Congress is back in session and there’s a lot on the agenda — from a potential government shutdown to the ongoing battle over the Epstein files. On this episode of “The Opinions,” the Opinion national politics writer Michelle Cottle is joined by the columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French to talk about whether the Democrats should shut down the government and Congress’s weakening role under Trump.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: This week we’re going to tackle one of my very favorite subjects, which is Congress.
They’re back from their time off, and are all geared up to defend our democracy or not. Well, however they choose to roll on the docket. They have a lot to do; it’s a huge to-do list. There is government funding, a possible government shutdown, a bill that would force the White House to release everything it knows about Jeffrey Epstein.
And then the bigger question that is always looming amid President Trump’s bulldozing of checks and balances: Does Congress even have any power anymore? Which I think we’re going to get into a lot.
So I want to start with federal funding because this is the big, ugly fight we’ve got coming up. The government is only funded through the end of this month, so we’ve got maybe two weeks to get this done. There are, of course, all the usual rumblings about a government shutdown, but the chance of that happening is never zero, especially with the sour mood in Congress and a heavy-handed Trump administration making things all the more complicated.
So with the upcoming battle, what are you guys hoping for? What’s making you really nervous? Jamelle, do you want to go first?
Jamelle Bouie: Sure, I’ll go first. I think Democrats should let the government shut down.
Cottle: You’re pro.
Bouie: I am 100 percent pro-shutdown — not because I think it’d be good; government shutdown is bad. But because the administration has shown its total contempt for the idea of Congress having power over the purse. The administration has engaged in all kinds of shenanigans to either avoid spending money that Congress has appropriated, to take money Congress has appropriated for one thing and spend it on another thing, to treat all appropriations from Congress as little more than recommendations for whatever the president wants to do.
And frankly, if there’s no guarantee that the White House is going to adhere to congressional appropriations — and I have to remind everyone, Congress has Article I in the Constitution, Congress has the power of the purse — that’s sort of its most important power. It’s really the whole ballgame. So if the administration isn’t going to take seriously what Congress says it ought to spend, I think the best option is basically to say: Listen, shut down the government until we can get guarantees that the White House is going to obey the law.
Cottle: David? Pro/con?
David French: I don’t think ransom shutdowns work. So for example, if you go back to the early Tea Party era — and do you remember the Ted Cruz-initiated government shutdown?
Cottle: Green eggs and ham, my friend!
French: Right. One of the goals was, OK, we’re going to shut down the government to hold up the Obama administration — to defund, to do something about Obamacare. That a) absolutely did not work, and b) it’s very debatable how these things play out. People get mad about government shutdowns, and they don’t always blame the party we want them to blame when it happens.
Now, I absolutely, totally, positively understand the impulse to shut down, because there are so few things an opposition party can do when they don’t control Congress. One of them is a filibuster. So when you’re in the opposition — when you don’t have the House, when you don’t have the Senate — you’re often grasping at straws. And at the same time, you have a lot of the public out there saying, “Fight, fight, fight. Do more to fight.” But your tools are so limited when you’re in the congressional minority.
So I understand the impulse. I just don’t think it always works out. Honestly, I don’t know that it has ever really worked out the way the architects of a shutdown wanted it to. So I would be against it. I don’t see the upside. What I do see is a lot of additional chaos, and I’m very leery of creating more power vacuums that Trump can fill. So consider me in the “against” category.
Bouie: Two quick observations. The first is I’m not sure one can draw an analogy between this shutdown and the 2013 shutdown with Cruz or any of the Gingrich ones, in part because the demand here isn’t that Trump repeal the “big, beautiful bill.” It’s not a demand for the administration to back off any of its lawful priorities. It’s a demand to follow the law — to treat congressional appropriations as the law.
If we’re going to give votes to pass a budget or a continuing resolution to keep funding the government — and we’re going to negotiate for the things we want to see — and then you’re just going to treat that as a recommendation you can blow off, then what’s the point? Right? It’s like Lucy holding the football and Charlie Brown trying to kick it — they’re just going to pull it away.
In this case, it’s not even about Democrats needing the filibuster or anything like that. It’s more that Republicans have the majority. Republicans need to figure out a budget. And if they need Democratic votes, then the guarantee they have to give is that the president won’t ignore the appropriation. And if they could make that guarantee and act on it, then I say: Democrats, please fund the government.
But if there’s not going to be any kind of reciprocity here, if it’s just going to be: You’re going to give us the votes and then we’re going to do whatever we want. Then I just don’t think that Democrats should engage in that just for the sake of Congress’s own powers, if nothing else.
Cottle: So, David, how do you view the whole issue with the complete disregard for checks and balances that the Trump administration is kind of ——
French: I absolutely hear what Jamelle is saying. I would feel more comfortable with his recommendation if I believed that a guarantee from Trump and his mini-mes in Congress meant anything.
I would feel that a Trump guarantee would have exactly as much weight as a Putin guarantee. So I think even if you end up with guarantees, Trump’s still going to do what he wants to do, and the only thing that is going to stop him is either acts of Congress that are so clear — crystal clear that they’re going to be backed up by the Supreme Court of the United States or, quite frankly, electoral losses in the midterms.
Even then, as long as he is president of the United States, I have a lot of questions as to what can or will realistically be done that he would view as binding him.
Cottle: OK, but by those standards, there’s no good option, right? You fund it and he’s going to blow it up. You don’t fund it and he’s going to blow it up. So at that point, then, I think Democrats are weighing people’s response to how they handle this.
I am quite certain that Democratic leader Chuck Schumer in the Senate is remembering just how much abuse he has taken over letting the last funding measures go through. In part Jamelle has mentioned the fight. I think a lot of Democrats and a lot of Trump-skeptical folks are a little bit concerned about the Democratic resistance lying down or the Democratic opposition lying down and saying: Sure. Just come on through.
So is there an argument that the fight in itself is worth something?
French: I mean, OK, but you’re going to hurt regular people. That’s why people don’t like government shutdowns: Someone always gets blamed for them. If you’re broadcasting to a base — which is a minority of America — saying, “fight, fight, fight, fight, fight,” and then you do something that doesn’t actually change Trump but does hurt regular people, that strikes me as an unwise decision.
The problem is, that “fight, fight, fight” instinct has to be channeled. First, it shouldn’t hurt regular, innocent people. That’s one very big component. And second, it has to be done in a way where there isn’t a high likelihood that you’ll receive the blowback for the action.
To me, this feels like déjà vu all over again. This fight was happening on the Republican side throughout much of Obama’s two terms, and even back in the Clinton-era shutdowns. There was always this refrain: We’ve got to do something, we’re going to shut down the government. At least then, Republicans could argue it was consistent with their limited-government ethos — they wanted to pare back the federal government anyway.
But I’m very leery of a “fight, fight, fight” approach that ends up hurting regular folks.
Cottle: So Jamelle, I mean, David’s point is spot on in terms of the reason shutdowns are so unpopular, because they do hurt people. How much are you worried about blowback?
Bouie: If the path toward a shutdown were a Democratic filibuster, I think there might be real concerns about blowback. But if the path toward a shutdown is just Democrats saying: You have the majority in Congress, you have the White House; we’ll let you figure out a budget deal. We’re just not going to participate — I don’t think there’s blowback there. I really don’t. Because in that situation, it’s Republicans who can’t figure out how to get things done, right? Democrats are under no obligation to fix Republicans’ problems for them.
And this is going to sound callous, but I think there’s an extent to which voters ought to feel some pain if the Republican Party can’t get it together enough to pass a continuing resolution. One of the dynamics of the past 10 or 15 years of American politics has been a profoundly irresponsible Republican Party — a party that has almost completely abdicated any serious attempt to govern — being bailed out by a Democratic Party that, rightfully, I suppose, feels an obligation to govern the country.
The effect of that, in terms of the message it sends to the public, is that there are no costs involved in electing anti-government maniacs. You can elect them as an affective way to express anger and disdain at the system, knowing the other side will feel some responsibility to keep things from getting too out of hand.
But what if you just let them get out of hand? What if you say: You know what, this is what you voted for. This is what you wanted, and this is what you’re going to get. We’re not going to bail out the Republican Party from its dysfunction and inability to govern.
Will that hurt regular people? Yes, it will. But sometimes, in the same way a kid has to fall off their bike to learn how to ride better, the public may need to touch the stove, to borrow a phrase that went around earlier this year, in order to figure out not to put these people back in office. I think so.
French: Well, I think we might be talking past each other a little bit. Because if the statement is “Democrats, don’t vote for a Republican budget,” and you’re in the minority — and Republicans, who have the majority, can still pass it — and you’re not filibustering anything you actually can filibuster, then to me, that’s not a government shutdown.
That would be a Chip Roy, Thomas Massie-style shutdown, if two or three or four Republicans in the House broke from the party line. And to me, that’s a very different thing.
Bouie: That’s the envisioned scenario. Not so much a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, but rather Republicans — because of Massie, Chip Roy and others — having leadership say: We’re going to need Democratic votes to do this. And so, I think Democrats just shouldn’t give them the votes. Just say: You know what? Not our problem.
French: I think the outcome is going to be that they won’t need Democratic votes — they’ll allow one or two to stand up in front of their constituents and say: Look how independent I am. But simply not voting for a Republican budget resolution when you’re in the minority, to me, is not engineering a government shutdown.
Cottle: It also got more complicated last week because President Trump announced he’s going to pursue a path of pocket rescissions, which is basically his way of unilaterally clawing back congressional funding. In this case, it would be around $5 billion in foreign aid. Even Republicans who might be happy to cut that money are a little nonplused that this is a blatant slap at Congress, showing no respect for the power of the purse, as Jamelle was talking about.
What this does is make it much harder for Senate leader John Thune to get Democratic votes for any kind of bipartisan funding bill. Everybody on both sides is pretty confident that this has just made their fall much uglier.
Another issue on the docket that’s a bit more complicated involves the Epstein files, especially because a couple of Republicans have joined Democrats on this. The House Oversight Committee has already released files from the Justice Department’s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring. But this wasn’t some big reveal — most of the documents had already been public, and conspiracy-minded MAGA fans are still eager to see what’s supposedly being hidden. Trump has done everything possible to distract from this.
Yet we see Thomas Massie, congressman from Kentucky and one of Trump’s chief antagonists in his own party — not that there are very many — hosting a news conference with Epstein’s victims this week.
So I wanted to get your take on whether you think this is going to continue to be enough of a problem that the White House has to further address it.
Bouie: I think so. You can’t explicitly run on “We’re going to release the Epstein files” and then, once you’re in office, be like, “On second thought, we don’t want to anymore.”
Cottle: No, we’re good. It’s all good.
Bouie: That is the most straightforward violation of a promise you can possibly imagine. And the fact that this isn’t just shadowed; this is a real thing. Jeffrey Epstein ——
Cottle: Oh, the victims had Nancy Mace, the Republican congresswoman, in tears.
Bouie: Right. And there are literally hundreds more victims beyond those who testified. There are all these unanswered questions about the president’s previous relationship with Epstein. This is going to be a thing the White House has to deal with.
It cannot wave this away or distract from it. They can try to instigate a war with Venezuela — which they’re doing — but this will still be something they have to account for.
French: You know, I stand by how I assessed this at the beginning: This is a bit of a problem for Trump, but he’s still going to keep his hold. What’s really interesting about Epstein to me is what this means for MAGA more broadly.
All of the conversation right now — and it’s super understandable, because we’re less than a year into this second term — gosh, less than a year into the second term. Let’s just say that again ——
Cottle: Shh, stop.
French: That all of the conversation — or 90 percent of it — is really focused on what this means for Donald Trump. I’m of the opinion that we’ve been through this before: Every scandal that has come up so far hasn’t dented Trump with the Republican base, including Jan. 6. In the days right after Jan. 6, McConnell’s approval rating plummeted and Pence’s approval rating plummeted among Republicans — not Trump’s.
What’s really interesting about this, though, are the divisions it’s exposing in MAGA. We’ve seen a lot of divisions arise over the last two to three months: Do you bomb Iran? Do you not bomb Iran?
I’m very interested in what the Epstein files represent going forward in terms of what MAGA is. What does this movement look like after Donald Trump is gone? It seems to me that there’s unity around Trump himself, but disunity is spreading across the rest of the Republican coalition on multiple important fronts.
And I think Trump has kind of kept the lid on this coalition. When Trump is gone and you lift the lid, it’s anybody’s ballgame as to which faction emerges. How long can this bag of scorpions stay together? I think the Epstein incident is a leading-edge indicator of that.
Cottle: So in terms of enduring damage, is it worse if the files come out? Obviously, we don’t know what’s in them. If there was something explosive, that would be one thing. Or if they continue to hide them, fueling the suspicion they’ve exploited so well for so many years.
But considering that a chunk of MAGA is fueled by conspiracy paranoia, would it be worse if people just continued to wonder? I mean, this is all assuming that there’s nothing in there showing that Trump did something truly illegal or appalling. But ——
Bouie: That’s the thing. If there’s something in there, then obviously, that’s the thing that’s more damaging. But even then I feel like, in the history of American scandals, it’s worse for it to be a steady drip. Trump’s ability to withstand scandal has a lot to do with the fact that it’s never been a steady drip. It’s always been right in your face.
And he’s always been quite unapologetic about it. That kind of short-circuits not just the public’s response to the scandal but also the press’s response, where there isn’t a story to follow over time, just one thing.
Bouie: Even if it isn’t dislodging Trump’s base, it is certainly harming his approval with the rest of the country.
I find myself saying it’s important to remember that Trump lost about half the voting public in last year’s election, started off his administration relatively unpopular for a new president and has only dipped below that since then.
And although Trump may not believe he has to maintain any particular standing with the public, it’s true that the worse they perform with the overall public, the weaker their position becomes.
Cottle: Well, he is a very special boy. But his congressional members are not necessarily right.
French: Yes! Thank you.
Cottle: And how much of a problem is it for Congress — except for a handful of Republicans — that they’ve basically just laid down in the street, like: Yeah, we’ll take whatever nonsense you’re going to spout about this, and we’re not going to demand anything?
Even after years of saying, “Oh, I’m going to release everything,” that has to reflect poorly on Congress.
French: You raise a great point, and that is: MAGA is making a huge mistake if it thinks that it — and all of its members — are as Teflon as Donald Trump is. Because what we’ve seen time and time again is that when primaries produce MAGA candidates in swing states — and by MAGA candidate, I mean someone who’s all in on Trumpism with very little normie Republican in them — the record is pretty grim.
But one other thing you said, Michelle, that I think is so important — and Jamelle said it too — is that drip, drip, drip, as Jamelle was saying, is really critical for people understanding that something is a problem. It takes time for it to seep into the system. And if the drip, drip, drip is followed by a big reveal, that’s the most catastrophic kind of scandal.
But what Trump does — if I can be a little crude — is different. Remember the drip, drip, drip of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which culminated in the blue dress? Then all of a sudden Clinton’s lie was exposed. Trump, on the other hand, runs around in public wearing the blue dress — there’s no drip, drip, drip. His corruption is just right there, out in the open. And there’s this interesting effect: If they’re not trying to hide it, the public doesn’t necessarily perceive it as corrupt. Does that make sense?
Bouie: I think that’s absolutely right.
Cottle: Maybe it feels like reality TV on some level. I just think that he operates with such different standards and people are like: Oh, it’s just Trump playing a role.
Bouie: Yeah, I think that’s right. I don’t think it’s just the public, I think it’s the press, too. I honestly think that Trump being so openly corrupt basically recalibrates everyone’s expectations about what is normal behavior.
And so this is not Epstein. The Trump family has made like $5 billion on some crypto coin and that’s so wildly corrupt — corrupt doesn’t even feel like the right word for it.
French: Insanely corrupt.
Cottle: But everybody just nods and they’re like, “He’s a great businessman.”
Bouie: But everyone’s like, “Oh yeah, Trump’s crypto coin.” And it just recalibrates expectations. Part of it is that Trump himself does not behave as if he has anything to hide. Epstein is sort of the one time where he is acting as if he has something to hide.
Cottle: Yeah, they all look very shifty. But all of this speaks again to what we were talking about, which is that Congress has basically just abdicated another area of its responsibility, which is accountability for the executive branch.
French: Can I ask y’all a question?
Cottle: Yeah.
French: This is a question I’ve been asking myself: Should we cover Congress less?
Cottle: Because it doesn’t matter anymore?
French: Correct. How many resources do you think a typical large-scale media operation dedicates to covering Congress versus the courts? One of those two branches is actually doing work that’s more relevant to people. It’s the courts, right?
Right now, I fear that a lot of the attention we’re pouring into Congress is fueling congressional dysfunction. Many of these members are now being elected with the mind-set that their job is to be a pundit, a spokesperson for the cause, rather than a legislator.
Cottle: Oh, 130 percent. I had just talked to a bunch of senators, and it’s not even like it used to be, with a basic timeline where you’re performing over weeks or months. Now they’re operating on social media quick hits — two seconds of fame on this, three seconds on that — and they’ll get beat down on Twitter if they don’t. It’s insane. And they’re all excruciatingly aware of it.
Bouie: I see your point, David. I think that every mainstream media organization could stop covering Congress the way it has and this would still be a problem, in part because for Republicans, at least, that’s not the media ecosystem they necessarily care about.
Cottle: Oh yeah — it’s not the media.
French: Right, for sure.
Bouie: It’s Fox, it’s ——
Cottle: OAN. Twitter.
Bouie: It’s Twitter. It’s all of that.
Cottle: The podcasters, the radios.
Bouie: It’s the ability to parlay some notoriety as a congressman into a podcast where you sell, you know, brain supplements. Michelle, you said earlier that Congress isn’t even doing its role in providing accountability.
This might feel a little esoteric, but I increasingly feel that this kind of language about Congress reflects a larger problem with the institution. In the constitutional text, Congress’s job isn’t just to provide accountability for the executive branch; it’s to lead the government. That’s Congress’s job.
In a fair reading of the text, Congress is the leading branch of government. Arguably, it’s the role of the courts and the executive to provide some bounds on Congress by design. Congress can do all these things, and there’s interesting scholarship on what enumerated powers actually include — whether Congress, by the text, has a much broader set of powers than we traditionally understand. The text suggests that Congress is a dominant, even domineering, institution that itself has to be bounded by other actors.
But for the last half-century, not just because of Trump, we’ve existed in a world where it’s the president who leads the government. Congress exists to put limits on executive authority, but congresspeople have internalized the idea that their job is not to lead the nation but to act as a support for the executive branch.
All of this has left us with a situation where Congress effectively dissolves itself for all intents and purposes, abdicating most of its authority to the presidency. And there doesn’t appear to be any countervailing force. Nerds like me may complain about it, but can anyone imagine a future Congress saying: Irrespective of who the president is, we have all this power and we’re not going to use it?
Individual members have the resources to learn a great deal. We’re not that far removed from a time when members weren’t just doing TV hits but were actual experts on issues, capable of writing complicated legislation. Are we ever going to reach a point where members of Congress see themselves as professionals doing a job that requires expertise — or are we stuck in the current reality, where they’re just junior partners to whoever’s in the White House?
French: To be very clear, I am not at all saying don’t cover Congress, but I’m saying that we have a massive imbalance right now. You can have a member of Congress who’s walking through the halls of Capitol Hill and they have a gaggle of media around them.
And yet, if I were to describe to an average American who is more powerful, who has more influence over your life — is it one of these cast of congressional characters or is it the chief judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals? It’s the chief judge of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Cottle: Yeah.
French: By 5,000 miles, and nobody knows who that is. And so what we’re doing with the following people around, hanging on their every word, listening to them writing news stories about their stupid posts, is that we are contributing to it.
I’ve reached a point — and I’m not exaggerating — where, let’s say I’m at dinner and I meet a bunch of people from different walks of life: One’s an accountant, one’s a lawyer, someone’s a construction worker, you name it. And then one person introduces themselves as a member of Congress — a Republican member of Congress from your district.
He is immediately the least interesting person to me at the table. I’m not joking.
Cottle: Oh, it’s so harsh. So harsh.
French: He’s the least interesting person because I’m looking at somebody who in many ways is a nonentity, as a separate human professional being. They are an extension of somebody else. That’s Donald Trump.
Cottle: So Jamelle, you were talking about the power Congress used to have and hasn’t wielded in decades. This is not all about Donald Trump. I like to point out that this was a big crusade for someone who has studied this a great deal over the years in the Senate, whose father used to argue before the Supreme Court all the time — Senator Mike Lee.
Senator Mike Lee had an Article 1 crusade right before the 2016 election because he saw Hillary Clinton coming, to some degree, and he was trying to scare his Republican colleagues into clawing back power. Over the years, I’ve made clear that Mike Lee has been a big disappointment in terms of his complete giving up and bowing before Trump.
Bouie: I mean, he’s a crank now.
Cottle: He is. When you mention his name, people roll their eyes because whatever he once stood for, he’s essentially put on the back burner to keep Trump happy. Yes, occasionally members pop up and want to pursue this, but then it runs counter to their partisan interests and they abandon it.
Bouie: I don’t think it’s something that’s going to come from individual members. It really has to be a sea change in attitudes within an entire political party. It has to be the partisan project of a party. I can kind of envision a pathway to it. For example, if one of the stories of this administration is the destruction of the administrative state and the gutting of the federal bureaucracy, it’s simply the case that liberals, progressives, or whatever you want to call them have a vested interest in rebuilding the administrative state and federal bureaucracy.
That might encourage some creative thinking about the role of Congress in reconstituting both of those things. And that’s not something that can really come from the executive branch — it has to come from Congress.
French: I’m 100 percent in agreement with Jamelle. Individual members of the Senate, for example, are not going to be able to shift the course of this train.
What I’m afraid of is that we’re going to have a situation where the natural consequences of this administration’s policies and Congress’s abdication of its authority are going to play out in ways that ultimately end up being profoundly negative for the United States of America, and they’re in the resulting sort of blowback. You’re going to have an opportunity for Congress institutionally to rediscover itself.
This very close 50-50, 51-49, 49-51 arrangement is not the norm in American history. We do go through periods with close divisions, but usually the logjam is eventually broken, and one party becomes dominant for a generation or more. We’ve seen this happen.
Think after Watergate: Following Nixon and the imperial presidency, there was a brief period of congressional reforms that really hemmed the president in. The logjam was broken, and real reform happened.
So I think we have to focus on two things. One, we need to contain the constitutional damage Trump is doing. But two, he has broken so many things that there’s going to be a rebuild task. How do we rebuild? What is the vision for rebuilding? And I would say, if that vision doesn’t involve structural reforms to revive Congress, we’re just going to repeat this awful tragedy over and over again.
Cottle: OK, so we’ve got a waste-no-crisis philosophy here. I like this. Everybody agrees it’s going to have to be something bigger than what we’ve been looking at.
I don’t want to leave everyone on a despondent, despairing note. So before we go, I want you all to bring us back from the holiday and roll us into the encroaching fall with a recommendation. Share something you’re enjoying right now — something you want people out there to know about.
Bouie: Sure. Where I live, it’s fall festival season; it officially started. We as a family went to one this past weekend. They had sunflowers, they had an apple cannon to shoot apples out of — that was pretty cool. And I’m just going to recommend that people go to fall festivals at nearby farms. They’re good fun and a nice way to spend a Saturday or Sunday outside — nice weather, enjoying the company of other people. And hopefully there’s some kind of gun that shoots fruit, which is pretty cool.
Cottle: I went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival a couple of weeks ago, and it was magic, but there was no fruit being shot.
Bouie: Yeah, this was great. It was an actual cannon, and you put an apple in it and you could shoot it. The velocity was quite intense. I definitely spent 20 bucks and a lot of time shooting apples at a rusty car.
Cottle: OK, David?
French: That’s a great recommendation, but my recommendation involves not getting off your couch because it is streaming, and it is “Foundation” on Apple TV+ — Season 3 came out. It’s loosely based on Isaac Asimov’s books, classic science fiction books, set very far in the future. And the basic story line is a mathematician using extremely advanced mathematical techniques has been able to predict the future course of the galaxy. He’s predicting the fall of the empire, the galactic empire and horrific chaos, darkness, awfulness as it falls.
Cottle: This may be too close to reality. I’m sorry, continue.
French: It’s close to reality, except there are some interesting — yeah, you can see echoes. But it’s true sci-fi. Anyway, he forms a foundation — hence the name “Foundation.” It’s a collection of people whose mission is to shorten the darkness if they can’t stop the fall of the empire.
What they aim to do is make the empire’s collapse less horrific and shorten the period of anarchy and chaos. So they want to “shorten the darkness.” I’ve often thought about that in connection with responding to the Trump era. We can’t stop the darkness, he won, but we can try to shorten it. And it’s a lot of fun.
Cottle: So I’m going to go a little off-topic and recommend a slightly weird read: “I Was a Teenage Slasher.”
I’ll just come right out and say it: As the summer comes to an end, I’m loath to give up my kind of trashy beach reading. This is a comedy-horror book that plays off movies like “Cabin in the Woods” or “Scream,” hitting all the classic horror tropes, except the narrator is basically turning into a slasher. For those of you who need a little escape, I recommend picking it up. Incredibly fast, fun read.
OK, I think that’s it, guys. As always, thank you very much, and we’ll do this again with whatever hell comes down the pike next week.
Bouie: Always a pleasure.
French: Thanks, Jamelle. Thanks, Michelle.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Original music by Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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