May. 2, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

This article contains some plot spoilers for “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”

An early, pivotal scene in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is so recognizable to anyone who works in media right now that it should come with a warning.

Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs, now an esteemed investigative reporter at a New York newspaper, is about to receive a prize during a journalism awards ceremony. But as the category is being announced, she and her colleagues receive text messages declaring that they’ve been fired because the newspaper is shutting down. Gobsmacked, Andy delivers an off-the-cuff acceptance speech in which she makes an impassioned plea to save journalism because it matters more than money or, you know, should.

Her comments go viral, which leads Irv Ravitz (Tibor Feldman), the CEO of media conglomerate Elias-Clark Publications, to ask her to return to Runway magazine, where she will lead the features department and bring some much-needed gravitas to the fashion publication. He wants to boost the mag’s credibility thanks to an error in judgment committed by none other than editor-in-chief Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep, still sporting that swoopy silver ’do). And that’s how the key figures from 2006’s “The Devil Wears Prada” find themselves back in the same orbit.

As a longtime journalist who has gotten significant career news at extremely inopportune times, the mass firing at an awards ceremony rang, sadly, true. I once learned I had a new boss while covering a panel at San Diego Comic-Con. Another time, I got the news that the popular blog I wrote for a major newspaper’s website was being discontinued while I was being checked for head lice. (Fun fact: I had it!)

This industry is brutal and always has been. But it is at its most broken point in modern history, and the film, to its credit, understands this. Not only are crusaders for good, old-fashioned, do-gooder journalism like Andy vulnerable to job cuts, even someone as established as Miranda, the “Prada”-verse’s equivalent of Anna Wintour, fears being pushed out of the profession altogether. This sequel, also written by Aline Brosh McKenna and directed by David Frankel, frames itself as a journalism movie in a way that its predecessor did not. But it mostly pays lip service to the sense of desperation that pervades the media business, rather than depicting it.

This moment aches for a great movie about the importance of the press. “The Devil Wears Prada 2” not only isn’t that movie, it winds up reinforcing many misguided perceptions of journalism as some elite profession that caters to the well-heeled.

To be clear, I did not walk into “The Devil Wears Prada 2” expecting to see “The Post.” (Although, in a way, isn’t that what I got?) As a work of popular entertainment, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” has three main responsibilities: to look great, to show off beautiful clothes and to give Stanley Tucci the chance to put exactly the right amount of sauce on every spicy comment he utters. The whole point of a sequel is to serve the audience the same decadent meal they enjoyed the first time.

But in 2026 you can’t make a movie about a media outlet without acknowledging that the media landscape is an active minefield. You also can’t make a second “Devil Wears Prada” that isn’t frothy and aggressively fabulous. Those two contrasting objectives ultimately knock each other out.

This film tries to give Andy the same level of integrity that she possessed in the 2006 movie, which ends with her interviewing for a gig at a traditional newspaper. To be fair, when she gets Ravitz’s job offer in the followup, she is torn about accepting it. But she likes the idea of getting to write some hard-hitting pieces and of hiring some recently unemployed friends. She also knows how hard it is to find a journalism job, let alone one that pays her more than she was already making.

We know that Andy is not wealthy based on her apartment, where brown water routinely spurts out of the faucet; as before, Tucci’s Nigel helps her out by loaning her outfits from Runway’s ample in-house closet. But not long after rejoining Runway, Andy moves into a much nicer building that’s been renovated by a man who soon becomes her boyfriend (and somehow manages to be even more boring than her boyfriend from the first film). Andy looks phenomenal — no surprise for a movie primarily about fashion. But it is hard to square the notion that Andy’s industry is in dire straits since her straits look pretty darn prosperous.

There is one montage of Andy doing the work of journalism, which mostly consists of her looking gorgeous in meetings or while typing on her laptop. In another scene, she frantically makes work-related phone calls. But the major set pieces take place at cushy events where tons of bold-faced names — Jenna Bush Hager! Law Roach! Karl-Anthony Towns, for some reason! — gather to clink champagne glasses. As fun as it is to watch those pans through the glossy party scene, they reinforce the idea that everyone who works in media spends their time rubbing shoulders with other elites. “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is not the first piece of pop culture to do this. But at this particular moment, when so many reporters and editors are getting laid off and struggling to make ends meet, it looks particularly unsavory and inaccurate.

It’s also hard to square all of the above with the fact that Runway is losing money, so much so that it may be sold to a vapid Jeff Bezos-like figure, played by Justin Theroux. During one “sobering” meeting in which Nigel says fewer staffers are being sent to Milan for Fashion Week, he adds that those who are going can no longer take private cars and, instead, will have to Uber. In this economy, no audience will empathize with how hard it is to be a writer, or to do any job for that matter, if Ubering is your version of slumming it. (The team, including Miranda, also has to fly coach. Folks, there is no way Miranda Priestly would ever fly coach. Someone would be left behind, or their job outright eliminated, before that woman sat in anything approaching economy class.)

In the first film, Andy’s friends give her a hard time when she gets caught up in her new job, accusing her of abandoning her principles. In the sequel, selling out is basically a requirement for anyone who plans to keep working in media. That discrepancy would have been really interesting to explore, but this continuation is too committed to hitting the same beats as its forerunner and landing on some version of a happy ending to go there. As in the first film, the sequel ultimately asserts that money and connections are more crucial to career survival than anything else. Which is a fascinating place to land after an opening in which a bunch of underpaid journalists get laid off and the guy who sold the paper walks away with millions.

What “The Devil Wears Prada 2” doesn’t dare to say is that the media’s reliance on the wealthiest one-percenters to keep outlets afloat is part of the reason so many people like Andy and her friends are losing their jobs: Too many of those cash-flush guys don’t care about the art or craft of journalism. (The movie does underscore that too many of those guys are actual guys.) Perhaps even more notably, it doesn’t point out that the seeds for the current media hellscape were being planted back in 2006, the year that the first movie premiered and that Twitter debuted. Rewatch the original and count the number of times anyone talks about the digital edition of Runway or even says the word internet. You’ll come up blank.

Again, I did not walk into this movie expecting a nuanced portrait of the journalism industry. But if you’re going to spotlight a topic, you have to reckon with it, preferably in a way that does the subject justice. “The Devil Wears Prada 2” takes the problems it raises and then does what Miranda did with her jackets and purses early in the first film: tosses them aside as someone else’s problem.

Jen Chaney is a freelance TV and film critic whose work has been published in The New York Times, TV Guide and other outlets.

May. 2, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Gas prices are at a four-year high. Annual inflation has jumped to a nearly three-year peak. Americans are souring on congressional Republicans, President Donald Trump’s handling of inflation and the war in Iran. And his approval rating is at the lowest point of his second term in several polls.

The message from the White House: Things are still better than they were under Joe Biden.

It is not, on its face, the stuff of a winning campaign message — a backward-looking defense at a moment when voters are asking forward-looking questions about their grocery bills, gas tanks and a war with no clear end.

And privately, even some of Trump’s aides acknowledge it.

“The vibe right now is we know we are already cooked in the midterms,” a White House official told MS NOW, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.

The numbers help explain the gloom. For the first time since 2010, voters say they trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle the economy, 52% to 48%, according to a recent Fox News poll. Economists have largely scaled back their forecasts for the remainder of the year. Energy analysts are warning that oil prices could surge even higher. And Moody’s recession model now puts the odds of a U.S. recession in the next 12 months at nearly a coin flip.

Six months out from the November election, Democrats are favored to take the House and are increasingly rosy about their prospects for the Senate despite a difficult map.

“As of this moment, of course you have to be very concerned,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., told MS NOW. “If you aren’t concerned, you’d be kind of foolish. … We are either going to win the majority by a little, lose the majority by a little, or lose it by a lot.”

Even so, more than a dozen GOP strategists, lawmakers and White House officials who spoke with MS NOW, said they remain cautiously optimistic that Republicans have enough time to at least stave off a blue wave.

But that optimism is contingent on several unpredictable factors — chiefly, whether the war in Iran comes to a speedy conclusion, and how long its economic aftershocks linger.

White House officials and their allies cautioned against writing the party’s obituary just yet. If 2024 proved anything, they argued, it is that the political environment can change dramatically in a matter of weeks, that news cycles move quickly and that voters have short memories. Internal polling circulating in the White House is not as dire as the public polling, according to one White House official. “Certainly there’s still a lot of work to be done, and that’s not a secret to anyone,” the official said. “But there’s still a lot of time left.”

Retiring Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., one of the few sitting GOP lawmakers openly critical of Trump, expects Republicans to hold the Senate, and told MS NOW that House Republicans can hang on to their razor-thin majority.

“If we’re disciplined, we keep control of the Congress,” Tillis said. “If we’ve lost, on Wednesday morning, don’t blame the Democrats. Republicans, go to the nearest mirror and look in the mirror. That’s why we’ll lose. If we play team ball, if we set aside our petty differences and recognize Republicans getting elected are the most important thing — no purity test, get them elected — then they’re not playing team ball, and they’re part of the problem.”

The plan, according to two White House officials, is a familiar one: pivot to kitchen-table issues and flood battleground states with Trump and Cabinet surrogates in the coming months. Republicans, these officials insisted, have a record to run on, including a cut in taxes via the One Big Beautiful Bill efforts to reduce drug prices and beefed-up border security.

But conspicuously absent from the game plan outlined by White House officials: any expectation of message discipline from Trump himself.

What matters, the White House official told MS NOW, is “doing what we need to do out on the campaign trail — the events, the fundraising, the retail politics of actually showing up in districts.”

“President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican party and he is committed to maintaining Republicans’ majority in Congress to continue delivering wins for the American people,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement to MS NOW. Trump, she added, would continue to draw “a sharp contrast” between his agenda and that of congressional Democrats, whom she said allowed “millions of illegal aliens to flow through the border, unanimously opposed the Working Families Tax Cuts, and are soft-on-crime.”

But there is bubbling frustration among Republican strategists working House and Senate races that the president and his team have been slow to focus on any of it. Trump has been consumed by the war in Iran and by the construction of a $400 million White House ballroom that has become an unlikely political liability — a gilded symbol, his critics argue, of a president more focused on monuments to himself than on voters squeezed by more everyday concerns.

Some of the major fights Trump has picked of late have only made life harder for Republican incumbents. One House Republican up for re-election in a swing district pointed to the president’s inflammatory Easter morning social media posts, his attacks on the pope and his habit of naming things after himself — episodes which, the lawmaker said, only serve to “fire up the people that want to put a check on his power, instead of taking his energy and focusing on stuff that makes their lives better at home.”

“I still think there’s a lot of members that don’t understand what we’re up against — and that includes leadership,” the House Republican said, granted anonymity in order to speak candidly. “It’s hard to tell if they truly believe the rhetoric that we’re gonna hold the House, or if they’re just saying that to make us feel like we can take some risks and take some really [bad] votes, and they’re just trying to get us to walk the plank for another piece of legislation that they feel they need.”

Several Republican strategists who spoke with MS NOW pointed to missed opportunities to tout the president’s record, and said that the window to alter the trajectory of the election is narrowing.

“If we can somehow — on a grand scale — tout our wins, get our message out and find some clearly stated wins with Iran and foreign policy, we’ll be on better footing,” said T.W. Arrighi, a Republican strategist and former spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.” But I want to spend the summer doing that, with prices ticking down. I don’t want to be spending just two months of the fall doing it.”

May. 2, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

The day after the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. CallaisLouisiana Gov. Jeff Landry issued an executive order purporting to halt the state’s House primaries so that the elections would be conducted in redrawn districts. Already, legislatures in several southern states have begun planning to dismantle districts that have protected voters of color from racial voting discrimination for generations.

Democratic-controlled state legislatures face a question: protect voters of color and their incumbent representatives, or maximize partisan advantage with more counter-strike gerrymanders of their own?

There’s actually a clear option for voting rights policy that would guard against racial discrimination while preserving the hard-won gains of the Voting Rights Act: proportional representation.

By amending the Uniform Congressional District ActCongress could neutralize the gerrymandering arms race and restore equality of opportunity to our democratic process. We suggest amending the law to make three fundamental changes to how members of the House of Representatives are elected.

First, states with more than one seat should elect members of Congress using multi-seat districts. Second, states should use some form of list ballot structure, where voters choose either a single candidate (as happens now) or a “party list” vote (like the straight-ticket voting used in six states). Third, states should allocate seats to party lists using a fair allocation formula to ensure that votes have equal weight in determining representation.

This type of system minimizes the state’s role in selecting winners and losers. While any method of registering voter preferences requires some state administration, the current system of single-seat districts allows the government — not the voters — to determine the primary basis of representation.

Additionally, this approach would achieve better representation for voters of color. It would preserve the protections provided by the Section 2 framework of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), with additional benefits. Under a single-seat “first past the post” system, the state is forced to arbitrate competing claims for representation among various racial groups. By contrast, our proposal shifts this power to the citizens, allowing voters to identify and organize their own electoral communities.

Under a list system, candidates running for office can choose to run together on a list, and seats are allocated to lists. This allows voters to pool their voting strength, such that every vote counts toward representation: Even if one’s top candidate fails to earn enough votes to be elected on their own, a vote still counts toward the list and the election of candidates from the voter’s preferred group of candidates. Moreover, the list system ensures minority representation. In a three-seat election, any list receiving 25% of voter support is guaranteed a seat.

List systems allow voters to exercise greater agency than does our single-seat, winner-take-all system. By grouping themselves on the basis of the identity that they find salient, voters determine which groups are entitled to representation. Voters of color are free to determine which aspects of their identity matter most to them. Under the Section 2 framework, voters of color are not entitled to representation as political minorities or based on their other identities even though the framework incentivizes a politics of racial-group identity.

Electing representatives throughout the United States via multi-seat list systems, the type used in the majority of other democraciesincluding Brazil, Norway and South Africa, would also improve substantive representation. List systems facilitate the emergence of different types of coalitions, which can make for more fluid and dynamic politics. Elections are more competitivecoalitions continually shift to attract more voters and party systems are more responsive. Because list systems allow efsmaller groups to gain representation, minority coalitions that do not run on ethnic appeals are likely to emerge, moving U.S. politics away from ethno-nationalist trends. The same mechanisms that facilitate the emergence and survival of racial minority coalitions also allow for small parties running on non-ethnic appeals to gain representation, which can temper racial polarization.

In the wake of the high court’s Callais decision, both parties may be tempted, tit-for-tat style, to use the redistricting process as a tool for partisan retaliation. This path of mutually assured destruction would further erode voting rights and the foundations of our democracy.

As two of us warned more than a decade agothe Callais decision was predictable. Civil rights activists might be tempted to double down on the VRA’s race-based anti-discrimination approach by relying on state voting rights acts to do what the federal Voting Rights Act once did.  This would be a mistake.

Opponents of state voting rights acts would find it remarkably easy to use the Callais precedent to strike down bills that are mini-replicas of the federal VRA. The core objection of the Supreme Court’s conservatives to the Section 2 framework is that it requires the government to use race to allocate political power — a practice Chief Justice John Roberts famously dismissed years ago as the “sordid business” of “divvying us up by race.”

Reform must protect voters of color and ensure better representation for all Americans — goals that proportional representation is uniquely positioned to achieve. While amending the Uniform Congressional District Act remains the ultimate objective, progress does not have to begin in Congress.

Reformers should champion proportional representation at the local and state levels. With state legislatures reconsidering their electoral lawsthis is a perfect opportunity to consider proportional reforms.  Local governments with the capacity to innovate should also serve as laboratories for electoral democracy. Voting rights reformers are not left powerless by the Callais ruling. There is an obvious next step. We don’t have to live with political or racial inequality.