It isn’t always easy to keep up with what’s happening in the US. “Shorter America” is a series where Dr Emma Shortis loops you in on what’s going on in America and shares news and analysis that you can trust.
Fri 14 Aug 2026 01.00 AEST
Photo: The White House/Flickr
She’s running. Is she running?! This week, we are deep into speculation about who will run for president in 2028 (assuming we make it that far). Primary races continue in Minnesota and Wisconsin, while the mad king Trump continues on his merry way.
This week:
A fragile consensus seems to be emerging: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is going to run for president in 2028. There has of course been a lot of speculation around her potential run for a long time now – really since she was elected to Congress in the 2018 mid-terms. In the 2020 presidential primaries, when Joe Biden said he would build a bridge for the next generation of Democratic leaders, many, many people pictured AOC on the other side.
Fast forward to 2026, and that possibility seems to be strengthening. That’s for a number of reasons, not all of them quantifiable (vibes matter). There’s the fact that democratic socialists are ascendant in the Party – winning and demonstrating their electoral strength in places like New York and Michigan. As our favourite Tressie MacMillam Cotton wrote in the NYT this week: “Socialists are winning because they are listening to people”. Wild, hey.
Anyway, there are other indications AOC is seriously considering a run: her appearance at the Munich Security Conference back in February, for example. And then there’s her recent, very personal, announcement that she’s freezing her eggs and will document that journey on social media, alongside a soft launch of her (long ago) breakup with her long-term partner.
No one can quite explain why this suggests a run is more likely, but, well, it does. It used to be you could tell who was running by who had published a book (I suspect I’m not the only person in this little community that still has a dog-eared copy of The Audacity of Hope in the bookshelf). But as we keep saying – the old game is over. And AOC is already playing the new one.
The primaries are nearly done – Minnesota and Wisconsin finished up this week. In Minnesota, former presidential aspirant Amy Klobuchar sailed through the race for the Democratic candidate for Governor, winning over 90% of votes. That means there’s just Massachusetts and New Hampshire to go, in early September (CNN has a handy guide to all the races). And then the mid-terms will be upon us.
We likely won’t know for sure who’s actually going to run until after the mid-terms. The results will indicate to Democrats which way the tide is turning (of course, that’s assuming they’re not overturned or catastrophically contested by Trump. Big ifs, not normal, etc). November will also tell us a lot about the prospects for democratic socialist candidates – and a lot about how hard centrist democrats will fight to keep them out.
At least so far, the indications are that they’ll fight pretty hard. Some centrist support seems to be coalescing around Rahm Emmanuel. The longtime Democrat is a former congressman, White House Chief of Staff to Barack Obama, and Mayor of Chicago. He’s…an interesting fellow (well-illustrated by this conversation with FT’s Gideon Rachmann). He’s been doing the rounds over the last few weeks, including giving a speech in Tel Aviv in July. Here’s our colleague Matt Duss in The Nation on that speech, which led into a broader conversation on the latest episode of the “American Prestige” podcast about the fight over foreign policy in the Democratic Party. I like the show a lot, but just be warned, it’s pretty wonky [complimentary].
Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to wreak havoc. On Tuesday US time, the president signed an Executive Order making big, potentially very damaging changes to childhood vaccination schedules. He said some extremely weird, clearly AI slop-informed stuff about vaccines “being poured into a little child’s body” and other dangerous BS.
But this week the weirdness crown once again goes to Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, RFK Jr. Here’s another Shorter America favourite, Jamelle Bouie, on why RFK’s ant-vaxx campaign isn’t just weird – it’s eugenics.
And, as Bouie continues: Trump is “a mad king who might honestly take the rest of us with him.”
Happy Friday.
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Spare a thought for Saudi Arabia. Its almost-omnipotent leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) notwithstanding, it’s in dire straits — and not just in the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb. Its faith-based security strategy has left it in a diabolical position, with immeasurable consequences for the Middle East as a whole.
