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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FDA recognizes that industry has expertise to offer and has a long-standing practice of allowing an industry seat in a non-voting role. Using waivers to seat financially conflicted voting members isn’t new either; the practice dates to the 1990s and has continued across both parties. What’s different here is the scale: eight of fourteen voting members, appointed together in one wave, most with financial ties. Not surprising, then, that they used their position to advance their businesses. The argument they made for those votes, that a prescription requirement moves people out of the dangerous unregulated market, doubles as their business plan: bolstering the clinics several of these committee members already run.

Appointing industry representatives with a direct conflict of interest is not just happening at the FDA. At the EPA, Administrator Lee Zeldin appointed four new members to the agency’s Science Advisory Board: one from Corteva, one from Dow, and two from Chemours. Three of the four have a direct financial interest in PFAS, the forever chemicals the board is supposed to evaluate. The following month, the EPA proposed rescinding its own 2024 drinking water limits on four PFAS chemicals linked to cancer and liver damage, reversing its position in ongoing litigation to side with chemical companies, including Corteva and Chemours, and water utilities that had sued to overturn the standards.

Kennedy introduced MAHA, Make America Healthy Again, on August 23, 2024, when he ended his own presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump, delivering a coalition built on one concern: that federal health decisions were being written by the industries they were supposed to regulate. Vaccine-safety skeptics were at its core, but it also appealed to parents worried about chemicals in food and water, and people convinced that the pharmaceutical industry had captured the agencies meant to check it. That coalition helped elect Trump in 2024.

The appointment of industry representatives to federal committees has not escaped MAHA’s attention. In August 2025, more than 200 MAHA activists wrote to President Trump opposing provisions in a federal spending bill that would shield pesticide makers from liability, warning that doing so “may well cost you the House majority in the midterms.” Six months later, in February 2026, Trump signed an executive order boosting domestic glyphosate production.

Nine days after the peptide vote, Trump signed an executive order on vaccines, a core issue for MAHA. The order narrowed the recommended childhood vaccine schedule from 18 to 11 diseases. It is not clear the order is enforceable, so this is a symbolic win for MAHA.

Two plus years into Trump, and we are able to see what the MAHA agenda actually is. Their attacks on vaccines are underway; it has not gotten rid of corporate self-interest prevailing over what’s safe to eat, drink, or inject.

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Endnotes

1. FDA advisory committee composition, vote outcome, and scientist objections: NBC News, FDA panel, with ties to the peptide industry, recommends easing restrictions on four of the compounds

2. Named committee members with financial ties to peptide clinics: Tech Times, citing Associated Press reporting, FDA Panel Backs Peptide BPC-157 for Compounding in 8-6 Vote Over Scientists’ Objections

3. FDA’s standard practice of a non-voting Industry Representative seat: U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Guidance for Industry: Advisory Committees

4. History of conflict-of-interest waivers across administrations: American Enterprise Institute, FDA Advisory Committees and Conflicts of Interest

5. EPA Science Advisory Board appointments, Corteva/Dow/Chemours affiliations: Society of Environmental Journalists, EPA Adds More Pesticide Industry Reps to Science Board

6. EPA’s reversal in PFAS drinking water litigation: Earthjustice, Trump EPA Proposes to Eliminate and Delay Protections from Toxic Forever Chemicals in Drinking Water

7. Kennedy’s endorsement of Trump and introduction of MAHA, August 23, 2024: NBC News, RFK Jr. joins Trump onstage in Arizona rally hours after endorsing

8. MAHA activists’ August 2025 letter to Trump: Reuters, via AOL, ‘MAHA’ activists urge Trump to oppose limits on pesticide regulation

9. February 2026 glyphosate executive order: NewsNation, Trump seeks to boost controversial herbicide glyphosate, drawing MAHA ire

10. Marion Nestle’s “MAHA versus the realities of MAGA”: Food Politics by Marion Nestle, Update on the MAHA Policy Report

11. August 10, 2026 vaccine executive order, schedule reduced from 18 to 11 diseases: The White House, Fact Sheet: President Trump Delivers Gold Standard Childhood Vaccine Recommendations

12. Legal experts on the order’s limited enforceability: CNN, What Trump’s executive order means for vaccinations this fall
    

Crowley Won. Now Meet Tom Tiffany.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley is the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, beating Francesca Hong 39.8% to 39.4% — roughly 3,200 votes with 98% counted. The AP called it at 2:34 a.m. after Hong conceded. Crowley had dropped out of the race a month ago after failing to gain traction, then re-entered days later with Tony Evers’s endorsement. In late July, he was polling in single digits. He is now the nominee, and if he wins in November he’ll be Wisconsin’s first Black governor.

The polls showed Hong with a 22-point lead going into Tuesday’s primary, one week after Michigan’s polls overestimated El-Sayed’s margin, adding fuel to the left vs. center debate within the Democratic Party.

For my take, this wasn’t as much about left versus center as it was a Democratic electorate obsessed with winning. Hong spent the final stretch defending deleted tweets in an uneven CNN interview while running almost no television ads, and Crowley and the Republicans blanketed the airwaves. The Bulwark framed the whole cycle around primary voters who “care less about ideological purity than beating Republicans.” As the spotlight grew on Hong, she just didn’t seem as impressive a candidate. Her loss says less about her ideology than about candidate quality — though it’s worth noting she also lost by 0.4 points while Kelda Roys pulled nearly 11% in Dane County, splitting the left’s own base.

One pattern has held across the primaries. The left’s candidates keep struggling with Black voters. In Michigan, Stevens beat El-Sayed by eight points in districts where more than 15% of the population is Black, and won seven of the state’s twelve largest counties with significant Black populations — Wayne, Saginaw, Genesee — by an average of 8.5 points. July polling had El-Sayed at 21% among Black voters. He is the first Democrat to win a Michigan primary statewide without carrying Wayne, Oakland, or Macomb since Bernie Sanders in 2016. In Wisconsin, Sabato’s Crystal Ball found the same shape: Crowley’s Milwaukee coalition ran through the city’s Black wards, while Hong’s came from younger, whiter neighborhoods and Latino pockets.

Crowley is Black and Milwaukee’s county executive, so some of that is a hometown effect, but the geography tells the same story in both states. The “leftist” candidates are winning young, college-educated, urban and campus-town voters, and losing the Black voters and non-college areas that decide general elections in Michigan and Wisconsin.

That’s a problem, because the central argument from the left wing of the party is that an economic populist message will pull working-class voters back. So far it’s pulling college towns. It doesn’t mean the message can’t work — it means somebody should be figuring out why it isn’t yet.

But the primary is over. So let’s talk about the man Crowley has to beat, because Tom Tiffany is not some run-of-the-mill Republican.

Tom Tiffany tried to overturn the election in his own state.

In December 2020, Tiffany signed onto the Texas lawsuit — Ken Paxton’s attempt to throw out the presidential results in four swing states, including Wisconsin, and hand the decision to Republican legislatures. Tom Tiffany asked the Supreme Court to invalidate the votes of the people who elected him.

Then, on January 6, 2021, hours after the mob was cleared from the Capitol, Tiffany voted against certifying Biden’s victory in Arizona and Pennsylvania. He was one of 147. Most of Wisconsin’s delegation, Republicans included, voted the other way. And he told WISN he planned to vote to overturn Wisconsin’s results too. That vote never happened because the insurrection ran out the clock. His explanation, in his own words: those states “really have a lot of fixing to do with their election systems.”

When Congress later tried to prevent a repeat by reforming the Electoral Count Act, Tiffany voted no and called it “a solution in search of a problem.” Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul’s assessment of Tiffany and the others who tried to upend the results: “It’s a betrayal of their oath of office.”

This is the man Republicans just nominated to administer Wisconsin’s elections. Wisconsin decided the presidency in 2016, 2020, and 2024. In 2028, the governor of Wisconsin will sit at the center of any dispute over its electoral votes. Tiffany has already shown you what he’d do.

The rest of the file.

On abortion, he co-sponsored the Heartbeat Protection Act, a six-week national ban. As a state senator, he voted for a 20-week ban with no exceptions for rape or incest and criminal penalties for providers, and said afterward “that was the right vote to take.” As a member of the Republican Study Committee he co-authored a budget endorsing the Life at Conception Act — fetal personhood, a national ban from the moment of conception, overriding state law. He called Dobbs “a historic victory for human rights.” He voted against codifying the right to contraception. Then, when he decided to run statewide, he deleted the abortion sections from his website and started talking about “reasonable restrictions.”

On health care, he voted for the budget bill that gutted Medicaid, and in January 2026 he voted against extending the ACA tax credits that 60,000 Wisconsinites rely on. He’s called the Affordable Care Act a “problem” in a state with more than 300,000 marketplace enrollees. He voted to make the corporate tax cuts permanent. He’s defended the tariffs. And per the Democratic Governors Association’s new opposition file, he helped block the release of the Epstein files while dismissing the survivors’ fight for them as an attempt to “change the subject.”

Crowley needs to make Tiffany answer for this record.

Did Joe Biden win Wisconsin in 2020? Do you regret signing the Texas lawsuit that tried to throw out your own constituents’ votes? Would you certify a Democratic presidential win in this state in 2028? Do you still support a national abortion ban from conception? Will you commit to exceptions for rape and incest? Why did you delete the abortion page from your website? Will you vote to extend the ACA tax credits your constituents lost? Do you support Trump’s executive order restricting mail voting — in the state where you’ve voted absentee yourself?

Eighty-two days. Tom Tiffany has never had to answer for any of this before a statewide electorate. Make this the year he does.

Read more: NBC News, PBS Wisconsin, Talking Points Memo, Wisconsin Watch, The Cap Times, The Message Box

Trump Hid in a Catering Truck and Left His Cabinet as Bait

On July 8, after the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump walked up the stairs of Air Force One in front of the cameras. Then he went out a different door, got into a catering truck, was driven across the tarmac, and flew home on a smaller military jet. The plane he’d been photographed boarding took off anyway.

Still on it: Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Stephen Miller, Steven Cheung, Will Scharf, White House aide Monica Crowley, and the entire traveling press pool. None of the reporters knew. The reason for the switch was an Iranian assassination threat relayed by Israel — the New York Times reported a specific threat involving a surface-to-air missile, with someone spotted near the summit carrying a shoulder-fired launcher.

Rubio and Bessent are fourth and fifth in the line of presidential succession. A senior official told the AP that Rubio knew about the switch and the threat and stayed on the plane anyway. Bessent, the official said, probably knew but not for certain. Nobody has explained why the plane was permitted to fly at all if the danger was real enough to justify the catering truck.

At the time, Trump told reporters the second jet had been sent ahead so U.S. troops in eastern England could get a look at the new Air Force One. That was a lie. He’s since confirmed the whole thing and, per Zeteo, he and senior officials have been privately laughing about the coverage.

Eighteen American service members have died in this war. Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln, deployed more than 200 days with no port call, have reportedly tried to jump overboard. And the commander in chief of that military hid in a food cart and let his own cabinet fly as bait. Loyalty in this administration runs exactly one direction, and everyone on that tarmac now knows which direction it is.

Read more: Washington Post, The Hill, AP, MS NOW, The Bulwark, Zeteo

Trump Signed an Order to Cut Childhood Vaccines by Seven

On Monday, with RFK Jr. standing beside him, Trump signed an executive order titled “Delivering Gold-Standard Vaccine Recommendations for Americans.” It cuts the list of diseases all children are recommended to be vaccinated against from 18 to 11 — seven vaccines removed from universal recommendation, including hepatitis A, hepatitis B, COVID, and flu, which move to “high-risk groups” and “shared clinical decision-making.” It directs that the MMR shot be split into three separate injections given at different visits, against the scientific consensus and for no medical reason. And it directs the Justice Department to pressure states to reduce school vaccination requirements.

Trump used the signing to repeat, falsely, that vaccines are linked to autism, and described the childhood schedule as pumping “vats” into children. “We’re doing 20 percent of that at each visit,” he said.

RFK Jr. tried this in January, cutting the schedule unilaterally without his own advisory panel, and a federal judge blocked it in March. The same cuts came back seven months later with a presidential signature on them, and they’ll almost certainly be challenged again.

Robert Hubbell called the order a “publicity stunt,” and on the narrow legal question he has a point. An executive order can’t rewrite the CDC schedule by itself. The Vaccines for Children program, which covers roughly half of American kids, is protected by statute because it keys off the CDC advisory committee. Blue Cross Blue Shield and CVS both said they’d keep covering recommended pediatric vaccines without copays, “at least for the time being.”

But the goal here is to create as much confusion as possible. A parent in a pediatrician’s waiting room this fall doesn’t know whether hepatitis B is still recommended, whether their insurer will cover the MMR if it’s now three visits instead of one, or whether the doctor telling them to vaccinate is following federal guidance or defying it. The result of all of this will be fewer vaccines given and more sick children.

Read more: CNN, NBC News, NPR, Robert Hubbell, What A Day

That's your Thursday. Crowley won and now faces a man who tried to throw out Wisconsin's presidential results. Trump hid in a catering truck and let two cabinet secretaries fly as decoys. And the childhood vaccine schedule just got cut by seven.

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El-Sayed Won.

The Associated Press called it this morning: Abdul El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, beating establishment favorite Rep. Haley Stevens by roughly a point. He won a swing-state Senate primary against the entire weight of the party apparatus and the most expensive Democratic primary in American history.

Roughly $60 million in outside money backed Stevens — a record for a Democratic primary. More than half of it, over $30 million, came from AIPAC's United Democracy Project, which broke its own single-race spending record on attack ads against El-Sayed. Axios put the outside-spending disadvantage at 12 to 1. And El-Sayed still won — while out-raising Stevens more than two to one in direct contributions, $4.6 million to $2.2 million in the second quarter.

He also did the thing the consultants said was suicide: he ran at the money instead of away from it. When Stevens voted with Republicans against an amendment to condition military aid to Israel, El-Sayed made it the campaign: "She chose to side with AIPAC and Republicans to continue to fund a war machine that has taken the loved ones of many Michigan families." His campaign cited Data for Progress polling showing 86% of Michigan primary voters were less inclined to back a candidate supporting continued funding to Israel. In Dearborn, crowds chanted "Down with AIPAC" at his rallies. His campaign manager's line last night: "This was always going to be the many versus the money."

This wasn't a safe blue district where a progressive could win on turnout. This was a statewide race in a genuine battleground, with control of the Senate riding on it, and AIPAC emptied the clip. Zeteo's Prem Thakker, reporting from the ground, called the night "an astonishing failure for AIPAC."

I didn’t have a particular dog in this race, other than my strong distaste for AIPAC. El-Sayed is closer to my personal politics than Stevens is, but a Stevens victory wouldn’t have been catastrophic. This primary was ugly. Both candidates sank below the acceptable threshold at times. The Democratic infighting of it all was incredibly counterproductive. And now, like James Talarico in Texas, El-Sayed has a huge job on his hands to win the support of Haley Stevens’ supporters. To be clear, Stevens has a role to play in that as well, but the onus is on El-Sayed to earn their votes.

Mallory McMorrow, an early rival of El-Sayed, who took 4% after suspending her campaign, endorsed El-Sayed: "We head to November together as a unified party." This is the right posture. I hope more follow her lead. Because regardless of where you land on the Democratic infighting scale, none of it matters if the Republicans hold the Senate. My great hope is that this Michigan Primary ends, or at least pauses until after the midterms, this so-called Democratic civil war. Now is the time to focus all our energy and attention on defeating Republicans. Which brings me to Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent in the Michigan Senate race. A man who has enjoyed the absence of the spotlight for too long. Let’s talk about him.

Mike Rogers, Florida Man.

Mike Rogers lives in Florida. Not "lived." Not "has a vacation place." In 2024, while running for Senate in Michigan, he was registered to vote in Cape Coral, Florida. He left Michigan more than a decade ago, but his record didn’t.

Rogers spent fourteen years in Congress. He voted against the Affordable Care Act and repeatedly to repeal it — in a state where the uninsured rate fell from 11% to 5% under that law, and where nearly two million people have pre-existing conditions. He backed the Ryan budget that would have turned Medicare into a voucher program and raised the eligibility age from 65 to 67, shifting costs onto seniors. He supported partially privatizing Social Security — a plan that would have put retirees' savings in the stock market right before it lost half its value in 2008. He voted for the Medicare Part D provision barring the government from negotiating drug prices, then defended it, then voted against lifting it — after taking more than $1 million from the pharmaceutical and health products industry over his career. He voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Twice. He voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act. Twice. He voted against repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell and against a fully inclusive Violence Against Women Act, and finished his House career with a 0 out of 100 on every HRC scorecard ever issued while he served. On abortion, he co-sponsored legislation to strip FDA approval from mifepristone, backed fetal personhood, and celebrated Dobbs — in a state where voters wrote reproductive rights into the constitution by 13 points. He couldn't vote on Prop 3 himself. He was still registered to vote in Florida.

Mike Rogers left Congress in 2015 and then got very, very rich. In 2013, his financial disclosure showed $380,000 of income. By 2023, that grew to $11.3 million. The former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee sat on the board of IronNet Cybersecurity from 2015 to 2023, advised Forgepoint Capital — a venture firm managing over $1 billion that invests in cybersecurity and AI companies holding federal contracts — from 2018 through at least August 2025, and picked up work tied to several Saudi companies. If he wins, he arrives in the Senate with a portfolio full of industries that live on the federal contracts he'd help write.

Two days ago, Semafor caught up with him outside a beachfront restaurant in Grand Haven. How would he vote on the Senate measures condemning Trump's tariffs?

"I don't know."

Where does he stand on the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization slush fund?

"I'm not talking about any of that stuff. I don't care. I mean, I care."

On Trump's war with Iran?

Rogers said he'd heard "hardly anything" from voters about it.

Rogers wants to run a small, local, inoffensive campaign about potholes and water quality while the man who gave him his "complete and total endorsement" runs the country into a ditch. He lost to Elissa Slotkin by 19,000 votes in 2024 by keeping his head down. He's running the same play.

So make him answer. Every debate, every town hall, every local news hit: Do you support tariffs that raise costs for Michigan manufacturers? Will you vote to end the Iran war? Do you still want to repeal the ACA? Would you have confirmed Todd Blanche? Do you support Trump's executive order restricting mail voting in your own state? Is birthright citizenship in the Constitution? Where do you actually live?

90 days, Democrats. Time to get on the offensive.

Read more: The Intercept, The Hill, Axios, Zeteo, The Message Box

Blanche Got His Deal.

Todd Blanche cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee 12-10 on Tuesday after Cornyn and Tillis got the written commitment they demanded.

Late Sunday, Blanche rescinded the May 18 order that created the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” — the taxpayer pot designed to compensate people who claim the government was weaponized against them, including January 6 defendants. “This order establishes, beyond any doubt, that there is no fund,” he wrote. But as NBC News found, the only person who signed the rescission was Blanche. The underlying agreement that created the fund was signed by lawyers for Trump, two of his sons, the Trump Organization, and the head of the IRS. One party to a five-party contract announced on X that the contract is void. Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s assessment: “It is a sham and a fraud on the Congress.”

And the rescission doesn’t touch what actually matters. It doesn’t claw back settlements already paid. It doesn’t disturb the tax-audit immunity Blanche personally signed for Trump and his family — the arrangement Judge Kathleen Williams nullified last month while referring Blanche to the bar, and which Aaron Parnas estimates spares Trump roughly $100 million in back taxes. Nothing stops a future attorney general, or Blanche himself, from reissuing the order.

Susan Collins announced she’ll vote no on the floor. Hundreds of his former colleagues signed a petition calling him unfit; the New York City Bar Association filed a formal objection; Epstein survivors testified against him; a federal judge referred him for discipline. If he’s confirmed anyway, remember that the entire accountability apparatus of the American legal profession said no, and the Senate said yes to a man whose qualification for running the Justice Department is that he used to be the defendant’s lawyer.

Read more: CNBC, NBC News, The New Republic, Letters from an American, The Parnas Perspective

Trump Prosecuted a Man for His Own Contractor’s Bad Paint Job

For weeks, Trump blamed vandals for the peeling coating and algae in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — a renovation whose contractor, Atlantic Industrial Coating, he hand-picked himself. He demanded arrests. The DOJ delivered one: Davey Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist. Then Hearn’s lawyers asked for the grand jury transcripts, and on Friday, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro moved to dismiss the case, conceding in court that the evidence wasn’t there.

A prosecutor who charges an innocent man to match a presidential talking point, then folds when discovery approaches, has committed a serious abuse of office. Trump said Pirro “choked” and “folded like an umbrella.” He is reportedly weighing firing her. Pirro and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum were spotted entering the White House hours later. Even Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana understood the actual lesson: “You better not go before a federal judge and make allegations you can’t back up.”

Brian Tyler Cohen’s point about the coverage is the one worth sitting with: legacy outlets described this as a case being “dropped,” a prosecutor who “choked,” a story that “didn’t hold up.” The plain word is lied. Trump lied about vandalism to cover for his own contractor’s shoddy work, the Justice Department indicted a man to make the lie true, and the prosecutor is now in trouble for refusing to keep it going. This is what weaponized law enforcement looks like. A canoeist and a paint job.

Read more: The New Republic, Democracy Now, Letters from an American, Pod Save America

They’re Writing the 2026 Steal in Public

Zeteo cataloged 19 ways Trump and Republicans are working to rig and steal the midterms: voter purges, gutting election security infrastructure, threats of arrests and raids at polling places, and targeted attacks on immigrant and Black voting power. A companion piece sketches the endgame — a scenario in which January 3, 2027 becomes the new January 6, with Republicans challenging Democratic House wins to hold the chamber even in defeat.

I’ve tracked the pieces here as they’ve come: the SAVE Act, the mail-voting executive order now sitting on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, the CMS memo chilling nursing-home voting assistance, the census filing, the Georgia election board hiring deniers with subpoena power. Each one looked small. Together they’re a system. And Brian Beutler argues Senate Democrats just passed on their last pre-election opportunity to force a real confrontation over it.

The counter isn’t complicated, and it hasn’t changed since I first wrote it in July: win by a margin too big to rig, and refuse to be surprised.

Read more: Zeteo, Off Message, David Pakman

That’s your Wednesday. El-Sayed beat $30 million of AIPAC money in a swing state. Blanche cleared committee on a rescission only he signed. Trump prosecuted an Olympic canoeist to cover for his own contractor. And the plan to contest the midterms is being written where you can read it.

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To understand why this subsidy existed, and what its end actually changes, you have to go back to how Medicare’s drug benefit was built in the first place.

A Program With No Government Option

When Congress created Medicare Part D in 2006, it did something Medicare’s other parts don’t do: it handed the entire program to private insurance companies. There is no government-run version of Part D the way there is for hospital coverage under Part A. Every senior on traditional Medicare who wants drug coverage enrolls in a private plan, and each insurer decides which drugs it covers and at what price. To keep premiums down, the government agreed to assume some of the risk by paying 80% of a senior’s catastrophic drug costs.

Capping Costs, Shifting Risk

In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act capped what seniors pay out of pocket for prescription drugs to $2,000 a year starting in 2025. In addition, the percentage that Medicare paid toward catastrophic drug costs was reduced from 80% to 20%, requiring the insurance company to cover 60% of that cost and the drug manufacturers to cover 20%. In short, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, seniors pay less, the government pays less, and insurers absorb most of the difference.

To help insurers adjust to that new liability, the government created a temporary subsidy in 2024, paying insurers directly to soften the transition. This is the subsidy that the Trump Administration just cut.

What We Don’t Know Yet

This change will take place at the beginning of 2027, a year ahead of the original schedule. So, at this time we do not know what the effect will be on seniors’ drug insurance premium. CMS says most seniors will see an increase of $10 to $20 per month. KFF’s Juliette Cubanski, director of the organization’s Medicare policy program, told the Washington Post it’s “certainly possible” some beneficiaries could face “relatively steep” increases without the subsidy in place.

The Wrong Focus

The focus has been on how to divide the cost of expensive drugs among seniors, insurers, and taxpayers. Almost none of it has been about lowering what the drugs actually cost.

Most wealthy countries negotiate drug prices directly and pay less for the same medicines as a result. The United States has only just begun to do this. Medicare’s new negotiating authority has cut prices by 38% to 85% on the 25 drugs negotiated so far in its first two rounds. There is also a working proof of concept already inside the federal government: the VA negotiates directly with manufacturers for about 9 million veterans, roughly a third the size of the traditional Medicare population buying separate drug coverage, but as a single buyer instead of hundreds of competing plans. Except for that negotiating authority, and one CMS rule still working through the approval process, the administration’s other drug-pricing efforts have moved through executive pressure and voluntary manufacturer deals, not binding law or finalized regulation.

However, there are some new efforts to actually lower drug prices in a handful of Democratic-led states. Five states have recently established their own efforts to lower drug costs by creating boards with authority to cap what can be charged for expensive drugs. This work is still in its early stages, and no board has yet forced a price down, but it’s a genuinely different model than anything happening at the federal level.

Stay tuned. When open enrollment brings real 2027 numbers, we’ll look at what actually changed for the people paying it.

An Underused Program

In researching this post, I learned about a program worth knowing regardless of what happens to premiums: Extra Help, Medicare’s Low-Income Subsidy, which waives the Part D premium and deductible entirely for anyone earning up to about $23,475 a year individually or $31,725 as a couple, with modest asset limits. CMS estimates two to three million eligible seniors haven’t applied. Applying at ssa.gov takes about ten minutes. If you know someone who might qualify – a family member, a neighbor, a fellow congregant - it’s worth sharing directly or mentioning to your church, library, or senior center as something worth posting.

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Endnotes

CMS ending the Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration, Oz “bailout” statement: KFF, CMS’s Decision to End Temporary Subsidies to Medicare’s Stand-Alone Drug Plans Could Mean Larger Premium Increases for Some Beneficiaries Next Year

Cubanski’s “relatively steep” quote to the Washington Post: FOX 5 DC, Medicare Part D subsidy program will end in 2027: Here’s what to know

Original 2024 creation of the Premium Stabilization Demonstration: CMS, News Alert: CMS Releases Preliminary 2025 Medicare Part D Bid Information and Announces Premium Stabilization Demonstration

IRA Part D redesign and the catastrophic-phase reinsurance shift from 80% to 20-40%: Congressional Research Service, Medicare Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration

Medicare drug price negotiation results, rounds one and two: CMS, CMS Delivers Savings for Seniors on 15 Major Drugs for Cancer and Chronic Disease

VA direct price negotiation and purchasing structure: U.S. Government Accountability Office, Prescription Drugs: Department of Veterans Affairs Paid About Half as Much

MFN pricing as executive action and voluntary deals, GLOBE/GUARD proposed rule status: Crowell & Moring, Trump Administration Pursues MFN Pricing for Prescription Drugs

State Prescription Drug Affordability Boards, Illinois’s failed effort, implementation status: MultiState, Prescription Drug Affordability Boards Face Implementation Hurdles

Extra Help 2026 income and asset limits, underenrollment estimate: CoveredUSA, Medicare Extra Help Eligibility 2026: Income and Asset Limits

Owning a home has long been a central marker of the American Dream, proof that hard work adds up to something stable. That marker is slipping out of reach for a generation. Younger Americans, watching home prices outpace their wages for years running, are increasingly skeptical they will ever own one at all.

There is broad agreement about the underlying problem: the country has not built enough housing, and that shortage has pushed prices up. Two barriers explain why. The first is approvals: developers can spend years navigating environmental review, zoning rules, and permitting before construction even starts. The second is financing: even an approved project still has to make financial sense, and if the costs are too high or the money too hard to secure, it does not get built.

Rather than pass a handful of narrow fixes that would each do little on their own, this bill goes after the system that produces both barriers.

Cutting the Red Tape

Approvals are often the first place a project stalls. The new law waives federal environmental review for infill development, building on vacant or underused lots within existing neighborhoods rather than open land at a city’s edge, and for adaptive reuse, converting existing buildings like offices into housing. It also requires every community that receives federal housing money to publish a public list of vacant land the local government itself owns that could be developed.

Local governments retain authority over zoning, the rules that determine what can be built where and how dense it can be, and the ability to weigh that authority against environmental review, resident input, and health and safety. The new law tries to make it worthwhile for a community to reconsider those rules, whether that means allowing more units per lot, streamlining permitting, or approving projects faster. It does this two ways: a new competitive grant program, which still needs Congress to appropriate money before it exists in practice, and small increases or decreases in Community Development Block Grant funding, an existing program that already receives annual funding, tied to how quickly a community permits new housing.

Making the Math Work

The second barrier is financing. The Federal Housing Administration insures apartment loans so private lenders can offer better terms than they otherwise would. Its per-unit insurance cap had been stuck at levels set decades ago, in some cases as low as $70,200, while construction costs kept climbing. The new law raises that cap to $308,880 and ties future increases to actual building costs. It also lets local governments spend existing federal block grant money on building new affordable housing, not just repairing what already exists, and loosens eligibility in a separate program that helps finance affordable rentals. These are changes to programs that are already funded and already moving money.

What Got Traded Away

The Senate and the House had very different ideas about the role of corporate-owned housing. The Senate, shaped in large part by Senator Elizabeth Warren, wanted to limit corporations’ ability to hold onto the homes they built by requiring them to sell to individual families, with renters getting first chance to buy. The House wanted corporations to have a bigger role in the housing market. What survived is a ban on large investors buying existing homes on the open market, but nothing stops them from building and holding new ones indefinitely. Because only the largest firms can afford to hold thousands of homes as long-term rentals, the practical effect favors companies like Blackstone and Invitation Homes over smaller investors trying to grow into the market.

Still Not Enough

While this legislation moves in the right direction, additional efforts are needed to fix the housing sector. In fact, two federal policies are making it more difficult to build new affordable housing: immigration and tariffs. Immigration enforcement has pulled construction workers off job sites across the country this year, shrinking the workforce this law needs to succeed. Tariffs on steel, lumber, and other building materials have added thousands of dollars to the cost of a single home, working against the same affordability this bill was written to improve. Affordability is what Americans said they wanted. A bill that moves in the right direction is not the same as delivering it.

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Sources

1. Congress.gov, 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (H.R. 6644), bill text and vote record

2. NPR, “Housing Affordability Bill Becomes Law Without Trump’s Signature,” July 2026

3. Bipartisan Policy Center, “Inside the Deal: What’s in the Final 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act”

4. NOTUS, “Elizabeth Warren Led a Key Housing Bill. She Might Lead to Its Downfall.,” March 2026

5. Bloomberg, “Corporate Landlords Targeted by Trump Now Poised for Growth,” July 2026

6. Fortune, “Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Is Worsening the Construction Labor Shortage Threatening Build Costs,” May 2026

7. Center for American Progress, “Trump Administration Tariffs Could Result in 450,000 Fewer New Homes Through 2030”

8. National Association of Home Builders, “How Tariffs Impact the Home Building Industry”

Trump’s War Is Escalating in the Middle East

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

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

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

Trump’s Polling Is Now Worse Than After January 6

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

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

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

Tillis and Cornyn Are Actually Holding the Line on Blanche

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump’s Corrupt, Chaotic Nuclear Deal

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Judge Threw Out the Times Subpoenas

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

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

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

They're Rigging the Census in Plain Sight

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

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

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

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

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

Read more: The Bulwark, Off Message, Zeteo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Endnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pentagon Can’t Make Payroll.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Came for Grandma’s Ballot

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

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

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

Read more: Off Message

The Presidency Has a Price List

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

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

April 8, 2025: Trump makes 327 stock purchases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump’s War: 17 Dead, 430 Wounded

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

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

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

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

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

Trump is Selling His Truth Social Messages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m his lawyer.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Government Built

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

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

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

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

Working Against Itself

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

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

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

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

The Consequence

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

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

What the Lesson Costs

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

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

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

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

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Endnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lindsey Graham Died.

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

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

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

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

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

Wednesday: One Man Answers for the Epstein Coverup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Subpoenaed the Reporters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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