Mail voting in the 2026 midterm elections will go on as usual – now that the Trump administration’s major efforts to disrupt how Americans vote by mail have been blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Postal Service had recently implemented new rules placing unprecedented restrictions on the practice of mail voting in federal elections. State officials and voting rights organizations immediately challenged these rules, arguing that the executive agency has no authority under the U.S. Constitution to unilaterally regulate election practices.

On Sept. 14, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court signaled agreement with these claims, voting 7-2 to uphold a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the new rules that will likely remain in place through the November midterm elections.

The controversy began in March 2026, when President Donald Trump issued an executive order designed to ensure “integrity in federal elections.” The executive order — among other things — mandates that the U.S. Postal Service, or USPS, implement uniform ballot and envelope requirements for mail and absentee ballots used in federal elections.

The order also required states to provide the Postal Service, 60 days prior to Election Day, with lists of all voters eligible to vote by mail or absentee. If a ballot sent via mail didn’t comply with the USPS’ requirements, or was sent by somebody not on a state-provided list, the order instructed the USPS to not deliver the ballot, effectively canceling that vote.

Two lawsuits challenging the executive order were immediately filed in federal court, one by state officials and the other by voting rights organizations.

Their arguments were straightforward: The president does not possess unilateral authority to alter the methods of voting in federal elections. Rather, the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution vests the authority to regulate the “time, place, and manner” of federal elections in the states and, if it chooses to act, Congress.

Federal judge rules against administration

The two lawsuits were heard by the same federal district court judge in Boston, who ultimately agreed with the plaintiffs and issued injunctions against the federal government. Those injunctions forbade the president and all relevant federal officials and agencies, including the USPS, from carrying out any aspects of the executive order regarding mail and absentee voting.

The lawsuit led by state officials ultimately made its way to the Supreme Court, which on Aug. 24 voted 6-3 along ideological lines in favor of the Trump administration. The court did not decide on the constitutional issues raised in the case but instead found that the states lacked the injury necessary to have standing to bring the case. The court reasoned that because the USPS had yet to implement the executive order, the states were not yet affected by it.

At the same time, the USPS began writing the rules and processes governing how it would carry out the executive order. These steps blatantly violated the remaining injunction in the voting rights organizations’ lawsuit. But the district court judge ended up dissolving that injunction on Aug. 26 in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in the other case.

That same day, the USPS officially published its new rules for mail ballots.

Widespread confusion

The USPS rules contained three key provisions.

First, states must design their ballot envelopes in accordance with USPS requirements, and the envelopes must be submitted to the USPS for final approval. Second, state and local election officials must input voters qualified to vote by mail or absentee into a USPS-run electronic portal at least 30 days before the date of a federal election. Lastly, any mailed ballot that does not adhere to the design requirements, or that is sent by somebody not on the USPS’ electronic portal, “will not be accepted” by the USPS.

These rules led to widespread confusion among election officials, who remained uncertain about how to apply them to the 2026 midterm elections. For one, the rules laid out no clear deadline for USPS approval of envelope designs. Moreover, the electronic portal’s 30-day deadline conflicted with state voter registration deadlines, with all states allowing individuals to register to vote at some point within 30 days of Election Day, and many far later.

Election officials were also left wondering how to adhere to these rules under such short notice. Some states, such as North Carolina, have already distributed mail ballots to voters. Election officials in Utah were meanwhile considering setting up their own distribution centers to bypass the USPS rules.

Following the USPS rules’ enactment, the plaintiffs from the original two lawsuits renewed their constitutional challenge, arguing that they now had standing to sue.

On Sept. 4, the federal district court issued a new preliminary injunction pausing the implementation or enforcement of the USPS rules. The court, in short, found that the USPS likely infringed upon Congress’ and the states’ Elections Clause powers.

On Sept. 6, the federal government petitioned to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking a stay – or pause – on the preliminary injunction.

In its petition, the government contended that the USPS rules do not unduly impede states’ administration of elections but rather “impose reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.” The petition elicited 20 amicus briefs, largely in opposition to the USPS, including one signed by seven Republican chief election officials detailing the impracticality of the USPS rules.

On Sept. 14, the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately voted to uphold the preliminary injunction, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissenting.

In one brief paragraph, the court stated that the federal government “is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge,” suggesting that a supermajority of the court believes the USPS exceeded its constitutional authority. Given that the litigation is still ongoing in district court, though, the Supreme Court did not issue any final decision on the merits of the parties’ claims.

Practically speaking, this ruling likely settles the question of whether the USPS rules will have any impact on the midterm elections in November.

With less than two months until Election Day, and a preliminary injunction remaining in effect with the Supreme Court’s endorsement, the federal government’s hands are tied until the litigation over the issue fully plays out in the federal district court.

By the time that happens, the country may already be looking ahead toward the 2028 presidential election.

John J. Martin, Assistant Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin

On May 24, Donald Trump Jr. was celebrating in the Bahamas, as scantily clad dancers in stilettos and sailor caps performed for him and his guests. It was the last night of his wedding, a lavish, three-day party held across a pair of ultra-exclusive private islands. A five-tier funfetti cake had been airlifted in from Florida, and helicopters and seaplanes descended on the islands before guests settled into their oceanfront villas. That night on the beach, Trump Jr. lifted his bride into the air while fireworks launched from a barge over the sea.

“It was everything we dreamed of and more,” his wife later wrote on Instagram.

That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.

Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

The guest list numbered around 50. It included Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law Jared Kushner, Eric Trump — and Kremlev, an imposing man with a shaved head who speaks limited English. The oligarch was part of a large group whose presence puzzled other attendees. They sometimes stood off by themselves, speaking Russian.

“It was really small, like, just really close friends,” Trump Jr. later said on his podcast. “Tried to keep it really tight. And it was just awesome.”

Kremlev’s previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr. represents an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son and gaining intimate access to the Trump family. For a decade, Putin’s government, regarded as a chief adversary of the U.S., has been accused of efforts to influence American elections. Attempts by Russia to make inroads with the Trumps before the 2016 election exploded into controversy that dogged much of the president’s first term.

National security experts expressed alarm at Trump Jr. accepting the oligarch’s largesse, saying it raised an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection? 

“If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” said Frank Montoya Jr., a retired career FBI official who held senior counterintelligence roles. Oligarchs like Kremlev often act in coordination with the Russian government. While it’s unclear if that happened here, Trump Jr. put himself in a precarious position, Montoya said. “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.”

Holden Triplett, who served as Trump’s counterintelligence director on the National Security Council during his first term, said Russian intelligence frequently seeks to build ties with U.S. government officials and their family members. “Money is a tried-and-true method to gain access,” said Triplett, who also worked for the FBI in Moscow.

In the days leading up to Trump Jr.’s wedding, Kremlev was in China as part of the delegation accompanying Putin, according to Chinese state media. The month before, Putin had bestowed him with a state honor, the Order of Friendship. The Ukrainian government has imposed sanctions on Kremlev personally, citing his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.

It’s not clear why Kremlev helped pay for Trump Jr.’s wedding. The men appear to have met only recently. Public reporting suggests Trump Jr. could have afforded it himself, with Forbes recently estimating his net worth at roughly $300 million. 

In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for Trump Jr. did not dispute the wedding payments from Kremlev. “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” he said. The spokesman said that Kremlev is “not someone he has a business relationship with” and that the men met through a mutual friend in the hunting world and bonded over their love of boxing and the outdoors.

A spokesperson for Trump Jr.’s brother Eric said of Kremlev: “Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is, nor has never heard his name.” 

In a statement, Kremlev’s press office said, “Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr have a friendly relationship” and they first met “a couple of years ago.”

The press office described Kremlev as a businessman and philanthropist, adding, “Mr. Kremlev has never discussed political matters with any of his American friends and acquaintances,” including Trump Jr. They said the boxing organization itself did not incur expenses for the wedding but did not comment on the payments from the Dubai entity. The press office also said that when Putin and Kremlev were in China recently, Kremlev was not part of Putin’s “official delegation.”

Kushner, who has been helping lead the U.S. government’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine, did not respond to requests for comment. The White House and the Russian government did not respond either.

The revelations come as Trump Jr. has emerged as a political power center in his own right. Beloved by the MAGA base, he reportedly played an active role in vetting White House cabinet picks for Trump’s second term and was dubbed his father’s “most essential political adviser” by The Wall Street Journal. “I certainly don’t think I’d be sitting here as the VP nominee without Don’s help,” Vice President JD Vance told the outlet in late 2024.

This account is based on records and interviews with dozens of current and former IBA officials and contractors, wedding attendees and other people in Trump Jr.’s and Kremlev’s circles.

Trump Jr. exchanged vows with socialite Bettina Anderson on a private island that was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the 2006 James Bond movie “Casino Royale.” They had their first dance on a second private island nearby that can rent for around $100,000 a night, paid for by Kremlev. The company that put on the fireworks display charges around $70,000 for such shows. (Kremlev did not attend the ceremony itself, which was held on the first day and had just 18 guests, Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said.)

The atmosphere was Monte Carlo meets frat party — helicopters in and out, a beachside DJ set, beer pong tournaments. One day, the men went spearfishing. Artisans at the London fashion house Safiyaa spent 150 hours embroidering Anderson’s bespoke silk reception outfit. The president’s son had undergone treatment to better define his jawline for the occasion.

Some longtime friends of Trump Jr. told associates they were disappointed not to be invited, though a few of his closest business partners — executives at the Trump family crypto company, World Liberty Financial, and the venture capital firm 1789 Capital — did make the cut. President Trump himself skipped it. (“He’d like me to go, but it’s going to be just a small, little private affair,” the president told reporters beforehand. “I said, you know, this is not good timing for me.”) But many of the guests were immediate family of the bride and groom.

That made the large contingent of Russians all the more conspicuous. “What are they doing here?” one person recalled thinking. At least one of the Russian guests had been with Kremlev on his China trip: Alexander Lagutin, a businessperson who has served in senior roles at a Russian defense contractor and a state-backed energy company. Kremlev’s right hand at the IBA, Elena Sobol, attended the wedding too. 

Since the wedding, the Trumps have released scores of photos and videos of the festivities. While they show many of the guests, the Russians have been absent from all of them. (The top of Kremlev’s head is visible in the back of one group photo posted on Instagram by a friend of the bride.) After the party was over, on his “Triggered” podcast, Trump Jr. emphasized the event’s privacy: “The people that were there — if you’re on that list, you weren’t talking.”

In 2009, Umar Kremlev did not yet exist.

He was in his late 20s, with a criminal record for extortion and battery, still going by his birth name, Umar Lutfulloyev, according to the Russian independent news outlet Proekt. But he was about to rapidly ascend in Russia to a position of wealth and influence, with the help of a powerful friend. (“Mr. Kremlev has a completely clean legal record,” his press office said.)

In 2010, he changed his name to Kremlev. He soon joined a Russian government-backed biker gang called the Night Wolves, eventually taking a leadership role, according to news reports. That is what first brought him close to Alexei Rubezhnoi, who now leads Putin’s presidential security service, Proekt reported. In 2017, Kremlev took over the Russian Boxing Federation, after Rubezhnoi personally intervened to put him at the helm.

In 2020, Kremlev became president of the IBA. The association was something akin to FIFA but for boxing and had long overseen the sport in the Olympics. But it had been beset by corruption allegations and was on the brink of insolvency. Kremlev brought money to the table from Gazprom, the state-owned company that operates as an arm of Putin’s government. Gazprom publicly became the IBA’s financial backer, filling its coffers with tens of millions of dollars.

Former high-level IBA officials said that Kremlev had a clear political agenda. “Umar is guided by Putin. It was using the sport for soft political power,” a former IBA board member told ProPublica. “It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.” Kremlev, 43, is also heavily involved in an organization called Healthy Fatherland, run by his 23-year-old wife’s twin sister. The group — which promotes healthy eating and youth sports — is under Ukrainian sanctions for its alleged role in a program of abducting Ukrainian children from occupied territories and relocating them under the guise of “rehabilitation.” (Healthy Fatherland did not respond to a request for comment.)

Kremlev’s cozy relationship with the government has made him rich. Putin used the levers of the state to make Kremlev a dominant player in the Russian sports betting industry, according to Proekt, and one of his companies was chosen to operate the national lottery. After Putin nationalized Russia’s largest car dealership company in 2023, Kremlev became the owner of that too.

He now flaunts that wealth through his boisterous public persona. In one video Kremlev posted on social media, he surprises a young mother by giving her a free car. In another, he criticizes his young female aide’s outfit as not feminine enough and makes her change. He shadowboxes with ostriches and brings in celebrities like Rick Ross and Naomi Campbell for IBA events; he praises Stalin and rides private jets.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. began to indict Russian oligarchs and seize yachts and other assets. Kremlev repeatedly told associates he was worried about being targeted by a U.S. government probe, according to a person close to IBA leadership. “He was very afraid of American sanctions,” the person added. (Kremlev does not appear on public U.S. sanction lists.)

With the business environment in Europe growing more hostile to Russia, Kremlev moved much of the IBA’s operations from Switzerland to the United Arab Emirates. A new Dubai entity, IB Challenger, would later pay wedding expenses for Trump Jr. The current sources of the IBA’s funds are murky, and, in recent years, top executives have given conflicting accounts of the status of its relationship with Gazprom. (Kremlev’s press office told ProPublica the IBA’s sponsorship contract with Gazprom “expired long ago.”) People close to the organization said they understood that its money still comes from Russia.

In 2023, the International Olympic Committee stripped Kremlev’s IBA of its role organizing Olympic boxing. It has cited a host of governance issues and the group’s refusal to “transparently explain the sources of its financing or to explain its full financial dependency, at the time, on a single state-owned company.” 

It was a major setback that deprived the IBA of a key source of its international influence. Kremlev has raged against the Olympic committee ever since and has said that his IBA predecessor, who he blames for the problems, “must be shot.”

Kremlev saw a potential ally in President Trump. After Trump’s second inauguration, in January 2025, Kremlev sent an open letter to the president asking him to look into the Olympic committee’s actions in advance of the 2028 Los Angeles Games. “We look forward with great optimism to the possibility of working together to make the Olympic movement great again,” he wrote.

In September 2025, the IBA brought in Trump Jr. for a panel discussion in Istanbul about boxing. With his then-girlfriend, Anderson, sitting offstage, he criticized transgender women competing in women’s sports and reminisced about watching Saturday night fights as a child. Trump Jr. shared the stage with Kremlev, the boxer Manny Pacquiao and Muhammad Ali’s daughter Rasheda. (Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said he was not paid for the appearance and was already in Turkey for an unrelated event.)

The president’s son had reason to be attuned to the sensitivity of cozying up with a Putin associate, especially while his father navigates the Russia-Ukraine war. Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting with a Russian attorney in Trump Tower became a major focus of the Robert Mueller investigation.

The Trump Tower meeting was arranged after an email offering Trump Jr. damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. famously responded, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” Trump Jr. later dismissed the matter as a “witch hunt,” and the Mueller report concluded that there was not enough evidence to convict him of a crime.

Recently, Kremlev has been working to expand into the U.S. market. In July, his group hosted a bare-knuckle boxing event in Miami, a chance to showcase a particularly bloody form of the sport in which contenders fight without gloves. But the debut was overshadowed when manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, who the IBA had brought in to host, was arrested by U.S. Marshals outside the arena. (Tate is facing rape and sex trafficking charges in the United Kingdom, which he has denied.)

Much about Kremlev’s relationship with Trump Jr., and where it is headed, remains unknown. In a press release after the Istanbul panel, the IBA hinted there was more to come. 

“President Kremlev and Donald Trump Jr made it clear – this alliance will not remain symbolic,” the press release read. “More joint initiatives will follow.”

Republished from ProPublica. ID 288199413 | Donald Trump Jr © More discussion of this issue is HERE.
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There will be a lot of ketchup thrown on White House walls tonight. A huge truck of it will be arriving any minute.

The Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, has stopped the USPS from implementing Donald Trump’s new restrictions on voting by mail.

The new onlne newspaper The Washington Sun:

The Supreme Court on Monday halted the U.S. Postal Service from going forward with a rule pushed by the Trump administration to restrict and change the process for mailing ballots in November’s election.

The 7-2 decision clears the way for states to use mail ballots under their current process, avoiding last-minute requirements that some election officials said would disenfranchise voters. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

The high court sided with voting rights groups and nearly half the states, which said it would cause a mad scramble for states to comply and, in some cases, it would be impossible within the timeframe of an election now 50 days away.

“Applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in his opinion Monday.

The Trump administration had asked the justices to lift a lower court ruling that blocked key parts of the USPS rule through Election Day on Nov. 3.

The rule stems from an executive order President Donald Trump signed in March that sought to redefine the federal government’s role in the mail-in ballot process. The president has said the policies will help safeguard elections from noncitizen voting — though noncitizen registration is illegal and rare, according to experts.

The rule requires states to submit the name, address and a unique barcode number of every eligible voter to a USPS portal, and then check that each outgoing ballot matches an entry on that list.

The USPS said in its final rule that each outgoing ballot envelope must be scanned individually, with a member of election staff present to oversee the entire process.

It also included an approval process for ballot envelopes, which many states have already purchased for their primaries, along with upgrading systems to comply with a new Intelligent Mail barcode, or IMb, for every ballot.

CNBC:

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, concurred with the ruling in a statement that said, “there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority.”

“But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections,” Kavanaugh added. “For that reason, I concur in the denial of the application for stay.”

Two of Kavanaugh’s fellow conservatives on the nine-justice court, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, dissented from the decision to reject a stay of the injunction against the Postal Service rule, which was issued in late August.

That rule, which implemented an executive order issued by Trump in March, established new standards for ballot envelopes and required states to create lists of voters who were eligible to obtain mail ballots.

Monday’s decision by the Supreme Court only prevents the Postal Service’s rule from being used in November’s elections. It is possible that the court will allow the rule to be used in future elections.

But this isn’t really a story about the Post Office. It’s another chapter in Donald Trump’s long-standing war with mail-in voting–a method of voting that he has attacked repeatedly while insisting, without evidence, of widespread fraud, that mailed ballots are an invitation to mail theft. This time the administration tried to use executive power to impose new requirements involving voter-eligibility lists, and specially approved ballot envelopes. The White House calls measures such as these election security. Voting-rights groups call them voter suppression. And states have a simpler objection: since when does a president get to rewrite the rules for how they run their elections?

The last question may be Trump’s biggest problem. Courts have already blocked portions of his election agenda, and now a Supreme Court with a 6-3 majority–including three justices Trump himself appointed–has refused, by a 7-2 vote, to let the Postal Service restrictions take effect while the case continues. That doesn’t mean Trump’s broader campaign to change election rules is dead. Other battles over citizenship requirements, voter identification and federal power remain very much alive. But it does mean that, at least in this round, Trump asked the courts to let him move ahead and got an answer he isn’t particularly famous for enjoying: No.

Any other result would’ve been a miscarriage of justice. There is simply no constitutional role for the federal executive branch in administering elections. https://t.co/UtHYBNJfQi

— Barb McQuade (@BarbMcQuade) September 14, 2026

BREAKING: Tonight’s Supreme Court ruling is a victory for the millions of American citizens who rely on mail voting. The Trump administration tried to use the postal service to interfere in our elections: it failed. 1/2

— Brennan Center (@BrennanCenter) September 14, 2026

?BREAKING: Supreme Court REJECTS Department of Justice effort to restore U.S. Postal Service mail-in voting rule.

A huge victory for voting rights and free and fair elections. A defeat for Trump and his scheme to rig the elections. https://t.co/J78WAbT9s0

— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) September 15, 2026

OMG! Supreme Court rebuffs Trump's attempt to break mail-in voting 7-2

We @DDFund_ were proud to file a brief in support of this outstanding outcome for LULAC & working with CLC

Also a VERY important signal of how Trump's other election sabotage efforts will be treated pic.twitter.com/dzTdKYudKM

— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) September 14, 2026

BREAKING: Supreme Court REJECTS Trump’s effort to interfere with absentee ballots. pic.twitter.com/HwcnYvTYF0

— Senator Adam Schiff (@SenAdamSchiff) September 15, 2026

The Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s controversial plan to change how mail ballots are sent to voters across the country, rebuffing a proposal that election officials warned would have had catastrophic consequences if allowed to take effect for this year’s… pic.twitter.com/QYkkPt41LB

— CNN (@CNN) September 14, 2026

Glad the Supreme Court made the right decision to protect our democracy, but it’s still scary that it wasn’t unanimous. Two justices, Alito and Thomas, completely willing to shred our Constitution. https://t.co/700ACLv6ss

— Andy Kim (@AndyKimNJ) September 15, 2026

This close to the election we need stability, not disenfranchisement and confusion. I’m glad a majority of the Supreme Court Justices rejected Trump’s mail-in ballot scheme that would have created chaos and denied many Americans the right to vote. I still encourage Washingtonians… https://t.co/X9kBMseAta

— Sen. Maria Cantwell (@SenatorCantwell) September 15, 2026

BREAKING: The Supreme Court has DENIED the Trump regime's emergency request to enforce new mail-ballot restrictions ahead of the midterm elections.

The ruling leaves in place a preliminary injunction blocking the U.S. Postal Service from requiring states to submit voter… pic.twitter.com/skQ8rzFJjB

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) September 14, 2026

BREAKING: The Supreme Court prevented a U.S. Postal Service regulation concerning mail-in ballots from going into effect, casting a decisive blow against President Donald Trump’s hopes of exercising federal control over the midterm elections. https://t.co/WkkSAYYijO

— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 14, 2026

BREAKING: The Supreme Court prevented a U.S. Postal Service regulation concerning mail-in ballots from going into effect, casting a decisive blow against President Donald Trump’s hopes of exercising federal control over the midterm elections. https://t.co/WkkSAYYijO

— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 14, 2026

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Sinclair Lewis deserves a prize for prescience. Ninety years ago, the author of “It Can’t Happen Here” created a presidential candidate named Buzz Windrip who rose to power with an openly demagogic agenda.

Buzz believed nonstop lying was the best way to connect with voters (“it is not fair to ordinary folks – it just confuses them – to try to make them swallow all the true facts”). He played them for suckers, and won. He told them “lowdown crooks, liars, and schemers” were trying to rig the election against him, that dishonest reporters were plotting his downfall, and that members of the “Nordic” race were more American than “people of inferior races.”

And he promised that, once elected, he would give each person $5,000.

I kid you not. It’s in the book.

Surely you heard what Trump said the other day: “If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000. Very much like a successful company will do a cash distribution to its shareholders.”

P. T. Barnum never actually said a sucker is born every minute, but the carnival barker who lives at the White House construction site apparently believes, even at this late stage of his deteriorating regime, that he can somehow sow mass gullibility. Granted, his latest con is probably catnip for the willfully ignorant and woefully naive (roughly one-third of the citizenry), but by now most Americans know he’s running on empty.

Plagued by high prices (from his un-winnable Iran war and his self-destructive tariff war), Trump’s merely offering a distraction, a shiny object for everyone to chase. Sending $5,000 to 270 million adult Americans would cost roughly $1.3 trillion, explode the already $40-trillion national debt, and require congressional approval.

It’s all just a mirage anyway. Remember last year when he teased the idea of sending us money from Elon Musk’s federal government cuts? Remember last year when he teased the idea of sending us money from the tariffs he’d slapped on our trading partners? What follows is a primer for MAGA amnesiacs, proof that all he’s doing now is recycling old grifts.

Feb. 2025: “There’s even under consideration a new concept where we give 20 percent of the DOGE savings to American citizens.”

July 2025: “We’re thinking about a rebate because we have so much money coming in from tariffs, a little rebate for people of a certain income level might be very nice.”

Aug 2025: “There could be a distribution or a dividend to the people of our country, I wield say for middle income people and lower-income people.”

Nov 2025: “We’re going to issue a dividend to our middle-income people and lower-income people of about $2000.”

Nov. 2025: “”I’ll be giving back $2000 or so to middle-income people, low-income people, everybody but the rich. It’ll be next year some time.”

Dec. 2025: “And we’re going to be giving back refunds out of the tariffs because we’ve taken in literally trillions of dollars. And we’re going to be giving a nice dividend to the people.”

Jan 2026: “We will be able to make a very substantial dividend to the people of our country. I believe we can do that without Congress.”

Feb 2026: “I’m looking at it (dividend) very seriously. I’m the only one who can do it because I’m taking in literally hundreds of billions of dollars. I can do that. I haven’t made the commitment yet, but I may make the commitment.”

Big surprise, he never did. And you have to wonder why not. After all, he’s been governing this whole time with a Republican House and Senate, so how come he and his congressional supplicants haven’t shared the purported bounty with us citizens (while stuffing his own pockets with $2.2 billion)?

Even Fox News host Laura Ingraham, normally a doormat, asked Trump on the air why he doesn’t simply dispense those $5000 checks right now, given the GOP’s power dominance in DC. This was his answer, verbatim: “Because the Democrats can’t do it. Because for them, it’s negative growth. With us, it’s so positive.”

Say what? He’s more coherent when he naps on camera.

In Ireland he actually uttered this sentence: “I always keep my pledge.” But don’t bet on any windfall for your gas and grocery tabs. Whether his MAGA candidates win or lose in November, it ain’t happening. Natalie Harp gets a dividend, not you. Stormy Daniels gets a dividend, not you.

But you already know these truths to be self-evident. As Tony Soprano warned us years ago, “One thing about us wise guys – the hustle never ends.”

Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.

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DJT is from a different species than past presidents, a self-involved narcissist. Rather than working to enhance American society, strengthen the nation, reduce inflation, lower the national debt, provide decent health care for all citizens, unify disparate groups, as other presidents have done or tried to do in the past, DJT is working primarily for himself rather than the nation. He’s interested in gaining revenge on anyone who crossed him during his first term, increasing his own and his family’s wealth and glorifying himself. No other president has pursued monuments to himself and self-glorification as DJT has. And no other president has accumulated the same level of wealth while in office. Perhaps some of his supporters are beginning to realize this, as his approval rating has been continuously falling.

His disturbed personality was not as evident during his first term in office. But now he likely feels he has nothing to lose and is willing to give vent to all of his emotions. He has pushed the Department of Justice, now run by his personal lawyer Todd Blanche, to go after everyone who questioned his actions during the last decade. These include Lettetia James, the prosecuting attorney in New York who sued Trump and the Trump organization for financial fraud in 2022. He also has directed the DOJ to prosecute James Comey, Former head of the FBI, Adan Schiff, a California Senator, John Bolton- Trump’s former National Security advisor and numerous others. There have been no successful prosecutions so far, but there have been significant legal costs and anxiety for Trump’s targets.

Trump’s glorification projects are lengthy, many of them yet to be consummated. He had his name placed on the Kennedy Center and made himself Chairman of the Board. He tore down the East Wing of the White House to put up a ballroom. He put gilt on many of the objects in the White House because he thought it looked better. He wants to build a 250 foot arch called the Arch D’Trump modelled after the Arc De Triumph in Paris. He’s urging his lackeys in Congress to have his image sculpted on Mt. Rushmore with the other presidents. He has pictures of all the presidents in the White House with his on top. A $250 bill is being printed with Trump’s image on it. He wants to have a class of new aircraft carriers named after him. And this is not a complete list.

Trump and his family have made billions of dollars in the crypto market which he thought was a scam originally. Now his sons run a crypto firm and have received huge sums from Middle Eastern officials and oligarchs. Trump has collected hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy tech bros and financial gurus who want to stay on his good side. Some of this money may be used for a Trump library. He allows people who pay a hefty fee to get early information on his Truth Social Posts so they can use it to aid in their investments. He accepted a luxury Boeing 747 jet from the government of Qatar estimated to be valued at $400 million or more. This contravened the emoluments clause in the Constitution, but Trump didn’t care. He has been given immunity for whatever he does in his role as president by the Supreme Court that seemed happy to do his bidding.

These actions described above are just a few of the efforts by Trump to glorify himself and gain extreme wealth. His presidency has not been about America first, but me first. The question that is being asked is what will follow?
www.robertlevinebooks.com

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Two weeks ago, I had the sad, yet almost indispensable occasion of visiting the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in New York City for the first time.

Sufficient to say that the sight of the 2,977 inscribed names of the victims of the unspeakable terrorist attacks brought tears to my eyes. The beautiful white roses placed inside the lettering of the names of a child, woman or man who would be celebrating a birthday on that day two weeks ago made the sadness even more poignant, almost unbearable.

While the reflecting pools and their symbology evoke deep grief and compassion, the sight of so many raw, physical exhibits at the Museum — the gigantic, mangled steel beams; the crushed fire truck (below); destroyed emergency vehicles; concrete remnants of the proud Towers — and the indelible images of the day we will never forget evoked horror, anger and an overwhelming sadness.

However, the sight of the awesome, colossal portion of the original slurry wall (below) preserved at the Museum evoked different feelings. Built during the construction of the Twin Towers to hold back the soft soil along the Hudson River and its water during construction, the slurry wall held and prevented an even greater disaster on that fateful day.

Seeing the indestructible slurry wall – nicknamed “the bathtub” – intact made me proud of American ingenuity and resilience.

The sights at the Museum also reminded me of the heroism and unselfishness displayed by so many – first responders, military, ordinary citizens — who answered the call without hesitation, many making the ultimate sacrifice.

I know that immense gratitude has been rightly expressed to these heroes and more is being bestowed upon them on this 25th anniversary of the tragedy. I join the nation and express my personal thanks, admiration and tribute.

I also want to recognize and thank a town, a nation, a people who instinctively stood with us, supported us, sacrificed for us on that disastrous day and for many years thereafter.

First, Gander, Newfoundland, the small town in Canada that welcomed 38 jumbo jets carrying nearly 7,000 passengers; whose citizens opened their homes, schools, churches, and community halls to house, feed, and comfort total strangers in an incredible act of compassion and neighborly hospitality.

Second, the country of Canada that, under operation Yellow Ribbon, worked with the FAA to shut down North American airspace and divert 224 U.S.-bound international flights safely to Canadian airports and accommodated nearly 33,000 stranded passengers and crew members from around the world.

The nation whose communities across the country, from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, provided medical care, phone banks to contact loved ones, and supplies without asking for anything in return.

The country that in the aftermath of 9/11 joined the U.S.-led coalition in the fight against terrorism and became one of our staunchest allies and supporters during the 12-year war in Afghanistan — a war that became Canada’s longest war and where more than 40,000 Canadian Armed Forces members served, 158 of them never to return home.

A country with which we have been close friends and good neighbors for more than 150 years and that shares with us the longest international land border in the world.

Hopefully, the U.S. Administration will, at least for one day, set aside its pettiness and animosity towards a good neighbor and thank Canada for its unwavering support when our nation was attacked.

In a 9/11 look back in Axios, Atlantic Council fellow and veteran diplomat Daniel Fried is quoted as posing the question, “If the United States were hit again, would Canada come to our aid with troops now? Would Denmark?”

I have absolutely no doubt they would.

===
Photos by author

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UN chief António Guterres called the 9/11 terror attack “an assault on humanity itself” to mark 25 years, but the Global War on Terror has squandered the solidarity that the entire world, including US enemies, felt with all Americans after that heinous act. Following the shockingly tragic deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans and people from over 90 countries at the World Trade Centre’s twin towers in New York, even Russia, Iran, and North Korea stood alongside Washington in mourning and in near-unanimous support.

Repeated American military interventions, human rights controversies, and shifting U.S. administrations have deeply polarized global public and political opinion. The global war on terror has turned into America’s longest “forever war”, far outlasting its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the latest war on Iran is currently bedeviling President Donald Trump.

That nascent war may be Trump’s nemesis, burdening him with growing daily frustrations. He is trapped in an asymmetric quagmire engineered by a militia he has designated as terrorist, fighting an enemy he calls the world’s ‘number one sponsor of terrorism’—all while it relentlessly swallows the U.S. military he boastfully describes as the ‘most powerful’ fighting force in human history.

Across a quarter-century, the highly lethal American global war on terror, which the UN system and almost all countries assist in various ways, has dramatically worsened the situation. It is riven by profound policy failures. Terrorism has spread from a small patch at the boot of Manhattan to engulf vast territories all the way from the Pacific Ocean tips of Indonesia and the Philippines to the Atlantic Ocean coast of Africa, remaining entirely relentless.

Despite Guterres’s outrage at terrorism, the UN’s unanimous Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy (GCTS) of 2006 is floundering in providing an alternative to the heavily militarized, unilateral US war on terror. The GCTS’s Ninth Review of July 2026 highlighted deep divisions when Israel and Argentina joined the US in rejecting a 28-page consensus text that Washington labelled as plagued by “nonsensical redundancies” and being “bloated, outdated, and lacking focus”.

Trump paid little heed to Guterres’s determination to prevent terrorists from actively exploiting artificial intelligence, commercial drones, and encrypted tools to finance and execute attacks. The UN is already transitioning its strategic focus toward a highly digitalized, data-centric framework. Its Global Counter-Terrorism Programme on Autonomous and Remotely Operated Systems (AROS) trains and equips countries, including across Africa and Central Asia, to detect and mitigate, among other threats, the weaponized swarms of commercial drones increasingly used by terrorists.

Trump seems to hold the UN system in disdain, but its work on terrorism deserves more attention and support because it brings many terrorism-affected countries together through specific programmes to provide contributions that the US cannot generate on its own.

For instance, the UN’s 2024 Counter Terrorism and Technology Plus (CT TECH+) Initiative is working with Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Iraq, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Funded by the European Union (EU), it is run alongside INTERPOL to actively build the capacity of weaker countries to gather digital forensics, monitor blockchain-based terrorist financing, penetrate the Dark Web, and use automated algorithms to rapidly scrub deepfakes and algorithmic propaganda from the internet.

The US can benefit greatly from the UN’s leading-edge project on AI and Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (PCVE), which studies how machine learning models can be used to predict local radicalization patterns and map community vulnerabilities before violence breaks out.

The project’s local and community-based findings can be particularly helpful for the global war against terrorism and lower costs for Washington. Local expertise and willing cooperation would also help the Pentagon provide better-tailored counterterrorism support for countries most impacted by radical Islamist Jihadists—such as those operating in the vast Saharan and Sub-Saharan desert wilderness. Backed by South Korea, the PCVE project examines how machine learning and generative AI impact national security.

A recurrent fear in democracies like the US, Europe, and India is interference in elections by hackers often based in Russia, Iran, and North Korea, who proliferate propaganda and disinformation on social media. A particularly useful project element is documenting how terrorist groups use Generative AI and synthetic media to produce automated, hyper-realistic propaganda and deepfakes.

Their deployment on chat systems to turn vulnerable local individuals into lone-wolf terrorists is a tremendous national security risk, as is their circulation of automated misinformation to deepen polarizing divisions among voters.

Despite Trump’s pretensions that U.S. power never needs anyone’s help, terrorism is no longer as raw as it was in 2001. Rather than the honest explosions of the past, it is now more like a depraved Venetian masked ball—disguised by millions of social media sites and revelers armed with 3-D printed weapons, stealthily devouring democracies from within.

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John Fetterman is acid reflux surging through our body politic.

Surely there must be a cure. But good luck with that.

Hounding him until he quits is theoretically possible, but why would he want to give up the perks of doing nothing on the taxpayer’s dime? Throwing him out in a statewide voter recall would be ideal, but the U.S. Constitution forbids it. That leaves one option – jettisoning his worthless ass in a Senate Democratic primary – but that’s two years away and even then he’d still be around, free to do nothing til his lame-duck gig expires at the dawn of 2029.

The brutal expose in the Wall Street Journal – which describes him blowing off a Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia meeting, blowing off a meeting with paralyzed military vets in order to gab on Fox News, and ghosting virtually all his Senate committee hearings – is yet another gut check for the 753,000 Democratic voters who inexplicably bought his phony act and made him their party nominee in 2022 – only to see him behave like a slacker who’d put the “The Dude” to shame.

This purported champion of the little guy reportedly has little interest in his job “beyond cultivating relationships with conservative media figures.” And it’s working so well he’s now more popular with Pennsylvania Republicans than their own senator, MAGA echo Dave McCormick. When Fetterman tells reporters that he doesn’t “have strong feelings” about releasing the Epstein files – wow, that’s MAGA gold.

It’s a shame that We the People have no imminent means to heave the guy from office – our Founding Fathers rejected the recall option as an excess of democracy – but part of the blame for Fetterman surely rests with the progressive lefties who chose him in that 2022 Dem primary.

There was a perfectly credible and qualified candidate in that primary. Unlike Fetterman, who as lieutenant governor had already earned a reputation for blowing off work, his opponent, Congressman Conor Lamb, was an ex-Marine who’d already served four years in the House after winning as a Democrat in a normally red area of western Pennsylvania.

But, tragically so – Lamb had some perceived liabilities: (1) He sometimes wore a suit, which made him look like just another politician, (2) He was in Congress, which made him radioactive to progressives who hate insiders, and (3) His 99 percent pro-Dem voting record wasn’t good enough for lefty litmus-testers, because word got around that in earlier years he’d broken with House Democrats 23 percent of the time (2018) and 17 percent of the time (2020). By contrast, Fetterman was out there talking a good game about progressive hot-button issues and dressing like a slob to woo working stiffs, and the fact that he’d gone to Harvard and had lived off his affluent conservative Republican parents well into his forties…none of that seemed to matter, or was widely known.

I won’t be drawn into a debate over whether Fetterman’s 2022 stroke scrambled his brain and turned him MAGA on key issues (he supports Donald Trump’s disastrous war with Iran and was the sole Dem senator who refused to curb he president’s war powers). By dint of his work habits alone – as lieutenant governor, he blew off his duties roughly one-third of the time – he was always ill qualified for the Senate.

To thwart future Fettermans, I suppose the only solution is for feckless and oblivious voters to pay more attention, do their homework, and not be so easily swayed by snake-oil salesmen. That admonition also applies to the MAGAts who propelled Trump to power, but, unlike those cultists, at least Pennsylvania’s progressives have been willing to admit they were snookered.

Fetterman continues to insist that he will “never” defect to the Senate Republicans, but by now it should be obvious that whatever he says has all the value of soiled Kleenex. It’s also obvious that if Democrats are truly determined to control the Senate in 2027, they need to mount a blue tsunami high enough to land them 52 seats. Because if they notch a mere 51, Fetterman would have outsize clout; he could switch parties and gift the tie-breaking votes to J.D. Vance, or he could simply leverage that threat as needed.

Fifty two seats is the only interim treatment. It won’t do much for the constituents who need help from the Democrats’ Dude, but we can still laugh at his cinematic doppelganger.

The Big Lebowski: “Are you employed, sir?”

The Dude (perplexed): “Employed?”

The Big Lebowski: “You don’t go out looking for a job dressed like that? On a weekday?”

The Dude: “Is this a… what day is this?”

Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com

OF RELATED INTEREST

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by Jon Queally
Common Dreams

An artificial intelligence researcher at Anthropic publicly quit his position on Tuesday, warning that major AI companies care too much about winning the technological race and not enough about guarding against out-of-control “superhuman systems” that workers in the industry legitimately fear “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Jacob Coxon, who previously worked at industry giant OpenAI before moving to Anthropic earlier this year, told the Wall Street Journal in an exclusive interview that he was leaving the company, as the newspaper reported, because “he doesn’t want to participate in an industrywide rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves, worried such systems could spiral out of control and destroy humanity.”

According to the WSJ:

Coxon said he left OpenAI earlier this year to join Anthropic because it is known for its model-safety efforts. But even though he found Anthropic’s safety efforts to be earnest, he now believes no company can responsibly develop AI that can outperform humans in a range of tasks, sometimes called artificial general intelligence, absent government intervention or a coordinated industry slowdown.

Recent hacks by models from OpenAI and Anthropic, some operating in collaborative swarms of agents, have illustrated how AI systems can adopt nefarious goals and try to conceal them from humans. Once the systems begin to improve on their own, Coxon said, he fears they could advance enough to refuse commands.
“I resigned from Anthropic today,” Coxon announced on social media Tuesday night. “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

In a 6-point thread that followed, Coxon elaborated on his reasoning in detail:

Coxon’s reference to the Hugging Face incident pertains to recent revelations about a so-called breakout event at OpenAI, which operates the ChatGPT protocol. In June, the company acknowledged that a “significant security incident” took place when AI agents within the company autonomously breached internal systems, using subterfuge to hide their actions from human operators. Since then, the incident’s scope has shocked AI experts, and similar events have also been exposed.

While US President Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have taken a hands-off approach to AI regulations, the industry has been pouring huge amounts of money into lobbying efforts and campaign spending to keep lawmakers from enacting stronger restrictions and oversight of the technology.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) have been leading a relatively lonely fight in Washington, DC for more aggressive federal guardrails, including saying last week they would soon introduce joint legislation that would ban artificial superintelligence and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulatory structure was put in place by Congress.

Coxon’s public resignation was met with applause from many, while other industry insiders backed his concerns.

“The caution is simple,” said one commenter with the handle Jabbar Digital, described as a tester of AI tools and a software developer, in a lengthy post on Coxon’s warning. “Capability is compounding. Coordination is not. If the people closest to the work are increasingly uneasy about the speed and the lack of external constraints, dismissing them as doomers is no longer a serious response. Neither is treating every capability jump as automatically good. The useful middle path is to take the technical progress seriously and take the internal dissent seriously. Both can be true at the same time.”

Evan Hubinger, the alignment science lead at Anthropic, chimed in on his personal social media account to say: “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

While bolstering Coxon’s worries, Hubinger said, “To be clear, as we say in [Anthropic’s] latest Risk Report, I think the risk from present models is low. What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said is happening faster than we thought.”

Running for US Senate in Michigan, Democratic nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed also weighed in on Coxon’s decision to quit so loudly and publicly.

“Most tech geeks don’t resign from their roles because…the tech they’re building could end humanity,” said El-Sayed. “How we change the incentives leading AI labs down this path and protect against these existential risks are defining political questions of our time.”

Graphic: ID 216959725 | Ai ©
Melpomenem | Dreamstime.com

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If you hear something rumbling, it’s the sound of Theodore Roosevelt turning over in his grave.

And Abraham Lincoln. And Benjamin Harrison. And Franklin D. Roosevelt. And Richard Nixon. And Jimmy Carter. Barack Obama and Joe Biden aren’t dead yet, but if they were, they’d be turning over in their graves.

They are among the presidents who worked hard to protect the environment, forests, oceans, air, endangered species, national parks and wildlife refuges. All that is threatened by Donald Trump, who is waging war not only on the environment, but on more than a century of presidential conservation.

For most of American history, conservation was one of the few issues that crossed party lines.

Republican Teddy Roosevelt set aside millions of acres of public land, created national forests and wildlife refuges, and believed the nation’s national treasurer belonged not just to his generation, but to generations yet unborn. Richard Nixon, another Republican, signed legislations creating the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Air Act, and other landmark environmental laws.

Benjamin Harrison expanded protection for forest lands, Jimmy Carter emphasized conservation and renewable energy, Barak Obama and Joe Biden expanded protections for public lands and clean-energy.

Trump’s approach has been dramatically different. His administration has emphasized expanding drilling, mining, logging, and fossil fuel production while targeting a slew of environmental regulations. Supporters argue these policies reduce energy costs, create jobs, and free businesses from excessive government regulation.

To supporters, these are long-overdue corrections to excessive regulation. Critics counter that the long-term costs — to clean air, clean water, wildlife habitat and the climate — far outweigh short-term gains. To critics, they amount to the most aggressive rollback of federal environmental protections in modern America history.

This debate is perfectly legitimate. Americans can disagree about how much regulation is OK or how quickly the nation should shift to cleaner sources of energy. But it’s far harder to explain why protecting national treasures has become a political target.

This conflict has become one of the fiercest environmental battles in decades.

The Trump administration has sought to expand oil and gas drilling on federal lands, increase logging in some public forests, reduce or eliminate protections for certain habitats and endangered species, scale back climate-related regulations, and accelerate permits for energy and development projects.

Environmental organizations, conservation groups, tribes, and a number of states have responded with a steady stream of lawsuits, arguing many of those actions violate environmental laws or ignore scientific findings. In some cases the administration prevailed. In others, courts have blocked or delayed its plans. The result is an extraordinary legal and political tug-of-war over who will decide the future of America’s public lands and national heritage.

National Parks don’t belong to Republicans or Democrats, and wildlife refuges don’t vote. Forests don’t contribute to political campaigns. The Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite and countless other public lands belong to all Americans, including generations who haven’t even been born yet.

Perhaps that’s why Roosevelt’s words still resonate more than a century later. He argued America’s resources should be used wisely — not exploited recklessly — and preserve whenever possible. He understood conservation wasn’t about preventing progress. It was about making sure progress didn’t destroy the very things that make America worth living in.

Every president has a legacy. Some build highways. Some appoint Supreme Court justices. Some champion science and space exploration. Some reshape the economy. Others preserve mountains, rivers, forests, and wildlife so future Americans can enjoy them as we do today.

If history ultimately remembers Donald Trump as the president who declared war on that legacy, the rumbling from those presidential graves may only grow louder.

Copyright 2026 Joe Gandelman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

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by David Anderson
Columnist

“9/11”: the name that jelled within days had a different feel here in this city, this little Manhattan shaped island I have lived in nearly all my adult life. Here it was even larger than the Big International Event as the wider world perceived it.

I recently learned that for many New Yorkers under 40 years old 9/11 is a historical abstraction like Hiroshima was to middle aged people like me. And currently there’s some scandal from Canada about whether it was “terrorism” at all which is stupider than the “9/11 Truthers” of 20 years ago.

It’s important to me to keep the story alive not because it is a Hometown Horror, or the impact on my own life but rather because it was a real inflection point in the battle of civilizations that woke the entire world up as to the nature of that battle, and the stakes.

But it really happened: 19 terrorists hijacked four American planes to try to destroy our society by instigating a “mass rise up against American hegemony” – which was mastermind fanatic Osama Bin Laden’s explicit goal. We New Yorkers were happy when nearly a decade later SEAL Team 6 blew his head apart.

I worked as a young trader in the World Trade Center (WTC) until mid 2001 when I quit (in a huff!) and went to work elsewhere on Wall St. I was a proprietary options/equities trader there until a few months before. “Timing is everything” in options trading but I had no idea what the future held. Or I’d be a richer trader, right?

Ironically since the previous time Islamists tried to take down the WTC Twin Towers in 1993 the buildings had incredible ground level security. Don’t forget your ID! Our enemies finally got it “right” flying two planes into my old office.

None of my former workmates were killed: we were mainly in the low rise W.T.C. 7 and the “NY Mercantile Exchange” at ground level. You could pop out to smoke and regard the looming towers like an ant. They were huge, colossal, way larger than how they look in the media. It was the people with the longest elevator ride, the best view who died. Like the “Windows on the World” restaurant waiter “Falling Man”.

The three things I remember most: Seeing crushed cop cars being driven up Third Ave on flat bed trucks on my way home from work. Our blue and white NYPD cruisers were crushed like ruined toys being taken to wherever cars are interned. We’d never seen our dependable NYPD cars crushed by a building. You’d think: “Oh god no, was there a cop in that at the time?”

The smell. The Twin Towers burned in a huge, demolished heap that smouldered for six weeks. Occasionally the wind would blow north and we’d smell burning office, paper and humans which wafted north over Manhattan. Unforgettable: “JUST PUT THE FIRE OUT ALREADY!”.

Of course that portal to Hell of wrecked buildings had a much more than just a distasteful effect on city workers many of whom died subsequently due to toxic exposure at the site, “The Pile.” Any wonder why we call these guys heroes?

Saddest were the home made “Missing” and “Have you seen?” posters plastered around town in public places with photocopied family pictures of ordinary workers from the WTC with their kids and pets hastily constructed. Intimate, goofy, grinning like your and my family photos. Nobody took the phone number tear offs at the bottom of the little posters. They were all dead and we all knew it, not “dazed” or “lost” as a few posters negotiated: your beloved was crushed under 110 stories of concrete and burning jet fuel due to Islamic terrorism.

So many little horrors: by the time Al Qaida Flight 1 zoomed low over the heads of me and 4 million Manhattanites to its final explosion they’d murdered a flight attendant with a knife.

There were minutiae: everybody wearing flag lapel pins all at once and for a long time New Yorkers were even more polite and kind to each other. Non New Yorkers think we’re rude (we’re not!) but people were noticeably more considerate to strangers.

Conversely I noticed more fights between friends and family: more domestics on the streets, loud disputes one can hear in close living, snappy parents to kids, beefs between neighbors. Funny what a thing like that does to human dynamics.

We turned our rage on ourselves and our loved ones. People drank more but not, I estimate, as much as during Covid which was crazy alkie. We have many adventures here.

Islam, the reason for the whole 9/11 experience continues apace, remaining and expanding.
While IMMEDIATELY after Oct 7 in Israel there was a “River to Sea” Palestine demonstration in Times Square just north of me, I don’t remember any “WE HEART AL QAIDA” marches in 2001.

Quarter of a century later I’m still here. I live in Chelsea, South Manhattan and my apartment looks south to the Financial District where the WTC’s replacement – the Liberty Tower – now stands proud. Strangely we have a Muslim mayor, a “Third Worldism” afficianado who actually provides cover for Al Qaida types, a disheartening fact.

We still do the “Columns of Light” whereby, like two towers, every year they beam up spotlights to the clouds: silent, two towers now of light and the memory. I see it every September out my window and think: “Well that was a Big Thing.” It is is as close as this atheist gets to spirituality and awe.

A bit like with people, if you live in a city through its worst and most terrifying moments you’ll end up loving that city …. all the more. I ?? NY.

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During recent months — between March and August 2026 — more than 27 metric tons of physical gold bars (worth approximately $3.84B) were shipped across the Atlantic again. This time in the opposite direction: from the United States and Canada to secure DNB vaults at a Dutch military base near the town of Zeist, the Netherlands.

The physical cross-Atlantic gold transport to Zeist was just part of a total gold transfer of 86 tons of gold, which also included the sale of around 59 metric tons of gold – worth approximately $8.3B — in New York and the purchase of an equivalent amount of gold in London via the Bank of England. The latter was done to mitigate the security risk and high cost of shipping the entire volume of bullion across the Atlantic.

The Netherlands removed far more gold from the U.S. than it did from Canada. Most of the gold transfer, $10.7B out of a total of $11.7B at December 2025 valuations, came from the U.S.

Interestingly, approximately the same amount of gold (about 27 tons) as was shipped from the U.S. and Canada to Zeist, the Netherlands, was transported from existing gold reserves at Zeist to London.

Apparently, the U.S./Canadian gold bars do not meet the so-called London Good Delivery (LGD) standard, and “could not be utilized as quickly and directly in a crisis situation.” The Zeist gold bars, on the other hand, already fit the London specifications and would not need to be melted down and recast.

Exactly how the precious metal was transported across the Atlantic is still a tightly held secret.

What does this gold flight out of North America, mostly out of the U.S., say about geopolitical and financial relations –- tensions and uncertainties –-between the U.S. and Europe?

Financial leaders are quite circumspect about it.

DNB President Olaf Sleijpen said: “With this relocation, we have improved the tradability of our gold reserves. We expect that we will never need to use them, but we do need to strengthen our resilience and preparedness.”

Frederic Schneider, a nonresident senior fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, said that while the Netherlands and other countries have been repatriating gold for several years, that desire has “gained momentum” since Trump’s second inauguration as US president…[Trump’s] increasingly bellicose and erratic behaviour even towards his allies, and the US’ increasing weaponisation of the dollar, international trade relations, and international payment systems [have] made many countries very nervous..”

The Dutch publication NRC.NL is less subtle. Emphasizing the important role gold plays in the financial system, especially in time of unrest, it writes:

Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the American president has caused unrest. He started a trade war, said he wanted to annex Greenland, kidnapped the president of Venezuela, and started a war against Iran. He also significantly increased the pressure on the American system of central banks, the Federal Reserve. He threatened layoffs, appointed like-minded individuals to the board, and continues to complain about the Fed’s interest rate policy.

It also points out “major [international] concerns about the independence of the Fed, and indirectly, about the gold reserves that the central bank manages on behalf of dozens of countries in vaults in New York.”

Dr Emma Shortis, Australia Institute’s international and security affairs director, is more blunt.

“Trump has shown himself entirely willing to trash the established norms and rules of international politics,” she says. “Having those reserves in the United States is a potential vulnerability…You can absolutely imagine a scenario where, for whatever reason, the Trump administration decides to hold onto them.”

She adds, “We have every reason to think, based on evidence of what the Trump administration has already done, that [it is] entirely willing to use advantages they have, like gold reserves stored in the United States, as weapons against traditional allies.”

The Netherlands is not the first country to move its gold reserves out of the U.S.

Between 2013 and 2017, the German Bundesbank repatriated 300 metric tons of gold from New York to Frankfurt. It also moved 374 tons of gold from the Banque de France to German soil.

Between 2017 and 2018, Turkey withdrew all its gold held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and transferred it back to Turkey and to other European banks.

More recently — in January 2026 — France completed the sale of more 140 metric tons of gold out of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, buying the gold back in Europe and depositing the gold at the Banque de France, all at a neat profit.

Italy, that keeps more than 40 percent of its gold in the U.S. — about 1,000 tons — “has also faced pressure to reconsider its US holdings.” A similar debate has been taking place in Germany.

The Financial Times summarizes the recent flight of gold out of the U.S. as follows:

The transfer follows calls from European politicians and taxpayer lobbyists to repatriate gold reserves from the US, warning that an unreliable American government under President Donald Trump may otherwise seize them amid growing transatlantic tensions.

The post The Netherlands Brings Home the Gold. Will More Follow Suit? appeared first on The Moderate Voice.

by Elwood Watson

From now on, far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos will have to promote his fringe conspiracies and racial controversies in Great Britain after being deported by the U.S. last month.

And early and staunch supporter of Donald Trump, Yiannopoulos was arrested by ICE just a few weeks after hurling unfound accusations at conservative podcaster Benny Johnson and Laura Loomer, a close ally of the president. Loomer seemed to be quite the happy pundit last week publicly taking credit for Yiannopoulos’ deportation.

Yiannopoulos was previously deported almost a decade earlier after becoming an early and prominent supporter of Trump’s initial presidential campaign. His influence was fleeting at best. In a 2017 video, he advocated adult sexual relations with boys as young as 13 and seemed to minimize pedophilia by Roman Catholic priests.

At the time, such disturbing comments cost him a lucrative book deal, then his position at Breitbart and an invitation to speak at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, also known as CPAC. It’s such a delicious irony this adamantly anti-Muslim, pro-immigrant crackdown, pro-ICE, pro-deportation individual has now suddenly found himself a victim of such restrictive policies.

Yiannopoulos has a long and sordid history of making outlandish, abrasive, and offensive comments about marginalized groups. He has been all too eager to assist in the conservative right’s dirty work. In an interview he informed Tucker Carlson “mainstreaming homosexuality in the Republican Party is the great regret of my life.”

As for his many flaws, Yiannopoulos larged received a pass from the far right, people for whom racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. are de rigueur. He also kept his eye on national politics, working on the 2024 presidential campaign of Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who fell from grace after praising Adolf Hitler and making a series of anti-Semitic comments.

Yiannopoulos should have known from the outset the “inclusion” afforded to him was temporary at best and came with strings attached. He would have to genuflect to his far-right audience and financial benefactors, could never speak ill of real racists and homophobes in the conservative ranks, and had to hammer the left ruthlessly by increasingly ramping up his acerbic, acid-tongue rhetoric. By pleasing his benefactors, he would receive ample compensation from right-of-center business groups and conservative political organizations.

His recent attacks on the Trump administration aroused the wrath of largely intolerant mainstream conservatives.

Modern-day conservative politics is deeply populated with numerous officials and candidates who have demonstrated fierce and unmistakable allegiance toward Donald Trump and the larger MAGA movement. They expect the commander in chief would reward such loyalty only to recognize the dispiriting and demoralizing realization that he would throw them to the wolves when they needed his support. Mike Pence, Kevin McCarthy, Reince Priebus, Mo Brooks, Ronna McDaniell, Elise Stefanik, etc. all suffered the same fate.

Loyalty is something Trump expects to receive, not reciprocate. We can now add Milo Yiannopoulos to the list of the disregarded allies who learned this humiliating lesson.

No one should feel too sorry for Yiannopoulos. Like many fabulists, he is likely plotting his return to the public arena. To quote P.T. Barnum, “a sucker is born every minute.” Thus, we can expect Milo to charm and weave his way successfully into the good graces of some gullible factions looking for a colorful personality, no matter how morally flawed or compromised. Yiannopoulos is well suited for such a task.

Copyright 2026 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.

The post Ex-Trump supporter learns loyalty is a one-way street appeared first on The Moderate Voice.