Trump’s War Is Escalating in the Middle East

The war roared back overnight. Iran launched what CENTCOM called a surprise attack on U.S. bases in Jordan; the U.S. answered with fresh strikes on Iranian targets — the fourteenth round of a conflict The Bulwark has taken to calling “Groundhog Day in Iran.” Andrew Egger’s description of the strategy is the whole review: the administration is “orbiting hopelessly around two demonstrably failed positions: If we bomb the hell out of them, they’ll give us what we want. If we stop bombing them, they’ll give us what we want.” The New York Times now charts it daily as “The Whiplash War.” Saudi Arabia is now in it, flying strikes into Iraq alongside U.S. planes while absorbing attacks from three directions.

Zeteo’s First Draft reports that Trump’s own advisers are privately trashing Fox News for nearly convincing the president to escalate to catastrophe. They describe a “TV-addled” commander-in-chief who took the world to the brink because cable hosts told him to. That’s not the reporting of some TDS-suffering Democrat. That is Trump’s own staff, describing a president whose war decisions are downstream of a programming schedule. Iranian negotiators, per HCR’s summary, have made their terms plain: sanctions gone, troops out, no more nuclear talk, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz. That’s not a ceasefire; those are the terms of surrender. Our surrender.

Read more: Zeteo, The Bulwark, Letters from an American, CNN

Trump’s Polling Is Now Worse Than After January 6

According to a new CNN/SSRS poll, Trump’s overall approval is 34% — tying the career low he hit immediately after January 6. But his net approval is now minus 32, worse than the minus 28 he carried in the wreckage of the insurrection, because his disapproval has climbed to 66%. Half the country now strongly disapproves, a record across both terms. Just 15% strongly approve — also a record. On the issues: 70% disapprove of his handling of the economy. 72% disapprove on Iran. 25% approve on inflation. On gas prices: 21%. Seventy-three percent say he isn’t paying attention to the country’s most important problems, and roughly three-quarters say he’s out of touch with ordinary people’s lives. His net approval among white Americans, dead even a year ago, is now minus 20. And this morning, Quinnipiac landed at 32%, with Trump losing ground among Republicans themselves.

The mechanism connecting these numbers to November is the war. Zeteo’s exclusive on Senate Democrats’ internal polling shows the Iran war has cratered Trump’s cost-of-living numbers and physically moved the map: Ohio and Alaska are now toss-ups, Iowa’s open Senate seat is among the most competitive in the country, and the memo’s conclusion is that the war helps Democrats whether it grinds on or ends in surrender. In Texas, Talarico is expanding his lead over Paxton. Sarah Longwell at the Bulwark talks a lot about the Bush line, 32% approval rating, as a marker to hit for the wheels to really fall off this administration. We are getting close to that. If he hits that number, will Republicans finally start to abandon Trump?

Read more: CNN, Letters from an American, Zeteo, Robert Hubbell, Semafor

Tillis and Cornyn Are Actually Holding the Line on Blanche

It looks like Todd Blanche’s nomination for Attorney General might be in some peril.

The Senate Judiciary Committee postponed this morning’s scheduled vote on Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general — because Thom Tillis and John Cornyn are refusing to advance it without written commitments from the Justice Department. Their two demands go directly at the corruption Judge Kathleen Williams exposed: kill the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that would compensate Trump allies, and restrict the tax-audit immunity Blanche personally signed for Trump and his family.

This is a good thing, but let’s not get carried away. Both men voted for nearly everything else this administration wanted, and a written promise from this DOJ isn’t worth the paper Blanche signs it on. And the fact that both Tillis and Cornyn aren’t willing to reject such an unqualified nominee outright is embarrassing.

But it is still important to notice what’s working. The survivors testified, met Blanche, and told the country what he was. A federal judge nullified his self-dealing settlement and referred him to the bar. And now two Republicans with nothing left to fear from Trump are using the only leverage that exists to extract concessions in writing. This is what checks and balances look like under Trump.

Read more: NBC News, The Hill, The Parnas Perspective

That's your Thursday. Trump's own advisers say Fox nearly talked him into catastrophe. His numbers are worse than after January 6. Tillis and Cornyn have Blanche at a standstill.

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Trump’s Corrupt, Chaotic Nuclear Deal

On Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed a 30-year nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia that paves the way for the kingdom to enrich uranium on its own soil. Per the Wall Street Journal, American companies would build the enrichment facility if a joint U.S.-Saudi study green-lights it. A “black box” arrangement without the IAEA’s Additional Protocol, the monitoring regime prior administrations of both parties considered non-negotiable. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has publicly vowed to build a nuclear weapon if Iran gets one. Saudi Arabia signed a defense pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan last year. Nonproliferation expert James Acton, via What A Day: “If you have an enrichment plant up and running, you can build enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in days.”

Rep. Brad Sherman said the quiet part at Wednesday’s hearing: the U.S. is “bombing Iran because they insist upon enriching” while “giving [Saudi Arabia] the green light… and the only difference I see here is that Westinghouse stands to make an awful lot of money on this deal, whereas the Iranians were not enriching American companies.” Westinghouse’s AP1000 reactors would anchor the program; the company is already backstopped by $17.5 billion in Energy Department loans.

Then came Thursday, and one of the most humiliating rollout collapses of this presidency. Trump posted that the already-signed deal “will be approved, but is totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.” Trump insisted there would be “no enrichment,” contradicting the central provision of the agreement his own energy secretary had signed 24 hours earlier. Karoline Leavitt confirmed: no Abraham Accords, “the deal is off.” Asked why no one had mentioned this condition at the signing, she explained that Trump “is always the final dealmaker.”

Here’s what makes it damning rather than just chaotic. Israeli normalization wasn’t some new idea Trump invented Thursday, it was Washington’s longstanding condition for Saudi nuclear cooperation, held as recently as the Biden administration. And it was Trump’s own team that dropped it: Reuters reported in May 2025 that his administration had formally delinked the nuclear talks from Israel recognition — the concession that made this deal closable at all, because the Saudis have said for years they will not recognize Israel without a pathway to a Palestinian state, which Israel rejects. So Trump gave away America’s decades-old leverage to secure a signing ceremony, then reimposed the condition via a social media post after the ink dried. The Washington Post’s headline says where this stands: the pact is now in doubt.

And then, as always, there is the corruption. Judd Legum did the accounting: the Saudi Public Investment Fund put $2 billion into Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners; Kushner has collected over $110 million in management fees from the Saudi government since 2021; as of March, he was seeking billions more, and he is back inside the government as a top foreign-policy hand on exactly this portfolio. Legum surveyed the coverage: of 202 major-outlet articles on Kushner’s Iran diplomacy, six mentioned his Saudi financial ties. The nuclear-deal coverage at the Journal, the Post, AP, and CNN omitted it entirely. The son-in-law on the Saudi payroll, the decades-old condition quietly traded away, the “black box” enrichment deal signed, and the president conditioning it back by post because he didn’t know what he’d given up. Sen. Ed Markey called the deal “irresponsible and dangerous.” It’s also for sale, and its own author can’t tell you what’s in it.

Read more: CNN, NPR, The Hill, Reuters, Popular Information, Time

A Judge Threw Out the Times Subpoenas

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian made the DOJ withdraw every subpoena sent to New York Times reporters over their Air Force One security stories. The government’s own lawyer admitted the subpoenas were “rife with inadvertent errors,” including that the DOJ had subpoenaed the phone records of one reporter’s mother and two reporters’ spouses. Subramanian found that the department had issued subpoenas two days after publication without exhausting any other investigative avenue, said the government had turned the law “on its head,” raised the question of whether prosecutors misled the judge who authorized the phone subpoenas, and floated sanctions. Rather than face a ruling, the DOJ folded. The subpoenas are “null and void,” and the department must now notify the court before issuing new subpoenas targeting these reporters. Per PBS, the administration also quietly withdrew similar subpoenas targeting Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters in Virginia.

The DOJ’s response to losing was to attack the judge. A spokesperson accused Subramanian of “overriding clear longstanding principles and common sense” and vowed the leak investigation “remains ongoing.” Robert Hubbell’s diagnosis rings true: after Trump and Blanche purged hundreds of career prosecutors, what’s left is a department too hollowed out to execute even its intimidation campaigns competently. Times counsel David McCraw called it “a great day for the First Amendment and a great day for the rule of law.” He is right, but it only happened because the Times fought rather than complied, and a judge did his job. That’s the lesson to bank for the next one, because there will be a next one.

Read more: CBS News, PBS/AP, NPR, Robert Hubbell, Zeteo

They're Rigging the Census in Plain Sight

Follow the pattern. The election speech flopped. The SAVE Act stalled. So the project moved somewhere even quieter: the census.

The Bulwark’s Receipts walks through a little-noticed OMB regulatory filing from late June that could exclude some or most immigrants from the census count — the constitutionally mandated enumeration that sets House apportionment, Electoral College weight, and a decade of federal funding. Unlike the loud, failed citizenship-question fight of 2020, this version is deliberately boring and, in The Bulwark’s words, “far more professionalized.” The day after filing, the administration asked a judge to pause a related lawsuit. Brian Tyler Cohen calls it what it is: a power grab “disguised as boring technical guidance” that could shift congressional seats and hundreds of billions of dollars for a decade.

Brian Beutler’s warning is the one Democrats need taped to their desks before the budget fight: the party is “gaming out responses to Trump’s election-subversion schemes, but they seemingly won’t withhold their votes for a budget that funds those schemes.” He’s right, and it’s maddening. If control of the count is control of Congress, then a budget vote that funds census manipulation is where we need to fight back.

And the pressure isn’t only external. Zeteo reports that 13 House Democrats — Cuellar, Davis, Golden, Gonzalez, Gluesenkamp Perez, Castor, Gottheimer, Kaptur, Lee, Moskowitz, Pappas, Soto, and Tran — voted for a national voter-ID bill tucked inside the insider-trading legislation I wrote about Wednesday. The Campaign Legal Center warns its ID list is “unreasonably narrow” — excluding the student, employee, public-assistance, and many tribal IDs that young voters and voters of color disproportionately carry.

The Senate can still filibuster the voter-ID bill. The census change is harder to block; that’s why we need to attack the funding source.

Read more: The Bulwark, Off Message, Zeteo

That's your Monday. The White House sold Saudi Arabia the enrichment it bombed Iran to stop. A judge made the DOJ crawl back on the Times subpoenas. And the census is being quietly rigged while Democrats debate whether to fund it.

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Affordability is the defining concern of the 2026 electorate. Poll after poll confirms it. Voters will be thinking about their pocketbooks in November, and which candidates and which party they trust to address these concerns will likely determine how they vote.

It is often hard to sort out the causes of higher costs: high interest rates, tariffs, war, or corporate pricing practices. In some cases it is obvious that corporations are adding junk fees to transactions consumers thought they understood: the resort fee added at hotel checkout, the concert that sold out to automated bots before they could click, the surprise charge on last month’s credit card statement.

Roughly half of American households report little or no monthly surplus after basic expenses. For those families, the cumulative impact of junk fees is significant. What most people do not realize is that government has the tools to address these corporate practices directly.

Trump has largely abandoned the federal role in protecting consumers from these practices. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created after the 2008 financial crisis to police predatory corporate behavior, has been systematically dismantled. Dozens of enforcement actions were dropped, settlements reversed, and rules withdrawn. A report prepared by the Senate Banking Committee minority staff estimated the cost to consumers at $19 billion in the first year alone, due to the loss of protections against overdraft fees, credit card late fees, and predatory lending practices that the bureau had spent years putting in place.

Some states, led by Democrats, are filling that vacuum, and they are doing it with well-documented solutions to well-documented problems. JB Pritzker, now in his seventh year as Illinois governor, has been among the most aggressive.

Illinois is the home of State Farm Insurance. They have had enough political clout to make Illinois an outlier when it comes to controlling insurance prices. When State Farm announced a 27.2 percent average rate increase last summer, Pritzker took action. He pushed for legislation, and this spring the General Assembly passed two bills giving the state Department of Insurance authority to review and reject excessive rate increases for both homeowners and auto insurance.

His most recent legislative package addresses three additional forms of corporate extraction. The centerpiece is the Junk Fee Ban Act, signed June 25. The law makes it unlawful for any business to advertise a price that does not include all mandatory fees before taxes. Hotels may no longer add undisclosed resort fees at checkout. Food delivery and rideshare apps must show full costs before consumers pay. Ticket vendors cannot bury processing fees in the final screen. The price you see is the price you pay.

Two accompanying bills address the live events market. One bans the automated bots that sweep up tickets at scale before individual consumers can access them. Another prohibits resellers from offering tickets they do not actually possess, a practice that leaves buyers holding worthless confirmation numbers.

A fourth measure brings Buy Now, Pay Later lenders under state oversight for the first time. The use of these products has grown rapidly, particularly among younger and lower-income consumers, while operating without the disclosure requirements that apply to credit cards. Illinois now requires BNPL providers to register with the state, disclose true loan terms, limit fees, and protect consumer data. As the state’s financial regulator put it: without oversight, these products operate like high-cost lenders dressed up as modern financial tools.

Illinois is not acting alone. Democratic-led states have been the primary movers on consumer protection as Washington has retreated. California, Minnesota, Colorado, Connecticut, and others have enacted comprehensive junk fee protections over the past two years, building a growing body of state-level protections that is becoming, by default, a national consumer standard.

Junk fees and predatory pricing practices are among the rare issues where public anger crosses party lines, with strong majorities of Republicans, Democrats, and independents supporting legislation to address them. What Pritzker demonstrated is that government can stop corporations from taking advantage of consumers. That is the difference between a party that campaigns on affordability and one that actually delivers it.

We are planning future installments and welcome your suggestions for Democratic leaders who have successfully advanced progressive policies. All installments are collected here.

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Endnotes

1. Affordability as top voter concern, 2026: Gallup, “Economy Tops List of Issues Americans Most Want Presidential Candidates to Address,” June 2026. https://news.gallup.com/poll/election2026issues

2. Roughly half of American households with little or no monthly surplus: PYMNTS Intelligence, “Tax Refund Season Reveals the Reality of Paycheck-to-Paycheck America,” early 2026. Approximately two-thirds of consumers reported living paycheck to paycheck in early 2026; roughly 24 percent struggled to pay bills. https://www.pymnts.com/study_posts/tax-refund-season-reveals-the-reality-of-paycheck-to-paycheck-america/

3. CFPB dismantled, cost to consumers: Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Minority Staff, “CFPB Year in Review,” February 9, 2026. The report calculated $19 billion in consumer losses in the first year, including $10 billion from credit card late fee protections, $5 billion from overdraft fee rules, and $4 billion from dropped enforcement actions. A subsequent minority staff report released July 16, 2026 updated the cumulative estimate to $26.5 billion. https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/new-report-finds-trumps-attack-on-the-cfpb-has-cost-americans-19-billion-in-one-year-alone

4. State Farm 27.2 percent rate increase and Illinois insurance legislation: Chicago Sun-Times, “Auto, Home Insurance Reform Clears Illinois General Assembly,” May 28, 2026. https://chicago.suntimes.com/springfield/2026/05/28/auto-home-insurance-reform-illinois-general-assembly-passage

5. Illinois previously the only state without homeowners insurance oversight: Capitol News Illinois, “Insurance Regulation Bills Clear General Assembly,” May 28, 2026. https://capitolnewsillinois.com/news/insurance-regulation-bills-clear-general-assembly/

6. Junk Fee Ban Act, ticket bot legislation, ghost ticketing ban, BNPL legislation, IDFPR Secretary Treto quote: Politico/News Channel 20, “Pritzker Signs Laws Targeting Junk Fees, Ticket Resale Practices and Buy-Now-Pay-Later Lenders,” June 25, 2026. www.newschannel20.com/news/local/pritzker-signs-laws-targeting-junk-fees-ticket-resale-practices-and-buy-now-pay-later-lenders/article_b0c61596-9319-4ec2-aa4b-d3c8a47b924e.html

7. Democratic states enacting junk fee protections: New Republic, “Junk Fees and the Democratic Affordability Agenda,” July 1, 2026; Bloomberg Law consumer protection state legislation review, 2025-2026.

8. Bipartisan support for junk fee legislation: YouGov survey, May 2024, cited in Data for Progress, “Voters Support Initiatives to Lower Drug Costs, Ban Junk Fees, and Strengthen Supply Chains,” December 2023. https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2023/12/12/voters-support-initiatives-to-lower-drug-costs-ban-junk-fees-and-strengthen-supply-chains

The Pentagon Can’t Make Payroll.

Yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine sat before Senate appropriators and asked for $67 billion in emergency funding, warning, in Hegseth’s own words, of “critical shortfalls that threaten our ability to pay our service members.”

Congress appropriated $183.2 billion for military pay this year, more than Russia’s entire defense budget, and the Pentagon is telling senators it may miss paychecks. According to the Washington Post, the Navy and Air Force will run out of operational funds at the end of this month. The Pentagon is already raiding equipment and maintenance budgets and canceling training exercises to bridge the gap.

Hegseth pegged the Iran war’s cost at $37.5 billion, up from the $25 billion he told Congress in April. Even that number is fiction: NBC reports the Pentagon’s internal estimate is $80 to $100 billion once you count repairing damaged bases, replacing destroyed aircraft, and replenishing weapons.

Sen. Jon Ossoff walked Hegseth through his own words: on day three of the war, Hegseth declared a core objective was to “destroy the missile threat”; by day five, to “obliterate Iran’s missiles and drones”; four months ago, he declared victory with “every single objective achieved.” Iranian missiles killed three American soldiers in Jordan on Friday. Hegseth’s answer: “No one ever stated that every single missile was gone.” When Sen. Gary Peters asked how “victory” squares with a request approaching $90 billion, Hegseth accused him of “Trump derangement syndrome.”

And the death toll itself is now in dispute. Zeteo identified Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad, 28, as the third service member killed in Friday’s attack, bringing the toll to 18. Bill Kristol flags Washington Post reporting that a Pentagon database briefly showed 18 dead and 447 injured — then reverted, without explanation, to older, lower numbers. Spokesman Sean Parnell called the reporting “outright lies from partisan hacks” from “the most transparent Department of War in history.”

For context: four Americans died in Benghazi. Republicans responded with 50 congressional hearings, 100,000 documents, and a Select Committee that ran two years and four months — longer than the Watergate probe. Thirteen U.S. service members died at Abbey Gate in Kabul. Republicans called it disqualifying for Biden's entire presidency and subpoenaed his Secretary of State. Trump's Iran war has now killed 18 Americans and wounded more than 430. The Republican response: zero oversight hearings into the war’s conduct, no Pentagon briefing since May 5, and a casualty database quietly edited downward. Four caskets bought a five-year crusade. Eighteen can't buy a subpoena.

Read more: CNN, NBC News, Letters from an American, The Bulwark, Robert Hubbell, Zeteo

They Came for Grandma’s Ballot

While the Pentagon was begging for money, the administration quietly did something nobody was watching. Brian Beutler reports that on Monday, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rescinded the federal guidance telling nursing homes that residents may vote “without interference, coercion, discrimination, or reprisal,” and that facilities are required to help them do it. That guidance was first issued in October 2020 and renewed before the 2024 election. The replacement memo instead warns facilities that voting assistance “should not violate federal or state voting laws.”

The two “fraud” cases the new memo cites tell you everything. In Texas, social worker Kelly Brunner was charged by AG Ken Paxton with 134 felony counts for registering nursing home residents to vote. The case collapsed, and officials confirmed “nobody was improperly registered, nor did any resident cast an invalid ballot.” In Wisconsin, a sheriff alleged fraud over eight ballots at a care center; every prosecutor with jurisdiction declined to charge, with the Milwaukee County ADA writing “there has been no evidence submitted that any of the individuals who received ballots did not request them.” Both cases trace back to Trump’s debunked 2020 nursing-home fraud tales. Both produced zero convictions. And both are now cited as federal policy.

Beutler deciphers the memo’s real message to nursing home staff: we will be watching. Help your residents vote, and you might be the next Kelly Brunner. That’s the mechanism, not banning anyone from voting, just making the people whose job it is to help too frightened to do it. Aimed at elderly and disabled Americans. Plenty of whom are Republicans, by the way, which tells you how desperate the turnout math has gotten. Last week it was the SAVE Act stalling in the Senate. This week it’s a CMS memo nobody covers. The project doesn’t stop when the bills die. It just moves somewhere quieter.

Read more: Off Message

The Presidency Has a Price List

Two stories this week, one thesis. Everything is for sale.

Item one: the Truth API now has a price. JVL at The Bulwark reports it runs $100,000 a month, $60,000 if you commit to 36 months, for millisecond delivery of the ten highest-ranking Truth Social accounts, which is to say Trump and his family. A hedge-fund executive told the Financial Times that traders without the feed will “get crushed.” And JVL replayed the timeline that shows exactly what’s being sold.

April 8, 2025: Trump makes 327 stock purchases.

April 9, 9:37 a.m.: he posts “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!”

That afternoon, 1:18 p.m.: he announces the tariff pause, and the S&P has its biggest one-day jump since 2008.

Advance knowledge of that one post was worth a 15.3% single-day gain on Apple alone. Starting August 1, that advance knowledge is a subscription product, sold by the company whose largest shareholder is the president. Note the contract term: 36 months runs to 2029.

Item two: the buy side. Judd Legum documents what relief from this government costs. On May 26, the FDA sent QOL Medical a warning letter over “false or misleading” marketing of Sucraid, a $12,000-a-month drug — a potentially existential threat, since QOL is under a corporate integrity agreement from a prior $47 million kickback settlement, and another violation could get it excluded from Medicare entirely. Thirteen days later, CEO Frederick Cooper wired $1 million to MAGA Inc. He’s given $4 million since February 2025, dwarfing his lifetime political giving. No enforcement action on QOL Medical has followed.

So here’s the menu: $100,000 a month to see the president’s words before you do. $1 million to make an FDA letter go away.

This week the House votes on the Stop Insider Trading Act. Republicans attached a rider deterring mail-in voting. Even the anti-corruption bill comes with a voter-suppression surcharge. I wrote Monday that corruption has climbed to 17% as voters’ top issue, second only to cost of living. These two receipts are why. Every voter understands a shakedown.

Read more: The Bulwark, Popular Information, Robert Reich, The Message Box

That's your Wednesday. The Pentagon can't make payroll. CMS quietly told nursing homes to think twice before helping residents vote. The presidency has a literal price list.

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Trump’s War: 17 Dead, 430 Wounded

Pvt. Isabella Gonzales of Carrollton, Texas, was 19 years old. 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, was 25. The Pentagon identified them Monday as the soldiers killed in Iran’s missile and drone attack on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. A third soldier at the base is still missing; unidentified remains have been recovered. A fourth service member died in Iraq Sunday during a controlled detonation of a downed Iranian drone. That brings the toll to at least 17 American service members killed and more than 430 wounded since Trump’s war began.

Marco Rubio’s explanation for the deaths: “We shot down almost all the missiles. One leaked through, hit the wrong place, and tragically, and it’s heartbreaking.” One leaked through. There have been four Iranian attacks in five days aimed at U.S. forces, including two direct hits on the Jordan base, and video shows personnel scrambling for shelters with little or no warning, raising the question of whether our missile defenses failed to intercept the attacks or failed to see them coming. The New York Times reports that the military may have withheld information about three earlier strikes in Jordan that wounded dozens, and the Pentagon hasn’t held a press briefing since May 5th.

Trump’s war is entering its sixth month and has racked up quite the bill. An estimated $113 billion has been spent, gas prices have gone up from roughly $3 to $4 a gallon, Iran has formally withdrawn from the ceasefire, there have been nine consecutive nights of U.S. strikes, and Brent crude has passed $90 as Tehran vows “not a single drop” of oil transits the Strait. A U.S. official told the Washington Post: “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.” The military is telling reporters it’s running out of ammunition, and its assessment is that the White House doesn’t know.

Even the MAGA media wall is cracking. Fox’s Maria Bartiromo asked on air how a supposedly “obliterated” Iran keeps hitting American bases. Fox contributor Joey Jones, a Marine veteran, challenged the strategy outright after the Jordan deaths.

Read more: CBS News, The Bulwark, Iran Cost Tracker.

Trump is Selling His Truth Social Messages

Dan Pfeiffer calls it “the most corrupt thing Trump has done since returning to office.” And incredibly, I think he is right.

Trump Media announced “Truth API” — a paid data feed, launching August 1, that delivers posts from Truth Social’s top ten accounts to paying clients “in milliseconds.” The top account is the President of the United States, who announces tariffs, war escalations, and market-moving policy on the platform. Customers have already signed up, including high-frequency trading firms. Trump owns roughly 41% of Trump Media through a revocable trust. Follow the chain: the president makes policy, announces it on his own platform, and his company charges Wall Street for the fastest access to the announcement, who can then sell stocks and assets impacted by the announcements. The profits flow to him. It’s legal only because the president is exempt from federal conflict-of-interest rules. “This is no different than Trump giving a heads-up on a market-moving announcement in exchange for a bribe,” Pfeiffer writes. “It’s pay to play.”

And there’s a second shoe. CNN compared Trump’s financial disclosures against his posting history and found at least 44 stock purchases involving 21 companies — Nvidia, Tesla, Boeing, RTX, Northrop Grumman — made within a week before Trump posted about those companies, their executives, or their products. So it's possible Trump has already been doing this; “Truth API” just puts the corruption on steroids.

Democrats need to jump on this because corruption is becoming a kitchen-table issue. Echelon polling, via Puck’s Peter Hamby, shows “political corruption” climbing from 8% of voters’ top-issue picks in December 2024 to 17% now. Second only to cost of living.

The message is simple: While you’re paying $4 a gallon for his war, Wall Street is paying him for the head start.

Read more: The Message Box, Time, Quartz, Puck

His Documents Confirmed the “Hoax,” and His Bill Is Dying

This weekend resulted in a plethora of fact checks on Trump’s bogus attempts to discredit our election system.

“China carried out the largest compromise of election data in history.” The intelligence says China was “analyzing” state voter rolls — data that is largely public. Your name, address, and party registration are available in most states to anyone, including data brokers who sell them. Calling that “the largest compromise in history” is like accusing someone of stealing the phone book. The National Intelligence Council’s actual assessment: China “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts” in 2020, and the national intelligence officer for cyber issues said flatly there was “no information suggesting China tried to interfere with election processes.”

“Voting machines are easily compromised,” and Venezuela proves it. The document Trump cited for Venezuela describes a vulnerability in a voting system used in Venezuela, not the United States. Trump’s own declassified document on U.S. systems says they “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome.” CISA, U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, called 2020 “the most secure in American history,” and Georgia and Pennsylvania both audited 2024 and confirmed the results.

“Hundreds of thousands of noncitizens and dead people are active on the voter rolls.” DHS Secretary Mullin claims 250,000 noncitizens are registered in four states, without saying how the data was matched or whether a single one of them voted. The Brennan Center’s Sean Morales-Doyle calls the methodology “garbage in, garbage out.” The actual numbers: Reuters found 129 federal noncitizen-voting prosecutions since 1996. The conservative Heritage Foundation’s own fraud database shows fewer than 100 noncitizen voting convictions since 1982. As UCLA election law expert Rick Hasen explained: “If his government had actual evidence of noncitizen voting, there would be indictments; Trump has been hounding US attorneys to bring such cases, and the fact that he hasn’t shows that these claims likely have no legs.”

Zeteo’s Prem Thakker went through the declassified trove and found a National Intelligence Council document stating that “President Putin and senior Russian officials are overseeing efforts by proxies… to spread claims about former Vice President Biden.” Hunting for evidence against China, the administration declassified official confirmation of the Russian interference Trump spent eight years calling a hoax.

David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research summed up the whole enterprise: “This administration has been in total control of the federal government for 18 months. They’ve redirected untold taxpayer resources to try to uncover evidence of massive voter fraud. And at the end of that 18 months, all we got is more rehashed, debunked conspiracy theories.”

The legislative arm is stalling along with the narrative. Sen. Lisa Murkowski says she won’t support the SAVE Act, citing the burden on rural and Alaska Native voters, and per Democracy Docket, the bill now lacks the votes to pass. House Republicans are trying to salvage it by stapling SAVE language onto other bills.

Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy rely on his ability to raise doubts about the security of our elections. It’s important that we show how false those claims are. Memorize these fact checks and use them to debunk these claims anytime you hear them.

The fact remains our elections are safe and secure; nothing Trump says can change that.

Read more: FactCheck.org, CBS News, US News, Zeteo, Robert Hubbell

That's your Monday. Trump’s war cost more American lives. Wall Street is buying his posts before you see them. And his own declassified documents prove his lies about our elections.

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This is “What I’m Hearing” — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.

Trump Promised “Really Big News” on Elections. His Own Documents Say Russia Helped Him.

The primetime address Thursday night was hyped for days: “shocking vulnerabilities” in American elections, delivered from the East Room, with a trove of newly declassified intelligence. Only one major broadcast network bothered to carry it live. Robert Hubbell called the result a “nothingburger,” and that’s being generous, because the documents Trump released actively disprove him.

His marquee claim was that China carried out “the largest compromise of election data in history.” What the documents show, per CNN’s review of the full trove, is that none of it supports the claim that any American election result was altered by foreign interference or fraud. The “compromise” amounts to China buying publicly available voter-roll data that anyone can purchase from a data broker. The intelligence community’s actual assessment, which Trump’s own administration declassified, found that China stayed on the sidelines in 2020. The country that ran an influence operation was Russia, promoting Trump. Even John Solomon, the man Trump hired to investigate voting irregularities, acknowledged no votes were changed in 2020, 2022, or 2024. And Sam Stein at The Bulwark found the perfect kicker: the IC’s March 2021 report defines “spreading false or inflated claims about alleged compromises of voting systems to undermine public confidence” as the signature move of hostile foreign actors. The president performed a foreign influence operation on himself in primetime.

This speech was never about 2020. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked directly whether Trump would accept the 2026 midterm results if Republicans lose. She declined to say. That’s the story. They are actively laying the groundwork to declare a national emergency and take control of elections in this country. It might not work, but that is the game plan.

And the machinery is already being assembled at the state level. Justin Glawe reports for Zeteo that Georgia’s Trump-praised State Election Board has hired two election deniers as taxpayer-funded investigators with subpoena power — one of whom posted “the cheat is on” before being hired. The board challenged 220 voter registrations in heavily Democratic Chatham County using software called ELLY, built by an election denier. When a 19-year county elections director tested ELLY, it flagged a board member’s living wife as dead and misrecorded the director’s own voting history. That’s the national plan in miniature: manufacture official-looking “fraud” findings locally, then cite them from the White House.

Read more: CNN, CBS News, Robert Hubbell, Zeteo, The Bulwark

“I’m his lawyer.”

On Thursday, Dani Bensky became the first Epstein survivor to testify before Congress, urging senators to reject acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s nomination. Per Aaron Parnas, she called it “absolutely egregious” that the DOJ released survivors’ nude images and identifying information while Blanche insisted “nothing was mishandled,” and said his eight months of silence toward victims has been “deafening.” Former DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer testified that documents contradict Blanche’s sworn account of her firing. The New York City Bar Association filed a formal objection. And then there was the moment that defines the nomination: asked whether he is Trump’s friend, Blanche answered, “I am his lawyer . . . was his lawyer.” The nation’s chief law enforcement officer, correcting himself mid-sentence about who he works for.

The survivors’ testimony potentially moved a vote. Sen. Thom Tillis conditioned his support on Blanche meeting with Epstein survivors: “I expect that meeting to occur before I’m willing to vote… I’m trying to get to yes.” So Thursday afternoon, Blanche met with them.

Annie Farmer, who testified at Maxwell’s criminal trial, whose sister Maria reported Epstein to authorities in 1996, came out saying she’s “even more confident in urging senators to vote against his confirmation.” Her description: “abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors — a marked contrast to his public testimony during his confirmation hearing.” Blanche wouldn’t commit to investigating why Maria’s 1996 report was ignored. He denied ever saying there were no investigative leads; when survivors pointed out he said it in the media, he doubled down. He claimed he lacks the power to open an investigation. There are some seashells in North Carolina that disagree.

Sky Roberts, brother of the late Virginia Giuffre, said the meeting “felt like he only had it because his hand was forced.” The survivors’ lawyer called it “clearly to check a box.” Blanche’s own summary: “The purpose of the meeting was just to listen. They weren’t prepared for this meeting, nor was I.” He scheduled a meeting to save his nomination and admitted he didn’t prepare for it.

Blanche remains under a federal court order to produce Epstein documents, and a judge just referred him to the New York Bar over misleading congressional testimony. The committee stands at 11-10. Tillis and Cornyn, two Republicans with nothing left to fear from Trump, hold the nomination in their hands. The survivors have done their part, at enormous personal cost. Now we find out if two senators can match the courage of the people they heard from this week. I highly doubt either Tillis or Cornyn will rise to the occasion. I hope I’m wrong.

Read more: CNN, ABC News, The Parnas Perspective, Popular Information, Letters from an American

ICE Killed a Second Man. The Shooter’s Own Family Says He Shouldn’t Have Had a Badge.

On Monday morning, an ICE officer shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian man, in his car near his home in Biddeford, Maine, in front of his wife and his 3-year-old daughter, still in her Bluey pajamas. Guerrero had work authorization and a Social Security number. He was a delivery driver. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin admitted to Sen. Angus King’s office that Guerrero was not the target of the operation. The agents wore no body cameras. No footage supports the official account, which, nearly word-for-word, is the same “vehicle attempted to flee” story ICE told after killing Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston two weeks ago. At least 10 people have now died in encounters with immigration agents since the crackdown began.

The Portland Press Herald identified the shooter as David Brouillette, 37, hired by ICE in late 2025, and the AP’s exclusive investigation into his record is damning. Hundreds of family court records allege years of physical and verbal abuse, stalking, and harassment; judges granted protective orders. One ex-wife says he once threw boiling water at her while she was holding their child. When he told his first ex-wife that ICE had hired him, she thought he was having a delusional episode. And after the shooting, he called her to ask her to lie. “He was asking if I could tell them that he was a good person and not to talk about the abuse and stuff that I had endured while with him, and he said that the most important thing is his character right now.” Flush with $70 billion and hiring at speed, ICE is waving through recruits wholly unqualified. These killings aren’t accidents; they are the direct result of policy decisions, and the blood is on the hands of the senators who authorized this budget.

Maine Senator Susan Collins, who again has some serious concerns, voted for the $70 billion ICE funding. After the killing, she took credit for persuading DHS to pause non-urgent traffic stops. Trump overruled it within a day, posting: “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” The only surviving concession: one team member per stop must wear a body camera. Two men are dead, the pause lasted 48 hours, and the senator who funded it all wants credit for a restraint that no longer exists.

Tim Miller at The Bulwark named the stakes better than I can: Araujo in Houston, in this country for more than 30 years, no criminal record. Guerrero in Maine, legally authorized to work. “Both of them were summarily executed in the street for being Hispanic.” His warning is about numbness — the administration is counting on the killings blurring into noise. “I’m not f***ing numb.” Neither am I. Remember their names, remember their families, hold their killers accountable, and make November about it. The midterms are 109 days away.

Read more: AP, Zeteo, The Bulwark, Robert Hubbell

That’s your Friday. Trump’s election speech was disproven by his own documents. His personal lawyer is about to become Attorney General. And ICE killed again.

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Trump’s systematic dismantling of the federal government was not intended as a civics lesson. But watching the consequences unfold, even just one year in, has clarified my thinking about what the federal government is actually for.

One of its most important and least visible roles is preventing problems before they happen — the kind that require multiple agencies, multiple levels of government, sometimes multiple countries, all sustaining a system that no single actor has the incentive or the authority to build alone.

DOGE cut programs by an unknown assessment of effectiveness. Programs designed to prevent problems were easy targets: if nothing bad has happened, the program looks unnecessary. Not preventing a problem was seen as “not needed” rather than effective. One of those programs recently made headlines.

What Government Built

The New World screwworm is a fly whose larvae burrow into the living flesh of warm-blooded animals — livestock, pets, wildlife, occasionally people. The infestation is painful and often fatal if untreated. In the 1930s, it was devastating American cattle at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Starting in the 1950s, USDA scientists developed what became one of the most successful pest eradication programs in history. Female screwworm flies mate only once. Release enough sterile males into an infested area, and the females mate with them, lay eggs that never hatch, and the population collapses. The United States was declared screwworm-free by 1966.

Understanding that protecting American ranchers required holding the line beyond the U.S. border, the program kept running. It pushed the screwworm south through Mexico, then Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and finally Panama, where a permanent barrier was established at the Daréin Gap in 2002. A joint U.S.-Panamanian facility bred and released up to 20 million sterile flies every week to hold it. A surveillance and monitoring system tracked the screwworm’s position across Central America and coordinated with foreign governments to respond when it moved. For six decades, the whole system worked.

It required sustained federal investment, USAID, and active cooperation with foreign governments across two continents. No private-sector actor would have built it, and no market incentive would have sustained it over 60 years and across seven countries.

Working Against Itself

Within the first months of the Trump administration, that coordination broke down.

DOGE cut two programs essential to the screwworm barrier. It eliminated the USAID grant that funded monitoring of the screwworm’s advance through Central America — the early warning system that tracked the pest's movement and coordinated with foreign governments to slow it. It also cut roughly 15 percent of USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, the domestic agency responsible for detecting and responding to agricultural threats at the border and inside the country.

Prior monitoring data had already shown the screwworm expanding northward, and that more sterile fly production capacity would be needed to hold the barrier. On Trump’s first day back in office, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced a $100 million Grand Challenge to fund new screwworm-fighting technologies. The production and research sides continued. Without the monitoring, the program no longer worked.

The US government was spending $100 million to create new sterile screwworms, but no longer had the capability to deploy them effectively.

The Consequence

On June 3, 2026, USDA confirmed the first screwworm case in the U.S. livestock herd since 1966. By late June, confirmed cases had grown to 26, spread across 21 quarantined Texas counties, with a case confirmed in New Mexico. Texas officials barred the movement of livestock, hides, and carcasses out of infested zones without inspection.

The cattle industry is already at its smallest in 75 years, strained by drought and existing economic pressure. Beef and veal prices were up 12.9 percent year over year in May. The Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association estimates the outbreak could cost the state’s ranchers $735 million to $745 million a year if it is not contained.

What the Lesson Costs

The screwworm program worked for 60 years because its monitoring, production, and international partnerships moved in concert. Unglamorous and invisible, it held a line that protected American ranchers and consumers.

The screwworm is not the only example. In July 2025, the CDC scaled back FoodNet, a three-decade-old federal-state partnership that monitored eight foodborne pathogens, down to two, dropping cyclospora entirely. FoodNet's purpose is trend surveillance — tracking whether specific pathogens are rising above historical baselines, so investigators know earlier when something unusual is happening. The actual tracing of an outbreak source relies on a separate system, one that the Trump administration, at the request of industry, has delayed implementation of until 2028. This summer, with more than 6,700 confirmed or probable cyclosporiasis cases across 30 states, investigators had to fall back on interviewing more than 1,000 patients to trace the largest cluster to shredded lettuce at Taco Bell locations in five states. DOGE weakened an already underfunded food safety surveillance system. The traceability tool that would have found the source faster does not yet exist.

My fear is that DOGE cuts many more effective integrated programs like this one, some of whose consequences will not be apparent for years, and all of which will be costly to rebuild. I will be writing more about what we are learning. We are now getting an education in what the federal government was quietly doing right.

Note: The paragraph about the cyclosporiasis outbreak was updated on July 22 to more accurately reflect the relationship between FoodNet and outbreak traceback investigations.

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Endnotes

1. New World screwworm biology, eradication history, and sterile insect technique: USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, New World Screwworm.

2. U.S.-Panama barrier at the Daréin Gap, COPEG facility, 20 million sterile flies released weekly: National Geographic, Inside the program that breeds billions of screwworm flies each year.

3. DOGE elimination of USAID screwworm monitoring program, part of 5,300 cuts: HuffPost, A Horrific Parasite Is Back — And Elon Musk’s DOGE Could Be Partly To Blame; Forbes, Screwworm in Texas Cattle Could Drive Up Beef Prices After DOGE Axed Prevention Efforts.

4. DOGE cut roughly 15 percent of USDA APHIS; agency of approximately 8,500 employees: USDA APHIS, 2024 Impact Report; American Prospect, Why That Next Hamburger Is Going to Cost You.

5. Prior monitoring data showed screwworm expanding northward; Grand Challenge launched January 21, 2026; 226 applications requesting $664 million; 40 projects funded at $105 million: USDA, USDA Announces New World Screwworm Grand Challenge; USDA APHIS, USDA Invests in Projects to Strengthen New World Screwworm Preparedness and Response.

6. First U.S. case June 3, 2026; 26 cases, 21 quarantined Texas counties; New Mexico case; Texas livestock movement restrictions: KXAN Austin, MAP: Where have New World screwworm cases been reported in Texas?; Texas Animal Health Commission, New World Screwworms.

7. Moore Air Force Base facility at one one-hundredth of required eradication capacity; full-scale domestic facility not ready until 2027: Common Dreams, Screwworm Parasite ‘No Longer Contained in Texas’.

8. U.S. cattle herd at 75-year low; beef and veal prices up 12.9 percent year over year in May; rancher loss estimate $735–745 million annually: Yahoo Finance, Beef prices hit record high as fear over screwworm outbreak lingers; KXAN Austin, MAP: Where have New World screwworm cases been reported in Texas?.

Lindsey Graham Died.

Sen. Lindsey Graham died Saturday night at 71 from an aortic dissection, a tear in his main artery, two days after his birthday. I don’t believe in speaking ill of the recently deceased, so I’ll keep this section to just the facts and others’ reactions.

Trump told NBC that Graham’s death is “a big blow to the SAVE America Act.” He told CNN Graham “was tough and nasty but I was nasty too.” His Truth Social tribute, as Zeteo cataloged, featured a photo of himself in a “Make Iran Great Again” hat. And on Fox & Friends Monday morning, Trump graded his most loyal Senate ally “a 99.9 instead of 100,” docking him a tenth of a point for criticizing Trump after January 6. Sen. Mike Lee suggested that the best memorial would be to pass the voter-suppression bill this month.

Robert Hubbell wrote the counter-obituary, resurfacing what Graham said before the conversion: “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell” (2015). “My party has gone batshit crazy” (2016). Against the epitaph he chose instead: “I am his north star.” That arc — from truth-teller to courtier — is the story of the modern Republican Party, and Graham wrote it about himself, in public, knowing exactly what he was doing.

The practical fallout is immediate. The GOP majority drops to 52. Graham’s death also narrows the Judiciary Committee to 11–10 the very week of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing, and McConnell’s absence deadlocks the Rules Committee 8–8. Gov. Henry McMaster appoints an interim senator ahead of an August 11 special primary; Nancy Mace has started polling her prospects.

Read more: Robert Hubbell, Zeteo, The Hill, Punchbowl

Wednesday: One Man Answers for the Epstein Coverup

Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, now acting attorney general, sits for confirmation hearings before the Judiciary Committee starting Wednesday. Bill Kristol’s advice to Democrats is the right one: give the hearing to the Epstein survivors.

The record Blanche has to answer for is specific. He attended the July 2025 Situation Room meeting about the political fallout of the Epstein files. He personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell a week later. He presided over her transfer to a minimum-security prison. And Robert Reich adds four more counts: conceded violations of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, revived prosecutions of Trump’s enemies, a settlement bearing only Blanche’s signature that grants Trump’s family immunity from financially related prosecution, and a DOJ exodus that has cut the Voting Section from 30 attorneys to 3.

Kristol cites polling showing that 75% of Americans, including 66% of Republicans, believe the government is still hiding information about Epstein. Sarah Longwell’s focus groups find Trump’s own voters saying, “obviously it’s all a cover-up.”

A single Republican — Cornyn, Tillis, or Cassidy — can stall the nomination. The Hill reports Tillis and Cornyn are both noncommittal. Cornyn just lost his primary by 30 points and owes Trump nothing. Let’s see if any of them have grown a spine. Don’t hold your breath.

Read more: The Bulwark, Robert Reich, Robert Hubbell, The Hill

Trump Sued Himself, Settled With Himself, and Signed His Own Immunity. A Judge Just Torched It.

This morning, a federal judge nullified the most brazen self-dealing arrangement of Trump’s presidency.

The scheme, briefly: Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion over the 2019 leak of his tax returns. He didn’t file the suit as a private citizen when he had every right to. He waited until he was president again and his own former criminal defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, ran the Justice Department. Then the two sides “settled.” The settlement created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate right-wingers who felt targeted by the previous administration. And the day after the deal was announced, Blanche quietly signed an addendum declaring the United States “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump, his family, or his businesses, and barring the IRS from auditing their past returns. The New York Times estimated Trump was facing roughly $100 million in liability from one pending audit alone.

Today, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams threw the whole thing out. Her 56-page order is the most withering judicial description of this administration. The lawsuit was brought “for an improper purpose — to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact.” There was “never adverseness between the Parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail” — because “the Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest.” Trump and his two oldest sons, she found, “acted in bad faith.” The tax amnesty “directly contravenes” the federal law barring presidents from influencing audits. She barred every party from citing the settlement in any proceeding, ever. This means the immunity Blanche signed is now worthless as a legal defense if a future administration comes calling.

And she didn’t stop at the deal. Williams referred Trump’s personal lawyer to the Florida Bar for discipline, and sent her order to the New York and D.C. bars, where proceedings against Blanche and Associate AG Stanley Woodward are already ongoing. She noted the case was reopened because 35 former federal judges filed a brief calling the settlement “a fraud on the court,” and she invited them to seek monetary sanctions. In a footnote, she wrote she was “extremely troubled” by Blanche’s congressional testimony that no court had any role in reviewing the arrangement.

Read more: CNN, CBS News, CNBC, The New Republic

They Subpoenaed the Reporters.

On Friday night, federal agents showed up at the homes of New York Times journalists with grand jury subpoenas.

The four reporters, Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt, had reported that the Secret Service urged Trump not to fly home from the NATO summit on the Qatari-gifted Air Force One, because the $400 million retrofitted plane lacks the defensive countermeasures of the old one, while Iran is actively threatening him. Trump himself told reporters, “I have a threat all the time. I’m No. 1 on their list.” The reporting was accurate. Trump was enraged anyway.

FBI Director Kash Patel spent roughly eight hours Friday running the leak hunt from the White House rather than FBI headquarters, and by evening, the DOJ had subpoenaed the four to appear before a Manhattan grand jury this Wednesday. The Times’ top newsroom lawyer, David McCraw: the appearance of federal agents on reporters’ doorsteps “should shock the conscience of any American.”

It is extremely rare for the government to compel reporters to reveal sources before a grand jury, and this became possible when Pam Bondi rescinded the Biden-era protections for journalists’ records last year. In January, FBI agents searched a Washington Post reporter’s home.

The subpoenas were issued by SDNY U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, whose confirmation hearing is Wednesday. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press is demanding senators hold him accountable. So picture the split screen: Clayton upstairs asking the Senate to trust him with the nation’s intelligence apparatus, while downstairs in Manhattan, his grand jury tries to force four journalists to name their sources for accurately reporting that the president’s gift plane isn’t safe.

Read more: NPR, CNN, PBS/AP, Letters from an American

That's your Monday. Lindsey Graham is dead. On Wednesday, Blanche answers for the Epstein files, Clayton answers for subpoenaing reporters — and four journalists face a grand jury for telling the truth.

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Platner Was A Fraud. The Movement Behind Him Is Real.

Graham Platner’s campaign collapsed in five days, and it deserved to. On Monday, Politico reported that Jenny Racicot, a woman Platner dated, says he came to her home in 2021, nearly blacked out, and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. Her account was backed by Facebook messages and corroborated by an ex-boyfriend she told at the time. Within hours, Warren, Sanders, Khanna, Schumer, and Gillibrand called on him to withdraw. The DSCC said it wouldn’t spend a dollar in Maine with him on the ballot. By Wednesday night, he was out.

This was Platner’s fourth scandal — after the offensive online posts, the Nazi-adjacent tattoo, and the explicit messages his own wife flagged to the campaign in its first days. Dan Pfeiffer, who endorsed him, called the allegations “well-documented, very credible, and highly disturbing” and admitted the obvious: “supporting him turned out to be a mistake.” Sam Stein at The Bulwark said it best: “It was selfish of him to go on, knowing there were other stories out there.” That’s what this is. Graham Platner looked thousands of volunteers, donors, and voters in the eye for a year and let them build a movement on ground he knew was mined. He let down his supporters, his state, and a country that needed this seat.

And then, on his way out, he made it worse. His exit video blamed a “corporate media system and the political establishment” for acting as “judge, jury, and executioner” — casting himself as the victim of the reporting rather than the author of his own collapse. He said he was suspending the campaign “not because of the allegations” but because of what “those in power” took from him. No accountability, no apology. That’s a man who learned nothing, grieving his own ambitions instead of the people he deceived. Platner needs to go away now, quietly, forever, and let Maine clean up his mess.

Platner is a failure, but the voters who supported him aren’t. Platner won more primary votes than any Democratic Senate candidate in Maine history because he channeled something real — the fury at a party that has lost twice to Trump and keeps offering the same consultants, the same donors, the same caution. NYT polling had him beating expectations days before the story broke. That fire didn’t go out on Wednesday night. It’s looking for someone worthy of it.

Maine Democrats have until July 27 to replace him, and the state party voted to hold a nominating convention. Troy Jackson, Dan Kleban, Shenna Bellows, and Nirav Shah are already jockeying. Susan Collins’s seat is still winnable, but a convention of party insiders is exactly the kind of process Platner’s voters revolted against. If the party treats this as a chance to install the establishment pick the primary rejected, it will lose the voters it just got back. Whoever emerges has to earn that fire — not inherit it.

Read more: NBC News, Maine Public, Axios, The Message Box, The Bulwark

He Did Everything Right. ICE Killed Him Anyway.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo woke up Tuesday at 5 a.m., ate breakfast, and drove through Houston’s East End picking up his construction crew — the same routine he’d kept for decades. Before 7 a.m., an ICE agent shot him in the abdomen. He died at Ben Taub Hospital, the same hospital where his sons were born.

Araujo was 52. He’d lived in the United States for 35 years. He built a construction business that employed other men, bought his family a home, and put three American-born sons through college. For the past 18 months, he’d been filing paperwork to regularize his status; his son says he was close to a work permit. He had no criminal record, per the Harris County DA. A witness told the Washington Post he heard Araujo shouting, “Me están matando” — they’re killing me.

ICE says he “rammed” an agent’s vehicle and “weaponized” his van, and that the agent fired in self-defense. ICE lies and has no credibility. As Rep. Sylvia Garcia put it: it’s ICE’s story — and it’s nearly word-for-word the same story the agency told after killing Renee Good in Minneapolis and Ruben Ray Martinez, a U.S. citizen, in cases where video later contradicted the official account. No video has been released. The federal government has blocked local investigations, leaving only a DHS inspector general review. ICE investigating ICE.

The three men in Araujo’s van, including his brother, were detained on the spot, and no one has heard from them since. His family fears they’ll be deported before they can testify. The only eyewitnesses to a killing by a federal agent are in that agency’s custody, location unknown. LULAC is offering $5,000 for witness video and begging people not to hand footage to ICE. Mexico’s president is preparing legal action against the United States.

Bill Kristol accuses the administration of “stonewalling and covering up,” and writes of Araujo: “I dare say he was a better American than they are.” Robert Reich supplies the machine behind the tragedy: ICE has quietly doubled its arrest quota to 2,000 per day, spread raids thin across the country to dilute the spectacle, and is burning through a $70 billion budget. Border czar Tom Homan has admitted half of ICE’s targets have no criminal record. A quota system that rewards volume, aimed at people with no records, produces exactly this. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo did everything we tell immigrants to do — work hard, raise your kids, file the paperwork. The system killed him mid-application, five minutes from the World Cup fan festival. His son said it best: “He did not deserve to be reduced to a headline of ‘Mexican man shot and killed by ICE.’”

Read more: The Bulwark, CNN, NBC News, Robert Reich

McConnell Has Been Hospitalized for Three Weeks. His Party Won’t Say Why.

Mitch McConnell hasn’t cast a vote since June 11. He was admitted to a hospital on June 14 — reportedly unconscious, per the Lexington Herald-Leader — and has been there ever since. Three-plus weeks. His office won’t say why he was admitted, what his condition is, or when he might return. The 84-year-old is retiring at the end of this term.

On Tuesday, in an obviously coordinated pushback, Thune, Barrasso, and Scott Jennings all announced within hours of each other that they’d had detailed phone calls with McConnell, in statements so similar they read as if they came from the same memo.

This is the party that spent four years demanding transparency about Joe Biden’s fitness. Glenn Beck is now making exactly that point from the right. The hypocrisy runs both directions, and the standard should be simple: when a sitting senator is hospitalized for three weeks, the public is owed more than “he’s improving.”

The political stakes are real. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority, and McConnell’s absence already helped Democrats pass the Kaine war-powers resolution, with four Republicans crossing over. Appropriations bills and the NDAA are stalling. The Senate returns July 13, and if he can’t return with it, every close vote this summer runs through an empty chair.

Read more: CNN, Washington Post, Axios, Al Jazeera

That's your Thursday. Platner is out. ICE killed a man and is holding the only witnesses. And McConnell has been hospitalized for three weeks.

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Three days earlier, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had stood at the State Department alongside Dana White, CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and signed a Memorandum of Understanding making UFC an official instrument of American diplomacy. Rubio called it “totally logical.” This, he said, is American soft power.

What Soft Power Used to Mean

In his 1961 inaugural address, President Kennedy made a pledge to the world’s poorest: “We pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves — not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.” That year, he established the United States Agency for International Development. For more than six decades, USAID built health systems, trained local institutions, responded to disasters, and invested in the conditions that allow developing countries to stabilize and grow.

In March 2025, the Trump administration terminated 83% of USAID’s 6,300 global programs. The Center for Global Development estimates the cuts could contribute to up to 700,000 additional deaths annually. Kenya lost access to its national health data systems — HIV tracking, malaria surveillance, patient records — not because of technical failure, but because Washington concluded that building a healthier, more stable world was no longer in the national interest.

What Replaced It

The full terms of the UFC MOU have not been made public. The State Department has said that UFC athletes and coaches will serve as sports ambassadors, traveling globally to lead training clinics and promote leadership skills among international youth. Rubio called UFC “the United Nations of fighting.” That is the extent of the public record.

What TKO Group Holdings president Mark Shapiro said was more specific: this was about earned media, new fans, and expanding viewership on Paramount+. The State Department is not a diplomatic partner in this arrangement. It is a marketing partner — lending the credibility of American foreign policy to a company whose stock the president holds, whose $1.1 billion-a-year broadcast deal depends on growing its global audience, and whose CEO described the entire enterprise as subscriber acquisition for a streaming platform.

The administration has made the open use of force the defining instrument of its immigration and foreign policy. For its celebration of America’s 250th birthday, it chose a sport in which the goal is to render your opponent unable to continue.

The question American soft power used to answer was: what can we offer? The question it now answers is: what are we trying to sell?

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Endnotes

1. Kennedy inaugural address, January 20, 1961: JFK Library

2. USAID founding and mission, Kennedy’s pledge as the origin of the agency: Origins (Ohio State University), The Birth and Death of USAID

3. Trump administration terminates 83% of USAID’s 6,300 global programs: reported widely; see State Department restructuring announcements, March 2025.

4. Center for Global Development estimate of up to 700,000 additional deaths annually from USAID cuts: Center for Global Development, cgdev.org

5. Kenya health data systems loss — HIV tracking, malaria surveillance, patient records: reported in multiple outlets covering USAID program terminations, March 2025.

6. Rubio-White MOU signing, June 11, 2026; State Department press release and ceremony remarks: U.S. Department of State, Secretary Rubio to Participate in Signing Ceremony with Ultimate Fighting Championship

7. UFC MOU terms: UFC athletes and coaches as sports ambassadors, training clinics, leadership skills: OAN News, Rubio and Dana White Sign Deal Bringing ‘UFC Diplomacy’ to State Dept.

8. Mark Shapiro on earned media, subscriber acquisition, Paramount+: The Hollywood Reporter, quoted in The Hill, White House Cage Fight Cost Federal Agencies, UFC at Least $60M

9. Trump holds TKO Group Holdings stock; Paramount paying TKO $1.1 billion annually for broadcast rights, analysts estimated deal at 18–47% above market value: Yahoo Sports, Inside the UFC-Trump Alliance

The Radical Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court closed its term this week, and the headline you saw was “Trump loses birthright citizenship.” That’s true, and it’s a genuinely good outcome. But the vote count should terrify you.

In Trump v. Barbara, the Court struck down Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, 6-3. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority, joined by Barrett, Kavanaugh, and the three liberals, holding what the Fourteenth Amendment has plainly said since 1868: if you’re born here, you’re a citizen. Trump attended the oral arguments in person, the first sitting president ever to do so, and he lost. The ACLU’s Anthony Romero called it “one of the most important constitutional cases of the past 100 years.” The families who spent eighteen months living in fear can stop being afraid. The majority opinion is clear, grounded in a century of precedent, and would be very hard for a future Court to unwind.

But, you should know by now, in Trump’s America, we can’t have anything nice. Inside this ruling is a massive warning sign. The Supreme Court has some radicals on it.

This ruling should have been 9-0. You don’t need to be a legal scholar to understand that. Instead, we got a 6-3 ruling, which was really a 5-3-1 ruling. Meaning there are currently four judges on the Supreme Court open to overturning birthright citizenship.

The Constitution is clear: if you are born in this country, you are a citizen. Don’t like that? There are ways to change the Constitution. It requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states. Donald Trump tried to change it via executive order. He signed a piece of paper on day one declaring that a right written into the Fourteenth Amendment no longer applied to the people he didn’t want it to apply to. And three justices of the Supreme Court — Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch — looked at that and said he could. Three sitting justices endorsed the idea that a president can amend the Constitution by fiat. A fourth, Kavanaugh, voted the right way on the order but wrote separately to say Congress could still strip birthright citizenship by ordinary statute — as if a simple law could override a constitutional guarantee that itself requires the amendment process to change.

Four justices on the Supreme Court of the United States just signaled that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee — the clause written to bury Dred Scott and make citizenship something no politician could take away — is negotiable. Three of them think a president can do it alone.

We won this one 6-3. If Congress passes a law ending birthright citizenship, it would be 5-4. Sit with how thin that is. The birthright ruling wasn’t the Court saving us. It was the Court showing us exactly how close the edge is, and how many of them are willing to walk us off it.

Read more: CBS News, The Bulwark, Letters from an American, Robert Hubbell

The Court Just Made the Case Against Itself.

The Supreme Court just made the strongest argument for expanding the court. JVL at The Bulwark chronicles it perfectly — you should read his entire piece.

He walks through the timeline of Trump’s Birthright order. Trump’s order was struck down at every level before it reached the Supreme Court. A district judge appointed by Ronald Reagan called it “blatantly unconstitutional” and said in four decades on the bench, he couldn’t remember a clearer case. A George W. Bush appointee certified the class action against it. The Ninth Circuit ruled against it. Every judge who looked at the order — across the ideological spectrum — reached the same conclusion: this isn’t close.

The first judges anywhere in America willing to say Trump could end birthright citizenship by executive order sat on the Supreme Court. And there were three of them.

That’s JVL’s argument, and it’s the right one. What does it mean that a third of the Supreme Court took the anti-constitutional side of a case that every other judge in the country found obvious? A Court where three justices will sign off on rewriting the Constitution by executive order is not a functioning check. Democratic politicians need to start banging this drum even louder. The Supreme Court is radical and compromised. A Court with three votes for constitutional demolition has a structural problem. The only fix is to expand the court.

Read more: The Bulwark

More Supreme Court

The same week as the birthright ruling, we got a slate of other rulings from the Supreme Court. In NRSC v. FEC, the Court struck down limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with their candidates — a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, written by Kavanaugh. Dan Pfeiffer calls it the most consequential campaign finance decision since Citizens United. The case was originally brought by JD Vance in 2022, when he was running for Senate. The Trump DOJ refused to defend the law, so the Court had to appoint an outside lawyer to argue in favor of keeping the limits. Now party committees can function as what Justice Kagan, in dissent, called “the candidate’s checking account” — an unlimited pipeline between the deepest-pocketed donors and the campaigns they want to own. Republicans currently hold a cash advantage. The ruling hands them a structural weapon heading into the midterms.

As discussed on Monday, in Trump v. Slaughter, the Court overturned ninety years of precedent to let the president fire the leaders of independent agencies at will. Trump celebrated on Truth Social that “90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed.” He’s not wrong about what he got.

Here’s the term in one sentence: the Court told Trump no on the case that made headlines, and yes on the two that shift durable power to him and his party. Birthright citizenship survived, barely. But presidential control over the administrative state expanded, and the wealthiest party got a new spending weapon.

Read more: CBS News, NPR — campaign finance, Letters from an American, Robert Hubbell

$1.2 Billion

Trump’s annual financial disclosure dropped this week. The 927-page filing shows Trump personally took in roughly $1.2 billion from crypto ventures in a single year — dwarfing what he made from the real estate empire that made him famous. Mar-a-Lago brought in $77 million. His crypto businesses brought in fifteen times that.

Here is the breakdown:

• $635 million in royalties from his $TRUMP meme coin, launched three days before his inauguration. The coin has since fallen by more than 97% from its peak, meaning those who bought in lost nearly everything while Trump collected the royalties.

• $500-plus million from World Liberty Financial, the crypto firm co-founded by his sons and the sons of Steve Witkoff. World Liberty sold a $500 million stake to an Emirati royal shortly before the inauguration.

• $196 million from a stablecoin holding company. $65 million more from equity sales.

Trump took office promising to make America “the crypto capital of the world.” He then appointed crypto-friendly regulators, gutted Biden-era enforcement at the SEC and DOJ, signed the GENIUS Act to legitimize stablecoins, and pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao — whose exchange had just done a $2 billion deal using World Liberty’s stablecoin. Every one of those moves raised the value of assets Trump personally owns.

A Chinese billionaire, Justin Sun, spent $75 million on Trump’s tokens and $200 million on his meme coins. A federal fraud case against Sun was quietly paused, then settled. The White House says there are “zero conflicts of interest.”

This is the whole scheme in one document. A billion-dollar payout disclosed on a federal form, earned from an industry the president spent the year deregulating for his own benefit.

I’ve said Trump will leave office the richest man alive. The disclosure is the receipt.

Read more: PBS, CBS News, Time

That's your Wednesday. Trump lost birthright citizenship but won the term. The Court handed his party an unlimited spending weapon. And the president has made $1.2 billion in crypto while regulating crypto.

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In August 2025, the first electric vehicle battery rolled off the assembly line at the BlueOval SK plant in Hardin County, Kentucky. It had taken four years to build. Four months later, a decision by President Trump would cost every one of the 1,600 workers their jobs.

The plant itself did not fail. Ford and its South Korean partner SK On had built it together as a joint venture to supply batteries for Ford and Lincoln electric vehicles. When the Trump administration and a Republican-controlled Congress eliminated the federal tax credit that made consumers willing to buy those vehicles, demand slowed, Ford dissolved the partnership, and Hardin County absorbed the loss.

What Democrats Built

In 2022, facing a post-COVID economy that had exposed decades of offshoring and industrial decline, the Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act. It was an ambitious attempt to address two problems at once: begin the transition to a green economy and rebuild American manufacturing in the communities that had lost it.

The policy toolbox had several complementary parts. Production tax credits made domestic battery manufacturing economically attractive for the first time. A Department of Energy loan program provided the capital at scale. Domestic content requirements tied those incentives to American jobs and American factories. A consumer tax credit made electric vehicles affordable enough to drive demand for what the factories produced. Kentucky was one of five states that captured more than $10 billion in investment. The factories rising across Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Michigan, and the Carolinas came to be known as the battery belt.

What Beshear Did With It

Kentucky has voted Republican in every presidential election since 2000, and Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature. Kentucky Republicans had their own theory of economic development: reduce the tax burden on businesses, limit regulation, and let the private market drive growth. Beshear’s theory was different. He believed a coordinated strategy that targeted specific industries and anchored them with a trained workforce would deliver jobs that the market alone would not produce in communities that had been waiting decades for them.

The IRA gave him the means to prove it. A federal policy environment that made Kentucky attractive to manufacturers who needed to build in America to qualify for the credits did not require a single vote in Frankfort. Beshear took full advantage of the opportunity.

He used every executive tool available to close the deals. The state put up a $250 million forgivable loan to BlueOval SK, paid upfront from state funds, to be forgiven when the company hit its employment targets. The state built a workforce training center at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College, designed around the plant’s specific technical requirements. He did the same with a second major battery investment in Bowling Green and maintained direct relationships with manufacturers across the state. By 2026, his administration had secured more than $13 billion in electric vehicle-related investment, part of more than $50 billion in total private investment announced since he took office, the largest economic development numbers in Kentucky history.

He also knew how to talk about it. Beshear focused on what Kentuckians could see and touch: the jobs in Hardin County, the workers who would fill them, the community that would grow around the plant. He leads with people and ends with people. That is how a policy built around climate and manufacturing becomes comprehensible to voters in one of the reddest states in the country.

When the Window Closed

President Trump and a Republican-controlled Congress eliminated the consumer tax credit for electric vehicles as part of the administration’s budget legislation in 2025. Ford and SK On dissolved their joint venture. The layoff notices arrived just before Christmas. One worker found out at a movie with her husband, who also worked at the plant, through calls from family. It was also the last day the couple could back out of buying a house. With no job, they lost their chance at a new home.

Beshear kept moving. He made sure Kentuckians knew that their congressman, a Republican who represented the district containing three electric vehicle plants and chaired the House Energy and Commerce Committee, had voted for the legislation that eliminated the credits those plants depended on. Then he used the relationship he had built with Ford. On April 30, 2026, Ford announced a new $2 billion investment at the same Hardin County site, creating 2,100 jobs in energy storage manufacturing. The plant will reopen in 2027. The laid-off workers can apply for the new positions.

The Lesson

Federal policy creates windows. The governors who are ready when the window opens are the ones whose communities feel the results. Beshear was ready, and he delivered the largest economic development numbers in Kentucky history without a single cooperative vote from his state legislature.

Kentucky is one of the clearest examples of what federal Democratic ambition looks like when a state executive knows how to capture it, and what it costs when one of those two things is removed. The IRA created the conditions. Beshear built the infrastructure to take advantage of them. When Congress eliminated the consumer tax credit, the workers in Hardin County paid the price.

What makes Beshear worth studying is not just the policy mechanism but how he stays centered on the needs of Kentuckians, in what he does, and in how he talks about it. He does not lead with ideology. He leads with Hardin County. The executive tools, the forgivable loan, the workforce training center, and the manufacturer relationships he maintained through disruption are in service of that. The results are specific enough to see and concrete enough to replicate.

The next installment looks at Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a different state, a different policy mechanism, and the same underlying argument. If you want to follow the series, all installments are collected here.

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Endnotes

1. BlueOval SK begins production, August 2025: EV Infrastructure News, BlueOval SK Begins US EV Battery Production. https://www.evinfrastructurenews.com/ev-battery/ford-joint-venture-blueoval-sk-begins-us-ev-battery-production

2. Ford and SK On dissolve joint venture, 1,600 workers laid off, December 2025: Utility Dive, SK On Pivots to Stationary Energy Storage After Ford Joint Venture Ends. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/ford-skon-dissolving-blueoval-sk-ev-battery-joint-venture/808012/

3. Worker learns of layoff at a movie, loses house purchase: Detroit News, Hundreds of Workers Set for Layoff as Ford Retools Battery Plant. https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/ford/2026/02/11/blueoval-sk-battery-park-kentucky-layoffs-ford-battery-plant-stationary-energy-storage/88551376007/

4. Biden administration passes Inflation Reduction Act, 2022, goals and policy toolbox: U.S. Department of the Treasury, The Inflation Reduction Act: Progress and Impact. https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-inflation-reduction-act-progress-and-impact

5. Kentucky one of five states capturing more than $10 billion in IRA investment, battery belt: Ohio River Valley Institute, BlueOval SK Development Timeline. https://ohiorivervalleyinstitute.org/blueoval-sk-development-timeline/

6. BlueOval SK announced September 2021, $5.8 billion investment, 5,000 jobs: Louisville Courier Journal, Ford, SK On Bringing 5,000 Jobs to Kentucky With Massive Electric Vehicle Battery Park. https://www.aol.com/news/ford-sk-innovation-open-electric-110259436.html

7. $250 million state forgivable loan: Murray Ledger, About 1,600 to Be Laid Off as Ford Repurposes BlueOval SK for Energy Storage. https://www.murrayledger.com/news/about-1-600-to-be-laid-off-as-ford-repurposes-blueoval-sk-for-energy-storage/article_3fdd1773-73f3-4d29-b5e8-9ffc77027831.html

8. Workforce training center at Elizabethtown Community and Technical College: Z93 Country, 1,600 Workers to Be Laid Off at Kentucky Manufacturing Plant. https://z93country.com/archives/511550/state-news/

9. Beshear administration reaches $50 billion in investment, 70,000 jobs: Spectrum News 1, Gov. Beshear Announces Historic Job Growth in Kentucky. https://spectrumnews1.com/ky/louisville/news/2026/05/20/economic-investments-record

10. One Big Beautiful Bill eliminates consumer EV tax credit, Beshear response: WUKY, BlueOval Layoffs Present a Challenge for Workers, State Supporters. https://www.wuky.org/wuky-news/2025-12-19/blueoval-layoffs-present-a-challenge-for-workers-state-supporters

11. Brett Guthrie, chair of House Energy and Commerce Committee: Spectrum News 1, Q&A With Republican U.S. Rep. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky. https://spectrumnews1.com/ky/louisville/in-focus-shows/2026/02/16/brett-guthrie-on-in-focus

12. Ford announces $2 billion investment, 2,100 jobs, Hardin County, April 2026: Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development, Gov. Beshear Joins Ford Motor

This morning was the clearest picture yet of what this Supreme Court actually is: an institution willing to hand Trump a sweeping, structural expansion of presidential power — while still drawing lines on the smaller fights.

In Trump v. Slaughter, the Court’s six conservatives voted to overturn Humphrey’s Executor — the 90-year-old precedent that let Congress shield the leaders of independent agencies from being fired at will. Chief Justice Roberts wrote it. The holding: the FTC’s for-cause removal protection is unconstitutional. The practical effect: FTC commissioners, and the leaders of more than two dozen other multimember independent agencies, are now at-will employees who serve at the president’s pleasure. It also effectively ends the law requiring the FTC to be bipartisan.

Think about what that means heading into a presidential administration that has spent eighteen months testing every limit. The agencies that police monopolies, protect consumers, enforce labor law, regulate elections-adjacent speech, and oversee markets can now be staffed entirely by presidential loyalists, removable the moment they cross him. Justice Kagan, writing for the three dissenters, pointed out that the Court was discarding a unanimous 1935 precedent that emerged from a firing at the very same agency. The conservative majority decided ninety years of settled law was wrong. This is the project Robert Reich has been describing for weeks: not narrow legal calls, but a deliberate effort to concentrate power in the executive and remove the checks around it.

However, it wasn’t a clean sweep for the Trump administration today.

In Watson v. RNC, the Court ruled 5-4 that states can count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked on time. Justice Barrett wrote the majority opinion, joined by Roberts and the three liberals. The RNC brought the case, backed by the Trump administration, seeking to overturn Mississippi’s five-day grace period. They lost. The ruling protects grace periods in 14 states and D.C. heading into the midterms. Washington’s Secretary of State noted that more than 250,000 ballots postmarked on time arrived late in 2024 — under the rule the RNC wanted, all of those voters would have been silenced, many in rural areas where the mail runs slowly.

The Court also declined to let Trump remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, leaving her in place. That one matters in light of Slaughter: the Court gutted independent-agency protections in one ruling while refusing to let Trump purge the Fed in another — a signal it’s carving out the Federal Reserve as a special case even as it demolishes the shield for everything else. The justices also refused to hear Trump’s appeal of the E. Jean Carroll verdict, leaving the $5 million judgment for sexual abuse and defamation intact and ending his last avenue of appeal. And in Chatrie v. United States, the Court held that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they pull your phone’s location data from Google.

So which is it? A Court that checks Trump, or one that empowers him? The honest answer is both. And the significance of each case is what matters here.

On the structural questions that shift permanent power to the presidency, this Court delivers for Trump. On the discrete fights where the law is clear and the politics cut both ways — mail ballots that millions of Republicans also use, a Fed that the markets need to be stable — it holds the line. Don’t mistake the second category for reform. The Slaughter ruling gives Trump the power he wants.

One more thing: the term isn’t over. The birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara, is still pending, along with the transgender sports cases. At least one more opinion day is coming this week. The biggest immigration ruling of the year could land within days.

Read more: CBS News, NPR, The Parnas Perspective, Robert Hubbell

Tungsten and the Family Business

The New York Times reported Sunday that the Trump administration approved up to $1.6 billion in federal financing for an American company, Kaz Resources, to mine tungsten in Kazakhstan — a metal the U.S. needs for missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips. The mines hold an estimated 1.4 million tonnes of tungsten trioxide, roughly 15% of global production. China was also bidding for access. So Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick met with Kazakh President Tokayev at the St. Regis Hotel in New York on September 23, and Trump joined the meeting by phone to seal it.

Now here’s the part that matters. Reporters Paul Sonne and Eric Lipton found that Dominari Securities — an investment firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, housed in Trump Tower — took a 20% stake in the project. Around the same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm controlled by Lutnick’s family and run by his sons Brandon and Kyle, helped a lead investor raise $210 million in new capital, the kind of deal that nets Cantor millions in fees. The Kazakh deal was signed on November 6, six days after the Trump sons’ investment, which was not disclosed at the time.

This isn’t a one-off. The Times found that one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mining deals, which are backed by roughly $8.9 billion in federal support. The fathers negotiate the deals. The sons take the stakes.

Sen. Jon Ossoff put the stakes in plain terms, promising accountability if Democrats retake Congress: “Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.” I’ve written before that Trump’s presidency is fundamentally a vehicle for personal enrichment — that he’ll leave office richer than any human being alive. The tungsten deal is what that looks like in practice. The same families running the war machine are now running the supply chain that arms it.

Read more: The New Republic, Zeteo, The New York Times

Hunger by Design

Judd Legum at Popular Information reports that hundreds of thousands of people have been pushed off SNAP nutrition assistance in Arizona as the first wave of cuts from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” takes hold. The numbers are staggering: Arizona’s SNAP enrollment fell from roughly 925,000 in January 2025 to 435,196 by April 2026. A drop of nearly 490,000 people, including 213,000 children. No state has cut deeper.

The bill, which Trump signed on July 4 last year, cuts roughly $187 billion from SNAP over the next decade. But the deepest cuts haven’t even hit yet. What’s happening in Arizona is the bureaucratic machinery grinding people out early. The law ties a state’s costs to its payment-error rate; Arizona’s 2024 error rate was 8.84%, and if it can’t get under 6%, the state owes between $100 and $300 million. So Arizona cut staff, added documentation requirements, and started enforcing a 30-day processing deadline. As one analysis explained, even if an eligible person submits everything on time, if the understaffed state fails to process it within 30 days, that person is automatically dropped and has to start over.

The law also expanded work requirements from ages 18-54 to 18-64, stripped exemptions for veterans, unhoused people, and foster youth, and ended eligibility for refugees and people granted asylum.

Lauren Bauer at the Brookings Institution called the new work requirements what they are: “a cruel policy to try to use hunger as leverage over people.” That’s the whole design. Every Republican in Arizona’s congressional delegation voted for this. Every Democrat voted against it. And the bill passed so narrowly that if two Republicans had flipped, it would have died. This was a choice, and Arizona’s hungry kids are the result. The cruelty is the point.

Read more: Popular Information, NBC News, PBS NewsHour

The Forever War Trump Promised Was Over

A weekend of renewed strikes has the supposed ceasefire in tatters. Iran hit an oil tanker — its second such attack since Thursday — after objecting to efforts to reopen the Strait of Hormuz without its oversight. The U.S. struck Iranian missile and drone sites. Iran retaliated against Bahrain and Kuwait, near the Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters. Trump escalated on Truth Social, warning “there may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable” and that “the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist.”

Sunday’s planned talks were canceled. Trump claimed Iran requested a Tuesday meeting in Doha; an Iranian official denied any formal negotiations were scheduled. Zeteo quotes a U.S. official describing, simply, a “forever war.” Rep. Ro Khanna says Congress should take Trump to court to compel an end to the strikes.

The fact is that the US negotiated a bad deal with Iran. Iran reads the MOU to mean it has full sovereign control of the Strait of Hormuz, working with its Gulf neighbors on transit, not with the United States. The U.S. believes it retains a role in keeping the Strait open. So when the Navy escorts a tanker through, Washington calls it freedom of navigation and Tehran calls it a violation.

The MOU allows Iran to charge a toll on Strait traffic after 60 days, effectively legalizing the chokehold Trump went to war to break. And Iran, having watched the U.S. bomb its facilities and then negotiate, has concluded the obvious lesson — that the only thing that would have deterred the attack was a weapon it didn't have. Its president now says enrichment is non-negotiable.

This is what Trump’s war accomplished: an Iran that controls the Strait, can tax the world's oil through it, and is more convinced than ever that it needs a bomb.

Read more: Robert Hubbell, Zeteo, The Parnas Perspective, Semafor

That's your Monday. The Court gutted ninety years of independent-agency protection. Trump’s sons cashed in on a tungsten deal his administration financed. Arizona pushed half a million people off food assistance, a third of them kids. And the war he said was over is back.

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Trump Holds Housing Hostage So He Can Suppress Your Vote.

Congress sent a sweeping bipartisan housing bill to the president’s desk with veto-proof margins: the House passed it 358–32, the Senate cleared it 85–5. All 32 “no” votes came from Republicans. The legislation would lower housing costs by tying federal grants to construction incentives, streamlining environmental reviews, and restricting large institutional investors from buying up single-family homes. In Jacksonville, Florida alone, investors own more than 20% of single-family rental homes. Between 2018 and 2024, Dallas and Phoenix each added at least 16,000 investor-owned homes. This bill was Congress’s answer.

Trump’s own press secretary had called it “one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history.”

Then, one hour before the signing ceremony, Trump killed it. On Truth Social, he wrote: “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby canceled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.” The SAVE America Act is his proof-of-citizenship voter ID bill — a contested elections overhaul that has nothing to do with housing and doesn’t have the votes to pass the Senate.

Minutes earlier, he called the housing bill “of minor importance.”

Let me be direct about what just happened. The cost of housing is the number one economic concern in America. Congress did something almost unheard of — passed a bill with bipartisan, veto-proof majorities — and the president is holding it hostage to a voter-suppression bill he can’t get through the Senate. Sen. John Husted of Ohio, who is staring down a 2026 election, publicly said he hopes Trump will eventually sign it. Republican members who wanted this on their record before November are furious. And because the bill sits unsigned, it faces a possible pocket veto if Congress adjourns within 10 days.

Democrats should be running on this by the end of the week. The ad writes itself: Trump had a bill on his desk that would have made it easier for you to buy a home. He refused to sign it to make it harder for you to vote. He called your housing costs “of minor importance.”

Read more: The Hill, NBC News, CNN, CNBC, CBS News

Trump Wants You To Buy Iranian Oil

The more people examine the actual terms of Trump’s MOU with Iran, the worse it gets.

Bloomberg reported Monday that the administration granted Iran a waiver to sell crude oil and petroleum products on the open market — dismantling a sanctions regime built up over decades. The waiver even allows Iranian oil imports into the United States, opening the door for the first such shipments in decades. “This waiver doesn’t just weaken the pressure campaign — it puts it into reverse,” said Brett Erickson of Obsidian Risk Advisors. “What took months to build will be dismantled in a fraction of the time.”

JVL at The Bulwark made the leverage problem explicit: Trump needs Iranian oil in the global marketplace to bring gas prices down before November. That means Iran has leverage over Trump, not the other way around. Trump is so desperate to lower prices that he’s maximizing Iranian oil flow regardless of what it costs in strategic concessions. And once Iranian oil is back in international supply lines, you can’t pull it out. The sanctions regime is gone, and it’s not coming back.

Meanwhile, the Senate passed Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine’s war-powers resolution to end the Iran war, with four Republicans joining every Democrat.

Vice President J.D. Vance touted Iran’s agreement to allow IAEA nuclear inspections as “a major milestone.” In fact, such inspections were part of the JCPOA — the Obama deal Trump tore up in 2018 — and they continued at some sites until Trump bombed Iranian nuclear facilities a year ago. Iran only kicked inspectors out because of Trump’s strikes. Vance is celebrating getting back to where we were before Trump broke it.

Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box argued the war “will still cost Trump in November.” Brian Beutler at Off Message went further: the people who killed the JCPOA “unlocked a hellish future.”

Read more: The Bulwark, Letters from an American, Puck

AIPAC Spent Millions in New York. The Left Won Anyway.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani went three-for-three on his congressional endorsements. Brad Lander defeated incumbent Dan Goldman with nearly two-thirds of the vote. State Assembly member Claire Valdez defeated Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. And Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old community organizer, narrowly defeated five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat — the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Goldman is the fifth House incumbent to lose a primary in 2026.

Zeteo framed it bluntly: “AIPAC Loses, as the Left Wins Big in New York.” VoteHub’s head of data science put it more historically: “The Democratic Tea Party is here. Tonight is shaping up to be one of the more consequential nights in recent Democratic politics.”

All three Mamdani-backed candidates campaigned explicitly against the pro-Israel lobby and against the war. Lander, who is Jewish, called Israel’s war in Gaza “genocide” and promised to co-sponsor legislation restricting U.S. military aid. In his victory speech, he vowed to abolish ICE and condemned “Trump’s fascism.” Avila Chevalier, a former Columbia encampment organizer, promised to oppose all military aid to Israel.

Here’s what matters beyond New York: Hakeem Jeffries campaigned aggressively against Mamdani’s candidates and lost. Jeffries told reporters on Capitol Hill that “a handful of primaries that go in one direction or the other aren’t going to reshape who we are as House Democrats.” I think he’s wrong — and the evidence is piling up faster than he can dismiss it.

In Maine, Graham Platner beat Janet Mills, a former governor and the establishment-backed candidate, so badly that she didn’t even make it to election day. In Michigan, polling averages show Abdul El-Sayed leading Schumer-backed Haley Stevens. And last night, Mamdani — who has been mayor for six months — went three-for-three against Jeffries-backed candidates in the city Jeffries represents.

This doesn’t mean every incumbent will lose. Most won’t. But a pattern this consistent isn’t a handful of anomalies. Pro-Israel alignment and establishment backing have become liabilities, not assets, in Democratic primaries. Voters are choosing candidates with bold ideas, a willingness to call out Israel’s atrocities, and real, substantial criticisms of the party.

That is a major shift in the Democratic Party — whether Jeffries admits it or not.

Read more: Zeteo, NBC News, PBS, NPR

That's your Wednesday. Trump called affordable housing "of minor importance." Iran can sell oil to America under his deal. And AIPAC's money stopped working in New York.

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Vance Negotiates, But The House Is Already On Fire.

JD Vance, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff just concluded 18 hours of negotiations with Iranian officials at a Swiss mountaintop resort. Vance emerged Monday morning, calling it “a successful foundation” for a final deal. According to Vance, Iran agreed to allow IAEA nuclear inspectors back into the country. The two sides agreed on a 60-day road map. Qatar and Pakistan, the mediators, called the session “positive” and “constructive.” Technical talks continue.

That’s the spin. Here’s the context.

While Vance was sitting across from Iranian negotiators, Trump was posting threats to “hit Iran very hard again.” The MOU that brought them to the table explicitly prohibits threats of force against the other party. Trump violated his own agreement in real time while his vice president was trying to implement it. Iran’s chief negotiator responded: the military is “ready to respond.” Lindsey Graham went further on Fox News: if diplomacy fails, “we’re going to take the Strait of Hormuz. We’re going to run it.” That’s a sitting U.S. senator proposing the permanent military seizure of an international waterway.

The deal that produced these talks was signed five days ago and is already in tatters.

On June 17, Trump and Iranian President Pezeshkian signed a 14-article memorandum of understanding to end the war. Trump signed it at Versailles during dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron. For about 72 hours, it looked like the war might be over. Tankers started moving. Oil dropped toward $80. The Strait of Hormuz reopened. Trump said Friday that “ships are flying out of the Hormuz Strait like nobody’s ever seen before.”

On Saturday — three days later — Iran closed the Strait again.

The original MOU required “the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including Lebanon.” Iran would reopen the Strait. The U.S. would lift the blockade and begin sanctions relief, including access to $6 billion in frozen assets. Iran reaffirmed it would not pursue nuclear weapons. A 60-day clock would begin for final negotiations. On paper, it was a weaker version of the Obama-era JCPOA, purchased at the cost of thousands dead, a destabilized region, and months of $4+ gas. Robert Hubbell called it plainly: “Trump surrenders to Iran.” Senior U.S. officials told Zeteo that Iran has Trump “by the balls.”

But even that deal couldn’t hold because Israel kept attacking Lebanon.

Iran’s Foreign Minister was explicit: “Any military attack by Israel against Lebanon from this point forward will be regarded by us as a violation of the memorandum.” Israel’s far-right National Security Minister Ben-Gvir was equally explicit: “Trump’s agreement does not bind us.” Israel’s Defense Minister Katz said Sunday that Israel “will not withdraw from the security zone in Lebanon” and the IDF is free “to act to eliminate threats.” Israeli strikes continued, killing over a dozen people in southern Lebanon hours after the MOU went into effect. The Lebanese death toll since March 2 has now exceeded 4,000. Amnesty International said this week that Israel’s forced displacement orders in Lebanon amount to war crimes.

On Saturday, Iran’s military command declared the Strait closed, citing “the explicit breach of the first clause of the post-war memorandum of understanding by the United States” and Israel’s “continuous and ongoing violations of the ceasefire in southern Lebanon.”

So what did Sunday’s 18-hour marathon actually produce? A “deconfliction cell” for Lebanon — meaning the parties agreed to set up a phone line to try to stop the fighting that the MOU was supposed to have already stopped. Kushner proposed that Iran’s unfrozen assets be used to purchase American soybeans, corn, and wheat — which Vance called “a classic Trump deal.” Iran agreed to let IAEA inspectors back in — something they had already agreed to under the JCPOA before Trump tore it up. And both sides agreed to keep talking.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Araghchi called the Lebanon deconfliction cell “the first real test” of the agreement. He also said that other provisions of the MOU will not be implemented until the Lebanon issue is resolved. Iran’s president said this morning: “What is certain is that we will never back down from the right to enrich uranium.” And a Middle Eastern official told CBS News that Trump’s own envoys are out of sync with Secretary Rubio on how to handle Israel and Lebanon — with Israeli officials viewing the decision to include Lebanon in the MOU as a concession to Iran that they never agreed to.

Trump’s War Failed

Trump launched a war with Iran, which has cost at least $40 billion and potentially $72 billion when replacement costs are factored in. He promised "unconditional surrender." Instead, he got a memorandum of understanding that gave Iran sanctions relief, access to frozen assets, and no nuclear concessions.

The Strait of Hormuz was open before the war. It is closed again now. Iran has demonstrated it can shut down 20% of the world’s seaborne oil trade at will. Over 3,600 Iranians have been killed, including hundreds of children. More than 4,000 Lebanese have been killed since March. Thirteen U.S. service members are dead.

Iran's regime is still standing. Its enriched uranium stockpile is intact. Its president says Iran will never give up the right to enrich. Hezbollah is still armed. Israel's defense minister says the IDF will not withdraw from Lebanon. And Iran now controls a toll system on the most important shipping lane on earth — a capability it did not have before Trump started the war.

Read more: NPR, NBC News, Al Jazeera, CBS News, Robert Hubbell, Zeteo, The Bulwark

That's your Monday. The Strait is closed again. Israel says it's not bound by the agreement.

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Three years in, the architecture is visible.

Lining Up the Levers

Moore has assembled something rarer than a good program. He has assembled three policies aimed at the same problem from different directions.

The ENOUGH Act, passed in 2024, is the anchor. The name stands for Engaging Neighborhoods, Organizations, Unions, Governments, and Households. It is the most ambitious state-run, place-based anti-poverty initiative in the country, targeting communities where at least 20 percent of children live in poverty. What makes it structurally unusual is how it works: the state funds the planning process itself, so communities with the deepest need but the least organizational capacity can compete. The first round of grants reached 27 organizations across all 12 eligible counties.

Alongside the ENOUGH Act, Moore has invested in violence prevention as a public safety and economic strategy rather than a policing problem. The Group Violence Reduction Strategy, a program the state has supported and helped fund in Baltimore, works by engaging directly with people identified by their communities as being at the highest acute risk of involvement in gun violence, as either a potential victim or a perpetrator. Community members, credible messengers, and faith leaders make direct contact. Those who accept services receive intensive life coaching, housing assistance, employment support, and cognitive-behavioral therapy through two nonprofits: Youth Advocate Programs and Roca. Since January 2022, 97.7 percent of participants have not reoffended.

The ENOUGH grants and the violence-prevention investment were designed to reinforce each other. A community organization called Tendea Family used an ENOUGH grant to launch Drug Free Down Da Hill, a neighborhood patrol that finds people struggling with addiction and connects them with recovery, job training, and housing, while also providing mental health support, food, and clothing. Moore described it at the Center for American Progress IDEAS Conference last week. His gloss: “They came up with the idea. Not the state.”

Moore also signed the Expungement Reform Act of 2025, which removed a legal trap that had permanently barred thousands of Marylanders from clearing their records because of minor technical probation violations, many dating back decades. Criminal records are barriers to employment, housing, and education. Moore frames expungement as workforce policy.

The logic is the same across all three: the conditions that produce poverty, violence, and workforce exclusion are interconnected, and policy works better when it addresses them collectively.

What the Numbers Show

Baltimore’s homicide numbers over the past three years are, by any honest measure, extraordinary. The city recorded 201 homicides in 2024, a 23 percent drop from 2023, which itself had seen a 20 percent drop from the year before. In 2025, the number fell to 133, the lowest in nearly 50 years. Juvenile victims of homicides and non-fatal shootings fell 74 percent in a single year.

The evidence supports treating violence as a public health problem with economic roots rather than a policing problem alone. A University of Pennsylvania evaluation of the Group Violence Reduction Strategy, the policy with the strongest formal evaluation behind it, found that in the first 18 months after the program launched in the Western District, homicides and shootings fell by roughly 25 percent, the equivalent of 60 fewer victims, with no evidence that crime simply moved elsewhere in the city. The program has since expanded to five of Baltimore’s nine police districts, and the numbers have continued to fall.

Arne Duncan, who served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools and then as US Secretary of Education before founding the violence prevention nonprofit Chicago CRED, arrived at the same conclusion through a different experience. After speaking with incarcerated people in Cook County jail about what it would take for them to put down their guns, he wrote that the loss of jobs and educational opportunities in high-poverty neighborhoods is the primary driver of violence, not policing failures. Chicago, using a similar community violence intervention model, is on track to close 2025 with homicides down roughly 50 percent from their 2021 high.

What Travels and What Doesn’t

Maryland’s specific policy architecture will not be directly replicated elsewhere. What travels is simpler: the principle that communities closest to the problem are closest to the solution, and that the state’s job is to fund the process of finding it and funding the implementation. Moore, from his own experience, understood the need to make sure on-the-ground voices participate in the program development and the need to bring policies in alignment with each other. That is not a talking point. It is a theory of change.

The next installment in this series looks at Governor Beshear from Kentucky. All installments are collected here.

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Sources

1. Wes Moore, The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (Spiegel & Grau, 2010)

2. ENOUGH Act of 2024, Maryland SB 482, signed May 9, 2024

3. Governor’s Office, Maryland: ENOUGH Initiative grant announcement, December 2024

4. Governor Moore remarks, Center for American Progress IDEAS Conference, Washington D.C., May 20, 2026

5. University of Pennsylvania Crime and Justice Policy Lab, GVRS evaluation, February 2024

6. Baltimore City Mayor’s Office, homicide data 2023-2025

7. Reform Alliance, Expungement Reform Act of 2025, April 2025

8. Arne Duncan, Chicago Sun-Times, August 2025; Brookings Institution, March 2025

I will be honest with you. When I think about the celebrations planned for this summer, my first instinct is to find a quiet forest somewhere and let July 4 pass without me. Not because I do not love this country. Particularly after the UFC Fight on the White House Lawn, the celebration being offered does not feel like mine.

If you feel the same way, you are not alone and are not being unpatriotic.

Two Visions of America

The Declaration of Independence says that all people are created equal and possess the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Constitution calls on us to form a more perfect union and promote the general welfare. Those are not small promises. They are the founding argument of this country, and they have never been fully kept.

For 250 years, two competing visions of what those words mean have been in direct conflict. The first holds that the promise was made for a select group: property-owning white men, specifically, and that the order they established is the natural and correct one. The second holds that the promise belongs to everyone, that the systematic exclusion of Black and brown people, of women, of the poor, from political and economic life has always been a betrayal of the founding ideal, and that the work of America is to close that gap.

Historian Heather Cox Richardson, writing on May 17, argued that the Trump administration is attempting to turn America’s story away from its Enlightenment foundations of natural rights, equality, and self-government, and toward a vision that asks Americans to accept that some people are better than others and to defer to their leaders. That is the vision animating the official celebration. The estrangement many Americans feel from this anniversary stems from this.

What the Official Celebration Is Erasing

The administration has spent the past year removing slavery exhibits from national parks and pressuring the Smithsonian to submit its anniversary programming for government review. A federal judge ordered one exhibit restored at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia after the administration removed displays about the enslaved people George Washington kept while living there; the administration said it would appeal. National Park Service records show the review extends to the Emmett Till monument in Mississippi, where staff were asked to consider removing an entire exhibit about his murder.

On May 17, on the National Mall, the official anniversary celebration held its first major event. Rededicate 250 was a daylong Christian worship service, with cabinet members participating, organized by Freedom 250 as a presidential anniversary event. All but one speaker was Christian. Its stated purpose was to rededicate America as “One Nation Under God,” with the entire 250-year history framed as evidence of God’s providence. Americans United for Separation of Church and State described it as advancing Christian nationalism rather than religious freedom. The founders, who were explicit about the separation of church and state, are not available to comment.

The Truer, Harder, More Hopeful Story

Richardson has also written that one of the hallmarks of a strongman’s rise is the attempt to rewrite history. The history being erased here is not comfortable. It is honest, and honesty is ultimately more hopeful than the version being offered in its place.

The Declaration’s promise of equality was written by men who enslaved other people and excluded women, Black and brown Americans, and the landless from political life entirely. What the last 250 years represent is not the fulfillment of that promise. It is the struggle toward it, driven by those who were excluded and by the allies who joined them: abolitionists, labor organizers, suffragists, civil rights leaders, and ordinary people who showed up when it mattered.

That struggle has never moved in a straight line. After the Civil War, the 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote and sent Black representatives to Congress. Within a decade, Supreme Court rulings had gutted federal enforcement and southern states began dismantling those gains through poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence. In 1875, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the 14th Amendment did not grant women the right to vote. It took 45 more years and a new constitutional amendment to reverse it. The current moment is not the first time the promise of America has faced serious opposition. It has not been the last word before, and there is no reason to believe it is now.

The Other Celebration

There are people and institutions working right now to tell the truer story. The Smithsonian’s “Our Shared Future: 250,” spanning all 21 of its museums, is committed to contemplating the consequences of American history alongside its achievements. The White House has pressured the Smithsonian to submit its programming for review and threatened funding cuts if exhibits were deemed divisive. The Smithsonian has complied with document requests. What remains on offer, including exhibits at the National Museum of African American History and the National Museum of the American Indian, still reflects a broader and more honest story than the official celebration. Visit si.edu/250 and draw your own conclusions. The congressional commission America250 is still operating its civic programming and oral history projects at america250.org. The New York Times has also compiled a useful guide to anniversary events across the country worth reading alongside these resources.

For those who want to go deeper, six resources worth your time:

• Heather Cox Richardson’s “250 to 250: We Are America” is a free series of one-minute videos featuring the people, places, and events that have moved the country toward its founding promise. Start here.

• Eddie Glaude Jr.’s America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries is the most direct scholarly treatment of this post’s argument: that the struggle of Black Americans is the true measure of democratic progress, and that every national anniversary has papered over that truth.

• Melissa Murray’s new book makes the Constitution itself accessible to ordinary readers, restoring it to the people it was written to serve.

• Ben Rhodes’ All We Say, published May 26, traces 250 years through 15 speeches, framing the nation as divided between two stories: one of inheritance and exclusion, the other of equality and belonging.

• The NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s “Reckon, Reimagine, Refound” initiative centers the Black freedom struggle in the anniversary and calls for a multiracial democracy where power is shared and dignity is sacred.

• Ms. Magazine’s “Feminist 250” covers America’s founding, lessons learned and future.

None of these resolve what is happening. They are evidence that the America many of us believe in is still showing up.

Closing

The founders left us a challenge: to make real the promise they could not keep themselves. That work is not finished. Celebrate the 4th of July in a way that is consistent with your values.

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Sources

1. Heather Cox Richardson on Rededicate 250: Letters from an American, May 17, 2026

2. Richardson on strongmen and rewriting history: Letters from an American, May 17, 2026

3. Richardson’s “250 to 250: We Are America” video series: Letters from an American, May 24, 2026

4. Slavery exhibit removed and restored, administration appeal: The Hill, Trump Aims to Change Black History at National Sites

5. NPS database, Emmett Till monument review: Washington Post via Rep. Huffman, Confidential Database Reveals Which Items NPS Thinks May ‘Disparage’ America

6. Rededicate 250, Christian nationalist framing, cabinet participation: NPR, Trump and Administration Officials Address Christian Gathering on National Mall

7. Smithsonian under pressure, Our Shared Future: 250: Hyperallergic, Trump Wants ‘American Exceptionalism’ at the Smithsonian. Will He Get It?

8. Smithsonian Our Shared Future: 250 programming: si.edu/250

9. Eddie Glaude Jr., America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries: Penguin Random House

10. Minor v. Happersett, 1875: Constitution Center, On This Day, Supreme Court Refuses Women Right to Vote

11. NAACP LDF Reckon Reimagine Refound: naacpldf.org

12. America250: america250.org

13. New York Times anniversary travel guide: America’s 250th Anniversary: Where to Celebrate This Summer

Four days later, Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, a 42,000-word encyclical on artificial intelligence and the human person. He had been working on it for five years.

Two events. One week. A clear picture of who is thinking carefully about what AI will do to ordinary people, and who isn’t.

What the Pope Said

Leo’s argument covers three distinct dangers.

On work: AI is already reversing the proper relationship between tools and people. Rather than machines being designed to serve workers, workers are being forced to adapt to the speed and demands of machines. Eliminating jobs in the name of profit is not progress. It is a choice that treats people as means rather than ends, and it will produce not just unemployment but what Leo calls “human and cultural impoverishment.”

On surveillance: AI gives whoever controls the data, government or private actors, an unprecedented capacity to monitor, track, and control populations. That capacity is not theoretical. ICE is already using AI tools to track people at scale, and the current administration is building the infrastructure to significantly expand that capability. The question the Pope is asking is who decided this was acceptable, and what legal framework governs it.

On warfare: machines that can decide to kill without meaningful human accountability are not simply better weapons. They are a different kind of decision, one that removes the human being entirely from the moral act. Leo calls for AI to be disarmed, drawing a direct parallel to the Church’s work on nuclear weapons. Anthropic, one of the leading AI companies, refused government demands to deploy its models for military and surveillance purposes. The government found willing vendors elsewhere without difficulty.

His demand across all three: voluntary corporate ethics are not enough. Robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, and governments that do not abdicate their responsibility are required. He published on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the Church’s original response to the industrial revolution.

We Have Been Here Before

The industrial revolution transformed work at a scale no existing institution was prepared to manage. Workers who demanded an eight-hour workday in the 1870s did not get it until the 1930s. Children comprised 6% of the national labor force in 1900. When workers struck, the federal government dispatched troops to break them. The reforms that eventually protected ordinary people came only after sixty years, a depression, and sustained political pressure that those in power had spent decades resisting.

What Washington Is Doing Instead

On his first day in office, President Trump revoked the Biden executive order on AI safety. States moved to fill the gap. The administration then moved to preempt state laws it deemed inconsistent with a federal framework that does not yet exist as binding law. The voluntary review order pulled on May 21 was not a regulation. It was a request that agencies be allowed to look at powerful AI models before release.

AI executives have donated millions to President Trump, and industry-backed PACs have spent heavily to keep federal oversight off the table. The industry shaping this moment has plenty of influence in Washington. No institution accountable to ordinary people has been asked to do the same.

What This Means

The question is not whether AI is good or bad. The benefits are real. But the dangers the Pope identifies, to workers, to people subject to government surveillance, to the basic question of who decides when a machine can take a life, are also real, and they are arriving faster than any democratic response.

The Pope delivered a universal message: AI must be subordinate to human dignity. Let’s learn from history and not wait 60 years for Washington to listen and act.

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Endnotes

1. Pope Leo XIV publishes Magnifica Humanitas, May 25, 2026: Vatican News, Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas on AI

2. Trump pulls voluntary AI executive order, May 21, 2026: Axios, Anti-‘doomer’ feedback derails Trump’s AI executive order

3. Trump revokes Biden AI safety executive order, preempts state laws: TechPolicy Press, The Need for AI Regulation Is Greater Than Ever

4. ICE use of AI tools for tracking and surveillance at scale: American Immigration Council, Mission Creep: AI Surveillance at DHS Crosses Dangerous Line Into Tracking Americans

5. Anthropic refuses Pentagon demands; government finds willing vendors: CNN Business, Anthropic rejects latest Pentagon offer; Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Anthropic-DOD Conflict

6. AI executives’ political donations and industry PAC spending: TechCrunch, OpenAI’s vision for the AI economy

7. Industrial revolution labor history: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Law Highlights 1915–2015

8. Rerum Novarum 135th anniversary context: America Magazine, In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo delivers on a people-first vision for AI

Donald Trump’s favorability ratings have started to decline. On its own, that would typically signal an advantage for Democrats. But recent polling tells a more complicated story: even as Trump weakens, the generic Republican candidate remains competitive with the generic Democrat.

Dissatisfaction with Trump is not automatically translating into support for Democrats. Voters may be open to change, but they need to understand what that change looks like in practical terms. A December Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 67 percent of Democratic voters want affordability to be the party’s central focus, while only 38 percent believe national Democratic leaders have a clear plan for delivering it.

National Democrats have a limited ability to advance policy while out of power in Washington. But at the state and local level, Democratic leaders are doing something the national party has struggled to do: translating values into specific, legible commitments that voters can evaluate. That work deserves more attention than it is getting.

New York City and the Mamdani Model

Zohran Mamdani took office as New York City’s 112th mayor on January 1, 2026, the city’s youngest mayor in more than a century and its first Muslim and first Asian American mayor. He won a near ten-point victory on a platform built around three concrete promises: freeze the rent, make buses free, and deliver universal child care.

What set Mamdani apart was not simply the content of those promises, but how he connected them. His agenda is organized around a single animating insight, articulated in a Columbia University public health analysis published before he took office: that housing, transit, food security, and child care are not separate policy buckets but interlocking systems that determine who gets to live well in a city and who gets left behind. That framing gave his platform structural coherence that most political agendas lack.

What He Has Done

The administration moved quickly on multiple fronts.

On housing, Mamdani revived a mothballed tenants’ rights office on his first day in office, appointed a housing commissioner with deep experience in tenant advocacy, and directed city agencies to hold “Rental Ripoff” hearings throughout his first 100 days, allowing renters to document the conditions they face. The Rent Guidelines Board, now majority-appointed by Mamdani, is expected to vote on a rent freeze in June.

On cost of living, he signed executive orders directing city agencies to crack down on junk fees and subscription traps, framing hidden charges as a direct affordability concern.

On childcare, Mamdani and Governor Hochul announced and funded a free care pilot for 2-year-olds, beginning with 2,000 seats in high-need neighborhoods and scaling to over 30,000 seats within four years. More than 50,000 families applied for 3-K and Pre-K seats after applications opened. Hochul provided state funding for the pilot, though she has declined Mamdani’s push to raise taxes on the wealthy to fund the broader agenda.

On public safety, the administration has committed to significantly expanding B-HEARD, the program that dispatches social workers and emergency medical technicians, rather than police officers, to mental health 911 calls. The city recorded its fewest murders, shooting victims, and firearm incidents in recorded history in the first two months of 2026, along with a nearly 25 percent decline in retail theft and a 20 percent drop in burglary rates. Whether those results are directly attributable to the new administration is too early to say with confidence, but they do not suggest the approach has created risk.

What Still Needs to Happen

Public transit is controlled by the state, so Albany has to be on board. Mamdani has secured support from state legislative leaders for reviving a fare-free pilot program, but Governor Hochul has not signed on and the issue remains unresolved.

Questions about long-term cost and fiscal sustainability are legitimate and have not been fully resolved. The administration’s approach is to seek new revenue from the state, primarily through taxes on high earners and corporations, while demonstrating that progressive policy and fiscal discipline are not mutually exclusive. That argument is still being made.

What This Means

When voters ask what Democrats stand for, the honest answer used to feel abstract. Mamdani has made it concrete. His platform was not a list of proposals. It was a coherent account of what makes daily life in a major American city costly, unstable, and unnecessarily difficult, followed by specific interventions aimed at each of those conditions.

Six months is not enough time to declare success. It is enough time to see whether a progressive agenda organized around lived experience, rather than policy categories, can be both politically viable and administratively serious. In New York City, the early answer is yes.

Trump’s declining numbers create an opening. Whether that opening becomes votes will depend less on the case against him and more on voters’ confidence that something better is already being built. That work is already underway. This series is about the people doing it.

Next in this series: Andy Beshear, who attracted $13 billion in manufacturing investment to one of the reddest states in the country, without a sympathetic legislature.

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“I Love the Inflation.”

Asked in the Oval Office on Wednesday whether he was worried about the morning’s inflation report, the President of the United States said: “No, I love it, the numbers were great… I love the inflation.”

The numbers were not great. May inflation came in at 4.2% year over year, the highest in three years and the first time it’s topped 4% since 2023. It’s the third straight month prices accelerated. And the cause is the war. Fuel oil is up 59% from a year ago, gasoline up 41%, and airfares up 27%. Strip out food and energy, and core inflation was a tame 2.9%, right where economists expected. It turns out that closing the Strait of Hormuz is not good for our economy. And things are likely to get worse before they get better.

The war is now 100 days old, and this week it got worse. After an Iranian drone downed a U.S. Army helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz on Monday, Trump ordered two straight nights of strikes on Iran. Iran responded by declaring the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint a fifth of the world’s oil passes through, fully closed. The Financial Times reports that roughly 15 ships a day are getting through now, compared with about 135 before the war. The U.S. Navy has escorted just over 200 ships in a month; the pre-war norm was around 3,000.

Asked why oil hasn’t hit the $250 a barrel analysts predicted, Trump described a “secret mission”: “We took out the other night, 22 ships, late at night, with no lights, because they don’t have any radar, because we blasted the crap out of it.” He claimed the U.S. has been quietly pulling “millions of barrels of oil” out of the strait. His own Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, testifying before Congress the same day, said he was not aware of any such operation.

And the strikes are no longer hitting only military targets. NYT visual investigators confirmed that a U.S. strike destroyed what appears to be a drinking-water facility near Sirik; Iran says the hit cut water to 20,000 people. Targeting civilian water infrastructure can be a war crime. Trump’s message to Iran from the Situation Room, delivered over the phone to a Fox News reporter, was that if they don’t sign his deal, “we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” and that “in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island.” JD Vance told CBS a deal “could happen in the next week.” What A Day notes Trump has now claimed a deal is imminent at least 38 times.

So that’s the picture behind “I love the inflation.” A war with no congressional authorization, now 100 days long, escalating toward an island invasion, with the world’s most important oil passage shut and civilian targets on the list — and the resulting price spike landing on Americans at the gas pump and the grocery store. Trump’s net approval on the economy has cratered to minus 34, down from plus 12. He told a reporter prices will “come down like a rock” after the war. There is no sign the war is ending, and he just promised to widen it.

Read more: Letters from an American, Robert Hubbell, The Bulwark, Semafor.

They’re Building the 2026 Fraud Lie Right Now.

The MAGA uproar over the election results in California foreshadows how Trump plans to challenge the midterm elections.

Start with what happened after Nithya Raman overtook Spencer Pratt in the LA count. Trump posted that there was “BIG cheating by the Dumocrats in California,” and the Republican Party fell in line. As The Bulwark’s Andrew Egger documents, Speaker Mike Johnson called the supposed fraud “so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove.” Mike Lee, Ron Johnson, and Ron DeSantis piled on. Egger’s warning is the one to sit with: unlike 2020, the base no longer even asks for fake evidence. Johnson is selling fraud that is, by his own admission, impossible to prove.

Bill Essayli, a federal prosecutor, is publicly promising California election-fraud charges in “one to two months” — while admitting “what we need now are witnesses.” Read that again. He has announced the charges and is now looking for the evidence to support them. Meanwhile, JD Vance referred Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison to the DOJ over Medicaid fraud that Minnesota’s own agencies had already caught and acted on. And Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 fraud convicts who together owe roughly $700 million in restitution. Actual fraud gets pardoned, while invented fraud gets a prosecutor and a press release.

The road to a House majority runs through California. After last year’s Prop 50 redistricting, the state is expected to deliver Democrats somewhere between three and five seats — and Republicans’ House majority is thin enough that five seats flip the chamber. The catch is which seats. The decisive districts are in the Central Valley and inland Southern California — places like David Valadao’s and Darrell Issa’s seats — and they count exactly the way Los Angeles just did: slowly, by mail, with the Democratic votes arriving last. One of these districts was decided by fewer than 200 votes in 2024.

So picture November. Control of the House comes down to a handful of California seats. On election night, as the in-person and early votes are counted first, the Republican leads in several of them. Over the next week or two, exactly as every election expert predicts, the mail ballots come in, they break Democratic, and the Democrat pulls ahead and takes the seat that hands the party the majority. That two-week gap, the one that is normal and legal and happens every single cycle in California, is the gap Mike Johnson and Donald Trump are right now rehearsing how to exploit. They are not litigating the LA mayor’s race because they care about the LA mayor’s race. They are practicing the move they intend to run when the House is on the line.

What weakens it is a blowout. If turnout is big and the Democratic wave is undeniable, the “it was stolen” story is much harder to sell over the noise of an obvious national verdict. What feeds it is a squeaker: a few close California seats, a two-week count, just enough ambiguity to pour the lie into. The defense, then, is the same as last week, only bigger: say plainly, now and through November, that a slow count is not a stolen one.

Read more: The Bulwark (Egger), Robert Hubbell, Hopium Chronicles.

The Man Who Buried the Epstein Files Is Up for Attorney General.

We now have a detailed account of how the Trump administration tried to make the Epstein story go away, and the lawyer at the center of it is the same man Trump just nominated to run the Justice Department.

The account comes from “Regime Change,” the forthcoming book by the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, excerpted this week. On July 17, 2025, ten days after the DOJ declared there was no Epstein client list, the administration’s most senior officials gathered in the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker built for national-security crises — to manage the political fallout from a dead sex offender’s files. In the room or on the phone: JD Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, then-AG Pam Bondi, then-Deputy AG Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel.

Two ideas came out of that meeting. Vance floated enlisting Tucker Carlson to interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, in hopes she’d say on camera that Trump was never involved in Epstein’s crimes. Blanche offered a variation: he, or another DOJ lawyer, would interview her instead. And Blanche proposed petitioning the courts to unseal the Epstein grand-jury testimony — knowing, the authors write, that grand-jury material is almost never released, and the request would almost certainly be denied. It was a way to appear transparent while guaranteeing that nothing would come out. A week later, Blanche personally interviewed Maxwell, who was given limited immunity and said she’d never seen anything untoward involving Trump. Shortly after, she was moved from her Florida prison to a lower-security federal camp in Texas.

Andrew Egger’s summary is hard to improve on: Trump found his new Roy Cohn. This is the man now nominated to be the permanent Attorney General — and it’s worth remembering what else he’s done in the acting role. Blanche indicted James Comey. He signed, alone, the settlement immunizing Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization from future IRS claims, the one we covered last week that survived the slush fund’s death. Former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann’s verdict on that immunity is plain: “You cannot give immunity for future crimes.”

His confirmation hearing is about a month out. Brian Beutler argues Democrats should stop being “incredibly inhibited about wielding procedural power” and force impeachment votes on Blanche and Bill Pulte rather than wait. The simpler point is the one every senator will have to answer: a vote to confirm Todd Blanche is a vote for the man who ran the Epstein cover-up. The senators to watch, per Semafor, are Tillis, Kennedy, and Cornyn.

Read more: Letters from an American, The Bulwark (Kristol & Egger), Off Message (Beutler), Zeteo.

That's your Thursday. Inflation hit a three-year high, and Trump said he loves it. The lawyer who ran the Epstein cover-up is up for Attorney General. And the big lie is back.

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