The Intercept Briefing

The Democratic Party has lost millions of voters since 2020, according to new analysis from the New York Times. Meanwhile, Republicans are gaining ground, even in traditional blue states, as more voters register with the GOP.

“We're missing layups on the basics right now,” says longtime Democratic strategist Nina Smith, alarmed by the news. “We're losing on voter registration in 30 states — the only 30 states that track voter registration between parties. We're losing in every single one.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Smith, a former senior adviser to Stacey Abrams with more than two decades in Democratic politics, joined host Jessica Washington to explain why the party keeps failing at the fundamentals — like voter registration, building the base, and party infrastructure — while Donald Trump consolidates power despite record-high disapproval ratings.

“Voter registration is like the layup of Democratic basketball politics,” says Smith. “How do we expect to win elections if we're not registering voters who are committed to us on our issues?” 

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Since the Supreme Court’s landmark June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade and federal abortion protections, a wave of state legislatures have rushed to impose bans and restrictions. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 41 states now have abortion bans in effect, including 12 with total bans. 

“We hear about the endless, supposedly unintentional consequences of abortion bans like rising maternal mortality, child rape victims forced to travel across state lines, increased risk of criminalization, pregnant victims coerced by their abusers, all of that,” says journalist Kylie Cheung, author of “Coercion: Surviving and Resisting Abortion Bans.” “But I very much argue that these aren't unintended consequences.” 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Cheung joins host Jessica Washington to trace the direct line from the Dobbs decision to state-sanctioned gender-based violence and control. 

“This is what abortion bans function to do, which is to police and control pregnant people, to feed cycles of abuse, to be this tool in the toolbox of abusers. To enact racial violence and economic subjugation and essentially lower women and pregnant people and people who can become pregnant to this lowered class in our society,” says Cheung. “And that is not unintentional at all.

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As the Israeli government weighs, once again, expanding its genocidal military campaign in Gaza, the enclave is sliding into a full-scale famine.

“We're seeing a purely manmade famine,” says Bob Kitchen, vice president of emergencies at the International Rescue Committee. “The Gaza Strip is surrounded by very fertile farming territory. All of the countries around Gaza have more than enough food.” 

This week on the Intercept Briefing, Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez speaks with Kitchen about what U.N.-backed hunger experts have called a “worst-case scenario.” Kitchen lays out how Israel’s ongoing war, combined with severe restrictions on humanitarian aid and commercial access, has created near-impossible conditions for food and medical supplies to enter Gaza — accelerating a crisis that could soon be irreversible.

“The only thing that's changed is the war, the restrictions on humanitarian aid, the restrictions on the market economy where commercial traffic can't get in,” says Kitchen. “That's the only thing that is driving the hunger right now.”

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Nationwide protests. Racist discrimination. Militarized police. These were the characteristics used to describe America during the long hot summer of 1967, when riots swept through more than 150 cities. They still describe America today, as the government has responded to protests against racist policing and immigration raids with militarized police forces backed by the Marines and the National Guard. 

It all sounds eerily similar to the America of more than half a century ago, when a presidential commission diagnosed the country’s problem: racism, particularly in policing, was causing widespread political unrest. 

“When a protest becomes that broad-based — cutting across gender lines and ethnic lines — then I think you have the opportunity to realize this is a true political movement,” says Rick Loessberg, an urban historian and the former planning commissioner for Dallas County, Texas, and the author of “Two Societies: The Rioting of 1967 and the Writing of the Kerner Report.”

“This is not just a group or a segment of the population letting off steam,” says Loessberg, “which was what was one of the explanations that was used in the 1960s. This is something else that's much, much deeper and much more significant.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Loessberg about what America learned — and didn’t learn — from our history of racist policing and political unrest.

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More than 1,000 Palestinians seeking food have been killed by Israeli forces in just the last few months, according to the United Nations. Israel’s blockade on aid, ongoing bombardment, and the dismantling of independent relief efforts have pushed Gaza to the brink of mass famine. At least 600,000 people are suffering from severe malnutrition, and aid groups warn of a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe.

“It's not about the distribution of food, it's not about humanitarian aid. It's about creating — luring Palestinians who are desperate into the south, putting them into a closed military zone,” says Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks with Hedges about how we got here and what’s at stake. Hedges spent seven years covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestine, much of that time in Gaza. He’s the author of 14 books, the most recent being “The Greatest Evil Is War” and “A Genocide Foretold.”

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During Donald Trump’s first term, the Supreme Court made some effort to check his power. But that era is over. The court has ruled that Trump cannot be prosecuted for actions he took as president, including for his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and it just wrapped its latest term by restricting lower courts' power to block his unlawful orders on issues like birthright citizenship, abortion care, and immigrants’ basic rights. 

“What the Supreme Court did is it limited lower courts’ ability to use what has been the most effective tool that lower courts have to reign in the Trump administration's lawlessness, which is to block a policy on a nationwide basis,” says Leah Litman, author of the new book, “Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes.” 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, newsroom counsel and correspondent Shawn Musgrave speaks with professor and attorney Litman and politics reporter Jessica Washington about how the Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority is laying the legal foundation for unchecked executive lawlessness — and signaling to Trump that it won’t stand in his way. 

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On the Fourth of July, President Donald Trump signed into law a bill that constitutes one of the largest transfers of wealth in history — taking money away from working people and giving it to the nation’s elite. 

The bill is the culmination of years of giveaways that have allowed corporations and billionaires to tighten their grip on the government. The law triples the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, slashes taxes for the most wealthy, and pays for it all by cutting health care for as many as 20 million people and gutting funding for public education and meals for school children. 

“ The reconciliation process goes hand-in-hand with all the executive orders that we've been seeing,” says Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa. “It goes hand-in-hand with all of the different things that DOGE was pretending to uncover. It goes hand-in-hand with so much of Project 2025. So this is all just one kind of super villain packed into this — what they call this one big bill — that's like thousands of pages.” 

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Lee speaks to host Akela Lacy about what Democrats are doing to meet the moment and how they can break through Republican messaging on the bill. 

“ Democrats are screaming into a void,” Lee says. “The reality is that we have been talking about Medicaid, and it's very hard to break through in a 24-hour news cycle and this big bubble where we are in a sea of red coverage, conservative media, conservative narratives, disinformation, misinformation. And to break through in that moment takes more than just us.”

At the heart of it all is one core problem: the power of money in politics, Lee says. She introduced a bill to ban super PACs, the kind of groups that helped elect Trump and have pushed Democrats to the right. 

“ You cannot have a democracy and super PACs,” Lee says. “If you are able to influence and shape the politics, shape information — what information gets out, which information doesn’t — because you have more money, then we don't have a level playing field.”

You can hear the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

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This week on The Intercept Briefing, we're re-sharing a conversation we first aired on March 7, 2025 – a conversation that’s only grown more relevant since it first aired. 

It’s a deep dive into the right-wing Christian ideologies shaping Donald Trump’s inner circle, featuring journalist and author of “Wild Faith,” Talia Lavin, and Intercept politics reporter Jessica Washington. 

As Trump consolidates power — with the backing of a hardline Congress and a Supreme Court increasingly aligned with his agenda — understanding the religious forces behind his movement is more important than ever.

We’ll be back next week with a new episode.

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This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to Iranian American author Hooman Majd about the Israel–Iran ceasefire, Trump’s role in escalating the conflict, and whether diplomacy can survive.

Listen to the full episode of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

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