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 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.