What The Hell America!

There’s a revolt brewing over Chuck Schumer’s decision to vote for closure on the House Republican’s funding bill—effectively punting on the first major fight with Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Seriously, the anger is palpable. And what’s remarkable is where it’s originating: not just the left, but Democrats who have won in Trump districts and those up for reelection in tough races. We will have more of that Sunday in Lauren Egan’s The Opposition (drop her a line if you’re hearing anything juicy).

Today, Morning Shots comes courtesy of longtime Bulwark pal and new Bulwark writer Will Sommer, whose newsletter False Flag—which will bravely wade into the right-wing media fever swamps that have now oozed up to engulf the whole nation—will start landing in your inboxes Tuesday. He’s got the latest on the MAGAfication of (if you’ll permit Andrew a point of editorial privilege) America’s second-best regional burger chain. Happy Friday.

by Will Sommer

The stock market is flailing, the trade war with Canada shows no sign of ending, and a new one with Europe is just kicking off. But Americans do have some good business news to cheer about: Midwestern fast food chain Steak ‘n Shake has ditched “seed oils” and now deep-fries its french fries in beef tallow.

The fries will taste like they used to decades ago, before McDonald’s and other chains ditched beef tallow for seed oils, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared in a rapturous interview with Sean Hannity this week at a newly tallowfied Shake ‘n Steak location.

“People are raving about these french fries!” Kennedy said.

“They’re amazing!” Hannity said.

As much as a celebration of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, the Steak ‘n Shake interview also marked another chapter into the Trump administration’s use of stunt capitalism. The White House has been increasingly reliant on photo-ops to move its agenda, such as the president’s decision to turn the White House lawn into a Tesla dealership on Tuesday.

It’s an approach that allows an administration to lean on politically coded initiatives as much, if not more, than actual science, evidence, or even policy. Steak ‘n Shake’s decisions to change its deep-frying process appears rooted not in actual health studies but in an internet-fueled fear, growing on the right, that seed oils—soybean oil, canola oil, sunflower oil, and more, known to the most ardent seedphobes as “the Hateful Eight”—are bad for your health.

But the evidence that seed oils are uniquely bad for you is, charitably, ill-defined. The American Heart Association says essentially that you don’t need to worry about it. But because seed oils are often used in processed foods, seed-oil fears can serve as a heuristic to push people toward healthier foods anyway.

In other words: There’s no kind of oil that is going to make a big sleeve of fries, from Steak ‘n Shake or any other chain, into a healthy choice.

Beyond that, it’s not even clear if Steak ‘n Shake has actually abandoned seed oils.

MAHA influencer Alex Clark—a Charlie Kirk adjunct who recently pivoted from conservative-inflected celebrity gossip to wellness with a podcast called Culture Apothecary—has been on a campaign to expose Steak ‘n Shake’s real seed oil roots, and she appears to be on to something.

That’s because, with a few exceptions like Five Guys, the vast majority of burger chains order pre-cut fries from restaurant wholesalers. Those fries are initially cooked in seed oils like soybean oil, then frozen.

Amid the controversy, MAHA sleuths with significant social media followings have been showing up at Steak ‘n Shakes with cameras and asking to see the tallow. One, fitness and food transparency social media figure Ryan Haff, said he still wouldn’t recommend Steak ‘n Shake. That’s because the fries are almost certainly pre-cooked in seed oils, even after RFK Jr.’s visit and the tallow marketing push.

“It’s kind of a way to get them back in the news and make them more relevant,” he said.

Steak ‘n Shake and Biglari Holdings, its owner, didn’t respond to requests for comment about its deep-frying processes. But on Wednesday, they posted a statement to their website copping to the pre-fry bait-and-switch. “We have made a commitment to remove seed oils from our restaurants,” the restaurant said. “However, we are just beginning since manufacturers are currently par-frying these products with vegetable oil prior to freezing and shipping them to us . . . In the spirit of transparency, we will continue to update you as we pass important milestones on our journey.”

Steak ‘n Shake certainly seems to be trying to get in good with MAGA. Its X account shared a picture its fries posed next to a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. The chain has said the tallow switch means it is “RFK’ing” its fries. And its move to beef tallow has occasioned near-universal praise from MAGA heavyweights. Donald Trump Jr., Charlie Kirk, Laura Loomer, and Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Marjorie Taylor Greene all praised the company on X. Steak ‘n Shake’s holding company, notably, also owns the increasingly right-tilting Maxim, which featured Luna on its cover last year.

The move to purge seed oils also strikes a Trumpian, things-were-better-in-the-old-days note. As Kennedy said in the interview, when he was a boy, American fries reigned supreme globally. Now, thanks to seed oils, European fries are crushing ours.

“The french fries here just don’t taste right,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy made clear that not everything on the Steak ‘n Shake menu has been touched by the healing tallow. Hannity apologized for ordering a soda, promising Kennedy that he wouldn’t drink the whole thing. When a waiter arrived with a milkshake, Kennedy blanched, and insisted he didn’t order the sugary drink.

The entire episode raised the question: Shouldn’t the nation’s chief health official be doing something else than hosting fast-food mukbangs amid a Texas measles outbreak that has infected more than 200 people? In this case, perhaps you would be grateful for the diversion. When he wasn’t telling Hannity about seed oils, Kennedy spent the rest of his Steak ‘n Shake visit warning viewers about the imagined dangers of the measles vaccine.

“It causes all the illnesses that measles causes,” Kennedy said.

by William Kristol

Tomorrow is March 15. “Beware the ides of March,” said the soothsayer to Ceasar. A soothsayer in Rome was a kind of fortune-teller or oracle who claimed an ability to divine the future. They were kind of the morning newsletter writers of their day.

And this particular soothsayer was alarmed.

As we should all be now.

Now I don’t want to go all gloomy and ides-of-March-y here. To the contrary—or a contrario, as the soothsayer would have said—there are reasons for hope amidst our alarm.

Donald Trump’s approval rating as president is falling. In Nate Silver’s average, he has slipped from an average 51.6 percent approval / 40 percent disapproval on inauguration day to 47.3 percent approval / 49.0 percent disapproval today. To put it differently, Trump’s gone from a net +11.6 percent to a net -1.7 percent. He’s losing more than a point on net a week, and his slide has recently accelerated.

This is noteworthy. In order to limit and mitigate the damage Trump can do over the next year and a half, it will be important for some Republican members of Congress, and some influential Trump supporters in various walks of life, to begin to doubt him and even to desert him. These people are not profiles in courage. They’re not going to get far out ahead of the public. These “leaders” will be much more likely to move if they see their followers beginning to jump ship.

So for the sake of the country, there’s no more important thing Trump opponents can do than find every opportunity to chip away at his popular approval. This doesn’t require Democrats to immediately “fix” their brand. It doesn’t require that liberals suddenly build a whole new media ecosystem to compete with the right-wing one. It doesn’t require deciding ahead of time which issues “work” and which don’t. It just requires taking advantage of opportunities that various Trump misadventures provide for eroding his support among different constituencies.

This is doable. It’s already happening. Trump is gradually losing ground politically.

So while it’s challenging, there’s no reason to be intimidated by the political task ahead.

But there is every reason to be alarmed by our situation. The Trump administration’s assault on the rule of law, on the guardrails that help defend a free government and a liberal society and a decent world order, has been fierce and sustained. It’s been far too easily accommodated by far too many. The forces of autocracy have done more damage and gained more ground than even some of us alarmists anticipated.

So this ides of March we should be alarmed but not intimidated. We’re in a fight that may be daunting but is certainly worth fighting. And no soothsayer can forecast its outcome.

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It was nice for all forty or so of us on the Bulwark team to see each other in person yesterday, and wild to think our first ever staff meeting had like six people in person.

• One of the advantages of an all-staff meeting? An in-person Next Level podcast, between two ferns! The triumvirate talks stonks, the Alien Enemies Act, Mahmoud Khalil, Newsom’s podcast, and Mayor Pete’s future.
• Deporting protesters? Weak move, bro. Sam Stein and Tim Miller break down how the campus free speech warriors have gone missing.
• Thugtatorship? Trump has brought it here. Holly Berkley Fletcher writes: “I spent a career watching African politics. I never expected to see the same dynamics in my hometown.”
• Casey Michel on the Russian delusion about Ukraine: “Behind Putin’s war—and any discussions about peace—is a two-century-old fiction about the two countries’ unity.”

LEGAL BEATDOWN: President Trump’s DOGE effort suffered perhaps its most stinging court loss yet yesterday, with a federal judge ruling that the firings of thousands of probationary employees across a range of federal agencies in recent weeks was illegal and ordering them hired back.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup had harsh words for DOGE’s core firing strategy—laying off entire classes of workers en masse while maintaining that every affected individual was being fired for performance reasons. He denounced this strategy as a “gimmick” designed to skirt federal laws, and showed a remarkable irritation with the government’s attempts to defend the practice: “I tend to doubt that you’re telling me the truth,” he told a Department of Justice attorney Thursday. “I’m tired of seeing you stonewall on trying to get at the truth.”

BRING OUT YOUR DEAD: Social Security, Elon Musk constantly and falsely maintains, is riddled with brazen, amateurish fraud, including regular payouts to long-dead recipients. Which makes it ironic that DOGE-initiated restrictions at SSA are actually creating new roadblocks to the administration figuring out who has and has not shuffled off the mortal coil.

Last month, the White House froze most spending on government credit cards, placing a $1 limit on hundreds of thousands of workers, wreaking havoc across the government. One effect, according to internal SSA communications viewed by The Bulwark, is that field offices “are unable at this time to request death certificates from the counties.”

“Please continue to attempt to contact third parties to obtain a death certificate if it is needed. Hopefully this won’t last too long and things will resume as normal,” the email said.

It’s just another example of the sort of penny-wise, pound-foolish “efficiency” DOGE is getting so good at. Reached for comment about the snag, the White House sent a cookie-cutter statement from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt: “Any American receiving Social Security benefits will continue to receive them. The sole mission of DOGE is to identify waste, fraud, and abuse only.”

THEY MAY BE OBSESSED: Two sources at the Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals inside HHS sent us note of an email they received yesterday demanding that they adhere to very strict protocols when it came to how they put together their . . . email signatures. The email reminded recipients of Trump’s anti-DEI directives. And then came the admonishment:

It has come to the Department’s attention that, despite OMHA representing we have complied with this EO, some employees continue to have pronouns in their email signature and/or nickname in Outlook. In furtherance of the above-referenced EO, HHS policy going forward is that Federal e-mail signatures can only include:

Full legal name (no nicknames or pronouns)
Title
Agency
Department
Telephone number (optional)
Agency logo (optional)

For Microsoft Office profile photos, your photo must be your official HHS photo or no photo at all. Emojis, AI images, or any non-official images should not be used.

A good use of everyone’s time.

WARTIME PRESIDENT: President Trump hasn’t been happy with the pace of deportations so far in his term. So today he’s trying something new. Per CNN:

The Trump administration is expected to invoke a sweeping wartime authority to speed up the president’s mass deportation pledge in the coming days . . . The little-known 18th-century law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, gives the president tremendous authority to target and remove undocumented immigrants, though legal experts have argued it would face an uphill battle in court. . . .

The law is designed to be invoked if the US is at war with another country, or a foreign nation has invaded the US or threatened to do so. Legal experts say it would be difficult for Trump to use the act when the US isn’t being attacked by a foreign government, even if the administration does cite threats from gangs or cartels.

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