbling among themselves. Instead, it has been GOP senators who have been his most surprising ride or dies, helping advance Trump’s agenda at a pace that belies the body’s usual slow crawl.

As Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has struggled to wrangle his caucus, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., by contrast has been tenaciously driving the White House’s agenda forward. It was always bound to be a thankless task for Thune to keep the famously distractible president on the best route. But the past month has seen Trump throw roadblock after roadblock directly in Thune’s path, making it almost impossible to avoid this week’s major collision.

Budget reconciliation billslike the one Republicans are currently shepherding through the Senate, are never easy. It’s meant to fund the ongoing mass deportation campaign, one of Trump’s key priorities. The bill is a workaround after the Democrats’ successful filibuster earlier this year saw money for immigration enforcement stripped from the Department of Homeland Security’s annual budget.

The urge to pile on other potential GOP priorities ahead of the midterms was sharp, but Thune signed off on a plan to keep the reconciliation bill narrowly focused on providing new cash to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol — on top of the money thrown their way in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Crucially, however, in dodging the need for Senate Democrats’ votes, the partisan budget bill will require the agreement of almost every Republican in both chambers of Congress to reach a majority.

Having shut the door on a free-for-all, the odds looked good for the $72 billion package — except for one (relatively) small problem. Trump allies — including Budget Committee Chair Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. — opted to add on $1 billion in Secret Service funding for security enhancements at the White House. That included $220 million for the “East Wing Modernization Project,” the official name of the ballroom Trump is constructing on the footprint of the demolished East Wing.

While the bill made clear that none of the funds “may be used for non-security elements” of the ballroom’s construction, enough Republican senators were still skeptical to place the bill’s passage at risk. A briefing from the head of the Secret Service did little to quiet those concerns. A ruling from the Senate parliamentarian last week that the funding didn’t fit the strict rules of the budget reconciliation process must have been something of a relief then, giving GOP senators a convenient excuse to strip the ballroom provision from the bill entirely.

But as soon as one problem was solved, Trump threw an even bigger one their way in the form of a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund with virtually no oversight.

There are more problems with the fund’s shady structure than we have time to unpack here. The short version is that in settling a lawsuit against his own administrationTrump ordered the acting attorney general to draw money directly from the Treasury and create a board to disperse payments to people who claim to have been persecuted by federal prosecutions under the Biden administration. According to the settlementthe five members of that panel will report directly to the president (with one member appointed in “consultation” with Congress) and have an obligation to keep exactly who has applied for those funds, let alone receive them, confidential.

To say this was not well received on Capitol Hill would be a massive understatement.

Some Senate Republicans immediately began considering ways to potentially throw limits on the fund into the reconciliation bill via amendment. Democratic senators, meanwhile, didn’t hide their excitement at the thought of providing their own amendments to block the fund, all of which would receive a vote under Senate budget rules.

A two-hour meeting between GOP senators and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at the Capitol did nothing to quell the furor. Punchbowl News reported that “around 25 of them, an exceptionally high number for these closed-door meetings — took turns blasting the proposal and lamenting that they were being put in this situation.”

It is revisiting the point that this whole mess is getting in the way of what was supposed to be the president’s top policy priority: immigration. Trump had said that he wanted the ICE funding measure on his desk by June 1. But instead of sending the funding bill to the House before a weeklong Memorial Day recess, senators instead were forced to flee Washington rather than face a series of politically embarrassing votes.

Trump has, naturally, not taken well to these shows of defiance from legislators. A Republican senator told MS NOW on Friday that the White House indicated the president could veto any reconciliation bill that excludes funding for his ballroom or places limitations on the “anti-weaponization” fund, with the latter a particular focus of the threat. (When asked about the claim, first reported by Semafora White House official told MS NOW that it was “not accurate.”)

But the Senate’s acts of rebellion come from a unique kind of frustration, sparked when someone you’re trying to help is only making the task harder. Trump’s allies in the upper chamber are growing tired of swerving around the president’s whiplash-inducing whims. It may not be long before they stop swerving altogether, simply continuing forward over what has gone from a roadblock to merely a road bump.

Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.