Yesterday marked one year since Joe Biden’s debate meltdown against Donald Trump. Happy anniversary to those who observe such things, or are triggered by such things. Please celebrate responsibly.

For Democrats, the debacle was a harsh awakening and the start of an ongoing spiral. Prior to that night, they could hold on to the delusion that the party might somehow eke out one last victory from Biden’s degraded capacity and ward off another four-year assault from Donald Trump. But that all exploded into the gruesome reality of June 27, 2024. Every interested viewer that night remembers where they were, their various feelings (depending on their perspectives) of revulsion, grief, glee, or disbelief.

I was watching at home, thinking for some reason that Biden might exceed his humble expectations. He had managed to do this periodically on big stages during his presidency—including the feisty State of the Union address he’d turned in a few months earlier. But by the time Biden walked to his podium in Atlanta, it was clear that was not happening. Something was off. The elderly president looked visibly stiffer than usual, like he was wrapped in cardboard. As co-moderator Jake Tapper of CNN unfurled his opening question—about rising grocery and home prices—Biden’s eyes bugged out, as if he was stunned. His face was a drab gray color. I remember thinking there was something wrong with my TV, until the texts started rolling in. A friend observed that Biden looked “mummified” on the stage. “Is he sick?” my wife asked as she entered the room.

Not a great start.

And this was before Biden had even said a word. Then he spoke—or tried to. Biden’s voice didn’t really work at first. It was raspy; he kept stopping, starting, dry-coughing. After a few sentences, everything was worse. “Oh my god,” came another text, which was representative of the early returns. “My mother told me she’s crying,” read another. (This person’s mother is evidently not a Trump supporter.) My wife left the room.

Mark Leibovich: Where is Barack Obama?

Now here we are a year later. Democrats have been battered by events since. First among them was Trump’s victory in November, in which traditional Democratic constituencies such as Black, Hispanic, and young voters defected to the GOP in large numbers. This was followed by the onslaught of Trump’s second administration. Democrats keep getting described (or describing themselves) as being “in the wilderness,” though at this point “the wilderness” might be a generous description; it at least offers peace and quiet—as opposed to, say, your average Democratic National Committee meeting in 2025.

Or, for that matter, the aftermath of this week’s Democratic primary in the New York City mayor’s race. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist state assemblyman from Queens, became an instant It Boy with his upset of scandal-soiled former Governor Andrew Cuomo. As happens with many progressive sensations these days, Mamdani’s victory was immediately polarizing. New York Democrats seem split over the result: On one side are lukewarm establishment titans such as Senate and House Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries; on the other are progressive demigods such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders.

The usual Democratic divides revealed themselves: insurgent versus establishment, socialist-adjacent versus moderate, young versus old (except for Bernie, the ageless octogenarian forever big with the kids). The deeply unpopular incumbent, Eric Adams, who was elected as a Democrat in 2021, is running for reelection as an independent; despite getting trounced in the primary, Cuomo plans to stay in the race—running on something called the “Fight and Deliver” ballot line. Mamdani is the clear favorite to prevail in November. But no one knows anything for sure, except that everything feels like a muddled mess, which has pretty much been the Democrats’ default posture since the Abomination in Atlanta a year ago.

The party’s grass roots are showing genuine energy these days. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez drew five-figure crowds at their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies this spring. The nationwide “No Kings” protests two weekends ago were indicative of a galvanized protest movement eager to be led. Yet these signs of Trump resistance are mostly happening separate from the Democratic apparatus. As my colleague David Graham recently wrote, the “No Kings” spectacles were themselves, paradoxically, a sign of how rudderless the party now finds itself. With a few exceptions, the Democratic leadership ranks have been largely AWOL. They toggle and flail between quiet paralysis and loud frustration, especially with one another.

Mark Leibovich: The week that changed everything for Gavin Newsom

Democrats have spent an inordinate amount of time and energy relitigating Biden’s tenure in the White House—whether he was fit to be there and how frail he had become. The phrase cognitive decline still comes up a lot, for obvious reasons, none of them fun or especially constructive. The 2024 campaign has also come in for a spirited rehash—especially among factions of Biden world, the Kamala Harris–Tim Walz campaign, and the various PACs and outside groups ostensibly designed to support them. Republicans have of course relished every chance to revisit Biden’s deterioration. The media have hammered this theme as well, most notably Tapper and his co-author, Alex Thompson of Axios, whose blockbuster autopsy, Original Sin, has been at or near the top of The New York Times’ nonfiction best-seller list for several weeks.

The surest way for Democrats to move on would be to jump straight to the future: Look to 2028, as quickly as possible. Presidential campaigns at their best can be forward-looking, wide-open, and aspirational. Yes, local elections—and certainly the 2026 midterms—are important, and maybe even promising for the party. But not as important as picking a new national leader, something the Democrats have not really done since Barack Obama was first elected in 2008. Among the many tragedies of Biden’s last act was that he delayed his party, indefinitely, from anointing its next generation.

Trump himself might not be on the ballot in 2028, but he’s still giving his opposition plenty to run against. So Democrats might as well take the show national and start now, if for no other reason than to escape from fractures of the present and circular nightmares of the recent past. Which began, more or less, on June 27 of last year. When Democrats stop dwelling on that disaster and what followed, that might signal that they’re finally getting somewhere.

Tulsi Gabbard’s tenure as director of national intelligence in the Trump administration may be facing a potential shake-up. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss the future of the administration’s national-security complex.

Gabbard joined the Trump administration in a “MAGA wing of no war, no foreign intervention,” staff writer for The Atlantic Shane Harris said last night. But following the U.S. air strikes on Iran, Gabbard is trying very quickly “to get the intelligence in her statements” to “line up with the president’s political preferences,” Harris explained. “That is dangerous in the conduct of intelligence. That is what intelligence professionals try to avoid.” This is also the “politicization of intelligence,” he continued, “which is precisely what [Gabbard] said she was going to root out in the intelligence community.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Shane Harris, a staff writer at The Atlantic; David Ignatius, a columnist for The Washington Post; Andrea Mitchell, the chief Washington and foreign-affairs correspondent at NBC News; and Ashley Parker, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

The stakes are almost embarrassingly simple: A man needs to win a race. F1 is a loud sports epic that thrusts the viewer into the high-octane, technocratic world of Formula One racing. These competitions are decided by complex car engineering and tactical pit stops; individual drivers are only as important as the car companies they work for. The film’s director, Joseph Kosinski, best known for the box-office sensation Top Gun: Maverick, accounts for this system’s intricacies by stripping the plot of any complications. Instead, in collaboration with Formula One’s regulating body, he creates a straightforward underdog tale, made compelling by its fidelity to the world’s fastest races.

Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, an over-the-hill, salt-of-the-earth gearhead who washed out of Formula 1 decades ago and has since taken on any racing challenge that he can. (He even drives a New York City cab at one point.) He returns to the sport when another former competitor, Ruben Cervantes (played by Javier Bardem), recruits Sonny to bolster the flailing, upstart team that Cervantes now owns. If his crew doesn’t win at least one race this season, the governing board can fire Cervantes, so Sonny joins up for one last rodeo.

In real life, Formula One is defined by the companies (known as “constructors”) that sink seemingly unlimited resources into getting to the top year after year—well-known brands such as Ferrari and Mercedes. F1 sticks them in the background (alongside actual racers such as Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen) while focusing on the fictional crew run by Cervantes, called APX. “I wanted to tell the story of the team at the bottom,” Kosinski told me. And rather than villainize any particular corporation—as James Mangold did in his period piece Ford v Ferrari—the director said that he was more intrigued by a quirk of Formula One, where constructors have multiple drivers in the field for each race. The big competition, then, is an internal one.

Read: Ford v Ferrari: A rollicking tale of fast cars and capitalism

That means Sonny’s biggest obstacle isn’t trying to overcome a champion such as Hamilton (who is listed as a producer on the film). His struggle is learning to work alongside one of his younger peers, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). “This notion of your teammate being your enemy, to me, that’s great for drama,” Kosinski told me, defining it as “that meta thing of a veteran and a rookie.” Whereas in Top Gun: Maverick, he explained, he was exploring a father-son dynamic, in F1, he sought to examine the relationship between two rivals.

This clever conflict helps the film upend the usual, dull stakes that have befouled so many works of its ilk in the past. The most successful racing movies of late have leaned more artistic than mainstream, while more extravagant attempts have failed either commercially or critically. F1 doesn’t quite slot into either category; it’s more of a long-shot sports saga with the peaks and valleys of joy and despair that come with it. (Think Hoosiers or Rocky, except with scenes set in Monaco and Abu Dhabi.) It’s familiar, but pleasantly so.

The film still manages to dig into the peculiarities of Formula One within its big, meaty character study. The sport is well suited for that type of intimate storytelling. “I can’t think of another sport like that, where the sport is literally engineered to create that internal team conflict,” Kosinski said. “That sense of internal competition brings the best and worst out of people.” The director discovered Formula One by watching the popular documentary series Formula 1: Drive to Survive, which brought greater visibility to the sport. He recalled how the first season focused on the last-place finishers, not the top ones: “What’s it like to be the team that goes and knows they’re going to lose every weekend?”

Read: How Netflix made Americans care about the most European of sports

Questions like this one seem to undergird much of Kosinski’s work. The director has long struck me as something of an under-sung auteur of big-budget features; he takes on brand-name franchises that are huge, technical challenges (such as his debut feature, Tron: Legacy), injecting humanity wherever possible. Top Gun: Maverick followed a plot befitting a legacy sequel—the growth of Tom Cruise’s protagonist into someone older and wiser—but Kosinski made it seem like it was, on a deeper level, about Cruise’s superhuman desire to stay relevant in Hollywood. The director similarly molds F1 around his star’s more reluctant image: Pitt portrays a man of few words who seems nostalgic for simpler times in his industry.

The specifics of Formula One border on arcane, and Kosinski gleefully plunges the viewer into all of its minutiae: the balance between aerodynamics and engine power in building the cars; the strategies behind taking a pit stop or passing another driver. Sonny is the viewer’s tether to reality; he’s happy to practice his steering-wheel grip using a common object—tennis balls—instead of an expensive contraption. (Joshua, meanwhile, employs a more intricate workout device.) Kosinski wanted to accurately depict the sport without losing viewers who are unfamiliar with or even intimidated by it. “It’s not just about people going around in circles,” he told me, pushing back against the mainstream image of Formula One as a bunch of rocket cars zooming around a track. “It really is chess at 200 miles an hour.”

F1 succeeds when it emphasizes that side of the sport, and as long as you can accept the well-trod beats of its plot. Pitt is there to glower and exude experience, and Idris brims with youthful, charismatic arrogance. Kosinski handles the racing scenes with the mechanical prowess he showed off in Top Gun: Maverick, mounting cameras to cars and highlighting their velocity in surprising ways. Sonny’s quest to prove his doubters wrong resembles the arc of many a sports drama. But Kosinski elevates that journey by capturing racing in all of its gorgeous, peculiar glory—there’s never been a portrait of Formula One quite like it.

Grassroots midwives and community birthworkers are fighting to protect Black and Indigenous maternal health, while Congress threatens to gut it.

This essay is part of an ongoing Gender & Democracy series, presented in partnership with Groundswell Fund and Groundswell Action Fund, highlighting the work of Groundswell partners advancing inclusive democracy. You’ll find stories, reflections and accomplishments—told in their own words—by grassroots leaders, women of color, Indigenous women, and trans and gender-expansive people supported by Groundswell. By amplifying these voices—their solutions, communities, challenges and victories—our shared goal is to show how intersectional organizing strengthens democracy.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” is really a Big Bad Blow to millions suffering an already inadequate and inequitable maternity care system. While policymakers debate in distant chambers, local organizations and midwife-led community-based initiatives are bracing to weather the coming storm.

A Shared Maternal Health Crisis

Today, Black and Indigenous communities face some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the U.S.—rates that would be a public health emergency in any other industrialized country.

Here, the numbers tell the story:

• The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate among industrialized nations—and Black women are disproportionately affected.
• Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.
• Indigenous women face similarly devastating odds, with maternal death rates up to four times higher in certain regions.
• Rural Native communities and urban Black communities alike are maternal care deserts—with hospitals closing midwives underfunded and culturally competent care often completely unavailable.
• Medicaid covers more than 50 percent of all births in both communities.

A Snapshot from the South Side of Chicago

A low-wage Black mother working a low-wage job finds herself pregnant for the fourth time. She is already drowning in childcare costs utility bills and housing stress. In the last five years, the four closest hospitals offering maternity care have closed.

She takes a bus to get to a crowded clinic for her prenatal appointment. There she waits over an hour, only to be seen for seven rushed minutes. She is met not with comfort or care—but with measurements, judgments and medical jargon. No one rubs her back. No one really asks how she’s doing. She is afraid to mention her challenges knowing a DCFS report might follow, threatening to take her children.

Her doctor doesn’t live in her neighborhood. When they talk about nutrition, no resources are offered—just prescriptions, vaccines and platitudes. She is healthy, but emotionally exhausted. At home, gunshots ring out at night. The price of food climbs. Her social media feed is flooded with trauma.

Her children—ages 3, 7 and 9—play quietly beside her. New rules limit access to after-school programs and childcare, and she doesn’t qualify for support. Suddenly, a breaking news banner flashes: “$880 billion to be cut from Medicaid. Up to 10 million people are poised to lose their Medicaid coverage.” She wonders if her care will continue to be covered by Medicaid or if she will end up birthing in her apartment alone.

How Did We Get Here? A Legacy of Midwifery—and the Systemic Dismantling of It

For generations, both Black and white women birthed at home under the watchful, empathetic and culturally-congruent care of local midwives. Traditional midwives didn’t just birth babies; they were at the center of their communities making sure all members stepped up to support a new mother and sustain her growing family. These midwives maintained the web of relationships by providing management of resources and distribution of food. Traditions and holistic views of life were at the center of the community.

This continued until the early 20th century when the newly organized medical profession began its campaign to move childbirth into hospitals in a push for “modern” birth. Hospitals offered white women pain-free births with drugs like “twilight sleep,” while Black women were left out of this system, excluded from care, denied hospital access, and given no investment in maternal infrastructure.

They took care of themselves as they always had, by birthing their own, and the older generation training the next. But then came the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, making it illegal to practice midwifery without becoming a nurse—a nearly impossible feat for Black and Indigenous women barred from nursing schools.

Medicaid and the Death of the “Granny Midwife”

In the South, the introduction of Medicaid in 1965 further accelerated the decline of traditional midwifery. Though not designed to destroy it, Medicaid’s hospital-centered reimbursement model effectively shut the door on community midwives—especially Black “granny” midwives who were denied licensure and payment. Birth moved into the hospital and the interlocking vestiges, systems of colonization, slavery and medical racism erased birth knowledge from the community replacing it with institutional control.

Those same communities now face a reality that their access to maternity services are at risk of disappearing. However, they are not interested in recreating a system that has so poorly served them. Rather than looking for governmental solutions, they are constructing their own.

Bringing Culturally-Congruent Care Back to Communities in Need

In Chicago and across the Midwest, organizations like the Black Midwifery Collective, Birth Roots Midwifery, and national programs like the Changing Woman Initiative, are reclaiming birth as resistance, as ceremony and as justice.

We must support these efforts not just with praise, but with policy and resources. This means expanding Medicaid, not slashing it. Funding traditional and community midwives, including certified professional midwives and Indigenous practitioners. Investing in midwifery education pipelines for Black and Indigenous students. Protecting homebirth and culturally congruent models within licensing and regulatory systems. And demanding data accountability and maternal health equity standards at every level of care.

Birthwork Is Liberation Work

This is about more than better outcomes—it is about reclaiming our bodies, babies and future. It is about breaking cycles of trauma and rebuilding cycles of care. Through this work, the pregnant woman on the South Side of Chicago can be offered a different experience—one in her own neighborhood, provided by a midwife from her own community who understands her life circumstances, offering not only time and resources, but hope.

The “Big Beautiful Bill” may have passed the House, but grassroots organizations are passing something stronger. A legacy of resistance and a future of justice.