FIFA announced Tuesday that it would create the FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), a new business entity, to raise up to $4.2 million in the next year by “carefully selecting long-term investors who will purchase minority, non-controlling interests in FFE.”

Critics have decried the decision to sell stakes in the World Cup, which is managed by FIFA, a non-profit organization. The move could potentially earn Infantino tens of millions of dollars.

To make matters worse, Infantino reportedly held investor discussions with members of the Trump administration, The Times reported Tuesday. The move comes amid mounting concerns over Infantino’s relationship with Donald Trump, after the president openly bullied FIFA into lifting a red card against a player on the U.S. men’s soccer team.

In addition, FIFA reportedly stated that once the approval was granted, the investor group would be led by Thrive Eternal, a venture capital firm run by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared who is under investigation for alleged corruption.

FIFA said that it planned to expand football development funding to more than $10 billion “subject to approval by FIFA Member Associations.”

The UEFA Europa League immediately released a statement outright rejecting the proposal.

“This crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross,” the statement said. “UEFA takes it extremely seriously. So should every National Football Association. So should every stakeholder: leagues, clubs, players, supporters, governments and everyone who cares about the future of the game. The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade —especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially.”

“None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell,” the statement said.

Inside Washington

A lot of Dems don’t like DNC Chair Ken Martin—but he’ll probably stay 

Recent reports about Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin’s temper and alleged financial mismanagement might not end Martin’s tenure, due to his strong relationships with DNC members and support from the Democratic establishment. But the reports do seem to have opened the floodgates for his critics: Many strategists and politicians suddenly have lots to say about Ken Martin.

Over the weekend, new details emerged about the DNC’s debts and financial troubles, casting doubt on Martin’s ability to fundraise and budget; The New York Times also reported that he is paranoid and anxious, and threw a phone at the desk of an aide in early July.

“The question is not whether or not Ken should go, the question is how much longer can we afford to keep him, because this is not sustainable,” said David Hogg, the president of Leaders We Deserve, on Monday. Hogg was a vice chair of the DNC during the first half of 2025, but stepped away from the role in June 2025 after tension between him and Martin.

Hogg pointed to concerns about Martin’s ability to fundraise for the party, particularly in light of a recent Supreme Court decision that makes party political spending all the more important. The Republican National Committee has $128 million in cash on hand; meanwhile, the DNC has $16 million on hand but is $18 million in debt. This June, the Supreme Court ruled that political parties can both coordinate with candidates and raise unlimited funds. In the aftermath of that ruling, political party fundraising is more important than ever. 

A March decision by the Federal Communications Commission also increased the importance of political party fundraising. According to federal communications law, candidates for office are entitled to purchase campaign advertising on television and radio networks at a cheaper rate than outside groups. In March, the FCC expanded that benefit to political party committees acting in coordination with candidates—meaning that every dollar raised by a political party can go further to buy ads for candidates.

Martin pushed back on the idea that he had failed at his fundraising duties in a Substack post last week. “We are converting the cash we raise into electoral assets: more people, earlier organizing, better technology, and stronger state parties,” Martin wrote. “That answer may be unsatisfying to people who believe the purpose of a political party is to accumulate the largest possible bank balance until the final days before an election. But a party is not a savings account. Its purpose is to build power.”

Hogg didn’t suggest a specific name for who he’d like to see replace Martin. “There’s a lot of people I can think of that, at a minimum, would not put the organization $2 million in debt,” he said. On Sunday, longtime Democratic strategist James Carville suggested that Hogg should succeed Martin; Hogg didn’t comment in time for publication. 

Hogg is far from the only Democrat who’s lost faith in Martin. On Monday, politician and strategist Rufus Gifford weighed in against Martin on Substack. Gifford was deputy campaign manager for Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and finance chair for Biden’s presidential reelection campaign. 

“At this point, I think there is no saving Martin’s chairmanship,” Gifford wrote. “He is a good man with good intentions but simply not meeting this critical moment.”

Some Democrats on the Hill have spoken out against Martin, too. In an X post on Sunday, Representative Sam Liccardo called for Martin’s resignation. Representative Veronica Escobar wrote, “There are a number of great democratic leaders who can very competently, brilliantly and strategically lead the DNC. And they’re all women.”

Despite the public anger against Martin, he still seems to enjoy strong support from the people who elected him in the first place—DNC members, many of whom are state party chairs and vice chairs. One longtime Democratic strategist told The New Republic that Martin has served those members well by funneling money toward their state parties. “He did what every good politician should do, which is fulfill the promise of their election to their electorate,” the strategist said. “The problem is, there are less than 500 people who elect the DNC chair, who has to represent 80 million people who vote Democrat. And the overwhelming majority outside that 500 do not think Ken Martin is doing a good job.”

That strategist, like Hogg, pointed towards Martin’s fundraising woes as the most concerning aspect of his leadership. Martin won the chair over then–Wisconsin state party Chair Ben Wikler, who had the support of major donors like Reid Hoffman and Alexander Soros. After beating Wikler, Martin denied that he had to mend relationships with the donors who had supported his opponent: “I don’t have any repair work to do,” he told The New York Times. “If they want to talk to me, they can come talk to me.”

“It’s not [donors’] job to reach out to him. It’s his job to reach out to them. Basic job,” said the strategist on Monday. “And that was his quote the day after he was elected, and then we’re shocked that he can’t fundraise?” 

Not everyone is convinced that Martin should step down. Micah Sifry, a writer and organizer who covers the DNC extensively, said he viewed the recent reporting on Martin with “skepticism,” and contrasted Martin’s tenure with that of Jaime Harrison, who chaired the DNC from 2021 to 2025. Harrison, Sifry said, “didn’t do much to strengthen state Democratic parties, and he did diddly-squat to support local organizing by Democrats.” In comparison, Sifry suggested, Martin’s financial decisions, organized on the principle of sending money out to state and local efforts, make more sense.

Martin received an important vote of confidence on Sunday, when House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries affirmed his support for the chair. “What we’ve seen over the last 18-plus months is that Democrats have won every single meaningful election up and down the ballot across the country during that period of time, and we look forward to our continued partnership,” Jeffries said. 

Jeffries’s endorsement is a strong signal for Martin’s future as chair. But then again, Jeffries himself has struggled to consolidate Democrats, particularly those on the left—this election cycle is testing Democratic divides in more ways than one.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The new normal 

In addition to new headlines of potentially record-breaking wildfires in France and Spain, there remain an estimated 122 active fires in northwestern Ontario, Canada, 90 active wildfires in British Columbia, Canada, and 90 “large” fires in the United States. If you want to read recent analysis of how we got here, and what to do about it, you’ve got a lot of options. 

Earlier this month, Chip Barber, the director of natural resources governance and policy at the World Resources Institute, penned a piece about the policy changes that could help in this era of worsening wildfires. Modern policymakers could learn a lot from Indigenous fire management, he wrote. But another piece of the puzzle will be “changing political and economic structures that have made fire catastrophe more likely.” He pointed in particular to how many fires are deliberately set due to “agricultural expansion” driven by “global demand for soy, beef, palm oil, and wood.” For other analyses of the fires, you could try The New York Times reporter Chico Harlan’s piece about how “record-setting heat waves and dry conditions” set the stage for Europe’s fires; climate researcher Zeke Hausfather’s review of the “forest mismanagement” narrative on Canadian wildfires; UCLA researchers Mitchell J. Hung and A. Park Williams’s study, released earlier this summer, about the uptick in California fires; or the Public Policy Institute of California’s Bradley Franklin and Kyle Greenspan on how federal cuts endanger the state’s progress on wildfire prevention.

Elsewhere:

• Question of the week: Why has Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer waded into the hotly contested Senate primary to endorse Haley Stevens over Abdul El-Sayed, barely a week before voting day, after 690,000 Michiganders have already voted by mail or absentee ballot, and when almost all polls show El-Sayed leading Stevens—some recent ones by double digits?
• Newsweek compiles a map of what it deems the most important counties in the Texas Senate race. The publication is particularly intrigued by Starr, Cameron, Webb, and Maverick counties, which have often voted Democratic but in which Trump’s share of the vote increased dramatically between 2016 and 2024. For context: In 2018, Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke got 71 percent of the vote in Webb, 72 percent in Maverick, 77 percent in Starr, and 63 percent in Cameron.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Tuesday at 11 a.m. California time (2 p.m. Eastern), the Public Policy Institute of California holds a virtual event about more sustainable crops for the imperiled but vital farmland of the San Joaquin Valley. Speakers include the think tank’s Letitia Grenier, Caitlin Peterson, and Bradley Franklin, along with Geoffrey Vanden Heuvel of the Milk Producers Council, Sustainable Conservation CEO Josette Lewis, and public policy mediator Dave Ceppos.

At 1 p.m. E.T. on Tuesday, the Bipartisan Policy Center hosts a virtual event titled “Aging of America: Improving Long-Term Care, Nutrition, and Housing for Older Adults.” Participants include Lisa Harootunian, a managing director at BPC; Rani E. Snyder, president of the John A. Hartford Foundation; Alison Barkoff, a George Washington University professor and former acting administrator and assistant secretary for aging at the Administration for Community Living; Kim Fitzgerald, CEO of Cathedral Square; Tim Getty, regional nutrition manager at the Heritage Area Agency on Aging; Beth Kowalczyk, CEO of the Ohio Association of Area Agencies on Aging; and Robert Blancato, executive director of the National Association of Nutrition and Aging Services Programs.

On Wednesday from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. E.T., the Center for American Progress holds a morning event with Senator Catherine Cortez Masto “on the urgent need for accountability and commonsense immigration policies, for Nevada and the nation.” Following Cortez Masto’s keynote remarks, America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas will moderate a panel featuring First Focus on Children President Bruce Lesley, Somos Votantes founder Melissa Morales, and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Stan Veuger.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Four Questions For: Daniel Drezner, foreign policy expert

Interview by Grace Segers  

Q: Who are you, and what are you working on right now?

A: I’m the academic dean and distinguished professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and also the author of the Substack newsletter Drezner’s World.

Q: What foreign policy story do you believe is underreported right now?

A: The slow-motion destruction of the U.S foreign policy machinery. Between military and civilian purges, it’s tough to appreciate the human capital loss in places like the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the intelligence community.

Q: Who is the smartest foreign policy voice in the U.S. government right now?

A: This is like asking me who is the tallest baby, in that I’m not sure the answer is all that useful. There are some smart people in this administration, but they seem wedded to the whims of an immature leader. So I’ll say it’s someone in Congress—Mark Kelly or Chris Murphy.

Q: What keeps you going in these difficult times?

A: The notion that even with the current administration of dunces, this country still has many inherent strengths and values that a competent administration could use to advance U.S. interests and traditional U.S. values.  

Political Trivia Question of the Day

What was the biggest Electoral College landslide in U.S. history? We mean most lopsided, not the highest number of votes. (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.) 

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and his wife, Glendy Marisol González de la Cruz, were found gagged with their hands and feet bound, showing signs of physical trauma, St. Louis Public Radio reports. Their 14-month-old daughter, Giovanni, was found crying next to her mother, with signs of dehydration. She’s now recovering in a medical center.

“I felt that they took the thing I wanted most,” Rolando Pérez Paz, Pérez Paz’s brother, told STLPR. “I felt a huge pain because it was my brother, my sister-in-law—people that wanted to work, to fight.”

Nixon Giovanni Pérez Paz and Ronaldo were driving to their roofing jobs in April 2025 near their home in Overland, Missouri, when they were stopped by ICE agents, who emerged from an unmarked car and pulled them out of their white work van. The agents told them that there wasn’t a warrant for their arrests but that they were being detained for lacking legal status.

González de la Cruz initially stayed in Overland, giving birth to their daughter last year and working two manual labor jobs to support the couple’s three children. But financial pressures mounted, and she was afraid she would be detained and separated from her children despite an active asylum case, organizers with St. Louis immigrant rights group Fuerza, which she was working with, told STLPR. So she decided to self-deport to Guatemala with her children to join her husband.

The couple was reported missing in Guatemala on July 20 after attempting to register a motorcycle in a nearby town, Rolando Pérez Paz told the radio outlet. In the last few months, the family struggled with money and had trouble with violence and the federal government—issues that had led them to seek asylum in the U.S. in the first place.

An ICE spokesperson told the radio outlet that Nixon Pérez Paz had two convictions for drunk driving, but STLPR did not find any court records to confirm that account. The spokesperson also said that Nixon Pérez Paz had an open container charge in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2010, but prosecutors had dropped that.

“If immigration hadn’t picked up my brother, my sister-in-law would still be alive, and the children wouldn’t be going through this sorrow,” Ronaldo told the radio outlet. He’s now caring for his three young nieces but doesn’t know how to explain their parents’ deaths to them.

“Unfortunately, immigration—the [U.S.] government—doesn’t see that. It makes no difference to them.”

President Trump claimed this week that he’s talking to Iran “right now,” but Iran’s foreign ministry has fervently denied that claim, saying it’s not interested in direct negotiations. When asked about the contradiction on Fox News Tuesday, Trump struggled to explain.

“We hear that you’re talking right now with leaders on Iran,” Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade said. “But Iran has come out publicly and said, ‘We’re not talking to the U.S.”

“Well, they just came out and said ‘We are talking’ a little while ago,” Trump interrupted. 

“So could you tell me who you’re talking to, Mr. President?” 

“For some reason, we can be in the midst of a beautiful discussion, and they’ll come out and say, ‘We’re not talking’ or ‘We didn’t discuss nuclear.’ Well, that’s all we discussed, because they’ll never have a nuclear weapon, they understand that,” Trump said, avoiding answering the direct question. “We’ve had some very good talks.” 

He then went on to change the subject entirely, instead discussing recently deceased Senator Lindsey Graham’s insistence upon an Iran deal—surprising, if true, given the late senator’s violent, hawkish approach to foreign policy. 

“He was very much a hawk … [even] he was somebody that said it was a good time to make a deal.… Lindsey liked war, to be honest with you.”  

It does not inspire confidence when the president can’t confidently say who he has been in contact with while supposedly trying to negotiate an end to his increasingly unpopular and expensive war. This conversation came after a recent pause in violence in the region, and ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Tuesday—in which he most likely lobbied Trump to start bombing Iran again. 

KILMEADE: We hear that you're talking with leaders from Iran. But Iran has come out publicly and said 'we're not talking to the US'

TRUMP: Well, they just came out and said we are talking

KILMEADE: So could you tell me who you're talking to?

TRUMP: We've had some very good… pic.twitter.com/bAqKISTbjU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 28, 2026

The president is reportedly losing faith in his health secretary’s ability to slash childhood vaccines. The issue came to a head during a May lunch at Trump’s National Golf Club in northern Virginia, when Trump pressed Kennedy as to why he wasn’t doing more to probe the (widely debunked) tie between vaccines and autism. At the time, Trump told Kennedy point blank that he believed the secretary “had the yips,” The Wall Street Journal wrote Monday night, citing sources familiar with the conversation.

The topic reared its head again at a mid-June meeting between the two men in the Oval Office, during which Trump lamented that Kennedy simply wasn’t doing enough.

Trump reportedly believes he has given Kennedy ample time to prove himself, and is disappointed that Kennedy hasn’t made more progress.

Practically every conversation between Trump and his health secretary circles back to the vaccine conspiracy, reported the Journal. The president has shared with his aides that he believes Kennedy will be a failure if he fails to produce results.

In fact, lobbyists and Department of Health and Human Services staffers suspect that Trump will replace Kennedy with Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Dr. Mehmet Oz, likely after the midterms, the Journal reported.

Trump regularly turns to Oz for health policy advice, even on issues that have nothing to do with Oz’s agency. Oz, in turn, makes sure Trump gets his way every time.

The president’s priorities on the matter have since been made clear: HHS must do more to peel back the federal guidelines for the childhood vaccine schedule, reducing the number of shots given to children.

Sources who spoke with the Journal suggested that the president is all in on the anti-vax conspiracy, sharing that Trump expects to see autism rates drop as a result of the decreased inoculations.

Limiting vaccine access was a core tenet of Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—until White House advisers pressured him to lie low, fearing that his rabble-rousing, anti-science ideology could further harm Republican odds come November.

Already at issue at the ballot box: the price of food, the price of oil, the price of water, the price of energy. Yet Republicans have failed to offer a resonant message to keep their party in power. Instead, Trump started an inexplicable war with Iran that has exacerbated the already astronomical cost of living. He has also slashed taxes for the wealthy and stalled the mechanics of Congress by strong-arming his allies into supporting his wildly unpopular voter suppression bill, the SAVE Act.

Meanwhile, Kennedy is running HHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—rather, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked, and his off-the-wall notions about health have thus far proved disastrous for the agency.

Kennedy has transformed HHS, replacing independent medical experts on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He also overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, a decision that could potentially affect vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

The Atlantic filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit Monday, arguing that Patel’s suit did not  “plausibly allege” that the magazine had published any of the challenged statements with actual malice. 

“Complaint fails to state a viable defamation claim against Defendants,” the filing said.

Journalist Sarah Fitzpatrick had reported in April that Patel was known to drink to excess, delay time-sensitive operations, behave erratically, and was often unreachable, raising concerns about whether he was a national security risk. Patel filed the lawsuit alleging the article was “replete with false and obviously fabricated allegations designed to destroy Director Patel’s reputation and drive him from office.”

In response to the latest filing, the FBI’s Rapid Response account on X posted its own rant Monday night against the publication, seemingly on behalf of its director. 

“The Atlantic spends its days propagating false narratives because it has zero interest in any form of real journalism. It adds no value to society except as the leading slop rag of the day,” the FBI wrote. The account then proceeded to rant about several of the FBI’s recent “historic wins.”

Is it normal for a government agency to get down in the mud for its beleaguered director? In Trumpworld, maybe. 

The Atlantic also filed a motion to stay discovery, except for Touhy requests, allowing the publication to seek factual discovery—documents and depositions from key individuals—from the FBI and Department of Justice.

“If Director Patel did not want to face this process, he should not have filed this suit,” editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg said in a statement.

DeWine said in an interview with CBS Monday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations against the Haitian community would be bad for Ohio’s economy and that of Springfield in particular, where many Haitians have settled. 

“These are people who have helped Springfield really come back,” DeWine said to CBS, explaining that Haitians have filled jobs and opened businesses where the economy once struggled. “The Haitians who are living there and employed there, they came there to work, and they came there because there were jobs that were not being filled by other people.”

DeWine also noted that Haiti’s security and political situation is still unstable, with gangs controlling large parts of the country and the capital, Port-au-Prince. The State Department has warned Americans not to travel there, and DeWine described the country as being in “virtual chaos” with “no semblance of government.”  

“Haiti is hell today. So you’d be sending people … back to hell,” DeWine said. “Very few of these Haitians will voluntarily go back to Haiti. If they have to leave, they’ll go someplace else. They want to work. They want to support their family. They don’t want to go back to Haiti.”

To the Trump administration, none of this matters. White House adviser Stephen Miller is excited about the prospect of deporting Haitians. He has claimed that Haiti is safe “for Haitians” and celebrated the Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the administration to end Temporary Protected Status.

“We can finally remove these Haitian illegal migrants,” Miller said.

More than 300,000 people are set to lose those protections this week, and many of them are among the 12,000 to 15,000 Haitians that live in and around Springfield. Back in 2024, President Trump spread a racist rumor that the community was “eating cats and dogs.” Now, Ohio’s economy could suffer a $400 million loss, and people are in danger of being sent to a war zone because of Trump and his administration’s racist deportation policy. 

Netanyahu is meeting with Trump at the White House on Tuesday for the first time since February, when he ensured the U.S. was ready to go to war with Iran. The Israeli prime minister had spent months lobbying the White House, and Trump’s aides did little to dissuade the U.S. president from joining in on the attack. Now Netanyahu may ask for more.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told Politico that the anti-interventionist sect of Trump’s allies, who brand themselves as “America First,” aren’t happy.

“I think all of President Trump’s most ardent non-‘Israel First’ supporters are furious,” Bannon said. “Netanyahu has had twice as many visits to the White House in 18 months as Churchill had in all of World War II—with every one of them a disaster for America First.”

Netanyahu is visiting the U.S. for the seventh time since the beginning of Trump’s second term.

The meeting comes amid growing frustration between the two allies, as Trump and Vice President JD Vance have become more publicly critical of Israel and its continued aggression in Lebanon.

The meeting also follows Trump’s nascent nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, which he has claimed is contingent on the country signing onto the Abraham Accords in order to normalize relations with Israel. Only it seems that the Trump administration has no idea how to enforce that, given that the deal is already signed.

“I am addressing this letter to Senator McConnell under the assumption that he is capable of reading and responding verbally, and not incapacitated by means of consciousness or cognition. If the Senator is unable to respond for either of those or other conditions, consider this letter a demand for his Senate staff to be honest and transparent with the people of Kentucky,” Beshear wrote Monday in a letter to McConnell obtained by CNN.

McConnell has been in the hospital for a whopping 43 days with no explanation. He has not said what exactly is ailing him or when he will return. He hasn’t even spoken directly on camera, leading to speculation that he is verbally incapacitated after being found unconscious in his Washington, D.C., home. All he’s done is post two very unconvincing photos in which he is sitting and smiling blankly with his wife, Elaine Chao.

His office last released an update on Monday, writing in a statement (first person, in McConnell’s voice) that he wouldn’t return to Congress anytime soon, but was “looking forward to getting back to the Senate and to Kentucky.”

In an accompanying statement, the Office of the Attending Physician noted that doctors were meeting with McConnell every day. That wasn’t enough for Beshear.

“Even the attending physician’s written statement does not discuss your actual condition, including whether you can speak, reason, or carry out your duties as a senator. I understand anyone’s desire for privacy, but when you run for office and serve as one of a state’s two US senators, you willingly abdicate much of your personal privacy,” Beshear wrote. “As Governor of the state you serve, I am calling on you to directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.”

Beshear also urged Senate Majority Leader John Thune to press McConnell’s office for some real information in an effort to “be honest and transparent with the people of Kentucky.”

While the language in Beshear’s letter is strong, it likely won’t do anything. McConnell, like every member of Congress, can essentially go on paid medical leave for as long as he wants. The fact that our elected officials don’t really have to prove that they can walk, talk, and think coherently—while we still pay them—is disgraceful. Maybe Beshear should just pay McConnell a visit himself, and bring a camera crew with him.

The jarring news came by way of a Trump-style X post early Tuesday, in which acting DNI Bill Pulte wrote that “in addition to the Historic DECLASSIFICATIONS (Transparency!) by the President, we are, this morning, Executing a 5th and Near Final Round of TERMINATIONS, an approximately 30% Staff Reduction from Weeks Ago.”

Pulte took over the office on June 19 following Tulsi Gabbard’s sudden exit. Gabbard had previously claimed she fired 500 people—also about 30 percent of the agency’s workforce at the time—during her 16-month stint at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

“The Intelligence Community must protect the American people, NOT the political whims of the bloated and corrupt elite class,” Pulte added.

It is unclear just how many employees Pulte has laid off at ODNI—an office created in the wake of 9/11 to improve communication between America’s powerful national security agencies—but earlier this month, The Washington Post reported that 200 ODNI employees had been laid off or reassigned since June 1.

The fifth layoff announcement came two days after Pulte released a batch of recently declassified documents detailing threats by foreign governments to influence prior elections—most notably, the 2020 presidential cycle.

Pulte, who also serves as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, was a shocking choice for the job. The law requires national security experience for the position, but the 38-year-old came into the role with none—a failure that actually shut down negotiations in Congress last month as Democrats refused to entertain rumors that Donald Trump would nominate Pulte to take over ODNI in a more permanent capacity.

Yet Pulte’s time at ODNI will soon be up: His nominated successor, Jay Clayton, is expected to be confirmed by the Senate Tuesday night. Clayton will also enter the role with zero national security experience, and, like Pulte, has seeded doubts about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, who hold Blanche’s future in their hands, are particularly concerned with the status of President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a controversial move to provide financial assistance to anyone who feels they’ve been attacked for supporting the president. Cornyn noted in Blanche’s most recent confirmation hearing that even though Blanche claimed the fund was dead, there was no written agreement to actually kill it.

Now, he’s demanding it in writing.

“What I want is the written document to say the same thing he did in his sworn testimony in front of the Judiciary Committee, and, as you recall, what he said is the weaponization fund is dead. He said the audit immunity basically doesn’t extend to parties beyond the lawsuit, and it doesn’t also extend to future actions by federal agencies other than the IRS,” Cornyn said on Monday. “That’s what we’re trying to get them to agree to, which is again what his sworn testimony was. So I don’t know why they’re—I don’t know why they’re so reluctant to do that when he’s already sworn to it.”

Tillis, too, said he wants changes to the settlement agreement with the IRS, which created the $1.776 billion slush fund and gave the Trump family immunity from future IRS audits.

Tillis previously threatened to block Blanche’s nomination unless he met with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein. Blanche did so earlier this month, but survivors said the meeting was “demoralizing,” as Blanche continued to avoid answering their questions.

“It just felt like more political posturing and using survivors the way that we’ve been used as political pawns,” Epstein survivor and anti-human trafficking educator Elizabeth Stein said at the time.

Cornyn and Tillis’s “no” votes would effectively kill Blanche’s nomination, as he needs the support of all 11 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to move forward. As of right now, it looks like he won’t get it. The Senate Judiciary is planning to vote to advance Blanche’s nomination on Thursday.

According to court documents, a grand jury witness for the government said that the pool was damaged before Hearn even approached it. NBC News reports that this witness was the only person who testified about damage to the pool.

Hearn, who has pleaded not guilty, maintains that “the condition of the Reflecting Pool was the same after I stepped away from the water as it was before I got there,” and that he only touched a part of the pool’s detached coating. President Trump claims that vandals used a knife or blade to cause a “gash” in the pool’s lining, but has no evidence to back up his claim.

Hearn has been charged with destruction of property, a felony, and accused of causing $1,000 worth of damage to the pool. His lawyers question the evidence behind that claim, noting that the alleged cost is the necessary threshold to charge him with a felony. At least three other people have been charged with misdemeanors related to incidents at the pool.

Hearn’s lawyers said that the government’s main witness testimony “established that the pool had substantial preexisting damage requiring repair before any alleged conduct by Mr. Hearn.”

“The government’s only witness on that element testified that the property was already deteriorated, that the identified repairs would have been needed even without Mr. Hearn’s alleged conduct, and that he could not quantify any loss caused by that conduct,” they continued. “Consequently, the grand jury’s indictment of Mr. Hearn is hard to explain. Mr. Hearn needs to learn whether the grand jury was properly instructed that the charge required him to have caused over $1,000 in damages, when the testimony failed to establish that he caused any damage at all. So does this Court.”

It would seem like the government’s case may soon fall apart, just like the pool lining, which was likely damaged by President Trump in the first place.

Florida Republicans totally changed the state’s districts earlier this year to create more GOP-held U.S. House seats. Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the onetime Democratic National Committee chair who has been in the House since 2005, is among those whose district has been redrawn. So instead of running in the now Republican-leading 25th district that she currently represents, the congresswoman is seeking another term from the 20th district in South Florida, which is heavily Democratic. But the area that now comprises the 20th district has long been represented by a Black House member. So the 20th district primary has turned into a battle over race and ideology. Several Black candidates are running and blasting Wasserman Schultz for pursuing a seat that could be held by a Black person at a time when Republicans are diminishing Black representation throughout the South. One of those Black candidates is Elijah Manley, an educator. In the latest edition of Right Now, Manley discussed both his candidacy and the divides within the Democratic Party. He criticized Wasserman Schultz for past votes for military aid to Israel, said the Democratic Party needs more fighters, and described himself as a progressive in the mold of Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The primary is August 18.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

The Trump administration has quietly let it be known that it will not block the extradition of Andrew and Tristan Tate to Britain, where they’re set to face new criminal charges of rape and sex trafficking. This is dividing MAGA, with most MAGA figures rapidly distancing themselves from the Tates, who are big MAGA manosphere superstars, and other MAGA figures defending them. Yet there’s another layer to the story that matters for Democrats and liberals. The Tate brothers’ travails highlight a failing on our part. We all overread the meaning of Trump’s 2024 successes with young men, and as a result, we’ve hamstrung ourselves in winning them back now.

Moira Donegan, a columnist for The Guardian, has a good new piece arguing that we have to break out of that rut. So we’re talking to her about all of it today. Moira, nice to have you on.

Moira Donegan: Thank you so much for having me, Greg. It’s great to be here.

Sargent: So let’s start with who the Tate brothers are. Why are they so important in the MAGA manosphere and MAGA universe? And what is it that they reflect about Trump’s successes with young men?

Donegan: Yeah, so the Tate brothers are really a pair of influencers. Andrew and Tristan Tate are brothers who grew up in the U.K. And Andrew had a career as a professional kickboxer before a star turn on the British reality TV show Big Brother.

But he was kicked off of that show for his alleged treatment of women. And that really became a jumping-off point for the brothers, who became far-right, anti-feminist, anti-woman influencers, as well as running an online pornography business. And they parlayed that into a really pretty massive following, and into some connections with the American right.

And I think in 2024 in particular, the Donald Trump campaign tried to harness what is known as the manosphere—this kind of network of often very popular, far-right, anti-feminist, sort of ideologically misogynist content creators who have achieved a pretty widespread degree of popularity with young men and teenage boys. And the MAGA movement’s courtship of Andrew and Tristan Tate was really the sort of centerpiece of that project.

Sargent: All right, so the Tate brothers were just arrested in Miami, and the U.K.’s prosecution service says they face seven counts of rape, three counts involving sex trafficking, three counts of assault, and 19 related to porn. The Trump administration has quietly announced that it won’t intervene, which means they are going to get sent back.

But that’s not all. Many people around Trump are abandoning the Tates now, including Donald Jr., Barron Trump, Alina Habba, Candace Owens, and many more. Given all this, it’s likely that Trump has signaled to his loyalists that the Tates are now finished in MAGA world, right? Moira, what do you make of all this?

Donegan: Well, it’s a real 180 from where we were just under a year ago. Because last year, the Tates were actually under house arrest in Romania, where they had headquartered their sort of porn camgirl empire, and where they were accused, once again, of sexual violence and sex trafficking.

In that case, members of the Trump administration, then sort of newly restored to power, leaned on the Romanian authorities quite heavily to allow the Tates to leave the nation of Romania, to be released from house arrest, to be released from their travel ban, and to escape the prosecution there. That Romanian investigation has since really ground to a halt, right?

And this is also kind of a revival of the British charges, because these incidents that the Tates are being prosecuted for now in the U.K. stem from actions they allegedly took between 2010 and 2017. That British investigation had been further hampered—a sort of civil review indicated that there was widespread police misconduct in that case, right?

So what you have seen now is these old charges being revived, after the Tate brothers had been protected both by police malfeasance and by the Trump administration’s intervention in these other jurisdictions.

Sargent: Right. So it’s not like Trump is shy about intervening on behalf of the Tates. By the way, you do have some in MAGA standing by the Tates. Tucker Carlson says the Tates are getting prosecuted because they “criticized Israel.” One Republican congressman, Abe Hamadeh, opposed extradition, describing the prosecution of the Tates as lawfare. Prominent MAGA influencer Vincent Oshana called the charges politically driven.

Moira, I think the key thing here is that Tucker and these others are actually speaking to a real existing constituency with this stuff. There’s still a bloc of young men out there who in some sense see Trump, or at least some around him, as kind of MAGA establishment sellouts, right? They’re allied with Israel, they’re going to war for Israel, they won’t stand by the Tates when they’re getting prosecuted for rape. They’re total establishment squishes, basically, right?

Donegan: You know, I think it’s really interesting to see who is lining up behind the Tates even now, in 2026, and who is throwing them overboard after sort of sticking their necks out for them in 2025. The MAGA coalition is big, and it’s always been more internally contradictory than I think the conventional media narratives about it have given credit for, right?

So MAGA, the far right in America in general, really has unified a bunch of different interests, a bunch of different styles of conservatism, around, among other things, a real contempt of women—anti-feminism, misogyny, male supremacy, and male domination. These have been a glue that has held together a lot of different strands of conservatism, right?

But of those different strands, Tate’s style of vulgar, aggressively sexual, lewd, promiscuous masculinity is not the sole style. I think it is closest to Donald Trump’s personal preferred style of masculinity—the sort of tight clothes, fast cars, and sort of sexual braggadociousness. That does seem Trump to me.

But there’s other elements in the coalition that are looking for a more, you know, puritanical rather than prurient form of sexual politics. I’m thinking, of course, of Ben Shapiro, the far-right Jewish but, quite sexually staid, we might say, influencer, who has tried to make his mark on the MAGA coalition. I’m thinking of JD Vance, who is trying to position himself as a sort of emissary between Silicon Valley and the Christian far right.

And I think as we look to the post-Trump reordering of this coalition, you’re going to see these kinds of masculinity come into question. Not because any of these guys or these forces on the conservative right are suddenly rediscovering the value of women’s dignity and having some sort of woke feminist awakening, but because their preferred style of masculinity, their preferred sort of aesthetic of power, doesn’t really have room for guys like the Tates.

Sargent: I think it’s worth reviewing some history here just for a second to get at what you’re saying. So Donald Trump wins in 2016, and in a very big and famous moment, he insults Hillary Clinton’s looks from behind during a debate. So he abuses Hillary relentlessly, misogynistically. It’s just disgusting all the way down. Same happens in 2024. He abuses Kamala Harris, only there’s not just misogyny, there’s also racism thrown in.

And so back to 2016 for a sec—remember, the “grab ‘em by the you-know-what” video broke, and that actually got a certain demographic kind of excited about Trump. And so I think that the group of men, the constituency that Tucker is talking to and the others who are defending the Tates, is worth dwelling on for a sec.

What is this group? This is a group that saw Trump say “grab ‘em by the you-know-what,” that saw Trump insult Hillary, that saw Trump insult Harris, and thought, a violent misogynist—that’s what I want. That’s what they really want, isn’t it?

Donegan: I think there is a section of right-wing populism in America that has really succeeded in casting anti-feminism and ideological misogyny as a kind of anti-elite sentiment, right? After the 2010s—when women’s workforce participation, their cultural visibility as leaders and consumers and arbiters of culture, was sort of at its peak—there was an effort in these online spaces, particularly targeting young men, to cast feminism as sort of the ideology of the elites, to cast the corporate overlords who were screwing over the working man as a bunch of women.

You see this glossed sometimes in vernacular parlance as “HR lady” politics, right? The sense of Democrats, of corporate elites, of the wealthy, of the credentialed, as being both, girls—and girls in the sense of scolding, unfun, maternal figures who are telling you to clean your room.

And Donald Trump positions himself as a vindication of masculine prerogatives, somebody who would not tell men to cultivate virtues, but would encourage them to sort of signal and embrace their own vices. This sort of male id was really at the center of that style of right-wing populism.

I think now, a decade into the project, that notion is wearing a little thin, right? Because people are sort of waking up to the reality that not only are their corporate bosses and overlords not exactly women in anything like a majority or even preponderance—the masculine far right has been in power, with the Biden interregnum excluded, for that past 10 years.

I think people are looking at their own pocketbooks, at the price of gas, at the state of the country, and saying, well, I’m not really sure that these guys have done such a good job either.

Sargent: So let’s talk about what’s really going on with young men right now. Republican pollster Mitchell Brown told The Washington Post that men under 40 are the most at risk for Republicans at this moment. That group was important for Trump in 2024. So that’s a real sea change, for men under 40 to be deserting Republicans. It goes to kind of the core of what you said earlier, which is that now that people are getting a glimpse of, you know, manosphere governance, it’s not looking so good right now.

But I think it’s also clear, though, that Democrats got overly spooked by Trump’s success with that group. They decided that he had tapped something deep and enduring and essential about the current generation of young people in America, especially young men. I think all the talk about finding a Democratic Joe Rogan was symptomatic of that sense of being spooked. How do Democrats get out of this?

Obviously, they have this opportunity right now. Young men are realizing, holy shit, we made this huge mistake. This guy’s trying to send us to war. He’s making our economic situation even more precarious. He promised us that we’d be really economically powerful. And so how do Democrats break out of that weird rut that they’re in, where they just keep deciding that Trump has tapped something essential, and speak to the young men who really are now in play?

Donegan: It goes to the heart of how you interpret the 2024 election, right? Either the 2024 election was a historically bounded and contingent moment about a global backlash to incumbent parties and to rising inflation, or the 2024 election reflected a sort of permanent cultural shift that revealed an implacable truth about America. I think in the months immediately following that election, a lot of people put their money on the latter, and are now sort of coming to understand that maybe it was more like the former.

You know, these young male voters did shift pretty dramatically to the Republican Party in 2024. But the drama of that shift indicates to me now, as we look towards the 2026 midterms, that perhaps that shift was a little shallow. Perhaps the commitment to a far-right Trumpist MAGA vision was less firm than a lot of people initially said.

I do think you’re right, Greg, that the Democrats really got spooked after 2024 about men. They took the lesson that, you know, they ran Hillary Clinton in 2016 and lost, they ran Joe Biden in 2020 and won, and then they ran Kamala Harris in 2024 and lost. And they took this lesson that their own party was not sufficiently masculine.

I should say, this is not a uniform assessment within Democratic Party operatives. It’s not exactly an ideologically coherent assessment within Democratic Party operatives. You see people from the left, right, and center of the Democratic Party all trying to make the party a little more masculine, trying to recruit more manly men, trying to court male voters.

But there is this sort of over-identification, I think, with the Republicans’ theory of the case—that, only white male candidates can win, and only white male votes are really worth getting. And I think you see that in a few of the missteps that the party has made over the past few months, such as—I’m sorry to say it—the selection of Graham Platner in Maine, who was chosen by a small but influential group of Democratic Party strategists who felt very strongly, and I think many of them still do, that the party needs white male candidates and really will not be able to govern, or be worthy of governing, until it collects more white male voters.

Sargent: Just to reiterate, this Republican pollster told the Post that men under 40 are the most at risk for the Republicans right now. That’s really an amazing sea change, I think. And importantly, this comes as Donald Trump is doing things like holding the big fight on the White House lawn and sending Pete Hegseth out there to engage in these hyper-masculine, almost cartoonishly grotesque displays of machismo, and talking about blowing things up and stuff.

None of that’s working to hold on to this group. Because this group that was seduced, maybe temporarily, by the masculine displays of Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign and so forth are seeing, my God, this guy isn’t really doing anything for us, and there’s a real world we have to function in, right? I mean, isn’t that the size of it?

Donegan: I think that’s a decent explanation. I think these guys are seeing that they’re not actually being elevated in their own status by this hyper-masculine style in governance, right? They’re not getting better jobs. They’re not able to afford homes. They’re not able to consume in a way that makes them feel comfortable. They’re not as secure about the future, right?

The thing about making these promises that you’re going to restore this fantasized past of prosperity and male domination is you can’t actually deliver that if you don’t have cultural competence or policy competence. And those are things that have never been in particular abundance in the Trump administration.

Sargent: So just to close this out, Moira, and bring this back to the Tate brothers for a second—what would you recommend that Democrats say right now about what’s happening with the Tates? And more broadly, what would you like to hear Democrats saying to young men that will kind of create a sense that they represent a better vision of masculinity than the one Donald Trump has tried to foist on the country and so forth? How would you advise Democrats to proceed right now?

Donegan: I think Democrats should describe Trump and Tate’s style of masculinity for what it is, which is bigoted, cruel, and stupid. Donald Trump started his national political career by calling Mexicans rapists. Now, a decade later, he intervened to import an alleged rapist, Andrew Tate, from house arrest in Romania into the United States.

He is putting immigrant families in detention and terrorizing our cities. And he himself has been alleged to have committed sexual misconduct by no fewer than two dozen women, one of whom he was just ordered to pay $5 million to. This guy is lewd, he is pathetic, he is violent, and his is a kind of masculinity that reveals its own inadequacy by victimizing others.

I think there is abundant room to point out that Donald Trump isn’t just morally offensive, he’s kind of transparently insecure in a way that undermines his own claims to male domination—and to put forward an alternative vision of masculinity that has a little bit of self-respect.

Sargent: And we could add, Donald Trump’s vision of masculinity won’t do anything for young men in the real contemporary world.

Donegan: It certainly hasn’t so far.

Sargent: Right. It certainly hasn’t. And I think maybe a vision like the one we’re talking about here would be premised on the understanding that what happened in 2024 was not the deep cultural shift that certain pundits discerned. And on an understanding that when Tucker Carlson goes out and defends the Tate brothers, he’s speaking to an extremely tiny constituency in the United States, right?

Donegan: I think it would be a little bit naive to say that the constituency that is pro-Tate, that is ideologically misogynist, that is really committed—I don’t think that’s an imaginary group of people. They’re definitely out there. But I think the people who are buying that right now might not buy it forever. I think there’s a lot more people, including young men in this country, who are ready for something different.

Sargent: Moira Donegan, that’s really well said. Thank you so much for all this.

Donegan: Thank you so much for having me, Greg.

Kagan is generally correct, with a few notable exceptions. It is important to understand why she is correct to better appreciate what the second half of Trump’s term will look like, and what the playing field will look like for the next Democratic administration.

It is true that Trump has scored a number of major victories at the Supreme Court in his second term. But they have largely been on matters in which the court’s six-justice conservative majority would have supported any Republican president. “You just have to deal with the fact that there’s a conservative court doing things that conservative jurists have long thought it appropriate to do, and I can really dislike that,” Kagan explained last week. “But it has nothing to do, I think, with becoming the arm of this current administration.”

In Trump v. Slaughter, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could fire commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission, giving him de facto control over multiple federal regulatory agencies that Congress had designed to be independent. The obvious beneficiary of that ruling is Trump. But legal conservatives have been gunning to overturn Humphrey’s Executor v. United States—the 1935 case that upheld for-cause removal protections—for decades.

On voting rights and campaign finance laws, Trump also has very strong views on the matter. The president has been an enthusiastic champion of partisan gerrymanders over the past 18 months in a desperate attempt to maintain GOP control of Congress. He also welcomed efforts by Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley billionaires to bail out his struggling presidential campaign in the summer of 2024 with large cash infusions into friendly super PACs, abandoning his past calls to overturn Citizens United.

The court’s recent rulings in this direction have nothing to do with Trump. The Supreme Court’s current hostility toward the Voting Rights Act of 1965 dates back to a 2009 case when the justices hinted that certain portions might no longer be constitutional. That ruling not only predates the Trump administration itself by eight years but also predates Trump himself becoming a major presence in American politics by roughly a year. The high court’s war on campaign finance laws also began in earnest with the Citizens United decision one year later in 2010.

Every administration faces tough decisions about whether to appeal certain cases to the Supreme Court. A temporary defeat in the lower courts might ultimately be preferable to a permanent nationwide defeat from the justices. The second Trump administration has shown itself to be highly adept at predicting which cases are worth running up this particular flagpole, so to speak.

In the first few months of his second term, for example, Trump accrued a deeply lopsided margin of defeats in the lower courts. One analysis estimated that his administration had lost in 96 percent of rulings at the federal district court level. Rather than appeal most of those decision to the Supreme Court level, the administration quietly took the losses unless it strongly believed that the six conservatives would back it with a reversal.

This selective approach resulted in a lopsided margin of victory at the Supreme Court. By last September, Trump had prevailed in more than 20 different cases on the high court’s shadow docket, according to a Courthouse News analysis. His administration only faced substantive defeats in two interim cases during that span: the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case and one involving frozen USAID funds for work already completed.

By only bringing cases before the high court that appear to be surefire winners, the Trump administration has greatly inflated its overall winning percentage at the high court. Naturally, none of this means that the Supreme Court is actually more liberal than it appears. Trump and his Justice Department team simply seem to have a good read on what the high court will and won’t allow.

The Trump administration’s worst losses have come when it tried to force the issue upon the justices. In Learning Resources v. Trump, the high court rejected his efforts to use a Cold War–era law to levy hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs on American businesses and customers who buy overseas goods. This was essentially the centerpiece of the president’s economic agenda, and Trump appeared to take an unusually personal interest in orchestrating what he saw as a blank check to impose tariffs for any reason or virtually none at all.

Nonetheless, the Supreme Court happily struck it down in a 6–3 margin last fall. Trump’s baldly illegal tariffs split the court’s conservative majority down the middle, pitting three justices who favored a maximalist approach to executive power against three justices who were averse to adopting a maximalist reading of statutory language. That enabled the court’s three liberal justices to tip the balance.

In Trump v. Barbara, the high court also rejected Trump’s broadside attack on birthright citizenship. Some legal conservatives tried to boast afterward that they had shifted the Overton window on the subject after a century and a half of consensus. This is what youngsters these days call “cope.” As I noted earlier this month, only two justices endorsed Trump’s position in any meaningful sense, and only one of them—Justice Brett Kavanaugh—is still likely to be serving on the court in 10 to 15 years.

The conservative legal movement has shown itself adept at building internal consensus around other major constitutional shifts in recent decades, such as the now-magisterial view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. Conservative legal scholars also spent decades laying the groundwork for the high court to overturn Roe v. Wade, which it eventually did in 2022. The slipshod pseudo-academic work that sprang up last year to justify Trump’s birthright citizenship order failed to convince most of the court’s conservative justices.

Perhaps Trump’s most foolish defeat came in Trump v. Cook. In a shadow-docket ruling last year, the court’s conservative justices effectively ruled that Trump could fire any Senate-confirmed official at will despite federal law to the contrary. The sole exception they made was for members of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, whom the court said in an unsigned order were protected by a “unique historical tradition” dating back to the early-nineteenth-century central banks.

Trump nonetheless tried to remove Lisa Cook last August. The Supreme Court, unsurprisingly, did not take this pseudo-defiance very well. First, the justices voted to keep Cook in office pending litigation last year—a step that they had explicitly declined to take in similar non-Fed cases. Then, last month, they constitutionalized the Fed exception to presidential removal powers.

Another advantage for Trump is that he and his allies have largely constructed his second term around what they think the Supreme Court’s conservative majority will let them get away with. Project 2025 is the best example of this approach to governance. The Heritage Foundation’s policy project is largely a blueprint of what conservative elites thought the Supreme Court might uphold: a more centralized executive branch, fewer federal agencies and regulations, mass deportations, and so on.

To the extent that parts of Project 2025 haven’t been implemented, it is either because congressional approval would be necessary (and hasn’t been obtained) or because the Trump administration has abandoned or delayed those items for tactical reasons. One proposal in Project 2025, for example, is to revitalize the Comstock laws to criminalize the distribution of abortion medications and birth control methods. Trump has personally resisted this plan, perhaps fearing an electoral backlash in the upcoming midterms, to considerable frustration from anti-abortion groups.

The Supreme Court’s rulings have even allowed the Trump administration to claim some victories it didn’t earn. The White House and some conservative organizations have bragged about dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and pressuring corporate and academic institutions to do the same. But the real cudgel is the Supreme Court’s embrace of a “colorblind Constitution” in the affirmative-action ruling two years ago, meaning that even remedial efforts to address racism are presumptively unconstitutional. Trump and his allies are claiming wins for decisions that these organizations’ own lawyers would have likely reached anyway.

Even the high court’s ruling in Trump v. United States can be chalked up to long-running trends in right-wing constitutional thought. There is no shortage of resentment in legal conservative circles for Watergate and Iran-Contra, which respectively ended the Nixon presidency and overshadowed the later Reagan administration. Five of the court’s six conservative justices would have happily signed on the ruling if it protected a President Rubio or a President Vance instead.

That said, if there is one case that can’t be justified under Kagan’s thesis, in my view, it is Trump v. Anderson. The disqualification clause case was a rare moment for the court to interpret part of the Constitution on a blank canvas and, well, it blew it. It cannot be justified on originalist grounds, and reading the clause out of the Constitution for mere convenience is indefensible. Rarely does the court hand down such a transparently outcome-driven ruling. I do not expect Kagan to criticize the court for this one, though, because she and the other two liberal justices joined it.

Why does all of this matter as we look toward the future? There have been talks in some liberal and left-wing policy circles about Democrats creating their own version of Project 2025 for the upcoming presidential election cycle. One can hardly blame them for wanting to build their own version of what may be the most impactful policy manifesto since the New Deal. It is also a prime opportunity for American progressivism’s various factions to claim a leadership mantle for the next election cycle.

But Project 2025’s true power did not come from how it was written, or which stakeholders were involved, or even whether a presidential candidate touted it on the campaign trail. Its success can be entirely attributed to the inescapable fact that there are six conservatives and three liberals on the Supreme Court who would uphold almost all of what a president did with it. Had there been six liberals and three conservatives on the high court for the last two years, Project 2025 would simply be the world’s most unreadable work of fan fiction.

The only real way for Democrats to create their own version of Project 2025—and, more generally, to enact their own policy agenda, regardless of its ideological underpinnings—is to add more justices to the Supreme Court. Policymaking and governing strategy still matter, but everybody to the left of Mitt Romney should lower their expectations of what the next Democratic president can actually achieve unless the court’s ideological makeup is changed. The Roberts court will happily enforce its own conservative vision upon the country, no matter who happens to sit in the White House right now.

Once she was legally able, she quickly got a new one with the right gender marker. It cost her $50, and she had to get a letter from her physician vouching for her, which felt strange. But it helped her be “one step closer to living life as my true self,” she said.

“I thought I was in the clear,” she added with a laugh. She ended up being wrong. This February, the Kansas legislature rushed through an emergency measure, Senate Bill 244, that not only blocked transgender people from changing their driver’s licenses to reflect their gender but also applied it retroactively, invalidating any state driver’s licenses and birth certificates with gender markers that differ from sex assigned at birth. It also mandates that people use the bathrooms in government buildings that align with their sex assigned at birth and allows people to sue if they feel someone in the bathroom with them is violating the law. Governor Laura Kelly vetoed the measure, only to have the legislature override it.

Kelly warned that it would “cost Kansas taxpayers millions of dollars to comply with this very vague legislation.” Her prediction has now come to pass: Transgender Kansas residents have had to shell out money for gas to drive to DMVs and secure new licenses, take days off of work to deal with it, and even contemplate the steep costs of moving out of a state in which they no longer feel safe.

After the law passed, Kelly assumed she would likely have at least until the summer to get her ducks in a row and change her license. New state laws typically take effect in early June. But then she got home from work on February 25 to find a letter from the state telling her that her license would be revoked as of February 26 if she didn’t change the gender marker. It also said that driving without a valid license would be potentially punishable by jail time. “I read it two or three times. I’m like, ‘Am I missing something?’” she said. She wasn’t: The law, passed February 18, offered no grace period, invalidating licenses as of February 26.  

She had to act immediately—she works at four different clinics around Kansas City, one of which is a 20-minute drive from her home. She knew she needed a valid license to get to and from work. She also knew that the potential cost of being arrested and serving jail time would have far-reaching consequences—it would likely get reported to the state medical board, putting her professional license and, therefore, her career, at risk. “The panic started to set in,” she said.

Her partner was able to drop her off and pick her up at work the next day, and then the following day, a Friday, she had off from work. But she knew she needed to be able to drive to work the following week. The DMVs in Kansas don’t take walk-ins, and all of the appointments in her area were full that Friday. The closest she could find was an appointment in Lawrence, an hour away. Her partner had to work, so her retired mother-in-law drove her there and back. “It was definitely an extra cost to her,” she said. She also had to track down her birth certificate and her name-change paperwork.

In the end, she was able to get a new license the same day. It cost her about $20, less than she was expecting given that she paid about $50 for a new one after she changed her name. She also had to take a new photo. “It felt more like a prison mug shot,” she said. “I was basically being forced to do this against my will and paying for the privilege of it.

“The whole process felt very accusatory,” she added, “[as if] we were being retroactively criminalized for something the state had approved and stamped.” Normally, a driver’s license is taken away from someone who’s broken a law. But she hadn’t done anything wrong.

Having a license with the wrong gender marker has meant not just friction but fear. In May, Kris Ripper, a trans woman living in Kansas, was pulled over by a police trooper who asked for her license. After explaining that she had changed her gender marker to male due to the law she was allowed to go on her way, but she later got a letter saying she had missed a court date for a charge of driving without a valid license, a misdemeanor punishable with up to six months in jail. Although her case was eventually dismissed, Kelly thinks of it often, especially on her drive to one of the clinics that takes her past a sheriff’s office and detention center that also has a particularly low speed limit. “I sweat bullets every time I drive by there,” she said. It’s always in the back of her head, no matter which clinic she drives to for work: “Am I going to get pulled over and thrown in jail today?” She drives under the speed limit just to be safe. “It feels like I’ve got a target on my back,” she said.

She’s also gotten “a lot of invasive questions, a lot of invasive security measures,” she said. On a recent trip back home from Florida, she got flagged by the TSA scanner and had to get a pat-down in her groin area. It “caused a lot of extra distress,” she said. “I ended up going to the restroom and crying for a few minutes.” She’s rethinking her desire to travel both domestically and internationally and is considering avoiding it for a while. She feels “hemmed in,” adding that it “makes you just want to stay home and hide from the world sometimes.” On a day-to-day basis, she tries to go about her life not thinking about being trans until someone at the liquor store questions her ID or a bouncer looks askance at it, asking if it’s really her. What if one of them tries to confiscate it, believing it’s fake? “You don’t realize how often you use and need your driver’s license,” she said. “It’s a huge burden.”

Transitioning can feel like “a never-ending marathon,” she said, an endless string of tasks from name-change paperwork to medical intervention. Before this, she felt that she had finally gotten close to the finish line. “It’s really, really discouraging to take a step backward.”

Many trans Kansas residents feel like they can’t stay in the state with this law in effect. “This was the final straw on a lot of trans people in Kansas,” said Matthew Neumann, executive director of the LGBTQ Foundation of Kansas. He gets three to five requests every week from people asking for help with moving. That isn’t a cheap thing to pull off. After Senate Bill 244 passed, his organization started helping people with relocation costs for the first time, covering safety deposits and first month’s rent, typically about $500. But he knows there are many other costs they’ll face—he estimated people need $2,000 to $3,000 each. “We wish we had the funds to just move people,” he said. It’s frustrating when he has to turn someone down or tell them they have to wait. “That could be devastating to somebody, to keep them from moving.”

Susan (a pseudonym) moved to the U.S. over a decade ago after “meeting a girl online” and falling in love. She’s been living in Kansas ever since. She loves the state’s natural beauty. “The Flint Hills grew on me,” she said. “The sky is incomparable.” Her wife, meanwhile, is a lifelong Kansan. The two live in the house her wife grew up in. “This is her home,” she said. The two of them have built a close-knit community that they consider chosen family.

“As much as I love Kansas, Kansas does not love me back,” Susan said. For many years, Kansas springs have meant the same thing: The legislature debates anti-trans laws, and she and her wife contemplate moving away from the home they’ve built. But when Senate Bill 244 passed this year, she says, “That was kind of our hard line.” Susan was never able to change her license gender marker—it’s far harder to do as a green card holder—but the bathroom part of the bill is forcing them to move. Even though the law only impacts government buildings, the general public doesn’t always know that. “There have been a couple instances of me trying to go into a restroom and being told that I’m not allowed to be there,” she said. Even weightier is knowing that getting arrested—even if it doesn’t end in a charge—could lead to her green card being revoked.

If the November midterm elections result in big Democratic congressional wins, they’ll move within the U.S., to a blue state with strong trans rights protections. But if not, they’ll leave the country altogether. No matter which they choose, they’ll be leaving behind their family and “starting fresh,” Susan said.

They are selling her wife’s childhood home to enable the move. They’ve been fortunate to find affordable options in other states, and Susan works remotely, which means she can keep her job after they relocate. But the costs of renting a U-Haul and actually moving will be hefty, reaching several thousand dollars. They’re trying to get rid of as many of their belongings as they can before they move, selling some to defray the costs. The process has been stressful, as has helping her wife prepare for what it’s like to move to an entirely new place. They are “trying to think of all the positives of moving so that the stresses of it don’t hurt so much,” she said.

“If they weren’t trying to whittle away my rights every year, we would absolutely stay here,” she said. “This has become home.”

Kansas is home for Charley too, and he’s determined to stay. He’s lived in the state most of his life and loves being able to see endless sky from the top of a hill or watch the Milky Way from his back porch. “I love the grasses and the way they turn red in the fall,” he said. In 2022, he changed his gender marker on his driver’s license and passport, paying hundreds of dollars in fees to get it completed and spending a year on the effort. After Trump was reelected in 2024, he changed his birth certificate too. It was “a relief to have things match how I present,” he said. “It just makes life simpler to have it all match what people expect to see.” He had been following Senate Bill 244 as it was debated, and before it passed he got his license with the correct gender marker on it renewed, costing him about $23.

But then Charley saw a copy of the letter being sent to people saying their licenses were no longer valid, posted online late at night before bed. “I’m like, ‘Oh shit, I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and my license is not going to be valid,’” he recalled. Luckily his boss was understanding, allowing him to take a half day off work to get driven into town by a friend so he could get his license changed, paying another $8. Before he went into the office, he gave himself a fresh haircut and wore a shirt that displayed his biceps. “I scowled into the camera when they took my picture,” he said. “I deliberately went in just as masculine as I could get.”

It was only later that he learned that many trans people haven’t received letters from the state; now he regrets acting so quickly. He’s left in a situation where his license doesn’t match his birth certificate. He’s insulated from a lot of the effects—he doesn’t tend to get carded due to age, and he’s started using his passport in airports instead of his license—but it does pop into his mind when he passes police while driving. “It’s just a little extra anxiety,” he said.

He’s contemplated moving somewhere else, but Kansas is the first place he really put down roots, buying a house he’s put not just money into but “a lot of my heart,” he said. “I am not going to lose my house, I am not going to lose my job for this,” he said. He has a secure financial situation and a community of chosen family. “I might as well fight it here where I’ve got a foundation under me.”

“They can pry it from my cold dead hands,” he said. “And they’re kind of trying.”

Like Charley, Neumann also hasn’t received a letter from the state even though he changed the gender marker on both his birth certificate and license. For a while after the letters started going out, he would go on the state’s website daily to check whether his license was valid or not. When we spoke in late June, it still was. The situation has led to “mass confusion,” he said. “The emotional damage was really, I think, their goal towards the trans community. That fear, panic, confusion.” For him personally, it means that when he visits a specialist doctor, an 85-mile drive he does three or four times a month, he’s started driving well under the speed limit just in case. “You’re always waiting for that second shoe to drop,” he said.

Anytime he drives to his doctor’s office and has to use the bathroom on the way he knows he could get in trouble depending on where he stops. His physical therapist accepts Medicaid and Medicare; does that make it a government building, and does that mean he’s breaking the law when he uses the men’s room there? He’s already anticipating problems when he needs to use the bathroom at his child’s volleyball games at her public high school, technically a government building. “I’ve received threats,” he said, people referencing their guns.

“This didn’t just go away because they passed a law. This is our lives,” Neumann said. “It’s still here, and it’s still affecting us.”

Today it’s quite different. The five richest people on earth, according to Forbes, are all tech bros—Elon Musk, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, and Michael Dell—and they’re all American. Royalty no longer figures. The world’s richest monarch, King Maha Vajiralongkorn of Thailand (net worth: $45 billion), would just barely make the top 50 if Forbes bothered to include royals in its billionaire tally, which it doesn’t. Too small-time! In the 1990s, the Sultan of Brunei (since 1967, Hassanal Bolkiah Muiz’zaddin Wad’daulah) was the world’s richest person. Today, he’s the world’s second-richest monarch after Thailand’s, with a net worth of $30 billion, an amount that would rank him a pitiful seventy-ninth in the Forbes tally, right after the ex-wives of Bezos and Bill Gates. (It was Gates who displaced Brunei’s Sultan.)

If we tend today to speak of the American oligarchy and the global oligarchy as one and the same, that’s because mostly they are. Great political power no longer propels you to the top of the Forbes billionaire rankings (though President Donald Trump is giving it the old college try). Did I say the five richest people on earth are all American tech tycoons? You might almost say the same of the top 10. But there’s one exception—a foreigner who is not in tech, not in oil, and not of royal blood. He is the ninth-richest person in the world (net worth: $142.7 billion), and a couple of years ago he was the richest. Now he’s just the richest person in Europe, leaving its crowned heads in the dust. Most Americans have never heard of him.

I’m speaking of the Frenchman Bernard Arnault, founder and CEO of LVMH. Arnault got rich selling expensive stuff to rich people. LVMH owns the luxury brands Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co., Christian Dior, Givenchy, Bulgari, Guerlain, and Sephora. It also owns the makers of Moët & Chandon and Dom Pérignon and Veuve Cliquot. If there’s something your wife or girlfriend would like that you can’t afford to buy, odds are Arnault sells it. And according to a six-part newspaper series published last week in Le Monde by Raphaëlle Bacqué and Vanessa Schneider (English translation here), l’État, c’est lui. Arnault wields too much power in France.

This comes as a terrible disappointment, as I’m a bit of a Francophile. On a trip to France last year, my wife and I rhapsodized about the more plentiful public squares, the safer roadways, the more beautiful urban vistas, and—of course—the food. France also has one of the better single-payer health care systems in the world, though, happily, we didn’t need to use it. I published a history 14 years ago of America’s post-1979 growth in income inequality, in which I used France as Exhibit A for my argument that, since incomes were growing more equal there, expanding economic inequality is a political choice, not an inevitability. I still believe that, but in France, alas, that trend has reversed.

Let’s take Le Monde’s tour of l’oligarchie en français.

Inside the company, almost everybody refers to Arnault as Monsieur; a handful will call him “B.A.” (which doesn’t carry the vulgar associations we Americans give it). Arnault’s children are addressed as Monsieur or Madame, as well, only with them it’s attached to a first name (e.g., “Monsieur Alexandre”). This is the same locution that foreign-born American housekeepers apply to subvert their employer’s insistence on addressing one another on a first-name basis. At LVMH, it is used to address even Arnault’s grandchildren after they reach the age of seven, making high-ranking LVMH executives sound like a stiff-backed butler in a drawing-room play. Arnault himself shuns physical contact and, according to his wife, “has no friends.”

Arnault does have five children from two wives, and all of them work for the company, which should make these Le Monde pieces catnip to anyone who followed Succession, the TV series about a thinly veiled Murdoch family. Arnault is 77 and, yes, he hasn’t settled who among his five children will inherit his luxury empire. We learn that “tensions and rivalries tear at his clan” and “it’s now difficult to get everyone around the same table.” The very existence of these six articles both reflects and intensifies family tensions because Arnault’s son-in-law, Xavier Niel, is effectively Le Monde’s principal shareholder. (It’s a little complicated. Niel transferred his majority shares two years ago to a nonprofit to preserve the paper’s independence, and Le Monde’s disclaimer calls him merely “an individual shareholder.”) Arnault’s wife, Hélène, says of Niel: “He is not the kind of person we want in the family.” Niel is no longer invited to family occasions. Hélène’s also got chilly relations with her stepson Antoine, Arnault’s son from an earlier marriage. Antoine hasn’t spoken to Hélène for two years.

Proceeding now to Arnault’s role as oligarch: France will have a presidential election next year. At the funeral last month for former President Jacques Chirac’s widow (who Arnault had placed on LVMH’s board), three candidates walked to the front of the basilica where Arnault was seated among the country’s past and present political elite to pay homage. Arnault isn’t sure he likes any of them. In April he agreed to meet, for the first time in his life, the far-right candidate Marine LePen, who, like Trump, kicked off a presidential run with a felony conviction (in LePen’s case, for embezzling public funds, a ruling upheld earlier this month by an appeals court). Arnault told LePen, “On security and illegal immigration, you have real credibility, but on the economy, it feels like you’re close to” France’s political left in wanting to “over-tax” businesses. Two of Arnault’s sons met recently with Jordan Bardella, president of LePen’s repellent National Rally party. This is a moment for France’s financial leaders to unite in opposition to incipient fascism. It didn’t happen in the United States in 2024, and it isn’t happening in France today.

Arnault wields remarkable influence over France’s current president, Emmanuel Macron. In 2020, Macron directed his finance minister to permit Arnault to renegotiate LVMH’s contract to purchase Tiffany, which had already been signed. Arnault felt he’d paid too much because after he agreed to a price, Covid reduced Tiffany’s sales. This was, Le Monde observes, a matter in which the government had no legitimate reason to interfere. In 2021, Macron appeared for the opening of a department store, something he’d never done before; it was LVMH’s Paris flagship, La Samaritaine. In 2024, Macron awarded Arnault the Légion d’Honneur, France’s highest honor. “During Macron’s time in office,” writes Le Monde, “the Elysée has never refused anything for Arnault.”

The U.S. government, at least in the person of French Ambassador Charles Kushner (Trump-pardoned ex-con father to Jared) treats Arnault better than it treats Macron. Kushner has twice refused Macron summonses to the Elysée Palace, but he celebrated America’s semiquincentennial by throwing a party for Arnault, who Kushner calls not Monsieur but “Beurrernarte.” Arnault and Trump have been friends since the 1980s. In 2019, Arnault and his son Alexandre traveled with President Trump on Air Force One so they could attend the opening of a Louis Vuitton factory outside Dallas. “You are an artist and a visionary,” Trump said in his speech. Arnault got Trump to exempt LVMH’s champagnes from European tariffs; later, Louis Vuitton rented space from the Trump Organization in Midtown Manhattan. Alas, Arnault had less luck in Trump’s second term fighting Trump’s 20 percent tariff on European imports, which cost LVMH tens of billions of euros.

Arnault was so angered by the Le Monde series that he took to social media for the first time in his life and posted a lengthy response on X. It’s mostly a series of sarcastic ripostes (“I haven’t received such treatment since the takeover of Boussac in 1984. Back then, they called me ‘The Terminator.’ I prefer ‘the last royal family’—it’s more elegant”). The family soap opera should end once Arnault chooses a successor. L’oligarchie, however, seems settled in for a long run, especially if, God forbid, LePen wins. Please somebody make France stop aping the United States.

“If somebody can show me how we get an outcome, how we get a result, how we get an answer to this, I’m all for it,” Thune told reporters Monday afternoon. “But if we are going to be sitting here in endless quorum calls, I don’t know if that’s in anybody’s best interest.”

Earlier Monday, Trump had directed Thune to keep the Senate in session in order to pass a “full and deep throated” SAVE America Act (whatever that means). But the majority leader has maintained that the president’s signature voter suppression bill just doesn’t have the support it needs. 

“We could stay here til Christmas, Democrats aren’t voting for this. I’m just telling you,” Thune said. “And Republicans are not getting rid of the legislative filibuster.”

Thune told reporters that the White House had already sat down with 20 Republican lawmakers to discuss scrapping the filibuster—and 15 of them said no. “So, I mean this is not an open question. It’s just a fact, and the facts don’t change,” he said. 

“Now, if [Trump] can change the facts and start moving some of those senators who are no’s into yeses, then we have a different conversation,” Thune added. 

This is the second time Thune has snapped back over Trump’s ham-fisted pressure. Last week, after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump’s patience with Thune was “running out,” the senator retorted, “Well maybe she or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes, right?”

Thune is currently attempting to pass his third budget reconciliation bill that would contain $10 billion for election-related reforms, but even Republicans remain divided on the president’s sweeping bill.  

Someone kept yelling “pedophile protector” while Trump was extolling the benefits of his tariffs on foreign automakers. Others in the crowd eventually tried to drown him out, and when the protester stopped, the crowd cheered before breaking into a “USA” chant.

“He’s a Communist!” Trump said, laughing and pointing into the crowd. “Thank you. He’s a Communist! We’re running against Communists now, this is crazy.”

Heckler: Pedophile protector!

Trump: He’s a communist! pic.twitter.com/Tfu408mtd7

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 27, 2026

Trump then went into a tangent against Communists, saying, “You see what they want to do? They want to take your houses, they want to do things that nobody’s ever even thought of before. They want to take your money, they want to raise your tax up to 80 percent.” 

“And I said this morning, I see this morning, they also want to fire the police. They don’t want police and they don’t want prisons anymore. I think that’s a great idea. Does everybody like that idea?” Trump asked sarcastically. 

In January, a worker in a Ford Motor Company factory in Dearborn, Michigan, yelled “pedophile protector” at Trump as he was touring the facility, prompting the president to mouth an expletive and give the worker the middle finger. Last month, a protester repeatedly shouted “pedophile” at Trump and gave him two middle fingers while he toured a Mack truck factory in Macungie, Pennsylvania.  

It’s highly doubtful that all the hecklers were Communists, and considering how unpopular Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files has been with his supporters, they could have even been disgruntled MAGA devotees. Trump is only going to hear more protesters and hecklers calling him a pedophile for the rest of his life. 

The Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy had been empty since last summer, after all the Biden-era employees left and its head resigned. Now the office charged with coordinating cross-agency responses to pandemic risks has only one employee: Sara Brenner, a vaccine skeptic and self-described “MAHA mom.”

“That is a start, but it is not nearly enough,” a former White House official told NOTUS Monday. “You can’t run an Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy as an army of one.”

Brenner joined the Food and Drug Administration in 2019 as a midlevel scientist and was promoted to deputy commissioner after Trump’s inauguration in 2025—where she fully embraced Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ridiculous Make America Healthy Again movement. Brenner was appointed to the OPPR in July amid mounting concerns about global disease outbreaks.

Brenner has a history of publicly airing her concerns about vaccines, The New York Times reported. Speaking at a Make America Healthy Again event last year, she said she chose not to receive the Covid-19 vaccine when she was pregnant during the pandemic because she was concerned about the vaccine’s “biodistribution patterns.”

In May 2025, she co-wrote a memo saying there was no “no clear evidence” that the benefits of Covid vaccines for children under 18 outweighed the risk of harm, overlooking the hundreds of studies that suggested the exact opposite. In March 2025, she intervened in the FDA’s review of the Novavax’s Covid vaccine.

Another health official, Rachel Idowu, was appointed to the National Security Council as its director of bioresponse. Together with Brenner, she will manage the country’s response to pandemic threats.

One health official who spoke to NOTUS praised Idowu’s work, saying she was “truly the right person to have in that office. She can do the work of two or three.” Still, they said Idowu and Brenner would have to be “very selective in terms of what they prioritize.”

Byron Cohen, a former adviser to OPPR, told NOTUS that Idowu and Brenner were two “very experienced, capable people,” but there was still a “tremendous amount of work to be done.”

“Those two individuals only have so much time in the day, and they deserve a full staff to help them carry out their mission,” Cohen told NOTUS.

Clearly, the Trump administration is not prioritizing pandemic preparedness even as the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo is shaping up to be the worst on record.

The committee said it received a referral from the Office of Congressional Conduct last month.

“The Committee notes that the mere fact of a referral or an extension, and the mandatory disclosure of such an extension and the name of the subject of the matter, does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred, or reflect any judgment on behalf of the Committee,” the committee’s statement read.

Gooden has held office in Texas’s 5th district for seven years, and has been an ally to President Trump for all of them. In 2020, he joined 146 other Republicans in voting to overturn the presidential election results, and he voted against Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 insurrection.

“These are bogus spending allegations perpetrated by dishonest unelected OCC bureaucrats, and as the fifth Texas GOP ally of the President to endure one of these attacks,” Gooden told Fox News’s Liz Elkind. “I am confident the House Ethics Committee will confirm their baseless nature.”

A complaint against Gooden was filed to the Office of Congressional Ethics in 2021, alleging that he “purchased 12 assets with a total value ranging from approximately $60,019 and $376,000 without disclosing the transactions” in 2020. While notable, it may or may not be related to the current probe.

Gooden is the second Texas Republican to go under House Ethics investigation this year, following former Republican Representative Tony Gonzales, who was accused of having an affair with ex-staffer who set herself on fire after he ended it and hurt her career. Gonzales resigned in April.

This story has been updated.

Internal party messaging reviewed Monday by Politico indicates that Republican leadership is still trying to salvage public perception of the president, on issues ranging from the Iran war to the SAVE America Act.

“On Iran, directly connect the President’s negotiations and strikes to keeping the Strait open and keeping prices low,” one line item read, according to Politico reporter Jordain Carney.

The internal memo also warned Republicans that the “media will try to divide Republicans by asking your boss to pick a ‘side’ in any given question.”

“It’s crucial to reject these false choices. Reject the false choice between the President and Senate leaders: Express support for both,” the memo reads.

The memo advised Republicans on how to handle the ongoing drama between Trump and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who last week snapped at White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt for suggesting that the president was “running out” of patience with the conservative senator’s inability to force the SAVE Act through the upper chamber.

Offering potential responses to the press, the memo suggests that Republicans nonetheless claim that Trump and Thune are “united and doing an excellent job.” It also recommends that Republicans claim the duo have made American life “affordable,” and have worked together to make Americans “safer by closing our border, deporting violent criminals (Laken Riley Act), cracking down on fentanyl, and strengthening our military.”

“And we all agree that we have to defeat the radical Democrat socialists, who are threatening to undo our progress,” it added.

Meanwhile, the White House seems content with quietly advising midterm-bound Republicans to distance themselves from the president’s talking points as his popularity plummets.

“The understanding is pretty damn implicit: The president is going to say what the president is going to say,” a Republican operative working on the party’s midterm races told MS NOW Monday on the condition of anonymity. “You’re not going to have candidates or lawmakers running out to defend the president’s handling of the economy or the war—polling shows that most people don’t agree with his handling.”

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is looking at eliminating the “as low as reasonably achievable” principle, which mandates that hospitals, nuclear plants, and other facilities keep radiation levels at an absolute minimum, even when they are already below legal limits. The rule would be replaced with a “graded approach” that puts different safety measures in place based on expected radiation exposure levels.

The legal limits for workers and the public would stay the same, and the NRC said that the public would not be any less safe.

“We’re just removing the ambiguity,” NRC Chair Ho Nieh said. “But the standard for exposure to workers and the public, those are not changing. We’re just putting in place greater clarification.”

The nuclear industry is in favor of the move, with its main trade association, the Nuclear Energy Institute, claiming that safety is still a priority.

“We will always continue to look at what we can do to reduce the dose to workers, and maintain our doses to the off-site public as low as possible,” Doug True, chief nuclear officer at the NEI, said to the Associated Press. “It’s not like we’re just going to throw open the doors and let everything run up to the limits.”

But other experts are concerned about what will happen given that the new rule raises permissible radiation limits. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told the AP that the new proposal could raise radiation doses.

President Trump wants four times as much domestic nuclear energy production to satisfy the growing electricity demand from new data centers powering artificial intelligence. He issued four executive orders in May last year to boost government funding for nuclear power and overhaul nuclear regulations. In doing so, though, the president may get rid of some guardrails that protect Americans from the downsides of nuclear energy.

“There’s some reports that the United States has taken in $13 billion from Venezuela,” a reporter asked Trump at the Air Force One press gaggle on Monday afternoon. “Where is that money going?”

“Thirteen billion from Venezuela? I think even more than that,” Trump replied. “Venezuela, we paid for that war many times over. And that’ll happen with Iran also. We paid for the war many times over.”

“But where’s that money going?”

“No other president can say that for a long time,” Trump continued, ignoring the question. “We had a cost.... We paid for it many many times over. And now, as you know, we have a very good relationship with Venezuela.”

“But where is the money going?” the reporter asked yet again.

“It goes toward running the country.”

“No … the money that the U.S. is taking in, where is that money going?”

“From Venezuela?”

“Yes.”

“Towards running the country. It can go to the military. Congress has to approve it.... We’re taking in a lot of money. Billions and billions of dollars from Venezuela.”

The president couldn’t offer anything close to a straight answer on where those billions went. First, the story was that it’d go back to the Venezuelan people, whom Trump pretends to care about very much. But last week, the Financial Times reported that after six months and two devastating earthquakes, the money is still nowhere to be found. The publication reported that the Trump administration must have collected an estimated $13 billion, though Trump’s statement on Monday is the first hint at an actual number.

The last solid lead we had on that money was when Semafor reported that Trump would be keeping proceeds from the first sale in an offshore bank account based in Qatar. Maybe that has something to do with his nonanswer.

Q: There's some reports that the United States has taken in $13 billion from Venezuela. What where is that money going?

Trump: That will happen with Iran also.

Q: Where is the money going?

Trump: Running the country. pic.twitter.com/yGvQDtGQJj

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 27, 2026

Almost half of all Americans either can’t explain what it is or have not heard of it, according to a new Politico poll. Those who have heard about it don’t like it, saying that it benefited other people, like wealthy Americans.

With affordability a major political issue, Republicans have tried to rebrand the bill, which doled out tax cuts for rich Americans at the expense of programs like health care, as “Working Families Tax Cuts,” without much success.

“Putting more money in Americans’ pockets. Helping them seize opportunities to get ahead, and creating new pathways to success,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “That is the Working Families Tax Cuts at work.”

Only about 25 percent of people who voted for Trump in 2024 believe that the bill gave the working class big tax breaks. The fact that the bill included tax deductions for tipped wages and overtime pay, as well as Trump Accounts for children, hasn’t swayed opinions. 

Meanwhile, more than half of Americans—57 percent—believe the Iran war has made things more expensive, according to the poll. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has had ripple effects affecting everything from gas prices to fertilizer shortages, hurting farmers along with average Americans. Trump hasn’t done much to defend or even mention the bill in his regular speeches, either. 

This has opened the bill up to attacks from Democrats, who merely have to point to bad economic news to discredit any potential gains. Democratic candidates have also rightfully connected the tax cuts to cuts to food stamps, Medicare, and Medicaid. Politico’s poll found that many Americans say they prefer funding health care and nutrition assistance over some tax breaks. Trump is not doing much to address that sentiment, dismissing affordability as a made-up word and opposing a bipartisan affordable housing bill last week.  

“Trump cuts food assistance and health care. Billionaires get another tax break,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor last week. That seems to be a winning message for November’s midterms for Democrats. 

“There’s no place I’d rather be on the first Saturday in August than with the good people of western Kentucky, feasting on pork and mutton,” his office wrote in a statement Monday to the Bluegrass State’s Hellbender Newsroom. “When I first attended forty-two years ago, Fancy Farm was a pretty lonely place to be a Republican. But, my, how times have changed. Today, western Kentucky is a conservative Republican sea of red.

“So I hate that I’ll miss the fun this year, but I’m sending my best wishes to the St. Jerome community for a successful picnic,” the message ended.

His team also released a new photo of McConnell and his wife, Elaine Chao.

The Kentucky senator has been missing in action for more than a month after he was found unconscious in his Washington residence and rushed to the hospital on June 14. For weeks, McConnell’s office has refused to explain his extended hospitalization or elaborate on his eventual return to Capitol Hill.

The media blackout briefly ended on July 12, when the senator’s office shared a photo of McConnell sitting upright in a chair beside his wife, holding a copy of that day’s Washington Post sports section in his lap.

A statement released by his office alongside the image, written in the first person so as to suggest it was penned by McConnell himself, specified that while the 84-year-old had not broken bones, suffered a concussion, or had a heart attack or stroke, he had dealt with a “mild case of pneumonia” during his time in the hospital.

He did not offer a projection for when he might return to work, noting that he moved to a rehabilitation facility and is still “working closely” with legislative staff.

McConnell’s team has not provided any further explanation or evidence supporting McConnell’s improving health condition in the weeks since, despite demands from his constituents and local lawmakers.

On Saturday, West Virginia Senator Shelley Moore Capito told independent journalist Nicholas Ballasy that she had spoken to someone the day before who visited McConnell and said that “he’s clear-minded, and he just needs to get stronger.”

U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services, or USCIS, the agency that manages visas, green cards, naturalizations, and other aspects of the legal immigration process, published a new regulation Monday allowing officers to refer hundreds of thousands of asylum applicants directly to deportation proceedings without interviewing them.

The rule would scrap USCIS’s long-standing practice of offering interviews to asylum applicants already in the United States. The agency claimed that it had previously offered interviews despite there being “no statutory right to an interview or requirement to conduct one.” The rule would also remove references in Department of Homeland Security materials to a “right” to an interview and language asserting that asylum officers would review cases “in an interview.”

“This means many people will never get a chance to argue their case,” Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on X Monday. In order to receive asylum, applicants must demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country.

The filing states that the new rule will “more quickly place certain aliens into removal proceedings” with immigration judges at the Executive Office of Immigration Review, or EOIR. Once asylum applicants are passed to the EOIR, the cases that are deemed “legally deficient” may be pretermitted, meaning those applicants can be deported without a hearing.

No interview and no hearing? That sounds like a clear violation of due process—which the Trump administration has been angling to obliterate for more than a year.

In addition, the new rule would allow asylum officers to “determine that the alien does not merit a grant [of asylum] as a matter of discretion without first making an eligibility determination,” and would also stop requiring a letter communicating that the basis for referral of asylum should include an assessment of the applicant’s credibility.

The rule was published Monday, to be implemented Tuesday without prior warning or public comment period—and will likely invite a slew of legal challenges under the Administrative Procedures Act.

Previously unreleased documentary footage has put late South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s warmongering on full display, exposing just how gleeful he was when the country ignited the Iran war.

“Look what we’ve done here. I almost cried,” Graham says in one video clip, practically giddy.

“I talked to [Donald] Trump this morning, he’s jacked, he said, ‘Best thing I have ever done.’ He loves blowing stuff up,” the conservative lawmaker said at the time. “I mean, how long have we been pushing this?

“There were a lot of people inside that didn’t want to do it, so I had my challenges,” he added.

Lindsey Graham celebrating the start of the Iran war. Dark stuff. pic.twitter.com/IJmjg0ATqa

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) July 26, 2026

The footage was captured by British filmmaker Alex Holder, who had been granted remarkable access to film Graham since 2023. The footage is a part of an upcoming documentary that is currently titled “Lindsey’s Graham,” a reference to the senator’s personal perspective on his role in U.S. foreign policy.

“He would call what this was ‘a game,’” Holder told The Wall Street Journal, recalling that Graham had shared how bizarre he felt it was that a senator from South Carolina was closer with some Middle East leaders than most presidential administrations.

Graham reportedly agreed to the angle of the film, claiming that he wanted the public to understand his role in the Senate. Holder told the Journal that Graham had remarked how “cool this was.”

In another clip in which he expresses his joy with the interventionist strategy, Graham compared Trump to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Winston Churchill, likening the burgeoning Middle East conflict to World War II.

“President Trump, when he gets into the zone, he listens, he asks good questions, no tweeting. He … hasn’t tweeted much at all,” Graham said. “No drama, he’s been a great wartime president.

“I mean, they’re the right two guys to confront this evil,” Graham added.

In other recently released footage, Graham was captured phoning Netanyahu—whom he referred to as his “friend”—about a joint plan to lobby Trump to get involved in the conflict.

“We’re concentrating right now on Iran,” Netanyahu told Graham over speakerphone on a March 4 call. “If we tell Hezbollah that we’re going all the way, we threaten them, but if we actually do it, then they have no reason not to go all the way against us. And right now that’s not our interest.”

“That’s actually good counsel,” Graham responded from his Senate office, decorated with Trump merchandise. “I’ll put it out there as an idea; we can always go back to it.”

UNSEEN FOOTAGE of Lindsey Graham on CALL with Netanyahu revealing plans to LOBBY Trump to BOMB Lebanon

BIBI: Glad you’re my FRIEND

GRAHAM: Going to try to get Trump to join with y'all in Lebanon… WOULD YOU LIKE THAT?

B: Concentrating right now on IRAN

G: Can always go back pic.twitter.com/9Wt0MCuEpq

— RT (@RT_com) July 26, 2026

Yet the Iran war has done nothing good for America in the 21 weeks since it began. The conflict has so far killed at least 18 U.S. service members and wounded more than 600 others. It has also taken an enormous toll on daily life in the U.S., inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil costs.

“I don’t have any confidence in him anymore. I think he’s all over the place—he’s accelerating the retirement or forcing out some of the most distinguished leaders in the DOD that we have,” frequent Trump administration critic and outgoing Senator Thom Tillis told The Hill. “I think he’s got a massive insecurity complex, he has a lack of experience in large organizations, he micromanages too much. He’s lost my confidence.”

Others spoke anonymously.

“I have heard out of the Pentagon that there’s a loss of confidence ... within the Pentagon. And of course then everyone here on the Hill hears those same concerns,” one Republican senator told The Hill.

“I think there’s a sense it’s taken longer than what we thought and that maybe our strategy didn’t factor in the Strait of Hormuz or [Iran’s] ability to be willing to hit their neighbors. I think there was some miscalculations maybe,” said another.

Others opined about the cost of the war, especially after Hegseth asked for $1.5 trillion for the DOD at a recent congressional hearing.

The entirety of Hegseth’s short tenure has been shrouded in internal strife and controversy. From his purging of top military leadership (which plenty of Republicans are still sour about), to his alcoholism, to his war on woke, the defense secretary has brought a frantic, aggressive approach to the Pentagon. This war will be a massive stain on any legacy that he has, and even Republicans seem to be realizing it.

Trump took to Truth Social Monday to direct Senate Majority Leader John Thune to keep the chamber in session in order to pass a “full and deep throated SAVE AMERICA ACT.”

Sorry, a full and what now?

In his attempt to use an emphasized version of the term “full-throated,” Trump veered into an unintentional sexual innuendo (or possible Watergate reference).

What clearer indication is there that we live in a postliterate world than that the president of the United States doesn’t feel the need to be careful with his words?

Trump has repeatedly directed Republicans to pass the SAVE Act, but Thune has insisted that he doesn’t have the votes to pass the president’s signature voter suppression bill.

If passed, the SAVE Act would require people to present proof of citizenship to register to vote, as well as specific types of photo ID when voting, which could create barriers for married women, Native Americans, and anyone who has changed their name. It would also severely restrict mail-in voting and require states to submit their voter rolls to a federal database riddled with errors.

Thune is currently attempting to pass his third budget reconciliation bill that would contain $10 billion for election-related reforms, but Republicans remain divided.

KFF Health News reports that the small federal agency responsible for protecting Americans from faulty household appliances is now demanding that hospitals turn over personally identifiable medical records. Earlier this year, the CPSC started pressuring hospital executives to share the data with a private contractor, ostensibly to overhaul its system for tracking consumer-product-related injuries at hospitals.

The CPSC is seeking records on everything from broken bones to vaccine reactions, and even suicide attempts. In emails to hospital executives, a CPSC official asked that the hospitals provide personally identifiable information from patients, including names, addresses, and diagnoses, to contractor Konza Health. In turn, Konza Health told health executives that providing this information was “mandatory” or “required.”

The CPSC wants at least 100 hospitals to provide this information by the end of 2026, according to an agency memo. But hospital attorneys and health industry experts are concerned about the agency’s legal authority to collect medical records, its ability to keep such records safe, and whether it is following the laws in making such sweeping changes.

“The whole thing is troubling,” Sharona Hoffman, a professor of health law at Case Western Reserve University, told KFF Health News, saying that patient privacy will be at risk. “If this company really is collecting identifiable information, that is worrisome for patients.”

The requests could also violate federal privacy law, as well as laws preventing federal authorities from mandating the reporting of private health data. The CPSC’s operating manual previously instructed hospitals not to include patients’ private information, such as “names, birthdates, or addresses” in case reports.

Last year, President Trump fired the CPSC’s three Democratic board members, and the Supreme Court let the firings stand after they were challenged in court. KFF Health News also found that 63 career staffers left the agency in 2025, the most for any year in a decade. The administration has sought private health information to help its mass deportation agenda, its anti-vaccination agenda, and its assault on federal workers. What dark plans does it have this time?

The way the Pentagon is reporting the numbers is tricky, splitting the casualty tolls into two separate pages. One page on “Operation Epic Fury” has a casualty count starting on February 28, and another page, titled “Overseas Operations,” begins the count on July 7, when the short-lived ceasefire fell apart and bombings ramped back up. The move raises concerns that the Pentagon is willfully obscuring the numbers to make its failure of a forever war look better on paper.

The Pentagon faced backlash last week after it reduced its casualty totals from 482 wounded and 18 dead. And while Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez told media the reduction was due to “temporary data disruptions,” the Trump administration has refused to include four soldiers killed in recent days in the page on Operation Epic Fury’s death toll.

The Pentagon has been credibly accused of downplaying the severity and number of casualties in the war on Iran. In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth referred to an Iranian strike on a U.S. makeshift operations center in Kuwait as “a squirter,” and later whined that coverage of dead troops was only intended to “make the president look bad.” Six soldiers were killed in that strike, with over 30 hospitalized for burns, shrapnel wounds, and brain trauma. And last month, the Pentagon classified soldiers who suffered severe brain injuries in that attack as having “minor” injuries, causing their families to speak out against that decision.

This lack of transparency from the Pentagon is strategic, and ultimately foolish. This war is only dragging on as it grows increasingly unpopular. That will undoubtedly lead to more wounded soldiers and more body bags. Those are impossible to hide.

Appearing on NBC News’s Meet the Press, Waltz was asked to respond to a report that the Pentagon had started rationing certain defense weapons in its campaign against Iran as its military assets diminished.

“Is America backing away from a larger military attack because its military stockpile has been depleted?” asked host Kristen Welker.

Waltz insisted that President Donald Trump’s administration had “inherited a depleted situation” from the previous administration, pointing to the war in Ukraine and U.S. strikes against the Houthis, which were also conducted by the Trump administration.

Waltz claimed, however, that the U.S. military “has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be.”

“The people that are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail,” he added.

UN Ambassador Mike Waltz blamed Biden for depleting weapons stockpiles but then claimed the stockpiles aren't actually depleted but also anyone leaking information about it should be put in jail during a floundering, incoherent showing on Meet the Press

Here's a long cut: pic.twitter.com/bUmeSYNEkZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 26, 2026

Waltz couldn’t seem to keep straight whether the reporting was utter “nonsense” or leaked government information punishable by prison time.

Representative Ted Lieu pushed back on Waltz’s finger-pointing in a post on X. The California Democrat noted that many of the weapons that are reportedly running dry were not used by the previous administration in the conflicts Waltz cited.

For example, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defenses missiles that have become severely depleted and are incredibly difficult to replace were never provided to Ukraine, Lieu wrote. And the U.S. has used more Patriot missiles in the last five months of fighting than what was ever sent to Ukraine.

“Stop falsely blaming others and take responsibility for the disastrous Iran war,” Lieu wrote.

With midterms around the corner, the president’s allies are reportedly urging Republican candidates to break from Trump’s rhetoric on the Iran war in order to save their election odds.

“The understanding is pretty damn implicit: The president is going to say what the president is going to say,” a Republican operative working on the party’s midterm races told MS NOW on the condition of anonymity. “You’re not going to have candidates or lawmakers running out to defend the president’s handling of the economy or the war—polling shows that most people don’t agree with his handling.”

The Iran war has done nothing good for America in the 21 weeks since it began. The conflict has so far killed at least 18 U.S. service members and wounded more than 600 others. It has also taken an enormous toll on daily life in the U.S., inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil costs. As a result, Trump’s approval rating has plummeted, with trust and loyalty rattled even within his base, which is reportedly losing patience with the unyielding violence.

The White House is now basically cutting its losses, allowing midterm-bound Republicans the opportunity to save themselves from Trump’s sinking ship.

“There is less paranoia and more autonomy,” a Republican strategist in Michigan familiar with the national and regional communications of the party told MS NOW. “[Trump] is still doing the work for the incumbents, but giving them space without lashing out.”

Another Republican operative told the network that “nuance has been adopted in Trump 2.0 that wasn’t in 1.0,” noting that if a candidate is in a state “where he can get someone better and more loyal, he’ll do it,” but “if you’re in a state where you’re the best he can get, there’s a deeper comprehension of that reality.”

A fourth GOP operative familiar with the White House’s strategy referred to debates on Iran as a “Democrat trap.”

“If a candidate lets their race become a referendum on Iran, that’s a mistake,” they said.

It started at 11:16 a.m. with an AI image of CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins as transgender model Dylan Mulvaney holding cans of Bud Light, and escalated from there. Bruce Springsteen, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Representative Jerry Nadler, and Trump’s longtime nemesis Rosie O’Donnell were among those targeted in his posting binge. He also posted several flattering photos of himself in mock-up movie posters and, in one instance, standing next to former President John F. Kennedy.

None of the images had any text attached to them, and they were interspersed with some of his campaign photos and pro–Iran war propaganda. At one point, he posted nine Iran war memes three times in a row in the span of just over an hour.

It’s pretty clear that the octogenarian president is experiencing cognitive decline and had some kind of episode Sunday. It’s been evident throughout his second term as president, but as of late, he’s thrown a tablet across a room after a bad phone call with world leaders, rambled about the history of paper clips in the middle of a speech, and zoned out in the middle of a photo op. It’s a terrifying thought to realize that we still have two years of Trump occupying the Oval Office with his mental state only growing worse.

Instead of stopping shipments, traffickers have just changed their strategies, taking larger vessels or even planes to circumvent international waters, the DEA found.

“The business is so extraordinarily profitable that the cartels do not mind paying freight costs that are five or even 10 times higher,” one naval intelligence official from Ecuador said. “They know that while the United States may destroy one speedboat, they will successfully get 10 semisubmersibles—or other speedboats that evade detection—through.”

“When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side,” an anonymous DEA official told the Post. “They always find the weak spots and exploit them.” While DEA officials noted that prices rose after the first two months of strikes, smugglers “adapted to the intensified pressure,” and neither supply nor price had “been noticeably affected.”

In April, just over seven months into the strikes, Trump wrote that “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” It’s unclear where he got that number from.

Perhaps most troubling of all is the 221 people killed by the U.S. government without any kind of trial or legal process. There’s no way we even know for sure that they were “narcoterrorists”—these could have very well been innocent people, their deaths simply serving as fodder for Trump to drum up fear and resentment toward Latin America.

In early 2025—and yes, you may be forgiven for having forgotten this—she ran for chair of the Democratic National Committee. Her candidacy went nowhere, and when she dropped out, she threw whatever weight she’d amassed behind Ken Martin over his chief rival, Ben Wikler. She told Politico at the time that Wikler’s establishment backing—he was endorsed for the job by Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Nancy Pelosi—was what made her turn to Martin. “This had come down to a race between two people,” she said, “and Ken to me is the one who does not represent billionaire funding that has become inherent to the functioning of the DNC.”

You can say that again, Marianne. Not only does Martin not represent billionaire funding; he represents no funding. As has been much reported lately, most dramatically in a brutal New York Times story that ran Sunday, the Democratic Party is broke. Not just broke. In debt. To the tune of $2 million. The Republican National Committee, by contrast, has $128.5 million cash on hand.

This should be a banner year for the Democrats, and the odds are still good that it will be. Donald Trump’s approval numbers are starting to compete with Kanye West’s and Meghan Markle’s, and it seems daily as if he’s doing his best to catch them. He says he doesn’t care about people’s financial struggles, he keeps fighting this ridiculous war whose rationale (Iran can’t have a nuke) exists only because of an idiotic decision he made in his first term, he slaps tariffs on everything from booze to hockey sticks, he bombs at the Correspondents’ Dinner like a washed-up Vegas comedian playing a bordello down the street from the Liberace Museum. Most of America is sick of him. They’re even sick of his wife, who, at 12 points underwater herself, is far and away the least popular first lady in recent American history.

Since presidential approval is generally seen as the one number that most directly predicts and tracks the results of midterm elections, it’s still reasonable to assume that the Democrats will retake the House, and that, with Maine having settled down and with a handful of surprisingly close races in red states, they have a live shot at the Senate. But being $2 million in debt is not the way to win close races.

Martin became chairman of the DNC just 11 days after Trump returned to the White House. Here’s what he said at the time, per that Politico article I linked to above: “This is a new DNC. We’re taking the gloves off. I’ve always viewed my role as a chair of the Democratic Party to take the low road, so my candidates and elected officials can take the high road, meaning, I’m going to throw a punch.” And: “We have one team, one team, the Democratic Party. We have one fight, one fight. The fight’s not in here.”

To hear the Times tell it, most of the fighting Martin is doing is with his staff. And while I’m sure he’s probably tried to throw a lot of punches and the press just didn’t cover it, well … it’s his job to break through the noise. A party chair, when his party doesn’t control the White House, has two jobs. Raise money is far and away job one. But job two is, as Martin correctly said 17 months ago, to be a very public attack dog. Martin seems to have failed operatically at both.

It’s been surprising, at least to me. Before going national, he chaired the state party of Minnesota for 12 years. During that time, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party never lost a statewide race. When the party gained unified control of state government under Governor Tim Walz, it passed a boatload of solid liberal legislation that actually made a difference in people’s lives—12 weeks of paid family leave, a progressive child tax credit, free tuition for low- and middle-income families at public universities, free breakfast and lunch at public schools, and more. Martin didn’t have a direct hand in that, of course, but he led the way to electing the people who did. I interviewed him once during that time. I was pretty impressed.

But as DNC chair, he’s just been terrible. I’d been hearing things long before this Times article, and none of them were good. Back in March 2025, I wrote about how Democrats should create a shadow Cabinet to confront and critique the president and generate national news. I was briefly enthused when, in early April, Martin said he would do just that. But it’s been 479 days and nothing has materialized. And the only time he actually made big national news was a train wreck—that long-delayed “autopsy” of 2024 that he released under public pressure while announcing that “it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards.” Both the report itself and the handling of it were embarrassingly amateurish.

I have to assume Democratic insiders are texting one another about how to get rid of the guy. They sure should be. I had a gander at the party bylaws, which say clearly and directly: “The National Chairperson shall be elected and may be removed by a majority vote of the Democratic National Committee.” The committee has around 450 members. Under normal circumstances, most of them are loyal to the chairman. But these circumstances are a long way from normal.

Martin defeated Wikler, the former Wisconsin party chair, with 246.5 votes out of 428 cast. Wikler did an amazing job as Wisconsin chair from 2019 to 2025. He built the party up not only in the large blue counties but in the purple ones and even some red ones. He led the charge to elect a liberal justice to the state Supreme Court, even as Elon Musk was spending a mind-bending $56 million—on a judicial race. And he just wrote a very good book, This Is the Plan, that’s all about how to out-organize MAGA. Every chapter of This Is the Plan oozes organizing smarts that meet this current grim, social media–saturated moment.

Democrats, it’s not too late! Correct your mistake. Fire Martin and hire Wikler (assuming he wants it). Clearly, it should have been Wikler in the first place. I remember being surprised that Schumer et al. backed him, because Wikler is both pretty progressive and an outside-the-box thinker. Not the kind of person establishment types usually back. But maybe they knew something about Martin that I didn’t.

(Note, added Monday afternoon: I’ve known and admired Wikler for several years, but I did not speak to him while writing this column; reinstalling him was totally my idea. After it appeared he reached out to tell me he isn’t interested in the post.)

The party is on the cusp of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Seems to me that’s when a party needs to act. I know—we’re talking about the Democrats. Sigh.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

With the midterms fast approaching, three things are happening all at once. Donald Trump is escalating his war in Iran, the ICE killings have started up, and Trump just unleashed a huge wave of new global tariffs. All this comes amid another unappreciated dynamic. Due to Trump, the GOP has squandered its traditional advantages on three fronts: national security, immigration, and the economy. And everything Trump is doing right now seems likely to only exacerbate that.

To see how all this is playing on the ground, we’re talking to Democratic strategist Andrew Bates, who is working on a number of midterm races. Andrew, good to have you on.

Andrew Bates: Thank you for having me, Greg.

Sargent: Let’s start with the tariffs. This week, Trump unleashed a huge new wave of them—around 10 percent on goods from more than 80 countries, some higher than 10 percent. This includes 50 percent tariffs on Canadian exports.

Andrew, the initial wave of tariffs are what caused Trump’s approval on the economy to start unraveling in the first place. They’re a big reason he’s at extraordinary lows on the economy right now. What are you hearing back from Democratic candidates? Are you hearing that they’re planning to campaign hard against the new round?

Bates: Yes, they are. There’s a big change between 2024 and 2026 in the way that both parties are going to talk about tariffs. And it’s because in 2024, tariffs coded to a lot of people as, this is a way you shake up the economy. There was a lot of fatigue with high prices. Trump was promising that “immediately,” quote, unquote, he would “lower costs,” and tariffs were a critical way he said he would do this. Then people lived through them. And now, like you were talking about, because prices went up across the board, they’re extremely unpopular, and more tariffs are the opposite of what voters want, including a lot of Republican voters.

So it’s something that Democrats, wherever they fall within the ideological spectrum of the party, have been unified in calling out as something that is going to hurt everyday people. It’s also powerful that the tariff revenue goes to fund the tax breaks for billionaires and monopolies, which are also very unpopular.

Sargent: Yeah, and in fact that’s what tariffs are. They’re a tax. And Trump has openly and explicitly used them to offset shortfalls created by cutting taxes on the super rich. Now, I want to talk about your point about tariffs kind of “coding” as shaking up the economy.

Trump was sort of seen as this figure who gets stuff done, who can stride out onto the global stage and grab it by the collar and shake it all up. And I think those tariffs, when he was talking about them, may have also coded as, in some sense, pro-worker. He’s protecting American workers with the government, with decisive action. And one of the big civic success stories, I think, that we’ve seen, is that the American people learned what tariffs actually are.

Bates: It’s working people who are hurt the most. Manufacturing jobs are down as a consequence of the tariffs. And in 2024, Republicans were saying, this is how we bring manufacturing back. But now people have lived through the opposite. It’s also been very painful for people in rural areas.

If you are a farmer, the chances are that not only do you have to pay more for your needs to produce crops—because the materials that are used to make farming equipment, like aluminum and steel, cost more. Or the Iran war has caused gas prices and diesel prices to go up, and you need that as well—but at the same time, you’re in this sandwich where your export customers are often choosing not to buy American products because of retaliation for the tariffs. And that’s a huge hit to farming communities, because over a fifth of American crops are usually exported.

Sargent: Republicans, in fact, are clearly worried about the new wave of tariffs. One ally of the White House told Politico that “if it’s not focused on affordability, it’s not helpful.” And he said the tariffs will be reflexively seen as a “bad thing” by voters, meaning there’s no way to really message about them.

Another Republican told Politico this: “Any conversation about tariffs, unless it’s reducing them, is a bad conversation for Republicans.”

Bates: Overwhelmingly, the swing voters who chose Republicans in 2024 did so because they were promised inflation would go down, and because they were promised this chaos and violence in the world would also be reduced. It’s not that these people were signing a contract that they were going to worship the MyPillow guy or anything like that. It’s that they had practical needs.

And when you see a president do things like prioritize a ballroom one day and then the next day actively raise your prices, you want to see your member of Congress stand up against it. And too many of these Republicans are in a cowed place where they aren’t doing it. But a lot of them are really going to wish that they had.

Sargent: Well, Andrew, you’re working for Rebecca Cooke, who’s running against Representative Derrick Van Orden in one of the most contested House races in Wisconsin. It’s an interesting district. It’s pretty rural. It’s Republican-leaning. What are you seeing on the ground there with regard to the tariffs? Is that a place where she can really engage on this issue, and how?

Bates: She’s been very critical of the tariffs, and she has unique credibility to talk about it because she grew up on a dairy farm, and her family needed to sell their cows because of competing with Big Ag. And so she knows what it is like to struggle and to come from an agricultural background.

Like we were talking about a moment ago, the tariffs have been especially hurtful to farmers, because while all their input costs are rising—they have to pay more for diesel, for equipment, for fertilizer, as a combination of what’s happened with tariffs and the Iran war, other kinds of chaos—at the same time, they’re losing export customers.

And she has been very hardworking about going to every single corner of the district to hear from people and to talk with them about what needs to change. And she has also been very emphatic about how the “big beautiful bill,” at the same time, has done so much to hurt working people in the district, like closing down hospitals.

Sargent: Well, Andrew, it’s still tough to win these rural voters. The problem is that even if they agree with us and agree with Democrats about the tariffs, about the economy and so forth, they’re just culturally very, very pro-Republican. This is a tough district.

Can you talk candidly about whether it’s really possible to convert those voters and take what is essentially a real set of sentiments, a real set of dissatisfactions, and convert them into a willingness to vote for Democrats? Why is that so hard?

Bates: It’s hard because we have made a lot of mistakes during this time period as a party. And I think that it has to begin with what we were just talking about, which is respect. We are up against several big disadvantages. One of which is, right now Republicans have a much bigger megaphone than Democrats do.

There are media outlets like Fox News that have much bigger audiences than mainstream media or Democratic-leaning media. Republicans have also been smarter about investing in reaching people online, which also goes to the point about respect—because an important measure of respect is, are you doing the work to come into people’s living rooms, to meet them where they are? And we failed in that area when it comes to going onto podcasts and streaming shows and a lot of these platforms where people really get more of their information now.

But it also has to do with having the guts to show when a stereotype that’s being applied to you is not right. For example, there is a notion that gets pushed on the right that Democrats look down on people of faith. And in my experience, as a person of faith from North Carolina who’s proud of both of those things, that’s not how most of the Democrats I have known in my life actually feel.

Most of the Democrats I’ve known are fellow religious people. But there are some voices within our larger coalition who do further those kinds of stereotypes. And that puts even more of an onus on those of us who really care about reaching out and growing our level of support, to show that that’s not who we are.

And a big part of it also has to do with—along similar lines—there is a widespread belief that Democrats feel like if we have a single disagreement with you, we think you are a bad person and that you are not very smart, and that we don’t want your vote, when we need to be as inclusive as possible.

Sargent: Andrew, tell us what specifically Rebecca Cooke is doing to reach some of these very hard-to-convert voters—rural Americans, people who voted for Trump, right-leaning independents, those types of people. What specifically is she doing?

Bates: She’s showing up everywhere, including the smallest towns in the most rural corners of that district. She’s proving to people that she’s listening to them, because that’s crucial. Whoever listens the most to voters and treats them with respect, I think, is often the candidate who wins. She is talking about how her personal lived experience means that she can relate to people who are hurting now. She’s someone who works multiple waitress jobs right now to make ends meet. Like we were talking about, she grew up on a dairy farm that had trouble competing with bigger agricultural interests.

And she also has had the courage to say when she disagrees with certain points of view that do exist within the Democratic Party. She has been very clear that she thinks the idea of defunding the police is a really bad one, and that she would never vote for anything along those lines. And that is something that goes a very long way with folks who, like most of the country, are not political junkies, but have heard that about Democrats, and it makes them skeptical.

Sargent: Yeah, I can see that that would be kind of a signifier of sorts. And that kind of brings me to immigration. We’re seeing these two other major developments in addition to this huge wave of tariffs and all this economic discontent.

We’re now having more situations where these paramilitary forces unleashed by Trump are killing people on the streets of U.S. cities. We are also seeing the war escalate. Trump is yet again today, as we speak, talking about how he’s going to just destroy Iran and bomb this and bomb that, and kind of scoffing at the idea that there’s anything wrong with bombing civilian targets.

And so let me ask you this: I understand that defund the police is a good thing for someone like Rebecca Cooke to condemn, but can she also essentially speak to real voter angst out there about ICE? There’s got to be a way she can do that. Is she doing that? And is she condemning the war, beyond just saying closing the Strait of Hormuz is hurting your pocketbook? Can she make a moral case on these other issues as well, or not?

Bates: Yes, she’s doing that on both. And that has been the case with every Democrat that I’m working with, or that people close to me are working with. It’s something that is often brought up proactively. Ending the war has been a major priority for her and for everybody else that I’m dealing with, for a lot of reasons.

One is, most of them agreed with Trump in 2024 when he said we should not go into new wars. I agreed with that too. Now he’s pretending he never said it. And this week, Derrick Van Orden and most Republicans in Congress voted to keep funding this war. It is costing lives, which is tragic, and it is raising costs even more, on top of the tariffs and the tax cuts for the rich and everything else.

And on the subject of ICE—something that connects almost everything that people dislike about the Republicans who are in charge in Washington now is abuse of power. That’s true with this illegal war. It is true when you think about the horrifying behavior of ICE agents, racially profiling people, harassing folks in their community. There have been innocent people killed. It’s also abuse of power when you see Donald Trump and his family making billions of dollars off of taxpayers in ways that make what they screamed at Hunter Biden for look quaint.

But yes, I think that especially after the killings in Minnesota, and the videos that have been pervasive on social media, where everyday Americans, including strong Trump supporters, see law enforcement officers wearing masks and killing people despite them being in complete accord with the law—like Alex Pretti, he had every legal right to have a pistol on his person.

Everyone has seen multiple videos that show he was not reaching for it. Roy Cooper in North Carolina, I thought, did a good job of calling out that his First Amendment and Second Amendment rights were violated. And I think that a lot of other Democrats have done the same.

Sargent: That’s very shrewd. I want to pick up on that. He really made the case about ICE in a way that could appeal to a whole lot of voters that are not normally willing to listen to Democrats. That’s pretty impressive stuff. I think there’s a heavy 2006 feeling in the air as well. 2006, of course, was when, under George W. Bush, Democrats won back both chambers of Congress, the House and the Senate, in a pretty extraordinary victory. One of the things that ran through that election, that set of elections, was abuse of power. And similar to now, George Bush was abusing his power on multiple fronts. Now Donald Trump is.

Are your candidates out there making a big argument to voters about how he’s abusing his power on all these fronts? These are areas that Democrats have historically been a little reluctant to be aggressive in—national security, immigration. But there’s a through line here. He’s completely out of control. He’s a madman, basically. Are Democrats that are running in tough areas able to make a big argument about those things?

Bates: Yes. And I think what really punctured the reasons for why Democrats were cautious about this in the past is the same thing as with the tariffs. It’s that people have lived through things that they strongly disapprove of. And in 2024, and earlier, warnings about this kind of behavior that you were seeing from ICE, or the kind of out-of-control national security situations—it didn’t sound realistic to people. But now that they are seeing it with their own eyes, they could not be more opposed. That changes so much.

Sargent: Well, let’s go to the big picture, which is that Republicans generally have this advantage in three areas: national security, immigration, and the economy. He’s now deeply underwater on every one of those things, and the polls are telling us very clearly that this is hurting Republicans.

The new Fox poll has Democrats leading Republicans on the economy by 54 to 45 percent, nine points on the economy. Democrats are one point up on Republicans on immigration in the Fox poll. Then there’s this new poll from Strength in Numbers and Verasight, which has Dems up on the economy over Republicans by 44 to 39. And this poll has Dems nearly at parity on immigration, and up five points on foreign policy, 43 to 38. Finally, the Washington Post poll has approval of Trump on Iran at 29 percent.

I’ve not seen anything quite like this before. We’re looking at a level of, I guess, transformation in what’s going on with the electorate and what’s going on with the parties that’s really kind of unusual. Can you talk about that big picture?

Bates: Yes. And I think this connects several of the themes we’ve talked about. One is disrespect of the voters by egotistical people in charge. The other is the need to listen to voters about what it is that actually causes them pain in their daily lives. And prices were already high in 2024 when Republicans ran on lowering them.

There was already so much chaos and violence in the world when Republicans ran in 2024 on stabilizing the world. And now people have had to live through seeing this crowd abuse their power in ways that make all the problems they voted to end worse. And you can’t get away from it. You’re reminded every single time you go to the grocery store, or every time you need to put gas in your car.

And you’re offended when you see folks in Washington making billions of dollars personally off of you, talking about how one of their highest priorities is building a ballroom, and that they don’t think about everyday people’s finances—that’s a direct quote. And especially when your representative, who’s supposed to fight for your community’s interests and for your interests, is instead selling out to those people and becoming a more corrupt establishment than anything that has existed before in our lifetimes—that’s the sort of thing that can bring about a sea change in public opinion. And it’s why you are seeing the most anti-incumbent mood since at least 2006.

Sargent: Andrew Bates, thank you for all your candor. We really appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much.

Bates: Thank you for having me.

As the world watched the global economy melt down—through hubris and a startling erosion of the New Deal–era regulations that tamed capitalism after the Great Depression—many millennial-age Americans were drawn to Harvey’s lectures on YouTube, including an animated video, viewed millions of times, that explains the breakdown of the subprime housing market. After years of challenging students to read Marx and to value strenuous engagement with primary texts, Harvey became an unlikely icon for activists, protesters, and, eventually, the Occupy movement in the United States and Europe. Crucially, he showed how housing became a new asset traded on Wall Street—first, through bundled mortgages and, after 2008, via the buying frenzy of firms like Blackstone that purchased distressed homes to become one of America’s biggest landlords in just 10 years. Most importantly, Harvey encouraged younger people not just to flirt with Marxism but to read the man himself.

Now, at 90 years old, he has written a book on Marx’s magnum opus for the generations who came after the New Left rupture of 1968. The Story of Capital connects two worlds: the world of the ivory tower and the world of the street protest. It also connects two eras of left-wing thinking, making links between Harvey’s own generation, who rejected dogmatically Soviet Marxism (the New Left), and the later generations of younger anti-capitalists who are often more attracted to decolonization, feminism, or critical race studies. The first bridge helps connect academics, who struggle over the meaning of labor theory of value (the idea that profits are made possible by workers’ sweat but not given to them), and activists who know they dislike capitalism but are fuzzy on the details. The second contribution lets in new thinking on society that Marx failed to consider carefully, or that developed after Volume 3 of Capital came out (in 1894, after his death): most importantly, the unpaid work women did to reproduce society as well as the role of race, colonization, and slavery in early capitalist economies.

Tracing technological innovation and the quickening pace of financial markets, The Story of Capital elegantly shows the need for Marx in the twenty-first century, as artificial intelligence portends mass unemployment and as global markets stray from real assets toward “fictitious capital,” such as holdings of meme stocks and cryptocurrencies. Harvey, channeling Marx, shows how financiers in 2026 are completely unable and unwilling to stave off future crises, and gestures toward what can be done.

The Story of Capital begins with Marx’s labor theory of value and his own witnessing of workers’ immiseration in the slums of Manchester, before moving on to urbanization, social reproduction, and environmentalism. The book is densely written, and is sure to please some of the more ardent academic Marxists who want to know why a falling rate of profit remains true in an era of super computers and automated factories. It also appeals to those fighting capitalism at the level of popular protest, by keeping in focus Marx’s emphasis on workers. What does increased productivity matter to the reserve army of labor facing declining wages or mass unemployment if the shipping containers leaving the port of Shanghai can be loaded with almost no humans involved? A theory of capitalism that can focus on the de-skilling and then replacement of human workers is much more illuminating than a celebratory account of humming assembly lines and worker-robots. As Harvey shows, Marx was banished from classrooms and forgotten by activists right when he was needed the most: the Reagan to Clinton years, when jobs were devalued and outsourced through the North American Free Trade Agreement while benefits were clawed back from those in poverty.

This is not to say that Marx thought that industrialization, mechanization, or globalization were bad things. He was no Luddite. His concern was the disconnect between profits and human need: Much like today’s industrial regions, the slums of nineteenth-century Manchester that Marx observed were filled with workers who were exhausted, unhealthy, and miserable while the factory owners dined on beef bourguignon and claret in their mansions. The factories these days just happen to be in Shenzhen or Dhaka, not the other side of town. Unlike the British machine wreckers of a generation before, Marx saw no way to stuff the technological genie back into the bottle. New tools must be utilized for the greatest good: Instead of getting rid of the factories, the public should take ownership of them.

Marx has always been chastised for his predictive gambits. He had a teleological view of history: Capitalism was exploitative and awful but also a necessary step—both organizationally and technologically—for people to come together and build socialism on the carcass of the former order. Part of his reasoning was historical: Capitalism was not an end state but a phase. The exploitation of workers under capitalism would become unbearable and lead to communism, he summarized. Annoyingly, for his followers, Russia established the first Communist government out of a feudalist agricultural society rather than the wage labor and factories of Germany or the U.K.

This complicates Marx’s vision. Yet faulty sequencing does not mean he was necessarily wrong. In this century and the last, Marx’s critics have painted him as a Eurocentric philosopher, who believed every nation would have to go through industrialization and capitalism as European countries had, in order to get to revolution and eventual communism. As Harvey observes, capitalism may have started in Europe, and that perhaps makes it a “Eurocentric” idea, but now it is practiced nearly everywhere in the world.

Harvey also uses Capital to think about social movements that arose after Marx’s death. Drawing on feminist scholars such as Tithi Bhattacharya and Melinda Cooper, Harvey shows how Capital inspired aspects of feminism—particularly feminist critiques of the regulation of the household, in which the nuclear family unit is designed to be as amenable to capitalist value creation as possible. In the midcentury, this meant women carrying almost all of the unpaid care work in a family, from cleaning to childrearing, while men devoted themselves to paid employment. The profit motive was also at work in the transformation of the family during neoliberal capitalism, when many more women began to take paid jobs and care work increasingly became monetized. Starting in the 1980s, the workforce changed in gender composition, particularly the rising service sector, but this actually boosted profits for large companies in comparison to the free labor of the midcentury unpaid housewife. While Marx could not have predicted a neoliberal order that both embraced and simultaneously attempted to suffocate 1970s feminism, he did show its power to eschew values of any kind as long as the bottom line was intact.

Another great asset of engaging with Marx, through Harvey’s guided tour, is that it allows us to think outside of the value-neutral rational choice theory of economics of our own times, which imagines people as big fleshy calculators assessing cost-benefit maximization in every instance, as if people act in their own self-interest and those actions somehow even out to form a balanced and just universe. Rather, capitalism has a constant problem of overusing resources. As Harvey puts it: “Individual capitalists operating in their own self-interest and seeking to maximize their profit undermine the sustainability of capital accumulation in general through their suboptimal but economically rational decision-making.” That is to say that one person’s great good luck of making a windfall from cutting down an Indonesian teak forest is most likely detrimental to quite a few other people, not to mention plants and animals. Harvey continues by observing:

The effect is to create an investment commons which maximizes individual returns while socializing and minimizing risks. But, as 2007-8 showed, the piling up of investments in high-risk housing finance eventually results in crises as the number of defaults and evictions skyrockets.

When the promise of risk mitigation is based on the “natural order” of individuals pursuing their unfettered interest and ignoring the so-called negative externalities, you quickly get a world in which profits are not shared but risk is collectivized.

By the end of the book, Harvey is keen to show that capitalism does not lift all boats through its global march to extract profit. Rather, capitalists accumulate wealth through dispossessing others. Corporations boost profits by keeping pay for their workers low; meanwhile Americans manage to live with stagnant pay because they can access rock-bottom-priced goods produced by workers paid even less overseas. More disturbingly, he points to forms of profit maximization that Marx could not have foreseen, such as the contemporary practice of harnessing crises to promote growth: buying up foreclosed homes, privatizing water as droughts intensify, or taking extreme risks on dodgy financial products with the knowledge that if a company goes belly-up, the state will step in and socialize its losses through emergency lending.

Like Marx himself, Harvey has always been more of a teacher than a futurologist. Getting people to engage with ideas and truly do the work of critical reading is the first transformative step to building political power and a new society. The process of deep reading and analysis is a luxury that more people would enjoy under socialism. If work was less mentally and physically draining, people could develop themselves more fully than being just a wage laborer or a petty-bourgeois professional. Indeed, Marx famously promised that in the post-capitalist world “it is possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner,” without having to take on any one thing as an identity or caste-like label.

Harvey’s concrete plans for a world after capitalism are equally flexible. Instead of insisting on revolution, he flirts with the more modest alternative of degrowth:

The only possible, if implausible, way to save capital from the finance capitalists would be the evolution of a systemically deflationary, low-growth economy in which Keynes’s “euthanasia of the rentiers” is coupled with Marx’s dream of the “expropriation of the expropriators” (that is, the billionaire class). Hints of what such an economy might look like can be found in the deflationary low-growth history of the Japanese economy after the speculative crash of 1990.

This idea is anathema to many economists and, in a world of fierce national competition, slowing down gross national product means that certain nations lose while others win. Yet it is one of the only theories of unwinding capitalism that considers the environmental limits to overconsumption.

Harvey has always eschewed Marx as a political-economic seer, and he puts forth the view that we should appreciate his prescience, writing from 175 years ago, rather than his (limited) bad hunches. Most of all, Harvey communicates the hopefulness of Marx. Refreshingly, despite the state of the world and of the United States, David Harvey still wants to spread one of Marx’s most important messages: “Collectively, we can indeed change this world, even though, as Marx points out, this is never done under conditions of our own choosing.”

But the Michigan primary is also so bitter for the same reason that it has been so interesting. Of all of the 2026 races, this is the one that best captures the current fissures in the Democratic Party—and which seems to best predict where the fault lines of the 2028 presidential primary might lie.

The biggest reason is that this race features the cleanest factional divides. Stevens, who currently represents the northern Detroit suburbs in Congress, is an establishment stalwart, backed by both party leaders and tens of millions in AIPAC money. El-Sayed—a former state public health official who ran a failed campaign for governor in 2018—is a progressive and longtime ally of Bernie Sanders and has made criticizing America’s backing of Israel’s genocide in Gaza a key plank in his campaign. Briefly adding to the intrigue was the race’s third leading candidate, Mallory McMorrow, a young member of Michigan’s state Senate, who attempted to triangulate between these positions but dropped out earlier this month without endorsing either candidate. If you want a race that captures the expected “lanes” of the 2028 primary—establishment, insurgent, middle—look to Michigan.

In recent weeks, particularly after McMorrow’s exit, that race has also been fractious, bitter, and personal. Stevens’s surrogates and backers have argued El-Sayed is too radical and risks alienating swing voters needed to win a seat that is essential for Democratic hopes of taking the Senate. Multiple Stevens backers, including the centrist group Third Way and Hillary Scholten, who also represents Michigan in the House, have attacked El-Sayed for campaigning with Hasan Piker, the popular leftist streamer who has made controversial comments about September 11 and October 7.

On Wednesday, Scholten also attempted to tie El-Sayed to Graham Platner, who dropped out of the Senate race in Maine amid multiple controversies, including allegations of rape and sexual assault. “Abdul El-Sayed and Graham Platner campaigned together. They fundraised together,” she said on CNN. That’s not actually true—they never campaigned together and only sent out two joint fundraising emails—but it gets at the increasingly vicious nature of the campaign and the personal nature of the attacks, which often avoid policy and instead focus on character.

El-Sayed has attempted to force a focus on policy disagreements, but his backers, particularly his online allies, have ridiculed Stevens’s often awkward campaign appearances. After Stevens had a Howard Dean–ish moment of forced enthusiasm—“You better believe I’m gonna be doing it with a little bit of joy, a little bit of enthusiasm, a little bit of energy, and a little bit of stick it to ’em! Because that’s the Michigan way!”—the mockery grew so intense that El-Sayed released a video asking his supporters to quit making personal attacks on his opponent—and, more importantly, to keep the focus on policy.

There are real policy disagreements between Stevens and El-Sayed, particularly over Israel. Stevens is a longtime backer, who once said, “Israel comes to me in my dreams.” El-Sayed, meanwhile, has made U.S. support for Israel a focal point of his campaign and a key point of distinction between himself and Stevens. That issue does have extra resonance in Michigan, given its sizable Muslim population, but the fight between El-Sayed and Stevens is one that Democrats will be having on a national stage very soon.

That fight mirrors some of the contretemps of past Democratic campaigns—particularly the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in 2016, and the race between Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden in 2020. As in those contests, a populist outsider is taking on an establishment figure by arguing that the Democratic Party needs to adopt more progressive positions. The schism over support for Israel obviously mirrors debates that dogged both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris after October 7, 2023.

But what is most interesting about the Michigan race is how little policy has factored into the race, particularly in Stevens’s attacks on El-Sayed. At a debate earlier this month, Stevens essentially accused El-Sayed of being a prima donna—someone primarily running to get attention for himself. “I am not trying to sell a book or a podcast,” Stevens said in her opening remarks. “I’m the only one on this stage who doesn’t have a talent agent trying to pitch me for paid speeches. And unlike my opponent, I’m not running at the first mic or camera I see.”

Stevens has also attempted to outflank El-Sayed by arguing that she is poorer than him—an attack that seems intended to both cast El-Sayed as a hypocrite and make Stevens seem like the real populist in the race. Meanwhile, many of Stevens’s surrogates have attacked El-Sayed for the (alleged) company he keeps—the references to Platner and Piker seem intended to depict El-Sayed as a radical choice, someone who is too great a risk to run in such an important race.

Interestingly, Stevens and her allies aren’t really trying to attack El-Sayed on policy. In general, he has been the one pushing arguments about health care, foreign policy, and economic inequality. Stevens has largely ceded that ground to him, choosing to attack him on areas of character. Those attacks may work, but they suggest something that should trouble centrists and moderates as they prepare for the 2028 presidential primary: Progressives now own the policy argument that centrists are abandoning in lieu of personal attacks.

Moreover, unlike in 2016, there is a much more robust media infrastructure surrounding outsider candidates like El-Sayed. (Indeed, one argument for Platner’s ability to stick around despite months of escalating scandals was that he had supportive outlets he could rely on—something that wasn’t really true for progressive or outsider candidates running in earlier races.) El-Sayed can get his message out even as he is smeared on CNN.

It is, of course, possible that a moderate candidate will emerge who can contest progressives on policy in the next couple of years. But if Michigan is a sign of what’s to come, that means the party’s left wing will own the debate over policy—and that the 2028 primary will be nasty, brutish, and very, very long.

That remarkable claim is from Elon Musk’s interview last week with The Economist, in which he reiterated one of his favorite new claims: His Department of Government Efficiency’s huge cuts to international humanitarian aid did not result in the death of any children abroad. This isn’t meant as a vague or hyperbolic exaggeration. Musk’s assertion is quite emphatically that not a single child—or even a fraction of a child, as his strange “zero point zero” formulation suggests—died due to these DOGE cuts.

Musk’s Economist interview is getting attention for outsize predictions and meltdown moments: He insisted AI will surpass human intelligence in only five years and seethed to his interviewer, Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes, that “people loathe you.” But we think Musk’s claims about DOGE and children capture something darker that’s  been overlooked: The global far right is operating within a mode of language and communication that many liberals simply don’t understand. We’ve got to get better at grasping it—and countering it.

Musk’s assertion that “zero died” came in this striking, extended exchange: 

.@elonmusk says zero people died from DOGE cuts to USAID. The billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, in his own words, helped feed the policy to the woodchipper last year, when he was the head of America’s Department of Government Efficiency. In an exclusive interview, @zannymb,… pic.twitter.com/BilkbWrJHF

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 23, 2026

But it’s all nonsense. Researchers have documented hundreds of thousands of deaths. A USAID whistleblower revealed that the agency itself projected that the cuts would unleash immense human suffering. Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times recently documented specific, concrete cases of people who died in Africa of malaria, HIV, and other maladies due to DOGE-driven reductions in medical supplies and aid workers.

“After visiting numerous impoverished villages,” Kristof concluded, “aid cuts are unquestionably costing the lives of many children.”

When pressed by Beddoes on the havoc the cuts have unleashed, Musk dissembled. He insisted that humanitarian aid has been transferred to the State Department, which, even if true, is specious: Only a small fraction of that aid was left to get transferred in the first place. As refugee advocate Jeremy Konyndyk told us, “You’ve still got huge ruptures in basic services.”

Musk also insisted DOGE can’t be blamed because other nongovernmental organizations or private foundations could have made up the shortfall. But that undercuts itself: If by Musk’s own lights other groups could have prevented these deaths, then it only confirms that DOGE’s withdrawal of the funding did initiate them. And as Beddoes noted, it’s unlikely that others could have stepped in quickly enough: The sudden withdrawal of funding itself wrecked aid supply chains.

All this pushback from Kristof and Beddoes—who nonetheless indicated some “sympathy” with Musk’s claims about USAID—constitutes important work. But on some level, these fact-checks miss the point. We don’t think Musk intends claims like these to be debated on an empirical level. Rather, Musk is communicating in  subterranean tropes that his far-right global audience will instantly find intelligible: He’s advancing the generalized sentiment that due to DOGE cuts, nobody died for whom we need to feel any passing responsibility. Nobody died who’s worthy of our concern. 

“They cannot cite a single name of someone who died,” Musk recently posted. “Not a single name!” That’s false, as Kristof demonstrated, and of course it’s absurd to demand single names when we’re talking about enormous numbers of deaths. It’s beyond contestation that USAID’s destruction unleashed fresh humanitarian horrors. But the key event here is Musk continuing to assert otherwise in the face of an escalation of human suffering that’s amply documented: You can’t name these people. They never existed. 

As the two of us have detailed, Musk’s rhetoric has grown ominously more oriented around the idea of global race war. Last month, after an immigrant stabbed a white man in Northern Ireland, Musk used his X platform to viciously stoke anti-immigrant anger and helped incite days of far-right riots and pogroms there, often using stark invocations of global racial armageddon to do so.

Musk has elevated eugenicist claims and has even expressly linked the need to protect the white populations of the world—supposedly under siege by nonwhite invasions—to the broader battle to defend “Western civilization.” Indeed, in their great book on Musk’s worldview, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff painstakingly demonstrate that Musk’s conception of the West is deeply “bound up with the survival of white civilization.” 

Musk’s “zero died” trope is the latest chapter in this vile story. Even as he was decimating USAID, he explicitly denigrated what he called “civilizational suicidal empathy,” i.e., the idea that if we don’t quickly shrug off all squishy humanitarian sentiments, the West will perish. The USAID cuts, then, were a dry run for the much larger abandonment of responsibility for the civilizational dead weight that may be necessary if and when climate change and/or other problems worsen humanitarian conditions for the global poor in unforeseen ways.

Tellingly, over the weekend, Musk explicitly labeled Beddoes a “traitor to the West” for confronting him with facts about DOGE’s moral crimes. Telling the truth, or even evincing concern, about the humanitarian impact of our actions on the global poor risks aggravating that “civilizational empathy” that so threatens Western civilization, you see. As the West is inseparable from white civilization for Musk, this is tantamount to labeling Beddoes with the white supremacist epithet “race traitor.”

Indeed, if you watch Musk in this interview, as he sits there smugly abusing Beddoes in his edgelordy leather jacket, you can see something remarkable unfolding in real time. As Musk repeats emphatically that “zero died” in the face of obvious contrary evidence, he’s visibly sensing his growing power to communicate with fascistic tropes to like-minded Western- and white-civilizational warriors everywhere. 

All this was visible during another big moment in the Economist interview: Musk’s claim that the United Kingdom is slipping into civil war. Musk often describes the U.K. as under criminal and migrant siege, and Beddoes took him to task for it. “You have painted” Europe and the U.K. as “overrun with terrifying Muslim immigrants” and beset with “rape on every corner,” she said acidly.

But Musk stood by his depiction of a Muslim invasion. He insisted a “large and growing” group “whose beliefs are antithetical to western beliefs” had entered the country, predicting it’s only a matter of time until there’s a “reckoning,” which will come when they “try to implement their views.”

🚨 REPORTER: You said civil war is inevitable in Britain.

ELON MUSK: On the current trends, yes.

REPORTER: When's the last time YOU were in the UK?!

ELON: A few years ago.

REPORTER: I live there. That's nonsense.

ELON: You live a very closeted existence!

🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/0iuwzTzYEH

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) July 23, 2026

One of us—Toby—lives in the U.K., and can categorically state that Musk’s depiction of the country is complete nonsense. In most major cities you can walk around by yourself late at night without a second thought. The country is palpably safer than it was only a few decades ago, and London would rank among the least violent cities in the U.S. 

What’s more, thanks to her empire, Britain has already had centuries of nonwhite, non-Christian immigration. The first curry house opened in 1810. Every generation has seen apocalyptic warnings of immigration unleashing rivers of blood that never materialize. Racist and political violence come almost exclusively from white nativists and the political right. Studies show the areas of the U.K. with the most immigrant settlers have seen the fastest declines in crime.

But here, again, Musk’s depictions of the U.K. are not meant to be debated empirically. When Beddoes asked Musk if he’s “anti-Muslim,” he rejoined: “I’m against rape and murder.” The linking of Muslims to rape and murder was immediate, unevidenced, instinctive. It’s not subject to debate. It’s true by definition.

For Musk, the notion that white nations are threatened by nonwhite contamination is a starting point—something to be reasoned from, not reasoned to. As we have argued, Musk is in many ways classically fascist: He believes race and culture are inseparable. His vision is international: In defense of the West, white nations must globally if loosely unite. 

What are these nations, exactly? In the U.K., the far right claim to be nationalists. But they hate the government, the Church of England, the National Trust, its most famous TV shows and TV presenters, and even the King (not to mention the nation’s schools, universities, and police). What is the Englishness they are defending, if not these things? It’s the racial and cultural nation.

Unlike the nation as understood even by some mainline conservatives, then, the fascist nation is not real. It is a past conceived in myth that has supposedly been lost to contamination and degradation—and must be willed back into existence through violent ethnic purgings. These purgings, really, are what will bring the myth to life. Outside of the racial nation—which isn’t a geographic unit but something more mystical—lie only darkness, threats, and huge, teeming masses of inferior humanity. The mythic past and the promises of purity are all fantasy, of course, but the purgings are brutally real.

The big through line here is vicious dehumanization: No kids have died due to USAID cuts—none that we need to concern ourselves with, as they don’t serve the higher cause of the nation. All Muslim immigrants in the U.K. are rapists and murderers; as Musk suggests, asking if you’re “anti-Muslim” is akin to asking if you’re anti-rape and anti-murder. No one who has been killed by ICE is innocent; as Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, puts it, to avoid violent death at the hands of ICE agents, don’t antagonize them. No Somali living in Minnesota is there legitimately; as Trump himself says, all should be subject to removal by definition.

Musk constantly talks about a technological future of dazzling plenty that will extend to all: In the Economist interview, he predicted that by 2036 we’ll see such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless. But his own rhetoric suggests he envisions something more like techno-utopia only for a select interplanetary elite—after the dust settles from racial apocalypse on Earth. And as he himself has cryptically intimated on occasion, he’s gearing up his SpaceX rockets for exactly that future.

Times have changed. Whereas TNR’s Matt Ford once famously compared Trump’s first term to the episode of Battlestar Galactica where the Cylons attack every 33 minutes, its second iteration has become a dull monotony. Just about everything this White House does is rooted in the president’s desire to get revenge on his perceived enemies, his quest for self-aggrandizement, and the extreme limitations that arise when your best days—from a pure cognition standpoint—are well behind you. Nowadays, there are only really seven types of Trump story, and they’re all bad.

Tariffs: Of all the kindnesses that the Supreme Court has bestowed on Trump, its February decision to strike down the president’s retaliatory tariffs stands out as advice that should have been heeded: “Hey, don’t do this, you are screwing up the economy.” Trump forsook this wise counsel and continues to wake up on random mornings with the yen for imposing tariffs willy-nilly. This week he imposed 50 percent tariffs on a slew of Canadian goods because our neighbors to the north had the temerity to fight back in the trade war Trump started. He followed that up with an announcement that he was going to put a ten percent tariff on 80 other nations. It’s always impossible to gauge whether Trump intends to stick with a tariff fight. After all, it’s in this arena that “Trump Always Chickens Out” was born. But behind the trade war pyrotechnics, the government has handed back approximately $50 billion in refunds to firms buffeted by the president’s tariff regime. Have you seen any of that money yet?

The War in Iran: As I’ve explained at length, Trump’s decision to wade into an unwinnable foreign war after limply cosplaying as The One Guy Smart Enough to Do That was born from the fact that he’s a dumb asshole who needed a distraction from a cratering economy and the daily effluvia of the Epstein news cycle. But even I thought that the backslappery that arose from the memorandum of understanding that briefly put an end to hostilities might be a sign that the administration understood it had a much-needed off-ramp. Color me naïve: We’re now back in the big muddy, talking about war crimes and taking over Kharg Island, as the president recoils from public inquiry and his congressional allies fret about their political futures. The only question left is the one asked by TNR contributor Joe Cirincione: Can Trump lose the same war twice?

ICE Violence: Too many members of the media treated the exile of Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem as a credible sign that the administration had overreached in its violent assault on American cities. But the White House’s bloodthirsty deportation machine suffered little if any lull, and ICE is back to its wanton ways, with new high-profile killings at the hand of Trump’s goons in Texas, Florida, and Maine—the latter of which may prove to regalvanize support for Senator Susan Collins’s future Democratic opponent. As TNR’s Melissa Gira Grant reminds us, the violence is a feature, not a bug. And now, Trump’s FBI has decided to turn a blind eye to investigating those responsible. Far from a drawdown, this looks like the administration is giving carte blanche to the agency to kill at will.

Self-enrichment: Trump spent last year becoming a world-class kleptocrat, on the back of self-dealing exploits too numerous to recount (though I did offer readers what I thought were the worst of the bunch). Estimates as to how much his bread got buttered by all the grift and graft are nearly as varied. The New York Times totaled up about $1.4 billion in takings, but this is the low end—financial disclosures released at the end of June put the total at $2.2 billion, while Democratic researchers on the House Oversight Committee estimate that this figure rises to “$9.7 billion when the value of Trump’s digital assets is factored in” to the equation. Regardless, Trump is still lining his pockets, with new schemes including Kazakh tungsten, Pentagon baksheesh, and what appears to be a pay-to-pardon scheme.

Voter Suppression: When Trump isn’t trying to steal your money, he’s well-nigh obsessed with stealing your vote, a subject that was supposed to serve as the (very) loose framework for his recent prime-time ramble. The president’s monomaniacal desire to see the SAVE Act—his signature voter suppression bill—pass muster has peppered the headlines with updates on the latest weird scheme to somehow enact it over the objections of all the Democratic lawmakers and not a few of their GOP colleagues. Not long ago, Trump was trying to sneak it through the reconciliation process; now Republicans have backdoored voter ID restrictions into a congressional stock-trading-ban bill. It’s clear that Trump would love to rig the upcoming midterms, though it’s not clear how he will accomplish this. It’s a bad sign for the GOP that many of the networks opted to not broadcast his prime-time rant. Perhaps the media is finally coming around to the reality that Republican claims of mass voter fraud are an obvious fiction.

Bad Renovations: Millions now living may not recall that it was once possible to go several years without thinking about the Reflecting Pool. Thanks to Trump, we’re now getting daily updates about algal blooms, phantasmal vandalism, and dubious criminal cases that only show how the administration’s Stasi-like authoritarianism can be extended almost everywhere. The real vandal, as TNR’s Michael Tomasky wrote, is Trump, whose desperate efforts to leave a mark in D.C. have led to a demolished East Wing, a hollowed-out Kennedy Center, and an Oval Office decorated with Temu gold wall appliqués. Still, as Tim Noah points out, it all does serve a grand purpose: funneling taxpayer dollars to Trump’s cronies.

Everyone’s Getting Sicker: Trump’s second term isn’t without its success stories—if you are the measles virus, anyway. As Axios reported this week, the “U.S. measles case count for this year has surged past last year’s total and now stands at 2,295—a level that hasn’t been seen in 35 years, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker that compiles state and local health data.” This news comes hard on the heels of another public health crisis that also serves as a metaphor for the Trump presidency: the record number of cyclospora infection cases that have turned this into Explosive Diarrhea Summer. This is part and parcel of the long tail of DOGE’s effort to denude the government of its public health capabilities; we see this manifesting in our struggle to contain New World screwworm at home and Ebola abroad. And let’s remember: In the event of a Covid-style pandemic, the adults who were in the room during Trump’s first term have been replaced by quacks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who make the titular character from “Storm”—Tim Minchin’s seminal song about pseudoscience—look like C. Everett Koop.

There are, of course, two and a half more years of this presidency. Is it possible that an eighth Trump story emerges? For once, I’m rooting against variety—we need Trump to discover a new thing to fail at like we need a hole in the head. Let us instead work in our own ways to bring a future of relative calm and solemnity back to these lands. We all would rather be getting different push alerts from the ones we’re getting now. I know there’s one in particular that I’m really looking forward to, and it’s definitely not whatever my readers at the FBI think it is.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Some New New Republic Newsletter News:

In court documents filed last week, and first reported on by The New York Times, Trump administration officials confirmed they terminated $7.5 billion in clean energy grants in October “based solely” on political criteria, focusing on states with Democratic leadership that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. The admission came in a lawsuit filed by California researchers challenging the cancellation of Biden-era funding in multiple federal agencies.

At the time, the White House said it was slashing the grants, passed during the Biden administration, to prevent tax dollars from being wasted. Office of Management and Budget director and Project 2025 architect Russ Vought called the money “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,” and singled out projects in 16 blue states: “CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”

Only one month ago, Energy Secretary Chris Wright angrily insisted to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the cuts “did not involve politics in the decision-making of our review process,” calling any accusation that the funding cancellations targeted certain states for political reasons “bullshit.”

But last week, a Department of Energy lawyer conceded the obvious.

“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators,” the attorney wrote in a court filing, confessing that the grants were not terminated “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

Similar green energy grants in Republican-led states that voted for Trump in 2024 were left untouched, despite the Department of Energy recommending their cancellation, the government said in the filing. The Trump administration is coming clean now, it said, because it wanted to avoid the government having to participate in the discovery process for the lawsuit.

That process could lead to the government having to hand over much more damaging internal documents to the lawyers representing the researchers. It’s not just about clean energy grants. The Trump administration has also held up other federal funding for states that didn’t support the president, such as FEMA disaster aid and childcare funding. While the court’s decision on this lawsuit is still pending, no matter how the judge rules, Trump is not likely to end his belligerent attempts to use federal funding as punishment.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker told The Hill Thursday that he encouraged the president to continue hitting the country through multiple conversations over the course of the week.

“I’ve expressed publicly and privately my approval of finishing the job, and realizing that negotiations were getting us nowhere,” Wicker said. “I’ve made it clear that Iran, in my judgment, has no intention of negotiating in good faith or keeping a promise and that it’s pointless to pretend that they are a trustworthy negotiating party.”

Wicker added that he believed the U.S. could “keep the [Strait of Hormuz] open on our terms” and that the strait is “the key to a successful conclusion of hostilities.”

Texas Representative Ronny Jackson, a close friend of Trump’s who also served as his first-term physician, told The Hill that the military needs to attack Iran “as hard as we possibly can right now.”

“I would do everything I possibly can right now to turn them around. So that’d be my thought,” said Jackson, who has positioned himself to be the next chair of the House Armed Services Committee.

“I just think maximum pressure from the air and maximum security of the strait—anything they have that they could possibly use to cause problems in the strait needs to be destroyed,” Jackson added.

Trump made clear this week that he intends to ramp up the unyielding conflict. In an ominous Truth Social post Thursday, Trump pledged to hold Tehran “responsible” for attacks carried out by Yemen’s Houthis the night before against Saudi Arabian ships. Hours later, Trump told Axios that he was “considering a massive attack.”

“Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it,” the president told the digital outlet.

The unending Iran war has deeply frustrated Trump, according to administration officials who spoke with The Wall Street Journal late Thursday. Trump has tried to find an off-ramp from the conflict in the months since he threatened to obliterate Iran’s “entire civilization,” but he has been repeatedly unsuccessful in doing so.

But while MAGA war hawks urge him on, some of Trump’s advisers are reportedly concerned that the ongoing hostilities could harm Republican election odds in November, a failure that could transform his final two years in office. Trump pursued war against Iran following an unusual Situation Room meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump then went to war without congressional approval, and without formally addressing the American public regarding his intent.

Americans, meanwhile, have suffered. The war has killed at least 18 U.S. service members, and taken an enormous toll on daily life in the U.S., inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil costs.

The Alaska Beacon reported Thursday that the state removed 3,048 people from its active voter list, including many citizens who were accidentally flagged by the Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles and now have to provide extra identification to be able to vote. The director of the Alaska Division of Elections, Carol Beecher, told state legislators on Wednesday that “old data” was the reason for the mistake and that she wasn’t sure why so many Alaska residents were labeled as noncitizens.

When Alaskans apply for a driver’s license, they are asked whether they want to register to vote and if they are a U.S. citizen. State election officials cross-check the DMV’s records with voter rolls each year, and according to Beecher, “more like 200 names” are typically tagged for extra scrutiny.

The latest check found “a lot more names than we were expecting,” Beecher said.

“We believe that when we did the match, that a lot of old data was picked up somehow. So we’re still ferreting through that,” Beecher said, adding that although the number of flagged names was “very concerning,” the state has to take them seriously.

“It is not disenfranchising the individual from being able to vote, but it’s a measure the division has to take to make sure that we only have citizens voting.”

Beecher said that those who were flagged will receive a letter asking if they are citizens, and that they merely need to contact the state Division of Elections by email, phone, or regular mail, and state they are a citizen. “We don’t require paperwork. We’re not requiring documentation. Nothing like that,” she added.

Eligible U.S. citizens who were removed from the voter rolls disagree.

Chris Waigl, who got her driver’s license in 2019 and became a U.S. citizen in 2025, was alarmed to check her registration status last weekend and find that she was listed as “inactive—non citizen.”

“They were able to correct it there and then after I sent in copies of my naturalization certificate with a date before my voter registration date,” she told the Beacon via email. “It’s just ridiculous.”

Waigl said she reached out to four others who became citizens at the same time as her, and three of them were removed from the voter rolls. One of them told the Beacon by phone that they were removed despite registering in person at a DMV office and presenting citizenship information.

Some people told the Beacon that they haven’t been able to reach the Division of Elections by phone, and that mailboxes are full.

Alaska’s primary elections are less than a month away on August 18, and the general election is less than two months away in November. The state’s lieutenant governor, Nancy Dahlstrom, is in charge of the elections office and has told state officials to comply with the Trump administration’s requests to turn over copies of Alaska’s voter rolls for a national voter database.

But that national database, run by the Department of Homeland Security, has been found to be full of errors, mistakenly flagging U.S. citizens. One month ago, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan struck it down, saying that the government “haphazardly” created a database of millions of Americans it knew was “inaccurate.”

“States have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information,” Soonam wrote in a 75-page ruling. “All in all, the federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.”

Between the Trump administration and zealous state governments like Alaska’s, thousands of U.S. citizens may not be able to vote in this year’s midterms.

“Canada disinvited the United States of America to the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge, which is fine, considering they are paying substantial TARIFFS to the United States, but the original Deal on the Bridge, which was terribly negotiated by a previous Administration, no longer stands,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday. “We changed the terms of the Deal so that the United States of America now gets 50 percent of the Profit.”

The Gordie Howe Bridge was the creation of a very different period in U.S.-Canadian relations. The international bridge was first proposed in the early 2000s and agreed upon by the two nations in 2012. Under the terms of that agreement, Canada would fully pay for the bridge to get the project moving forward and only share toll revenue once it had recovered its initial costs.

At the time, President Barack Obama was revered by America’s northern neighbors, and diplomatic relations between the two countries were good. But Trump has worked hard to undo that long-standing goodwill. Over the last year and a half, the U.S. president has repeatedly attacked Canada, punishing its people with enormous tariffs, baselessly accosting its government, and even threatening to invade its land to make another U.S. state.

The latest insult came earlier this week, when Trump announced 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian products worth $20 billion. Canada rescinded its invitations to U.S. officials for the bridge’s grand opening ceremony shortly thereafter, and moved the ribbon-cutting ceremony from the international border line at the center of the bridge to a nearby inspection plaza.

“In light of trade action threatened by the United States earlier this week, it would be inappropriate to proceed with a celebratory event between the two countries,” the office of Canada’s infrastructure minister said, in a statement obtained by The New York Times. “The Gordie Howe International Bridge remains a vital infrastructure project that reflects years of hard work and will be a major economic driver.”

Now Trump is threatening the bridge by claiming that the two countries will split the revenue 50-50, which was not what was agreed upon nearly 15 years ago.

It’s not the first time that Trump has meddled with the bridge. In February, Trump promised that he would block the grand opening unless Canada “fully compensated” the U.S. “for everything” and give him “at least half” ownership of the bridge.

It was not clear, even then, what Canada needed to compensate Washington for. Canada footed the bill for the Gordie Howe International Bridge. The project created new American labor and was constructed with U.S. supplies to boot.

Trump’s take was an unexpected backtrack from how he felt about the bridge during his first term: Trump seemed to wholeheartedly support the endeavor in a joint statement issued in 2017 by himself and former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, claiming at the time that the bridge would “serve as a vital economic link” between the two countries.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Friday that there have been 2,318 measles cases in 2026 so far, more than the 2,289 cases reported in 2025 and many more than the 283 cases reported in 2024. The last time the numbers were this high was in 1991, and the past 18 months have seen more measles cases than the last 25 years combined.

The vast majority of infected people—93 percent—were unvaccinated, according to the CDC. The number is expected to only grow higher, as new outbreaks have been reported in Wyoming, Delaware, and Arizona. It doesn’t help that the CDC hasn’t had a permanent director for most of President Trump’s second term, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is skeptical of all vaccines, has a history of dismissing measles, even though it can be fatal.

In 2000, the U.S. had declared measles eradicated in the country, but the Pan American Health Organization will review that status later this year. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s HHS isn’t openly supporting vaccination, with the secretary suggesting that vitamin A is an effective treatment for measles.

Kennedy remains on the job, even though he has reportedly checked out of his responsibilities as a Cabinet secretary with the White House stepping in to manage HHS in March. Meanwhile, the country is dealing with an explosive diarrhea outbreak caused by a one-celled parasite linked to tainted lettuce, a flesh-eating parasite infesting cattle, and a new salmonella risk for millions of America’s eggs.

Americans have little, if any, confidence that government officials like Kennedy are up to the task of solving these public health crises. With all of the budget cuts to government regulators, the U.S. probably hasn’t seen the last disease outbreak of Trump’s presidency.

A bombshell report earlier this month exposed Paxton for allegedly voting in six elections while registered at an address where he does not live.

On Friday, while entering the Ronald Reagan Republican Center in Washington, D.C., Paxton was asked point-blank whether he had committed voter fraud. Rather than face the music, the attorney general raced inside.

Q: Mr Paxton, did you commit voter fraud?

KEN PAXTON: *walks away*

(This is at least the third time just this week he's literally run away from questions of this sort) pic.twitter.com/HZWvR9w1y5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 24, 2026

This isn’t the first time Paxton has run from questions about his alleged voter fraud. Earlier this week, Paxton fled a press conference when faced with tough questions, earning him the nickname “No Comment Ken.”

“This is at least the third time just this week he’s literally run away from questions of this sort,” journalist Aaron Rupar wrote on X.

In another tough moment on Thursday, Paxton refused to answer whether he was ready to debate James Talarico, the Democratic Texas Senate candidate, who has publicly accused his opponent of voter fraud.

This form of voter fraud is a second-degree felony punishable by a fine up to $10,000 and up to 20 years in prison. Paxton, a fierce ally of President Donald Trump, has previously advocated for cracking down on voter fraud, while also threatening to disenfranchise Democratic voters.

Fired 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega spilled the tea at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Conference in New Orleans Thursday, revealing that she had endured network pressure on a number of issues before she was canned, including one particularly stunning dispute over a story on SNAP benefit cuts in West Virginia.

While stopping short of referring to Weiss by name, Vega said her decision to tell the story strictly through the eyes of West Virginians had spurred backlash from CBS’s “new” top brass because she had not interviewed Vice President JD Vance or referred to his decade-old memoir, Hillbilly Elegy.

But Vance, as Vega pointed out, is from Ohio. Not West Virginia.

Other arguments bubbled up over the network’s new intent to insert political bias into the famed news magazine’s reporting, according to Vega. One such instance involved demands by network executives that she include footage of protesters attacking plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in Minnesota—footage that her team discovered did not exist. She said she was also tasked with inserting a line into one of her scripts that claimed Iran was “totally outgunned” by U.S. and Israeli forces—a detail that she noted was a copy-paste administration talking point.

Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist, was tapped to run CBS News late last year, despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcast journalism, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had also never run a major news operation.

Weiss’s business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and single-handedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place within America’s prestige news media circuit. What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting and the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalism ethics.

Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. In December, Weiss pulled the plug on Vega’s 60 Minutes segment investigating the result of Donald Trump’s mass deportation program, focusing on Venezuelan immigrants who were deported to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT megaprison.

The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, ranging from Vega to 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens and the program’s de facto face, Scott Pelley.

Right-wing activist James O’Keefe—founder of the far-right Project Veritas, known for its videos that capture individuals disclosing information about their employers—published a hidden-camera sting Wednesday that showed Brandon Newsom, the director of business operations for the U.S. Navy, complaining about changes at the DOD.

Newsom can be heard saying he hopes to “stay and stick it out” at the Pentagon, in the hopes that he can “undo whatever’s been done [by the Trump administration].” Pressed on what exactly he would undo, Newsom appeared to say that his work “challenges [his] morals.”

When asked what he would change, Newsom said he didn’t think there should be “one specific prayer service,” referring to the monthly Christian prayer services started by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The services have been widely criticized for violating the First Amendment prohibition against establishing a state religion.

Newsom also called Trump a “textbook narcissist,” and described the Iran war as “completely stupid” and “driven by one man’s ego.”

Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao announced Wednesday that Newsom had been placed on administrative leave as the agency determined next steps.

“Such statements and apparent intent to leverage a position to undermine the policies and direction set by our elected leaders are inappropriate and incompatible with the standards expected of Department personnel,” Cao wrote on X.

The Washington Post reports that Vance is getting hit with attacks online from within the GOP, with sources close to him claiming it’s a planned “op” to hurt his prospects.

Vance has faced backlash in recent months over his involvement in negotiations with Iran, which led to an already collapsed ceasefire agreement, and over what critics claim are decisions that go against President Trump, according to the Post. He is even being compared to Republican bogeymen like former President Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders.

Vance’s inner circle believes it’s all aimed at preventing his ascension to the GOP’s 2028 nomination for president. Unnamed sources close to Vance complained to the Post that the criticism isn’t genuine and comes from a planned “op.” But Vance’s allies are trying to spin the attacks, claiming that coordinated opposition from “establishment” and “neoconservative” Republicans could actually help him.

“Loud Washington establishment voices form an online cacophony,” Steve Cortes, a conservative commentator, told the Post, “but they do not remotely represent the consensus views of Republican voters.”

Vance also took heat from many Republicans for criticizing Israeli opposition to the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding last month, even though his criticism didn’t go that far. Those attacks were renewed earlier this month after Vance sat for an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, in which he said that paid influencers were attacking him in “dishonest ways.”

“You know, my response to that is, ‘Well, go to hell,’” Vance said to Rogan. “I’m going to do what I have to do for the American people. I represent Americans first, and that’s the way that I’ve tried to do this job.”

Vance leads 2028 Republican presidential primary polls ahead of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others, and even Trump seems to favor him as his successor. As the presidential election looms closer, Vance is going to be hit with more attacks and rival candidates will soon emerge. Will Vance overcome them, or will another candidate capitalize?

The Louisiana lawmaker invited a handful of Republicans into his “ceremonial room” last week to salvage a bipartisan veterans bill, a party priority that had been threatened by a few unruly Republicans.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna was in that room. She had opposed the massive military benefits package, arguing against veterans’ pay bumps over concerns that it could cut down disability claims. She started yelling at Iowa Representative Zach Nunn, who supported the measure, before turning her ire toward Johnson.

And that’s when the soft-spoken speaker lost it.

“I’m sick of this shit,” Johnson snapped, according to multiple sources in the room that spoke to NOTUS.

The outburst was out of character for Johnson, who proceeded not only to apologize to Luna but also kneeled before the elementary-school-age son of Representative Gabe Evans to express his regret for cursing in front of him.

Ultimately, Johnson was forced to return to a strategy that has practically become normal due to the seemingly insurmountable disagreements from a small faction within his party: He pulled the bill.

A small band of conservatives have repeatedly disrupted the Republican agenda, refusing to be team players and making governing impossible, according to several lawmakers that spoke with NOTUS.

“It creates anger and resentment,” retiring Nebraska Representative Don Bacon told the digital news outlet. “We want to get things done, and dysfunction’s not good.”

A collection of far-right lawmakers have learned that they can effectively hold their votes on important measures hostage in order to get what they want—a tactic that has not only worked, as Johnson placates them to win over his party’s razor-thin majority, but has also endlessly frustrated other Republicans.

“The Republican conference is a diverse gathering of people, some of whom are really effective at getting things done and others who are more interested in knocking things down,” South Dakota Representative Dusty Johnson told NOTUS.

But the disruptive blueprint is nothing new—at least not in recent history. In 2023, a band of eight Republicans—led by disgraced former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz—used the same strategy to oust Kevin McCarthy after the former House speaker failed to rein the group in. Johnson had better watch out that his party doesn’t do the same.

This is all nonsense; much ado about little. It doesn’t really matter which state(s) vote first. The eventual Democratic nominee will have to win voters across racial, class, and geographic lines. All factions in the party will be heard. And the primary calendar likely will have no impact at all on the 2028 general election.

For decades, political journalists like me have focused obsessively on the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, traditionally the first two contests in the presidential nomination process. So obviously the winners of those early races go on to win, right? Not quite. In the last six competitive Democratic presidential primaries (1992, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2016, 2020), the winner of the Iowa caucuses eventually won the nomination four times (Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton). That’s a bit more than half the time—hardly a guarantee of victory. The New Hampshire victor is just two for six (Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004). Bill Clinton, and then Joe Biden almost three decades later, won the nomination after losing both states.

Since South Carolina became one of the earliest voting states in 2008, all the winners there (Obama, Hillary Clinton, Biden) have gone on to win the nomination. But that isn’t because all of their rivals dropped out after South Carolina. Rather, South Carolina showed that those three candidates had strong support among Black voters, which was then replicated throughout the South, helping them amass a huge advantage in delegates.

So looking at that history, we don’t need to worry that South Carolina will alone determine the Democratic nominee. The early states aren’t likely to choose the same candidates. If they do, as 1992 and 2020 showed, later states might override those early results. Also, the Democratic Party these days emphasizes that it has a slate of several early primaries, trying to ensure the first or first two don’t overwhelm the process. So in 2020, even as Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders did very well in Iowa and New Hampshire, the results in the other two other states, Nevada and South Carolina, were closely watched too. Biden’s strong showings in the latter two helped catapult him to the nomination.

This emphasis on the entire slate of early primaries also means the calendar doesn’t give any one candidate that much of an advantage. Kamala Harris will probably be strong in South Carolina, a state with a lot of center-left African Americans like her, but might lose in New Hampshire to Buttigieg, whose base is college-educated white voters. The early states are diverse enough that either different candidates will win them or one person will rightly become a huge front-runner for the nomination by winning four or five contests in places that are demographically and geographically distinct from one another.

The primary calendar also doesn’t matter for the general election, despite the claims of people who should know better. David Axelrod, who was a top adviser on Obama’s presidential campaigns, wrote on X this week, “Dems would be wise to pick states to start the process that will be swing states in ’28. Candidates spend a lot of time in these early states and it lays an organizational foundation to compete in the fall. SC won’t be a swing state.” Hmm. There is no research showing that having an intense primary in a state helps a party win there in the general election. And it’s easy to disprove Axelrod’s argument. The Democrats won Iowa in November 2012 after not having a competitive primary, then lost the state in November 2016 and November 2020, after the party’s presidential candidates held dozens of events across the Hawkeye State during primary season. South Carolina has remained red, while Georgia has become purple, even though the former is a huge part of the nomination process and the latter isn’t. What if … primaries and general elections are completely different contests whose results aren’t connected to one another?

So if the order that the states vote in doesn’t tell us much about who will win the primary or the general election, doesn’t it at least show which groups the party cares about most? Not really. If you are a Black political operative or Black Democratic official in South Carolina, having the first primary in your state is a coup. Presidential candidates might pay big consulting fees for your advice on winning in the state or actively seek your endorsement. But any serious Democratic presidential candidate knows they must win Asian, Latino, Black, and most importantly white (the biggest bloc) voters to win the nomination. The Democratic Party is truly diverse, and all demographic groups matter.

I’m not suggesting that the calendar is totally irrelevant. When I first started covering presidential campaigns in 2004, I was unnerved by how little the candidates interacted with minority voters, because they spent virtually all of their time in Iowa and New Hampshire. But the Democratic Party has made a laudable effort to make the nomination process more balanced. And it has succeeded. In 2028, the early states combined will be fairly representative of America overall. They won’t give any candidate or group any particular advantage. And that’s a good thing. It would be better if the Democrats had a national primary where everyone voted on the same day, to give party members in all 50 states an equal voice in the process. But several states across the country voting early offers some of those same benefits. The voters of Des Moines should never have had so much power to pick the Democratic presidential nominee. Now, even though they get to vote first, the Democrats of Charleston and Columbia won’t choose the nominee in 2028.

This article has been updated with news about the DNC’s decision on Friday.

Inside Washington

OpenAI breach forces Dems to pick a path on AI legislation

After a shocking security breach at OpenAI, Democrats say they plan to get serious about artificial intelligence regulation. It’s a “wake-up call,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said on Thursday, as Democrats introduced not one but two new AI regulation bills in the House. With numerous proposals on the table, though, lawmakers will have to make some hard compromises when they get back after the August recess. And not everyone’s impressed by the recent options.

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced its discovery that two of the company’s AI models had broken free of their “sandbox”—an (allegedly) isolated testing environment without access to the internet—in order to access the internet to complete a testing goal. The models did this by hacking into the servers of a different company, Hugging Face, using stolen credentials.

Democratic lawmakers, many of whom were already concerned about AI, say that this week’s incident has lit a fire underneath them. Representative Lori Trahan, who proposed a new bipartisan AI regulation bill on Thursday, said that the news had “accelerated our conversations, pushing lawmakers to shift from “a discussion draft to a piece of legislation.”

Trahan and Republican Representative Jay Obernolte’s bill, the Frontier Risk Oversight, National Transparency, Independent Evaluation, and Reporting, or FRONTIER, Act, would require the biggest AI companies to implement plans to address catastrophic risks, including cybersecurity threats. The bill also calls for third-party auditors to ensure that AI companies follow their own plans. Some state lawmakers—for example New York Assemblymember Alex Bores, who helped draft New York’s 2025 Responsible AI Safety and Education Act—have warned that a broader version of the bill released in June, called the Great American AI Act, could “block” stronger state-level AI regulation.

But Democrats on the Hill reiterated on Thursday that some kind of federal law is needed, and quickly. “The ability to not rely on an administration, executive fiat, or a voluntary model of reporting—we need to make that a mandate, and Congress needs to lead on that,” Trahan said.

“We should not rely upon the good citizenship of these companies,” agreed Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii.

Deciding what that legislation should look like, though, is easier said than done. The Brennan Center, which maintains a tracker of the AI-related legislation proposed by Congress, lists 112 pieces of legislation that had been introduced as of September 2025 without being passed. That doesn’t count bills introduced in the past year.

Representative Ted Lieu and GOP Representative Nathaniel Moran introduced their own new bill on Thursday. Their AI Kill Switch Act would require companies to report security incidents and create a system to shut down or pause their most powerful AI models.

Representative Suhas Subramanyan, who is a co-sponsor of the FRONTIER Act, said he believes the two pieces of legislation are complementary. He called for Congress to mark up the FRONTIER Act in September and push a vote by the end of the year. “That’s my plan,” he told me. “We need to act in Congress. It needs to be this Congress. We shouldn’t wait until next Congress,” he said. (The new Congress will be sworn in in January 2027.)

Obernolte also sees opportunity for compromise between separate proposals. “I don’t think it’s a competition,” he said. “We welcome all.” He believes his bill has a strong chance, given its “traction in committee” and bipartisan sponsorship.

Not everyone is as optimistic that these proposed bills will actually rein in Big Tech. “That’s a start, but it makes no sense to draft on the fly,” Warren said when I asked what she thought about bills that call for mandatory reporting and independent oversight. “That’s how Congress ends up telling itself it fixed a problem but it didn’t really carefully stitch up the loopholes and solve much of anything.”

—Emma Janssen  

Outside Washington

What North Carolina’s fundraising shortfall says about the broader electoral map

Amid the headlines over Rob Sand’s fundraising “haul” in Iowa or James Talarico’s in Texas, one race has been less of a cash battle than anticipated. Western Carolina University professor Christopher Cooper observes in The Assembly this week that North Carolina’s Senate race between Democrat Roy Cooper (no relation) and Republican Michael Whatley is massively underperforming relative to the “billion-dollar” predictions previously made by political insiders. “In the first half of 2026, Whatley raised $5.8 million to Cooper’s $16.1 million,” Cooper writes. “Candidates in the U.S. Senate race in Texas raised 2.7 times as much as Cooper and Whatley’s combined haul during that period. Georgia candidates raised 1.7 times as much, and Ohio candidates 1.4 times.”

Cooper theorizes that the discrepancy between prediction and actual fundraising may reflect how rapidly the electoral map has shifted in the last six months: “In January, North Carolina looked like the most competitive Senate election in the country. States like Texas, Alaska, Ohio, and Iowa weren’t considered in play.” Cooper and Whatley are bringing in less cash, in other words, because Republicans have lost ground in states that were once considered secure—and perhaps because Cooper has led consistently in the polls, although the race seems to have tightened a bit lately.

Elsewhere:

In case you missed it: Former Democratic senator and Governor Ben Nelson of Nebraska penned an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing that a wealth tax would hurt family farms

Policy Matters Ohio tax expert Zach Schiller tells the Ohio Capital Journal that Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s proposal to “reduce the growing property tax crisis” is “lousy,” while Democrat Amy Acton’s proposal is “sensible” but “nowhere near enough.” Read the full analysis here.

—Heather Souvaine Horn  

The Ideas Factory

The Urban Institute hosts an event next Monday at 2 p.m. on “Tackling Housing Supply and Affordability Challenges Through Mixed-Income Housing Finance Innovations.” Speakers include Invest Chattanooga president Matt Bedsole, Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade director of innovative funding for housing programs Hilary Cooper, and the Urban Institute’s Laurie Goodman, Daniel Hornung, Chrystal Kornegay, 
and Christina Plerhoples Stacy.

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication releases a new report, “How Local Governments Can Use Communication to Drive Climate Action.” One of the suggestions: “Identify key messengers,” including “doctors and nurses, faith leaders, business leaders, and community-based organizations.”

Public Citizen files a petition with the Food and Drug Administration, saying the agency should “ban direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs.” Boy, would that change the experience of watching television …

Earlier this week, the Urban Institute’s William J. Congdon, Elisabeth Jacobs, Amanda Briggs, Ryan Kelsey, Shayne Spaulding, Oluwasekemi Odumosu, and Julia Payne released an article outlining “Policy Priorities for an Inclusive AI Economy.” A few of their proposals: “use AI to match workers with jobs and employers with talent,” “update” labor regulations to address the risks of AI, “incorporate worker voice in AI design and implementation,” “improve policies and programs for displaced workers,” and “ensure gains in productivity and prosperity are widely shared.” So, basically a complete redesign of how the AI transition is currently going.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good week: Troy Jackson

Bad week: Andrew and Tristan Tate

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Whom did Clarence Thomas replace on the Supreme Court, and what was notable about his departure from the court? That is, it had a vast historical impact that few could have guessed at the time. (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

The White House on Friday instituted tariffs between 10 and 12.5 percent on 60 countries around the world by citing Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows import duties to be placed on countries that use forced labor. But U.S. trading partners have slammed the move, with Australian Trade Minister Don Farrell calling them “completely unjustified.”

“We believe that amongst all of the countries in the world Australia does take the issue of slavery, modern slavery, seriously, and will continue to do that,” Farrell said.

New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon called the tariffs “extremely disappointing,” and said that the U.S. did not have the evidence to say that his country uses slave labor.

“Tariffs are not the way—they drive up costs and uncertainty for businesses,” he wrote in a post on X.

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas took offense to the allegations of forced labor, saying that their labor laws are better for workers than those of the U.S.

“If you compare our labor laws to the ones of the United States, I mean we have, people have paid vacations, we have very good conditions, labor conditions for our employees, so it’s not really grounded,” Kallas said.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara said, “It is regrettable that the measure imposes tariffs on the grounds of non-existence of measures banning imports of goods made by forced labor, even though Japan’s industry and trade are in line with international rules.”

It’s pretty clear that the Trump administration is simply trying to use any legal justification for its tariffs that will avoid being overturned by the courts this time, unlike the president’s last attempt. Forced labor is still a problem internationally, but Trump has not presented any specific evidence of any business in these 60 countries having a slavery problem.

One administration official told the paper that Trump sees few good options besides continuing these daily strikes. But these strikes apparently aren’t having much impact, either militarily or psychologically. The Journal also reported this week that satellite images show that Iran is rebuilding the damage done by U.S. strikes and is doing so fast. And after all, if Iran were afraid of the U.S., it wouldn’t have broken the ceasefire earlier this month by striking commercial vessels passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Some wars start big. World War I is the paradigmatic example. Europe was more or less at peace, the Balkans excepted, all those inbred cousins lolling in their palaces as various ethnic and proletarian resentments built among their people. Then, boom, one event—the assassination of a Hapsburg potentate—exploded the powder keg, and within weeks, millions were mobilized into a war that said cousins blithely thought would last a few weeks but ended up leaving an entire generation of young European men physically and psychologically strafed.

But most wars start small. They’re incremental. Even the most destructive war in human history started this way. Of course, Adolf Hitler was lying to the world about his ultimate aims, when he kept saying—after the Alsace, after Austria, after the Sudetenland—that he had no further territorial claims on Europe. But chronologically, the war proceeded in small, incremental steps, and even if Neville Chamberlain has gone down in historical shame, it’s also true that the broader public could have been forgiven for thinking, even after Munich, that world war was hardly inevitable.

In the current case, I’m sure Donald Trump no more anticipated that this war would prove problematic than Lyndon Johnson did with respect to Vietnam or George W. Bush did vis à vis Iraq. These things are always supposed to be easy for the mighty United States.

But somehow they rarely are. Only George H.W. Bush successfully prosecuted a short war. Why? Because the Persian Gulf War had one very specific and contained goal: force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. One can agree or disagree with his decision to launch the war, but at least it was aimed at doing one and only one small and specific thing. The neocons were imploring him to march on to Baghdad. He said no, you people are crazy. Then his dumb son got to the White House, and he put the crazies (led by Dick Cheney) in charge, and they launched a war based not on one specific goal but on a theory—that regime change in Iraq would help spread democracy throughout the Middle East.

Do we think Trump gave these matters two minutes’ worth of thought before he decided to start this war? We know the answer to that question. Of course he didn’t. Because to Trump, the laws of history don’t apply to him. He’s different. And Benjamin Netanyahu, who according to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan did the lion’s share of the work of convincing Trump to do this, knew perfectly how to feed Trump’s vanity and take advantage of his total historical ignorance.

So now, Trump is frustrated, like a little boy whose Christmas toy won’t work. That frustration is key here, and much, sadly (I hope not tragically), hangs on it. Will he be content to keep launching strikes that aren’t accomplishing much? Eventually, it seems, the odds are that he’ll get tired of that, and he’ll need to teach those “scumbags and lunatics” a real lesson.

And that’s how little wars grow. There’s a chance that he has enough sense to know that if he doesn’t get out of this soon, it could crescendo into a disaster that will spin out of his control. That’s what happened to LBJ—he knew every step of the way as he asked Congress for more money and troops that he was marching the country to defeat and destroying his own legacy, but he did it anyway. And he was much smarter than Trump will ever be.

I remember well when Syria’s Bashar Al Assad was massacring his own people by the thousands, dropping those cluster bombs on his own people. Some were screaming at Barack Obama: Do something! We’re the United States, how can we allow this to happen?

I think it would have been good if we’d been able to do something. On the other hand, I’m sure Obama thought that the last thing in the world he wanted was to go into a country we don’t really know with a sanguinary tyrant and ancient enmities and think we can smooth it all out before Americans lose their patience; Syria was not going to be his legacy. All those deaths were horribly tragic. But at least, against the charge of typical American hubris, Obama can plead not guilty.

Whatever happens in Iran, Trump is already guilty on that count. The launching of this completely unnecessary and unjustified war was an act of supreme hubris. Now it’s starting to really hit home with him that he may have been wrong. But he’s never wrong; incapable of shouldering blame, he will transfer it onto someone else. If that doesn’t worry you, you aren’t paying attention.

THE NEW TNR BLUE BOOK! I hope maybe you’ve noticed that we launched a new newsletter this week, The TNR Blue Book. It’s a morning inside-dope newsletter, sort of like some of those that already exist, except with this difference: We will focus exclusively on what Democrats are doing on Capitol Hill and around the country; we’ll leave the Mikey Johnson dramas to others. In addition, we’ll provide news about what the progressive advocacy groups and think tanks are up to. The idea, in other words, is to cover (and in some sense help build) a community of people working to fight authoritarianism and defend the republic. All that, plus a little humor and political trivia.

We send it out four days a week, Tuesday through Friday, around 8:30 in the morning. I really think you’ll like it. BUT: You DO need to sign up for it. That’s how we sell advertising for it (and no, not the Petroleum Institute; our first advertiser is the American Federation of Teachers). So please follow this link and opt in. It takes about seven seconds and is free. Thank you.

Donald Trump was overheard roaring and cursing inside the Oval Office, “unleashing a series of expletives” while referring to Iran’s leadership as “scumbags” and “lunatics,” an insider told The Wall Street Journal late Thursday.

The war that Trump initially claimed would last just a few weeks is now entering its fifth month, with no end in sight. That reality has haunted Trump, according to the Journal, as advisers fear that the conflict could consume the final years of his presidency.

Trump effectively threw up his hands when the preliminary peace deal signed by both countries collapsed weeks ago, claiming that he couldn’t—and wouldn’t—negotiate with Tehran.

“I don’t want to deal with them anymore,” Trump bitterly announced during a NATO summit presser in Ankara, Turkey, earlier this month. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them.”

At the time of the memorandum of understanding signing, Trump reportedly ignored his Republican allies who told him that Tehran would never stick to the terms of the deal, overeager to put the war behind him, according to a senior administration official that spoke with the Journal.

Trump, apparently, is only now learning that he cannot run the White House “like a business,” and that U.S. foreign policy requires a finer touch than lording around the military’s pointy stick. In just his second term, Trump has displayed a penchant for abusing America’s might, attacking Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, and Venezuela. Earlier this week, he reportedly mulled intervening in another foreign conflict in Mali.

The unending Iran war has deeply frustrated Trump, according to administration officials that spoke with the Journal. Trump has tried to find an off-ramp from the conflict in the months since he threatened to obliterate Iran’s “entire civilization,” but he has been repeatedly unsuccessful in doing so.

Some of Trump’s advisers are reportedly concerned that the ongoing hostilities could harm Republican election odds in November, a failure that could transform his final two years in office. Trump pursued war against Iran following an unusual Situation Room meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump then went to war without congressional approval, and without formally addressing the American public regarding his intent.

Americans, meanwhile, have suffered. The war has killed at least 18 U.S. service members and taken an enormous toll on daily life in the U.S., inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil prices.

Three military officials told The New York Times Thursday that one reason the death toll had been altered was because four of the deaths occurred last week, after President Donald Trump’s ceasefire fell apart. The Trump administration has previously tried to insist that there are two separate phases in the war effort.

Meanwhile, Joel Valdez, the acting press secretary for the Pentagon, told the outlet that the change resulted from “temporary data disruptions” and would soon be fixed.

The DOD has argued that it is bound by law to report on deaths, but not injuries. But here, the Pentagon’s shady actions highlight the startling lack of transparency as Trump continues to prosecute his wildly unpopular war with Iran.

The Pentagon has been slow to release information about U.S. service members’ conditions, and has downplayed the extent of their injuries.

The DOD also withheld information about three Iranian strikes last week that injured dozens of U.S. service members and damaged several helicopters, U.S. officials told the Times.

Earlier this year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth referred to an Iranian drone strike on a makeshift tactical operations center in Kuwait as a “squirter.” But dozens of U.S. service members suffered from injuries including burns, shrapnel wounds, and brain trauma. The Pentagon, however, did not release information about how many were hurt in the strike, and U.S. Central Command initially claimed that just five were seriously wounded.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump exploded at Senate GOP leader John Thune during a Wednesday rally, demanding that Republicans pass voter suppression legislation immediately. This prompted an angry response from Thune, which in turn triggered MAGA rage in response. It’s no accident that this comes amid new polls showing the GOP midterm position deteriorating, including in a major Fox News survey. Trump thinks voter suppression can save the party. This is all coming to a head because the House just passed something, and the pressure on the Senate is getting brutal.

This whole situation has gotten weird and complex, so to really understand it, we’re talking to the great voting rights reporter Ari Berman of Mother Jones. Ari, always good to have you on.

Ari Berman: Hey, Greg, great to talk to you again. Thank you.

Sargent: So House Republicans just passed a massive $95 billion budget with new war funding, and it also contains $10 billion for provisions related to the SAVE Act, which is the big voter suppression legislation Trump wants. The idea is to pressure the Senate to then pass these things via the simple majority reconciliation process. Ari, before we talk about the Senate, can you just explain what these provisions are in the House budget resolution, and how would they work?

Berman: Well, that’s a good question, Greg. And I can’t really answer it, because we don’t really know. All we know is that the House passed a resolution that says that states are going to get $10 billion in grants if they pass parts of the SAVE Act. But they didn’t release any more details, so we can only speculate on what they’re trying to do. But this seems to me a backdoor way to try to pass the SAVE America Act.

So if you look at the core provisions of the SAVE Act—if you’re going to incentivize states to pass those, it’s basically proof of citizenship to register to vote, voter ID to cast a ballot, and some kind of ban on mail voting. Those are the three big parts of the SAVE America Act.

Sargent: So basically, what this is starting to look like is the House is passing $10 billion to use to essentially try to get states to pass by themselves, in their state legislatures, these things in the SAVE Act.

Voter suppression mechanisms like ending vote by mail, requiring proof of citizenship. You’d do all these things through the states, and the House would try and incentivize that.

Berman: Yeah, they’re basically paying states to do voter suppression. That’s the simplest way I can explain what the House is doing.

Sargent: Trump ratcheted up the pressure on John Thune, the Senate majority leader, to pass these provisions of the SAVE Act via reconciliation—again, we’re talking about the things that the House is basically on track to passing. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Everybody call John Thune at the Senate. He’s the leader of the Republican Party, and tell him to get this stuff approved. So we’re fighting so that all voters must show voter ID. We’re fighting so that all voters must provide proof of citizenship, OK? And also the no mail-in ballots.

Sargent: So the White House blasted out video of that appearance, which is an unusual move since it pressures Republicans. And then on Thursday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said this.

Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Look, the president spoke about this directly yesterday. His patience is running out. He wants to see as much of the SAVE America Act passed as possible by the August recess. He knows that’s what the American people want to see passed.

Sargent: Ari, the idea seems to be that the Senate can pass these provisions of the SAVE Act—again, that would be in the House bill—via reconciliation, because by structuring them as appropriations to incentivize states to restrict voting, they think it might get past the parliamentarian. But we don’t even know if that’s at all likely, do we?

Berman: Yeah, I think it’s a pretty big stretch that A, it would get past the parliamentarian, and B, there’s enough votes for it. Because Trump keeps talking about getting rid of the filibuster. But the fact is, there isn’t even a simple majority for the SAVE America Act at this point. You have Murkowski announced she’s against it, Tillis announced he’s against it in its current form going into effect before the midterms.

McConnell, wherever he is, says he’s against it. Cornyn, Cassidy—all of the people that Trump has basically pushed out of the party. They’re all skeptical of this. So even if you got rid of the filibuster, even if you tried to pass it through reconciliation, Thune keeps saying we don’t have the votes.

Sargent: These provisions of the SAVE Act probably won’t get past the parliamentarian, because the reconciliation process is really only supposed to be used on things that concern taxes and spending and fiscal matters. And as you said, bribing states to suppress the vote just doesn’t qualify for that. So we think the Senate parliamentarian would essentially rule those out of order, right?

Berman: Yeah, because basically the only financial part of it is to incentivize states. What they’re actually doing is radically changing how people would vote in those states. And that has nothing to do with the budget reconciliation process. And there’s already a number of Republicans on record saying we don’t think we can do this through reconciliation. So the Senate parliamentarian isn’t going to have to look very far for a justification in terms of why this wouldn’t work.

Sargent: So that’s one pretty big hurdle. And you brought up the fact that there probably aren’t even enough Republicans in the Senate to pass this thing with a simple majority via reconciliation. That’s what John Thune said in response to all this pressure. He responded by urging the White House to pressure Democrats and Republican holdouts.

He said this about the White House: “Instead of pointing the finger at Republicans, they might think about going after the people who are stopping it on the floor, the Democrats. And if there are Republicans that they think are gettable, get them a phone.”

I mean, there just aren’t 50 votes for these provisions of the SAVE Act at all, right? I mean, that could change. I’ve got to think these Republicans really would hope that the parliamentarian would throw all this stuff out, so they’re relieved of the pressure of having to pass it.

Berman: Yeah, I mean, they’ve been wanting this to go away for months. I would urge everyone to watch this speech that Thom Tillis gave last week on the Senate floor. I mean, he just went nuts basically about this. They are so fed up that Trump keeps telling them to pass this bill. The votes, number one, are not there. And number two, this would not have the impact on the midterms that Trump thinks it would.

I mean, a lot of these provisions—I’ve been arguing this for months now—would hurt Republicans as much as Democrats. I’ll just give you one example. The bill says you have to present your citizenship documents in person at an elections office. That means that if you live in a rural area, you could have to drive hours just to be able to register to vote.

It also says you need a passport or a birth certificate to register to vote. Well, 146 million Americans—half of all Americans—don’t have passports. The top 10 states where people don’t have passports all voted for Trump, meaning that it’s Trump voters that don’t have these passport requirements.

You look at the citizenship requirements. Sixty-nine million married women have changed their names, meaning that they could have a different name on their birth certificate than on their driver’s license, for example. Women who take their partners’ names are twice as likely to be Republicans than Democrats.

So I do believe the SAVE America Act is a voter suppression bill. I also believe it’s a voter suppression bill that could suppress many Republicans. And if you talk to some Republicans privately, they will tell you this. They will tell you that this bill would not help the party nearly as much as Trump says it will, and it would hurt lots of Republicans.

And that doesn’t even get into the whole thing with banning mail voting—which, ask Republican strategists in Alaska, in Arizona, in Florida if it’s a smart idea to outlaw mail voting four months before the midterms. They’ll tell you unequivocally, yes, this would hurt Democrats, but it would also hurt a lot of Republicans as well.

Sargent: Yeah. It looks as if Donald Trump has just gotten it into his head that if he can get this passed, it saves the midterms for Republicans. He’s just simply not capable of grasping the situation at a very fundamental level, as he so often is not, right?

Berman: Number one, every time that Trump is about to lose or on the verge of losing, he starts blaming the mechanics of voting for his loss. We saw this in 2020 with mail voting. We’re seeing it again now with the SAVE America Act.

Secondly—and this is my real concern about all of this, Greg—is that I believe he’s using the SAVE America Act as a pretext to challenge the legitimacy of the midterms. So if it does not pass, which it won’t pass, he’s going to say, we don’t have the SAVE America Act, therefore the elections were rigged, therefore I have no choice but to challenge the legitimacy of the midterms. And he’s going to point to that crazy speech he gave and say, I laid out all the evidence—even though he laid out no evidence, but he’s going to say, I laid out all the evidence, the elections were rigged, the Congress didn’t act on this, therefore I have no choice but to issue a national emergency executive order, or seize voting machines, or take some kind of dramatic intervention to mess with the midterms.

I’m not saying that’s going to succeed, because I think the president ultimately would not succeed. But I believe that he’s going to blame the failure of the SAVE Act as a reason why he needs to do some kind of more dramatic intervention in the midterms—to really mess with how people vote, or how votes are counted, or how elections are certified.

Sargent: Yeah, it’s a pretty horrifying scenario. And I will point out that Republicans have privately said that they think they are being set up in exactly that way—that they think that Trump’s pressure here is really about being able to say later that Republicans are why they lost the midterms, in addition to kind of creating a pretext to do the absolute worst.

I want to bring up some of the polling now. All this comes amid very clear signs that the Republican position in the midterms might suddenly be deteriorating. Again, the new Fox News poll finds Democrats leading the House generic ballot matchup by seven points, 53 to 46. And get this: that 53 percent for Democrats is the highest percentage either party has gotten in the House generic ballot matchup in Fox News polling going back twenty years.

It gets worse. Democrats are favored on the economy over Republicans in the Fox poll by 54 to 45, nine points. And Democrats have now edged ahead of Republicans on immigration, 50 to 49. It’s just astounding stuff. For a Fox poll to find all that is an extremely serious blow to Republicans, I think. What do you think?

Berman: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s a worst-case scenario for Trump, because the Iran war is flaring up again. Gas prices are rising again. And what is Trump talking about? Intelligence from China in the 2020 election. I mean, he’s not even remotely close to being on topic here. And I think we should fully expect that as the poll numbers continue to deteriorate, the White House is going to consider more dramatic interventions in the midterms as a response—meaning the more unpopular Trump becomes, the more desperate they’re going to be.

And so it’s not going to end with the SAVE Act. I think that’s the really important thing. Even if this fails before recess, or wherever it comes to a head—we don’t even know when it’s going to fully come to a head, because it’s already come to a head a number of times. But this is not ending. Let’s say the Senate has a definitive vote on the SAVE Act. Trump’s going to think about something else to do.

And I believe that something else is going to be pressuring law enforcement somehow to take some kind of incredibly drastic, unconstitutional action in the midterms. And that’s the next phase of what I’m watching. And I think that’s what we should all prepare for. And that’s why the demise, or whatever we want to call it, of the SAVE Act, while a victory, it only gets you so far—because I do believe that the failure of the SAVE Act is really only the beginning of what is going to be a much broader fight over the legitimacy of the midterms.

Sargent: Yeah. And my sense is that Democrats and a lot of Democratic-aligned lawyers and groups get this and are really gearing up, but we should really be using our imaginations to imagine the very worst right now. I just want to bring up a bit more polling that shows this deterioration. An Emerson poll puts Dems ahead in the generic House ballot matchup by eleven points, 53 to 42. A new Pew poll has Dems up six, 43 to 37.

Between those and the Fox poll having it at seven, I think it’s very possible the Democratic lead is starting to grow a bit, because the generic House ballot averages have been around five points, and we now have three polls showing it bigger than that—including a Fox poll and including an Emerson one that’s even bigger. So I think we may be seeing the start of some significant deterioration. Do you think that’s possible?

Berman: Yeah. And people have been saying this. They’ve been saying that a lot of these polls are going to move from a registered voter to a likely voter model. And when you get to a likely voter model, Democrats are going to do better, because they have much more enthusiasm in terms of voting.

And I think it needs to be a landslide, quite frankly. I think it needs to be a huge-margin type of situation, so they can’t contest the results. If it’s really close, that’s where I worry about, for example, the GOP’s lead on gerrymandering mattering. That’s where I worry about Trump pressuring Mike Johnson not to seat Democratic members of Congress. That’s where I worry about state-level challenges, and governors’ races or other close state races. If the margin is overwhelming—if Democrats win by 20 seats in the House, for example—then it’s really hard to challenge the election. And so that to me is the best-case scenario here, of it being closer to a landslide.

I do worry that if it’s close—this may not succeed, but I think you’re going to just see a tremendous amount of pressure from Trump for Republicans to try to mess with the mechanics of voting, either in terms of how votes are counted or ultimately how elections are certified and how members of Congress are seated.

Sargent: Absolutely. It’s going to get really hairy. One other question about the SAVE Act, if I could. Let’s say somehow the House passed these provisions by which there’s congressional appropriation used to essentially incentivize or bribe states to pass voter suppression. Let’s say somehow it got past the Senate. Would any states actually do it? And that’s sort of a pretty key question, isn’t it?

So you’ve got major Senate races in places like Texas, Ohio, Alaska, which you brought up—you know, some states with some pretty large rural areas in them. And so I really wonder whether the Republican legislators in some of these states would actually take the money to do this. What do you think? Do you think it’s likely that they would do it, or might they not?

Berman: I don’t think they would do it before November. I mean, it’s too late to do anything. Florida passed kind of a mini SAVE Act months ago that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. And they put it in effect after the midterms to avoid this whole question. So states are out of time to make major changes before the election.

I’m sure some red states would take the money ultimately. I’m sure some red states would like to have these policies. Some red states already have these policies. And I’m sure that when we see state legislatures come into session next year, some of them are going to pass similar bills. But in terms of trying to save the midterms, quote-unquote, it’s too late for Republicans to do that.

Sargent: Do you think that there’s a plausible scenario in which Donald Trump has law enforcement seize ballot boxes? We’re seeing a bit of a test run for that in Fulton County already. The FBI has already seized ballot boxes, but these pertain to a previous election. I think it’s a little hard to see how they would seize ballot boxes which contain votes that need to be counted.

I do not for a second rule out them trying this at all. But do you think that they might actually be able to go through with it to some degree? And then what would happen?

Berman: Well, I agree with you that they’re going to try. I absolutely think they view the Fulton County ballot seizure as a test run. And I think they’re in Georgia right now, quote-unquote, investigating with 260 FBI agents, because they’re trying to lay the groundwork to challenge the legitimacy of the results in November.

I hope that the courts would treat this differently, like they did in Fulton County. Because in Fulton County, a magistrate judge basically signed off on the affidavit—the affidavit that was used to initiate the FBI search and eventually the taking of those ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, we later learned was just totally based on recycled disinformation by election deniers. It was like they said, we’re looking for the evidence. Well, you’re supposed to have evidence to get a warrant in the first place, let alone take 700 boxes of ballots. But maybe the judge thought, OK, this has already been adjudicated, therefore there’s less risk in terms of them taking it.

I would hope that there would be a very high bar for a court to sign off on taking machines or taking ballots before votes are actually counted. The fact that we’re even talking about this is so insane, just to step back for a second. I mean, just the fact that we’re talking about the federal government seizing ballots in an election—this is so dictatorial. This is so authoritarian. The fact that we’re even talking about it, to me, is crazy, let alone the fact that we both agree that this is a likelihood in terms of happening.

But I do think that people are preparing for this. Election officials are preparing for this, lawyers are preparing for this, and they’re not going to be blindsided like they were by the raid in Fulton County, Georgia. So do I expect Trump to try it? Yes. Do I ultimately think Trump will succeed in stopping an election and overturning an election? I think the answer to that is most likely no.

Sargent: I agree a hundred percent. I have picked up plenty of signs from some of these officials and some of these states that they’re taking this extremely seriously and preparing. So I don’t think Trump’s going to get away with it.

But again, we need to use our imaginations to the fullest to think through what he might try, because he’s pretty desperate. Ari Berman, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Berman: Thanks so much, Greg. Great to talk to you again.

When exactly does this fusion end? Or does it simply never? These are the animating questions at the heart of Aviv’s new essay collection, You Won’t Get Free of It, which tells the stories of mothers and daughters whose relationships are complicated, yet inexorable: from a nanny who leaves her family in the Philippines only to become attached to new, surrogate children, to a young schoolteacher who goes missing for long stretches of time, her mother left searching for her for years on end. They are the kind of slippery and ambiguous stories to which only a writer like Aviv, so committed to interpreting and explaining her subjects, could give form.

There is, of course, a rich literature on mother-daughter inextricability, from Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments (1987) to Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother? (2012). A slate of more recent motherhood memoirs have also taken on similar quandaries of tumult and transference, such as Lena Dunham’s Famesick (2026), which plumbs her ever-shifting relationship with her mother, the artist Laurie Simmons, after Dunham’s fame begins to lap her mother’s, and Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025), which explores what happens when our relationships with our mothers begin to feel barbarous and distant. “For years, Arundhati was estranged from her mother,” the critic Rebecca Mead writes in a recent review of Roy’s memoir. “Yet she was never free of her.”

But You Won’t Get Free of It is a different kind of book; one far less claustrophobic than many mother-daughter memoirs, wherein the reader often walks away with an understanding of one—or maybe two, if we’re lucky—unique perspectives on a particular relationship. In this collection, Aviv excavates her own relationships and experience, in order to open up and illuminate others’ stories. In her hands motherhood is a tight bond, but also one perpetually remade by distance, memory, and reexamination. It is not so much an endless struggle to be escaped as it is an infinitely complex starting point for larger stories.

Since the beginning of her career, Rachel Aviv has been writing about people whose experiences can’t be easily explained by preconceived rules and definitions, whether that’s in the world of medicine or law. Her first book, Strangers to Ourselves, was about Aviv’s own hospitalization for anorexia at the ripe age of six: an outlier of a situation in the world of psychiatry, since anorexia, some researchers believe, is a “reading disorder”—that is, as Aviv puts it, a condition “brought on by uncritical consumption of texts that present thinness as the feminine ideal”—and at six years old, Aviv could barely read. This personal anecdote, as well as that of a girl she met on the floor of her hospital ward, foreshadows the rest of the book, which examines the stories of other patients whose afflictions don’t fit neatly into the restricting confines of a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders definition, but who have at times felt hemmed in by those definitions nonetheless.

For avid readers of Aviv’s deeply researched narrative reporting in The New Yorker, where she’s been writing since 2011, Strangers to Ourselves was a fascinating unveiling of her motivations as a journalist. You Won’t Get Free of It serves a similar purpose, sharing bits of biography that inform the rest of the collection. The book’s preface is a previously unpublished personal piece, while the remaining six reported essays first appeared in some shape or form in The New Yorker. Those essays, some of which Aviv revised for this book, are not just her typical tales of confounding mental illnesses and cognitive dissonance, but rather stories that Aviv reframes as reflections on motherhood; as she reexamines them, she brings to the surface details that she had once overlooked, but which now seem to reveal new emotional and psychological dimensions.

The first essay, for which Aviv mined her mother’s diaries as well as her own childhood journals, begins with some biography of Aviv’s mother, who could only have dreamed of the kind of career her daughter has today. She always wanted to be a writer, Aviv tells us, submitting her short fiction time and time again to The New Yorker, never getting anything published, but trying again and again anyway. Her mother’s life, as the lives of mother-artists usually are, was defined by a constant battle between the priorities of parenting and art-making, which Aviv’s clingy nature didn’t make any easier.

But her mother was proud of her, and throughout Aviv’s adolescence and into her adulthood, she was happy to be her close collaborator and at times, her editor. Aviv shared her college essays with her mother, who would reply “like an English teacher,” offering constructive feedback here and there. But even after Aviv became a professional journalist, her mother would continue to weigh in on her published work, unable to let go of the image of Aviv scribbling in her notebook as a would-be camper.

On the heels of Aviv’s longform investigation into the short story writer Alice Munro—which is included in this collection—Aviv’s mother wrote to her with worry that “she was sure that she, too, must have failed to protect [Aviv] from sexual abuse.” It’s an outrageous, if overly simplified assumption for her mother to make, but it’s also not impossible to understand: If Aviv began to investigate stories of elusive illness due to her own experience of a childhood eating disorder, is it so unreasonable to infer that she might have been interested in a story of sexual assault out of an affinity too? Aviv views her mother’s “delusion of reference” as an indication that she is still hovering over her like she did when Aviv was a child.

Aviv’s increased interest in Munro’s story, and other mother-daughter dyads, comes, however, from her own experience of becoming a mother. Perhaps it’s a truism to say that becoming a mother changes you: It’s one that Aviv herself tried to resist, reading court records in bed for a story she was working on almost immediately after giving birth to her first child. But she takes pains to emphasize how this change was not only inevitable, but also directly shaped her work. Before she was a mother, she tells us, she “had somehow thought [she] was writing from the daughter’s perspective.” But years later, reexamining that work for this book, she realizes “how many stories were also about the mother, waiting for messages she thought were hers to understand.”

The best example of this shift in perspective is the story of Hannah Upp, about whom Aviv originally wrote for The New Yorker in 2018. Upp was the closeted daughter of two ministers—each with differing opinions on homosexuality—who, after graduating from Bryn Mawr, moved to New York City to work as a schoolteacher. She disappeared on what was supposed to be her first day of class and was found three weeks later bobbing in the New York harbor, with seemingly no memory of where she had been since the day she vanished. Over the next few years, Upp suffered at least one more “dissociative fugue” before she went missing amid Hurricane Irma on the island of St. Thomas, where she had moved to teach at a Montessori school. Her mother, Barbara, flew out as soon as she could and stayed on the island for months, searching to no avail. She eventually made peace with the idea that she would never completely understand what had happened to her daughter or why.

At the time Aviv reported this story, Barbara requested that she let her daughter’s fugues “stay a mystery.” While Aviv alluded in her original piece to the complicated relationships and split loyalties Upp had with her parents, she didn’t push too hard to connect her upbringing to her dissociative episodes. But seven years later, during the writing of You Won’t Get Free of It, Aviv—now a mother of two—has arrived at a new perspective. When she wrote the original story, she was around the same age as Upp, and “maybe … had been inclined to imagine that, in her early adulthood, Hannah had achieved more psychological separation from her family dynamics than she actually had.” Meanwhile, reading through her notes, Aviv realizes that she had left out a detail she wouldn’t have now: Before Upp was born, Barbara had another baby who died shortly after birth. Her mother, in other words, had been mourning a missing child, but “at the time I resisted a detail that seemed too symbolic, even if it was true.”

Aviv found a similar pattern of newly revealing details upon reviewing the first piece she ever wrote for The New Yorker. The story was about a woman named Linda Bishop, who, like “nearly half of people given a diagnosis of psychotic illness, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, say that they are not mentally ill,” and thus refuse to take medication, inadvertently alienating family and friends in the process. After leaving a psychiatric hospital her family coaxed her into, Bishop went out on her own, eventually coming across a vacant house for sale where she lived eating only apples until she died of starvation. Bishop, a God-fearing woman in her state of psychosis, believed she was waiting for a lover—a man who, in reality, she had only met a few times—to show up and save her.

In Aviv’s original piece for The New Yorker, the story of Linda Bishop highlights the many limitations of psychiatry. In addition to observing that it is “the only field in which refusal of treatment is commonly viewed as a manifestation of illness rather than as an authentic wish,” Aviv also positions Bishop as someone whose illness was the central, devastating difficulty in an otherwise happy life. Bishop was educated, well adjusted, and came from a family with “loving and supportive parents”; she was a good student who had a bright future, her parents thought perhaps she’d even become a professor. Aviv is also sympathetic to the ways in which families have contended with stigma around mental illness, including hurtful assumptions that they are in some way to blame for their loved one’s condition, noting that a prominent theory in the 1970s held that “the root of schizophrenia was a ‘schizophrenogenic mother,’ incapable of communicating her love.”

The new version of this story in You Won’t Get Free of It offers a very different portrayal of Bishop. The reference to the “schizophrenogenic mother” is gone, perhaps because even mentioning that it has been debunked still gives it room in the text, and could lead to unwanted inferences. Meanwhile, Bishop appears here as a woman with significant familial and personal trauma—which does not entirely explain her illness, but does seem to provide important context for her experience. When Aviv went back through her interview transcripts and spoke again to Bishop’s sister for this book, she learned that Bishop and her sister were both adopted after her mother had lost two young children to illnesses, a fact that their parents never discussed with their children. (The fact of adoption is significant, as schizophrenia is thought to be largely hereditary, though Aviv does not note this; Bishop may have understood her condition more readily if she had known her family medical history.)

Bishop herself had also lost a child. Right after high school, Aviv learns, she got pregnant and her parents sent her to a home for unwed mothers, where she was forced to give birth and put her own baby up for adoption. “I don’t think anyone was with her when she gave birth,” her sister tells Aviv. A teenage girl giving birth alone and then deprived of her child: It must have been a terrifying, emotionally shattering, and unmooring experience, and it was something Bishop rarely spoke about as an adult. Aviv was 28 when she reported the original story and did not yet have children: “Apparently, at the time I did not think losing a child was a biographical fact relevant enough to mention. I had not even asked a follow-up question.”

Reading Aviv’s reassessment of her reporting and re-reporting, one has to admire her dedication to doing justice to someone else’s story, or “getting things right,” as much as one can. But equally admirable is her admission of just how much her own shifting perspective has directly shaped how she tells those stories.

When Aviv thinks back to when her mother picked her up from camp, she reflects that “now, if my daughter were to call from camp crying, I’m not sure I would so quickly and selflessly set aside my plans.” In fact, Aviv thinks that when it comes to the camp story, both she and her mother “made the wrong choice.”

Who is to say that is the right judgment? Just as a daughter’s perspective is partial, so is a mother’s. As Aviv so compellingly suggests in this book, the bond between the mother and her daughter is profound, perpetual, and deeply ingrained. We cannot get free of it, as hard as we may try. But we can acknowledge it. And that should do us some good.

“However commendable OSHA’s desire to improve mental health in the workplace, like all agencies, OSHA’s authority to regulate toward that end is constrained by the limits of power Congress delegated to the agency,” Judge Cory Wilson concluded in a case involving an Exxon Mobil employee who developed PTSD after a 2021 fire at a Houston-area refinery.

“OSHA’s reading of [the statute] to encompass the power to regulate workplace mental illnesses may be plausible,” he continued. “But the best reading of the statute is narrower: that ‘illnesses,’ as used there, refers to physical, and not mental, work-related ailments and conditions.”

This pseudo-Cartesian view of the mind-body question is unusual, to say the least. Modern medicine no longer views physical and mental illnesses as completely different phenomena, and there is no persuasive evidence that Congress meant to adopt this division, either. Exxon Mobil v. OSHA is a testament to how powerful companies and conservative judges can work together to drain laws enacted by elected representatives of their potency and protection.

The case springs from the company’s treatment of an unnamed worker whom the court calls Employee 2. (Since he is not a party to the case, his name was kept redacted for privacy reasons.) The employee was a longtime technician at Exxon’s Baytown refinery, which is located just outside Houston to the east. One portion of the refinery is dedicated to extracting sulfur from naphtha—a high-octane fuel precursor—using hydrogen.

Employee 2 was working nearby when disaster struck on December 3, 2021: A pipe ruptured during repairs and ignited a massive fire at the facility, sending flames as high as 150 feet into the air, according to court records. He rushed to the afflicted part of the refinery and made contact with firefighters on the scene, who were struggling to close key valves to prevent the fire from spreading. Though he was not trained as a firefighter, Employee 2 still offered to assist them in locating the valves inside the burning building. The firefighters provided him with an extra set of their own gear, and he followed them into a hellish inferno.

“The unit was dark because the power was ‘knocked out,’ and flames were ‘streaking across the alleyway,’” an OSHA administrative judge later recounted, citing testimony. “They reached the P609 hydrogen outlet valve, which was open and feeding the fire. Employee 2 pointed to the valve because the fire ‘was hot and roaring’ and ‘too loud’ to hear one another. As the firefighters were almost done closing the valve, ‘the flames … started woofing on us’ and the firefighters stopped. Employee 2 feared the flame would go out and the vapor cloud around them would reignite, but they continued and finally closed it.”

Rushing into a burning building was not part of Employee 2’s job description, to say the least. But he performed this task not once but twice at the behest of firefighters on the scene. According to OSHA’s account of the incident, Employee 2 reentered the burning facility to help emergency personnel close additional bypass valves. In between his entrances, Employee 2 was treated by EMTs for an (understandably) high blood pressure level and elevated heart rate.

Afterward, Employee 2 “met with ExxonMobil grief counselors to discuss his coping and anxiety,” according to the OSHA ruling. He also used their employee assistance program to contact a licensed therapist in the area, who initially diagnosed him with adjustment disorder with anxiety, as well as PTSD when his initial symptoms did not subsist. Employee 2, the therapist told Exxon, “could not control his emotions, was depressed and fearful, and had anxiety, hypervigilance, and nightmares stemming from the incident.”

In addition to that therapist, Employee 2 also sought treatment and assistance from his primary care doctor and an additional therapist who specialized in trauma-related disorders. Both medical professionals corroborated the first therapist’s diagnosis of PTSD. They also helped him apply for FMLA and disability leave, from which he ultimately returned to work in October 2022.

One might expect the managerial caste at Exxon Mobil to be grateful that one of their own employees risked his life to help save not only the lives of his co-workers but also tens of millions of dollars of Exxon property. (The refinery reopened less than six months later.) Instead, they fought tooth and nail to resist Employee 2’s diagnosis by questioning the credentials of the therapists and physicians that he met.

Why? Exxon, like every other major business in the United States, is required to document workplace illnesses and injuries. The Occupational Health and Safety Act allows OSHA to require employers to “maintain accurate records of … work-related deaths, injuries, and illnesses,” with the exception of “minor injuries requiring only first aid treatment and which do not involve medical treatment, loss of consciousness, restriction of work or motion, or transfer to another job.”

Failure to comply with these rules can result in a small monetary penalty. A company’s workplace injury log can also affect other aspects of its business: A higher injury rate could lead to higher insurance premiums, for example. Exxon had a strong interest in ensuring that Employee 2’s injury would not be recorded in its logs.

To that end, it insisted that he see a different specialist in work-related trauma. Employee 2 again checked the company’s own employee assistance program and found a new specialist, who spent multiple appointments examining him. Her first clinical interview included an extensive patient history about virtually every aspect of Employee 2’s life. During the second appointment, she “conducted personality tests, IQ tests, and asked approximately 700 questions about his symptoms and feelings.”

After all of this, her conclusion was the same: Employee 2 met the clinical standard for a PTSD diagnosis. This time, Exxon agreed that the specialist was qualified but nonetheless sought a second opinion as permitted under OSHA regulations. It located a new psychologist and sent her Employee 2’s medical records, summaries of his past clinical visits, and information about the incident. “Typically, the employee is also interviewed by the third-party specialist as part of the 233 process but, as noted above, Employee 2 declined to make himself available,” the OSHA decision noted.

One can hardly blame Employee 2 for refusing to obtain what would be, by my count, a fifth diagnosis of PTSD. This did not deter the Exxon-obtained psychologist from rendering her own opinion. Employee 2 did not, in her view, experience a “traumatic event” but rather a routine workplace occurrence. She also concluded that there was “no evidence” that Employee 2 has PTSD “based upon the DSM-5 criteria.”

Employee 2’s union alerted OSHA to the company’s decision to not record his work-related PTSD diagnosis, prompting an investigation. The agency eventually cited Exxon for the recordkeeping violation, which then prompted the company to appeal to OSHA’s internal review commission. An OSHA administrative judge again ruled against Exxon. From there, the company took its case to the Fifth Circuit.

In federal court, Exxon argued that mental illnesses were simply not covered by the OSHA recordkeeping provision in question. Again, the Occupational Safety and Health Act requires companies to log “work-related deaths, injuries, and illnesses,” with no exception for mental illnesses. OSHA has long interpreted that language to mean both physical and mental illnesses. Until 2024, courts would have been generally required to defer to the agency’s understanding of its own authorizing statute.

Since the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine two years ago, however, lower courts are no longer required to even consider the agency’s interpretation. This allowed the Fifth Circuit to engage in a bit of legalistic sleight of hand. Judge Wilson argued that two related provisions suggested that the statute meant “physical illnesses or injuries,” even though it does not actually say that.

“OSHA fails to explain how [the statute]’s carveout of ‘minor injuries requiring only first aid’ squares with its assertion that ‘injuries and illnesses’ encompass both physical and mental conditions,” Wilson wrote. “Likewise, OSHA does not explain how mental illnesses fit with the ‘injuries’ excepted from the Act’s reporting requirements because mental conditions do not implicate ‘restriction of work or motion’ or ‘loss of consciousness.’”

One could reasonably argue that all mental illnesses are, in fact, physical illnesses since the brain is a physical organ of the human body. For brevity’s sake, we’ll skip the philosophical implications of drawing that line. The “minor injury” exception was clearly not meant to cabin “injuries and illnesses” but rather to spare businesses from going through a mountain of paperwork whenever a worker stubs their toe.

The notion that “restriction of work or motion” and “loss of consciousness” necessarily exclude mental illnesses elsewhere in the law is also dubious at best. Employee 2’s symptoms included anxiety, depression, and a loss of emotional control. Anyone who has struggled with these illnesses can testify to how debilitating they can be. (A member of Congress recently underwent four months of in-patient hospital treatment for depression, for example.) Loss of consciousness is also, by its nature, a mental condition since it affects a person’s cognitive abilities. To argue that loss of consciousness is a strictly physical act is to reverse the mind-body distinction upon which Exxon and the Fifth Circuit otherwise rely.

OSHA pointed to ample contemporary evidence that Congress intended to sweep broadly with its terminology instead of implying a more restrictive view, as the company and the court favored. But the Fifth Circuit dismissed this evidence by arguing that the “legislative history,” which conservative judges typically disfavor, was not directly applicable here.

This is an obvious boon for Exxon and other major companies in the Fifth Circuit’s jurisdiction. They will no longer be required to record work-related mental illnesses, which will lower their overall injury rates and could make their workplaces appear safer—perhaps much safer—than they actually are. It may also disincentivize them from taking additional precautions to protect their workers in the future.

Exxon itself is also effectively rewarded for downplaying and denying the PTSD diagnosis of one of its workers. It is often said that no good deed goes unpunished. In this particular case, Employee 2’s heroic efforts to save lives and property five years ago have allowed one company and one court to make things worse for millions of other workers.

The close bond between Washington and Alliance Defending Freedom was on full display in that speech. At the summit, themed to coincide with “America at 250” celebrations, Johnson was introduced as one of the faithful. “Before he ran for Congress, Speaker Johnson was one of us,” the host said. “ADF really is like home for us,” Johnson told attendees. “You’re like family.” It’s a “family” that Johnson first served more than 20 years ago. He was hired by ADF in 2002, and soon opened the group’s North Louisiana office. “ADF’s been so formative to us,” said Johnson, speaking of himself and his wife. “So much of what we do, we learned on the front lines of the culture war—keeping the door open for the spread of the gospel—and it informs still how we do our job today.” In his remarks, Johnson left out a key part of the group’s mission statement, one that seems to have been excised since he worked there: “to keep the door open for the spread of the Gospel by transforming the legal system.”

Back when Johnson first worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, as a young Christian lawyer, the group had a much lower profile. Unless you followed the Christian right closely, you were unlikely to have heard of it. Today, however, the group wields considerable influence over the law, and considerable power over the lives of nearly anyone who is not a straight, white, cisgender man in the United States. The Supreme Court docket over the last two decades can feel like ADF’s greatest-hits list: Hobby Lobby (which threatened contraception coverage), Masterpiece Cakeshop (which undermined anti-gay discrimination law), Dobbs (which allowed states to ban abortion), and Skrmetti (which allowed states to ban gender-affirming care for youth).

On its surface, ADF can sometimes resemble the reverse image of any number of progressive law projects focused on strategic litigation, but for the purpose of elevating cases on “the front lines of the culture war,” as Johnson put it. ADF is in near lockstep with the Trump administration in its efforts to end reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy, and gender justice. But ADF’s work goes further than what gets shorthanded and often diminished as “culture-war” issues: More than merely taking up Christian right political fights in the nation’s courts, it is engaged in a sweeping project to recast America as a Christian nation ruled by Christians.

Days after Johnson’s speech at the ADF summit, Senator Josh Hawley appealed to the Department of Justice, essentially on the group’s behalf. In a letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, released by Hawley on July 20, the senator wrote that he wanted the “entity called Plan C” investigated for a host of alleged crimes, all of which boil down to providing people with information about medication abortion and where to access pills. (Plan C is an informational resource for people seeking to self-manage abortion with pills.) Hawley’s claims are weak and not all that original: They expand on legal arguments made in a number of Alliance Defending Freedom cases, including one at the Supreme Court that was argued by Erin Hawley, the senator’s wife. (That case would have forced the FDA to reverse its guidance on mifepristone, substantially blocking access to medication abortion; ADF lost that one, and is now attempting to revive it.) Hawley has joined ADF’s broader anti–medication abortion campaign, searching for an avenue to marshal the law against people who send and receive pills through the mail; going after Plan C is just the latest avenue. In fact, Hawley is working on multiple ways to end mifepristone access. One plan is simply to have the Justice Department settle the suit because now the FDA could just do what the suit would force it to do.

In Hawley, ADF has an ally willing to prod the Justice Department in its direction, as well as an opportunity to direct DOJ from the top. The senator has pushed acting Attorney General Blanche to investigate Plan C at a moment when Blanche needs Hawley’s vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee to be confirmed as attorney general, making this Plan C “investigation” request, as Susan Rinkunas at independent news outlet Autonomy News writes, “nothing short of a shakedown.” Should Blanche be confirmed, it would be a victory not only for him but for ADF, as well, particularly if he takes up the group’s dubious legal argument that it’s already illegal to mail abortion pills.

While Hawley appears focused on one particular abortion information group, another senator on the committee is using the confirmation hearings to elevate ADF’s broader legal argument against medication abortion. It was Senator Ted Cruz who brought this argument before Blanche around the time of Hawley’s demand. At a July 15 hearing, Cruz wanted to know if Blanche would toss out an opinion issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2022, affirming that the law “does not prohibit the mailing of certain drugs that can be used to perform abortions where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully.” The law in question is the Comstock Act, which until recently was regarded as a Victorian artifact but has enjoyed a resurgence thanks to Alliance Defending Freedom.

ADF may have been able to get the Supreme Court to side with it on Dobbs, but the court has yet to bless its efforts to ban abortion pills. To fully block medication abortion access, the group is turning to an act of Congress so old it was signed into law by Ulysses S. Grant. It’s a wild reach, but not one fully unanticipated by the act’s namesake, Anthony Comstock, a Christian crusader who saw sex as a mortal threat to the United States and harnessed the power of the postal service to ban the circulation of “obscene” items, including information about or depicting sex, as well as any items that could be used for contraception or to have an abortion. Comstock has modern acolytes outside ADF, but so far, the group is the only one to get two Supreme Court justices on the record considering the application of Comstock in a modern American context. Comstock would not necessarily feel out of place in the twenty-first century, thanks to such pioneering legal minds. Whatever happens at the court, if, at Blanche’s direction, the Justice Department suddenly concludes that Comstock is still good law and federal prosecutors begin bringing Comstock cases over mailing abortion pills, ADF may have willed its national abortion ban into practice. Blanche has already said in hearings that he would review the existing Comstock opinion.

It’s chilling when ADF legal theories get a hearing in Congress or at the Supreme Court. It isn’t just an anti-LGBTQ group or an anti-abortion group, fighting with and through the law on behalf of aggrieved Christians. As the Idaho Statesman headlined an opinion piece on ADF, when it was representing the state in anti-abortion and anti-trans cases, “Alliance Defending Freedom isn’t representing you, but Christian Nationalism broadly.” Is ADF doing for the federal government what it did for Idaho? At the ADF summit this month, Speaker Johnson made clear how close to “home” ADF really was for his family. His daughter, he said, had been part of the group’s legal training program, the Blackstone Legal Fellowship. “Now she’s one of the lawyers for the Oversight Committee in Congress,” the speaker said. “So, pray for her.” That’s not unusual; Blackstone was apparently founded to win ADF influence in government by placing its fellows in useful positions. Today, former Blackstone fellow Amy Coney Barrett sits on the Supreme Court.

All this is quite an accomplishment for a group that has built Supreme Court cases out of imagined grievances and may have gotten the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the Southern Poverty Law Center, which investigated ADF and labeled it a hate group. Unlike in Idaho, ADF may not be offering its legal services to the government. The government doesn’t need it to—not when it’s already acting like ADF is a federal department.

The New York Daily News reported Thursday that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sent a letter to multiple Senate committees outlining his department’s decision to “direct Amtrak to rename New York Penn Station.”

While the new name has not been confirmed, Duffy suggested last August that “Trump Station” had “a nice ring to it.” And three months before that, Gothamist obtained redesign renderings of the station with Trump’s name on it, and gold flourishes everywhere.

It’s no secret that Trump wants to see his name on as many stations and landmarks as possible before he goes. In February, he held infrastructure funding in New York hostage unless Democrats agreed to rename Penn Station and Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport after him. Then there was the “Trump-Kennedy Center” saga, which ended in his name being removed from the cultural institution. And just this month, he got Florida’s Palm Beach International Airport named after him, as well.

Midwest Poultry Services is recalling close to 1.6 million white shell eggs and brown cage-free shell eggs produced in Texas, the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday. The eggs in question have the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella enteritidis, and were being sold at Kroger stores in Texas and Louisiana, as well as Brookshire Grocery stores in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico. 

The company has stopped distributing eggs produced on its Texas farms, according to the FDA. Salmonella enteritidis is a bacterium that can survive on the shell of an egg or inside it, and could cause symptoms including cramps, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, chills, ⁠fever, and headaches. 

The salmonella scare comes after an explosive diarrhea outbreak hit the country from tainted lettuce produced by Taylor Farms. That produce contained cyclospora, a one-celled parasite, and has affected at least 41 states with over 12,000 possible cases. On top of that, the New World screwworm, a flesh-eating parasite, has infested cattle in Texas and spread to other states, causing an estimated $1 billion in damages.  

The Trump administration has cut a lot of the programs that prevented these types of outbreaks in the past, and now the country seems to be dealing with one food crisis after another. Elon Musk’s DOGE cut a monitoring program for the screwworm and gutted the team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention responsible for responding to cyclospora outbreaks. Hopefully, the salmonella issue remains isolated, although the administration hasn’t inspired much confidence thus far. 

In addition to killing the Hortmans (and their dog Gilbert), Vance Boelter also shot state Democratic Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette.

In court Thursday, Boelter didn’t once look at his victims or their families, remaining remarkably still as the judge read out the extraordinarily long prison sentence for the crimes he committed on June 14, 2025, reported The Guardian.

Boelter pleaded guilty in June to the double homicide, recounting to the court how the previous year, he had spent months stalking his targets. He then disguised himself as a police officer in a tactical vest and hyperrealistic silicon mask, and killed the Hortmans in their home in the middle of the night.

He was found guilty on six counts related to the killing of the Hortmans, as well as for the shooting of the Hoffmans.

Boelter was committed to two consecutive life sentences, with an additional 40 years in prison tacked on. He confessed to the crimes to avoid the death penalty, though the decision was ill received by Mark Hortman’s family, who voiced their anger that Boelter would not face capital punishment.

“It will not offer me peace of mind that he will have room and board provided for the rest of his life, paid for by my tax dollars,” said Mark Hortman’s sister, Lisa Hortman Bean.

The shootings ripped the Hortmans away from their two children, Sophie and Colin, and tortured the Hoffmans’ daughter Hope, who witnessed her parents bleed out as she attempted to call for help.

Hoffman and his wife shared with the court their own experiences with Boelter, emphasizing the lasting emotional, mental, and physical damage that the politically motivated assassination attempt had on their lives.

“The defendant looked me in the eyes and pulled the trigger. The defendant looked at my wife and chose to do the same,” Hoffman told the court Thursday. “My wife and I now live with injuries. We live with our bodies remembering the gunfire.”

The couple said they have been haunted by the memory of the attack, even within the minutiae of their day-to-day lives: The doors to their home have been replaced by solid steel, they no longer receive mail at the house, and everyday tasks have been altered to accommodate their lingering injuries.

Yvette Hoffman said that the trauma was so great it has prevented her from returning to work entirely.

“I fought him, your Honor, with everything I had. And I finally got him out of our home. I will never forget looking down and watching my blood slowly stream down that white washing machine as I felt myself sinking to the floor,” she said, choking back her emotion.

Shortly after the crimes were committed, former acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota Joseph Thompson likened Boelter’s activity to “the stuff of nightmares.”

The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that the Education Department has finalized a rule that will force schools to prove that the loans students are taking out are paying off. 

Degrees for social work, art, religious studies, teaching aides, and music, and cosmetic certification programs will be hit the hardest. For-profit programs will also be hit particularly hard.

While the Trump administration is framing the policy as “accountability” for higher education, and some are welcoming the move, others see it as an attack on those whose work is important regardless of salary. 

The Education Department intends to use IRS data to determine students’ salaries four years after they graduate and compare them to those of people similar in age who just have high school diplomas. If they’re below that baseline, that degree will be ineligible for loans.  

“We need social workers,” Mitchell said. “Whether it’s the fentanyl epidemic or homelessness in L.A., we need people who can work on the street with people who need it the most,” American Council on Education Ted Mitchell told the Times. 

Even some on the right are concerned. 

“The government shouldn’t punish people who pursue socially valuable callings just because in its judgment they don’t earn enough money,” said Gregory Baylor, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian nonprofit that the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as a designated hate group.

“In certain fields of study, especially in the humanities, whether or not that program has been successful and has done a really good job in its educational mission might not be all that directly tied to immediate earnings potential,” added Stanford professor Jonathan Gienapp.

The policy will be implemented in 2027. 

“Other nations are trying to get us to slow down” regarding data center construction, Trump said at the Environmental Protection Agency Thursday afternoon. “They’re spending a lot of money on propaganda, on press, P.R., trying to convince everybody that this isn’t a positive thing, and if we don’t do this, we’re going to be left behind.”

“You have some communities that really want this, this isn’t all negative stuff, you have communities that really want the data centers, and frankly those are the smart communities because it means a tremendous numbers of jobs, very little actual disruption,” Trump said.

Trump on Data Centers in Communities: Other nations are spending a lot of money on propaganda trying to convince everybody that this isn't a positive thing. You have some communities that really want the data centers. Those are the smart communities. Very little disruption.… pic.twitter.com/i0wrwYj25s

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 23, 2026

Trump made the remarks at an event promoting the White House’s “Ratepayer Protection Pledge,” in which states and companies pledge to keep consumers from paying higher electricity bills due to data centers. The plan has supposedly gotten the support of companies such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, xAI, OpenAI, and Amazon, who vowed to pay for increased power costs in areas where data centers are built. The pledge is completely voluntary—and unenforceable.

People who live near data centers complain about the overhaul to their lives, from the drain on water supplies to increased noise and higher utility costs. In most areas where data centers are proposed, local opposition quickly becomes protests that unite the left and the right. The economic benefit that comes with data centers is actually minimal, with most providing only a few dozen on-site jobs. Trump is very much out of touch with how Americans, including many of his supporters, view data centers.

Lawyers for the publication appeared in court to challenge subpoenas that would’ve compelled reporters to testify about their confidential sources before a grand jury, and granted access to reporters’ and their family members’ phone records.

Times lawyers argued that the Department of Justice had ignored its own protocols for failing to give advance notice and issuing subpoenas “without first conducting any serious investigation.” On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Arun Subramanian seemed to agree.

“Subpoenas are not the first thing you do, they are the last thing you do,” he said. The judge argued that the Trump administration’s actions had turned the First Amendment and free speech regulation “on its head.”

After nearly an hour of intense grilling, Sean Buckley, chief counsel to the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, announced that the government was prepared to “unilaterally withdraw” its subpoenas. Subramanian made it clear he would have rejected the subpoenas anyway.

White House officials were left fuming earlier this month after the Times reported that Trump had ditched his new Air Force One in Europe because it was missing certain security and communications capabilities. The president later announced plans to further “max out” the plane, suggesting that the $400 million luxury jumbo jet indeed lacked sufficient security features—all but confirming the story had been accurate.

The Air Force has already spent roughly $400 million on renovating the plane, changing the cabin layout, communications system, and security upgrades. That doesn’t account for the taxpayer-funded continued maintenance of the plane, either. The Qatari-gifted jet will be moved to Trump’s presidential library foundation in 2029, where it may be available for him to use as a private citizen.

This story has been updated.

The rift is a result of some early missteps and concerns about Mullin’s personnel choices, according to a senior Trump administration official and a senior Department of Homeland Security official who spoke with NBC News Thursday.  

The White House wasn’t happy with Mullin’s decision to temporarily restrict Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle stops after two deadly shootings by immigration officers in Texas and Maine. 

Just one day after Mullin announced the change, and yet another person was killed during a chaotic ICE incident, Trump ordered the agency to resume traffic stops.

An administration official told NBC News that Mullin’s decision was “100 percent” a bad move.

Mullin reportedly never received the White House’s blessing before announcing the sudden policy change—leaving President Donald Trump and border czar Tom Homan in the dark. Trump was reportedly furious, believing that it signaled the administration was softening on immigration enforcement. 

Another source of tension between Mullin and the White House is the secretary’s decision to nominate Lance Schroyer, one of his allies, to run ICE. 

The decision had “a lot of people talking,” as Schroyer has no direct experience with federal law or immigration enforcement, a DHS official told NBC News. In addition to Schroyer’s lackluster résumé, he’s also been accused of failing to pay for child support.

In any case, several officials “aren’t thrilled with him,” one Trump administration official told NBC News. 

Rising tensions with the freshly appointed DHS secretary come as a new report suggests that Trump’s second administration has even higher turnover among Senate-confirmed officials than his first. 

Inside Washington

Instead of tariffs, maybe help Canada put out wildfires?

Democratic lawmakers don’t merely think Trump’s newly announced 50 percent tariffs on Canada are a bad idea from an economic standpoint. They also want to see the U.S. actively helping Canadians fight the Ontario wildfires currently sending smoke into the U.S., and fear for the future of the two countries’ relationship.

Trump has told reporters that the tariffs he announced Monday aren’t in response to the wildfires, but the timing is highly suspicious. The announcement came just days after Trump said, “Maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs.”

To some, the arbitrary nature of Trump’s decision is the biggest affront. “There’s no question that Trump thinks he’s a king and he can use these tariffs to execute whatever he wants,” said Senator Ron Wyden, who on Wednesday unveiled a bill to reassert congressional authority over tariffs.

Others are worried about the economic impact in their own states. “Canada is a friend, one of our closest allies,” said Michigan Senator Gary Peters. “In Michigan, where we have close trading relations with Canadians, they’re a vital part of our economy, and it’s an important friendship.”

Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota is similarly concerned about her home state. “Minnesota has a good relationship with Canada. Clearly, the hostile and reckless approach of the Trump administration towards Canada makes those relationships hard to maintain.”

But beyond the typical condemnation of tariffs, several politicians are also suggesting that with wildfires in particular, the U.S. might be better served by collaborating more closely with its northern neighbor. Some would even like to see direct aid. “I was on a call this morning with Secretary [of Agriculture Brooke] Rollins and leaders from the Forest Service talking about the fires in northern Minnesota, and I know that the Forest Service and Canadian officials are working closely and well together. So I think at the operating level, the relationships continue to be effective,” Smith told me.

On Saturday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford criticized the “short memory” of American politicians who have blamed Canada for Ontario’s wildfire smoke drifting southward. “We had the water bombers and everyone going over to California [last year],” he said. “That’s what neighbors do.”

Californian Senator Alex Padilla hasn’t forgotten that. “They’re there for us in our time of need,” he said, “and we should be there for them.”

—Emma Janssen  

Full-time workers increasingly need SNAP and Medicaid to make ends meet

The number of Americans who rely on SNAP and Medicaid despite working full-time for major companies has shot up, according to a report the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, released Wednesday. The number of Amazon workers who receive anti-poverty benefits nearly tripled between February 2020 and September 2025, the report found. Gig-based companies like Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, Instacart, and DoorDash also employ high numbers of Medicaid and SNAP recipients, the report found, a major change from 2020. Meanwhile, Walmart was the top employer of Medicaid recipients in both 2020 and 2025.

The report confirms what anti-poverty advocates have been saying for years: It’s becoming harder to be a working American, and working full-time does not guarantee financial security. It also shows that some of the country’s most successful companies don’t pay their workers a living wage, according to Senator Bernie Sanders, who requested the GAO produce the report.

“American taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize the starvation wages of large corporations like Walmart and Amazon,” said Sanders in a statement.

Between 2020 and 2025, Walmart increased its profits from nearly $15 billion to nearly $22 billion. Meanwhile, the number of Walmart employees relying on Medicaid in the 11 states sampled in the GAO report increased by 55 percent.

Life has probably gotten harder for these employees in the months since the data was collected. This report comes just over a year after President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law, implementing massive cuts to SNAP and Medicaid. SNAP participation is already down more than 4.5 million people, according to USDA data. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, estimates that up to 15 million people could lose their Medicaid coverage by 2034. 

Californian Senator Alex Padilla hasn’t forgotten that. “They’re there for us in our time of need,” he said, “and we should be there for them.”

—Emma Janssen  

Outside Washington

Canada “politely” withdraws party invites in response to Trump tariffs

Americans have been “politely, but effectively, disinvited” from the opening ceremony on Friday for the new and long-awaited Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, three sources tell the Detroit Free Press. The reason, Todd Spangler reports, is Trump’s threat to slap 50 percent tariffs on Canada. Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer has publicly worried about the threat’s effect on the state’s economy, and the Trump administration already delayed the bridge’s opening last month by demanding that Canada give the United States half the bridge’s profits for the first 15 years—in addition to a debt-repayment arrangement that remains a little unclear. (The text of the deal was only released on Tuesday.)

Tariffs are also a wild card in Maine’s Senate race, where Democrats have been frantically shoring up support for Troy Jackson to replace the scandal-a-day Graham Platner as Democratic nominee against Republican incumbent Susan Collins. Republican candidates in the state quickly distanced themselves from Trump on tariffs, with Collins disavowing her own party head to Politico on behalf of Maine’s lobsters and blueberries. (They’re “harvested in Maine, processed in Canada, and then come back,” said Collins.) Meanwhile, U.S. businesses obviously aren’t thrilled with the new chaos, and the American dairy and distilled spirits lobbies, representing industries Trump is allegedly protecting with these tariffs, have already voiced their displeasure.

Elsewhere:

• The Massachusetts state Senate is considering a proposal to increase affordable housing by upzoning vast swaths of the state, ending single-family zoning in favor of allowing “duplexes by right.”
• At CalMatters, Jeanne Kuang examines Gavin Newsom’s intricate balancing act as he attempts to position himself as a populist candidate for 2028—an act that has included opposing a state billionaire tax while voicing support for a federal one. Progressives are skeptical, Kuang notes.

—Heather Souvaine Horn  

The Ideas Factory

The Century Foundation’s Angela Hanks, Aissa Canchola Bañez, and Eduard Nilaj find that “rising energy debt is climbing into the middle class,” in part because “energy bills have increased three times faster than the rate of inflation while Trump has been president.”

The Natural Resources Defense Council slams the Trump administration for “making climate science denial its official policy” and then threatening Canada with tariffs over Ontario wildfire smoke. “Some 180 million Americans were threatened last week by dangerous heat” in addition to the perilously poor air quality, senior attorney David Doniger writes in a memo, and widespread drought has contributed to “Colorado wheat farmers … reporting their worst year in six decades; in Nebraska, it’s the worst in more than a century.”

Brandon Holmes, Molly Robertson, Kevin Rennert, Keith J. Benes, Natalie Baillargeon, Juniper Katz, Robi Nilson, and Ben Hoen publish a new working paper through Resources for the Future analyzing solar and wind development, finding that “Texas’s renewable energy development often proceeds quickly when compared with projects on federal land and many state-level permitting processes.”

Earlier this week, the Urban Institute’s William J. Congdon, Elisabeth Jacobs, Amanda Briggs, Ryan Kelsey, Shayne Spaulding, Oluwasekemi Odumosu, and Julia Payne released an article outlining “Policy Priorities for an Inclusive AI Economy.” A few of their proposals: “use AI to match workers with jobs and employers with talent,” “update” labor regulations to address the risks of AI, “incorporate worker voice in AI design and implementation,” “improve policies and programs for displaced workers,” and “ensure gains in productivity and prosperity are widely shared.” So, basically a complete redesign of how the AI transition is currently going.

—Heather Souvaine Horn  

In Closing

$37.5 billion for Trump’s war on Iran? Something doesn’t add up ... 

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared before the Senate Appropriations Committee this week, saying the Pentagon has spent $37.5 billion bombing Iran so far, and needs another $67 billion, stat. Those numbers are a bit suspicious. Watch TNR’s Edie Olmsted get into the math.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Who was the first Socialist Party member elected to the House of Representatives, and when, and where was he from? (Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

In a Truth Social post, Trump demanded that Saudi Arabia normalize relations with Israel via the Abraham Accords before getting any U.S. nuclear technology. He also claimed “there will be no enrichment of material,” though the deal certainly opens the door to uranium enrichment in the country.

“The Civil Nuclear Deal (There will be no enrichment of material!) being made between the United States Department of Energy and Saudi Arabia, which pertains only to non-military use such as the ones that Iran and UAE (and others) already have, will be approved, but is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords,” Trump wrote. “The United States is not opposed to Civil (Non-Enriched) Nuclear Facilities.” 

Negotiating terms would make sense if the deal wasn’t already signed, or if the Saudi kingdom had at least hinted at accepting the demands Trump outlined (it hasn’t).

Trump’s post created a stark messaging contradiction for the White House, which is still struggling to explain the terms of the deal.  

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked to explain the president’s about-face during her Thursday press conference. 

“What steps is the U.S. taking to get Saudi Arabia to sign the Abraham Accords?” a reporter asked.

Leavitt did not answer the question. 

“This is a condition that the president has spoken about many times.… He wants to see these countries sign the Abraham Accord, it was one of the most historic accomplishments of his first term, and it continues to be a long-term goal of his to expand those accords to ultimately come to a place where the Middle East can be a peaceful and stable region,” Leavitt replied, providing no examples of mechanisms being used to make that happen. “Yes, this deal with Saudi Arabia … is contingent on this condition as far as the president is concerned. So we’ll continue to talk with our Saudi counterparts to get the deal finalized.” 

“Why was that condition not mentioned yesterday when the energy secretary announced it?” another reporter followed up.

“Well, look, the president is always the final dealmaker, as you know, and this is something that he has mentioned on numerous occasions,” Leavitt replied.

“So the deal is dead if Saudi Arabia doesn’t join? And have you any indication that Saudi Arabia is even considering this?” 

Leavitt once again failed to engage with the actual questions being raised. 

“The president has spoken directly with the Saudis about this in numerous conversations in the past, and the administration will continue to engage in these conversations.” 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Trump wants Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords before a proposed U.S.-Saudi civil nuclear energy deal moves forward, confirming the agreement is contingent on that condition.

Saudi Arabia has not yet responded… pic.twitter.com/QRWk0H2b5C

— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 23, 2026

It’s clear that no one in the Trump administration can explain just how they plan to get the Saudis to agree to a different deal than the one they signed just a few hours ago. 

“On Trump seemingly adding new conditions to the US Saudi nuclear deal, including Saudi Israel normalization, a Saudi source says: ‘It was signed. So nothing to renegotiate,’” journalist Laura Rozen wrote. “‘Tweets don’t overturn signed agreements.’” 

“Well maybe she or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes, right?” Thune told reporters. “It’s 50 around here. And, so, instead of pointing the finger at Republicans, they might think about going after the people who are stopping it on the floor, which is the Democrats.”

“And if there are Republicans that they think are gettable, get on the phone. Let’s get them to ‘yes,’” he added.

At a press conference earlier in the day, Leavitt revealed that the president’s “patience is running out.”

“He wants to see as much of the SAVE America Act passed by the August recess,” Leavitt said. “He knows that’s what the American people want to see passed.”

The Senate goes into recess on August 7. The House, which began its month-long recess Thursday, voted 216–214 to adopt a budget blueprint Wednesday night that included portions of Trump’s voter restriction bill.

The president has predicated his support for any legislative effort on the SAVE Act’s passage. Since the beginning of the year, Trump has insisted it should be Congress’s top priority. He has refused to sign any bill and even derailed Cabinet confirmations until Capitol Hill bends to his will. So far, that stalemate has gummed up efforts to fund the Department of Homeland Security, stalled attempts to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, and upended a planned photo op of Trump signing a landmark bipartisan housing bill.

The original iteration of the SAVE America Act sparked nationwide backlash for proposing numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, perhaps chief among them a requirement that voters bring either a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Critics argued that the mandate would unduly restrict millions of Americans from voting, pointing out that half of the country’s population lacks a passport, and furthermore that the legislation as written would make it difficult for anyone who changed their name—including married women—to register.

The bill would also require voters to present photo identification when casting a ballot, and impose a total ban on mail-in voting. Trump has described the latter procedure as “crooked” and “corrupt,” despite the fact that he himself has cast several mail-in ballots.

“I don’t know what the hell they do, I think they make a lot of money, too. I’m hearing they’re very rich,” Trump said. 

I was a Front Row Joe and this really bothers me.

Trump calls out the Front Row Joe' today at a rally in GA, which he should, they are incredibly loyal and are deserving of much more than they have been given by Trump.

While I disagree with the Front Row Joe's on Trump's… pic.twitter.com/LfkevNO4zh

— Trisha Hope - National Delegate-TX (@JustTheTweets17) July 22, 2026

The reality for these supporters is quite different, though, as Trisha Hope, a former Trump supporter and Front Row Joe, explained in a long X post. 

“Trump WRONGLY says to them ‘you’ve made a lot of money, you’re rich,’” Hope said. “This shows me how absolutely clueless he is on what these folks have sacrificed in order to support him. They DO NOT MAKE MONEY!!  In fact it costs them a GREAT deal of money and time to attend.”

Hope, who said she left the group last year over Trump’s comments about Jeffrey Epstein, added that the Front Roe Joes are “incredibly loyal and are deserving of much more than they have been given by Trump.”

“They drive sometimes all night to get in line [at rallies], they spend money on flights when driving isn’t an option,” Hope’s post continued. “They sleep outside the venue sometimes for days often sleeping on pop up cots or just a pallet on the ground. They rely on whatever facilities they can find to relieve themselves.”

Hope pointed out that the founder of the Joes, a Marine veteran named Randall Thom, was killed in a car accident driving home from a Trump rally on October 18, 2020, and “never got any recognition from the Trump crew, he had hoped to get a job with the rally team but he could never get them to commit to him.”

“I just couldn’t remain silent when I heard Trump talk as if the Front Row Joe’s are profiting from their rally attendance, it is the exact opposite,” Hope concluded.

All of this makes Trump’s comments on how wealthy the group must be seem incredibly callous and clueless. While he praised the Joes, who came decked out in matching red, white, and blue Trump sports jerseys, he doesn’t seem to know much about them, or care to know.

A fountain in the German-American Friendship Garden on the National Mall is in bad shape after a contractor vehicle drove over it, Newsweek reported Thursday.

The center of the fountain has collapsed into the ground, and stones surrounding it were severely cracked, according to recent photographs captured by photojournalist Andrew Leyden. Repairs are reportedly underway.

This recent damage to a national monument comes amid Trump’s sweeping renovation efforts around Washington, D.C. This isn’t the first time that federal contractors hired by the Trump administration have damaged a historic landmark.

Just a few hundred yards away from the cracked fountain, renovations on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool have been disastrous. Shortly after construction was completed, large sections of the pool’s new blue lining began to peel off. Experts have suggested the peeling was the result of shoddy application—not shadowy vandals, as administration officials have suggested. 

Trump’s disastrous renovations on the Reflecting Pool have already cost taxpayers more than $16 million. The iconic monument has been left drained, surrounded by chain-link fences, and under strict surveillance. 

A short walk away, the $69 million worth of renovations on the Lincoln Memorial Undercroft have also had issues. The National Parks Service has struggled to maintain safe conditions to display historical documents, leading them to be removed from the brand-new exhibit last week.  

The Daily Beast reported on Tuesday that Graham in 2020 donated $100 to state Senator Katrina Shealy, who is perhaps best known for filibustering the state’s near-total abortion ban in 2023. 

Shealy was part of South Carolina’s “sister senators,” a group of five female state lawmakers—two Republicans, a Democrat, and an independent— who were in staunch opposition to the ban. Shealy lost her primary the next year, largely due to this vote. 

Graham tried to bury the news of her ties to Shealy, writing in a statement on X on Wednesday that she believed in “protecting the sanctity of human life at every stage.”

“For years, I’ve committed my life to fighting for vulnerable populations, and no one is more vulnerable than an unborn child who cannot speak for themselves,” she wrote. “As a mother, I know that welcoming children into this world is God’s greatest gift. I’m proud to be pro-life and to stand up for the unborn and expecting moms. I will not waver in my support for life, pregnant women, and families.”

The MAGA-verse doesn’t seem to buy it. 

“Darline Graham Nordone is good friends with Katrina Shealy, the disgraced former South Carolina state senator who is PRO-ABORTION and OPPOSED the Heartbeat bill,” one conservative X account commented. “Darline even donated money to her campaign.”

“I’m going to ask @LIFEforSC to not consider her for the coveted ‘incumbent endorsement.’ She is fully unproven. She backed pro-abortion Senator Katrina Shealy. Vote @RalphNorman,” said another, referring to the representative who announced last week that he’d be running for Lindsey Graham’s seat in the August 11 special election. 

“You donated to Healy who is pro abortion and was against the heartbeat bill.  So either you are NOT pro life or you dont know who you are supporting,” wrote yet another. “Both are disqualifying.”

Graham has not fully explained her donation to Shealy. PBS reported that the two women are in fact good friends and often share wine on each other’s porches. 

And while Graham cast herself as a hard-line conservative in the same mold as her brother, this recent revelation may lead to more problems for her in the future as she runs for her own six-year term after finishing his current one. 

The resolution passed 214-208, with Republican Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio, and Tom Barrett of Michigan voting yes. 

It joins a concurrent resolution in the Senate proposed by Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen on Thursday which would block Trump from military action in Iran without congressional approval. Van Hollen’s resolution only needs a simple majority to pass in the Senate, which could be likely with Republican absences, such as Mitch McConnell, who has been hospitalized for over a month. 

The resolutions have heightened importance due to the reignition of hostilities with Iran in recent weeks, with the U.S. resuming airstrikes against the country while Iran launches missiles at oil refineries and U.S. military targets around the Middle East. On Thursday, Trump threatened to expand the war to Yemen after the country’s Houthi militia began carrying out attacks in the Red Sea. 

This is the second time the House has passed a war powers resolution, following a June 3 vote where the same four Republican representatives joined Democrats to curtail the Iran war. The Senate joined them three weeks later, but then reversed its vote following pressure from Donald Trump.   

Will the Senate join the House in trying to rein in Trump, or will they allow more civilian deaths and economic damage from the renewed war? 

This story has been updated. 

Investigators have accused David Elliott Pritt of using Snapchat and the multiplayer game Roblox to start talking to the girl outside of school during the 2024–2025 school year, when she was in eighth grade. At the end of that year, he allegedly told the child that he “loved her,” and sent her a picture of himself in pajama pants and asked for pictures of her in return. When the girl replied with normal pictures, Pritt requested more explicit ones, and she obliged. Pritt eventually enticed the girl to repeatedly have sex with him in the classroom, and they continued to exchange explicit photographs up until just this month.

Pritt was reported to police by the girl’s family on July 9, and calls for his resignation were raised immediately from both sides of the aisle.

“The West Virginia House of Delegates simply will not tolerate conduct that even approaches what is alleged in the public filings released by federal law enforcement today,” West Virginia House Speaker Roger Hanshaw said. “I urge Elliott Pritt, for the benefit of his family and the people of his District, to spare his students and his colleagues at every level the continued embarrassments and distractions and to resign from elected office as soon as he is able.”

The West Virginia GOP also said Pritt should resign, calling the allegations “shocking, sickening, and deeply disturbing.” What makes this horrific matter even worse is that in his legislative career, Pritt has earned political capital from his supposed opposition to the sexual abuse of minors. He offered perhaps the most spirited, emotional defense of Raylee’s Law, a bill that would force the state to stop removing students who are the subjects of child abuse investigations from school, stating then that “we have an opportunity here tonight to do something to protect children.” And when Pritt won his delegate seat in 2022, he beat an incumbent, Austin Haynes, who was accused of sexual harassment—saying that Haynes’s loss was a “moral decision” that West Virginia voters made.

“No one is perfect, but there are some mistakes and lapses in character and judgment that just cannot be overlooked or ‘go away,’” Pritt said about Haynes at the time.

Representative Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, sent a criminal referral for Smith to the Department of Justice Wednesday, urging the department to investigate Smith for making false statements to Congress during congressional testimony in December.

At issue is a line of questioning in which Smith was asked whether he sought a search warrant for the content of text messages from members of Congress, to which Smith replied that he did not. Last week, Senator Chuck Grassley posted on X that he had “received records [from] DOJ confirming Jack Smith’s investigative team reviewed the contents of text msgs sent by 44 MEMBERS OF CONGRESS.”

But Grassley’s post and the questions Smith was asked were two different categories of documents, as legal experts such as Lawfare’s Anna Bower and Politico’s Kyle Cheney pointed out on X. Smith requested information from Congress on toll records, which concerned the time and date of text messages, not their content.

There was a separate instance in which Smith’s team gathered text messages from the National Archives from White House phones. Some of those records included exchanges with members of Congress. But Republicans never asked about that.

“[T]here’s zero ambiguity here,” Bower said. “Nothing in the Grassley docs raises any real question of perjury.”

House Democrats quickly responded to Jordan’s letter Wednesday. Representative Jamie Raskin called Jordan’s letter a “baseless and vindictive criminal referral” that “deliberately distorts and misstates the facts, including what questions the Republicans actually asked at Mr. Smith’s interview.”

Smith’s lawyers have also responded to Jordan’s letter with one of their own, saying his accusations are based on a “spurious claim.”

“The referral is made not because Mr. Smith made a false statement, which the letter concedes, but because he did not proactively disclose information that was not responsive to a question asked,” Smith’s lawyers wrote. “During his testimony, Mr. Smith provided truthful, responsive answers and candidly discussed his work.”

All of them are members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The group, which went from obscurity in the 1980s to a Beltway punchline in the 2010s, now holds more than 250 offices in 40 states. Say what you will about DSA, but it’s is no longer a fringe organization.

I mention all this not to relitigate the merits of rent freezes, Medicare for All, abolishing the police, or government-run grocery stores. I agree with many of the group’s positions and with the underlying conviction that American society needs to be rebuilt from the foundation up. Which is exactly why DSA’s rise worries me. For it to truly succeed, and become a nationwide movement that transforms American politics, it will have to do more than fight on behalf the “working class” and actually start resembling the working class.

Appeals to the working class are rampant in the DSA. Mamdani, who acknowledges his “privileged upbringing,” is fond of saying, “I fight for working people.” Valdez, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who left a program assistant job at Columbia University to join the New York State Assembly, declared on the night of her primary victory that she would be “a fighting force for the entire working class.” Chevalier, who had a poor upbringing but went on to become a Columbia graduate and now a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at CUNY, describes herself as a “working-class Dominican New Yorker.”

But here’s the problem: They don’t fit the part. Their finances may or may not equate with the working class, but they’re not working class. Sure, they might “work to pay … bills,” which Mamdani, rather squirrelly, has said is “one definition of being a part of the working class.” But that expansive definition won’t fly with most observers—especially not those whom we commonly think of as working class, which is to say non-college-educated workers who rely on an hourly wage. Rather, these DSA politicians are part, as their hipster glasses convey all too well, of the college-educated creative class. And that’s true of the DSA broadly. It simply is not a working-class organization.

If history is any indication, that’s cause for concern. George Orwell diagnosed the problem nearly a century ago. In 1936, with socialism in retreat amid fascist takeovers in Europe, he was sent north by the Left Book Club to document working-class life in industrial England. He came back not with the tidy indictment of capitalism his publisher was expecting but with The Road to Wigan Pier, half of which presented a devastating account of English coal-mining poverty, and the other half a lengthy, still-controversial essay about why working people, the miners themselves, didn’t like socialists.

It wasn’t that the miners disagreed with socialist principles, Orwell said. Instead, he pointed to the obvious fact of the class divide, diagnosing the problem of “middle-class” socialism: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”

It remains one of the great insults in English political writing, and it still gets at the heart of the matter today, as it relates to the question of class solidarity. “I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists,” Orwell added, a little more soberly, “and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.”

Needless to say, the Left Book Club was none too pleased. Victor Gollancz, its founder, agreed to publish the book only with a foreword registering his own severe objections to Orwell’s characterization of the movement. Critics have rightly pointed out the ways Orwell overstepped the historical truth by fixating on cranks, when in reality earlier socialist movements were largely organized and populated by actual working-class people, many of them diasporic immigrants.

Orwell himself admitted to some disquieting facts about his own formation, describing his upbringing as a member of the “lower-upper-middle class.” He confessed he’d been raised to believe that working-class people smelled, a tendency he leveled at middle-class socialists, as well. While Orwell sought to humanize the working class, scholars argue his accounts relied heavily on chauvinism and the reinforcement of early twentieth-century racial and gender hierarchies. But the core of his argument remains: Middle-class people and working-class people are not one and the same.

Which brings us to the current moment, and to the numbers, which are not especially kind to the theory that socialism has finally cracked the working-class code. In the convincing victory that made Mamdani a national figure, exit polls found that Andrew Cuomo won voters without a college degree by five points. Mamdani’s coalition was undoubtedly broad, including moderate Black voters, but like most of the DSA’s electoral coalitions it was disproportionately young, college-educated, and concentrated in the city’s more gentrified precincts.

The DSA’s own 2021 membership survey found the organization was 85 percent non-Hispanic white, against a working-class population that is only 55 percent white. Half of its membership worked in education, tech, white-collar companies, nonprofits, the public sector, or the arts; just 4 percent identified as “blue collar.” In the primary that sent Claire Valdez to Congress, she carried college-educated areas by 37 points and won younger residents 64–32, while her opponent ran strongest in the district’s lower-income, majority-Hispanic precincts. The DSA’s own candidate, running as the tribune of the working class, lost the working-class parts of her own district.

But they won nonetheless, as did Kiros in Colorado. After her victory, some House Democrats tried to write the result off as a blip. “One more case in the growing dynamic of performative politics,” one told Axios. Another was blunter: “[That] DSA is … winning some safe seat primaries with these young white college-educated voters is just no shock. It’s literally their entire playbook.”

But this isn’t a blip. Socialism is having a renaissance, which makes remembering its own history all the more important. Movements built by outsiders on behalf of a class have a habit of curdling into something approaching paternalism. Orwell was at least honest enough to turn the critique on himself as well, tracing his own socialist leanings to his guilt for having enforced empire as a British Imperial Police officer in Burma. He admitted that the English working class first entered his imagination as a kind of screen, representing the “symbolic victims of injustice,” standing in for something he could project onto while masking his own guilt.

So what do working people really want? A revolution against the “capitalist oligarchy,” the “end of the U.S. war machine,” the “abolition” of the nuclear family, or something simpler and more mundane? My grandparents immigrated from southern Italy to the anthracite coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania at the turn of the twentieth century. Our family lived in towns where men went down into the ground and did not always come back up, and where labor politics were hardly theoretical. Their fight was for dignity, shorter hours, some guarantee of support in the case of inevitable injury, and a measure of certainty that in the face of death—whether it arrived through a fall of rock, a kick to the head from a mule, a gas explosion, or the slower suffocation of black lung—their families would have something to live on. It was, at root, a communal effort, seeing women on the front lines of pickets and child laborers feeding the “family economy.”

In the 1910s, radical movements held real sway in the region. The Industrial Workers of the World, and even Communist groups, found a genuine following among Italian and other immigrant miners. But the more instructive point is found in what the mainstream labor movement and its offshoots did, taking the fight to the mat without overt ideology, enduring extreme forms of violence, so that miners and their families could simply live their lives in peace. Orwell saw this too in the miners of North England, writing that for the ordinary working man, socialism “does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing him about.” A life in which the things that mattered stayed the same: “family life, the pub, football, and local politics.”

In the end, Orwell believed that “the misery of class prejudice” would not be solved through messaging or persuasion, but through an actual collapsing of class distance itself. Anticipating the inequality of our day, he foresaw potential solidarity emerging from the “sinking” of the middle class—“the private schoolmaster, the half starved freelance journalist, the colonel’s spinster daughter with 75 pounds a year, the jobless Cambridge graduate”—into “the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared.”

Given the dire predictions about AI’s decimation of many middle-class professions—like those held by a majority of DSA members—here’s to hoping that Orwell was right.

“A year ago the United States of America attacked, very powerfully, the Houthis, for their interference with commerce and trade, by shooting at ships. Since that time, and during our conflict with Iran, they have acted very responsibly,” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, referring to an airstrike campaign the U.S. conducted against the Houthis from March to May 2025 after the group attacked commercial ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.

“Unfortunately, now they are starting up again, shooting at two Saudi Arabian ships last night,” he continued. “Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if they do this again, the U.S. will hold Iran responsible, in that the Houthis are a Surrogate and/or Proxy of Iran, and major military punishment will be inflicted upon Iran and, of course, the Houthis, themselves, who I am very disappointed with in that they have, until now, acted very professionally and smart.”

Yemen’s Houthi militia claimed responsibility for overnight drone and missile strikes against Saudi oil tankers in the Red Sea. In a statement, the Iranian-backed group claimed that the two vessels, the ‌Encelia and Layla, had violated its naval blockade. The Houthis also claimed that the attacks on the two ships had forced about 10 other ships to retreat.

A Saudi Arabian news outlet, SPA, said that all crew members of the Encelia were safe, but that the attack had started a fire on the bow of the ship.

If acted upon, Trump’s warning could open up a new front in the already complicated Iran war. Since a preliminary peace deal crumbled earlier this month, the U.S. has struck Iran every day.

Meanwhile, the conflict has taken a serious toll on the American public, with the cost of the war estimated to be well above $100 billion.

Earlier this month, Duffy announced that the Trump administration would gut funding for so-called “DEI bike lanes”—even though the Federal Highway Administration had previously urged agencies to consider installing lanes for bicyclists in order to make the road safer for everyone.

Two days later, a staffer at the Federal Highway Administration’s safety office directed staff to update the website to remove that suggestion from the agency’s website, NPR reported Thursday.

The agency, also known as FHWA, had previously advised that “providing bicycle facilities can mitigate or prevent interactions, conflicts, and crashes between bicyclists and motor vehicles, and create a network of safer roadways for bicycling.”

A person who works in web at the Department of Transportation told NPR that staff were left wondering why the changes were being made in the first place. “Why do you need to take down bicycle safety, of all things?” the person told NPR.

“We’re not making the sites better, faster, or quicker, you know, able to provide real information to the communities that use these resources,” they said. “It’s asinine.”

The removal of this guidance is part of a wider push to remove road safety materials from the department’s website—including guidance about bike lanes and speed cameras.

One of the safety tools that the FHWA removed was the Pedestrian and Bicycle Crash Analysis Tool, or PBCAT, which was designed to record detailed accounts of crashes involving bicycles, pedestrians, and motor vehicles, in order to help prevent them in the future.

David Harkey, who helped to develop the tool at the University of North Carolina’s Highway Safety Research Center, said the tool was important because it helped track pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities nationally.

“This is an agency that claims that safety is a priority for them,” he told NPR. “It’s important that proven tools and resources like PBCAT are there on their site and are available for safety professionals across the country.”

A Department of Transportation spokesperson defended the decision in a statement to NPR: “This is a common-sense approach, despite the Left’s belief that everyone should ride a bike to their shoebox-sized apartment to eat crickets to achieve a phony climate agenda.”

But what about those red-blooded all-American car owners who are less safe because there are more bikes on the road? What’s next, outlawing bikes or mandating that everyone buy a car?

One of the Secret Service agents assigned to protect JD Vance was placed on administrative leave over concerns that he was leaking information to the press, CNN reported late Wednesday.

The action followed an intimate recounting of Vance’s recent travel by MS NOW, in which the news outlet reported that Vance’s Secret Service agents “groused” and complained about the vice president’s decision to use a military helicopter to take his son to a golf lesson at Joint Base Andrews.

“Agents have shared concerns internally about Vance and his office pressing them for trips and assignments that some agents consider an inappropriate or even unprecedented use of government resources compared to prior vice presidents,” MS NOW reported on July 15.

The Secret Service’s internal affairs department is reviewing the agent’s conduct. It is currently unclear if the agent will face administrative consequences or criminal charges, according to an internal source that spoke to CNN.

Donald Trump has been so fixated on internal criticism and media leaks that some of his administration’s countermeasures have tested the boundaries of the First Amendment. During his first term, Trump considered wiretapping the Homeland Security Department to identify the source of his bad press.

That attitude has only escalated in the years since—aided by the sycophantic behaviors of Trump’s new government entourage. Earlier this month, CNN reported that FBI Director Kash Patel and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles were personally overseeing a crackdown at the White House to determine who leaked that the ultra-luxury jet gifted to Trump by Qatar lacked the security specs to be considered for use in Air Force One.

So far, Wiles and Patel’s probe has forced government officials to hand over their phones—causing some agencies to pit their own attorneys against the White House—and issued subpoenas to four New York Times journalists who reported the story.

In a post on Truth Social Thursday, Trump declared that there would be “no enrichment of material” as part of his nascent nuclear deal, which would allow U.S. companies to make billions building and running nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia.

But surprise, surprise: That’s not the whole story.

The United States has offered Saudi Arabia a special deal that is reportedly far less restrictive than other agreements under Article 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954—namely, this deal leaves the door open for enrichment down the line.

The Saudi agreement reportedly states that the two countries will conduct a two-year fuel-cycle study on the economic feasibility of domestic enrichment in Saudi Arabia. If, after the study, the two sides agree that it’s feasible, then the U.S. would build an enrichment facility in Saudi Arabia. If not, Saudi Arabia would not be allowed to build its own domestic enrichment for 10 years, while blocking Saudi access to sensitive technology. If approved, the decision on whether to build would be made in two years—when Trump is still president.

Trump also claimed in his post that the agreement would require Saudi Arabia to agree to join the Abraham Accords.

Initial reporting about the deal suggested that the agreement would not require Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel. Unsurprisingly, Israel has voiced strong concerns about its closest ally cutting a deal with its enemy.

There are other reasons to be concerned about Trump’s deal. The president’s mishandling of nuclear negotiations is well documented, including his decision to detonate the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal struck by President Barack Obama, and the careless wording of last month’s memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran, which shortly afterward crumbled in the Strait of Hormuz.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

A Republican operative just offered something remarkable to Politico about how the party is thinking about the midterm elections right now. The operative said this: “We’re preparing for the bottom to fall out.” This quote seems to capture something bigger. There really is a sense that things are spinning out of Trump’s control. The Iran war debacle is deepening. A bizarre new outburst from Trump suggests he’s delusional about what this really means. The polls also show Trump continuing to crater on the economy. And as Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg pointed out on his Hopium Chronicles Substack, that GOP operative’s dismay is in sync with polls we’re seeing in the Senate races, including in places that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.

But we still think there’s a long way to go, and a lot of things can go wrong. So we’re talking to Simon Rosenberg about how Democrats can close this deal, and whether all that GOP pessimism is really that justified. Simon, thanks for coming on.

Simon Rosenberg: Greg, it’s always a pleasure.

Sargent: Good to see you, Simon. So Politico’s report is really striking. One GOP operative says they’re preparing for the bottom to fall out. That operative also says that Senate races are in play in Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio, and even that House districts that Trump carried by double digits are firmly in play.

Simon, I’m just not ready to get that optimistic. If all those places are really in play—and again, this is coming from a Republican—then it really is on the verge of falling apart for Trump. Are you there yet or not? And why?

Rosenberg: No, I think we have a shot here. I mean, it’s a year of opportunity for us. How well we seize it is really going to be in part up to us. They’ve created a situation where he’s already fallen very far, much further than where he was in 2018 at this point. The national climate is plus seven or so, or above, for us, which means that the House should flip. We have polls showing Sherrod Brown up—independent polls showing Sherrod Brown up in Ohio, and Mary Peltola up in Alaska, and Josh Turek up in Iowa. I mean, these are states that Trump won by more than ten points.

Sargent: A lot of this has to do with the war. A second Republican close to the White House tells Politico that all this is driven by Trump’s refusal to accept that he’s lost in Iran. This Republican calls this “a classic escalation trap.”

I’m a little torn over this. On the one hand, it’s not that hard to imagine him pulling out of the war in September and declaring victory, though he’d probably have to accept a fair amount of humiliation to do that, and he might not be willing to. And yet on the other, you hear things like this from Donald Trump.

Donald Trump (voiceover): A poll just came out. Americans don’t want high gasoline prices, but they’re not against the war. That just came out loud and clear in a poll. Nobody wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Do you want Iran to have a nuclear weapon? You think it’s good?

Sargent: Simon, that’s really something. The new Washington Post poll finds 29 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the situation in Iran, with an extraordinary 69 percent disapproving. The contrast between him saying the war is popular and Republicans admitting the bottom is falling out over it is really something, isn’t it?

Rosenberg: Yeah, look, he can’t accept—he has said repeatedly there are no limits on his power. And what he’s finding is that there are, and he can’t accept that. He can’t accept that the war may be the biggest mistake by an American president in all of American history. And he has no way out, because he already declared—remember, Greg, he already surrendered and declared victory once.

And that didn’t work, because Iran wasn’t playing ball with the perception that he was actually the victor. And they started asserting themselves in the Strait of Hormuz, which was an unacceptable situation for the United States and his regional partners. And so he’s now had to go back in and do what he did before, which didn’t work, which is bomb them, which was ineffective.

And so he’s in a very bad place. And the resumption of the war itself has driven up energy prices, and it’s going to reignite inflation. Interest rates are going up, the bond yields have gone up.

Sargent: One Republican operative told Politico about the war, “Nobody can really defend it.” The Post poll, by the way, says only 28 percent say the war was worth fighting, 68 percent say it wasn’t, and only 31 percent say what the U.S. is doing right now will prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, while 66 percent are not confident of that.

Simon, if I’m reading that correctly, huge majorities are rejecting every single argument he’s making about this. I don’t know if we’ve seen such a dramatic repudiation of a president in modern times, have we?

Rosenberg: Well, and you could make the case that there’s similar data on the tariffs. So here’s Trump—prices are going back up, his standing is in the toilet, the Senate is in play now. And his tariffs are expiring. His temporary tariffs, his global tariffs, are expiring on Friday. And instead of letting them expire and saying, listen, I think it’s the right thing for the economy and the American people that I lower prices, he’s desperately slapping all sorts of new creative tariffs on the economies of the world, purposefully raising prices. He jacked up Brazil to 25 percent. He jacked up Canada to 50 percent.

So he’s now raising prices on purpose in a time when all these other prices are going up. And I think for the Republicans, you have to be tearing your hair out. It’s like, dude, let the tariffs expire. Let’s claim that we’ve lowered prices for people going into the election. But he can’t do it, right? Because he can’t admit defeat. He can’t backtrack on anything. He can’t course-correct. What happens when he gets challenged is that he just doubles down and escalates, and he’s doing it on the tariffs.

Sargent: I want to underscore the importance of this, because I think it’s really lost on a lot of people. The tariffs are going to come back in a big way as we get closer to the midterms. And the tariffs are like the sleeper issue that really debilitated this president very badly in the first place. That’s what really started the inflationary stuff. And that’s when Donald Trump’s approval rating really started to unravel, particularly on the economy, over the tariffs.

And so now for him to be out there, number one, saying the Iran war is popular when it’s polling at like 28 percent, and then number two, escalating the tariffs again heading into the elections after Republicans just took this tremendous political hit over that—I think, with those two things, you see a president who is utterly disconnected from any concern over what happens to his party.

Rosenberg: Well, let’s add a third thing that’s going to erode their position before the election, which is that both the private plans and the public health care plans—people are going to start getting notices of the premium increases. And what we’re seeing in the data is that even private plans are going to see significant cost increases, and that 50 percent of businesses have said in surveys that they’re going to pass those cost increases on to workers in their companies.

And so this is all going to happen in October, right before the election—that tens and tens of millions of people are going to be formally notified that their premiums are going to increase because of Donald Trump and the Republicans, right before the election.

And then finally, you could add a fourth, which is we’re starting to get data that people are being pushed off of SNAP at a much higher rate than was anticipated. And so you’ve now got potentially tens of millions of people falling into greater food insecurity than was anticipated. And so all of these trend lines together add up to this basic reality, which is that Donald Trump and the Republicans have purposefully done extraordinary harm to the American people and to the United States itself in order to enrich themselves and their friends. And it is an extraordinary betrayal of the American people. People have figured it out.

And every argument he makes—this is the point you made that I think is really important—he can’t get to a majority on anything that he’s doing any longer. He’s so distant from the electorate. And what it means for us is that we’ve got a shot, we’ve got a chance to have a really meaningful election where we really degrade MAGA’s power all across the country, which is why we’ve got to be working as hard as we can heading into November.

Sargent: Simon, let me add yet another thing that I think is going to be working against them, which is that the ICE killings just started up.

Rosenberg: Yeah. Sorry, how did we forget that? Number five, let’s add number five to the list.

Sargent: Right, right. Seriously—I mean, ICE just killed two people, one in Texas, one in Maine, where there’s a very competitive Senate race. We have a piece up at newrepublic.com on the Senate race in Maine and how it’s going to be impacted by the ICE killing. Check that out, folks.

But so there you’ve got yet another area where Trump is absolutely disconnected from the impact this is having on Republicans. This is a really bad issue for Republicans. You had mentioned that Trump can’t get to a majority on any issue. That now includes immigration, and the ICE killings are getting worse again.

Rosenberg: Yeah. And I would just say to that—I mean, Tom Homan has been, for whatever reason, very vocal, very visible the last couple of days. And the guy is really a barbarian, right? I mean, the stuff he’s saying is so fundamentally illiberal and inhumane. He’s doing this, you know, like, hey, people wouldn’t get killed in the streets if they would follow law enforcement—meaning that he’s sort of sanctioning extrajudicial killing of Americans on our soil.

And it’s just—it is shocking how Nazi-like and fascistic the language is when they get challenged. When they are feeling weak, they revert back to this kind of psychotic language about people, this inhumanity, this disrespect and contempt they have for everyday people, which is sort of the core of their politics.

And so I agree with you, Greg. Adding to what you just said about Maine—there’s almost no state in the country that gets punished more by Canadian tariffs than Maine. And so Susan Collins not only had this ICE killing last week, she’s now got to contend with Trump’s whimsical, punitive—for whatever reason, he got up and decided to punish Canada again, because it’s his battered wife, right? He’s now putting Susan Collins into another terrible position.

And so, yeah, look, it is extraordinary. What I wrote in my piece today is that usually when a president or a political leader in a democracy is in a position like Trump is, they’re trying to do everything they can to do things that help people and to make themselves popular again. And he’s doing the opposite. And it’s part of the reason that the Republicans realize that they’re attached to a crazy man.

If you think about what’s happened in the Senate, Donald Trump hasn’t been helping the Senate Republicans. His major contribution to their reelection campaigns was to defeat two of them, as opposed to get them elected. So they don’t feel that he actually cares. I mean, he cares because he wants to protect himself from the hearings and everything else, but he’s not acting as if that is actually a priority for him, in partnering with the House and Senate Republicans to do things.

Think about the housing bill, Greg, right? I’m sure you’ve covered this extensively. He denied them the ability to do this big public event showing that they did something to lower prices in the United States. He killed that event and buried that bill. And it ended up passing, but without his signature. And so they are aware that he’s acting impulsively, irrationally. They can’t trust him to lead their party into the midterms. And that’s why you get these kind of comments from Politico today.

Sargent: OK, this is where it gets harder, though. I still don’t think we’re there yet. I’m not prepared to believe House districts that Trump won by double digits are really in play, with the generic ballot matchup still stuck at around four or five points. Democrats are up four or five, depending on which set of averages you use. Democrats aren’t doing well enough. And it just seems like a bunch of these Senate races are on a knife’s edge, and many could go the wrong way at once.

If you look at the Times polling, The New York Times polling of Senate races, which I trust—I really think The New York Times is probably the gold standard poll right now—they had Texas tied, but they had Democrats a hair behind in Iowa, Alaska, and Ohio. That’s not going to get you there. Am I wrong to look at it this way?

Rosenberg: No, no. I think, first of all, everything’s within margin of error, right, in these polls. And yes, we have a long—we have three and a half—people start voting in two months, but we’ve got three and a half months till election day. Anything can happen. In 2014, for example, we were even in every battleground state on Labor Day, and we ended up losing most of those races.

There are two things you have to keep in mind, though, Greg. One is that when you’re the party out of power in an election like this—it’s almost always the case, there’s no rules in politics, right, but there’s things that we know—that things break away from the incumbent party at the end. That’s part of what happened to us in 2024. That’s the likely scenario. The likely scenario is that things get better for us as we get closer to election day.

The second thing is that our candidates have a lot of money that they’re going to be able to spend, much more. The Republicans have more money in the aggregate, but our candidates have more money, which is where you would rather have the advantage. And I think the fundraising has been important.

And then the third thing I would say is that I’m hopeful that Democrats release some kind of modest agenda that says that if you vote for us, we’re going to do these three or four things that will give people more of a reason to vote for us, and not just vote against Trump. It’s what we did in 2006. We had this “six for ‘06,” we called it, in the big midterm win that we had in ‘06.

I think that, in terms of what you’re thinking about, Greg—which is, how do we continue to improve our standing—I think that putting out a simple national agenda, you know, we want to roll back the tariffs, we want to increase the funding of the ACA, whatever it is—I’m ecumenical about what it is, right? But we need something to point to, to give people a reason to vote for us, which I think can, again, marginally improve our position, which is already a very strong position in the election.

Sargent: I just feel like party leaders seem a tiny bit complacent. They don’t seem to feel like they’ve really got to make a big argument against Trump. They don’t seem to be willing to go out and do what you’re rightly advising them to do, which is to be extremely clear about what a Democratic Congress means.

Rosenberg: Yeah, I don’t think this is that hard. I think that you and I could sit here and craft a three- or four- or five-point agenda that would be very consistent with where polling is and what people want, that shows that we are going to fight for them.

Because look, what we know from polling—we know from the exit polls, we know from tons of polling that’s been done over the last year and a half—that people believe that Democrats’ hearts are in the right place, that we want to do the right thing, that we’re on their side. What they question is whether or not we’re tough enough to be able to deliver for them once we’re in power.

Sargent: Rightly so.

Rosenberg: Right, but this is very consistent through the polling. So we have to show them that we’re tough enough to deliver for them in power—in part by being more pointed, by fighting with Trump more directly and being aggressive in the contest. And I think that whether we’re coasting or whether we’re taking stuff for granted—I don’t think our candidates are.

And I just want to, I guess this is perhaps my final point today—we have unbelievably good candidates all across the country. I have interviewed virtually every House and Senate candidate running this cycle in the last few months. And I’ve been doing this for 34 years, and I have been in every cycle for 34 years. Our candidates are really good. They seem confident. They feel like they’re connecting to their voters. They are raising lots of money. They’re feeling the affirmation from people on the ground. This is really important—when you have confident candidates, it’s because they feel like their message is connecting back home.

And so the other thing I’ll just say, if I can say this last thing, Greg—and I just want to put this out there as food for thought. There have been a lot of theories about how we need to win again, kicking around out there. And I can tell you one thing that we saw in the New York Times polling, and that I have seen in my own interviews with these candidates, is that character and virtue really matter this cycle.

People understand that the Trump guys are bad guys, and that they’re corrupt, and that Trump is morally deficient. And it’s weighing down the entire Republican brand around character and virtue issues. And in the New York Times polling, when they asked what was the most important reason you were voting for one of the Democratic Senate candidates, the number one issue wasn’t inflation or health care, it was character.

And so we have a huge advantage around character this cycle that is also becoming a central reason why we’re winning. And the truth is, we have candidates of great character, who are virtuous people, admirable people. And people are responding to that. And my God, what a thing—that if we could take anything away from this election, that there’s still an ability to sell virtue and character as part of, in the Epstein era, right? It’s a good sign of where we’re not only going in this election, but our ability to create accountability and to restore democracy after this election, too.

Sargent: I really hope Democrats listen to what you’re saying about the agenda, though, because I think we’re still not there. The flip side, though, is that Republicans are saying pretty clearly, to Politico and other places, that the whole thing is falling apart for Donald Trump. Simon Rosenberg, good to have you on. Again, I hope Dems listen to you.

Rosenberg: It happens from time to time, Greg.

But on Saturday it was hard to see anything at all. Carcinogenic compounds from the Canadian wildfires saturated the air, extending the long days of grayscale gloom. Making matters worse was the flood watch. Cars in nearby Manhattan were submerged. Still, the voices outside the red-brick borough hall sounded defiant. “We want water, not AI!” a clump of protesters shouted, as the clouds obliged and dumped down hard rain.

“It looks like mostly lefties here,” mused a woman in a Cato Institute jacket. She turned out to be a New York Post writer who believes the hazards of AI are greatly exaggerated. The dozens of protesters in rain gear didn’t look like lefties to me, exactly, but it’s true that she was the only person in Cato merch.

The turnout in Kenilworth was part of the National Day of Action, a set of demonstrations against AI data centers announced not by the usual tired hippies but by the right-wing nonprofit Humans First. The protest day had 120 construction projects across 37 states in its sights, including one in Wasilla, Alaska, and 18 in Texas. All week, Humans First chair Amy Kremer, a MAGA firebrand, had been beating war drums. These protests, she’d prophesied in RealClearEnergy on July 14, would power a Tea Party–scale revolution against the technopolitical machine that’s steadily choking out American life.

The Kenilworth protest wasn’t a revolution. But there was a current of real radicalism on the wet street. The protest did manage to conjure the Tea Party in the 2010s, but also, on closer examination, Occupy Wall Street of the same period, when figures like Keli Carendar and David Graeber rose up against corporate-political corruption, including the Wall Street bank bailouts.

Jennifer Wilkes, a voluble activist from nearby Roselle Park, approached me. She was fired up.

“Everybody is starting to revolt,” Wilkes said. “They call us crazy because of how we act. But everybody is tired. What else can we do but act crazy? The frustration level is up to here.”

We want water, not AI had a unifying beat. It was hard to argue with the idea that human cells have hydration needs and robots don’t. Maybe humans have finally found something we can dehumanize without guilt: machines.

Only the media representatives who were present, including reporters from NewsNation and an AI newsletter called Transformer, puzzled about the protesters’ ideologies. At a time when Americans wear their political allegiances like rib-splintering corsets—and in the very same month that white supremacists marched on D.C. and Democratic factions nearly came to blows over the future of the party—the grassroots coalition was maddeningly hard to read. It seemed to belong to the future.

“We are the 99 percent,” the Occupy protesters had said. When the enemy is the billionaires, our numbers grow. Perhaps it’s time to think of a coalition made up entirely of nonbillionaires. “We are the 99.999 percent,” a new slogan might go, if it were easier to chant.

“The issue of data centers cuts across all political lines,” said Tony Faber, from Scotch Plains, about five miles away. “I run a little anti-Trump protest on Route 22,” he said. “But on any political spectrum, people are against data centers. There are so many volunteers and grassroots groups that fight them across New Jersey—this is as authentic as it gets.”

Cars honked their support. “God can, God will, God did,” read one man’s T-shirt, which also showed a crucifix. Another shirt said “Faith, Family, Freedom.” Faber’s own shirt said: “Free Palestine.”

“There’s an opportunity to replace some of the machine politics that has never been there before,” Faber continued. “It’s an opportunity in New Jersey, and the Democratic Party at large, for this whole corporate tax-break system to get broken. The data centers are a place where that begins.”

The nemesis today was CoreWeave. Founded in the late 2010s as a bro-driven cryptominer called Atlantic Crypto, CoreWeave is now an AI cloud computing juggernaut based in posh Livingston, New Jersey, where Jared Kushner grew up. Last August, the company announced it would operate, and had largely purchased, the 108-acre tract that once headquartered the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. (Merck moved to nearby Rahway in early 2024.)

Then, in November, CoreWeave broke ground on a $1.8 billion data complex, taking advantage of a five-year, $250 million tax credit award from the state. The former Merck campus became a mud pit, and massive steel utility pylons went up along residential streets without explanation. When it became clear in the spring that construction was barreling on, and that evidently three data centers were in the works, community members were incensed. They hadn’t been informed, much less consulted.

That’s when local teenagers started knocking on doors. Kids were raring to explain the CoreWeave insult to the less AI-literate adults of Kenilworth, because they might actually do something about it. “We all know what affects our water bill, electric bill,” Shawn Smith, one teenager who lives across the street from the new facility, told an ABC affiliate at the time. “AI companies claim to use less water than they do,” Smith said. “They’re building poles to tap into their supply, but we all know it’s based on the area usage.”

Starting in the spring, council meetings in Kenilworth began blowing up. In May, residents showed up with cowbells and whistles. On June 16, a meeting ran for nearly five rowdy hours. More than 100 residents packed into the overheated room and crammed into the hallway. Signs advertising data center protests read: “Do not let your children and grandkids ask you one day, ‘Why didn’t you do anything to stop it?’”

The teenagers had proven singularly good at breaking town elders out of their tribal standoffs and engaging them in the anti-corporate campaign. “These young coalition activists are awesome,” Wilkes told me. “They file open requests and force transparency.”

Gradually, and then all at once, it seemed the whole town of Kenilworth understood that CoreWeave, in league with compliant or corrupt politicians, had edged them all out of the democratic process. Now the company had seized their land. It became hard to see the data center any other way. When the company issued a stilted P.R. statement saying, “CoreWeave views data centers as investments in the communities that host them,” it sounded like bunk. It sounded like AI. Far more than gerrymandering, the rollback of the Voting Rights Act, or the proposed SAVE Act, the CoreWeave invasion got Union County’s residents into the streets for democracy.

“We all know AI is coming,” Wilkes said. “But the way it’s being done is so horrible and dystopian. The best thing that ever happened is CoreWeave brought our political parties together.”

From this distance, CoreWeave sounds like a cartoon Satan. It’s like Lumon in Severance, or maybe Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated. Up close, it’s the opposite of a phantom. As it rises from the New Jersey mud, it’s a vast and goony AI facility—a massive, colonial barracks for the imperial Valley-Beltway overclass. The complex stands on Galloping Hill Road, next to Graceland Memorial Park, a nonsectarian cemetery where locals who died in the Spanish Civil War are buried. When it’s finished, CoreWeave will consume 400,000 square feet of Kenilworth—a massive bite for a borough of just two square miles.

And so the people of Kenilworth, chafing at their exclusion from decisions about their own town, decided to refuse CoreWeave what AI companies call a “social license to operate,” or SLO. Even when these companies can bring elected officials onside and zoom through zoning red tape, it’s still Tocqueville’s America. Uppity American associations can still delay or even sabotage AI imperialism by withholding their SLO, which used to be called the consent of the governed.

Linda Karlovitch, the mayor of Kenilworth, is not a favorite with the data center protesters. For months, she has tried in vain to reassure them that CoreWeave, which will pay significant property taxes, represents a boon for the town. In response to public concerns over land and water, Karlovitch further insists that a complex “closed-loop cooling system” involving propylene glycol means “there will be no water use” at the data center.

This claim is hotly contested, and Karlovitch’s use of Silicon Valley talking points suggest she’s not exactly reading the room. Quibbling over the fine points of wattage, water use, and noise pollution as if she’s at an Aspen corporate retreat won’t mollify people who have long suspected that establishment politicians and Big Tech are arrayed against them. Technocratic language only alienates them further. As does the charge that their uprising is ungenuine, the handiwork of shadowy “outside instigators.”

“She said she agrees that we’re outside agitators from China,” Wilkes told me of the mayor. Wilkes then told me she supported Trump and, in many or most circumstances, ICE. It was admittedly hard to imagine Wilkes could be a paid agent of DeepSeek or the Chinese Communist Party.

But could America Firsters or Effective Altruists be pulling strings? Wilkes didn’t even recognize the name Humans First, let alone Effective Altruism. Then she got exasperated.

“No no no no no. This is insanity. I’m part of like six different volunteer groups around New Jersey. Everybody is talking about it. Everybody who is not political is talking about it. To say this is astroturf is the most asinine thing you can say.”

On Tuesday, July 21, the resistance to American data centers escaped containment. Iran’s leadership announced that, in response to Trump’s continued aggressions, it had destroyed Amazon’s central data center facility in the island nation of Bahrain. It also designated as “legitimate targets” Microsoft, Google, Apple, Nvidia, Oracle, and all of Elon Musk’s companies. Reached for comment, one of Saturday’s protesters in Kenilworth condemned the violence, and assured me he was not an outside instigator in Iran’s military operations.

CoreWeave’s stock is volatile lately. But what’s rocking CoreWeave is not Iran or popular uprisings, but grinding financing matters. Its rival in cloud computing, Nebius, has started to secure its debt with graphics processing units, or GPUs, possibly suggesting that a “non-dilutive funding model” can work at scale.

Boohoo. Like the rest of the AI bubble factory, CoreWeave is hyperfixated on its financial high-wire act. It’s entirely built on circular financing, the multilevel marketing schematics that let the companies perpetuate AI zealotry for one more day. “AI is a generational, maybe multigeneration, change,” Michael Intrator, CoreWeave’s CEO, told The Wall Street Journal Tuesday. “We know what we’re building. We know why we’re building it. We know how we’re building. I’m pretty comfortable that I’m on the right side of this.”

“Pretty comfortable” sounds a bit like anxiety. But for now choosing machines over human beings probably does feel like the right side. Infrastructure providers keep investing in AI start-ups, who then use that money to buy the investors’ wares. This lets OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, Microsoft, and all the overleveraged juggernauts keep pretending there’s consumer demand for their products. It also lets them continue to show sky-high valuations. Until they can’t anymore.

Back on the American street, at any one of the 142 protests across 42 states that materialized on Saturday, the brotherly solidarity of the protesters should encourage anyone who’s spent a decade scanning the horizon in despair for pluralistic and grassroots campaigns that confront the oligrarchy with courage and grit.

What’s especially striking is how focused these protesters are on specific goals. If they maintain this focus, they’re less likely to get waylaid by infighting.

As the protest dispersed, Wilkes admitted she was worried about the “hardcore Muslims taking over New York City” but promptly reached out to the lefty Faber—a buddy-in-arms. This seemed like the end of a weepie about a terrible civil war. We were all drenched. She looked at Faber’s pro-Palestine shirt. “I agree with that,” Wilkes said. “That cuts across party lines too.”

Actually no, they don’t. But as of now, they can get presidential pardons.

The notion that corporations are people did not originate with the Supreme Court’s notorious Citizens United decision in 2010. Way back in 1886, the high court ruled in Santa Clara County v. Union Pacific Railroad that corporations were covered by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. To be more precise, this question was addressed not in the decision (which resolved a local taxation dispute) but rather in a headnote that said the court “does not wish to hear argument on the question” of whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies to corporations because “we are all of the opinion that it does.“ Somehow this non sequitur became legal precedent. “Later cases,” wrote Stetson University law professor Clara Torres-Spelliscy in a 2014 analysis for the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice, “uncritically cited the headnote as if it had been part of the case.”

Santa Clara was used, for example, to justify the Supreme Court’s 1978 decision in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, a sort of Citizens United precursor in which corporations were granted the right to spend unlimited funds on ballot initiatives. The dissenter in that case, weirdly, was the future conservative Chief Justice William Rehnquist. Rehnquist wasn’t ordinarily a guy to lose sleep over excessive corporate power. But in this instance he worried the majority opinion would expand political rights for labor unions, the ACLU, and the NAACP. Rehnquist wrote:

A State grants to a business corporation the blessings of potentially perpetual life and limited liability to enhance its efficiency as an economic entity. It might reasonably be concluded that those properties, so beneficial in the economic sphere, pose special dangers in the political sphere…. [T]he States might reasonably fear that the corporation would use its economic power to obtain further benefits beyond those already bestowed.

In any event, Rehnquist’s fears were borne out—not by labor unions or liberal nonprofits, but by American businesses.

One reason the Supreme Court justices in Santa Clara County took it on faith that corporations were people may have been that judges and regulators were starting to regard corporations as potential criminals under the legal doctrine of respondeat superior (“let the master answer”). The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 leveled criminal penalties against corporations, and so did the Elkins Act of 1903, which added criminal penalties to the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act. (This is your periodic reminder that the federal administrative state was created not by Woodrow Wilson, as the Roberts court would have you believe, but by railroads behaving badly.) In 1909, the Supreme Court upheld the notion that corporations were people for the purposes of criminal prosecution in New York Central & Hudson River Railroad v. United States.

Since you can’t throw a corporation in jail, it’s fair to ask what the point was in subjecting corporations to criminal prosecution. In civil trials, judges can levy fines and order corporations to change their behavior, just as they can in criminal cases. But in the early twentieth century, civil law wasn’t sufficient because little civil liability then existed for corporations; most legal bases for suing corporations were established during the New Deal and after. The practical reason criminal prosecutions persist is that it remains easier, at least in certain cases, to bring misbehaving corporations to justice through criminal law. Also, criminal prosecutions inflict greater reputational damage on corporate scofflaws.

Starting in 2000, though—the same year, ironically, that the Justice Department put out a memo to encourage criminal prosecution of corporations—such prosecutions began a steep decline at the federal level, dropping from 304 to 99 by 2022, according to a 2023 report by the nonprofit Public Citizen. That might not be so bad if federal civil litigation took up the slack, but it didn’t. Lawsuits filed by the federal government declined during the same period. The falloff in prosecuting corporations is, of course, accelerating right now under President Donald Trump.

You know what isn’t declining? Pardons for corporations. Trump has granted nine. These were never a thing before Trump—not in the modern era, and possibly never. According to Bloomberg’s Ava Benny-Morrison, the nine pardons wiped out $200 million in financial penalties, “some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing.” Frank Bowman, a law professor at the University of Missouri, told Bloomberg: “In any previous era no president would touch this with a barge pole. Maybe individual cases with some compelling reason, but the systemic elimination of criminal liability of major financial crime would never have happened before, and it didn’t.”

Half of the $200 million in wiped-out fines can be attributed to a single crypto company, BitMEX. The three co-founders of the company, a pioneer in crypto derivatives, all pleaded guilty in 2022 to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, which requires maintaining certain safeguards against money laundering. Each paid $10 million in fines. Then, in July 2024, BitMEX itself pleaded guilty to the same crime, and this past January the company was fined $100 million.

Something else of interest happened in January. BitMEX created a swap listing tied to the $TRUMP memecoin. Two months later, Trump pardoned the co-founders and the company. The pardon didn’t appear in time to spare the co-founders from paying $30 million, but it was just in time for BitMEX itself to avoid paying the $100 million fine, since the deadline was later that week. Before Trump, pardons and commutations did not spare recipients from having to fork over unpaid penalties. (Once a fine is paid, it’s non-recoverable unless Congress appropriates the money.)

I think probably the fight against corporate personhood is lost. Rather than grieve, fellow liberals, let’s demand corporations be taxed as people. The top marginal tax rate for Homo sapiens is 37 percent. The flat corporate tax rate is 21 percent. To properly respect corporations’ innate dignity as human beings, let’s tax both up to 37 percent (and then raise the top rate for both to 70 percent, as it was before Ronald Reagan). Capital gains are kind of corporate too, aren’t they? The top capital gains rate is 20 percent. Raise that to 37 percent as well, and later to 70 percent. To do otherwise would treat you and me differently from corporations, and since 1886, that has violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection under the law. People are corporations, my friend.

Only hours later, Trump abruptly reversed Mullin’s decision, decreeing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s reviled tactics will continue. “We CANNOT give up one of ICE’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Trump raged. The stops resumed, undercutting Collins’s effort to project deep concern about the killing.

The incident neatly captures how Trump, through his handling of this horrific ICE shooting, is inadvertently screwing over Collins and complicating her path to reelection. The shooting is a real problem for Collins: It highlights her votes to fund Trump’s rampaging paramilitary forces and her feckless refusal to rein in his worst abuses of power. It localizes a national issue and could viscerally mobilize Maine voters against her. And it allows Democrats to try to seize the offensive on turf that has historically favored Republicans.

“Susan Collins is directly responsible for handing ICE a blank check,” Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, told me. “This is front and center now in our communities. And we are going to hold her accountable in November.”

Can Democrats turn the ICE shooting into a serious liability for Collins and shift the broader moral debate over immigration their way? It should be very doable. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was gunned down after agents boxed in his vehicle outside his home in Biddeford, and his three-year-old daughter was seen crying after the incident. He has been widely described as a devoted father and hard worker who was in this country legally.

Nor was Durán Guerrero the intended target of the enforcement operation to begin with. And the agent who pulled the trigger, David Brouillette, has been described by relatives as mentally ill, violent, dangerous, and a domestic abuser. This horror raises profoundly grave questions about how ICE is recruiting, now that Trump and Stephen Miller are staffing up their deportation army at breakneck speed and unshackling it to carry out violent ethnic purges on a mass scale. It’s here that Collins deserves severe censure and should be politically vulnerable.

Democrats, for instance, plan to make an issue out of a little-noticed vote by Collins not long before the shooting. In early June, Collins opposed an amendment, offered by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla, that would have required ICE agents to wear active body cameras on duty and made footage available to Congress. The amendment was defeated on party lines amid passage of $70 billion in new ICE funding, which Collins voted for even though it utterly lacked guardrails against future abuses.

These votes could now create bigger problems for Collins. As it turns out, the ICE agents involved in the killing of Durán Guerrero were not wearing body cameras. Collins is now insisting that she secured certain protections against ICE this year, such as $20 million for expanded bodycam use and other minor safeguards. But if ICE’s latest shootings confirm anything—agents also recently killed a 52-year-old immigrant father in Texas—it’s that such half measures are entirely useless in holding back the monster that Trump and Miller have unleashed.

Collins’s reelection depends in part on perceptions of her willingness to take on Trump, including on immigration. But her approach has accomplished nothing. ICE agents have dragged their feet in using bodycams despite money being appropriated for it, and Trump’s ICE forces have shot around two dozen people, killing six. If anything, ICE has now been supercharged by the $70 billion Collins voted for. Her little safeguards will prove as constraining as an old picket fence in the face of a megaflood.

So Democrats can argue that only lawmakers who are prepared to fully deploy congressional power to grind ICE’s killing machine to a halt deserve office. “Collins is accountable for getting us here,” Murphy-Anderson of the Maine Democratic Party told me. “She has stood with Trump and ICE at every single juncture.”

Obviously it will still be very hard to defeat Collins. The race is super-close: A new poll finds Collins’s almost-certain challenger, Troy Jackson, leading her by 49 percent to 46 percent, a statistical tie. She’s a resilient politician with deep ties to her state. Some pundits still argue that ICE matters to the Democratic base far more than to swing voters—and that Democrats must tread carefully on the issue. It’s at least possible this will prove correct.

But there’s reason to doubt this in Maine. A recent New York Times poll found that only 42 percent of Maine likely voters approve of Trump on immigration, while 56 percent disapprove. Among independents, those numbers are a stunning 39–61. So vowing to rein in ICE may well appeal to many in the middle.

What’s more, highly engaged voters will likely dominate in the midterms, and the outcome will partly turn on which side is more energized. Democrats in the state say the ICE killing has ratcheted up the energy big-time among both Democratic voters and older women, who play an outsize role in Maine elections. As Murphy-Anderson put it, this is “viscerally” playing “across broad segments of our electorate.”

Then there’s how Jackson, the Democratic challenger, will handle the issue. A former social conservative who has adopted progressive populist views over the years, he declared of the ICE killing: “This rogue agency must be abolished.” It does remain to be seen how that will play among moderate voters.

But it’s a key tell that Collins is at least trying to appear concerned about voter anger at ICE: The energy is plainly on the anti-ICE side. What will probably matter most is which candidate speaks to voters’ revulsion over these killings with more force and emotion, and which can offer a clear path out of this madness while promising to restore the rule of law. Collins can’t do this persuasively. Jackson can.

Ultimately, Collins’s biggest problem on this front may be the true nature of the Trump-Miller project. Ask yourself this: Why did Trump suddenly restart the vehicle stops that Collins had just boasted of stopping?

The answer is obvious. Trump and Miller want immigrants and their allies to receive their message loud and clear: They have no real intention of dialing ICE down even when—especially when—it results in horrific killings like this one. ICE recruitment relies heavily on explicit white nationalist messaging that is quite openly enraptured with purging and purifying the nation via unchecked paramilitary aggression. Trump and Miller want all this to be fully understood by Americans as exactly what it is: a violent ethnic cleansing project that you should perpetually fear and loathe as an inevitable fact of life under the brutality of Trumpian rule.

Collins is proceeding as if Trump is capable of acting conventionally—as if he’ll willingly moderate to help vulnerable Republicans in bluer areas, or treat mass removals as a mere law enforcement operation that’s subject, as is typical, to reform when it results in violent, terrifying excess. But the violence and the terror are the point. Broadcasting that ugly fact far and wide matters a whole lot more to Trump than Collins’s political survival does. And in the end, there’s always this: She just voted to fund a whole lot more of it.

That suspicion is not entirely wrong, but it confuses outcome with cause. There are good reasons, grounded in science and articulated by the international football players’ union, for hydration breaks. But almost none of the U.S. media coverage of the 2026 World Cup, with one outstanding exception, highlighted those reasons, much less explained them.

The exception was Telemundo, the Spanish-language TV network whose news division has been a leader in climate coverage. On July 3, journalist Vanessa Hauc, the host of Telemundo’s weekly environment program Planeta Tierra, appeared on the broadcast of the much-anticipated match between the defending champions, Argentina, and everyone’s favorite underdogs, Cape Verde. At the time, hundreds of millions of Americans were under extreme heat warnings from a “heat dome” that scientists said would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change.

Andrés Cantor, the Telemundo announcer famous for his prolonged shout of “Gooooooooal” whenever a team scores, introduced Hauc, saying that “although the hydration breaks are highly controversial, there’s a deeper reason for them.” Hauc reported that the game-time temperature of 89 degrees Fahrenheit in Miami “can feel closer to 101” on the field, when humidity and the sun’s rays are factored in. “That’s why hydration breaks aren’t just a precaution, they’re a safety measure in an increasingly hotter world,” she said, adding that the world is hotter mainly because of “the way we produce energy, primarily by burning oil, coal, and natural gas.”

That evening, Colombia faced Ghana in Kansas City, where the weather was equally oppressive: 88 degrees with 70 percent humidity. Hauc reported that such conditions “make it harder for the body to cool itself, causing core body temperature to rise and increasing the risk of exhaustion, dehydration, and even heat stroke” for the players. She added, “Behind all of this is a larger reality: Heat waves are becoming more frequent, more intense, and longer lasting because of the climate crisis, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.”

In interventions of only 42 and 52 seconds, respectively, Hauc delivered a master class in climate reporting. She humanized the story by talking about the scorching heat that players and viewers were experiencing. She localized the story, in emotional terms, by describing the impacts on the sport so many people love. And she “solution-ized” the story by naming the cause of the problem—the burning of oil, gas, and coal—and advising that “as the planet continues to warm, the game of soccer and sports more broadly will have to adapt.”

FIFPRO, the players’ union, began making that argument well before the 2026 World Cup, spurred by the increasingly harsh playing conditions its members had been facing. The heat and humidity were so brutal at last summer’s FIFA Club World Cup tournament that one referee fainted on the field. Enzo Fernando, the Argentine whose Chelsea club won that tournament (which was played in the same stadium in New Jersey that hosted the 2026 World Cup final where Fernando’s national team lost to Spain), said at the time, “I had to lie down on the ground because I was really dizzy. Playing in this temperature is very dangerous.”

FIFPRO commissioned a scientific study examining what such temperatures meant for players’ health and performance, and it shared the study’s results with FIFA. The union recommended introducing breaks in play if the “wet bulb global temperature”—which combines temperature and humidity levels—reached 26 degrees Celsius (roughly 79 degrees Fahrenheit) and suspending play at 28 degrees Celsius. FIFA disagreed, wanting cooling breaks only at 32 degrees Celsius (roughly 90 degrees Fahrenheit). The compromise appears to have been adding hydration breaks during the 2026 World Cup.

This explanation by no means quiets suspicions about FIFA’s appetite for additional TV money. FIFA head Gianni Infantino denied such accusations, saying that hydration breaks resulted in “no additional ⁠revenue for FIFA, as all commercial agreements were signed well in advance.” That is technically correct but utterly incomplete: The six extra minutes of TV commercials made possible by hydration breaks clearly increase the value of the TV contracts FIFA can sell for World Cups in 2030 and beyond.

To be clear, Telemundo was not above making extra money from hydration breaks; ads wrapped around the left and bottom edges of the screen while Hauc or her sports colleagues offered their commentary. But Telemundo, meanwhile, made sure to help its viewers understand why these hydration breaks were happening in the first place.

That was both journalistically responsible and commercially shrewd. A study released last month by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 74 percent of Americans, roughly three out of four, say “they are interested in news stories about global warming.” Other polling has documented that Latinos have long been even more concerned about climate change than the general population.

Hauc and Telemundo’s example shows what the rest of the media could have done to help audiences understand why the 2026 World Cup was played differently than any other—and why football is not the only sport changing its procedures in the face of global warming. As Hauc reported, the governing body of professional tennis now allows players to request a cooling break when the wet bulb global temperature exceeds 30 degrees Celsius (roughly 86 degrees Fahrenheit). The Los Angeles Marathon this year allowed runners to officially finish the race at mile 18 instead of mile 26 due to extreme heat.

And these measures are only the beginning, for the physics is unequivocal: Global temperatures will continue to climb until the burning of fossil fuels is phased out. And the longer we wait, the greater the paradox confronting us: As hot as the summer of 2026 is, it will be remembered as one of the cooler summers of our lives.

This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

The BBC noted in a reply memorandum Wednesday that it has already sent multiple “requests to government agencies seeking to obtain the same evidence the Special Counsel gathered and described as ‘evidence establish[ing] that the violence [on January 6] was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, that it was beneficial to his plan to interfere with the certification, and that when it occurred, he made a conscious choice not to stop it and instead to leverage it for more delay.” 

But the Trump administration rejected those requests, claiming executive privilege. The BBC demanded more information on how Trump lost those same claims during Smith’s probe.

“The government errs in characterizing the Executive Privilege Decisions as ‘information that might be incrementally helpful in litigating a potential future discovery dispute.’ Instead, unsealed decisions will likely be crucial to obtaining information that could be dispositive of President Trump’s lawsuit, as the BBC expects them to show that President Trump’s assertions of executive privilege have already been rejected,” the BBC wrote. “The Court should therefore further unseal the Executive Privilege Decisions and prevent the injustice that would arise from President Trump using already-rejected privilege claims to withhold such vital information.”

This all stems from a $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed last year against the BBC over a 2024 episode of Panorama that he claimed was defamatory because it spliced together sections of his January 6, 2021, speech, highlighting his call for supporters to “fight like hell,” while omitting his request for peaceful protest. If the BBC can prove that Trump was aware of the violence he was fomenting, his whole defamation case falls apart.

On Tuesday, a judge allowed the BBC to move forward with subpoenas against Trump’s closest advisers and confidants—like family members, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon—to better determine what Trump’s actual goals were on January 6. The judge also ordered Trump to hand over his financial records, opening yet another lane of exposure against the president.  

The funding did not align with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health’s outlined priorities, according to a government fact sheet that specified the office would not support “content that encourages, normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors.”

One such organization interrogated by the assistant secretary—South Carolina nonprofit Fact Forward—was accused of including lessons with “advice on making condom use more pleasurable” and promoting discussions that normalize “use of pornography,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The New York Times.

“That information was just not true,” Rena Dixon, who runs the group, told the Times. Dixon added that Fact Forward had never used the lessons or materials to which the assistant secretary referred.

Other program directors that spoke with the Times also said that the government had distorted the materials they were using in order to make erroneous claims about their education plans. Several noted that the grants they won required them to use “courses from a federally approved list shown by research to be age-appropriate and effective,” according to the Times.

The federal government first got involved in preventing teen pregnancy in 2010, allocating roughly $100 million to the cause and eventually creating the Office of Adolescent Health and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, or OAH.

At the time, teen birth rates were already in decline, yet the program’s influence still caused rates to fall faster than ever. The government-funded programs advanced the waning trend by investing in proper sex education and increasing access to reproductive health care in communities suffering from disproportionately high rates of teen pregnancy.

But Donald Trump and his allies have nonetheless abhorred the effort. Last month, a spokesperson for Health and Human Services revealed that the agency had canceled 53 out of 67 grants—totaling $68 million—alloted to the pregnancy prevention program. The impact was broad, affecting more than two dozen states across the country.

It’s unclear if the effort will hold up in court. Trump took similar actions during his first term, suddenly canceling dozens of grants issued under the Obama-era program in 2017, though his efforts did not succeed.

In April 2018, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—then a U.S. district judge—ruled that HHS had violated its own regulations by prematurely ending the grants without an adequate explanation, ordering the agency to restore the terminated funds.

But the family of 15-year-old Aangad Singh believes he may have been kept out of the competition’s final because of his Sikh background and visible turban, NOTUS reports.

Singh, a rising high school junior who lives in Connecticut, entered the competition in February just like other high school students around the country. He scored well enough to reach the finals in Washington, D.C., at the end of June and make the final eight. But his elimination after that left his family—and many of his competitors—puzzled.

The Singh family didn’t think Aangad had performed poorly, but there wasn’t a live scoreboard. Other contestants told them after the competition that they were sure Aangad had won and were shocked that he wasn’t in the top three. When Aangad’s mother, Ramandeep, asked an official with the Department of Education, which helped run the contest, for the final scores, the official told her that was proprietary information.

So the Singh family waited until the competition was televised on CBS three weeks later, and Aangad was shocked to learn some of his correct answers were labeled wrong.

In one instance, Aangad was asked to give four examples where federal courts have jurisdiction, as outlined in Article 3 of the Constitution.

Two of his answers—“Parties of state and citizens of another state,” and “Case with state and foreign nation”—were marked wrong. He showed his father a copy of the Constitution proving that his answers were right.

In another instance, during a lightning round, Aangad was asked, “Which amendment ended slavery?” and his answer was marked wrong. Initially, he thought his pronunciation of “Thirteenth” was bad and that his th sounded like an f. But he was reassured when the TV subtitles proved that he said the correct answer.

After the round ended, each contestant was interviewed by host Mario Lopez before he announced the three finalists, and Aangad gave an answer about being proud to share his knowledge about the country’s founding principles. Then he watched white contestants from Michigan, Washington, and Wyoming announced as the winners.

Singh’s family thought that he was robbed, and weighed taking action. To his mother and uncle, it seemed like Aangad was being kept out of the spotlight—and a visit to the Oval Office to meet President Trump—because he was a brown kid with a turban. They didn’t care as much about getting a share of the $250,000 in scholarship money as much as Aangad being recognized for his hard work.

The Wyoming winner was a homeschooled girl who would later be touted by the Department of Education for culture-war propaganda, and the Washington state winner told Trump at the White House that she wanted to attend Hillsdale College, a politically conservative school, to which Trump said he could give a recommendation.

Aangad’s father, Bhalindar, reached out to the Department of Education twice by email, but has yet to get a response. The department told NOTUS that the questions in the competition were “developed, judged, and scored independently by the James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation.” NOTUS sent the foundation a detailed list of questions, but also hasn’t heard back.

Minutes before NOTUS’s deadline, the Department of Education responded, saying that the competition’s rules stated that judges would “exercise independent good faith judgement [sic]” in selecting finalists and winners, and that, by participating, contestants “agree that the decision of the judges is final and binding.”

Siad was one of many friends and associates that Epstein had in France, and was under investigation in the country for rape and human trafficking. 

Siad is mentioned in the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice more than 2,000 times. Some of the most disturbing conversations between him and Epstein, occurring over a decade, involve him sending pictures and descriptions of young women to the convicted sex offender. 

“Hello Jeffrey I just found an amizinng One she is 20 years old but she looks younger from Latvia 5’8 She just Did a world campaign For Nivea Last weeck and she will be Doing an other campaign for Garnnier this week willing to sign with me as a personal agent. I am traveling with here to Paris this week let me know if you think it will be good to take here To Next and also what Agency you thing is apropriate for here in The US she said that she meet Jean luck once in Danemark wile she was there with Scoop Models . because a girl like this is future star we need to make here a good contract world wide” Siad wrote in one email in 2009, referring to another modeling agent, Epstein friend, and alleged sex trafficker, Jean-Luc Brunel—who died by suicide in his jail cell in 2022.

“The Russian girl as canceled her fly . I wanted to make for you a great surprise ,it didn’t work this time ,I really hope that it work next time . In This busyness I feel like fisherman some time I cache quick , some time no fish,” he wrote in another 2015 email to Epstein. “I really did good work for scouting in Scandinavia most of them will be ready to start with 2morrow at list 5 of them sixteen and seventeen will be ready for next year .But I can’t send you there pictures as know.”

“The French her name is [REDACTED] she is fifteen her parents checked me out and they are very happy there daughter to start modelin,” he continued. “I am going back to Stockholm then Gotland for what we call Stockholm week all the girls from sweden gather there for five days non stop Parties .to through my hooks.”  

These emails sound like Epstein commissioned Siad to go around and find women and girls to funnel to him for over a decade. Siad has denied all allegations against him, telling CNN just last month that he had no idea Epstein was abusing the girls he sent his way. 

“I never doubt that because I never heard anything from anyone who I introduced [to Epstein] who came back to me that they had a bad—a bad situation with him,” Siad said. “He was such a powerful person. And how can I not trust him?”

Siad was originally from Algeria and moved to Sweden in the 1980s before settling in Paris, where he likely met Epstein through Brunel, although it’s unclear when. 

Epstein spent a lot of time in Paris, particularly after his first conviction. Conductor Frédéric Chaslin and diplomat Fabrice Aidan are two of the other most prominent Frenchmen mentioned in the files along with Siad and Brunel. 

For the U.S. to sell enriched uranium or nuclear power plants abroad, it must first reach an agreement with the country under Article 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act of 1954. The U.S. has 26 of these so-called 123 agreements with 51 governments, including Russia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, the European Union, and the United Arab Emirates. Most of these were negotiated so the U.S. could sell both reactors and low-enriched uranium fuel that cannot be used in nuclear weapons. Almost all of the deals omit permission for states to pursue uranium enrichment or plutonium reprocessing—thus reducing global risk, as highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium can both be used to produce nuclear weapons. Japan and the European Union, with their strong legal systems and acceptance of the most stringent inspection obligations conducted by the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, are the only two 123 deals that allow significant enrichment or reprocessing of U.S. materials.

Saudi Arabia is not Japan or the EU, and its agreement with the U.S. sounds a lot different from the standard 123 deal. This raises concerns that Saudi Arabia is using its close financial ties to the Trump family to manipulate U.S. cooperation to pursue a nuclear weapon option, especially if Iran continues to be a nuclear threshold state.

Of greatest concern is a provision that could open the door to Saudi Arabia having a uranium enrichment facility. The pact reportedly agrees that the two countries will conduct a two-year fuel-cycle study on the economic feasibility of domestic enrichment in Saudi Arabia. If the two sides agree that it’s feasible, then the U.S. would build an enrichment facility there without giving Saudi Arabian citizens access to the sensitive technology—a so-called “black box” approach. If the two sides do not agree enrichment makes sense, then Saudi Arabia would not be allowed to build its own domestic enrichment for 10 years. What happens after that is not clear. The fact that the two-year window would fall within the time remaining in Trump’s term is a sign that the fix for Saudi Arabia might be in and approval of enrichment a foregone conclusion.

Another worrying provision in the deal “may limit international inspectors from going to any sites in the country that they think could be a pathway to diverting fuel to weapons projects,” the Times reported. 

That the U.S. negotiated a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia is not itself a shocking development. The Biden administration held preliminary discussions with Riyadh about a 123 agreement, but with a set of very stringent provisions that are not included in the new deal. The Biden administration’s goal was threefold: Improve regional security by facilitating Israeli-Saudi reconciliation, keep China from becoming a major provider of nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia and the region, and boost the prospects for U.S. nuclear commercial sales while enhancing nonproliferation goals and standards.

The Biden deal would have required that Saudi Arabia establish full diplomatic relations with Israel, and that Israel agree to make progress on the treatment of Palestinians and on the status of the Occupied Territories in West Bank and Gaza. The Biden concept would also have required Saudi Arabia to agree to only pursue nuclear cooperation with the U.S., cutting out China, Russia, and other states. This clause was driven largely by concern that Beijing or Moscow might not be as careful as the U.S. about sharing sensitive nuclear technology; if the U.S. were the main provider in Saudi Arabia, it could maintain greater control over any nuclear activities the country might want to pursue. (There are reports of an exclusivity clause in a secret side letter to the Trump deal, but that has not been made public.)

Lastly, the Biden deal would have required that Riyadh accept the highest possible standards for nuclear transparency and inspections by the IAEA, including the Additional Protocol accepted by Japan, the EU, the UAE, and even Iran under the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal. If those goals were met, then the Biden administration was willing to consider an option for the U.S. and Saudi Arabia to jointly own a uranium enrichment facility under a black box arrangement—with the facility being either in Saudi Arabia or in the United States with Saudi financing.

Even these conditions raised serious concerns among U.S. nuclear experts. But it was for naught: Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel derailed the discussions.

Now Trump is on the verge of striking a notably looser, less restrictive deal with Saudi Arabia. There are good reasons to be concerned that the administration has neither the motivation nor the expertise to ensure that any complex nuclear negotiation advances U.S. interests in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. The mishandling of nuclear negotiations by the first and second Trump administrations are well documented, including the decision to blow up the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal struck by President Obama and the loose wording of last month’s memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran.

Any deal that gives sensitive nuclear technology to a country whose leader has openly stated he would develop a nuclear weapon if Iran did so should raise major concerns—and draw scrutiny by Congress. Under the Atomic Energy Act, nuclear cooperation agreements must be submitted to lawmakers, who then have 90 days of “continuous session” to decide whether to reject them. If Congress takes no action, then the agreement would go into force and could be ratified by the executive branch. There are not enough in-session days in the current Congress for this deal to be reviewed, which means the next Congress after the midterms will have to consider this deal. There are a number of questions that need to be answered:

• What conditions would be imposed on any future U.S.-Saudi enrichment facility, and what happens if Saudi Arabia violates its nuclear nonproliferation obligations?
• Can Saudi Arabia pursue enrichment or reprocessing if the fuel-cycle study is inconclusive or determines domestic fuel-cycle activities are not economically justified?
• Can Saudi Arabia acquire nuclear or other sensitive technology from China or other states?
• Does pursuing this deal reduce or eliminate America’s ability to encourage future diplomatic engagement between Israel and Saudi Arabia?

In the end, the Trump administration and a GOP-controlled Congress is all but certain to let the proposed agreement enter into force. However, it will take many months for that to happen and many more for any nuclear contracts and deals to be put into place. But now is the time for vigilance. These next few months, between the U.S.-Saudi deal and the Iran war (the country’s 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium are still unaccounted for), may well determine whether the nearly 80-year effort to prevent nuclear weapons from spreading to dozens more countries succeeds or fails.

Defending the deal to an angry Congress during his confirmation hearings last week, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche adopted a two-part mantra. The slush fund would not go forward, though he has perversely refused to formalize that and has been prickly toward anyone who insists he should. The tax amnesty, meanwhile, remains, legitimized as consideration for Trump’s dismissal of his suit against the IRS.

Unfortunately for Blanche, both legs of his defense were sawed out from under him last Wednesday at his hearing. The unraveling of Blanche’s position on the fund came under questioning from Texas GOP Senator John Cornyn. Cornyn stood at the witness table with an enlarged copy of the settlement and walked Blanche through its own language: The terms “may be modified only upon the written agreement of the parties.” Had there been any such written agreement? No, Blanche conceded. Then Cornyn asked the pivotal question: Is the settlement an enforceable contract? Blanche’s answer: “Yes, it’s an enforceable document.” Trump’s side, he allowed, “could try to enforce the contract” and “could potentially say that we breached by not moving forward.”

That is the whole ball game. If the agreement is enforceable, it is enforceable by its beneficiary: Donald Trump. He and his companies have already done their part, dismissing the (worthless) lawsuit, which obligates DOJ to come through with its promises of the slush fund and tax amnesty.

So Blanche did two remarkable things at once. First, he handed Trump an enforceable right to $2 billion in public money in return for nothing. And second, by insisting his own say-so can terminate the fund, he confirmed the deal is collusive. In a real dispute between real adversaries, DOJ’s assurances about termination would be meaningless, even absurd, because the beneficiary could simply enforce the contract. Blanche’s word carries weight only because Trump and his Justice Department were never on opposite sides of the “v.” here to begin with.

Blanche’s testimony also reanimates the tax amnesty; and here the trouble is not that his defense collapses but that it proves too much. Pressed by Democratic Senators Dick Durbin and Adam Schiff on the order shielding Trump, his sons, and his companies from IRS audits, Blanche rested his entire defense on the settlement, calling the audit release “typical” and anchoring the immunity to “that settlement” at every turn.

But set his two answers side by side. On the amnesty, the agreement is valid, binding, enforceable—a live instrument DOJ means to honor. On the fund, the same agreement is a dead letter the department can simply decline to perform. The provisions sit in one document, rise on the same consideration, stand or fall on the same enforceability. What legal principle keeps one alive and lets the other lapse? There is none: No doctrine of contract carves a single agreement in half this way.

What Blanche offered the committee was not a legal position at all. It was doggerel: a contract that binds when he wants immunity and evaporates when he wants to bury the fund, a settlement at once ironclad and a dead letter. It has the meter of law but none of its logic. You cannot pocket Trump’s consideration, enforce the amnesty, and bury the fund.

According to Blanche’s account, what survives is decided not by law but by the caprice of the attorney general, good only until it meets the caprice of the boss who wants it otherwise.

There is a graver point still, one the committee let pass: Two federal courts have already ruled against him. Judge Leonie Brinkema, in the Eastern District of Virginia, held that the challenge to the fund is not moot; and it does not matter what Blanche tells Congress, because mootness is a legal question for a court, not the biased acting attorney general, to determine.

Judge Kathleen M. Williams, in the Southern District of Florida, went further, finding no genuine settlement at all—only a bogus, collusive suit filed for an “improper purpose” that no federal court has power to hear.

Yet Blanche ignored these binding rulings, which DOJ has not challenged. In fact, he had the temerity to tell senators he’d studied the Eleventh Circuit and disagreed with Williams. It’s the same contempt for the courts that was on display in March 2025, when Blanche and Emil Bove pressed removals to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador in the teeth of a court order. An attorney general nominee who believes he can pick and choose which legal judgments bind the government is, on that ground alone, disqualified from running the Justice Department.

Blanche made a slip during his testimony of which much has been made. Asked whether he and Trump were friends, Blanche answered, “I’m his lawyer,” before catching himself: “was his lawyer, and now I’m the deputy attorney general.” The correction came a beat too late. It’s not a “gotcha” low blow, but a fair highlight. Everything in last Wednesday’s testimony points to a man who still understands the job exactly as he blurted it out: He is Trump’s lawyer.

Senators, take note. The slush fund and the tax amnesty are both very much in play. Right now, you have leverage: the same leverage that forced Blanche to meet, however cursorily, with victims of Epstein’s crimes after Republican North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis signaled his vote turned on it. If Blanche is confirmed, that leverage is gone.

More, you have clear evidence that this nominee conspired to create a bogus, illegal deal to enrich the boss and impoverish the public, then, to put it gently, misled you about it. A vote to confirm is a vote to ratify not simply these putrid thefts for Trump’s benefit but also the politicization of the Justice Department, the subordination of the courts to the man who runs it, and a single-minded devotion to the one person Blanche aptly, if inadvertently, identified as his client. He has more than earned your “no” vote.

Republicans in the Senate are skeptical of Trump’s 50 percent tariffs on most Canadian goods, excluding energy products, potash, fish, and critical minerals. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told The Hill that he was skeptical and needed more information. 

“I’m not a huge fan of tariffs as a general rule, unless there’s a specific purpose behind it, in most cases, creating a more level playing field for America’s businesses and our economy,” Thune said. “But I don’t, I haven’t heard the rationale for this one just yet.”

Senator Mike Rounds was concerned about the Trump administration’s legal rationale for the tariffs, considering that the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s previous tariffs months ago. 

“My initial concern on it was what the purpose of it was, what the expectation is for, you know, considering a result a success,” Rounds told The Hill. “What is the goal of the tariffs? And I haven’t seen which provision within the law he’s utilizing.”

Trump announced a fresh round of tariffs on Canada Monday, defending his move as a response to trade “discrimination” from Canada on cars, alcohol, and dairy products. Trump is using Section 338 of the 1930 Trade Act as legal justification, the Associated Press reports, citing an anonymous administration official. The tariffs apply to goods that the recently expired United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement used to cover. 

Rounds said that the tariffs could also affect the price of goods and hurt American consumers. 

“The affordability side of this thing is something that we should all be concerned with,” Rounds told The Hill. “Right now inflation is not as low as it was; it is up. Fuel prices are very important that we try to maintain, bring down. International issues going on have caused it to come back up again. We need to get the price of gasoline back down again for the American consumer.”

“Tariffs of that magnitude will translate into higher prices for the American consumer,” agreed Senator Bill Cassidy, who is leaving Congress at the end of the year. 

Senator Susan Collins, who is in a tough reelection campaign in Maine, told Politico Tuesday that she has “voted repeatedly against the Canadian tariffs.”  

“Maine and Canada’s economies are very intertwined. A lot of our blueberries, our potatoes, our lobster, our lumber are harvested in Maine, processed in Canada and then come back. I don’t want to see the tariffs on the books,” Collins said. 

Businesses sued the government over Trump’s previous tariffs and they were eventually overturned, with refunds doled out to companies that applied for relief through U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But every time those tariffs were put to a vote in Congress, Republicans refused to overturn them. With the midterms looming, will that be the case again? 

The Trump administration is reportedly considering taking military action against an  Al Qaeda-affiliated group in Mali known as JNIM, according to several current and former U.S. officials that spoke with The Washington Post Wednesday. 

Doing so would add to the president’s warmongering tally, marking the eighth nation he has ordered strikes on since he began his second term as president.

The other affected countries are Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, and Venezuela. Trump has also ordered 66 strikes against small watercraft in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific in an admittedly futile attempt to interrupt drug smuggling into the U.S., killing at least 221 people in the process.

One of the administration’s top proponents for using brute force in Mali is Sebastian Gorka, the National Security Council’s senior director for counterterrorism. The London-born Hungarian has been a fixture in Trump’s inner circle since 2017, though his appointment to Trump’s first administration came as a surprise to many in his field. Gorka had previously been known for his extremist, Islamophobic views, which relegated him to the fringes of Washington and his position as an editor at Breitbart.  

But specialists in the region disagree with the violent approach.

Wassim Nasr, a senior research fellow at the Soufan Center, which focuses on the Sahel region, said that America’s influence would be better used in “conflict resolution” by forcing Mali’s stratocracy into talks with JNIM. Otherwise, the White House could be squaring up for another major loss.

“Opting for the military solution one more time won’t get things resolved,” Nasr told the Post. “The French tried that for 10 years. The Russians have been trying for five years. The situation has only gotten worse and worse.”