The talking point assembled itself within a day: Obama looks down on the places regular people eat. He sneers at chain restaurants. He disrespects working families who like a big menu and a slice of cheesecake on an anniversary.

It’s nonsense, and everyone involved knows it’s nonsense. It was also so predictable.

The next day, Sunday, Trump stood in front of about four thousand people in Port Huron, Michigan, and said this about Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for United States Senate:

“I’m here to keep a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member from becoming a United States senator, and that’s the fact.”

It is not a fact. PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire on Tuesday, their lowest rating, reserved for claims that are both false and ridiculous. When they asked the White House for any evidence at all, the White House did not respond. El-Sayed has disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood. Scholars who study the organization told PolitiFact its members would likely have expelled him — among other things, for supporting LGBTQ rights.

Trump kept going. El-Sayed should have to pass through a metal detector before he’s allowed into the Senate. He shouldn’t be allowed to fly. A Democratic win would “open the floodgates” to “hordes of jihadists to our shores.”

David Beamer — the father of Todd Beamer, who died on Flight 93 — stood on the same stage and told the crowd, “The enemy is right here among us.” He questioned whether El-Sayed is really an American at all, birth certificate or not.

Birtherism, as ugly as it was, at least pretended to be an argument about a document. Produce the paper and the question goes away. This is an evolution. This says the paper is irrelevant. They are now arguing that you can be born here and not be a real American.

From the same stage, Trump said that any Jewish person supporting Abdul El-Sayed “should be ashamed of themselves,” and that they should “never speak to them again.”

Racism. That is the closing argument in Michigan.

A Desperate Playbook

They are not doing this because it’s working. They’re doing it because nothing else is. Trump is at 35% approval. Democrats are up eleven on the generic ballot, the largest margin for either party in any cycle since 2008. Thirty million people have already voted, double the pace of 2022, and Democrats lead the early vote in eight of ten Senate battleground states. Trump spent the final week of the campaign rallying in Mississippi.

So out comes the oldest tool in the drawer.

This country has been running this exact play for more than a century and a half. The Know-Nothings built a national party in the 1850s on the premise that Catholics answered to a foreign power and could never be loyal Americans. Irish immigrants were drawn as apes in the national magazines and told there was no work for them. In 1928, the country was warned that electing Al Smith meant the Pope would run America. In 1960, John F. Kennedy had to stand before a room of Protestant ministers in Houston and explain that he could be trusted to use his own judgment.

And Jews. Jews have been on the receiving end of this in every century, in every country that has ever tried it. The charge has always been the same one: dual loyalty. Your real allegiance is elsewhere. You may have been born here, but you are not one of us.

The most infamous “America First” speech was delivered by Charles Lindbergh in Des Moines, Iowa, in September 1941. Its subject was which groups were secretly dragging the United States into a war against its own interests. One of the three groups he named was the Jews.

To Jewish voters in Michigan

Let me address Jewish voters in Michigan directly. Jew to Jew.

You have an obligation to vote for Abdul El-Sayed.

Not because your concerns about him are imaginary. El-Sayed has said things in the past that raise legitimate questions among Jewish Michiganders. He has walked some of it back. He may never have addressed some of it adequately. I am not here to tell anyone their discomfort is fake.

What I’m here to say is this. If you believe that those past comments represent a bigger threat to you and your family than the blatant othering and racism coming out of Trump, out of Mike Rogers’s campaign, and out of their allies — then you have not been paying attention to the history of Jews in the world.

Our history is not complicated. In every country, in every era, where racism went unchecked — where the othering of one group was permitted, where the scapegoating of immigrants and minorities was normal politics — Jews were not safe.

If you think the right is going to finish with Muslims and stop there, you have not been paying attention. If you think it ends with trans people, you have not been paying attention. It does not end. It never has. The machinery doesn’t get dismantled once it’s done with the first group; it just gets pointed somewhere new. And it always, always comes for us.

You can have your concerns about El-Sayed. Keep them. Hold him to them if he wins — write to him, show up at his town halls, make him earn it.

But a man standing on a stage in Port Huron telling Jewish Americans that the ones who disagree with him should be shamed and shunned is not protecting you. He is not courting you. He is assigning you a vote.

The far bigger threat to the Jewish community is unchecked bigotry and unchecked hatred. If this rhetoric works — if it moves votes, if it wins this seat — it will not stop. It will spread, and it will get louder, and Jews are always less safe in a country where it’s loud.

If you are concerned about Jewish safety, then your only option is to reject the politics of hatred and bigotry and cast your vote for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.

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This year’s midterms are on track to be the most expensive on record. Political ads alone are projected to cost $11.6 billion, up from $8.9 billion in 2022.

Voters have noticed. Gallup found that 89% say government corruption is widespread, the highest in 20 years, and a Brennan Center poll found that 64% of voters name campaign contributions from billionaires as a cause of corruption. The Texas Senate race between Ken Paxton and James Talarico is a prime example of record spending and billionaire giving.

How the Money Gets Around the Limits

Federal law sets three lanes. The first is personal contributions. Candidates can accept up to $3,500 per election from an individual. The second is contributions to specific party committees. Party committees are capped at $44,300 per donor per year.

The third lane is Super PACs, and those have no caps. Super PACs can take unlimited sums from individuals, corporations, and unions, and spend unlimited amounts, as long as they do not coordinate with a campaign. Some of that money arrives through 501(c)(4) nonprofits, which do not have to name their donors, so the original source never appears.

The biggest checks this year are mostly going to one party. The New York Times found that the 20 biggest donors of the cycle, who have given a combined $1.2 billion, lean heavily Republican.

As of June, Republican Party committees held roughly twice as much cash as Democratic committees. Two recent Supreme Court rulings also give political parties more flexibility to use their money to directly support their candidates.

In Texas, super PACs are carrying most of the load.

Texas: Small Donors Against One Big Check

Texas has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1988. Democrat James Talarico, a state representative from Austin and former middle school teacher, is trying to change that. A lifelong Presbyterian, he says his politics grows out of his faith. Republican Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general, was impeached in 2023 and acquitted by the Texas Senate. President Trump endorsed him over Sen. John Cornyn and has since made repeated trips to Texas to campaign for him.

Talarico raised $64 million in the third quarter, mostly from small donors. Paxton raised $18 million. Yet, as of early October, Paxton and the groups backing him had outspent Talarico and his allies by more than two to one, roughly $175 million to $71 million, according to the ad tracker AdImpact. General-election ad spending reached $259 million through September, past the roughly $200 million spent on the entire 2024 race. The total, counting primaries and reserved airtime, tops $500 million.

Much of the gap traces to one donor. On Sept. 9, Elon Musk gave $75 million to the Senate Leadership Fund. The next day it moved $75 million into a new super PAC, Texas PAC, dedicated to electing Paxton. Two weeks later, the sequence repeated with $83 million, bringing the total to $158 million. Musk has given about $366 million this cycle. George and Alex Soros, the largest Democratic donors, had given $103.7 million to Democratic-aligned groups as of the Times’s late-August tally.

The Money Voters Cannot Trace

The New York Times estimated that about $1 billion in anonymous money is moving through this year’s elections, almost certainly an undercount. Both sides in Texas draw on it. A Virginia nonprofit called Preserve Texas gave more than $1 million to a pro-Paxton super PAC, and the Talarico campaign has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that Paxton’s campaign treasurer established and controls it. A pro-Talarico super PAC received millions routed from the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a Democratic dark money group that does not disclose its donors.

Who Benefits

Both parties use these tools. Talarico has never taken corporate PAC money and has called for banning super PACs, yet a super PAC backed by several billionaires is spending on his behalf, and he has said he will not disarm unilaterally.

Republicans accounted for 72% of broadcast ad spending in the Texas race through September, and rules that give parties more flexibility to spend matter most to the party with the most to spend.

What Happens Next

Cook Political Report moved the race from Lean Republican to Toss Up in August, and it has stayed there despite the spending gap. Whether the money decides the race will be known on Nov. 3.

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Sources

1. Ad spending: Axios, 2026 midterm elections projected to set new advertising record (Sept. 2, 2025); U.S. News & World Report, Midterm Ad Spending Is Set to Hit $11.6 Billion as Dark Money Grows (Oct. 7, 2026)

2. Corruption polling: Gallup, Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread (Sept. 2, 2026); Brennan Center for Justice, Poll: Voters Want Solutions for Government Corruption (June 2, 2026)

3. Federal Election Commission: Contribution limits for 2025-2026; Contributions to super PACs and hybrid PACs; Statistical Summary of 18-Month Campaign Activity of the 2025-2026 Election Cycle (party committee cash on hand as of June 30, 2026)

4. Supreme Court rulings: FEC Record, Supreme Court finds limits on coordinated party expenditures unconstitutional in NRSC v. FEC (July 1, 2026); The Desk, Supreme Court restores lower political ad rates for party committees (Sept. 4, 2026)

5. Megadonors: The New York Times, Meet the Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2 Billion Into the Midterms (Aug. 28, 2026); Newsmax, Top 20 Midterm Donors Give $1.2 Billion (summary of the Times analysis)

6. The candidates: Newsweek, James Talarico Texas Senate Race: List of Celebrity Donors and Endorsements; Religion Unplugged, As Talarico Eyes Senate Bid, Religion Becomes a Texas Battleground (June 16, 2026); Courthouse News, Trump endorses Texas AG Ken Paxton in heated GOP Senate runoff (May 19, 2026); NPR via WWNO, Trump heads to Texas to campaign for Paxton and De La Cruz (Oct. 7, 2026)

7. Texas fundraising and ad spending: Axios, Trump names scapegoats as Republicans sweat in Texas (Oct. 16, 2026); NPR, Texas Senate race shatters state’s campaign spending record (Oct. 5, 2026); KERA, Senate GOP smashing political spending records in Texas with ad-buying binge for Ken Paxton (Oct. 2, 2026) and More than $500 million has been spent on advertising in Texas’ U.S. Senate race (Oct. 15, 2026)

8. Musk’s contributions: The Hill, Musk bankrolls PAC spending big on Paxton in Texas (Oct. 15, 2026); CBS News, Elon Musk donates over $150 million to Senate GOP group, assisting Ken Paxton; CNBC, Elon Musk gives $276 million to Republican groups, becomes biggest known 2026 midterm donor (Oct. 12, 2026)

9. Dark money and the candidates’ positions: Political Wire, How Dark Money Is Washing Over the 2026 Election (Aug. 31, 2026), quoting the Times; CBS News, Dark money in Texas Senate race spurs Talarico complaint to FEC against Paxton (Sept. 2, 2026); The Texas Tribune, Dark money fuels attack ads in final stretch of Texas’ U.S. Senate primaries (Feb. 20, 2026); Houston Public Media, Here are the megadonors and dark money groups boosting James Talarico’s anti-billionaire Senate bid (May 14, 2026); James Talarico for Senate, Corruption & Democracy

10. Race rating: Cook Political Report, Texas Senate race

During one of Michigan’s Senate debates, one exchange focused on a camera on a utility pole. Democrat Abdul El-Sayed said the federal government should regulate Flock, whose cameras photograph every car that passes. Republican Mike Rogers said states can handle it and that the cameras help catch suspected terrorists. The debate over cameras is part of a broader concern about a surveillance state.

The Michigan Senate Race

Abdul El-Sayed, a physician and former Detroit health director, is the Democratic nominee. Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent and congressman, is the Republican and narrowly lost the 2024 Senate race. Recent polls show El-Sayed ahead.

Why Flock Cameras Worry People

With advances in technology, businesses and governments now collect data about nearly everyone, and artificial intelligence makes that data far easier to search and analyze.

Flock cameras have become the best-known example because they are everywhere and because ICE has access to the data as part of Trump’s mass deportation efforts. They log every passing vehicle’s plate, make, color, and even bumper stickers, which police say helps solve crimes such as car thefts. According to the ACLU, any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search that database.

In Texas and Florida, police officers allegedly used the database to track an ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend. The Texas officer has pleaded not guilty to felony stalking.

Immigration enforcement is an example of the government accessing this data to monitor and track individuals, which the ACLU says happens without warrants. Flock has no formal contract with ICE, but audit records from one Illinois police department show more than 4,000 searches by agencies nationwide with immigration-related reasons such as “ICE,” though some cited Homeland Security Investigations, which also investigates other crimes.

The Government’s Own Data

Government-held data raises the same tension. A federal judge found the IRS broke the law about 42,700 times by sharing taxpayer information with ICE. According to court filings by Democratic attorneys general, ICE also passed improperly shared Medicaid data to Palantir, which says it was purged.

The midterms themselves have also become a flashpoint in the tension between election security and privacy. The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for full voter files, including partial Social Security numbers, saying it needs them to confirm accurate rolls. As of October 1, CBS News reports, no court had ruled in its favor.

Where the Two Candidates Differ

Rogers has spent much of his public life in national security, first as an FBI agent and then as chair of the House Intelligence Committee. In 2012 he backed renewing Section 702, which lets the government collect foreign targets’ communications, including Americans’ messages gathered for another purpose (I wrote about this in April). In 2013 he opposed limits on the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. In 2024 he said the FBI was wrong to search those Americans’ messages, blaming “a culture issue and a leadership issue,” but he did not say whether he would require a warrant. His current position is unclear.

His campaign says he opposes unchecked use of Flock cameras on law-abiding citizens, though he left Congress before Flock existed. El-Sayed wants Washington to regulate Flock, and Rogers says the states can handle it.

Who Sets the Limits

So far, courts and city councils have set most of the limits. Judges have blocked IRS data sharing and rejected voter-file demands. City councils can decide whether and how to use Flock, and the ACLU reports that more than 200 cities have ended contracts. Congress has mostly been absent from the discussion. How to balance safety and liberty in the age of artificial intelligence is too big a question to leave to judges and city councils alone. Michigan’s next senator will help decide whether Congress keeps sitting it out, keeps backing the administration’s expanding surveillance powers, or redraws the lines to protect both safety and liberty.

What You Can Do

Vote. Check your registration at USA.gov, which sends you to your state’s official site. Avoid VoteSafe.org. It is run by America PAC, which Elon Musk funds, and the site says it can share what you enter with business partners and combine it with other data about you for marketing.

Volunteer or give. Join a local campaign or Volunteer Blue, or give to candidates you support or to Vote Save America.

Curious about Flock cameras where you live? The ACLU’s Flock page explains what the cameras do and how communities are pushing back.

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Endnotes

1. Debate exchange on Flock, federal regulation and states, and the candidates’ positions: Michigan Public, Rogers, El-Sayed debate gets hostile as candidates clash in pivotal US Senate race, October 9, 2026.

2. Debate moments: The New York Times, 5 Key Moments From a Hostile Michigan Debate, October 2026.

3. Polling edge for El-Sayed (Susquehanna Polling and Research, El-Sayed 46%, Rogers 39%, August): ABC News affiliate coverage, Poll: Senate hopeful El-Sayed takes 7-point lead over Republican opponent, August 19, 2026. Check for a newer poll before publishing.

4. Flock as a midterm issue; Rogers campaign position and that Flock did not exist when he left Congress: ABC News, How Flock cameras are becoming an issue in the midterm elections, September 4, 2026.

5. How Flock cameras work, who can search the database, warrantless immigration-agent use, and 200-plus cities ending contracts: ACLU, Get the Flock Out, updated October 9, 2026.

6. Katy, Texas officer charged with stalking and misusing official information, pleaded not guilty: KEDT, Former Katy officer faces charges after allegedly using Flock cameras to track ex-wife, August 26, 2026.

7. Florida case (Orange City officer, ex-girlfriend) and other cases: 404 Media, Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock to Stalk People.

8. Danville, Illinois audit records showing more than 4,000 immigration-related searches, and the Homeland Security Investigations caveat: Lucy Parsons Labs, ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows.

9. IRS shared taxpayer information with ICE; judge found about 42,695 violations (February 2026 ruling): CPA Practice Advisor, Appeals Court Upholds Block on IRS-ICE Taxpayer Data Sharing Deal, September 9, 2026.

10. Medicaid data passed to Palantir; Palantir says the dataset was purged: NPR via Michigan Public, ICE shared Medicaid data it wasn’t supposed to have with Palantir, July 17, 2026.

11. Justice Department suits against 30 states and D.C., data requested, stated rationale, and no court rulings in its favor as of October 1: CBS News, The Trump administration has filed 31 lawsuits seeking states’ voter data. Here’s where they stand., updated October 1, 2026.

12. NRSC ad, Rogers’ statement, and the Islamophobia characterization: NOTUS, Republicans Are Running Ads Attacking ‘Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed’, August 6, 2026.

13. No evidence of Muslim Brotherhood ties; January 2026 designation of the Egyptian branch: Bridge Michigan, Fact check: No evidence Abdul El-Sayed pledged support to Muslim Brotherhood, September 3, 2026.

14. Rogers’ 2012 co-sponsorship and vote on the five-year Section 702 renewal: House roll call 569, H.R. 5949, via What’s The Vote, September 12, 2012; sponsors via BillTrack50, https://www.billtrack50.com/billdetail/344602.

15. 2013 vote on the Amash amendment and Rogers’ defense of the NSA program (failed 205 to 217): Voice of America, US House Votes Down Attempt to Halt NSA Surveillance Program, July 24, 2013.

16. Rogers on FBI searches of Americans’ data under Section 702 and “a culture issue and a leadership issue”: Michigan Public, Meet Republican candidate Mike Rogers, July 24, 2024.

17. Voter registration check: USAGov, How to confirm your voter registration status.

18. VoteSafe.org and America PAC: Cybernews, Elon Musk’s ‘VoteSafe’ site is harvesting and selling voter data, September 2026. Cybernews reports the site’s terms allow sharing or selling data; confirm the exact wording on the site itself.

In a survey of 1,202 registered voters taken October 9 through 12, 88 percent said they were extremely or very concerned about corruption in government. Inflation and high prices came in at 85. Gas prices at 83. Health care at 80. Sixty percent said they were extremely concerned about corruption — the single highest-intensity number in the poll.

This is the same poll that put Trump’s approval at 36 percent, the worst he has ever recorded in a Fox survey for either term, with 77 percent disapproving of his handling of the economy and Democrats up 54–45 on the generic ballot.

Corruption is no longer an elite concern. It is the most widely felt concern in the country, and it is beating the pocketbook issues it was supposed to lose to.

Voters have stopped treating these as two separate things. As James Talarico said in a recent CNN town hall: “We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.”

Here is the problem we still have. When people hear corruption, they still think of a broken system. DC is broken. Politics is broken. Both sides are corrupt.

That blur is the Republican Party's single most valuable asset right now.

The reality is, corruption in this country isn't a system problem. It is a single-party problem. It is being run at the largest scale we have ever seen, by Donald Trump, by his administration, by the people in his orbit, and by the Republican Party that protects all of them.

Heading into these midterms — and frankly well past them — the job is to divide, delineate, and establish that distinction until it sticks.

Not a system problem. A party problem. A Trump problem. A Republican problem.

Here are four stories that prove it.

The Ballroom

Last Thursday, the Washington Post obtained the internal spreadsheet tracking donations to Trump’s White House ballroom. Sixty-seven gifts over $10,000. Three hundred thirty-three million dollars. At least $77 million of it anonymous.

Donald Trump is not on the list.

A year ago he said the ballroom was “being paid for a hundred percent by me and some friends of mine.” The friends are on the spreadsheet. He isn’t.

Here’s how the money moves. It runs through the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit that generally doesn’t have to disclose its donors, under a twelve-page agreement that requires anonymity “to the extent permitted by law.” From there it reaches an account the President controls. Unlike a campaign contribution, there is no limit, no disclosure requirement, and no reporting deadline.

Here is who is on the list:

Charles Ergen, $25 million. The FCC opened an investigation into his company, EchoStar, in May 2025. In June, Ergen met with Trump and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr; EchoStar later said Trump encouraged “an amicable resolution.” The FCC dropped the investigation in September. Ergen gave $12.5 million in December and another $12.5 million in February — both times asking to stay anonymous. In May, the FCC and the Justice Department approved EchoStar’s license sale to AT&T.

Salesforce, $3 million. Marc Benioff pledged his first million the day after Trump publicly praised him. Then the Army awarded Salesforce a contract worth up to $5.6 billion. The Pentagon says it received exactly one bid.

Nvidia, $25 million, roughly three months after the administration cut it a deal to sell advanced chips to China. Rocket, $10 million, three weeks after the Federal Housing Finance Agency approved its acquisition of Mr. Cooper. ServiceNow, $5 million, after the GSA agreed to make its AI software available to federal agencies at a discount. Crypto companies and their investors, more than $18 million combined.

Isabela Herrera, $2.5 million. Her father, the banker Julio Herrera Velutini, was indicted on bribery charges in 2022. In August 2025, the charges were reduced to a misdemeanor. The following month, she pledged the $2.5 million and wired a first installment of $835,000. In January, Trump pardoned her father. Her second payment was due this month.

About half the $333 million came from companies or executives holding federal contracts.

The $580 Million Trade

On March 23, between 6:49 and 6:50 a.m., roughly 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate contracts changed hands. The Financial Times valued them at about $580 million.

Fifteen minutes later, Trump posted that he was postponing all military strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure for five days. Brent fell as much as 14 percent.

Somebody made a fortune in a single minute on a decision only a handful of people on earth knew was coming.

Analysts at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission did their jobs. They flagged the trades and sent an insider-trading referral to the agency’s enforcement division. Then, as Bloomberg reported Monday, an adviser to CFTC Chairman Michael Selig — a Trump appointee — ordered the referral withdrawn and took over the examination himself.

These aren’t victimless crimes. Someone placed a $580 million bet one minute before the President of the United States moved the global oil price, and the other side of that trade was ordinary investors and, quite possibly, pension funds. The CFTC’s own analysts thought it was worth investigating. They were overruled.

One Billionaire, One Senate Seat

Elon Musk has put $366 million into this election. Two hundred seventy-six million of it since July.

To put $366 million in context: he spent roughly $290 million electing Donald Trump president in 2024. He is now spending more on a midterm than he spent on a presidency. And he’s spending a lot of it in one state.

On September 9, Musk gave $75 million to the Senate Leadership Fund. On September 10, the Senate Leadership Fund wired $75 million to Texas PAC, a super PAC supporting Ken Paxton. On September 23, Musk gave the Senate Leadership Fund $83 million. On September 24, the Senate Leadership Fund wired $83 million to Texas PAC.

The Texas Senate race will come down to a few percentage points. James Talarico raised $64 million from ordinary people last quarter. Ken Paxton just needs the one.

Russia, Russia, Russia.

On October 14, without warning, Starshield — the military version of Starlink that Ukraine’s drone operators depend on — was capped at 100 miles per hour.

Ukraine’s mid-range strike drones fly faster than that. So do the interceptor drones they use to shoot down Russia’s jet-powered attack drones.

That same night, Russia fired 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 drones at Ukraine. Ukraine intercepted four of the 39. Roughly 600,000 people lost power. Presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov said several missions were severely disrupted.

Nobody would say who did it.

Musk’s answer, posted on X: “Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately [the President].” The White House said it has no control over SpaceX.

Then Reuters reported Thursday that the order came from inside the White House. A senior U.S. official denied it came from Trump personally.

This does not appear to be Elon Musk unilaterally switching off an ally’s battlefield communications. It appears to be the United States government ordering a private contractor to degrade an ally’s battlefield communications during one of the largest attacks of the war — and then nobody in that government being willing to sign their name to it.

Trump lifted sanctions on Russian diesel, a move Republican Senator Thom Tillis said on Meet the Press may violate the sanctions law Trump himself signed last month. Trump announced an “energy ceasefire” that Zelensky learned about from the news and Russia violated within hours. Trump told Newsmax that Zelensky is “more difficult to deal with than Putin” and called Ukraine’s refinery strikes “a disgrace.” Tillis has asked the Pentagon’s inspector general to investigate the Starshield slowdown.

So: the largest political donor in the United States holds the federal contract for the system that got switched off. The administration he is spending $366 million to protect gave the order. And the beneficiary was Moscow.

Which brings us to the wedding.

“Dear Friend Umar”

ProPublica reported last month that Umar Kremlev — president of the International Boxing Association, financed by Gazprom, decorated with Russia’s Order of Friendship, a traveling companion of Vladimir Putin on a state visit to China shortly before the event, and a figure in a Russian organization under Ukrainian sanctions for abducting Ukrainian children — quietly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Donald Trump Jr.’s May wedding celebration in the Bahamas. He rented the private island. He paid for the fireworks. The money ran through a Dubai entity tied to his boxing federation. His Russian guests kept to themselves and appear in none of the family’s published photos.

Bettina Trump described it on Instagram as an extraordinarily generous gift from “our dear friend Umar.” The President, asked about it: “I have no idea who Umar is.” Days later he said the payments were “totally allowed” and that he believed his son had paid the money back.

Retired FBI counterintelligence official Frank Montoya Jr. supplied the only analysis required: “If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something.”

On September 21, Republican Senator John Curtis of Utah wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee asking it to subpoena Donald Trump Jr. “These reports,” he wrote, “raise legitimate questions about foreign access to members of a sitting president’s family.” They “may create expectations of a returned favor.” They “could even create national security vulnerabilities.” On camera, he was blunter: “It’s corruption. I don’t like it.”

Dick Durbin said he’d support it. John Cornyn said he’d support it.

Chuck Grassley’s committee confirmed it received the letter, said a hearing before the end of the year would be difficult, and would not say whether it will investigate

That’s where it sits. A Republican senator says the president’s son took money from a Putin associate and calls it corruption. A second Republican senator backs him. The Republican chairman says we are too busy to investigate.

It’s the Corruption, Stupid.

A ballroom in the president’s name, with $333 million pledged from contractors and pardon-seekers, routed through a nonprofit that doesn’t have to name them, into an account the president controls. An insider-trading referral on a $580 million bet placed sixty seconds before the president’s own post, killed by an appointee of that president. A Senate majority resting on one man’s checkbook, while that same man’s company holds the contract for a satellite network the White House ordered throttled in the middle of a Russian missile barrage. A Russian oligarch paying for the first son’s wedding, with two Republican senators asking for a subpoena and the Republican chairman unable to find a hearing date.

There is no “both parties” version of any of that. There is no Democratic equivalent waiting to be discovered. These are not failures of a system that got away from everybody. They are decisions, made by people, all in the same party.

Repeat after me: “The system is not corrupt. The Republicans are.”

People are hurting, and the hurt is real. But stop talking about prices as if they came out of nowhere. You paid roughly $1,100 in tariffs the Supreme Court ruled illegal; Apple got $2.2 billion of it back and then wrote the White House a $25 million check. You can’t afford diesel; the people who knew exactly when the strikes would stop made $580 million in one minute, and the regulator who noticed was told to drop it.

Talarico has the frame. We have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis. And the solution is proper oversight. In both the House and the Senate.

In 18 days, I suspect the American voters will demand it. Let’s hope the Democrats can deliver.

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This post is part of MurMur’s ongoing series on the 2026 midterm elections. Read the rest of the series here.

The Race

Jon Husted, Ohio’s former lieutenant governor, was appointed to the U.S. Senate in January 2025 to fill the seat JD Vance left when he became vice president. This November’s special election will decide who serves the last two years of that term. His opponent is Sherrod Brown, who represented Ohio in the Senate for 18 years before losing the state’s other seat in 2024.

Trump carried Ohio by 11 points in 2024. Even so, the race is a toss-up, and Republicans are spending big to defend it. The Republican super PAC alone has pledged more for Husted than Brown’s entire campaign has raised.

Voters nationally are growing wary of the giant data centers built to power artificial intelligence, and in Ohio that unease has become a central issue in the campaign: a September poll found 70% of Ohio voters believe data centers are bad for the environment, and 65% say they hurt their community’s quality of life.

Data Centers in Ohio

Two things explain why data centers have become such a big issue in this race.

The state is home to more than 200 data centers, most built in the years before the AI boom. That existing footprint already coincided with a 55% rise in Ohioans’ electric bills between 2021 and 2026, well above the national average.

Backed by a state tax break that cost $1.57 billion in waived sales tax last year alone, more than 100 new data centers are now in Ohio’s pipeline. These aren’t like the ones already built: they run 5 to 10 times bigger, while creating relatively few permanent jobs. One proposed campus in Pike County alone would need 10 gigawatts, nearly a third of the power Ohio’s entire electric grid currently generates.

Many of these deals have also been negotiated under nondisclosure agreements, so residents learn about them only after the fact. Without state protections, communities have acted instead: at least 138 Ohio towns and townships have paused new data center construction, and 23 have effectively banned it.

The Current National Policy

Trump is a strong supporter of AI and the data centers that run it. He warned that communities rejecting them would end up “backwards and poor,” and suggested that people concerned about them were stupid.

So it’s no surprise the 2025 tax law Husted voted for lets companies deduct new equipment’s full cost immediately instead of over several years. It is especially valuable to hyperscale data centers, where equipment costs run into the tens of billions of dollars.

The Candidates’ Positions

For years, Husted was Ohio’s leading promoter of data centers. As lieutenant governor, he joined announcements of new projects and defended the tax breaks that came with them. That’s why voters hold him responsible for the state’s embrace of the industry, and its problems.

This summer, as Brown began running ads calling him “the face of data centers in Ohio,” Husted tried to blame Democrats, not data centers, for higher electricity rates.

At the same time, he said he no longer supports the state’s sales tax break for new data centers, and introduced federal legislation encouraging states to consider making data centers pay for the grid upgrades they require.

Brown would end the state’s data center tax breaks, require data centers to pay the full cost of their electricity, and let communities decide whether they get built. He has not said how he would do it or backed any of the federal bills addressing data centers. Despite pushback from the building trades unions that have long supported him, he hasn’t softened that position.

Neither candidate has proposed a federal policy that would resolve what’s actually driving voters’ anger. And neither supports the statewide pause on new construction that most Ohioans want.

What Happens Next

On November 3, voters in 18 Ohio communities will decide local data center measures, from zoning limits to outright bans, on the same ballot as the Senate race.

Those local votes will show what Ohioans want for their own communities, town by town, absent a state or federal answer. The Senate race will show who voters trust to represent their interests, including on data centers.

This is the fourth in a MurMur Impact series tracking how national policy is shaping key Senate races ahead of November’s midterms.

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The Race and the Money

• Wikipedia, 2026 U.S. Senate special election in Ohio — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_United_States_Senate_special_election_in_Ohio

• The Hill, Cook moves Ohio Senate race to toss-up, April 2026 — https://thehill.com/homenews/5829228-senate-races-shift-democrats/

• BGSU Poll, September 2026 — https://www.bgsu.edu/arts-and-sciences/democracy-and-public-policy-research-network/bgsu-poll.html

• Axios Cleveland, Ohio ad spending, September 23, 2026 — https://www.axios.com/local/cleveland/2026/09/23/ohio-political-ads-brown-husted-2026-senate

• U.S. News/Reuters, Brown and Husted fundraising totals, September 18, 2026 — https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2026-09-18/trump-linked-pop-up-pacs-blitz-ohio-with-ads-against-brown-in-costly-senate-race

• Legis1, Senate Leadership Fund’s $79 million pledge for Husted, May 2026 — https://legis1.com/news/ohio-2026-senate-election-the-money-race-shaping

Ohio’s Data Center Boom

• Axios Columbus, Ohio’s data center pipeline, March 2026 — https://www.axios.com/local/columbus/2026/03/04/ohio-data-center-boom-moratorium-laws

• DMNews, Ohio’s data center tax break cost by year, August 2026 — https://dmnews.com/dmn-r-ohios-data-center-sales-tax-exemption-cost-the-state-nearly-1-6-billion-last-year-and-governor-dewine-has-now-frozen-it-through-the-end-of-his-term-leaving-the-next-governor-to-decide-whether-ta/

• Department of Energy, Pike County data center fact sheet — https://www.energy.gov/articles/fact-sheet-department-energy-ensuring-affordable-energy-access-ohio-while-powering-future

• Wikipedia, List of power stations in Ohio — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Ohio

• Ohio Capital Journal / Capital & Main, Ohio electricity bills and legislature, September 22, 2026 — https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/09/22/candidates-rune-against-data-centers-but-ohio-legislature-didnt-get-the-memo/

• Ohio Capital Journal, 138 local moratoriums, September 18, 2026 — https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/09/18/ohio-now-has-over-125-active-moratoriums-on-data-centers-see-where-they-are/

National Policy and Trump

• Gizmodo, Trump on communities rejecting data centers, August 2026 — https://gizmodo.com/trump-to-communities-fighting-data-centers-have-fun-being-poor-2000805020

• Crooks and Liars, Trump’s September remarks on data center opposition — https://crooksandliars.com/2026/09/trump-calls-people-who-dont-want-data

• Washington Post, Senate vote count on the 2025 tax law, July 2025 — https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/07/01/senate-big-beautiful-bill-vote-count/

• ITEP, OBBBA expensing and data centers — https://itep.org/big-tech-is-raking-in-enormous-tax-breaks-for-ai-development/

• Utility Dive, House passes Ratepayer Protection Act, September 2026 — https://www.utilitydive.com/news/house-passes-ratepayer-protection-bill-data-centers/830658/

• The Hill, Heinrich blocks Husted’s bill and offers the Grid Savings Act, September 17, 2026 — https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/6096398-heinrich-blocks-husted-data-center-bill/

Husted’s Record

• PolitiFact, Husted and data center tax incentives, September 23, 2026 — https://politifact.com/factchecks/2026/sep/23/sherrod-brown/jon-husted-pushed-for-data-centers-and-tax-incentives-in-ohio-as-sherrod-brown-ads-say/

• Statehouse News Bureau, candidates recalibrate on data centers, August 17, 2026 — https://www.wvxu.org/2026-08-17/ohios-u-s-senate-candidates-recalibrate-their-stances-on-data-centers

• CNBC, Husted’s Middletown remarks, August 21, 2026 — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/21/jon-husted-data-centers-ohio-senate.html

Brown’s Record

• Cleveland Scene / Ohio Capital Journal, Brown’s data center positions, August 10, 2026 — https://www.clevescene.com/news/ohio-news/sherrod-brown-jon-husted-offer-contrasting-visions-for-data-centers/

• Politico via Yahoo, Brown’s data center ads and labor allies, September 25, 2026 — https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/sherrod-brown-data-center-attacks-084500915.html

Last week, Xi Jinping came to the White House.

You would think that a president who had just told the country that this man’s government stole an American election might raise it. Hold him accountable. Ask for something.

Instead, Xi got the red carpet at Joint Base Andrews. The first time in sixty-four years a president has personally greeted an arriving leader there. Xi got American service members on their hands and knees smoothing the wrinkles out of a rug. Xi toured the new helipad. Xi got a 134-person state dinner with every tech billionaire in America in the room, a toast, and an extension of the trade truce to January 10.

We got nothing on China stealing an election, because there was nothing.

That is either a man too weak to say to Xi’s face what he says into a camera, or a man who knew the whole time it was false. Both are embarrassing.

And it’s the perfect representation of this second term: a near-total failure. Not by my standards, not by his opponents’ standards, but by the standards he set for himself.

Let’s go down the list.

He promised to prosecute his enemies. He has zero convictions.

He wanted James Comey and Letitia James indicted. He said so publicly, demanding Attorney General Pam Bondi act “NOW!!!” His U.S. Attorney in Virginia, Erik Siebert, reviewed the evidence and declined to bring charges. So Trump forced him out and installed Lindsey Halligan — his own former personal lawyer, an insurance attorney who had never prosecuted a case in her life.

She got the indictments. Judge Cameron McGowan Currie threw them out, ruling that Halligan had no legal authority and that the indictments were “unlawful exercises of executive power.”

Two weeks ago, a federal appellate panel heard the Justice Department’s attempt to revive both cases a year later and was openly skeptical.

Joe diGenova, one of Trump’s own lawyers, quit the effort and explained why: “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.”

He promised to root out the deep state. The people he hired to do it are gone.

Dan Bongino, the election-denying podcaster he installed as deputy FBI director, lasted less than a year before returning to his show.

Andrew Bailey, the former Missouri attorney general brought in as co-deputy, resigned Monday. His portfolio was election integrity. According to CBS News, Kash Patel cut him out of meetings he should have attended because Bailey kept flagging things as unconstitutional.

Pam Bondi is gone. Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence who was supposed to declassify the truth about it all, is gone. Kristi Noem is gone. Karoline Leavitt is gone.

They found nothing. No conspiracy, no cabal, no document. The declassified trove Trump released this summer to prove China stole 2020 contained, instead, the intelligence community’s finding that China stayed out of the election and Russia ran an operation to help him.

With full control of the federal government and unqualified stooges appointed to key positions, Trump has provided zero evidence of election interference.

His attempts to block access to the ballot have failed.

The SAVE Act is dead; Republican leaders concede it won’t pass before November. His executive order allowing the Postal Service to refuse mail ballots was struck down 7–2, with only Thomas and Alito dissenting. His attempt to end birthright citizenship lost 6–3 in Trump v. Barbara. The Justice Department has lost all twenty-three district court rulings in its campaign to force states to hand over unredacted voter files.

The exception came on September 25, when the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that DHS may use its revamped SAVE database to verify voter citizenship.

The Court permitted individualized checks and pointed out that federal law already bars systematic purges within ninety days of an election. Justice Jackson, dissenting with Sotomayor and Kagan, warned the decision creates conditions for states to cancel the registrations of recently naturalized citizens.

So: if you are a naturalized citizen, or you know one, check your registration this week at vote.gov. If you get flagged, proof of citizenship clears it. Don’t wait until November 3 to find out. (Also DO NOT use votesafe.org; that is a site Elon Musk has set up to collect voter data and presumably do some horrific James Bond villain action with it)

The path to the ballot remains open this Mid-Term. Two fights are still coming after Election Day — making sure every legal vote is counted, and every rightfully elected representative is seated. But the effort to stop you from voting has largely failed.

Why am I saying all of this?

I’m not writing this to manufacture hope, and I’m not pretending the damage isn’t real.

We'll live with the wreckage of this administration for decades. The trade agreements China signed with Canada and across South America don’t dissolve when a new president takes the oath. The distrust we've built with our allies doesn't reset in January 2029. And the families ICE tore apart, the people detained unconstitutionally, the man shot in front of his daughter in Biddeford — none of that is undone by an election.

But there’s a second thing that’s also true. He is weak, and we shouldn’t fear him.

Reuters/Ipsos has him at 32% — the lowest approval rating of his political career, not just this term. Every major poll released in late September had him underwater by at least fourteen points, most by twenty or more. He is net negative in 47 states and the District of Columbia. In Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, and Nevada, his net approval has dropped more than twenty-five points since he took office. Half the country strongly disapproves; fifteen percent strongly approve.

And the collapse is happening inside his own coalition. Republican approval fell from 82% to 73% in a single week. Among his own 2024 voters, strong approval has gone from 53% to 35%.

So if the midterms break the way they look like they'll break, there should be no hesitation. Subpoena everything. The tungsten deal, the crypto billions, the casualty database, the Kushner fees, the killed investigations.

Don’t relax. The votes still have to be counted, and the winners still have to be seated, and those fights are coming.

But stop being afraid of him.

Donald Trump is a failed president. Not a dangerous strongman who failed — a failed president who spent two years telling us he was dangerous.

Start to believe that. Start to act like it’s true.

Quick Hits: What You Need To Know

Trump is running campaign ads with your money. Three White House spots tagged "Paid for by the U.S. Government" have aired on NFL games, SNL, and Fox News Sunday at a cost above $1.7 million, funded by $20 million OMB pulled from Customs and Border Protection.

A senator tried to trap Jack Smith and confused the Hawks with the Hawkeyes. Eric Schmitt accused Smith of lying about attending a Warriors–Hawks game in Atlanta. In reality, Smith had been at a Maryland women's game against the Iowa Hawkeyes. Watch the clip. It’s straight out of a Veep episode.

Democrats lead in eight Senate races. Nate Silver's averages: Cooper +8.8 in North Carolina, Ossoff +8.2 in Georgia, Brown +4.1 in Ohio, Talarico +3.4 in Texas, El-Sayed +3.2 in Michigan, Jackson +2.5 in Maine, Peltola +2.4 in Alaska, Turek +1.9 in Iowa.

Impeachment talk is back, with three names. Trump, Pete Hegseth, and OMB Director Russ Vought, whose "pocket rescissions" would cancel roughly $810 million Congress already appropriated, including $567 million in refugee services.

The midterms are in 34 days.

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Sources

The Xi visit

• NBC News — UN speech

• The Hill — state dinner guest list

• ABC News — arrival and dinner

• Rolling Stone — full 134-name list

The prosecutions

• ABC News — Currie dismissal

• NBC News — “unlawful exercises of executive power”

• Democracy Docket — Halligan appointment, Siebert ouster

• Washington Post — appellate panel skeptical

The departures

• CBS News — Bailey resignation, Patel cutting him out

• CNN — election-security portfolio

• Axios — Bongino timeline

• The Daily Beast — Bondi, Noem, Leavitt, Gabbard departures

The ballot

• NPR — USPS rule blocked 7–2

• CNBC — “unlikely to succeed on the merits”

• CNN — SAVE ruling explained

• NPR — Jackson dissent, naturalized-citizen risk

• JURIST — 65 million verified, 28,635 flagged

• Trump v. Barbara, decided June 30, 2026, 6–3

• Oligarch Watch — votesafe.org

The polling

• Reuters/Ipsos — 32%, career low; GOP approval 82% → 73%

• Newsweek — underwater in 47 states and D.C.

• Strength In Numbers/Verasight — 50% strongly disapprove, 15% strongly approve, 53% → 35% among 2024 Trump voters

• Newsweek — state-by-state declines

This post is part of MurMur’s ongoing series on the 2026 midterm elections. Read the rest of the series here.

THE RACE

Iowa’s Senate race is shaping up to be a case study in how tariffs affect the farm economy. The U.S. Senate seat is open, and Democrats see a real chance of flipping it. Josh Turek, a Democratic state senator and Paralympic gold medalist, is running against Ashley Hinson, a three-term Republican congresswoman. Iowa has trended solidly Republican — Trump carried it by 13 points in 2024, and Republicans have held all six of its U.S. House seats since 2023 — but voter frustration with Trump has pulled the race to a toss-up and put three of those six House seats in play. Trump’s approval rating in Iowa has gone from positive to deeply negative since his second term began.

Hinson has stood with Trump on nearly every major test, more consistently than her fellow Iowa Republicans in Congress. In February, she voted against ending his tariffs outright. Turek, who has never held national office, has no voting record on tariffs to weigh against hers.

TARIFFS AND THEIR IMPACT

In April 2025, Trump bypassed Congress and, citing emergency powers, imposed tariffs on nearly every country the U.S. trades with. Dozens of countries retaliated, and China hit back hardest at American agriculture, targeting soybeans specifically. Trump negotiated a truce that October and extended it again this September, but the damage has stuck: U.S. soybean exports are still down roughly 40% this marketing year, from 32.2 million metric tons to 19.3 million metric tons, almost entirely because of China. Iowa, the country’s second-largest soybean producer, has taken an outsized share of that loss.

In contradiction to his protect-America policy, Trump allowed Argentina to import an additional 80,000 tons at a reduced tariff rate. Six months later, trying to bring down retail prices, he waived a separate tariff on beef from Brazil and Paraguay. Beef prices are still up 9.4% over the past year, with the USDA forecasting nearly 10% for all of 2026.

Trump’s other policies made matters worse. A 50% tariff on imported steel has driven up farm equipment prices. And the war in Iran pushed up both energy and fertilizer prices — the two biggest drivers behind a projected 4.5% rise in total farm production costs this year. All of that pressure has pushed more farms under: Iowa’s Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings jumped from 7 to 18 in a single year.

TWO APPROACHES ON THE BALLOT

This U.S. Senate race features two very different approaches to governing, not just two positions on tariffs. Turek has built his career in the state legislature working across party lines; Hinson has been one of the most reliable Republican votes in Congress. On tariffs: Turek opposes them outright, calling them part of the “chaotic” policy out of Washington that’s pushing farms toward a 1980s-style crisis. Hinson has voted to keep them in place.

Trump’s decision to drop that protection on beef put Hinson and Turek in rare agreement — both oppose it, for different reasons. She sees it as undercutting the same protection she supports everywhere else; he sees it as proof the tariffs were never really about protecting farmers in the first place.

She’s betting voters give her credit for the one time she pushed back. Turek is betting they notice it’s the exception, not the rule.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

The next six weeks will test both candidates’ bets. Trump’s beef tariff waiver is set to expire in late November — after Election Day, on November 3 — so voters will have to judge the tradeoff before they see how it resolves.

This is the third in a MurMur Impact series tracking how national policy is shaping key Senate races ahead of November’s midterms.

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1. Cook Political Report, “IA Senate 2026” race rating (moved to Toss Up, August 20, 2026).

2. Newsweek, “Donald Trump’s Approval Rating Goes Underwater in Two GOP-Leaning States.”

3. Congress.gov, H.J.Res.72 (119th Congress), all actions; vote taken February 11, 2026.

4. Congress.gov, Congressional Research Service, “Argentine Beef Import Quota Expansion” (IN12687).

5. MercoPress, “The US Waives Beef Tariffs for Brazil and Paraguay, but Not for Argentina and Uruguay,” August 28, 2026.

6. USDA Economic Research Service, Food Price Outlook, summary findings.

7. Farm Policy News (University of Illinois), “USDA’s 2026 Farm Income Outlook Improves, but Expenses Sharply Higher,” September 2026.

8. American Farm Bureau Federation, “Agricultural Trade: China Steps Back From U.S. Soybeans.”

9. CNBC, “U.S.-China Trade Truce Extended for Two Months, Bessent Says, as Xi Begins State Visit,” September 24, 2026.

10. KWQC, “Iowa Farm Bankruptcies More Than Double as Economic Pressures Mount,” April 28, 2026 (American Farm Bureau Federation data).

And yet, Democrats still seem nervous about running on it.

The nervousness comes from somewhere real. Corruption polls as an elite concern. Protecting democracy didn’t seem to work last time around. Prices are what people feel. Run on the thing people feel.

I think that’s wrong and very short-sighted. Jon Ossoff has been making the case all year — “either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.” James Talarico is running on it in Texas and beating an indicted attorney general. Abdul El-Sayed ran on it in Michigan and beat $30 million of AIPAC money. And Mary Peltola launched her campaign against Dan Sullivan in January, vowing to lower costs and “expose political corruption in Washington,” in a state Trump won by thirteen points, where she’s now running even.

Corruption isn’t an alternative to kitchen-table issues. You paid roughly $1,100 in tariffs the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Apple got $2.2 billion of that money back. Walmart got $2.4 billion. You got nothing. Trump’s net worth has nearly tripled since he took office, while your grocery bill keeps going up. Jared Kushner has collected over $110 million in fees from the Saudi government while negotiating a peace deal with Iran. Meanwhile, you can’t afford gas.

This matters because beating Donald Trump is not the goal. We need to root out what he’s installed. And as his approval rating plummets, his successors will start to distance themselves from him. Corruption will keep them tethered to his failed administration.

Marco Rubio, jailing a sixteen-year-old for what his grandmother did in 1979. Pete Hegseth, who told Congress this war cost $25 billion when his own department knew it was three times that. Todd Blanche, who signed his boss’s family a tax amnesty with his own signature and is now the Attorney General of the United States. Kristi Noem, who ran a $220 million taxpayer-funded ad campaign starring herself, and awarded no-bid contracts to firms tied to her own advisors. RFK Jr., taking millions in book advances while running the agency the books are about, after charging $100,000 to license the “Make America Healthy Again” name he now uses as federal policy.

All of them need to be defined by the most corrupt administration in our country’s history.

Economic issues are important. The corruption is the story. We need to tell this story.

Here’s what else you need to know

Xi got the red carpet. Trump met Xi Jinping at Joint Base Andrews — the first time a president has greeted an arriving leader there in 64 years — showed him the new helipad, noted that Xi “likes granite,” and extended the trade truce only to January 10, with no deal on AI, Taiwan, or trade.

A Trump judge said the press ban was unconstitutional. The White House ignored him. Judge Timothy Kelly ordered CNN, MS NOW, and Politico’s access restored for 14 days; hours later the Secret Service turned a Politico reporter away at the gate. The “misinformation” the White House cited turned out to be JD Vance, quoted on background at a briefing the White House itself arranged.

Musk’s $1 million ad blitz is built on claims that don’t survive a search. America PAC is running ads in five states accusing Democratic Senate candidates of positions they’ve publicly rejected — and attacking Troy Jackson in Maine for wanting government healthcare, eight years after Musk tweeted that health care “should be taken care of by govt/taxpayers” and called himself a socialist “of sorts.”

Forty days out, Democrats are favored in both chambers. Nate Silver’s model gives them an 88.9% chance in the House and 64.2% in the Senate, with a generic-ballot lead wider than the one that produced a 40-seat wave in 2018 — though a single NYT/Siena poll showing Collins up three in Maine was taken before ProPublica’s bribery story broke.

DoorDash paid $131.5 million for wage theft. New York City extracted the largest worker settlement in its history from a company that admitted “we screwed up.”

The midterms are 40 days away.

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Sources

The polling — NYT/Siena (Sept. 8–13); NBC News (Sept. 11–15); Echelon Insights via Puck

The candidates — Ossoff via The New Republic; El-Sayed and AIPAC spending via The Intercept; Peltola’s launch via Axios and PBS/AP

The tariff refunds — Fortune; Morning Brew; Newsweek; household cost estimates from the Tax Foundation and Yale Budget Lab

Trump’s wealth — Forbes, via Nasdaq and The Daily Beast

Kushner — Popular Information

Rubio — The Nation; The Bulwark; CBS News; Newsweek

Hegseth — Popular Information; casualty database removals via CBS News and AP

Blanche — CNN; CBS News

Noem — CNN, from invoices obtained by Sens. Welch and Blumenthal; Fox 9

RFK Jr. — CBS News; Axios

This post is part of MurMur’s ongoing series on the 2026 midterm elections. Read the rest of the series here.

The Race

Maine’s Senate race is shaping up as a case study in that anxiety, with healthcare at its center. Susan Collins, 73, has represented Maine in the Senate for nearly thirty years and is seeking a sixth term. Her opponent, Troy Jackson, 58, a former president of the Maine Senate, became the Democratic nominee after Graham Platner withdrew amid misconduct allegations. Cook Political Report has rated the race as a toss-up.

Congress passed a sweeping law that has already hit ACA marketplace enrollees hard: premium payments for 22 million subsidized marketplace enrollees are set to more than double this year, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates the Medicaid and marketplace changes combined will leave 10 million more people uninsured by 2034.

What It Means in Maine

Some 58,000 Mainers who rely on the state’s ACA exchange for coverage have already experienced a 23.9 percent increase, with a likely increase of 14.8 percent next year. Maine’s health department estimates that 31,000 people could lose Medicaid coverage in 2027, the first year new paperwork requirements to verify employment take effect. Four Maine hospitals are at risk of closure because of the Medicaid cuts: Calais Community Hospital, Cary Medical Center, Northern Light Maine Coast Hospital, and Northern Light A.R. Gould Hospital.

The story Mainers are talking about is Lincoln Hospital’s maternity unit, closing this December, the twelfth rural birthing unit to shut in Maine since 2015. MaineHealth cites falling birth volume and OB-GYN shortages, not the new Medicaid cuts, as the cause. But a hospital already running on a thin margin has less room to absorb any new strain.

Congress did include a $50 billion fund to cushion rural hospitals against these cuts. Even so, Maine’s health department calculated that the state stands to lose $2.5 billion more from the Medicaid cuts than it will receive from the fund.

Collins’ Vote

Collins is known as a fierce independent, but her vote on this bill shows that has not truly been the case during Trump’s presidency. She voted to advance the legislation, which included the healthcare cuts described above, through an earlier procedural stage. According to critics, she voted against the bill’s final passage only after it became clear Republicans had the votes to pass it without her. It passed 51 to 50, with Vance casting the deciding vote. Voters will need to determine whether Collins did what she could to stop these cuts or was complicit in their passage.

Two Competing Approaches

Collins and Jackson both offer a response to the healthcare crisis, and the differences between their approaches say a lot about how each would govern. Collins favors a narrow, incremental fix within the existing system. Jackson favors extending Medicare to cover everyone.

With Ohio Republican Bernie Moreno, Collins has proposed reinstating the ACA’s enhanced premium tax credits, which expired at the end of 2025, for two more years, capping eligibility around $200,000 in income and requiring a minimum $25 monthly premium. Health policy analysts note the plan addresses only the marketplace side of the crisis, leaves the Medicaid cuts untouched, and could raise costs for the lowest-income enrollees under the new minimum-premium requirement.

Jackson’s plan is Medicare for All, a position that, by his own account, dates to why he entered politics more than two decades ago. His campaign says the cost would be covered by taxing billionaires and corporations, ending insurance-industry profit-taking, and negotiating lower drug prices. Collins’ campaign disputes the arithmetic directly, arguing that taxing fewer than a thousand billionaires cannot fund coverage for 340 million people. The fullest version of his plan, pairing a national Medicare for All system with a state public option as a transition step, comes from the platform he ran on for governor earlier this year.

Collins is proposing a patch to the existing system. Jackson is proposing to extend Medicare to everyone. The gap between those two approaches is what this race’s healthcare debate actually comes down to.

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Sources

• Congressional Budget Office, coverage-loss estimate for the reconciliation law (August 2025 detailed estimate)

• KFF, premium payment increases for subsidized ACA Marketplace enrollees, 2026

• Cook Political Report, Senate race ratings, September 2026

• Bangor Daily News, fact-check of Democratic ads on Collins’ decisive-vote record, September 16, 2026

• Portland Press Herald, comparison of Collins’ and Jackson’s healthcare positions, August 13, 2026

• Maine Morning Star / MECEP, analysis of Medicaid cuts and the Rural Health Transformation Program, August 2026

• STAT, reporting on the origin and shortcomings of the Rural Health Transformation Program, September 14, 2026

• KFF Health News, on Maine’s reworked Rural Health Transformation Program allocation, July 2026

• Maine Public / Bangor Daily News, coverage of the Lincoln Hospital labor and delivery closure, August 2026

• NPR, profile of the Collins-Jackson race and Jackson’s “symbolic opposition” critique, May 2026

That’s the President of the United States, at the United Nations, describing American foreign policy.

Trump addressed the 81st General Assembly on Tuesday and used it to boast about the invasion of Venezuela and the removal of Nicolás Maduro — announcing a 65-billion-barrel oil deal he called “perhaps the biggest deal ever made.” Then the lede: “To the victor belong the spoils, you’ve all heard that. Our actions in Venezuela are proof that the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.”

He turned to Iran and said he faces a choice between a deal and moving to “annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly,” driving it “into hell.” He told the assembly the U.S. will not join any global regulation of AI, and urged other countries to abandon the International Criminal Court — the body that prosecutes war crimes. When he said Cuba “will fall,” the Cuban delegation stood up and walked out.

Asked about ending the Iran war, Trump told the General Assembly: "I believe we'll make a deal right after the election because it doesn't make sense for them not to. They're waiting to see how I do in the midterm election."

Read more: NBC News, CBS News, Zeteo, Letters from an American, The Bulwark, Semafor

Republicans Now Oppose A War They Voted For Six Times

Aaron Parnas reports that House and Senate Republicans are now telling reporters they expect to “get crushed” in November. Gas is near $4.50. Diesel tops $6.50. NBC has Democrats up five on the generic ballot; Fox has it at seven. Sen. John Kennedy said Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa “ought to be fat guy layups for us” — and aren’t.

So suddenly Republicans are discovering they oppose the war. Semafor's Burgess Everett reports that Mike Rogers in Michigan, Reps. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Ashley Hinson in Iowa, Rep. John James in Michigan, and Sen. Jon Husted in Ohio have all now called for it to end.

Don’t let them off the hook. They had six chances to end this war, and Congress has already gone home until after the midterm elections.

The House has voted on Iran war powers resolutions six times this year. The most recent passed on September 15, 220–204, with seven Republicans joining every Democrat. Three of those seven were voting that way for the first time.

Ashley Hinson, running for Iowa's open Senate seat, has voted against ending the war all six times — including on September 15, eight days ago. On Monday she posted: "Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn't have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran… the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end." NBC asked her campaign about her prior votes. Her campaign didn't respond.

Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks did flip on September 15. Both are in toss-up districts. Both had voted no on every previous attempt this year. Miller-Meeks’s explanation: “I said it in March: the mission had to stay focused and limited.” In March she voted against ending it.

And Nunn’s timing deserves its own paragraph. On August 17 — a month before his vote — he hosted Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for a campaign fundraiser at the Iowa State Fair, where Hegseth praised him as a needed ally for backing the department’s military actions in Iran and its spending requests. Four weeks later he decided the war had gone on too long.

Sarah Trone Garriott, running against Nunn: "Nunn voted for the war five times, campaigned with Pete Hegseth, and called it 'worth it.' Now, just ahead of the midterms, he's trying to back away." Christina Bohannan, running against Miller-Meeks: "The fact that it took her until weeks before an election to realize how angry the people she represents are shows just how out of touch she is."

The CBO now puts the war’s cost at $38 billion through August 1, rising $2 to $3 billion a month, and projects it will add half a point to inflation heading into 2027. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva warned this week that “winter is coming” on prices: “We should prepare for people being more unhappy. Maybe on the street.”

None of these people had a change of heart. They read a poll. The vote that would have mattered was in March, and in April, and in June, and in July. They took all six and chose Trump every time.

Read more: The Parnas Perspective, Semafor, The Bulwark, NBC News, Prof G Markets

The Press Ban and A Merger.

On Friday, Trump barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from White House grounds for reporting “FICTION and LIES,” warning “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.” Saturday, reporters’ credentials were confiscated at the security kiosk. Sunday, he posted an AI-generated image of trash bags labeled with their names. Monday morning, all three sued in federal court, calling the ban “a direct assault on the First Amendment” and asking for emergency relief.

They’ll likely win. Trump announced his reason himself — he dislikes their coverage — which is textbook viewpoint discrimination. CNN sued over Jim Acosta’s credentials in 2018 and won. Per Wall Street Journal reporting relayed by Zeteo, the ban surprised Trump’s own staff and came after Natalie Harp — the aide who spent a year dodging her security clearance and rode with him in the catering truck out of Ankara — showed him clips.

On Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and eleven other Democratic attorneys general dropped their antitrust suit against Paramount’s roughly $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The deal puts CBS, CNN, HBO, TNT, MTV, and both studios under David and Larry Ellison — major Trump donors.

Bonta was winning. In July, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a temporary restraining order rejecting many of Paramount’s arguments and set trial for March. Then the Ellisons started threatening to move Paramount out of California, and Newsom and Mayor Bass pushed for a settlement.

What Bonta got: no divestitures. Not one. Not even CNN. Thirty theatrical films a year — which, as Matt Stoller points out, is fewer than the two studios already release. $1.5 billion in domestic production. Terms David Ellison had publicly offered in a New York Times op-ed back in August. The Hollywood Reporter called the whole thing “a stern finger wag.”

And the centerpiece, the “news editorial independence board” meant to protect CNN and CBS News: five journalists, charged with monitoring “editorial independence, including from… ownership and shareholders” — appointed by Paramount’s board of directors. The watchdog is picked by the people it watches. Bonta’s own description: “The state of California will have no input in it. No government entity will have any input into it.”

Jane Fonda called the agreement a union-buster. Kara Swisher is quitting her CNN contributor role rather than work for the Ellisons.

I'm not sure how much the ban itself matters. CNN can still report, and a judge will likely restore the credentials within weeks.

The merger is the one that lasts. And if the Ellisons run CNN the way they've run CBS News, the audience won't wait around for the editorial independence board to save them — they'll go where the reporting still is. That migration is why Zeteo, The Bulwark, and Popular Information broke most of what you just read, and why you’re reading this instead of watching a cable panel.

That’s not a happy ending. Losing CNN is a real loss, and a healthy country doesn’t rebuild its press one Substack at a time. But it does mean the people who thought they were buying the conversation bought a building the audience is already leaving.

Read more: CNN — lawsuit, CNN — settlement, NPR, American Prospect, Popular Information, Zeteo

“Senator Collins Would Like to Call Martin to Thank Him”

That sentence is from an email sent by a staffer at Susan Collins’ super PAC, seven days after the PAC cashed a $150,000 check that a federal contractor had illegally funneled through a fake nonprofit.

ProPublica published the full story Tuesday: the FBI spent five years building a bribery case against Maine’s senior senator, and the Trump Justice Department shut it down.

Here is what the documents show.

In 2018, Martin Kao, CEO of the Hawaii defense contractor Navatek, tried to meet with Collins. He was told he’d need to donate first. When they did meet, he pitched an $8 million research grant for Navatek and the University of Maine. A 2019 email from a Navy official reads: “I spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M. The interested company is Navatek.”

In late 2019, at a Corner Bakery in Washington, Scott Reed — head of the pro-Collins 1820 PAC — asked Kao for $500,000. Kao said Navatek wanted something back: tens of millions in additional federal funding. Federal contractors are flatly barred from making campaign contributions, so the money would move through a shell company. Kao wanted assurance Collins would know where it came from. Reed confirmed she would, and that Navatek would get its contracts.

A $150,000 down payment arrived through an entity called “the Society of Young Women Scientist [sic] and Engineers.”

Seven days after it cleared, that email went out asking for Kao’s phone number, because the senator wanted to thank him.

A few weeks later, Kao’s team met with Collins’ office and came out with money. His email to his executives: “We were very warmly received. Excellent meeting. Total of $32M will be supported.” That year, the Senate allocated at least $10 million based on Navatek’s proposals. At the time, Collins sat on the Appropriations Committee. Now she chairs it.

Then it started to unravel. The Campaign Legal Center noticed a typo in the shell company’s name on the check and filed an FEC complaint. A Hawaii reporter traced the fake nonprofit to Kao’s wife. And as Kao scrambled to cover it up, Cleta Mitchell — a lawyer for Collins’ super PAC — suggested the shell company start making other charitable donations in Maine to make it look legitimate.

Now for a slight legal caveat. The Corner Bakery conversation comes from Kao himself, who is serving 87 months for pandemic-relief fraud plus 33 concurrent months for these campaign crimes, and who started talking while hoping to shave time off his sentence. Scott Reed denies ever having this conversation.

So set Kao aside. The check is real. The fake nonprofit is real. The "thank him" email is real. The "$32M will be supported" email is real. The $10 million is real.

Federal law flatly bars government contractors from giving money to federal candidates or their committees. Not "limits" — bars. Navatek held Navy contracts, so Navatek could not legally write the $150,000 check, and everyone involved knew it. That's why the money moved through a fake nonprofit instead. Routing a contribution through a shell entity to hide its true source is its own separate federal crime: the straw-donor ban. Three Navatek executives – Lawrence Lum Kee, Clifford Chen, and Martin Kao – pleaded guilty to these crimes.

The open question, the one the FBI spent five years investigating before the Trump administration gutted the entire department, involved Senator Collins.

Under federal law, bribery is the exchange of money given or accepted in return for an official act. As ProPublica put it, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, "would constitute criminal bribery." The ask at the bakery, the assurance that Collins would know where the money came from, the assurance that the contracts would follow, the $150,000, the phone call to say thank you, the meeting, the $32 million, the $10 million that actually moved.

By late 2024, the agents working the case asked their superiors for authorization to open a formal bribery investigation. Then Trump was inaugurated; those senior officials were replaced, and the request went nowhere.

Susan Collins’ entire pitch to Maine is that, even though you might not like Trump AND even though I’ve been a complete shill for Trump, I’m still delivering for Maine.

Her office announced in February that she’d secured $428.6 million for 158 Maine projects this year alone, nearly $1.5 billion since 2021. “As Chair of the Appropriations Committee, I fought hard to ensure this important funding was included.”

She’s right that the seat on the Appropriations Committee delivers. ProPublica’s reporting raises the question of who else it was delivering for.

Read more: ProPublica, Maine Public, Boston Globe, Portland Press Herald, Bangor Daily News, Zeteo

That’s your Wednesday. Trump bragged about conquest at the UN. Republicans discovered they oppose a war they funded six times. He banned three newsrooms and Democrats gave away two more. And the Collins bribery probe was killed by the Justice Department.

The midterms are 41 days away.

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Republicans hold the House by five seats, 220 to 215, the narrowest majority since 1930. Flip the three closest Republican-won races, a combined 7,309 votes, and Democrats would control the chamber.

Trump Isn’t Running. He’s Still the Election.

His approval rating is in the basement, and for good reason. He has raised prices on food, gas, housing, nearly everything a family needs to get by. He pulled the country into a war with Iran that has become a quagmire. His immigration crackdown treats due process as optional and neighbors as suspects. Through it all, he has prioritized billionaires over everyday Americans.

Trump has shown a disregard for the law. Congress approved roughly $430 billion in federal spending that the administration has simply refused to release. A Justice Department expected to operate independently now pursues the president’s personal enemies. It is so bad that the courts themselves no longer presume the administration is acting in good faith, including judges Trump himself appointed.

The corruption underneath it all starts with personal enrichment, often in exchange for political favors. Trump and his family have taken in more than $2 billion in cash and gifts since his 2024 reelection, mostly through crypto ventures. Vice President Vance put it more plainly than any Democrat has: if Watergate happened today, he said, “it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

The Map, the Money, and the Mood

Democrats need a net gain of just three House seats and four Senate seats to take back both chambers.

The conventional wisdom says they’re on track to do it and then some, in a blue wave driven above all by how unpopular Trump has become. His approval rating has been stuck in the mid-30s for months, underwater by roughly 20 points. The generic congressional ballot, which asks voters whether they’d rather see Democrats or Republicans running Congress, has shown a steady Democratic lead of six to seven points for weeks, a margin last seen in 2018, the year Democrats picked up 41 House seats.

Voters also trust Democrats more than Republicans on the issues they care about most. Affordability tops that list: gas prices, utility bills, grocery costs, and health care, where Democrats hold a 24-point trust advantage in one recent poll. Other rising concerns include AI, the growing surveillance state, and election laws themselves. Recent polling shows voters trust Democrats over Republicans even here, on ground Republicans have traditionally claimed as their own.

But two factors complicate that story. To tilt the playing field for Republicans, Trump initiated a mid-decade redistricting effort, something normally done only once a decade, after the census. After a tit-for-tat scramble among 10 states, 16 congressional districts had shifted toward Republicans against just 6 that shifted toward Democrats, a real, baked-in advantage.

The second factor is money. Combined, the three national Republican committees hold roughly $277 million in cash; the three Democratic committees hold about $136 million. Outside spending tells the same story: Republican-aligned super PACs hold a combined $118 million more than their Democratic counterparts, and dark money follows the same pattern. One analysis found that 16 of the 20 largest donors this cycle are backing Republicans.

Another factor that runs counter to the trend is the Democratic Party itself. Its favorability is about as weak as the Republican Party’s, and in some polls worse. What Democrats have going for them is enthusiasm. Democratic and many independent voters, who have soured on Trump, are highly motivated to vote. Many Republicans, meanwhile, are unhappy enough with Trump that they may not turn out to vote in the numbers Republicans have seen in past elections.

Trump Tried to Change the Rules

Aware of his unpopularity and determined not to lose Congress, Trump tried to change the election landscape, and in many cases, succeeded.

Mentioned above was his mid-decade redistricting, which increased the number of Republican-favoring districts by 10. He also pressed the Supreme Court to let parties spend unlimited amounts in coordination with their candidates, and to provide access to discounted TV ad rates previously available only to candidates. Given the financial advantage Republican committees already hold, this tilts the playing field further in their favor.

While Congress wouldn’t pass a restrictive voter registration law he wanted, 14 states have adopted similar measures. The most recent fight, over mail-in voting, ended with the Supreme Court blocking Trump’s effort to restrict it, though the fight itself may have left enough confusion among voters to depress turnout regardless of who won in court.

Whether Trump’s unpopularity, the map he redrew, the money stacked against Democrats, or the rules he rewrote decides this election won’t be clear until votes are counted.

What You Can Do

With 28 races rated within the margin of error heading into November, you can make a difference this cycle even if you live in a solidly blue or red district.

Vote. Make sure you’re registered first; it takes thirty seconds to check. If you’re voting by mail, send your ballot back as early as possible, or use a drop box if one is available near you.

Talk to the people in your life. They trust you more than they trust any politician or any news outlet.

Volunteer through a local candidate’s campaign or an organization like Volunteer Blue.

If you can, give any amount to candidates you support or to organizations like Vote Save America.

This is the first installment in a new series on the issues voters care about most and the races they’re shaping this November.

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Sources:

1. Wikipedia, “2024 United States presidential election”

2. Inside Elections, “The 7,309-Vote Election,” published Nov 2024 (combined margin in the three closest House races)

3. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, withheld/impounded federal funding analysis — figure as reported by Senate Appropriations Democrats, ~$430B, cited as of Sept 16 2026

4. American Oversight, tracker of criminal investigations into Trump’s perceived political enemies, ongoing, cited as of Sept 16 2026

5. ProPublica, reporting on federal judges declining to extend the “presumption of regularity” to this administration’s DOJ, 2026

6. Common Dreams, coverage of VP Vance’s remarks at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, speech delivered June 2026

7. SCOTUSblog / reporting on the Supreme Court’s IEEPA tariffs ruling, decided Feb 20, 2026, 6-3

8. Nate Silver, Silver Bulletin — Trump approval rating (mid-30s, ~-20 net) and generic congressional ballot (D+6 to D+7), tracking average as of early-mid Sept 2026

9. Reuters analysis of 2026 mid-decade redistricting, cited Sept 2026 (16 districts shifted R, 6 shifted D)

10. FEC filings via reporting (e.g. Epoch Times/Techtimes coverage), national party committee cash on hand as of June 30, 2026 FEC filing period ($277M combined GOP committees vs. $136M combined Democratic committees)

11. Reporting on Congressional Leadership Fund / Senate Leadership Fund vs. Democratic counterpart cash on hand, cited Sept 16 2026 ($118M GOP super PAC advantage)

12. Financial Times, “US billionaires line up to bankroll Republicans’ election push,” 2026 (16 of the 20 largest donors this cycle backing Republicans)

13. Ipsos, “The Midterm Enthusiasm Gap,” Aug 2026 (Democratic voters 10-22 points more likely to call election important/certain to vote)

14. Daily Signal, on states enacting SAVE Act-style voter laws, published Aug 8, 2026 (14 states)

15. Wiley Law / court reporting, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. FEC, decided June 30, 2026, 6-3

16. CBS News / Daily Record, reporting on Supreme Court restoring parties’ access to lowest-unit-rate TV ad pricing, ruling issued ~Sept 5, 2026

17. NBC News, on the Supreme Court declining to lift the block on Trump’s mail-ballot executive order, ruling issued Sept 14, 2026, 7-2

18. New York Times/Siena College poll, conducted Sept 8-13, 2026 (party-trust-by-issue findings, including D+24 on health care and a Democratic edge even on AI)

19. Cook Political Report, race ratings as of September 16, 2026

20. Brennan Center for Justice, “Trump’s Iran Strikes Are Unconstitutional,” 2026

21. Center for American Progress, “Trump’s Take” tracker, cited Sept 16 2026

The Supreme Court Rules Against Trump’s Mail-Ballot Scheme

Monday night, the Supreme Court refused to let the Trump administration enforce its Postal Service mail-ballot rule. The vote was 7–2. The Court’s unsigned order found the government “unlikely to succeed on the merits” of its challenge to Judge Talwani’s injunction. The rule will not be in effect in November. Only Thomas and Alito dissented.

This is not a final ruling that the rule is illegal forever. Kavanaugh concurred while writing that “there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority” — but that applying it now “would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.” The fight over future elections continues. The fight over this one is over, and we won it.

This was not a party-line outcome. Republican state election officials — including from Utah, which votes almost entirely by mail — signed a brief warning the Court that implementing the plan now “will almost certainly lead to mistakes, delays, and confusion for both voters and election officials.” Republicans who actually run elections were against these rules.

The Justice Department has now lost all 23 district-court rulings in its campaign to force states to hand over unredacted voter files. It has appealed twenty across ten circuits. Its one completed appeal died at the Sixth Circuit.

Early in-person voting starts Friday in the first states, and North Carolina and parts of Wisconsin are already mailing ballots.

If you’re checking your registration this week, use vote.gov. Not a site you saw in an ad. Oligarch Watch reports that Elon Musk’s America PAC has spent heavily — more than $180,000 on Meta in a single week — driving voters in key states to a site called votesafe.org. Vote.gov collects nothing. According to Oligarch Watch’s review, votesafe.org harvests your name, date of birth, full address, phone number, IP-derived location, device fingerprint, and click history, and an August 29 rewrite of its privacy policy dropped the promise not to share that data.

I can’t independently verify every line of that reporting, so take the recommendation rather than the accusation, but there is one official federal site: it’s free, it asks for nothing, and it’s vote.gov.

Read more: NBC News, NPR, CNBC, The Hill, Oligarch Watch, Robert Hubbell

Twelve Minutes

A federal whistleblower — a client of the nonprofit Democracy Defenders Fund — has given Congress a nearly 30-page disclosure about a Department of Homeland Security program called the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.” Schumer and Padilla sent it to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Sunday and made it public Monday. The New York Times first reported the program earlier this month.

In late August, hundreds of officers in the USCIS Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate — people whose job is to investigate immigration fraud and national security threats — were pulled off that work. They received a single video training course lasting one hour and forty-five minutes. Then they were handed lists of names and a quota: 40 people per day. That works out to about twelve minutes to determine whether a human being is legally entitled to vote, and to create a federal law enforcement record if you decide they’re not.

To look up those records, agents were directed to impersonate the voters themselves — entering birth dates and partial Social Security numbers gathered from internal and external sources into public state lookup tools that, in many states, only the voter is permitted to use. In Virginia, the registration database tells you outright that accessing another voter’s record “is unlawful… punishable as computer fraud under Va. Code § 18.2-152.3.”

DHS’s own chief counsel addressed that. Agents were told they “are not personally liable” so long as the searches were properly documented. Padilla estimates the operation has likely produced “thousands of violations of state laws.”

And the data is junk by design. An alien registration number stays in a person’s file forever — including after they become a citizen. A training video described the source data as having been enhanced with “supplemental magic.” The whistleblower concluded that the process “is knowingly sweeping known U.S. citizens in as potentially ‘unlawful voters,’” with naturalized citizens disproportionately likely to be flagged and referred for criminal investigation.

Nobody at DHS believes this will turn up meaningful numbers of noncitizen voters, because every audit ever conducted has found the practice vanishingly rare. It isn’t built to find fraud. It’s built to generate paper — federal records on government letterhead, naming American citizens — that can be waved around in November.

Read more: NPR, Democracy Docket, HuffPost, AP, Letters from an American

Seven Republicans Voted to End the War. Then Massie Moved to Impeach Hegseth.

Late Tuesday, the House adopted Rep. Seth Moulton’s Iran war powers resolution 220–204. Seven Republicans crossed over: Massie, Fitzpatrick, Davidson, Barrett, Mace, Miller-Meeks, and Nunn. In July there were four. This is the sixth war powers vote this year, and defections grow each time.

Hours before that, Thomas Massie blindsided his own leadership by introducing eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a privileged resolution, which forces a floor vote as soon as tomorrow unless Speaker Johnson recesses the House early to avoid it.

And the numbers finally arrived. The Congressional Budget Office puts the war’s cost at $38 billion above planned Pentagon spending through August 1 and projects it will add 0.6 points to inflation by spring.

Then CBS News published photographs, supplied by active-duty service members, of what the Pentagon hasn’t been showing: a destroyed E-3 Sentry at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia and hollowed-out buildings at Camp Buehring. The Defense Department inspector general estimates equipment losses of up to $3.7 billion, including nearly 60 aircraft.

One deployed service member described it to CBS this way: “We’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”

Brent crude is near $108. Diesel set another record at $6.31 after Saudi loadings stopped at Yanbu. Mortgage rates are at 7.22%. JD Vance told the New York Post the war will enter “a much different phase” within a couple of months and declined to offer a timeline.

Trump is losing his war with Iran. And all of us are paying for it.

Read more: The Parnas Perspective, The Bulwark, Zeteo, Semafor, CBS News

Voters Now Say Republicans Are the Elitist Party

The New York Times and Siena College polled 1,503 likely voters September 8 through 13. Democrats lead the generic ballot 51–43, the same margin as 2018 when Democrats gained 40 seats.

Voters now trust Democrats more on health care by 24 points, on the cost of living by 51–43, on immigration by 52–45, and on the economy. Republicans hold an edge on exactly one issue: AI policy. Independents break for Democrats 57–34.

Asked which party is more extreme, more elitist, and more corrupt, voters named Republicans — by 8 points, 10 points, and 14 points respectively.

Only 14% of likely voters say the economy is better than a year ago, down from 31% in January — and among Republicans, it collapsed from 72% to 29%. White voters without college degrees, the most durable part of his coalition, disapprove of his handling of the cost of living by 21 points. And the Hispanic numbers trace the whole arc of his second term: Democrats led by 8 points in April 2025, 16 in January, 30 in May, and 43 now.

Senate Democrats killed the crypto Clarity Act on Tuesday over the provisions that would have protected Trump’s $1.4 billion in digital-asset income. Kevin Warsh, Trump’s own hand-picked Fed chair, is expected to raise rates today in open defiance of him, with the 10-year Treasury at 5.041%, a 19-year high. And Judge Christopher Cooper ruled for the second time that Trump cannot put his name on the Kennedy Center without Congress — after which his board voted to close the building indefinitely, and Trump announced the renovation “will not take place” unless he gets the name.

As Catherine Rampell put it, he “doesn’t have the power to rename an institution but does have the power to close it.”

That’s the man voters just called elitist and corrupt by double digits.

Read more: Fox 5 NY, MS NOW, The Message Box, Robert Hubbell, Zeteo, Semafor

That’s your Wednesday. The Supreme Court killed the mail-ballot rule 7–2. DHS agents are impersonating voters. Seven Republicans voted to end his war, and one moved to impeach his Defense Secretary. And voters now call the GOP the more corrupt party by fourteen points.

The midterms are 48 days away.

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Palestinians in the West Bank have lived under Israeli military rule since 1967, when Israel captured the territory in the Six-Day War. A 1993 agreement was meant to be a five-year bridge to a lasting settlement. It never came. Since then, the International Court has viewed the occupation, and the settlements built on it, as illegal. Palestinians there live under checkpoints that control basic movement, permits required for ordinary life, searches without warrants, and imprisonment without formal charges.

Things worsened in December 2022, when Prime Minister Netanyahu formed the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. Settler violence has reached an all-time high, with an average of six attacks a day in the first half of 2026. More than 1,200 Palestinians have been killed in the last three years. More than 11,000 are currently in Israeli prisons. Since the current government took power, police cases against settlers accused of these attacks have fallen 70 percent. Only one Israeli has been charged with killing a Palestinian in the West Bank since 2019.

In February 2023, settlers rampaged through the Palestinian town of Huwara while Israeli soldiers stood by. Israel’s own military commander for the West Bank called it a pogrom. My grandmother left Russia to escape pogroms. I did not expect to see the Israeli army and Israeli citizens engage in pogroms.

This escalation of violence is now official Israeli policy. To hold his governing coalition together, Netanyahu gave the radical-right minister Bezalel Smotrich sweeping control over the West Bank. Smotrich has said the goal is “maximum territory with minimum Arabs.”

Britain’s ban on settlement goods, joined by eleven other countries, has little economic impact. Less than five percent of Israeli exports come from settlements. The real leverage sits in a separate, untested set of sanctions targeting companies and banks that finance settlement construction and mortgages. This announcement comes six weeks before the Israeli election, and how far Britian will go in implementation depends on the next government’s policy on the West Bank. There is one candidate, Gadi Eisenkot, who has campaigned against Netanyahu’s West Bank policy.

Until now, the Trump Administration’s policy has been to allow Israel to conduct its policy in the West Bank and Gaza without comment or criticism. Trump was briefed in advance on the UK’s sanctions plan by UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and did not object. When Ambassador Huckabee criticized Britain’s move, the White House distanced itself from his comments rather than defending them. Privately, Trump pressured Netanyahu into removing a small number of unauthorized outposts built inside Palestinian-administered land. The government’s official settlement program, the far larger effort actually driving land seizure across most of the West Bank, continued without interruption.

On his first day in office, Trump revoked the one sanctions tool that had existed for violent settlers. In April, the Republican-controlled Senate declined to block a $295 million sale of bulldozers, the same equipment Israel uses to demolish Palestinian homes in the West Bank. It has also declined to hold Israel accountable for the deaths of American citizens: at least nine Americans have been killed by Israeli settlers or soldiers in the West Bank since 2022, none of which resulted in a single criminal charge.

This is the first sign of any international pressure on Israel. These actions alone will not be enough. It remains to be seen if countries are willing to put enough pressure to change Israel’s behavior. I hope so.

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Endnotes

1. Ed Miliband’s full September 8 speech to Parliament, declaring the occupation unlawful and describing “ethnic cleansing perpetrated by settler terrorists”: The Times of Israel, Full speech: Ed Miliband says entire occupation unlawful

2. Smotrich’s “maximum territory with minimum Arabs” quote, the coalition mechanism that gave him control of the West Bank, and settler violence as deliberate annexation strategy: J Street, Maximum Territory with Minimum Arabs

3. The Huwara attack and Israel’s own military commander calling it a pogrom: CNN, Huwara: The settler attack on this West Bank town was called a ‘pogrom’ by Israel’s military

4. More Palestinians killed in the West Bank in the past three years than the previous seventeen combined: Oxfam International, More Palestinians killed by Israeli military and settlers in the West Bank in last 3 years than previous 17 combined

5. More than 11,000 Palestinians currently held in Israeli custody: UN OCHA, Humanitarian Situation Update #330 | West Bank

6. The 70 percent drop in police cases against settlers, and only one Israeli charged with killing a Palestinian since 2019: Human Rights Watch, West Bank: Israel-Backed Settler Violence Drives Displacement

7. The coalition’s economic impact, the sanctions targeting companies and banks, and the link to Israel’s October 27 election: J Street, The UK, France, and Canada’s West Bank Sanctions, Explained

8. Trump’s revocation of Executive Order 14115 on his first day in office: NBC News, As Trump lifts sanctions on West Bank settlers, anti-Palestinian violence flares

9. The Senate’s failed vote to block the $295 million bulldozer sale: The Times of Israel, US Senate foils effort to nix Israel arms sale, but record 85% of Democrats support the move

10. Nine American citizens killed in the West Bank since 2022, with no accountability: Senator Chris Van Hollen, Van Hollen, 30 Colleagues Press Administration for Accountability

Trump “Promises” $5,000 to Vote Republican

At the Republican Party’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas Wednesday night, Donald Trump made an offer.

“Here is my promise: If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them… because of our tremendous strength and success economically, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” And then, in case anyone missed the structure: “If the Republicans win, you win with us. And it will be called the ‘Trump dividend.’ Congratulations. Now all we have to do is win.”

NPR’s write-up handled it in one line: “Quick math puts the bill for this proposed ‘dividend’ at more than $1 trillion. Plus, it’s illegal to pay or be paid to influence voting.”

Let’s take both halves seriously. On the money: roughly 245 million adult citizens times $5,000 is more than $1.2 trillion. For scale, CNBC notes the government has already spent $1.27 trillion just servicing the national debt this fiscal year, and committed $1.36 trillion to defense. So he is promising a one-time payment roughly the size of the entire defense budget, from an economy running $2 trillion annual deficits against $40 trillion in debt, with no appropriation, no bill, and no legal authority to issue it.

On the legality: 52 U.S.C. § 10307 makes it a federal crime to offer anything of value to induce a vote. Trump conditioned $5,000 on an election outcome, on camera, at a party convention. Sen. Bernie Moreno’s response was to promise he’d “get a bill ready” for November 3.

Trump’s bribe signals desperation. Instead of touting any economic or policy accomplishments, he’s just going straight to bribery. But we must remember, offering people money and then not delivering is Trump’s signature move. In November 2025, Trump promised every American a $2,000 tariff dividend. It never came. He endorsed returning 20% of DOGE savings to taxpayers. That never came. He backed depositing $1,000 into Americans’ health savings accounts; the bill failed in the Senate. What has he done? Instituted an illegal tax on all Americans in the form of tariffs, extracted $166 billion from Americans, and then returned that money to corporations when his tariffs were ruled illegal.

The rest of his Trumpalooza midterm convention has been a complete failure. Reporters posted photos of empty upper decks while Trump insisted the 21,000-seat arena was packed. He spoke for an hour and forty-five minutes. Ken Paxton, the Senate candidate the Texas venue was built around, got a five-minute slot at rush hour and used it to ask for money — and Trump mocked his clothes and his voice from the stage, acknowledged doing so was “so insulting,” and then told Texans to elect him anyway. An NBC count found 33 Republicans in competitive races skipped it; 29 showed.

At his convention, Trump asked all Americans “to pretend that I’m on the ballot.”

Finally, something I agree with.

Read more: CNN, NPR, CNBC, TIME, Robert Hubbell, The Parnas Perspective

Trump’s Oligarchy Is Getting Richer. The Rest of Us Aren’t.

Trump explained his $5,000 promise by comparing it to what “a successful company will do — a cash distribution to its shareholders.”

Boy did he pick the wrong metaphor.

Judd Legum flagged new Bureau of Labor Statistics data this week showing that labor’s share of GDP — the slice of everything this country produces that goes to the people who produce it — fell to 52.8% in the second quarter of 2026. That is the lowest figure since the bureau began tracking it in 1947. It was 53.7% in Q1, itself a record low. It was 63.9% in 2000.

In that same quarter, per the Bureau of Economic Analysis, corporate profits rose 9% — an increase of $400.9 billion.

The economy grew. The workers’ share of it hit an eighty-year low. The difference went to profits, not workers.

Pew found 76% of Americans rating the economy poor or only fair and this is why. Despite low unemployment, despite a strong stock market, people aren’t making more money.

Legum connects it all to policy. A February Labor Department rule made it easier to reclassify employees as independent contractors — EPI estimates that switch costs a construction worker up to $19,526 a year and a truck driver $21,532. A Center for American Progress analysis found that union-filed unfair labor practice cases are 14.2 points more likely to be dismissed, NLRB elections are down 30%, and worker participation is down 42% in 2025.

So when the president stands in Dallas and offers you $5,000 as a shareholder dividend, understand the framing he chose. In this arrangement, you are not the shareholder. You are the labor input whose declining share funded the actual dividend, and you’re being offered a one-time, legally impossible payment to keep it that way.

Don’t settle for pennies on the dollar. Vote your pocketbook.

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

They Jailed a 16-Year-Old for What His Grandmother Did in 1979

On April 9, Maryam Tahmasebi was teaching a psychology class at Los Angeles Pierce College when her son texted to say his father hadn’t picked him up from school and wasn’t answering his phone. She picked the boy up, drove home, and called the police, assuming a medical emergency. As she later wrote in The Nation: “it never occurred to me that he could have been detained by ICE. We are legal permanent residents with valid green cards.”

Her husband, Eissa Hashemi, a professor of business psychology at The Chicago School, was in a downtown ICE facility. The next morning, DHS vehicles surrounded Maryam’s car at her son’s school drop-off. She and the 16-year-old were shackled in front of his classmates and moved overnight to the Dilley detention center in Texas.

They have been there five months.

Eissa’s mother, Masoumeh Ebtekar, was the English-language spokeswoman for the students who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held 52 Americans for 444 days. The American press called her “Screaming Mary.” She later served as an Iranian vice president. All of that is real, and all of it is condemnable.

None of it was done by her son, who wasn’t born yet.

Rubio announced the family’s green card revocations on X: “Her family should never have been allowed to benefit from the extraordinary privilege of living in our country. America can never become home for anti-American terrorists or their families — and under the Trump Administration, it never will.”

Newsweek reported flatly that “the administration has not alleged that the family participated in any criminal or hostile activity.” No charges. No crimes. No immigration violations — Eissa entered legally on a student visa in 2014, all three got green cards in 2016, and Maryam had a pending citizenship application when they took her. He hasn’t left the country in twelve years. Both of them have spent their careers mentoring graduate students, including, as Maryam notes, veterans who served this country for decades.

The mechanism Rubio used is a 1990 provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act letting the Secretary of State declare a noncitizen deportable if their presence causes “serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” It’s the same authority used against Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk. It requires no crime and produces no trial.

Tim Miller at The Bulwark has been corresponding with Maryam, who gets one hour of email access a day and no other internet. Eissa is held at a separate facility twenty minutes away; they speak for a few minutes every couple of weeks. He’s been put in the orange jumpsuit reserved for detainees with criminal records. He developed infections and waited weeks for antibiotics.

And when the family finally gave up and asked to leave the country — not to Iran, where there’s an active war and where their son doesn’t speak, read, or write Farsi, but to a third country — a judge approved Eissa’s voluntary departure to Turkey. The government appealed to stop him from leaving. Maryam’s and her son’s petitions were denied outright. Separate judges handled their cases.

So to summarize: An entire family with full legal status in the US was captured and arrested for committing no crime, eventually agreed to self-deport, but Marco Rubio decided it was better to keep them captive.

Rubio’s own grandfather, Pedro Víctor García, re-entered the United States in 1962 without a visa, was detained and ordered deported — and someone in the Miami immigration office let him stay anyway. The Cuban Adjustment Act made it permanent in 1967. Years later, Rubio’s brother-in-law was sentenced in one of the biggest cocaine cases of Miami’s cocaine-cowboy era. Marco Rubio was 16 years old when the feds took that family member away.

Sixteen. The same age as the boy in Dilley.

Nobody put Marco Rubio in a camp for his grandfather’s illegal entry or his brother-in-law’s cocaine ring. He finished high school, went to the University of Florida, and got to be judged on what he did himself. That is the whole promise of the country, and now Rubio wants to pull the ladder up behind him, denying everyone else the same opportunity he has. It's despicable and un-American.

I’ll leave you with Maryam’s own words: “If this could happen to us, a law-abiding family of two professors and a young boy, it can happen to anyone.”

Read more: The Nation, The Bulwark, CBS News, NBC Los Angeles, Newsweek

That's your Thursday. Trump promised $5,000 he cannot legally send, from an economy where the workers' share just hit an eighty-year low. And a 16-year-old is in a Texas detention camp for what his grandmother did in 1979.

The midterms are 54 days away.

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He was mostly right. Most of the people who paid these tariffs will not see the money back. Most of the companies that imported the goods will.

Americans paid the tariffs.

Throughout the tariff fight, Trump repeatedly said that the cost would not be passed on to consumers. The companies collecting the money say otherwise.

Capri Holdings, Nike, Levi Strauss, Procter & Gamble, Columbia Sportswear, Build-A-Bear, and McCormick all told investors they raised prices because of the tariffs. Yale’s Budget Lab, an independent economic think tank, found that 61 to 80 percent of the tariff cost on core goods was passed through to consumer prices as of this summer.

The Choice Belongs to the Company

When a company imports goods, its broker files an entry with U.S. Customs and Border Protection declaring the tariff owed. Customs already has that entry on file. It looks up what the company was charged, subtracts the tariff amount, and refunds the difference. No new paperwork required. The government collected roughly $166 billion under these tariffs; about $129 billion of that has been approved for refund so far, all through this same importer-based process.

So it’s up to each company to decide whether to refund consumers, and how.

Some companies have good customer records, which makes this straightforward. Not all of them are choosing to use them. FedEx and UPS bill by shipment, so when the refund comes in, they will reverse specific charges on specific accounts. Some health care companies have the same kind of records: Medline, GE HealthCare, Solventum, Baxter, and Cardinal Health all sell to hospitals under contract, with itemized invoices. Only two of the five, Medline and Cardinal Health, have returned any money, and only partially.

Companies that sell to millions of anonymous customers have a harder problem to solve. Some aren’t trying very hard to solve it. Nintendo said consumers “agreed” to the tariff-driven price when they made the purchase and are therefore “not entitled” to any refund. Of the roughly fifteen major companies that have disclosed how much they received in refunds, only a handful, including Costco, which told investors its “commitment will be to find the best way to return this value” to members, have said anything about what they plan to do with it. Nintendo’s position is closer to the norm than Costco’s.

Nothing Is in Place to Help Consumers

Nothing is currently in place to help consumers. They’re left holding the bag, and the government seems unable, or unwilling, to do anything about it.

The Federal Trade Commission no longer has the authority to get money back for consumers, a result of a 2021 Supreme Court ruling. Efforts to pass legislation requiring companies to make consumers whole for any refunds they receive are going nowhere in Congress.

Twenty-three states tried to sue on behalf of residents who’d paid higher prices from a similar tariff, and the courts said they couldn’t: they hadn’t suffered the kind of direct harm required to sue at all.

Since the court would not give standing to the states, three individuals have filed class actions instead, each trying to represent everyone who was charged the same way they were. A New York shopper sued Five Below after the company wouldn’t say what it planned to do with its refund. A customer sued the parent company of Ray-Ban and Oakley over a tariff surcharge it continued to charge even after the tariffs were struck down. A South Carolina customs broker sued FedEx and UPS directly, arguing that even the fees stacked on top of the tariff itself were never lawfully owed. None of these cases has been decided yet. Companies are fighting them hard, and legal analysts are genuinely split on whether they’ll succeed, but six months in, none has been thrown out either.

This Was a Choice

The government illegally took money from millions of Americans, admitted the money shouldn’t have been collected, and is now returning it to the corporations that collected it instead of the people who actually paid it. No federal agency, no bill in Congress, and no court has been willing or able to change that.

Trump didn’t have to do it this way. He used a tool that let him impose these tariffs without asking Congress, the same Congress controlled by his own party, and without building any mechanism for the money to find its way back to the people it came from.

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Endnotes

1. Bessent’s “won’t see it” comment and “bad framing” exchange: The Hill, Bessent Avoids Questions on Tariff Refunds

2. Supreme Court ruling that IEEPA did not authorize the tariffs: Ropes & Gray, Supreme Court Strikes Down IEEPA Tariffs: Key Takeaways and Implications for Importers

3. Companies raising prices because of tariffs (Capri, Nike, Levi Strauss, Procter & Gamble, Columbia Sportswear): CBS News, Walmart and Other Big Companies Say Tariffs Are Forcing Them to Hike Prices

4. Tariff cost passthrough rate of 61–80 percent on core goods: Yale Budget Lab, The Short-Run Effects of 2025 Tariffs So Far

5. Total tariffs collected ($166 billion) and refund process: California Department of Justice, Attorney General Bonta Urges Congress to Fix Trump’s Tariff Mess and Refund Americans

6. Medline refund and customer return figures: Medline Q2 2026 results, Medline Reports Second Quarter and First Six Months 2026 Results

7. Cardinal Health refund and customer pass-through: Cardinal Health Q4 2026 earnings call, Cardinal Health (CAH) Q4 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

8. Nintendo’s “not entitled” position, Amazon and Costco refund approaches: Newsweek, Tariff Refunds Split Companies as Consumers Demand Share of $166B

9. FTC’s Section 13(b) refund authority stripped by the Supreme Court in 2021, and Chair Ferguson’s response under questioning: Senate Commerce Committee, Cantwell to Trump FTC Chair: Protect Consumers, Not the President’s Allies

10. Tariff Relief for Consumers Act (H.R. 7822) text and status: Congress.gov, H.R.7822 — 119th Congress: Tariff Relief for Consumers Act

11. Section 122 tariff struck down by the Court of International Trade, and the standing ruling for the 23 states versus the three direct-payer plaintiffs: Skadden, US Trade Court Strikes Down Section 122 Tariffs

12. Private class action landscape and legal theories (unjust enrichment, breach of contract): Foley & Lardner, After Learning Resources: Defending Against the Wave of Consumer Class Actions Seeking Tariff Refunds

13. Individual plaintiffs (Anastopoulo v. FedEx/UPS, related suits) and case status as of mid-August 2026: FreightWaves, FedEx, UPS, Oakley Face Lawsuits Over Trump Tariff Refunds

14. Collapse of U.S.–Canada trade talks and new 50 percent tariffs: NPR, As Canada Readies Retaliatory Tariffs, Mark Carney Says His Nation Is ‘At War’ With U.S.

Dissent Among the Generals

There is a formal mechanism in the U.S. military for telling the Secretary of Defense he is making a mistake. It’s called a non-concurrence, and it means: I will carry out this order, but I want the record to show I advised against it.

Six months into Trump’s war, four of the most senior commanders in the American military have filed one.

Alex Horton and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported Saturday that the August 14 edition of the classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book contains warnings from the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as the four-star commanders responsible for Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Their assessment: sustaining large-scale operations against Iran is degrading America’s ability to respond to threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland. The Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Daryl Caudle, told Hegseth the Navy cannot sustain its current level of support because there is no anticipated end date. Adm. Samuel Paparo at Indo-Pacific Command objected to giving up a carrier strike group and destroyers. Formal non-concurrences were registered by the CNO and the commanders of European, Indo-Pacific, and Southern Command.

Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling explains in The Bulwark why this matters: “Non-concurrence is not insubordination. It doesn’t mean a commander will refuse an order. It means the commander is formally telling the secretary: I will execute this decision, but you need to understand the risk it creates in my area.”

The Pentagon’s response was to attack the reporting while conceding the facts. Spokesman Sean Parnell posted that publishing the assessments is “a crime” and “a betrayal of the force” — then, in the same statement, wrote: “Of course, we demand candid military advice. Non-concurs are standard. The Secretary sees them constantly.” So the document is real, the dissent is real. The crime is that you found out.

Dan Driscoll, a Yale Law classmate and close ally of JD Vance, resigned after months of friction with Hegseth over the purge of senior Army officers. The Atlantic reported he raised the firings directly with Trump, who was surprised by their scale. The United States Army, more than 450,000 active-duty soldiers, now has no confirmed secretary, no chief of staff, no operations general, and no Europe commander. The acting chief has halted a joint U.S.–Ukraine drone training program.

Trump’s reaction to all of this? Posting a fake video of a battle. Trump published an AI-generated clip captioned “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!!” — Kharg being the terminal that handles roughly 90% of Iran’s oil exports. The Defense Department confirmed the next morning that no such strike occurred. By 8:09 a.m. he was posting that “Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD!” Zeteo reports that three officials had no idea whether Trump knew the video was fake, and wouldn’t be surprised either way.

That same Zeteo reporting includes four U.S. officials and one Trump adviser saying the consensus inside the government is that we are losing. “We aren’t winning,” one senior official said. “Why are you asking me if I think we’re winning? What a stupid question.” Two of them said they went to reporters because they were disgusted by a propaganda push they described as “nothing but lies and distortions,” timed to the midterms.

The people who run the American military wrote down that this war is unsustainable, the President posted a fake video of a victory that didn’t happen, and the Pentagon’s response was to call journalism a crime. This is the result of Trump and Hegseth’s incompetence.

Read more: Washington Post via Spokesman-Review, The Bulwark, The Hill, Zeteo, Letters from an American, Robert Hubbell

One Bad Barcode Can Kill 10,000 Ballots

An anonymous federal official with direct knowledge of the Postal Service’s new mail-ballot system filed a whistleblower disclosure, released today by Sen. Richard Blumenthal and prepared by the lawyers at Whistleblower Aid. It describes a system built in a “rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed process.”

Under the new rules, states submit a manifest for each batch of ballots, with a unique barcode assigned to every voter. USPS scans a sample against its portal. And as the complaint puts it: “if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state — effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters.”

One scanning error. Ten thousand ballots returned to sender. The whistleblower notes the obvious: “Even under ordinary circumstances this would be problematic because of predictable errors in any barcode scanning process.”

These are not ordinary circumstances. The whistleblower says systems like this typically take nine months to a year to debug. This one got four days of user testing because leadership was racing a September 1 implementation date. Workers on the project described it days before launch as a “s--- show.”

Then there’s this quote: “USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation — raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.”

That’s a federal official saying, on the record through counsel, that the breakage may be the point.

USPS also appears to be ignoring a federal judge. The whistleblower says USPS kept building this after a federal judge blocked the rule. Blumenthal calls the implementation “perilously rushed and potentially unlawful” and has sent the disclosure to the Postal Service inspector general.

Blumenthal’s summary: “The Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.”

Just to be clear, the rule that puts all this into implementation is still blocked. Judge Talwani’s hearing on a longer injunction was set for September 3rd, and this disclosure lands directly in that record. Nobody’s ballot has been rejected yet.

But do this: request your ballot now, return it as early as your state allows, and if you can vote in person, do that instead.

Read more: CNN, NBC News, CBS News, Votebeat, NPR, Hopium Chronicles

The Supreme Court Allows Trump’s “Likely Unlawful” Ballroom to Proceed

In an unsigned 5-4 shadow-docket order Monday, the Supreme Court let construction continue on the roughly 90,000-square-foot ballroom rising where Trump demolished the East Wing last fall. The majority never reached the question of whether it’s legal. It held that the National Trust for Historic Preservation — a nonprofit chartered by Congress specifically to protect public buildings — lacked standing, because it couldn’t show a “concrete and particularized” injury.

Robert Reich’s response is the shortest version: if the National Trust lacks standing, “I can’t imagine who would.”

The dissent is where this gets interesting. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three Democratic appointees and wrote that the construction “is likely unlawful” under the statute barring building “on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.”

The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court thinks Trump’s ballroom is “unlawful” and yet five justices vote to allow it to proceed. Another example of this Supreme Court bending itself backward to allow Trump to do whatever he wants. Time to expand the court.

Read more: Zeteo, Robert Hubbell, Robert Reich, Puck

That’s your Tuesday. Four of the military’s most senior commanders formally told Hegseth this war is unsustainable. A USPS whistleblower says one bad barcode can send 10,000 ballots back. John Roberts says the ballroom is probably illegal, but nobody’s allowed to sue.

The midterms are 63 days away.

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The Mail Ballot Rule Is Blocked Again

On Tuesday, I wrote that the Supreme Court had not approved Trump’s mail ballot order, and that a nationwide injunction still blocked it. Here’s what’s happened since.

Wednesday, under pressure from Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, Judge Indira Talwani lifted her own nationwide injunction — the last thing standing between the Postal Service and Trump’s executive order. Democratic states and the League of Women Voters immediately filed new challenges aimed at the final USPS rule, which the agency had quietly released the previous Friday night. And late Thursday, Talwani blocked it again with a 14-day temporary restraining order.

In her eleven-page order, she found the plaintiffs likely to win on three separate claims: that USPS had no statutory authority to issue the rule, that it unconstitutionally imposes requirements on states, and that it unconstitutionally bars non-compliant election officials from using the mail to send ballots at all. On the evidence: “the record continues to lack any evidence regarding fraudulent absentee or mail-in voting.” And in summary: “The USPS’s interest in correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement of citizens who need access to mail ballots in order to vote.”

As she noted in her order, most plaintiff states have already ordered their ballots, and some are required by state law to start mailing them as early as next week. The restraining order runs 14 days. Talwani holds a hearing on September 3 to decide whether to extend the block. Whatever she decides is headed straight back to the Supreme Court, and this time on the merits, which the justices have carefully avoided touching.

Robert Hubbell is the person to read on this. This week he flagged Chris Hayes’s on-air claim that the rule “hands the USPS veto power over every voter in America” as unsupported by the actual text. His read on the real danger ahead is narrower and more plausible than the panic version — that the Supreme Court stays Talwani’s order under a stretched reading of the Purcell principle, letting the rule operate through November without ever ruling it lawful.

For now the rule is blocked, and ballots are going out.

Read more: CNN, NBC News, NPR, Reuters, Robert Hubbell

Did RFK Jr. Lie to Congress?

In 2018, two infants in Samoa died after two nurses mixed the dry MMR vaccine powder with an expired muscle relaxant instead of sterile water. Both nurses were sentenced to five years for manslaughter. It was human error, established and prosecuted. Samoa halted all vaccinations for ten months.

In January 2019, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — then running an anti-vaccine nonprofit — wrote to Samoa’s prime minister asking to study the country’s MMR vaccines, arguing the deaths came from a defective batch rather than the malpractice Samoan authorities had already identified. In that letter he used the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times. He visited that summer and met with anti-vaccine activists. Samoa’s health chief later described it to the Guardian as a “significant disinformation campaign.”

Four months after the visit, measles swept the country. It sickened more than 5,700 people and killed 83, mostly children under five, in three and a half months.

In January 2025, during his confirmation hearings, senators repeatedly asked him about that trip. Ed Markey: “Did the trip have nothing to do with vaccines as you told my colleagues in Senate Finance yesterday?” Kennedy: “Nothing to do with vaccines.” He told the Senate the trip was to introduce a medical records digitization system.

The Associated Press and the Guardian obtained the letter this week, along with emails from U.S. Embassy and U.N. staffers giving contemporaneous accounts that vaccine safety concerns drove the visit.

HHS’s defense has been to call these claims defamatory, and claim he wasn’t under oath. As the AP points out, knowingly giving material false testimony to Congress is a crime that carries prison time whether or not you were sworn. It’s just rarely prosecuted, and it will not be prosecuted by this Justice Department against this administration’s own health secretary.

Now the American chapter. This week Pennsylvania announced that two unvaccinated people in Lancaster County died of measles, one a newborn too young to be vaccinated, who depended entirely on the herd immunity around her. In 2021, Kennedy spoke at a fair in that same Lancaster County, where he praised the area’s low childhood vaccination rates and downplayed how dangerous measles is.

Kennedy’s response to the deaths was to suggest Governor Shapiro’s announcement might “have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.” CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz went on Fox Business and said, “We don’t know if the children died from measles or had another condition that was already attacking them and they just happened to get measles at the same time.”

Ron Wyden has called for a criminal investigation. American Oversight has asked the Justice Department to open one. Markey, Angela Alsobrooks, and Hawaii Governor Josh Green have renewed calls for his removal. None of that goes anywhere with this DOJ and this Senate.

Which makes this a midterm argument rather than a legal one. A documented letter, a documented denial, 83 dead in Samoa and two dead in Lancaster County. Congressional subpoena power is the only path to hearings and accountability. Another argument for Democrats to take the House in November.

Read more: AP, CNN, The Guardian, Popular Information, Letters from an American

Lake America

Welcome to America’s parody era.

Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America" in U.S. government documents and the federal geographic names database. His explanation, per the Wall Street Journal: "We took something called the Gulf of Mexico, we changed it. So if you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we'll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific."

Not that we need to take this seriously, but I will point out that Lake Ontario derives from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which predates both Canadian Confederation and the Declaration of Independence. The province of Ontario is named after the lake, which is named after a Native American word. This is all just so unserious.

Semafor’s Nicholas Wu reports from Michigan that Trump’s 50% tariffs have handed Democrats there a unifying issue — in a state whose top export destination is Canada, and one that conveniently changes the subject from the party’s internal fight over Israel. Aaron Parnas has the numbers: Michiganders pay roughly $3,200 a year in tariff costs, about 142% more than the rest of the country, and a June poll found state residents oppose the Canada tariffs 63–31, with more than a third of Republicans opposed.

Abdul El-Sayed is running straight at it against Mike Rogers — the Florida resident I wrote about three weeks ago who wouldn’t say what he thought about tariffs, the war, or anything else.

And the coalition is cracking in public. The United Auto Workers rejected the latest escalation. The Detroit chamber of commerce warned that escalating tariffs “will only cause economic pain on both sides of the border.” Even Tom Tiffany — Wisconsin’s Republican nominee for governor, the man who signed the lawsuit to throw out his own state’s presidential votes — said publicly he disagreed with the Lake America order. Still silent on the tariffs, though.

Meanwhile, Canada announced retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on roughly $20 billion of American imports — while removing U.S. seafood from the list, which the Maine lobster industry noticed. And Canada’s economy grew at an annualized 3.3% last quarter, its fastest since 2023.

Not only is Donald Trump embarrassing us on the international stage, but he is also destroying our economy and driving our closest ally into the hands of Europe and China. The dumb name is temporary; the economic pain isn’t.

Read more: Semafor, Letters from an American, The Parnas Perspective, Robert Hubbell

That's your Friday. A judge blocked the mail ballot rule again and found zero evidence of fraud in the record. RFK Jr. may have lied to Congress. Trump renamed a lake while Michigan pays $3,200 a year in tariffs.

The midterms are 67 days away.

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It’s important to understand that an EO cannot legally change the Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule. But it can add to the confusion already surrounding how best to protect children from preventable childhood illnesses. This EO arrived the same week that the CDC reported that measles cases had reached their highest level in 35 years and that vaccination coverage among kindergartners had fallen for the second year in a row.

Trump continued to share misinformation at the signing, claiming that some childhood vaccines are the size of a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s body. A typical dose is about a tenth of a teaspoon; it would take roughly 1,200 doses to fill an actual soda bottle. Claims like this only add to the confusion.

What the Executive Order Actually Does

As already noted, the EO cannot change the Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule. Courts have already stopped the administration’s previous efforts to do that, when they bypassed the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the CDC director, the officials legally responsible for setting the vaccine schedule. Legal and medical experts agree. Families are unlikely to see any real change in what’s required or recommended for their children.

The EO frames this as a reduction from 18 recommended diseases to 11. Most press coverage puts the actual number at 17, not 18; the EO reaches 18 by counting a treatment for RSV that isn’t technically a vaccine, a detail that undercuts its own claim to scientific rigor.

The EO also calls for splitting the combined MMR vaccine into three shots, a recommendation that traces back to discredited research linking vaccines to autism. No manufacturer currently makes separate versions. Merck, one of two manufacturers, said developing them could take up to a decade.

The EO may be mostly symbolic on the schedule itself, but it does direct the Justice Department to investigate what kinds of exemptions states allow from school vaccination requirements. All states allow exemptions for medical reasons. Most also allow exemptions for religious reasons, though the process varies widely. Five states allow no religious exemption at all, and are likely to be the DOJ’s target: California, Connecticut, Maine, New York, and West Virginia. Not by coincidence, those five states have some of the country’s highest vaccination rates, and none is where the current measles outbreak is concentrated.

What’s Already Happening

Whatever Trump’s exact motive for continuing to promote misinformation about vaccines, the timing lines up with an administration trying to win back an anti-vaccine base it recently disappointed on peptide and PFAS regulation. Heritage Foundation researcher Jay Richards said the EO could re-energize MAHA voters ahead of the midterms.

The CDC’s most recent report shows real strain already underway. MMR coverage among kindergartners has fallen to 92.4%, below the 95% threshold needed to prevent outbreaks, a level the country hasn’t reached since 2019-2020. Exemptions reached a record 4.2%. About 280,000 kindergartners started school without a documented, complete MMR series. KFF’s Jen Kates says the decline is concentrated in certain pockets of the country, exactly where outbreaks like the current measles surge begin.

What You Can Do

Help your family, friends, and community make sense of this. A vaccine dose is about a tenth of a teaspoon, not a bottle of soda, and decades of research have found no link between childhood vaccines and autism. Your state’s requirements haven’t changed. For the schedule itself, the American Academy of Pediatrics publishes its own schedule, endorsed by 12 major medical organizations, at healthychildren.org.

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Endnotes

1. Full text of Executive Order 14420, including the schedule downgrades, the MMR split, and the Justice Department directive: The White House, “Delivering Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations for Americans,” August 10, 2026.

2. Fact-check of Trump’s “bottle of soda” claim, including the 1,200-dose comparison: PolitiFact, “Doctors Don’t Inject Kids With Soda Bottle’s Worth of Vaccines. Trump’s Claim Is Pants on Fire,” August 11, 2026.

3. March 16 federal court ruling blocking the January schedule change for bypassing the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and the CDC director: NBC News, “Federal Judge Blocks RFK Jr.’s Changes to Childhood Vaccine Schedule,” March 16, 2026.

4. Merck’s statement that separating the MMR vaccine could take up to a decade to reach FDA approval and market, and reporting on the schedule’s actual disease count (17, not 18): Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “What Does the Executive Order on Childhood Vaccines Say?” August 2026.

5. Legal and medical experts stating the order is unlikely to change vaccine mandates families actually follow, and framing from a political scientist that the order is largely symbolic: The 19th News, “What Trump’s Vaccine Order Says About His Relationship With MAHA Moms,” August 2026.

6. Heritage Foundation researcher Jay Richards on the order’s potential to re-energize MAHA voters, and polling on the political risk to Republicans ahead of the midterms: The Hill, “Trump’s Vaccine Policy Complicates Path for Vulnerable Republicans Ahead of Midterm Elections,” August 2026.

7. CDC data on kindergarten MMR coverage, exemption rates, and the number of kindergartners without a complete MMR series for the 2025–2026 school year: CDC, SchoolVaxView, “Vaccination Coverage and Exemptions Among Kindergartners,” updated August 17, 2026.

8. KFF’s Jen Kates connecting declining regional coverage to the current measles outbreak, and the confirmed measles case count for 2026: CNBC/Reuters, “U.S. Kindergarten Vaccine Coverage Falls, CDC Says,” August 17, 2026.

9. State-by-state exemption law variation, and the five states, California, Connecticut, Maine, New York, and West Virginia, that allow only medical exemptions: National Conference of State Legislatures, “States With Religious and Philosophical Exemptions From School Immunization Requirements,” 2026.

10. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ independently published 2026 childhood and adolescent immunization schedule, endorsed by twelve medical organizations: American Academy of Pediatrics / HealthyChildren.org, “AAP Releases Recommended Childhood and Adolescent Immunization Schedule for 2026,” January 26, 2026.

The Supreme Court Did Not Approve Trump’s Mail Ballot Order

On Monday, the Supreme Court, 6-3, lifted one of two injunctions blocking Trump’s March executive order on mail voting. The headlines that followed said the Court “upheld” the order, “backed” it, “handed Trump a win.” Axios ran “Supreme Court upholds Trump’s order to overhaul mail-in ballots.” That is not what happened.

The Court ruled on standing — that the 23 states and D.C. that sued had sued too early, before the Postal Service had issued a rule, so the district judge lacked jurisdiction. It expressly declined to say anything about whether the order is legal. Its own words: “The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell.”

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan, spelled it out in dissent: “Today’s decision does not address whether the President’s attempts to interfere with states’ administration of the November 2026 elections are lawful. Nor does it suggest that the Executive Branch has any constitutional or statutory authority to implement the President’s directives. Instead, today’s decision merely postpones adjudication of those challenges.” Justice Jackson wrote separately that the ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections” and noted that “no judge or Justice” has concluded the order is constitutional. She called it “blatantly unconstitutional” and said the states have not been foreclosed from challenging it.

A separate nationwide injunction is still in place. Judge Indira Talwani issued it on August 11 in a related case, and it still blocks the Postal Service from following Trump’s directives. As Votebeat put it in the only accurate headline I found: Trump’s executive order is still legally blocked from taking effect.

None of this means the order is harmless. It would require DHS to send every state a list of citizens over 18, require states to hand the federal government a list of everyone they’re mailing ballots to, and allow the Postal Service to refuse to deliver ballots in states that don’t comply. Andrew Egger flags the real trap ahead: if the Court tosses the next round of challenges by invoking the Purcell principle — its reluctance to change election rules close to an election — after tossing this round as too early, that’s a closed loop with no moment when anyone is allowed to ask the question.

But as of now, the order is still blocked.

Read more: Votebeat, NPR, Democracy Docket, The Bulwark

The Census Bureau Published Fake Voter Fraud

Catherine Rampell at The Bulwark has spent 20 months telling readers that federal statistical agencies were still trustworthy no matter what the White House said. She has stopped saying it. This week the Census Bureau — an institution that has operated in some form since 1790 — published a report called “Noncitizen Voting in the 2020 Election, A Beginning Analysis,” which appears to have been assembled by political operatives on loan from a Trump-aligned outfit, using confidential administrative records they likely had no legal right to touch.

The findings weren’t officially announced by the bureau. They were announced by Trump on Truth Social: “the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally! … I WON THE ELECTION!” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick amplified it an hour later. The report carries no named authors and doesn’t identify which Census program produced it — unlike every other bureau research publication Rampell has seen. It includes no margins of error, in violation of Census policy, which means it never established that 24,000 is statistically distinguishable from zero. And it relies on voter data purchased from a vendor called DataClear, which Census alum Amy O’Hara notes is not among the regulars in the field.

Robert Reich points out that the Heritage Foundation’s own election fraud database logs fewer than 300 proven cases of fraudulent absentee ballot use across 43 years, from 1982 to 2025. A 2025 Brookings study found about four fraud cases per 10 million mail ballots cast. A February review found roughly 35 noncitizen voting cases nationwide out of 154 million votes in 2024. Noncitizen voting is already a felony punishable by deportation.

Why this matters beyond one bogus report: every nationally representative survey in this country calibrates against Census ground truth. Corrupt it and the corruption propagates into everything. Denice Ross, the former U.S. chief data scientist, calls the mechanism a “data-quality doom loop”: bad data erodes trust in government, which produces worse data.

And this isn’t the first breach. In a January court filing, the administration admitted DOGE staff at Social Security illegally accessed records under a data-sharing agreement with a group hunting voter fraud to overturn election results.

Trump doesn’t require reality to operate. He will cite these fake numbers and use them to advance his election rigging agenda. Despite what he says, voter fraud is extremely rare. Any attempts to convince you otherwise are not done to protect democracy, they are being done to subvert it.

Read more: The Bulwark, Robert Reich, Letters from an American

Canada Walked Away

On Friday night, hours before Trump’s new tariffs took effect, Mark Carney pulled Canada’s negotiators out of the room.

The tariffs — 50% on about $20 billion of Canadian goods, roughly 5% of what Canada ships us, everything from hockey sticks to tongue depressors to cement — were imposed under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. That’s Smoot-Hawley. No president had ever used it. It requires no investigation, has no time limit, and allows duties up to 50% on any country deemed to “discriminate” against U.S. commerce. Carney’s explanation for walking: “last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.” Later, more plainly: the U.S. “asked too much and they offered too little.”

Canada retaliates September 8, targeting steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics. Asked why it felt like he was going to war, Carney answered: “Because we were attacked.” He told Canadians in the spring that “America is trying to break us so that they can own us,” and that it would never happen. He is now opening what he calls intense discussions with the European Union.

Trump’s answer Monday was to escalate into the part of the economy that actually matters. He posted that starting January 1, 2027, he’ll hit imported cars, trucks, auto parts, and steel with 50% tariffs. “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years,” he wrote, and they are “among the worst Nations in the World to deal with.” Canada is the third-largest source of American imports — more than $380 billion in goods last year. Then this morning, he floated the idea of renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who used to admire him, told the AP that Trump has “declared war, economic war against his closest friend and ally.” Ford’s province powers 1.5 million American homes and businesses, and he says everything is on the table — electricity, high-grade nickel, processed uranium. He was specific about the targeting: “The red states we’re gonna hit hard.” And he pointed at the Reagan portrait in the Oval Office and said Reagan would be “spinning around in his grave,” and that Trump should take the picture down.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board called it “the dumbest trade war in history” and said escalating “makes no economic or political sense.” Housing starts fell 12.4% last month, and existing tariffs on Canadian lumber are already driving building costs up. Trump’s dumb trade war will make housing costs skyrocket.

But even if Trump chickens out again, the damage has still been done, because Canada already found other partners.

In January, Carney became the first Canadian prime minister to visit Beijing since 2017 and came home with a deal. Canada cut its tariff on Chinese electric vehicles from 100% to 6.1% — an initial 49,000 cars a year, rising to about 70,000 over five years — in exchange for China dropping its canola seed tariff from 84% to 15%. China is also expected to start investing in Canada’s auto industry within three years. Understand what that breaches. North America had a shared wall against Chinese EVs, 100% tariffs on both sides of the border. Canada just opened a door in it, and once Chinese automakers have dealer networks, service infrastructure and supply chains inside North America, no future president un-rings that bell. Trump’s response at the time: “That’s what he should be doing. It’s a good thing for him to sign a trade deal.”

Europe is the bigger structural loss. In February, Canada became the first non-European country to join the EU’s SAFE initiative — a €150 billion joint procurement fund inside Europe’s €800 billion rearmament program, running through 2030. Canada has been spending as much as 70% of its military equipment budget on American-made gear. Carney has said plainly he wants that number down. The first contract already landed in March. The EU is now Canada’s second-largest trading partner at $178.6 billion a year.

That’s the part that outlasts this presidency. Tariffs come off with a signature. Trade agreements have decade-long tails, and defense procurement relationships take a generation to build and a generation to rebuild. Canada spent eighty years wiring its economy and its military into ours. It is now, deliberately and with public support, wiring itself into somebody else’s. Even if a new administration restores normal order tomorrow, the relationship will never be what it was. This is our loss and China’s win, and we will be paying for it long after the man who caused it is gone.

Read more: The Hill, NBC News, Al Jazeera, Letters from an American, The Bulwark, Semafor

That's your Tuesday. The Supreme Court did not approve Trump's mail ballot order. The Census Bureau published fake voter fraud. Canada walked away.

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Trump Gives Your Money to Apple.

In February, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the 1977 emergency powers law Trump used to impose his global tariffs never gave the president the authority to tax. The tariffs were illegal. Roughly 330,000 importers had already paid about $166 billion under them, across more than 53 million shipments. That money is now being refunded, about $100 billion went out the door by the end of July, with $129 billion approved.

Here’s who’s getting it. Walmart: $2.4 billion. Apple: $2.2 billion. Ford: $1.3 billion. Nike: $986 million. FedEx: $800 million. Amazon: $640 million. General Motors: $500 million. More than 40 companies in the S&P 500 reported a combined $9.6 billion in refunds last quarter alone. Apple said the payout added about 11 cents to its quarterly earnings per share.

Here’s who isn’t getting it: you. The Tax Foundation estimates the tariffs cost the average household about $1,000 last year. Yale’s Budget Lab puts it at $1,100. Customs rules recognize only the company that paid the government at the border. Walmart paid customs, you paid Walmart, and customs is now paying Walmart back. There is no federal mechanism for reaching the person at the end of that chain.

So what are the companies doing with it? Apple says the money goes toward its U.S. investment projects and has made no commitment to customers. Walmart says lower prices, without naming an amount or a date. Nintendo argues that consumers agreed to the tariff-driven price increases when they made their purchases, and are therefore “not entitled” to any of the rebate. Amazon is the rare exception — it found a limited set of cases where it can trace an import charge to a specific buyer, and refunded those automatically.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called this outcome in advance. In February he predicted the rebates would be “the ultimate corporate welfare.” He was right. He just didn’t do anything about it.

The polling on this is not close. Roughly six in ten voters disapproved of the tariffs. A Harris Poll found that 72% of Americans believe the tariffs raised their own prices. And in Data for Progress polling for the Groundwork Collaborative, 78% said consumers should get at least a portion of the refunds. Only 8% said corporations should keep all of it.

Trump instituted an illegal tax on Americans and is now giving your money back to the largest corporations in America, several of which have been paying for access since inauguration day. It’s that simple. A New York woman named Tyasia Johns has already filed the class action. Every Democrat in the country should be supporting her.

Read more: Morning Brew, CNN, Fortune, Newsweek, The Message Box

The Debt Hit $40 Trillion. Guess Who Collects the Interest.

On Tuesday, the national debt crossed $40.05 trillion. It took this country 192 years to borrow its first trillion. It took about five months to borrow this one. The CBO projected in 2023 we wouldn’t hit $40 trillion until fiscal 2028. We got there two years early. American excellence indeed!

Interest on that debt has reached about $1.17 trillion this fiscal year, up 15% from last year. That’s more than the United States spends on national defense. More than it spends on Medicare. It is now the second-largest line in the federal budget, behind only Social Security. July alone produced a $432.3 billion deficit, the worst single month since March 2021.

Ask Bessent why, and he’ll tell you. He has now conceded the trajectory and blamed three things: the Iran war, the tariff refunds, and the One Big Beautiful Bill. Read that list again. The war he started. The refunds going to Apple. And the bill that cut Medicaid and SNAP while making the corporate tax cuts permanent. The Treasury Secretary just described the entire Trump agenda as the cause of the fastest debt expansion in American history.

But that’s not it. Robert Reich traced where that trillion in annual interest actually goes. About 70% of the debt is held domestically, and nearly half of that sits with mutual funds, pension funds, insurance companies, and banks. The richest 1% of American households hold roughly 35.6% of all financial assets — meaning they collect, at minimum, a third of the interest payments on the national debt. And the debt was built substantially by cutting their taxes: tax cuts since 2001 have reduced federal revenue by $10.6 trillion, with 65% of the benefit flowing to the richest fifth.

Under Eisenhower the top marginal rate was 91%, and wealthy Americans financed the government by paying taxes. Today the richest 400 Americans pay an effective total rate of about 24% — and the government borrows the difference back from them, at interest, forever.

Republicans have run on debt panic for a generation. They now own the record, the interest flows upward, and the legal debt ceiling sits at $41.1 trillion — roughly $1 trillion of headroom, which at this pace is a matter of months. Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said this debt “finds its way to the pocketbooks of people one way or another.”

Read more: CNBC, NPR, CNN, Robert Reich, Letters from an American

Trump Threatened to Bomb Oman

The 60-day clock Trump set at Versailles ran out Monday with no deal on the Strait of Hormuz and no deal on Iran’s nuclear program. His response was to threaten to bomb the country mediating.

“If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” he told Fox News’s Trey Yingst. Asked later whether he’d lost patience, he added: “I don’t think they’ve behaved very well, but we’d handle them very easily, just like we do other things.”

Retired Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, writing in The Bulwark, laid out what Oman actually is to us. It was the first Persian Gulf state to grant American forces basing access, in 1980. It hosted Operation Earnest Will during the Tanker War. It opened the deep-water port at Duqm to U.S. warships in 2019. And it brokered the secret Washington-Tehran channel that produced the 2015 nuclear deal. Hertling’s line: “Oman hasn’t been in the way. It has often been the way.”

Why threaten them now? Because Oman and Iran are close to their own arrangement on the strait, one that doesn’t run through Washington. Iran said Monday it had reached a deal with Muscat. A U.S. official told Semafor the fear is exactly that: “Most countries in the region would be fine with that. But Trump really wants to say he opened up the strait without a direct toll.”

Meanwhile, the strait tells you how the war is currently going. Before it started, roughly 130 vessels passed daily. Three went through last Sunday. CENTCOM insists the strait “remains open for commercial vessel transit.” Trump says he’ll “pretty soon” be declaring it American territory and has posted a Truth Social map labeling it “New US Territory.”

And then there’s the arsenal. Zeteo reports that two people with knowledge of classified inventory data put the share of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles expended in this war at “at least the high nineties” percent. Asked how many remain, a U.S. government official answered: “We have some left?” That builds on Reuters reporting that the Army has used “virtually all” of both. CNN reports close to half the Tomahawks are gone. These are the weapons that let us hit hardened targets without putting pilots over enemy air defenses. Trump’s response: the U.S. has “far more munitions than anyone in the world,” the depletion is “peanuts,” and leakers “are being hunted down.”

The Pentagon revised its own war dead from 18 down to 14 overnight. The Intercept documented a casualty undercount one official called a cover-up. CENTCOM says the strait is open; three ships went through. Stars and Stripes documented sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln, nine months deployed, describing suicidal ideation. When Trump was asked about it, he said “No, they’re not,” and called the deployment “not nearly long enough.”

Every correction runs the same direction. Fewer dead. More open. Better supplied. Happier sailors. One of Zeteo’s sources put it best: “CENTCOM is pissing on your leg and saying it’s rainy.”

Read more: CNN, Axios, CBS News, The Bulwark, Zeteo

Only 28% of Them Voted for Trump’s Candidates

Nearly 300,000 people turned out Tuesday for Republican primaries in Wyoming and two Florida congressional districts where Trump had endorsed. Just 28% voted for the candidate he told them to.

All three picks lost. Rep. Cory Mills went down in Florida’s 7th, weighed down by a House Ethics probe and a DOJ inquiry into his finances. Catalina Lauf lost the 19th. Megan Degenfelder lost the Wyoming governor’s primary. Republican primary voters have now rejected 10 Trump-endorsed candidates for statewide office or Congress this cycle — six in August alone. His picks for governor in Georgia, Iowa, and Minnesota all lost earlier.

Trump’s overall endorsement record this year is still 313 of 330, about 96%, but most of those are unopposed or token races. What changed is what happens when the endorsement gets tested against a real opponent. In September he bragged his record was “like 399-0.” On Wednesday morning he was publicly minimizing his own support for Mills.

The thing that kept congressional Republicans in line for a decade was fear of a primary. If the endorsement can’t deliver a Wyoming governor’s race, that fear starts to evaporate, and a lame-duck president at 33% approval has nothing else to enforce discipline with.

The other Tuesday number is the one Democrats should point at. In Pennsylvania’s 12th District state House special — held by Republicans since 1999, in territory Trump carried by 18 — Democrat Brandon Dukes leads by 88 votes. Across 109 contested specials over 21 months, Democrats have run an average of 12.5 points ahead of Harris’s 2024 numbers in the same seats. And turnout: nearly 800,000 Democrats voted in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary, over 1.5 million in Michigan, roughly 2.3 million in the Texas Senate primary.

One side is showing up. The other is starting to move on from its leader.

Read more: CNN, Washington Post, US News, The Parnas Perspective, Robert Hubbell

That’s your Thursday. You paid $1,100 in illegal tariffs and Apple got $2.2 billion back. The debt hit $40 trillion. Trump threatened to bomb the country mediating his own war. And only 28% of Republican primary voters did what he told them.

The midterms are 75 days away.

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