The Dictatorship
Trump’s Sydney Sweeney ad comments show how out of hand the discourse has become
On Monday morning, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social about actor Sydney Sweeney’s controversial ad campaign for American Eagle. The ads, showing Sweeney in various scenes sporting blue jeans, flaunting her blond hair and blue eyes to demonstrate her “great jeans” (widely read as a pun on “genes”), has been widely criticized by viewers who say it references eugenics and spreads a white nationalist message of genetic superiority; American Eagle responded to backlash in a statement posted to Instagram saying that the ad “is and always was about the jeans.” Trump’s post, which was swiftly deletedpraised Sweeney and the ad, saying that jeans were “flying off the shelves,” while calling out several companies and celebrities the president said are “woke.”
Formerly prominent right-wing commentator-turned-Democrat Joe Walsh used the American Eagle ad as an excuse to blame Democrats for “losing touch with men.”
Trump’s now-deleted post followed his comments on Sunday, when he was asked about his thoughts on Sweeney following reports that she was registered to vote as a Republican in Florida in 2024. “If Sydney Sweeney is a registered Republican, I think the ad is fantastic,” Trump said, just before boarding Marine One.
Predictably, criticism from some folks on the left has been met with a torrent of backlash and abuse from the political right. Media watchdog Media Matters reported that Fox News spent 85 minutes talking about the ad last week. Trump joining in the fray with support for the ad is perhaps no surprise; he has been struggling with public approval as he tries to wriggle his way away from the Epstein scandal at the same time many of his deeply unpopular tariffs have gone into effect.
The Sweeney/American Eagle ad discourse offers Republicans a familiar line of attack on well-worn culture war grounds. The ad is just vague enough to be deniable, yet it gives the right an opportunity to paint leftists as out-of-touch and cancel-hungry.
Some in the center haven’t been able to resist taking potshots at the left over it. Formerly prominent right-wing commentator-turned-Democrat Joe Walsh used the American Eagle ad as an excuse to blame Democrats for “losing touch with men,” despite the fact that the ad is not a political issue and that neither the Democratic Party nor its leaders have commented on it.
But a small handful of individuals on the left have appointed themselves as stand-ins for the Democratic Party. We see this approach play out repeatedly in culture-war attacks by the right. If one vaguely left-coded person says something that the right gets upset at, in this case a handful of liberals questioning the Sweeney ad on Tik Tok, and if it then goes viral, large portions of the media and the entirety of the right wing expect every rank-and-file Democrat to answer for that one person, as we see with everyone from the White House to the vice president to conservative columnists dumping this controversy at the feet of Democrats.
This dynamic does not appear to exist for the right and Republicans, who seem uninhibited to go around burning and pillaging anything that even remotely offends conservative ideologues.
Just a few years ago, the right melted down over a Bud Light Instagram ad featuring Dylan Mulvaneya trans influencer. A mass boycott was started that threatened Anheuser-Busch’s existence as a company and myriad videos from right wingers popped up online with influencers and celebrities alike using firearms to shoot at Bud Light cans. It was the childish political meltdown to end all childish political meltdowns.
I’m sick and tired of this cancel-culture propaganda. We all should be.
Yet I don’t recall seeing any reporters or commentators demanding that Republicans answer for the violent backlash toward Bud Light. Then-president Biden condemned bomb threats made against the company while Republicans defended the over-the-top reaction — but Republicans were never asked to disavow any of it.
And yet here we are today, with a couple of social liberals and lefties making media posts calling out this ad and a Columbia University professor analyzing it for eugenic language on TikTok. And it’s being spun into a legitimate political problem for Democrats, one that threatens to cost them a chunk of voters.
I’m sick and tired of this cancel-culture propaganda. We all should be.
My hope is that someday we can all recognize this inherent hypocrisy. Anyone who takes a handful of lefty social media posts and spins them into some grand problem with the entire left and the Democratic Party is not working in good faith. We can’t keep pretending that only Democrats have agency to respond and tamp down on their own base — and yet that they are also answerable for every stray comment some vaguely left-coded person makes.
Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. She was the first openly transgender Capitol Hill reporter in U.S. history.
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance say their interim deal to end the war with Iran will deliver a financial windfall to American farmers.
But the Iranians deny it. And in the absence of more details, sanctions experts are flummoxed over exactly how billions of dollars’ worth of Iranian assets would make their way to the American heartland from the escrow accounts where they’ve been locked for years by U.S. sanctions.
A tentative agreement reached last week would reopen the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas once passed, and allow Iran to start selling its oil freely again during a 60-day period when the two countries will continue negotiating key issues. The memorandum of understanding also promised to unfreeze Iranian assets.
Trump’s deal has come under fire for failing to address the reasons the president cited for going to war with Iran on Feb. 28, including curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, its missile program and its support for militant groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Lashing back at critics Tuesday on his Truth Social media platform, Trump said U.S. farmers would get a payday: The U.S. Treasury Department, he wrote, would release the Iranian assets “into escrow, controlled by the U.S.A., and will be used for the purchase of food and medical supplies, exclusively from the United States, including Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans from our great American farmers. These are things that are desperately needed by Iran.’’
Vance, who spoke about the proposal after high-level talks in Switzerland, and Trump say that any frozen funds and assets held outside of Iran will be used to buy U.S. crops.
But the Iranians deny that’s part of the deal. A spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Esmail Baghaei, said any agricultural purchases would be based on “prices and quality,’’ not terms dictated by Washington.
“It is interesting that the philosophy and goal of the war, which was the destruction of the Iranian civilization and the collapse of Iran, has become enriching American farmers,” Baghaei said.
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Iran’s ambassador in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, rejected Vance’s contention that the U.S. and Qatar would dictate how Iran uses unfrozen funds. “Iran is the only country who decides what to do with those assets,” he told reporters.
A U.S. official dismissed the contradiction, asserting that Iranian leaders were speaking to their domestic audience. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
Joseph Glauber, a research fellow emeritus at the International Food Policy Research Institute, said Iran was unlikely to abandon its other trade partners on food.
Iran’s major suppliers include Brazil, India, Turkey, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Argentina, he said. Trump’s demand to buy from the U.S. would “create some hard feelings with some of our competitors.”
Under previous sanctions, the U.S. has required that money foreign countries spend on imports from Iran — such as South Korean purchases of oil and Iraqi purchases of Iranian electricity — be locked in escrow accounts and typically released only if the Treasury approves and if the proceeds go toward “non-sanctionable’’ items such as food and medicine.
On Monday, the U.S. Treasury approved the sale of Iranian oil, petrochemicals and petroleum products through Aug. 21. It did not mention any escrow accounts.
Richard Goldberg of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who coordinated efforts to put diplomatic pressure on Iran in the first Trump administration, said in a post on X that he would welcome “a clarification that Iran is actually restricted to only buying U.S. agricultural products.”
Richard Nephew, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said it’s unclear what the new U.S.-Iran agreement actually means for releasing restricted Iranian assets.
Could the U.S. require that the assets be used to buy American farm products?
“Well, we can try!’’ Nephew, who helped design Iran sanctions in the Obama and Biden administrations, said by email. “All you really need to do is to tell a foreign bank that they can move the money but only to a U.S. bank to buy soybeans or whatever.”
Banks do not have to comply, he said. If they refuse, the U.S. could sanction them as well.
But it’s rare for the U.S. to conduct itself that way, he added, “in part because we don’t usually like to give the impression that we treat national security issues as a cash grab.”
___
Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Michelle L. Price in Washington contributed to this report.
Wednesday marks four years since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Dobbs decisionwhich effectively overturned Roe v. Wade and repealed the constitutional right to an abortion. On “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski explained how the ruling set off a domino effect across the United States, affecting not just abortion-related care, but also altering “the state of women’s healthcare as a whole.”
As Brzezinski noted, states across the country have enacted harsher abortion restrictions since the 2022 ruling, with 13 outright banning the procedure with very limited exceptions. This has created a climate of fear among those who treat pregnant patients, with many healthcare providers worrying that any care involving an abortion could violate the law, even when the mother’s health is at risk.
“We are talking about people dying when they’re miscarrying because doctors are too afraid to intervene and save their lives,” Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent for The Nation, told MS NOW.
Brzezinski said the laws have effectively limited women’s “access to lifesaving healthcare.”
The MS NOW host reflected on some high-profile stories of pregnant women who faced delayed care in states with near-total abortion bans, noting “the numbers of cases that we’ve covered here on the show of women who have had their lives threatened, have been forced to give birth to dying or dead babies, and then, by the way, denied the access to ever create life again, because they became sterilized in the process.”
“There’s an image I can’t get out of my head,” Brzezinski added, before sharing reporting from ProPublica about Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old mother who died in Texas in 2023 after not receiving timely care for a miscarriage.
“For months afterward, Porsha’s 3-year-old son would chase after women who looked like her on the street, shouting, ‘That’s Mommy!’” Brzezinski said. “That’s the detail I can’t forget. I can’t stop imagining that little boy chasing after strangers on the street. And that story repeats itself.”
You can watch Brzezinski’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW. She was previously a segment producer for “AYMAN” and “The Mehdi Hasan Show.”
One of the biggest upsets in Tuesday night’s primaries came in New York’s 13th Congressional District, where Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old democratic socialist, managed to beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 71, who was backed by establishment Democrats.
Chevalier, a doctoral student in sociology at the City University of New York, secured 49.4% of votes in the district — which encompasses upper Manhattan, Harlem and parts of the Bronx — defeating Espaillat, who received about 46% of the votes after representing the district for nearly a decade, according to The Associated Press. She now advances to the November general election, which she is presumed to win in the solidly Democratic district.
Chevalier’s primary win marks a major win for the Democrats’ left-wing flank that backed her, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdaniwho endorsed Chevalier last month during a joint interview on MS NOW’s “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
Here is what to know about Chevalier and the platform she campaigned on.
She has never held elected office
Prior to her congressional campaign, Chevalier had never run or held elected office. But she has been involved with advocating for issues that became political flashpoints, including helping organize the pro-Palestinian encampments at Columbia University, according to her biography on the website of the Justice Democratsthe progressive group that recruited her to run.
The daughter of Dominican immigrants, Chevalier also worked as an organizer for Families for Freedom, a New York City group that assists immigrants facing deportation.
Chevalier earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies from Columbia University in 2016 and later worked as a paralegal, according to her LinkedIn.
Chevalier faced scrutiny during her campaign over previously articulated stances and incendiary comments, including her appearance at a Times Square rally the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, where attendees reportedly suggested the attack was justified.
At a March candidates’ forum, Chevalier declined to condemn Hamas, saying that a request to do so “ignores the 75 years of occupation that the Palestinian people have been subjected to and the conditions that that folks were living under before this genocide began,” the local outlet City & State reported. Later, on local radio station WNYC, Chevalier said she did condemn Hamas when asked, adding, “As far as I know, the U.S. does not send a single dime to Hamas. What we fund is the Israeli military.”
In a series of since-deleted social media posts between 2018 and 2022Chevalier also used expletives to refer to former Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic National Committee, calling for abolishing borders and stopping all deportations, according to BLN. Other reports noted that she called former President Joe Biden a “rapist” and disparaged white people in some of her posts.
Chevalier has said she has “grown considerably” since writing those posts and that she regrets them. Mamdani defended her after the social media posts surfaced but said he was unaware of them before endorsing Chevalier.
She’s the left’s preferred candidate
Chevalier’s focus on affordability, expanding housing access and opposing war and deportations made her the preferred candidate of many progressive groups. In addition to the endorsements from Mamdani and the Justice Democrats, she was also backed by the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and several progressive members of the New York City Council.
After her primary win, the Democratic establishment also seems to have rallied behind her, despite her previous expletive-laden critiques of them.
In a statement Tuesday, DNC Chair Ken Martin called Chevalier “a tireless advocate for the hard-working people of New York City” who “will fight for healthcare, affordable housing, public education, civil rights, and an economy that works for everyone.”
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
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