Editor's Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative August 2026 news and views. See our News Reports section for coverage of earlier dates, months and years.

Editor's Note: Scroll below for Part 12of our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative Julye 2026 news and views, with clips beginning at Aug. 1 and extending in reverse chronological order. See our home page for more recent coverage during this unusually heavy news period.

Excerpts below are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes"

Aug. 27

Top Headlines

• New York Times, U.S. Immigration Crackdown: ICE Arrests Soar as People With No Criminal Record Are Increasingly Targeted, Albert Sun and Allison McCann, Aug. 27, 2026 (print ed.). A surge in immigration arrests this summer has swept up thousands of people who had not previously been the focus of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. They included people married to U.S. citizens, people who had entered legally and were pursuing an asylum claim, and others with a temporary legal status that the administration pushed to revoke.
• New York Times, Live Updates: Helicopters Rescue Nepal Flood Survivors, With More Than 1,400 Still Missing, Anupreeta Das, Binod Ghimire and Mujib Mashal, Aug. 27, 2026. Here’s the latest: Officials said hundreds were killed in Nepal and Tibet. New York Times reporters flew with rescuers to remote Himalayan areas, where shocked survivors described a torrent of mud sweeping away villages.
• Morning Shots viaThe Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Coming Midterm Crashout, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Aug. 27, 2026. In today’s newsletter, we’re taking a quick break from our terrible present to imagine one pleasant probable future: the post-midterms litany of excuses for a blue wave that Donald Trump is already rehearsing in public.

First Dolly Parton, now Tim Curry. Not to get all alarmist, but the last year celeb deaths started piling up like this was 2016 —and look how that year turned out. Happy Thursday.

News Roundups

• Meidas Touch Network, Thursday Afternoon Updates: Trump Distracts as Midterm Doom Looms, Ben Meiselas, right, Aug. 27, 2026. It’s Thursday afternoon, and a lot has happened so let’s get into it: Trump’s focus of the day: renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America;” Trump’s Canada tariffs remain deeply unpopular; Trump voters in Iowa say they are done with him; Lifelong Texas Republicans say they’re likely to vote Democratic over massive benefits given to data centers. 
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Furious With White House Social Media Team, Big Epstein Developments, RFK Jr. Lied Under Oath, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 27, 2026. Today’s newsletter has a bit of everything, from serious accountability fights to some genuinely bizarre self-inflicted wounds. The Justice Department is signaling it will appeal a ruling that would force it to unredact key Epstein files, even as a former JPMorgan executive tells Congress he handed Epstein confidential bank information for years. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing new evidence that he lied to the Senate about his 2019 Samoa trip, and a Florida grand jury has found that the DeSantis administration misappropriated $10 million meant for poor kids’ health insurance to help defeat a marijuana ballot measure.
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Trump Blasts his Own Party as Canada Trade War Accelerates, Beef Import Plan Fails, and Approvals Sink ahead of the Midterms, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 26, 2026. Today's rundown is a big one, and it centers on a president who seems to be losing patience with his own party. Trump spent Wednesday afternoon firing off a wave of Truth Social posts, including one warning that the GOP doesn't "fully grasp how badly they are f---ing up," and it's not hard to see why he's rattled. His trade war with Canada just escalated into matching retaliatory tariffs, his new beef import plan has drawn public criticism from his own senators and ranchers who feel thrown under the bus, and his approval rating is stuck near record lows heading into the midterms.

High Tech, Children's Mental Health and Education

• New York Times, Will Meta’s Changes Benefit Young Users’ Mental Health? Nina Agrawal and Roni Caryn Rabin, Aug. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Psychologists said the changes were a symbolic victory, but warned their effectiveness might be limited.
• New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Make Sure His Competitors Share His Pain, Mike Isaac, Aug. 27, 2026. Meta, the social media giant, agreed to change the way children interact with its apps. That could be trouble if its competitors don’t abide by the same rules.
• New York Times, A Movement to Restrict Social Media for Children Has Taken Hold Globally, Ephrat Livni, Aug. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Governments around the world have passed or proposed a range of bans or restrictions on young teens using addictive social media platforms.

Portrayal Of President Trump in the White House changing place names around the Western Hemisphere by The Wayne Madsen Report (using AI).

• Wayne Madsen Report via Substack, Opinion: Whimsically changing place names is the domain of vainglorious dictators, Wayne Madsen, right, author and journalist, Aug. 27, 2026. We don’t have to take this s____ from Trump. The human septic tank seated in the fake gold encrusted Oval Office will go down in history. But it won’t be the history that he envisages for himself. If Trump believes for one second that all the places he is naming after himself or with the word “America” will survive a nanosecond after he leaves— to the happiness and delight of billions — this mortal coil, he’s deluding himself and his dwindling ranks of single-digit IQ cult members.

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr, shown below right, was a principal architect of the Heritage Foundation's plan to reshape the FCC as part of a larger transformation of American into an ultra-right nation especially supportive of the Christian Nationalism values espoused by many of the Heritage Foundation's supporters who also supported the Trump for President campaign. Carr worked on Project 2025 while he also held a full-time job as a Republican FCC Commissioner, thereby ensuring that taxpayers in effect paid for his career ascendancy and political advocacy at the same time.

• Checks and Balances (publication of the Society for the Rule of Law), Opinion: Thank you, Brendan Carr, Bob Corn-Revere, Aug. 27, 2026. Your disregard for the First Amendment will usher in a new era of reform and clarity. I suspect you are not feeling a lot of love these days. It is widely said that you are nothing but a political hack who sold out your previously professed beliefs about free expression and the rule of law for the short-term goal of being named FCC chairman, that you corrupted the agency’s nonpartisan purpose by focusing its efforts on punishing perceived critics of the Trump administration, and that you regularly prostrate yourself with cringe-worthy displays of servility to soothe the president’s fragile ego. 

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• New York Times, Republicans Caught in a Bind With Trump as Midterms Near, Tim Balk, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman, Aug. 27, 2026. The president’s pull with the party base has been clear and his resources are vast. But his low approval ratings make him a liability with swing voters.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: How He’ll Lose, Andrew Egger, right, Aug. 27, 2026. Things are pretty bleak out there. But let me paint you a picture.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: With Ten Weeks To Go Dems Are Closing Strong And Trump Just Keeps F*cking Up, Simon Rosenberg, right,Aug. 27, 2026 (video). As bad as things are for Trump now, and they are bad, they are likely to get worse in the final ten weeks of the election. The economy is getting worse. Inflation is too high. The markets are unhappy. His new trade war with Canada will further erode his standing in critical battleground states. Trump cannot admit he has lost the Iran war, and keeps humiliating himself -- and growing weaker -- in front of the entire world. 

U.S. Midterm Election Political Dirty Tricks 

• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Senate GOP’s fake news website falsely links Democrat to murder, Judd Legum, right, Aug. 27, 2026. On August 6, Popular Information exposed a network of fake news websites surreptitiously controlled by Senate Republicans. One of these sites is now being used to legitimize a specious attack against former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper.
• New York Times, A Republican Attack Ad Used a Family’s Tragedy. Now They’re Furious, Jessica Contrera, Aug. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Relatives of a family killed by a semi truck say they were not consulted about the ad, which connected the crash to illegal immigration.
• The Frank Figliuzzi Show via Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Can We Stop Trump's Election Meddling? Frank Figliuzzi, right, commentator and former FBI executive, Aug. 27, 2026. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes Joins The Show.

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, Saudi Arabia Appears to Be Preparing for a New War With the Houthis, Vivian Nereim, Aug. 27, 2026. Analysts say that weeks of Houthi attacks on Saudi targets have brought the kingdom and the Iranian-backed militia to the brink of full-blown conflict, and could open a new front in the Iran war.
• New York Times, Qatari Prime Minister Travels to Tehran as Iran War Nears Six-Month Mark, Ismaeel Naar, Aug. 27, 2026. Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani has been a key mediator in the conflict, even as his country has blamed Tehran for hundreds of missile and drone attacks.
• New York Times, Democrats to Force Senate Vote on Israel’s Human Rights Practices, Robert Jimison, Aug. 27, 2026. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is leading a group of Democrats seeking answers about violence against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

U.S. Foreign Policy, National Security, Ukraine War

• New York Times, C.I.A. Chief Delivered Bleak Assessment of Russia’s War in Secretive Moscow Visit, Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes, Aug. 27, 2026. John Ratcliffe’s meeting this week with a Russian intelligence chief was aimed at pushing the Kremlin to pursue a peace deal with Ukraine.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

• Raw Story, Zeteo report: Michael Cohen motive exposed by DoJ insiders,Travis Gettys, Aug. 27, 2026. The Department of Justice has discussed using former attorney Michael Cohen, right – who has seemingly come crawling back – as a witness to build new criminal cases against President Donald Trump's legal adversaries, according to a new report. Zeteo's Asawin Suebsaeng, who has a personal history with Cohen, the president's longtime personal attorney and fixer, reported that Trump administration officials are hoping to leverage his testimony to bring criminal prosecutions against New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg – both of whom successfully battled Trump in court.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion:In LaMonica McIver Dissent, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 26, 2026. Judge Ambro Describes Costs of Politicized Prosecution and Speech and Debate. The Third Circuit mostly rejected U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver’s appeal of Jamel Semper’s ruling from last November that she was not immune from charges that she assaulted the ICE goons who were impeding her efforts to conduct an oversight visit to Delaney Hall. Judge Cindy Chung (appointed by Biden) bumped one of three charges back to Semper, but otherwise rejected the rest.

More On Recent U.S. Immigration Crackdown: Aug. 16 Story

Galina Bobreneva and her husband, Brent Jindra, at their home in Redwood City, Calif (New York Times photo by Gabriela Bhaska).

• New York Times, He Was a MAGA Patriot. ICE Took His Wife Away, Miriam Jordan, Aug. 16, 2026. The case represents a new front in President Trump’s mass deportation drive: arrests at airports of people who have active immigration cases and no criminal history. Brent Jindra, a tech salesman, voted for President Trump three times, drawn by his aggressive immigration agenda. He never imagined the crackdown would ensnare his own wife.
• New York Times, ICE Agent Released From Texas Jail After Minnesota Loses Court Fight, Mitch Smith and Ernesto Londoño,.Aug. 27, 2026. The state had sought to have the agent extradited from Texas to answer charges in Minneapolis related to an on-duty shooting that wounded an immigrant.

Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup 

Future President Trump, right, enjoying life with his onetime best friend Jeffrey Epstein along with Trump's now-notorious birthday greeting to Epstein.

• Lincoln Square Media, Six Questions Podcast: Katie Phang on Why She’s Suing the DOJ over the Epstein Files, with Steven Beschloss, Aug. 27, 2026. The future of the Justice Department is bleak, and that is a generous construction:" — Katie Phang.
• Seymour Hersh via Substack, WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JEFFREY EPSTEIN, Seymour Hersh,Aug. 27, 2026. An account from decades ago raises questions about his connections to Mossad and the FBI—but not the CIA. We need another bipartisan committee today to get answers for the American people to questions that need to be asked and answered. Let’s call it the Epstein Committee. 

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a former longtime heroin user now posturing as a health care advocate, is flanked by President Trump and Dr. Mehmet Oz, another health care promoter of dubious credibility and extraordinary wealth generated from nostrums -- and keen loyalty to Trump -- whom Trump nominated for high office. 

• PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Relentless Reporter Hounds RFK Jr. Into Fleeing From His Own Press Conference, Jason Easley, right,Aug. 27, 2026. When RFK Jr. was asked relentlessly about a $1 million donation he took from the Kratom industry, he walked out on a press conference and ended his own event.
• Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump was exposed today. Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 26, 2026. At 10:00 am this morning, the official social media account of the United States Department of Education posted a video no other living or dead presidential administration would have ever even imagined publishing. While they were attempting to glorify Donald Trump and show the world just how powerful and feared he was, the clip they chose to make that point ended up saying something far darker than they seemed to realize, or more honest than they meant to be. Either way, no one at the agency responsible for educating America’s children appears to have stopped long enough to understand what they were actually posting or the ramifications for doing so.

Tributes To Dolly Parton

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 26, 2026 [We Will Always Love You: Special Remembrances], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 27, 2026. Last night, at exactly 9:25—9 to 5—the top of the Empire State Building in New York City lit up pink. The antennas of Chicago’s Willis Tower—formerly the Sears Tower—lit up pink, too. So did the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, which also sported a giant pink heart. The Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee; Reunion Tower and other buildings in the Dallas skyline; and the Longfellow, Burns, Fore River, Braga, and Zakim bridges of Boston; Caesar’s Superdome in New Orleans; and, of course, Nashville’s KVB Bridge and historic Metro Courthouse were all lit up in pink last night.

More On Nepal-Tibet Flood Disaster 

• New York Times, Live Updates: Rescuers Scour Himalayan Valleys for Survivors After Devastating Flood, Binod Ghimire, Lily Kuo, Mujib Mashal and Leo Sands, Aug. 27, 2026. More than 1,000 people were missing in Nepal and the Tibet region of China after a torrent of mud, water and ice swept away villages and bridges. Officials said at least 335 people had been killed. Here’s the latest.
• New York Times, Survivors of Nepal Floods Describe a Devastating Force That Turned Everything Upside Down, Binod Ghimire, Aug. 27, 2026. Survivors described the terrifying speed and power of the “boulders, sand and thick sludge” that killed hundreds and wiped out villages on the border between Nepal and Tibet.

More World News, Global Human Rights 

• New York Times, Ratko Mladic, Murderous ‘Butcher of Bosnia,’ Dies at 83, Dan BilefskyAug. 27, 2026. A general during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, he was convicted in the killing of some 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, Europe’s deadliest massacre since World War II. 

More On Trump's Trade War Against Canada

• Diane Francis via Substack, Opinion: Canada Has Cards, Diane Francis, a Canadian economist, Aug 27, 2026. In 2013, I wrote a book called “Merger of the Century” about how Canada’s economic dependence on the United States in the form of a lop-sided trading relationship was also a strategic vulnerability. And here we are: It’s 2026, Canada remains economically and militarily dependent on the US, and Donald Trump is making a move. Fortunately, Canada has cards.
• The Daily with Sarah Jones viaPoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Republicans May Be Doomed In Michigan Because Of Trump’s Canada Trade War, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Aug. 27, 2026. Canada is Michigan’s biggest export market. It is also a state with key Senate and House races. Trump’s trade war with Canada is so bad for Michigan that it could doom Republicans
• Politico, Why carmakers are staying quiet despite 'cataclysmic' Canada tariff threat, Daniel Desrochers and Oliver Ward, Aug. 26, 2026. Trump has threatened to raise tariffs on automobiles and parts to 50 percent if Canada and the U.S. can’t strike a deal by Jan. 1.'

U.S. Markets, Economy, Inflation, Jobs

• New York Times, Nvidia’s Profit Doubles to $59.69 Billion Thanks to A.I. Spending, Kalley Huang, Aug. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Quarterly revenue also more than doubled, to $96.22 billion, the company said, topping expectations on Wall Street. Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence spending spree may have unsettled Wall Street, but the chipmaker Nvidia is still cashing in on sales to the biggest technology companies.

More Global Art, Culture News, News Media 

Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Roy Cohn, from 1981. The scarred face of Roy M. Cohn, the notorious New York City lawyer, fixer and master of the political dark arts, an attorney for Donald Trump and a close companion of the future president, floating bodiless in a pool of black, his hooded eyes staring directly back at the viewer.

• New York Times, Roy Cohn, Robert Mapplethorpe and a Trump-Era Dilemma Over Free Speech, Michael M. Grynbaum, Aug. 27, 2026. When a respected biographer tried to use a Mapplethorpe photograph of Roy Cohn for a book cover, worries about the wrath of Mr. Cohn’s protégé, President Trump, intervened.
• New York Times, Yayoi Kusama, Pop Artist Who Expanded and Endured, Dies at 97, Holland Cotter, Updated Aug. 27, 2026. The Japanese artist’s polka-dot-covered paintings, phallic sculptures and public performances caused a stir in New York City and Europe in the 1960s.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion:A Shoddy Analysis Was Written by Peter Baker, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 26, 2026. Peter Baker wrote a post that has been well-received, but not by me. Here’s what it claims: At Home and Abroad, Deference to Trump Turns Increasingly to Defiance. Is it analytically sound?

Top Stories

New York Times, U.S. Immigration Crackdown: ICE Arrests Soar as People With No Criminal Record Are Increasingly Targeted, Albert Sun and Allison McCann, Aug. 27, 2026 (print ed.). A surge in immigration arrests this summer has swept up thousands of people who had not previously been the focus of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign. They included people married to U.S. citizens, people who had entered legally and were pursuing an asylum claim, and others with a temporary legal status that the administration pushed to revoke.

A majority of the immigrants arrested in July were people who were accused of violating civil immigration laws but who had not been charged with or convicted of a crime, an analysis of newly released federal data shows. The share with a past violent criminal conviction fell to less than 4 percent.ICE arrests of people with no criminal history have risen fastestOverall, immigration arrests rose to record highs with 43,000 ICE arrests in June and 49,000 in July. Two fatal shootings involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, in Texas and Maine, drew outrage but did not meaningfully slow the pace of arrests.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said that the administration was keeping its promises to arrest and deport criminals and that anyone in the country illegally was a target for enforcement.

The new data contains details on every ICE arrest through Aug. 5 and offers the fullest picture yet of how the agency’s activities have shifted since public backlash forced a retreat from the aggressive tactics seen in Minneapolis early this year. It was obtained by the Deportation Data Project, an academic group, through a public records lawsuit and analyzed by The New York Times.

After his confirmation this spring, the secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, promised quieter but more effective enforcement. ICE now appears closer than ever to meeting a recent goal of 2,000 daily arrests.

“They have more officers, more money, more detention space, more local partners and better systems,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official. “And they’re finally putting all the pieces together to build out this deportation machine.”

A wider focus

Immigration arrests are near all-time highs in almost every state. Even sparsely populated Montana and Vermont saw spikes, with arrest rates more than doubling.

But the surge was strongest in Florida and Texas, two states with large unauthorized immigrant populations and leaders friendly to the Trump administration’s crackdown.

ICE is making more than 380 arrests a day in Texas and more than 230 a day in Florida, with each state up by more than 100 arrests a day from the spring.

All the same, the increase has affected states led both by Republicans and by Democrats. New Jersey and New Mexico have seen arrests double, despite both states passing laws this year that restrict government cooperation with ICE.More agents, more arrests

ICE appears to be hitting new arrest records in a couple of ways: The agency has hired thousands more agents — growing to 29,000 employees in June, up from about 21,000 when Mr. Trump took office, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. And it has relied more on state and local law enforcement partners.

ICE has rapidly expanded a program to deputize local police officers to arrest immigrants. The share of people detained through the program, known as 287(g), is now around 14 percent, the data shows.

New York Times, Live Updates: Helicopters Rescue Nepal Flood Survivors, With More Than 1,400 Still Missing, Anupreeta Das, Binod Ghimire and Mujib Mashal, .Aug. 27, 2026. Here’s the latest: Officials said hundreds were killed in Nepal and Tibet. New York Times reporters flew with rescuers to remote Himalayan areas, where shocked survivors described a torrent of mud sweeping away villages.

Emergency workers searched steep Himalayan valleys and helicopters ferried bewildered residents to safety on Thursday during a sprawling search for survivors of a devastating flood that killed hundreds and left more than 1,400 people missing in a river valley that runs from Tibet into Nepal.

Some survivors wept after landing at a rescue base. One interviewed by a New York Times reporter in Timure, a Nepalese village, described what sounded like a thunderclap and a breeze, before a wave of muddy water crashed into his home, carrying away his wife and two daughters. “They all died and I lived,” the survivor, Dawa Lama, said, adding that he still clung to a slim hope they had somehow survived.

The devastation stretched for miles a day after a giant torrent of water, mud and ice swept through a remote river valley in northern Nepal and the Tibet region of China. The flood caught many of its victims without warning, destroying roads, snapping bridges, toppling buildings and cutting communications — all of which were complicating rescue efforts.

Scientists said the flood was probably unleashed by a massive rock landslide that coincided with the collapse of a glacier high in the mountains near the border on Wednesday morning, unleashing the torrent down the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli rivers. Survivors described lightning fast floodwaters laden with debris that shattered houses and quickly swallowed up people trapped in buildings or as they fled on foot.

Warming temperatures caused by climate change may have destabilized the rock face, scientists said, though they added it was too early to determine a precise cause.

Officials said hundreds were killed in Nepal and Tibet. New York Times reporters flew with rescuers to remote Himalayan areas, where shocked survivors described a torrent of mud sweeping away villages.

Morning Shots viaThe Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Coming Midterm Crashout, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Aug. 27, 2026. In today’s newsletter, we’re taking a quick break from our terrible present to imagine one pleasant probable future: the post-midterms litany of excuses for a blue wave that Donald Trump is already rehearsing in public.

First Dolly Parton, now Tim Curry. Not to get all alarmist, but the last year celeb deaths started piling up like this was 2016 —and look how that year turned out. Happy Thursday.

News Roundups 

Meidas Touch Network, Thursday Afternoon Updates: Trump Distracts as Midterm Doom Looms, Ben Meiselas, right, Aug. 27, 2026. It’s Thursday afternoon, and a lot has happened so let’s get into it.  Here are some of the top stories we’re tracking:

• Trump’s focus of the day: renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America” (above)
• Trump’s Canada tariffs remain deeply unpopular
• Trump voters in Iowa say they are done with him
• Lifelong Texas Republicans say they’re likely to vote Democratic over massive benefits given to data centers
• Mike Johnson says Trump’s presidency is effectively on the ballot in the midterms
• Trump amplifies a warning about a Republican “midterm reckoning”
• The White House says there are no negotiations with Iran, while The Atlantic reports that the Trump regime wants Iran out of the headlines before November
• U.S. Patriot missile stocks in Europe are “beyond critical,” per AP
• The USPS says new mail-in voting restrictions are now in effect as court challenges continue
• The Trump regime deleted a video they posted after commenters pointed out they accidentally compared Trump to Hitler
• WaPo reports on $900 million from canceled wind energy deal is facilitating a transaction benefiting a firm led by a major Trump donor
• A former staffer for Georgia Republican Senate candidate Mike Collins posted Nazi and KKK imagery

Trump Is Desperate to Change Subjects as Voters Turn On Him

Here’s what Trump is focused on today: renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”Image

A quick message to American voters: this is what this regime is doing when they aren’t insider trading, making everything more expensive, selling pardons, and taking bribes from cronies.

Voters are noticing.

CNN spoke with a young Trump-supporting Iowa voter who said that just two years out of high school, he is struggling financially and feels the American dream slipping away.

When asked what he’d say to Trump: “I would just look him in the face and just say, f*** you, that’s about it.”

Ouch.

Another Iowa voter who voted for Trump 3 times said he is “very disappointed” and that he is “over the Trump thing.” His message for Trump? “Stop the bulls**t.”

Texas Republicans, meanwhile, are furious about the treatment of massive data centers. CNN featured lifelong Republicans who said they’re considering voting Democratic for the first time after concluding Republican leaders ignored their concerns while providing major benefits for the data center industry. One lifelong Republican noted that the Democratic candidates were actually showing up to hear their concerns.Republicans Know They Have a BIG Problem

Speaker Mike Johnson is now framing the midterm as a referendum on Trump. Interesting strategy. Johnson discussed Republicans midterm convention in Dallas, where Trump will tell voters that even if his name isn’t on the ballot, his administration and legacy are. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer went on Fox with the usual buzzwords, warning of “Marxism,” “socialism,” and “anarchy.” Michigan Republican Congressman John James went on right-wing MAGA influencer Benny Johnson’s how to discuss… circumcision? I’m trying to understand their closing argument here.

Trump seems to understand the danger, too. He amplified a post from MAGA influencer Matt Van Swol warning that congressional Republicans could face a “midterm reckoning” for failing to deliver Trump’s agenda. Ah yes, it’s always other people’s fault. Trump is already setting the stage to blame Congress for his own failures and for whatever happens in November. Nothing is ever his fault, after all.Trump’s Canada Tariffs Continue To Backfire

Peter Navarro went on Steve Bannon’s show and referred to the Canadian people as “useful idiots” while mocking PM Carney and Ontario Premier Ford as “Laurel and Hardy.” Very normal. The issue for Trump and his goons is Americans don’t want this fight. Polling shows net support for Trump’s Canada tariffs at -33 overall, and -44 among indies.The Iran War Continues to Drain America’s Defenses

The White House continues to say no negotiations are ongoing with Iran. At the same time, The Atlantic reports that the Trump regime is hoping they can keep the war out of the headlines heading into the midterms. That means we’ll continue to talk about it every single day. One adviser explained the political strategy: “We’re just trying to hang on until the midterms.”

Meanwhile, the AP is reporting the U.S. has used about 65% of the Patriot interceptors at issue, around 1,500 of 2,330. A defense official warned NATO could be left taking “punch after punch” in the mouth if Russia launched ballistic missiles while European defenses remain depleted. When Defense Sec. Hegseth was asked about U.S. munitions levels, he refused to provide the numbers, mocking reporters and saying America could have “110%” or “1%.”

We also have an update regarding the 19-year-old sailor aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln who tried to jump overboard due to the dire conditions and mental stress. He is now facing disciplinary charges following his suicide attempt. His wife says he repeatedly sought mental health assistance and paternity leave prior to the incident.Mail-In Voting Update

We need to keep following this one closely. The U.S. Postal Service now says its new mail-in voting restrictions are in effect while court challenges continue. According to the USPS, the rule became effective August 21. It was initially blocked by injunctions, but USPS says those injunctions no longer prevent implementation for the November 3 midterms or earlier federal elections. We will continue following the ongoing legal battle here.The Education Department’s Propaganda Fail

Yesterday, the Trump Department of Education posted a 19-second video beginning with Gary Oldman portraying Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. Churchill says, “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!” In the post, the DOE compared Trump to the tiger. But commentators quickly pointed out: the “tiger” Churchill is referencing is Adolf Hitler. The Education Department compared Trump to Hitler. After a few hours, the department deleted the post.Trump Donor Linked to Wind Energy Cancellations

A Washington Post investigation is now putting scrutiny on the Trump regime’s campaign against offshore wind. German energy company RWE is receiving $1.2B from a federal fund in exchange for surrendering offshore wind leases and committed to investments in what they’re calling “conventional energy” (oil, gas, etc). $900M of that money is being used to purchase a stake in Louisiana LNG from Stonepeak, a private equity firm co-founded and led by a billionaire who has contributed roughly $1M to Trump-related inaugural efforts.And…There’s More

A former staffer for Georgia Republican Senate candidate Mike Collins was discovered to have shared an image depicting himself in Ku Klux Klan robes in addition to posting swastikas and other white nationalist and Nazi rhetoric online. Collins is facing off against Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff.

Ted Cruz retweeted a Dolly Parton clip from an account that subsequently changed its display name to “Ted Cruz’s Tiny Penis.” Cruz’s post was up for hours before he realized and deleted.

The White House tried to post an America vs. Canada visual featuring an eagle stomping on a Canadian goose. But the full video actually showed the goose winning the fight, and the eagle retreating.

Trump posted a “Mission Accomplished” Iran graphic that brought flashbacks to George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment during Iraq.

And yes, the sealant on the Reflecting Pool is peeling again.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Furious With White House Social Media Team, Big Epstein Developments, RFK Jr. Lied Under Oath, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 27, 2026. Today’s newsletter has a bit of everything, from serious accountability fights to some genuinely bizarre self-inflicted wounds. The Justice Department is signaling it will appeal a ruling that would force it to unredact key Epstein files, even as a former JPMorgan executive tells Congress he handed Epstein confidential bank information for years. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing new evidence that he lied to the Senate about his 2019 Samoa trip, and a Florida grand jury has found that the DeSantis administration misappropriated $10 million meant for poor kids’ health insurance to help defeat a marijuana ballot measure.

Then there’s the stuff that’s harder to make up. Donald Trump is furious with his own team as the Education Department accidentally compared Trump to Hitler in a promotional video, Ted Cruz got tricked into promoting an account with an obscene name, and a Florida congressman reversed his entire opinion of Jelly Roll the moment the singer made fun of Trump’s weight. And a Navy sailor who attempted suicide aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln is now facing discipline instead of support, a story that raises hard questions about how the military handles mental health.

Also, a quick heads up: if you come across videos like this one making the rounds, it’s not me. I’d never use a background like that, for one thing. AI impersonation has gotten completely out of hand lately, so stay sharp out there.Photo by Aaron Parnas on August 27, 2026. May be a meme of one or more people and text that says 'ann.leslie.3511 11h Get your lantern powered by batteries candles, generators of you have homes. We seen this was coming. All Praises to The Most High YAH and help your neighbors … TRUMP TRUMPTODECLARE to DECLARE NNATIONAL NNATIONALELECTRICITY ELECTRICITY TikTok EMERGENCY လေင်မြ််ပေါင်သန update + 1.6K 283 436 1K'.

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There’s a lot here, so let’s get into it.

Epstein:

The Department of Justice signaled this week it will appeal a ruling that requires it to unredact key documents in the Epstein files, a case brought by attorney and journalist Katie Phang, according to The Hill. The June preliminary injunction from U.S. District Judge Emmit Sullivan ordered redactions removed from documents including at least eight email exchanges between Epstein and an unnamed party about a “torture video” and sexual activity with young women, including minors, plus interviews with a woman who says Trump violently attacked her as a minor. Notably, the DOJ’s notice of appeal doesn’t lay out any legal arguments and instead calls its own ability to appeal “inconclusive,” describing the filing as merely a “protective notice of appeal.” The department has argued some redactions protect victim identities and contact information, and some previously redacted details have already leaked out anyway, including that Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem was the one emailing Epstein about the torture video.

Judge Sullivan has grown visibly frustrated with the DOJ’s handling of the case, warning at a recent hearing that he has held attorneys in contempt before and asking prosecutors, “You want me to issue another order and say, ‘I really mean it this time’?” The DOJ maintains that unredacting some information, like the bin Sulayem email address, would serve no real purpose since the information is already public and easily searchable online. But Phang’s suit also seeks additional detail from the tranche of documents describing the FBI’s interviews with the woman who alleges Trump assaulted her as a minor, a request the DOJ has been slower to address. The dispute underscores the broader fight over how much of the Epstein files the public will ultimately get to see, and the DOJ’s own uncertainty about its legal footing suggests this fight is far from resolved.

Separately, former JPMorgan Chase executive Jes Staley told the House Oversight Committee in a July interview, released as a transcript Wednesday, that he repeatedly shared confidential and market-sensitive bank information with Jeffrey Epstein,including details of JPMorgan’s 2008 financial crisis communications with the Federal Reserve and a $44 billion figure on private bank inflows over a two week span. Staley, shown above at right in a file photo collage with Epstein, also confirmed he was named a trustee of Epstein’s estate years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction, signing trust documents in 2014 and an amendment in 2015, though he says he ultimately declined to serve and received no compensation. He defended sharing the information as something he believed he had authority to do, maintaining he had a close professional relationship with Epstein but was unaware of his crimes, and he separately testified that he’d warned Epstein the bank considered him a high risk client over his large cash withdrawals. Staley ran JPMorgan’s private bank and asset management business, where Epstein was a client, before later leading Barclays from 2015 until his 2021 resignation, and the disclosures add to a growing list of prominent figures, including Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whom the oversight committee has questioned about their ties to Epstein.

Trump not happy with White House social media

Trump’s own government just handed him a fresh headache, and it wasn’t from an opponent this time, it was his own social media team. And, he is not happy. The Education Department’s official X account posted a 19-second clip Wednesday meant to hype the president, opening with Gary Oldman’s Churchill declaring “you cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth” before cutting to a flattering Trump montage captioned “no one does it like us” with a tiger emoji. The problem is that Churchill’s “tiger” line, from the film Darkest Hour, refers to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany, meaning whoever cut the video accidentally cast Trump in Hitler’s role instead of the fearsome hero they were going for. Users pounced immediately, X attached a community note explaining the reference, and the department quietly deleted the post. It’s the latest in a growing pattern of amateur-hour missteps from pro-Trump government and campaign accounts, following earlier controversies over a racist AI video depicting the Obamas as apes and separate AI images placing Trump alongside Jesus Christ, all of which suggests whoever is running this content pipeline keeps embarrassing the president rather than helping him.

Meanwhile, the White House posted this image in an effort to suggest that the United States was beating Canada in the trade war. The only issue? The viral clip shows that the goose actually wins, and the internet made clear how this was a metaphor for the current state of US-Canada trade tensions, where Canada keeps matching Trump’s tariffs blow for blow instead of backing down.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has been getting flack for posting “mission accomplished” regarding the war in Iran:

Senator Ted Cruz got caught up in an embarrassing social media prank this week after he shared what he thought was a heartfelt Dolly Parton tribute, a vintage clip of her singing and joking with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, and captioned it “legend” with crying and heart emojis. Shortly after Cruz amplified the post, the account behind it changed its display name to “Ted Cruz’s tiny dick,” meaning the tribute Cruz shared now sat directly above a post attributed to that name. Cruz deleted his repost once the switch was noticed, but the original clip stayed up and kept racking up engagement, eventually topping 80,000 likes and millions of views. For roughly a full day before he caught it, one of the country’s most prominent Republican senators had effectively turned his own Dolly Parton memorial into free promotion for an account mocking him.

Florida Republican Rep. Jimmy Patronis did a dramatic about-face on country star Jelly Roll this week after the singer used a guest hosting spot on Jimmy Kimmel Live to mock Trump’s weight, joking that his own 300 pound weight loss meant he’d “lost an entire Donald Trump” and telling the president “from one fat pig to another” that losing weight would let him “see your penis again.”

Patronis, who back in 2024 had enthusiastically invited Jelly Roll to perform at Florida’s Gulf Coast Jam, reversed course entirely, declaring the singer “100 percent not welcomed to Florida’s panhandle” and saying he didn’t even want to see his tour bus on Interstate 10. He also dismissed Jelly Roll as a “token ‘country’ star the libs in California are allowed to enjoy,” insisting “he ain’t country, never was.” The flip flop was captured and shared by journalist Ron Filipkowski, contrasting Patronis’s old welcoming post with his new hostile stance side by side. It’s a pretty clear case of a Trump ally’s tune shifting the moment someone took a shot at the president.

Service member charged:

A 19-year-old sailor who jumped from the USS Abraham Lincoln on August 3, in what his wife describes as a suicide attempt, is now facing Navy disciplinary action rather than mental health support, according to MS NOW. Charging documents reviewed by the outlet show he’s been accused of violating Article 83 for malingering, defined as intentionally faking illness or injury to avoid duty, and Article 86 for being absent without leave. His wife told MS NOW he’d repeatedly asked his chain of command and the ship’s medical team for help before he jumped, and had also been denied paternity leave multiple times despite the couple welcoming a daughter in February while he was deployed. He’ll face a captain’s mast, where a commanding officer decides punishment, and could lose half his normal pay under this non-judicial process.

MS NOW reports that after being medically evacuated and returned to San Diego on August 13, the sailor spent five days at Naval Medical Center San Diego, where staff monitored his vital signs but he never saw a psychiatrist or therapist, and he was ordered back to work immediately upon release. His first actual therapy appointment didn’t come until August 26, nearly two weeks later. His wife also said the Navy didn’t notify her about the incident until four days after it happened, and that she first learned what happened from a message sent by one of her husband’s friends on the ship rather than from the command. In a text to his wife 13 days before he jumped, the sailor wrote “i think the boat is finally getting to me” and said he didn’t know if he could finish the deployment after learning it had been extended again.

MS NOW notes the case is raising broader questions about how the military handles mental health, especially as deployments hit record lengths, with Rep. Sara Jacobs, a California Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee representing the Lincoln’s home port, saying “no one should be punished for getting the mental health care they need.” A former Army judge advocate general, Cody Harnish, told MS NOW that while military court martial guidance says bona fide suicide attempts should not be charged, pursuing punishment is left to a commanding officer’s discretion, calling it “a policy choice.” A Navy official responded to MS NOW by saying the service is “fully committed to the health and wellbeing of every Sailor” and that mental health resources are available 24/7. The Lincoln has been deployed since November 2025, with its return repeatedly extended due to the war with Iran, and Defense Department data cited in the piece shows 471 service members died by suicide across all branches in 2024. Same reminder as before: if this touches close to home, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) is available any time.

RFK Jr. lied under oath:

Newly obtained letters reported by the Guardian and AP indicate that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., left, lied during his 2025 Senate confirmation hearings when he repeatedly told lawmakers his 2019 trip to Samoa had “nothing to do with vaccines.” A letter Kennedy wrote to the Samoan prime minister before that trip explicitly says he wanted to study the MMR vaccine there, using the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times and proposing a “detailed health informatics assessment” of what happened with Samoa’s MMR vaccines. Kennedy’s Samoa visit came months before a 2019 measles outbreak that killed 83 people, mostly children under five, and critics say the trip emboldened anti-vaccine activists on the island at a time when Kennedy led the anti-vaccine nonprofit Children’s Health Defense. During his hearings, Kennedy told Senators Ron Wyden and Ed Markey multiple times that his trip was solely about introducing a medical records digitization system, not vaccines, and separately claimed no Samoan skipped a vaccine because of him.

The newly revealed letter fits into a broader pattern of communications the Guardian and AP had already uncovered showing CHD’s involvement in Samoa dating back to 2018, when two children died after being given an improperly mixed MMR vaccine and the country halted all vaccinations for ten months. During that pause, CHD began corresponding with Samoan officials, and Kennedy’s January 2019 letter, written on CHD letterhead, speculated the deaths might stem from bad vaccine lots rather than the human error that Samoan health officials ultimately identified. The Samoan prime minister responded a month later welcoming Kennedy’s team to conduct their assessment, and a CHD colleague later described the visit in an internal email as part of a vaccine related “mission.” Kennedy traveled to Samoa with his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, in mid-2019, where he met with anti-vaccine activists, one of whom reportedly helped arrange the trip with a US embassy employee.

HHS pushed back hard on the story, calling any claim that Kennedy lied “false and outright defamatory,” and noting that Kennedy was not under oath during either hearing, which matters since knowingly lying to Congress is technically a crime that’s rarely prosecuted and carries a five year statute of limitations. HHS did not respond when the Guardian asked it to directly reconcile Kennedy’s “nothing to do with vaccines” testimony with his own letter, and the White House did not respond to a request for comment either. Attorneys with Senate procedure expertise say that if Democrats retake the House or Senate in November, they could use Kennedy’s statements as grounds for hearings, an impeachment inquiry, or other roadblocks for the administration. The Senate ultimately confirmed Kennedy on a narrow 52 to 48 vote, and he has separately floated the idea that Dr. Anthony Fauci could face perjury charges over his own Covid era testimony, raising the specter of similar scrutiny eventually applying to Kennedy himself.

Other news:

CIA Director John Ratcliffe used his unannounced Tuesday trip to Moscow, the first known visit to Russia by a CIA director under Trump, to warn Russian officials against escalating conflict with NATO allies, especially the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, amid intensifying drone and missile strikes between Russia and Ukraine and recent Russian threats against NATO countries backing Kyiv. He also pressed Moscow to scale back military and economic support for Iran, urging Russia to stop sharing weapons and defense technology with Tehran and advising against “overreacting” to expanded U.S. sanctions Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent threatened this week, this after reports that Russia has been shipping drone and missile components to Iran and possibly helping it target U.S. facilities. Trump downplayed the trip as “semi-routine” in a radio interview while acknowledging its goal was pushing toward ending the Ukraine war, and the visit follows a pattern of Trump dispatching Ratcliffe, generally seen as a Russia hawk, into sensitive diplomatic missions, including a secret May trip to Cuba warning its government to reform or face pressure. Lawmakers were largely kept in the dark about the Moscow visit, though Senator James Lankford said he welcomed the outreach, arguing “things don’t get better by not talking.”

Lifelong Texas Republicans say they’re switching to the Democratic party over frustrations with data centers that they describe as overloading power grids, guzzling water, and disrupting rural life, with one voter calling the GOP’s response “nothing more than the middle finger” and another saying he’d vote for “the devil” before backing Governor Greg Abbott again. These voters say Republican leaders like Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton have ignored their concerns while Democrats have actually listened. The defections are surfacing amid a tight U.S. Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Paxton, with polling showing an unusually close contest in what’s traditionally been solid Republican territory. It’s a notable sign of how a normally under-the-radar infrastructure issue is starting to reshape political loyalties in a deep-red state.

The U.S. government declared a drought disaster for 26 of Puerto Rico’s 78 municipalities on Wednesday as water shortages deepen across the island, with more than a third of Puerto Rico under extreme drought and July marking San Juan’s driest month in over 120 years. Governor Jenniffer González said she requested the declaration from the USDA more than two weeks ago, and it now allows farmers in affected areas to apply for emergency loans, though farmers like Naia Seda, whose 15-acre farm hasn’t seen rain since April, describe crops shriveling and dropping before they ripen. The drought has forced many farmers to halt production as early as May, hit hydroponic and soil vegetable growers hardest, and pushed livestock breeders to sell young bulls at rock-bottom prices with no buyers, with one farmer even returning to work as a mechanic to get by. The crisis follows González declaring a state of emergency in late July and activating the National Guard to help distribute water, plus rationing measures in San Juan and six other cities that leave more than 180,000 customers without water for 48-hour stretches. Meteorologists attribute the drought to an El Niño warming cycle also affecting the U.S. Virgin Islands, though Puerto Rico’s water problems are compounded by long-neglected, crumbling infrastructure that has caused shortages independent of the weather.

A sealed Florida grand jury report obtained by CBS News Miami finds that the DeSantis administration “misappropriated” $10 million in taxpayer money meant to provide health insurance for poor kids, instead routing it through the Hope Florida Foundation and into political committees that helped defeat the 2024 marijuana legalization ballot measure, though the grand jury said it couldn’t identify enough evidence to bring criminal charges since “nobody will take responsibility” for the decision. The report points squarely at Attorney General James Uthmeier, who was the governor’s chief of staff at the time and whose PAC, Keep Florida Clean, received the bulk of the diverted funds, and it says then-Attorney General Ashley Moody knew about the plan and authorized her deputy John Guard to sign off on the settlement without proper vetting. The money originated from a Medicaid overbilling settlement with Centene that was supposed to fully reimburse Florida taxpayers, but state officials quietly rewrote the deal twice in September 2024 to siphon $10 million to Hope Florida instead, then rushed it out within a week even as the broader taxpayer repayment took over a year. That $10 million left Hope Florida’s account within 25 days, funneled through two nonprofits that then transferred most of it directly into Uthmeier’s political action committee, which in turn sent money to the Republican Party of Florida and another PAC he chaired. Neither DeSantis, Moody, nor Uthmeier was called to testify before the grand jury, and all three have since dismissed the matter, with DeSantis calling it fine and Uthmeier labeling it a “nothingburger,” even as the grand jury recommended new state laws to prevent this kind of unmonitored taxpayer fund diversion in the future.

A federal judge in Texas denied Minnesota’s attempt to force Governor Greg Abbott to extradite ICE agent Christian Castro, who was charged in May with four counts of second-degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime after shooting Venezuelan national Julio Sosa-Celis in the leg through the door of a Minneapolis home during an enforcement operation. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. ruled that while Abbott has taken an unusually long time weighing the request, Minnesota failed to show any legal requirement forcing Texas to extradite Castro within a specific deadline, even though Texas law otherwise requires his release by Thursday, the 90-day mark, unless he’s extradited. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who sued Abbott earlier this month accusing him of turning Texas into “a sanctuary state for violent criminals,” said the state would keep litigating, while Governor Tim Walz argued Texas has always honored extradition requests before and this case shouldn’t be different. Abbott’s office celebrated the ruling as protecting the governor’s constitutional authority over extradition decisions from being “commandeered” by the courts.

General Mills announced Wednesday that it has removed artificial colors from all its U.S. cereals, including Lucky Charms and Trix, switching instead to fruit and vegetable based dyes and spice derived colors like turmeric and paprika, with 90 percent of its U.S. retail products now free of artificial dyes and the rest, like some Betty Crocker mixes and Fruit Roll-Ups, set to transition by the end of 2027. This makes General Mills the second major cereal maker to make this shift, following WK Kellogg’s announcement earlier this month that it will remove artificial colors from Froot Loops and Apple Jacks by the end of this year. Health advocates have pushed for years to get artificial dyes out of foods over studies linking them to hyperactivity and attention issues in some children, though the FDA maintains approved dyes are safe for most kids while acknowledging some sensitivity exists; the FDA did ban Red 3 last year over cancer concerns in lab studies. Pressure has mounted from multiple directions, including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pushing food companies to phase out petroleum based dyes, and General Mills itself signed an agreement with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last year committing to remove synthetic dyes from all its products by the end of 2027.

A small plane carrying four people crashed into shallow waters near the remote coastal town of Seldovia, Alaska on Wednesday, killing everyone on board. The Piper PA-24 had taken off from Anchorage and was heading to Seldovia’s airport, about 136 miles southwest, when it went down and became submerged in about 15 feet of water in the Seldovia Slough, forcing troopers to wait for low tide to reach it. All four bodies were recovered and sent to the medical examiner’s office, though their names haven’t been released pending notification of next of kin, and the cause of the crash isn’t yet clear as the NTSB investigates. Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan said he’ll be briefed by the NTSB and FAA, calling the crash “heartbreaking and unacceptable” and reaffirming aviation safety in Alaska as a priority. This comes less than a week after a separate Alaska crash at a remote military site killed all eight people aboard, when the aircraft’s pilots couldn’t see the gravel airstrip during a second approach in heavy fog. 

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Trump Blasts his Own Party as Canada Trade War Accelerates, Beef Import Plan Fails, and Approvals Sink ahead of the Midterms, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 26, 2026. Today's rundown is a big one, and it centers on a president who seems to be losing patience with his own party. Trump spent Wednesday afternoon firing off a wave of Truth Social posts, including one warning that the GOP doesn't "fully grasp how badly they are f---ing up," and it's not hard to see why he's rattled. His trade war with Canada just escalated into matching retaliatory tariffs, his new beef import plan has drawn public criticism from his own senators and ranchers who feel thrown under the bus, and his approval rating is stuck near record lows heading into the midterms.

High Tech, Culture, Children's Education 

New York Times, Will Meta’s Changes Benefit Young Users’ Mental Health? Nina Agrawal and Roni Caryn Rabin, Aug. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Psychologists said the changes were a symbolic victory, but warned their effectiveness might be limited.

Psychologists and child advocates welcomed news of the landmark settlement Wednesday over claims that the social media giant Meta had harmed young users with its addictive platforms. But many expressed skepticism that the company’s planned changes would have a meaningful effect on adolescents’ mental health.

For users under 18, Meta announced it would introduce a default two-hour daily time limit, restrictions on use during nighttime and school hours and a ban on cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup filters, among other changes.

“There’s a desire to say with this kind of verdict and these kinds of changes, ‘This is going to solve the problem — this is going to protect teens’ mental health,’” said Jacqueline Nesi, an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University.

But research suggests that the relationship between social media use and mental health is much more complex, Dr. Nesi said. Technology can hijack young people’s time and attention, sometimes at the cost of beneficial activities like exercise, sleep or in-person interactions, and some studies have linked heavy social media use to anxiety. But the idea that social media is the primary or main driver of mental health problems in children and teenagers “is just not supported with the research,” Dr. Nesi said.

Experts agreed that the settlement and the changes Meta announced were a major symbolic victory. Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics, said the measures would send “a powerful message” that platforms like Instagram are risky and should be used with care.

Candice Odgers, a professor of psychology and informatics at the University of California, Irvine, said the settlement would force Meta to design its social media platforms in a way that would make them safer — something psychologists like her have long called for.

But unless the whole industry gets on board, young people can simply migrate to other platforms, Dr. Odgers said. (On Wednesday, Meta urged TikTok and YouTube to put similar measures in place, saying that it wanted to protect teens but adding that “we cannot do it alone.”) And even there, the science remains unsettled on any causal link between social media participation and adolescent mental health, she added.

Several large-scale reviews have shown weak associations in the adolescent population between social media use and mental health, Dr. Odgers said. These have been both positive and negative. For example, she said, algorithmic feeds can harm someone who has disordered eating, but social media can be a valuable resource for people who are looking for certain kinds of information or who are in crisis.

Some researchers pointed to sleep as a potentially important factor. “We know that for many teens, the way they are using technology in general, the way they’re using social media, is getting in the way of their sleep,” Dr. Nesi said. Poor sleep over time can lead to or exacerbate anxiety and depression and can affect physical health. Teens will now be restricted from using Facebook and Instagram between midnight and 6 a.m., but “it’s an open question whether these protections will actually lead to more sleep for teens,” Dr. Nesi said. (Instagram already had an option for users to select “sleep mode” and opt out of nighttime notifications.)+

In addition, six hours of sleep a night is not enough, said Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist and author of “The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age.”

She said the agreement for Instagram and Facebook to silence notifications during school hours also does not go far enough, because young people need relief from notifications after school hours so they can do homework or focus on other activities.

New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Make Sure His Competitors Share His Pain, Mike Isaac, Aug. 27, 2026. Meta, the social media giant, agreed to change the way children interact with its apps. That could be trouble if its competitors don’t abide by the same rules.

The up to $17.1 billion that Meta agreed on Wednesday to pay to 47 states, the District of Columbia and some U.S. territories to settle a three-year-old lawsuit probably won’t sting that much for Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive.

The details of the settlement, however, could leave a mark. Meta also agreed to rein in children’s access to its marquee products like Instagram and Facebook, create daily time limits, increase parental controls and cut off access during school hours.

That could permanently alter how Meta interacts with its youngest users, the next generation to scroll and click on its various apps, and make it hard for the company to uphold its claim to be the world’s dominant social media company.

Mr. Zuckerberg has a contingency plan: Level the playing field, so that children can’t just switch to the app of a competitor. If he has to play by new rules, he wants companies like YouTube and TikTok to do the same. Meta built a financial incentive into its deal with the state attorneys general, designed to rope in the other companies.

Here’s how it would work: The base line of Meta’s monetary settlement is $12 billion. The company has also agreed to a two-hour daily time limit for children. Meta will reduce that to one hour if YouTube and TikTok also agree to a one-hour limit. And if the other companies also pay $5 billion to the states, Meta will throw in the rest of the $5 billion or so it has promised.

It is not clear what sort of mechanism would be needed to make such cooperation from the other companies a reality. YouTube and TikTok have yet to publicly acknowledge Meta’s overtures. YouTube declined to comment, and representatives for TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.

On Wednesday, some lawmakers hinted at their appetite to make the rules apply to the rest of the industry.

New York Times, A Movement to Restrict Social Media for Children Has Taken Hold Globally, Ephrat Livni, Aug. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Governments around the world have passed or proposed a range of bans or restrictions on young teens using addictive social media platforms.

Meta’s landmark settlement of up to $17.1 billion with U.S. states and territories on Wednesday over claims it endangered children with addictive social media platforms ended one struggle with regulators.

But Meta — and its peers across the industry — still face many others around the world.

The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and other tech giants have faced a slew of bans and restrictions internationally in the last year, as the movement to shield young people from social media’s potential harms seems to be gaining ground globally.

Still, those bans and restrictions have faced setbacks and obstacles. Even some world leaders who say they may support such bans in theory are questioning the approach or its effectiveness.

These are some of the countries where social media for young people has already been banned or restricted and some that have been contemplating similar steps over the last year. 

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

New York Times, Republicans Caught in a Bind With Trump as Midterms Near, Tim Balk, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman, Aug. 27, 2026. The president’s pull with the party base has been clear and his resources are vast. But his low approval ratings make him a liability with swing voters.

President Trump, standing at a lectern bearing the seal of the president of the United States, greets Representative Mike Lawler. A crowd of supporters stands behind them.

President Trump has been the most potent force in Republican primary elections, elevating allies and foiling foes with endorsements, social media posts and rally appearances.

But as the end of primary season draws near and the sprint to the general election begins, Mr. Trump may soon be something entirely different for Republican candidates. A liability.

The president’s approval rating is well underwater, dragged down by rising prices and an unpopular war. And Democrats have made clear that they hope to target Republican candidates in battleground races by tying them to Mr. Trump, believing they can ride voter anger with his administration to congressional majorities.

Yet Republicans in competitive contests may still need him. Even as they look for ways to distance themselves from Mr. Trump to appeal to swing voters, they must also weigh the president’s hold on their party’s base and his tendency to lash out at Republican dissenters.

“It’s a difficult one,” said Brendan Steinhauser, a Republican strategist in Texas, adding that the president’s approach to the primaries had probably made the dilemma harder for candidates, but predicting they would increasingly seek separation from him. “I think it’ll be very subtle. I think it’ll be district by district.”

Many Republicans are hoping for financial support from the president’s well-funded but tightfisted super PAC, MAGA Inc., which came to the rescue of Senator Darline Graham in her hotly contested Republican runoff this week. The group flooded the contest with more than $800,000 worth of voter calls and text messages.

There are signs of deeper involvement to come in races against Democrats. At a meeting in the Oval Office this month, Mr. Trump met with senior advisers and a small number of ad makers who had signed up with MAGA Inc., according to two people briefed on the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a private conversation. The existence of the meeting was first reported by The Atlantic.

The gathering included a discussion about Democrats’ plans to make the election a referendum on Mr. Trump, and the president made clear that he wanted the advertising to include a robust defense of his record, according to the people briefed on the meeting. It was unclear how big of a share commercials focused on Mr. Trump would take of a fall ad campaign.

Spending by the group could be a welcome development for Republicans. As political headwinds have strengthened against them in the spring and summer, they have been holding out hope that MAGA Inc. would begin to invest in a challenging midterm cycle. But a rush of spending could also offer another way for the president to tighten his grip on the party — and on candidates who are angling for a measure of independence.

Mr. Trump, who has managed to revive his standing after past spells of widespread unpopularity, has started to put himself at the center of the midterms. He has urged supporters to “pretend” he is on the ballot and suggested he will spend significant campaign cash reserves.  

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: How He’ll Lose, Andrew Egger, right, Aug. 27, 2026. Things are pretty bleak out there. But let me paint you a picture.

Sixty-nine days from now is Wednesday, November 4. We’ll wake that morning—if current trends hold—to news of a ringing electoral repudiation of Donald Trump and his Republicans. Team Red will have lost the House; they may even have lost the Senate. Trump’s chances of further major legislation will have gone up in smoke, and he may well be staring down the barrel of two years of pure legislative pain: no ability to get his nominees confirmed, no ability to stave off messaging bills aimed at his weaknesses, no way to avoid constant investigative scrutiny.

He’ll be furious. He’ll be crashing out. And we already know exactly what he’ll be saying.

Yesterday, Trump shared a post on Truth Social from the brainless MAGA influencer Matt Van Swol. “I don’t think the GOP fully grasp how badly they are fucking up right now,” Van Swol wrote. “I’m talking to people who normally have ZERO interest in politics who are legitimately pissed off. They are not seeing the major reform they thought would happen and are REALLY MAD about it.”

“I’m very worried the GOP is sleepwalking toward a midterm reckoning they don’t see coming,” he continued. “People believed they were voting for the Trump agenda. And instead, many feel like they’re getting the same old Washington. If Republicans in Congress don’t start producing tangible results, they’re going to discover that frustration has consequences . . . And by the time they realize how deep-seeded that frustration is, it may already be too late.”

That Trump would endorse this sentiment, two months and change before the midterms, is astonishing. For all his happy talk, it seems like he’s really starting to feel like his party is blowing it. And, of course, he’s deeply convinced it’s anybody else’s fault but his.

Which is preposterous. Trump has remade the entire GOP and all of American politics in his own lurid image, and it’s an image that Americans have never hated more. Trump has always struggled to turn out his motley base when he himself isn’t on the ballot, and that base is dwindling away day by day regardless. Everywhere you look, it’s warning lights blaring on the dashboard. Pollster G. Elliott Morris notes that the president’s last bastion of issue approval, border security, just went into the red: He’s now at -5 on the topic. And the enthusiasm gap is getting downright insane: 49 percent of voters strongly disapprove of Trump’s performance, while only 17 percent—17 percent!—strongly approve.

In such an environment, you might expect GOP candidates to be sprinting away from the president at top speed, desperate to convince voters who have already soured on him that downballot candidates might still have something to offer. But they’re in too deep; if they knifed Trump now, he’d turn on them, and voters wouldn’t forgive them anyway. So all they can do is white-knuckle it to Election Day and pray for a miracle.

Meanwhile, Trump seems determined to hang himself around every other Republican’s neck. He has internalized the pattern that Trump-era Republicans get crushed when Trump isn’t on the ballot in the most self-flattering way possible. To Trump, it isn’t that his unique bundle of tics and pathologies has proven uniquely compelling for shaking the chuds, racists, militiamen, and conspiracy theorists out of America’s couch cushions every four years. Rather, it’s that every politician around him is a hopeless chump with absolutely zero juice of their own. Best they can hope is to be the moon to his sun.

It should be said, too, that the party’s official organs have done nothing but flatter Trump’s priors in this regard. Guys like RNC Chair Joe Gruters have been making the case religiously since last year: Republicans don’t have a prayer in the midterms unless they throw themselves into the muscular, varicose arms of Donald J. Trump. Why was there only one set of footprints in the sand? It was then, Mr. President, that you carried us.

Trump is already taking this attitude to the campaign trail. He’s out there confiding in his base voters that he’s worried they won’t show up: “What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” he said at a rally for Sen. Darline Graham last week. “Just come and vote, it’s so important.” Next month, at an unprecedented midterm convention in Dallas, Trump and Co. will make the case again: Your Republican candidates are good because they’re for Trump.

If this message fails—and it’s easy to see why it would—Trump’s rage will be incandescent. I go out there and bust my ass for you worthless lumps and you still can’t get over the finish line! The president is never one to keep these things to himself. The post-midterms crashout will be breathtaking—and a powerful sign of good things to come.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Inside Ukraine’s Breakthrough Missile Deal… The new defense cooperation agreement with the U.K. is less about the war now than about European security for the next generation, argues MARK HERTLING.
• Tim Curry, 1946–2026… He understood that if you’re going to play a pirate alongside Muppets, a campy alien, or a monstrous clown, you might as well go all the way, remembers SONNY BUNCH.
• Trump Is Racing to Build His Ballroom Before the Courts Stop Him… On The Illegal News, SARAH LONGWELL and ANDREW WEISSMANN discuss a pair of Supreme Court moves benefiting Trump, including John Roberts allowing construction on the White House ballroom to continue and a ruling affecting Trump’s plans for mail-in voting.
• How to Win… The only likely way to end the nightmare of Trump—and Republicans supporting him no matter how much he ruins the country—is for Democrats to win in Republican-leaning states and congressional districts, says NEERA TANDEN on The Bulwark Daily with TIM MILLER.
• Pete Hegseth Is Hollowing Out the U.S. Military… On the latest Command Post, BEN PARKER and MARK HERTLING give their takes on Trump’s latest claims that the U.S. has “really dominated” Iran, the Pentagon’s purge of senior military leaders, and reports that a top Army official was pushed out after opening an investigation into the bizarre Kid Rock helicopter flyby.

Quick Hits

GUYS ON THE INSIDE: Trump’s attempt to monkey with mail-in ballots may still fail at the Supreme Court—but it won’t be for lack of lickspittles at the Postal Service. This week, the New York Times reported on a little-noticed personnel move Trump made this summer: filling four vacancies on the USPS’s board of governors with Republican allies. Here’s the Times:

The selections broke with a longstanding practice of nominating board members in bipartisan pairs. Two of those nominees are on a fast track for approval, and could reach a full Senate vote when the chamber returns from recess in September. If confirmed, their appointments would effectively tip the board to a majority that is loyal to Mr. Trump.

What are the qualifications of these worthy gentlemen?¹ The Times notes that none have “much experience in mail, logistics, postal operations, or public administration.” But they do have a lot of highly valuable experience in expressing skepticism about the results of past elections: “I have no information to reach a conclusion that it was free and fair,” one of the nominees wrote of the 2020 election in his congressional questionnaire.

As we’ve been saying: Trump may not actually manage to derail the midterms. But you’d have to be crazy to think he’s not going to try.

SPEAKING OF THE MIDTERMS: Back in the day, when the Soviet Union was going to invade a Warsaw Pact country that sought to escape Soviet control, they would manufacture a request for help from “comrades” in that country to intervene and stop this terrible “counter-revolutionary” plot.

The Trump administration and the Republican party seem to be developing a similar playbook this year in their effort to subvert the 2026 elections.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that audio obtained by the Bangor Daily News has Maine’s Republican nominee for governor, Bobby Charles, telling supporters recently that he would ask Tom Homan, the White House border czar, to send U.S. Marshals and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to polling places in the state in the weeks before this fall’s midterm elections.

The pretext would be that this was needed to stop non-citizens from voting. But the obvious effect would be to intimidate Latino citizens—and other non-white or foreign-born citizens, as well—from showing up at the polls. And then these federal forces would presumably be available for other mischief as well, on Election Day and right after.

So the Trump administration wouldn’t be intervening on its own to tilt the electoral playing field. It’s just responding to requests by alarmed local citizens and candidates!

According to the voter fraud database maintained by the Heritage Foundation, Maine had two cases of voter fraud in 2010. Both were by citizens. There have been none since.

It’s a ludicrous fig leaf for federal intervention—but the Trump administration and the Republican party are happy to take advantage of any and all fig leaves this November.

—William Kristol

VIVEK ON MAX: The allegations against Ohio Rep. Max Miller may have lost him a few important Republican backers, including both of Ohio’s senators, Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno. But he’s retained the support of others, including Donald Trump and—as HuffPost reports—gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.

Ramaswamy hasn’t exactly been Miller’s loudest defender. But in a surreptitiously taped conversation at a public event last week, Ramaswamy made clear to a voter who thanked him for backing Miller that he supports “everyone up and down the ticket.”

Ramaswamy’s oppo sensors appeared to go up when the attendee pressed further, asking if he would campaign with Miller: “Where did you live? Where’d you grow up?” Apparently satisfied by the answers, he pressed on: “Look, my view is this is the most important election for preserving Republican control of the House, the Senate, and also protecting the Republican control of the state. If we compromise that, we’re done.”

That’s the impossible situation Miller has placed other Ohio Republicans in: The best argument left to them is if we start throwing alleged abusers out, the Communists win.

MORE PAPER FOR YOUR PAPER?: There have been a slew of articles in recent days that this newly resumed trade war between the United States and Canada is going to mean pricier toilet paper for American consumers. But it’s tough to make sense of whether this is actually true. Yes, “toilet paper or face tissue stock” is part of the tariff back-and-forth. But the likely end result is higher prices on U.S. toilet paper imported into Canada. And if that results in fewer U.S. toilet paper exports, it may end up being good for consumers here. Which is good news, since the price of sanitary tissue paper has been steadily rising since early 2024.

Still, there is panic that U.S. consumers are going to be paying more for their double-plies—so much so that Laura Ingraham felt compelled to ask U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer about it during an interview last night. Greer didn’t rule out a possible price increase in toilet paper but called it unlikely. Hold onto your butts. 

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: With Ten Weeks To Go Dems Are Closing Strong And Trump Just Keeps F*cking Up, Simon Rosenberg, right, Aug. 27, 2026 (video). The proud, plucky patriots of this remarkable community gathered last night and the big takeaway was this -- as bad as things are for Trump now, and they are bad, they are likely to get worse in the final ten weeks of the election.

The economy is getting worse. Inflation is too high. The markets are unhappy. His new trade war with Canada will further erode his standing in critical battleground states. Trump cannot admit he has lost the Iran war, and keeps humiliating himself - and growing weaker - in front of the entire world. His big cuts to health care are going to become a major issue this fall as Americans in both private and public insurance plans will see premium increases. In most elections the incumbent party loses ground as we get closer to the election. Mass deportation continues to generate terrible stories across the country daily.

To better understand why the economy is likely to continue to erode in these next ten weeks watch my new interview with economist Rob Shapiro.

• Consumer confidence is at its lowest reading in the past 65 years in the University of Michigan survey:
• Two children died of measles this week. Look at this extraordinary record of failure to protect the public’s health:
• This is the lead story on the homepage of the Washington Post;
• Here’s another Washington Post headline:

So as bad as things are now they are likely to get worse for Trump and the Rs in these final ten weeks.

And where things are for them now is bad. Here’s a round up of recent Senate polling:

Here’s a round up of recent gubernatorial polling.

In FiftyPlusOne’s forecasts today Dems have a 91% chance of flipping the House and a 55% chance of flipping the Senate:

Perhaps the most important data of all comes from the new Strength in Numbers poll this week. Americans have once again put their trust in us on the all the issues that matter. It is not just that voters have rejected MAGA. By electing us in races all across the country these past 19 months, and by what we see in this data, voters are affirmatively backing Democrats and counting on us to deliver something better for them:

In my talk we also discuss our party’s embrace of a raucous pluralism; of why I trust Leader Jeffries; on the role manipulated polling plays in our politics; on the exciting progress we are making in rolling out our New Battlefield Project with the state parties; on the need for our family to have a sustained conversation about Jews, Israel, and rising anti-semitism; and we once again read The Gettysburg Address to be inspired to embrace “the great task remaining before us” which is to bring about a “new birth of freedom” here and everywhere.

It was a lively affair -- get to it when you can.

U.S. Midterm Election Political Dirty Tricks 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Senate GOP’s fake news website falsely links Democrat to murder, Judd Legum, right, Aug. 27, 2026. On August 6, Popular Information exposed a network of fake news websites surreptitiously controlled by Senate Republicans. One of these sites is now being used to legitimize a specious attack against former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper.

The North Carolinian bills itself as “Independent Journalism for North Carolina.” But the website is not independent. It is fully controlled by the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the super PAC of Senate Republicans.

The North Carolinian published an unbylined article on August 21: “Families Demand Accountability for Repeat Offenders as North Carolina Prison Releases Face New Scrutiny.” The article focuses on the “murder of 22-year-old North Carolina resident Logan Federico.” It emphasizes that the man who was accused of murdering Federico, Alexander Dickey, had previously been charged with “at least 48 crimes across 14 separate occasions, including 31 felony charges.”

The article then links Federico’s murder to “the decision by former governor Roy Cooper’s administration to release thousands of inmates during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Federico’s murder, however, has nothing to do with Cooper or North Carolina.

The crime was committed in 2025 in South Carolina by Dickey, a South Carolina man who was previously incarcerated in South Carolina. All of Dickey’s crimes occurred in South Carolina. Dickey was released from Lexington County Detention Center, a South Carolina jail, by a South Carolina judge.

The purported news article about Federico’s murder in the North Carolinian does not mention South Carolina. The fake news website is being used to legitimize the smear with an article no legitimate outlet would publish.

The SLF is promoting the fake news article to North Carolina residents through paid ads on Meta platforms.

The online campaign also reinforces a television ad by the SLF. The ad features an image of a report about the murder by WCNC, a North Carolina TV station, with a “Charlotte, N.C.” dateline. But, conveniently, it obscures the text of the piece stating the crime took place in South Carolina.Federico’s father has appeared with Cooper’s opponent, Republican Michael Whatley, on the campaign trail.

New York Times, A Republican Attack Ad Used a Family’s Tragedy. Now They’re Furious, Jessica Contrera, Aug. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Relatives of a family killed by a semi truck say they were not consulted about the ad, which connected the crash to illegal immigration.

In the months after Jesse Mallen’s sister died in a highway crash, looking at photos of her brought him comfort. Then he saw her face in a political attack ad.

The ad, which aired across Ohio this month, shows Mr. Mallen’s sister, Lynnea Soposki, along with her husband, Luke, and their 1-year-old son, Logan. In April, all three family members were killed when a semi truck crashed into their pickup truck on a highway north of Columbus, causing a nine-car pileup and setting their vehicle on fire.

The driver, who was charged with multiple felonies, has been accused of fraudulently obtaining U.S. citizenship and Ohio drivers licenses.

Titled “Dangerous for Ohio,” the ad was paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee and authorized by the campaign of Senator Jon Husted, who is running against former Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat.

“Sherrod Brown opened our borders to dangerous illegals — the consequences were deadly,” a narrator says before the ad shows a photo of the semi driver, a photo of the family who died and a video of the crash. “Brown doesn’t care.”

Shortly after the crash, the Ohio Department of Public Safety issued a news release stating the driver entered the United States in the 1990s and “subsequently used multiple names and dates of birth to obtain state and federal identification.” The state said it was turning its investigation over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But the driver, Modou Ngom, has not been charged with any immigration-related crimes. His lawyer, who declined to comment on Wednesday, has said in a court motion that the state’s statements violated Mr. Ngom’s right to a fair trial. In a statement on Wednesday afternoon, the Department of Homeland Security said Mr. Ngom was naturalized as a citizen in 2015, but did not answer a series of questions about the state’s fraud allegations.

Mr. Mallen, 40, said in an interview that he privately reached out to the Husted campaign through email and certified mail last week, imploring it to stop running the ad.

“What we all want is to be able to grieve in peace and privacy, and for our family to not be used in such a classless way by a politician, especially without being consulted,” Mr. Mallen said. “We certainly would not have said yes, but quite frankly, I think they knew that.”

The Frank Figliuzzi Show via Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Can We Stop Trump's Election Meddling? Frank Figliuzzi,right, commentator and former FBI executive, Aug. 27, 2026. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes Joins The Show.

"The threat itself is the voter intimidation. The threat of the rule is the voter suppression."Frank FigliuzziAug 27∙PaidREAD IN APP

Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes joined Frank Figliuzzi to discuss election security, the multi-faceted role of state secretaries, and pushback against Trump’s extensive federal overreach. As the midterms close in, Frank is talking with top elections officials in key states about what they’re doing to protect your vote amid Trump’s multi-faced threats to the process.

Fontes wanted to reassure voters following this week’s Supreme Court ruling, stressing that mail-in voting rules remain functional and protected against last-minute disruptions from the Trump administration.

He also dismantled the administration’s lies about widespread illegal voting. Emphasizing Arizona's decentralized, paper-ballot system and air-gapped tabulators, Fontes highlighted the state's robust security measures and bipartisan preparations to ensure smooth, secure elections despite meddling from the Trump administration.

“This old Marine doesn’t put up with that bullshit very easily,” Fontes tells Frank.

Portrayal Of President Trump in the White House changing place names around the Western Hemisphere by The Wayne Madsen Report (using AI).

Wayne Madsen Report via Substack, Opinion: Whimsically changing place names is the domain of vainglorious dictators, Wayne Madsen, right, author and journalist, Aug. 27, 2026. We don’t have to take this s____ from Trump. 

The human septic tank seated in the fake gold encrusted Oval Office will go down in history. But it won’t be the history that he envisages for himself. If Trump believes for one second that all the places he is naming after himself or with the word “America” will survive a nanosecond after he leaves— to the happiness and delight of billions — this mortal coil, he’s deluding himself and his dwindling ranks of single-digit IQ cult members.

Many dictators have renamed cities, regions, mountains, roads, and even countries to glorify themselves, their ideology, or their regimes. Few of these name changes survived their deaths. Neither will Trump’s. The Democratic Party had better promise to immediately revert to the status quo ante on Trump’s name changes or they will be facing the music from an electorate tired of all the bullshit. Hopefully, “Pétains” like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer have gotten the message. If not, it’s bye bye to them.

The Fetid Prince of Mar-a-Lago and his lackeys have seen fit to place the name Donald J. Trump on everything from the John F. Kennedy for the Performing Arts and the U.S. Institute of Peace to West Palm Beach International Airport and various highways around the nation. Trump’s Justice Department goon attorneys have threatened to have the Kennedy Center demolished as “structurally unsound” unless the name is changed to “The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.” Trump also plans to have his signature, which looks like a seismograph reading for a 9.0 earthquake, along with his ugly mug on a $250 bill. The same mug shot and his signature are set to appear in some U.S. passports.

Trump began his strongman geographical renaming spree by signing an executive order reverting the name of the Alaskan mountain Denali to Mount McKinley. The state of Alaska, which has called the mountain Denali since 1975, continues to do so. Trump signed another meaningless superficial executive order designating the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” No other nation or international organization have recognized the command from the dime store Hitler. Doubling down on his re-mapping tantrum, Trump recently issued another of his unenforceable executive orders renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” Trump also stated he might rename the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans the “American Ocean.”

Over the past century, Trump’s name changing spree rivals that of Soviet Communist dictator Joseph Stalin. In fact, Trump, who decided to marry two women from the former Communist bloc in Eastern Europe (and likely molested scores of teens from Eastern Europe during his dalliances with pedophile human traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell), joins such Soviet era geographical name changers as Klement Gottwald, Walter Ulbricht, Josip Broz Tito, and Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Trump, his Sharpie in hand over a world map, has also farted out of his mouth a claim that he has renamed the Strait of Hormuz, which lies between Iran and Oman, as U.S. territory under the name “Strait of America.”

Trump and his Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth are boastful about having re-named the Department of Defense, which it has been since 1947, as the “Department of War.” No other nation — not Russia, North Korea, Iran, or Cuba — calls their armed forces ministries or departments the “Department of War.” Trump and his mentally challenged Cabinet and advisers believe they are somehow “special.” They are, if one defines “special” as the designation used by mental hospitals for their most peculiarly acting patients. You know. The ones who shit on the floor and then use it as tempera finger paint on the padded walls.

Hegseth, the guy who uses his snot for Brylcreem, thought it would be too clover by half to rename various Army installations, which had previously been named after Confederate traitors, to revert back to their racially tinged names by claiming the bases were not being named for Confederates. Hegseth and his merry band of devotees to Spartan military homo-erotica insisted that Forts Lee, Braddock, Hood, Gordon, Pickett, A.P. Hill, Polk, Rucker, and Benning were named after obscure members of the military who just so happened to have the same last names as the rebel generals. Bullshit. Hegseth and his cronies wear their white nationalism on their sleeves, and no amount of Eddie Haskell-like gaslighting will change anyone’s minds.

Over the last century, tin horn dictators from multiple countries have renamed place names to satisfy their over-inflated egos. Trump will not only go down in history as the worst American president but he will join such rogues as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and the Kims of North Korea as a brutish map changer.

Trump believes he is as consequential to history as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, and other tyrants. Actually, Trump does join those dictators, especially the prolific name changer Stalin, but not for the reason he thinks. Among his other outrages, Trump’s fetish for unilaterally changing names will follow him to his grave and be imprinted in the annals of the history of his fellow eternally damned.

Approx. Year | Dictator | Place Renamed | New Name | Current Status

• 1922|Joseph Stalin, right|Yamburg, Ingria|Kingisepp|Still current
• 1922|Joseph Stalin|Yekaterinodar|Krasnodar|Still current
• 1924|Joseph Stalin|Tsaritsyn|Stalingrad|Now Volgograd1
• 1924|Joseph Stalin|Petrograd|Leningrad|Reverted to St. Petersburg in 1991
• 1924|Joseph Stalin}Yekaterinburg|Sverdlovsk|Reverted in 1991
• 1924|Joseph Stalin|Yuzovka|Stalino|Now Donetsk in Ukraine
• 1924|Joseph Stalin|Simbirsk|Ulyanovsk (named after Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin|Still current
• 1925|Benito Mussolini|Littoria (new city)|Founded as Littoria|Now Latina
• 1926|Joseph Stalin|Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan|Frunze|Reverted in 1991
• 1931|Joseph Stalin|Dushanbe|Stalinabad|Reverted to Dushanbe in 1961
• 1931|Joseph Stalin|Tver|Kalinin|Reverted in 1990
• 1932|Joseph Stalin|Nizhny Novgorod|Gorky|Reverted in 1990
• 1934|Joseph Stalin|Vyatka|Kirov|Still current
• 1935|Joseph Stalin|Tskhinvali|Staliniri|Reverted
• 1935|Joseph Stalin}Samara Oblast|Kuybyshev Oblast (after Bolshevik leader Valerian Kuybyshev)|Reverted in 1991
• 1936|Joseph Stalin|Yeniseysk region settlements|Numerous “Stalin” names|Mostly reverted
• 1936|Rafael Trujillo|Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic|Ciudad Trujillo|Reverted in 1961
• 1938|Adolf Hitler|Linz expansion|Planned “Führerstadt Linz”|Never fully realized
• 1938|Joseph Stalin|Orenburg|Chkalov|Reverted in 1957
• 1939|Joseph Stalin|Khujand, Tajikistan|Leninabad|Reverted in 1992
• 1944|Joseph Stalin|Käkisalmi, Finnish Karelia|Priozersk (now Russia)|Still current
• 1944|Joseph Stalin|Viipuri, Finnish Karelia|Vyborg|Still current
• 1945|Joseph Stalin|Lviv, Ukraine|Lvov|Reverted in 1991
• 1945|Joseph Stalin|Perm|Molotov|Reverted in 1957
• 1945|Josip Broz Tito|Podgorica, Montenegro|Titograd|Reverted in 1992
• 1945|Josip Broz Tito|Veles, Macedonia|Titov Veles|Reverted in 1996
• 1945|Todor Zhivkov|Montana, Bulgaria|Mihaylovgrad|Reverted in 1993
• 1946|Enver Hoxha|Kuçova|Qyteti Stalin (”Stalin City”)|Now Kuçovë
• 1946|Joseph Stalin|Yonashiro|Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk|Still current
• 1946|Joseph Stalin|Königsberg|Kaliningrad|Still current
• 1949|Joseph Stalin|Varna, Bulgaria|Stalin|Reverted in 1956
• 1949|Mátyás Rákosi|Dunapentele, Hungary|Sztálinváros (”Stalin City”|Now Dunaújváros
• 1949|Klement Gottwald|Zlin|Gottwaldov|Reverted in 1989
• 1949|Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej|Brașov|Orașul Stalin (”Stalin City”)|Reverted
• 1950|Kim Il Sung|Numerous streets, squares|Kim Il Sung Streets|Many remain
• 1951|Juan Perón|Chaco province|Provincia Presidente Perón|Reverted in 1955
• 1951|Kim Il Sung|Songjin|Kimch'aek|Still current
• 1952|Joseph Stalin|Katowice|Stalinogród|Reverted in 1956
• 1952|Joseph Stalin|Kuressaare, Estonia|Kingissepa|Reverted in 1988
• 1952|Juan Perón|La Pampa province|Provincia Eva Perón|Reverted in 1955
• 1953|Walter Ulbricht|Chemnitz|Karl-Marx-Stadt|Reverted 1990
• 1954|Mao Zedong|Tihwa|Ürümqi|Still current
• 1955|Nikita Khrushchev|Marijampolė, Lithuania|Kapsukas|Reverted 1991
• 1961|Francisco Franco|Many plazas and streets|Plaza del Caudillo, etc.|Many later renamed2
• 1964|Nikita Khrushchev|Stavropol|Tolyatti (named after the Italian Communist leader)|Still current
• 1965|Mobutu Sese Seko|Léopoldville|Kinshasa|Still current
• 1967|Levi Eshkol|West Bank Palestinian Territory|Judea and Samaria| Largely unrecognized by the international community
• 1971|Mobutu Sese Seko|Congo (Kinshasa)|Republic of Zaire|Reverted in 19973
• 1965|Nicolae Ceaușescu|Onesti, Romania|Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej|Reverted in 1990
• 1973|Mobutu Sese Seko|Elisabethville|Lubumbashi|Still current
• 1973|Francisco Macias Nguema|Santa Isabel, Equatorial Guinea|Malabo|Still current
• 1975|Lê Duẩn|Saigon|Ho Chi Minh City|Still current
• 1976|Jean-Bédel Bokassa|Numerous roads and monuments|Named after Bokassa|Mostly removed
• 1976|Saparmurat Niyazov|Many streets|Türkmenbaşy|Many remain or were changed3
• 1976}Leonid Brezhnev|Zmiiv, Ukraine|Gotwald|Reverted in 1990
• 1978|Fidel Castro|Isle of Pines|Isla de la Juventud (Isle of Youth)|Still current
• 1988|Ne Win|Rangoon|Yangon|Still current
• 1989|Ne Win|Burma|Myanmar|Still current
• 1990|Saddam Hussein|Kuwait|Iraqi province of Kadhima|Reverted to Kuwait after Iraq’s defeat in Desert Storm
• 1993|Saparmurat Niyazov|Krasnovodsk|Türkmenbaşy|Still current
• 2003|Saparmurat Niyazov|Numerous towns, schools, airport|Named after himself or family|Many later reverted
• 2016|Nursultan Nazarbayev|Many avenues and institutions|Nazarbayev|Many remain
• 2019|Nursultan Nazarbayev|Astana|Nur-Sultan|Reverted to Astana in 2022
• 2025-26|Donald J. Trump|Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario, Denali, Kennedy Center, etc.|Gulf of America, Lake America, Mount McKinley, Kennedy-Trump Center, etc.|Still current but awaiting a massive pushback in 2027 

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr, shown below right, was a principal architect of the Heritage Foundation's plan to reshape the FCC as part of a larger transformation of American into an ultra-right nation especially supportive of the Christian Nationalism values espoused by many of the Heritage Foundation's supporters who also supported the Trump for President campaign. Carr worked on Project 2025 while he also held a full-time job as a Republican FCC Commissioner, thereby ensuring that taxpayers in effect paid for his career ascendancy and political advocacy at the same time.

Checks and Balances (publication of the Society for the Rule of Law), Opinion: Thank you, Brendan Carr, Bob Corn-Revere, Aug. 27, 2026. Your disregard for the First Amendment will usher in a new era of reform and clarity.

Now that ABC Network has sued the Federal Communications Commission for violating the First Amendment in response to your unprecedented gambit of seeking to deny renewal of its television station licenses, I suspect you are not feeling a lot of love these days.

It is widely said that you are nothing but a political hack who sold out your previously professed beliefs about free expression and the rule of law for the short-term goal of being named FCC chairman, that you corrupted the agency’s nonpartisan purpose by focusing its efforts on punishing perceived critics of the Trump administration, and that you regularly prostrate yourself with cringe-worthy displays of servility to soothe the president’s fragile ego.

All these things may be true. But the criticism is terribly unfair because it fails to acknowledge your substantive accomplishments. When the dust settles, it may turn out that you have done more than any FCC chairman since the agency’s creation in 1934 to advance full First Amendment protection for the broadcast medium.

For starters, you have become a catalyst for bipartisanship. You united 13 former top FCC officials from across the political spectrum to publicly oppose your various efforts to punish ABC (and the number is 14, if you count me, who filed a separate opposition). This impressive list includes six former commissioners (four of whom served as chairman), chiefs of staff, bureau chiefs, and a general counsel. Three of the four former chairmen are Republicans.

Bringing together a group of individuals who hold sharply different views on politics and broadcast policy is no small feat. I don’t know of anyone else who could have managed it. But Ronald Reagan’s FCC chair, Mark Fowler, crystallized the motivation for this kumbaya moment in a sworn declaration filed in the ABC lawsuit: “Never in its history has the agency ever acted so corruptly and unlawfully to intrude on broadcasters’ First Amendment rights.”

As it turns out, your bad example has proved to be a powerful unifying force. And the feeling may well be unanimous. There is not a single living former FCC commissioner or high-level staff member who has publicly endorsed your stated views of the law or your actions against ABC. So, congratulations.

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Another accomplishment is that you brought the Commission’s jawboning out in the open. Jawboning is the practice of misusing regulatory processes and employing threats to coerce the government’s targets into silence. The Supreme Court recently —and unanimously — reaffirmed that such tactics are illegitimate and unconstitutional. The FCC has long been guilty of this practice, and commissioners of both parties have engaged in it. Just never so openly or to this extent.

But jawboning cases were always notoriously hard to prove because the pressure tactics usually were brought to bear in back rooms and behind closed doors. That is no longer true. In your zeal to curry favor with your boss, you have made your threats openly on social media and at other venues. You have reposted and amplified President Trump’s dyspeptic rants about the media and his condemnation of certain on-air personalities.

Most notorious was the podcast interview where you delivered an ultimatum to the Disney Corporation (owner of the ABC network) that it must do something about late-night host Jimmy Kimmel “or there will be additional work for the FCC ahead,” adding, “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Simply breathtaking. Not since the term “wardrobe malfunction” was coined to describe the 2004 Super Bowl incident with Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake has a phrase associated with an FCC proceeding inspired such widespread reaction (and mockery).

Ted Cruz, the Republican chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, called your remarks “dangerous as hell,” likening them to a mafioso threat. Your Kimmel ultimatum even caught the attention of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who called it out in his concurrence in Trump v. Slaughter. After citing your remarks and expressing concern about the accumulation of executive power, Justice Gorsuch suggested the courts may need to become more active in checking its misuse.

And this foreshadows what may be your most lasting achievement. The campaign against ABC through a series of escalating demands, abusive investigations, and the threat to its licenses has given the network no realistic option but to sue the FCC. The lawsuit sets forth in vivid detail the many ways in which the Commission has abused its own processes, violated due process, and ignored the law in retaliation for being on Trump’s wrong side. The FCC’s actions betray the agency’s purpose and violate the First Amendment.

But by overreaching to the extent that you have, the FCC under your management has opened the door for a judicial response even before the end of your ABC show trial. That change of venue takes the matter out of the FCC arena, which currently is run by political whim, and into court, which is governed by the rule of law. It also takes the timing out of your hands, where the game has been to slow-roll the process to make it as painful and expensive as possible.

Judicial oversight promises to end not only your current abuses but could lead to more lasting positive changes in the law. As a regulated medium, broadcasting has been subject to less robust First Amendment protections under obsolete precedents like Red Lion Broadcasting Company v. FCC. Although the FCC never had the authority to regulate broadcast programming in the ways you now claim, courts up until now have been reluctant to overrule it for lack of a clear case of FCC overreach. You have solved that problem in spades.

Once in court, it will be difficult to avoid dealing with these old precedents, which are the elephant in the room. The process of correcting the law began in the 1980s when the FCC under Mark Fowler eliminated the FCC’s fairness doctrine because it was inconsistent with the First Amendment. And now, with your ongoing demonstration of just how partisan and out-of-control the Commission can be, it is, as Justice Gorsuch put it, “time to return, all the way, to the Constitution.”

And that will be your true legacy. These positive developments may just be the result of your unprincipled blunders, but they are accomplishments nonetheless. Thank you, Brendan Carr.

Bob Corn-Revere is chief counsel for FIRE and a served as chief counsel to former FCC Chair James H. Quello.

 More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, Saudi Arabia Appears to Be Preparing for a New War With the Houthis, Vivian Nereim, Aug. 27, 2026. Analysts say that weeks of Houthi attacks on Saudi targets have brought the kingdom and the Iranian-backed militia to the brink of full-blown conflict, and could open a new front in the Iran war.

After weeks of attacks by Yemen’s Houthi militia on Saudi ships, airports and oil facilities, Saudi Arabia appears to be preparing for a renewed war against the group, analysts say, potentially deepening the turmoil in the Middle East.

It is unclear what Saudi Arabia’s goals would be if it were to go back to full-blown war with the Houthis. But it could open a new front in the U.S. war with Iran — the Houthis’ primary backer.

When the kingdom last embarked on a bombing campaign against the Houthis, in 2015, it turned into a decade-long quagmire that entrenched the group’s rule in northern Yemen and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis from violence, hunger and disease.

Few observers or officials believe there is a realistic path to routing the militia entirely. Instead, Saudi Arabia could aim to weaken the group and pressure it to negotiate a resolution to Yemen’s civil war that is more favorable to the kingdom and its Yemeni allies, analysts say.

Channels that were kept open for years between the two sides appear to have broken down. “I am not seeing a political offramp at this point,” said Mohammed al-Basha, a Yemen-focused political analyst based in Washington. “War is coming.”

Earlier this week, the Houthis claimed responsibility for a ballistic missile attack on a Saudi oil tanker as well as two attacks on Saudi-backed forces inside Yemen, with the group’s military spokesman, Yahya Saree, promising to confront any escalation with “stronger and more severe strikes.”

A Saudi official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government protocol, said that the kingdom prefers peace, but is ready for war with the Houthis, and will protect itself by any means necessary.

If the Houthis continue to escalate their attacks, he added, the kingdom would be willing to conduct airstrikes to support the Yemeni government — effectively, a motley coalition of anti-Houthi forces — in its battle against the militia.

The last Saudi intervention in Yemen was an effort to restore the internationally-recognized government, which the Houthis had ousted from the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, with Iranian support. The fighting brought the country to the brink of famine and ultimately failed to rout the Houthis.

After a truce in 2022, the Houthis emerged with the conviction that they had won. Saudi officials turned to dialogue, hoping to contain the militia on their southern border and garner influence over it.

That approach appeared to work, until the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran turned into a regionwide conflagration, shifting the Houthis’ calculus. 

New York Times, Qatari Prime Minister Travels to Tehran as Iran War Nears Six-Month Mark, Ismaeel Naar, Aug. 27, 2026. Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani has been a key mediator in the conflict, even as his country has blamed Tehran for hundreds of missile and drone attacks.

The prime minister of Qatar, a key mediator in the U.S. war with Iran, landed in Tehran on Thursday for talks with senior Iranian officials as the conflict nears the six-month mark with no clear end in sight.

The prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, met with the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, according to Iran’s state media.

Majed al-Ansari, a spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry, said late Wednesday that the discussions in Tehran would focus on creating the “conditions conducive to dialogue” and on restoring marine traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

Sheikh Mohammed’s trip to Tehran comes at a moment of heightened tension between Iran and Qatar. An Iranian general recently accused the Qataris of detaining three pilots who were shot down early in the war, a claim that Qatar denies.

After the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, Qatar has faced more than 700 missile and drone attacks that it blamed on Tehran, including strikes on natural gas facilities. Last month, Qatar accused Iran of targeting one of its gas tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.

Qatar, which hosts a major U.S. military base, helped broker a cease-fire between the United States and Iran in June that was intended to pause hostilities and lead to negotiations toward a lasting peace.

That agreement has since unraveled, largely because of disputes over the strait, a crucial waterway for oil and gas that runs along Iran’s southern coast and that both Tehran and Washington have blockaded.

For weeks, Iran and Oman, which also abuts the Strait of Hormuz, have been in talks about introducing a temporary route through the waterway, but no agreement has yet been announced.

New York Times, Democrats to Force Senate Vote on Israel’s Human Rights Practices, Robert Jimison, Aug. 27, 2026. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is leading a group of Democrats seeking answers about violence against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, on Thursday plans to introduce a resolution that would order the Trump administration to provide Congress with a detailed accounting of Israel’s human rights practices in the West Bank, laying the groundwork to force a vote on the matter in coming weeks.

The measure, the latest bid by Democrats in Congress to challenge the policies and actions of Israel’s government, invokes a provision of the Foreign Assistance Act that allows lawmakers to request information from the State Department about the human rights record of any country receiving U.S. security assistance.

Co-signed by 10 Senate Democrats, the resolution is privileged, meaning that Mr. Van Hollen could force a vote on it even if Republican leaders refuse, as expected, to bring it to the floor. That could lead to yet another vote in Congress showcasing Democrats’ divide over Israel as a growing contingent in the party turns against the Jewish state.

“We’ve seen ongoing human rights violations on the West Bank, but we’re going from bad to abysmal,” Mr. Van Hollen said in an interview.

The resolution focuses on at least nine U.S. citizens who have been killed in the West Bank since January 2022, including Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist killed in 2022, and Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, who was fatally shot by an Israeli soldier in 2024. It argues that Israeli authorities have failed to punish those responsible and that American agencies have failed to conduct their own independent investigations or provide substantive information about existing ones.

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

“If the United States Senate shines a spotlight on this, we will save lives,” Mr. Van Hollen said. “We will save the lives of American citizens. We will also save the lives of Palestinian civilians.”

Concern about violence in the West Bank has steadily grown among Democrats in Congress. Last year, Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, introduced the West Bank Violence Prevention Act, which Mr. Van Hollen cosponsored, to impose visa and financial sanctions on people who commit or facilitate violence against civilians there. The bill attracted broad Democratic support but did not advance out of the Republican-led Foreign Relations Committee and was never brought up for a vote.

J Street, the liberal pro-Israel advocacy group that backed that legislation, has argued that sanctions are needed to disrupt networks supporting extremist settlers and Palestinian militant groups and preserve the possibility of a two-state solution. The group has cited estimates that settler violence rose 30 percent during the first months of 2025 compared with the same period a year earlier.

The issue has also prompted unusually sharp criticism from Israeli officials. Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States and a longtime settler, said earlier this year that extremist settler violence was a “stain” on Israel and was costing the country support in Washington. He said the Israeli government was taking this seriously.

U.S. Foreign Policy, National Security, Ukraine War

New York Times, C.I.A. Chief Delivered Bleak Assessment of Russia’s War in Secretive Moscow Visit, Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes, Aug. 27, 2026. John Ratcliffe’s meeting this week with a Russian intelligence chief was aimed at pushing the Kremlin to pursue a peace deal with Ukraine.

John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, made a secretive visit to Moscow this week to privately share his bleak assessment of the state of the Russian war against Ukraine, and to urge the Russians to cut a deal before their military and economic situation gets worse, current and former officials said.

Mr. Ratcliffe, left, delivered the message to Aleksandr V. Bortnikov, the head of Russia’s F.S.B. intelligence service, and made no threats about potential consequences for the Russian side should President Vladimir V. Putin ignore the C.I.A. director’s assessment and choose to continue fighting.

C.I.A. analysts have long questioned whether Mr. Putin’s advisers have given him honest assessments of the war’s trajectory and toll.

The C.I.A. has long maintained communications channels with the F.S.B. and Russia’s foreign intelligence service, which is known as the S.V.R.

Officials said Mr. Ratcliffe’s intelligence channel with Bortnikov runs parallel to separate channels that President Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, have established with other senior advisers to Mr. Putin.

Some officials said they hoped that Mr. Putin, a former intelligence officer himself, would see a message from the C.I.A. director as more urgent and credible than communications through normal diplomatic channels.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

For much of last year, Mr. Trump and some of his top advisers appeared to hold the belief that a Russian battlefield victory over Ukraine was inevitable because of Russia’s larger population and its nuclear arsenal.

But the Russians have suffered massive losses, and their battlefield gains have stalled.

It is not clear whether Mr. Ratcliffe’s message presaged any change in U.S. policy toward Russia or Ukraine.

Mr. Ratcliffe’s visit was the latest effort by the Trump administration to breathe new life into stalled negotiations. It has become increasingly clear that Ukraine is not going to give up its fight in the east, even with reduced U.S. military support

Given what he presented as the bleak military and economic reality for Russia, Mr. Ratcliffe told Mr. Bortnikov that he believed it was time for Moscow to engage in serious negotiations to end the war.

Since Mr. Trump’s return to office, the United States has scaled back its military support to the Ukrainians, forcing them to rely more heavily on European partners.

The C.I.A. has maintained its close intelligence partnerships with the Ukrainians, which began more than a decade ago.

The private message that Mr. Ratcliffe delivered to Mr. Bortnikov about Ukraine echoed some of the director’s public statements.

Last month, Mr. Ratcliffe spoke out pointedly about Russian troop losses during the war, and Moscow’s inability to advance on the battlefield. He noted that the life expectancy of a Russian soldier on the front lines was less than 35 minutes.

And he added that Russia had gained only about 1 percent of Ukraine’s total territory in the 18 months since he became C.I.A. director, a development he attributed to Ukraine’s “mastery” of drone technology.

Before Mr. Ratcliffe met with Mr. Bortnikov in Moscow, he spoke with his Ukrainian counterparts, assuring them that he would be exploring Russian positions, not making concessions on behalf of the Ukrainians.

European diplomats believe there may be an opening to secure a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in the coming winter months, given the largely stalled Russian offensive in the Donbas, and because of Ukraine’s ability to continue imposing deep costs on Russia with its drone warfare.

Some of those European officials have been pressing the Trump administration to add a national security official to the mix of officials pressing the Russians for a peace deal, someone who could deliver the kind of tough message Mr. Ratcliffe delivered this week.

The Ukrainians have long viewed Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner as too close to the Russians. They view Mr. Ratcliffe, a longtime Russia hawk, as a potentially more neutral mediator.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly used Mr. Ratcliffe as a discreet messenger.

In January, he became the first cabinet-level official to visit Venezuela after U.S. special operation forces seized President Nicolás Maduro.

In May, he traveled to Cuba, giving its leaders a bleak assessment of the state of the Cuban economy in the face of a U.S. oil blockade. He urged the country to make a series of sweeping political and economic changes before the situation got worse.

Direct contacts between U.S. and Russian spy chiefs have been sporadic in recent years.

In November 2021, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director in the Biden administration, met face to face in Moscow with Mr. Bortnikov and other top Russian officials to warn Mr. Putin against launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

A year later, in November 2022, Turkey hosted a face-to-face meeting in Ankara between Mr. Burns and Sergei Naryshkin, the leader of Russia’s foreign intelligence service. U.S. intelligence agencies had intercepted Russian communications about the possible use of a nuclear device by the Russians to slow Ukrainian advances in that fall’s counteroffensive. Mr. Burns warned Mr. Naryshkin of serious consequences if the Russians acted on the alleged threat.

The Turkish hosts wanted the meeting to be the start of a lasting channel of direct communication between Washington and Moscow to reduce tensions. But the C.I.A. was angry at Moscow when, after the meeting, the Russian side made it public. Mr. Burns and Mr. Naryshkin did not have a second face-to-face meeting, though they continued to communicate occasionally by phone.

After Mr. Trump took office last year, Mr. Ratcliffe and Mr. Bortnikov worked out the details of a prisoner swap, but this week’s face-to-face meeting in Moscow was their first.

If you can physically assault and then fine a member of Congress every time she tries to exercise oversight, then the ability to conduct that oversight becomes radically constrained.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Rights, Justice 

Raw Story, Zeteo report: Michael Cohen motive exposed by DoJ insiders,Travis Gettys, Aug. 27, 2026. The  Department of Justice has discussed using former attorney Michael Cohen, above – who has seemingly come crawling back – as a witness to build new criminal cases against President Donald Trump's legal adversaries, according to a new report.

Zeteo's Asawin Suebsaeng, who has a personal history with Cohen, the president's longtime personal attorney and fixer, reported that Trump administration officials are hoping to leverage his testimony to bring criminal prosecutions against New York Attorney General Letitia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg – both of whom successfully battled Trump in court.

"Bragg’s case, of course, is the reason Trump became America’s first felon president, a label Trump bitterly resents," Suebsaeng wrote.

That's why the president wants revenge against them both, Suebsaeng said, and he's apparently dangling a pardon to Cohen as leverage for his testimony.

"Cohen had previously posted on Substack that he felt 'pressured and coerced' to be those prosecutors’ star witness against Trump, though Cohen has been publicly very coy about claiming whether he was 'coerced' to give false testimony," Suebsaeng wrote.

DOJ does have the authority to charge prosecutors with coercing false testimony, although that almost never happens, but Trump officials are considering it now.

"Well before Cohen and Trump’s radio reconciliation, several sources with direct knowledge of the matter – in and close to the Justice Department – started telling me that some appointees in the Trump White House and DOJ had discussed the prospect of using Cohen as a witness if the feds criminally charge James and Bragg for, among other things, supposed civil rights violations against Trump," Suebsaeng wrote.

Trump allies have been discussing the matter since at least 2023, when policy advisers and lawyers close to Trump began drawing up strategies for a potential second term.

However, any such prosecution would face steep obstacles, and even advisers who favor charging James and Bragg acknowledge the cases would be difficult to win.

"For starters, the second Trump administration has acted in such a bumbling way in its efforts to vindictively and selectively prosecute and imprison the president’s political foes that some of those attempted prosecutions – including of Letitia James – are getting torn apart in the courts," Suebsaeng wrote. "Moreover, several senior Trump advisers simply do not trust Cohen, and view him as having negative credibility as a witness or an ally."

Attorney General Todd Blanche, in particular, denounced Cohen as a liar and unreliable witness while defending Trump against claims he made in court cases involving James and Bragg, but Suebsaeng noted that the president doesn't seem to care about winning and simply enjoys tormenting them and forcing them to pay legal fees fighting the charges.

"We’ll see what happens," the reporter concluded. "But keep an eye out for moves Team Trump makes regarding the president’s former henchman." 

More On Recent U.S. Immigration Crackdown: Aug. 16 Story

Galina Bobreneva and her husband, Brent Jindra, at their home in Redwood City, Calif (New York Times photo by Gabriela Bhaska).

New York Times, He Was a MAGA Patriot. ICE Took His Wife Away, Miriam Jordan, Aug. 16, 2026. The case represents a new front in President Trump’s mass deportation drive: arrests at airports of people who have active immigration cases and no criminal history.

Brent Jindra, a tech salesman, voted for President Trump three times, drawn by his aggressive immigration agenda. He never imagined the crackdown would ensnare his own wife.

Last month, moments after the couple got off their flight in Burbank, Calif., a young man in a brown hooded sweatshirt stopped Galina Bobreneva.

“Congratulations, you’ve been chosen for secondary screening,” he told her, according to the couple’s recollection.

The man was a federal agent, and after questioning Ms. Bobreneva for about 15 minutes, he led her away in handcuffs to an unmarked vehicle.

“I’m only doing my job,” he said. “Everything will be OK.”

So began a 16-day ordeal: a night on the floor of a basement holding cell in downtown Los Angeles; two weeks in a Mojave Desert detention center and a frantic legal effort to win her release.

New York Times, ICE Agent Released From Texas Jail After Minnesota Loses Court Fight, Mitch Smith and Ernesto Londoño,.Aug. 27, 2026. The state had sought to have the agent extradited from Texas to answer charges in Minneapolis related to an on-duty shooting that wounded an immigrant.

An immigration officer facing state charges in connection with a shooting in Minneapolis was released from jail on Thursday after Republican officials in Texas prevailed in an extradition battle with their Democratic counterparts in Minnesota. It is unclear whether the agent will ultimately answer those charges in court.

The officer, Christian Castro of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had been jailed for the last three months in Cameron County, Texas, while Minnesota officials sought to have him sent north to face assault charges related to a shooting in January that wounded a Venezuelan immigrant.

Sheriff Manuel Trevino of Cameron County said Mr. Castro was released just before 7 a.m. local time.

The case has tested the limits of state powers in an era of deep political mistrust.

It is rare for federal agents to face state criminal charges for on-duty conduct, and the Trump administration has argued that the charges Minnesota prosecutors have filed against Mr. Castro are illegitimate. It is also exceedingly rare for one governor not to act on a request from another to extradite a criminal defendant, as Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas has done.

Because Mr. Castro did not agree to leave Texas, where he lives, Minnesota officials needed Mr. Abbott to approve a request to extradite him. But Mr. Abbott, a Republican, has so far declined to act on the request from Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, a Democrat. Because Texas law limits detention in extradition cases to 90 days, Mr. Castro had to be freed on Thursday.

Minnesota officials have said they were worried that Mr. Castro would flee to Mexico if he was released, and they filed a lawsuit asking a federal judge to force the Texas governor to act. But Mr. Abbott’s lawyers said he needed more time to determine whether Mr. Castro was eligible for extradition. The judge sided with Texas on Wednesday, finding that there was no proof that Mr. Abbott was acting in bad faith.

Mr. Castro was among the thousands of federal agents sent to Minnesota last winter as part of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, which resulted in violent clashes between agents and residents, thousands of arrests and three shootings.

Mr. Castro was accused of shooting a Venezuelan man, Julio C. Sosa-Celis, on Jan. 14 after a long car chase and short foot pursuit with Mr. Sosa-Celis’s roommate.

State prosecutors said Mr. Castro fired through the door of a home, striking Mr. Sosa-Celis in the leg. They charged Mr. Castro in mid-May in state court in Minneapolis with four counts of assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime.

Mr. Castro, who returned to Texas shortly after the shooting, did not travel to Minnesota to face the charges. He was arrested in Texas in late May on a warrant from Minnesota.

Mr. Castro has not publicly addressed the charges against him, and he did not respond to requests for comment through a jail messaging system in recent months.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, federal officials backed Mr. Castro and accused Mr. Sosa-Celis and his roommate, who is also from Venezuela, of engaging in a sustained attack with a broom and a shovel.

Days after the shooting, Mr. Sosa-Celis and his roommate were charged in federal court with assaulting a law enforcement officer. But federal prosecutors dismissed that case in February after investigators determined, based on a video of the encounter, that agents had likely lied about the events that led to the shooting.

Federal officials have said they were investigating the agents involved in the shooting, though no federal charges have been announced.

Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup 

Future President Trump, right, enjoying life with his onetime best friend Jeffrey Epstein along with Trump's now-notorious birthday greeting to Epstein.

Lincoln Square Media, Six Questions Podcast: Katie Phang on Why She’s Suing the DOJ over the Epstein Files, with Steven Beschloss, Aug. 27, 2026. "The future of the Justice Department is bleak, and that is a generous construction:" — Katie Phang.

In this episode of Six Questions, Stephen Beschloss interviews independent journalist and former prosecutor Katie Phang, right, about her ongoing legal battle against the Department of Justice and new Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Phang explains her decision to sue Trump’s DOJ to force the release of heavily redacted Epstein files, noting that as an independent reporter, filing a lawsuit was a necessary tool to hold the government accountable. "We have an obligation to be truthful, but we don't have an obligation to be neutral,” she notes. 

Seymour Hersh via Substack, WHAT I KNOW ABOUT JEFFREY EPSTEIN, Seymour Hersh, right, Aug. 27, 2026. An account from decades ago raises questions about his connections to Mossad and the FBI—but not the CIA.

Let me begin this messy story by telling you that I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, in a lower middle class, racially mixed ward that also included the University of Chicago and a few upper middle class neighborhoods.

It was controlled by an elected Democratic party leader named Marshall Korshak, an attorney whose brother was Sidney Korshak. As I would learn in high school, Sidney was the most powerful mob boss in Chicago. He oversaw drugs, prostitution, police payoffs and had ties to the corrupt International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Decades later, when I was at the New York Times, Jeff Gerth, an expert on the financing of organized crime, and I published, after months of interviews, a four-part series on the newspaper’s front pages focused on Sidney and his control of racketeering, prostitution, and vice in Chicago.

The date the first installment of our series was to appear was delayed at the last minute because of a sudden Teamsters strike that kept the Sunday New York Times and its Korshak revelations from being distributed around the country for days. The senior editors at The Times understood why the strike had taken place, but that fact was never published.

Our reporting involved two long background interviews with Roy Cohn, the prominent New York mob lawyer and fixer who had famously served as counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy when he was on the House Un-American Activities Committee during the postwar Red Scare and later as a mentor to New York businessman Donald Trump. Once assured we were speaking privately, Cohn provided a firsthand view of the link between politics and crime as well as the way certain prominent senators were kept supplied with pretty women.

So I knew the sort of man Jeffrey Epstein was when he first became known for providing airplanes for various politicians, including a former president, and later for running what seemed to me to be a series of a high-end whorehouses at no charge for prominent men, many high up in the world of American business and New York finance.

And so when I learned the story I’m about to tell, I wanted nothing to do with it...

I’m telling it now because I have been told that specific evidence about Epstein’s connections to foreign and domestic intelligence services, particularly Mossad and the FBI, though they do exist in government files, have yet to be the subject of materials made public by the Trump administration’s Justice Department and have not come under scrutiny by the Congress and the media.

I had a distressing discussion of the Epstein affair with a well-informed international source I’ve known for a long time. He suddenly volunteered last fall to talk about what he knew about Epstein. His point was that if all the details were to come out about Epstein and Israel it could cause problems for the past and present members of some in the Trump administration, as well as for senior officials in prior Democratic administrations.

I shared this account with a sophisticated American official whom I have learned to trust over the years. He told me that there was yet to be a serious nonpartisan investigation of the role of some senior members of the FBI who knew of and abetted Epstein’s collection of compromising videos.

Epstein was seen in 2016 as a possible source for dirt on Trump by the Clinton campaign, the official told me, “because they wanted to get rid of Trump. But Epstein was too smart to get involved.” He added that Epstein became “an asset” for the FBI, while the CIA had done “an analysis of his assets” but “was not interested in him because he was not reliable and had no tactical intelligence.” He has learned during a long career, the official told me, not to become a fan of any president.

This account raises more questions than it answers, but even the most bare-boned analysis of Epstein’s actions, taken in what amounts to plain sight, demands the immediate release of whatever evidence has been withheld by the Justice Department.

We need another bipartisan committee today to get answers for the American people to questions that need to be asked and answered. Let’s call it the Epstein Committee.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption  

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a former longtime heroin user now posturing as a health care advocate, is flanked by President Trump and Dr. Mehmet Oz, another health care promoter of dubious credibility and extraordinary wealth generated from nostrums -- and keen loyalty to Trump -- whom Trump nominated for high office. 

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Relentless Reporter Hounds RFK Jr. Into Fleeing From His Own Press Conference, Jason Easley, right, Aug. 27, 2026. When RFK Jr. was asked relentlessly about a $1 million donation he took from the Kratom industry, he walked out on a press conference and ended his own event.

The FDA has warned the American people not to use kratom, a dangerous plant-based product that in small doses acts as a stimulant, but in larger doses has opioid effects and is addictive.

Kratom is not the sort of product that the Secretary of Health and Human Services should be taking money from or giving favorable policies to, but that is what HHS Secretary RFK Jr. is accused of doing.

Kratom products are sold in gas stations around the country, and they have been linked to liver toxicity, seizures, and thousands of deaths.

According to a New York Times investigation published in June:

Mr. Kennedy, as health secretary, called the governor of Ohio to try to head off a state ban on kratom in the fall of 2025. Months later, Botanic Tonics donated $1 million to a political committee associated with Mr. Kennedy.

…

The administration’s receptiveness to kratom comes as Mr. Trump has also expressed a willingness to loosen rules covering other drugs backed by influence campaigns, including cannabis and psychedelics. The permissive posture stands in contrast to Mr. Trump’s baseless skepticism about highly regulated and widely used medications like Tylenol and vaccines.

When Kennedy was asked about this $1 million donation, it did not go well.

At an event in Tampa, FL, with Sen. Ashley Moody that was about school nutrition, Kennedy was asked, “ I'm wondering, you fought very hard to get a ban on 7OH. People also say that natural leaf kratom is addictive. What are you doing to fight that scourge?”

The HHS Secretary answered, “FDA is looking at that issue right now. “

Then the question came about the donation: “The Justice Department dropped its case against Feel Free, and MAHA PAC received a $1 million donation. Does that have anything to do with the DOJ dropping the case?”

Kennedy denied knowledge: “I don't know anything about either of the things that you just said. I have no idea who the million-dollar donation... I don't-”

The reporter filled him in, “It was from Jerry Ross of Feel Free.”

Kennedy continued to deny knowledge of the donation, “Okay. I don't know anything about that.”

Reporter, “Do you know him?”

More denial from Kennedy, “And I don't make decisions for the Justice Department.”

The reporter would not stop asking, “Are you in the pocket of Feel Free, sir?”

Kennedy, “Excuse me?”

She asked again, “Are you in the pocket of Feel Free?”

Sen. Ashley Moody stepped in and ended the event, “Thank you very much for joining us today to talk about our kids and their healthy futures, and Florida is gonna continue to lead the way. Thank you so much for being here. We appreciate it. Thank you.”

As RFK Jr. was walking out, the questions kept coming: “So you have no knowledge of that one million dollar donation? You don't know about the donation, sir? Do you know Jerry-?” 

It is not only RFK Jr. who has taken money from the kratom industry. Donald Trump has taken donations, and so has DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullen.

When reporters ask the questions that members of this administration don’t want to answer about their alleged corruption, Kennedy’s response is typical of how this administration behaves.

RFK Jr.’s event was derailed by a journalist who would not stop asking an important question about why a product that has been linked to thousands of deaths is getting special treatment and not being cracked down on by the nation’s top public health official.

If Democrats win back all or part of Congress in November, don’t be surprised if RFK Jr. leaves the administration before the investigations can begin.

Corruption is not a victimless crime. When an administration looks the other way, people can and do die.

Reporters need to keep asking the questions, because that is the only way that corrupt people are held accountable. 

Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump was exposed today. Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 26, 2026. At 10:00 am this morning, the official social media account of the United States Department of Education posted a video no other living or dead presidential administration would have ever even imagined publishing.

While they were attempting to glorify Donald Trump and show the world just how powerful and feared he was, the clip they chose to make that point ended up saying something far darker than they seemed to realize, or more honest than they meant to be. Either way, no one at the agency responsible for educating America’s children appears to have stopped long enough to understand what they were actually posting or the ramifications for doing so.

In the post, they included a scene from a movie and a caption that read, “No one does it like us. 🐅.” They included that tiger emoji. It was a very dramatic scene, showing Gary Oldman, playing Winston Churchill in the 2017 film Darkest Hour, as he pounded on the table before his war cabinet and shouted, “You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!” At first glance, the message they were trying to send seemed obvious. Trump was the tiger. A strong, powerful, and unstoppable leader. A man the rest of the world should fear and respect. Except there was one horrifying problem with that message. The tiger Churchill was talking about, who they were aligning with the President of the United States, was Adolf Hitler.

Churchill was not calling Hitler strong. He was calling him dangerous. He was warning his government that negotiating with a fascist is not possible and it certainly is not good-faith diplomacy. It is surrendering to them. The line that follows in the film is even more important than the one they shared because it captures exactly what we are living through: “When will the lesson be learned?” That is the question the United States Department of Education accidentally asked the entire country this morning. When will the lesson be learned?

The answer is not buried in a history book. It is playing out right now, today, in the story of a man not enough Americans know about. A man who learned the lesson, recognized the warning signs, sounded the alarm for the rest of us, and is now being punished for refusing to stay silent.

His name is Jason Watson, and he is a Major in the United States Air Force. On July 1st, he put on the uniform of the country he swore an oath to defend, walked to the steps of the United States Capitol, and did something he knew could cost him everything. He called for the impeachment, conviction, and removal of Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. He cited the war in Iran, launched without congressional authorization, and said he could no longer remain silent while the Constitution he had sworn to defend was being violated. He knew there would be consequences and what speaking publicly in uniform could mean for his career, freedom, and the life he had built in service to this country. He spoke anyway, and he still hasn’t stopped speaking, even after he was arrested that same day.

Last week, Watson spoke publicly again, this time in an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, and said, “What is happening with President Trump is not normal. He has failed us. And not only is he a failure as president, he is flagrantly violating the Constitution, breaking the law, engaged in rampant corruption and is killing Americans. And that is unacceptable to me and it should be unacceptable to all of us.”

The morning after that interview aired, Watson told his chain of command he would no longer wear his uniform. He was arrested again. On August 18th, the Air Force ordered him into pretrial confinement, where he was taken into military custody and locked up while the case against him moves forward, before he has been tried or convicted of the charges he now faces. It is hard not to wonder whether the decision to confine him was made, at least in part, to ensure he could not speak publicly again. On Monday, he was formally charged with ten specifications under three articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice: three counts under Article 88 for using contemptuous words against the president, five counts under Article 92 for disobeying orders, and two counts under Article 133 for conduct unbecoming an officer. Article 88 is a provision so rarely invoked that only two convictions under it have been recorded since 1951. His attorney believes Watson is the first major in the history of the American military to be charged under it.

Watson is now sitting in confinement awaiting what comes next. His attorney, Christopher Mutimer, says the conditions amount to solitary confinement. He could face significant jail time and dismissal from the military, potentially losing the career he built serving the same country he says he was trying to defend by speaking out. Mutimer said of him, “It is my hope that other Americans who feel powerless in this moment will take some measure of courage from his willingness to speak and to stand by his convictions.”

Thank you to those of you who support this work with a paid membership. Your $5 a month is what allows me to keep writing every day and, just as importantly, to keep these posts free and accessible to everyone. Those who can pay are the reason those who can’t still have access. And right now, with so much at stake heading into the midterms, that matters more than ever. If you’re in a position to join, I’d be grateful to have you with us.

There is a reason the military has rules against officers publicly attacking the president, and we should not pretend those rules do not matter simply because we agree with what Watson said. The chain of command exists for a reason. The military cannot function if service members decide for themselves which commander they will obey based on politics or personal belief. Civilian control of the military, discipline within the ranks, and continuity of command are fundamental to a functioning democracy. Those protections were built for moments of disagreement and instability, and they matter. But those same service members also take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, and military law requires them to obey lawful orders, not unlawful ones. That is not optional. It is a requirement. And that creates an impossible position for anyone in uniform right now, because the rules demand obedience to the chain of command and faithfulness to the Constitution, and Watson believed those two obligations were no longer pointing in the same direction.

That is also what makes Watson’s decision so profound. He knew those rules. He understood the consequences better than most of us ever could. He had spent his career inside the institution he was challenging, and he knew exactly what could happen if he crossed that line. Yet he still reached the conclusion that the greater danger was staying silent. That whatever punishment might come to him personally was less important than warning the country he had sworn to defend.

Watson was not asking for power. He was putting his own at risk. He was not protecting his career. He was jeopardizing it. He was not demanding that the country pledge loyalty to him. He was trying to warn his country about the man to whom the military chain of command ultimately leads. There is something deeply unsettling about an officer deciding that the only way left to honor the deeper meaning of his oath was to risk being punished by the institution he had spent his career serving.

Watson is now sitting in confinement after putting his career and freedom on the line to warn the country he served. Hours ago, Donald Trump posted something that made the contradiction of this moment impossible to ignore. At 12:31 this afternoon, he shared a black-and-white photograph of himself as a young man in a military academy uniform, standing beside his parents. There was no caption or explanation, just the photograph. To anyone who did not know his history, the implication was obvious: it looked like a photograph of a young Donald Trump who had served in the military. That is what made the image so misleading. The truth is that Trump was sent to New York Military Academy as a teenager, reportedly because of disciplinary problems, not because he had enlisted in the United States military or answered any call to serve his country.

Years later, when his country actually called young men of his generation to serve during the Vietnam War, Trump received five draft deferments, including a medical deferment for bone spurs. This is a man who has reportedly referred to Americans who died in war as “suckers” and who has disparaged prisoners of war. He has never worn the uniform of the United States military in service to this country. Not once, not even for a single day.

Major Watson is not the only one refusing to stay silent. This week, VoteVets, one of the largest veterans’ advocacy organizations in the country, launched nearly one thousand digital billboards near military installations across the United States. The billboards feature Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth against a backdrop of fire, with a single message: the Iran war means higher prices with no end in sight. The campaign spans ten cities, from Fayetteville to San Antonio to Colorado Springs to Virginia Beach. These billboards are not appearing in liberal enclaves or on cable news panels. They are appearing where military families live. Where they drive to the commissary. Where they fill up their gas tanks and stretch their paychecks. Because these families are the ones paying for a war they did not ask for, not just in service and sacrifice, but also financially.

Alongside VoteVets, Win Without War has been running its own billboards near Fort Bragg and Camp Lejeune, asking service members directly whether domestic deployments and ICE-related duty are what they signed up for.

This is a whole new level of resistance coming from inside the military community itself, from people who understand what that oath means and what it requires of those who take it. They are speaking publicly, at scale, on the roads outside the very bases where service members live, work, and train. These are people close enough to the institution to understand what is at stake, and they are willing to stand outside its gates and say out loud what too many people with power in Washington still will not.

There is something about seeing that resistance come from people who have worn the uniform that makes this even harder to live through. Maybe it is because they understand the weight of that oath in a way most of us never will. They know why the chain of command matters and why discipline matters. They know what could happen if our military loses both. Yet they also know there is something above every commander, general, and even the president. The oath that they took. And they know it was written that way for a reason. It was designed to make loyalty to our Constitution stronger than loyalty to any one man. The authors had learned that lesson through some of the darkest chapters in human history and had made the conscious decision to include that safeguard.

After World War II, after the camps were liberated and the world saw where fascism ultimately leads, we said, “Never again.” We taught generation after generation what happened for a reason. Not just so they would know Hitler’s name or remember the horrors of the Holocaust, but so they would understand how a country gets there. People obey. Institutions fall in line. Those who speak are punished. Everyone else sees what happens to them and learns to stay quiet. Eventually, loyalty to one man matters more than loyalty to the law. “Never again” was supposed to mean we would recognize those signs before it all happened again.

That is why the oath matters so much. Watson understood that. The veterans behind those billboards understand it. Churchill understood the danger, too, in the very scene this administration posted as propaganda without seeming to understand the warning inside it.

Churchill was right about the tiger. You cannot reason with it while your head is already in its mouth. You cannot keep giving it what it wants, hoping that eventually it will be satisfied and leave the rest of us alone. At some point, we have to recognize the danger and refuse to keep feeding it. That is what Americans are beginning to do. Watson refused. The veterans speaking out are refusing. People across this country are refusing to stay quiet, fall in line, or accept that any one man should be more powerful than the Constitution that belongs to all of us. The Department of Education accidentally gave us the question we should all be asking right now: “When will the lesson be learned?” Maybe the answer is right now, while there is still time to do something about it. And if history has taught us that ordinary people have the power to stop extraordinary evil, then the courage and resistance rising across this country is proof that we still have the power to change where this ends. 

Tributes To Dolly Parton

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 26, 2026 [We Will Always Love You: Special Remembrances], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 27, 2026. Last night, at exactly 9:25—9 to 5—the top of the Empire State Building in New York City lit up pink. The antennas of Chicago’s Willis Tower—formerly the Sears Tower—lit up pink, too. So did the Ferris wheel at the Santa Monica Pier, which also sported a giant pink heart. The Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee; Reunion Tower and other buildings in the Dallas skyline; and the Longfellow, Burns, Fore River, Braga, and Zakim bridges of Boston; Caesar’s Superdome in New Orleans; and, of course, Nashville’s KVB Bridge and historic Metro Courthouse were all lit up in pink last night.

The Arthur Ashe Stadium played “Jolene” during the U.S. Open. Jack White played Jolene in London. Elsewhere in London, the Buckingham Palace band played “9 to 5.”

All this and more for a woman born on January 19, 1946, in Sevier County, Tennessee, in a cabin in the Smoky Mountains without electricity or running water.

Dolly Rebecca Parton was the fourth of twelve children born to illiterate sharecropper Robert Lee Parton Sr. and Avie Lee Caroline Owens. A musical prodigy encouraged by her mother, Dolly was singing on local radio and television shows in Nashville by the time she was 10 and debuted at the Grand Ole Opry when she was 13. In 1964 she moved to Nashville, where other musicians quickly recognized her talent as a songwriter. Over her career, she would write songs made famous by Kenny Rogers, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Whitney Houston, Tina Turner, and others.

In 1965, Parton made her first record, and the following year she married asphalt paver Carl Dean, who stayed out of the limelight during their 59-year marriage. Following the success of Parton’s first record, country music star Porter Wagoner invited her to become part of his show in 1967.

There she blossomed, joining Wagoner to record a dozen studio albums that produced a number of top 10 hit singles. Playing off Wagoner’s famous rhinestone-studded suits made by Ukrainian-American designer Nudie Cohn, the petite Parton adopted huge hairstyles and emphasized her figure, and soon began wearing rhinestones herself.

She once told a journalist that she modeled her public image after a woman others called the “town tramp” but whom she saw as a glamorous contrast to the women in Parton’s own life. “She had bright red lipstick, long red fingernails. She had high-heeled shoes, little floating plastic goldfish in the heels of them, short skirts, low-cut tops, and I just thought she was beautiful. When people would say, ‘She ain’t nothing but trash,’ I would always say, ‘Well, that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up.’” But, in an industry dominated by men, Parton also noted her style was a way for a small woman to “fill my space.”

By the 1970s, Parton was coming into her own, taking on the music industry on her own terms.

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose. And do it with purpose,” Parton was famous for saying. “Don’t ever sacrifice who you are, your principles and your morals and your values to just try to get ahead in business. It ain’t worth it.”

Rather than running from her upbringing in rural poverty, Parton embraced the values that upbringing had inspired in her. In 1971 she hit #1 on the country charts with her song “Joshua,” inspired by the Appalachian men around whom she had grown up whose rough looks covered their quality. In the same year, her “Coat of Many Colors” reached #4, telling the story of how her mother had made her a coat of rags, rich with love. Those who valued possessions over love, she sang, were the ones truly impoverished. In 1972 she wrote “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” about the peace and humanity of rural life, “walking home from church on Sunday with the one you love, just laughing, talking, making future plans.”

She parted ways with Wagoner in 1974, and her farewell song to him, “I Will Always Love You,” became a global sensation that reached #1 on the country charts in 1974, 1982, and again in 1992, when it spent 14 weeks at #1 after Whitney Houston covered it. In 1974, Parton also delivered “Jolene,” the desperate plea of a woman to a beautiful rival not to “take my man.” “Jolene,” too, hit #1 on the country charts.

In 1975 and 1976 the Country Music Association named Parton Female Vocalist of the Year, and in 1978 it honored her as Entertainer of the Year, just three of the many awards she would win as her musical career took off not just at home but also internationally.

In 1976, Parton began working with manager Sandy Gallin, and in 1980 she launched her film career, starring with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in 9 to 5, a comedy with a subversive subtext about discrimination against women. In the film, for which Parton wrote the theme song, three working women replace their sexist, domineering boss and implement programs their colleagues like, including equal pay, flexible hours, and an on-site daycare center, all of which result in dramatically improved office productivity.

A massive success at the box office, 9 to 5 opened doors for Parton in the movie industry, leading to parts in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Steel Magnolias, and other films. She and Gallin created a production company, Sandollar, which produced her television specials and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

For almost sixty years, Parton was a member of the American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada, a labor union that represents about 70,000 singers and players and is affiliated with the AFL-CIO. She joined the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) in 1969.

AFM International president Tino Gagliardi told John Nichols of The Nation: “Before she was an icon, Dolly was a working musician. Dolly never forgot the musicians who helped bring her music to life. By standing firm for solidarity and treating every player with dignity, she elevated our entire profession.”

In 1989, Sandollar helped to bring awareness and empathy to the AIDS crisis with the documentary Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt. The film explored the lives of five of the individuals memorialized in panels on the AIDS Memorial Quilt and called attention to the Reagan administration’s lack of response to the epidemic.

In 1990, Common Threads won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and in the 1991 song “Family” that she wrote with Carl Perkins, Parton sang: “Some are preachers, some are gay, some are addicts, drunks, and strays, but not a one is turned away when it’s family. Some are lucky, others ain’t, some are fighters, others faint. Winners, losers, sinners, saints, it’s all family.”

In a conversation with host Larry King in 2016, Parton noted that she had taken heat for her support for the LGBTQ community, but that she did “not believe that we should criticize and judge other people. I think we should be accepting and loving. We are all God’s children. We are who we are, and we should be allowed to be who we are…. I just think that we should be more loving, more caring. We are who we are. If you’re gay, you’re gay. If you’re straight, you’re straight, and you should be allowed to be, you know, how you are, and who you are.”

In 1986, Parton bought an interest in a theme park owned by Jack and Pete Herschend in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. Renamed “Dollywood,” the park became the biggest ticketed attraction in the state, now visited by about 4 million people a year and employing about 4,000. “I always thought that if I made it big or got successful at what I had started out to do, that I wanted to come back to my part of the country and do something great, something that would bring a lot of jobs into this area,” she told a reporter.

Two years later, she established the Dollywood Foundation to support education in Sevier County. In 1990, her “buddy” program decreased the high school dropout rate in classes that participated from 35% to 6%. In 2016, the Dollywood Foundation created the My People Fund—as in, these are my people—providing immediate financial assistance to families who lost their homes in wildfires in Sevier County that November. It donated more than $12 million.

In 2020, Parton donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to fund the research that allowed researchers to prove that mRNA vaccine technology worked. That research led to grants that enabled development of the Moderna mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 that saved millions of lives. She also helped encourage others to get vaccinated, taking her own shot on camera in a dress she had cut the shoulders out of so the doctor would have easier access.

Beginning in February 2022, under the Grow U program, Parton provided 100% free tuition, fees, and books to any of the 11,000 employees at any of the 25 amusement parks and attractions under Herschend Enterprises. The president of Dollywood told reporters that one of the key tenets of the Dollywood Foundation is to “learn more.” He said that Parton is “very supportive of the employees learning and continuing to grow themselves.”

That drive for growth and opportunity was behind Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, which Parton founded in 1995 to put books into the hands of every young child in Sevier County. Her inspiration, she said, was her father, who was “the smartest man I have ever known but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all his dreams.” The program has grown until it now serves children across the United States, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

In February 2018, Parton donated the 100 millionth book from her Imagination Library to the Library of Congress. It was a copy of her book Coat of Many Colors, dedicated to her father.

By the time Dolly Parton died on Tuesday, August 25, at the age of 80, her Imagination Library had delivered more than 332 million books to more than 3 million children.

“When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true,” the Imagination Library website reads. “I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.”

When children age out of Dolly’s Imagination Library, they receive a final letter from her hoping they would “have a great time” in school and urging them to keep reading.

The letter ends: “You and all of your friends are very special. There is no limit to what you can do or how far you can go. Just remember the lessons my family taught me—dream big dreams; learn everything you can learn; and care for all those who care for you. You do all of these things and you can be anyone you want to be.

“You are terrific, and remember…

“I Will Always Love You,

“Dolly.”

Nepal-Tibet Flood Disaster 

New York Times, Live Updates: Rescuers Scour Himalayan Valleys for Survivors After Devastating Flood, Binod Ghimire, Lily Kuo, Mujib Mashal and Leo Sands, Aug. 27, 2026. More than 1,000 people were missing in Nepal and the Tibet region of China after a torrent of mud, water and ice swept away villages and bridges. Officials said at least 335 people had been killed. Here’s the latest.

The search for more than 1,000 people missing after a devastating Himalayan flood entered a second day on Thursday, as emergency workers scrambled across steep mountain valleys and mud-covered villages to look for survivors and deliver supplies.

A giant torrent of water, rocks and ice swept through the area between Nepal and the Tibet region of China, destroying roads, snapping bridges, toppling buildings and cutting communications. Scientists said the flood was most likely unleashed after an enormous chunk of ice broke from a glacier high in the mountains on Wednesday morning.

Nepali officials reported at least 332 deaths, while the authorities in China, where far less information was being released, reported three deaths in Tibet. The toll was expected to rise.

Images from the disaster captured its terrifying speed and force. Surveillance footage verified by The New York Times shows crowds running from the surging water before torrents of water and thick clouds engulfed buildings and vehicles at the Gyirong crossing on China’s border with Nepal.

Officials in both countries, along with aid organizations, were still assessing the scale of the tragedy and struggling to establish an accurate count of the missing.

In Nepal, more than 800 people, including about 500 foreign tourists, were unaccounted for as of Thursday morning, the country’s disaster management authority said. The missing tourists included more than 130 from India, as well as travelers from the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada and Malaysia.

In China, at least 558 people were missing in Tibet’s Gyirong County, including 260 foreigners, Chinese state media reported. China’s foreign ministry said that 100 Chinese citizens were missing in Nepal.

The disaster caused power outages and cut off communications in a region that is already remote, hampering relief efforts. The flood destroyed dozens of bridges and about 25 miles of roads, Nepal’s government said.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said the worst-affected areas were “extremely difficult to reach.” Many vital supplies were being delivered by helicopter. The United Nations, citing Nepali authorities, said about 10,000 households needed “immediate relief.”

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• Initial assessment: Scientists say an ice avalanche was a major trigger for the flooding, but the extraordinary volume of water suggests other factors may also have contributed. Read more ›
• Censorship in China: Footage released by Chinese state media showed surging waters at the Gyirong border crossing. But some videos taken and posted online by locals were blocked on Chinese social media. Read more ›
• Pilgrimage: Many of the missing Indian nationals had been on a religious pilgrimage traveling to or from Mount Kailash, a Tibetan peak revered by many Hindus as the spiritual home of the god Shiva that is also sacred to Buddhists and Jains. Read more ›
• Nepal’s government: The disaster is a major challenge for Nepal’s recently elected government and Prime Minister Balendra Shah, who swept to power on the back of a youth-led protest movement last year.

New York Times, Survivors of Nepal Floods Describe a Devastating Force That Turned Everything Upside Down, Binod Ghimire, Aug. 27, 2026. Survivors described the terrifying speed and power of the “boulders, sand and thick sludge” that killed hundreds and wiped out villages on the border between Nepal and Tibet.

The numbers alone reflect the scale of the destruction: Hundreds of people are reported dead so far, with over a thousand others missing, and entire towns have been wiped out after floods swept the Himalayan region on the border between Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday.

But for the survivors, it is the force of the deluge that haunts them. One minute, their lives were routine. The next, the world turned upside down.

Rajan Khatri, 41, a police officer posted at Syabrubesi, one of the riverside villages worst affected by the floods, said he had received a call around 9:10 a.m. local time from a friend warning him that a massive flash flood was heading downstream.

He and his colleagues had no time to react. As soon as he hung up, high waves swept through the police station.

The water flung him out of the building, and he lost consciousness.

“One of my senior officers and I were together when the wave struck. I was thrown out, but he was unlucky and was buried or swept away,” he said from a hospital bed in Kathmandu.

“I cannot explain how big the waves were. They engulfed several-meters-high buildings in a fraction of seconds,” he said. “It wasn’t just water. It was a combination of boulders, sand and thick sludge.”

Of the seven people who had been working at his police station, Mr. Khatri is one of three to have been found alive. He said he was worried about whether the other four had survived.

After regaining consciousness, he looked around and saw nothing but debris. He said at least 100 houses had been swept away, along with the office of a hydropower project, schools and other government facilities.

Mr. Khatri waited amid the debris until his rescue on Thursday morning. He had sustained chest injuries from the force of the floodwaters.

Smriti Ojha, 17, was getting ready for school in Trishuli, in Nepal’s Nuwakot district, when she felt a tremor.

World News, Global Human Rights, Disasters 

New York Times, Ratko Mladic, Murderous ‘Butcher of Bosnia,’ Dies at 83, Dan BilefskyAug. 27, 2026. A general during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, he was convicted in the killing of some 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica, Europe’s deadliest massacre since World War II.

Ratko Mladic, right, the former Bosnian Serb general whose actions during the Balkan wars of the 1990s led to him being called the “Butcher of Bosnia” and who was held responsible for Europe’s deadliest massacre since World War II, the killing of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, has died. He was 83.

His death was announced on Thursday by Serbian state media.

Mr. Mladic was captured on May 26, 2011, in a farming village north of Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, after almost 16 years as a fugitive, ending one of the longest manhunts in modern history. His 2017 conviction by an international tribunal on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes marked the end of a dark and bloody chapter.

In pronouncing a life sentence, the presiding judge, Alphons Orie, said Mr. Mladic’s crimes ranked “among the most heinous known to humankind.” Mr. Mladic appealed the verdict, which was upheld in 2021.ImageA man in a suit sits with his hand near his mouth and earpieces in his mouth, in front of a screen.Mr. Mladic at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague on Nov. 22, 2017, when he was found guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.Credit...Nihad Ibrahimkadic/Anadolu Agency, via Getty ImagesImageA woman stands, arms raised in exuberance, as others sit and stand and clap around her.Relatives of the victims of the massacre at Srebrenica reacted as they watched a live broadcast of the verdict and sentencing in Mr. Mladic’s trial.Credit...Dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Balkan wars erupted as Yugoslavia was breaking up into independent states. Slobodan Milosevic, the nationalist president of Serbia, one of those states, was intent on creating a Greater Serbia. He reawakened old ethnic and religious enmities and started wars pitting Serbs against Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims and the Albanians of Kosovo.

Roughly 100,000 people died during the conflict and more than 2.5 million were displaced.

A ruddy-faced and intimidating man with a bellowing voice, piercing blue eyes and a grandiose sense of himself, Mr. Mladic, an officer in the Yugoslav People’s Army, led the army of the Bosnian Serbs in the early 1990s.

On the eve of the Srebrenica massacre, he promised to avenge the conquest of Serbia centuries before by the Ottoman Muslim Turks. Over 10 days, his soldiers hunted down, captured and summarily executed thousands of Bosnian Muslims, lining them up with hands tied behind their backs and shooting them. Women were raped. International pleas for restraint were ignored.

Serb forces buried the remains, dug them up again and scattered them in distant mass graves in an organized effort to hide damning evidence of war crimes.

More On Trump's Trade War Against Canada

Diane Francis via Substack, Opinion: Canada Has Cards, Diane Francis, Aug 27, 2026. In 2013, I wrote a book called “Merger of the Century” about how Canada’s economic dependence on the United States in the form of a lop-sided trading relationship was also a strategic vulnerability. I pointed out that when more than 70 percent of exports flow to one market, an American tariff, border closure, or political ultimatum could threaten the entire Canadian economy.

I argued that the country should also address its reliance on American military protection and its failure to meet its NATO security spending commitments. Finally, I concluded and warned that eventually “the Americans are not going to put up with paying for our defence forever” and would “gobble us up”. And here we are: It’s 2026, Canada remains economically and militarily dependent on the US, and Donald Trump is making a move. Fortunately, Canada has cards.

The Economist cautioned the US and Canada against becoming enmeshed in an all-out trade war. “The trouble is that America’s economy is 13 times larger than Canada’s and [Prime Minister Mark] Carney has until then to find a way to defuse a grave threat to his country’s economy,” it concluded. However, Canadians are furious about tariffs, Trump’s “51st state” insults, and bullying, and the majority support retaliatory tariffs. Trump scoffs, but Canada has leverage and will cause harm to America. It doesn’t have many cards, but it has some important ones:

EnergyCanada provides essential energy to America. About 30 US states trade or import electricity from Canada, and all major regional grids outside Texas are interconnected across the border. The states most dependent on Canadian electricity are in the Northeast and Midwest border regions, with Vermont, New York, Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota leading the reliance on cross-border power grids. Fossil fuels are another critical commodity that Canada provides, roughly 60% of all America’s oil imports and 98% of its natural gas imports. Cutting off energy exports altogether isn’t feasible because it would endanger Americans and because central Canada relies on oil shipped through the US. But Canada could put export taxes on all forms of energy and other vital commodities to increase their prices, which would hurt the US economy, its consumers, and possibly convince Trump to back off.

PotashCanada provides 80% of America’s potash, which is an essential fertilizer used by American farmers. An export tax could be imposed, reducing farm incomes. This is a key lever because Canada is the world’s biggest potash producer and the only alternative would be to buy potash from Russia, Belarus, or China.

Autos and Auto PartsTrump’s threat to impose 50% tariffs on Canadian-made vehicles, parts, and steel will boomerang and damage American consumers and America’s “Big Three” American car giants – General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Stellantis (parent of Chrysler, Dodge, and Ram). These companies have invested hundreds of billions of dollars over decades in building manufacturing, engineering, and assembly operations in Canada, mostly in Ontario. This was done to tap its auto market but mostly to take advantage of Canada’s cheaper power costs and its lower labor costs that are US$20-an-hour less in Canada, mostly because healthcare costs are borne by all Canadian taxpayers, not paid by corporations. This two-state supply chain has made cars cheaper for both American and Canadian consumers. Dividing the industry would force massive writedowns for American companies and raise car prices for all buyers.

MAGA Trucks and TargetsInterestingly, Trump’s team asked for a carve-out from tariffs for the big truck operations in Ontario, but this was astutely refused by Ottawa because the request was purely political. Canada’s truck plants produce vehicles that are wildly popular among MAGA followers, notably Silverados, Ford Super Duty trucks, and produce most of the parts for Ram and others.Trump autographing MAGA-owner’s truck made in Canada

Targeting Republican statesCanada has also imposed $20 billion in tariffs on producers in states where there are hotly contested political races or which are solidly Republican. For instance, there are tariffs on processed cheese from Wisconsin, seafood from Maine, and washers and dryers from Kentucky, where GE Appliances has a major operation. Ontario and some other provinces have also ordered the removal of US alcohol products, including Kentucky bourbons, Tennessee whiskeys, California wines, beers, and ready-to-drink cocktails. This has sparked major outcries as these industries became collateral damage.

Border State SympathyMichigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said residents in her border state were “uniquely impacted” because tariffs drive up costs for families and businesses and threaten its auto manufacturers. New York Governor Kathy Hochul said Trump was “needlessly picking fights” with US allies. California Governor Gavin Newsom posted: “Our closest ally. Our critical trading partner. And Trump is hitting Canada with 50% tariffs. What the actual f*ck are we doing?” They all support ending tariffs.

What Donald Trump is doing is creating a new “world order,” which aims to replace geopolitics with geoeconomics. He intends to reduce America’s soaring trade and military spending deficits. To do so, he brutally beats up foes, military allies, and trading partners alike. China has been clobbered with tariffs, but also India. He’s pushed the European Union into remilitarizing, paying tariffs, and buying American weapons on behalf of Ukraine. Japan and South Korea have been hit with high tariffs, and will eventually be forced to reimburse the US for years of military protection. Now he attacks Canada, and, indirectly, the US economy. He persists despite polls that show Americans are against the US-Canada trade war:CBS News/YouGov poll

However, to be fair, Trump’s tariff battles have yielded some positive results. Excessive tariffs against American products have fallen in many jurisdictions. Europe is militarizing after years of freeloading, and the specter of tariffs has lit a fire under Canada’s federal government to contribute fully to NATO and develop the country’s resources. But Trump’s style of negotiation — which includes trash-talking — backfires. He belittles Canada and demotes its Prime Minister to “Governor Carney”. He tells fibs and claims Canadians want to join the US, but the facts are that few, if any, are attracted to America’s awful healthcare system, crime and poverty rates, or political gridlock, not to mention its current leader, President Trump.

Unfortunately, neither side can win this trade war. Canada is one of America’s biggest suppliers and customers, and a lengthy trade war will cause inflation and unemployment in both countries. If the conflict lasts for months, Canada will go into a recession, further damaging the US economy and disrupting supply chains. Despite the stakes, both sides dig in for a fight. Worse, Prime Minister Carney’s rhetoric is alarmist, and declares this is a fight for Canada’s soul and existence. “Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us,” Carney said. “And I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen.’ We are keeping that promise.”

But Canadians have no one to blame except Carney’s own Liberal Party and predecessors who were socialists and environmentalists who didn’t grow the economy and freeloaded militarily. Every time Canada’s Liberals nixed an oil project or refused to support a gas or mining mega-project, they reduced Canada’s sovereignty. That’s why this was predictable. On August 24, I drove south from Toronto to New York City, crossing the normally congested US-Canada border. Instead of long lineups, there were only a handful of cars and virtually no trucks lined up in either direction. It was grim evidence that a trade war had begun that no one will win. 

The Daily with Sarah Jones viaPoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Republicans May Be Doomed In Michigan Because Of Trump’s Canada Trade War, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Aug. 27, 2026. Canada is Michigan’s biggest export market. It is also a state with key Senate and House races. Trump’s trade war with Canada is so bad for Michigan that it could doom Republicans

Democrats only need to pick up three seats to take back control of the House of Representatives, and thanks to Donald Trump, they could win all three in Michigan. The Senate contest features Mike Rogers, the former Republican congressman going up against Democrat and former top state health official Abdul El-Sayed is the top contest in Michigan.

Republicans had high hopes that they could make the election about El-Sayed instead of Trump and the economy. Michigan Republicans started to convince themselves that they might be able to use El-Sayed to hurt Democrats up and down the ballot.

All those hopes turned to dust when Trump slapped a 50% tariff on Canada, and Canadians responded with retaliatory tariffs. Canada's retaliation happens to target agricultural states like Iowa and North Carolina, which also have key Senate races. Border states like Maine and Michigan will be heavily and directly impacted.

However, no state will be as directly impacted by Trump’s Canada trade war as Michigan, and this reality has fallen into Democratic laps and may erase any other issue Republicans hoped could carry them to victory.

Semafor reported:

President Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada is handing a political gift to Democrats in this pivotal battleground state.

Democratic candidates across Michigan are unifying against Trump’s 50% tariffs on an array of Canadian goods, hitching Republicans to a trade battle against a trusted neighbor that polls show is unpopular. The alignment is a helpful way for Democrats to change the subject from US-Israel policy, a topic that has bitterly split them in this state in particular.

Taking on Trump over Canada trade also helps Democrats sidestep their own past divisions on the issue. The party has long cleaved between pro-business factions and labor allies, and some Democrats — especially in Michigan — remain open to targeted tariffs, not to mention critical of free trade pacts.

Michigan exported more than $21 billion in goods to Canada last year. If those exports dry up, it is going to result in even more Trump-caused damage to the state’s economy.

Trump’s original tariffs already took a bite out of the Michigan economy. These tariffs, which directly target Canada, along with Canadian retaliation, could increase voter pain as they head to the polls.

Michigan is a must-win state for Republicans, but Trump’s actions could result in the GOP getting cleaned out up and down the ballot in a critical election. Trump’s tariffs could take what was looking like a big win for Democrats and make it gigantic. 

Politico, Why carmakers are staying quiet despite 'cataclysmic' Canada tariff threat, Daniel Desrochers and Oliver Ward, Aug. 26, 2026. Trump has threatened to raise tariffs on automobiles and parts to 50 percent if Canada and the U.S. can’t strike a deal by Jan. 1.

The auto industry would face an existential crisis if the U.S. and Canada don’t cool their trade war over the next four months. But the sector’s lobbyists are treading cautiously as they try to nudge the Trump administration back to the table.

The stakes are clear. Take Ford’s F-Series Super Duty truck, made in a new plant in Windsor, Ontario. Its transmission comes from Ohio. Its axles come from Michigan. Its engine comes from Ontario.

If the North American neighbors don’t resolve their differences by Jan. 1, President Donald Trump has pledged to hit the truck, its Canadian parts, and others like it with a 50 percent tariff when crossing the border, a result that would be “cataclysmic,” for the industry, according to one industry official who said companies would be forced to raise prices.

But as they wait for tempers to cool in Ottawa and Washington, carmakers are taking a soft touch approach to lobbying the Trump administration to abandon its trade war.

“We’re kind of regrouping,” said another auto industry official. “We just need to let both sides go back to their corners for a bit, and then figure out how to come back together.”

Both industry representatives were granted anonymity to describe private conversations.

The auto industry’s delicate approach highlights the rocky path for businesses caught in the crossfire of President Donald Trump’s trade agenda, particularly in the manufacturing sector, where the administration has been clear about its reshoring goals. The health of the industry is pivotal not just for the Trump administration’s economic message — where automaking is a potent symbol of the president’s promised industrial renaissance — but also the U.S. economy and the nearly 1 million people it employs.

Where U.S. companies in some industries like steel and aluminum are actively pushing for protectionist measures, the auto industry has long been wary of any tariffs that disrupt a highly-integrated North American supply chain.

“Reindustrialization is a real thing, and no one would argue that’s not a good thing for our countries,” said Glenn Stevens, the chief automotive and innovation officer at the Detroit Regional Chamber. “The issue really for us has been here in Michigan is we want that, and we’ve seen some of that, but we really don’t want that at the expense of a trading partner that we’ve been with for, in the auto industry, almost 125 years together.”

White House spokesperson Kush Desai said Trump’s economic agenda has “secured billions in manufacturing investments from foreign and domestic automakers alike.”

“As the President has made clear, Canada and other trading partners cannot keep freeriding off of the United States, and the Trump administration will continue to put Americans and America First,” Desai said.

The auto industry was among the first Trump targeted with tariffs when he began his second term, imposing a 25 percent across-the-board duty on autos and auto parts on national security grounds early in 2025. They were also one of the first industries to push back. The “Big Three” U.S. automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, which owns Jeep and Chrysler — were able to secure exemptions early in the process for automobiles and parts that were made in North America.

Those exemptions were critical, auto lobbyists argued, because parts and vehicles regularly move across borders between Canada, Mexico and the U.S., sometimes several times. Under the terms of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement and its Trump 1.0 replacement, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, most of that commerce was tariff-free. That integrated supply chain, auto companies have argued, has allowed North American cars to compete with overseas competitors, while also helping attract investments from major Asian manufacturers, from Toyota plants in Kentucky to Hyundai plants in Alabama.

But as Trump secured deals with other major auto manufacturing countries, like Korea and Japan, the North American auto industry soon found itself at a disadvantage, sometimes paying a higher tariff on vehicles than those that were built entirely in Asia and shipped across the Pacific.

The Trump administration was on the verge of a trade deal with Canada last week that could have lowered tariffs on Canadian automobiles to as low as 7 percent — a move that U.S. car companies were prepared to embrace, even as they continued to push for tariffs between the two countries to be eliminated outright. One of the industry officials called it a “welcome improvement” that would have removed what the industry sees as a competitive disadvantage vis-a-vis Asian manufacturers.

That came to a crushing halt Friday night when talks between Canada and the U.S. fell apart. Trump’s subsequent threat to raise tariffs on automobiles and auto parts to 50 percent on New Year’s Day added additional pressure. In the span of 72 hours, the industry went from cautiously optimistic to staring down what it described as an existential threat to North America’s competitiveness in the auto industry.

Even the group that would ostensibly benefit from a policy that brings more auto manufacturing back to the U.S. — the United Auto Workers Union — quickly panned the escalation.

“The UAW rejects any escalation on Canada, a country with strong unions and labor standards,” the union’s president, Shawn Fain, said in a statement. “If we’re going to increase tariffs anywhere, it should be on countries where automakers continue to offshore jobs because they can pay workers $3 an hour, force them to work in unsafe conditions, and crack down on independent unions.”Watch: The ConversationHow Jonathan Haidt turned the fight over kids and social media into a political movement45:47How Jonathan Haidt turned the fight over kids and social media into a political movement

Auto manufacturers view the trade relationship between Canada and the U.S. as balanced. That isn’t the case in the White House, where Trump has said the U.S. “doesn’t need” Canadian cars and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said he likes “cars made in America, built by Americans in America.”

The dynamic has become challenging for the auto manufacturers, particularly as they continue to repeat concerns about how the administration’s approach to trade is threatening the region’s competitive edge.

“I keep hearing that the Detroit automakers have really annoyed all of the governments, even the U.S. government, with all their asks over the last year-and-a-half,” one of the industry officials said. “I’m not saying that no one’s listening to them, but I think they’ve overstayed some of their welcome. And then there’s just a natural aversion to listening to the foreign companies,” even as foreign automakers have made substantial investments in U.S. plants, employing more than 100,000 American workers.

Any lobbying success may need to run through Lutnick, whose Commerce Department is in charge of the tariffs on the auto industry. While Lutnick helped auto companies secure exemptions to the tariffs in 2025, creating a rebate program depending on how much of the car is made from U.S. parts, he was also a key figure in securing trade deals with South Korea and Japan that lowered tariff rates in those countries to 15 percent.

“I think [the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office] does understand that North American auto trade is at a competitive disadvantage because of the agreements with Korea and Japan,” one of the industry officials said. “I’m not sure everybody in the administration accepts that.”

Fresh trade tensions between the U.S. and Canada could also muddy and prolong uncertainty for North American manufacturers, while leaving the future of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement in limbo.

“It’s difficult for either Canada or Mexico to negotiate on the specifics in USMCA until they know what the tariff rates are going to be on these 232s,” the second auto industry official said, referring to the U.S. tariffs on cars, trucks and metals.

U.S. Markets, Economy, Inflation, Jobs

New York Times, Nvidia’s Profit Doubles to $59.69 Billion Thanks to A.I. Spending, Kalley Huang, Aug. 27, 2026 (print ed.). Quarterly revenue also more than doubled, to $96.22 billion, the company said, topping expectations on Wall Street.

Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence spending spree may have unsettled Wall Street, but the chipmaker Nvidia is still cashing in on sales to the biggest technology companies.

Nvidia’s profit for the quarter that ended in July more than doubled from a year earlier to $59.69 billion, the company said on Wednesday. Revenue also more than doubled, to $96.22 billion. Just three years ago, Nvidia’s quarterly profit was $6.2 billion.

“A.I. has reached its inflection point,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said in a statement.

In an indication that the A.I. boom still has plenty of momentum, Nvidia told investors that its projected revenue in the current quarter would increase 90 percent from a year ago to $108 billion. The company expects to grow about 70 percent next year, even though it is “supply-constrained,” Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, said during a call with analysts and investors..

Nvidia’s chips are the centerpiece of giant A.I. data centers, and demand for those chips has become a barometer of the A.I. boom. Other technology companies have been buying tens of billions of dollars’ worth of those chips, making Nvidia the most valuable public company in the world, with a market capitalization of about $5 trillion.

More Global Art, Culture News 

Robert Mapplethorpe’s photograph of Roy Cohn, from 1981. The scarred face of Roy M. Cohn, the notorious New York City lawyer, fixer and master of the political dark arts, an attorney for Donald Trump and a close companion of the future president, floating bodiless in a pool of black, his hooded eyes staring directly back at the viewer.

New York Times, Roy Cohn, Robert Mapplethorpe and a Trump-Era Dilemma Over Free Speech, Michael M. Grynbaum, Aug. 27, 2026. When a respected biographer tried to use a Mapplethorpe photograph of Roy Cohn for a book cover, worries about the wrath of Mr. Cohn’s protégé, President Trump, intervened.

It is an arresting, menacing image:

The photograph, taken by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1981, is an unforgettable depiction of its subject, and the celebrated author Kai Bird thought it would make the perfect cover art for his new biography of Mr. Cohn, “American Scoundrel,” which will be released by Scribner next week.

That the picture never ended up on the book’s cover is a matter of regret to Mr. Bird — and a small but telling illustration of the anxiety that has taken root in the nonprofit world because of Mr. Cohn’s most famed protégé, an ambitious real estate developer now serving his second term as president.

President Trump loomed large in the decision by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, which administers the artist’s estate and catalog, to decline the request to license the photograph, according to three people familiar with its deliberations.

Mr. Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989, is widely remembered for fighting censorship. In this case, the foundation’s board feared that Mr. Trump could retaliate, perhaps by threatening its nonprofit tax status, if the president — who has used the levers of government to pressure universities, law firms and TV networks — were to take offense, the people said.

As a charitable organization, the Mapplethorpe Foundation is legally prohibited from engaging in certain political activities. Mr. Bird’s book is subtitled “Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump,” and the board was concerned that the photo’s inclusion could be construed as a kind of political act, the people said.

It would not be the first time that a cultural organization has been alarmed by the president’s hardball tactics — some of which he honed under Mr. Cohn, who prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and aided Senator Joseph McCarthy in his witch hunt for communists.

Mr. Trump has demanded changes at the Smithsonian and taken control of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He has threatened to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status. Nonprofit groups, like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Democratic fund-raising platform ActBlue, have been investigated by his Justice Department.

Mr. Bird, whose 2005 biography of Robert Oppenheimer, “American Prometheus,” was adapted into the Oscar-winning Christopher Nolan film, said in an interview that he was “thunderstruck” and “outraged” when he learned that the Mapplethorpe Foundation had declined to license the portrait. “It’s astonishing that these people are being so cowed, so easily,” he said.

In his biography of Mr. Cohn, Mr. Bird writes that the foundation’s decision was “yet another example of Roy’s ghost haunting us from the grave.”

The Mapplethorpe Foundation declined to comment on Mr. Bird’s criticisms.

Mr. Mapplethorpe started the foundation shortly before his death “to protect his work, to advance his creative vision and to promote the causes he cared about,” according to the foundation’s website.

His photography, which explicitly depicted the sexual lives of gay men, was the subject of several well-publicized battles over free expression, notably when Jesse Helms, the conservative North Carolina senator, objected in 1989 to the use of federal funds for exhibits of his work.

When the matter of Mr. Bird’s biography arose last year, the artist’s foundation made a different calculus. Its board determined that any kind of government retaliation could drain its financial resources, creating an existential risk for the organization, according to the people familiar with the board’s decision-making. And while the biography may have brought attention to Mr. Mapplethorpe’s work, the photo would ultimately be in service of one author’s commercial endeavor.

New York Times, Yayoi Kusama, Pop Artist Who Expanded and Endured, Dies at 97, Holland Cotter, Updated Aug. 27, 2026. The Japanese artist’s polka-dot-covered paintings, phallic sculptures and public performances caused a stir in New York City and Europe in the 1960s.

Yayoi Kusama, a Japanese artist whose polka-dot-covered paintings, phallic sculptures and public performances caused a stir in New York City and Europe in the 1960s, and whose mirrored “Infinity Room” installations became selfie sensations and blockbuster museum and gallery attractions in recent decades, has died. She was 97.

Ms. Kusama first gained attention in the late 1950s and early 1960s with her immense abstract paintings that she called “Infinity Nets.” These were composed of countless small, curving strokes of white paint on all-white or all-black surfaces, suggesting giant, swirling meshes pierced with pinprick holes.

Aug. 26

Top Headlines

Donald Trump greets Chief Justice John Roberts as he arrives to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress.Donald Trump greets Chief Justice John Roberts as he arrives to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress (Win McNamee photo via Getty Images).

• The New Republic, Analysis: The Supreme Court Joins Trump’s Insidious War on Voting Rights, Matt Ford, Aug. 26, 2026. The high court’s shadow-docket decision isn’t the final word on mail-in ballots, but it reveals the conservative bloc’s comfort with the administration’s voter suppression schemes.

As indicated by the above collage collected by a critic of President Trump, the president last fall posted a video portraying himself as a military pilot dumping sewage on the population of New York City, America's largest city, with his press secretary insulting a reporter who questioned the president's message.

• New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Judge Allows U.S.P.S. Move to Restrict Mail Voting as States Mount New Challenge, Zach Montague, Aug. 26, 2026. Mail-In Voting: With the general election just over two months away, the U.S. Postal Service can move forward with rules to restrict mail-in voting, a federal judge said Wednesday. The judge cited a Supreme Court ruling this week that it was too soon for opponents of the changes to challenge them. But in a new suit filed Wednesday, more than 20 states said recent actions by the U.S.P.S. were enough for courts to consider the legality of the administration’s efforts. Read more ›
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Der Untergang, Paul Krugman, right, Aug. 26, 2026. How badly will Trump punish America? What I don’t think people are fully aware of is just how bad it can get, given that Trump is so obviously dissociating, decompensating, that he’s not all there.

Note: After I recorded this it was reported that Trump officials are threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center if it can’t be renovated to Trump’s taste (and presumably with his name added). Matches my argument exactly.

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump Is Weaker Than Ever, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Aug. 26, 2026. And therefore more dangerous.

News Roundups 

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Trump Blasts his Own Party as Canada Trade War Accelerates, Beef Import Plan Fails, and Approvals Sink ahead of the Midterms, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 26, 2026. Today's rundown is a big one, and it centers on a president who seems to be losing patience with his own party. Trump spent Wednesday afternoon firing off a wave of Truth Social posts, including one warning that the GOP doesn't "fully grasp how badly they are f---ing up," and it's not hard to see why he's rattled. His trade war with Canada just escalated into matching retaliatory tariffs, his new beef import plan has drawn public criticism from his own senators and ranchers who feel thrown under the bus, and his approval rating is stuck near record lows heading into the midterms.
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Important Tuesday Night News Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 26, 2026. White House in Turmoil as Trump Faces Attacks on Multiple Fronts, It’s CHAOS!!!! 

U.S. Military, National Security, Foreign Affairs

• The New Republic, Analysis: Hegseth’s Army Purges Have Undermined Military Leadership on Iran, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, Aug. 25, 2026. The extent to which Trump’s “Secretary of War” has damaged the United States’ military capability is even worse than previously thought.
• The New Republic, Analysis: Did Hegseth Really Fire the Army’s Top Officer Over Kid Rock? Malcolm Ferguson, Aug. 26, 2026.  The Army has been left without a chief of staff for months thanks to Hegseth.

More On US. Governance 

• The Hartmann Report, Opinion: RFK Jr. Gets Busted as America’s Vaccine Defenses Collapse, Thom Hartmann, right, Aug. 26, 2026. Covid is surging, measles is killing again, and the man running America’s health system spent years attacking the very vaccines that could save lives....
• The Daily with Sarah Jones via  PoliticusUSA, Trump’s Mail In Ballots Executive Could Be Blocked Again As Soon As Tomorrow  , Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, Aug 26, 2026. 23 state attorneys general have filed a new motion seeking to block Trump’s mail-in ballots executive order, and the injunction could be granted as soon as tomorrow afternoon.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: What Is Going on with Vote By Mail? Ben Sheehan, Aug 26, 2026. Civics expert Ben Sheehan explains the latest after SCOTUS’s confusing ruling on Trump’s executive order earlier this week. 
• Politico, Trump signs controversial beef import plan despite ranchers' backlash, Grace Yarrow, Aug 26, 2026. A slew of Republican lawmakers and beef industry allies have come out against President Donald Trump's plans that aim to lower the cost of ground beef.President Donald Trump speaks.

More On U.S. Trade War With Canada

• The New Republic, Analysis: How Trump’s Crazed Fury at Canada Is Already Backfiring Badly for Him, Greg Sargent, right, Aug. 25, 2026. The escalating trade war with Canada will hit hard in the Midwest—right where some of the most important contests in the midterms will be decided.
• Public Notice, Trump shitposts fail to win support for Canadian trade war, Liz Dye, Aug. 26, 2026. Elbows up! Donald Trump spent the past week cozying up to North Korea and attacking Canada. Whatever claim the US had to be a beacon of free trade — not to mention moral leadership — has been demolished like the East Wing of the White House.
• Hope for America, Opinion: Only the good die young,  Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 26, 2026. At 6:58 this morning, just as the sun was rising over Washington, D.C., Donald Trump was already wide awake inside the White House, posting on social media about renaming lakes to provoke and harass one of our closest allies. “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing [sic] much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice  

Jeffrey Epstein's fellow sex trafficker and teen rapist Ghislaine Maxwell, left, is shown attending a social gathering with her friends Donald Trump and the onetime model and party girl Melania Knauss, the future First Lady Trump.

• All Rise News, Tonight in Your Rights: Maxwell’s ‘frivolous’ challenge fails, Adam Klasfeld, right, Aug. 25, 2026. Far from spilling the beans on “25 men,” Maxwell refused to concede Epstein’s guilt, a judge noted. Also: Trump threatens the Kennedy Center. Ghislaine Maxwell’s attempt to overturn her sex trafficking convictions failed again on Tuesday, as a federal judge rejected her “meritless” and “frivolous” claims that new evidence from the Epstein Files Transparency Act exonerates her.
• The New Republic, Meta Caves With $17 Billion Settlement in Social Media Addiction Case, Aug. 26, 2026. Meta has agreed to a massive settlement in a lawsuit over how it intentionally designed Instagram and Facebook to addict children.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

• Hope for America, Opinion: Trump’s Rose Garden rambling, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 25, 2026. At 2:37 in the afternoon, a visibly frail President of the United States made his way slowly to the Rose Garden podium for a back-to-school event. But before he said a single word about education, he talked about the $400 million ballroom he is building to impress China’s President Xi.
• MSNOW, News and Comment: Trump Organization’s overseas projects proliferate amid conflict-of-interest concerns, Soorin Kim, Aug. 26, 2026. Unlike Donald Trump’s first term, the Trump family businesses are making millions for the president with new development and licensing deals. Trump adds at least $2 billion in personal profits during second term.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Desperate Men Do Desperate Things, William Kristol, right, Aug. 26, 2026. I regret to report that Donald Trump notched a couple of wins last night. He helped pull Sen. Darline Graham across the finish line in the runoff for the Republican Senate nomination in South Carolina, as she defeated Rep. Ralph Norman 52 to 48 percent. And the candidate Trump endorsed in the GOP runoff for governor of Oklahoma, Mike Mazzei, edged out state Attorney General Gentner Drummond for that nomination by half a point.
• New York Times, News Analysis: Even as Trump’s Standing Slips, He Slingshots a Political Novice to Victory, Emily Davies and Tim Balk, Aug. 26, 2026. After facing low approval ratings and endorsement setbacks, the president made a show of force in lifting Darline Graham to the Republican nomination for Senate in South Carolina.
• The New Republic, GOP Voters Boo Trump After Lindsey Graham’s Sister Wins Runoff, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, Aug. 26, 2026. Supporters of the defeated Ralph Norman were left chafing after the president—and a mountain of outside money—took their preferred candidate down.
• The  Hill, Analysis On U.S. Congress Midterm Rating Changes: Seven more House races shift toward Democrats, Nathan L. Gonzales, Aug. 26, 2026. Minority party maintains advantage in fight for the majority. With two months to go before Election Day, Democrats continue to have the advantage in the fight for the House as Inside Elections shifts its race rating of seven more districts in the party’s favor.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Jeffries Never Should Have Met With Kushner, Jennifer Rubin, right, Aug. 26, 2026. Wrong person, wrong premise — eventually the right tone. 
• New York Times, In Headache for Republicans, Second Dan Sullivan Advances in Alaska Senate Race, Tim Balk, Aug. 26, 2026. A long-shot candidate with the same name as the incumbent Republican senator will be on the ballot in November. That could be a problem for the G.O.P.

U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets

• New York Times, Bessent Faces Credibility Test in Quest to Tame Markets, Alan Rappeport, Aug. 26, 2026. The Treasury secretary is confronting the limits of his ability to reshape the economy ahead of midterm elections.
• New York Times, ‘Honeymoon’s Over’: Warsh Under Pressure as Fed Weighs Raising Rates, Colby Smith,.Aug. 26, 2026. Kevin M. Warsh is scheduled to deliver his first address at the Federal Reserve’s annual conference in Jackson, Wyo., with U.S. government bond markets on edge and inflation risks resurfacing.

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, U.S. ‘Economic D-Day’ Targets More Than Just Iranian Oil, Zane Irwin, Aug. 26, 2026 (print ed.). The United States threatened sanctions for any country or entity that engages with Iran’s gold, digital assets, aviation, shipping and tech industries. Here’s why that matters.

More  World News, Global Human Rights, Disasters

• New York Times, Live Updates: Hundreds Missing as Wall of Water Sweeps Away Villages in Nepal and Tibet, Binod Ghimire, Leo Sands and Lily Kuo, Aug 26, 2026. At least 160 people were killed when floods tore through a Himalayan river valley between Nepal and the Tibet region of China, the authorities said. Hundreds were missing, including foreign tourists.
• New York Times, Ukraine’s Most Potent Weapon: The Software Orchestrating Its Drone Army, Constant Méheut and Olha Konovalova, Aug. 26, 2026. The Delta system pulls together battlefield data to identify targets, creating a miles-wide “kill zone.” The technology is credited with helping to cut Russian advances to a near standstill.

U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion  

• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Did Mamdani “doxx” wealthy New Yorkers? Judd Legum, right, Aug. 26, 2026. “PIED-A-TERROR,” the New York Post cover blared on July 28. The paper claimed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani put “people in danger by posting a ‘rich to be taxed’ list publicly.” 
• The New Republic, Right Now Podcast Opinion: Why Professors Got Behind Abdul El-Sayed, Perry Bacon, Aug. 25, 2026. AAUP president Todd Wolfson says that endorsing El-Sayed and other candidates is part of defending both higher education and democracy.

Aug. 26

Top Headlines

Donald Trump greets Chief Justice John Roberts as he arrives to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress.Donald Trump greets Chief Justice John Roberts as he arrives to deliver an address to a joint session of Congress (Win McNamee photo viaGetty Images).

The New Republic, Analysis: The Supreme Court Joins Trump’s Insidious War on Voting Rights, Matt Ford, Aug. 26, 2026. The high court’s shadow-docket decision isn’t the final word on mail-in ballots, but it reveals the conservative bloc’s comfort with the administration’s voter suppression schemes.

The Supreme Court lifted a lower court’s stay of President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to commandeer state vote-by-mail systems in a 6-3 vote on Monday night. Its explanation for the decision began with a lie. “About five months ago, President Trump issued an Executive Order designed to maintain public confidence in federal elections,” the court claimed in an unsigned order.

In reality, Trump has no interest in maintaining public confidence in federal elections. He has spent the last 14 years publicly undermining confidence in election results, even in ones that he won. His executive order was intended to sow discord in and seize control of state election processes ahead of the midterms, where his party is preparing to lose one or both chambers of Congress.

Monday’s order in Trump v. California does not give Trump a full green light to pursue his plans. A separate lower-court injunction in League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump remains in effect for now. The Supreme Court’s order also left room for the states to renew their challenge to a key part of the executive order at a later date.

At the same time, the court’s framing of the dispute in Monday’s order inspires little confidence that it will protect state vote-by-mail processes from Trump’s attacks. It gives extraordinary deference to the executive branch while ignoring the systemic threat that Trump’s efforts represent to the midterm elections. That does not bode well for future litigation against the executive order.

“For its part, the court has opted to take a blinders-on approach to evaluating the merits of the government’s arguments about the order’s directives, present impact, and anticipated effects, despite this court’s admonition that courts ‘are not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free,’” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion, quoting from a 2019 ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan also dissented separately.

This case springs from the president’s opposition to American democracy. Trump has treated any presidential election result that he dislikes as illegitimate for the last 14 years. Since 2020, he has been obsessed with promoting the phantasmal threat of significant fraud from mail-in ballots, despite uncovering no evidence that it exists or has played a role in any U.S. presidential election. (And despite the fact that he casts his own vote by mail.)

After news outlets called the 2012 election for Barack Obama on Election Night, Trump posted on Twitter that the result was illegitimate. “This election is a total sham and a travesty,” he wrote in a since-deleted post. “We are not a democracy!” Other tweets complained that “more votes equals a loss” and called for “revolution!” Finally, he called on Americans to “march on Washington and stop this travesty,” foreshadowing his own coup attempt eight years later.

In 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by narrowing winning key battleground states to secure a majority of electoral votes. Clinton, however, secured a majority of the popular vote by a margin of three million ballots. Trump had suggested ahead of Election Day that voter fraud might be his undoing before his surprise victory. When the size of Clinton’s popular-vote margin became apparent, he brought it up again. “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” he lied.

Trump’s plan to retain the White House in 2020 centered on a convoluted and half-baked scheme to dispute the results in key states, create fraudulent slates of electors, and eventually have then-Vice President Mike Pence discard the legitimate ones during a joint session of Congress. Trump hoped to claim an early victory on Election Night when the states showed him ahead and then challenge subsequent ballot counts as illegitimate. This plot fell apart after Fox News’s election analysts swiftly called Arizona for Joe Biden on Election Night. Courts rejected Trump’s subsequent lawsuits, Pence declined to carry out the plot on January 6, and a mob summoned by Trump to D.C. attacked the Capitol later that day.

In 2024, Trump again planned to use legal challenges and other procedural tactics to undermine public confidence in the election results if he lost. Those plans never came to fruition because Trump won a majority of electoral votes and the popular vote on Election Night. Faced with this indisputable proof of the American election system’s integrity—if the results were rigged in 2020, why not do it again in 2024?—Trump nevertheless pursued his plot to attack mail-in voting earlier this year ahead of the midterms.

This time, he hopes to wield the machinery of the federal government against state election officials. Trump’s executive order in March had three interlocking parts. One requires the Department of Homeland Security to create “state citizenship lists” of voting-age U.S. citizens for distribution to state election officials. Another provision instructs the Department of Justice to “take all lawful steps to deter and address noncompliance with federal law,” including by prosecuting state and local election officials and withholding federal funds from states.

Taken together, those two provisions strongly imply that state and local officials who do not use the “state citizenship lists” will be prosecuted by the Justice Department. Finally, the order also directs the United States Postal Service to, among other things, not transmit mail-in ballots from states that don’t submit their own voter registration lists to the agency. It would require states to conform their own ballot tracking procedures to federal control.

This amounts to an unprecedented attempt to bring American elections at least partly under direct presidential control. The Constitution gives no role whatsoever to the president in the running of federal elections. Article One reserves that power to the states, which actually run elections, and to Congress, which can legislate rules about the “time, place, and manner” of federal elections. The vice president has a purely ministerial role in presiding over the joint session of Congress that counts votes from the Electoral College every four years.

To that end, a coalition of states led by California sued earlier this year to block the executive order from taking effect, describing it as an unconstitutional attack on how they run their elections. A federal district court judge in Massachusetts agreed and enjoined the executive branch from carrying out the three aforementioned provisions.

In explaining its decision, the conservative majority described the March executive order as generically as it possibly could. “The order is an internal directive from the President to his subordinates mandating that certain agencies pursue certain policies,” it claimed in Monday’s order. “It neither requires nor forbids anything of anyone outside the executive branch.” From there, they adopted a backbreakingly deferential reading of the executive order’s text in favor of the White House.

On the state citizenship lists, the court said the order’s provision “is an internal directive from the president to a subordinate” that “imposes no concrete harm on the states.” Therefore, the court said, the states had no standing to challenge it. The same is true in the majority’s eyes for the prosecution directive. “Setting prosecutorial priorities lies within the president’s Article II power,” they noted, arguing that the investigation and prosecution is based on “existing federal laws.”

If this was all that the executive order contained, perhaps that reluctance to enjoin the executive branch might be understandable. The courts could still intervene when the Justice Department brought subpoenas or indictments down the road. But the court also rejected—only for now, as I’ll explain later—the states’ challenge to the USPS rulemaking process.

Part of the justices’ reasoning was that the lower court’s stay was premature because the Postal Service hadn’t yet released a rule to comply with the order. That rendered the states’ claims hypothetical in its view. “[The district court] first had to speculate about whether the Postal Service would propose a rule,” the majority wrote. “Then it had to speculate about how the agency would weigh the comments it received. Then it had to speculate about whether the agency would issue a final rule. Then it had to speculate about what the final rule would say. Finally, after all that, the district court still had to speculate about whether the text of a hypothetical final rule would harm the states.”

One small flaw in this reasoning is that the district court’s speculation was correct. The Postal Service announced its final rule on Friday, three days before the Supreme Court’s order to lift the stay was issued. (The Justice Department said the agency would take no action on the rule until the court issued a decision on its legality.) As expected, it set out regulations that would allow it to not deliver mail ballots in states that refuse to cooperate with the Trump administration’s “requests” for state voter data.

If the USPS rule goes into effect, it could upend the midterm elections altogether. Many states allow mail voting; some, such as Oregon, rely on it entirely. The USPS rule imposes specific requirements for state mail-voting envelopes that those states could not have known about until recently. Allowing Trump’s executive order to stand for the midterms opens the door to widespread confusion among election officials and the possibility that millions of Americans will be disenfranchised by an illegal presidential act.

Whoops! Not to worry, the majority said in Monday’s order, because it had to evaluate the states’ standing claims at the time that they filed the lawsuit. It was hardly speculative that Trump and his subordinates were trying to engineer a very specific outcome here. An executive order is hardly a suggestion, and Trump’s public comments made his priorities clear. If you thought otherwise, you were intruding on the president’s constitutional prerogative to issue constitutionally dubious orders to his subordinates.

Instead, Monday’s order leaned heavily on deference to the “internal operations of the executive branch” when weighing the irreparable-harm standard for shadow-docket relief. “Because reversal of the district court’s judgment would come too late for the 2026 midterms, the district court’s errors deal ‘a serious setback’ to the executive’s ‘goals’ while this litigation unfolds,” the majority claimed, quoting from earlier rulings. “When a federal court ‘improperly intrudes on a coordinate branch’ in this way, interim relief is justified.”

The dissenting justices found this argument absurd. They noted, as I already have, that the Constitution allocates the power to run federal elections to the states. “The majority says it was speculative to think there would be a final rule at all when this suit was filed, seemingly accepting the government’s representation that it may not actually implement the executive order,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which Kagan joined. “Yet even as the government represents that it may not implement the executive order at all for purposes of defeating standing, it insists that it seeks to implement the executive order immediately for purposes of establishing irreparable harm. The government cannot have it both ways.”

Thanks to the six conservative justices, apparently it can. The problem is not so much what Monday’s ruling did—though that was deeply flawed as well—but how the court reached its decision and how it appeared to process the situation at hand. The majority could have hardly done more to express sympathy with Trump’s order and its goals. At every turn it treats the Trump administration’s goals as legitimate and defensible; the states’ interests are deemed abstract, hypothetical, groundless, intrusive, or premature.

“What makes today’s ruling so off-base is the [majority’s] lack of situational awareness regarding this equitable judgment,” Jackson explained. “It treats the government’s stay application as if the whole point is merely to demonstrate that the plaintiff states’ claims are not justiciable. Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.”

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Judge Allows U.S.P.S. Move to Restrict Mail Voting as States Mount New Challenge, Zach Montague, Aug. 26, 2026. Mail-In Voting: With the general election just over two months away, the U.S. Postal Service can move forward with rules to restrict mail-in voting, a federal judge said Wednesday. The judge cited a Supreme Court ruling this week that it was too soon for opponents of the changes to challenge them. But in a new suit filed Wednesday, more than 20 states said recent actions by the U.S.P.S. were enough for courts to consider the legality of the administration’s efforts. Read more ›

• Saudi Deal: The Trump administration has presented to Congress a nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia that could lead to the kingdom enriching its own reactor fuel, according to two officials with firsthand knowledge of the submission. The proposal has revived concerns about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Read more ›
• Immigration Crackdown: A Navy sailor aboard the beleaguered aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln said his father was released by immigration enforcement agents in the United States on Tuesday. Read more ›

The Postal Service can for now move ahead with plans to restrict mail-in voting ahead of the midterm elections in November, after a federal judge on Wednesday lifted an order that had blocked it from carrying out Trump administration efforts.

The judge, Indira Talwani of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts, wrote that she felt compelled to act in response to a ruling from the Supreme Court on Monday that action by the courts was premature.

The Trump administration has submitted to Congress a nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia that could allow the kingdom to enrich its own fuel for nuclear reactors, according to two officials with firsthand knowledge of the transmission of the agreement.

The accord, announced by the White House last month, would deepen ties between the United States and Saudi Arabia at a moment when the war with Iran has strained the relationship between the two countries. The 30-year agreement would give U.S. companies a central role in developing Saudi Arabia’s civilian nuclear infrastructure while largely shutting out foreign competitors.

More Administration News

Luis Manuel Aviles, left, and Joshua Aviles, in a handout family photo.Credit...Katherine Delgado, via Associated Press

A Navy sailor aboard the beleaguered aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln said his father was released by immigration enforcement agents in the United States on Tuesday, several days after his detention at a traffic stop as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants.

Luis Manuel Aviles, 48, was arrested by Border Patrol agents on Saturday in Key West, Fla., as his son, Joshua Aviles, was returning to the United States after a nine-month deployment to the Middle East in support of the war with Iran. Amid reports of poor conditions aboard the carrier, it began its journey home to San Diego last week, a voyage of about 13,000 miles.

Trump’s new tariffs on Canada raise familiar legal risks

To impose punishing tariffs around the world, President Trump has repeatedly turned to a series of decades-old, never-before-used trade powers, only to be slapped down by federal courts for overstepping the law.

But those past defeats have hardly deterred the president, who reprised that exact strategy this week to commence his new trade war against Canada — risking yet another round of costly legal wrangling for the White House.

As indicated by the above collage collected by a critic of President Trump, the president last fall posted a video portraying himself as a military pilot dumping sewage on the population of New York City, America's largest city, with his press secretary insulting a reporter who questioned the president's message.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Der Untergang, Paul Krugman, right, Aug. 26, 2026. How badly will Trump punish America?

Der Untergang naht.

Pardon my German pronunciation. I’m going to take a break today from wonky economic analysis and talk about, well, Donald Trump, but in a slightly different way from what I think most people are saying. Not positive, obviously.

Just before recording this, I saw that Trump wants to rename Lake Ontario Lake America. Which is silly, would be funny, except that this guy is the President of the United States. And it’s really kind of troublesome that someone in that position is that out of it, that petty, disconnected from reality.

And look, it’s not news to anybody that Trump is ego-driven, disconnected from reality, and at the same time, somehow commands a level of deference and obedience from the entire machinery of the federal government that no president has ever had before. So this is really quite serious.

What I don’t think people are fully aware of is just how bad it can get, given that Trump is so obviously dissociating, decompensating, that he’s not all there.

Obviously, he was already a very problematic personality, which was doing a great deal of damage to the United States. I don’t think even now people fully appreciate the amount of damage that has been done. Even before the Iran War, Trump’s provocations, insults, his trade wars, really destroyed the world’s trust in America.

America became a country that could not be trusted to honor agreements. It was a country that constantly tried to bully other countries. Our word was worth nothing. Our sanity was not to be taken for granted. And then, of course, along comes Iran, where in addition to showing that we’re not to be trusted, that we’re not going to be relied upon., we also showed that we were far weaker than people imagined.

If there’s one thing people thought it was, well, America has a powerful military. It turns out, well, not as powerful and not nearly as competent as people thought. How much of that is the result of Trump and Hegseth degrading it and how much of it was there to begin with is an interesting question. But anyway, at this point, we are not loved, we are not respected, and we aren’t even feared.

And we’re not getting that back. Even if Trump is succeeded by someone decent —God help us if he isn’t— but even if we have a more or less rational, well-intentioned government that follows, the world now knows that we are capable of putting someone like Trump in a position of unprecedented, almost absolute power and that it can happen again.

And the world also knows that we’re just not as fearsome as we seem to be. That we can be defied much more successfully even by smallish countries than anyone really imagined.

And we’re not getting that back. I anxiously wait for the days when we’re no longer a Trump-ruled country, but this is my country, and what will be left of us, what will be left of our role in the world, even once he’s gone?

Okay, the title I gave, the way that I opened this talk was Der Untergang, which is the German title of the movie Downfall, about the last days of Adolf Hitler. I hope that nobody is going to complain about my using the German, right? We’re long past the point where it’s considered unthinkable and incredibly rude to make Nazi parallels. There’s a lot of people in this administration or close to this administration who are effectively Nazis, in some cases explicitly Nazis. America is not yet Germany under Hitler. But the reason we don’t have a functioning Gestapo in this country is not for lack of desire to have one. It’s because these people, at least so far, don’t have the juice. So all of the stuff, all of the parallels seem appropriate.

And the parallels are there. I mean, the parallels are there even in seemingly small things. Hitler was obsessed with building a gigantic gaudy ballroom. So there’s just a lot of parallels in there.

Now the main message of the movie Der Untergang is that it’s about Hitler in his final days who knew that he was losing. He knew that defeat was looming. He knew that his power was collapsing. And his reaction was, among other things, to take it out on his own country.

Hitler never accepted that he had failed Germany. He felt that Germany had failed him. And so he had a plan, often called the Nero Decree, which was to destroy as much as possible of Germany’s infrastructure. Supposedly to deny it to the victorious allies, but in large part to punish Germany.

Well, Trump knows. He may deny it, he may have his moments when he actually believes that the polls are all fake and all of that, but in many ways he is behaving like somebody who knows that his days of supreme power are about to end. He, of course, is not going to accept that it’s his fault. It’s the fault, obviously, of the Democrats, who are all communists. It’s the fault of the Republicans, who didn’t live up to his leadership. The fault of everybody but him.

What does he do in the position of losing? Probably not committing suicide in the Fuhrerbunker, but still in the position of losing all of his power. Well, what you do in that position, if you are somebody like Trump, who is an empty vessel: there’s nothing in there, the only pleasure he appears to take in life comes from dominating other people.

Well, one thing you do is you try to stick your name everywhere, or leave your imprint everywhere. So Trump, according to reporting by Swan and Haberman, spends most of his time thinking about his construction projects and trying to leave his mark on everything in Washington.

What I don’t think we’re fully appreciating even about those projects is that there isn’t a whole lot of actual construction. There’s a lot of starting of stuff, but so far it’s been mostly destruction, mostly tearing stuff down. We don’t have a triumphal arch, but we have a hole where the ballroom is supposed to be. We have just a lot of damage having been done to our nation’s capital and to the iconic structures that were supposed to define, symbolize who we are as a country. The scale of the destruction is really quite amazing.

So I’m not going to try fancy video editing here. I’m just going to show you a picture of what the environs of the White House look like right now. There you go. That bare area is the South Lawn, ripped up because of Trump’s cage match. You can see in the corner there the hole in the ground, which is where the east wing of the White House used to be. Basically, Trump has left, so far, wreckage in his wake.

Even the things which have not involved tearing stuff down, the gilding of statues, the horrific redecoration of the White House, is surpassingly ugly. That’s partly because Trump has terrible taste, but it’s also, I think, a clear sign of aggression. He’s saying, oh yeah, you’re going to give me a 33% approval rating? Well, I’m going to make the nation’s capital as ugly as I can in this little time as I possibly can.

Now, this is all superficial. This is stuff that can and will be repaired. It’ll cost a lot of money, but OK. So we’ll rebuild the White House. We’ll reseed the South Lawn. We’ll strip the gilding off the statues. We’ll make the White House a dignified place again.

But how much more will be coming? When we talk about Hitler’s last days, as I said, one of his last attempted acts was what’s called the Nero Decree, which was an attempt to destroy as much of Germany’s infrastructure as possible, supposedly to deny it to the victorious allies. But clearly, and even there’s some evidence that he actually he clearly thought this as a way of punishing the German people for failing him.

Now, historiography is a little more complicated than that, as it usually is, but that’s clearly the gist of it. That Hitler’s final acts were to basically try to bring everyone else down with him.

Do you really want to say that that’s not what’s going to happen with Trump? Assuming that he loses much, if not all, of his power to shape events this November, and of course we’re all worried about how he may try to disrupt or overturn the election, but assuming he doesn’t manage to do that, he will find himself much diminished. How much damage will he do basically taking revenge on America?

Because always you want to bear in mind that Trump hates America. He hates the values on which America was built. He hates democracy. He hates rule of law. He hates all of the things that are what we’re supposed to be about as a nation.

But increasingly it looks as if he just plain hates this country because it doesn’t love him. How much damage will he do? How much damage can he do? I don’t want to make a specific prediction, but I’m worried.

And don’t say that he won’t do that or he can’t do that. Those have been famous last words again and again over the past decade. So this is going to be even worse, even uglier, I think than most people imagine.

Note: After I recorded this it was reported that Trump officials are threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center if it can’t be renovated to Trump’s taste (and presumably with his name added). Matches my argument exactly.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump Is Weaker Than Ever, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Aug. 26, 2026.And therefore more dangerous.

If you’ve come for deep reflections on Dolly Parton’s musical career, may we politely suggest reading Jill Lawrence’s remembrance on the site today. As for us Morning Shots denizens, our forte is the value of liberalism and the importance of strong civic virtues. And on these fronts, we feel more than comfortable reflecting on Parton. Because, frankly, there were few like her. She was universally beloved in an era where we’re encouraged to hate. She was loved by country music fans and drag queens alike. Who still alive can bridge those divides?

The Bulwark is home to a number of parents of young (and not so young) kids. Like so many others, we benefited from Dolly Parton’s imagination library—a book gifting program that sent hundreds of millions of books to kids across the country. It was a simple, profoundly generous act. Elected officials spend their careers in the business of improving people’s lives and do far less. Our modern-day elites devote their fortunes to rockets for themselves. We need more Dolly Partons in our lives these days, which is why it was so painful to hear that the one we had passed away. Happy Wednesday.

News Roundups 

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Trump Blasts his Own Party as Canada Trade War Accelerates, Beef Import Plan Fails, and Approvals Sink ahead of the Midterms, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 26, 2026. Today's rundown is a big one, and it centers on a president who seems to be losing patience with his own party. Trump spent Wednesday afternoon firing off a wave of Truth Social posts, including one warning that the GOP doesn't "fully grasp how badly they are f---ing up," and it's not hard to see why he's rattled. His trade war with Canada just escalated into matching retaliatory tariffs, his new beef import plan has drawn public criticism from his own senators and ranchers who feel thrown under the bus, and his approval rating is stuck near record lows heading into the midterms.

Meanwhile, a disturbing Washington Post report ties the ouster of the Army's top general directly to his refusal to bury an investigation into a Kid Rock flyby, a Navy captain accused of rape is facing nothing more than a workers' comp claim, and Nepal is reeling from a flash flood that has killed at least 95 people with hundreds still missing.

I am working on some big projects coming soon and will never stop. Not now. Not ever. 

Here’s the news:

Trump blasts his own party:

Trump spent Wednesday afternoon posting a flurry of Truth Social messages, including a repost of a July message from right-wing commentator Matt Van Swol warning that “I don’t think the GOP fully grasp how badly they are f---ing up right now” and that the party is “sleepwalking toward a midterm reckoning they don’t see coming,” citing unmet priorities like the voter ID law Trump has pushed. The rant ranged widely beyond politics, touching on the newly renamed “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” White House ballroom construction photos, lists of his own accomplishments, favorable coverage of his administration, and pictures with his parents alongside comparisons of himself to former Presidents Obama and Biden. He also took a swing at the National Baseball Hall of Fame committee for keeping pitcher Roger Clemens out, calling the voters “a bunch of jealous people with far less Talent.” In a separate post, he said Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, who lost Tuesday’s GOP runoff to Trump-backed Sen. Darline Graham, “ruined his career when he endorsed Nikki Haley.”

The social media outburst comes as Trump faces real friction within his own party over recent trade decisions. Over the weekend he let a 50 percent tariff take effect on about $20 billion in Canadian goods, prompting Canada to retaliate with matching tariffs, while his separate move last week to ease restrictions on beef imports has also drawn GOP criticism from lawmakers in border and agriculture-heavy states. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina called the subsidized beef import plan a “mistake,” and Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming posted that “Americans want US beef on the table, not foreign imports.” The beef policy is a response to soaring prices, which hit $6.89 per pound for ground beef in July, a 57 percent jump since 2021 driven by a shrinking cattle herd.

All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of weak approval numbers for Trump heading into the midterms. He sits at 38.2 percent in Nate Silver’s polling average, just above his second-term low of 38.1 percent hit earlier this month and down about four points since January, while a Reuters or Ipsos poll released Monday put him at an even lower 33 percent, matching his prior low from mid-August. That same survey found support for U.S. military action in Iran down to 31 percent, a six-point drop since March, and for the first time in roughly a decade more voters, 38 percent, said they trust Democrats over Republicans to handle the economy. Together the trade fights, beef policy backlash, and sagging poll numbers help explain why Trump is publicly airing frustration that his own party doesn’t grasp the trouble it’s in.

Navy Sailor told Rape claims are “Workers Comp”:

Civilian engineer Elsie Dominguez, 35, sued the federal government after alleging that Yamil Sanchez Padilla, captain of the USNS Carson City, used a master key to enter her quarters overnight in December 2021 and raped her while she slept. She reported the assault through proper channels the next morning, but a federal judge has now dismissed her civil lawsuit, ruling in August 2026 that the case must instead be handled as a workers’ compensation claim under the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act since she was on temporary travel status for work when it happened. The assault forced her to take a full year of unpaid leave to recover, during which she lost her health insurance and struggled to access therapy because of state licensing restrictions on providers. She also described career fallout, including social isolation from colleagues after the incident became known. Her attorney, Christine Dunn, argued that being raped in one’s own bed is fundamentally different from the physical injuries, like a dislocated shoulder or an impact from ship movement, that workers’ comp was designed to cover.

Separately, a criminal case was pursued against Sanchez Padilla when Coast Guard prosecutors filed a sexual misconduct complaint against him in February 2025, and he was removed from the ship and placed on paid administrative leave while the matter proceeded. That criminal case was ultimately withdrawn, though Sanchez Padilla agreed to surrender his merchant mariner credentials as part of the resolution, meaning he can no longer serve in that licensed role. Dominguez, meanwhile, has continued her career and now works as first assistant engineer aboard the USS Lewis B. Puller, and she also holds the rank of lieutenant commander in the Navy Reserve. The case has drawn attention to how sexual assault claims against military or federal employees at sea get routed through administrative workers’ comp systems rather than the courts. Her legal team suggests that routing effectively limits her ability to hold the government accountable through ordinary negligence litigation.

Beef Issues:

Several key Senate Republicans issued unusually pointed public criticism of Trump’s plan to expand tariff-reduced beef imports ahead of the midterms, warning it would hurt American ranchers. Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming, Tim Sheehy of Montana, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Steve Daines of Montana, and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi all pushed back, a notable break from the party’s usual reluctance to challenge Trump directly. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association was even blunter, saying the move was “100 percent about the 74 days between now and the midterm elections.” The criticism comes as ranchers already feel squeezed by falling cattle prices and rising input costs, and Republicans worry the optics of siding with importers over domestic producers could cost them in cattle-heavy states. It adds to a growing pattern this week of GOP lawmakers distancing themselves from Trump’s economic moves as midterm anxiety builds.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says she’s not personally involved in deciding which countries will supply the up to 300,000 metric tons of tariff-free ground beef Trump announced last week, a 90-day plan meant to sell beef at 25 percent below market prices as the U.S. deals with high beef costs tied to a shrunken cattle herd. Ranchers and industry groups worry the move undercuts domestic producers without addressing the underlying supply shortage, and critics have raised transparency and food safety concerns, particularly given a recent Argentine beef recall. Rollins said the actual negotiations are being handled by Trump and the U.S. Trade Representative, with more details expected soon.

Corte Argentino USA LLC recalled roughly 29,628 pounds of raw beef imported from Argentina after it entered the U.S. without the required import inspection, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announced; the issue was caught during routine FSIS inspection activities, and it’s classified as a Class I recall, meaning there’s a “reasonable probability” that using the product could cause serious health consequences or death. The affected products, all from Argentine producer Frigorifico Gorina SAIC, include boneless beef cuts like Top Sirloin Butt, Eye Round, Topside Cap Off, Flat, and Knuckle, produced between May 15 and May 20 with use-by or freeze-by dates of September 15-20, bearing establishment number “EST. N° OF. 2025” and shipping mark “26644-AA.” The recalled beef was distributed to retailers in Florida and Texas, and there have been no confirmed reports of illness or injury linked to it so far. The FSIS is advising anyone who bought the products not to eat them and to either throw them away or return them to the place of purchase.

Justin Tupper, president of the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association, said Trump’s reputation with ranchers has “taken a hit” over his plan to import 300,000 metric tons of tariff-free foreign ground beef over 90 days to lower grocery prices, arguing on MS NOW’s “State of Play” that foreign beef, which isn’t held to the same standards as domestic production, will neither bring down store prices nor help ranchers grow their herds. American Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall sent Trump a letter the same day calling the plan a source of “apprehension” and “chaos,” noting that 70% of spring-born calves are sold during the same 90-day window, which he warned will weaken cattle prices and discourage the herd-rebuilding investments needed to fix a U.S. cattle herd already at historic lows after drought, lost grazing land, and reduced packing capacity. Duvall argued directly against Trump’s own affordability message, writing “bringing down the price of cattle will not bring the price of beef down for American families” and warning the roughly 660 million pounds of discounted foreign beef would instead prolong tight supplies and high consumer prices, especially since experts note big packers and retailers, not shoppers, tend to capture any savings. Tupper echoed those concerns while also raising food safety questions, saying that while support for Trump remains, the policy undercuts his own “America First” agenda and frustrates ranchers who “just want to have a free and fair market system” without “outside influences” throwing “a monkey wrench into it.”

Canada stands firm:

President Trump escalated his rhetoric against Canada on Wednesday, telling radio host Glenn Beck that Ottawa has “taken advantage of the United States for many decades” and is “one of the worst countries in the world to deal with,” a day after Canada rolled out retaliatory tariffs. He complained specifically about Canadian dairy tariffs, argued Canada “takes advantage of us as though they were a state” despite imposing tariffs U.S. states themselves are constitutionally barred from applying to one another, and claimed Canada has “taken our car industry” and “agriculture industry” while blocking American farmers from selling there tariff-free. Trump argued the U.S. doesn’t need anything Canada supplies that couldn’t be sourced elsewhere, saying “we could get by” and that “it’s time to teach Canada you can’t do this anymore,” even though Canada is one of America’s largest trading partners and energy sources. The outburst came less than a day after Canada matched his latest tariffs with its own retaliatory package, continuing an exchange that has grown increasingly personal between the two governments.

That Canadian retaliation, announced Tuesday, doubles existing counter-tariffs on U.S. steel and aluminum to 50%, and adds new tariffs of 15, 25, and 50% on more than $20 billion worth of roughly 700 U.S. goods, including clothing, furniture, video game consoles, and other electronics, taking effect September 8. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the moves were designed to “match dollar for dollar, rate for rate” against Trump’s tariff agenda, framing it as a necessary response to Washington using “economic integration as a weapon rather than the foundation for a win-win partnership.” The retaliation followed the U.S. imposing a 50% tariff on $20 billion of Canadian exports last Saturday, covering a mishmash of products like buoys, textiles, and Christmas lights, after Prime Minister Mark Carney walked away from last-minute talks he said offered unacceptable terms, telling reporters “you’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked.” Ottawa is also rolling out a $5.4 billion package to cushion workers and businesses hurt by the trade war.

On the ground, many Canadians have embraced a defiant, “elbows up” mood reminiscent of the grassroots boycotts of U.S. alcohol, produce, and travel that emerged during the first tariff wave, even as businesses brace for real financial pain. Small business owners described concrete impacts: a Manitoba plant-accessories retailer is shifting to domestic-only sales once his U.S.-bound stock sells out, an Alberta beekeeper is selling honey directly to local customers rather than exporting it (the U.S. normally buys 56% of Canada’s honey exports), and a Belleville cannery owner worries new tariffs could hit his products “at a moment’s notice.” Provincial leaders have turned combative too, with Manitoba’s Wab Kinew declaring Canada has “the upper hand” and Ontario’s Doug Ford, previously dubbed “Captain Canada,” repeatedly telling Trump he could “kiss” his backside, prompting Trump to threaten renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” in response. Carney argues Canada is negotiating from a stronger position than before, having struck new trade deals with South Korea, China, Germany, and India over the past year, though individual business owners still worry about domestic suppliers hiking prices and smaller, women-owned companies bearing the brunt of the standoff.

Pete Hegseth purges military:

Days before Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, right, forced Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George into retirement in April, George was reportedly told by Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the officer now positioned to replace him, that Hegseth wanted him to drop an investigation into an unauthorized helicopter flyby at Kid Rock’s Tennessee property, according to The Washington Post citing people familiar with the discussions. George was pushed out anyway, without explanation and less than two months into the U.S. war in Iran, clearing the way for Hegseth to nominate LaNeve, his own top aide, to lead the Army amid broader concerns about Hegseth’s leadership. George was originally expected to serve through 2027 to complete a typical four-year term, and he declined to comment to The Post on the matter.

The flyby itself happened in March, when two Apache helicopters from the 101st Combat Aviation Brigade circled Kid Rock’s property while he saluted and cheered on camera, during the same window as nationwide “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration, prompting the Army to suspend the pilots and open an investigation on March 31. Hegseth reversed that decision the same day, posting on X, “thank you Kid Rock, U.S. Army pilots suspension LIFTED. No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots,” even as a 101st Airborne spokesperson said the flight wasn’t tied to the protests. Kid Rock later told the Associated Press he’d spoken directly with the pilots and told them “you guys are always welcome to cruise by my house, any time,” while also mocking California Governor Gavin Newsom online for lacking that “level of respect.” Trump, asked about the videos at the time, said he hadn’t seen them but added, “I’m sure they had a good time... they probably shouldn’t have been doing it,” while noting he liked Kid Rock. A few weeks after George’s ouster, Hegseth himself flew in Apache helicopters with Kid Rock out of Fort Belvoir, calling him “a patriot and huge supporter of our troops.”

LaNeve’s nomination to permanently lead the Army remains stalled in the Senate, and if it isn’t confirmed, Hegseth could simply keep him on indefinitely as acting chief of staff instead. The Pentagon did not respond to questions about LaNeve, but Hegseth defended him in a statement to The Post as “precisely the kind of leader the U.S. Army needs right now,” someone “not interested in playing politics in Washington” and a “back-to-basics, no politics, no-nonsense General.” Hegseth went on to attack LaNeve’s critics as “out-of-touch so-called insiders who’ve spent years undermining our military with woke policies and endless wars,” claiming “their days of influence are over.” The episode adds new detail to the broader pattern of Hegseth firings and leadership turmoil at the Army previously reported by other outlets, tying George’s dismissal directly to his reluctance to bury the Kid Rock investigation.

Other news:

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani reluctantly lifted the last remaining block on Trump’s mail-in voting plan on Wednesday, saying the Supreme Court’s ruling earlier in the week left her no choice, which clears the way for the Postal Service to start enforcing new rules that could include refusing ballots from voters not on newly compiled federal lists. The Supreme Court had ruled that earlier challenges were premature since USPS hadn’t finalized its plan, but USPS issued that final rule on Friday, prompting Democratic attorneys general from 23 states to file a brand new lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to block it before ballot distribution begins next week. Talwani, an Obama appointee also overseeing that new case, pushed back in her order on some of the Supreme Court’s reasoning and suggested the legal whiplash around USPS’s role might actually be the administration’s intended goal. Separately, civil and voting rights groups plan to amend their own existing suit to directly challenge the new rule, and a Trump-appointed judge in Washington is handling yet another related case brought by Democratic Party groups. Trump has pushed unsubstantiated fraud claims about mail-in voting for years, but broader efforts to reshape the nation’s voting systems, including a stalled bill and a DOJ push for voter rolls rejected by roughly two dozen courts, have largely failed.

Actor Tim Curry, best known for playing Dr. Frank-N-Furter in 1975’s “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” has died at 80, according to his longtime manager Marcia Hurwitz; no cause of death has been made public. The English performer built a five-decade career across film, TV, and theater, with other memorable roles including Wadsworth in “Clue,” Pennywise in the 1990 TV adaptation of Stephen King’s “It,” Rooster Hannigan in “Annie,” Mr. Hector in “Home Alone 2,” and Long John Silver in “Muppet Treasure Island,” along with a Daytime Emmy for voicing Captain Hook and three Tony nominations. Curry had struggled with health issues since a 2012 stroke left him partially paralyzed and unable to walk, and last year he published a memoir, “Vagabond,” marking Rocky Horror’s 50th anniversary, in which he wrote that despite playing many larger-than-life characters, “I was none of them.” In one of his final interviews, given from a wheelchair to CBS Sunday Morning in October 2025, he said he loved how acting gave him “the freedom of being somebody else.”

According to author Michael Wolff, speaking on The Daily Beast’s Inside Trump’s Head podcast, Trump’s personal assistant Natalie Harp, 35, drew astonishment from fellow staffers at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf club after she and her mother were repeatedly granted access to an exclusive, all-you-can-eat Sunday buffet that ordinary staff weren’t allowed to attend, with Wolff saying it became “a major moment within the campaign.” The scrutiny follows the recent publication of gushing letters Harp wrote to Trump, in which she called herself “unworthy” of serving him and said “you are all that matters to me,” as well as revelations that she went more than a year without the standard West Wing security clearance and was one of the few aides Trump brought with him on a secret secondary plane out of Turkey after an alleged Iranian assassination threat in July. White House spokesman Davis Ingle defended Harp as “one of the most loyal and hardest-working aides” on Trump’s team while attacking Wolff as a “professional scumbag and serial liar,” and the story has since become political ammunition, with Sen. Jon Ossoff mocking Trump’s travel with Harp at a rally and Rep. Debbie Dingell proposing renaming Lake Ontario “Lake Natalie” in response to Trump’s own rebranding threat toward Canada.

A catastrophic flash flood swept the Himalayan border of Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday, killing at least 95 people in Nepal so far and leaving hundreds missing, including 384 travelers tracked by Nepal’s tourism authority (105 Indians, 93 Nepalis, three Americans, 12 British nationals, plus around eight South Koreans reported separately by Yonhap), in what officials describe as a still-unfolding disaster. Nepal’s foreign minister said an earthquake, a 4.4 magnitude quake recorded about seven minutes before the flood hit on security footage, may have triggered an ice-rock avalanche on the Nepali side of the Lhende Khola river, though the exact cause is unconfirmed, and experts warn a second flood could occur because debris is still blocking the river upstream. The flooding destroyed homes, roads, bridges, and power infrastructure, knocked out 430 MW of electricity (over 12% of Nepal’s hydropower capacity), and prompted flood alerts in India’s Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states, while on the Tibetan side a mudslide cut off the Gyirong border crossing under five feet of sediment, leading China to deploy at least 574 rescuers and President Xi Jinping to call for all-out search efforts. Rescue helicopters in Nepal’s Rasuwa district still can’t land because of high water, and Prime Minister Balendra Shah has ordered residents near the river to move to higher ground, with a similar flood on the same river last year, which killed nine and washed away a bridge linking Nepal and China, having been traced to a draining glacier lake.

Senator Chris Murphy says ICE was arresting parents at a bus stop in Connecticut today as children were getting on the bus:

Oil prices fell for a third straight day Wednesday, with U.S. crude dropping over 1.5% to around $81 a barrel (briefly touching $79, its lowest since August 13) and Brent down about 2% to just under $86, driven by a cluster of hopeful signals from the Iran conflict: renewed Iran-Oman talks about reopening the Strait of Hormuz, State Department plans to send diplomats back to Middle East embassies, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio telling allies the U.S. doesn’t expect to resume strikes on Iran. Trump also claimed on social media that the Navy had cleared all mines from the Strait, though the post was identical to one he made on August 18, raising questions about its accuracy, and shipping data from Kpler showed Strait crossings still far below pre-war levels (just five vessels Tuesday versus a pre-war average of 130). Despite the drop in crude, gas prices haven’t budged, with the national average ticking up to $4.10 a gallon, and July inflation data released the same day showed the Fed’s preferred PCE gauge stuck at 3.7% (core PCE at 3.3%), with one economist noting “the impacts of the war in Iran are still apparent.” The falling oil prices did help push bond yields and mortgage rates lower for a second straight day, with the 30-year fixed mortgage rate dipping to 6.74%.

Meta agreed Wednesday to pay roughly $18 billion to settle a wide-ranging social media addiction lawsuit brought by California and other states, in a deal covering 52 attorneys general nationwide, though the company denies any liability and disputes the allegations. Under the settlement, teen accounts on Facebook and Instagram will default to a combined two-hour daily usage limit (removable only with parental permission), nighttime use blocks, hidden likes on teens’ posts, a ban on “extreme makeup filters,” an option for a non-algorithmic feed, and the ability to disable autoplay video, alongside new parental control tools and enhanced age verification. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led the suit, called it a deal that will “make social media less dangerous for our kids,” while Meta’s chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney framed it as empowering parents and urged competitors TikTok and YouTube to adopt similar measures, though neither company immediately responded. The settlement, which still needs a judge’s approval (Judge Yvonne Rogers said she’s inclined to approve it but wants more time to review), came a day after Instagram head Adam Mosseri testified in the case, and follows other recent losses for Meta, including a $900 million fine in New Mexico in March and a California ruling finding Meta and Google liable in a young woman’s mental health case.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded Elon Musk Ukraine’s Order of Freedom, one of the country’s top state honors, via a presidential decree published Wednesday praising him “for outstanding personal contributions to protecting human life and freedom, and for developing relations between the peoples of Ukraine and the United States of America.” The honor comes as Kyiv pushes to expand its use of Musk’s Starlink terminals, which have served as the backbone of Ukrainian battlefield communications and drone piloting since Musk activated the service over Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion; earlier this year Musk also agreed, at the request of Ukraine’s since-dismissed defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov, to disable thousands of Russian “grey-market” Starlink terminals, disrupting Russian forces. Ukraine is now specifically asking to use Starlink over Russian territory itself, aiming to help strike targets like the ballistic missile launchers hitting Ukrainian cities, a move Zelenskyy said Musk had opposed as a “major escalation” but that Kyiv is now getting “more encouraging feedback” on. Zelenskyy argued that extending Starlink coverage over Russia could undercut capabilities Moscow is relying on to prolong the war.

Glenn “Bubba” Pysher, 22, was shot and killed by police in Upper Pottsgrove, Pennsylvania early Saturday after a night out drinking led him to mistakenly knock on a stranger’s door instead of the friend’s house he meant to walk to, with his mother saying he was simply calling out “hey, let me in,” thinking it was his friend’s home. The homeowners, spooked by the attempted entry, called 911, and police who responded found Pysher at the back of the house, where an “encounter ensued” that ended in officers fatally shooting him, according to the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office; his mother said he was unarmed, carrying only a cell phone and a backpack, and that the shooting happened within minutes of officers arriving. It’s not yet clear why officers opened fire, though the incident was captured on backyard surveillance cameras that are now part of the investigation. Pysher, remembered by loved ones as a “promising young man, athlete, and scholar,” had recently transferred to Saint Elizabeth University in New Jersey to play baseball and was set to start classes the following Monday.

A federal judge in Houston ordered the release of Daniel Tirado Pantoja, the second witness freed from immigration detention in connection with the fatal ICE shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo on July 7, after more than a month in custody; U.S. District Judge Alfred Bennett found Tirado Pantoja had no criminal record and posed no flight risk or danger to the community. Tirado Pantoja was one of three passengers in Salgado Araujo’s work van when the Mexican national and homebuilding business owner, who had lived in the U.S. without legal status for 35 years, was shot; DHS claims Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle” and that the officer fired in self-defense, but Tirado Pantoja and fellow passenger Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego, released last month, dispute that account, saying agents were never in front of the vehicle, that Salgado Araujo had put the van in park before the shooting, and that the ICE vehicle struck them from behind and then again on the driver’s side. Salgado Araujo’s son said his father was simply on his way to pick up his workers and was in the process of obtaining a work permit. A third passenger, Victor Salgado, the victim’s brother, remains in custody and has also asked a judge for release, while DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday’s ruling.

Uber announced Tuesday it will let parents livestream their teens’ rides as part of its teen accounts program, which lets 13 to 17 year olds request rides with a guardian’s permission; the video comes from the driver’s front-facing camera showing the backseat, and parents get a push notification to tap in and watch in real time when a stream is available. Both the teen and driver are notified whenever a parent starts watching, the feed is encrypted and visible only to the linked parent, and it automatically ends when the trip does, with neither parents nor drivers able to rewatch it afterward unless Uber needs to review the recording for a reported safety incident. Since drivers must opt in, livestreaming won’t be available on every ride, and parents will only learn if video access exists once the trip has already started. The feature is currently being tested in nine markets, including Atlanta, Orlando, Phoenix, and Rhode Island, with a nationwide rollout planned in the coming weeks, adding to existing teen-account safety tools like real-time trip tracking, PIN verification, vetted drivers, and Uber’s RideCheck alerts for unusual stops or route changes.

A federal judge in Texas, Reagan appointee David Hittner, struck down the state’s 2023 drag show ban, ruling that it violated the First Amendment because it was so broadly written it could criminalize things like cheerleading, dancing, and live theater. Hittner invoked Dolly Parton in his opinion, noting that many people had “chastised” her as a “voluptuous sex symbol” over the years to illustrate how subjective and overreaching the law’s standard for “prurient” content really was. The ruling means Attorney General Ken Paxton, now the GOP Senate nominee, can no longer enforce the law, which had exposed business owners to $10,000 fines and drag performers to a Class A misdemeanor carrying up to a year in jail. One plaintiff, a performer known as Brigitte Bandit, celebrated the decision online and said she’d perform as Parton at an Austin bar this weekend in tribute. Hittner closed his ruling with a blunt suggestion for anyone still offended by drag shows: simply don’t go.

SpaceX is planning to spend $100 billion building a massive new “Starbase” launch complex on 125,000 acres of coastal wetlands at Pecan Island in southern Louisiana, expanding its Starship operations beyond South Texas and Florida. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the site will eventually support thousands of Starship launches a year and will be “self-sustaining,” with its own methane production, power generation, deep-water shipping to move Starships from Texas, and likely an airport, though construction won’t begin until next year with the first launch targeted for 2029. The land had been tied up in a decade-long lawsuit against ExxonMobil over wetland loss from coastal drilling, which only cleared the way for the deal after the state settled with Exxon this summer. Louisiana officials, including Governor Jeff Landry, touted the project as bringing more than 3,000 jobs paying an average of $92,600 a year, nearly triple the local average wage. The plan has also drawn environmental concern since Pecan Island is a protected stopover for migratory birds, and Shotwell acknowledged past bird disturbances at the Texas site while pledging funding for wetland restoration and stewardship.

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Important Tuesday Night News Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 26, 2026. White House in Turmoil as Trump Faces Attacks on Multiple Fronts, It’s CHAOS!!!!

Today’s newsletter carries a lot of weight: country music lost one of its true giants, as Dolly Parton died in Nashville at 80, capping a six-decade career that took her from an Appalachian cabin with no plumbing to Hollywood, Broadway, and a philanthropic legacy that put more than 200 million books in kids’ hands.

Closer to Washington, the trade fight with Canada boiled over, with Ottawa slapping new tariffs on roughly $20 billion in US goods after talks with the Trump administration collapsed amid dueling accounts of who walked away from the table, and no shortage of insults along the way.

We also have the first television interview with Alex Pretti’s family since federal immigration officers shot and killed him in Minneapolis in January, and a deep look at how a wave of firings by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has left the Army without a chief of staff and thinner at the top than it’s been in decades, even as it faces its busiest stretch since Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here’s the news:

Following our reporting, Luis Manuel Aviles, the Nicaraguan immigrant father of Navy sailor Joshua Aviles, was released from ICE custody Tuesday, days after being detained during a traffic stop in Key West, Florida, where the family lives; his son confirmed the release in a Facebook statement thanking supporters and asking for privacy while the family reunites. Joshua Aviles is currently deployed on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which just completed a record setting nine month uninterrupted deployment and is now headed back to the West Coast, a trip expected to take a month or more. DHS said Luis Manuel Aviles, 47, who has lived in the US for 20 years and worked as a hotel handyman, entered the country illegally at an unspecified time and place, while his family said he had a work permit, Social Security card, driver’s license, and an active asylum case, along with pending immigration petitions filed by relatives to secure his legal status. When asked to confirm those details, DHS did not directly address them but said that having a family member in the military “is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws” and does not grant parole, lawful status, or immunity from enforcement. The case drew national attention after Joshua Aviles posted from the ship describing his father as a hardworking man whose only “crime” was coming to the US to give his children a better life, and questioning how he could keep working long days not knowing how his father was being treated.

Dolly Parton:

Dolly Parton, the rhinestone-clad daughter of Appalachian poverty who became one of country music’s defining voices, died Tuesday in Nashville at 80; no cause was given, though concerns about her health had grown since a postponed Las Vegas residency last year. Over six decades she racked up 25 No. 1 country singles, roughly 90 Top 40 hits, and about 3,000 published songs, including “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You,” the latter later a chart-topping cover for Whitney Houston. She broke through in 1967 on “The Porter Wagoner Show” before eclipsing her mentor and striking out solo in 1974, going on to headline stadium tours, star in films like “9 to 5” and “Steel Magnolias,” and build the Dollywood theme park.

Her career, by the numbers and the milestones: she was the top ranking female singer on country radio from 1967 to 1993, with 25 No. 1 country singles and roughly 90 Top 40 hits drawn from about 3,000 songs she published in her lifetime. Her breakthrough came in 1967 as the “girl singer” on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” where she and Wagoner recorded 21 hit duets before she split from him in 1974 to go solo, writing “I Will Always Love You” as a farewell. That song later became a No. 1 pop hit for Whitney Houston in “The Bodyguard” in 1992. Other signature songs included “Jolene,” “Coat of Many Colors,” “9 to 5,” and “Islands in the Stream” with Kenny Rogers.

Beyond records, she built a wide entertainment and business empire: she starred in films including “9 to 5,” “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,” and “Steel Magnolias”; hosted her own syndicated TV series starting in 1976 and later an ABC variety show; opened the Dollywood theme park in the mid 1980s; and recorded acclaimed collaborative albums such as “Trio” with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999, the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022, and she won 10 Grammy Awards among more than 50 nominations.

Her songwriting was known for empathy and social conscience: she wrote about childhood poverty and bullying in “Coat of Many Colors,” about teen pregnancy and patriarchy in “Down From Dover” and “Daddy Come Get Me,” and about workplace and bedroom equality for women in “9 to 5” and “Touch Your Woman.” She later extended that inclusive spirit to LGBTQ audiences with the Oscar nominated “Travelin’ Thru” from “Transamerica” and “Rainbowland,” recorded with her goddaughter Miley Cyrus.

Her philanthropic legacy centers on the Imagination Library, which she founded in 1995 and which has since distributed more than 200 million books to children, along with disaster relief efforts for her home region after the Gatlinburg wildfires and support for Covid vaccine research. A Broadway musical based on her life, “Dolly: A True Original Musical,” is scheduled to open in early 2027.

Canada retaliates with major tariffs:

Canada’s retaliation: Canada announced it will raise steel duties and impose new tariffs of 15% to 50% on roughly $20 billion worth of U.S. goods, effective September 8. The list covers more than 800 product entries, targeting sectors like steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics. Steel, aluminum, furniture, and clothing face the steepest 50% rate, while dairy, appliances, cheese, and fish get 25%, and items like rubber molds and machinery parts get 15%. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said the response was designed to “match the American tariff on the same type of Canadian good,” and existing counter-tariffs on autos remain in place.

How talks broke down: The move follows the collapse of trade negotiations after the U.S. hit numerous Canadian products with new 50% tariffs starting last Saturday. Prime Minister Mark Carney said he walked away from a deal Friday night after Washington proposed “unfair” and “uneconomic” last-minute terms, and had pledged to retaliate “dollar-for-dollar.” U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer disputed that account, saying the U.S. had offered to cut steel and aluminum tariffs in half and reduce auto and softwood lumber tariffs substantially, but that “they simply wanted more.” Carney maintained, “We could not accept what the U.S. had offered, nor could we give what they asked.”

Escalating rhetoric: The tariff fight has been accompanied by heated exchanges between Trump and Canadian officials, including Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who told Trump he could “kiss my ass” and called him the “king of bankruptcies.” Trump fired back by dismissing Ford’s comments as “bluster” and threatened a second wave of 50% tariffs on Canadian autos and steel. On Tuesday, Trump further needled Ottawa by threatening to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America,” which Canadian officials dismissed as “shenanigans” while affirming they’d “always call it Lake Ontario.” Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said protecting Ontario’s auto industry remains a top priority and that she’s been in regular contact with Honda, Ford Motor, and Toyota’s Canadian divisions.

Alex Pretti’s family speaks out:

Alex Pretti’s parents, Michael and Susan, and sister Micayla gave their first TV interview since the 37-year-old ICU nurse was shot and killed by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis on Jan. 24, speaking with George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America. The family described the horror of learning what happened: a stranger’s phone call asking about “an Alex J. Pretti,” followed by seeing the actual shooting footage on television before anyone from the government contacted them. “We watched it on TV and was like, ‘That’s our son. That’s Alex.’ And they killed him,” Michael said, noting they still haven’t heard from anyone. Susan added they saw him “shot 10 times... in the back.” The family disputed claims Alex was protesting, saying he was an “observer” recording the scene with his phone, and bystander video showed him being pepper-sprayed and restrained before being shot after apparently trying to help a woman being pushed by an officer.

The family condemned Trump administration officials who publicly branded Alex a violent threat in the hours and days after his death, including then-Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who said he seemed to want to “massacre law enforcement,” then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who called it “domestic terrorism,” and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who labeled Alex “an assassin,” a claim VP JD Vance amplified. President Trump also cited footage of an earlier, separate confrontation Alex had with agents 11 days before his death to call him an “agitator” and “possible insurrectionist.” Susan grew emotional recalling those words, asking, “What did he do to deserve to be murdered?” Michael called Trump’s rhetoric “so unpresidential,” and the family says none of Trump, Vance, Miller, or Noem have ever reached out to them, which Michael said “tells me they don’t care.” Susan said she still expects a formal apology for what was said about her son.

Seven months later, the family says the DOJ’s federal civil rights investigation into the shooting remains opaque, with family attorney Steven L. Schleicher saying they don’t know its status or what evidence has been gathered, and accusing the government of “gaslighting and word salad.” A July 13 meeting with Minnesota’s U.S. attorney “raised more questions than answers,” and DOJ has said family communications typically don’t occur until later stages like indictment or trial, while DHS says the case “remains under active investigation” and the FBI declined comment. The two officers who fired the fatal shots have not been officially identified by the government, though ProPublica reported their names in February, something Micayla says isn’t enough, insisting the names be formally released. Susan also linked Alex’s case to that of Renée Good, another U.S. citizen fatally shot by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis around the same time, arguing “people need to be held responsible when they murder people in this country,” while Michael said the more than 2,000 supportive cards and letters they’ve received have offered some comfort.

Defense Department ‘rudderless’

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s string of firings and feuds has left the Army without a chief of staff since he dismissed Gen. Randy George without explanation in April, and there is no sign a replacement is imminent; officials say Hegseth has also forced out at least three other senior officers viewed as potential successors. As recently as January 2025, the Army had 10 four star generals on active duty; it now has just five, the fewest in decades, with key posts like the Transformation and Training Command sitting empty for months after Hegseth fired Gen. David M. Hodne without explanation. Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, once seen as a possible Hegseth successor, is also expected to leave in the coming months and is reportedly barely on speaking terms with Hegseth, even as the peace effort he was leading on Ukraine has stalled. Critics, including Rep. Pat Ryan, a Democrat and former Army intelligence officer, warn that purging battle tested leaders makes troops less safe and erodes the military’s apolitical character, while the Army’s official statement insists its leaders remain focused on readiness and modernization.

The leadership vacuum comes as the Army faces its busiest stretch since Iraq and Afghanistan, with air defense soldiers absorbing increasingly sophisticated Iranian missile attacks in the Middle East and Army units in Europe supporting Ukraine against Russia. The empty Transformation and Training Command is especially significant because it oversees Patriot antimissile crews, the main defense against Iranian ballistic missiles, and the Army has been burning through scarce Patriot interceptor supplies as Iran’s missiles grow more capable of evading them; one such strike killed three US soldiers in Jordan in July. Separately, Hegseth demoted Gen. Christopher T. Donahue’s European ground command to a three star position in July, effectively forcing him toward retirement, despite Donahue’s teams of drone defenders having been credited with responding to an early Iranian drone attack that killed six soldiers in Kuwait. Taken together, officials and lawmakers argue the thinned ranks and unresolved vacancies leave the Army poorly positioned to keep pace with Russia and China’s rapid adoption of AI and drone warfare.

Tension between Hegseth and Gen. George dated back to Hegseth’s own mistrust of Army leadership, rooted partly in his forced departure from the National Guard over tattoos deemed extremist; that friction escalated last October when Hegseth pushed out Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus a year early and nominated his own senior aide, Gen. Christopher LaNeve, to replace him. Senators, frustrated by the lack of transparency, placed a hold on LaNeve’s confirmation, and Hegseth wrongly accused George of colluding with those lawmakers, even though George had actually urged them to let the nomination proceed; Hegseth fired George in a 15 second phone call less than two months after LaNeve was finally sworn in as vice chief. Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, who says she’d been assured George would finish his term, complained directly to President Trump, who told her the firing was Hegseth’s call and to “tell the general I’m sorry.” LaNeve, who still lacks enough Senate Republican support to be confirmed as chief, is now serving simultaneously as vice chief and acting chief, and has signaled he wants the Army to refocus on basic combat skills, warning that “every shortcut in training and lapse in discipline will be paid for in blood.”

Other news:

According to ProPublica, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth polled top U.S. military commanders in early 2025 about cutting the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response program, expecting support for eliminating it, but every commander pushed back, with nine choosing to keep the effort running at reduced staffing and two commands, including those overseeing the nuclear arsenal and cyber threats, refusing any cuts at all. Hegseth gutted the program anyway, shrinking it from roughly 200 people to about two dozen even as the U.S. launched new military campaigns in Somalia, Yemen and Iran, and Central Command was left with just one staffer instead of the nine it said it needed. The consequences were severe: a Yemen air campaign killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 others, and a U.S. airstrike on a school in Minab, Iran, killed more than 100 children after outdated intelligence led to the attack, prompting congressional scrutiny and a letter from 11 Democratic senators questioning whether the staffing cuts contributed to the tragedy. Facing that blowback, the Pentagon is now considering partially reviving the program at 35% of its original staffing under a plan from policy under secretary Elbridge Colby, which the same commanders Hegseth originally polled have endorsed, though the Defense Department did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins refused to tell the public where the United States would be importing beef from:

According to CNN, the Justice Department is considering federal charges against ICE agent Christian Castro, who is accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant, Julio Sosa-Celis, in the leg in Minneapolis this past winter, with a decision possibly coming as soon as Tuesday. Castro was already arrested in May on state charges of second-degree assault and falsely reporting a crime, but Texas Governor Greg Abbott has refused to extradite him to Minnesota, and he could be released from custody in Cameron County, Texas as soon as Wednesday, putting pressure on prosecutors to act quickly. A DOJ spokeswoman told CNN that no charging decision has been made and that the civil rights division is consulting with local prosecutors as a standard part of the investigation. The case took a dramatic turn earlier this year when the DOJ moved to drop charges against Sosa-Celis and another man after ICE admitted its agents made “false statements” under oath, and the two agents involved remain on administrative leave while that conduct is investigated.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe made an unannounced overnight trip to Moscow to meet with Russian officials, a US official familiar with his travel told CNN, marking his first known visit to Russia as CIA director under President Trump; the substance and topics of the meetings were not disclosed, and the CIA declined to comment. The visit comes as talks to end the Russia Ukraine war have stalled, and the US reportedly asked Ukraine to pause drone and missile strikes on Moscow and northern Russian cities from Monday through Wednesday, telling the Ukrainians a senior US official would be traveling in the country. It also follows by one day Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s announcement of “Operation Economic Outcast,” a strategy to isolate Iran by punishing countries and entities that keep doing business with Tehran, notable given Russia’s status as a strategic trading partner of Iran’s. Flight tracking data showed an American Boeing C-17 Globemaster III landing at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport early Tuesday after departing from Riga, Latvia, having originally taken off from Joint Base Andrews; Latvia’s Defense Ministry confirmed the flight was properly coordinated and authorized for its airspace but said it could not provide further details since the aircraft is not operated by Latvia’s armed forces.

According to The New York Times, Trump administration lawyers told a federal judge in a court filing that the Kennedy Center could need to be “taken down” and potentially replaced by an outdoor amphitheater on the Potomac if the $250 million renovation ordered by President Trump does not move forward, a suggestion the plaintiff’s lawyer called a “not-so-subtle threat.” The filing came in response to a lawsuit from Rep. Joyce Beatty, an ex officio board member who is fighting both the center’s closure plans and a board decision, already ruled unlawful by Judge Christopher R. Cooper, to add Trump’s name to the building; the center is appealing that ruling and in the meantime removed his name from the facade. The judge also temporarily blocked the closure plans, and the center’s executive director has testified under oath that no one there currently plans to demolish the building, though he acknowledged he isn’t “in control of” Trump’s “personal decision-making.” Beatty has argued the closure may be masking financial fallout from the center’s politicization, and the Times notes The Washington Post reported that ticket revenue and fund-raising have plummeted since Trump’s name was added, leaving the center on track to miss its revenue target by nearly $100 million this year, while Justice Department lawyers countered that Trump earned the inscription by helping secure $257 million in congressional funding and a new donor base.

Indiana Governor Mike Braun is calling for a formal investigation into NIPSCO after nearly two weeks without power for thousands of residents across northwest Indiana, saying the utility “has failed to keep its end of the bargain” despite Hoosiers paying it every month to maintain the system and respond to severe weather. Braun directed the Indiana Office of Utility Consumer Counselor to file a complaint asking the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to open an investigation, including scrutiny of how NIPSCO spent more than 81 million dollars earmarked for vegetation management between 2023 and 2025 and 2.3 billion dollars meant for infrastructure upgrades since 2016. NIPSCO responded that it will cooperate fully with any investigation and remains committed to transparency. Residents in Gary, Hammond, and Munster described mounting stress after 13 days without electricity, with families cooking by lighter, throwing out spoiled food, and worrying about safety in the dark, while one resident said doctors haven’t been able to remotely monitor her heart monitor since it lost power. NIPSCO says it’s committed to restoring service as quickly as possible, and NBC Chicago reported seeing crews from NIPSCO, contracted linemen, and ComEd actively working in Gary.

Two unvaccinated people in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania have died of measles, marking the first U.S. measles deaths of 2026 and the state’s first in 35 years. The deaths come amid a growing outbreak that has reached 393 confirmed cases statewide, with 86 diagnosed in just the past week and 70 people hospitalized. Nationally, the CDC has recorded 2,777 measles cases this year, the highest total in 35 years, with about 7% of cases requiring hospitalization. The outbreak coincides with declining MMR vaccination rates in Lancaster County (down from 95.5% in 2017 to 87.6% in 2025) and rising vaccine exemptions among kindergartners nationwide, as well as a recent Trump executive order aimed at reducing recommended childhood vaccines. Pennsylvania’s health secretary emphasized that the MMR vaccine is safe and remains the best protection against the disease.

The Ohio Parole Board recommended Tuesday that death row inmate Tyrone Noling, who has spent 30 years denying he committed the 1990 murders of an elderly couple, have his sentence commuted to life with the possibility of parole as early as 2029, though Noling himself is seeking a full pardon and says he won’t accept a commutation. The decision now rests with outgoing Republican Governor Mike DeWine, who co-sponsored Ohio’s death penalty law in 1981 but has since reversed course, calling in June for lawmakers to abolish capital punishment altogether. Noling was convicted based on testimony from three teenage gang members who later recanted, saying police pressured them to name him, and no physical evidence or murder weapon ever tied him to the killings. Innocence Project attorneys have since uncovered evidence pointing to another suspect, a man later executed for an unrelated 1991 murder, including a lab report suggesting a cigarette butt found at the scene could have been his rather than Noling’s. The case has drawn celebrity support from figures like Kim Kardashian, and even the former county sheriff who investigated the killings now says he believes Noling and the other teens were innocent.

Newly released court documents detail the grim conditions investigators found inside a Burlington, Connecticut home where the skeletal remains of three family members, Paul Cash, Sally Cash, and their son Brian Cash, were discovered on June 14. The remains were found after the home was purchased at a foreclosure auction, when visitors touring the property for renovation planning noticed an open window, climbed inside, and spotted what looked like skeletons in an upstairs bedroom and a room above the garage. According to the search warrant, officers found the home heavily cluttered throughout, with overgrown landscaping and a green pool outside, and described an “overwhelming foul odor” upon reaching the second floor. Two of the three skeletons were found together in one bedroom, both lying on their backs inside sleeping bags with no signs of a struggle, while the third was found similarly in the room above the garage. The medical examiner said the remains were too decomposed for a definitive cause of death, ruling out carbon monoxide poisoning but citing malnutrition or hypothermia as possibilities, and state police have said there’s no indication the deaths were criminal or suspicious.

U.S. Military, National Security, Foreign Affairs

The New Republic, Analysis: Hegseth’s Army Purges Have Undermined Military Leadership on Iran, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, Aug. 25, 2026. The extent to which Trump’s “Secretary of War” has damaged the United States’ military capability is even worse than previously thought.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to fire numerous top generals has put America’s military between a rock and a hard place in its war against Iran.

The Army has been without a chief of staff since Hegseth fired General Randy George in April; he has forced out at least three senior officers that were believed to be in the running to be George’s replacement, according to current and former officials that spoke with The New York Times.

All in all, Hegseth has forced out at least half a dozen senior officers, according to inside sources that spoke with the Times, who say this purge has damaged the service’s expertise and has eroded its top ranks.

Those affected include General James Mingus, the Army vice chief of staff that Hegseth forced out last year with little explanation, and General David Hodne, whom Hegseth hired and then fired just eight months later.

Other axed officers include Major General William Green, General Christopher Donahue, and General James Slife, the Air Force vice chief of staff.

General CQ Brown Jr. was also fired from his position as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the early weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, and General David Allvin retired early last fall.

Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, the Army’s top civilian leader, is also believed to be on his way out in the coming months, according to the Times, which reported that Driscoll has already moved out of the large family house he was renting outside Washington.

“Hollowing out the most battle-tested and most lethal, proven leaders in a time of war means troops are less safe and we’re less likely to win,” Representative Pat Ryan, Democrat of New York and a former Army intelligence officer, told the daily newspaper. “We’re doing generational damage to the sense that the military is an apolitical trusted organization that swears an oath to the Constitution, not to a president.”

Hegseth’s decision to undermine top military leadership has left a definitive vacuum in the highest echelons of the Army. At the time of Hegseth’s confirmation, there were 10 four-star generals on active duty. Now, there are just five—the smallest number to lead the service in years.

Meanwhile, the Army’s Middle East bases have been battered by Iran’s seemingly endless supply of cheap drones since late February. The conflict has so far killed at least 18 U.S. servicemembers and wounded more than 776 others. It has also taken an enormous toll on daily life in the U.S., inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil costs. 

The New Republic, Analysis: Did Hegseth Really Fire the Army’s Top Officer Over Kid Rock? Malcolm Ferguson, Aug. 26, 2026.  The Army has been left without a chief of staff for months thanks to Hegseth.

Army chief of staff General Randy George insisted on conducting a probe into whether the Pentagon violated protocol after the military performed a flyby around MAGA musician Kid Rock’s Tennessee estate—and a No Kings protest. Days later, he was fired.

George was reportedly advised by the Army’s No. 2 officer, General Chris LaNeve, to drop the probe at the behest of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

This new information, reported by The Washington Post, offers a potential catalyst for George’s abrupt firing, as the Pentagon gave no specific reason when he was booted out in April.

The flyby occurred on March 28, and saw two AH-64 Apache helicopters hover over a No Kings protest in Nashville, Tennessee, before performing maneuvers next to Kid Rock’s mansion nearby. The Army briefly suspended the helicopter crews involved before Hegseth personally intervened and announced the soldiers would not be punished. “No punishment. No investigation. Carry on, patriots,” Hegseth wrote on X at the time. Weeks later, he and musician Kid Rock went on a taxpayer-funded helicopter joyride.

While Hegseth and the Pentagon still decline to say why exactly George was fired, his refusal to ignore possible violations may certainly have played a role. George is one of numerous high-ranking military officials who have been unceremoniously fired by Hegseth during his tenure.

More On US. Governance 

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: RFK Jr. Gets Busted as America’s Vaccine Defenses Collapse, Thom Hartmann, right, Aug. 26, 2026. Covid is surging, measles is killing again, and the man running America’s health system spent years attacking the very vaccines that could save lives....

Louise went to the local pharmacy yesterday to get her Covid shot because Covid is climbing in all fifty states right now. She was turned away, because there’s apparently no current Covid vaccine available anywhere in America.

This isn’t a minor risk to us all, and should be a national scandal. It’s baffling that the media is ignoring it, particularly given the consequences.

A Nature study published this month from Boston Children’s Hospital found that severe Covid reactivates other dormant viruses already quietly living inside us, including Epstein-Barr, cytomegalovirus, and herpes simplex. They noted that up to 50,000 Americans died of Covid in the 2025-2026 respiratory season and over ten million Americans are living with debilitating long Covid.

An earlier Nature paper out of the University of Colorado found that Covid infections can wake up dormant cancer cells sleeping in the lungs, roughly doubling the probability that lung cancer survivors will die of that cancer. They also pointed out that because the vaccine reduces the severity of the Covid inflammatory response, it also reduces the chances of lung cancers popping up after people catch the disease.

So, the shot she was trying to get wasn’t just because she didn’t want to spend a week in bed with a sore throat and a fever (although that’s good enough): these are deadly real-life consequences of letting your vaccination (and the immunity it confers) slide.

The lack of a vaccine and the muttering of our pharmacist about “the feds” led us on a search for reasons why there’s no current vaccine anywhere in America right now, while other countries are happily vaccinating their people as you read these words. Turns out it appears to be mostly Bob Kennedy’s responsibility.

Manufacturers stopped making last year’s formula long ago, and the new formula for the 2026-2027 season that includes the new and truly awful XFG strain was initially approved by the FDA back in May. Last year we got the new fall vaccine on August 27th, but that agency still hasn’t granted final approval to the new vaccines, so nothing is shipping and won’t until late September or October.

And it’s not like this couldn’t have been predicted; every year since the pandemic we’ve seen a late summer wave as people travel and kids go back to school. The wave this year is particularly bad, most likely because so many people haven’t gotten their boosters and so our national immunity has waned.

Why the delay?

— Bob fired all seventeen medical professionals who were members of the CDC’s Vaccine Advisory Committee and replaced them with anti-vax quacks. A federal judge, noting their lack of genuine qualifications, stayed Bob’s appointments in March (along with Bob’s rewriting the childhood vaccine schedule) so the committee that authorizes your insurance company to pay for your shots has been legally frozen for five months. If you want a shot, be prepared to fork over a hundred bucks or more. If you can find one.

— Bob also cancelled 22 mRNA vaccine research projects worth close to half a billion dollars, this same year that a breakthrough was announced with the development of an mRNA vaccine that knocks out the deadly skin cancer melanoma.

These new mRNA vaccines are safe and effective, and offer dramatic promise for fighting everything from regular diseases to cancers of all types. Because they’re made in a lab instead of grown in eggs like the conventional flu (and many other) vaccines, they can be quickly and inexpensively mass produced, something that’s particularly useful for rapidly mutating viruses like Ebola, Covid, and the flu.

And just two weeks ago, with Bob standing next to him, Trump signed an executive order cutting recommended childhood immunizations from 17 down to 11, ordered the MMR shot split into three separate injections (there is no scientific basis for this whatsoever), and ordered Todd Blache’s Justice Department to start suing states that don’t hand out religious and other exemptions for childhood vaccinations to pretty much any parent who wants one.

The result of this and Kennedy’s trash-talking vaccines for years is quickly becoming evident: Americans are dying. Two unvaccinated people died of measles in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania this week; they’re the first measles deaths in the US this year, and the first in that state in 35 years.

Why Lancaster County and why now?

Five years ago, on July 31, 2021, when he held no federal office, Bob Kennedy showed up at the Lancaster County farming fair and spoke to a crowd of around 1,500 people. He told them a joke about measles, saying when he got it as a kid it let him stay home and watch TV all week with his brothers and sisters.

The crowd laughed.

He then told them the treatment for measles was chicken soup and vitamin A, and warned that the feds were coming to vaccinate the local Amish community because “they cannot stand the fact that you are healthy.”

They’re not laughing now. They’re dying.

Paul Offit has written about that speech at length, and he noted that Bob had been to Samoa where he apparently cautioned people about vaccines. As a result, Offit notes, 83 people died, most of them children.

Measles vaccine coverage among kids in Lancaster County has fallen, since 2017, from 95.5% down to 87.6%. Because measles is the single most contagious disease known to humanity — it can linger in the air for several hours and infects 9 out of 10 unvaccinated people who walk through that cloud and take a breath — a community really needs to maintain around a 95% vaccination rate to avoid big outbreaks.

After yesterday’s two measles deaths, Bob called Governor Josh Shapiro to offer federal help. Shapiro turned him down, telling reporters:

“I was very, very blunt with him, and I made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania.

“There’s real life consequences to spreading misinformation.”

Nationally, we’ve seen >2,700 cases this year so far, the worst year for measles since 1991, and we’re about to lose the “measles elimination” status we earned in 2000. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Bob if he accepts any responsibility for that awful record, he said, “Absolutely not.”

So now that we know the “How,” what’s the answer for the “Why?”

Mary Trump, a brilliant writer and commentator, licensed clinical psychologist, and Trump’s niece who’s known him and his family since childhood, was on my radio/TV program yesterday and we discussed one possible answer: Vladimir Putin wants Americans sick and broke and Donald — who’s talked with Putin for more than an hour about every 2 weeks since his inauguration and whose CIA director is in Moscow right now — could be happy to oblige.

Pretty much everything Putin has asked of Trump or would want from him he’s gotten:— Cut off weaponry to Ukraine,— Reduce American troop strength in Germany,— Block NATO membership for Ukraine,— Trying to recognize parts of Ukraine as Russian territory,— Ordering State and Treasury to give sanctions relief to Russian oligarchs,— Letting the nuclear START treaty expire,— Disbanding the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force,— Closing the State Department’s R/FIMI office that mapped Russian disinformation efforts targeting Americans,— Gutting CISA’s election security teams including the Election Security Resilience Team that could block Russian election-manipulation efforts and regional advisors, and more.

When Biden was president in 2021, our State Department nailed three English-language online outlets run by Russian intelligence that were trash-talking the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins published a study in the American Journal of Public Health showing how Russian troll accounts were “using vaccines as a wedge” to create the appearance of a debate among American scientists when none existed. They concluded the Russian goal was to “corrode trust in vaccines” among the American public.

Only two cabinet secretaries have ever been successfully impeached: Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876 and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in 2024. Neither was convicted and removed from office by the Senate.

Nonetheless, Congresswoman Haley Stevens filed articles of impeachment against Kennedy last December, charging abuse of authority and citing his efforts to undermine American public health.

While there’s no chance Mike Johnson or Republicans in the House will allow articles of impeachment against Kennedy to even get out of committee this year, supporting such an effort could — if Democrats can take the House and Senate this fall — pave the way for a return to normalcy either through replacing him or simply chastising him.

When Republicans impeached Mayorkas, they established the modern precedent of impeachment as a remedy for a secretary who’s considered incompetent by the majority of Congress. 

The Daily with Sarah Jones via  PoliticusUSA, Trump’s Mail In Ballots Executive Could Be Blocked Again As Soon As Tomorrow  , Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, Aug 26, 2026. 23 state attorneys general have filed a new motion seeking to block Trump’s mail-in ballots executive order, and the injunction could be granted as soon as tomorrow afternoon.

It looks like Trump’s victory would allow him to implement his executive order attacking mail-in voting, which could be very short-lived.

23 state attorneys general are requesting a motion to block the implementation of Trump’s order.

Plaintiff States satisfy the requirements for temporary and preliminary injunctive relief and a stay under 5 U.S.C. § 705. First, Plaintiff States are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims because the Rule violates the horizontal and vertical separation of powers, commandeers Plaintiff States’ election officials to implement an unlawful federal program, exceeds Defendants’ statutory authority under Title 39 of the U.S. Code and transgresses specific prohibitions therein, is arbitrary and capricious and contrary to statute, and contravenes both the Voting Rights Act and the Privacy Act.

Second, Plaintiff States are suffering and will continue to suffer immediate and irreparable harm if Defendants are allowed to implement the Rule as to Plaintiff States’ federal elections. The Rule forces Plaintiff States to upend their core activities in preparation for the rapidly approaching midterm elections and to divert their limited resources to implementing the Rule.

Mail-in ballots will begin to be sent to voters by the end of next week in some states. If the USPS rule is left in place, states will need to scramble to comply with it, but this may not be an issue for very long.

The AGs also argued that blocking the rule serves the public interest: “Third, the balance of equities and public interest weigh in favor of a temporary restraining order and an emergency stay, followed by an expedited preliminary injunction and stay of the Rule’s effective date, to halt the Rule’s significant disruption of mail voting until this case can be resolved on the merits.”

Josh Gerstein of Politico posted on X that a new block of the mail-in ballots rule could be issued as soon as tomorrow afternoon: “My takeaway: Talwani might act to block the plan (again) anytime after noon tomorrow. The Sept. 3 hearing is only on the PI, not the TRO.”

Several forms of action are in play. The judge could issue a preliminary injunction blocking the implementation of the USPS rule while the motion for a restraining order is argued.

With so little time before the midterm election, it is likely that Trump’s order and the USPS rule will be tied up in court until after the midterm election.

Time is definitely on the side of Democrats in this case.

The effort to block mail-in voting would harm both Republicans and Democrats. Trump is under the mistaken belief that limiting vote-by-mail will only hurt Democrats, but Republicans have been relying on vote-by-mail for decades. The legal fight over Trump’s meddling with mail-in voting is likely to be long and complicated, and won’t save the House and Senate majorities for the GOP in November.

The Contrarian, Opinion: What Is Going on with Vote By Mail? Ben Sheehan, Aug 26, 2026. Civics expert Ben Sheehan explains the latest after SCOTUS’s confusing ruling on Trump’s executive order earlier this week. 

Back in March, Trump issued an executive order which told the Department of Homeland Security to make a list of everyone in every state who is a citizen and at least 18 years old by election day, and those lists get sent to each state.

The Postal Service may only send mail-in ballots to the people on those lists, and they have to use a special barcode to track the ballots. If states send ballots to anyone not on those lists, state and local officials can be prosecuted by the federal government. President Trump says this is all to ensure that only citizens vote in the midterms.

I will just add that there is no evidence of widespread voting by non-citizens. We are talking about a few dozen votes over the course of 40 plus years, and out of more than 2 billion votes cast, an infinitesimal percent.

So basically, just ignore everything else from earlier this week. The states and others who sued over this executive order, the Supreme Court basically said they sued too early. They have to wait until the Postal Service rule is actually official.

Now as of today, Wednesday, August 26th, the Postal Service rule is official, so states can sue over it. They already have. I imagine those lawsuits will quickly end up back at the Supreme Court in the next week or so. And because the election is ten weeks away, if states have to comply with a new rule, it will really change how they do vote by mail. Some states start mailing ballots out in just a few weeks.

To be clear, Trump cannot directly affect our elections. States run our elections. It says so in the Constitution. Congress gets some say. The president does oversee homeland security. He can try to regulate the post office, which is a government agency but an independent one, with an executive order.

And yes, the president appoints members of the board that oversees the post office. Thirty percent of Americans vote by mail, and eight states vote entirely by mail.

Here’s what I think is going to happen. I think the Supreme Court will rule against this executive order for the midterms, but it might allow it to go into effect in 2028.

I just don’t see them allowing this rule to be implemented so late in the game. But I could be wrong. We’ll know more for sure in the next week or so.

Politico, Trump signs controversial beef import plan despite ranchers' backlash, Grace Yarrow, Aug 26, 2026. A slew of Republican lawmakers and beef industry allies have come out against President Donald Trump's plans that aim to lower the cost of ground beef.President Donald Trump speaks.

President Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Wednesday that aims to lower ground beef prices by dramatically boosting imports from other countries — despite outrage from Republicans and the administration’s allies in the beef industry.

Trump’s proclamation will remove tariffs from 300,000 metric tons of imported lean beef trimmings for 90 days. He said the countries supplying the beef would sell it at 25 percent below current market prices, as he first announced on Truth Social Friday.

The administration is also eyeing a separate group of industry-friendly policy updates to roll out alongside the import plan, in hopes of quelling wrath from the beef industry and some Republican lawmakers, according to two people familiar with the plans who were granted anonymity to discuss them. Many of the industry’s demands — like mandating country-of-origin labels on beef products sold in the U.S. — would take congressional action.

Trump’s proclamation does not specify which countries will supply the beef imports, as questions have swirled from consumers and industry leaders about which countries even have the supply of trimmings to export in the short term. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters Tuesday that she was not “privy” to that information and that U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer was working closely with Trump on the details of the imports.

Trump said he could also halt the increased imports if beef prices don’t come down or if countries do not sell at a 25 percent discount the president said he had negotiated.

“If the action taken in this proclamation does not result in a lower sale price of imported ground beef, I may end the action taken in this proclamation in order to, among other things, prevent a windfall to foreign producers,” Trump’s proclamation said.

But all of that would ignore the preponderance of historical and recent data that point to 2026 being a good Democratic year.

 More On U.S. Trade War With Canada

The New Republic, Analysis: How Trump’s Crazed Fury at Canada Is Already Backfiring Badly for Him, Greg Sargent, right, Aug. 25, 2026. The escalating trade war with Canada will hit hard in the Midwest—right where some of the most important contests in the midterms will be decided.

Here’s a bit of poetic justice for you: The Democratic bid for control of Congress just might end up running right through the very heart of Trump country. We’re talking about parts of the Midwest that helped drive Donald Trump’s two successful presidential bids—states like Iowa and Ohio, which he drove deeper into the red column, and states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, which Trump flipped outright twice.

That reality explains why Trump’s extended eruption of fury at Canada—he has now redoubled trade hostilities with our longtime ally—is very bad news for the GOP. Trump’s new trade war with Canada threatens fresh harms to local economies in the Midwest—and it’s handing Democrats a weapon in the homestretch of these contests to win over rural Americans and others who are experiencing all this endless derangement in very concrete ways.

“It’s a really dangerous time to be a farmer in the Midwest,” Josh Turek, the Democrat who is challenging Representative Ashley Hinson for the open Senate seat in Iowa, told me.

On Monday, Trump exploded wildly at Canada over the implosion of trade negotiations between the two countries. That collapse in talks over the weekend unleashed 50 percent tariffs by the United States on a large range of Canadian goods, and Canada will now retaliate with tariffs on targeted American exports. Talks are reportedly suspended until after the midterms.

What triggered Trump is that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had refused to be cowed by the American threat of tariffs. So Trump threatened yet more tariffs on still more Canadian goods next year, raging: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!”

Whether we “need” Canada or not, the fact remains that a lot of trade currently takes place between the two countries. You know who actually can’t afford for all this to be upended right now? Republican incumbents and candidates in the Midwest, that’s who. So “we” may not “need” Canada, but Republicans in the region really “need” Trump to not rupture trade relations with our ally for the next two months.

Here’s why: Control of the House will turn in no small part on three very competitive House races in Iowa, one in Wisconsin, and three or four in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Turek is locked in a dead heat in the Iowa Senate race, and winning there could be pivotal to a Democratic Senate takeover. So could a win by Sherrod Brown, who leads slightly in Ohio. And anything that helps Abdul El-Sayed keep the highly contested Michigan Senate seat blue will also be critical.

These areas will very likely feel the political impact of Trump’s new trade war. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs are expected to hit American exports of agricultural machinery, and that could hit Iowa manufacturers. The state’s very competitive 2nd congressional district, for instance, includes facilities run by John Deere, Altorfer (which deals in Caterpillar products), and other farm equipment concerns.

“Tariffs don’t just hurt our farmers, they hurt our manufacturers, as well,” Lindsay James, the Democratic candidate in that district, told me. She added that her GOP opponent, businessman Joe Mitchell, will be a “rubber stamp” for Trump’s trade wars, which she labeled “impulsive.”

Such messages could land disproportionately in Iowa because Trump’s trade wars have already given the state’s agricultural economy a thorough pounding.

Turek, meanwhile, also singled out the coming impact of trade hostilities on farm equipment manufacturers. He noted that tariffs are contributing to a perfect storm in Iowa, which also includes Trump’s war on Iran, which is driving up fertilizer and diesel prices, and his effort to reduce beef prices by importing huge amounts of it, which will undercut American producers.

“You talk to farmers, and they’ll tell you it’s one gut punch after another,” Turek told me, adding that he constantly hears Iowans tell him: “This is betrayal.”

Or take Wisconsin’s 3rd congressional district, where Rebecca Cooke, who grew up on a dairy farm, is challenging GOP incumbent Derrick Van Orden. In Wisconsin, local press coverage of Trump’s latest trade-warring is already forecasting that the state’s exports of dairy goods and farm equipment to Canada could be hit by retaliatory tariffs.

“It’s going to impact the district in a huge way,” Cooke told me. This could resonate in Wisconsin because the state, like Iowa, already has gotten badly hurt by previous Trump trade-warring, Cooke said: “Farmers are already feeling the squeeze, and this will hurt agricultural communities even more.”

All this gives Dems a potent line of attack on incumbent Republicans: that they’ve done nothing to resist the tariffs, even though the levies constitute a huge usurpation of their own power—that is, of Congress’s power to tax.

“Derrick Van Orden has gone right along with whatever Trump says,” Cooke told me. “He’s a lackey for this administration.”

In fact, the trade-warring may be providing a backdoor way to make Trump a liability for GOP candidates even in places that backed Trump by large margins. Voters there appear prepared to agree that policies coming out of Washington are hurting them. So some Democrats are making their races about GOP incumbents’ failure to protect voters from those policies, without too much specific talk about Trump that might trigger negative partisanship.

This dynamic may prove particularly pronounced in the Midwest. Some experts on the region point out that it’s already been disproportionately hurt by Trump’s trade wars, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee tells me it plans to make the latest round a liability for “every Midwestern Republican.”

Note that Trump’s latest eruption vows 50 percent tariffs on a whole slew of Canadian cars, trucks, and automotive parts. How do you think rupturing the auto industry’s complex cross-border supply chains—which are so deeply interconnected that they’ve been called the “Great Lakes supercluster”—will go over in Michigan and Ohio?

There’s still more. Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, points out that Canada is the state’s number one trading partner, with agricultural crops and equipment constituting a “huge industry” in all its competitive House districts. Speaking about Trump’s new trade-warring, Bonder said: “You can’t overstate how much this hurts Pennsylvania’s economy.”

Ron Brownstein recently identified a paradox embedded in Trumpism. Trump’s political successes have been particularly transformative in Midwestern states with large percentages of blue-collar whites in them. Yet in these midterms, his profound unpopularity is now pushing even states he’s turned deep red—like Iowa and Ohio—to revert to competitive swing states.

There’s another layer of irony here, however. The shock of Trump’s 2024 victory led many commentators to conclude that his right-wing populist nationalism had touched a deep, authentic wellspring of sentiment in the American electorate. Yet his mass deportations have unleashed ferocious national opposition. His “America First” unshackling of the U.S. military from international commitments and alliances is absolutely tanking his public standing. And now, if his tariffs and trade-warring help produce a massive electoral backlash—right in the region long mythologized as the heartland of Trumpian populism—it would represent a fitting and highly satisfying outcome indeed.

Public Notice, Trump shitposts fail to win support for Canadian trade war, Liz Dye, Aug. 26, 2026. Elbows up! Donald Trump spent the past week cozying up to North Korea and attacking Canada. Whatever claim the US had to be a beacon of free trade — not to mention moral leadership — has been demolished like the East Wing of the White House.

And so it was probably inevitable the president would dig the prototypical failed economic policy of the 20th century out of history’s dumpster and operationalize it against our closest ally.

Smoot-Hawley tariffs are back, baby! Sure, aggressive levies cutting off trade as a means of stimulating domestic industry never worked for those people. In fact, it effectively crashed the global economy and turned a recession into the Great Depression. But it may work for us!Tariff Man's new assault on Canada is his dumbest yetTariff Man's new assault on Canada is his dumbest yetLiz Dye·Jul 23Read full story

It will not work for us. But it may make us so roundly despised that it galvanizes other countries to reimagine the world order so as to cut out the one, heretofore indispensable nation.USMCA? Never heard of it!

Upon returning to office, Trump immediately took a Sharpie to “the most modern, up-to-date, and balanced trade agreement in the history of our country, with the most advanced protections for workers ever developed” — also known as the USMCA, which he himself negotiated in 2018 as a replacement for NAFTA

"We don't need anything that Canada has, we don't need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have,” he blustered in June. “We don't need their cars, we don't need their lumber, we don't need their energy, we don't need anything that they have."

This is self-evidently ridiculous.

Canada supplies roughly 80% of the potash American farmers use as fertilizer. Midwest refineries are built to run on heavy Canadian sour crude, and the pipeline infrastructure simply doesn't exist to swap in lighter, American-produced oil from places like Texas. Canadian hydropower fuels a significant share of the electricity supply in New York and New England. And the auto and auto parts trade between the two countries, already strained by Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs, is about as integrated as two countries' economies get.

And yet Trump negotiated as if Canadians could never say no, even as he demanded crippling concessions and lobbed humiliating insults at our stalwart ally. Trade talks were at an impasse after 18 months of threats and taunts about annexing our northern neighbor. But in July the prospect of an additional 50 percent levy on a sprawling list of Canadian goods forced Canadians back to the negotiating table. And last week, with the major principles agreed, Trump congratulated both sides for striking “a very fair deal.”

"Our farmers are going to be thrilled; our manufacturers are going to be thrilled," he gushed. "And basically, we have no tariffs going into Canada anymore."

Instead talks collapsed Friday night, when Prime Minister Mark Carney announced he was suspending negotiations and recalling Canada’s negotiators to Ottawa.Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comMark Carney: "In recent days. the US proposed new terms that were uneconomic, unfair, and undermine the net benefits for Canada, and called into question the reliability of any deal. In short, they asked too much and they offered too little ... You're at war when you get attacked. We got attacked."Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:05:46 GMTView on Bluesky

By Saturday morning, the Trump administration had levied tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian goods — hockey sticks, building materials, beer, cheese. Carney promises dollar-for-dollar retaliation, hitting US steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp, paper, and electronics starting September 8.

The New York Times and Washington Post confirm that the deal fell apart because the Trump administration attempted to extract a fresh round of concessions at the last minute.

After domestic companies aggressively lobbied Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the US backpedaled on reductions in steel and aluminum tariffs. Plus Lutnick insisted on excluding Ontario-built heavy trucks (the Ford F-350, F-450, and GM Silverado) in hopes of forcing carmakers to relocate production to the US.

And if you’ve got a problem, that crank Peter Navarro can make it worse.

“Navarro and Lutnick were both yelling at Greer saying: ‘What are you doing? This is stupid. You know, we’re not giving these things away,’” a source told the Post.

Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the Canadians would never go for it, and he was right.Get ready for the next big bailoutGet ready for the next big bailoutPaul Waldman·September 30, 2025Read full story

America’s last-minute demands included: dropping French language labeling and content requirements, an absolute non-starter for the country’s restive Québécois population; getting rid of “buy Canadian” government initiatives while leaving similar “buy American” measures in place; and restoring US-produced liquor to Canadian shelves. That last decision lies with each province, and Ontario Premier Doug Ford told Carney he wouldn’t go along with it.

Trump responded with a grotesque post comparing Ford to his dead brother, calling Carney “Governor,” and lying about Canada’s unemployment rate. (In reality, Canada has a higher labor force participation rate than the US.)Lots of “bluster” from Doug Ford, who is the Premier of the Canadian Province of Ontario, but who is better known as the less charismatic, intelligent, and overall unimpressive brother of the late, great, Rob Ford. America has been carrying Canada for decades, but no longer! The U.S.A. will always be far bigger, richer, and stronger than Canada. Without the United States, Canada couldn’t survive — It’s where they get all of their money and, because of their current bad leadership, primarily Governor Carney, and his Flunky, Ford, they will not be allowed to keep taking advantage of the United States — Their key to survival. Remember, much of the Electricity, Oil, and Gas that Canada gets is transported through the U.S.A. Someone should get these clowns to “fall in line” or, the consequences for Canada will be far WORSE! Canada’s Unemployment Rate is now at 10%, and rapidly rising. Their businesses are fleeing for the United States, and it’s all because of their failed policies, and inept leadership! The days of ripping off our Farmers, and other Businesses, are OVER! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

The president is currently shitposting about changing the name of Lake Ontario, “in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.”Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comTrump posts a graphic showing Lake Ontario renamed as "Lake America"Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:26:21 GMTView on Bluesky

But what actually killed the deal was a demand that Canada subordinate its independent trade policy to the ever-changing whims of the United States — specifically, that Ottawa agree in advance to match tariffs imposed by Washington, even when it would override Canada’s existing trade agreements.

Per the New York Times:

The United States wanted Canada to apply US tariffs to other countries, particularly when it came to steel, now and in the future: If the United States changed policy and place higher tariffs on certain goods from a third country, Canada would need to do the same, even if it already had a trade agreement in place, a Canadian official said.

American negotiators characterize this as a measure to prevent Canada becoming a passthrough conduit for goods excluded by US tariffs. But no sovereign country could voluntarily surrender its trade policy, much less yoke itself to an erratic neighbor whose maniac leader imposes a new tariff scheme every week.

“Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen,’” Carney said Saturday. “We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away.”

This echoes a major speech Carney gave in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in which he exhorted middle powers to band together rather than rely on the United States to ensure their national and financial security.

“You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination,” he warned, adding that “hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.”

And Canada is putting its money where its mouth is. Only two nations imposed retaliatory tariffs in response to Trump’s two prior rounds of levies: Canada and China. In fact, that response is now being cited as justification for the latest tariffs.

As America reverts to naked suzerainty, Canada hopes to lead the international resistance movement — yet another reason the Trump administration was so insistent on blocking the country’s power to enter into its own international trade deals.

But a funny thing happens when a world leader actually puts in the effort to explain his policy choices. Carney’s approval rating is at 60 percent, and polls show that 76 percent of Canadians support his decision to walk away from trade talks with the US.Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comCanadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne: "Canada will match the US tariffs dollar for dollar, rate for rate. Effective Sept 8, Canada will impose counter-tariffs of up to 15, 25, or 50 percent on $27.6 billion of imports from the US."Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:16:11 GMTView on Bluesky

The fallout from these tariffs will absolutely hit Canadians harder than Americans, with potential job losses in the tens of thousands. But Canadians are gearing up for the fight, and a movement to boycott US-made goods is picking up steam. In contrast, Americans feel no patriotic support for Trump’s capricious levies. And as Politico points out, swing state voters really don’t like these tariffs. That may have an impact in November, with the midterms serving as a referendum on Trump’s handling of the economy.

Naturally Susan Collins is concerned. And with Trump’s tariffs about to increase costs for farmers, builders, and autoworkers, she’s got a reason to be — as do her fellow Republicans in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa. Because Canada’s leaders have done the work to ensure that their citizens are prepared to absorb the pain from this trade war.

Carney spent the past nine months making the case that Canada must fight back against the United States to ensure its survival. Trump spent that time posting AI slop and pretending that the US has nothing to lose. One of these men has a 30 percent approval rating 70 days before an election.

Looks like it’s time for Tariff Man to test his theories … again.

When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win. Example, when we are down $100 billion with a certain country and they get cute, don’t trade anymore-we win big. It’s easy! 

Hope for America, Opinion: Only the good die young,  Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 26, 2026. At 6:58 this morning, just as the sun was rising over Washington, D.C., Donald Trump was already wide awake inside the White House, posting on social media about renaming lakes to provoke and harass one of our closest allies. “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to doing [sic] much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

This was just the first of dozens of posts he made throughout the day while the White House kept him locked away from the waiting press and public view. This is what the 80-year-old man entrusted with the most powerful office in the world decided to do as soon as he woke up.

Like many others, this was the first thing I saw when I woke up this morning, and it made me stop and stare at my phone, asking myself again how we got here. How did we go from stability, coexistence, and allyship to a President of the United States who wakes up looking for new ways to torment our neighbor? I found myself thinking about the 80 years Donald Trump has spent on this planet, how much he has been given during that time that most could only dream of having, and how much harm he has done and continues to do with it. Most days I might have cast aside the pettiness of the whole thing and moved on to the next story, but my mind kept coming back to the absurdity of a world filled with problems he has the power to help solve, and how at every turn and opportunity he instead spends so many of his waking moments searching instead for something else he can make angrier, more divided or completely destroy.

What I didn’t know was that just a few hours later, everything I was thinking about would take on an entirely different weight. Because this afternoon, Dolly Parton died. She was 80 years old, too. And suddenly, I found myself thinking about 80 years in an entirely different way. About how much life that really is. How many choices it holds. How many opportunities we are given to make someone else’s life a little better, or a little worse. And ultimately, how differently two people can choose to spend the time they are given.

Trump wasn’t finished with Canada; the lake post was only the beginning. He was fixated for hours. By 9:40 AM, Trump was attacking Canada again, accusing our neighbor of “Ripping Off” the United States for decades, calling them “the most difficult and unreasonable” country he deals with, and declaring that “they are not a State, and will be entitled no longer.” Twenty minutes later, he claimed the United States loses “on average, 60 Billion Dollars a year with Canada,” another number thrown into the world to convince Americans that one of our oldest allies is somehow our enemy. Four minutes after that, his account shared a map of the Great Lakes with “Lake Ontario” crossed out in red and “Lake America” stamped over it in shiny gold, complete with a “Team Trump” logo at the bottom. This is what our foreign policy has been reduced to under the Trump administration. There is no real strategy or diplomacy. Only threats, insults, and poorly executed propaganda. The President of the United States is using the power and reach of his office to torment a neighboring democracy because they will not bow down to his ever-changing demands. That is where we are now.

What made the whole thing even more troubling and, really, dangerous was what Trump posted in between those attacks. At 9:32 AM, he praised his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea,” while repeating that he had instructed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to substantially reduce joint military exercises with South Korea, bending American military policy to please the North Korean dictator. So within the same hour that Trump was threatening Canada, one of our closest allies and a democracy that has stood beside us for generations, he was bragging about doing a favor for Kim Jong Un. And I don’t know how we are supposed to look at that and pretend any of this is normal. Canada is not threatening us with nuclear weapons. They are not starving their own people, imprisoning political opponents, or running one of the most repressive governments on earth. They are our neighbor and our ally. Yet Trump treats them like an enemy that needs to be punished while treating a brutal dictator like a friend whose approval he desperately wants.

And this is so much bigger than another unhinged social media post. The President of the United States is using American power to antagonize the countries that have historically stood beside us while bending over backward for the dictators who threaten them. He sees loyalty and cooperation from our allies as weakness, but cruelty and absolute power from men like Kim Jong Un as something worthy of respect. It is completely backward, and every time he does this, he makes the world a little more dangerous. He weakens relationships that took generations to build, undermines the alliances that have helped prevent larger wars, and sends a very clear message to dictators around the world that if they flatter Donald Trump enough, he might be willing to give them anything they want, no matter the cost.

And this isn’t just about who Donald Trump considers a friend or an enemy. It’s about the fact that this same warped thinking now runs through nearly every part of our government. He gravitates toward the cruelest people, embraces the worst ideas, dismisses experts who tell him things he does not want to hear, and surrounds himself with people willing to reinforce whatever conspiracy or grievance has captured his attention that day. The things that should protect us become the things he attacks, and the people and ideas that should frighten us become the ones he elevates. We can laugh at the absurdity of “Lake America,” but there is nothing funny about what happens when this way of thinking begins determining American policy. Because we might see what he says as ridiculous and unworthy of even our attention, but millions of his devoted followers don’t. They believe him, and they repeat it. They make decisions based on it as if what he says is the gospel, and eventually the consequences become real people whose lives are changed, or even lost. Today, two people died because of the disinformation coming from this administration.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health confirmed today that two unvaccinated people have died of measles in Lancaster County, the first measles deaths in Pennsylvania in 35 years. Hundreds of people have already been infected in the state, dozens have been hospitalized, and vaccination rates in Lancaster County have fallen below the level needed to protect the community from outbreaks like this one.

Lancaster is a beautiful place I have visited many times before. It is my husband’s hometown, and we were heartbroken to hear that this was happening there. These are real people, real families, and a real community now dealing with a disease that most of us grew up believing had been left in the past. And that is what makes this so difficult to accept. Because this did not have to happen.

We know how to prevent measles. We have known for decades. These deaths should not have happened. Yet instead of protecting the progress that has been made against the spread of measles, this administration has spent its time elevating conspiracy over science, putting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, and undermining confidence in vaccines that have saved countless lives. Trump just signed an executive order this month calling for the combination MMR vaccine to be separated into individual shots, despite the lack of scientific evidence that doing so is safer. This is where all that disinformation eventually leads. It leaves parents afraid of the medicine that can protect their children, and communities vulnerable to diseases we already knew how to control.

Which makes what happened later today feel even more heartbreaking. The woman who used her own money to help fund vaccine research that would protect millions of people died this afternoon in Nashville. She was 80 years old. Her publicist confirmed she passed at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, surrounded by loved ones, after a brief battle with cancer. Her family asked that in lieu of flowers, people donate to her Imagination Library.

She was born on January 19, 1946, in a one-room cabin on the banks of the Little Pigeon River in Pittman Center, Tennessee, in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. She was the fourth of 12 children. Her family had no electricity or running water. The walls were lined with newspaper for insulation. The doctor who delivered her was paid with a bag of cornmeal. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, was a sharecropper who could not read or write. She described her family as “dirt poor,” but she also said, “We didn’t have any money, but we were rich in things that money don’t buy. Like love and kindness and understanding.”

She could have been bitter about those years and resented the poverty, cramped cabin, and the weight of growing up with eleven siblings and parents who had almost nothing to give but love. But she never did. She adored her father. She spoke about him for the rest of her life. She had more pride than money could ever buy for him. “Daddy was a very smart man,” she said. “And I often wondered what he could have done had he been able to read and write.”

He inspired her to start the Imagination Library, a program she launched in 1995 in her home county of Sevier County, Tennessee, to mail one free book per month to every enrolled child from birth to age five, regardless of family income. It started as a small local effort. It became the largest children’s book-gifting program in the world. Over 300 million books have been mailed to children in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland. More than three million books go out every single month. All because a girl from a one-room cabin loved her father enough to make sure no other child would grow up without the chance to read as he had.

But that was not all she built. In 1988, she created the Dollywood Foundation and a program called the Buddy Program, which gave $500 to every seventh and eighth grader in her area who graduated from high school. The local dropout rate went from 35 percent to six percent. She covered 100 percent of tuition, fees, and books for any of her 11 thousand Dollywood employees who wanted to continue their education. After the Gatlinburg wildfires in 2016, she gave $1,000 a month for six months to every family that lost a home, and raised millions more. After Hurricane Helene in 2024, she donated $1 million of her own money and another $1 million from her businesses.

And in April of 2020, when the world was shutting down and the virus was spreading faster than anyone could contain it, Dolly Parton donated one million dollars to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. That money funded what researchers later called the “critical” early stages of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. When she received her first dose on camera in March of 2021, she sang a version of “Jolene” with the word “vaccine” and told the country, “Don’t be such a chicken squat. Get out there and get your shot.” She died today at Vanderbilt. The same hospital where her donation helped fund the vaccine that saved millions of lives and continues to save lives.

Dolly Parton spent her 80 years building an empire of kindness, literacy, and generosity from almost nothing, and when she saw something broken, hurting, or someone who needed help, her instinct was always to ask what she could do to help.

Thank you to those of you who support this work with a paid membership. Your $5 a month is what allows me to keep writing every day and, just as importantly, to keep these posts free and accessible to everyone. Those who can pay are the reason those who can’t still have access. And right now, with so much at stake heading into the midterms, that matters more than ever. If you’re in a position to join, I’d be grateful to have you with us.Subscribed

Donald Trump has spent his 80 years showing us almost the exact opposite instinct. He was born into enormous wealth, inherited the advantages and access that came with his family name, and has spent much of his life trying to make the world around him a monument to himself. And now he is doing it to our country. He demolished the East Wing of the White House to make way for a massive new ballroom. He is pushing forward with plans for a 250 foot triumphal arch in Washington, larger than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. His Treasury Department announced that Donald Trump’s signature will become the first sitting president’s signature to appear on American paper currency. The Kennedy Center board he chairs has voted to put “Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump” across the facade of a national memorial built to honor John F. Kennedy, while also renaming the grounds “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.” And today, his administration went to court and argued that without the renovations and financial support tied to his recognition, the Kennedy Center could deteriorate to the point that it would eventually need to be torn down. This is what he does.

Maybe that is why today has hit so many of us so hard. It is not just that we lost Dolly Parton. It is what her loss illuminates about the moment we are living through. Her life feels like an answer to so many of the questions we keep asking ourselves about whether goodness still matters, whether one person can really make a difference, and whether it is worth continuing to try when so much of the world seems to be controlled by people determined to tear it apart.

She proved that it is. Dolly spent her life showing us that what matters in the end is how we made other people feel, who we helped along the way, and whether this world was any better because we were lucky enough to spend some time in it. She put books into children’s hands. She helped families rebuild their lives. She opened doors for people who needed a chance and gave without demanding anything in return. And perhaps the most beautiful part of her legacy is that she never had to tell us she was building one. She just kept doing good, year after year, until one day we looked around and realized how much of it she had left behind.

Today was another tough one. The hits just keep coming, and I found myself asking over and over again why someone with such a pure heart had to be taken from us while we are living through a moment that already feels so cruel. I keep trying to visualize the path out of this for us. A place somewhere on the other side of all of this where life starts to make sense again. Maybe you are feeling that way, too. Maybe your mind is going in 100 different directions these days, trying to figure out how we possibly get from where we are to where we need to be.

What I keep reminding myself in moments like these is that we do not have to know the entire path tonight. We just have to keep taking the next step together. The midterms are the next step, and then the presidential election after that. There are so many next steps we can take. We can organize the resistance and vote. We must speak out when something is wrong. We need to support the people and institutions doing good work and check on the people around us who are struggling. We must refuse to allow cruelty to make us cruel. And when we see a need that we have the ability to fill, we fill it.

That might be the most important thing Dolly Parton taught us. One person born with almost nothing can change millions of lives by deciding, over and over again, to give instead of take. We do not have to be billionaires or be famous. Most of us will never have our names on buildings, and that was never the point anyway. We just have to look around at the little piece of this world within our reach and ask ourselves what we can do to leave it better than we found it.

Tomorrow we will wake up to a morning without Dolly still here earthside, but she will live on in our hearts and her work will continue without her. The Imagination Library will keep mailing books to children who will never meet the woman responsible for putting them into their hands. The medical research she supported will continue helping people she will never know about. The students whose education she invested in will carry what she gave them into families and communities of their own for generations to come. The people she helped after fires and floods will wake up tomorrow in lives she helped them rebuild. She is gone, but the good she put into the world is not, and it never will be.

That is what legacy means. Not a name chiseled onto someone else’s building or a lake renamed in a fit of rage. Legacy is what keeps going after we are gone, measured in the lives we changed while we were here.

What Dolly taught us is that love and kindness always win. Many years from now, Dolly’s impact on this world will still be felt. For generations to come, there will still be people walking this earth whose lives are better because a little girl born in a one-room cabin in Tennessee grew up, remembered what it felt like to have nothing, and decided that if she ever had enough, she would give something back. Maybe that is the only legacy any of us should ever hope to leave behind: not proof that we were here, but proof that someone else’s life was better because we were. And on the darkest days, when it feels like cruelty and hate are winning, we need only remember that one life filled with enough goodness can keep changing this world long after it is gone.

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice  

Jeffrey Epstein's fellow sex trafficker and teen rapist Ghislaine Maxwell, left, is shown attending a social gathering with her friends Donald Trump and the onetime model and party girl Melania Knauss, the future First Lady Trump.

All Rise News, Tonight in Your Rights: Maxwell’s ‘frivolous’ challenge fails, Adam Klasfeld, right, Aug. 25, 2026. Far from spilling the beans on “25 men,” Maxwell refused to concede Epstein’s guilt, a judge noted. Also: Trump threatens the Kennedy Center

Ghislaine Maxwell’s attempt to overturn her sex trafficking convictions failed again on Tuesday, as a federal judge rejected her “meritless” and “frivolous” claims that new evidence from the Epstein Files Transparency Act exonerates her.

“Maxwell’s claims are all meritless and all or almost all are frivolous,” U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer wrote in a 67-page ruling. “The vast majority are procedurally barred—either because Maxwell made and lost the same arguments on direct appeal, or because she could have made such arguments on appeal but elected not to do so. And the purported ‘new’ evidence to which Maxwell points, principally materials released under the [Epstein Files Transparency Act], is largely irrelevant to the charges against Maxwell and does not support her claims of error. On the contrary, to the extent it is relevant, far from exculpating her, it incriminates her or reinforces the correctness of the legal rulings Maxwell challenges.”

In late 2021, Maxwell’s trial brought to light her reputation as Jeffrey Epstein’s “No. 2” and the “lady of the house” who participated in the grooming and abuse of minors and young women. Four of Epstein’s survivors testified against her, and multiple witnesses said that Maxwell touched their breasts in normalizing Epstein’s abuse. A federal jury quickly convicted her on five of the six counts against her, and a trial judge sentenced her to 20 years imprisonment.

Although her appeals failed all the way up to the Supreme Court, Maxwell won a transfer to a more lenient prison last year after speaking with Attorney General Todd Blanche. Once her appeals were exhausted, Maxwell ditched her legal team and filed a pro se petition challenging her verdict in the Southern District of New York.

It didn’t fare any better, but some of her allegations raised eyebrows.

For the first time, Maxwell alleged to have been selectively prosecuted because the government never indicted the four alleged Epstein co-conspirators and “25 men” she said had entered settlements with victims.

Engelmayer called this point “patently frivolous.”

“Maxwell served for years as Epstein’s indispensable recruiter and groomer in chief,” the judge noted. “She does not point to any other person who abetted Epstein in this manner or to this degree. That is fatal to Maxwell’s claim of selective prosecution, because she has not identified, and cannot identify, any offense participant ‘similarly situated’ to her. […] On the contrary, Maxwell has not implicated any other person in the child sex abuse scheme.”

In fact, the judge noted that Maxwell did “not even concede Epstein’s culpability” for the sex trafficking scheme.

As for the supposedly exculpatory Epstein files released by Congress, Judge Engelmayer found that they weren’t worth mentioning beyond stating that they are “at best irrelevant to—and many undermine” Maxwell’s claims.

Trump: Kennedy Center might need to be ‘taken down’

Nice cultural landmark that you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.

In one of its most brazen court filings to date, the Trump Justice Department suggested that losing its latest legal battle over the Kennedy Center might lead to the historic building’s demolition.

The Kennedy Center board has hinged plans for a $250 million renovation on honoring Trump as its patron.

“Without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down, with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years,” the government’s latest filing states. “Such a replacement will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy, but would be simpler and more economical to build, operate, and maintain.”

Before Trump’s second term, there was never any allegation that the Kennedy Center was on the brink of financial or structural collapse.

On the contrary, nonprofit tax records showed that the cherished cultural landmark was in fine financial health: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts reported more than $306 million in revenue and $266 million in expenses in 2024, the filing shows.

Far from single-handedly rescuing the Kennedy Center from oblivion, the Trump administration has driven ticket sales off a cliff. The Washington Post reported that sales dropped by half the week after Trump’s takeover of the board and kept cratering as artists and audience members alike left in droves. The Kennedy Center’s internal projections reportedly anticipate roughly $124 million in revenue for the 2026 fiscal year, less than half the amount pulled in during the last full year of the Biden administration.

Stacking the Kennedy Center’s board with his loyalists, Trump relentlessly pushed to turn the institution into a monument in his own honor and hitch its continued existence to his glorification.

In previous court filings, the Kennedy Center Board indicated that it revised the nonprofit’s bylaws to require clawing back all donations if the building weren’t renamed “Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” Multiple federal courts made clear that this poison pill provision doesn’t change federal law, which created the Kennedy Center as a memorial to the assassinated 35th president of the United States, not a shrine to a living one.

After delaying the removal of Trump’s name from the building, the Board plotted an alternative way to put it back up by writing that the building was “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” and “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.”

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper will hear arguments on whether to block that plan.

The Trump Justice Department has been setting the stage for that hearing by pushing the dubious narrative that the Kennedy Center is in “crisis,” “critical condition” and “terminal decline” — and whose sole possible savior, Trump, is being stymied by a “nakedly partisan” lawsuit by Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio board member.

Although the Kennedy Center board argues that it wants to pay tribute to Trump’s “extraordinary contributions,” Beatty responded that Trump is simply trying to take credit for signing legislation appropriating taxpayer money.

The New York Times quoted an attorney for preservation groups stating: “no one concerned about America’s historic landmarks can afford to treat this as idle speculation,” particularly after the Trump administration razed the East Wing of the White House to the ground — so far, with the Supreme Court’s blessing.

Ex-SPLC officer pleads not guilty

The only former Southern Poverty Law Center employee to be charged to date in the Trump Justice Department’s crusade against the storied civil rights group pleaded not guilty on Tuesday.

Heidi Beirich, the SPLC’s former chief financial officer, waived her appearance in court to enter her plea during her virtual arraignment, which was transmitted via Zoom teleconference.

In her absence, her attorney Michael Proctor indicated that she pleads not guilty to allegations that she engaged in wire fraud and money laundering in connection with the SPLC’s now-shuttered informant program.

Earlier this summer, the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post provided an early glimpse into the salacious allegations against Beirich in an article titled “SPLC boss funneled $1.2 million to lover in neo-Nazi group — pair even had joint bank account.”

The prosecution’s claims against Beirich closely mirror that report — down to the allegation that she had a “romantic relationship” with an informant inside the National Alliance. But a more complicated image emerges beneath the tawdry headline.

There is no indication in the indictment that Beirich personally “funneled” that amount of money to the informant, who received money from the SPLC over the course of “over 20 years” — at a rate of roughly $60,000 a year or less. Beirich left the SPLC in 2019, indicating that she didn’t have control over his payments for at least four of the years at issue.

What the SPLC received in return from the informant is a separate story. In 2014, the informant broke into the headquarters of the National Alliance and stole 25 boxes of the neo-Nazi group’s sensitive secrets. Beirich then used that information to publish an exposé titled “Chaos at the Compound,” implicating the extremist groups in alleged tax fraud.

The Trump Justice Department’s theory of the case holds that the SPLC defrauded donors by claiming that they were trying to “dismantle” hate groups when they actually “manufactured ” the racism that they opposed. If that were the case, it would make little sense to implicate a neo-Nazi group in what the SPLC’s post described as a “prosecutable pattern of embezzlement and income tax fraud going back at least 15 years.”

U.S. Magistrate Judge Kelly Pate temporarily scheduled Beirich and the SPLC institutionally to stand trial on the same date: Oct. 5, 2026.

The New Republic, Meta Caves With $17 Billion Settlement in Social Media Addiction Case, Aug. 26, 2026. Meta has agreed to a massive settlement in a lawsuit over how it intentionally designed Instagram and Facebook to addict children.

Meta has agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion in a settlement with 48 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Northern Mariana Islands, for the harm that its social media platforms have done to kids and teenagers.

Under the terms of the settlement, the company will agree to put a cumulative two-hour limit for users of Facebook and Instagram under 18, which will require a parent’s permission to override. Meta will also hide likes on minors’ posts by default and block “extreme makeup filters.” The only states that weren’t a part of the settlement were New Mexico, which won its own lawsuit against Meta earlier this year, and Florida.

Meta only has to pay 70 percent of the total sum unless TikTok, owned by Paramount Skydance, and YouTube, owned by Google parent Alphabet, also agree to pay states $5.3 billion between them and implement default time limits on their apps and services. If they don’t, Meta doesn’t have to pay the remaining 30 percent, which is also $5.3 billion.

Meta is still facing thousands of lawsuits from individuals, organizations, and school districts. New Mexico’s lawsuit resulted in the company having to pay $375 million in civil penalties, create a $567 million fund to address harms to children in the state, and put limits on how minors interact with the app.

The settlement is a rare agreement across political lines, with Democratic as well as Republican state and territorial attorneys general all seeking to hold Meta accountable. CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemingly sought to avoid accountability by cozying up to President Trump after the 2024 election, donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and changing Meta’s content moderation policies after meeting with the president.

But Meta is now on the record agreeing that restitution needs to be made due to the harms of its social media platforms, even if it isn’t outright admitting guilt. It remains to be seen if other social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube follow suit.

The settlement still needs approval from a federal judge.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

Hope for America, Opinion: Trump’s Rose Garden rambling, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 25, 2026. At 2:37 in the afternoon, a visibly frail President of the United States made his way slowly to the Rose Garden podium for a back-to-school event. But before he said a single word about education, he talked about the $400 million ballroom he is building to impress China’s President Xi.

When he finally turned to the children seated in front of him, he used the moment to repeat the debunked claim linking vaccines to autism, telling them they’re requesting parents get “five different shots” so their “beautiful little bodies can handle it.” This is the same man who launched Operation Warp Speed and demanded credit for it.

Vaccines were only one of the enemies he manufactured from that podium. He went after trans children, teachers, and critical race theory, then accidentally admitted what it has always been about when he said he hopes Democrats keep defending trans athletes because it makes it “impossible to win a race, politically.” This is what a leader does when he is terrified of losing power: he manufactures enemies out of the vulnerable and hopes fear will keep enough of the country behind him. First it was immigrants, then Mexico, then Greenland, then Zelenskyy, then Iran, then vaccines, then teachers and trans children. And now, Canada, a close ally and one of our largest trading partners, suddenly recast as an enemy over nothing. When one target stops producing enough fear, he finds another, because keeping us angry at each other is how he keeps us from turning our anger toward him.

He threatened to raise tariffs on Canadian vehicles and steel to 50 percent, called Prime Minister Carney a “clown,” mocked Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s late brother, and threatened to cut off Canada’s energy. Ford did not flinch, unloading on Trump as a bully and a “loser” before delivering the line heard loudest: “Your own people, President Trump, don’t even like you, and they’re going to speak loud and clear when it comes to the midterms.” That’s what this administration is working so hard to make us forget. Americans and Canadians are not strangers. We share family, history, towns, and lakes, and we have bled alongside one another. Canadians are not our enemy. Trans children are not our enemy. Teachers, immigrants, and our neighbors are not our enemy. Every time this regime points at another group and tells us to be afraid, the people dividing us are the ones we should be watching. Most of us already see through it, and we are exhausted by the daily performance of cruelty. We want to go back to being a country that does not have to worry about what its president might do to the people next door. And we can. The path back starts in November.

MSNOW, News and Comment: Trump Organization’s overseas projects proliferate amid conflict-of-interest concerns, Soorin Kim, Aug. 26, 2026. Unlike Donald Trump’s first term, the Trump family businesses are making millions for the president with new development and licensing deals. Trump adds at least $2 billion in personal profits during second term.

In January 2017, just days before President-elect Donald Trump took office for the first time, he announced that to avoid the appearance of any conflict of interest or foreign influence, he had backed away from a new $2 billion business deal with a Dubai-based developer that had built his Trump-branded golf course in the United Arab Emirates.

In January 2025, just days before returning to the White House for a second time, Trump announced that Damac Properties — the same Dubai-based developer he had turned down eight years prior — said it would invest $20 billion in building data centers in the U.S., as the president himself raked in more than $10 million in licensing and management fees over the years from that Dubai golf course.

The Trump Organization no longer appears to be shying away from new business opportunities with Damac, either. The president just last year earned at least $10 million in license fees tied to two projects with Damac in Abu Dhabi that have yet to be publicly announced, including in Al Raha Beach, according to his latest financial disclosure. Few details are known about those projects, as the Trump Organization has yet to officially announce new initiatives in those locations.

In contrast to the relative restraint of his first term — when concerns about potential conflicts of interest and foreign influence kept the Trumps away from new overseas projects, and even had them back away from pending projects in Russia, China, Israel and the UAE — Trump’s family businesses have approached foreign dealings in his second term by rapidly expanding their footprint around the globe, announcing new projects month after month.

According to MS NOW’s tally, based on the president’s personal financial disclosures and listings and public announcements from the Trump Organization and its partners, the Trump Organization has at least 19 new golf courses, hotels, resorts, towers and other projects currently under development or pending abroad.

At least a dozen of those projects have been announced by the Trump Organization since the 2024 presidential election, with another five unannounced projects listed in Trump’s financial disclosures — all of which suggests the president’s family business is moving full steam ahead in its pursuit of foreign business deals.‘Directly profiting’ off policies: Trump sons linked to 10 defense companies receiving gov. fundsDecember 22, 2025 / 08:49

The president earned almost $60 million from various real estate licensing and management deals around the world in just the first year of his second term, his latest financial disclosure shows. During the 2024 presidential election year, he brought in at least $45 million from similar foreign deals.

Trump, since his return to the White House, has distanced himself from the Trump Organization and has said he has given his older sons control of the family business to avoid potential conflicts of interest, as he did in his first term. But the president’s ethics pledge this time around is different from his first term’s, in that it no longer prohibits his family business from making new business deals with foreign (nongovernmental) partners — something the president vowed to stay away from the first time.

“The second term makes the first term look quaint,” said Robert Maguire, research director at the ethics group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, who has done extensive research into the Trump family businesses and the ethical issues connected to the presidency. “As soon as Trump became the presumptive nominee in 2024, he began a rash of incorporations that included a number of new foreign developments, and he has continued that throughout his presidency.”

“We’ve never had a dichotomy like this where people are in difficult straits financially and the president of the United States is literally making billions of dollars in office off of businesses,” Maguire said.

Asked about the Trump Organization’s foreign licensing deals and concerns about potential conflicts of interest, a White House official referred MS NOW to the Trump Organization, saying, “This has nothing to do with the White House.” The White House has previously stated that the president and his family have never engaged in business dealings raising conflicts of interest and never will, and that the president has only acted in accordance with the nation’s interest.

“For nearly five decades, the Trump Organization has been a leader across real estate, hotels, golf, and residential and commercial properties — a legacy built over generations of the Trump family’s deep roots in the property business,” a Trump Organization spokesperson told MS NOW. “The company operates completely separate from the presidency and is in full compliance with all ethics and conflict-of-interest laws.”

“In keeping with that commitment, the organization has not only implemented a comprehensive set of internal ethical standards, but also appointed an independent outside ethics advisor to ensure continued transparency, uphold the highest standards of integrity, and avoid even the appearance of impropriety,” the spokesperson said.Expansion in the Middle East

In 2015, when real estate developer and reality television star Donald Trump jumped into the world of politics, his overseas portfolio included his signature golf courses in Scotland and Ireland and a handful of Trump-branded buildings in South Korea, Turkey, Panama and Canada.

In the past decade, the Trump family’s foreign business portfolio has expanded exponentially. While the president’s prized golf courses in Scotland and Ireland continue to be his biggest sources of foreign real estate income, the Trump Organization’s footprint has expanded, particularly in the Middle East and in Asia, boasting at least 14 Trump family-owned or -branded luxury golf resorts, hotels, apartments, mansions and commercial buildings currently open and operating around the world.

Some of them, including the Dubai golf course developed by Damac, were launched before Trump’s first term, allowing new Trump-branded golf courses and luxury towers to pop up in India and the Philippines during his first term, as his pledge at the time didn’t prohibit the Trump Organization from continuing on with existing partnerships with foreign companies.Eric Trump, center, smiles as he look at the plans of their new project.Eric Trump looks over the proposed plan ahead of a signing ceremony with Qatar’s Diar and Dar Global in Doha on April 30, 2025.Karim Jaafar / AFP via Getty Images

After Trump left office, however, the Trump Organization’s foreign investments began to explore new deals abroad. The company’s major new overseas projects kicked off in 2022 with “the AIDA project,” a massive, $500 million project in Muscat, Oman. A Trump-branded commercial and residential complex — 100 meters above the shore, to include a golf course, a five-star hotel and luxury villas — was touted as “one of Oman’s most expansive and ambitious initiatives, marking a significant leap forward in the region’s luxury real estate and tourism industries.” The collaboration with Saudi Arabian developer Dar Al Arkan and its international arm, Dar Global, has already paid almost $10 million in licensing fees to Trump since 2022, according to financial disclosures.Since then, the Trump Organization announced at least five additional projects with either Dar Al Arkan or Dar Global, including an exclusive golf resort, hotels and mansions in Wadi Safar, Saudi Arabia; a Trump-branded skyscraper in Jeddah; and more Trump-branded towers in Dubai, Doha, Qatar and the Maldives.

In all, Trump has made at least $61 million in license fees just from projects with Dar Al Arkan and Dar Global since 2021, his financial disclosures show. The Saudi developer, which reportedly has deep ties to the Saudi government and royal stakeholders, has quickly become one of the Trump Organization’s biggest real estate partners.

At the same time as Trump touts his close relationships with the Saudi royals and leaders from the UAE and other Gulf nations, and hosts them at the White House, his family businesses reportedly get massive licensing deals and crypto investments from companies based in those countries. Critics continue to raise questions about potential conflicts of interest.

“It is true that the president and the vice president are exempted from a lot of the rules that federal officials have to follow,” Maguire said. “It is also true that every other president has followed these rules stringently.

“We had [Barack] Obama asking whether or not he could keep his Nobel Prize and getting approval for it; George Bush had a part ownership in the baseball team, the [Texas] Rangers, that he sold,” Maguire continued. “There’s a long history of presidents coming into office and making sure that the American people didn’t have reason to think that they were acting in anything other than the national interest.” 

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Desperate Men Do Desperate Things, William Kristol, right, Aug. 26, 2026. I regret to report that Donald Trump notched a couple of wins last night. He helped pull Sen. Darline Graham across the finish line in the runoff for the Republican Senate nomination in South Carolina, as she defeated Rep. Ralph Norman 52 to 48 percent. And the candidate Trump endorsed in the GOP runoff for governor of Oklahoma, Mike Mazzei, edged out state Attorney General Gentner Drummond for that nomination by half a point.

The good news is that both were close calls. The Trump-backed candidates came close to losing. Neither race should have been so heavy a lift. In addition to having the help of Trump, Graham and Mazzei were backed by their Republican governors, and their campaigns and outside supporters far outspent those of their rivals. It’s also worth noting that the non-Trump-endorsed candidates weren’t anti-MAGA or anti-ICE or anti-anything much the Trump administration has done. Still, they are Republicans who were opposed by Trump. And they almost won.

Put last night’s results together with Trump’s continued erosion in national polls, and one can say that the president is weaker than he perhaps has ever been politically, not just in terms of support among the general public, but even in his own party. Make no mistake: He still dominates and controls it. But in a new Reuters-Ipsos poll, which has only 33 percent of Americans overall approving of Trump’s job performance against 65 percent disapproving, one can see slippage even among Republicans: 18 percent of Republicans disapprove of Trump’s job performance, and of the 82 percent who approve, only 35 percent strongly approve while 47 percent only somewhat approve.

So the public, including some Republicans, is moving away from Trump. His key policies, such as the Iran war and the tariffs, are clearly failing. His senior officials, from Pete Hegseth to Scott Bessent, are floundering. Meanwhile, Trump himself looks ever more unhinged and erratic. He is a flailing president presiding over a failing administration.

But he remains a very dangerous president—more dangerous than ever, I’d say. Desperate men do desperate things. And desperate groups of men do desperate things. So a desperate Trump is becoming more megalomaniacal than ever. And the Trump administration is becoming ever more radical in pursuing its authoritarian projects.

Seeing that this is happening takes a little getting used to. After all, when “normal” politicians lose support, they correct course to try to repair the damage to their popularity. Even normal demagogues adjust their messages in light of their effectiveness.

But Trump is no longer a garden-variety demagogue, and his administration is less and less responsive to normal political constraints. Trump and his apparatchiks have almost given up on persuading people. They seem entirely focused on stoking the hatreds of their most rabid supporters, and on redoubling their attempts to exercise all the levers of power at their disposal—whether in the service of mass deportation and political retribution at home, or bullying allies and destroying the liberal order abroad.

And, of course, they seem very focused on staying in power—regardless of what the public wants or decides. Look at Trump’s personal behavior in recent months. Is this a man who will willingly give up the power and privileges, the pomp and circumstance of the presidency in 2029? Look at the men and women around him. Are they not going to do everything they can to prevent another administration from coming in and turning over the rocks of lawlessness and corruption? Do the grifters in high positions feel they can afford to lose power? Will the fanatics and authoritarians accept the proposition that their policies might be reversed? And will the elected officials of the Republican party insist on free and fair elections or the peaceful transfer of power to the opposition?

And how confident can we be that the guardrails of democracy hold? So many of them—within the executive branch, in Congress, in the Republican party, even in the society at large—have been weakened or removed by the Trumpists. And that effort continues apace. We no longer live in the political world of 1974—or for that matter of 2020. The guardrails won’t function automatically. The Trumpists will need to be stopped—they will need to be resisted and defeated—by the American people.

I don’t think it’s overly dramatic to say that the next two years could well be as decisive for the fate of the American republic as any since 1945. And as we gather our breath here in late August to prepare for the task before us, I keep thinking back to a passage that I’ve quoted before but that I’ll take the liberty of quoting again, something James Carville wrote for The Bulwark six years ago:

But as I sit here, I can say with certainty that in all my years, joining in this crusade to take America back from the brink of destruction is the greatest thing I have ever been a part of in my life.

This crusade is something noble.

We can’t be sure of how the fight will go. We can be sure the path ahead won’t be smooth or easy. We can’t be sure of victory. But we can be sure it’s a good fight.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Prepare for Trump to Try to Steal the Midterms… It’s not the time to panic; it is the time to get ready, argues MONA CHAREN.
• The Pentagon’s Uniquely Positioned Newspaper—and Why It Should Stay That Way… If Stars and Stripes can’t report bad news, troops will look elsewhere, observes MARK HERTLING.
• I Worked for Trump. The Natalie Harp Saga Isn’t Surprising. Whether printing out glowing tweets or stealing flattering mirrors, aides have always gone to absurd lengths to win this president’s favor, writes SARAH MATTHEWS.
• Dolly Parton, 1946–2026… Behind the rhinestones and under the towering wigs was a singular artist and businesswoman who owned her talent, her music, and her place in American life, writes JILL LAWRENCE.
• Wall Street Legend Calls Out Scott Bessent… Stanley Druckenmiller just delivered a brutal public rebuke of his former protégé, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. CATHERINE RAMPELL and BOB ELLIOTT, CIO of Unlimited, break it down.
• What Is Trump’s CIA Director Doing in Moscow? On Bulwark Takes, MICHAEL WEISS and former CIA officer MARC POLYMEROPOULOS give their takes on CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s unexpected visit to Moscow.

Quick Hits

MEASLES WATCH: Two people who got the measles in Pennsylvania’s ongoing outbreak have now died, state officials announced on Tuesday. We don’t yet know many details about who they were—old or young, male or female. But we know they were not vaccinated against the disease. And we know they are no longer alive. Those facts alone speak volumes.

Five people have now died from the disease over the last two years, which is the most in a two-year period since the early 1990s. Not coincidentally, the more than 5,000 measles cases over the same period are also the most in any two-year period since the early 1990s. And it is not even close. This is what happens when vaccination levels in parts of the country have dropped below the levels needed for herd immunity.

And the death count doesn’t even fully capture the toll. Some people who get the disease will require hospitalization. All will be at risk of permanent hearing and vision loss. A few may even develop a neurological condition that can strike many years after infection. Last year, a child in Los Angeles died from that condition.

Trump administration officials insist that none of this is their fault—that insofar as rising measles cases are a result of falling vaccination rates, the trend started before they took office. True! But one reason for those falling rates is all the misinformation out there, all the unsupported conspiracy theories insisting the measles vaccine is worse than the disease.

A big source of that misinformation is the man Trump put in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And wouldn’t you know it? Back in 2021, he visited Lancaster, Pennsylvania—center of the current outbreak in the state—where, according to a local press account, he told a crowd that “The cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A.”

There is, to be clear, no cure for measles.

It didn’t have to be this way. All Kennedy and Trump had to do was maintain the status quo on policy, by continuing to promote vaccination as their predecessors had. Instead, they have found all kinds of ways to dial back federal support and erode public confidence—Trump, most recently, by calling the measles vaccine “lethal.” Which means there are almost certainly many more cases in America’s future and, tragically, a few more deaths too.

–Jonathan Cohn

IF I CAN’T HAVE IT, NOBODY CAN: There are many things that upset Donald Trump—women who spurn his advances, non-white refugees, Mike Pence certifying an election. But there’s one thing that may drive him the craziest of all: Being told he’s not allowed to put his name on something. This has been evident in his summer-long hissy fit over a judge’s order that his name be removed from the façade of the Kennedy Center—incredibly, the tarps obscuring the center’s now-restored name have still not come down—and it became clearer than ever this week in the form of a preposterous threat from the Justice Department: If Trump is not allowed to proceed with his plans to close and renovate the Center and restore his name to the building, he may just raze the whole thing instead.

Without Trump’s efforts to “save” the Kennedy Center, Justice attorneys argued that:

The Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down, with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years. Such a replacement will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy, but would be simpler and more economical to build, operate, and maintain.

The meaning couldn’t be plainer. Nice performing arts center you’ve got there. It would be a shame if something happened to it. See the East Wing lately? The filing makes this even more explicit: If Rep. Joyce Beatty continues her legal efforts to block Trump’s name from being added to the building, “it almost guarantees the continued decline and eventual demise of the Kennedy Center, probably leading to the construction of a new, but very different kind, of venue.”

CANADA PUNCHES BACK: Canada announced its retaliatory tariffs on hundreds of American goods Tuesday, as a tit-for-tat trade war threatens to stack ever-higher economic damage on the two highly integrated economies. The New York Times has the details:

As a trade war between the countries intensifies, Canada will start collecting tariffs of 50, 25 and 15 percent on about 700 products beginning on Sept. 8. The most significant measure is a doubling of tariffs on American steel and aluminum to 50 percent. But the list of products affected ranges from household rolls of aluminum foil to railway locomotives and steel bridges.

Many of the American products Canada will now tax mirror the Canadian exports hit by the new U.S. tariffs, particularly in clothing, forestry products, tools and electronics including smartphones. But Canada is also targeting costly consumer products like dishwashers, washing machines and stoves.

A wide array of fish, frozen and fresh, also appear on the list. The new Canadian levies cover about $20 billion per year of imports from the United States, the same value as the Canadian exports affected by the tariffs.

Read the whole thing. It’s astonishing how badly Trump seems to have misread the room on this one. Most of his bullying trade “wins” over the years have come from countries happy to give him some small, symbolic concessions so he can declare victory and move on down the line. Canada, though, seems eager to make Trump—and America—bleed for the way they’ve been treated. Can you blame them?

New York Times, News Analysis: Even as Trump’s Standing Slips, He Slingshots a Political Novice to Victory, Emily Davies and Tim Balk, Aug. 26, 2026. After facing low approval ratings and endorsement setbacks, the president made a show of force in lifting Darline Graham to the Republican nomination for Senate in South Carolina.

President Trump had seemed to be in danger of taking a major defeat on Tuesday night.

His choice for Senate in South Carolina, Darline Graham, had admitted at a debate that she wasn’t “that informed on national security.” Mr. Trump’s so-far-stingy super PAC was forced to spend more than $800,000 to help her. Many South Carolina Republicans expected her to lose, in what would have been the president’s first defeat in a Senate primary all year.

Instead, as Mr. Trump has done often since his rise to power a decade ago, he defied electoral expectations.

Ms. Graham’s narrow primary runoff victory on Tuesday night in the race to succeed her brother, the late Senator Lindsey Graham, was a show of force by a president who invested significant political and financial capital to assist her quest. His efforts ensured that Ms. Graham, who had no political experience to speak of and was little known before her brother’s death last month, will now be favored to serve in the Senate through at least 2032.

The outcome in South Carolina, one of the final major primaries before the midterm elections in November, offered a reminder of Mr. Trump’s influence over the Republican base, months after a spring retribution tour where he drove a series of G.O.P. opponents out of Congress. And Ms. Graham’s win came as another Trump-endorsed candidate, Mike Mazzei, prevailed in a hotly contested Republican primary runoff for governor of Oklahoma.

Some of the luster had seemed to come off Mr. Trump’s political brand in recent weeks. His approval ratings have drooped, his party’s midterm outlook has darkened and his chosen picks in several races for governor and the House have fallen short.

While Ms. Graham emerged triumphant in South Carolina on Tuesday, it came at a cost. As Mr. Trump and his party struggle to defend Republican congressional majorities, he expended time and energy in a race for a solidly red seat expected to have no bearing on control of Congress.

Still, in South Carolina, Republican voters signaled that the party’s political identity, and perhaps its fortunes, remain tightly intertwined with Mr. Trump even as the party begins to imagine what it might look like after his presidency.

“They still trust the president,” said Ida Martin, a Republican state executive committeewoman from Williamsburg County. “Trump came for her, and people showed up.”

Ms. Graham’s triumph may have reflected the loyalty that plenty of Republican voters in South Carolina felt for her brother, who represented the state in the Senate for more than two decades. But it underscored the president’s ongoing ability to bend primaries to his will. Some South Carolina voters said that they had been on the fence — and that the president’s intervention had been decisive in their vote.

“South Carolina is truly Trump country,” Ms. Graham said at her election night party, thanking the president for his support.

Mr. Trump’s grip on his party has sometimes seemed most solid in the South.

It was there that he scored some of his most impressive victories of primary season: Voters followed his instructions by ousting Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. And they sided with his choice for Senate in Georgia, elevating Representative Mike Collins despite Republican warnings that the congressman’s right-wing politics might hurt the party’s chances in a contest that could determine control of the Senate.

The voters who came through for Mr. Trump in South Carolina did not have to worry much about general-election implications; the winner of the primary is widely expected to prevail in November. But they did have to look past — or at least accept — the unique particulars of Ms. Graham, who was hardly known before the summer, and who did not appear to have many firmly held policy positions beyond a conviction that transgender girls should not play girls’ sports.

The New Republic, GOP Voters Boo Trump After Lindsey Graham’s Sister Wins Runoff, Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, Aug. 26, 2026. Supporters of the defeated Ralph Norman were left chafing after the president—and a mountain of outside money—took their preferred candidate down.

Donald Trump just lost a lot of support in South Carolina.

Supporters of defeated Republican candidate Ralph Norman booed and jeered at mentions of the president’s name during his concession speech Tuesday night, expressing their palpable aggravation over Trump’s unwanted involvement in the contentious Senate runoff.

Trump had endorsed—and actively campaigned for—Darline Graham for South Carolina’s open Senate seat. Against all odds (and the predictions of Republican strategists, who thought Graham was headed for a heavy defeat), he got his wish: Graham won the race by five percentage points.

“The president got involved. He has that right, that’s his prerogative,” Norman said, sparking a wave of boos from the crowd.

“His policies are good, I never understood why he got in this race,” Norman continued as the crowd clapped.

“But it is what it is, and I’ll accept it,” he added. “I’ve always said something good will come out of this. I don’t know what it is, but something good will come out of it.”

The junior Graham took the reins of her sibling’s powerful office last month, after the 71-year-old suddenly passed away from an aortic dissection. Despite having zero relevant experience or qualifications, Graham gained the president’s support and was subsequently appointed by South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster.

Within the span of a few short weeks, the 62-year-old undertook a gambit to make her interim responsibilities more permanent, throwing her name on the ballot to be formally selected by the state electorate. The money poured in behind her, with chief executives, lobbyists, and prominent Republican donors pumping thousands of dollars into her nascent campaign, violating the weekly thresholds set by the Federal Election Commission—a detail not lost on Norman in his closing remarks on Tuesday.

“We had $8 million spent against us. I couldn’t come up with that much money,” Norman said. “All of our money came from South Carolina and my personal account. My opponent—the money came from outside PACs, I mean it’s a fact, I’m not being critical.”

Graham’s next political hurdle arrives in November, when she’ll have to face off against Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, in the general election. This time, the odds will be more in the Republican nominee’s favor: The last time South Carolina elected a Democrat to the Senate was in 1998.

The Contrarian, Opinion: Jeffries Never Should Have Met With Kushner, Jennifer Rubin, right, Aug. 26, 2026. Wrong person, wrong premise — eventually the right tone. 

Democrats of all political stripes were exasperated by a New York Times report Sunday that “Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, met privately in recent weeks with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and top outside adviser, and discussed potential areas of common ground.” Numerous Democrats fumed that the get-together violated pro-democracy, anti-corruption values, defied common sense, and seemed politically naïve.

First and foremost, Jeffries made a cardinal error in meeting with Kushner, a non-government employee whose self-promotional antics — aided by his family connection — have no doubt made Hunter Biden blush. (If you can imagine Speaker Mike Johnson meeting with Hunter Biden in search of “common ground,” you can appreciate the absurdity of the Jeffries meeting.)

The meeting inevitably extends legitimacy to Kushner’s ethical gamesmanship, which characterizes the regime’s grotesque corruption. Kushner has fully exploited his name to pursue billions in foreign investment opportunities, all the while evading whatever ethical constraints (concern for presidential relations’ ethics — how quaint!) exist for those performing top government jobs. While continuing to carry out missions for his father-in-law regarding Gaza and Iran, Kushner has leveraged his role to reap riches in the Middle East, triggered an uprising in Albania stemming from his scheme to develop an island resort, and been forced to back out of a scandal-plagued Serbian boondoggle.

As Jeffries surely knows, reports in March that Kushner was soliciting funds from Middle East sovereign wealth funds (while acting as an envoy, however incompetently, in Iran talks) triggered a furious statement from Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-OR) and House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA). In it, they recapped Kushner’s years-long exploits, starting with Wyden’s “investigation of Kushner’s conflicts of interest in 2020 with an initial probe into whether Kushner advised Donald Trump to support a blockade against Qatar while Kushner Companies was seeking a billion-dollar bailout from Qatari, and possibly other Middle Eastern officials, for the property at 666 Fifth Avenue.”

As Wyden recounted, his investigation in 2024 examined “whether Affinity Partners, the firm Kushner launched immediately after the end of the first Trump administration, was in reality a compensation scheme designed in part to skirt federal disclosure requirements.” As a result of the investigation, he referred Kushner to the Justice Department for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act in connection with his Saudi investment activities.Subscribed

On the House side, in 2024, Ranking Member Garcia and Ranking Member Jamie Raskin “urged Chairmen James Comer and Glenn Grothman to hold a hearing regarding Kushner’s apparent influence peddling and quid pro quos for actions he undertook to reshape U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and beyond, as senior adviser in President Trump’s first Administration, following reports that Kushner was close to finalizing investments in Albania and Serbia and leveraged relationships he built during his time as a senior adviser in his father-in-law’s White House.” And Kushner continues to evade Congressional inquiry to this day, a direct affront to its Article I power. Once in the majority, Democrats should be investigating — not looking for common ground with — Kushner.

Given all that, any meeting with him strikes one as ill-conceived (at the very least). One can imagine some critical messages Jeffries could have delivered, including:

a warning to preserve all documents relevant to allegations of self-dealing with foreign powers;

a heads-up that Democrats will pursue, without exception, all allegations of corruption involving Trump, Trump family members, associates, and government employees;

a preview of legislation that would mandate full financial disclosure and conflicts of interest rules for anyone serving as an envoy/international negotiator; and

an FYI that the disgraced Board of Peace will be put under close supervision of Congress (and/all U.S. government employees and/or presidential relations barred from participation), beginning with public hearings and a subpoena of all relevant documents.

In response to written questions to Jeffries’s staff asking: whether Kushner’s conflicts of interest came up at the meeting; what common ground Jeffries believes might exist; and why Jeffries decided to meet with someone who has purposefully sidestepped a government role to avoid scrutiny, I received a bland written statement early Monday evening:

Throughout this Congress, Republicans have adopted a my-way-or-the-highway approach to governing that has failed the American people. To stop the madness, we have repeatedly made clear that an extremist approach will not work and will be met with forceful opposition. The American people want bold change and that’s what House Democrats will deliver. In every conversation that we have with the Trump administration, we will continue to make it explicitly clear that the affordability crisis is not a hoax and nothing short of transformational policy change is acceptable. We are fighting for an affordable America. The question is whether Republicans will join us.”

That was not going to mollify irate Democrats. Fortunately, later Monday evening, Jeffries’s tone noticeably shifted. He released the following video just a few hours later:repjeffries repjeffriesCongressman Hakeem Jeffries on Instagram: "No one from the Trum…View on Instagram

To review: Jeffries’ tone did improve, although the original decision to meet with Kushner was, as they say in soccer, an “own goal.” When Democrats, as seems increasingly likely, win the House majority, their leadership will meet with Trump, his Cabinet, and/or White House staff. But even then, it is hard to fathom any rationale for meeting with someone who has chosen to avoid a government post to flout White House conflicts of interest laws and keep his affairs hidden from Congress.

Moreover, in the future, Jeffries must avoid any signal that that this is a “normal” president with whom he expects to do business, lest he rekindle criticism that he does not appreciate the nature of the Trumpian threat to democracy and is seeking to accommodate rather than confront a dangerous president. To be clear: no “common ground” exists with a regime engaging in an illegal war (contemptuous of Congress’s constitutional role), massive self-dealing (allegedly involving family members!), a reign of terror against immigrants, routine destruction of constitutional guardrails (e.g., ignoring Congress’s appropriations’ role, violating the Epstein Files Disclosure Act), a savage assault on healthcare to pay for billionaires’ tax cuts, thorough corruption of the Justice Department, and routine racist insults.

If they gain the majority, Democrats’ mandate will not be to find “common ground” with a decrepit autocrat bent on destroying congressional power. It will be to halt him in his tracks, reverse disastrous policies, and exercise exacting oversight. For now, Democratic leaders should focus entirely on achieving a resounding defeat that will hold Kushner, his father-in-law, and the entire regime accountable for their incompetence, malfeasance, and illegality.

The  Hill, Analysis On U.S. Congress Midterm Rating Changes: Seven more House races shift toward Democrats, Nathan L. Gonzales, Aug. 26, 2026. Minority party maintains advantage in fight for the majority. With two months to go before Election Day, Democrats continue to have the advantage in the fight for the House as Inside Elections shifts its race rating of seven more districts in the party’s favor.

Some of the movement affects the current contours of the House battleground.

The contest for California’s 21st District, represented by Democrat Jim Costa, moves from Likely Democratic to Solid Democratic and off the list of competitive races as Republicans focus their resources elsewhere.

And three open races for GOP-held seats enter battleground territory, shifting from Solid Republican to Likely Republican: Kentucky’s 6th District (represented by Andy Barr), Nevada’s 2nd (Mark Amodei) and South Carolina’s 1st (Nancy Mace).

While the House battleground typically includes a disproportionately high number of seats held by one party in wave election years, things are remarkably symmetrical across the current list of districts to watch.

Republicans are defending 37 seats rated as competitive by Inside Elections, including the California seat where Rep. Kevin Kiley, an independent who still caucuses with the GOP, is running for reelection. Democrats are defending 29 seats. (This does not include the handful of districts rated as Solid takeovers for either party as a result of redistricting.)

In contrast, on the eve of the 2010 midterms, Democrats were defending 100 of the 109 competitive seats, and Republicans went on to flip the House with a net gain of 63 seats.

There’s also symmetry in the race ratings. There are currently 185 House races rated Solid Republican compared with 184 rated Solid Democratic. Twenty-eight races are rated Likely/Lean/Tilt Republican compared with 22 similarly rated contests on the Democratic side.

But while the ratings may not be evidence of a looming Democratic wave election, it’s important to remember that Democrats don’t need a wave to win the House majority. They need a net gain of just three seats to get to the magic number of 218.

Right now, that would mean winning 12 of the 16 races that Inside Elections rates as Toss-ups. That is well within reach in the current political environment, and the battleground could continue to shift toward Democrats in the final weeks.

Overall, Inside Elections currently projects House Democrats to gain anywhere from two to 10 seats — almost any outcome within that range would result in a Democratic majority. The projection would likely be higher — closer to five to 15 seats or even 10 to 20 seats — had it not been for the mid-decade redistricting battle and related court decisions that resulted in more redrawn seats that give Republicans an advantage.

Inside Elections has also made some shifts within the current battleground.

The contests for two Democratic seats fall down the list of Republican takeover opportunities, including California’s 45th District (represented by Derek Tran) and New Jersey’s 9th (Nellie Pou). Those districts could become more competitive in a different cycle and different political environment. On the other side of the ledger, two Republican seats look increasingly vulnerable. The race for Colorado’s 5th District (represented by Jeff Crank) shifts from Likely Republican to Lean Republican, while Texas’ 15th (Monica De La Cruz) moves from Lean Republican to Tilt Republican.

In general, there are a lot of districts where Republican strength appears soft against a unified and motivated Democratic base. If it becomes clearer that GOP turnout will be lower than usual, we could see a surge in Democratic takeover opportunities in places where the party would normally have no realistic chance of winning.

It’s certainly possible that the macro and micro midterm analysis showing Democrats with the advantage is off. There could be a systemic polling “miss,” even though polling in cycles without Donald Trump on the ballot is usually better than presidential years. Trump’s political standing could also improve, even though his job approval rating seems headed in the wrong direction. Or the election could become a referendum on the Democratic Socialists of America, even though voters are typically focused on current economic conditions.

New York Times, In Headache for Republicans, Second Dan Sullivan Advances in Alaska Senate Race, Tim Balk, Aug. 26, 2026. A long-shot candidate with the same name as the incumbent Republican senator will be on the ballot in November. That could be a problem for the G.O.P.

Dan J. Sullivan, a retired teacher who is challenging the Republican senator Dan S. Sullivan of Alaska, won a spot on the general-election ballot on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.

His emergence from the state’s nonpartisan primary poses a headache for the incumbent.

Dan J. Sullivan is not expected to wage a competitive general-election campaign. But Republicans have worried for months that some voters may confuse the two Sullivans in November, potentially depriving Senator Sullivan of votes and lifting his well-funded Democratic challenger, former Representative Mary Peltola, to victory.

Senator Sullivan and Ms. Peltola easily earned spots on the general-election ballot; soon after polls closed a week ago, The Associated Press said they both had advanced. But Dan J. Sullivan won just a few thousand votes, and it took about a week for it to become clear that he had secured one of the four spots on the November ballot.

Democrats and Republicans alike see Dan J. Sullivan as no mere campaign curiosity. If he wins even a sliver of general-election votes, it could be decisive in a narrow race.

Alaska uses a ranked-choice general-election system, which means that voters confused about the Sullivans could simply rank them both before Ms. Peltola — but it is unclear how the dynamic may play out in voting booths.

Senator Sullivan trailed Ms. Peltola by nearly six percentage points in the nonpartisan primary.

It was unclear late Tuesday whether another Republican, Gerald L. Heikes, would join the Sullivans on the ballot in November, potentially offering Ms. Peltola another marginal lift.

The contest in Alaska is one of a handful of competitive races seen as the most likely to determine which party wins control of the Senate.

With Republicans now holding 53 seats, Democrats would have to keep all their seats and flip four to win the chamber in the midterms. Democratic leaders consider Alaska to be one of their most promising targets.

It was not always clear that Dan J. Sullivan, running as a Republican, would even be eligible.

The Alaska Division of Elections, which is overseen by the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, removed Dan J. Sullivan in June from the primary ballot, finding that his candidacy was intended to confuse voters and was not a “good-faith” effort. An Alaska judge, in turn, restored his spot on the ballot, saying that the elections agency had exceeded its authority.

Republicans have claimed that Ms. Peltola’s campaign planted Dan J. Sullivan in the race to trick voters. But the Peltola campaign has denied coordinating with him. He said in a recent interview that he had voted for Ms. Peltola in her bids for the House of Representatives in 2022 and 2024, but that he was running in good faith and was not a secret Democrat.

Broadly, Democrats in Alaska have dismissed allegations of foul play, casting Dan J. Sullivan’s candidacy as an amusing but far from unheard-of quirk of the insular world of Alaska politics.

When Senator Sullivan was first elected to the Senate in 2014, another Republican named Dan Sullivan, then the mayor of Anchorage, was also on the primary ballot as a candidate for lieutenant governor.

On the day of this year’s primary, the former mayor weighed in on the Senate race. “As the OG Dan Sullivan, I urge Alaskans to vote for Sen. Daniel S. Sullivan,” he said in a statement on social media. “He’s been great for Alaska.”

When Dan J. Sullivan announced in May that he was entering the race, he said in a statement, “It’s time for Alaska to elect a Sullivan that’s on their side.”

U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets

New York Times, Bessent Faces Credibility Test in Quest to Tame Markets, Alan Rappeport, Aug. 26, 2026. The Treasury secretary is confronting the limits of his ability to reshape the economy ahead of midterm elections.

When auditioning to be President Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent accused Democrats of constructing a centrally planned economy. He argued that their interventions in markets were politically motivated and said the sitting Treasury secretary, Janet L. Yellen, was purposely changing how government bonds were being sold to stimulate the economy before the 2024 election.

“History teaches us that prioritizing free enterprise and limiting government’s role in the economy are key to raising living standards,” Mr. Bessent said at a Manhattan Institute conference.

Two years later, as Treasury secretary, Mr. Bessent is seeking his own interventions into the markets and the economy in ways that conflict with his stated philosophy. Since entering the White House, the second Trump administration has taken equity stakes in more than two dozen companies and subsidized the U.S. critical minerals industry. A former skeptic of tariffs, Mr. Bessent last week called the taxes that the government collected from companies for their imports “the people’s money.”

But global anxiety about America’s heavy, sustained borrowing and the war in Iran has been impossible to obscure, and Mr. Bessent is starting to see the limits of his powers to bend the global economy to his will.

This week, six months into a war with Iran that has exacerbated inflation, the Treasury secretary unveiled a new round of economic warfare that he billed as D-Day and Operation Economic Outcast. It largely amounted to a warning to other nations that they would face U.S. sanctions if they did not cut ties with Iran.

Mr. Bessent also tried to meddle this month in global financial markets as part of an effort to lower interest rates. He did so by announcing surprising interventions in currency and bond markets and by signaling that the U.S. government was prepared to take further action.

When markets rejected his move — which even his mentor, the investor Stanley Druckenmiller, panned as senseless — he used his megaphone to make the case that investors were misguided about the fundamentals of the U.S. economy. Mr. Bessent is pushing to curb long term bond yields and allay fears about America’s $40 trillion debt burden.

“He’s trying to see if he can persuade the markets by flicking his wrist to bring them to command,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economics professor.

The strategy of jawboning markets is not new. For decades political leaders facing looming debt crises have attempted to talk their way out of trouble.

Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister, tried unsuccessfully to alleviate concerns about Italy’s debt problems during Europe’s 2011 debt crisis before ultimately stepping down as bond yields soared. In Britain, former Prime Minister Liz Truss was unable to convince markets that economic growth would cure her economy’s fiscal problems. She was forced to step down after a month and a half amid market backlash.

“He has a lot of credibility, but he’s spending it on this,” Mr. Rogoff said of Mr. Bessent.

New York Times, ‘Honeymoon’s Over’: Warsh Under Pressure as Fed Weighs Raising Rates, Colby Smith,.Aug. 26, 2026. Kevin M. Warsh is scheduled to deliver his first address at the Federal Reserve’s annual conference in Jackson, Wyo., with U.S. government bond markets on edge and inflation risks resurfacing.

Three years before taking over as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin M. Warsh recounted an exchange he once had with a hero of his, Paul A. Volcker, the celebrated central banker.

Mr. Volcker, who navigated the Fed through one of the worst bouts of inflation in the 1970s and 1980s, told Mr. Warsh, then a governor, that the central bank’s job boiled down to two primary responsibilities. The first was getting interest rates “about right.” The second was to “make sure you look like you know what you’re doing.”

Those duties are top of mind as Mr. Warsh prepares for his first address as chairman to the world’s leading economic policymakers in Jackson, Wyo. His speech, scheduled for Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern, is the biggest draw of the three-day conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

It will offer Mr. Warsh the most powerful perch yet to articulate his own framework for thinking about the economy, the policy choices in front of the Fed as it contends with elevated inflation and how he is assessing seismic changes — such as new sources of productivity gains from artificial intelligence — that could alter the country’s growth prospects in the years ahead.

Those details have been intentionally sparse, reflecting Mr. Warsh’s inclination to guard his preferences. One of the only things that Mr. Warsh has made unequivocally clear is that he is committed to getting inflation down after five years of the central bank’s overshooting its 2 percent target. And even then, he has spoken only obliquely about the possibility of raising rates to get there.

The lack of specifics on where Mr. Warsh stands on a number of fundamental issues has caused confusion both inside and outside the Fed, overshadowing his broader ambitions to enact sweeping change at the institution. Resolving this does not require Mr. Warsh to provide specific guidance about the Fed’s policy moves in September and beyond, as he is staunchly opposed to doing. But a slight change of tack is required to begin to reset the narrative after a rocky start.

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, U.S. ‘Economic D-Day’ Targets More Than Just Iranian Oil, Zane Irwin, Aug. 26, 2026 (print ed.). The United States threatened sanctions for any country or entity that engages with Iran’s gold, digital assets, aviation, shipping and tech industries. Here’s why that matters.

Frustrated on the military front by its war with Iran, the United States has announced an “Economic D-Day,” threatening to punish any country or entity that does business with Tehran in key industries.

The U.S. Treasury Department vowed to target Iran’s gold, digital assets and aviation industries, among others, aiming to throttle the few options Iran has left for global trade. Iran uses these sectors “to prop up its failing economy” and to “continue its campaign of destabilization and terrorism in the region and around the world,” the Treasury Department said in a statement on Monday.

Iranian officials dismissed the Trump administration’s pronouncement as bluster. Iran’s speaker of Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said in a statement on social media on Monday that Iran’s trading partners were not taking the new threats seriously.

The sweeping Treasury announcement left many questions, including how far the United States was willing to go to punish major Iranian trading partners, like China. And Iran has long found ways to circumvent such measures, including by trading with Russia and its neighbors in the region.

But though the declaration served as a warning to certain industries, it did not immediately blacklist all individuals and companies involved, providing time for negotiations. The threat of a more aggressive economic tack via new U.S. sanctions, however, came less than a week after the United Arab Emirates, one of Iran’s top trading partners, announced plans to halt all trade and financial transactions with the country.

Mahdi Ghodsi, an economist at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, said the new generalized sanctions proposed by the United States stood to hit ordinary Iranians the hardest. As in war, Mr. Ghodsi said, “civilians are the casualties” in economic conflict.

Here are the sectors the United States has threatened with further sanctions.Gold

The United States has enforced sanctions on Iran for decades. And before the first U.S. and Israeli missiles struck Iran on Feb. 28, economic suffering in the country was deep and widespread.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in East Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Some Iranians have turned to gold to protect their savings from a currency crisis and surging inflation. The precious metal is viewed as a safer asset than Iran’s currency, the rial, which hit record lows on Monday after the new U.S. threats of sanctions.

The nation’s central bank has also been loading up on gold for years. Over a four-month stretch in 2025, Iran imported more than $1 billion worth of gold, mostly from Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and China, according to a leading Iranian economic newspaper.

But hoarding gold could further slow the economy, Mr. Ghodsi said, as more people could hold assets designed to preserve wealth long-term rather than exchange cash to keep the economy moving.

Iran’s cryptocurrency sector is worth nearly $7.8 billion, according to 2025 estimates by Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm.

The same organization calculated that the volume of funds received by accounts affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps grew to more than $3 billion in 2025 from over $2 billion in 2024, based on data from U.S. and Israeli governments agencies.

Like gold, analysts say, alternative financial assets have become an important way for Iranian civilians to try to protect their wealth. The United States has also accused Tehran of using the technology to facilitate illicit cash flows.

“The Iranian regime increasingly turns to cryptocurrency as a tool of choice for sanctions evasion, supporting transactions linked” to the Revolutionary Guards, the Treasury Department said in its Monday statement.

The United States has targeted Iranian cryptocurrency firms before. In June, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the country’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Nobitex, accusing it of helping the government evade sanctions, pay for militant activities and transfer wealth abroad.

One person singled out in Monday’s announcement was Ivan Obukhov, a Ukrainian national based in the Emirates, who the Treasury Department said had “for years served as a broker for Iranian shadow fleet vessels” and had “facilitated Iranian oil shipments for the Iranian military and its proxies.”

He is accused of processing more than $100 million worth of cryptocurrency payments since 2023 to facilitate oil sales for the Revolutionary Guards.

More World News, Global Human Rights, Disasters

New York Times, Live Updates: Hundreds Missing as Wall of Water Sweeps Away Villages in Nepal and Tibet, Binod Ghimire, Leo Sands and Lily Kuo, Aug 26, 2026. At least 160 people were killed when floods tore through a Himalayan river valley between Nepal and the Tibet region of China, the authorities said. Hundreds were missing, including foreign tourists.

A giant torrent of mud, water and ice that began high in the Himalayas tore a devastating path through a mountain valley on the border between Nepal and Tibet on Wednesday, smashing buildings and sweeping away fleeing people caught by surprise by its speed and destructive force.

At least 160 people were killed and hundreds more were missing after the flood, which snapped bridges into pieces and pulled multistory structures off their foundations. The deluge also engulfed dozens of men, women and children who were overtaken as they tried to run. The death toll was expected to rise.

Initial assessments by geologists and glaciologists indicated that an enormous chunk of ice — possibly a half-mile wide — had snapped off a glacier at an altitude of 17,000 feet and tumbled thousands of feet into a river valley below. Scientists studying the disaster said the impact registered as the equivalent of a 5.2-magnitude earthquake and crushed the ice into a fast-moving mix of water, ice and rock that pulverized everything in its path.

Officials in Nepal reported 157 deaths. Chinese officials reported only three deaths in the Tibet region of China, but the Chinese state news agency Xinhua said there had been “significant” casualties at the Gyirong port of entry, at the border with Nepal.

Surveillance footage circulating on social media and verified by The New York Times shows crowds running up a road near the port before torrents of water and thick clouds engulf the parking lot and surrounding buildings, destroying the area.

“The bottom looks like a bomb exploded — it’s just deposits from the broken-up glacier,” said Daniel Shugar, a geologist at the University of Calgary in Canada who studied satellite imagery to analyze what happened. He said other factors may have also contributed to the landslide.

As many as 391 tourists, including 291 foreigners, had been reported missing in Nepal, the country’s tourism board said in a statement. They included more than 100 people on a pilgrimage from India, a dozen Britons and at least three Americans. Citizens from Australia, the Netherlands, Malaysia and South Africa were also among the missing.

Thousands of people live in riverside settlements downstream from the flooding, including along the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers in the Rasuwa district. The authorities have not estimated the number of people missing and the extent of damage but said that bridges, schools and hydropower projects had been swept away.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

Initial Assessment: A preliminary analysis of satellite imagery indicates that an ice avalanche set off the flooding, said Simon Cook, a glaciologist at the University of Dundee in Scotland who is part of a team of scientists studying the disaster. According to their initial assessment, he said, a large chunk of ice broke off from a high-altitude glacier and tumbled thousands of feet toward the Bhote Koshi River in Nepal, releasing vast amounts of energy that pulverized the ice into a significant volume of flood water. Read more ›

Destruction in China: Footage released by Chinese state media shows surging waters overwhelming buildings at the Gyirong port, taking out trees and making roads impassable. Read more ›

Rescue Effort: Security teams led by the Nepali Army have been carrying out rescue operations, airlifting at least 114 people to safety. The army has mobilized 12 helicopters, set up a temporary hospital in the flood zone and evacuated at least 25 seriously injured people to Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital.

Nepal’s Government: The disaster adds to the woes of Nepal’s recently elected government, and its 36-year-old prime minister, Balendra Shah, who swept to power on the back of a youth-led protest movement last year.

New York Times, Ukraine’s Most Potent Weapon: The Software Orchestrating Its Drone Army, Constant Méheut and Olha Konovalova, Aug. 26, 2026. The Delta system pulls together battlefield data to identify targets, creating a miles-wide “kill zone.” The technology is credited with helping to cut Russian advances to a near standstill.

A soldier in camouflage with a holstered gun stands beside a person in black. The person in black points at multiple computer screens, observed by several others with headsets.Officers from Ukraine’s First Separate Assault Regiment looking at live battlefield footage from drones, displayed through the Delta system, at a command bunker in eastern Ukraine in 2025.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

By The screens, showing live drone footage of the battlefield, flickered with color-coded frames: green for Russian equipment, blue for Ukrainian forces, orange when friend and foe were hard to tell apart. Then, a frame flashed red, indicating a Russian soldier sprinting along a tree line.

The Ukrainian troops watching from an underground command post on the eastern front sprang into action. A duty officer logged the Russian soldier’s coordinates into a computer. This automatically placed a diamond-shaped marker on a digital battlefield map, visible to all units in the vicinity. Within minutes, three attack drones were in the air, closing in.

The first drone missed. But the duty officer, from the Ukrainian First Separate Assault Regiment, fed the strike location and a video of the attack to drone teams from two other units so they could try to kill the Russian soldier.

This chilling sequence — detection, tracking, strike — all depended on powerful software that Ukraine has developed, called Delta.

The software pulls streams of battlefield intelligence, including drone video feeds, radio intercepts and satellite images, into a single platform that helps detect targets. The system then distributes the targets to thousands of reconnaissance and attack drones that fly around the clock, helping to create a miles-wide “kill zone” where anything that moves can be spotted and hit within seconds.ImageA small drone, lit by green and blue lights, sits in dark grass. Golden fields and distant hills are under a night sky with a handful of stars.Preparing a drone in the Zaporizhzhia region of southeastern Ukraine in July. The Delta software coordinates information from drone video feeds, radio intercepts and satellite images.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Col. Artem Martynenko, who oversees the development of the software for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, called Delta the “nervous system” of the army of drones that have brought Russian advances to a near standstill.

Western militaries have begun to take note. Daniel Driscoll, the U.S. Army secretary, has called the software “absolutely incredible” and acknowledged that American forces were playing catch-up.

Delta’s battlefield management system “fully integrates every single drone, every sensor and every shooting platform into just one single network,” Mr. Driscoll told the Senate in May, adding, “Ours does not.”

NATO forces got an appreciation of that gap last year during an exercise in Estonia in which Ukrainian drone units decimated alliance formations in simulations.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Experts say software like Delta is the next frontier in warfare. With the battlefield already saturated with drones, victory depends less on the sheer number deployed and more on how fast they can be sent to strike. Kyiv and Moscow are competing to build the best system, with both turning to artificial intelligence to gain an edge.

Delta’s origins go back more than a decade. In 2014, a group of Ukrainian volunteers battling Russian-backed separatist forces in eastern Ukraine was experimenting with reconnaissance drones. The idea was to improve artillery targeting and replace old-fashioned tools like binoculars.

But the data that the drones collected moved too slowly. Getting the intelligence to artillery units took a chain of radio calls. By the time a target could be fired on, the objective had often vanished, said Yaroslav Honchar, a co-founder of the group, Aerorosvidka.The group created Delta as a solution. The software began as a shared digital map on which targets could be pinpointed. NATO financed the effort, Mr. Honchar said, hoping to steer Ukraine toward the alliance’s own doctrine of rapid force coordination across the battlefield.

U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion  

The New Republic, Right Now Podcast Opinion: Why Professors Got Behind Abdul El-Sayed, Perry Bacon, Aug. 25, 2026. AAUP president Todd Wolfson says that endorsing El-Sayed and other candidates is part of defending both higher education and democracy.

The American Association of University Professors endorsed Abdul El-Sayed during the Democratic primary for the open Michigan U.S. Senate seat.

It was the group’s first political endorsement ever. That set off a controversy about whether professors should collectively endorse, particularly during primaries.

Todd Wolfson, the president of the AAUP, defends the group’s endorsement in the latest episode of Right Now. He says that AAUP has decided that professors should not remain silent amid the growing attack on higher education and would be issuing more endorsements this fall. And Wolfson, a professor of journalism and media students at Rutgers University, argues that professors and universities have a critical role in defending democracy at a time of democratic backsliding. 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Did Mamdani “doxx” wealthy New Yorkers? Judd Legum, Aug. 26, 2026. “PIED-A-TERROR,” the New York Post cover blared on July 28.

The paper claimed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani put “people in danger by posting a ‘rich to be taxed’ list publicly.”In an article published online on July 27, the Post claimed that the Mamdani administration “published a searchable database of Big Apple properties that could fall under the state’s new pied-à-terre tax, effectively doxxing thousands of wealthy New Yorkers.” The Post quoted people calling it a “reckless and foolish move,” “a mistake,” and “a dangerous precedent.”

An article published the same day by the New York Post Editorial Board called the database an “enemies list” and “a kind of one-stop class-warfare shopping list for antifa radicals looking for targets.” The article claims that the list was released to “scar[e]” people and that the Mamdani administration “want[s] everyone owning private property to fear their wrath.”

But Mamdani did not “doxx” any New York City residents. The same information has been public — and searchable online — for decades.

This is not unique to New York City. Property records, including tax information, are publicly available across the country because these records make private ownership of real property possible. Without a public record, there would be no way to resolve competing claims over the same property or ensure that property is transferred unencumbered.

The city was required to publish an updated property ownership list in July as it implements the pied-à-terre tax. The tax will create an annual surcharge on some properties that are not used as a primary residence, also known as “pieds-à-terre.” The tax will apply to condos and co-op units valued at over $1 million and homes valued over $5 million. An April analysis by New York City Comptroller Mark Levine found that the tax could raise between $340 million and $510 million in revenue annually.

But there is little in the new list that wasn’t already freely available. The city has a searchable database called the Automated City Register Information System (ACRIS) that allows users to quickly and easily search through property records by name and address.

While around 960,000 properties were included in the supplemental roll, the actual list of properties that will be subject to the pied-à-terre tax is much smaller. Last month, the city mailed letters to around 17,000 property owners that may be subject to the new tax. Around a third of the letter receivers have already applied for exemptions, the New York Times reported earlier this month.

New York officials have contested the claim that residents were doxxed by the database. “We publish property tax rolls in accordance with the law, as the city has done twice a year for years, frankly, if not decades and centuries,” Mamdani said during a press conference. New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) said that there was “[n]othing unusual here,” adding, “Every building, property tax debt is public. Always has been.”

Several residents included in the data set are now suing the Mamdani administration, arguing that city officials “acted too hastily and sowed confusion.” The lawsuit seeks to take down the supplemental tax roll, among other things, but does not challenge the actual tax. A judge temporarily paused the rollout earlier this month, but an appeals court threw out the order.

Nevertheless, the false “doxxing” claim has been repeated incessantly by the New York Post, and has now spread to other media outlets.

Popular Information produces in-depth investigations you will not find anywhere else. We can do this reporting because we are truly independent — there are no corporate overlords or billionaire funders pulling the strings. This newsletter exists because of readers like you. Upgrade to paid to support this work.SubscribedAn avalanche of false accusations

Since its initial article from July 27, the New York Post has published around 30 articles on the pied-à-terre tax. Many of them have repeated the doxxing claim and implied that the Mamdani administration is purposely endangering residents who might disagree with the mayor’s agenda.In a column from August 1, for example, the New York Post Editorial Board wrote, “The sole explanation for this intentional data dump is that the mayor’s office wanted to embarrass and frustrate people who have the bad taste to own something in a city ruled by socialists who believe that all housing should be public housing.”

On August 10, the Editorial Board repeated a similar claim, saying, “This mass doxxing can only be understood as Mao-style anti-landlord rabble-rousing, aiming to shame and scare the radicals’ class enemies.”

On the cover of its August 11 edition, the New York Post described the database as a “shame the rich” list.In several articles, the New York Post made reference to the 2024 murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione, implying that by making their addresses public, Mamdani was opening wealthy New Yorkers up to similar attacks. One opinion column claimed that Mangione murdered Thompson “in the name of the same toxic ideas that Mamdani peddles.”

The New York Post’s doxxing claim has spread to other outlets, including more mainstream papers like the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

The Wall Street Journal has published many articles on the pied-à-terre tax, and several acknowledge that the information in the new database was already publicly available. However, one column by the paper’s editorial board strikes a very similar tone to the New York Post’s coverage. It says, “The Mayor rolled out his new pied-à-terre tax by publishing the names and addresses of some 960,000 people who could have to pay. Nothing like publicly stigmatizing your class enemies, comrade.”

The Washington Post Editorial Board published a similar statement. The editorial reads, “Note to future mayors: Naming and shaming nearly a million homeowners in your city isn’t a good use of political capital.” Like the New York Post, the Washington Post column also mentions Mangione, saying that such a “high-profile [instance] of anti-capitalist violence may contribute to the anxiety” of wealthy New Yorkers named in the database.

Fox News has also repeatedly pushed the claim that the Mamdani administration is doxxing people. On July 28, for example, Fox News contributor and New York Post columnist Miranda Devine said the database “is really inciting the bloodlust of [Mamdani’s] Marxist revolutionary comrades…. This is inviting other professional squatters to move into these homes or worst-case, Luigi [Mangione] wannabes to prey on these people who have done nothing wrong.”

Other outlets that have claimed that Mamdani is doxxing people include right-leaning sites The Daily Wire and Reason. But the claim has also been repeated by the left.

On a July episode of Pivot, a podcast produced by New York Magazine, liberal businessman Scott Galloway said he had been “doxxed” by Mamdani. Galloway, who noted that he initially supported the pied-à-terre tax, said, “The question I would have is, other than trying to identify and imply these people have done something wrong — and then, 18 months after a health-care CEO was executed in the street, published the list — what is the upside here? Why is he doing this?”

Galloway’s comments were covered by outlets such as Fox News, Reason, and The Hill. Popular Information reached out to Galloway for comment but did not receive a response.

Beyond the media, powerful politicians have also parroted the doxxing claim. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) posted on X, “Comrade Mamdani doxxed thousands of New York City homeowners. This is the communist intimidation playbook in action.”

Aug. 25

Top Headlines

The U.S. Supreme Court, as portrayed by its official photo and in a 2024 magazine cover portrait.

• New York Times, Supreme Court Allows Trump Plan to Restrict Mail-In Voting, for Now, Abbie VanSickle and Ann E. Marimow, Aug. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The administration asked the court to clear the way for President Trump’s order that creates “state citizenship lists” and directs the Postal Service to decide who gets a mail-in ballot.  
• New York Times, Trump Quietly Asserts Control Over Postal Service Amid Plans to Overhaul Voting, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Adam Sella and Nick Corasaniti, Aug. 25, 2026 (print ed.). That effort got new attention on Monday, when the Supreme Court allowed preparations for mail voting curbs to proceed. The justices said it is not a final determination on the order’s legality. Four weeks before President Trump signed an executive order seeking to restrict mail voting, he filed four nominations for vacancies on the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service. All four were Republicans. Three have expressed doubts about who won the 2020 presidential election and the security of voting.
• One First, Analysis and Opinion: Making Sense of the Mail-in Ballots Ruling, Steve Vladeck, right, Aug. 24, 2026. The Supreme Court’s grant of a stay in one of the mail-in ballot cases is deeply wrong, but it’s also not the main event over whether Trump’s patently unlawful executive order can take effect.
• New York Times, News Analysis: At Home and Abroad, Deference to Trump Turns Increasingly to Defiance, Peter Baker, right, Aug. 25, 2026. While the president remains the most dominant figure in the world, other leaders and institutions are pushing back more vigorously than at the beginning of his second term.

Special Reports

• New York Times, Study’s Alarming Finding: At Least 1 in 4 N.F.L. Players Gets Brain Disease, John Branch, Aug. 25, 2026. The actual prevalence, researchers said, may be much higher. Since the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. was first scientifically linked to football about 20 years ago, and as hundreds of former professional football players have been diagnosed with the disease after their deaths, a haunting question has lingered: Just how many N.F.L. players will end up with C.T.E.?
• New York Times, Many N.F.L. Players Get Brain Disease. Why Hasn’t OSHA Intervened? John Branch, Aug. 25, 2026. “We never see things that are this dire,” a former chief scientist of the agency said about rates of C.T.E. in former players. The most notorious form of workplace illness in the United States might be black lung disease. Scientists say that 10 to 20 percent of coal miners who have worked 25 years or more have gotten it. It has long been considered an epidemic. Imagine an American job that is less safe than that, where one in four workers (and maybe far more) ends up with an incurable, degenerative brain disease that withers the mind, sometimes after just a few years of exposure.
• New York Times, Your Child Plays Football. How Can You Minimize Risk of C.T.E.? John Branch, Aug. 25, 2026. Researchers say it’s all about reducing the total number of blows to the head.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Canada Retaliates, Maxwell’s Bid to Leave Prison Denied, Trump Suggests Renaming Lake Ontario, Trump Jails Service Member Who Called for Impeachment, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 25, 2026. Canada’s trade war with the US just got personal, with Ontario Premier Doug Ford telling Trump he can “kiss my ass” as Ottawa prepares retaliatory tariffs and Trump threatens to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Newly leaked details reveal Trump ignored direct Oval Office warnings before launching the Iran war, and now Iranian state TV is airing a video asking “where and how should we kill Barron Trump.” And an Air Force major was formally charged under a rarely used military law after twice being arrested for calling for Trump’s impeachment.

More On Middle East Wars

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Losing the Iran War: The Economic Front, Paul Krugman, right, Aug. 25, 2026. The D in Bessent’s “D-Day” stands for Dud. Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, is preparing what he calls an “economic D-Day,” economic sanctions that will bring the Iranian regime to its knees — a tricky proposition since, according to those same officials, Iran is already on its knees. What you need to know is that this economic campaign will fail as thoroughly as the military campaign.
• Politico, A politically impossible situation’: New poll shows Trump voters losing patience with Iran war, Megan Messerly,Aug. 22, 2026. The share of MAGA voters who think the war is worth the economic cost has fallen to roughly over a third, down from 50 percent in May, the Politico Poll found. Half of President  Donald Trump’s MAGA base thought the Iran war was worth its economic costs in May. Now, just a little more than a third do.

More On U.S. Trade War Against Canada

• New York Times, U.S. Tariffs Could Price Canadian Firms Out of U.S. and Threaten Thousands of Jobs, Ian Austen, Aug. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The 50 percent tariffs President Trump imposed on Canadian exports to the United States will make it impossible for many Canadian companies to continue to sell to the U.S. market, economists say.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 24, 2026 [Canada Unites In Tariff Fight Against U.S. While Trump Flails, Fails], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 25, 2026. On Friday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney instructed Canadian negotiators to walk away from talks with officials from the Trump administration over new tariffs of 50% Trump had imposed on $28 billion of Canadian products. Carney explained in a statement that “last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”
• Emptywheel, Opinion: Trump is Being Confronted by his Worst Nightmare, Peterr, Aug. 25, 2026. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is Donald Trump’s worst nightmare: a banker with political power.

U.S. Billionaires, Budgets, Taxes, Regulation, Accountability

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, Aug. 25, 2026. ‘Debt crisis’? No, a competency crisis. Whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, Republicans holler about federal debt, lamenting that the economic crisis is around the corner. Their solution (Increase taxes? Cut defense? Don’t be daft!) invariably entails slashing vital domestic programs. But when the debt hit $40T, a new record, Republicans were suspiciously silent. It seems the “crisis” is not a crisis unless the president is a Democrat.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Anti-billionaire tax ad falsely claims every Californian will have to “report all their assets,” Judd Legum, right, Aug. 25, 2026. In November, California voters will consider a one-time 5% tax on the assets of a few hundred of the state’s billionaires. The initiative, should it pass, is expected to generate tens of billions of dollars for health care and education programs. Opponents of the measure have a big problem: taxing billionaires is quite popular.

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

• New York Times, Trump Administration Aims to Revoke Visas of Foreign Citizens Applying for Asylum, Edward Wong, Updated Aug. 25, 2026. The State Department, in a move that could affect as many as 200,000 visa holders and asylum applicants, has begun its review. Cancellations could occur in waves. The State Department has begun reviewing such visas, and cancellations are expected to occur in waves. The move could affect as many as 200,000 U.S. visa holders and asylum applicants.
• Minnesota Reformer, New court filings reveal more details of undercover agents’ surveillance of anti-ICE protesters, Madison McVan, Aug. 25, 2026. A court filing Tuesday morning in the federal case against 15 anti-ICE protesters contained more than 200 pages of undercover agents’ notes and photos from the Department of Homeland Security’s widespread surveillance operation during Operation Metro Surge.
• Emptywheel, Analysis: The Invented Blockade and the Fake Doxing that HSI Turned into “Terrorism,” Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Aug. 25, 2026. Isaac Sant’s attorney has filed a bunch more exhibits in preparation of a discovery hearing that the government did not succeed (at least not yet — we’ll see whether John Roberts weighs in!) in getting moved on Thursday. I’ve collected everything here. There are photos from one of the undercover officer’s (the one who dropped her wire at a boxing class) undercover phones. I suspect Sant included the pictures because DOJ is withholding the parallel contents from the main UC’s phone, even though the report cherrypicking that content promised that it would all be downloaded when the investigation is over.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

• Hope for America, Opinion: Nobody actually likes Donald Trump, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 24, 2026. At 2:37 p.m., a visibly frail Donald Trump (shown above) emerged from the White House and slowly made his way down the corridor, his eyes fixed on the ground beneath him through nearly every careful step. The President of the United States chose to begin an event about education for America’s children with a $400 million vanity project he is building to impress an authoritarian leader, the president of China. When he finally decided to turn his attention to the reason for the event in the first place, children, he couldn’t even keep the focus on their education. 
• New York Times, At Trump’s IndyCar Race, a V.I.P. Invitation Became a Diplomatic Snub, Anton Troianovski and Eric Schmitt, Aug. 25, 2026. Foreign ambassadors were promised free food and drinks, misting fans and shaded seats during the event. Then some of them were uninvited. about this,” Mr. Ischinger said. “Is it a sign of their unimportance, that they were not being taken seriously?”

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• The Warning with Steve Schmidt, Hakeem Jeffries Owes America an Explanation, Steve Schmidt, right, Aug. 24, 2026. Hakeem Jeffries, who could soon be Speaker of the House, held a secret meeting with Jared Kushner just months before the midterms. Steve Schmidt explains why this betrayal could cost the Democratic Party everything.
• New York Times, Jeffries Defends Kushner Meeting, Vowing Tough Oversight of Trump, Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, Aug. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The Brooklyn Democrat, who is in line to be speaker should his party win the House, has drawn ire from some progressives for huddling with the president’s son-in-law. 
• New York Times, Election Live Updates: Darline Graham, With Push From Trump, Wins Senate Primary in South Carolina, Emily Davies, Aug. 25, 2026.  South Carolina Republican voters nominated Darline Graham for her late brother Lindsey Graham’s former Senate seat on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, handing President Trump a major win after he helped catapult Ms. Graham from relative obscurity to a Senate nomination.
• New York Times, Poll Shows Shapiro With a Wide Lead in Pennsylvania, Evan Reynolds and Ruth Igielnik, Aug. 25, 2026. A New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll found Gov. Josh Shapiro leading Stacy Garrity and having support in the state for a possible presidential bid.
• New York Times, Fetterman’s Popularity With Republicans Surges as He Angers the Left, Poll Finds, Reid J. Epstein and Ruth Igielnik, Aug. 25, 2026. Pennsylvania Republicans now view John Fetterman, the state’s Democratic senator, more favorably than its sitting G.O.P. senator, a New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll found.
• New York Times, Two Unvaccinated People Died From Measles in Pennsylvania, Officials Say, Teddy Rosenbluth, Aug. 25, 2026. The deaths were the first in the United States in 2026.
• New York Times, Trump Lays It on the Line for Darline Graham, Emily Davies, Patricia Mazzei and Michael Gold, Aug. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The president rallied for the sister of Lindsey Graham in her South Carolina Senate run and pressured allies to endorse her. A super PAC run by his advisers has spent nearly $800,000 on her campaign. Will it be enough?

U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

• New York Times, Dolly Parton, Superstar Whose Songs Spoke to Millions, Dies at 80, Bill Friskics-Warren, Aug. 25, 2026. Known for her outsize persona, appearance and talent, she rose from rural poverty to become a top-selling singer, songwriter and entrepreneur.
• New York Times, Trump Officials Propose Sale of ‘Woke’ Painting by Kehinde Wiley, Zachary Small, Aug. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The State Department recently removed the painting of Dominicans from a U.S. embassy, noting it was by the artist who made Barack Obama’s presidential portrait. The State Department wants to sell a painting by the celebrated artist Kehinde Wiley that the director of its Art in Embassies program called “very woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.” It was removed from the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic last week.

Top Stories

The U.S. Supreme Court, as portrayed by its official photo and in a 2024 magazine cover portrait.

New York Times, Supreme Court Allows Trump Plan to Restrict Mail-In Voting, for Now, Abbie VanSickle and Ann E. Marimow, Aug. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The administration asked the court to clear the way for President Trump’s order that creates “state citizenship lists” and directs the Postal Service to decide who gets a mail-in ballot. 

A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to move forward with plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections.

In an emergency order, the justices said President Trump could proceed with implementing an executive order he had signed, which directed the U.S. Postal Service to help decide which voters should receive mail-in ballots. Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security will also create lists of U.S. citizens that the administration believes could be used to monitor voter rolls for noncitizens.

The decision means the administration can move ahead with planning for restricting the use of mail ballots even as a lower court continues to weigh the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order. But with little more than two months until Election Day — and considerably less before early voting begins in many states — it remains unclear whether the White House’s rules will be in effect for a midterm election in which control of both chambers is at stake.

The order by the court was unsigned, as is typical in such emergency rulings. The majority wrote that it agreed with the government’s argument that it should be able to move forward with its plans, finding that the Trump administration was “likely to suffer irreparable harm” unless the justices lifted a freeze that had been imposed by lower courts.

The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warning that the majority “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

The majority said the states that challenged the president’s order could not demonstrate that they were sufficiently harmed by voting rules that had not yet taken effect. The justices cautioned that their order was preliminary and not a final decision about whether the administration’s order “will necessarily be lawful” once the plans are complete. “On that score, time will tell,” the majority said in the 10-page, unsigned order.

That could mean the legal battle will return to the justices, perhaps quickly, as the administration moves to implement the president’s order before the midterms. 

New York Times, Trump Quietly Asserts Control Over Postal Service Amid Plans to Overhaul Voting, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Adam Sella and Nick Corasaniti, Aug. 25, 2026 (print ed.). That effort got new attention on Monday, when the Supreme Court allowed preparations for mail voting curbs to proceed. The justices said it is not a final determination on the order’s legality.

Four weeks before President Trump signed an executive order seeking to restrict mail voting, he filed four nominations for vacancies on the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service.

All four were Republicans. Three have expressed doubts about who won the 2020 presidential election and the security of voting.

The selections broke with a longstanding practice of nominating board members in bipartisan pairs. Two of those nominees are on a fast track for approval, and could reach a full Senate vote when the chamber returns from recess in September. If confirmed, their appointments would effectively tip the board to a majority that is loyal to Mr. Trump.

The quiet attempt to restructure the leadership of the Postal Service comes as the president and his allies are trying to transform the 251-year-old agency into a central player in their quest to overhaul the nation’s elections. Last year, Mr. Trump took an unusually active role directing the board of governors to select the current postmaster general, David Steiner. And the president has imposed a highly partisan agenda on a historically apolitical institution: restricting mail voting, a practice more heavily used by Democrats than Republicans, which Mr. Trump has publicly acknowledged would benefit his party.

Control of the Postal Service grew even more critical on Monday, after the Supreme Court ruled to allow the administration to move forward with plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections.

The justices cautioned that the decision was preliminary and should not be construed as a final determination on the legality of the order. It also remains unclear whether the administration can implement the restrictions in time for mail voting this year.

“It is clear to me that the president is looking for people who will do exactly what he says and will carry out his order without respect for the U.S. Postal Service,” said Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who serves on the Senate Homeland Committee with oversight of the agency.

Jonathan Smith, the head of the American Workers Postal Union, said postal workers are worried about being ordered to implement policies that are legally questionable.

“They can direct the people I represent to follow procedures we perceive as possibly not constitutionally sound or legal or even ethical,” Mr. Smith said in an interview. “Because the board of governors were put there for that purpose.”

Since he returned to power last year, Mr. Trump has recruited allies for key roles across his administration who are willing to act on his false claims that his defeat in 2020 was rigged and the country’s election systems are not secure. He has pressed for criminal investigations of election officials in states he lost in 2020. His top legislative priority is enacting a law that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. He has deployed the Department of Homeland Security to scour state voter rolls for noncitizens.

Few agencies are as central to this mission as the Postal Service. And few are as blatantly straining the boundaries of executive power. The Constitution grants the president no authority over elections, an area of governance that only Congress and the states may regulate. Yet Mr. Trump has instructed the Postal Service to effectively police mail voting and decide which ballots can be delivered.

One First, Analysis and Opinion: Making Sense of the Mail-in Ballots Ruling, Steve Vladeck, right, Aug. 24, 2026. The Supreme Court’s grant of a stay in one of the mail-in ballot cases is deeply wrong, but it’s also not the main event over whether Trump’s patently unlawful executive order can take effect.

I apologize in advance for writing a stream-of-consciousness post in a hurry (and for the errors that may result), but I want to provide a (short) bit of context for the headlines folks are seeing about the Supreme Court’s Monday afternoon ruling in Trump v. California, in which the Court (over dissents from the the three Democratic appointees) granted President Trump’s application to stay a district court injunction that was blocking two parts (sections 2 and 3) of his March executive order purporting to impose limits on mail-in voting. (For background and links to the relevant earlier developments, see this earlier bonus post, from which I’ve removed the paywall.)

To understand what’s going on, I’m going to try to tee this up as a progression of eight different points.

New York Times, News Analysis: At Home and Abroad, Deference to Trump Turns Increasingly to Defiance, Peter Baker, right, Aug. 25, 2026. While the president remains the most dominant figure in the world, other leaders and institutions are pushing back more vigorously than at the beginning of his second term.

This is a summer movie that’s been seen before: President Trump makes demands. When the other side does not give him what he wants, he escalates with bombastic threats of crippling punishment. The other side surrenders.

Except that Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, evidently has not read the script. His refusal to buckle in the face of Mr. Trump’s trade ultimatum even at the cost of retaliatory tariffs has flipped the narrative of the president’s second term. Instead of giving in, Mr. Carney is testing whether defiance is a viable strategy against Mr. Trump.

The age of capitulation that defined Mr. Trump’s return to office may be starting to fade. World leaders and domestic institutions are, in some cases at least, showing less willingness to submit to Mr. Trump’s will. European leaders have refused to join his war with Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel flatly rejected his Gaza plan. Gulf Arab states forced him to abandon plans to charge a shipping toll in the Strait of Hormuz.

Universities and law firms are rebuffing his directives rather than signing on the bottom line. Bond markets are rebelling against his fiscal policies. Even the ABC network, whose $16 million payment to settle a Trump lawsuit was seen as an early example of yielding to the president, has discovered that it did not buy peace and is now suing his administration for threatening its broadcast licenses.

None of which means that Mr. Trump should be underestimated. Although his poll numbers are at or near historic lows, he remains the most dominant figure on the planet, able to reset the terms of the global conversation on a whim with a social media post and unafraid of wielding power in ways that his predecessors did not.ImageMr. Carney walks past a row of Canadian flags.Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada said he had long warned that “America is trying to break us so they can own us, and I promised that that will never ever happen.”Credit...Patrick Doyle/The Canadian Press

He may yet bring Canada and Israel to heel through force of personality, tariffs or other means. The Supreme Court has given him one free pass after another to use his executive authority as he sees fit, whether it be taking control of independent agencies, building his cherished ballroom or trying to crack down on mail-in voting.

And every time someone predicts that Republicans in Congress will finally begin exhibiting some independence, they prove the prognosticators wrong. While they have resisted his pressure in some instances lately, Senate confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general made clear that he still dominates his party’s congressional wing.

But even among Republicans, there are some worrisome signs for the president. Although he has successfully punished several prominent Republican lawmakers he deemed disloyal by rallying his MAGA base to defeat them in party primaries this year, G.O.P. voters have rejected Mr. Trump’s endorsed candidates in 10 nominating contests, including six in August alone. Polls show his support among Republicans slipping.“I think that recent weeks have been somewhat of an inflection point,” said Norm Eisen, a former Obama White House lawyer and founder of a group called the Democracy Defenders Fund, who has been waging multiple court fights against Mr. Trump. “At home and abroad, pro-democracy forces and everybody else are standing up to him with much more widespread vigor.”

Among others, Mr. Eisen has been involved in legal battles over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, birthright citizenship, the Federal Reserve and the aborted prosecution of a former Olympian charged with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. To the extent that there has been a shift, Mr. Eisen said, it owes in part to overreaching by Mr. Trump. “Trump has been his own worst enemy,” he said.

Mr. Trump and his advisers reject that assessment, of course, and point to his continuing ability to shape events. In a series of social media posts in recent days, the president has taken credit for falling crime rates and insisted that he is winning the war with Iran. He has disputed polls showing his unpopularity and rejected stories about recent primary losses.

“The actual Polls are tremendous, and the Spirit in our Country has never been higher,” he wrote. “We’re winning against EVERYONE, including Iran, whose Country is in Economic and Military Death Spiral.”

Special Reports

New York Times, Study’s Alarming Finding: At Least 1 in 4 N.F.L. Players Gets Brain Disease, John Branch, Aug. 25, 2026. The actual prevalence, researchers said, may be much higher.

Since the degenerative brain disease known as C.T.E. was first scientifically linked to football about 20 years ago, and as hundreds of former professional football players have been diagnosed with the disease after their deaths, a haunting question has lingered:

Just how many N.F.L. players will end up with C.T.E.?

New data provides a sobering indication: At least one in four of all the people who have played in the N.F.L. might expect to end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, according to a study of hundreds of cases over a recent six-year period.

Researchers considered every former N.F.L. player who died from 2016 to 2021. There were 878. Some died in their 20s, some in their 80s, most in between.

The study’s main finding was simple math: At least 215 of those 878 former players — 24.5 percent — had C.T.E.

The actual prevalence could be far higher. The roughly 25 percent rate does not consider the 643 brains that were not examined. Some of those, maybe many of them, likely had C.T.E. too.

New York Times, Many N.F.L. Players Get Brain Disease. Why Hasn’t OSHA Intervened? John Branch, Aug. 25, 2026. “We never see things that are this dire,” a former chief scientist of the agency said about rates of C.T.E. in former players.

The most notorious form of workplace illness in the United States might be black lung disease. Scientists say that 10 to 20 percent of coal miners who have worked 25 years or more have gotten it. It has long been considered an epidemic.

Imagine an American job that is less safe than that, where one in four workers (and maybe far more) ends up with an incurable, degenerative brain disease that withers the mind, sometimes after just a few years of exposure.

Imagine the outrage at the working conditions, the demands that something be done to protect the employees, the questions about whether the industry needed to be overhauled, if not abolished.

“I don’t think that this would be abided in any industry,” said Doug Parker, the head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration under the Biden administration.

New York Times, Your Child Plays Football. How Can You Minimize Risk of C.T.E.? John Branch, Aug. 25, 2026. Researchers say it’s all about reducing the total number of blows to the head.

Two things are true: Football has a hold on American culture, and tackle football is not good for brains. Navigating that contradiction can be especially tricky for parents of children who play the game.

Twenty years into the era of C.T.E. awareness, parents know enough to be worried but perhaps not enough to avoid the risks entirely.

Some lean into the positives of the game — among them, the joy and excitement it brings to families, the sense of community it builds, the multigenerational traditions it holds, and the lessons about teamwork and work ethic — and hope that, fingers crossed, C.T.E. is not looming inside the brain.

It’s a risk-reward calculation, one that the children might not be old enough to consider.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Canada Retaliates, Maxwell’s Bid to Leave Prison Denied, Trump Suggests Renaming Lake Ontario, Trump Jails Service Member Who Called for Impeachment, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 25, 2026. Canada’s trade war with the US just got personal, with Ontario Premier Doug Ford telling Trump he can “kiss my ass” as Ottawa prepares retaliatory tariffs and Trump threatens to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Newly leaked details reveal Trump ignored direct Oval Office warnings before launching the Iran war, and now Iranian state TV is airing a video asking “where and how should we kill Barron Trump.” And an Air Force major was formally charged under a rarely used military law after twice being arrested for calling for Trump’s impeachment.

Also today: the Trump administration is preparing the largest mass visa revocation in US history, the EPA wants to let datacenters keep their air pollution secret, the Supreme Court just handed Trump a win on mail voting restrictions, and the wife of an active duty Army sergeant was deported to Honduras while their six-year-old watched.

Canada tells Trump to Kiss its Ass:

Canada is set to unveil retaliatory tariffs against the US on Tuesday as the trade war intensifies, with Prime Minister Mark Carney signaling he may abandon matching US duties dollar for dollar in favor of more targeted countermeasures aimed at protecting Canadian workers and industries. Trump escalated again Monday, telling Canada to “fall in line” or face consequences “far WORSE” than existing tariffs, threatening 50% tariffs on Canadian vehicles, auto parts, and steel starting January 2027, and on Tuesday reportedly threatened to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Carney accused Washington of treating Canada like a subsidiary and said in French that the US wants to “destroy our major industries, including autos, steel and aluminum,” calling it one of the main reasons Canada walked away from the deal. He added that Canada is now finding reliable partners “everywhere in the world, except in the United States... And Russia.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has been the most combative voice in the dispute, telling an Ottawa radio show Trump “can kiss my ass” and that Canada would “go at him full steam,” while separately warning “everything is on the table,” including cutting off electricity and critical minerals like nickel and uranium from Ontario. Ford repeatedly invoked Ronald Reagan’s opposition to tariffs, saying Reagan would be “throwing up” and “spinning around in his grave,” and compared Trump to a bully who needs to be confronted rather than appeased. Trump fired back personally on social media, mocking Ford as “the less charismatic, intelligent, and overall unimpressive brother of the late, great, Rob Ford” and again referring to Carney as “Governor Carney,” insults Ford dismissed by saying “bring it on, buddy, I’m ready.” Ford also revealed he’d opposed the draft deal Carney had been considering, particularly a provision that would have restored American liquor to Ontario shelves.

The original trade talks collapsed largely over a “culture war” sticking point: Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette said the US demanded last-minute concessions on Quebec’s French-language protections, specifically Bill 96 and Bill 109, which she called a “red line” central to Quebec’s identity that would not be negotiated away regardless of tariff threats. US officials and companies including Netflix, YouTube, Apple, and Spotify have argued the laws burden manufacturers and streaming services with French-language packaging and content quota requirements, and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer called the collapse “a missed opportunity” for Canada. The breakdown reportedly also briefly united English and French speaking Canadians in a shared rejection of US pressure, though Quebec sovereigntist leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon said any future independence referendum would be delayed given the “unpredictability” of the Trump administration complicating that debate.

The auto industry sits at the center of the economic stakes, since Ontario is the hub of Canada’s vehicle manufacturing and its plants are deeply integrated with US automakers including Ford, GM, and Stellantis, supporting tens of thousands of jobs on both sides of the border; Greer argued Canada’s auto industry only exists because of the 1960s Auto Pact, while Carney called the partnership “the most successful automotive partnership in history.” Canada’s reciprocal 50% tariffs, covering roughly $28 billion in US goods, are expected to take effect September 8, and as of the most recent reporting there are no scheduled talks to resume negotiations between the two countries. Ford has used electricity as leverage before, having imposed a 25% surcharge on power sent to Michigan, Minnesota, and New York earlier in the dispute, which prompted Trump to threaten doubling steel and aluminum tariffs before both sides backed down, suggesting this standoff could follow a similar pattern of escalation and retreat.

Trump missed Iran warnings:

Newly leaked details show Trump ignored direct warnings before launching the Iran war. In a February Oval Office meeting, Tulsi Gabbard warned that striking Iran risked closing the Strait of Hormuz, triggering energy chaos, and installing an even more hardline successor to Khamenei, while military leaders separately warned about heavy casualties and depleted munitions stockpiles. Trump launched the attack alongside Israel on February 28 anyway, and Mar-a-Lago reportedly erupted in celebration when Khamenei’s killing was confirmed. Since then, Gulf nations and even some Republicans have pushed Trump to end the war, and sources say he’s privately furious, asking allies “why isn’t Iran folding” and at one point suggesting they should “bomb the s--t out of Iran” before a friend talked him down. White House spokesperson Olivia Wales is still defending the war as a success despite the fallout now playing out in real time.

That fallout includes a new video from Iranian state TV asking “where and how should we kill Barron Trump,” with claims of a 10 million dollar bounty and assertions that his movements are being monitored. The report alleges a woman managed to breach Secret Service security to get near Barron, and cites claims that communication happened partly through Xbox voice chat and messaging. The Secret Service has confirmed it’s aware of the threats and is investigating, and this isn’t the first time Trump’s family has been targeted, with similar threats previously made against Melania and Ivanka. A billboard reading “We will kill Trump” has also appeared in Tehran, and Iranian officials have invoked the concept of “qisas,” or retributive justice, tying it directly to Khamenei’s death.

Meanwhile Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has rolled out “Operation Economic Outcast,” a new sanctions campaign hitting aviation, digital assets, gold, shipping, and technology, with more than 60 entities sanctioned so far. The UAE’s abrupt trade suspension with Iran is being read as directly tied to the pressure campaign, and China, India, Turkey, and Iraq all now face exposure depending on how closely they keep trading with Tehran. China has formally objected, calling the sanctions counterproductive, and oil prices have actually dipped despite the escalation, suggesting markets aren’t convinced the pressure will hold. The sanctions have also triggered suspensions of remittances affecting Iranian Americans and a halt to sports and academic exchange programs.

On the ground in Iran, the human cost is mounting fast. The rial has collapsed to roughly 2 million to the dollar, and the real base wage for Iranian workers has more than halved over the past decade down to about 83 dollars a month. Long lines are forming at gas stations in Tehran as shortages spread, and a separate oil tanker was disabled off the coast of Oman amid the rising regional tension. Pakistan has stepped in to mediate, describing a recent meeting as “positive and productive,” even as the U.S. simultaneously lifted Syria’s state sponsor of terrorism designation in an unrelated but notable regional move.

Israeli strikes and tank fire killed at least four people, including two children, in Gaza on Monday, a week after a U.S. delegation led by Jared Kushner met with Prime Minister Netanyahu and privately asked Israel to draw down its attacks. A 4 year old was killed and his mother and sister wounded when a strike hit a building in the Bureij refugee camp despite an evacuation warning, while separate strikes hit the Shati refugee camp and Deir al-Balah, which Israel’s military said targeted Hamas weapons storage sites inside mosques, though it offered no evidence. In southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, a man was killed and five others wounded in one strike, and Israeli tank fire separately killed a 10 year old girl in an incident Israel’s military said it wasn’t aware of. Israel has struck Gaza on six of the seven days since the Kushner meeting, and Gaza’s health ministry says Israeli strikes have killed at least 1,288 Palestinians since the October ceasefire took hold, with Israel maintaining its strikes are responses to ceasefire violations that have killed five Israeli soldiers. Separately, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened to escalate strikes further unless Hamas stops kites from being flown from Gaza into Israel, which a Hamas spokesperson dismissed as “children’s toys.”

Major Watson:

Air Force Maj. Jason Watson was formally criminally charged Monday under the Uniform Code of Military Justice after twice being arrested for publicly calling for Trump’s impeachment, including once while protesting in uniform on the Capitol steps in July and again in August just days after criticizing Trump in a CNN interview. He faces three counts under the rarely used Article 88 for “contemptuous” remarks about Trump, five counts under Article 92 for disobeying orders, including wearing his uniform at a political protest and refusing to wear it to work the next day, and two counts under Article 133 for conduct unbecoming an officer. Watson is currently in pre-trial confinement, which his attorney says amounts to solitary confinement for his own safety, and Watson has said he believes Trump is “flagrantly violating the Constitution” and wanted to set an example for others who feel scared to speak out.

Article 88 convictions are extraordinarily rare, with CNN identifying only two since the modern military justice code took effect in 1951, an Army lieutenant convicted in 1965 for protesting the Vietnam War and a Marine officer convicted in 2021 for publicly criticizing the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal, who the Trump administration has since brought on as a Pentagon adviser. Legal experts note the standard for what counts as “contemptuous” is vague, and a pretrial hearing may be needed to determine whether Watson’s comments were simply fair criticism of the president. It remains unclear whether his case will proceed to trial or what severity of court martial he could face, and the Air Force has said only that Watson is presumed innocent while the case moves forward.

Other news:

A US judge has rejected Ghislaine Maxwell’s latest attempt to overturn her sex trafficking conviction, dismissing her appeal as “frivolous,” “meritless,” and “lengthy and rambling.” Maxwell, 64, is serving a 20 year sentence for procuring girls for the late Jeffrey Epstein after being convicted on five felony counts in December 2021. She had argued in her appeal that her constitutional rights were “violated in multiple respects,” but the New York judge flatly rejected those claims. The ruling is the latest setback in her ongoing legal efforts to fight the conviction, which followed a case that made her one of the most prominent figures tied to Epstein’s abuse network.

The Trump administration is preparing what would be the largest mass visa revocation in U.S. history, targeting up to 200,000 foreigners who hold business or tourism visas but have applied for or are seeking asylum. The State Department is expected to announce revocation of B1 and B2 visas issued between 2016 and 2026 to holders who’ve sought asylum, working in coordination with DHS, according to internal documents obtained by the AP and two officials. A State Department spokesman said the goal is to stop people from entering as short-term visitors and then filing for asylum to stay permanently, though he wouldn’t specify how many visas would ultimately be revoked. The revocations wouldn’t necessarily trigger immediate deportations, since most pending asylum cases would simply be recategorized and lose their business or tourism status rather than face removal right away. This builds on a broader crackdown that’s already revoked roughly 175,000 visas over the past 18 months for reasons ranging from criminal convictions to public criticism of U.S. policy, and it comes alongside separate efforts to crack down on birth tourism.

The Trump EPA has proposed a new rule that would kill the requirement for datacenters to publicly disclose the air pollution they release, letting emission permits get issued behind closed doors instead. Datacenters are often sources of nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide and heavy metals, and while the Clean Air Act currently requires “minor” polluters to disclose expected pollution levels to the public through state agencies, the new rule would make that disclosure voluntary and left to state and local officials’ discretion. Former EPA air office official Joe Goffman said the move guts what he called an “ironclad promise” of public transparency, warning most states, many of which actively court datacenter investment, are unlikely to require disclosure voluntarily, leaving communities in the dark about what they’re breathing and weaker in court or public fights. Big tech companies already split datacenter permit requests into individual pieces per generator or turbine specifically to stay under the less scrutinized “minor” review process rather than face costlier federal review, and advocates say this rule would strip away the last real transparency in that already legally shaky practice. The EPA says the change is meant to cut red tape and speed up permitting to support “American economic development and energy dominance,” but critics including a former deputy director of the EPA’s air quality office call it part of a broader pattern of the administration abandoning transparency as a core EPA principle.

CNN host Kaitlan Collins raised alarm after the Supreme Court sided with Trump on Monday, ruling that 23 Democrat-led states lacked legal standing to challenge his March executive order restricting mail-in voting, letting him move forward with parts of the order even as a lower court still weighs its legality. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented sharply, calling the ruling a “nightmare” that “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty” into the midterms just 71 days away. On her show, Collins noted the irony that Trump himself voted by mail in Florida’s primary last week despite calling mail-in ballots “inherently corrupt,” and brought in legal analysts including Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg, who argued Trump lacks constitutional authority to do this since Congress never delegated voting eligibility decisions to the Postal Service. CNN’s Elie Honig noted the ruling was a narrow procedural win, since the court found the challenging states hadn’t yet shown concrete harm, not a final ruling on the underlying constitutional question. Ginsberg also predicted Republican pushback is coming given that older voters, a core GOP demographic, rely heavily on mail voting, calling it “a rather flawed political strategy.”

Army Sgt. Hedar Leonel Turcios Juarez’s wife, Cristy Maryori Villafranca-Trejo, was deported to Honduras on August 24 after ICE officers detained her outside a Walmart in July while the couple’s six-year-old daughter watched, part of a broader pattern in which Trump’s deportation campaign has swept up more than 50 parents and spouses of active-duty service members, with at least six deported so far, according to an AP investigation. Turcios, who became a US citizen in 2024 after a nine-month Middle East deployment, said his wife “took care of my family” while he served and “is not a threat to anybody,” and an ABC News review found no criminal records for any of the military spouses named in the report, undercutting the administration’s stated focus on “the worst of the worst.” DHS confirmed the removal, saying Villafranca-Trejo entered the country illegally in 2016 and was “released into the country under the Obama administration,” and separately stated that having a military family member “is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws.” Advocacy group Repatriate Our Patriots says it’s currently working with eight active-duty service members and one veteran on similar cases, describing families as “living in the shadows” out of fear of seeking help while their service member is deployed, a shift from decades of bipartisan policy that generally shielded military families’ undocumented relatives from deportation and even used citizenship pathways as a recruitment incentive.

Senator Darline Graham and Representative Ralph Norman face off Tuesday in a Republican runoff to fill the remainder of the late Lindsey Graham’s Senate term, capping a compressed 45 day sprint since his sudden death in July. Governor Henry McMaster initially appointed Darline, Lindsey’s sister and a career civil servant who led the state’s commission for the blind, to serve in a caretaker role, but she surprised the political establishment by entering the race herself with Trump’s encouragement and topped a crowded 10 candidate field to reach the runoff. Norman has attacked her lack of experience, seizing on her comment that national security “is not my thing” and comparing her candidacy to hiring an unqualified coaching prospect just because they’re “kin to Tom Brady,” while running his own ads declaring “Voting for Ralph Norman is MAGA” in response to Trump’s endorsement of Graham. Trump has framed his backing of Graham as repaying a debt to his late friend Lindsey, while also using the race as a test of his own pull with Republican voters ahead of the midterms, telling a Myrtle Beach rally crowd to “pretend” he’s on the ballot himself. The winner will face Democratic pediatrician Annie Andrews in November, in a state Democrats haven’t won statewide in two decades.

A Wisconsin kitten named Erebus Anomaly has broken the world record for most toes on a cat, officially recognized by Guinness World Records on May 13 with a total of 29 toes, edging out the previous 24 year old record of 28. The Maine Coon, born in March to owners Kendra Vandenbloomer and Hunter Nett of Kaukauna, inherited the trait from his father, who had 24 toes himself, and the extra digits stem from polydactyly, a genetic condition that’s relatively common in the breed. Before claiming the record, Erebus survived a serious health scare as a kitten, an aspiration event that led to a pneumonia diagnosis, time on an oxygen machine, and lungs that appeared abnormally white on scans, a recovery his owner called “definitely miraculous.” X-rays taken to confirm his recovery ended up doubling as documentation for his record application, and his owners, who run a Maine Coon breeding cattery, say Erebus isn’t going anywhere and will stay with them.

A U.S. military C-17A Globemaster III transport plane landed in Moscow Tuesday morning under mysterious circumstances, according to NBC News. Flight tracking data showed the aircraft departed Joint Base Andrews in Maryland Sunday afternoon, made a stop in Riga, Latvia, then flew on to Vnukovo International Airport in Moscow. It’s not known who was aboard or what the mission was, and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he had no information about the aircraft when asked. U.S. military officials, the White House, the U.S. embassy in Moscow, and the Russian embassy in Washington all did not immediately respond to questions about the flight.

Nearly two weeks after storms knocked out power across northern Indiana, thousands of residents in Gary remain without electricity, with more than 8,600 customers still waiting as of Monday according to utility provider NIPSCO. The prolonged outage has caused real medical strain, including for 73 year old asthma patient Joetta Walker, who can’t run her nebulizer and has had to rely on an inhaler and candlelight to get through each day. Mayor Eddie Melton said he pressed President Trump directly for help and an executive order, and Trump told him he’d “do all that he can,” while NIPSCO says it expects full restoration by Tuesday. Residents describe spoiled food, sweltering homes, people sleeping in cars with the AC running, and a wave of generator thefts, and several told NBC they suspect their city, which is mostly Black, has been pushed to the back of the repair line.

The U.S. military carried out its first drug boat strike in more than two months on Sunday, killing two people in the eastern Pacific Ocean and bringing the campaign’s overall death toll to 223 people across 67 strikes since it began last September. U.S. Southern Command said the vessel was a “low profile” craft operating along known narcotrafficking routes, though as with nearly all these strikes, the military offered no evidence the boat was actually carrying drugs. The pause followed the deadly late June earthquakes in Venezuela, and the renewed strike comes as the administration pushes deals with Colombia, Guatemala and Honduras to extend the campaign onto land, though Guatemala has denied agreeing to any such deal. Of 28 known survivors across the campaign, only three have ever been rescued, and the very first strike in September 2025 drew lasting controversy after a follow up attack killed two survivors who’d made it out of the initial strike. Legal scholars and lawmakers have questioned both the legality and effectiveness of the strikes, especially since most fentanyl entering the U.S. is trafficked over land from Mexico rather than by sea.

Multiple people, including children, died Sunday evening in Billings, Montana, after a gunman opened fire at a home in a family disturbance and then set the residence ablaze, according to authorities. The shooter died of a self inflicted gunshot wound, and interim Yellowstone County Sheriff Kent O’Donnell said “multiple adults and multiple juveniles” were killed, though officials are withholding the number of victims, their names and ages for now while the investigation continues. Officers arrived within about ten minutes of the initial 911 call, heard gunfire from the back of the house, and three minutes later the home was fully engulfed in flames. Billings Fire Chief Matt Hoppel said limited water access and fewer nearby hydrants than ideal slowed the firefighting response as conditions worsened, and both the origin of the fire and a possible motive remain under investigation.

Icelanders vote Saturday on whether to resume EU membership talks, and pro-EU campaigners are leaning heavily on Trump’s repeated threats to annex Greenland, which sits less than 300 kilometers from Iceland, to make their case. Former Reykjavík mayor Dagur Eggertsson said the Greenland threat has real weight with voters, and echoed Canadian PM Mark Carney’s argument that “small and middle powers need to stick together” through closer ties with Europe. Polls show the race is essentially tied, with a mid-August Gallup poll giving the “Yes” camp just a 51.5 percent edge, and the debate cuts both ways on the core theme of sovereignty, since “No” campaigners argue EU membership itself would erode Icelandic independence, particularly over fisheries and farming policy that sank an earlier accession bid in 2015. Younger, urban voters citing the geopolitical climate and inflation, Iceland’s annual rate is running at 5.6 percent, nearly double the euro area’s, tend to favor the “Yes” side, while rural voters, especially farmers and fishermen outside Reykjavík, are more likely to vote no and argue existing NATO membership and the 1951 bilateral defense pact with the U.S. are protection enough.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has been invited to an October meeting of EU trade ministers in Dublin, according to two European diplomats who spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity, though Greer hasn’t yet confirmed he’ll attend. The October 22-23 gathering, organized by Ireland’s EU Council presidency, would be Greer’s second appearance before EU ministers and comes as Brussels awaits results of a U.S. investigation into excess manufacturing capacity that could clash with last year’s transatlantic trade pact. The meeting follows a familiar pattern, last year both Greer and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick traveled to Brussels seeking commitments that the EU loosen its tech rules, and tensions have only grown since, with Trump threatening an investigation into Brussels’ digital regulations after the EU fined Google under the Digital Markets Act. Most recently, Trump’s envoy to Brussels, Andrew Puzder, criticized the bloc’s climate and sustainability rules, underscoring that even after last year’s tariff truce ended the trade war, Washington is now shifting its pressure campaign toward the EU’s broader regulatory framework rather than tariffs alone.

More On Middle East Wars

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Losing the Iran War: The Economic Front, Paul Krugman, right, Aug. 25, 2026. The D in Bessent’s “D-Day” stands for Dud.

So here, according to Trump and his officials, is the state of the war with Iran: Iran has been totally defeated and is desperate for a deal — indeed, Trump has announced that a deal is imminent on at least six distinct occasions. Also, because there is no deal, and Iran is intransigent, Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, is preparing what he calls an “economic D-Day,” economic sanctions that will bring the Iranian regime to its knees — a tricky proposition since, according to those same officials, Iran is already on its knees. But whatever.

What you need to know is that this economic campaign will fail as thoroughly as the military campaign.

The U.S. plan, or maybe just a concept of a plan, appears to be “Blockade me? No, blockade you!”

On one side, the U.S. is trying to restore the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz despite Iranian threats. At least some tankers are running the strait “dark,” with their transponders off. Private insurers won’t cover the risks of these runs, so the U.S. government is providing insurance instead. And U.S. military forces are providing some protection against Iranian drones and missiles.

This part of the plan is, dare I say it, not entirely stupid. Clearly at least some oil is making it out. The Trump administration says 8 million barrels a day, which would be a significant amount if true. Unfortunately, that figure is coming from Trump officials, who have zero credibility, so it’s anyone’s guess how big the number really is.

More important, however, is the fact that even a successful re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz matters a lot less now than it would have a few months ago. There are two main reasons ending Iran’s blockade of the Strait, even if possible, will be ineffective.

First is the sheer scale of the U.S. military failure in the Persian Gulf. Not only did U.S. attacks on Iran fail to overthrow the regime, Iranian attacks have forced the U.S. to abandon many of its bases in the region. The loss of these bases, combined with the depletion of U.S. stocks of interceptors and other munitions, means that America is effectively unable to defend its Gulf allies.

So what will happen if Iran feels that its blockade of Hormuz isn’t doing enough damage? It can and will escalate to attacks on oil facilities all around the region. And there’s very little America could do to stop it.

Second, energy prices to final users have become increasingly disconnected from the price of crude oil. Remember, people don’t burn crude, they burn gasoline and diesel. And the prices of these refined products are up much more than crude prices. The chart below shows the price of Brent crude along with the wholesale price of diesel fuel and a weighted average of the wholesale prices of diesel and gasoline:

The huge premium in the prices of refined products over the price of crude — the “crack spread” — is a result of a global shortage of refining capacity (partly caused by Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries.) So even if Bessent can get more oil flowing through Hormuz and drive down crude prices, the economic pain that Americans are suffering at the gas pump will remain high.

What about Bessent’s threat to isolate Iran economically, cutting off both its exports and imports? There’s a one-word rejoinder: China. As I wrote a few weeks ago, China has been the winner from Trump’s war.

Now it’s true that the U.S. Navy can and has mostly blocked Iranian oil exports, although maintaining this blockade is harder than it may seem. After all, we know that the Navy is under severe strain, literally having trouble keeping sailors fed and the plumbing on their ships working. These difficulties, in turn, stem largely from the loss of U.S. bases, especially the base in Bahrain. Still, this means that Iran is losing its main source of export revenue. In 2025, that revenue amounted to about $45 billion.

That is a lot of money from Iran’s point of view — around 7 percent of the country’s 2025 GDP. It is, however, only about 0.2 percent of China’s GDP.

Why is China relevant? Well, because the Chinese are obviously enjoying great geopolitical benefits from Trump’s self-inflicted quagmire in Iran. And it would cost them very little, from their point of view, to keep us stuck in the quagmire by supplying the Iranian regime with enough money to finance purchases of essential imports.

Can’t the U.S. blockade Iranian imports too? No. Lucian Truscott has a very good article explaining how fundamentally impossible it would be for the US to close the many, many routes through which goods can get into Iran.

In his remarks yesterday, Bessent made grandiose claims to the effect that we can isolate Iran by imposing sanctions on countries and companies that deal with the Iranian regime. But the Trump administration has already imposed tariffs and other sanctions on so many countries, for so many alleged purposes, and backtracked so many times, that its credibility is exhausted. Moreover, Iran can get much of what it needs from China. So do you really believe that a weakened U.S. can coerce China into helping it defeat Iran? And against China’s own strategic interests? If you believe that I have a few 30-year bonds to sell you.

Yes, the United States still has the capability to impose substantial economic hardship on Iran. But it’s just another Trump fantasy to believe that he can intimidate a regime that has already survived decapitation of most of its leadership, enduredmonths of intense bombing, and that has successfully retaliated against U.S. allies in the Gulf.

While Scott Bessent is a contemptible sycophant, he isn’t stupid. He surely knows that this pathetic attempt to pressure Iran will not only not work but also reeks of desperation. And the erstwhile bond trader in him will know what happens when those who really have the goods – China, in this case – smell the scent of desperation. I can safely predict that the Chinese will make sure that the Iranian regime survives, and that they will thoroughly enjoy watching Trump slowly twist in the wind over the Strait of Hormuz.  

Politico, A politically impossible situation’: New poll shows Trump voters losing patience with Iran war, Megan Messerly, Aug. 22, 2026. Half of President Donald Trump’s MAGA base thought the Iran war was worth its economic costs in May. Now, just a little more than a third do.

That precipitous, 13-point drop in just two months, according to a new POLITICO Poll, reveals how the president’s most die-hard supporters are starting to agree with the majority of Americans who have long opposed the U.S.’ involvement in the war.

Additionally, 37 percent of self-identified MAGA Trump voters say the U.S. should continue its involvement only if it doesn’t increase costs, up from 29 percent who said the same in May, according to the survey, conducted by independent polling firm Public First. Nearly 1 in 5 MAGA voters believe that the U.S. should end its war in Iran, regardless of the costs.

That flagging support among the president’s most loyal supporters is the clearest sign that Americans’ patience is wearing thin as the economy continues to dominate as voters’ top concern heading into a critical midterm cycle.

But Trump on Monday gave little indication that he was looking for a quick end to the war. The U.S. military has pounded Iran for the last two weeks, and speaking to reporters on Tuesday the president claimed that Iranian officials “want to desperately meet” but that “until they are ready to meet in a meaningful way we have no interest in even talking.”

The White House is “at a maximum level of frustration right now, and I was told by very senior people that the president is now fully aware that the only way to the victory that he wants is completely politically impossible. The American people just will not support the kind of escalation it would take at this point,” said one person close to the White House, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. “We’ve got more dead Americans and a politically impossible situation.

More On U.S. Trade War Against Canada

New York Times, U.S. Tariffs Could Price Canadian Firms Out of U.S. and Threaten Thousands of Jobs, Ian Austen, Aug. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The 50 percent tariffs President Trump imposed on Canadian exports to the United States will make it impossible for many Canadian companies to continue to sell to the U.S. market, economists say.

The 50 percent tariffs that President Trump imposed on Canada this weekend could be devastating for many Canadian companies and their employees. It could price them out of the United States and lead to the loss in tens of thousands of jobs, economists say.

“Fifty percent is a huge number for the individual products that are affected,” said Joseph Steinberg, a professor of macroeconomics at the University of Toronto.

“For those products, we should see a very large reduction in exports,” he added. “In some cases, exports will stop altogether, and the firms that produce those products will be severely impacted. Some will undoubtedly shut down.”

Up to 90,000 jobs in Canada could be lost, according to calculations by Trevor Tombe, a trade economist at the University of Calgary in Alberta. Those include jobs at companies not directly affected by tariffs. For example, demand for truck drivers will dry up once Canadian firms are shut out of the U.S. market.

Among the industries likely to be hit hard is forestry. After decades of steep tariffs on softwood lumber — levies that Mr. Trump increased last year — it is facing additional 50 percent tariffs on exports that include plywood, laminated wood products, fiberboard, paper, tissue for toilet paper and packaging.

“We’re getting hammered,” said Derek Nighbor, president of the Forest Products Association of Canada. Nevertheless, he said, he supports the decision of Prime Minister Mark Carney to walk away from trade negotiations with the United States on Friday night.

“This is at a time when the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are not great,” Mr. Nighbor added. “We’re dealing with very, very soft markets that aren’t going to get much better if this kind of tariff behavior keeps up.”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Canada? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

On Tuesday, Mr. Carney is expected to announce retaliation tariffs against the United States, Canadian officials said.

The collapse of trade talks led Mr. Trump to unleash the new tariffs on hundreds of exports from Canada. They cover about $20 billion in trade from Canada. The tariffs arrived on top of levies of 50 percent imposed on Canadian steel and aluminum, as well as 25 percent duties on automobiles that Mr. Trump announced last year.

On Monday, Mr. Trump also threatened to raise auto tariffs to 50 percent on Jan. 1 and to impose the same tariff on auto parts that are currently exempted from payments if they qualify as North American under the trade treaty between the United States, Mexico and Canada.

While $20 billion in trade sounds huge, it is about 5.5 percent of the value of all products Canada sends to the United States. So the new tariffs may not have a sweeping, debilitating effect on Canada’s economy, economists say.

Canada’s exports are dominated by shipments of oil and gas — items that Mr. Trump has excluded from his tariff war, along with the fertilizer potash and most minerals.

For the Canadian economy as a whole, the new levies will increase the effective tariff rate for Canadian products by about 2.5 percentage points, economists say. That will raise the average tariff that the United States puts on Canadian goods to about 6.5 percent, Professor Tombe said by email.

By comparison, Mr. Trump negotiated deals with several other major trading partners that brought in 15 percent in general tariffs.

The Royal Bank of Canada also estimated that tariffs at that average level would affect only about 0.4 percent of Canada’s economic output.

But in an analysis published on Monday, TD Securities, Toronto-Dominion Bank’s investment brokerage, said that the new tariffs were a potential problem even if they were unlikely to put sustained pressure on the Canadian dollar.

“The larger concern is the signal a failed agreement sends about the prospects for a broader trade resolution,” the analysis said. “Markets may interpret this as evidence that trade uncertainty will persist.”

While the tariffs that were imposed on Saturday will hurt the forest industries, they will most severely hit companies that export machinery and electronics, and that produce furniture, toys and products made largely of plastic. 

   At the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada took a stand against President Trump’s desire for the United States to own Greenland, and called on medium-size countries to stand up to larger powers (Associated Press photo by Markus Schreiber via New York Times).

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 24, 2026 [Canada Unites In Tariff Fight Against U.S. While Trump Flails, Fails], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 25, 2026. On Friday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney instructed Canadian negotiators to walk away from talks with officials from the Trump administration over new tariffs of 50% Trump had imposed on $28 billion of Canadian products. Carney explained in a statement that “last-minute changes in the U.S. proposed terms were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”

He has a point. From July 1, 2020, until Trump’s second term, the U.S., Canada, and Mexico traded under the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA). Negotiated under the first Trump administration, USMCA replaced the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and was similar to it, creating one of the world’s largest free trade zones.

The trade zone reinforced the close alliance between Canada and the U.S., enabling people in both countries to enjoy the longest demilitarized border in the world stretching more than 5,000 miles (more than 8,000 kilometers) across the entire North American continent. Canada and the U.S. have shared military and defense capabilities, with the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) operating since 1957 to detect aircraft or missiles, especially those coming over the North Pole, that could prove a threat to the United States (NORAD’s Santa Tracker originally was a way to make Americans aware of what NORAD did).

But as soon as he won reelection in 2024, Trump began to emphasize that he intended to use “economic force,” specifically tariffs, to pressure Canada into joining the U.S. as its 51st state. He began to exercise that threat the day he took office for the second time, saying he would put 25% tariffs on Canada. This violation of his own trade agreement reflected the administration’s abandonment of the principles of free trade and defensive alliances put in place after World War II, replacing that system with one favored by autocrats like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, in which strong countries imposed spheres of influence in their regions of the world.

Since then, Trump has sought to use the extraordinary economic power of the United States to force Canada and other countries into subordinate relationships. The recent threat against Canada came after Trump’s previous tariffs either were struck down or expired. On July 20, Trump said he would use Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, more commonly known as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, to impose a 50% tariff on certain Canadian products. No president had ever before invoked Section 338, which allows a president to impose tariffs when a country discriminates against U.S. products relative to its comparative treatment of other countries’ goods.

On Sunday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Carney would have to back down because tariffs will be “devastating for his country.” Also on Sunday, the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted that Trump “has contrived an array of pretexts—from fentanyl trafficking to trade deficits—to bludgeon Canada with tariffs.” And the editorial board, known for its right-wing slant, called Trump’s tariff war on Canada “the dumbest trade war in history” and said it “makes no economic or political sense.”

Canada is the second largest trading partner of the U.S., and the editors noted that Trump’s “latest round of border taxes will hit an array of consumer goods, construction materials and manufacturing components,” driving prices still higher at a time when consumers are already squeezed.

Trump’s new attack on Canada might not make economic or political sense for the U.S., but it seems to make sense for a decaying president.

Trump is flailing in Iran, and so—as national security scholar Tom Nichols pointed out in The Atlantic after Trump nonsensically attacked South Korea, another longstanding and loyal ally—he is looking to reassert his dominance. Trump doesn’t dare to cross the leaders who actually threaten the U.S., those like Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Instead, Nichols writes, he is trying to make himself feel better by “kicking America’s allies, the nations he can punish without fear that they will kick him back.”

“At a better moment in American history, an enraged Congress would step in and demand answers about such dangerous idiocy,” Nichols wrote. “They would rush to the White House, talk to the press, hold hearings, and in general act like responsible stewards of American power.” But Republicans in charge of Congress appear to be unwilling to cross Trump. Our allies, though, Nichols notes, “have power and agency of their own, and even now are likely planning for a world in which the Americans are no longer men and women of principle who stand by their word and by their friends.”

That moment appears to have arrived.

In Davos, Switzerland, in January 2026, Carney warned the World Economic Forum that the world is “in the midst of a rupture.” He warned that the post–World War II rules-based international order is no longer automatically a route to prosperity and security as the world’s most powerful nations are using the economic integration that system championed as a way to coerce other countries.

He urged “middle countries” to create “coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests” as an alternative to a “world of fortresses” made up of major powers with spheres of influence.

On Friday night, after recalling Canada’s negotiators, Carney released a statement saying: “We have recognised from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship. Our government understood, before many, that America is altering all its trade relationships. Putting tariffs on its closest allies and charging for access to its vast market.”

Although negotiators had tried to work with the U.S., he wrote, Canada’s core economic strategy has been on building Canada’s economy and diversifying economic partnerships. He noted that Canada is creating jobs at four times the rate of the United States. “Canada has what the world wants,” he wrote, “And we will not allow any nation to determine our future.”

In an address to Canadians on Saturday, Carney said: “Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen.’ We are keeping that promise.” “Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away. And we are just getting started.”

Carney said Canada will retaliate against the U.S. tariffs, dollar for dollar, beginning on September 8.

This morning, Trump exploded on social media, claiming that “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years” and warning that “Canada will be treated like a State no longer!” He said that on “January First, 2027,” he would place tariffs of 50% on “all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel.” Canadians “feel entitled,” he wrote, “and yet, WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who used to be a Trump fan, told reporters today “I have a lot of real estate on my ass, so [Trump] has a lot of room to kiss my ass.”

Today Carney told reporters that Canada will soon “begin intense discussions with the European Union, the world’s second-largest economy, to build a much stronger and deeper economic and security partnership. Now,” he said, “we can build such unparalleled access because we’re trusted, because we’re reliable, and because we have what the world wants.”

On Friday The Economist reviewed polling by YouGov showing that Trump has a positive job approval rating in only three states: West Virginia, Idaho, and Wyoming.

There seems little reason to think those numbers are going to turn around. On Friday, Trump announced he would try to lower beef prices by suspending tariffs on imports of up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef that he said would be sold “at 25 percent below current prices.”

Cattle ranchers and farmers, who have in the past strongly supported Trump, cried foul, saying the imports would drive down prices while making it impossible to distinguish between U.S. and foreign meat just after nearly 30,000 pounds of Argentine beef were recalled after missing a required inspection in the U.S.

Trump has refused to identify from which country or countries he plans to get the ground beef, a reluctance dovetailing unfortunately with a report from Dave Philipps with visuals by Erin Schaff in the New York Times on August 20 that the Bureau of Land Management under Trump has been selling wild horses for slaughter as meat for as little as $25 a head. Wild horses are legally protected from hunting or capture, but the administration appears to be selling them to middlemen who resell them into the food pipeline unquestioned.

In a sign of just how untrustworthy many Americans now consider Trump, anti-Trump social media users were quick to put the two stories together.

Georgi Kantchev, Rebecca Feng, and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal today also cast doubt on the administration’s claims that large volumes of oil are moving through the Strait of Hormuz. “The trackers whose job it is to count the world’s oil shipments see much less,” they write.

On Sunday, Noah Robertson and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s insistence that he needs his new ballroom for security is bunk: the White House already has a secure, hardened facility that can withstand a nuclear blast and house dozens of people for weeks. It was built secretly during the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, the angry opposition to the Trump administration and the wealthy tech bros it serves is taking shape with popular fury over the data centers. These facilities house computers, servers, and data storage infrastructure and have existed for a long time, but to support the extraordinary demands of artificial intelligence they have grown exponentially lately. Tech giants have built huge facilities that are noisy, pollute, and require huge amounts of energy and water.

Technology advocates have pushed their agenda by claiming they will dramatically expand the economy, and the Trump administration has backed their ambitions. Trump even brought billionaire Elon Musk into the administration after he poured almost $200 million into getting Trump elected.

But opposition to the data centers is bipartisan and growing as they appear to symbolize the takeover of our system by a few wealthy men like Musk. Molly Hennessey-Fiske of the Washington Post reported today that in Texas, some Republicans are mobilizing to prevent Republican Greg Abbott from winning a fourth term as governor because of his support for data centers.

Over the weekend, the growing fury over Trump and his administration led to an uproar over a report in the New York Times by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni about a meeting in the past weeks between House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. The journalists said the meeting was about “potential areas of common ground,” a vague description that led a clearly nervous House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to warn Kushner: “You better not bet against the House Republicans.”

But even the idea that Jeffries was talking to Kushner was enough to infuriate opponents of the administration, a fact that seems likely to have been behind the leak of the meeting in the first place. For his part, Haberman and Karni note, Jeffries has emphasized that he wants “to get rid of toxic Trump cabinet secretaries,” including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth,” but it’s clear that demands for even more widespread accountability are growing.

In addition to posting a number of references to the first plane landing “at the newly named President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” claims that the “Radical Left Democrats are going CRAZY with Fake Polls,” and two photos of himself with Kim Jong Un, Trump posted today that “IRAN IS COMPLETELY COLLAPSING!!!”

And yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent today announced “Operation Economic Outcast,” an initiative to demand other world leaders join with the U.S. in strangling Iran’s economy. Bessent says Trump is contacting other leaders, but, as Riley Beggin, David J. Lynch, and Aoife Walsh of the Washington Post note, would neither say who they were nor specify the deadline.

“The United States expects action,” Bessent told reporters. “We do not have infinite patience here.”  

Emptywheel, Opinion: Trump is Being Confronted by his Worst Nightmare, Peterr, Aug. 25, 2026. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is Donald Trump’s worst nightmare: a banker with political power.

Let’s start with the banker part of this nightmare. For thirteen years, Carney worked on international finance at Goldman Sachs; for five years, he headed the Bank of Canada as they responded to the 2008 financial crisis; and for eight years he was in charge of the Bank of England as the UK debated, approved, and negotiated the terms of Brexit. And in all that time, Carney developed and honed his analytical skills.

Bankers are big on two things above all: hard data and binding commitments. If you want a loan from a banker, you can pull out all your glossy PR pieces around with all their gauzy pictures of how wonderful the future will be if you get this loan, but until you show the banker hard numbers, you aren’t going to get that loan. Similarly, bankers want to see how you have handled your binding commitments in the past. Have you paid previous loans according to the terms of the agreements? Have you lived up to your past promises, or have you tried to wiggle out of them through imaginary loopholes or simply walking away from them?

You can see why bankers are Trump’s biggest nightmare. As a private businessman, Trump’s failure to show hard data that would back up his glossy PR and his objective record of not living up to the terms of the agreements he signed led to bank after bank showing him the door. “No, we’re done. If you want a loan, go find some other sucker to give it to you.” It wasn’t envy or personal animus, but basic banking logic. Trump had proven to be a double failure through his dependency on fuzzy numbers and his overall untrustworthy in living up to his contracts.

As bad as that is for Trump, it is the addition of Carney’s political power that makes Trump really sweat. Where Trump blusters and threatens, Carney has a way of being able to work with others by leaning on that insistence on hard data and binding commitments. He and his Liberal allies are miles (or kilometers) apart from Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford and other Conservative leaders on a lot of policy issues, but they both know that if they can justify their positions with solid numbers and can come to an agreement with each other, they will live up to whatever was decided together.

In Carney’s late Friday announcement describing the downfall of negotiations, one piece has gotten precious little attention from the media. There’s been a lot of talk about various items that became dealbreakers, especially as Carney laid them out in his Saturday speech, but not much notice of his earlier point when he told his negotiators to come home. From the CBC:

Carney said Canada went into the trade talks fully aware the U.S. had changed its spots and had embarked on a mission to reshape its trading relationships to one where it used previous “economic integration as a weapon.”

He noted that the Trump administration has justified tariffs on Canada with a continually changing rationale that began with fentanyl and since moved to wildfire smoke, dairy quotas, the certification of U.S. aircraft and Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s anti-tariff ads that quoted former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, all of which violate the Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement.

Through the Trump administration’s actions, Carney said, Canada has come to realize “that sometimes, its signature was written in pencil.”

This is not hyperbole, but a cold assessment of hard data on past commitments. Leaving aside the bankruptcies and broken contracts that litter Trump’s private business track record and looking solely at his actions as the US president, that cold assessment does not look good. Trump unilaterally tore up NAFTA in his first term, only to realize that the US still needed it, so Trump tweaked it a little and rebranded it USMCA. In his second term, Trump tore up USMCA, wondering what kind of idiot negotiated such a bad agreement. (Yes, self-awareness is not one of Trump’s strengths. Why do you ask?) Then there’s Trump’s backing away from NATO’s firm Article Five commitment to mutual aid of all its members, unilaterally tying the US commitment to Trump’s perception of whether the nation attacked has “paid up”. Trump made the unconditional terms of the NATA treaty conditional. Again and again, Trump record is to break agreements.

Bankers don’t like that kind of screwing around with contracts. International diplomats and politicians don’t like that abdication of national commitments, either. So Trump shouldn’t be surprised that Carney — a banker with national and international political clout — will not look kindly on Trump’s dealmaking.

The NYT has a longish story outlining their research into the breakdown in trade talks between the US and Canada [gift link], and a couple of things stand out. First, while the Canadian team was relatively united (including consultations between Carney and the provincial leaders), the Trump team was bifurcated between US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick. Greer’s portfolio did not cover all aspects of US/Canadian trade, and required Lutnick’s participation in the negotiations.

This did not go well.

Last Monday afternoon, with the talks still underway, Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, and Dominic LeBlanc, the Canadian trade minister, dodged reporters waiting in the Washington humidity as they left a roughly two-hour meeting at the Commerce Department.

Canadian negotiators were used to working closely with Mr. Greer, who oversees U.S. trade deals and helped negotiate the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement during Mr. Trump’s first term. But many of the issues that Canadians cared about most were instead the purview of the man who stayed inside in the air conditioning: Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce.

Mr. Lutnick, a hard-charging former bond broker who has known Mr. Trump for decades, oversees the administration’s tariffs on cars, trucks, steel and aluminum. And in the coming days, he would take a hard line on those topics, issues that ultimately took down the talks.

Second, this division stood in harsh contrast to the Canadian side of things. It’s not that the Canadians didn’t have internal disagreements – Carney, the Liberal PM, and the Conservatives leaders across the country had different negotiating priorities, but these were nowhere near as divisive as those between Lutnick and Greer. What Greer and the Canadian negotiators had worked toward, Lutnick blew up.

But what finally tanked the talks, and what will make things difficult for Trump going forward, is that Carney has the backing of ordinary Canadians of all political stripes. For example, look at the shift in Canadian vacation and travel spending:

For decades, heading south meant one thing for most Canadians: the United States. That has changed dramatically over the past year and a half. Frustrated by tariffs, “51st state” rhetoric, and a political climate that feels increasingly hostile, Canadian travelers have redirected billions of dollars away from American hotels, theme parks, and shopping malls toward destinations that feel warmer in more ways than one.

This isn’t a quiet, temporary dip either. It’s one of the most sustained and statistically documented travel boycotts in recent memory, and the money hasn’t disappeared, it’s simply gone somewhere else. From the Caribbean to the Canadian Rockies, entire tourism economies are now feeling the ripple effects of a shift that started as political protest and turned into a genuine reshaping of how Canadians vacation.

This kind of broad backing from the Canadian people is what made it possible for Carney to order his negotiators home. My Canadian friends tell me that if Trump could somehow get a trade agreement that got Canadian liquor stores to put Kentucky bourbon back on their shelves, those bottles would sit there gathering dust.

Will there be economic hardship for the Canadians? Absolutely. But here’s the thing: Canadians take their national anthem seriously.

Last winter, I was watching an hockey game and chills went up my spine as I watched the pre-game ceremonies. This wasn’t a match between the US and Canada national teams, nor an NHL playoff match. It was an ordinary match played in Canada between one of the NHL’s Canadian teams and a team from the US. It was being played when Trump’s bluster attacking Canada was very much in the news, with Trump’s repeated remarks that Canada should be the 51st state, references to “governor Carney,” and escalating on-and-off-again tariff threats.

Before matches like this with teams from two countries, both national anthems are sung. That night at that hockey game, the singer was a local television personality, and when she sang the US anthem, it was obvious she had a very nice voice as well. Her solo voice was greeted not with boos, but with a respectful silence for the anthem of the visiting team. After it was over, and she prepared to sing “O Canada,” the whole feel of the room shifted.

Canadians love singing their anthem at games like this, but that night they were in full voice. The singer was amplified, but the crowd’s combined voices were just as strong, and grew stronger as the song moved along. The singer could feel this, and so as the anthem approached its end, she pulled the microphone away from her lips and became a conductor of sorts for the crowd as the last lines burst from every throat:

God keep our land glorious and free!O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.

That’s when the difference between the two anthems became stunningly obvious to me. Musically speaking, the US anthem tells the story of outnumbered and outgunned Americans being inspired by the flag that continues to wave despite all the enemy’s bombs and rockets. The Canadian anthem, on the other hand, is a promise made the Canadian people to their nation. Yes, the US anthem can be inspiring, but the Canadian national anthem is a commitment between the singers and their country. *We* stand on guard for our nation, says the song, say the singers. (I searched long and hard to find video of that evening, but came up empty – sorry!)

And this wasn’t just one exuberant song sung one night a couple of month ago, as recent numbers back this up:

Three-in-four Canadians are endorsing the Carney government’s decision to walk away from trade negotiations with the United States late Friday night, confirming that long-expressed national resolve and desire to see Canadian negotiators take a “hard line” with Washington was more than theoretical.

Yes, folks in BC in the west have different priorities than the Quebecois in the east. Yes, the folks in the oil fields have different priorities than the timber workers and the auto workers. But they sing the same anthem and share the same commitment to standing guard for their country. Yes, the various politicians are pressing Carney’s government for more information and proposing different approaches going forward. But they *all* take that anthem seriously, especially the promise at the end.

Trump has seriously misjudged Carney, perceiving his quiet, bankerly negotiating style for weakness. He’s learning — too late — that Carney is not Doug and Bob McKenzie in a suit. What Trump is learning is that this banker/politician is his worst nightmare, because Carney and other other political leaders of all stripes in Canada know they have the backing of overwhelming numbers of ordinary Canadians. Trump can only wish for support like that, and his living nightmare is that he knows he doesn’t have it.

U.S. Billionaires, Budgets, Taxes, Regulation, Accountability

The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, Aug. 25, 2026. ‘Debt crisis’? No, a competency crisis.

Whenever a Democrat occupies the White House, Republicans holler about federal debt, lamenting that the economic crisis is around the corner. Their solution (Increase taxes? Cut defense? Don’t be daft!) invariably entails slashing vital domestic programs. But when the debt hit $40T, a new record, Republicans were suspiciously silent. It seems the “crisis” is not a crisis unless the president is a Democrat.

Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) summed it up perfectly: “We get lectured all of the time by these supposed fiscal hawks. And then every single time they grandstand, they do a little dance on the floor that they’re actually going to stand up to the, you know, the debt and increasing the deficit, and then they fold every time like a cheap fan. I’m so sick of being lectured by them.”

In a similar vein, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) blasted the Republican pearl-clutching about the debt. “$40 TRILLION. That’s our national debt. Republicans ran up the tab, handed billionaires another tax break, and now wanna lecture working families about ‘fiscal responsibility,’” she POSTED on X. “You can’t max out the card AND pretend you’re the accountant.”

Under Trump, fiscal irresponsibility has reached new heights. “The Treasury Department’s daily financial report shows that the nation’s debt reached $40.05 trillion on August 18, more than double its level in 2017. The federal debt has ballooned because government spending is outstripping revenue, forcing the U.S. to borrow more money to cover the shortfall,” CBS News reported, quoting Michael Peterson, CEO of the nonpartisan Peter G. Peterson Foundation. He reminds us, “It’s clearly been accelerating because, like any debt problem, the longer you ignore it, the worse it gets.”

Whether you think the enormity of the debt is itself a crisis or simply a drag on the economy, the immediate results are indisputable. “As the government continues to borrow, interest payments are consuming a larger share of the nation’s spending, creating a compounding effect that further fuels the debt,” CBS News reports. “The U.S. government now spends more on servicing its debt than on national defense or Medicare.”

Republicans’ galling hypocrisy about spending, debt, and deficits aside, the real crisis (and the cause of MAGA’s political crisis) is an utterly corrupt and incompetent regime pursuing policies that worsen inflation, aggravate the gap between rich and everyone else, keep interest rates high, and thereby produce anemic economic results. As University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said recently, this president has given us “the most incoherent, chaotic, unhelpful economic policy” of our lifetime, strewn with self-owns (e.g., mass deportation, frenetic tariff shifts) that undermine even the most robust, innovative economy in the world.

In full view last week was the maladministration of our feckless Treasury, egged on by an unhinged president. Paul Krugman explained the latest machination from incompetent sycophant Scott Bessent (whose laughably false statements describing the nonexistent Golden Age — e.g. “unprecedented economic growth, lasting dollar dominance, and fiscal strength and stability” — are further evidence that this Cabinet is a refuge for unqualified White suck-ups):

High long-term interest rates are an embarrassment for the Trump administration, and Bessent is trying to make the picture look prettier, even though this means undermining the people who are supposed to be making monetary policy.

The maneuver is failing: 30-year yields fell briefly on Wednesday, when the policy was announced, but bounced back on Thursday and were higher as I write this than they were a week ago — clear proof that you can’t gaslight the bond market.

So Bessent, a former bond trader himself, has squandered all of his credibility with his sycophancy, his apparent demands that top officials engage in unethical and probably illegal conduct, and his abuse of the Treasury’s financial power for clearly political goals.

The Wall Street Journal’s headline dryly observed: “The Wild Week When Scott Bessent Was Schooled by the Bond Market.” The report continued: “Investors remain anxious about stubbornly high inflation, mounting federal debt, a deluge of corporate borrowing to fund artificial-intelligence investments, and a new Federal Reserve chairman whose approach to setting interest rates remains enigmatic to many. For some, the Treasury Department’s response only added to the sense of a typically staid market gone disturbingly off-kilter.”

When confronted with Bessent’s face plant, Trump lashed out, fulminating on the failed bond market gambit: “The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will.” At best, one can say Trump is shockingly ignorant; at worst, he is so crazed as to imagine the military can storm the bond markets. In any sane political universe, the 25th Amendment should be seriously considered.Subscribed

It’s no wonder why the American people have utterly lost confidence in the Trump regime. “A new poll [before the latest meltdown] shows Democrats with a 6-point advantage over Republicans on the economy two months away from the midterm elections,” The Hill reported, citing the results of the Financial Times’ Focaldata poll. With 63 percent saying the economy is moving in the wrong direction, Trump and Bessent’s happy talk is more likely to annoy voters than put their minds at ease.

Across the board, voters are giving Trump and his crew rotten marks for an economy they know does not work for their own families. “Mr Trump’s net approval rating for his handling of inflation and prices reached -44 in August, the lowest it has been this term,” the Economist’s YouGov poll tracker found.

And to put an explanation on the worst spasm of government mismanagement of economic affairs in our lifetime, with thuggish threats, Trump drove Canada, our longtime ally, from the negotiating table and slapped a new 50% tariff on our second closest trading partner, leaving Prime Minister Mark Carney righteously indignant and vowing to decouple his economy from the U.S. The result will be another blow to U.S. consumers, “who have been paying for Mr. Trump’s tariff policies through higher prices that have also been driven by the war in Iran and spiraling oil costs,” as the New York Times reported.

So let’s dispense with the Republicans’ hypocrisy about debt, blame-shifting, and disingenuous demands to scrounge for savings at the expense of working and middle-class families. The only real “crisis” is a crisis in economic competence, brought on by MAGA’s devotion to an unhinged, thoroughly corrupt president, and Republicans’ insistence on fattening the wallets of billionaires and trillionaires. In doing so, they are savaging regulations that protect the health and well-being of Americans, indulging in maddeningly self-destructive trade and immigration policies, and blaming hardworking Americans for the results of a rigged economy. The solution to the crisis begins in November, with a Democratic Congress willing to rein in Trumpian chaos, reverse ludicrous policies (including chaotic tariff moves), and return a measure of stability to the Trump-generated economic catastrophe. 

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Anti-billionaire tax ad falsely claims every Californian will have to “report all their assets,” Judd Legum, right, Aug. 25, 2026. In November, California voters will consider a one-time 5% tax on the assets of a few hundred of the state’s billionaires. The initiative, should it pass, is expected to generate tens of billions of dollars for health care and education programs. Opponents of the measure have a big problem: taxing billionaires is quite popular.

A new ad being run extensively on Meta platforms navigates around this issue by claiming it is not a “billionaire tax” but an “everyone tax.” This may be an effective message but it is not true.

The ad features a “Trojan pig” being led through the streets of a suburban community by someone who resembles Bernie Sanders. A mother running with a stroller is coaxed by the Sanders lookalike, “Do you like free stuff?” She nods.

As the Sanders lookalike flees the scene, the narrator claims that it was all a ruse. “Buried in the 32-page bill, they snuck in a provision that allows them to turn the tax on you,” the narrator says ominously. “Every Californian will have to report all their assets to the state tax board.”

This is a lie.

The rest of the ad shows the tax’s backers, hidden in the belly of the wooden pig and dressed in suits, ripping away personal property from residents. They steal a small boat and a surfboard, and assault a young boy to seize his bike. The ad concludes as the Sanders lookalike returns and grabs the woman’s stroller. “I thought you were taxing billionaires?” she asks him, crying. “You should have read the fine print,” he replies with a grin.

The fundamental premise of the ad is false. It claims that the initiative’s drafters included a provision that allows them to “turn the tax on you.” The initiative says that the tax can only be amended by the Legislature through a two-thirds vote of both houses. Even then, any changes must be “consistent with and further[] the purposes of the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act,” which is a one-time tax on the assets of billionaires.

It would be easier for the California legislature to simply create a new wealth tax that applies to everyone, starting from scratch — that takes the same two-thirds vote. But that has nothing to do with the initiative.

Nevertheless, the ad claims that “every Californian will have to report all their assets to the state tax board.” Under the initiative, Californians just have to certify that they do not have $1 billion or more in assets by checking a box. This will be an easy calculation for nearly all Californians.The money behind the deception

The ad, which launched last week, is sponsored by Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes, a project of the California Business Roundtable (CBRT). The group has already spent between $125,000 and $150,000 promoting the ad on Meta platforms. In total, the group has spent over $440,000 since April on ads targeting the tax on billionaires.

The top donor to the CBRT Issues PAC is Peter Thiel, the Trump-supporting venture capitalist with a net worth of about $27 billion. Thiel donated $3 million to the CBRT Issues PAC in December 2025. Other top supporters include former Google CEO Eric Schmidt ($1.5 million) and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen ($750,000). Both men are billionaires.

Another $1.9 million came from Kim DeGeorge, who lists her occupation as “not employed.” Kim DeGeorge is the spouse of Marco DeGeorge, the co-founder of the athleisure brand Alo. Marco DeGeorge has a net worth of $3.7 billion.

The CBRT did not respond to a request for comment.

Billionaires fighting a billionaire tax with AI slop

The Meta ad library discloses that CBRT’s anti-billionaire tax ad was “created or edited with AI.” It shows. For example, the Bernie Sanders lookalike begins the ad with gapped or missing teeth. By the end of the ad, he reappears, wearing a different tie, with a perfect teeth.

There is an even more embarrassing error in the tagline that ends the ad where the word “billionaire” is misspelled. Another ad posted to the group’s Instagram account yesterday contains the same misspelling.

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

New York Times, Trump Administration Aims to Revoke Visas of Foreign Citizens Applying for Asylum, Edward Wong, Updated Aug. 25, 2026. The State Department, in a move that could affect as many as 200,000 visa holders and asylum applicants, has begun its review. Cancellations could occur in waves. 

The Trump administration plans to revoke the visas of foreign citizens who came to the United States temporarily for tourism or business but have sought to stay in the country longer by applying for asylum.

The State Department has begun reviewing such visas, and cancellations are expected to occur in waves. The move could affect as many as 200,000 U.S. visa holders and asylum applicants.

”Under President Trump and Secretary Rubio’s leadership, we are making clear that a visa is a privilege — not a right,” Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement.

He added that the agency was coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security “to identify and revoke the nonimmigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently.”

“These types of visas are issued with the clear understanding that they are for those who intend to return home,” Mr. Pigott said.

Barring most foreign citizens from staying in the United States or immigrating to the country is a goal of President Trump and his supporters.

The Homeland Security Department has halted the processing and adjudication of asylum applications, although a federal judge has said the administration must review such applications.

The foreign citizens the State Department is targeting in these cases came to the United States on what are known as B1 or B2 visas, issued for short-term stays for tourism or for business and work.

The Associated Press reported earlier on the new effort to revoke a large number of visas.

“As the process will be ongoing, the number of revocations remains dynamic and will be done on a rolling basis,” Mr. Pigott said.

On Friday, a federal judge in New York struck down the Trump administration’s efforts to halt the issuance of visas to people applying from 75 countries, many of them in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Judge Jeannette A. Vargas said the main rationale of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his department, based on the notion that many foreign citizens from those countries would rely on assistance in the United States, had no legal basis.

Her ruling was not specifically on the department’s new public charge criterion for immigrant visas.

The threat to revoke visas for asylum seekers was only the latest change in how the government is handling visas.

Separately, the State Department also recently told embassies and consulates that they must reschedule all visa interviews until consular officers complete training sessions on a more restrictive policy. For most diplomatic posts, the sessions are expected to take place this week.

The training sessions focus on what the department calls a public charge rule, in which consular officers are supposed to deny immigrant visas to applicants who might rely on public assistance when they are in the United States.

When asked about the pause or postponement of visa interviews worldwide, the State Department issued a statement through an official that said “in early August, we launched a global training initiative at all of our embassies and consulates worldwide. To accommodate this in-depth training, appointments for visa services will be adjusted.”

The department did not say when the foreign citizens would be told of times for rescheduled appointments. The move by the department is expected to lead to uncertainty among immigrant visa applicants.

Minnesota Reformer, New court filings reveal more details of undercover agents’ surveillance of anti-ICE protesters, Madison McVan, Aug. 25, 2026. A court filing Tuesday morning in the federal case against 15 anti-ICE protesters contained more than 200 pages of undercover agents’ notes and photos from the Department of Homeland Security’s widespread surveillance operation during Operation Metro Surge.

The documents reveal new information about groups and events targeted by the agents — and contain dozens of photos of cars of people who trailed immigration agents in their cars.

The exhibits were submitted to the court by attorney Kevin Riach, who is defending Isaac Sant, one of the 15 Minnesotans charged with conspiracy to assault or impede federal agents. All 15 pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The documents further underscore the feds’ use of intelligence tactics — including the use of undercover agents and electronic surveillance — as a frustrated Trump administration sought to tamp down the widespread resistance to the immigration crackdown, which wound up ensnaring many legal residents and led to the killings of two Americans.

Riach previously submitted another batch of undercover agents’ reports and other surveillance-related documents — including administrative subpoenas for unions’ financial records — in a motion requesting that the judge order DHS to release even more information on the surveillance campaign.

A hearing on that motion is scheduled for Thursday. (The federal government asked U.S. District Judge David Schultz to postpone the hearing until next week, citing staffing shortages. Schultz denied that request on Monday.) 

The new documents describe the efforts agents undertook to identify the individuals behind the websites defend612.com and melttheicemn.com, the website for an event in February that convened hundreds of activists from around the country to learn from members about the Minnesota anti-ICE movement. Agents subpoenaed the websites’ registrars and payment processors to confirm the identities of the website creators.

Agents also used a “chat capturing software” to record the contents of Signal group chats, according to an undercover agents’ report, though the software isn’t named.

The new documents also contain dozens of photos of cars with redacted license plate numbers, presumably of cars that followed ICE — known as “patrollers” — and attendees at meetings of anti-ICE organizations. Previously-released internal DHS documents described undercover agents noting the license plate numbers of cars in the parking lots of such meetings, including at churches.

Some of the photos capture daily life in the Twin Cities during the federal operation: anti-ICE graffiti on stop signs and buildings; posters of Renee Good and Alex Pretti with the message “MURDERED BY ICE”; a person in a “FCK ICE” button writing “chinga la migra” in chalk on a sidewalk; a table with pizza and coffee outside of the Whipple Federal Building.

There are several photos of mourners gathered at Alex Pretti’s memorial site.

Prosecutors have said they have 20 terabytes of data in their possession, though not all of it is directly related to the defendants in the conspiracy case.

“I’m inferring that not every bit of evidence was necessarily gathered pursuant to a warrant,” Schultz said in an earlier hearing in the case.

Emptywheel, Analysis: The Invented Blockade and the Fake Doxing that HSI Turned into “Terrorism,” Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), Aug. 25, 2026. Isaac Sant’s attorney has filed a bunch more exhibits in preparation of a discovery hearing that the government did not succeed (at least not yet — we’ll see whether John Roberts weighs in!) in getting moved on Thursday. I’ve collected everything here.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

Hope for America, Opinion: Nobody actually likes Donald Trump, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 24, 2026. At 2:37 p.m., a visibly frail Donald Trump (shown above) emerged from the White House and slowly made his way down the corridor, his eyes fixed on the ground beneath him through nearly every careful step.

Wearing a deep blue suit and bright yellow tie, the discoloration on his right hand stood out as he carefully stepped up to the podium in the Rose Garden. His back-to-school event lasted less than 25 minutes from start to finish, but even that appeared difficult for him to get through. He stumbled over words he has said countless times before: “But really bringing hope to countless fanalees [sic], number of families.” His voice appeared to slur at times, even as he told an audience filled with schoolchildren that he was unhappy his press secretary was leaving to spend more time with her own children: “She decided she loved her children more than she loved Donald Trump. I’m very upset about this.”

Before he said a single word about education, or mentioned a single child or teacher in the audience, he talked about his construction projects. “We have President Xi coming in two weeks,” he said. “And I was over in China two months ago and we saw the Great Hall of China. Well, now we’re going to have a great hall too in the United States.” The President of the United States chose to begin an event about education for America’s children with a $400 million vanity project he is building to impress an authoritarian leader, the president of China.When he finally decided to turn his attention to the reason for the event in the first place, children, he couldn’t even keep the focus on their education. Instead, he looked directly into the crowd of children seated in front of him and said this: “We’re strongly requesting, even telling people when you get your shots for your young child. And this has to do, we think, with preventing autism that you go to the doctor for five small shots instead of one big massive shot. You do it in five different shots. Five different shots, small little shots where those beautiful little bodies can handle it.”

Donald Trump launched Operation Warp Speed. He is the same person who stood before the country and demanded credit for the fastest vaccine development in modern history. And now he was standing in the Rose Garden, in front of other people’s children, repeating disinformation to children about the debunked claim linking vaccines and autism. He spent years demanding praise for helping accelerate the development of vaccines, and now he is using the presidency to undermine confidence in them. He took one of the accomplishments he was proudest of, possibly the only redeeming thing to come out of his leadership, and turned it into something parents are supposed to fear.

Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, a physician, has publicly corrected the President of the United States on his vaccine stance multiple times in the past, saying that childhood vaccines “are safe and effective and will not cause autism” and calling Trump’s suggestion “wrong, irresponsible, and actively makes Americans sicker.”

But vaccines were not the only enemy he manufactured from the podium. He told the audience that “extreme ideologies such as critical race theory and transgender insanity were forced upon our children as young as four and 5 years old.” He said that “every public school in America is now on notice” and that any school that tells a child “they’re trapped in the wrong body” is “committing child abuse.” He claimed that “after decades of racist policies and illegal quotas, we brought back the merit system into education.” And he said he hopes Democrats keep defending trans athletes because “it’s got to be impossible to win a race, politically.” He said that last part while he shook his head as if what he was saying actually held any truth.

Underneath all the rambling and cruelty, he accidentally admitted what this has always been about. Winning. Not protecting children or improving their schools. It was never about making their lives safer or giving them a better future either. It was always about winning elections.

Because for him, trans kids are not human beings. He does not care about children, let alone LGBTQIA+ children, or he would be listening to the experts who tell him that what he is doing will cost lives. He is just using them as a political strategy. He knows there is no evidence of gender changes happening at schools. There are no “woke” teachers secretly convincing children to change their gender behind their parents’ backs. That is not what is happening in American classrooms. None of that matters to him, though, because the truth isn’t politically useful. Fear is. And he wants us scared, especially of each other.

When it was over, he invited the children in the audience to follow him across the South Lawn to tour the construction site of his ballroom, which he called “the ballroom slash military complex.” He said, “I love the sound of construction.” As he walked off, the White House band played what can only be described as an unusual, slowed-down rendition of his favorite song, what he refers to as the “gay national anthem” YMCA.

This is what a leader does when he is terrified of losing power. He creates enemies and singles out communities of people who are already vulnerable, turns them into threats, and hopes that fear will unite enough of the country behind him to keep himself in control. That’s what makes this moment, just months before the midterms, so dangerous. Trump knows his grip on power is at risk. He knows that if Republicans lose control of Congress, the investigations, subpoenas, oversight, and accountability he has spent his presidency trying to escape could come roaring back. So he needs Americans angry, and he really needs us afraid. Most of all, he needs us fighting one another instead of looking at him. This isn’t new. History has taught us exactly what leaders willing to do anything to hold onto power do when they become desperate. They find someone for the public to blame.

In 1930s Germany, the economy was in ruins. Unemployment was devastating, and people were angry and desperate for someone to tell them why their lives had fallen apart. Hitler gave them an answer. He pointed at Jewish people, a community that had lived in Germany for centuries, built businesses, raised families, and contributed to every part of German life, and told the country: they are the reason you are suffering.

The camps did not come first; the lie did. Hitler and the Nazis spent years telling Germans that their Jewish neighbors were responsible for problems they did not create. They repeated it until people who had lived side by side for generations began to look at one another differently. And then the rhetoric became policy. The propaganda that was pushed turned into new laws. Rights were stripped away, and persecution with no basis became normalized. The horrors inside the camps came next.

That is the playbook we are watching right now. Not exactly or at the same scale, or with the same outcome, at least not yet. But the pattern can’t be ignored. We have a leader in decline, surrounded by a government in chaos, with an economy that is hurting people, doing the one thing he knows how to do: pointing at someone else and saying, “They did this to you.”

New York Times, At Trump’s IndyCar Race, a V.I.P. Invitation Became a Diplomatic Snub, Anton Troianovski and Eric Schmitt, Aug. 25, 2026. Foreign ambassadors were promised free food and drinks, misting fans and shaded seats during the event. Then some of them were uninvited.

Two weeks ago, the State Department invited foreign ambassadors to what looked like one of the premier diplomatic events of the Washington summer: a V.I.P. zone at President Trump’s IndyCar race last Sunday.

The dignitaries would be brought by bus to the “Freedom 250” track set up in downtown Washington, according to emails that two diplomats shared with The New York Times. The invitation promised free food and drinks and “shaded seating areas with misting fans.” The dress code was “summer chic/golf attire.”

Then on Saturday evening, some embassies received another email. “Due to changes by the event organizers,” it said, the V.I.P. invitation was off.

The State Department apologized to the embassies and offered them general admission tickets instead. And several senior diplomats from countries including Germany and Monaco still got V.I.P. treatment. But to some of the disinvited foreign officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of offending their host government, the episode was the latest sign of the Trump administration’s lack of interest in traditional diplomacy.

One senior diplomat said they had cut short a vacation to be in Washington for the race, seeing attendance as “part of my duty.” Another described the last-minute change as particularly frustrating because embassies had been told on Friday — a day before the cancellation email — that ambassadors could bring plus-ones. And another said they had missed the Saturday evening email and arrived at State Department headquarters at 9 a.m. on Sunday, only to be told, along with several other diplomats gathered in the Harry S. Truman Building lobby, that they were no longer invited as V.I.P. guests.ImageDrivers take a small stage as they are introduced on camera during the opening ceremony of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix in Washington on Sunday.Credit...Alex Kent/The New York Times

Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official who is the research director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the incident fits into a pattern of signals that the Trump administration “just doesn’t really care very much” about what “not just diplomats, but other countries, think of them.”

“If it was isolated, it wouldn’t mean anything,” said Mr. Shapiro, who had not heard of the IndyCar episode before it was described to him by a reporter. “But because it’s part of a much larger pattern that goes much higher and reaches into much more consequential areas, I’m sure it will, in its own small way, reinforce that.”

It was unclear how the decision was made on who made the cut, or how many diplomats were disinvited. Several who were disinvited asked that their countries not be identified to avoid antagonizing the White House. Those officials received an email Saturday evening with the subject line “Important event update” in all capitals.

“Due to changes by the event organizers, we are no longer able to provide expediated entry into the racetrack or provide access to a hospitality zone,” the email said, with a typo. “Chiefs of Mission should make their own transportation arrangements to and from the racetrack.”

It said that ambassadors could instead use the Ticketmaster smartphone app to receive two free general admission tickets to the race, adding: “We sincerely apologize for the last-minute changes to the event.” At least one said he took up the offer, setting aside the blazer he had planned to wear to comply with the “summer chic” dress code.

A State Department official said in a written statement that the last-minute switch for those diplomats who had to settle for general-admission tickets was “due to a change imposed by private event organizers.” The official also said that “foreign ambassadors have benefited from extraordinary access through official and private engagements” during the Trump administration, “including a full slate of events and celebrations related to America’s 250th.”

Sunday’s race was put on by Penske Corp., the owner of the IndyCar racing series. While the race was privately funded, it had the imprimatur of Mr. Trump, who signed an executive order in January directing it to take place and took a lap around the course in his limousine before it began.

Penske recouped some of the cost by selling 78 V.I.P. suites at the race that could offer access to administration officials, seat 30 to 40 people and cost $200,000 each, according to The Athletic. The race organizers announced on Aug. 14 that the luxury suites surrounding the 1.7-mile race circuit around downtown Washington would feature “premium food and beverage options” as well as “executive restrooms located on all three floors.”

It was the day before that announcement, on Aug. 13, that several embassies received their invitations to watch the race from “a climate-controlled hospitality suite.” It included a gold U.S. seal and the Freedom 250 Grand Prix’s marketing tagline, “Let freedom rev.”

A spokesman for IndyCar did not provide details to explain the back-and-forth. He said in an email that the company “did not downgrade anyone’s invitation and was pleased to host several Ambassadors at the event.”

Monica Crowley, the State Department’s chief of diplomatic protocol, played a prominent role in the event, which she promoted as a historic display of American excellence.

Ms. Crowley later posted images of herself donning a black-and-blue race suit and riding as a racecar passenger for what she called “a 180mph spin.”

The Trump administration has signaled in a variety of ways that it places less emphasis than many of its predecessors — let alone other governments — on diplomatic tradition. A year and a half into Mr. Trump’s term, 98 ambassador posts around the world remain unfilled. Roughly 3,500 Foreign Service officers have left the diplomatic corps, according to an estimate from the American Foreign Service Association, with only about 1,000 new officers taking their place. The department also laid off more than 1,000 civil servants last year.

Last month, a senior health official with the State Department displayed a map of Africa at an international AIDS conference that incorrectly identified several African countries. The State Department called the incident “an unfortunate error.”

Wolfgang Ischinger, a German ambassador to Washington during the George W. Bush presidency, said he could not recall a mix-up similar to the IndyCar episode during his tenure. He said an administration’s treatment of foreign diplomats came down to building trust with other countries, and that the Trump administration has already lost trust in episodes like its efforts to take over Greenland and the current trade war with Canada. Mr. Ischinger is now chairman of a marquee diplomatic gathering, the Munich Security Conference.

“I can just see how at embassy dinners this week, next week, people will keep talking about this,” Mr. Ischinger said. “Is it a sign of their unimportance, that they were not being taken seriously?”

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

The Warning with Steve Schmidt, Hakeem Jeffries Owes America an Explanation, Steve Schmidt, right, Aug. 24, 2026. Hakeem Jeffries, who could soon be Speaker of the House, held a secret meeting with Jared Kushner just months before the midterms. Steve Schmidt explains why this betrayal could cost the Democratic Party everything.

New York Times, Jeffries Defends Kushner Meeting, Vowing Tough Oversight of Trump, Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, Aug. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The Brooklyn Democrat, who is in line to be speaker should his party win the House, has drawn ire from some progressives for huddling with the president’s son-in-law. 

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, was forced to defend himself on Monday for taking a recent meeting with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and top outside adviser, amid a backlash about the encounter from some progressives.

“I wanted to give you a little real talk on this Jared Kushner situation,” Mr. Jeffries said in a video he posted on social media, in which he appeared in Brooklyn dressed in a bright green Yankees cap and matching polo shirt.

Mr. Jeffries, who had initially declined to acknowledge the meeting or comment on it, said in the video that Mr. Kushner had asked for the meeting, and he had taken it, in order “to discuss the affordability crisis that exists, that is not a hoax.” (Mr. Trump has accused Democrats of inventing the concept of “affordability” to attack him over the high cost of living.)

The discussion came as Mr. Trump and Democrats are attacking one another relentlessly on the campaign trail as they battle for control of Congress, and as the president’s inner circle is facing the increasingly likely possibility of a Democratic takeover, one that would put the Brooklyn lawmaker in line to be the House speaker.

It drew bitter criticism from some Democrats, who are eager to see accountability for the Trump administration on a range of topics after a pliant two years of House Republican control. They said his decision to privately huddle with Mr. Kushner raised questions about how tough Mr. Jeffries would be in investigating the administration.Sign up to get Maggie Haberman's articles emailed to you. Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent reporting on President Trump. Get it sent to your inbox.

“You do not meet with them — don’t have anything to do with them,” James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, vented online in a four-minute rant about Mr. Jeffries. “Any business we have is going to be conducted with you under oath.”

Mr. Jeffries insisted in the video that he would be aggressive.

“I shouldn’t have to say it, but I am,” he said. “No one is going to get a pass. We’re going to hold every single member of the Trump cartel accountable.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Kushner did not respond to an email seeking comment on Mr. Jeffries’s video.

The confab, which was first reported by The New York Times on Sunday, was described by people familiar with it as a general get-together in New York City to discuss areas where the Trump administration and Democrats could find common ground, discussing housing, cost-of-living and immigration. Mr. Kushner used the discussion to suggest that Mr. Jeffries meet with Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, with whom the Democratic leader has no relationship, according to one of the people with knowledge of the meeting. 

New York Times, Election Live Updates: Darline Graham, With Push From Trump, Wins Senate Primary in South Carolina, Emily Davies, Aug. 25, 2026.  South Carolina Republican voters nominated Darline Graham for her late brother Lindsey Graham’s former Senate seat on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, handing President Trump a major win after he helped catapult Ms. Graham from relative obscurity to a Senate nomination.

Ms. Graham, 62, defeated Representative Ralph Norman, a staunch conservative hard-liner, in the special Republican primary runoff for Senate. She was aided in no small part by Mr. Trump, who hosted a rally for Ms. Graham, threw his super PAC’s weight behind her and even pressured his fellow Republican elected officials to endorse her.Emily DaviesAug. 25, 2026, 9:53 p.m. ET1 minute ago

Reporting from Columbia, S.C.

Darline Graham is previewing her argument against Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democratic nominee, calling her “the most radical liberal ever nominated for a statewide office by the South Carolina Democratic Party.”

Ms. Graham, who appeared far more relaxed onstage than she had all month, said Ms. Andrews was going to roll out a “massive advertising effort tomorrow morning.” She attacked the nominee for her views on gender and abortion rights, among other issues.Emily DaviesAug. 25, 2026, 9:42 p.m. ET11 minutes ago

Emily DaviesReporting from Columbia, S.C.

Senator Darline Graham walked onstage to Pitbull’s “Give Me Everything” and pumped her fist. Her family stood behind her.

“I continue to miss Lindsey every day, and there is still a big hole in my heart,” she said. “But I know he’s looking down right now very proud of everyone in this room.”

She thanked the president for his support and said, “South Carolina is truly Trump country.”

New York Times, Poll Shows Shapiro With a Wide Lead in Pennsylvania, Evan Reynolds and Ruth Igielnik, Aug. 25, 2026. A New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll found Gov. Josh Shapiro leading Stacy Garrity and having support in the state for a possible presidential bid.

Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a moderate Democrat, is in the driver’s seat for re-election in a battleground state, according to a New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena University poll.

Mr. Shapiro leads Stacy Garrity, the Republican state treasurer, by 16 percentage points among likely voters, according to the poll. He leads in nearly every demographic group and is winning 11 percent of President Trump’s 2024 supporters.

Throughout his first term, Mr. Shapiro has cultivated a pragmatic image focused on local issues, even while frequently denouncing the Trump administration and becoming a national figure in his own right. He was vetted as a potential running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, and he is often discussed as a potential candidate for president in 2028.

The poll finds Mr. Shapiro running ahead of his own party in the state. When voters were asked which party they will support for Congress, Democrats had a six-percentage-point lead. That represents a better showing than 2024, when Mr. Trump narrowly carried the state, but is well below Mr. Shapiro’s margin.

New York Times, Fetterman’s Popularity With Republicans Surges as He Angers the Left, Poll Finds, Reid J. Epstein and Ruth Igielnik, Aug. 25, 2026. Pennsylvania Republicans now view John Fetterman, the state’s Democratic senator, more favorably than its sitting G.O.P. senator, a New York Times/Philadelphia Inquirer/Siena poll found.

Senator John Fetterman’s political loyalties have become an important question in Washington, with some of his fellow Democrats worrying that the Pennsylvanian could abandon the party just as it has an opportunity to claw back control of the Senate.

In fact, Mr. Fetterman’s regular critiques of Democrats have made him so popular among Republicans in his home state that they now view him more warmly than Pennsylvania’s Republican senator, David McCormick, according to a new poll from The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Siena University.

 New York Times, Two Unvaccinated People Died From Measles in Pennsylvania, Officials Say, Teddy Rosenbluth, Aug. 25, 2026. The deaths were the first in the United States in 2026.

Two unvaccinated people in Pennsylvania have died from measles, as a large outbreak there continues to spread, the state’s Health Department reported on Tuesday morning. They were the first measles deaths this year in the United States.

The deaths come during a record-setting year for measles in the United States: More cases have been reported in 2026 than in any year since the virus was declared eliminated in 2000.

Outbreaks have popped up all over the country. Lancaster County, Pa., where both patients lived, has been at the center of an outbreak that has so far hospitalized 70 people and infected more than 390, a third of whom were children. Some public health experts believe this number to be a vast undercount because the area is home to large Mennonite and Amish communities that tend to avoid traditional health care.

Health officials, citing privacy reasons, did not say whether the two patients were children or adults.

Measles deaths are extremely rare in the United States. But the virus’s recent resurgence has caused a handful of fatalities. Two school-aged children and one adult died last year from measles complications, the first such deaths in the country in a decade.

“These five deaths that have occurred since 2025 are extremely, extremely rare in the modern era,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease doctor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “They’re also a harbinger of what is happening as this virus takes hold again in the United States.”

Public health experts are especially concerned because the school year is beginning, giving the virus more opportunities to spread among unvaccinated children, said Dr. David Kimberlin, a pediatric infectious disease expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

The best way to protect against measles is with two doses of a vaccine, which is usually administered to children as a combination measles-mumps-rubella, or M.M.R., shot. Two doses of the vaccine prevent more than 97 percent of measles infections.

Nationwide, routine childhood vaccination rates have been on the decline, dipping below the 95 percent benchmark that experts say is necessary to stave off outbreaks. Within some pockets of Lancaster County, the vaccination rate is much lower: Just a quarter of people within the local Amish community had been vaccinated against measles, according to a 2025 estimate. Since the start of the outbreak, the state has run 91 different pop-up vaccination clinics, which have administered more than a thousand doses of the M.M.R. vaccine.

At a news conference, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, said the federal government was partly to blame for the hesitancy surrounding vaccinations.

“When the information we see coming from the federal government in some cases isn’t driven by facts and by science,” he said, “it makes it even more confusing for parents, and that has a serious impact.”

Earlier this month, President Trump made the unsubstantiated claim that vaccinating against measles, mumps and rubella at the same time could be “quite lethal.” The nation’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long underplayed the seriousness of measles infections and spread misinformation about vaccines. In one instance, in 2021, Mr. Kennedy visited a farm in Lancaster County and told the Amish community there that health authorities wanted them to vaccinate “because they cannot stand the fact that you are healthy.”

Mr. Kennedy reached out to state officials on Tuesday morning and offered to send staff to aid in controlling the outbreak, Mr. Shapiro said, adding that he had declined the offer.

“I was very, very blunt with him,” Mr. Shapiro said. “I made very clear that his actions and the rhetoric that’s coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America, particularly right here in Pennsylvania.”

New York Times, Trump Lays It on the Line for Darline Graham, Emily Davies, Patricia Mazzei and Michael Gold, Aug. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The president rallied for the sister of Lindsey Graham in her South Carolina Senate run and pressured allies to endorse her. A super PAC run by his advisers has spent nearly $800,000 on her campaign. Will it be enough?

President Trump has stuck his neck out for Senator Darline Graham.

In the weeks leading up to South Carolina’s primary election runoff for Senate on Tuesday, Mr. Trump traveled to Myrtle Beach to rally supporters and personally called high-level state officials to compel them to endorse Ms. Graham. A super PAC run by his advisers, MAGA Inc., notoriously wary to spend on races this cycle, invested more than $800,000 on phone calls on her behalf, according to campaign finance filings released on Monday, nearly a third of the total the committee has spent this year.

On the line: The president’s credibility in a state that twice in the last six months has rejected his preferences. In June, voters discarded his first choice for governor, prompting him to make a second endorsement in the final stretch. And earlier this year, the Republican-held State Senate declined to take up a new congressional map backed by Mr. Trump and other national Republicans that would have eliminated South Carolina’s lone majority Black district, which is held by a Democrat.

With several high-profile losses in other states, Mr. Trump’s national endorsement track record is at stake, too. Because he touted Ms. Graham more enthusiastically than most other candidates, a loss for her would amount to a huge loss for him.

“What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Myrtle Beach on Friday. “Just come and vote. It’s so important.”

Ms. Graham is facing Representative Ralph Norman, a hard-line conservative who has occasionally irked the president, in the race to serve a full, six-year term following the death of Senator Lindsey Graham in July. The winner in the solidly Republican state will compete in November against Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democratic nominee.

A longtime administrator of disability services, Ms. Graham had never held public office until the state’s governor appointed her to serve out the remainder of her brother’s term in the Senate. Weeks later, on Aug. 11, she finished first in a crowded special primary election, boosted by Mr. Trump’s endorsement and a pitch to voters that she would carry on the most popular parts of her brother’s tenure. That included pledges to keep his staff, who are well-liked for their constituent services, and to follow the wishes of the president. But in the final week of a whirlwind election the political winds have shifted against her.

Last week, during the only televised debate of the runoff, Ms. Graham stumbled over a question about the importance of Taiwan to U.S. interests, admitting that she was “not that informed on national security.” A day earlier, the Republican Party chapter in her home county endorsed Mr. Norman. Plenty of empty space was visible at Mr. Trump’s rally in Myrtle Beach on Friday, and not everyone who attended seemed entirely sold on Ms. Graham. 

U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

New York Times, Dolly Parton, Superstar Whose Songs Spoke to Millions, Dies at 80, Bill Friskics-Warren, Aug. 25, 2026. Known for her outsize persona, appearance and talent, she rose from rural poverty to become a top-selling singer, songwriter and entrepreneur.

Dolly Parton, a rhinestone-studded, rags-to-riches daughter of Appalachia who for six decades ruled country music — and much of pop culture — with an outsize personality and down-home wit that enshrined her as one of America’s most cherished originals, died on Tuesday in Nashville. She was 80.

Her death was announced in a video posted on social media by her nephew Bryan Seaver. No cause was provided. Concerns about Ms. Parton’s health, which began last year as she postponed and later canceled a Las Vegas residency, grew to the point that she took to social media last fall to announce, “I ain’t dead yet.” In May, she said she had responded well to treatment after, as she put it, her immune and digestive systems “got all out of whack” in recent years.

From her hardscrabble beginnings to glittering stardom, Ms. Parton’s life was the stuff of make-believe. With her voluptuous figure, sparkly stage costumes and blond bouffant wigs, she was likened by the writer Chet Flippo to the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Depression-era symbol of abundance. Her songs spoke to millions, confronting privation and loss even as they radiated possibility and hope.

She was, quintessentially, a uniter of people. In 2019, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Is There Anything We Can All Agree On? Yes: Dolly Parton.”

Ms. Parton cannily exploited — and transcended — rural stereotypes and kitsch to fashion a down-home chic entirely her own. (“A country girl’s idea of glam,” she called it in the song “Backwoods Barbie.”) In the process, she became an international celebrity who headlined stadium tours, starred in Hollywood movies, built a business empire and appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. Her at times girlish soprano notwithstanding, she was anything but the “dumb blonde” invoked in the title of her 1966 single.

“I’ve created this and played it up — the makeup, the whole persona,” Ms. Parton said, alluding to her plastic surgeries as well as her colloquial “Dollyisms” in a 2002 interview with The Times.

“But this isn’t all I am,” she added. “It’s not even most of what I am. Hopefully people can see beneath the hair to know there’s a brain, beneath the boobs to know there’s a heart and behind all the other stuff to know there’s some talent.”ImageIn a black-and-white photo, a man in a rhinestone-studded suit sits, propping up his hands with a guitar, while a blonde woman stands next to him.Ms. Parton with Porter Wagoner. Her early breakthrough came in 1967 when she was hired to appear on his syndicated country music television variety program.Credit...Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Inducted into both the country music and rock ’n’ roll halls of fame, Ms. Parton was the top-ranking female singer on country radio from 1967 to 1993, and had a total of 25 No. 1 country singles.

Her early breakthrough came in 1967 when she was hired as the “girl singer” on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” a syndicated country music television variety program. Several years later, she had No. 1 country hits with records like “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You.”

Both songs were among about 3,000 titles she published in her lifetime, hundreds of which have been recorded by other artists, including Tina Turner, Norah Jones, the White Stripes, Merle Haggard, RuPaul and Whitney Houston.

Featured in the 1992 movie “The Bodyguard,” Ms. Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” spent 14 weeks at the top of the pop chart. The song had previously been a No. 1 country single twice, in versions released by Ms. Parton in 1974 and 1982.

Kehinde Wiley painted “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960” after the State Department commissioned it in 2013 (Photo via United States Embassy, Santo Domingo)

New York Times, Trump Officials Propose Sale of ‘Woke’ Painting by Kehinde Wiley, Zachary Small, Aug. 25, 2026 (print ed.). The State Department recently removed the painting of Dominicans from a U.S. embassy, noting it was by the artist who made Barack Obama’s presidential portrait.

The State Department wants to sell a painting by the celebrated artist Kehinde Wiley that the director of its Art in Embassies program called “very woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.” It was removed from the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic last week.

The painting by Wiley, who rose to fame after being selected to create President Barack Obama’s official portrait, features four Dominican models against a floral backdrop. It was commissioned by the federal government in 2013 and paid for with taxpayer dollars.

State Department officials removed the painting from the embassy last week, after first hiding it behind a tarp designed with an image of the American flag.

Erin Scavino, the director of Art in Embassies, criticized Wiley’s painting in a recent podcast interview and pointed out the artist’s connection to Obama. Leah Campos, the U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, celebrated its removal on social media with a video playing the rock anthem “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” writing that the painting was an example of “globalist and woke ideologies.”

Neither elaborated on what she found objectionable.

In a statement on Monday about the removal of the painting, a State Department spokeswoman did not directly address the artwork. The statement instead criticized comments Wiley had made in 2023 about his “Judith and Holofernes” painting, which he described as “a play on the ‘kill whitey’ thing.” It also cited accusations of sexual assault that Wiley has denied.Sign up for the Race/Related Newsletter Join a deep and provocative exploration of race, identity and society with New York Times journalists. Get it sent to your inbox.

“The work of an individual with such violent and racist words and depictions has no place in the America First State Department,” the spokeswoman said.

The statement said the State Department is determining whether it can legally sell the painting of Dominicans, which is titled “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960.”

“If that is feasible,” the spokeswoman said, “it would be the goal of Art in Embassies to proudly do so.”

A smaller painting by the artist sold at a Phillips auction in 2024 for nearly $845,000. Wiley and his gallerist, Sean Kelly, did not respond to requests for comment.Virginia Shore, who commissioned the Wiley painting, established many of the embassy art collections as director of acquisitions and chief curator for the Art in Embassies program between 2000 and 2017. She described the work as nonpartisan and said there was no precedent for selling embassy artworks.Trump Administration: Live UpdatesUpdated Aug. 25, 2026, 1:51 p.m. ET2 hours ago

The C.I.A. director makes a secret visit to Moscow.Hegseth’s purge of top generals leaves the Army rudderless.The E.P.A. moves to curb public input on air pollution permits for data centers.

“Calling this woke is difficult for me to understand,” she said. “This is a program validated and financially backed under Bush. There is a science of building trust and empathy across borders.”

Wiley received an award from the State Department in 2015 because of his contributions to cultural diplomacy. He often takes inspiration from historic paintings, asking contemporary Black models to pose inside his version of the compositions. For “Young Artists After Siamesas 1960,” he spent two years studying paintings by the Dominican artists Celeste Woss y Gil and Gilberto Hernández Ortega, working with art students in the country to finish the scene.

The artwork’s removal was the latest attempt to politicize the State Department’s art program, which became part of the government during the Kennedy administration in 1963 to foster cultural diplomacy. The program was strengthened in 1999 under the Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act, which led to embassies developing their own permanent art collections.

This year, Scavino claimed to have gotten an ambassador in Bucharest, Romania, fired over “satanic baby art,” though the diplomat’s departure was reported as a planned retirement. She also selected a friend with no curatorial experience to serve as the commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, bypassing normal procedures. In July, Scavino organized an exhibition in Washington that aimed to “Make Art Great Again” with nearly 70 versions of the American flag on display.

Aug. 24 

The U.S. Supreme Court, as portrayed by its official photo and in a 2024 magazine cover portrait.

Supreme Court Order Providing Trump Temporary Win On Elections Oversight

• New York Times, Supreme Court Allows Trump Plan to Restrict Mail-In Voting, for Now, Abbie VanSickle and Ann E. Marimow, Aug. 24, 2026. The administration asked the court to clear the way for President Trump’s order that creates “state citizenship lists” and directs the Postal Service to decide who gets a mail-in ballot. 
• New York Times, Trump Quietly Asserts Control Over Postal Service Amid Plans to Overhaul Voting, Zolan Kanno-YoungsAdam Sella and Nick Corasaniti, Aug. 24, 2026.That effort got new attention on Monday, when the Supreme Court allowed preparations for mail voting curbs to proceed. The justices said it is not a final determination on the order’s legality.

Special Report

• One First, Analysis and Opinion: Making Sense of the Mail-in Ballots Ruling, Steve Vladeck, right, prominent scholar on Supreme Court jurisprudence teaching at Georgetown University Law Center, Aug. 24, 2026. The Supreme Court’s grant of a stay in one of the mail-in ballot cases is deeply wrong, but it’s also not the main event over whether Trump’s patently unlawful executive order can take effect.

More Top Headlines  

President Trump likes to portray himself as a king, as evidenced above by his self-portrait on a throne adorned with a Nazi-stylized golden eagle that he posted to his Truth Social account on Nov. 25, 2025

• New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Issues Fresh Tariff Threats Against Canada, Ana Swanson, Aug. 24, 2026. What We’re Covering Today. U.S.-Canada Trade: President Trump lashed out at Canada on Monday, vowing to increase tariffs on cars, trucks, auto parts and steel to 50 percent starting January 1. The threat, in a social media post, was the latest volley in an escalating trade war that began after talks between the countries collapsed last week. Mr. Trump wrote that Canada was “among the worst Nations in the World to deal with.” 
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Moose That Roared, Paul Krugman, right, Aug. 24, 2026. Why Trump will lose his war with Canada.One clear lesson from a year and a half of Trumpian trade war is that when trade conflicts become extreme, access to crucial imports is more important than the ability to export to another country’s markets.  And the U.S. economy is far more dependent on Canadian goods than most Americans realize.
• New York Times, Trump Lays It on the Line for Darline Graham, Emily Davies, Patricia Mazzei and Michael Gold, Aug. 24, 2026. The president rallied for the sister of Lindsey Graham in her South Carolina Senate run and pressured allies to endorse her. A super PAC run by his advisers has spent nearly $800,000 on her campaign. Will it be enough?

More On U.S. National Security, Foreign Affairs, Military, Allies

• New York Times, U.S. Military Kills 2 People in Attack on Boat in Pacific, Eric Schmitt, Aug. 24, 2026. The United States has killed at least 223 people since its campaign of boat strikes began nearly a year ago. The U.S. military killed two men in a strike against a boat in the eastern Pacific that it said was transporting narcotics, U.S. Southern Command announced early Monday. It was the first such strike by the military since June 21.
• New York Times, U.S. Marines Cancel Drill With South Korea, Citing Iran War Demands, Choe Sang-Hun, Aug. 24, 2026. The move to call off the high-profile event was communicated in June, South Korea said. President Trump shortened another joint military exercise earlier this month.

More On High-Tech Warfare 

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Reality TV Cabinet Secretary Has No Grasp of Reality, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger, Aug. 24, 2026. Killer AI-powered robots with no human in the loop have been a hypothetical sticking point between the Trump administration and AI companies. But in Ukraine, they’re already a reality.
• New York Times, A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by A.I., Andrew E. Kramer,Visuals by Nicole Tung, Aug. 24, 2026. An attack by what Ukrainian officials said was a Russian drone with an Nvidia chip presages a dystopian future of weaponry untethered to humans.
• New York Times, Minicomputers Made by Nvidia Are Powering Moscow’s A.I. Drones, Andrew E. Kramer, Aug. 24, 2026. The miniature Nvidia computer that Ukrainian officials say Russia has used in fully autonomous A.I.-guided drones is an inexpensive model designed for civilian robotics and machine vision applications, according to the company.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Mass Exodus as White House Staffers see ‘Writing on the Wall,' Economic ‘D-Day’ for Iran, WAPO Columnist Restored, and Ballroom Issues, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 24, 2026. Trump is bracing for a fresh wave of staff departures as the midterms approach, with insiders telling Politico that people “see the writing on the wall.” Iran’s currency has collapsed to a record low as the Treasury Secretary promises an “economic D-Day,” even as tensions in the Strait of Hormuz keep escalating. And a new report reveals the White House already has a secret nuclear-proof bunker, undercutting Trump’s security case for his $600 million ballroom.

Special Report

Children in cages: Trump's United States of America, above, and Hitler's Nazi Germany

• Lance's Substack, Opinion: ICE Agents And Recruits Are Not Just “Similar” To Hitler’s Stormtroopers. The Stormtroopers Are The Model For ICE, Lance F Rosen, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Introduction: The coming midterm elections are going to be a bloody affair. Nothing about them will go smoothly. The results will be contested in virtually every race which Democratic candidates win. There are a wide variety of operations planned which will be run through the courts, coupled with moves to disrupt the voter tallies, and likely attempts at the seizure and destruction of ballots, this all in the aftermath of a nationwide terror campaign of voter suppression, intimidation, and obstruction, leading up to election day at the polls.

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, Iran Warns Gulf States Against Joining Trump’s Economic War, or Else, Erika Solomon, Aug. 24, 2026 (print ed.). Iran’s new hard-line national security adviser, Mohsen Rezaei, vowed to prevent “a single drop of oil” from leaving the region.

More On Russia's War Against Ukraine

• New York Times, British Leader Arrives in Ukraine for Independence Day as Russia Amps Up Warnings, Michael D. Shear, Aug. 24, 2026. In his first foreign trip since taking office, Prime Minister Andy Burnham of Britain arrived in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, on Monday along with other European leaders for the country’s Independence Day.

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

Lindsay Clancy in court during her murder trial on Wednesday in Plymouth, Mass. (Pool photo by Amanda Sabga).

• New York Times, News Analysis: Why the Lindsay Clancy Case Is Dividing Americans, Shaila Dewan, Aug. 24, 2026 (print ed.). She s being tried on murder charges for killing her three young children. The tragedy has resurrected debates over whether such women are criminals or victims.

More On Trump Team Governance

• CNBC, Bessent could tap near $1 trillion Treasury General Account to fund bond buybacks, sources said, Steve Liesman, Aug. 24 2026. Key Points: The Treasury could use its General Account to help fund purchases of government bonds, according to two senior Treasury officials.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: True North, Strong and Free, William Kristol, right, Aug. 24, 2026. What do you do if you’re a second-tier official in Trump’s cabinet, basically a laughingstock, but very eager to curry favor from the boss? Well, the boss loves TV and has been desperate to find some kind of political win in the series of embarrassments and travesties with which he has marked America’s semiquincentennial. But the stunt you contributed—a televised Great American Road Trip for your family sponsored by companies regulated by your department—hasn’t worked out very well.
• The Triad via The Bulwark, Opinion: Trump and Natalie:  A F*cked-Up Love Story, Jonathan V. Last, above, Aug. 24, 2026. The weirdest relationship ever just got weirder. Last week the Daily Beast unearthed a video essay Harp recorded circa 2017. (She would have been in her mid-twenties at the time.) In the 96-second video, Harp narrates a montage of still photos explaining how Donald Trump saved her life.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Democratic U.S. Senate Nominees Josh Turek of Iowa, above left, and James Talarico, Texas (File photos). 

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Democrats Bounce Back in the Heartland, Jennifer Rubin, right, Aug. 24, 2026. MAGA alienates red America. Since the 2024 election, legacy media pundits and many establishment Democrats have complained that Democrats focused too heavily on “cultural issues” — meaning everything from abortion to social justice, which happens to impact the most vulnerable and loyal voters in the Democratic base. They’ve suggested this focus was ruining the Democratic Party “brand” among swaths of the electorate, including working-class whites and rural voters. It turns out that all it took was a couple of years of atrocious malfeasance and incompetent Trump regime rule (including disastrous tariffs), some dogged Democratic grassroots organizing, and a crop of top-flight Democratic candidates to reverse the trend. 
• New York Times, Can Democrats Win Back the Senate? Why Their Chances Are Improving, Tim Balk, Aug. 24, 2026. Republicans still have some clear advantages on the map, but President Trump’s unpopularity has opened the door for an outcome that once seemed far-fetched.
• New York Times, As Democrats Struggle in Some Western States, Independents See an Opening, Anna Griffin, Aug. 24, 2026. From South Dakota to Alaska, independents are challenging incumbent Republicans and eschewing a Democratic label that Western voters find toxic.

U.S. Jobs, Economy, Inflation, Culture, Markets

• New York Times, These Conservatives Want to Be Working Moms. The Manosphere Disapproves, Vivian Yee, Aug. 24, 2026. At a conservative center for women leaders, interns told stories about their lives. One said a male classmate told her, “I don’t know if women should be lawyers.”

Supreme Court Order Providing Trump Temporary Win On Elections Oversight

The U.S. Supreme Court, as portrayed by its official photo and in a 2024 magazine cover portrait.

New York Times, Supreme Court Allows Trump Plan to Restrict Mail-In Voting, for Now, Abbie VanSickle and Ann E. Marimow, Aug. 24, 2026. The administration asked the court to clear the way for President Trump’s order that creates “state citizenship lists” and directs the Postal Service to decide who gets a mail-in ballot. 

A divided Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to move forward with plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections.

In an emergency order, the justices said President Trump could proceed with implementing an executive order he had signed, which directed the U.S. Postal Service to help decide which voters should receive mail-in ballots. Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security will also create lists of U.S. citizens that the administration believes could be used to monitor voter rolls for noncitizens.

The decision means the administration can move ahead with planning for restricting the use of mail ballots even as a lower court continues to weigh the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order. But with little more than two months until Election Day — and considerably less before early voting begins in many states — it remains unclear whether the White House’s rules will be in effect for a midterm election in which control of both chambers is at stake.

The order by the court was unsigned, as is typical in such emergency rulings. The majority wrote that it agreed with the government’s argument that it should be able to move forward with its plans, finding that the Trump administration was “likely to suffer irreparable harm” unless the justices lifted a freeze that had been imposed by lower courts.

The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warning that the majority “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

The majority said the states that challenged the president’s order could not demonstrate that they were sufficiently harmed by voting rules that had not yet taken effect. The justices cautioned that their order was preliminary and not a final decision about whether the administration’s order “will necessarily be lawful” once the plans are complete. “On that score, time will tell,” the majority said in the 10-page, unsigned order.

That could mean the legal battle will return to the justices, perhaps quickly, as the administration moves to implement the president’s order before the midterms.

New York Times, Trump Quietly Asserts Control Over Postal Service Amid Plans to Overhaul Voting, Zolan Kanno-YoungsAdam Sella and Nick Corasaniti, Aug. 24, 2026. That effort got new attention on Monday, when the Supreme Court allowed preparations for mail voting curbs to proceed. The justices said it is not a final determination on the order’s legality.

Four weeks before President Trump signed an executive order seeking to restrict mail voting, he filed four nominations for vacancies on the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service.

All four were Republicans. Three have expressed doubts about who won the 2020 presidential election and the security of voting.

The selections broke with a longstanding practice of nominating board members in bipartisan pairs. Two of those nominees are on a fast track for approval, and could reach a full Senate vote when the chamber returns from recess in September. If confirmed, their appointments would effectively tip the board to a majority that is loyal to Mr. Trump.

The quiet attempt to restructure the leadership of the Postal Service comes as the president and his allies are trying to transform the 251-year-old agency into a central player in their quest to overhaul the nation’s elections. Last year, Mr. Trump took an unusually active role directing the board of governors to select the current postmaster general, David Steiner. And the president has imposed a highly partisan agenda on a historically apolitical institution: restricting mail voting, a practice more heavily used by Democrats than Republicans, which Mr. Trump has publicly acknowledged would benefit his party.

Control of the Postal Service grew even more critical on Monday, after the Supreme Court ruled to allow the administration to move forward with plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections.

The justices cautioned that the decision was preliminary and should not be construed as a final determination on the legality of the order. It also remains unclear whether the administration can implement the restrictions in time for mail voting this year.

“It is clear to me that the president is looking for people who will do exactly what he says and will carry out his order without respect for the U.S. Postal Service,” said Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who serves on the Senate Homeland Committee with oversight of the agency.

Jonathan Smith, the head of the American Workers Postal Union, said postal workers are worried about being ordered to implement policies that are legally questionable.

“They can direct the people I represent to follow procedures we perceive as possibly not constitutionally sound or legal or even ethical,” Mr. Smith said in an interview. “Because the board of governors were put there for that purpose.”

Since he returned to power last year, Mr. Trump has recruited allies for key roles across his administration who are willing to act on his false claims that his defeat in 2020 was rigged and the country’s election systems are not secure. He has pressed for criminal investigations of election officials in states he lost in 2020. His top legislative priority is enacting a law that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. He has deployed the Department of Homeland Security to scour state voter rolls for noncitizens.

Few agencies are as central to this mission as the Postal Service. And few are as blatantly straining the boundaries of executive power. The Constitution grants the president no authority over elections, an area of governance that only Congress and the states may regulate. Yet Mr. Trump has instructed the Postal Service to effectively police mail voting and decide which ballots can be delivered.

Special Report

One First, Analysis and Opinion: Making Sense of the Mail-in Ballots Ruling, Steve Vladeck, right, Aug. 24, 2026. The Supreme Court’s grant of a stay in one of the mail-in ballot cases is deeply wrong, but it’s also not the main event over whether Trump’s patently unlawful executive order can take effect.

I apologize in advance for writing a stream-of-consciousness post in a hurry (and for the errors that may result), but I want to provide a (short) bit of context for the headlines folks are seeing about the Supreme Court’s Monday afternoon ruling in Trump v. California, in which the Court (over dissents from the the three Democratic appointees) granted President Trump’s application to stay a district court injunction that was blocking two parts (sections 2 and 3) of his March executive order purporting to impose limits on mail-in voting. (For background and links to the relevant earlier developments, see this earlier bonus post, from which I’ve removed the paywall.)

To understand what’s going on, I’m going to try to tee this up as a progression of eight different points:

First, the executive order at issue has two different sets of provisions under challenge. Section 2 of the EO is directed toward DHS, and deals with the sharing of “citizenship lists” between the federal government and states. Section 3 (the really troubling part) is directed toward the U.S. Postal Service, and is the part that, if fully implemented, would allow the USPS to refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in states that don’t match their voter rolls to DHS’s own (likely deeply incomplete) list. So keep these two different sections in mind.

Second, there are two different cases at the forefront of challenges to the executive order, both pending before Judge Talwani in the District of Massachusetts. One is California v. Trump (a challenge by blue states); the other is League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump (a challenge by private organizations/voters). Critically, Judge Talwani has issued injunctions against the executive order in both cases. But Monday’s Supreme Court ruling applies only to one of them—the one brought by the states. For unimportant procedural reasons, the League of Women Voters case moved a bit slower, and Judge Talwani’s injunction in that case remains in effect. Even though the Solicitor General had asked the Supreme Court to reach out and pour cold water on that injunction, too, I don’t see anything in the 10-page majority opinion that speaks to the validity of that injunction one way or the other.

Third, late Friday night, the U.S. Postal Service (finally) released the “Final Rule” that was supposed to be published by the end of July that purports to implement Trump’s executive order. It’s that rule, not the executive order itself, that would be the basis for the USPS messing with mail-in ballots come October and November. The rule itself acknowledges the injunctions in both the California and League of Women Voters cases, and provides it won’t go into effect so long as those injunctions remain in force (as one of them still does). And in the League of Women Voters case, Judge Talwani has already indicated that she is inclined to block that rule, too—for the same reasons she enjoined the executive order. That ruling may come as soon as tomorrow—which is when any opposition to such a ruling from the government is due at 8:00 a.m. ET. (The rule is currently set to be “published” in the Federal Register on Wednesday.)

Fourth, and just to be as clear as possible about this, it’s the still-to-come litigation over the USPS Final Rule that’s going to be critical here. In a moment, I’ll get to how the majority opinion from the Supreme Court may and may not influence the trajectory of the League of Women Voters case, but until and unless the injunction of the executive order in that case, or a subsequent TRO or injunction of the USPS Final Rule itself, is vacated by the First Circuit or the Supreme Court, the status quo (that is to say, no mail-in ballot mischief) will persist. The USPS Final Rule itself can’t go into effect until the League of Women Voters injunction is frozen.

Fifth, and turning to the Supreme Court’s actual ruling, the core of the majority opinion is that the blue states brought their challenge too soon. My own view is that both of the dissenting opinions (one by Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Kagan; and one by Justice Jackson) already had the better of this argument before the USPS issued its Final Rule last Friday. But to suggest today that these cases are premature is, to use a technical word, bollocks. It’s not going to matter, because the League of Women Voters case will almost certainly be “ripe.” But it’s still a ridiculous rationalization by the Court that I’ll try to write more about later this week.

Sixth, the “ripeness” part of the opinion likely won’t matter much in the League of Women Voters case. Neither will the standing analysis, since voters dealing with a USPS Final Rule are, in numerous material respects, differently situated from blue states challenging the executive order on its face. The part of the majority opinion that may carry over is its discussion of “irreparable harm.” Justice Jackson, as usual, is right about how the majority is once again perverting that concept (as I noted just this morning in discussing the Chief Justice’s “administrative stay” in the ballroom case). But the majority’s wrongheaded irreparable harm analysis will surely apply to a challenge to the USPS Final Rule, too. That should mean that the inevitable emergency application in the League of Women Voters case comes down to the underlying legality of the USPS Final Rule (which would be bad for Trump), except that…

Seventh, the shadow looming over all of this is the “Purcell principle,” the idea that, as election day draws nigh, federal courts should stay their hand rather than issue coercive orders changing the rules for when and how people vote. Purcell is the source of significant controversy and criticism, almost all of it deserved. Among the charges are that (some of) the justices are ruthlessly inconsistent in when they do and don’t apply Purcell—leading to the worry that an injunction against the USPS Final Rule might be deemed “too close to the election,” and stayed under Purcell. That’s a genuine concern, and given the Court’s own repeated transgressions of the Purcell principle earlier this term in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama, to hide behind it to allow the USPS Final Rule to go into effect would be as indefensible and anti-democratic a ruling as the Court has handed down in a very long time. That brings me to…

Eighth, there’s still a lot to play for in these cases. My own view is that the Court should have denied the stay, especially with respect to section 3, for the reasons the unanimous First Circuit panel articulated in California (Judge Dunlap dissented only as to section 2). But even with tonight’s stay, section 3 remains blocked; the USPS Final Rule remains frozen; and the real question is going to be what happens with the (seemingly inevitable) TRO or injunction against the USPS Final Rule that’s still to come in the League of Women Voters case.

All of this is to say, yikes, but also, stay tuned. And if you’re not already a subscriber, I hope you’ll consider signing up for more posts like this (and also ones written with a bit more … preparation).

More Top Stories

President Trump likes to portray himself as a king, as evidenced above by his self-portrait on a throne adorned with a Nazi-stylized golden eagle that he posted to his Truth Social account on Nov. 25, 2025

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Issues Fresh Tariff Threats Against Canada, Ana Swanson, Aug. 24, 2026. What We’re Covering Today.

• U.S.-Canada Trade: President Trump lashed out at Canada on Monday, vowing to increase tariffs on cars, trucks, auto parts and steel to 50 percent starting January 1. The threat, in a social media post, was the latest volley in an escalating trade war that began after talks between the countries collapsed last week. Mr. Trump wrote that Canada was “among the worst Nations in the World to deal with.” Read more ›
• Middle East: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is expected to outline new measures to isolate Iran’s economy, which is already in free fall because of the war and U.S. sanctions. A spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry said the United States was “repeating methods that have proven unsuccessful” as it seeks to pressure Tehran. Read more ›
• South Korea: The U.S. canceled an amphibious landing exercise with South Korean forces that had been set for next month, citing resource constraints driven by the war in Iran, the South Korean military announced Monday. Read more ›President Trump threatened on Monday to increase tariffs on all cars, trucks, car parts and steel from Canada to 50 percent, starting Jan. 1, as the relationship with America’s closest traditional ally edges toward a full-blown trade war.

President Trump threatened this morning to increase tariffs on all cars, trucks, automotive parts and steel from Canada to 50 percent, starting January 1. He called Canada “entitled” in a social media post, saying “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!”

Trade tensions between the U.S. and Canada exploded into a trade war last week after the countries failed to reach a trade deal and Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian exports on Saturday. 

Writing on Truth Social, the president said that Canada was “among the worst Nations in the World to deal with” and that it “will be treated like a State no longer.”

“They feel entitled, and yet, WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” he wrote.

Trade tensions between the United States and Canada have spiraled over the past few days, after the two sides failed to reach a trade deal and Mr. Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion of the country’s exports on Saturday.

Mr. Trump had threatened those tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian exports in a bid to speed trade talks and persuade Canada to remove some of the retaliatory measures it had taken against yet other tariffs Mr. Trump introduced last year.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said the countries were close to a deal and paused those tariffs for three days. But late on Friday, officials in Canada and the United States announced that they had failed to come to an agreement.

Mr. Trump’s actions provoked a defiant response from his Canadian counterparts. On Saturday, Mark Carney, the country’s prime minister, said the longtime allies were “at war” over trade, and promised to respond in kind with tariffs targeting U.S. agriculture, electronics, steel and other sectors.

Canadian officials attributed the breakdown to U.S. negotiators, claiming that Washington had made last-minute demands that upended the talks. But Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, said on Monday that Canadian leaders were to blame.

“We progressed to a point Tuesday night where we had enough agreement among the parties to announce that we had found a way to a deal,” Mr. Greer told CNBC. “Then we set about to finalize it. And then in the last hours, I think, there were things that the Canadians just, you know, they wanted more.”

Mr. Greer told The New York Times in an interview on Saturday that the U.S. offer included cutting tariffs targeting steel, aluminum and automobiles, and eliminating entirely a tariff Mr. Trump put on lumber last year. Speaking on CNBC on Monday, he said that Canadian officials had also been pressing U.S. leaders to drop some tariffs on heavy-duty vehicles.

“I don’t know if it was political for them,” Mr. Greer said. “It certainly doesn’t make economic sense, but perhaps for political reasons, they have some by-elections coming up, I don’t know. But they came in and they wanted more. And we weren’t prepared to do that.

   At the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada took a stand against President Trump’s desire for the United States to own Greenland, and called on medium-size countries to stand up to larger powers (Associated Press photo by Markus Schreiber via New York Times).

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Moose That Roared, Paul Krugman, right, Aug. 24, 2026. Why Trump will lose his war with Canada.

Canadians cancel trips, ban American booze after Trump's tariffs | Reuters

Two years ago the idea of a trade war between Canada and the United States would have seemed absurd. Canada was our closest ally, a nation whose soldiers have fought and died alongside Americans in many wars, up to and including Afghanistan. Most of us speak more or less the same language. And we’ve had free trade agreements with Canada since 1988, with the most recent version signed by none other than Donald Trump.

But days after taking office, Trump II imposed steep tariffs on Canadian goods. His supposed economic rationale was nonsensical, and I immediately argued that it was a “dominance display”. Canada is a relatively small economy that relies heavily on selling to the U.S. market. So Trump believed that he could make an example of Canada, forcing it to grovel and even possibly bullying it into becoming the 51st state.

Fortunately, it didn’t work, as a provoked Canada reacted with defiance. Among other things, most Canadian provinces have banned sales of U.S. alcohol, a serious blow to U.S. businesses. Before Trump began his bullying, Canada’s Conservatives were generally considered to be a shoo-in to win the April 2025 election. But the perception that the Conservatives were Trump-friendly led to a stunning upset that made Liberal leader Mark Carney Prime Minister:No photo description available. Carney currently has 60 percent approval and 31 percent disapproval — almost exactly the opposite of Trump’s numbers.

Yet a bully refuses to learn that his actions are counterproductive and instead doubles down. So Trump persisted, most recently by imposing steep new tariffs on Canadian exports, invoking a never-before-used section of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff act as legal justification. In an effort to head these new tariffs off, Canada entered negotiations with the United States, talks that for a while seemed on track to ramp down the tensions. But on Friday Canadian negotiators walked out — and the U.S.-Canada trade war is now on.

Why did the talks break down? According to U.S. officials, the Canadians made additional last-minute demands, although they offered no specifics on what these demands were. According to the Canadians, it was the Americans who suddenly changed the terms. According to the Toronto Star, Carney

was faced with a trade agreement that was suddenly transformed into an attack on Canadian sovereignty, an attempted psychological annexation that could have turned Canada into an American client state, a sort of North American Belarus.

Does anyone seriously doubt that Canada, not the Trump administration, is telling the truth?

Anyway, the trade war is now on. Who will win it?

On the face of it, the opponents — I still have to rub my eyes at the idea of Canada as an enemy — appear extremely unevenly matched. The U.S. economy is a dozen times larger than Canada’s. We buy three-quarters of their exports, while they buy only about a sixth of ours. Surely they must have much more than we do to lose from trade conflict.

Yet one clear lesson from a year and a half of Trumpian trade war is that when trade conflicts become extreme, access to crucial imports is more important than the ability to export to another country’s markets. In the case of Trump’s tariffs on China, they have been little more than an inconvenience to the Chinese economy. But China’s threat to cut off exports of rare earths is an existential threat to Western technology industries.

And the U.S. economy is far more dependent on Canadian goods than most Americans realize.

For example, Trump has declared that the U.S. doesn’t need Canadian lumber, an assertion whose truth depends on the meaning of the word “need.” The U.S. does indeed produce most of its own lumber, but Canada dominates the supply of lumber with a high strength to weight ratio, which is preferred by contractors for framing.

Another example: The U.S. is a net exporter of crude oil, but imports millions of barrels a day from Canada, mainly into the upper Midwest. That region could in principle get its oil from Texas instead, but that’s an immediate non-starter: the pipeline infrastructure isn’t there and refineries need heavy Canadian crude rather than lighter Permian basin oil.

Yet another example: U.S. imports of electricity from Canadian hydropower are small compared with overall consumption, but are often a significant part of total supply in New York and New England.

And a disruption of the huge U.S.-Canada trade in automobiles and auto parts will be immensely disruptive to the auto industry on both sides of the border. U.S. automakers and other manufacturers are already at a competitive disadvantage because of Trump’s tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.

The point is not that Canada has “escalation dominance” — the ability to retaliate to every U.S. action with an even more damaging counterreaction — in a trade conflict with the United States. Rather, the point is that an all-out trade war would create a lot of pain in the U.S. in addition to inflicting severe damage to the Canadian economy. And all indications are that the Canadians will be much more willing to bear the pain of a trade war than Americans will – especially given that the great majority of Americans are already dissatisfied with Trump’s economic management.

Despite Trump’s best efforts, only a minority of Republicans — and nobody else — has been persuaded that the Canadians are acting badly:

On the other side, Trump has managed to convince Canadians of all political stripes that the U.S. can’t be trusted:So, does Trump have any chance of winning his trade war with Canada?

The truth is that it’s hard even to figure out what a Trump win would mean in this context. Would it mean Canada agreeing to become the 51st state? That’s not going to happen.

Would it mean, as Carney suggested in his remarks after the talks broke down, Canada giving up on its promotion of French as a co-equal language with English? That also won’t happen.

Or would it mean Canada making enough concessions that Trump can at least claim victory? That’s also tricky, because until Trump went on the attack Canada wasn’t doing anything wrong. So it can’t promise to end its unfair policies when there basically weren’t any such policies.

The bottom line is that Trump is going to lose his trade war with Canada as thoroughly as he has lost his shooting war with Iran. But because he won’t face reality, trade with our northern neighbor will probably be disrupted until the narcissistic bully in the White House no longer controls trade policy. 

New York Times, Trump Lays It on the Line for Darline Graham, Emily Davies, Patricia Mazzei and Michael Gold, Aug. 24, 2026. The president rallied for the sister of Lindsey Graham in her South Carolina Senate run and pressured allies to endorse her. A super PAC run by his advisers has spent nearly $800,000 on her campaign. Will it be enough?

President Trump has stuck his neck out for Senator Darline Graham.

In the weeks leading up to South Carolina’s primary election runoff for Senate on Tuesday, Mr. Trump traveled to Myrtle Beach to rally supporters and personally called high-level state officials to compel them to endorse Ms. Graham. A super PAC run by his advisers, MAGA Inc., notoriously wary to spend on races this cycle, invested more than $800,000 on phone calls on her behalf, according to campaign finance filings released on Monday, nearly a third of the total the committee has spent this year.

On the line: The president’s credibility in a state that twice in the last six months has rejected his preferences. In June, voters discarded his first choice for governor, prompting him to make a second endorsement in the final stretch. And earlier this year, the Republican-held State Senate declined to take up a new congressional map backed by Mr. Trump and other national Republicans that would have eliminated South Carolina’s lone majority Black district, which is held by a Democrat.

With several high-profile losses in other states, Mr. Trump’s national endorsement track record is at stake, too. Because he touted Ms. Graham more enthusiastically than most other candidates, a loss for her would amount to a huge loss for him.

“What I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” Mr. Trump said at the rally in Myrtle Beach on Friday. “Just come and vote. It’s so important.”

Ms. Graham is facing Representative Ralph Norman, a hard-line conservative who has occasionally irked the president, in the race to serve a full, six-year term following the death of Senator Lindsey Graham in July. The winner in the solidly Republican state will compete in November against Dr. Annie Andrews, the Democratic nominee.

A longtime administrator of disability services, Ms. Graham had never held public office until the state’s governor appointed her to serve out the remainder of her brother’s term in the Senate. Weeks later, on Aug. 11, she finished first in a crowded special primary election, boosted by Mr. Trump’s endorsement and a pitch to voters that she would carry on the most popular parts of her brother’s tenure. That included pledges to keep his staff, who are well-liked for their constituent services, and to follow the wishes of the president. But in the final week of a whirlwind election the political winds have shifted against her.

Last week, during the only televised debate of the runoff, Ms. Graham stumbled over a question about the importance of Taiwan to U.S. interests, admitting that she was “not that informed on national security.” A day earlier, the Republican Party chapter in her home county endorsed Mr. Norman. Plenty of empty space was visible at Mr. Trump’s rally in Myrtle Beach on Friday, and not everyone who attended seemed entirely sold on Ms. Graham.

More On U.S. National Security, Foreign Affairs, Military, Allies

New York Times, U.S. Military Kills 2 People in Attack on Boat in Pacific, Eric Schmitt, Aug. 24, 2026. The United States has killed at least 223 people since its campaign of boat strikes began nearly a year ago.

The U.S. military killed two men in a strike against a boat in the eastern Pacific that it said was transporting narcotics, U.S. Southern Command announced early Monday. It was the first such strike by the military since June 21.

The United States began a campaign of boat strikes last year in the run-up to the military operation that seized Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela. The military has continued the operations in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, killing at least 223 people in 67 strikes that it said were involved in the narcotics trade.

But narcotics experts say the boat strikes have failed to slow the smuggling of cocaine from South America to the United States. According to Brown University, the costs of the operation were at $4.7 billion as of March 31.

Legal specialists also have said that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

Southern Command provided little detail about the strike that took place on Sunday but noted that intelligence reports said the vessel was trafficking narcotics and traveling on a route used by drug smugglers.

“Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere executed a lethal kinetic strike on a low-profile vessel operating along established narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific,” Southern Command said in a statement, referring to a new military unit set up to expand the Pentagon’s war against drugs in cooperation with regional allies.

Gen. Francis L. Donovan, the head of Southern Command, said in the statement on social media announcing the strike, “When I ordered the establishment of Joint Task Force Western Hemisphere, it was precisely for this purpose: to accelerate, synchronize, and execute lethal actions against these destabilizing narco-terrorist networks.”

Southern Command did not explain the two-month lull in strikes since an attack on a boat in the Caribbean killed eight people on June 21. Military officials have attributed the pause at least in part to planes and other equipment being diverted to help victims of the recent earthquake in Venezuela.

The Trump administration has in recent months stepped up its cooperation with allies across Latin America to combat the drug trade. It created the coalition, part of the regional Shield of the Americas alliance, and convened its first meeting in March.

That month, Ecuador and the United States launched joint military operations against designated terrorist groups. In May, the Pentagon pressed Guatemala to agree to joint U.S. airstrikes and other military action inside its borders to target suspected drug groups.

New York Times, U.S. Marines Cancel Drill With South Korea, Citing Iran War Demands, Choe Sang-Hun, Aug. 24, 2026. The move to call off the high-profile event was communicated in June, South Korea said. President Trump shortened another joint military exercise earlier this month.

The United States has canceled a joint amphibious landing exercise with South Korean forces that was set for next month, citing resource constraints driven by the war in Iran, the South Korean military announced Monday.

The U.S. Marine Corps had notified its South Korean counterpart in June that Middle East operational demands would prevent the deployment of forces for the biennial exercise known as Ssangyong, or “Twin Dragons,” the South Korean Marine Corps said on Monday. The U.S. military in Korea did not immediately comment on the announcement.

The move marked the second joint military drill with South Korea to be canceled or downsized during President Trump’s second term. The decision has intensified doubts over Washington’s commitment to maintaining a credible deterrent on the Korean Peninsula and ​its capacity to manage concurrent global conflicts, as U.S. weapons stockpiles have fallen to troubling levels.

Ssangyong is one of the highest-profile joint exercises that the allies have conducted for decades. In a typical iteration, more than 10,000 Marines from both countries storm a sandy beach on the southeastern coast of South Korea, supported by columns of amphibious vehicles and fleets of military aircraft. North Korea has routinely condemned the drill as a rehearsal for invasion.

While Ssangyong was previously shelved during Mr. Trump’s first term​ —​ when he dismissed major exercises as “provocative” and too expensive amid his personal diplomacy with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un​ —​ it was revived in 2023.

However, Mr. Trump recently renewed his criticism of the drills, labeling them “insulting” to Mr. Kim. Earlier this month, he abruptly ordered the Pentagon to curtail the Ulchi Freedom Shield, shortening the 11-day annual exercise to just five days.

“The U.S. and South Korean Marine Corps are continuing close consultations regarding the future resumption” of Ssangyong, Han Seung-jeon, a South Korean Marine Corps spokesman, said on Monday.

Beyond financial concerns, Mr. Trump has questioned why his country should support joint military drills when South Korea has declined to participate in the conflict with Iran. The war has significantly strained U.S. military resources, depleting critical munitions stockpiles and forcing a realignment of assets from Asia to the Middle East.

Mr. Trump also appears eager to pivot from the Middle East conflict toward renewed diplomatic engagement with Mr. Kim, with whom he once said he “fell in love.” While halting drills successfully incentivized Mr. Kim to negotiate​ during Mr. Trump’s first term, North Korea dismissed this month’s scaling down of Ulchi Freedom Shield as “unworthy of comment.”

More On High-Tech Warfare 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Reality TV Cabinet Secretary Has No Grasp of Reality, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger, Aug. 24, 2026. Killer AI-powered robots with no human in the loop have been a hypothetical sticking point between the Trump administration and AI companies. But in Ukraine, they’re already a reality.

The New York Times reports on what may be the first known fatalities from an autonomous drone weapons system—a Russian drone that killed three civilians in the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia last month. It’s a grisly new world we’re walking into. Happy Monday.

New York Times, A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by A.I., Andrew E. Kramer,Visuals by Nicole Tung, Aug. 24, 2026. An attack by what Ukrainian officials said was a Russian drone with an Nvidia chip presages a dystopian future of weaponry untethered to humans.

The young woman ran for her life, but it was too late.

A small Russian drone resembling a model airplane swooped down from the sky last month in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine. As it tried to navigate toward a gas station, it crashed into a wall and exploded in a hail of shrapnel, killing Tetiana Bubynets, 19, a university student, and two others.

They were among the thousands of Ukrainian civilians who have died in Russian airstrikes, but the circumstances of their deaths came with an ominous twist. The drone that killed them was guided by an experimental artificial intelligence system, not a human pilot, according to drone experts, Ukrainian military commanders and the forensic team that examined wreckage from the deadly strike and others in the city.

The drone was programmed by human operators to travel toward a particular gas station, but once it got close, it chose its exact target — most likely propane tanks — on its own, based on its training to recognize such tanks and strike them, the experts and military officials said.

It is a development long watched for in the war in Ukraine, presaging a dystopian future in which killer robots roam the skies making life-or-death decisions that reduce targets to data points.

“This is a risk for the whole world,” said Col. Serhiy Minaiev, the commander of air defenses in Zaporizhzhia. “In a few years, we will be living in a ‘Terminator’ movie. It’s no joke. Machines are making decisions to strike.”ImageA person walks through a scene of charred wreckage.

The aftermath of a strike in Zaporizhzhia last month. Though airstrikes have caused thousands of Ukrainian deaths, Russia’s use of autonomous A.I. drones like the one that killed Ms. Bubynets is a new development.VideoWorkers installing anti-drone nets over a main road in a southern neighborhood of Zaporizhzhia.

Analysis of debris from this attack and others in Zaporizhzhia found that the drones had onboard minicomputers, sold commercially by Nvidia, that made their targeting decisions, the experts and military officials said. Nvidia produces a majority of the chips powering the world’s most advanced A.I. systems.

The presence of Nvidia modules and a lack of antennas on the drones led Ukrainian air defense commanders to surmise that the weapons were guided by an autonomous A.I. system, which was confirmed on further investigation.

Autonomous A.I. systems can be trained on thousands of images to recognize categories like “river,” “military truck” or “person.” Self-targeting drones use their cameras to hunt for these things with greater precision than a human pilot can provide. But opponents of such weapons argue that, without human intervention, drones may be more prone to mistakes or violations of the laws of war, such as by failing to distinguish innocent civilians from combatants.

The use of self-targeting A.I. in the gas station attack, on July 6, would be the first documented case in which civilian deaths were caused by a Russian drone outfitted with such a system, said Kateryna Bondar, a senior fellow at the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. She added that the Nvidia module “is the best proof” that Russia was experimenting with autonomous A.I.

While an adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky has written on social media that Russia was testing self-targeting A.I. systems, the fatalities have not been previously reported, nor have the details of the Nvidia Jetson Orin computer module that was used.

New York Times, Minicomputers Made by Nvidia Are Powering Moscow’s A.I. Drones, Andrew E. Kramer, Aug. 24, 2026. The miniature Nvidia computer that Ukrainian officials say Russia has used in fully autonomous A.I.-guided drones is an inexpensive model designed for civilian robotics and machine vision applications, according to the company.

Ukrainian forensic examiners recently found the minicomputer, the Nvidia Jetson Orin, in the wreckage of drones launched by Russia’s military in apparent tests of a self-targeting system in the city of Zaporizhzhia in southeastern Ukraine.

Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency showed New York Times reporters two such guidance systems that included damaged but still recognizable Jetson computer components. Air defense officials said that a drone with one of the systems killed three people in an attack in Zaporizhzhia on July 6.

The Russian weapon is a new step in the use of A.I. in combat. Earlier A.I.-guided drones had a “human in the loop” safety button that required a live pilot to confirm a target. Those systems used artificial intelligence only in the last several hundred yards of a drone’s flight to help make them impervious to radio signal jamming.

The tech giant says it does not sell the devices in Russia, but they are widely available on resale markets. When purchased that way, they are virtually impossible to track.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Mass Exodus as White House Staffers see ‘Writing on the Wall,' Economic ‘D-Day’ for Iran, WAPO Columnist Restored, and Ballroom Issues, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 24, 2026. Trump is bracing for a fresh wave of staff departures as the midterms approach, with insiders telling Politico that people “see the writing on the wall.” Iran’s currency has collapsed to a record low as the Treasury Secretary promises an “economic D-Day,” even as tensions in the Strait of Hormuz keep escalating. And a new report reveals the White House already has a secret nuclear-proof bunker, undercutting Trump’s security case for his $600 million ballroom.

Also today: an arbitrator ordered the Washington Post to reinstate a columnist it fired over her comments on Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the family of a USS Abraham Lincoln sailor says his father was detained by Border Patrol while he’s deployed overseas, RFK Jr.’s frustration with Trump helped trigger a sweeping vaccine order, the data center backlash is spreading across party lines, an 8-year-old Louisiana girl has died from a brain-eating amoeba, and California is demanding Paramount sell off channels before it’ll approve the Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

I also want to update you on the censorship I’m facing. My TikTok now has a strike on it, and my videos are being flagged with “check your sources” labels, something media companies on the platform don’t have to deal with. Help me fight back. Here’s the news:

White House Staff Exodus:

Trump is bracing for more departures from his top team as the midterms approach, with a former administration insider telling Politico that staffers are “seeing the writing on the wall” and quietly weighing their next moves. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt already announced her resignation this month, and she’s since been joined by Director of Legislative Affairs James Braid, White House Counsel Dave Warrington, and U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin, all confirming they’re heading for the exit. The exodus is driven by staffers’ expectations that Republicans may lose the House and possibly the Senate, which would stall Trump’s agenda and open the administration up to congressional investigations, compounded by the unpopular war with Iran and an approaching GOP presidential primary. One unnamed source described the calculus bluntly, weighing the daily political battles against post-administration business prospects and whether staying is worth the private-sector cost. A person close to the administration added that anyone wanting a “decent job downtown” needs to leave now, while relationships built during the majority still have trading value. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers pushed back, insisting Trump’s movement is “bigger than any one staff member” and that his agenda will continue unabated.

This isn’t the first wave of turnover this term — Trump had relatively few departures in 2025 beyond national security adviser Mike Waltz’s ouster over the “Signalgate” scandal, but the pace picked up sharply this year. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was dismissed in March, quickly followed by the departures of Attorney General Pam Bondi and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Trump has also publicly raged at U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro, suggesting she could be next, and vowed to “hunt down” whoever leaked details of an alleged Camp David confrontation with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over depleted munitions stockpiles. No successors have yet been named for any of the four most recent departures. Leavitt is seen as the hardest to replace, since she gave the press secretary role a stability Trump struggled to achieve in his first term, and he’s praised her combative style with reporters in the past, once joking about her “lips” moving “like she’s a machine gun.”

Trump himself addressed the press secretary vacancy over the weekend, claiming he’s received numerous applications for the job because Leavitt had made the role “glamorous.” The comment came even as the broader staffing picture points to genuine uncertainty inside the West Wing rather than eagerness to join it, given how many senior officials are actively planning their exits. The contrast between Trump’s public framing and the private assessments described anonymously to Politico underscores a widening gap between the administration’s messaging and internal morale. With the midterms still ahead and no clear successors named for Leavitt, Braid, Warrington, or Martin, the coming months could bring further reshuffling as remaining staffers reassess their positions. Whether this turnover accelerates or stabilizes will likely hinge on how the midterm elections actually play out for Republicans in the House and Senate.

Iran’s “Economic D-Day”

Iran’s rial has dropped to a record low of more than two million to the US dollar on the open market, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent prepares to unveil what he’s calling “economic D-Day,” a sanctions push he described in a Financial Times op-ed as “the single greatest financial offensive ever marshalled against an adversary.” Iran’s Central Bank governor Abdolnaser Hemmati tried to calm businesses Monday, promising $20 billion in foreign currency for the industrial sector by year’s end and guaranteeing supplies for essential goods and medicine. A former Treasury official told CNN the US is more likely to enforce existing sanctions more strictly than expand them, targeting Iran’s oil ecosystem since Beijing buys roughly 90% of Iranian crude exports, though China doesn’t acknowledge this in its own customs data. The International Monetary Fund expects Iran’s economy to contract more than 5% this year, with food inflation exceeding 100% and unemployment rising. Analysts note that without China’s cooperation, which is unlikely given strained leverage and Xi Jinping’s planned US visit next month, the sanctions push is unlikely to force Iran’s capitulation, and one expert pointed out the US has sanctioned Iran continuously since 1979 without ever achieving that outcome.

Tensions over the Strait of Hormuz continue escalating, with Iran’s state-controlled Persian Gulf Strait Authority warning that ships violating transit rules could face detention or confiscation, and Iran’s security chief vowing to “neutralize the economic war” while threatening to halt oil flow through the strait entirely. A tanker, likely the Saudi-flagged AMZAN, was struck by an unknown projectile 63 nautical miles west of Yanbu on Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast, catching fire on its main deck; all crew were reported safe, and a maritime intelligence group assessed Houthi involvement as the leading explanation. Oman’s Foreign Minister will visit Tehran Tuesday to discuss the strait and other regional developments, continuing talks between the two countries on new shipping routes through the waterway, while Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, is also visiting Iran for talks with senior officials. Iran separately warned NATO member Bulgaria against allowing its territory to be used for US or Israeli military action, with a foreign ministry spokesperson saying Iran reserves the right to strike the source of any attack, after refueling aircraft reportedly left Bulgarian territory. The spokesperson added that Iran has been “playing chess for a long time” and has “also learned to play poker,” a swipe back at Trump’s earlier comment that Iranians “are good poker players, but they’re dying.”

There appear to be growing divisions within Iran’s leadership over how to handle the conflict, with President Masoud Pezeshkian acknowledging the country “cannot continue with war forever” even as other officials continue rejecting dialogue with Washington. Pezeshkian said Iran is “apologetic that these problems exist” as the country endures what he called a “full-scale economic, military, and security war,” an unusually candid admission given the toll of sanctions and the six-month military conflict with the US and Israel. Inside the US, the economic fallout is also being felt, with gas prices remaining elevated and a Federal Reserve official saying Sunday that the US inflation target may stay out of reach until the war ends. The current sanctions regime traces back to 1979, when the US embassy in Tehran was seized after the Iranian Revolution, and a Congressional Research Service report calls US sanctions on Iran “arguably the most extensive and comprehensive” the country maintains against any nation, though exceptions exist for food, medicine, and telecommunications equipment meant to help Iranians bypass government internet blackouts. Despite the pressure, Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi argued that while past sanctions rounds have devastated Iran’s economy, none have led to actual capitulation or surrender.

White House bunker:

Former officials say Trump’s security justification for his $600 million White House ballroom is undercut by the fact that a secret nuclear-proof bunker already exists beneath the complex, according to a Washington Post report citing three ex-officials. That bunker was commissioned after 9/11, completed under Barack Obama, sits 60 feet below street level, and is reachable by private elevator, stocked with a month’s supply of food and its own air system, and built to withstand threats including a weapon of mass destruction. It succeeded the older Presidential Emergency Operations Center built for FDR during World War II, which sheltered Laura Bush and Dick Cheney on 9/11. The former officials note the security rationale being used for the ballroom now echoes the reasoning used to justify the bunker during the War on Terror, raising doubts about whether the new project is actually necessary. White House spokesman Davis Ingle disputed this, tying the “East Wing Modernization Project” to security needs and pointing to a foiled attack on a UFC event at the White House as proof of the need for drone-proof structures and drone ports.

The ballroom’s fate currently rests with the Supreme Court, after Chief Justice John Roberts issued an order Friday allowing construction to continue while the court considers an emergency appeal arguing the project needs congressional approval to proceed. Both a district judge and a federal appeals panel have already ruled that majority support from the House and Senate is required for the ballroom, though they carved out an exception for the underground military complex specifically. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Army Secretary Dan Driscoll have separately defended that subterranean complex as essential for “continuity-of-government” and uninterrupted command during an attack or crisis. Lawyers for the White House told the Supreme Court the ballroom project is 65 percent complete, with a 250-person crew working on it 20 hours a day, seven days a week.

Trump has aggressively defended the project, calling opposition to it “disloyal” and attacking the National Trust for Historic Preservation for suing to block it, arguing the lawsuit risks exposing sensitive military details. He complained in the Oval Office last week that the suit forced information about “military things in this ballroom” into public view that ideally would have stayed hidden. The dispute pits the administration’s continuity-of-government rationale against critics who argue the existing bunker already fulfills that role, making the ballroom’s security framing look more like justification after the fact. The Independent said it reached out to the White House for further comment on the bunker report but has not yet received a response noted in the piece.

Other news:

An arbitrator ruled that The Washington Post must reinstate opinion columnist Karen Attiah with back pay, finding the paper “did not have good and sufficient cause” to fire her and violated its labor agreement when it terminated her last September over Bluesky posts about “white men who espouse hatred and violence” following Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The Post had argued the posts harmed the organization’s integrity and violated its social media civility standards, while Attiah maintained she was doing her job as an opinion writer commenting on the discourse around political violence. Testimony revealed that opinion editor Adam O’Neal flagged the posts as “beyond the pale” to HR chief Wayne Connell, and the two then met with then-CEO Will Lewis before deciding to fire her. Attiah, represented by Democracy Defenders Action and the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, said the ruling confirms it was wrongful termination and hopes it sends a message that “freedom of expression is always worth fighting for,” while a Post spokeswoman said only that the company respects the arbitration process. The case unfolded against the backdrop of owner Jeff Bezos’s broader push to reorient the Post’s opinion section toward “personal liberties and free markets,” a shift that had already prompted subscriber backlash and accusations that Bezos was courting favor with the Trump administration.

Former NBA player Enes Kanter Freedom was ejected from Sunday night's Indiana-Chicago WNBA game after Sky guard Natasha Cloud confronted him near the baseline, where he was wearing a shirt reading "WOMAN noun. adult human female."

Luis Manuel Aviles Roa, a Nicaraguan man detained by Border Patrol during a vehicle stop in Key West, Florida, is the father of Joshua Aviles, a sailor who has been deployed for over nine months aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Middle East; Joshua learned of his father’s arrest by phone on Saturday and wrote on Facebook that he’s “fighting for a country that has given me everything” while his dad, who held a driver’s license, Social Security card, and work authorization, sits in ICE custody. The family says they’ve been going through the legal process to get Aviles Roa a green card and are still waiting on approval, with Joshua writing it’s been hard to keep working 12-plus-hour days not knowing how his father is being treated. DHS confirmed Aviles Roa entered the country unlawfully and will stay in ICE custody pending removal proceedings, stating “having a family member in the military is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws.” The story lands alongside broader scrutiny of the USS Abraham Lincoln’s deployment, which just ended a record-breaking 200-plus consecutive days at sea without port access, and amid ongoing criticism from civil rights advocates that the administration’s immigration enforcement raises due-process and racial-profiling concerns.

An executive order signed this month scaling back the U.S. childhood vaccination schedule was driven largely by Trump’s frustration that his administration wasn’t moving fast enough on what he believes is a likely contributor to autism, according to five current and former officials who say the order alone doesn’t fundamentally change immunization policy or satisfy either Trump or Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” base. The directive cuts the recommended childhood immunization schedule from 17 shots to 11, calls for splitting the combined MMR vaccine into three separate doses (something manufacturers say could take years), and directs the Justice Department to challenge state school vaccination mandates; a similar Kennedy-led effort in January was blocked by a federal judge in March, and the administration is still bound by that ruling while it appeals. Kennedy’s own promised timelines for autism answers, first September 2025, then pushed to March 2026, repeatedly slipped, and tensions boiled over at a televised July 31 cabinet meeting when Trump pressed Kennedy on autism research progress and got only “we will have an answer for you,” which officials say signaled to aides that the executive order needed to be rushed out.

The tech industry is increasingly alarmed that the swift, bipartisan backlash against data centers isn’t a fleeting election-year issue but a lasting political crisis stretching into 2028, with politicians across the spectrum, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, and Michigan Senate nominee Mike Rogers, embracing curbs like moratoriums and local approval requirements even after previously courting the projects as economic wins. States have moved on the financial front too, with eight enacting legislation this year rolling back data center tax subsidies and 17 more considering it, while public frustration centers on fears of higher power bills, strained water supplies, and landscape damage. Some industry insiders describe this as an “oh shit” moment, while others dismiss it as a temporary storm, though national party organizations, including the NRSC in a memo about Ohio Sen. Jon Husted, are now treating it as a real electoral threat. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has tried to get ahead of the backlash with a $1 billion community investment fund, though critics question whether one company’s PR effort can fix what’s increasingly seen as an industry-wide reputational problem, and even an OpenAI executive admitted “we have real work to do” to win over communities living near the facilities.

8-year-old Lillian Smart of Ruston, Louisiana died from primary amebic meningoencephalitis after likely contracting the brain-eating amoeba Naegleria fowleri while swimming at Lake Claiborne, with her family writing on Facebook that “the injuries to her brain were too severe for her little body to recover from”; she died just a day after her birthday, and the Louisiana Department of Health noted the infection is nearly always fatal but extremely rare, with only 180 U.S. cases and three in Louisiana recorded between 1937 and 2025.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is expected to require Paramount to sell off select cable channels and keep its film studio operationally distinct from Warner Bros. Discovery before he’ll approve the $110 billion merger, with Paramount and California officials meeting Monday to try to settle the state’s antitrust lawsuit, which was filed in Oakland federal court on July 13 alongside 11 other states over concerns the deal would hurt competition, raise consumer prices, and cut industry wages. Paramount CEO David Ellison has pledged the combined studios would release 30 movies a year to counter those concerns, though regulators call that promise legally unenforceable, and the company is separately asking a judge to force the suing states to post a $1.88 billion bond, since delays are costing it a contractual $7 million daily penalty plus mounting “ticking fees” to Warner Bros. shareholders that could reach $1.7 billion by June. Bonta fired back sharply at the bond request, accusing Paramount of trying to “blackmail” the states into backing down from a timeline the company itself agreed to. Paramount notes regulators in at least 68 countries have already cleared the deal, leaving the state lawsuits as the last obstacle, with its DOJ clearance set to expire February 19 and a trial over the states’ challenge scheduled to begin in March.

Tropical Storm Moke was passing south of Hawaii’s Big Island on Sunday, expected to dump up to 10 inches of rain (15 in isolated spots) on communities still recovering from Hurricane Lala, which caused two deaths, flooding, mudslides, and power outages (over 6,500 customers still without power) after dropping a record 43.54 inches of rain on the island’s northeast coast. Hawaii County Mayor Kimo Alameda urged residents to stay off roads and shelter in place, with county shelters open, while Gov. Josh Green had already told residents to restock food and medicine ahead of the storm. Separately, Tropical Storm Iselle formed in the eastern Pacific far from Mexico’s coast and could strengthen into a hurricane within a day or two, though it poses no immediate coastal threat.

Former Cirque du Soleil acrobat Mariia Konfektova is suing the circus for $16.75 million after falling 15 feet during a Kooza performance in Portland, Oregon in August 2024, which she says left her with a concussion, double vision, and fractures to at least seven facial bones plus her skull, wrist, and lower back. Her lawsuit claims Cirque du Soleil failed to install adequate safety mats, nets, or fall protection, and that she had previously raised concerns about the rigging winch and the weight of the hoop she was using. Oregon OSHA fined the circus $8,070 for safety violations, though it’s appealing at least one citation, and the report noted the floor material had “some ability to reduce the severity of the impact.” Cirque du Soleil said at the time it followed emergency procedures and prioritized her health and safety; Konfektova alleges she was later fired over the company’s stated concerns about her mental fitness to work, and she’s said ongoing medical, insurance, legal, and immigration complications have left her unable to fully return to her career while awaiting further legal processes.

Special Report

Children in cages: Trump's United States of America, above, and Hitler's Nazi Germany

Lance's Substack, Opinion: ICE Agents And Recruits Are Not Just “Similar” To Hitler’s Stormtroopers. The Stormtroopers Are The Model For ICE, Lance F Rosen, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Introduction: The coming midterm elections are going to be a bloody affair.

Nothing about them will go smoothly. The results will be contested in virtually every race which Democratic candidates win. There are a wide variety of operations planned which will be run through the courts, coupled with moves to disrupt the voter tallies, and likely attempts at the seizure and destruction of ballots, this all in the aftermath of a nationwide terror campaign of voter suppression, intimidation, and obstruction, leading up to election day at the polls.

Depending on the final results, (with the high probability of the Democrats retaking the House and even odds on the Senate) Trump’s puppet House Speaker Mike Johnson will take all requisite measures in order to suspend Congress to prevent the swearing in of newly elected Democrats.

Johnson himself telegraphed his intentions at a GOP retreat where he promised to be their “protection” from Democrats who he claimed are planning to impeach Trump and/or put them on trial.

Trump has repeatedly broadcast that using ICE at the polls is part of his plan to overturn results which go against candidates running with his fascist loyalty cult. Trump confidants such as Steve Bannon are screaming it from the rooftops.

The newly confirmed Attorney General, Trump’s personal lawyer Todd Blanche, stated in response to a question about it at a public conference, “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places? Illegals can’t vote. It doesn’t make any sense.”

President Trump, a lifelong atheist and sociopath who like his father has surrounded himself with well-known clergy to amass power, frequently references his supposed sacred status as God's chosen warrior on earth to save the United States, as in his self-published, slimmed-down portrait above, which includes the violent code message used by his QANON cult "Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming."

What doesn’t make sense of course is that Trump has created a cult following based around the ‘Big Lie’ that Democrats can only win elections by importing illegal aliens to vote for them, despite there being no substantial proof of this happening anywhere, ever. We are also well aware that Blanche has been engaged in a years long cover-up for his client regarding the Epstein espionage/pedophile network and is so compromised himself that he will do only what Trump tells him to do in this regard.

Only last week Blanche announced that he is deploying 1000 DOJ “election monitors” to the polls that day. He said very little about who the DOJ monitors will be, or how they will be selected. Are they FBI agents, Federal investigators, deputized agents from who knows what private security firm, etc? Likewise we ask where they will be sent, but only a fool would deny that the White House will decide which elections they consider life and death, and on that basis have Blanche send them to these specific locales. The two of them rise or fall together, therefore no lie, no fabrication, no set of illegal actions is a bridge too far for either.

Part I--Stephen Miller Is Running This Show--

 White House advisor Stephen Miller, above left.At this point it is plainly visible that Trump himself is so far gone cognitively and physically that he is incapable of planning or coordinating anything. He spends his spare time super-glueing gold filigree onto Oval Office doorknobs, making stock purchases, and playing internet troll with his dear Natalie upstairs late into the dawn hours.

Otherwise they roll him out publicly on occasion like a windup toy and pull the string to set him off on one or another of his dementia-driven obsession-laced rants. He will go anywhere that there are cameras and an audience of MAGA cabbageheads to get up and talk about himself, and to make threats against his enemies for whom he demands retribution. Election campaigns, superpower summits, funerals, national TV addresses, it doesn’t matter where he is speaking or why, he is the main subject of everything coming from his own mouth, therefore his relationship to the world around him ranges from disinterested to destructive to dysfunctional.

Trump is barely there. So we need to keep our eyes on those who are.

ICE is Miller’s personal operation. The mass deportation policy has always been his strictly defined domain. Mass deportations, ie; the ethnic cleansing of the United States, was Donald Trump’s leading (and almost only) campaign issue, and therefore he credits Miller for his return to the presidency. That is what your MAGA friends, neighbors, and family members voted for, though many reading this will resist the thought because realizing who these people really are under the surface can be painful. This is why it is neither inflammatory or inaccurate to say that MAGA is a homegrown American Nazi Party, and what we once knew as the Republican Party has ceased to exist.

More importantly, mass deportation policy is also the issue around which Trump announced he would declare a state of national emergency starting on “day one,” and this in order to justify invoking wartime powers to repel the fictional Mexican drug cartel-Chinese fentanyl <invasion> of the US Southern border. (The use of the word “invasion” here is key to calling border enforcement a national security emergency warranting the expansion of executive orders) Every non-citizen, including those who are documented, could then be branded a criminal <and> a national security threat, and subsequently forcibly detained and deported.

It is crucial to remember that Miller is a Nazi in his identity. Meaning, that he has studied them intensively and borrows heavily from Hitler’s strategy and tactics as dictator. Miller’s intellectual idol was law Professor Carl Schmitt, also a favorite of the infamous Federalist Society. For those unfamiliar, Schmitt was Adolf Hitler’s “Crown Jurist” and legal adviser, who authored the legal arguments in support of Hitler’s coup after the Reichstag Fire, and thereafter wrote the legal arguments justifying the mass executions of Hitler’s enemies, (including of his own SA leadership) in the “Night Of The Long Knives.”

Schmitt’s “exceptionalism” doctrine and the concept of the “unitary executive” are the basis even today of the Supreme Court’s deranged ruling from two years ago on “presidential official immunity,” bestowing on the President a legal shield for life against any prosecution, when the crime committed is defined by them as an “official act.” Therefore Miller as a “Schmittian” has no problem stating publicly his intention to suspend Habeus Corpus if need be to put down Trump’s opposition extra-legally, whether they are citizens or not. This was covered last year by Rachel Maddow.

However, Miller’s personal identification with the Nazis goes far beyond his political/legal ideology. It is rooted in his embrace of violent white nationalism, his bottomless well of cruelty, his rage, his obsessive desire to annihilate or take bloody retribution against anyone in his way, and his belief that certain categories people, who he sees as being of the wrong race, religion, or gender, are in fact subhuman.

For those who want to lump this statement into the category of rhetoric or hyperbole, Miller himself stated this belief at a security conference in Europe. There is no way to “spin” this atrocious quote.

[”It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled — to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person,” he said. “Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way — in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.”]

When first reading of this I flashed back to my first reading of “Mein Kampf” some 55 years ago, after reading Hitler’s ranting recollections of first encountering the caftaned and bearded Jewish men of Vienna.

[”Is this a Jew? was my first thought. Is this a German? For a few hellers I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life. Since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. When I recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion.”]

A clever one this meshugannah Miller is, managing to tell three lies in one sentence in his speech. First, that all of Trump’s opponents are Antifa, therefore terrorists. Second, that the demonstrations were violent. Third, that everyone in attendence is deformed looking, not normal.

Somehow he thinks his view about how Trump’s opposition appears to him should be remotely relevant to the attendees of a 66 nation conference on security, most of whom see him as a psychotic aberration, a blot on all US history with zero common ground existing between them. So his speech was not even intended for them, it was given for his “audience of one” back home.

Some among his advisers told Trump that Miller’s public outbursts were hurting them with their own base leading up to the mid-terms, so he was sidelined for political reasons. Instead Fox and other MAGA outlets promoted Miller’s wife Katy to be his designated spokesperson and she became the leading retailer of his Nazi hatreds.

Miller was there speaking for one reason, which was his “coming out” event to announce that his several month long gagging and disappearance from the airwaves in the aftermath of the awful Minnesota ICE killings was over. The blowback against Miller’s bloodcurdling defense of the ICE agents involved was past, and he was making known that he was given a green light once again to run White House domestic policy, and to be as public as necessary in doing so.

My assessment is that Trump is seeing the poll numbers and is panicking, likely concluding that regular old MAGA politicking is not working and that he’ll have to resort to the bloody business of voiding the midterm results and using force to do it. Which means Miller’s stock is up again.

This little game of White House musical chairs, the removal of Bondi and installation of Blanche, the resurfacing of Miller, and not incidentally the unexpected resignation of top Trump Propaganda Minister Karoline Leavitt, along with the public statements about how ICE and the DOJ will be used on election day and thereafter, all speak volumes about what the future holds, and what we need to prepare for starting now.

Emergency actions by Governors, Mayors, State Attorneys General, municipal District Attorneys, in conjunction with local law enforcement, will be needed and should be coordinated both nationally and regionally in order to preempt Trump from voiding the election results. It might even reach the point of Governors having to call out their National Guards, beating Trump to the punch before he can federalize them under Title X, in order to protect voters from federal law enforcement goon squad operations.

This is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. To adequately grasp what this might look like, imagine hundreds of smaller scale January 6ths happening at State Capitols, boards of election, mail delivery centers, or any other location relevant to the certification of election results.

As far as is known, Democratic strategists are “gaming” the many possible scenarios for what Trump and Miller might do, and are planning out a legal/political strategy to neutralize them. Remember that these are the same “expert” consultants who chose to do nothing in the way of investigating computer voting irregularities after the 2024 Presidential election. We are not signing off on a theory about that either way, but the relevant point is that if the Democrat’s strategy in regard to Trump’s “second coup” plan is what they should do “after the fact,” or is defensive in nature, or characterized as a “conventional” response, then say goodbye and goodnight to democracy. We need bold preemptive actions, given that Trump’s plans are transparently illegal.

Part II-- The “Deep Dive” On Hitler’s Recruitment Of The Sturmabteilung, The Stormptroopers (SA) ...What Kind Of Men Were They?

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, Iran Warns Gulf States Against Joining Trump’s Economic War, or Else, Erika Solomon, Aug. 24, 2026 (print ed.). Iran’s new hard-line national security adviser, Mohsen Rezaei, vowed to prevent “a single drop of oil” from leaving the region.

President Trump has warned that “Economic D-Day” is coming for Iran. This weekend, Tehran promised to fight back, threatening any nation that helps the United States.

Iran’s new security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, on Saturday vowed to strike the interests of oil-rich neighbors if they joined U.S. efforts to further isolate Iran, whose economy is already in free fall. He warned that Tehran would seek to prevent “even a single drop of oil” from leaving the region.

“Any country that becomes a partner in creating economic restrictions against us will be regarded by us as an enemy,” he said in an interview with Iran’s state broadcaster.

Mr. Rezaei is a political hard-liner and former head of the Revolutionary Guards. The interview offered his first extensive comments since taking up his new post two weeks ago — and struck an aggressive tone in line with Iran’s increasingly uncompromising regional strategy. At one point, he asked whether Iran should pursue building a nuclear bomb, which Tehran has previously insisted it has no intention of doing.

Iran’s new leaders, who replaced comparatively more cautious figures killed by the U.S. and Israeli bombardment this year, are “changing the deterrence equation from purely defensive measures to an offensive approach in all spheres,” including the economy, said Mohammad Ghaderi, a Tehran-based foreign affairs expert.

“Tehran is seeking to impose greater costs on the United States and its allies,” Mr. Ghaderi said. “This conveys the message that the cost of continuing hostility toward Iran will have far more extensive consequences for Washington and its allies than in the past.”

Though active military hostilities have ebbed, Iran and the United States remain locked in an economic standoff. Mr. Trump, who imposed a naval blockade of Iran, has now threatened “tremendous economic consequences” on any nation doing business with Tehran. His treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is expected to announce the U.S. economic plan against Iran on Monday.

Iran is continuing to disrupt the global economy by blocking traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for oil and gas exports from the Persian Gulf. It refuses to relent until a deal is reached with Washington that offers it access to frozen assets and relief from the sanctions Mr. Trump now looks set to try to expand.

Oil-producing countries seeking to extricate themselves from the regional showdown have spent billions in recent months to expand pipelines and other infrastructure to keep exports flowing. Saudi Arabia, for instance, reduced its reliance on the strait by pumping much of its oil through a pipeline and loading it onto tankers in the Red Sea, while Iraq has been pumping more oil through pipelines to Turkey, or trucking it for export from neighboring Syria.

Mr. Rezaei said Iran would first seek to negotiate with countries perceived to be joining the U.S. pressure campaign. But if that failed, he said, Iran would move to block oil not only through the strait, “but from the Persian Gulf at all.”

“Countries cannot join America in imposing an economic blockade and harm our interests while we continue allowing oil to leave the Persian Gulf,” he said, noting that Iran was not currently interfering with oil leaving through other routes, “but we will target those routes as well.”

More On Russia's War Against Ukraine

New York Times, British Leader Arrives in Ukraine for Independence Day as Russia Amps Up Warnings, Michael D. Shear, Aug. 24, 2026. In his first foreign trip since taking office, Prime Minister Andy Burnham affirmed support for Kyiv despite new warnings from Moscow of potential consequences.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham of Britain, below right, arrived in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, on Monday along with other European leaders for the country’s Independence Day, in his first foreign trip since taking office.

Mr. Burnham’s visit comes as Russia has sharpened verbal attacks against Britain’s longstanding assistance to Ukraine, warning of consequences if the aid and support continue.

In a statement on Monday following the prime minister’s arrival, Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, accused Britain of stoking tensions.

“Britain is taking part in the war — and it is taking part on the side of the Kyiv regime,” he told Russian reporters in a televised briefing on Monday. “Britain has been hellbent on pouring oil on a fire and plotting to prevent any kind of peace process.”

Along with other European countries, Britain has long pushed for a cease-fire in a war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. But those efforts have faltered as the United States seized control of the peace process in the last year.

Mr. Burnham appeared to stand firm against the aggressive Russian comments on Monday as British officials announced that he would present President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine with technical plans for a long-range missile.

“Despite Russia’s outrageous threats to my country we will continue our support for you,” Mr. Burnham said in a speech from Sofiivska Square in Kyiv. “This is the moment to keep up the pressure on Russia, to stop their ability to fund this illegal war.”

The missile, jointly built with France, is known as the Storm Shadow in Britain. Officials said that allowing the classified plans to be provided to Kyiv would allow Ukraine and France to build the French version, known as SCALP, on assembly lines inside Ukraine.

Mr. Burnham arrived in Kyiv by train on Monday morning after traveling overnight. Mr. Burnham met with Mr. Zelensky and will chair an in-person and virtual meeting of the “coalition of the willing,” a group of leaders who have pledged support for Ukraine in the war against Russia.Katarina Mathernova, the European Union’s ambassador to Ukraine, told reporters on Sunday night as she traveled for the coalition meeting that the mood in Ukraine had “darkened” this summer amid targeted Russian attacks on civilians.

She also noted that the war seemed to be moving into a new phase in which both sides try to inflict serious economic damage on the other. Russia is choking off Ukraine’s grain exports through the Black Sea, and Ukraine is targeting economic actors, like Wildberries, a company that is Russia’s equivalent to Amazon.

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice

Lindsay Clancy in court during her murder trial on Wednesday in Plymouth, Mass. (Pool photo by Amanda Sabga).

New York Times, News Analysis: Why the Lindsay Clancy Case Is Dividing Americans, Shaila Dewan, Aug. 24, 2026 (print ed.). She s being tried on murder charges for killing her three young children. The tragedy has resurrected debates over whether such women are criminals or victims.

Tasha Kenney woke up at 4 a.m. on Thursday, donned a pink T-shirt and drove to the courthouse in Plymouth, Mass., to show support for Lindsay Clancy, the mother on trial for killing her three young children.

Ms. Kenney, a teacher who lives 90 minutes away, joined hundreds of other pink-clad women gathered on the courthouse lawn because she had suffered from severe postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter a decade ago. And she believes the Clancy children could have been saved if the warning signs had been heeded.

As Americans have been riveted by the televised trial of a woman accused of the most incomprehensible of crimes, the Clancy family’s tragedy has also become a case in point for all manner of perceived societal ills.

For many, it is evidence that the United States neglects new mothers and fails to properly care for maternal mental health. Others are outraged that the methodical killing of three innocents could be treated as anything other than murder. They see the nearly $1 million that has been donated to a fund for Ms. Clancy’s parents as evidence of “cultural rot.”

Jonathan Hatami, a child abuse prosecutor in Los Angeles County, said in an interview that he was disturbed that people seemed more worried about Ms. Clancy than the children — ages 5, 3 and 8 months — that she has admitted to having killed.

While there are important issues that need attention, he said, “We can’t be killing children and then say, ‘Oh, I’m happy now that mental health is being discussed.’”

Perhaps all the gnashing of teeth should come as no surprise. The question of how mothers who kill their children should be dealt with is perennially unsettled, and the Clancy case has been supercharged by cultural divides and clickbait.

“We can’t really look away,” said Michelle Oberman, a legal scholar who has studied cases of mothers who kill. “It is just stunning and epic, in the magnitude of loss and the unthinkability of the crime.”

More On Trump Team Governance

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: True North, Strong and Free, William Kristol, right, Aug. 24, 2026. What do you do if you’re a second-tier official in Trump’s cabinet, basically a laughingstock, but very eager to curry favor from the boss? Well, the boss loves TV and has been desperate to find some kind of political win in the series of embarrassments and travesties with which he has marked America’s semiquincentennial.

But the stunt you contributed—a televised Great American Road Trip for your family sponsored by companies regulated by your department—hasn’t worked out very well.

So Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, hurried over to the Fox booth at the IndyCar race in D.C. yesterday. He was asked about Trump’s feud with Canada—and as we’ve come to expect from a Trump administration official, he entered the fracas in a particularly stupid and offensive way.

The fight Duffy was so giddy to join began on Friday, when Trump renewed his trade war with Canada, our second-largest trading partner and the single largest purchaser of U.S. exports. On Saturday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a powerful and well-received speech to his countrymen explaining that the Trump administration had introduced last-minute terms that were “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.” Carney stated emphatically that “We cannot accept what they offered and we will not give what they asked.”

This morning, the Wall Street Journal editorial page—normally happy enough to excuse Trump—put the blame squarely on the president in an editorial titled “The Dumbest Trade War Revisited,” with the subhed, “Trump’s decision to escalate a tariff brawl with Canada makes no economic or political sense.”

On TV yesterday, Duffy didn’t even try to defend Trump’s tariff war. Nor did he address Carney’s broader point about America under Trump: “We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed. We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”

But Duffy vaguely knows that the Trump administration pretends to be pro-military and pro-social conservatism. So he launched a drive-by attack on Canada on those fronts.

Canada, Duffy claimed, is “a country that doesn’t have a military. . . . We provide their security for them, and they take advantage of us.”

As our friends in Quebec would say, c’est faux. Canada has fought alongside us in wars for over a century. In World War II, Canada suffered about 44,000 war deaths, about 0.4 percent of its population, a slightly higher per capita casualty rate than the United States. (They also joined the war in 1939, two years before the United States.) And of course a few miles down from Omaha Beach and the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc was Juno Beach, where, as Ronald Reagan said in his speech on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the world saw “the unsurpassed courage of the Canadians who had already seen the horrors of war on this coast. They knew what awaited them there, but they would not be deterred.”

Half a century later, after the attacks on the United States on 9/11, Canada provided generous shelter to thousands of stranded Americans when our airspace was closed, led the effort to invoke NATO’s Article 5 on behalf of the United States, and then fought side by side with us in Afghanistan, losing 158 soldiers.

I suppose it would be too much to expect a Trump cabinet member to know any of this. Or if he knows it, to acknowledge it.

But Duffy wasn’t finished aping the higher-profile members of the cabinet. Turning from mimicking macho Pete Hegseth to imitating sanctimonious JD Vance, Duffy also attacked Canada for its “record high euthanasia rates.” He was presumably referring to Canada’s “Medical Assistance in Dying” program, a more liberal assisted suicide policy than we have in the United States. Whatever the merits or demerits of that policy, one might point out that Canada in fact has a lower overall suicide rate than the United States, and for that matter a higher average life expectancy.

But it’s the culture war that matters to Duffy and to his audience—not Trump’s trade war, not any real wars, and not the actual well-being of Americans.

Meanwhile, it’s our neighbors to the north who see the situation clearly. As Canadian journalist Stephen Marche wrote this morning:

For Canada, the choice came down to either severe but temporary economic instability or binding itself to a pseudo-democratic fiscal basketcase of a nation, whose only apparent foreign policy objective has become domination for the gratification of its president’s slapdash vanity.

This description of the United States under Trump is sad but true. And while Duffy can insult Canada in his effort to suck up to Trump, his claim that “you’re gonna see Mark Carney come to the table very very quickly” is unlikely to be any more accurate than other claims this administration has made about victory in war.

Duffy’s comments yesterday are a useful reminder of the bottomless vulgarity and mendacity of Trumpism. Carney, on the other hand, has spoken truth to power. He has reminded us how free men and women should stand up to attempts at autocratic domination.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• John Roberts Gives Trump a License to Bulldoze the Law... The chief justice’s order turns the president’s illegal ballroom construction project into a fait accompli, argues KIM WEHLE.
• Roy Cooper’s Radical Strategy: Act Normal… His message is simple, his persona is unglamorous, and his old-school North Carolina Senate bid is working. LAUREN EGAN reports from the road in the Tar Heel state.
• Shield of the Republic Says Farewell… In their final Bulwark show, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN discuss Trump’s threat to bomb Oman, his curtailing of joint exercises with South Korea, and the Pentagon shuttering access to the Defense Technical Information Center.
• Trump’s War Has Left America Weaker… On The Bulwark on Sunday, MICHAEL WOOD joins BILL KRISTOL to assess the failed Iran war, the damage to America’s military, and what it reveals about the limits of U.S. power.

Quick Hits

BREAKING: MMR VACCINE NOT LETHAL: Some of our nation’s top health officials, it turns out, will say obviously true things about vaccines. All you have to do is put them on the spot and refuse to let them change the subject until they do.

To wit: Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, admitted yesterday on CBS’s Face the Nation that “the MMR vaccine is not a lethal vaccine.” This directly contradicted Donald Trump’s comment earlier this month that there is a “possibility” that the measles, mumps, and rubella shots are “quite lethal” when administered in combination—as they have been routinely administered across the world for more than forty years. But it took some doing to get Oz to say so.

“The president twice said the shot may be lethal,” Margaret Brennan asked. “Do you want to clarify that?”

“We want patients to get the treatments that their doctors are recommending to them,” Oz replied, “but we also want patients to have autonomy to decide what their kids receive.”

“But he said it was the MMR vaccine and he used the term ‘lethal,’” Brennan said. “That’s what I’m asking you to clarify.”

“The president wants Americans—and he’s said this many times—to get vaccinated as their doctors recommend. As long as they have a choice in the matter,” Oz said. “The challenge we’re running into is that many states have not clarified that, and actually it’s harder for parents to ask these difficult questions.”

“The MMR vaccine is not offered in three separate shots,” Brennan said. “Merck, which produces it, said they couldn’t offer that for another ten years. Currently it is only offered as a single shot. The president called that single shot lethal. Do you want to clarify that?”

“The MMR vaccine is not a lethal vaccine,” Oz finally said. Thanks, Doc! Clear communication from our top health officials is so important.

A BLUE MIRAGE?: Polling and conventional wisdom have been predicting monster midterm results for Democrats. But could that be a mirage? Last week, the Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini made that case in a Substack post, arguing that “Senate polling is always worse in the summer” and that Democratic candidates tend to lose their apparent summer leads by Election Day.

And when looking at the last few cycles, he’s got a point: “3,312 polls over the last four election cycles in the old FiveThirtyEight archive confirmed the pattern,” Ruffini wrote. “In each of those four cycles, the Democratic candidate’s margin was overstated. The average polling error across all polls was D+3.7, and 73% of polls released overstated the Democrat relative to the election result.”

So should Democrats be worried? No, responds progressive pollster G. Elliott Morris. “Bias in polls tends to change randomly from year to year,” Morris writes, citing polling data dating back to 1998. “Like taking the under on low-probability bets, predicting polling error from previous cycles’ misses works until it doesn’t.”

Morris offers a few more thoughts on why this cycle might be different in the data:

Early polls tend to sample adults or registered voters instead of likely voters. But as Election Day approaches, pollsters tend to make the switch to the more accurate voter screen.

In the past few cycles, Democrats were doing better in [polls of adults and registered voters] than in polls of likely voters. So the LV switch produced a natural curve to the right that made it look like Democrats were losing ground—when in reality, their support in early polls was inflating because they sampled the wrong populations.

But, as Ruffini’s own polls have shown, this is not the case for 2026. Democrats are doing about a point better in LV polls vs adult and RV samples this year. So one could even argue we should naturally see the opposite drift this year as pollsters switch to LV screening.

Read the whole thing—and keep taking every poll with a grain of salt. 

CNBC, Bessent could tap near $1 trillion Treasury General Account to fund bond buybacks, sources said, Steve Liesman, Aug. 24 2026. Key Points: The Treasury could use its General Account to help fund purchases of government bonds, according to two senior Treasury officials.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has built up the TGA to around $950 billion currently.

The Treasury surprised markets last week by doubling the size of bond buybacks, but the impact on yields was short-lived because of skepticism over the firepower available to Bessent.

The Treasury could use its near $1 trillion General Account to help fund its recently announced plans to increase purchases of government bonds, according to two senior Treasury officials.

Using the TGA would provide the Treasury with considerable firepower to influence long-term bond yields. The Treasury surprised markets last week with an announcement that it would be doubling the size of buybacks of off-the-run securities on the long end from $2 billion to at least $4 billion. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on CNBC such operations could be even larger than the new higher minimum.

However, the Treasury made no mention of how it would fund the purchases. Most market participants assumed it would do so by selling short-term bills. The senior Treasury officials did not rule that out. Bessent in the CNBC interview called the operation a “Treasury Twist,” a reference to a government or Federal Reserve operation where long-term Treasurys are bought and paid for with short-term issuance. That also implied that short-term bonds would be sold.

But since the surprise announcement, bonds have retreated from an initial rally, sending yields higher, in part because of skepticism voiced by many market analysts about how effective the operation would be and whether the Treasury’s resources were too limited.

Using the TGA could change that perception. The TGA is essentially the government’s checking account, a rainy day fund of sorts held at the Federal Reserve. It is already funded with existing tax collections. Bessent has built up the TGA to around $950 billion currently, compared with a stated goal under the Biden administration of around $550 billion to $600 billion.

The officials would not say how much, if any, of the TGA would be used or when such an announcement could be made. There was no implication it could be used beyond the purchase of off-the-run securities that were the focus of last week’s announcement.

The Triad via The Bulwark, Opinion: Trump and Natalie:  A F*cked-Up Love Story, Jonathan V. Last, above, Aug. 24, 2026. The weirdest relationship ever just got weirder.

1. Munchausen?

The Trump-Harp relationship turns out to be even weirder than we already knew.

Let’s jump back to the beginning—the very beginning—with the story Harp used to catch Donald Trump’s attention.

Last week the Daily Beast unearthed a video essay Harp recorded circa 2017. (She would have been in her mid-twenties at the time.) In the 96-second video, Harp narrates a montage of still photos explaining how Donald Trump saved her life. She claims that on November 9, 2015 she was the victim of “medical error” when she was “accidentally infused with sterile water.”

I went into hemorrhagic shock, losing 100 percent of the average person’s blood platelets, but only 30 percent of my own. Thanks to a rare blood condition, I became the only survivor of sterile water infusion. But today I have cancer and chronic pain. I’ve had to pay my own medical bills, been denied appointments, prescribed opioids, given access to life-ending drugs, and every problem could be traced back to politics.

Then, miraculously, Harp’s video transitions to Donald Trump speaking exactly one year later, on November 9, 2016, saying that “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”

The video closes with Harp saying, “The elites thought they held the Trump card. But they didn’t count on Donald Trump. Like I did.” At the end of the video there’s a title card with the name of the video (“The Forgotten”) and the cast of the production. “Natalie J. Harp, MBA” is identified as playing “The Patient.”

In June 2019 Harp published an essay on LinkedIn that took elements of this story and did some more worldbuilding:

On November 9, 2015—a year to the day Donald Trump would win the presidency—a nurse mixed up my IV with the deadly substance of sterile water leaving me housebound and searching for care. Instead of studying my symptoms to diagnose my condition, my Democrat-controlled state and country offered me opioids, barbiturates, medical marijuana, disability, Do-Not-Resuscitate orders, and yes, Death With Dignity. Before one appointment, I was even instructed in the voluntary stopping of eating and drinking (VSED).

The LinkedIn essay added a new wrinkle: Donald Trump had miraculously cured her cancer sometime after she suffered from a “medical mistake” exactly one year before Trump’s first election.

When I failed the two available chemotherapies for my rare disease and was denied from clinical trials, my oncologist said I would have to suffer through the symptoms for several more months on a failed chemotherapy while awaiting a new round of FDA-approvals for the clinical trial drugs to which I was denied access.

Donald Trump had another option ready: Right to Try. While some may argue that this legislation has not benefited the terminally ill or was repetitive to existing law, I beg to differ. My oncologist didn’t tell me I had other options. Donald Trump did. So I found another oncologist who was willing to try a different approach—an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug for an unapproved use. Now my numbers are stabilizing and so is my pain.

So I ask you: Who has delivered more for people with pre-existing conditions? Joe Biden in over four decades or Donald Trump in just over two years?

This essay was not presented as a story featuring a character, like “The Forgotten,” but rather as a personal testimonial. It caught the eye of someone at Fox & Friends who booked Harp on the show two days later. From Fox:

A millennial who’s fighting a rare form of cancer hit back Friday at Joe Biden’s claim that his presidency would “cure cancer,” and credited legislation passed during President Trump’s administration with saving her life.

Natalie Harp, who has battled stage 2 bone cancer for most of her life, said during an appearance on “Fox & Friends” that President Trump’s “Right to Try” act allowed her to make a comeback after a nurse’s medical mistake in 2015 left her wheelchair-bound and in excruciating pain.

“I’m not dying from cancer any more thanks to President Trump, I’m living with cancer,” she said.

So now she’d suffered from “stage 2 bone cancer” for “most of her life.”¹ Trump seems to have been watching the broadcast because, according to Fox, he called the show to praise Harp.

President Trump phoned in to “Fox & Friends” on Friday to celebrate his 73rd birthday and called Harp a “young, beautiful woman”. . . .

Twelve days later she was onstage with Trump at a Faith & Freedom Coalition event giving her testimonial to a ballroom at the Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Washington, where she blamed the “medical error” that changed her life on . . . Democrats, claiming that medical error was “the number-three cause of death under the previous administration.”

The following August, Harp spoke at the Republican National Convention where she added more details to her story:

About five years ago, I was the victim of a notoriously deadly medical error. I survived, but only to be diagnosed with a rare and terminal bone cancer. You know, the Democrats love to talk about healthcare being a human right, but a right to what? Well, I'll tell you. To them, it's a right to marijuana, opioids and the right to die with dignity. A politically correct way of saying assisted suicide. I was told I was a burden to my family and to my country, and that by choosing to die early, I'd actually be saving the lives of others by preserving resources for them, rather than wasting them on a lost cause like myself.

I would like to know the name(s) of the medical professionals who told the twentysomething Harp that she should kill herself because she was a “burden” to her family and her country. Because if it happened, those people should have their licenses revoked.

What do you think the odds are that it happened?

Here are some other things that might not have happened.

If Natalie Harp did indeed have cancer, then Trump’s Right to Try policy had no bearing on her treatment. The Washington Post notes two problems with her story:

Right to Try applies to drugs that have not yet gained any FDA approval. Harp claims that her treatment involved off-label use of a previously approved drug. Off-label drug treatment is covered by what is known as “expanded access” policies, which antedate Right to Try and Donald Trump’s administration.

Here’s the Post: “It is also striking that two months before Trump even signed the law, Harp had already spoken online about receiving her new treatment.”

Oops.

What a wild story we have here.

• She claims to be the victim of medical error and that “medical errors” are the third-leading cause of death under a Democratic president. (They’re not; this is a bullshit stat.)
• She claims this medical error occurred exactly one year before Trump’s election.
• She claims that “Democrats” were behind her medical problems at every turn.
• She claims that in a Democratic state, her health care providers denied her access to care and when they weren’t denying her access, were pushing “opioids,” “marijuana,” and “assisted suicide.” She claims some medical professionals scolded her and told her she was a “burden” on both “her family” and “her country.”
• She claims that she was saved from death by an off-label treatment, but then attributes this “miracle” to a law that had nothing to do with off-label treatments.
• Her cancer seems to have been totally cured just in time for her to work for Donald Trump.
• Oh, and throughout all of this Harp identified herself as a California “entrepreneur.”²

No one is willing to say that Harp’s entire origin story is cooked up—after all, there are some fuzzy pictures of her in hospital beds and in wheelchairs. But at the same time, there are lots of inconsistencies, contradictions, and outright falsehoods in it.³

And it is weird that there are no corroborating accounts from friends who knew Harp back during her school days, or nurses and doctors who worked with her. For instance, the second oncologist who she claims treated her with the life-saving drug—where is she?

Literally the entirety of Harp’s origin story is her own (shifting) first-person account.

It’s possible that parts, or even most, of her story are true.

It’s also possible that a young Trump superfan made a piece of video slash fiction because she saw a host of other weirdos and misfits becoming MAGA influencers. It’s possible that after she was sucked into the whirlwind, this superfan desperately airbrushed and retrofitted the story to make it plausible enough that she could just roll with it. And now she’s living the dream.

But wait—because it’s about to get really crazy.

2. Letters

Harp comes from an eccentric family. In 2020 her father reportedly committed suicide and her brother claims that Natalie and her mother wanted to cover it up and tell people that he merely “died in his sleep.”

About that brother: Preston is a Communist sympathizer living in Nicaragua where he makes psychedelic, folk/rock music.

He seems to be the normal, well-adjusted Harp.

Because the Daily Beast got the full text of two of Harp’s letters to President Trump and whoa, Nelly.

The first letter is a giant apology. Harp is worried that she embarrassed Trump by running after him on a golf course in Scotland. Here’s part of that letter:

I want things to always be right between us. I also know I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time). I haven’t been myself, dwelling on the Past, and the pain of losing my Dad, and I started letting the remarks of people who haven’t bothered me before, get to me—not because I care what others think, but because I see myself being lowered in your eyes and good opinion. That is the fear you see, because I never want to bring you anything but joy. I’m sorry I lost my focus. You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life . . .

Just a reminder: This letter was written in 2023 by a grown-ass 31-year-old woman to her employer.

She “forgets” to eat? “Forgets” to sleep? She has “fear” about “being lowered” in Trump’s eyes? Note the weird capitalizations, like she’s adopted his writing style.

That’s some weird shit.

But it gets weirder still. Because that was just the first of two letters Natalie wrote to Trump apparently on the same day.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Democratic U.S. Senate Nominees Josh Turek of Iowa, above left, and James Talarico, Texas (File photos). 

The Contrarian, Opinion: Democrats Bounce Back in the Heartland, Jennifer Rubin,right, Aug. 24, 2026. MAGA alienates red America.

Since the 2024 election, legacy media pundits and many establishment Democrats have complained that Democrats focused too heavily on “cultural issues” — meaning everything from abortion to social justice, which happens to impact the most vulnerable and loyal voters in the Democratic base. They’ve suggested this focus was ruining the Democratic Party “brand” among swaths of the electorate, including working-class whites and rural voters. It turns out that all it took was a couple of years of atrocious malfeasance and incompetent Trump regime rule (including disastrous tariffs), some dogged Democratic grassroots organizing, and a crop of top-flight Democratic candidates to reverse the trend. Now, without the need to throw Blacks, women, and immigrants under the bus, Democrats’ comeback in red America is in full swing.Brandon Dukes, who just won a special election in PA’s 12th, chose to run because “the district is changing”

A case in point: Democrat Brandon Dukes scored a narrow victory in last week’s special election in the Pennsylvania 12th General Assembly, an overwhelmingly White Pittsburgh suburban district that has not sent a Democrat to the state house since the 1990s, and that voted for Donald Trump by 18 points in 2024. The Pennsylvania Capital Star reported that the win was “a major boon for Pennsylvania Democrats, who are hoping to build momentum going into a series of key elections this fall.” Pennsylvania Democratic Party Chair Eugene DePasquale told the paper:

Pennsylvanians across the political spectrum are sick and tired of Republicans’ chaotic, corrupt, and cost-raising agenda — and they’re ready to reject them at the polls and elect Democrats up and down the ballot in historic fashion.

If Democrats can keep the state house, re-elect Governor Josh Shapiro, and flip 3 state senate seats, they will have a trifecta for the first time in decades.

The PA 12th state house race follows Democrats’ streak of special election victories since January 2025, in which they have flipped 31 legislative seats. These come in addition to outsized wins in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races and a huge turnout advantage in the 2026 primary season in MAGA strongholds like Texas.

Democrats hope the pattern holds in the Wisconsin 3rd, where Rebecca Cooke is looking to knock out MAGA foot soldier Rep. Derrick Van Orden, who voted for the big, ugly bill that that “sharply cut Medicaid, the SNAP food assistance program and renewable energy incentives,” all cuts that “have hit rural areas, which have high rates of poverty and food insecurity, hard,” as Reuters recounted. Van Orden’s fidelity to Trump has cost his constituents dearly: “Van Orden also voted ​against rescinding some of Trump’s controversial tariffs. The administration’s tariff policies have stalled purchases of U.S. agricultural products, including by China, a major consumer of goods such as soybeans, which are widely grown in the district.”

In addition to securing the House majority, Democrats are increasingly optimistic that they can net 4 seats to take the Senate. High-quality nominees — e.g., Josh Turek in Iowa, James Talarico in Texas, Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Mary Peltola in Alaska — are running neck-and-neck or ahead of Trump loyalists. “Rural Americans are feeling the pain of Trump/MAGA economic policies — for example, high gas prices — that directly impact household budgets. The pain is felt acutely,” Lavora Barnes, former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, tells me. “Policies in the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ are forcing rural hospitals to close and driving everyone’s prices higher. MAGA policies represent failure to follow through on promises made to rural communities — a betrayal.”Subscribed

Trump can insult voters by claiming affordability is a hoax, but rural voters, be they in Iowa, Texas, Wisconsin, or any other state, know that diesel and fertilizer prices have soared (thanks to Trump’s illegal, reckless war, which has jammed up transportation through the Strait of Hormuz); rural hospitals are closing, and tariffs have decimated farm sales.

“What we’re hearing from voters across the political and geographic spectrum — including rural swing voters — is consistent: they feel like the system is broken and nobody gives a damn about them and the pressures on them and their families,” Yasmin Radjy, executive director of the grassroots group Swing Left, told me via email. “MAGA Republicans control Washington with a trifecta that defers entirely to Donald Trump. . . and they own the consequences: higher costs, less affordable health care, and an agenda that asks working families to pay more while giving more to people at the top.”

Trump’s announcement Friday — that he was lowering tariffs on ground beef imports (evidence that somebody has finally convinced him that consumers pay the cost of tariffs) brought howls of protest from farm-state Senate Republicans, who are all too aware that their constituents will see this as another financial body blow. (Perhaps they should have clawed back Congress’s tariff power months ago? Now they reap the blame for Trump’s erratic policies.)

Underscoring the anti-MAGA backlash, Cook Political Report analysis moved both Texas and Iowa Senate races to “toss-ups.” Regarding Iowa, Cook’s Jessica Taylor observed: “Rising fertilizer and diesel prices, in addition to tariffs, have uniquely harmed the state’s agriculture-dependent economy.” On top of that, Iowa farmers have “lost a steady source of income after the Trump administration cancelled food purchasing assistance programs that enabled state and tribal governments to purchase locally farmed food and distribute it to food banks.” To add to Iowans’ woes, Yasmin Radjy tells me, “We’re hearing from women voters who now have to drive for hours to get basic gynecological care because of rural hospital closures they blame their Republican representatives for.”

Moreover, Turek benefits from a superb Democratic gubernatorial nominee, Iowa state auditor Rob Sand, in a race now rated “lean Democratic,” and from competitive House races in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd congressional districts — which Roll Call reports are shifting toward Democrats.

Democrats’ comeback is not merely a function of MAGA incompetence and arrogance. “Democrats have been making investments in outreach to rural communities with sustained voter engagement and organizing,” Barnes tells me. “Candidates are showing up to listen to voters and talk about how they will focus on the issues that impact families every day. And Democratic State parties are fielding candidates everywhere — no longer allowing seats to go unchallenged.”

In the face of Trump’s plummeting popularity, a rotten economy, soaring opposition to data centers in farm communities, and rising fury over mistreatment of our military, MAGA Republicans increasingly look flummoxed. Former Republican voters find it increasingly hard to defend very non-conservative policies, resulting in record debt, rising interest rates, and anemic growth. Some MAGA candidates, faced with questions about such policies, have scrambled to change the topic to ludicrous hot-button issues. Senator Darline Graham says she “doesn’t speak politician,” meaning she cannot talk cogently about Iran, but knows trans girls in high school sports are the real problem! Others deflect by ranting about “socialism” or pathetically blaming Joe Biden for Trump’s debacles.

Republicans’ last-gasp tactics are unlikely to forestall massive Republican losses not just in traditional swing races but in states and districts that were safely Republican just two years ago. Democrats should take nothing for granted. They have 71 days to make the most of the electoral opportunity and historic victories — with the support of red enclaves — for pro-democracy forces.

New York Times, Can Democrats Win Back the Senate? Why Their Chances Are Improving, Tim Balk, Aug. 24, 2026. Republicans still have some clear advantages on the map, but President Trump’s unpopularity has opened the door for an outcome that once seemed far-fetched.

As a tumultuous primary season draws to a close, Democrats have opened up more than one path to winning control of the Senate, according to strategists in both parties and independent analysts, reshaping the battle on a map where Republicans still hold significant advantages.

Voters are uneasy about President Trump’s handling of the economy, and his unpopular war with Iran has driven increases in the costs of fuel, food and health services, putting Republicans on the defensive in states they once saw as much safer terrain.

The basic contours of the map remain challenging for Democrats. Holding 47 seats in the Senate, they must flip at least four to win a majority. At the same time, they are trying to defend seats in two states Mr. Trump won in 2024. And four of the six most competitive races are in states Mr. Trump won by double digits.

Republicans are also hoping that Democratic divisions in two important battlegrounds, Maine and Michigan, could help offset some of the political headwinds.

Mr. Trump himself has expressed concern about a pattern of Republicans not performing as well in cycles when he is not on the ballot. “Pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot,” he said at a rally in South Carolina on Friday, aiming to motivate his base.

But Mr. Trump’s approval rating is below 40 percent, unnerving Republicans, who worry that voters in the center will break for Democrats. And rank-and-file Democratic voters are plainly energized: They have been turning out in huge numbers for primaries.

Now the battle for the Senate, once seen as tilting heavily toward the G.O.P., is increasingly up for grabs. 

New York Times, As Democrats Struggle in Some Western States, Independents See an Opening, Anna Griffin, Aug. 24, 2026. From South Dakota to Alaska, independents are challenging incumbent Republicans and eschewing a Democratic label that Western voters find toxic.

During his brief time in the Idaho House of Representatives, Todd Achilles often stopped to admire a photograph from the state’s 1899 legislative session, and not just because some of the turn-of-the-century hairstyles and beards were “wild,” he said.

In the photo were lawmakers from four distinct parties, along with a handful of unaffiliated candidates.

“That was a period just like now,” Mr. Achilles said. “People were fed up with the party system and looking for something different.”

Today, he’s part of an effort to bring that same kind of something different to Idaho and other parts of the West. Mr. Achilles, an unaffiliated candidate for U.S. Senate, is among a wave of independent challengers to entrenched Republican incumbents or heirs apparent in red states.

In Idaho, where unaffiliated voters outnumber Democrats 2 to 1, Mr. Achilles is the more prominent and moneyed of two independents challenging the incumbent, Jim Risch. Independents also are running for Idaho governor, both of the state’s U.S. House seats and 12 state legislative seats.

Next door in Montana, another independent, Seth Bodnar, is running for the Senate as an independent, as is Dan Osborn in Nebraska and Brian Bengs in South Dakota. Another, Bill Hill, is running for Alaska’s lone House seat. All those candidacies say a lot about the state of the Democratic Party west of the Mississippi, excluding what’s known, affectionately or not, as “the left coast” — California, Oregon and Washington.

Some of these independents are long shots, none of them are favored, but they all figure they are better off than a Democrat would be.

“We’ve got a brand problem in places like Idaho and Montana,” said Jared DeLoof, Democratic Party chairman in Ada County, which includes Boise and its fast-growing suburbs. “Having a ‘D’ next to your name makes winning unlikely, if not impossible.”

Many Democratic leaders don’t love the trend. Lauren Necochea, chairwoman of the Idaho Democratic Party, said progressives and moderates could not “expect independents to save us.”

“I think the independent candidates will generally fade away after the election,” she said. “The Democratic Party will still be here doing the work to hold Republicans accountable.”

But Democrats face steep odds in most of the states with independent options this year — and for election cycles to come. That’s prompting some hard conversations with Democratic candidates.

Party leaders in Ada County wrote a public letter in July asking their U.S. Senate nominee, David Roth, to drop out. Their logic echoed Democrats who pushed nominees aside in Senate races in Nebraska and South Dakota this summer, and tried but failed in Montana: Mr. Roth wasn’t running a credible campaign and risked helping Mr. Risch glide to re-election.

“We simply want the best path forward for everyone fighting to save this country,” Ada County Democratic leaders wrote.

Mr. Roth initially balked, saying he and Mr. Achilles were too far apart philosophically, but he eventually withdrew.

“Democratic parties are doing some interesting calculus here,” said Jaclyn Kettler, a political scientist at Boise State University. “Is it best to have a candidate under the party label on the ballot, or is it best to have an independent candidate that’s more aligned with their issue positions than the Republican would be?”

U.S. Jobs, Economy, Inflation, Culture, Markets

New York Times, These Conservatives Want to Be Working Moms. The Manosphere Disapproves, Vivian Yee, Aug. 24, 2026. At a conservative center for women leaders, interns told stories about their lives. One said a male classmate told her, “I don’t know if women should be lawyers.”

The young women bent their heads over their books one morning in July — studying, if such things can be studied, how a woman should be.

One of them read aloud from a passage about Mary Wollstonecraft, the early women’s rights advocate, who had slammed the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau for writing, in her words, that “man was made to reason, woman to feel.”

Kimberly Begg, the president of the Clare Boothe Luce Center for Conservative Women, stood at the front of the conference room, leading one of her periodic book club sessions for summer interns and young staff members.

She had designed this discussion of 18th-century ideas specifically to confront a charged new political movement.

“I actually hear this a lot right now, that women are ‘feelers’ and men are ‘thinkers,’” Ms. Begg said. “Wollstonecraft is saying if we embrace this,” she added, “we are going to be not just harming women, but all of society.”

For the women listening, Rousseau’s assessment did not match reality. But it did sound familiar.

These days, the idea that women are intellectually inferior leaches steadily from manosphere podcasts, influencers who promote traditional gender roles and ultraconservative pulpits.

Ms. Begg, a lawyer with five children who often draws on her Catholic faith, has heard some conservatives pushing for a return to rigid gender norms, with women firmly planted at home. One of her sons told her that some of his male high school classmates have openly questioned whether women should be able to vote.

From a squat brick office park in Northern Virginia, the Luce Center is staking out what seems like a fraught position these days: that it is possible to be a conservative woman who values motherhood and family, but one with a career, an egalitarian marriage and a voice.

High-powered women are not exactly missing from the conservative world. President Trump has hired women for prominent positions, including his chief of staff and press secretary, as well as several in his cabinet (though many have left or been fired). Erika Kirk has led Turning Point USA since her husband and the group’s founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated last year. Many of the Make America Healthy Again movement’s biggest stars are women.

Yet such women, even those encouraging conventional gender roles, are often told to be quiet. Some red-pill conservatives have rebuked Ms. Kirk for her public role away from her children. They have chastised Alex Clark, a star MAHA podcaster, and Brett Cooper, a YouTube commentator, for having a platform.

Meidas Touch Podcast, Trump DC RACE EVENT becomes INSTANT DISASTER!! Ben Meiselas, right, Aug. 23, 2026. MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump's DC Grand Prix event becoming a complete disaster.

Meidas Touch Podcast, Trump DC RACE EVENT becomes INSTANT DISASTER!! Ben Meiselas, right, Aug. 23, 2026. MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump's DC Grand Prix event becoming a complete disaster and Meiselas speaks with DC reporter Ben Weiss who has been covering the race.

The Freedom 250 Grand Prix in Washington DC has been an utter disaster. This is the Indie car street race as part of Freedom 250 that the Trump regime has been talking about while the American people are struggling to afford groceries and gas and diesel and anything and everything. The Trump regime is focused on things like this, the Freedom 250 Grand Prix.

I'll show you some photos of what it looked like outside in Washington DC where they effectively shut down the city to build a 1.7 mile long track around Washington DC to race these indie cars. You can see t was not all that crowded. The Trump regime claimed they were going to have hundreds of thousands of people there.

They did not really have all that many people there. But also, it's proven to be, as everybody expected, it would be a very dangerous track for the racers.These cars really aren't meant to do street racing like this. I mean, there is some street racing that they do, but that's not really what they're supposed what these cars were built for in areas like this.

And so, we knew that the Trump regime was spending a lot of time welding down 200 manhole covers ahead of this race. There were a lot of bumps on the street as well. And I was watching this so you don't have to watch it, but it was Indie car after Indie car was crashing into the wall one after the other. These very expensive cars were just like getting destroyed.

And you know, if you looked at what was happening as they're riding on the road that's not meant for this type of racing, there was like a kicker bump before one of the intersections by like a crosswalk area which kind of kicks the back end of the car and the back unloads and what you see is the kind of rear tire brake pressure locks and then the car loses control and then smashes into the wall. and it was like one car after one car smashing into the wall as I was watching this thing.

So, Saturday was the qualifying uh round and some of the practice sessions. Sunday is the actual race itself and I just think it's going to, I think we're going to, I'm worried about what's going to happen on Sunday based on what I've seen on Saturday.

Doug Bergam, right, the interior secretary responsible for fabricating evidence against a two-time Olympiccanoist in the reflecting pool, David Hearn, in order to frame David Hearn.

This is the type of stuff that Doug Burgum is doing right now. And so he's behind the Indie car street race,Freedom 250 Grand Prix, that this is what like the Trump regime has been talking about this whole week. again, while we're in a catastrophic war, while the American economy is in a catastrophic state.

I mean, Donald Trump hasn't even addressed the fact that we're in a full-fledged trade war with Canada now as a result of his horrific conduct and behavior and bad faith negotiation. But this is what they're talking about.

I mean, this is like an insane psychotic regime we have here in the United States. Doug Bergam earlier today was bragging that the manhole covers were being welded down. Play this clip,

NewsMax Correspondent: Mr. Secretary. Uh, you know, certainly hoping for a big crowd at this 250,000.I've seen the curves. Some of those turns are pretty tight. How do you keep spectators safe during such an unprecedented event?

Doug Burgum: Well, the Penske team and the Indie Car Series team that helped build this thing have taken every precaution. You'll see these concrete barriers everywhere, the high fences. They've even gone so far as making sure they're welding uh the manhole covers down so they don't get uh sucked up like a vacuum when these cars fly over the top of them. '

And and of course fans will be kept in a safe area, but it is a huge areas on the National Mall with large video screens where fans are going to be able to watch. We expect over race weekend yesterday, today, and tomorrow there could be a million people that are here in person. But, you know, shout out to the National Park Service, which managed the National Mall, our US Park Police and others.

Non-stop events: The Great American State Fair, the UFC fights, the record setting, world-record=-setting fireworks when we had we there'll be 40 million people that transverse the National Mall this year. It's never looked better.

Ben Meiselas: What the hell are you even talking about? And we can't afford things. We can't afford groceries. We can't afford gas. We can't afford rent. What the hell? You ripped away our healthcare. No one wants this. What do you do is this?  What are you doing? 

Justice Integrity Project Editor's Note: JIP's offices adjoin the race car route, providing a rooftop view that provided a direct view of the route, the street pedestrian traffic and key relevant parts of the National Mall, including one of the major celebrity reviewing stands for the race. It is this editor's estimate that visibile sections of the crowd indicated a very modest size crowd, probably no more than 50,000 -- not the 250,000 or one million organizers boasted about -- and that overall attendance for the events was similarly vastly less than those claimed by the Trump operatives and their media outlets, an especially striking shortfall because normal Mall events such as the annual Folklife Festival on the Mall or the congressionally planned 250th anniversary celebration were cancelled by the Trump Administration.    

Children in cages: Trump's United States of America, above, and Hitler's Nazi Germany

Lance's Substack, Opinion: ICE Agents And Recruits Are Not Just “Similar” To Hitler’s Stormtroopers. The Stormtroopers Are The Model For ICE, Lance F Rosen, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Introduction: The coming midterm elections are going to be a bloody affair. Nothing about them will go smoothly. The results will be contested in virtually every race which Democratic candidates win. There are a wide variety of operations planned which will be run through the courts, coupled with moves to disrupt the voter tallies, and likely attempts at the seizure and destruction of ballots, this all in the aftermath of a nationwide terror campaign of voter suppression, intimidation, and obstruction, leading up to election day at the polls.

PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Is About To Lose A Trade War With Canada, Jason Easley, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Trump has put 50% tariffs on hundreds of Canadian goods, and the response from Canada has set Trump up to massively lose his latest trade war.In July, as the war in Iran continued to sputter and economic pressure grew on the American people from higher gasoline prices, Donald Trump, out of the blue, announced a new 50% tariff threat on Canadian goods.

Children in cages: Trump's United States of America, above, and Hitler's Nazi Germany

Lance's Substack, Opinion: ICE Agents And Recruits Are Not Just “Similar” To Hitler’s Stormtroopers. The Stormtroopers Are The Model For ICE, Lance F Rosen, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Introduction: The coming midterm elections are going to be a bloody affair.

Nothing about them will go smoothly. The results will be contested in virtually every race which Democratic candidates win. There are a wide variety of operations planned which will be run through the courts, coupled with moves to disrupt the voter tallies, and likely attempts at the seizure and destruction of ballots, this all in the aftermath of a nationwide terror campaign of voter suppression, intimidation, and obstruction, leading up to election day at the polls.

Depending on the final results, (with the high probability of the Democrats retaking the House and even odds on the Senate) Trump’s puppet House Speaker Mike Johnson will take all requisite measures in order to suspend Congress to prevent the swearing in of newly elected Democrats.

Johnson himself telegraphed his intentions at a GOP retreat where he promised to be their “protection” from Democrats who he claimed are planning to impeach Trump and/or put them on trial.

Trump has repeatedly broadcast that using ICE at the polls is part of his plan to overturn results which go against candidates running with his fascist loyalty cult. Trump confidants such as Steve Bannon are screaming it from the rooftops.

The newly confirmed Attorney General, Trump’s personal lawyer Todd Blanche, stated in response to a question about it at a public conference, “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places? Illegals can’t vote. It doesn’t make any sense.”

What doesn’t make sense of course is that Trump has created a cult following based around the ‘Big Lie’ that Democrats can only win elections by importing illegal aliens to vote for them, despite there being no substantial proof of this happening anywhere, ever. We are also well aware that Blanche has been engaged in a years long cover-up for his client regarding the Epstein espionage/pedophile network and is so compromised himself that he will do only what Trump tells him to do in this regard.

Only last week Blanche announced that he is deploying 1000 DOJ “election monitors” to the polls that day. He said very little about who the DOJ monitors will be, or how they will be selected. Are they FBI agents, Federal investigators, deputized agents from who knows what private security firm, etc? Likewise we ask where they will be sent, but only a fool would deny that the White House will decide which elections they consider life and death, and on that basis have Blanche send them to these specific locales. The two of them rise or fall together, therefore no lie, no fabrication, no set of illegal actions is a bridge too far for either.

Part I--Stephen Miller Is Running This Show--

At this point it is plainly visible that Trump himself is so far gone cognitively and physically that he is incapable of planning or coordinating anything. He spends his spare time super-glueing gold filigree onto Oval Office doorknobs, making stock purchases, and playing internet troll with his dear Natalie upstairs late into the dawn hours.

Otherwise they roll him out publicly on occasion like a windup toy and pull the string to set him off on one or another of his dementia-driven obsession-laced rants. He will go anywhere that there are cameras and an audience of MAGA cabbageheads to get up and talk about himself, and to make threats against his enemies for whom he demands retribution. Election campaigns, superpower summits, funerals, national TV addresses, it doesn’t matter where he is speaking or why, he is the main subject of everything coming from his own mouth, therefore his relationship to the world around him ranges from disinterested to destructive to dysfunctional.

Trump is barely there. So we need to keep our eyes on those who are.

ICE is Miller’s personal operation. The mass deportation policy has always been his strictly defined domain. Mass deportations, ie; the ethnic cleansing of the United States, was Donald Trump’s leading (and almost only) campaign issue, and therefore he credits Miller for his return to the presidency. That is what your MAGA friends, neighbors, and family members voted for, though many reading this will resist the thought because realizing who these people really are under the surface can be painful. This is why it is neither inflammatory or inaccurate to say that MAGA is a homegrown American Nazi Party, and what we once knew as the Republican Party has ceased to exist.

More importantly, mass deportation policy is also the issue around which Trump announced he would declare a state of national emergency starting on “day one,” and this in order to justify invoking wartime powers to repel the fictional Mexican drug cartel-Chinese fentanyl <invasion> of the US Southern border. (The use of the word “invasion” here is key to calling border enforcement a national security emergency warranting the expansion of executive orders) Every non-citizen, including those who are documented, could then be branded a criminal <and> a national security threat, and subsequently forcibly detained and deported.

It is crucial to remember that Miller is a Nazi in his identity. Meaning, that he has studied them intensively and borrows heavily from Hitler’s strategy and tactics as dictator. Miller’s intellectual idol was law Professor Carl Schmitt, also a favorite of the infamous Federalist Society. For those unfamiliar, Schmitt was Adolf Hitler’s “Crown Jurist” and legal adviser, who authored the legal arguments in support of Hitler’s coup after the Reichstag Fire, and thereafter wrote the legal arguments justifying the mass executions of Hitler’s enemies, (including of his own SA leadership) in the “Night Of The Long Knives.”

Schmitt’s “exceptionalism” doctrine and the concept of the “unitary executive” are the basis even today of the Supreme Court’s deranged ruling from two years ago on “presidential official immunity,” bestowing on the President a legal shield for life against any prosecution, when the crime committed is defined by them as an “official act.” Therefore Miller as a “Schmittian” has no problem stating publicly his intention to suspend Habeus Corpus if need be to put down Trump’s opposition extra-legally, whether they are citizens or not. This was covered last year by Rachel Maddow.

However, Miller’s personal identification with the Nazis goes far beyond his political/legal ideology. It is rooted in his embrace of violent white nationalism, his bottomless well of cruelty, his rage, his obsessive desire to annihilate or take bloody retribution against anyone in his way, and his belief that certain categories people, who he sees as being of the wrong race, religion, or gender, are in fact subhuman.

For those who want to lump this statement into the category of rhetoric or hyperbole, Miller himself stated this belief at a security conference in Europe. There is no way to “spin” this atrocious quote.

[”It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled — to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person,” he said. “Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way — in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.”]

When first reading of this I flashed back to my first reading of “Mein Kampf” some 55 years ago, after reading Hitler’s ranting recollections of first encountering the caftaned and bearded Jewish men of Vienna.

[”Is this a Jew? was my first thought. Is this a German? For a few hellers I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life. Since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. When I recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion.”]

A clever one this meshugannah Miller is, managing to tell three lies in one sentence in his speech. First, that all of Trump’s opponents are Antifa, therefore terrorists. Second, that the demonstrations were violent. Third, that everyone in attendence is deformed looking, not normal.

Somehow he thinks his view about how Trump’s opposition appears to him should be remotely relevant to the attendees of a 66 nation conference on security, most of whom see him as a psychotic aberration, a blot on all US history with zero common ground existing between them. So his speech was not even intended for them, it was given for his “audience of one” back home.

Some among his advisers told Trump that Miller’s public outbursts were hurting them with their own base leading up to the mid-terms, so he was sidelined for political reasons. Instead Fox and other MAGA outlets promoted Miller’s wife Katy to be his designated spokesperson and she became the leading retailer of his Nazi hatreds.

Miller was there speaking for one reason, which was his “coming out” event to announce that his several month long gagging and disappearance from the airwaves in the aftermath of the awful Minnesota ICE killings was over. The blowback against Miller’s bloodcurdling defense of the ICE agents involved was past, and he was making known that he was given a green light once again to run White House domestic policy, and to be as public as necessary in doing so.

My assessment is that Trump is seeing the poll numbers and is panicking, likely concluding that regular old MAGA politicking is not working and that he’ll have to resort to the bloody business of voiding the midterm results and using force to do it. Which means Miller’s stock is up again.

This little game of White House musical chairs, the removal of Bondi and installation of Blanche, the resurfacing of Miller, and not incidentally the unexpected resignation of top Trump Propaganda Minister Karoline Leavitt, along with the public statements about how ICE and the DOJ will be used on election day and thereafter, all speak volumes about what the future holds, and what we need to prepare for starting now.

Emergency actions by Governors, Mayors, State Attorneys General, municipal District Attorneys, in conjunction with local law enforcement, will be needed and should be coordinated both nationally and regionally in order to preempt Trump from voiding the election results. It might even reach the point of Governors having to call out their National Guards, beating Trump to the punch before he can federalize them under Title X, in order to protect voters from federal law enforcement goon squad operations.

This is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. To adequately grasp what this might look like, imagine hundreds of smaller scale January 6ths happening at State Capitols, boards of election, mail delivery centers, or any other location relevant to the certification of election results.

As far as is known, Democratic strategists are “gaming” the many possible scenarios for what Trump and Miller might do, and are planning out a legal/political strategy to neutralize them. Remember that these are the same “expert” consultants who chose to do nothing in the way of investigating computer voting irregularities after the 2024 Presidential election. We are not signing off on a theory about that either way, but the relevant point is that if the Democrat’s strategy in regard to Trump’s “second coup” plan is what they should do “after the fact,” or is defensive in nature, or characterized as a “conventional” response, then say goodbye and goodnight to democracy. We need bold preemptive actions, given that Trump’s plans are transparently illegal.

Part II-- The “Deep Dive” On Hitler’s Recruitment Of The Sturmabteilung, The Stormptroopers (SA) ...What Kind Of Men Were They?

Aug. 23

Top Headlines  

At the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada took a stand against President Trump’s desire for the United States to own Greenland, and called on medium-size countries to stand up to larger powers (Associated Press photo by Markus Schreiber via New York Times).

• New York Times, Canada-U.S. Trade War: What to Know, Staff Reports, Aug. 23, 2026. Canada suspended trade negotiations, triggering President Trump’s 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods. Mark Carney said he would retaliate “dollar for dollar.” 
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary Sunday Update: Trump Moves Closer to Declaring Election Emergency and all the Major News of the Day, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Trump is quietly laying the groundwork for a national emergency declaration on elections, doctors are sounding alarms about his weight as the White House stays evasive, and infighting inside his own administration keeps spilling into public view even as the trade war with Canada turns real.

  Also today: a viral video of an ICE agent telling a U.S. citizen "because you're an immigrant" was reason enough to cuff him, Iran calling out new US sanctions as a sign of desperation, mystery manhole crews back under Manhattan, a fast-moving wildfire forcing 14,000 evacuations outside Reno, Zelenskyy drawing a hard line against wartime elections, and Kazakhstan wrapping up an election built to hand its president another seven years. 

• PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Is About To Lose A Trade War With Canada, Jason Easley, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Trump has put 50% tariffs on hundreds of Canadian goods, and the response from Canada has set Trump up to massively lose his latest trade war.In July, as the war in Iran continued to sputter and economic pressure grew on the American people from higher gasoline prices, Donald Trump, out of the blue, announced a new 50% tariff threat on Canadian goods.

Special Report No: 1

• Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Full Harp-Trump Letters Are Worse Than You Think, Seth Abramson, right, Aug. 21-22, 2026. We still only have two complete letters from White House aide Natalie Harp to President Donald Trump—the man she calls her “Guardian” and “Protector, her “Alpha and Omega”—but they are horrifying.

Taken in isolation and exclusively on their face, the just-released Harp-Trump Letters would excite little comment or concern. What really makes these letters, and the relationship they imply, so upsetting is that as a matter of national security it seems relevant that one of the two people in this odd relationship is a President of the United States with demonstrably zero interest in protecting classified intelligence ....and the other person in the relationship at hand has infiltrated the White House for reasons that remain unclear but that we know, at least, she’s aggressively lied about for many years. (Continued below: The Ten Most Harrowing New Revelations in the Just-Released “Full” Harp-Trump Letters)

Special Report No: 2

Children in cages: Trump's United States of America, above, and Hitler's Nazi Germany

• Lance's Substack, Opinion: ICE Agents And Recruits Are Not Just “Similar” To Hitler’s Stormtroopers. The Stormtroopers Are The Model For ICE, Lance F Rosen, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Introduction: The coming midterm elections are going to be a bloody affair. Nothing about them will go smoothly. The results will be contested in virtually every race which Democratic candidates win. There are a wide variety of operations planned which will be run through the courts, coupled with moves to disrupt the voter tallies, and likely attempts at the seizure and destruction of ballots, this all in the aftermath of a nationwide terror campaign of voter suppression, intimidation, and obstruction, leading up to election day at the polls.

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, Iran Warns Gulf States Against Joining Trump’s Economic War, or Else, Erika Solomon, Aug. 23, 2026. Iran’s new hard-line national security adviser, Mohsen Rezaei, vowed to prevent “a single drop of oil” from leaving the region.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary Sunday Update: Trump Moves Closer to Declaring Election Emergency and all the Major News of the Day, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 23, 2026. (Continued from above). Also today: a viral video of an ICE agent telling a U.S. citizen "because you're an immigrant" was reason enough to cuff him, Iran calling out new US sanctions as a sign of desperation, mystery manhole crews back under Manhattan, a fast-moving wildfire forcing 14,000 evacuations outside Reno, Zelenskyy drawing a hard line against wartime elections, and Kazakhstan wrapping up an election built to hand its president another seven years.

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 20, 2026 ['Not That Informed On National Security?'], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 23, 2026. On Tuesday, August 18, during a debate for a runoff to win the South Carolina Republican senatorial primary, Senator Darline Graham (R-SC) answered a question about Taiwan and the importance of the South China Sea by saying: “I’m not that informed on national security.” She paused, and added: “But I do support the military.” The audience reacted with boos and gasps. Senators are supposed to manage national security.

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice   

Former U.S. Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi, the Trump ally accused of supervising phony federal prosecutions in Minnesota to divert attention from federal agent's conduct in killing protester Alex Pretti.

• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Kavanaugh Stop from Hell that Destroys Minnesota’s Other Criminal Cases, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 23, 2026. Last week, I showed that the investigation into the MN-15 was predicated, in theory on February 11 and on paper on March 10, on a claim that there had been a bunch of assaults on law enforcement officers. The problem with that claim — that DHS had to investigate a bunch of people who weren’t suspected of assault based on a bunch of past assaults — is that those past assaults were fabrications. By the time DOJ charged the MN-15 indictment on June 11, over two dozen of the assault charges filed in January had either been diverted or dismissed by the government. Those assaults were fabrications, many of them rolled out for Pam Bondi’s propaganda purposes on January 28, after CBP officers had shot Alex Pretti dead.
• The Contrarians, Opinion: From the Kennedy Center to the Paramount-Warner Merger, You Are Winning in Court, Norman Eisen, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Publisher’s Roundup. In the second Trump administration, the battle for our democracy has taken us to some unexpected places across the hundreds of legal cases and matters that Contrarians have helped fund through paid subscriptions. Saving democracy isn’t just about politics. Culture matters as much and maybe even more, and this week saw remarkable developments in two of the matters in what I think of as our Contrarian cultural litigation portfolio.
• Eyes On Ice, Police are feeling the heat As Maine Melts their 287g agreements, Staff Report, Aug. 23, 2026. In Maine, a hard boundary has been drawn between local policing and federal civil immigration enforcement. It did not arrive quietly.
• Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: The Dual State: How Trump Is Using Ernst Fraenkel’s Playbook to Fracture the Law, Edwin Eisendrath, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Ernst Fraenkel studied American law at the University of Chicago, and he wrote about what was happening back in Germany. His book, "The Dual State," has a lot to tell us about America today. He explains that for most Germans, the rule of law continued as it always had. But the normative state had boundaries, and many Germans—particularly Jews—fell into what Fraenkel called the prerogative state. Those in the prerogative state were subject to all the power and none of the justice that a state can deliver.

U.S. Water, Drought, Energy, Climate Crises

• New York Times, America’s Desert Metropolis Is on the Short List to Lose Water, Reis Thebault, Photographs and Video by Rebecca Noble, Aug. 23, 2026. Decades ago, Arizona won funding for a massive Colorado River project by agreeing to be first in line for cuts at a time of deep drought. The Trump administration says that time has come.
• New York Times, Bigger, Hotter Fires Are Slowly Erasing America’s Great Forests, Eric Niiler, Photographs and Video by Nic Coury, Aug. 23, 2026. Towering woodlands in the West are being permanently replaced by tracts of spiky shrubs. Conditions “just aren’t normal anymore,” one researcher said.

U.S. Governance

• New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Attends Grand Prix Race for America’s 250th Birthday, Staff Reports, Aug. 23, 2026. What We’re Covering. Grand Prix: President Trump and the first lady are attending the Freedom 250 Grand Prix on Sunday in downtown Washington, where roads have been turned into an IndyCar racecourse. Mr. Trump was driven around the course in the Beast, the presidential limo, before the race got underway. The race is the final major event in the city to celebrate the United States’ 250th anniversary. 
• Meidas Touch Podcast, Trump DC RACE EVENT becomes INSTANT DISASTER!! Ben Meiselas, right, Aug. 23, 2026. MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump's DC Grand Prix event becoming a complete disaster.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

• New York Times, The Midterms Feel Like 2006 All Over Again, Carl Hulse, Aug. 23, 2026. With an unpopular war and high prices agitating voters, members of both parties see parallels to an election cycle when Democrats romped. But a lot has changed.
• New York Times, The Data Center Backlash Bursts Into the Midterms, Shane Goldmacher, Aug. 23, 2026. With opposition to the centers mounting, many Democrats and a growing number of Republicans are campaigning against them.
• New York Times, Angry Ohio Voters Could Turn Their State Purple Again, Campbell Robertson and Jessica Contrera, Aug. 23, 2026. A governor’s race, a Senate contest and enough congressional contests to swing control of the House are all in play in Ohio, where voters of all stripes express a deep sense of powerlessness. 
• New York Times, Times Exclusive: Jeffries and Kushner Meet Privately as Midterm Attacks Fly, Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni, Aug. 23, 2026. President Trump’s son-in-law and the man in line to be speaker of a Democratic-led House discussed how Democrats and the administration could work together.

U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets

• New York Times, What Canadian Goods Will Take Trump’s 50% Tariffs? Some Pretty Strange Items, Ian Austen, Aug. 23, 2026. Buoys, dog muzzles, capes, national flags and “base metal statuettes” from Canada are now more expensive for U.S. shoppers.

U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

• The Quietside Journal (Maine), Publisher's Opinion: Covering Susan Collins Part 3: How Maine newspapers marginalize themselves over time, Lincoln Millstein, small town Maine digital news publisher and former prominent editor with the New York Times, Boston Globe and Hartford Courant, Aug. 23, 2026. How Maine newspapers marginalize themselves over time.

Top Stories

   At the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada took a stand against President Trump’s desire for the United States to own Greenland, and called on medium-size countries to stand up to larger powers (Associated Press photo by Markus Schreiber via New York Times).

New York Times, Canada-U.S. Trade War: What to Know, Staff Reports, Aug. 23, 2026. Canada suspended trade negotiations, triggering President Trump’s 50 percent tariffs on a range of Canadian goods. Mark Carney said he would retaliate “dollar for dollar.”

Talks between the United States and Canada failed late Friday to head off steep new tariffs on Canadian goods, prompting Canada to promise “dollar for dollar” retaliation.

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada said he had suspended the talks because the American side had introduced last-minute terms that were “unfair, uneconomic and called into question the reliability of any deal.” Then on Saturday, in a powerful speech to Canadians, Mr. Carney said Canada was under attack by President Trump’s tariffs and was “at war” with the United States.Didn’t President Trump say there was a deal?

He did, twice. On Tuesday, he said the two countries had reached a deal aside from some details and had extended an earlier deadline that would have introduced the new tariffs.

On Friday, only hours before the two sides announced the collapse of the negotiations, Mr. Trump said he thought a deal could be reached.Why did negotiations fall apart?

Mr. Carney blamed last-minute demands for the collapse of negotiations. He said, among other things, that American negotiators pushed to roll back Canada’s efforts to promote Canadian, including French-language, content in online streaming services; subsidies for industries like publishing and film production; and even mandatory labeling in French as well as English on packaging. French is an official language in Canada.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, a U.S. official said Canada wanted concessions that the United States wasn’t prepared to give, particularly when it came to the automotive sector, as well as trade in steel, aluminum and lumber.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Canada? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.Carney’s fighting words.

Slamming the U.S. proposal as “a bad deal,” Mr. Carney’s forceful speech on Saturday made it clear that he considered Mr. Trump’s tariffs an attack on Canada. “We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed,” he said. “We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”

“We cannot accept what they offered and we will not give what they asked,” he added. “We were not prepared to compromise Canada’s sovereignty or undermine our key industries.”

Mr. Carney, who is burnishing his reputation as a leader who will stand up to Mr. Trump, said Canada would retaliate against the new tariffs “to protect our workers and businesses.”ImageA U.S. flag and a Canadian flag next to a bridge crossing the border. The sky is gray and cloudy.Only hours before negotiations were suspended, Mr. Trump said he thought a deal could be reached.

The United States had offered to reduce its tariffs on steel, aluminum and autos, and to eliminate a recently imposed tariff on Canadian lumber, before the negotiations suddenly collapsed, the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer, told The New York Times in an interview on Saturday.

Early Sunday morning, Mr. Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, that Canada wanted the “benefits of being a State, without being one!!! They have also charged our great farmers, for many years, massive amounts of Tariffs. No more!!!”

But he did not seem to respond directly to Mr. Carney’s muscular speech against the United States.  

PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Is About To Lose A Trade War With Canada, Jason Easley, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Trump has put 50% tariffs on hundreds of Canadian goods, and the response from Canada has set Trump up to massively lose his latest trade war.In July, as the war in Iran continued to sputter and economic pressure grew on the American people from higher gasoline prices, Donald Trump, out of the blue, announced a new 50% tariff threat on Canadian goods.

Politically, it seems Trump was looking for an easy win, but he got another setup for defeat.

The Trump tariffs are very unpopular in the United States. The tariffs, along with the Iran war, are viewed as drivers of inflation.

The Mike Pence-founded conservative think tank Advancing American Freedom wrote in a recent policy memo about Trump’s tariffs:

American families, not foreign countries, are bearing the burdens for the administration’s tariff policies. Congress must reclaim its power to ensure there is “no taxation without representation.”

These are not the words used to describe a popular policy.

Trump is starting a trade war with Canada from a position of ultimate political weakness.

David Frum summed up the Trump administration’s one thought on Canada:

The Trump administration has one big idea about Canada: The U.S. is larger, stronger, and richer than Canada, so Canada must sooner or later surrender to Trump’s demands. That one big idea is wrong.

…

Yes, Trump can hurt Canada more than Canada can hurt Trump. That part of Trump’s thinking is true. But wars are not decided only by the question Who can inflict more pain? Wars are also decided by the question Who can endure more pain? Trump’s failure to accept this truth is why he lost the Iran war—and why he is losing his trade wars.

Trump has set himself up for another loss, and one look at how Canada is reacting to this trade war shows why.

Trade talks collapsed after Canada walked away and claimed that Trump is asking for too much and offering too little.

Prime Minister Mark Carney told the Canadian people:

• We are stronger now than when the United States started this trade war. More unified, more determined, and more ambitious.
• With the strongest fiscal position in the G7 and a resilient economy, Canada has all the resources we need to pivot and prosper.
• Growth is accelerating, and we are projected to have the second-fastest rate in the G7 this year and next.
• We are creating jobs at four times the rate of the United States.
• Our non-U.S. exports are up sharply and are on track to double over the next decade.
• Foreign direct investment in Canada is at its highest level in two decades, running at twice the rate of our nearest G7 competitor.
• Canada now ranks as the most attractive country in the world for infrastructure investment.
• Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And I promised: “That will never, ever happen.”
• We are keeping that promise.
• Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America.
• We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away. And we are just getting started.
• Canadians don’t submit to the weather – we thrive in it.
• We don’t wait to see which way the wind is blowing. Or surrender ourselves to the waves to be storm-tossed by events.
• We set our own course.
• We make our own weather.
• In Canada, we are masters in our own home, from coast to coast to coast.
• Building Canada strong. For all.

Standing up to Trump on tariffs has been great politics for Carney. 

Just how wrong is the Trump administration about Canada?

A poll from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute found, “Canadians by a five-to-one ratio believe it was the right move (76%) for Canada to walk away from trade negotiations with the United States rather than the wrong one (13%). And at least two-thirds in every province in the country believe that to be the case.”

Liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between support the Canadian government standing up to Trump. For Mark Carney, these trade wars are a political gift. For Republicans in the United States, they are a curse that raises prices for the American people and costs them votes in the midterm election.

Trump is going to either back down or lose this trade war. Either way, Canada will defeat him. 

Special Report No. 1

Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Full Harp-Trump Letters Are Worse Than You Think, Seth Abramson, left, Aug. 21-22, 2026. We still only have two complete letters from White House aide Natalie Harp to President Donald Trump—the man she calls her “Guardian” and “Protector, her “Alpha and Omega”—but they are horrifying.

Taken in isolation and exclusively on their face, the just-released Harp-Trump Letters would excite little comment or concern. They present as just two in a presumptively lengthy stream of communications between an eighty-year-old married serial rapist and a blonde, conventionally attractive aide who’s well less than half his age. The two exemplars we now have of how these two people communicate, specifically samples of Natalie Harp’s “adoring” (NYT) missives to President Donald Trump, for all intents and purposes appear to hail from the sort of toxic, clandestine romantic relationship most of us have been in at least once. Usually in our teens.

On that basis, the most notable aspects of these letters by far would have to be:

(a) the two ends of this seemingly unmistakably romantic relationship (whether physical or not) both insisting that there is no such relationship, as does everyone less powerful than them in the White House they jointly control, which is basically everybody;

(b) the fact that one of the two is a religious zealot while the other has astonishing contempt for all religious people;

(c) the apparent factoid that one of the two is not known to have ever been in a serious romantic relationship before, while the other is the alleged or proven perpetrator of literally hundreds of incidents of Rape, Sexual Harassment, Sexual Assault, infidelity, ambiguously voluntary groping, misogynistic taunting, and diabolically gleeful home-wrecking, as well as war crimes in multiple countries that he either authorized or aided and abetted and which indiscriminately killed women and children (along with a history of publicly fantasizing about violence against women in speeches that were by turns sadistic and onanistic in delivery and tone);

and (d) that the more powerful of the two mutual admirers is the autocratic capo of far-right political party whose self-ascribed obsession with “moral accountability”and “personal responsibility” saw its zenith in the impeachment of a Democratic president (Bill Clinton) over a deeply wrong—but nevertheless notably less troubling—workplace relationship than the one we’re speaking of right now.

Sure, we could add here that Trump is a married man, but the general sense now is that the marriage in question is a sham, Melania Trump is disgusted by her husband and is no longer even willing to live with him, and Donald Trump has cheated on her so many times and under such humiliating circumstances—every one treated as just fine by voters in a political party that defines itself by its devout Christianity—that there’s no explicit violation of the Word of God that Donald Trump could flout and lose the support of (say) a grifting heretic like his personal spiritual mentor, Paula White-Cain.

Sure, we could add that Natalie Harp describing Donald Trump (caps in original) as her lifelong spiritual “Guardian” and “Protector” and “Alpha and Omega”—all roles that God himself is supposed to fill in the life of a devout Christian—certainly adds an odd dimension to what at least seems to be an instance of emotional adultery, but then again, Donald Trump already publicly, on national television no less, declared himself “God’s Chosen One” and not one evangelical supporter batted an eyelash, so there’s that.

And as Trump has repeatedly framed himself as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ—yes, in those terms—even a religious zealot like Harp can feel that as long as she does whatever he tells her to do she’s serving God (or at least the only one she’ll know while on Earth).

And sure, the very fact that Donald Trump, an atheist who is among the least godly Americans to rise from this soil—he installed a golden statue of himself at one of his clubs and called it Don Colossus, encouraging Christians to pray over it (the same thing he’s done over and over and over again elsewhere); he was convicted of 34 counts of a theft-related offense (Fraud); he’s one of the only men alive famous for bearing false witness against his neighbors; he proudly orders illegal killings in other parts of the world, his own back yard, and amidst illegal wars he unilaterally launched—has somehow convinced an apparently bright young lady to give him “all her heart,” to the point that she expressly dishonors her late father by expressly raising up in his place a man whose diabolical nature appears to be virtually boundless is… well, something.

It’s troubling, one supposes—though only if one is a Christian, or a non-Christian who cares about decency.

No—what really makes these letters, and the relationship they imply, so upsetting is that as a matter of national security it seems relevant that one of the two people in this odd relationship is a President of the United States with demonstrably zero interest in protecting classified intelligence (he infamously steals it, flushes it down toilets, eats it, rips it up, trashes it, puts it in burn bags, discloses it cavalierly to our enemies as small talk, develops plans to sell it, hides it from even those entitled to access to it, blurts it out, lets it be intercepted by America’s enemies over non-secure phone lines, or else declassifies it via Jedi mind tricks, as his mood dictates) and the other person in the relationship at hand has infiltrated the White House for reasons that remain unclear but that we know, at least, she’s aggressively lied about for many years.

All of which means, if we refuse to take the Harp-Trump Letters in isolation—and here at Proof we never take things in isolation, as not only is there no reason to do so but doing is be unnatural amidst the interconnectedness of the political world—we can review them with an eye toward the sort of intelligence and security reviews they clearly never got.

The author of this Proof report is a former federal criminal investigator and retired criminal defense attorney who only writes about complex interactions that are at once multivariate, must be analyzed and tracked over time, and are not the product of just one discrete narrative stream. If a story can be summarized in a squib, this outlet has little interest in covering it; Proof is strictly a curatorial journalistic enterprise (see also here and here).

In the most recent Proof report on Harp and Trump, Proof showed that Ms. Harp is a possibly unprecedented national security threat to the White House, her boss Donald Trump, and possibly even the United States. She’s in a position to do enormous harm to American interests, and is only in her current taxpayer-paid position ($150,000/year) because the sitting President of the United States is a dirty old man who is not only wildly immature for his advanced age but also—subclinically speaking—a malignant narcissistic psychopath.

This is not the first time Donald Trump has endangered the United States by dint of his greed and vanity and overarching venality, and it won’t be the last.

Enter the two just-released Harp-Trump letters (see images infra, below).

These two letters from Harp to Trump, so inappropriate and unnerving as to surely be without precedent, take the concerns Proof has already expressed about this situation to a new level. While many of the odd professions of devotion in these two documents have already been unpacked here at Proof and elsewhere, what’s most surprising in the release of these documents by The Daily Beast is how many sentences in them have flown under the radar while in the hands of journalists who should have known better.

It doesn’t take a former federal criminal investigator to see all the warning signs in these two missives—warning signs that should have caused the United States Secret Service to immediately leap to the defense of their protectee Trump and the nation as a whole. But it certainly doesn’t hurt that this author has that particular training (see here for more detail on my training and practice).

In undertaking this analysis, Proof both sidesteps the aspects of these letters that have already been discussed in detail here and, despite the urgency of the situation and the callous disregard for propriety shown by both Harp and Trump, attempts to approach at least the former person with a small amount of grace.

While it’s true that Harp appears to have been the “but for” cause of the leader of the free world going full Ku Klux Klan and comparing his predecessor Barack Obama to an ape—as well as other upsetting incidents, like the same leader portraying himself gleefully spraying diarrhea all over American voters—it remains the case that Harp appears to be a troubled young woman in an extremely precarious psychological state, and there’s no reason for anyone not to be at least broadly empathetic to such a state of affairs. Yes, even if the person in question has chosen to exhibit religious devotion to someone they knew (or should have known) is a serial rapist, war criminal, convicted felon, long time conman, draft dodger, serial adulterer, domestic abuser, serial sexual harasser, misogynist, racist, heretic, antisemite, Islamophobe, ableist, transphobe, xenophobe, and unrepentant wannabe fascist dictator whose sexual attractions are self-admittedly pedophilic and says the only code he follows is the dictates of his own spectacularly malformed mind.

With all that in mind, let’s proceed.

(Continued below: The Ten Most Harrowing New Revelations in the Just-Released “Full” Harp-Trump Letters)

Special Report No. 2

Children in cages: Trump's United States of America, above, and Hitler's Nazi Germany

Lance's Substack, Opinion: ICE Agents And Recruits Are Not Just “Similar” To Hitler’s Stormtroopers. The Stormtroopers Are The Model For ICE, Lance F Rosen, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Introduction: The coming midterm elections are going to be a bloody affair.

Nothing about them will go smoothly. The results will be contested in virtually every race which Democratic candidates win. There are a wide variety of operations planned which will be run through the courts, coupled with moves to disrupt the voter tallies, and likely attempts at the seizure and destruction of ballots, this all in the aftermath of a nationwide terror campaign of voter suppression, intimidation, and obstruction, leading up to election day at the polls.

Depending on the final results, (with the high probability of the Democrats retaking the House and even odds on the Senate) Trump’s puppet House Speaker Mike Johnson will take all requisite measures in order to suspend Congress to prevent the swearing in of newly elected Democrats.

Johnson himself telegraphed his intentions at a GOP retreat where he promised to be their “protection” from Democrats who he claimed are planning to impeach Trump and/or put them on trial.

Trump has repeatedly broadcast that using ICE at the polls is part of his plan to overturn results which go against candidates running with his fascist loyalty cult. Trump confidants such as Steve Bannon are screaming it from the rooftops.

The newly confirmed Attorney General, Trump’s personal lawyer Todd Blanche, stated in response to a question about it at a public conference, “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places? Illegals can’t vote. It doesn’t make any sense.”

President Trump, a lifelong atheist and sociopath who like his father has surrounded himself with well-known clergy to amass power, frequently references his supposed sacred status as God's chosen warrior on earth to save the United States, as in his self-published, slimmed-down portrait above, which includes the violent code message used by his QANON cult "Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming."

What doesn’t make sense of course is that Trump has created a cult following based around the ‘Big Lie’ that Democrats can only win elections by importing illegal aliens to vote for them, despite there being no substantial proof of this happening anywhere, ever. We are also well aware that Blanche has been engaged in a years long cover-up for his client regarding the Epstein espionage/pedophile network and is so compromised himself that he will do only what Trump tells him to do in this regard.

Only last week Blanche announced that he is deploying 1000 DOJ “election monitors” to the polls that day. He said very little about who the DOJ monitors will be, or how they will be selected. Are they FBI agents, Federal investigators, deputized agents from who knows what private security firm, etc? Likewise we ask where they will be sent, but only a fool would deny that the White House will decide which elections they consider life and death, and on that basis have Blanche send them to these specific locales. The two of them rise or fall together, therefore no lie, no fabrication, no set of illegal actions is a bridge too far for either.

Part I--Stephen Miller Is Running This Show--

 White House advisor Stephen Miller, above left.At this point it is plainly visible that Trump himself is so far gone cognitively and physically that he is incapable of planning or coordinating anything. He spends his spare time super-glueing gold filigree onto Oval Office doorknobs, making stock purchases, and playing internet troll with his dear Natalie upstairs late into the dawn hours.

Otherwise they roll him out publicly on occasion like a windup toy and pull the string to set him off on one or another of his dementia-driven obsession-laced rants. He will go anywhere that there are cameras and an audience of MAGA cabbageheads to get up and talk about himself, and to make threats against his enemies for whom he demands retribution. Election campaigns, superpower summits, funerals, national TV addresses, it doesn’t matter where he is speaking or why, he is the main subject of everything coming from his own mouth, therefore his relationship to the world around him ranges from disinterested to destructive to dysfunctional.

Trump is barely there. So we need to keep our eyes on those who are.

ICE is Miller’s personal operation. The mass deportation policy has always been his strictly defined domain. Mass deportations, ie; the ethnic cleansing of the United States, was Donald Trump’s leading (and almost only) campaign issue, and therefore he credits Miller for his return to the presidency. That is what your MAGA friends, neighbors, and family members voted for, though many reading this will resist the thought because realizing who these people really are under the surface can be painful. This is why it is neither inflammatory or inaccurate to say that MAGA is a homegrown American Nazi Party, and what we once knew as the Republican Party has ceased to exist.

More importantly, mass deportation policy is also the issue around which Trump announced he would declare a state of national emergency starting on “day one,” and this in order to justify invoking wartime powers to repel the fictional Mexican drug cartel-Chinese fentanyl <invasion> of the US Southern border. (The use of the word “invasion” here is key to calling border enforcement a national security emergency warranting the expansion of executive orders) Every non-citizen, including those who are documented, could then be branded a criminal <and> a national security threat, and subsequently forcibly detained and deported.

It is crucial to remember that Miller is a Nazi in his identity. Meaning, that he has studied them intensively and borrows heavily from Hitler’s strategy and tactics as dictator. Miller’s intellectual idol was law Professor Carl Schmitt, also a favorite of the infamous Federalist Society. For those unfamiliar, Schmitt was Adolf Hitler’s “Crown Jurist” and legal adviser, who authored the legal arguments in support of Hitler’s coup after the Reichstag Fire, and thereafter wrote the legal arguments justifying the mass executions of Hitler’s enemies, (including of his own SA leadership) in the “Night Of The Long Knives.”

Schmitt’s “exceptionalism” doctrine and the concept of the “unitary executive” are the basis even today of the Supreme Court’s deranged ruling from two years ago on “presidential official immunity,” bestowing on the President a legal shield for life against any prosecution, when the crime committed is defined by them as an “official act.” Therefore Miller as a “Schmittian” has no problem stating publicly his intention to suspend Habeus Corpus if need be to put down Trump’s opposition extra-legally, whether they are citizens or not. This was covered last year by Rachel Maddow.

However, Miller’s personal identification with the Nazis goes far beyond his political/legal ideology. It is rooted in his embrace of violent white nationalism, his bottomless well of cruelty, his rage, his obsessive desire to annihilate or take bloody retribution against anyone in his way, and his belief that certain categories people, who he sees as being of the wrong race, religion, or gender, are in fact subhuman.

For those who want to lump this statement into the category of rhetoric or hyperbole, Miller himself stated this belief at a security conference in Europe. There is no way to “spin” this atrocious quote.

[”It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations and you see any photograph of those who were assembled — to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person,” he said. “Not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way — in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.”]

When first reading of this I flashed back to my first reading of “Mein Kampf” some 55 years ago, after reading Hitler’s ranting recollections of first encountering the caftaned and bearded Jewish men of Vienna.

[”Is this a Jew? was my first thought. Is this a German? For a few hellers I bought the first anti-Semitic pamphlets of my life. Since I had begun to concern myself with this question and to take cognizance of the Jews, Vienna appeared to me in a different light than before. Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. When I recognized the Jew as the leader of the Social Democracy, the scales dropped from my eyes. A long soul struggle had reached its conclusion.”]

A clever one this meshugannah Miller is, managing to tell three lies in one sentence in his speech. First, that all of Trump’s opponents are Antifa, therefore terrorists. Second, that the demonstrations were violent. Third, that everyone in attendence is deformed looking, not normal.

Somehow he thinks his view about how Trump’s opposition appears to him should be remotely relevant to the attendees of a 66 nation conference on security, most of whom see him as a psychotic aberration, a blot on all US history with zero common ground existing between them. So his speech was not even intended for them, it was given for his “audience of one” back home.

Some among his advisers told Trump that Miller’s public outbursts were hurting them with their own base leading up to the mid-terms, so he was sidelined for political reasons. Instead Fox and other MAGA outlets promoted Miller’s wife Katy to be his designated spokesperson and she became the leading retailer of his Nazi hatreds.

Miller was there speaking for one reason, which was his “coming out” event to announce that his several month long gagging and disappearance from the airwaves in the aftermath of the awful Minnesota ICE killings was over. The blowback against Miller’s bloodcurdling defense of the ICE agents involved was past, and he was making known that he was given a green light once again to run White House domestic policy, and to be as public as necessary in doing so.

My assessment is that Trump is seeing the poll numbers and is panicking, likely concluding that regular old MAGA politicking is not working and that he’ll have to resort to the bloody business of voiding the midterm results and using force to do it. Which means Miller’s stock is up again.

This little game of White House musical chairs, the removal of Bondi and installation of Blanche, the resurfacing of Miller, and not incidentally the unexpected resignation of top Trump Propaganda Minister Karoline Leavitt, along with the public statements about how ICE and the DOJ will be used on election day and thereafter, all speak volumes about what the future holds, and what we need to prepare for starting now.

Emergency actions by Governors, Mayors, State Attorneys General, municipal District Attorneys, in conjunction with local law enforcement, will be needed and should be coordinated both nationally and regionally in order to preempt Trump from voiding the election results. It might even reach the point of Governors having to call out their National Guards, beating Trump to the punch before he can federalize them under Title X, in order to protect voters from federal law enforcement goon squad operations.

This is where the proverbial rubber meets the road. To adequately grasp what this might look like, imagine hundreds of smaller scale January 6ths happening at State Capitols, boards of election, mail delivery centers, or any other location relevant to the certification of election results.

As far as is known, Democratic strategists are “gaming” the many possible scenarios for what Trump and Miller might do, and are planning out a legal/political strategy to neutralize them. Remember that these are the same “expert” consultants who chose to do nothing in the way of investigating computer voting irregularities after the 2024 Presidential election. We are not signing off on a theory about that either way, but the relevant point is that if the Democrat’s strategy in regard to Trump’s “second coup” plan is what they should do “after the fact,” or is defensive in nature, or characterized as a “conventional” response, then say goodbye and goodnight to democracy. We need bold preemptive actions, given that Trump’s plans are transparently illegal.

Part II-- The “Deep Dive” On Hitler’s Recruitment Of The Sturmabteilung, The Stormptroopers (SA) ...What Kind Of Men Were They?

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, Iran Warns Gulf States Against Joining Trump’s Economic War, or Else, Erika Solomon, Aug. 23, 2026. Iran’s new hard-line national security adviser, Mohsen Rezaei, vowed to prevent “a single drop of oil” from leaving the region.

President Trump has warned that “Economic D-Day” is coming for Iran. This weekend, Tehran promised to fight back, threatening any nation that helps the United States.

Iran’s new security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, on Saturday vowed to strike the interests of oil-rich neighbors if they joined U.S. efforts to further isolate Iran, whose economy is already in free fall. He warned that Tehran would seek to prevent “even a single drop of oil” from leaving the region.

“Any country that becomes a partner in creating economic restrictions against us will be regarded by us as an enemy,” he said in an interview with Iran’s state broadcaster.

Mr. Rezaei is a political hard-liner and former head of the Revolutionary Guards. The interview offered his first extensive comments since taking up his new post two weeks ago — and struck an aggressive tone in line with Iran’s increasingly uncompromising regional strategy. At one point, he asked whether Iran should pursue building a nuclear bomb, which Tehran has previously insisted it has no intention of doing.

Iran’s new leaders, who replaced comparatively more cautious figures killed by the U.S. and Israeli bombardment this year, are “changing the deterrence equation from purely defensive measures to an offensive approach in all spheres,” including the economy, said Mohammad Ghaderi, a Tehran-based foreign affairs expert.

“Tehran is seeking to impose greater costs on the United States and its allies,” Mr. Ghaderi said. “This conveys the message that the cost of continuing hostility toward Iran will have far more extensive consequences for Washington and its allies than in the past.”

Though active military hostilities have ebbed, Iran and the United States remain locked in an economic standoff. Mr. Trump, who imposed a naval blockade of Iran, has now threatened “tremendous economic consequences” on any nation doing business with Tehran. His treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, is expected to announce the U.S. economic plan against Iran on Monday.

Iran is continuing to disrupt the global economy by blocking traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for oil and gas exports from the Persian Gulf. It refuses to relent until a deal is reached with Washington that offers it access to frozen assets and relief from the sanctions Mr. Trump now looks set to try to expand.

Oil-producing countries seeking to extricate themselves from the regional showdown have spent billions in recent months to expand pipelines and other infrastructure to keep exports flowing. Saudi Arabia, for instance, reduced its reliance on the strait by pumping much of its oil through a pipeline and loading it onto tankers in the Red Sea, while Iraq has been pumping more oil through pipelines to Turkey, or trucking it for export from neighboring Syria.

Mr. Rezaei said Iran would first seek to negotiate with countries perceived to be joining the U.S. pressure campaign. But if that failed, he said, Iran would move to block oil not only through the strait, “but from the Persian Gulf at all.”

“Countries cannot join America in imposing an economic blockade and harm our interests while we continue allowing oil to leave the Persian Gulf,” he said, noting that Iran was not currently interfering with oil leaving through other routes, “but we will target those routes as well.”

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary Sunday Update: Trump Moves Closer to Declaring Election Emergency and all the Major News of the Day, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Trump is quietly laying the groundwork for a national emergency declaration on elections, doctors are sounding alarms about his weight as the White House stays evasive, and infighting inside his own administration keeps spilling into public view even as the trade war with Canada turns real.

Also today: a viral video of an ICE agent telling a U.S. citizen "because you're an immigrant" was reason enough to cuff him, Iran calling out new US sanctions as a sign of desperation, mystery manhole crews back under Manhattan, a fast-moving wildfire forcing 14,000 evacuations outside Reno, Zelenskyy drawing a hard line against wartime elections, and Kazakhstan wrapping up an election built to hand its president another seven years.

Some of you have also reached out about my TikTok account saying you cannot see some videos, well, I now have a strike on the account and it is one strike away from completely banning me.

This Sunday evening, I want to take a moment to speak directly to you.

Thank you for giving me the best job in the world. Thank you for subscribing, for reading, for supporting independent journalism when it has never mattered more. Because of you, I get to do this full time, with no corporate sponsor whispering in my ear, no advertisers steering the narrative, no worrying about clicks or quotas. This platform is 100% editorially independent, and every word you read here comes from a place of truth and a fierce love for this country. Your subscriptions fuel it.Subscribed

Mainstream media keeps catering to the powerful and the profitable. We chose something different. We chose each other, we chose honesty, and we chose to tell the stories that need telling, no matter how uncomfortable they are for the people in power.

Here’s the news:

Election Emergency Declaration:

Trump is building the case for a national emergency declaration on elections before November, and the signs point to it happening soon. He used a primetime address in July to repeat the false claim that 2020 was stolen, and former strategist Steve Bannon predicted right after that Trump would declare a national security emergency to “protect” elections, telling followers to “block the last week of August out.” Asked point blank whether he’d declare such an emergency, Trump refused to rule it out, saying only “stranger things have happened.” Aria Branch of the Elias Law Group, who has already sued to block earlier Trump election orders, says the administration is actively “searching for” a legal basis that she argues simply doesn’t exist. Democratic lawmakers and voter groups have taken the threat seriously enough to run tabletop exercises for scenarios like ICE agents stationed at polling places.

The evidence that this is coming is the documents themselves. A White House task force pulling from the ODNI, NSA, CIA and DHS has been declassifying “election integrity” files at an accelerating pace, seemingly to build a paper trail for the emergency to come. One release recycled an intelligence assessment that actually found no evidence China altered the 2020 vote, but officials pivoted to seize on a New Jersey software error that let 6,600 noncitizens register (fewer than 400 voted) to push broader noncitizen voting fraud claims. The Census Bureau then claimed 24,000 noncitizens voted in 2020 without disclosing its methodology, a number election expert David Becker said “fails the laugh test,” and DHS separately claimed 278,000 noncitizens are registered nationally using a tool already reported to be inaccurate. Each release reads less like an investigation and more like a predicate being built for the announcement Bannon promised.

When directly asked if an emergency declaration was coming, the White House wouldn’t say no, instead pointing to the “Save America Act,” which would let DHS purge state voter rolls, restrict mail-in voting, and require proof of citizenship and photo ID to vote. Former White House attorney Ty Cobb, now a Trump critic, said ICE presence at polls is “a virtual certainty” once this happens, and raised the possibility of National Guard deployment too, calling it an echo of Trump’s failed 2020 push to seize voting machines. Branch says the constant rhetoric is already functioning as intimidation on its own, even before any formal declaration. She’s counting on the Constitution’s clear limits on executive control over elections to give her side ground to fight it in court once it comes. The pattern across all of it points the same direction: this isn’t hypothetical anymore, it’s a matter of timing.

The U.S. Postal Service published a final 95-page rule late Friday tightening mail-in voting requirements ahead of November’s midterms, timed so it can take immediate effect if courts lift the injunction currently blocking it, after U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani blocked the changes that stem from Trump’s March executive order pushing his long-standing false claims about 2020 voter fraud. The rule would require states to hand USPS lists of voters who received mailed ballots along with unique barcodes on outbound and return ballot envelopes, and USPS would refuse to deliver ballots in states that don’t comply, though it says it won’t inspect ballot contents or track party affiliation. Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias accused USPS of having “caved to Trump,” while many states and congressional Democrats argue the agency lacks the authority to make such a drastic change this close to an election. USPS says the rule “will help determine adherence to federal law and facilitate law enforcement efforts,” and it plans to formally publish the rule August 26 while taking no action to implement it unless the injunction is lifted.

Judge Indira Talwani sharply criticized the Trump administration and USPS for publishing their final rule restricting mail-in ballots late Friday night even though two separate court orders already block it from taking effect, warning that the move risks sowing confusion among states and voters this close to the midterms. She indicated the timing and publication itself, not just the underlying rule, may be grounds to enjoin USPS further, treating the late-Friday release as an end run around her existing injunction rather than the neutral contingency planning the agency claimed it was.

Trump’s health concerns:

Doctors are raising concerns about President Trump’s weight, which has climbed to about 238 pounds as of a May medical report, up from 215 pounds listed at his August 2023 Georgia booking and just 1.6 pounds shy of the “obese” classification he carried in 2019 and 2020 given his 6-foot-3 height. The administration says he gained 14 pounds between his two most recent annual checkups, and he has visibly appeared heavier in photos than during his 2023-2024 campaign. Obesity specialist Scott Kahan of George Washington University argued that “addressing obesity to protect the president’s health should be a priority similar to ensuring Secret Service protections for his life,” while former FDA commissioner David Kessler warned about visceral fat around the liver, pancreas, and heart contributing to premature death. The White House did not directly answer questions about Trump’s weight, instead pointing to his energy, cognitive fitness, and packed schedule as evidence of healthy aging, and it denied he has ever taken a GLP-1 drug despite renewed scrutiny after Stat News reported the administration helped an unnamed 79-year-old patient get expedited access to the powerful weight-loss drug retatrutide.

Trump’s weight has been a recurring storyline across his political career, from his children telling Barbara Walters in 2015 that they wished he ate healthier, to a 2016 appearance on “The Dr. Oz Show” where he weighed 236 pounds and told host Mehmet Oz, now his Medicare and Medicaid chief, that he wanted to drop 15 to 20 pounds. He grew heavier during his first term regardless, reaching 239 pounds in January 2018 and 244 pounds by June 2020 under successive White House physicians Ronny Jackson and Sean Conley, the latter of whom found him technically obese at 243 pounds in February 2019. That same year, Trump contracted a serious case of COVID-19, a disease researchers have linked to worse outcomes in obese patients, and he credited an experimental Regeneron antibody treatment with helping save his life. He appeared notably thinner when announcing his 2024 campaign, with a doctor’s note crediting “an improved diet and continued daily physical activity,” though his weight has since crept back up in his second term.

Trump has often turned his own and others’ weight into a political weapon, mocking Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and former adviser Chris Christie while insisting at last month’s White House correspondents’ dinner that he’d “never call anybody fat.” He’s defended his own diet publicly, joking that avoiding bulletproof vests keeps him from looking heavier and suggesting in the Oval Office that “maybe junk food is good and the other food is no good,” since many health-conscious people he’s known have died anyway. Outside physicians pushed back on that framing, though some cautioned against reading too much into weight alone for older patients; obesity specialist Gitanjali Srivastava said that for a patient in their 70s or 80s, “it’s less about a number, but more about what is the percent body fat” and overall function. The White House responded to the broader scrutiny by contrasting Trump’s “sharpness, unmatched energy” with what it called the prior administration’s cover-up of Joe Biden’s decline, while Trump himself has joked about not wanting to surpass William Howard Taft, the heaviest president in history at over 300 pounds, saying “I have to be careful because I don’t want to supersede his record.”

Other News:

Trump lashed out at Canada for the first time since trade talks collapsed Friday, writing “Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one!!!” and “No more!!!” after accusing Canadian farmers of hitting the US with tariffs for years. His comments followed the US imposing 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods on Saturday, covering everything from hockey sticks to tongue depressors, with Mark Carney vowing to match them “dollar for dollar.” Carney told reporters in Ottawa that Canada is “at war” over trade, saying “you’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” and that Trump had miscalculated by escalating the fight. US trade representative Jamieson Greer countered that the US was simply responding to a year of Canadian retaliatory measures, telling Fox & Friends Weekend the goal is “protecting American workers and protecting American supply chains.” The breakdown has also thrown the future of the USMCA into question, since Trump refused to renew the deal this summer despite Canada and Mexico requesting a 16-year extension, with Carney calling the collapse “certainly not good news” for the pact.

NBC’s Kristen Welker pressed Senator Tim Scott on Meet the Press over whether Susan Collins is right that Trump’s Canada tariffs will raise costs for American families, and when Scott tried to pivot back to blaming Joe Biden, Welker cut him off, pointing out Trump has now been in office two years and inflation has actually ticked up on his watch, from 3% when Biden left to 3.4% now. Scott tried again to invoke Biden, prompting Welker to flatly tell him, “The Biden administration is over,” refusing to let him deflect from a question about current policy. The exchange captures a broader pattern of Republicans still reaching for the Biden blame two years into Trump’s term, even as reporters increasingly push back on that framing with the actual numbers.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said children should be tracked toward trades like plumbing and electrical work as early as elementary school. The push comes as the administration touts skilled-trade demand tied to the AI data center boom, and it’s already launched Pell Grant funding for short-term vocational courses and pressured Brown University to invest $50 million in Rhode Island workforce programs as part of a discrimination settlement. Critics note the same administration has simultaneously slashed billions in education and research funding, including canceling more than 1,000 University of California research grants worth nearly $2 billion after officials admitted to searching for keywords like “diversity” and “vaccine hesitancy” to flag programs for cuts. It has also directed immigration enforcement at college campuses, targeting green card holders over political speech and pushing schools to cooperate with Homeland Security on raids. And on the practical side, the manufacturing jobs this trades push is supposedly feeding into haven’t materialized, with the US actually shedding about 75,000 manufacturing jobs since Trump took office, which some economists tie to the tariff agenda and instability from the Iran war.

Democrats and other Trump critics reacted with disbelief to a New York Times report that House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries met privately with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, to discuss possible areas of collaboration, a meeting that comes just months before midterms where Democrats are favored to retake the House and make Jeffries speaker. Critics point to longstanding conflict-of-interest concerns about Kushner continuing to profit off foreign nations while working on Ukraine, Iran and Gaza policy, with House Judiciary Democrats already investigating his private business raising money from Gulf states while he served as a special envoy. Tommy Vietor, a former Obama aide and Pod Save America co-host, said Kushner “has no actual government job, he just uses his family connections to get money from gulf autocrats,” and that the only appropriate Jeffries approach is “demands for documents and subpoenas.” Senator Chris Van Hollen was more measured on Meet the Press, saying he’s fine with people meeting but that “it’s another thing to see something real come out of that,” while former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger simply posted “Make this make sense” tagging Jeffries. Jeffries himself didn’t address the meeting directly, instead issuing a statement accusing Republicans of a “my-way-or-the-highway approach” and vowing Democrats will keep fighting for “an affordable America.”

A viral video out of Lake Worth, Florida shows a Border Patrol agent approaching a U.S. citizen at a gas station, demanding his ID, and when the man asks why, the agent replies, “Because you’re an immigrant.” Before the man is even identified, agents grab his hands and cuff him while bystanders can be heard questioning how officers can arrest someone whose identity they haven’t confirmed. The incident raises a direct Fourth Amendment problem: the Supreme Court has held that roving Border Patrol agents need reasonable suspicion based on specific circumstances to stop and question someone about immigration status, and apparent ethnicity alone isn’t enough. That leaves the obvious question of what legal basis existed here beyond the agent’s own stated reasoning, since being told “because you’re an immigrant” is not a lawful basis for a stop. The episode lands as one more example of citizens being forced to prove their status to federal agents on the spot, with little clarity on what accountability follows when that goes wrong.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi dismissed the threat of new US sanctions as a sign of desperation, saying Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s promised “toughest sanctions in history,” set to be detailed at a Monday press conference, amount to “repetitive scenarios” that show Washington has run out of ideas after nearly six months of war. Despite Iran’s economy already reeling from sanctions and repeated airstrikes since the US and Israel launched attacks on February 28th, Tehran remains defiant, having effectively blockaded the Strait of Hormuz to unauthorized oil tankers and driven up global oil prices in the process, with Araghchi insisting “all of their actions... have failed, and this new issue of theirs will fail as well.” Trump has warned of economic consequences for any country offering Iran “a lifeline,” pressuring China, which buys more than 80% of Iran’s exported oil, even as Beijing calls for diplomacy instead. Amid the standoff, Pakistan’s army chief Asim Munir is set to visit Tehran Monday as part of Islamabad’s mediation efforts, while Iranian Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf claimed Tehran has received “numerous messages” from neighboring countries about building new regional security and economic arrangements independent of US influence. Iran has yet to see Trump achieve his stated war goals, including dismantling its nuclear program (whose status remains unclear since UN inspectors were barred in 2025) or triggering an uprising against its clerical government, and while President Masoud Pezeshkian has also called for ending the war diplomatically, he framed it as negotiating from a position of strength, saying “it would be better to end the war today, when we are powerful and have dignity.”

New York police are investigating a video posted to TikTok on Friday showing three people in overalls and headlamps emerging from a manhole at 32nd Street and 7th Avenue near Penn Station and Madison Square Garden after 4 a.m. on August 18th, though no arrests have been made and the investigation remains ongoing. The city’s Department of Environmental Protection inspected the sewers in the area and found no infrastructure damage, while stressing that entering sewers is “both illegal and extremely dangerous” due to hazards like noxious gases, unstable surfaces, and flooding risks. It’s unclear whether this incident connects to a similar wave of videos that circulated in May, when groups of men, similarly dressed in protective clothing and headlamps, were seen emerging from manholes in Brooklyn, including one instance where seven men climbed out and changed clothes near active traffic, with at least three carrying shovels. A senior law enforcement official said at the time that the leading theory was the individuals were scavenging for valuables, and police said NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit searched the sewer system afterward and found nothing nefarious left behind.

Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told NBC’s “Meet the Press” he’s “kicking the tires” on a potential 2028 presidential run, saying Democrats haven’t answered the call on building “an economy that really does work for everybody, especially working people,” and that his focus is “not on majority leader” of the Senate but “on what Democrats stand for going into 2028.” Pressed on whether he’s seriously considering a campaign, he noted he’s already visited early nominating states New Hampshire and Iowa, and said Democrats need to be clear “not just what we’re against, but what we’re for,” adding “I very much want to be part of that debate, and I am kicking the tires, testing the waters.” He joins a crowded and still wide-open field of potential 2028 Democratic contenders that includes Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear, Pete Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cory Booker, Ruben Gallego, and Kamala Harris, none of whom has emerged as a clear frontrunner. On the party’s leftward flank, Van Hollen said democratic socialists “do” have a place in the party “as part of the debate,” pointing to recent DSA-aligned primary winners like Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon, though he said some DSA platform planks, like replacing the president and Supreme Court with bodies subordinate to Congress or abolishing the Senate, go too far even for many candidates across the Democratic spectrum, himself included.

The fast-growing Hawk Fire spread from the Sierra foothills toward central Reno early Sunday, expanding past 10,500 acres and prompting evacuation orders for nearly 14,000 homes, with the “GO NOW” zone reaching the edge of the University of Nevada campus. Governor Joe Lombardo declared a state of emergency in Washoe County and mobilized the Nevada National Guard, deploying two helicopter crews for aerial firefighting and 60 troops to help secure evacuated neighborhoods, while roughly 400 personnel from local, state, and federal agencies are fighting the blaze on the ground and in the air. Strong, gusty winds, low humidity, and dry vegetation are driving the fire’s rapid growth, according to Truckee Meadows Fire & Rescue, and nearly 10,000 homes and businesses were without power Sunday as portions of US Route 395 were closed. Reno Mayor Hillary Schieve urged residents not to delay evacuating, warning “structures have already been burned in this fire and your life is more important than a building,” while officials are also monitoring a county detention facility near the evacuation zone in case it needs to be cleared. The fire follows an earlier wave of blazes north of Reno this month that displaced more than 13,000 residents, and while the university and Reno-Tahoe International Airport remained outside the evacuation zone as of Sunday morning, the smaller Reno-Stead Airport was closed to general aviation traffic due to the fire.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said holding elections during active fighting with Russia would “destroy” Ukraine by splitting the country, his first public comments on the issue since ousted former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov called for a wartime poll following his surprise dismissal, which sparked protests that later cooled once demonstrators balked at Fedorov’s election demand. Zelenskyy, whose approval rating has held steady around 60%, cited an August 5th poll showing 57% of Ukrainians want elections only after fighting ends, and noted wartime elections are barred by Ukrainian law given security risks and the millions of citizens abroad, under occupation, or serving at the front. He publicly detailed his rift with Fedorov for the first time, saying he offered him four options to stay in government that Fedorov rejected, and linked the fallout partly to a failed effort to secure SpaceX’s approval for Ukraine to use Starlink over Russian territory for deep strikes, after Trump accused Zelenskyy of misleading him when Elon Musk denied having approved it. On the battlefield, Zelenskyy struck an optimistic tone, saying Ukraine has nearly retaken all of Dnipropetrovsk region and could reach territorial parity with Russia’s 2026 gains by year’s end, even as he warned of a $27 billion defense budget shortfall and a steep decline in Patriot missile deliveries, from 675 in 2023 to an expected 264 in 2026.

Kazakhstan held a parliamentary election Sunday that’s expected to further consolidate President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s power, with the pro-presidential Adilet party predicted to win an overwhelming majority in the country’s first vote for a new single-chamber parliament called the Kurultai. The election follows a March constitutional overhaul, approved by 87% of voters in a referendum, that merged the two parliamentary chambers and expanded presidential authority, including reviving the vice presidency. A Kazakh court ruled last month that the changes reset Tokayev’s term clock, clearing the way for him to seek another seven-year term. The 73-year-old Tokayev, a former Soviet official and UN diplomat who has tried to balance ties between Moscow and the West since Russia sanctions began, is tightening his grip amid economic strain, with February inflation hitting 10.2% and tax hikes fueling discontent, conditions analysts say authorities fear could reignite unrest like the deadly January 2022 fuel protests. The vote comes alongside an intensifying media crackdown, including roughly ten criminal cases against independent journalists and bloggers, among them YouTube journalist Lukpan Akhmedyarov, who faces up to seven years in prison over “disseminating false information” after publishing a list of Kazakh citizens fighting in Ukraine. Akhmedyarov said repression has sharply escalated ahead of the vote and that the outcome is “not very difficult to predict.”

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 20, 2026 ['Not That Informed On National Security?'], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 23, 2026. On Tuesday, August 18, during a debate for a runoff to win the South Carolina Republican senatorial primary, Senator Darline Graham (R-SC) answered a question about Taiwan and the importance of the South China Sea by saying: “I’m not that informed on national security.” She paused, and added: “But I do support the military.” The audience reacted with boos and gasps. Senators are supposed to manage national security.

Trying to clean up her mistake, Graham went to an interview with the friendly Sean Hannity at the Fox News Channel, where she tried to make a virtue of her error by saying it reflects that she is not a politician. Then she added that people in South Carolina are worried less about foreign affairs than they are about affordability, “boys in girls’ sports,” the Second Amendment, “illegal immigration,” and the SAVE America Act.

Journalist Parker Molloy noted that trans girls have been banned from competing in K–12 girls sports since 2022 and are banned from competing in the NCAA and the Olympics. “This is literally an issue that doesn’t affect SC at all anymore,” Molloy noted. “They got what they wanted. How is this still a priority?”

Graham perfectly represents the modern Republican Party. South Carolina governor Henry McMaster appointed her to fill the vacancy caused by the death of her brother, Senator Lindsey Graham. McMaster said Trump “thought it was a great idea” for her to replace her brother, and she has indicated her loyalty to Trump and her willingness to pass the SAVE America Act he so badly wants in order to rig the 2026 midterm elections. Graham has little political experience, and with little to offer voters other than loyalty to Trump, she is simply echoing Republican culture war talking points that worked for him in 2016.

But it appears voters don’t like living in the world Trump is creating.

As Cleve R. Wootson Jr. noted yesterday in the Washington Post, Trump went to South Carolina last night to help Graham’s campaign. He told those attending the rally that the election was really about him. Although Graham’s opponent in the runoff, Representative Ralph Norman, has made much of Graham’s inexperience, Trump told rally attendees: “They’re only fighting Darline because they want me to lose.”

Wootson notes that Trump is hoping for a Graham win to restore some of the power that is slipping away as his popularity continues to slide to new lows. Primary candidates he backed for governor in Iowa, Georgia, Wyoming, and Minnesota all lost, as did those he backed in congressional primaries in Michigan and Tennessee.

Indeed, as Graham was fumbling the debate last Tuesday, two former teachers endorsed by Democrats flipped the Sarasota, Florida, school board. That board had been dominated by right-wing candidates since 2022, led by Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler, who has said public schools are “indoctrination centers for the radical left” and that she wanted to bring “religious values” to them.

Formed in 2021, Moms for Liberty was behind the book banning of the past several years. Ziegler is married to the former chair of the Florida Republican Party, who was forced out of his position after a woman alleged he had raped her in relation to the three-way sexual relationship she had with the Zieglers. Bridget Ziegler refused to step down from the school board after the scandal broke.

As Kerry Sheridan of WUSF reported, Beth Mayberry and Megan Tennimon ran on issues of school funding, academic achievement, and helping students in underserved areas. Both won their races by more than 10 percentage points.

As political historian Joanne Freeman put it Saturday morning in our chat on What the Heck Just Happened?, when Republican leaders in 2020 decided not to write a political platform at all, but simply to “reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration” and to say it would “continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” they gave him every reason to think that “all of the things that he’s doing to promote himself—the races and the gold and everything else—that that’s all campaigning. It’s all about him.”

Then, when party leaders in 2024 essentially turned Trump’s social media posts into a platform, they embraced the idea that the party could stay in power through slogans. They promised to “DEFEAT INFLATION, AND QUICKLY BRING DOWN ALL PRICES,” to “BRING BACK THE AMERICAN DREAM AND MAKE IT AFFORDABLE AGAIN FOR FAMILIES, YOUNG PEOPLE, AND EVERYONE,” to “promote a Foreign Policy centered on the most essential American Interests, starting with protecting the American Homeland, our People, our Borders, our Great American Flag, and our Rights under God,” and so on.

The Republican Party tied itself to Trump and remains tied to him as he devotes his time to celebrating himself with his ballroom, a UFC cage match at the White House, his triumphal arch, renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and now this weekend’s “Freedom 250 Grand Prix” around the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in which 25 IndyCar drivers are covering 147 laps at speeds up to 150 mph around a 1.7-mile (2.7 km), 7-turn street circuit loop past the U.S. Capitol, the Washington Monument, the National Archives, and the National Gallery of Art.

The race has required workers to weld down more than 200 manhole covers, move traffic lights, and put up barriers that have disrupted traffic, while the National Gallery of Art has had to protect its sculptures from vibrations and airlines have had to reroute flights.

Meanwhile, the country remains embroiled in an apparently purposeless war in Iran; the economy is slowing and prices of food and gas are rising; Americans are horrified by the tactics of ICE and Border Patrol, who have abused and killed immigrants and U.S. citizens alike; Trump, his family, and his allies have put at least $2.2 billion in Trump’s pockets; and Trump has alienated our closest allies.

Just after midnight on August 21, Trump imposed a 50% tariff on a range of goods from Canada. Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney suspended trade negotiations with the U.S. and said Canada will impose retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. beginning September 8. In a statement, Carney said: “We have recognised from the beginning that America has changed, and that we will not return to our old relationship.” Canada, he said, will be “focused on building our strength at home [and] diversifying our partnerships abroad.”

And now the story that the closest advisor to the President of the United States is a 35-year-old woman who seems unhealthily obsessed with him ties Republican Party leadership to the reality that they are permitting the destruction of the United States with barely a whimper.

As Trump led Republicans into a box canyon, they have left an open field for Democrats to redefine the nation’s politics.

On August 17, former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg recorded a video to assure those Americans who oppose the Trump administration that they are in the large majority. He noted that the strategy Republicans are pursuing shows how unpopular they are.

“Think about it,” he said. “They’re not out there showing that the economy is somehow better than it looks…. They’re not defending their cuts to healthcare, they’re not defending the tax cuts for the wealthy. They’re not defending the corruption that’s going on in Washington.”

“It’s too late for that,” he said, because “we’ve all seen that those policies have failed. They made us all pay tariffs and said the reason we got to do this is to bring back manufacturing jobs…. Well, we paid the tariffs, and then America lost manufacturing jobs. They cut taxes for the rich. They said we’ve got to do that in order to speed up economic growth. And what happened? Economic growth slowed down…. They said they were going to cut costs and prices. Inflation is actually higher now than the day Donald Trump took office. They said they were gonna drain the swamp. And then they expect us to be okay with the first family making a billion dollars or more in crypto deals while the president’s in office….

“A lot of people believed this president and Republicans when they said no new wars. Then, what do we get? A war with Iran in the Middle East right now, which means all of us here at home are paying higher gas prices.”

The Republican strategy is not to change their policies, Buttigieg said. “It’s changing the maps. Changing the rules. Because that’s the only way they could win. They know they’re on the wrong side of the American people….

“You’re already in the majority if you think that we need healthcare for all, not Medicaid cuts and cutting Obamacare…. Right now, if you think that the wealthiest people in the country need to be paying their fair share in taxes, which is more than they’re doing today, where they currently pay less than a lot of teachers and nurses and firefighters. You are definitely in the majority if you believe that the wealthiest nation in the world ought to do the best job of funding public education and making sure it works. Not this Republican approach, which is to literally eliminate the Department of Education. You’re not alone if you think that in any decent economy, one job ought to be enough. And you’re certainly not alone if you believe that a woman’s healthcare decisions ought to be up to her and no one else, that in a free country, you should get to be who you are, and love who you love, and live a life of your choosing. When you believe these things, you’re not just not alone. You’re part of a powerful majority. Really a supermajority of the American people.

“So, whether you’re a Democrat, an independent, or someone who has generally voted Republican in the past, most voters want the same things right now: to be led and represented by normal people who are good at getting things done. People want leaders who respect those who disagree or vote differently instead of calling them the enemy. People who know that God does not belong to a political party in the United States of America. Most voters want to elect leaders who are not simply trying to rebuild the past, but trying to create something new and better.”

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice 

Former U.S. Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi, the Trump ally accused of supervising phony federal prosecutions in Minnesota to divert attention from federal agent's conduct in killing protester Alex Pretti.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Kavanaugh Stop from Hell that Destroys Minnesota’s Other Criminal Cases, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 23, 2026. Last week, I showed that the investigation into the MN-15 was predicated, in theory on February 11 and on paper on March 10, on a claim that there had been a bunch of assaults on law enforcement officers.

The problem with that claim — that DHS had to investigate a bunch of people who weren’t suspected of assault based on a bunch of past assaults — is that those past assaults were fabrications. By the time DOJ charged the MN-15 indictment on June 11, over two dozen of the assault charges filed in January had either been diverted or dismissed by the government.

Those assaults were fabrications, many of them rolled out for Pam Bondi’s propaganda purposes on January 28, after CBP officers had shot Alex Pretti dead.

In fact, many of those cases were dismissed because defendants started asking for — and some judges ordered DOJ to provide — details on the circumstances behind Bondi’s trophy arrests, most notably, why DOJ released all those trophy photos in defiance of sealing orders in all the cases. Those cases might have been dismissed for any number of abuses, but many of them were dismissed because DOJ didn’t want to share any discovery about they they staged those trophy photos (they staged a second batch on February 5, and at least five of those cases have also fallen apart, as well).

And that’s why I’ve spent the past several days reviewing the case of Mohamed Jama, whose case DOJ moved to dismiss on June 10, one day before the MN-15 indictment.

Customs and Border Patrol officers with apparently close ties to Greg Bovino mobbed Jama in St. Cloud for driving while Somali-American on January 20, then charged him with assault. And because his case fell apart differently than everyone else’s, it led to discovery about the deceitful role of HSI Agent Richard Berger, who attested to at least two dozen of the cases that fell apart, about the trophy photos that DHS arranged using undisclosed Signal texts, and to the well-substantiated evidence that CBP created a collision with Jama knowing the owner of the white van he was driving (who is a foot shorter than Jama) is a naturalized citizen, just like Jama is.

It took a while for Jama to be assigned an attorney, Surya Saxena, and like these other cases, DOJ filed a misdemeanor information rather than subject their case, originally charged as a felony, to initial review. Like the others, it kept (and keeps) cycling through a series of JAG officers appointed as Special AUSAs. It took until March for Saxena to file some of the same motions everyone else was filing:

Motion to dismiss for outrageous government misconduct; MTD for failure to state an offense; Motion to suppress the stop that led to Jama’s arrest;Motion for discovery

In spite DOJ’s repeated effort to argue that Jama had not met the standards for an evidentiary hearing, Magistrate Judge Leo Brisbois granted him one, which was held on May 4. The transcript is worth a read for the multiple Perry Mason moments:

Where Border Patrol Agent Muniz (who was in Minnesota for just one month) espoused the belief that white vans by themselves were evidence that the people inside were working for cash and therefore undocumentedWhere Muniz responded that he didn’t know how far St. Cloud was from a border, and so whether he had any legal jurisdiction to be hunting Somali-Americans in white vans in the first placeWhere Saxena got Muniz to admit that the three screen shots, which purported to explain the basis for the stop, lacked key detailWhen Muniz admitted they didn’t preserve the checks on the white van’s vehicle registrationWhere Saxena got his client to stand up in the courtroom to demonstrate that, at 6’6″, Jama looked nothing like the 5’6″ guy who owned the van (whom CBP officers falsely claimed was not a citizen)Where Muniz tried to claim he and his colleagues, who were masked and driving rental cars, looked like St. Cloud copsWhere Muniz tried to invent excuses for turning his body camera off and on to hide the damning bits

Perhaps my favorite was, after Muniz repeatedly tried to deny they were in pursuit of Jama when they boxed him in, when Saxena asked Muniz whether he really believed CBP could pull someone over in an unmarked rental car.

Q. So your testimony is that any time law enforcement has any information that someone is armed and dangerous based on anything, you can pull them over in an unmarked — or in an unmarked rental car; is that right?

A. No.

Shortly thereafter, Saxena played the interview Muniz gave, months ago, to describe what happened, where he had told DHS that the other unmarked rental car told him they were going to box Jama in and so were pursuing the van as opposed to simply following it.

Q. Okay. And that vehicle, as you just said, was there to box in the defendant’s vehicle, right?

A. No. I said we called backup to try to box him in.

Q. You called for backup for the purpose of boxing him in, right?

A. No. We were — yeah, that’s what we were thinking we were going to do eventually.

Q. Okay. And they told you that they were going to box him in?

A. I’m not too sure they told me that.

Q. Well, that’s what you just said on the interview; isn’t that right?

A. Can you replay it?

Q. Sure. (The audio/video is played as follows:)

SPEAKER: When we were driving after that, I want to say we had already called reinforcements or backup. So the backup gets there, and they tell us they are going to try to box it in. So we’re able to overtake the van. We get in front of it. Somehow he got behind us. And when we were in front of him, he gets behind us and clips us on the back.

Having denied, repeatedly, that CBP set out to chase down a brown person against whom their probable cause was unsubstantiated, Saxena confronted Muniz with tape showing that two rental cars set out to box Jama in, pursuing him rather than just following him, and because no one had their body cameras on, CBP had no proof that Jama caused the accident that ensued, as they had claimed.

Read the transcript. It’s worth it!

But the important disclosures for the discovery request before Judge Brisbois were that Muniz had never been asked for materials from his phone, and that the discussions in advance of attempting to stop Jama happened on a Microsoft Teams chat, none of which had been turned over.

Based on all that Perry Mason-ing (and before Saxena could file a follow-up), Brisbois granted much of Saxena’s discovery request. Which DOJ sort of provided by June 8, though not before documenting all the times CBP blew off their discovery requests and not by conducting the searches of CBP devices themselves, and not before asking for three more weeks to get the searches that led to the stop in the first place.

Two days later, after reviewing the stuff CBP had finally turned over, DOJ moved to dismiss the case, with prejudice.

On June 25, having reviewed the newly disclosed discovery, Saxena submitted a filing basically saying, “fuck no, we’re not dismissing this in the interest of justice without reviewing the criminal conduct of the people who did this.”

That filing is worth a read, too. It shows that CBP was pursuing Jama’s van two hours earlier than Muniz claimed at the evidentiary hearing (and Berger claimed in his affidavit), and that the CBP officers knew the owner of the van (the guy who is a foot shorter than Jama but who is, like Jama, a naturalized Somali refugee) was an American citizen. It describes how CBP took a trophy photo of Jama, but then someone at DHS asked for a photo posed like the other 26 trophy photos — those staged photos of all the people whose cases have also collapsed.

Here’s how it ends:

Now that the government has provided additional disclosures that demonstrate that its prosecution was fundamentally flawed from the start, it is attempting to sweep the relevant facts under the rug by claiming dismissal “in the interests of justice” without acknowledging its mistakes and failures. The facts described above demonstrate that Agent Flores knew that the registered owner of the vehicle the Defendant was driving was a U.S. Citizen, and that he had no lawful basis or reasonable suspicion to tell his fellow agents to attempt to conduct an investigative Terry stop of the Defendant. See Kansas v. Glover, 589 U.S. 376, 386 (2020) (Although Border Patrol officers may base their suspicion to conduct a stop in part based on information that the registered owner of the vehicle is unlawfully in the United States, a stop is not justified if “the presence of additional facts might dispel reasonable suspicion.”) The agents then engaged in an unlawful vehicular pursuit of the Defendant without the authority to do so; they pursued in unmarked rental vehicles without lights or sirens and did not have the authority to arrest the Defendant for state law traffic violations. See 8 U.S.C. § 1357. They caused an accident, blamed the Defendant, and then attempted to humiliate him by taking selfies and eventually “trophy” photos.

The Court and the public have a significant interest in documenting the government’s failures and attempting to deter the government from engaging in the same unlawful conduct in future cases. Accordingly, the Court should enter an order dismissing this case with prejudice and requiring the United States to either appear at a hearing or submit a written response explaining the reasons underlying its decision to move to dismiss.

Once the Court is satisfied it has received a truthful recitation of the reasons underlying the government’s motion, the Court should enter an order reciting the reasons for the dismissal, to include:

(1) that Border Patrol agents knowingly attempted to engage in immigration enforcement against an individual who they believed to be a U.S. Citizen;

(2)that agents unlawfully engaged in a vehicular chase of the Defendant using unmarked civilian rental cars without lights or sirens, in violation of federal law and outside their authority as Border Patrol agents;

(3)that agents unlawful conduct caused a traffic accident that the agents then blamed on the Defendant; and

(4)that agents unnecessarily took selfies and “trophy” photos with the Defendant for the purpose of embarrassing the defendant and attempting to sway public opinion related to Operation Metro Surge.

Additionally, the Court should consider entering an order finding that Agents Berger and Muniz provided false or recklessly inaccurate testimony, and that Agent Flores acted dishonestly. Agent Berger’s own credibility has now been called into question by this Court, as has the veracity of information provided to him by other agents. See United States v. Etherington, 26-mj-58 (ECF No. 52) (Schultz, M.J.); United States v. Adbebe, 26-mj-77 (Mot. Hrg.) (Cowan Wright, M.J.).

Agent Berger either intentionally provided false testimony regarding the registered owner’s immigration status or he was mislead by Agent Flores. In either instance, one or both of the Agents’ dishonesty should be documented for purposes of later Giglio disclosures. These agents should not be allowed to testify in future proceedings or affidavits without their prior dishonesty being recognized by the Court and disclosed to future defendants.

Agent Muniz also testified that he personally looked that the Teams chat records checks and personally concluded that the registered owner was not a U.S. citizen. In light of the clear records shared on the Teams chat demonstrating that the registered owner was a U.S. citizen, the Court should confirm that Muniz also provided false testimony. [links added]

The next day, the District Judge in this case, Michael Davis, referred that question back to Brisbois. On July 31, Brisbois set a hearing — one that will be the functional equivalent of the one that Judge Todd Edelman will hold in Davey Hearn’s case around the same time — for September 1.

Here’s the thing: DOJ knew well that its predication for the MN-15 case was bullshit long before June 11, probably even before it approved the case on March 10.

But it also faces precisely the problem DOJ has been trying to avoid since Jonathan Ross shot Renee Good dead, since Christian Castro shot Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis and then lied about it, since Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez shot Alex Pretti dead.

CBP knew the guy who owned the white van was a US citizen and had no reason to believe that Jama was anything but either. Nevertheless, driving in a city where they have no jurisdiction, they unlawfully followed and assaulted Jama.

CBP committed precisely the conspiracy with Jama that DOJ accuses the MN-15 of, but with far less evidence and far sketchier claims of assault and far more proof of a cover-up.

Daniel Rosen keeps charging Minnesotans. But all the evidence shows that the invaders driving rental vans committed far more crimes.

• Selected filings
• January 23: Arrest affidavit attested by Richard Berger
• March 6: Pretrial filings:
• Motion to dismiss for outrageous government misconductMTD for failure to state an offenseMotion to suppress the stop that led to Jama’s arrestMotion for discovery
• May 4: Evidentiary hearing
• May 18: Order granting more discovery
• June 8: DOJ provides more discovery
• June 10: DOJ moves to dismiss
• June 25: Saxena moves for a discovery hearing

The Contrarians, Opinion: From the Kennedy Center to the Paramount-Warner Merger, You Are Winning in Court, Norman Eisen, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Publisher’s Roundup. 

In the second Trump administration, the battle for our democracy has taken us to some unexpected places across the hundreds of legal cases and matters that you Contrarians have helped fund through your paid subscriptions. Saving democracy isn’t just about politics. Culture matters as much and maybe even more, and this week saw remarkable developments in two of the matters in what I think of as our Contrarian cultural litigation portfolio.

Let’s start with the fight over the naming of the Kennedy Center. You will recall that our successful litigation to get Donald Trump’s name off that building was powered by you, Contrarians. Now he and his handpicked cronies on the board are defying the court’s decision by again saying they will add Trump’s name to the center. An Aug. 13 resolution “calls for (1) the inscription ‘Renovated and Restored by President Donald J. Trump’ to be placed under President Kennedy’s name on the Center’s façade, (2) the inscription ‘Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund’ to be placed under the first inscription, and (3) the site of the Kennedy Center to be named the ‘President Donald J. Trump Plaza.’”A tarp partially obscures the name of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, but we are working to get it removed. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP)

Congress created the Kennedy Center to honor John F. Kennedy — and no one else. And, with your support, Contrarians, we are going to keep it that way. Representing Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), my Democracy Defenders colleagues and our Washington Litigation group co-counsel immediately filed papers seeking an emergency stay, and the judge has just ordered a hearing for Thursday.

We already won on this issue, and we are confident of success again. That is, of course, thanks to you. Because the Contrarian is independent, all profits go to help support pro-democracy litigation like this. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one to help us win the Kennedy Center case and so many others.Subscribed

Another ongoing cultural matter your paid subscriptions are helping to support is blocking the Paramount-Warner merger being pushed by Trump cronies Larry and David Ellison. This week proved that California Attorney General Rob Bonta is not flinching, including in a remarkable and principled series of public comments. He and his AG colleagues should hang tough in talks with Paramount reportedly taking place next week — and every indication is that they will. Our democracy is on the line.

Let’s review how we got here. The Ellisons are seeking a mega mashup of two of the biggest players spanning movies and cable. They shamelessly cozied up to Trump before and during the approval process. DOJ antitrust experts reportedly had concerns with the deal, as well they should: It is bad for audiences and artists alike, and will cost thousands of jobs. Those are precisely the kind of harms from over-consolidation that antitrust law exists to prevent. Nevertheless, Trump DOJ higher-ups approved it.

That’s where you come in, Contrarians. Thanks to the support provided by your paid subscriptions, my pro-democracy colleagues and I helped lead the way in building the #BlockTheMerger movement.Subscribed

Together with wonderful partners, including the Committee for the First Amendment, we launched #BlockTheMerger. Thousands of entertainment and news industry leaders responded, from movie stars and news anchors to key grips and makeup artists. They called on state AGs to step in and enforce antitrust laws. Twelve AG heroes, led by Bonta, answered by filing suit and winning preliminary relief, delaying the merger pending a trial next year. The success the states have already had with Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín reflects the strength of their case.

Rocked by all this, the Ellisons are striking back with the tools at their disposal: money, special interest influence, and their fellow fat cats. Allied billionaires like Ari Emanuel, whose TKO has a $7.7 billion deal with Paramount, argue that the lawsuit is rooted in partisan politics and is an affront to the First Amendment. But that’s sophistry. As Bonta’s office put it, this is a “clear-cut antitrust case.” The crux of the case is economic: who gets richer, who gets laid off, and whether a handful of plutocrats will be able to consolidate even more power over America’s entertainment and news industries.

Contrary to the propaganda that the Ellisons and their self-interested billionaire buddies like Emanuel are pushing, the merger would undoubtedly lead to further job losses. This would be devastating for an industry that has already lost roughly one-third of its workforce, about 42,000 jobs, over the past five years. A new analysis from Los Angeles County says that the merger could put at risk more than 10,000 jobs and result in $1.26 billion in lost wages for workers. And Ellison has already demonstrated that jobs are secondary to his desire to seize power for himself, after he threatened to rip the company out of California — even though Paramount and Warner have been a core part of that state for over a century — if the AGs refuses to negotiate, a move Bonta described as “blackmail.”

The money versus the many: It’s a terrible look for the Ellisons. Perhaps that is why in recent days, a nonprofit group called Neighbors for Strong Communities launched a campaign targeting Californians with messages supporting the merger and urging them to pressure Bonta to drop the lawsuit. Incorporated this summer, the group has no board, founders, and no staff, and it refuses to disclose its funders. As our colleagues at The Committee for the First Amendment succinctly put it, “These are classic hallmarks of a corporate-backed astroturf campaign designed to manufacture the appearance of grassroots opposition.”

I wouldn’t make too much of Friday’s news that the AGs and Paramount are meeting next week. Meetings between plaintiffs and defendants are routine across the life of a case. Though it is true that other California politicians — including Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass — have been urging a meeting, both have backtracked on any suggestion that they unconditionally support a weak settlement. Moreover, Bonta remains steadfast in his commitment to pursuing the legal challenge. When asked about the broader Ellison effort to pressure him, Bonta dismissed the attempts as “desperate” and said that “it seems like they are grasping at straws.” And here’s what he had to say in response to a request for comment on reports of his upcoming meeting with Paramount:

As I’ve said before, generally for all of my cases, I prefer to resolve disputes in the boardroom, not the courtroom. As I’ve also said, if the opposing party in litigation wants to meet in good faith to make a sincere effort to resolve the case, we’ll meet. And as I have further said, any potential discussions about the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger will be unproductive absent robust structural remedies on the table that address our concerns. As it stands today, the proposed Warner Bros./Paramount merger will mean higher costs, less competition, lower wages, job cuts, and fewer movies and TV shows. This merger violates long-standing federal antitrust law, and we are committed to enforcing the law.

Your paid subscriptions, Contrarians, help pay for these matters and more than 300 others. It’s the best bargain in journalism, because you also get all the great news and opinion from The Contrarian, as you can see with the best of the week’s coverage below.SubscribedElections & What Comes Next

Democrats Are Left with Two Primary Lessons

Jennifer Rubin, right, wrote on what we should take away from a primary season that has seen no small amount of infighting between left and center Democrats and what it all says about our chances this fall and beyond. “It’s time to come together — and for others to plan to get out of the way.”

Four Things Democrats Can Do with a Majority in Congress

Tom Malinowski laid out an agenda for empowered Democrats to hit the ground running. “The mission … will be to keep things from getting worse and to restore checks and balances, so that the long process of renewal can begin.”

Dems Are Assembling a Big Tent in Florida

On the podcast this week, meet two candidates with real momentum to turn Florida blue. Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon’s $975k campaign beat a $16.2 million campaign to secure the U.S. Senate nomination, while David Jolly secured the gubernatorial nomination in a landslide. How did they do it? “Voters tell us what they want.”ICE Watch

No One Can Keep ICE’s Escalating Abuses out of the News

Ciera Stone wrote on how, despite Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s best efforts to operate under the radar, ICE’s brutality is too plain to be ignored. “If the Trump administration really wants ICE out of the headlines, it needs to stop these Gestapo-style operations and heed demands for oversight, accountability, and reform. Or, maybe, just retire the agency altogether.”

Detention Deaths and Shock Gloves: ICE Violence Continues to Escalate

Tim Dickinson spoke with Juan Proaño, CEO of the League of United Latin American Citizens, about the new executive order on birthright citizenship, how ICE’s human rights abuses continue to escalate with recent deaths at the Delaney Detention Center in New Jersey, and much more.Big Tech Trouble

Trump Just Gave Corporations a License to Hack

Brian O’Neill considered a new policy under which private companies can conduct cyber operations against foreign actors on the government’s behalf — opening up a dangerous new regulatory can of worms. “What happens when something designed for exceptional cases becomes routine?”

Children in the Machine

Reuben Steiger wrote on the outdated internet safety laws — drafted largely before the year 2000 — that no longer stand up to protecting children in an era in which a majority of teens report regular interaction with an AI “companion.” “The transition from [a bot] providing emotional support to encouraging self-harm can happen all too quickly.”

Memo to Democrats: Your Anti-Big Tech Majority Is There for the Taking

Ami Fields-Meyer wrote on the popular backlash against data centers as a golden opportunity for Democrats to become standard-bearers in demanding the Big Tech regulation most Americans want. “Moments when the public suddenly sees and feels the consequences of unchecked corporate power are rare.”

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: The Dual State: How Trump Is Using Ernst Fraenkel’s Playbook to Fracture the Law, Edwin Eisendrath, right, Aug. 23, 2026. Let me tell you about Ernst Fraenkel.

Born in 1898 in Germany, Fraenkel grew up a proud German. He fought for the Kaiser in World War I. He later became a prominent lawyer. He was also Jewish, which meant he was banned from appearing in court in 1933, when the Nazis came to power. In 1938, he fled the country. In 1939, he arrived in America, and four years later, he became an American citizen.

Fraenkel studied American law at the University of Chicago, and he wrote about what was happening back in Germany. His book, "The Dual State," has a lot to tell us about America today.

He explains that for most Germans, the rule of law continued as it always had. He called this the normative state. Contracts were enforced. The government protected the rights of citizens. Laws constrained prosecutors, and courts did their jobs. But the normative state had boundaries, and many Germans—particularly Jews—fell into what Fraenkel called the prerogative state. Those in the prerogative state were subject to all the power and none of the justice that a state can deliver.Subscribed

Among the insidious dangers of a dual state is that, for most citizens, it is business as usual. They don’t see the cruelty. They don’t experience the coercion. They think these are normal times. They say things like, “The pendulum swung too far in one direction, but it will swing back, like it always does.” And they don’t notice as the prerogative state expands, and their own freedom leaches away.

Donald Trump and the Republicans have recreated that dual state in our country. To be sure, we have more tools than the Weimar Republic to fight back. But the dangers are very real—and, for some, fatal.

Three stories in the news last week prove this point.An Out-of-Control ICE Agent

Steve Held, Dave Byrnes, and Raven Geary at Unraveled Press have done incredible work that showing how ICE operates in the prerogative state. They managed to uncover the identity of one of the masked agents who terrorized Chicago last October. His name is Martin Lagunas.

He leads what is called an Enforcement and Removal Operations team based in Chicago. At Broadview, his team threw tear gas at protesters. In Waukegan, he took part in the incident where ICE arrested a man and abandoned a child in a car. He went to Minneapolis during the ICE occupation there. He threatened people on the street, telling one observer, “Stop following us. Trust me. You’re not gonna like the outcome.”

When ICE murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis, Lagunas posted a story about her death on Facebook and wrote, “FAFO” (fuck around and find out). He was caught on camera spraying chemical agents into car vents before breaking the windows and forcing drivers and passengers onto the ground.

This week, you may have seen the video: Lagunas stopped a car in Falls Church, Virginia, and pointed a gun at the driver’s head.Aaron Fritschner @fritschner.bsky.socialVideo of an ICE agent pulling a gun on a wife and mother, who is a US citizen born and raised in the area, near Bailey's Crossroads in Northern Virginia yesterday. Chillingly, they claimed she “almost ran them over” until she told them she had video proving that was a lie.Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:18:21 GMTView on Bluesky

In the normative state, bad officers are relieved of duty. There is oversight. Officers like John Burge and Derek Chauvin were charged, prosecuted, convicted, and jailed.

Lagunas remains on the street. Why? Because Donald Trump has created a space in America where the law is no more than the armed weaponization of his desires. It is his prerogative whether someone gets arrested, charged, or even killed.

The Corrupt Trump DOJ

My friend, Mike Nellis, is a political consultant. For a time, one of his partners was the daughter of the judge in New York who oversaw Donald Trump’s hush-money trial. You remember that. Trump was convicted by a jury of 34 felonies. That trial was an example of the normative state. But Donald Trump rejected the verdict and created space around it for his prerogative state to intervene.

His henchman in the House, Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, held hearings to discredit the judge. Those hearings went after Nellis’ firm because Jordan wanted to create the impression that Trump’s prosecution was political. Because Nellis would not release emails with his clients, Jordan sent a letter to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi referring Nellis’ firm for contempt.

The U.S. Attorney in Chicago, Andrew Boutros—the same guy who oversaw the corrupt manipulation of a grand jury to indict the Broadview Six—launched an investigation into Nellis’ firm. Subpoenas were issued, but there was never any indication of what crimes might have been committed. There were no crimes committed. Instead, the government engaged in another fraud, issuing broad subpoenas not because there was a crime, but to try to find one—and to create a lot of smoke to give the impression that was a fire somewhere.

The Nellis case and the fraudulent indictments of the Broadview Six make it clear that the U.S. Attorney here in Chicago is using the power of his office for political persecution. That is the prerogative state: the lawless abuse of power.

New Revelations from Minnesota

Last week, we learned that after Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered by border agents, the federal government opened an investigation—not into the killings, but instead targeting labor unions, environmental groups, the Democratic Socialists of America, and a local activist coalition.

They were looking for evidence that these groups supported protesters. It is not illegal to protest in America. It is not illegal to support protesters in America. Not in the normative state. But in the prerogative one, instead of investigating the murder of Americans, the tools of government coercion target the regime’s critics.

There are plenty of other examples. Perhaps the clearest is the government’s effort to take away the freedom of an Olympic athlete because Donald Trump needed a fall guy for his botched reflecting-pool fiasco. In that case, our government was perfectly willing to take away an American’s freedom for 20 years just because it was good propaganda for a corrupt administration.

One man leads the effort inside the Justice Department and the FBI to create and enforce this prerogative state. That’s Todd Blanche. And Republicans in Congress just confirmed him to be our Attorney General.

In spite of it all, I remain an optimist. Across our country, the growing resistance to the Trump administration gives me comfort. The way people came together when ICE attacked Chicago and Minneapolis confirmed that, when pushed to extremes, we will not be divided by race. The turnout and energy on the pro-democracy side in recent primaries prove that we will not quietly give up our national project. We are winning in court. We are winning in the streets. We are winning in public opinion. We are winning at the ballot box.

But all our efforts are predicated on the rule of law. Our efforts are legal, and they rely on a system that protects us from arbitrary power. In America, unlike in Russia, our government cannot just jail us. In America, unlike in Tiananmen Square, our government cannot just shoot us.

And yet, in some instances, that is exactly what is happening.

The prerogative state in America still faces real constraints. We still have space to push back. But we are in a race. We simply must win in November, and we must insist that the winners be seated in Congress. But we cannot stop there. As Fraenkel witnessed, no one is safe in a dual state. The Executive Branch is powerful. So long as Donald Trump leads it, it acts to satisfy his whims rather than our laws. Until he is removed from power, American freedom is at risk.ArticlesA Death in Chicago and Why ICE Needs Civilian OversightEdwin Eisendrath·September 17, 2025A Death in Chicago and Why ICE Needs Civilian Oversight

This week, just after dropping his kids off at school, Silverio Villegas-González was killed by ICE officers in suburban Chicago. According to the Chicago Sun Times, ICE agents said they stopped the car as part of ‘targeted law enforcement activity.” The incident is described this way: 

Eyes On Ice, Police are feeling the heat As Maine Melts their 287g agreements, Staff Report, Aug. 23, 2026. In Maine, a hard boundary has been drawn between local policing and federal civil immigration enforcement. It did not arrive quietly.

A law [named for brevity after a provision 287g] limited contact and cooperation between Maine law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. Police leaders fought the bill hard. Recent reporting shows departments are now implementing the required changes rather than openly defying them.

The material reality is straightforward: local agencies had been diverting public safety resources into the federal mass deportation apparatus. Traffic stops turned into handovers. Jails held people past release dates on ICE detainers. Information about addresses and release dates was fed upstream. Maine residents, workers, and families absorbed the consequences. The law cuts that pipeline.What the Law Prohibits

The legislation, allowed to become law without the governor’s signature, places strict limits on local police. It prevents Maine law enforcement from:

Using resources or personnel to enforce federal civil immigration laws.

Detaining individuals solely on the basis of a hold request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Sharing personal information such as a person’s home address, work address, or anticipated release date with immigration authorities, unless that information is already available to the public.

A sweeping new ICE operation shows how Trump’s focus on immigration is reshaping federal law enforcement

The ACLU of Maine frames the law as a barrier against local agencies carrying out a federal immigration agenda that large parts of the state reject. In practice it ends voluntary participation in civil enforcement, traffic-stop handovers without judicial process, and the use of local jails as holding pens for federal civil detention.The Initial Pushback from Police

Before passage, law enforcement leadership across Maine was vocal in opposition.

Former Piscataquis County Sheriff Robert Young argued the bill erected an unnecessary wall between local law enforcement and federal agencies.

Maine State Police testified that the restrictions were too broad and would interfere with necessary coordination.

The Maine Chiefs of Police Association opposed the measure on operational grounds.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills critiques prospective red flag referendum during budget address | Maine Public

mainepublic.org

Maine Gov. Janet Mills critiques prospective red flag referendum during budget address | Maine Public

Their objections rested on the familiar claim that any limit on information-sharing or detention cooperation threatens public safety. The empirical record from 2025 showed the opposite pattern: local resources were being used for civil immigration enforcement far more often than for the serious criminal investigations the agencies claimed to prioritize.

Compliance Over Rebellion

The story of open rebellion by police has not materialized. Evidence points the other way.

Maine State Police moved early to implement the required policy changes.

The Maine Chiefs of Police Association circulated guidance to members on how to comply.

The ACLU of Maine sent letters to agencies reminding them of obligations, including the end of proactive notifications to ICE about inmate releases. According to an ACLU staff attorney, responses have largely been acknowledgments and agreements to distribute the information.

The law takes effect against a backdrop of intensified federal operations and community pushback. Maine’s choice is limited but clear: local police will no longer function as force multipliers for civil immigration enforcement. Federal agents retain their own authority. What they lose is the free use of Maine’s jails, officers, and data pipelines. That is the material boundary LD 1971 draws.

U.S. Water, Drought, Energy, Climate Crises

New York Times, America’s Desert Metropolis Is on the Short List to Lose Water, Reis Thebault, Photographs and Video by Rebecca Noble, Aug. 23, 2026. Decades ago, Arizona won funding for a massive Colorado River project by agreeing to be first in line for cuts at a time of deep drought. The Trump administration says that time has come.

From a secure, windowless room in northern Phoenix, technicians control the Colorado River water that sustains America’s largest desert metropolis.

The vast canal system the team oversees has for four decades conveyed an increasingly scarce commodity across 330 miles of rugged terrain to slake blossoming subdivisions, sprawling farmland and, in recent years, a powerhouse semiconductor industry. It supercharged Arizona’s economy and transformed Phoenix into one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities.

But this lifeline, known as the Central Arizona Project, came with a catch. In exchange for billions of federal dollars to build it, the state agreed to lower-priority water rights, putting the aqueduct among the first in line for cuts in a time of deep drought.

Now that time has come.

“It was the price we had to pay,” said Kathryn Sorensen, a former water director for the city of Phoenix. “The chickens have come home to roost.”The map locates the Central Arizona Project, a canal system that connects the Colorado River with Phoenix and Tucson.

With the seven states that rely on the Colorado River deadlocked over how to split its diminishing supply, the Trump administration is pushing its own plan to divide the water. The three downriver states — Arizona, California and Nevada — would most likely shoulder the most pain, but no single user stands to lose more than the Central Arizona Project.

Short-term reductions, announced by the federal government on Friday, will cost Arizona roughly one-third of its share of river water over the next two years. But beyond that, a range of cutbacks remain possible.

Under the most severe outcome, the system would be cut off entirely during the driest years, setting off a social and economic meltdown Arizonans shudder to even imagine.

“They are threatening to shut down the Southwest,” said Brenda Burman, the project’s general manager. “It’s not possible to picture it.”

Water is gold in the western United States, and people have been fighting over every drop for generations. The Colorado, a river that supports 40 million residents and is buckling after decades of drought and overuse, is the fiercest battleground of all. Access to it is governed by an arcane legal system that prioritizes the oldest established users.

The earliest laws were written for a river that no longer exists, and states do not agree on how to proceed. The high-stakes talks have gained urgency as the water levels of the river’s largest two reservoirs, Lakes Mead and Powell, have dwindled in recent weeks to record lows.

Arizona officials say any proposal that cuts off the state’s canal system is unacceptable, and they have threatened to sue, initiating court battles that could go on for years. For now, water experts say, taps and sprinklers will continue running from Phoenix to Tucson.

But any serious hit to the state’s Colorado River supply is likely to drive up the cost of replacement water and lead to more groundwater pumping, jeopardizing an already depleted safety net for future generations.VideoCreditCredit...

Human life in the parched Southwest has always depended on harnessing water.

The prehistoric Hohokam people built a flourishing society in the Sonoran Desert by carving a network of irrigation canals. Hundreds of years after the mysterious disappearance of the canals, the Bureau of Reclamation in 1911 dedicated its first major dam outside Phoenix to bring more settlers to the valley.

But state leaders knew they would need another source of water to continue growing, and they had their eyes on the Colorado River.

“The Central Arizona Project was Arizona’s holy grail,” said Thomas E. Sheridan, a historian who has written extensively about the system’s origins.

After decades of bitter interstate disputes, Congress approved construction of the aqueduct in 1968. The project would suck water from the Colorado and transport it to faraway cities, tribes and farms — an engineering marvel and a testament to the country’s belief that it could bend nature to its will.

But California cajoled Arizona into a compromise. Even during times of shortage, the Golden State would get its full allocation of water, no matter what.

When the project made its first deliveries to Phoenix in 1985, the celebration was tempered by foreboding: “The time is going to come in the not too distant future when we are going to be looking for water again,” a congressman cautioned at the time.

Cities that count on the Central Arizona Project have tried to prepare. The region now uses less water than it did 40 years ago, even as its population has more than doubled, and it has frantically recharged its aquifers.

Most Arizona officials do not expect the federal government to approve more massive water infrastructure projects, but they insist Congress should help pay for smaller-scale solutions like desalination plants or dam expansions. 

New York Times, Bigger, Hotter Fires Are Slowly Erasing America’s Great Forests, Eric Niiler, Photographs and Video by Nic Coury, Aug. 23, 2026. Towering woodlands in the West are being permanently replaced by tracts of spiky shrubs. Conditions “just aren’t normal anymore,” one researcher said.

On a gentle slope on the western side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where a towering green canopy of ponderosa pines had stood for centuries, wildfires have transformed roughly 1,700 acres into brown, bare shrubland.

That forest is gone for good, scientists say. Spiky shrubs and poison oak have replaced the majestic trees. All that is left of the pines are burned logs and dead branches.

It’s part of a wider transformation that’s taking place across the Western United States, from Oregon to New Mexico, as bigger and hotter wildfires sweep through forests that have not evolved to survive such high-intensity blazes and a warmer climate. Recent studies estimate that as much as 40 percent of Western conifer forests will turn into shrubland by 2100 as a result.

“This is a permanent shift from one ecosystem type to a fundamentally different one,” said Winslow Hansen, a forest ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, an independent research center in Millbrook, N.Y.

The consequences of the shift, for both people and wildlife, are expected to be profound.

Researchers say that as trees disappear, winter and spring snow will melt faster, affecting wildlife as well as communities that are already struggling with water shortages. Some Western states get as much as 75 percent of their water from snowmelt.

“When you remove the forest, that snow is more susceptible to melting earlier,” said Benjamin Hatchett, an interdisciplinary scientist at Colorado State University. And he noted that a warmer, more arid climate dries out soil and pulls moisture from plants, making them more susceptible to wildfire. “That thirstier atmosphere is a big concern,” he said.

Forests also absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Bigger, older trees store more carbon than younger trees and shrubs. The loss of conifer forests today means a hotter tomorrow.

To better understand these cascading effects, Dr. Hansen and Johan Eckdahl, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, visited the Sierra Nevada this month. On a 100-foot hillside plot that burned in the 2022 Oak fire, they recorded each flowering plant and shrub, filled plastic bags with soil, and checked the ground moisture and temperature with a special probe.

U.S. Governance

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Attends Grand Prix Race for America’s 250th Birthday, Staff Reports, Aug. 23, 2026. What We’re Covering

• Grand Prix: President Trump and the first lady are attending the Freedom 250 Grand Prix on Sunday in downtown Washington, where roads have been turned into an IndyCar racecourse. Mr. Trump was driven around the course in the Beast, the presidential limo, before the race got underway. The race is the final major event in the city to celebrate the United States’ 250th anniversary. Read more ›
• Trade: Canada and the United States were entering a new era of tension after trade talks collapsed, setting off new U.S. tariffs. On Saturday, Prime Minister Mark Carney called the latest proposal from Washington “a bad deal” and said Canada was “at war” with the United States. Read more ›

Trump was driven around the race course in the Beast, the presidential limo, while the presidential jet donated by the Qatari royal family flew slowly overhead flanked by four fighter jets.

Downtown traffic has snarled, as crews scurry to put up barriers, weld down manhole covers and even relocate traffic lights.

The National Gallery of Art has conducted vibration studies and put up protective panels around some of its outdoor sculptures, while other nearby Smithsonian museums prepared to reduce public access.

Airlines have rerouted flights, as the closest airport braces for a temporary shutdown. And at least one school within the exclusion zone has had to go fully remote.

Even before the first engine has revved in Washington’s first Grand Prix this weekend, the effects of turning a warren of museums and historic landmarks at the seat of government into a 1.7-mile IndyCar racecourse have rippled across the capital. And for some residents and commuters, the resulting disruptions are wearing thin in a summer that has been full of them.

“It’s putting additional stress on a stressful situation,” Jason Cummins, who commutes regularly from Baltimore to Washington, said on Friday as he walked near the race perimeter back to his parked car. His drive into the city, normally about an hour, had taken twice as long that morning, he said.

“I understand that this is the nation’s capital,” he said, “but there’s a lot of things that happen here.”

The Freedom 250 Grand Prix is the final major event in downtown Washington to mark the United States’ 250th anniversary, punctuating a summer that also featured a state fair exhibition, an Ultimate Fighting Championship match and a marathon Independence Day parade, concert and fireworks display. Many of those events also involved military flyovers, making them sonically inescapable for nearby residents.

And all of them have been heavily promoted by President Trump, in a city already wary of his attempts to leave his imprint on it.

For the race, the Trump administration has planned a two-day extravaganza, complete with more flyovers, fireworks and an honorary presidential lap of the course. The main event will feature 25 drivers zipping around for 147 laps, crisscrossing the National Mall and making tight turns around some of the nation’s most iconic buildings.

Race organizers have handed out about 140,000 tickets to spectators, which is also being broadcast on Fox Sports. And Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, has recorded a number of promotional videos to hype the event, repeating what has become its patriotic catchphrase: “Freedom doesn’t ring — it revs.”

While the race is expected to draw crowds, it is also expected to hamper other activities in and around the city, such as the National Book Festival, which is taking place a few blocks north of the race perimeter on Saturday, and travel in and out of Ronald Reagan National Airport, which announced a three-hour shutdown to coincide with the prerace festivities on Sunday.

Yet organizers, federal officials and the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, have said they would be open to the race becoming a tradition.

“It’s not just fun and games for our city. These are events that draw tens of thousands of people to our city,” the mayor’s office said in a statement. “Those visitors stay in our hotels, go to our restaurants, they visit our neighborhoods. For D.C., that means more good-paying jobs and more opportunity for our workers and businesses.”

Representatives of the race organizers did not respond to a request for comment.

A day before the race festivities were set to begin, the streets around downtown Washington were eerily quiet, even for a summer Friday. Residents and commuters, it appeared, had heeded city leaders’ exhortations to use the Metro, or simply stay home.

The Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, home to the busiest runway in the country, has been closed to flight traffic as the race grand prix gets underway. The 3-hour ground stop, expected to end at 1:15 p.m., is the latest closure the F.A.A. has imposed at the airport in connection to celebrations for America’s 250th anniversary.

Cabinet secretaries are milling around the racetrack and paddock. Here’s Howard Lutnick seeking selfies with drivers.

Meidas Touch Podcast, Trump DC RACE EVENT becomes INSTANT DISASTER!! Ben Meiselas, right, Aug. 23, 2026. MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Donald Trump's DC Grand Prix event becoming a complete disaster and Meiselas speaks with DC reporter Ben Weiss who has been covering the race.

The Freedom 250 Grand Prix in Washington DC has been an utter disaster. This is the Indie car street race as part of Freedom 250 that the Trump regime has been talking about while the American people are struggling to afford groceries and gas and diesel and anything and everything. The Trump regime is focused on things like this, the Freedom 250 Grand Prix.

I'll show you some photos of what it looked like outside in Washington DC where they effectively shut down the city to build a 1.7 mile long track around Washington DC to race these indie cars. You can see t was not all that crowded. The Trump regime claimed they were going to have hundreds of thousands of people there.

They did not really have all that many people there. But also, it's proven to be, as everybody expected, it would be a very dangerous track for the racers.These cars really aren't meant to do street racing like this. I mean, there is some street racing that they do, but that's not really what they're supposed what these cars were built for in areas like this.

And so, we knew that the Trump regime was spending a lot of time welding down 200 manhole covers ahead of this race. There were a lot of bumps on the street as well. And I was watching this so you don't have to watch it, but it was Indie car after Indie car was crashing into the wall one after the other. These very expensive cars were just like getting destroyed.

And you know, if you looked at what was happening as they're riding on the road that's not meant for this type of racing, there was like a kicker bump before one of the intersections by like a crosswalk area which kind of kicks the back end of the car and the back unloads and what you see is the kind of rear tire brake pressure locks and then the car loses control and then smashes into the wall. and it was like one car after one car smashing into the wall as I was watching this thing.

So, Saturday was the qualifying uh round and some of the practice sessions. Sunday is the actual race itself and I just think it's going to, I think we're going to, I'm worried about what's going to happen on Sunday based on what I've seen on Saturday.

Doug Bergam, right, the interior secretary responsible for fabricating evidence against a two-time Olympiccanoist in the reflecting pool, David Hearn, in order to frame David Hearn.

This is the type of stuff that Doug Burgum is doing right now. And so he's behind the Indie car street race,Freedom 250 Grand Prix, that this is what like the Trump regime has been talking about this whole week. again, while we're in a catastrophic war, while the American economy is in a catastrophic state.

I mean, Donald Trump hasn't even addressed the fact that we're in a full-fledged trade war with Canada now as a result of his horrific conduct and behavior and bad faith negotiation. But this is what they're talking about.

I mean, this is like an insane psychotic regime we have here in the United States. Doug Bergam earlier today was bragging that the manhole covers were being welded down. Play this clip,

NewsMax Correspondent: Mr. Secretary. Uh, you know, certainly hoping for a big crowd at this 250,000.I've seen the curves. Some of those turns are pretty tight. How do you keep spectators safe during such an unprecedented event?

Doug Burgum: Well, the Penske team and the Indie Car Series team that helped build this thing have taken every precaution. You'll see these concrete barriers everywhere, the high fences. They've even gone so far as making sure they're welding uh the manhole covers down so they don't get uh sucked up like a vacuum when these cars fly over the top of them. '

And and of course fans will be kept in a safe area, but it is a huge areas on the National Mall with large video screens where fans are going to be able to watch. We expect over race weekend yesterday, today, and tomorrow there could be a million people that are here in person. But, you know, shout out to the National Park Service, which managed the National Mall, our US Park Police and others.

Non-stop events: The Great American State Fair, the UFC fights, the record setting, world-record=-setting fireworks when we had we there'll be 40 million people that transverse the National Mall this year. It's never looked better.

Ben Meiselas: What the hell are you even talking about? And we can't afford things. We can't afford groceries. We can't afford gas. We can't afford rent. What the hell? You ripped away our healthcare. No one wants this. What do you do is this?  What are you doing? 

Justice Integrity Project Editor's Note: JIP's offices adjoin the race car route, providing a rooftop view that provided a direct view of the route, the street pedestrian traffic and key relevant parts of the National Mall, including one of the major celebrity reviewing stands for the race. It is this editor's estimate that visibile sections of the crowd indicated a very modest size crowd, far less than the 250,000 or one million organizers boasted about -- and that overall attendance for the events was similarly vastly less than those claimed by the Trump operatives and their media outlets, an especially striking shortfall because normal Mall events such as the annual Folklife Festival on the Mall or the congressionally planned 250th anniversary celebration were cancelled by the Trump Administration.    

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

New York Times, The Midterms Feel Like 2006 All Over Again, Carl Hulse, Aug. 23, 2026. With an unpopular war and high prices agitating voters, members of both parties see parallels to an election cycle when Democrats romped. But a lot has changed.

The war in the Middle East is increasingly unpopular. So is the president as his numbers dip perilously — a common development in the sixth year of a presidency. Congressional Republicans are embroiled in unsavory scandals. Americans are shelling out big bucks for gas while economic anxiety runs high.

The grim backdrop for November’s midterm elections has created a steep challenge for Republicans and opportunities for Democrats that look much the same as those they encountered in 2006. Back then, congressional Republicans faced the voters at the midpoint of President George W. Bush’s second term, with the public roiled by the war in Iraq, high fuel prices and a series of ugly accusations against members of the G.O.P. majority on Capitol Hill.

“It is striking,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader and chief architect of his party’s Senate campaign strategy this year and two decades ago. “The analogy is amazing.”

The parallels are not perfect, since politics and campaigns have both changed radically over 20 years. But the comparisons are instructive, as officials in both parties stare down the final months of an election that will determine who controls Congress for the remainder of President Trump’s term.

“This is 2006 2.0,” said Rahm Emanuel, who in 2006 was an ambitious Democratic House member from Illinois and Mr. Schumer’s counterpart across the Capitol as the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “The similarities are eerie.”

Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Schumer both have good reason to look back fondly on 2006, when Democrats triumphed in a blue wave.

Exceeding expectations that year, Democrats picked up six seats in the Senate, taking control of the chamber. In the House, where the Republican majority seemed to have exhausted itself after a dozen years, Democrats gained 31 seats and installed Nancy Pelosi, who is now retiring, as the first woman speaker. Mr. Bush, another victim of the six-year presidential itch, famously branded the outcome “a thumping.”

New York Times, The Data Center Backlash Bursts Into the Midterms, Shane Goldmacher, Aug. 23, 2026. With opposition to the centers mounting, many Democrats and a growing number of Republicans are campaigning against them.

The fight over data centers is suddenly at the epicenter of the midterm elections.

One new ad in Texas begins with someone typing into a chatbot, “Why is my electric bill going up?” Another in Ohio blames one of the state’s Republican senators for a proliferation of data centers, calling them “a total scam.” And in top House battlegrounds in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the Democratic challengers are all running ads against the server warehouses powering the artificial intelligence boom.

Data centers have become unlikely fault-lines in the broader fight over an A.I. revolution that is remaking the global economy and threatening to disrupt the job market. Now politicians are racing to tap into the backlash — or inoculate themselves — as political strategists in both parties described the issue as an unusually fast-moving force that is already reshaping races for the House, the Senate and governor’s mansions.

“It’s very much a bottom up, organic movement,” said Anna Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster, who said that while people’s views on data centers were largely tied to how close they live to them, the facilities were also becoming symbols of the excesses of Silicon Valley.

“Data centers are a physical manifestation,” she said. “Billionaires are building them, and it feeds into all of the big tech skepticism that is there. It’s very symbolic of everybody’s issues with A.I.”

The one-page document, which was earlier reported by Axios, amounted to a desperate plea for the well-heeled industry to finance an advertising campaign — lest a Husted loss serve as “a cautionary lesson” for politicians elsewhere.

Zac McCrary, a Democratic pollster, said that opposing data centers offered Democrats a rare chance to make inroads in rural areas and small towns that are resisting the developments.

“It absolutely shakes up the snow globe on the partisan coalitions in a part of the world where Republicans have been dominant,” he said. “It’s one of the few issues today that does not immediately code as red or blue, left or right.”

In Florida, Representative Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor, spent more than $2 million on one ad in his primary, vowing to “protect” the state from data centers that “jack up utility rates.” In the ad, he tried to cast that position as standing with Mr. Trump, whose administration sought to blunt some of the opposition earlier this year by proposing a “ratepayer protection pledge,” in which data centers promise not to drive up electricity costs.

His Democratic opponent in the fall, David Jolly, said that “we don’t want crime or data centers in our neighborhoods” in one of his first ads of the general election.

In a sign of how top-of-mind data centers have become, Mr. Donalds brought up the topic unprompted at an event last week in Naples, Fla. “Listen, I know people have concerns,” he said. “I’ve seen the polling. But leadership isn’t just looking at polling.”

There are signs that the emerging data center debate is scrambling the usual partisan divisions.

So far, Democrats have chiefly been the ones racing to harness voter anger about data centers over rising electricity prices, water use and mistrust of the tech sector. They aim to punish Republicans for cozying up to industry by approving many of these projects.

But in recent weeks, a growing number of Republican candidates have scrambled to shield themselves from any fallout. They have voiced skepticism about data centers, despite President Trump’s full-throated cheerleading for the A.I. industry and fears among party leaders in Washington that blocking construction of the centers could slow the economy and make the United States less competitive against China.

Some Republicans are now using “data center” as an epithet, and casting themselves as the real opponents of corporate tax breaks and unfettered construction. Last week, Mike Rogers, the Republican running for Senate in the key swing state of Michigan, said that he supports a one-year moratorium on data center construction.

Polls show a revolt brewing against data centers. A Gallup poll conducted in March showed 71 percent opposed local construction of the centers, and a summer survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the number of people opposing new data centers in their areas had risen by 12 percentage points since February and March.

The fallout has been so swift that in some races, including the governor’s contests in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida, both Democrats and Republicans are airing television ads about data centers.

On Wednesday, a remarkable memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that data center politics was endangering Senator Jon Husted of Ohio, a Republican. His challenger, Sherrod Brown, the state’s former Democratic senator, has aired millions of dollars of ads, calling Mr. Husted “the face of data centers in Ohio.”

“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” the memo said.

New York Times, Angry Ohio Voters Could Turn Their State Purple Again, Campbell Robertson and Jessica Contrera, Aug. 23, 2026. A governor’s race, a Senate contest and enough congressional contests to swing control of the House are all in play in Ohio, where voters of all stripes express a deep sense of powerlessness.

Across Ohio, a state that receded from the nation’s political battle zone as its voting patterns turned an ever deeper shade of red, signs of discontent this year are everywhere.

In packed public forums, residents rage about data center projects. In grocery store aisles, shoppers lament to cashiers how little they can get for $50. In the soybean and corn fields, farmers express anxiety and pessimism. The basics of life and business have gotten punishingly expensive, and many have come to doubt that relief is coming anytime soon.

“It’s all dumpy. Businesses are closing, the roads look like crap,” Kim Hall, 59, said as she shopped at a Dollar General in North Ridgeville, Ohio, on Wednesday. “Grocery prices are outrageous, and I can barely afford to live.”

Frustration like hers is evident in every region and demographic in the state, and it’s why Ohio may be up for grabs in the 2026 midterms. With the general election less than 75 days away, polls show dead heats for governor and a coveted Senate seat. Enough congressional seats are in play for either party to swing control of the House. Come November, the state that once bragged “So goes Ohio, so goes the nation” will find out if it is truly inching back toward purple.

But how voter frustrations will play out is anyone’s guess. Ms. Hall, who worked as a cook at McDonald’s until a kidney cancer diagnosis last year, was once an enthusiast for President Trump. In 2024, she voted for Kamala Harris. This fall, she said she is likely to give up on voting.

“I don’t like anybody,” she said. “I don’t agree with any of them.” 

New York Times, Times Exclusive: Jeffries and Kushner Meet Privately as Midterm Attacks Fly, Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni, Aug. 23, 2026. President Trump’s son-in-law and the man in line to be speaker of a Democratic-led House discussed how Democrats and the administration could work together.

Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, met privately in recent weeks with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and top outside adviser, and discussed potential areas of common ground, according to five people with knowledge of the meeting.

The rare engagement was held in a private space in New York City, offered up by a mutual friend of the two men, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting and a third who was briefed on it. They and others were granted anonymity to discuss a meeting about which they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Through aides, neither man would comment on the session, which was described by one person with knowledge of it as a broad conversation on a range of topics. Still, its timing underscored that those around Mr. Trump were well aware of the likelihood of a Democratic-led House, and trying to foster as much of a working relationship as possible before any change. Mr. Jeffries is in line to be the speaker, were Democrats to win the majority.

Democrats and the president have been savaging each other on the campaign trail with increasing fury as the midterm elections approach, and as Republicans are fighting to retain their thin House and Senate majorities.

Mr. Trump has called Mr. Jeffries a “thug,” and at a May campaign event referred to him as a “low IQ” person who had inspired him to deride Democrats as the “Dumocrats.” Mr. Jeffries routinely suggests that Mr. Trump is not only extreme but corrupt, vowing that Democrats would “hold the crooks accountable” if they won control.

The private get-together was described by one of the people as a catch-up for Mr. Kushner and Mr. Jeffries. The two men have stayed in touch since they worked together on a criminal justice bill midway through Mr. Trump’s first term.Sign up to get Maggie Haberman's articles emailed to you. Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent reporting on President Trump. Get it sent to your inbox.

During the recent meeting, the pair discussed housing, immigration and the high cost of living as potential areas of common ground. Mr. Kushner suggested that Mr. Jeffries should meet with the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, two people with knowledge of the meeting said.

The likelihood of any compromises between the White House and Democrats on those issues seems remote.

Mr. Trump this year refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill in part because he said it was “Warren centric,” referring to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, its top Democratic champion. And he has repeatedly expressed openness to a deal with Democrats on immigration, only to back away from any such agreement. He successfully lobbied Republicans to abandon a bipartisan border security bill in 2024.

White House officials and an aide to Mr. Kushner did not respond to messages seeking comment.

In a statement, Mr. Jeffries did not acknowledge the meeting, but suggested that the only way Democrats would cut deals with the administration would be if Republicans were willing to come their way on cost-of-living issues, his party’s top priority.

U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets

New York Times, What Canadian Goods Will Take Trump’s 50% Tariffs? Some Pretty Strange Items, Ian Austen, Aug. 23, 2026. Buoys, dog muzzles, capes, national flags and “base metal statuettes” from Canada are now more expensive for U.S. shoppers.

Anoraks and suit jackets. National flags. Some Christmas ornaments. And 36 different kinds of plywood.

The lists of hundreds of goods from Canada subject to new 50 percent tariffs from the United States are long and seemingly organized at random.

The Trump administration imposed the tariffs, which took effect on Saturday, after Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada called off trade negotiations with the United States that had lasted nearly a month. “They asked too much and offered too little,” Mr. Carney said.

Mr. Carney has promised to retaliate “dollar for dollar” against the new tariffs, which join previous tariffs of up to 50 percent that President Trump put on Canadian aluminum, steel and autos last year. Lumber has tariffs that predate Mr. Trumps’s return to office; he nevertheless increased them last year.

Here are some of the goods that are subject to the new tariffs:Major Exports

For Canadian companies that depend on U.S. business, the new tariffs are likely to be a source of great anxiety. For customs brokers and trade lawyers who guide those companies, they are an extraordinary business opportunity.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Canada? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

But for the lay reader, the tariffs are sometimes baffling. The items affected, according to the Trump administration, cover $20 billion in Canadian exports. They are laid out in three lists, which can be found here, here and here.

Some clear patterns emerge from the text. Canada’s forest industry, which has been enmeshed in a seemingly endless battle with the United States for decades, has been particularly targeted. On the lists, the many wood products include 36 different kinds of plywood alone. Homebuilders in the United States have already said there is not enough American product to replace Canadian plywood, so the tariffs could increase housing construction costs.

Alcohol is also prominent. The Trump administration has been particularly vexed by the fact that eight of Canada’s 10 provinces still restrict U.S. wine and spirits from their government-owned liquor distribution system and stores. Those measures began after Mr. Trump suggested making Canada the 51st state and imposed tariffs in violation of the free trade agreement between the two countries and Mexico.

Some of the drinks now effectively shut out from the United States by tariffs hold little obvious appeal, including “mixtures of or with a basis of odoriferous substances with 20 to 50 percent alcohol by weight requiring only the addition of ethyl alcohol or water to be a beverage.” Left unexplained is why anyone would add more alcohol to something that is already half composed of the intoxicant.Dairy products are another target. Canada uses production quotas and other tools to protect domestic dairy producers, who sell largely to the Canadian market, potentially limiting the effect of the new U.S. duties.

Clothing and textiles also take a hit. Like the United States, much of Canada’s clothing production moved overseas long ago, and some Canadian online retailers sell goods made abroad to U.S. customers. That, however, will not give them an out. Simply shipping things from Canada triggers the tariffs, regardless of where the products were made.And Some Peculiarly Specific Ones

Few items of clothing escaped the tariffs. They include overcoats, anoraks, windbreakers, sleeveless jackets, cotton sweaters, T-shirts, car coats, capes, cloaks, track suits, suit jackets, blazers and dresses. Gloves, mittens and mitts are on the list unless they are related to sports.

Also included are national flags, canvas used for painting stage backdrops, tarpaulins, awnings and sun blinds.

Not every item on the list comes from large companies. Several products, including jewelry and honey, come from small, even one-person, operations.

U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

The Quietside Journal (Maine), Publisher's Opinion: Covering Susan Collins Part 3: How Maine newspapers marginalize themselves over time, Lincoln Millstein, small town Maine digital news publisher and former prominent editor with the New York Times, Boston Globe and Hartford Courant, Aug. 23, 2026. How Maine newspapers marginalize themselves over time.

Sunday morning. Time to devour the Sunday paper along with your coffee and catch up on the week’s big stories.

“U.S., Canada Spiral Toward Trade War,” the Wall Street Journal blared on its home page this morning.

The WSJ does not publish a Sunday paper. But the Portland Press Herald and the Bangor Daily News still do.

I could only find only a generic wire-service article buried in the BDN website which failed to mention that Canada is Maine’s largest trade and investment partner.

According to the Maine International Trade Center, “Maine exported $1.3 billion of products – approximately 40% of the state’s total exports – to Canada last year.

“This figure only accounts for physical products. The value of the relationship grows substantially when adding in services like banking and tourism.

“Maine’s natural resource-based industries (potatoes, blueberries, lobster, forest products, etc.) are highly integrated with Canada, which is characterized by two-way trade flows of raw materials and finished products, as well as bilateral investments in each other’s markets.”

Seemed like fodder for a story or two, especially since an election is on tap Nov. 3 for the United States Senate in Maine.

The era of social media has exposed the hands-off coverage of Republican Susan Collins by the state’s largest newspapers which some believe is responsible for her 30-year-tenure.

On Aug. 2, I wrote about the masterful way she has manipulated coverage, including reports that how she got the Press Herald to change a headline for one which was friendlier to the senator.

This behavior will leave a permanent stain on the state’s news organizations the likes of which I did not detect in the aftermath of the 2000 Senate race, when Collins defeated Sara Gideon.

Since then, alternative voices have emerged on the right and the left, and they know how to use social media more deftly than they did six years ago.

Maine journalist Andy O’Brien is a perfect example.

He wrote in April on his Substack page, “Maine’s two dailies have been protecting Susan Collins for too long” under the headline, “The Susan Collins Media Industrial Complex.”

O’Brien didn’t start writing on Substack until 2025. Even though the platform was launched in 2017, it didn’t start gaining traction until the 2020 election year.

Its star, Heather Cox Richardson, did not begin writing on Substack until December 2019.

Bluesky, the explosive social network, began as a research project at Twitter in 2019. It launched as an invite-only beta app in February 2023 and finally opened its registration to the general public without invitations on February 6, 2024.

“Collins Watch” uses Bluesky.

It posted yesterday that, “Susan Collins making clear she won't do anything to stop a Republican policy that she concedes hurts her own state … notice how she's too much of a chicken to use the words ‘Trump’ or ‘president’ and instead resorts to ‘The Administration.’ “

The biggest alternative voice which has emerged may be that of the Mainenewsroom, which boasts of 30,000 followers on Facebook.

No one gets into the weeds as much as Andy O’Brien.

“The Bangor Daily News is notorious for its fealty to Collins though, especially at election time. When I’ve submitted op-eds that criticize Collins to the paper, the BDN’s editorial department has aggressively edited them to remove much of the criticism, even once going so far as to insist I give equal criticism to Senator Angus King during the 2020 campaign.

“After a lengthy back-in-forth with the editors, I reluctantly relented. It’s well known that the family who owns the BDN is close friends with Collins. In 2013, Susan Warren, the stepmother of BDN publisher and Collins donor Richard Warren, sold a house to Collins and Daffron.”

On July 14, I wrote BDN editor Dan MacLeod, “I thought of this story idea, but then I read that the Times already covered it. It was such an obvious story but no Maine paper touched it.Are you under pressure not to publish articles critical of Susan Collins during this campaign?”

He replied, “It’s always good to hear from you though I am surprised to see you ask this question. I have no idea what candidates Rick (publisher Richard Warren) prefers and he never tries to bend news coverage to fit his politics.

“We did cover the political ramifications of the ICE shooting. We don’t cover every story the same way as every other news org. We regularly ask Collins tough questions. We’re always open to story ideas if you’d like to share.”

The Press Herald and the BDN no longer commit previously de riguer tasks like “papers of record” - publishing Collins’s statements on important news for instance.

Influence is the coin of the realm for the press. Can traditional media in Maine still wield that power, as alternative voices gain traction?

POSTSCRIPT:

I worked on the State Desk of the Hartford Courant in my twenties and received a hands-on education of how the “front office” influences the news pages.

One example was the the hand-written “business office must” memos from the publisher (we called them BOMs). Most of the edicts were small, almost inconsequential ones -- announcements of open houses and the like for car dealerships. We were ordered to tuck them at the bottom of local news pages. They were not labeled “advertisement.”

The Courant was clearly the voice of the establishment, as its political writer saw to it.

When I got to the Boston Globe in the Eighties, I witnessed a newsroom which leaned into divisive politics with a heavier hand. Senior editors and the publisher regularly lamented in private how far the editor Tom Winship had pushed his agenda on the news pages.

He told me at lunch once at Locke-Ober, after I asked him what was the first thing he did after becoming editor:

“I married Cambridge,” meaning he became an acolyte of the “People’s Republic of Cambridge” and wanted badly to align himself with the views of the university from across the river which starts with an “H.”

I spent five years at the New York Times and witnessed first-hand the influence exerted on the paper by powerful forces on Broadway on its Arts section and the olive oil industry and the like on its food writers. That’s a story for another day. 

Aug. 22 

Special Report

• Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Full Harp-Trump Letters Are Worse Than You Think, Seth Abramson, right, Aug. 21-22, 2026. We still only have two complete letters from White House aide Natalie Harp to President Donald Trump—the man she calls her “Guardian” and “Protector, her “Alpha and Omega”—but they are horrifying.

Taken in isolation and exclusively on their face, the just-released Harp-Trump Letters would excite little comment or concern. What really makes these letters, and the relationship they imply, so upsetting is that as a matter of national security it seems relevant that one of the two people in this odd relationship is a President of the United States with demonstrably zero interest in protecting classified intelligence ....and the other person in the relationship at hand has infiltrated the White House for reasons that remain unclear but that we know, at least, she’s aggressively lied about for many years. (Continued below: The Ten Most Harrowing New Revelations in the Just-Released “Full” Harp-Trump Letters)

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trade War With Canada Erupts as Canada Rebukes Trump, Trump Prepares for Impeachment, ICE Caught Using Racist Language, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 22, 2026. Trump officially has a trade war with Canada now, tariffs are climbing to 50% on roughly $20 billion in goods after last minute talks collapsed Friday night, and both sides are digging in. House Democrats are quietly mapping out a wave of investigations for a potential 2027 majority, and Trump himself admitted last night he expects to be impeached if they win.
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Important Saturday Night Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 22, 2026. Canada and the US are now in a full-blown trade war, 50% tariffs are hitting $20 billion in Canadian goods, and Prime Minister Mark Carney says the breakdown comes down to one thing: Canada showed up united, and the US didn’t, a point he made with a pointed jab about “coordination” inside the Trump administration.

Trump Election-Meddling, Autocracy-Creation

• New York Times, Postal Service Publishes Finalized Plan to Restrict Mail Ballots, Adam Sella, Aug. 22, 2026 (print ed.). The plan complies with President Trump’s executive order to restrict mail voting, which was blocked by federal courts and is under review at the Supreme Court.
• New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s Election Meddling Erodes Our Democracy, The Editorial Board, Aug. 20, 2026. The surest sign of democratic collapse is the unwillingness of an elected political party to leave office. The party rewrites laws and changes election rules to prevent its opponents from gaining power. The shift often starts slowly but can ultimately end in autocracy. President Trump has taken worrisome steps down this path since returning to office in January 2025. He has directed Republican-run states to enact newly gerrymandered maps to increase the chances that Republicans maintain control of Congress even if they receive fewer votes this year. He has tried to pass legislation that could keep many eligible voters from voting. And he has sent signals that he may use the power of the federal government to disallow legitimate ballots this fall. On July 16, Mr. Trump took the remarkable step of giving a prime-time White House address devoted to lies and misleading statements about voter fraud.

U.S. Trade Wars, Tariffs, Economy

• New York Times, U.S. Economy Could Feel the Sting From Trade War With Canada, Tony Rommm, Aug. 22, 2026. A tit-for-tat trade fight between the two allies could create new headaches for consumers and businesses already stung by high prices.
• New York Times, ‘Attacked’ by Trump on Trade, Canada Is ‘at War’ With U.S., Carney Says, Ian Austen, Aug. 22, 2026. Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a powerful speech to Canadians on Saturday morning, hours after ordering negotiators to suspend U.S. trade talks despite President Trump’s punishing tariffs.
• New York Times, Canada-U.S. Trade War Escalates as Talks Collapse, Matina Stevis-GridneffIan Austen and Ana Swanson, Updated Aug. 22, 2026. Intense negotiations to stave off new levies by the Trump administration ended in an impasse as Mark Carney suspended talks. U.S. tariffs on Canada, and retaliatory tariffs on the U.S., will come into effect.
• New York Times, News Analysis: Carney Stands Up to Trump in Trade War Despite the Risks, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Aug. 22, 2026. Canada’s prime minister walked away from what he thought was a bad trade deal with the United States. Many Canadians are behind him, but it will be costly.

Trump Obsessions, Oppressions, Greed, Cover-up 

• Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: He really IS Stark-Raving Mad, This proves it, Robert Reich, right, author and former U.S. Labor Secretary and University of California professor, Aug. 21, 2026. I need to inform you of a very serious matter. Trump is threatening the Center for American Progress, a prominent liberal think tank, with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a report concluding that his deployment of the National Guard to cities across the country has had little effect on reducing violent crime. This is nuts, for several reasons.
• Hope for America, Opinion: The president is falling apart, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 21, 2026. At 7:05 tonight, Donald Trump was seen offstage through a slit in the curtain, wearing a deep navy suit and bright red tie as he made his first pass at the stage. Not even a minute later, he emerged, energized and ready to go. At 7:09, with sweat already pooling on his face, he launched into an hour and 20 minutes of pure chaos and madness, stopping at one point to tell the crowded room that Melania Trump hates when he dances to YMCA. “She hates when I dance to that great... to the gay national anthem. That’s what it is. It’s called the gay national anthem.” He warned the crowd that he would be impeached if Democrats take back Congress. And then he declared that there really is no Republican Party anymore. It is all MAGA.

U.S. Immigration Policy, Abuses, Rights

• New York Times, Judge Strikes Down Trump’s 75-Country Visa Ban, Mattathias Schwartz, Aug. 22, 2026 (print ed.).The ruling from the Southern District of New York found that the policy went beyond Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s legal authority. In a 61-page ruling, Judge Jeannette A. Vargas of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York disputed the administration’s public rationale for the policy, billed as a “pause,” that immigrants from the targeted countries were likely to draw public benefits and become “a financial burden to Americans.” In fact, Judge Vargas found, U.S. officials were ordered to refuse visas to eligible immigrants who were likely to be self-sufficient, in violation of a statute that requires individualized assessments. The majority of the 75 countries on the State Department’s list are non-European and have significant nonwhite populations. 
• New York Times, Ankle Monitors Leave Haitians in Ohio Feeling Shaken and Shackled, Miriam Jordan, Aug. 22, 2026. The devices, which will make it easier for authorities to locate immigrants in Springfield if large-scale deportations begin, have intensified a sense of dread. Following the termination of a legal protection called Temporary Protected Status that allowed 330,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States, his administration has launched an aggressive electronic monitoring campaign centered on the small city. Springfield, home to between 10,000 and 15,000 Haitians, has also seen a robust ICE presence and more than 20 arrests since last week.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Before Fabricating Assaults to Justify the MN-15 Investigation, DHS Focused on a Protest of Trump’s 2017 Inauguration, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 21, 2026. As I laid out in this post, DOJ and DHS used assault charges fabricated against 16 people whom Pam Bondi used as trophies to retroactively justify spying on the Minnesota protest community for months. On January 28 — the same day Bondi paraded her trophies on Xitter, DOJ opened the investigation that would result in charges against 15 activists it misleadingly billed as Antifa: the next day, DOJ indicted the first round of people in the Cities Church protest relying at least in part on fabricated claims.

Special Report (Continued From Above)

• Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Full Harp-Trump Letters Are Worse Than You Think, Seth Abramson, righjt, Aug. 21-22, 2026. We still only have two complete letters from White House aide Natalie Harp to President Donald Trump—the man she calls her “Guardian” and “Protector, her “Alpha and Omega”—but they are horrifying. The Ten Most Harrowing New Revelations in the Just-Released “Full” Harp-Trump Letters.

More On Harp-Trump Relationship, Security Implications

 President Donald Trump and Natalie Harp in the Oval Office on May 30, 2025. Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP

Our Land, Political Opinion: A Natalie Harp Conspiracy Theory (Not Really), David Corn, right, Aug. 22, 2026. It’s very easy to be a conspiracy-monger. Let’s give it a shot.

This week, there was a hullabaloo about Natalie Harp, Donald Trump’s 35-year-old aide who’s been derisively referred to within the White House as the “Human Printer.” She’s always by Trump’s side, typing his social media posts and printing out and feeding him positive and misleading information about his presidency. There’s been much speculation and tittering about her devotion and physical closeness to Trump. She was part of the small elite band that was hustled into that now-infamous catering compartment in Turkey when Trump covertly fled Air Force One to use another aircraft due to a security threat. Her notes to Trump read like love letters. (“You are all that matters to me.”) But the Harp tale is indeed a serious episode that reminds us of how Trump and his gang don’t give a damn about security. The fact that a staffer with such access to Trump could blow off a security clearance for so long is troubling. 

• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Natalie Harp Was the Document Author of Trump’s Blow-Off of the January 6 Committee, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 22, 2026. I was reminded that when I wrote this post on the final workings of the January 6 Committee, I checked the document metadata for the conspiratorial rant Trump sent Congress in lieu of a real legal response.

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, News Analysis: Who Has the Last Say in Lebanon? Hezbollah and the State Both Say They Do, Christina Goldbaum, Aug. 22, 2026. President Joseph Aoun took office with a popular mandate to reassert control after the militant group dragged the country back into war with Israel.

More On U.S. National Security, Military, Foreign Policy

• White House Chronicles, Commentary: Brain Injuries From Blasts Driving Young Vets to Suicide, Llewellyn King, above, Aug. 22, 2026. We all get a warm glow when we hear the airline gate agent inviting active-duty service members to board early. What isn’t said, isn’t known, is that some of those young men and women will die eventually by their own hands, and at nearly three times the rate of civilians in the same under-34 age group. Veterans, particularly young veterans, men and women, are in danger of walking on the dark side in terrible isolation, despair and misery — in a darkness so extreme it defies comprehension by those who are in the light. These veterans are the victims of traumatic brain injury, a hard-to-diagnose and treat brain wounding by the force of shock waves from explosive blasts. The shock waves can cause minute tears or other damage that medical imaging and blood tests can’t detect in a living patient.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Is Breaking the Law to Cover Up How Russia Helped Him Win in 2024, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 21, 2026. Trump is flouting the law that required him to lay out election interference in 2024 by March. Disclosures during the Biden administration, including federal indictments, accused both Russia and Iran of engaging in aggressive influence operations in 2024. Congress passed a number of laws after Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election intended to better inoculate the American public from foreign attempts to influence voters. That included requirements for more transparency with lawmakers and the public from the nation’s spy agencies about what intelligence had been collected concerning the ambitions of foreign powers around federal elections.

U.S. Racial and Public Education Politics In History 

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 21, 2026 [Race, Poverty, Education and Politics: Linked], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 22, 2026. On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved American, led about 70 of his enslaved and free Black neighbors in a rebellion to awaken his white neighbors to the inherent brutality of slaveholding and the dangers it presented to their own safety.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Rights, Justice

Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha Vance (Facebook photo).

• The Michael Fanone Show, Political Opinion: Stop Waiting for Usha Vance to Save Us From Her Husband, Michael Fanone, above right, former U.S. Capitol Police officer severely injured by rioters during the pro-Trump Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Aug. 22, 2026. For a decade now, we’ve been playing the same game with Trump world. We scan the room for the secret adult. The one who privately thinks this is insane. The one who’s quietly uncomfortable and, any day now, is going to step in and restrain the person with real power. We are almost always wrong. And the newest place we’ve been telling ourselves that fairy tale is JD Vance’s marriage.The story we wanted to believe

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

• New York Times, Why Polling Chaos Could Create Big Problems for American Politics, Reid J. Epstein, Aug. 22, 2026. Bad polls. Misleading betting odds. Surveys meant to shape narratives. Ahead of the midterms and 2028, there is suddenly serious confusion about candidate strength and voter sentiment.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Weeks Before Election He’s Losing Trump Clownishly Raises Prices On All Sorts of Things, Simon Rosenberg, right, Aug. 22, 2026. His war has failed. His economic policy has failed. His trade policy has failed. MAHA has failed. His political project is failing.
• The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Rosie O’Donnell Delivers One Final FU to Trump and Sings Him Right Out the DoorCommentary, Rosie O’Donnell Delivers One Final FU to Trump and Sings Him Right Out the Door, Thom Hartmann,right, Aug. 22, 2026. The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion…
• New York Times, The Socialist, a Million-Dollar Rowhouse and Unanswered Questions, Jeremy W. Peters, Nate Schweber and Miles G. Cohen, Aug. 22, 2026. Differing accounts of where Gustavo Gordillo, a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, lives are raising doubts about whether the city’s left-wing organizers are ready for prime time.It seems like a straightforward question: Where does Gustavo Gordillo, one of New York’s leading socialist organizers, live?

Media, Celebrity, Education, Sports, Religion 

The United Kingdom's Prince Harry and his bride, Meghan Markle, on their wedding day before they renounced their royal titles.

• New York Times, Harry and Meghan See Their California Dreams, and Riches, Fade Away, Nicole Sperling and Shawn Hubler, Aug. 22, 2026. Like so many others before them, Prince Harry and Meghan arrived in Hollywood with big plans. They are leaving with their star power fading.
• New York Times, Prince Harry and Others Told to Pay Daily Mail Publisher $13 Million, Stephen Castle, Aug. 21, 2026. Harry and six other high-profile figures lost a privacy lawsuit against Associated Newspapers. They may eventually have to pay more than twice the initial sum, a judge said.
• New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg Buys an Irish Castle, Alan Yuhas, Aug. 21, 2026. The prominent landowner has added a nearly 200-year-old estate to his holdings. For two centuries, Strancally Castle’s towers and parapets have overlooked a bend in the Blackwater River and a swath of Irish land as it passed from one wealthy family to the next. It now joins the holdings of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the 21st century’s most prominent landowners, along with a place on an artificial island in Miami Beach, a large house in Washington and compounds in California and Hawaii.

Special Report

Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Full Harp-Trump Letters Are Worse Than You Think, Seth Abramson, left, Aug. 21-22, 2026. We still only have two complete letters from White House aide Natalie Harp to President Donald Trump—the man she calls her “Guardian” and “Protector, her “Alpha and Omega”—but they are horrifying.

Taken in isolation and exclusively on their face, the just-released Harp-Trump Letters would excite little comment or concern. They present as just two in a presumptively lengthy stream of communications between an eighty-year-old married serial rapist and a blonde, conventionally attractive aide who’s well less than half his age. The two exemplars we now have of how these two people communicate, specifically samples of Natalie Harp’s “adoring” (NYT) missives to President Donald Trump, for all intents and purposes appear to hail from the sort of toxic, clandestine romantic relationship most of us have been in at least once. Usually in our teens.

On that basis, the most notable aspects of these letters by far would have to be:

(a) the two ends of this seemingly unmistakably romantic relationship (whether physical or not) both insisting that there is no such relationship, as does everyone less powerful than them in the White House they jointly control, which is basically everybody;

(b) the fact that one of the two is a religious zealot while the other has astonishing contempt for all religious people;

(c) the apparent factoid that one of the two is not known to have ever been in a serious romantic relationship before, while the other is the alleged or proven perpetrator of literally hundreds of incidents of Rape, Sexual Harassment, Sexual Assault, infidelity, ambiguously voluntary groping, misogynistic taunting, and diabolically gleeful home-wrecking, as well as war crimes in multiple countries that he either authorized or aided and abetted and which indiscriminately killed women and children (along with a history of publicly fantasizing about violence against women in speeches that were by turns sadistic and onanistic in delivery and tone);

and (d) that the more powerful of the two mutual admirers is the autocratic capo of far-right political party whose self-ascribed obsession with “moral accountability”and “personal responsibility” saw its zenith in the impeachment of a Democratic president (Bill Clinton) over a deeply wrong—but nevertheless notably less troubling—workplace relationship than the one we’re speaking of right now.

Sure, we could add here that Trump is a married man, but the general sense now is that the marriage in question is a sham, Melania Trump is disgusted by her husband and is no longer even willing to live with him, and Donald Trump has cheated on her so many times and under such humiliating circumstances—every one treated as just fine by voters in a political party that defines itself by its devout Christianity—that there’s no explicit violation of the Word of God that Donald Trump could flout and lose the support of (say) a grifting heretic like his personal spiritual mentor, Paula White-Cain.

Sure, we could add that Natalie Harp describing Donald Trump (caps in original) as her lifelong spiritual “Guardian” and “Protector” and “Alpha and Omega”—all roles that God himself is supposed to fill in the life of a devout Christian—certainly adds an odd dimension to what at least seems to be an instance of emotional adultery, but then again, Donald Trump already publicly, on national television no less, declared himself “God’s Chosen One” and not one evangelical supporter batted an eyelash, so there’s that.

And as Trump has repeatedly framed himself as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ—yes, in those terms—even a religious zealot like Harp can feel that as long as she does whatever he tells her to do she’s serving God (or at least the only one she’ll know while on Earth).

And sure, the very fact that Donald Trump, an atheist who is among the least godly Americans to rise from this soil—he installed a golden statue of himself at one of his clubs and called it Don Colossus, encouraging Christians to pray over it (the same thing he’s done over and over and over again elsewhere); he was convicted of 34 counts of a theft-related offense (Fraud); he’s one of the only men alive famous for bearing false witness against his neighbors; he proudly orders illegal killings in other parts of the world, his own back yard, and amidst illegal wars he unilaterally launched—has somehow convinced an apparently bright young lady to give him “all her heart,” to the point that she expressly dishonors her late father by expressly raising up in his place a man whose diabolical nature appears to be virtually boundless is… well, something.

It’s troubling, one supposes—though only if one is a Christian, or a non-Christian who cares about decency.

No—what really makes these letters, and the relationship they imply, so upsetting is that as a matter of national security it seems relevant that one of the two people in this odd relationship is a President of the United States with demonstrably zero interest in protecting classified intelligence (he infamously steals it, flushes it down toilets, eats it, rips it up, trashes it, puts it in burn bags, discloses it cavalierly to our enemies as small talk, develops plans to sell it, hides it from even those entitled to access to it, blurts it out, lets it be intercepted by America’s enemies over non-secure phone lines, or else declassifies it via Jedi mind tricks, as his mood dictates) and the other person in the relationship at hand has infiltrated the White House for reasons that remain unclear but that we know, at least, she’s aggressively lied about for many years.

All of which means, if we refuse to take the Harp-Trump Letters in isolation—and here at Proof we never take things in isolation, as not only is there no reason to do so but doing is be unnatural amidst the interconnectedness of the political world—we can review them with an eye toward the sort of intelligence and security reviews they clearly never got.

The author of this Proof report is a former federal criminal investigator and retired criminal defense attorney who only writes about complex interactions that are at once multivariate, must be analyzed and tracked over time, and are not the product of just one discrete narrative stream. If a story can be summarized in a squib, this outlet has little interest in covering it; Proof is strictly a curatorial journalistic enterprise (see also here and here).

In the most recent Proof report on Harp and Trump, Proof showed that Ms. Harp is a possibly unprecedented national security threat to the White House, her boss Donald Trump, and possibly even the United States. She’s in a position to do enormous harm to American interests, and is only in her current taxpayer-paid position ($150,000/year) because the sitting President of the United States is a dirty old man who is not only wildly immature for his advanced age but also—subclinically speaking—a malignant narcissistic psychopath.

This is not the first time Donald Trump has endangered the United States by dint of his greed and vanity and overarching venality, and it won’t be the last.

Enter the two just-released Harp-Trump letters (see images infra, below).

These two letters from Harp to Trump, so inappropriate and unnerving as to surely be without precedent, take the concerns Proof has already expressed about this situation to a new level. While many of the odd professions of devotion in these two documents have already been unpacked here at Proof and elsewhere, what’s most surprising in the release of these documents by The Daily Beast is how many sentences in them have flown under the radar while in the hands of journalists who should have known better.

It doesn’t take a former federal criminal investigator to see all the warning signs in these two missives—warning signs that should have caused the United States Secret Service to immediately leap to the defense of their protectee Trump and the nation as a whole. But it certainly doesn’t hurt that this author has that particular training (see here for more detail on my training and practice).

In undertaking this analysis, Proof both sidesteps the aspects of these letters that have already been discussed in detail here and, despite the urgency of the situation and the callous disregard for propriety shown by both Harp and Trump, attempts to approach at least the former person with a small amount of grace.

While it’s true that Harp appears to have been the “but for” cause of the leader of the free world going full Ku Klux Klan and comparing his predecessor Barack Obama to an ape—as well as other upsetting incidents, like the same leader portraying himself gleefully spraying diarrhea all over American voters—it remains the case that Harp appears to be a troubled young woman in an extremely precarious psychological state, and there’s no reason for anyone not to be at least broadly empathetic to such a state of affairs. Yes, even if the person in question has chosen to exhibit religious devotion to someone they knew (or should have known) is a serial rapist, war criminal, convicted felon, long time conman, draft dodger, serial adulterer, domestic abuser, serial sexual harasser, misogynist, racist, heretic, antisemite, Islamophobe, ableist, transphobe, xenophobe, and unrepentant wannabe fascist dictator whose sexual attractions are self-admittedly pedophilic and says the only code he follows is the dictates of his own spectacularly malformed mind.

With all that in mind, let’s proceed.

(Continued below: The Ten Most Harrowing New Revelations in the Just-Released “Full” Harp-Trump Letters)

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trade War With Canada Erupts as Canada Rebukes Trump, Trump Prepares for Impeachment, ICE Caught Using Racist Language, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 22, 2026. Trump officially has a trade war with Canada now, tariffs are climbing to 50% on roughly $20 billion in goods after last minute talks collapsed Friday night, and both sides are digging in. House Democrats are quietly mapping out a wave of investigations for a potential 2027 majority, and Trump himself admitted last night he expects to be impeached if they win.

Also today: Kash Patel’s girlfriend just lost a defamation suit in one of several cases she’s filed over “foreign agent” claims, Trump spent Friday night ripping into Tucker Carlson, MTG, and Thomas Massie in a bizarre late night tirade, and a full rundown of everything else, from a record jump in vaccine exemptions among kindergarteners to an ICE agent’s arrest to a growing lettuce recall now linked to nearly 11,000 illnesses.

Lots to cover, and I just wanted to say thank you all for your support. I’m working on some exciting projects, including a live show that’s set to start nearly every night soon. We’re ramping up, not slowing down.

Here’s the news:

Trump impeachment:

House Democrats are quietly assembling a sprawling investigative agenda for if they retake the majority in November, with nearly a dozen early targets ranging from the Iran war and Trump’s family business dealings to the White House ballroom, his Jeffrey Epstein ties, and ICE’s immigration enforcement. The party is split on strategy: progressives like Judiciary’s Jamie Raskin call impeachment “a tool” and note most of the caucus has voted for it before, while leadership figures like Pete Aguilar insist impeachment “just doesn’t exist” as a topic in their meetings. Oversight ranking member Robert Garcia frames the focus as “Trump corruption and Trump family corruption,” citing crypto schemes, pardon sales, and defense contracts, while AOC wants a parallel track on “very real issues” like data centers straining water and power supplies and healthcare monopoly pricing.

The White House says it’s prepared to handle oversight regardless of who controls Congress, and DOJ has already issued a memo asserting executive privilege can shield some presidential communications with private advisers, which Democrats read as early stonewalling. Some members, like Josh Gottheimer, are wary of a third impeachment attempt after two failed Senate trials, joking that “the third movie is never good,” while Jeffries, the likely next speaker if Democrats win, would have to referee the divide between that caution and the appetite among roughly 140 Democrats who backed forcing an impeachment vote last December. Trump even said last night that he will be impeached if Democrats take over:

Democratic control would hand multiple committees (oversight, intelligence, judiciary, foreign affairs) subpoena power, and the administration is already preparing for it: White House lawyers have briefed Cabinet secretaries on likely subpoenas and how to respond, anticipating that agencies may stonewall or fight requests in court. Sen. Adam Schiff, who chaired Intelligence during Trump’s first impeachment, said Democrats are weighing a workaround if the administration blocks access, issuing subpoenas directly to Trump’s outside political allies or donor companies instead. Investigators are eyeing Trump Organization dealings abroad and in crypto, contracts awarded to Trump allies, and construction projects including the ballroom and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool renovation, even as Trump’s aides deny any conflicts of interest and say his sons run the business independently.

The political stakes are tight: Democrats need only a handful of seats to flip the House, and Republicans privately worry about holding it, while the Senate is seen as a toss up by both parties. Trump was impeached twice before (2019 over Ukraine aid, 2021 over January 6) and acquitted both times in the Senate, and any member can still file impeachment articles unilaterally, as Al Green did last December before losing his primary. Beyond impeachment, House Democrats plan hearings on grocery and healthcare costs, and Rep. Robert Garcia said his Oversight Committee is spending the summer finalizing its full agenda ahead of a potential majority.

Trade war with Canada:

A trade war has officially erupted between the US and Canada after last-minute talks collapsed just before Trump’s midnight Friday deadline, triggering 50% US tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods, about 5% of everything Canada exports north to south. Prime Minister Mark Carney said Ottawa couldn’t reach a deal that would “meet our objectives,” announced he was suspending negotiations and recalling Canada’s negotiators, and vowed Canada “will match those tariffs dollar for dollar to protect our workers and businesses.” US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer claimed Washington had offered “significant tariff reductions on steel, aluminum, autos, and lumber” plus a “historic economic and national security partnership,” but Carney said last-minute US changes to the terms “were unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”

The breakdown caps a relationship that’s steadily deteriorated since Trump’s return to office, driven by disputes over Canadian provincial alcohol bans, auto and dairy quotas, and steel and aluminum duties, with Trump this week emphasizing the failed deal would have been “great for our farmers” by loosening Canada’s dairy import restrictions. The tariffs Trump is now imposing rely on a little-known, never-before-used 1930s law called Section 338, which unlike his other tariff authorities appears to carry no time limit, meaning these duties could stay in place indefinitely unless a future president removes them, and the move is expected to face legal challenges. The target list reaches far beyond the dairy, alcohol, and auto sectors at the heart of the dispute, spanning close to 500 items, from smartphones and video game consoles to clothing, jewelry, furniture, and even antiques, though Trump has so far spared major Canadian exports like energy, critical minerals, and fish.

Canadian officials and businesses are already bracing for fallout: Carney, right, says his government will roll out “additional measures to support Canadian workers and businesses,” on top of nearly $25 billion in support provided over the past 18 months, while insisting Canada’s economic growth is “accelerating” and that Ottawa will “not allow any nation to determine our future.” On the ground, the trade war is already reshaping commerce, Montreal’s famed Schwartz’s Deli has stopped selling its Black Cherry Cola because of the US tariffs, and Canadian businesses more broadly say they fear closures without a deal in place. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says she’s still “aiming to get the best agreement” for her province specifically, even as the broader standoff between Ottawa and Washington shows no sign of resolving.

Kash Patel’s Girlfriend Suffers Setback:

Country music singer Alexis Wilkins and FBI Director Kash Patel (Photo via Instagram).

FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend, 27-year-old country singer Alexis Wilkins, has lost a defamation lawsuit against former Republican Senate candidate Sam Parker, whom she’d accused of falsely implying in a viral X thread (1.6 million-plus views) that she was a foreign agent sent to manipulate and compromise Patel. A federal judge in the US District Court for the District of Utah ruled the case didn’t belong in that jurisdiction, and the decision drew little attention since neither party commented publicly, with Court Watch first reporting the ruling Friday. Wilkins was seeking $5 million in damages, and the case is one of several similar suits she’s filed against conservative figures making comparable “foreign agent” claims, including ex-FBI agent Kyle Seraphin and influencer Elijah Schaffer.

Wilkins has also sued MS NOW, seeking at least $75,000 in damages in the US District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, over a report alleging she’d repeatedly asked her FBI security detail to drive her friends home after nights out in Nashville. MS NOW journalists Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian, both named in the suit, say they relied on confidential sources for that claim. MS NOW’s legal team has moved to dismiss or transfer the case, citing lack of personal jurisdiction in Tennessee, a defense that mirrors the one that just sank her Utah case against Parker.

Wilkins’ attorneys argue the MS NOW report is false on its face, claiming she had no security detail at the time described and that she doesn’t drink alcohol. Taken together, the pattern across her lawsuits, against Parker, Seraphin, Schaffer, and MS NOW, shows Wilkins aggressively litigating claims about her relationship with Patel and her conduct, even as the jurisdictional dismissal in Utah suggests her broader legal strategy may face similar procedural hurdles going forward. Patel and Wilkins have been in a relationship since 2023, and neither has publicly commented on this week’s ruling.

Other news:

Trump spent Friday night on a furious late-night tirade against Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Thomas Massie after Carlson met with the two, branding them “LOSERS ALL,” calling Carlson “totally irrelevant” and “Low I.Q.” while demanding he take a cognitive test, dismissing Greene as “highly neurotic” and claiming she turned on him only because he stopped taking her calls, blasting Massie as a “failed politician” and “real JERK,” and signing off with the bizarre closer: “PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”

New CDC data shows kindergarten MMR vaccination rates dipped slightly to 92.4% while non-medical exemptions jumped 17% in a single year, from 3.6% to 4.2% nationwide, the largest such increase ever recorded, with at least 280,000 kindergarteners missing the MMR shot. Vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit and other public health officials say the decline reflects confusion sown by the administration, pointing to Trump’s August 10 executive order (signed alongside RFK Jr.) calling for splitting the MMR vaccine into three separate doses and Trump’s own false claims that combined vaccines could be “quite lethal” and that some shots look “like the size of a soda bottle.” Local officials like Cleveland’s Dr. David Margolius say federal confusion is undermining real local progress, even as they push exemption-hit pockets like Idaho and Ohio toward better numbers amid the worst measles year since 1991. The piece also traces Kennedy’s own history as an anti-vaccine activist, including his past paid role at Children’s Health Defense, undisclosed referral fees from vaccine-injury law firms, his firing of the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, and false claims like MMR containing “aborted fetal debris.” Offit summarized Kennedy’s approach bluntly: “he is waging a war against vaccines” as “a zealot” who tells parents on hiking trails not to vaccinate their kids.

Tina Peters, the convicted Colorado election clerk whose prison sentence was commuted by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis in May, traveled to Washington this week for meetings with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and DOJ civil rights chief Harmeet Dhillon, pitching a plan to invoke emergency powers and assert unprecedented federal control over elections before the midterms. It’s her latest stop on a national tour spreading the same false voting-machine conspiracy theories that got her convicted, following a private White House lunch with Trump in June where she was also greeted by JD Vance and Marco Rubio. Colorado AG and gubernatorial candidate Phil Weiser, whose office helped prosecute her, called the Washington reception “perverse,” saying “she is a criminal who compromised elections and election equipment, who is entirely unremorseful,” while Polis defended his commutation but said he’s “disappointed but not surprised” she’s still spreading “baseless and inaccurate claims.” Peters is also reportedly weighing a consulting job in Shasta County, California’s elections office, offered by controversial county clerk Clint Curtis, and touted an already-debunked Census Bureau claim of 24,000 noncitizen votes in 2020 during her meeting with Lutnick.

This weekend’s Freedom 250 Grand Prix IndyCar race around the National Mall has drawn sponsorship from corporations with major business before the federal government, including Boeing ($2.8 million in lobbying last quarter alone), SpaceX, Delta ($300,000 lobbying Transportation and Congress), Shell, and Amazon, fitting a broader Trump-era pattern of corporate money flowing into opaque nonprofits around events like the inauguration, the White House ballroom, and June’s UFC matches on the South Lawn. Sen. Chris Van Hollen criticized Trump for “extracting IndyCar contributions from the same corporations he regulates” instead of lowering costs for Americans, while CREW’s Donald Sherman said the arrangement risks “significant conflict-of-interest concerns” by letting companies “grab the attention and favor of the administration” through donations or ad buys. The White House dismissed the criticism as “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” and organizers say no taxpayer money is funding the race itself, though a local official said D.C. will likely still tap congressional funds for police and other costs. IndyCar chair Bud Denker, who also heads Penske and the race’s nonprofit, spent $35 million transforming the Mall area and has openly touted sponsor placements (”Boeing is at turn six... Starlink is at turn two”), while ethics watchdogs at the Brennan Center flagged VIP packages that could let wealthy attendees buy access to federal officials at the event, calling it something that “contributes to the sense of cynicism that the public increasingly has.”

The FDA says recalled Taylor Farms iceberg lettuce from a Mexican facility may have reached nine more states and territories than previously known (California, Delaware, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, plus D.C. and Puerto Rico), expanding America’s largest-ever cyclosporiasis outbreak, which now totals 10,930 illnesses across 17 states tied specifically to this lettuce. Nationally, CDC data shows over 27,000 cyclospora cases across more than 40 states, with Michigan hardest hit at 14,277 cases, 335 hospitalizations, and two deaths, some linked to Taco Bell locations that have since pulled the lettuce. Separate, still-unexplained outbreaks are also growing, with the largest jumping from 172 to 201 cases in just the last few days, and HHS says it’s working with state and local officials to trace exposure sources. Cyclospora spreads only through human waste contaminating water or produce, and symptoms like explosive diarrhea and severe dehydration typically don’t appear until two weeks after exposure, which is part of why outbreaks like this one are so hard to trace before tainted products disappear from shelves.

At least 16 people were killed and more than 130 wounded, including 22 children, when Russian drones struck a shopping centre in Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskiy’s hometown, on Friday, with a second drone hitting the site roughly half an hour after the first in what Zelenskiy called a deliberate “double tap” targeting emergency responders; nine people, including two children, remained missing as of Saturday, a separate Mykolaiv strike the same day killed four (three of them children), and the attack came a day after a Russian ballistic missile strike killed 17 in Kyiv, part of an escalating air war as the fighting nears the four and a half year mark.

ICE agent Thomas Bailey, 58, was jailed Friday in St. Tammany parish, Louisiana, charged with unauthorized entry after allegedly breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s apartment near Covington without permission while she wasn’t home. Bailey works out of ICE’s Oakdale, Louisiana office, roughly three hours away, and could face up to six years in prison and a $1,000 fine if convicted. ICE said it couldn’t comment on the specific case but stressed it “takes all allegations of employee misconduct seriously” and that “the vast majority” of its employees act with “professionalism and honor.” The arrest adds to mounting scrutiny of ICE’s hiring practices amid rapid expansion under Trump’s deportation push, following AP reporting that at least two dozen ICE employees and contractors have faced criminal charges since 2020, and border chief Tom Homan’s admission that an ICE officer involved in a fatal Maine shooting likely “should have ever cleared vetting.” A recent PBS/NPR/Marist poll found 65% of Americans believe ICE has gone too far in its immigration crackdown. Body camera footage shows ICE agents using racial slurs during immigration operations:

California AG Rob Bonta’s office and Paramount Skydance are set to meet Monday for settlement talks aimed at resolving the multistate antitrust lawsuit challenging Paramount’s $111 billion purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, ahead of a March trial. The push comes after Gov. Gavin Newsom, gubernatorial frontrunner Xavier Becerra, and LA Mayor Karen Bass all signaled they’d prefer the case settle rather than go to trial, with Newsom saying “there are many meetings going on” and that he’s “appreciative” of Bonta’s stated preference to resolve disputes “in the boardroom instead of the courtroom.” Bonta, who sued alongside 11 other state AGs in July over concerns spanning theatrical film distribution and basic-cable licensing, insisted any settlement talks would be “unproductive absent robust structural remedies,” warning the merger as proposed “will mean higher costs, less competition, lower wages, job cuts, and fewer movies and TV shows.” Newsom also said he takes seriously Paramount’s threat to leave California over the litigation, a threat Bonta has separately called a form of “blackmail,” and momentum for a settlement has been building from other stakeholders too, including the country’s three largest theater chains, two Hollywood unions, and roughly a third of state legislators representing LA County.

Karoline Leavitt confirmed Friday that after leaving her post as White House press secretary at the end of August, she’ll join MAGA Inc., the Trump-aligned super PAC sitting on over $350 million ahead of the midterms — a role she held before joining Trump’s 2024 campaign. She hasn’t specified her title but said “you guys will still see me all the time,” and Friday’s flight to Myrtle Beach for a Lindsey Graham rally was her last official trip as press secretary. Trump has called her a future “top adviser” and said he’s received an unprecedented number of applications for her replacement, with CNN’s Scott Jennings and Katie Miller (wife of Stephen Miller) reportedly among the top contenders. Leavitt says she’ll still join Trump on the midterm campaign trail, including September’s GOP convention in Dallas. 

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Important Saturday Night Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 22, 2026. Canada and the US are now in a full-blown trade war, 50% tariffs are hitting $20 billion in Canadian goods, and Prime Minister Mark Carney says the breakdown comes down to one thing: Canada showed up united, and the US didn’t, a point he made with a pointed jab about “coordination” inside the Trump administration.

Also today: a new financial disclosure shows Trump made over 1,000 stock trades in a single month, part of a pattern of more than 21,000 trades in 2025 alone, raising fresh questions about how a sitting president is this active in the market while setting the very trade and tariff policy that moves it. Plus a CNN review finds a top Trump aide flooded Twitter with over 150 posts on January 6th, a mother is detained by ICE while recovering in the hospital from a car crash, a service member says his father was taken by ICE while he was deployed fighting in Iran, and a full rundown of everything else, from a federal court striking down Trump’s 75-country visa ban to Congo’s fight against the fastest-spreading Ebola outbreak in history.

Here’s the news:

Canada Trade War:

After a last-minute breakdown in trade talks Friday night, the US imposed 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods early Saturday, prompting Prime Minister Mark Carney to vow “dollar-for-dollar” retaliatory tariffs on US steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp, paper, and electronics starting September 8th. Carney said the US “asked too much, and they offered too little,” accusing Washington of proposing new terms in the final days that were “uneconomic, unfair” and undermined the deal’s reliability, despite Canada offering concessions like restoring US alcohol to store shelves. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer countered that Canada “declined to finalize the trade deal under the terms agreed earlier this week” after the US offered “significant tariff reductions on steel, aluminum, autos, and lumber,” and said no new talks are planned as the US moves ahead with its own countermeasures. The tariffs rely on the little-used, Depression-era Section 338 law, which unlike Trump’s other tariff authorities carries no apparent time limit, meaning the duties could remain indefinitely absent a legal challenge or a future president’s reversal. Analysts estimate Canada could lose up to 90,000 jobs and 0.3% to 0.6% of GDP from the new tariffs, with Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia expected to be hit hardest given their manufacturing, auto, and export-heavy economies.

Provincial leaders have rallied behind Carney’s hardline stance, with Ontario Premier Doug Ford pledging “full support for a strong response, tariff for tariff, dollar for dollar” and British Columbia Premier David Eby declaring “our politeness should never be mistaken for weakness.” The breakdown caps months of on-and-off negotiations in which the US sought Canadian concessions including dropping retaliatory auto tariffs, loosening dairy quotas for US cheese producers, and lifting provincial bans on American alcohol sales, the last of which the Distilled Spirits Council says cut US spirits exports to Canada by more than 70% year-over-year. Business groups on both sides warned a deal’s collapse would hurt everyone, with the Canadian Chamber of Commerce’s Candace Laing calling the new tariffs “a body blow to North American competitiveness” that leaves small exporters questioning what they can still afford. Public opinion is split on how far to push back, with an Abacus Data poll finding about 36% of Canadians support retaliation and 30% prefer continued negotiation, leaving Carney needing to convince the public that standing firm against Washington is worth the near-term economic pain. The dispute marks a serious rupture in what had been one of the world’s most deeply integrated trading relationships, with Canada sending roughly 70% of its exports to the US.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has pushed the fight further by urging Ottawa to target retaliatory tariffs specifically at states that backed Trump, including Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Texas, and Wisconsin, arguing in a letter to Carney that Canada should hit “politically significant states to the current administration’s base of support.” Alabama is a notable target given Canada is its largest export market, having received $4.3 billion in Alabama goods in 2025, representing 18% of the state’s total exports, while also ranking among Alabama’s top import sources. Ford also called for treating Canada’s electricity, energy, and critical minerals infrastructure as “Team Canada assets” to strengthen the country’s negotiating leverage, framing the broader fight bluntly: “we have to use every tool in our toolbox to make sure, as Donald Trump is trying to inflict pain on every Canadian, that we inflict pain right back.” It remains unclear whether Carney’s government will actually pursue state-targeted tariffs, which would represent a shift from Canada’s current sector-based retaliation approach, and Alabama officials have not yet responded to the proposal. The idea surfaces as both countries brace for a prolonged standoff, with Carney’s broader sector-based countermeasures already set to take effect September 8th regardless of whether the state-specific approach gains traction.

Senator Susan Collins, who is vulnerable, came out against the tariffs:

When asked whether Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s involvement in the final days of trade talks was an impediment to reaching a deal, Prime Minister Mark Carney deflected the question back to the US administration but couldn’t resist a pointed jab at Washington’s internal coordination, saying the Canadian negotiating team was unified with everyone clear on the country’s objectives, then adding, “you cannot say that about the US administration,” implying that mixed signals or infighting on the American side, rather than any single official, were what ultimately sank the negotiations.

Trump’s Stock Trading:

A financial disclosure published Saturday by the US Office of Government Ethics shows President Trump made more than 1,000 securities trades in June alone, including significant purchases of Berkshire Hathaway, Visa, Mastercard, and Cintas. Because the filing only requires disclosing a value range rather than exact figures, the total value of June’s transactions falls somewhere between $78.1 million and $263.1 million. The single largest transaction was a June 22nd sale of between $5 million and $25 million in a Vanguard exchange-traded fund. The scale of this trading activity, even within just one month, is unusual for a sitting president.

June’s activity is part of a much larger pattern documented over the past year: Trump made more than 21,000 securities trades in 2025 alone, often in bursts tied to market events he himself created, with total value estimated between $600 million and $1.86 billion. Disclosures have occasionally shown him buying and selling the same security on the same day, a trading pattern more typical of an active trader than a passive investor. The sheer volume raises questions about how closely his personal financial interests intersect with the market-moving policy decisions he makes as president.

The White House maintains there is no conflict of interest because Trump’s investments are independently managed, and his son Eric, executive vice president of the Trump Organization, has said the assets are held in a blind trust. Critics note that a true blind trust typically means the office holder has no knowledge of or input into specific holdings, which is difficult to reconcile with such an active, high-volume trading pattern. Bloomberg’s report does not allege any specific instance of trades timed to policy decisions, but it lays out the scale of the activity for public scrutiny. The disclosure was reported by Bloomberg’s Hadriana Lowenkron, a White House correspondent covering the administration.

Other news:

A CNN review of Natalie Harp’s now-removed Twitter account found she posted more than 150 tweets on January 6, 2021, urging Republicans to “FIGHT FOR TRUMP,” amplifying Trump’s stolen-election claims, and promoting Rudy Giuliani’s “trial by combat” call before the Capitol riot. After the Capitol was breached, Harp, then a One America News host, falsely claimed the rioters “were not Trump supporters” and spread unfounded reports that Antifa had infiltrated the mob, later praising lawmakers like Josh Hawley, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the six senators who voted to sustain election objections as “patriots.” University of Akron political scientist David B. Cohen described her as “a totally loyal sycophantic adviser” who gives Trump the reverence he craves, and CNN’s review found her devotion dating back to 2016, including tweets defending him during his 2019 impeachment and declaring Biden’s win “A COUP.” Harp, who has served as a close Trump aide during his second term, was thrust into public attention this week after Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff named her in a floor speech and the Daily Beast published letters she reportedly wrote pledging her loyalty to the president; neither Harp nor the White House responded to CNN’s request for comment.

Grace Stephanie Calero Cabanilla, 39, and her 19-year-old daughter Giulianna were recovering at HCA Florida Poinciana Hospital in Kissimmee after a rollover crash around August 20th when Polk County deputies, operating under a 287(g) agreement with ICE, questioned the pair’s immigration status and turned them over to federal agents, who detained the mother despite her pending asylum case and valid work permit; the daughter, who holds a visa valid through 2030, suffered a seizure after watching her mother restrained, and the family has since launched a GoFundMe as public reaction to the enforcement action remains sharply divided.

A 1-year-old baby appeared unrepresented in Arizona immigration court this week and was instructed to file an asylum application before the next hearing or face deportation, with the USCRI attorney present staying silent rather than objecting, according to court filings in an ongoing legal dispute between immigrant-rights nonprofits and the Trump administration. The incident stems from the July 31st lapse of a contract with the Acacia Center for Justice, which had distributed federal funds to nearly 100 legal providers representing over 24,000 unaccompanied migrant children, leaving many kids to face court alone despite two new HHS contracts awarded to USCRI ($20 million) and anti-trafficking group Our Rescue ($158 million). Nonprofit leaders have documented other cases of USCRI attorneys staying silent during proceedings, including an August 6th California hearing where an unrepresented minor requested voluntary departure without any objection, and the suing nonprofits argue HHS has created “a façade of compliance” that’s produced chaos rather than actual representation. An ORR spokesperson said USCRI is still assessing which children remain represented amid unclear transitions, while an ORR official told the court that attorneys have covered all hearings for 1,800 kids in the agency’s care without complications; USCRI and Our Rescue did not respond to requests for comment.

A service member says his father was taken by ICE while he was deployed aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln for over nine months fighting the war in Iran.

Per his post, his father has a driver’s license, social security card, and a work permit.

A New York federal judge, Jeannette Vargas, struck down the Trump administration’s policy suspending visa processing for citizens of 75 countries, ruling that Secretary of State Marco Rubio exceeded his statutory authority in issuing the ban. The court found the rule unlawfully bypassed consular officers, who hold statutory discretion over individual visa eligibility decisions. The lawsuit challenging the ban was brought by two nonprofit organizations along with 11 individuals directly affected by the suspensions. Immigration advocates hailed the ruling as a major win for the rule of law and for family reunification.

Congo has received more than 16,250 doses of the Ervebo Ebola vaccine, part of a planned 70,000-dose shipment from the WHO and partners, as the country battles the fastest-spreading Ebola outbreak in history. The outbreak is caused by the rare Bundibugyo virus, which has no approved treatment or vaccine of its own, though Ervebo (licensed for other Ebola strains) may offer some protection according to the WHO. The current outbreak has recorded 2,557 deaths among 5,375 confirmed cases across six provinces and is on pace to surpass the 2014-2016 West Africa outbreak that killed over 11,000 people, with Africa CDC data showing transmission hasn’t yet peaked and could triple. Containment efforts are being hampered by armed conflict between the government and rebel groups controlling key hot-spot cities, attacks on medical staff and facilities, a mobile labor population and conflict-displaced people, and a lack of basic health infrastructure. More vaccine doses are expected to arrive early next week.

Nine months after Trump promised his drug-pricing deals would expand Medicaid access to GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound, only Indiana has publicly signed on, 29 state Medicaid programs have declined to participate, and access has actually shrunk, with five states (California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina) ending coverage over the past year and Rhode Island set to follow in October. States cite budget fears reinforced by California’s experience, where projected GLP-1 costs were set to nearly quadruple to $800 million by 2028-29, plus looming Medicaid cuts from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act; Louisiana’s Medicaid director Seth Gold said he wants coverage but won’t risk having to “contract or withdraw” it later like other states have. Under the model, states get Wegovy at $245 per monthly dose (Indiana will cover $85.16 of that per person) in exchange for adopting standardized criteria including a BMI of 35 or higher, but participation requires new budgeted spending that states like Florida and Oregon say would need fresh legislative appropriations, while New Jersey and Kentucky law outright bars Medicaid weight-loss drug coverage. Seven states are still weighing participation, and experts say most others are taking a “wait-and-see” approach, watching how Indiana’s Medicaid budget holds up over the next one to three years as federal cuts phase in before committing either way.

Federal prosecutors pursuing charges against former FBI director James Comey for allegedly threatening Trump cited passages from Comey’s novel FDR Drive to bolster their case, arguing its fictional protagonist, a federal prosecutor who targets a far-right media personality, shows Comey believes such figures should have “something... done” about them. PEN America’s legal director Mara Gassmann condemned the move as a “desperate Hail Mary” that compounds First Amendment concerns, warning that “extreme caution should be taken any time creative works are used to support criminal charges.” The underlying charges stem from a May 2025 Instagram post where Comey, vacationing in North Carolina, arranged seashells to spell “8647,” which prosecutors say is unambiguously a threat against the 47th president using “86” slang for getting rid of someone; Comey has said the connection “never occurred to me” and took the post down since he opposes violence of any kind. Prosecutors also suggested in their filing that Comey had a financial motive to stir controversy to boost book sales, though the novel has sold just 6,471 copies according to Circana BookScan. Comey’s attorneys are seeking dismissal, arguing no reasonable observer would read “86 47” as a personal threat and calling the prosecution “vindictive and selective,” rooted in what they describe as Trump’s years-long campaign to punish Comey for protected speech tied to his handling of the 2016 Russia investigation.

The Justice Department reached a $400 million settlement with TikTok and parent company ByteDance to dismiss claims that the app illegally collected data on millions of children under 13 without parental consent and failed to honor deletion requests, resolving a lawsuit the Biden administration filed in 2024, while also vacating a separate 2019 FTC privacy consent decree tied to TikTok’s predecessor Musical.ly; DOJ cited “significant changes” to TikTok’s management, ownership, and privacy practices, including its restructuring as a joint venture under US investors (with ByteDance retaining a 19.9% stake), but former Biden-era FTC public affairs director Douglas Farrar blasted the deal as “a Trump bailout for Larry Ellison,” calling the violations “the worst we saw” and the fine “a fraction of what the government should have sought.”

A Texas appeals court slashed the $50 million judgment Alex Jones owed Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis down to about $6 million, with the Third Court of Appeals citing state damage caps in a unanimous ruling that left $4.1 million in compensatory damages intact but cut over $45 million in punitive damages to $1.5 million. The ruling doesn’t touch a separate $1.25 billion judgment against Jones in Connecticut, where he was also found liable for defaming Newtown families who say his followers, believing his hoax claims, subjected them to death threats, harassment, and abuse. Jones called the Texas ruling “a gigantic victory for the First Amendment” and says he’ll keep appealing to the state Supreme Court, though the court did not overturn the underlying defamation finding against him. Heslin and Lewis’s attorney Mark Bankston dismissed the ruling as “irrelevant,” noting Jones still faces over a billion dollars in total liability and that Sandy Hook families have yet to collect any money from him as he wages appeals through state and bankruptcy courts. Jones took Infowars off the air in April and now streams from new platforms, while satirical outlet The Onion’s bid to take over Infowars’ branding remains on hold amid the ongoing bankruptcy liquidation proceedings.

Russian drone and missile strikes killed at least seven people across Ukraine on Saturday, including two people killed in a ballistic missile strike on the Kyiv region and one killed when missiles hit railway infrastructure in Kyiv itself, while a Ukrainian drone strike on Russia’s Krasnodar region killed two children and wounded two adults. Zaporizhzhia was also hit hard, with a nighttime drone strike killing one person and a daytime attack killing three more and wounding 15, plus three more wounded in a strike on a minibus in the regional capital. The attacks came a day after Russian drones hit a shopping center in Zelenskyy’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih, a strike Ukrainian officials say has now killed 16 people, left nine still missing, and wounded 130 in what Zelenskyy called a deliberate “double-tap” targeting rescuers; Kryvyi Rih has been struck repeatedly through the war, including an April 2025 attack that killed 20 people. The UN says Kyiv was among the hardest-hit cities in July alone, with at least 54 civilians killed and 202 wounded, as Russia exploits Ukraine’s shortage of Patriot interceptors to intensify ballistic missile attacks on the capital. Ukraine, meanwhile, has pushed the war onto Russian soil with long-range drone strikes on oil facilities and retail warehouses, including a strike Saturday on the Novokuibyshevsk oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region, roughly 620 miles from the front line.

Trump Election-Meddling, Autocracy-Creation

New York Times, Postal Service Publishes Finalized Plan to Restrict Mail Ballots, Adam Sella, Aug. 22, 2026 (print ed.). The plan complies with President Trump’s executive order to restrict mail voting, which was blocked by federal courts and is under review at the Supreme Court.

The Postal Service on Friday published regulations that would restrict mail voting, its latest effort to comply with President Trump’s call to restrict the popular practice just months before the midterm elections.

In a 95-page final rule, the Postal Service clarified how it would carry out an executive order Mr. Trump signed in March, which sought to restrict mail ballots and create state-by-state lists of citizens to help determine voting eligibility.

In the rule, the Postal Service said that it would deliver mail ballots only in states that shared voter data with the federal agency.

Before the Postal Service accepts ballots into its system, the agency would review every envelope for compliance with the new standards, including by checking that the recipient was enrolled with the Postal Service to receive a mail ballot.

If the regulations are enacted, the Postal Service would not deliver mail ballots to states that do not comply.

Mr. Trump’s executive order was largely blocked by federal courts this summer, and the Postal Service said in its rule published on Friday that it would “not take actions to implement the rule specifically for the 2026 election unless and until the government obtains relief from those injunctions.” In a filing to the Supreme Court, the Justice Department said that the government would not enforce the final rule unless the Supreme Court ruled in its favor.

The Supreme Court is reviewing the issue and could rule at any time.

A Postal Service spokesman on Friday declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly made unfounded claims that mail voting is “cheating,” even as he has voted by mail in multiple elections, including earlier this week.

The president has admitted that combating fraud is not the only reason to target the practice. In March, he told Republican lawmakers that passing a strict voter identification law cracking down on mail ballots, which Democrats now use more than Republicans, would “guarantee the midterms” for his party.

New York Times, Opinion: Trump’s Election Meddling Erodes Our Democracy, The Editorial Board, Aug. 20, 2026. The surest sign of democratic collapse is the unwillingness of an elected political party to leave office. The party rewrites laws and changes election rules to prevent its opponents from gaining power. The shift often starts slowly but can ultimately end in autocracy.

President Trump has taken worrisome steps down this path since returning to office in January 2025. He has directed Republican-run states to enact newly gerrymandered maps to increase the chances that Republicans maintain control of Congress even if they receive fewer votes this year. He has tried to pass legislation that could keep many eligible voters from voting. And he has sent signals that he may use the power of the federal government to disallow legitimate ballots this fall. On July 16, Mr. Trump took the remarkable step of giving a prime-time White House address devoted to lies and misleading statements about voter fraud.

The New York Times editorial board is tracking 12 categories of democratic erosion in the United States, based on historical patterns and interviews with experts. Our index places the United States on a scale of 0 to 10 for each category. Zero represents the United States before Mr. Trump began his second term — not perfect, surely, but still a strong democracy. Ten represents the condition in a true autocracy, such as China, Iran and Russia. Based on Mr. Trump’s statements and actions about the 2026 midterms, we are moving our assessment of one of the categories — manipulating the law to stay in power— up one notch, to Level 3:

Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has become an enforcer of his personal interests, targeting people for legally dubious reasons while creating a culture in which his allies can act with impunity. The targets include Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, and several Democratic. True authoritarians go much further, but Mr. Trump has already undone the post-Watergate depoliticization of the Justice Department.

Together, Mr. Trump’s actions have left constitutional scholars and democracy experts anxious about this year’s midterm elections. They wonder if the Trump administration may use false pretenses to send federal agents to Democratic-leaning areas to intimidate people and suppress voting. Experts are also worried that after the elections, Mr. Trump may pressure legislators not to certify the winners, as he unsuccessfully tried to do after the 2020 presidential election. Even if he does not take these extreme steps, the gerrymandering campaign he has demanded has probably tilted the competition for control of the House of Representatives at least 2.5 percentage points in Republicans’ direction.

It remains unclear how far Mr. Trump will go this fall. He does often make statements that amount to little. But his extended attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election should make clear that the threat is real. He has demonstrated that he prioritizes his own interests over the national interest. He is often willing to defy bipartisan traditions and even act illegally.

Politicians from both major parties and federal judges should be prepared to push back forcefully against any attempt he and his allies make to interfere with the 2026 elections. If the president succeeds in perverting the results, he will be emboldened to take similarly unconstitutional steps in 2028.

This editorial is our fourth version of the autocracy index, which we first published in October 2025. The updated version includes chronological lists of the antidemocratic steps Mr. Trump has taken in all 12 categories, and we plan to update them again in the months ahead.

U.S. Trade Wars, Tariffs, Economy 

New York Times, U.S. Economy Could Feel the Sting From Trade War With Canada, Tony Rommm, Aug. 22, 2026. A tit-for-tat trade fight between the two allies could create new headaches for consumers and businesses already stung by high prices.

Since President Trump has returned to office, the United States and Canada have repeatedly come close to an all-out trade war — only for Mr. Trump to dial back some of his harshest attacks against one of America’s closest allies.

But that period of relative calm came to an end on Saturday, as new 50 percent tariffs from Washington took effect, drawing a pointed threat from Canada to respond in kind. The resulting clash left the two North American neighbors barreling toward a dangerous tit-for-tat escalation, one that may yet inflict real harm on the U.S. economy.

For Mr. Trump, the return to trade brinkmanship reaffirmed a time-old truth: His tariffs are taxes on imports, meaning some of the cost of his latest duties may ultimately fall hardest on U.S. importers stung by years of persistently high prices.

Although Mr. Trump’s tariffs only cover a small subset of Canadian goods, the consequences could quickly spiral. If Canada retaliates, and Mr. Trump does the same, the result could be a series of new shocks for the U.S. economy at a time when it is already weathering plenty.

“The bigger deal is uncertainty,” said Scott Lincicome, the vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Canada? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Mr. Lincicome said that volatility had pervaded Mr. Trump’s entire second term, as his ever-shifting tariffs — raised and lowered sometimes by the stroke of a pen — roil Wall Street, anger the courts, infuriate U.S. allies and help to drive up the price of consumer goods domestically.

With Canada, though, Mr. Lincicome said the new clash could weigh heavily on businesses that transact across the U.S.-Canadian border. The retaliatory tariff increases could affect prices, and consequently translate to “slightly less investment, slightly less economic activity,” while the confusing trade climate persists.

In the end, Mr. Trump could still avert catastrophe and strike a deal with Canada as soon as this weekend. But, by Saturday morning, that appeared unlikely: Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative, told Fox News that there were no new talks planned with his Canadian counterparts, adding that the administration was “moving forward” with its tariffs. In response, Canada showed no sign that it planned to back down. Hours later, Mark Carney, the country’s prime minister, threatened to unveil its own tariff measures against the United States shortly after Labor Day, targeting sectors including agriculture, steel and electronics. 

  At the World Economic Forum on Jan. 21, 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada took a stand against President Trump’s desire for the United States to own Greenland, and called on medium-size countries to stand up to larger powers (Associated Press photo by Markus Schreiber via New York Times).

New York Times, ‘Attacked’ by Trump on Trade, Canada Is ‘at War’ With U.S., Carney Says, Ian Austen, Aug. 22, 2026. Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a powerful speech to Canadians on Saturday morning, hours after ordering negotiators to suspend U.S. trade talks despite President Trump’s punishing tariffs.

The morning after he pulled negotiators from trade talks in Washington and set off a new round of American tariffs, Prime Minister Mark Carney called the U.S. proposal “a bad deal” and said Canada was “at war” with the United States.

“We’ve recognized from the start that America has changed,” he said in an address to Canadians on Saturday. “We recognize that sometimes, its signature is written in pencil.”

“We cannot accept what they offered and we will not give what they asked,” he added. “We were not prepared to compromise Canada’s sovereignty or undermine our key industries.” 

In a muscular, 22-minute speech that let Canadians — and Americans — know exactly where he stands, Mr. Carney said that Canada was under attack by President Trump’s punishing tariffs.

“You’re at war when you’re attacked, and we got attacked,” Mr. Carney said.

But unlike his electrifying speech at Davos that spoke of a rupture in the world order, Mr. Carney explicitly named the United States as an aggressor and a threat to Canada and the global economy.

The latest U.S. tariffs, he said, “are designed to hurt and divide us. They are a miscalculation because Canadians will always take care of each other. We know we’re stronger together.”

On Friday night Mr. Carney blamed unspecified last-minute demands for the collapse of negotiations, saying that they were “unfair, uneconomic and called into question the reliability of any deal.” Minutes later, the United States went ahead with previous plans and introduced 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian exports. 

New York Times, Canada-U.S. Trade War Escalates as Talks Collapse, Matina Stevis-GridneffIan Austen and Ana Swanson, Updated Aug. 22, 2026. Intense negotiations to stave off new levies by the Trump administration ended in an impasse as Mark Carney suspended talks. U.S. tariffs on Canada, and retaliatory tariffs on the U.S., will come into effect.

Crucial trade talks between the United States and Canada to stave off punishing new tariffs by the Trump administration on Canadian goods collapsed late Friday, with Canada saying it would retaliate “dollar for dollar.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada said he had decided to suspend the talks because the American side had introduced last-minute terms that were “unfair, uneconomic, and called into question the reliability of any deal.”

He added that the talks, which had been going on for weeks and had intensified in the past few days, had marked important progress but had ultimately “not been enough to meet our objectives for Canadians.”

United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told reporters that Canada had walked away from the negotiating table, minutes before a deadline ushering in new 50 percent tariffs by the Trump administration on a broad range of Canadian goods.

“Tonight, Canada declined to finalize the trade deal under the terms agreed earlier this week, despite the U.S. offer to Canada to receive the best treatment of any major exporter to our market,” Mr. Greer said on a virtual briefing with the press.

“New demands and walk backs of other commitments by Canada have upended the careful balance reached in the past days,” Mr. Greer added.

Shortly before Mr. Greer’s statement to the press, U.S. Customs and Border Protection sent out guidance for importers saying that the Canadian products that the president had identified would face tariffs after 12:01 a.m.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Canada? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Speaking to reporters, a U.S. official said that Canada wanted concessions that the United States wasn’t prepared to give, particularly when it came to the automotive sector, as well as trade in steel, aluminum and lumber.

If Canada does retaliate, the official said, Mr. Trump would be provided with options “to level out the playing field once again.”ImagePresident Trump at the White House on Friday.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

In his statement, Mr. Carney said Canada would retaliate against the new tariffs, which will affect $20 billion in Canadian exports by the U.S. administration’s calculations, “to protect our workers and businesses.”

In addition to making hundreds of Canadian products like cheese and hockey sticks price-prohibitive in the U.S. market, the tariffs will further fracture the once-close relationship between the countries, which has drastically deteriorated since Mr. Trump returned to office, targeted Canada with tariffs and repeatedly proposed that it be annexed as the 51st state.

Negotiators from both countries have been cooped up in the United States trade representative’s office in Washington for up to 10 hours a day for several days this week hammering out the details of the failed agreement.

Just hours before the two sides announced negotiations had been suspended, Mr. Trump said he thought a deal could be reached with Canada. On Tuesday he declared that the two nations had reached a deal aside from working out some details and had extended an earlier deadline that would have introduced the new tariffs.

But Mr. Carney made good on his promise to walk away from a deal he didn’t think was good enough. Polling suggests that many Canadians support his decision. A recent Léger poll found that 56 percent of respondents are opposed to any further trade concessions from Canada.

He also got an early endorsement for his decision to walk away from talks from Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province and home to the country’s important auto industry. “As we fight to protect Canadian sovereignty and economic security, everything needs to be on the table. Ontario is ready to do its part,” Mr. Ford said.ImageThe General Motors plant in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada, on Wednesday.Credit...Carlos Osorio/Reuters

In addition to fending off the new tariffs, Canada wanted to use the talks to roll back and ideally eliminate tariffs of up to 50 percent that Mr. Trump has imposed on the country’s steel, aluminum and autos. Canadian negotiators also hoped to achieve some relief on softwood lumber tariffs that go back decades and were augmented with additional tariffs from Mr. Trump.

The U.S. side wanted the eight Canadian provinces that had barred American wine and spirits from their government-owned alcohol distribution systems to end the boycotts, which were brought in last year in response to Mr. Trump’s trade attack. It also wanted Canada to drop its retaliatory tariff on American cars and to change how American dairy products are allowed into Canada’s tightly controlled market.

In the final days of negotiations, it appeared that Canada had become resigned to only succeeding in reducing, not eliminating, the current tariffs.

Leading into Friday’s talks, several people in both countries briefed on the negotiations described U.S. proposals that still maintained substantial, if lower, tariffs on the two metals and autos.

They said that the plan would cut steel and aluminum tariffs to 25 percent from 50 percent. But only a limited quantity of Canadian steel would be allowed at that reduced rate, with the balance still facing a 50 percent tariff.

Under the plan, the people briefed said, autos would fall to 15 percent from 25 percent, with the rate being adjusted for American parts, which typically make up about half the value of a vehicle made in Canada. Executives and analysts in the auto industry said that would still leave production in Canada unprofitable and likely doom assembly plants in the country.

While the Supreme Court struck down most of Mr. Trump’s tariffs in February, both last year’s tariffs and the new measures against Canada were brought under other trade laws that were not covered by the decision.

The legal provision that Mr. Trump has used to impose the new 50 percent tariffs on Canada, Section 338, stems from a 1930 law and has never been used before. The tariffs could face legal challenges in the coming weeks.

The development was bad news for consumers and businesses on both sides of the border, warned Candace Laing, who leads the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.

“This will be a body blow to North American competitiveness in this self-defeating trade saga,” she said. “Americans will see their costs go up, and Canadians will see customers, investment and small businesses disappear.”

New York Times, News Analysis: Carney Stands Up to Trump in Trade War Despite the Risks, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Aug. 22, 2026. Canada’s prime minister walked away from what he thought was a bad trade deal with the United States. Many Canadians are behind him, but it will be costly.

On Friday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada did something that few other world leaders before him have dared to do.

After days of intense trade negotiations with the United States, with less than an hour to go on a midnight deadline for a new round of tariffs from the Trump administration, Mr. Carney instructed his negotiators to walk away.

Then, he announced that once 50 percent tariffs came into effect on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods, he would order retaliatory tariffs on the United States “dollar for dollar.”

In a statement, Mr. Carney said he had gone into the trade talks in good faith, seeking “the best deal for Canadians” but “never a deal at any price or on any deadline.”

By walking away, Mr. Carney chose a road that no major U.S. ally has taken: With his country’s economy on the line, he stood up to President Trump and refused to accept the administration’s offer of a new trade relationship with tariffs permanently baked in. Britain, the European Union and other major U.S. trading partners have agreed to smaller deals that have been volatile and often left them worse off.

The collapse of the talks came after Mr. Trump declared on Tuesday that the deal was practically done.

Mr. Carney never echoed that. Over the week, as negotiators spent long hours in Washington huddled in the office of the U.S. trade representative, Mr. Carney appeared optimistic but insisted that there was still work to be done.

Until there wasn’t.

Trump Derangement, Greed, Obsessions, Oppressions, Team Cover-up 

Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: He really IS Stark-Raving Mad, This proves it, Robert Reich, right, author and former U.S. Labor Secretary and University of California professor, Aug. 21, 2026. I need to inform you of a very serious matter.

Trump is threatening the Center for American Progress, a prominent liberal think tank, with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a report concluding that his deployment of the National Guard to cities across the country has had little effect on reducing violent crime.

This is nuts, for several reasons.

First and most obviously, his lawsuit violates the First Amendment. Even if the Center for American Progress’s report is factually wrong — and all the studies I’ve seen on the subject suggest that it’s accurate — the Center has a constitutional right to publish it.

It’s bad enough for a sitting president to file defamation lawsuits against news organizations like the BBC and The New York Times, as Trump has done. It’s utterly absurd for him to file a defamation lawsuit against a research organization that’s come up with an analysis and conclusion he dislikes.

If this lawsuit ever reaches a federal court — and I hope it does — the court should not only throw it out but impose a fine on Trump for filing such a completely frivolous complaint.

Second, for a president of the United States to employ a personal lawyer to make such a legal threat takes Trump’s rage to a new and bizarre level.

It’s also irresponsible for any lawyer to agree to carry out this threat. This alone is grounds for disbarring the lawyer in question, Alejandro Brito. Brito has filed multiple failed suits on Trump’s behalf. Last month, a federal judge in Florida referred Brito for potential disciplinary proceedings after ruling that a suit he filed for the president against the IRS amounted to an improper exercise in self-dealing.

Third, if anyone wanted evidence that Trump has lost it — I mean, truly lost it, as in totally nuts — this is the smoking gun. Trump’s rage at opponents has now morphed into an attack on a group for merely trying to issue a report, the conclusions of which he finds offensive. No sane president would do this.

I’m going to say this as clearly as I can: Trump’s mind has gone. He is capable of doing almost anything, and evidently the people around him are unable to control him. His continuation in the presidency constitutes a clear and present danger to the United States. The 25th amendment must be invoked, or he needs to be impeached and convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors. Now. 

Hope for America, Opinion: The president is falling apart, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 21, 2026. At 7:05 tonight, Donald Trump was seen offstage through a slit in the curtain, wearing a deep navy suit and bright red tie as he made his first pass at the stage. Not even a minute later, he emerged, energized and ready to go. Stepping forward, he stopped to soak in the cheering crowd as Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” blasted through the speakers. As he headed toward the podium, he approached the steps and gripped the handrail with one hand before grabbing it with both and using it to catapult himself toward the stage.

At 7:09, with sweat already pooling on his face, he launched into an hour and 20 minutes of pure chaos and madness, stopping at one point to tell the crowded room that Melania Trump hates when he dances to YMCA. “She hates when I dance to that great... to the gay national anthem. That’s what it is. It’s called the gay national anthem.” He warned the crowd that he would be impeached if Democrats take back Congress. And then he declared that there really is no Republican Party anymore. It is all MAGA.

He is not exaggerating when he says the Republican Party as we knew it is gone. He is describing what he has built. A political movement where no internal dissent, institutional checks, or voices inside the room feel safe, or are allowed to say no. When there is nothing left to push back against a president, all that remains is domination.

Today, his Pentagon showed us exactly what that kind of unchecked power looks like when it reaches the last independent voices standing between the American military and state-run propaganda. They fired three people from Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that has served American troops since the Civil War. The reason they were fired is the part that concerns me the most.

Max Lederer is an Army veteran who joined Stars and Stripes in 1992 and served as its publisher for 19 years. Erik Slavin was named editor-in-chief last September after joining the paper in 2005 as a reporter in Japan. He went on to embed with American forces in Iraq, report from South Korea, and oversee news operations in Europe and the Middle East. Lara Korte joined in 2024 and has spent the last six months reporting from the Middle East on the Iran conflict, living alongside the servicemembers and military families whose stories she was telling the world. All three received separation notices on Friday, all citing insubordination.

And what was the insubordination? What was the act so dangerous, so threatening to the Department of Defense, that it required the removal of three journalists from a newspaper that has existed for over 160 years? They defended the idea that the troops deserve the truth.

In a CBS Sunday Morning segment that aired last month, Slavin was asked whether he had any red lines. He answered the way any journalist with integrity would. He said that if the Pentagon tried to kill an accurate story and replace it with one written by its own public affairs office, that would be a red line. Korte said something just as direct and apparently just as unforgivable: “I’m working for Stars and Stripes. Not for the Pentagon, not for any administration, not for any policymaker. I’m here to cover the military community.”

That is what got them fired. No breach of ethics or failure of any kind. They said what the mission of their newspaper has always been, and the Pentagon treated it as an act of defiance.

But here is the part that I keep coming back to, the detail that tells us everything about how far this has gone. According to a source who spoke to Fox News Digital, the Pentagon did not simply decide to fire Slavin and Korte on its own. Pentagon leadership directed Max Lederer to do it. They told the publisher of the troops’ own newspaper to fire his editor and his reporter for defending press freedom on television. Lederer refused, so they fired him too.

This is a travesty. The man who spent 19 years serving the troops’ right to a free press was fired because he would not become the instrument of its own destruction. He chose his journalistic integrity over his job. He chose the mission he was given over an order that betrayed it, and they ended his career for it.

They already seem to have his replacement waiting, too. Earlier this month, and without much fanfare, the Pentagon installed Navy Captain William Urban, an active-duty public affairs officer, as Lederer’s deputy. Lederer was not consulted, and he was not told it was coming. He found out after it had already happened. When Lederer announced his retirement this week, writing in a staff memo that his understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes differed “in fundamental ways” from the direction the Department of Defense has for the organization, Urban was already there, ready to step in. On Friday, Urban published an open letter about “modernization,” saying he had received “multiple assurances” from Pentagon leadership that they remain committed to editorial independence. We will have to wait and see whether he is given Lederer’s position.

They can tell us they remain committed to editorial independence, but their actions tell a very different story. This did not happen overnight. For eight months, they have been methodically dismantling the independence of Stars and Stripes from the inside. When we look at everything they have done, step by step, it becomes impossible to pretend this was anything else.

In January, Hegseth’s spokesman declared that the Pentagon would return Stars and Stripes to what he called its “original mission,” refocusing content away from “woke distractions” and toward “warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability.” That same month, applicants for jobs at the paper were being asked through the federal hiring system to explain how they would advance the President’s policy priorities.

In March, the Pentagon issued new rules declaring that content must be ‘consistent with good order and discipline.’ That phrase comes directly from the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and Slavin immediately raised an alarming question: could a servicemember working for Stars and Stripes face military discipline, even court-martial, for something they publish? The Pentagon did not answer. And that same month, the paper’s own Pentagon reporter was barred from attending a Hegseth press conference. The Pentagon claimed there was no room. They blackballed their own newspaper from covering their own briefing.

In April, they fired the ombudsman. That was the person whose entire job was to safeguard editorial independence. In June, they banned reporters from the Pentagon’s press office entirely.

And then in August. Urban was installed, and Lederer was pushed out. Today, three journalists who dared to say the troops deserve the truth were terminated.

It took them just eight months to dismantle something that had endured since the Civil War. I keep thinking about the servicemembers overseas right now, the ones stationed in the Middle East, the ones on ships, the ones in places where Stars and Stripes might be the only independent news they can access. What do they read now? What source do they have that is not controlled by the chain of command that sends them into harm’s way? Who tells them the truth when the truth is inconvenient for the people giving the orders?

What is happening makes me think of Eisenhower. In this moment, history feels less like a lesson and more like a gut punch, because General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who commanded the liberation of Europe, personally defended Stars and Stripes during World War II. He wanted the troops’ newspaper free from propaganda and free from the influence of military brass. He understood, in the middle of a gruesome and bloody war, that soldiers fighting for democracy needed to read the truth, not the version that flattered their generals or the version that protected politicians from scrutiny. He demanded they be told the truth.

That was the principle. For more than 80 years, through Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq, Afghanistan, and administrations of both parties, that principle held. It did not take a foreign enemy to destroy it. It just took Trump appointing and Congress confirming Pete Hegseth. And he only needed eight months to do it.

The timing of all of this is what makes what happened later in Trump’s rally so disturbing. On the same day that the Pentagon dismantled one of the military’s oldest independent sources of news, Trump showed us exactly what he plans to fill the space now that the truth has been pushed out. Fear, propaganda, and stories he can pervert, repeat, and pull out whenever he needs them.

At 8:06, near the end of the rally, he pulled out a piece of paper and brought back an old rally staple he had not used in some time. “The Snake.”

“The Snake” is a poem written in 1963 by Oscar Brown Jr., a Black civil rights activist, singer, and social justice advocate from Chicago. It is based on one of Aesop’s fables, “The Farmer and the Viper,” a story about trust and betrayal. A tender-hearted woman finds a half-frozen snake on a path. She takes it in, wraps it in silk, lays it by the fire, feeds it milk and honey. And when the snake recovers, it bites her. As she lies dying, she asks the snake why. And the snake replies: “Oh shut up, silly woman. You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”

Trump has been reciting this poem at rallies since January 2016. He stole it from a Black civil rights activist, twisted its meaning, and turned it into a weapon against immigrants. In his sick rendition, America is the tender-hearted woman and immigrants are the snake. The moral, as he frames it for those cheering crowds, is that compassion is foolishness and cruelty is wisdom. He trains his followers, night after night and rally after rally, to believe kindness is the problem. That the woman who showed mercy deserved what she got.

Oscar Brown Jr. died in 2005, before Trump ever touched his words. But his daughters have been fighting to reclaim them ever since. The family sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Trump campaign. He ignored it. And his daughter Africa Brown said exactly what I felt hearing him recite her father’s work when she said: “Trump is the living embodiment of the snake that my father wrote about in that song.”

The American people are the tender-hearted woman. They saw what Donald Trump was. He incited an insurrection on January 6th. He tried to overturn a free and fair election. He was indicted on 91 felony counts across four cases. He was found liable for sexual abuse. He was convicted of 34 felonies. He showed this country exactly what he was. Every warning sign was there, and every red flag was flying high in the sky for all to see. And a substantial part of our country took him in anyway. They gave him a second chance. They nursed him back to power and believed him when he promised he would be different this time.

And he bit them. He bit the veterans whose newspaper he gutted today. He bit the workers whose jobs are disappearing while he stands in front of a microphone and brags about the greatest economy in history. He bit the taxpayers by increasing the deficit while grocery prices soar. And he bit the world by launching his ego war that has caused instability and sky-high fuel prices. He bit every single person who believed him when he said he was fighting for them.

And when they cry out, and they ask him why, the answer is the same one it has always been. You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in. He told them. He showed them. He never once hid what he is. And now the bite is not just for the people who voted for him. It is for all of us.

And when his time was up, and he was ready to go, YMCA blasted through the speakers one last time. The gay national anthem. He did his little dance, and then he started pretending to hit golf balls from the stage. Air golf, swinging at nothing, while the crowd cheered. Then he made kissing faces, pointing at people in the audience and blowing kisses through the air. That is how the President of the United States ended his evening.

The hardest part of watching that rally was not what came out of his mouth. Most of it was the same recycled talking points, the same chaos his deteriorating mind can hold on to. It was just the same material his handlers fill these speeches with because they know he can still perform it. I expect that. It feels like background noise at this point. What really hurt and what made me have to take breaks before turning it back on was watching the people cheer for him. People were cheering for the worst things he said. People were booing the press and the media. That is the part that breaks something in me every time. It is devastating knowing that these are my fellow Americans.

Today has been especially brutal when it comes to “reader feedback.” It happens, and my skin has grown thicker, but some days it really piles on. Watching this rally felt personal in a way it normally doesn’t. I found myself looking at their faces and wondering which one sent the email today telling me to end my life. Which one wished cancer on me. Which person cheering for our clearly soulless president decided it was acceptable to threaten my child today.

This is what is happening. Every single night. I made a decision when I started writing these posts that I would try not to delete those comments. When this is all said and done, I want people to be able to search for their family members. I want them to be able to look back and see what they said, what they did, and what this man turned them into. Maybe that is part of how we stop this from happening again. Maybe someday someone will look back and discover that the grandparent they remembered as the kindest person in the world was going onto a stranger’s page and wishing death on her and her children. There has to be a record of how people behaved during this time. There has to be.

I have not given up on these people even after this. I have to hold onto the belief that they are not all too far gone. But I am also not spending my energy trying to convert the committed. I would still welcome any one of them back if they can stop long enough to look around and ask themselves whether their lives are actually better, or whether they have simply been taught to hate their neighbors and say things to strangers they would never say to their faces. Maybe some will see it before it reaches them. Maybe others will have to feel the bite themselves before they finally see the snake for what he is.

On days like this, I turn to action. I do something meaningful to mend my heart. Today, Trump gave me the direction I needed. I did what I always do when this administration attacks the First Amendment and our free press: I rallied. Because the answer to silencing good people is making sure their voices get even louder. This is something we can all do. We can rally behind the journalists who refuse to be silenced. We can rally behind independent writers and content creators. We should support anyone willing to tell the truth about what is happening to this country, so they have the resources to keep going.

The reality is that once they finish with legacy media by gutting it like they did Stars and Stripes and CBS, and they have frightened reporters into silence, the independent voices will be all that is left. Saving those voices is going to be a battle too. They will come for the rest of the free press the same way: slowly and methodically, until one morning we wake up and the only voices left are the ones they have approved to speak. You have been wonderful supporting me with your paid subscriptions, and I cannot tell you how much that means. Your support allows me to keep all my content free and never behind a paywall. But please do not stop with me. If you are able, think about the other people doing this hard work. The new voices just finding the courage to speak.

The people who have been doing it for years and are running on fumes and conviction. The journalists, writers, and creators working day and night to make sure the truth is reaching as many people as possible. The people you turn to when you need to understand what is really happening. See if they have a paid subscription and subscribe to them if you are able. Make sure the people telling us the truth are supported well enough to keep doing it, because we are going to need them for whatever comes next.

Towards the end of Trump’s speech tonight he said this: “Remember they say again that Trump gets a lot of votes, but if he’s not on the ballot, people don’t vote so much. I am on the ballot.” And he is right. When we go to vote in November, we are voting for Trump. We are voting to give him two more years of unchecked power, or to put restraints on that power and begin demanding accountability for what he has done with it. November is the moment the tender-hearted woman finally sees the snake for what it is and stops taking it back in. 

U.S. Immigration Policy, Abuses, Rights

New York Times, Judge Strikes Down Trump’s 75-Country Visa Ban, Mattathias Schwartz, Aug. 22, 2026 (print ed.).The ruling from the Southern District of New York found that the policy went beyond Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s legal authority.

A federal judge on Friday struck down the Trump administration’s ban on issuing visas to immigrants from 75 countries, finding that the policy was “contrary to law” and beyond the legal authority of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

In a 61-page ruling, Judge Jeannette A. Vargas of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York disputed the administration’s public rationale for the policy, billed as a “pause,” that immigrants from the targeted countries were likely to draw public benefits and become “a financial burden to Americans.”

In fact, Judge Vargas found, U.S. officials were ordered to refuse visas to eligible immigrants who were likely to be self-sufficient, in violation of a statute that requires individualized assessments. An internal State Department cable made public as evidence in the case instructed consular officers to deny visas even when visa applicants provided “additional evidence that demonstrates he or she overcomes the public charge refusal.”

The majority of the 75 countries on the State Department’s list are non-European and have significant nonwhite populations. They range across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, including a number of U.S. allies, such as Jordan and Egypt.

Judge Vargas’s ruling also reverses any visa denial that was based solely on the policy, which took effect in January. That raises the possibility that thousands of old visa applications would need to be reviewed.

Among the plaintiffs in the case are six U.S. citizens who claim that the administration’s ban kept their relatives in Ghana, Jamaica, Guatemala and Ethiopia from receiving visas to travel to the United States. Other plaintiffs are five professionals from Colombia — including an engineer, an architect and a Harvard-trained endocrinologist — who received notices that their visa applications had been denied, and referred to the Trump administration’s new policy.

In 2018, during President Trump’s first term, the Supreme Court upheld the third iteration of his travel ban, which restricted entry into the United States by foreign nationals from several Muslim-majority countries. But that earlier ruling upheld the president’s broad power to limit entry into the country, not the issuance of visas, Judge Vargas wrote.

Friday’s ruling was praised by Joanna Cuevas Ingram, a senior staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, one of the nonprofit groups and private firms representing the plaintiffs.

“Today’s decision is a significant victory for the hundreds of thousands of families across the world whose lives were thrown into chaos by this administration’s unlawful and discriminatory visa ban,” she said in a statement. 

U.S. Immigration: Changes to Temporary Protected Status (New York Times chart Aug. 8, 2026).

New York Times, Ankle Monitors Leave Haitians in Ohio Feeling Shaken and Shackled, Miriam Jordan, Aug. 22, 2026. The devices, which will make it easier for authorities to locate immigrants in Springfield if large-scale deportations begin, have intensified a sense of dread.

Before dawn on Wednesday, Jonas Julien waited in the darkness of his Springfield, Ohio, home for his ride to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office about an hour away.

The 35-year-old Haitian immigrant had completed another grueling 12-hour shift at 3:30 a.m. After a quick bite and shower, he had stretched on the couch to avoid waking his wife and their 2-month-old daughter. But sleep never came.

“I don’t know what awaits me, and I am just exhausted from the worry,” Mr. Julien said after climbing into the back seat of a Toyota Corolla, clutching a folder of immigration documents that included an active asylum petition and a work permit valid until 2029.

By the time he returned to his wife and daughter about 10 hours later, a clunky black band with a blinking light would be clamped around his left ankle. He would have an order to report back to ICE in a few weeks. And he would be afraid for their future.

Mr. Julien is among hundreds of Haitians in Springfield who have been summoned to ICE offices, according to the Haitian Support Center, a local organization. The group estimates that more than 100 people have been fitted with ankle monitors.

A city of 60,000 between Dayton and Columbus, Springfield emerged in recent years as hub of Haitian immigration and its newcomers a target of attacks from President Trump.

Following the termination of a legal protection called Temporary Protected Status that allowed 330,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States, his administration has launched an aggressive electronic monitoring campaign centered on the small city. Springfield, home to between 10,000 and 15,000 Haitians, has also seen a robust ICE presence and more than 20 arrests since last week.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Before Fabricating Assaults to Justify the MN-15 Investigation, DHS Focused on a Protest of Trump’s 2017 Inauguration, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 21, 2026. As I laid out in this post, DOJ and DHS used assault charges fabricated against 16 people whom Pam Bondi used as trophies to retroactively justify spying on the Minnesota protest community for months. On January 28 — the same day Bondi paraded her trophies on Xitter, DOJ opened the investigation that would result in charges against 15 activists it misleadingly billed as Antifa: the next day, DOJ indicted the first round of people in the Cities Church protest relying at least in part on fabricated claims.

Then, after the fact, DOJ reconstructed spying that DHS undercover officers — most notably one referred to as 9843 — had already done in the weeks leading up to that. On February 28, HSI documented a bunch of spying that several undercover officers had done. Then, still months later, on April 7, HSI collected a bunch of screen caps of Signal chats 9843 took.

The indictment itself starts on January 11, with an Emergency Response Meeting to — effectively — respond to the Renee Good killing. But the narrative of this retroactive reconstruction shows it started before Good’s killing, on January 5, when 9843 went to a meeting (but did not record it) where the potential of illegal actions was allegedly discussed but no specific illegal actions were planned.

From that unrecorded meeting, 9843 invented the conspiracy he spent five more months looking for. That unrecorded meeting is where all this started.

Somehow, from there, 9843 got into one after another Signal chat; the genesis of that, too, is sketchy.

Almost immediately after that, 9843 started focusing on Sant, who months later would become the lead defendant in this case (and the defendant who released all these exhibits), starting with the meeting that does serve as the first overt act in the indictment.

Sometime before January 13, 9843 saved a selfie from Sant.

That selfie was possibly this photo (January 12 was a Monday) showing what appears to be damage from a rubber bullet.

Just over a week later, DHS had gotten back a Clearview dossier on Sant, using that photo as seed, including pictures of some other dude with a pregnant wife. The Clearview dossier also included pictures of what appear to be Sant’s past activism. One of those was this picture, sourced to an article from 2018, describing that the last remaining charges against hundreds of protestors against Trump’s first inauguration had been dropped.

The fourth person from left in that picture is Chelsea Manning.

By the time HSI got this Clearview dossier (which also showed what they purported to be Sant at an Occupy event), 9843 had already started focusing on Sant’s role in that J20 protest, capturing a chat where Sant described being a part of it.

Again, all of this spying took place before DOJ retroactively justified this investigation by framing a bunch of people with assault: 9843 had decided Sant would be a close focus, then had begun to focus on Sant’s exoneration in the J20 protest.

9843 returned to that protest at least once more. On March 15, 9843’s description of another meeting focused on Sant’s description of what — based on timing — appears to be the J20 protest.

Now’s a good time to remind what happened with the J20 protest, the time Sant described (though I’m still looking for his record in the docket) being arrested for “wearing black.”

After a limited number of people at a protest of Trump’s first inauguration damaged a limo, the cops kettled everyone at the protest. DC USAO charged hundreds of them. But then — as Ryan Reilly covered for years — the cases fell apart, partly because (as may happen with this prosecution) prosecutors had no individualized evidence against many of the defendants.

[M]ore than 230 cases that arose out of the mass arrests of protesters near Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Protesters were arrested after police trapped them in a “kettle” after some people smashed windows, destroyed a limousine and threw objects at officers during a demonstration against the incoming president.

The government adopted the extraordinary tactic of charging hundreds of people arrested on a public street with felony crimes based on the theory that their choice of black clothing meant they were part of a felony rioting conspiracy. But the #J20 prosecutions, as activists dubbed them, were largely a bust for the government. Jurors acquitted the first six defendants to go to trial in late 2017, a judge ordered charges against 10 other defendants dropped because prosecutors withheld evidence, and charges against all remaining defendants were dropped in mid-2018.

In 2024, the main prosecutor on the case, Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens, faced an ethics complaint because, while she relied heavily on one Project Veritas video in her attempt to prosecute the defendants, she withheld an exculpatory PV video from them.

Kerkhoff Muyskens and Washington Police Detective Greggory Pemberton were “primarily responsible for the government’s investigation” into the events of Jan. 20, 2017, according to the ethics complaint, which alleges Kerkhoff Muyskens violated six of the D.C. Bar’s rules of professional conduct. The Office of the Disciplinary Counsel in Washington, which serves as the chief prosecutor for attorney disciplinary matters, wants the D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility, which is the disciplinary arm of the D.C. Court of Appeals, to consider imposing sanctions on her.

Pemberton, who now heads the Washington police union, faced questioning during trials from defense attorneys about his “anti-liberal biases,” the complaint noted. When defense counsel raised “troubling” edits to video evidence that they believed Pemberton made, Kerkhoff Muyskens “falsely told the court that only she — not Pemberton — was responsible for the edits,” according to the complaint.

At issue is video from Project Veritas, a conservative group that recorded undercover videos, which was essential to prosecutors’ case.

Both Kerkhoff Muyskens and Pemberton understood that Project Veritas “had a reputation for editing videos in a misleading way,” the complaint says. Kerkhoff Muyskens and Pemberton also “omitted and cut footage from the original videos, in part, to remove footage of the operative that could reveal his identity or reveal the identity of Project Veritas as the source of the video,” it says.

Even though Project Veritas provided videos of another training session that occurred at American University on Jan. 14-15, Kerkhoff Muyskens didn’t turn them over to defense lawyers, the complaint alleges. The complaint says the undisclosed videos “consistently showed that protesters were trained and instructed to expect a non-violent protest; to remain non-violent; to use non-violence and de-escalation techniques with police and counter-protesters; to be wary of counter-protester infiltrators, including Project Veritas; to rely on [Washington police] to handle any violence from either protesters or counter-protesters; to stay close with their protest group for safety and security; and to comply with police instructions and ‘police lines.'”

As a reminder, far right trolls play a (hidden) role in this prosecution too, with the focus on Kyle Wagner arising out of his conflicts with Jake Lang and Jayden Scott, both of whom themselves engaged in criminal activity but were not charged for conspiring with each other.

As for the conspiracy that 9843 dreamt up on January 5, before ICE shot Renee Good, before ICE shot a Venezuelan and missed his kid and lied to cover that up, before CBP shot Alex Pretti, Sant shows up all through this indictment, in part because he advocated using shields at protests.

On February 6, DHS unlawfully stopped him and told him he couldn’t follow them.

On or about February 6, 2026, federal immigration officers were engaged in an arrest operation on or around Cedar Avenue South in Minneapolis. SANT drove a red Subaru and followed vehicles that were driven by federal immigration officers. Federal immigration officers stopped the Subaru and warned SANT that they were engaged in official duties and that any interference would constitute a violation of federal law. Despite the warning. SANT continued to followed the immigration officers’ vehicle and impeded the transport of the detained individual.

Two months later, it happened again.

On or about May 4, 2026, al approximately 2:08 p.m., SANT sent a message in the “Whipple Watch (Refiesh)” Signal group chat, stating. “494 E approaching concord st s…Just getting to woodbury…Nb on 494…00 we have any rr (rapid response) calls in hudson? We’re looking to handoff if possible… We’re in WI. we’re going to keep following. We won’t get back to Whipple for another one…Carmichacl rd nb…” At 2:29 p.m.. SANT messaged, “Cop pulling us over…stopped by police in Hudson WI… They let us go with a warning. Threatened us with criminal charges.”

That act — following an ICE car across state lines on May 4 — is the single charge against Sant, in addition to that conspiracy 9843 dreamt up before all this started.

The day after Sant was indicted for his activities in Minnesota (including describing his past arrest in J20), on June 12, the DC Bar slapped Kerkhoff Muyskens with a six month bar sanction for her ethical failures in pursuing that case.

Special Report (Continued From Above) 

Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Full Harp-Trump Letters Are Worse Than You Think, Seth Abramson, left, Aug. 21-22, 2026. We still only have two complete letters from White House aide Natalie Harp to President Donald Trump—the man she calls her “Guardian” and “Protector, her “Alpha and Omega”—but they are horrifying.

Taken in isolation and exclusively on their face, the just-released Harp-Trump Letters would excite little comment or concern. They present as just two in a presumptively lengthy stream of communications between an eighty-year-old married serial rapist and a blonde, conventionally attractive aide who’s well less than half his age. The two exemplars we now have of how these two people communicate, specifically samples of Natalie Harp’s “adoring” (NYT) missives to President Donald Trump, for all intents and purposes appear to hail from the sort of toxic, clandestine romantic relationship most of us have been in at least once. Usually in our teens.

The Harp-Trump Letters: The Ten Most Harrowing New Revelations in the Just-Released “Full” Harp-Trump Letters

Letters from Trump White House aide Natalie Harp to President Trump, as reported by The Daily Beast.

(1) Harp takes up an inordinate amount of President Donald Trump’s time with what can only be termed abject nonsense, distracting him still further from even occasionally paying attention to the welfare of the United States.

Trump is infamously not very interested in doing his job—one of his biographers says that he spends 70% of his daily mental energies focused on his vanity renovation and self-worship projects—which makes the revelation that what little time he is available to think about anyone else is likely spent dealing with his (at a minimum) emotional mistress a profoundly upsetting one.

We learn in the letters above that not only does Natalie Harp write inappropriately long missives to an elderly man who infamously doesn’t read well (or really ever) and presumably has many other things on his plate, that not only do these letters go into obsessive personal detail about people and places and situations President Trump couldn’t possibly care about—after all, he doesn’t even much care or notice his own children Barron and Tiffany—but, far worse than this, that it’s clear that Harp calls Trump on the phone like he’s her dad or a pizza joint rather than using the spectacularly expansive resources of the federal government at her disposal. In the first of the two letters above she described getting out of a trivial jam by calling the President of the United States directly instead of the hundreds of other options she had before her.

(2) Harp appears to refer to herself as some sort of side piece.

Keeping in mind that—when it deigns to identify her as having an actual job or role at all—the White House insists that Harp is either the White House Appointments Secretary or the Special Executive Assistant to the President of the United States.

So why, when she and Trump are on a fun golfing outing together, does she refer to herself as simply one of the “girls” who follows Trump around his golf course? She even uses the term dismissively—voluntarily and on purpose—in the context of her doing things American taxpayers are presumably paying her $150,000/year to do.

That is a massive salary that’s 250% above the median salary in the United States. It is not a salary we give to mere “girls” who chase old men on foot (while trying to not be “embarrassing”) as the old men they’ve glommed onto zoom about ritzy golf courses.

Harp admitting that she was told by a golf course attendant that her status as one of the most powerful officials in Washington—in reality, if not by title—didn’t warrant her getting a golf cart when Trump’s entire entourage had one underscores that it is not just Harp who sees herself as some sort of benighted celebrity groupie… but so does everyone else. And that is actually a national security problem.

It’s not just a national security problem because Harp is regularly toting around info and devices that America cannot afford to let its enemies get their hands on—in other words, Harp being a secure and well-transported member of Trump’s entourage is actually not optional, but mission-critical—but because the description Harp gives in her letters of how she is treated in Washington is a textbook case of how a very happy employee becomes a dangerously disgruntled one.

And what can a disgruntled top aide to the President of the United States do? Well, let’s ask a man who spent three entire presidencies—twelve years—regularly in and around the White House and its top officials. According to Hunter Biden (emphasis in original),

If this relationship was with a 35-year-old staffer and Barack Obama, what would [Republicans] be doing right now? What would they be doing?

What would they be doing if it were my dad, but just—more so—take it if it were in the Obama administration, and there was a 35-year-old staffer writing love letters to the president.

A person who sleeps on a cot at his country club to be closer to him.

And professes any of the things that we now know she has professed through writing to the president.

Somehow we know all this shit.

There’s a level of it which is just like, “Who is this sociopath—this psychopath—who’s a meter away from the [nuclear] football? And from the most powerful man in the world?”

That [she should] have this level of access—which we now know went on for a year without getting a security clearance at all—[when] she is now basically living with Donald Trump on a 24/7 basis?

Even her brother [Preston] talks about [how strange it is].

So the idea [coming from the White House] that we can’t question this? That they’re somehow offended by the idea that [it should be questioned]? That we should protect this 35-year-old person’s privacy?

You know what? Go fuck yourself. You’ve got to be kidding me.

I really mean it. I’m sorry for the language—my dad would tell me, “You gotta stop with the language”—but are you kidding me? Are you joking?

Just from a policy perspective, just from a national security perspective, but from the perspective of… it isn’t just weird to us! It’s weird to everybody [around the world]!

And if I can’t question that, but they can question whether or not it was appropriate—and spend literally fifteen years still talking about—when Barack Obama wore a tan suit? I mean, these people are out of their minds.

They’re out of their minds. Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.

(3) The difference between “I apologize” and “please forgive me” matters, because one creates leverage and the other does not.

Harp, her notes reveal, habitually doesn’t just adore Donald Trump but fetishize him.

She wants him to have—and exert—power over her, including (it’s clear) the power to punish.

Put aside the potential psychosexual dimensions of that and just focus on the practical ones: an employee apologizes for shoddy work; someone who is attempting to repeatedly emphasize, instantiate, and deepen an asymmetrical power relationship begs for forgiveness. Natalie Harp does the latter and does it intentionally, and is well aware that it gives Trump power over her. Indeed, in the letters she asks Trump to “cuss her out,” to remind her that she is “unworthy,” to self-consciously treat giving her attention as a gift he doles out to her slowly—but only when she deserves it. That would be odd enough on its face, but when this is the dynamic between two people who are actually almost never physically apart but just meters from one another 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it is toxic to the point of being dangerous.

So why would Natalie Harp want Trump to have special leverage over her above and beyond the fact that he is her superior and—not for nothing—the U.S. president?

And how would we imagine an unambiguously Chaotic Evil creature like Donald Trump seeking to exploit this leverage in private? Sadly, we don’t even have to wonder much about this, as the Epstein Files, the Proof Series, other Trump biographies, and decades of interviews and articles and exposés on Trump underscore how he likes to treat women even when he doesn’t have any particular leverage over them:

• He is violent with them;
• he seeks to physically control their movements;
• he likes them to change their appearance so they look more like his daughter;
• he controls how they dress;
• he controls their hygienic protocols;
• he requires that they be instantly available to him at all times;
• he verbally berates them;
• when convenient to him, he forgets that they exist;
• he lies to them for fun; and
• he appears to relish the idea of his being either a father-like, “sugar daddy,” or prison guard figure in their psychological construction.

How many of these components do we see in the Harp-Trump relationship already, just based on the minimal amount we know about it?

• Trump seems to take pleasure in forgetting that Harp exists and seeing how she reacts;
• Harp says that Trump always notices how she is dressed;
• Harp says that Trump always notices her hygiene;
• we see visual evidence that Harp is trying to look more and more like Ivanka;
• Trump appears to have encouraged Harp viewing his as a father figure;
• Trump appears to have encouraged Harp viewing him as a “guardian”. and “protector” (akin to a “sugar daddy” who has made her entire career and, as she puts it, “life” possible, to which Trump has replied, “she’ll never leave me”);
• Harp appears to relish the sort of casual cruelty Trump gets arouses by;
• Harp certainly implies that Trump has “cussed her out” in the past, which is not something a responsible employer does, and certainly not inside the halls of power in D.C. (think here of how many politicians, mostly—tellingly—women in the Democratic Party like Katie Porter and Amy Klobuchar, have recently been attacked by male Republican critics for allegedly not being nice enough to their staffers);
• Trump clearly requires that Harp attend on him hand and foot at all hours of the day and night; and as part of that,
• it’s clear that Trump effectively is controlling Harp’s physical movements, to the point that when she detects she’s lost the physical closeness to him he requires she can be seen sprinting across multiple golf course holes to get to him quickly.

All this is grotesque, sure, but it also underscores something no one wants to say: Trump is a more than equal participant in a security situation that could lead to his death. He’s putting pressures on a troubled person that could eventually cause her to crack, and as the one in most proximity to her, he’s the one most likely to be hurt.

That isn’t a relationship assessment. It’s a security assessment.

(4) “I know that some people have said that I haven’t been texting them back.”

What happens when you put a naive, troubled, almost supernaturally credulous person in charge of nearly all communications between the leader of the free world and (a) domestic leaders of his own party, (b) domestic leaders of the opposing party, and (c) every leader of every other country on Earth, as we now know Trump has done?

And what happens if, having done this, you then begin abusing that person mentally and emotionally and psychologically, such that they report not eating, not sleeping, having a personality crisis, and more personal suffering in that vein?

Well, they start failing in their job.

And if that job is bagging groceries, the downstream effects of those failures are, to insert a mathematical variable we can’t exactly measure, x.

For someone in Harp’s job, the consequences are, what… 10x? 50x? 100x? Potentially incalculable?

The simple fact is that Natalie Harp putting into a private letter to Trump the fact that she is basically falling apart should be terrifying to the nation, as we know from his lifetime of malignant narcissistic psychopathy—this is a man who used to throw rocks at babies in cribs when he was a boy—that Trump is not going to be there for Natalie Harp as she experiences something like non-drug-assisted ego death. He will spurn her in the most vile terms; abandon her; encourage her to cannibalize herself emotionally for his own gratification, but he will not do anything to heal. He never has done so before and literally does not have that particular gene in him.

Which suggests Harp will get worse and worse at her job over the next two-plus years.

She’ll make more and more mistakes.

Those mistakes will have greater and greater consequences.

They will continue to be only revealed to Trump, and only in private, and only in missive his personal vanity will cause him to keep hidden.

And the bigger the errors are, the more they will start to harm Trump himself as well, which his reaction to in the past has been to… well, hide what’s happened, lie about it, blame it on others, seek to punish those innocent others, create sprawling conspiracy theories to cover all of this, seek to punish those allegedly involved in the imaginary conspiracy theory, start stealing taxpayer money to pay for some cockamamie alleged conspiracy theory that doesn’t exist at all, and so on.

Doubt this? Look at how he handled his. no-bid contract to a buddy to fix the Reflecting Pool going south because he chose a corrupt incompetent rather than a professional with experience in the sort of work to be done. He had an Olympian falsely indicted.

Look at how he handled his illegal midnight destruction of the White House’s East Wing, which he green-lit without getting any of the proper authorizations or permissions. He accused a group of concerned American citizens who believe in rule of law of Treason, a death-penalty eligible offense.

One could go on and on in this vein, of course, but closer to home we might note that when Natalie Harp convinced Trump to post on social media the single most racist post any government official has ever posted, he spun a web of lies about how he would deal with the situation and (of course) what caused it in the first instance while (likewise of course) refusing to apologize for any of it.

As Harp’s errors compound, so will the fallout, so will the cover-ups, and so will the downstream complications from having a religious zealot without any supervision or oversight at the heart of the American government.

(5) Harp is tortured by the past—which is not just a mental health issue but a likely security one, as her past has largely been defined by Donald Trump.

In the first letter, Harp writes, “I haven’t been myself, dwelling on the Past, and the pain of losing my Dad.” In addition to revealing (or more accurately reiterating) what are colloquially if inappropriately dismissively called “daddy issues” that Trump is almost certain to trigger in her, Harp emphasized that she is particularly thinking about the period of her father’s death—which, as Proof previously reported, may well involve some thought of Trump because her plot with her mother to lie about Robert Harp’s death a month before Natalie big speech at the RNC not only caused a permanent estrangement with her brother Preston but may have been prompted by a fear that Trump (who at the time was obsessed with criticism that his early support for people staying at home during the pandemic could be leading to suicides) would rescind his offer for her to lie about her bone cancer treatment to a national audience if he knew her father had committed suicide during the pandemic, partly due to a depression exacerbated by isolation.

In other words, Harp telling Trump she’s obsessing over her father’s death and all it cost her could well be a euphemistic reference to all she lost—Preston, a certain amount of self-respect from dishonoring her father’s life by lying about his death—because she left an entire life behind to become Trump’s oft-mistreated house servant.

And if the U.S. Secret Service can read her note that way, and in the interest of taking a conservative approach to securing its primary protectee Trump it definitely should, it presents us with a possible security situation. Why? Because Harp is fixating on a moment of her life that could involve a deep, trauma-supercharged dissatisfaction with and even anger at the President of the United States, which she was at the time experiencing not just only emotionally but through physical self-deprivations (of food, of sleep, of the company of others) that could pervert her judgment and even make her dangerous.

More broadly, when the person in the best position of anyone on Earth to harm a U.S. president, gain unauthorized access to the nuclear football, intercept an emergency message to the president whose interception could cost thousands of lives, ignore or fabricate or misdirect or amend a message from a world leader that leads to a major diplomatic or even military engagement says that they are “not themselves,” and when the reason for this is partly that they are being thoughtlessly worked to the bone by Donald Trump, that is a five-alarm fire for a security professional. It could lead to the sort of resentment of Trump that eventually leads to violence, or even a psychotic break in which someone who still believes they’re in love with the POTUS harms him.

(6) Harp is making clear how desperately isolated she is within the White House, and that very isolation can lead to psychological trauma but also a scenario in which an unwell person is not being supervised, overseen, cared for, tracked, or in any way meaningfully watched by anyone at a time she could be a significant security risk.

Harp writes, in her first letter, that “I [have] started letting the remarks of people who haven’t bothered me before get to me.” Readers will recall that Proof established in its first report on Harp that she appears to have no friends, no hobbies, minimal friendly contact with her co-workers, no supervisor, no professional peers, no down-time, no time off, no vacations, and no opportunities to physically distance herself from her charge (Trump) or her role (meeting his every whim within seconds of him articulating it). Now imagine adding to that situation that Harp has begun to be aware of (a) how many people dislike her at the only place she meaningfully resides, (b) starting to hear exactly what they are saying about her—keeping in mind that these are some very powerful, influential, famous political figures who are saying such things about her—and (c) is self-admittedly “letting [these words]….get to [her],” meaning that they are now affecting her emotional state in measurable ways.

In any normal workplace, that would be grounds for a leader in the workplace calling a meeting to try to change its climate. But the problem is that Trump infamously loves pitting employees against one another in increasingly diabolical ways, which is why traditionally his workplaces have not been a healthy place for innocents like Harp.

A normal workplace would also have a supervisor who could quickly step in to put a stop any bullying. The problem? Donald Trump has ensured that Harp is outside the chain of command, so Susie Wiles can’t help her; and if you’re wondering whether Trump has isolated Harp in this way partly to exert a disgusting sort of ownership of her, you’re right. All of the evidence we have is that Trump doesn’t want anyone else admiring or playing with his toy, and the result of that is that Harp has now found herself in an excruciatingly psychologically harmful position with no one to advocate for her. Trump is neither interested in nor capable or doing so.

In this light, Harp telling Trump, “I see myself being lowered in your eyes and good opinion” is a very dangerous indication that she feels a traumatic experience upon her (the disapproval of a father figure) but also no way to stop that trauma from occurring and no one to protect her from it. Having spent many years as a public defender representing persons with mental health issues, my concern in the above facts would be the possibility that Harp decides that the only way her pain can end is to at once remove herself and the fetish to which her pain is attached (Trump) from the equation.

That would be a historically bloody and horrible end for all concerned, that Trump is psychologically unable to see it coming, temperamentally unwilling to do anything to prevent it, and psychologically and emotionally and mentally damaged enough himself to perhaps even be unable to fathom the grave danger seeking “24/7/365” worship from another might bring to himself.

If you think any of the foregoing is hyperbolic, consider that the letters above are a private confession that Natalie Harp has made explicit is soul-baring and raw and unguarded: she is telling the person who is “all that matters to me” and who she believes cares about her more than “anyone in the world” that she is (a) afraid (“that is the fear you are seeing”), (b) “losing focus,” and (c) becoming a worse person in some way (which is why she tells him, “I will return a better person.” All of these are signs that are deeply troubling.

(7) Because we do not have the full context behind these letters, we have to engage in some of the same educated guesswork that security professionals at the Secret Service would have had to engage in after getting their hands on them weeks too late to have prevented any imminent threat they might have augured; the first such piece of guesswork involves a “forced vacation” narrative.

Donald Trump, according to this author—who is a New York Times bestselling Trump biographer and presidential historian—may be the least empathic American alive today, and I say that advisedly. Trump is clinically non-empathic, with a penchant for framing everything he sees in terms of how it affects him. If you want an example, consider the fact that he appears to have buried his beloved ex-wife Ivana Trump, the mother of three of his children, in a disgusting dirt heap on one of his golf properties in order to exploit a gruesome tax loophole.

Yes, this really is Ivana’s grave, and its location really does indicate that Trump felt it might qualify him for an obscure tax exemption:

Keep in mind that Trump is a billionaire. Keep in mind that he claims to love his kids, who beyond any doubt loved their mother. Keep in mind that Trump and Ivana actually remained close over the years, so this is not a vengeance-type situation.

This is unrestrained, borderline-demonic clinical narcissistic malignant psychopathy, though some would surely argue it trends rather more, in the end, to sociopathy. And it is relevant to the Natalie Harp situation in the following way: if Donald Trump is even noticing that you may need help, you are in a grave existential state of distress and likely in real personal danger of committing self-harm.

It’s with that backdrop that we notice something odd about the close of Harp’s first letter, above: that she seems to be writing from some sort of vacation Trump has paid for her to take, including paying for her to buy things on the trip that remind her of it:

“You gifted me with Mementos of this Trip of a Lifetime, a Coming of Age. I will return a better person.”

Now, to be clear, there are other context clues with respect to when this letter was written and other lines it contains that underscore that Harp may have been with Trump and many others on this so-called (and tellingly mis-capitalized, given that Harp writes out all Trump’s appallingly mis-capitalized social media posts) “Trip of a Lifetime,” so Proof isn’t suggesting Trump sent Harp off on her own but rather that he appears to have taken steps to do the bare minimum for Harp psychologically by trying to turn what ostensibly was a work(ish) trip of some kind into what his aide might reasonably perceive as a vacation. Was it a vacation? Almost certainly not. But when a man who cares for no one but himself is even trying to make you feel like you’re on a vacation when you’re actually working for him, it means you really are in dire straits.

Remember what Trump was seeing, as we know from the first letter—Image

—namely, a young woman with no friends or peers who is not eating, not sleeping, is starting to regularly mess up at work, is not herself, looks afraid, believes she is becoming worse all around, is being bullied, is distracted all the time, is grieving, is obsessing over the past, and is certain she is losing the respect of the only person she cares about. Trump’s reaction, consistent with his psychopathy, is to buy her a little memento during a work trip to make it feel like the “Trip of a Lifetime,” a “Coming of Age.” That the memento was almost certainly inexpensive, and almost certainly one that Trump will find a way to charge to either taxpayers or donors or the Board of Peace or as a write-off at one of his shell companies is clear…

…but also clear is the fact that Harp was such a mess that Trump not only noticed in the first instance, which is borderline astonishing, but that he tried to help himself by giving Harp enough of a feeling a work vacation that it would compel her to say to him, “I will return a better person.”

Which is perhaps the saddest part of all this: that Harp surely knows she hasn’t been gifted with a vacation, but rather has been gifted, in a thinly veiled way, with…

…a second chance.

A second chance to remain beside, and not fail, her “Guardian” and “Protector.” And that realization almost certainly would have made her feel, whatsoever she was writing to Trump at the time, even more isolated and desperate. Which is why this is such a good moment in this report to remind readers that we are speaking of the mental state of a person whose duties in the White House approach something on the order of a co-POTUS, inasmuch as she is literally fielding multiple texts and calls from world leaders or American celebrities daily. Calling her “the human printer” is a nasty piece of bullying inside the White House, sure, but Proof does not write about Harp because she’s known to carry a portable printer around in a gargantuan, monstrously capacious travel bag. And in fact it’s likely that Harp’s co-workers mock her in this way because they know the truth: she has far more access to power and information than any of them do. She may even have more influence on the President of the United States than they do. Certainly that’s why many of them were left to die during Operation Orange Chicken in Turkey in Jiuly 2025, while Natalie Harp was saved.

How do you think they feel, knowing this? But more importantly, what does it say for how important Harp is to Trump that she would be one of only three people in his orbit who he chose to save (all of whom control his social media communications)?

And what does it therefore mean to the highest levels of power in America if Harp is in the state we’re describing here?

(8) The second piece of educated guesswork security professionals in the USSS would have had to engage in after getting their hands on Harp’s letters is one that Proof wants to be careful about: possible evidence of suicidal ideation (or more) by Harp.

This piece of analysis focuses on the following words, but also conjoins these words with the analysis we’ve already covered in this report:

My hands looked worse [on this trip] because the Cold turns the old “scars” purple. [I am] still on the road to recovery!

Before we analyze the above, Proof will take the unusual step of quoting itself from this very report:

[On the above-cited trip, Trump was looking at Harp and seeing] a young woman with no friends or peers who was not eating, not sleeping, starting to regularly mess up at work, was not herself, looked afraid, believed she was becoming worse all around, was being bullied, was distracted all the time, was grieving, was obsessing over the past, and was certain that she was losing the respect of the only person she cared about.

So now the second quote above has added to it that Natalie Harp, while in Scotland and Ireland with her father-figure, was scared that her father-figure might have noticed that she had “scars” on her “hands” which he might have believed were fresh due to their color, so she assured him that the scars were “old” and that she was “still on the road to recovery.”

Let’s be very clear in saying that she could be referring to scars related to her bone cancer treatments. It remains possible that—and this is still pretty dark, frankly—Harp was trying to assure Trump that her cancer had not returned, a scenario she might have perceived as an opportunity for Trump to get rid of her and frame it as a real kindness (something on the order of, “You’re not well, you need to take a long break from Washington, sweetheart…”) Does this hypothetical make much sense? No, not really, as the only way Harp would have new scars relating to bone cancer treatments (and she clearly worries Trump will think the scars are new) is if she just had surgery, which of course she didn’t and Trump would have known about if she had… making explaining the appearance of her scars to him essentially unnecessary.

If, alternately—and I say this as someone with some professional experience in this area as a former public defender, especially as one who at times represented juveniles—Natalie Harp had a history of a specific type of self-harm (via cutting), or at some point in the past had attempted suicide (via slitting), or at some point in the past had engaged in some other form of self-harm (such as jumping from a second-story height, running through a glass window, breaking glassware in her hand or against a wall), it might well leave the sort of “scar” that Harp would be desperate to have Trump think was not new.

Now is a good time to read the second excerpt above and ask yourself whether, purely on the evidence of the letter—which is about all we and the Secret Service would ever have had to go on—you would think Harp was speaking of surgery or depression.

• Cancer or self-harm.
• Remission or suicide.

There is, it goes without saying, nothing shameful about depression, about anxiety, or about thoughts of self-harm.

{Note: If you or someone you know is going through a hard time, help is available. In the United States, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours/day, 7 days/week. These services are free and confidential.} 

There is also nothing to prevent, under ordinary circumstances, a person who is experiencing depression or anxiety or suicidal ideation from working in a highly challenging, demanding, lucrative, well-respected, culturally central career.

But the Office of the President of the United States is historically an exception.

Anyone who may be experiencing any sort of diminished mental capacity, addiction, psychological trauma, or other non-physical injuries may well find themselves not permitted to be in the physical presence of the President of the United States 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

To be sure, such employment might still be possible—one imagines, though it’s not easy—if that employee’s supervisor had some means to (with the permission of the employee to avoid a HIPAA violation) ensure that the person so situated relative to the most powerful man on Earth was taking their medication, regularly seeing a medical professional, engaged in recommended counseling, and so on.

But the truth of the matter? Not only does Natalie Harp have no such supervisor, but (a) she’d be unlikely to submit to any medical oversight if she believed the consequences of her doing so could involve her temporarily or even permanently losing physical access to Trump (consider how she refused to even fill out an SF-86 form for over year, and we can’t exclude the possibility that what she was trying to hide were past mental health episodes or even suicide attempts that might impact her security clearance or even her employment in any government agency), and (b) even if somehow it were appropriate to ask these questions of Harp under HIPAA and even if she cleared someone to do so and even if the White House consequently got some clear answers on all this… Trump would order everyone to ignore them. He is not capable of seeing his most ardent followers as unwell in any way, anything short of fascistically perfect, which is why when he saw the January 6 insurrectionists on television he immediately declared that they couldn’t be Trumpists because they in his view looked “very trashy” (he eventually relented on their political affiliation, but not as to their appearance).

And this is the context for Harp exhibiting anxiety, in her second letter, about how she looked to Trump not just in terms of her dress and her makeup but—much more curiously—her hands, which she admitted were “scarred.”

And not just scarred, but scarred in a way and for a reason that, in the midst of Harp discussing her sorry mental and emotional state, compelled her to assure Trump that she was “on the road to recovery.”

Which couldn’t really refer to her bone cancer, as so far as we understand her long, winding, and clearly partially false recovery story, she is in full remission—not simply “on the road to recovery.”

And if Harp is referring to a past incident of self-harm, instead, it is very unlikely that she would be allowed to continue in her current White House role, as the mental state one is usually in during a suicide attempt is non-normative enough that the USSS might worry it could lead to one causing harm to another, even if the person in question had no history of violent conduct, no animus toward the potential victim, and was not experiencing any symptoms (like hallucinations) that are known to lead to involuntary harm against others in some instances. If Harp suffers from any mental health condition at all, she knows all this, knew it when she wrote the letters above, and knew it when she inexplicably refused to submit herself to the background check everyone else in the White House suffers through because it might have revealed problematic hospitalizations apart from the bone cancer-related ones Trump knows of.

(9) The second letter is one giant, ringing national-security alarm bell—even if we only consider the parts that haven’t already been widely reported.

Harp says that she cannot even remember the last time she wasn’t “plugged in.”

That sort of obsessive digital-tech use, especially when (as Maggie Haberman notes) all of it is spent in the “social media gutter” of “poison” and misinformation—and keep in mind that Harp is a sheltered, devout, inexperienced near-recluse—is extremely dangerous to anyone’s mental health. That Harp can’t even remember a time she wasn’t wading through filth is an admission of a sort of psychosocial disassociation no one working in intelligence or security would ever miss, especially if they protect the President of the United States.

Harps says that having “time to think” had a “negative” effect on her. Think about that: a woman who spends all day in the digital gutter gets a chance to briefly escape it and it’s a “negative” experience because the thoughts being out of the gutter cause her are bad ones. That is, in my professional experience… a very, very dangerous sign.

Harp says her signs of “burnout” were so severe that she knows Trump—famously not attuned to anyone but himself—“picked up on them.” That means they were very bad.

But that’s not the really bad part.

The really bad part is that Harp revealed to Trump a veritable mountain of resentment:

I had not idea how rapidly I was starting….to envy those whose only ‘job’ seems to be to talk with you, and look pretty. I want that job!!

She goes on, making clear that she doesn’t just harbor enormous resentment to her colleagues inside the White House but to her father-figure himself (emphasis added):

So many times, I’m just trying to stay afloat with all that’s coming in for you [that] I look like a hunchback who didn’t have time to freshen up (at least you know what I should look like)!

I miss the days when you used to call [me], during my Talkshow [sic] days, and we’d talk about everything and nothing. I want to get back to that synergy.

We shouldn’t have to talk about work all the time!!

I’ve always felt like an in-betweener, somewhere between Staff and those you enjoy talking to on the Plane or at Dinner, because that’s who I used to be to you…

This is very clearly the anger of someone who is in a largely unrequited romantic fixation, or even an intermittent physical relationship with a large power differential.

Underneath these words is actual legitimate anger at an oft-fired-upon, schemed-against, routinely assassination-escaping President of the United States whose Secret Service has been so filled with political appointees and sycophants that real questions about its capacity to protect Trump—or anyone—have been raised, and not just since the Butler Incident. These concerns go back to before the January 6 insurrection.

But Harp doesn’t stop there:

I wish I could hear every conversation, because that’s when you’re having a good time, getting away from it all, at least for a few moments.

This is a personal with an unhealthy fixation and attachment engaging in an act of imaginary wish fulfillment that is dangerous precisely because it will never come to pass.

• Trump is not going to be anything Natalie Harp wants or needs, now or ever.
• He is not going to change any part of his life to make hers even an iota better.

And the person who wrote the fundamentally angry letter below is a troubled person who’s not going to handle that rejection and subsequent state of affairs in healthy ways.

(10) Most of the last paragraph supra has been reported, but not the overall tone of it.

Harp presents, above, as someone who believes her current position is the most vital thing that has ever happened in her life; that she is on thin ice as work, meaning that she shortly might lose the only thing she values; that she is becoming increasingly desperate to please a man who gets bored with his playthings easily, which frantic pleading is unlikely to be anything he finds (after a while) interesting or attractive; who has now reached the point at which—in psychological terms—she appears to be begging to be abused so that she won’t be abandoned by a father-figure (again); and who is even stooping to remind her boss of “the promise you made to me after I lost my dad” as one of the stages of grief (bargaining) over what she perceives to be the imminent loss of her role in the White House.

Of course, as of a few weeks ago Harp wasn’t at risk of losing her job. She may well have feared it, but it wasn’t a likely outcome.

Now she is at risk of losing her job. Now it is a likely outcome.

These letters embarrass Trump, distract him from the things he wants to focus on, put something one than him in the MAGA limelight—that has always been unacceptable to him—and raise red flags his other employees will now be increasingly aggressive in pursuing, particularly the sort of security professionals who (whatever he might falsely claim) he can ignore but it eventually becomes tiring for him to continually put off.

So what happens if, as more and more unsettling stories about Trump and Harp come out in media outlets like Proof and others, Trump unceremoniously dumps Harp out of his life as he has so many others? How does she react? With violence? Toward the co-workers she hates? Towards herself? Toward the government building that’s come to feel like a prison to her? Toward the object of all her affection and devotion?

Keep in mind that Trump has a history of attracting unusual figures who must thereafter be extricated from him and his circle. Laura Loomer. Marla Maples. Kimberly Guilfoyle. Yes, many are young women, but Trump also has to for periods of time disassociate himself from the weirdest men who surround him, like when he “fired” Roger Stone from his campaign in 2015 or relegated Corey Lewandowski to a mere “body man”—from campaign manager—during the following year. As Proof has explained, Trump attracts troubled people on purpose…

…but sometimes goes way too far in doing so. That appears to have happened now, but under far more potentially dangerous circumstances than ever before.

Conclusion

There is not much more to add to the foregoing, except to offer a cautionary tale that acts, here, as a sort of dark vision of how this whole situation at the White House could play out.

Those of you who are into comedy and music will likely know the name Reggie Watts.

You will likely know that Watts’s longtime girlfriend recently committed suicide, and that Rolling Stone just wrote a horrifying investigative report about how that suicide appears to have come to pass. On its face, the Watts-McCollough Situation couldn’t be more different than the Harp-Trump Situation, as Trump is a teetotaller and Watts takes, well, all the drugs. As do—perhaps even must—anyone who dates him seriously.

But then check this out:

Like McCollough, right now Harp is spending every day with the man of her dreams.

But being with her is causing her to come apart at the seams, just as happened with Kat McCollough.

If Harp loses what she has now—particularly if she loses it because she feels she wasn’t able to weather the best thing that ever happened to her—her Fall could be long, hard, and destructive. It is a blessing (of the most morbid sort) that Kat only passed away alongside a German man she’d just met who want the same end for himself. But there is no guarantee that Natalie Harp, who exhibits an anger toward Donald Trump in the letters above that we see now sign of in anything Kat wrote about Reggie Watts, handles her far from grace in a way that leads to he leaving the country and taking her own life. Any security professional would tell you that toxic relationships that cause one or both parties enormous pain and then fall apart can lead to everything from suicide to murder-suicide, mass shootings to drug overdoses.

At this point, Natalie Harp has to be carefully extricated from the White House, and in being so extricated shown the sort of grace and patience she might think Trump has shown her but he almost certainly has not, the sort of patient worldliness her life has thus far apparently lacked (by design), and the sort of caution and deliberation that apparently neither she, Trump, nor anyone in the White House is actually capable of.

All of which is one way of saying this situation will be handled wrong, and badly, and that that very fact could lead to some horrible and unprecedented outcome that redounds to the detriment of not just this administration but the entire country.

More On Harp-Trump Relationship, Security Implications

 President Donald Trump and Natalie Harp in the Oval Office on May 30, 2025. Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP

Our Land, Political Opinion: A Natalie Harp Conspiracy Theory (Not Really), David Corn, right, Aug. 22, 2026. It’s very easy to be a conspiracy-monger. Let’s give it a shot.

This week, there was a hullabaloo about Natalie Harp, Donald Trump’s 35-year-old aide who’s been derisively referred to within the White House as the “Human Printer.” She’s always by Trump’s side, typing his social media posts and printing out and feeding him positive and misleading information about his presidency. (“Look, this poll shows that 110 percent of all Republican voters think you’re better looking than Jesus Christ!”) She’s also a conduit for aides and foreign leaders who want to slip Trump a message.

There’s been much speculation and tittering about her devotion and physical closeness to Trump. She was part of the small elite band that was hustled into that now-infamous catering compartment in Turkey when Trump covertly fled Air Force One to use another aircraft due to a security threat. Her notes to Trump read like love letters. (“You are all that matters to me.”)

This new shot of attention for Harp was triggered when Sen. Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, said at a campaign rally, “[Trump] golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” Outraged MAGA-ites and Trump defenders pounced (see Dumbass Comment of the Week below) and slammed Ossoff for supposedly implying Harp and Trump were trysting and denounced him for denigrating a hard-working woman.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether Ossoff unfairly insinuated anything and demeaned Harp. His remark was at least partially prompted by the reports that Harp was one of the few aides who accompanied Trump when he skedaddled from Air Force One and left behind the seemingly expendable Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Whether he intended to or not, Ossoff spurred a national conversation about Harp—and about the appropriateness of discussing her bizarre relationship with Trump. Her 24/7 presence in his life has prompted the predictable and icky whispering. But we can be even more conspiratorial.

On Wednesday, MSNOW reported that for more than a year, while working for Trump in the White House during his second term, Harp declined several times to seek a security clearance. Obtaining clearance is a routine move for an aide, especially a staffer in such proximity to the president. After all, she can hear and see the top-secret information flowing to and from Trump. It’s a tremendous security lapse to allow a person without clearance around-the-clock access to the president. Yet Trump permitted this. Eventually, Harp did receive a clearance. But how stringent was the review? And why did she not do so at the start?

That’s a bit suspicious, right? What would Alex Jones have said if an aide to President Barack Obama or President Joe Biden had done the same? Now let’s add to the picture where Harp worked prior to joining Trump’s presidential campaign in 2022: the One America News Network.

OAN is a far-right cable news outfit that’s for Trump fans and MAGA-heads who think Fox News has gone soft. And it’s been overtly pro-Russia. When it was launched in 2013 by Robert Herring Sr., a millionaire who got rich in the circuit board business, he instructed OAN staff to promote Trump, push conservative issues, and downplay Russian aggression. Fun fact: Herring married a Russian woman years earlier. And OAN aired reports from RT, a Kremlin-funded media outlet and propaganda shop. In 2017, the Washington Post reported that OAN producers “said Herring repeatedly urged against running stories critical of Russia.” This was after Russia had launched its first invasion of Ukrainian territory and illegally annexed Crimea—and after Vladimir Putin had attacked the 2016 election in part to help Trump win.

Later, during the 2020 presidential campaign, OAN played a key role in promoting Russian disinformation. One of its anchors, Chanel Rion, teamed up with Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal lawyer, to smear Joe Biden, claiming without evidence that Biden had engaged in brazen corruption in Ukraine. The pair both promoted baseless allegations about Biden made by Andriy Derkach, a Ukrainian legislator who was later sanctioned by Trump’s own Treasury Department for being a Russian agent. Derkach served as a major source for a series of Rion reports bashing Biden.

After the 2020 election, the US intelligence community stated in a public report that Moscow used “proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives—including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden—­to US media organizations, US officials, and prominent US individuals, including some close to former President Trump.” The media organizations referenced here included OAN. The report also noted that Derkach and the Russian operation assisted the production of an anti-Biden documentary, apparently a film that aired on OAN in early 2020. (Following Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Derkach fled to Russia. In 2024, he was appointed to a seat in the Russian parliament’s upper chamber.)

After the start of the Ukraine war in 2022, OAN aired a report from the front lines filed by Mark Dougan, a former Florida cop and fugitive who found asylum in Russia and became involved in disinformation operations Moscow mounted against the United States. He was identified on OAN as a foreign correspondent for the network, and the long piece he produced claimed that Ukrainian forces—whom he called “Nazi terrorists”—had massacred civilians and that the war had been caused by “kleptocrats in Washington” who were desperate to keep “Ukraine out of the hands of Russia” because they used Ukraine to “launder their money” and needed to hide their corruption. Dougan accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of skimming billions of US aid money and causing “thousands of innocent people to die.” OAN was broadcasting straight-­out, pro-­Putin, made-in-Russia propaganda.

As regular readers might guess, I cover OAN, Derkach, and Dougan in more detail in my forthcoming book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America.

Now what might a creative, conspiracy-minded person do with all these dots? An attractive aide has an oddly close connection to the president and is situated to know everything and can influence his thinking. She helps write his tweets. She can control what information he receives. She once worked for an organization that has aired Russian disinformation, that has been identified by US intelligence as an outlet for Kremlin propaganda, and that has been ordered by its owner to go easy on Russia. And she was reluctant to submit to a security clearance investigation.

Hmm.

President Donald Trump and Natalie Harp in the Oval Office on May 30, 2025. Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP

I’m not saying that a young blond woman who has become such an important aide for Trump is a Russian operative. I’m just asking questions—as the conspiracy-peddlers like to say. But I have no doubt if there had been a similar set of facts for Obama or Biden, OAN, Fox News, Kash Patel, Glenn Beck, Roger Stone, and just about the entire MAGAsphere (and maybe Joe Rogan) would have been off to the races with such a narrative.

But the Harp tale is indeed a serious episode that reminds us of how Trump and his gang don’t give a damn about security. The fact that a staffer with such access to Trump could blow off a security clearance for so long is troubling. As is the fact that Jared Kushner, who is not a government employee and who has business interests around the world, is handling highly sensitive matters in three sets of negotiations: the Ukraine war, the Israeli-Palestinian war in Gaza, and the Iran war. (He’s also doing a piss-poor job in each of them.) No one was punished for Signalgate. Trump readily accepted a 747-8 from Qatar that posed significant security problems. Mar-a-Lago is a counterintelligence nightmare. Trump’s crypto business and other deals allow foreigners—perhaps even overseas officials—to buy influence with him. Let’s not forget he swiped top-secret documents when he left the White House in 2021 and stored some in a bathroom.

Trump won the presidency in 2016 partly because he and MAGA world went apeshit over Hillary Clinton’s handling of emails when she was secretary of state. There was never evidence that her use of a private server for her official emails—a violation of the rules—led to any security breaches.

But during both Trump administrations, there have been multiple instances of Trump and his lieutenants violating basic security protocols. Harp dodging a security clearance investigation is the latest example. The Donald-Natalie story might seem like gratuitous gossip. Yet it shows once more that Trump and his gang have no respect for rules and believe they can get away with anything. That attitude is a national security threat. 

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Natalie Harp Was the Document Author of Trump’s Blow-Off of the January 6 Committee, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 22, 2026. I was reminded that when I wrote this post on the final workings of the January 6 Committee, I checked the document metadata for the conspiratorial rant Trump sent Congress in lieu of a real legal response.

I suspect I checked the metadata because, even amid the intemperate rants that stood in for legal defense at the time, this was a remarkable piece of propaganda.

A month before Donald Trump would formally announce his campaign, Natalie Harp announced her centrality in Donald Trump’s orbit with a final act of defiance to the January 6 Committee.

It raises whole new questions about how she landed that role.

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, News Analysis: Who Has the Last Say in Lebanon? Hezbollah and the State Both Say They Do, Christina Goldbaum, Aug. 22, 2026. President Joseph Aoun took office with a popular mandate to reassert control after the militant group dragged the country back into war with Israel.

When Lebanese and Israeli officials sat down in April for their first direct talks in decades, Lebanon’s leaders called it a breakthrough: a chance, finally, to reclaim some control over the country’s fate after Hezbollah had dragged it into yet another war with Israel.

But four months and seven rounds of negotiations later, there is little to show for it. The standstill is a blow to Lebanon’s president, Joseph Aoun, who took office last year with a popular mandate to wrest power from Hezbollah.

Mr. Aoun, elected by Lebanese lawmakers, pledged to restore the state’s monopoly on arms and curtail Hezbollah’s political sway. The government he formed spent much of last year making headway on that promise, working to strip Hezbollah’s influence from the country’s international airport, the commercial port in Beirut, and the banks, all used to smuggle in weapons and cash.

When Hezbollah fired on Israel in March in solidarity with Iran, setting off another all-out war, the shortcomings of the efforts to bring the group to heel were laid bare. However much the Lebanese state had chipped away at Hezbollah’s influence, the group could still drag the country into war.

Israel insists that its forces will remain in the large swath of southern Lebanon seized in this war until Hezbollah is disarmed. On Saturday, Lebanon’s National News Agency reported a series of Israeli airstrikes and demolitions overnight and into the morning in towns and villages around the south. Israeli forces have carried out demolitions and strikes nearly daily for about four months in areas they occupy. 

More On U.S. National Security, Military, Foreign Policy

White House Chronicles, Commentary: Brain Injuries From Blasts Driving Young Vets to Suicide, Llewellyn King, above, Aug. 22, 2026. We all get a warm glow when we hear the airline gate agent inviting active-duty service members to board early. What isn’t said, isn’t known, is that some of those young men and women will die eventually by their own hands, and at nearly three times the rate of civilians in the same under-34 age group.

Veterans, particularly young veterans, men and women, are in danger of walking on the dark side in terrible isolation, despair and misery — in a darkness so extreme it defies comprehension by those who are in the light.

These veterans are the victims of traumatic brain injury, a hard-to-diagnose and treat brain wounding by the force of shock waves from explosive blasts. The shock waves can cause minute tears or other damage that medical imaging and blood tests can’t detect in a living patient.

Frank Larkin, who heads up Warrior Call, an organization devoted to helping TBI-afflicted veterans, knows the problem in a savagely personal way: His son, Ryan, a decorated Navy SEAL, took his life at age 29. He was a victim of TBI.

Larkin is a former Navy SEAL, a police officer, a Secret Service agent and a U.S. Senate sergeant at arms. He is a passionate advocate for research, understanding, compassion and giving veterans an ecosystem in which they can feel secure, comforted and part of a tribal continuance that extends from the time in service to life in the civilian world.

Thomas Bowman, a Marine for 30 years and later the Republican staff director of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee and deputy secretary of the Veterans Administration in the first Trump administration, knows the issue from its institutional challenges.

Larkin and Bowman joined me and my colleague, Adam Clayton Powell III, on the PBS and SiriusXM Radio program “White House Chronicle” to discuss a disturbing uptick in veteran suicide from TBI.

When a sufferer seeks and receives medical help, the chances are it will be treated as psychological rather than physical in origin. Bowman stresses how important records and continuity of monitoring are. He believes artificial intelligence will be a great asset in managing veterans’ medical histories and ensuring they are seen as a continuum, not a series of disjointed episodes.

Larkin says his son became withdrawn and “stopped smiling, as if a mask had been put over his face.” He knew his problem, but he was unable to overcome it, even with a dedicated support system. Before he took his life, Ryan asked that his brain be donated to science.

TBI victims can suffer from frequent headaches, sleeplessness, brain fog and shortened tempers. Drugs, alcohol and homelessness complicate and worsen their predicament.

Larkin says young veterans can find themselves “in a very dark place, suffering invisible wounds.”

Things are getting worse on the battlefield. Drones are an increased source of brain damage. These, Larkin and Bowman point out, are unlike mortars and improvised explosive devices: They explode on the same plane as soldiers’ heads.

Not all the damage takes place on the battlefield. Some of it can be part of routine training, the frequent exposure to everything from a soldier’s weapon to artillery and mortar live-fire practice.

Larkin and Bowman speak of the good work at the Department of Veterans Affairs, but also of the numbing bureaucracy there. Larkin regrets the loss of 30,000 personnel at the VA in recent government trimming.

Nonetheless, the rate of veteran suicide is going up, according to the latest VA report. The overall rate for veterans of all ages, based on data through 2023, was 35.2 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 34.7 deaths per 100,000 in 2022. The suicide rate for civilians of all ages was half the rate.

Suicide among veterans is the 12th-leading cause of death for veterans overall but the leading cause of death for veterans under 45, the VA report found.

As a former homicide detective, Larkin believes these suicides are underreported. He says this is sometimes to protect a family and for other reasons.

All suicides are terrible but particularly when the victims are young and have come to that bleak place because they served.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Is Breaking the Law to Cover Up How Russia Helped Him Win in 2024, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 21, 2026. I got into it with Grok over at the Nazi bar after Elon Musk’s robot played dumb over and over again to deny that Trump willingly accepted help in 2016. Maybe Grok is willfully dumb because of Elon’s role in the whole thing.

All that’s before you consider how quickly Steve Witkoff and Jared resumed the outreach from Kirill Dmitriev, or how quickly Trump moved to get Alexander Smirnov sprung from prison.

Grok showed amazing agility for a robot, always moving the ball from “accepting” Russian help to “sitting in a room and asking for it.”

The robot claims there are no documents akin to the ones John Solomon had just released implicating Eric Swalwell, but not showing that he knew Christine Fang was working for China. Except that among the documents Solomon released, he revealed that Konstantin Kilimnik had renewed his efforts to get Trump elected in 2020.

And that Michael Caputo had participated in an anti-Biden propaganda effort in 2020, before he joined Trump’s government.

NYT doesn’t go into all this detail in its piece describing how Trump is flouting the law that required him to lay out election interference in 2024 by March. But it did note the gravy train Benny Johnson was floating on.

Disclosures during the Biden administration, including federal indictments, accused both Russia and Iran of engaging in aggressive influence operations in 2024. Iranians were charged with hacking Mr. Trump’s campaign and shopping stolen material to various news outlets in an effort to harm his bid to return to the White House. The Justice Department and other agencies accused President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of again trying to bolster Mr. Trump (and degrade U.S. support for Ukraine) by targeting the United States with disinformation — including by secretly funneling $10 million to a conservative media start-up.

But those revelations were piecemeal, and do not offer a full portrait of what foreign meddling took place.

Congress passed a number of laws after Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election intended to better inoculate the American public from foreign attempts to influence voters. That included requirements for more transparency with lawmakers and the public from the nation’s spy agencies about what intelligence had been collected concerning the ambitions of foreign powers around federal elections.

In a letter in July, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee urged Bill Pulte, then the acting director of national intelligence, to declassify and publicly release a redacted version of the 2024 election report. The law at issue requires the assessment’s public release within 60 days of the conclusion of the federal election cycle “to the greatest extent possible” while protecting sources and methods.

The Trump administration also has yet to deliver to Congress a report required by law, identifying foreign intelligence threats to the coming 2026 midterm election. The deadline was in early May, a Democratic aide to the House Intelligence Committee said.

“The intelligence community is currently in violation of multiple statutes designed to ensure that Congress understands the full scope of foreign adversary plans and intentions this cycle,” as well as the administration’s efforts to combat those threats, the letter said.

Though to be honest, I think Trump may have as much to hide regarding the Iran hack-and-leak that successfully compromised Trump’s rat-fucker Roger Stone, his defense attorney Lindsey Halligan, and his campaign manager (though Trump delayed confirmation that Iran did get at least some files from Susie Wiles), as he does on the Russian front. I say that for reasons beyond the fact that even as he was being hack Trump was promising to be nice to Iran.

I originally thought this response from Trump was a response to the Ukraine question, I think, instead, he was responding to the hacking question.

Can you say anything about the hacking of your campaign?

I don’t like it. Really bad. I’m not happy with it. Our government shouldn’t let that happen.

Does there need to be a government response?

Yeah there should be. Our government should not let — they have no respect for our government.

Trump blamed the government after, earlier in the Potemkin Presser, he had already predicted that “we” will be friendly with Russia’s increasingly critical ally, Iran.

We will be friendly with Iran. Maybe, maybe not. But they cannot have a nuclear weapon. We were all set to make sure they did not have a nuclear weapon.

There was a blackmail component with the Bolton hack, and I would be unsurprised if Iran at least tried that with Trump. Just as importantly, even from the few documents I saw from the hack (the vetting documents for JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum), I have real questions whether Trump vetted JD anew or just relied on one that Peter Thiel had done in 2022.

Whatever the reasons, Donald Trump is defying the law that requires him to tell us all the ways Russian intervened to help him get elected in 2024 before they try again in 2026.

U.S. Racial and Public Education Politics In History 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 21, 2026 [Race, Poverty, Education and Politics: Linked], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 22, 2026. On August 21, 1831, Nat Turner, an enslaved American, led about 70 of his enslaved and free Black neighbors in a rebellion to awaken his white neighbors to the inherent brutality of slaveholding and the dangers it presented to their own safety.

Turner and his friends traveled from house to house in their neighborhood in Southampton County, Virginia, freeing enslaved people and murdering about 60 of the white men, women, and children they encountered. Their goal, Turner later told an interviewer, was “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.”

State militia put down the rebellion in a couple of days, and both the legal system and white vigilantes killed at least 200 Black Virginians, many of whom were not involved in Turner’s bid to end enslavement. Turner himself was captured in October, tried in November, sentenced to death, and hanged.

But white Virginians, and white folks in neighboring southern states, remained frightened. Turner had been, in their minds, a well-treated, educated enslaved man, who knew his Bible well and seemed the very last sort of person they would have expected to revolt. And so they responded to the rebellion in two ways. They turned against the idea that enslavement was a bad thing, and instead began to argue that human enslavement was a positive good.

And states across the South passed laws making it a crime to teach enslaved Americans to read and write.

Denying enslaved Black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation. The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled religion and propaganda to defend their dominance.

In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina explained that society needed “a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill.”

But when they organized in the 1850s to push back against the efforts of elite enslavers like Hammond to take over the national government, members of the fledgling Republican Party recognized the importance of education. In 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln explained that those who adhered to Hammond’s “mud-sill” theory “assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible…. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous.”

Lincoln argued that workers were not simply drudges but rather were the heart of the economy. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” He tied the political vision of the Framers to this economic vision. In order to prosper, he argued, men needed “book-learning,” and he called for universal education. An educated community, he said, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.”

When they were in control of the federal government in the 1860s, Republicans passed the Land Grant College Act, funding public universities so that men without wealthy fathers might have access to higher education. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans also tried to use the federal government to fund public schools for poor Black and white Americans, apportioning money according to illiteracy rates.

But President Andrew Johnson vetoed that bill on the grounds that the federal government had no business messing with education: that process, he said, belonged to the states—which for the next century denied Black people equal access to schools, excluding them from full participation in American society and condemning them to menial labor.

Then, in 1954, after decades of pressure from Black and Brown Americans for equal access to public schools, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California, unanimously agreed that separate schools were inherently unequal and thus unconstitutional.

Immediately, white southerners lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Others took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools.

Within years, these segregation academies would dovetail neatly with the religious schools organized after the 1962 Engel v. Vitale decision in which the Supreme Court struck down state-mandated prayer in public schools, and the 1963 Abington School District v. Schempp decision prohibiting teachers from leading students in prayer and Bible reading. The Supreme Court decisions against prayer in schools reinforced the idea that the government opposed “family values,” and fundamentalists pulled their children out of public schools and created alternative religious schools. Fundamentalist leader Jerry Falwell began to suggest that public schools should be abolished entirely.

Both of these developments provided constituents for Ronald Reagan’s rise to political power with a message that public employees had gotten too powerful and that public enterprises should be privatized.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced: “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the secretary of energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used it to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The drive to push tax dollars from public schools to private academies through a voucher system remained a top priority for those on the right. In his first term, Trump asked Congress to fund “school choice for disadvantaged youth, including millions of African-American and Latino children. These families should be free to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school that is right for them.” His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was a staunch supporter of school choice and the voucher system; she and her family gave $600,000 to promote school choice ballot laws in the decade before 2017.

The coronavirus pandemic sped up the push to defund public schools as Trump pushed hard to transfer funds from the closed public schools to private schools. That push helped to change the nature of vouchers from ones targeted at students from poor families or students with special needs toward vouchers for everyone. In 2022, Arizona lawmakers passed the biggest school voucher program in the nation.

Advocates claimed that the new program would “save taxpayers thousands per student, millions statewide,” but in fact, as Eli Hager of ProPublica explained in 2024, the parents most likely to apply for subsidies already had their children in private school or were homeschooling them, using the vouchers to replace what they had been paying in the past. The state’s spending on vouchers ballooned to $886 million in 2024–2025 as families from wealthier, whiter school districts used vouchers for children who were already in private school. The costs blew a hole in the state’s budget: in 2024, Arizona faced a shortfall of $1.4 billion, forcing the state to slash spending for water infrastructure, road repair, and community colleges.

But voucher programs continued to expand, helped by DeVos’s continued promotion of vouchers after Trump left office. In 2022 a nonprofit she founded poured about $9 million—about $2.5 million of which came from DeVos and her husband—into state elections, backing nearly 200 candidates who would push school vouchers to subsidize private schools with public tax money.

In May 2025, Texas governor Greg Abbott signed into law a voucher program in Texas under which, beginning this fall, families will receive about $10,000 a year for each school-age child to spend at a private school or $2,000 for children being homeschooled. The program is capped at $1 billion in its first two years, but experts predict it will rise to almost $5 billion by 2030.

The measure had faced opposition from Democrats and also Republicans from rural districts who worried about money draining from their public schools. It passed only after national pro-voucher advocates poured money into replacing the Republican state legislators who had stood against a voucher system with pro-voucher candidates. Abbott said that one of those donations, $6 million from Republican megadonor billionaire Jeff Yass of Pennsylvania, was the “largest single donation in Texas history.”

Earlier this month, Jaden Edison and Sneha Dey of the Texas Tribune explained that a report from the state comptroller showed that of the more than 100,000 families participating in the new private school voucher program, most are white and from urban areas. Their families make less than twice the federal poverty level. About 70% were already attending private schools or being homeschooled.

Austin Democratic state senator Sarah Eckhardt said the report “proves this program is a billion-dollar handout to exclusive private schools concentrated in big cities, while public schools across the state are underfunded and closing at an alarming rate.”

In Arizona, opponents of the voucher program tried to put onto the ballot this fall a measure that would have limited eligibility for the program by income and cracked down on the misuse of funds by homeschoolers, who used voucher money for ninja warrior training centers, trampoline parks, pianos, and so on. But voucher supporters sued over the signatures on the ballot measure, and on Tuesday the Arizona Supreme Court decided in their favor, throwing the measure out of this fall’s election.

Elvia Díaz of the Arizona Mirror wrote: “Arizona school vouchers that are pulling $1 billion away from students in K–12 public schools are here to stay, whether we like it or not.” She noted that “the real challenge is a public school system left underfunded and a voucher system left unchecked.”

In 1831, southern lawmakers tried to create a white nation by making it a crime to educate Black Americans. In 2026 the intent to exclude certain Americans from participation in the Enlightenment principles that undergird the nation remains the same, only less explicit.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Rights, Justice

Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha Vance (Facebook photo).

The Michael Fanone Show, Political Opinion: Stop Waiting for Usha Vance to Save Us From Her Husband, Michael Fanone, above right, former U.S. Capitol Police officer severely injured by rioters during the pro-Trump Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Aug. 22, 2026. For a decade now, we’ve been playing the same game with Trump world. We scan the room for the secret adult. The one who privately thinks this is insane. The one who’s quietly uncomfortable and, any day now, is going to step in and restrain the person with real power.

We are almost always wrong. And the newest place we’ve been telling ourselves that fairy tale is JD Vance’s marriage.The story we wanted to believe

You know the version. Here’s Usha Vance — daughter of Indian immigrants, summa cum laude at Yale, a Cambridge master’s, clerkships for Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts, a real legal career — standing next to a man who went from privately calling Donald Trump “America’s Hitler” to becoming maybe the most aggressive MAGA enforcer in the country.

And a lot of people looked at that mismatch and decided she must secretly hate all of it. She’s trapped. She’s biting her tongue. She’s the moderate hostage.

A new Vanity Fair profile takes that comforting little story and puts a pin in it. One of the Vances’ own Yale Law classmates says it flat out: “It’s patronizing to say that she’s been silenced. She has chosen this.”She wasn’t dragged into the transformation. She was there for the construction.

Here’s the part the “trapped wife” narrative can’t survive.

When JD Vance showed up at Yale Law in 2010, he wasn’t the polished operator you see now. He was a kid from Middletown, Ohio, raised largely by his grandparents, dropped into an elite world he didn’t have the map for. Usha had the map. And according to Vanity Fair, she became something like his guide to that world.

JD himself has written about her teaching him which fork to use at formal dinners. Friends say she literally kept a spreadsheet — things she thought he should try that would make him more cultured, more polished, more able to move through rooms he hadn’t grown up in. It sounds charming. It’s also telling. She was building the operating system, and he was a very eager student.

Then Hillbilly Elegy hit, JD got famous as the guy who could “explain” working-class Trump voters to the coastal set, and — this is the part everyone forgets — he didn’t even like Trump. Reprehensible. An idiot. “America’s Hitler,” he told a former roommate.

And then he decided he wanted power. Peter Thiel wrote the checks. Trump gave the blessing. The Never Trumper became the warrior. We’ve picked that hypocrisy apart plenty of times. What this profile adds is the question nobody was asking out loud: where was Usha for all of it?SubscribedTheir own classmates started a group chat about it

That’s not me being cute. Vanity Fair reports that members of the Vances’ Yale Law cohort were so floored watching this couple’s political metamorphosis that they spun up a private Signal group just to compare notes.

And you can see why it scrambled their brains. Usha was once described as “leftish.” Her mother worked on diversity initiatives at UC San Diego. Usha herself worked at a firm that publicly bragged about hiring women and underrepresented lawyers — while her husband was busy making the war on DEI and “wokeness” the spine of his entire political identity.

There even seem to be personal lines. A friend once told The Washington Post that Usha was disturbed by Trump’s incitement of January 6th. JD went the other direction entirely — defending Trump’s conduct, attacking the investigation, hammering Mike Pence for certifying the election.

So what happened between those two people? Honestly, we don’t fully know. Usha turned down Vanity Fair’s interview request, and nobody should pretend to narrate the inside of a stranger’s marriage. But here’s the thing: we don’t need the private thoughts. We have the public choices.

The public record of a woman with agency

She helped prep him for the vice-presidential debate. When the “childless cat ladies” comments blew up in his face, she didn’t hide — she went out and publicly defended him, insisting people just needed the “context.” She walked away from her legal career the moment Trump put JD on the ticket. She’s stood at his side as he became one of the load-bearing figures of MAGA.

And she told NBC something revealing earlier this year: when something’s bothering JD, “that’s when I come into the picture.” She admitted she doesn’t always agree with him or the administration — but that everyone around them knows how deeply she’s invested in his success.

That’s not a hostage. That’s a partner with agency. And honestly, treating a 40-year-old Supreme Court–clerk attorney like a helpless prop standing mutely behind her husband is its own kind of insult. She’s brilliant, disciplined, ambitious. She knows exactly what she’s doing.The Fuentes line — and the choice not to draw it

Here’s the ugliest wrinkle, because Usha has personally been a target of the exact forces her husband’s movement has fed.

White nationalist Nick Fuentes went after her for being Indian American — sneering about how JD could champion “white identity” while married to an Indian woman. If there were ever a moment where you’d expect JD Vance to draw a hard line, it’s an open racist attacking his wife.

Instead, when MAGA later fought about whether to push people like Fuentes out, JD came down against “purity tests.” At a Turning Point USA event he said he wasn’t carrying around a list of conservatives to denounce, and that the movement should welcome pretty much anyone who loves America.

And one of the couple’s Yale classmates read that decision and drew the obvious conclusion: Usha must have been fine with it. The logic is brutal in its simplicity — JD is fiercely protective of his family. If she’d demanded he condemn Fuentes, he would have. As the classmate put it: “The choice not to criticize Nick Fuentes and people like him in the Republican Party — that is a choice.”Disagreement isn’t resistance. Silence isn’t opposition.

That word — choice — is the whole thing.

JD chose to trade everything he’d said about Trump for a shot at power. And Usha has made choices too. She chose to leave her career. She chose to campaign. She chose to defend him on camera. She chooses, still, to stand beside him as he leads a movement whose fringe aims racist attacks at her personally.

None of that requires her to agree with every word out of his mouth. Married people aren’t a hive mind, and she clearly doesn’t share every MAGA belief. But at some point the interesting question stops being what does she privately think and becomes what is she publicly willing to enable.

Because that’s the trap in the story we keep telling ourselves. We’ve spent a decade hunting for the secret moderate inside Trump world — the one who’ll finally apply the brakes. Maybe Usha Vance really is more complicated than the movement. More moderate than her husband. Maybe she genuinely can’t stand some of the people orbiting him.

But disagreement isn’t resistance. And silence isn’t opposition. When you’re helping someone climb, defending them when they’re hit, prepping them for the big stage, and standing beside them while they carry a movement you supposedly have reservations about — the gap between what you believe and what you’re building quietly closes to nothing.

She’s not trapped. She’s not naïve. And according to the people who knew her before any of us had heard the name JD Vance, she is definitely not powerless.

She helped build this man. And whatever comes next, she’ll be right there beside him, cutting the ribbon.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

New York Times, Why Polling Chaos Could Create Big Problems for American Politics, Reid J. Epstein, Aug. 22, 2026. Bad polls. Misleading betting odds. Surveys meant to shape narratives. Ahead of the midterms and 2028, there is suddenly serious confusion about candidate strength and voter sentiment.

When Mandela Barnes dropped out of the Wisconsin governor’s race two weeks before the Democratic primary, he declared, “It has become very clear who our nominee is going to be.”

He meant Francesca Hong, who had a commanding lead in polls — not David Crowley, who ended up narrowly winning the nomination.

Politicians like Mr. Barnes have relied on public and private surveys of voters’ views to guide their decisions for as long as pollsters have sought to measure public opinion. But in this year’s midterm contests, misleading polling has shaped campaign narratives, donor behavior and news coverage like never before.

Polls are traditionally used to measure public opinion, not mold it. But this year, several Democratic campaigns have seized on unreliable polls to push the perception that their candidates are surging to try to solidify support, attract donors and scare off rivals. The rise of prediction markets has also created financial incentives for untrustworthy or even fake political polls at a moment when it has become even more expensive and difficult to conduct high-quality public opinion surveys.

Some Republicans — particularly President Trump — have for years pointed to dubious polling to advance their political goals, but the phenomenon has become far more acute in Democratic primaries this year. In recent weeks, questionable surveys have created confusion and warped perceptions of the results of key primaries for the party.

In Michigan’s primary for Senate, polls fueled a widespread belief that Representative Haley Stevens, a moderate Democrat, was a major underdog to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive. After she voted on Primary Day, the first question she faced from reporters was about how Dr. El-Sayed built such a large polling lead. She ended up losing by just a percentage point.

In Wisconsin’s primary for governor, polls that consistently showed Ms. Hong ahead by double digits created an air of inevitability around her nomination. When she lost, it was viewed as a stunning upset.

“After seeing the polls, I think everybody would have called me the underdog,” Mr. Crowley said. “During this race, I had to be a little bit recklessly optimistic.”

The polling world has also been rocked by recent revelations of made-up surveys and sketchy practices.Three purported polls of the Los Angeles mayor’s race, the Wisconsin primary for governor and the Nevada governor’s race turned out to be entirely fake — a “short-term social experiment,” according to the website that released them. The fakery’s discovery, by The Los Angeles Times, came only after Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles posted approvingly about one of the polls, which showed her ahead.

Another pollster acknowledged that in a survey of Florida’s primary for governor, it had shifted some respondents’ support from the candidate they had said they backed to another candidate because the initial results “did not align with our read of the race.” (None of the polls above were included in The New York Times’s poll trackers or coverage because they did not meet its basic transparency and professionalism standards.)

All of this is happening at the dawn of the 2028 presidential primary season, when dozens of candidates are likely to be defined in part by polls that cement impressions and set narratives that may not be tethered to political reality.

“Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who was a senior aide on Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign for president. “Polls now are not just a way of measuring the horse race. It’s a way for candidates and their allies to influence the horse race.”

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Weeks Before Election He’s Losing Trump Clownishly Raises Prices On All Sorts of Things, Simon Rosenberg, right, Aug. 22, 2026. His war has failed. His economic policy has failed. His trade policy has failed. MAHA has failed. His political project is failing.

Donald Trump is a world-altering, titanic f*ck up He and his team increasingly look like rapacious buffoons who are way over their head:

Yesterday our desperate, addled leader clownishly refused to answer which countries he was importing low cost beef from The sense of decay is everywhere. Natalie Harp’s brother is a Sandinista!

We end the week with a 90% chance of winning the House according to FiftyPlusOne. And a 55% chance of winning the Senate: 

The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Rosie O’Donnell Delivers One Final FU to Trump and Sings Him Right Out the DoorCommentary, Rosie O’Donnell Delivers One Final FU to Trump and Sings Him Right Out the Door, Thom Hartmann, right, Aug. 22, 2026. The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion…

Republicans created the morbidly rich and stuck America with the $40 trillion debt. For decades, I’ve been pointing out that in 1981 Ronald Reagan adopted a strategy proposed a few years earlier in the Wall Street Journal of spending like a drunken sailor when a Republican is in the White House to stimulate the economy and create the illusion of good times, while running up the national debt to astronomical levels, all so that they could scream about the national debt and demand cuts to social programs whenever a Democrat came into office. Republicans have been religiously following this ever since; the only Republican president to deviate from it was George HW Bush.

The result, of course, is our $40 trillion national debt. With that $40 trillion, we could have had a national healthcare system and free college for all Americans, but instead we got Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, had a whole collection of bizarre billionaires. Finally, thankfully, both economists and Democrats have figured this out and are finally starting to speak out. It’s insane that the GOP has gotten away with this scam as long as they have…

— Donald Trump claims we have a new category of crime: publishing numbers he doesn’t like. When the Center for American Progress ran the crime data for Washington DC after Trump threw thousands of National Guard troops onto the streets and found that they not only didn’t reduce crime but also burned through more that $1.7 billion in our tax dollars, Trump went nuts. His personal lawyer sent a 9-page letter to CAP demanding a retraction, an apology, and cash (of course), backed by the threat of a $5 billion defamation suit. Always classy, Trump’s lawyer closed the demand letter with the all-caps “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.” He also floated the possibility of going after CAP’s donors, the sort of Putin-esque or Stalin-esque action that FIRE’s Aaron Terry called (correctly) “wholly incompatible with a free society.” Meanwhile in Florida, Trump toady Joe diGenova has his DOJ investigators demanding to interview the FBI officials who executed the Mar-a-Lago search — which turned up more than 100 classified documents Trump had stolen and was criminally in possession of — in pursuit of the theory that thief Trump, rather than the US government, was the actual victim. Is this still America?

— Trump’s inspectors general have found our government’s waste, fraud, and abuse: It’s them. You’ll recall that Trump fired over 20 Inspectors General across most all of the federal government’s major agencies, replacing these watchdogs with MAGA grifters and lapdogs. The IG for the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, Cheryl Mason, demanded a private bathroom suite for her office, apparently because she didn’t want to rub elbows with the riff-raff. She claimed that Senate-confirmed appointees are legally entitled to a private bathroom, a law that literally doesn’t exist. There is a $5000 cap for renovations, which wouldn’t begin to touch the cost of what she did. She also commissioned a personal flag at more than a thousand dollars at the same time she was largely ignoring the “stop fraud and waste” job of an Inspector General while she slow-walked reports on electronic health records, and cut criticism of the VA’s physician shortages out of final drafts. Over at the Labor Department, losing Republican Congressman Anthony D’Esposito fired the staff overseeing corruption and now campaigns alongside Trump. At HUD the acting IG told his staff that instead of looking for waste, fraud, and abuse, they should instead become the Secretary’s “strong right arm.” Audits are, as a result of all this corruption, down 15% and investigative reports down by a quarter. As fired Interior IG Mark Greenblatt put it plainly: “You’ve co-opted the umpire and made them part of your team.” Veterans get the shortages, Mason gets her very own flag.

— The Democratic establishment is now upset that they’ve spent a decade begging young people to run for office. Over on Fox “News” they’re loving James Carville, who’s now aligned himself with a “moderate” group that wants to hang onto control of the Democratic Party, as he blasted the DSA for borrowing the Party’s “godd’mn” name. This is part of a broader pattern among the neocons and neoliberals who’ve largely run and profited from the Party since Clinton flipped it in that direction in 1993, as documented by Fair Media Watch’s Raina Lipsitz. Young progressives are getting into races across the country, and the old Party “establishment” is recasting their participation as some sort of sinister infiltration. The problem Carville, Axelrod, et al are having is that a new Berkley Institute of Government Studies poll found that Democrats in California back candidates who call themselves progressive fully 60% of the time, and back those who call themselves “democratic socialists” 58% of the time. So-called “mainstream Democrats” are only supported 48% of the time by Democratic voters. And that’s among all ages; when you look at voters under 40 the gap is even wider. Meanwhile in the real world of actual Senate races, Roy Cooper is advertising that he opposed defunding the police, Iowa’s Josh Turek is running an ad boasting that he sided with Republicans more than 700 times, and Mary Peltola is promising Alaskan voters that she’ll take on Democrats too. A party this eager to apologize for existing may want to consider what it’s asking anyone to vote for.

— Judge Emmet Sullivan, forty-one years on the federal bench, has run out of F’s to give about the Justice Department’s ongoing Epstein/Trump child rape coverup. Yesterday, Sullivan gave AG Todd Blanche until next Thursday to explain why his department keeps hiding a trove of foreign-language Epstein documents, along with FBI agents’ interview notes from women accusing Epstein and Trump of rape and sexual abuse. This is the same case — brought by Katie Phang — where the judge issued a preliminary injunction way back in June ordering the DOJ to remove redactions including email exchanges about a torture video and video interviews with a woman who accuses Trump of raping her when she was a minor. Sullivan noted that Blanche has basically admitted he’s covering up for Trump by breaking the law known as the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and at a hearing earlier this month one of his DOJ lawyers refused to commit to any timetable whatsoever for compliance. Sullivan is threatening these attorneys with contempt, but odds are they all figure Trump will pardon them and billionaires will hire them no matter what. The cover-up continues, as the billionaire-owned corporate press yawns…

— Big corporate American employers are advertising jobs that don’t exist just to terrify their employees. It’s psychological warfare against workers, this scam run by major corporations where they spend a few pennies to post job opportunities similar to their own existing workers’ jobs not because they plan to hire people but to intimidate their existing employees into not asking for raises. The job platform Greenhouse found that 18 to 22% of its own postings were never filled by the companies posting them, an analysis of LinkedIn put the U.S. figure at 27.4%, and BLS data showed a shocking 2.2 million advertised openings in a single month that produced not even one single hire. When pressed, nearly one in three employers admitted that they posted roles with no intention of hiring anybody. Welcome to the end point of 45 years of Reaganomics where unions are struggling, workers are under psychological warfare attack, and the middle class continues to be converted into the working poor by the GOP and their corporate buddies.

— Crazy Alert! Rosie O’Donnell closed out her week guest-hosting Kimmel with an extraordinary rendition of “Danny Boy.” Back from her new home of Ireland, where she’s lived since 5 days after Trump’s second inauguration, O’Donnell spent the week refusing to say Trump’s name, instead calling him “Mango Mussolini” and “President Oompa Loompa.” She dedicated her final number Thursday night to Trump with the classic Irish song Donny Boy as the screen behind her showed his polling graphs collapsing, the Reflecting Pool turning green, the ballroom, the Iran war, and measles. She wrapped it up with the chorus, “Come on, resign and make this country great again.” She also thanked Jimmy Kimmel for reminding everyone that free speech still exists here in America, a reminder of how FCC Chairman and Trump lickspittle Brendan Carr tried to take him down and is still harassing Disney/ABC. It was perfect!

New York Times, The Socialist, a Million-Dollar Rowhouse and Unanswered Questions, Jeremy W. Peters, Nate Schweber and Miles G. Cohen, Aug. 22, 2026. Differing accounts of where Gustavo Gordillo, a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, lives are raising doubts about whether the city’s left-wing organizers are ready for prime time.It seems like a straightforward question: Where does Gustavo Gordillo, one of New York’s leading socialist organizers, live?

The question has turned into something quite mysterious — and revealing about the new left’s struggles around issues of wealth and class.

When The New York Times this month profiled Mr. Gordillo, who studied fine arts at Yale, the reporter, as is standard practice, asked the subject where he lived.

The question was relevant, in part, because many of the high-profile activists are the offspring of affluent parents who have not experienced working class life and basic financial pressures, like paying rent.

Mr. Gordillo and other leaders have been eager to dispel the notion that they are privileged socialists.

The reporter who profiled Mr. Gordillo, 38, noticed that his father, also named Gustavo Gordillo, had purchased a rowhouse in the quickly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn and that public records listed that as the younger Mr. Gordillo’s address. The reporter asked the younger Mr. Gordillo if living there contradicted his socialist beliefs.

No, Mr. Gordillo responded, saying he actually rents an apartment in Crown Heights, a nearby Brooklyn neighborhood.

The reporter was skeptical and asked for proof. Mr. Gordillo, a co-chair of the New York chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, provided some mail and a union membership card that had a Crown Heights address on it.

Then things got complicated. On Wednesday, The New York Post splashed its cover with an article quoting Mr. Gordillo’s father, saying that his son does live in the Bed-Stuy rowhouse.The tabloid said the younger Mr. Gordillo was pursuing “his anti-capitalist lefty agenda while enjoying the life in the two-story, nearly 2,000-square-foot row home on a gentrifying tree-lined block in Bed-Stuy.”

The Times reporter reached back out to the younger Mr. Gordillo asking him to explain the discrepancy. That’s when Mr. Gordillo stopped responding to the reporter.

You may ask why the address of an ascendant socialist leader matters. But the question gets at the heart of an issue that has loomed over the increasingly powerful movement: Are the leaders genuinely tapped into New Yorkers’ economic anxieties and connected to the working class?

The issue is acutely sensitive for the New York chapter of the D.S.A., and as their movement becomes more prominent, it is drawing more scrutiny. Rising home prices have driven an affordability crisis all over the city, including in neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy, which for decades were home to working-class Black families. Reducing income inequality and high living costs have been two of the most animating issues for the D.S.A.

The D.S.A. is not eager to discuss the wealth or comforts of its leaders. On Friday, a spokesperson for the New York chapter of the D.S.A. said that the group’s policy would not allow them to comment on any member’s “personal details.”

The controversy demonstrates how glaring the spotlight can be for newcomers to the world of New York politics.

Mr. Gordillo and the D.S.A. have often vilified the wealthy. Now, his address — and whether he really lives in a rowhouse valued between $1 million and $2 million — has become a distraction for the growing left-wing movement.

Mr. Gordillo has listed the Bed-Stuy rowhouse as his permanent address in public records going back to 2020. His father bought the two-story rowhouse in 2019 through a limited liability corporation, tax records show. The sale price, according to public records, was $935,000. And documents filed with the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in 2023 show plans for a gut renovation estimated to cost at least $1 million, with an addition and a roof garden. Renovations appear to be ongoing.

The Times visited both the rowhouse and the Crown Heights apartment this week. In Crown Heights, tenants said they had seen Mr. Gordillo in the building months ago. They recalled seeing two items posted on his apartment door: a campaign sign for Mr. Mamdani and an eviction notice.

Court records confirm that the landlord of the property in March filed to evict Mr. Gordillo for failure to pay rent. The D.S.A. spokesperson said Mr. Gordillo had “never been evicted.”

“Of all the neighbors who come and go,” said one longtime resident who declined to give his name, “he was the quickest to come and go.”

Questions about Mr. Gordillo’s housing surfaced as other aspects of his biography have become murkier. He moved to the city in 2013, after studying sculpture and video at Yale and worked in a high-end art gallery in Chelsea. He quit, he told The Times, because selling art to wealthy people conflicted with his values, and he decided to become an electrician.

In interviews, he has described himself as a union electrician. The Times confirmed earlier this month that he was a member of the local IBEW chapter, which represents electricians in the city, though the union said he was more than $300 behind in dues.

But the union also said that Mr. Gordillo’s enrollment in an apprenticeship program was terminated in March of this year after he failed to complete the required work.

So, is he really a union electrician? It is unclear.

The D.S.A. urged The Times to get back to more important issues.

Media, Celebrity, Education, Sports, Religion

The United Kingdom's Prince Harry and his bride, Meghan Markle, on their wedding day before they renounced their royal titles.

New York Times, Harry and Meghan See Their California Dreams, and Riches, Fade Away, Nicole Sperling and Shawn Hubler, Aug. 22, 2026. Like so many others before them, Prince Harry and Meghan arrived in Hollywood with big plans. They are leaving with their star power fading.

It began with such high hopes.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex landed in Hollywood in 2020, flush with a multimillion-dollar Netflix deal and a promise that the duo, scorned by the royal family, would make a slew of inspirational programming.

Two years later, “Harry & Meghan” the Netflix six-part docuseries on the couple’s departure from Britain, generated 23.4 million views in its initial release, immediately topping the company’s charts as the most watched ever for the first four days of a documentary. In total, the program has garnered 70 million views since its debut.

Nothing else Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, ever made for the service — whether it was “Live to Lead,” a seven-episode interview show with world leaders, or “Polo,” a docuseries about the sport — reached such heights.

In 2025, the Netflix deal was not renewed. A similarly lofty agreement at Spotify also fell short of expectations.

And as Americans asked this week why the couple was leaving their West Coast idyll, Hollywood observers pointed to one of the most enduring themes in the history of Southern California: show business aspirations that failed.

“There has always been this aura here, this magical thinking,” said Leo Braudy, a Los Angeles cultural historian and the author of “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History.” “Everybody thinks, ‘I’m beautiful,’ or ‘I’m handsome.’ Everybody thinks, ‘If those people can make it in Hollywood, so can I.’”

But most people don’t make it, he said, and throughout history, even otherwise wealthy and powerful people have mistakenly imagined that success in other fields would automatically translate to show business glory.\

It began with such high hopes.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex landed in Hollywood in 2020, flush with a multimillion-dollar Netflix deal and a promise that the duo, scorned by the royal family, would make a slew of inspirational programming.

Two years later, “Harry & Meghan” the Netflix six-part docuseries on the couple’s departure from Britain, generated 23.4 million views in its initial release, immediately topping the company’s charts as the most watched ever for the first four days of a documentary. In total, the program has garnered 70 million views since its debut.

Nothing else Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, ever made for the service — whether it was “Live to Lead,” a seven-episode interview show with world leaders, or “Polo,” a docuseries about the sport — reached such heights.

In 2025, the Netflix deal was not renewed. A similarly lofty agreement at Spotify also fell short of expectations.

And as Americans asked this week why the couple was leaving their West Coast idyll, Hollywood observers pointed to one of the most enduring themes in the history of Southern California: show business aspirations that failed.

“There has always been this aura here, this magical thinking,” said Leo Braudy, a Los Angeles cultural historian and the author of “The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History.” “Everybody thinks, ‘I’m beautiful,’ or ‘I’m handsome.’ Everybody thinks, ‘If those people can make it in Hollywood, so can I.’”

But most people don’t make it, he said, and throughout history, even otherwise wealthy and powerful people have mistakenly imagined that success in other fields would automatically translate to show business glory.

• New York Times, Prince Harry and Others Told to Pay Daily Mail Publisher $13 Million, Stephen Castle, Aug. 21, 2026. Harry and six other high-profile figures lost a privacy lawsuit against Associated Newspapers. They may eventually have to pay more than twice the initial sum, a judge said.

New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg Buys an Irish Castle, Alan Yuhas, Aug. 21, 2026.The prominent landowner has added a nearly 200-year-old estate to his holdings.

For two centuries, Strancally Castle’s towers and parapets have overlooked a bend in the Blackwater River and a swath of Irish land as it passed from one wealthy family to the next.

It now joins the holdings of Mark Zuckerberg, one of the 21st century’s most prominent landowners, along with a place on an artificial island in Miami Beach, a large house in Washington and compounds in California and Hawaii.

A spokesman for Mr. Zuckerberg, the 42-year-old billionaire chief executive of Meta, confirmed this week that he had bought the castle, a Gothic-style estate in Waterford County, a region of southeastern Ireland with about 130,000 people. The castle was built around 1830 and renovated in the early 2000s.

The purchase does not appear to be listed in Ireland’s ​property price register. The Irish Times, which reported the news on Thursday, estimated that the estate could be worth $23 million to $35 million.

Around the middle of the 19th century, the estate was valued at 61 pounds, according to an entry about the castle in a University of Galway archive of landed estates that also mentions it contained an art collection and a library.

“Mark and his family look forward to caring for this historic home and visiting when traveling to Ireland,” said Brian Baker, the spokesman for Mr. Zuckerberg.

The castle was built for a former member of Parliament, John Keily, according to Ireland’s National Built Heritage Service, which describes the building as both “muscular” and “dour.”

The estate has never left private hands, leaving the public to glimpse its interior only in historical archives. An entry about Mr. Keily in “The History of Parliament” website says the house was designed “on a lavish scale; it took a brisk walk of 4½ minutes to reach the dining room from the kitchen.”

The castle was most recently owned by Michael Alen-Buckley, the chairman of the investment firm RAB Capital, and his wife, Giancarla Alen-Buckley, a member of the family behind the luxury Rocco Forte Hotels group.Editors’ Picks

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“We leave our home of twenty-five years fondly and are grateful for the opportunity we have been given to save and restore Strancally Castle,” the couple said in a statement. “We are delighted that Mark and his family intend to build on our stewardship by continuing to invest in maintaining and enhancing the property and grounds as their home.”

It is not clear how much time Mr. Zuckerberg or his family (he has three daughters with his wife, Priscilla Chan) will spend in Ireland, but his company has a significant presence there.

Like many major U.S. companies, Meta uses an office in Dublin as its European headquarters, and about 1,500 employees work there. Ireland has become a hub for multinational corporations, both for its relatively low corporate income tax rate, 15 percent for big companies, and its history of allowing corporations to shift profits out of the country into places like Bermuda, Grand Cayman and the Isle of Man.

Ireland’s status as a base for several technological giants has made it a key player in enforcing European Union regulations and, increasingly, a center of protest against the companies and their data centers.

Asked for comment about Mr. Zuckerberg’s purchase, the Waterford City and County Council extolled the area’s attractions — wild coastlines and mountains, picturesque festivals and towns — and the history of the county and city.

“Founded by the Vikings in 914 AD, Waterford is Ireland’s Oldest City that has been shaped by centuries of history and today it is evident that the county’s remarkable architecture keeps its past vividly present,” the council said in an email.

Aug. 21

Top Stories

President Trump bragged on the White House website that he has created a "Golden Age for Farmers" -- something many now dispute.

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Important Friday Update: MAGA Farmers Turn on Trump, Pentagon Launches Major First Amendment Assault, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 21, 2026. MAGA Reaches BREAKING POINT as Trump TURNS BACK on His Own Supporters. 

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Concerning Natalie Harp Letters Exposed, Billions Stolen From Pardon Victims, and 68,000 Indiana Homes Still Without Power, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 21, 2026. Buckle up because this morning’s newsletter has a lot: love letters, a catering truck escape, and a security clearance she avoided for over a year. How one small dig from a senator blew up into a week of scrutiny over Natalie Harp, above the aide standing closer to Trump than almost anyone in his orbit. A new House report puts a $1.7 billion price tag on Trump’s pardons, money that should have gone to crime victims and instead lined the pockets of convicted allies who donated big and lobbied hard.  

Special Reports

President Trump met in Alaska last year (as shown in the photo above) with a warm, red carpet welcome for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

• Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: Trump is a puppet leader installed by Putin, Wayne Madsen, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer and NSA analyst, Aug. 19-20, 2026. The Trump regime takes its marching orders from the Kremlin and, when advantageous to Israel, from Netanyahu.  
• Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Evidence Is Mounting That Natalie Harp Is a Major National Security Vulnerability for America, Seth Abramson, right, Aug. 20, 2026. With each revelation about who this person is, how she got where she did, what she does daily, and how her control over the President of the United States has evolved, things look darker and darker. You may think you already know all the ways in which Natalie Harp—an attractive 35-year-old blonde woman who looks somewhat like the very Donald Trump daughter the president has long openly lusted after (see here, here, here, here, and here) and who appeared out of nowhere praising Trump on Fox News at a key moment in the 2020 presidential campaign season—is an unprecedented national security threat. You don’t. 
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Prepare for Catastrophe! Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 20, 2026. Time to revisit my argument that people should remember there are multiple ways to fight fascism, all of which ideally work together to restore democracy.

More Top Headlines

• New York Times, News Analysis: Why China Thinks It Can Resist Trump’s Economic Threats on Iran, David Pierson and Berry Wang, Aug. 21, 2026. Beijing can squeeze U.S. critical mineral supplies and has enough oil to withstand the loss of Iranian crude, Chinese analysts say. As Iran’s largest trading partner, China would seemingly have much to lose from President Trump’s threat this week to impose “tremendous economic consequences” on nations doing business with Tehran. But Beijing has reasons to feel confident it can withstand Mr. Trump’s latest warning — if it is ever fulfilled. 

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice 

A construction crew continues to work on the White House ballroom on Wednesday (New York Times photo by Andrew Leyden). 

• New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Chief Justice Allows White House Ballroom Construction While Full Court Considers the Issue, Ann E. Marimow, Aug. 21, 2026. What We’re Covering Today. The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily allowed President Trump to continue construction of a White House ballroom. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., acting on his own, issued a one-sentence placeholder that gives the justices more time to fully consider if construction can proceed. With new U.S. tariffs on Canada set to take effect at midnight, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government and Mr. Trump’s aides were locked in intensive trade negotiations on Friday. Mr. Trump has threatened new levies on about $20 billion in Canadian goods, on top of already hefty import taxes.  Mr. Trump will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of ground beef to be imported into the United States with lower tariffs over the next 90 days, he said in a social media post on Friday morning, a bid to lower the cost of a staple food for Americans pinched by higher prices. The beef will be sold 25 percent below the current market price, which is $6.89 per pound, he said. 
• New York Times, Pentagon Fires Stars and Stripes’ Advocate for Independence, Erik Wemple, April 23, 2026. The newspaper’s ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith, said she had been given no reason for her dismissal. 
• The Guardian, Texas appeals court slashes $50m judgment against Alex Jones over false claim Sandy Hook shooting was hoax, Edward Helmore, Aug. 21, 2026. A Texas appeals court has slashed the $50m judgment to $1.5m against Alex Jones, founder of the rightwing platform Infowars, over falsely calling the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, a hoax.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, Aug. 21, 2026. Judges stop Trump’s arrogant power grabs. Donald Trump’s authoritarian mindset treats government property as his own and considers Congress, not to mention previous administrations’ policy precedents, as nuisances at best. These days, however, federal courts are halting his imperious disregard for the rule of law. This week he suffered three more embarrassing defeats in federal court.
• New York Times, Trump Administration Has a Different Way to Drain Harvard Funding, Mark Arsenault and Irena Hwang, Aug. 21, 2026. The federal government has slowed Harvard’s funding, despite the university’s legal victories. The conflict is forcing hard choices on campus. One of Harvard University’s biggest federal funding streams is down sharply, according to a New York Times analysis of government data. The declines have persisted even after a federal judge forced the Trump administration to reverse drastic cuts to the university last year.
• Receipts via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s War on Reality Comes for the Census, Catherine Rampell, right, Aug. 21, 2026. I’ve spent the last twenty months telling people the guardrails around government data were holding. This week, they finally broke. A “study” supposedly about noncitizen voting—unsigned, with numbers that don’t add up, and reportedly drafted by outside political operatives—went out under the Census Bureau’s own letterhead. Today’s newsletter is about what happened and why it matters far beyond this one sketchy report.
• New York Times, Trump Threatens Suit Over Report He Doesn’t Like, Aiming to Intimidate a Critic, Alan Feuer, Aug. 21, 2026. It was the latest example of President Trump’s bid to use the legal system against those who voice unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Before Fabricating Assaults to Justify the MN-15 Investigation, DHS Focused on a Protest of Trump’s 2017 Inauguration, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 21, 2026. As I laid out in this post, DOJ and DHS used assault charges fabricated against 16 people whom Pam Bondi used as trophies to retroactively justify spying on the Minnesota protest community for months. On January 28 — the same day Bondi paraded her trophies on Xitter, DOJ opened the investigation that would result in charges against 15 activists it misleadingly billed as Antifa: the next day, DOJ indicted the first round of people in the Cities Church protest relying at least in part on fabricated claims. 

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

• Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump just keeps getting richer, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 21, 2026. After not being seen publicly for over a month, Melania Trump emerged from the White House at 3:48 this afternoon and made her way along the colonnade overlooking the Rose Garden. She was joined by her husband, who gripped her hand with his own swollen and makeup-covered hand.

More On Trump Governance 

U.S. Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., attends the Senate Judiciary Committee mark up on the nomination of Todd Blanche to be attorney general, in Hart building on Aug. 4, 2026 (CQ-Roll Call photo by Tom Williams via Getty Images).

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Your New Senator Is a Total Lightweight. She’s Perfect, Andrew Egger, Benjamin Parker, Jim Swift, Aug. 21, 2026. Darline Graham is the very model of a modern MAGA senator.
• Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy and Opinion: Good Senate Polls In MN And NH, Simon Rosenberg, right, Aug. 21, 2026. A new well-regarded poll in New Hampshire has Chris Pappas with a comfortable lead over this most likely opponent, Chris Sununu. This margin would be in keeping with the national climate in a state Harris won by 3 points in 2024 (data via FiftyPlusOne). Republicans released a Minnesota poll that has our Senate nominee Peggy Flanagan up 5, the second poll this week showing Flanagan with a modest 5 point lead. Here’s our updated Senate poll round up. 
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 20, 2026 [Hiding U.S. Health Care Cuts], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 21, 2026. On Saturday, August 15, the New York Times editorial board published an op-ed noting that the Republicans are trying to hide the cuts they have made to health care in the U.S. The editorial board called the expansion of affordable health care to millions of Americans one of the great achievements of the federal government in this century. Before the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 without a single Republican vote, about 18% of Americans under 65 had no health insurance. With the passage and later expansion of the ACA, also known as Obamacare, the number of uninsured had fallen below 10%. But now, the journalists note, Trump and the Republicans are working to uproot that achievement. 
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Leave Darline Alone, Andrew Egger, right, Aug. 21, 2026. Darline Graham’s Taiwan gaffe couldn’t have come at a worse time. The South Carolina senator—sister and successor of the late Lindsey Graham—had hoped her Tuesday debate against Rep. Ralph Norman would quiet Republican whispers that she wasn’t ready for primetime ahead of next week’s runoff. 

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, News Analysis: The Message Behind Trump’s Threats of ‘Economic Warfare’ Against Iran, Anton Troianovski and Alan Rappeport, Aug. 21, 2026 (print ed.). Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to reassure investors worried about the pressure campaign on Iran on Thursday, declaring that a resumption of “large-scale” fighting was unlikely.
• New York Times, Iran Must Plan to Overcome ‘Unjust’ U.S. Sanctions, Top Tehran Official Says, Aurelien Breeden, Aug. 21, 2026. lMohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, lead negotiator in talks with Washington, made the comments after President Trump vowed an “economic D-Day” against Iran.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

Democratic U.S. Senate Nominees Josh Turek of Iowa, above left, and James Talarico, Texas (File photos). 

• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Democrats Could Flip Two Senate Seats In States That Trump Won By Double Digits, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, Aug. 21, 2026. The picture for the 2026 midterm election is becoming clearer as the campaign approaches Labor Day. Unlike campaigns of yesteryear, candidates no longer wait until after Labor Day to start general election campaigns. Sprints to November often begin on primary night or as soon as the primary elections are settled.
• Civil Discourse, Opinion: They’re Building The Excuse Now, Joyce Vance, Aug. 21, 2026.On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced a Department of Commerce “report” that claims more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the 2020 election. That sounds bad, right? At least, until you hear the response.
• Florida Politics, Alex Vindman puts money, resources behind Democratic slate after loss to Angie Nixon, A.G. Gancarski, Aug. 20, 2026. Retired Lt. Col. Alex Vindman may have lost in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate Primary, but that doesn’t mean he’s not interested in the Florida Democratic Party’s success in November.
• Politico, Knicks owner bankrolled Hochul. Now he's the GOP's biggest donor in New York, Nick Reisman, Bill Mahoney and Alex Gangitano, Aug. 20, 2026. Sports and entertainment mogul James Dolan has emerged as the largest GOP donor in the Empire State this election cycle after backing Gov. Kathy Hochul’s last campaign.
• Politico, Progressive Aisha Wahab wins Eric Swalwell’s former House seat, Dustin Gardiner, Aug. 20, 2026. The California state lawmaker defeated a more moderate Democrat, overcoming an onslaught of spending from outside PACs.California state Sen. Aisha Wahab speaks during a primary election night event on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026, in Hayward, Calif.

World News, Global Human Rights, Disasters 

• Semafor, Mystery surrounds US deportations to Liberia, Adrian Elimian, Aug. 21, 2026. Liberia’s agreement to accept up to 1,200 deportees from the US remains shrouded in mystery a day after the first 20 arrivals landed in Monrovia, leaving many wondering what Liberia is getting in return.

More On Epstein Files, Trump Coverup

• Last Page First, Jane Doe 4 and the Epstein Files: The Leaked FBI Notes Nobody Could Verify, Jana, right, Aug. 21, 2026. The FBI records are real. The leaked handwritten notes were never verified, then they were pulled. What happened, what the evidence shows, and how bad sourcing can damage a survivor’s story. The real story is not the leak. It is that DOJ has had these notes since 2019 and still has not produced them, amid repeated promises of transparency and a federal judge warning government lawyers about contempt. If DOJ eventually turns over the missing 37 pages, they can be compared directly with the copies that circulated online. That is what will settle this. Not one phone call. Not a source saying something felt right. Not silence from a lawyer. Not a document going viral before anyone knew where it came from.

More On Media, Celebrities, Propaganda, Culture 

The United Kingdom's Prince Harry, shown in a 2021 interview before he renounced his royal title.

• New York Times, Prince Harry and Others Told to Pay Daily Mail Publisher $13 Million, Stephen Castle, Aug. 21, 2026. Harry and six other high-profile figures lost a privacy lawsuit against Associated Newspapers. They may eventually have to pay more than twice the initial sum, a judge said.
• New York Times, Return of Harry and Meghan to U.K. Renews Questions About Their Security Fears, Adam Goldman, Aug. 21, 2026. The couple lost their publicly funded security after deciding to leave Britain in 2020, deepening their split with the royal family. 
• MSNOW, Opinion: Michael Cohen once called Trump a con man and a cheat. Now he’s back to calling his ex-boss ‘sir,’ Anthony L. Fisher, Aug. 21, 2026. The president’s former fixer-turned-witness for the prosecution, shown at right, was eager to patch things up in a groveling interview.
• The Social Contract with Joe Walsh, Opinion: Why I Feel Sorry For Michael Cohen, Joe Walsh, right, Aug. 21, 2026. I’ve known Michael Cohen for a number of years. I think I had him on my radio show in 2019 when he testified before the House Oversight Committee, accusing Donald Trump of criminal conduct and campaign finance violations. We stayed in touch and we communicated fairly regularly when he was released from prison. And he and I had a weekly show on Substack for the past year or so, which ended earlier this year. Just a few months earlier, Cohen was in the thralls of positioning himself as a leader of the resistance movement. And now here he was, like a Trump fanboy again, trying to get back into Trump’s good graces and maybe even become Trump’s fixer again.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Is Breaking the Law to Cover Up How Russia Helped Him Win in 2024, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 21, 2026. I got into it with Grok over at the Nazi bar [X, formerly Twitter] after Elon Musk’s robot played dumb over and over again to deny that Trump willingly accepted help in 2016. The robot claims there are no documents akin to the ones John Solomon had just released implicating Eric Swalwell, but not showing that he knew Christine Fang was working for China. NYT doesn’t go into all this detail in its piece describing how Trump is flouting the law that required him to lay out election interference in 2024 by March. 

Top Stories

President Trump bragged on the White House website that he has created a "Golden Age for Farmers" -- something many now dispute.

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Important Friday Update: MAGA Farmers Turn on Trump, Pentagon Launches Major First Amendment Assault, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 21, 2026. MAGA Reaches BREAKING POINT as Trump TURNS BACK on His Own Supporters.

There are many who would prefer I stay quiet. There are those who have threatened me, pressured me, tried to intimidate me into silence. They’ve tried to shut down my platforms and discredit my work. They’ve done everything possible to push me out of the fight for truth. But here is my message to them, and I want it to be heard loud and clear: I am not going anywhere.

And this week proved exactly why that fight matters. Because of our reporting, the sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln are coming home. That’s not a coincidence, and it’s not nothing. It’s what happens when people keep reading, keep sharing, and keep paying attention even when the people in power would rather you didn’t.

I’ve said it before, but I will say it again: your subscriptions are what make this possible. They keep the lights on, they keep the truth alive, and they ensure that what you read here is never compromised. If you are already a paid subscriber, I cannot thank you enough, you are the reason this work continues. And if you are not, your presence still matters deeply. Every reader, every voice, every set of eyes on this truth is part of the fight.

Now, to today’s news. Days after Stars & Stripes reported on the very conditions we’ve been covering aboard the Lincoln, the Pentagon fired the publisher and editor who ran that story, the latest move in Trump’s broader effort to control what service members are allowed to read. Meanwhile his own party is turning on him over his beef import deal, with a Republican senator revealing he warned Trump against it for a year and Trump allies calling it a “betrayal.” Plus the Supreme Court lets his ballroom construction continue, Ed Martin exits the DOJ pardon office at the center of a $1.7 billion scandal, DHS gets caught inflating noncitizen voter numbers by nearly a hundredfold, and a full rundown of everything else from Ukraine to a Nebraska school district banning shock gloves.

Pentagon Fires Key Journalist:

The Pentagon reportedly fired Stars & Stripes publisher Max Lederer and editor Erik Slavin on Friday, citing insubordination without detailing the alleged conduct, and gave them five days to appeal. The firings came just days after the outlet reported on troubling crew conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, coverage published the same day as similar reporting in Navy Times, and which Trump dismissed by claiming the Lincoln’s deployment “had not nearly been long enough.” Lederer, who’d served as publisher for 19 years and was already nearing a September retirement, wrote to staff that “my philosophy of leadership, and my understanding of value and mission of the Stars and Stripes, differ in fundamental ways from the direction of the leadership of the Department of Defense.” The Defense Department, led by Pete Hegseth, has not commented, and details of the alleged insubordination remain unrevealed.

This fits a broader pattern of the Trump-led Pentagon clashing with its own military press. Spokesperson Sean Parnell previously pledged to bring “Stars & Stripes into the 21st century” by refocusing content “away from woke distractions that syphon morale,” and the outlet’s ombudsman, Jacqueline Smith (shown at right in a Hearst Connecticut Media Group photo by Carol Kaliff), was fired back in January after writing critically about Pentagon press restrictions, a firing she’s since suing over as retaliatory. Slavin himself had warned in July that editorial independence was his line in the sand, saying “if we can’t do that, if we were turned into something other than that, if we were public relations? Yeah, that’s the foxhole,” notable since the Pentagon provides roughly 65% of the outlet’s funding. The Pentagon has separately restricted press access and demanded reporters not seek confidential sources, prompting journalists to turn in their badges and fueling a legal battle plus an influx of rightwing media voices into the press corps.

Stars & Stripes is a storied institution, first published during the Civil War in 1861 and turned into a daily under Gen. John Pershing’s orders during World War I, and it still reaches about 1.4 million readers daily online and through an overseas print edition. It’s historically been described as representing “the free thought and free expression of a free people,” a mission now in direct tension with an administration pushing to reshape its coverage. The firings mark an escalation beyond access restrictions and rhetoric into removing the outlet’s own leadership over specific unfavorable reporting. It leaves the publication’s editorial future, and its relationship with the military that funds most of its budget, notably uncertain.

MAGA Farmers Erupt:

The GOP is erupting over Trump’s beef tariff move, with cattle industry leaders and Republican lawmakers alike accusing him of selling out American ranchers. National Cattlemen’s Beef Association CEO Colin Woodall warned that “flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef is not the way to rebuild the American cattle herd,” noting cattle markets “already turned sharply lower this morning” and that the timing couldn’t be worse since ranchers are making critical herd decisions right now. Wyoming’s Meriwether Farms called it a “betrayal” outright, and Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) said Florida ranchers will “feel this squeeze” and deserve a “long-term plan that doesn’t leave them in limbo” rather than short-term relief “at the expense of American ranchers, free markets and long-term solutions.” MAGA farmers called it a betrayal:

The sharpest break came from Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.), who revealed he’d been privately warning Trump against this for a year: “I’ve advised President Trump against this course of action for a year because American ranchers have been struggling against the packer monopoly for decades, and this will further harm them, most of whom are MAGA Republicans.” He argued the move “will make it more difficult for American ranchers to rebuild our herd and bring prices down for the American people” and will “harm our ranching families who feed the nation.” Even Trump ally Tomi Lahren piled on, demanding mandatory country-of-origin labeling at minimum and accusing the plan of being “a giant gift to the meat packers” who’ll undercut ranchers with “cheap foreign” beef while American cattlemen get “driven out of business.” When asked what countries Trump made a deal with concerning beef, he refused to say:

Beyond the ranching world, critics say the episode is exposing a deeper contradiction in Trump’s economic messaging. Alex Jacquez of the Groundwork Collaborative said Trump is “once again explicitly admitting his broad-based tariffs raise prices for Americans,” while Cato Institute fellow Marian Tupy argued the reversal “once again exposes the absence of a coherent economic philosophy within MAGA,” since defenders can’t simultaneously claim tariffs don’t raise prices and celebrate their removal for lowering them. Tupy concluded flatly that “loyalty to Trump comes first and the economic rationale follows.” The backlash comes even as a White House official defended the 90-day, 300,000-metric-ton tariff suspension as a short-term fix for a cattle herd at its lowest level since 1951, with average ground beef prices now around $6.89 a pound.

Other news:

The Supreme Court, via Chief Justice John Roberts, issued a temporary stay Friday allowing Trump’s White House ballroom construction to continue while the full court weighs next steps, pausing lower court rulings that had blocked the aboveground work. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing, arguing Trump lacked authority to demolish the East Wing for the project, with one key question being whether the trust even has legal standing to sue over aesthetic objections from a member. As of August 14, the administration says the $400 million, privately funded project was 65% complete, with a 250-person crew working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, and includes an extensive underground component the administration calls vital for security. A federal judge had allowed underground work to proceed but blocked the ballroom itself pending litigation, a ruling the D.C. Circuit upheld on August 7 with a Friday deadline to halt construction absent Supreme Court intervention. The trust noted this stay isn’t a final ruling on the merits, and the White House had no immediate comment.

Trump announced Friday that Ed Martin, the “Stop the Steal” organizer and Jan. 6 defense attorney who most recently served as the Justice Department’s pardon attorney, is leaving the administration to focus on “legal battles” ahead of the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential race. Martin initially served as interim U.S. attorney for D.C. starting in January 2025, where he fired and demoted Jan. 6 prosecutors and opened a review of the office’s handling of the Capitol riot cases, but Trump withdrew his formal nomination in May 2025 after Senate Republicans, including Thom Tillis, balked at confirming him for that specific district. He was then named associate deputy attorney general and pardon attorney, and put in charge of a “weaponization working group” targeting prosecutors who’d investigated Trump and his allies, though NBC reported in February 2026 that he’d already been stripped of that role. Attorney General Todd Blanche called him “a patriot who loves this nation,” and Martin himself responded on X with “Proud to serve. Fight Fight Fight.” His exit comes as the same pardon office he ran is now the subject of the House Judiciary Committee’s report accusing Trump’s pardons of costing crime victims $1.7 billion.

Asked by a reporter whether he’d discussed another form of market intervention with Treasury Secretary Bessent as bond yields climbed back up, Trump responded, “The ultimate intervention is our military. And if we have to use that, we will,” an alarming suggestion that he’s open to deploying the military in response to bond market conditions.

The Trump administration is drawing sharp criticism after CNN reported, citing three sources, that the Navy is working to rename the USS Doris Miller, an aircraft carrier under construction to honor the Black Pearl Harbor hero, with two sources saying there have been internal talks about naming it after Trump instead, something no Navy carrier has ever done for a sitting president. NAACP president Derrick Johnson called it “a slap in the face to every war hero and every service member who has worn the uniform,” adding “Donald Trump only wants to serve himself” and that renaming it after Trump “while our armed forces are living in deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln” makes “a mockery” of Black Americans’ long military service. Miller, a mess attendant with no weapons training, shot down four to six Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor in 1941, earned the Navy Cross for shielding his mortally wounded captain and manning a machine gun under fire, and died in 1943 when the USS Liscome Bay sank; his family has long pushed for his Navy Cross to be upgraded to a Medal of Honor. Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, a retired Navy officer, wrote that the carrier “shouldn’t be renamed at all, let alone for Donald Trump, who has denigrated servicemembers like Dorie Miller who have paid the ultimate price,” while the Navy declined to comment and the White House referred questions to the Pentagon, which also declined to comment.

A month after Trump claimed in a primetime address that DHS had found 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote across four states, records obtained by the Guardian show DHS has actually manually confirmed only 185 non-citizens on Nevada’s rolls out of the 15,903 it initially flagged, with more than 14,000 still needing review. DHS official Kimberley Vogt told Nevada officials the 15,903 figure was just a “preliminary” ceiling, not a vetted count, and even sent the state an additional 6,218 unreviewed names; Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said his office “will not risk disenfranchising eligible voters” without high-confidence proof of ineligibility. DHS said it compared Nevada’s public voter rolls to internal immigration data, with prominent election denier Heather Honey, now a DHS employee, on the review call, and officials confirmed they’ve made no criminal referrals despite Secretary Markwayne Mullin earlier threatening election officials with fines and prison time over noncompliance. David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research said the episode fits a pattern: “every time, they refuse to show their work or justify their methodology,” and “when states demand evidence and transparency, the administration’s claims wither away to small numbers.” The meeting had a few tense moments too, including Nevada’s elections director correcting a DHS official’s pronunciation of “Nevada” and a DHS official insisting “we don’t name and shame” other states, only for a Nevada deputy secretary to reply, “Except in the press releases.”

Russian drones struck a shopping center in Kryvyi Rih, President Zelenskyy’s hometown, on Friday, killing 14 people and wounding 121, including 22 children, in what Zelenskyy called a “double-tap” strike, an initial drone wave followed by a second as rescuers responded, calling it a “terrorist act” and vowing a response. It came just 24 hours after Russia hit Kyiv with dozens of missiles and drones overnight, killing at least 16, part of an intensifying campaign exploiting Ukraine’s chronic shortage of Patriot interceptors, with the UN saying July alone saw 54 civilians killed and 202 wounded in Kyiv. Ukraine’s air force said it shot down or suppressed 107 of 135 Russian drones launched overnight, while separately Ukrainian drones reportedly struck an oil refinery in Perm (nearly 1,000 miles from the border) and a military airfield in Volgograd, and Russia said its defenses intercepted over 500 Ukrainian drones across the day. Long-range strikes on both sides have escalated as neither military makes meaningful progress along the roughly 780-mile front line, with Kyiv aiming to make ordinary Russians feel the war’s costs and pressure Putin toward negotiations, something he’s shown no sign of pursuing.

Nearly 40,000 bottles (39,060) of Clear Eyes Maximum Itchy Eye Relief, sold nationwide at retailers like CVS and Walmart, have been voluntarily recalled over a “lack of assurance of sterility.” The affected 0.5-fluid-ounce bottles, Lot 2552A with a September 30, 2027 expiration date, were distributed by Medtech Products, owned by Prestige Consumer Healthcare, which said the product wasn’t confirmed contaminated but it recalled it “out of an abundance of caution.” No injuries have been reported, and the FDA classified it as a Class II recall, meaning it could cause temporary or medically reversible health problems. The recall began July 29 and is still ongoing.

Omaha police agreed this week to stop having school resource officers carry “G.L.O.V.E.” electric shock gloves in Nebraska’s largest school district, after Superintendent Matthew Ray requested it following community backlash; the AP had first revealed ICE’s plan to equip officers with the same devices. At a school board meeting, roughly 30 speakers, including a student who said she couldn’t imagine seeing a peer “electrocuted” in what’s supposed to be a safe space, spoke against the gloves with no one speaking in favor, while Omaha police said the devices, used twice this past school year (once on a special-education student who threw a chair and punched a guard), were their “safest use-of-force option.” Not every district followed suit: the suburban Bellevue police department, which patrols two Omaha schools, says it will keep using the gloves it’s carried for three years, with its chief saying he’s “not comfortable” giving up “a tool that has repeatedly proven to be safe, effective, and less harmful than the alternatives,” and three other metro districts haven’t acted either. Omaha’s 34 school resource officers were mostly trained on the devices, which the department bought for about $66,000 for 40 units in 2025, and Omaha officers will keep carrying tasers, batons, OC spray, and firearms instead going forward.

Federal authorities arrested 11 people after boarding two cruise ships in Boston, Holland America’s Volendam and Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norwegian Breakaway, accusing them of receiving and distributing child sexual abuse material. The operation ran between last Friday and Sunday; nine of those arrested are Philippine citizens, one is Indonesian, and one is Nicaraguan, with authorities searching living quarters and electronic devices but not releasing identities or ship breakdowns. All 11 are being processed for removal under the Immigration and Nationality Act for crimes involving moral turpitude. The arrests are part of “Operation Tidal Wave,” a CBP and Homeland Security Investigations initiative targeting cruise ship crewmembers, run with the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, though CBP didn’t confirm whether those arrested actually worked on the ships.

An 18-year-old attacked the Brinell School in Fagersta, Sweden, with a sword on Friday, killing one person and seriously injuring two others before being arrested; police confirmed shots were fired during the arrest. The attack happened during class hours at a school with roughly 400-500 students, and there’s no word yet on a motive, though police say there’s currently no indication of multiple perpetrators. Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson called it a violent act coming “right after the summer break” and said his thoughts are with those affected. Local authorities set up a crisis center in a nearby sports hall, locked down several surrounding schools, and put up roadblocks as police reviewed camera footage as part of their investigation.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Concerning Natalie Harp Letters Exposed, Billions Stolen From Pardon Victims, and 68,000 Indiana Homes Still Without Power, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 21, 2026. Buckle up because this morning’s newsletter has a lot: love letters, a catering truck escape, and a security clearance she avoided for over a year. How one small dig from a senator blew up into a week of scrutiny over Natalie Harp, above, the aide standing closer to Trump than almost anyone in his orbit.

A new House report puts a $1.7 billion price tag on Trump’s pardons, money that should have gone to crime victims and instead lined the pockets of convicted allies who donated big and lobbied hard. Tens of thousands of Indiana residents are marking nine straight days without power today, throwing out spoiled food and sleeping without air conditioning as patience wears thin. And a full rundown of today’s other news, from the administration gutting legal aid for over 20,000 migrant children while building new facilities to detain them, to deportation flights landing in Haiti and Liberia, to tornadoes tearing through the Northeast, to a beef deal that quietly admits Trump’s own tariffs drove prices up in the first place.

I am going to have some important interviews for you this evening. We will never stop!

Here’s the news:

Natalie Harp:

Trump’s West Wing exploded over a small dig from Sen. Jon Ossoff, who mocked Trump for preferring to “travel with Natalie” on his “flying palace” rather than do his job as the Iran war drags on. Communications director Steven Cheung and spokesman Davis Ingle responded with vulgar, personal attacks on Ossoff, calling him a “cuck loser” and a “feminine theatre kid.” When CNN’s Kristen Holmes asked Trump about the comment directly, he snapped “be quiet” at her, and the official White House Rapid Response account then attacked her personally, saying her future children would be “sickened and embarrassed” by her question. The disproportionate reaction backfired, turning a passing jab into days of sustained national coverage of who Natalie Harp actually is. Trump allies, including one of his sons and a Cabinet member, rushed to publicly defend her, which only fueled more scrutiny.

Natalie Harp, 35, is a former OAN host turned Oval Office gatekeeper, so close to Trump that aides nicknamed her the “Human Printer” for constantly handing him printouts of favorable news and polling. She was one of only a handful of aides who fled with Trump in a catering truck during a security scare in Turkey this summer, leaving even the Secretary of State behind on what became a decoy plane. Two sources told MS NOW she declined for over a year to complete the standard SF-86 security clearance paperwork required of West Wing staff, with Trump himself eventually intervening before she finally completed it in recent months. National security officials and White House staff have separately raised concerns that her unusually close, round-the-clock access gives her more exposure to sensitive information than nearly any other senior official, and that she feeds Trump unvetted material that plays to his worst instincts. The White House insists she “has a security clearance like everyone else” and is simply a “loyal and hardworking” aide.

The Daily Beast, drawing on letters supplied to Trump biographer Michael Wolff, published two intimate notes Harp wrote to Trump in 2023 after a golf trip to Scotland and Ireland, when she was 31 and he was 76. In them she calls him her “Guardian and Protector,” says she envies women “whose only job seems to be to talk with you and look pretty” and wants that job herself, and repeatedly describes herself as “unworthy” of him. She apologizes at length for minor mishaps on the trip and signs off “With all my heart, Natalie” and “Always, Natalie.”

Wolff says the letters were discovered and circulated by campaign staff alarmed at how close Harp was getting to Trump, calling the dynamic “not a relationship that should exist in a professional setting.” Harp’s estranged brother has separately told CNN he believes she has an “unhealthy obsession” with the president, while the White House dismissed the coverage as “Trump-Deranged” media noise. Here is the second letter:

Pardons:

A new House Judiciary Committee Democratic report, from ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin, finds Trump’s pardons have wiped out $1.7 billion in court-ordered restitution and fines owed to crime victims, calling it a “massive redistribution of wealth in favor of convicted criminals.” It highlights former Nikola CEO Trevor Milton, pardoned before a judge could rule on nearly $700 million in restitution, after Milton and his wife donated over $1.8 million to pro-Trump committees; fraudster Jason Galanis, whose victims lost over $80 million in restitution, and who then unsuccessfully tried to reclaim $2 million he’d already repaid; and Ozy Media’s Carlos Watson, pardoned en route to prison, wiping out $37 million owed to defrauded investors. The report also cites roughly $3 million in forgiven restitution owed by January 6th rioters and clemency for former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, convicted of drug trafficking conspiracy, who allegedly cultivated ties to people “in President Trump’s orbit.” You can see the full amounts below in this spreadsheet:

The committee argues Trump has “demolished” a traditionally nonpartisan pardon system, partly by firing U.S. Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer in 2025 and replacing her with Trump ally Ed Martin, whom Oyer has called an “ideological extremist” so unqualified the Senate previously tanked his nomination for U.S. Attorney for D.C. The report accuses Trump of letting clemency flow to “high-bidding,” deep-pocketed convicts who lobbied through or enriched Trump allies and attorneys, and of recipients securing pardons by flattering Trump or paying people close to him. Democrats note the irony that House Republicans have made “fighting fraud” a talking point to justify immigration crackdowns and cuts to health care and food assistance, while Trump pardons convicted fraudsters wholesale. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Judiciary Committee Democrats, currently in the minority, say they’re seeking control of the panel after the 2026 midterms, which would let them issue subpoenas, hold hearings, and depose witnesses over the pardons. The report frames the findings as evidence of systemic self-dealing rather than isolated clemency decisions. It’s part of a broader pattern of Democratic oversight reports building a paper trail ahead of a possible change in House control.

Indiana Power:

Tens of thousands of residents in northwest Indiana, particularly Gary, entered a ninth straight day without power on Thursday following the deadly August 11 storm, throwing out spoiled food, lining up for hot meals, and hunting for places to charge phones, with Northern Indiana Public Service Co. reporting 68,000 customers still out, mostly in Lake County, and full restoration not expected in some areas like Gary until Tuesday. Community resilience researcher Courtney Page-Tan warned that health risks compound with each passing day, from carbon monoxide poisoning tied to poorly ventilated generators to medical devices losing charge and spoiled refrigerated food, while local voices described mounting exhaustion: hairstylist Shatiya Hardin said her Gary neighborhood is “always in survival mode” but that patience is wearing thin nine days in, and East Chicago resident Kevin Mejia has been sleeping on the floor without air conditioning while fielding hundreds of requests for food and help from neighbors, especially the elderly. The outages have also closed schools across the region, including Gary’s roughly 4,300-student district since August 13 and Portage Township Schools, which delayed its start to August 25 over downed trees and safety concerns, a disruption Page-Tan said hits paycheck-to-paycheck families hardest when parents miss work for lack of childcare.

About 250 miles southeast in Columbus, Ohio, heavy rain dumped more than 3 inches in 12 hours on Thursday, triggering flash flooding that swamped roadways just as the city was still cleaning up from severe weekend storms. First responders rescued two women trapped on foot in a flooded creek and saved a 12-year-old boy who was swept off a bridge while riding his bicycle in high water, according to Fire Division Lieutenant Nick Davis. Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said the city has been “all hands on deck supporting residents since last week” and is now shifting focus to recovery despite what he called “this curveball from Mother Nature.” NIPSCO, the Indiana utility, separately described the storm damage in its territory as “unprecedented and widespread,” noting that neighboring Illinois, served by a different utility with fewer trees and some buried power lines, recovered from the same storm system much faster.

Other news:

CNN sources say Trump joked that aide Natalie Harp, dubbed the “human printer,” could replace outgoing press secretary Karoline Leavitt, right, and on Thursday night he posted an AI-generated image of himself at the press podium captioned “The Best Press Secretary.” Sources say political commentator Scott Jennings has emerged as the frontrunner for the job and reportedly met chief of staff Susie Wiles at a D.C. steakhouse, though he was coy when CNN asked him about it directly. A White House official told CNN “it feels like her and Susie are the only people holding this place together sometimes,” referring to Leavitt, underscoring anxiety over her exit. Jennings has separately defended Harp against criticism from Sen. Jon Ossoff, telling Politico “somebody needs to defend her honor” since she “never put her name on a ballot.”

The US deported over 160 people to Haiti on Thursday, the first flight since the Supreme Court let the administration end TPS for roughly 350,000 Haitians. The plane landed in Cap-Haïtien rather than Port-au-Prince, since the capital’s airport is under a flight ban and gangs control an estimated 70% of the city, and many deportees covered their faces out of fear of being targeted. Arrivals included both TPS holders and Haitians who’d served US prison sentences, and were sent off with as little as $65; one man, deported after 19 years in prison for a crime he denies, told the AP he left Haiti at age 5 and has family in New York, but “ICE just sent me here.” Haiti’s government says it isn’t requesting these returns, and activists warn the country — where gang violence has displaced 1.5 million people and killed over 3,100 people this year — has no real capacity to absorb them, especially with 140,000+ more already deported there from the Dominican Republic alone.

The Trump administration let a federal contract funding legal aid for over 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children expire July 31, replacing the nearly 100-organization network with a $20 million deal with US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants and a $158 million contract with Our Rescue, a group founded by an ex-ICE agent accused of sexual exploitation and trafficking that has no apparent immigration legal experience. Groups like Houston’s GHIRP (500 clients) and Michigan’s MIRC (withdrawing from 520 of 950 cases, laying off its 70-person team by October) are being forced to drop hundreds of child clients even as asylum interviews and court hearings get fast-tracked, and a court filing cites children as young as one appearing in court without a lawyer. Advocates say ORR has increasingly shared data with ICE that’s led to over 12,000 arrests of sponsors and parents, effectively using children as “bait,” while deportations of unaccompanied minors have tripled since Trump’s first term. The administration is simultaneously building new detention capacity specifically for children, including a proposed 3,000-bed emergency facility and a 528-bed Louisiana facility on a site with high “forever chemical” contamination, despite existing shelters running at only about 27% occupancy.

Trump this morning touted a deal to lower beef prices by cutting tariffs and easing quotas on imports (up to 300,000 metric tons tariff-free, sold 25% below market price) to address the smallest US cattle herd since 1951 (86.2 million head), but the move is also a tacit admission that his tariffs pushed those prices up in the first place, since if removing them brings prices down, imposing them must have raised them. Supporters call it relief for shoppers and breathing room for herds to rebuild, while skeptics say it just papers over deeper supply problems.

The U.S. carried out its first deportations Thursday under an agreement for Liberia to accept up to 1,200 non-Liberian deportees, sending 20 people, a mix of African, North American, South American, and Caribbean nationals, to Roberts International Airport outside Monrovia, one of the Trump administration’s largest efforts yet to deport people to countries other than their own. Liberia’s Justice Minister Natu Oswald Tweh said deportees can seek asylum there if they wish, while the State Department declined to answer specific questions about the deal but called implementing the administration’s immigration policies a “top priority,” and Homeland Security declined to confirm the flight “for operational security reasons.”

A man dressed as Darth Vader addressed San Diego’s Public Safety Committee on August 19 to satirize the city’s 550+ Flock license plate readers, which track vehicles’ movements, makes, models, and even bumper stickers. He joked about using the surveillance network to follow children and hunt down Luke Skywalker in his X-Wing, with council members playing along and calling him “Darth Vader” throughout. The stunt landed amid a real debate over the technology, with supporters crediting it for recovering stolen cars and aiding investigations, while critics warn of privacy invasions and potential misuse by officers. It’s part of a broader nationwide reckoning over license plate reader surveillance that the costume was clearly designed to needle.

Ukrainian intelligence official Maj. Gen. Vadym Skibitskiy says the roughly 8,500 North Korean troops now in Russia include a new drone unit of about 400 operators capable of striking targets inside Ukraine, and Putin may ask Kim Jong Un for up to 50,000 more troops when the two meet in September. North Korea has also supplied at least 150 KN-23/24 ballistic missiles (40 delivered so far, including two suspected in a July 30 strike that killed four children) plus roughly 90 personnel to help with launches, in exchange for Russian air defense systems like the S-400 and a Pantsir-1 launcher already received.

Third-country deportation agreements are often deliberately opaque, with migrants sometimes sent to countries they’ve never set foot in or where they face safety risks; per Third Country Deportation Watch, the administration has struck such deals with at least 35 countries, including 14 in Africa, and deported more than 23,000 people to 26 countries under these arrangements, though Liberia’s own six-page agreement from September 2025 doesn’t specify numbers or nationalities. The deal is also central to the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man mistakenly deported to a Salvadoran prison, whom the administration has vowed to send to Liberia after being blocked from returning him to El Salvador; Abrego Garcia says he’d accept deportation to Costa Rica instead, which has agreed to take him, but the government hasn’t acted on that option, and he’s now fighting the Liberia deportation in federal court in Maryland.

Cameroon’s 93-year-old President Paul Biya, the world’s oldest head of state, returned to Yaoundé on Thursday after more than 10 weeks abroad, the longest recorded absence of his 44-year presidency, having left in June for what his office called “a brief private stay in Europe” that fueled speculation about his health and a possible power vacuum. Biya, who began his eighth term after a widely disputed October election that triggered protests leaving at least 16 people dead, was not shown deplaning or holding any briefings, appearing only to wave to supporters from his vehicle as close collaborators awaited him at the airport. Cameroon has no constitutional bar on a president leaving for months, but with no vice president, an office Biya alone controls filling, opposition figures say the country has effectively been run on “autopilot” in his absence; parliament reinstated the vice presidency in April, though critics called the move a power grab since Biya can appoint or dismiss the deputy and define the role’s authority at will. His nearly half-century in power has coincided with Boko Haram insurgency in the north, separatist conflict in the west, and a stagnant economy, leaving much of the population, more than 70% of which is under 35, disillusioned with a leader older than almost all of them.

Severe storms and possible tornadoes tore through the Northeast on Thursday, with a likely tornado ripping through Atlantic Beach on Long Island's outer barrier, destroying a beach club and littering the shoreline with debris, prompting Nassau County to declare a state of emergency, though officials reported no serious injuries or deaths. Flash flooding closed part of the Long Island Expressway in Queens and stranded dozens of drivers, while in Jersey City, New Jersey, emergency crews used inflatable boats to rescue 69 people trapped in flooded cars. A likely tornado also struck Dover, Delaware, causing significant damage, downing trees and power lines, and knocking out electricity to more than 1,000 customers, though police reported no serious injuries there either. The National Weather Service said it couldn't immediately confirm a tornado at the Long Island beach but had warned of waterspouts in the area, and meteorologists expected the storm system to move offshore and taper off through the evening.

A charter Cessna 441 crashed Thursday at the remote Cape Newenham Long Range Radar Site Airport, about 450 miles west of Anchorage, killing all eight people aboard, two pilots and six passengers, after taking off from Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport; the aircraft was operated by Anchorage-based Security Aviation under a civilian contract, and search and rescue teams confirmed no survivors after landing near the site. U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Robert Davis called it “a devastating loss for our military family and the communities we serve,” while Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who said she’s flown with Security Aviation extensively and knows many of its pilots, offered condolences and thanked the Coast Guard, NTSB, Alaska State Troopers, and Rescue Coordination Center for their response; the names of those killed will be released 24 hours after next of kin are notified.

Karmelo Anthony’s attorneys are seeking a new trial after the 19-year-old was sentenced to 35 years for fatally stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalf during a bleacher confrontation at a Texas high school track meet last year, arguing that an off-the-record agreement between both sides to withhold inflammatory evidence, including a text where Anthony fantasized about stabbing someone and Metcalf’s history of fighting and using racist language, tainted the June trial. Defense attorney Russell Wilson also alleged the original judge ran a “shadow docket” that improperly shielded character evidence “off the record, at an astonishing clip,” while prosecutor Bill Wirskye defended the trial as fair, noting Anthony’s own original attorneys agreed to the arrangement and that Anthony, who is Black, “went there that day spoiling for a fight” against Metcalf, who was white, having withheld evidence of Anthony’s own obsession with weapons in exchange. The case has drawn intense national attention and racial framing on social media despite both sides maintaining race wasn’t the cause, alongside threats against the original trial judge, fabricated autopsy reports circulating online, and witness intimidation attempts. Anthony already won one procedural victory this week when Judge Michael Chitty replaced Judge John Roach, who had been removed partly over a TV interview in which he said jurors “got it right,” and Chitty will now decide whether to grant the retrial, with the hearing set to continue Friday.

More Top Stories

New York Times, News Analysis: Why China Thinks It Can Resist Trump’s Economic Threats on Iran, David Pierson and Berry Wang, Aug. 21, 2026. Beijing can squeeze U.S. critical mineral supplies and has enough oil to withstand the loss of Iranian crude, Chinese analysts say.

As Iran’s largest trading partner, China would seemingly have much to lose from President Trump’s threat this week to impose “tremendous economic consequences” on nations doing business with Tehran.

For decades, China has defied Western sanctions on Iranian oil by buying up to 90 percent of Tehran’s oil exports. China has also supplied Iran with technology and raw materials to build an arsenal of missiles and drones.

But Beijing has reasons to feel confident it can withstand Mr. Trump’s latest warning — if it is ever fulfilled. And increasingly, Chinese analysts see the war in Iran, which the White House seems unable to end on favorable terms, as a sign of America’s mounting weakness.

“This threat reveals how desperate the Trump administration has become on the issue of Iran,” said Wu Xinbo, a leading American studies scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai, who advises China’s foreign ministry.

“They issue this threat, not because they think it is workable, but because they have no other options,” he said, to get out of this “self-created dilemma.”.

In a social media post on Wednesday, Mr. Trump vowed to inflict an “economic D-Day” on Iran, as well as to punish countries that “provide any type of lifeline” to the country. On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent implied that it was in China’s best interest to cooperate. 

• New York Times, News Analysis: The Message Behind Trump’s Threats of ‘Economic Warfare’ Against Iran, Anton Troianovski and Alan Rappeport, Aug. 21, 2026 (print ed.). Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to reassure investors worried about the pressure campaign on Iran on Thursday, declaring that a resumption of “large-scale” fighting was unlikely

But China might be feeling emboldened as the United States withdraws military assets in the Pacific that were largely meant to project power in Asia. Most recently, that included moving the aircraft carrier George Washington out of the region to support operations in the Middle East.

Lin Jian, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, said on Friday that China opposed unilateral sanctions and that pressure would not resolve the crisis in Iran.

One major reason that pressure may backfire against the United States is that China is equipped to cut the supply of critical minerals to American companies, including makers of U.S. weapons, which have been depleted because of the war.

China demonstrated the power of this chokehold when it forced Mr. Trump to pause a blistering trade war last year by cutting off its critical minerals exports. That détente that has largely held.

The threat of economic consequences now raises questions about the durability of that truce, nearly a month before Mr. Trump is scheduled to host China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, for his first state visit to Washington since 2015.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi last met in Beijing in May, in a summit that China interpreted as highly successful. Mr. Trump did not challenge Mr. Xi on divisive issues like the status of Taiwan, the self-governed island claimed by Beijing, and he was effusive in his praise, calling Mr. Xi a “great leader.”

“I doubt either side wants Iran to derail Xi Jinping’s upcoming visit to the United States. President Trump has clearly attached considerable importance to his relationship with Xi and to the visit itself,” said Wang Zichen, a foreign policy analyst at the Center for China and Globalization, a research institute in Beijing. 

U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice 

A construction crew continues to work on the White House ballroom on Wednesday (New York Times photo by Andrew Leyden). 

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Chief Justice Allows White House Ballroom Construction While Full Court Considers the Issue, Ann E. Marimow, Aug. 21, 2026. What We’re Covering Today.

• White House Ballroom: The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily allowed President Trump to continue construction of a White House ballroom. Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., acting on his own, issued a one-sentence placeholder that gives the justices more time to fully consider if construction can proceed. Read more ›
• Trade: With new U.S. tariffs on Canada set to take effect at midnight, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government and Mr. Trump’s aides were locked in intensive trade negotiations on Friday. Mr. Trump has threatened new levies on about $20 billion in Canadian goods, on top of already hefty import taxes. Read more ›
• Beef Tariffs: Mr. Trump will allow up to 300,000 metric tons of ground beef to be imported into the United States with lower tariffs over the next 90 days, he said in a social media post on Friday morning, a bid to lower the cost of a staple food for Americans pinched by higher prices. The beef will be sold 25 percent below the current market price, which is $6.89 per pound, he said. Read more ›The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily allowed President Trump to continue construction of a luxury White House ballroom to replace the East Wing he demolished last fall.

In a one-sentence order, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., acting on his own, issued a placeholder that gives all nine justices additional time to more fully consider whether construction of the planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom can proceed.

The chief justice’s order did not provide a timeline for when the court would act next, stating only that a lower-court ruling against the Trump administration was paused “pending further order of the undersigned or of the court.”

Lower court judges had ruled that Mr. Trump exceeded his authority by moving ahead with the construction without approval from Congress. Even so, they had allowed the project to continue in recent months while litigation was underway.

Mr. Trump first promoted the ballroom, estimated to cost $400 million, as a much-needed expansion to properly host visiting dignitaries who have been relegated to tents outdoors because of the lack of such space — a version of the ballroom he built at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida but more than four times larger.

But the project has grown in size and scale. In recent months, the president and his legal team have pivoted to emphasize what they say is the national security imperative of upgrading the bunker beneath it, which was built during World War II, which they now say is integral to the ballroom project.

When the administration asked the justices to intervene last week, the president referred to the project on social media as the “Military Complex” and said it is “vital to our National Security, and the Safety of all Presidents.”

The president’s lawyers also submitted sworn statements to the Supreme Court from top national security officials, including Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Jay Clayton, director of national intelligence. They warned that halting the construction would put the president and his family at risk and said the renovations were urgently needed to protect against possible attacks.

As of Aug. 14, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said the project was 65 percent complete and that it was essentially too late to turn back.

The temporary order from Chief Justice Roberts came two weeks after a three-judge appeals court panel in Washington issued a lengthy 2-to-1 ruling that said Congress had not “ceded unfettered authority to the executive branch to dramatically redesign, reshape and reconstruct the White House — the People’s House — to fit a particular president’s desires.”

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit had agreed to pause its order until Friday, and construction has continued in the interim.

The challenge to the project was brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States, a nonprofit chartered by Congress to guard public buildings. The group said the president had resisted oversight in violation of the Constitution and federal law, which gave Congress the power to decide which structures can be built on federal property in Washington.

The Guardian, Texas appeals court slashes $50m judgment against Alex Jones over false claim Sandy Hook shooting was hoax, Edward Helmore, Aug. 21, 2026. A Texas appeals court has slashed the $50m judgment to $1.5m against Alex Jones, founder of the rightwing platform Infowars, over falsely calling the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, a hoax.

The ruling does not affect a $1.4bn judgment against Jones in Connecticut, but is a significant legal victory for Jones after he and his company, Free Speech Systems, were found liable for damages for claiming the mass shooting didn’t happen.

The unanimous opinion issued by the Texas third court of appeals found that Sandy Hook parents Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis did not show sufficient evidence that harassment enflamed by Jones’s hoax claims rose to a level that would allow them to exceed the state’s $750,000 cap on damages.

Last year, the US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from Jones over the larger award, but did not provide a reason for its decision.

Jones’s efforts to meet the awards have been subject to legal wrangling. In 2024, Jones dropped a petition and placed himself and his company into bankruptcy, admitting he had to pay the Sandy Hook families. Bankruptcy legal proceedings continue.

Jones has fought to retain control of Infowars, the influential rightwing business and platform he founded in the late 1990s that he used to broadcast conspiracy theories – and enrich himself with millions of dollars by marketing herbal supplements in the process.

Earlier this year, the satirical website the Onion announced plans to take control of Infowars and turn it into a parody of itself under a leasing agreement provisionally approved by a Texas court. However, a completed deal remains in limbo, due to legal appeals.

Under a proposed deal with court administrators, Infowars would be leased by Global Tetrahedron, a Chicago-based company that owns the Onion, for $81,000 a month – money that would go toward paying the judgments against Jones.

Comedian Tim Heidecker, Infowars’s creative director, said: “It would be just a beautiful joke if we could take this pretty toxic, negative, destructive force of Infowars and rebrand it as this beautiful place for our creativity.”

Heslin and Lewis’s six-year-old son, Jesse, was among 20 young children and six educators killed in the 2012 attack on Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. The lawsuit and 2022 verdict against Jones marked the first time he was held financially liable for peddling lies about the massacre, claiming it was faked by the government to tighten gun laws.

Jones, who portrayed the lawsuit as an attack on his first amendment rights, conceded during the trial that the attack was “100% real” and that he was wrong to have lied about it. But Heslin and Lewis told jurors that an apology wouldn’t suffice and called on them to make Jones pay for the years of suffering he had put them and other Sandy Hook families through.

Jones’s trial attorney, Andino Reynal, had said immediately after the verdict that Jones would appeal against the damages amount, and predicted it would be reduced to $1.5m. 

The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, Aug. 21, 2026. Judges stop Trump’s arrogant power grabs.

Donald Trump’s authoritarian mindset treats government property as his own and considers Congress, not to mention previous administrations’ policy precedents, as nuisances at best. These days, however, federal courts are halting his imperious disregard for the rule of law. This week he suffered three more embarrassing defeats in federal court.

First, in keeping with his telltale authoritarian habit of ignoring, sidestepping, or outright violating unambiguous statutes regarding federal properties, Trump has been trying to thwart the FBI headquarters’ move to Maryland in violation of an ongoing, congressionally authorized relocation process. Just as the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals recently slapped down his East Wing building project (and before that, a district court nixed his renaming of the Kennedy Center), U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang in Greenbelt, Maryland, this week held that Trump could not negate the decision of the General Services Administration’s action, pursuant to its statutory authority, to relocate the headquarters. Trump and embattled FBI director Kash Patel, in deciding to countermand the GSA’s site selection without going back to Congress, had acted “unlawfully,” Chuang held.

Maryland’s attorney general and governor took a victory lap, as the Associated Press reported:

“Maryland and Prince George’s County committed more than a decade of work to earn the FBI headquarters and pledged hundreds of millions of dollars,” Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement. “By blocking the Trump Administration’s unlawful attempt to move the FBI to the Reagan Building and divert the funds Congress set aside for this project, the Court has cleared the path back to Greenbelt.”

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, also a Democrat, said, “Now it is time to stop the games and get to work building the world-class FBI headquarters that our public servants deserve, where it belongs: in Prince George’s County, Maryland.”

As Brown put it, the case (in keeping with other recent humiliating Trump defeats) was really about separation of powers and defending the legislative branch’s powers, which Trump threatened to override. “[W]hen Congress makes a decision, the Trump administration does not get to ignore it because they do not like the outcome,” Brown said simply. He added, “Congress made a promise. The Trump Administration tried to break it. Now, the jobs, investment, and opportunity Marylanders deserve are within reach.” Trump vows to appeal, but for now his imperious move is on hold.Subscribed

This was not Trump’s only court loss this week, nor even the only case in which a judge slammed the regime for capricious, arbitrary action. A White House that posits itself as the great defender of religion has been overtly hostile to groups other than white Christian Evangelicals (e.g., Muslims), blasphemous in its imagery of Trump, and disrespectful of places of religious worship.

In a case that came to the 4th Circuit, Trump tried to reverse a longstanding government policy limiting immigration raids at places of worship. The panel unanimously held in favor of litigants from Cooperative Baptists, Quakers, and Sikh congregations, whose houses of worship had been imperiled by indiscriminate, often violent immigration dragnet operations:

In January 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rescinded a long-standing policy of limiting immigration enforcement actions at or near houses of worship. Among other things, DHS’s new policy removed guidelines requiring that immigration officers weigh various considerations before conducting enforcement actions at these sensitive locations. Instead, the new policy requires only that the officials use their discretion and “common sense” in deciding where to conduct immigration enforcement actions. . . .

The plaintiffs assert, among other things, that the new policy has and will continue to chill immigrant attendance at the plaintiffs’ worship services and other ministries. They further allege that this decline in attendance burdens their ability to worship communally and to minister to immigrant communities, both acts of which are fundamental to their religious exercise.

The 4th Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision, issuing a preliminary injunction under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), finding many immigrants decided “not to attend the plaintiffs’ houses of worship because of the new policy. . . . [and that] the plaintiffs’ asserted injury of a decline in attendance at worship services and other activities is fairly traceable to the new policy.”

Despite the court’s restrained language, it highlighted the White House’s obvious contempt for diverse religious faiths for whom communal worship is vital:

DHS has made clear that it intends to target houses of worship in future immigration enforcement actions. As recounted above, a DHS spokesperson explained in January 2025 that the new policy expands the reach of law enforcement in sensitive locations so that “[c]riminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest.” For the plaintiffs, who welcome immigrant worshipers and have locations in or near immigrant communities, DHS’s statement emphasizing the rationale for this policy change shows that the threat of immigration enforcement at their houses of worship is real and substantial.

This was not a close call. “[W]e easily conclude that the district court did not err in determining that the balance of equities and the public interest support granting the preliminary injunction.”

Third, in another defeat for the Trump regime’s gambit of trying to install U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation (following a similar defeat in the Third Circuit regarding Alina Habba), a 9th Circuit panel unanimously slapped down Trump’s attempt to leave in place interim U.S. attorney Sigal Chattah, a Trump flunky and election denier who “has reportedly sought to investigate a political adversary and benefit allies and pushed the FBI to investigate claims of noncitizens voting in the 2020 election,” the Nevada Independent reported.

In an opinion authored by Trump appointee Judge Eric D. Miller, the court held Attorney General Todd Blanche could not “make someone an Acting United States Attorney — bypassing the usual requirement that a U.S. Attorney be confirmed by the Senate — by designating that person as the first assistant to an already-vacant office of U.S. Attorney.” It refused to allow Blanche to make her a “de facto acting U.S. attorney by delegating all of the functions and duties of the U.S. attorney to someone else.” The court thereby preserved the Senate’s constitutional role, despite Trump and his puppet Blanche’s antics, which, as the New York Times reported, have fomented “a sense of chaos within the Justice Department, which has pivoted in some instances to a retribution campaign against President Trump’s perceived enemies” and severely damaged its prosecutorial record, with defeats ranging “from its immigration-related prosecutions to the recent abandonment of [the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool] vandalism case.”

Trump’s raging arrogance, contempt for Congress and due process, and willful disregard for Americans’ rights will not abate, nor will his spineless congressional allies defend their own institutional prerogatives. However, lower federal court judges have consistently defended the rule of law, the separation of powers, and due process against arbitrary actions by an unhinged president. We should be grateful for their undaunted and uncompromising stance in defense of our democracy that keeps tyranny at bay.

New York Times, Trump Administration Has a Different Way to Drain Harvard Funding, Mark Arsenault and Irena Hwang, Aug. 21, 2026. The federal government has slowed Harvard’s funding, despite the university’s legal victories. The conflict is forcing hard choices on campus.

One of Harvard University’s biggest federal funding streams is down sharply, according to a New York Times analysis of government data.

The declines have persisted even after a federal judge forced the Trump administration to reverse drastic cuts to the university last year.

The funding, from the National Institutes of Health, currently lags about 18 percent behind the average pace of grants during the Biden administration, the analysis shows.

Last year, Harvard successfully sued the Trump administration, after the government announced it had frozen more than $2.2 billion in 2025, from multiple federal agencies.

But unlike then, when Trump officials made a public spectacle out of announcing the cuts, the N.I.H. is mainly delaying, reducing or rejecting grant requests, often leaving researchers and university leaders in the dark about what is happening.

The reduction appears to be the latest front in the Trump administration’s on-again, off-again war with Harvard and other elite universities. It is a new, more subtle tactic that is harder to fight in court, but that could be just as damaging if cuts and uncertainty build.

The Trump administration has targeted a number of the nation’s elite universities, accusing them of tolerating antisemitism and pursuing racial diversity in ways that flout the law, among other criticisms. Harvard — the country’s wealthiest university — has been one of the most frequent targets of federal officials.

As the Trump administration has pulled multiple levers to try to bring Harvard and other schools to heel, Harvard has often pushed back. It was the first institution to sue the Trump administration, has won in court on a number of occasions and has not reached a settlement with the federal government, as other prominent schools have done.

Now, however, the university faces cuts that may be harder to counter. Last September, a judge ruled that the administration had improperly cut off funding to Harvard when it ended all of its grants in 2025, finding that the government had violated Harvard’s First Amendment rights.

But in the ruling, the judge suggested that there were lawful means the government could pursue if it wanted to restrict Harvard’s money, should it choose to.

That is what is happening.

Through June 30 of this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, the N.I.H. provided Harvard 309 awards worth a total of $200 million. The amount is down from an average of roughly 440 awards worth $246 million for the same nine-month period in 2021-2024, according to the latest data available.

Harvard is still one of the largest recipients of N.I.H. funding, though it is far behind the top grantees such as Johns Hopkins, the University of Michigan and Yale. Other major research universities have also seen reductions in N.I.H. funding.

Though N.I.H. support has slowed compared to the Biden years, the 2026 awards are outpacing last year, when Harvard’s funding was frozen. By the same point in 2025, N.I.H. funding to Harvard was stalled at 201 grants worth $94 million.

In recent months, Harvard’s individual schools have laid off staff. The leadership of the university’s largest division, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, reported in an email to the division on Aug. 14 that 165 of its staff positions had been eliminated in a layoff and restructuring. The job cuts were aimed at reducing a major deficit.

Carrie Barbash, an organizer and former president of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers, said the final number of layoffs may change as some staff members whose jobs were eliminated consider moving into some newly designed roles.

The current grant slowdown is not taking place evenly across Harvard. The university’s Chan School of Public Health is heavily dependent on N.I.H. funds and has seen nearly 25 percent less in grant funding this year, compared to the average amount from 2021 to 2024.

The N.I.H. has obligated $67 million across 63 awards to Chan through June of this fiscal year; the 2021-24 average for the same time period was $90 million across more than 100 awards.

Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at the Chan School, said that fallout from the funding slowdown goes beyond individual projects that lost grants. More than a year of federal cuts — and legal fights over the reductions — have “shaken any sense of stability as to whether the federal government is a reliable funder,” she said.

The school is already cutting back, with layoffs and reductions in the number of slots for Ph.D. students. “It’s not just that you lost funding, it’s that you’re reducing the size of the cohort for the next generation of researchers that you’re training,” Dr. Krieger said. “What is the knowledge lost? And what are the myriad ripple effects for the economies of the cities and towns that depend on universities as major employers?”

Harvard has also won some rounds in its fight with the administration. Harvard’s court victories protected much of its grant money and its ability to host international students.

A federal judge on Aug. 13 dismissed a Trump administration lawsuit against Harvard that had accused the school of tolerating antisemitism and sought the ability to deny it grants.

Harvard’s endowment continues to ride the stock market to record highs, and the university’s steadfastness under pressure has inspired supporters and alumni who do not want it to yield to President Trump.

While Yale University is in talks to perhaps become the next elite school to settle with the administration, Harvard continues to hold out. Harvard is not believed to be engaged in any serious settlement talks at this time.

“Harvard is fighting for principles, both legal and constitutional, and doing so on behalf of the entire system of colleges and universities,” said Lee Bollinger, the former president of Columbia University. “We should all be grateful.”

Yet, as Mr. Bollinger noted, “any litigant will inevitably pay a high price.”

The administration has pushed the fight to Harvard on several fronts. The university is still engaged in other litigation and appeals with the Trump administration; a loss in any major case could be devastating.

The Trump administration continues to open fresh battles. The government is proposing new budget rules that would give the administration’s political appointees more power over grants.

White House spokeswoman Liz Huston blamed the ongoing battles between the university and the administration on Harvard’s “stubborn commitment to unlawfully discriminating on the basis of race and failing to properly protect its students.”

“Unless Harvard comes to the table in good faith, the Trump administration will continue pursuing every available legal avenue to enforce federal civil rights laws,” she said.

Facing the uncertainty caused by lawsuits, grant slowdowns, and other pressures from the administration, Harvard and other schools are likely to continue to retrench, said Tom Gerety, a former president of Amherst College.

“The main thing you do in uncertainty is hunker down and say, ‘What cuts can we make right now?’” he said, noting that research universities are already trimming back on Ph.D. programs.

Tighter research budgets will mean scientists are more likely to seek jobs outside the United States, he said, while those still at American schools may be less likely to take the unconventional big swings in their research that can lead to scientific breakthroughs.

“This is going to hurt,” Mr. Gerety said, “and it’s going to hurt a lot more in 10 years than it does now.”

The government has pursued appeals of federal court rulings that went Harvard’s way last year.

The two sides, as well as a number of outside parties, filed briefs this summer over last fall’s decision in the funding case. The government is also appealing a June 2025 court decision blocking the administration’s effort to stop Harvard from hosting international students. Oral arguments in that case are scheduled for October.

New York Times, Trump Threatens Suit Over Report He Doesn’t Like, Aiming to Intimidate a Critic, Alan Feuer, Aug. 21, 2026. It was the latest example of President Trump’s bid to use the legal system against those who voice unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment.

President Trump has opened a new front in his campaign to intimidate political foes, threatening a prominent liberal think tank with a $5 billion defamation lawsuit over a report concluding that his deployment of the National Guard to cities across the country has had little effect on reducing violent crime.

The threats against the think tank, the Center for American Progress, were Mr. Trump’s latest effort to use the legal system to punish critics for voicing unflattering facts and opinions generally protected by the First Amendment. And while it is unclear how far any suit the president might ultimately file will get in court, it could force the organization to spend money fighting it off and make it even more of a target of his allies and supporters.

On Monday, one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, Alejandro Brito, wrote a letter to the center warning that he would file the suit if the group did not fully retract the report, which was published on its website on July 13. The letter, viewed by The New York Times, was addressed to the group’s president and chief executive, Neera Tanden, a longtime Democratic official who served as a senior adviser to President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and to several of its board members.

Mr. Brito claimed that the report about the National Guard was full of malicious and false statements. He gave Ms. Tanden and members of her board until 5 p.m. on Friday to retract it and apologize to Mr. Trump.

Ms. Tanden pushed back, saying in a statement that the center would “neither cower nor bend in the face” of legal action. She also defended the report, asserting that while its findings might have been “inconvenient to the Trump administration,” they were “grounded in rigorous, evidence-based research and analysis.”

“This threatened lawsuit’s attack on facts and evidence is baseless,” she added. “A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that is contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us.”ImageNeera Tanden, the president and chief executive of the Center for American Progress, said that the center would “neither cower nor bend in the face” of legal action.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

Mr. Trump has often lashed out at scholars and commentators for reproaching or critiquing him in the news media. And since winning re-election, he has filed a flurry of lawsuits against news organizations like the BBC and The Times, claiming they defamed him. He has even filed suit against the Des Moines Register, arguing that a poll the paper published before the 2024 election indicating that he would lose the vote in Iowa amounted to consumer fraud and election interference.

(The Times has filed its own suits against the administration, including two seeking increased access for its reporters at the Pentagon.)

The president has repeatedly claimed that his administration is the most transparent in American history. But he and his aides have used lawsuits and executive actions to go after law firms, universities and television networks. They have also used criminal tactics such as search warrants and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to pry loose sensitive information from reporters.

Many of these efforts have faltered once they reached court and faced judicial scrutiny. Mr. Brito himself has filed multiple failed suits on behalf of Mr. Trump. Last month, a federal judge in Florida referred Mr. Brito for potential disciplinary proceedings after ruling that a suit he filed for the president against the Internal Revenue Service amounted to an improper exercise in self-dealing.

The Center for American Progress report accused Mr. Trump of seeking to take credit for a nationwide decline in violent crime that began before he returned to the White House. The report determined that there was “no evidence” that the National Guard deployments had affected the crime rate, adding that they were poised to cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion if they continued through the end of 2026.

The report asserted that the “primary goal” of the deployments was “never to stop crime.” Instead, it said they amounted to “a dangerous power grab by the Trump administration.”

The team that put the report together used an analysis based on homicide, violent crime and gun victimization data in cities where the National Guard was deployed — Washington, Los Angeles and Memphis — over the period from January 2023 to this February.

“This approach was employed to identify any statistical changes in crime trends associated with the deployment of the National Guard in specific cities,” its authors wrote.

Mr. Trump referred to the report on social media last week after watching a television segment about the report, which he described as “another Radical Left SCAM.” In the post, he threatened to sue the center and several of its funders, including the liberal financier George Soros, who has long served as a boogeyman for the administration.

A week later, Mr. Brito’s letter arrived at the center, saying that the president would sue if Ms. Tanden and her colleagues did not retract the report, issue an apology and give Mr. Trump unspecified financial compensation.

The letter ended with an all-caps salutation: “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.”

On Friday, a lawyer for the center fired back in a letter of his own, deriding Mr. Trump’s accusations that he had been defamed.

“This is utterly absurd,” the lawyer, Kevin H. Metz, wrote to Mr. Brito. “Truth is not and cannot be defamation.”

Mr. Metz went on to say that the center welcomed the opportunity to make its case in court and receive more information on the National Guard deployments through the process of discovery.

Other think tanks of various political stripes have rallied to the center’s side.

“Independent organizations across the ideological spectrum must be free to express their analysis and opinions, and to challenge those in power without fear of political retaliation or legal intimidation,” said Peter Goettler, the president and chief executive of the libertarian Cato Institute. “Disagreements on matters of policy should be settled through open inquiry, evidence, and debate — not threats designed to silence criticism.”

Receipts via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s War on Reality Comes for the Census, Catherine Rampell, above, Aug. 21, 2026. I’ve spent the last twenty months telling people the guardrails around government data were holding. This week, they finally broke.

A “study” supposedly about noncitizen voting—unsigned, with numbers that don’t add up, and reportedly drafted by outside political operatives—went out under the Census Bureau’s own letterhead. Today’s newsletter is about what happened and why it matters far beyond this one sketchy report.

If you have any insights to share about this report, please reach out via our confidential tips line. Meanwhile, thanks for reading, and for being a Bulwark+ member. Your support helps us track threats to institutions that many of us have taken for granted.

–Catherine

Share(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock, Truth Social, Census.gov)

SOMEONE ASKS ME AT LEAST ONCE A WEEK whether they should still trust the federal government’s data releases. When we hear official announcements about things like unemployment or inflation, can we rely on those figures to accurately reflect reality, and to be based on proven models? Up until now, I have always said yes.

Sure, the numbers coming out of the White House may be bull.¹ But the numbers from independent statistical agencies (the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, etc.) have remained solid and trustworthy, I usually explain.

After all, these stats agencies employ armies of dedicated, fastidious civil servants who collect the underlying data and conduct careful statistical analysis. Their work is firewalled from political interference. I’ve been covering these data releases long enough² to know that if Trump were cooking the books, it would be obvious—not least because those career civil servants would be screaming bloody murder and quitting en masse.

Unfortunately, I can no longer vouch for any of that. Now my answer is: No, you should not default to trusting the government data. There’s clear evidence the Trump administration is cooking at least some of the books.

That’s because (to switch metaphors) this week we crossed the Rubicon: The granddaddy of all statistical agencies—the U.S. Census Bureau, which has existed in some fashion since 1790³—was infiltrated by

Trump’s goons. From available reporting, it appears that a Trump-aligned political group wrote up some propaganda about voter fraud, possibly by using/abusing confidential government records they should not legally have had access to; the Census Bureau then released that propaganda as if it were a normal, technocratic agency publication, on bureau letterhead and with other trappings of “real” independent research.

This is a five-alarm fire. It’s freaking out all the data-watchers I’ve been pestering over the past twenty months, who are usually assuring me that the guardrails have held.

“I’ve been waiting until the thing that I see that I go, ‘Oh my God, that’s it,’” says Amy O’Hara, a Census Bureau alum and current executive director of Georgetown’s Federal Statistical Research Data Center, about what appears to be a cataclysmic breach of government data. “And this is it.”

Panicking about government data might seem like a luxury, given other gothic horrors this administration has visited upon the populace. But let me explain why this could be the beginning of the end for your basic privacy protections, ability to hold politicians accountable, and, perhaps, U.S. economic hegemony.

What’s wrong with this “study”

There were red flags about this “study” almost immediately. The first was that its results were announced by the president, on his Truth Social feed, rather than by the Census Bureau itself.

“The Census Bureau has begun checking the Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records,” Trump posted. “On the first 128,000,000 Voters, the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally! The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION!”

About an hour later, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (whose department oversees the Census Bureau) echoed his boss. He tweeted out a link to the new “study,” titled “Noncitizen Voting in the 2020 Election, A Beginning Analysis.” Lutnick also pledged that “that is just the beginning” of the bureau’s alleged findings on voter fraud. He did not mention that the results of the “study” contradict other available examinations of the prevalence of voter fraud, nor that other claims the administration has made about noncitizens voting have been unsubstantiated.

Curiously, the report had no named authors. Nor did it even list the department or program within the Census Bureau that created it. This is unlike every other Census research publication I’ve ever seen. Why was no one willing to sign their name to it? I wondered.

When I started calling around to data nerds, many pointed out some other, subtler problems with the report. Prepare yourself; this gets weeds-y.

The “study” claims to match up national voter data with government citizenship records, but there’s no national voter database that would allow Census to do this; instead, Census apparently bought data from a relatively unknown private vendor, DataClear. The company is not one of the regulars in selling voter data files, O’Hara says.

Unfortunately, the report provides no information on how reliable this commercial voter data file is—or how often it is missing critical bits of information like birth dates or Social Security numbers, which would help ensure that people with common names don’t result in false-positive matches. (For example, a U.S.-citizen and registered voter named Maria Garcia could get accidentally linked to a noncitizen named Maria Garcia.⁴)

Relatedly, the report didn’t include any margins of error, or other indicators showing how confident the (unnamed) authors were about their findings. Besides violating Census Bureau policy, this also means the report didn’t say whether the “24,000 noncitizen voters” number was statistically different from zero noncitizen voters—that is, whether that number could be within the margin of error.

Trump’s alleged smoking gun almost certainly wasn’t statistically different from zero, according to every statistics and elections expert I interviewed, who cited known problems with commercially available voter data (including gaps in key information), and the likelihood of very high rates of false-positive matches.⁵

Funnily enough, one of the citations in the Census report’s list of references was a paper on . . . false-match rates. Which may well have been a sly “cry for help” from some anonymous civil servant forced to work on this steaming pile of garbage.

“This seemed like a call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house, blink-twice-if-you-need-help type message,” said Justin Levitt, a Loyola Marymount law professor who specializes in elections and voting rights. He can’t say for sure, he clarifies, but he points to other little Easter eggs throughout the report “that, to a trained eye, say, ‘don’t trust me.’”

Trump, via Census, is selling you out

So who actually wrote this report?

Everyone connected to Census I’ve spoken with has disavowed participation in this project, though based on what meager methodology is included in the report (and that “cry for help” footnote), some civil servants were likely involved at least a little, even if under duress. (If you have any insights into what happened, please reach out via The Bulwark’s confidential tips line.)

A source close to Census had told me that political operatives on loan to the bureau from a Trump-aligned private group, the Center for Renewing America, put the report together; NPR meanwhile reports that it was actually a different MAGA hack-joint, the America First Policy Institute, that was involved.

(The Census Bureau did not respond to a list of questions about the new report, including about its authorship and missing methodological information. Notably, the America First Policy Institute boosted the Census release on X, remarking that “maximizing transparency is a critical step to restoring confidence in our elections.”)

Whoever wrote the “study” or ordered it up clearly had a predetermined conclusion they wanted to reach, and then reverse-engineered the data to produce their answer. They did so by using sensitive administrative records, including data that’s supposed to be protected under federal law for privacy and data-integrity reasons.

This apparent breach has two disturbing consequences.

First is that the release of an obviously political conclusion under the once-pristine brand of the Census Bureau undermines the bureau’s legitimacy and makes its data less useful to those who rely on it—which is virtually everyone, whether they know it or not.

“The reason that any survey in the country works is because it has a baseline of ground truth, from the Census,” explains Levitt. “A ‘nationally representative sample’ is supposed to track what we understand the nation to look like, because of what the census says it looks like.”

Now who knows? If political operatives can churn out partisan pseudoscience and slap the Census Bureau’s name on it, what other data products might they compromise? And this is on top of other ways that agencies and data series have been under attack, via funding cuts, high-profile firings, censorship, and other technical meddling.

U.S. statistical agencies have for generations been the envy of the world, because they produce reliable information that voters, businesses, consumers, and families rely on. They have been one of our most unsung economic (and democratic) strengths.

But now, every decision Walmart makes about where to locate a new store; a family makes about where to live for good schools or low crime; a developer makes about where to build; a voter makes about whether a politician has delivered on promises to reduce prices; or a doctor makes about what illness you might have—they’re all going to be worse.

Political meddling with the data “impact[s] both the trust of people using the data, whether the data are as accurate as they should be,” said Denice Ross, the former U.S. chief data scientist and current director of the Federation of American Scientists Data Policy Institute. “And then they also impact [the] trust of people who give data to the federal government. And that can be sort of a data-quality doom loop, if we have declining trust in the data and then declining trust in government, which results in lower-quality data.”

Second is what all this means for your privacy, given the (legally protected) confidential records that outside political operatives, with or without help from career civil servants, appear to have accessed.

There have been prior cases of unlawful access to confidential administrative records by political operatives. In fact, the Trump administration has admitted as much: In a January court filing, the administration acknowledged that DOGE employees at the Social Security Administration illegally accessed sensitive personal records as part of a secret data-sharing agreement with a partisan advocacy group that wanted to “find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain states.” The advocacy group was not named, but the election-denier project certainly sounds a lot like what just came out of Census.

What else, then, might Trump’s flunkies start digging for, and at whose behest, or in whose interests—now that they’re not even trying to hide it?

— Speaking of golden geese we are killing: The number of international students applying to attend U.S. colleges this fall dropped by 10 percent, the biggest decline in at least a decade. It probably doesn’t help that the Trump administration just changed student visas so that they last just four years, rather than for the duration of a student’s program of study (which for, say, Ph.D. programs, is 5+ years). University and labor groups just filed a lawsuit challenging the rule, but probably too late for the current crop of matriculants.

— Americans’ self-reported use of alcoholic beverages is at a record low. Maybe that’s why it’s so important to Trump (a famous teetotaler) that Canadians start buying American booze again, under penalty of higher tariffs.

— Also, we recently began tariffing the European Union, Canada, and scores of other trading partners for supposedly not doing enough to block imports made with forced labor—but have carved out separate tariff exemptions for Trump donors who actually do practice forced labor.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Before Fabricating Assaults to Justify the MN-15 Investigation, DHS Focused on a Protest of Trump’s 2017 Inauguration, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 21, 2026.

As I laid out in this post, DOJ and DHS used assault charges fabricated against 16 people whom Pam Bondi used as trophies to retroactively justify spying on the Minnesota protest community for months. On January 28 — the same day Bondi paraded her trophies on Xitter, DOJ opened the investigation that would result in charges against 15 activists it misleadingly billed as Antifa: the next day, DOJ indicted the first round of people in the Cities Church protest relying at least in part on fabricated claims.

Then, after the fact, DOJ reconstructed spying that DHS undercover officers — most notably one referred to as 9843 — had already done in the weeks leading up to that. On February 28, HSI documented a bunch of spying that several undercover officers had done. Then, still months later, on April 7, HSI collected a bunch of screen caps of Signal chats 9843 took.

The indictment itself starts on January 11, with an Emergency Response Meeting to — effectively — respond to the Renee Good killing. But the narrative of this retroactive reconstruction shows it started before Good’s killing, on January 5, when 9843 went to a meeting (but did not record it) where the potential of illegal actions was allegedly discussed but no specific illegal actions were planned.

From that unrecorded meeting, 9843 invented the conspiracy he spent five more months looking for. That unrecorded meeting is where all this started.

Somehow, from there, 9843 got into one after another Signal chat; the genesis of that, too, is sketchy.

Almost immediately after that, 9843 started focusing on Sant, who months later would become the lead defendant in this case (and the defendant who released all these exhibits), starting with the meeting that does serve as the first overt act in the indictment.

Sometime before January 13, 9843 saved a selfie from Sant.

That selfie was possibly this photo (January 12 was a Monday) showing what appears to be damage from a rubber bullet.

Just over a week later, DHS had gotten back a Clearview dossier on Sant, using that photo as seed, including pictures of some other dude with a pregnant wife. The Clearview dossier also included pictures of what appear to be Sant’s past activism. One of those was this picture, sourced to an article from 2018, describing that the last remaining charges against hundreds of protestors against Trump’s first inauguration had been dropped.

The fourth person from left in that picture is Chelsea Manning.

By the time HSI got this Clearview dossier (which also showed what they purported to be Sant at an Occupy event), 9843 had already started focusing on Sant’s role in that J20 protest, capturing a chat where Sant described being a part of it.

Again, all of this spying took place before DOJ retroactively justified this investigation by framing a bunch of people with assault: 9843 had decided Sant would be a close focus, then had begun to focus on Sant’s exoneration in the J20 protest.

9843 returned to that protest at least once more. On March 15, 9843’s description of another meeting focused on Sant’s description of what — based on timing — appears to be the J20 protest.

Now’s a good time to remind what happened with the J20 protest, the time Sant described (though I’m still looking for his record in the docket) being arrested for “wearing black.”

After a limited number of people at a protest of Trump’s first inauguration damaged a limo, the cops kettled everyone at the protest. DC USAO charged hundreds of them. But then — as Ryan Reilly covered for years — the cases fell apart, partly because (as may happen with this prosecution) prosecutors had no individualized evidence against many of the defendants.

[M]ore than 230 cases that arose out of the mass arrests of protesters near Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. Protesters were arrested after police trapped them in a “kettle” after some people smashed windows, destroyed a limousine and threw objects at officers during a demonstration against the incoming president.

The government adopted the extraordinary tactic of charging hundreds of people arrested on a public street with felony crimes based on the theory that their choice of black clothing meant they were part of a felony rioting conspiracy. But the #J20 prosecutions, as activists dubbed them, were largely a bust for the government. Jurors acquitted the first six defendants to go to trial in late 2017, a judge ordered charges against 10 other defendants dropped because prosecutors withheld evidence, and charges against all remaining defendants were dropped in mid-2018.

In 2024, the main prosecutor on the case, Jennifer Kerkhoff Muyskens, faced an ethics complaint because, while she relied heavily on one Project Veritas video in her attempt to prosecute the defendants, she withheld an exculpatory PV video from them.

Kerkhoff Muyskens and Washington Police Detective Greggory Pemberton were “primarily responsible for the government’s investigation” into the events of Jan. 20, 2017, according to the ethics complaint, which alleges Kerkhoff Muyskens violated six of the D.C. Bar’s rules of professional conduct. The Office of the Disciplinary Counsel in Washington, which serves as the chief prosecutor for attorney disciplinary matters, wants the D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility, which is the disciplinary arm of the D.C. Court of Appeals, to consider imposing sanctions on her.

Pemberton, who now heads the Washington police union, faced questioning during trials from defense attorneys about his “anti-liberal biases,” the complaint noted. When defense counsel raised “troubling” edits to video evidence that they believed Pemberton made, Kerkhoff Muyskens “falsely told the court that only she — not Pemberton — was responsible for the edits,” according to the complaint.

At issue is video from Project Veritas, a conservative group that recorded undercover videos, which was essential to prosecutors’ case.

Both Kerkhoff Muyskens and Pemberton understood that Project Veritas “had a reputation for editing videos in a misleading way,” the complaint says. Kerkhoff Muyskens and Pemberton also “omitted and cut footage from the original videos, in part, to remove footage of the operative that could reveal his identity or reveal the identity of Project Veritas as the source of the video,” it says.

Even though Project Veritas provided videos of another training session that occurred at American University on Jan. 14-15, Kerkhoff Muyskens didn’t turn them over to defense lawyers, the complaint alleges. The complaint says the undisclosed videos “consistently showed that protesters were trained and instructed to expect a non-violent protest; to remain non-violent; to use non-violence and de-escalation techniques with police and counter-protesters; to be wary of counter-protester infiltrators, including Project Veritas; to rely on [Washington police] to handle any violence from either protesters or counter-protesters; to stay close with their protest group for safety and security; and to comply with police instructions and ‘police lines.'”

As a reminder, far right trolls play a (hidden) role in this prosecution too, with the focus on Kyle Wagner arising out of his conflicts with Jake Lang and Jayden Scott, both of whom themselves engaged in criminal activity but were not charged for conspiring with each other.

As for the conspiracy that 9843 dreamt up on January 5, before ICE shot Renee Good, before ICE shot a Venezuelan and missed his kid and lied to cover that up, before CBP shot Alex Pretti, Sant shows up all through this indictment, in part because he advocated using shields at protests.

On February 6, DHS unlawfully stopped him and told him he couldn’t follow them.

On or about February 6, 2026, federal immigration officers were engaged in an arrest operation on or around Cedar Avenue South in Minneapolis. SANT drove a red Subaru and followed vehicles that were driven by federal immigration officers. Federal immigration officers stopped the Subaru and warned SANT that they were engaged in official duties and that any interference would constitute a violation of federal law. Despite the warning. SANT continued to followed the immigration officers’ vehicle and impeded the transport of the detained individual.

Two months later, it happened again.

On or about May 4, 2026, al approximately 2:08 p.m., SANT sent a message in the “Whipple Watch (Refiesh)” Signal group chat, stating. “494 E approaching concord st s…Just getting to woodbury…Nb on 494…00 we have any rr (rapid response) calls in hudson? We’re looking to handoff if possible… We’re in WI. we’re going to keep following. We won’t get back to Whipple for another one…Carmichacl rd nb…” At 2:29 p.m.. SANT messaged, “Cop pulling us over…stopped by police in Hudson WI… They let us go with a warning. Threatened us with criminal charges.”

That act — following an ICE car across state lines on May 4 — is the single charge against Sant, in addition to that conspiracy 9843 dreamt up before all this started.

The day after Sant was indicted for his activities in Minnesota (including describing his past arrest in J20), on June 12, the DC Bar slapped Kerkhoff Muyskens with a six month bar sanction for her ethical failures in pursuing that case.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump just keeps getting richer, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 21, 2026. After not being seen publicly for over a month, Melania Trump emerged from the White House at 3:48 this afternoon and made her way along the colonnade overlooking the Rose Garden. She was joined by her husband, who gripped her hand with his own swollen and makeup-covered hand.

With American flags carefully placed behind the podium, she stopped at the microphones and struggled to take her hand back from Donald Trump before he made his way to a seat saved for him in the audience. Once he was seated, the First Lady began her short speech: “Good afternoon. I heard you missed me.”The event started ten minutes early and was over just 18 minutes later. Information provided to the press by the First Lady’s office highlighted her attire, noting that she wore a bright red Dior pencil skirt with an oversized sky-blue shirt by Michael Kors. Her look was completed with a pair of $895 Manolo Blahnik suede pumps.

After more than a month out of the public eye, and two months without making a public remark, the First Lady of the United States spent barely 18 minutes at an event that had been hyped as a major showcase for her “Fostering the Future” program. And the information her office chose to highlight to the press was what she wore, not the substance of what she said. Doing some rough math, it appears her full outfit cost more than $5,000.

On its own, the price of Melania Trump’s outfit would be little more than a detail. But today, it became part of a much larger story. Because while the White House was making a point of telling us what the First Lady was wearing, we learned that the national debt of the United States had crossed $40 trillion.

Melania Trump stood before a wall of American flags and announced a “strategic alliance” with IndyCar and Fox Corporation for her Fostering the Future initiative, a $2 million scholarship program for young people aging out of foster care. “The greatest investment America can make is not in technology, infrastructure, or capital markets,” she said. “It’s our children.”

If this were anybody else, we might be celebrating. Children are our future. They should be invested in, and we should be doing everything we can as a society to secure their future. I want nothing more than to believe that the woman standing in the Rose Garden today genuinely cares about children. But we no longer have the luxury of believing anything she says after everything she has done. And everything she has not done. This is the same woman who wore a jacket that read “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” on a trip that included a visit to a facility housing immigrant children separated from their families. The same woman whose privately recorded audio captured her saying, “Give me a f***ing break,” while complaining about criticism over family separation at the border. The same woman who has been married to a man who is referenced in the Epstein files over 38,000 times and whose administration is using the weight of his office to protect a trafficking ring that appears to include children.

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So when Melania Trump tells us that America’s greatest investment is “our children,” it begs more questions than it answers. Which children? What investment? What has this administration actually done for children?

The reality is that this event was not really about foster care. It was the opening act for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, a vanity race through the streets of Washington this Sunday, where IndyCar drivers will scream past the National Mall at nearly 200 miles per hour while the President of the United States takes an honorary lap in The Beast. They know the optics and timing for this spectacle are terrible, so they needed a way to tie it to a cause that most Americans would support. That is the real reason Melania suddenly returned to public life, even for just 18 minutes.

The race chairman, Bud Denker, described the event as taking place in the president’s “backyard,” and by backyard he is referring to the People’s House, not Donald Trump’s private property. That is the capital of the United States of America that they are treating like a private estate. There is no reverence left and no respect for what these spaces are supposed to represent. Just spectacle after spectacle, each one designed to make us forget that this is supposed to be our country, not theirs.

This is the same summer that gave us a UFC fight on the White House lawn for Trump’s 80th birthday and a NASCAR race on a military base in San Diego. This was supposed to be the year we celebrated 250 years of American independence. Instead, it has turned into one stunt after another centered around Donald Trump. IndyCar has hardly been an innocent bystander in all of this. Before the race even began, it was forced to pull an officially licensed “ONE NATION ONE RACE” T-shirt featuring the Lincoln Memorial after people pointed out that the phrase could be interpreted as white supremacist language.

Preservationists have also warned that the vibrations from the race could damage frescoes and artifacts in buildings along the route, including the National Archives, which houses the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The race “celebrating” the founding of this country could literally put the documents that started it at risk.

This administration isn’t just putting our physical history at risk. We learned today that something else is in danger too: our financial future. The United States Treasury reported that the national debt has officially surpassed $40 trillion. That is the highest it has ever been in the history of this country. It took nearly 200 years to reach the first trillion, in 1981. Now we are adding a trillion every five months, and it is accelerating. On our current trajectory, we could hit $50 trillion in just six years. The deficit through the first ten months of this fiscal year is running roughly $169 billion ahead of the same period last year. In July alone, the government borrowed $14 billion a day.

When I think of that number, it is almost too large to comprehend. One way to think of it is that $40 trillion means we carry roughly $117,000 in debt for every single person in this country. Interest payments on that debt now exceed $1 trillion a year, making it the second largest line item in the federal budget, behind only Social Security. The government is now spending more on interest from past borrowing than it spends on national defense. That is money that could be going to children’s programs.

This is after Donald Trump sold us the lie that there was waste everywhere and that he created DOGE to address it. Instead, they gutted USAID, fired tens of thousands of federal workers, and went after programs Americans have spent their lives paying into with their tax dollars. Social Security. Medicare. Medicaid. Food assistance. Housing. Education. We all pay in. We share the cost. That is how public infrastructure works. We pool our resources so the collective investment makes things more affordable and creates stability for everyone. That is what our government is supposed to do with our money.

But Trump is not concerned in the least about actually being the president and executing the job he was elected to do. He told us these cuts were necessary. That we were saving money. That the belt-tightening was patriotic, and that somehow we would keep more of our money while receiving greater benefits. But that is not what happened. They cut the programs and services Americans had already paid for, and then borrowed against the country’s future to pay for an entirely different set of priorities. He created a hole. And then he borrowed to fill it.

The debt did not go down. It went up. By $3.8 trillion in 19 months. The war in Iran is costing billions. Tax cuts stripped revenue that could have reduced the deficit. Interest payments on the debt his own policies deepened continue to climb past a trillion dollars a year. And more than $100 billion went toward refunding tariffs after the Supreme Court struck them down. He created the crisis, the courts reversed him, and the American taxpayer was left paying for both the damage and the cleanup.

We can’t forget that while the national debt was exploding, American families were losing programs they depend on, inflation was soaring, and basic necessities were becoming more expensive by the month, Donald Trump’s personal wealth was doing the opposite. According to Forbes, Trump’s net worth went from approximately $2.3 billion in 2024 to roughly $6.5 billion. His personal fortune has nearly tripled. His income in 2025 alone exceeded $2.2 billion. The Washington Post reported that no past president has seen financial gains while in office like these, not even Trump himself during his first term. And one analysis found that his single-year increase in wealth approaches the combined net worth of every other president while in office. All 44 of them. Combined.

And it wasn’t just him. By last September, the Trump family, including Melania, his children, and Jared Kushner, was worth approximately $10 billion, nearly double what they were worth around the 2024 election. Donald Trump Jr. went from roughly $50 million to $300 million. Eric Trump’s net worth increased tenfold, to roughly $400 million. During Trump’s first term, Eric publicly swore off foreign business deals while his father held office. During the second, Trump told The New York Times there would be no such restrictions. He didn’t just take down the guardrails. He sold them for scraps.

I continue to be deeply concerned that all of this corruption is being normalized. I worry that too many people have simply accepted it as part of American life. There are no large-scale, nationwide protests happening anymore. People are exhausted. They have jobs and families and bills to pay, and after years of constant crisis, I think a lot of people are desperate to feel normal again. I understand that. But there is a real danger in learning how to live around corruption instead of continuing to be outraged by it. Eventually, things that would have caused a national scandal ten years ago barely hold our attention for a day. We lower our expectations, and we stop expecting investigations. We stop believing accountability is even possible, and the people abusing their power learn from our exhaustion too. They realize they can go a little further because the public has become accustomed to what they did before.

We cannot allow ourselves, our children, or our grandchildren to grow up believing this is simply how the world works. That the president gets rich while the country goes broke. That lying is just strategy, and that stealing is just business as usual. Because what happens at the highest levels of government eventually changes the standards we apply everywhere else. When the most powerful people in the country can lie openly, enrich themselves, ignore laws, punish their enemies, and face no meaningful consequences, we are teaching an entire generation that rules are really only for people without enough money or power to escape them. We are teaching them that integrity is something we talk about but do not actually require from our leaders. And once that becomes accepted at the top, it becomes much harder to demand something different from corporations, schools, local governments, employers, or even from one another. That is what normalization does.

And right now, the lesson being taught from the highest office in the land is that there are no consequences for anything. That you can take whatever you want, hurt whoever you want, and no one will stop you. I think about the kids watching this. I think about the generation growing up right now who have never known a version of the presidency that was not this. And I think about what kind of country we are building if we let this become their baseline for what is acceptable.

And this is the part that we must never allow to become normal, because it is the foundation that everything else is built on. The man who sat in the Rose Garden today in front of his wife is the same one who was found liable by a unanimous federal jury for sexually abusing a woman in a department store dressing room. He is also the same person who was convicted of 34 felony counts.

In any other era, either one of those things alone would have been permanently disqualifying. Both of them together should have ended not just a political career, but the willingness of any institution or person to associate with him. And yet here he is, in the Rose Garden for an event about helping children.

Some days I’m angry and some I’m just sad. Today was a sad day. Not because of a single moment, but because I just keep coming back to what kind of country we are leaving to the next generations. Right now, many of them will be living in a country saddled with debt, having fewer rights than their parents did, and thinking that is just what the United States of America is. But then I remember that the fact that I am writing this, and you are reading it, means we are not too far gone. None of us are sticking our heads in the sand to avoid what is happening. We are still carrying the torch of truth so others can see it too. And we have no plans to stop. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

More On Trump Governance   

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 20, 2026 [Hiding U.S. Health Care Cuts], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 21, 2026. On Saturday, August 15, the New York Times editorial board published an op-ed noting that the Republicans are trying to hide the cuts they have made to health care in the U.S.

The editorial board called the expansion of affordable health care to millions of Americans one of the great achievements of the federal government in this century. Before the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 without a single Republican vote, about 18% of Americans under 65 had no health insurance. With the passage and later expansion of the ACA, also known as Obamacare, the number of uninsured had fallen below 10%.

But now, the journalists note, Trump and the Republicans are working to uproot that achievement. While they extended Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations in their July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” passed without a single Democratic vote—they refused to extend subsidies that enabled people to afford healthcare insurance in the ACA marketplaces.

The Democrats shut down the government last fall to try to force Republicans to restore those cuts, foreseeing that higher prices for premiums would drive healthier people out of the markets and out of healthcare insurance, while the loss of those healthier people from risk pools would drive up premiums for those remaining.

They were unsuccessful, and as they warned, without the subsidies, people dropped their health insurance. A report from the Department of Health and Human Services in late June 2026 showed that at least 5 million people lost health insurance in the first six months of the year, a drop of about 13%. For those remaining, premiums have spiked: the editorial board notes that a middle-income, middle-aged couple with two children could pay an additional $3,500 a year, more than doubling their premium from before the cuts. Deductibles also jumped this year by about $1,000 a person as people chose cheaper policies that offered less coverage.

Democrats shut down the government also because they wanted to restore the cuts of about $1 trillion over the next ten years Republicans had made in funding for Medicaid. In their budget reconciliation bill, Republicans placed what they called a “work requirement” on enrollees, requiring them to prove they have a job or a valid exemption.

But, as the editorial board notes, the “work requirement” is really a “paperwork requirement” that will throw people eligible for the program off it because they have not filed the right paperwork. As the board reports, Elizabeth Zhang and Gideon Lukens of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimated that about two of the three people who will lose Medicaid because of the new requirement are legally entitled to it.

They estimated that up to 15 million people are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage. That, in turn, will force hospitals, especially rural hospitals, to cut back services or close. Although still legally required to provide services to everyone, they will not be reimbursed for the cost of such care and will drop labor and delivery services, for example. Those closures will not just mean poorer health care, they will mean lost jobs.

As the New York Times editorial board noted, Republicans deliberately put off the implementation of most of the Medicaid cuts until after the 2026 midterms.

New York Times reader KAM from Marin County, California, noted in a comment on the story that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent defines onerous paperwork differently than Republicans in Congress. Bessent recently announced the Treasury will no longer require shell companies to disclose even the name, address, and identification of people who own an interest of more than 25% or who exercise “significant control” over the company, as Congress required in the 2021 Corporate Transparency Act. Congress designed the law to combat money laundering, but Bessent says the paperwork puts an undue burden on businesses.

In 1883, sociologist William Graham Sumner published What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, concluding that the answer was: nothing. In a time when unregulated industrialization was making fortunes on the one hand and driving down wages on the other, creating extremes of rich and poor, Sumner turned on its head the traditional idea that the economy of the United States would provide a living to any man who worked hard. Instead, Sumner argued that anyone who did not succeed in the United States must be “negligent, shiftless, inefficient, silly, and imprudent.”

Not only was it unfair to make “the industrious and the prudent” responsible for such shiftless men, he wrote, it would ruin the country by destroying individual enterprise. Sumner called for a “laissez-faire” world in which those who failed should be permitted to sink into poverty and die to keep the U.S. from becoming a place where lazy people wanted a handout. In the end, such people needed to be purged from society for the good of the nation.

At the time, those succeeding in the industrializing economy nodded along with Sumner. The Republican New York Times editor wrote that even though Sumner’s “views are singularly hard and uncompromising, it is difficult to quarrel with their deductions, however one may feel one’s finer instinct hurt by their apparent cruelty.”

The Trump administration seems to have embraced Sumner’s belief that the nation depends upon the survival of the fittest.

As microbiologist and senior health reporter Beth Mole reported last year in Ars Technica, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears to believe that the key to health is not to rely on the vaccines proven to prevent infectious diseases, but rather to have a strong immune system fortified, as he wrote in a 2021 book, “through healthy living, clean water, and good nutrition.” He accused those who support vaccines of misleading the American public for the benefit of the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare industry.

This seems to explain why he has claimed—without evidence—that the Texas children who died of measles were malnourished and that “[w]e don’t know what was killing” the 83 Samoans who died in the country’s 2019 measles epidemic, during which Kennedy associated with members of the anti-vaccine movement there. It would also explain why he promised to turn away from promoting vaccination to exploring new treatments for measles, including vitamins.

And it would help to explain the effort to change the vaccine schedule for children by separating the MMR vaccine into single-disease vaccines. Rather than two shots, requiring two doctor’s visits, the vaccine series would require six. Experts say such a change will mean poorer children will not get the whole vaccine series, putting them and their communities at risk.

If overall health can fight off germs and illness, then measures like the pasteurization of milk and the tracking of foodborne illnesses are unnecessary.

The U.S. is experiencing a particularly bad wave of foodborne illness. It’s driven both by hot weather that nurtures food contamination and by federal funding cuts that scaled back the ability of federal agencies to conduct food inspections and provide grants to state and local health departments that used to be able to trace outbreaks quickly.

Deidre McPhillips of CNN reported that so far this year, the U.S. has reported about 10,500 cases of foodborne illness. Between 2021 and 2025, the annual average was about 1,500 cases. At least 9,481 people in 17 states have fallen ill with cyclosporiasis carried by lettuce from Taylor Farms, and thousands more cases are being investigated. It’s the largest cyclospora outbreak in U.S. history, spurred by cuts of more than 40% to food safety detection systems.

It’s not just lettuce. Frozen organic blueberries sold in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia have been recalled for E. coli; fresh jalapeños from Taylor Farms have been recalled for salmonella; 1.5 million dozen eggs sold in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and New Mexico have also been recalled for salmonella. Anna Skinner of Newsweek notes that while the focus has been on produce, in fact, FDA records show what she calls “a steady stream of recalls” that includes “prepared foods, salad dressings, soups, bakery items and ready-to-eat products,” potentially contaminated with salmonella, Listeria, or foreign materials, including pieces of metal.

As former U.S. surgeon general Dr. Jerome Adams wrote in USA Today, “You cannot effectively focus on chronic diseases while you’re being repeatedly overwhelmed by acute infectious outbreaks.” He called for restoring the mandatory tracking of all eight pathogens that were covered by the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) before the administration cut the surveillance down to just two, and for filling the leadership positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration that are currently vacant. He called for inspectors to prioritize high-risk foods and imports and for the Department of Health and Human Services to reaffirm that vaccines are safe and effective.

In the 1890s, the determination of those like William Graham Sumner to keep government out of society in order to promote individualism had undermined public health and safety. Producers adulterated tuberculosis-carrying milk with chalk and formaldehyde, decorated candy with lead paint, and scooped melted ice cream off the bottom of the vat to refreeze for sale the next day, and what was in sausage meat was a terrifying mystery.

In the early twentieth century, middle-class Americans demanded regulation of the food and drug industry, ushering in the reforms that we now call the Progressive Era.

U.S. Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., attends the Senate Judiciary Committee mark up on the nomination of Todd Blanche to be attorney general, in Hart building on Aug. 4, 2026 (CQ-Roll Call photo by Tom Williams via Getty Images).

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Leave Darline Alone, Andrew Egger, right, Aug. 21, 2026. Darline Graham’s Taiwan gaffe couldn’t have come at a worse time. The South Carolina senator—sister and successor of the late Lindsey Graham—had hoped her Tuesday debate against Rep. Ralph Norman would quiet Republican whispers that she wasn’t ready for primetime ahead of next week’s runoff. 

Instead, she tripped headfirst over a question about America’s posture toward Taiwan and the South China Sea, managing only to say that foreign policy isn’t her area of expertise and she supports the military.

The moment was particularly painful because Lindsey Graham was one of the Senate’s biggest Taiwan boosters and China hawks. Darline Graham’s entire case is that she’s carrying on her brother’s legacy. And yet there she was in a damage-control appearance on Sean Hannity the next night, insisting that her voters are “concerned about a lot of things other than Taiwan,” like the Save America Act and men in women’s sports.

It’s all been very embarrassing for Darline. But I keep wondering: What if she’s right?

Here are two ways of thinking about the work of being a senator. One is as an awesome responsibility: One of just a hundred members of America’s upper legislature, the Greatest Deliberative Body On Earth™, setting down laws and policy for the most powerful country in the world. If that’s the job, then it’s hard to dispute that being informed on national security and foreign policy is crucial.

The other is as a fun D.C. social club and media platform. Nothing real ever happens in the ossified, deadlocked Senate, to whose legislating and foreign-policy-setting powers President Trump has helped himself in ever greater amounts. The job of a GOP senator is to say nice things about the president, vote down Democratic efforts to rein him in, and give him whatever he asks for in a massive reconciliation bill once or twice a year. (Pretending you might occasionally do something else is an optional extracurricular.)

I would like to live in a world where every senator believes in Option A. Is that the world we live in?

Keeping China constrained in the South China Sea is a longtime U.S. policy goal. It seems important that senators should know the issue back to front, and it’s a good thing that we have such a robust class of China hawks in the Senate GOP.

What has that class of China hawks been up to lately, by the way? Because I seem to remember that, earlier this week, President Donald Trump took a sledgehammer to our Pacific China posture in one of his most insane statements in recent memory. Fuming that South Korea was not sufficiently respecting his bromance with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and that it had not joined his war with Iran, Trump abruptly ordered longstanding joint exercises with South Korea’s military cut short—a dramatic blow to our alliance, which relies in large part on American guarantees of protection against South Korea’s lunatic nuclear neighbor. America doesn’t provide these guarantees out of the goodness of its heart. South Korea would be a crucial regional ally, providing military support and key bases, not just in the event of a future conflict against North Korea, but against China as well.

Share this newsletter with someone who cares about Taiwan. Or lives in South Carolina. Or is represented by a senator.

What did the Senate’s GOP China hawks make of this senseless provocation, so damaging to our regional interests? They’re harder to find than usual at the moment, since the Senate is currently on recess.

But yesterday, I reached out to eleven of them: Jim Risch, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, Pete Ricketts, Dan Sullivan, Todd Young, Bill Hagerty, Marsha Blackburn, Rick Scott, John Cornyn, and Ted Cruz. Did any of them, I wondered, have anything at all to say on the topic? Not a single one of their offices—not one—sent back a substantive reply.

The foreign policy titans of the Senate GOP have had their hands full not noticing things like this lately. They’ve sat by as Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department blows through our missile inventory pummeling a truculent Iran, despite growing concerns that this short-sighted action jeopardizes our future ability to defend Taiwan. They’ve repeatedly tied their own hands on the Iran conflict in other ways as well, shrugging at Trump’s brazen defiance of their warmaking authorities and routinely voting down War Powers resolutions that would force him to seek their permission to keep the Iran conflict going.

It’s Darline Graham’s contention that GOP voters don’t care about any of this. What they want their senators to be doing, she argues, is chasing a bunch of right-wing culture-war shibboleths: beating their heads against the wall of the DOA Save America Act, rabble-rousing about the elevenish male trans athletes a year who want to play in girls’ and women’s athletics. The Serious Men of the Senate flatter themselves that their job is more serious and important than this. But I suspect Darline might know what time it is better than they do.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Is Finally Losing Ground Among Republicans… Focus groups show they’re mad about Iran. They’re mad about grocery prices. And they’re starting to wonder what on earth the president is doing, writes SARAH LONGWELL.
• End of the Endless Summer… The Eve Babitz revival offered an intoxicating escape from our modern literary anxieties. Her final, briefly wonderful book of letters brings us back down to earth, writes HENRY BEGLER.
• The Politics of AI Are Shifting in Real Time… Mark the summer of 2026 as the moment when an unlikely supermajority of Americans came together on one issue: their opposition to data centers. DAVID WALLACE-WELLS joins TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily.
• Trump Just Ordered the Government to Delete the Receipts… On The Illegal News, ANDREW WEISSMANN joins SARAH LONGWELL to discuss the Trump administration’s move to erase corporate ownership records, the latest developments in the Fauci investigation, how a bizarre election controversy in Alaska led to a DOJ investigation, and what Democrats still need to learn about persuasion in the Trump era.
• Natalie Harp Is an Intelligence Nightmare… On Bulwark Takes, MICHAEL WEISS and MARC POLYMEROPOULOS discuss the “human printer,” Trump’s “economic D-Day” against Iran, the risks of secondary sanctions and a prolonged blockade, and why Tehran may retaliate rather than simply give in.
• Life Is a Highway: The Terror of ‘It Ends’... Writer/director ALEX ULLOM joins SONNY BUNCH on The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood to discuss his new existential indie horror.

Quick Hits

SPEAKING OF DRONES: Gen. Randy George was a well-respected infantry officer and something of a reformer—a rarity at the top of rigid conservative hierarchies like the U.S. military. The defining effort of his tenure as chief of staff of the Army was the Army Transformation Initiative, which sought to catch the service up to the technologies of the modern battlefield, like drones and directed-energy weapons.

Then Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired him in April, on suspicion of leaking internal disputes to the press. George’s acting successor is Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who was confirmed as vice chief of staff in January after a stint as a senior military assistant to Hegseth.

LaNeve recently ordered an experimental drone unit George had pioneered shuttered, reports the Wall Street Journal. An Army spokesman told the Journal that “Ultimately, these aerial systems are enablers that support our soldiers.” Sure, fine—but how is kind of an important question, as anyone who’s been paying attention to the wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and Nagorno Karabakh over the past six years would realize.

The Journal reported that “The elimination of a futuristic drone battalion is part of a broader ‘back-to-basics’ approach ordered up by . . . LaNeve.” Did America’s enemies get that memo, too?

BAIT-AND-SWITCH: If you’re an American healthcare company, you probably rely in some form or other on immigrants. If you’re an unscrupulous American healthcare company, you might lure people here with the promise of work and a better life, only to pay them poorly, and if they try to quit, threaten to charge them $10,000 or more for the privilege—oh, and maybe also call ICE.

That’s exactly what a group of nurses accused Avant Healthcare Professionals of doing in a lawsuit. At first, the firm fought the suit—but then it signed a $3 million settlement. Avant Healthcare Professionals, it turns out, is part of Jackson Healthcare, as in Rick Jackson, who just days before the settlement won the Georgia Republican gubernatorial primary.

If this news had come out before the primary, it’s hard to tell how Jackson would have fared. Maybe Republican primary voters would have punished him because his company lured people here from abroad. Or maybe they would have rewarded him because it subsequently mistreated them.

CNN has the whole story.

INVESTIGATION INCEPTION: The government is investigating the government for investigating the guy in charge of the government for crimes against the government. Did you get that? Reuters spells it out in more detail:

The U.S. Justice Department has ​requested to interview FBI officials who were involved in the 2022 search of Donald Trump’s ‌Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida as part of a wide-ranging probe examining past investigations of the president, four sources familiar with the matter said on Thursday.

The requests came from investigators working with Joe diGenova, a Trump ally who began overseeing ​the Florida-based investigation earlier this year. The investigation has been seeking to establish that Trump was ​the victim of a criminal conspiracy against his rights.

A refresher: The FBI searched Mar-a-Lago because Trump had illegally stashed troves of extremely highly classified documents there, including some related to nuclear secrets. At various points, he discussed some of these documents with people who had no business knowing about them in places where discussions about such things had no place being held. When the government asked for the documents back, Trump went to extreme lengths to lie, hide the documents, and avoid returning them. The only reason he’s not in Florence, Colorado is because Judge Aileen Cannon’s sycophancy toward him was second only to Natalie Harp’s.

Can’t wait for the next administration, when the FBI gets to investigate Justice Department officials for investigating FBI officials for investigating Trump.

 Cheap Shots

Food for thought in these letters: Who comes off worse, the worshiper or the worshiped?

Letters from Trump White House aide Natalie Harp to President Trump, as reported by The Daily Beast.

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, News Analysis: The Message Behind Trump’s Threats of ‘Economic Warfare’ Against Iran, Anton Troianovski and Alan Rappeport, Aug. 21, 2026 (print ed.). Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to reassure investors worried about the pressure campaign on Iran on Thursday, declaring that a resumption of “large-scale” fighting was unlikely.

President Trump’s threats of an “economic D-Day” carry a clear signal to Iran that he does not want to go back to war.

The problem for the Trump administration is that Iran was also listening.

President Trump this week promised an “economic D-Day” against Iran, a “crushing” operation to “cripple” Iran. The U.S. clampdown is formidable, a combination of wartime destruction, a naval blockade and sanctions that have already put the Iranian economy under more pressure than its regime has experienced in decades.

But between the lines of the administration’s threats was a signal that Mr. Bessent made as clear as ever on Thursday: Mr. Trump does not want to go back to war right now. The president is waging an economic campaign against Iran having already spent weeks bombing the country earlier this year, and having stepped back from multiple threats since then to resume the violence.

As a result, experts say, Mr. Trump is stuck in a conflict with limited leverage, a demonstrated vulnerability and an emboldened adversary. Even as Iran reels from shortages and inflation, Mr. Trump is likely to increasingly feel the pressure of the approaching midterm elections in the shadow of an unpopular war and high gas prices. It is a dangerous combination, experts say, that could prompt Iran to sense American weakness and lash out.

“They read him now as not wanting to escalate militarily,” Dennis B. Ross, a former Middle East negotiator for presidents of both parties, said of Iran’s leaders. “That creates an incentive for them to show that they may escalate militarily.”

Mr. Bessent told CNBC on Thursday that the Treasury Department would hold a news conference about the new measures targeting Iran next Monday. He said traders had been wrong to bid up the price of oil in response, given that the administration’s new economic threats were a sign there would not be an immediate return to full-scale bombing.

New York Times, Iran Must Plan to Overcome ‘Unjust’ U.S. Sanctions, Top Tehran Official Says, Aurelien Breeden, Aug. 21, 2026. lMohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, lead negotiator in talks with Washington, made the comments after President Trump vowed an “economic D-Day” against Iran.

A top Iranian official said on Friday that his country would seek to dampen the effect of economic sanctions after the Trump administration vowed to aggressively tighten the pressure campaign against Tehran.

“We must plan for the unjust sanctions so that we can overcome them,” the Iranian official, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who is the lead negotiator in talks with the United States, told a gathering of Iranian and Iraqi business representatives in Baghdad, according to a post on his social media channel.

The United States has already imposed debilitating sanctions on Iran’s economy and leadership, and the Trump administration has previously sanctioned foreign businesses and organizations that trade with Tehran. But Washington suggested this week that officials were preparing measures to target countries that buy Iranian oil.

President Trump has promised an “economic D-Day” against Iran and vowed “tremendous economic consequences” for countries that do business with Tehran.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is expected to detail the new measures targeting Iran at a news conference on Monday, wrote on social media on Thursday evening, “Any remaining tie to Tehran will hasten a nation’s economic oblivion, whether that tie be purposefully constructed or willfully ignored.”Mr. Trump’s threats of economic escalation seem to reveal his reluctance to return to the full-blown military confrontation with Iran that began in February with a large-scale U.S.-Israeli attack.

Since a cease-fire in June, the war has settled into an uneasy standoff with little sign of diplomatic progress.

In Baghdad, Mr. Ghalibaf told the business representatives, “The Americans and Israelis have realized that they cannot prevail against Iran and Iraq in conventional military warfare.”

“Therefore,” he added, “they have entered into cognitive warfare and economic warfare, and now you are the soldiers and commanders on this battlefield.”

The Trump administration has also taken aim at Iran’s allies in the region. On Thursday, Washington said that Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon, would be designated an affiliate of the Iranian regime under the command of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The announcement came along with the issuing of new sanctions against 10 individuals accused of working to smuggle cash to the militia.

The United States has designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization since 1997 and has long accused the group of being an Iranian proxy. The announcement on Thursday appeared to formalize Washington’s view that the group was a direct arm of Iran in the Middle East.

Broader sanctions targeting Iran’s ability to export oil would compound Tehran’s economic challenges. The war and a U.S. blockade of the country’s ports have crippled key industries, and Iranians are already contending with sky-high inflation.

This week, the United Arab Emirates, a major trading hub for Iran, announced that it was halting all trade and financial transactions with Tehran. Analysts say that the Emirates has been key to Iranian efforts to evade international sanctions, though Emirati officials deny that.Iran has weathered decades of U.S. sanctions since the 1979 revolution that brought the Islamic republic to power, including by trying to diversify the country’s economy beyond oil. The American naval blockade has severely restricted Iran’s ability to export oil.

On Thursday, Shamseddin Hosseini, chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s economic commission, said that it was important for Iran to reduce reliance on the country’s southern ports, where the U.S. blockade is in place, and to expand trading routes across the land border in the northeast, according to Iranian state media.

“To get out of the current situation, the path of economic policymaking must be changed,” Mr. Hosseini said, according to the reports.

China, Iran’s largest trading partner, could be one of the countries most affected by U.S. penalties on importers of Iranian oil. For years, Beijing has defied Western sanctions by buying as much as 90 percent of Tehran’s oil exports, though that represents a marginal share of China’s total oil imports, analysts say.

Lin Jian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said on Friday that his country opposed “unilateral sanctions” and called for the sides to resolve their differences through diplomacy.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

Democratic U.S. Senate Nominees Josh Turek of Iowa, above left, and James Talarico, Texas (File photos). 

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Democrats Could Flip Two Senate Seats In States That Trump Won By Double Digits, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, Aug. 21, 2026. The picture for the 2026 midterm election is becoming clearer as the campaign approaches Labor Day. Unlike campaigns of yesteryear, candidates no longer wait until after Labor Day to start general election campaigns. Sprints to November often begin on primary night or as soon as the primary elections are settled.

The storm that has been forming against Republicans has been growing for more than a year. The funnel clouds are beginning to develop. It is only a matter of when touch down occurs and how big this storm will be.

Republicans have long held a structural advantage in the battle for the Senate due to the number of supposedly safe seats that the party was defending in 2026. Democrats were supposed to struggle to hold seats in Michigan and Georgia, but Sen. Jon Ossoff is on the verge of running away with his reelection bid, and Abdul El-Sayed has opened up an early lead over Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan.

The Senate math is shifting because the Trump presidency has been such a disaster that Republicans running in red states that the president won by double digits less than two years ago are now seeing their races as in play.

A list of Republican-held Senate seats is in danger because of Trump’s failed presidency, and what must be most troubling for Republicans is that two states that Trump won by double digits have seen their Republican held Senate seats move toward Democrats.

The two Senate seats are both surprising in their own ways. Given the circumstances of 2026, candidate quality matters a great deal for both parties. Democrats need baggage-free candidates who can keep the focus on the issues, and Republicans need candidates with their own center of gravity who stand a chance of not being dragged down by Trump’s unpopularity.

In Texas, all of the factors are lining up against Republicans in the Senate race.

The Cook Political Report has shifted the election from leaning Republican to a toss-up:

Getting to 50% of the vote as a Democrat in Texas is a tall order, but Talarico also may not need to, given the presence of a libertarian on the general election ballot. If GOP voters who don’t want to vote for Talarico but can’t stomach pulling the lever for Paxton decide to vote third party, that would still benefit Democrats.

We acknowledge that this race could shift back to the GOP once millions of dollars in attack ads are launched at Talarico, and we would adjust our rating accordingly then. But there may not be much to do to improve Paxton’s fortunes other than to make him the lesser of two evils for partisan voters. That could be enough to save him narrowly, but at this juncture we have to call Texas a Toss Up.

Texas Republicans have spent decades building a system of voter suppression that will make it a challenge for Democrats to win in the Lone Star State. There is a reason why only Beto O’Rourke has run close statewide as a Democrat in the last 30 years.

James Talarico could win statewide in Texas, but no one should underestimate how difficult the challenge will be.

If Republicans lose Texas, they will lose the Senate.

The other race that has moved toward Democrats deserves more attention, because what is happening in Iowa is a reflection of Trump’s failure.

Only one Democrat holds statewide office in Iowa: State Auditor and Democratic gubernatorial nominee Rob Sand. Iowa has moved to the right since Barack Obama won it in 2012, but Trump’s tariffs and crushing of the farm community have made it possible that Iowa experiences its own blue wave in 2026.

From The Cook Political Report:

Three of the four congressional seats are competitive, and the open governor’s race is moving away from them (more on that race below). Rising fertilizer and diesel prices, in addition to tariffs, have uniquely harmed the state’s agriculture-dependent economy.

…

This ratings shift isn’t an indictment of Hinson, who’s running a strong campaign and is a prodigious fundraiser, but simply reflective of the challenging political environment. Turek needs to raise more money if this is going to remain a top-tier opportunity for Democrats, but the early spending Republicans are already deploying to define Turek shows they’re concerned about their prospects in this now-battleground state. As in Texas, there’s also a libertarian on the ballot who could attract protest votes away from Hinson if voters are particularly fed up with the White House. With Texas shifting into Toss Up, Iowa belongs in the same bucket.

Hinson could easily be dragged down by Trump. Because Democrats have so many races moving in their direction in the state, Iowa is a better opportunity for a flip than Texas at this moment.

Gov. Greg Abbott will be on the ballot and is currently leading his race in Texas, but in Iowa, Democrats could be poised to win the governor’s race and three House seats. The combination of Democratic ballot momentum helping Josh Turek and Trump’s unpopularity hurting Hinson is how Senate seats flip.

Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy and Opinion: Good Senate Polls In MN And NH, Simon Rosenberg, right, Aug. 21, 2026. A new well-regarded poll in New Hampshire has Chris Pappas with a comfortable lead over this most likely opponent, Chris Sununu. This margin would be in keeping with the national climate in a state Harris won by 3 points in 2024 (data via FiftyPlusOne):

Republicans released a Minnesota poll that has our Senate nominee Peggy Flanagan up 5, the second poll this week showing Flanagan with a modest 5 point lead. When the other party releases a poll showing your candidate up 5 and at 50 we would call that encouraging:Here’s our updated Senate poll round up. We got a shot peeps!The Guardian figured out who was behind the fake Median poll operation and it’s a 21 year old with AI:

A 21-year-old recent college graduate was behind an anonymous website that put out widely shared fake election polling in Wisconsin, Nevada and California, the Guardian can reveal.

The website, Median Strategies, abruptly shut down and withdrew its polling earlier this week following questions from a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. In an unsigned statement, it described a “short-term social experiment” to examine how fake polling “could enter and spread through the political information ecosystem without independent verification”.

“I wanted to see if fake polls could really penetrate the ecosystem that easily,” Rahil Prakash told the Guardian on Thursday when reached by phone. “And as it turned out, it could.”

…….In an interview, Prakash said he was motivated to start the fake polling project after a significant polling miss in the Michigan Senate primary, where polls had showed Abdul El-Sayed with a heavy lead over his opponent Haley Stevens before election day. In the event, El-Sayed wound up winning by a much smaller margin than polls had suggested.

“This is what inspired me to test my theory,” said Prakash. “I was a bit shocked, perhaps at how fast this sort of information can spread.”

Our good friend Tom Bonier is coming by here on Tuesday at Noon ET to talk about the challenges we all face from manipulated polling in our new, evolving political battlefield. You can join us by heading the main Hopium site at noon where the video will play at the top of the screen.Subscribed

Chair Ken Martin has published a new piece about the DNC’s work this cycle that is well worth a read, Investing to win, investing to build, investing to last. I also recommend this new op-ed from the Chairs of the process that created our new Presidential calendar, Minyon Moore and Jim Roosevelt Jr, Mark your calendars — Democrats are ready for 2028.

A few more things to read this weekend:

• Scott Bessent Fails to Gaslight the Market, Paul Krugman
• ICE begins deporting Haitians who lost TPS back to homeland, The Washington Post
• The NYT - Inside Russia’s Giant Push to Upend a Tiny Country: In Moldova, Moscow paid Orthodox priests, conducted a vote-buying scheme and set up training camps on election interference — all in an effort to derail the Western-leaning government 
• Democrats put Trump’s ‘corruption’ front and center as they plan possible 2027 probes, Politico 

Civil Discourse, Opinion: They’re Building The Excuse Now, Joyce Vance, Aug. 21, 2026.On Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced a Department of Commerce “report” that claims more than 24,000 noncitizens illegally voted in the 2020 election. That sounds bad, right? At least, until you hear the response.

Lauren Groh-Wargo, the president and CEO of Fair Fight, put it like this: “This is a bald-faced lie.”

Marc Elias called the report “dodgy,” and his Democracy Docket explained that “the analysis the president cites relies on an incomplete commercial voter file and record-matching methods that raise serious concerns about the accuracy of its conclusions.”

NPR reported that the supposed “Census Bureau report” wasn’t actually produced by Census Bureau staff and “has ties to a Trump-aligned think tank.” The full report, which is seven pages long, is presented as an official document here. But NPR says “the team behind it included individuals affiliated with the America First Policy Institute, a think tank started by officials from Trump's first administration.” It’s not just the Justice Department that has been politicized to serve Trump’s political purposes.

Trump can’t stop claiming the 2020 election was rigged, no matter how many judges, including many he appointed, say it’s not so. Still more damaging is the way he may use this to justify imposing measures that make it more difficult for eligible Americans to vote in the name of preventing fraud.

To people like me who’ve spent decades working on voting rights in the Deep South, this is a familiar approach. In order to justify restrictive measures, state and local officials would claim there was voter fraud—dead people voting, people voting more than once. It wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter; it was used to justify all manner of restrictive measures that made it more difficult to vote, disallowing practices like early voting or mail-in voting.

Trump has a history of blowing up the narratives around voter fraud into previously unseen proportions, falsely claiming it’s responsible for his 2020 loss, and looking ahead to set it up as an excuse when his party does poorly in the midterms. When it comes to these new allegations, even the right-wing media ecosystem hasn’t been pushing them hard, because of the obvious flaws. But we know how Trump works. It’s a tailor-made excuse for his 2020 loss and a justification for urging states to adopt more restrictive measures now. Trump posted about the report on Tuesday, claiming: “The Census Bureau has begun checking the Voter Records from 2020 against their Citizenship Records. On the first 128,000,000 Voters, the Census Bureau proves that over 24,000 Noncitizens voted illegally! The Census Bureau is going to analyze the next 32,000,000 Voters, and this number will explode. I WON THE ELECTION!” Then, to keep it simple, he posted some little graphics, including this one, which make claims that aren’t backed by fact.

Secretary Lutnick has been in the press in connection with Jeffrey Epstein of late, including a trip up to Capitol Hill to testify and revelations that he visited Epstein Island with his wife, children, and nannies in tow despite claiming he had cut off all ties with Epstein years earlier out of disgust with him. Now he’s currying favor with Trump on one of the issues that is the most important to the president, backing his claim that he won in 2020. But this isn’t Lutnick’s first outing assisting the president with his efforts to federalize our elections.

When Trump issued his March 2026 executive order to restrict mail voting, Lutnick got a major role. The order directed the Secretary of Commerce to coordinate with DHS, the SSA Commissioner, and the Postmaster General to implement it—Lutnick was Trump’s point person. Lutnick was the one to brief Trump on the contents of the executive order before Trump signed it. (If you thought Trump devised it on his own, no dice.) That order is, of course, on hold, after a federal judge ruled it was illegal.

So it’s no surprise Lutnick has found a new way to push Trump’s goals, even if that meant bringing in ringers from a pro-Trump think tank to author a report that supposedly came from the Census Bureau. Experts note that the Census Bureau does not even collect the information necessary to be able to publish definitive findings about alleged noncitizen voting. The data used in its report are modeled population estimates.

But none of that will keep Trump from using it, so it’s important for us to be prepared. The claim itself sounds shocking. But it’s a fabrication, and we need to be prepared to say so. Protect Democracy identified some of the most egregious flaws in the report. Expect Trump to gloss over them entirely. But the report uses stale citizenship records that misidentify, for instance, people who have become naturalized citizens. And since the Census is prohibited by law from asking citizenship questions, it does not hold and cannot verify any citizenship records. The study Lutnick offers uses private commercial vendor files, not voter rolls maintained by Secretaries of State, and that data is demonstrably flawed for the purpose it’s being used for. There are other issues, including flawed matching algorithms and demographic bias. Suffice it to say, this is another instance where someone who needs to remain in Trump’s favor has manufactured something to support his claims, despite the absence of facts to back them up.

A former Census Bureau employee pointed to the report's irregularity: “My biggest concern would be there's no author attached to the report, which is not common practice within the Census Bureau,” says Misty Heggeness, a former bureau economist whose work is cited in the report. “Usually there are layers and layers of rigor and testing because the Census Bureau is a neutral statistical agency. They want to make sure that they're getting it right and understanding the data. The fact that there's no author on this report leads me to wonder whether or not that did happen.”

The report is just another indication we are living with a desperate administration trying to convince Americans not to trust their own elections. Their goal: create cover for rejecting 2026 election results if they don’t suit Trump. What they’re doing here fits a pattern we’ve become used to, where the administration makes claims about elections that aren’t true, that don’t withstand scrutiny by the courts. But they make them nonetheless and it’s done as though they are gospel. But they aren’t. With Trump, they never are. It’s our job to be prepared to push back against the excuses they’re preparing for the 2026 election, the challenges they’re trying to set up now, because they know they’re going to lose if it’s a fair fight. 

Florida Politics, Alex Vindman puts money, resources behind Democratic slate after loss to Angie Nixon, A.G. Gancarski, Aug. 20, 2026. Retired Lt. Col. Alex Vindman may have lost in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate Primary, but that doesn’t mean he’s not interested in the Florida Democratic Party’s success in November.

He’s giving $400,000 to the state party to “support General Election candidates up and down the ballot,” the FDP is announcing.

Chair Nikki Fried hailed the donation.

“Alex Vindman’s campaign was never just about one race. It was about defending this country and building a stronger Florida. After a hard-fought Primary, he is putting the strength of his campaign behind our entire Democratic ticket. We appreciate his service to this nation and his continued fight to help us take back our state,” Fried said.

Vindman likewise took the long view in his comments, saying the “fight was always bigger than any single campaign; it’s always been about fighting corruption and the chance at prosperity for Floridians.”

“Florida Democrats have a strong slate of candidates ready to lead, from the federal level all the way down to School Boards and County Commissions, and I want to make sure they have the resources they need to win. Beating Donald Trump’s agenda means winning at every level, and I’m all-in to help Democrats do exactly that this November.”

The reference to the President is purposeful. Vindman, the former Director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council, may be best known for serving as a witness in an impeachment inquiry over Ukraine.

Vindman says his donation to the Florida Democratic Party is “just the beginning” of his efforts to support Democrats in Florida and beyond.

“Over the course of the next few days and weeks, we are going to make more contributions to the places it will matter most,” he promises.

“Because I want you to know that your support is going where you intended: to help elect Democrats everywhere and to put a check on Donald Trump’s power. Our campaign received a record number of individual donations — more than 500,000— from people who want Democrats to win everywhere. It’s only right that the money continues to go toward that.”

Vindman has resources to help out in a way few defeated candidates do. He ended the Primary campaign with more than $7 million cash on hand, as he spent conservatively in anticipation of a General Election race that won’t happen this cycle.

State Rep. Angie Nixon, who won Tuesday’s election by a double-digit margin, says Vindman and she “chatted” recently.

“It was quick. He said he’s going to join me in taking out Ashley Moody,” she told Florida Politics exclusively Thursday night.

Interestingly, Moody said on a cable hit Thursday that “the media wanted this race to look very different,” with Vindman as the nominee.

Vindman has already sent out at least one fundraising email on Nixon’s behalf, saying that while he is not the nominee, the goal of flipping the Senate and checking Trump remains the same.

With a national reputation and network, Vindman is positioned to play an important role for a party that has been locked out of power statewide since Chair Fried decided not to run for re-election as Agriculture Commissioner four years ago.

Politico, Knicks owner bankrolled Hochul. Now he's the GOP's biggest donor in New York, Nick Reisman, Bill Mahoney and Alex Gangitano, Aug. 20, 2026. Sports and entertainment mogul James Dolan has emerged as the largest GOP donor in the Empire State this election cycle after backing Gov. Kathy Hochul’s last campaign.

Dolan, his company and family members donated $1.4 million this year to committees supporting Hochul’s GOP foe, Bruce Blakeman, and have put millions more into super PACs that have started to support the Republican. The money represents crucial support after one of the party’s biggest rainmakers stopped giving.

The money stands to have an impact far beyond the gubernatorial campaign: Republicans desperately need Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, to run a competitive race against Hochul in order to win several New York swing House seats that will potentially determine control of Congress and the final years of Donald Trump’s presidency.

The giving also arrives during an advantageous moment for Dolan, the owner of the New York Knicks, Rangers and the arena where they play — iconic Madison Square Garden. Trump, a Blakeman ally, is backing an $8 billion overhaul of New York City’s Penn Station that will leave the Garden in place — potentially sparing Dolan a major headache.

The president and Blakeman were guests in Dolan’s suite during game three of the NBA Finals. Dolan plans to bring his basketball team to the White House, the first time an NBA champion has done so during either Trump presidency.

“Historically he’s leaned toward Republicans, but he hasn’t always been about Republicans,” said New York Conservative Party Chair Jerry Kassar. “He’s been about what’s best for his business interests.”

A spokesperson for Madison Square Garden Entertainment, which Dolan leads as executive chairman and CEO, said the company supports “candidates that are interested in helping all New Yorkers.”

“That cannot be done in a failing economy,” the spokesperson added.

The company did not make Dolan available for an interview.

The political giving has included $2 million to MSG’s super PAC, which has historically backed moderate Democrats, including Hochul. It also started transferring money to a separate super PAC that was launched last year to support Rep. Elise Stefanik’s brief gubernatorial bid and is now running pro-Blakeman ads. Both of those groups list MSG’s top government relations executive, Richard Constable, as an officer in paperwork filed with the state Board of Elections.

Constable, who served in the cabinet of former GOP New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s administration, declined to speak about the political activity when reached by phone. He did not return a follow-up text message.

Steve Fulop, the president of the private-sector boosting Partnership for New York City and a Hochul ally, said most business leaders stood behind her reelection.

“The business community is obviously not monolithic, but I’d say the majority of the prominent leaders in the business community are supporters of Governor Hochul,” he said. “There are different people who choose to go elsewhere, but I’d definitely say the majority of them are supporters of the governor.”

Dolan’s contributions to boost Blakeman highlight Gotham’s overlapping worlds of political influence, high-stakes real estate development and bright lights entertainment — an environment Trump himself marinated in for decades while crafting his image as an only-in-New York tycoon. The political giving underscores how Dolan, long a lightning rod for disgruntled fans and left-leaning officials, is willing to buck New York’s Democratic leadership in favor of an underdog Republican with strong ties to Trump.

This financial support for Republicans is arriving at a critical time for a party that’s been shut out of statewide office for 20 years. One of the New York GOP’s most prominent donors, billionaire cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, has ceased his political giving after years of underwriting Republican efforts, The New York Times first reported. Lauder contributed more than $11 million to efforts boosting then-Rep. Lee Zeldin’s gubernatorial campaign four years ago.

Republicans need the 70-year-old Blakeman to be a strong top of the ticket — the latest polling shows him down 10 percentage points among likely voters. New York is home to several swing House districts, including at least three seats in the bellwether Big Apple suburbs that stand to determine who controls the closely divided chamber.

Politico, Progressive Aisha Wahab wins Eric Swalwell’s former House seat, Dustin Gardiner, Aug. 20, 2026. The California state lawmaker defeated a more moderate Democrat, overcoming an onslaught of spending from outside PACs.California state Sen. Aisha Wahab speaks during a primary election night event on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026, in Hayward, Calif.

Aisha Wahab, a progressive California state lawmaker, has won the special election for an East Bay congressional seat previously held by former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, who resigned over allegations of sexual assault.

The Associated Press declared the race for Wahab on Thursday afternoon, after the latest vote count expanded her lead over fellow Democrat Melissa Hernandez.

“This victory belongs to the voters who made clear that our district cannot be bought,” Wahab said in a statement. “Through one of the ugliest, most expensive elections we’ve ever seen, we never took the bait or went negative. We stayed focused on the people, and I will fight for this district that raised me.”

Wahab defeated Hernandez, a more moderate Democrat and president of a Bay Area regional transit board, despite an onslaught of spending from outside PACs, including several funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Those groups poured more than $6 million into television ads and mailers attacking Wahab or boosting Hernandez.

The race emerged as the latest proxy battle between populist progressives and more establishment forces wrestling for control of the Democratic Party in primary contests across the country. And while Wahab prevailed, Hernandez dramatically narrowed her 26-point lead from the primary. Wahab and Hernandez are now poised for a contentious rematch in November, when they compete for a full term.

In California, the race highlighted tensions between Wahab and top leaders of the state’s Democratic congressional delegation after she refused, ahead of the June primary, to go along with their plan to elect a temporary caretaker after Swalwell resigned. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the longtime chair of California’s delegation, released a video rebuking Wahab on the eve of Tuesday’s election.

World News, Global Human Rights, Disasters 

Semafor, Mystery surrounds US deportations to Liberia, Adrian Elimian, Aug. 21, 2026. Liberia’s agreement to accept up to 1,200 deportees from the US remains shrouded in mystery a day after the first 20 arrivals landed in Monrovia, leaving many wondering what Liberia is getting in return.

The Liberian government has insisted the deal is “not a transaction with a quid pro quo,” but that claim has failed to quiet the questions.

“It’s very hard to imagine that [claim] is true,” said Robert Blair, a Brown University professor who studies Liberian politics, adding that Monrovia likely expects “some sort of favorable treatment” from Washington down the line, even absent explicit terms.

“Everyone is basically speculating because so little is written down,” said one immigration attorney who has represented clients removed to third countries under earlier deals.

A State Department spokesperson called implementing President Donald Trump’s immigration policies a “top priority” but declined to offer details of the arrangement with Liberia.

“As a general matter, we do not comment on the details of our private diplomatic communications with other governments,” the spokesperson said. Title iconKNOW MORE

The opacity extends to the deportations themselves. The lawyer told Semafor that Ghana’s earlier deal with the Trump administration appeared designed so migrants without passports could be deported by Ghanaian authorities to their home countries under the Economic Community of West African States’ passport-free travel zone — raising the question of whether Liberia, also a member of the West African bloc, will do the same.

“I would not be terribly surprised if they were willing to do that,” Blair said.

Liberian officials have framed the arrangement as consistent with the country’s history of welcoming refugees. Reuters reported that Liberia received $5 million from the US for “migration management activities” earlier this year, which could ostensibly be used for taking in the deportees. 

More On Epstein Files, Trump Coverup

Last Page First, Jane Doe 4 and the Epstein Files: The Leaked FBI Notes Nobody Could Verify, Jana, left, Aug. 21, 2026. The FBI records are real. The leaked handwritten notes were never verified, then they were pulled. What happened, what the evidence shows, and how bad sourcing can damage a survivor’s story.

Before this piece was published, the journalist who posted the leaked notes pulled them from her own platforms. She wrote that she was “working hard to verify” them, that they “may be part of a disinfo campaign,” and that she was “putting the brakes on everything” until more was known.

That came after a federal judge had already warned the Justice Department in open court that he had held government lawyers in contempt before and was willing to do it again. Six days later, an independent journalist published 22 pages of handwritten notes she said were leaked copies of records DOJ is still withholding.

So the basic question is: what in this leak was ever actually verified?

What We Actually Know

Jane Doe 4 told the FBI in four interviews in 2019 that Jeffrey Epstein abused her on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, beginning around 1983, and that Donald Trump sexually assaulted her when she was between 13 and 15.

Those interviews are part of the FBI record. DOJ released them in stages this year, with the final batch coming out on March 5. What it did not release were the handwritten notes taken by the interviewing agents, along with roughly 37 pages tied to her file.

Those are the records now being fought over in federal court.A November 19, 2009 federal court order concerning Jane Doe 4’s deposition in the Epstein civil litigation. The court noted that her deposition had already taken place. EFTA02748206.

At an August 13 status hearing in Phang v. Blanche, a DOJ lawyer could not give the court a date for producing the notes. Judge Emmet Sullivan brought up the Ted Stevens case and reminded the lawyers that he had held government attorneys in contempt before for withholding information. He said he had no desire to go down that road again, but made clear he was willing to enforce the court’s orders.

Sullivan then gave Phang’s legal team ten days to propose how the case should move forward. Separately, her lawyers have asked the court to hold Blanche in contempt and impose a $1,000-a-day fine until he complies. That fine has been requested, not granted.

Phang’s attorney, Brendan Ballou, was blunt after the hearing. He said Blanche had “failed to follow the law,” pointing to DOJ’s failure to produce the required redaction log, begin producing foreign-language documents and turn over the notes concerning Trump.

DOJ has defended its handling of some of the material, saying it remains focused on protecting victim privacy.

The underlying story was already serious. There are FBI interviews, records DOJ still has not produced and a federal court fight over getting them released.

None of that needed an anonymous Reddit leak to make it worth reporting.

The Leak Nobody Could Actually Verify

On August 19, a journalist published 22 pages of handwritten notes she said had leaked to her. By her own account, the first batch came through an anonymous tip pointing to a Reddit thread. A second batch arrived through a private message.

The authentication came down to one phone call.

The source she contacted had seen the real missing notes once, briefly, in a supervised setting, and had not been allowed to photograph them. The source told her the leaked pages felt legitimate, but also said the handwriting did not match what they remembered and that a name they specifically recalled seeing in the real notes was missing.

That should have been enough to keep digging before publishing.

Katie Phang did exactly that. She did not post the leaked pages. On Bluesky, she said there were “concerns and questions about their authenticity” and that she was trying to get them vetted by sources who could actually verify them.

Phang’s own lawsuit is the reason these missing records are being fought over in court. She had every reason to want answers about them. She still did not call the leaked pages authentic before she could establish that they were.

Within days, the journalist who published the notes pulled them from her platforms. She wrote that she was “working hard to verify” them, that they “may be part of a disinfo campaign,” and that she was “putting the brakes on everything” until more was known. The Reddit thread the pages were said to have come from is also gone.

No government agency authenticated them. No court authenticated them. And no independent news outlet had shown they were the missing FBI notes before they were published to a large audience.

A researcher has said that related material appeared on Scribd under a pseudonym before it reached Reddit. That may help explain how the files traveled online. It does not tell us who created them or whether they are genuine.

If you are publishing purportedly leaked FBI records involving a survivor, allegations of sexual abuse and the sitting president, “it looks right” is not verification. A source remembering something similar is not verification either.

The person who published them ultimately decided there were enough questions to pull them herself.A Wrong Name Is Not a Small Error

You can already see the danger of getting ahead of the evidence with one name: “Jim Atkins.”

Jane Doe 4’s FBI material refers to a man by that name and describes ties to Ohio, a university or college, and the survivor’s mother.

The Post and Courier later dug through public records and matched roughly sixteen details from her interviews. Its reporting pointed to Jimmy L. Atkins, a Hilton Head real estate figure who also had ties to a for-profit college in Ohio.

That identification is backed by substantially more reporting and records. It is still not the same thing as the FBI or DOJ officially confirming that Jimmy L. Atkins was the man Jane Doe 4 was talking about.

Before that reporting appeared, a different candidate had also been proposed.

You can see how the match happened. Some of the details appeared to fit.

But that is not enough.

So we are left with two public attempts to identify “Jim Atkins.” One is backed by much stronger reporting. The other remains unconfirmed. Neither has been officially confirmed by the government.

And this is where bad verification starts hurting real people.

Once you attach a real person’s name to allegations involving sexual abuse and blackmail, that name travels. Screenshots travel. Search results travel. Other people repeat it.

A correction does not magically pull all of that back.

You cannot treat verification like cleanup after the fact. With allegations this serious, getting the person wrong can drag an uninvolved person into an abuse story while doing absolutely nothing to help the survivor whose story you were supposed to be reporting.The Incentive to Be First

None of this happens in a vacuum. The Jane Doe 4 story has been covered again and again by a group of independent journalists and podcasters who regularly appear on each other’s shows and cite each other’s work.

That is not automatically a problem. But it does mean something unverified can move very fast.

An anonymous tip becomes a Reddit post. Then a private message. Then a published story in front of a large audience, sometimes in the span of a night. Once one person puts it out, everyone else is reacting to it, quoting it, trying to identify names and scrambling to figure out what they have before anyone has really established what the document even is.

That is where the rush to be first starts screwing up the reporting.

Who leaked these pages, where they actually came from and whether they were deliberately planted are still open questions. Nobody can responsibly answer those yet.

Guessing does not help Jane Doe 4. It does not make her allegations stronger. It just adds more noise to a story that was already supposed to be about getting the actual records released.

What Matters Now

The real story is not the leak. It is that DOJ has had these notes since 2019 and still has not produced them, amid repeated promises of transparency and a federal judge warning government lawyers about contempt.

If DOJ eventually turns over the missing 37 pages, they can be compared directly with the copies that circulated online. That is what will settle this. Not one phone call. Not a source saying something felt right. Not silence from a lawyer. Not a document going viral before anyone knew where it came from.

Until then, the leaked pages are still unverified pages that were published, spread widely and then pulled by the person who published them.

And this is where the rush to publish starts causing problems.

Jane Doe 4’s allegations already exist in FBI records. There is already a legitimate court fight over material DOJ has not produced. Throwing questionable documents into the middle of that does not help her. It gives people something easier to attack, something easier to dismiss, and another excuse to cast doubt on everything else.

In a story involving a survivor, that kind of mistake can do real damage.

Survivors do not need people racing to be first. They need people willing to verify what they are putting in front of the public.

DOJ still has the records that can actually answer the question.

Those are the records worth waiting for.

More On Media, Celebrities, Propaganda, Culture 

The United Kingdom's Prince Harry, shown in a 2021 interview before he renounced his royal title.

New York Times, Prince Harry and Others Told to Pay Daily Mail Publisher $13 Million, Stephen Castle, Aug. 21, 2026. Harry and six other high-profile figures lost a privacy lawsuit against Associated Newspapers. They may eventually have to pay more than twice the initial sum, a judge said.

Prince Harry and six other high-profile figures in Britain were ordered on Friday to make an initial payment of £9.54 million, about $13 million, to the publisher of The Daily Mail, after they lost a privacy case against the company.

In July the group of claimants, which included the singer Elton John and the actress Liz Hurley, failed in its efforts to sue the publisher, Associated Newspapers, over allegations of phone hacking and intruding into its members’ private lives between 1993 and 2011.

On Friday a judge in the High Court in London ordered them to make an initial payment “on account” by Aug. 28 for the legal costs incurred by the newspaper company in the case.

In a written statement that summarized the ruling, the judge, Sir Matthew Nicklin, said that “the reasonable sum on account is £9,544,355.”

The judge, whose formal title in the High Court is Mr. Justice Nicklin, declined to impose a cap on the total payment that might be ordered from the claimants, meaning that they might eventually have to pay up to £34.5 million, the costs that Associated Newspapers said it had incurred up to July this year.

However, he said in his full ruling that Associated’s costs “appear exceptionally high” and “largely unexplained,” so a court assessment would take place to determine the appropriate final sum.

The judge’s ruling comes just days after Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, made public their plans to return to Britain, with their children Prince Archie, 7, and Princess Lilibet, 5. The court case against Associated Newspapers was Harry’s last in a series he has undertaken against Britain’s tabloid newspapers, with whom he has had a fractious relationship.

The seven claimants ordered to pay the initial multimillion-pound fee are Harry; Elton John and his husband, David Furnish; Simon Hughes, a former lawmaker; the actresses Sadie Frost and Liz Hurley; and Doreen Lawrence, a member of the House of Lords and social justice campaigner whose son was the victim in a notorious 1993 racist murder case.

The seven claimants had accused private investigators of listening in on phone calls, intercepting voice mail messages and tricking people into handing over information to obtain phone numbers, medical records and bills.

During the trial, those who gave evidence in court included Harry, who flew in from the United States to attend the hearing in person. Current and former employees of Associated also appeared, denying any wrongdoing.

In a ruling in July, the judge ruled that Harry and the other high-profile claimants had failed to prove “that the information complained of had been obtained unlawfully.”

In his statement on Friday, the judge rejected a request from the group of claimants to set a cap on costs at between £18 million and £20 million, arguing that doing so would “risk being no more than a judicial estimate of what appears, at this stage, to be a reasonable maximum.”

He added: “That would be vulnerable to the charge that it was arbitrary. It would also risk unfairness to Associated, because it would deprive Associated of the opportunity to demonstrate, on evidence and in the proper forum, that costs above the cap were reasonably incurred.”

However, he made clear his skepticism about the scale of the costs that the newspaper group had claimed. “I regard a claim for costs in excess of £34 million as, on its face, excessive and as giving rise to real concerns as to whether all of the costs now claimed by Associated were reasonably incurred and are reasonable in amount,” he wrote.

According to The Law Society Gazette, a British legal publication, the group of celebrities that brought the claim have legal insurance covering them for £16.2 million in the event of them losing the case.  

New York Times, Return of Harry and Meghan to U.K. Renews Questions About Their Security Fears, Adam Goldman, Aug. 21, 2026. The couple lost their publicly funded security after deciding to leave Britain in 2020, deepening their split with the royal family. 

Before they left Britain in 2020, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, weathered a storm of threats and digital abuse. A former top police official once described their safety risks as “disgusting and very real.”

Such threats made security a paramount issue for the couple once they announced this week that they are returning to live in Britain. Their safety had been at the heart of the fallout from their original decision to leave the country, when the government withdrew their publicly funded, armed security after they stepped down from their royal roles.

The pair have said the decision put them in danger, and it became a bitter flashpoint in their rupture with the royal family. Harry at one point even claimed the move was a plot to keep him in Britain.

The couple have not said what kind of arrangements they have made for their protection upon their return, expected this month. But the kind of security they had access to while living in California for the past few years is not possible in Britain without government resources.

While armed private security is legal and ubiquitous in the United States, guns are tightly restricted in Britain. Even top American law enforcement officials such as F.B.I. agents must get permission from the government to carry firearms in Britain.

Still, an unarmed detail is relatively common among Britons who use private security, said Chris Phillips, a former senior British counterterrorism official.

“There are lot of people over here that have security, and they are not armed,” he said.

As for Harry, he added, “There are going to be threats to him. There is no doubt about it.”

Harry’s and Meghan’s return to Britain comes at a time when they are unpopular with the British public, and news coverage of their security has emphasized comments from Britons saying they do not want the government to pay for it.

The armed details that the government provides are stretched thin, officials have warned, in part because of a high number of protectees. Britain has a record nine living former prime ministers who get round-the-clock security.

Prime ⁠Minister Andy Burnham refused to wade into the royal saga on Thursday when questioned by reporters, declining to say who would foot the bill for protecting Harry, Meghan and their two children, Archie, 7, and Lilibet, 5.

“This is a private matter,” Mr. Burnham said. “It’s a ⁠matter for Harry and ⁠for Meghan, and ⁠we wish ⁠them well in the moves that they are ⁠making.”

As Harry and Meghan split with the royal family in 2020, questions over their safety arose as part of a larger debate over their expectations about a post-royal life.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Is Breaking the Law to Cover Up How Russia Helped Him Win in 2024, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 21, 2026. I got into it with Grok over at the Nazi bar after Elon Musk’s robot played dumb over and over again to deny that Trump willingly accepted help in 2016. Maybe Grok is willfully dumb because of Elon’s role in the whole thing.

All that’s before you consider how quickly Steve Witkoff and Jared resumed the outreach from Kirill Dmitriev, or how quickly Trump moved to get Alexander Smirnov sprung from prison.

Grok showed amazing agility for a robot, always moving the ball from “accepting” Russian help to “sitting in a room and asking for it.”

The robot claims there are no documents akin to the ones John Solomon had just released implicating Eric Swalwell, but not showing that he knew Christine Fang was working for China. Except that among the documents Solomon released, he revealed that Konstantin Kilimnik had renewed his efforts to get Trump elected in 2020.

And that Michael Caputo had participated in an anti-Biden propaganda effort in 2020, before he joined Trump’s government.

NYT doesn’t go into all this detail in its piece describing how Trump is flouting the law that required him to lay out election interference in 2024 by March. But it did note the gravy train Benny Johnson was floating on.

Disclosures during the Biden administration, including federal indictments, accused both Russia and Iran of engaging in aggressive influence operations in 2024. Iranians were charged with hacking Mr. Trump’s campaign and shopping stolen material to various news outlets in an effort to harm his bid to return to the White House. The Justice Department and other agencies accused President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of again trying to bolster Mr. Trump (and degrade U.S. support for Ukraine) by targeting the United States with disinformation — including by secretly funneling $10 million to a conservative media start-up.

But those revelations were piecemeal, and do not offer a full portrait of what foreign meddling took place.

Congress passed a number of laws after Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election intended to better inoculate the American public from foreign attempts to influence voters. That included requirements for more transparency with lawmakers and the public from the nation’s spy agencies about what intelligence had been collected concerning the ambitions of foreign powers around federal elections.

In a letter in July, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee urged Bill Pulte, then the acting director of national intelligence, to declassify and publicly release a redacted version of the 2024 election report. The law at issue requires the assessment’s public release within 60 days of the conclusion of the federal election cycle “to the greatest extent possible” while protecting sources and methods.

The Trump administration also has yet to deliver to Congress a report required by law, identifying foreign intelligence threats to the coming 2026 midterm election. The deadline was in early May, a Democratic aide to the House Intelligence Committee said.

“The intelligence community is currently in violation of multiple statutes designed to ensure that Congress understands the full scope of foreign adversary plans and intentions this cycle,” as well as the administration’s efforts to combat those threats, the letter said.

Though to be honest, I think Trump may have as much to hide regarding the Iran hack-and-leak that successfully compromised Trump’s rat-fucker Roger Stone, his defense attorney Lindsey Halligan, and his campaign manager (though Trump delayed confirmation that Iran did get at least some files from Susie Wiles), as he does on the Russian front. I say that for reasons beyond the fact that even as he was being hack Trump was promising to be nice to Iran.

I originally thought this response from Trump was a response to the Ukraine question, I think, instead, he was responding to the hacking question.

Can you say anything about the hacking of your campaign?

I don’t like it. Really bad. I’m not happy with it. Our government shouldn’t let that happen.

Does there need to be a government response?

Yeah there should be. Our government should not let — they have no respect for our government.

Trump blamed the government after, earlier in the Potemkin Presser, he had already predicted that “we” will be friendly with Russia’s increasingly critical ally, Iran.

We will be friendly with Iran. Maybe, maybe not. But they cannot have a nuclear weapon. We were all set to make sure they did not have a nuclear weapon.

There was a blackmail component with the Bolton hack, and I would be unsurprised if Iran at least tried that with Trump. Just as importantly, even from the few documents I saw from the hack (the vetting documents for JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Doug Burgum), I have real questions whether Trump vetted JD anew or just relied on one that Peter Thiel had done in 2022.

Whatever the reasons, Donald Trump is defying the law that requires him to tell us all the ways Russian intervened to help him get elected in 2024 before they try again in 2026.

MSNOW, Opinion: Michael Cohen once called Trump a con man and a cheat. Now he’s back to calling his ex-boss ‘sir,’ Anthony L. Fisher, Aug. 21, 2026. The president’s former fixer-turned-witness for the prosecution, shown above, was eager to patch things up in a groveling interview.

This was Michael Cohen’s big moment. President Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer/fixer turned nemesis/witness for the prosecution has apparently turned the page on his stint as a #Resistance figure and made amends with the man who is the only reason most people know Michael Cohen’s name in the first place.

Cohen, who testified against Trump in the latter’s 2024 New York “hush money” trial, hyped the previously recorded sit-down with a post on his Substack titled “The Impossible Reunion” and even previewed the discussion with a livestream Thursday afternoon as a must-hear interview between the two convicted felons.

“Loyalty doesn’t mean pretending someone never hurt you. Forgiveness doesn’t mean surrendering your principles. Reconciliation doesn’t mean rewriting history. It means deciding that your history doesn’t have to end with your worst chapter. And frankly, it takes far more courage to extend a hand across a divide than it does to throw stones from behind a keyboard,” Cohen wrote. Trump to be interviewed by friend-turned-enemy Michael CohenAugust 20, 2026 / 09:16

But in the end, it was a whole lot of nothing. The conversation reportedly lasted 40 minutes, but Cohen has released only 15 minutes so far — first on New York’s WABC-AM radio, and later on Cohen’s podcast and Substack. The rest is set to be rolled out in a similar fashion Sunday.

The big show began with a lengthy rant against the news media and unnamed partisan bogeymen on both the left and right who Cohen alleged were only interested in stirring up “rage bait.” Then came a jarring pivot to a curiously infomercial-like interview with a tech company boss. Then, finally, Cohen rewarded listeners with the much-hyped interview.

In his 2020 memoir, Cohen called Trump “a cheat, a mobster, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.” On Thursday, however, he was back to calling Trump “sir.”

Since 2018, Cohen has been a fixture on TV, radio and podcasts, willing to spill the beans on Trump’s unsavory dealings that he personally enabled. But the interview portion that aired Thursday was so vapid and backslapping that it seemed to undermine its apparent purpose — to rehabilitate Cohen among the MAGA faithful.

Whatever else you may think about Trump, he’s an accomplished showman. So he’d probably recognize that Cohen’s show was an absolute dud. This obsequious slobberfest won’t buy Cohen a return to Trump’s inner circle, but it did very likely end his relevance to anyone else.

Of all the indignities Cohen has suffered on behalf of Trump, that he couldn’t even get Trump to give him a good soundbite for this reunion show must rank high among them.

Cohen segued into a logic-challenged rant against the media for reporting Trump’s historically atrocious approval ratings. Cohen argued that because Trump isn’t running for a third term, his poll numbers are irrelevant.

“CNN, MS NOW and the other left-leaning outlets…constantly talking about you being underwater with favorability numbers, Mr. President. What do you say to these people who keep bringing up polls when you’re not even running for office again? What’s the point?”

Presidential job approval numbers are not the same as campaign polling numbers. But Cohen most likely knew that already, so let’s move on.

Trump rambled in his typical incessant fashion, praising himself for a great economy and his war with Iran that’s going just super. Cohen asked why the president doesn’t tell the American people how lucky they are “to go to sleep at night with knowledge that there will be no intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile being fired towards the United States.”More from MS NOW Daily

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This was Trump’s reply:

“So I do tell that. The press doesn’t get it out, and I say it often. I said it the other day at a big rally I had with the police out on Long Island, and we have these unbelievable rallies. The rallies are potentially bigger than ever. I mean, if we did rallies, as an example, if we did rallies now, nobody ever had rallies like this. Their potential, I think, they’re bigger than ever. There’s a great spirit for what’s going on, especially in light of what’s happening with all these crazy theories and policies and lunatics that are running. You have lunatics. They would destroy the country, and they’re being put in the Democrat Party. I think they’ll be wiped out in the election, because the people are too smart to allow that to happen. It’s never worked in a thousand years. That stuff has never worked and is not going to work now. But they’re not even smart people. You know, you watch some of them; half of them can’t even speak properly. So I think we’re doing very well.”

Of all the indignities Cohen has suffered on behalf of Trump, that he couldn’t even get Trump to give him a good soundbite for this reunion show must rank high among them.

Trump bragged about scrapping the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the multinational nuclear agreement with Iran that the Obama administration negotiated in 2015 — which led Cohen to ask how Iran ended up with 1,000 pounds of “soon to be made nuclear-grade enriched uranium”?

The answer, of course, is that Iran ended up with that much near-weapons-grade uranium precisely because Trump scrapped the agreement that would have prevented it. Now he’s losing a war he foolishly started against that same regime.

The rest of the quarter-hour largely consisted of base insults at various Democrats and outright false claims about how Trump’s tariff war is great for Americans and U.S. business interests.

Ultimately, this was 15 minutes of dull, right-wing radio pablum, made notable only by the fact that a sitting president and his former bag man were conducting it as a kiss-and-make-up reunion. If this preview is any indication, tuning into the rest of the chat on Sunday is a sucker’s bet, as is Cohen’s apparent attempt to win back Trump’s audience.

The Social Contract with Joe Walsh, Opinion: Why I Feel Sorry For Michael Cohen, Joe Walsh, right, Aug. 21, 2026. I’ve known Michael Cohen for a number of years. I think I had him on my radio show in 2019 when he testified before the House Oversight Committee, accusing Donald Trump of criminal conduct and campaign finance violations. We stayed in touch and we communicated fairly regularly when he was released from prison. And he and I had a weekly show on Substack for the past year or so, which ended earlier this year.

Michael said something to me after he got out of prison that he repeated to me a number of times during our brief friendship/working relationship. You see, both he and I left Trump world around the same time, but he always reminded me that I voluntarily left Trump and Trump world, and he left because he had no choice. He was kicked out.

When people would often say to us both how courageous he and I were to leave Trump, he’d quietly admit to me, “No, Joe. You were courageous. You CHOSE to do the right thing. You chose to do the right thing knowing it would cost you and you would lose everything. I had no choice. I was FORCED to do the right thing. You chose to turn on Trump. I turned on Trump to save my hide. I was kicked out of his orbit. I had no choice.”

I’ve thought about those words a lot these past few weeks, and certainly the past day or two, watching Michael Cohen get down on his knees and kiss Trump’s ass again, as he’s worming his way back into Trump world. He even had Trump on his radio show yesterday (to be aired in full this weekend, I believe), and it was absolutely nauseating. There was Cohen making nice with, kissing the ass of, and praising to the high heavens this guy who just a few months ago he was calling a racist, a pathological liar, and a legitimate threat to democracy and the rule of law.

Just a few months earlier, Cohen was in the thralls of positioning himself as a leader of the resistance movement. And now here he was, like a Trump fanboy again, trying to get back into Trump’s good graces and maybe even become Trump’s fixer again.

And the general reaction, rightly, from pretty much everyone has been, “What a fucking sellout Cohen is. I knew it. I knew he didn’t genuinely ever change. What a liar Cohen always was, and what a fraud.” And while I can’t necessarily disagree with any of that, my reaction has been quite different. I feel sorry for Michael Cohen. I have genuine pity for him. Because I think he’s just not capable of doing the right thing, the honest thing, and I think he knows it.

Look, I’m not surprised Cohen flipped back to Trump. In my final conversations with him before we ended our relationship, it became clear to me that he knew much more about Trump and Epstein than he was letting on, and he knew much more about Trump and young women than he was letting on. He just wasn’t being honest about what he knew. And it also became crystal clear to me in our conversations that Cohen wanted a pardon. A pardon that only Trump could give. That was what was driving Cohen’s turn. He needed that favor from Trump, so fuck doing the right thing — he needed to go be a Trump lackey again.

But in all my conversations with him this past year, it was also clear to me that Michael wasn’t comfortable as a “resistance” figure. He wasn’t comfortable being in opposition to Trump. He didn’t fit in and he knew it. I could tell he genuinely missed being in Trump world and feeling important, being relevant. He wanted that back.

Michael Cohen is a fundamentally dishonest person. He’s a liar. No matter what political side he’s on. I like Michael, but I always knew I couldn’t believe much of what he said. He’s always on the make; he’s always hustling. He’d lie about anything if he could benefit financially from it. And I think he knows that about himself. What a horrible thing to know about yourself.

Which brings me back to those words he would often say to me — "Joe, you're courageous. You chose to leave knowing it would cost you everything. I'm not courageous. I didn't have any choice but to leave." Looking back this week, I now realize those were the only truly honest words Michael Cohen ever said to me. Honest because, in saying that to me, I knew he was telling me that he knew there was no fucking way he would ever have voluntarily left Trump world. He was telling me that he knew he wanted to stay Trump's fixer. It was him telling me that, unlike me, he knew he was not capable of doing the right thing. Because whenever he said those words to me, there was a sadness in his voice. He knew the difference between him and me.

Which is why, with this latest turn of his back into Trump’s arms, I feel sorry for him. He’s like that addict who just knows he can and will never quit.

Look, fuck Michael Cohen for doing what he did. But yes, I pity him as well. 

Aug. 20

Special Reports

President Trump met in Alaska last year (as shown in the photo above) with a warm, red carpet welcome for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

• Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: Trump is a puppet leader installed by Putin, Wayne Madsen, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer and NSA analyst, Aug. 19-20, 2026. The Trump regime takes its marching orders from the Kremlin and, when advantageous to Israel, from Netanyahu.  
• Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Evidence Is Mounting That Natalie Harp Is a Major National Security Vulnerability for America, Seth Abramson, right, Aug. 20, 2026. With each revelation about who this person is, how she got where she did, what she does daily, and how her control over the President of the United States has evolved, things look darker and darker. You may think you already know all the ways in which Natalie Harp—an attractive 35-year-old blonde woman who looks somewhat like the very Donald Trump daughter the president has long openly lusted after (see here, here, here, here, and here) and who appeared out of nowhere praising Trump on Fox News at a key moment in the 2020 presidential campaign season—is an unprecedented national security threat. You don’t. 
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Prepare for Catastrophe! Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 20, 2026. Time to revisit my argument that people should remember there are multiple ways to fight fascism, all of which ideally work together to restore democracy.

More Top Headlines

• New York Times, Trump’s Order to Cut Military Exercises With South Korea Carries Risks, Experts Say, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper, Aug. 20, 2026. President Trump’s decision to curtail the military exercises came as allies question the U.S. commitment to longstanding alliances.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Politicians Suddenly Notice Everybody Hates Data Centers, Andrew Egger, Brendan Hartnett and Jim Swift, Aug. 20, 2026. And, suddenly, so do politicians!

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: RFK Jr. Faces Growing Calls to Resign Over Recall Crisis, Hegseth's Wife Sat In on Classified Briefings, Melania Breaks Her Silence, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 20, 2026. More than 50 food recalls since January. Blueberries, eggs, lettuce, infant formula twice over, salsa, cheese, chicken treats for your dog, contaminated with everything from Salmonella to E. coli to botulism, spanning nearly every aisle of a normal grocery run. That list is why growing numbers of Americans are now calling for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign as Health and Human Services Secretary, and after you see the full scope of it today, it’s hard to argue they’re wrong. That’s just the start. 
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Alarm Bells as Trump's Closest Aide Lacked a Clearance for a Year, North Korea Fires Back, Iran's "Economic D-Day," and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 20, 2026. Today’s edition starts with a story that should worry you more than most: the aide who sits closer to Donald Trump than almost anyone else in Washington, who filters what he reads, drafts what he posts, and is described by insiders as a channel through which foreign leaders try to reach him, went more than a year without completing a basic White House security clearance. Nobody seems to know why. Trump had to personally step in to get it done.

More On Middle East Wars 

• Public Notice, News and Opinion: How Trump misunderstood what Americans think about war, Paul Waldman, right, Aug. 20, 2026. It's not just about casualties or how long it lasts. Whenever President Trump talks about the Iran War, one can feel his frustration that the public isn’t more enthusiastic about it — or at least unconcerned.
• New York Times, How the U.S. Navy Is Helping Get Oil Through the Strait of Hormuz, Peter Eavis and John Ismay, Aug. 20, 2026 (print ed.). With Iran making ship traffic perilous, a U.S. operation offers a way out for some energy exports, stealthily shepherding tankers on dangerous journeys.
• Foreign Policy Magazine, Opinion: The Top 10 Ways Trump Has Made America Weaker, Stephen M. Walt, Aug. 19, 2026. He’s been one of the most consequential presidents in U.S. history—in all the wrong ways.

More On Trump Administration Policies, Orders

• New York Times, How Trump Is Trying to Crush California’s Environmental Policies, Maxine Joselow, Aug. 20, 2026. At least a half-dozen federal agencies have taken action against the state that has long led the nation in environmental protections.
• New York Times, Trump Administration: See Where Indy Cars Will Race Through the Nation’s Capital, Victor Mather and Jeremy White, Aug. 19, 2026. When the 2026 IndyCar racing schedule was announced in September, it included races in the familiar locations: Indianapolis, the site of the organization’s marquee race, the Indy 500; Phoenix; Detroit; and Milwaukee. But in late January, a new race was suddenly added to the mix, by executive order.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Galas, Corruption 

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 19, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 20, 2026. The political world has been consumed over the past few days with a Republican meltdown about Trump’s aide Natalie Harp.

Accountability for Trump Team?  

• Hope for America, Opinion: We are done with Donald Trump, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Aug. 20, 2026. At 3:02 p.m. this afternoon, the President of the United States hobbled into the Roosevelt Room 32 minutes late for his meeting with tech leaders. While they waited for his arrival, they had each stood in their assigned places, fidgeting and trying not to let the heat of the room get to them.
• Meidas Touch Network, Top House Democrat Puts Melania Trump on Notice Over Epstein, Ben Meiselas, right, Aug. 20, 2026. Melania Trump could find herself facing questions under oath about Jeffrey Epstein if Democrats win back control of the House.
• Politico, #Resistance Democrats are flopping in primaries, Samuel Benson, Aug. 20, 2026. Alexander Vindman’s Senate primary loss Tuesday is the latest stumble from a top Trump critic. During President Donald Trump’s first term, they were resistance stars. During his second term, they couldn’t survive primaries. Alexander Vindman’s Senate primary loss in Florida on Tuesday is the latest stumble for Democrats who rose to prominence during the impeachment trials and accountability protests of Trump’s first term. Vindman, a former National Security Council aide who testified during the 2019 House impeachment inquiry, made standing up to Trump and other forms of corruption a centerpiece of his campaign.
• Hope for America, Opinion: The President of the United States goes MISSING, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 20, 2026. For an entire day, the President of the United States never appeared before the American people, staying hidden inside the White House while the press waited. With Trump, the quiet usually means something is happening he does not want seen. And in his absence, his administration went to work on propaganda. 

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

• Slate, News and Comment: Trump can’t stop, won’t stop (attacking elections), Shirin Ali, Aug. 20, 2026. It doesn’t matter how many times he loses in court. Slate newsletter analyzed ongoing legal battles over Trump administration's voting system executive orders, highlighting Minnesota federal court dismissal of DOJ lawsuit seeking voter rolls.DOJ considering Supreme Court appeal regarding emergency implementation of mail-voting restrictions after lower courts issued injunctions.)
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Democratic Leaders Need Bold Talk, Jennifer Rubin, right, Aug. 20, 2026. Build the broad coalition, don’t let the legacy media call the shots. Florida Democrats in Tuesday’s primary proved the scope of the party’s big tent, nominating centrist, staunchly pro-Israel incumbents such as Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (running in a redrawn district) and Jared Moskowitz — but also former Republican David Jolly for governor and left-leaning progressive Angie Nixon for Senate, who ran an insurgent campaign against establishment favorite Alex Vindman, getting outspent 16:1.
• The American Prospect, The Credit Card Operative Helping Shape Democratic Primaries, Luke Goldstein and David Dayen, right, Aug. 20, 2026. Peter Kauffmann, vice chair for VoteVets, which has raised $20 million to spend in primaries on mostly moderate candidates this year, is running a front group fighting to keep credit card fees high.
• New York Times, Trump Local Impacts Nationally: Alabama Democrats Look for a Black Backlash Over Voting Rights, Emily Cochrane, Aug. 20, 2026 (print ed). Democrats in Alabama and beyond are trying to harness Black anger over the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act and the Republican redistricting that followed.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Michigan’s Green Ghost, Brendan Hartnett, right, Aug. 20, 2026. As The Bulwark first reported, the Green Party of Michigan may have nominated a Republican plant to run on its ballot line in Michigan’s competitive 7th Congressional District.

U.S. Debt, Markets, Economy, Inflation

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

• New York Times, U.S. Debt Hits $40 Trillion as America’s Borrowing Binge Continues, Alan Rappeport, Aug. 20, 2026. President Trump’s promises to restore fiscal order and reduce the amount of America’s debt burden have been undercut by spending on the Iran war, tax cuts and tariff refunds.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Case Against Bond Market Panic, Paul Krugman, right, Aug. 20, 2026. Don’t let the Very Serious People undermine a progressive agenda — again. 

World News, Global  Economy, Human Rights, Disasters

• New York Times, China Sentences Evergrande Founder to Life in Prison, Yan Zhuang and Alexandra Stevenson, Aug. 20, 2026. Hui Ka Yan’s punishment caps the downfall of a property empire whose collapse set off a prolonged crisis in the Chinese economy. 

Wayne Madsen Special Report (Continued from top)

President Trump met in Alaska last year (as shown in the photo above) with a warm, red carpet welcome for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

• Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: Trump is a puppet leader installed by Putin, Wayne Madsen, right, Aug. 19-20, 2026 (continued from above). The Trump regime takes its marching orders from the Kremlin and, when advantageous to Israel, from Netanyahu. The following FBI investigation code names represent its long-term and short-term probes ((including operations involving allied law enforcement and intelligence agencies) of Russia/Trump collusion campaign operations; Trump’s theft and compromise of highly-classified intelligence documents; the financial involvement of Russian oligarchs and other criminals with Trump, his business associates, and family members (including Trump’s financial ties to international child sex trafficking perpetrators Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jean-Luc Brunel, David Siad, and others); and January 6, 2021 attempted coup against the government.  
• Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Evidence Is Mounting That Natalie Harp Is a Major National Security Vulnerability for America, Seth Abramson, right, Aug. 20, 2026 (continued from above). With each revelation about who this person is, how she got where she did, what she does daily, and how her control over the President of the United States has evolved, things look darker and darker. 

Aug. 20

Special Reports 

President Trump met in Alaska last year (as shown in the photo above) with a warm, red carpet welcome for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting and Opinion: Trump is a puppet leader installed by Putin, Wayne Madsen, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer and NSA analyst, Aug. 19-20, 2026. The Trump regime takes its marching orders from the Kremlin and, when advantageous to Israel, from Netanyahu. 

The people of Nazi-occupied France, post-1968 Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, and Japanese-occupied Manchuria understand what it’s like to be ruled by an elder puppet leader installed by a fascistic foreign dictatorship. Donald Trump was installed twice as a Kremlin puppet in the White House through a sophisticated election interference operation carried out by Russian intelligence agents acting in concert with Republican officials and U.S. big tech oligarchs.

One of the reasons the political opposition to the Trump regime has been frustrated by the national Democratic Party is that it acts more like a ”loyal opposition” party than a resistance force.

Notorious Puppets: Japan's Emporer Hirohito, left, who the honorary leader of his nation's fascist regime during World War II and its prelude, Marshal Philippe Pétain, center, the French World War I national hero who served as the puppet leader for Nazi-controlled France during World War II, and treated the octogenarian collaborator for what he was — an enabler of Adolf Hitler. The Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia rightly viewed Communist dictator Gustav Husak — installed by the Soviet military following the 1968 invasion by the Warsaw Pact — as the puppet of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

The Free French resistance to the Vichy regime of Nazi puppet Philippe Pétain treated the octogenarian collaborator for what he was — an enabler of Adolf Hitler. The Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia rightly viewed Communist dictator Gustav Husak — installed by the Soviet military following the 1968 invasion by the Warsaw Pact — as the puppet of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Donald Trump’s wife, Ivana Zelníčková (shown above in a 1988 AP photo upon being granted U.S. citizenship), was a Czechoslovak StB (Státní bezpečnost) intelligence asset for the Husak regime and her father, Miloš Zelníček, was an agent for the StB in Gottwaldov, one of the most pro-Soviet cities in Czechoslovakia. Ivana Trump’s mother, Marie Zelníčková, was a telephone operator for SPT Telecom, the Communist state-owned phone company. One of Marie’s chief responsibilities was to facilitate the StB’s operation of the Jitka system, specialized telephone tapping hardware.

The Japanese puppet installed in occupied Manchuria, Emperor Puyi, was the pretender to the Qing dynasty. The puppet Manchu ministers all received their marching orders from Japanese vice-ministers.

Make no mistake about it: Trump regime Cabinet secretaries follow the orders of Vladimir Putin much in the same manner as Vichy obeyed Hitler, Husak took direction from Brezhnev, and Puyi and his collaborative ministers obeyed the diktats of Emperor Hirohito’s government. The United States is a Russian-occupied nation with Trump and his regime acting as the Kremlin’s puppets. Trump and his Russian overseers represent the worst threat to constitutional governance since the Confederacy . A few, but not enough, Democratic politicians understand that the midterm elections represent what may be the last stand of the American resistance to fascism and Russian domination.

The Trump regime has placed itself so far under the domination of Russia that it votes regularly in the UN and other bodies with Russia and such Russian proxies as North Korea, Belarus, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali, in addition to such pariah nations as Israel and Eritrea. Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine, South Korea, and NATO is part of a program manufactured in the Kremlin and dictated to Trump by Putin. Trump has also betrayed the democratic political parties of the world — from center-left, center, and center-right — to back far-right neo-fascist parties, some with roots in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.

With such pro-Russian assets as Tulsi Gabbard, right, Kash Patel, below left, Pete Hegseth, Bill Pulte, Jared Kushner, and others having held positions of influence within the U.S. national securityinfrastructure, any important U.S. classified information has already been compromised to the Russians. What Trump had not previously compromised with his illegal possession and storage of Top Secret codeword documents at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster has long since been an open book for Russia’s SVR, GRU, and FSB intelligence agencies.

Trump has also mirrored the anti-democratic actions of Putin in Russia by infringing on the sovereignty of the states. One of Putin’s first actions was abolishing the sovereignty of autonomous republics and regions across Russia. Putin has also banned Yabloko, the sole political party opposed to the invasion of Ukraine, a month prior to the September 18-20 parliamentary elections, Copying Putin, Trump is calling the Democratic Party “communist” and is threatening the declaration of a national emergency in order to prevent expected Democratic victories in the November mid-terms.

In almost every way imaginable, Trump has imposed a Russia-like tyrannical regime in the United States. ICE conducts workplace raids, traffic stops, and neighborhood sweeps in the same manner that Russian police conduct street checks, metro sweeps, and apartment raids to find draft‑eligible men. ICE asks for immigration status documentation. Russian police ask for internal passports, military IDs, or draft papers. In both cases, people often comply because resisting armed officers carries risk. In the United States, the surveillance agenda has been imposed by a Russian puppet regime in Washington powered by Israeli and Peter Thiel/Larry Ellison/Elon Musk “Big Brother tech.”

Donald Trump is selling off America’s assets, from national parks, wildernesses, wetlands, and forests to federal buildings, landmarks, and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to the highest bidders. It is the most massive privatization of public assets since the post-Soviet sell-off of state-owned industries to unscrupulous oligarchs.

Trump’s attempts to centralize federal authority over U.S. states and tribal nations and Putin’s long‑running project to strip autonomy from Russia’s republics and regions are cut from the same fascist playbook. Trump’s deployment of federal agents to Portland, Seattle, and other cities against the wishes of governors and mayors initiated a policy of asserting federal authority over local law enforcement. Trump’s efforts to override state‑run election systems and moves to weaken state control over water rights and environmental regulation are aimed at eliminating the constitutional powers of the states. Tribal nations are faring no better. The Trump regime is trying to reinterpret treaty obligations while ordering the Justice and Homeland Security departments to take actions that tribes argue undermined tribal policing authority and sovereign treaty rights.

Putin is the inspiration for Trump’s move against the states and tribal nations. Putin replaced direct elections of region and republic governors with Kremlin appointments. The Kremlin also took over regional police forces and created the National Guard (Rosgvardia) that reported directly to Putin. Trump’s new powers handed over to ICE, as well as the superseding of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, has turned ICE and the U.S. military into armed and unsupervised agents of Trump’s dictatorial tyranny.

While Trump misuses the military for his fascist power grab, he is relegating the armed forces to third world status. Trump has ordered the Navy to return to arcane steam catapults for launching aircraft from carriers and build unneeded “Trump-class” battleships, while breaking supply chains for deployed Navy vessels in the Middle East and South China Sea.

U.S. naval vessels sport noticeable rust patches reminiscent of those of the Russian fleet after the fall of the Soviet Union. The Trump regime has censored news of the Iranian decimation of the U.S. Naval Support Activity in Bahrain in much the same way that the Kremlin routinely covers up its repeated ground defeats in Ukraine. And there is very strong suspicion that the Pentagon is covering up the number of U.S. combat deaths and wounded in the Iran quagmire as a result of orders from the Oval Office."

There’s no great solution to keeping unsightly rust off Navy ships

USS Dewey, one of the many rust buckets making up Trump’s Navy

Placing a deranged alcoholic [as shown below] in charge of a re-named Department of Defense (“Dept. of War”) is designed to damage the morale of the military.

Senior military leaders look on at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia.

DOGE idiot Elon Musk’s systematic destruction of the federal government, along with placing the Russia-loving Kash Patel in charge of the FBI, were all ordered by Trump’s Kremlin masters.

Trump’s discarding of the NATO alliance, along with mutual defense treaties with South Korea, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, were at the behest of Putin. Trump’s threats to annex Greenland, Canada or Alberta, Venezuela, the Panama Canal, Cuba, parts of Mexico, and the Strait of Hormuz littoral of Oman’s Musandam Peninsula, the UAE’s emirates of Ras al Khaimah and Fujairah, and Iran’s Qeshm island are aimed at giving cover for Russia to seize control over other vital waterways, including Denmark’s and Sweden’s Straits of Kattegat and Skagerrak, Estonia’s and Finland’s Gulf of Finland; and La Pérouse Strait between Sakhalin/Kurils and Japan’s Hokkaido island.

Trump’s voting with Russia in the UN and disregard for America’s longstanding military alliances were all dictated by Washington’s Russian overlords.

Trump posts map with Hormuz as 'new US territory', says no Iran talks planned | South China Morning Post

Moscow was able to gain control of the United States without firing a shot. Putin was aided abetted by such big tech oligarch rogues as Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreesen, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Jack Dorsey, and Robert and Rebekah Mercer. 

They funded (as illustrated by the chart below) the Russian-led influence operations that resulted in Trump’s dubious victories in 2016 and 2024.

Never before in U.S. history had the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies constructed a massive and provable criminal case against Trump and his campaign staffs for conspiring with Russia to defeat Democratic candidates Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.

See below (at the bottom of today's news report) for the FBI investigation code names represent its long-term and short-term probes ((including operations involving allied law enforcement and intelligence agencies) of Russia/Trump collusion campaign operations; Trump’s theft and compromise of highly-classified intelligence documents; the financial involvement of Russian oligarchs and other criminals with Trump, his business associates, and family members (including Trump’s financial ties to international child sex trafficking perpetrators Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jean-Luc Brunel, David Siad, and others); and January 6, 2021 attempted coup against the government.

Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Evidence Is Mounting That Natalie Harp Is a Major National Security Vulnerability for America, Seth Abramson, right, Aug. 20, 2026. With each revelation about who this person is, how she got where she did, what she does daily, and how her control over the President of the United States has evolved, things look darker and darker.

You may think you already know all the ways in which Natalie Harp—an attractive 35-year-old blonde woman who looks somewhat like the very Donald Trump daughter the president has long openly lusted after (see here, here, here, here, and here) and who appeared out of nowhere praising Trump on Fox News at a key moment in the 2020 presidential campaign season—is an unprecedented national security threat.

You don’t.

This remains true even though, over the last week—ever since Americans learned that during Operation Orange Chicken the president chose to save his new personal aide’s life instead of either the United States Secretary of State (Marco Rubio) or the United States Secretary of the Treasury (Scott Bessent)—many Americans have been worried about how Harp came to be at the center of the people’s business in the White House.

As those questions have mounted, the White House hasn’t been able to answer them.

In fact, it hasn’t even tried.

It won’t make Harp available for interviews; has attacked anyone who mentions Harp with shocking viciousness; and responds to queries about her only with hagiographic praise that wouldn’t be out of place on a government-run Pyongyang bathroom stall.

It won’t even clearly state what the official position is that Donald Trump has now given to an inexperienced young person—Harp was in her mid-20s, and had only just recently finished her schooling in Business Administration at two religious schools, when she entered Trump’s inner circle—even though it’s we taxpayers who are paying $150,000/year to Harp, which notably is about 250% over the 2026 U.S. median salary.

• Sometimes the White House says Natalie Harp is Special Assistant to the President.
• Sometimes the White House says she is Executive Assistant to the President.
• Sometimes the White House says she’s the White House Appointments Secretary.

When she worked on the 2024 Trump presidential campaign, Trump declined to give her any title at all.

For her part, Harp refers to herself a “self-employed entrepreneur” on LinkedIn—thereby erasing her massive government salary and her employment by America’s taxpayers.

Sometimes the White House implies that it’s been grooming Harp to be White House Press Secretary, though besides being telegenic and having briefly worked on-air for a fake-news organization, it’s not clear what would qualify her for that position, either.

Sometimes Harp is merely said to be the leading “gatekeeper” to the President of the United States—i.e., to get to him, you must (rather inexplicably) go through her, first.

What’s clear is that none of these jobs have to do with any of the subjects Ms. Harp studied in school. Nor—far more oddly—does any of it apparently have to do with anything Harp actually does on a daily basis. As readers will see in the list below, nothing Harp does in the White House appears to be worth any salary at all—let alone the well over half a million dollars Harp would earn over the course of a four-year presidential term—for major-media reports unanimously establish that what Harp does is no more than a series of things Trump should do himself or no one should:

She types out social media posts that Trump dictates. Given that Trump and his doctors have consistently said that he’s in excellent physical health, and given that his fingers work and he’s literally sitting beside Harp as she types out his social media posts, and given that most of those social media posts do nothing more than diminish the Office of the President and the standing of the United States in the world—truly, you’ve got to read them to believe how deranged they are (see here, here, here, here, and here)—it would surely be the general consensus of mental health experts, former diplomats, attorneys, and politicos that Trump ought to either stop using social media altogether or else type his own posts. His doing so would presumably reduce their number, force him to consider his words and their number far more carefully than he does when he can simply project his bile directly onto Harp’s furiously typing fingertips, and reduce $150,000/year in federal waste and fraud—exactly the task he set Elon Musk and DOGE to in 2025 but appears only to believe in if it doesn’t effect his own daily routine.

She prints out deranged internet content that sends President Trump spiraling in dangerous ways—and much of what she hands to him is farcical, made up, misleading, disinformation, factually impossible, or mere conspiracy theory.

The President of the United States should spend, under his Oath of Office, exactly no time each day surfing the web for the latest crackpot content online, but neither should we be paying $150,000 per annum for someone else to do that. Why?

Because the end result is the same: an alternately comical and dangerously misinformed stream of presidential declarations born of a man spending much of his day reading the dregs of the internet in printed-out format. Vanity Fair reports that anything Harp hands to Trump fits into one of three categories that are broadly classifiable as “satisfaction, validation, and jubilation.”

So either Harp is deliberately appealing to Trump’s worst psychic demons, getting him to stew daily over his enemies’ comeuppance with a grim, devious satisfaction; or trying to find obscure sources to validate whatever he already believes, which given his native ignorance on most topics and penchant for conspiracy theories means she’s trawling low-quality websites and anonymous digital screeds to pander to the president’s limited digital and/or media literacy; or she’s encouraging him to read about his own victories, which is a waste of any president’s time as it does no more than stroke his ego. None of this constitutes the work of a U.S. president, and none of this is healthy for anyone—let alone a man obsessed with vengeance, adulation, and disinformation.

More Top Headlines

New York Times, Trump’s Order to Cut Military Exercises With South Korea Carries Risks, Experts Say, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper, Aug. 20, 2026. President Trump’s decision to curtail the military exercises came as allies question the U.S. commitment to longstanding alliances.

For years, the U.S. and South Korea militaries have participated in one of the largest military exercises in the world, with thousands of troops from both countries preparing for possible North Korea aggression.

On President Trump’s orders, the Pentagon curtailed this year’s exercises and scaled back some live-fire components of the drill, which were already underway.

Current and former military officials say the move is likely to undercut U.S. military readiness in the region at a time when allies are questioning the Trump administration’s commitment to longstanding partnerships and countering China.

The president’s decision is also unlikely to affect the person he hoped to sway: North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un.

The exercises, called Ulchi Freedom Shield, usually run for 11 days and have sometimes included 17,000 or more U.S. troops and 50,000 South Korean troops. In past years, the sessions have featured some computer simulations carried out in a large bunker south of the capital, Seoul, intended to check the allies’ readiness to repel a North Korean attack.

This year, some 18,000 South Korean troops were to take part in Ulchi Freedom Shield. The Pentagon has not said how many American troops had been expected to participate.

While both countries have insisted that the exercises were defensive in nature, Mr. Kim has long called them provocative. North Korea’s Foreign Ministry has condemned the drills as “a rehearsal for an aggressive war.”Want to stay updated on what’s happening in North Korea and South Korea? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

The country conducted two ballistic missile tests off its east coast this month, vowing to “respond to a new level of a threat with a new level of a deterrent.”

Mr. Trump seemed to agree with North Korea, saying in a post on Sunday that the country under Mr. Kim had been “unthreatening and respectful” while he has been president.

American troops have been through this before. Mr. Trump abruptly canceled the exercise in 2018 during his first administration, without notifying Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

At the time, Trump administration officials said they wanted to give negotiations meant to rein in North Korea’s nuclear ambitions an opportunity to succeed. Mr. Trump met with Mr. Kim three times but ultimately failed in that goal.

Back then, officials said the military could weather one big interruption in the exercise schedule but that readiness would suffer if the drills lapsed for several years.

After Mr. Trump’s announcement on Sunday, the Pentagon declined to say which specific training events would be canceled, modified or conducted through computer simulation. But former commanders said two main components would be affected: the testing of high-level command problems and other issues, and training for large scale, on-the-ground live fire and troop maneuvering.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Politicians Suddenly Notice Everybody Hates Data Centers, Andrew Egger, Brendan Hartnett and Jim Swift, Aug. 20, 2026.And, suddenly, so do politicians!

Fresh off freezing up on a question on Taiwan at a primary debate this week, Sen. Darline Graham hustled to Sean Hannity’s Fox News show last night for a little damage control.

“I don’t speak politician,” she said by way of explanation. “I think people in South Carolina are more worried about making ends meet. They’re concerned about boys in girls’ sports. One lady talked to me extensively about that today. They’re concerned about the Second Amendment, they’re concerned about the Save America Act, illegal immigration. So they’re concerned about a lot of other things other than Taiwan.”

She doesn’t speak politician yet, but she’s trying to learn. Happy Thursday.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: RFK Jr. Faces Growing Calls to Resign Over Recall Crisis, Hegseth's Wife Sat In on Classified Briefings, Melania Breaks Her Silence, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 20, 2026. More than 50 food recalls since January. Blueberries, eggs, lettuce, infant formula twice over, salsa, cheese, chicken treats for your dog, contaminated with everything from Salmonella to E. coli to botulism, spanning nearly every aisle of a normal grocery run. That list is why growing numbers of Americans are now calling for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign as Health and Human Services Secretary, and after you see the full scope of it today, it’s hard to argue they’re wrong.

That’s just the start. The Defense Secretary’s wife has reportedly been sitting in on sensitive military meetings his own spokesman insists she wasn’t really part of, including one with British defense officials who spoke only in general terms because her presence made them uneasy. President Trump is so frustrated that Iran won’t fold that he’s now threatening to bomb Oman, the country that’s actually trying to mediate his own war for him, and has posted a map claiming pieces of three countries as “New U.S. Territory.” And the Navy is quietly discussing stripping a Black Pearl Harbor hero’s name off a warship, potentially to make room for the sitting president’s.

Before we get into it, I want to say thank you. Because of you, because you read, you shared, you refused to let this story die, the USS Abraham Lincoln is coming home. We exposed the truth. You carried it. That is the power of independent media, and it is not an abstraction, it just proved itself in the real world. Let’s get into it.

RFK Jr. Faces Resignation Calls:

Americans are increasingly calling for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign as Health and Human Services Secretary as the list of food recalls under his watch has ballooned past 50 since the start of the year, a rolling catalog that now includes frozen blueberries, iceberg lettuce, shell eggs, mixed berries, pistachio nut butter, jalapeño-containing dips and salsa, soup kits, salad dressings, granola, infant formula not once but twice, multiple cheese varieties, dried and smoked herring, yellowfin tuna, chia seeds, tamales, chocolate bars, and even dog food and dog treats, contaminated with everything from Salmonella and Listeria to E. coli and botulism.

The sheer breadth of it, spanning nearly every aisle of a normal grocery run, month after month, has turned what might once have been treated as routine food safety enforcement into a mounting political liability, with critics pointing directly at Kennedy’s gutting of federal food monitoring programs and the CDC and FDA’s diminished capacity to catch contamination before it spreads nationwide. What started as scattered criticism has hardened into open calls for his resignation, with the argument boiling down to a simple one: an agency this hollowed out cannot protect the country’s food supply, and the growing recall list is the receipts.

Pete Hegseth and his Wife:

Pete Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Hegseth, has reportedly been joining him in sensitive military meetings and frequently shows up at the Pentagon, and a source close to Hegseth said he likes having her travel with him to “keep him out of trouble” given his history of heavy drinking. The Wall Street Journal first reported she was present in a highly sensitive meeting with top British defense officials after the US temporarily stopped sharing military intelligence with Ukraine, and a Trump administration official told the New York Times that in an undisclosed portion of that meeting, the British indicated their officers on the ground in Ukraine were at risk without US intelligence like early missile warnings. The British reportedly spoke only in general terms because her presence made them uneasy, later holding a smaller, more detailed meeting without her. Last year she was also included in a group Signal chat where Hegseth shared attack plans for US warplanes targeting the Houthis in Yemen. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has said she was only in the British meeting for introductions, left soon after, and has not been present for any Defense Department discussion involving classified information.

Jennifer Hegseth’s influence goes well beyond sitting in on meetings. She spent 18 years as a Fox News producer, including on “Fox & Friends” and “Watters’ World,” and now functions as her husband’s most influential adviser and de facto producer at the Pentagon, prepping him for appearances, sitting in on his meetings with journalists, interviewing potential staff, and helping shape Defense Department videos. An administration official said she has also encouraged Hegseth’s adversarial relationship with the press and pushed to bar reporters from the building, despite her own two-decade journalism career, and John Ullyot, a former Pentagon spokesman under Hegseth, described a roughly 40-minute interview in which she grilled him with unexpectedly hard-edged questions before he was hired. The Pentagon hasn’t said whether she holds a security clearance, though she reportedly moves through the building freely, including via an elevator that opens directly into her husband’s office suite, and stays in direct contact with his inner circle, including chief of staff Ricky Buria and close friend and Hegseth communications adviser Tami Radabaugh. Critics have raised alarms over the arrangement: Ullyot called it “bonkers that a defense secretary would involve his wife in his sensitive official duties” and face no consequences, while Senator Chris Coons said last year “this is not normal” and that Hegseth “can’t just hand” his high-level classification access to his wife. This comes as Hegseth faces separate pressure over the costly Iran war, shrinking munitions stockpiles, poor conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln during an eight-and-a-half-month deployment, firings of senior military leaders, and blocked promotions for women and minorities.

The couple’s relationship began as an affair while both were still married to other people and working together at Fox News, and Hegseth has openly credited her, alongside his Christian faith, with turning his life around after a period of heavy drinking and a 2017 sexual assault accusation he settled for $50,000 while denying wrongdoing. He has said things like “my Jenny, my wife, Jennifer, changed my life, saved me, there’s just no doubt about it,” and without his “two J’s,” Jennifer and Jesus, he “wouldn’t be sitting here right now.” Since arriving in Washington in December 2024, she has taken on a highly visible public role too, from accompanying him to pre-confirmation Senate meetings that startled Republican senators, to homeschooling several of their children under a conservative Christian curriculum, to hosting Pentagon events for military mothers and Gold Star families. This month she was named chair of the unpaid President’s Military Spouse Commission in an Oval Office ceremony, telling Trump the group’s work touches on “housing, health care, employment, child care, and education” for military families. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has publicly defended her expanded role, calling her “an accomplished leader in her own right” and “a true force multiplier,” and saying the department “actively plans to involve her even more deeply in the future.”

Iran War:

President Trump has increasingly lashed out at allies as the Iran war drags on without the victory he sought, threatening to bomb Oman for acting as a mediator, posting a map labeling parts of Oman, the UAE, and Iran as “NEW U.S. Territory,” and declaring “ECONOMIC D-DAY” against Iran with warnings of “TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences” for any country giving Tehran a lifeline. Analysts say this is frustration boiling over: Carnegie’s Andrew Leber said Trump “is in a situation that he can’t get out of” since “neither military force nor bluster” can force Iran to change course, so “he lashes out at others,” while former negotiator Alan Eyre compared the administration to a “thrashing mastodon, slowly sinking into a tar pit.”

Notably, Trump’s anger at Oman came even though he explicitly agreed to let Oman negotiate partial control of the Strait of Hormuz in the memorandum of understanding he signed with Iran in June, which Eyre said reflects Trump being upset at Oman “for the same reason he is upset with South Korea,” since neither has solved his underlying problem. Iran’s Mohsen Rezaei mocked the “New Territory” map, saying the gap between America’s inability to reopen the strait and its claim to own it is “greater than the 7,000-mile distance between Washington and the Strait itself.” Gulf allies like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE are meanwhile trying to hedge, maintaining ties to Washington while quietly exploring their own accommodations with Iran to keep their economies’ “lifelines” open.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday the US will impose “the toughest sanctions in history” on Iran, framing the economic focus as a way to avoid restarting large-scale military action, and said full details would come at a Monday press conference. He described the approach as a “one-two punch” combining the existing naval blockade, now in its 38th day, with the new sanctions, and said “it is going to work in Iran and we are going to collapse this regime,” calling on China, which buys more than 80% of Iran’s shipped oil, to “get with the program.” Iran’s foreign ministry pushed back hard, calling the sanctions “economic terrorism” that would harm ordinary Iranians and amount to crimes against humanity, while Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accused Trump of trying to distract from America’s own record $40 trillion debt.

Experts were skeptical of how much bite the threats actually have: Council on Foreign Relations analyst Edward Fishman noted Iran has been under sanctions since 2018 already, leaving Washington’s remaining options limited mostly to squeezing partners like China, the UAE, and Turkey, and said Trump’s implied threat to cut off the entire world from the US economy “is not credible.” Oil prices rose to a three-week high on the news, and Oman’s foreign minister separately rejected further escalation, saying lasting security in the strait requires a permanent regional peace rather than more threats.

The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln left the Middle East on Thursday and began its roughly 13,000-mile, four-to-five-week journey home to San Diego after a grueling nine-month deployment, the longest and hardest stretch of its mission having come amid US operations against Iran. The carrier’s roughly 5,000 sailors spent all but a handful of days, a brief stop in Guam and one in Oman, at sea since departing on November 21, with no rest days at all, and reports in recent weeks described shortages of basic supplies, water contamination, plumbing failures, and deteriorating mental health on board, worsened after Iran destroyed a key Navy supply hub in Manama, Bahrain. CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper publicly dismissed many of those complaints as “old news” in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, while also sending the ship off with a traditional Navy farewell, “fair winds and following seas.” The Japan-based USS George Washington has now taken the Lincoln’s place under CENTCOM’s control as of Wednesday, part of a Navy posture that still includes roughly 20 warships in the region, two full carrier strike groups, an amphibious ready group, and destroyers enforcing Trump’s ongoing blockade of Iranian ports. Democratic lawmakers have cited the deployment’s conditions as evidence of strain on military resources from the broader war effort, a criticism that’s persisted even as officials tout the carrier’s return as a sign operations are winding down.

Other news:

The Navy is working to rename the aircraft carrier USS Doris Miller, currently under construction and set to honor the Black Pearl Harbor hero, with two of three sources telling CNN there have been internal discussions about renaming it after Trump instead, which would be unprecedented for a sitting president. The Navy is reportedly planning to name a different warship after Miller and is recommending him for the Medal of Honor, though Miller’s great-nephew Thomas Bledsoe said the family hadn’t been told about either the renaming or the renewed honor, calling the Medal of Honor push “very positive” after years of advocating for it. The ship, currently referred to only by its hull number CVN-81 in internal Navy communications and a recent White House shipbuilding executive order, faces a deadline since its keel-laying ceremony is expected by year’s end, even though delivery isn’t planned until 2034.

This fits a broader pattern under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth of renaming military assets tied to diversity or inclusion considerations, including his 2025 order to rename the USNS Harvey Milk and earlier efforts reverting Confederate-honoring base names, with acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao’s office also reportedly revising formal guidance on who ships can be named after, including presidents. Miller, a mess attendant with no weapons training who manned an anti-aircraft gun during the 1941 attack and was later awarded the Navy Cross before dying in combat in 1943, was the first enlisted sailor and first African American ever honored with a namesake aircraft carrier when it was announced in 2020; the Pentagon said it has “nothing to announce at this time.”

The Trump administration is moving to eliminate a 10-mile drilling-free buffer zone around Chaco Culture national historical park, a New Mexico world heritage site sacred to Indigenous Pueblo peoples, opening 336,400 acres to oil, gas, and uranium extraction and drawing scrutiny from UNESCO, which says extractive activity is “incompatible with world heritage status” and is awaiting a federal response on the plan’s impact; the proposal drew roughly 100,000 mostly hostile public comments during an unusually short 14-day comment window, with former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland warning it would cause “irreversible damage” and critics citing risks to the park’s aquifers, dark skies, and air quality, all part of a broader pattern of the administration opening protected lands near sites like Carlsbad Caverns and the Grand Canyon to industry.

Melania Trump made her first public appearance in over a month on Thursday, joking “I heard you missed me... Here I am” as she took the White House Rose Garden lectern to launch “Fostering the Future,” a new scholarship initiative for young adults aging out of foster care, backed by a $2 million donation from IndyCar and Fox Corporation that expands the program to 26 academic institutions including Indiana University and Purdue. Her return comes after a stretch in which she skipped several high-profile events, including the dignified transfer of four service members’ remains, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, and Senator Lindsey Graham’s funeral, with a Daily Beast analysis finding she’d appeared publicly only 38 days all year before Thursday.

The appearance also lands amid intensifying scrutiny of Trump aide Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old executive assistant who has rarely left the president’s side and recently faced reports she went over a year without completing White House security clearance paperwork and was among the small group who secretly joined Trump on a military aircraft leaving Turkey this summer. Melania has otherwise kept a low public profile in this term, though her office said in July she helped reunite five Ukrainian and Russian children with their families amid the war, and in April she delivered a pointed five-minute address denying any connection to Jeffrey Epstein and condemning what she called “unfounded and baseless lies” from people seeking to “gain financially and climb politically.”

About 300 supporters, most of them women, rallied outside the Massachusetts courthouse where Lindsay Clancy is on trial for strangling her three children in January 2023, wearing pink and holding signs like “Believe” and “She Needed Help” as they said her case reflects how the mental health system dismisses women in crisis; her attorney argues she isn’t criminally responsible due to postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder, and testimony that day came from a hospital chaplain who described Clancy, paralyzed from the waist down after jumping from a window following the killings, as telling her early on “I’m so glad my children are safe” and later disclosing she’d heard a voice warning that if she didn’t comply, neither she nor her children would be safe. In response, Republican men on Twitter asserted that the 19th Amendment should be repealed:

A New York Times investigation found that the Bureau of Land Management is exploiting a legal loophole to funnel thousands of protected wild mustangs into slaughter: once a horse fails three weeklong adoption listings, it can be declared “unadoptable” and sold rather than adopted, stripping its federal protections, and while buyers must sign contracts promising not to slaughter the horse or knowingly resell it for slaughter, they can legally sell to an unaccountable middleman who faces no such restriction. Government sales of wild horses more than doubled to 3,700 in 2025 after Trump took office, with about 500 of those going to a little-known Ohio livestock trader named Brandon Jones, who bought horses for as little as $25 each despite the government spending over $3,000 to capture and transport each one, and horse meat fetching up to $750 at slaughter; Jones has refused to disclose where his horses ended up, denies any went to slaughter, and dismissed photographic evidence of trucks leaving his property at midnight by suggesting “could have been cattle.”

Wild horse advocacy groups have documented over 250 mustangs bought at BLM sales events and quickly resold to livestock auctions frequented by slaughter buyers in the past year alone, tracked via the government’s own neck-branding system, including horses tied to Jones that surfaced at a Tennessee slaughter-buyer auction and others whose brands appeared on trailers crossing into Canada, the only remaining export destination for horse slaughter since the U.S. industry closed in 2011. The BLM has publicly touted its record-high sales numbers as a taxpayer win, estimating it saved $56 million in 2025 by moving horses off its books, even as advocates like Clare Staples of Skydog Ranch argue the agency “is saying to the public that slaughter is off the table, but they’re doing it in plain sight using a third party,” and the agency did not respond to the Times’ questions about its sales practices.

A North American river otter, likely a juvenile, was spotted on camera in the Bronx River on Bronx Zoo grounds, marking researcher RJ Hawkins’ first confirmed sighting there since the early 1900s. The otter was captured only from behind, prompting Hawkins to double check the footage before confirming its identity, joking he “didn’t want to become the boy who cried river otter.” Hawkins said the appearance is a strong sign of the freshwater ecosystem’s recovery, since otters tend to be among the last species to return once a habitat is restored, crediting years of work by the city, community members, and nonprofits. The same two-year-old camera has also recorded various birds and a coyote, and last year captured the first North American beaver seen in the Bronx County section of the river in seven years. Hawkins said he hopes the otter returns, noting that if it doesn’t reappear, it could be a sign the ecosystem still needs more restoration work.

The Department of Education posted an AI-generated image on X, made with Grok Imagine, showing Trump driving a Mario Kart-style vehicle alongside Education Secretary Linda McMahon and a third man that many online users say bears a strong resemblance to Jeffrey Epstein, captioned "Freedom REVS." The post, shared Wednesday afternoon, quickly drew viral mockery, with one widely shared reaction reading "Putting Epstein there for the love of the game is crazy."

The State Department declared Thursday that China is “wrongfully” detaining U.S. citizen Min Zin, a Berkeley political science Ph.D. candidate and founder of the Institute for Strategy and Policy in Myanmar, who was arrested on spying charges after traveling to Yunnan Province in June at the Chinese government’s own invitation to attend an academic conference. Assistant Secretary of State Dylan Johnson called on Beijing to “release all U.S. citizens arbitrarily detained or exit banned in China,” and Zin’s think tank welcomed the designation, urging Washington to keep the case a top priority ahead of Xi Jinping’s planned September 24 meeting with Trump in Washington. Zin, a former student activist in Myanmar’s 1988 pro-democracy movement whose research focuses on democratization, is one of two Americans the State Department has designated as wrongfully detained in China, the other being seismologist Youlin Chen, held since 2024, whose case Representative John Moolenaar has separately pressed China to resolve. The designation lands amid a broader recalibration of U.S.-Asia relations, as Trump scales back joint military exercises with South Korea and plans a separate meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un later this year, and the Chinese Embassy had not responded to a request for comment as of publication.

The FBI arrested 35-year-old Jessica Bowie of Albany on Wednesday, charging her with attempting to provide material support to ISIS after she allegedly told a confidential source posing as an ISIS facilitator that she wanted to bomb the New York State Capitol and “kill the senators while they are meeting,” having scouted the building, less than two miles from her home, on five occasions between July 21 and August 9. According to the criminal complaint, Bowie converted to Islam five years ago, was radicalized online, swore allegiance to ISIS in recorded audio messages, and once wrote “Praise be to Allah for September 11”; FBI Albany Special Agent in Charge Craig Tremaroli said she hoped to escape after the attack, flee the country, and later return to strike targets like Times Square on New Year’s Eve or even the White House, telling sources the president would be the ideal target but “an even harder job.” She used $200 from a confidential source to buy bomb-making materials at a Home Depot on August 5 and, as recently as last week, arranged to buy a handgun and ammunition so she could “shoot back” at police during the operation, with the deal completed Wednesday just before her arrest. Asked if she’d be bothered by killing other Muslims, including children or pregnant women, she said it would “definitely” bother her but that she hoped Allah would forgive her; she faces up to 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and lifetime supervised release, and Governor Kathy Hochul said the state has stepped up Capitol security this year amid a broader rise in political violence and 

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Prepare for Catastrophe! Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 20, 2026. Time to revisit my argument that people should remember there are multiple ways to fight fascism, all of which ideally work together to restore democracy.

The Erica Chenoweth rule, which says that if you can get 3.5% of a population in the streets, it often leads to regime change.Local node activism, as with immigration or data centers.Fighting in the courts.Beginning to peel off four people in the Senate or eight or nine people in the House.Waiting until 2026, winning at least one house of Congress, and beginning to rein in Trump that way.Rescuing Republicans from a predictable catastrophe like Democrats did in 2008 and 2020.

I’m revisiting this now for several reasons.Local nodes

First, because I was badly overdue to add one of the most effective means of fighting fascism in the last 20 months, local activism of the sort we saw in LA, Chicago, and Minnesota in response to ICE invasions and of the sort we’re seeing unite left and right to fight data centers. One strength that local activism has is that media coverage arises out of civil society, the activism itself. This remarkable WSJ story on the activism opposing a Meta data center in Kentucky, for example, describes how activists used hunting maps to track what land Meta was snatching up.

Local officials have tried to assure residents that they are dealing with a major player in AI, not a fly-by-night operator.

Residents spent months piecing together the rumors and clues that float through a small town. One local official said the builder is among the 10 biggest companies in the world. A Maysville woman traveling with her husband on a work trip coincidentally met a man who said he’d been in the area on behalf of Meta.

A public-records request yielded clearer evidence: hundreds of pages of land studies and applications filed by an LLC established for “Project Crisham.” The contact for that LLC, a fiduciary director in the greater Philadelphia area named Pamela Gregorski, has worked on several data-center projects that were later revealed to be Meta sites.

With little information at hand, Bare and her neighbors have coordinated their research.

Janet Garrison, a dirt-bike-riding grandmother who taught information technology at the local community college, downloaded an app used by hunters to map the plots being acquired. She and others set up an information booth at the local fair.

When Garrison first learned of the data center, she thought of her former students and the jobs it might bring. Soon the opaque process irked her.

“We wanted to be a part of this,” she said. “But the NDAs…they just locked down and backed up.”

In the case of data centers, this local opposition has provided the base for political candidates to turn support from Big Data and AI companies into a toxin.

One limitation with the Erica Chenoweth rule is it’s not clear how it works in a country as big as the US. These local nodes provide one of the answers.Don’t put off to January what could be done today

Another reason I’m reposting this is I’m seeing an increasing number of people not just assuming Democrats will win (in an election assumed to be free and fair without Trump interference) at least one house of Congress in November, but also assuming Democratic subpoenas will be more effective than something they can do now.

While winning one or even both houses of Congress does look increasingly likely, we can’t assume elections will be free and fair and the huge GOP infusion of cash have not yet hit most races.

Plus, people are insanely optimistic about how quickly Democratic Committee Chairpersons will be able to exercise oversight over Trump (as distinct from private industry). Trump succeeded in obstructing such efforts in 2019, and he has new tools to use to do so going forward. That’s not to say Democrats shouldn’t try, but until Democrats either win a bunch of lawsuits (with Trump’s SCOTUS) or defund everything until Trump cries uncle, subpoena power will not be the magic antidote many are treating it as.

There are existing tools that may be more effective than subpoena power, and if we focus on using them now, then the chances of winning the election and exercising real oversight will go up as well.Chances of snowballing catastrophes are increasing

But the biggest reason I’m posting now is to follow-up on the last installment of this argument I made.

As item 6 on this argues, two of the only times right wingers have been willing to — have begged — to share power this decade came after right wing catastrophes: the Wall Street crisis in 2008 and COVID in 2020.

Neither time did Democrats, empowered by the leverage of GOP desperation, exact enough from Republicans. Had Obama simply invested more, demanded accountability from the banks, and jailed people for stealing people’s homes via mortgage fraud, the entire world would be in a different place. And as we speak, Trump is using that the fraud enabled by the approach used to float the economy during COVID to defund blue states.

But we’re at the point where Trump’s incompetence is beginning to create snowballing problems.

DOGE and RFK Jr — with an assist from Brooke Rollins — have conspired to allow debilitating illnesses, bugs, and poisons flourish.

Whiskey Pete Hegseth has shot America’s collective wad, pushed multiple ships to the brink of mutiny or suicide and in response led to further retreats from the Pacific. The price of oil is heading north again. Trump has emptied the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to dangerous levels. Iran has threatened to treat the next 30 months like an extended hostage crisis. The US is considering retreating from the Middle East. Both US Gulf and Asian allies are feeling betrayed and shopping security options elsewhere.

Partly as a result of that, and partly as a result of Trump’s other financial mismanagement, Scott Bessent is tinkering with the economy in a way that normally reflects a crisis. And Bessent’s efforts aren’t working.

Trump’s corruption is destroying the government services that Americans rely on.

Around the world, extreme climate is creating day-to-day risks for ordinary people. This winter the combination of the Iran War and climate problems may lead to further increases in food prices, if not shortages.

Hospitals are closing. People are losing health care. People are losing food stamps.

Largely to feed conspiracy theories, Trump gutted cybersecurity (and Iran exploited that) even as AI makes it far easier to carry out massive attacks — even by accident.

A few weeks back Dan Drezner contemplated something I’ve been contemplating as well. How long will it be until Americans experience attacks within the US that affect their day-to-day life?

What’s going to happen if, via some combination of all this, cities lose their water supply (which has already happened in Puerto Rico) or broad regions lose their electricity? What happens if that occurs during an extreme weather event when millions rely on air conditioning?

Obviously, these snowballing problems only increase Democrats’ chances in November. They increase the likelihood that — as happened in 2008, when John McCain took the lead in at least one poll on August 20 and then picked a charismatic governor as running mate who ended up backfiring, only to have a massive economic crisis starting a month later — November will look very different than it currently does.

But they also increase the chance that there’ll be a catastrophe — multiple catastrophes — at a time when Trump has stripped the government, and especially his cabinet, of competent people. And if something happens — if, as is easily foreseeable, multiple somethings happen at once — we need to be prepared both to help save lives and livelihoods, but also to use the crisis, NeoCon style, as a way to reverse Trump’s abuses. As Naomi Klein taught us almost two decades ago, if you don’t respond to disaster, the fascists will.

One reason I harp endlessly on the multiple ways to fight fascism is that many of the most effective ways to fight fascism don’t involve the Democratic Party, sure as hell don’t require the leadership of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.

There is never an excuse to expect the Democratic Party to fight this fight for you, because some of the most effective ways to fight are things you can do personally.

We don’t know what will happen in the near or long term. We do know that if we’re pursuing all measures, every method of fighting fascism is more likely to succeed.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Alarm Bells as Trump's Closest Aide Lacked a Clearance for a Year, North Korea Fires Back, Iran's "Economic D-Day," and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 20, 2026. Today’s edition starts with a story that should worry you more than most: the aide who sits closer to Donald Trump than almost anyone else in Washington, who filters what he reads, drafts what he posts, and is described by insiders as a channel through which foreign leaders try to reach him, went more than a year without completing a basic White House security clearance. Nobody seems to know why. Trump had to personally step in to get it done.

That’s not the only place where the wheels are showing this week. Trump declared “economic D-Day” on Iran on Wednesday, all-caps threats and all, then turned around and said the situation is “so good” that talks could resume “at some point.” Iran’s foreign minister didn’t even bother with a real rebuttal, he just pointed at America’s $40 trillion debt and walked away. Meanwhile, newly surfaced emails show US immigration officials were quietly coordinating deportation lists with the Iranian government in the middle of an active war between the two countries. And North Korea answered a US goodwill gesture with ten ballistic missiles, then had Kim Jong Un’s sister flatly deny Trump’s claim that a meeting between the two leaders is even in the works.

Here’s the news:

Iran/Military:

President Trump announced a “crushing economic operation” against Iran on Wednesday, which he dubbed an “economic D-Day,” posting on Truth Social that it would involve “Economic Warfare and Isolation on an unprecedented scale” and warning that any country providing Iran a “lifeline,” through oil smuggling, swap lines, cash transfers, or front companies, would face “TREMENDOUS Economic Consequences.” Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi dismissed the threat as a distraction, writing that the so-called “Economic D-Day” is “a diversion from America’s own crisis: unprecedented debt & surging interest costs,” and warning that “doubling down on failed policies will only bring further defeat,” pointedly sharing a New York Times article about the US national debt crossing $40 trillion. Despite the escalation in rhetoric, Trump said the US could return to negotiations with Iran “at some point,” insisting “right now, I think the situation is so good,” while reiterating that Iran “cannot have a nuclear weapon” under any deal. Trump also claimed the Navy’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has been “extremely effective” and suggested the waterway won’t be “as important as it was in the past” given a record number of oil pipeline projects underway, even though oil prices have climbed to their highest level since July.

The war is drawing in more regional players and straining US military resources nearly six months in. The Pentagon confirmed the USS George Washington aircraft carrier arrived in the Middle East to relieve the USS Abraham Lincoln, whose crew has faced reported mental health concerns after a nearly nine-month deployment that’s already run well beyond the typical six-month tour, though CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper said the Lincoln actually has among the lowest mental health case rates of the Navy’s 11 carriers.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps separately warned that Saudi Arabia “will certainly be unable to contain” the Houthis in Yemen, a new front that opened last month after tit-for-tat strikes, with the Houthis now attacking Saudi vessels, blockading Red Sea ports, and reportedly plotting to seize land along the Bab al-Mandab Strait to further threaten global shipping. Diplomatic efforts continue in parallel, with Araghchi holding a call with Pakistan’s army chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, to discuss mediation efforts, since Pakistan is among the countries trying to broker talks between Washington and Tehran.

In a separate but related development, newly released emails obtained by the National Iranian American Council reveal that US immigration officials quietly coordinated with the Iranian government to deport more than 100 Iranians on three flights between September 2025 and January 2026, despite the rising tensions between the two countries. The emails show Iranian officials had direct influence over deportation lists, with one ICE official writing “per request from the Iran Embassy I added a few cases,” and another noting that “Iran has requested that I amend the previous manifest and expedite the removal process” after meeting with an Iranian Embassy director. The revelation offers a rare, detailed look at behind-the-scenes cooperation between the two governments even as they remain locked in an active war, raising questions about the nature and extent of US-Iran coordination on immigration enforcement during this period.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Army is phasing out a cutting-edge drone assault battalion it established in Europe just this past January, a unit created to absorb lessons from Ukraine’s drone warfare against Russia, as part of a broader “back-to-basics” push by acting Army Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who is closely aligned with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. After participating in a major exercise in Germany this August and September, the roughly 600-soldier battalion will report its findings and then “refocus on its core warfighting tasks as an airborne infantry battalion” rather than continuing its drone-focused mission, reversing a signature initiative of LaNeve’s predecessor Gen. Randy George, whom Hegseth ousted in April. Military experts like Brookings’ Michael O’Hanlon criticized the move, warning that “Ukraine has essentially revolutionized the close fight” and that any setback to the drone program would be “deeply regretful and dangerous,” while the Army declined to specify how it plans to accelerate drone capabilities going forward. The decision is one of several moves by LaNeve that have drawn friction, including shifting a specialized Multi-Domain Task Force from Europe to South Korea, reassigning a Texas-based armored corps to a new Western Hemisphere Command, rewriting Army fitness standards over Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s objections, and canceling a planned speech by senior Ukrainian officers at Fort Benning.

Natalie Harp Security Risk:

Trump’s closest aide, Natalie Harp (shown above), went without a routine White House security clearance for more than a year, declining multiple times to complete the process despite receiving extensions, according to two people familiar with the matter who told MS NOW they don’t know why she resisted. Concerns mounted inside the White House counsel’s office and among security officials, including the Secret Service, until Trump personally intervened and Harp finally completed the SF-86 background investigation form in recent months, ultimately receiving her clearance. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told MS NOW that “Natalie Harp has a security clearance like everyone else, and she is a loyal and hardworking member of President Trump’s team,” but a senior White House official confirmed she’d received multiple extensions on the lengthy paperwork.

The lack of clearance is one of several internal red flags raised about Harp, who holds the titles special assistant and executive assistant to the president and operates unusually close to him, filtering much of the information he sees daily; one national security official noted her physical proximity in the West Wing and residence gives her access to highly sensitive information, arguably more than most senior officials. One source described her as someone who “plays into the less productive and more troublesome parts of his nature, putting things in front of him that aren’t vetted,” and said subtle staff efforts to limit her access have failed because “she is just persistent.”

Harp’s rise to Trump’s inner circle began in 2020, when she spoke at the Republican National Convention crediting Trump’s signing of the Right to Try Act for saving her life during bone cancer treatment, a claim medical experts have since questioned, and she later worked as a host at the far-right network One America News before joining Trump’s 2022 reelection campaign, where staff nicknamed her the “Human Printer” for constantly delivering favorable coverage and polling to him by hand. She became an official White House staffer at Trump’s January 2025 inauguration and was recently thrust further into the spotlight after reports she was among the small group of aides who accompanied Trump inside a catering cart as he secretly departed Air Force One amid security concerns in Turkey.

The New York Times has also reported that Harp frequently accompanies Trump on golf trips and to Mar-a-Lago, helps draft his social media posts, and carries a portable printer to deliver information to him in hard copy, while Maggie Haberman has separately described her as a channel through which “foreign leaders try to reach him.” Harp’s estranged brother, Preston Harp, told CNN her devotion to Trump amounts to an “unhealthy obsession,” a characterization Eric Trump pushed back on, calling her “an incredible young woman” and “arguably one of the hardest-working people in the White House.” The security clearance revelation adds a new, more concrete dimension to concerns that had previously focused mainly on her outsized access and influence rather than formal vetting gaps.

Separately, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff has doubled down on his criticism of Trump’s relationship with Harp after facing a week of attacks from the president’s allies over remarks he made at a campaign rally, where he said Trump “golfs and trades stocks” and “wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie to their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar,” referencing the new Air Force One jet and the White House ballroom project.

Eric Trump called Ossoff’s comments “absolute trash,” and White House communications director Steven Cheung launched vulgar attacks against the senator, but Ossoff, who is running for reelection against Trump-backed Rep. Mike Collins, told MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell it’s “been amazing to watch this White House melt down over this all week.” He defended his right to criticize Harp and other staffers by noting “these White House staffers are adults, public officials paid by the taxpayer with immense power in positions of public trust,” and accused Harp of “printing out Donald Trump’s daily dose of delusion and flattery,” while also taking aim at comments from trade adviser Peter Navarro and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He capped his response by dismissing the backlash entirely, saying “no one cares about their feelings.”

North Korea:

North Korea answered de-escalation with a show of force. Less than a day after the US and South Korea agreed to shrink the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercises, Pyongyang fired roughly ten short-range ballistic missiles toward the sea from the Pyongyang region on Thursday. South Korea’s military said it was coordinating closely with the US and Japan on the launches, and Japan’s prime minister’s office confirmed it had detected a suspected launch as well. South Korea’s presidential national security council held an emergency meeting afterward and issued a statement urging the North to halt the launches, noting they’re banned outright under UN Security Council resolutions. The timing made the message hard to miss: a goodwill gesture from Washington was met almost immediately with a demonstration of strength rather than reciprocity.

Kim Yo-jong’s response was calibrated, not a flat rejection. She dismissed the drill drawdown as cosmetic, saying “the provocative, aggressive nature of the drills won’t change even though their duration and size were reduced,” and warned the US would not get the response it wanted if it tried to frame the move as good faith. What stood out was what she left out, she skipped North Korea’s usual fire-and-brimstone rhetoric entirely. She also said personal relations between her brother and Trump remain “still excellent,” a notably warm line given the rest of the statement. Taken together, it reads less like Pyongyang closing the door and more like it holding out for a bigger concession before returning to the table.

Trump and Kim Yo-jong are now telling contradictory stories about a possible meeting. Trump said Wednesday he’s planning to meet Kim later this year, and when asked if Kim had responded to his outreach, he told reporters “Yeah, he has,” with the Wall Street Journal reporting a possible tie-in to November’s APEC summit in Shenzhen. Kim Yo-jong flatly denied it, saying she knew “absolutely nothing” about any such communications and calling it “perhaps the only matter I do not know about” in her brother’s foreign policy. She also reiterated that “the United States’ hostile policy toward the DPRK has not changed,” despite the scaled-back drills, and separately denied Zelenskyy’s claims that North Korea planned to send tens of thousands of troops to fight for Russia. The upshot is a genuinely open question of whether Trump’s promised year-end meeting is real, given his own account is being directly contradicted by the regime’s own spokesperson.

Epstein Files, Trump Coverup

A federal magistrate judge recommended Tuesday that a lawsuit brought by more than 30 Epstein survivors against the FBI be allowed to proceed, despite the statute of limitations having technically expired before they sued. U.S. Magistrate Judge Ryon McCabe found the plaintiffs plausibly alleged that FBI agents in Florida and elsewhere created a foreseeable risk to victims by mishandling tips and failing to properly investigate Epstein starting as early as 1996, though he was skeptical they can ultimately prove the FBI’s inaction directly caused their abuse.

McCabe recommended a 90-day discovery period to examine FBI policies on sexual abuse and child sexual abuse material before the government can renew its dismissal bid, and the case now heads to U.S. District Judge David Leibowitz for a final call on whether to accept that recommendation. The plaintiffs argue the case isn’t time barred because the government’s suppression of records kept them from learning the full extent of the FBI’s failures until recent disclosures under the Epstein Files Transparency Act and congressional hearings. The Justice Department is fighting the suit on sovereign immunity grounds, arguing the Federal Tort Claims Act doesn’t cover the FBI’s discretionary investigative decisions and that the claims are filed too late regardless. 

Other news:

A Cole County judge ruled Wednesday that Missouri can use its new, Trump-backed U.S. House map in the November elections, rejecting a bid by the group People Not Politicians to put the Republican-friendly districts to a statewide referendum vote. Judge Daniel Green sided with Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins and Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, agreeing that Missouri’s Constitution doesn’t authorize a referendum on congressional redistricting and that swapping districts after the primary would violate federal law. The map, redrawn after Trump urged GOP-led states to gerrymander ahead of the midterms, is designed to flip Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City-area seat by pushing it deep into rural, Republican territory, with about 59% of its voters new to the district. Opponents immediately vowed to appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court, arguing the circuit court ruling isn’t the final word. Missouri is one of eight states where Republicans have redrawn maps this cycle, part of a broader push to net up to 16 additional House seats nationally, while Democrats counter with new maps in California and Utah.

James Braid, the White House’s director of legislative affairs and its top liaison to Congress, is leaving the administration, a person with knowledge of the transition told Politico, though it’s not yet clear where he’s headed next. Braid had been responsible for pushing Trump’s agenda through a narrow congressional majority, a job made harder by the president’s repeated clashes with members of his own party, and he was heavily involved in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and a recent bipartisan housing bill. His exit adds to a wave of senior departures, coming days after press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced she’s leaving and while deputy chief of staff James Blair is already on leave to run Trump’s political operation, all against a backdrop of near record low approval ratings and a tough midterm outlook for the GOP. Braid’s resume made him a particularly valuable Trump translator on Capitol Hill: he came from a top policy role under then Senator JD Vance, previously served as chief of staff to former Reps. Matt Rosendale and Ken Buck, deputy chief of staff to Rep. Mark Sanford and then Rep. Ted Budd, policy director for the House Freedom Caucus, and had a stint in the first Trump administration as well. Neither Braid nor the White House immediately responded to Politico’s request for comment.

Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, posted a video of himself touring construction of a gallows complex, complete with viewing booths for victims’ families, where Palestinians convicted of terror offenses in military courts will be hanged, boasting “terrorists will be executed” at the site. The facility follows a new law passed by the Knesset earlier this year, 62 to 48, that makes the death penalty the mandatory sentence for such convictions in military courts unless special circumstances allow life imprisonment, a law that applies only to Palestinians and not to Jewish extremists convicted of comparable crimes.

Ben-Gvir, who has past convictions for incitement to racism and support for a banned terrorist organization and is already under sanctions from the UK, France, and Ireland, drew separate international condemnation days earlier for advocating “30 to 40 targeted assassinations per night” in Gaza and saying some Palestinians “are not even people,” comments the French foreign minister called “unacceptable and inhuman” and the UN secretary general called “appalling” and “dehumanising.” Amnesty International said the death penalty law itself dismantles safeguards against arbitrary killing and the right to a fair trial while further entrenching what it calls Israel’s system of apartheid against Palestinians. The gallows video surfaced alongside separate criticism of Israel over new tenders for the E1 settlement block near Jerusalem, which UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband called an “unacceptable and destructive act” that risks cutting off the West Bank from East Jerusalem, prompting him to summon Israel’s charge d’affaires in protest.

The FDA upgraded a recall of frozen blueberries and mixed berries sold at Publix to a Class 1 recall on Tuesday, its highest health risk category, meaning there’s a reasonable probability the product could cause serious illness or death. Publix had recalled four varieties of frozen GreenWise organic blueberries and mixed berries back on July 29 over potential E. coli contamination, and the products were sold across eight states including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. The CDC has confirmed 12 illnesses tied to the outbreak strain across two states, though no deaths have been reported. Affected products carry expiration dates before February 9, 2028, and customers are told to discard them or return them to Publix for a full refund. It’s the second recall the FDA has bumped to Class 1 status in about a week, following a similar upgrade to an egg recall over salmonella risk.

FAA officials are growing frustrated with Peraton, the Herndon, Virginia contractor that won a $1.5 billion deal in December to serve as “lead systems integrator” on the Trump administration’s air traffic control modernization effort, with three people telling Politico the agency could scale back the company’s role. Complaints include failing to manage subcontractors on site, letting schedules slip on an Alaska facility project, and in one case a Peraton manager reportedly showing up to a radar site, bringing doughnuts, and sitting in the corner instead of overseeing the work. Peraton, which mostly works on national security programs and had little prior FAA experience, disputes the characterization and says it remains “a proud, trusted partner” fully committed to hitting milestones, while the FAA says it has not penalized the company or issued a formal warning letter. The overhaul itself carries high stakes, coming after last year’s deadly midair collision near Reagan National that killed 67 people and a fatal LaGuardia runway crash this year, making 2025 to 2026 the deadliest two year stretch for U.S. airline travel in two decades. Sources also note the FAA shares some blame for micromanaging the project and restricting Peraton’s ability to operate, even as the agency pushes an aggressive timeline to have major parts of the new system running by 2028.

Trump's pick to lead the FDA, Heidi Overton, faces an uphill Senate confirmation fight largely because Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the Health Committee and a vaccine policy advocate, has already signaled her role in last week's executive order scaling back the childhood vaccine schedule may cost her his vote, calling it "almost disqualifying." Without Cassidy, Overton likely can't clear committee, and she faces additional resistance from MAHA activists who see her as too industry friendly on issues like glyphosate, from some FDA career staff and outside experts who question whether the 37 year old, still in her medical residency when she joined Trump's team in 2019, has the management experience to run a 16,000 person agency, and from Democrats and abortion rights groups mobilizing against her anti-abortion record, which includes past writings calling for a ban on mailing the abortion pill mifepristone. The White House and some allies frame her loyalty as her chief asset, describing her as a "good soldier" who will execute Trump's priorities even though she has "no regulatory track record," while anti-abortion groups like Americans United for Life and Students for Life are optimistic she'll push to finalize restrictions on the abortion pill.

Five news reporters and two military members were briefly held at gunpoint by security officers at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Monday after officers mistook their escorted convoy for an unauthorized entry attempt. The group, which was being driven onto the base by uniformed public affairs staff ahead of an invitation-only groundbreaking for a new missile operator training facility, was suddenly ordered out of their vehicle at gunpoint, with sirens sounding and barricades going up at the gate. The two military members, one enlisted and one a junior officer, were handcuffed and placed in base vehicles, while the civilian reporters, from outlets including Noozhawk, KEYT, KSBY-TV, and the Santa Maria Times, were made to sit on a curb for more than 30 minutes, causing them to miss the event before being released without further incident. A Space Launch Delta 30 spokesperson called it a breakdown in communication, saying the base has seen a rise in unauthorized entry attempts and that "every potential unauthorized presence must be treated as a legitimate threat until proven otherwise."

More On Middle East Wars 

Public Notice, News and Opinion: How Trump misunderstood what Americans think about war, Paul Waldman, right, Aug. 20, 2026. It's not just about casualties or how long it lasts.

Whenever President Trump talks about the Iran War, one can feel his frustration that the public isn’t more enthusiastic about it — or at least unconcerned.

“After we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated,” Trump told a crowd last week, “pretty soon I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.”Aaron Rupar 6dTrump says that after Iran is defeated he’s going to declare the Strait of Hormuz a territory of the United States227 191 46

Perhaps realizing that reminding people (even in jest) of the waterway that has caused him so much trouble is not such a great idea, he then got serious.

“For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so a very evil country cannot have — a country, really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world — we don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon.”

It wasn’t exactly the stuff of “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds … we shall never surrender.” But Trump does not do stirring calls to sacrifice; instead, he tells the nation that while it may seem like you’re sacrificing if you listen to the lying media, you really aren’t. You’re just paying “a tiny little bit more for your gasoline.”

This reveals just how deeply he has misunderstood how the American public actually thinks about war, and why as the Iran conflict drags on, his effort to win the public to his cause has been as complete a disaster as the war itself.The lessons Trump mislearned

While the Vietnam War was one of the defining events in his generation’s coming of age, Trump seems to have emerged from it with few ill effects.

Like many sons of wealthy men, he managed to finagle his way out of serving without too much trouble (the doctor who testified to little Donnie’s supposedly crippling bone spurs just happened to be one of Fred Trump’s tenants). When it was over, he learned not much more than that the war was bad and Americans turned against it because it went on for a long time and a lot of our soldiers died.

That analysis isn’t wrong, just woefully incomplete.

It’s true that the public was affected by seeing the endless stream of body bags arriving back home, young men (and some women) with lives cut short, and hundreds of thousands more with physical and psychological wounds they would carry for the rest of their days. But though support had been fading steadily over time, it wasn’t simply a matter of too many months and years.

That was evident in the way the Tet Offensive in January 1968 turned the public decisively against the war. It wasn’t because Tet was a defeat for the US and its South Vietnamese allies; it wasn’t. Instead, the offensive demonstrated that all the government’s assurances that the war would be over soon were lies. North Vietnam was not on the verge of being broken, and we were not seeing “the light at the end of the tunnel” as military leaders had said so often.

When CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite told his viewers a month later that “it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past,” he gave voice to what most Americans had already realized.

Fast forward a few decades, when Trump ran for president in 2016. The Iraq War was over, but his party was still dragging it around like an anchor — and he alone among the primary candidates was untainted by it (even if his story about having publicly opposed it from the beginning was a ridiculous lie).

As Trump promised to turn away from that kind of adventurism, he seemed to take the same lesson from Iraq that he did from Vietnam: It was long and bloody, thousands of Americans died, and the public doesn’t like that one bit.

Trump’s rhetoric on Iran revolves around these two points: My war is short, he insists (so far anyway), and only a small number of Americans have died!

In May, he posted a chart to Truth Social comparing the length of other American wars to the current one (with the caption “Wow. Study this chart!”). The message was apparently that the war was no big deal because it was only in its sixth week.

Then in July, he followed up with another chart comparing the small number of deaths among US forces in this war to those of the past. This comparison is one he frequently makes in spoken remarks as well, often getting his facts wrong.

“In Vietnam, we lost 200,000,” he said not long ago (in fact, 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War).

Perhaps Trump might have done better to consider not just why the public eventually turned against those wars, but also why it supported them in the first place.

The truth is that watching your government wage foreign wars is part of what it means to be a American; seldom do more than a few years go by without us bombing, attacking, or invading some country or other. Many of those wars received ample public support — all, in fact, were more popular than the Iran War at their outset. That was because the public was told why the war was necessary, a story that always included some kind of threat to Americans.Trump has no way out on IranTrump has no way out on IranNoah Berlatsky·May 28Read full story

Sometimes the threat was real (Germany and Japan in World War II) and sometimes it was phony (Iraq), but it made enough sense for Americans to feel that their safety was genuinely at risk. In Vietnam, the Cold War placed the conflict in a broader context in which America had something at stake. In Iraq, Americans were told not only that Saddam Hussein was about to attack us with his fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, but that he was plotting with Al Qaeda and we could visit revenge for September 11 upon him and his country.

Eventually the public realized that the WMDs didn’t exist and Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. But it wasn’t until the war had been going on for a couple of years that a majority of Americans finally concluded it was a mistake.

Trump understood that history, but made the mistake of thinking it meant that he had plenty of time to carry out a splendid little war in Iran before the public would turn against it. The problem was that he never gave them a good reason for the war in the first place. There was no grand conflict of civilizations of which this was supposedly a part, and no dire threat to the homeland. The average American might think (accurately) that the Iranian regime is a bunch of nasty fellows who do nasty things, but they don’t fear that the Revolutionary Guard is going to kill their children any time soon.

In other words, Americans don’t like long wars and they don’t like casualties — but only when the stakes don’t seem to be worth it and we don’t seem to be winning. A short war with few American deaths won’t necessarily gain their support, especially if they’re going to be asked to pay an economic price for what appears to be a pointless escapade.

There may have been another factor at play: Trump loves little more than to do things other presidents didn’t do, to demonstrate his unique power and importance. But as Dalia Dassa Kaye wrote in March, as much as Trump’s predecessors would have liked to see the demise of the Islamic Republic, “there is a reason no previous president authorized a war against Iran … there is wide consensus — among previous US officials and the expert community — that overthrowing a regime through external military force, and certainly by airpower alone, is unlikely to work and risks unleashing dangerous consequences.” And here we are.

Where exactly is that? The war may not have gone on long by the standards of some previous disasters, but it’s getting longer every day.No one is coming to bail Trump out of his disastrous warNo one is coming to bail Trump out of his disastrous war

In an echo of all those “light at the end of the tunnel” briefings in Vietnam, Trump and his aides tell us that everything is going great, and a few more threats of destruction is all it will take to convince the Iranian regime to capitulate — as if they haven’t been trying and failing with that very approach for months.

“The crushing sanctions and one of the most successful blockades in history have crippled Iran’s economy and has left Iran completely broke, and it would be wise for Iran to agree to a deal,” a White House official recently told Politico. “Otherwise, they know what will happen.”

Yes, they know exactly what will happen, and so does the American public: The US will drop some more bombs (maybe), and nothing will change.

Now it appears that since bombing hasn’t worked and we’re pretty much run out of military targets, and diplomacy hasn’t worked (no doubt having something to do with Trump’s impossible demands), economic pressure might do the trick. As Jonathan Lemire of The Atlantic reports, “In recent weeks, aides have shown Trump the significant impact that existing sanctions are having on Iran’s economy,” designed to convince the president “that tightening the current sanctions and issuing fresh, tough ones could force leaders in Tehran to buckle.”

In other words, they’re trying to fool him, so he can fool himself, and he’ll then try to fool the public. It doesn’t seem like a strategy built on a very sophisticated understanding of what might be necessary to win the war or persuade Americans — which makes it much like all the other decisions that led us to this point. 

New York Times, How the U.S. Navy Is Helping Get Oil Through the Strait of Hormuz, Peter Eavis and John Ismay, Aug. 20, 2026 (print ed.). With Iran making ship traffic perilous, a U.S. operation offers a way out for some energy exports, stealthily shepherding tankers on dangerous journeys.

Only a few oil tankers braved Iran’s attacks to go through the Strait of Hormuz for much of the war, leading to a drastic reduction in how much crude reached world markets.

But since May, the U.S. military has played a crucial role in getting millions of barrels of oil through the strait, helping to keep oil prices from rising further.

The operation stealthily shepherds tankers through the southern part of the strait on routes close to Oman. Iran effectively controls which ships go through its side of the strait, opposite Oman.

Before the war, about 15 million barrels of crude oil a day went through the Strait of Hormuz. In July, tankers using U.S. protected routes transported around five million barrels of oil daily out of the Persian Gulf, according to analysts.

“It’s one of the surprising successes,” said Michelle Wiese Bockmann, a shipping analyst at Windward, a maritime analysis firm. “They have been extraordinarily effective in keeping that southern corridor operating, despite the attacks.”

But the U.S. effort, which Iran opposes, has come at a cost.

The U.S. military is deploying significant resources to get a limited amount of oil through the strait — something it did not have to do before the war, when tankers sailed freely through the waterway.

“It’s extremely labor intensive to provide for that kind of persistent defense,” said Joshua Tallis, an analyst at Center for Naval Analyses.

To try to protect vessels on the southern corridor, Central Command uses a range of weapons that can intercept Iranian drones and missiles. Ship operators say they register any planned trips through the strait with the U.S. military, and then report possible threats or attacks as they occur. The United States uses ships, helicopters and planes to launch weapons to intercept attacks. It has helped over 1,000 ships transit the strait, according to Central Command.

The U.S. tanker protection operation has drawn attacks by Iran. At least 15 ships taking the southern routes have been hit since the start of June, injuring 16 mariners and killing two, according to a New York Times analysis of data collected by the International Maritime Organization, a part of the United Nations. Another ship was struck this week while it was sailing close to Oman, killing a crew member, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, an entity administered by Britain’s Royal Navy, said on Tuesday.

The Iranian military retains the ability to escalate its attacks on all shipping in the area, as well as on oil and gas facilities in Gulf countries. And Iran is demanding permanent control over ship traffic in the strait, something it did not have before the war.

“Iran’s threat over the strait will remain significant for the foreseeable future,” said Mona Yacoubian, a director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization.

Many large shipping companies have chosen to stay away from the strait until there is a lasting cease-fire, and traffic through the strait remains far below what it was before the war.

The tanker protection effort in the southern corridor is one of the two major U.S. operations aimed at loosening Iran’s grip on the strait. The other is a U.S. Navy blockade of ships visiting Iranian ports, which has greatly restricted Iranian oil leaving the gulf, and deprived Tehran of much needed oil revenue.

Helping the tankers get out through the southern corridor increases the supply of crude to world markets and reduces the likelihood of oil prices spiking to the heights they reached earlier in the war. Gulf oil is also bypassing the strait by being pumped in greater volumes through Middle Eastern pipelines.

Ms. Wiese Bockmann, the shipping analyst, said the amount of oil going through had been rising since May, when the tanker protection initiative began. Roughly four million barrels a day exited in June, rising to some five million a day in July, she said.

Ships that navigated the strait with the assistance of Central Command, the U.S. military unit running the operation, typically turn off their transponders to avoid detection by Iran. That makes it harder for firms that track vessels to get a full picture of traffic in the strait.Image

Foreign Policy Magazine, Opinion: The Top 10 Ways Trump Has Made America Weaker, Stephen M. Walt, Aug. 19, 2026. He’s been one of the most consequential presidents in U.S. history—in all the wrong ways.

MAGA: “Make America Great Again.” That was U.S. President Donald Trump’s promise to the American people. Elect him, and the country would recover its mojo and return to a golden age of internal harmony, economic vitality, domestic sovereignty, and global influence. It was a seductive vision, especially for those Americans who had been buffeted by globalization and believed that immigrants and “globalists” were undermining the country from within.

As Trump’s second term nears the midway point, there can be little doubt that he is one of the most consequential presidents in U.S. history. Unfortunately, almost all the consequences of his actions have been harmful, not just for most people in the United States but also for America’s relative power and standing in the world. His cronies and family members may be reaping the benefits, but the cumulative impact of his actions will be not a return to greatness, but a weaker and more divided America.

More On Trump Administration Policies, Orders

New York Times, How Trump Is Trying to Crush California’s Environmental Policies, Maxine Joselow, Aug. 20, 2026. At least a half-dozen federal agencies have taken action against the state that has long led the nation in environmental protections.

The Trump administration has taken a series of extraordinary steps to attack California’s position as a national leader in environmental protection, enlisting at least a half-dozen federal agencies to undermine the state’s efforts to pivot away from fossil fuels.

President Trump has been vocal in his contempt for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat and possible 2028 presidential contender whom he refers to as “Gavin Newscum.” His administration has marshaled the full power of the federal government to clamp down on the state’s climate initiatives.

Mr. Newsom, a loud and pointed critic of Mr. Trump, pledged soon after the 2024 election to insulate California’s environmental policies from a second Trump administration — perhaps making the state an inviting target for a president who has been using government levers to punish perceived enemies.

There are almost too many examples to list.

Mr. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have blocked California from setting its own limits on automobile pollution, which federal law has permitted since the 1970s. The Energy Department has announced $75 million for a new coal export terminal in Oakland, Calif. The Interior Department has paid energy companies to cancel planned wind farms off the coast of California and other blue states. The president ordered a company to restart a pipeline that caused one of the state’s largest oil spills in 2015.

And just last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration signaled it could curb the power of the California Coastal Commission, a state agency that has protected the shoreline from threats like oil spills for more than half a century.ImageThree men stand in front of a crowd speaking near an oil facility. 

New York Times, Trump Administration: See Where Indy Cars Will Race Through the Nation’s Capital, Victor Mather and Jeremy White, Aug. 19, 2026. When the 2026 IndyCar racing schedule was announced in September, it included races in the familiar locations: Indianapolis, the site of the organization’s marquee race, the Indy 500; Phoenix; Detroit; and Milwaukee. But in late January, a new race was suddenly added to the mix, by executive order.

President Trump announced that as part of the celebrations of the nation’s 250th birthday, a race would be held on the streets of Washington. It will be the first IndyCar race held in the capital, and it will shut down much of downtown Washington for two days on Aug. 22 and 23.

All the top Indy drivers, including the series champion Alex Palou and the Indy 500 winner Felix Rosenqvist, are expected to participate.

The cars will race 147 times around a 1.7-mile course lined with temporary concrete barriers that will pass many of the city’s landmarks. Here’s one lap along the track.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Galas, Corruption 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 19, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 20, 2026. The political world has been consumed over the past few days with a Republican meltdown about Trump’s aide Natalie Harp.

The story began when Democratic Georgia senator Jon Ossoff said at an event for his reelection campaign on Sunday that Trump does not appear to want to do the job of the presidency. Ossoff added: “He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” That was it. That was all he said.

On Monday, CNN reporter Kristen Holmes asked Trump to respond to Ossoff’s comment. Trump first referred to Ossoff as Pee-wee Herman, a child-man film character created by late actor Paul Reubens, then defended the ballroom and attacked the reporter. Later, as Scott Nover of the Washington Post reported, the White House rapid response team took to social media to call Holmes a “disgraceful, humiliating embarrassment to her alleged profession.”

Then, in an unusual escalation, the account targeted Holmes’s children, posting: “Someday, your children will come across your disgusting and inhumane question. They will be sickened and embarrassed to have a parent be so callous and vindictive. It’s quite troubling.”

You could almost feel the palpable relief that the White House might be able to gin up a controversy that could rally the base, one that, for the first time in a long time, didn’t automatically show the president or the administration in a bad light. Undermining Ossoff, whose speeches have been a particularly sharp thorn in the administration’s side lately, appeared to be icing on the cake.

Certainly the call went out to right-wing media figures to pile on to the idea that Ossoff was making a sexist attack on Harp. Megyn Kelly posted that Ossoff “was clearly implying that Trump is having an affair w/his staffer,” and Michael Knowles wrote: “Every time I see a woman at work, I just know she’s sleeping with her boss! Am I right? Anyway, am I the new Obama yet?” White House spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote: “Jon Jackoff has to be the biggest cuck loser in politics,” and Newt Gingrich posted: “Jon Ossoff owes Natalie Harp a personal apology for having smeared her.”

Matt Royer of the Democratic National Committee Youth Council noted: “The word “affair” was never uttered, and yet apparently every single conservative talking head in the world heard it anyway, so what does that tell you?” He added: “Never have I seen a more exquisite example of the Streisand Effect where someone’s supporters fall over themselves to basically accuse them of adultery when it wasn’t even brought up.”

Commandeering the news cycle with manufactured outrage distracted attention from other issues Ossoff did call attention to in the same sentence. Ossoff called out Trump’s apparent stock manipulation, an issue Trump highlighted recently when he sold early access to his Truth Social posts for as much as $100,000 a month. It has been widely reported that investors appear to be making a killing by anticipating Trump’s posts as they make markets go up or down.

An investigation by Casey Tolan and Isabelle Chapman of CNN published on July 16 found that Trump himself “made at least 44 stock purchases of 21 different companies within a week before he posted a complimentary Truth Social message about the firms, their executives or their products.”

“He’s selling faster access to his tweets, and then you can bet on the markets,” comedian Shane Gillis recently told popular podcaster Joe Rogan, “It’s literally insider trading.” Rogan, whose support for Trump in 2024 was important to his victory, responded: “Wait a minute, is that real? How is that legal? Who’s telling him this is a good idea? $100K to get early tweets? That’s literally crazy. He’s just on a grab.”

As Matthew Chapman of RawStory reported, the two went on to discuss Trump’s involvement with cryptocurrency. “This government has done some (expletive) that no government has ever done before and one of them is the crypto stuff,” Rogan said. “The crypto stuff is nuts. Trump has made billions in crypto. Then you got his sons and his sons are involved in these weird business deals, and there’s a lot of money flowing around that you could dig in and start arresting people.”

Attacking Ossoff for allegedly smearing Harp also shifted attention from Trump’s ballroom, which is enormously unpopular and which is in the news as Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court to override lower courts’ rulings that he does not have the authority to build such a structure without the permission of Congress. Even Republican members of Congress seem reluctant to grant such permission, as it highlights Trump’s grabs for luxury while Americans are hurting under high gas and grocery prices caused by Trump’s tariff wars and war on Iran.

Recently, New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, who with Jonathan Swan wrote about Trump’s second administration in Regime Change, has told podcasters Ezra Klein and Axios’s Mike Allen that Trump spends about “70%” of his time working on his Washington, D.C. projects. “He is spending a huge amount of energy, mental and otherwise, on these renovation projects, beautification projects around Washington, and then monuments to self,” Haberman told Allen.

She described a visit with Trump seventeen days into the Iran war in which “[i]t was very clear what his mind was on while we were there. And what it was not really on was the war.” “You would think that on the 17th day of the war that he would have maps of the Middle East or maps of troop deployments—who knows,” Haberman said. “He picks up these pictures, and [they’re] of maple trees. And he says: ‘I am choosing maple trees for the White House. I am good at picking trees.’ I’m paraphrasing here, but that is pretty much what he said.”

Recent news reports tie the lack of supplies on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln to Iran’s damaging strike on the only U.S. naval base in the Middle East, known as Naval Support Activity Bahrain, in the first weeks of the war. Trump has downplayed the poor conditions aboard the vessel, infuriating the families of the sailors.

He continues to downplay the flailing of his administration in Iran, as well, as Iranian forces continue to control the Strait of Hormuz. When asked today about the strait, he told reporters: “Last night we had a lot of boats come through, we have possession, complete control of the strait, I mean, outside of nuisance value—and there is nuisance value when they shoot a drone every once in a while, but and not everybody’s going to go through. But they come through. And over the last couple of weeks, we had a lot of oil coming in, a lot of oil. It’s not gonna be perfect, but it’s a lot of oil coming in, a lot. In fact, people are amazed.”

Scott Waldman of Politico reported on Monday that while an average of almost 140 ships a day traversed the strait before the war, last Sunday only 3 did.

The Harp story also has taken oxygen from increasing pushback against the Trump administration. Yesterday ABC and its parent corporation, The Walt Disney Company, launched a federal lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), saying the Trump administration violated their free speech rights. The lawsuit claims that administration officials tried to do Trump’s bidding by launching investigations and challenging broadcast licenses because Trump didn’t like their talk show opinions, news coverage, and late-night comedians.

As David Folkenflik of NPR noted, the lawsuit began with the words: “Government censorship is deeply un-American.”

This is a one-eighty for ABC. In 2024 it agreed to donate $16 million to Trump’s presidential library to settle a lawsuit Trump brought over the assertion by George Stephanopoulos that Trump had been found liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. In fact, Trump had been found liable for sexual abuse, and the judge said that while what he did fell under the common definition of rape, New York state law had a very precise definition that his actions didn’t fit.

The settlement made ABC one of the first to settle with Trump. That money seems to have disappeared, and there is currently a congressional investigation into where it, along with almost $50 million more from similar settlements, has gone.

FCC chair Brendan Carr seemed to back away from previous threats, saying that ABC and Disney were acting too hastily and that the FCC has not yet decided whether to renew the licenses. “Ultimately,” he said, “they’re going to get a fair shake before the agency.”

Jeremy Barr of The Guardian shed light on the issue today when he reported on new documents obtained thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and a lawsuit from Democracy Forward showing that Carr has been working closely with the White House and right-wing media. In addition to talking and meeting with White House officials, Carr has been working with the Fox News Channel and the chair of the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group.

There is also the uncomfortable fact that the national debt passed a record $40 trillion yesterday, much sooner than expected. The U.S. is currently spending more than a trillion dollars a year to pay interest on the national debt, more than it spends on defense.

As Steven Rattner noted in the New York Times yesterday, Trump said in his 2024 campaign, “We’re going to grow like nobody’s ever grown before,” but in fact, the economy is slowing. He promised to bring the cost of gasoline below $2 a gallon; it is now above $4 a gallon.

In 2025, Trump said he would balance the federal budget, but in fact, thanks largely to his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the deficit is growing. Also in 2025, Trump promised that his new tariffs would enable him both to cut taxes and to pay down the deficit; in fact, the national debt relative to gross domestic product (GDP) is about to break the record set during World War II.

Republican operatives appear to have thought that the Harp story could enable them to pivot to attack Ossoff and change the narrative, but it seems they miscalculated. Their attention to Ossoff’s statement that Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” has brought attention to the relationship between the 80-year-old president and the 35-year-old aide, who was once a host on the right-wing OAN network.

Maggie Haberman told MS NOW that for Trump, Harp “is sort of his binky, for lack of a better way of putting it, a comfort blanket.” She is the main buffer between Trump and the outside world, filtering the information the president sees, setting up meetings and passing along messages, writing social media posts, and printing out articles praising Trump.

In their book, Haberman and Swan wrote that Harp leaves “adoring letters” to Trump in “private spaces,” saying things like: “you are all that matters to me.” CNN’s Holmes reported that Harp is “physically close to Trump at all hours of the day” and that Harp once jumped into the trunk of an SUV to stay close to Trump after being told there was no room for her in the vehicle.

The renewed scrutiny of Harp has turned up the story that for more than a year, she refused to get a routine security clearance to work at the White House. A national security official expressed concern to Jake Traylor and Jacqueline Alemany of MS NOW that Harp has more access to sensitive information than nearly all of the other White House officials.

When Trump left a decoy Air Force One airplane for a smaller plane in early July, he left behind cabinet secretaries but brought Harp with him.

Accountability for Trump Team?  

Hope for America, Opinion: We are done with Donald Trump, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Aug. 20, 2026. At 3:02 p.m. this afternoon, the President of the United States hobbled into the Roosevelt Room 32 minutes late for his meeting with tech leaders. While they waited for his arrival, they had each stood in their assigned places, fidgeting and trying not to let the heat of the room get to them.

One of the crypto executives had been heard saying to the press standing behind a rope on the other side of the room, “Are you guys hot over there?” while SEC Chairman Paul Atkins added his own remarks, asking the room if anyone could dance.

With Trump finally in the room, he took his place at the podium. Using his right hand that was discolored and bruised, he turned the pages to read his remarks, and it was hard not to see just how much makeup had been applied to the decaying skin across the back of his hand.

Then he started talking. For the next 41 minutes, in a room named after Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, two presidents who broke up monopolies, created Social Security, built national parks, and led this country through the Great Depression and a world war, Donald Trump held court with the men and women who are making him rich. He opened his remarks by introducing each executive by name as if he were introducing contestants at a pageant. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase. “He’s one of the greats,” Trump said. “You look much younger. You look good.” The CEO of the New York Stock Exchange. “He owns a thing called the New York Stock Exchange, a quite nice asset, right?” The CEO of Robinhood. The CEO of Kraken. The Winklevoss twins. And then, turning to the room with a grin, he called them “my male models who happen to be genius, they’re brilliant and they look good, right?”

These are the people the President of the United States has bet the future of the American financial system on.

And then, one by one, they returned the favor. The CFTC chairman called this “a golden age of American innovation.” The SEC chairman thanked Trump for “making IPOs great again.” Brian Armstrong called his campaign strategy “astute.” Every single one of them stood at that podium and praised him while the country falls apart around them. Not one of them mentioned the war in Iran that has no exit strategy, or the bond market crisis that saw long-term borrowing costs hit their highest levels this week. They were only there to praise him and play his game because they all knew that if they didn’t play it, someone else would.

Because this wasn’t really a meeting about the future of American finance. It was a meeting between people who have figured out how profitable it can be to keep each other in power. According to Reuters, Donald Trump has personally earned more than $1.4 billion from the cryptocurrency industry. That includes hundreds of millions from a $TRUMP meme coin and from selling tokens through World Liberty Financial, a company he co-founded with Steve Witkoff, who now serves as his special envoy. Donald Trump wasn’t in that room as the president. He was there as the man who is profiting with them. He is the regulator and the beneficiary. He is writing the rules for the industry that is making him a billionaire, and the men in that room know it, and they praise him for it. Someone has to pay for all of that wealth, and it is the American people. We are the ones carrying the risk, absorbing the losses, and living with the consequences while they walk away richer. What we saw in that room was a business transaction at the expense of the American people.

At one point during his remarks, Trump said, “One year ago this summer, I signed landmark legislation known as the GENIUS Act. I named it after myself.” The room laughed. He laughed. And moments later, while trying to describe the future of financial technology, he said, “We’re also on the very beginning of a revolution in fictional and financial.” He meant to say something else. But fictional may be the single most honest word he has spoken in months. Because everything about this presidency is fiction. The booming economy is fiction. The successful foreign policy is fiction. The “golden age” is fiction. And the only people who say it are not doing so because they believe it. They are saying it because they are being paid to repeat it.

Then he left crypto behind entirely and drifted to North Korea. “I do have a good relationship with Kim Jong-un, as you know, you’ve seen,” he said. “He didn’t like Biden, he didn’t like Obama, he didn’t like anybody, but he likes me.” He confirmed he plans to meet with Kim later this year, and he called the dictator who runs concentration camps, starves his own people, and has built an arsenal that Trump himself says includes 57 nuclear weapons, “very well-behaved.” And then he explained why he had just gutted joint military exercises with South Korea, one of our most important democratic allies, a country that has stood beside the United States for 70 years. “I was not happy when South Korea said, no, they’re not interested in helping us with the Hormuz Strait,” Trump said. “I felt that to do a massive war exercise, I thought that was very insulting to somebody that frankly has been, during my term at least, very well-behaved.”

That is Trump actually telling the truth about how he leads our country. He explained his entire foreign policy. The dictators who manipulate him get rewarded with flattery and favors. The democracies that have stood by us for generations get punished the moment they decline to do what he demands. Kim Jong Un gets praised as “well-behaved” because he figured out long ago that all you have to do is flatter Donald Trump and he will give you whatever you want. South Korea, which hosts tens of thousands of American service members and has a mutual defense treaty with the United States, gets its military exercises slashed because its president said no to joining Trump’s war. Kim Jong Un’s own sister responded publicly and said she was unaware of any communication between the two countries and had “no interest” in the reduced exercises. A retired South Korean special forces commander said, “North Korea and China would be the ones most pleased by this.” Trump does not even understand or care what he has just done.

Then came the interest rates. He told a room full of cameras, “I almost like to hear bad numbers; I’m saying I hope we have bad numbers today, interest rates will go down.” The President of the United States said he hopes for bad economic numbers. He then added, “Every time I hear a country is doing well, I say, oh, it’s too bad because they lift up interest rates.” The president just said that good news for the country is bad news for him. He is rooting against us and would rather see the numbers go down so his scoreboard looks better. And when a reporter asked directly whether Americans should be concerned about volatility in the bond market, Trump said, “No, I don’t think so.” He then explained his theory of economics: “When our country is strong, interest rates should go down. When our country is weak, frankly, they should go up.” That is the opposite of how any of this works, and the president of the United States should know this. He does not understand the most basic economic forces governing the lives of over 330 million people, because he has never bothered to learn.

Then he went into last night’s elections. “The public’s pretty smart, you see that last night. We had some great success last night; the Republican Party had tremendous success last night.” That was another lie. The night before, three of his endorsed candidates lost their primaries. Cory Mills, whom Trump endorsed in February and called “an America First Patriot,” lost by 13 points and is facing a DOJ investigation and a House Ethics Committee probe over allegations of assault, campaign finance violations, and threats to distribute sexually explicit images. Catalina Lauf got just 22 percent of the vote. Megan Degenfelder lost the Wyoming governor’s race by more than 15 points. Trump’s primary losses just keep piling up, and yet he stood in the Roosevelt Room and told a room of billionaires it was a tremendous success.

Shortly after he turned the microphone over to others, he almost immediately struggled to stay awake, appearing to fall asleep as he stood there. Multiple times during the event, his eyes closed, and his body began to sway before he caught himself. And not one person in that room acknowledged it or showed any real concern. And that is what complicity looks like in 2026 so as not to interfere with their profitability.

Maybe the most disturbing part was that they all just stood there as Trump used this event to once again attack Democrats, to call the Biden era “weaponization,” to spread lies, and to deepen the divide in this country. They stood there and let him do it. They nodded along. They waited for their turn at the microphone. Because none of it mattered enough to interrupt an arrangement that was making them richer.

Each one of them chose to be there and chose to stand beside him. They chose to praise him. These are the rats coming out of the gutters, and we need to remember that. Every name and all of their companies.

When this chapter of American history is finally over, when the investigations begin, and the consequences come, we cannot just go back to life as normal. We cannot pretend this was a passing storm, or that they were simply following the regulatory process, or that they somehow didn’t understand who they were standing beside and what he was doing to this country. They knew. They could see exactly what the rest of us could see, and they made their choice anyway.

And we need to remember that choice. We need to hold every single one of them accountable, so that the next time someone like Donald Trump tries to take this country, the people deciding whether to help him know there will be a price for doing it. Because if there is no consequence for standing in the Roosevelt Room and praising a man while he dismantles our democracy, then we are not just allowing this group of enablers to escape accountability. We are teaching the next group that enabling authoritarianism is profitable, and that when it is all over, they can simply walk away with the money and pretend they had nothing to do with it.

What worries me most about where we are right now, in the year 2026, is that we have law enforcement officials and constitutional legal scholars running scenarios to protect the Constitution from the President of the United States. I’m thankful they are doing this, but I’m deeply concerned that they have to. We have a president who constantly threatens to run again in 2028 and serve a third term, who talks openly about overriding the constitutional limits on his power, who pulls out a “Trump 2028” hat and treats the whole thing like a joke. We have a Speaker of the House being discussed openly as someone who could refuse to seat duly elected and certified members of Congress simply because they are not Republicans. And we have a President of the United States actively working to rig the outcome of the midterm elections before a single vote has been cast because he knows losing control of Congress could mean losing the protection that comes with it.

That is what is happening, and it is happening while he falls asleep in meetings and calls dictators “well-behaved.” That spectacle is not separate from what is happening behind the scenes. It is helping to provide the cover for it. While the country watches him struggle to stay awake and make it through his remarks, the people surrounding him are testing how much of our constitutional system they can dismantle before enough of us realize what they are doing. He performs the presidency while they dismantle the democracy that makes the presidency possible.

The midterms are 11 weeks away. Nothing matters more right now. The primaries are finishing up across the country, and once our candidates are set, we go. We donate. We volunteer. We send postcards. We make calls. We knock on doors. We talk to our friends and our neighbors. We do every single thing within our power to make sure people understand what is at stake. Everyone’s part in this is going to look different, but every one of us has a part. And for the next 11 weeks, we go all in.

We also have to keep the pressure on to make sure every voter in this country sees the failure sitting in the Oval Office. We cannot let him distract us long enough for us to forget what he has done and still plans to do. He has 11 weeks to try. Eleven weeks to throw rallies and tantrums, manufacture distractions, sign rocks, attack his enemies, and tell us everything is wonderful while the country can see with its own eyes that it isn’t. Let him try. We’re not moving on. 

Meidas Touch Network, Top House Democrat Puts Melania Trump on Notice Over Epstein, Ben Meiselas, right, Aug. 20, 2026. Melania Trump could find herself facing questions under oath about Jeffrey Epstein if Democrats win back control of the House.

Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, told MeidasTouch co-founder Ben Meiselas that the first lady is among the people Democrats want to question as they prepare for potentially sweeping investigations should they take control of the committee after the midterms.

Garcia specifically pointed to Melania Trump’s past connections to figures in Epstein’s orbit and her own public comments surrounding the controversy.

“Melania clearly has information,” Garcia said. “There’s a lot of speculation about who knew who when, who was introduced to who and how, when and how. And so I think those are valid questions.”

Garcia argued that Republicans themselves established precedent for congressional investigators questioning presidential relatives, pointing to their treatment of Hunter Biden as well as congressional scrutiny involving Bill and Hillary Clinton.

And Melania is only be the beginning.

“We have to speak to the Trump family,” Garcia told Meiselas later in the interview. He said Democrats intend to investigate potential conflicts and financial dealings involving crypto, foreign investments, real estate transactions and other activity connected to Trump and members of his family.

Garcia also said Democrats are already preparing public hearings on the Epstein files if they win the majority, noting that the Republican-controlled committee has held no public hearings on the matter.

“There have been zero public hearings. Zero,” Garcia said. “We’re planning all that out right now.”

Those investigations could trigger major legal confrontations with the Trump administration. Garcia said Democrats are preparing to use subpoenas, contempt proceedings and the courts if witnesses refuse to cooperate.

“We’re going to do whatever it takes,” Garcia said. “Use every single power that we have, the courts, the Congress, contempt, to ensure that they answer questions on behalf of the American public.”

Watch Ben’s full interview with Rep. Robert Garcia above as he discusses Melania Trump, the Epstein investigation, potential Trump family subpoenas and the oversight battles Democrats are already preparing for if they retake the House.  

Hope for America, Opinion: The President of the United States goes MISSING, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 20, 2026. For an entire day, the President of the United States never appeared before the American people, staying hidden inside the White House while the press waited.

With Trump, the quiet usually means something is happening he does not want seen. And in his absence, his administration went to work on propaganda. The official White House account posted a grainy, menacing black-and-white image of Trump looming over the camera like a figure from a 1930s propaganda ministry, captioned “DEPORT. DEPORT. DEPORT.” But the photo was not from any presidential moment. It was pulled from footage last summer of a confused man wandering the West Wing roof to look at his ballroom, telling reporters he was “taking a little walk.” They took a strange, aimless moment and tried to manufacture a strongman out of it.

After the Census Bureau released a preliminary analysis flagging about 24,000 records as possible noncitizen voters out of 128 million from 2020, a fraction of a fraction of a percent from a check known to produce false positives, Trump instantly declared “I WON THE ELECTION,” though he lost the popular vote by more than seven million. But none of this is about 2020. It is about November 2026. Last time, he tried to overturn an election after he lost. This time he is laying the groundwork beforehand: government data to cite, the SAVE America Act to sell as the fix, and a “noncitizen voting” narrative to make Americans distrust the results before a single vote is counted.

But someone fought back today. Disney sued the FCC for waging what its lawsuit calls a retaliatory censorship campaign against ABC over Jimmy Kimmel and “The View,” with one First Amendment attorney saying no administration has ever so deliberately sought to limit the freedom of the broadcast press.

When a company the size of Disney decides suing the government is less dangerous than staying silent, it tells us how serious this moment is, and that the resistance is growing. In 1954, it took just one question, “Have you no sense of decency?”, for the Senate to turn on Joseph McCarthy, because enough people inside still believed the institution mattered more than one man. None of what we are living through had to happen. These are choices. And if a government can choose to build all this, then someday we can choose to tear it down and build something better.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

Slate, News and Comment: Trump can’t stop, won’t stop (attacking elections), Shirin Ali, Aug. 20, 2026. It doesn’t matter how many times he loses in court. Slate newsletter analyzed ongoing legal battles over Trump administration's voting system executive orders, highlighting Minnesota federal court dismissal of DOJ lawsuit seeking voter rolls.DOJ considering Supreme Court appeal regarding emergency implementation of mail-voting restrictions after lower courts issued injunctions.)

President Donald Trump’s attempt to nationalize America’s voting system suffered another loss in court this week, just the latest in a lengthy series of defeats over Trump’s blatantly unlawful executive orders around voting. This time was a bit more dramatic, though, with a judge bluntly calling out the Justice Department for using a lawsuit against Minnesota as a “fishing expedition” to help it find a violation of federal law.

U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez dismissed the case, ultimately finding that Congress never authorized the attorney general to access voting records and documents that state officials create themselves.

These continued losses won’t end the story, though. Newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche announced this week that he’s considering asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the dozens of lawsuits his DOJ has filed against states that, like Minnesota, refused to hand over their voter rolls. Trump and Blanche are attempting to bully states into submission over “election integrity,” but it’s obvious what the real endgame is: Complete control over U.S. elections.

All of this began about four months ago, when Trump signed an executive order targeting mail voting. It directed Homeland Security to create a national list of all U.S. citizens over the age of 18 who would be eligible to vote, and then that list would be sent to all 50 states. Each state would then have to send the United States Postal Service a separate list of all of its eligible voters—presumably it would need to match DHS’ list—so when election time rolled around, USPS could refuse a mail ballot from someone not on a state’s shared voter list. Immediately upon Trump signing this EO, it was obvious to many that it would be found unconstitutional by the courts.

Regardless of that fact, the Trump administration pushed forward, now having established legal footing to force states to work with the federal government and, more importantly, fueling a massive step toward nationalizing America’s elections. Most states did not fall for this scheme and refused to create or send any voter lists to the federal government, prompting the DOJ to sue 30 states and D.C. for noncompliance. So far, most of these lawsuits have been dismissed, while 16 predominantly Republican states agreed to comply with Trump’s EO.

The case in Menendez’s courtroom was a bit different. Initially, Minnesota did share some information when the DOJ asked, mostly relating to maintenance of its voter rolls, which is congressionally mandated. However, the state refused to send anything more detailed, as it includes sensitive identifying information like Social Security numbers. However, the DOJ was unsatisfied and continued to push for full access to Minnesota’s voter rolls, which eventually culminated in the lawsuit.

That effort has effectively been put to bed, as Menendez concluded that Congress never intended to allow the AG to access voter records and papers that state election officials create. The AG can only access voter records that come into the possession of state election officials, a critical distinction which Menendez says the DOJ intentionally misconstrued. “The unredacted statewide voter registration list the government demanded from the state defendants in this case is not a record or paper that comes into Minnesota election officials’ possession,” she wrote.

Menendez also found the DOJ's argument that Minnesota could be violating federal election law and therefore it must hand over its voter rolls to be disingenuous. “The government suggests it is permitted to use a civil action as a ‘fishing expedition,’ ” she wrote. “But an ordinary litigant isn’t allowed to seek discovery first and allege a claim later, and the federal government has no special privilege to do so.”

Thanks to Menendez, the DOJ’s graveyard of dismissed election-related lawsuits just grew an inch. But this administration is not one to cut its losses and run. Last month, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on an emergency basis to allow it to fully implement the presidential executive order that would order the USPS to refuse to mail ballots to voters if they didn’t appear on a Trump-approved list. Back in June, after considering a lawsuit brought by 23 states and D.C., U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani issued an injunction that prevented the federal government from implementing that EO. A divided appeals court also turned down the Trump administration’s request to intervene, because such a drastic change to U.S. mail-voting processes so close to the midterm elections “would sow confusion and threaten disenfranchisement of many eligible voters.”

The Trump administration’s request of SCOTUS flies in the face of a decades-old doctrine known as the Purcell principle, coined by Slate contributor Richard L. Hasen, which demands that any significant election-related changes not be made close to an election, because it risks voter confusion and administrative chaos, as Donathan L. Brown, a civil rights scholar and associate professor at Northeastern University, explained recently in Slate.

The states responded to the lawsuit earlier this month, and now we wait to see if the justices decide to weigh in. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is actively working other angles, demanding the federal government be given access to voting equipment. Colorado and Missouri have faced these requests, and Georgia was the scene of a full-on FBI raid earlier this year, in which federal officials seized more than 600 boxes of voter data.

When you consider that there are less than three months left until November’s consequential midterm elections, plus the president is earning a 61 percent disapproval rating, and 10 of his endorsed candidates for statewide office or Congress have lost their primaries so far, it’s clear the Trump administration has reason to be panicking. Unfortunately for Americans, that means the lawless attacks on our election apparatus may be about to hit an inflection point. 

The Contrarian, Opinion: Democratic Leaders Need Bold Talk, Jennifer Rubin, right, Aug. 20, 2026. Build the broad coalition, don’t let the legacy media call the shots.

Florida Democrats in Tuesday’s primary proved the scope of the party’s big tent, nominating centrist, staunchly pro-Israel incumbents such as Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (running in a redrawn district) and Jared Moskowitz — but also former Republican David Jolly for governor and left-leaning progressive Angie Nixon for Senate, who ran an insurgent campaign against establishment favorite Alex Vindman, getting outspent 16:1.

In these sorts of free-wheeling environments with combative primary races, Democratic minority leaders can easily wind up in a no-win situation. You can bet that corporate media figures and agitated corporate Democrats, alarmed at Nixon’s socialist affiliation (she joined the DSA in June, but it did not endorse her), will be looking to egg on intraparty fights.

Between trying to avoid gaffes, responding to unhinged lies from the White House (which helpfully generates non-stop backlash against MAGA lackeys), and refereeing factions of their diverse party, Democratic leaders can easily sound defensive or overly cautious just when the base is itching for boldness. And while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is among the most hesitant to get out ahead of his members, Democrats’ greatest risk is skittish failure to convey that leadership has internalized the base’s demand for bold change.

However, with Donald Trump collapsing in the polls and suffering one defeat after another, Democratic leadership and their surrogates are well positioned to project strength and avoid the trap of excessive timidity.

In this environment, Democratic leaders should not waste time on Sunday legacy media shows (whose aging audiences have dwindled), on which hosts recycle tired tropes (Dems in disarray!) and false equivalence. If Dems want to reach persuadable voters, they should recall a crucial 2024 election lesson: independent media, podcasts, and candidates’ own social media accounts offer a reach as large as — if not larger — than legacy media’s, allowing access to critical swing voters. Moreover, as Nixon (as well as Senate nominees in Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota) proved on Tuesday, high-energy grassroots campaigning must not be underestimated.

If Democratic leaders talk about “socialists’” role in the party (in part because some corporate Democrats fuel the left vs. center-left sniping by punching left rather than forging an anti-fascist common front), they should remember that voters do not agree on the meaning of “socialism,” let alone attach a negative connotation to the term. The party's leaders would be foolish to flyspeck the policy views of voters or candidates identifying as “socialists” who support the party’s basic agenda (e.g., extending healthcare access, halting the illegal war, upholding the rule of law).

Democratic leaders’ job now is not to act as gatekeepers, but rather to roll out the welcome mat for new coalition members.

As Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said in his Atlanta speech on Sunday, Democrats need to present their campaign as a place “for everyone who craves sanity, competence, [and] quality public service.” Anyone irate that the Trump regime and its MAGA enablers make you “pay more for everything and took us to war on lies and spent most of last year trying to cover up for the world’s most famous pedophile while the crook president and his crook family rake[d] in billions” should feel right at home.Subscribed

On policy, Democratic leaders need not get tied up in knots debating the details of issues that will not get resolved before the 2028 election (e.g., Medicare for All). Their present task regarding healthcare is stopping MAGA’s assault on Medicare and Medicaid and fighting to restore Affordable Care Act subsidies.

Democrats should also seize the chance to flip the script when, as often happens, Trump’s accusations turn out to be nothing more than projection. Trump hollering about “communism” is deeply ironic, given his own infatuation with the most ruthless communist dictator on the planet, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Regarding Trump’s order to cancel or curtail military exercises with longtime ally South Korea, the New York Times reported:

President Trump denounced [joint summer military exercises], dealing yet another blow to the seven-decade-old alliance between Washington and Seoul. Under Mr. Trump, bilateral relations have already come under immense strain from ​his punishing tariffs on South Korean exports.​ And his transactional diplomacy has frustrated South Korea, most recently when he appeared to put Saudi Arabia on the path to enriching nuclear fuel on its own soil, a demand Seoul has made for years.

In recent years, North Korea has not only expanded its nuclear arsenal but also repeatedly threatened ​to use it against South ​Korea, labeling its neighbor ​a “most ​hostile enemy.” Its leader, Kim Jong-un, has also forged a mutual defense treaty with Moscow, dispatching troops and​ weapons to ​support Russia’s war against Ukraine. Despite these escalations, Mr. Trump, in a social media post, characterized North Korea as “unthreatening and respectful” while boasting of his “very good relationship” with Mr. Kim.​

Between Trump’s latest gift to the communist regime and his suck-uppery to China’s President Xi Jinping (at Taiwan’s expense), Trump and his congressional enablers deserve every ounce of condemnation Democrats can muster for his facilitation of communist aggression.

In addition, Democrats can be much more explicit about their commitment to reform (e.g., a mandatory Supreme Court ethics code and term limits) and oversight. In vowing to hold Trump — as well as his family, cronies, and Cabinet — accountable for malfeasance and gross incompetence, Democrats can underscore Republicans’ acquiescence in unprecedented corruption and their tolerance of life-endangering incompetence. 

Impeachment should remain on the table for the worst offenders. Since his confirmation, despite ample evidence of unfitness, Attorney General Todd Blanche showed up to campaign for Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, the GOP’s New York gubernatorial nominee. Blanche’s participation potentially violated the Hatch Act and was an outrageous breach of ethical norms expected from the top law enforcement official for all Americans. Blanche revels in his role as a political hack, while refusing to reassert the department’s independence (further highlighting the moral cowardice of Republicans such as Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, who couldn’t bear to oppose his nomination).

Given that, plus Blanche’s ongoing flouting of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Democrats should remain committed to investigating his conduct and pursuing impeachment. While they’re at it, they should explicitly remind Justice Department employees of their ethical and legal obligations to the Constitution, the courts, and the public. Regardless of what orders their MAGA bosses deliver, they too will have to answer for their conduct.

Democrats must reiterate that Blanche and other flagrantly incompetent and/or dishonest Cabinet members (e.g., RFK, Jr., who destroyed our national health infrastructure, or Pete Hegseth, who bollixed the war and corrupted military promotions) will not get a pass for lying, malicious assault on the rule of law, or stomach-turning malfeasance.

In sum, Democratic leaders’ task is to sustain an aggressive attack on the MAGA menace while keeping the flaps of the big tent wide open for all who want to defeat fascism. They should avoid feeding legacy media horserace storylines designed to highlight intraparty conflict. Instead, they must work 24/7 to forge the broadest pro-democracy coalition in history and relentlessly attack MAGA’s reckless, pro-communist foreign policy; domestic policy disasters; and relentless corruption.

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Politico, #Resistance Democrats are flopping in primaries, Samuel Benson, Aug. 20, 2026. Alexander Vindman’s Senate primary loss Tuesday is the latest stumble from a top Trump critic.

During President Donald Trump’s first term, they were resistance stars. During his second term, they couldn’t survive primaries.

Alexander Vindman’s Senate primary loss in Florida on Tuesday is the latest stumble for Democrats who rose to prominence during the impeachment trials and accountability protests of Trump’s first term. Vindman, a former National Security Council aide who testified during the 2019 House impeachment inquiry, made standing up to Trump and other forms of corruption a centerpiece of his campaign.

His national profile helped haul in big money, but that wasn’t enough to stave off an upset loss to democratic socialist Angie Nixon, whose win showed the shifting politics of the Democratic base.

“Vindman is a hero, but memories fade and the focus of most folks is on the cost of living,” said longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod. “She made those issues her focus.”

Democratic voters clearly want fighters who will stand up to the president and the GOP. But the string of losses for resistance candidates from the first Trump term illustrates a new era for the restive Democratic base, where vocal opposition to the president through official channels and public remonstrations no longer guarantees success.

The political graveyard of Trump-resistance-fighter campaigns is growing by the week.

Two of the 2021 House impeachment managers, Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), are among them: DeGette lost her reelection bid to a democratic socialist this summer, while Swalwell dropped out of the California gubernatorial primary after a string of sexual assault allegations. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), the lead majority counsel in the first Trump impeachment inquiry, was ousted in his primary. Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer honored for his heroics on Jan. 6, 2021, lost a House bid in Maryland — his second unsuccessful run.

Other Democrats who built their profiles on Trump resistance flopped as well.

Tom Steyer, a prominent financier of the Trump resistance movement, failed to advance in the California gubernatorial primary. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a member of the Oversight and Intelligence committees during the 2021 impeachment, fell short in his Senate bid. Reps. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.) and Al Green (D-Texas), both of whom led impeachment pushes against Trump, were ousted by younger challengers. And George Conway, a longtime Trump critic and Lincoln Project co-founder, won just six percent of the vote in a House primary in New York City.

“‘#Resistance’ was a very Trump 1.0 mood, and now we are in a different moment of anger,” said Lanae Erickson, senior vice president at center-left think tank Third Way. “They’re mad about the war. They’re mad about costs. They’re mad about the establishment not having delivered anything for them.”

Not all the races were defined by Trump accountability politics. Swalwell dropped his bid after multiple sexual assault allegations, several incumbents lost to DSA challengers in closed primaries, and in Goldman’s case, the debate over Israel was a major factor.

A Democratic operative who worked on one of the resistance races, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said the throughline is that those candidates are “institutionalists” who argued the justice system was going to hold Trump accountable. But voters have lost faith in those institutions after he returned to office, and were sold by other candidates’ messaging that relied more on railing against those very systems.

“The prescription isn’t what they were looking for anymore,” the operative said.

If Democrats retake control of the House, they will have to confront their base’s appetite for holding Trump accountable. Republicans have long warned that Democrats will immediately move to impeach Trump should they regain a House majority in 2027. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) — the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee — hasn’t ruled out impeachment.

But some Democrats are more careful. “There are certain sections of people that definitely want Democrats to prioritize impeachment of the president. There are also other segments of people that want Democrats to prioritize bringing down the cost of living,” said Rep. Julie Johnson (D-Texas), who lost a runoff in a newly gerrymandered district. “You can’t just focus on one thing at the exclusion of the other.”

These electoral results, along with a growing list of Trump-endorsed candidates who have lost their primaries, suggest Americans are ready to move past Trump, argued Mike Madrid, who co-founded (and later disaffiliated with) the anti-Trump GOP group Lincoln Project.

“People are just tired of him, broadly. They don’t want to deal with him and the fights and the exhaustion and the never-Trump model, but also the sycophantic MAGA support model either,” Madrid said, pointing to the string of Trump-endorsed candidates who lost primaries on Tuesday, from Florida to Wyoming. “It’s Trump fatigue.’”

Some candidates are taking note — and adjusting accordingly.Watch: The ConversationAdam Schiff on Democrats’ ‘losing message,’ AOC and AIPAC30:32Adam Schiff on Democrats’ ‘losing message,’ AOC and AIPAC

David Jolly, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Florida and a former GOP House member, left the Republican Party in 2018 over disagreements with Trump. He was an independent after that and a regular MSNBC talking-head criticizing the president. He registered as a Democrat more than a year ago, before launching his bid for governor.

Despite Trump’s role in his political evolution, Jolly hasn’t made Trump central to his race for governor. “I’m not running the race about Trump. I rarely talk about him. But I am going to tie Byron to Trump’s economy,” Jolly told POLITICO after winning the nomination on Tuesday night, referring to his Trump-endorsed opponent, GOP Rep. Byron Donalds.

Former Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), who served on the House Jan. 6th Committee, is running for her old seat against Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.). She said in a statement that she was “proud of the work I did in Congress to hold Donald Trump and his Administration accountable,” but quickly pivoted into an attack focused more on pocketbook issues.

Some of the candidates who lost primaries say their resistance bona fides did help — just not enough.

Dunn, the Capitol Police officer, earned the Presidential Citizens Medal from former President Joe Biden for his heroism on Jan. 6, 2021 and became well-known for his outspokenness about that day. He said that had little to do with his primary loss — although he acknowledged that Democratic voters’ top priority this cycle has shifted to affordability concerns.

“While name recognition got me to be a formidable challenger, it didn’t put me across the finish line,” said Dunn, who finished third in a crowded primary in Maryland’s 5th District. “I just think it’s too nuanced to just drill it down to ‘people just don’t care anymore.’” The Democratic nominee, Adrian Boafo, is “strongly about holding Donald Trump accountable,” Dunn added.

Goldman, similarly, lost to former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who often highlighted how he put his “body on the line” to push back against the administration’s immigration policies.

Steyer, the billionaire who ran for California governor, lost to Xavier Becerra — who campaigned hard on his court fights with the Trump administration as California’s attorney general, but also leaned into unrelated sections of his resume like his time as Biden’s health secretary.

Months before entering the race, Steyer reminded voters of the Need to Impeach campaign he once funded in an ad supporting last year’s Democratic gerrymander in California. But those credentials — which he later stressed on the campaign trail — were too dated and too intangible to push him over the top, according to his former campaign spokesperson Kevin Liao.

“Tom Steyer led an impeachment movement almost 10 years ago now, and I think it’s hard to expect the electorate to hold that long of a memory on anything that happened almost a decade ago,” he said. 

The American Prospect, The Credit Card Operative Helping Shape Democratic Primaries, Luke Goldstein and David Dayen, right, Aug. 20, 2026. Peter Kauffmann, vice chair for VoteVets, which has raised $20 million to spend in primaries on mostly moderate candidates this year, is running a front group fighting to keep credit card fees high.

This is a collaboration with The Lever, a reader-supported investigative news outlet that holds accountable the people and corporations manipulating the levers of power.

One of the top officials for an establishment-friendly political network playing a major role in Democratic primaries this election cycle also helms an astroturf lobbying group representing the interests of Wall Street banks and credit card companies.

Peter Kauffmann is listed as vice chair of VoteVets, a Democratic Party–aligned group that primarily supports military veterans running for office, and as treasurer of Vet Voice Foundation, an affiliated philanthropic arm.

But Kauffmann has also been acting as the chief spokesperson for a group called the Small Business Payments Alliance. The lobbying operation claims to represent the interests of ordinary small businesses, but it is fighting to protect one of the largest costs most small businesses face: swipe fees on every transaction at retail stores, charged by the credit card duopoly Visa and Mastercard.

Kauffmann’s dual role is jarring, given VoteVets’ general track record of supporting efforts to protect people from financial schemes, particularly veterans and service members. VoteVets and its allies have vocally opposed the Trump administration’s gutting of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and highlighted the impact of consumer-protection deregulation on military families going back to President Donald Trump’s first term.

VoteVets’ campaign arm has a more prominent function, however: to serve as a stalking horse for establishment candidates in primary elections while maintaining an image as an independent and trusted source marshaling veteran support. Having an attachment to big banks and credit card firms could diminish that reputation.

In a statement, Kauffmann said that the lobbying group he runs “is a coalition of small business owners working to fight harmful policies being pushed by the nation’s largest corporate megastores.” He likened the Small Business Payments Alliance’s support from the credit card industry, which he acknowledged, to other groups’ support from big retailers. “The difference is that SBPA actively works to protect small businesses,” he concluded.

VoteVets did not respond to a request for comment to clarify Kauffmann’s role at the organization.Veterans for Billionaires

VoteVets’ political action committee has raised over $20 million this year from a host of billionaire donors and used its war chest to intervene in Democratic primaries, often to support more moderate candidates over progressives.

That includes spending $10 million in the Iowa Senate primary this year to boost state Rep. Josh Turek, who is not a veteran, over state Sen. Zach Wahls, who was endorsed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). VoteVets then dropped $1 million to support former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin in his primary challenge against 14-term incumbent Rep. John Larson in Connecticut’s First Congressional District. As was the case in both those primaries, VoteVets frequently backs the same candidates as a new dark-money political network, The Bench, which shares many of the same donors.

Other VoteVets candidates this year include Rebecca Bennett in New Jersey and Cait Conley in New York, both prized establishment recruits with military backgrounds, as well as reach candidates Zach Dembo in Kentucky and Nancy Lacore in South Carolina. The organization lost a swing-seat race in Michigan, backing former Navy SEAL Matt Maasdam, who finished third in a race won by progressive organizer Will Lawrence.

There is one more VoteVets investment yet to play out on the primary calendar: It has spent over $1 million supporting Maura Sullivan, who is competing in the September 8 primary for New Hampshire’s First Congressional District to replace Rep. Chris Pappas, who is running for U.S. Senate.

All of these candidates have similar profiles: military experience and moderate politics.The Prospect in your inbox

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In some races, namely the Iowa Senate primary, the group has appeared to act as a pass-through entity for party leadership to support the Democratic establishment’s favored candidates. Both House Majority PAC, controlled by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Senate Majority PAC, run by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have funneled money through VoteVets.

“I’m not aware of a single veteran who fought for an American democracy where billionaires, corporations, and shady interests funnel dark money into TV ads to buy politicians,” said Adam Green, co-founder of the advocacy and campaign support group Progressive Change Campaign Committee.“The Claims They Make Are Blatantly False”

Kauffmann lists his affiliation with VoteVets on the page for his consulting firm, Bluejacket Strategies, where he’s represented a range of clients, from labor groups to large corporations like CVS.

That includes the Small Business Payments Alliance. The ostensible grassroots group pitches itself as a voice for small business, but its website says that it’s “a project of the Electronic Payment Coalition,” a lobbying vehicle funded by the credit card industry.

The group’s main advocacy work has been devoted to defeating the Credit Card Competition Act, a bill that aims to break up Visa and Mastercard’s duopoly by forcing credit card issuers to provide merchants with competitor payment processing networks so they can choose the option with lower fees.

Despite earning bipartisan support and even Trump’s endorsement, the bill has consistently failed to pass, amid an avalanche of lobbying from Wall Street groups like the Electronic Payments Coalition (EPC) and Small Business Payments Alliance. The EPC, the top credit card networks, and the biggest credit card issuers have spent more than $200 million on politics overall since 2023, including $3.8 million for Trump’s inaugural committee, nearly $16 million in campaign contributions, and $165 million in lobbying on Capitol Hill. Maintaining the status quo on swipe fees is among their top issues; the Credit Card Competition Act is the only bill mentioned on the group’s website.

The biggest recipients of campaign dollars from the credit card lobby include Reps. Andy Barr (R-KY) and French Hill (R-AR), leading Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee, which oversees the swipe fee legislation. Barr is likely to replace Mitch McConnell in the U.S. Senate.

The Small Business Payments Alliance has repeatedly flown small-business owners from across the country to Washington to lobby against the Credit Card Competition Act and delivered candy to congressional offices around holidays on multiple occasions. It has spent over $5 million in digital ads attacking the legislation. The organization’s website includes several slickly produced testimonials from small-business owners about the importance of credit card access, while intimating that the Credit Card Competition Act would destroy that access and ruin cash back or airline mile rewards programs, something the bill text doesn’t mention at all. 

New York Times, Trump Local Impacts Nationally: Alabama Democrats Look for a Black Backlash Over Voting Rights, Emily Cochrane, Aug. 20, 2026 (print ed). Democrats in Alabama and beyond are trying to harness Black anger over the Supreme Court’s weakening of the Voting Rights Act and the Republican redistricting that followed.

Doug Jones, a former senator, and Shomari Figures, a current but endangered representative, have been here before in Alabama.

Mr. Jones lost his Senate seat in 2020 to Tommy Tuberville, a former college football coach, and now hopes to beat him in November in a contest for governor. Mr. Figures won a House district in 2024 that was redrawn to give Black voters more representation. Now he is confronting new district lines drawn explicitly to give his seat to a Republican.

Besides being Democrats, what both men have in common is a need for Alabama’s Black voters to come out in November in overwhelming numbers, energized and angered in part by the Supreme Court’s decision in April that weakened the Voting Rights Act and set off a new wave of redistricting in the South.

“They know that their vote is not counting the same way,” Mr. Jones said of Black voters in an interview before a town hall in Troy, Ala., on Tuesday. He added, “People are paying attention to that, and they’re not happy about it.”

Voting rights are deeply personal in Alabama, where the state’s white leaders spent the civil rights movement strenuously resisting their Black citizens’ demands for a fair shake at the ballot box. The blood of those citizens helped galvanize Washington to enact the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Then this spring, acting on a lawsuit in Louisiana, the Supreme Court freed Southern leaders from the act’s strictures encouraging minority representation. Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama all moved quickly to dilute districts with strong blocs of Black voters and tilt them toward the G.O.P.

Alabama’s Legislature redrew the Second Congressional District where Mr. Figures’s victory in 2024 gave the state two Black House members — Mr. Figures and Representative Terri Sewell — for the first time.ImageA man in a short-sleeved, checked short carries “Doug for Alabama” yard signs.Voters take home yard signs for former Senator Doug Jones, who is running for governor of Alabama.Credit...Charity Rachelle for The New York Times

“Two was like giving candy to a baby — we were so happy, so excited,” said Gwendolyn Davis, 67, as she prepared to leave the Troy town hall with a stack of yard signs. “And with one stroke of a pen from another state, the Supreme Court has reversed” that.

She added, “I will do whatever I can to make sure that people realize how important it is.”

The new Second District was drawn to favor Republicans by pairing the majority-Black city of Montgomery with part of the southeastern Wiregrass region, making the new district whiter and more conservative. The old lines had stretched farther across the state, linking voters in Montgomery and part of Mobile to voters in the rural counties once farmed by slaves.Sign up for the Race/Related Newsletter Join a deep and provocative exploration of race, identity and society with New York Times journalists. Get it sent to your inbox.

Both Mr. Tuberville and Rhett Marques, a Republican state representative running against Mr. Figures, supported the new congressional map and are favored to win their races.

Their campaigns, both backed by Mr. Trump, have worked to frame their Democratic opponents as extreme and out of touch. In a primary election night speech this month, Mr. Marques described the election as a choice between “craziness and common sense.”

But Democrats say they have a chance, predicting that a backlash over the new congressional maps will energize Black voters as President Trump’s sagging approval ratings demoralize white conservatives, many of who might sit the election out.What matters to you in the South?Emily Cochrane covers the South for The Times. She is eager to learn about what makes life in this changing region distinct, and to talk to people whose lives have been directly affected by laws passed in Washington. Share your thoughts

That Democratic hope goes beyond Alabama and other Southern states directly affected by the voting rights decision. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on Wednesday launched digital advertisements in New York, Nebraska and Ohio House districts aimed at mobilizing Black voters, some of them explicitly invoking voting rights and the need for representation. Those ads followed a civil-rights-themed blitz last May in 21 House districts.

There is evidence that Black voters are indeed energized, though not necessarily over voting rights. In Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor last week, David Crowley, Milwaukee County’s Black executive, scored an astounding upset over a democratic socialist, Francesca Hong, who had been leading comfortably in the polls but struggling with Black voters. Black Milwaukee may well have made the difference.

A similar story played out in Michigan earlier this month, where Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive physician running for Senate, seemed to be cruising to a Democratic primary victory, despite troubles with Black voter support. In the end, he barely squeaked out a win over Representative Haley Stevens, who defied the polls and nearly scored an upset with Black support in Detroit and Flint.ImageShomari Figures speaks into a microphone onstage. Doug Jones is seated near him.This campaign season, Mr. Figures and Mr. Jones have linked arms, joining each other in Troy and Montgomery for town halls this month where they challenged their state leaders.Credit...Charity Rachelle for The New York Times

For Mr. Jones and Mr. Figures, the civil rights theme is not a stretch. As a U.S. attorney in Birmingham, Mr. Jones helped prosecute two members of the Ku Klux Klan who bombed a church there in 1963 and killed four young Black girls.

Mr. Figures’s father, Michael Figures, a state senator and civil rights lawyer, helped bring the lawsuit that bankrupted the Klan. Michael Figures also helped sue the state of Alabama over its congressional map in the 1990s, leading to the creation of the first majority-Black district in the state.

This campaign season, Mr. Figures and Mr. Jones have linked arms, joining each other in Troy and Montgomery for town halls this month where they challenged their state leaders.

“They have to do everything they can to reduce representation,” Mr. Figures told the crowd in a ballroom at Troy University.

“They redrew my district in furtherance of that effort,” he said. “But we’re going to win it in November.”

Mr. Jones has campaigned in several majority-Black counties, including rural Greene County, which has already shown signs of the energy that he will need. About 79 percent of Greene County is Black, and in the May primary, turnout was strikingly high.

Last month, Mr. Jones told a cluster of residents gathered at the Greene County courthouse that Alabama leaders were “going to draw district lines to make sure” that “your voice is not represented in the Congress of the United States.”

“I think the Voting Rights Act is going to be an issue in this fall campaign,” Mr. Jones added. “And I think people are energized.”

Such sentiments carry risk. Some organizers cautioned that the new maps could also demoralize Black Alabamians already disconnected from political leaders. Energizing such voters will not happen automatically.

“Each time that you take people’s rights away like that, they’re going to be discouraged and they’re not going to want to go vote,” said Marilyn Hobbs, who volunteers with a voter education organization in Montgomery. “We’ve got to knock on the doors.”

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Michigan’s Green Ghost, Brendan Hartnett, right, Aug. 20, 2026. As The Bulwark first reported, the Green Party of Michigan may have nominated a Republican plant to run on its ballot line in Michigan’s competitive 7th Congressional District.

Our investigation uncovered that 25-year-old Shane Dedrick was chosen as the party’s nominee after joining the Green Party of Michigan’s April nominating convention on Zoom—during which he kept his camera off, seemed to know little about the party platform, and went through practically no vetting. Dedrick is not active on social media, does not have a campaign website, and has yet to register with the FEC.

Despite multiple attempts, The Bulwark was unable to get in contact with Dedrick. We’re not alone.

Following our story, Michigan’s WLNS reached out to Dedrick unsuccessfully and even visited his residence, but no one came to the door. Douglas Marsh, communications director for the Michigan Greens, told WLNS, “To my knowledge, no one has heard from him since April 25,” when Dedrick first introduced himself to the party, never showed his face, and left 33 minutes later as the party’s nominee. Marsh told The Bulwark that he has still not been able to contact Dedrick.

Initially, that didn’t stop the Michigan Greens from continuing to promote Dedrick on social media. However, in recent days, the party has not included Dedrick in its posts advertising its slate of candidates.

On Wednesday, the party even posted a quote from its secretary of state nominee, Eric Borregard: “If I lived in the 7th District, my own personal choice would probably be the grassroots candidate Felix Thibodeau of the Working Class Party now.”

Asked if this meant the Michigan Green Party was withdrawing its support for Dedrick and endorsing Thibodeau, Marsh told The Bulwark, “The party has opted not to formally endorse any candidates not in the party this cycle, but the longer Dedrick remains MIA, the more difficult it is to extend him the benefit of the doubt.”

The post about Thibodeau has since been deleted from the post.1 But a comment from the party account expresses largely the same sentiment:

No, unfortunately it’s passed the point of no return for that one. The party did make a mistake in the Dedrick nomination. It’s up [to] the voters now to make up their own minds which one of four candidates is best for them in the end. Maybe the Republicans would rather vote for a handsome young MAGA mystery candidate than an old warmonging [sic], crazed budget busting lunatic like [incumbent Rep.] Tom Barrett.

Marsh told The Bulwark, “I remain agnostic about Dedrick’s intentions in seeking and accepting our nomination. He signed a sworn and notarized affidavit in 2026 indicating his wish to affiliate with an ecosocialist organization. If it was fraudulent, we will explore options, but so far all we have to work with is silence and unanswered questions.”

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Postliberalism Is Not About Economic Transformation… Disregard the empty allegations of ‘socialism.’ The real problem with postliberalism is its underlying authoritarian vision, writes MATT McMANUS.
• Cowards Are Running This Country… On The Bulwark Daily, former CIA officer JULIA CURLEE joins TIM MILLER to talk about the chaos of the anti-trans witch hunt that resulted in her firing, and ERRIN HAINES comes on to discuss the Florida primaries and Democratic prospects in the South.
• Tim Unboxes a Republican Candidate’s “Medical Device”... Zach Lahn is the Republican nominee for governor of Iowa with a very unusual résumé and some very unconventional positions. BRENDAN HARTNETT joins TIM on Bulwark Takes to dig into Lahn’s ties to . . . Kansas (?) and the Koch network.
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Quick Hits

DIFFERENCES OF JUDICIAL OPINION: During his first term, Donald Trump was mostly happy to nominate federal judges from the existing conservative legal movement. Then he noticed something: Sometimes, when he wanted to do a thing—steal the 2020 election, for example—his own judges wouldn’t let him. Judases! Benedict Arnolds! When Trump got back in office, he decided he’d target a different kind of judge.

The strategy is paying off. Yesterday, Politico took a look through the towering pile of lawsuits—more than 20,000 of them—that have been filed over the past year over ICE’s policy of locking up people facing deportation proceedings without bond. In the vast majority of cases, judges have ruled against these detainments. But there’s one single group of judges who have tended to side with the president: The judges he nominated since returning to office.

Seems pretty bad—but then, there are some silver linings. One, Trump is way off the pace of his first term in filling federal court vacancies, in part because there are many fewer vacancies for him to fill. And two, he hasn’t gotten any new cracks at another SCOTUS vacancy yet—and God willing he never will.

NOW HERE’S A PUZZLER: “President Trump’s half-built White House ballroom is a 90,000-square-foot embodiment of a recurring legal conundrum,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “What happens when a boundary-pushing president moves faster than courts can keep up?”

What a mind-bending paradox indeed! The report continues:

Construction of the “concrete-and-steel superstructure,” [the Trump administration says], has already advanced so far that it would be “practically impossible” to stop now, let alone tear down what has already been built.

Two lower courts have ruled that the ballroom project is probably illegal because Congress never approved it. But Trump has been allowed to build while the litigation proceeded. He has taken full advantage of that dispensation, leaving the Supreme Court in a pickle as the grace period is set to expire this week. [Emphasis added.]

The solution seems pretty simple: The president shouldn’t be allowed to continue to do something that’s probably illegal. That’s more or less what the word “illegal” means—you’re not allowed to do it.

Frustrated sarcasm aside, the Journal article is really about how the administration is rushing, in a whole bunch of areas, to create facts on the ground before the courts can intervene. It’s an important subject worthy of attention.

It’s also why the Supreme Court should block further construction immediately and indefinitely, and why the next Congress and/or president should demolish Trump’s construction—as a demonstration of the supremacy of the law and the government’s fealty to it.

Besides, if the Reflecting Pool saga is any indication of Trump’s preference for contractors, that ballroom won’t be safe to stand in.

U.S. Debt, Markets, Economy, Inflation

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

New York Times, U.S. Debt Hits $40 Trillion as America’s Borrowing Binge Continues, Alan Rappeport, Aug. 20, 2026. President Trump’s promises to restore fiscal order and reduce the amount of America’s debt burden have been undercut by spending on the Iran war, tax cuts and tariff refunds

America’s gross national debt topped $40 trillion for the first time on Wednesday, an ominous milestone for an economy that sits on a shaky fiscal foundation after decades of borrowing to pay for the rising costs of the military, social safety net programs and President Trump’s tax cuts.

This year alone, the United States is on track to borrow more than $2 trillion to help pay for its obligations, including spending on the war in Iran and the sweeping tax cuts that Republicans enacted in 2025. Soaring interest payments to investors who have purchased America’s debt now make up about half of that red ink, pushing the United States into a deeper financial hole.National debt as a percentage of G.D.P.

Whether the mounting debt load is a problem to be solved or a function of America’s economic strength remains a matter of debate. Deficits are also a point of political gamesmanship, with Republicans most passionate about eliminating them when they are out of power.

“The scariest thing about this is how we’re starting to see the debt spiral begin,” said Marc Goldwein, senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which supports deficit reduction, referring to interest on the debt.

The inability of lawmakers to confront the debt comes with long-term risks. While the United States remains the world’s largest economy, its mounting debt load could lead investors to demand higher interest rates for U.S. bonds or raise questions about the nation’s creditworthiness, which could erode confidence in the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Both Republicans and Democrats are responsible for America’s borrowing burden. The United States has had to sell an increasing amount of debt to cover the costs of health programs, stimulus benefits, disaster relief and daily government operations.

President Trump has promised to restore fiscal order, yet many of his policies have only exacerbated America’s financial woes.

When he first ran for the White House in 2016, Mr. Trump said he would eliminate the national debt within eight years by making new trade deals and jump-starting economic growth. Since then, the national debt has doubled.

In his second term, Mr. Trump’s biggest initiatives to cut spending and increase revenue have failed to materialize.

The Department of Government Efficiency, led initially by Elon Musk, promised to reduce federal spending by $1 trillion. So far it claims to have produced savings of just over $200 billion. The Government Accountability Office said this month that the department’s estimate lacked reliability and transparency.

The Trump administration was making progress in collecting additional government revenue by imposing sweeping tariffs on imports. Those plans were derailed this year when the Supreme Court ruled that some of those tariffs were illegal, forcing the federal government to refund more than $160 billion of the money to companies that paid the import duties.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who set a goal of reducing the deficit to 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2028 from over 6 percent when Mr. Trump took office, acknowledged last week that deficits were going in the wrong direction this year.

In an interview with Newsmax, Mr. Bessent offered several reasons to explain why deficits are growing. He said that spending associated with the war with Iran had forced the country to spend more on the military, and that tariff refunds had undercut the Trump administration’s progress toward reducing the deficit as a share of gross domestic product in 2025. The war in Iran, which has caused energy prices to rise in the United States, has also been a drag on economic growth and diminished the expansion that Trump administration officials had hoped would increase tax revenue.

Mr. Bessent also said last year’s tax cuts were adding to deficits because businesses were taking advantage of a provision allowing them to immediately deduct the cost of factory construction and equipment. According to estimates from the Joint Committee on Taxation, those measures could cost $100 billion this year. However, the Treasury secretary said that despite their initial cost, the cuts would pay off in the future with additional revenue.

“That is a hit now to the deficit, but we are creating productive assets for future growth which will be paying taxes down the line,” Mr. Bessent said. “I think of that more as like pulling back a slingshot and creating a lot of potential energy that becomes kinetic.”

Despite his confidence that the fiscal trajectory will stabilize, investors have been demonstrating their anxiety over U.S. deficits by demanding greater compensation for holding American bonds. The yield on 30-year U.S. Treasuries hit its highest level in nearly two decades this week, meaning higher borrowing costs for inflation-weary consumers and businesses.re not stopping until the balance of power in this country shifts back to where it belongs: with the people. 

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Case Against Bond Market Panic, Paul Krugman, right, Aug. 20, 2026. Don’t let the Very Serious People undermine a progressive agenda — again. 

Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion by Neil Gaiman | Goodreads

Yesterday I wrote about how interest rates are rising around the world. I acknowledged that the higher rates are a real problem, but argued that there is no evidence that the U.S. faces a looming Greek-type debt crisis. Today I’ll talk about why it’s important for the future Democratic administration (assuming that we have free and fair elections in 2028) to keep a sense of perspective and not panic about the size of the federal debt.

Yes, as headlines in every newspaper are telling us, U.S. debt just hit $40 trillion —a number that is big and round, but otherwise has no special significance. More relevant is the incredible irresponsibility of the Trump administration, with its unfunded tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, billions in wasteful military spending — redesigning aircraft carriers because Trump doesn’t like the way they look! — and more. Yet I don’t think that the U.S. faces a debt crisis. Specifically, I don’t think we will suffer a broad economic crisis brought on by investors’ loss of faith that the heavily indebted U.S. government will fail to pay what it owes.

I backed up that claim in yesterday’s post by citing market data showing that investors have little concern that the U.S. will default on its debt or that it will try to inflate the real value of the debt away. While such data are important, however, as some readers pointed out, they are not definitive because markets often fail to see even predictable crises coming. Some of us remember all too well the market’s complacency about housing in the 2000s, even though the signs of a massive bubble were everywhere one looked.

But anyone who asserts that markets are missing an impending debt crisis should be asked to explain how, exactly, such a crisis might play out. Don’t wave your hands at the debt crises that struck Greece and other southern European nations around 2010, because our situation is very different: Unlike Greece, which is a member of the euro area, the U.S. economy runs on dollars and U.S. government debt is denominated in dollars.

That matters because it’s very hard to construct a scenario for a Greek-style debt crisis in a nation that borrows in its own currency. As far as I can tell — and I’ve studied the issue at length — there are no historical examples in which this happened. The detailed, wonkish logic of why we are not and have never been Greece is explained in a paper I presented at the IMF’s annual research conference some years ago.

Yet the issue of whether a U.S. debt crisis was imminent was highly relevant at the time I presented that paper. Why? Because the Very Serious People were using scare stories about a potential debt crisis to demand fiscal austerity that delayed full recovery from the global financial crisis right to the end of the Obama administration, not to mention demanding cuts to Medicare and Social Security.

Who were the Very Serious People? Some were Republicans out to sabotage Obama. Others were self-important centrists. And the media played a big role. As Ezra Klein wrote in 2013,

For reasons I’ve never quite understood, the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply when it comes to the deficit. On this one issue, reporters are permitted to openly cheer a particular set of highly controversial policy solutions.

The VSPs, aka the debt scolds, went strangely silent once Trump took office the first time. Somehow massive revenue-losing tax cuts that further enriched the already wealthy didn’t alarm them as much as fiscal stimulus aimed at fighting mass unemployment.

But if Democrats control Congress and the White House in 2029, you can be sure that the Very Serious People will be back.

Paul Waldman had an excellent post on this recently, in which he made a prediction:

We know exactly what is going to happen once a Democrat is elected president — in fact, the ground will be seeded during the 2028 campaign. All of a sudden, the deficit will become an urgent matter that Democrats have to address, the subject of endless media coverage and fake concern from Republicans. Democratic plans for programs such as health care will be met once again with “But how are you going to pay for it?” Proposals for new commissions to recommend drastic budget cuts will be bandied about. Professional deficit scolds from organizations like the Peterson Institute will once again find themselves deluged with media requests. And because Democrats desperately want to be considered Serious People, they tend to react by saying “Oh yes, we take the deficit very seriously and we are committed to tackling it,” then find themselves hamstrung in their ability to govern.

Exactly. And the message for Democrats is clear: Don’t let the Very Serious People do what they did to Obama, using scaremongering about a debt crisis to block a progressive agenda.

I’m not saying that Democrats should be like Trump, and blithely ignore debt and deficits. They should by all means push for tax hikes on high incomes, close loopholes exploited by multinational corporations, strengthen IRS enforcement, and more. This could make a big difference: As Jared Bernstein and Bobby Kogan have shown, our deficit would be far more manageable if first Bush, then Trump, hadn’t rammed through tax cuts that hugely favored high-income Americans:

So Democrats should aim to restore the progressivity of the U.S. tax system, which would both help reverse our descent into oligarchy and help make the budget deficit more manageable. But the lesson from the Obama years is that they must not let themselves be intimidated by dire warnings about an imminent debt crisis. These warnings were totally wrong 15 years ago, and will still be wrong in 2029 even if interest rates remain relatively high.

In short, do not give in to debt panic.

World News, Global  Economy, Human Rights, Disasters

New York Times, China Sentences Evergrande Founder to Life in Prison, Yan Zhuang and Alexandra Stevenson, Aug. 20, 2026. Hui Ka Yan’s punishment caps the downfall of a property empire whose collapse set off a prolonged crisis in the Chinese economy. 

A court in China on Thursday sentenced the billionaire founder of Evergrande to life in prison, years after the real estate giant’s collapse brought China’s financial system to the brink.

Hui Ka Yan, the company’s founder and former chairman, was also ordered to forfeit all of his personal assets, marking the final chapter in a remarkable fall from the upper echelons of Chinese society. Once one of the world’s richest men, Mr. Hui had belonged to an elite group of political advisers and cultivated the image of a flamboyant tycoon.

The Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court found that between 2016 and 2021, Mr. Hui and Evergrande engaged in large-scale financial fraud and committed crimes including misuse of funds, fund-raising fraud and illegally taking public deposits, according to an announcement the court posted on social media. Mr. Hui pleaded guilty to the charges in April.

On Thursday, Mr. Hui stood expressionless in a navy blue shirt, flanked by two police officers, as the court handed down its sentence. It was the first time he had been seen in public since his sudden disappearance in 2023. His hair, once jet black, was now white. (In more flush times, Mr. Hui wore a gold-buckled Hermès belt to a staid political conference and traveled to Paris to taste rare French wines.)

The court stripped him of his political rights for life and fined Evergrande Group and its subsidiary, Evergrande Real Estate Group, a combined $2.35 billion.

Evergrande was once China’s fastest-growing property developer. But its collapse in 2021 under more than $300 billion of debt pushed China’s financial system to the edge and exposed a vulnerability in the Chinese economy: its extraordinary dependency on real estate to drive growth.

Few companies played a bigger role in China’s staggering real estate boom. Evergrande’s crash helped usher in a prolonged housing crisis that is still being felt across the economy.

The court found that Mr. Hui bore responsibility for Evergrande Group’s operations and should be punished severely because his actions and those of the company “seriously disrupted the socialist market economic order,” according to its social media post.

“The amount involved in the crime is exceptionally large, the circumstances are particularly heinous, exceptionally heavy economic losses have been caused, and the harm to society is extremely grave,” the court said.

Mr. Hui founded Evergrande in 1996 in southern China just as the country was beginning to urbanize and move people from the countryside into the cities. Evergrande rode that transformation to spectacular heights, and Mr. Hui expanded his empire to include a soccer team and an electric vehicle company.

But by 2020, Beijing was growing worried that its property boom — the biggest the world has ever seen — was threatening the financial system. Developers like Evergrande had borrowed extensively from local governments, banks and other creditors to finance breakneck expansion. To cool the market, officials imposed restrictions on how much developers could borrow. For heavily indebted companies like Evergrande, the measures cut off the steady flow of cash they needed to keep building.

When Evergrande collapsed in 2021, much of the blame fell on Beijing and its abrupt crackdown. Home buyers protested in the streets in cities across China. But the company had been borrowing beyond its means for years and had engaged in questionable accounting.

Special Reports (Continued from Above)

Seth Abramson Special Report

Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Evidence Is Mounting That Natalie Harp Is a Major National Security Vulnerability for America, Seth Abramson, right, Aug. 20, 2026. With each revelation about who this person is, how she got where she did, what she does daily, and how her control over the President of the United States has evolved, things look darker and darker.

You may think you already know all the ways in which Natalie Harp—an attractive 35-year-old blonde woman who looks somewhat like the very Donald Trump daughter the president has long openly lusted after (see here, here, here, here, and here) and who appeared out of nowhere praising Trump on Fox News at a key moment in the 2020 presidential campaign season—is an unprecedented national security threat.

You don’t.

This remains true even though, over the last week—ever since Americans learned that during Operation Orange Chicken the president chose to save his new personal aide’s life instead of either the United States Secretary of State (Marco Rubio) or the United States Secretary of the Treasury (Scott Bessent)—many Americans have been worried about how Harp came to be at the center of the people’s business in the White House.

As those questions have mounted, the White House hasn’t been able to answer them.

In fact, it hasn’t even tried.

It won’t make Harp available for interviews; has attacked anyone who mentions Harp with shocking viciousness; and responds to queries about her only with hagiographic praise that wouldn’t be out of place on a government-run Pyongyang bathroom stall.

It won’t even clearly state what the official position is that Donald Trump has now given to an inexperienced young person—Harp was in her mid-20s, and had only just recently finished her schooling in Business Administration at two religious schools, when she entered Trump’s inner circle—even though it’s we taxpayers who are paying $150,000/year to Harp, which notably is about 250% over the 2026 U.S. median salary.

Sometimes the White House says Natalie Harp is Special Assistant to the President.

Sometimes the White House says she is Executive Assistant to the President.

Sometimes the White House says she’s the White House Appointments Secretary.

When she worked on the 2024 Trump presidential campaign, Trump declined to give her any title at all.

For her part, Harp refers to herself a “self-employed entrepreneur” on LinkedIn—thereby erasing her massive government salary and her employment by America’s taxpayers.

Sometimes the White House implies that it’s been grooming Harp to be White House Press Secretary, though besides being telegenic and having briefly worked on-air for a fake-news organization, it’s not clear what would qualify her for that position, either.

Sometimes Harp is merely said to be the leading “gatekeeper” to the President of the United States—i.e., to get to him, you must (rather inexplicably) go through her, first.

What’s clear is that none of these jobs have to do with any of the subjects Ms. Harp studied in school. Nor—far more oddly—does any of it apparently have to do with anything Harp actually does on a daily basis. As readers will see in the list below, nothing Harp does in the White House appears to be worth any salary at all—let alone the well over half a million dollars Harp would earn over the course of a four-year presidential term—for major-media reports unanimously establish that what Harp does is no more than a series of things Trump should do himself or no one should:

She types out social media posts that Trump dictates. Given that Trump and his doctors have consistently said that he’s in excellent physical health, and given that his fingers work and he’s literally sitting beside Harp as she types out his social media posts, and given that most of those social media posts do nothing more than diminish the Office of the President and the standing of the United States in the world—truly, you’ve got to read them to believe how deranged they are (see here, here, here, here, and here)—it would surely be the general consensus of mental health experts, former diplomats, attorneys, and politicos that Trump ought to either stop using social media altogether or else type his own posts. His doing so would presumably reduce their number, force him to consider his words and their number far more carefully than he does when he can simply project his bile directly onto Harp’s furiously typing fingertips, and reduce $150,000/year in federal waste and fraud—exactly the task he set Elon Musk and DOGE to in 2025 but appears only to believe in if it doesn’t effect his own daily routine.

She prints out deranged internet content that sends President Trump spiraling in dangerous ways—and much of what she hands to him is farcical, made up, misleading, disinformation, factually impossible, or mere conspiracy theory.

The President of the United States should spend, under his Oath of Office, exactly no time each day surfing the web for the latest crackpot content online, but neither should we be paying $150,000 per annum for someone else to do that. Why?

Because the end result is the same: an alternately comical and dangerously misinformed stream of presidential declarations born of a man spending much of his day reading the dregs of the internet in printed-out format. Vanity Fair reports that anything Harp hands to Trump fits into one of three categories that are broadly classifiable as “satisfaction, validation, and jubilation.”

So either Harp is deliberately appealing to Trump’s worst psychic demons, getting him to stew daily over his enemies’ comeuppance with a grim, devious satisfaction; or trying to find obscure sources to validate whatever he already believes, which given his native ignorance on most topics and penchant for conspiracy theories means she’s trawling low-quality websites and anonymous digital screeds to pander to the president’s limited digital and/or media literacy; or she’s encouraging him to read about his own victories, which is a waste of any president’s time as it does no more than stroke his ego. None of this constitutes the work of a U.S. president, and none of this is healthy for anyone—let alone a man obsessed with vengeance, adulation, and disinformation.

She ensures that the President of the United States doesn’t read anything of value. As established in Proof of Collusion (2018), Proof of Conspiracy (2019), and Proof of Corruption (2020), Donald Trump infamously doesn’t read his daily intel briefings (the “PDB”), insists that all presentations to him be oral, and when he must read anything demands it be bullet-pointed and no more than a page long (even if the document it summarizes is hundreds of pages). He’s regularly said, by those who’ve worked closely with him, to be functionally illiterate (see here, here, here, and here) as well as someone who—and Trump actually admits this—reads only “about myself.” Putting aside that this likely should disqualify him from any leadership position, let alone the presidency, it’s true that it’s conventionally been the role of a POTUS’ special assistants to bring him the manageable number of newspapers he reads daily, even if, as would surely be the case with Mr. Trump, he reads only their headlines. Harp appears to have exactly the opposite role. She gives the president zero newspapers, magazines, or briefings—ever—but instead creates the appearance of informing the President of the United States about current events by presenting him with squibs written by trolls and cranks. So Harp must be dinged here not just for what she does do, but for what she doesn’t.

She acts as his moral support and “human binky.” This isn’t a slur—this is the reporting that has come from Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, a Trump biographer and White House Correspondent who says that in the White House it’s a settled and accepted fact that Trump needs Harp around for moral support—someone who’ll praise and validate him endlessly, beyond the normal human bounds of such effusive goosing. Haberman is the one who described Harp as a “human binky” and confirmed that White House staffers likewise see her this way. While it’s beyond the scope of this report to say whether someone who needs as much second-to-second validation as Donald Trump does—and while it’s beyond the skills of this author to state definitively what he suspects is true, which is that such a need indicates Trump lacks an internal sense of self-worth—can ably serve as President of the United States, what’s certain is that Trump should be paying Harp to be his binky, not us. Moreover, and as importantly, this role should not be commingled with other, actually administratively urgent roles that a POTUS needs filled. Certainly, Harp-qua-binky should not make it her business to keep away from Trump other White House officials who might be doing something other than fluffing his shattered ego. Her acts of obstruction are undoubtedly counterproductive to any person running one of the world’s superpowers with skill and adroitness.

And yet, having said all the above, I’ll say too that if you thought this was the worst of the Natalie Harp Situation, you’d be dead wrong. You’d be wrong because the full scope of the problem here can’t be readily conceived of; in fact, it’s so unthinkable—by way of being so unprecedented—that it would be astonishing if any American, at least without first doing a deep dive on Harp themselves, would think of it on their own.

So let’s start with the basics.Natalie Harp: The Basics

We begin this lengthy report with simple, core realities that are nevertheless unusual and unsettling:

Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp is in closer daily physical proximity to the President of the United States daily than anyone on Earth.

Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp has more regular access to the often classified information received by the President of the United States daily than anyone on Earth besides the president himself.

Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp, who has no background in any arena that’s relevant to the presidency or her current government job—Law, Journalism, Intelligence, National Security, Military Studies, Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, Domestic Policy, Political Science, Sociology, or Public Policy—is the chief decider of what information the President of the United States receives. And thus far her decision has been to “play into the less productive and more troublesome parts of his nature, putting things in front of him that aren’t vetted”—meaning that, by volume, Natalie Harp is the leading misinformation agent in the White House, evem as her sole victim is the leader of the free world.

The President of the United States deems Harp so mission-critical to his life and political career that he not only says she’s the only person in the world who “loves [me] as much as my wife and children,” but chose her—and not his Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, Deputy Chief of Staff (Stephen Miller), chief spokesman (Steven Cheung), or chief speechwriter (Ross Worthington)—to survive the “enormous” risk of a missile attack against Air Force One in Turkey last month. This means that Trump is treating Harp as emergency personnel in the White House when (see supra) there’s no evidence she does anything of any value.

From the foregoing, we’d at least assume that Natalie Harp is the most studied, vetted, tracked, generally known-about person in the White House. After all, one can’t, surely, be in the closest proximity to both Donald Trump and all the information he receives daily—especially under circumstances in which he appears to trust you and care about you more than almost anyone—without having being thoroughly checked out, right?

Well, keep that thought in mind, as you’re going to be more than disappointed.Natalie Harp: The Omissions

What value Natalie Harp brings to the White House isn’t the only mystery at the heart of her presence mere feet from the President of the United States wherever he goes.

Far more importantly, Harp’s entire life is a black box almost no one has seen inside.

Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp did not undergo any security checks whatsoever for the first year-plus of her time in the White House.

Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp was the reason these security checks did not occur; in other words, she refused to agree to them, and issued refusals over and over without being willing to offer a reason for them.

Reliable major-media reporting reveals that Harp came onto Trump’s radar when she very publicly said (in 2019, during a Fox News interview) that he had saved her life by signing a so-called “Right to Try” bill in 2018 that let her get experimental treatment for her bone cancer. The problem? Medical experts years ago debunked this lie by Harp, confirming that she would have been well aware when she got her cancer treatments that Trump and his bill had nothing to do with them or her cancer remission. (There is much more on this infra.) In other words, Harp’s whole MAGA “origin story” is a lie.

Harp’s own words establish that she lied, as in a 2024 campaign documentary she can be heard saying (falsely) that Trump was the first politician she ever became interested in and (also falsely, if her “Right to Try” story were at all true) that she became invested in Trump because of his political acumen: “Politics was never something I liked. When I was sick, I started watching the Republican debates. He was my first exposure to politics, and I loved it. Like, this guy, he gets it.” In fact (see infra), Harp’s family reports that her obsession with Republican politics began when she was a child. Yet Trump actively participated in Harp’s cynical ruse, pretending that he hadn’t already come to know her extremely well when he introduced her as a political prop at the 2019 Faith & Freedom Coalition “Road to Majority” Summit (which fell in the midst of his presidential campaign and his ardent wooing of Christian evangelicals). “They were preparing her for death. Her name is Natalie Harp, and because of ‘Right to Try,’ she’s now living, and I think doing phenomenally well. And somebody said she’s here. Are you here, Natalie? Where’s Natalie? Will you come up here, please?” No, “somebody” didn’t casually tell Trump, “she’s here.” Trump operationally transported Harp to a spot on stage where she could used as a premeditated campaign setpiece at a time he was getting bad press for having made fun of evangelicals behind their backs. And as we’ll see infra, he also knew his bill had nothing to do with her recovery.

Harp’s father committed suicide in 2020, and she thereafter lied to everyone about how it happened—a plot her mother supported, suggesting some possible mental instability in Harp’s remaining parent even putting aside what we now know (as is discussed much more, infra): there is a very real possibility that Robert Harp’s death was linked to Donald Trump’s domestic policies in a way that Natalie Harp might have felt required her to lie about it in order to stay in Trump and his team’s good graces during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign she wanted desperately to be a part of.

The foregoing alleged scheme to lie about a parent’s death is troubling because the parent apparently willing to go along with it—Natalie’s mother—was the one who homeschooled Harp for many years, and is now said by her son Preston Harp to be not just “extremely conservative” but obsessed with giving Natalie a “Christ-led education.” That terminology raises the possibility that Harp’s textbooks as a child were religious texts, and that her knowledge of contemporary civilization is therefore minimal.

Harp did not leave her “Christ-led” schooling to begin non-religious schooling at any point—as in fact she’s never received any non-religious schooling. She went right from her “Christ-led” homeschooling to religious-school study at Point Loma Nazarene University and then a religious-school master’s at Liberty.

Reliable major-media reporting confirms that inside the White House Harp is known as a “loner” who “forgets to eat and sleep” because her devotion to Trump as a pseudoreligious figure (see infra) is so extreme as to be nearly monastic. More than once, observers in journalism have written that Harp appears to consider Trump the Second Coming of Christ, an observation buttressed by the fact that when she had a vlog on the fake-news website OANN she would close out each episode with either a Bible quote or a Trump quote—appearing to treat these two discrete categories of citation as literally interchangeable.

Ms. Harp is estranged from her brother Preston in part because, unlike her, he escaped his mother’s nefarious influence and Natalie didn’t. Natalie now won’t speak to Preston, having been indoctrinated by her mother’s thesis of “American Exceptionalism,” under which thesis she for years tried to feed Natalie and Preston the “delusion” that “[her thesis] is the [sole] correct way of looking at things—that the United States is the boss of the world, and that slavery was normal back then [in the 1800s], so people weren’t bad because they had slaves.” Yes, that’s right, Natalie Harp was raised in a slavery apologist home. Worse still, there’s evidence that the other reason for Preston’s estrangement from Natalie and her mother may have to do with Robert Harp’s death—and may therefore be, also, connected to Natalie’s unhealthy obsession with Donald Trump (more infra).

Harp never revealed to Trump that she has a history of becoming obsessed with GOP presidents and trying to get near to them by inappropriate communications. Her brother describes this as an “obsession” of hers that has lasted for decades.

Needless to say, at this point the sheer volume of red flags here is enough to, going forward, keep Harp out of the White House forever. Ex ante, it would have ensured that she never worked there in the first instance. We can now see why she might have refused in the first instance to fill out security-clearance paperwork or have a deep background check conducted by security professionals inside the federal government.When I failed the chemotherapies that were on the market, no one wanted me in their clinical trials. They didn't give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did, and without you, I'd have died waiting for them to be approved.

—Natalie Harp, lying on national TV at the 2020 Republican National Convention

So Harp’s origin story is a lie; she refused to let any experts look into it; and yet she wanted to have the closest proximity and access to the President of the United States of anyone on Earth after a quarter-century of religious education had allowed her to transmute a lifelong obsession with GOP presidents to a belief—shared by Donald Trump, worryingly enough—that Trump himself is God’s “Chosen One” on Earth.

Harp’s relationship with Trump is thus revealed as not just delusional and toxic but mutually parasitic, as she feeds Trump’s dangerous delusion that—despite being a serial rapist, convicted criminal, draft dodger, lifelong con man, serial adulterer, and so on—he’s been personally chosen by a God he doesn’t actually believe in to rule the world…

…even as he, in turn, by accepting this heretical premise, feeds Harp’s delusion that she’s now become a latter-day Apostle.

It’s no wonder that it took complaints by numerous White House officials—political and intelligence and security staff alike—for President Trump to be willing to step in and force a security check for Harp, which fact of course only means that the one that was ultimately done (which she passed) was pro forma. It was, that is, conducted by men and women who already understood the result the president wanted from them.

So it would be folly to submit that Natalie Harp received an unbiased, professional, careful, thorough security review. She almost certainly didn’t—or at least no more than Jared Kushner ever did. In other words, Harp was seen as a security risk by all the people in the White House who are expert at spotting these things—to include spotting someone so mentally troubled that she might lash out with violence if she were suddenly torn from a man she likens to Jesus—and Mr. Trump overruled them because he likes being likened to Jesus and can’t fathom the massive personal danger to himself that definitionally accompanies such a third-party delusion.

More to the point, Trump has a history of grudgingly agreeing to basically rushed and fake security checks on his favorite people. He fundamentally has no belief or interest in the security-clearance process, which is why he stole dozens and dozens of boxes of classified documents from the American people in 2020 and 2021. Nor does the man have any abiding trust in those who conduct the checks, which is why he treats them as necessary only when public relations considerations force his hand. (As we’ll see below, Trump largely picks as agents people he knows wouldn’t pass background checks, which is another reason he’s largely eschewed them in his political career.)

And now here’s where things start getting really bad.Natalie Harp: The Revelations

Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp controls the flow of information to the President of the United States.

Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp controls which people get face-to-face access to the President of the United States.

Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp harbors bizarre prejudices and exhibits mortifyingly antisocial conduct and horrifyingly bad judgment as she discharges her taxpayer-funded duties, even as Trump protects her when she does so by hiding or papering over the trail of evidence that would lead to her.

Reliable major-media reporting establishes that Harp regularly receives texts and phone calls from foreign leaders, including hostile foreign leaders, and sometimes is the one who determines both which of these Trump speaks to and even what he hears in the first instance about why they want to speak to him.

At this point, a reasonable person would, knowing only the above, want Natalie Harp physically separated from Donald Trump by the U.S. Secret Service. Not in a day, not in a week, but this instant.

The above suggests that Harp is acting as a co-POTUS of sorts of a historically elderly president experiencing early-onset dementia who has been prone—his whole life—to believe disinformation and conspiracy theories and nonsense, which further reporting on Natalie Harp reveals is largely what she feeds him. While Trump is an atheist, he is also an amateur eugenicist and neo-Nazi-curious fascist who would be naturally susceptible to an attractive young blond woman who meets Trump’s very particular beauty standards telling him he really is better and more important than all other men.

All this is a grave danger to the whole world, given that Trump reacts in mercurial fashion to new information and has his finger on the nuclear trigger. That the USSS long ago began to express the expert opinion that Harp is a national security risk only underscores how mainstream and—again—objectively reasonable these concerns are.

But the danger America faces from this situation is even greater than any of that.Natalie Harp: The Suspicious Signals

Confirmed foreign intelligence on Donald Trump since the 1980s, especially intel originating from the KGB, says that “women” should be used to gain his confidence—especially young and attractive blondes who flatter him. This is a tactic that has been used by America’s enemies in the past, particularly Russia.

Trump is known—because he’s said it himself, repeatedly—to be strongly sexually attracted to his daughter Ivanka, prevented from trying to have sex with her (he has often noted) only by their familial relationship. That Harp isn’t related to Trump but looks suspiciously like Ivanka and appears to have changed her own appearance to further the resemblance makes her exactly the sort of “honey pot” a hostile foreign nation would attempt to put in Trump’s path (see also here, here, here, and here). Trump has a history of looking for young women who remind him of Ivanka, such as when he told the porn star he was cheating on Melania Trump with around the time she was giving birth to their son Barron, “Stormy Daniels,” that she was “beautiful, smart, just like my daughter.” And he keeps doing that: as The Daily Beast reports, “Karen McDougal, another adult entertainer with whom Trump had an affair, said he told her the same thing.” Objectively, Harp looks exponentially more like Ivanka Trump than either Daniels or McDougal, making it all but impossible that Trump hasn’t marked the close resemblance.

Harp appeared on Trump’s radar screen less than 48 months after finishing her education, which, while not suggesting that Trump has been “grooming” her, underscores that she’s a wildly inappropriate age for Trump from a romantic standpoint (remembering here not only Trump’s decades of rapes, sexual assaults, and sexual harassment in and out of the workplace but also that Trump once told another young aide who was constsntly with him, Hope Hicks, that she was a great “piece of tail”). More importantly, Harp’s age underscores that she lacks the work experience to be the foremost aide to a President of the United States, is not in fact eligible (as some Trump defenders insist) to be “daughter figure” to Trump or he a “father figure” to her (as Trump’s actual children are mostly a decade older than Harp and Harp’s mom is decades younger than Trump is), and came under Trump’s spell at an age—26 or 27—it’s preposterous for a then-seventy-something President of the United States to think reasonable for a would-be protégé. Even someone twice Harp’s age would be much younger than Trump, if certainly a more age-appropriate helpmeet.

Until it came to be widely reported (see supra) that Harp is regularly in contact with foreign leaders whose sophistication as (variously) diplomats, manipulators, influencers, current or former intelligence agents, lobbyists, and all around cads exceeds anything Harp could possibly understand or respond intelligently to by a factor of ten or more—she simply has virtually no life experience, training, or education that would prepare her for such machinations—America had no reason to fear that Harp might be impressed upon by foreign agents to do their bidding, even merely to the point of giving them (say) privileged access to the president. But now there is every reason to fear that Harp could become an unwitting asset for hostile foreign agents, which is not the same thing as a witting agent of course—these are two very different ideas in intelligence—but potentially just as dangerous to the United States.

Even if we assume that Harp is in this moment as cautious as possible about doing anything that might harm or disadvantage Trump, that might not always be the case. If she becomes disillusioned with him, any betrayal—or even physical assault—becomes a possibility. Harp’s brother confirms that Harp is troubled, having been unhealthily obsessed with celebrities in the past, having suffered a severe and debilitating psychological trauma right around the time she met Trump (her father’s suicide) having been raised and homeschooled in an extremely far-right ultra-Christian household that at least one child exposed to it felt he needed to flee, having thereafter continued her narrow and cloistered indoctrination at two religious institutions, and as a result of the foregoing having been insufficiently socialized in contemporary American life but sufficiently ideologically programmed by possibly irresponsible and self-interested sources to believe some highly unusual things about the United States and its leadership cadre and lack the capacity to process new developments in a safe and healthy way. All this makes her easier for a foreign power to manipulate, makes it easier for her to make catastrophic mistakes in her job out of zeal or ignorance—mistakes that could cause massive consequences for large numbers of people—and more likely to leave her motivated not by the sorts of things taxpayers pay their employees to be motivated by, such as state and federal laws or state and federal constitutions—but an eldritch supernaturalism that can be used to justify anything. In this light, he enabling and toadying of Trump seems unsettlingly on-brand and very much a sign of bad, Eva Braun-like things to come.

These items call into question what Harp wants with Trump, and what Trump wants with Harp. It frames a dynamic in which his Oath of Office is likely to be the farthest thing from Trump’s mind, even as being an independent and self-assured operator in the White House—as opposed to something more like a glorified house-servant—may be a role that Harp not only isn’t interested in but also isn’t capable of.

All of which may seem esoteric on its face, but in fact describes what an extremely toxic interpersonal relationship would look like. And when a President of the United States is enmeshed in a deeply toxic relationship, it’s something very different from when a regular civilian is. While a toxic relationship may well destroy a regular civilian’s life, it’s just as likely, when such a relationship infests the Oval Office, to have the catastrophic domino effect on others.

And this is how all the foregoing looked even before we start seeing the texts.Natalie Harp: The Alarm Bells

Here are some things—wildly inappropriate things—Natalie Harp has written to her boss, the President of the United States, while we were paying her $150,000/year to be a professional executive secretary to the most powerful man on Earth, not a groupie:

“I want things to always be right between us. I also know I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time). With all my heart, Natalie.” (link)

“You are all that matters to me.” (link)

“Thank you for being my Guardian and my Protector in this Life.” (link)

“You are the alpha and the omega….the be all and end all…. What would I be without you?” (link)

“I don’t ever want to let you down.” (link)

“I also am sorry if I was an embarrassment walking the course in Scotland.” (link; this came after “Several videos…show[ed] Ms. Harp sprinting across great distances to keep up with Mr. Trump’s golf cart as it putters across his course in Scotland”)

“I want to bring you joy, to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’” (link)

“I want to get back to that synergy….where we’d talk about everything and nothing.” (link)

“After going through all of this self-analysis, my conclusion? I need to reunite my past self with my current into a better version who will make you proud.” (link)

“Please, when I fail, will you tell me? You have the absolute right to cuss me out, if need be, when I deserve it, because no one knows or cares about me more.” (link)

“Thank you for always being there for me—I’ll never forget when you made that promise to me after losing my dad…. to modify a classic, ‘I could not have parted with you, to anyone less worthy.’—and, I will add, it is always I who am unworthy. Always, Natalie.” (link)

Even taken in isolation, any one of these notes Harp passed to her boss would be deemed creepy, unprofessional, unnerving, and nothing taxpayers should be paying for. At most, they present Harp as being something like a house-elf from Hogwarts who Trump pays out of his own pocket and tries to keep out of the way of actual government business daily. Only “I don’t ever want to let you down” is remotely appropriate, and (a) it isn’t in the context of the rest, and (b) is still not something you’d say to your boss—you’d just commit yourself to do better and more professional work going forward.

But the rest? Well, let’s summarize what it reveals about this person who controls all access to Trump, deals directly with foreign leaders, has no clear job title in the White House but has more access to classified information than anyone but the president, refused to submit to a security-clearance background check, and is said by those who know her to be troubled:

She deems Donald Trump her “Guardian”;

she deems Donald Trump her “Protector”;

she deems Donald Trump “the alpha and the omega” (a euphemism for a god-figure);

she deems Donald Trump her surrogate father (this is the only possible reading of the quote she included in her last note above, which says that she could only let go of the memory of her actual father because her surrogate father, Trump, is such a worthy replacement for her actual blood kin);

she welcomes his verbal abuse because she is “always unworthy” of him;

she loves him with “all her heart”;

her obsession with his minute-by-minute needs causes her to “forget to eat and sleep”;

he is the only thing in her life “that matters”;

her boss (Trump) “cares about her more” than anyone in the world, in her view, to include anyone in her family (even the mother who raised and schooled her) and any friends (though candidly major-media reporting suggests that she has none); and

even when she is doing something that’s her job, like trying to remain close to him when he’s golfing so she can pass text or phone messages to him, she feels she must abjectly apologize if her doing her job ever “embarrasses him.”

But the list above leaves out some of the notes bullet-pointed above, because these others must be put into a second category: proof that Harp is stealing money from taxpayers because she does not actually do real work at the White House. Consider:

She tells her boss that she is in the midst of a personality crisis, which is at once oversharing and a sign that she does not see him as her employer (“I need to reunite my past self with my current into a better version [of myself]”);

she identifies her job not as achieving certain identifiable tasks for the American people, the American government, the White House, or even her boss, but simply to “make [Trump] proud,” which is something you say to a parent rather than an employer;

she admits that her anxiety over making Trump proud and her personality crisis are making her dangerously ineffective at work (as anyone not eating and not sleeping would be, especially if their task is partly to run interference between the President of the United States and some of the most dangerous autocrats alive);

she speaks of her time with Trump in emotional rather than professional terms (“I want things to always be right between us”; “Thank you for always being there for me”; “I want to bring you joy”), to the point that what she is clearly describing is an emotional relationship rather than a professional one; and

she makes clear that she does not spend her time doing her job but just hanging out with her boss (“I want to get back to that synergy….where we’d talk about everything and nothing”; “[I want us to] feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work’”).

What is this person actually being paid to do? Bring the president “joy,” like he lives in ancient Chinese pleasure palace? Worship him as “alpha and omega,” like he’s a marble sculpture of Apollo in a Roman pleasure garden? Make him “proud,” like he’s a 1950s Don Draper-style dad coming home from a long day at the ad agency? What is this person doing at the heart of the American federal government, collecting secrets and parceling out the attention of the most powerful man alive?

All of which causes us to return to some major alarm bells not yet discussed.

Natalie Harp’s sole purpose while she was vlogging on the fake-news website OANN was to spread the same lies that led to the January 6 armed insurrection, caused her future boss to be criminally indicted at both the state and federal level, pursued ardently by counterintelligence and congressional investigations, and civilly sued. Specifically, despite having no evidence that anything she said was true, her job was to pretend what she said was true to (a) please an audience of one (Trump), (b) give Trump campaign and social media disinformation he could cite as though it were real or accurate, and (c) popularize ideas and disinformation that had already caused massive death, injury, destruction, chaos, destabilization, and terror across the United States. That is what this person was paid to do.

Nothing she was doing had anything to do with her training, education, experience, knowledge base, or research. Natalie Harp is not qualified to do anything by her life experience—which is minimal almost to the point of eeriness—but her education and training arguably qualifies her to work in a business setting at the middle-management level (at most, given her present age). Yet there is no evidence this author can identify that Harp has ever worked in business or sought employment there. Instead, the focus of her life began to be, around the time Trump was elected to his first term, fighting off bone cancer; as part of this legitimately courageous fight, she used a tactic she would later try to use with respect to her father’s tragic suicide: she invented a more marketable story, in fact one designed to get the attention of a U.S. president, something she’d been trying to do literally since she was a child. As the New York Times reports, Harp began publicly lying about her cancer fight, falsely claiming that Trump’s 2018 Right to Try Bill is what allowed her to get a treatment for her bone cancer that in fact… she’d begun taking two months before the Bill was passed, and that the Bill would never have affected because her treatment was already FDA-approved.

Trump knew Harp was lying about her cancer treatment, so he saw in her someone who was already morally compromised and pathologically deceitful and therefore useful to his political operation. According to the Washington Post, Trump has ready access to proof that only ten people have ever benefited from his Right to Try Bill, and Harp isn’t one of them. The Proof Series has tracked similar processes in Trumpworld too many times to count; suffice to say that, across the seven exhaustively sourced books in the Series, readers have come to understand Donald Trump’s lifelong modus operandi well: find people who are irretrievably addicted or have lifelong addictive personalities (Michael Lindell, Pete Hegseth, Corey Lewandowski, Katrina Pierson, Alex Jones), who have grown up around organized crime (Michael Cohen, Boris Epshteyn), who are known to work for foreign nations who are hostile to the United States (Erik Prince, Paul Manafort, Aras Agalarov), who are known to be creepily obsessed with nations hostile to the United States (Carter Page, Rodney Cook Jr., Michael Flynn, Thomas Barrack, Howard Lorber), who are lifelong grifters who make no secret of their Baby Billy-like unscrupulous ambitions (Paula White-Cain, George Papadopoulos, Paolo Zampolli, Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman), whose known crimes or other assorted malfeasance ensure they will never cooperate with the police and can be easily blackmailed (Jeffrey Epstein, Tevfik Arif, Felix Sater, Steve Wynn), whose past “professional” work product confirms they have no ethical standards (Roy Cohen, Alan Dershowitz, Kenneth Starr, Howard Lutnick, Rudy Giuliani, Jeanine Pirro, Elliot Broidy, Joe diGenova, Victoria Toensing), who are known to be motivated by insidious and antisocial prejudices (Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon), who are gleeful and proud political “ratfuckers” (Roger Stone), who will say or do anything for the right price (Jared Kushner, Charles Kushner, Keith Schiller, Alan Weisselberg), who will say or do anything for power (Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei, Viktor Orbán), who will say or do anything for attention (Kellyanne Conway), who are truly astonishing moral cowards (Mark Meadows, Mike Johnson), who are psychopathic autocratic war criminals (Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Mohammed bin Salman, Mohammed bin Zayed, Benjamin Netanyahu, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan), who are genuinely cracked in the head and therefore can’t get meaningful mainstream work in their field (Peter Navarro, Kash Patel, George Nader, Jeffrey Clark, Sidney Powell, Ed Martin), or who are actually involved in organized crime, and then make use of their services over and over and over and over again so that you’re not constantly forced into new vetting processes. A final category is to find young women too stupid, inexperienced, and incurious to be afraid of making a deal with the devil—him—and into this category we can put both the aforementioned Hope Hicks and Natalie Harp, though Harp’s grifting off her cancer treatment would have suggested to Trump she had the potential to exhibit great loyalty to him… as he knew his bill couldn’t have affected her life one whit, but the fact that she was willing to pretend otherwise on national television (the 2020 RNC) was a good sign.

From a counterintelligence standpoint, it would appear that Harp threw away all her schooling and even her commitment to Biblical principles to join a media operation with an effective audience of one—one of the most ungodly men ever to enter U.S. politics—and spent two years essentially auditioning for a job with Donald Trump over the airwaves. This smacks of obsession or ulterior motives, not dedication or ambition. At just 30 years old, Harp abandoned all that she believed in and everything she’d worked for so that she could play the longest-shot lottery ticket imaginable: becoming a president’s platonic soulmate. From an intelligence standpoint this suggests either foreign compromise or mental illness, both of which represent a major danger to the president. So which is it? The evidence suggests the latter. Reports now show Harp accusing the “Democrat-controlled state” of trying to her hooks on drugs and kill her (in 2016 she “wrote a 29-page report that blamed Democrats for her health problems,” the Washington Post reports), being lied or and/or negligently treated by a succession or doctors and nurse until Donald Trump (of all people) told her the truth about her medical care over the TV, getting in screaming matches in the lobby of Trump Tower, diving into the truck of an SUV she was not invited to ride in to stay close to Trump, running headlong across golf courses on multiple occasions in full view of journalists, sleeping in the women’s locker room of a Trump golf club to remain close to Trump after staff asked her to leave for the summer… none of this is normal. And keep in mind that for years Trump was such a stickler for superficial professionalism that he got angry if a man met with him who wasn’t wearing a suit and was openly disgusted by men with beards. Yet here we see a religious zealot acting publicly like a crazed indentured servant, and Trump loves it. It’s a sign of something deeply unusual about how they interact. There is even evidence that when Trump doesn’t like hard data given to him by experts, he commands Harp to go find new data he will like—an invitation for her to produce him with misinformation or disinformation that he will then make policy decisions based on. This echoes what Trump used to do with his later-imprisoned capo Michael Cohen: ask him to find him pleasing information without caring whether it was true or not, and implying that he would be deeply displeased if his lackey told him that what experts had previously presented to him was accurate. We should consider, therefore, that the one Natalie Harp role not listed supra is to lie to him upon command in ways that could lead to wildly bad policy or dangerous decisions in the midst of a war or some other national emergency.

Trump and his fans have been telling the world for years now that there is a condition called Trump Derangement Syndrome that causes otherwise normal people to become so obsessed with what Donald Trump is saying, thinking, or doing at any given moment that that preoccupation becomes their life and they are—as a consequence—incapable of functioning normally in the world. Trump and his fans underscore that those with TDS aren’t just mentally ill but potentially dangerous and need immediate psychiatric interventions.

Natalie Harp presents as having the most serious case of TDS ever put on record, and is in a position to do grave physical injury at any moment—should her severe TDS get triggered in an unexpected way—to a man who allegedly has faced more assassination attempts than any modern president, though tellingly all the ones we know about came at the hands of…

…people who are Republicans and were previously huge Trump supporters.

Like Harp.

Harp, who works 24 hours a day 7 days a week, never takes a day off, has no office of her own so she simply moved into the Oval Office—yes, really—and doesn’t just field texts from world leaders but sends messages to world leaders from Trump, schedules all Trump’s meetings, passes messages from the most powerful Republicans in America, does not allow herself to be physically separate from the president at any point, never takes her eyes off the president, doesn’t do interviews, and (per the Times) operates “entirely outside the White House chain of command,” meaning she has no boss anywhere on Earth but Donald Trump and cannot be supervised or reprimanded by anyone but him. That’s a scenario otherwise reserved for the Chief of Staff, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and members of the Presidential Cabinet.

And now Natalie Harp.

And the entire White House is, behind the scenes, in an uproar over this.

The Times reports that top staff are “frustrated,” “fascinated” at the possibility that there is more to the situation than they understand, livid that Harp daily gives him “poisonous and counterproductive” intelligence, does all her “research” by “fish[ing] [it] out of the social media gutter”—bypassing actual journalism altogether—and “unnerved” by her public “displays of devotion.”

CNN reports that “Trump advisers who at times have wanted to meet privately with the president [routinely]…find [an uninvited] Harp sitting in on the meeting as well”; that Harp is so “territorial about Trump” that she “irritates” her co-workers by often scolding them about the fact that “she only reports to him”; and that Harp will maintain “unusual authority” in the White House no matter what happens—because Trump has decreed it.

People reports that Trump deems Harp’s letters so “adoring” (Maggie Haberman’s classification of them, having read them) that she would choose him over any amount of money, which is useful for him because he currently doesn’t pay her any and it’s unclear whether he would be willing to pay for her emotional slavery were he ever to exit the White House (keeping in mind that Harp’s mother believes being a slaver does not make one a bad person). The magazine also notes that Harp is now said to have “the most control” of anyone alive over Donald Trump’s Truth Social account, which the man himself has acknowledged can boost or collapse markets the world over. What happens if one day she doesn’t ask his permission before she posts? Indeed, how would we even know if that had already happened? If that had happened many times?

Per Newsweek, even before Harp became Trump’s shadow inside the White House, her interactions with Trump during the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign were so “unnerving” to the entire campaign staff that it was generally agreed that she and the former (and future) President of the United States had a “weird relationship.”

But of course the other person with a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome is Trump himself. An adviser tells media that Trump keeps Harp around because he “likes the attention and the fact that she is 100% committed and loyal,” meaning that competence and appropriateness to the position aren’t part of the equation. Harp has her job because she is an attractive young woman who dotes on a dirty old man, is committed to him like a girlfriend or even (voluntary) slave would be rather than any employee, and is so loyal that she will lie to him if he asks, lie for him if he asks, and produce disinformation for him to disseminate globally if he commands it. All to the greater glory of Trump himself, at once the namesake of TDS and its greatest sufferer.

“She’ll never leave me,” Trump once infamously said of Harp. And that appears to be just about all he cares about, when as POTUS he has hundreds if not thousands of obligations and considerations that should be significantly closer to top of mind.

In other words, Harp presents as being every bit the danger to either Trump or America or both that the Secret Service previously warned the president of, so it should worry us that Trump explained away the entirety of Operation Orange Chicken by paternalistically explaining to America that he has to do whatever the Secret Service tells him…

…when apparently the one area that doesn’t extend to is called “Natalie Harp,” a malign influence upon the most powerful man in the world that the Secret Service has been trying desperately to excise for over a year and a half but has met resistance from the president over at every turn. And this, indeed, may be the biggest warning sign of all:

Harp has so played on Donald Trump’s need for minute-by-minute validation—it seems likely no prior president has had such a fragile ego, thought so little of himself, or been less sure of his own identity—that she really is, as many are now calling her, the “President’s binky.” And binkies are bad for fragile people in the long run, which is why all children eventually have theirs taken away. Over-reliance on a binky can ruin a child’s identity formation. So what does one do when the person with the binky is everyone’s boss, and he refuses to let his binky go despite it having long ago become debilitating and toxic, and being of such dubious construct that it could one day become imminently dangerous to him and even the world?

After all, is Natalie Harp close enough to Trump at all times that she could get a finger on the nuclear football if its briefcase were open? Possibly; it certainly seems likely she knows the code from her Guardian and Protector and could easily over-power him if she wished. Is she close enough to kill the president if he somehow re-traumatizes her (e.g., as a father figure, commands her to leave his presence forever, her biological father having left her forever via suicide)? Yes, certainly. Far more plausibly than either of these scenarios, could she simply divert, hide, amend, or otherwise tarnish the utility and/or content of an emergency message directed to—or from—the president? Absolutely. Is this the sort of thing she might do in “good faith” but as a result of psychological derangement, believing she was protecting the POTUS when in fact she was obscuring critical intelligence from him in a moment bigger for the world and its people than she could possibly be qualified to foresee?

Yes.

When you have “an unusually intimate bond” (Vanity Fair) with an unstable person, anything can happen. As Trump biographer Michael Wolff recounted in one of his books, Trump will sometimes be at the Resolute Desk and suddenly shout, “‘Bring me the poison!’ His basket of Starbursts, Hershey’s Miniatures, Laffy Taffy, and Tootsie Rolls instantly appears. ‘OK, get the poison out of here,’ he says, [after] taking two handfuls.”

Right now Harp is the one bringing the poison—but she just might be the poison, too.Conclusion

But here’s where this really hits home: in the MAGA reaction to these revelations.

It wasn’t, “Huh?” It wasn’t, “This is a bizarre thing to focus on.” It wasn’t, “This is a bit strange, but let’s pump the brakes on hyperventilating about it just yet.”

No—all of MAGA, online and off, reacted as though a pot full of boiling water had just been thrown in its face. The reaction to the simple observations above was so cataclysmically outsized that it immediately caused the whole world to wonder if the real story of what’s going on with Trump and Harp isn’t much worse than we suppose.

And no, I’m not referring to a sexual relationship.

Instead, public speculation on what could possibly explain MAGA reacting more vociferously to the Natalie Harp story than America losing a war to Iran has focused on the following possibilities, all of them plausible and consistent with the facts:

(1) Harp knows better than anyone else that Trump is secretly in the midst of a major medical malady, as she has been the one responsible for hiding it—and if Congress subpoenas her in January 2027, she may be forced to reveal things about Trump and his health that he and his doctors have lied about for years but could now all but end his presidency.

(2) Harp is being used as a clandestine conduit, by Trump, to engage in corrupt communications with donors, foreign leaders, and other potentially shadowy figures—meaning she knows who’s bribing Trump and how, knows where the proverbial bodies are buried, and so on. If she’s scorned by Trump out of political convenience, she might become the most dangerous person ever to turn on him.

(3) Harp is being used, likely unwitting, as a clandestine conduit by foreign leaders using her naivete as a means of executing an influence operation on Trump. Unlike her, Trump is supposed to protect himself (and America) from this happening and be able to see the signs of it occurring. That he can’t or won’t or hasn’t or doesn’t means either he is okay with the influence campaign because he likes what he’s getting out of it, is letting it happen because he literally doesn’t care about his job or America, or is so smitten with Harp that he is allowing American national security to be undermined by the oldest counterintelligence ploy in the whole book—a fact that would make him look like a pathetic dolt in the eyes of all Americans.

(4) Because Harp literally hears and sees everything in the most corrupt presidential administration in American history, she’s a shibboleth of sorts that unlocks not only every potential Article of Impeachment against Trump but also all post-presidency investigations and indictments. This makes her the most dangerous person alive to the would-be family dynasty that has controlled one of America’s two major political parties for a decade and stands to keep controlling it for decades to come.

(5) Trump is much farther down the road toward an intellectually paralytic form of dementia than anyone has let on, and as his de facto nursemaid Harp may be one of the only people left who is capable of keeping Trump able to do the job of president. In this view, any attack on her that could remove her from Trump’s side could imperil his entire presidency and almost immediately.

(6) Trump is so singularly—and single-mindedly—emotionally committed to Harp, to the point that their relationship comprises a form of emotional adultery, that any White House employee or Republican adviser who wants to stay on Trump’s good side must publicly, viciously, and almost rabidly defend Harp or else risk getting excommunicated from Trump’s inner, second, and third circles of influence. In this view, defending Harp is the most important and urgent act of MAGA virtue-signaling Trump’s foremost lackeys, lickspittles, and attack dogs have been called to for years.

Does there remain a possibility that Trump is getting pleasured on the down low by Ms. Harp, participating at age 80 in the sort of adulterous affair he’s participated in literally scores of times in the past, but now at a moment when the revelation of a sordid, Clinton-like Oval Office dalliance could be the straw that broke the camel’s back for many MAGAs wearying of Trump? Sure, anything’s possible, and it is true that Trump doesn’t have to be performing sex acts himself—in the sense of him initiating, maintaining, and taking the point on sexual contact—for him to be in a physical affair with a woman 45 years his junior. But we simply don’t have any evidence on this score as yet, other than the fact that it is exactly the sort of thing this man would do and we know that because he has spent his entire adult life doing it.

Wayne Madsen Special Report

President Trump met in Alaska last year (as shown in the photo above) with a warm, red carpet welcome for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: Trump is a puppet leader installed by Putin, Wayne Madsen, right, Aug. 19-20, 2026. The Trump regime takes its marching orders from the Kremlin and, when advantageous to Israel, from Netanyahu. 

The following FBI investigation code names represent its long-term and short-term probes ((including operations involving allied law enforcement and intelligence agencies) of Russia/Trump collusion campaign operations; Trump’s theft and compromise of highly-classified intelligence documents; the financial involvement of Russian oligarchs and other criminals with Trump, his business associates, and family members (including Trump’s financial ties to international child sex trafficking perpetrators Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jean-Luc Brunel, David Siad, and others); and January 6, 2021 attempted coup against the government:

CROSSFIRE HURRICANE

CROSSFIRE RAZOR

CROSSFIRE FURY

CROSSFIRE DRAGON

CROSSFIRE FUSION

CROSSFIRE TYPHOON

PLASMIC ECHO

OXFERD COMMA (included former British MI6 Russia agent Christopher Steele’s report on Trump’s compromise by Russia, including every description of Trump’s perverse sexual peccadilloes while visiting Russia.

ARCTIC FROST

MARBLE FRAMEWORK

MIDYEAR EXAM

ROUND RIVER

PROTECTED VOICES (with Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and National Security Agency (NSA))

CYBERSENTY (DHS)

CYBER STORM (DHS)

SHIELDS UP (DHS)

KLEPTOCAPTURE (DOJ)

REPO (Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs) Task Force (FBI, DOJ, G7, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC))

Operation DESTABILISE (UK National Crime Agency (NCA))

Operation ELBRUS (UK National Crime Agency)

Operation VENUS (EUROPOL, UK National Crime Agency, others)

Operation USURA (Spanish Guardia Civil/Policia Nacional (GC/PN), EUROPOL, Italian PS/GF)

Operation RANSOM (Spanish GC/PN, EUROPOL)

Operation DARKNET/HYDRA (DOJ, FBI, and EUROPOL)

Operation AVALANCHE (FBI, DOJ, EUROPOL, German Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), others)

Operation GAMEOVER ZEUS (GOZ)

Operation TOVER

Operation CLEAN SLATE

Operation SHROUDED HORIZON

Operation ONYMOUS (German BKA, Dutch Politie and OM)

Operation BAYONET (German BKA, Dutch Politie and OM)

Operation WIREWIRE

OPERATION REWIRED

Operation SABOTOR

Operation DISRUPTOR (Dutch Politie and OM)

Operation DARK HUNTOR (Dutch Politie and OM)

Operation SPECTOR (Dutch Politie and OM)

Operation COOKIE MONSTER

Operation DUCK HUNT/QAKBOT (Dutch Politie and OM)

Operation DYING EMBER

Operation RANSOMWARE (FBI, EUROPOL)

Operation MASQUERADE

Operation VPNFILTER

Operation CRONOS (EUROPOL, NCA, BKA Dutch Politie and OM, Danish National Cybercrime Center (NC3), New Zealand Cybercrime Unit)

Operation ENDGAME (EUROPOL, NCA, German Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), Dutch Politie and OM, Danish NC3))

Operation VENETIC (NCA)

Operation POWEROFF

Operation RANSOM

Operation LIONFISH (INTERPOL)

Operation LIBERTERRA (INTERPOL)

Operation LIBERTERRA II (INTERPOL)

Operation HAECHI (INTERPOL)

Operation HAECHI III (INTERPOL)

Operation HAECHI IV (INTERPOL)

Operation TRIGGER-SALVO (INTERPOL)

Operation TURQUESA (INTERPOL)

Operation GLOWING SYMPHONY

Operation AETHER (EUROPOL, NCA)

Operation TALENT (EUROPOL, Danish NC3)

Operation LABHOST (EUROPOL, NCA)

Operation EASTWOOD (EUROPOL, German BKA, Dutch Openbaar Ministerie (Public Prosecution Service) and National Police (OM and Politie), Swiss Federal Police, Italian Polizia di Stato (PS) and Guardia di Finanza (GF) (PS/GF), Latvian State Police, Lithuanian Police) (LP), Estonian State Police (EEP), Finnish State Police (Valpo), Swedish Police Authority, Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC))

Operation FIRST VPN

Operation PHOBOS AETOR (Danish NC3)

Operation SERENGETI 2.0

Operation RED CIRCUS

Operation STOVEWOOD

Operation ELVEDEN

Operation ZEUS (FBI, EUROPOL)

Operation HIGH ROLLER (FBI, EUROPOL, INTERPOL)

Operation JABBER ZEUS (FBI, NCA)

Operation PHISH PHRY (FBI, EUROPOL)

Operation GHOST CLICK (FBI, EUROPOL)

Operation TRIDENT BREACH (FBI, EUROPOL)

Operation BOT ROAST (FBI)

Operation SKYNET

Operation FALCON

Operation ROUBLE

Operation SIBERIA

Operation VOLGA

Operation TUNDRA

Operation BOREAL

Operation KESTREL

Operation GLOBAL HOAX (INTERPOL)

Operation 911 S5 TAKEDOWN

Counter-HYDRA MARKET

Counter-GARANTEX

Counter-TGR GROUP

Counter-SMART GROUP

Counter-LOCKBIT (Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), New Zealand Police Cybercrime Unit)

Counter-GRINEX

Counter-BITZLATO

Counter-BITPAPA

Counter-SUEX

Counter-CRYPTEX

Counter-PM2BTC

Counter-TORNADO CASH

Counter-BITRIVER

Counter-QQAAZZ (EUROPOL, Centre for Cybersecurity Belgium, EUROCLEAR, Latvia State Police, Bulgarian National Police Service, Romanian Police, Georgia Financial Police (later compromised by Russian intelligence)

Counter-UAPS

Counter-CARDPLANET

Counter-UNICC

Counter JOKER’S STASH

Operation OLIGARKH (EUROPOL, Spanish GC/PN, Italian PS/GF)

Operation STRONGBOX (EUROPOL, Spanish GC/PN, Portuguese Polícia de Segurança Pública (PSP))

Project A.S.S.E.T. (EUROPOL)

Operation BEAUTIFUL (Spanish GC/PN, EUROPOL)

Operation SNAKE (Spanish GC/PN)

Operation MALAYA (Spanish GC/PN)

Operation EMPERADOR (Spanish GC/PN)

Operation BALKAN (Spanish GC/PN)

Operation TROJAN (Spanish GC/PN)

Operation JAVA (Spanish GC/PN)

Operation AVISPA (Spanish GC/PN)

Operation WASP (Spanish GC/PN)

Operation VAROLA (Spanish GC/PN)

Operation OIKOS (Spanish GC/PN)

Operation MURSAL (Spanish GC/PN)

Operation PANDORA (EUROPOL, NCA)

Operation PANDORA II (EUROPOL)

Operation SENTINEL (EUROPOL)

Operation VENUS

Operation FIRST LIGHT (INTERPOL)

Operation GENESIS MARKET

Operation SKEIN (Irish An Garda Síochána, EUROPOL, INTERPOL, FBI, NCA, EUROJUST)

Operation JACKAL (Irish An Garda Síochána, EUROPOL, INTERPOL, FBI, NCA, EUROJUST)

Operation ELABORATE (Irish An Garda Síochána, EUROPOL, INTERPOL, FBI, NCA, EUROJUST)

Operation APHRODITE (Irish An Garda Síochána, EUROPOL, INTERPOL, FBI, NCA, EUROJUST)

Operation BREACH

Operation ALPHABAY

Operation GRANITE

Operation MERIDIAN

Operation ICEBREAKER (Danish NC3)

Operation SILVER AXE

Operation

Operation HANSA

Operation NOVA (Danish NC3)

Operation GOLDDUST (Danish NC3)

Operation ORBIT

Operation ECHO

Operation ATLAS

Operation COLOSSUS

Operation CONTI (Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC))

Operation KARAKURT

Operation HIVE

Operation RAGNAR LOCKER

Operation CLOP

Operation REVIL (Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC)

Operation TRICKBOT

Operation EMOTET (Dutch Politie and OM)

Operation EGREGOR

Operation NETWALKER

Operation DARK MARKET

Operation SILK ROAD

Operation SILK ROAD 2.0

Operation GOZNYM (German BKA, Dutch Politie and OM)

Operation SPRING CLEANING

Operation DYING EMBER

Operation CYCLOPS BLINKNovember 20, 2020 The Honorable William P. Barr Attorney General U.S. Department of Justice Dear Attorney General Barr: On Octob

This massive investigation was directed at various Russian and Trump campaign code-named operations designed to facilitate Trump’s capture of the U.S. government by Russia. The Russian/Trump operations are as follows:

FANCY BEAR

COZY BEAR

CADET BLITZ

PROJECT LAKHTA

OPERATION OVERLOAD (also known as MATRYOSHKA)

OPERATION UNDERCUT

STORM-1516

STORM-1679

COPYCOP

NOTPETYA

BLACKENERGY

INDUSTROYER

SNAKE

COSMICDUKE

APT28 AND APT29

MINIDUKE

COZYDUKE

SEADUKE

CLOUDDUKE

SOLARWINDS

YTTRIUM

OLYMPIC DESTROYER

SUNBURST

KAZUAR

DROVORUB

WHISPERGATE

ACIDRAIN

SEASHELL BLIZZARD

VOODOO BEAR

IPSTORM

PAWN STORM

ANYPROXY/5SOCKS

KELIHOS

SPYEYE

TELEBOTS

IRON VIKING

RSOCKS

SOFACY

SEDNIT

STRONTIUM

AQUA BLIZZARD

VOID BLIZZARD

GHOST BLIZZARD

STATIC TUNDRA

EMBER BEAR

PROJECT HOUDINI (Cambridge Analytica)

GAMAREDON

DRAGON FLY

CALLISTO

MIDNIGHT BLIZZARD

NOBELIUM

TURLA/VENOMOUS BEAR

BERSERK BEAR