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In recent years, ABC’s daytime talk show The View has become an essential stop for top-level politicians. Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, J. D. Vance, and Hillary Clinton are among the many to have visited.
On the one hand, the show is not exactly The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in terms of policy-focused, hard-hitting journalism. On the other, The View fills a special role in informing the electorate: In an era when news consumption has become siloed and partisan, it’s a show that has no simple ideological profile. Though somewhat left-leaning, the show always has at least one right-coded host on its panel. That means it’s been singularly able to reach a wide audience of people who aren’t necessarily political junkies.
Or at least that was true. Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, said in February that he was investigating whether The View had violated the FCC’s “equal time” rule by hosting some candidates but not their opponents. “Bona fide news interview” programs are exempt from the rule, but Carr argued that The View was not one. Since then, Semafor reports, the show hasn’t hosted a single political candidate in a competitive race, and “has in recent weeks rebuffed some candidates that it invited on the show.”
This isn’t just a disturbing example of government interference with the press. It’s also a sign of things to come. Last week, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, a case that concerned whether the president had the power to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the federal bodies known (now anachronistically) as independent regulatory agencies. In 1935, the Court ruled 9–0 in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States that these officers could be fired only for cause. In Slaughter, the justices cashiered that precedent.
This is a major change in executive power, giving the president greater ability to fire officials with whom he disagrees politically and to treat these agencies as extensions of his political project. The Atlantic has run excellent articles on how the ruling is a triumph for the unitary-executive theory and a betrayal of originalism, but it’s easy to lose sight of the real-world implications. Most of us who don’t work in the federal government, law schools, or political-science departments don’t think about “executive power” on an everyday basis. But the government influences our life on an everyday basis.
What Slaughter means for most people is that the president now has much greater control over many of the parts of the government that affect us most directly. In other words, partisan politics will start infringing on areas of life where they have hitherto been remote or absent. Seeking the overturning of Humphrey’s Executor was a goal laid out in Project 2025, the policy plan that has become a road map for the Trump administration. Project 2025 seeks not just a much more powerful president but a reshaping of American society at a fundamental level, instituting a traditionalist and Christian regime. Control of these agencies is one method to achieve that.
Carr’s crusade against The View is a preview of what post-Slaughter America might look like. Carr was one of the authors of Project 2025, and, long before Slaughter, he was acting as though he were under full White House control. The FCC has always been led by political appointees, but Carr has made partisan combat his central aim. Last year, he pressured BREAKING NEWS over a 2024 interview with Kamala Harris that had infuriated Trump. Months later, he attempted to get Disney to fire the late-night host Jimmy Kimmel for jokes about Charlie Kirk and the Trump family.
With the new powers the Court has granted, Trump can seek to politicize other bodies that aren’t typically partisan—say, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the agency that guarantees that even if a bank fails, you don’t lose money, up to a $250,000 limit. (Project 2025 proposes rolling it together with several other bodies as part of a loosening of financial regulations.) He can sack FTC commissioners he views as too harsh on corporate interests.
But he also can try to render other agencies useless. In 2025, Trump fired a Biden-appointed member of the National Labor Relations Board. For months after that, the board didn’t have a quorum, which meant it couldn’t act. The fired member has challenged the firing, and although Slaughter does not directly decide that suit, the Supreme Court’s reasoning would appear to allow her removal to proceed. The Federal Election Commission has not had a quorum since May 2025, because Trump was slow to nominate members and the Senate hasn’t acted on their nominations.
Under the direction of Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget and another Project 2025 author, the administration has frozen the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in place and tried to strip nearly all of its funding. The CFPB was established by Congress to protect Americans from predatory lenders, debt-relief companies, for-profit colleges, and the like, but Vought has effectively nullified Congress’s passage of the law.
In a poll released last week, Politico found that six in 10 Americans feel “like politics are everywhere these days where it does not make sense for things to be political.” Slaughter all but guarantees that the problem will get worse soon.
Related:
Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Today’s News
- Senator Bernie Sanders called on Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner to drop out of Maine’s Senate race following a new sexual-assault allegation, joining other Democrats who have withdrawn their support after previous similar allegations. Platner has denied wrongdoing and has until Monday to remove his name from the ballot.
- At the NATO summit in Turkey, President Trump said he “was very disappointed with NATO” and criticized allies for refusing to join the U.S. and Israel’s military campaign against Iran. Trump also praised Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan and floated selling advanced F-35 fighter jets to Turkey despite existing congressional restrictions.
- At least three tankers appeared to come under attack while trying to transit the Strait of Hormuz through a route that Iran had warned ships not to use, though Tehran did not claim responsibility. After, the Treasury Department revoked a waiver allowing Iran to sell oil and petrochemicals, cutting off a major revenue source negotiated during recent talks.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
The Genes That Could Cancel Out a Fatal Diagnosis
By Roxanne Khamsi
When Ludivine Verboogen and Romain Alderweireldt’s third child was born in Belgium in late 2015, they marveled at his long fingers. Perhaps one day he will be a famous pianist, they thought. But soon Ludivine grew worried that her son was not developing as well as his two older sisters had. His muscles seemed weak, and the physiotherapy appointments she was taking him to three times a week didn’t seem to be helping. “A lot of doctors were telling us that he was fine, nothing was wrong with him,” Romain recalled to me.
Ludivine persisted, and shortly before their son was a year old, she and Romain found out that his long fingers and lack of muscle tone had a devastating explanation.
Read the full article.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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