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The House board flashed 427–1. Down on the floor, a Louisiana Republican named Clay Higgins had just cast the lone "no" on a bill ordering the Justice Department to release the Jeffrey Epstein files within 30 days. Within hours, Senate leaders signaled they would clear the measure by unanimous consent; on Wednesday, they did, sending it to the president’s desk. Yesterday, Donald Trump signed it.
In a year obsessed with fracture, the Epstein Files Transparency Act produced legislative agreement: a left–right coalition large enough to end a monthslong stall. The bill moved after a discharge petition—one of Congress’s bluntest tools—forced the vote.
If there’s a more bracing portrait of American political agreement in 2025, it’s hard to think of one. But it is not the only example.
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Trump did remake American politics—on trade, on the border, on the judiciary—but the country’s broad middle is now remaking his administration back. You can see it in the agreements that break through: near-unanimous votes to take down AI deepfakes; lopsided margins to harden fentanyl rules; a Supreme Court that still says "9–0” on many cases; a TikTok policy that drifted from ban-it-tomorrow theatrics to a divest-or-comply framework because millions use the app. Even the loudest politician of his era keeps adjusting to where the voters already are. The death of moderate America has been greatly exaggerated.
Common Knowledge
The dominant story line of 2025 is that America is polarized almost beyond repair—and you can find eloquent versions of that claim on both sides of the aisle.
If you listen to Democratic leaders, the mood music is often dirgelike. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries keeps promising to "push back against the far-right extremism…being unleashed on the American people," casting the problem as not merely partisan but existential. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, fresh from the shutdown trench, called to "end the circular firing squad" on Face the Nation. And when Barack Obama weighed in after the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the murders in Minnesota, he called the country "at an inflection point," warning leaders against rushing to name an enemy and, in the process, teaching their followers to despise the other side’s right to speak.
Republicans aren’t exactly whistling a happier tune. Speaker Mike Johnson spent the shutdown blasting Chuck Schumer as captive to a "Marxist" wing, insisting the stalemate owed less to line-item haggling than to a base that punishes compromise. Liz Cheney, now outside Congress, told a law-school audience that Capitol Hill’s culture incentivizes "toxic" and "bitter" behavior. Mitt Romney, retired from the Senate, chimed in: "You don’t carry around matches when there’s a lot of gasoline around you… and there’s a lot of gasoline in the atmosphere in America right now." His culprit list starts with social media.
Even the centrist who made a career out of cutting deals agrees. Joe Manchin calls Washington’s political culture "toxic," argues the incentives are rigged toward the loudest edges, and pleads for a coalition that will reward compromise again.
Taken together, the testimony is consistent: from Obama’s "inflection point" to Johnson’s "Marxist" warnings, from Shaheen’s "circular firing squad" to Cheney’s "toxic" and Romney’s "matches," the people who actually run—or used to run—American government are telling the same bleak story.
Uncommon Knowledge
Now the part you don’t hear as often: wherever you look, American institutions keep producing broad, cross-party coalitions on concrete things—and in ways that keep nudging Trump, of all politicians, toward the center of public opinion he helped to redefine.
Start with the Epstein vote, The House’s 427–1 is a clear signal. The Senate’s unanimous consent is likewise not a fluke. The bill’s details—“searchable and downloadable" publication within 30 days, followed by a required accounting of what was withheld and why—are the sort of provisions that civil libertarians and populists have been demanding for years. That it arrived via discharge petition (a tool that works only when a bipartisan majority rebels against leadership) makes it more striking.
This isn’t a one-off. In May, Trump signed the TAKE IT DOWN Act, the first federal law to criminalize the non-consensual distribution of intimate images—including AI-generated deepfakes—and to force platforms to remove them within 48 hours. It sailed through the Senate unanimously and through the House 409–2. The law’s text, the White House signing notice, and the end-of-term write-ups are all unambiguous: near-unanimity in both chambers; signatures on May 19; platforms on the clock until May 2026 to build removal tools.
The fentanyl crackdown is another case study. The HALT Fentanyl Act—to permanently schedule fentanyl analogs—cleared the Senate by a lopsided vote and the House by 321–104, with dozens of Democrats joining Republicans even as civil-liberties groups warned of overcriminalization. The Judiciary Committee’s releases and the House sponsors’ own account show an old-fashioned coalition: border hawks, suburban moderates, and medical groups alarmed by synthetic-opioid deaths.
On national security, the Senate passed the annual defense policy bill 77–20 even during a shutdown, then moved (by voice vote) to repeal long-stale 1991 and 2002 war authorizations tucked into that same bill—an overdue clawback of authority that once looked impossible.
Meanwhile, the supposedly "six-to-three, all-the-time" Supreme Court quietly turned in a term where fewer than one in 10 merits decisions split along the classic ideological line. Even as the justices fought bitterly over a handful of blockbusters, typical cases were joined across the aisle, and a very large share were unanimous.
Congressional behavior looks similarly less apocalyptic on close inspection. The Lugar Center’s Bipartisan Index, the least sexy data set in Washington, still shows a durable bloc of members who make a habit of crossing the aisle to co-sponsor and recruit co-sponsors from the other party; year after year, the habit of cooperation is measurable and persistent.
After a fatal January mid-air collision over D.C. airspace, Senate Commerce leaders Maria Cantwell and Ted Cruz assembled a bipartisan aviation-safety package requiring ADS-B tracking across military aircraft—including helicopters—to close a long-criticized loophole. Committee work was unanimous; the floor path bipartisan.
And then there’s Trump himself—the man whose disruption turned blunt populism into the lingua franca of American politics—being tugged back, sometimes, to the median voter he once delighted in offending.
After the Alabama embryo decision turned IVF into a flashpoint, Trump’s line was not coy: he "strongly supports IVF" and wants states to protect access. That put him to the left of many social conservatives and squarely with the public. It also put him in alignment with the late Kirk. On his own show this year, Kirk warned the GOP there is "no value to campaigning" against IVF, a pragmatic concession to the supermajority that supports it. (There were, predictably, some furious reactions online.)
Trump has been riffing for months about getting into heaven—part joke, part confession, part brand management. In an on-plane gaggle he mused, "I don’t think there’s anything that’s going to get me into heaven… I’m not maybe heaven-bound," before adding that simply flying on Air Force One might qualify. He leaned into it with a fundraising email whose subject line read, "I want to try and get to Heaven." It’s easy to mock, but the subtext is familiar: Americans want their leaders, whoever they are, to make some peace with the moral majority, which now includes a lot of suburban women who like IVF and a lot of digital natives who like TikTok.
On TikTok, in fact, Trump has repeatedly delayed the ban that Congress authorized and the courts allowed—multiple extensions to keep the app alive while a sale is negotiated. For a politician once defined by the theatrical flourish of a ban-hammer, this is a notably middle-ground, market-aware solution that recognizes a basic truth: 170 million Americans use the thing, and a sudden blackout would be political arson. The extensions drew bipartisan complaints; they also reflect bipartisan realism.
None of this is meant to minimize genuine, bitter fights. There are plenty. But the surprising data hiding in plain sight is how often the system still defaults to agreement when the question is concrete, the victims are real, and the remedy is specific.
Which brings us back to the Epstein vote. In the span of a day, the House and Senate found overwhelming consensus for transparency on one of the most toxic names in American public life—and did so despite the White House’s earlier reluctance and leadership’s discomfort.
And consensus has been working, quietly, around the edges of the culture war all year: protecting victims of AI exploitation; curbing synthetic opioids; trimming centuries-long war powers; keeping aircraft separated over the Potomac; nudging the most polarizing politician of the age into mainstream positions, on some issues at least.
The pundit’s tale of two Americas will not die, and it shouldn’t; there are real divides. But moderate America—the one that has a deeply held intuition that victims deserve help and the public deserves the truth—keeps showing up.
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