From July 24 to Aug. 2, Capitol Hill and the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. will host the most comprehensive gathering of whistleblower advocates, documentary filmmakers, and investigative journalists in the country, timed to coincide with America's 250th anniversary and National Whistleblower Appreciation Day on July 30th.

This year's summit, themed "America 250: Unity in the Community," will be The 14th Annual Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival. The in-person programming extends from July 27 to 30 begins with an opening plenary at 9 a.m. July 27 on Capitol Hill at the U.S. House Rayburn Building’s Gold Room in Washington, DC.

ACORN 8 is proud to partner with African American Women in Cinema (AAWIC) and the Justice Integrity Project (JIP) to present this year's award-winning event.

"ACORN 8 was the first NGO to promote National Whistleblower Appreciation Day by hosting the Whistleblower Summit for Civil & Human Rights on Capitol Hill, focusing on whistleblower policy and legislation more than a decade ago," said summit Co-Founder and Festival Director Marcel Reid, shown above. "This year, we are pleased to celebrate America's 250th anniversary and introduce National Whistleblower Appreciation Day to a wider national audience through the Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival, which highlights whistleblower advocates in journalism, investigative reporting, and documentary and narrative filmmaking."

The summit will explore the relationship (and tension) between sources and investigative journalists, a dynamic essential to enterprising reporting. "Whistleblowers pay a very high price for speaking truth to power and for having integrity," said Summit Co-Founder and Managing Director Michael McCray, left. "Publishers win Pulitzers, reporters become bestselling authors, but whistleblowers often risk their lives and livelihoods with little or nothing in return."

Festival programming will feature films about whistleblowers and the First Amendment, as well as films touching on human rights issues including freedom of expression, women's rights, and discrimination. This year's slate showcases a broad array of storytelling and emerging talent from around the world.

Hosts and featured speakers will outline a program of panels, films, awards and advocacy at the free, non-partisan event helping whistleblowers fulfill their goals first exemplified by whistleblowers during the American Revolutionary War and now extended each year with National Whistleblower Day, July 30.

The program includes sessions July 28 at the Rayburn Building’s Room 2024, on July 29 at the bookstore Busboys and Poets branch on at 14th St. NW in the District of Columbia, and finally at the National Press Club July 30 for an invitation-only awards presentation. A selection of documentary films is available for remote viewing from July 24 to Aug. 2 for those who register for that paid segment of the programming (Summit Details and Registration: https://www.whistleblowersummit.com/).

Among the sessions will be the following, to be presented July 28 at Rayburn Room 2044:

Follow The Pipelines: Ongoing Middle-Eastern Conflicts Put Into Perspective

•Charlotte Dennett, above right, attorney, investigative reporter and author of Follow the Pipelines: Uncovering the Mystery of a Lost Spy and the Deadly Politics of the Great Game for Oil.

• Dr. Gregory Stanton, below right, founder and retired president of Genocide Watch, author and former professor and State Department Foreign Service Officer.

• Moderator Andrew Kreig, attorney, global affairs commentator and Summit Host Committee member.

Other panels and this year’s award-winners will be announced in coming days, and are available on the event website. Credentialed press are invited to register to attend the awards ceremony at the National Press Club beginning at 5:30 p.m. July 30. "I hope the festival will continue to draw attention to whistleblowers, their powerful stories, their tremendous bravery, and their importance to the U.S. Constitution," said Reid.

The summit opens on Capitol Hill, where attendees will have the opportunity to meet noted whistleblowers, who in the past have included Frank Serpico and Jeff Wigand, as well as political leaders, including U.S. Senator Charles Grassley and Former Representative Jackie Speier. The event culminates with the Pillar Awards Presentation at the National Press Club on July 30th, National Whistleblower Appreciation Day.

About the Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival

The 14th Annual Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival hosts free, in-person events from July 27 to July 30, 2026, with online documentary films available for viewing July 24 through Aug. 2. For schedule and tickets, visit: https://www.whistleblowersummit.com/summit-schedule. Locales are: the U.S. House Rayburn Building, Busboys & Poets Bookstore 14th & V Sts. NW (B&P) and National Press Club (NPC).

Contact the author Andrew Kreig

Other Relevant, Recent Whistleblower News

July 12

New York Times, Whistle-Blowers Accuse Kennedy Center of Contracting Flaws Under Trump, Julia Jacobs and Zach Montague, July 12, 2026 (print ed.). Documents submitted to Congress detailed concerns about competitive bidding processes and a White House order to tear up new bathroom tile because of its color.

As the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts prepares for major renovations, former project managers there have sent Congress internal documents that they say show how the institution bypassed government contracting norms in work carried out under President Trump.

The documents — sent to a Senate and a House committee last month by lawyers for unidentified clients referred to as whistle-blowers — detail how vendors were selected for work without competitive bidding under rationales that are depicted as flawed.

In one case, a center official described a company chosen for flooring work as the “only identified firm on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard that maintains a fully vertically integrated model, vital for acoustic continuity, architectural uniformity, and operational agility.”

In a letter to the committees, lawyers for the former project managers say their clients question whether the business, located in South Carolina, was the only one available that was qualified to do the flooring work.

The letter says the center’s decision to skip bidding in another case was designed to help meet deadlines important to the president, such as the Kennedy Center Honors in December, which he hosted. 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Important Epstein Update, Trump Targets Journalists, Iran Vows to Avenge Leader's Death as Trump Fears Possible Assassination, Aaron Parnas, right, July 11, 2026. Trump is reportedly furious over revelations that the Qatari Air Force One jet does not meet U.S. security standards.

Now, in what critics are calling a major assault on the First Amendment, his administration is subpoenaing journalists at their homes. At the same time, the administration is obstructing key Epstein investigations, Kash Patel has been summoned to the White House, and Trump is reportedly preparing for the possibility of his own death by ordering missiles locked and loaded at Iran as Tehran vows to avenge the Ayatollah’s death.

I also spoke today with Epstein survivor Lara Blume McGee ahead of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing. For the first time, she shares her story on camera and says this Department of Justice has done nothing to protect survivors or deliver justice.

I told you I would never stop talking about the Epstein files, and I meant it. More interviews are coming. 

Epstein News:

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez accused the Justice Department of obstructing the state's reopened criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's activities at Zorro Ranch by failing to provide requested unredacted federal records despite repeated requests since February. Torrez argues the withheld documents contain names of survivors, witnesses, and potential co-conspirators that are essential to pursuing state prosecutions, warning that delays are causing evidence to grow stale and investigative leads to disappear. While the Justice Department says it supports New Mexico's investigation and is prepared to assist, the dispute has complicated the state's renewed effort—which includes searches of the ranch, subpoenas, and a bipartisan truth commission—to fully investigate alleged crimes connected to Epstein's New Mexico property.

Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) urged acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to fully comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, arguing the Justice Department has failed to release all required unredacted Epstein records and has overused redactions without sufficient explanations. Their letter, sent ahead of Blanche’s Senate confirmation hearing, cites a recent court order requiring additional document disclosures and criticizes the DOJ for missing deadlines while maintaining it has already complied with the law. The lawmakers contend that protecting victim privacy should not be used to broadly withhold records, saying full compliance is necessary to ensure transparency, accountability, and justice for survivors.

First Amendment Attack:

Overnight, while many were asleep, the Trump administration issued subpoenas to several New York Times reporters following the newspaper’s reporting on security concerns involving President Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One. The subpoenas seek to compel the journalists to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan about an alleged violation of federal criminal law, though they provide few details. In some cases, federal agents delivered the subpoenas directly to reporters’ homes, an unusual step that the newspaper described as an escalation in the administration’s actions toward the press. The reporting in question cited anonymous sources discussing sensitive national security matters related to the aircraft.

Before one of the stories was published, an FBI official asked The New York Times to delay publication, citing national security concerns, and requested that the newspaper identify its confidential sources. The Times declined to reveal its sources and proceeded with publication. The newspaper strongly criticized the subpoenas, arguing they threaten press freedom and the public’s right to independent reporting. Statement from The New York Times: “Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used. This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

The subpoenas come amid broader tensions between the Trump administration and major news organizations. While both Democratic and Republican administrations have pursued leak investigations, subpoenas targeting journalists are relatively uncommon, and First Amendment advocates warn they may discourage investigative reporting. It also highlights other recent legal disputes involving The New York Times, including lawsuits over Pentagon access, an employment discrimination case that the newspaper says is retaliatory, and a separate defamation lawsuit brought by President Trump. Together, these events reflect an ongoing legal and political conflict between the administration and the news media.

Kash Patel:

According to MS Now, FBI Director Kash Patel abruptly canceled a planned trip to Chicago after being called to the White House, though administration officials disputed reports that he was summoned over internal frustration. According to the report, some White House officials were concerned about Patel's recent actions, including criticism over his use of FBI resources for travel, a combative social media post, and negative publicity surrounding trips tied to his girlfriend's performances.

Patel had planned to combine an official visit to the FBI's Chicago field office with attending his girlfriend's country music festival performance, prompting internal complaints that the work event was added to justify the travel. The White House said Patel's visit was for unrelated meetings, while the FBI declined to comment and defended his travel as compliant with federal rules. The report also says President Trump and some senior aides have grown frustrated with recurring controversies surrounding Patel because they believe they distract from the administration's broader agenda.

Patel responded to criticism over his reported use of government resources by posting on X, "Nah, my jet ski is gold plated… dumbass," after criticism that he should keep a lower profile amid growing scrutiny. Patel is facing questions from lawmakers about his travel, spending, and use of FBI resources, while the FBI has denied any wrongdoing and disputed the allegations. His social media response drew widespread criticism online, with many users arguing it reinforced concerns about his judgment and leadership rather than addressing the substance of the allegations.

July 11

New York Times, Times Journalists Subpoenaed as Trump Escalates Pressure on Media, Michael M. Grynbaum, July 11, 2026. The Justice Department is seeking to compel testimony from reporters who wrote about the new Air Force One. The Times called the move a “brazen act.”

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Confirms: Accepting a Flying Bribery Palace Made Him Less Safe, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 11, 2026. From the moment Trump posted a tweet claiming he was sending his Flying Bribery Palace back separately from the NATO summit in Ankara, the entire world knew there was a problem with the jet Qatar gifted him.

That Trump offered a transparently stupid excuse — he wanted to show it off to the military — was no real fix. His expressed worry about being targeted by Iran only further confirmed that the Flying Bribery Palace might not stand up to an Iranian attack.

[W]hen pressed by reporters in Ankara about the reason for the change, Mr. Trump also repeatedly noted that he was Iran’s No. 1 target, and referred at one point to having seen or been briefed on a list of Tehran’s targets in recent days.

By the time NYT provided details of the Flying Bribery Palace’s shortcomings on Thursday, based in part on the observations of a former Air Force official, the outline of what they were had become fairly clear: The Flying Bribery Palace could not protect against an Iranian missile attack.

[O]fficials who have been briefed on the retrofitting of the Qatari jet, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe its security features, said it did not have the same counter-defensive capabilities of the previous model.

[snip]

The older planes that served as Air Force One included a defensive system designed to defeat heat-seeking missiles. That capacity is also planned to be included in the new Boeing planes, according to three former Pentagon officials.

Different parts of the defensive systems are visible on the old Air Force One, under the wing of the plane and on its tail. They are not observable in photographs of the new Qatari plane, according to a third former Air Force official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the security protocols. [my emphasis]

That Thursday story made clear that such shortcomings that had been discussed all along.

But in a statement it made when it announced that the donated jet was ready to transport the president, it acknowledged that the temporary plane did not have all the equipment usually found on an Air Force One.

“No risk was taken in security, safety or mission communications,” the Air Force said in a statement on June 19. “But the collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets that Boeing must deliver to support the next 40 years.”

To sum up:

Trump calls attention to a change in his plans by telling a transparent lie about it.His own comments confirm a concern about his safety.NYT provides one line about counter-defensive capabilities in a story relying in part on public observation and public statements.

And then Trump sent subpoenas to the four NYT journalists who worked on the story, thereby confirming that the story was correct — that Trump’s Flying Bribery Palace had inadequate equipment to counter a missile attack.

The subpoenas don’t do anything to alleviate the risk to Trump’s security he made clear by announcing the plane change. Indeed, the confirm, for all the world, that Trump’s Flying Bribery Palace is an easy target.

At each level of the story, Trump confirmed the story.

I don’t mean to minimize the abuse of subpoenaing the reporters. This is another alarming attack on the free press (and may be an attempt to find Congressional sources who have long pointed out the weaknesses of the Flying Bribery Palace).

But Trump is the one who disclosed his plane was inadequate to the task. The reporters only responded to Trump’s repeated signals that his plane was inadequate by filling in dots that had been in plane (ha!) sight since Trump accepted the bribe.

This is just like the arrests of people — including Davey Hearn, whom Jeanine Pirro indicted last week — who put their hands in Trump’s reflecting swamp: An effort to distract from the consequences of his own corruption.

Trump is criminalizing calling out his corruption. He sure as hell is not keeping anyone safe. 

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

ENote: Excerpts below are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes" such as this. Nearly all excerpts are drawn from news sources for which the Justice Integrity Project pays a subscription. Readers here are encouraged also to subscribe to these outlets also to receive their full coverage and to support their work.  

July 18

Top Headlines

An officer’s hands stretch toward a man with his back to a chain-link fence in a still from a body cam video. Jaime Diaz, an undocumented immigrant, was charged with assaulting a border Patrol officer in Laredo, Texas. But video footage shows it was the officer who punched Mr. Diaz (New York Times photo by Mike McIntire).

• New York Times, Investigation: They Were Charged With Assaulting ICE Agents. The Cases Are Crumbling, Mike McIntire, Danny Hakim, Alexandra Berzon, Jazmine Ulloa and Lauren McCarthy, July 18, 2026. The Trump administration has lost or abandoned hundreds of criminal cases against protesters and immigrants, a Times investigation found.
• PPR Global, Ukraine War: Russians Are Leaving Crimea... The $4 Billion Kerch Bridge Just Turned Into an Escape Pipe, Staff Report, July 18, 2026 (video). Water, gas, electric shortages prompt massive flights of civilians, military families.

News Roundups

• MeidasTouch Network, Saturday Afternoon Updates: Multiple U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iranian Strikes + More, Ben Meiselas, right, July 18, 2026. Top stories we’re tracking today: Iran strikes Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan with ballistic missiles, hitting areas near US troops and fighter jets; CENTCOM confirms two US service members killed in action in Jordan on July 17 defending against Iranian missile and drone attacks, with one more missing in action and four others medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals before being discharged; A second Iranian strike in two days hits a Kuwaiti power and desalination plant, sparking a major fire; The US strikes a desalination plant in Jask, Iran, cutting off drinking water to roughly 20 villages and 10,000 people.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Republicans Urged to Avoid Trump's Lies, Trump Guts Election Offices, GOP Seeks to Revoke Canadian Visas, Moscow Burns, Aaron Parnas, right, July 18, 2026. Republicans are being urged to distance themselves from Trump’s election-denial address as his administration dismantles key protections against cyberattacks and other election threats. Nearly all of the major claims in his speech have now been disputed. Meanwhile, Canadian wildfires continue to rage as U.S. Republicans push to declare Canada’s ambassador persona non grata and revoke Canadian officials’ visas. Iran has withdrawn from the memorandum of understanding, while fires burn near Moscow following Ukrainian strikes.

More On U.S. Immigration, Rights

A memorial for Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was killed by the ICE agent David Brouillette. Credit...Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

• New York Times, ICE Agent Defended Shooting of Immigrant in Maine, Ex-Wife Says, Jenna Russell, Pooja Salhotra and Jacey Fortin, July 18, 2026. The agent, whose identity has not been confirmed by officials, has a history of abusive and frightening behavior, according to a former wife and others who knew him.
• MS Now, Opinion, The ICE shooting in Maine upended Susan Collins’ re-election race, Amy Fried, July 18, 2026. Graham Platner’s exit had dominated the contest, but the killing of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero starkly shifted Mainers’ attention.

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

• Raw Story, 'Sees only white': Hawaii Supreme Court burns down John Roberts for 'naked racism,' David Edwards, July 17, 2026. Hawaii's highest Court launched a rare attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, accusing the John Roberts-led bench of enabling "naked racism" and bending the Constitution to "whatever the Court needs it to be."
• Politico, Judge rules FEMA CFO’s firing was illegal, Josh Gerstein, July 17, 2026. Lawyers said the court ruling is the first to reject President Donald Trump's claims that he can bypass civil service laws to fire federal employees.
• Politico, Judge rules OMB can’t retroactively nix grants based on new rules, Jennifer Scholtes and Kyle Cheney, July 17, 2026. The court denied the Trump administration’s request to dismiss a lawsuit brought by 20 states.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

U.S. Senate candidate Troy Jackson speaks with voters at the Augusta Civic Center in Augusta, Maine, on July 18, 2026, where voting is taking place for the Maine Democratic deleate nominees (Lucy Lu photo for Politico)..

• The Contrarian, Publisher’s Roundup and Comment: Trump’s Speech About 2020 Proved He Was a Loser — and Still Is, Norman Eisen, right, and Sarah Jackel, July 18, 2026. Thursday night’s self-ballyhooed presidential address was the same old Donald Trump.
• New York Times, Without Platner, Maine Democrats Scramble to Keep Grassroots Energy Alive, Benjamin Oreskes, July 18,2026. Graham Platner’s campaign for Senate imploded last week. The activists who backed him are seeking a candidate to carry his populist message in the race against Republican Susan Collins.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, My Conversation With Alex Wagner, Simon Rosenberg, right, July 18, 2026. This terrific conversation includes an extensive exploration of what we need to do now to counter Trump's escalating assault on our elections, our liberties, and our democracy.
• New York Times, These 16 Democrats Voted to Stop Israel Aid. AIPAC Took Action, Adam Sella, July 18, 2026. After 103 Democrats voted to eliminate aid to Israel, the lobbying group closed off online donations for more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers it had endorsed.
• Politico, ‘It’s scary’: Scandal sends Wisconsin Dems into freakout mode over governor’s race, Tyler Katzenberger, Will Steakin and Lisa Kashinsky, July 18, 2026. The Democratic establishment is alarmed that a top candidate’s collapse and the surge from a democratic socialist could cost them the governorship.

More On Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup

Governor Ayotte is running for reelection in New Hampshire (Gage Skidmore photo).

• Meidas Touch Network, Exclusive: Kelly Ayotte Took Campaign Donations From Epstein Associates, Troy Matthews, July 18, 2026. Kelly Ayotte received campaign donations from several known associates of Jeffrey Epstein.Donors included Leslie Wexner, Leon Black, Marc Rowan, and John Phelan, all linked to Epstein.Ayotte, elected New Hampshire Governor in 2024, faces re-election this November.
• New York Times, He Pursued a Pardon in Trump’s Justice System. It Added to His Problems, Benjamin Weiser, July 18, 2026 (print ed.). Michael Castillero was convicted of defrauding investors in a $386 million scheme. Then he started courting MAGA influencers.stem more broadly.See more on: U.S. Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, Donald Trump, U.S. 

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Fighting Intensifies With Strikes on Critical Infrastructure, Aaron Boxerman and Leily Nikounazar, July 18, 2026. In the days since the cease-fire unraveled, the United States and Iran have expanded the scope of their attacks, with reports of water facilities and other structures coming under fire. Here’s the latest.
• Politico, Water infrastructure hit in Iran, Kuwait amid latest Gulf war flare-up, Zia Weise, July 18, 2026. Tehran attacked Washington’s Gulf allies after another night of U.S. strikes.

More On Global News

• New York Times, Mamdani Says He May Still Order Netanyahu’s Arrest, Sally Goldenberg, July 18, 2026. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in an interview with The New York Times that he was in “an active conversation” with New York City’s Law Department on whether he had the authority to arrest the Israeli leader.
• Meidas Touch Network, All HELL BREAKS LOOSE as Moscow HIT by MASSIVE ATTACK!!! Ben Meiselas, July 18, 2026. 

U.S. Entertainment, Media, Education, Sports, Religion

Boosie BadAzz onstage in a white and green football jersey with a green hoodie underneath and large jewelry on his hands, wrists and around his neck.Boosie BadAzz performing in Charlotte, N.C., last year (Photo by Jeff Hahne via Getty Images).

• New York Times, Boosie Lobbied for a Trump Pardon. It Never Came. He Wants a Refund, Rick Rojas, July 18, 2026. The Southern rapper paid $600,000 to two right-wing operatives. Now, they’re in a dispute over a contract the rapper believes entitles him to at least half his money back.
• Politico, Trump’s threats to revoke TV licenses get serious, John Hendel, July 17, 2026. Brendan Carr is already scrutinizing TV broadcasters, but he may have to be careful echoing the president’s political grievances, legal experts say.

More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Lina Khan on AI and More, Paul Krugman, right, July 18, 2026.Talking with one of our sharpest minds on market power (shown above in a file photo). I managed to get to talk to Lina Khan, who was the incredibly influential and smart head of the FTC in the previous administration—with the current administration doing everything it can to undo her work. She played an important role in the Mamdani transition team and has had a lot of smart thoughts about technology and policy right now. 
• Politico, White House teleprompter operator placed on leave amid prediction market insider trading investigation, July 16, 2026. Trump “believes it's deeply unfortunate and frankly a disgrace,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at a press briefing.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

• New York Times, F.B.I. Evidence Team Visits Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Devlin Barrett and David A. Fahrenthold, July 16, 2026 (print ed.). Officials surveyed the newly drained pool, where the floor began peeling soon after a $16 million repair job. President Trump has blamed vandals.

Top Stories

An officer’s hands stretch toward a man with his back to a chain-link fence in a still from a body cam video. Jaime Diaz, an undocumented immigrant, was charged with assaulting a border Patrol officer in Laredo, Texas. But video footage shows it was the officer who punched Mr. Diaz (New York Times photo by Mike McIntire).

New York Times, Investigation: They Were Charged With Assaulting ICE Agents. The Cases Are Crumbling, Mike McIntire, Danny Hakim, Alexandra Berzon, Jazmine Ulloa and Lauren McCarthy, July 18, 2026. The Trump administration has lost or abandoned hundreds of criminal cases against protesters and immigrants, a Times investigation found.

In its nationwide immigration crackdown, the Trump administration has charged hundreds of people with assaulting or impeding federal agents. President Trump has branded them “insurrectionists,” “animals” and “thugs,” part of a broader effort by his administration to cast protesters and immigrants as violent criminals.

But a close examination of those cases reveals that in its rush to meet White House demands for deportations, federal law enforcement has engaged in extensive misconduct — ranging from attacking protesters to destroying evidence and misrepresenting facts in court.

The New York Times found that the Trump administration has filed assault charges against more than 550 people who were caught in its immigration dragnet — far more than previously known. Of the more than 400 cases resolved so far, nearly half have unraveled: Juries acquitted defendants, judges threw out charges, or prosecutors withdrew them.

The record is abysmal by the typical standards of federal prosecutions: The Justice Department seldom loses criminal cases, with more than 90 percent of defendants pleading guilty or being convicted at trial.

The Times obtained court filings for every assault case and reviewed hearing transcripts, interviewed witnesses and federal officials and watched videos of dozens of encounters that led to criminal charges. The review, the most comprehensive to date, suggests that the administration’s use of the law has often been less about protecting federal agents than about providing legal cover to cow protesters and immigrants into submission.

“There seems to be a pattern of charges being filed without any merit,” said Jimmy L. Arce, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago who served on a commission that investigated immigration raids in the city last year. He added that some defendants were “having their speech criminalized by the U.S. attorney’s office.”

Earlier this year, the Trump administration dialed back some of its most confrontational tactics, leading to fewer assault charges. But it recently began an aggressive new wave of enforcement, with agents killing two immigrants in Texas and Maine. With hundreds of cases resolved, it is now possible to more fully assess the administration’s conduct and results.

In the half of assault cases that ended in the government’s favor, almost all were guilty pleas. The Times’s analysis of the 213 cases that the government has lost or abandoned found that:

In dozens of cases, court records and videos show that federal agents were the first to get physical — including shoving, tackling or pepper-spraying defendants. Many defendants successfully argued that the assaults they were accused of were actually acts of self-defense.

Judges repeatedly chastised prosecutors and immigration agents for misconduct including distorting facts and withholding evidence. Two judges found that agents purposely destroyed evidence, including ordering a defendant to delete cellphone photos.

Officers charged more than two dozen people who were filming or following agents, often while honking car horns, blowing whistles or shouting warnings like, “La migra is coming!” There was no allegation of physical contact with agents.

In more than 100 cases, prosecutors did not claim that any agents were injured. In at least seven other cases, officers’ injuries were caused by their or their colleagues’ actions. For example, a judge last fall dismissed assault charges against an immigrant, ruling that the agent involved had been cut by shards of glass from a car window he himself had smashed.

Sixty-five times, prosecutors abandoned or downgraded charges before hitting a deadline to present evidence to a grand jury or judge. Former prosecutors said that this pattern of rapid retreat was unusual and signaled that the cases should never have been brought.

Dropping charges

The government has lost or abandoned nearly half of the resolved cases in which it accused people of assaulting immigration agents. Normally the Justice Department wins more than 90 percent of its criminal cases.Charged (558)Dismissed (191)Acquitted (22)Convicted (4)Pleaded guilty (246)Pending (95)

The Trump administration’s strategy hinges on a once-obscure statute, 18 U.S.C. 111, that makes it a federal crime to assault or forcibly impede a government officer. Punishments range from a fine to 20 years in prison.

For decades, prosecutors used the law sparingly. One exception was when the Biden administration invoked it to charge hundreds of people involved in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Prosecutors had a perfect record of winning convictions in those cases, until Mr. Trump returned to office and issued blanket pardons.

As the Trump administration’s efforts to round up undocumented immigrants encountered resistance last year, officials embraced an expansive reading of the assault statute as a way to arrest and prosecute people who got in the way of ICE and Border Patrol agents. The government’s reliance on the statute became so great that agents at times called out “18 U.S.C. 111” as they got into scuffles and made arrests.

Lauren Bis, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, declined to comment on specific incidents but said that “it should come as no surprise that there’s an increase in criminal referrals under 18 U.S.C. 111 as there’s been a massive increase in violence and threats against federal law enforcement.”

On occasion, officers were seriously hurt by protesters or immigrants, The Times found. Last June, Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, a sex offender in the United States illegally, drove away while a federal agent had an arm inside the car window. The agent — who months later would kill the protester Renee Good in Minnesota — was dragged about 100 yards.

Mr. Muñoz-Guatemala is one of only four people in the Times analysis who was convicted by a jury. The other 22 who faced jury trials were acquitted. Nearly 200 others had the charges dismissed — including two mothers from Charlotte, N.C.

PPR Global, Ukraine War: Russians Are Leaving Crimea... The $4 Billion Kerch Bridge Just Turned Into an Escape Pipe, Staff Report, July 18, 2026 (video). Water, gas, electric shortages prompt massive flights of civilians, military families.

News Roundups

MeidasTouch Network, Saturday Afternoon Updates: Multiple U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iranian Strikes + More, Ben Meiselas, right, July 18, 2026. Top stories we’re tracking today:

• Iran strikes Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan with ballistic missiles, hitting areas near US troops and fighter jets
• CENTCOM confirms two US service members killed in action in Jordan on July 17 defending against Iranian missile and drone attacks, with one more missing in action and four others medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals before being discharged
• A second Iranian strike in two days hits a Kuwaiti power and desalination plant, sparking a major fire
• The US strikes a desalination plant in Jask, Iran, cutting off drinking water to roughly 20 villages and 10,000 people
• Iran warns it will target Abu Dhabi and Dubai airports and the ports of Fujairah and Jebel Ali if the US keeps hitting Iranian infrastructure
• US destroys six more bridges in Iran’s Hormozgan province, fueling speculation about a ground invasion of Iranian territory
• Iran formally exits the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, with Iran’s Supreme Leader saying the US president’s signature has proven worthless and warning of “unforgettable lessons” ahead for Washington
• Ukraine hits Russia’s largest e-commerce logistics hub, run by Wildberries, deep inside Russian territory near Moscow and Tambov
• Ukrainian drones destroy a Russian Tu-95 strategic bomber at Engels air base, flying roughly 800 kilometers to hit it
• Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces sink or damage another 13 Russian “shadow fleet” vessels, bringing the two week total past 170
• The Russian stock market keeps sliding, dropping below the 2000 level even as oil prices climb
• Zelenskyy reports deadly overnight Russian strikes on Odesa, Kyiv, Sumy, and Zaporizhzhia, including more than 130 drones and 13 missiles in one night
• Trump spends Saturday morning on “Executive Time” at his Bedminster golf course while all of this unfolds
• Trump reposts Tim Sheehy attacking Canada over wildfire smoke, calling him “a winner,” as the smoke-tariff feud with Ottawa escalates
• The New York Times publishes an interview with NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani on Gaza and inequality
• Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski takes a shot at American healthcare, contrasting it with European values

Trump Is on His Golf Course While the Middle East Burns

It’s Saturday morning and Donald Trump’s public schedule says he is “participating in Executive Time” at Bedminster. Closed press. No cameras. Meanwhile, American troops are sitting in the middle of a region Trump has set on fire, and we’ve just learned some horrifying news.

Iran hit Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base overnight with ballistic missiles, and the footage circulating this morning shows pillars of thick black smoke pouring out of the base. This is the same base that reportedly houses US forces, and multiple open source accounts are now describing damage to troop billeting areas. Not hangars. Not fuel depots. Where people sleep.Screenshot of footage reportedly showing the impact of two Iranian IRBMs at Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base (MSAB) last night.

And now we have confirmation. CENTCOM says two US service members were killed in action in Jordan on July 17 while defending against those Iranian ballistic missile and drone attacks. One more is currently missing in action. Four additional troops were medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals and have since been discharged, and others treated for minor injuries have returned to duty. Those are the numbers CENTCOM has confirmed so far, and we’ll keep watching for updates.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to. This isn’t Iran launching a single missile and missing. Multiple trackers describe salvos of eight to twelve missiles at a time, with a meaningful share getting through. If the Patriot interceptor systems the Trump regime has been leaning on are only stopping a fraction of what’s coming in, that means American lives are on the line every single night this continues, and it’s happening while the Commander in Chief is at his private gold club.The Desalination War

This is one of the darkest threads of the week and it deserves its own section.

The US struck the Jask desalination plant in Iran, destroying the seawater pumping station and power transformer and cutting off running water to roughly 20 villages and about 10,000 people, according to reporting from independent monitors tracking the strikes. Iran’s response has been direct and explicit: hit our water, we hit yours.

Kuwait has now been struck twice in two days on its power and desalination infrastructure, according to Kuwait’s own Ministry of Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy, which confirmed a fire at one of its plants and urged citizens to conserve electricity during peak hours while emergency crews respond. Kuwait relies on desalination for around 90 percent of its drinking water. This is now a major crisis. That is the water supply for an entire country, now a bargaining chip in Trump’s war.

Iran has been explicit that this is retaliatory. Their logic, as they’ve stated it publicly, is if American strikes cut off water to Iranian villages, then countries hosting American forces should not expect their own water infrastructure to be safe either. Iran has now threatened Abu Dhabi and Dubai’s airports along with the ports of Fujairah and Jebel Ali if US strikes on Iranian infrastructure continue.

This is escalation on a civilian infrastructure level, and it is happening because Donald Trump chose this path.

Iran Walks Away From the Table Entirely

As if the infrastructure war wasn’t enough, Iran has now formally exited the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding altogether. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister said Iran has suspended all of its commitments under the agreement, arguing the US had trampled on and halted its own end of the deal first.

Iran’s Supreme Leader went further, framing the repeated US breaches of that agreement as proof that the American president’s signature is worthless and unreliable, and warning that Iran and what he calls the resistance front have “unforgettable lessons” in store for Washington.

Here are his full remarks: 

“The Great Satan’s repeated violations of the memorandum of understanding signed between the Presidents of Iran and the U.S. once again prove to everyone how worthless and unreliable the signature of the U.S. President is, and that bullying, hegemonic ambitions, and savagery are inseparable elements of the American way and doctrine.

The Great Satan has once again revealed its true face without a mask, so that this dark experience of crime and bad faith will stand as yet another powerful testament to America's deceitfulness, irrationality, untrustworthiness, and wickedness.

Now that the American enemy is seeking to ignite war and incur even heavier costs and greater disgrace, it should know that the beloved Iranian nation and the Axis of Resistance have unforgettable lessons in store for it.”

Bridges Today, a Ground Invasion Tomorrow?

The US destroyed another six bridges in Iran’s Hormozgan province on Friday, disrupting a major highway link. Bridges don’t get destroyed by accident, and they don’t get destroyed for no reason. Taking out transportation infrastructure ahead of a ground operation is a pattern military analysts recognize immediately, and Iran’s armed forces have responded by releasing a video that essentially dares American forces to try a ground invasion, framing it as something they’ve been preparing for.

The US reportedly has around 50,000 troops in the region right now and growing. I don’t need to spell out what a ground war against a country the size and capability of Iran could mean for that number.

Meanwhile, flight tracking accounts have documented additional KC-135 refueling tankers and F-16 fighters moving into the region over the past day, which tells you the Pentagon is bracing for this to get worse, not better.

And how did one of Trump’s top aides respond to all this? Dan Scavino posted a video of B-2 bombers and F-22 Raptors flying over mountains, scored to Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma.”Ukraine Set Moscow on Fire, Literally

While Trump is busy blowing things up in the Middle East, Ukraine has quietly built up a long-range strike capability that is now landing hundreds of kilometers inside Russia, and it is landing hard.

Zelenskyy confirmed that Ukrainian forces hit military logistics and energy infrastructure in the Moscow and Tambov regions, targeting facilities tied to sanctioned drone components and navigation equipment. One of the targets was a massive Wildberries logistics hub, essentially Russia’s version of an Amazon fulfillment center, which Ukraine says is also used to move military supply components. Footage shows the strike touching off fires large enough that a thick, dark cloud has been sitting over parts of the Moscow region for more than a day.

Ukraine also says it destroyed a Russian Tu-95 strategic bomber at Engels air base in Saratov, flying long-range drones roughly 800 kilometers to hit it. One Russian military channel’s own reaction, translated from Telegram, admitted flatly that Russia doesn’t build those aircraft anymore and hasn’t for a long time. That is not a small loss for a country that relies on that bomber fleet for its missile strikes on Ukrainian cities.

On top of that, Ukraine’s naval drone forces say they’ve now hit 172 vessels in Russia’s so-called shadow fleet over the past thirteen days. And Russia’s stock market keeps sliding, dropping below the 2000 level even while global oil prices climb, which is not the combination a war economy wants to see.

None of this erases the human cost on Ukraine’s side. Zelenskyy reported overnight strikes that killed people in Odesa, Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, and beyond, with more than 130 drones and 13 missiles launched in a single night, including ballistic missiles aimed at Kyiv for the sixth time this month. Real people are dying on both ends of this war every single night, while the man who promised to end it in 24 hours golfs in New Jersey.

Mamdani’s Contrast Is Getting Sharper by the Week

On a very different note, the New York Times ran an interview this morning with NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. He made the point that it’s hard to explain to a New Yorker why their basic needs aren’t part of the conversation when the country has billions of dollars available to fund wars overseas, and he brought up how someone who traveled to Gaza on a relief mission was later killed by the Israeli military, even in a moment the rest of the world was supposed to be celebrating together. He also pushed back on the idea that a strong economy is only measured in growth numbers, pointing out that this is the wealthiest city in the country and also one where a quarter of residents live in poverty.

Whatever your politics, that contrast between wartime spending and basic domestic needs is going to keep showing up in this campaign, and it’s going to keep showing up in campaigns well beyond New York.

Poland’s Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski also had a pointed line worth including here. Speaking about healthcare, he noted that Europe is sometimes criticized as a declining civilization, but that letting people go bankrupt over medical bills isn’t how a good society should treat its own people.Where This Leaves Us

This chaos is exactly why we wrote WTF America?!: The Way Out of This Hell and Back to Democracy. We wanted to lay out how we got here and, more importantly, the way back. It’s dedicated to all of you, the Meidas Mighty, and it comes out this October. If you haven’t already, preorder your copy now. Thanks for sharing, liking, re-stacking, and spreading the word!

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Republicans Urged to Avoid Trump's Lies, Trump Guts Election Offices, GOP Seeks to Revoke Canadian Visas, Moscow Burns, Aaron Parnas, right, July 18, 2026. Republicans are being urged to distance themselves from Trump’s election-denial address as his administration dismantles key protections against cyberattacks and other election threats. Nearly all of the major claims in his speech have now been disputed. Meanwhile, Canadian wildfires continue to rage as U.S. Republicans push to declare Canada’s ambassador persona non grata and revoke Canadian officials’ visas. Iran has withdrawn from the memorandum of understanding, while fires burn near Moscow following Ukrainian strikes.

Some of you have said that I look especially burned out lately. The truth is, this past week has been a lot. Between the Epstein coverage, the Blanche hearing, Trump’s speech, and everything else, it has been a whirlwind, and many of you have felt it too. These are some of the messages I have received from people canceling their subscriptions over the past few days:

Just know that I am doing this every day, around the clock, and I will not stop. Here’s the news:

Trump speech/Elections:

Two days after Donald Trump devoted a heavily promoted prime-time address largely to disputed claims and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, alleged foreign interference, and the need to pass the SAVE America Act, Republican leadership is urging members of Congress to ignore the speech and the contents within it. Republican congressional leaders Mike Johnson and John Thune issued no statements about the speech, while “Fox & Friends” ignored it during its entire three-hour Friday broadcast, signaling discomfort within the party.

Although some Trump-aligned Republicans praised the address, GOP strategists and lawmakers privately suggested that revisiting the 2020 election would not help candidates facing voters primarily concerned about inflation, jobs, health care, and the cost of living. Documents released alongside the speech showed internal debate about China’s preference for Trump to lose in 2020 but reportedly still concluded that Beijing did not intend to interfere, while separate claims about 250,000 foreign nationals on voter rolls relied on disputed methods. Polling has found that only 29% of Americans believed Trump was focused on the right priorities, suggesting that his continued election fixation may be losing its political power even among dedicated Republican voters.

Acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte initially wanted President Trump to name intelligence officials accused of concealing election interference during his prime-time address, according to Politico. A senior official said Pulte later backed away after realizing that publicly identifying those individuals could endanger their lives. The official accused Pulte of first intensifying Trump’s interest in the idea and then becoming frightened by its possible consequences. Trump ultimately delivered a more restrained speech than some aides had expected, despite his history of departing from prepared remarks to attack political opponents. The address still centered heavily on election conspiracy theories and repeatedly debunked claims about the 2020 presidential election.

Trump claimed that China illicitly obtained 220 million U.S. voter files, calling it potentially the largest compromise of election data in history. However, much of the cited information—including names, addresses, phone numbers, and party affiliations—is legally available through public requests, purchases, or downloads in many states. Access rules vary nationwide, with some states imposing eligibility or purpose requirements and others restricting records to certain organizations, but sensitive identifiers such as Social Security numbers are generally withheld. Election expert David Becker told CBS News that public voter-roll information alone would not be sufficient to create or alter registrations, which normally requires matching driver’s-license or Social Security data. It remains unclear whether Chinese actors relied entirely on public records and commercial databases or also obtained private information through computer intrusions.

The Trump administration has eliminated or sidelined thousands of federal employees and programs responsible for protecting elections. CISA lost nearly 1,000 workers—almost one-third of its staff—and ended partnerships that helped state and local election offices monitor cyberthreats, forcing them to rely more heavily on their own limited resources. The administration also dissolved the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, weakened the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center, and closed a State Department office that countered foreign disinformation.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department redirected voting-rights personnel toward voter-roll maintenance and suspected fraud, and the White House removed the remaining leadership of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission. Administration officials say these changes reduce duplication, prevent politicized enforcement, and prioritize essential work, but state officials and Democratic lawmakers warn they leave elections more vulnerable to cyberattacks and foreign interference.

Mike Lindell, the Trump-endorsed candidate for Minnesota governor, is not registered to vote in the state where he is seeking office. The 65-year-old MyPillow CEO remains registered in Texas despite returning to Minnesota to launch his campaign. The situation is particularly notable because Lindell has made election security and voter-roll scrutiny central to his political identity. Unless he registers in Minnesota before the primary, he will be unable to cast a ballot for himself.

Canada fires:

President Trump and several Republican lawmakers threatened punitive action against Canada over wildfire smoke that has created hazardous air quality across parts of the United States. Trump accused Canada of failing to maintain its forests and suggested adding the costs of the pollution to existing tariffs. Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno introduced legislation that would sanction responsible Canadian officials, revoke their visas, potentially declare Canada’s ambassador unwelcome, and study a tariff-funded compensation program. Environmental experts rejected those proposals, arguing that extreme heat and climate change have dried Canada’s forests and made its wildfires more intense and difficult to control. Critics also accused Republicans of using Canada as a scapegoat while the Trump administration promotes fossil fuels, weakens carbon-emission regulations, and opposes renewable energy.

Dense smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed skylines across the Midwest and Northeast for a third consecutive day Friday, pushing air quality back to dangerous levels. The persistent haze has affected major population centers, including New York City, where smoke obscured the skyline and raised concerns about outdoor activity. The pollution could also threaten conditions surrounding the World Cup final, depending on how winds carry the smoke and whether it remains concentrated over the region. At the same time, nearly 9,000 cloud-to-ground lightning strikes across Oregon and Washington have created the potential for new wildfires in the Pacific Northwest. One meteorologist described the convergence of dense smoke in the East and heightened fire danger in the West as almost “cosmically unlucky.”

Iran:

Iran says it has formally withdrawn from the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding and suspended all obligations under the agreement. Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi accused the United States of abandoning its own commitments, declaring, “We are no longer implementing them.”

The United States completed a seventh consecutive night of strikes on Iran, using fighter jets, drones, and warships against surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage, and maritime capabilities. CENTCOM said the campaign is intended to degrade Iran’s military capabilities and has also targeted a port surveillance tower allegedly used by the Revolutionary Guard to track commercial vessels. Iran’s Health Ministry said U.S. strikes between June 27 and July 18 killed at least 50 people and injured more than 500, including women and children. The United Nations expressed concern about the escalation and condemned attacks on civilian infrastructure, although the United States has not confirmed Iranian allegations that it deliberately targeted civilian sites.

Iran responded with missile and drone attacks across the region, targeting sites in Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain, Iraq, and other U.S.-aligned countries. Kuwaiti officials reported damage to a desalination plant and an oil facility, injuries to workers and firefighters, and a temporary closure of the country’s airspace, while several American service members were reportedly injured in attacks on Jordanian bases. Iran also claimed it struck U.S. facilities in Syria, Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait, but CENTCOM and Syrian officials denied several of those claims, including allegations that American troops were killed at Syria’s Al-Tanf base. The Gulf Cooperation Council accused Iran of committing war crimes by deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure, while Iran insisted its retaliatory strikes would continue until security was restored along its southern coastline and the Strait of Hormuz.

The renewed fighting has sharply disrupted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, with only eight vessels crossing Thursday—the lowest total in three weeks—and most using the Iranian-controlled route. Maritime experts said fear of missile and drone attacks has brought shipping conditions back to a “worst-case scenario,” while the U.S. said it redirected, disabled, or boarded several commercial ships as part of its blockade of Iranian ports. Brent crude rose above $88 per barrel, its highest level in a month, as markets reacted to the conflict and the collapse of the earlier U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding. Diplomatic efforts continued as Kuwait consulted Pakistani mediators and Lebanon’s president traveled to Washington for talks aimed at stabilizing the region and addressing the conflict involving Israel and Hezbollah.

Ukraine:

Ukrainian drone attacks across Russia killed at least eight people and injured more than 60, according to Russian officials. The strikes hit two Wildberries warehouses in the Tambov and Moscow regions, as well as an oil depot near Noginsk, sparking major fires and forcing evacuations from a maternity hospital and residential building. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the warehouses supplied sanctioned components used to manufacture Russian drones and navigation equipment.

Ukrainian drones blew up the 2nd largest Wildberries warehouse in Russia in the Moscow suburb of Elektrostal, 33 miles east of the Kremlin.

Thick black smoke blanketed Russia’s Moscow region and obscured the sun following a strike on an oil refinery.

Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed that air defenses intercepted 379 Ukrainian drones across 19 regions, annexed Crimea, and surrounding seas overnight.

Other news:

Assistant Treasury Secretary Kenneth Kies is reportedly leaving the Trump administration after clashing with White House officials over a potential request involving the IRS. According to The Wall Street Journal, Kies warned that the request might violate Section 7217 of the Internal Revenue Code, which prohibits White House officials from directing the IRS to begin or end an audit or investigation of a specific taxpayer. Kies served simultaneously as Treasury’s top tax-policy official and the IRS’s acting chief counsel, giving him significant authority over tax policy and enforcement. He previously worked as a tax lawyer for Trump but recused himself from the president’s lawsuit against the IRS, which was later dismissed following a controversial $1.8 billion agreement that reportedly included protections against future audits. Neither the precise White House request nor the official reason and timing for Kies’ departure has been publicly confirmed.

Billionaire financier Leon Black’s voluntary interview with the House Oversight Committee ended in less than an hour after lawmakers served him with subpoenas for nondisclosure agreements and a second appearance, prompting his attorneys to end the session. Black denied knowing about or participating in Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged sexual abuse and trafficking, saying their relationship centered on Epstein’s professional advice and access to influential people. He defended paying Epstein approximately $158 million for tax and estate-planning services, claiming the advice saved him between $1 billion and $2 billion, though he later paid the U.S. Virgin Islands a $62.5 million settlement over his financial support of Epstein. Questioned about a suggestive poem he wrote for Epstein’s 50th-birthday book, Black acknowledged that Epstein knew attractive women around the world but denied they were truly “best friends,” despite describing him that way in the message.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that New Jersey’s bans on semiautomatic rifles classified as “assault firearms” and magazines holding more than 10 rounds violate the Second Amendment. It is the first federal appellate ruling to strike down a state prohibition of this kind and goes further than a 2024 decision that invalidated only the state’s AR-15 ban. The ruling conflicts with decisions from other appellate courts, including one that upheld Illinois’ semiautomatic-weapons ban just a week earlier. New Jersey’s attorney general called the decision legally incorrect and said the state is considering its options, while the NRA celebrated it as a historic victory. The widening disagreement among lower courts comes as the Supreme Court prepares to decide whether state bans on semiautomatic rifles are constitutional.

Paul Pelosi, the 86-year-old husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, was charged with misdemeanor hit-and-run after allegedly striking an unoccupied parked car in Napa County, California, and leaving without providing his information. Police later located him nearby in a vehicle with significant damage consistent with the July 3 collision. Authorities said alcohol did not appear to be involved, and Pelosi was not arrested at the scene. He also faces a lesser charge for making an unlawful turn and could receive up to six months in jail, a $1,000 fine, or both when he appears in court August 14. A family spokesperson said Pelosi apologized to the car’s owner and promised to pay for the damage; he previously pleaded guilty to driving under the influence following a separate 2022 crash.

The Justice Department has concluded that the federal law banning TikTok from government devices no longer applies to the version currently operating in the United States. Its legal opinion argues that Congress targeted TikTok’s former ByteDance-controlled ownership structure, which changed after mostly American investors acquired a majority stake in January 2026 and reduced ByteDance’s share to 19.9%. Federal employees may now download the app on official devices, although individual agencies retain the authority to prohibit it for security, productivity, or workplace-policy reasons. The new U.S. venture has promised stricter cybersecurity protections, American-based algorithm training, and ongoing source-code reviews by Oracle. Some lawmakers and rival technology investors remain skeptical that the restructuring adequately addresses national-security concerns, and a legal challenge to the deal is still pending.

Two U.S. Forest Service employees were rescued after being zip-tied and held at gunpoint for nearly 15 hours inside a trailer in Northern California’s Shasta-Trinity National Forest. Authorities say Joseph Charles Henrichsen, 49, used one victim’s phone to announce the hostage-taking, threaten violence, and demand to speak with the FBI. Local and federal teams used drones to locate the trailer before crisis negotiators secured the employees’ release early Friday; Henrichsen and his 23-year-old son, Phoenix, surrendered shortly afterward. Officials said Joseph Henrichsen possessed an AR-15 and claimed to have grenades during the standoff. Both men face federal kidnapping charges carrying possible sentences of life in prison, while investigators are still working to determine their motive.

China and Japan are advancing reusable-rocket technology, challenging SpaceX’s longtime dominance in recovering and relaunching boosters. SpaceX stood alone in this capability for nearly a decade, allowing it to reduce launch costs and maintain a major competitive advantage. Blue Origin joined the field last year by successfully landing one of its boosters on an offshore platform. Recent Chinese and Japanese recovery efforts suggest reusable spaceflight is becoming an increasingly global capability. Experts say the growing competition could significantly lower launch costs and usher in a new era for the commercial space industry.

More On U.S. Immigration, Rights

A memorial for Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was killed by the ICE agent David Brouillette. Credit...Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

New York Times, ICE Agent Defended Shooting of Immigrant in Maine, Ex-Wife Says, Jenna Russell, Pooja Salhotra and Jacey Fortin, July 18, 2026. The agent, whose identity has not been confirmed by officials, has a history of abusive and frightening behavior, according to a former wife and others who knew him.

A federal immigration agent told his former wife that he was the person who fatally shot a Colombian immigrant in Maine this week and defended his actions to her, the ex-wife said.

The woman, Ashley Brouillette, identified the agent as David Brouillette, 37, in an interview on Thursday. She said that when she spoke to him on Wednesday about the shooting, Mr. Brouillette said that it was justified.

He told her not to talk to anyone about him, she said, but then asked her to defend his character. “He said, ‘You need to tell them I’m a good person,’” she recalled Mr. Brouillette saying, adding that he asked her not to tell anyone that he had abused her during their marriage. “I told him that I wouldn’t lie for him,” Ms. Brouillette, 37, said.

The Department of Homeland Security has not released the name of the shooter, and a spokeswoman for the agency declined to confirm whether Mr. Brouillette had fired the fatal shots, saying that publicizing agents’ names puts them at risk.

Ms. Brouillette said she had spoken to her ex-husband about the shooting and had also seen video and images of him at the scene. Two other people — one a relative who asked not to be identified and another a high school friend of Mr. Brouillette’s — said they also recognized him from video footage and witness photos, but could not confirm that he was the person who fired the fatal shots.

No video shedding light on who fired the fatal shot on Monday has emerged. But one video recorded just after the shooting appears to show another agent consoling Mr. Brouillette. 

MS Now, Opinion, The ICE shooting in Maine upended Susan Collins’ re-election race, Amy Fried, July 18, 2026. Graham Platner’s exit had dominated the contest, but the killing of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero starkly shifted Mainers’ attention.

Nothing has absorbed Maine politics like the candidacy of Graham Platner. Almost from the moment he announced his run for the U.S. Senate in mid-August 2025, he drew big crowds and lots of attention. His strongest backers stuck with him through controversy after controversy until Jenny Racicot publicly accused him of sexual assault. Platner denied the allegation, but his support collapsed.

Yet even after Platner officially withdrew as the nominee on July 10 and the Maine Democratic Party began the process of replacing him, it seemed like Mainers were going to keep talking about him for a while. Many of his committed voters were deeply disappointed about what they learned; others were very angry that the news had been revealed. Some suggested they might write in Platner’s name or not vote at all in the fall.

Then came an awful event that starkly shifted Mainers’ attention, and moved the focus of the Maine Senate race from Platner to Sen. Susan Collins.

The killing of 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday was a real shock in the state. Maine often has the lowest rate of violent crime nationally and homicides are rare, with only 21 in 2025.

Maine, like Minnesota, is a highly participatory state, and both places responded similarly to ICE incursions this past winter.

Of course, it wasn’t just Guerrero’s death that was the story, but also who shot him — an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer — and the circumstances of his killing. For one, unlike other shootings by ICE officers, the Department of Homeland Security did not even claim that Guerrero posed any sort of imminent threat or that the shooter feared for their life. Rather, DHS said that Guerrero’s “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.”

Moreover, Guerrero was legally in the country, according to local immigrant rights groups. And Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, said Guerrero wasn’t even the person ICE was seeking.

Witnesses were shaken by what they saw. One bystander, Daniel Boucher, “choked up” recounting his experience, reported The Associated Press. “His face was bloody. His head was bloody,” Boucher said of the victim. “I clearly heard the victim say, ‘I tried to stop.’” Em Akerley, another neighbor who heard the shots and looked out the window to see some of what happened, told a local news station, “You know, it shatters the illusion that Maine is safe … I don’t know what he did, but he didn’t deserve to be executed in the street.”Susan Collins’ BROKEN VOWS may hand Dems The Senate: Ari on Maine’s MAGA ProblemJuly 14, 2026 / 07:11

Mainers quickly mobilized, with demonstrations in Biddeford, Portland, Bangor and Scarborough. “This is a land for people who want to be here,” said one rallygoer. “It doesn’t matter who you are, where you came from, what color your skin is. That’s what America is about.”

Both Senate candidates and members of the public criticized Collins. Protesters in Biddeford crowded the doorway at the senator’s local office, shouting, “Vote her out!” Senate candidate Shenna Bellows argued that she had already acted when, as secretary of state, she blocked ICE from getting undercover license plates and proclaimed, “There should be no secret police in our state.” Another contender, Troy Jackson, referred to “ICE’s rogue actions” and blasted Collins for voting “to send $70 billion dollars to ICE with no reforms.” A third potential Democratic nominee, Nirav Shah, contended, “There is a straight line from Sen. Collins to the lawlessness we saw yesterday.”

While, as I’ve noted, some Platner supporters were deeply unhappy that he wasn’t going to be the Democratic nominee, his absence in the aftermath of the shooting didn’t seem to matter in the least.

And why should it have? Maine, like Minnesota, is a highly participatory state, and both places responded similarly to ICE incursions this past winter. More from MS NOW Daily

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Collins tried to claim credit for ending the winter surge. But Democrats and immigrant rights leaders were skeptical and pointed to her support for increased ICE funding without any reforms.

In both places, ICE showed up with face masks and randomly detained people, including those in the country legally. Agents smashed in the car windows of a University of Maine-trained civil engineer, Juan Sebastián Carvajal-Muñoz, and took him away with the car still running. He had a valid permit to work, an engineering job and no criminal record. A man training to be a corrections officer in southern Maine suffered the same fate, and as did others, including asylum seekers.

Then, as now, Mainers came together, sometimes via social media and sometimes through various groups, to try to counteract ICE.

As in Minnesota, ICE was heavy-handed and showed disrespect for civil rights. Two Maine women observing ICE were told they would be put on a domestic terrorist watch list and sued. “Only 11 of the nearly 200 people detained in Maine during a massive January immigration enforcement surge were recorded as having a criminal record,” the Bangor Daily News reported, making ICE look even more abusive.

At the time, Collins tried to claim credit for ending the winter surge. But Democrats and immigrant rights leaders were skeptical and pointed to her support for increased ICE funding without any reforms. 

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

Raw Story, 'Sees only white': Hawaii Supreme Court burns down John Roberts for 'naked racism,' David Edwards, July 17, 2026. Hawaii's highest Court launched a rare attack on the U.S. Supreme Court, accusing the John Roberts-led bench of enabling "naked racism" and bending the Constitution to "whatever the Court needs it to be."

The broadside came buried inside a ruling handed down this week that threw out the controversial 1990 rape conviction of a Maui man. The court found that discredited FBI hair-and-fiber testimony was false and denied Daniel Granillo a fair trial, and ordered a new trial.

Using the ruling as a vehicle, Justice Todd Eddins explained why Hawaii no longer takes its cues on constitutional rights from Washington, and he opened with race.

"The Roberts Court sees only white," Eddins charged, opening with an attack on the chief justice.

"That is not blindness," the opinion said, arguing that the court's racial preferences were at the heart of its decisions. "That is white sight, by design."

Eddins pointed to the Court's April decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted a core protection of the Voting Rights Act. That ruling, he wrote, buried "the crown jewel of the civil rights movement," and he accused the justices of "looking at naked racism and seeing none of it."

That record, Eddins argued, exposed the court's colorblind pose as a fiction. "A Constitution interpreted this way is not colorblind," he wrote. "It is whatever the Court needs it to be."

"The Fourteenth Amendment is not colorblind. It never was," Eddins insisted of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law.

The opinion then turned from race to money. On rulings that lifted limits on political spending, Eddins wrote that the wealthy had bought the system.

"Billionaires spend to be repaid," the opinion charged. "Everyone else just votes."

He was harsh, too, on the decision granting President Donald Trump broad immunity from prosecution, writing that the court had "placed a president above the law."

The whole record, Eddins argued, freed Hawaii to disregard the Court. State constitutionalism, he wrote, makes it easy to treat "Roberts Court jurisprudence" as "white noise."

He closed by refusing to take any further instructions from Supreme Court justices.

"That's not all life tenure and zero accountability have produced lately," the opinion concluded. "But it's enough."

Politico, Judge rules FEMA CFO’s firing was illegal, Josh Gerstein, July 17, 2026. Lawyers said the court ruling is the first to reject President Donald Trump's claims that he can bypass civil service laws to fire federal employees.

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration violated the law when it fired the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s chief financial officer without going through the steps Congress has mandated for terminating civil servants.

Following an hourlong hearing Friday, U.S. District Judge Michael Nachmanoff rejected arguments that President Donald Trump’s power over the executive branch gave officials the right to fire FEMA CFO Mary Comans last year without giving her a hearing or the right to transfer to another job.

“For the last 140 years….the Supreme Court has affirmed the president does not have plenary power to remove inferior officers,” Nachmanoff said as he ruled from the bench.

Nachmanoff said the Justice Department was effectively arguing to overturn Supreme Court precedent, including an 1886 ruling that upheld Congress’ authority to set rules for the removal of what the Constitution calls “inferior” executive branch officials.

The judge, a Biden appointee based in Alexandria, Va., appeared to acknowledge that the high court has repeatedly expanded the president’s power to dismiss top decision-makers in the executive branch. But he said the justices have never “explicitly overruled” the 19th century decision letting Congress set the rules for lower-ranking employees.

“Judicial restraint requires that this court follow the law as it stands today,” Nachmanoff said.

Since Trump returned to office last year, the administration has fired scores of Justice Department prosecutors, immigration court judges, FBI agents and others while bypassing normal procedures. Many of the dismissed workers were told they were being fired under “Article II,” the part of the Constitution that lays out the powers of the presidency.

Trump’s claims of broad presidential power are backed by conservative legal scholars who support the “unitary executive theory,” which holds that the Constitution gives the president sweeping and perhaps even complete authority over personnel in the executive branch.

However, attorneys for Comans said Nachmanoff’s ruling Friday is the first to hold that one of the recent round of firings based on presidential prerogatives went too far.

“This is huge,” said Mark Zaid, one of Comans’ lawyers. “It’s an incredibly significant victory.”

Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Comans and several colleagues were fired in February 2025, amid the frenzied cost-cutting drive undertaken by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. DHS officials said she circumvented higher-ranking officials to authorize almost $60 million in what the agency called “egregious” payments to New York City for luxury hotel rooms for undocumented immigrants.

Comans, who said she had the approval of a DOGE official to disburse the funds, quickly filed suit over her firing.

Immediately after Nachmanoff’s ruling, Comans entered the courtroom gallery, embracing and kissing her husband. She appeared to be on the verge of tears.

“Today is a victory for every civil servant,” she told POLITICO.

Nachmanoff did not immediately order Comans’ return to her position or that she be restored to the payroll. However, the judge said she is entitled to a “name clearing hearing” to address the allegations that DHS officials made against her. The precise format for that proceeding is still to be determined, but Nachmanoff said he was “inclined” to have it take place before a magistrate judge.

Politico, Judge rules OMB can’t retroactively nix grants based on new rules, Jennifer Scholtes and Kyle Cheney, July 17, 2026. The court denied the Trump administration’s request to dismiss a lawsuit brought by 20 states.

A federal judge declared Friday that the Trump administration can’t cancel grants based on new rules or goals established after the fact — in a blow to its efforts to terminate billions of dollars already promised.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, denied the Trump administration’s request to dismiss a lawsuit brought by 20 states, three governors and the District of Columbia challenging the cancellation of billions of dollars in federal grant awards since President Donald Trump was inaugurated last year.

Federal law does not allow the “terminations of awards based on new program goals or agency priorities that an agency identifies after granting the award,” the court concluded.

The ruling comes as lawmakers in both parties, including Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine), urge White House Budget Director Russ Vought to delay plans to overhaul the approval process for federal grants. The Trump administration is proposing a new regulation that would put political appointee in charge of approving or nixing awards for federal dollars.

Then, as now, Mainers came together, sometimes via social media and sometimes through various groups, to try to counteract ICE.

New York Times, He Pursued a Pardon in Trump’s Justice System. It Added to His Problems, Benjamin Weiser, July 18, 2026 (print ed.). Michael Castillero was convicted of defrauding investors in a $386 million scheme. Then he started courting MAGA influencers.

Not long after Michael Castillero was convicted in a Manhattan trial last fall in a $386 million fraud scheme, his pardon lawyer began drafting a letter to President Trump.

Mr. Castillero was a good man, a loving father and husband and an ardent backer of Mr. Trump, the lawyer wrote, but there was another reason the president ought to consider pardoning him: He was a target of “the Biden lawfare machine.”

“This is another case where a successful entrepreneur who is true MAGA is paying a price for his dedication,” the lawyer, Peter Ticktin, a longtime friend of the president, wrote in seeking a pardon for Mr. Castillero.

Not just that, Mr. Ticktin wrote. He noted that Mr. Castillero’s case in federal court for the Southern District of New York was initially overseen by Judge Jesse M. Furman, who “received scrutiny for his role in blocking the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil,” whom Mr. Ticktin described as “an antisemitic supporter of the Hamas terrorist group attending Columbia University.”

And, Mr. Ticktin added, a separate civil suit against Mr. Castillero, brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission, went before another Southern District judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, who “has drawn criticism for his handling of the civil trial brought by E. Jean Carroll against you, Mr. President.”

In years past, such naked appeals to a president’s sense of grievance might have been unusual, to say the least. But under President Trump, using all available arguments to seek a pardon has become almost standard practice, as much a part of diligent lawyering as filing briefs or making objections at trial.

“There’s no world these days in which I don’t at least discuss it with clients,” said Lawrence Lustberg, a prominent New Jersey lawyer who did not represent Mr. Castillero but had a client whom President Trump pardoned in a separate case last year. “I mean, it’s almost malpractice not to think about it.”

“All the old rules,” added Daniel McGuinness, one of Mr. Castillero’s defense lawyers, “are out the window.”

Mr. McGuinness said he used to discourage clients who raised the idea of a pardon by explaining the near impossibility of obtaining one.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

U.S. Senate candidate Troy Jackson speaks with voters at the Augusta Civic Center in Augusta, Maine, on July 18, 2026, where voting is taking place for the Maine Democratic deleate nominees (Lucy Lu photo for Politico).

Politico, Troy Jackson jumps out to big lead in race to replace Graham Platner in Maine, Aaron Pellish and Andrew Howard, July 18, 2026. The progressive logger and lawmaker dominated Maine Democrats’ Saturday county meetings to pick a replacement for Platner.

As Maine Democrats began the rushed and convoluted process to name a successor to scandal-plagued former nominee Graham Platner, it became quickly clear that progressive Troy Jackson was in control.

From meetings in rural Calais near the Canadian border to urban, progressive Portland, in high school gyms and over Zoom calls across eight counties, the blue-collar logger former state Senate president ran up the score on Saturday.

His campaign dominated the first of two days of the delegate-selection process, with his longtime union allies flexing their organizing muscles to out-maneuver his rivals en route to capturing a strong majority of delegates.

“I’m asking for your vote, but I’m also asking for more than that,” Jackson told over 100 supporters at a Friday evening rally under a gazebo at a park overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Portland, Maine.

“I’m asking you to organize,” he continued. “I’m asking you to talk to your neighbors. I’m asking you to show up at your county meetings, make the calls, send the texts and bring even more people into this movement.”

Organize they did.

On Saturday, Maine Democrats in eight counties chose 319 of the 500 open delegate slots. Jackson-aligned candidates carried an overwhelming majority of the spots selected, while supporters of former state Center for Disease Control director Nirav Shah and Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’ backers made up just a handful apiece, according to a POLITICO analysis of the campaigns’ released slates and the lists of elected delegates.

Jackson’s performance was so dominant on Saturday — capped off by a clean-sweep of the state’s largest county — that he announced he would host a celebratory tailgate during Sunday’s delegate selection caucus in York County.

The victor of Democrats’ flash pseudo-primary will be thrust immediately into the national spotlight in arguably the most important offensive opportunity for Senate Democrats this fall. Collins is the only Republican running for reelection in a state that President Donald Trump lost in 2024.

Speaking to a small group of reporters in Augusta on Saturday afternoon, Jackson acknowledged the stakes and the challenge.

“It’s probably the biggest race in the whole country,” Jackson said. “And Senator Collins is a whole different type of person to run against.”

Jackson’s campaign showed up to the county conventions with organized groups of volunteers, many of them sporting “Jackson for Maine” t-shirts from his recent unsuccessful run for governor. They also carried flyers with clear delegate slates after making a deluge of calls across the state to recruit supporters and make sure their backers were in place to push him at next week’s convention.

A logger from far-northern Allagash, Jackson made his rise in Maine politics through organized labor and has long been an ally of progressives, receiving Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) backing in the gubernatorial race. He campaigned arm-in-arm with Platner during the original primary. But Jackson swiftly called for him to exit the race after POLITICO reported that a person who dated Platner said he sexually assaulted her. Platner denied the accusation, but dropped out four days later.

Jackson has been able to quickly establish himself as the candidate most in the mold of the oysterman, who dominated the Senate primary, given his longtime track record of backing similar policies.

Saturday’s strong organizational effort by Jackson and his allies — which came just eight days after Platner dropped his campaign, augmented by volunteers from more than a dozen unions that are endorsing Jackson — represents an impressive accomplishment under a tight timeline.

And it has set him up as the clear favorite over a crowded field of more than 10 candidates heading into the second day of county conventions. His nearest rivals, fellow former gubernatorial nominees Shah and Bellows, came out of Saturday’s slate of conventions with hardly any path to victory. Eight more counties will select 181 more combined delegates on Sunday, with another 101 Democratic state committee members already chosen and whose votes are less clear since they are not being elected as part of any slate. Together they will all make up the 601 delegates who will pick their party’s nominee next weekend in the crucial Senate race.

Some of Jackson’s supporters didn’t come in committed to a candidate, but had been swayed by his team’s hyper-local level of retail politics, which will be crucial in the battle with Collins, one of the strongest retail politicians in Congress.

The makeshift slate of county caucuses had its challenges. Voters, delegate nominees and campaigns encountered some minor hiccups while participating in the process, which was created by state and local Democrats in the two weeks after Platner’s exit from the race.

In-person and virtual county meetings provided staff to help voters resolve issues with the state’s online ballots, while campaigns scrambled to adapt to the quirks of the process.

Some delegate nominees were listed on the slates for multiple campaigns, although Jackson’s campaign featured less overlap than others. Bellows’ delegate slate included enough nominees in each county to account for the alternates that voters are allowed to select in each state. Shah’s and Jackson’s campaigns did not, causing confusion among Shah and Jackson supporters in Hancock County over where to assign their additional votes.

The big delegate prize on Saturday was in Cumberland County, which includes the state’s largest and most Democrat-dense city of Portland. Jackson-aligned candidates claimed a clean sweep of the nominating spots in an online process that saw such high interest the party needed to extend the voting times. The final alternate delegate was a tied vote, so the county chair drew names out of a baseball cap to decide the winner.

While Jackson has a clear lead heading into Sunday, the delegates who are chosen — even if they are aligned with a particular candidate — are not formally pledged and can still change their votes at next week’s convention.

Graham Platner, Maine Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat, speaks during a campaign event.

New York Times, Without Platner, Maine Democrats Scramble to Keep Grassroots Energy Alive, Benjamin Oreskes, July 18, 2026. Graham Platner’s campaign for Senate imploded last week. The activists who backed him are seeking a candidate to carry his populist message in the race against Republican Susan Collins.

Ryan Warren sat in his home office in Fairfield, Maine, on a recent morning, racing to design campaign materials between Zoom meetings and phone calls with fellow political organizers.

Just days earlier, he had been working to elect Graham Platner to the U.S. Senate. But after Mr. Platner’s withdrawal from the race amid scandal, Mr. Warren had a new mission: finding a way to keep his populist movement alive while scrambling to find a new Democratic nominee.

“Our movement was not solely about Graham, even though he brought us together,” Mr. Warren said.

The implosion of Mr. Platner’s campaign followed months of controversy about his personal behavior, culminating in an accusation of rape, which he denied. It crushed the spirits of his most loyal supporters: Some of them felt betrayed by his behavior, while others saw the allegations as a plot by establishment Democrats to derail Mr. Platner’s insurgent campaign.

Now his supporters — including what his campaign claimed was an army of 15,000 volunteers — are contemplating whom to back among an unwieldy field of a dozen candidates.

Many Platner activists are also questioning the fairness of the political moment and whether they want to keep participating in politics at all.

The extraordinary situation in Maine has arrived as Democrats are waging a high-stakes effort to defeat Senator Susan Collins, the five-term Republican incumbent. Flipping the seat is a critical part of the Democrats’ efforts to take control of the Senate.

Spencer Toth, Mr. Platner’s former organizing director, said that the nominee who ultimately emerges from this truncated campaign will benefit from the volunteer infrastructure that has taken shape over the past year. What remains to be seen is whether any of the candidates can excite the network of volunteers who once supported Mr. Platner.

“Many of these candidates claim to espouse progressive beliefs that are similar to Graham,” said Mr. Toth, who worked briefly for the state Democratic Party after his role with Mr. Platner. “The thing is, it was never about the bullet points, but rather the way he was willing to speak to any issue directly and honestly that made voters love and trust him.”The state’s Democratic Party will hold a convention to choose a replacement for Mr. Platner next weekend, and most of the candidates are promising to pick up his progressive platform. Courting his most loyal volunteers could be critical to the party’s success in the fall.

The Contrarian, Publisher’s Roundup and Comment: Trump’s Speech About 2020 Proved He Was a Loser — and Still Is, Norman Eisen, right, and Sarah Jackel, July 18, 2026. Thursday night’s self-ballyhooed presidential address was the same old Donald Trump.

Six years on, he still refuses to accept the clear and unambiguous fact that he lost the 2020 election. Thursday’s speech was the same desperate claims — this time from the East Room in the White House. No wonder almost every respectable network refused to carry it, with CBS — now owned by his enablers the Ellisons — a notable exception.

Pay close attention: Trump didn’t claim that there was any actual interference in voting or election results. At no point did Trump say or point to any evidence that a single vote was changed or altered. Indeed, even White House conspiracy theorist John Solomon admitted as much to reporters afterwards. That’s because it did not happen. Audits, recounts, certifications, federal investigations, and more than 80 judges, including those appointed by Trump himself, have all uniformly rejected his attacks on the 2020 election.Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday. (White House YouTube)

What we got instead on Thursday was a rehash of four myths, all of which fall apart on close examination.

1. Myth: Purported Vulnerabilities in Electronic Voting and Ballot-Counting Systems. Trump spoke broadly about vulnerabilities in voting machines, but he did not say there is evidence that voting machines or votes were breached. And that’s because they weren’t. He wants to scare you with the hypothetical, but truth is that our election officials put safeguards in place to minimize any vulnerabilities. Their dedicated work and vigilance ensure our elections work as intended, protected from technological exploitation.
2. Myth: China’s Acquisition of American Voter Data. This is a scare tactic. Trump made wild claims about the compromise of election data, but let’s be clear: He did not say that votes were exploited or compromised. The voter registration data he is in a twist about actually consists of basic and publicly available data such as names and addresses — far less personal information than what the average American shares when ordering clothes on Temu.
3. Myth: Michigan Voter-Registration Investigation. Again, there was zero evidence of voting fraud here. Trump didn’t point to any and can’t. Though there were isolated cases of irregularities in registration, local election officials flagged them in real time. Our elections systems worked as intended to unearth them. This is a backhanded endorsement, not a critique.
4. Myth: Noncitizens on State Voter Rolls. Trump has made these wild claims of folks improperly registering over and over again using baseless allegations and wrong lists, such as the error-ridden and oft-abused Department of Homeland Security SAVE databases. The truth is that Americans follow voter registration laws and cast ballots in good faith, as we documented in our Democracy Defenders Action report with LULAC on The Big Lie.

Then there was the avalanche of documents Trump said would prove him right. They did just the opposite. For example, they show Russia, not China, was working to interfere in the 2020 election — to help Trump! If all of this is the best he and the election deniers have, they are in trouble.

Thursday was a flop — a predictable one. One of us (Norm) was asked by cable TV to do a curtain raiser for the speech. The forecast was for a comically loony mish-mash along the lines of other famous conspiracy theories, and boy did Trump deliver:

Trump lost in 2020. This will remain true no matter how many pieces of bogus evidence he invents or floats. The truth is Trump and his fellow election deniers are not just trying to prove bizarre counterfactuals about prior elections. They’re trying to fool us into doubting the next one.

But we will not let that happen. And with your help, Contrarians, we will call them out on their actions. In America, leaders do not choose their voters; voters choose their leaders. The American people will not let Trump and his cronies take our vote or our voice.

Thanks to you, we stand ready for whatever Trump and his administration may throw at us next. Your paid subscriptions help make our Democracy Defenders Fund and Action election protection work possible and also help power the rest of our over 300 legal cases and matters. If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one.Subscribed

And of course, your paid support also makes possible our phenomenal daily democracy coverage. Take a look at the best of the Contrarian this week, assembled by our wonderful colleagues:Dept. of Injustice

Trump’s Cronyism Signals a Chilling — and Familiar — Story

Brian Tyler Cohen analyzed how Trump’s corruption is following an all-too-familiar global playbook — Putin’s — and what we need to do to step out of Russia’s post-Soviet footsteps. “If the next Democratic administration doesn’t take note and prosecute the criminals of today to the fullest extent of the law, then that criminality is doomed to repeat itself.”

Trump DOJ’s NYT Subpoenas Are the Latest Encroachment on Press Freedom

Josh Levs wrote on the latest moves of an administration actively hostile to a free press and how coverage has fallen short by ignoring the history of reporter subpoenas. “It’s crucial information because it shows the media’s successful track record in fighting back.”

Trump’s Lawyers Should Be Sanctioned

Erwin Chemerinsky argued — apropos of a federal judge shutting down Trump’s outrageous IRS lawsuit this week — that all lawyers complicit in Trump’s abuses of power should expect repercussions for egregious misconduct. “Abuses of the legal system, even at the direction of the president, are unacceptable.”

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, My Conversation With Alex Wagner, Simon Rosenberg, right, July 18, 2026. This terrific conversation includes an extensive exploration of what we need to do now to counter Trump's escalating assault on our elections, our liberties, and our democracy.

Sending along an interview I did yesterday with journalist, former MSNBC anchor Alex Wagner, and now a fellow Substacker too. It’s a comprehensive and thorough look at our moment, and well worth your time. I’ve always found Alex to be one of the sharpest commentators out there and she does not disappoint in our lively back and forth.

The bulk of our conversation is about Trump’s unhinged speech on Thursday night, his desperation, and his clear decision now to do whatever it takes to keep us from winning the November election and taking back power in January. I offer a few ideas on what we need to do now:

1 - Win the election by as big a margin as possible to make whatever Trump attempts far harder.

2 - Create a national campaign to encourage people to vote early. I explain why in our conversation and in this recent post.

3 - National Democrats - Schumer, Jeffries, The Governors, The AGs, DNC/State Parties, Marc Elias, other democracy groups - should come together and create a unified front to defend our elections and our democracy. Right now our leaders are working in silos and it just isn’t enough given the gravity of what Trump is attempting. They should speak with one voice to educate and prepare the American people for what is to come, and build an integrated coordinating council or war room to counter it all - for we are stronger together than apart.

As part of that effort Democrats should announce a simple agenda to let voters know what we will do when back in power. We’ve offered some ideas for can be in a national agenda in our evolving Agenda Project. Whatever our leaders come up with it is essential they offer a clearly articulated accountability and renewing democracy agenda as part of this broader agenda. For as Hardy Merriman told us a few months ago the global democracy movement has learned that those parties attempting to enact far reaching accountability and democratic reforms fair far better when they’ve campaigned on the reforms and earned a clear mandate from voters. And we also know from polling that voters want us to be talking about us preserving their rights and freedoms (No Kings) and not just “kitchen table issues” and that there is nothing more intrinsically American than fighting for freedom and democracy.

We also know from polling, lots and lots of polling, that voters believe that our hearts are in right place but question our toughness, and whether we are strong enough to be able to fight and deliver for them. So we should see this fight for our rights and liberties as a real test of our character, resolve, “toughness to govern” and the ability do hard things - one we simply must pass. For truly beating MAGA, truly creating accountability, truly restoring our democracy, and truly giving the American people a better tomorrow will be the hardest thing our leaders - and all of us - have ever done; there is no easy path ahead; and we need to get on with it now.Subscribed

That’s some of what Alex and I talked about it. Get it when you can, enjoy your summer weekend, watch my new interviews with party leaders in Georgia, Iowa, and Maine (below), and let’s now go do the work to make sure we win this election by as big a margin as possible…….We Can Do This People!!!!!!!!!!

New York Times, These 16 Democrats Voted to Stop Israel Aid. AIPAC Took Action, Adam Sella, July 18, 2026. After 103 Democrats voted to eliminate aid to Israel, the lobbying group closed off online donations for more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers it had endorsed.

After nearly half of House Democrats voted to eliminate U.S. aid to Israel this week, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group appeared Friday to withhold backing for lawmakers it had endorsed.

The move comes amid a broader realignment in Congress on Israel and is the latest sign of tensions between the Democratic Party and the lobbying group, AIPAC.

Many Democratic lawmakers were torn about the vote this week on an amendment, sponsored by a Republican critic of foreign assistance, that would have stripped both military and humanitarian aid. But 103 Democrats ultimately voted yes, signaling a rebuke of Israel as many Democratic voters have expressed outrage over the war in Gaza. The amendment, which sought to cut $3.3 billion in aid to Israel from a foreign affairs spending bill, was ultimately rejected.

AIPAC chastised those voting in favor. And it appeared to take action against more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers whom it had endorsed as “pro-Israel,” most in safe seats but some with left-wing primary challengers.

Deryn Sousa, an AIPAC spokesperson, said on Friday that “AIPAC members are deeply appreciative of their representatives who stand on principle and are disappointed by those who don’t.”

The lobbying group appeared to remove donation links for 15 lawmakers running for re-election, and for Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who is not. Here’s a look.

Politico, ‘It’s scary’: Scandal sends Wisconsin Dems into freakout mode over governor’s race, Tyler Katzenberger, Will Steakin and Lisa Kashinsky, July 18, 2026. The Democratic establishment is alarmed that a top candidate’s collapse and the surge from a democratic socialist could cost them the governorship.

Sara Rodriguez had a prime opportunity this past Saturday to show voters gathered for a gubernatorial candidate forum in Wisconsin’s rural Northwoods that she was the person who could unite Democrats, thwart a democratic socialist insurgency and deliver the party unified control of state government for the first time in a generation.

Except the lieutenant governor didn’t show up. Her reserved table sat empty, save for a lone campaign sign. She blamed the last-minute cancellation on a family emergency. But a day later, Rodriguez revealed she had just fired her campaign manager for overcounting donations by hundreds of thousands of dollars over multiple months.

After a weeklong scramble to unsuccessfully contain the financial and political damage she dropped out of the race on Friday, declaring in a video that her money issues were an “ongoing distraction” and that she didn’t want it to “become a cloud over an election that Democrats need to win.”

Her downfall has thrown the Democratic primary field into upheaval less than a month from Election Day. “This race is now in chaos,” said Mitchell Stough, a now-former Rodriguez campaign staffer.

Democratic socialist state Rep. Francesca Hong is surging, alarming centrist Democrats who fear her unabashed leftism may torpedo what should be a winnable race against Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany in a key swing state. The only other frontrunner, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, lost a 2022 Senate campaign after facing relentless attacks for past progressive positions — a fact that’s giving Democrats pause.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who dropped out and endorsed Rodriguez less than two weeks ago, told POLITICO Friday night “I’m jumping back into this race,” expanding the already-splintered field of candidates that includes state Sen. Kelda Roys and Joel Brennan, a former Cabinet secretary for Gov. Tony Evers, who are languishing in the polls while potentially playing spoiler.

The stakes are sky-high for Democrats. They haven’t held unified control of swing-state Wisconsin’s government since 2010. In a favorable national political environment, this is their best chance in many years to win in a stubbornly purple state where elections are often decided by the thinnest of margins. And Hong’s apparent momentum is alarming some Democrats who see a winnable race slipping away.

“There’s a ton of policymaking power that hinges on the next election cycle in Wisconsin,” said Andrew Mamo, a Democratic strategist who worked on Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s re-election campaign in 2024. He said he worries about the possibility that Hong “gets the nomination and loses because she’s too left.”

“Let’s not fuck it up,” Mamo added.

As one Democratic state lawmaker, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said of Hong, “It’s scary to think that this is the person who is leading the primary … There’s a lot of us that think if she’s the nominee, we lose that seat, even in what’s supposed to be a very big Dem year. And we will lose the Assembly, too.” 

More On Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup

Governor Ayotte is running for reelection in New Hampshire (Gage Skidmore photo).

Meidas Touch Network, Exclusive: Kelly Ayotte Took Campaign Donations From Epstein Associates, Troy Matthews, July 18, 2026. Kelly Ayotte received campaign donations from several known associates of Jeffrey Epstein.Donors included Leslie Wexner, Leon Black, Marc Rowan, and John Phelan, all linked to Epstein.Ayotte, elected New Hampshire Governor in 2024, faces re-election this November.

New Hampshire Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte accepted tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from individuals identified to be associates of pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in the released DOJ Epstein files. These individuals included Leon Black, Leslie Wexler, John Phelan, and Marc Rowan.

Leon Black contributed $2,700 to Kelly Ayotte. Black and Jeffrey Epstein knew each other for decades, “Often socialized and dined together,” and Black was a lucrative client for Epstein until Epstein’s death. Between 2012 and 2017, Black paid Jeffrey Epstein at least $170 million for tax and estate planning advice, all after Epstein’s 2008 sex crime conviction. Black’s payments flowed to two Epstein-controlled entities in the U.S. Virgin Islands: Southern Trust Company and Financial Trust Company, averaging roughly $8 million per wire transfer.

Black was forced to resign as CEO of Apollo Global Management due to his relationship with Epstein.

Black was accused of sexual assault by a woman interviewed by the FBI and federal prosecutors as part of investigations into potential co-conspirators of Jeffrey Epstein, but denied wrongdoing.

Black has been subpoenaed to testify before the House Oversight Committee Thursday July 16th.Federal Election Commission

Leslie Wexner contributed $5,400 to Kelly Ayotte through two maximum individual donations of $2,700 in both the primary and general elections in 2016. Wexner has long been linked to Epstein through a decades-old financial relationship. Epstein served as Wexner’s money manager beginning in the late 1980s and was given sweeping control over large portions of Wexner’s fortune. Epstein also served as a director of both the Wexner Foundation and Wexner Heritage Foundation.

Epstein also lived in properties owned by Wexner and used his proximity to Wexner’s wealth and status to elevate his own standing. Wexner had nine phone numbers in Epstein’s black book and appears on 15 flight log entries. After severing ties around late 2007, Wexner received approximately $100 million back from Epstein in early 2008 as a private settlement, including $46 million transferred to the YLK Charitable Fund.

Wexner has said he severed ties with Epstein years before Epstein’s 2008 conviction and has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal conduct.Federal Election Commission

Marc Rowan donated $2,700 to Ayotte. Rowan regularly had meetings with Epstein in his New York home where we now know Epstein was sexually assaulting young girls. Rowan, co-founder of Apollo Global Management, has longstanding ties to Republican political fundraising efforts and has donated millions of dollars to GOP-aligned committees in recent years. He has also been associated with President Donald Trump and was previously considered for a Treasury Secretary role.

Documents released in connection with Epstein investigations indicate that Rowan maintained contact with Epstein during the 2010s. Records show multiple meetings, including visits to Epstein’s New York residence, as well as ongoing communication related to financial and professional matters.

Documents also suggest that Epstein and Rowan discussed business strategies and that Epstein was consulted on certain financial issues involving Apollo. The records also indicate that introductions were made between Epstein and other business figures through Rowan’s network. Apollo shareholders filed a class action lawsuit alleging that senior leadership, including Rowan, misrepresented the extent of Epstein’s involvement with the firm.Federal Election Commission

Trump’s former Navy Secretary John Phelan contributed $2,700 to Kelly Ayotte. Phelan was listed as a passenger on Jeffrey Epstein’s private Boeing 727 jet for two transatlantic flights between New York and London in February and March of 2006.

More On Iran War

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: Fighting Intensifies With Strikes on Critical Infrastructure, Aaron Boxerman and Leily Nikounazar, July 18, 2026. In the days since the cease-fire unraveled, the United States and Iran have expanded the scope of their attacks, with reports of water facilities and other structures coming under fire. Here’s the latest.

The United States and Iran expanded the scope and intensity of their attacks on Saturday, striking critical infrastructure sites that included a power station and water facilities, with no sign of an off-ramp to end the fighting.

More than a week after President Trump said the cease-fire with Iran was effectively over, American forces stepped up their assault, targeting “surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage, and maritime capabilities,” according to U.S. Central Command.

The bombardment has failed to break the deadlock over the Strait of Hormuz, the vital waterway for global oil and gas shipments that Iran has blockaded. The United States has also reinstated its own blockade on Iranian ports. With no apparent negotiations taking place, the two sides appear to be sliding back toward a wider war.

Iranian state media reported on Saturday damage to bridges and roads in the south of Iran, and said that a water desalination plant in Jask was hit. It cited a local official as saying that about 10,000 people were facing water shortages. The U.S. military did not immediately respond to a request for comment on those claims.

Iran has responded with its own attacks on American allies in the Persian Gulf. Air-raid sirens continued to ring out in Bahrain on Saturday morning, warning of new Iranian strikes. And the Jordanian military said it had intercepted 10 Iranian ballistic missiles overnight, without reports of major damage.

On Saturday, Iranian missiles and drones pummeled the Gulf state of Kuwait, where the government said another power and water treatment plant had been attacked — the second in two days — sparking fires. An oil facility was also struck, leading to injuries and “severe material losses,” according to Kuwait’s state-run petroleum corporation.

Kuwait’s Army said late Friday night that several of its personnel had been wounded by Iranian drone strikes on military facilities. Iran’s military said it was targeting U.S. bases in Kuwait and elsewhere in the region. It largely did not comment on the attacks on infrastructure that served civilians.

Last month, the United States and Iran reached a cease-fire meant to reopen the strait and allow for broader negotiations. But Iran, citing ambiguous language in the agreement, has continued to assert control over the waterway, attacking ships attempting to transit through routes outside its channels.

Mr. Trump has frequently threatened to bombard Iranian infrastructure, including power plants and bridges, in an apparent effort to force Iran’s leaders to make a deal and end the war. Analysts say there is little guarantee that stepping up attacks would force Iran to change course.

Bombing critical infrastructure could further disrupt daily life for many civilians caught up in the conflict. Legal experts have warned that, depending on the circumstances and intent, such attacks are potentially war crimes under international law.

• Here’s what we’re watching today:
• Lessons from past wars: Mr. Trump has struggled to convert American military might into a strategy that can bring victory in the war he began in late February alongside Israel. It’s a challenge the United States has faced again and again, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read more ›
• Rising oil prices: Oil prices jumped to their highest level in a month on Friday as the fighting in the Strait of Hormuz brought shipping there to a halt. Read more › 

Politico, Water infrastructure hit in Iran, Kuwait amid latest Gulf war flare-up, Zia Weise, July 18, 2026. Tehran attacked Washington’s Gulf allies after another night of U.S. strikes.

Iran launched a fresh spate of strikes on Washington’s Gulf allies on Saturday morning after the United States bombed the country for a seventh consecutive night following the collapse of a ceasefire deal.

Both Iran and Kuwait said the latest attacks hit desalination plants, a crucial source of water in the dry Middle East region.

Kuwait’s energy and water ministry said Saturday that an Iranian attack had sparked a fire at a power and desalination plant. The country depends on desalination for 90 percent of its drinking water.

Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted local authorities as saying that 10,000 people were facing water shortages following a U.S. strike on a desalination plant. Tehran has previously accused Washington of damaging a desalination plant in March.

U.S. Central Command said it had hit “surveillance sites, military logistics infrastructure, underground weapons storage, and maritime capabilities.”

Meanwhile, Bahrain and Jordan said they each intercepted several strikes from Iran on Saturday. Tasnim quoted the Iranian army as saying that they had targeted U.S. bases in Jordan and Kuwait.

A ceasefire agreement reached in June was declared over by U.S. President Donald Trump last week after talks to end the conflict stalled./Related Tags

More On Global News

New York Times, Mamdani Says He May Still Order Netanyahu’s Arrest, Sally Goldenberg, July 18, 2026. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in an interview with The New York Times that he was in “an active conversation” with New York City’s Law Department on whether he had the authority to arrest the Israeli leader.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said his administration was still discussing whether to arrest the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, if he comes to New York City as expected for the U.N. General Assembly in September.

“I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu belongs in the Hague,” Mr. Mamdani told Lulu Garcia-Navarro this week on “The Interview,” a New York Times show, referring to the home of the United Nations’ International Court of Justice.

“He’s a war criminal who has been charged by the International Criminal Court,” Mr. Mamdani added. “And what you will find is that is an opinion that is held by many, purely because of what his actions have wrought over these last many years.”

The mayor said he was unclear on whether he has the legal authority to order the New York Police Department, which he oversees, to detain a foreign leader like Mr. Netanyahu. He said he was in “an active conversation” with the city’s Law Department over the matter.

“Whatever the law allows me to do in New York City, that’s what we will do, but we won’t be writing our own laws to that end,” Mr. Mamdani added.

During his mayoral campaign last year, Mr. Mamdani said in an interview with The Times that he would order the Police Department to arrest Mr. Netanyahu, who is locked in his own re-election bid in Israel.

At the time, he said he would be honoring a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court after Mr. Netanyahu’s role in the war in Gaza, which Mr. Mamdani and a United Nations commission have called a genocide.

Mr. Netanyahu addressed Mr. Mamdani’s threat to arrest him during a recent radio appearance, saying he is not concerned, and he accused the mayor of supporting Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls a significant portion of Gaza. Hamas was responsible for the deadly attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which precipitated Israel’s deadly war in Gaza.

“I think he should look at who he's condemning, who he’s praising,” the prime minister said during an interview this week with Sid Rosenberg, a local radio personality and a frequent critic of Mr. Mamdani. “He’s condemning Israel, the one democracy that stands shoulder to shoulder with American values.”“Who does he champion? Hamas, that calls openly to massacre every Jew on earth, that conducted that horrible massacre, the worst massacre on Jews since the Holocaust,” Mr. Netanyahu added.

He also said Mr. Mamdani “doesn’t care” that “those who hate the Jews and Israel ultimately hate America."

“And in fact I think secretly, he hates America,” Mr. Netanyahu added.

Mr. Mamdani does not speak positively about Hamas when he criticizes Mr. Netanyahu and has condemned the Oct. 7 attacks. He has made his extensive concerns about Israel a focal point of his political identity, raising the issue frequently. Several people who know him well have said he considers Palestinian liberation one of the most pressing moral issues of his time.

Mr. Mamdani’s views about Israel are no longer on the fringe of the Democratic Party. Nearly half of House Democrats voted this week to end U.S. aid to Israel, which was not enough for the measure to pass, but enough to demonstrate a shift in the party’s posture toward one of the country’s stalwart allies in the Middle East.

Asked by Ms. Garcia-Navarro about the political weight he places on Israel, Mr. Mamdani said the war was motivating voters throughout the country, including in House races in New York last month, when his endorsed candidates emerged victorious.

“It is hard to find a more bankrupt policy approach than what our country has done to Gaza and to Palestine,” Mr. Mamdani added.

He also talked about national politics, speaking positively about the prospect that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a fellow democratic socialist, may run for president in 2028.

“I think she’d make a good anything,” he said.

U.S. Entertainment, Media, Education, Sports, Religion 

Boosie BadAzz onstage in a white and green football jersey with a green hoodie underneath and large jewelry on his hands, wrists and around his neck.Boosie BadAzz performing in Charlotte, N.C., last year (Photo by Jeff Hahne via Getty Images). 

New York Times, Boosie Lobbied for a Trump Pardon. It Never Came. He Wants a Refund, Rick Rojas, July 18, 2026. The Southern rapper paid $600,000 to two right-wing operatives. Now, they’re in a dispute over a contract the rapper believes entitles him to at least half his money back.

Boosie BadAzz, a prolific and popular Southern rapper whose career started in the 1990s, built a reputation that lent credence to his chosen name. He has had many run-ins with the law, and has served time in the notorious Louisiana prison known as Angola. He has also kicked up plenty of controversy, including a well-documented history of bizarre, homophobic and transphobic rants.

Last year, he found himself staring down the possibility of another stretch in prison, having pleaded guilty to a federal felony gun possession charge. It would mean years away from his children, and years away from making music and money. The tough facade he projected through his music was slipping. Boosie, 43, was worried, he said.

Then came an offer he could not resist.

Two lobbyists reached out to the rapper’s lawyers, saying they could use their proximity to President Trump and others in his orbit to help Boosie secure a pardon. He paid them $600,000 for their services. But the pardon never came.

“I was in a bad position, and they preyed on me, bro,” Boosie, whose legal name is Torence Hatch Jr., said in an interview. “They were chasing the money.”

Now, he wants the money back — half of it, at least. He has a signed contract that entitles him to such, he said.

The lobbyists disagree. Two right-wing operatives with tarnished histories of their own, they say they did exactly what they had promised for Boosie and owe him nothing.

After Boosie’s claims were widely circulated this week in news reports and on social media, one of the lobbyists challenged him to a public debate with journalists in attendance. “He has smeared us unfairly,” the lobbyist, Jack Burkman, wrote in an email to The New York Times. (The dispute was reported by the political news website NOTUS.)

In a separate statement, Mr. Burkman said that he and his partner, Jacob Wohl, had undertaken a “massive, highly tailored advocacy campaign across Congress, the executive branch and leading political influencers and media figures” in an attempt to secure a pardon.

“In 25 years,” he added, “we cannot think of a single client for whom our firm has done more work than Boosie.”

He was an unusual client in other ways, too.

Boosie found fame and commercial success as an early practitioner of a Southern strain of hip-hop that took over rap music roughly two decades ago.

First as Lil’ Boosie and then as Boosie BadAzz, he has pumped out hundreds of songs. His music draws upon the lessons and the pain of a hardscrabble youth in Baton Rouge, his Louisiana hometown, where he has remained a beloved figure.

Many rap listeners can recognize him instantly because of his distinctive voice, raspy and high-pitched (like “a frog on helium getting bear-hugged by a bodybuilder,” as a Pitchfork critic put it). And there’s the high-and-tight haircut he’s so closely associated with that barbers know it as a “Boosie fade.”

But his career has been marred by controversy and legal setbacks.

He was sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, or Angola, in 2009 after pleading guilty to a third-offense marijuana possession charge. His stay was extended after he was caught trying to smuggle in codeine.

Politico, Trump’s threats to revoke TV licenses get serious, John Hendel, July 17, 2026. Brendan Carr is already scrutinizing TV broadcasters, but he may have to be careful echoing the president’s political grievances, legal experts say.

President Donald Trump’s threats against broadcast television licenses are suddenly less of a laugh line to the media world and more of a real danger.

Trump’s broadsides Thursday night against NBC and ABC were just the latest occasion during the past nine years when he’s called for revoking the licenses of TV outlets that anger him, this time after the two networks declined to air his White House speech on election security.

“Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses,” he said Thursday.

But unlike Trump’s first term, when Republican leaders at the Federal Communications Commission disavowed any such reprisals, current Chair Brendan Carr has repeatedly opened probes and inquiries into the same TV networks that have drawn the president’s ire. And that has some policy veterans worried that the FCC may act this time, teeing up a constitutional fight.

“We’ve never in this country had a law that permits a royal decree for news coverage,” said Robert Corn-Revere, a former top FCC who’s now chief counsel for the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression. “If you expressly link a licensing proceeding to whether or not the networks are airing coverage that the president wants covered, then whatever legitimacy that those proceedings might have had is automatically diminished if you link them.”

Carr spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment Friday, and the FCC chair has yet to weigh in on X, where he is fairly prolific.

But he has already begun scrutinizing the diversity practices at NBC parent company Comcast and the network’s relationship with other TV station owners. He has also called in the licenses for ABC’s eight network-owned TV stations for an early renewal, a move that could lead to their being revoked.

Trump’s conservative allies have urged the FCC to go ahead with denying the licenses. Some renewed that call Thursday after ABC and NBC said they wouldn’t carry Trump’s speech live.

“Pull it,” Steve Bannon, the senior White House chief strategist during part of Trump’s first term, said on his podcast Thursday. “Let’s see what tough guys they are when you do that.”

Trump’s latest threats came during a primetime address in which he aired long-running claims that U.S. elections are vulnerable to fraud and foreign tampering.

More On U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Lina Khan on AI and More, Paul Krugman, right, July 18, 2026.Talking with one of our sharpest minds on market power (shown above in a file photo. 

Lina Khan, who chaired the Federal Trade Commission under Joe Biden, is one of the smartest and most influential thinkers about antitrust in our high-tech era, and one who has blazed new paths in policymaking. I spoke with her at a Graduate Center event back in March, and caught up with her again earlier this week for another enlightening conversation.

Paul Krugman: This week, I managed to get to talk to Lina Khan, who was the incredibly influential and smart head of the FTC in the previous administration—with the current administration doing everything it can to undo her work. She played an important role in the Mamdani transition team and has had a lot of smart thoughts about technology and policy right now. And I thought we could talk for a bit about this, well, it’s always a bizarre moment these days, but this is the bizarre moment we’re in. And so, hi.

Lina Khan: Hi, great to be here.

Krugman: I want to get into technology and AI, but I wanted to just start with something that just happened. One of your special causes, which is “Click to Cancel,” which you tried to get as a national policy, just went through in New York City. Can you talk a little bit about what was achieved here and why?

Khan: I’d be happy to. So, last week, the Mamdani administration announced that they are moving forward with two consumer protection initiatives. One was the finalization of a “Click to Cancel” rule, which basically says that businesses have to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one.

This rule is responding to the fact that we’ve seen a pretty significant pivot to service-based revenue, and more and more companies are relying on subscriptions as a regular business revenue line. And that has created an opportunity for firms to create a lot of friction when people are trying to unsubscribe. A lot of people can relate to situations where it’s very easy to sign up, or sometimes you’re enrolled without even your full knowledge or consent. But then once you try to cancel, companies can make you jump through all sorts of hoops. Maybe you signed up with one click online, but to cancel you have to phone somebody, except the hours are really restricted or there’s nobody there to pick up the phone. In some instances, you may actually have to go in person.

When we were at the FTC, we got thousands upon thousands of complaints, and people shared how, even during the pandemic when they were looking to cancel their gym membership, some gyms required that they go in person even after they had left the state. So this has been a growing problem, and people lose real money from it. I mean, there are estimates that, in New York City alone, people could be collectively losing over $160 million a year. So this rule, which is going to go into effect in October, is an incredibly important step forward.

The administration also announced that they’re going to be proposing a rule to tackle junk fees. These are the fees that oftentimes show up at the very end of a transaction, even though they were not reflected in the original advertised price. Sometimes they’re called convenience fees, service fees, or amenity fees. And these are non-discretionary; people have no choice but to see them included. Companies will, again, often not advertise them on the front end, which is both deceptive for consumers but also gives them an unfair competitive advantage, because honest businesses that are marketing the all-in price then lose business to those firms that instead do pricing where they market a lower price and then add all the additional fees at the end.

So, I’m really thrilled that the Mamdani administration is moving forward on these two initiatives, especially because we have seen some very serious backsliding at the federal level, where consumer protection initiatives have either been abandoned entirely or powerful companies that have connections to the White House. 

Politico, White House teleprompter operator placed on leave amid prediction market insider trading investigation, July 16, 2026. Trump “believes it's deeply unfortunate and frankly a disgrace,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at a press briefing.

A White House teleprompter operator has been placed on unpaid leave amid a Commodity Futures Trading Commission investigation into insider trading on the prediction market platform Kalshi, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and two people familiar with the probe said on Thursday.

The two people, who were granted anonymity to discuss details of the investigation, said the CFTC was looking into Gabriel Perez, a longtime teleprompter operator for President Donald Trump.

Trump “believes it’s deeply unfortunate and frankly a disgrace,” Leavitt told reporters at a press briefing. “And the individual that was cited in that report is complying with the CFTC but has been put on [un]paid administrative leave. There will be a teleprompter operator tonight, of course, but it will not be the one unfortunately in that story.”

ABC News first reported on the investigation. It’s the latest example of a high-profile disclosure of alleged insider trading on prediction markets, which have rapidly gained popularity in recent years.

“Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC after an exchange investigation,” Robert DeNault, Kalshi’s head of enforcement, said in a statement. “We have been assisting regulators on this matter and provided evidence we collected, as we do in any referral.”

In April, Kalshi suspended three congressional candidates for betting on their own races.

Virginia candidate Mark Moran, who launched an insurgent bid to primary Democratic Sen. Mark Warner before launching an independent bid, said at the time that he had gambled on his race in an effort to call attention to Kalshi’s effects on young men.

“I traded $100 on myself, knowing this would happen (also knowing that I wouldn’t be vying for the democratic nomination) and the attention it would create to highlight how this company is destroying young men and as Senator I will go after Kalshi and impose significant penalties on them - 25% - a vice tax - to pay down our national debt,” he wrote on X.

Perez did not respond to a request for comment sent through the White House, and he could not immediately be reached directly.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

New York Times, F.B.I. Evidence Team Visits Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Devlin Barrett and David A. Fahrenthold, July 16, 2026 (print ed.). Officials surveyed the newly drained pool, where the floor began peeling soon after a $16 million repair job. President Trump has blamed vandals. 

An F.B.I. evidence-gathering team visited the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Wednesday afternoon after the landmark was drained so that crews could repair peeling sections of its newly installed blue lining.

Photos taken by a New York Times photographer showed people wearing F.B.I. insignia and standing on the dry, grime-covered pool floor. They appeared to be documenting the scene in detail, with some using laser-scanning and measuring equipment. A spokesperson for the F.B.I. said that the team was assisting the U.S. Park Police in investigating damage to the pool.

The Trump administration spent more than $16 million to repair the century-old pool this year, giving out no-bid contracts to improve its filtration system and to apply a layer of waterproofing across the pool’s 2,000-foot-long concrete floor. The contracts were rushed through, bypassing normal procedures, so the pool would be ready for the country’s 250th birthday on July 4.

But problems quickly appeared. Algae blooms turned the water bright green. And sections of the lining began to peel from the bottom, floating near the pool’s surface.

President Trump has blamed both problems on vandals.

In social-media posts this week, he said the pool’s lining had been cut with a knife or box cutter.

“The slashes were 300 yards long, and the floor of the pool was cut and then pulled upward, with great force, by these thugs,” Mr. Trump wrote.

But so far, the Trump administration has not provided much evidence for those claims.

The National Park Service made a police report about vandalism on June 9, shortly after the work was completed. But that report described cuts in a different part of the pool, a strip of gray caulking around the pool’s edge. It did not mention damage to the blue lining that covers its broad floor, though the Interior Department said later that the blue section was “disturbed.”

In addition, the Justice Department has charged at least four people with crimes, accusing them of removing pieces of the pool’s lining. But the accounts of those incidents by prosecutors make it clear that they were not the original cause of the problems with the liner: All of the incidents happened days after the liner was first seen peeling up.The most serious charges were filed against a former U.S. Olympian, David Hearn, who was charged with a felony, accused of damaging a two-square-foot section of the pool. He has pleaded not guilty and said he merely touched a section of the lining that had already detached.

The pool has been drained slowly over the last few days, leaving behind a coating of dirt and debris that made it difficult to judge how much of the lining needs repair. The contractor that applied the liner, Atlantic Industrial Coatings, has said that the problems affected only a “very small part” of the pool’s floor. The company said on its website that it intended to repair the pool as part of the warranty.

July 17

Top Headlines

 President Donald Trump addresses the nation from the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. on July 16, 2026 (Saul Loeb via Getty Images).

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:The Real Threat to Our Elections Is Donald Trump,Bill Kristol, Sam Stein and Benjamin Parker, July 17, 2026. And it has been for years.
• New York Times, News Analysis: A Trump Obsession That Carries a Cost for Democracy, Peter Baker,.July 17, 2026. In demanding steps to address the integrity of voting, President Trump persisted in  relitigating his 2020 election defeat while finding ways to cast doubt on the 2026 outcome
• Paul Krugman via Substack,  Political-Economy Commentary: Trump Can’t Get No Respect, Paul Krugman, right, July 17, 2026. Donald Trump surprised me last night. I expected to hear lurid lies about the 2020 election. What he offered instead was mostly dreary innuendo that convinced nobody. Which is not to say that his speech was free of lies. Indeed, more or less every word he spoke was a lie. Here’s the part that caught my eye: "Two years ago, our country was dead. Now, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. America is respected like we have never been respected before." In reality, one of the most spectacular consequences of Trump’s return to power and the mess he has made since has been a collapse of global respect for America. 

U.S. Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche, currently acting attorney general and a former Trump criminal defense attorney before the president nominated him for Senate confirmation (Shown at U.S. Capitol on July 16, 2026).

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Blanche opponents; Buttigieg illuminates as a progressive role model, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 17, 2026. Courageous individuals this week showed tenacity and devotion to the rule of law in confronting acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, an unapologetic presidential flunky nominated for AG who lacks rudimentary legal ethics and has consistently subverted justice to meet the whims of his boss.
• New York Times, U.K. Live Updates: Andy Burnham to Replace Keir Starmer as Labour Party Leader, Michael D. Shear, July 17, 2026. Mr. Burnham is expected to promise in a speech more public control of essential services, a shift of power toward local governments and a push for economic growth. Here’s the latest.

News Roundups 

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump's Documents Disprove Election Claims, Trump Officials Lash Out After Speech Fails, Major Epstein News, Iran Bombings, Aaron Parnas, right, July 17, 2026. What a morning it has been. The White House spent the night lashing out at those who criticized Trump’s election speech. I reviewed many of the documents it released, and they disprove most of Trump’s claims. They show that Russia, not China, tried to meddle in the election, and it did so to help Trump, not hurt him. Even Trump’s own people acknowledged that no votes were changed, only to be rushed away when they began telling the truth. Meanwhile, I have more exclusive Epstein reporting, the latest on the U.S. bombing of Iranian bridges overnight, and much more.
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Major Trump Speech and Epstein News. I Watched and Fact Checked.Aaron Parnas, right, July 16, 2026. I watched Donald Trump’s address so you didn’t have to—and fact-checked it below. I won’t make you sit through the speech. I’ll tell you what he said, what was false, and what he left out.

Trump Positions Election Deniers For Top Federal Posts

• Democracy Docket, News and Advocacy: Trump pushes debunked election lies, demands SAVE America Act in primetime speech, Yunior Rivas, July 16, 2026. President Donald Trump used a primetime address Thursday to resurrect debunked claims about the 2020 election, allege sweeping foreign interference in voting and pressure Congress to pass the anti-voting SAVE America Act.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 16, 2026 [Telling Moment During Hearing], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 17, 2026. An exchange yesterday between Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to oversee the U.S. intelligence community as director of national intelligence, illustrated the dilemma of those trying to force Trump’s lies onto the American people when they are confronted with reality.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Call Is Coming from Inside the White House, Sam Stein, right, July 17, 2026. When our nation’s intelligence agencies put together a report on the impact foreign governments and actors had on the 2020 elections, they broke down the results into two categories.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Two Options: Lose or Cheat, William Kristol, right, July 17, 2026. Just one footnote to Sam’s piece: A couple of polls that appeared earlier this week are a useful reminder of why Donald Trump is making such frantic efforts to lay the groundwork for his election interference. The reason’s simple: If he doesn’t cheat, he’s going to lose.

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

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was on his way to work when he was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on July 7 in Houston, Texas, his family said (Family photo from Ronaldo Salgado).

• New York Times, U.S. Immigration Crackdown: In Houston, a Different Kind of Mourning After Fatal ICE Shooting, Jazmine Ulloa, July 17, 2026. After a federal agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the grief and anger in Magnolia Park has been less visible, but no less intense.

More On #MeToo Abuses

• New York Times, Guest Essay: When I Sued Roger Ailes, #MeToo Hadn’t Taken Off. Now It’s the Law of the Land,.Gretchen Carlson, July 17, 2026. Ms. Carlson, a journalist (shown above when she was a Fox News anchor), is a founder of Lift Our Voices, a nonprofit organization that strives to end the use of nondisclosure and forced arbitration agreements in cases involving workplace harassment and discrimination.

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: U.S. Hits Bridges and a Port in Country’s South, Iranian Media says, Leily Nikounazar, Shirin Hakim, Updated July 17, 2026. The U.S. military’s Central Command said the latest round of attacks had “hit dozens of Iranian military targets” but made no mention of civilian infrastructure. Here’s the latest.

More Global News

• New York Times, News Analysis: Ukraine Was on a Roll. Then a Clash Over War Strategy Exploded Into View, Andrew E. Kramer, July 16, 2026 (print ed.). From an underground parking garage, Ukraine’s newly dismissed defense minister aired the most dramatic, public critique of the military command to emerge during the war.
• New York Times, New Prime Minister Faces Old Problems: How to Make Britain’s Economy Grow, Eshe Nelson, July 17, 2026. Conversations with economists, and people around him, shed light on how Andy Burnham might tackle entrenched challenges.
• New York Times, How Andy Burnham, ‘King of the North,’ Conquered U.K. Politics, Michael D. Shear, July 17, 2026. A plain-spoken politician from a modest background in northwest England, Mr. Burnham is set to be named Labour leader — and prime minister apparent — on Friday.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Democracy Docket, News and Advocacy: Even Republican judges don't buy the DOJ’s voter roll arguments, Jen Rice, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has now lost 15 times — and won zero (!) times — as it battles in court for access to states’ voter rolls. And the majority of those rulings are coming from judges appointed by Republicans.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: "All Eyes Are On Iowa," Simon Rosenberg, right, July 17, 2026. Hopium Checks In With Rita Hart, Chair Of The Iowa Democratic Party: Gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand and our US Senate candidate Josh Turek lead in current polling in this Trump +13 state. 

Food Poisoning, Wildfires, Pollution, Climate Change, Public Health

• New York Times, Cyclospora Linked to Taylor Farms Lettuce Sent to Taco Bell, Christina Jewett, Alice Callahan and Caroline Hopkins Legaspi, July 17, 2026 (print ed.). Federal officials worked with Michigan investigators to trace the outbreak to iceberg lettuce, which may also have gone to other vendors.

U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

• Emptywheel, Analysis:To Beeb Adverse or Not to Beeb, That Is the Question, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right,), July 16, 2026. I noted that Judge Kathleen Williams order — issued Monday — finding that Trump and his personal and government lawyers had engaged in fraud on the court basically took the unitary executive to its logical conclusion. If Trump has complete control over the government, he cannot be adverse to it.

Top Stories

 President Donald Trump addresses the nation from the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. on July 16, 2026 (Saul Loeb via Getty Images).

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:The Real Threat to Our Elections Is Donald Trump, Bill Kristol, Sam Stein and Benjamin Parker, July 17, 2026. And it has been for years.

The company that owns Truth Social, which is itself mostly owned by Donald Trump and his family, is marketing a new, premium service, according to the Financial Times. Pay a fee, and you can get access to posts from Donald Trump and the other “highest ranking” accounts on the network whole “milliseconds” before everyone else.

The whole scheme would be a little more believable if the service, rather than being yet another transparent opportunity for companies and wealthy people to shove money at the president, were something anyone actually wanted to buy. Happy Friday.

President Trump delivers a nationwide address from the Oval office carried on all four major television networks Wednesday, Dec.17, 2025 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

New York Times, News Analysis: A Trump Obsession That Carries a Cost for Democracy, Peter Baker,.July 17, 2026. In demanding steps to address the integrity of voting, President Trump persisted in  relitigating his 2020 election defeat while finding ways to cast doubt on the 2026 outcome

President Trump used a lot of alarming words on Thursday night as he addressed the American people about threats to the integrity of elections in the United States: “Deep state.” “Rigged and stolen.” “Conspiring.” “Manipulation.” “Corrupt.” “Fraud.” “Cover up.”

But the bottom-line message he clearly wanted to leave with the public was this: He is not a loser, regardless of the result of the 2020 election. There were dark forces at work to thwart him. And if his party loses this fall’s midterm election, he intimated, that may not be an honest outcome either.

Mr. Trump’s prime-time speech from the East Room of the White House was an astonishing spectacle featuring a president intent on persuading the country that its elections cannot be trusted, at least not the ones where he or his allies fall short. He cited selectively declassified documents to make sensational claims about vulnerabilities of the election system, although nothing he revealed proved any outcomes were actually changed.

The exercise underscored how much Mr. Trump in his second term has come to be obsessed with relitigating the 2020 election and finding ways to cast doubt on the 2026 election. In the 18 months since he returned to office, he has installed election deniers in key positions, sought to change the rules to make it harder to cast ballots, seized voting records in a bid to prove his conspiracy theories and purged officials who investigated his efforts to overturn his election defeat six years ago.

“It does feel a little like Captain Ahab in ‘Moby Dick,’” said Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission. “He is just fixated on his claim that he didn’t lose the 2020 election. Armchair psychiatrists can say he doesn’t like losing, he can never admit he lost anything. But it’s clearly become an important part of his psyche and in some ways an important part of this administration.”

On one level, according to people close to him, Mr. Trump’s fixation on rewriting the history of 2020 is about salving the wounded ego of a man who constitutionally resists ever admitting that he has lost anything. He has made it a litmus test for anyone working for him to accede to, or at least not contradict, the lie that he won back then, not Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Trump has authorized investigations to revisit his many claims that have previously been debunked, inquiries seemingly aimed not at following wherever the facts may take them but in search of facts to back up his own unsubstantiated certitudes. It is hard to imagine that he would accept any investigation concluding that he lost fair and square.

But while part of this is about looking backward, it also is about looking forward. With Mr. Trump deeply unpopular, according to polls — just 37 percent approve of his performance in the latest Washington Post-Ipsos survey — his party faces a possible drubbing in congressional races in November. So Mr. Trump seems intent on laying a predicate that, at the least, could explain away a defeat and, at most, his critics fear, potentially justify direct intervention aimed at changing the results.

“It’s the standard approach to cast doubt on the electoral rules of the game where many populist authoritarians feel threatened by unpopularity at the polls or if the results declare them the loser at the ballot,” said Pippa Norris, who has taught political science at Harvard University for three decades and was the founding director of the Election Integrity Project. “Indeed, it’s been a leitmotif which the president has used for more than a decade now.”

Mr. Trump’s allies insist that he has well-founded reasons for his election conspiracy hunt, that Democrats, the news media, career officials and foreign governments all had cause to try to stop him from winning a second term and then hide their tracks. A self-serving establishment, they say, is protecting its own power and eager to take down a disruptive outsider in the form of Mr. Trump.

“The president passionately believes he was wronged in the 2020 election,” said Christopher Ruddy, his friend and chief executive of Newsmax Media, “and I think he is motivated for two reasons, to get vindication and to prevent future election irregularities.”

But some Republicans wish Mr. Trump would move on, seeing the issue as politically unhelpful in a campaign season when voters are focused on the cost of living and other matters close to home.

An Economist-YouGov poll last month found that Mr. Trump has persuaded 50 percent of Republicans that the 2020 election was rigged, but that is more of an article of faith among the president’s base than the broader electorate. While 66 percent of self-identified MAGA Republicans share that view, just 32 percent of other Republicans do and only 23 percent of independents.

Mr. Trump’s repeated forays into election denialism this term also reflect the change in his inner circle. While there were powerful voices in his first term who told him that his claims of election fraud were not true, most notably William P. Barr, then the attorney general, Mr. Trump this time is surrounded by advisers who either cheer him on or keep quiet.

“Clearly, there’s nobody in the White House who can say no to him; there’s no adult in the room,” said former Representative Barbara Comstock, Republican of Virginia and a longtime Trump critic. “They won’t say to him, ‘Mr. President, you lost the damn election. Why are we doing this again?’”

Indeed, would-be administration officials at the start of this term were asked point-blank during job interviews if they believed Mr. Trump won the 2020 election. Those who said no were generally not welcomed into the fold. Conversely, Democrats have now made a point of asking the same question during confirmation hearings of Trump nominees, leaving them struggling to find an answer under oath that does not anger the president.

“Do you deny that Joe Biden won the 2020 election?” Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, asked Jay Clayton, the president’s nominee for director of national intelligence, during a hearing this week.

“Senator, I’m not an election denier,” Mr. Clayton responded. “Joe Biden was certified as the president of the United States.”

Paul Krugman via Substack,  Political-Economy Commentary: Trump Can’t Get No Respect, Paul Krugman, right, July 17, 2026. Donald Trump surprised me last night. I expected to hear lurid lies about the 2020 election. What he offered instead was mostly dreary innuendo that convinced nobody.

Which is not to say that his speech was free of lies. Indeed, more or less every word he spoke was a lie, including “a,” “and,” and “the.” But the most spectacular lies weren’t about U.S. elections. They were at the beginning, when Trump boasted about America’s place in the world.

Here’s the part that caught my eye:

We had transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation, but not anymore. Two years ago, our country was dead. Now, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. America is respected like we have never been respected before.

In reality, one of the most spectacular consequences of Trump’s return to power and the mess he has made since has been a collapse of global respect for America. The chart at the top of this post is from Pew’s Global Attitudes Survey, but you don’t need a formal survey to know that the world increasingly despises the U.S. Just travel overseas and talk to people.

And it’s not just public opinion. Governments around the world, very much including nations that used to be our most loyal allies, are scrambling to reduce their dependence, economic and military, on an America that can’t be trusted and has also proved itself far weaker than anyone imagined.

Why do global attitudes toward the U.S. matter? For one thing, they obviously matter enormously to Trump. Claims that America was a laughingstock under Biden but that everyone now admires him are near the top of many of his speeches. Trump is not, to say the least, a man with great inner strength. He lives for external validation, or the appearance of external validation. Clearly, the delusion that the world is in awe of his prowess is key to his fragile sense of self-worth.

More important, Trump’s boasts about America’s international reputation are part of the case he is building for disrupting and/or rejecting the results of the midterm elections. Trump isn’t just insisting that everything is rigged against him. He’s also insisting that since he’s doing such an incredible job — presidenting like nobody has ever presidented before — nobody should get in his way or place any limits on his power.

It’s safe to say that at this point nobody who wasn’t already completely in the Trump tank is being persuaded by all this strutting, or indeed by anything Trump said in last night’s low-energy, boring rant. But remember: At this point, none of what Trump says is really about persuasion. It’s all about laying the groundwork for his attempt to destroy democracy.

U.S. Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche, currently acting attorney general and a former Trump criminal defense attorney before the president nominated him for Senate confirmation (Shown at U.S. Capitol on July 16, 2026).

The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Blanche opponents; Buttigieg illuminates as a progressive role model, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 17, 2026. Courageous individuals this week showed tenacity and devotion to the rule of law in confronting acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, an unapologetic presidential flunky nominated for AG who lacks rudimentary legal ethics and has consistently subverted justice to meet the whims of his boss.

U.S. Judge Kathleen M. Williams of the Southern District of Florida, in a ruling on Monday, demolished Blanche in finding Donald Trump’s IRS lawsuit a scam used to concoct a slush fund for insurrectionists and grant Trump and his family immunity from future tax audits. Williams further held that Blanche’s role in devising a collusive suit violated federal Rule 11 and warranted referring him for Florida state bar discipline.

“[T]he Court finds that this matter was brought for an improper purpose — to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact,” Williams wrote, noting Blanche’s glaring conflict of interest (namely: having previously represented Trump personally).

In her unequivocal slap down of Blanche and the other DOJ attorneys, Williams removed any doubt about the current DOJ’s utter lack of integrity and, specifically, the unfitness of Blanche to serve in, let alone lead, DOJ.

Well in advance of Blanche’s appearance Wednesday, the survivors of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein launched a massive campaign to block his confirmation as AG. They continued their efforts the week, flooding the airwaves to urge the Senate not to reward Blanche, the architect of his scheme to illegally withhold release of the Trump-Epstein pedophile files. Their PSA was courageous and compelling:

Jim Acosta @jimacosta.bsky.social: Epstein survivors released this video today urging senators to block the confirmation of Todd Blanche for Attorney General. They’re trying to get to 20,000 signatures on their petition to send a message to the Senate.

After Blanche’s deceitful testimony in which he falsely stated he was prohibited from meeting with victims, survivor Lara Blume McGee said at a press conference:

Under Mr. Blanche’s watch, the Department of Justice has released materials tied to the Epstein investigation in ways that exposed survivors’ names, medical and financial details, and other identifying information that should have been protected.

She continued. “For many of us, the DOJ’s redactions were not merely inadequate — they were another violation, reopening wounds we had fought to keep closed.”

Survivor Dani Bensky’s gut-wrenching testimony, shown above and excerpte in video here, put the blame directly on Blanche for releasing victims’ names and images:

She attested to “real and irrevocable harm” and called him out for refusing to meet with victims despite spending 9 hours to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell.

“To add insult to injury, the information that Todd Blanche gathered in the White House Situation Room last summer to curb the political fallout from the Epstein files was absolutely abhorrent. Instead of following investigative leads, our government treated and continue to treat this as a political crisis that needs to be managed,” she explained, utterly demolishing Blanche’s credibility.

Senators who vote to confirm Blanche in the face of such damning evidence of ethical depravity and professional unfitness should face the wrath of voters and the condemnation of history. By contrast, Judge Williams and the Epstein survivors deserve full credit for courageously defending truth, decency and the rule of law.Subscribed

Don’t forget about Buttigieg

Democratic fresh faces such as Texas Senate nominee James Talarico, thirty-seven, and midterm standout campaigner Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), thirty-nine, have earned praise for their media savviness and ease in connecting with voters. However, Democratsshould not ignore the continued maturation of former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg, shown above in a CNN interview this year, as a first-rate political leader and communicator.

Of the current batch of lithe, highly articulate, Obama-level-cool political stars, Buttigieg, forty-four, is literally and figuratively the veteran — given his military service, tenure in the Biden administration, and extended national media presence. Thanks in part to his greying beard, he no longer comes across as a precocious college kid. Instead, he brings a unique degree of gravitas and refreshing distance from the internecine squabbles between factions of the party.

As the 2020 Iowa caucus winner, he snagged the plum spot of headlining last Sunday at Iowa Democrats’ “Liberty and Justice Celebration” fundraising dinner, a high-energy affair that benefited from Democratic enthusiasm over its strong contenders for governor, Senate, and the 1st and 3rd House congressional districts.

Buttigieg argued persuasively that the elite corruption endemic in our politics is why “we cannot have nice things.” Reminding the crowd that “[o]ur political and economic and social systems have been letting us down for a long time,” he explained that “our economy is unfair because our politics is unfair.”

Our democracy has been hijacked by the current “carnival of corruption,” Buttigieg observed, pointing to Trump’s defective jet gifted by the Qataris and his grotesque self-enrichment, including crypto graft; the Supreme Court’s indulgence of Trump’s tyrannical whims with a grant of absolute criminal immunity; and congressmen’s participation in ethically galling insider trades and utter lack of interest in checking executive overreach. “This hurts us. This is why things aren’t working properly,” he explained. “This is why they can make you pay more at the pump for a war you never asked for; how they burned down the Department of Education while we are worried about kids who cannot do math or read like they are supposed to.”

Buttigieg conceded Democrats have too often gotten “boxed in” as defenders of the status quo. “But the answer cannot be to put everything back the way it used to be. We are not going to all this trouble to find the shards of everything they smashed up and try to tape it back together to look just like it used to,” he implored the crowd.

Eschewing buzzy descriptors (“socialist” or “center left”), Buttigieg demonstrates that the real imperative for Democrats is boldness, the determination to offer concrete, dramatic solutions to bolster our democracy and ensure widespread prosperity for ordinary Americans.

New York Times, U.K. Live Updates: Andy Burnham to Replace Keir Starmer as Labour Party Leader, Michael D. Shear, July 17, 2026. Mr. Burnham, right, is expected to promise in a speech more public control of essential services, a shift of power toward local governments and a push for economic growth. Here’s the latest.

Andy Burnham will be installed on Friday as the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, the final step before King Charles III asks him on Monday to form a government and become the country’s 59th prime minister.

In a speech at a special conference of Labour Party members, Mr. Burnham is expected to promise more public control of essential services, a shift of power toward local governments and a push for economic growth by increasing the country’s industrial base, according to excerpts released by Labour Party officials.

The former mayor of Greater Manchester faces many of the same structural problems that have caused the country to churn through prime ministers every few years since 2016: slow economic growth, high government debt, a struggling national health service and deep political divisions.

Mr. Burnham, who will replace outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, has offered few details about how he would confront those. And the excerpts released before the speech were vague. He is expected to say the Labour Party under his leadership must have the “courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected” and the “conviction to argue for our plans.”

In his career as mayor of Greater Manchester, Mr. Burnham repeatedly argued that the national government in Westminster was ignoring the needs of local communities, especially in the north of England. He has promised to set up an office in Manchester as a symbol of the government’s determination to ensure that changes.

News Roundups 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump's Documents Disprove Election Claims, Trump Officials Lash Out After Speech Fails, Major Epstein News, Iran Bombings, Aaron Parnas, right, July 17, 2026. What a morning it has been. The White House spent the night lashing out at those who criticized Trump’s election speech. I reviewed many of the documents it released, and they disprove most of Trump’s claims. They show that Russia, not China, tried to meddle in the election, and it did so to help Trump, not hurt him. Even Trump’s own people acknowledged that no votes were changed, only to be rushed away when they began telling the truth.

Meanwhile, I have more exclusive Epstein reporting, the latest on the U.S. bombing of Iranian bridges overnight, and much more.

I am working now to learn what comes next in the Todd Blanche saga, and I expect to have exclusive news soon. I am also continuing to review and fact-check every document released by the White House.

It has already been a busy night, and it is going to be an even busier day. Here’s the news:

Trump speech fallout:

The White House reportedly went into damage-control mode after Trump’s primetime address received a harsh response. Trump had promised to reveal “really big news,” but the anticipated bombshell never materialized. Speaking from the East Room, he attempted to convince Americans that the country’s election system contains “shocking vulnerabilities.” Instead, the speech was widely criticized and quickly challenged by fact-checkers. The White House’s reaction suggested that the address had backfired rather than delivered the political victory Trump expected. Here are some ways I fact checked:

Trump claimed China carried out the largest election-data breach in history during the 2020 election cycle. This is misleading because much voter information is already publicly available or can be purchased. Federal officials said obtaining voter-registration data did not affect voting or election results. Trump also claimed the election system is catastrophically insecure. That is false: audits and federal assessments found no evidence that malicious activity compromised the 2020 or 2024 results.

Trump claimed voting machines are easily compromised, but that claim lacks evidence. The declassified intelligence he cited concerned a vulnerability in a Venezuelan system that generally is not used in the United States. American voting machines are closely monitored and typically backed by paper ballots that can be audited by hand. Trump also exaggerated the number of dead people and noncitizens on voter rolls. These registrations—and illegal votes cast under them—are extremely rare and have not been shown to alter election outcomes.

Trump falsely claimed major television networks refused to carry his speech because they wanted to conceal election corruption. ABC, NBC and CNN made the address available through their streaming platforms, websites and YouTube channels. Trump also falsely described mail-in ballots as inherently corrupt. Studies have found mail-voting fraud to be extraordinarily rare and far too limited to change election results. Trump continues to attack mail voting despite recently casting a mail-in ballot himself.

Trump released declassified intelligence intending to support his claim that China interfered in the 2020 election to defeat him, but the documents instead show that Vladimir Putin and senior Russian officials directed efforts to help Trump win. Russian proxies allegedly spread claims about Joe Biden and Burisma while trying to orchestrate a major corruption scandal against the Democratic nominee. The documents indicate these narratives were promoted through American officials, prominent figures and media outlets, although many identities remain redacted. The broader release says several foreign governments could potentially access election data, but provides no evidence that China manipulated voting systems or that foreign interference changed the 2020 result. In short, Trump’s own document release undermined his claims about China while reinforcing the intelligence assessment that Russia worked to benefit his campaign.

The documents Trump declassified to “prove” the 2020 election was rigged actually show the opposite: Russia sought to interfere by hurting Joe Biden and helping Trump win.

The documents also confirm that China did not interfere in the election, directly contradicting Trump’s claims. He literally released evidence that says the exact opposite of what he told the country—and his most devoted followers will still believe the lie.

John Solomon, whom Trump hired to investigate alleged voting irregularities, acknowledged that no votes were changed in the 2020, 2022 or 2024 elections. Asked whether the 2020 results showing Joe Biden won the presidency were accurate, Solomon replied, “I’m researching.” He also said there is no intelligence indicating that Venezuela tampered with U.S. voting machines. His admissions directly undercut key claims Trump made about compromised elections and foreign interference.

Among the documents released by the White House is a claim that China “compromised” Colorado’s voter-registration rolls. But those rolls are public records—accessing publicly available information is not evidence that an election was hacked or compromised.

Sen. Mark Warner confronted CBS anchor Tony Dokoupil over the network’s decision to broadcast Trump’s election conspiracy theories. Dokoupil was leading CBS’s coverage of Trump’s Thursday evening address when Warner challenged the framing almost immediately. The exchange came amid criticism that CBS has adopted a more MAGA-friendly editorial approach since Bari Weiss became editor-in-chief. The article characterizes Dokoupil as “MAGA-approved” and says Warner dismantled his presentation within seconds. The confrontation highlighted the growing debate over whether airing Trump’s false claims gives them undeserved credibility.

Following the speech, the White House spent the overnight hours attacking journalists and media companies:

Epstein news:

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s first meeting with Epstein survivors lasted roughly an hour and left attendees more concerned about his nomination. Blanche opened by saying he was not asking the survivors to make commitments and would not make any himself. When asked why he had publicly said there were no investigative leads, he denied ever making that statement. He also claimed he lacked the power to open an investigation and directed survivors to other Justice Department officials in the room. Survivors left without clear answers about who could authorize an investigation or what additional information was needed.

Sky Roberts, the brother of the late Virginia Giuffre, pointed to evidence Virginia had provided concerning the man formerly known as Prince Andrew, including sworn testimony and a photograph. When Roberts asked whether that material constituted an investigative lead, Blanche said Andrew would not cooperate and Virginia was no longer available. Survivors noted that Blanche demanded testimony and evidence while appearing to dismiss examples of both already contained in government files. They also criticized him for offering no credible plan to investigate alleged perpetrators and enablers beyond Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Afterward, Blanche told reporters that he had encouraged the survivors to give the FBI any information that might assist investigators.

Survivors described Blanche as abrasive, condescending, evasive and intentionally noncommittal throughout the meeting. Annie Farmer said he would not commit to examining authorities’ failure to pursue her sister Maria Farmer’s 1996 report or release records about decisions not to charge Epstein. Farmer also called his explanations for interviewing Maxwell and her subsequent transfer to a less secure facility unsatisfactory and contrived. Dani Bensky and Lara Blume McGee said the meeting was unproductive and appeared designed to secure confirmation votes rather than deliver accountability. Several attendees urged the Senate to reject Blanche’s confirmation, arguing that he had left survivors trapped in the same cycle of unanswered questions.

Iran:

The United States struck bridges, rail links and other infrastructure in southern Iran for a sixth consecutive night. The attacks appeared designed to isolate Bandar Abbas, Iran’s main port, from Tehran and the rest of the country. U.S. Central Command said it targeted military logistics and maritime capabilities, while Iranian officials said civilian infrastructure was hit. Iranian state media reported that at least eight people were killed and 20 were injured. The strikes also damaged power infrastructure and a maritime control tower at Chabahar, another major Iranian port.

Iran retaliated with missiles and drones aimed at U.S. military facilities in Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar and, for the first time, Syria. The Revolutionary Guard claimed it targeted radar installations, missile platforms, aircraft and a Special Operations command center. These claims could not be independently verified, and the Pentagon did not immediately comment. A child in Qatar was injured by falling shrapnel during interception operations, while air-raid sirens sounded in Bahrain. The escalating attacks followed the collapse of a ceasefire and interim agreement between Washington and Tehran. Here is a video of bridges in Iran destroyed following US strikes:

Fighting has largely halted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which carried about one-fifth of the world’s oil before the war. Iran declared the waterway closed and threatened to prevent oil and gas exports as long as U.S. attacks continued, while Washington reimposed its naval blockade. Despite growing fears about the global economy, Trump insisted the United States was “winning big in Iran.” Communication channels remain open, with the White House saying Tehran wants to make a deal. Iran also released American prisoner Dena Karari in what Trump described as a gesture of goodwill.

Other news:

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Treasury Department’s top tax policy official, Kenneth Kies, was reportedly forced out after clashing with the White House over IRS audits. Kies warned that political officials risked violating a federal law restricting senior officials from influencing tax-enforcement decisions. He served simultaneously as assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy and acting chief counsel of the IRS. According to people familiar with the matter, he will leave both positions within the coming weeks. His ouster raises questions about potential White House attempts to interfere with the independent enforcement of federal tax laws.

Canadian wildfire smoke is creating dangerous air quality for more than 120 million people across the Midwest and Northeast, with conditions expected to remain poor through Saturday. New smoke plumes from Ontario have pushed pollution to the surface, driving air-quality levels above hazardous thresholds in cities including Chicago, Detroit and Toronto. Wildfire smoke contains PM2.5 particles that can enter the lungs and bloodstream, posing the greatest risk to children, older adults and people with heart or lung conditions. A heat dome over the central United States is pulling the smoke south, while climate change is making severe fire and smoke seasons longer and more likely. Officials recommend limiting outdoor activity and keeping windows closed, particularly in areas under air-quality alerts.

Here is what the map means: Federal health officials linked shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia to a multistate cyclospora outbreak. The FDA traced the contaminated lettuce to a single unnamed supplier, and Taco Bell has stopped using its products. More than 30 states have reported cyclospora infections this year, with cases surpassing the previous national record of roughly 4,700. The parasite can cause prolonged watery diarrhea, frequent or explosive bowel movements and other intestinal symptoms, but the illness is typically treatable with antibiotics. Officials are investigating whether contaminated lettuce remains available elsewhere and advise consumers not to eat shredded lettuce from affected Taco Bell locations.

According to Politico, Trump administration officials are reportedly considering replacing Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Troy Edgar just months after his return to the agency. Current and former DHS officials accuse Edgar of micromanaging operations, interfering in matters beyond his authority and lacking a strong understanding of the deportation process. His management style reportedly conflicts with Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s effort to decentralize decision-making after months of turmoil under Kristi Noem. Mullin and the White House publicly defended Edgar, insisting that he retains their full confidence. Brian Cavanaugh, Trump’s nominee for DHS undersecretary for management, is reportedly being considered as a possible replacement once confirmed.

ICE arrested Chinese human rights lawyer Wu Shaoping in Pennsylvania while he was delivering Amazon packages, despite his pending U.S. asylum application. Wu entered the country legally in 2019 after fleeing a crackdown on lawyers and activists in China and applied for asylum the following year. He has continued advocating for Chinese political prisoners while awaiting a decision on his case. Human rights advocates fear that deporting him to China could expose him to imprisonment and persecution for his legal work and activism. Wu remains in detention ahead of a July 27 immigration hearing, and his arrest has alarmed other Chinese dissidents who sought protection in the United States.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and Donald Trump are expected to attend Sunday’s World Cup final in New Jersey, where Spain will face Argentina. Their meeting comes amid tensions over Spain’s defense spending and its refusal to support the U.S. attack on Iran. Trump previously threatened to cut off trade with Spain because Madrid would not commit to NATO’s target of spending 5 percent of GDP on defense. He later softened his position and praised Spain for meeting its agreed 2 percent target. Despite their disagreements, Trump and Sánchez reportedly had a friendly conversation about the World Cup at the recent NATO summit. 

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Comment: Major Trump Speech and Epstein News. I Watched and Fact Checked.Aaron Parnas, right, July 16, 2026. I watched Donald Trump’s address so you didn’t have to—and fact-checked it below. I won’t make you sit through the speech. I’ll tell you what he said, what was false, and what he left out.

But that’s not all. There is major Epstein news. This afternoon, survivors sat down with Todd Blanche for the first time—the first meeting between survivors and the attorney general. Blanche was rude, dismissive and, according to those in the room, gaslit them. It was a slap in the face. I have exclusive reporting from inside the meeting.

Here is everything you need to know right now about Trump and Epstein. Subscribe to support my around-the-clock reporting, or upgrade your subscription today.Subscribed

Trump Speech:

Tonight, Donald Trump announced the release of what he called “critical intelligence” exposing serious vulnerabilities in the American election system and a years-long effort to conceal foreign interference.

But there is one glaring problem with the scandal Trump described: much of the alleged cover-up happened during his own first presidency.

“Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” Trump said. He claimed the material shows that the election system is dangerously exposed to “hacking, exploitation and foreign interference.”

“Just as disturbingly, this vital information has for many years been covered up and hidden from you,” he added.

Trump said China carried out what he described as the largest compromise of election data in history beginning during the 2020 election cycle. He also spoke about alleged Chinese interference dating back to 2019, when he was already president.

According to Trump, China’s goal was to undermine public confidence in him.

“They focused on undermining confidence in the U.S. president,” he said. “They wanted to just want you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually your president has done a great job.”

Trump then claimed that dozens of significant CIA and NSA reports about China’s election activities were kept out of his presidential briefings.

“These were briefings I would get almost every day,” he said. “Everything was kept out.”

In other words, Trump is alleging that a massive foreign-interference scandal unfolded inside the United States government while he was president—and that his own intelligence agencies kept him in the dark.

Trump also claimed that “burn bags” from the Obama administration had been discovered. He suggested they contained highly incriminating material but did not explain what the material was or provide evidence supporting the allegation.

He is now calling on the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA to investigate the alleged concealment.

“Today, I’m asking [them] to investigate how and why such crucial information was hidden, to fire those involved in the cover-up, and to file criminal charges, if appropriate,” Trump said.

He also claimed that dead people remain “active” on voter rolls and described the election system as fundamentally indefensible.

“These disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it,” Trump said. “It is not defensible.”

Trump said the newly released documents also show that the CIA received reporting about a plot intended to benefit Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela. He argued that the intelligence demonstrated the need for urgent action to prevent the American election system from being hacked or compromised “like it was in the past.”

“China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections,” Trump said. “Evidence of fraud has been buried.”

But Trump did not explain how the alleged foreign activities translated into fraudulent votes or changed an election result. Foreign attempts to influence an election, vulnerabilities in election infrastructure and actual voter fraud are separate claims requiring different evidence.

The central question raised by Trump’s announcement is therefore unavoidable: If this was one of the largest election-related intelligence failures and cover-ups in American history, how did it happen while Trump himself occupied the White House?

Trump is presenting the disclosures as evidence of a scandal hidden from the American people. At the same time, his account suggests it was also hidden from—or missed by—the president responsible for overseeing the government while it allegedly occurred.

Epstein Survivors:

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, right, met Thursday with several accusers of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but the meeting appeared to deepen survivors’ concerns about his nomination to lead the Justice Department. The approximately hourlong meeting at Justice Department headquarters in Washington followed a demand from a Republican senator whose support is considered crucial to advancing Blanche’s nomination. I have exclusive recaps of what happened inside the meeting:

Blanche began by telling survivors, “I am not asking you guys to commit to anything today, and I don’t expect that I have to commit to anything today, too.”

The survivors asked him why he had said there were no investigative leads.

“I never said that,” Blanche replied. They pressed him, pointing out that he had said it in the media. Amanda Roberts, the sister in law of Virginia Giuffre, asked him directly whether he had misspoken. Blanche doubled down.

“I never said that.” The conversation then turned to opening an investigation. Blanche said he did not have the power to do that. He pointed to other people in the room, including members of his team.

“You need to talk to other people,” he said. “I can’t open an investigation. They can. I’m just the attorney general.” Sky Roberts, the brother of Virginia Giuffre, responded: “Respectfully, Mr. Blanche, what do you need from us to help you open an investigation?” Blanche said he needed testimony and evidence.

Sky reminded him that Virginia had presented evidence against the man formerly known as Prince Andrew. There was sworn testimony. There was a photograph. It was in the files. “Isn’t that an investigative lead?” Sky asked.

Blanche replied, “Andrew won’t cooperate with us, and Virginia isn’t here, so I can’t…” That exchange gets to the heart of what happened in the room.

The survivors pointed to testimony and evidence already contained in the files. Blanche said he needed testimony and evidence. When confronted with a specific example of both, his response was that Andrew would not cooperate and Virginia was no longer here.

The survivors came prepared with direct questions. They wanted to know why existing evidence was not being treated as an investigative lead, who had the authority to open an investigation, and what more they were expected to provide.

They did not leave with clear answers. Afterward, Blanche told reporters that he had encouraged the accusers to provide the FBI with any information that could assist investigators. Several survivors, however, described the meeting as evasive, unproductive and lacking meaningful commitments to accountability.

Annie Farmer said the encounter strengthened her opposition to Blanche’s confirmation.

“After meeting with Todd Blanche, I feel even more confident in urging senators to vote against his confirmation as the United States’ attorney general,” Farmer said in a statement. She described Blanche as “abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors,” contrasting his demeanor with his public testimony during his confirmation hearing.

Epstein whistleblower Maria Farmer, shown in a file photo at right, repeatedly and unsuccessfully asked federal authorities beginning in 1996 to investigate Epstein and his ring of traffickers and financers on the basis of their horrific depradations.

Farmer said Blanche criticized the failures of previous administrations but declined to take responsibility for decisions made underhis own leadership. According to Farmer, he would not commit to investigating why authorities failed to pursue her sister Maria Farmer’s 1996 report about Epstein. He also declined to release documents concerning internal deliberations over whether to charge Epstein.

Farmer further criticized Blanche’s explanations for his nine-hour interview with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell and Maxwell’s subsequent transfer to a less secure facility, calling them “wholly dissatisfactory and contrived.”

“His evasiveness felt like a deliberate attempt to claim the attorney general’s office is powerless in this matter,” Farmer said. “By passing the buck once again, he is leaving survivors trapped in the same endless loop of searching for answers and receiving none.”

Another accuser, Dani Bensky said the meeting was neither substantive nor productive. “My mind has not been changed that he will do what is best for the American people and survivors in this country,” Bensky said.

Earlier Thursday, Bensky testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that women harmed by Epstein had attempted to meet with Blanche “through multiple channels” but received no response.

“We deserve to be heard directly, not dismissed and ignored,” she told lawmakers.

Lara Blume McGee, another Epstein survivor who attended the meeting, accused Blanche of treating the encounter as “a perfunctory audition for votes, not accountability.”

McGee, left, said Blanche was condescending, repeatedly interrupted survivors and failed to explain why the Justice Department had released materials that exposed survivors’ identities. She also said he presented no credible plan to investigate potential perpetrators and enablers beyond Epstein and Maxwell.

“He offered no real plan to investigate anyone beyond Epstein and Maxwell and gave no reason to believe the remaining files aren’t vital to exposing other perpetrators and enablers,” McGee said. “Todd Blanche is unfit to be attorney general — Senator Thom Tillis and the Senate must vote no.”

Here is another statement I just received from Marijke Chartouni: “When institutions fail to address the concerns of sexual abuse victims, the betrayal comes at a much higher price. This perpetuates the cycle of oppression by creating psychological barriers that prevent victims from seeking necessary help, resulting in oppression in its most intimate form: survivors being implicitly and explicitly told that victimization was their fault, that their trauma didn’t deserve recognition, and that their recovery wasn’t worth institutional investment.”

Trump Positions Election Deniers For Top Federal Posts

Democracy Docket, News and Advocacy: Trump pushes debunked election lies, demands SAVE America Act in primetime speech, Yunior Rivas, July 16, 2026. President Donald Trump used a primetime address Thursday to resurrect debunked claims about the 2020 election, allege sweeping foreign interference in voting and pressure Congress to pass the anti-voting SAVE America Act.

But despite years of claiming that the election was stolen, he presented no evidence that any entity, foreign or domestic, manipulated votes or registration records, or in any way altered the outcome of the 2020 election. In fact, he didn’t even assert it.

In a disjointed speech, Trump claimed China obtained 220 million U.S. voter files and accused intelligence officials — whom he termed the “Deep State” — of concealing election threats. And he suggested electronic voting systems had previously been compromised.

Trump also announced that his administration would declassify intelligence documents supposedly backing his claims.

In fact, the U.S. intelligence community previously concluded that no foreign actor attempted to alter voter registration, ballot casting, vote tabulation or the reporting of results in 2020. Federal agencies also rejected claims that Venezuela, China or other foreign governments controlled voting equipment or manipulated vote totals.SIGN UP TODAYGet updates straight to your inbox — for free

Trump nevertheless described the newly released material as “brand new and irrefutable information” and said his administration would notify states about alleged vulnerabilities before the midterms.

Then he pivoted to pushing SAVE, his pet legislative project that election experts call “the most restrictive voting bill ever.”

“Addressing this crisis of election security demands that Congress must pass the SAVE America Act,” Trump said. “The only reason you wouldn’t do it is if you want to cheat.”

The massive anti-voting bill, which has stalled in the Senate, would require voters to show photo identification and provide documentary proof of citizenship. Trump also demanded an effective end to mail voting, falsely calling the practice “inherently corrupt.”

In pushing SAVE, Trump has regularly claimed — falsely — that illegal voting by noncitizens is widespread in U.S. elections.

During his speech Thursday, the president went further, saying that an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had identified 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in federal elections.

He then directed DHS to notify states about these supposed noncitizens on the voter rolls and order their removal.

Trump also called for federal investigations, firings and possible criminal charges against officials he accused of suppressing intelligence.

“Today, I’m asking the Office o 1 of 10,330

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 16, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 17, 2026. An exchange yesterday between Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to oversee the U.S. intelligence community as director of national intelligence, illustrated the dilemma of those trying to force Trump’s lies onto the American people when they are confronted with reality.

Ossoff asked Clayton: “Who won the 2020 election?”

Clayton responded: “Uh, you know, I’m not, I’m not gonna do this with you.

Ossoff: “This is a job interview. We’ve established that you have an obligation to be honest and forthright with the committee.”

Clayton agreed.

Ossoff: “Who won the 2020 election?”

Clayton: “Like I said, I’m not I’m not gonna get into that with you.”

Ossoff continued to ask, and Clayton continued to refuse to answer the question, saying: “We can keep doing this,” and saying he was not going to “engage in the theater.”

Ossoff said: “You’re here asking for the support of senators to lead America’s intelligence community. We’ve established that you have an obligation to be honest and forthright with this committee and with the American public, but you refuse to answer a simple matter of fact about the 2020 election. Is that right?”

Clayton: “No, that’s not right.”

Ossoff: “Then answer the question. Who won the 2020 election?”

Clayton: “I have answered the question.”

Ossoff: “Answer it. What is your answer?”

Clayton: “I’ve given you my answer.”

Ossoff: “What is your answer?”

Clayton sat in silence.

Ossoff: “You refuse to answer a basic question about who won a presidential election? But you ask to lead America’s intelligence community? Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge the president’s delusions? We know, you know, everybody in this room knows the truthful answer to that question, why can you not give it?”

Clayton could not answer because, although all of the claims of Trump and his loyalists that he won the 2020 presidential election have collapsed in court, Trump requires his cronies to claim that the election was stolen in order to have justification for rigging future elections. They know the truth—that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes and by 51.3% to 46.8% in the Electoral College. But they refuse to say so because if they do, they will lose Trump’s favor.

Those loyalists are the people Trump is putting in control of the American government. In his own confirmation hearing today for elevation to the position of attorney general—the person at the head of the country’s legal system, representing the American people—Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche slipped. When asked if he and Trump were friends, Blanche answered, “I’m his lawyer,” before correcting himself to say: “was his lawyer.”

Blanche was Trump’s criminal defense attorney and has openly used the power of the Department of Justice to pursue Trump’s political opponents.

The editorial board of the New York Times called out another problem with Blanche. On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida Kathleen Williams questioned whether Blanche is fit to practice law at all. She found that the slush fund/immunity deal Blanche signed off on with Trump, the Trump family, the Trump Organization, and their associates had been manufactured to give cover to a deal they did not want reviewed by a judge.

Yesterday we saw in real time how, with Blanche’s support, Trump is stacking the courts with loyalists. In Seattle, Washington, a panel of federal judges appointed by five presidents unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff, a former judge and longtime state and federal prosecutor as U.S. attorney. The judges appointed Rogoff to replace the Trump appointee whose 120-day interim position ended in February. By law, an interim U.S. attorney can stay in office for no more than 120 days, but Trump has tried to get around that law by changing the title under which his appointees operate, turning the interim U.S. attorney into an assistant U.S. attorney while leaving the top position empty.

The judges, to whom replacing an interim U.S. attorney falls if there is no presidential appointment, unanimously agreed to Rogoff. He took the oath of office at 8:00 in the morning and, within the hour, received an email telling him he was fired.

“District court judges can appoint a temporary U.S. Attorney, and [the president] can fire them,” Blanche posted on social media Wednesday.

Trump’s styling of himself as an authoritarian ruler showed yesterday in the announcement from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that the Treasury will issue a new commemorative $1 coin with Trump’s likeness on it this fall as “a lasting symbol of patriotism.” It is unclear if the coin will circulate as currency.

While living monarchs who are heads of state appear on coins, living political leaders who appear on currency tend to be those trying to make themselves indistinguishable from the government. Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Idi Amin in Uganda, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq all put themselves on currency. The U.S. passed a law in 1866 barring living people from appearing on U.S. financial instruments.

According to Alice Gibbs of Newsweek, the Trump administration is getting around that law by relying on a law permitting the coining of collectible currency to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary, as the country did with its bicentennial quarters in 1976.

Luke Broadwater and Marco Hernandez of the New York Times today did a deep dive on the helipad Trump is building on the South Lawn of the White House. They note that it’s usually very hard to get permissions to build a helipad because of zoning laws, airspace regulations, and impact on the environment. Trump himself has said there is “no harder zoning thing to get.”

But Trump is pushing ahead with the one he wants without permission from Congress and without any review panel. Construction began last month on the site where Trump had ordered an Ultimate Fighting Championship stadium built for a cage match on his birthday. Trump says Lockheed Martin, which is a major defense contractor and which makes the new, powerful helicopters Trump uses, is donating the money to build the helipad.

A spokesperson for the White House told the reporters that “operational upgrades to the White House grounds, such as the helipad installation, do not require commission reviews.”

Trump did not get reviews or permissions to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool either, and when that went poorly he insisted that vandals had attacked it. His loyalists parrotted his claims, and the Department of Justice went so far as to arrest and charge 67-year-old cyclist David Hearn, who touched part of the pool’s detached lining, accusing him of vandalizing it.

Today Jarrett Ley, Meg Kelly, Klara Auerback, and Maura Judkis of the Washington Post reported that all of the peeling occurred at the seams of the lining and that experts said those failures were likely due to the way the lining was installed. They explained at length what those mistakes were.

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers denied that this could be the case. “There were no missteps during the initial repairs to the pool,” Rogers said. “Unfortunately, deranged individuals made several gashes in the side of the pool and destroyed over 300 feet of the pool’s siding. Once the necessary repairs to fix the vandalism are complete, the Reflecting Pool will be restored to all its glory.”

Trump’s conviction that he and his cronies should run the United States without input or check from Congress or experts and without reference to reality has brought us to a perilous place.

Trump yesterday told the Fox News Channel that the U.S. is planning to attack Iran’s bridges and power plants. Today, Parisa Hafezi, Samia Nakhoul, and Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported that Iranian leaders have asked the Houthis they back in Yemen to close the Bab el-Mandeb strait that commands the opening between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. The Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb are the two main routes for oil exports from the Middle East. The closure of the second strait would exacerbate energy shortages even as the U.S. oil reserve drops to its lowest level since 1983.

Despite the administration’s insistence that addressing climate change is a “scam,” the extreme weather caused by climate change has sparked more than 800 wildfires in Canada and at least a dozen in northern Minnesota. Smoke from the fires is exposing Americans from the Midwest to the Northeast to hazardous levels of air pollution.

CBS News reports that Detroit, Minneapolis, and Chicago today rank in the top five most polluted cities in the world, and that officials in New York City are distributing N95-type masks to commuters. Ben Noll of the Washington Post reported that more than 115 million people are in the plume of unhealthy to hazardous air quality and that conditions are expected to get worse.

At the same time, pouring rain in the Texas Hill Country is causing deadly floods. CNN reported that the Guadalupe River at Comfort, Texas, rose more than 25 feet in an hour as the heavens dropped about half a year’s worth of rain in southern Texas.

Meanwhile, there are now nearly 7,000 known cases of food-borne illness from a parasite that is causing “explosive diarrhea” in patients in more than 30 states across the U.S. Brian Beutler of Off Message commented: “I feel like if Biden or Obama had turned America into a diarrhea splatter film, Republicans would’ve made it into a political problem for them.”

A new Washington Post/Ipsos poll showed that Trump has lost even many Republicans. Only 37% of those polled approve of his job performance, while 61% disapprove. The percentage who “strongly” approve of Trump has dropped to a new low of 15%. Only 26% of Independents approve of his job performance, while 71% disapprove. Sixty-six percent of Americans say groceries are unaffordable.

And so, with Trump scheduled to give a prime-time address tonight, apparently to argue for voter restrictions, Senator Ossoff told reporters: “Here’s what’s going to happen tonight: the world’s most famous sore loser will deliver a prime-time presidential sour grapes address to pursue his 6-year-old grievances about the 2020 election, while his war in the Middle East spirals out of control and the cost of living continues to rise for Americans across the country.”

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

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was on his way to work when he was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on July 7 in Houston, Texas, his family said (Family photo from Ronaldo Salgado).

New York Times, U.S. Immigration Crackdown: In Houston, a Different Kind of Mourning After Fatal ICE Shooting, Jazmine Ulloa, July 17, 2026. After a federal agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the grief and anger in Magnolia Park has been less visible, but no less intense.

In Magnolia Park, one of Houston’s oldest Latino barrios, a makeshift memorial for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo sits on a torn-up street near the spot where he was killed.

Since Mr. Salgado Araujo, a Mexican home builder and father of three, was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer last week, construction workers and landscapers in work shirts and dusty boots have often come alone to stand in silence.

Neighborhood residents have dropped off rosaries and candles. Many have worn Mexico soccer jerseys in tribute to one of Mr. Salgado Araujo’s favorite teams.

His killing has hit hard, another immigrant’s life taken by agents carrying out President Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Yet, the mourning feels different in Magnolia Park.

In parks, shops and backyards in the neighborhood, people have voiced their grief in hushed tones. There are no shrill whistles or clashes with agents. There have been fewer news cameras and demonstrations than in cities like Chicago or Minneapolis.

At a restaurant, television screens alternated between clips of World Cup matches and news footage of federal agents wrestling migrants to the ground in confrontations across the country.

Maria, 52, a cashier who spoke on the condition that her last name not be published because she fears retaliation from immigration authorities, said she had lived and worked in Houston without legal status since she had left central Mexico with her daughter some 30 years ago.

She had never seen staff and customers so scared or concerned over immigration enforcement — or so angry, she said. “It could have been any one of us,” she said. For now, she added, there is little she can do but stay inside as much as possible and check her social media accounts for reports of ICE before she goes out.

New York Times, Guest Essay: When I Sued Roger Ailes, #MeToo Hadn’t Taken Off. Now It’s the Law of the Land,.Gretchen Carlson, July 17, 2026. Ms. Carlson, a journalist (shown above when she was a Fox News anchor), is a founder of Lift Our Voices, a nonprofit organization that strives to end the use of nondisclosure and forced arbitration agreements in cases involving workplace harassment and discrimination.

Ten years ago I made the terrifying decision to sue Roger Ailes, who was then the Fox News chief executive and chairman, for sexual harassment. In the weeks that followed, more than 20 other women spoke up about his abuse. Just months before, Bill Cosby had been charged with sexual assault. Later, new sexual harassment claims against Bill O’Reilly became public, and women began speaking out against Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer and so many more.

The #MeToo hashtag and movement, started by Tarana Burke a decade earlier, reignited globally. Prominent men accused of horrific behavior were finally held to account. The momentum felt unstoppable.

But then Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court despite his furious reaction to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault. President Trump won re-election despite having been found liable for sexual abuse. Pete Hegseth was confirmed as secretary of defense despite having settled sexual assault claims. (Mr. Hegseth denies the accusations.) Once-canceled men, from Louis C.K. to Mr. O’Reilly, reclaimed their spotlight. Harassers continue to get away with toxic behavior in workplaces and our communities every day. It has become all too common to hear that #MeToo is dead.

That verdict could not be more wrong.

Over the past decade, the #MeToo movement has achieved crucial legal reforms across the country and around the world. Chief among these are laws restricting the use of nondisclosure agreements and forced arbitration clauses, which corporate America and abusers had employed to silence victims and allow bad behavior to continue unchecked. As a result of those reforms, millions of workers have stronger rights and protections to speak up against their abusers.

The recasting of the legal landscape is #MeToo’s real legacy, and it will live on long after this or that predator has exited the scene.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

My former Fox News colleague Julie Roginsky and I helped push for the passage of two federal laws, the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act and the Speak Out Act, both signed in 2022, which prevent companies from imposing these silencing clauses for workers who’ve experienced sexual misconduct.

Nineteen states now have laws that restrict NDAs. New Jersey, California and Washington State have banned the use of NDAs for all toxic workplace issues, which means that workers in those states can no longer be silenced about harassment, discrimination or retaliation. This is watershed legislation that helps millions of workers own their own voices. For every high-profile case, like FKA Twigs suing Shia LaBeouf over an NDA she says concealed abuse or the N.F.L. losing in its effort to push for forced arbitration in a discrimination case, there are thousands of people whose names we will never know for whom these laws make a tremendous difference.

Those laws didn’t just happen. They’re a direct result of the #MeToo movement and the personal and professional risks survivors took to drive structural change for all workers.

In New Jersey, Assemblywoman Katie Brennan exposed rampant failures in the state’s handling of sexual assault claims she made against a senior staff member on Phil Murphy’s 2017 campaign for governor. Ms. Brennan’s advocacy was central to New Jersey’s passage of strong anti-NDA laws, the first of their kind in the nation, helping to lay the groundwork for other states to follow.

Tanuja Gupta’s work at Google helped to shine a national spotlight on the widespread use of forced arbitration by U.S. corporations. Ifeoma Ozoma risked significant legal and financial consequences when she broke her NDA with Pinterest to accuse the company of rampant racial and gender discrimination, and she later was a driving force behind California’s landmark Silenced No More Act. And last year Zelda Perkins, a former assistant to Mr. Weinstein and one of the first women to publicly break her NDA with his company, spearheaded legislation in the United Kingdom that bans NDAs in incidents of abuse.

Lawmakers in New York and Connecticut will have the opportunity again next year to pass legislation restricting NDAs in all incidents of abuse and harassment. Because these states are home to some of the world’s most powerful employers, policy change there would have nationwide implications. Look at Washington, for example: When that state banned NDAs in cases of harassment and discrimination in 2022, Microsoft eliminated confidentiality clauses in its settlement and separation agreements with its employees nationwide. It just takes a first step.

When the #MeToo movement kicked off, the possibilities seemed endless. I’m sure many people thought change would come quickly. But that’s not how movements work. We cannot judge the success of #MeToo only by whether it stopped all abuse and rewrote our rules, nor whether it’s still dominating headlines and social media feeds.

Even though Mr. Ailes died almost a decade ago, I still cannot talk about what happened to me at Fox News, because I am bound by the highly restrictive NDA I signed back when such things were standard elements of employment contracts. Thanks to these subsequent laws, however, survivors can now speak up in court about instances of abuse, harassment, discrimination and retaliation. These laws give survivors their voice back. #MeToo made them happen, and we’re not giving up any time soon.

More On Iran War

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: U.S. Hits Bridges and a Port in Country’s South, Iranian Media says, Leily Nikounazar, Shirin Hakim, Updated July 17, 2026. The U.S. military’s Central Command said the latest round of attacks had “hit dozens of Iranian military targets” but made no mention of civilian infrastructure. Here’s the latest.

The U.S. military struck bridges and a port facility in southern Iran, Iranian state media reported on Friday, and Middle East nations said they were fending off more attacks by Tehran as the opposing sides escalated their weeklong crisis over the Strait of Hormuz.

The latest American attacks targeted rail and road connections between Iran’s southern port cities and the rest of the country, Iranian state media said, as the U.S. military seeks to degrade Tehran’s ability to choke shipping in the strait. Iranian state media reported that at least six bridges in the southern province of Hormozgan, home to the Bandar Abbas naval base, were hit, citing provincial officials.

Strikes also hit the Bandar Abbas railway station, Iran’s state broadcaster said. Nearby, in Khamir County, six bridges were hit, Iran’s state news agency reported, citing local officials. A control tower at the Chabahar port on the Gulf of Oman was also destroyed in a strike, according to the state broadcaster.

Eight people were killed and 20 others wounded in the U.S. attacks across Iran, the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reported on Friday.

The U.S. military’s Central Command said in a statement early Friday that the latest round of American attacks had “hit dozens of Iranian military targets such as coastal surveillance and air defense sites, military logistics infrastructure, and maritime capabilities.” The statement made no mention of civilian infrastructure.

As President Trump strains to find a resolution to a war that has dragged on for more than four months and damaged the global economy, he has threatened to attack civilian infrastructure to try to force Iran’s leaders to make a deal. Such attacks could be considered a war cri

More Global News

New York Times, News Analysis: Ukraine Was on a Roll. Then a Clash Over War Strategy Exploded Into View, Andrew E. Kramer, July 16, 2026 (print ed.). From an underground parking garage, Ukraine’s newly dismissed defense minister aired the most dramatic, public critique of the military command to emerge during the war.

For President Volodymyr Zelensky, a long string of political and battlefield setbacks had by this summer seemed to fade into the rearview mirror. Ukraine, through the grit of its soldiers and the innovation of its engineers, entered a winning streak.

What snapped it was not a fearsome Russian offensive or another unraveling of relations with President Trump. Instead, it was an outbreak of political infighting, which culminated with Mr. Zelensky’s dismissal on Wednesday of a popular, youthful defense minister who championed the innovations of drone warfare.

The minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, responded Thursday by hosting reporters and opposition politicians in an underground parking garage, for security against Russian missiles. There, he aired the most dramatic, public critique of Ukraine’s war strategy, its corruption in defense contracting and the shortcomings in its military command to emerge during the full-scale war with Russia.

After more than four years in which virtually all Ukrainian officials lionized the military leadership, Mr. Fedorov lit into it. An open clash between the minister of defense and the commanding general had cracked an all-important sense of unity in fighting the larger Russian Army, as well as the narrative of a Ukraine riding high in the war.

For weeks, Ukrainians had talked of a turning point in the conflict, with Ukraine having battlefield and diplomatic success, after a cold, dark winter of heavy Russian bombardments.ImageA damaged room filled with rubble, debris, and boxes. Several people in orange hard hats and yellow vests clear materials.Emergency workers clearing an apartment in Moscow following a Ukrainian drone strike in May.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times

The front line, while still a swirl of lethal violence, has mostly stabilized with drone-fighting tactics. Ukraine has regularly attacked Moscow with exploding drones, and just in the past week and a half, it reported hitting 116 ships in the Black and Azov Seas. Ukraine is receiving installments of a 90 billion euro loan from the European Union. And at a meeting in Ankara, Turkey, last week, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Zelensky’s prosecution of the war and offered a pathway to more of the lifesaving interceptor missiles that Ukraine desperately needs.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Ukraine?

Now, suddenly, the country is mired in a political crisis that is the most significant leadership breach since Mr. Zelensky in 2024 fired a previous commanding general, Valeriy Zaluzhny, who had clashed with the president over mobilization policies.

New York Times, New Prime Minister Faces Old Problems: How to Make Britain’s Economy Grow, Eshe Nelson, July 17, 2026. Conversations with economists, and people around him, shed light on how Andy Burnham might tackle entrenched challenges.

One after the other, Britain’s recent prime ministers have pledged to revive the nation’s economy. One after the other, the promised growth eluded them.

Andy Burnham, right, set to formally become the newest prime minister on Monday, has arrived with his own version of this pledge: “Good growth in every British postcode.”

His plan? Give away power to local officials so they can make their own economic choices. Mr. Burnham has promised to bring about “the biggest change in our lifetimes to the way the country is run.”Mr. Burnham has not revealed the details of his economic agenda. But his priorities are emerging in his speeches and recommendations from advisers. The New York Times spoke with five economists and policy strategists who are playing a role in formulating Mr. Burnham’s economic vision, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk openly about policies that were still not final.

Alongside the so-called devolution of power, Mr. Burnham has said he will bring more public utilities and services under public control, while quickly tackling the high cost of living.

But Mr. Burnham will face the same economic challenges that befell his predecessors: a heavy public debt burden, stubbornly high inflation and low productivity growth. Those are compounded by the unavoidable legacies of the country’s decision a decade ago to leave the European Union, which has dragged on the economy, and years of too little public investment. Nervous consumers are saving a lot, rather than spending.More On Iran War

New York Times, How Andy Burnham, ‘King of the North,’ Conquered U.K. Politics, Michael D. Shear, July 17, 2026. A plain-spoken politician from a modest background in northwest England, Mr. Burnham is set to be named Labour leader — and prime minister apparent — on Friday.

Andy Burnham, the man about to become Britain’s next prime minister, looked exhausted and on the edge of fury.

It was October 2020, the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic. As mayor of Greater Manchester, he had just learned from an aide that the Conservative government in London, some 200 miles south, had imposed fresh lockdown restrictions on his area, while refusing his demand for $87 million to protect low-income workers and struggling businesses.

“This is no way to run the country in a national crisis,” he fumed in front of a Manchester concert hall. “They should not be doing this. Grinding people down. Trying to accept the least they can get away with.”

“It is frankly disgraceful,” he said.

The video clip went viral, earned Mr. Burnham the nickname “King of the North” and was arguably the moment that set him hurtling toward No. 10 Downing Street.

On Friday, he will become the leader of the Labour Party and on Monday, King Charles III will formally ask him to become the country’s 59th prime minister.

Mr. Burnham’s brand has always been that of the plain-spoken, stand-up-for-the-little-guy politician. Despite his highbrow English degree from Cambridge University, his regional accent communicated his ordinary upbringing in northwest England. Born in 1970, Andrew Murray Burnham grew up in a close-knit Roman Catholic family in the village of Culcheth, between two postindustrial cities in decline for decades: Liverpool, where he was born, and Manchester.

“Our lifestyle was modest, and we never had a family holiday abroad,” he wrote in “Head North,” his 2025 memoir. “But we didn’t want for anything.”

As an ambitious young member of Parliament, he quickly rose through the ranks even as he lost two bids to become Labour Party leader. He was a junior minister under Tony Blair and a member of Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet before growing disillusioned with London and returning home to run one of Britain’s largest cities.Editors’ Picks

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Now, he will replace Keir Starmer, one of the most unpopular British leaders in modern history. It is not clear how Mr. Burnham intends to overcome the challenges that doomed his predecessor: high government debt, slow economic growth, aging infrastructure and political division.ImageAndy Burnham sits next to the former prime minister, Keir Starmer. Both men are smiling as a third person hunches over them and is also smiling.Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, with Andy Burnham in Ashton-under-Lyne, England, in April. Mr. Burnham is now faced with replacing Mr. Starmer, one of the most unpopular politicians in recent years. Credit...Pool photo by Paul Ellis

“Andy Burnham is fundamentally an instinctive politician,” said Joshi Herrmann, a journalist and the founder of The Manchester Mill, who has covered Mr. Burnham for years. “That’s a valuable skill set,” he said. “But it’s naïve to think that a better communicator is going to get around these fundamental problems of British life.”‘Not for people like me’

Mr. Burnham was 17 when the rejection came.

By his own admission, the interview in the wood-paneled room at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge University, had gone poorly. He had fumbled a question about The Canterbury Tales and accepted that the “completely alien world” of one of Britain’s elite universities was out of reach.

Instead, on his 18th birthday in 1988, he was back at Cambridge for another interview, this time with Fitzwilliam College, which offered him a place.

It was Stephen Harrington, his English teacher at St. Aelred’s Catholic High School, who urged a reluctant Mr. Burnham to set his sights on Cambridge.

“It was very much ‘Oh, no, no. That’s not for people like me,’” Mr. Harrington recounted to the BBC.

If he was uncertain that he belonged there, Mr. Burnham had little doubt where he did. After serving as a political assistant to lawmaker Tessa Jowell, he longed to enter politics in Westminster, the seat of Britain’s government. “From my early twenties,” he wrote in his memoir, “my ambition was to become a member of Parliament.”

In 2000, Mr. Burnham moved back to his parents’ house to run for office in nearby Leigh.

When he won the election in June 2001, he was just 31 years old.ImageAndy Burnham plays ping pong along side then Prime Minister Gordon Brown.Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain with Andy Burnham in London in 2009.Credit...Pool photo by Arthur EdwardsThe Hillsborough legacy

On a spring day in 2009, Mr. Burnham was standing in front of nearly 37,000 people.

It was the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, when nearly 100 soccer fans were crushed to death in the deadliest sporting tragedy in British history. In the ugly aftermath, the police and parts of the media falsely blamed Liverpool Football Club fans, hiding the actual cause: failures by the police.

Mr. Burnham, the still-youthful secretary of Culture, Media and Sport, was deeply familiar with the tragedy, not least as one of his friends had been at the Hillsborough match. When he was asked to represent the government at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium for the remembrance, his “blood instantly ran cold,” he later recalled. The government was still, two decades later, refusing to acknowledge what had happened.

As he began to speak, the boos came quickly. The crowd chanted “Justice for the 96” for several minutes, leaving Mr. Burnham to stand silently.

Hillsborough became his cause. Mr. Burnham added his voice to those arguing for a new inquest and full disclosure of all documents related to the disaster. After listening to the debate, Prime Minister Gordon Brown backed Mr. Burnham. Subsequent investigations found the police had lied repeatedly and Liverpool fans were cleared of any responsibility.

The need for an extended fight on behalf of the Liverpool fans was deeply frustrating for Mr. Burnham, according to his memoir and other interviews. He still believed he had a place in London, but only if he could bring wholesale change to the system.

In 2010, Mr. Burnham tried, and failed, to become the leader of the Labour Party. Five years later, he tried again.ImageAndy Burnham stands among seated supporters during the launch of his bid for the Labour party leadership.Andy Burnham during the launch of his Labour party leadership bid in 2010. His unsuccessful bids for party leadership helped fueled his embrace of more local politics. Credit...via Getty Images

He entered the 2015 contest as its front-runner, but was defeated by Jeremy Corbyn, from the party’s hard-left wing.

Disillusioned by that loss and his broader frustration with politics in London, Mr. Burnham announced in 2017 that he would campaign for the Manchester mayoralty. In his memoir, he described the Hillsborough anniversary as the moment he realized how the British political system “fails people in a very personal way.”

“While it would be another eight years before I finally left, things were never the same after that day,” he wrote. “The spell was broken and I had fallen out of love with Westminster.”Promises in Manchester

On his first day as mayor in 2017, Mr. Burnham declared that he would make good on an audacious promise to end rough sleeping — the British term for homelessness — in three years.

“Whilst the city centre’s skyline is filled with cranes, our streets should not be crowded with people who have no roof,” Mr. Burnham said as he walked through the downtown, greeting people who had spent the night on the street.

It was classic Burnham — the kind of retail politics that he excelled at during his campaign. He pledged to donate 15 percent of his $148,000 salary to homelessness charities, and continued to do this over his nine years in office.

But critics say the rough-sleeping promise was also evidence of another trait: the tendency to over-promise and under-deliver.

In 2020, the year Mr. Burnham had said there would be no more homeless people sleeping in the streets of Manchester, the problem had dropped by about half. But the Manchester Mill reported this year that the number of rough sleepers had increased steadily over the past four years, undermining the mayor’s promise.

Some of Mr. Burnham’s other efforts in Manchester have been more durable.

His relentless pursuit of economic investment has led to a building boom downtown. And while he has little foreign policy experience, Mr. Burnham traveled the globe as mayor, building partnerships with businesses in a way that complicated the idea that he was a traditional left-wing politician.ImageA canary yellow bus is at a bus station in Manchester as a few people walk the streets.A Bee Network bus at a station in Manchester in June. Mr. Burnham has been praised for his improvements to the area’s bus network.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times

In September 2018, he traveled to China to boost efforts to improve high-speed trains across his region. Two months later, the Chinese Embassy in Britain posted a news release praising the mayor’s visit.

Mr. Burnham’s most well-known legacy in Greater Manchester is the buses. Using existing mayoral powers, Mr. Burnham dramatically improved the area’s transportation network. He imposed new regulations over the legal objections of private bus companies, lowering fares and increasing reliability.

Luke Raikes, who was a member of the Manchester City Council for 11 years, said the new bus system “made a huge and very visible difference to people.”Overplaying his hand

The event on the fringes of the 2025 Labour Party conference was packed. Everyone wanted to hear Manchester’s mayor, who had hinted days earlier that he might challenge Mr. Starmer for leadership of the party.

“I’ve done nothing more than launch a debate,” Mr. Burnham insisted that day in September. At the time, he had no path to power. He couldn’t challenge the prime minister unless he was a member of Parliament.

The conclusion in Labour Party circles was that Mr. Burnham had overplayed his hand. His barely concealed ambition suggested he lacked party loyalty.

But eight months later, voters in a set of municipal and regional elections delivered a searing declaration of no confidence in Mr. Starmer, who was already badly weakened by a scandal over Peter Mandelson, a Jeffrey Epstein associate he had appointed as U.S. ambassador.

Mr. Burnham’s moment had arrived.

Within days, a Labour lawmaker in Makerfield resigned to make way for Mr. Burnham to run. In June, he won decisively.

For more than two decades, Mr. Burnham has accused national governments of failing to address the needs of working-class people, especially outside London. At his Covid news conference in 2020, he railed against a Conservative government he accused of refusing to listen to the needs of its people — “people too often forgotten by those in power,” he said that day.

On Monday, he will finally wield that power himself, and will immediately confront some of the difficult choices that he accused others of botching.

“We have no sense of the trade-offs Burnham is going to make,” Mr. Herrmann said. “I would bet my bottom dollar that he doesn’t know what trade-offs he’s going to make either.”

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Democracy Docket, News and Advocacy: Even Republican judges don't buy the DOJ’s voter roll arguments, Jen Rice, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has now lost 15 times — and won zero (!) times — as it battles in court for access to states’ voter rolls. And the majority of those rulings are coming from judges appointed by Republicans.

The Trump DOJ hasn’t won any of its voter roll lawsuits, and this week brought even more losses. Judges dismissed cases in Virginia, New Mexico and West Virginia. Cue the “sad trombone” sound effect.

Notably, the Virginia case was dismissed by a Trump-appointed judge. And the New Mexico and West Virginia lawsuits were tossed out by judges appointed by former President George W. Bush.

“Given the lack of an adequate basis or purpose, one is left to wonder what the real purpose was for the Justice Department to go to the trouble of filing civil actions like this one all around the nation,” U.S. District Judge Thomas Johnston, who heard the West Virginia case, wrote in his ruling.

In our era of extreme polarization, at least judges appointed by both parties so far agree: Trump’s unrelenting quest for voter rolls is unlawful.

Check out our members-only website and explore premium newsletters from Marc and the Democracy Docket team.EXPLORE PREMIUM CONTENTAn Alabama redistricting win is now at risk after recent Supreme Court rulings

A lower court already found evidence that an Alabama county engaged in racial gerrymandering. But now the 11th Circuit may be forced to vacate that win for Alabama Black voters after the U.S. Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) conservative majority made it all but impossible for federal courts to block race-based redistricting.

Last year, a district court found that the Jefferson County Commission map violated the 14th Amendment’s prohibition on racial gerrymandering. The county appealed the decision to the 11th Circuit.

Next week, the court will hear arguments on whether recent SCOTUS redistricting rulings impact the lower court’s findings. Given the intentional, racially-motivated redraw we saw in Alabama alone this year, we aren’t holding our breath that the answer will be “no.”

It’s just the latest example of how the high court’s decision to enable gerrymandering and take a legal chainsaw to the Voting Rights Act will continue to have consequences at every level of government.

Democrats face uphill battle in New York redistricting referendum

New York lawmakers voted last month to approve a constitutional amendment that would allow them to redistrict for 2028. After the next general election in November, the state legislature will need to pass the measure again before sending it to the voters for final approval.

But they’re facing a problem. Next year, New York will likely have the least favorable electorate for Democrats of any year in the past decade, Politico reported this week. With virtually no high-profile races on the 2027 ballot to draw New York City voters to the polls, the party will need to contend with higher GOP voter turnout thanks to local contests in other parts of the state.

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: "All Eyes Are On Iowa," Simon Rosenberg, right, July 17, 2026. Hopium Checks In With Rita Hart, Chair Of The Iowa Democratic Party: Gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand and our US Senate candidate Josh Turek lead in current polling in this Trump +13 state. 

Our good friend Rita Hart, Chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, dropped by earlier today to provide an update on what has become one of the important and exciting battlegrounds of the 2026 election - Iowa!

When she last joined us in February Chair Hart told us that in the six special elections in Iowa since the 2024 elections our candidates overperformed our 2024 results by an average of 22 points. We won of four of those races, flipped two state Senate seats to end the GOP supermajority, and elected the first Latina to the state House and the first Black woman to the State Senate. As we discussed at the time these special election performances are arguably the best performances in state legislative special elections of any state in the country.

With the outgoing governor with one of the lowest approval ratings, incumbent Senator Joni Ernst retiring, and the state left in bad shape after years of bad GOP governance, it was clear that 2026 was shaping up to a year of remarkable opportunity for us in Iowa.

Here’s Rita from our new interview:

And so now, here we are, Simon I've been saying it for months, and you've been saying it with me. All eyes are on Iowa. And that is really true right now. We have got a real opportunity here to do something quite outstanding and to give the rest of the country hope. Because this isn't just one candidate who has an opportunity to flip a seat from red to blue in the state of Iowa. We have a ticket of candidates. Starting with Rob Sand, who has the opportunity to flip this state. This is the first year since 1968 that we've had an open governor's race and an open U.S. Senate seat with two terrific candidates to step up into these spaces. So that is going well. Those two candidates are gaining a lot of ground.

Rob is a 99 county party tour… that’s how many counties there are in Iowa, 99… which he did last year as well, which created a lot of excitement, interest, and a lot of opportunity to get Democrats fired up, but also to let Independents know that this is an opportunity to see and hear from Rob Sand, who has a message that says we're all in this together. He's going to be a governor for all…..

And along with that, Josh Turek, who has a proven record of winning in a very red district himself…

We go on to discuss how this is not just a year of opportunity but we have a truly remarkable group of candidates running for Governor, Senate, and the US House who can take advantage of this perhaps once in a generation opportunity. Both Sand and Turek lead in that Fox News battleground poll from two weeks ago:

and we’ve been supporting Christina Bohannan in IA-1 and Sarah Trone Garriott in IA-3 who are terrific, experienced, and engaging candidates. You can find our interviews with all four of them, below.

There are two primary ways to help these good Democrats of Iowa win this November. First, you can give to our Winning Iowa fund which splits a contribution three ways among Sand, Turek, and the state party. Next, you can give to our Winning The House fund which includes Bohannan and Garriott. Among these various ways to give to Iowa this remarkable community has already contributed almost $400,000 this cycle - amazing stuff all!

The vibe in this conversation is very similar to what he heard from Charlie Bailey yesterday - optimism, determination, and excitement about the top of the ticket and the strong candidate who’ve come forward this cycle.

We also talked about something that we keep hearing from our candidates and party chairs from across the country - that people are responding well to Democrats showing up in person in places that haven’t been strong Dem territory in recent years. This is an important exchange:

Simon: You know, one of the things we’re hearing is that people are anxious and interested in the human connection again. It’s not just that after years of COVID and screaming online and rowdy television ads... that us showing up at the doors in community events, going into parts of the state that we haven’t been into with a strong candidate... this stuff really matters right now because there’s so much uncertainty and people are worried and scared. And so us being present physically, not just through ads, I think has become a really powerful tool in our toolbox this cycle. And it’s exciting for me to hear you say this because I’m hearing it from all these other states and candidates all around the country.

Chair Hart: Yeah, I think the recent research is really clear that the number one reason why people decide to vote for whoever they end up voting for, their number one reason, the most influential thing that happens to them is a conversation. A conversation with a friend, a family member, a neighbor. Someone who knocks on their door who knows more about the candidates, about the political process than they do. That’s the most important, most influential thing. That is more than a flyer that they get in the mail, more than an ad that they see on TV.

And I would and I totally agree with you, Simon. People are so hungry for human interaction. I’m hungry for it... we’re all looking for that human interaction and that ability to find what’s in common, that we’re all in this together. We’re sick of the division. We’re sick of anybody and anything that puts more emphasis on our differences than on our commonalities. And that’s why I think Rob Sand, one of the reasons why he’s the fifth most likely Democratic flip this cycle, is because that’s his message. He talks about being a governor for all. He talks about how it doesn’t matter what letter is behind your name. He’s trying to build an Iowa that’s better and truer, not redder or bluer. And people are really responding to that. And our other candidates are echoing that sentiment as well. And when we add our organizers to it and then our volunteers, that’s how we win these elections. That’s how we change minds and get some Ds elected.

Yes, my friends, as we’ve learned this cycle, strong state parties matter!!!!!!

Food Poisoning,  Wildfires, Pollution, Climate Change, Public Health

New York Times, Cyclospora Linked to Taylor Farms Lettuce Sent to Taco Bell, Christina Jewett, Alice Callahan and Caroline Hopkins Legaspi, July 17, 2026 (print ed.). Federal officials worked with Michigan investigators to trace the outbreak to iceberg lettuce, which may also have gone to other vendors.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has linked an outbreak of cyclosporiasis to iceberg lettuce that Taylor Farms supplied to Taco Bell, according to two federal officials who declined to be named.

The C.D.C. said the shredded lettuce was sent to Taco Bell locations in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia. In a notice posted Thursday night, the agency warned the public not to eat shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations in those states.

It remains unclear if Taylor Farms sent the lettuce to other vendors, said one of the officials, who was not cleared to speak for the administration. The C.D.C. has not publicly named Taylor Farms in its investigation.

A spokeswoman for Taylor Farms did not respond to requests for comment.

More than 1,644 people reported eating at Taco Bell before becoming sick with the parasitic infection, and 94 had been hospitalized, according to the C.D.C.

Food and Drug Administration officials also said the lettuce was grown by a single supplier in Mexico. The agency has stepped up screening at the border for the company’s lettuce, according to an agency update posted Thursday night.

The F.D.A. said that other restaurants and stores might be implicated as health officials continued their investigation. And not all Taco Bell locations in the five states had received the affected lettuce.

In a statement Thursday night, Taco Bell said it was voluntarily removing potentially affected lettuce it had received from a supplier in select states. It did not identify the supplier but said that the lettuce from that supplier would be “indefinitely removed” from its supply chain nationwide and would be replaced quickly.

The United States is on track to have more cyclospora cases in 2026 than in any previous year, with 1,645 confirmed cases and 141 hospitalizations across 34 states as of Monday, according to the C.D.C. The agency is investigating more than 5,100 additional illnesses that may have been caused by the parasite, which is transmitted through food or water contaminated with feces.

Health officials are also investigating other cyclosporiasis illnesses and outbreaks in other states that are unrelated to the one linked to Taco Bell, the C.D.C. said in its notice posted Thursday night.

Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, the chief medical executive for Michigan, said in an interview on Tuesday that not everyone sickened in the state had reported eating at a single restaurant. A supplier that sells a product to restaurants may also stock grocery stores, she said.

Many people who have gotten sick said they did not eat at Taco Bell.

Other states with higher than usual cyclospora cases this year include North Carolina, Illinois, Maryland and Texas.

With around $7 billion in annual revenue, Taylor Farms, based in Salinas, Calif., is one of the largest producers of fresh lettuce and vegetables in the country. Bags of its chopped salad kits can be found at Walmart, Whole Foods, Target and other grocery stores, and it is a leading supplier of lettuce and other produce to many large restaurant chains.

U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

Emptywheel, Analysis:To Beeb Adverse or Not to Beeb, That Is the Question, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right,), July 16, 2026. I noted that Judge Kathleen Williams order — issued Monday — finding that Trump and his personal and government lawyers had engaged in fraud on the court basically took the unitary executive to its logical conclusion. If Trump has complete control over the government, he cannot be adverse to it.

What Judge Williams has done — in addition to imposing sanctions that will be particularly onerous on Trump’s personal lawyer, but which could strengthen ethics complaints against Blanche and Stan Woodward — is take the unitary executive to its logical conclusion, which would mean that Trump (and his failsons and eponymous corporations) cannot be adverse to the government and so Trump can’t keep using the courts to steal from taxpayers.

From yesterday’s hearing, it seems that the personal lawyer Trump is trying to confirm as Attorney General (who will nevertheless be able to continue serving as AG even if the Senate does not concur), Todd Blanche, plans to simply blow off the judge’s ruling that he is a fraud. Not only did he say he disagrees with it in his confirmation hearing, but he violated the spirit of Judge Williams’ order by calling the attempt to steal taxpayer money a settlement (though that part of the order is only binding on the plaintiffs — Trump and his private team — and formal defendants, Todd Bessent and Frank Bisignano).

But as I said, it is still a legal opinion, one in the Miami Florida District where Trump is trying many of his other shenanigans.

One place it could have a swift impact is on Trump’s attempt to sue the BBC for the way they edited a documentary about Trump’s coup attempt. At issue is Trump’s attempt to prevent BBC from getting US government documents to contest the suit.

Trump has been defying discovery in the lawsuit he chose to file for some time. Back in May, the Beeb [JIP Editor's Note: "The Beeb" is a nickname in UK and Europe for the BBC] defended its extensive discovery demands with Alex Britto, the lawyer Judge Williams referred for bar investigation. Later that month, they asked Magistrate Judge Enjolique Lett to force Trump to provide the necessary discovery, and on June 10, she ordered Trump to start complying or she would issue a default judgement.

In contravention of this Court’s 29 Order Setting Discovery Procedures, Plaintiff failed to submit his position to Defendants and, therefore, failed to submit a joint motion as it relates to 57 Motion for Discovery Hearing Related to Plaintiff’s Responses and Objections to Defendants’ First Requests for Production and Interrogatories. While counsel are free to disagree with the relief and basis on which the opposing party may seek said relief, they are not permitted to disregard the Court’s orders and procedures. Plaintiff is hereby ORDERED to respond to Defendants’ 57 Motion for Hearing Related to Plaintiff’s Responses and Objections to Defendants’ First Requests for Production and Interrogatories on or before June 23, 2026. The response shall not exceed five (5) pages. Failure to do so may result in sanctions including granting the relief by default.

Several weeks later, the US noticed that they might get involved. In the Beeb’s response, invoked Judge Williams’ comments, in an early order, describing the lack of adversity between Trump and the government.

First, the Notice asserts that the United States is “seeking the necessary authorization, pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 517, to participate in this litigation,” and further states that this process “requires coordination with the numerous federal entities served with a subpoena” as well as the “approval of the United States Department of Justice through the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division.” See ECF 91 at 2. The conflict of interest is clear and stark on the face of that information. As another Court in this District recently observed, “although President Trump avers that he is bringing this lawsuit in his personal capacity, he is the sitting president,” and the agencies and entities with which the government intends to coordinate, as well as the Department of Justice from which the government asserts it will seek approval, “are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.” See Order at 3, Trump v. IRS, No. 1:26-cv-20609-KMW (S.D. Fla. Apr. 24, 2026) (Williams, J.). Indeed, “President Trump has issued multiple executive orders which shape the relationship of the agencies of the executive branch to his presidency,” including to assert that “‘[n]o employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law . . . that contravenes the President[’s] . . . opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to . . . positions advanced in litigation[.]” Id. at 3 n.2 (quoting Exec. Order No. 14215, § 7).

The government’s “potential participation” in this matter thus raises profound questions about whether and to what extent the Plaintiff in this case – the sitting President – could and would direct that participation. Defendants therefore request that, if the government ultimately decides to seek participation in this matter, the Court provide Defendants the opportunity to address those questions before the United States is actually permitted to participate. [my emphasis]

On Tuesday, the day after Judge Williams issued their ruling, the US did move to intervene in the BBC case. Among other things (including claiming tons of stuff is publicly available after DOJ deleted loads of it and stating it might contest the authenticity of what was preserved elsewhere), they disclaim any conflict of interest.

5 The BBC wrongly suggests the United States has a conflict of interest in filing this statement. See ECF No. 93. Plaintiff is suing a non-U.S. government entity in his personal capacity over a documentary the BBC released while Plaintiff was still a private citizen. See Compl. § 105. It was the BBC, not Plaintiff, that chose to seek third-party discovery from the Federal Government.

To be sure, the fight may never get this far. For example, Trump (and DOJ) contest the scope of Trump’s lawsuit, whether it is just about a very specific edit in the Panorama video or a larger, sustainable claim, that Trump knew his mob would respond with violence.

And DOJ is misrepresenting the scope of the Beeb’s requests. Just pages after noting that BBC is asking for two memos warning of violence and their backup (here are all the subpoenas),

FBI’s 11-request subpoena seeks all documents and communications from the Washington Field Office about violence and the use of weapons on January 6; all documents and communications referenced in reports prepared by field offices in New Orleans and Norfolk about protest planning activities, as well as communications related to these reports involving the Washington DC area’s Joint Terrorism Task Force;

It complains that the Beeb isn’t using the publicly available versions of the memos themselves.

But there is no evidence in the BBC’s requests that it considered public sources of information prior to issuing the subpoenas. For instance, the BBC’s FBI subpoena seeks two memoranda prepared by field offices in New Orleans and Norfolk, ECF No. 61-2 at pgs. 599–600, but these memoranda have long been publicly available as part of Congress’s release of materials. 

But this fight could soon pivot on whether Trump’s personal lawyer turned AG is attempting to protect further transparency about Trump’s role in a coup by claiming Trump does not control the entirety of the government that, he claims, he does control.

July 16

Top Headlines

• New York Times, News Analysis: In Iran, Trump Risks Another American ‘Forever War,’ Steven Erlanger, July 16, 2026. President Trump, who promised to “end wars,” not start them, may have fallen into a familiar presidential trap.
• New York Times, Live Updates: Trump Exaggerates Claims About Election Vulnerabilities in Speech, Maggie Haberman, July 16, 2026. President Trump drew selectively from documents his aides published online to insinuate that U.S. elections have been compromised for years and that government officials had suppressed the evidence.
• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Humiliated As Networks Refuse To Air His Primetime Address, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, July 16, 2026. Trump thought that he would get wall-to-wall coverage from all TV networks for his primetime speech, but two have declined, and others may not carry the whole address.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: All the Dictator’s Men, William Kristol,Will Saletan and Benjamin Parker, July 16, 2026. The assault on liberal democracy is a whole-of-government Trumpist project.art of the Trumpian project is to erect such an imposing façade of power and legitimacy that we forget that the underlyng foundation is weak—very, weak. Check out this polling aggregation from the New York Times.
• New York Times, Ukraine’s Minister of Defense, a Proponent of Drone Warfare, Is Forced Out, Andrew E. Kramer, Updated July 16, 2026. Ukraine’s minister of defense, the youthful face of the country’s successful drone warfare program, was ousted on Wednesday in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest shake-up of his government. and military contractors over the role of innovative weaponry.

U.S. Domestic Governance 

U.S. President Donald Trump has published many self-portraits like that above he published on Nov. 23, 2025, portraying himself as a king, a godlike figure or a warrior inflicting military and other violent reprisals on nations and political opponents.

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: It Sure Looks Like Dictatorship, Will Saletan, right, July 16, 2026. Todd Blanche, the acting U.S. attorney general, testified yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is seeking formal confirmation to his job. The whole arrangement is grotesque: Blanche is Trump’s well-paid former personal attorney, and as deputy attorney general, he has already done numerous corrupt favors for the felon who appointed him.
• New York Times, White House Faces Stiff Pushback on Subjecting Grants to Political Review, Tony Romm, July 16, 2026. Academics, city leaders and congressional lawmakers number among the thousands to urge the Trump administration to reconsider a plan to assert more control over grants.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Democracy in an Age of Powermaxxing, Paul Krugman, right, July 16, 2026. The billionaire backlash has finally arrived. But is it too late?

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump to Accuse China of 2020 Interference, Major Epstein News, Survivor Testifies Against Blanche, Wildfires, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, July 16, 2026. Congress is pushing new legislation that would allow Jeffrey Epstein survivors to hold the Department of Justice accountable. At the same time, Epstein survivors are taking the courageous step of testifying under oath in Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing.Tonight, Donald Trump is expected to address the nation and reportedly claim that China interfered in the 2020 election. Some networks may choose not to carry the speech live. Meanwhile, devastating wildfires continue to tear across Canada, and there is much more to cover throughout the day.

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

• The Triad Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: A Modest Request: Don’t Grow Numb to This, Jonathan V. Last, above, July 16, 2026. Goons with guns are bad. The Normalization of State Violence.
• New York Times, Trump Administration: Trump Administration Argues for Fencing Off Park Next to White House, Luke Broadwater, July 16, 2026. The Commission of Fine Arts is set to consider the administration’s proposal regarding Lafayette Square Park, which has been the site of numerous protests.
• New York Times, Trump Is Building a White House Helipad. He Sought No Approvals, Luke Broadwater and Marco Hernandez, July 16, 2026. President Trump, a former real estate mogul who knows a few things about construction projects, says there is “no harder zoning thing to get” than a helipad. But he is building one at the White House, and building it fast.
• New York Times, Key Senator Demands Blanche Meet With Epstein Survivors, Devlin Barrett, July 16, 2026. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina made the stipulation during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday for witnesses to discuss Mr. Blanche’s nomination.
• New York Times, Bags in Van of ICE Victim Contained Salt, Not Drugs, Lawyer Says, J. David Goodman, July 16, 2026. Federal investigators said a “crystal-like” substance in the bags looked like methamphetamine. A lawyer for the victim’s brother said it was salt.
• CT Mirror, A killing, a pardon and a defamation suit — not a typical campaign, Mark Pazniokas, July 16, 2026. Republican 5th Congressional District candidate Jonathan De Barros claims in a defamation lawsuit that four Republicans falsely referred to him on social media and at a GOP nominating convention as “a murderer.” He is seeking damages — and a gag order silencing them. 

Wildfires, Weather, Climate

• New York Times, Live Updates: Wildfire Smoke Chokes Skies Across Swath of U.S. and Canada, Judson Jones and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, July 16, 2026. A strip of dense smoke combined with extreme heat has pushed air quality to unhealthy levels. Officials encouraged people in cities, including New York, to stay indoors.
• New York Times, Top Science Panel Backs Research Linking Extreme Weather to Climate Change, Raymond Zhong, July 16, 2026. Attribution science is advancing quickly, researchers said. That could support lawsuits seeking damages for severe events worsened by global warming.
• New York Times, Flash Flooding Worsens in Texas After Dozens Are Rescued From Rising Water, Judson Jones, Christine Hauser and Isabella Kwai, July 16, 2026 (print ed.). The Guadalupe River had surged to potentially catastrophic levels, forecasters warned on Thursday. Over 20 river gauges across the state were expected to reach flood stage.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

 

• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump And Greater MAGA Are Far Weaker Today. It's Why We Must Fight Now With Everything We Got, Simon Rosenberg, right, July 16, 2026. "Greater MAGA" -- Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Orban -- is far weaker today. It's a very important development in our fight for freedom and democracy here and everywhere. I think we should be pleased with what has clearly become a significant weakening of the Greater MAGA political project this year. Orban fell in Hungary. Vučić was forced to call early elections in Serbia. Failed wars have dramatically weakened Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu. Europe has held, Ukraine is on the offensive, the opposition leads in current polling in the upcoming October elections in Israel, and Zelenskyy has emerged as a powerful and inspiring leader of the global pro-democracy movement.
• New York Times, Can a Pro-Israel Democrat Still Win a Big Primary? She’s Going to Try, Reid J. Epstein, July 16, 2026. To prevail in Michigan’s crucial Senate primary, Representative Haley Stevens will need to overcome Democratic voters’ skepticism of Israel. Pro-Israel groups are spending heavily to help her.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: It Is What It Looks Like, William Kristol, right, July 16, 2026. It’s sometimes painful, but surely important to see things as they really are. The last couple of weeks in American politics have been helpful in that respect. They’ve made it harder to miss seeing the stunning depth and breadth of the Trump administration’s illiberalism.

U.S. Economy, Transportation, Energy, Markets, Regulation

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 15, 2026 [America's Post-Covid Economic Rescue, Five Years Later], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 16, 2026. Exactly five years ago, on July 15, 2021, I wrote: “Today Americans began to see the concrete effects of the American Rescue Plan show up in their bank accounts, as the expanded child tax credit goes into effect for one year. Through this program, the Child Tax Credit increased to $3,000 per child aged 6 to 17 and $3,600 per child under 6. All working families will get the full credit if they make up to $150,000 for a couple or $112,500 for a family with a single parent. The government sent payments for almost 60 million children on Thursday, totaling $15 billion.
• Oligarch Watch via Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Trump quietly clears the road for Musk’s Cybercab, Caleb Ecarma, July 16, 2026. “It’d be wonderful for the United States to have a national set of rules for autonomous driving.”' Four years ago, Elon Musk conceded that Tesla, his automotive company, would be “worth basically zero” if it failed to deliver true autonomous driving technology. Since then, Musk, Tesla’s chief executive and largest shareholder, has directed the company to pump tens of billions of dollars into speculative autonomous driving research, development, and hardware. The Trump administration is now moving to fulfill the regulatory wishlist necessary for Musk’s autonomous driving dream — including deregulatory actions that would clear the way for automakers to drop traditionally required manual controls and safety features. These changes that would accommodate the Cybercab’s lack of a steering wheel, mirrors, and brake and acceleration pedals.

U.S. Education, Culture, Media, Religion

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Academic Freedom Advocates Stand Up at Yale, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 16, 2026. Democracy does not defend itself. Harvard, Penn, and a batch of elite universities have compromised academic independence and thrown diversity under the bus to ward off Trump regime threats to slash funding by signing off on agreements that compromise academic independence, allow government oversight, forfeit efforts to recruit a diverse student population, and cede protection for vulnerable LBGTQ+ students. Fortunately, Yale’s law school dean and other faculty are leading the charge against the latest infringement on academic freedom and the crusade against diversity.

More On Russia-Ukraine War

• New York Times, Mass Protests Across Ukraine Oppose Ouster of Defense Minister, Cassandra Vinograd, Andrew E. Kramer and Oleksandr Chubko, July 16, 2026. Demonstrators demanded the reinstatement of Mykhailo Fedorov, who had come to symbolize Ukraine’s success in using drones to strike back against Russia.

Top Stories

New York Times, News Analysis: In Iran, Trump Risks Another American ‘Forever War,’ Steven Erlanger, July 16, 2026. President Trump, who promised to “end wars,” not start them, may have fallen into a familiar presidential trap.

No one starts a war expecting it to last forever.

Yet, since Vietnam, American presidents have repeatedly gotten into conflicts that seem like they could last forever, at least until the next president — or the one after that — decides that the expense and political pain are not worth it, declares victory and goes home.

On Iran, President Trump may have fallen into the same trap.

He campaigned for office vowing to end wars, not start them, and to never get involved in a forever war, let alone one in the Middle East. And yet he risks doing so in Iran, his critics say.

The war that Israel and the United States began with such force has alternated between moments of negotiation and military strikes. They have failed so far to reach Mr. Trump’s stated goals of regime change or ending Iran’s nuclear program, while the war has created a new, seemingly intractable problem, bottling up the Strait of Hormuz.

With diplomacy at a dead end, at least for now, a frustrated Mr. Trump finds himself back at war, the cease-fire broken, the strait blocked. The memorandum of understanding he said “achieves everything we set out to accomplish” — despite wildly divergent interpretations of it — is in tatters after less than a month.

“Both sides looked to the memorandum of understanding as the continuation of the war by other means, not as a bridge to peace,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group.

Without a long-term strategy to produce a sustainable settlement, he said, there’s a risk of creating “the circumstances for a forever war.”

The idea of the “forever wars” began with 9/11 and the “global war on terror,” pulling the United States into long military engagements, with troops on the ground, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Those conflicts, which began by toppling hostile regimes before turning into counterinsurgency campaigns, ended either inconclusively or in defeat after considerable expenditure and loss of life.ImageA line of soldiers, silhouetted in dim light, walk toward a helicopter with its rotor blades turning.President Trump has been unwilling to commit ground troops to the fight against Iran, as his predecessors did in Afghanistan and Iraq. American soldiers in Kunduz, Afghanistan, in 2011.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

Powerful leaders with powerful militaries are prone to fall into “the short-war fallacy,” said Lawrence D. Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College, London, who last year wrote an article, “The Age of Forever Wars.” “They think they can win quickly and not suffer adverse consequences,” he said.

Like Mr. Trump in Iran and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Ukraine, “they fail to appreciate the limits of military power and so set objectives that can be achieved, if at all, only through prolonged struggle,” Mr. Freedman said.

And even the most sophisticated military forces are not enough, if there’s no strategy to turn battlefield superiority into lasting political and diplomatic success. Mr. Trump faces the added challenge of trying to win using only air and sea power, without politically unpalatable use of ground troops on Iranian soil.

The Persian Gulf war of 1991 was quick and succeeded in its aims, because President George H.W. Bush had a limited political objective — drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. That was a lesson lost on his son, President George W. Bush, in the second war against Iraq, which ended up enhancing Iran’s power in the region. In Afghanistan, after the younger Bush drove out the Taliban, he and his successors tried vainly to remake the society, but when Washington tired of the effort, the Taliban returned.

There is an argument, sometimes made by Mr. Trump himself, that he went to war in Iran to finally end what he considered a 47-year war between the United States and Iran, which began with the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the taking of more than 60 American hostages.

The U.S.-Iran “forever war,” argued Vali Nasr, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is just another round of a conflict that has sometimes blown hot and sometimes resulted in agreement, like the 2015 nuclear deal Mr. Trump tore up in 2018.Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Mr. Trump, urged by Israel, has also inserted himself in a parallel “forever war” — the one between Israel and Iran, which is being played out with Iran’s proxies in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Yemen.

Mr. Trump still has the ability to sell this unpopular war to his base as a victory of some kind and go home. But to the surprise of many, he seems to be doubling down, albeit with no clear path to a diplomatic settlement. And his commitment to keep the Strait of Hormuz open, while Iran insists on maintaining control, could mean a very long American military engagement, even with the help of allies.

New York Times, Live Updates: Trump Exaggerates Claims About Election Vulnerabilities in Speech, Maggie Haberman, July 16, 2026. President Trump drew selectively from documents his aides published online to insinuate that U.S. elections have been compromised for years and that government officials had suppressed the evidence.

President Trump made at times outlandish claims about the safety of American voting systems in a White House address on Thursday night, drawing selectively from documents his aides published online to insinuate that U.S. elections have been compromised for years and that government officials had suppressed the evidence.

Mr. Trump, who has in recent months increasingly pressed his yearslong and unsubstantiated argument that the outcomes of U.S. elections have been “rigged” by various forces, also laid out a purported effort by the Chinese government to undermine him in 2019. But the documents posted by the White House, although heavily redacted, were far more guarded in their conclusions.

Despite dozens of investigations, audits, recounts and court proceedings at the local, state and federal levels that have failed to produce examples of major voter fraud, Mr. Trump has long claimed the 2020 election was rigged against him.

Still, Mr. Trump was more circumspect in his description of the end result of the 2020 election than he usually is — or than Democrats and some Republicans anticipated he would be — and did not declare that he had actually won that race. But he made sweeping statements about nearly every aspect of the American voting process: that information for tens of millions of American voters was easily obtained by China, that registration drives are marked by fraud, and that voting machines can be manipulated.

Mr. Trump’s description of China as having attempted to influence the 2020 election was backed years ago by John Ratcliffe, now his C.I.A. director and then his director of national intelligence. But Mr. Ratcliffe was not alone in that assessment, and the matter was the subject of internal debate among intelligence officials.

Although he focused primarily on foreign interference, Mr. Trump renewed his call for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would impose nationwide voter identification requirements and significantly curtail voting by mail.

Here’s what else to know:

• Michigan: Mr. Trump discussed documents regarding an investigation into a voter registration group in Muskegon, Mich., that he said were just declassified, although the investigation itself has long been known to the public. In the documents, which had not previously been made public, former employees of the organization said they were encouraged to fill out fake information on voter registration forms in order to achieve quotas and get paid. But in October 2020, the local clerk there said hundreds of “irregular” applications had been caught, and none of them had resulted in any ballots being sent out incorrectly. Read more ›
• Venezuela: Mr. Trump overstated, again, what newly declassified documents said about Venezuela’s ability to rig vote counts. Documents posted by the White House featured an analysis by the C.I.A. that found that officials there had “some capability in manipulating electronic voting systems” to influence the outcomes of races in Venezuela, but determined that the Venezuelan government did not have the ability to rig elections outside its own country. Read more ›
• TV Coverage: Mr. Trump accused ABC and NBC of refusing to cover his speech because “they don’t want to reveal” the corruption in the electoral system, and called for their government-issued broadcast licenses to be revoked. CNN also did not air the full speech, while MS NOW and CBS aired some portions live, then cut away for analysis and fact-checking. Fox News took a careful approach: Sean Hannity, a Trump ally, called the president’s claims “pretty remarkable,” but was careful not to endorse his allegations. A Fox News correspondent, Aishah Hasnie, then stated bluntly on-air that the network was “not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statements and claims at this time.” Read more ›
• Election Security: Repeated investigations and audits have debunked claims by the president and his allies of widespread fraud or manipulation of votes, whether by foreign powers or officials at the state or federal levels, in 2020 or other elections. Federal officials over the years have highlighted some genuine concerns around election vulnerabilities, particularly as they related to foreign influence actors; however, Mr. Trump’s false claims have at times either exaggerated or obscured those concerns. Read more ›

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Humiliated As Networks Refuse To Air His Primetime Address, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, July 16, 2026. Trump thought that he would get wall-to-wall coverage from all TV networks for his primetime speech, but two have declined, and others may not carry the whole address.

Donald Trump has been upset about his declining relevance for a while now. Trump’s Truth Social posts no longer get treated like breaking news on cable news. Not every utterance of his gets endless coverage.

Most of what Trump does or says during the day doesn’t get coverage by the evening. It seems that the nation is, in many respects, treating Donald Trump like the unpopular soon to be lame duck president that he is.

Conservative media still go gaga for Trump, but the president doesn’t deliver big numbers in terms of views or ratings for them anymore. In fact, much of conservative online media is in the midst of dealing with double-digit audience decline.

Excitement and interest in Donald Trump were only lower after the 1/6 attack.Trump’s answer to this problem is the primetime address. The president has decided that he is going to use the platform of primetime White House addresses to force America to pay attention to him.

Trump thought that the networks would line up to cover him speaking from the White House. The primetime address would be his new platform. It was how Trump planned to stay relevant and drive the national political discussion, but the television networks aren’t playing along.

Axios reported:NBC News said in a statement it would provide live coverage of the president’s remarks on NBC News NOW, and air “a special report on the [NBC]” afterward.ABC said it would air the speech on its 24/7 streaming channel, ABC News Live, and ABC News Radio “with comprehensive, anchored coverage” and “in our regular network newscasts.”

ABC added that it is “prepared to break into network programming to deliver live updates and reporting should significant developments occur.”

CBS and FOX have yet to announce their plans for the speech.In 2022, ABC, NBC, and CBS all refused to air Joe Biden’s White House address on democracy because they thought it was partisan.Trump’s speech is expected to contain conspiracy theories and lies about the 2020 election.

Any network that airs it will be undermining democracy. All networks should decline to air Trump’s address unless they are going to interrupt and debunk it in real time. The speech should not be aired by any network outside of Fox News and Newsmax.

My guess is that the cable news networks, other than Fox News, will drop in and out of the speech. Trump thought that he was going to get the nation’s attention. Instead, he is getting mostly shoved onto streaming.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: All the Dictator’s Men, William Kristol,Will Saletan and Benjamin Parker, July 16, 2026. The assault on liberal democracy is a whole-of-government Trumpist project.art of the Trumpian project is to erect such an imposing façade of power and legitimacy that we forget that the underlyng foundation is weak—very, weak. Check out this polling aggregation from the New York Times:

Nate Cohn writes: “The latest Times/Siena poll finds just 37 percent of Americans approve of President Trump’s performance, putting his ratings in new political territory. . . . no president’s approval rating has been under 38 percent for more than a few days in the last 17 years, according to our average.”

Until now, that is. Happy Thursday.

New York Times, Ukraine’s Minister of Defense, a Proponent of Drone Warfare, Is Forced Out, Andrew E. Kramer, Updated July 16, 2026. Ukraine’s minister of defense, the youthful face of the country’s successful drone warfare program, was ousted on Wednesday in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s latest shake-up of his government.

The departure of the minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, 35, for years the most prominent proponent of fighting with drones and robots, clouds the future of Ukraine’s innovation-centered strategy for confronting the much larger Russian Army. He had previously headed a ministry focused on e-government initiatives and had for years been Mr. Zelensky’s closest adviser on technology.

Mr. Fedorov confirmed his departure, after just six months as defense chief, in a social media post in which he described his approach to war as fighting with the “speed of innovation.” Neither he nor the president indicated whether he would take another position in Mr. Zelensky’s government.

The departure of Mr. Fedorov is part of a personnel overhaul that includes the dismissal of the prime minister. Mr. Zelensky did not comment on Mr. Fedorov’s leaving.

His exit came amid broader debate in Ukraine and beyond on the future of war. Mr. Fedorov clashed with seasoned military generals who saw aspects of his robot war vision as fanciful or naïve. He also angered established defense contractors with programs threatening their businesses, such as one that allowed soldiers to buy their own weapons on the website Brave1, nicknamed the “Amazon of Weapons.”

Mr. Fedorov had helped create a surge of optimism in Ukraine, as his tenure coincided with drone programs long in the works coming to fruition, enabling recurring, long-range strikes into Russia and a strategy of isolating and bombarding the occupied Crimean Peninsula.

Several men stand in a circle, including one wearing a puffy vest with the logo “BRAVE1,” and another wearing a hoodie with “STDRONES” on the back.

Mr. Fedorov, second from left, attending a demonstration by Ukrainian drone manufacturers near Kyiv in March.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

But from the moment of his appointment in January, Mr. Fedorov, Ukraine’s youngest cabinet minister, clashed with army generals who argued for the continued need for gritty, dangerous infantry deployments in the war.

His efforts to overhaul military procurement had made enemies of contractors in the multibillion-dollar defense industry. Within the army, he had critics who noted his lack of military experience and saw him as adept at presentations.

Serving as the face of the popular drone program also posed political risks, analysts said, in a system firmly dominated by Mr. Zelensky.

“Zelensky wants to be the only star,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, the head of the Penta Center for Political Studies, an independent think tank base in Kyiv. Mr. Fedorov also had support in the political opposition, which Mr. Zelensky likely saw as a threat, Mr. Fesenko said.

Volodymyr Ariev, a member of Parliament in the opposition European Solidarity party, said he had intended to vote for Mr. Fedorov if he were renominated as defense minister. Mr. Fedorov, he said, had been sidelined by “corrupt guys who want to keep the profits on defense contracts.”

Mykhailo Fedorov announced he was leaving the ministry on Wednesday after conflicts with generals and military contractors over the role of innovative weaponry.

U.S. Domestic Governance  

U.S. President Donald Trump has published many self-portraits like that above he published on Nov. 23, 2025, portraying himself as a king, a godlike figure or a warrior inflicting military and other violent reprisals on nations and political opponents.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: It Sure Looks Like Dictatorship, Will Saletan, right, July 16, 2026. Todd Blanche, the acting U.S. attorney general, testified yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is seeking formal confirmation to his job. The whole arrangement is grotesque: Blanche is Trump’s well-paid former personal attorney, and as deputy attorney general, he has already done numerous corrupt favors for the felon who appointed him.

But the hearing was instructive. Blanche displayed the sort of personality that serves comfortably in an authoritarian administration.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked Blanche, “Do you think [the] blanket pardon by the president of January 6th rioters was the right thing to do?”

Blanche gave an answer that would have sounded quite natural in a dictatorship: “The Constitution gives the president the full power to pardon anybody for any reason he wants. And so I don’t question President Trump’s authority or his decision to do so.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R. I.) asked Blanche about his role in arranging the dismissals of cases against January 6th defendants. Blanche again: “He has the absolute right to pardon anybody for any reason he sees fit. And every one of them got pardoned or commuted. . . . The fact that my department had to take action in response to those pardons, by dismissing some cases, is exactly what I have to do under the law. And it’s what I did.”

That’s how an apparatchik thinks in an authoritarian regime. To Blanche, “under the law” doesn’t mean that the president has to respect the jurors who convicted his supporters of crimes. It means that the apparatchik must do whatever the president commands. And if the president has a power, that power cannot be questioned, advised, or held to a higher standard.

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Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) asked, “Is the Department of Justice that you are running independent from the White House?”

“The Department of Justice, like every single department in the executive, is part of the executive,” Blanche replied. “Article II of the Constitution gives the power of the executive to President Trump.”

Sen. Dick Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked about Trump’s commutation of the sentence of David Gentile, a fraudster who reportedly said he had paid for clemency. Again, Blanche refused to address the merits. Trump “has full authority to pardon or commute anybody convicted of federal crime,” Blanche insisted. “He does not, nor should he—[he] has no obligation to discuss pardon or commutation decisions with me.”

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked Blanche about a press conference he gave on April 8. At the press conference, a reporter had brought up Trump’s demands “to see his perceived political enemies prosecuted.” Blanche, responding to the reporter, had affirmed that some DOJ prosecutions involved people whom “the president in the past has had issues with and that [he] believe[s] should be investigated. That is his right. And indeed, it is his duty to do that.”

At yesterday’s hearing, Blanche stood by that answer. He told Hirono, “As the president of the United States, under Article II, he’s in charge of the Department of Justice. And so my answer reflects that idea.”

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) asked Blanche whether the DOJ “should be independent or not.” Again, Blanche emphasized his loyalty to Trump: “The Department of Justice is under the executive branch. If confirmed, I will be a member of the president’s cabinet.”

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) asked Blanche about an agreement he had signed—in response to a lawsuit filed by Trump—to exempt Trump’s family from tax investigations. Schiff noted that it was an obvious scam, since Blanche was Trump’s former lawyer as well as his appointee. Blanche stood by his role in the agreement. “Somebody had to sign that document, when the president sued,” he told Schiff.

Somebody had to sign that document. He has the absolute right. He has no obligation. Any reason he wants. I don’t question.

This is the sort of person who rises to power in an authoritarian government—or, to put it more precisely, the sort of person who rises in service to power.

Blanche is also the sort of person who gets confirmed by an authoritarian Senate. Even Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, the Republican on the committee who was considered most likely to oppose Blanche, endorsed the nominee’s slavish loyalty. Tillis said he opposed some of Trump’s decisions, but added, “Not you, Mr. Blanche. You work for somebody, and you’ve got to do what you’re told to do.”

Actually, no. In a free country, people don’t have to do what they’re told to do. Blanche could have opposed the January 6th pardons, the tax immunity deal (for which Blanche was recently referred by a federal judge to the New York Bar for discipline), or Trump’s demands to prosecute his enemies. Instead, he saluted and complied. He represents exactly what our government has become.

New York Times, White House Faces Stiff Pushback on Subjecting Grants to Political Review, Tony Romm, July 16, 2026. Academics, city leaders and congressional lawmakers number among the thousands to urge the Trump administration to reconsider a plan to assert more control over grants.

Some of the nation’s top law enforcement officials were not pleased when the White House embarked on its push to assert more political control over more than $1 trillion in annual federal grants.

The proposal, unveiled in May, stood to enable the administration to steer significant funding to causes and organizations aligned with President Trump — and to cancel grants if recipients did not conform to his political views. That troubled a set of groups representing sheriffs, narcotics officers and district attorneys, which said this month that the “undefined expectations” in Washington could interfere with public safety.

The letter was one of roughly 500,000 formal comments that have flooded the Trump administration in recent weeks. Many of the posted submissions expressed misgivings with the draft White House plan to take greater control of federal spending.

The opposition has been wide ranging, spanning academic researchers, artists, city leaders, civil engineers, congressional lawmakers, housing experts, state attorneys general and regular Americans, who have warned that the White House could imperil public services if it subjects federal grants to political review.

The administration proposal, which is not final, targets a vast set of federal funding for climate, education, health, housing and infrastructure. If carried out, the regulation would require Mr. Trump’s political appointees to approve grants before they are awarded to cities, states, nonprofits and other institutions. The review would primarily aim to ensure that the money supports purposes that “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.”

Recipients of federal funding would also be subject to broad political handcuffs. Taxpayer dollars could not “promote anti-American values,” for example, or be doled out to nonprofits that engage in some kinds of “issue advocacy” or that have certain “memberships and affiliations.” And a large set of topics would be off limits, especially for scientists and researchers, who could face some of the most severe restrictions.

The White House budget office has described the proposal as necessary to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, including spending that the office’s director, Russell T. Vought, deems to be “woke.” To achieve that goal, the administration has adopted an expansive view of its budgetary powers, even though Congress possesses the power of the purse under the Constitution.

Many recipients of federal grants told the White House over the last two months that the proposed changes could be debilitating, and that they cannot afford to have their aid revoked if Mr. Trump does not agree with their agenda.

“This will put a lot of things up in the air,” said Andy Schor, the mayor of Lansing, Mich., a Democrat. He added that the plan would affect “policing to housing to all the dollars we get from the feds.”Such interruptions have already plagued Mr. Schor’s community. The mayor recalled a series of incidents in which federal grants to the city and local nonprofits, including money to address redlining and combat violence, had been interrupted or canceled at various points under Mr. Trump.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Democracy in an Age of Powermaxxing, Paul Krugman, right, July 16, 2026. The billionaire backlash has finally arrived. But is it too late?

Suddenly it’s OK to sound the alarm about the political power of billionaires. And I do mean suddenly. The chart above, from political scientist Andrew Hall, examines fundraising emails to track the extent to which politicians say negative things about the hyper-wealthy. Not surprisingly, almost all mentions are negative. Until 2025 there were remarkably few such mentions – that is, until the cavalcade of fawning tech bros at the Trump inauguration abruptly made criticism of billionaires and their influence mainstream.

Hall calls this “billionaire bashing.” Tyler Cowen calls it “billionaire derangement syndrome,” as if it were unreasonable to worry about the political power of a handful of incredibly wealthy men who are bestowing tens of millions in favors to the Trump administration and the Trump family, as well as spending vast sums to influence elections and Supreme Court nominations. The real puzzle is why it didn’t happen sooner.

You don’t need statistics to realize that there has been an explosion of wealth at the very top of the scale. From their titanic yachts to their life extension treatments, the hyper-wealthy are flaunting their billions almost everywhere one looks. For example, a few days ago the Wall Street Journal published a report on a new trend: “landmaxxing,” as in, the hyper-wealthy are increasingly buying giant estates:

And the statistics bear out the impressionistic evidence: there has been an explosion of wealth at the very top. In last Sunday’s primer I noted that in 1982, the first year Forbes compiled its list of the 400 richest Americans, the combined wealth of the 400 was only $92 billion. In 2025 it was $6.6 trillion. Even adjusting for inflation, the growth of wealth at the top has dwarfed gains in income and wealth for the average American:

So why should the rest of us care about how the other 0.0002% live? One important reason is that wealth at the top is, to a significant extent, coming at the expense of American workers. As a recent report from the New York Fed documents, the share of national income going to workers is at an 80-year low:Line chart tracking labor share in percentage (vertical axis) from 1945 through 2025 (horizontal axis); starting in the early 2000s, labor share entered a sustained decline, with a particularly sharp drop during the global financial crisis.A second, even more important reason is the fact that the hyper-wealthy aren’t just landmaxxing -- they’re powermaxxing.They are seriously undermining American democracy as well as lowering the living standards of ordinary Americans.

The Journal article about mega-estates name-checked Larry Ellison, who is America’s 2nd richest man, and Ken Griffin, who is only the 21st richest, with a mere $50 billion in net worth. In addition to buying huge compounds, both men are very much buying political influence. Ellison’s family has taken control of CBS, which it is rapidly corrupting into a right-wing mouthpiece, and is trying to take over CNN too. And the day after the report on landmaxxing, the Journal published this:

Again, statistical data bear out the impressionistic evidence. As recently as the 2000s, the hyper-wealthy played little direct role in campaign finance, although influence campaigns by the likes of the Koch brothers and Richard Mellon Scaife were already having a major effect on the politics of taxation, climate and more. Since then the combination of soaring billionaire wealth and the Citizens United decision by the Roberts Supreme Court — a court whose Trump-enabling, anti-democratic slant was itself largely engineered by the Kochs — have opened the floodgates. Billionaires accounted for almost 20 percent of campaign spending in 2024, and that surely understates their influence:Massive political spending has given billionaires massive political power. True, some of what the Trump administration does reflects Trump’s personal whims, obsessions and vanity — which is why the Iran debacle happened and is turning into a quagmire. But a large part of federal policy now is government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires.

What do billionaires want and get? Money isn’t their only object. Some of them genuinely believe in causes beyond their own further enrichment. Unfortunately, these causes are on average loathsome. Elon Musk, to take the most prominent example, appears to be personally committed to white supremacy and right-wing extremism. Peter Thiel, who bought JD Vance his Ohio Senate seat, appears to be genuinely crazy: he’s called for a return to monarchy and is now ranting about the antichrist. As Henry Farrell argues, we shouldn’t be talking about billionaire derangement syndrome, we should be talking about deranged billionaire syndrome.

Obligatory disclaimer: not all billionaires are deranged, and some are public-spirited figures who try to use their wealth and power to help others. However, the Citizens United decision, along with the Trump administration’s raw corruption, opened the door for the all too numerous predatory billionaires to acquire more political power in order to further rig a system that is already greatly tilted in their favor. Want to pollute air and water? Want your anti-competitive merger approved? Want a big tax cut that benefits the billionaire class while stripping ordering people of their healthcare? Want to eliminate financial regulation so that you can play games with and siphon off other people’s money? No problem on all those counts.

Above all, the billionaires want low taxes for themselves. A recent paper by Balkir et al estimates that because we tax income from wealth at much lower rates than income from wages, the wealthiest 400 people in American pay an average tax rate of 24%, compared with 30% for the population at large and 45% for high-income Americans who derive their income from earnings rather than ownership of assets.

As I noted Sunday, low taxes on the hyper-wealthy feed a downward spiral of oligarchy in which low taxes make it easier for huge fortunes to grow even larger, and in which the power of vast wealth keeps increasing, leading to even more favorable policies for the few.

This downward spiral has been taking place for decades. As I said, the real question about the backlash against billionaires is why it didn’t happen sooner.

And rather than belittling anti-billionaire sentiment and suggesting that it’s excessive, we should be asking whether it’s remotely enough. Democracy is on the cliff-edge. Can we pull out of the oligarchic spiral soon enough to save it?

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump to Accuse China of 2020 Interference, Major Epstein News, Survivor Testifies Against Blanche, Wildfires, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, July 16, 2026. Congress is pushing new legislation that would allow Jeffrey Epstein survivors to hold the Department of Justice accountable. At the same time, Epstein survivors are taking the courageous step of testifying under oath in Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing.

Tonight, Donald Trump is expected to address the nation and reportedly claim that China interfered in the 2020 election. Some networks may choose not to carry the speech live. Meanwhile, devastating wildfires continue to tear across Canada, and there is much more to cover throughout the day.

I will be watching tonight’s speech from start to finish, and I will bring you updates as it unfolds. What I will not do is simply repeat the President’s claims. I will fact-check the speech in real time, separate fact from fiction, and make sure you get verified information instead of political spin.

I will be working around the clock today to keep you informed with fast, accurate reporting that follows the facts wherever they lead. If you value independent journalism that is grounded in evidence, verified facts, and accountability, please consider subscribing. Every subscription directly supports this work and helps ensure we can continue delivering reporting that answers only to the truth. If you have not yet subscribed, I hope you will join us today.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

Trump’s Address to the Nation:

Donald Trump is expected to deliver a primetime speech on election security that may include intelligence concerning China’s intentions or capabilities related to the 2020 election. Reuters reports that White House officials debated releasing the intelligence because they were concerned it could be misleading if presented without proper context. According to Reuters’ sources, the intelligence does not show that China manipulated ballots, altered vote counts, or changed the outcome of the 2020 election. The White House has not confirmed the contents of the speech, with Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissing reports based on anonymous sources as speculation. The remarks come as Republicans prepare for a difficult midterm election campaign.

The anticipated speech revisits Trump’s longstanding claims about election security, even though his allegations of widespread fraud in the 2020 election have been repeatedly rejected by courts, recounts, and election officials. Reuters notes that numerous reviews found no evidence of fraud sufficient to affect the election’s outcome. Some Senate Republicans, including Majority Leader John Thune, have urged the party to focus on the 2026 elections and current voter concerns rather than relitigating 2020. Democrats and voting rights advocates argue that Trump’s renewed focus on election fraud could undermine confidence in future elections. Reuters emphasizes that any discussion of the China intelligence should not be interpreted as evidence that the 2020 election results were altered, because the intelligence reportedly does not support that conclusion.

During questioning, Sen. Cynthia Lummis was asked whether Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are "duly chosen and sworn in." After a long pause, she replied, "I don't know," drawing attention because the question concerns an established fact rather than a disputed issue.

According to The Daily Beast, Major television networks have not cleared their schedules to air President Trump's planned primetime address on election security, and it remains unclear whether the White House requested that they interrupt regular programming. Broadcast networks have previously declined to carry presidential speeches they viewed as primarily political rather than matters of national importance. Some Democratic lawmakers and media figures have urged networks not to air the address live, arguing it could further undermine public confidence in elections.

Epstein:

Epstein survivor Danielle Bensky testified on Capitol Hill today, under oath, at the Todd Blanche hearing. Watch her heroism:

Rep. Thomas Massie and a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, which would allow state attorneys general, victims, members of Congress, and certain state officials to sue the Department of Justice if it fails to comply with the existing law requiring disclosure of Epstein-related records. Supporters argue the DOJ has unlawfully withheld millions of files, overused redactions, and delayed releasing records required under the original Epstein Files Transparency Act. The bill would also give victims access to unredacted records about their own cases, require the DOJ to provide state prosecutors with records needed for investigations, and impose penalties for officials who knowingly conceal or withhold files. If the House does not consider the legislation within seven legislative days, supporters say they will pursue a discharge petition to force a vote.

During a Fox News appearance, Todd Blanche argued that "there's only one president that's held Jeffrey Epstein accountable, and that's Donald J. Trump." Fox News host Jesse Watters responded by saying he wasn't sure Blanche fully understood how people felt about the issue:

Vice President JD Vance acknowledged that the Trump administration mishandled the release of the Epstein files, saying, "If people want to say we mishandled the Epstein release, guilty. We did mishandle it."

Iran:

The U.S.-Iran conflict intensified with a new round of American strikes targeting military and naval infrastructure across Iran, including areas near Tehran and the strategic port of Bandar Abbas. U.S. Central Command said the attacks were intended to reduce Iran’s ability to threaten shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. also disabled an oil tanker attempting to reach an Iranian port after it allegedly ignored repeated warnings during the U.S. naval blockade. Iran reported casualties from the strikes, while the U.S. described the operations as a response to continued Iranian threats.

Iran responded with missile and drone attacks against U.S.-allied countries in the region, including Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan, raising fears of a broader regional war. Jordan said it intercepted multiple incoming missiles, while Kuwait activated its air defenses against drone attacks. Iran warned that any further attacks on its infrastructure would trigger retaliation against regional infrastructure and reiterated that it would not allow foreign control over the Strait of Hormuz. At the same time, Iranian officials maintained they remain open to diplomacy if negotiations can protect the country’s interests.

About a week after President Trump said of Iran's leaders, "I don't want to deal with them anymore... They're scum... They're sick people," Vice President JD Vance said he was "frustrated by Americans who say you can't negotiate with Iran." The differing statements suggest a contrast between Trump's harsh rhetoric toward Iran's leadership and Vance's argument that diplomacy should not be ruled out.

The escalating conflict is disrupting global energy markets and international shipping. Oil prices have climbed above $85 per barrel, while U.S. gasoline and diesel prices have risen significantly as concerns grow over potential disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global oil transit route. India instructed shipping companies to stop assigning Indian sailors to vessels traveling through the strait because of increasing security risks. Reports also emerged of a drone strike on a ship near Iraq’s Basra port, adding to concerns about maritime safety in the region.

The crisis is also reshaping regional politics and diplomacy beyond the battlefield. Lebanon announced it intends to end Hezbollah’s independent military presence and centralize decisions on war and foreign policy under the Lebanese state. Israel indicated it plans to maintain troops in security zones in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria despite ongoing negotiations, while Pakistan urged both the U.S. and Iran to return to negotiations under their existing memorandum of understanding.

A U.S. citizen, identified by her lawyer as Dena Karari, has been released from Iran after being unable to leave the country since December 2024. President Donald Trump announced her release, calling it a "gesture of goodwill" by Iran, while her lawyer credited the administration's efforts with securing her freedom. According to her lawyer, Karari was never physically imprisoned but was prevented from leaving Iran, repeatedly interrogated, and accused over her work with the Children of Mehr Foundation, a nonprofit supporting disadvantaged children. She is now safely outside Iran and traveling back to the United States. Her lawyer also called on Iran to dismiss charges against the foundation's local staff, noting that up to five other Americans remain detained in Iran.

Canada fires:

Canada is battling 857 active wildfires, most of which remain out of control, with major fire clusters in western Ontario generating massive smoke plumes. The smoke has spread across much of Canada and into the northern United States, significantly reducing air quality. Authorities reported 23 new fires on Thursday alone, and thunderstorms expected in Ontario are unlikely to bring enough rainfall to slow the fires. The situation remains highly volatile as dry conditions continue to fuel wildfire activity. This is the latest from WX:

Smoke from the fires has triggered hazardous air quality across parts of the U.S., prompting health warnings for millions of people. Air quality alerts cover the Upper Midwest, Great Lakes, and Northeast, with residents in affected areas advised to stay indoors and limit outdoor activity. Detroit currently has the worst air quality in the world, according to IQAir, followed by Minneapolis and Toronto. Smoke has also created hazy skies and unusually red sunrises and sunsets as it drifts farther south.

Weather patterns are expected to keep pushing wildfire smoke into the U.S. through the weekend, potentially affecting major events. Northwesterly winds are carrying smoke toward New Jersey, raising concerns about air quality for Sunday’s World Cup final. Meteorologists expect wind patterns to shift by Monday, redirecting much of the smoke toward Quebec and improving conditions across the northeastern U.S. However, air quality is expected to remain poor in many areas until then. Here is a video of the fires from Northern Ontario:

The wildfires are disrupting transportation and highlighting the growing risks posed by extreme fire conditions. A dramatic video showed a freight train surrounded by wildfire flames in northern Ontario, forcing workers to request an emergency rescue. Canadian National Rail confirmed all workers were safely evacuated and temporarily suspended rail operations in the affected region. The incident underscores the widespread impact of the fires on critical infrastructure and public safety.

Other news:

The Trump administration replaced educational panels about slavery at George Washington's former Philadelphia home with new exhibits that critics say present a more sympathetic view of enslavers and downplay the realities of slavery. The change followed a months-long legal battle after the National Park Service removed the original panels under an executive order directing federal sites to present a more favorable view of American history. The administration argues the new exhibit still acknowledges the evils of slavery while providing broader historical context, but historians, city officials, and activists accuse it of sanitizing history and undermining public trust. Philadelphia's mayor condemned the overnight replacement, while opponents vowed to continue legal challenges and educate visitors using the original exhibit's content.

Greater emphasis on Washington’s discomfort with slavery: The new panels highlight that George Washington became uneasy about slavery later in life and eventually freed the enslaved people he owned in his will. Critics argue this shifts attention away from the fact that he actively enslaved people throughout most of his life.

Portrayal of enslaved people as having more autonomy: One new panel states that enslaved people at the President’s House “experienced a greater modicum of autonomy than elsewhere in the South,” noting they could sometimes explore Philadelphia and even attend the theater with tickets purchased by Washington. Historians and activists argue this language minimizes the reality that they remained enslaved and had no genuine freedom.

Broader patriotic framing: The replacement exhibit places more emphasis on the nation’s founding, the Revolution, and the eventual abolition of slavery, arguing that the Founders began a process later completed by the Civil War. The original 2010 exhibit focused primarily on the lives, identities, and experiences of the nine enslaved individuals who lived and worked at Washington’s Philadelphia residence.

Reduced focus on slavery’s central role: Critics contend the new exhibit shifts the narrative from examining the contradictions between American ideals and slavery to presenting a more balanced or favorable account of the Founding Fathers. The Interior Department says the new panels still acknowledge slavery’s injustices while providing additional historical context, but opponents argue they soften the brutality of slavery and amount to a rewriting of history.

Roger Rogoff, a veteran prosecutor and former Washington state judge, was unanimously appointed by federal judges as the U.S. attorney for Western Washington after the previous interim appointment expired. Less than an hour after being sworn in, President Donald Trump’s administration fired Rogoff, prompting him to consider legal action over his removal. The dispute stems from the administration’s effort to keep unconfirmed U.S. attorneys in office through temporary personnel changes, a practice that has faced legal challenges. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche defended the firing, arguing that the judges bypassed the traditional consultation process with the administration, while critics, including Sen. Patty Murray, said the appointment was lawful and accused the administration of politicizing the role. Rogoff said he anticipated the possibility of being fired but viewed the judges’ unanimous appointment as a significant honor after decades of public service.

Republican Senate candidate Rep. Mike Collins is facing renewed scrutiny after CNN reported that his son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II, has promoted White nationalist ideology, shared antisemitic content, praised extremist groups, and used Nazi imagery across social media while maintaining close personal and professional ties to Collins. Scheer, who is married to Collins' daughter, has appeared in Collins' campaign materials, attended campaign events, lived on Collins-owned property, and allegedly helped produce promotional content for the congressman's trucking company, though Collins' campaign did not directly address questions about Scheer's views.

The New York Times has asked a federal court to block Justice Department subpoenas requiring three of its journalists to testify before a grand jury about sources for reporting on security concerns involving the new Air Force One gifted by Qatar. The newspaper argues the subpoenas violate constitutional protections for press freedom and were issued in bad faith to punish its reporting. The Justice Department maintains that the reporters are not targets of the investigation but are material witnesses in an effort to identify officials who leaked classified national security information. At his Senate confirmation hearing, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche defended authorizing the subpoenas, saying the goal is to determine who disclosed classified information, not to prosecute journalists. The dispute highlights growing tensions between the Trump administration and the press, following broader efforts to investigate government leaks and roll back protections for journalists in leak investigations.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani visited a World Cup watch party at Rikers Island, where more than 100 inmates with good disciplinary records watched the England-Argentina semifinal as part of a broader jail recreation program. Correction officials said about 4,500 inmates have participated in roughly 90 watch parties during the tournament, arguing the events improve safety and morale inside the jail. Mamdani spoke with inmates, discussed the match, and congratulated one person who said he was being released later that day. The visit came as Rikers continues to face intense scrutiny, with a federal monitor recently reporting persistent violence, poor management, and unconstitutional conditions at the jail. Despite those ongoing problems, inmates who attended the event described it as a rare opportunity to enjoy a positive communal experience and a catered meal.

Joe Rogan told Vice President JD Vance that he agreed with comments made by Texas state Rep. James Talarico opposing laws requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public schools. Rogan said Talarico, a Christian with seminary training, argued that forcing religious displays on others can drive people away from Christianity rather than encourage faith. Rogan said he thought Talarico made a “really good point” and agreed that mandated religious displays are not the right approach.

A new Pew Research Center survey found that, for the first time in about 20 years of tracking, China is viewed more favorably than the United States across the countries surveyed. China received more positive ratings than the U.S. in 25 of 36 countries and territories, while Chinese President Xi Jinping was viewed more favorably than President Donald Trump in 22 of them, although confidence in both leaders remained relatively low. Researchers attributed the shift to declining global perceptions of U.S. foreign policy, including tensions with allies, military actions, and trade disputes, alongside fading negative views of China tied to the Covid-19 pandemic. The White House rejected the findings, arguing that Trump's policies have strengthened global stability, while China's embassy said the results reflect international recognition of China's progress. Despite China's improved image, the U.S. continues to be viewed as more respectful of personal freedoms overall, though that advantage has narrowed in recent years.

After Argentina defeated England 2–1 in the World Cup semifinal, several Argentine players celebrated with a banner reading “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” (“The Malvinas are Argentine”), referring to the disputed Falkland Islands. The U.K. government called the display inappropriate and urged FIFA to investigate, arguing that it violated the organization’s rules against political messages at sporting events. FIFA’s disciplinary code allows fines for political or ideological displays, and similar incidents involving territorial disputes have previously resulted in sanctions. The Falkland Islands remain a longstanding point of contention between Britain and Argentina, stemming from the 1982 war over the territory that left hundreds dead on both sides. The controversy comes just before Argentina faces Spain in the World Cup final, with renewed scrutiny on FIFA’s enforcement of its political neutrality rules.

More than 500 Rohingya refugees are feared dead after two overcrowded boats carrying people fleeing Myanmar reportedly capsized in the Bay of Bengal. The vessels, carrying a combined estimated 530 passengers, departed from Myanmar’s Rakhine state in late June, with one disappearing shortly after departure and the other believed to have sunk off Myanmar’s coast on July 8. The U.N.’s refugee agency (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said the casualty figures have not yet been officially confirmed but warned the incidents could represent a devastating loss of life. Many Rohingya continue to risk dangerous sea crossings because of persecution in Myanmar, worsening conditions in refugee camps in Bangladesh, and ongoing conflict in Rakhine state, despite the heightened dangers of monsoon season. U.N. agencies called for stronger international efforts to improve search and rescue operations, expand refugee protection, and combat human smuggling to prevent further tragedies along one of the world’s deadliest migration routes.

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

The Triad Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: A Modest Request: Don’t Grow Numb to This, Jonathan V. Last, above, July 16, 2026. Goons with guns are bad

1. The Normalization of State Violence

After two cancelled flights, three airlines, and one unexpected shuttle through Nashville, I finally made it back to New Orleans Monday night following my interview with Pete Buttigieg in Des Moines. Along the way, as I sat on a series of tarmacs, I realized something: I was pissed.

It was three big stories—stories I’ve been covering this week on The Bulwark Podcast—that had my cortisol spiking, cheap white wine in hand.

• Rep. Ro Khanna and my friend and former co-host Cameron Kasky’s detention by Israeli settlers (aided by the IDF) in the West Bank.
• The CPS swatting-style incident that Pete and his family are still recovering from.
• And the two most recent ICE killings: Lorenzo Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine.

While those stories may not seem related, they connect in one profound way:

They are an affront to the most fundamental democratic principle, that with the awesome power of the state to inflict violence upon its citizens comes the grave responsibility to use it judiciously and only as a last resort. That the most essential right we have as Americans is that the state cannot deprive us of our lives, liberty, or property without due process of law.

In short, all three of these stories, at their core, demonstrate that the Fourteenth Amendment¹ is our way of life; but that it’s also under siege, and we, the American people, are not doing enough to defend it.

Let me explain.

I’m not a superhero guy, but I do know that Spider-Man said, “With great power comes great responsibility.”²

Spider-Man was right. With great power does come great responsibility. And there really isn’t any greater responsibility than the ability to inflict state violence onto somebody. The state’s control of your body, of your person, is the maximum amount of power it possesses.

The Founders recognized that the state could wield this kind of power and that there would be people who would wield it corruptly, wrongly, and viciously. The Civil War and our country’s reckoning with slavery crystalized the need to explicitly enshrine protection against these abuses in the Constitution. That gave us the Fourteenth Amendment, which declares that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The state cannot not use its violence and its power against you without giving you a chance to defend yourself. There’s no more foundational principle of American democracy than that. It’s the same underlying logic as “Taxation without representation is tyranny.” And it’s an idea we’ve spread around the world, as other nations looked to us as an example of a government that could better protect citizens’ basic rights.

But it’s a principle that the MAGA “patriots” don’t celebrate or even believe in.

They’re more into Caudillo-style government. That’s why they cheer on Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. They practice a kind of government that the Peruvian dictator Óscar Benavides once summed up as, “To my friends everything; for my enemies, the law.”

Which brings us to the two recent ICE killings.

In Maine, Joan Guerrero was in the country legally on a work permit. In Houston, Lorenzo Araujo entered illegally more than thirty years ago, but since then, has been working and raising a family, with no criminal record. He was in the process of obtaining legal status.

Both of them were summarily executed in the street for being Hispanic.

On The Next Level on Tuesday, Sarah was talking about how people in her focus groups are just kind of numb by all the news right now. I said: “I’m not fucking numb.” And that seemed to resonate with many of you.

For me, this is the thing to not be “fucking numb” about. If you’re not protesting, or petitioning, or posting, or showing up when the state is murdering our neighbors, then what is the point of all this? What is the point of the American system? There was no Fourteenth Amendment protection provided for Joan Guerrero or Lorenzo Araujo. They did not have due process of law. That cannot be America.

Protectors of the Public: U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell (from left), officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, and Capitol Police Pfc. Harry Dunn are sworn in Tuesday before testifying before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack by insurrectionists against lawmakers scheduled to certify that Democrat Joe Biden had defeated then-President Trump in the 2000 presidential election. (Pool photo by Oliver Contreras via Getty Images).

New York Times, Trump Administration: Trump Administration Argues for Fencing Off Park Next to White House, Luke Broadwater, July 16, 2026. The Commission of Fine Arts is set to consider the administration’s proposal regarding Lafayette Square Park, which has been the site of numerous protests.

A federal design panel on Thursday will consider the Trump administration’s plan to add a permanent fence around Lafayette Square Park, a public space next to the White House that is frequently the site of protests.

The move comes as President Trump and the Secret Service say that they are concerned about the security of the White House during protests. The administration’s submission to the panel, the Commission of Fine Arts, includes photos of pro-Gaza graffiti left in the park, and of standoffs between police officers and protesters.

The administration said that there were “several examples of assemblies that elevate into non-peaceful demonstrations which have resulted in violence towards law enforcement officers maintaining the necessary standoff from restricted areas and vandalism.”

The Commission of Fine Arts, which advises the administration on design projects in Washington, is also set on Thursday to consider a proposal to build a 33,000-square-foot security screening facility for visitors to the White House, the latest major change to the grounds overseen by Mr. Trump.

But it is the proposal to add permanent fencing to Lafayette Square Park that has drawn opposition from people who believe it runs counter to the free speech activities that frequently take place there.

Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat who represents the District of Columbia, has introduced a bill to prohibit permanent fencing at the park.

“Lafayette Square has long welcomed First Amendment demonstrations, vigils and public gatherings,” Ms. Norton said in a statement, adding: “Permanent fencing at Lafayette Square would send the wrong message to the nation and the world by continuing to transform our democracy from one that is accessible and of the people to one that is exclusive and fearful of its own citizens.”

New York Times, Trump Is Building a White House Helipad. He Sought No Approvals, Luke Broadwater and Marco Hernandez, July 16, 2026. President Trump, a former real estate mogul who knows a few things about construction projects, says there is “no harder zoning thing to get” than a helipad. But he is building one at the White House, and building it fast.

Such projects usually require a developer to navigate a complex web of zoning laws, airspace regulations and environmental impact studies, while negotiating with town councils and fighting off community pushback. Construction at the White House can often face additional hurdles.

But Mr. Trump has encountered no such difficulties as he quickly proceeds with construction of a black granite helipad on the South Lawn. He has not asked Congress or any review panel, such as the Commission of Fine Arts, to approve the project.

Past presidents have involved Congress and review panels in changes to the White House grounds, though Mr. Trump has asserted that he has the right to undertake major construction projects, such as a new 90,000-square-foot ballroom, without congressional approval. That project is currently the subject of litigation.

A White House spokesman said in an email that “operational upgrades to the White House grounds, such as the helipad installation, do not require commission reviews.”An overhead shot of workers on a construction site outside the White House.

Workers at the construction site of the new helipad on July 15. Salwan Georges for The New York Times

Work on the helipad — which will be 100 feet in diameter and feature a presidential seal — started last month, shortly after a makeshift stadium built to host an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight significantly damaged the South Lawn.

Dana White, the U.F.C. president, said that his organization had set aside $700,000 to repair the lawn after the June 14 event. But Mr. Trump instead decided to forge ahead immediately with a helipad he had long wanted.

April 23An overhead shot of the White House and the lush green South Lawn in front of it.

Before any construction started. Doug Mills/The New York Times

May 26An overhead shot of the White House and the South Lawn, where a big stage is being constructed.

Why Trump is building a helipad

The helipad would allow Mr. Trump to use the latest generation of Sikorsky helicopters as Marine One on White House grounds — a move multiple administrations had avoided because the new, more powerful helicopters were likely to damage the South Lawn during landing.

The Navy began the search in 2010 for helicopters to replace the two models that have been used to transport the president and vice president for more than four decades — the VH-3D and the VH-60N. It purchased 23 VH-92A helicopters, including two test aircraft, at about $215 million apiece, with a total cost estimated at $5 billion, according to the Government Accountability Office.

New York Times, Key Senator Demands Blanche Meet With Epstein Survivors, Devlin Barrett, July 16, 2026. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina made the stipulation during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday for witnesses to discuss Mr. Blanche’s nomination.

A Republican lawmaker whose vote will be crucial in advancing Todd Blanche’s nomination as attorney general demanded that the nominee meet with survivors of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse to win his support.

Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina made the stipulation during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday for witnesses to discuss Mr. Blanche’s nomination. For months, a group of Epstein survivors have tried unsuccessfully to meet with Mr. Blanche, who is now serving as the acting attorney general.

Mr. Tillis, who is retiring next year, has spoken favorably about Mr. Blanche’s nomination, including on Wednesday, when Mr. Blanche appeared before the committee. But on Thursday, Mr. Tillis laid out a new condition related to the Epstein case, which has become a political albatross for both President Trump and the Justice Department leadership, including Mr. Blanche.

If Democrats on the Judiciary Committee all vote against Blanche, a single Republican “no” could sink his nomination. Mr. Tillis has made similar threats before, including privately signaling he would withhold his support for the incoming defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, but he has frequently dropped his resistance on the Senate floor, appearing loath to challenge the Trump administration when it comes to casting his final vote.

During the hearing on Wednesday, in which Mr. Blanche’s handling of the Epstein case was a frequent topic of questioning, Mr. Blanche was noncommittal about whether he would meet with Epstein survivors. He said he could not do so without their lawyer present, and added that he had an aide who could meet with them instead.

Mr. Tillis made clear a day later that he thought Mr. Blanche should sit down face-to-face with the survivors.

“I expect that meeting to occur before I’m willing to vote out of the committee,” Mr. Tillis said, noting that the Senate schedule gives Mr. Blanche roughly two weeks to have such a meeting before the panel votes.

The senator said he was “trying to get to yes” on Mr. Blanche’s nomination. He added, “But this is a very important part of getting to yes. There should not be any reason” Mr. Blanche cannot meet with survivors of Mr. Epstein’s abuse, he said.

Senators on Wednesday repeatedly pressed Mr. Blanche over Mr. Epstein, particularly Mr. Blanche’s decision to spend two days interviewing Mr. Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, after which she was transferred to a more lenient prison camp. Federal prison veterans have said that such a transfer violates agency policy and longstanding practice.

New York Times, Bags in Van of ICE Victim Contained Salt, Not Drugs, Lawyer Says, J. David Goodman, July 16, 2026. Federal investigators said a “crystal-like” substance in the bags looked like methamphetamine. A lawyer for the victim’s brother said it was salt.

Small bags inside a van whose driver was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent contained salt, not drugs, said a lawyer for a witness, contradicting federal agents.

Investigators with the F.B.I. got a warrant to search the van on Tuesday after telling a federal judge they believed that a “crystal-like” substance in the plastic bags might be methamphetamine.

On Thursday, Ruby Powers, a lawyer for Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, the victim’s younger brother and a passenger in the van, said in a statement that “after consulting with my client and his family, our understanding is that this was granulated salt.”

Like other construction workers, her client and his brother would mix the salt into water and add lemon as a kind of homemade energy drink during their days working in the hot Houston sun, Ms. Powers said in an interview.

“He puts it in a water bottle and makes his own Gatorade, an electrolyte mix,” she added.

The Harris County district attorney, Sean Teare, also cast doubt on the presence of drugs Thursday. “Based on what we’ve learned about the passengers, it’s inconsistent that drugs were in the van,” Mr. Teare said in a statement

CT Mirror, A killing, a pardon and a defamation suit — not a typical campaign, Mark Pazniokas, July 16, 2026. Republican 5th Congressional District candidate Jonathan De Barros claims in a defamation lawsuit that four Republicans falsely referred to him on social media and at a GOP nominating convention as “a murderer.” He is seeking damages — and a gag order silencing them.

A counterclaim by one of alleged defamers accuses De Barros of misusing the court to intimidate critics who engaged in protected political speech, and it asserts that any reference to De Barros as a “murderer” meets the legal test of “substantial truth.”

Undisputed is that De Barros shot and killed one young man and wounded another as a teen outside a recreation center in Waterbury on a Sunday afternoon in October 1996. Or that he was convicted of murder, attempted murder and assault with a firearm and sentenced to life in prison.

From there, the Jonathan De Barros story gets complicated. The 18-year-old who shot two people is now 47, a self-described MAGA patriot, backer of police, defender of gun rights — and a candidate for the contested Republican nomination in Connecticut’s 5th District.

“Most people are not the same they were 30 years ago,” De Barros said.

The state Appellate Court overturned his conviction in July 2000 and ordered a new trial, concluding the original judge had erred in barring evidence relevant to De Barros’ claim that he shot the victims in self-defense. De Barros remained in prison while the case proceeded.

A second trial, during which De Barros was allowed to introduce testimony suggesting the dead man had a gun, ended with a hung jury. Rather than go to trial for a third time, De Barros pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter under the Alford Doctrine, which allows a defendant to maintain their innocence while conceding the state might have sufficient evidence for a conviction.

The deal provided a path to freedom in 2015. He had been behind bars for 19 years, since his arrest on the day of the shootings. The Board of Pardons and Paroles notified him in March 2022 it had granted him an “absolute pardon,” expunging even the record of his arrest.

“Congratulations, as you are now legally able to truthfully state you have never been arrested or convicted of a crime in the state of Connecticut as it relates to any of the convictions pardoned,” wrote T. Brooks, a parole supervisor.

But what does that do to the right of anyone else to say he indeed was arrested and convicted of a crime? Or to note that the man De Barros shot nearly 30 years ago still lies dead, whether the victim of murder or manslaughter?

De Barros said he is comfortable with the facts, so long as the full story is told.

“The problem is the individuals were calling me a murderer, and I’m not a murderer,” De Barros said. “They know exactly why they are doing it. They want to interfere with a federal election.”

His lawsuit accuses four people of defamation: Jeff Weiss, Pam Salamone and Steve Pedbereznak of Cheshire and Dawn Mariorano of Waterbury.

Weiss and Salamone were delegates who supported Chris Shea, a firefighter and retired Navy SEAL, over De Barros at the convention in May. Pedbereznak, a retired Waterbury police officer, and Mariorano, the city’s GOP nominee for mayor in 2023, host a political podcast streamed on Facebook.

“The Defendants’ conduct in repeatedly and publicly calling the Plaintiff a ‘murderer,’ despite full knowledge of his absolute pardon, the reversal of his murder conviction by the Appellate Court, and the true facts of the underlying matter, was extreme and outrageous,” De Barros states in his suit.

At the nominating convention, De Barros finished second to Shea. De Barros says he had 30% of the vote before delegates were asked if they wished to change their votes, as the rules of both parties allow.

Salamone, according to De Barros’ lawsuit, “began circling the room speaking to people stating that the Plaintiff is ‘a murderer’ … do you really want a ‘murderer’ representing you[?]”

De Barros lost votes during the switching, dropping to 22% — still comfortably more than the 15% necessary to qualify for a primary against Shea on August 11.

Salamone declined to comment.

The only reply to De Barros in court came in a counterclaim and motion to dismiss made on behalf of Weiss by state Rep. Craig Fishbein of Wallingford, a lawyer and ranking Republican on the legislature’s Judiciary Committee.

Fishbein called De Barros’ litigation a SLAPP suit, an acronym for a “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” the tag lawyers apply to frivolous actions filed to intimidate or silence critics.

And that, Fishbein wrote, is grounds for dismissal under what is colloquially known as Connecticut’s “anti-SLAPP law.” It states that in a civil action “based on the opposing party’s exercise of its right of free speech … in connection with a matter of public concern, such opposing party may file a special motion to dismiss the complaint, counterclaim or cross claim.”

Weiss has not acknowledged making remarks about De Barros or the criminal case on social media, as the candidate alleged in his lawsuit. Even if he did, Fishbein wrote, “they are substantially true, and therefore are not actionable defamation.”

“In fact, they are protected speech,” Fishbein wrote. “Here, Plaintiff DeBarros filed this action merely as a political scare tactic to try to silence the free speech of Defendant Weiss — the very soul of Connecticut’s anti-SLAPP statute.”

His campaign bio describes De Barros as a victim, first outside the North End Recreation Center in 1996 and then in court:

“As a teenager, he was attacked by multiple gang members, one armed with a loaded firearm. Forced to act in self-defense, Jonathan was wrongfully charged after a Democrat-appointed prosecutor withheld crucial evidence proving the assailant’s gun was in police custody.

“After 19 years of wrongful incarceration, his conviction was unanimously overturned by the Connecticut Court of Appeals, and he was later granted a full, complete, unconditional and absolute pardon by Democratic Governor Ned Lamont.” 

Wildfires, Weather, Climate

New York Times, Live Updates: Wildfire Smoke Chokes Skies Across Swath of U.S. and Canada, Judson Jones and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, July 16, 2026. A strip of dense smoke combined with extreme heat has pushed air quality to unhealthy levels. Officials encouraged people in cities, including New York, to stay indoors.

A plume of dense smoke from Canadian wildfires stretched across much of the northeastern United States and southern Canada on Thursday, rendering the sun a dull orange and making the air in some of the region’s most populated cities potentially unhealthy to breathe.

Air quality readings surged to dangerous levels on Thursday morning in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis and Toronto, along with many places in between. Conditions were forecast to worsen across much of the region throughout the day, and sensor readings have risen to unhealthy levels in Washington, Philadelphia and New York.

New York Times, Top Science Panel Backs Research Linking Extreme Weather to Climate Change, Raymond Zhong, July 16, 2026. Attribution science is advancing quickly, researchers said. That could support lawsuits seeking damages for severe events worsened by global warming.

The nation’s top scientific advisory body issued a report on Thursday backing a growing field of science that could help governments hold oil, gas and coal companies responsible for the damage caused by extreme weather.

The field, known as extreme event attribution, seeks to answer an increasingly common question: How much was the latest heat wave, downpour, drought or wildfire worsened by climate change?

Scientists have long understood that global warming, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, is making certain kinds of extreme weather more intense and more likely. But only in the past two decades have they developed the tools for estimating precisely how much worldwide warming is shaping particular weather events in particular places.

The new report, published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, doesn’t make recommendations on how attribution science should be used in policy and the law, though it notes that attribution findings could be relevant in several types of legal cases. In a $50 billion lawsuit against oil companies, Multnomah County in Oregon cited an attribution study that concluded that a record-shattering 2021 summer heat wave in the Pacific Northwest would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change.

As more states and localities file such lawsuits, allies of the fossil-fuel industry have attacked scientists who conduct attribution analyses as being activists against oil producers. This week, Energy in Depth, a project of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, a lobbying group, suggested that the National Academies report should be seen as “the latest deliverable in a well-funded litigation campaign.”

The National Academies report finds that researchers’ methods for extreme event attribution have advanced “considerably” in recent years. Scientists are using more sophisticated techniques and better data, the report says. That is helping them assess with greater confidence how much the searing temperatures during a particular hot spell, for instance, can be attributed to human activity as opposed to routine randomness in the atmosphere. 

New York Times, Flash Flooding Worsens in Texas After Dozens Are Rescued From Rising Water, Judson Jones, Christine Hauser and Isabella Kwai, July 16, 2026 (print ed.). The Guadalupe River had surged to potentially catastrophic levels, forecasters warned on Thursday. Over 20 river gauges across the state were expected to reach flood stage.

Flash flooding intensified across southern Texas on Thursday, after pounding rain caused rivers to surge and forced a scramble of evacuations and more water rescues.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

 

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump And Greater MAGA Are Far Weaker Today. It's Why We Must Fight Now With Everything We Got, Simon Rosenberg, right, July 16, 2026. "Greater MAGA" -- Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Orban -- is far weaker today. It's a very important development in our fight for freedom and democracy here and everywhere.

We had our weekly get together of our proud plucky patriots last night. It was a lively affair, as they often are. Here’s some of what we discussed……

Gratitude:  I began by expressing profound thanks for the way this community has rallied behind the Maine Dems as they work to navigate a very challenging moment, and for all the calls folks have made to try to block Blanche and Clayton this week. So far we’ve raised almost a quarter of the budget the MDP needs to put on their vital process of picking a new Senate nominee.

The Weakening Of Greater MAGA: This talk each week is designed to take a step back from the day to day and assess our progress in our fight to defeat MAGA and usher in a new birth of freedom, here and everywhere. In that regard I think we should be pleased with what has clearly become a significant weakening of the Greater MAGA political project this year. Orban fell in Hungary. Vučić was forced to call early elections in Serbia. Failed wars have dramatically weakened Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu. Europe has held, Ukraine is on the offensive, the opposition leads in current polling in the upcoming October elections in Israel, and Zelenskyy has emerged as a powerful and inspiring leader of the global pro-democracy movement.

Here in the US falling gas prices have not resulted in an improvement in Trump’s or Republican polling, a huge blow to Trump particularly as the war resumes and oil prices rise again. Yesterday, Bibi suffered an enormous defeat as 103 Democrats, including Nancy Pelosi, voted to block aid to Israel. Support for the current Israeli government has collapsed in Congress and with the American people.

Trump will still do harm here and around the world. Putin will keep bombing Ukraine. Bibi will continue his aggression. We know that. But we also know that greater MAGA is far weaker today than it was a year ago, something that we should be acknowledging, and celebrating, together. It’s a big deal, and we should be loud and proud about it all.

The Election Outlook Remains Promising For Democrats: We got a very important gauge of the depth of disapproval voters have for Trump and the GOP this week as we learned that while inflation dropped by 0.4 percent in June Trump’s poll numbers have not improved. Given how late we are in the cycle -- early voting begins in two months -- and given the resumption of the war and higher oil and gas prices, any kind of meaningful recovery for Trump and the GOP has become far, far less likely.

New data from Navigator shows how much named Republicans are struggling in the battleground -- 34% approval, and while their disapproval remains below Trump that’s what campaigns and advertising are for -- to connect each GOP candidate directly to Trump’s failed regime, soaring disapproval, and ongoing betrayal of the country:

That’s why we are raising money for our candidates -- to let them tell their story, extol their virtues, and connect their opponent directly to higher prices, rising health care costs/reduced access to care, and the broader oligarchical betrayal of our democracy and rule of law - more for me, less for all of you…..

For inspiration watch to my interview with Devon Murphy-Anderson of the Maine Dems this week to hear how hard they’re fighting to keep this seat in play for us. Listen to my interview with Charlie Bailey from Georgia who explains why this is the best political environment we’ve seen for Dems there since 1998. .

Here’s my latest Senate polling round up. With our inspiring candidates and gritty party chairs leading the charge 2026 has clearly become a year of opportunity for us:

Trump Is Going To Do “Whatever It Takes” To Stay In Power. As we’ve been discussing here this past week Trump has clearly decided to do everything he can to prevent us from winning the election and taking power next January. He’s fighting to get his quislings into AG and ODNI this week, which is why we’ve been making our calls. Tonight he’s going to introduce a wild, unfounded conspiracy about the 2020 elections into our discourse that he’ll use to undermine the integrity of our November elections. And more is sure to come for with the deep rejection of him and his failed regime by the American people means he use illicit means to remain in power (as he did with Russia in the 2016 election, and he did when he tried to undermine and then overturn the 2020 election).

Here at Hopium, we are responding to Trump’s escalating desperation and illiberalism by encouraging everyone to adopt Vote Early campaigns in their communities; by helping educate you about what Trump is attempting in our daily posts and in our Evolving Battlefield series of discussions; and in the coming days by launching a new effort to get our Congressional leaders to begin talking to the American people more forcefully about what Trump is attempting to do, and to lay out a clear accountability/renewing democracy agenda for when we return to power in January. For as Hardy Merryman told us a few months ago the global democracy movement has learned that those parties attempting to enact far reaching accountability and democratic reforms fair far better when they’ve campaigned on the reforms and earned a clear mandate from voters.

The Debate In Our Family About Our Future: Here at Hopium we welcome the internal family debate and discussion about our future path, recognizing the necessity of our party to grow, experiment, innovate, and get better and stronger. My encouragement to all of you is to welcome this debate in your networks and communities, to encourage it, whiling striving to keep it respectful, civil, and grounded in truth. For as we say here we know that in this fight against MAGA we’re going to hang together, or we we’re going to hang separately.

In that regard, last night I raised concerns about what we’ve learned about the epic levels of gaslighting that Platner and his team attempted over the past year. They gaslit us about Platner’s redemption story, a central pillar of his brand, by hiding his series of affairs in the first year of his marriage, after he was “redeemed.” They gaslit us about the strength of his candidacy, as rather than being a strong general election candidate, he was arguably our weakest battleground candidate of the last three election cycles relative to the partisan lean of the state. And they gaslit us about the strength of his national movement, as we’ve now just learned that the campaign essentially ran out of money in mid-June and had no longer had a chance of winning the election.

We know now that Platner and his team knew it was over in mid-June and yet he stayed in the race, and fought with everything he had to remain even after credible rape accusations. They delayed the process of transitioning to a new candidate by weeks, and then made the transition as difficult has possible. All of this together is remarkably shameful and reckless behavior, recklessness that may cost us the Senate majority this November.

The reason the lying, gaslighting, and recklessness of Platner’s team matters so much is that they are also in charge of another critical battleground Senate race right now, the campaign of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan. What we’ve learned in recent days raises serious questions about what whether can trust these same people with another must win Senate race. For what we’ve learned about the Platner campaign in recent days raises serious questions about the competency and integrity of the people who ran it in a time when virtue and character have become critical differentiators for us in the November elections.

After Platner should we really be trusting another battleground Senate race to the same crew that lead to his spectacular flame out? We should not fool ourselves about the risk it brings.

Finally, we must at all times remind ourselves that what Trump wants more than anything else is for us to be fighting with each other and not with him. Why we need to stay focused on Job One:  electing these forty courageous patriots fighting with everything they got to flip the House and Senate this November, and thus do our part in bringing about that new birth of freedom here and everywhere as Greater MAGA weakens here and around the world.

That’s what we talked about last night. Watch the video, share it with others, hit like so more will see it, and let’s keep working hard all. For remember that Hopium is hope with a plan. We don’t just hope that tomorrow will be better than yesterday. We do the work to make it so.

 

 

New York Times, Can a Pro-Israel Democrat Still Win a Big Primary? She’s Going to Try, Reid J. Epstein, July 16, 2026. To prevail in Michigan’s crucial Senate primary, Representative Haley Stevens will need to overcome Democratic voters’ skepticism of Israel. Pro-Israel groups are spending heavily to help her.

One after another, mainstream Democrats have lost high-profile primary races this year to progressives who campaigned on ending U.S. military support for Israel.

Haley Stevens, right, is trying to defy that trend.

Ms. Stevens, a moderate Michigan congresswoman backed by Democratic leaders in Washington and the leading pro-Israel super PAC, is aiming to win one of the party’s most important Senate primaries as a firm supporter of the Jewish state.

She does not believe there has been a genocide in Gaza. She supports maintaining U.S. military aid to Israel without conditions. And she makes no apology for receiving more than $28 million in advertising help from the nation’s leading pro-Israel super PAC, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm. (Despite calling “for an end to dark money in this country” in an interview with The New York Times, she has received another $20 million in help from four other super PACs with undisclosed donors.)

Ms. Stevens was first elected to the House in 2018, before the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, set off a devastating war in Gaza that has turned many Democratic voters against Israel. She combines her backing of Israel with calls for a two-state solution — the mainstream party position before 2023.

The politics of Israel are at the center of her fiercely competitive Aug. 4 primary against Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official who has emerged as one of his party’s most outspoken critics of American policy in the Middle East. Savvy on social media and keenly aware that Democratic voters are in an anti-establishment, Israel-skeptical mood, Dr. El-Sayed, shown at left in a photo by Conlan Houston, has pushed relentlessly to tie Ms. Stevens to pro-Israel and corporate interests.

In an interview, she made clear that she would prefer to talk about rising costs and Michigan manufacturing companies that are struggling under Mr. Trump.

“The No. 1 thing I hear is, Why are we getting screwed over by Donald Trump as Michiganders?” she said. “‘Why has millions of dollars of investment in Detroit gone away because of tariffs?’”

Israel, she said, “is something that Abdul wants to make this race about, and it’s an important issue to him.”

The country also remains firmly in the news. Months into the war that President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel started against Iran, fighting has flared up again, putting a fresh focus on America’s support for the Jewish state. On Wednesday, a House vote to eliminate U.S. aid to Israel split Democrats, with almost half of them supporting the move.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel and Michigan? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Now Ms. Stevens — who once said at a Hanukkah celebration that “Israel comes to me in my dreams” — is testing whether Democratic primary voters will embrace a pro-Israel candidate in a race where Middle East politics are a major issue.

In an interview last week on a park bench outside her campaign headquarters in Detroit, she said her position on Israel was based on her belief that the peace and the security of both countries required the United States to continue sending both offensive and defensive weapons to Israel.

“I’m not a wardrobe in search of a bedroom, shopping around policy positions,” she said. “You know, I’ve got an opponent who wants to make this race all about one matter. I’m not denying that it’s a matter we disagree on. I’m also not ignoring that there is real pain and rolling of Michiganders going on right now because of Donald Trump and his reckless bullcrap policies.”

She added, “I am not a Netanyahu apologist, all right?”

A Vital Race in the Land of ‘Uncommitted’

In Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey and New York, Democratic primary voters have rejected candidates who defended Israel and backed a two-state solution in favor of those who labeled the war in Gaza a genocide.

Those primaries all came in deep-blue House districts. Michigan is a different story.

The state is a presidential battleground that in 2024 backed both President Trump and Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who won her Senate bid that year. Home to large numbers of Jewish and Muslim American voters, it will hold one of the nation’s most competitive Senate races this fall.

It is also the birthplace of the “uncommitted” movement, which in 2024 encouraged Democrats to cast presidential primary protest votes against President Joseph R. Biden Jr. over his support for Israel in the Gaza war.

More than 100,000 Democrats — about 13 percent of the state’s 2024 primary voters — chose “uncommitted,” making Michigan the first of a series of states in which Democrats rebuked Mr. Biden over his Israel policy.

Now, former Representative Mike Rogers, a Republican who narrowly lost to Ms. Slotkin two years ago, is running again and is unopposed for the G.O.P. nomination.

The race is critical to Democrats’ hopes of retaking a Senate majority. The party must hold its own seats — including the one in Michigan, where Senator Gary Peters is retiring — and flip at least four Republican-held seats.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: It Is What It Looks Like, William Kristol, right, July 16, 2026. It’s sometimes painful, but surely important to see things as they really are. The last couple of weeks in American politics have been helpful in that respect. They’ve made it harder to miss seeing the stunning depth and breadth of the Trump administration’s illiberalism.

Actually, “illiberalism” is too mild. As Robert Kagan has explained, what we’re seeing is not so much illiberalism as anti-liberalism. It’s not that Trumpists don’t quite understand the case for liberalism, or that they’ve unwittingly deviated from liberal norms or principles. It’s a frontal assault on liberalism in the broad sense of the word—on democracy, on the rule of law, on civil and political liberties, on limited government, on pluralism, on honesty and decency. That assault has been purposeful. It now spreads across the entire Trump administration and permeates its ranks. For all of Trump’s erraticness and unpredictability, for all of his administration’s misfires and clownishness and zigs and zags, Trumpism has an animating spirit, and the Trump administration has a coherent project.

Just yesterday we saw this, at the confirmation hearings for Todd Blanche as attorney general and Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence. As Will explains above, Blanche’s testimony is an illustration of “how an apparatchik thinks in an authoritarian regime.”

Will’s analysis of Blanche also holds for Clayton. When Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Clayton who won the 2020 election, his response was that Joseph R. Biden Jr. was “certified” as the winner. Clayton wouldn’t actually say Biden won.

This is all part of the Trumpist rewriting of history. Indeed, Trump will deliver a primetime speech tonight challenging the results of the 2020 election. It will no doubt be an easily mockable performance, and there will be much talk of Trump’s endless obsession with 2020 and of his psychological need not to admit defeat.

But it is more serious than that. As Orwell famously wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” The speech will claim to be based on new “intelligence” assembled by Bill Pulte, Trump’s current acting director of national intelligence. And it’s part of a series of claims Trump has been making of widespread rigging of elections in the United States—not just of the 2020 contest. All of this is, in turn, undergirds a broad-based effort by his administration to lay the groundwork for an attempt to subvert free and fair elections in 2026 and especially in 2028, and if necessary for not abiding by the results.

It was also yesterday that Trump reversed the announcement by his Department of Homeland Security that it would suspend most vehicle stops in light of the killings of innocent men by government agents within the last week. Trump was caught unaware by the decision, and immediately overturned it. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” the president wrote. Trump cares more about maintaining the all-out assault on immigrants than even pretending to make obviously reasonable reforms. Meanwhile, an unprecedented number of individuals are not just being killed on the streets by ICE but are dying in ICE’s custody.

The more one looks at the mass deportation agenda and the fervor of its embrace by Trump and Trumpists, the more one is reminded of Umberto Eco’s observation in his great 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism”:

Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism.

And one can easily look beyond DOJ and ODNI and DHS for evidence of the assault on liberal norms and principles. From the weightiest matters, such as Trump’s renewed threat to commit possible war crimes by targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran, to the more symbolic ones, like the attempt to reshape the history told in our national parks and the Smithsonian, the assault on liberalism is a whole-of-government effort.

Dare one apply to that project Eco’s term, Ur-Fascism? It can sound extreme or overwrought. But read Eco’s essay. And look at the Trump administration, with its assortment of diligent apparatchiks, crazed fanatics, eager enablers, slimy opportunists, and, yes, performative clowns pushing more or less in the same direction. Look at the spirit of the political movement that impels it. This is in fact what many fascist and proto-fascist governments and movements have looked like. Trumpism looks and sounds and behaves like ur-fascism. It can be unpleasant to see things for what they are. But it’s important to do so.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Who’s to Blame? Ask the Far Right—They Have a List. Feminists, immigrants, professors, and just about everyone else: a look at the movement’s ever-expanding catalogue of villains, from MATT MCMANUS.
• Trump’s Sort-of Gift to Kyiv… Making Patriot missiles in Ukraine is a good idea . . . eventually, writes BRYNN TANNEHILL.
• Senate Dems’ Top Strategist Outlines His Path to the Majority… A good environment, the right candidates, and a bit of luck might very well equal 51 members, even with Platner-esque speed bumps, reports LAUREN EGAN.

Quick Hits

NOW I’M JUST A HUMBLE COUNTRY CHICKEN: The thing about populists is that most of the time, the people who base their entire political brands on appealing to “real Americans,” the “working people,” the “common man,” the “forgotten men and women of America” are actually egomaniacs who disdain the rubes they trick into supporting them. Especially in America, plenty of politicians grow up poor or experience hardship in their lives before they rise to high office. The late Lindsey Graham is one example—but he never promoted himself as the true champion of the toiling masses.

You know who did, though? Vice President JD Vance. While Vance has already, in his short political career, changed his tune more often than a toddler with Spotify, the central theme of it has been his hardscrabble upbringing (as detailed in his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy and then later in the major film of the same name) and his authentic representation of a forgotten, downtrodden part of (white) America—not just Appalachia but anywhere drugs and deindustrialization have ruined the lives of (white) people.

All of which is to say that this report from MS NOW about Vance’s abuse of expensive government-funded travel for the most ridiculous possible personal reasons is completely unsurprising:

On Thursday last week, Secret Service agents groused among themselves as they prepared to deliver another perk to Vice President JD Vance’s family: join a military helicopter crew to fly his young son to his golf lesson. . . .

Agents have shared concerns internally about Vance and his office pressing them for trips and assignments that some agents consider an inappropriate or even unprecedented use of government resources compared to prior vice presidents, they said. . . .

Operating the helicopter costs taxpayers between $16,000 and $24,600 per hour of use, according to 2022 Defense Department budget estimates.

Read the whole thing. It’s always the ones you most suspect.

YOU’RE FIRED: The Trump administration—and Donald Trump himself—aren’t exactly known for their stable and predictable personnel practices. But in terms of government tenures, this story makes Anthony Scaramucci look like Andrew Marshall:

The Trump administration fired a federal prosecutor on Wednesday, less than an hour after he was appointed to lead the United States attorney’s office in Seattle, a move that sets the stage for a likely legal battle.

Federal judges in the Western District of Washington had unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff to be the Justice Department’s top official there, filling a vacancy that the president has never addressed. But the Trump administration has largely defied attempts by federal judges to fill vacancies, leading to Mr. Rogoff’s swift dismissal, via email, after 54 minutes.

Unlike in similar Trump administration firings, Mr. Rogoff has retained an employment law firm and is weighing a legal fight over his dismissal.

The New York Times has the full story. The second Trump administration has a long-running beef with the judiciary about who gets to appoint U.S. attorneys and how. The judiciary’s position is: Only people legally allowed to hold the roles get to fill them, and if the offices stay vacant for too long, the local courts will pick someone, per longstanding precedent and law. Trump’s position is: Screw you and your rules! To which he apparently also now wishes to add: If I can’t (or, more accurately, won’t) pick a U.S. attorney, then no one can!

REMEMBER EBOLA???: Explosive diarrhea is bad and all, but that Ebola outbreak in central Africa still isn’t contained—not by a long shot. The Economist has the story:

“We keep asking and we still haven’t got anything,” says Moise Bulabantu, from a dingy clapboard clinic on the outskirts of Bunia, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The 38-year-old community nurse is the only public-health worker in his district of more than 40,000 people, where an outbreak of Ebola has been spreading. Every day he sees patients who are feverish or vomiting. But the government has yet to send protective equipment. “We’re pushing for the minimum,” says Mr Bulabantu, who has bags under his eyes. “We only have gloves.”

Stories such as Mr Bulabantu’s are common across Ituri, the main province affected by the Ebola epidemic. When the Congolese government declared an outbreak on May 15th, the disease had been spreading for at least six weeks, prompting the World Health Organisation (who) to declare it a public-health emergency two days later. Health authorities are still failing to contain the epidemic.

As of July 11th Congo had confirmed 1,830 infections, more than 90% of them in Ituri, and 648 deaths. On July 9th the government admitted that the disease had spread to two other provinces. There is a high risk it could soon enter neighbouring South Sudan. Unless the response improves dramatically, the current outbreak may become as bad as the one that killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa a decade ago, according to calculations in June by the American Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Read the whole thing. Surely none of this is exacerbated by the massive cuts to USAID, right? 

U.S. Economy, Transportation, Energy, Markets, Regulation 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 15, 2026 [America's Post-Covid Economic Rescue, Five Years Later], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 16, 2026. Exactly five years ago, on July 15, 2021, I wrote:

“Today Americans began to see the concrete effects of the American Rescue Plan show up in their bank accounts, as the expanded child tax credit goes into effect for one year. Through this program, the Child Tax Credit increased to $3,000 per child aged 6 to 17 and $3,600 per child under 6. All working families will get the full credit if they make up to $150,000 for a couple or $112,500 for a family with a single parent. The government sent payments for almost 60 million children on Thursday, totaling $15 billion.

“This is a really big deal. In America, one in seven children lives in poverty. This measure is expected to cut that poverty nearly in half. Studies suggest that addressing childhood poverty continues to pay off over time, as it helps adults achieve higher levels of mobility.”

The American Rescue Plan, passed in March 2021, was an early achievement of the Biden presidency, becoming a signature law as every Republican voted against it. A year later, researchers at the Brookings Institute found that the temporary expansion of the child tax credit lifted 3.7 million children out of poverty before it expired on December 31, 2021.

Family members did not stop working, as critics said they would. Instead, they used the money to cover routine expenses, decreasing their reliance on credit cards; had better nutrition; and made long-term investments in education for both children and parents.

Now, five years later, the results of the Republicans’ signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), passed without a single Democratic vote and signed into law last July, are revealing a very different set of priorities.

The OBBBA extended or expanded more than $4.5 trillion in tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, while cutting more than $1 trillion from social welfare programs. It did increase the child tax credit, but less than it would have if Congress had just adjusted the credit based on inflation since it had set the amount in 2017. And, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Institute of Tax and Economic Policy, the benefits from the OBBBA measure went mostly to the richest fifth of Americans, dropping essentially to zero by the time they got to the poorest fifth.

The measure cut $187 billion in federal funding from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and on Monday, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that between the passage of the OBBBA in July 2025 and March 2026—the last month for which there is data from all states—more than 4 million people lost access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. At least a quarter of those people are children. Those losses will mount in 2027—after the midterm elections—when states will have to assume much more of the costs of the program.

At the center of the difference between the Democrats’ signature bill and the Republicans’ is how the representatives of those parties see the purpose of the American government. Should it be used for the good of the American people, or to concentrate wealth and power among a few?

On July 9, Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian of MS NOW reported that Trump’s appointees in the Department of Justice are overruling the career attorneys in the antitrust division who have called for reviews of how corporate mergers and acquisitions might lead to price gouging for consumers and taxpayers. Trump-appointed officials are pushing ahead without reviews designed to protect the American people from monopoly power and, in what former assistant attorney general Bill Baer called “unilateral surrender,” are not pursuing lawsuits to enforce antitrust laws.

“Consumers are getting really screwed by all of this,” a source told Leonnig and Dilanian. “We’re talking 10 years of consumer harm that can’t be undone.”

On Friday, Trump called a select group of Republicans who sit on the House Budget Committee to Camp David to put together a funding package, primarily for military funding, that they can get past Congress through budget reconciliation, a process that will not need any Democratic votes. Even the invitation to Camp David was controversial, though: Trump extended invitations to members of the far-right Freedom Caucus, but not to the more moderate Republicans on the committee. Invitations were secret, and members’ phones were confiscated at Camp David.

Budget Committee member Erin Houchin (R-IN) told Jake Sherman of PunchBowl News that she was urging committee members to vote no on the package.

Today House Republicans released a $95 billion budget framework to provide another $73 billion for additional military funding for the war on Iran, a $12 billion bailout for farmers hurt by Trump’s tariff wars, and $10 billion to enact aspects of the SAVE America measure Trump has been unable to convince Congress to pass.

Money for farmers was part of a sweetener to try to get Democrats on board with the measure, but it does not appear to be enough to get them to agree to fund an unpopular war and voter suppression. Representative Brendan Boyle (D-PA), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, told Kevin Freking and Lisa Mascaro of the Federal News Network, “I’m going to fight like hell to make sure taxpayer dollars are being used to lower costs and make life better for American families, not to bankroll Trump’s giveaways to billionaires and endless wars overseas.”

“This ‘America Last’ budget would add tens of billions more to the national debt to fund the most unpopular war in American history,” Boyle said.

Catie Edmondson of the New York Times noted that spending requests are usually dealt with through the bipartisan appropriations process, but Republicans are, once again, trying to maneuver around the Democrats to fund priorities the Democrats reject: an immigration enforcement surge that has led to two deaths at the hands of ICE agents in the past week, and the war in Iran.

Even Republicans don’t appear to want to throw more money at the Iran War before the midterms, especially as the Pentagon has been opaque about the costs of the war and the White House has refused to confer with Congress about it. They also don’t want to fund the unpopular voter suppression measure Trump wants, as prices for everyday Americans at the gas pump and grocery store are noticeably higher than they were a few months ago.

Representative Warren Davidson (R-OH) wrote on social media that the Republicans’ budget plan was “DOA,” or “dead on arrival.”

The deaths six days apart of two immigrants, neither one of whom was the intended target of the operation during which they were shot and killed, has rekindled the unpopularity of the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. As protest broke out in the wake of the shooting death of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, yesterday, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), called for Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to “cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”

Collins, who is running for reelection, is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and was a key vote in the June measure that provided an additional $70 billion for immigration enforcement through 2029. As Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center noted, $70 billion “is more than the budgets for all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. Marshals Service.”

ICE issued a memo yesterday ordering agents to prioritize tactics other than traffic stops, prompting praise from Collins.

But at 6:45 this morning, Trump insisted—incorrectly—that the people ICE is rounding up are “Criminals, and we have to get them out. In order to do this, we must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch. I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job. Keep those Crime Stat Records coming! Remember, you are loved and respected in America.”

The Iran War is also back on the front burner.

On Monday, Trump announced he was reimposing a blockade on Iran and that the U.S. would become the “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT”; yesterday he reversed course, claiming that Gulf allies told him they would rather invest directly in the U.S. than pay tolls.

Last night, Barak Ravid of Axios, who often has inside information from the White House, reported that Trump yesterday held a meeting in the Situation Room with his top national security team to discuss “new plans for devastating strikes” against Iran. Those in the room included Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dan Caine, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, White House special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and other senior officials, Ravid reported.

Before the meeting, Trump told the Fox News Channel that after the “hard” strikes this week, “[n]ext week, it gets really bad for them because next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges. We’re gonna knock out all their power plants. We’re gonna knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”

Attacks on civilian infrastructure are usually illegal under international law.

Nate Swanson, a former member of Trump’s negotiating team, told foreign policy specialist Laura Rozen of Diplomatic that Trump’s escalation was probably a ploy to kick-start further negotiations. “I think it is a very risky and low probability gamble, but nothing else makes sense…. I don’t see a feasible pathway towards military victory, nor do I believe that we can [militarily] open the Strait of Hormuz against Iran’s wishes.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same. When I wrote about the importance of the American Rescue Plan five years ago, I ended my discussion of it with the observation that “this huge achievement of the Biden presidency—every single Republican voted against it—has taken a backseat in the news to two blockbuster stories about the former president.”

Images of President Trump and his ally and benefactor Elon Musk are shown a collage published on Instagram.

Oligarch Watch via Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Trump quietly clears the road for Musk’s Cybercab, Caleb Ecarma, July 16, 2026. “It’d be wonderful for the United States to have a national set of rules for autonomous driving.”'

Four years ago, Elon Musk conceded that Tesla, his automotive company, would be “worth basically zero” if it failed to deliver true autonomous driving technology.

Since then, Musk, Tesla’s chief executive and largest shareholder, has directed the company to pump tens of billions of dollars into speculative autonomous driving research, development, and hardware. Recently, Tesla used its Gigafactory in Texas to produce scores of Cybercabs, a driverless-only model that the company cannot currently sell or deploy on public roads.

However, the Trump administration is now moving to fulfill the regulatory wishlist necessary for Musk’s autonomous driving dream — including deregulatory actions that would clear the way for automakers to drop traditionally required manual controls and safety features. These changes that would accommodate the Cybercab’s lack of a steering wheel, mirrors, and brake and acceleration pedals.

Accompanying the deregulations is a Department of Transportation (DOT) initiative to establish a uniform framework for evaluating the safety of automated driving systems at the federal level.

Musk — who shelled out $290 million to help elect Donald Trump in 2024 and another $85.1 million this cycle, largely backing congressional Republicans — has long lobbied for a similar national framework. According to Musk, the current fragmented system, in which individual states and cities decide whether automated driving systems are safe enough to deploy on public streets, is to blame for the plodding rollout of Tesla’s so-called Robotaxi ride-hailing service.

The DOT’s push to create a federal safety standard for self-driving systems and to loosen vehicle safety requirements to allow for autonomous vehicles like Tesla’s Cybercab were both included in the White House’s “2026 Regulatory Plan and the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions.” The agenda, a massive document quietly released last week, proposed eliminating or weakening hundreds of federal regulations.“Tesla will have the largest fleet of autonomous vehicles”

For years, Musk has said the future of Tesla hinges on its ability to create driverless vehicles that it can both sell to consumers and use to dominate the ride-hailing industry.

“Tesla will have the largest fleet of autonomous vehicles as far into the future as I can imagine,” he wrote in a February post on X.

Part of that vision, he has said, includes doing away with steering wheels or pedals, despite the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), a DOT agency, enforcing a litany of safety standards requiring vehicle manufacturers to include analog controls.

Amid the Trump administration’s deregulatory binge, DOT has proposed carving out numerous special exceptions to the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) that would apply to Tesla’s steering-wheel-less, pedal-less, and mirrorless Cybercab model.

One new deregulatory proposal from DOT indicates that current FMVSS requirements for vehicle electronic stability controls need to undergo “modernization” to allow approval of automated vehicles “that lack manually operated driving controls.”

Another deregulatory change calls for an “update [to] the light vehicle brake systems standard… to except ADS-equipped vehicles without manually operated driving controls from the requirements for physical brake controls that presume a person is driving the vehicle.”

A third safety overhaul would apply to the Cybercab’s mirrorless design: Because the FMVSS requires that new vehicles be equipped with rearview mirrors and backup cameras, DOT has proposed establishing new functional requirements specific to automated vehicles that would not require vehicles “to be equipped with mirrors and a rearview image display.” Instead, separate requirements would be created for the “detection of… standardized objects that simulate small obstacles such as a child,” according to a deregulatory notice issued by the Office of Management and Budget.BRUSSELS, BELGIUM - JANUARY 10: Tesla Cybercab or Robotaxi two-passenger battery-electric self-driving car interior on display at the AutoSalon on January 10, 2025 in Brussels, Belgium. (Photo by Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images)The interior of a Tesla Cybercab self-driving car on display at the AutoSalon on January 10, 2025, in Brussels. (By Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images)

According to Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, the centibillionaire has previously said that Tesla would commit to a car with “No mirrors, no pedals, no steering wheel,” adding, “This is me taking responsibility for this decision. Let me be clear. This vehicle must be designed as a clean robotaxi. We’re going to take that risk. It’s my fault if it fucks up. But we are not going to design some sort of amphibian frog that’s a halfway car. We are all in on autonomy.”

In a July interview, NHTSA administrator Jonathan Morrison made clear that federal regulators were supportive of that vision, saying the agency would “absolutely” do away with the steering-wheel requirement in the future. “If you’re developing a vehicle that is designed never to be driven by a human operator, does it make any sense to require manual controls for the vehicle?” he told CNBC. “I think the answer is pretty clear there.”“It’d be wonderful for the United States to have a national set of rules for autonomous driving”

Last year, when Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy visited Tesla’s facilities, Musk lobbied for Washington to override states by setting national safety rules for automated driving technologies.

“It’d be wonderful for the United States to have a national set of rules for autonomous driving as opposed to 50 independent sets of rules on a state-by-state basis,” he told Duffy at the time.

Duffy, a former reality TV star, congressman, and Fox Business host, appears to have taken that request to heart.

In a notice listed as a “Deregulatory” agenda item, DOT announced plans for a new protocol to decide the operational “concept” of self-driving vehicles and select “operational areas” where automated driving systems could serve as “the sole driver” of a vehicle. “NHTSA will also identify metrics to predict and to track safety outcomes,” read the notice that was included in Trump’s 2026 “Unified Agenda.”

It continued:

To date there is no uniform approach to assess the safety performance of [Automated Driving Systems] ADS-equipped vehicles intended to operate on U.S. public roads. Currently, ADS entities must navigate a patchwork of State laws and regulations to deploy ADS-equipped vehicles. This rulemaking will provide Federal leadership on the safety performance of ADS-equipped vehicles. A uniform ADS safety performance assessment approach encourages American innovation and ADS development and promotes continued safe operation of ADS-equipped vehicles on U.S. public roads.

So far, Tesla has only tested its driverless Robotaxi ride-hailing service in two Republican states — Texas and Florida — with permissive regulatory environments. Even in Austin, Texas, where Tesla has its largest and longest-running Robotaxi test pool, the company has only deployed a few dozen vehicles. Many of those vehicles are partially accompanied by a human “safety monitor,” and all of them are overseen by remote human operators.

While Musk and other executives have marketed Tesla’s advanced driver assistance systems as up to 10 times safer than human drivers, a Reuters investigation in May found the company had significantly skewed comparison data to arrive at that claim. “The automaker counted Tesla crashes with airbag deployments and compared them with federal data on all crashes in which a tow-truck removed a vehicle — a far less restrictive criterion,” Reuters reported.

Tesla, which has repeatedly missed deadlines set by Musk to achieve autonomous driving, also faces a growing number of lawsuits and investigations into the role its driver assistance systems — Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and Autopilot — have played in fatal crashes.

U.S. Education, Culture, Media, Religion

The Contrarian, Opinion: Academic Freedom Advocates Stand Up at Yale, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 16, 2026.Democracy does not defend itself.

It is all too common, as Anne Applebaum wrote of Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for a Republican politician to “abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator.” We have seen a horde of figures in civil society make their Faustian bargain with Donald Trump and his authoritarian, white supremacist regime. However, for those in positions of responsibility in academe, Big Law, media, and business, there is an alternative to slavish careerism and unbridled ambition to climb the inner rungs of power.

Even when elite institutions appear ready to buckle, individuals and groups with modest financial resources and limited legal protections have proven that they can stand up — at great risk to themselves— and shame the accommodationists, thereby slowing the rush to collaborate with a tyrannical regime. The contrast between feeble ingratiators and principled dissenters has been especially vivid in the realm of higher education.

Harvard, Penn, and a batch of elite universities have compromised academic independence and thrown diversity under the bus to ward off Trump regime threats to slash funding by signing off on agreements that compromise academic independence, allow government oversight, forfeit efforts to recruit a diverse student population, and cede protection for vulnerable LBGTQ+ students.

These sorts of agreements, which have been imposed at Penn and the University of Virginia, have been roundly condemned for abrogating First Amendment rights and academic freedom, two cornerstones of our democracy. “These agreements are vague, contradictory and contain unlawful terms that subject universities to ongoing legal jeopardy,” wrote two Yale alums currently teaching at Penn. “For example, following Virginia’s policy could imperil Yale’s laudable efforts to expand access to low-income and first-generation college students.” Some of these extortionist deals have limited foreign student enrollment and forced schools to discriminate against trans students. They’ve also opened a Pandora’s box of ongoing litigation. “Provisions that conflict with the law and with one another expose institutions to liability from all directions. Also, the use of vague terms such as DEI, gender ideology, and domestic terrorism bolsters executive discretion and invites overcompliance.”

Last month, we learned that the Trump regime was “conducting a far-reaching investigation into whether Yale University’s admissions practices violate anti-discrimination laws, prompting one of the country’s most elite schools to pursue settlement talks with the government,” the New York Times reported. The Justice Department, as it has time and again, has speciously claimed that efforts to expand diversity amount to illegal discrimination. In this case, DOJ is not only attempting to bully the medical school (the focus of its original allegations of “illegal preferential treatment to Black and Hispanic applicants”), but also the law school and undergraduate programs. Not everyone at Yale, however, has been willing to roll over and play dead.Yale Law School (Credit: CHUYN)

Fortunately, Yale’s law school dean and other faculty are leading the charge against the latest infringement on academic freedom and the crusade against diversity. “The dean, Cristina M. Rodríguez, and a group of law school faculty members have quietly lobbied top Yale leaders in recent days, arguing that the Trump administration cannot be trusted, and that settling would threaten the rule of law and the university’s reputation,” the New York Times reported. “They have even explored whether the law school could be excluded from any settlement with the federal government. Students, faculty, and alumni have been openly pressuring Yale President Maurie McInnis,” a sign that Rodríguez has a reservoir of support.

In an insightful interview with the Yale Daily News, Yale alum and former FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter (whom MAGA Supreme Court justices ruled that the president had unlimited power to fire without cause), reminded the Yale community that “it cannot be that I, Becca, normal human, had the wherewithal to challenge something that was wrong and an abuse of power, and Yale — with its $44 billion endowment — does not.” She acknowledged, “It’s not fun to push back — it’s much nicer to sort of think about how to walk away or make it go away in the short term — but it’s so much better in the long term to stand on principle,” adding that “especially as an academic institution, I think Yale has an incredible obligation to do that, and that obligation is to its students, to its alumni, to its faculty, to its employees, to its partners.”Subscribed

Courage may prove contagious at Yale, where an array of groups — including the Yale College Council, Yale College Democrats, the Yale chapter of the American Association of University Professors, and an alumni group “Stand Up for Yale” — have mobilized to put the kibosh on capitulation. Yale’s chapter of AAUP put out a letter declaring, “The choice before Yale is not simply whether to settle one investigation. It is whether to participate in a broader campaign to turn civil rights enforcement into a mechanism of political control.”

On Friday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) spoke at Yale alongside Yale students, alums, professors, and Mayor Justin Elicker to push back against collaboration. “We’re at a legacy-defining moment,” Blumenthal said. “Yale will be regarded either as a beacon and a fighter for academic freedom or as the weakling who succumbed and obeyed.”

Whether defenders of academic freedom can prevail at Yale or not, the concerted effort to object to spineless capitulation and force institutional elites to justify their actions is critical in the fight for democracy, preservation of First Amendment rights, and defense of civil society. When elites learn that capitulation will spark fierce criticism and exact lasting personal and institutional cost, they are much less likely to engage in Quisling behavior and more inclined, however reluctantly, to resist authoritarian intimidation.

As the Trump administration and its MAGA enablers now face frequent legal setbacks and edge closer to a potentially devastating midterm election, it is especially critical for democracy advocates to hold the line, refuse to give away precious democratic ground, and deny the Trump crowd any easy wins. Now, more than ever, it is time for Yale, higher education, and civil society as a whole to keep their nerve and refuse to voluntarily concede critical freedoms to a faltering fascist regime growing more desperate by the day to cling to power.

More On Russia-Ukraine War

New York Times, Mass Protests Across Ukraine Oppose Ouster of Defense Minister, Cassandra Vinograd, Andrew E. Kramer and Oleksandr Chubko, July 16, 2026. Demonstrators demanded the reinstatement of Mykhailo Fedorov, who had come to symbolize Ukraine’s success in using drones to strike back against Russia.

Thousands of people took to the streets of cities across Ukraine on Thursday to protest the dismissal of Mykhailo Fedorov, the country’s young and tech-minded defense minister, just six months into his tenure.

The demonstrations were only the second large street protests in Ukraine during more than four years of war. Rallies also took place last year against a move by President Volodymyr Zelensky to neuter anticorruption agencies.

On Thursday, protesters poured into a square in central Kyiv, the capital. They turned out in Odesa, in the south, and in Lviv, in the west. In the frontline city of Kharkiv, in the northeast, more than 300 protesters with cardboard signs crowded sidewalks, chanting “Shame, shame, shame!” Their numbers grew as the morning wore on.

“Hands off Fedorov!” one sign read. “Why break what’s working?” read another.

The protesters were dismayed that Mr. Zelensky had ousted his defense minister just as many military analysts were saying the war had turned in Ukraine’s favor. The shift is more marked than any since the conflict’s first months, when Russia endured a series of defeats.

Mr. Fedorov, 35, is a prominent proponent of the use of unmanned systems in the war. He had come to symbolize Ukraine’s success in using long-range drones to strike military and oil industry targets inside Russia and to wage an intense campaign to cut off occupied Crimea.

July 15

Top Headlines

• New York Times, News Analysis: U.S. War Against Iran Enters a New Phase, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger, Updated July 15, 2026. As President Trump resumes his war, the focus is now on the Strait of Hormuz. But it remains unclear how far the U.S. military will go to exert control.
• New York Times, Live Updates: Key G.O.P. Senator Presses Todd Blanche, Trump’s Attorney General Pick, Glenn Thrush, Devlin Barrett and Alan Feuer, July 15, 2026. Here’s the latest. Mr. Blanche, the acting attorney general and a former leader of Mr. Trump’s criminal defense team, faced methodical questioning from Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who has expressed doubts about him.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: They Don’t Care If ICE Kills People, Bill Kristol, Mona Charen and Benjamin Parker, July 15, 2026. Trump lauds ICE as the body count mounts.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above beating police officers). Pro-Trump insurrectionists whom Trump pardoned are reportedly part of his immigration crackdown, which is widely suspected as being a test-run of Trump-orchestrated voter suppression efforts heavily targeting urban, African-American neighborhoods to retain Republican power during the November mid-term elections.

• New York Times, Trump Pressures ICE to Resume Traffic Stops After Agency Pulls Back, Madeleine Ngo, July 15, 2026. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ordered its officers on Tuesday to halt most vehicle stops across the country after they shot two people over the past week.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Forever War Gets Scary, Paul Krugman, right, July 15, 2026.  But I'm not talking about bombs and drones.
• The Hartmann Report, Advocacy and Opinion: Midterm Elections: The Con Always Works, Right Up Until the Moment it Doesn’t, Thom Hartmann, right, July 15, 2026. Democracy has survived con men before, but only because ordinary Americans refused to become the mark…

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

Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche attends a kick-off celebration for the "Great American State Fair" on the National Mall in Washington, DC, June 24, 2026. (Photo by Jemal COUNTESS / AFP via Getty Images) 

Epstein survivor Theresa Helm speaks at a Sept. 3 rally on Capitol Hill. (C-SPAN)

• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: What is Todd Blanche still hiding about Epstein? Judd Legum, right, July 15, 2026. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider the nomination of Todd Blanche to be the next U.S. Attorney General. Blanche, President Trump’s former personal attorney who has been serving in an acting capacity since April, faces a number of obstacles to his confirmation.
• The Contrarian, Opinion and Advocacy: A Collection of Blanche Checks, Norman Eisen, right, Jennifer Rubin, Peter Carr, Tom Joscelyn, Ben Sheehan, Katie Phang, Eliza Orlins, April Ryan, and Maya Wiley, For months, Acting AG Todd Blanche has dodged a clear answer — but The Contrarian hasn't looked away. Here's a range of takes on Trump's ex-lawyer ahead of his confirmation hearing to lead the DOJ. 
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: New ICE, Same as the Old ICE Political Opinion: New ICE, Same as the Old ICE, William Kristol, right, July 15, 2026. After the killings in January in Minneapolis of Renée Good and Alex Pretti sparked widespread public outrage, and with Democrats in Congress blocking additional multi-year funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Trump administration made some adjustments.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: We Must Stop Blanche And Clayton, More Terrible Polling For Trump, Powerful New Ads From Dems, Simon Rosenberg, right, July 15, 2026. We have one job today: Call and call and demand your Senators and Rep oppose and work against Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton. The installation of these two venal men, given Trump’s intensifying spiral and escalating desperation, would be a national emergency, a five alarm fire for our democracy. The confirmation hearings for both began this morning in the Senate.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump DOJ Says it Will not Comply With Epstein Criminal Investigation, Blanche Blasted, Trump Urges ICE Continue Traffic Stops, Aaron Parnas, right, July 15, 2026. There is a lot to cover today. I am currently watching Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing and will be speaking this afternoon with a senator who is questioning him.

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Exchange Strikes for Fifth Straight Day, Ravi Mattu, Qasim Nauman, Eric Schmitt and Jenny Gross, July 15, 2026. Here's the latest. The United States launched new attacks against Iranian targets on Wednesday, hours after Iran targeted American military sites in the region. Neither side has shown signs of backing down as they enter a new stage of the war.
• New York Times, News Analysis: For Israel, the U.S.-Iran Hostilities Have Created an Uneasy Limbo, David M. Halbfinger, July 15, 2026. Officials see a return to full-blown war as preferable to an agreement that fails to curb the threats Iran poses to Israel. Meanwhile, they wait.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: The bombing campaign in Iran is escalating, Aaron Parnas, right,July 15, 2026. The U.S. dramatically escalated its war with Iran by launching a new wave of airstrikes after four consecutive nights of attacks, targeting military sites tied to threats against commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. 

More On U.S. Foreign Policy, Israeli Horrors

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Enough Is Enough, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 15, 2026. Israel’s conduct warrants a strong U.S. reaction. You need not take the word of Israel’s committed enemies. For months now, Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, has been among the leading voices denouncing “a terrible process of brutalization” in Israeli society, including the epidemic of brutality and lawlessness in the occupied West Bank. Marauding bands of violent thugs now routinely attack and murder Palestinians and burn property in what can only be described as routine pogroms, which the government either tacitly encourages, denies, or rationalizes. 

More Global News

• New York Times, China’s Economy Grows at Slowest Pace in Years, Alexandra Stevenson and Murphy Zhao, July 15, 2026. Economic growth of 4.3 percent in the second quarter, versus the same period last year, reflected a broad slump outside of the country’s export-oriented manufacturing might.
• New York Times, Ukraine Pounds Russian Ships in Its Campaign to Cut Off Crimea, Nataliya Vasilyeva, Marc Santora and Cassandra Vinograd, July 15, 2026. After striking roads and railways, Kyiv is now focusing on sea routes as it tries to disrupt fuel supplies and pressure Russia to end the war.
• "Thinking about..." Historical Commentary: New Lecture Series for the Public: "Hitler and Stalin Today," Timothy Snyder, right, July 15, 2026. Today, I am publicly releasing the first lecture of a ten-lecture course I tought at the University of Toronto this past year.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance  

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Triumphal Arch . . . of What? Mona Charen, right, July 15, 2026. If completed as planned, Donald Trump’s triumphal arch outside Arlington National Cemetery will tower over the graceful Memorial Bridge, obstruct the view of the Lincoln Memorial from Arlington cemetery (and vice versa), and offend anyone whose taste is north of Liberace. But there’s another aspect of this grotesquerie that deserves some attention: Namely, what is the triumph Trump is celebrating?

U.S. Religion, Culture, History, Law, Education 

Leonard Leo (Associated Press photo by Carolyn Kaster).

• Catholics for the Common Good, Analysis and Opinion: The Shadow Pope of K Street, Michael Fox, July 15, 2026. The Catholic Right in America Follows Leonard Leo not Pope Leo XIV.The American Catholic Right answers to two authorities and neither of them is Pope Leo XIV. One is Donald Trump, whose agenda it takes up as its own. The other is Leonard Leo, a lawyer and political power broker who holds no public office, gives few interviews, draws no crowds, and whose influence will last for decades.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 14, 2026 [Trump drilling Emergency]' conflicts with historical  protections'], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 15, 2026. In August 1870 a U.S. exploring expedition headed out from Montana toward the Yellowstone River into land the U.S. government had recognized as belonging to different Indigenous tribes.

Top Stories

New York Times, News Analysis: U.S. War Against Iran Enters a New Phase, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger, Updated July 15, 2026. As President Trump resumes his war, the focus is now on the Strait of Hormuz. But it remains unclear how far the U.S. military will go to exert control.

The Trump administration has lurched back into a war against Iran that had never really ended.

When the war started more than four months ago, U.S. forces targeted Iranian military bases, missile launchers, ships and naval facilities. Israel, fighting alongside the United States, hit leadership targets, hoping to bring down Iran’s hard-line government.

Their record of success has been mixed, at best. Israel killed the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but the leaders who succeeded him were even more hard-line. U.S. forces struck thousands of targets, but did not destroy Iran’s ability to control the Strait of Hormuz, the waterway through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil typically flows.

For roughly 90 days beginning in April, an on-again-off-again cease-fire prevailed. And then it was over.

The United States now appears to be entering Round 2 of its military campaign. This round has a new focus — but not necessarily a clearer strategy.

Iran’s ability to control the strait, despite the pummeling its navy took, is by far the most important lesson of the first phase of the war. So it is no surprise that the Trump administration is focused on trying to loosen Iran’s grip on it.

Last Tuesday, in retaliation for attacks on tankers, President Trump ordered airstrikes on dozens of targets in Iran, including coastal radars, anti-ship missile launchers and a fleet of small Iranian attack boats.

After a short lull, the United States hit 140 military targets in the first of three consecutive days of heavy bombing this week.

U.S. forces carried out new rounds of attacks on Iran throughout Tuesday and resumed a naval blockade of Iranian ports, a strategy that showed some success in the earlier phase.

The strikes are intended to open the waterway to shipping. The purpose of the naval blockade is to put economic pressure on Iran by choking off its trade and to flex American military might.

New York Times, Live Updates: Key G.O.P. Senator Presses Todd Blanche, Trump’s Attorney General Pick, Glenn Thrush, Devlin Barrett and Alan Feuer, July 15, 2026. Here’s the latest. Mr. Blanche, the acting attorney general and a former leader of Mr. Trump’s criminal defense team, faced methodical questioning from Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who has expressed doubts about him.

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general nominated by President Trump to oversee the Justice Department, faced pointed questions during a confirmation hearing on Wednesday from Senator John Cornyn, a Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee whose support could be crucial.

Mr. Cornyn, one of two G.O.P. lawmakers on the committee who has expressed reservations about Mr. Blanche, pressed him over a deal the department reached with the president that a federal judge said this week amounted to self-dealing. Even a single Republican vote against Mr. Blanche could be enough to sink his nomination, and Mr. Cornyn said during a brief recess that he was undecided.

The questions from Mr. Cornyn, a lame-duck senator from Texas who lost to a Trump-backed primary challenger, focused on two heavily scrutinized elements of the agreement, which stemmed from Mr. Trump’s suit against the I.R.S. over the leaking of his tax information.

Mr. Blanche approved a provision that would grant the president, his family and his businesses sweeping protection from audits and has refused to put on paper that another provision — a $1.8 billion fund for those the Trump administration believes to have been wronged by the legal system — is dead for good.

Mr. Cornyn, a former judge, displayed text of the deal on a poster behind him and noted that Mr. Trump “has not agreed in writing” to nixing the fund. During a recess, Mr. Cornyn said Mr. Blanche’s answers did not “lead inevitably to the conclusion that it’s dead,” adding that it “could be revived at a future date.”

But a second Republican who has raised concerns about Mr. Blanche, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, appeared supportive after hearing his answers, including a promise that Mr. Blanche would review the pardons process. “You did a great job today,” Mr. Tillis said.

Mr. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor who served as Mr. Trump’s personal defense lawyer, has overseen disruptions unlike any in the department’s history, with mass firings, politically motivated persecutions and the erosion of a tradition of independence from the White House.

Democrats have accused Mr. Blanche of behaving like Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and his close ties to the president were underscored in his response to a softball question from a Republican senator. Asked if he was the president’s friend, Mr. Blanche replied, “I’m his lawyer — was his lawyer.”

Here’s what else to know:

• Epstein files: Mr. Blanche defended the department’s handling of the release of government files related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a process he oversaw as deputy attorney general. He cast the Trump administration as aggressively transparent, but Mr. Durbin pointed out that it took an extraordinary bipartisan effort in Congress to force the documents’ release. They also sparred over whether Mr. Blanche would meet with a group of Epstein victims, some of whom were at the hearing, with Mr. Blanche offered them a meeting with a staff member but not committing to personally meeting with them.
• Partisan divide: Senator Charles Grassley, the committee chairman, sought to fend off criticism of Mr. Blanche in his opening statement, calling investigations of Mr. Trump during the Biden administration as an attack on the rule of law. Senator Richard Durbin, the top Democrat on the committee, cast Mr. Blanche as a partisan actor and said the department had charged the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, “for taking pictures of seashells” — a reference to an image of shells arranged to spell “86 47” that the Justice Department said constituted a threat on the president.
• Targeting political enemies: Mr. Blanche has been guided by a maximalist interpretation of Article II of the Constitution. By his reading, the president has the legal right to order investigations against targets of his choice, or demand the department drop charges against his allies.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: They Don’t Care If ICE Kills People, Bill Kristol, Mona Charen and Benjamin Parker, July 15, 2026. Trump lauds ICE as the body count mounts.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has his first day of hearings for his nomination to the top Justice Department job today. He’ll spend most of the day answering questions—or, more precisely, not answering questions, because the rules the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee imposed on this hearing (ten minutes of questioning per senator only) basically guarantee that Blanche can blather, platitudinize, and filibuster his way through the whole thing. Happy Wednesday.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above beating police officers). Pro-Trump insurrectionists whom Trump pardoned are reportedly part of his immigration crackdown, which is widely suspected as being a test-run of Trump-orchestrated voter suppression efforts heavily targeting urban, African-American neighborhoods to retain Republican power during the November mid-term elections.

New York Times, Trump Pressures ICE to Resume Traffic Stops After Agency Pulls Back, Madeleine Ngo, July 15, 2026. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ordered its officers on Tuesday to halt most vehicle stops across the country after they shot two people over the past week.

President Trump on Wednesday criticized his administration’s directive to halt Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from conducting most vehicle stops after two fatal shootings, immediately throwing the policy into question a day after it went into effect.

In a post on social media, Mr. Trump defended the traffic stops and urged ICE to “go back and do your very important job.”

“We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” Mr. Trump wrote. “Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands.”

The temporary pause on vehicle stops came on Tuesday, after ICE agents shot and killed one person in Houston and another in Biddeford, Maine, over the past week as part of a recent surge in immigration arrests. Both people were killed after officers tried to stop their cars, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Trump’s post.

Tom Homan, the White House border czar, tried to downplay the potential impact of the pause on Tuesday, saying it was a temporary measure to “make sure we’re doing the right thing.” But many arrests occur after ICE officers pull over people in their cars, and the pause threatened to hamper the agency’s ability to increase arrests at a time when the White House and Mr. Trump’s conservative supporters are pressuring it to ramp up deportations.

Some influential lawmakers had urged Markwayne Mullin, the homeland security secretary, to impose the pause, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican seeking re-election this year.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Forever War Gets Scary, Paul Krugman, right, July 15, 2026. But I'm not talking about bombs and drones.

The war with Iran has just reached a very scary phase, and I’m not talking about the bombs and the drones. Hi, Paul Krugman here, doing a brief podcast instead of a full post, because I actually spent the day with friends and doing other things, and this is a quicker alternative.

If you’re following the news, you know that the sort-of ceasefire with Iran has been called off. Trump has reinstated the blockade. The Iranians are back to hitting things with their drones and missiles.

The U.S. position has been wildly erratic. First, Trump said he was going to impose a 20% toll on all shipping, basically turning the Strait of Hormuz into a U.S. toll booth, which would have been wildly illegal and irresponsible, aside from being impossible. Now he says, no, he’s going to demand that countries invest in the United States, which is also actually wildly illegal. But in any case, it’s never going to happen.

And yet, this is extremely scary. The reason to be afraid is not that I think the war is going to come to America. It’s not even that I think the United States is going to seriously try to occupy Iran. We don’t have the troops. We don’t have the missiles. Trump depleted a large share of our weaponry in the course of his failed war so far. So this is likely going to be punitive strikes, maybe some war crimes along the way, but that’s all.

But what is really frightening here is that it does appear as if Trump has given up on trying to extract something that looks like victory. If we go back just a few days ago, it appeared that what was going to happen was that Trump was going to de facto pull out, give upon the project, take advantage of falling oil prices because the strait was sort of kind of open — and try to spin the story about this was truly, this was actually an American victory and the economy is great and look at the stock market.

And, you know, just it was a little bit — more than a little bit —stupid and doomed. It was also kind of amazing because a serious attempt to end the conflict would have required facing up to reality, saying, OK, this war didn’t go well, but America remains great. Sorry about that.

But that was apparently not something Trump emotionally could bring himself to do. He just cannot admit that this venture failed. He can never admit that anything failed. We’re going to be searching for the saboteurs of the reflecting pool for the remainder of his presidency.

This is a change in strategy that is ominous because what is Trump’s plan for the midterm elections? Here the idea presumably was that there would be enough economic success and people would have sufficiently short memories that they would possibly give Trump credit for opening the Strait of Hormuz, but in any case have put the gas price shock and the whole disruption surrounding the war behind them. And be ready to start admitting that this is the golden age that Trump and company keep on claiming it is.

Now that’s all off. Now it’s just we’re going to bomb Iran. No clear strategy there, but we’re not going to even pretend that things are okay. We’re going to blockade them, which actually has a little bit more leverage, but no hint that anything might be resolved in a way that would help Republican chances in the midterms. So what is going to happen?

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that just as Trump essentially gives up, not gives up in the sense of abandoning his war, but gives up on trying to achieve anything he can even spin as a positive outcome, that we now have an announcement that this Thursday he’s going to have a primetime speech, which reports say is going to be about election fraud in 2020. Some reports hinting that he might try to declare the two Democratic senators from Georgia somehow illegitimate.

Okay, that’s not going to actually work. And nobody’s going to be convinced by the claim that he actually won the 2020 election. But what is happening is that effectively he’s setting up the pretext, the groundwork for massive interference in the vote this November. That we’re basically seeing the stage set for some kind of attempt to block fair elections, maybe block elections entirely.

I don’t know how this is going to play out. But we are really now at the point where it’s pretty clear that Trump and the people around him have given up on actually winning the election. They’ve decided instead that somecombination of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and possibly massive illegality is their way forward.

And don’t say they wouldn’t do that. That has been famous last words every step of the way. The proposition that there were some things that even Trump and company would not do has been the best way to be wrong about everything, every step of the Trump administration.

So in a peculiar way, the fact that Trump is back to bombing Iran is really bad news, not because of the bombs. Yes, it’s terrible and all that, But not because I have any real fear that America is going to be at risk from a foreign power, but because I think it signals an enormous risk to us from our own president, our own government.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

And take care.

The Hartmann Report, Advocacy and Opinion: Midterm Elections: The Con Always Works, Right Up Until the Moment it Doesn’t, Thom Hartmann, right, July 15, 2026. Democracy has survived con men before, but only because ordinary Americans refused to become the mark…

Tomorrow night at nine o’clock Eastern, Donald Trump will look into a television camera and tell America he’s rescuing democracy. He teased the address to reporters this week, promising “really big news” about “free and fair elections” and adding that “it doesn’t get bigger.” For once, he and I agree. It doesn’t get bigger.

An administration official told Reuters that the speech will center on newly declassified intelligence about the 2020 election and what the White House calls voting machine vulnerabilities open to foreign hackers; multiple election experts quoted in that same reporting warn he’s laying the groundwork to contest Republican losses this November.

To understand what we’ll actually be watching Thursday night, we have to go back to 1973, to a Manhattan night spot called Le Club, where a 27-year-old Donald Trump, freshly sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to Black families, met the most feared lawyer in New York. It’s a story I tell in detail in The Last American President.

Roy Cohn had made his reputation as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, wrecking careers with accusations he never had to prove. His advice to young Trump, as Cohn’s own cousin later recalled it, was blunt: “You might be guilty; it doesn’t matter.” Don’t settle. Don’t apologize. Attack the accuser.

So instead of quietly signing the consent decree his father’s regular lawyers recommended, Trump called a press conference and countersued the federal government for $100 million. A judge tossed the countersuit, the Trumps eventually signed roughly the deal they’d been offered at the start, and Cohn declared total victory anyway.

He understood something that’s become the operating system of Donald Trump’s entire life: the court of public opinion matters more than any court of law, and a lie defended with absolute commitment will usually beat a truth defended halfheartedly.

Over their thirteen years together, Cohn drilled three rules into his student: Attack, never defend. Deny everything, admit nothing. Claim victory no matter what actually happened.

When Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation in 2017, Trump reportedly demanded of his aides, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was mourning a fixer who’d been dead for three decades.

It took him eight more years, but he’s finally found his Roy Cohn. He’s found several of them, in fact, and he’s installed them at the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

That’s the machinery humming behind Thursday’s speech. The acting Director of National Intelligence is now Bill Pulte, a nepo-baby real estate guy with no intelligence experience who referred Trump’s political enemies for criminal prosecution based on mortgage records he pulled from government databases, and who Democrats say was installed precisely to help Republicans rig the midterms.

A White House task force has been combing through thousands of pages of classified documents, timed to land in the middle of an election season. Federal agents have already raided the Fulton County elections office and carted off 700 boxes of 2020 ballots, something I covered here at the Hartmann Report earlier this year.

Steve Bannon has promised ICE agents at the polls come November, and Trump’s new Postmaster General has confirmed the Postal Service won’t deliver mail-in ballots from states that refuse to hand over sensitive voter data to the federal government. And Jay Clayton, Trump’s pick for permanent DNI, faces his Senate confirmation hearing today, one day before the speech, having already auditioned for the job by echoing Trump’s phony claims about “election integrity” on CNBC.

Standing in front of Mount Rushmore on the third of July, Trump told the crowd that if Senate Republicans kill the filibuster and pass his SAVE America Act, with its proof-of-citizenship, driver’s license-must-match-birth certificate (that kicks off millions of married women), and photo ID requirements, then Republicans “will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

He tried holding a bipartisan housing affordability bill hostage to force the Senate’s hand, and now GOP leadership is trying to attach SAVE to the national security spending bill this week. Even Dan Abrams, hardly a flamethrower, opened his radio show this Monday by saying it’s time to admit the president of the United States is “trying to cheat” in the midterm elections.

One detail gives the whole con away: Tulsi Gabbard, before she resigned as DNI last month, commissioned a forensic analysis of voting machines seized in Puerto Rico. That analysis, Reuters reports, found security flaws but no evidence of hacking — none — and Gabbard’s own follow-up report recommending fixes has been sitting unreleased at the White House for months.

They went looking for proof of fraud, found none (but perhaps a way to hack machines in the future), buried the report that could have helped states harden their systems before November, and are now preparing a primetime address built on the fumes of the very investigation that came up empty.

Roy Cohn would be proud. Claim victory no matter what the facts say. When you’re in the wrong and on the defensive, lie and attack.

I lived in East Germany’s shadow for a year in the 1980s, working for an international relief organization in a small village a few miles from the border, and in 1986 I passed through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. Most Americans probably don’t remember or even know that the DDR held elections; regular ones, with polling places and ballots and officially reported turnout levels that were typically north of 98 percent.

What they didn’t have was any possibility of a surprise. The regime had hollowed out every institution that could have made the outcome uncertain, so the election became theater, a ritual performed to legitimize a result already decided.

Putin ran East Germany’s KGB at the time, and he’s now Trump’s mentor with biweekly phone calls. Authoritarians rarely abolish elections. They keep the shell and kill what’s inside it, and it appears that Trump is following the path Putin blazed at multiple levels.

So will it work here? There’s no secret button that flips vote totals: more than 98 percent of American ballots are cast in jurisdictions with paper records, and when Trump signed an executive order that would have forced the decertification of voting machines, a federal judge permanently blocked it based on the Constitution handing the running of elections to the states.

The weapon Trump and his corrupt GOP will use is chaos, not hacking: seizures of ballots and equipment, decertification fights, litigation that delays counts past deadlines, ICE vans parked outside polling places in Democratic neighborhoods, and a pre-built national narrative, launched tomorrow night, that gives every Republican candidate permission to refuse to concede when they lose.

David Becker, a former Justice Department voting rights attorney, thinks the document dumps will fall flat with most Americans, and the primary results this spring suggest voters aren’t buying what Trump’s selling.

But Roy Cohn’s method never needed a majority to believe the lie. It only needed enough confusion, enough delay, and enough intimidation to change who shows up and what gets counted. It’s worked for Donald Trump for fifty years.

Remember, though, how it ended for the teacher. Roy Cohn died in 1986, disbarred just weeks earlier for dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation, abandoned by nearly everyone he’d ever helped, including Trump, who dumped him when he got sick.

The con, in other words, always works right up until the moment it doesn’t.

Whether Thursday night marks the beginning of the biggest con in American history or the beginning of its collapse depends less on what Trump says than on what tens of millions of us do between now and the first Tuesday this coming November.

Congress is voting this week on whether to bolt the SAVE Act onto the national security spending bill, so call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell your senators and representative where you stand, and don’t forget to mention Todd Blanche to your senators.

Check your voter registration right now at vote.org, because purges are already underway in Red states, and track what your own legislature is doing to protect or restrict your ballot at openstates.org.

Democracy has survived con men before, but only because ordinary Americans refused to become the mark. As Jefferson told us, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty…”

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

Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche attends a kick-off celebration for the "Great American State Fair" on the National Mall in Washington, DC, June 24, 2026. (Photo by Jemal COUNTESS / AFP via Getty Images) 

Epstein survivor Theresa Helm speaks at a Sept. 3 rally on Capitol Hill. (C-SPAN)

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: What is Todd Blanche still hiding about Epstein? Judd Legum, right, July 15, 2026. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee will consider the nomination of Todd Blanche to be the next U.S. Attorney General. Blanche, President Trump’s former personal attorney who has been serving in an acting capacity since April, faces a number of obstacles to his confirmation.

One of the biggest is Jeffrey Epstein.

Blanche stands accused of failing to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the public disclosure of most Department of Justice (DOJ) files associated with the late sex criminal. On April 27, journalist Katie Phang sued Blanche in federal court, alleging he had “either retracted, or failed to produce entirely, documents that should have been produced” under the law.

The most explosive of Phang’s allegations is that Blanche has “withheld notes from FBI interviews with a victim who has alleged that in the 1980s, when she was about 13 years old, Epstein introduced her to Trump, who in turn assaulted her.”

In March, the DOJ belatedly released redacted typed summaries of three interviews with the woman discussing her interactions with Trump, including the alleged sexual assault. Those summaries were initially excluded from the DOJ’s primary release of Epstein files in January and disclosed only after their exclusion received media attention.

Phang sued to force Blanche to release the FBI’s handwritten notes from the interviews with the woman, which were also referenced in the Maxwell case. According to Phang, the disclosure of these notes was required under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

In response to Phang, Blanche did not address the substance of Phang’s argument. Instead, he argued that the Epstein Files Transparency Act did not create a private right of action and, therefore, Phang did not have standing to sue. He also argued that, even if Phang had standing, she did not suffer any injury from his refusal to disclose the interview notes and other documents.

Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected all of Blanche’s arguments. He ruled that Phang did have standing and that Blanche’s failure to fully disclose the Epstein files created real harm to Phang as a journalist. Sullivan also found that, in not addressing the substance of Phang’s arguments, Blanche “conceded that he is in violation of the Act.” Sullivan ordered Blanche to produce the documents Phang was seeking by July 2 or “show cause” as to why they should not be produced.

Blanche did not produce the documents sought by Phang on July 2. Instead he filed a response to Sullivan’s order to show cause. Blanche said he had cause not to release the interview notes “because, by their nature, the underlying notes are substantially similar to the ultimate reports, and have accordingly been deemed duplicative.” Blanche also said the fact that the notes were handwritten “further complicates the redaction process and increases the risk of inadvertent disclosure” of the victim’s identity.

In a response to Blanche filed July 13, Phang said that Blanche was openly defying the court and the law. Blanche “makes clear that whatever the federal statute requires him to do, he will not comply,” Phang argues.

Phang notes that Blanche claims “that FBI handwritten interview notes are similar to subsequent FD-302s [interview summaries] as a general matter.” But “he has not argued—let alone provided any evidence—that the specific handwritten notes at issue here are substantially similar to the FD-302s that have been produced.” Further, “[t]he Epstein Act does not exempt from production documents that are ‘substantially similar’ to those that have been produced.” This amounts to an attempt by Blanche “to write exceptions into the Epstein Act that don’t exist.”

Phang is now asking the court to fine Blanche $1,000 per day until he complies with the judge’s order.

Blanche has until July 20 to respond to Phang. But he will almost certainly have to address his handling of the Epstein files during today’s committee hearing.Other documents Blanche refuses to release

Along with the interview notes, Phang has highlighted four other categories of information she says Blanche has illegally withheld. Sullivan sided with Phang in each instance.

First, Phang notes that Blanche has redacted the identity of the senders or recipients of at least eight damning emails. These messages, some of which were sent to Epstein, include “Thank you for a fun night… Your littlest girl was a little naughty” and “the key are the 14 to 15 year old girls—i am a sexual pervert because i say they are now of a reproductive age?” In his latest filing, Blanche claims that the senders of some of these messages are “victims.” But even in two instances where Blanche concedes the sender is not a victim, Blanche has refused to unredact the emails, citing generalized concerns about “personal privacy.”

Second, Phang seeks to unredact the identity of four names listed as “co-conspirators” on two documents. Blanche argues that three of the four individuals are also “victims.” The fourth is Lesley Groff, Epstein’s former assistant who has not “asserted victim status.”

Third, Phang notes that Blanche has not released any material in the files that was written in a language other than English. Blanche’s response is that a review of documents written in other languages is “not practical.” In this case, the court order did not give Blanche the option to “show cause” in lieu of complying with the order. Blanche decided not to take action anyway. Phang argues Blanche has “obviously and arrogantly ignored this Court’s order here.”

Finally, Phang seeks a log of all redactions from the Epstein files, along with an accompanying justification, as required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Blanche acknowledges the DOJ has not produced such a log but claims there is no deadline for the DOJ to do so. This directly contradicts both Sullivan’s order and any reasonable interpretation of the law.

The Contrarian, Opinion and Advocacy: A Collection of Blanche Checks, Norman Eisen, right, Jennifer Rubin, Peter Carr, Tom Joscelyn, Ben Sheehan, Katie Phang, Eliza Orlins, April Ryan, and Maya Wiley, For months, Acting AG Todd Blanche has dodged a clear answer — but The Contrarian hasn't looked away. Here's a range of takes on Trump's ex-lawyer ahead of his confirmation hearing to lead the DOJ. 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: New ICE, Same as the Old ICE Political Opinion: New ICE, Same as the Old ICE, William Kristol, right, July 15, 2026. After the killings in January in Minneapolis of Renée Good and Alex Pretti sparked widespread public outrage, and with Democrats in Congress blocking additional multi-year funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Trump administration made some adjustments.

Two of the most visible faces of the mass deportation effort, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino, were fired. Incoming DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said during his confirmation hearing that he hoped to have DHS generate less controversy. And as Republicans in Congress muscled through multi-year funding for ICE, there was talk that ICE would itself initiate various reforms, like having its agents wear body cameras.

All of this helped Trump’s mass deportation regime weather the political storm, get its multi-year appropriation, and avoid all requirements of accountability or transparency. By summer, ICE was unabashedly back. Under renewed pressure from the White House to meet higher immigration arrest quotas, the agency ramped up arrests to roughly 2,000 a day—about twice its daily total compared with the spring.

Then in the last ten days, in the course of its deportation frenzy, ICE has once again killed two innocent individuals. When 52-year-old husband and father Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot a week ago in Houston, DHS lied that he had “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” A week later, when 26-year- old husband and father Joan Sebastian Guerrero was killed in Biddeford, Maine, DHS retreated to the meaningless claim that the agent who shot Guerrero was “fearing for public safety.” ICE has shared no evidence from videos or witnesses about what actually happened in either case. It has not told us who those agents, acting and killing in our name, are. We do know that they were supposed to be looking for men other than the ones they shot. And we’ve been told they were not wearing body cameras.

Houston’s top prosecutor, Harris District Attorney Sean Teare, has been more forthcoming. He has said that the actions of federal immigration agents “in no way resemble” the tactics of “every law enforcement agency” he’s worked in, and that “either these agents are completely untrained, or intentionally putting themselves in situations where they can justify firing into cars.” Or both.

And these recent shootings didn’t come out of the blue. In recent weeks, we’ve seen videos and heard reports from all around the nation of illegal and indecent behavior by ICE agents. So while billions more dollars have been spent and thousands more agents have been added, we have no more transparency and accountability than before.

At The Bulwark, we promise you three things: We’ll deal in facts, we’ll tell you what we really think, and we’ll put the future of democratic government ahead of partisan or tribal affiliation. Join our community and support our work by becoming a Bulwark+ member.Subscribed

Now, after the killings, and after widespread criticism of the practice of vehicle stops, there were once again some suggestions that things might change. On Monday night, ICE ordered a suspension of vehicle stops during enforcement operations. But by Tuesday afternoon, border Czar Tom Homan was reassuring Fox News that the pause on ICE agents conducting vehicle stops is not a policy change but rather a short-term review, and that ICE agents will “get back to doing what they do best.” And our president posted this morning to tell us that “the men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job,” adding, “we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

There’s no reason to think there’ll be any kind of fundamental change to this thuggish and lawless agency, or to the mass deportation agenda that incentivizes and excuses its thuggish and lawless behavior. In fact, all evidence now points to things staying the same.

My colleague Adrian Carrasquillo reported yesterday that at a small vigil in Houston a Mexican-American man told Ronaldo Salgado,

I see you as my sons. We’re the generation of your dad . . . We don’t ask anyone for anything. We hand our children over to this nation, and with all my heart, I see you as my son. And I know you make your father proud, and your father is watching you. And you make him proud.

The fact that immigrants like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Guerrero want to come here and live here and work here and raise their families here should make us all proud. It is the acts of our own government that should make us ashamed.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump DOJ Says it Will not Comply With Epstein Criminal Investigation, Blanche Blasted, Trump Urges ICE Continue Traffic Stops, Aaron Parnas, right, July 15, 2026. There is a lot to cover today. I am currently watching Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing and will be speaking this afternoon with a senator who is questioning him.

The Trump administration has informed the New Mexico attorney general that it will not cooperate with the state’s only active criminal investigation related to the Epstein files. That comes as Epstein survivors continue urging the Senate to reject Blanche’s confirmation. Meanwhile, the bombing campaign in Iran is escalating, Trump is demanding that ICE resume traffic stops, and there is much more to cover.

This morning, I’ll be back with the next episode of The Raging Perspective at noon, followed by our next paid subscriber live stream at 7:30 p.m. ET tonight. You can find the link here.

I am working around the clock today covering the Blanche hearing, and tomorrow all eyes will be on Trump’s speech about the 2020 election. Get ready because the news isn’t slowing down. Here’s the news:

Epstein Investigation:

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is escalating a dispute with the Justice Department, accusing federal officials of refusing to provide unredacted Jeffrey Epstein records needed for the state’s active criminal investigation into alleged crimes at Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. Torrez said the DOJ has failed to honor earlier assurances of cooperation and gave the department until July 31 to release the records or face legal action. The Justice Department rejected those claims, saying it cannot legally release millions of unredacted documents because of federal law, court orders, and privacy protections for victims and witnesses. The dispute centers on New Mexico’s effort to investigate allegations that Epstein trafficked and abused girls at his ranch, including claims tied to a 2019 email alleging two foreign girls were buried on the property.

The New Mexico Attorney General confirmed that the Trump Administration will not comply with their criminal investigation into the Epstein files.

Former Goldman Sachs chief legal officer Kathryn Ruemmler is scheduled to appear before the House Oversight Committee for a closed-door interview about her relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Lawmakers say recently released Justice Department records indicate Ruemmler remained in contact with Epstein between 2014 and 2019, years after his 2008 conviction, and allegedly provided informal legal advice while receiving expensive gifts. Ruemmler has denied any wrongdoing, saying she never formally represented Epstein, regrets knowing him, and has sympathy for his victims. She resigned as Goldman Sachs’ chief legal officer earlier this year but remains with the bank as an adviser. Her testimony is part of the committee’s broader investigation into Epstein’s network, which has also included interviews with other prominent political and business figures.

Todd Blanche:

Epstein survivors are urging the Senate to reject Todd Blanche's nomination for attorney general ahead of his confirmation hearings, arguing the Justice Department mishandled the release of Epstein files under his leadership. Advocacy group World Without Exploitation says the DOJ exposed survivors' names, phone numbers, and home addresses while keeping many alleged abusers and powerful associates redacted, putting victims' safety at risk and revictimizing them. The group also criticized the department for failing to release millions of remaining Epstein-related documents and for not pursuing others allegedly involved in Epstein's crimes. Blanche has defended the DOJ's handling of the records, saying the Epstein files should no longer be an issue after the department released the documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but survivors continue calling on senators to vote against his confirmation.

I spoke with Jess Michaels yesterday:

I asked Epstein survivor Jess Michaels what would she tell Senators during Todd Blanche's confirmation hearing. She said it simply: You cannot say an investigation is concluded when you have not met with the survivors.

I also spoke with Lara Blume McGee:

Senator Dick Durbin said Todd Blanche admitted, “I made a mistake,” regarding the Trump administration’s controversial IRS settlement and the proposed anti-weaponization fund during a private meeting ahead of Blanche’s confirmation hearing. Durbin said Blanche acknowledged the error after lawmakers raised concerns about the arrangement, which has faced bipartisan scrutiny. The reported admission comes as Blanche seeks Senate confirmation for a top Justice Department role. The settlement and fund have become a key issue in his confirmation process, with senators pressing him over his judgment and independence.

Durbin to Blanche: Under your leadership, more than 1,000 FBI personnel were pulled off of other priorities and directed to flag Epstein Records for any mentions of Trump. When scrutiny of the cover-up intensified, you participated in meetings in the White House Situation Room to strategize about how to protect Trump, not Epstein survivors. In clear violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, your explanation, “It isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.” These survivors deserve much better.

The New York City Bar Association urged the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject Todd Blanche’s nomination for U.S. Attorney General, arguing that his record as Deputy and Acting Attorney General shows he lacks the independence, ethics, and commitment to the rule of law required for the position. The letter accuses Blanche of pursuing politically motivated prosecutions, placing loyalty to President Trump above the Constitution, undermining the Justice Department through firings and restructuring, and violating professional ethical standards. It also criticizes his role in the Trump IRS settlement and his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, arguing those actions demonstrate conflicts of interest and abuse of authority. The association concludes that Blanche is unfit to lead the Justice Department and calls on the Senate to reject his confirmation.

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: We Must Stop Blanche And Clayton, More Terrible Polling For Trump, Powerful New Ads From Dems, Simon Rosenberg, right, July 15, 2026. We have one job today: Call and call and demand your Senators and Rep oppose and work against Todd Blanche and Jay Clayton. The installation of these two venal men, given Trump’s intensifying spiral and escalating desperation, would be a national emergency, a five alarm fire for our democracy. The confirmation hearings for both began this morning in the Senate. 

Here’s the NYT’s Editorial Board this morning in an editorial opposing Blanche (gift link, read the whole thing!):

On Monday, two days before the Senate hearing to consider Todd Blanche’s nomination to become the nation’s chief law enforcement official, a federal judge strongly suggested that he may not even be fit to practice law.

………

Of all the powers Americans give their government, none can curtail personal liberty like those of the Department of Justice, and this editorial board has listed the ways Mr. Blanche has abused that authority. He has celebrated the Jan. 6 rioters. He has misled Congress under oath. He has said it is Mr. Trump’s “right,” and “indeed it is his duty,” to use the department to investigate people he “has had issues with.”

…………….

To understand why Mr. Blanche poses such a threat to America’s system of justice, look at how sharply he and Mr. Trump have strayed from traditional restraints on the use of law enforcement powers.

Mr. Blanche’s relationship with the president stems from his role as a private lawyer. Over the past decade, Mr. Blanche first represented Trump allies like Paul Manafort before joining the team that defended Mr. Trump over his hush-money payments to the actress Stormy Daniels. After Mr. Trump won the election in 2024, he chose Mr. Blanche to be deputy attorney general.

Ethical guidelines exist to prevent government lawyers who previously were in private practice from using their offices to aid their former clients rather than their current one, the people of the United States. In Judge Williams’s suggestion that Mr. Blanche be a candidate for punishment, she cited these conflict-of-interest guidelines.

He has brazenly defied them at the Justice Department over the past year and a half. He has presided over the frivolous indictments of the former F.B.I. director James Comey and the investigations of the former C.I.A. director John Brennan and the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, all perceived enemies of the president. The cases have gained no traction in the courts.

Mr. Blanche has also mounted an onslaught against the news media, attempting to undermine the First Amendment. Under his watch, the F.B.I. raided the home of a Washington Post reporter and issued multiple subpoenas against news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal. Last week, the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, who works for Mr. Blanche, went to the White House to oversee an investigation that led to the subpoenaing of five New York Times reporters who broke the news that Mr. Trump’s new version of Air Force One had security flaws.

These acts represent an appalling politicization of law enforcement. Mr. Blanche has helped Mr. Trump violate decades of bipartisan tradition and use the Justice Department as an instrument of personal power.

If Mr. Blanche is confirmed, the problems are likely to worsen. Mr. Trump has repeatedly indicated an interest in interfering with this year’s midterm elections. He continues to lie about his 2020 defeat, and his administration, including Mr. Blanche, has investigated election officials who have done nothing wrong. There is every reason to worry that Mr. Blanche might use the powers of the Justice Department to intimidate voters or interfere with ballot counting this fall.

I would two more things to these long list of “injuries” and “abuses” - the green light he’s given to Trump’s historic corruption, and a refusal to prosecute or even investigate the DHS agents murdering people on our streets.

Here’s an excerpt from a letter Rep. Robert Garcia, Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee, sent to the Senate today. Yes, House Members can and should weigh in on what happens in the Senate:

“I write to urge the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject the nomination of Todd Blanche to serve as Attorney General of the United States. More than any other individual, Mr. Blanche oversaw and implemented the White House coverup of the Epstein files. He oversaw the violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA), botched the release of the files, and continues to withhold millions of documents from Congress and the American people. He released information which put Epstein’s survivors in danger, while the names of Epstein associates and accomplices were and remain withheld. Further, he is a central architect of the Administration’s policy of providing preferential treatment to Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for favorable testimony.

Mr. Blanche’s handling of the Epstein files shows his only loyalty is to President Trump, his former client, and not delivering justice to Epstein’s survivors or transparency to the American people. No nominee with his record should be confirmed to lead the Department.”

Trump dropped this little bomb in Blanche’s lap this morning - he appears to have reversed DHS’s decision yesterday to end traffic stops that keep resulting in dead people on our streets. Yes this is Trump encouraging state-sponsored killings of every day people in America - for violence, illiberalism and lawlessness is at the very core of the Trump-Blanche project…..

Make your calls everyone. Urge your networks to join you. As Trump’s failed regime keeps failing here and abroad he is growing more desperate and willing to do “whatever it takes” to prevent a free and fair election and a peaceful transfer for power next January.

We need to act as if our democracy is on the line today. For it is.

• Trump Keeps Eroding - In their new monthly tracking poll released this morning, Echelon Insights, a respected Republican firm, has Trump down 23 points, 38%-61% in a survey fielded July 9-13. Below is the monthly results of this poll. Trump starts recovering in February. The war comes and he starts eroding. No recovery even with gas prices dropping, just more erosion. Every GOP operative in the country will be reviewing this data today, mainly in horror. It explains why we’re seeing escalating desperation from Trump and the White House.
• Making Voter Reg Great Again - G. Elliott Morris writes today about the new large sample Pew Poll, which among other things find non-voters swinging back towards Democrats. This data suggests that Democrats should be pouring more money into voter activities in these closing months of the 2026 election.
• Michigan - A new, independent poll in Michigan has Rep. Haley Stevens leading Abdul El-Sayed 48%-41%. This is the first independent poll we’ve seen in Michigan in a while and was fielded entirely after their one-on-one debate last week. While Stevens leads there is a lot of soft support for both candidates and many undecided. Things could still move in these final weeks before their August 4th primary - this thing ain’t cooked yet.

I want to highlight two things from the linked article above. First, like in Maine with Platner and in other recent races the demographic group that’s powering the success of “new left” candidates are white college educated voters, not non-college, working class voters:

Stevens’ strengths in the poll are with Black voters (67% to El-Sayed’s 21%), non-college-educated voters (56% to El-Sayed’s 34%), voters over age 55, Metro Detroit voters and traditional Democrats.

El-Sayed is getting the most support from White voters (51% to Stevens’ 39%), college-educated voters (48% to Stevens’ 41%), outstate voters, those under age 55 and likely primary voters who identify as Democratic Socialists.

Pew had similar findings in a poll earlier this year about how Democratic voters feel about leaders who identify as Democratic Socialists. In their poll 32% of Democrats like someone with the DSA affiliation, and here again we see the upper income, more highly educated skew:

Differences by education

Democrats with a college degree are more likely than those without one to like leaders who identify as democratic socialists (41% vs. 26%).

Differences by income

Four-in-ten upper-income Democrats like leaders who identify as democratic socialists. Smaller shares of those with middle (34%) and lower incomes (24%) say the same.

The second point is this observation from the pollster:

“Abdul El-Sayed wants to make this a race about the direction of the Democratic Party, and Haley Stevens wants to make this a race about the direction of America,” Czuba said.

This is something that I’ve argued repeatedly here -- that the “new left” messaging that has emerged in recent months may be well suited towards Democratic primary audiences in blue places, but I think has significant limitations with battleground general election audiences; and that the “new left” seems a lot more focused on beating Democrats than Republicans.

While most of our Senate candidate this cycle have been overperforming the partisan lean of their states, both El-Sayed and Platner (even at the height of his polling) have consistently underperformed the partisan lean. The jury is still out on whether this new, insurgent narrative and messaging can work outside a Democratic primary audience in blue places for it is designed, purposefully, for taking out Democrats and not Republicans. 

More On Iran War

New York Times, Iran War Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Exchange Strikes for Fifth Straight Day, Ravi Mattu, Qasim Nauman, Eric Schmitt and Jenny Gross, July 15, 2026. Here's the latest.

The United States launched new attacks against Iranian targets on Wednesday, hours after Iran targeted American military sites in the region. Neither side has shown signs of backing down as they enter a new stage of the war.

The United States and Iran exchanged strikes for a fifth consecutive day on Wednesday, with both sides showing no sign of backing down as they entered a new stage of the war.

U.S. Central Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East, said on social media that it had launched a new wave of strikes on military targets in Iran “to further degrade” its ability to attack commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for oil and gas shipping.

New York Times, News Analysis: For Israel, the U.S.-Iran Hostilities Have Created an Uneasy Limbo, David M. Halbfinger, July 15, 2026.

'Officials see a return to full-blown war as preferable to an agreement that fails to curb the threats Iran poses to Israel. Meanwhile, they wait.Listen · 7:52 min

For weeks, Israelis have lamented the uncertainty and volatility of the on-again, off-again conflict with Iran. As the United States and Iran shift from talks to threats and strikes in the Persian Gulf, Israel has so far sat on the sidelines, stuck in a kind of limbo.

Israeli civilians are worried they could find themselves stuck abroad if they leave over the summer, or back in bomb shelters if war breaks out again. After its onslaught against Iran ended with a nominal cease-fire, the military, already embroiled in Lebanon and Gaza, does not know what to plan for.

That uncertainty — a constant tension that shows no sign of resolving — is an uncomfortable place for the country to be. Polls show that Israelis feel less secure now than they did before the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran in February.

But for many in Israel, that may be better than the alternatives.

The difficulty for Israel is that its own goals and those of the Trump administration are not aligned. President Trump has made clear that his main and most immediate objective is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic unimpeded by Iran. Even at his most bellicose, Mr. Trump has maintained that the current U.S. attacks on Iran are meant not to re-escalate the conflict, but to force Iran back to the bargaining table.

For Israel, however, a U.S.-Iran agreement has become something to fear, given the contours of and omissions from the memorandum of understanding that the two adversaries agreed to in June.

More On U.S. Foreign Policy, Israeli Horrors

The Contrarian, Opinion: Enough Is Enough, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 15, 2026. Israel’s conduct warrants a strong U.S. reaction.

You need not take the word of Israel’s committed enemies. For months now, Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, has been among the leading voices denouncing “a terrible process of brutalization” in Israeli society, including the epidemic of brutality and lawlessness in the occupied West Bank.

Marauding bands of violent thugs now routinely attack and murder Palestinians and burn property in what can only be described as routine pogroms, which the government either tacitly encourages, denies, or rationalizes. The absence of a robust U.S. reaction to this unfolding horror raises serious questions about our ability to influence events in the region, not to mention our standing internationally as the supposed leader of the “Free World.”

Incidents of unprovoked violence are not stray or isolated, but are now part of the regular pattern of daily life on the West Bank. “Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians and foreign media reporters in the West Bank, blocking and damaging their vehicles during the pursuit,” Haaretz reported on Saturday.

The attack on journalists was among at least 20 incidents of settler violence and incursions into Palestinian communities reported across the West Bank over the weekend, including assaults, armed threats, property damage, trespassing and clashes that led to arrests by Israeli security forces, according to Palestinian reports.

The accounts should appall anyone who claims to care about democracy and human rights. “CNN said its reporters were among those attacked by the settlers near Sinjil, where settlers lynched a Palestinian American last year. According to the channel, a group of settlers blocked the road with their car, preventing the CNN team from moving forward.”

The sense of impunity with which radical settlers now behave was on full display when settlers confronted at gunpoint and detained Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) in full sight and without objection by Israeli military personnel. The New York Times reported on Khanna’s visit to “the ruins of Khirbet Zanuta, a tiny Palestinian Bedouin village in the southern West Bank that was abandoned”:

Suddenly, a car of men holding guns pulled up and blocked the narrow road out of the village. The men began taunting the congressman and his team, swearing at them in Hebrew and Arabic and kicking the tires of their minibus, according to accounts, photographs and video footage from Mr. Khanna, an aide and his security guard. A photographer for The New York Times traveling in a different vehicle also saw the interaction.

Rather than forcefully intervene, IDF soldiers, according to Khanna, “smoked cigarettes, chatted with the men and after the settlers left, moved a car to block the road.” The culture of thuggery, unashamed even in plain sight of a U.S. congressman, should be illuminating. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, as he invariably does, brushed off the incident as an aberration of stray hoodlums.Rep. Ro Khanna after being detained by radical Israeli settlers on his trip to the West Bank

The Netanyahu government’s go-to response — rank indifference to active incitement — no longer passes the straight face test. While incidents have skyrocketed by more than 560 percent, only “6.6 percent of the cases resulted in an indictment — according to data from Israel Police.” The UK, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, Norway, Ireland, New Zealand, and France have barred entry of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (although the EU as a whole could not agree on sanctions) in response to the nonstop racist incitement. International condemnation, including a ban from France and Ireland, recently followed Ben-Gvir’s release of a video showing detained activists from the Gaza-bound aid flotilla kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs after their vessel was intercepted. Meanwhile, a larger pattern of horrendous Palestinian prisoner abuse and widely circulated images of apparent war crimes has emerged, with a predictable Netanyahu response: threatening to sue the New York Times for publishing evidence of abuse.

The overall picture should stun the conscience of anyone who supports democracy and the rule of law. In the U.S., such conduct has spurred more lawmakers previously sympathetic to Israel to call for stringent action. Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-CA), for example, recently announced he would cosponsor legislation that “authorizes targeted sanctions against individuals and entities responsible for violence in the West Bank that threatens regional stability and undermines U.S. national security interests and prospects for a negotiated resolution.” Panetta and other lawmakers recognize that the escalating violence is not an isolated issue, nor incidental to U.S. interests. Instead, it “risks drawing the United States deeper into broader regional conflict.”Subscribed

While Netanyahu, who brought into government and enabled Ben Gvir and Smotrich — allowing them to indulge in racist rhetoric and abusive policies — bears responsibility, his possible defeat in upcoming elections may do nothing to improve the situation, given the political positions of his opponents. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who rose to prominence as director of the Yesha Council, an umbrella body for the settlements, and who is running in coalition with opposition leader Yair Lapid, has denounced violent extremism. But it is far from clear he will take decisive action if he comes to power. Gadi Eisenkot, the former top commander of the Israeli military, whose centrist Yashar party has been rising in the polls, remains maddeningly vague on issues, including the West Bank.

We should not bank on the existing Israeli political system to tackle endemic abuse absent outside pressure. Fortunately, as J Street Ilan Goldenberg argues, the U.S. has an unprecedented opportunity to use its leverage to curb Israel’s egregious, lawless abuse of Palestinians and gross violations of international law. The Israeli political system recognizes it is on thin ice with Democrats, and that even its standing with Republicans is no longer so secure as to ensure it can avoid adverse U.S. reaction.

That opens the door for Congress to pass, as Goldenberg recommends, the West Bank Violence Prevention Act, “targeting violent settlers as well as the organizations and institutions that finance and enable them.” It also leaves room for wider changes in the U.S.-Israel relationship, including a phase-out of military aid and economic sanctions against illegal settlements and other human rights abuses.

The narrative long-pitched by AIPAC and a U.S. administration driven by right-wing Christian Zionists and Netanyahu apologists (epitomized by Sen. Lindsey Graham, Pete Hegseth and other outspoken Islamophobes) — namely, that Israel is simply the innocent victim of antisemitic smears — does not match reality. The attitude has prompted administrations of both parties to indulge in inexcusable Israeli conduct and now fuels an unprecedented backlash against the nation.

Facts on the ground in Israel and the changed outlook on Israel in the U.S. present the chance for a break with a status quo that is no longer acceptable to most Americans. American politicians need to confront Israel’s deteriorating human rights record, take notice of the dramatic shift in American public attitude regarding Israel, and formulate a policy that furthers our stated goals of promoting democracy and regional stability, while fulfilling the legitimate aspirations of two peoples fated to share the same land.

More Global News

New York Times, China’s Economy Grows at Slowest Pace in Years, Alexandra Stevenson and Murphy Zhao, July 15, 2026. Economic growth of 4.3 percent in the second quarter, versus the same period last year, reflected a broad slump outside of the country’s export-oriented manufacturing might.

China’s economy last quarter grew at the slowest rate in three years, reflecting a broader slump that the country’s leaders signaled earlier this year when they set the lowest growth target in more than three decades.

On Wednesday, that National Bureau of Statistics said the economy expanded by 4.3 percent in the second quarter, compared to a year ago, down from a 5 percent pace in the first quarter and short of economists’ expectations.

Although China’s factories are churning out chips and electric cars to supply a global boom in artificial intelligence and energy-saving products, many Chinese people are feeling squeezed at home.

A long-running property crisis has no end in sight, with steep declines in construction dragging down economic growth. Jobs outside of factories are hard to come by and paychecks are not growing. Retail sales of consumer goods have been choppy. They fell in May, for the first time since the end of Covid-19 lockdowns in late 2022, before recovering somewhat in June.

That is in stark contrast to China’s relentless strength in manufacturing and trade, with a government report released on Tuesday showing China’s exports surging by 27 percent in June compared with a year earlier, driven by shipments of chips, batteries and cars. China’s trade surplus in June, at more than $125 billion, was second largest on record.

In other words, China’s mighty export machine is masking weaknesses elsewhere.

“You get this A.I. boom, which is a global thing, and China is part of the leading nations on the frontier,” said Yu Song, the chief China economist at UBS Securities. “Without this, China’s economy would be in a much worse state.”

New York Times, Ukraine Pounds Russian Ships in Its Campaign to Cut Off Crimea, Nataliya Vasilyeva, Marc Santora and Cassandra Vinograd, July 15, 2026. lAfter striking roads and railways, Kyiv is now focusing on sea routes as it tries to disrupt fuel supplies and pressure Russia to end the war.

Ukraine has opened another front in its intensifying blockade of Crimea, striking growing numbers of Russian vessels in the waters near the occupied peninsula as it tries to heap pressure on the Kremlin to end the war.

Kyiv is using its expanding arsenal of long-range drones to mount its largest campaign in the Sea of Azov since Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Advances in technology have only recently brought the sea, which is surrounded by Russia and Russian-occupied territory, in reach of drones piloted by Ukrainian soldiers.

These drones have been the backbone of weeks of attacks against Crimea as Ukraine tries to expose Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, as unable to defend the peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014.

Ukraine has struck power stations, military infrastructure and fuel facilities, as well as roads and railways leading into Crimea. The attacks have caused power cuts and fuel shortages, which Mr. Putin has vowed to alleviate with increased sea deliveries to the peninsula.

The Ukrainian military appears determined to throw a wrench in the Russian leader’s plans. It says it has struck dozens of vessels — tankers, cargo ships and auxiliary boats — as part of an effort to “systematically disrupt the enemy’s logistics chain.”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.

The New York Times was unable to verify Ukraine’s claim that it had damaged or destroyed 116 Russian vessels in the Sea of Azov in the past nine days. Russia has acknowledged only a handful of attacks on its ships. The Times verified strikes on at least 11 vessels in the Sea of Azov, but the true number is most likely higher.

Tomas Alexa, an analyst at Ambrey, a maritime consultancy, said that from footage posted by the Ukrainian military on social media, it appeared that Ukraine hit 30 to 35 Russian vessels last week just between Monday and Thursday, mostly in the Sea of Azov.

On Wednesday, the Ukrainian military said that the first round of strikes in the Sea of Azov had ended and that it had begun targeting Russian ships in the neighboring Black Sea.

It was not clear what the vessels in the Sea of Azov were transporting. Leaking fluids were observed in satellite images reviewed by The Times, and the Russian authorities said at least one vessel was carrying methanol.

Ukraine has said its attacks are intended in part to disrupt Russia’s lucrative oil exports. But only smaller vessels tend to transit the relatively shallow Sea of Azov, and that indicates that the Russian ships were most likely bringing supplies to Crimea, not carrying oil abroad, said Elisabeth Braw, a fellow at the Atlantic Council who studies Russia’s maritime operations.

"Thinking about..." Historical Commentary: New Lecture Series for the Public: "Hitler and Stalin Today," Timothy Snyder, right, July 15, 2026. Today, I am publicly releasing the first lecture of a ten-lecture course I tought at the University of Toronto this past year.

The course is called “Hitler and Stalin Today.” Consider this a public resource for students, researchers, and anyone interested in understanding the relationship between history and contemporary democracy.

Throughout the ten lectures, I examine the Nazi and Soviet responses to the new globalized world they shared. The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now. Their ideologies are described as worldviews and as practical politics, with an emphasis on the reasons for their appeal. Attention to their policies of mass killing, essential events of twentieth-century history, instructs us about how “it” can happen here. The study of dissident thought helps us to see connections between historical predicaments and our own, and instructs us about possible reactions as individuals and as citizens. Ultimately, the course asks what we have learned from the twentieth century, and what we should.

Thinking about... is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribed

The first lecture (video above) is titled “What is history?” We speak often about history, but we are careless with the past. When we choose not to know what has happened before, we are also choosing not to influence what will happen after. If we don’t care about history, we find ourselves in an eternal present, denied any sort of imagination about the future, and nurtured on lies about a past in which we were innocent. History does not mean these misleading tales; it means a search for knowledge, using a certain set of tools; it means a process that enriches and humanizes, one that allows us to name things by their proper names.

There are two readings to go along with this lecture:

• Tadeusz Borowski, Here in Our Auschwitz
• The War on History is a War on Democracy

Hope you enjoy this brand new lecture series! Every Wednesday, I will release a new lecture, paired with readings. 

More News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: The bombing campaign in Iran is escalating, Aaron Parnas, right, July 15, 2026. The U.S. dramatically escalated its war with Iran by launching a new wave of airstrikes after four consecutive nights of attacks, targeting military sites tied to threats against commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran retaliated with missile and drone attacks aimed at U.S. allies including Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan, while Iranian officials said recent American strikes killed at least 30 people and wounded more than 260. President Trump warned that unless Iran agrees to negotiate, the U.S. will expand its campaign to target bridges, power plants, and other critical infrastructure next week.

The battle over the Strait of Hormuz remains at the center of the conflict, with Iran insisting the waterway is closed to all vessels and claiming it fired warning shots at commercial ships attempting to pass through. The Trump administration, however, says the strait is open to all shipping except Iranian vessels as the U.S. reimposes a naval blockade targeting Iran’s ports and cargo. Ongoing attacks have effectively brought commercial traffic through the vital oil route to a standstill, despite competing claims over who controls it. European aviation authorities have also warned airlines to avoid flying over much of the Persian Gulf because of the growing risk posed by missiles, drones, and air defense systems.

The renewed fighting is driving economic and global security concerns as oil prices remain elevated, with Brent crude trading above $85 a barrel after surging on news of the blockade and intensified strikes. CENTCOM said its latest operations are intended to weaken Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping and civilian crews, while both countries continue exchanging military attacks. The collapse of the ceasefire has raised fears that the conflict is sliding back toward a broader regional war with no immediate diplomatic breakthrough in sight. Military operations, retaliatory attacks, and threats against shipping lanes continue to escalate as both sides show little sign of backing down.

Other News:

Trump said Wednesday that ICE should continue using traffic stops despite the agency’s recent decision to suspend most of them following a series of fatal shootings involving immigration officers. The apparent reversal comes after ICE officers fatally shot motorists in Maine and Texas and another man died while fleeing federal agents in Florida, fueling criticism of the agency’s enforcement tactics. Trump called traffic stops one of ICE’s “most important and effective” crime-fighting tools and argued ending them would benefit criminals. At least 11 people have died during immigration enforcement operations since the administration’s mass deportation campaign began, with several deaths involving vehicle encounters. Critics, including law enforcement experts and some lawmakers, have urged ICE to reconsider the tactic, warning that shootings involving moving vehicles pose serious risks to both officers and civilians.

Civil rights leaders, including Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III, have announced a “March on Washington 2026: Defend the Vote” on August 28 to push for stronger voting rights protections. Organizers say the march is a response to recent Supreme Court rulings they believe have weakened key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, particularly protections against racial discrimination in elections. The demonstration will mark the 63rd anniversary of the historic 1963 March on Washington and aims to pressure lawmakers while mobilizing public support for voting rights. A broad coalition of civil rights, labor, and advocacy organizations, including the NAACP and National Urban League, is expected to participate alongside members of Congress. Organizers say the event is intended to highlight what they view as growing threats to voting access and representation in the United States.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiled the first images of a new $1 gold coin featuring President Donald Trump’s likeness, saying the U.S. Mint will begin striking it to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. Bessent said the coin is intended to celebrate American liberty, patriotism, and the nation’s semiquincentennial, and its design matches one of the proposed 250th anniversary concepts released earlier this year. The unveiling is likely to spark legal scrutiny because federal law generally bars living people from appearing on U.S. currency, although the Trump administration argues a 2020 law authorizing special 250th anniversary coin designs allows the coin to proceed. The announcement comes just weeks after the administration also introduced a new $250 bill bearing Trump’s image, raising broader questions about the legality of featuring a sitting president on U.S. currency.

Jay Clayton, President Trump's nominee to become director of national intelligence, is expected to receive a relatively favorable reception at his Senate confirmation hearing as lawmakers from both parties seek to replace acting DNI Bill Pulte. Democrats view Clayton as a more conventional choice than Pulte but are expected to press him on whether he would protect the intelligence community from political interference ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The hearing comes as the White House prepares to declassify intelligence documents related to the 2020 election and ahead of Trump's planned speech on election integrity. Clayton has previously questioned election security, arguing mail voting creates greater opportunities for fraud, despite repeated findings that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Republicans also hope Clayton's confirmation will help break a congressional stalemate over renewing key U.S. surveillance authorities, which Democrats have tied to replacing Pulte as acting intelligence chief.

Engineers at U.S. startup Tornyol demonstrated a tiny autonomous drone that successfully intercepted and knocked a flying moth out of the air, marking what the company called its first successful mid-air insect takedown. The 40-gram drone uses ultrasonic sensors, microphones, and AI-powered software to detect the unique wingbeat signatures of insects, with the long-term goal of identifying and targeting mosquitoes by species and sex. The company says swarms of about 10 drones could eventually clear mosquitoes from an area of one square kilometer, though that claim has not yet been tested outside the laboratory. Tornyol hopes the technology will provide a chemical-free, lower-cost way to reduce mosquito populations and combat mosquito-borne diseases.

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo has surpassed 2,000 confirmed cases and claimed at least 754 lives, making it the fastest-growing outbreak of its kind on record. Health workers at hospitals in the hardest-hit areas have gone on strike, saying they have not been paid despite working on the front lines of the crisis. The World Health Organization says roughly 80% of new infections are coming from unknown chains of transmission, while ongoing conflict, population displacement, and mining activity have made contact tracing extremely difficult. Officials have also been unable to identify the outbreak’s first patient, and there are currently no approved vaccines or treatments for the Bundibugyo strain driving the outbreak. Researchers have begun clinical trials of two potential treatments as health authorities race to contain the rapidly spreading virus.

Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot celebrated for safely landing US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009, announced that he has been diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer's disease at age 75. In a statement, Sullenberger said he is beginning a "long journey" with the disease but hopes speaking publicly will encourage other families affected by Alzheimer's to come forward. He said he remains committed to serving others and continuing his advocacy for aviation safety despite the diagnosis. Alzheimer's affects roughly 7 million Americans, has no cure, and is the most common form of dementia, though treatments can help manage symptoms and slow progression.

England's run to the World Cup semifinals has provided a major financial boost for pubs across the country, with millions of extra pints sold and some establishments seeing around 15% of their annual sales generated during the tournament. Pub owners say Wednesday's semifinal against Argentina is expected to be the busiest night yet, with more than 6 million additional pints projected to be sold nationwide. Despite the surge in business, industry leaders warn that rising taxes, business rates, and operating costs continue to force pubs to close, with 161 shutting their doors in the first three months of the year alone. Hospitality groups argue that temporary government relief is not enough and are calling for long-term tax and business rate reforms to keep pubs financially viable. Many owners say the World Cup offers a welcome boost, but stress that the industry cannot rely on a major sporting event every four years to survive.

New York City health officials are responding to a Legionnaires' disease outbreak on the Upper East Side after 76 building cooling towers tested positive for Legionella bacteria. Sixty people have been diagnosed with the disease this month, including 15 who remain hospitalized, though no deaths have been reported. Officials have ordered building owners to disinfect contaminated cooling towers, with most already completing the required cleanup while others face a deadline to do so. Health authorities say the outbreak is linked to cooling tower mist, not drinking water or air conditioners, and are urging anyone who recently visited the affected area to watch for symptoms such as fever, chills, fatigue, confusion, and diarrhea. The city says the outbreak appears to be slowing but continues to investigate the exact source while warning that additional cases may still emerge due to the disease's incubation period.

A Utah man has been arrested after police say he stabbed a Muslim man multiple times inside a shopping mall because of the victim’s religion. Authorities allege the suspect told investigators he intentionally targeted the victim because he was Muslim and expressed violent anti-Muslim beliefs, leading police to describe him as a significant danger to the public. The victim, a kiosk worker, remains in critical condition after reportedly being stabbed numerous times before bystanders subdued the attacker until officers arrived. The suspect now faces attempted murder and weapons charges, while Muslim advocacy organizations have condemned the attack and called for accountability. The incident has renewed concerns about anti-Muslim violence and rising religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States.

A Louisiana man has been charged with the murder of Deputy U.S. Marshal Drew Hanson after authorities say he opened fire on law enforcement officers attempting to arrest him at his home in Alexandria. Clarence A. Frazier Jr., 48, allegedly shot Hanson while U.S. marshals and sheriff’s deputies were serving an arrest warrant after he failed to appear for trial on rape and sexual battery charges. Prosecutors charged Frazier in federal court with the murder of a federal officer, an offense punishable by life in prison or the death penalty, before he was taken into custody following a standoff. Frazier had been scheduled to stand trial that day on felony rape and sexual battery charges and was also listed as a registered sex offender. Acting U.S. Attorney Todd Blanche said Frazier will be prosecuted “to the fullest extent of the law.”

One person is dead and three others remain missing after a 50-foot cabin cruiser carrying 20 adults capsized near Alcatraz Island during a family memorial service in San Francisco Bay. Authorities believe rough waters and a large wave may have caused the boat to overturn, throwing passengers into the water. Thirteen people were rescued, while three others were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries and were expected to recover. Rescue crews, including the Coast Guard, firefighters, divers, helicopters, and local law enforcement, continued an extensive overnight search for the missing passengers. Officials also confirmed that a dog aboard the vessel died in the incident as investigators work to determine the exact cause of the capsizing.

China’s economy grew at an annual rate of 4.3% during the April-June quarter, its slowest pace since late 2022 and well below the previous quarter’s 5% growth. While exports surged thanks to strong demand for artificial intelligence technologies and electric vehicles, weak consumer spending, sluggish investment, and a prolonged property downturn continued to weigh on the broader economy. Chinese officials acknowledged an imbalance between strong manufacturing output and weak domestic demand, as the country increasingly relies on high-tech industries such as AI, semiconductors, and robotics for growth. Economists have warned that heavy investment in advanced technologies may come at the expense of job creation and other sectors of the economy. Despite the slowdown, China is maintaining its 2026 growth target of 4.5% to 5%, though international forecasts expect growth to remain below that level.

The U.K. government has announced plans for a voluntary overnight social media curfew for 16- and 17-year-olds, alongside new default settings that disable features like autoplay to reduce excessive screen time. The proposal follows last month’s announcement of a social media ban for children under 16 and will require parliamentary approval before taking effect. Officials say pilot programs showed the curfew reduced overnight social media use while improving sleep and concentration, arguing most teenagers kept the default settings enabled. Critics and child safety advocates welcomed the move but warned voluntary measures alone will not fully address the addictive design of social media platforms. The proposal is expected to move forward even after Prime Minister Keir Starmer leaves office, with his anticipated successor signaling support for the plan. 

U.S. Religion, Culture, History, Law, Education 

Catholics for the Common Good, Analysis and Opinion: The Shadow Pope of K Street, Michael Fox, July 15, 2026. The Catholic Right in America Follows Leonard Leo not Pope Leo XIV.The American Catholic Right answers to two authorities and neither of them is Pope Leo XIV. One is Donald Trump, whose agenda it takes up as its own. The other is Leonard Leo, a lawyer and political power broker who holds no public office, gives few interviews, draws no crowds, and whose influence will last for decades.

Trump’s authority is political. He sets the agenda from day to day, and the Catholic Right gives him a prince’s loyalty, defending his decisions and policies as their own. Leonard Leo’s authority is the kind a pope holds: the power to set the spiritual and moral agenda, and to decide what is, and what is not, the proper Catholic response to the questions of the day. Within the world of the American Catholic Right, he is the shadow pope, holding in fact these powers over millions of American Catholics that Pope Leo XIV holds only in name.

Leonard Leo (Associated Press photo by Carolyn Kaster).

In this strategic alliance between the Catholic Right, governed by Leonard Leo, and the American state, governed by Donald Trump, the pope in Rome is meant to be irrelevant. It is Leonard Leo who stands behind Trump as Pope Leo III stood behind Charlemagne, providing the Catholic Church’s moral and religious mandate for Trump’s rule. Donald Trump and Leonard Leo need not be friends, as Charlemagne and Leo III were not, but they know they need each other to reach their grandest goals. Charlemagne offered military security while Leo III provided divine legitimacy. In the same way, Trump provides the political and military power while Leonard Leo supplies, for Catholics and others, the legal and moral justifications for the ways in which that power is used.

When I say “the Catholic Right,” I mean the organized right-wing movement that claims to speak for the Catholic Church in American politics: the donor networks and legal shops, the media outlets like EWTN and First Things and the National Catholic Register, political organizations like CatholicVote and the Catholic League, think tanks like the Napa Institute and the Acton Institute, the clergy who lend it credibility and cover, and the laity whom it forms to advance the goals of contemporary American conservatism.

Those goals include mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, ending DEI policies, downplaying or ignoring the role slavery and racial discrimination played in American history, removing environmental restraints on capital, weakening trade unions, enforcing strict gender norms, reducing corporate taxes, and projecting American military power across the globe whenever the president chooses. It is a machine with institutions and payrolls, designed to provide a Catholic rationale for each of these goals, and perhaps more than anyone else, Leonard Leo built it and helps pay for it. It is also a machine whose goals are often in direct conflict with the Catholicism that comes from Rome.

For thirty years Leonard Leo ran the pipeline of the Federalist Society, the lawyers’ network he built from a student club into the vetting house for the American judiciary, with chapters in all accredited law schools and major cities, and tens of thousands of members. It recruits conservative law students, carries them through prestigious judicial clerkships and government posts onto the bench, and screens them for conservative poltical reliability at every step. Leo assisted Clarence Thomas through his 1991 confirmation and then ran the campaigns for John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. He drew up the Supreme Court list Donald Trump ran on in 2016, seated the three justices who built the conservative supermajority, and helped place more than two hundred judges on the federal appellate bench and the district courts. By the end of Trump’s first term, judges who he and the Federalist Society had vetted comprised quarter of the federal bench and six of the nine seats on the Supreme Court. The Court that overturned Roe v. Wade was his more than any other man’s, and so were the rulings that ended affirmative action, gutted the regulatory state, give the president sweeping power over the federal government and granted a president broad immunity from prosecution.

The money came in a single stroke. In 2021 a Chicago industrialist, Barre Seid, signed $1.6 billion over to Leonard Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust, the largest known political advocacy gift in the country’s history, and Leo came to command a war chest larger than either political party.

He moves this great stream of money as poltical influence through funds with bland names, the 85 Fund, the Concord Fund, the Rule of Law Trust, the Freedom and Opportunity Fund that gave away $250 million in a single year, routed through donor-advised accounts that bury the source, and out to two for-profit firms he controls, the BH Group and CRC Advisors, that have collected more than $135 million from his own network.

Watchdogs have charged that Leo arranged for the nonprofits he directs to enrich him personally. The Campaign for Accountability put the figure at $73 million, and the money paid off a mortgage, bought an eleven-bedroom house in Maine, and stocked a wine locker at Morton’s. He directed secret payments to Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Thomas, and told the go-between to keep her name off the paperwork. The District of Columbia opened an investigation and the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena; Leo defied both and denies any wrongdoing.

With the federal courts already captured, Leo turned the machine outward. His network funneled more than $50 million into the groups that wrote Project 2025, the blueprint for the second Trump administration. Through the Teneo Network, which he chairs and which he calls a Federalist Society for every field at once, he places his brand of conservative ideologues in finance, journalism, entertainment, and the universities. In 2024 he told his grantees to stop holding seminars and start waging campaigns, to turn their ideas into weapons and, in his own words, “crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power in our society.” He has pledged a billion dollars to that fight. He sits on the board of governors of the Council for National Policy, a secretive umbrella organization and networking group that advocates for conservative policies, and that the New York Times has called "a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country," who meet three times yearly behind closed doors at undisclosed locations for a confidential conference.“

Under all of it sits a chapel. Leo takes his spiritual direction at the Catholic Information Center, the Opus Dei house on K Street, where he and his wife rank among the chief donors and where the Center gave him its John Paul II New Evangelization Award in 2022. He is a knight of the Order of Malta. His money underwrites nearly all of the institutions that tell American Catholics what their faith requires of them in public: Tim Busch’s Napa Institute, the Becket Fund on whose board he sits and which he twice rescued from insolvency, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and the Catholic press and legal shops that carry the message outward. He holds the courts, the treasury, and the culture, and his See is three blocks from the White House.

There is a spiritual logic beneath the strategy. Opus Dei, where Leo prays and takes his direction, is the prelature Josemaría Escrivá founded in 1928, and it teaches the faithful to sanctify the world by excelling in their professions and carrying the faith into the institutions of secular power. Leo built his life on that counsel: seat vetted believers in the clerkships and the courts, and then, through Teneo, in finance and media and the universities. The pipeline is Escrivá’s instruction given a war chest.

The title of the official leader of the Catholic Church is papa, father. St. Peter, whom Jesus charged three times to feed the sheep, is counted the first.

The man elected by the College of Cardinals to take up Peter’s role of leading the Church walks onto the balcony as the Holy Father and blesses a square of upturned faces. He wears his fatherhood in the open.

Leo XIV fathers the faithful in the open way the office asks. He went to Lampedusa for the drowned and he turns his face toward the stranger at the edge of the water whom no nation wants.

In contrast, Leonard Leo leads the Catholic province of the American Right from the shadows, through intermediaries and trusts and foundations and political PACs. When he bought himself a parish church in Maine, he did it through a foundation that listed only his own name.

The Catholic Church believes that a pope is chosen under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. The cardinals lock the doors, sing the Veni Creator Spiritus, and cast their ballots. The Church holds also that the cardinals remain free to choose badly. Grace works through the vote without forcing it.

Leonard Leo came to lead the Catholic province of the American Right through a conclave of one. No cardinal deliberated over Barre Seid’s gift; one industrialist in Chicago signed the check, and a shadow pope was made without a vote or a prayer. There was no white smoke, only a wire transfer.

The pope speaks as the vicar of Christ, reading the moral order of creation through the Gospel. He teaches the natural law with the cross behind him.

Leonard Leo claims the same voice. He describes his work as natural law, the natural order, “how we and the world are wired,” and rejects the word theocracy for it. He grounds the courts he built on an order he says God wrote into things.

Leonard Leo did not invent the ambition. When the American bishops measured Ronald Reagan’s economy against Catholic social teaching in their 1986 pastoral, Economic Justice for All, Michael Novak and William Simon convened a lay commission and answered it before it appeared, arguing that the faith itself blessed the free market. Stephen Schneck of the Catholic University of America called that rebuttal the start of a conservative drive to build “their own magisterium on the side.” Leonard Leo is what that drive became once it had a billion dollars behind it.

The two readings collide on the questions that decide lives. Leo XIV teaches, with the Catechism that Francis revised in 2018, that the death penalty is inadmissible; the Catholic Court Leonard Leo assembled keeps the machinery of execution running. Leo XIV teaches that the migrant’s dignity comes before the border; the Catholic Court that Leonard Leo put in power sanctions the very deportations that Rome calls inhuman. On the scaffold and on the stranger, the vicar in Rome teaches one thing and the vicar on K Street rules the other way. The American Catholic Right chooses to obey the vicar on K Street.

The pattern is larger than any single issue. The Church that spoke through the bishops’ letters of the 1980s taught a whole social Gospel at once: the union and the worker, the migrant, the poor, the condemned man, the peace of nations, and the unborn child, none of them optional. The machinery Leonard Leo built keeps the short list the Republican coalition already wanted, abortion, religious liberty, the policing of sex and gender, and lets the rest fall silent. His Becket Fund and his Ethics and Public Policy Center made religious liberty the defining Catholic cause in the federal courts, while the wage, the union, the migrant, the prisoner, and the wounded creation of Laudato Si’ dropped out of the public creed. What remains is a party platform with a Roman collar, and where the platform and the Gospel diverge, the platform wins and keeps the name.

Catholic means universal. The father of a universal Church fathers everyone, which is why Leo XIV crosses the water to the migrant outside the walls, and why the popes before him washed the feet of prisoners and Muslims. The shadow pope’s flock is a tribe. It is a donor network, the institutions of conservative power, and the narrow nation that JD Vance ranks ahead of the stranger in his ordo amoris, his order of love.

As we noted at the outset, the strategic alliance between Donald Trump, the secular ruler who provides the political and military power, and Leonard Leo, the shadow pope who supplies the legal and moral justifications for the ways in which that power is used, is not new. In the eighth century the popes, hemmed in by enemies they could not fight, turned to the Frankish kings, and the kings turned to the popes for a sanction no army could supply. Pope Stephen II crossed the Alps to anoint Pepin, and Pepin drove the Lombards from Italy and handed the pope a kingdom. Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor on Christmas Day of 800, and Charlemagne became the sword of a Christendom the pope alone could bless. The king carried the face and the muscle; the pope carried the legitimacy. Neither ruled without the other.

Trump and Leonard Leo stand in those two places. Trump supplies the face and the muscle. Leo supplies the sanction, along with the judges, the money, the priests, and the Catholic institutions. The difference between the present and its historical models is that Leonard Leo is not actually the pope. He is a shadow pope, playing the part for the American Catholic Right and for no one else.

Nor is he an antipope. The Church has known those: the rival claimants who reigned from Avignon during the Great Schism, who seized the title, split the obedience of Christendom, and could in the end be judged and deposed, because the throne they claimed was one everyone could see. Leonard Leo claims nothing. He issues no decree, declares no legitimacy, sits in no rival chair. He leaves Leo XIV in Rome with the official title and the balcony, and simply takes the obedience that belongs to the office. That is what makes him harder to resist than any antipope: there is no false claim to refute and no throne to strip, only a man whose power lasts precisely as long as some American Catholics grant it.

Trump's power ends when his term does; Leo's is built to outlast it, the way the medieval papacy crowned Charlemagne and then the emperors who followed him, the office enduring while the dynasties changed. When Trump is gone, the courts, the fortune, and the Catholic institutions remain, ready to sanction whoever comes next. And some of the men who will angle to replace Trumo, including such as Vice President JD Vance and State Department Secretary Marco Rubio, are Catholics, so the next prince would need no Protestant intermediary at all. Both men already play the part — self-described faithful Catholics who defend the movement's wars and deportations against the Catholic pope who condemns them.

But a shadow rules only where the light is blocked, and only for as long as the Church consents to stand in the dark. Leonard Leo’s authority over American Catholics is not a sacrament and cannot become one. It was not conferred in a conclave that opened by calling down the Holy Spirit; it was purchased with one man’s fortune, and what a fortune bought the faithful can refuse.

Many are refusing already. The bishops who go to the border instead of the donor gala, the priests who preach the whole Gospel and not the portion the donors will pay for, the women religious who have stood with the migrant and the condemned for a hundred years, and the lay Catholics who read Matthew 25, Rerum Novarum, Laudato Si’, and Magnifica Humanitas and hear in Pope Leo XIV the authentic voice of the Catholic Church.

Pope Leo XIV was chosen by the Holy Spirit. Leonard Leo was chosen by a wire transfer. To stand with the pope is to choose the rightful successor of Peter over the shadow pope on K Street.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance  

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Triumphal Arch . . . of What? Mona Charen, right, July 15, 2026. If completed as planned, Donald Trump’s triumphal arch outside Arlington National Cemetery will tower over the graceful Memorial Bridge, obstruct the view of the Lincoln Memorial from Arlington cemetery (and vice versa), and offend anyone whose taste is north of Liberace.

But there’s another aspect of this grotesquerie that deserves some attention: Namely, what is the triumph Trump is celebrating?

The Arch of Titus in Rome celebrates the Roman victory over the Jews and the sacking of Jerusalem in AD 70. The Arch of Constantine honors Emperor Constantine’s AD 315 victory in the Battle at the Milvian Bridge (before which Constantine supposedly saw a cross in the sky and therefore converted to Christianity). The Arc de Triomphe in Paris was commissioned by Napoleon to commemorate his victory over the combined armies of Austria and Russia at Austerlitz in 1805. Whatever your view of imperial campaigns, military historians regard Napoleon’s victory there as one of history’s greatest. Nelson’s Column in London honors Horatio Nelson’s defeat of the French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar. Nelson was mortally wounded, but his statue towers above the city he saved.

The United States has not traditionally gone in for victory monuments. We have a Washington monument, but that’s for the whole man, not the military victory. Same with the Lincoln memorial, which stresses the terrible sacrifices the Civil War demanded. There is a moving memorial at Pearl Harbor that remembers our dead and tells the story of our recovery. The tone is solemn. You can find a World War II memorial in Washington, but it’s a tribute to the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and others who fought the war, not a gloating expression of chauvinism.

The Dewey monument in San Francisco honors the commodore who defeated the Spanish in Manila Bay, but it’s the exception that proves the rule. There is no victory arch for the Mexican–American War—though it was a crushing victory that doubled our territory. Americans felt queasy about celebrating it even in the nineteenth century. Ulysses Grant, who served in that war, recalled in his memoir: “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.”

And the Vietnam Memorial is a mournful thing. A black granite trove of carved names, it memorializes the thousands of 15- to 62-year-olds who gave the last full measure of devotion to a nation that should never have gotten involved in that war with ground troops.

What victory is Trump memorializing? The great battle of Caracas that extracted a single man from his palace and left a repressive regime in place? Or is it the Iran War, clocking in at an estimated $113 billion so far, draining our munitions (that could have helped Ukraine), and leaving the regime in the hands of even more radical forces than before, a regime that now knows it has little to fear from the United States and has a powerful weapon in the Strait of Hormuz? A regime before which the Trump administration is dangling $300 billion of carrots for peace? When one side is offering reparations, who won?

The proposed Arc de Trump would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe in scale, and destroy the geometry of the capital. The Memorial Bridge connects Arlington Cemetery and Robert E Lee’s former homestead to the Lincoln Memorial. It knits the former enemies back into one nation, but emphasizes that this is Lincoln’s country now. His temple catches the sunlight.

After World War I, New York constructed a temporary Victory Arch of wood and plaster to welcome home the troops. There were plans to finish it in stone but the funds never materialized and it was allowed to crumble. That would be a just fate for Trump’s monstrosity—but then again, wrecking cranes would be more efficient.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• As America Is Losing Friends, China Is Courting Them… Just look at the contrast between NATO and BRICS, writes MARK HERTLING.
• Time for Radical Change… On the flagship pod, PETE BUTTIGIEG joins TIM MILLER to discuss his speech in Iowa, and the radical institutional changes he’d like to see.
• The Faustian Tragedy of Lindsey Graham… His loyalty to Trump would have guaranteed him another six years in the Senate. Instead, it became the closing irony of his life, WILL SALETAN observes.

Quick Hits

JUSTICE FOR E. JEAN?: It’s really by a series of misnomers that we refer to “the justice system,” the “Justice Department,” Supreme Court “justices,” and so on. We have a system that attempts, at its best, to ensure some fairness in the process of social control—a process that’s a necessary and even salubrious part of any government. Government is generally better than anarchy, and if there can be a modicum of deliberation, reflection, and impartiality in the exercise of power, that’s better still—but it ain’t justice.

Take the case of E. Jean Carroll. She finally received the $5 million Donald Trump owed her for sexually abusing her and then defaming her ($5.6 million to be precise, when accounting for interest). That’s good. We should live in a society in which, if one person is legally found to have sexually abused another and then defames them, they should pay a penalty to the victim. (Maybe they should also pay a penalty to society, but that would involve the criminal “justice” system, which isn’t in play here.) A jury determined in 2023 that the amount Trump owed Carroll was $5 million—and now, after exhausting all appeals, the money has been transferred, along with the interest.

But in the meantime, Trump became president again and used his power to enrich himself by at least $2.6 billion so far. That ain’t justice.

THE KILLINGS WILL CONTINUE: ICE’s rapid changes in its policy regarding vehicle stops over the last twenty-four hours are enough to give every agent whiplash. As Bill wrote above, the agency is under pressure to meet its quotas. Some in the administration clearly see the practice’s deadly consequences as a bad thing (or, at least, the resulting PR from those deaths are viewed as a bad thing). Others—possibly including the president—don’t agree. But the reaction many in the MAGA crowd had to the announcement of a brief pause in the policy reveals that the movement writ large doesn’t have any compunction about the policy at all. Just take a look at this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or . . . You get the point.

So why is ICE so focused on traffic stops in the first place? A sympathetic answer could be that it’s easier for officers to control the situation compared to, say, going into people’s houses. But if any credence at all is to be given to ICE’s reflexive insistence that any officer who shot someone feared for his life because his victim had weaponized a vehicle, maybe homes are safer after all.

Homes are also more private. Depending on how the administration is feeling, that could be a good thing or a bad thing: Quiet deportations don’t create annoying news cycles like the ones we’ve seen after the extrajudicial killings of Renée Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero. But also, the government simply doesn’t have the capacity to deport all the people it wants—it needs some of them to self-deport, which means it needs them to be terrified to stay, which means it needs to inflict some kind of violence—whether that’s sending people to a Salvadoran torture chamber or occasionally shooting someone in the head. It’s not formally part of the mass deportation policy, but the administration, and its diehards online, certainly aren’t acting like these killings get in the way of their policy goals.

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN: Is there about to be a major conversion in the postliberal world? First Things is perhaps the most prominent outlet publishing on religion and politics today. One of its big-ticket items is the Erasmus Lecture, given annually by a public intellectual. This year it’s Yoram Hazony, the Israeli-American political theorist whose The Virtue of Nationalism put an intellectual veneer on a global nationalist turn in the late 2010s.

One problem: First Things’s print edition announced Hazony, a Modern Orthodox Jew, will be lecturing on “How Only the New Testament Can Restore America.” Big if true, as they say. Could it be that Hazony had seen the light of Christ? It’s hard to think of someone whose political thinking would be more fundamentally changed by conversion than Hazony. In any case, it wasn’t so. Hazony corrected the magazine’s “erroneous announcement” on X. He would be speaking on his original topic, “Only the Old Testament Can Restore America.” (Even that’s a concession—Jews prefer not to think of the Hebrew Bible as something old which had to be completed by something new). One wag joked it was “wishful thinking” from the First Things crew, whose religious profession tends toward the Catholicism of its editors-in-chief (both converts).

This copyediting pratfall raises darker specters. Under the editorship of R. R. Reno, First Things has become a primary venue of postliberal writing, and while postliberals form a united front against liberals, their visions are often incompatible. We saw this in an early kerfuffle, when Reno published a piece by a Catholic “integralist” defending “the Mortara case,” a nineteenth-century incident in which a sickly Italian Jewish boy was secretly baptized by his Catholic nanny. When he recovered, the Church found it necessary to “adopt” the boy, now six years old. “Should putative civil liberties trump the requirements of faith?” the author asked pregnantly. Well, Jewish readers freaked out, and so did small-L liberal Catholics and Protestants. And when Reno walked it back, integralists complained he was a squish.

The Erasmus Lecture typo wasn’t a Mortara case by stealth, but it reminds us that the postliberal alliance can only last until the Great Satan of liberalism is defeated. After that, it’s every postlib for himself.

—Joshua Tait

July 14

Top Headlines

• The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Why are Trump and the GOP Tearing America Apart? Thom Hartmann, right, July 14, 2026. One year after Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill," millions have lost food assistance and healthcare while billionaires pocket massive tax cuts. The bigger question is: why? Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history. 
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Democrats Block Military Spending Package, Elon Musk Referred for Criminal Prosecution, Trump Pays Carroll, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, July 14, 2026. Senate Democrats successfully blocked a massive defense spending package that included the U.S.-Israel cooperation agreement. Elon Musk has been referred for possible criminal prosecution over allegations he interfered in Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court election. Donald Trump has finally paid E. Jean Carroll the millions she was awarded by a jury after he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. And much more.Tonight, I’ll be speaking with Epstein survivor Jess Michaels ahead of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing tomorrow.
• New York Times, Blanche Was a Driving Force in Retribution Campaign, Emails Show, Glenn Thrush, July 14, 2026. The cooperation of Todd Blanche, right, in President Trump’s retribution against enemies will be a flashpoint in his confirmation hearing to be attorney general on Wednesday.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption  

• The Contrarian, Advocacy and Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 14, 2026. ‘Weaponized’ lies. The murder of yet another nonviolent, decent, hardworking American at the hands of ICE thugs operating under the banner of federal immigration law should be grounds for national outrage and termination of all Trump officials involved in the perpetuation of a rogue operation. This is especially the case when agents of that operation kill with impunity and then resort to easily debunked lies to cover their tracks.
• Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: The People vs. Trump's Police State, Robert Reich, right, July 13, 2026. Trump's police state is growing, but communities are organizing against it. Trump is turning America into a police state. His forces are ICE and Border Patrol, the National Guard and the U.S. Army, and the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI.
• New York Times, Trump Paid $2 Million by South Korean Company Facing Trade Investigation, Eric Lipton and John Yoon, July 14, 2026. The payment illustrates the minefield Mr. Trump has created by maintaining personal financial ties with foreign businesses while he is in office.
• New York Times, ICE Ordered to Cease Most Vehicle Stops After 2 Killings in a Week, Madeleine Ngo, Hamed Aleaziz and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, July 14, 2026. Agents fatally shot a man in Houston and another in coastal Maine, both in their vehicles. The killings were the latest in a string of ICE shootings during President Trump’s second term.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Suddenly, Hormuz is Less Crucial Than It Was, Paul Krugman, right,July 14, 2026.  Why? Because the real energy crunch is coming from the Russia/Ukraine war. 

More On Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverups 

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, left, with President Trumpl his friend who nominated him. Lutnick, who falsely denied contacts with Epstein during recent years, is newly linked to the notorious financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a close associate of Trump for many years before Epstein's death while in custody during Trump's first term. A photo, below, showed Lutnick at right with Epstein, center, on the sex offender's Caribbean island, Little St James, in December 2012 (photo via U.S .Department of Justice). 

• BBC, Investigation: How US commerce secretary's Epstein links were uncovered by British whistleblower, Andy Verity, Rob Byrne, and Ben Milne, July 13,2026. Howard Lutnick was appointed US commerce secretary by President Trump in 2025

More News Roundups 

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump to Launch Major Effort to Undermine Elections, Officials Fear War Crimes Investigation, NDAA Vote, ICE, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, July 14, 2026. Trump’s speech Thursday night is expected to lay the groundwork for renewed attacks on the integrity of upcoming midterm elections, with election experts warning about the potential impact. Trump officials are also escalating efforts to undermine the International Criminal Court as the administration seeks to shield U.S. and Israeli officials from potential war crimes prosecutions.

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

• New York Times, What We Know About the ICE Shooting in Maine, Madaleine Rubin, July 14, 2026 (print ed.). A federal immigration agent shot and killed a man in a car on Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine. It was the second fatal encounter in a week involving an agent and a person in a vehicle.
• New York Times, In Rare Testimony, Supreme Court Justices Will Ask Congress for Security Funds, Ann E. Marimow,.July 14, 2026. Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett, the first justices to appear before lawmakers since 2019, are requesting millions of dollars to address security concerns amid rising threats.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Judge Kathleen Williams Hoists the Unitarians on Their Fraudulent Petards, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 14, 2026. Throughout Trump’s second term, I’ve been waiting for SCOTUS’ holding in Trump v. US that the President controls all investigative decisions to implicate Trump personally in the weaponized prosecutions DOJ pursues.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Public Notice, Analysis and Opinion: Mitch McConnell's legacy of destruction, Paul Waldman, right, July 14, 2026. He may have found Trump distasteful, but no one did more to protect him. At this point, it wouldn’t be surprising if McConnell doesn’t return to the Senate before his term ends in January. But even if he recovers, this is a good time to take stock of the legacy McConnell leaves behind as one of the most influential congressional leaders of the modern era.
• New York Times, Graham’s Death Complicates G.O.P. Agenda in Congress, Michael Gold and Carl Hulse, July 14, 2026 (print ed.). Senators returned to the Capitol mourning their colleague, who played pivotal roles on multiple issues confronting lawmakers.
• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Elon Musk Referred For Prosecution On Election Bribery Charges In Wisconsin, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, July 14, 2026. The Wisconsin Elections Commission found that Elon Musk likely broke the law when he promised $1 million checks to voters in a 2005 Supreme Court special election. Musk has been referred to the DA.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Is It Too Much to Ask? William Kristol, right, July 14, 2026. “There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”
• New York Times, Red State, Blue Governor: It Could Happen in Iowa. Would It Matter? David W. Chen, Photographs by Jamie Kelter Davis, July 14, 2026. Democrats have real hope for candidates for governor in red states like Iowa and Ohio, but if Republicans seize supermajorities in the legislatures, their power would be limited.

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Iran Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Reignite War Over Strait of Hormuz, Ravi Mattu, Qasim Nauman and Eric Schmitt, July 14, 2026. The twocountries slid back to open war over the waterway, as the U.S. planned to reinstate a blockade on Iranian ports on Tuesday. Iran said it had attacked two tankers and fired at U.S. military sites.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Destruction Alone Doesn’t Win Wars, Mark Hertling, right, July 14, 2026. The United States can destroy more targets than Iran. It can sink ships, eliminate missile batteries, strike command centers, and impose military losses that Tehran cannot reciprocate. But Iran does not have to match American firepower to achieve its goals. It must only keep commercial shipping at risk, energy markets unsettled, Gulf governments nervous, American bases under threat, and U.S. forces responding to the next crisis.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 13, 2026 [Bad Options For United States], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 14, 2026. The U.S. is restarting hostility—a blockade is an act of war—and, according to Trump, will protect the Strait of Hormuz but expects to be paid. Crucially, officials in the Trump administration continue to deny that Congress has any role in declaring war, despite the clear language of the Constitution. Today Elizabeth Dwoskin, Andrew Ba Tran, Luis Melgar, and Peter Jamison of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s sons “Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have amassed a portfolio of defense technology start-ups that are benefiting from new Pentagon priorities and spending, further entangling the United States’ interests and the Trump family’s financial fortunes.” They have invested in more than a dozen defense companies that have collectively received at least $3.2 billion in business directly from the government since those investments, along with $3.1 billion in options for future contracts.

• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Straight talk about Hormuz, Judd Legum, right, July 14, 2026. Since the United States attacked Iran on February 28, 2026, Iran has closed — or severely restricted passage through — the Strait of Hormuz. As a result, the global supply of oil has been constrained, raising prices for U.S. consumers and others worldwide. This outcome was entirely predictable. Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz as a response to foreign aggression for 50 years. Four months later, the Trump administration still has not identified an effective strategy to reopen the strait. Instead, Trump simply asserts that the Strait of Hormuz is open or under U.S. control — over and over again.

U.S. High Tech, Media, Climate

• New York Times, F.C.C. Approves Test of Space Mirror to Light Night Sky Despite Outcry, Hiroko Tabuchi, July 10, 2026. A start-up company has permission to try its plan to bounce solar rays onto the dark side of Earth, turning night to day for a three-mile-wide patch. The federal government has approved plans by a start-up company to test a satellite that would use a 60-foot mirror to reflect sunlight back to Earth after dark, as part of a project the company says would power solar farms, provide light for rescue workers and illuminate city streets.

Top Stories

The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Why are Trump and the GOP Tearing America Apart? Thom Hartmann, right, July 14, 2026. One year after Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill," millions have lost food assistance and healthcare while billionaires pocket massive tax cuts. The bigger question is: why?

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history.

They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.

That’s where ProPublica found Ana Alvarez on a recent morning, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant and lost her family’s SNAP benefits last September. She reapplied in December and the government still hasn’t processed her application.

She calls the agency every week and gets told to keep waiting, so she clips coupons, her kids don’t go to the zoo anymore, and as the summer heat bears down she’s doing grim arithmetic on rent, the car payment, and the electric bill that keeps the air conditioning running. She’s one reason Arizona has lost more than half of its SNAP recipients in a single year.

In Michigan, a widow named Sarah works two food service jobs to raise her 9-year-old daughter on $219 a month in food assistance, help she’s needed since her husband died suddenly six years ago. Last Christmas one of her employers wrote a single number wrong on her renewal paperwork, one missing zero, and the state cut her off.

And in Atlanta, Human Rights Watch documented a 36-year-old supermarket cashier who was working and meeting every requirement until she gave birth in late 2025, at which point Georgia shut off both her Medicaid and her food stamps, claiming she’d failed to report the job she was standing at every day. She’s spent the months since trying to get her coverage back while the medical bills pile up. In the party of family values, apparently, having a baby is now a firing offense.

None of these women are cheats or freeloaders. They’re workers, mothers, widows: exactly the people these cynical Republicans swear they’re protecting. But the numbers tell the story: more than 4 million Americans have been pushed off SNAP since the bill passed, the steepest drop since Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts, and in just the 13 states that publish the data, roughly 808,000 children have lost food assistance.

The Congressional Budget Office projects millions more will lose Medicaid as the work requirement paperwork machine grinds through the states, even though more than nine in ten of the people targeted are already working, in school, caring for family, or disabled.

The cruelty built into the bill isn’t a side effect: it’s the whole reason for the “enhanced” paperwork requirements. Every mother who gives up in frustration, every widow tripped up by a typo, every application left to rot in a backlog is a line item of savings that can translate into a larger tax cut for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg while the poorest households actually see their taxes go up.

That’s the morality of today’s GOP laid bare. They looked at Ana Alvarez’s five kids and Sarah’s daughter and that new mother in Atlanta, and they decided the billionaires needed the money more.

Every day, it seems, we see or hear about another way in which Trump and his lickspittles in Congress and the various federal agencies are tearing down our country, weakening our defenses, pitting Americans against each other, looting our government, and making life harder for everybody except the morbidly rich.

The question nobody seems to have an answer to is, “Why?”

— Is it that, as Craig Unger seems to suggest, that Trump’s been a Russian agent for decades and is setting us up to lose to the newly-forming Axis of Russia and China?

— Is it that he spent so many years burning with rage and embarrassment at not being accepted by New York high society that he’s just come to hate America?

— Could it be that American-values-hating foreign powers that have poured literally billions of dollars into the Trump family are paying him to tear us apart so they’ll never again have to endure the humiliation of having their human, civil, and women’s rights records called out by a future administration?

— Is it possible it’s all just to pay for tax cuts for billionaires?— Or are his, Vance’s, and Musk’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist, libertarian, and/or neo-Nazi ideologies so intense that they’re willing to essentially burn the country down just to expel immigrants, deny benefits to people of color, elevate the rich, crush unions, and re-subordinate women?

These are serious questions for which I can’t find credible answers that explain the entire spectrum of their behavior. Why would Trump and the GOP:

— Condemn 12 million Americans to sickness and early death by gutting Medicaid (and the biggest cuts don’t even kick in until right after this fall’s election)?— Destroy American soft power by killing USAID, thus condemning millions to death?— Fire so many workers at the Social Security Administration that just getting through to sign up or get help has turned into a multi-day slog?— Gut the State Department at a time diplomacy is most needed for world peace?— End food assistance (SNAP) for millions when one-in-five American children experience hunger?— Refuse to enforce laws and rules that allow workers to form unions in their workplaces?— Propose forcing all new Medicare recipients onto Medicare “Advantage” corporate scam plans?— Refuse military aid to Ukraine for over a year to give Russia time to finish off their genocidal job?— Stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from going after fraudsters and banks when they rip people off?— Eliminate a major NOAA program designed to warn communities about the dangers of flooding and other extreme weather crises?— Politicize the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Election Commission?— End net neutrality so none of us are safe online?— Shut down anti-cyber-warfare operations in the federal government?— Defund university research that leads to innovation and saves lives?— Cut unemployment insurance benefits across Red states?— Terminate support for people with student loans and gut scholarship programs?— Slash Affordable Care Act outreach budgets and allow junk insurance plans?— Reverse over 100 environmental rules, including those on clean air, clean water, and chemical safety?— Weaken Dodd-Frank, including gutting oversight of “too big to fail” banks and stress tests for mid-size financial institutions?— Dial back OSHA workplace safety standards and inspections?— Cut taxes to rich people while raising them via tariffs on working class folks?— Change the Federal Trade Commission to allow more monopolistic, rip-off corporate behavior?— Make it harder to vote and harass Blue states by demanding their voter information?— Work to prosecute women who have miscarriages or abortions?— Make it harder to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)?— End auto emission standards and increase our reliance on fossil fuels?— Pack the courts with judges the American Bar Association says are “unqualified”?— Destroy our faith in our elections and set up election workers for harassment?— Fire the Inspectors General (who find waste, fraud, and abuse) across multiple federal agencies?— Weaken whistleblower protections?— Put the military on the streets of our cities in violation of Posse Comitatus?— Use state power to punish political opponents and those who’ve investigated Trump’s crimes, alleged Russian collusion, and corruption?— Create a network of concentration camps across America?— Allow a shadow cabinet of billionaires and theocrats via Project 2025?— Attack judges and prosecutors, leading to violence and threats of violence?— Foment violence (like on January 6th) as a political strategy?— Destroy our asylum and refugee systems?— Pardon insurrectionists, rapists, cybercriminals, and other wealthy criminals?— Defund the IRS so they can no longer audit the morbidly rich, leading to the loss of hundreds of billions in federal revenues?— Ban books and censor libraries?— Criminalize trans and queer people?— Roll back gun safety measures?— Defund the arts, humanities, and public media?— Gut vaccine and other programs that keep Americans healthy?— Nakedly politicize the military?— Expand federal surveillance powers while kneecapping oversight?— Criminalize free speech, particularly on college campuses?— Attempt to revoke birthright citizenship?— Attack press freedom and bar the Associated Press from the White House?— Sabotage the US Postal Service?— Undermine the census?— Scale back civil and women’s rights enforcement?— Normalize autocratic language like “vermin,” “scum,” and calling immigrants “animals”?— Expel millions of brown-skinned immigrants who’ve already gone through the legal process to get work permits and are on a path toward citizenship?— Create international fiscal chaos with an on-again, off-again TACO tariff policy?— Cancel the suicide hotline for queer kids?— Gut our national parks and sell off our federal lands to wealthy friends of the administration?— Create a vast, secret, unaccountable police force with masked officers whose identity is concealed?— Allow the president to accept hundreds of millions in obvious bribes from foreign powers in violation of the Constitution?— Work so hard to conceal the crimes of a notorious sexual predator?

And this, of course, is just a partial list of the ways Trump and the GOP have weakened our nation, reduced our standing and prestige in the world, corrupted our government, and immiserated working class families.

Many of the theories about why Trump and the GOP would enthusiastically do so much damage to our people, our military, and our democracy contradict others.

For example, why would billionaires want tax cuts at the expense of damaging the economy that made them rich? Why would we promote a muscular military policy like bombing Iran while simultaneously destroying morale within the ranks of our military and kneecapping our intelligence agencies?

“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” sang Bob Dylan back in the 1960s.

Today, we’re there. 

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Democrats Block Military Spending Package, Elon Musk Referred for Criminal Prosecution, Trump Pays Carroll, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, July 14, 2026. Senate Democrats successfully blocked a massive defense spending package that included the U.S.-Israel cooperation agreement. Elon Musk has been referred for possible criminal prosecution over allegations he interfered in Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court election. Donald Trump has finally paid E. Jean Carroll the millions she was awarded by a jury after he was found liable for sexual abuse and defamation. And much more.Tonight, I’ll be speaking with Epstein survivor Jess Michaels ahead of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing tomorrow.

I am working around the clock to keep the Epstein story in the spotlight while also covering everything else unfolding across the country and around the world. Because of my reporting on Epstein, I have become a target for relentless attacks and intimidation. That pressure will not stop me from doing this work.

I will never stop. Not now. Not ever. I need your support tonight. 

Elon Musk:

A bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission has found probable cause that Elon Musk likely violated the state’s election bribery law by giving away $1 million checks during Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court election. In a 5-1 vote, the commission referred two complaints against Musk to the Brown County District Attorney for possible prosecution. Commissioners concluded the giveaways were offered to induce people to vote, which Wisconsin law prohibits. The law bars offering anything of value to encourage someone to cast a ballot. The referral does not constitute a criminal conviction, but it allows prosecutors to determine whether charges should be filed.

The controversy centers on Musk’s announcement that he would award $1 million to Wisconsin voters ahead of the election. After legal experts warned the plan could violate election law, Musk deleted his original post and said the money would instead go to two people who signed a petition opposing “activist judges” and would serve as spokespersons for that effort. The elections panel nevertheless found there was probable cause that the giveaways were intended to influence participation in the election. Commissioners cited Wisconsin’s election bribery statute in concluding the matter warranted further investigation. The case now moves to local prosecutors for review.

Musk was one of the largest financial backers of the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, spending at least $20 million to support Republican candidate Brad Schimel. Despite the massive spending, Schimel lost decisively to liberal Judge Susan Crawford in what became one of the most expensive judicial elections in U.S. history, with overall spending exceeding $100 million. Other major donors, including billionaire George Soros, also poured money into the race. The election drew national attention because of its potential impact on key legal and political issues in Wisconsin. The commission’s findings now add another legal challenge stemming from Musk’s involvement in the contest.

Donald Trump / E Jean Carroll: 

Former President Donald Trump is shown in a photo collage with columnist E. Jean Carroll, who won a jury verdict that he sexually attacked her three decades ago.

The disclosures in the E. Jean Carroll rape verdict echoed Trump's words in "Hollywood Access" videotape, reported upon above, that arose during the 2016 presidential campaign. Shown Then: The front page of a 2016 New York Daily News edition contrasts with President Trump's claimed innocence in the Carroll case.

E. Jean Carroll has received the more than $5.6 million that Donald Trump owed her after a federal court released the funds from an escrow account following the collapse of Trump’s final appeal. The money was released on July 9, one day after Judge Lewis Kaplan, left, ordered the disbursement. The Supreme Court had declined to hear Trump’s appeal, triggering an agreement that required the funds to be turned over to Carroll. Trump’s legal team unsuccessfully argued the money should remain in escrow while seeking reconsideration. Carroll’s attorney said the payment fulfills the unanimous 2023 jury verdict that found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

The payment was made through the federal court’s registry investment system, where Trump deposited the money while pursuing appeals. Both sides had previously agreed that the funds would be released if the Supreme Court refused to hear Trump’s case. Because the money was held by the court rather than Trump, it could not be delayed indefinitely through additional legal maneuvers. Judge Kaplan rejected Trump’s request for more time to challenge Carroll’s motion to release the funds. The court’s action effectively ended the payment dispute in the 2023 case.

The $5.6 million judgment stems from Carroll’s successful 2023 lawsuit over Trump’s sexual abuse and defamatory statements after she publicly accused him of assaulting her in a New York department store in the 1990s. Trump has consistently denied the allegations and any wrongdoing. The payment is separate from the $83.3 million verdict Carroll won in a 2024 defamation case over additional statements Trump made while president. Both lawsuits originated from Carroll’s 2019 memoir, in which she detailed the alleged assault. Trump continues to contest the findings, but the 2023 damages have now been fully paid.

Military Spending:

Senate Democrats voted 46-50 to block debate on the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), arguing Congress should not advance a $1.15 trillion defense bill while President Trump continues the new war with Iran. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the legislation a “permission slip” for the administration to continue military operations without meaningful congressional oversight. The procedural vote marked a rare setback for one of Congress’ most important annual bills. The measure required 60 votes to move forward but fell short almost entirely along party lines.

Democratic opposition also centered on provisions that would significantly deepen U.S.-Israel military and intelligence cooperation. The bill would require the Pentagon to appoint an official coordinating defense technology with Israel, expand joint weapons development, and increase intelligence sharing, including controversial “data fusion” capabilities. Several Democratic senators, including Chris Van Hollen, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, and Peter Welch, urged colleagues to reject the bill until those provisions could be debated. Critics argued Congress should not mandate expanded cooperation with Israel without greater scrutiny.

Outside Congress, a coalition of 14 civil liberties, foreign policy, and antiwar organizations urged senators to oppose the NDAA unless lawmakers were guaranteed a vote on an amendment prohibiting funding for what they described as Trump’s unauthorized war with Iran. The groups argued Congress should exercise its constitutional authority over war powers and military spending. The dispute also reflects broader shifts within the Democratic Party, where support for Israel has declined sharply ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll cited in the article, Israel’s favorability among Democrats has fallen from 59% in 2018 to 22% in 2026.

Iran:

President Trump threatened to expand U.S. attacks to Iranian civilian infrastructure, saying American forces would target Iran’s power plants and bridges next week unless Tehran agrees to negotiate. He also declared that military strikes would continue until he personally decides “it’s enough,” signaling no immediate end to the escalating conflict. The comments came as the United States launched another round of strikes against Iranian targets. The threats marked one of Trump’s strongest public warnings since the renewed fighting began.

The U.S. military resumed its naval blockade of Iranian ports and launched additional strikes aimed at degrading Iran’s ability to attack commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. Central Command said attacks began Tuesday afternoon as the blockade officially went back into effect, with more than 20 Navy warships and hundreds of military aircraft operating across the region. Iranian state media reported explosions near Bandar Abbas as the strikes unfolded. The Treasury Department also announced new Iran-related sanctions targeting individuals, entities, and vessels.

Trump declined to commit to releasing the findings of the investigation into the Minab school strike, saying, "I don't think anybody will ever be able to say what happened there." He argued that the incident occurred amid intense fighting, with "missiles flying all over the place," and said he did not believe anyone could definitively conclude the United States carried out the strike. "While things like that happen in war," Trump said, "I don't know how anybody could say that we shot it."

Iran responded by launching missiles and drones at targets in Kuwait, including a naval vessel and the Ali Al Salem airbase, while warning that continued U.S. military action would prevent the Strait of Hormuz from fully reopening. Iranian officials said Tehran no longer considers itself bound by last month’s memorandum of understanding with Washington and vowed to defend its sovereignty over the strategic waterway. The Revolutionary Guard warned that continued U.S. operations could halt regional oil and gas exports, while Kuwait reported intercepting one ballistic missile, five cruise missiles, and 33 drones. The renewed exchanges underscore the rapid escalation of the conflict despite ongoing international calls for de-escalation.

Trump has backed away from his proposal to impose a 20% fee on all ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz after facing criticism from allies and members of his own party. Instead, he announced the U.S. will maintain a full blockade only on ships traveling to or from Iranian ports or carrying Iranian cargo, while all other commercial traffic will remain free to pass. Trump said Gulf state leaders persuaded him to abandon the toll plan in favor of securing large investment commitments from their countries into the United States, calling that approach preferable to charging shipping fees. The original proposal drew bipartisan criticism over its legality and potential economic consequences, while the revised policy comes as fighting between the U.S. and Iran resumes following the collapse of their ceasefire.

Other news:

The House voted 308-117 to pass the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make Daylight Saving Time permanent nationwide and eliminate the twice-yearly clock changes. The bill now heads to the Senate, where its future remains uncertain before it could reach President Trump for his signature. Supporters argue the change would improve sleep, mental health, public safety, and economic activity by providing more evening daylight, while opponents warn it could create darker winter mornings that would affect farmers, students, and commuters. Trump praised the legislation, calling the current system of changing clocks twice a year wasteful and unnecessary. Similar efforts have failed in the past, including a 2022 Senate-passed bill that stalled in the House and a short-lived 1974 experiment that was later repealed after public backlash.

Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo was pulled over by a Las Vegas police officer in May after allegedly failing to come to a complete stop before making a right turn at a red light, according to newly released body camera footage. When the officer approached the truck, Lombardo identified himself by saying, “I’m Joe Lombardo,” and the officer responded that he was already aware of the governor’s identity before letting him go without issuing a citation. The entire encounter lasted about 15 seconds, and police did not explain why no ticket was issued, though law enforcement officials said it is common to give warnings rather than citations for minor traffic violations. Lombardo’s campaign said he fully complied with the stop and praised the officer’s professionalism, while police union representatives and ethics experts said they saw no evidence the governor received improper special treatment. The footage surfaced months before Lombardo’s reelection campaign, where he is expected to face Democratic Attorney General Aaron Ford.

ICE has temporarily paused most vehicle stops nationwide following the fatal shootings of 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, both of whom were shot by immigration agents during traffic encounters. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed it is reviewing enforcement procedures, while reports indicate the pause will remain in place until officers receive additional training on high-risk vehicle stops. The shootings, which involved officers not wearing body cameras, have sparked widespread protests and renewed calls for independent investigations. Since January 2025, federal immigration officers have fatally shot 11 people, including five who were in vehicles, with several official accounts later challenged by video evidence.

Darline Graham, the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, was sworn in Tuesday as South Carolina’s interim U.S. senator, just three days after his death, after being appointed by Gov. Henry McMaster to serve the remainder of his term through Jan. 3. At 62, she became the first woman to represent South Carolina in the Senate and cast her first vote shortly after taking the oath on the annual defense authorization bill. Darline, who had never previously held elected office, said she would honor her brother’s legacy by supporting President Trump and continuing Lindsey Graham’s work on behalf of South Carolina. She previously served on South Carolina’s Commission for the Blind and worked at Clemson University and in state government. Republicans will still hold an Aug. 11 special primary to choose a nominee for the November election, where the GOP candidate will face Democrat Annie Andrews.

The Trump administration has launched a new AI cybersecurity initiative called “Gold Eagle” that will use advanced artificial intelligence models to identify and help patch software vulnerabilities across federal agencies, critical infrastructure, and private industry. The voluntary clearinghouse fulfills a major requirement of President Trump’s June executive order on AI security and is intended to coordinate government and industry efforts to address security flaws discovered by frontier AI systems. White House officials said leading AI companies, including developers of advanced models such as Anthropic’s Mythos and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6, helped shape the program. Administration officials also emphasized that open-source AI developers will play a significant role in the initiative as the White House weighs additional measures to address security risks associated with open-source artificial intelligence.

New York Times, Blanche Was a Driving Force in Retribution Campaign, Emails Show, Glenn Thrush, July 14, 2026. The cooperation of Todd Blanche in President Trump’s retribution against enemies will be a flashpoint in his confirmation hearing to be attorney general on Wednesday.

Todd Blanche, right, then the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, had been on the job only for a couple of months in May 2025, when he was handed a migraine in a Detective Columbo trench coat by the name of Edward J. Martin Jr.

Mr. Martin, a right-wing lawyer who championed the cause of the Jan. 6 rioters, had just been forced out as the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. The White House then inserted him into Justice Department headquarters, in part to oversee a task force to investigate claims that the Biden administration had targeted President Trump and his allies.

Mr. Blanche, who once led Mr. Trump’s criminal defense team, did not believe that Mr. Martin, a provocateur with minimal prosecutorial experience, had the chops and know-how to do the job, according to current and former officials who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.

“I am frustrated,” Mr. Blanche wrote to Mr. Martin, after less than a month on the job, documenting a relationship that swiftly descended from tense to testy.

He moved quickly to rein in Mr. Martin, scheduling a check-in meeting every Friday, according to a trove of internal Justice Department emails obtained by a government watchdog and provided to The New York Times in advance of Mr. Blanche’s confirmation hearing to be attorney general on Wednesday.

Mr. Blanche, a methodical former federal prosecutor, also created an organizational plan for the weaponization group that assigned key investigative lanes to some of his own deputies. That ensured, among other things, that he had tight control over one of the most sensitive issues on his plate — demands from Mr. Trump and his supporters to identify, investigate and punish those who had once pursued them.

The multifaceted portrait of Mr. Blanche that emerges from 352 pages of documents obtained by American Oversight is of a Trump loyalist who is committed to executing the president’s agenda but also intent on keeping a firm a grip on processes inside his building, perhaps because he has such limited control over forces beyond it.

Mr. Blanche’s cooperation in Mr. Trump’s retribution campaign, both as deputy attorney general and acting attorney general since the ouster in April of his predecessor, Pam Bondi, is his defining characteristic, in the view of critics. It will be a flashpoint in Mr. Blanche’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Todd Blanche oversaw senior Justice Department officials pursuing politically charged investigations, convened recurring meetings of the so-called weaponization working group, and committed departmental resources to advancing President Trump’s efforts targeting political opponents, election administration and other high-profile vendettas,” said Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, which obtained the documents through the Freedom of Information Act.

“Senators should judge him not by his assurances at a confirmation hearing, but by the record he has already built,” she said.

Mr. Blanche’s defenders argue that he has been a low-key, but important check on Trumpian excesses, slowing down or countering Mr. Martin and other Trump advisers, including a federal housing official, Bill Pulte.

The newly disclosed emails cover a relatively narrow, but nonetheless crucial, patch of a battleground in Mr. Blanche’s tenure at the department: how to enact Mr. Trump’s Day 1 executive order to “correct past misconduct by the federal government related to the weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the intelligence community.”

During the first half of 2025, it appeared as if the department’s weaponization group would be a major, perhaps central, part of Mr. Trump’s drive to punish those who once held the power to hold him to account.

That is the less the case now. Much of the action has migrated to U.S. attorney’s offices, including in Miami, where prosecutors have been grinding away in an effort to build what Trump loyalists describe as “grand conspiracy” by the Biden and Obama administrations, despite a paucity of evidence.

It is not clear, more than a year and a half into the administration, if the group will ever exercise the power supporters applauded and critics feared.

But at the time of Mr. Martin’s arrival last May, Mr. Blanche diverted a significant complement of top lawyers in the deputy attorney’s office to the group, records show. And people close to Mr. Blanche said it still remained an important vehicle to identify and address wrongdoing, even acts that fall below the threshold of criminality.

One Blanche aide, Christopher-James DeLorenz, a former law clerk for Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Trump appointee in the Southern District of Florida who presided over the case involving Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents, was responsible for investigating potential wrongdoing by the special counsel Jack Smith. Mr. Smith oversaw the documents investigation in Florida and another, into Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Kendra Wharton, a longtime Blanche associate who served on the president’s criminal defense team, was assigned to investigate “coordination” between federal prosecutors and Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who successfully prosecuted Mr. Trump. Ms. Wharton later recused herself from the inquiry, citing an unspecified conflict of interest, according to the emails. She left the department in late July 2025.

Others in Mr. Blanche’s office led teams responsible for digging up information on hot-button political issues — an F.B.I. memo that targeted a conservative Catholic group in Richmond, Va.; federal scrutiny of conservative school board members’ and prosecutions of anti-abortion activists under the FACE Act, a 1994 law that prohibits obstruction and intimidation at women's clinics.

One team, led by another Blanche aide, Paul Perkins, focused on a single person: Tina Peters, a pro-Trump Colorado elections official convicted and imprisoned for state election-related crimes, who sentence was later commuted by the state’s Democratic governor.

Mr. Martin was given personal control of two investigations he had long championed: Investigating the prosecutions of Jan. 6 rioters — even though all of those convicted, including violent criminals, received clemency from Mr. Trump — and a probe into President Biden’s use of an autopen.

Mac Warner, an ally of Mr. Martin and a former Republican official from West Virginia, was assigned to investigate election fraud. One email shows Mr. Warner spending several hours at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — an early signal of the expanded role the White House envisioned for the agency.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Trump Keeps Bombing, Nothing Keeps Changing, Bill Kristol, Mark Hertling, and Benjamin Parker, July 14, 2026. What’s the definition of insanity again?

The National Mall has a new feature. No, not the once-again-drained Reflecting Pool. And no, not the mysterious gash the president insists some vandal (or “Vandal”) made in it—the length of which has grown, somehow, to 300 feet since the last time he complained about it. No, the new feature is a 10-foot “participation trophy” to Donald Trump for his war in Iran, installed by an anonymous protest-art group near the Martin Luther King Memorial. Not everyone can be a winner, right? Happy Tuesday.

More On Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverups  

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, left, with President Trumpl his friend who nominated him. Lutnick, who falsely denied contacts with Epstein during recent years, is newly linked to the notorious financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a close associate of Trump for many years before Epstein's death while in custody during Trump's first term.

More On Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverups BBC, Investigation: How US commerce secretary's Epstein links were uncovered by British whistleblower, Andy Verity, Rob Byrne, and Ben Milne, July 13,2026. Howard Lutnick was appointed US commerce secretary by President Trump in 2025

A British man has told the BBC how he unearthed evidence indicating that his former employer, Howard Lutnick -- now US commerce secretary -- failed to disclose a business relationship with the paedophile financier, Jeffrey Epstein.

Simon Andriesz, previously a managing director at a Wall Street firm, discovered an email chain from 2018 in which Lutnick and Epstein had discussed the prospects of a start-up business they were both involved in.

Andriesz shared his findings - from the millions of released Epstein files -- with US politicians on the influential House Oversight Committee, ahead of an appearance there by Lutnick in May.

Lutnick told the committee that, to the best of his knowledge, he had only learned this year that Epstein had been an investor in the firm. Speaking on his behalf, the US Commerce Department told us there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

Andriesz also discovered in the files that one of Lutnick's firms had made plans in 2013 to go into business with another figure linked to Epstein, the then-Prince Andrew, left, by commercially exploiting the contacts the former UK trade envoy had made.

"What it involved was a loan to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of £1m... to basically buy a prince," he tells File on 4 Investigates.Searching 3.5 million documents

"I was completely shocked," says Andriesz, describing the moment when he discovered his own name in the Epstein files - a massive collection of documents, photos, video and emails relating to the notorious sex offender, released by the US government in the past year.

The specific files in which Andriesz appeared related to interviews he had given to the FBI while in dispute with his former employer, BGC Partners -- a financial brokerage firm, part of Lutnick's Cantor Fitzgerald group.

In 2016, Andriesz had raised concerns internally about accounting irregularities at the firm. He was sacked in 2017, but some of his allegations later led to BGC being ordered to pay a $3m (£2.24m) penalty by the US derivatives regulator for "numerous supervision, reporting, and record-keeping violations".Simon Andriesz wearing a dark quilted jacket stands on a beach beside the sea. The photograph is taken in profile, with Andriesz looking toward the horizon. In the background, waves roll toward the shore and a grassy cliff extends into the water beneath a cloudy sky. The scene is brightly lit by daylight, with the coastline and ocean filling much of the frame.Simon Andriesz, now living in Cornwall, has been in dispute with his former employers in the US for several years

BGC told us that Andriesz's allegations lacked credibility and were "categorically false". It said the claims had been investigated by authorities in several jurisdictions which, according to BGC, had not substantiated the allegations.

Andriesz spoke to the FBI about BGC, and about the firm's ultimate boss, Lutnick, in 2020-21 -- after Epstein had killed himself in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

The Epstein files show Andriesz alleged that Lutnick had had undeclared business ties with Epstein. The FBI did not investigate these accusations.

Andriesz tells the BBC he was disappointed that few had seemed interested in what he had discovered: "I'm exposing Howard Lutnick's relationship, financial links, with Jeffrey Epstein, and there's no interest."

In 2025, Lutnick was appointed US commerce secretary, at which point he sold his shares in Cantor Fitzgerald and passed control of the firm to his sons.

On a podcast later that year, he claimed he had only ever met Epstein once, 20 years earlier, when they had been neighbours in Manhattan, and that he had found his behaviour "gross".

However, with the Epstein files' release, inconsistencies began to appear in this version of events. A photo, above, showed Lutnick at right with Epstein, center, on the sex offender's Caribbean island, Little St James, in December 2012 (photo via U.S .Department of Justice). 

Four years earlier in Florida, Epstein had been sent to prison for two charges of soliciting prostitution -- including one with a minor.

Andriesz suspected there was yet more to find in the Epstein files that could back up his claims -- if only people knew where to look in the 3.5 million pages of documents.

"Everyone was searching 'Lutnick'," he says. He knew, though, that Cantor Fitzgerald executives preferred to use initials rather than full names in their emails.

Andriesz searched for "HWL" (Howard William Lutnick) and found emails sent to and from Epstein in 2018. Epstein had talked directly to Lutnick about a digital advertising company called Adfin, in which he and Lutnick's firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, had both invested.

Andriesz spotted correspondence where Epstein had directly asked the HWL account: "what do you think the prospects for adfin are?"

Lutnick responded: "Producing revenue finally. This is their year. Next 12 months they need to become economically self-sufficient."

Andriesz then shared this information with US politicians on the House Oversight Committee, the US Congress's main investigatory committee.

Lutnick agreed to appear before the committee in an off-camera hearing in May.

He has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and he told the committee: "I unequivocally condemn the conduct attributed to Jeffrey Epstein and everyone who participated in his illegal activities. The survivors of his crimes deserve our respect and support."

Lutnick repeated his claim to the committee, that he did not know until this year that Epstein had been a co-investor in Adfin. However, Democrats on the committee accused him of lying and all 21 signed a letter demanding his resignation.

The US Commerce Department told us the allegations against Lutnick were "a desperate partisan distraction from the historic work of this Administration", adding that the commerce secretary has answered hundreds of questions before Congress and there is "no evidence of wrongdoing or legitimate cause for concern".'To buy a prince'

Another discovery Andriesz made in the Epstein files concerned Lutnick's association with two other people who knew Epstein well - the then-Prince Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson (shown above with him in a 2014 photo via Getty Images).

Lutnick had been friends with Ferguson since the 1990s and was a guest at Princess Eugenie's wedding in 2018.

Documents in the files revealed his firm, Cantor Fitzgerald, had a plan in 2013 "to buy a prince", as Andriesz puts it, and exploit Andrew's contacts with wealthy individuals and sovereign institutions

Under the proposed terms of the deal, £1m would be loaned to a firm controlled by the prince, which would then be bound to do business exclusively with Cantor Fitzgerald.

Epstein warned the prince's business aide, David Stern, against the deal, the files reveal. One of his concerns was about the exclusivity of the deal -- under its terms, Andrew could only introduce wealthy clients to Cantor Fitzgerald and no-one else.

The files indicate that advisers to both Lutnick and the former prince discussed the deal for four months, from August to November 2013, but it came to nothing.

Asked about the deal, Cantor Fitzgerald did not deny the talks took place but told the BBC it did not go into business with the former prince. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor did not respond to a request for comment. 

Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein partying together at Mar-a-Lago, along with an artist's rendering of a birthday card that the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump sent Epstein in 2003 boasting of their shared secrets. 

Andriesz, now 57, lives in a quiet Cornish seaside village, a world away from Wall Street. He says the litigation of the past decade has had a devastating effect on his career, his finances and his health.

Despite winning a financial award of $420,000 (£313,000) for his whistleblowing from the US regulator, Andriesz says authorities in the US and UK have failed to hold BGC and Cantor Fitzgerald properly to account -- or protect him from retaliation by his former employer for his reports of wrongdoing.

BGC says it has strong policies protecting whistleblowers from retaliation and denies retaliating against Andriesz. It says it has had no involvement with him since his departure other than responding to litigation he has initiated.

It maintains Andriesz's employment was terminated after he refused to follow medical advice, declined to perform essential job duties, rejected reasonable accommodation, and ultimately abandoned his role.

Speaking on behalf of Lutnick, the White House said: "The BBC's pathetic and desperate attempt to slander Secretary Lutnick will do othing to change the fact that he has been the most consequential Commerce Secretary in modern history." 

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

The Contrarian, Advocacy and Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 14, 2026. ‘Weaponized’ lies.

The murder of yet another nonviolent, decent, hardworking American at the hands of ICE thugs operating under the banner of federal immigration law should be grounds for national outrage and termination of all Trump officials involved in the perpetuation of a rogue operation. This is especially the case when agents of that operation kill with impunity and then resort to easily debunked lies to cover their tracks.

As the New York Times recounted, the inexcusable killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — a hardworking, fifty-two-year old small businessman and devoted family man, shown above, who had been a resident of the United States for thirty-five years — followed a familiar, loathsome pattern: A violent encounter with an unarmed Hispanic member of the community, a rush to demonize the victim, and subsequent lies that he “weaponized his vehicle.”Lorenzo Salgado Araujo (Credit: Ronaldo Salgado)

As we have heard in so many similar situations, ICE falsely claims the suspect “tried to run over an agent, who then fired at him.” That was a shameful pack of lies. A Homeland Security Department spokesman later fessed up that Araujo was not the intended target of the agents. As attested by Araujo’s brother and two other men in the car, they were on their way to a construction site and did not “use his vehicle as a weapon or attempt to run over the immigration officers.”

From start to finish, ICE has been in cover-up mode— body cameras were conveniently off, agents removed Araujo’s phone and wallet when he was in the ambulance (resulting in his admission as a John Doe), and DHS reportedly pressured witnesses in the vehicle to self-deport. “ICE has a pattern of lying. It is disgusting and cruel,” Rep. Pamila Jayapal (D-WA) said succinctly.

The only thing “weaponized” here is a federal agency that has an unmatched record of mayhem and violence. “Since last year, federal agents have fired on at least 21 people, many of whom were shot in their vehicles. Five people, including three U.S. citizens, were killed as a result,” the Times noted. While ICE repeatedly claims its agents were attacked with vehicles, these claims have evaporated in court.

While the agents directly involved, the ICE supervisors, and the reprehensible Trump lackey Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin have moral and political responsibility for what can only be described as a government-sanctioned killing, they are not the only ones with blood on their hands. Every Republican in the House and Senate who voted to dump more funds into an unreformed and unaccountable operation (most recently adding $70 billion to ICE and Customs and Border Protection via reconciliation) owns the death, trauma, and terror that ensued.

While Democrats do not currently control either house of Congress, they are not without immediate recourse. Harris County District Attorney’s Office Sean Teare told Houston Public Media on Thursday, “We’re going to look at every avenue, and if a state crime was committed, be it a murder, be it a manslaughter, be it tampering with evidence, we are going to investigate it.” He added that “if someone committed that crime, you don’t get to hide behind a badge.”

Democrats must proceed on multiple fronts. Every Democrat on the ballot must hold every Republican incumbent responsible for funding and enabling gross human rights violations. Just Monday, there was another reported ICE killing of a Colombian man (who was legally authorized to work in the U.S.), this time in Maine. Such atrocities underscore the need to hold Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), who voted to continue to fund the deportation killing machine, wholly responsible for the spate of inexcusable deaths.

Meanwhile, as in the case of the victims of Trump’s extrajudicial killings on the high seas in the Caribbean, international law has a role to play as well. Mexican officials announced two days after Araujo’s murder that they would file criminal complaints “over the deaths of several Mexican nationals during immigration operations, in the nation’s most confrontational protest yet against President Trump’s immigration policies,” according to the New York Times. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum declared, “We cannot allow our brothers and sisters in the United States to be mistreated,” a sentiment that other countries whose nationals are similarly abused can certainly adopt. Given that the U.S. is fast becoming an international pariah for its conduct, international diplomatic and/or economic pressure may finally bring some accountability to the Trump regime.

However, domestic political pressure is the ultimate remedy for these killing sprees and the intolerable reign of terror directed primarily at brown and black people whom the Trump white supremacists want to racially cleanse from our country. (In case you had any doubt about the racist intentions of the Trump regime, thousands of Haitians in Ohio, Somalian immigrants in Minnesota, and Syrian refugees in Chicago are just some of the migrants facing complete disruption of their lives, loss of employment, and fear of deportation to centers characterized by life-threatening conditions.)

Democrats must vow to end all funding to ICE and CBP in their current incarnation and commit to comprehensive, exacting oversight to determine liability at all levels for this epidemic of death, abuse, and lawlessness (with an eye toward criminal referral to states and, once a Democratic administration is in power, federal authorities).

Democrats need no longer tiptoe around the only sensible long-term solution: Abolish ICE and CBP, redesign interior enforcement to end dragnets and gross violations of civil liberties, and reform our legal immigration system from top to bottom. The latter must entail an effort to regularize asylum claims, swiftly work through the backlog of cases, legalize long-term residents who have committed no crimes and have been productive members of the community (removing the cloud of fear that hangs over families such as the Araujos), and rebuild/rationalize our legal immigration system.

As Jayapal put it, “[I]t doesn’t matter what you want to call it, but we have to disband ICE. We have to melt ICE. We have to abolish ICE.” She added: “Whatever word you want to use, what we need to get to is the end-result: ICE should not exist as it exists. And DHS should not exist as it exists.” Every Democrat should be as definitive and matter-of-fact.

The weaponization that Americans face does not come from mythical “car ramming” by immigrants. The weaponization of federal forces against innocent people — a weaponization we should deplore — stems from Trump’s campaign of nonstop lies and racist smears to sow fear and malicious incitement of violence against non-white immigrants. It stems from an atmosphere of impunity among federal forces who have been unleashed to terrorize fellow Americans with consequences, who are tearing apart the fabric of American life and making a mockery of the rule of law. James Talarico, Democratic Senate nominee, spoke movingly of the murder of a Texan “neighbor,” a man “who embodied the American dream.” Every elected official must decide either to enable or dismantle the despicable system that enabled this, and voters must hold them responsible for their choice.

Fortunately for the future of pluralistic democracy and the decency of American society, voters — who months ago showed majority support for abolishing ICE — are ahead of the politicians. The upcoming midterms will allow them to reject the status quo. We should not wait for future instances of murder and mayhem to push politicians to end the reign of terror that has turned American cities into killing zones and our legal system into a nightmare.

New York Times, Trump Paid $2 Million by South Korean Company Facing Trade Investigation, Eric Lipton and John Yoon, July 14, 2026. The payment illustrates the minefield Mr. Trump has created by maintaining personal financial ties with foreign businesses while he is in office.

The lead investor in a South Korean aluminum company that has challenged Commerce Department penalties on certain exports from South Korea to the United States made a $2 million payment last year to President Trump’s holding company.

The payment by the parent company, Base Group, was revealed for the first time in Mr. Trump’s annual financial disclosure form released in late June.

The document offered only a cryptic explanation for the payment, stating that it was part of a “letter of intent” and a “nonrefundable development fee.” In statements to The New York Times, the company and the Trump family said the payment relates to a still-unannounced golf course project.

Base Group has spent nearly a decade courting the Trump family, exclusively selling Trump-branded wine in South Korea and, more recently, hosting Mr. Trump’s son Eric at its Seoul headquarters.

The topic at the February gathering, according to a company executive: ways to increase trade between South Korea and the United States.

The efforts by Base Group to build ties with Mr. Trump and his family come as its corporate affiliate, Korea Aluminium, has curbed exports to the United States after the Commerce Department concluded that a group of South Korean companies circumvented trade duties on Chinese-made aluminum.

The New York Times found no evidence that Mr. Trump or a member of his family had intervened with U.S. officials on behalf of Base Group or Korea Aluminium. Base Group also disputed that it had violated any U.S. trade rules.

Alan Garten, the chief legal officer for Trump Organization, said in a statement that the payment was not related to the trade dispute.

“We have been in the golf, hospitality and real estate business for decades and have entered into transactions with countless companies around the world,” Mr. Garten said in the statement. “Any suggestion that this transaction was driven by anything other than legitimate business considerations is pure fiction.”

Still, the financial ties between the president and the South Korean company illustrate the minefield Mr. Trump has created by maintaining personal financial ties with nearly 30 different business ventures with foreign counterparts worldwide — unlike any other president in modern American history.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China and South

New York Times, ICE Ordered to Cease Most Vehicle Stops After 2 Killings in a Week, Madeleine Ngo, Hamed Aleaziz and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, July 14, 2026. Agents fatally shot a man in Houston and another in coastal Maine, both in their vehicles. The killings were the latest in a string of ICE shootings during President Trump’s second term.

The Trump administration has ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to halt most vehicle stops while carrying out operations across the country, according to people familiar with the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly about the directive.

The order comes after ICE officers killed two people over the past week in Houston and the coastal city of Biddeford, Maine, amid a recent surge in immigration arrests. Both were shot after agents tried to stop their vehicles, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The pause on vehicle stops could hamper the agency’s ability to increase arrests as it faces increasing pressure to deliver on the president’s promise of mass deportations. But it comes as some influential lawmakers and state officials have demanded answers about the latest shootings.

Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican who is running for re-election this year, said in a statement on Tuesday that the shooting in Biddeford raised important questions, and that she had urged Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, to “cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”

The White House referred a request for comment to ICE, which said in a statement that the agency would not discuss law enforcement tactics.

At least 22 people have been fired on by agents involved in Mr. Trump’s deportation crackdown since he took office for his second term in January 2025. Six people, including three U.S. citizens, have been killed as a result of those shootings, nearly all of which involved officers firing at people in vehicles.

In Houston last week, ICE agents shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the city for more than three decades, during a traffic stop while he was driving to work with several passengers. He was not the intended target of the ICE operation, federal officials acknowledged, after initially saying he was.

In Maine, ICE agents shot and killed a Colombian man early Monday, also in his vehicle. He was identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, according to a spokesman for Senator Angus King of Maine. A statement from the Homeland Security Department was unclear about whether Mr. Guerrero was the person that agents had been seeking.

Federal officials said the two men attempted to flee the traffic stops, although they did not provide video or other evidence to support those accounts. In several other immigration enforcement shootings, videos have later emerged that contradicted the agency’s narrative, and in at least one of those cases, an agent who fired on a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis now faces state charges.

The renewed deportation effort in recent weeks has lacked the fanfare of previous high-profile enforcement surges, including in Minneapolis in January, during which two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed. On Monday, a county prosecutor in Minneapolis said the Justice Department had turned over evidence in those shootings to state investigators after months of stonewalling.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Suddenly, Hormuz is Less Crucial Than It Was, Paul Krugman, right, July 14, 2026. Why? Because the real energy crunch is coming from the Russia/Ukraine war. 

Is Russia burning?

Are we back at war with Iran? Did the war ever stop? The US is, once again, bombing Iran while Iranian drones strike shipping. Iran, giddy with its success in defying America, is demanding sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, while Donald Trump is saying no, he owns the Strait and will collect 20 percent tolls.

Folks, this is bad. U.S. national security policy is now entirely in the service of one man’s vanity. We got into this mess because Trump thought he could win an easy victory that would let him strut around feeling powerful. Now we can’t get out because he won’t admit that his war has been a humiliating failure.

The good news is that Trump’s temper tantrum will probably do less economic damage than one might have expected — because the cease-fire that is apparently over wasn’t doing as much good as one might have expected. The fact is that there is now a disconnect between events in the Strait of Hormuz and the energy prices that matter. This disconnect is coming from a surprising place, another war that was supposed to yield a quick, easy victory but didn’t: Vladimir Putin’s attempt to conquer Ukraine.

To see what I’m talking about, start with a question: Why was oil so cheap just before this latest confrontation?

Oil prices rose a lot — about $45 per barrel — after it became clear that Trump’s vision of a splendid little war wasn’t going to be fulfilled and that Iran retained the ability to choke off shipping through the Strait. Here’s the price of West Texas Intermediate, the US benchmark:

Oil prices did not, however, rise as much as many observers thought they would have to given the huge fraction of global oil supply — around 20 percent — that formerly passed through the Strait. And shipments through the Strait have never come close to fully resuming. So why was the price almost back down to prewar levels before this latest blowup?

Part of the answer is that the world found ways to reduce the impact of the Hormuz closure. Millions of barrels of oil a day literally bypassed the Strait via pipelines. Suppliers outside the Persian Gulf, including Venezuela, increased production. China sharply reduced its oil imports. And a significant part of world oil demand was met by drawing down inventories.

There was, however, another factor: The effective price of oil to consumers — which is the price that matters for demand — rose a lot more than the crude oil prices one usually hears about. Even before the latest crisis that effective price remained far above prewar levels. And these continuing high prices to consumers kept oil demand low and hence depressed the demand for crude.

What do I mean by the “effective price” of oil? Consumers don’t burn crude oil. They burn products like gasoline and diesel that are refined from crude oil. As Javier Blas points out in a very useful Bloomberg article, a rough rule of thumb is that every three barrels of crude are refined into two barrels of gasoline and one barrel of heavier distillates like diesel fuel.

Since there are 42 gallons in a barrel, this suggests that the effective price of a barrel of oil to consumers is 28 times the pump price of a gallon of gasoline plus 14 times the price of a gallon of diesel. Here’s what that price has looked like since the beginning of this year:

As you can see, the price of oil to consumers rose substantially more than the actual price of crude — around $75 a barrel versus $45. This presumably led to a much larger fall in demand than one would have predicted from the price of crude alone. And effective prices to consumers were still far above pre-war levels even before the latest round of shouting-and-shooting between Trump and the IRGC began. The higher effective prices to consumers were holding global demand down even though crude prices were almost back to pre-war levels.

Why are prices of gasoline and diesel so high compared with crude oil prices? As Blas explains, because there is a global shortage of refining capacity.

Some of this shortage reflects the loss of refined products that were formerly exported from the Persian Gulf. But a big factor now is the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

Before that war began, Russia was a major exporter of refined petroleum products. But Ukraine’s astonishing mastery of drone warfare has enabled this valiant democracy to carry out an ever-more-effective strategic campaign against Russian energy infrastructure, above all its refineries. Russia not only can’t keep exporting gasoline and diesel fuel, it’s now facing major shortages (and huge gas lines) at home, and may soon be forced to import refined products.

The result is, as I said, a global shortage of refining capacity. Blas suggests that around 10% of world refining capacity is now out of operation.

And this shortage of refining capacity makes the collapse of the jerry-rigged deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz less relevant than one might have thought. To oversimplify, a true reopening of the Strait would have made more crude oil available to the global economy, but that wouldn’t have done the global economy much good in the short run, because in the world doesn’t have the capacity to turn that crude into usable products.

Perhaps that’s too glib. Gasoline prices have ticked up with the renewed Hormuz confrontation, which wouldn’t be happening if refining capacity were the only constraint that matters:

Nonetheless, it’s safe to say that the end of the Hormuz deal, such as it was, doesn’t change the underlying dynamics. In other words, expect the pain at the pump to continue and inflation to remain sticky.

And of course the overarching moral of this story is the immense folly and criminality of a war that has left America and the world in a much worse place than they would have been if Trump and his enablers had just left things alone — or, better yet, had preserved the pretty good deal Iran and Barack Obama had agreed to in 2015.

Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion: The People vs. Trump's Police State, Robert Reich, right, July 13, 2026. Trump's police state is growing, but communities are organizing against it. 

Yesterday, Joan Sebastian Guerrero — a 26-year-old from Colombia with a wife and 3-year-old daughter — was killed by an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine. Guerrero was authorized to work in the United States and had been issued a Social Security number, according to the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition.

Last Tuesday, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant who had lived in Houston for 35 years, running a small business — was killed when driving to work with three other men. Agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement began following him and shot him after they said he failed to stop his vehicle.

We may never know exactly what happened to Guerrero or Araujo because, as with Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, ICE’s accounts of both killings have been contradicted by eyewitnesses. ICE says the victims “weaponized” their vehicles — the same excuse they used to murder Renee Good. In none of the cases were agents using body cameras.

Trump is turning America into a police state. His forces are ICE and Border Patrol, the National Guard and the U.S. Army, and the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI. Here’s a quick summary:

1. ICE and Border Patrol (Department of Homeland Security)

From early 2025 through mid-2026, federal immigration agents have fired on more than 20 people, many of whom were shot in their vehicles. At least seven of these people died. In some cases, video evidence has undermined the accounts initially provided by federal officials.

Over the same period of time, more than 50 people have died in ICE custody, often because authorities refused to treat acute medical conditions.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is bringing charges of “domestic terrorism” against Americans who have protested against ICE.

Eight people were recently convicted in Texas of “domestic terrorism” following an incident last year in which a police officer was shot during an anti-ICE protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center. A ninth defendant in that case, Ines Soto, was sentenced to 50 years in prison for “providing material support to terrorists” because he had transported political pamphlets in his car; his wife, Elizabeth Soto, was also sentenced to 50 years. Seven others convicted at trial received sentences ranging from 30 years to 100 years in prison for Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist convicted of attempted murder.

2. National Guard and federal troops (Department of Defense)

ICE isn’t the only federal police force killing Americans. Authorities in Memphis are investigating the second fatal shooting in four days of a city resident by federal agents sent there to to deal with crime and drug enforcement. Two days earlier, two National Guard members killed Tyrin Johnson, 20. At least two other people have been killed by federal agents in Memphis over the last two months.

Trump established the federal task force on crime by executive order last year, sending federal troops and law enforcement agents to Democratic-run cities that he claimed were overrun with crime. All four of the Memphis deaths have occurred in the last two months.

Federal agents and National Guard troops remain in Memphis and in Washington, D.C. On Friday, a Pentagon official said the National Guard will remain activated in Washington through Inauguration Day 2029 “until law and order are fully restored in our Nation’s Capital.”

3. The FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration (Department of Justice)

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation said that one of the shootings in Memphis was done by an agent from the Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA, part of the Department of Justice, is targeting drug trafficking in many U.S. cities.

The FBI, also part of the Justice Department, is doing drug raids in U.S. cities. Its recent efforts include “Operation Hard Ball” this July in Los Angeles and Sacramento; “Rancho San Pedro Takedown,” also this July, involving federal agents in Los Angeles; “Operation Powder Island” this July, supposedly targeting a Georgia-based network that extends to Atlanta, Jacksonville, Charlotte, Dallas, and Buffalo; and “Minneapolis Gang Takedowns” in June and July, against Minneapolis street gangs.

4. Trump’s Police State: Blurring the lines

The Trump regime has blurred the lines between federal immigration enforcement, federal crackdowns on crime, and federal enforcement of drug laws. Trump has often — baselessly — equated immigrants with violent criminals, and violent criminals with drug smuggling.

This was Trump’s message last October when he told American troops that he would send “more than the National Guard” into cities. “We have cities that are troubled, we can’t have cities that are troubled. And we’re sending in our National Guard, and if we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard, because we’re going to have safe cities … . We’re not going to have people killed in our cities. And whether people like that or not, that’s what we’re doing.”

In the same speech, Trump defended U.S. military strikes against small vessels from South America suspected of smuggling drugs. So far, U.S. military strikes on such vessels have killed more than 210 people, without evidence they’re involved in drug smuggling.

Some of these activities may be legitimate. What’s troubling is the size and scope of Trump’s federal police state — now involving ICE and Border Patrol from the Department of Homeland Security; the National Guard and the U.S. Army from the Department of Defense; and the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and federal prosecutors from the Justice Department.

We have no way of knowing what training these forces have received to deal with civilian populations inside the United States, who is deploying them and what criteria are being used to select places for their deployment, what controls and limits have been placed on them, and whether any of them will be deployed at polling places on November 3.

It is time we got some answers. The United States has never before had a federal police force.

5. The People Respond

Many communities across the nation are organizing in response. In Minneapolis: Memphis; Washington, D.C.; Houston; Los Angeles; Chicago; Atlanta; Portland, Maine; and elsewhere, people are mobilizing to protect one another.

They are also preparing for the midterm elections. They are determined not to be intimidated. Nor will they be goaded into violence.

Adam Serwer’s words from his Atlantic article published on January 26, just days after Alex Pretti’s murder, bear repeating. They’re relevant beyond Minneapolis.

“The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it.

Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about ‘Western civilization,’ while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors. These agents, and the president who sent them, are no one’s heroes, no one’s saviors — just men with guns who have to hide their faces to shoot a mom in the face, and a nurse in the back.” 

More News Roundups 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump to Launch Major Effort to Undermine Elections, Officials Fear War Crimes Investigation, NDAA Vote, ICE, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, July 14, 2026. Trump’s speech Thursday night is expected to lay the groundwork for renewed attacks on the integrity of upcoming midterm elections, with election experts warning about the potential impact. Trump officials are also escalating efforts to undermine the International Criminal Court as the administration seeks to shield U.S. and Israeli officials from potential war crimes prosecutions.

Meanwhile, gas prices continue to climb as the conflict with Iran intensifies, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has been drained with no obvious evidence of the massive “gash” Trump claimed existed, and we’ll also cover the latest on the NDAA, ICE, and much more. I spoke with Hakeem Jeffries about much of this today.

Here’s the news:

Trump’s Speech:

Trump to revive 2020 election claims: President Trump will deliver a national address on Thursday focused on newly declassified intelligence and what his administration describes as vulnerabilities in U.S. voting machines. The speech is expected to revisit his long-standing claims that the 2020 election was compromised. Courts, recounts, audits, and Trump’s own Justice Department previously found no evidence that fraud or voting machine manipulation altered the election outcome. Election officials have consistently maintained that the 2020 election was secure.

Administration expands election investigations: The Trump administration has formed a White House task force to investigate aspects of the 2020 election and has authorized the declassification of intelligence related to the vote. Officials say the effort is aimed at examining potential security weaknesses and foreign interference risks. The administration has also sought to increase federal oversight of election administration over the past year. Critics argue these moves could shift authority away from states, which traditionally oversee elections.

Concerns ahead of the 2026 midterms: Election experts and Democrats warn that reviving unsubstantiated claims about the 2020 election could undermine confidence in future elections, particularly before the 2026 midterms. They argue that repeatedly portraying past elections as illegitimate may lay the groundwork for challenging future unfavorable results. Election security officials continue to say there is no evidence that voting machine vulnerabilities changed previous election outcomes. The debate is likely to intensify as Congress and control of the House are at stake in November.

An adviser told Axios that the goal is to establish a rhythm of high-profile addresses because they project authority and make Trump's messages seem more significant. The adviser also suggests that Trump's desire to speak publicly and frequently is driving the approach.

ICE:

A 26-year-old Colombian man was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine, after agents attempted to stop the vehicle he was driving during an operation targeting someone else with a final deportation order. Federal and state officials say the man was not the intended target and allege he drove toward an officer, prompting the agent to open fire, though the incident remains under investigation and no body camera footage exists. Immigrant rights groups say the man was authorized to work in the United States and are calling for an independent investigation.

National Defense Authorization Act:

Massie seeks to remove U.S.-Israel defense integration from the NDAA: Rep. Thomas Massie plans to reintroduce an amendment stripping Section 219 from the Fiscal Year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. The provision would significantly expand U.S.-Israel military technology cooperation in areas including AI, missile defense, cybersecurity, quantum technology, and joint weapons development. Massie argues it would integrate Israel too deeply into U.S. defense research and procurement, threatening American sovereignty.

The amendment was blocked but could return: A bipartisan amendment from Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna to remove Section 219 was denied a vote by the House Rules Committee. However, because the House failed to approve the procedural rule governing debate on the NDAA, the bill stalled before reaching the floor. Massie says he will reintroduce the amendment when the NDAA is brought back for consideration.

Supporters and critics disagree over the proposal: Supporters, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, view the initiative as shifting the U.S.-Israel relationship from military aid to a deeper defense partnership through joint research and production. Critics argue the provision expands foreign influence over U.S. defense policy and military supply chains. Rep. Adam Smith, who initially supported the language, later reversed his position after hearing concerns from constituents and citing Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and elsewhere.

Iran:

The United States launched a third consecutive night of strikes on Iranian military targets while President Trump moved to reinstate a naval blockade of Iran. U.S. officials said the strikes targeted missile sites, drones, coastal defenses, and maritime assets to reduce Iran's ability to threaten shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran responded with attacks in the Persian Gulf, including strikes linked to Bahrain and commercial tankers connected to the United Arab Emirates. The escalating conflict has raised concerns about disruptions to global energy supplies and broader regional instability.

U.S. inflation slowed to 3.5% in June, driven largely by a 5.7% drop in energy prices after the U.S. and Iran briefly reached an interim agreement. Consumer prices fell 0.4% from May, the largest monthly decline since April 2020. However, core inflation, which excludes food and energy, remained unchanged, indicating that underlying price pressures persist. Economists warn that the recent spike in oil prices following renewed U.S.-Iran hostilities could reverse June's progress and push inflation higher in the coming months.

Brent crude has climbed above $81 per barrel, reaching its highest level in weeks as markets price in growing geopolitical risks surrounding the Strait of Hormuz. The rally follows days of Iranian attacks on commercial shipping, three consecutive nights of U.S. strikes on Iranian military targets, and the reinstatement of the U.S. naval blockade of Iran. With commercial traffic through the strait sharply reduced, traders are adding a larger risk premium to global oil prices. Higher energy costs could increase inflationary pressures and raise fuel prices worldwide if the conflict continues to escalate.

Trump reportedly gave Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman advance approval for military strikes against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen after Saudi Arabia requested U.S. support. The strikes on Sanaa airport prompted Houthi missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabia, marking the most serious escalation between the two sides since 2022 and raising fears that the fragile four-year truce could collapse. U.S. officials say Saudi Arabia sought Trump's backing because it expects any broader conflict with the Houthis could require American military and diplomatic support. The renewed fighting also risks increasing regional tensions and further expanding the conflict involving Iran and its allies.

Other News:

Following Sen. Lindsey Graham's death, President Trump urged the Senate to pass cryptocurrency legislation or the SAVE America Act in his honor, but many senators rejected those ideas as inconsistent with Graham's legacy. Instead, according to Politico, lawmakers from both parties argue that the most fitting tribute would be passing Graham's bipartisan sanctions bill targeting Russia, which he had championed until his death. While Senate leaders support advancing the sanctions measure, its fate remains uncertain because some Republicans are skeptical and Trump has not publicly committed to backing it. Several senators criticized efforts to tie Graham's name to unrelated legislation, calling the sanctions bill the clearest reflection of his priorities on national security and support for Ukraine.

New photographs appear to show what look like tire tracks on the floor of the drained Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, fueling new questions about the troubled renovation project. The tracks come after President Trump claimed vandals caused extensive damage to the pool's liner, though no public evidence has confirmed either the source of the marks or the cause of the damage. The pool has been drained for a second round of repairs after problems including peeling coating, algae blooms, and reported vandalism, while officials continue investigating what led to the project's rapid deterioration.

Trump and his officials argue that the International Criminal Court (ICC) could expose U.S. leaders, military personnel, and allies to war crimes investigations, and the administration has launched a campaign to weaken the court. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the ICC threatens U.S. sovereignty and plans to pressure other countries to distance themselves from the tribunal through diplomatic and economic measures. Legal experts cited in the article dispute Rubio's claims, noting that the ICC does not have jurisdiction over crimes committed on U.S. soil and can generally only prosecute crimes committed in countries that have accepted its jurisdiction. The effort expands on earlier Trump administration sanctions against ICC officials, while critics warn it could undermine international accountability for war crimes and other serious human rights violations.

The Trump administration has created a joint Pentagon–Justice Department task force to investigate and prosecute government officials who leak sensitive information to the press. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the initiative is intended to protect national security, while the Justice Department maintains that it is targeting leakers rather than journalists. The announcement follows subpoenas issued to New York Times reporters over stories about security concerns involving Trump's new Qatari-gifted Air Force One. Press freedom advocates and media organizations argue that the subpoenas and broader crackdown threaten First Amendment protections and represent an escalation of the administration's efforts to intimidate independent journalism.

Michigan health officials say lettuce or salad greens are the leading suspected source of a large Cyclospora outbreak, though the investigation is ongoing and other foods have not been ruled out. Michigan has reported 2,640 cases and 44 hospitalizations, while thousands of cases have been identified nationwide, making 2026 likely to become the largest Cyclospora outbreak on record in the United States. Because leafy greens have been linked to previous outbreaks, officials recommend buying whole heads of lettuce instead of bagged salad kits, discarding the outer leaves, and thoroughly washing produce to reduce the risk of infection. Cyclospora causes severe watery diarrhea, cramping, nausea, and fatigue, and people with symptoms should seek medical care, as the infection can be effectively treated with antibiotics.

The Trump administration has revived plans to build an immigrant detention center in New Jersey's 7th Congressional District, creating a political challenge for Republican Rep. Tom Kean Jr. as he faces a competitive reelection campaign. The proposal is opposed by both Republican and Democratic local officials, but Kean has not explicitly endorsed or opposed the project, drawing criticism from his Democratic opponent and some local Republicans. The issue forces Kean to balance loyalty to the Trump administration with growing local opposition in his swing district. Democrats hope the controversy will weaken Kean's support by portraying him as unwilling to stand up to the administration on an unpopular local issue.

President Trump signed an executive order reinstating his 2017 decision to significantly reduce the size of Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, reversing protections restored by President Biden. The order was signed alongside Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and the state's Republican congressional delegation. Supporters argue the move returns more control over public lands to the state and expands opportunities for development and resource use. The decision is expected to reignite legal and political battles over conservation, tribal protections, and federal authority over public lands.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, right, is imposing the nation's first statewide moratorium on new large-scale data center construction, pausing permits for up to one year while regulators develop rules to address energy use, environmental impacts, and rising utility costs. Existing approved projects and smaller facilities for research, education, and health care will be exempt. Hochul also plans to work with lawmakers to eliminate tax subsidies for data centers, arguing that New Yorkers should benefit from AI-driven economic growth without bearing the environmental and financial costs. The move comes despite opposition from AI companies, developers, and unions, and could serve as a model for other states grappling with the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure.

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

New York Times, What We Know About the ICE Shooting in Maine, Madaleine Rubin, July 14, 2026 (print ed.). A federal immigration agent shot and killed a man in a car on Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine. It was the second fatal encounter in a week involving an agent and a person in a vehicle.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed a man in a vehicle on Monday morning in Biddeford, Maine. It was the second fatal episode in a week, as the Trump administration continues its immigration crackdown, and the latest in a string of encounters between agents and people in cars.

The man was identified as Joan Sebastian Guerrero, according to Matthew Felling, a spokesman for Senator Angus King of Maine.

The Homeland Security Department said in a statement on Monday that ICE agents had been monitoring what they believed to be the residence of someone who was in the country illegally and for whom they had a removal order.

It was unclear from the department’s statement whether Mr. Guerrero was the person agents had been seeking.

Video recorded early on Monday and posted to social media showed agents surrounding a body next to a car with bullet holes in the windshield.

“I heard agony,” said Mary Hayes, a local resident, who said she saw a screaming woman on her knees, next to a young girl. “I heard a howl that came from your soul, that your whole life had just changed and it was never going to be the same.”

Here’s what we know:Witnesses heard gunfire early Monday morning.

On Monday morning, agents tried to stop a vehicle that had departed from the residence they were monitoring, D.H.S. said in its statement, which came nearly 12 hours after the shooting.

“The vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon,” the statement continued. The driver was struck and died from his injuries.

In a separate communication received by some members of Congress, the department used more pointed language, saying the driver had “weaponized his vehicle toward law enforcement.”As of Monday evening, no video evidence confirming the government’s version of events had emerged.

New York Times, In Rare Testimony, Supreme Court Justices Will Ask Congress for Security Funds, Ann E. Marimow,.July 14, 2026. Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett, the first justices to appear before lawmakers since 2019, are requesting millions of dollars to address security concerns amid rising threats.

For decades, Supreme Court justices appeared before Congress each year to answer questions from lawmakers about the court’s budget requests.

That tradition ended after 2019, first as Covid shut down in-person hearings and then during a period of tension between the court and Congress.

In 2023, amid questions about justices’ acceptance of free travel, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. declined a request to appear before Congress to discuss whether the nine justices would adopt a new ethics code. He cited “separation of powers concerns.”

But on Tuesday, for the first time in seven years, two sitting justices — Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett — are scheduled to testify at the Capitol about the court’s request for millions of dollars to enhance security at a time when threats against the justices, their families and other federal judges are increasing.

The justices speak in public only rarely and even more infrequently face pointed or hostile questions, as they might from members of Congress. Raising the stakes on Tuesday, the appearance by Justice Kagan, a liberal, and Justice Barrett, a conservative, is taking place two weeks after the court completed a blockbuster term, issuing controversial decisions that might prompt questions from lawmakers.

The justices, for instance, affirmed Congress’s taxing power in a 6-to-3 decision blocking President Trump’s sweeping tariffs on imports from nearly every major U.S. trading partner. They also significantly weakened the landmark Voting Rights Act, clearing the way for Republicans throughout the South to redraw congressional maps.

When justices last appeared before Congress in 2019 to testify about their budget, the discussion was wide-ranging. They were asked about their views on the possibility of televising the Supreme Court’s oral arguments and whether the court would draft an ethics code.

Tuesday’s sessions before House and Senate subcommittees are officially set for Justices Kagan and Barrett to answer questions about the court’s $228 million request for the budget year that begins Oct. 1. The proposal includes funding to expand the court’s police force, which is responsible for round-the-clock security at the justices’ homes and for providing security when the justices travel outside the Washington area.

The court’s request also includes increased funding to hire additional engineers and developers to protect the work of the justices from cyberattacks and millions of dollars for a regional command post for officers responsible for protecting the justices’ homes.

Budget documents show an increase of $6.5 million to design a new facility that could result in visitors at the court being screened outside the building, a setup similar to that adopted at the Capitol with the opening of a visitor’s center in 2008.

Protests initially erupted outside the justices’ homes in 2022 after the leak of a draft of the court’s decision to eliminate the nationwide right to abortion. That year, an armed man tried to assassinate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh at his home.

Data from the U.S. Marshals Service, which oversees security for the entire federal judiciary, showed there were more than 600 threats against judges in the 2023 fiscal year, the year after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade.

More recently, the police said in May that Justice Barrett’s Northern Virginia home was the target of a “swatting” attack, in which a false tip reporting gunshots was called in to prompt a law enforcement response.

Lawmakers have approved additional security-related funding for the Supreme Court on a bipartisan basis. But their questions on Tuesday are likely to extend beyond the budget and security concerns.

In response to the court’s decisions in recent years, including its ruling to grant Mr. Trump immunity from prosecution for official acts, some Democrats have called for an overhaul of the court. Political candidates and lawmakers have proposed term limits for the life-tenured justices and adding justices to the bench to restore “balance” on the nine-member court that now has six justices nominated by Republicans.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Judge Kathleen Williams Hoists the Unitarians on Their Fraudulent Petards, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 14, 2026. Throughout Trump’s second term, I’ve been waiting for SCOTUS’ holding in Trump v. US that the President controls all investigative decisions to implicate Trump personally in the weaponized prosecutions DOJ pursues.

Investigative and prosecutorial decisionmaking is “the special province of the Executive Branch,” Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832 (1985), and the Constitution vests the entirety of the executive power in the President, Art. II, §1. For that reason, Trump’s threatened removal of the Acting Attorney General likewise implicates “conclusive and preclusive” Presidential authority. As we have explained, the President’s power to remove “executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed” may not be regulated by Congress or reviewed by the courts. Myers, 272 U. S., at 106, 176; see supra, at 8. The President’s “management of the Executive Branch” requires him to have “unrestricted power to remove the most important of his subordinates”—such as the Attorney General—“in their most important duties.” Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 750 (internal quotation marks and alteration omitted).

While that might have happened in the case of Jan Carey, a veteran prosecuted for burning a flag after Trump issued an Executive Order claiming to make that a crime, DOJ dismissed that case before turning over discovery that might implicate Trump.

But in Trump’s IRS lawsuit, Judge Kathleen Williams did similar work in declaring that Trump and DOJ had engaged in a fraudulent settlement, holding the Unitary Executive to account in several ways.

First, she pointed to the decisions granting the President increasingly unbridled authority over the Executive to point out there’s no way Trump can be adverse to the Executive Branch he runs.

Here, Defendants are the Treasury Department—an Executive agency—and the IRS, the largest bureau of the Treasury Department. Both Defendants are unquestionably part of the Executive Branch and ultimately answer to its Chief Executive, President Trump. President Trump’s authority to appoint and remove federal officers as he sees fit is evidence of his ability to exercise control over Defendants. See U.S. CONST. ART. II, § 2. Article II explicitly states that “[t]he President shall . . . appoint . . . all Other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for[.]” Id.; see also Cunningham v. Neagle, 135 U.S. 1, 63 (1890) (noting that the ministerial officers are marshals of the United States who are “appointed by the president,” and are “removable from office at his pleasure[.]”). While the Constitution strategically allows “individual executive officials” to “wield significant authority,” such “authority remains subject to the ongoing supervision and control of the elected President.” Seila Law LLC, 591 U.S. at 200; see also Br. for Pet’r at 10, Trump v. Slaughter, 609 U.S. __ (2026) (No. 25-332) (“Article II requires that the President control all executive power—especially the authority wielded by agency heads, who are ‘the most important’ of the President’s subordinates and who ‘must be the President’s alter ego[s]’ in their agencies.”) (citing Myers, 272 U.S. at 133); id. at 2 (“Removal is the President’s indispensable tool of control.”). President Trump’s supervisory authority directly implicates two key individuals acting on behalf of Defendants: Scott Bessent, 22 the Secretary of the Treasury Department and Acting Commissioner of the IRS, and Frank J. Bisignano, 23 the Chief Executive Officer of the IRS. Plaintiffs cannot argue before the Supreme Court that Executive Branch actors “unquestionably exercise[] executive power, and must therefore be controlled by the Chief Executive[,]” Slaughter, 609 U.S. at 27, and then here, argue that the Parties are sufficiently adverse to establish an actual case or controversy.

22 “On January 28, 2025, Secretary Bessent was sworn in as the 79th Secretary of the Treasury of the United States.” Scott Bessent, U.S. Dept. of Treasury, (last visited July 9, 2026). Secretary Bessent also serves as the “Acting” Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. See The Commissioner’s Section, Internal Revenue Serv., (last updated Feb. 12, 2026). [my emphasis]

Under Slaughter, the defendants who report to Trump cannot be said to be adversaries to his private person.

Then Williams pointed to an Executive Order Trump signed in February 2025, proclaiming his own personal control over all of government, including interpretations of law and litigation approach.

In addition to the Constitutional and statutory bases for President Trump’s control over Defendants, President Trump’s Executive Order confirms his intent to wield actual, comprehensive control over Defendants in this matter. Executive Order 14215: Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies (“Executive Order”) sets out the scope and breadth of President Trump’s control over federal agencies. The Executive Order was issued on February 18, 2025, shortly after President Trump took office for his second term, and expands the President’s oversight of federal agencies and employees.28 Notably, the Executive Order provides that “it shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure Presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch.” Id. § 1.

Most relevant to the issue of control in this matter is Section 7 of the Executive Order which explicitly addresses President Trump’s ability to direct Defendants’ conduct in litigation. Section 7 begins by declaring, “The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.” Id. (emphasis added). The Section continues by making clear that “The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.”29 Id. (emphasis added). The following language further animates the Court’s concern as to adverseness in this matter:

No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General.

Id. (emphasis added).

Way back in February 2025, Stephen Miller or Russ Vought got Trump to brag about how much power he planned to yield. And now it has come back to bite him.

Williams then looked at the various people who intervened — but in some instances did not file notices of appearance — in the case, showing how conflicted it all was. She paid particularly close attention to Todd Blanche’s evolving claims about the Terrorist Slush Fund, a topic that several Republican Senators who will vote on Blanche’s confirmation in the days and weeks ahead remain squeamish about.

Ultimately, the DOJ has endeavored to justify its position to create the appearance of a case or controversy “resolved” under the aegis of the Court. But the Parties, most of whom are government actors, did not engage in any public discussion or judicial review regarding their “unusual” arrangement and whether they were legally adverse; indeed, they actively avoided such an undertaking.38 And the extraordinary award fashioned by the Parties for claims that were never litigated, and have yet to be defined, on behalf of unidentified third parties39 whose future remedies bear no relationship to the claims in this case, indicates that real adverse interests were never before the Court. Cf. Monsanto Co., 72 F.4th at 1266 (finding a justiciable case or controversy where the parties zealously asserted their rights and there was “no suggestion” that the defendant “selected or control[ed]” the plaintiff’s counsel). Indeed, the DOJ seems to have purposefully adopted the strategy of creating a “slush fund disguised as a settlement, and then doling the money out to whatever constituency the Executive wants bankrolled.” Keepseagle v. Perdue, 856 F.3d 1039, 1058 (D.D.C. 2017) (Rogers, J., dissenting).40

38 The Court is extremely troubled by the testimony given by Acting Attorney General Blanche on May 19, 2026. In response to why the “settlement agreement” had not been submitted to this Court for review, he stated that “there is no judge” because the case had been dismissed and, therefore, there was “no mechanism” for reviewing the agreement. See supra note 13. While temporally accurate, this answer is, at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous. The Court was available to review any pleading by any Party at any time during this lawsuit. And if Acting Attorney General Blanche had thought the dismissal was improvidently granted or thought Plaintiffs misspoke when they said, “no judicial analysis is appropriate,” (DE 52 at 2), he only had to file an appearance and ask for relief.

39 Compounding these concerns, an official at the DOJ publicly stated that he intended to apply for compensation from the Fund. See Daniel Lippman, DOJ Official Sought Weaponization Fund, POLITICO (June 10, 2026),

But Judge Williams was even more scathing in her treatment of Todd Blanche’s attempt to win his client millions of dollars in tax relief.

Moreover, the Release Order, signed only by Acting Attorney General Blanche, extends a blanket grant of immunity to all Plaintiffs and their families and “affiliates,” and precludes all “current or possible” investigations or actions before any other agencies or departments.50 The Release Order also purports to bar the IRS from conducting any future tax audits of President Trump, his sons, and their entities.51 This provision directly contravenes 26 U.S.C. § 7217, titled “Prohibition on executive branch influence over taxpayer audits and other investigations,” which states:

It shall be unlawful for any applicable person to request, directly or indirectly, any officer or employee of the Internal Revenue Service to conduct or terminate an audit or other investigation of any particular taxpayer with respect to the tax liability of such taxpayer.

26 U.S.C. § 7217(a) [link added]

The explicit text of this statute prohibits President Trump and his lawyers—one of whom was former White House Counsel—from asking for or promoting termination of an audit directed toward him.52 And acquiescing to any such demand is wholly incompatible with the duties of DOJ attorneys (as well as CEO Bisignano for the IRS) to enforce the law and protect the public interest. Moreover, the conferral of possibly millions of dollars in tax relief and corollary benefits potentially violates Article II, Section I of the United States Constitution, a limitation surely known by former White House Counsel and the current Acting Attorney General. See U.S. CONST. art. II, § 1, cl. 7: “The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be encreased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.”53

52 This proviso of the “settlement” also raises the question of whether the agreement violates Article II, Section 3 of the United States Constitution, which directs that the President “shall take [c]are that the Laws be faithfully executed[.]” U.S. CONST. art. II, § 3.

53 “Neither the Union nor any of its members will be at liberty to give, nor will he (the President) be at liberty to receive any other emolument than that which may have been determined by the first act.” THE FEDERALIST NO. 73 (A. Hamilton).

And while I would ordinarily think that Trump would appeal this decision, there may be several reasons he might not. For one, it would sustain this as a live controversy, when Trump has been trying to bury it until the political controversy goes away (or until after the election). For another, Trump took this lawsuit in Florida because he assumed it would be an easy path to political wins. Already, his past frivolous lawsuits are creating 11th Circuit precedents constraining his corruption — Judge Williams cited the SDFL and 11th Circuit opinions upholding sanctions for his lawsuit against Hillary Clinton over and over.

And because this fact was so obvious and so insurmountable, the Court finds that this matter was brought for an improper purpose—to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a “settlement” that had no viable basis in law or fact. As was observed in another matter brought in this District, “this case is part of Mr. Trump’s pattern of misusing the courts to serve political purposes.” Trump v. Clinton, 653 F. Supp. 3d 1198, 1219 (S.D. Fla. 2023).

[snip]

Although Rule 11 limits imposing monetary sanctions following a voluntary dismissal, the Court’s inherent authority remains available to address conduct that abuses the judicial process. Trump v. Clinton, 161 F.4th 671, 688 (11th Cir. 2025) (“Federal courts have the inherent authority to fashion an appropriate sanction for conduct which abuses the judicial process.”);

Todd Blanche moved the grand conspiracy case against all of Trump adversaries to Florida in hopes of a more favorable legal landscape. But now Trump’s fraudulent tax claims risk making Florida less friendly for Trump’s shenanigans.

What Judge Williams has done — in addition to imposing sanctions that will be particularly onerous on Trump’s personal lawyer, but which could strengthen ethics complaints against Blanche and Stan Woodward — is take the unitary executive to its logical conclusion, which would mean that Trump (and his failsons and eponymous corporations) cannot be adverse to the government and so Trump can’t keep using the courts to steal from taxpayers.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Public Notice, Analysis and Opinion: Mitch McConnell's legacy of destruction, Paul Waldman, right, July 14, 2026. He may have found Trump distasteful, but no one did more to protect him.

As of this writing, Mitch McConnell is still among the living.

It’s been a month since the 84-year-old senator from Kentucky was taken from his Washington home in an ambulance, and he was finally heard from on Sunday, releasing a statement and photograph that left most questions about his health unanswered.MeidasTouch @meidastouch.comIn a written statement with a photo, Mitch McConnell says he was “briefly unconscious” after his fall last month but did not suffer a heart attack or stroke. He says he’s recovering in a rehabilitation center after developing pneumonia and won’t return to the Senate floor until doctors clear him.Sun, 12 Jul 2026 21:57:32 GMTView on Bluesky

At this point, it wouldn’t be surprising if McConnell doesn’t return to the Senate before his term ends in January; unlike the rest of us, members of Congress enjoy unlimited paid medical leave to take at their leisure. But even if he recovers, this is a good time to take stock of the legacy McConnell leaves behind as one of the most influential congressional leaders of the modern era.

McConnell was an extremely shrewd and effective backroom operator, especially when he was in the opposition and deployed his considerable skills and creativity to the project of obstruction. In fact, almost everything about how the contemporary Republican Party operates in Congress — its aversion to solving problems, its destruction of the norms that used to allow the institution to operate, its embrace of chaos and dysfunction — can be at least partly attributed to McConnell.Lindsey Graham and the rot of modern conservatismLindsey Graham and the rot of modern conservatismTom Schaller·Jul 13Read full story

To be generous, there were moments when he displayed glimmers of morality, especially when offering criticisms of Donald Trump’s worst abuses. It’s to his credit that Trump never liked him. But again and again, those moments proved fleeting, and McConnell became Trump’s most important enabler.

Unlike the backbench MAGA cheerleaders whose enthusiasm never waned, McConnell actually had the power to determine whether Trump’s corruption and attack on American democracy would continue — and he always made the wrong choice.A one-man assault on the system

Political scientists often describe how the last few decades have been characterized by asymmetric polarization: While both parties have moved away from the center ideologically, Republicans have moved farther and faster. But alongside the evolution of its ideas about policy, the GOP underwent a striking shift in its beliefs about how policy should be made.

Mitch McConnell was the architect of that change.

McConnell became minority leader after Republicans lost control of the chamber in 2006, and would stay in charge of his caucus for 18 years, longer than any Republican in the Senate’s history. While he may not have been the first to push against established norms — his longtime Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid, was a bare-knuckle partisan brawler who was not averse to bending the rules — McConnell took things farther than anyone had before.

The first key moment came when Barack Obama was elected in 2008. Though Obama had won a sweeping victory and the country was in the midst of a catastrophic economic crisis, McConnell told his caucus they had a path back to power: Obstruct everything Obama tried to do, regardless of whether Republicans had any substantive objections to it. Only if they forced Obama to fail could they retake power.

If it seemed like the parties were working together, he explained, Obama would get the credit; if all the public saw was gridlock and nasty infighting, the president would get the blame.

“If [Obama] was for it,” said former Ohio Sen. George Voinovich about McConnell’s strategy, “we had to be against it.” Every procedural tactic would be deployed, including turning the filibuster from an occasional tool used to stop major legislation to a weapon fired at almost any legislation the majority party proposed.

At every point, McConnell went farther than congressional leaders had before.

When Republicans took control of the Senate following the 2014 election, he instituted a virtual blockade of Obama’s judicial nominations; while the Senate had confirmed 132 judges in the previous two years, that number fell to just 20 in the final two years of Obama’s term.

Which brings us to the signature episode of McConnell’s tenure: what he did when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016.The wreckage Merrick Garland leaves behindThe wreckage Merrick Garland leaves behindLisa Needham·November 8, 2024Read full story

Faced with the possibility that the balance of the court could shift from 5-4 in conservatives’ favor to 5-4 liberal, McConnell had to act fast. So “without consulting his colleagues,” the Washington Post reported in 2017, “McConnell declared that no Supreme Court nominee from then-President Barack Obama would ever be considered.”

It was unprecedented in American history: By simply refusing to hear Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, McConnell effectively changed the size of the court from nine justices to eight. He then gave Republicans a shamelessly disingenuous talking point to repeat in order to justify their power grab — that no justice should ever be appointed in an election year so the voters could weigh in.

Just as everyone knew he would, McConnell reversed himself four years later when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died less than two months before the 2020 election. Though McConnell had held open Scalia’s seat for over a year, he made sure Amy Coney Barrett would be confirmed to fill Ginsburg’s seat in just 39 days. He said later, “one of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’”

To be that cynical and hypocritical took gall. But it also took an awareness of something McConnell understood when many others didn’t: There is no political cost for procedural radicalism.Trump vs. algae is the feud we deserveTrump vs. algae is the feud we deserveNoah Berlatsky·Jul 7Read full story

To work in Washington is to be keenly aware of the norms, habits, and procedures that make the federal government work. McConnell realized that while behavior that violates those norms and habits might generate outrage within the political world — stern editorials from the Post and the Times, pressing questions on the Sunday shows, Brookings Institution reports about the degradation of democracy — the overwhelming majority of voters either couldn’t care less, or would forget all about it before long.

In other words, playing by the rules is for suckers; what matters is power, and winning, and getting what you want.

And win he did: Republicans got those Supreme Court seats, and now they enjoy a 6-3 supermajority that has overturned Roe v. Wade, given Trump the powers of a dictator (and permission to commit crimes while in office), dismantled the Voting Rights Act, and so much more.

Every time another appalling decision comes down, you can almost hear Mitch McConnell smirking.

McConnell’s relationship with Donald Trump went through enough ups and downs to fill an entire book, but in the end, it comes down to this: Not only was McConnell there for Trump again and again when it counted, he was the one person who could have forestalled Trump’s disastrous return to the White House. He chose not to, despite having condemned Trump’s actions in fomenting the January 6 insurrection.

Like some other Republicans in the immediate aftermath of that horror, having cowered in fear of their lives from the mob Trump sent their way, McConnell was critical of Trump and dismissed the conspiracy theory of a stolen election. But then he stepped in to ensure that Trump would be able to make his ultimate return.The emerging coupThe emerging coupDavid R. Lurie·July 18, 2025Read full story

Had Trump been convicted in his second impeachment, he would have been barred from running for president again. McConnell made sure that wouldn’t happen, first by insisting that the impeachment trial had to be delayed until after the president left office. Given how raw emotions were immediately after the insurrection, it’s entirely possible that Trump would have lost that vote if the impeachment had happened quickly. By putting off the process, McConnell gave Trump’s allies time to put pressure on Republican senators to get behind him again.

Then when the vote finally took place after Joe Biden’s inauguration, McConnell voted to acquit — on the grounds that a president can’t be convicted once he has left office (which is nowhere in the Constitution).

The final vote was 57-43 in favor of conviction, 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority necessary. There is little question that if McConnell had told his caucus to convict Trump — and voted for conviction himself — there would have been more than enough votes, and Trump would never have returned to the White House.

Yet right after the vote, McConnell gave a speech on the Senate floor calling Trump “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day” — this after he made sure he would be acquitted. It was as if a juror walked out of court and said, “The defendant definitely committed the murder. But we decided to let him go anyway.”

It was a microcosm of McConnell’s entire relationship with Trump: He let everyone know that he found Trump personally distasteful, but made sure Trump could get away with anything.

What McConnell’s legacy adds up to

McConnell never minded playing the villain; with a secure Senate seat, he was happy to take incoming fire if he got what he wanted. For many years, he was the most unpopular politician in America, because all Democrats hated him and plenty of tea party Republicans did, too. The latter group were largely mistaken, however; they saw him as a representative of the establishment, but didn’t credit him for how he was dragging government policy to the right.

In 2020, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer wrote that “for months, I searched for the larger principles or sense of purpose that animates McConnell … finally, someone who knows him very well told me, ‘Give up. You can look and look for something more in him, but it isn’t there. I wish I could tell you that there is some secret thing that he really believes in, but he doesn’t.’”

That’s only partly true; it’s more accurate to say that McConnell believed in whatever would maximize his own power and that of his party. His cynicism and even contempt for voters were boundless. No one fought harder to expand the ability of corporations and the ultrawealthy to spend all they want to influence politics; when your TV screen and inbox are filled with negative ads every two years, you can thank Mitch McConnell. Was that because he sincerely preferred a system in which the rich can buy elections, or just that he knew that the more the rich are in control, the better it would be for Republicans?

In the end, it’s hard to know for sure, and what matters is this: The United States government is profoundly worse for Mitch McConnell having had so much sway over it for so long — less efficient, less effective, less humane, and more corrupt.

As they start preparing for the massive reconstruction project that faces them when they take back power, Democrats should learn this important lesson from McConnell: while the public may recoil at certain kinds of substantive radicalism, they will barely notice procedural radicalism.

That’s what they’ll need to exercise if they are to undo the damage that Trump and McConnell have wrought. If they don’t, they’ll find themselves stymied and forced into half-measures — and that would be Mitch McConnell’s final triumph.

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Elon Musk Referred For Prosecution On Election Bribery Charges In Wisconsin, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, July 14, 2026. The Wisconsin Elections Commission found that Elon Musk, shown above, likely broke the law when he promised $1 million checks to voters in a 2005 Supreme Court special election. Musk has been referred to the DA.

Sometimes a story in politics isn’t forgotten and eventually moves forward in a potentially satisfying way.

During the 2025 Supreme Court special election in Wisconsin, Elon Musk announced that he would be coming to the state to give a talk and award two voters $1 million each.

Musk pulled the same stunt in Pennsylvania and got away with it because of a lack of clarity in the Pennsylvania statute.

Wisconsin has a very clear law against election bribery. At the time, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler called for a felony arrest warrant to be issued against Musk:

Elon Musk has committed a blatant felony by offering money for votes in order to help Brad Schimel. Musk’s illegal election bribery scheme to put Brad Schimel on the Supreme Court is a chainsaw attack on democracy and the rule of law in Wisconsin and our nation.

Elon Musk should be brought to justice for his illegal attempt to buy votes for Brad Schimel, and Brad Schimel should immediately condemn Musk’s crimes and disavow his continued involvement in his campaign. If Schimel does not immediately call on Musk to end this criminal activity, we can only assume he is complicit.

Wikler was correct, and election officials in Wisconsin have concluded that Musk likely broke the law and could face 2 counts of election bribery charges.

The AP reported: The Wisconsin Elections Commission last week referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office, which can choose to bring criminal charges over violating the state law against election bribery. Prosecutors have 40 days to report back to the commission.

…

The complaints, which are confidential under state law, were brought by voters in Milwaukee and Green Bay, which is in Brown County. Musk handed out checks at a rally there just days before the election.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission, consisting of three Democrats and three Republicans, voted 5-1 in closed session on Thursday to refer the complaints to the district attorney, the commission’s spokesperson Emilee Miklas said.

…

The motion approved by the elections commission said it found probable cause that Musk broke Wisconsin law by making a social media post offering $1 million to people who voted in the Supreme Court election “in order to induce them to vote in that election.”

Offering people money or a chance to win money to get them to vote is against the law. Musk messed with the wrong state when he tried this in Wisconsin.

Elon Musk ended up deleting the post and not giving money away in Wisconsin, but he has now found out that you can’t delete a crime.

Whether the district attorney will charge Elon Musk has not been determined, but the best way to stop this form of election corruption is to prosecute anyone who tries to rig an election through bribery.

It is a certainty that when Donald Trump weaves election conspiracies on Thursday night, he won’t mention the potential bribery charges against Elon Musk.

 Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Is It Too Much to Ask? William Kristol, right, July 14, 2026. “There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

Thus the great Edmund Burke, friend of the American Revolution and critic of the French Revolution, a thinker and statesman claimed in the twentieth century as a great conservative but in the nineteenth century (more accurately, I think) as a great liberal.

“Our country ought to be lovely.” These words of Burke come to mind this morning in light of the now-familiar justifications and coverups by top government officials of ICE agents killing innocent people in our streets. They come to mind in light of the moving public service announcement by survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell urging members of Congress not to confirm Todd Blanche, who has utterly and purposefully failed to seek justice for them. They come to mind in light of the announcement of a presidential speech later this week designed to rewrite history in order to subvert our next elections.

Burke aimed high, perhaps too high. Perhaps it’s too much to ask that one’s country be lovely. Maybe it’s better to lower one’s sights, as Burke’s friend, Adam Smith, did when he observed that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” But even so: Surely our nation ought not be ugly. And if it is too much to expect that our government be lovely, it’s not too much to ask that our government act defensibly. It’s not too much to ask that our public officials behave decently.

But, you say: Our country is better than our government.

I hope so.

But it’s a representative government. Our president was elected, and then, after attempting to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, was elected once again. Our elected members of Congress have confirmed the leaders of the executive branch and funded its activities.

Our government isn’t behaving admirably. And so we have to say that we as a nation aren’t behaving admirably either.

It will take quite a while to restore decency and responsibility to our public life. What we can do now is to check the injustice and limit the damage. We can pressure our representatives not to confirm someone like Todd Blanche and not to fund an agency like ICE. We can help dissidents in the executive branch; we can appeal to the courts; we can act at the state and local level; we can work through civil society. We can argue and agitate and vote.

We can demonstrate love for our country by working to make it far less ugly, and far more lovely.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Ukraine Mourns an Unlikely Champion… History won’t judge Lindsey Graham in just one language, observes CATHY YOUNG.
• The Lindsey Graham Conspiracy Theories Are Already Running Wild… but WILL SOMMER doesn’t think they’ll stick.
• Sam Neill, 1947–2026… SONNY BUNCH remembers an unlikely superstar.
• August’s Bulwark Book Club pick is Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. Mona and Bill Kristol will discuss this lesser-known but very interesting Twain novel on August 12, and also consider Twain’s remarkable life and work as a whole. Pick up the book, and leave your questions for Mona and Bill here.

Quick Hits

IMPROPER ROBBERY SCHEME: Remember when Trump sued the federal government for a bajillion dollars and then ordered the government to settle, and then they settled before any court could look under the hood? Well, a federal judge in Florida finally got a chance to comment on the case and what she found is every bit as corrupt as we expected. The New York Times summarizes:

A federal judge ruled on Monday that President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service was an improper exercise in self-dealing and barred him from claiming that the extraordinary tax protections he received were part of a legitimate settlement agreement. . . .

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the president,” the judge wrote.

Judge Kathleen Williams even referred Trump’s lawyers—including Attorney General–designate Todd Blanche—to the New York and Florida bar associations for possible disciplinary action because their abuse of the legal system was so blatant and malevolent.

But she didn’t actually dissolve the deal by which Trump effectively granted himself immunity from IRS investigations. “Whether executive branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax moneys for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this court,” she explained.

That ruling will presumably have to wait for another day.

DISCOUNT HORMUZ: Ever since Iran announced that it was closing (or partially closing, or tolling, or whatever) the Strait of Hormuz, Donald Trump’s approach to the whole conflict seems to be: Anything you can do, I can do worse.

And so, yesterday morning, he posted to his social media network,

The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security . . .

Well, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi knows a negotiation when he sees one. “POTUS is absolutely right. Whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service,” he tweeted, but “20% is of course too much. We will be fair.”

Nothing like a little competition to drive down prices.

DO IT FOR LINDSEY: CNN reported yesterday that President Trump is planning to support¹ a bipartisan bill imposing new sanctions on Russia that Sen. Lindsey Graham had advocated before his sudden death.

The endorsement comes days after Graham’s unexpected death, likely further smoothing the path for a bill that the South Carolina senator spent years working to push across the finish line.

Graham and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal previously indicated the administration was prepared to back the package, saying Friday that they reached an agreement following extensive negotiations. Yet it was unclear at the time whether Trump would directly support the bill, as the president had repeatedly panned the legislation and pushed for more direct discretion on imposing sanctions.

The article doesn’t explicitly say that Trump changed his mind because Graham died, but it also doesn’t offer any alternative interpretations of Trump’s change of heart. Perhaps a paroxysm of sentimentality caused by Graham’s sudden death moved the president—but if so, that’s an awful way to move legislation.

Cheap Shots

In a normal administration, a White House source telling CNN that the president plans to support something is tantamount to the president supporting it, but with this administration, who knows?

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New York Times, Graham’s Death Complicates G.O.P. Agenda in Congress, Michael Gold and Carl Hulse, July 14, 2026 (print ed.). Senators returned to the Capitol mourning their colleague, who played pivotal roles on multiple issues confronting lawmakers.

Still shaken from the sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Senate Republicans returned to Washington on Monday and were immediately forced to confront the policy and political complications caused by his absence.

Coupled with the extended leave of Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican who was hospitalized last month and has not said when he will return to the Senate, Mr. Graham’s death on Saturday has created further difficulties for an election-year legislative agenda that already faced significant hurdles.

The loss of Mr. Graham and the absence of Mr. McConnell have temporarily whittled down an already slim Republican majority and are threatening to stall spending bills, a major budget measure the party had hoped to use to push through hundreds of billions of dollars of military spending, and at least one crucial nomination.

It also left uncertain the fate of a new package of sanctions against Russia that Mr. Graham had negotiated in the days leading up to his death, which now lacks its most influential Republican champion in the Senate.ImageSenator John Thune, wearing a dark suit, is surrounded by people pointing phones in his direction.Senator John Thune, the majority leader, at the Capitol on Monday. “His voice is going to be really, really missed in terms of the relationship that Senate Republicans have with the president and his team,” Mr. Thune said of Mr. Graham.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

In the coming days, Senate Republicans had hoped to quickly confirm President Trump’s pick as attorney general, Todd Blanche, whose confirmation hearings are set for Wednesday and Thursday. They are also eager to pass annual spending bills ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government. And with the midterms looming, many Republicans are hoping to find a way to push through sweeping policy initiatives in an arcane budget process known as reconciliation that allows them to skirt a Democratic filibuster.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

All of those are up in the air with the loss of Mr. Graham. He sat on the Appropriations and Judiciary Committees, where Republicans could now find themselves short of a majority to approve legislation or nominations, and was the chairman of the Budget Committee, which would drive the reconciliation process.

Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader, who was a longtime friend of Mr. Graham’s dating to their early years together in the House, had already been skeptical that he and his fellow Republicans could push through a politically charged, one-party budget bill so close to the November election.

“Obviously there are a lot of considerations that we have to work through: how big it is, what the offsets are, what our limitations are,” Mr. Thune said. “To get that done and get the requisite number of votes in both the House and Senate will be a heavy lift.”

Mr. Thune and other senators were visibly affected by the death, and Mr. Graham’s Senate desk was draped in black velvet and held a vase of white roses.

With senior roles on the panels overseeing the Justice Department, spending and budget policy, Mr. Graham was seen as an important Republican voice in all three efforts. And as Republicans try to take advantage of their governing trifecta before the elections, Mr. Graham was viewed as a crucial link between the Senate and the White House.

Many of Mr. Graham’s colleagues acknowledged that he would have been particularly valuable helping Senate Republicans navigate an increasingly tense relationship with Mr. Trump, who has grown frustrated by their refusal to bow wholeheartedly to his agenda.

“His voice is going to be really, really missed in terms of the relationship that Senate Republicans have with the president and his team,” Mr. Thune said in a CNN interview on Monday. “Because he was so good and so effective at talking to the president, and it was so respected by the president.”

That connection would have been central to any attempt to push through a third reconciliation bill.

Mr. Trump last week urged congressional Republicans to turn to the procedure — which allows bills that affect government revenues to pass the Senate on a simple-majority vote — to provide $350 billion to the Pentagon and to impose long-sought restrictions on elections.

As the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Mr. Graham would have overseen that process, steering any measure through complex rules that govern what provisions can be included. Before his death, he signaled a willingness to try to meet Mr. Trump’s demand, even as many Republican senators, including Mr. Thune, have been skeptical that they could muster the necessary support to pass such a measure given disputes about how to pay for new spending with compensating cuts elsewhere.

Though Mr. Thune has not yet named a successor, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, is widely viewed as the next in line to lead the budget panel. But Mr. Johnson is among the staunchest fiscal conservatives in Congress, and his approach to spending cuts may rankle vulnerable lawmakers who do not want to slash government programs.

New York Times, Red State, Blue Governor: It Could Happen in Iowa. Would It Matter? David W. Chen, Photographs by Jamie Kelter Davis, July 14, 2026. Democrats have real hope for candidates for governor in red states like Iowa and Ohio, but if Republicans seize supermajorities in the legislatures, their power would be limited.

With President Trump’s approval ratings languishing and Democratic candidates polling well, Rob Sand, Iowa’s state auditor, could become the state’s first Democratic governor in 16 years after November’s election.

Yet as governor, Mr. Sand would be unable to block Republican priorities if the G.O.P. wins a supermajority in the state legislature. Republicans would have the numbers to override any of his vetoes, as Govs. Laura Kelly of Kansas and Andy Beshear of Kentucky, both Democratic leaders in Republican states, know all too well.

So Democrats are leaning on a handful of moderate newcomers — bolstered by outside money — to flip several districts in November, and influence the balance of power in a state that has gone from consummate battleground to ruby red over the past decade.

Among them, Jill Alesch, a veteran and former prosecutor, is vying for an open State House seat in suburban Des Moines. Mike Tupper, a retired police chief and former Republican, is seeking to oust a first-term State House Republican in Marshalltown, a small blue-collar city.ImageA historic schoolhouse in Marshalltown, Iowa, where Mike Tupper, a retired police chief, is running against State Representative David Blom, a Republican.ImageA mural on a school in Marshalltown celebrates the diversity of the community, where the school district boasts a sizable number of Mexican immigrants and refugees from Myanmar.

“There’s a little bit of this sense of, ‘Rob Sand is this once-in-a-generation candidate, he’s going to win and suddenly he’s going to be able to wave a magic wand and transform the politics of Iowa,’” said Mandara Meyers, executive director of the left-leaning States Project, which spent more than $130 million nationally on state legislative races in the past two election cycles, and is now supporting Ms. Alesch and Mr. Tupper. “But you have no real teeth to your ability to actually improve the politics and improve lives in your state without that legislative power, too.”

Breaking a supermajority in states with divided government has become a priority in a highly polarized era. Democrats did it in North Carolina in 2024, giving Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, a backstop — on paper, anyway. In Vermont, Republicans ousted more than two dozen Democratic lawmakers, thanks to pocketbook issues, aiding Gov. Phil Scott, a moderate Republican.

Now the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee wants to crack Republican supermajorities in states with competitive governor’s races, including Ohio and Kansas. The Republican State Leadership Committee, vowing to “withstand sustained pressure,” hopes to block a Democratic supermajority in Nevada that would weaken Gov. Joe Lombardo, should he win re-election.

Republicans downplay the Democrats’ aspirations in Iowa, a state that Mr. Trump won by 13 percentage points in 2024.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” said Pat Grassley, the Republican speaker of the Iowa House, and grandson of Senator Charles E. Grassley, also a Republican. “In 2020, out-of-state liberal donors poured millions into Iowa to try to buy the House, but Iowans saw right through it. In the elections since, Iowa has only trended more red.”

More On Iran War

New York Times, Iran Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Reignite War Over Strait of Hormuz, Ravi Mattu, Qasim Nauman and Eric Schmitt, July 14, 2026. The two countries slid back to open war over the waterway, as the U.S. planned to reinstate a blockade on Iranian ports on Tuesday. Iran said it had attacked two tankers and fired at U.S. military sites.

Here’s the latest.

The United States and Iran reignited their war over the Strait of Hormuz, trading strikes as President Trump said he would resume a naval blockade Tuesday on Iranian ports and impose tolls on ships passing through the waterway.

The new attacks over control of the waterway, which is a crucial transit route for oil and gas shipments, could further intensify a conflict that has already roiled the global economy and left many dead. Oil prices soared on Tuesday in one of the biggest daily jumps since the start of the war, as Mr. Trump’s preliminary cease-fire deal with Iran lay in tatters.

The latest hostilities follow weeks of strikes between the United States and Iran, as diplomatic efforts to turn the truce into a permanent deal to end the war stalled. Mr. Trump has formally notified Congress that the fighting resumed and said last week that the cease-fire was “over.”

U.S. Central Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East, said the blockade of Iranian ports, which had been in effect from April to June, would begin late Tuesday local time. It said that its latest strikes on Iran, which concluded early Tuesday morning, were intended to degrade the Iranian military’s ability to target commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has said the cease-fire agreement gave it authority over shipping in the waterway. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said overnight that it had fired on two tankers after they attempted to transit through Omani waters rather than a route in Iranian-controlled territory.

The Iranian military also said it had launched strikes at U.S. military facilities in Bahrain and Jordan. Officials from those countries have said the attacks were intercepted, without specifying whether they had caused any damage.

Mr. Trump said on Monday that the United States would charge a fee on each ship passing through the strait equal to 20 percent of the value of its cargo in return for providing security, just weeks after his administration said imposing tolls was unacceptable. He did not provide any details on how the United States would collect the fees, and some analysts were skeptical it would be implemented because of the huge costs it would impose on shipping and logistics.

Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, posted a retort on social media, saying that Mr. Trump was “absolutely right” that whoever provided safe passage through the strait should be compensated — and repeated Iran’s claim to that role “forever.”

Here’s what else to know:

• War powers: Mr. Trump formally notified Congress that fighting with Iran had resumed, dismissing the importance of the cease-fire he long trumpeted. He did not outline a new strategy for resolving the conflict. Read more ›
• Trump’s fee: His announcement that the United States would impose a 20 percent fee on shipping through the strait contradicted top officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance, who had insisted that there could be no fees or tolls for the use of an international waterway. Read more ›
• Oil soars: The price of Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil prices, rose above $86 a barrel on Tuesday for the first time in a month. The price has soared by about 12 percent in the past 24 hours, one of the steepest daily increases since the early stages of the war, and is 17 percent higher than before the war. Read more ›

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Destruction Alone Doesn’t Win Wars, Mark Hertling, right, July 14, 2026. The United States can destroy more targets than Iran. It can sink ships, eliminate missile batteries, strike command centers, and impose military losses that Tehran cannot reciprocate. But Iran does not have to match American firepower to achieve its goals. It must only keep commercial shipping at risk, energy markets unsettled, Gulf governments nervous, American bases under threat, and U.S. forces responding to the next crisis

Washington may be winning most exchanges of fire, but Tehran has the initiative: It still decides, for the most part, where the conflict occurs, which American assets must be defended, and how many additional missions U.S. forces must assume.

The Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran called for an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations,” but it was never a peace settlement. Its vague language governing commercial shipping through the strait virtually guaranteed competing interpretations. Halfway through the MOU’s sixty-day negotiating period, questions about Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions, and U.S. force posture also remain unresolved.

With the resumption of combat in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States is being pulled into multiple overlapping campaigns: striking Iranian nuclear and military capabilities, protecting commercial shipping, suppressing coastal missile systems, defending regional bases, and reassuring Gulf partners. But there is no clearly articulated political end state. This is mission creep.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, meanwhile, appears willing to absorb extraordinary punishment. Iranian facilities have been destroyed, missile and drone systems attacked, and commanders killed, yet Tehran continues launching weapons, threatening shipping, and striking facilities across the region. This exposes the critical difference between punishment and coercion: The United States is unquestionably punishing Iran, but not compelling it to change its behavior.

Strategy should start with a desired political outcome and then direct military, diplomatic, and economic power toward achieving it. It should not be assembled one retaliatory strike at a time.

America’s Gulf partners understand the danger. They fear Iran, but they also fear an unlimited American–Iranian war fought across their region. They want Washington to deter Iranian aggression and protect freedom of navigation, but they do not want their cities, energy infrastructure, airfields, and populations threatened or bombarded.

The United States can destroy more, but Iran can disrupt more. Iran can lose every tactical encounter and still produce strategic effects. It can raise shipping costs, disrupt energy markets, strain American alliances, expose regional bases, and draw the United States deeper into an open-ended campaign.

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To get a sense of how that happens, look no further than Russia’s war in Ukraine. Russia is the stronger combatant on paper: It has more people, territory, weapons, industrial capacity, and ability to absorb casualties and replace equipment. Yet after more than four years of war, those advantages have not produced the political outcome Vladimir Putin sought. Russia has destroyed Ukrainian cities, seized territory, killed civilians, damaged energy infrastructure, and imposed enormous costs. But it has not conquered Ukraine, broken its government, divided NATO, or forced Kyiv to accept political subordination.

Ukraine cannot defeat Russia by matching its mass. It wins by surviving, and its survival has depended on three things Russia initially underestimated: adaptation, outside support, and national will.

That will is visible in both the Ukrainian government and its citizens. Ukraine is a democracy, so its continued resistance depends not simply on government orders but on public consent, political legitimacy, military service, sacrifice, and the population’s belief that national survival is worth the cost. That resolve is not unlimited, but it has already disproved Moscow’s expectation that the government would collapse, and the country would quickly submit.

Iranian will is different. In a theocracy, it is difficult to separate the determination of the regime, the Revolutionary Guard, and the broader population. Tehran can suppress dissent and impose costs on citizens in ways a democratic government cannot. Yet the regime’s willingness to absorb attacks, continue retaliation, and accept economic pain remains a form of strategic endurance that American planners cannot ignore. Military superiority matters less when the adversary believes it can outlast the stronger power politically.

Ukraine’s adaptation has repeatedly changed the character and geography of its war. It challenged the Russian Black Sea Fleet without possessing a conventional navy. It transformed inexpensive drones into weapons capable of attacking armor, artillery, command posts, airfields, ammunition depots, and energy infrastructure. It extended the battlefield deep into Russia, forcing Moscow to defend millions of square miles, including areas just recently considered beyond Ukraine’s reach.

Russia can destroy more. So Ukraine must adapt faster—and sustain the will to continue.

But adaptation and will cannot substitute indefinitely for soldiers, weapons, and allied support. Ukraine’s forces are under enormous pressure. Its cities remain vulnerable, its soldiers are exhausted, its air defenses are strained, and uncertainty about Western assistance continues to benefit Moscow.

But for all that, Russia’s strategic goals remain stubbornly out of reach.

Russia is unquestionably punishing Ukraine. But punishment is not coercion. Ukraine continues to fight, its government remains independent, NATO is larger than it was at the beginning of 2022, and Europe is rearming. Russia’s mass has produced destruction and territorial gains, but not the strategic victory that drove the invasion.

Wars are not decided solely by who destroys more. They are decided when military operations break an opponent’s ability, or will, to resist. Russia and the United States—in very different ways and with greatly varying degrees of professionalism and efficacy—have shown their abilities to destroy. While Ukraine fights for democracy and freedom and Iran fights against it, both have shown their wills to resist and to win by not losing.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 13, 2026 [Bad Options For United States], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 14, 2026. Today began with yet another demonstration of the fact that the U.S. options for extricating itself from Trump’s war on Iran with conditions anywhere near as good as they were under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated with a number of countries under President Barack Obama, or even as good as they were in February 2026 before Trump and Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu launched air strikes on Iran, do not appear promising.

At 10:16 this morning, Trump announced on social media that the Strait of Hormuz “is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran. We are reinstating THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE, so named because it is only stopping Iran’s ships or customers from entering or leaving. All other countries will have fair and open use of the Strait. The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as ‘THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,’ but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World. The process and formation will begin immediately.”

In other words, the U.S. is restarting hostility—a blockade is an act of war—and, according to Trump, will protect the Strait of Hormuz but expects to be paid.

Trump has been clear that he considers the memorandum of understanding he signed on June 17 no longer in force, probably not least because Iranian officials interpret the words of the hastily constructed deal as giving Iran control over the Strait of Hormuz. They have been clear they intend to charge fees for passage of the strait, a condition the U.S. rejects although Trump’s current claim that the U.S. will charge fees seems to undercut the U.S. position.

Crucially, officials in the Trump administration continue to deny that Congress has any role in declaring war, despite the clear language of the Constitution. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, the president can respond without congressional input to an “imminent threat” so long as the president notifies Congress in writing within 48 hours of the beginning of hostilities. After that notification, the president has only 60 days before he must either end hostilities or secure congressional approval for them.

Trump got around this law first by overruling his own intelligence agencies to insist that Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S. Then when the May 1 deadline for either withdrawal or congressional approval approached, he claimed that hostilities had ended on April 7 with the declaration of a ceasefire, notwithstanding that both sides continued to shoot at each other and the U.S. maintained its blockade of Iranian ports.

Now they are claiming the power simply to start the clock again. On Friday, Trump formally notified Congress that the U.S. has resumed strikes on Iran, claiming the Pentagon has another 60 days to strike Iran before the timeline specified by the War Power Act runs out.

Today Elizabeth Dwoskin, Andrew Ba Tran, Luis Melgar, and Peter Jamison of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s sons “Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have amassed a portfolio of defense technology start-ups that are benefiting from new Pentagon priorities and spending, further entangling the United States’ interests and the Trump family’s financial fortunes.” They have invested in more than a dozen defense companies that have collectively received at least $3.2 billion in business directly from the government since those investments, along with $3.1 billion in options for future contracts.

Tonight U.S. Central Command announced it has begun a third night of strikes against Iran.

At about 7:15 this morning, an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. According to staff from the Portland Press Herald, Guerrero was from Colombia and was authorized to work in the U.S. The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition said he had a Social Security number and was on his way to work.

Spokespeople for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, have not commented. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) has called for “a full and impartial investigation,” but as her political opponents note, Collins voted just last month to give ICE another $70 billion. ICE and Border Patrol had become far less visible as Republicans worked to pass supplemental funding for ICE and Border Patrol through Congress. In the wake of that new funding, immigration sweeps are back in the news. Protests broke out today outside Collins’s Biddeford office.

Senator Angus King (I-ME) told Patrick Whittle, Leah Willingham, and Jack Brook of the Associated Press that Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told him Guerrero had tried to use his vehicle as a weapon against officers, forcing the agent to shoot. This allegation has been a common one for agents trying to justify fatal shootings, including that of Renee Good in Minnesota. Witness Daniel Boucher said that in the aftermath of the shooting, he saw Guerrero “bleeding profusely from the head. He was talking. He said: ‘I tried to stop.’”

This evening, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) said she had learned that the man ICE shot and killed was not the person they had an order to pick up. ‘

In a statement tonight the Department of Homeland Security claimed that the officer shot because he was “fearing for public safety.” David Bier of the Cato Institute and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the Immigration Council both called out that language, noting DHS was claiming not that the officer feared for his life, but that he had a vague concern for “public safety.”

The ICE killing of a man in Maine comes less than a week after ICE shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo of Houston, Texas. Salgado Araujo was a Mexican national who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years and was close to obtaining legal status. His son told Lekan Oyekanmi, Jack Brook, and Jeffrey Collins of the Associated Press that the homebuilder knew what to do when approached by ICE but may have feared that the men following him in unmarked SUVs intended to steal his tools.

ICE said the officers “attempted to conduct a vehicle stop as part of a targeted enforcement operation to arrest an illegal alien” and that Salgado Araujo “rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” It added that an officer “discharged his weapon in self-defense.”

A lawyer for two of the people in the van with Salgado Araujo denied that he tried to ram officers. A source later told Dalia Faheid, Chris Boyette, Priscilla Alvarez, and Caroll Alvarado of CNN that ICE’s description of the events that killed Salgado Araujo as a “targeted enforcement operation” was misleading. While that may have been the case, Salgado Araujo was not the target. They saw him in his van near the target and thought he “resembled the target.”

José Olivares of The Guardian noted that Salgado Araujo was the tenth person shot and killed by federal immigration officers from either ICE or Border Patrol this year. Twenty-one more people have died in ICE detention this year.

This afternoon the Trump administration finally turned over to Minnesota investigators evidence from the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January. That evidence includes statements, video from police body cameras, and Good’s badly damaged SUV.

Today U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida Kathleen Williams said Trump, his lawyers, and the lawyers for the Department of Justice had manufactured the so-called settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. “[T]he Court finds that this matter was brought for an improper purpose—to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact,” she wrote. They launched the lawsuit “as a means of conferring legitimacy upon a course of action that they were unwilling to subject to judicial review.”

The course of action they intended to take was to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund for Trump loyalists who claimed that the Department of Justice under former president Joe Biden had been weaponized against them. While that part of the deal got most of the attention, probably more important to Trump was the addition to the “settlement” announced the next day: a promise that Trump, his family, his businesses, and even his “associates” would be immune from prosecution for any tax crimes revealed by audits of tax returns filed before May 19, 2026.

“No sitting President has ever sued federal agencies completely subject to his control for monetary benefits, or any benefits that inure to him, his family, and associates,” Williams wrote. After Trump dropped his lawsuit, thirty-five former judges had asked Williams to set aside her dismissal of the case with the goal of determining whether the claimed “settlement” was a fraud on the court.

In her opinion, she noted that the question before the court was simply whether there was a legitimate lawsuit, and the answer was no. The final disposition of the slush fund and the immunity were not questions before the court. “Whether Executive Branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax monies for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this Court. The question is whether the Parties could do so by claiming to be adverse and engaging the legitimacy of a court proceeding. The answer is a resounding ‘no.’”

Williams recommended legal sanctions against some of the lawyers involved and said she was “extremely troubled” by the testimony of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, which was “at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous.”

Blanche used to be Trump’s personal defense lawyer and has said he believes he has a “continuing duty of loyalty” to Trump. The president has nominated Blanche to become attorney general. His confirmation hearings begin on Wednesday.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Straight talk about Hormuz, Judd Legum, right, July 14, 2026. Since the United States attacked Iran on February 28, 2026, Iran has closed — or severely restricted passage through — the Strait of Hormuz. As a result, the global supply of oil has been constrained, raising prices for U.S. consumers and others worldwide.

The Strait of Hormuz is a vital route not just for oil but also for fertilizer, and its closure has contributed to a significant increase in food prices.

On at least two dozen occasions since the outset of the war, according to a comprehensive Popular Information analysis, Trump has declared that the Strait of Hormuz was “open” or controlled by the United States.

“The Hormuz Strait is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran,” Trump said on Monday on Truth Social. Trump’s claim is false. So are similar declarations that Trump has made for months.

Simultaneously, Trump announced a plan to reinstate a U.S. blockade of the strait for Iranian ships and have the U.S. charge a 20% fee on all cargo. But it’s unclear how any of this accomplishes the goal of opening the strait or bringing down the cost of energy. In response to Trump’s announcement, energy prices spiked.

Maritime traffic in the strait has been severely disrupted since February. Prior to the war, an average of 125-140 vessels a day traversed the strait. On July 12, the number was 14. (Some tankers, fearful of attacks, have switched off their transponders, making tracking more difficult.)

This outcome was entirely predictable. Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz as a response to foreign aggression for 50 years. Four months later, the Trump administration still has not identified an effective strategy to reopen the strait. Instead, Trump simply asserts that the Strait of Hormuz is open or under U.S. control — over and over again.

Trump shifted abruptly between claiming the strait would open soon, claiming the strait was already open, and claiming the strait was closed only because he decided to close it. At no point were any of these claims accurate.

Thank you to everyone who supports this work with a paid subscription. Popular Information has no corporate owner and no billionaire backer — it is funded by readers. Paid subscribers are the entire reason this three-person newsroom can spend hours upon hours digging through campaign finance filings, obscure government documents, and corporate disclosures. They are also why every investigation is free for anyone to read. Those who can pay make this work accessible to those who can't. Together, we maximize the impact of this work. If you're in a position to become a paid subscriber, I'd be grateful to have your support. — JuddSubscribed

Iran has closed or severely restricted traffic in the Strait of Hormuz using a combination of mines, anti-ship missiles, drones, and small high-speed attack boats. The U.S. military has been unable to effectively counter these measures, despite its massive budget and superior capabilities. Iran can create enough uncertainty to dissuade transit through the strait with cheap, haphazard tactics.

The Trump administration, through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, announced it “will insure losses up to $40 billion for tankers brave enough to transit the Strait of Hormuz.” That has not been enough to entice most shippers to risk passage.

Trump now finds himself in an intractable situation. His only apparent avenue for opening the strait is to get Iran to agree to open the strait. But Iran has come to the conclusion that its control of the strait is its best leverage against the United States and other enemies. Trump’s diplomatic team of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff — with occasional cameos by Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — has been unable to convince Iranian officials otherwise.

That leaves Trump with no way to open the Strait of Hormuz and no way to extricate himself from an unpopular war while the strait remains closed.

The Trump administration’s failure to anticipate Iran’s response to a U.S. attack was one of the biggest military blunders in recent history. American consumers will likely pay the price for years to come.

New York Times, F.C.C. Approves Test of Space Mirror to Light Night Sky Despite Outcry, Hiroko Tabuchi, July 10, 2026. A start-up company has permission to try its plan to bounce solar rays onto the dark side of Earth, turning night to day for a three-mile-wide patch.

The federal government has approved plans by a start-up company to test a satellite that would use a 60-foot mirror to reflect sunlight back to Earth after dark, as part of a project the company says would power solar farms, provide light for rescue workers and illuminate city streets.

In a license issued on Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission gave the green light for Reflect Orbital of Hawthorne, Calif., to launch its Eärendil-1 satellite into low Earth orbit. The company plans to deploy its test satellite this year but has said it eventually wants to send as many as 50,000 big mirrors into space.

The approval came despite a flood of opposition from astronomers, wildlife experts and others who say the light from the mirrors could distract airplane pilots, wreak havoc on astronomical observations and interfere with circadian rhythms, the light-and-dark cycles that help people, animals and plants know when to wake and sleep, to bloom or to migrate.

“It’s terrifying to me that one country can change the night sky for everybody in the world,” said Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada. “I need access to dark skies in order to do my research. If you’ve got giant mirrors shining down, then we’ve lost that.”

In a letter to the F.C.C. sent last month, the American Astronomical Society, said the endeavor “cannot be considered to serve the public interest” and in fact would waste taxpayer dollars by wrecking the work of federally funded astronomical facilities, even as it brought untold risks to people and wildlife.

“It is clear that the activities that Reflect Orbital is proposing will have an impact on the Earth environment, including on human health, agriculture and wildlife, in addition to astronomy,” Roohi Dalal, the society’s director of public policy, wrote.

Roughly the size of a dorm fridge, Reflect Orbital’s first prototype, once in space about 400 miles up, would unfurl a square mirror nearly 60 feet wide. The mirror would bounce sunlight to illuminate a circular patch about three miles wide on the Earth’s surface.

Reflect Orbital hopes to launch 1,000 larger satellites by the end of 2028, and 5,000 others by 2030. The largest mirrors are planned to be nearly 180 feet wide, reflecting as much light as 100 full moons.

The F.C.C. stressed, however, that it was approving only “a single demonstration satellite” that would test a technology that could advance American leadership in outer space. “Reflect Orbital’s demonstration satellite is an example of a potentially groundbreaking technology,” the commission said in its order granting the license.ission, which issues the licenses needed to deploy satellites, the F.C.C. said. In reviewing satellite applications, it generally checks to ensure that a spacecraft’s radio communications do not create interference problems for others, and that the vessel will be safely disposed of at the end of its operational lifetime.

The federal government’s overall stance is that activities in space are not subject to environmental regulations and review, which apply only to Earth. “Even if the commission had authority to review and condition these operations (which it does not), these harms are unlikely to occur,” the F.C.C. said.

July 13

Top Headlines

President Trump posted the self-portrait above illustrating his aggressive attitude, a frequent theme on his Truth Social website (April 29, 2026).

• The Hartmann Report, Opinion and Advocacy: The Oligarch's Warning: This Fall, America Decides Which of Russia's Four Futures to Follow, Thom Hartmann, right, July 13, 2026. The permanent fence around Lafayette Square isn't just about security. It's the latest warning that oligarchy is preparing to defend itself from democracy…Friday afternoon the Trump administration released a formal proposal to ring Lafayette Square with a permanent fence up to ten feet tall and to install gates across Pennsylvania Avenue at 15th and 17th Streets, all of it designed so officials can seal off America’s most famous protest ground within minutes.
• New York Times, Times Exclusive: Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Cultivate Ahmadinejad, Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman, July 13, 2026. The yearslong effort to groom the former Iranian president as an intelligence asset culminated in a dramatic effort to take him to an Israeli safe house in the early days of the war. But the plan fell apart.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News Update, Major Epstein News, ICE Kills Man Who Was Not Their Target, Trump Calls for Arrests of Socialists and Launches 'New' War, Aaron Parnas, right, July 13, 2026. It has been another extraordinary day of news. A second fatal ICE-involved shooting in America has now occurred, this time in Maine, and the videos emerging from the scene are deeply disturbing. Large protests have erupted as outrage grows. In Minnesota, state officials say they have finally obtained key evidence from the federal government as they investigate the ICE officers involved in the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
• MeidasTouch Network, Monday Afternoon News Updates: Trump's Desperate Iran Plot, Another ICE Shooting, a Major Court Loss + More, Ben Meiselas, right,July 13, 2026. Here’s what we’re tracking today:
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Monday Update: Congress is Frozen as it Returns to DC, Another ICE Shooting, Trump Takes Over Strait, McConnell Health Questions, Aaron Parnas, right,July 13, 2026. Congress is back in session, with hearings on the Epstein files, the Supreme Court, and a renewed push to pass the SAVE Act. And right now, it is completely frozen. Meanwhile, President Trump says the United States is taking over the Strait of Hormuz as the conflict with Iran escalates. He also posted a bizarre tribute to Lindsey Graham. Questions continue to swirl around Mitch McConnell’s health, with few in either party convinced by the recently released “proof of life” photo. And another ICE-related shooting has now occurred, this time in Maine.

Trump Team Opressions, Obsessions, Corruption

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Oligarchy in Action: The Case of Corporate Tax Cuts, Paul Krugman, right, July 13, 2026. 'How big money trumps the people’s will — and how to reclaim democracy. I’ve written on a number of occasions about what I called, in yesterday’s primer, the downward spiral of oligarchy in America: The political power of the hyper-wealthy tilts policy in their favor, and this policy tilt reinforces the wealth and power of that tiny minority. In today’s post I’ll follow up by focusing on one especially clear example: The drastic fall over time in taxes on corporate profits, despite overwhelming popular opinion that corporate taxes are too low, not too high.
• The Hartmann Report, Opinion and Advocacy: The Oligarch's Warning: This Fall, America Decides Which of Russia's Four Futures to Follow, Thom Hartmann, right, July 13, 2026. Continued from above: The wholly-owned toadies on the Supreme Court have spent the last half-century legalizing the purchase of the American government, a story I tell at length in my new book "Who Killed the American Dream?" In 2024, the Court’s six corrupt Republicans ruled in Snyder v. United States that officials who take payments after performing favors have merely accepted legal “gratuities” rather than bribes. Yeah, billionaires can now legally give tips to judges and politicians.

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Live Updates: Iran Ramps Up Threats as It Retaliates Against U.S. Strikes, Hari Raj, Eric Schmitt, Jenny Gross and Leo Sands, July 13, 2026. Senior Iranian officials called for revenge against the United States and Israel for killing the late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as a new exchange of attacks pushed the region into deeper uncertainty.

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

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Give Blanche’s Hearing to the Epstein Survivoirs, William Kristol, right, July 13, 2026. A year ago, on July 17, 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche hurried to an emergency evening meeting in the White House Situation Room with his fellow Trump administration apparatchiks. Its location might suggest it had to do with national security. It didn’t. It was about the political security of Donald Trump.
• New York Times, With Threats Rising, Supreme Court Asks Congress to Increase Security Funds, Ann E. Marimow, July 13, 2026. Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan are scheduled to make a rare appearance at the Capitol to testify about the court’s more than $200 million request.
• New York Times, Live Updates: Judge Says President’s Lawsuit With I.R.S. Was Self-Dealing, Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer, July 13, 2026. What We’re Covering Today.  
• Emptywheel, Analysis: Trump Fired Pam Bondi the Day After DOJ Agreed to Share Epstein Files with New Mexico, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 13, 2026.Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee will take place on Wednesday and Thursday.

More On U.S. Health, Governance

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 12, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 13, 2026. The United States is currently in the grip of an outbreak of the Cyclospora parasite, which causes severe diarrhea and has sickened more than 3,000 people across the U.S. Last August, Aria Bendix of NBC News reported that on July 1, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would no longer track infections caused by cyclospora and five other common causes of foodborne illnesses.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Massive giveaway to Trump donors buried in obscure government document, Judd Legum, right, July 13, 2026. The administration quietly delivers a huge win to corporate poultry processors, who have donated tens of millions to Trump and his allies, at the expense of family farmers.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Anti-Democratic Party Hysteria Is Out of Sync With Reality, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 13, 2026. Democrats’ successes should not be ignored; plus a note on Senator Lindsey Graham. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) passed away suddenly Saturday night from an apparent tear in his aorta. Unfortunately, Senate colleagues and most legacy media outlets are avoiding the hard reckoning he deserves. Few American politicians have been as disastrously wrong in their advocacy for regime change in the Middle East, not just once but twice, or in their indulgence in an Israeli right-wing government that took Israel (and in turn, U.S. policy) down a morally abhorrent road of domestic reprehension of Palestinians. He supported authoritarian rule in derogation of Israel’s professed democratic values and reckless violence aimed at the utterly unattainable goal of obliterating military threats to Israel’s survival at the expense of attainable diplomatic solutions.
• Madness, Opinion: Voters want candidates to fight data centers, Thor Benson, July 13, 2026. Americans across the country have been pushing back against building new data centers for the past year or so, and it looks like this issue is not going away any time soon. As I wrote for Rolling Stone in May, this could become a defining battle of the midterms.
• New York Times, Maine Democrats to Chuck Schumer: Stay Out of Our Senate Race, Tim Balk, July 13, 2026. Local Democrats are warning the top Senate Democrat to keep away as they replace Graham Platner, and the candidates are giving his leadership in Washington low marks.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York is accustomed to getting his way in Democratic primaries for Senate.

More On U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham's Death

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: LINDSEY GRAHAM, R.I.P., Benjamin Parker, right, July 13, 2026. There will be more to say in the coming days about the life and career of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly late Saturday night. One thing that’s hard not to notice, though, is the way in which his career arc so directly mirrors that of the modern Republican party. Even in an abbreviated life, he outlived the version of the GOP he worked in for so long.
• Mediaite, Trump Treasury Secretary Reportedly ‘Fielding Calls’ To Run For Lindsey Graham’s Seat, Jennifer Bowers Bahney, July 13, 2026. Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is said to be “fielding calls” from power brokers urging him to run for the Senate seat held by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

More Global News 

• New York Times, A Robot Army Remakes Ground Warfare in Ukraine, Maria Varenikova, July 13, 2026. They began as supply mules. Now ground robots evacuate the wounded, hold trenches and even do the killing.
• New York Times, Lebanese Hold Fast to Their Land Despite Threat of Long Israeli Occupation, Abdi Latif Dahir, Visuals by Daniel Berehulak, July 13, 2026. Entire towns in southern Lebanon have been hollowed out by the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Some residents have stayed, fearing permanent displacement.

Top Stories

President Trump posted the self-portrait above illustrating his aggressive attitude, a frequent theme on his Truth Social website (April 29, 2026).

The Hartmann Report, Opinion and Advocacy: The Oligarch's Warning: This Fall, America Decides Which of Russia's Four Futures to Follow, Thom Hartmann, right, July 13, 2026. The permanent fence around Lafayette Square isn't just about security. It's the latest warning that oligarchy is preparing to defend itself from democracy…

Friday afternoon the Trump administration released a formal proposal to ring Lafayette Square with a permanent fence up to ten feet tall and to install gates across Pennsylvania Avenue at 15th and 17th Streets, all of it designed so officials can seal off America’s most famous protest ground within minutes.

Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton had already introduced legislation to stop Trump, warning that we shouldn’t leave “citizens peering at their democracy from behind permanent fences.”

Lafayette Square is where Alice Paul and her Silent Sentinels stood through freezing winters demanding that Woodrow Wilson support women’s suffrage, and where peaceful protesters were gassed and beaten in June of 2020 so Donald Trump could stroll across the park for a photo op, Bible in hand.

For over two centuries, every president since John Adams has had to look out his window at Americans exercising their First Amendment right to tell him exactly what they think of him.

This administration proposes to end that tradition with steel pickets spaced four inches apart, and to have the whole apparatus ready as we head toward a November election that could break the GOP’s grip on Congress or see open corruption of our election by Trump’s goons, which would inevitably lead to mass protests.

Governments that trust their own people don’t wall themselves off from them; fortress states do.

And by a remarkable coincidence, this was the same week that one of the richest men in Russia gave the world a sixty-hour guided tour of life inside a mature fortress state, along with a warning about where that road ends that every American should know about.

The Economist just published an extraordinary profile of Andrey Melnichenko, whose fertilizer, coal, energy, and logistics empire accounts for roughly one full percent of Russia’s entire GDP, and who was the richest man in the country when Putin invaded Ukraine.

For twenty years Melnichenko lived the bargain Putin offered Russia’s oligarchs: stay out of politics and you can keep your fortune, your yacht, your villa in Switzerland. Then came the Ukraine war, the sanctions, and finally the shakedown.

In 2023, Putin’s prosecutors moved to confiscate one of Melnichenko’s Siberian power companies, and the case quietly evaporated two weeks later, right after he donated 32 billion rubles, about $335 million, to a school for gifted children that operates under Putin’s personal patronage.

In a fully realized oligarchy — like Putin has established in Russia and Trump is trying to create here with pardons and government contracts essentially for sale — that’s what legal property rights become: a subscription service, renewable at the pleasure of the man at the top.

Melnichenko told The Economist that he can see only four possible futures for Russia if it stays on the current course Putin is pursuing, every one of them grim:

— It can crawl back to a victorious West as a defeated vassal, which he predicts would provoke the same revanchist rage that the Versailles treaty incubated in Germany a century ago and that led straight to World War II.— It can settle permanently into China’s orbit as a resource colony with a flag and faint appearance of independence.— It can fragment into civil conflict, with warlords fighting over the pieces of a nuclear-armed state.— Or it can finish its transformation into a continental North Korea, a garrison society sustained by rationing, repression, isolation, and what he describes as turning “external confrontation into a permanent instrument of domestic politics.”

That fourth scenario, which he says is under serious discussion inside the Kremlin, describes a government that identifies permanent enemies abroad and at home to justify permanent repression of its own citizens.

Anyone who’s watched masked federal agents disappearing people off American streets, or read this administration’s directives treating its domestic political opposition as a terrorist threat, or looked at the blueprints for that fence around Lafayette Square, has seen the early architecture of exactly that.

And Melnichenko’s preferred alternative for Russia against these four possibilities? He names it, with a candor you rarely hear from men of his class, as “oligarchy in the classical sense of the word.”

Rule by elites. Businessmen, technocrats, and nationalists would govern the country together, cutting deals among themselves because the four alternatives threaten their fortunes and their family dynasties, while ordinary Russians continue receiving what he frankly admits has so far been “a simulation of participation.”

Surprised that a billionaire’s best imaginable future for his nation is rule by billionaires?

Ours have been saying the same thing out loud for years about America. Peter Thiel, the money behind JD Vance’s entire political career, wrote for the Cato Institute back in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and he and many of his morbidly rich colleagues have spent the years since funding politicians and projects built explicitly to act on that conviction. (Column continued below in section "Trump Team Oppressions, Obsessions, Corruption."

New York Times, Times Exclusive: Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Cultivate Ahmadinejad, Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Farnaz Fassihi and Ronen Bergman, July 13, 2026. The yearslong effort to groom the former Iranian president as an intelligence asset culminated in a dramatic effort to take him to an Israeli safe house in the early days of the war. But the plan fell apart.

In early 2024, the rector of a university in Budapest received a startling request from a top Hungarian government official.

The official told the rector, Professor Gergely Deli, that Ludovika University of Public Service should hold a climate change conference and extend an invitation to an unlikely guest: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the widely reviled former president of Iran.

Even more shocking was the reason. The official told Mr. Deli that the conference was merely a front for Mr. Ahmadinejad to have secret discussions in Budapest with intelligence operatives from Israel, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s avowed enemy.

Mr. Deli knew that the invitation could tarnish both his own reputation and that of the university. But, he said in an interview, he believed he might be playing a role in saving lives.

“You have two enemies, and if these enemies want to talk with each other, then it’s best to do what you can to make them talk,” he said.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s 2024 visit to the university and a second one the following year were part of a yearslong Israeli effort to groom him as an intelligence asset who, when the time came, could be installed as Iran’s new leader, according to both American and Iranian officials familiar with the operation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence.

Recruiting Mr. Ahmadinejad was of such priority for Israel that the country’s then-spy chief David Barnea even traveled to the Hungarian capital in 2024 to meet with Mr. Ahmadinejad personally, according to former American officials. Soon afterward, they said, Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, notified the C.I.A. that it had been in contact with Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Israel’s decision to build a regime-change plan around Mr. Ahmadinejad is an extraordinary twist in the saga of the country’s relations with the former president, who was known for accelerating Iran’s nuclear program, calling regularly for the destruction of Israel and denying the Holocaust.

In recent years, according to American officials, Israel secretly paid money to Mr. Ahmadinejad for housing and travel, and Israeli operatives met him abroad on several occasions, including during his trips to Budapest.The effort culminated in late February of this year — during the first days of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran — with an audacious operation to relocate the former leader, who had been living under strict surveillance in Tehran. The goal: to set in motion the plan to topple the current regime and install Mr. Ahmadinejad.

The plan failed.

On Feb. 28, an Israeli airstrike hit Mr. Ahmadinejad’s compound, targeting the building of his bodyguards and his armored vehicle. After the strike, according to four senior Iranian officials, a black Peugeot car arrived, picked up Mr. Ahmadinejad and whisked him away at high speed from the chaotic scene.

American and Iranian officials with knowledge of the operation said the car had been driven by Mossad operatives, who took Mr. Ahmadinejad to a secret safe house in Iran.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Central America, Eastern Europe and the Middle East? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

But the former Iranian leader was upset about the frantic rescue operation, and he appeared to be disillusioned about the Israeli plan to return him to power, according to people with knowledge of what occurred.

He eventually left the safe house under circumstances that are still unclear. Mr. Ahmadinejad was not seen in public again until last Monday, when he made a brief appearance at the funeral procession for the slain supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

His current status remains uncertain. But four senior Iranian officials said that Mr. Ahmadinejad was in the custody of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ intelligence wing, under house arrest now that Iran has learned about much of his interactions with Israel.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News Update, Major Epstein News, ICE Kills Man Who Was Not Their Target, Trump Calls for Arrests of Socialists and Launches 'New' War, Aaron Parnas, right, July 13, 2026. It has been another extraordinary day of news. A second fatal ICE-involved shooting in America has now occurred, this time in Maine, and the videos emerging from the scene are deeply disturbing. Large protests have erupted as outrage grows. In Minnesota, state officials say they have finally obtained key evidence from the federal government as they investigate the ICE officers involved in the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Meanwhile, President Trump has formally declared what the White House describes as a new war with Iran and says the United States will intensify its bombing campaign. He also shared a video calling for the arrest and deportation of democratic socialists, including Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Here’s what you missed:

I have an exclusive Epstein PSA released by survivors ahead of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing.

Maine ICE Shooting:

An ICE agent fatally shot a 26-year-old Colombian man during an immigration enforcement operation in Biddeford after authorities say he attempted to flee in a vehicle “in the direction of the officer.” According to the Maine Attorney General’s Office, agents were carrying out an operation tied to a final order of removal when the shooting occurred shortly before 7:20 a.m. Monday. The victim was identified by immigration advocates as someone who was authorized to work in the United States. The Maine Attorney General is investigating the use of deadly force, while ICE and the Department of Homeland Security have released few details about the incident. Video footage was released by the Portland Press Herald this afternoon:

Witnesses described a chaotic and traumatic scene, including seeing the victim bleeding from the head after he was shot. Neighbors said the man’s family, including his 3-year-old daughter, arrived at the scene shortly afterward, adding to the emotional impact of the incident. Border Patrol said it was not involved in the enforcement operation but did offer medical assistance, which was ultimately not needed. Lawmakers, including Sen. Angus King and Rep. Chellie Pingree, said they have received little information from federal agencies and believe the agents involved were not wearing body cameras. More disturbing video from ScopeReport was released showing agents handcuffing the body of the man after killing him:

The shooting sparked protests across Biddeford and intensified demands for transparency and accountability. Sen. Angus King said the FBI is expected to investigate the shooting, while Biddeford Mayor Liam LaFountain said the victim’s family deserves compassion and a full explanation of what happened. Protesters gathered outside Sen. Susan Collins’ Biddeford office, and demonstrations continued throughout the day as community members called for answers. Residents also said they had noticed an increase in ICE activity in the area in recent weeks.

The fatal shooting has quickly become a flashpoint in Maine’s debate over immigration enforcement. Former Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah said he would oppose additional funding for ICE until the agency is reformed, even if it meant risking a government shutdown. Former Gov. Paul LePage urged the public to remain calm and allow investigators to complete a full and fair investigation before reaching conclusions. With multiple investigations now underway, state and federal officials are facing mounting pressure to release more information about one of the state’s highest-profile immigration enforcement incidents in recent years.

Trump’s Address to Nation:

Trump's Thursday speech is expected to focus on newly declassified intelligence reports that the White House says reveal plans by foreign nations to interfere in the 2020 election, according to two White House officials who spoke to MS NOW.

The Trump administration is expected to begin releasing classified intelligence and law enforcement documents related to the 2020 election as part of a new White House task force reviewing claims of election irregularities. The report says the effort is part of a broader push that includes Justice Department warnings to election officials, expanded federal election monitoring, and new FEMA requirements tied to election administration ahead of the midterms. Election experts and voting rights advocates warn the actions could undermine public confidence in elections and raise concerns about potential federal interference in state-run voting processes. State and local officials are reportedly being urged to prepare legal responses to any attempts by federal authorities to seize election materials or disrupt voting operations.

Iran:

According to a letter obtained by Politico, Trump has formally notified Congress that the United States has entered a “new” war with Iran, triggering a new 60-day War Powers clock that allows military operations to continue without congressional authorization. In a July 10 letter, Trump said the renewed conflict began with U.S. strikes on July 7 and that American forces remain prepared to take additional military action as needed. The announcement follows Trump's declaration that the ceasefire with Iran is over, as fighting intensifies around the Strait of Hormuz, where U.S. forces have struck more than 300 Iranian military targets in the past week. The move is expected to reignite congressional battles over presidential war powers after bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate previously voted to oppose continued military action without explicit approval from Congress.

Trump said the United States will intensify its military campaign against Iran, declaring, “We’re gonna hit ‘em very hard tonight and we’re gonna hit ‘em hard tomorrow.” He added that Iran has no meaningful ability to respond, saying, “There’s not a damn thing they can do about it. They have nothing going other than they have big mouths.” The remarks signal an escalation in U.S. military operations as the renewed conflict with Iran continues.

Trump announced that the United States will become the "guardian of the Strait of Hormuz," saying the U.S. would protect the vital shipping lane while charging a 20% fee on cargo passing through it as reimbursement for providing security. The proposal marks a dramatic shift in U.S. policy and comes after renewed military exchanges between the United States and Iran ended a short-lived ceasefire. Trump's plan appears to conflict with longstanding international maritime law, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously acknowledged that no country can legally impose tolls on an international waterway like the Strait of Hormuz. The administration has not yet explained how such a policy would be implemented or enforced, raising significant legal and geopolitical questions.

U.S. Central Command announced that it will resume blockading maritime traffic entering and leaving Iranian ports at 4 p.m. ET on July 14. The renewed operation comes after the collapse of a memorandum of understanding that had temporarily halted the blockade. The agreement lasted less than a month before military tensions between the United States and Iran escalated again. The move signals a return to direct efforts to restrict Iranian maritime commerce as the conflict continues to intensify.

U.S. Central Command released footage showing Corsair sea drones striking an Iranian submarine facility and shipyard at Bandar Abbas as part of a broader campaign targeting more than 300 Iranian military sites since July 7. The operations, ordered by President Trump, have involved fighter jets, naval vessels, and one-way drones aimed at degrading Iran's ability to threaten commercial shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has responded by launching missile attacks on U.S. military sites across the region, while global oil prices climbed to about $79 a barrel amid concerns over disruptions to a waterway that handles roughly 20% of the world's oil supply. Despite ongoing diplomatic efforts to restore a ceasefire, both sides continue to accuse each other of violating previous agreements.

Other news:

Republican Ron Johnson says that the picture Mitch McConnell’s office released was an “old image.”

Trump shared a video on Truth Social calling for the criminalization of democratic socialism and the arrest and deportation of its leaders. The video, featuring conservative commentator Michael Savage, specifically targeted Sen. Bernie Sanders, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and the Democratic Socialists of America. Savage urged reviving the House Un-American Activities Committee and called for hearings followed by arrests and deportations, describing democratic socialism as a threat that "must be criminalized." Trump reposted the video without adding any comment, amplifying its message to his followers.

Crews have drained the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., to carry out sealant repairs, exposing the basin floor and liner as Atlantic Industrial Coating works on the project. On-site photos and observations show no visible 350-foot gash or other major damage matching former President Donald Trump’s claims about the pool. Instead, the liner appears to have problems including flaking “American Flag Blue” paint, air bubbles, and large creases, raising questions about the quality of the installation. The repairs come after repeated issues delayed completion of the high-profile renovation.

Nearly 20 FBI agents were seen entering Sen. Lindsey Graham's Capitol Hill residence Monday afternoon, alongside U.S. Capitol Police, according to NBC News. Two law enforcement sources said federal authorities are continuing to investigate Graham's death out of an abundance of caution, which is standard in the case of a sitting U.S. senator. The sources emphasized there is no new evidence suggesting foul play since Graham died Saturday night, and investigators have not indicated any change to the initial assessment of his death.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster has appointed Darline Graham Nordone, the sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, to serve the remainder of his Senate term through January. Nordone, who helped raise Graham after their parents died and frequently appeared alongside him during his political career, is expected to be sworn in Wednesday and will become the first woman to represent South Carolina in the U.S. Senate.

Flowers, handwritten notes, and other tributes have been placed outside Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Capitol Hill office as lawmakers, staff, and members of the public continue to mourn his death. The memorial has grown throughout the day, reflecting bipartisan expressions of respect for the longtime South Carolina senator and his decades of service in Congress.

A cyclospora outbreak has sickened more than 3,000 people in Michigan and Ohio, with dozens hospitalized, while additional cases have been reported across at least 31 states. Health officials have not yet identified the source, saying the investigation is complicated because symptoms often appear days after exposure and the parasite is difficult to detect and trace. Experts also warn that recent reductions in federal foodborne illness surveillance have slowed efforts to identify outbreaks and link cases. Officials say there is no nationwide food recall at this time and are urging people to wash produce thoroughly and follow food safety precautions while investigators continue searching for the source.

Minnesota prosecutors say they have finally obtained key evidence in their investigations into the fatal shootings of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti, shown above, as well as the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis, after federal officials had withheld it for months. The newly released materials include police body camera footage, witness statements, hard drives, physical evidence, and Good’s vehicle, allowing investigators to conduct a full review of the cases. Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said the evidence is critical for ensuring transparency and accountability, calling cooperation from federal authorities essential. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison criticized the federal government for delaying access to the evidence for more than six months, saying it should never have taken that long for state investigators to obtain materials needed for their investigation.

Ukraine and 10 allied countries announced a new Integrated Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition to jointly develop a European-backed missile defense system designed to complement existing air defenses and provide a lower-cost alternative to the U.S. Patriot system. The initiative comes as Russia intensifies ballistic missile attacks on Ukraine, leaving Kyiv critically short of interceptor missiles and increasing pressure on allies to bolster air defenses. Leaders meeting in Paris also discussed securing additional Patriot interceptors, expanding deployment of the Franco-Italian SAMP-T system, increasing sanctions on Russia, and targeting Moscow’s “shadow fleet” used to export sanctioned oil. The coalition additionally announced plans for joint military exercises and continued work on long-term security guarantees for Ukraine as part of broader efforts to strengthen Europe’s collective defense.

MeidasTouch Network, Monday Afternoon News Updates: Trump's Desperate Iran Plot, Another ICE Shooting, a Major Court Loss + More, Ben Meiselas, right, July 13, 2026. Here’s what we’re tracking today:

• Trump declares the US will “run” the Strait of Hormuz and charge a 20% cargo fee
• Overnight US strikes hit Iranian oil, gas, and water infrastructure, Iran claims phased retaliation against Jordan, Bahrain, and Kuwait
• Satellite trackers spot a Special Forces mothership near Oman and Russian officials flying into Tehran
• Oil prices spike again as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve nears empty
• Marco Rubio announces a campaign to dismantle the International Criminal Court
• Trump pushes for Lindsey Graham’s sister to fill his Senate seat
• A federal judge shreds Trump’s lawsuit against his own IRS over the “Anti-Weaponization Fund”
• New rules require English proficiency for commercial drivers
• A man is shot and killed by ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine
• Schiff’s office uncovers more taxpayer money spent on giant Trump banners
• Newsom signs EV rebates and business incentives into law in California, as well as affordable housing legislation
• Pete Buttigieg keynotes Iowa Democrats’ annual dinner
• A dozen Democratic states sue to block the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger
• A proof of life photo is released by Mitch McConnell’s team

“The Guardian of the Strait”

Donald Trump announced this morning that the United States is going to “run” the Strait of Hormuz and charge every ship passing through a fee equal to 20% of its cargo. He’s calling the US the “Guardian of the Hormuz Strait,” in all caps.

Let’s be honest about what this is. The entire justification for this war was supposedly Iran’s nuclear program. Then it became regime change. Now the stated goal is apparently just seizing and monetizing an international waterway. That’s an admission that the mission has completely collapsed into something else.

Because here’s the truth. Iran is not backing down, the Strait is functionally closed right now, and the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is creeping toward the exact level that used to be considered the point of no return. If that threshold gets crossed, there’s no longer a safety net between the American economy and total shock.

So Trump goes on Fox and gets asked about all this, and instead of addressing any of it, he starts talking about how “we’ll be reimbursed” and “we’re gonna get paid.” It;s “Mexico will pay for the wall” all over again.

Then he pivots to attacking Barack Obama, implying without quite saying it that Obama “sided with Iran” because of his faith, resurfacing the conspiracy theories he has pushed since day one.

Strikes, Counterstrikes, and a Region on Fire

Overnight, US forces hit Iran’s largest petrochemical hub in Mahshahr, in Khuzestan province, which is Iran’s main oil producing region. A water pumping station in the same area was also struck, killing one person and injuring four, according to local officials. This was the third round of US strikes in roughly 24 hours, and Iran’s response to the previous round had already been the largest in months.

Iran’s IRGC claims it hit back in phases. First, targeting fuel and munitions storage at a base in Jordan. Then hitting facilities at a US airbase in Bahrain, including a hangar reportedly housing a surveillance aircraft. Then striking fuel tanks and air defense systems at bases in Kuwait. We are awaiting full confirmation on all of this. But footage did show smoke rising over the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain, and Jordan suspended flights out of Amman after strikes reportedly hit an airbase there.

Meanwhile satellite trackers spotted something worth watching closely. A US Special Forces support ship called the Ocean Trader was found sitting at a port in Oman that Iran struck just days earlier. The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has been tracked moving north in the Gulf of Oman without visible escort, well within range of Iranian missiles. And multiple Russian government aircraft, the kind normally used for top officials, have been flying from Moscow to Tehran. Add in a retired CENTCOM commander going on CBS to argue the US should consider seizing Iran’s Kharg Island as leverage in future negotiations, and you start to see the outline of something much bigger than airstrikes being floated.

The region is already spilling over. An Iranian plane carrying a Houthi delegation was blocked from landing in Yemen by Saudi airstrikes and had to divert. A suspected Iranian drone was spotted over Basra, possibly headed toward Kuwait. This is not staying contained.Oil Is Spiking and the Safety Net Is Almost Gone

US crude jumped nearly 5% today after Iran again declared the Strait closed, with prices near $75 a barrel. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is reportedly within striking distance of the level considered the floor for emergency operations. Once that cushion is gone, there’s nothing left to absorb a real supply shock. And yet Trump posted this morning that his approval rating is at 59% and that gas prices are falling, both of which massive lies.Rubio Declares War on the World Court

Marco Rubio published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Why We’re Dismantling the ICC,” arguing the court poses an existential threat to American sovereignty and could go after US military and law enforcement personnel. He accompanied it with a video framing the court as an unelected global tribunal trying to seize control of American law. This comes as the Trump regime faces growing scrutiny over its military conduct abroad and its immigration enforcement at home, and going after the institution that investigates war crimes while you’re actively expanding a war is not exactly subtle. They are terrified of real consequences when they are out of office. Rubio’s attacks on the ICC feel more like an admission of guilt than anything.Political Updates Surrounding Lindsey Graham’s Death

Trump is publicly pushing South Carolina’s governor to appoint Lindsey Graham’s sister, Darline, to fill his Senate seat, and reporting suggests that appointment is likely to happen. Governor of South Carolina Henry McMaster is holding an event later today to announce his pick to fill the seat temporarily. A special election for the permanent replacement will occur in August. McMaster is expected to select Trump’s choice of Graham’s sister.

A Judge Torches Trump’s Own IRS Lawsuit

A federal judge in Florida issued a scorching ruling against Trump’s lawsuit involving his own IRS and a so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund” settlement, finding the whole arrangement was cooked up for the appearance of legitimacy rather than any real legal dispute. The judge pointed directly at the fact that Trump’s own former lawyers, now running the Justice Department, negotiated a settlement with Trump’s current lawyers, meaning there was never any actual adversity between the two sides to begin with. She’s opened the door to possible sanctions and bar discipline for the attorneys involved. Read more at Meidas News.Another ICE Killing and More Domestic News

In Biddeford, Maine, a man was shot and killed by ICE agents Monday morning. Immigrant rights groups identified him as a 26-year-old Colombian man who was authorized to work in the US. Witnesses described a chaotic scene, a car spinning out of control in an intersection, agents pulling the driver out, and no one immediately going to help him as he lay in the street. One witness said she watched him bleed out and heard him say he was trying to stop. ICE is again claiming the man tried to run them over in his car. Thus far, witness accounts and video contradict their story. Protests are already underway in Maine.

Senator Adam Schiff’s office uncovered new contracts showing even more taxpayer money went toward giant Trump banners on federal buildings in Washington, including a nearly $39,000 Interior Department contract and a $114,000 FAA contract. Schiff called it propaganda paid for by the public and argued it violates long-standing restrictions on using tax dollars to glorify a sitting president.

In a written statement accompanied by a new photo, Mitch McConnell’s office yesterday released a statement attributed to their boss, which says he was “briefly unconscious” after his fall last month but did not suffer a heart attack or stroke. McConnell says he’s now recovering in a rehabilitation center after also developing pneumonia and won’t return to the Senate floor until doctors clear him. Though the photo of McConnell includes a newspaper with yesterday’s date, many folks still aren’t buying the story being presented by his team.ImageDemocrats Making Moves

Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation creating a $3,500 instant rebate for Californians buying their first electric vehicle, explicitly filling the gap left after Trump and Republicans killed the federal EV tax credit. He also signed a bill extending California’s CalCompetes business incentive program, which has already delivered over $1.8 billion in tax credits tied to tens of billions in investment and tens of thousands of jobs.

Newsom also made an announcement earlier to cut red tape in the state in order to build more housing.

Pete Buttigieg keynoted the Iowa Democratic Party’s annual dinner over the weekend, making the case for building a broader coalition rather than just talking to people who already agree, and tying pocketbook issues like diesel prices directly to the health of democracy itself.Twelve States Sue to Block a Media Mega-Merger

A coalition of a dozen Democratic-led states filed suit to block Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing it would hand one company, run by David Ellison, control over two news networks, two major studios, and two streaming services, while giving four companies control of more than 90% of top-grossing films. California’s attorney general is leading the effort and warning it would mean higher prices and less content for everyone from moviegoers to cable subscribers. Paramount says the deal raises no real antitrust concerns and plans to fight the suit.

That’s where things stand as of Monday afternoon. Let me know what you think in the comments, and thanks for spreading the word.

New York Times, Live Updates: Judge Says President’s Lawsuit With I.R.S. Was Self-Dealing, Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer, July 13, 2026. What We’re Covering Today.

• I.R.S. Settlement: A federal judge said in a scathing ruling on Monday that President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service was an improper exercise in self-dealing. The ruling did not explicitly kill the settlement that Mr. Trump worked out with his own government, but referred the attorney that brought the case to the Florida state bar for potential disciplinary action. Read more.
• Lindsey Graham: As Republicans scramble to replace the late Senator Lindsey Graham on the ballot in November, Mr. Trump recommended that South Carolina’s governor appoint Mr. Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, as a temporary replacement. Read more › 
• Supreme Court Security: Two Supreme Court justices, Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan, will testify before the Congress this week about the court’s $228 million budget request. It will be the first appearance by any justice before lawmakers since 2019. Read more ›

A judge issued a scathing ruling over Trump’s deal with the I.R.S.

A federal judge on Monday ruled that President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service was an improper exercise in self-dealing and barred him from claiming that the extraordinary tax protections he received were part of a legitimate settlement agreement.

In the order, the judge, Kathleen M. Williams, also referred the lawyer who brought Mr. Trump’s case against the I.R.S. to the Florida bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. Judge Williams added that she would forward her decision to the New York bar, which is already investigating the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche.

The decision by the Judge Williams did not explicitly kill the deal that Mr. Trump had worked out with his own government to receive what amounted to amnesty from investigations into tax returns that he, his family and their businesses have already filed. But Judge Williams’s scathing ruling exposed the negotiations between Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and senior officials at the Justice Department he controls for what she says they were: backroom dealings that did not arise from a legitimate legal process.

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the president and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law,” the judge wrote.

The 56-page decision, issued in Federal District Court in Miami, came two months after the Justice Department released a pair of documents purporting to be formal agreements that settled Mr. Trump’s remarkable suit against the I.R.S. The documents laid out a pair of separate but shocking moves — one granting the president, his family and his businesses wide-ranging immunity from tax inquiries and the other creating a $1.8 billion fund aimed at compensating allies of Mr. Trump who say they were the victims of so-called government weaponization.

After outcry from Republicans on Capitol Hill, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said the Justice Department would not move forward with the fund. But he said that Mr. Trump’s extraordinary protections from I.R.S. scrutiny would remain in place.

From the outset, Judge Williams, the Obama appointee who released the 56-page ruling in Federal District Court in Miami, had profound questions about the president’s suit. Because Trump was seeking damages from a part of the federal government that he controlled, the judge was concerned that he was effectively suing himself and was on both sides of the case.

The judge, Kathleen M. Williams, also referred the lawyer who brought President Trump’s case against the I.R.S. to the Florida bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. She added that she would forward her decision to the New York bar, which is already investigating the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche.

The agreement with the I.R.S. included a provision that gave President Trump, his family and his businesses potentially lucrative protection from agency investigations. In June, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said the Justice Department stood by the provision.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Monday Update: Congress is Frozen as it Returns to DC, Another ICE Shooting, Trump Takes Over Strait, McConnell Health Questions, Aaron Parnas, right, July 13, 2026. Congress is back in session, with hearings on the Epstein files, the Supreme Court, and a renewed push to pass the SAVE Act. And right now, it is completely frozen.

Meanwhile, President Trump says the United States is taking over the Strait of Hormuz as the conflict with Iran escalates. He also posted a bizarre tribute to Lindsey Graham. Questions continue to swirl around Mitch McConnell’s health, with few in either party convinced by the recently released “proof of life” photo. And another ICE-related shooting has now occurred, this time in Maine.

I’ll be bringing you real-time updates throughout the week. We have interviews lined up with governors, Hakeem Jeffries, Epstein survivors, members of Congress, and more. Our next paid subscriber live event will be Wednesday evening at 7:45 p.m. ET, immediately following Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing.

To say this will be a busy week is an understatement. If you want to support my live reporting, keep me caffeinated, and help independent journalism continue to grow, please subscribe or upgrade your subscription today. Your support makes this work possible, especially at a time when independent media is under increasing pressure.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

Congress returns to Session:

Congress returns to Washington this week as Senate Republicans scramble to replace the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, whose death has complicated the GOP’s legislative agenda. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster is expected to appoint an interim senator within days, with a special Republican primary scheduled for Aug. 11 to choose a nominee for the November election. Graham’s death also leaves Republicans down a key vote as they try to advance President Trump’s priorities, including a major reconciliation package, while Senate Budget Committee leadership is in transition. Combined with Sen. Mitch McConnell’s continued absence due to his month-long hospitalization, Republicans are effectively operating with two fewer senators as they try to move legislation through the chamber.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled two days of confirmation hearings this week for acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, though it remains unclear whether the death of committee member Sen. Lindsey Graham will affect the process. Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee has announced that the confirmation process for Clayton is back on track.

Republicans in both the House and Senate remain divided over President Trump’s renewed push for the SAVE America Act, which would restrict mail-in voting and impose new nationwide election rules. While the House previously passed the measure largely along party lines, it currently has no viable path through the Senate because of unified Democratic opposition and resistance from some Republicans.

Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan are scheduled to testify before Congress this week as the federal judiciary seeks nearly $9.7 billion in funding, including a significant increase for judicial security following a rise in threats against judges. Barrett is expected to speak from personal experience after multiple security incidents, including a swatting attempt at her home earlier this year and other threats targeting her family. Although the hearings are focused on the judiciary's budget, lawmakers are also expected to question the justices about ethics, court leaks, prediction markets, and recent Supreme Court rulings. Barrett could face scrutiny over her votes joining the majority in cases rejecting President Trump's attempts to end birthright citizenship and impose broad tariffs, decisions that have drawn criticism from some conservatives despite her generally conservative voting record.

Speaker Mike Johnson and House Budget Committee Republicans reportedly spent the weekend at Camp David trying to finalize a reconciliation package but left without reaching an agreement, according to Politico. Johnson and NRCC Chair Richard Hudson are expected to meet with President Trump at the White House today as negotiations continue. The talks have become even more complicated following the sudden death of Senate Budget Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, who had been leading the bill’s path through the Senate.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has reportedly asked JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon to explain the bank’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and detail his own knowledge of those ties. According to the Financial Times, Warren also asked whether Dimon sought advice from Epstein while lobbying against a U.K. tax on banker bonuses. The request comes as scrutiny of Epstein’s financial and political connections continues to intensify.

Trump posted, what many have called, a “bizarre” tribute to Sen. Lindsey Graham on Truth Social alongside a photo of himself wearing a "Make Iran Great Again" hat and holding a mock Wikipedia page labeling him the "Acting President of Venezuela," a reference to January's U.S. operation that captured Nicolás Maduro.

Trump reflected on his relationship with the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, saying Graham's only real misstep was his criticism after January 6. Trump recalled Graham later called him and said, "Did I really say that? I can't believe it," before taking it back, adding, "So I give him a 99.9 instead of 100."

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster now faces a pivotal decision after Sen. Lindsey Graham's death, as he will appoint an interim senator to serve until January while Republicans hold a special primary on Aug. 11 to choose a nominee for the November election. The compressed timeline favors well-known Republican candidates with strong political networks, and the eventual nominee will face Democratic candidate Annie Andrews, though the GOP remains heavily favored in the deep-red state. Rep. Joe Wilson has already expressed interest in the seat and is viewed as one of the potential contenders.

Iran News:

President Trump said the United States intends to maintain control over the Strait of Hormuz following recent military operations, declaring, "We're gonna keep the strait, and we'll probably run it. We'll become the guardian of the strait." He added that the U.S. should be compensated for that role, saying, "We should be reimbursed for that. When we do that, we're gonna be reimbursed. We're gonna get paid."

Donald Trump was on the verge of making more racist remarks about President Obama, but caught himself briefly. Trump criticized Obama over Iran, saying, "Obama was the worst of all because Obama actually went to their side," before cutting himself off and adding, "because, you know, he's a... well, let's not say. Let's leave that for another time."

Mitch McConnell

Senator Mitch McConnell’s office released the first photo of him since his June 14 hospitalization, along with a statement saying he was briefly unconscious after a fall but did not suffer a heart attack or stroke. The statement said he later developed a mild case of pneumonia, has been transferred to a rehabilitation center, and is continuing to recover. Despite the update, several individuals on the right and the left questioned the authenticity of the photo and statement, arguing that only an unedited video would prove McConnell’s condition. Some also cited previously reported emergency dispatch audio referencing CPR and accused his office of withholding information.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear says he is “concerned” about Sen. Mitch McConnell’s month-long hospitalization, arguing that while elected officials deserve medical privacy, they also have a responsibility to keep the public informed. “If you’re in the hospital for an entire month, you owe it to the people who elected you to give them an update,” Beshear said.

Other news:

One person is dead after a shooting involving ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday morning, according to Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau. Maine State Police are on the scene gathering details, and Fecteau said he expects the FBI to investigate the incident. Authorities have not yet released additional information about what led to the shooting or the identity of the person who was killed.

Japan is creating its first centralized intelligence agency since World War II as Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi seeks to strengthen the country's national security amid growing threats from China, Russia, and North Korea. The new agency will coordinate intelligence gathering across government departments, replacing Japan's long-fragmented system, and is being developed with advice from allies including the United States, Australia, and Germany. The effort is part of a broader push by Takaichi to expand Japan's defense capabilities, protect sensitive technologies, and counter espionage and foreign influence operations. Critics warn the agency could erode civil liberties and revive concerns about government surveillance, while supporters argue it is a necessary modernization to address increasingly complex security threats.

Sen. Adam Schiff says newly uncovered government documents show the Trump administration awarded additional taxpayer-funded contracts to produce and install large promotional banners featuring President Trump and "America First" branding on federal buildings in Washington, D.C. Schiff's office identified contracts worth roughly $39,000 at the Department of the Interior and more than $114,000 at the FAA, adding to previously reported banner spending. Schiff argues the expenditures violate longstanding federal prohibitions on using taxpayer money for government propaganda and self-promotion, and is calling for congressional oversight. The Trump administration has not publicly responded, and the legality of the spending has not been decided in court.

A new report from Physicians for Human Rights and UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center found that law enforcement officers misused crowd-control weapons in 412 verified incidents across 16 U.S. cities during protests against the Trump administration's immigration enforcement between June 2025 and May 2026. The report says the incidents resulted in at least 203 injuries and documented cases of officers firing projectiles at protesters' heads and deploying tear gas in enclosed spaces. Researchers said the highest concentration of alleged abuses occurred in cities where former Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino oversaw operations.

According to Reuters, the White House is preparing to bring together utility companies, data center developers, and state leaders to announce a voluntary pledge aimed at ensuring the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure does not raise electricity bills for households and businesses. The initiative builds on an earlier agreement signed by major tech companies, including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI, committing to pay for the power generation and grid upgrades needed for their AI projects instead of shifting those costs onto existing ratepayers. The administration hopes expanding the pledge to utilities and other stakeholders will ease concerns that AI’s massive electricity demand could drive up consumer energy prices. The move is part of President Trump’s broader push to rapidly expand U.S. AI infrastructure while avoiding political backlash over rising utility bills.

Acclaimed New Zealand actor Sam Neill, best known for playing Dr. Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park franchise, has died at the age of 78, his family announced. They said his death was sudden and unexpected, though he remained cancer-free after undergoing treatment for a rare form of blood cancer. Neill appeared in more than 150 film and television productions over a career spanning five decades, including The Hunt for Red October, The Piano, Event Horizon, Peaky Blinders, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Tributes poured in from leaders including New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, as well as fellow actors who praised his talent, humor, and lasting impact on the film industry.

Keystone pipeline operator South Bow has agreed to pay a $26.9 million civil penalty and spend about $40 million on safety improvements to settle allegations stemming from the massive 2022 oil spill in Kansas, one of the largest onshore crude pipeline spills in the U.S. in nearly a decade. The proposed settlement also requires more than $3 million for environmental restoration projects in Kansas. Federal officials said the spill released nearly 13,000 barrels of crude oil, harmed or killed more than 2,700 animals, and was linked to construction and soil-compaction failures dating back to the pipeline's installation.

Public health advocates are accusing the Trump administration of filling the EPA’s Science Advisory Committee on Chemicals with industry-aligned scientists who they say have financial conflicts of interest and could benefit from weaker chemical regulations. A coalition of environmental groups alleges at least 13 proposed appointees have ties to companies that manufacture or use chemicals the committee is expected to review, raising concerns the panel could help justify deregulation. The EPA rejected those claims, arguing that prior industry employment or consulting work does not automatically constitute a conflict of interest under federal law and that such experience can reflect scientific expertise.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is being drained again for additional repairs after President Trump's multimillion-dollar renovation ran into problems, including peeling paint, algae blooms, and alleged vandalism. The setback has disappointed tourists hoping to see the restored landmark, while Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said the latest work is also intended to clean up debris from the July 4 fireworks and repair vandalism. Trump has blamed vandals for damaging the pool's new liner, and one former Olympian has pleaded not guilty to federal charges alleging he caused about $1,000 in damage. 

Trump Team Opressions, Obsessions, Corruption

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Oligarchy in Action: The Case of Corporate Tax Cuts, Paul Krugman, right, July 13, 2026. 'How big money trumps the people’s will — and how to reclaim democracy.

I’ve written on a number of occasions about what I called, in yesterday’s primer, the downward spiral of oligarchy in America: The political power of the hyper-wealthy tilts policy in their favor, and this policy tilt reinforces the wealth and power of that tiny minority. In today’s post I’ll follow up by focusing on one especially clear example: The drastic fall over time in taxes on corporate profits, despite overwhelming popular opinion that corporate taxes are too low, not too high.

As I pointed out in yesterday’s primer, the best available explanations for the huge rise in wealth concentration at the topof the distribution emphasize the large decline in tax progressivity since the 1970s, which greatly reduced tax rates on high-income individuals. In particular, lower taxes on income from capital made it possible for the already wealthy to accumulate ever more wealth.

A crucial change was a drastic fall in taxes on corporate profits, most of which indirectly fall on stockholders. Here is a chart from the most recent primer, which shows the change in corporate taxes as a share of profits over time:

This massive decline in corporate taxation – from 35% in the 1960s to around 12% today -- benefits the people who own corporations. Not surprisingly, equity ownership is highly concentrated among the wealthy. The Distributional National Accounts produced by Gabriel Zucman and colleagues include an estimate of the effective federal tax rate on the top 0.01% of the income distribution, broken down by the kind of tax. They find a drastic decline in taxes at the top, mainly driven by the decline in corporate taxes:

I should acknowledge that there is dispute both about just how much taxes for those at the top of the income distributionhave declined and about the sources of that decline, which largely rests on the question of the extent to which corporate tax cuts trickle down to workers and consumers. Zucman and colleagues assume very little trickle down. As I’ll explain in a moment, recent experience supports their view. But I should acknowledge that there is a dispute.

My main point, however, is that the big reductions in corporate taxes have taken place without broad public support — in fact, in the teeth of very broad public opposition.

Gallup has been surveying Americans about their views on taxes on a regular basis for more than 20 years. Public opinion on corporate taxes has barely changed over time. A huge majority consistently says that corporations pay too little, while hardly anyone says they pay too much:

Americans, then, overwhelmingly believe that corporate taxes should go up — yet they keep going down. Why?

Part of the answer is campaign finance, which was increasingly dominated by the interests of capital even before Citizens United unleashed a tsunami of billionaire money:

Another part of the answer is corruption. Before Trump 2.0 political corruption was generally disguised and implicit: Politicians and political staffers favored corporate interests because of incentives like the revolving door, in which they could expect to move on to well-paid employment as lobbyists. These days, thanks to Trump, political graft is open and direct: much of it is simply cash, crypto and sweetheart contracts that enrich politicians and their families.

In addition, big money has gained the ability to shape the information environment. Right-wing think tanks, subsidized “research” and captured media relentlessly push the interests of billionaires. This shifts the Overton Window, the range of policies conventional wisdom considers acceptable: even centrists often end up viewing billionaire-friendly policies as sensible and reasonable, while other policies — even policies that were considered perfectly normal in the past, like high taxes on profits — are viewed as radical and irresponsible.

A key part of the argument that corporate taxes must be kept low is the claim that the United States is competing with other nations for a limited pool of global capital, and that if we have higher corporate taxes than other nations, the capital will go elsewhere. Correspondingly, advocates of further cuts in corporate taxes claim that such cuts will generate huge inflows of capital from abroad, leading to higher economic growth and wages for workers.

So it’s worth pointing out that Trump did, in fact, slash corporate taxes in 2017. What happened as a result? Basically, nothing, except that corporations paid even less in taxes.

True, some corporations revised their accounting fictions, reassigning some profits they had booked with subsidiaries in Ireland and other low-tax nations back to the parent company. But there was no huge surge in US investment.

This experience convinced me that there is very little trickle-down from corporate tax cuts. Thus the huge decline in corporate tax rates since 1970 was, in fact, a huge indirect tax cut for wealthy individuals who own lots of stock. And this, as I noted earlier, fueled America’s spiral into oligarchy, in which growing concentration of wealth at the top generates the resources to further tilt economic and political policies in their favor.

Is the system rigged? Yes, it is. Can we unrig it? Yes, we can. If you look back at the chart showing the downward trend in tax rate on the top 0.01%, you will see that there were significant although temporary reversals in that trend under both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (reflecting, in Obama’s case, tax hikes to pay for expanded healthcare.) Right-wingers predicted disaster from these tax hikes, which never materialized.

What we need going forward is for voters to elect candidates who are committed to reversing the downward spiral of oligarchy. Realistically this means electing Democrats who are committed to raising taxes on the wealthy. Beyond that, it means rejecting Democrats — like, alas, Sen. Gillibrand of New York — who accept tainted corporate campaign funds and sweetheart perks bestowed on themselves and family members. Furthermore, once in power, Democrats must pass laws that stop lawmakers and their family members from engaging in corrupt enrichment.

Perhaps in a perverse way we can thank Trump: things are so nightmarishly bad that we may have the best chance in decades of finally breaking out of the oligarchy trap.Paul KrugmanJul 13

The Hartmann Report, Opinion and Advocacy: The Oligarch's Warning: This Fall, America Decides Which of Russia's Four Futures to Follow, Thom Hartmann, right, July 13, 2026. Continued fromm above:

The Economist just published an extraordinary profile of Andrey Melnichenko, whose fertilizer, coal, energy, and logistics empire accounts for roughly one full percent of Russia’s entire GDP, and who was the richest man in the country when Putin invaded Ukraine.

For twenty years Melnichenko lived the bargain Putin offered Russia’s oligarchs: stay out of politics and you can keep your fortune, your yacht, your villa in Switzerland. Then came the Ukraine war, the sanctions, and finally the shakedown.

In 2023, Putin’s prosecutors moved to confiscate one of Melnichenko’s Siberian power companies, and the case quietly evaporated two weeks later, right after he donated 32 billion rubles, about $335 million, to a school for gifted children that operates under Putin’s personal patronage.

In a fully realized oligarchy — like Putin has established in Russia and Trump is trying to create here with pardons and government contracts essentially for sale — that’s what legal property rights become: a subscription service, renewable at the pleasure of the man at the top.

Melnichenko told The Economist that he can see only four possible futures for Russia if it stays on the current course Putin is pursuing, every one of them grim:

— It can crawl back to a victorious West as a defeated vassal, which he predicts would provoke the same revanchist rage that the Versailles treaty incubated in Germany a century ago and that led straight to World War II.— It can settle permanently into China’s orbit as a resource colony with a flag and faint appearance of independence.— It can fragment into civil conflict, with warlords fighting over the pieces of a nuclear-armed state.— Or it can finish its transformation into a continental North Korea, a garrison society sustained by rationing, repression, isolation, and what he describes as turning “external confrontation into a permanent instrument of domestic politics.”

That fourth scenario, which he says is under serious discussion inside the Kremlin, describes a government that identifies permanent enemies abroad and at home to justify permanent repression of its own citizens.

Anyone who’s watched masked federal agents disappearing people off American streets, or read this administration’s directives treating its domestic political opposition as a terrorist threat, or looked at the blueprints for that fence around Lafayette Square, has seen the early architecture of exactly that.

And Melnichenko’s preferred alternative for Russia against these four possibilities? He names it, with a candor you rarely hear from men of his class, as “oligarchy in the classical sense of the word.”

Rule by elites. Businessmen, technocrats, and nationalists would govern the country together, cutting deals among themselves because the four alternatives threaten their fortunes and their family dynasties, while ordinary Russians continue receiving what he frankly admits has so far been “a simulation of participation.”

Surprised that a billionaire’s best imaginable future for his nation is rule by billionaires?

Ours have been saying the same thing out loud for years about America. Peter Thiel, the money behind JD Vance’s entire political career, wrote for the Cato Institute back in 2009 that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and he and many of his morbidly rich colleagues have spent the years since funding politicians and projects built explicitly to act on that conviction.

Melnichenko is a useful analyst for this critical time in both Russian and American history precisely because he’s no cartoon villain, and he’s barely ideological at all.

Ammonia from his plants ends up in Russian munitions, he coordinates with Putin’s military and secret police to protect his factories from Ukrainian drones, and he explicitly avoids “moral judgments” about things like democracy because he considers them a “distraction” from “designing systems that work.” Sort of like when Elon Musk said:

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.“

Honoré de Balzac gets credit for the observation that, “Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,” and Melnichenko’s own history, which began with an illegal currency exchange run out of a Moscow State University dorm room and protected by moonlighting police cadets, fits the pattern comfortably.

His way of thinking is common among men who’ve accumulated billions: they deal in what works, what maintains stability, what’s most efficient, and who can be bought or brought along, while “esoteric” and “idealistic” concepts like democracy, individual rights, and “the pursuit of happiness” only enter the calculation as variables to be managed.

That same mindset built America’s modern oligarchy. Exxon’s own scientists, for example, predicted global warming with alarming internal memos starting in the late 1970s, and the company’s executives, having weighed the future of our planet and our children against their bottom line, spent the next four decades funding lies to keep us burning their product and filling their money bins.

It was nothing personal: they were simply setting aside empathy while optimizing their own incomes, and the habitability of our planet was simply a variable.

The blueprint for the larger project was drafted in 1971, when tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell, two months before Nixon put him on the Supreme Court, sent a confidential memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce calling on American business to organize, fund, and capture the universities, the media, the courts, and the American political system itself.

Out of that memo grew the think tanks, the “scholars for hire,” and the vast rightwing media machines that have spent five decades teaching Americans to distrust their own government, oligarchs arguing essentially that oligarchy is preferable to democracy.

Reagan’s functional suspension of our anti-monopoly laws in the 1980s then let a handful of men amass fortunes larger than any human beings had ever held, morbidly rich on a scale even the pharaohs never dreamed of, and today those men fund virtually every Republican in Congress along with a distressing number of Democrats.

Their wholly-owned toadies on the Supreme Court have spent the last half-century legalizing the purchase of the American government, a story I tell at length in my new book Who Killed the American Dream?

The foundation was a fraudulent headnote slipped into an 1886 Supreme Court decision falsely claiming the Court had ruled that corporations are persons with rights under the 14th Amendment; Citizens United built on that fraud in 2010 by declaring that corporate and billionaire money is constitutionally protected speech.

But it gets worse: in 2024 the Court’s six corrupt Republicans ruled in Snyder v. United States that officials who take payments after performing favors have merely accepted legal “gratuities” rather than bribes. Yeah, billionaires can now legally give tips to judges and politicians.

And just two weeks ago the same six on-the-take justices struck down the post-Watergate limits on coordinated party spending, freeing the morbidly rich to invisibly pour unlimited money through the parties directly into their chosen candidates’ campaigns, four months before the midterms. Justice Kagan warned in dissent that the RNC and DNC can now simply function as an oligarch’s or corporation’s secret checking account for their selected candidates and the public will never know who bought their election and owns their politicians.

Putin’s oligarchs and ours arrived by opposite roads: his through a state that swallowed its billionaires and ours through billionaires who swallowed their state, but the citizens of both countries ended up in the same place under either arrangement: on the outside, holding a “simulation of participation” while men like Musk buy our elections and the favors our politicians can bestow.

So Americans should ask the question Melnichenko asked about Russia: What futures are actually on our menu? I can count four, and the parallels are uncomfortable.

The first is aristocratic dictatorship. America completes its realignment away from the world’s democracies and toward Moscow, Beijing, and the Gulf monarchies that Trump and Vance so visibly admire, and the world gets run as a cartel of strongmen and sovereign wealth funds while our Constitution becomes a mere decoration. Much of our current foreign policy already points in this direction.

The second is civil conflict that tears our country apart. Prominent voices on the right have been openly fantasizing about civil war for years, and a government that expects to be loved doesn’t need a ten-foot fence around Lafayette Square or gates across Pennsylvania Avenue. Building permanent infrastructure to wall off protest four months before a national election shouts at us that Trump and Vance are planning for a coming confrontation with the American people.

The third is slow imperial decline, the road Britain walked after the two world wars: a once-dominant nation growing gradually poorer, shabbier, and more irrelevant while its aristocracy extracts whatever’s left. This is oligarchy’s default trajectory, the one we’re already on if nothing dramatic intervenes, and it ends with our grandchildren living in a country that used to matter but is now subject to the whims of its oligarchs and more powerful nations.

The fourth is democratic renewal, the road Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt opened and JFK and LBJ paved: breaking up concentrated wealth and power, taxing the morbidly rich, and building the healthcare, education, childcare, and retirement security that working people in Scandinavia and most of the rest of the developed world now take for granted.

Unlike the other three, this future has a living constituency and a vibrancy that’s been missing from the American political scene since the days of JFK.

Just three weeks ago, voters across New York swept young progressives and democratic socialists into Democratic nominations, toppling establishment incumbents despite millions in super PAC money arrayed against them, because ordinary Americans keep voting for economic democracy whenever somebody credible actually offers it.

Russia is probably too far down the road of tyranny to make a sudden transition like this back to democracy; its independent press is dead, its opposition leaders are in prison, in exile, or in the ground, and even its billionaire would-be reformer can’t imagine anything better than a politer class of elites running the place.

We’re not there yet. Our elections still mostly count, some of our courts still hold, our press is battered but breathing, and we still retain the right, for now, to stand in front of the White House and say, “No!” Every one of those things is on the ballot this November, and the people fencing off Lafayette Square understand that better than most.

Melnichenko offered one more observation that applies as much to Washington as to Moscow:

The Russian regime looked absolutely impregnable in 1913, and again in 1986, and both of those governments were gone within a few years. He quotes former Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar’s line that, “Big changes come later than we think but earlier than we expect.”

That’s true of dictatorships, and it’s equally true of oligarchies as I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy

Working people get angry when confronted with an exploitative rule by the rich and then rise up in revolt. We can see this happening in Argentina right this moment.

At that point, a nation’s leadership must choose between abandoning oligarchy and going back to democracy — as we did with Lincoln taking on the oligarchs of the Confederacy in 1861, and FDR’s New Deal presidency in 1933 — or bringing down the iron fist and converting the oligarchy into dictatorship, as Putin did in Russia.

Oligarchy, as I detail in that book, is always a transitional form of government that either reverts to democracy or transitions to dictatorship. It rarely last more than a single generation.

Thus, which kind of sudden change America experiences — the hard snap into strongman rule or the breaking of billionaire power over our government, purging dark money, and a restoration of democracy — will largely be decided by what we all do between now and the first Tuesday in November.

They’re building a fence around the town square, so our answer must be to make it useless by showing up everywhere they can’t fence. Call your senators and representative through the Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and demand they block the permanent fencing of Lafayette Square and pass real protections for the November election.

Check your voter registration today at vote.org, because purges are already underway in multiple Red states, and save the Election Protection hotline, 866-OUR-VOTE, in your phone right now.

Democracy, as Bernie said on my program every Friday for 11 years, has never been a spectator sport, and this is the year that old cliché becomes literal. If this article helped you see the stakes, please share it widely and support independent journalism by subscribing at hartmannreport.com; the oligarchs own their media, and we have to sustain our own.

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

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Give Blanche’s Hearing to the Epstein Survivoirs, William Kristol, right, July 13, 2026. A year ago, on July 17, 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche hurried to an emergency evening meeting in the White House Situation Room with his fellow Trump administration apparatchiks. Its location might suggest it had to do with national security. It didn’t. It was about the political security of Donald Trump.

Ten days earlier, the Trump administration had tried to close the door on the Jeffrey Epstein matter. The Justice Department and the FBI had announced that the Epstein investigation was complete, that nothing further could or should be done, and no new documents would be made public. But that effort to stonewall was already falling apart. Now it had to be replaced with a more elaborate coverup.

Orchestrating that coverup was the point of the Situation Room meeting. A week later, Blanche flew to Florida to meet with Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell and ensure she continued not to talk. A week after that, Maxwell was transferred to a cushy federal prison. Since then, Blanche has since presided over the Justice Department’s non-compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, as well as the botching of the legally required redactions of names of and details concerning several Epstein survivors. In short, Blanche has been central to the Epstein coverup.

This week Blanche will be appearing before the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, making the case for his confirmation as attorney general.

There are, needless to say, many important issues to raise with Blanche, who has been shameless in turning the United States Justice Department into Trump’s personal law firm. But if Democratic senators want to stop him—or if, failing that, they at least want to weaken him and the Trump administration’s assault on the rule of law—the Epstein coverup should be their focus.

As we saw after the failed attempt to stonewall the Epstein case, and as we have seen since in the none-too-successful coverup, the Epstein case matters to the public. And the public isn’t pleased with what they’ve seen from the Trump administration.

We are also, to say the least, not pleased with what we’ve seen. That’s why we’re building a community dedicated to a better kind of politics. Join us.Subscribed

For example, a poll last month showed that seventy-five percent of Americans—including sixty-six percent of Republicans—believe that the federal government is continuing to hide information about Epstein and his clients. And just ten percent of Americans—and just twenty-one percent of Republicans—think the Trump administration has helped deliver justice in cases connected to Epstein.

And our colleague Sarah Longwell reports that “voters still bring up the files, often unprompted, in many of the focus groups we conduct. And it’s not just partisan Democrats; we hear it from all kinds of groups—men, women, young, old, Republicans of all stripes, from three-time Trump voters to Biden-to-Trump flippers.”

Here are a couple of examples from Sarah’s focus groups:

“Obviously it’s all a coverup from Trump originally being like he didn’t want it to be released,” said Allison, a 2024 Trump voter who now disapproves of the job the president is doing. “He was very dismissive about it. A reporter was mentioning Epstein, he’s like, ‘Why are we still talking about this guy?’ It’s like, why would we stop talking about him?”

And,

A 2024 Trump voter named Wednesday offered the most damning critique: “I watched the dozens of women victims go on TV, go on interviews, and beg this administration and this president for help. . . . Trump got on TV and called what they were saying and the Epstein files a ‘Democratic hoax.’”

Democratic senators can highlight Blanche’s leadership of the coverup and make him try to defend it. As Sarah puts it, “When voters scroll through their social media feeds after the hearing, Democrats should ensure that they get clip after clip of Blanche squirming to justify his handling of the Epstein files.”

It’s also likely that when Blanche testifies on Wednesday, Epstein survivors will be present. Will Blanche, who has refused to meet with them, acknowledge them? Will he apologize for the botched redaction process over which he presided that exposed them to further pain and harassment? Will he repudiate Trump’s dismissal of them?

On Thursday, Democrats intend to use their limited ability to call witnesses to have at least one courageous Epstein survivor appear. That testimony could be the highlight of the hearing.

Recent experience suggests that it will be difficult to persuade Republican senators to break with Trump—though Epstein is the one issue on which Republicans in Congress have notably done so. But if Republicans do stick with Trump and Blanche is confirmed, this will dramatically make the case for why Republicans need to be deprived of continued control of the Senate. If Susan Collins in Maine and Dan Sullivan in Alaska and Jon Husted in Ohio and Ashley Moody in Florida and Roger Marshall in Kansas vote for Blanche, voters in their states will have a chance this November to hold them accountable, and to ensure greater accountability over the next two years for the Trump administration.

And by the way, do John Cornyn and Thom Tillis and Bill Cassidy want to end their last terms in the Senate voting to enable the ongoing Epstein coverup?

It’s worth noting that defeating Blanche—and/or removing Republicans who would prevent serious oversight and legislation in 2027 and 2028—would not only mean a chance at justice for Epstein survivors and for the truth about Epstein. It would also weaken the Trump administration’s ability to continue its project of what NYU law professor Ryan Goodman calls “radical lawlessness,” which is intensifying and, if unchecked by Congress, will continue to intensify.

Democrats in Congress often lament their inability to affect the course of events in the era of Trump. This week’s confirmation hearing provides them a chance to act.

The U.S. Supreme Court, as portrayed by its official photo and in a 2024 magazine cover portrait, at top, by The New Yorker artist Anita Kunz illustrating the magazine's analysis "The Face of Justice" by Françoise Mouly.

New York Times, With Threats Rising, Supreme Court Asks Congress to Increase Security Funds, Ann E. Marimow, July 13, 2026. Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Elena Kagan are scheduled to make a rare appearance at the Capitol to testify about the court’s more than $200 million request.

The Supreme Court is asking for millions of dollars from Congress to draft plans for a new facility to screen visitors outside the court’s home on Capitol Hill, as security threats against the justices mount.

The $6.5 million proposal is preliminary but could result in visitors at the court being moved out of the building for screening, a setup similar to that adopted at the Capitol with the opening of a visitor’s center in 2008.

Budget documents show the justices asked for money to design a new facility as part of an overall $228 million request for the budget year that begins Oct. 1, an increase of about $20 million.

Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett are scheduled to make a rare appearance at the Capitol on Tuesday to defend the court’s budget before House and Senate subcommittees, the first time justices will have testified before Congress since 2019.

Threats against the justices, their families and other federal judges have risen dramatically in recent years, data from the U.S. Marshals show.

After a draft of the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked in 2022, an armed man tried to assassinate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh at his home.

In May, police said they determined that Justice Barrett’s Northern Virginia home had been the target of a “swatting” attack, in which a false tip reporting gunshots was called in to prompt a law enforcement response. Last year, police officers in South Carolina were dispatched to the home of one of Justice Barrett’s sisters because of a threat that there was a pipe bomb in her mailbox, which proved to be a hoax.ImageJustices Elena Kagan, second from left, and Amy Coney Barrett, at right, are scheduled to appear at the Capitol on Tuesday, the first time justices will have testified before Congress since 2019. Credit...Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

The court’s budget proposal also requests an increase of $14.6 million to continue the expansion of the court’s in-house police force and for security when the justices travel outside the Washington area.

And the justices have asked for additional funding for a regional command post to be located outside the court complex for the officers responsible for securing the justices’ homes. The post is intended to “improve reaction time in case of an emergency,” according to budget documents. They’ve also requested $2.3 million to hire engineers and developers to protect the work of the justices from “quickly evolving cyberthreats.”

Congress has largely deferred to the justices on issues of security, and lawmakers have approved additional funding for them on a bipartisan basis. Lawmakers have until Sept. 30 to pass a new spending bill for the next fiscal year.

“I want to give them all of the security they need,” Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said this spring of the justices.

But, she added, “the court has to come up here, tell us what you’re doing. We have no idea what you spend the money on.”

That kind of request has resulted in Tuesday’s visit by the justices, who are scheduled to testify before a House subcommittee in the morning and in front of senators in the afternoon.

The Supreme Court’s budget request includes two parts — money for salaries and general operations and, separately, expenditures to maintain the court’s building and grounds, which includes the request for funds for a new courthouse visitor’s entrance.

Justices Kagan and Barrett are scheduled to discuss only the first part, though they could be asked about either.

And lawmakers’ questions on Tuesday could range beyond the budget. The justices could be asked about some of their more contested recent rulings, their decisions to take part in or recuse from key cases and more.

The Supreme Court’s decisions in recent years — especially the overturning of Roe and the grant of immunity to President Trump from prosecution for official acts — have led some Democrats to call for an overhaul of the court. Lawmakers and candidates have proposed term limits for the life-tenured justices and to add justices to the bench to restore “balance” on the nine-member court that now has six justices nominated by Republicans.

The testimony from Justice Kagan, a liberal, and Justice Barrett, a conservative, will come two weeks after the Supreme Court wrapped up a momentous term with rulings that frustrated both Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The court blocked Mr. Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States to undocumented immigrants, but significantly weakened the landmark Voting Rights Act, clearing the way for Republicans throughout the South to redraw congressional maps.

Until recently, it was common for sitting Supreme Court justices to appear each year before Congress. Justices testified at least once every year from 1960 through 2011, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service.

More recently, the relationship between the Supreme Court and Congress has been occasionally fraught, particularly when the Democrats controlled the Senate and were pressuring the court to adopt a code of ethics specific to the nine justices.

Justices last appeared before Congress in 2019, when Justices Kagan and Samuel A. Alito Jr. were politely quizzed about their views on the possibility of televising the Supreme Court’s oral arguments and whether the justices would draft an ethics code.

But after revelations that Justice Clarence Thomas had failed to report gifts and luxury travel paid for by a Texas billionaire in 2023, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. declined a request to appear before Congress.

Such appearances, the chief justice wrote at the time, are “exceedingly rare, as one might expect in light of separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.” The invitation came from Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who then led the Senate Judiciary Committee. Later that year, the justices issued a broad code of conduct that was praised as a first step but also criticized for lacking an enforcement mechanism.ImageA Fairfax County Police officer blocks the street for abortion-rights activists as they march toward the home of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in Falls Church, Va., in 2022.Credit...Nathan Howard/Getty Images

At Tuesday’s hearings, Justices Kagan and Barrett will likely strive to focus only on their budget request and court security, potentially touching on how the increase in threats has changed the daily lives of Supreme Court justices in the last decade.

Before the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, who was hunting in Texas without official security when he died in 2016, most of the justices drove themselves to and from work and were frequently spotted without a security detail while performing ordinary errands like grocery shopping.

But since protests erupted outside the justices’ homes after the leak of the abortion decision, they now have round-the-clock security, including at their homes, and are accompanied at all times by members of the court’s police force.

Justice Clarence Thomas spoke about the changes at a judicial conference in Florida in May.

“Because of security concerns, we’re not able to move around as much as I used to,” the justice said, describing how he no longer takes law clerks on an annual trip to Gettysburg, Pa., and spends more time at home making pulled pork.

In recent years, the court transitioned from relying on U.S. Marshals to protect the justices’ homes to assigning that role to the U.S. Supreme Court Police. The court has dramatically expanded the size of its in-house police force because of “evolving risks that require continuous protection,” according to another recent budget proposal.

A recruiting video says the police force includes “more than 200 sworn officers and growing” and advertises the role as: “The highest court. A higher calling.”

Data from the U.S. Marshals Service, which oversees security for the entire federal judiciary, showed there were more than 600 threats against judges in fiscal 2023, the year after the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion. The U.S. Marshals reported a 57 percent increase in significant security incidents for judges in fiscal 2025 and the number was on track to rise again in fiscal 2026, according to the judiciary’s budget proposal.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Trump Fired Pam Bondi the Day After DOJ Agreed to Share Epstein Files with New Mexico, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 13, 2026.Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee will take place on Wednesday and Thursday.

I’m pessimistic any Republican on the Committee will object to formally installing Trump’s defense attorney as Attorney General. Thom Tillis, who plays a big game of opposing January 6, doesn’t find Blanche’s coddling of terrorists (most recently with the dismissal of the Proud Boy leader verdicts against those who appealed) disqualifying.

But Blanche’s role in covering up the Epstein files may still incur a political cost. I’ve described Katie Phang’s attempts to force Blanche to adhere to the Epstein Transparency Act here; her response to Blanche’s excuses for not doing so is due today, with Blanche’s reply due next Monday, so all that may take too long to stave off a Senate vote. The survivors have taken out a billboard trying to hold him accountable.

Perhaps most interesting, though, is a letter that New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sent to Blanche last month, reported by MS-Now here, demanding that DOJ finally turn over files relevant to his investigation of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes in the state. It laid out a timeline showing how DOJ has given him the runaround, promising cooperation but ultimately giving him none.

• I. February 13, 2026 — Written correspondence to then-Deputy Attorney General Blanche requesting access to a specific EFTA document and all related Zorro Ranch investigative materials.
• II. March 13, 2026 — Formal letter to Attorney General Bondi identifying five illustrative redacted EFTA documents and requesting access to complete, unredacted versions of all pertinent records.
• III. April 1, 2026 — Telephone conference with Associate Deputy Attorney General Diego Pestana, in which the USDOJ affirmed its commitment to cooperation and directed the NMDOJ to submit a formal Touhy letter through standard channels.
• IV. May 3, 2026 — Comprehensive Touhy letter submitted to First Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Ellison and FBI Albuquerque Special Agent in Charge Justin Garris, identifying specific EFTA document examples and requesting access to all relevant unredacted records. This letter sought a response from the USDOJ by May 11, 2026
• V. May 29, 2026 — Written follow-up to Acting Attorney General Blanche and Associate Deputy AG Pestana renewing the request after receiving no substantive response to the Touhy submission.
• VI. June 4–5, 2026 — Meeting requests directed to your office seeking an in-person conference during Attorney General Torrez’s visit to Washington, D.C. No response was received. [my emphasis]

The timeline has all the trappings of bureaucratic blow-off.

But I am specifically interested in the affirmative commitment to cooperate in the normal fashion on April 1.

That was the day before Trump fired Pam Bondi on April 2.

And since then, DOJ has provided no formal response to Torrez’ Touhy letter, the means by which prosecutors make a formal request for materials from DOJ. Blanche’s office totally blew off requests for a meeting in early June.

Probably, the affirmative response to Torrez has nothing to do with the timing of Pam Bondi’s firing; Trump was ready to fire her anyway (though her failure to squelch the Epstein investigation was a key part of it). But Blanche’s commitment to serving Trump’s needs has ratcheted up on all issues since then.

Again, I don’t think any of this will prevent his confirmation. But (as this post from Sarah Longwell argues) it may well make it politically more damaging.

Incidentally, there’s someone who could offer some insight into why DOJ asked New Mexico to drop its investigation of Epstein: Maurene Comey, who made the ask back in 2019. I’m surprised Dems on Oversight have not yet asked James Comer to subpoena her. 

More On U.S. Health, Governance

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 12, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 13, 2026. The United States is currently in the grip of an outbreak of the Cyclospora parasite, which causes severe diarrhea and has sickened more than 3,000 people across the U.S. Last August, Aria Bendix of NBC News reported that on July 1, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), overseen by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., would no longer track infections caused by cyclospora and five other common causes of foodborne illnesses.

The CDC, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and ten state health departments covering about 54 million people have run a program called the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network, or FoodNet, since 1995. Until last July 1 it monitored eight pathogens. Now it monitors only salmonella and toxin-producing E. coli.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai said then: “The health and safety of the American people is the Administration’s utmost priority. USDA, HHS, FDA, and the CDC will continue to cooperate and maintain the highest vigilance to safeguard our food supply against pathogens.” But director of the Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition Security at George Washington University Barbara Kowalcyk called the decision to reduce FoodNet surveillance “very disappointing,” saying, “A lot of the work that I and many, many, many, many other people have put into improving food safety over the past 20 or 30 years is just going away.”

Meanwhile, the New World screwworm continues to spread in the U.S. and Central America, where Melody Schreiber of The Guardian reported today conservation cameras are showing the infestations spreading rapidly in deer, jaguars, peccaries, and even porcupines.

While Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has repeatedly blamed former president Joe Biden for the arrival of the flesh-eating maggots, three former officials from the Agriculture Department, as well as another source, told Marcia Brown of Politico in June that Trump administration officials held up funding for the construction of a facility crucial to slowing the spread of the pest and also delayed funding for a $100 million research initiative to find new ways to stop the screwworm.

Trump administration cuts to staffing at the USDA meant that in 2025 the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service staffing dropped by 25%. More than half of the area veterinarians retired or resigned.

Things aren’t going terribly well internationally, either.

Despite the repeated assertions of administration officials that the U.S. “holds all the cards” in its war with Iran, Edward Wong, Michael Crowley, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported today that the memorandum of understanding Trump signed on June 17, 2026, formalized Iran’s power over the Strait of Hormuz. Former U.S. analysts and officials told the reporters that the agreement was dangerously vague and that Iran has interpreted its provision saying that Iran would “make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels” through the strait as giving Iran control of the waterway.

As Iran has attacked ships trying to get through the strait near the Oman shoreline, Trump has ordered airstrikes on Iran. Over the weekend, Iran’s Navy said it was closing the strait “until the end of U.S. interference in the region.”

Today Tara Copp and Alex Horton of the Washington Post reported allegations from soldiers who survived the Iranian attack on Port Shuaiba in Kuwait that killed six U.S. military personnel and wounded dozens more that the generals in command ignored intelligence that Port Shuaiba was a probable target. The site was not adequately protected against drones, as scouts noted before the war when the Pentagon began to move troops off large bases onto smaller facilities to make them harder for Iran to target. Port Shuaiba’s emergency warning system wasn’t working, and the facility had no coverings to conceal personnel or hamper drones. Then troops were deployed there without weapons.

After the strikes, wounded soldiers sent to Germany’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center discovered that they had neither been listed in the military’s database as seriously injured nor been recorded on the flight manifest as medical evacuees, so could not be admitted as patients. Doctors treated them as outpatients and sent them to barracks where they waited a week to be sent back to the U.S.

In June, Jonah Kaplan and Michael Kaplan of CBS News reported that wounded soldiers and their families say the Army downplayed their injuries. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters in March that almost 90% of the injuries 400 service members had sustained had been minor and that the wounded soldiers had returned to duty. One man the Army classified as “not seriously injured” sustained extensive shrapnel wounds, a concussion, hearing and vision loss, and lung damage. Another underwent multiple surgeries to remove shrapnel.

Wounded soldiers told Kaplan and Kaplan that the duty for which they had been cleared was an active order to recuperate from injuries in a specialized recovery unit.

An Army spokesperson explained that the classifications were military designations. The spokesperson explained that the Army classifies soldiers as “seriously injured” or “very seriously injured” only if they are at risk of dying from their wounds within the next 72 hours.

Tonight the U.S. military launched new strikes against Iran. In a brief interview with Reuters over the weekend, Trump said: “We’re beating them up.”

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died Saturday night at age 71, apparently from a rupture of his aorta due to cardiovascular disease. Graham had just returned from a trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, where he met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky. A former officer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG Corps) in the U.S. Air Force, Graham was a staunch supporter of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and of Ukraine. In that, he stood apart from Trump.

In his earlier years in Congress, Graham was an establishment Republican who pushed for the impeachment of President Bill Clinton but was willing to work with Democrats personally. He once said of then-senator Joe Biden of Delaware: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, you’ve got a problem. He’s the nicest person I’ve ever met in politics. As good a man as God ever created.”

He objected to the takeover of the Republican Party by the MAGA Republicans. In December 2015 he called then-candidate Donald J. Trump “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” and said: “He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.... I don’t think he has a clue about anything. He’s just trying to get his numbers up and get the biggest reaction he can.” “You know how you make America great again?” he said, “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

In 2016, Graham said he voted for Independent Evan McMullin because “Voting for Hillary Clinton was always a non-starter and I couldn’t go where Donald Trump wanted to take the USA & [the Republican Party].”

But after a meeting with Trump in March 2017, Graham became a loyalist. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he ushered through Trump’s judicial nominees, and his fierce defense of Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings for a position on the Supreme Court has been credited with enabling Kavanaugh’s nomination to go through despite accusations of sexual assault.

Graham was a staunch enough Trump supporter that he urged Trump not to concede the 2020 presidential election because “[i]f Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again.” He called Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger over the votes in Georgia; Raffensperger believed Graham was suggesting he should throw out legal ballots.

Graham briefly turned against Trump after the president tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, but then he came around to Trump again, supporting his 2024 presidential run.

Graham’s sudden death came as a surprise, but Trump was able to find Graham useful one last time. Although Graham’s top priority appears to have been working with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) to push more stringent economic sanctions on Russia, Trump told Kristen Welker of Meet the Press that he had spoken to Graham just before he died. According to Trump, Graham “said, ‘We’re all set for the SAVE America Act,’” the voter suppression act that Trump wants so badly. Trump continued: “He was pushing the SAVE America act like crazy…. And I said, ‘Well, we’re gonna get it done, Lindsey. We’re gonna get it done.’”

On May 3, 2016, Senator Lindsey Graham posted on social media: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Massive giveaway to Trump donors buried in obscure government document, Judd Legum, right, July 13, 2026. The administration quietly delivers a huge win to corporate poultry processors, who have donated tens of millions to Trump and his allies, at the expense of family farmers.

Last week, the Trump administration published the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions. The purpose of the Unified Agenda is to detail all of the proposed rules and rescissions under consideration by the current administration. The voluminous document, which is so large it is no longer printed, contains 450 pages of narrative text and an additional 3,954 individual rule entries.

Many of these entries catalogue actions that were previously announced by individual agencies. But sprinkled throughout the text are genuinely new policy actions.

The Unified Agenda released last week includes a new massive giveaway to corporate poultry processors, who rank among Trump’s largest political donors.

Pilgrim’s Pride, the nation’s second-largest poultry processor, donated $5 million to President Trump’s 2025 inauguration — the single largest donation by any corporation or individual. Pilgrim’s Pride’s donation was more than the donations of Meta, Amazon, Google, and Apple CEO Tim Cook combined.

In the 2026 cycle, Ronald Cameron, the owner and chairman of Mountaire Farms, the nation’s fourth-largest poultry processor, donated about $5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF) and the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the two super PACs devoted to maintaining Republican control of Congress. Since 2016, Cameron has donated about $29 million combined to the CLF and SLF.

In the 2024 cycle, Cameron donated $1 million to MAGA Inc, Trump’s main Super PAC, and $2 million to Preserve America, another super PAC supporting Trump. Cameron also made a critical $2 million donation to Rebuilding America Now, a Super PAC formed to support Trump’s candidacy, in August 2016. That donation came at a time when Trump was trailing in most polls and his political support was flagging.

The latest Unified Agenda reveals the Trump administration plans to repeal rules that protect farmers from abuses by large poultry processors, including Pilgrim’s and Mountaire.

Farmers who raise chickens are paid by companies like Pilgrim’s and Mountaire through the “tournament system.” Under this arrangement, the large poultry processors supply birds, provide feed, provision veterinary care, and dictate production methods. The farmers are paid a fee to raise the birds.

The tournament system compensates farmers based on how efficiently they convert feed to the weight of the birds. The most efficient farmers receive bonuses while less efficient farmers see their fees docked. (The bonuses are essentially funded by the reduced fees paid to some farmers.) This is seen as a rigged game that leaves the chicken farmers open to exploitation. After all, it is the poultry processors that control the inputs that largely determine the efficiency of the operation.

The Rural Advancement Foundation International called the tournament system “a manipulative scheme designed by poultry processing corporations to stabilize and control their own production expenses—in the form of prices paid to farmers—while transferring as much of the financial risk involved with growing chickens as possible onto growers they contract with.”

In February 2024, an Agriculture Department rule went into effect that required corporate poultry processors to provide more transparency to chicken farmers. Specifically, poultry processors were required to disclose the typical annual earnings of comparable farmers, a summary of the processor’s litigation and bankruptcy history, and company policies on depopulation events like disease outbreaks. This was a modest effort, but it did give farmers more information before contracting with companies like Pilgrim’s and Mountaire.

The National Chicken Council, which includes Pilgrim’s and Mountaire, “strongly“ opposed the disclosure rule. The new Unified Agenda revealed that the Trump administration is planning to repeal this rule. The Trump administration, according to the Unified Agenda, is also planning to repeal a related rule that prohibits poultry processors from retaliating against farmers that speak to regulators or join grower associations.

On July 1, another, more significant rule was supposed to take effect. The rule would have required corporate chicken processors to guarantee a base rate of pay to farmers and limited the amount of price variability that could be imposed with the tournament system. Under the current system, chicken processors can cut payments to farmers “by 50% or more.”

This rule had already been delayed by the Trump administration. The new Unified Agenda revealed that the Trump administration is planning to eliminate it entirely.

Although the rule reforming the tournament system was issued during the Biden administration, it is not a partisan issue. In a June 10 hearing, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) questioned Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on why the rule was being delayed.

“Going back 10 or 15 years, I’ve been involved in trying to help these poultry farmers not be screwed by the people that they’re producing the chickens for,” Grassley said. “So, how does this delay help our small family farmers, and does this delay help meatpackers more than family farmers?”

Rollins replied that she was focused on “making it better,” adding “I look forward to working with you on that.” But Grassley pressed. “How does the delay help the small family farmer?” he asked. “Can I circle back to you on that?” Rollins asked in response. “I want to get fully up to speed.” Rollins added that there were “real concerns with the way the Biden team wrote the rule” and “some real concerns with the profitability — and to ensure we are protecting all American agriculture.”

Less than a month later, Rollins’ department proposed scrapping the rule entirely. Grassley did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move was announced very quietly, buried amid thousands of other rules and rescissions. This may be because it could create political problems for Trump and his allies. Trump has sought to portray himself as a champion of the family farmer.

As Grassley intimated, this is a move to benefit corporate poultry processors at the expense of the family farmer.

The gift to Pilgrim’s Pride and other large poultry processors comes after these companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars over schemes to raise prices for consumers and shortchange farmers. In 2021, Pilgrim’s Pride pleaded guilty and was “sentenced to pay approximately $107 million in criminal fines for its participation in a conspiracy to fix prices and rig bids for broiler chicken products.” Separately, Pilgrim’s Pride paid “$75 million in 2021 to settle with poultry buyers over claims they colluded with Tyson Foods, and another $100 million in 2023 to resolve claims from poultry farmers alleging it colluded with rivals to underpay them through unfair tournament-style payment systems.”

Pilgrim’s Pride and Mountaire are also defendants in a long-running class action lawsuit, In re Broiler Chicken Antitrust Litigation, alleging that numerous large poultry processors have been conspiring to raise chicken prices since 2008. In 2025, Mountaire was among a group of defendants who paid $22.4 million to settle a portion of the claims brought by consumers. Pilgrim’s Pride was among a group of defendants who paid $181 million to settle consumer claims in 2021.  

More On Iran War

New York Times, Live Updates: Iran Ramps Up Threats as It Retaliates Against U.S. Strikes, Hari Raj, Eric Schmitt, Jenny Gross and Leo Sands, July 13, 2026. Senior Iranian officials called for revenge against the United States and Israel for killing the late supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as a new exchange of attacks pushed the region into deeper uncertainty.

Here’s the latest.

Senior Iranian officials ratcheted up their threats as the latest exchange of strikes with the United States spilled into Monday, with neither side showing signs of backing down from a cycle of attacks that is unraveling the cease-fire and pushing the region into deeper uncertainty.

Ali Bagheri Kani, the deputy secretary of the powerful Supreme National Security Council, was among the officials calling for revenge against the United States over the killing of former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, describing it as “the right of the Iranian nation,” according to the state broadcaster. Within Iran, he and other conservative hard-liners have in recent weeks increasingly become more vocal in their uncompromising stance toward the United States.

Early Monday, Iran’s military said it launched another barrage of strikes aimed at American military assets throughout the Middle East, targeting Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman. Hours earlier, U.S. forces said they had launched more strikes on Iran aimed at stymying its ability to attack commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

The latest exchange caps a nearly weeklong flare-up of attacks between the United States and Iran as they tussle over control of the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed before the war.

With the prospects of an immediate diplomatic solution to the impasse looking ever dimmer, the hostilities pushed up the price of Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, to roughly $78 a barrel on Monday, an increase of about 3 percent.

A framework deal signed by President Trump and his Iranian counterpart last month included language that Tehran said gave it control over traffic through the strait, but the United States has insisted that the passage remain open to all shipping.

After a brief respite following last month’s truce, shipping through the strait plummeted again over the weekend after Iran attacked a Cypriot-flagged container ship on Saturday that it accused of “violating” its conditions for transiting the waterway, setting off the latest exchange of hostilities. Just 14 ships passed through the waterway on Sunday, the lowest level in a month, according to Kpler, a maritime data firm.

Here’s what else to know:

• Iranian strikes: The latest Iranian salvos on Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman were aimed at American targets including ammunition depots and radar facilities, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said in a statement carried by state media.
• U.S. allies: Jordan’s air defense systems intercepted four missiles from Iran on Monday, the official Petra news agency reported, citing Jordan’s armed forces, which said there were no casualties or material damage in the attacks. Kuwait’s army said its air defenses intercepted hostile aerial targets and Bahrain said it also fended off Iranian missile and drone attacks on Monday morning.
• American attacks: The U.S. military’s Central Command said its latest wave of strikes had hit “dozens of targets” early Monday local time, including Iranian air-defense systems and missile and drone capabilities. A U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations said the number of strikes was somewhat lower than the previous night, when U.S. forces struck 140 Iranian targets.
• Market volatility: Oil prices rose on Monday and global stock markets fell after the Iranian and U.S. attacks over the weekend. In the United States, the average price of gasoline was $3.87, according to the AAA motor club, up 7 cents compared to a week ago. Read more ›

More On U.S. Elections, Politics

The Contrarian, Opinion: Anti-Democratic Party Hysteria Is Out of Sync With Reality, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 13, 2026. Democrats’ successes should not be ignored; plus a note on Senator Lindsey Graham.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) passed away suddenly Saturday night from an apparent tear in his aorta. Unfortunately, Senate colleagues and most legacy media outlets are avoiding the hard reckoning he deserves. Few American politicians have been as disastrously wrong in their advocacy for regime change in the Middle East, not just once but twice, or in their indulgence in an Israeli right-wing government that took Israel (and in turn, U.S. policy) down a morally abhorrent road of domestic reprehension of Palestinians. He supported authoritarian rule in derogation of Israel’s professed democratic values and reckless violence aimed at the utterly unattainable goal of obliterating military threats to Israel’s survival at the expense of attainable diplomatic solutions.

Domestically, he played a small but critical role in trying to steal the 2020 election, assisting Donald Trump’s campaign to “find” nonexistent votes to swing Georgia’s election results. His role in demagoguing and running roughshod over now Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault victims marked a low point in Supreme Court confirmation hearings and helped steer the court toward its downward spiral into rank partisanship. More generally, his support for a corrupt, racist, conspiracy-mongering president who threatens the fiber of our democracy leaves a legacy of moral cowardice. As someone who formally supported comprehensive immigration reform, his indulgence of the rank racism and domestic campaign of terror against migrants exemplifies the rot at the core of the Republican Party.

We leave it to others to scrounge for redeeming features or accomplishments that contributed to the well-being of Americans and the advancement of our democratic values. His career should stand as a reminder that, in the end, access to power and electoral success mean little. History will judge him harshly for his role in the MAGA assault on democracy and America’s disastrous loss of international stature.

Republicans have stood by an adjudicated sexual abuser, grotesquely corrupt, and mentally deteriorating president. They nominated for Senate the scandal-drenched Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who gave a pedophile a slap on the wrist — and recently paraded around Britain on a 4th of July jaunt with his mistress, the center of his wife’s filing for divorce on “biblical grounds.” They are steadfastly backing the chief architect of the Epstein file cover-up and the slush-fund-for-insurrectionist schemes, Todd Blanche, for US attorney general. Yet, after reading or listening to a slew of legacy media pontificators and hand-wringing Democrats, you would think the Democratic Party is the one that “cannot go on like this,” as the New York Times editorial board intoned after Maine Senate nominee Graham Platner was forced out of the race.

Republicans’ utter lack of self-reflection, dissent, or remorse for their backing of serial miscreants and their refusal to break ranks on disastrous policies — e.g., unleashing murderous, rogue ICE shock troops; enabling a disastrous Iran war; taking healthcare coverage away from millions — or challenge Donald Trump’s reign of corruption earn a shrug from corporate media. Ho hum, “Republicans acting like Republicans.” Unflinching unity in the face of manifest malfeasance shields them from the level of scrutiny and condemnation commensurate with their conduct.

Democrats operate in a different universe. Moving in unison, albeit not as quickly as one would hope, to eliminate bad actors or to balance diverse parts of a big-tent coalition might not warrant applause. But the searing criticism that has followed responsible party action boggles the mind.

Democrats certainly could have collectively defused the Platner ticking time bomb months ago. But they did move swiftly in response to a credible rape allegation to dump him, just as they promptly chased former California congressman Eric Swalwell from the governor’s race in the face of allegations of his sexual assault.

To pretend there is any moral equivalence between the parties when it comes to handling moral depravity is to become an apologist for the party that has eschewed every standard of decency in favor of ruthless pursuit of power and cultist loyalty to a depraved narcissist.

For all the caterwauling about Democrats, their position heading into the midterms remains exceptionally strong. They have broken through on virtually every policy issue, from affordability to immigration/ICE abuse to forever wars.

The furor directed at “the Party” (as if there is a single locus of power directing a sprawling party’s primary choices in hundreds of races) and constant rage at the “establishment” has become farcical. For all the grousing about “the Party,” Democrats’ electoral success over the last year (e.g., a run of special election wins, stunning turnout in primaries, sweeping victories in November 2025) suggests they are doing something right. Democratic analyst and data guru Simon Rosenberg reminds us that Senate polling shows “establishment” Democrats backed by leadership (e.g., Roy Cooper, Mary Peltola, Sherrod Brown, Josh Turek) “outperforming 2024 by double digits throughout the battleground [states],” while Gallup shows Democratic Party ID at a 35-year high.(Credit: Douglas Rissing)

Generic congressional polling, if anything, seems to underestimate Democrats’ advantages in the races that matter. Last week’s polling, for example, shows that in a key swing race in the NY 17th, Republican Mike Lawler is down by 6 points, a 12-point swing from his victory in 2024. In the PA 7th, firefighter Bob Brooks has a small but decisive lead over Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, who flipped the seat in 2024. Zeroing in on swing voters (the truly persuadable), Democrats have a 12-point lead.

The actual campaign landscape bears no resemblance to the gloom-and-doom commentary that Callais was going to ensure Republicans kept the House majority or that sniping about socialists winning in safe Blue seats spelled disaster (Democrats in disarray!).Subscribed

FiftyPlusOne’s massive data analysis concludes that if the election were held today (it isn’t, so take it with a grain of salt), “Democrats would take the House pretty comfortably with a median of 226 seats — well past the 218 they need for the majority.” Not bad for a party supposedly suffering from moral and political failure (according to the compulsive hand-wringers).

On the Senate front, replacing Platner with a noncontroversial Democrat will return the focus of the Maine race to Collins, an unpopular, weak figure whose refusal to stand up to Trump and role in putting MAGA justices on the Supreme Court to scuttle abortion rights obliterated her “moderate” façade. However they got there, Democrats’ decision to dump Platner spells trouble for Collins, whose campaign lost its best shot to cling to power.

Coupled with strong polling for Sherrod Brown in Ohio (and Jon Ossoff’s pulling away in Georgia), James Talarico’s impressive campaign — as evidenced by his fundraising juggernaut — in Texas, and Mary Peltola’s success in shifting Alaska into the “toss-up” column, Democrats should be cautiously optimistic about netting 4 seats to win the Senate majority.

Furthermore, Democrats’ prospects in governors’ races continue to improve in places like Arizona, Maine, Ohio, and Iowa. If Republicans are looking to the top of the ticket to help them out in down-ballot races, they are likely to be severely disappointed.

So, why the excessive gloom and doom, moral finger wagging at Democrats, and stunning lack of exacting coverage of Republicans’ habitual deceit about everything — from the health/functionality of its incumbents (e.g., Rep. Tom Kean, Jr., Sen. Mitch McConnell) to the disastrous results of the Iran war over which they abdicated responsibility?

Well, billionaire-owned media thrives on coverage that induces Democratic doom-scrolling and attempts to reassure Republicans that they get “fair” coverage (i.e., coverage that forgoes moral judgment, indulges in outlandish moral equivalence, and reduces all issues to process/horse-race politics). There is a ready-made market for Democratic hysteria mongers. But that does not mean the rest of us should buy into the “sky is falling” narrative.

It should not be so difficult to convey the real contrast between a flawed but decent pro-democracy party that polices its own and has made tremendous strides in sharpening its message, and a depraved “blood and soil” fascist movement reliant on scapegoating, lies, and violence devoted to propping up the most corrupt presidency in history. Fortunately for the fate of democracy, voters seem to have a better grasp than much of the punditocracy on the choice we’ll face in November.

Madness, Opinion: Voters want candidates to fight data centers, Thor Benson, July 13, 2026. Americans across the country have been pushing back against building new data centers for the past year or so, and it looks like this issue is not going away any time soon. As I wrote for Rolling Stone in May, this could become a defining battle of the midterms.

We've seen more evidence of this recently. According to a Heatmap poll from last month, 71 percent of Americans now oppose a data center being built in their community. The poll found that support for data center construction has drastically decreased across the political spectrum. This appears to be one of the more bipartisan issues out there.

A Guardian report from earlier this month detailed how voters are pushing back against data centers. One way they're doing that is by recalling politicians who don't take the right stance on this issue.

"In just May and June, voters in states including California, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, Oregon and Texas launched efforts to recall elected officials over their handling of datacenter proposals," The Guardian writes.

There are multiple reasons why residents oppose these data centers. They range from increasing electricity costs to environmental concerns to opposition to the AI industry generally. It's also become clear that voters in many areas are quite upset about the damage data center construction can do to people's homes. This construction often involves the use of powerful explosives that send out shockwaves.

Many prominent Democrats are pushing back against data centers. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have introduced a bill in Congress that would halt data center construction until industry regulations are created. Similar bills have been introduced in numerous states.Subscribe to Madness

While Donald Trump is actively boosting the AI industry, Republicans across the nation see that voters are angry. Many of them are also jumping on the anti-data center bandwagon. A recent Bloomberg analysis found that dozens of Republican candidates are now running ads that highlight their opposition to data center construction.

Electricity prices have been high for some time now, and they're not expected to go down anytime soon. As I said, that's one of the driving forces behind this fight. These data centers use a huge amount of energy, and residents are tired of the costs of that energy use being passed on to them.

I'm not saying the data center issue will decide who controls the House or the Senate on its own, but it's clearly a significant concern for many voters out there. A candidate's stance on this issue may also signal something to voters: They might decide that a candidate who supports data center construction cares more about corporations than the people.

It'll be interesting to see how candidates take on this issue in the coming months and how their decisions affect their poll numbers. The AI industry is spending a lot of money trying to influence the midterms, so that'll likely also play a role here.

New York Times, Maine Democrats to Chuck Schumer: Stay Out of Our Senate Race, Tim Balk, July 13, 2026. Local Democrats are warning the top Senate Democrat to keep away as they replace Graham Platner, and the candidates are giving his leadership in Washington low marks.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York is accustomed to getting his way in Democratic primaries for Senate.

But even as Mr. Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate for nearly a decade, has successfully recruited a number of nominees in marquee races this year, he is getting a clear message from his party’s voters, candidates and local leaders in all-important Maine: Stay away.

In Maine, a pivotal battleground in the fight for control of the Senate, Democrats are trying to flip the seat of Senator Susan Collins, a five-term Republican. In the spring, they soundly rejected Mr. Schumer’s choice, Gov. Janet Mills. Graham Platner, an oysterman running on a progressive and anti-establishment message, forced Ms. Mills out of the race weeks before Primary Day.

Now that Mr. Platner has ended his campaign after a rape allegation that he denies, voters and state party leaders are warning Mr. Schumer and other Democratic leaders in Washington, D.C., not to intervene in the process the state party is using to replace Mr. Platner. All the leading candidates running to replace Mr. Platner have signaled interest in replacing Mr. Schumer as leader after the midterms.

“Do you want Maine to decide for you if you vote in New York?” said Paige Zeigler, the chair of the Waldo County Democrats in Maine’s Midcoast region. “Do I want Washington to decide for me? No. Christ no.”

Mr. Schumer’s aides say he will accede to Maine Democrats’ requests.

“Leader Schumer has been clear that he will play no role in selecting Maine’s new Democratic nominee,” a spokeswoman for Mr. Schumer, Allison Biasotti, said in a statement. “He has full faith in Maine Democrats to choose their nominee. Once they do, Democrats will unite to defeat Susan Collins and take back the Senate.”

The replacement for Mr. Platner will be decided by about 600 delegates at an unusual nominating convention in late July.Some Democrats have said the implosion of Mr. Platner’s insurgent campaign supported an argument that experienced Washington hands should play a role in finding — and vetting — candidates. And Mr. Schumer’s favored candidates have won or are well on their way to the Senate nominations in competitive races in North Carolina, Iowa, Ohio and Alaska.

More On U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham's Death

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: LINDSEY GRAHAM, R.I.P., Benjamin Parker, right, July 13, 2026. There will be more to say in the coming days about the life and career of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly late Saturday night. One thing that’s hard not to notice, though, is the way in which his career arc so directly mirrors that of the modern Republican party. Even in an abbreviated life, he outlived the version of the GOP he worked in for so long.

Graham was elected to Congress in the “Republican Revolution” year of 1994, when the mainstream of the party were conscience conservatives, somewhat overlapping with but not yet dominated by the radically religious wing of the party. Graham rose quickly in this environment, becoming one of the House managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in just his second term in Congress.

But it was in the Senate that Graham made his real reputation. Joining the chamber in 2003, just months before the invasion of Iraq, he made his name as a neoconservative foreign policy hawk, especially regarding Middle Eastern issues. He was, famously, a consistent wingman for John McCain until the latter’s death in 2018.

Graham’s campaign for president in 2016 was pretty transparently just a gambit to win support for his style of foreign policy, in opposition to both Obama-era, lead-from-behind retrenchment in the Democratic party and Rand Paul-style libertarian isolationism then rising in the Republican party.

Graham was at that time a frequent, cogent, pointed, and sound critic of Donald Trump—so much so that Trump, in a pique of annoyance, gave out his cell phone number at a rally.

Throughout his Senate career, he was also a frequent exponent of bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform—though never to much avail.

Graham’s most dogged pursuit, however, wasn’t any policy. It was electoral victory: both his own and his party’s. He went from Trump critic to Trump ally as soon as it was politically advantageous—then seemed to sour on Trump after January 6th before going right back to him. He once talked about Joe Biden as the kindest soul in politics, then participated in the savaging of the Biden family when it served Trump’s interest.

The full story of how Graham thought he could use Trump and Trumpism to his own ends—but was in turn used by Trump and his movement—has been told by Will Saletan. Will wrote that piece in 2023. But the end of Graham’s story is not much different from where he left off, except it’s now more certain.

Comprehensive immigration reform has never seemed less likely. Instead, the Republican party—Graham very much included—either cheered or meekly piped down as Trump’s mass deportations sent innocent people to foreign torture chambers and killed people—some American citizens, others trying to become American citizens—in the streets.

And this Republican president—whom Graham did so much to support, to legitimize, to try to influence—started a war in the Middle East that has resulted in the strengthening of a terroristic, tyrannical Islamist regime, a heavier burden on the people living under that regime, a rebalance of power in the region against the United States, a major rift between the United States and Israel, and a weaker American military posture around the world.

Graham tried, over a three-decade career in Washington, to be always at the center of his party. In that, at least, he never failed.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• One Weird Trick for Torpedoing Todd Blanche’s Hearing… Trump voters tell me again and again they’re disappointed with the president over one thing. It could complicate his hopes for a new attorney general, writes SARAH LONGWELL.
• Susan Collins Is Beatable No Matter Who Replaces Platner… Her old formula—express concern but side with Trump—is facing its toughest test yet, argues JILL LAWRENCE.
• NATO’s Annual Circus Comes to Turkey… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN survey the latest geopolitical absurdities, from Erdoğan gifting revolvers and live, gold-plated ammunition at the NATO summit to the fine print behind Trump’s Ukraine policy—and, because no week is complete without it, Graham Platner’s latest self-inflicted disaster.

Quick Hits

LIFE’S A MITCH: Turns out Sen. Mitch McConnell was basically fine this whole time! At least, that’s the report the senator gave. McConnell (really, some aide) posted a photo of himself and his wife, former Secretary of Labor/Transportation Elaine Chao, along with a statement Sunday, explaining his recent weeks of hospitalization:

Last month, I took a fall which landed me in the hospital.

My doctors have confirmed that I didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion. I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. I don’t have any tumors or hemorrhages. But I was briefly unconscious and was taken to the hospital. While receiving excellent care over the past several weeks, I’ve also had to deal with a mild case of pneumonia.

I can assure you that I’ve been a good patient. At my age, I tend to do what my doctors tell me to do. I’ve submitted to every test they can think of to help figure out what caused this incident. And I’m continuing to do everything they ask to speed my recovery. In fact, with signs of continued progress, I’ve been able to move from hospital care to a rehabilitation center where I’ll keep regaining my strength.

Usually it’s not a good sign when you have to list the diseases you don’t have—or when you find it appropriate to hold a copy of the latest issue of a newspaper to prove you’re still alive to this very day.

The tone of McConnell’s statement clearly suggests that, after this rough patch, everything will be just fine in no time. The photo—accompanied by no video or audio recording and quickly dissected by every wanna-be internet sleuth on X—probably won’t cut it.

CRIME AND ASTONISHMENT: Was January 6th an insurrection? The answer, up till the past two years, was obviously yes. It certainly was when federal prosecutors presented evidence to a jury, resulting in lengthy prison terms for several leaders of the Proud Boys, who led the storming of the Capitol that day.

But then Trump took office for the second time. And his Justice Department decided that, akshually, it wanted to drop the case post-conviction. Judge Timothy J. Kelly, while finding that he had no power to oppose the government’s motion, made it painstakingly clear that he thought it was—to use the legal jargon—horseshit:

First, there is little mystery about why the Government is moving to dismiss this case, or whether dismissal is in fact what the Executive seeks. President Trump’s views about the prosecution of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6—whether those views are based on fact or fiction—are well known, as is his intention to extend clemency to them . . .

All that said, because the decisions to issue the Executive Order and to abandon this prosecution—even after the Government secured convictions for serious crimes relating to the attack on the Capitol on January 6—are solely the Executive’s, no one should mistake the Court’s granting of the Government’s motion for its agreement with those decisions.

As the Court has said many times, the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a perilous event. It was an attack on people, including police officers, many of whom were injured. It was an attack on a coordinate branch of government—Congress—that [the] Founders saw fit to give a place of primacy in Article I of the Constitution. And it was an attack on the Constitution’s mechanism to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next, what President Reagan called “nothing less than a miracle.” President Ronald W. Reagan, Inaugural Address (Jan. 20, 1981). Moving forward, if this Nation’s experiment in self-government is to last another 250 years, the American people—no matter their partisan preferences—will have to act together to preserve, protect and defend that miracle through our constitutional framework.

I know it feels like we do this every week, but it’s worth repeating, so say it with us: Judge Kelly was nominated by Donald Trump.

Mediaite, Trump Treasury Secretary Reportedly ‘Fielding Calls’ To Run For Lindsey Graham’s Seat, Jennifer Bowers Bahney, July 13, 2026. Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is said to be “fielding calls” from power brokers urging him to run for the Senate seat held by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC).

Politico reported Sunday that Bessent is a South Carolina native, “who has maintained a house there during his time in Washington.”

Bessent was “fielding calls from people asking him to run, according to a person familiar with the communications,” the report said. “Another person close to Bessent said his interest is staying on as Treasury secretary, a role he’s long wanted.”

Politico added, “A Treasury spokesperson had no immediate comment.”

Since word of Graham’s death broke early Sunday morning, Republicans have been scrambling over how to keep his Senate seat.

President Donald Trump told NBC News he had “someone in mind” for Graham seat, but didn’t elaborate.

Outgoing Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) told CNN that she was “not pursuing” an interim appointment that could be made by South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R).

“I told the governor this morning that, I suggested that he should nominate himself,” Mace told Fredericka Whitfield. “He can do that, to be a sort of caretaker in between now and January 3rd. And then there would be a special election,” Mace said.

“I’m not pursuing it. I’m told that Joe Wilson’s not pursuing it, that interim appointment, because we need every vote that we can have for the president in the House as it stands today,” Mace said.

Mace added, “I would be remiss if I didn’t look at” running for the seat, “but right now, my focus is going to be on mourning Lindsey Graham and honoring his legacy.”

According to Politico, “A special candidate filing period will open up on July 21 for Republicans interested in running for Graham’s seat, and will remain open for a week, according to state law and the state Republican Party. A primary would be held on August 11, with a runoff if no candidate reaches 50 percent of the vote on Aug. 25.”

The winning Republican will face Dr. Annie Andrews (D) in November “for a full, six-year term that would start in January of next year,” the report added.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!

More Global News 

New York Times, A Robot Army Remakes Ground Warfare in Ukraine, Maria Varenikova, July 13, 2026. They began as supply mules. Now ground robots evacuate the wounded, hold trenches and even do the killing.

While flying drones have grabbed the world’s attention and rewritten the rules of combat, a quieter revolution is crawling along beneath them on the battlefield in Ukraine.

Battalions of ground robots — tracked and wheeled machines that deliver supplies, haul ammunition, evacuate the wounded, lay mines and, increasingly, hold land — now conduct thousands of missions every month. That has made them an indispensable tool for Ukrainian infantrymen who spend monthslong rotations in buried bunkers hiding from flying drones.

At the cutting edge, unmanned ground vehicles are doing what once seemed a generation away: assaulting and capturing enemy trenches. In April, President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukrainian forces had captured a Russian-held position using only land and aerial drones, without putting a single soldier on its own side in direct danger.

Ukraine is outrunning the world’s most advanced militaries, including Russia’s, in its development of ground robots. Leading the charge are not the software whizzes behind aerial drones, but welders and grease monkeys whose MacGyvered creations help with the grunt work of infantrymen.

New York Times, Lebanese Hold Fast to Their Land Despite Threat of Long Israeli Occupation, Abdi Latif Dahir, Visuals by Daniel Berehulak, July 13, 2026. Entire towns in southern Lebanon have been hollowed out by the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Some residents have stayed, fearing permanent displacement.

On summer mornings in the southern Lebanese town of Marjayoun, when wildflowers bloomed and the sky stretched clear across the horizon, life and business were usually good for Hikmat Farha. Travelers stopped at the gas station his family had owned for decades. Friends and relatives drifted in and out of his nearby home, where he brewed coffee and shared vegetables from his garden.

That routine has been completely upended this year.

Flare-ups of violence between Israel and the Iran-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah have transformed life in Lebanon’s south. In Marjayoun, near the border with Israel, many businesses have shuttered. Homes sit quiet behind padlocked gates. And the eerie silence is broken only by those who, like Mr. Farha, have chosen to remain, traversing town for groceries and medicine.

“We have stayed steadfast on the land, but Marjayoun is like a ghost town,” Mr. Farha, 73, said. “We want peace.”

July 12

Top Headlines 

President Trump's nominee to become U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, is shown at right in a file photo showcasing his previous role in defending Trump from fraud charges before the convictions were voided because of the president's reelection.

• The Parnas Perspective, Sunday Evening News Update and Comment: Graham's Death Creates Major Issues for Republicans, McConnell Proof of Life, Large-scale Iran Bombing, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, July 12, 2026. Lindsey Graham’s death has created major challenges for Republicans, especially ahead of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing and the uncertain future of the SAVE America Act.

Meanwhile, the United States continues its large-scale bombing campaign against Iran. New questions are also swirling about Mitch McConnell’s health, while troops are accusing military leaders of ignoring warnings before Iran’s deadly strike on an American base. And that’s just the beginning.

• New York Times, News Analysis: Contrasts in War: Trump Sought an Exit. Putin Pushed On. Now Both Are Stuck, Anton Troianovski and Paul Sonne, July 12, 2026. The Iran and Ukraine wars underline the common limits of military force in achieving political ends, but also the differences between a dug-in Russian president and a vacillating American one. 
• New York Times, Fact Check: Trump Justifies Money Made as President With Inaccurate Claims, Linda Qiu, Videos by Jamie Leventhal, July 12, 2026 (print ed.). President Trump has wrongly attributed the $2 billion windfall he gained during his second term to a hot stock market and claimed that he was the only president to donate his salary.

More On Lindsey Graham Death

President Trump and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who was one of Trump's harshest critics before becoming one of his greatest apologists and advocates (Reuters photo by Leah Mills).

• The Warning with Steve Schmidt, Opinion: The Warning with Steve SchmidtLindsey knew better. He chose worse, Steve Schmidt (commentator and the senior strategist for Republican 2008 Presidential Nominee John McCain, the late Arizona senator), July 12, 2026. Lindsey Graham was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention.
• New York Times, Lindsey Graham, Republican Senator and Staunch Trump Ally, Dies at 71, Robert Jimison and Amelia Nierenberg, July 12, 2026. He died of “a brief and sudden illness” on Saturday evening, his office said. Over more than two decades in the Senate,he consistently pushed for the use of U.S. military power overseas. 

Trump's Obsessions, Oppressions and Threat 

President Donald Trump, as portrayed in a graphic by columnist Lance Rosen, who argues that an increasingly deranged represents a serious world threat launching an apocolyptic vengence on the world congruent with Norse and Nazi-mythology visible also increasingly.

• Lance’s Substack, Opinion: Richard Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” And The Accelerating Psychological Breakdown Of Donald Trump, Lance F Rosen, right, July 12, 2026. The German word in the above headline is associated with composer Richard Wagner, and his famous “Ring Cycle” of staged musical operas. It is drawn from the Norse mythology of “Ragnarok” which has been popularized in modern times by video games and the cartoon character of “Thor” from Marvel’s “Avenger” series. Wagner, as many are aware, was Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer. Nazi ideology was rooted in the old Nordic myths, with their stories, symbols, Runes, and belief system that ascribed superpowers to those who carried their common ancestral heritage.

You have likely heard the popular expressions, “burn it all down,” and “going out with a bang.” You might also remember the explicitly Wagnerian ending to the James Cagney gangster film “White Heat,” where the character standing on top of a flaming gas refinery tank explodes the whole thing while screaming “top of the world Ma, top of the world!” That, in a nutshell, encapsulates the state of mind of the current President Of The United States, the person who holds the nuclear codes. He sees all of his Democratic liberal opponents as communist terrorists, as opposed to Jews being his main target. He is obsessed with the danger of his own assassination. He likely has never seen or understood a performance of Wagner. But he loves the idea of setting Valhalla on fire. The Strategic Issue At Hand. 

• Scott MacFarlane News, GOP's Trump-Adoration Legislation is Fading Into Obscurity, Scott MacFarlane, right, July 12, 2026. Trump-Glazing Bills Are Collapsing. His fellow Republicans have attempted a whole series of vanity, congratulatory legislation that might butter-up President Trump. With just a few in-session weeks remaining in the 119th Congress, the butter isn’t spreading.

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

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

• Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: The Jan. 6 Insurrection Succeeded, Susan J. Demas, right, July 12, 2026. In 2024, Donald Trump vowed to be America’s “retribution.” He didn’t hide what he planned to do. He bragged about it. And voters elected him anyway.
• Status with Natalie Korach, The Times’ Subpoena Showdown, Natalie Korach, July 12, 2026. Behind the scenes, Status has learned, top New York Times executives have been in close contact with five reporters targeted by federal prosecutors, preparing the newsroom for a high-stakes fight over press freedom.
• New York Times, White House Directed Patel to Oversee Investigation Involving Times Reporting, Devlin Barrett, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, Updated July 12, 2026. The F.B.I. director spent about eight hours at the White House Friday focused on the effort, which led to the subpoenaing of several Times reporters who wrote about the security of Air Force One.Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 6, 2026 [Trump Picks FBI Targets For Press Probe], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 12, 2026. Last night the Department of Justice subpoenaed reporters from the New York Times over a story the newspaper published on Wednesday. Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt reported that the Secret Service had security concerns about the new Air Force One Boeing 747-8 given to the U.S. by Qatar. So, when tensions escalated with Iran while Trump was in Türkiye for the NATO summit, they asked the president to use one of the other, older, Air Force One planes for his return journey. Trump and White House officials pushed back strongly against the idea that the new plane had any security problems after pouring what appears to have been hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into renovating the plane.

• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Confirms: Accepting a Flying Bribery Palace Made Him Less Safe, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 11, 2026. From the moment Trump posted a tweet claiming he was sending his Flying Bribery Palace back separately from the NATO summit in Ankara, the entire world knew there was a problem with the jet Qatar gifted him.
• New York Times, Blanche Stares Down Confirmation Hurdle: Lingering G.O.P. Doubts, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer, July 12, 2026. Key Republicans on the Judiciary Committee could push for concessions from Todd Blanche, in line to be attorney general, though they did not appear in revolt.
• New York Times, Guest Essay:This Is a Lot More Worrying Than the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Executive Power, David Lawrence, July 11, 2026 (print ed.). The Supreme Court last week expanded the powers of the unitary executive, raising fears among many that the presidency is becoming too strong. Yet as big as the ruling appears to be, it wasn’t even the most concerning news in the past month about the accumulation of unchecked power in the Oval Office. The day after the court’s ruling, the Trump administration lifted restrictions it had imposed on access to top artificial intelligence models from Anthropic, a leading A.I. company, seemingly on the condition that the company submit to ongoing government oversight. Only a limited set of customers — those approved by the Trump administration — have been allowed use of the A.I. tool.

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Live Updates: Iran Targets Gulf States After Night of Intense U.S. Strikes, Leo Sands, Sanam Mahoozi and Aaron Boxerman, July 12, 2026. U.S. Central Command said it had hit about 140 targets in Iran overnight after Tehran attacked a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s military said it had responded by firing at U.S. targets in Jordan, Oman and Qatar. Here’s the latest.
• New York Times, Hard-Liners in Iran Want to Keep Fighting America, Neil MacFarquhar, July 12, 2026. With much of their leadership killed in the war, Iran’s conservatives have sought to fill the void and intensify the fight against the United States.

More Global News

• New York Times, Zelensky Announces Leadership Shuffle as War Turns in Ukraine’s Favor, Andrew E. Kramer, July 12, 2026. President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine’s prime minister, Yuliia Svyrydenko, would step down amid a broader shake-up in Ukraine’s senior leadership.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Lindsey Graham's Passing Is Another Stage In The Death Of Trumpism, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, July 12, 2026. Time is marching on, and staunch Trump allies like Lindsey Graham are dying in the ultimate reminder that the supposed movement that Trump built is also dying a little more every day.
• New York Times, Lindsey Graham Was Facing Re-election in November. What Happens Now? Bayliss Wagner, July 12, 2026. South Carolina law suggests his death triggers an Aug. 11 special Republican primary election, and the state’s governor can appoint a replacement to serve out the rest of his term, through early January.
• Lance’s Substack, Opinion: Lindsey Graham’s Passing Exposes A Painful Truth...About Us, Lance F Rosen, right, July 12, 2026.You’ll not hear me eulogizing him and there will be no praise coming from here for anything he did, though some will point to his stubborn defense of Ukraine as a good thing. His motives, even for that, were to a degree politically self-serving. He has been morally dead since the day he visibly lost his mind in the Senate during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
• MOBOLOGY, Investigative Commentary: The tragic suicide of Vincent Foster: The crime and the politics (Part 1), Dan E. Moldea, right, July 12, 2026. This month is the 33rd anniversary of a death that led to a cataclysmic upheaval in American history. The Foster case was an eye-opening, life-altering experience for me. Through my research, I collected clear evidence that a dishonest, money-grubbing cabal of Clinton haters—who shared information, covered up each other's mistakes, fabricated evidence, and received their funding from the same sources—had tried to portray Foster's suicide as a murder in a cynical effort to undermine the authority of the Clinton White House.
• New York Times, The Democratic Socialists Winning Elections Far From New York City, Benjamin Oreskes and Mark Sommer, July 12, 2026. They won Democratic state legislative primaries in Buffalo and Syracuse, showing how the party’s messaging and ground game can work outside New York City. 

More On U.S. Media 

• New York Times, Michael Cohen Helped Convict Trump. Now, He’s Making Nice Again Maggie Haberman and Ben Protess, July 12, 2026. A previously unreported encounter last summer set the stage for a rapprochement between the president and his former fixer, who has so far avoided the diatribes and prosecutions that President Trump has directed at other critics. Last summer, as many one-time adversaries of President Trump sought to bury the hatchet with him, he met with someone who seemed like a intractable enemy: his former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen.Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump had a brief yet significant conversation at the president’s private, members-only golf club in Bedminster, N.J., breaking a yearslong estrangement marked by legal disputes and public acrimony, according to people with knowledge of the encounter, who discussed the private session on the condition of anonymity.

Top Headlines

President Trump's nominee to become U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, is shown at right in a file photo showcasing his previous role in defending Trump from fraud charges before the convictions were voided because of the president's reelection.

The Parnas Perspective, Sunday Evening News Update and Comment: Graham's Death Creates Major Issues for Republicans, McConnell Proof of Life, Large-scale Iran Bombing, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, July 12, 2026. Lindsey Graham’s death has created major challenges for Republicans, especially ahead of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing and the uncertain future of the SAVE America Act.

Meanwhile, the United States continues its large-scale bombing campaign against Iran. New questions are also swirling about Mitch McConnell’s health, while troops are accusing military leaders of ignoring warnings before Iran’s deadly strike on an American base. And that’s just the beginning.

I will have more important Epstein Files reporting tomorrow and Tuesday, including critical interviews with survivors and members of Congress. I am also speaking with Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s team to learn more about the situation surrounding Senator McConnell’s health.

Now more than ever, I need your support to keep this work going. I will be reporting live from the ground throughout the week, cutting through the spin and covering what is actually happening, not just what makes the evening news.

Here’s the news:

Lindsey Graham’s Death:

Lindsey Graham’s death is expected to have immediate consequences for the Trump administration’s agenda, beginning with Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. Republicans had counted on Graham, a key member of the committee, to provide a critical vote in support of Blanche’s nomination. With Graham gone, Republicans now have only a one-vote margin on the committee, meaning a single GOP defection could block the nomination from advancing. The White House will now face added pressure to keep every Republican in line, including persuading senators such as Thom Tillis, who has previously broken with the party on key votes.

According to Axios, after a phone call on Saturday, Sen. Lindsey Graham reportedly told someone he was not feeling well but planned to seek medical attention after his scheduled Sunday television appearance. He also reportedly joked, “I can't die now. I still need to do the Russia sanctions, get Iran sorted out and do Israeli-Saudi normalization.” His cause of death is below.

Trump ordered all flags across America to be flowing at “half mast.” This is not normal protocol as typically flags are flown at half staff following the passing of a member of Congress in Washington, D.C. and in their home state.

On Meet the Press, Trump said he spoke with Sen. Lindsey Graham “minutes before” his death and described Graham’s passing as “a big blow to the SAVE America Act,” acknowledging the loss could complicate Republicans’ legislative agenda. Trump also revealed he already has someone in mind to replace Graham but declined to name the person, saying it was too soon. When moderator Kristen Welker attempted to ask about Iran, Trump cut off the discussion, calling Iran’s leaders “very, very evil and sick people” before saying he did not want to discuss the issue because he wanted to honor Graham’s life. Here is the full interview:

Trump closed his interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper after declining to discuss other topics out of respect for Sen. Lindsey Graham. Tapper invited Trump to return for another interview, saying there were many additional issues to cover. Trump replied, “Sure. We’re trying to have CNN go on a normal path,” prompting Tapper to respond, “Well I’m on a normal path right here, sir.” Trump ended the conversation by saying, “Good. You are.” This is in reference to Trump wanting to change leadership at CNN:

Rep. Nancy Mace said she is open to running for Sen. Lindsey Graham’s vacant South Carolina Senate seat, telling reporters, “I’ll certainly take a look at it.” Mace becomes one of the first prominent Republicans to publicly express interest in the race, which is expected to feature a crowded GOP primary after Graham’s death. With South Carolina remaining a strongly Republican state, the eventual GOP nominee will likely enter the general election as the favorite.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) called on Senate Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act as a tribute to the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, arguing that advancing the legislation would honor Graham's legacy. Lee's comments come as Republicans face a razor-thin Senate majority following Graham's death, complicating the path forward for major GOP legislation.

Iran war:

The United States launched its largest round of strikes on Iran in weeks, hitting roughly 140 Iranian military targets overnight after blaming Iran for attacking a commercial vessel in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran responded by launching attacks targeting U.S. military bases across the Gulf, while Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates all reported drone or missile activity, interceptions, or damage. The exchange marks a major escalation as diplomacy between Washington and Tehran continues to unravel. Pakistan, which has served as a mediator in recent negotiations, called on both sides to immediately de-escalate and return to dialogue. This is video from US strikes on Iran:

A Washington Post investigation reports that six Americans were killed in an Iranian drone strike on Kuwait's Shuaiba Port on March 1 after commanders allegedly failed to act on intelligence warning the facility was vulnerable. According to the report, interviews with 17 witnesses indicate the command center lacked adequate drone defenses and that its leaders ignored repeated warnings before the attack. Survivors also reportedly criticized the military's healthcare system and its handling of the aftermath. The allegations have not been independently verified, and the U.S. military has not publicly responded to the Post's findings.

Tensions remain high over the Strait of Hormuz, with Iran insisting it has effectively closed the strategic waterway while the United States says it remains open to lawful commercial traffic. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said it attacked a merchant vessel and declared transit “not possible,” while U.S. Central Command and President Trump rejected those claims, insisting ships can still pass safely. Despite the conflicting statements, maritime tracking data shows shipping traffic through the strait has slowed dramatically, and a commercial vessel was damaged near the waterway after an attack that forced its crew to abandon ship. The dispute over the strait comes as both countries continue issuing contradictory public statements about the state of negotiations and regional security.

Trump said the United States struck Iran “very hard” after Tehran allegedly abandoned what he described as a nearly completed agreement and instead attacked a commercial ship with a drone. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz also rejected earlier suggestions that Iran’s attacks on merchant vessels were accidental, arguing the strikes reflected deliberate decisions by Iran’s leadership rather than rogue actions by lower-level officers. Meanwhile, additional attacks were reported across southern Iran, including military facilities near Bandar Abbas and Qeshm Island, as both sides continued exchanging strikes. The rapid escalation has left the region on edge, with Gulf nations increasing security measures while world powers continue urging restraint.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the escalating conflict in the Gulf is becoming increasingly dangerous, saying he is "deeply concerned" by Iran's attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. strikes on Iran, and Tehran's attacks on neighboring countries. He urged all sides to halt the attacks immediately, warning that a full-scale regional war would have catastrophic consequences not only for the Middle East but also for global peace and the world economy.

Mitch McConnell Update:

Sen. Mitch McConnell has now been hospitalized for about a month, but his office still has not disclosed why he was admitted or provided details about his condition. His staff has only said that he is “continuing to improve” and remains engaged in Senate and Kentucky matters while recovering. The lack of information has fueled widespread speculation online, prompting calls for greater transparency from figures including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear. McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, did not immediately return from a planned trip to China, with her spokesperson saying his condition did not require her immediate return.

In a written statement accompanied by a new photo, Mitch McConnell says he was “briefly unconscious” after his fall last month but did not suffer a heart attack or stroke. He says he’s now recovering in a rehabilitation center after also developing pneumonia and won’t return to the Senate floor until doctors clear him.

Several top Republicans say they have spoken with McConnell in recent days, describing him as alert, engaged, and eager to return to work, even as questions about his health persist. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Sen. John Barrasso, and CNN contributor Scott Jennings all said McConnell discussed policy and current events with them by phone, while President Trump said he has not spoken to him and does not know how he is doing. Reports citing emergency dispatch audio from the day of McConnell’s hospitalization referenced a cardiac arrest call and CPR at his residence, though CNN said it has not independently confirmed those details. McConnell has missed several key Senate votes during his absence, including votes on housing legislation and measures related to presidential war powers.

Other news:

MS NOW reports that two Atlanta-based FBI intelligence analysts, who are married, were fired after refusing to participate in the Trump administration’s investigation into Georgia’s 2020 presidential election, arguing the probe was not justified under FBI and Justice Department policies. According to the report, the analysts were escorted from their office after declining the assignment, while the FBI said employees are expected to follow agency standards but did not confirm the firings. The investigation has reportedly mobilized about 260 FBI intelligence analysts nationwide, with some tasked with reviewing voter records and checking information on approximately 175,000 individuals. The probe has drawn criticism because multiple previous investigations found no evidence of fraud sufficient to change Georgia’s 2020 election results, and Sen. Mark Warner warned that redirecting FBI resources toward the case could undermine the bureau’s core mission ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

According to Reuters, the United States and Canada have reached an agreement allowing the $4.7 billion Gordie Howe International Bridge between Detroit and Windsor to open on July 27 after months of delays tied to a dispute over toll revenue. Under the deal, the U.S. will reportedly receive 50% of bridge toll profits and gain veto power over toll increases exceeding 10%, while Canada will establish a 15-year regional economic development fund tied to bridge profits. President Trump claimed the revised agreement secured a "much better deal" for the United States after previously threatening to block the bridge's opening over financial concerns. The new crossing is expected to ease congestion at the busy Ambassador Bridge, reduce truck crossing times by about 20 minutes, and improve freight movement across the busiest U.S.-Canada commercial border crossing.

A tourist was seriously injured Friday evening after a bison tossed them roughly 8 feet into the air in Yellowstone National Park. Professional photographer Mike Macleod, who filmed the incident, said the animal was "angry, agitated and charging anything and everything" before the attack.

Russian troops mounted a YakB-12.7 helicopter machine gun on a fixed stand for a live-fire training exercise, but the drill quickly spiraled out of control. Video shows the weapon's extreme recoil overwhelming the improvised setup almost immediately. The exercise appears to end in chaos as the mounted gun becomes unstable during sustained fire. The footage has rapidly spread online as another example of unconventional battlefield improvisation.

Ukraine has launched one of its most consequential maritime campaigns of the war, forcing Russia to suspend shipping through the Sea of Azov after targeting roughly 90 vessels in less than a week. Ukrainian officials say overnight strikes hit 10 tankers, four ferries, and the Syzran oil refinery, while also damaging electrical infrastructure in occupied Crimea. The shutdown disrupts a critical Russian logistics corridor used to move oil, grain, steel, military supplies, and sanctioned exports through the Kerch Strait and Don-Azov Canal. Ukrainian officials argue the campaign is steadily isolating Crimea, degrading Russia’s military logistics, and shrinking Moscow’s so-called shadow fleet, although many battlefield claims from both sides remain difficult to independently verify.

Israeli strikes in Gaza killed at least six Palestinians on Sunday, including 9-year-old Tala Abu Matar, while more than a dozen others were wounded, according to local health officials. The Israeli military said it targeted Hamas infrastructure and a weapons production site in Gaza City but said it was unaware of some reported civilian casualties. Although violence has declined since the October ceasefire, Israeli strikes continue almost daily, with Gaza’s Health Ministry reporting more than 1,000 Palestinians, including at least 260 children, killed since the truce took effect. Meanwhile, ceasefire negotiations remain stalled over Hamas’ disarmament and Gaza’s reconstruction, leaving most of the territory’s more than two million residents displaced and living in overcrowded camps or damaged buildings.

Experts are warning that the new world screwworm could become much harder to contain in the U.S. because the parasite has now become established in wildlife across parts of Central America, not just livestock. Researchers say illegal cross-border cattle trafficking has been the primary driver of its rapid spread north, allowing infected animals to bypass health inspections and transmit the parasite deep into forests. The U.S. is currently releasing about 100 million sterile flies to slow the outbreak, but scientists estimate roughly 500 million would be needed to push the screwworm back south and eradicate it. Experts also caution that today's larger cattle populations, widespread illegal livestock movement, and limited research on the pest make the current outbreak more challenging than the successful eradication campaign carried out in the 1960s.

At least 27 people were killed after a massive fire tore through a pub in Bangkok just after midnight, with firefighters taking about 30 minutes to bring the blaze under control. Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said the cause of the fire remains under investigation, while several survivors were transported to nearby hospitals. Videos from the scene showed flames engulfing the entrance as patrons fled and thick black smoke billowing into the night sky. The tragedy is the latest in a series of deadly nightclub fires in Thailand, including a 2022 pub fire that killed 14 people and the 2009 Santika nightclub fire that claimed 66 lives.

World No. 1 Jannik Sinner successfully defended his Wimbledon title, defeating Alexander Zverev in four sets, 6-7(7), 7-6(2), 6-3, 6-4, to capture his fifth career Grand Slam championship. The victory comes just weeks after Sinner’s disappointing French Open exit and marks his 10th straight win over Zverev, who appeared hampered by a knee issue after slipping in the third set.

U,S. President Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Put are shown conferring at the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany on On July 7, 2017, one of many of their close communications, normally highly secret and seemingly mutually supportive as indicated by resulting publicly discernable actions by their respective governments.

New York Times, News Analysis: Contrasts in War: Trump Sought an Exit. Putin Pushed On. Now Both Are Stuck, Anton Troianovski and Paul Sonne, July 12, 2026. The Iran and Ukraine wars underline the common limits of military force in achieving political ends, but also the differences between a dug-in Russian president and a vacillating American one. 

President Vladimir V. Putin is in his fifth year of trying to bomb a smaller country into submission. President Trump tried to pull the plug after six weeks, only to be drawn back in.

Neither man has come close to achieving his goals. But the contrast between the relentless killing by Mr. Putin’s Russia in Ukraine and Mr. Trump’s on-and-off bombing in Iran is the story of two leaders of major powers struggling to find their ways out of wars of choice.

Mr. Putin’s ground invasion of a neighboring democracy and Mr. Trump’s air war on a Middle East theocracy are difficult to compare, and each leader appears convinced that his war is just while the other’s is wrong. But the two conflicts intersect in numerous ways in global geopolitics, from energy markets and air-defense supplies to the diplomatic bandwidth of White House envoys.

Most broadly, they have both demonstrated the limits of military force in achieving political ends, while weakening the image of power that both the United States and Russia seek to project on the world stage. But they also underscore the differences between a dug-in Mr. Putin and a constantly shifting Mr. Trump.

To Mr. Trump’s hawkish critics, his difficulty negotiating with Iran on a long-term peace deal — as underlined by Iran’s attack on commercial ships last week, and U.S. retaliation — is evidence that he stopped his full-fledged bombing campaign too soon. Some even suggested after Mr. Trump’s initial cease-fire in April that Mr. Putin’s refusal to compromise could be something to learn from.ImageDamage from U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in Tehran this year. To Mr. Trump’s hawkish critics, his difficulty in negotiating a long-term peace deal is evidence that he ended the full-fledged bombing campaign too soon

“I really think that we lost our leverage by stopping the campaign,” Jack Keane, a retired general, said on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom” back then. “I would have preferred to go into negotiations with the war continuing because we have leverage over them as the war is continuing. That’s kind of Putin’s playbook, isn’t it?”

In Russia, some commentators pointed to Mr. Trump’s preliminary memorandum of understanding with Iran as a sign of weakness, the latest signpost of American decline. But there were also whispers that Mr. Trump took a step some wished Mr. Putin would take, according to Tatiana Stanovaya, a specialist in Kremlin politics at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. Mr. Trump looked ready to cut his losses in a war effort that went way off course.

“They bombed a little bit and figured it out,” Ms. Stanovaya said, channeling the feelings of some of her contacts in the Russian elite. “Will Putin figure it out?”

Last year, Mr. Trump appeared to offer Mr. Putin an offramp. The White House dangled sanctions relief and business deals in exchange for a cease-fire in his war, despite widespread criticism that the offer was rewarding Russia for its aggression.

But it was not good enough for Mr. Putin, who insisted that the “root causes” of the war be addressed before he stopped fighting — Kremlin-speak for Mr. Putin’s wide-ranging territorial and political demands, like keeping Ukraine out of NATO. Two people close to the Kremlin said the Russian president saw his war as his main leverage over Ukraine and the West. If he stopped without getting concessions first, they said, he was unlikely to get them with the military pressure off.

From Mr. Putin’s perspective, one of the people said, Mr. Trump made a mistake in starting the war on Iran, but Mr. Trump’s cease-fire in April was also a mistake in that it ran counter to Mr. Putin’s doctrine of maintaining military pressure on an opponent for as long as it took to extract lasting concessions. The two people spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal for talking candidly about Mr. Putin.

To some of the Iran hawks in Mr. Trump’s circle, the contrast between Mr. Putin’s stubbornness and Mr. Trump’s vacillation represents a misreading by both men of their capabilities. General Keane, who received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Mr. Trump in 2020, said the United States “made a choice to go to a cease-fire” in April when its military options against Iran far exceeded what Mr. Putin can do in Ukraine with conventional weapons.

“Putin, no matter what he does, is not going to achieve that kind of domination over Ukraine,” General Keane said in an interview. “That’s completely different from the U.S. situation where we really do have the capability to end this militarily if we desire to.”

New York Times, Fact Check: Trump Justifies Money Made as President With Inaccurate Claims, Linda Qiu, Videos by Jamie Leventhal, July 12, 2026 (print ed.). President Trump has wrongly attributed the $2 billion windfall he gained during his second term to a hot stock market and claimed that he was the only president to donate his salary.

The $2.2 billion windfall President Trump reaped since his second term has raised questions over potential conflicts of interest and whether he has profited from public office, but Mr. Trump has dismissed any notion of impropriety.

Some of Mr. Trump’s most lucrative ventures seemed to intersect directly with his administration’s policies like cryptocurrency and dealings with foreign governments.

But, Mr. Trump has argued, his personal financial gains reflected a stock market benefiting everyone; his investments and business dealings were in a blind trust, not unlike other presidents; and unlike his predecessors, he donated his presidential salary.

Except none of those assertions are true. Here’s a fact-check.

More On Lindsey Graham Death 

President Trump and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who was one of Trump's harshest critics before becoming one of his greatest apologists and advocates (Reuters photo by Leah Mills).

The Warning with Steve Schmidt, Opinion: The Warning with Steve SchmidtLindsey knew better. He chose worse, Steve Schmidt (commentator, Lincoln Project co-founder and senior strategist for Republican 2008 Presidential Nominee John McCain, the late Arizona senator), July 12, 2026. Lindsey Graham was a lonely and unprincipled man who betrayed his country for power and his decency for attention.

Let it be known for all time that he knew exactly what Donald Trump was from the very beginning, and chose him over his country:

If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed ... and we will deserve it.

I believe Donald Trump would be an absolute, utter disaster for the Republican Party, destroy conservatism as we know it.

We would get wiped out and it would take generations to overcome a Trump candidacy.

Donald Trump is not going to be the nominee of the Republican party. If he is, that’s the end of the Republican Party.

Trump is an interloper and a demagogue of the greatest proportion.

When Donald Trump attacked America, and tried to burn down the republic built by Washington, saved by Lincoln and redeemed by King, he was aided by Lindsey Graham who supported the lies, dismissed the insanity and sought personal gain from it all.

Lindsey Graham was a pathetic man, a true cynic and a faithless servant of the Constitution.

He was a simple man to understand and a tragic one. He lacked a moral core and any sense of right and wrong. The great empty spaces of his life were filled with an insatiable need for “relevance.” He found it as a cast member in the most malignant reality show ever made.

Let there be no confusion about what Lindsey Graham was. There was no complexity to the man, nor much in the way to plumb and analyze about his journey to the bottom of the Trump sewer.

Lindsey Graham lived his life as a pilot fish, a parasitic sucker fish hovering about larger predators. He was a sidekick and the hollowest of hollow men. Here is what I once shared with Rolling Stone:

People try to analyze Lindsey through the prism of the manifest inconsistencies that exist between things that he used to believe and what he’s doing now. The way to understand him is to look at what’s consistent. And essentially what he is in American politics is what, in the aquatic world, would be a pilot fish: a smaller fish that hovers about a larger predator, like a shark, living off of its detritus. That’s Lindsey. And when he swam around the McCain shark, broadly viewed as a virtuous and good shark, Lindsey took on the patina of virtue. But wherever the apex shark is, you find the Lindsey fish hovering about, and Trump’s the newest shark in the sea. Lindsey has a real draw to power — but he’s found it unattainable on his own merits.

Let there never be any confusion over the choice Lindsey Graham made.

• He chose Trump over his friend.
• He chose Trump over his country.
• He chose Trump over his duty.
• He chose Trump over his oath.

Now he’s dead, and Trump is his rotten legacy — and in that, he won’t be alone.

• In the end he made an adjudicated rapist laugh and played a lot of golf with him.
• He was a warmonger and the architect of a lost war against Iran.
• Lindsey Graham helped Trump divide America and break our alliances, ideals and traditions.
• He was no patriot.

Lindsey Graham made his choice.

The high court of history will pass a brutal judgement about a man who knew better, but chose worse.

I won’t mourn Lindsey Graham’s death, but rather the country he helped break.

He was a most contemptible man.

New York Times, Lindsey Graham, Republican Senator and Staunch Trump Ally, Dies at 71, Robert Jimison and Amelia Nierenberg, July 12, 2026. He died of “a brief and sudden illness” on Saturday evening, his office said. Over more than two decades in the Senate, he consistently pushed for the use of U.S. military power overseas.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and stalwart ally of President Trump who was a forceful advocate for an interventionist U.S. foreign policy, died on Saturday evening. He was 71.

He died of “a brief and sudden illness,” his office said in a statement early Sunday. No further details were provided about where he died or the cause. After recently returning from a trip to Ukraine, Mr. Graham had been scheduled to appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning.

Mr. Graham was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994, before winning his Senate seat in 2002. Last month, he fended off five challengers to win the Republican primary in his bid for a fifth term.

Mr. Trump offered his condolences on social media early Sunday, calling Mr. Graham “one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known.”

“He was always working, and was a true American Patriot,” Mr. Trump added. “Lindsey will be greatly missed!!!”

Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, a Republican, can immediately appoint a temporary replacement to fill Mr. Graham’s Senate seat. Mr. Graham was set to face Annie Andrews, a Democrat and a pediatrician, in the general election in November.

Mr. Graham’s death comes as another influential Republican senator, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has spent several weeks in the hospital for undisclosed reasons. It leaves Senate Republicans without a senior lawmaker and reliable vote as they face pressure from Mr. Trump to continue advancing his legislative agenda.

Mr. Graham, who made a long-shot bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination that went to Mr. Trump, consistently argued for the use of American military power overseas. He was a fierce supporter of Israel and of Ukraine, making multiple trips to both countries, and he recently supported aggressive military action against Iran. He was a familiar face for many world diplomats and leaders, several of whom paid tribute to him on Sunday.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, right, called Mr. Graham a “beloved friend” in a social media post.

“Lindsey understood that the security of Israel and America are inseparable,” Mr. Netanyahu wrote, adding, “Israel has lost one of its greatest friends.”

Mr. Graham helped navigate Ukraine’s strained relations with the Trump administration after Russia’s invasion in 2022 and had often visited Kyiv, the capital, despite regular Russian bombardment of the city. On his recent trip to Ukraine, his final visit overseas, Mr. Graham visited a drone factory and met with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Lindsey was a true defender of freedom and the values that make our world safer,” Mr. Zelensky wrote on social media on Sunday, saying he was “deeply saddened” by Mr. Graham’s death.

Mr. Graham was one of many powerful Republicans who changed their public position on Mr. Trump. As Mr. Trump was first rising in the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Graham lambasted him as a “demagogue” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”

“You know how you make America great again?” Mr. Graham said in a CNN interview in 2015. “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

He said he had voted in the 2016 election for Evan McMullin, an independent candidate, rather than for Mr. Trump or the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton.

A decade later, though, he was regularly and effusively lauding Mr. Trump. In a speech celebrating his South Carolina primary victory last month, Mr. Graham joked, “Mr. President, you’re not far behind God.”

Over his Senate career, Mr. Graham rose to lead two influential committees, Judiciary (from 2019 to 2021) and Budget (starting in January 2025).

• PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Lindsey Graham's Passing Is Another Stage In The Death Of Trumpism, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, July 12, 2026. Time is marching on, and staunch Trump allies like Lindsey Graham are dying in the ultimate reminder that the supposed movement that Trump built is also dying a little more every day.
• New York Times, Lindsey Graham Was Facing Re-election in November. What Happens Now? Bayliss Wagner, July 12, 2026. South Carolina law suggests his death triggers an Aug. 11 special Republican primary election, and the state’s governor can appoint a replacement to serve out the rest of his term, through early January.
• Lance’s Substack, Opinion: Lindsey Graham’s Passing Exposes A Painful Truth...About Us, Lance F Rosen, right, July 12, 2026.You’ll not hear me eulogizing him and there will be no praise coming from here for anything he did, though some will point to his stubborn defense of Ukraine as a good thing. His motives, even for that, were to a degree politically self-serving. He has been morally dead since the day he visibly lost his mind in the Senate during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

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

Trump planned a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists (some shown above).

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: The Jan. 6 Insurrection Succeeded, Susan J. Demas, right, July 12, 2026. In 2024, Donald Trump vowed to be America’s “retribution.” He didn’t hide what he planned to do. He bragged about it. And voters elected him anyway.

There is something I haven’t wanted to say out loud for a long time.

The Jan. 6 insurrection succeeded.

Not immediately. Not completely. Not in the way its architects hoped on the afternoon they watched a mob tear through the Capitol looking for members of Congress to kill. But in every way that ultimately matters — politically, legally, historically — the people who plotted to destroy American democracy on January 6, 2021, got what they desired. Donald Trump is back in the White House. His insurrectionists were pardoned. And a Supreme Court he stacked now holds that a president cannot be prosecuted for the acts of a president.

It worked. And we need to say so clearly before we can figure out what comes next.

Let me tell you what happened that day. Because the right-wing fan fiction has now metastasized into the marrow of our nation — albeit with deeply contradictory lore, ranging from crackpots insisting it was a false-flag operation run by Antifa and federal agents to Trump declaring that it was merely “a day of love.”

So we need to be blunt about the facts.

On Jan. 6, 2021, a horde of thousands — organized in part by the Proud Boys and other extremist groups, summoned to Washington by Donald Trump himself, and directed toward the Capitol by Trump in a speech that told them to “fight like hell” — overwhelmed Capitol Police and breached the building while Congress was certifying the 2020 election results. They came with weapons. They came with zip ties. They beat officers with flagpoles, fire extinguishers, and their fists.

Five officers died in connection with the attack — including Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who suffered a stroke after being attacked, and four officers who later died by suicide. More than 140 others were injured. So much for “Back the Blue.”

The mob chanted, “Hang Mike Pence.” Some of them were looking for Nancy Pelosi. Others left notes for the lawmakers they were hunting. This wasn’t spontaneous. It was planned.

Trump hadn’t arrived at Jan. 6 by accident. For months, he had filed and lost 61 of 62 post-election lawsuits — including before judges he had personally appointed, who found no evidence of fraud sufficient to change any outcome. He summoned GOP elected officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania. He called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and ordered him to “find 11,780 votes.” He pressured Pence to abandon his constitutional duty and refuse to certify the results.

The insurrection was not a riot that got out of hand. It was the tactical finale of a multi-front attempt to overturn a free and fair election.

When Joe Biden was certified as the 46th president on Jan. 7 — not the 6th, the date the Constitution stipulated — most of us, the Coalition of the Decent, let out a collective sigh of relief. The republic had held. The system had worked, barely, at great cost. Reasonable people thought Trump was finished. 

U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell (from left), officers Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department, and Capitol Police Pfc. Harry Dunn are sworn in Tuesday before testifying before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack (Pool photo by Oliver Contreras via Getty Images).

Let us note, for the historical record, who told us we were hysterical for worrying about this in the weeks before it happened. Pundits. Republican officials. The conventional wisdom of a Washington press corps that had spent four years normalizing the abnormal and insisting that institutions would hold. They were wrong, as they had always been wrong about Trump — wrong about his willingness to do harm, wrong about the limits of his cruelty, wrong about the depths he would sink to hold power. They underestimated him because they needed to. The alternative was too unsettling to process.

The House voted to impeach Trump a second time on Jan. 13, 2021 — charging him with incitement of insurrection. It was the right thing to do, but only ten Republicans crossed the aisle. And, as I’ve argued, it didn’t happen fast enough. What followed in the Senate, however, was something else.

The upper chamber voted 57-43 to convict — a majority, a historic bipartisan rebuke — and yet, still ten votes short of the two-thirds required for removal. Forty-three Republican senators voted to acquit a man they had just watched attempt a coup. Most of them knew exactly what they were doing.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who may or may not be dead right now, delivered a scorching floor speech about Trump’s culpability immediately after voting to absolve him, saying he believed Trump was constitutionally disqualified from future office. But then he mournfully declared that the Senate lacked jurisdiction over a former president — a legal theory widely criticized as invented for the occasion. (And just to put a bow on this fiasco, a few years later, McConnell endorsed Trump for president. Again.)

What those 43 votes said to Trump, to his movement, and to the country was: this is acceptable. An insurrection is not disqualifying. Try harder next time.

The Republican Party spent the following two years trying to convince itself it could move on. Leaders lined up for the 2024 nomination. Ron DeSantis. Nikki Haley, who had served in Trump’s Cabinet and emerged after Jan. 6 as one of his sharpest critics. Vivek Ramaswamy, who briefly positioned himself as a rational tech-sector alternative and then ended up running DOGE during Trump II.

A significant portion of the party was looking for an exit ramp. They got a big assist in staying lost.

Merrick Garland, in normal times, might have been an excellent Attorney General. But these were not normal times. By the time Garland appointed Jack Smith as Special Counsel in May 2022 — sixteen months after the attack — Trump had already regained his footing in Republican politics. By the time Smith indicted Trump for Jan. 6 conspiracy in August 2023 — more than two-and-a-half years after the attack — Trump had already locked up the Republican nomination.

Garland’s caution, his determination to avoid any whiff of political maneuvering, meant Trump had time to turn the indictments into a campaign platform. Every charge became proof of persecution. Every delayed hearing became proof of exoneration by inertia.

Trump was ultimately charged with 91 felony counts across four criminal cases. He was convicted in New York on all 34 counts in May 2024. A civil jury found him liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, eventually awarding her $88 million in damages. He was a convicted felon with a civil finding of sexual abuse who had incited an insurrection and been impeached twice.

He won the presidency anyway.ArticlesFlinching from Power: Three Mistakes Democrats Need to OwnSusan J. Demas·Jul 5Flinching from Power: Three Mistakes Democrats Need to Own

In the spring of 2009, as millions of Americans were losing their jobs, homes, and retirement savings, the executives at AIG’s financial products division — the unit whose reckless bets had nearly brought down the global financial system — collected $165 million in bonuses

Part of what made that possible was the ultra-conservative Supreme Court, shown above.

On July 1, 2024, in a 6-3 ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court held that former presidents enjoy at least presumptive immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. Three of those six justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett — sit on the court because Donald Trump appointed them. The ruling effectively neutered Smith’s Jan. 6 case, forcing prosecutors to strip out evidence related to Trump’s official actions before the case could proceed. By the time the decision came down, with the election months away, there was no longer any realistic path to a verdict before November.

For anyone who had been watching and wondering if maybe the charges against Trump were politically motivated — which is what Trump had been screaming for two years — the Supreme Court’s intervention was a permission slip.

The court, the highest legal authority in the country, had just said: It’s complicated. The criminal accountability the law promised turned fizzled out. And for a significant slice of undecided voters who were angry about inflation, exhausted from the pandemic, and looking for a reason to believe the charges were overblown, the court gave them exactly what they needed.

Trump won the 2024 election. He won all seven swing states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — states Biden had carried in 2020. He won the popular vote with a plurality of 49.8 percent, the first Republican to win the popular vote since George W. Bush in 2004. His margin was wider than 2016, when he lost the popular vote and won only through an electoral bankshot. He won bigger after 91 criminal charges, after being convicted on 34 counts, after a civil jury found him liable for sexual abuse. He won despite Jan. 6.

Because of Jan. 6 might be more accurate — because the insurrection demonstrated that rules, norms, and laws were not going to stop him, and because the people who were supposed to enforce those rules largely didn’t, and because the rest of us were told for four years that we were being hysterical when we said the consequences for American democracy were dire.

On the first day of his second term, Trump pardoned nearly 1,500 people who participated in the Capitol attack. The historical record was already being erased before he signed the paperwork. A subsequent Lawfare study found that at least 97 of those pardonees have since been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of new crimes — including one man, freed from prison by the pardon, who was then convicted of child molestation and sentenced to life. The people who broke into the Capitol on Trump’s behalf weren’t waiting patiently to make amends. Most were just biding their time for Daddy Trump to erase the record of what they’d done.

Here is what I think we need to sit with, uncomfortably, for a while.

If you voted for Trump in 2024, you voted for a man you watched attempt a coup with your own eyes. You saw the violence on your television. You saw the zip ties and the beaten cops and the Confederate flags carried through the Capitol. You knew he had been impeached twice and found liable for sexual abuse. And you made the calculation — whether because of inflation, resentment, exhaustion, or genuine agreement with what he was doing — that all of that was acceptable.

That is a reckoning this country has to have. Not as an insult to Trump voters, many of whom have since expressed regret. But as an honest accounting of how a democracy survives — or doesn’t — we need to grabble with the fact that its citizens were given a clear choice in 2024 between democratic norms and the restoration of a man who violated them catastrophically. And millions of them choose the latter.

The insurrection succeeded because we let it. Because the Senate gave Trump a pass. Because Garland waited too long. Because the Supreme Court handed him immunity. Because enough voters decided that Jan. 6 was not, in the end, a dealbreaker.

Unless we are honest about how we got here, we will be here again. The next authoritarian won’t need to improvise a coup at the last minute. He will have the blueprint. He will have the immunity ruling. He will have the precedent.

The question is whether we are honest enough about what happened — and what we allowed — to build back a democracy that holds.

Status with Natalie Korach, The Times’ Subpoena Showdown, Natalie Korach, July 12, 2026. Mentioned in this edition: David Ellison, Kash Patel, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, Jake Tapper, Felice Belman, Graham Platner, and more. But first, The Sunday Spotlight.

Behind the scenes, Status has learned, top New York Times executives have been in close contact with five reporters targeted by federal prosecutors, preparing the newsroom for a high-stakes fight over press freedom.

Over the last few days, as The New York Times braces for a potential precedent-setting legal showdown with the Trump administration over press freedom, the newspaper’s top leadership has been in close contact with the five reporters targeted by federal prosecutors, seeking to reassure them that the institution will mount an aggressive defense against the extraordinary effort to compel their testimony before a grand jury.

Behind the scenes, Status has learned, Times executives have held several conversations with the journalists, with Executive Editor Joe Kahn personally involved in the discussions as the newspaper prepares for what could become one of the most consequential press-freedom battles of Trump's second term. On Sunday, chief executive Meredith Kopit Levien brought that message to the broader newsroom and company. In an internal memo obtained by Status, Kopit Levien recirculated a Saturday note from Kahn that denounced the subpoenas. She added that leadership regards the action as “a brazen attempt to stifle independent reporting.” “As Joe says, the five colleagues who have been targeted—and our whole newsroom, which works hard every day to serve our mission and the public’s right to know—should know that they have the full weight of The Times, and each of us, behind them,” she wrote.

Together, the Times leadership’s actions underscore how seriously it views the administration’s move as a direct attack on the newspaper’s reporting and as a broader threat to press freedom.

The subpoenas, issued by the Southern District of New York, seek testimony from Times reporters Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, Eric Schmitt, and Adam Goldman over their reporting on security concerns surrounding the Qatari-donated Boeing 747 that Trump has sought to use as the new Air Force One.

The journalists have been ordered to appear before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday, setting up what is likely to become an expedited legal battle over whether reporters can be compelled to testify about confidential sourcing and newsgathering.

Renowned First Amendment attorney Ted Boutrous, who successfully represented CNN during Trump’s first term when the White House sought to exile Jim Acosta, told Status he expects The Times to move quickly to quash the subpoenas and that a judge will likely allow the newspaper to challenge them before any testimony is compelled.

“My expectation is that the district court will give the journalists and The Times an opportunity to be fully heard on these issues,” he said. “The idea that they’re going to have to go and testify on Wednesday seems highly doubtful.” But Boutrous added that the compressed timetable and the DOJ’s decision to serve the subpoenas directly at the reporters’ homes appeared designed to send a message. “To go to their houses and serve the subpoenas when they know where David McCraw is, they know where The Times is, they know the drill on this,” Boutrous said, referring to the newspaper’s longtime deputy general counsel.

“Instead, it’s really a bush league maneuver in so many ways. So unprofessional to serve these grand jury subpoenas without notice to anybody.” “

There are all these flashing red lights that say intimidation, harassment, retaliation for speech and journalism, and I think it's deeply troubling for the First Amendment and our democracy,” Boutrous added.

Kahn, for his part, projected confidence in the paper’s ability to prevail. “We have the best legal team in the business,” he wrote in his memo. “The Trump administration, with its impulsive subpoenas, used vague pretenses of a threat to national security to try to compel our reporters to appear before a grand jury. The law protects news gatherers from this sort of retaliatory abuse of prosecutorial power.”

The aggressive posture also reflects the extent to which The Times has emerged as one of the leading major news organizations confronting the Trump administration in court over issues of press freedom. In recent months, the paper has sued the Defense Department over restrictions on Pentagon access, countersued the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and now appears poised to mount another high-profile legal battle over its reporters' ability to protect confidential sources.

The stakes extend far beyond the Times journalists. If prosecutors succeed in forcing reporters to testify in a leak investigation, it could have a chilling effect, weakening long-standing protections surrounding confidential newsgathering and making sources significantly more reluctant to come forward.

Meanwhile, for the Trump administration, the subpoenas are the latest in a series of increasingly aggressive moves toward journalists and news organizations in Trump’s second term.

In January, FBI agents searched the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson as part of a leak investigation, seizing her electronic devices. Later that month, former CNN anchor turned independent journalist Don Lemon was arrested by federal agents after covering a protest that disrupted a church service in Minnesota.

Elsewhere, Trump has used regulatory power to his advantage, putting pressure on news organizations to settle lawsuits, including ABC News and CBS News. Separately, Trump also sued The Times last year, accusing it of publishing stories to “sabotage” his 2024 presidential campaign and business interests.

This all comes as Trump prepares to attend the rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, an event that specifically celebrates the role of the free press in American democracy.

In a statement, WHCA president Weijia Jiang condemned the subpoenas and expressed support for the Times reporters, writing that they were “targeted for doing their jobs to uphold the public’s right to know how its government operates.”

“The WHCA condemns any act of intimidation against journalists, including attempts to pressure them into revealing sources,” she added. The juxtaposition is striking. Next Friday, July 24, Trump is expected to sit among journalists at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. At the same time, his Justice Department is pursuing one of the most aggressive efforts in recent memory to force reporters to testify about their reporting and confidential sources.

New York Times, White House Directed Patel to Oversee Investigation Involving Times Reporting, Devlin Barrett, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, Updated July 12, 2026. The F.B.I. director spent about eight hours at the White House Friday focused on the effort, which led to the subpoenaing of several Times reporters who wrote about the security of Air Force One.

The White House directed Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, to oversee a leak investigation into reporting by The New York Times about security issues with the new Air Force One, leading to a flurry of subpoenas to several Times reporters Friday night, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

Mr. Patel, left, scuttled a planned trip to Chicago and spent roughly eight hours at the White House on Friday, running the investigation from there rather than F.B.I. headquarters — a major departure from historical practice. Mr. Patel also briefed senior administration officials on the investigation, two people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions.

The White House’s deep involvement in the case came after officials said that President Trump was enraged about the coverage of the Qatari-donated plane, which The Times reported Thursday lacks the same defensive countermeasures of the previous Air Force One.

Mr. Trump flew on the new jet to a NATO meeting in Turkey earlier in the week, but was forced to change to the old plane when he departed because of Secret Service concerns, as The Times reported on Wednesday.

Mr. Patel’s role in the investigation, in close coordination with top administration officials, reflects a further dismantling of the wall that had separated the White House and the F.B.I. in previous administrations. The government’s effort to immediately seek information from journalists, when such cases are typically centered first on identifying potential internal wrongdoing by officials, comes as the Trump administration has intensified pressure on news organizations.

In response to a request for comment, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said that “President Trump is laser focused on helping the American people and keeping them safe. That will always be his priority.”

Emily Covington, the director of the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs, sought to downplay the unusual nature of the subpoenas, some of which were delivered late Friday night directly to the doors of the reporters’ homes. 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 6, 2026 [Trump Picks FBI Targets For Press Probe], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 12, 2026. Last night the Department of Justice subpoenaed reporters from the New York Times over a story the newspaper published on Wednesday.

Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt reported that the Secret Service had security concerns about the new Air Force One Boeing 747-8 given to the U.S. by Qatar. So, when tensions escalated with Iran while Trump was in Türkiye for the NATO summit, they asked the president to use one of the other, older, Air Force One planes for his return journey.

Trump and White House officials pushed back strongly against the idea that the new plane had any security problems after pouring what appears to have been hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into renovating the plane. But, according to Adam Gramegna of Military . com, U.S. officials told CBS News that the speed with which the plane was rushed into service meant that it does not have the same protections as the older planes.

According to Devlin Barrett, Glenn Thrush, and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, the story that his prized plane was not as good as the older ones enraged Trump, and the White House called in FBI director Kash Patel to find the two anonymous sources who leaked it. Patel spent about 8 hours on Friday running an investigation from the White House, rather than FBI headquarters, before the reporters received the subpoenas.

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton, whom Trump has nominated to be the next director of national intelligence, issued the subpoenas. The reporters are ordered to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday “in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law.” The Department of Justice said the subpoenas are related to “the crime of leaking national security information.”

The Justice Department emphasized that “reporters are not the targets. Those leaking classified information are.” But issuing subpoenas to U.S. journalists, who are protected from government interference by the First Amendment, is a huge red flag. As former Time magazine editor Rick Stengel noted: “The reporting that the Times journalists have been subpoenaed for is exactly the kind of journalism the First Amendment is designed to protect: matters involving national security and taxpayer dollars. Reporting that embarrasses a president is protected speech.”

David McCraw, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for the Times, said: “The appearance of Federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects. Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used. This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

By 11:18 PM on Friday, Trump’s fury had turned back to Iran. He posted on social media that if Iran tried to assassinate him, “Locked and Loaded” missiles would begin to rain down on the country “to completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran—PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!”

Today he turned his anger toward those questioning his mental acuity, particularly New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman, who commented on MS NOW about his reference in Türkiye to the “Islamic State of Japan.” At 12:23 PM he lashed out at “Maggot Hagerman” and then, to refute her claims, wrote that he “just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed, I do it every six months, and I requested another Cognitive Test, the only President to do so, three times, and I aced them all—Got every question right. Few people in Washington, D.C., could do so, including Maggot and her flunky associate, Jonathan Swan. I would be willing to bet they couldn’t get 50% of the questions right.”

The White House said Trump was referring to a physical he underwent in May.

Then, at 3:16, the president’s account posted a screed of almost 450 words complaining angrily that “I win the Election IN A LANDSLIDE against the entire Dumocrat Party,…against almost 100% negative press and Fake News,…especially Maggot Hagerman, one of the most unattractive people in the News “Business,” and her lightweight assistant, Jonathan Swan…. All I do is WIN, often against all odds,” yet no one compliments him on his great successes.

Here he may have had in mind Thursday’s news story from Catherine Rampell of The Bulwark about his claim on social media on Monday that Walmart would be “dropping the price of ground beef by almost 15 percent” “at my Administration’s request.” Rampell reported that a Walmart spokesperson told her a different story: the price cuts were part of usual summer rollbacks, which had begun the week before Trump took credit for them. Rampell noted that Trump “looks for opportunities to slap his name on politically useful things that companies were already planning to do—seasonal sales, major investments, hiring, et very much cetera.”

White House spokesperson Kush Desai clarified on social media that the president’s “announcement was that the sale is extending all summer long,” adding, “The media’s obsessive need to try to undermine any good news when it affects President Trump is pathological.”

A rant about the news media took up most of Trump’s long post, as he insisted that those reporting his bad poll numbers and policy failures “have no credibility…. If the Election was held again today, I would win by even more—Actually, much more!” he posted. “The Dumocrats don’t have what it takes, their Policies are wrong, and they are, generally, stupid people. They are going COMMUNIST because they are a desperately ‘sinking ship,’ and there’s not a thing they can do about it.

“Instead of writing inaccurate, false articles, for over 10 years now, shouldn’t it be time that they say, ‘We give up, we can’t beat him, there seems nothing we can do.’ Isn’t it time they say, ‘TRUMP IS THE BEST POLITICAL ATHLETE OF ALL TIME! CONGRATULATIONS, MR. PRESIDENT. YOU HAVE BEATEN US FOR 10 YEARS, AND WE ARE NOT GOING TO WASTE OUR TIME FIGHTING YOU ANY LONGER. WE CAN’T WIN. DO A GREAT JOB, SIR, RUNNING OUR COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’”

Journalist Aaron Rupar used a common meme often used to respond to unreasonably long posts. “I ain’t reading all that,” he commented. “I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.” Conservative lawyer George Conway wrote: “A severely mentally ill man has control of the launch codes for America’s nuclear arsenal, but it doesn’t seem that many people care.”

Almost 450 words evidently weren’t enough. At 4:54 he reiterated the themes of the long post in a shorter one, then a minute later, accused “the Dumocrats” of being communists. A minute after that, he claimed: “The Radical Left Lunatics, often referred to as Dumocrats, have lost control of their Party.”

Apparently, media criticism still stung. At 5:27, Trump took on reports of the high cost of his damaging renovations in Washington, D.C. Posting photos of what he said was “the horrible front of the White House,” he continued: “The Radical Left Dumocrats criticize me for spending so much time bringing our White House back to the Glory of 100 years ago—Actually, it will be far better than that, and they will not shame us for bringing our Great and Brilliant Monuments to the past and the future back to levels never seen before. This is what we are doing all over Washington, D.C., and, in different ways, with our Country, itself!”

But his confidence that American voters will support Republicans in the 2026 elections is shaky enough that he continues to call for the Senate to rig them. At 6:07 he reposted what purported to be a poll from right-wing loyalist Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) claiming that 97.2% of supporters want the Senate to take up the voter suppression SAVE America Act when it goes back into session next week, while only 2.8% want the Senate to take up “Anything else.”

Meanwhile, on Friday a Pentagon official told Rebecca Turco of WJLA 7News in Washington, D.C., that National Guard troops will stay activated in Washington through Inauguration Day 2029 “until law and order are fully restored in our Nation’s Capital.”

“So,” Bill Kristol of The Bulwark commented. “[M]ilitary troops under the direct control of Trump and Hegseth will be on the streets of our nation’s capital for the rest of Trump’s term. The rationale—they’re here to help with a crime emergency—is laughable. But of course the real reason is ominous.”

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Confirms: Accepting a Flying Bribery Palace Made Him Less Safe, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 11, 2026. From the moment Trump posted a tweet claiming he was sending his Flying Bribery Palace back separately from the NATO summit in Ankara, the entire world knew there was a problem with the jet Qatar gifted him.

That Trump offered a transparently stupid excuse — he wanted to show it off to the military — was no real fix. His expressed worry about being targeted by Iran only further confirmed that the Flying Bribery Palace might not stand up to an Iranian attack.

[W]hen pressed by reporters in Ankara about the reason for the change, Mr. Trump also repeatedly noted that he was Iran’s No. 1 target, and referred at one point to having seen or been briefed on a list of Tehran’s targets in recent days.

By the time NYT provided details of the Flying Bribery Palace’s shortcomings on Thursday, based in part on the observations of a former Air Force official, the outline of what they were had become fairly clear: The Flying Bribery Palace could not protect against an Iranian missile attack.

[O]fficials who have been briefed on the retrofitting of the Qatari jet, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe its security features, said it did not have the same counter-defensive capabilities of the previous model.

[snip]

The older planes that served as Air Force One included a defensive system designed to defeat heat-seeking missiles. That capacity is also planned to be included in the new Boeing planes, according to three former Pentagon officials.

Different parts of the defensive systems are visible on the old Air Force One, under the wing of the plane and on its tail. They are not observable in photographs of the new Qatari plane, according to a third former Air Force official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the security protocols. [my emphasis]

That Thursday story made clear that such shortcomings that had been discussed all along.

But in a statement it made when it announced that the donated jet was ready to transport the president, it acknowledged that the temporary plane did not have all the equipment usually found on an Air Force One.

“No risk was taken in security, safety or mission communications,” the Air Force said in a statement on June 19. “But the collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets that Boeing must deliver to support the next 40 years.”

To sum up:

Trump calls attention to a change in his plans by telling a transparent lie about it.His own comments confirm a concern about his safety.NYT provides one line about counter-defensive capabilities in a story relying in part on public observation and public statements.

And then Trump sent subpoenas to the four NYT journalists who worked on the story, thereby confirming that the story was correct — that Trump’s Flying Bribery Palace had inadequate equipment to counter a missile attack.

The subpoenas don’t do anything to alleviate the risk to Trump’s security he made clear by announcing the plane change. Indeed, the confirm, for all the world, that Trump’s Flying Bribery Palace is an easy target.

At each level of the story, Trump confirmed the story.

I don’t mean to minimize the abuse of subpoenaing the reporters. This is another alarming attack on the free press (and may be an attempt to find Congressional sources who have long pointed out the weaknesses of the Flying Bribery Palace).

But Trump is the one who disclosed his plane was inadequate to the task. The reporters only responded to Trump’s repeated signals that his plane was inadequate by filling in dots that had been in plane (ha!) sight since Trump accepted the bribe.

This is just like the arrests of people — including Davey Hearn, whom Jeanine Pirro indicted last week — who put their hands in Trump’s reflecting swamp: An effort to distract from the consequences of his own corruption.

Trump is criminalizing calling out his corruption. He sure as hell is not keeping anyone safe.  

New York Times, Blanche Stares Down Confirmation Hurdle: Lingering G.O.P. Doubts, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer, July 12, 2026. Key Republicans on the Judiciary Committee could push for concessions from Todd Blanche, right, in line to be attorney general, though they did not appear in revolt.

Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican undecided about Todd Blanche’s nomination as permanent attorney general, drew a red line last month: He would vote no if Mr. Blanche was too soft on the rioters who had ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Soon after, Mr. Tillis, a moderate on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he had a “positive predisposition” after meeting with Mr. Blanche, despite the fact that the acting attorney general had recently signed off on a $1.8 billion fund that could have been funneled to those who stormed Congress.

Just a single no vote from a Republican would deadlock the committee and effectively sink the confirmation of Mr. Blanche, who became the Justice Department’s acting leader after Pam Bondi was fired in April. That gives Republicans on the panel rare leverage to extract concrete concessions from Mr. Blanche, 51.

Whether they will use that leverage is arguably the biggest wild card ahead of Mr. Blanche’s high-stakes confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

(It is not yet clear how the death of committee member Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, who died late Saturday, will affect the timing of the hearing — or who will be chosen by leadership to replace him on the panel.)

“Blanche tries to dress it up, but at the end of the day, he’s just Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, and that is all he will ever be,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who squared off in May against Mr. Blanche in a contentious hearing that centered on creation of the compensation fund.ImageBefore joining the Justice Department, Mr. Blanche was a defense lawyer for Mr. Trump.Mr. Blanche represented President Trump in his Manhattan trial over the falsification of business records to cover up a payment to Stormy Daniels.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Republicans are not in revolt, but they are restless. During a testy confrontation in late May, Republican senators lambasted Mr. Blanche for agreeing to create what critics have described as a “slush fund.” The deal forced them to defend a related provision shielding Mr. Trump and his family from tax investigations that might be worth more than $100 million to the president.

Mr. Blanche quickly backtracked from the fund proposal, telling lawmakers, during a June 2 hearing before the House, “We are not moving forward with the fund, period.” But Democrats have pointed to his flat refusal to put his reversal in writing as an indication that he could devise an alternative.

In private meetings, Mr. Blanche has repeatedly told senators the fund plan was “dead,” at times repeating the word three times for emphasis, according to people familiar with the conversations. But he has given no indication that he intends to scrap the part of the agreement offering immunity on past I.R.S. audits.

The tax provision has emerged as a major sticking point for another Republican on the Judiciary Committee, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who lost a primary election this spring.

Unlike Mr. Tillis, Mr. Cornyn has not yet indicated how he is leaning and has requested a follow-up briefing on the tax issue. “I will not make a decision on confirmation until after that briefing and completion of his hearing before the committee,” Mr. Cornyn wrote in a recent X post.

Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Tillis have also questioned Mr. Blanche’s independence from White House control. Mr. Tillis, who is retiring next year, warned Mr. Blanche during an interview on CNN that he would oppose his nomination if he detected “even a whiff of a lack of independence.”

Democrats say there has been a waft, not a whiff. They see the hearing as an opportunity for the committee’s Republican majority to reassert legislative authority over a department they regard as a cabal of Mr. Trump’s formal personal lawyers acting in his interests, rather than for the public good.“A lot depends on how much Trump baggage Republicans want to carry into the November election,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat who serves on the committee.

The committee, led by Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, has pushed through Trump appointees, even those Republicans have criticized — like the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel — after extracting vague assurances from the nominees that they would safeguard the department’s tradition of independence and abide by the rule of law.ImageSenator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, last month will be a crucial vote in guaranteeing Mr. Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general.Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, speaking last month to reporters on Capitol Hill.Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times

Mr. Blanche is unique among recent cabinet nominees in that he is basically seeking confirmation for a job he has already been doing for a year and a half, first as the deputy attorney general, then as acting attorney general.

Allies of Mr. Blanche believed he could simultaneously restore stability and competence to the department in the wake of Ms. Bondi’s turbulent tenure — and take a handful of calibrated actions sufficiently drastic to convince Mr. Trump he was tough enough.

He has been a compliant if not always gung-ho executor of Mr. Trump’s demand that the department open investigations against his perceived enemies and let friends off the hook. He played a major role, along with Ms. Bondi, in protecting the president during the furor over the Jeffrey Epstein files, vetting documents for Trump-related material and personally interviewing Mr. Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison.

During his monthslong audition for the job, he trumpeted Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud and greenlit the prosecution of the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, for posting an image of seashells on a beach spelling out “86 47.” He oversaw the drafting of the $1.8 billion fund that spurred a powerful backlash in his own party.

Mr. Blanche has a mixed record when it comes to the attacks on the Capitol in the wake of Mr. Trump’s defeat in 2020, the issue Mr. Tillis has identified as dispositive for his support.

It is not clear what Mr. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, thought of Mr. Trump’s decision to offer broad clemency or pardons to hundreds of rioters convicted of crimes. He has not talked about it much. But there is no indication he protested to anyone in the White House, and he has often diverted questions about its moral and political implications, citing Mr. Trump’s nearly unrestricted pardon power under the Constitution.

No one can last long in Mr. Trump’s orbit while offering frank criticism about the Jan. 6 rioters — or, for that matter, the riot itself.

But as Ms. Bondi’s deputy, he repeatedly clashed with the department’s most outspoken defender of the Jan. 6 rioters, Ed Martin, a right-wing lawyer from Missouri who raised money for many of the participants and even defended some in court.

New York Times, Guest Essay:This Is a Lot More Worrying Than the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Executive Power, David Lawrence, July 11, 2026 (print ed.). The Supreme Court last week expanded the powers of the unitary executive, raising fears among many that the presidency is becoming too strong. Yet as big as the ruling appears to be, it wasn’t even the most concerning news in the past month about the accumulation of unchecked power in the Oval Office.

The day after the court’s ruling, the Trump administration lifted restrictions it had imposed on access to top artificial intelligence models from Anthropic, a leading A.I. company, seemingly on the condition that the company submit to ongoing government oversight. On Tuesday, OpenAI finally announced that it will release broadly its new artificial intelligence model, GPT-5.6, access to which has been restricted at the request of the U.S. government. Only a limited set of customers — those approved by the Trump administration — have been allowed use of the A.I. tool.

These restrictions on the A.I. industry are the latest instance of the White House creating its own parallel administrative state, sidestepping Congress. Congress and the courts must push back

The right vigorously criticizes government control of private industry as a kind of communist central planning. Many Republicans objected to a rent freeze by New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani — a policy that is being imposed through the public processes of a legally created oversight board. The president’s unauthorized intervention in private business poses an even more direct threat to free enterprise.

True, the Supreme Court’s ruling last week gave the president more authority over agencies that Congress had wanted to insulate from political interference, such as the Federal Trade Commission. But agency leaders must still follow clear rules that Congress has written into the law. By contrast, the Trump White House’s ad hoc interference in private business decisions — exemplified by but not limited to its recent meddling in the A.I. industry — has come without congressional sanction. President Trump is planning product releases and choosing customers of a key industry in our ostensibly free-market economy.

No legislation authorizes the White House’s recent moves to effectively regulate domestic A.I. customers and model release timing. Congress has yet to pass comprehensive A.I. safety legislation, and the Trump administration has spent most of the past year and a half discouraging necessary lawmaking. The White House has filled the gap it helped create with whatever rules it sees fit to impose at any given moment.

In a normal process, an agency such as the Federal Trade Commission exercises powers granted by Congress, subject to various forms of judicial review. If the agency exceeds the scope of its legal authority, the courts nullify its illegal actions. Only Congress writes the laws. The executive carries them out.

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurring opinion in last week’s ruling reminded us that the founders feared “when ‘the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person.’” Those fears should be especially great when unitary control is exerted over society-shaping technology.

On A.I., the White House has effectively created and put into effect its own mini-regulatory administration. The Trump administration’s directions to Anthropic and OpenAI follow its release last month of an executive order creating, by fiat, a regulatory framework for identifying “covered frontier models” and steering their release. The order contains some good ideas for Congress to consider, but it does not execute a law passed by Congress; it creates its own.

Apparently recognizing its lack of legal authority to do this, the Trump administration claims that compliance is “voluntary.” Yet few would believe a request from this White House is merely that. The Oval Office commands enormous power to threaten and cajole private companies into compliance. Indeed, the administration has already moved to exile Anthropic products from the Pentagon after the company failed to cooperate with the executive branch’s dictates.

After the Supreme Court ruling, the president has more power over the Federal Trade Commission and other agencies with oversight of these companies. The boost in presidential authority will enhance the White House’s ability to pressure businesses, which will want to avoid regulatory fights — even ones they are confident they would ultimately win in court. This dynamic, however, will not be new.

The A.I. business is not the only industry that Mr. Trump has subjected to his new form of unitary executive. Under pressure, the Japanese company Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel last year granted a special “golden share” to the American government as part of a national security review of Nippon Steel’s acquisition of the U.S. company. According to public reports, the White House now has authority over the company’s plant closures, headquarters moves and job transfers.

Mr. Trump also pressured Intel into selling the government a 10 percent stake in the company and took a 15 percent cut of Chinese sales from the chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia. On his busy Truth Social account, the president has issued orders on the pricing of gasoline, where Apple should build phones and the content broadcast on late-night TV — each backed by threats to use state power to force compliance. This week Mr. Trump took credit for Walmart’s announcement that it would cut beef prices, saying the company was doing so “at my Administration’s request” to celebrate the country’s semiquincentennial.

The White House’s attempts to command the economy can and should be challenged in court. Model developers such as Anthropic and OpenAI may fear retribution too much to vigorously defend themselves. But those excluded from access to their products might have claims they can bring before judges.The need to rebalance power in Washington was clear before the Supreme Court’s latest round of rulings. It grows more urgent each time the executive writes and enforces its own rules.

And Congress must take more control. If the safety risks posed by artificial intelligence did not already spur lawmakers to pass a comprehensive A.I. bill, the president’s unbounded direction of the industry adds urgency. In the meantime, Congress should aggressively investigate the administration’s assertions of control over the economy, expose any favoritism or corruption and write laws as needed to provide cover to those who fear or incur retaliation for defying a presidential “request.”

David Lawrence oversaw antitrust policy at the Justice Department from 2019 to 2026. He departed the government in March and now conducts scholarship and technology development related to law, antitrust and artificial intelligence.

Trump's Obsessions, Oppressions and Threat 

President Donald Trump, as portrayed in a graphic by columnist Lance Rosen, who argues that an increasingly deranged represents a serious world threat launching an apocolyptic vengence on the world congruent with Norse and Nazi-mythology visible also increasingly.

Lance’s Substack, Opinion: Richard Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” And The Accelerating Psychological Breakdown Of Donald Trump, Lance F. Rosen, right, July 12, 2026. 

Introduction: The German word in the above headline is associated with composer Richard Wagner, and his famous “Ring Cycle” of staged musical operas. It is drawn from the Norse mythology of “Ragnarok” which has been popularized in modern times by video games and the cartoon character of “Thor” from Marvel’s “Avenger” series.

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“Das Niebelungen” is the last of four Wagner operas in the cycle, and the theme is both dark and apocalyptic, depicting the Nordic mystery religion allegory known as “The Twilight Of The Gods,” in which their version of heaven, Valhalla, must be burned entirely and then flooded with all of creation destroyed, in order to bring about renewal and new spiritual life.

Wagner had been greatly influenced at this stage of his work by the German philosopher Schopenhauer, for those who want to make a deep dive into this, and this was, according to the Wagner scholars, very much reflected in his work.

Wagner, as many are aware, was Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer. Nazi ideology was rooted in the old Nordic myths, with their stories, symbols, Runes, and belief system that ascribed superpowers to those who carried their common ancestral heritage.

Most of the earliest Nazi Party recruits were heavily indoctrinated in these Nordic mysteries by the teachings of a cult called the “Thule Society,” which sought to incorporate it into the Nazi’s political ideology of Aryan racial supremacy. A leading member of Wagner’s Bayreuth Circle was geopolitical philosopher and race theorist Lord Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who like Wagner, his wife Cosima, son Siegrfied, were all fanatical anti-semites.

Wagner actually wrote a long published essay on how Jews corrupted modern music. Chamberlain married Wagner’s daughter Eva, and his philosophical tracts were required reading for all of the Nazi’s early recruits.

Hitler himself was enraptured by Wagner’s granddaughter Winifred with whom he was a close friend.

The relationship between Hitler, Wagner’s music, the Bayreuth Festival, and Nazi propaganda was so interwoven and well-known that the proposal by conductor Daniel Barenboim of the Israeli Philharmonic to perform Wagner in Jerusalem some three decades ago was met by a storm of protest and was shut down beforehand.

The concept or gestalt associated with Götterdämmerung is that the world’s evils must in the end be solved with an apocalyptic event which purifies the world with fire and water. It was the Nazi’s metaphor for conquering and eliminating those people and cultures which they saw as biologically inferior or unfit through wars of annihilation.

You have likely heard the popular expressions, “burn it all down,” and “going out with a bang.” You might also remember the explicitly Wagnerian ending to the James Cagney gangster film “White Heat,” where the character standing on top of a flaming gas refinery tank explodes the whole thing while screaming “top of the world Ma, top of the world!”

That, in a nutshell, encapsulates the state of mind of the current President Of The United States, the person who holds the nuclear codes.

He sees all of his Democratic liberal opponents as communist terrorists, as opposed to Jews being his main target. He is obsessed with the danger of his own assassination. He likely has never seen or understood a performance of Wagner. But he loves the idea of setting Valhalla on fire. He told us as much yesterday.

The Strategic Issue At Hand

Our greatest vulnerability in this period is the way in which mainstream media’s corporate gamemasters manage our perceptions of reality. They will play upon popular opinion, old antagonisms, feelings of personal desperation or hopelessness, financial anxiety, divisions both ideological and identity-centered, and victimization, to weave fact-based but highly misleading fictional narratives and headline news coverage which puts clicks and ad revenue ahead of truth and reality.

One method by which this is done is to present news events as separate, without any attempt to provide coherency or context, as if they are unrelated, when precisely the opposite is true.

For example, take a few of the major stories from the last week.

1. Trump restarting the Iran War and renewing his blood-curdling threats to wipe that whole nation off of the face of the Earth, trashing his own Memorandum Of Understanding over what appears to have been a deliberately contrived and relatively insignificant incident.

2. Trump’s incoherent and embarrassing dysfunction at the Turkïye NATO Summit, calling Ukraine president Zelensky President “Putin” repeatedly, and railing about thousands of missiles being launched by the Islamic Republic Of Japan. Those are the incidents we know about, and surely there were more.

3. The conflicting and absurd stories by Trump and the White House regarding switching of his Air Force One Jet from the Qatari gifted plane to the original, at first claiming he wanted people in the UK to see the new plane, then him blurting out that its security was compromised.

4. Trump’s purge of the federal election agency commissioners whose job is to maintain free and fair elections.

5. The expanded use of the DOJ and Federal/State law enforcement to target his opposition through mass arrests and indictments of protesters.

6. The photos of Trump’s “cankles” having swelled to the point of extending over the sides of his shoes.

7. The new White House construction started this week for excessive gate and portico security, supposedly due to Iran sponsored assassination threats, when every security specialist will tell you that Iran can’t get near the White House or it’s current bunker.

These are not “five separate stories.” They are actually one story, singularities emerging out of one continuous manifold, reflecting a coherent, intelligible, dynamic process, which all lead to the same frightening conclusion.

We are witness to a complete, total, psychological and physical breakdown crisis involving the world’s most powerful person, under conditions where everyone surrounding him is too fearful, corrupt, compromised, or incompetent to maintain any effective control over him, or to force his resignation and/or removal from office through constitutional means.

What Can We Do?

If I and my wife Martha were organizing in the US right now, we would be hyper-focused on two things. Delivering a midterms landslide, because narrow victories will not be allowed to stand. And a campaign to invoke the 25th Amendment. There are other constitutional remedies out there being floated for removing the entire administration, some of which have merit, but in this context are virtually useless.

We have no time for drawn out legal scenarios and procedures. Many have their hopes set on a midterm sweep to regain the House and Senate, followed by a swift impeachment <next year>. Unfortunately those good folks are living in a Ken and Barbie Mattel Universe and in effect are engaged in doll-play. There isn’t going to be a “next year” if he is not removed now.

Trump will instruct his underlings to not recognize Democratic victories which flip GOP seats in close races. Democratic winners will likely be blocked from being seated. Trump might even act through Speaker Johnson to suspend the US House under a state of emergency on the model of Adolf Hitler after the Reichstag Fire. This in addition to the vast array of voter suppression and election rigging measures they are putting into play, including canceling mail-in votes and computer fiddle-faddle.

Even were the best election outcome to happen and Congress reconvenes lawfully, Trump will not comply with any impeachment process. He will start a full scale civil war before he would voluntarily leave the White House. The new security measures being built there, including his Hitler-style “Führerbunker,” is meant to protect himself from his American opposition, (including from within his own US Military command) not Iranian terrorists. 

Once Again, The Vance Issue...A Quiet Gradual Coup Attempt-

As I have attempted to build the case recently, many signs point toward Vance being “phased in” as acting President through a noticeable increase in his role. The Iran negotiations should never have involved him, as he is among the most morally unqualified and conflicted persons in the regime. Yet there he was, in Pakistan, filming the sequel to “Chuckie Does Islamabad.”

Vance, right, for the record, is an execrable and useless fleshblob of a human being, a cristo-fascist infection in the body politic. In his case, were he to assume the presidency, his job title acronym should just be shortened from POTUS to PUS, in order to accurately convey his destructive impact on our political life.

I. Don’t. Want. Vance. For. President. Some of you will argue that because I call for invoking the 25th Amendment that I do in fact want him to be my president. Please, just stop. You know better.

We are dealing with a madman. Never has any American President in the age of strategic nuclear deterrence been so insane that they have left deathbed last wishes to annihilate an entire nation in the event he is assassinated. Do people realize the door he has opened here?

What if Trump has a coronary due to being an obese symptomatic mess who won’t follow doctor’s orders, who won’t even wear compression socks? His Cabinet is comprised of lunatic paranoid conspirophiles who are just salivating to use the military to conduct mass arrests, trials, and executions. What stands in the way of them fabricating a Democratic assassination plot to poison him as his cause of death, or the use of microwave weapons among other esoteric theories. Or, to just hire a false-flag shooter to do the job and blame it on the Democrats, Iran, or some other targets of convenience? Who thinks that could never happen? Well, just add that to the list of things you never thought you’d live to see, but did.

The purpose of a public campaign to invoke the 25th is to unleash the American people on the sitting Congress and force the mass defections of Republicans who might, under the circumstances of Trump’s growing insanity, be moved. I call them “the head shakers.” They are the ones who know that Trump is insane but are too cowardly to say so. In private, when he says and does these things, they shake their heads and roll their eyes, and might even confide in a close colleague that he is way out of his mind.

A wave of mass defections from Trump/MAGA creates the optimal conditions under which Trump’s removal could happen. It is a longshot. But if anyone thinks that Democratic protests against Trump will move the needle, that, once again is a Ken and Barbie-world delusion, just as unlikely as that pair growing real genitalia and running off somewhere to make plastic babies. All they do is reinforce Trump’s paranoid insanity, and to provide a database for Flock cameras to assist the regime in their fascist foto-flockery.

We have to break off a huge chunk of Trump’s political support network, and there is no way around it. It was Republican defections which forced Nixon to resign over Watergate. We need more Thomas Massies. We have to make them, because they won’t spring up on their own.

That means you have to try and talk to them.

There are no guarantees or even likelihood that anything will work, the 25th, impeachment, the midterms, or 2028, and in fact those of us who are honest will admit that the US is pretty far gone. More Americans voted for Trump than Germans ever voted for Hitler in a free election.

Conclusion:

Our biggest obstacle is not “Dark Money” and billionaire corporate control of the media. It isn’t even Fox News. Kash Patel and Todd Blanche are not the greatest threat to our liberties, or the Supreme Court to our system of laws.

It is our own cynicism. Our willingness to argue over everything amongst our own allied forces. To choose division over unity. To listen to our fears in the present instead of the voices of future generations. Our choices to escape the current crisis by descending into mindless entertainment and distractions. Our decisions born of personal desperation and survival, instead of the common good.

No, it is our own efforts to shrink into littleness, to lay low, at a moment of great crisis in which future humanity’s fate hangs on what we do in the next four months, that is our greatest obstacle. Fear of prosecution or reprisals should not deter us from mobilizing for either the elections or the 25th Amendment. They can’t arrest everyone, but they do pick targets in order to scare the rest of us. That’s really all they have.

You all know there will be no end to Trump or MAGA’s reign of terror unless we organize a Republican opposition out of this cascading lunacy. But you won’t do it. You won’t even try because of your deeply ingrained cynicism. You don’t want to look at how the same crises affecting you might be affecting them, because you are haughty in the belief of your own intellectual and moral superiority to them. Too many of you hate them all now, and suffer from the same lack of empathy which you have smugly ascribed to them.

We still have time, in my view, to take stock, recalibrate, and make some urgently needed changes. But those changes should start with the person we see in the mirror. When we have a few spare minutes, we might want to begin that conversation sooner rather than later.

(Photos, top, Trump, Surtr, the Norse fire god, Richard Wagner, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Winifred Wagner with Adolf Hitler)

Scott MacFarlane News, GOP's Trump-Adoration Legislation is Fading Into Obscurity, Scott MacFarlane, right, July 12, 2026. Trump-Glazing Bills Are Collapsing.

His fellow Republicans have attempted a whole series of vanity, congratulatory legislation that might butter-up President Trump.

With just a few in-session weeks remaining in the 119th Congress, the butter isn’t spreading. It’s melting!

A review of approximately a dozen pieces of Congressional legislation to honor Trump shows none is gaining any significant traction. Even amid a fierce GOP primary season, Republicans are largely avoiding any official position on the following POTUS-praising measures:

• Minting a $250 bill currency, with Trump’s portrait on the bill
• Minting a $100 bill currency, with Trump’s portrait on the bill
• Renaming Dulles International Airport to be the Donald J Trump International Airport
• Carve Donald Trump’s likeness on to Mount Rushmore
• Create and award a “Donald Trump Peace Prize” inside the US State Dept.
• Create a federal holiday for Donald Trump’s birthday
• Award a Congressional Gold Medal to Donald Trump
• Formally honor Donald Trump for achieving peace in the Middle East (Yes.. this was proposed in the Senate *before* the War in Iran)
• Formally “recognizing President Donald J. Trump’s Role as a Transformational Peacemaker Whose Achievements in International Diplomacy Merit the Nobel Peace Prize” (That was also introduced before the War in Iran)
• Order federal health officials to launch a formal study of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (yes.. This was seriously introduced by Rep. Warren Davidson, R-OH)
• Formally authorize construction of the Trump Ballroom
• A House resolution formally “acknowledging the positive impact President Donald J. Trump has had on America.”

Some of the measures were introduced more than a year ago. But momentum is non-existent.Upgrade to paid

At least 218 votes are typically needed to ensure approval on the US House floor. The high-water mark for the legislation above are a paltry 29 for the Congressional Gold Medal bill. And there are 16 co-sponsors for the $250 Trump bill legislation.

Nearly all of the Trump-loving bills were announced with fanfare by their Republicans sponsors. But fanfare doesn’t win votes.

Rep Brandon Gill, the Texas Republican who sponsored the $100 Trump currency legislation touted his plan, “There has been no one who has done more to bring America into the golden age than President Trump. Featuring him on the $100 bill is a small way to honor all he will accomplish these next four years.” Only three of Gill’s colleagues agreed to co-sponsor the bill: Retiring Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX), Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), who recently ran in a competitive GOP U.S. Senate primary.

When he tried to galvanize support for this “Trump Derangement Syndrome” research legislation, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) argued, “TDS has divided families, the country, and led to nationwide violence—including two assassination attempts on President Trump. The TDS Research Act would require the NIH to study this toxic state of mind, so we can understand the root cause and identify solutions.”

Just one of Davidson’s colleagues is listed as an official co-sponsor in the House’s on-line database. It’s Rep. Barry Moore, an Alabama Republican who is favored to win a US Senate seat in November.

Perhaps none of these Trump-adoration bills was championed as demonstratively as Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s (R-FL) legislation to etch Trump’s likeness into Mount Rushmore. Luna’s bill was formally introduced less than two weeks into Trump’s second term.

Luna proclaimed, “He will be forever remembered among the great like Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.”

Rep. Luna's Mt. Rushmore bill

It hasn’t worked for our Luna. There are ZERO listed co-sponsors, despite an ongoing jockeying by House Republicans to pay homage to Trump amid Congressional GOP primaries..

“Congressional Republicans continue to embarrass and debase themselves with their weak pandering to their sun king, Donald J. Trump,” said Rep. James Walkinshaw, a first-term Democrat from Virginia. Walkinshaw told me, “They seem to believe they exist merely to orbit and vie for his good graces. It’s the lowest of low.”

Walkinshaw’s Democratic colleague from Virginia also blistered the House GOP Trump-glazing bills. Rep. Suhas Subramanyam said, “Instead of lowering costs and making life better for their constituents, House Republicans have decided the only person they want to help is Donald Trump. They’ve looked the other way as he and his family line their pockets with taxpayer dollars, tried to give him millions for his gaudy ballroom and even attempted to name places after him, like Dulles Airport in my district.”

Subramanyam said, “They are in for a surprise in November when voters can finally tell Republicans what they think about this agenda.”

More On Iran War

New York Times, Live Updates: Iran Targets Gulf States After Night of Intense U.S. Strikes, Leo Sands, Sanam Mahoozi and Aaron Boxerman, July 12, 2026. U.S. Central Command said it had hit about 140 targets in Iran overnight after Tehran attacked a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s military said it had responded by firing at U.S. targets in Jordan, Oman and Qatar. Here’s the latest.

Iran attacked U.S.-allied Persian Gulf Arab states on Sunday after American forces conducted some of their most intense strikes against Iran in weeks, with no signs of diplomatic progress to try to salvage a cease-fire that has been steadily unraveling.

The U.S. military’s Central Command said that the Iranian navy attacked a Cypriot-flagged container ship in the Strait of Hormuz overnight, and that it had hit about 140 Iranian military targets in response, capping nearly a week of back-and-forth attacks.

Iran confirmed that it had struck what it called a “violating” vessel in the strait, and said that in retaliation to the U.S. strikes overnight, it had targeted American military assets in Jordan, Oman and Qatar.

Kuwait also reported incoming fire, and on Sunday morning the United Arab Emirates’ defense ministry said that it was also intercepting missile and drone attacks from Iran.

Iran and the United States appear locked in a spiraling cycle of attacks, at the center of which is a tug of war over control of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway used to transport a large share of the world’s energy resources.

Although both sides agreed to restore access through the waterway in last month’s truce, Iran has insisted that all ships transiting the strait must travel through its territorial waters, as it seeks to use control over the waterway as leverage in peace talks. Washington has demanded that Tehran abandon its claim and say that all channels for crossing the strait are open. Neither side is backing down, putting their temporary truce in peril.

American officials had expressed optimism as recently as Friday that the strait could soon be reopened in full, but there was no sign of movement over the weekend toward a diplomatic breakthrough.

Here’s what else to know:

• Latest strikes: Iran’s state broadcaster reported early Sunday that explosions had been heard in southern coastal cities that had been targeted in previous rounds of U.S. strikes, many of which include major energy centers and military installations. It said that a military barracks in Bushehr and a military site in Deyr had been among those targeted, but did not say whether there had been casualties. The U.S. Central Command did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the overnight strikes.
• Trading threats: President Trump and Iran’s supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, exchanged threats throughout the week as tensions built over the Strait of Hormuz. The Iranian leader, in his first statement since a weeklong funeral for his father and predecessor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed revenge for the his killing in the first U.S.-Israeli attacks of the war.
• Market volatility: The latest attacks threaten to further unsettle energy and financial markets. Daily shipping traffic through the strait recently dropped to the lowest level in weeks, according to Kpler, a maritime data tracking firm. Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, closed the week near $76 per barrel, about 5 percent higher than prewar levels. Read more ›

New York Times, Hard-Liners in Iran Want to Keep Fighting America, Neil MacFarquhar, July 12, 2026. With much of their leadership killed in the war, Iran’s conservatives have sought to fill the void and intensify the fight against the United States.

The striking prominence of red flags — a Shiite Muslim symbol for vengeance — among the sea of mourners attending the weeklong funeral of Iran’s late supreme leader was considered a none-too-subtle statement that the country should continue the war with the United States.

That is a demand of the ultra-hard-liners in the Islamic Republic, who want to maintain its 47-year confrontation with Washington. Analysts saw the flags as a telling example of the jockeying for position amid the newly fluid politics in Iran, ever since the war launched by the United States and Israel in February ushered in political uncertainty in Tehran by decapitating the leadership.

The hard-liners “are attempting to use the atmosphere of mourning, national insecurity and opposition to negotiations to narrow the range of politically acceptable debate and to portray compromise as both strategically dangerous and morally illegitimate,” said Saeid Golkar, a professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who studies Iran’s security forces.

In any case, prospects for a compromise dimmed last week when the United States and Iran resumed military strikes. The fighting was prompted by the unsettled question of the extent of Iranian control over vital shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz.

The collapse of the cease-fire jeopardized the memorandum of understanding that the two sides signed on June 17 as a blueprint for future peace talks, including the fate of Iran’s nuclear program.

Fighting resumed Saturday evening and into Sunday, with strikes by both sides. Iran announced that the strait would be completely closed indefinitely, after its navy fired warning shots that halted a merchant vessel navigating without its permission, according to a statement carried by the official IRIB state broadcaster. U.S. Central Command said it was carrying out retaliatory strikes inside Iran.

The renewed warfare further cleaved differences over the wisdom of negotiating that have been evident in Iran since the talks began.

“There is tension between those who favor the primacy of the ‘battlefield’ and those the one of ‘diplomacy,’” said Ali Fathollah-Nejad, director of the Center for Middle East and Global Order, a think tank in Berlin. Those skeptical of diplomacy believe that Iran’s nuclear program, its ballistic missiles and its proxy forces across the Middle East are “indispensable pillars for regime survival, deterrence and power projection — and therefore nonnegotiable,” he said.Overall, the death of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at the start of the war is believed to have strengthened the hand of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in running the country. The absence of his son and successor in public has helped feed the air of uncertainty.

More Global News

New York Times, Zelensky Announces Leadership Shuffle as War Turns in Ukraine’s Favor, Andrew E. Kramer, July 12, 2026. President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine’s prime minister, Yuliia Svyrydenko, would step down amid a broader shake-up in Ukraine’s senior leadership.

President Volodymyr Zelensky announced on Sunday a shake-up of his top leadership, including the dismissal of the prime minister, in a personnel overhaul that comes as momentum in the war has shifted in Ukraine’s favor.

Mr. Zelensky said the personnel changes were needed to focus the government’s work on high-priority foreign and domestic policies, including relations with the United States, membership talks with the European Union, securing sufficient supplies of weaponry for the army, and supporting cities and towns near the front line.

“Ukraine is changing its political strategy,” Mr. Zelensky said in a statement about the overhaul. He said he would designate an official to oversee each priority policy.

Mr. Zelensky said that Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko, a 40-year-old former minister of economy who had led a team of mostly young politicians in Mr. Zelensky’s government, would step down as prime minister.

“The Cabinet of Ministers needs to be renewed,” Mr. Zelensky said.

In the statement, he did not mention any other personnel changes. Earlier, Mr. Zelensky had said he planned changes in the diplomatic service in order to focus diplomacy on securing military supplies from allies. In the statement, he said he would also replace leaders of law enforcement agencies.

Political analysts will be watching two popular generals seen as potential rivals for the presidency in postwar elections, both of whom now work in Mr. Zelensky’s administration.

General Kyrylo Budanov, a former director of military intelligence, is currently chief of staff, and General Valery Zaluzhny is ambassador to Britain. Whether Mr. Zelensky keeps them inside the administration, and in which capacity, will partly define Ukraine’s postwar political lineup.

Mr. Zelensky said he would work with Parliament, which must approve ministerial changes, on the overhaul. Mr. Zelensky’s political party, Servant of the People, holds a majority in Parliament but has sometimes struggled to pass legislation or win confirmations, as lawmakers don’t always vote along party lines.

Mr. Zelensky last reshuffled the cabinet in July 2025, after a year and a half of gradual losses along the front line and as Ukraine suffered electrical blackouts as Russia hammered the country’s power grid.

He has replaced individual ministers in scandals over mismanagement and corruption, including a minister of national unity and minister of energy who were implicated by anti-corruption investigators in a kickback scheme.

The current political reshuffle comes after a shift in the tide in the war. Ukraine’s strategy of fighting with drones both on the front line and to hit targets deep in Russia is yielding results.

The Russian army is enduring huge casualties from exploding drones. U.S. and Ukrainian officials estimate about 30,000 of its soldiers a month are killed or injured just to maintain a mostly static front line. Russia is making slow gains in the eastern Donbas region but some months has a net loss of territory as Ukraine advances elsewhere.

Ukraine is also mass producing long-range exploding drones that have incapacitated about a quarter of Russia’s oil refining capacity. Ukraine claimed to have struck more than 90 ships in the Sea of Azov in the past week, in what would be a major security lapse for Russia in the sea.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Lindsey Graham's Passing Is Another Stage In The Death Of Trumpism, Sarah Jones, right, and Jason Easley, July 12, 2026. Time is marching on, and staunch Trump allies like Lindsey Graham are dying in the ultimate reminder that the supposed movement that Trump built is also dying a little more every day.

The corporate media’s reaction to the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) overnight has not been to reflect on a complicated political legacy, which isn’t complicated upon examination, but it has been to give Graham what he always wanted.

All of those Sunday morning show appearances and never meeting a camera that he didn’t love mean that Graham is getting lionized by the corporate media because he played their game.

For those who don’t know, Graham’s death was announced overnight in a brief statement from his office:

On the evening of Saturday, July 11, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham passed away from a brief and sudden illness. Senator Graham’s family appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period.

Graham has spent the past decade spending almost all of his time gluing himself to Donald Trump.

The president posted on his Truth Social account:

Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known, is dead! He was always working, and was a true American Patriot. Lindsey will be greatly missed!!!

It is typical of Trump that the death of a man who trashed the legacy that he was building to serve him gets two sentences on social media. Trump has spent years going on longer rants about windmills on the platform, but Graham gets two sentences.

A special Republican primary must be held by August 11 to pick a new Senate nominee for the party, and South Carolina Gov. McMaster will appoint a temporary replacement to finish out the remainder of Graham’s term.

In the bigger picture, the death of Lindsey Graham is another political highway marker in the death of Trumpism.

Donald Trump’s political philosophy, what little of it there is, has never been about the future. Trumpism is about Trump and the present. Trumpism was never designed to have a long shelf life because it is centered on one man and his whims.

What is obvious, although the mainstream political press will never say it, is that Trumpism has been on the death clock since Trump won the 2024 election.

Lindsey Graham is an example of what is happening to the entire Trump legacy. Graham is most famous for being a sycophant for John McCain. After McCain’s death, Graham was a sycophant for Donald Trump.

Graham has no enduring policy legacy besides a perpetual bloodlust for endless war, especially in the Middle East.

Sen. Graham didn’t reshape the Senate or leave a lasting legacy for America.

Much like Trump, Lindsey Graham was always more interested in his own relevance than in being a lion of the Senate.

Graham always wanted to stay in the good graces of both the media cameras and those in power within the Republican Party.

Graham went from being an independent-minded Senator in the John McCain mode to being a Trump cheerleader because he was following the power for his own relevance and survival.

In the coming days, Lindsey Graham will be given the media’s polish job, but the real message behind Graham’s passing won’t be discussed.

Graham sold himself out for a movement that never really was, and that blip on the political radar will someday soon fade from view and be gone.

New York Times, Lindsey Graham Was Facing Re-election in November. What Happens Now? Bayliss Wagner, July 12, 2026. South Carolina law suggests his death triggers an Aug. 11 special Republican primary election, and the state’s governor can appoint a replacement to serve out the rest of his term, through early January.

The sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, comes less than four months before he was set to appear on the ballot as a strong favorite to win a fifth term.

Now, South Carolina Republicans are facing a fast-paced scramble to replace him on the general election ballot. (Mr. Graham won the Republican primary by a wide margin this year.)

South Carolina law sets out a timeline for replacing him on the ballot. Its provisions suggest a special primary election will be held on Aug. 11, according to the schedule set out in the law. If no candidate secures a majority, a runoff between the top two finishers would take place two weeks later, on Aug. 25.

Candidates can file for the seat as soon as July 21, the second Tuesday after Mr. Graham’s death, and the filing period will close on July 28. State law says that the election must happen on the second Tuesday after that deadline.  

Lance’s Substack, Opinion: Lindsey Graham’s Passing Exposes A Painful Truth...About Us, Lance F Rosen, right, July 12, 2026.You’ll not hear me eulogizing him and there will be no praise coming from here for anything he did, though some will point to his stubborn defense of Ukraine as a good thing. His motives, even for that, were to a degree politically self-serving.

He has been morally dead since the day he visibly lost his mind in the Senate during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

You have all seen Graham’s famous quotes attacking Trump for his racism when he first ran, and then watched his utter capitulation when Trump was elected, becoming his worst flunky and slobbering court bootlicker. That will be his legacy, in a nutshell. But I can’t leave it at that, not in these times with all that is at stake.

It is easy to say he was compromised and that Trump had leverage on him for obvious reasons. I think there was always more to it.

Someone with that kind of power who held it for that long also has files of their own, a ton of compromising material on others, which is in part how they get where they are and stay there. There is always the threat of MAD, (Mutually Assured Destruction) if a political adversary threatens to bring your secrets out, that it will invite full retaliation. So, I never believed that Lindsey’s closet full of personal lifestyle secrets were the means by which Trump “broke him.”

It could be something else entirely, far worse, not just career ending but of a seriously corrupt nature from which he could never bounce back or evoke public sympathy, and would mean jail time. Not necessarily Epstein level crimes, but something government-related involving serious national security type of exposure. That part is just speculation based on prior experiences which can be taken with a grain of salt.

Of course, there are several governments which would know if there were anything like that, two of which covertly worked to bring Trump to the presidency twice, if that is where we want to look for a plausible explanation of his degeneration.

One time Hillary Clinton, shown above in a file photo, in a moment of candor said of him, to paraphrase; “I have no idea what happened to Lindsey, I don’t think anyone does, I used to work with him in the Senate and he was friendly, cooperative, reasonable, nothing like he is now.” I think that Hillary, who was a centrist Democrat known for her bipartisanship going way back, speaks for many others. I would expect that Joe Biden feels the same, and in fact won’t be surprised at all if he goes to Lindsey’s funeral to pay tribute to his “old friend.” That part will be painful and bares a whole other layer of tragedy in our recent history.

A few Democratic Senators, many of whom we like and respect, will show up and extoll his virtues in a vain attempt to remind people of what he once was. (or seemed to be on the surface). He was the best friend of Senator John McCain, the bipartisan partner of Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman and others. They’ll all try to avoid the touchy subject of how Graham did and said virtually nothing and refused to break with Trump when he trashed the war record and career of McCain both before and after he died. If there is such a thing as a point of no return, that was where Graham zoomed way past it.

There is a shared sense that Graham was at some point “turned.” Again, the easy explanation is that Trump blackmailed him. I think, however, that if we are to learn anything of value by looking at his public political life, as opposed to his private one, we need to examine the roots of his deep, and tragic moral flaw in character, which was his craven and flaming hypocrisy.

That hypocrisy was not just reflected in his bashing of LGBTQ persons and alignment with MAGA in trying to strip them of human rights and dignity. That hypocrisy extended into every area of his political life.

One example comes to mind, which is that he defended Ukraine when Putin invaded them and launched missile attacks on civilian targets like hospitals and schools, then kidnapped, starved, and murdered Ukrainian children, and Graham repeatedly led the way by voting to send the Ukranians arms to defend themselves. Yet he backed and voted to arm and defend Israel when Netanyahu committed the same or worse Putinesque level of war crimes against the civilian population of Gaza. It was as if he lived in two worlds simultaneously, which had separate sets of rules.

Graham’s corruption, which stood squarely at the center of his tragic and destructive end, was that he saw no contradiction or moral conflict whatsoever on a vast array of public policy issues where he was equally duplicitous.

He had no compunction at all in expressing a strong life-long core value in one policy or another, and then tossing it out the window in a pragmatic fashion when it was personally advantageous to himself or to his party.

When under the relatively positive influence of McCain, (who was indeed a war hero, but never a political hero for me personally in the Senate. I know too much) Graham was at least functional to the extent that as a GOP Senator he occasionally put country over party. He was one of these technocratic legislators who wanted to have a record of getting things done, to build up his resume for a possible presidential run, or more likely a Supreme Court nomination. His ambitions for the Court are reflected in his decades of fanatical power grabbing as a leading figure on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was his bully pulpit.

Then all that went out the window. The same person who attacked candidate Trump for his arch-racism in 2016, then joined forces with him as president and helped him install three of history’s most racist Supreme Court Justices to work with the others in rolling back the progress of the 20th Century.

He was shameless in his willingness to stand on principles, then flush them away like a dead Goldfish.

That was his character flaw. He didn’t “change.” Nor was he broken by someone else. That flaw was always there. But as we have also seen in the case of the 80 plus million people who voted for Trump twice, Trump brought out the very worst in him, exploiting what was in effect a “pre-existing condition” of sociopathic beliefs.

In that sense, Lindsey Graham is all of MAGA, and they are him.

Think about the millions of Americans who you thought you knew and liked, or even loved, who “went to the dark side” over the last 12 years. People who identify as patriots, church people, hard workers, good neighbors, who would do good deeds and look after your kids. Now we hate them because we now know them as persons that believe in both people and ideas which are anathema to us, which conflict with our values, and support policies which we rightly describe as evil. Did they have a “secret life” which someone used as leverage to make them embrace the MAGA agenda? You tell me.

We console ourselves by believing that they somehow were changed from the outside. Influenced by bad actors. Brainwashed by Fox News. What we don’t want to think about is that the MAGA side of them was always there, lurking behind their closely guarded expressions and kept quiet through the careful avoidance of talking politics.

Trump gave his supporters permission to be their true selves. To open up, speak their minds, and dump their full load of grievances, resentments, even hatreds which they had bottled up for years. It all was legitimized and these people felt ok with saying it out loud because the president said it, and it was now considered acceptable behavior.

We, their friends and family, lied to ourselves and acted shocked when we saw that side of people. The side which was always there but we never wanted to see.

That is the story of Lindsey Graham that will not be told at his funeral, who he was.

Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and hundreds of other people who were close to him, didn’t want to look under the hood of the man who was Lindsey Graham to see what was wrong with his motor. And many of them were truly shocked by his apparent “breakdown.”

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a longtime reputed closeted gay hypocrite, joyously posed with two UFC contestants at the June tournament President Trump organized outside the White House.

There will be an attempt to fixate on his alleged secret life and speculate as to whether his “change” was the result of blackmail. In my view this yet another example, (like Fetterman) of people rationalizing and defending their own willful blindness and delusion in refusing to delve beneath the surface and see things as they really are.

What are we defending when we rationalize our own awful judgment? We are announcing that we intend to change nothing and continue on the same path, doing the same things in the same way, rather than learning from it. To dwell on the surface of things. To avoid potentially stressful discussions. To avoid investigating certain matters which we prefer not to know about, because it interferes with our comfort zones. So we grab for the nearest available “simple” explanation, even though people are complicated and never simple.

As with alcoholics and addicts, every lie begins with the lie we tell ourselves. That is the ongoing tragedy of our MAGA friends and family. That is what is wrong with the Democrats who never imagined something like MAGA and Trump taking power, and were very much unprepared for it. We tell ourselves that our decisions are for the greater good. We ignore the symptoms of a total collapse of character and identity in a person because it is too painful to deal with, and then try to delude ourselves that they are the same person they always were.

And that self-deluding life of lies is what made Lindsey Graham’s motor run. He didn’t change. He was “broken” before he was anybody, and only one person apparently, his best friend, cared enough to try and fix him. Former POW John McCain knew as much about people being broken as any living person. He himself and his comrades endured incalculable suffering and he had deep insight into what was needed to overcome it.

So long as McCain lived, Graham was better able to access his better self, because his friend fought to strengthen what little was there. When he was gone, Graham became the worst version of himself. The one who betrayed his nation, his political principles, and his best friend.

That isn’t a scandal. It is a tragedy, because it was one he shared with tens of millions of Americans who were also to a degree broken by life. People who chose to embrace the worst versions of themselves because Donald Trump told them it was patriotic to lie, to hate, to divide, and to betray their own values.

No one should read into this anywhere that it is a defense or apology for a man whose balance sheet in life is heavily weighted toward the red. It is however vital to understand him if we are ever to fix the broken souls who walk amongst us that are just like him.

These are the thoughts which preoccupy me much more than “information,” or whatever is in the daily headlines. It is the subjective side of what makes people tick which matters most to me, because that is real history.

Postscript: Concretely in the short term Graham’s death hurts Ukraine. He was there with Zelensky negotiating the points of a Senate resolution to tighten the sanctions on Russia’s war economy, and had bipartisan support lined up for it. It was expected that Graham would lead the effort in the Senate to pass it. Now it is in doubt, between him and McConnell being dead for all intents and purposes. It will be up to Dem Richard Blumenthal to pick up the baton. If anyone has suspicions to raise about Graham’s COD and possible Russian involvement, I’ll not discourage the discussion.

MOBOLOGY, Investigative Commentary: The tragic suicide of Vincent Foster: The crime and the politics (Part 1), Dan E. Moldea, right,July 12, 2026.This month is the 33rd anniversary of a death that led to a cataclysmic upheaval in American history.

Introduction

In the midst of LAPD Detectives Tom Lange and Philip Vannatter's media war with Detective Mark Fuhrman, a convicted perjurer who had written his own book about the O.J. Simpson case, Fuhrman's right-wing publisher, Regnery Publishing approached me, as Lange and Vannatter’s co-author, to write a book about the death of Vincent Foster, President Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel who had been found dead at Fort Marcy Park in northern Virginia on July 20, 1993.

Regnery, who offered me a $100,000 advance, had recently rejected previous book proposals on the Foster case by Foster's secretary, Linda Tripp, and Fuhrman, who believed that Foster had been murdered. . . .

The Foster case was an eye-opening, life-altering experience for me. Through my research, I collected clear evidence that a dishonest, money-grubbing cabal of Clinton haters—who shared information, covered up each other's mistakes, fabricated evidence, and received their funding from the same sources—had tried to portray Foster's suicide as a murder in a cynical effort to undermine the authority of the Clinton White House.

My May 24 column detailed how I became involved in the investigation of Foster’s suicide, stemming from my work as the co-author with Tom Lange and Philip Vannatter of our book, Evidence Dismissed: The Inside Story of the O.J. Simpson Case (Pocket Books, 1997).

This is the first time that this updated story has been offered to Mobology subscribers.

Reed Irvine (DEM): Help from an unexpected source

Reed Irvine—the overlord of the right‑wing watchdog group, Accuracy in Media (AIM)—had probably spent more time than anyone investigating the alleged dark side of the Vincent Foster death case. In fact, Irvine was among those who believed that Foster was murdered.

After agreeing to write the Foster book, I made an appointment with Irvine to discuss the case. He was extremely cordial and wanted to help me—especially after hearing that I was under contract with Alfred Regnery, his conservative publishing soulmate.

During our meeting about Foster, left, Irvine pulled a couple of files from a large box on the floor that was filled with thousands of pages of documents.

“What’s that?” I asked Irvine, pointing at the box.

“Believe it or not,” he replied, “this is where we keep our files on the Foster case.”

Irvine then invited me to come back the following day to look through the box.

The next morning, I returned to Irvine’s office, but he had not yet arrived. I went to his secretary, who remembered me from the day before. When I asked her for the box Irvine had shown me, she led me to it and offered to seat me in a room where I could go through the files. She even offered to photocopy a file or two.

I hoisted the box on my shoulder and followed her into the room. I sat on the couch, placing the box on a long table in front of me. The secretary smiled and returned to her desk.

As I leafed through this amazing archive, I discovered not only public documents but correspondences between and among Irvine and others in the right‑wing community who were involved in their own Foster investigations, as well as a stack of transcripts of taped conversations Irvine had recorded, some secretly, with several journalists, including Arthur Sulzberger, the owner of the New York Times, and Sixty Minutes correspondent Mike Wallace.

This, I immediately knew, was a gold mine.

A few minutes later, when Irvine’s secretary returned to check on me, she asked if I wanted her to photocopy anything. I laughed and said, “I want the whole box and everything in it. In fact, I’ll go to Kinko’s right now and Xerox everything myself. I can get it all back to you tomorrow. . . . Is that okay?”

She thought for a moment replied, “Yes, I think that’ll be all right. Just . . .”

Before she even finished speaking, I had the box back on my left shoulder and was on a dead sprint for the exit. Seeing Irvine, who had just entered his office, I quickly shook hands with him and told him that his secretary had given me permission to take and photocopy the entire box of documents, as long as I returned it the following day.

Irvine smiled and nodded, adding that he hoped the files would be useful.

That day, I spent nearly four hours copying Reed Irvine’s personal files about Vincent Foster and his death. Then, after returning the box of documents to Irvine’s office, I logged these and other files into my database on the Foster case.

Reading through only a handful of these records, I quickly realized that Irvine and others in the “Foster‑was‑murdered” crowd were obviously basing their entire case on a series of clearly innocent police mistakes and omissions, which had created a false portrait of what really happened.Kevin Fornshill points to where he discovered Foster’s dead body (DEM)Approaching the U.S. Park Police

The U.S. Park Police had jurisdiction in the Foster case and handled the crime‑scene investigation. That was my next stop.

But, at first, no one wanted to talk.

The Park Police had been hammered by everyone from right‑wing congressmen and senators to a variety of conspiracy theorists, like Reed Irvine, who were trying to prove that Foster was murdered. In short, the Foster case had brought this small but respected law‑enforcement agency nothing but trouble.

But through a local law-enforcement source and friend, I was introduced to and interviewed Kevin Fornshill of the U.S. Park Police. He was the officer who had received permission to leave his security post at CIA Headquarters on July 20, 1993, and to respond to a dead‑body call at nearby Fort Marcy Park, just off the George Washington Parkway in northern Virginia.

Fornshill, who had found Foster’s body in a hidden grove, personally gave me a tour of the area, which I videotaped, and a detailed account of what he saw and did.

After that, I was introduced to and interviewed the three USPP investigators at the crime scene—Cheryl Braun, John Rolla, and Renee Abt. I also had meetings with Pete Simonello, the criminalist assigned to the case, as well as Sergeant Pete Markland, who took over the case as its lead detective, and Captain Charles Hume, who headed the overall investigation.

During the next few months, I interviewed every Park Police officer and official who played any role in this case, including Robert Langston, the USPP chief. Through all of the official and unofficial investigations of Foster’s death, no one else could make that claim.

Early in my research—after, among other things, conducting my interviews and reviewing all of the investigative reports in the case, as well as the photographs taken at the crime scene and during the autopsy—I found the evidence to be overwhelming. . . . Foster had, indeed, committed suicide.

It was a dead-bang no-brainer.

I quickly realized that, after earlier writing four conspiracy books—about the corruption of Jimmy Hoffa (1978), a contract killing in Ohio (1983), Ronald Reagan and the Hollywood mob (1986), and the NFL and the Mafia (1989)—I was about to publish my third book in a row, telling readers what they already knew.

First, Sirhan acted alone, (1995). Then, O.J. acted alone, (1997). And, now, Foster acted alone, (1998).

On December 16, I had dinner with Al Regnery at the University Club. In the midst of our conversation, I pulled a computer disk from my suit jacket and handed it to my publisher. Attached was my cover letter, which read:

[T]he purpose of showing you this draft [of my manuscript] is two‑fold: one, to give you a heads‑up about the book and its contents; and, two, to give us a little time to resolve any potential editorial and/or political problems that this manuscript might cause. Specifically, I don’t want either one of us to be blindsided by anything after the others have seen it; i.e. I know how loyal Harry Crocker, whom I also respect and admire, is to Ambrose Evans‑Pritchard.

As you will see, this book is a dramatic contrast to those by Evans‑Pritchard and Christopher Ruddy.

Actually, Ruddy, a former reporter for the New York Post, had done well with his book. He was greatly helped by a surprisingly favorable review in the New York Times Book Review, which praised his questionable research and legitimized his dubious conclusions about Foster’s death that cast suspicion on the President and Hillary Clinton.

The Times assigned Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor at William Buckley’s conservative publication, National Review, to write the review. Brookhiser concluded:

You don’t have to believe in murder in high places to be unhappy with the way the Foster case has been handled. . . . [S]o many loose ends suggest that the initial Park Police investigation was sloppy and that all subsequent ones—which essentially began by accepting its conclusions—have been lazy. Zealous colleagues may have rifled Foster office; why not his body?

On December 22—nine days before my deadline—Regnery called me and said that he liked my manuscript very much and did not suggest any changes other than routine editing.

New York Times, The Democratic Socialists Winning Elections Far From New York City, Benjamin Oreskes and Mark Sommer, July 12, 2026. They won Democratic state legislative primaries in Buffalo and Syracuse, showing how the party’s messaging and ground game can work outside New York City.

As the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, Megan Romer has worked for plenty of campaigns and knocked on all sorts of doors across the country.

But for Ms. Romer, there is something special about Buffalo that made it “the best canvassing city in the country,” and it’s not just because she hails from nearby Cayuga County.

“Everybody has got a front porch,” she said. “It is such a nice place to spend a Saturday talking to voters.”

Ms. Romer speaks from recent experience. She was part of a volunteer team that knocked on around 25,000 doors in the western Buffalo area, helping Adam Bojak to a decisive win in last month’s three-way Democratic primary for a State Assembly seat. If Mr. Bojak wins in November, he will become the State Legislature’s first democratic socialist to represent western New York.

Roughly 150 miles to the east in nearby Syracuse, a similar army of fired-up volunteers knocked on thousands of doors in support of Maurice Brown, a democratic socialist. The effort paid off: Mr. Brown narrowly defeated Assemblyman William B. Magnarelli, a 28-year incumbent, by 82 votes in a primary that saw about 6,700 people cast their ballots.

More On U.S. Media

New York Times, Michael Cohen Helped Convict Trump. Now, He’s Making Nice Again Maggie Haberman and Ben Protess, July 12, 2026. A previously unreported encounter last summer set the stage for a rapprochement between the president and his former fixer, who has so far avoided the diatribes and prosecutions that President Trump has directed at other critics.

Last summer, as many one-time adversaries of President Trump sought to bury the hatchet with him, he met with someone who seemed like a intractable enemy: his former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen.

Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump had a brief yet significant conversation at the president’s private, members-only golf club in Bedminster, N.J., breaking a yearslong estrangement marked by legal disputes and public acrimony, according to people with knowledge of the encounter, who discussed the private session on the condition of anonymity.

Their conversation, which has not been previously reported, provided Mr. Cohen a toehold into Mr. Trump’s orbit and set in motion a broader effort to make peace with the president. His private outreach also included a second, longer meeting with Mr. Trump this year and calls to some of the president’s closest allies.

Mr. Cohen’s public stance has shifted as well. Two years after serving as the star witness against Mr. Trump at the president’s criminal trial in New York — delivering testimony that helped secure his conviction for falsifying business records — Mr. Cohen has publicly assailed the prosecutors leading the case.

In an interview on Saturday, Mr. Cohen said his relationship with the president had improved in recent months after Mr. Trump had noticed a liberal backlash to his criticism of prosecutors.

“If Donald Trump and Michael Cohen can rekindle and reconcile their past relationship, then anyone should be able to,” he said.

Mr. Cohen stands to gain from the rapprochement. With the White House’s apparent blessing, he is debuting a radio show on Sunday on a Trump-friendly station in New York, WABC. He is filling former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s slot during the summer, but he has said that he hopes to get a syndicated show eventually.

Unlike several prominent Trump critics who have legally sparred with the president, Mr. Cohen has not faced prosecution from Mr. Trump’s Justice Department, which has sought to bring charges against figures such as former F.B.I. director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James. Mr. Trump has not publicly attacked Mr. Cohen since retaking office.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The truce represents a surprising third act in the tumultuous Trump-Cohen relationship

The two men, both known for their tough-guy personas and tendency to lash out at enemies, have worked together, betrayed each other and now might soon be chatting again in public: While promoting his new show, Mr. Cohen recently said that he expected Mr. Trump to call in as a guest in the coming weeks.

On his show, Mr. Cohen could continue to undermine his role as a witness at Mr. Trump’s criminal trial, if his most recent public remarks are any indication.

During the Manhattan district attorney’s investigation into Mr. Trump over a hush-money deal with a porn actress, Mr. Cohen said he was helping prosecutors because Mr. Trump “needs to be held accountable for his dirty deeds.” Mr. Cohen, who went to prison for his role in the hush-money deal, now contends that he “felt compelled and coerced to deliver what they were seeking.”

Mr. Trump — who has recently told aides and confidants that he felt sorry for his former fixer, lamenting his time in prison — could try to leverage Mr. Cohen’s recent criticism of prosecutors as he challenges the legal cases against him. His lawyers have already cited Mr. Cohen’s comments in court papers, part of a broader effort by the president to recast the past decade, including his refusal to acknowledge his loss in the 2020 election.

There is also potential peril in Mr. Cohen and Mr. Trump’s reconciliation. Mr. Cohen may not stick to Trump’s talking points, having already noted publicly that he does not agree with the president on everything.

The two-decadlong relationship between them was born from conflicts, one involving New York real estate, rather than presidential politics. After buying apartments in two of Mr. Trump’s New York buildings, Mr. Cohen caught Mr. Trump’s eye during a dispute with the condo board at Trump World Tower in New York in the mid-2000s.

Mr. Cohen, who had idolized Mr. Trump since his youth on Long Island, saw a potential mentor and patron. Mr. Trump saw a potential bulldog enforcer.

Mr. Cohen often delivered. He threatened Mr. Trump’s foes — Mr. Cohen once wrote that he served as Mr. Trump’s “designated thug” — and occasionally worked on real estate projects.

Mr. Cohen was not given a formal role in the 2016 campaign. But he found ways to be useful to the president politically.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Cohen played a pivotal role in covering up a potential scandal that could have damaged Mr. Trump’s candidacy. When the porn actress Stormy Daniels threatened to go public with her story of a sexual encounter with Mr. Trump, Mr. Cohen bought her silence with a $130,000 payoff.

In 2018, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to several federal crimes, including for his role in the payoff, though he said Mr. Trump had directed him to make the secret payment.

Mr. Cohen was the only person to serve prison time for that deal. Released during the pandemic, the Trump administration threw him back behind bars when he would not sign papers ruling out writing a book. A judge ordered him released, saying the move was “retaliatory.”

Mr. Cohen emerged from prison angry, saying he was determined to set the record straight. He released books titled “Disloyal” and “Revenge,” as well as a podcast called “Mea Culpa.” He also met with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which ultimately indicted Mr. Trump for his role in the hush-money deal.

Mr. Cohen took the witness stand in that case. He also testified in a civil case that Ms. James brought against Mr. Trump, who was found liable for fraud.

Mr. Trump called Mr. Cohen a “rat” and a “liar.” He even sued Mr. Cohen, ultimately dropping the case days before Mr. Trump was set to be deposed.

For years, Mr. Cohen did not back down. In social media and on cable news, he boasted of his role in holding Mr. Trump accountable, noting that he had voluntarily testified before Congress and met with prosecutors some 20 times. He likened Mr. Trump to a mobster.

“If the country won’t forgive me, how can I ever forgive myself?” he wrote on Twitter in 2021. “It’s why I have and will continue to cooperate with law enforcement; to ensure Trump and company are held responsible.”

Mr. Cohen nevertheless has said he had some misgivings about testifying at Mr. Trump’s criminal trial. And some of Mr. Cohen’s friends have contended that he never wanted to break up with Mr. Trump and would have preferred remaining in his orbit, rather than enduring years of testimony and receiving accolades as a hero of the left.

After Mr. Trump returned to office last year, Mr. Cohen began to seek out his former boss.

His effort gained traction last summer, when he met with Mr. Trump at Bedminster. Mr. Trump’s top personal legal adviser, Boris Epshteyn, was present for the conversation but did not arrange it, the people briefed on the matter said.

It is unclear who did; Mr. Cohen has declined to say, and a White House spokesman did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The president and his aides have yet to comment on Mr. Cohen’s change in tone publicly.

Still, according to the people briefed on the initial Bedminster conversation, it broke the ice, without cementing a new relationship. By late summer, Mr. Cohen began softening his tone about Mr. Trump in television appearances.

In January, Mr. Cohen made a vocal public turn: In a Substack essay, he argued that he was an involuntary participant in the cases against Mr. Trump, compelled to testify by subpoena. He also accused prosecutors of posing “inappropriate leading questions to elicit answers that supported their narrative.”

Mr. Cohen has said he received a swift and furious reaction from liberal readers. That’s when a Trump associate brought the backlash to the president’s attention, Mr. Cohen recently said when he appeared as a guest on a WABC radio show. The associate, Mr. Cohen added, relayed to him that the president had expressed sympathy for him.

So, Mr. Cohen said, he texted the president to thank him and express “my sincere hope that this long, exhausting feud could finally end.” Mr. Trump responded, Mr. Cohen said. According to people with knowledge of the matter, they met in Florida some time after the Substack essay. It all unfolded “about six, seven months ago,” Mr. Cohen said in the appearance.

“We rekindled our relationship because of a shared experience of betrayal,” he said.

Mr. Cohen also contacted a number of Trump allies, including one of his lawyers and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who then had him on her podcast. There, he defended Mr. Trump from questions about past ties to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Eventually, he landed on WABC, a home to Trump acolytes including Roger Stone.

John Catsimatidis, the station’s owner and a longtime Trump supporter, told The New York Post that he had checked with the White House before giving Mr. Cohen the show. In a brief call with The New York Times, he declined to elaborate.

July 11

Top Headlines

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, empowered by President Trump with vast powers over Venezuela after a United States commando team seized that nation's president this year, is shown above briefing Trump, who appeared to fall asleep at the time of the photo during the public event.

• New York Times, How Marco Rubio is Running Venezuela From Afar, Tyler Pager and Anatoly Kurmanaev, July 11, 2026. The secretary of state effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government. His grip on the country is a vivid manifestation of American power in the Trump era.
• Democracy Docket, Analysis and Advocacy: Trump just fired the agency that runs elections, Marc Elias, right, July 11, 2026. In March 2025, Donald Trump tried to seize control of federal elections via a sweeping executive order. That order sought to commandeer the Election Assistance Commission — a bipartisan federal agency that assists state election officials — to execute his anti-voting scheme.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Saturday Night Update and Comment: I am Fighting With the Justice Department Over the Epstein Files, Aaron Parnas, right, July 11, 2026.I promised you I would not stop, and this fight has now reached the Justice Department itself. Meanwhile, the Iranian government has again closed the Strait of Hormuz, there are major new developments involving ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, an update on Mitch McConnell, and much more.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Important Epstein Update, Trump Targets Journalists, Iran Vows to Avenge Leader's Death as Trump Fears Possible Assassination, Aaron Parnas, right, July 11, 2026. Trump is reportedly furious over revelations that the Qatari Air Force One jet does not meet U.S. security standards. Now, in what critics are calling a major assault on the First Amendment, his administration is subpoenaing journalists at their homes. At the same time, the administration is obstructing key Epstein investigations, Kash Patel has been summoned to the White House, and Trump is reportedly preparing for the possibility of his own death by ordering missiles locked and loaded at Iran as Tehran vows to avenge the Ayatollah’s death.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 10, 2026 [Trump Election-Rigging Threats], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 11, 2026. Presumably afraid of investigations into his actions, President Donald J. Trump appears to have abandoned all pretense of governing for the good of the country and is focusing on rigging the 2026 election to keep Republicans in power.

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

• MSNOW, Advocacy and Opinion: The National Guard occupation that has been brutalizing Memphis must stop, Sheree Renée Thomas, July 11, 2026. Troops deployed to Memphis must recognize the dangerous absurdity of the mission. The strategies of a combat theater cannot be translated into civilian law enforcement or community life. To walk through Memphis is to step into an eerie, simultaneous haunting, both visible and invisible. You see armed soldiers and federal agents everywhere in Memphis: an uncanny, disruptive presence woven into the mundane fabric of our daily lives. Since they arrived in September, they have become a disturbingly normalized fixture. 
• New York Times, ICE Killing in Houston Puts Focus on Surge in Immigration Arrests, Jazmine Ulloa, Hamed Aleaziz and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, July 11, 2026 (print ed.). The shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo occurred as immigration enforcement has ramped up across the country, with thousands being arrested daily.

U.S. Governance

• New York Times, Whistle-Blowers Accuse Kennedy Center of Contracting Flaws Under Trump, Julia Jacobs and Zach Montague, July 12, 2026 (print ed.). Documents submitted to Congress detailed concerns about competitive bidding processes and a White House order to tear up new bathroom tile because of its color.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Confirms: Accepting a Flying Bribery Palace Made Him Less Safe, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 11, 2026. From the moment Trump posted a tweet claiming he was sending his Flying Bribery Palace back separately from the NATO summit in Ankara, the entire world knew there was a problem with the jet Qatar gifted him.
• New York Times, Bipartisan Housing Bill Becomes Law Even Though Trump Refuses to Sign It, Michael Gold, Updated July 11, 2026. After a 10-day clock, the housing bill turned into law at midnight without the president’s signature. But his decision not to sign reflects a growing rift between him and Senate Republicans.

U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

• New York Times, Times Journalists Subpoenaed as Trump Escalates Pressure on Media, Michael M. Grynbaum, July 11, 2026. The Justice Department is seeking to compel testimony from reporters who wrote about the new Air Force One. The Times called the move a “brazen act.”

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Israel Struck an Iranian Steel Facility. Was It a Valid Military Target? Yeganeh Torbati, July 11, 2026. l During the war, Israel attacked Iran’s steel plants, saying they provided forces with revenue and the means to make weapons, but it also hurt the civilian economy.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• New York Times, Platner’s Rise and Fall Revives Old Questions About ‘Bernie Bros’ and Women, Patricia Mazzei and Kellen Browning, July 11, 2026. The collapse of Graham Platner’s Senate bid in Maine after a rape allegation renewed attention to a movement built by Senator Bernie Sanders that some say is too forgiving of male misconduct.

More On U.S. Immigration, Economy, Inflation, Jobs

• White House Chronicle, Opinion: A British Immigrant’s Defense of Immigration, Llewellyn King, right, July 11, 2026. Migration, people moving to new lands, is as old as human history, and as fraught. Today it is a global problem complete with layered hypocrisy, cruelty and, always, hope among those on the move. War and extreme poverty collude in driving people to seek a livable future.

Top Headlines

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, empowered by President Trump with vast powers over Venezuela after a United States commando team seized that nation's president this year, is shown above briefing Trump, who appeared to fall asleep at the time of the photo during the public event.

New York Times, How Marco Rubio is Running Venezuela From Afar, Tyler Pager and Anatoly Kurmanaev, July 11, 2026. The secretary of state effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government. His grip on the country is a vivid manifestation of American power in the Trump era.

President Trump was sitting in the Oval Office earlier this year with Secretary of State Marco Rubio when an idea came to him.

Maybe he should dispatch Mr. Rubio permanently to Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, where U.S. commandos had carried out the proudest foreign policy achievement of Mr. Trump’s second term: the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president.

Mr. Rubio could be the next leader of Venezuela, Mr. Trump suggested. And while the president’s aides say he was joking — and that he frequently teases Mr. Rubio about an overseas assignment — the fact is that Mr. Rubio does not need to move to Caracas.

He already runs Venezuela from Washington.

In the six months since U.S. forces blew open Mr. Maduro’s bedroom door and snatched him in the dead of night, Mr. Rubio has become the de facto viceroy of Venezuela, holding sway over a sovereign nation in a way that no American official has since L. Paul Bremer III arrived in Baghdad in 2003 to run U.S.-occupied Iraq.

Mr. Rubio now effectively controls Venezuela’s finances, the distribution of its natural resources and its government, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials and people close to both governments in Washington and Caracas, who provided details about his involvement in steering the country’s policies. Many spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private interactions and internal discussions.

While he has not visited Venezuela in person since the U.S. took over, the secretary of state is deeply involved in the country’s day-to-day operations, keeping in close contact with Delcy Rodríguez (shown in a New York Times photo by Frances Robles), who was Mr. Maduro’s vice president and now leads her country on an acting basis, with the imprimatur of the United States. The two exchange messages in Spanish on WhatsApp, trading gossip, birthday greetings and selfies.

Despite the banter, the relationship between Mr. Rubio and Ms. Rodríguez is far from a partnership. It is a manifestation of Trump-era American power, in which the winner takes all regardless of sovereignty and international law.

Democracy Docket, Analysis and Advocacy: Trump just fired the agency that runs elections, Marc Elias, right, July 11, 2026. In March 2025, Donald Trump tried to seize control of federal elections via a sweeping executive order. That order sought to commandeer the Election Assistance Commission — a bipartisan federal agency that assists state election officials — to execute his anti-voting scheme.

My team and I immediately sued on behalf of the Democratic Party and won a swift victory. A federal judge held that "our Constitution does not allow the President to impose unilateral changes to federal election procedures."

But Trump was not done. He believes he has found a shortcut to undermine the 2026 elections.

On Thursday, Trump fired the Democratic members of the EAC and the remaining Republican commissioner resigned. The agency, which certifies voting machines and publishes election guidance, no longer has any members. It is, for all practical purposes, defunct.

Over the last sixteen months, Trump has concocted new ways to accomplish his goal of restricting voting rights and spreading lies and disinformation.

He has used the Department of Justice to seize ballots. He has appointed a committed election denier to head the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He has repeatedly claimed powers he does not have — including the power to control how states count ballots and certify elections.

Yet Trump's frustration has only grown.

His effort to rig the midterms through partisan gerrymandering fell short. His insistence that Congress pass the SAVE Act, a massive voter suppression law, has failed to produce a bill for him to sign.

His Department of Justice sued 30 states to access sensitive voter data. My law firm intervened to fight all these cases. We are undefeated so far. DOJ is 0-11, including five losses before judges Trump himself nominated.

At the Supreme Court, we recently beat a Republican National Committee lawsuit that would have limited voting by mail. Trump's latest executive order aimed at the U.S. Postal Service's handling of mail-in ballot delivery was recently halted by two different federal courts. Another judge blocked Trump's plan to have states use the federal SAVE database to disqualify voter registrations.

Nearly everywhere he turns, Trump sees his administration and his allies losing in court. His decision to fire the entire EAC took place against this backdrop.

Make no mistake: this is a dangerous development for free and fair elections and for democracy itself. Though the EAC's powers were limited, Trump's actions are a clear statement that he intends to strip all power he can from any entity he does not control directly — to remove all checks on his power, all experts who could question his statements, and all centers of authority that do not answer to him.

In the end, what will save democracy from Trump's authoritarian impulses is that the Constitution places the power to set voting rules and administer elections with the states. As the federal judge wrote in her opinion striking down Trump's first elections executive order, in terms of elections, the founders "assigned no role at all to the President."

This does not mean that Trump will not try to exploit his power to fire EAC commissioners to his advantage. It certainly does not mean he won't try to, once again, claim power he does not have.

But I can promise him this: If he tries to limit voting rights, we will sue. If he tries to take control over or impede voting, we will sue. And if he tries to seize ballots or tamper with vote counting or certification, we will sue.

I do not relish these fights, but I won't shy away from them. And history has shown that when we bring these cases — when democracy is on the docket — we win far more often than we lose.

But litigation alone will not save free and fair elections. I have often said that my job as a litigator is to buy time for democracy. We cannot, via the courts, stop Trump and his movement from launching their next attack; we can simply limit the damage of their last. We, as citizens and voters, are tasked with using that time effectively.

We need to demand our state legislatures strengthen and improve their own election laws now, rather than assume Washington will do it for them. We need civil society leaders — from Big Law to business leaders to the largest nonprofits — to stand up for democratic institutions. Most importantly, we need voters to do the thing Trump fears most: turn out in numbers too large for any of this to matter.

Donald Trump did not fire the EAC because he is winning. He fired it because he is losing — in Congress, in the courts, and increasingly in the court of public opinion. An administration confident in its ability to win a fair election does not need to disable the agency that helps run one.

I can promise that my team and I will keep suing. But eventually, it must be the American people, not any court, that ends Trump's ability to escalate his attacks on free and fair elections.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Saturday Night Update and Comment: I am Fighting With the Justice Department Over the Epstein Files, Aaron Parnas, right, July 11, 2026.I promised you I would not stop, and this fight has now reached the Justice Department itself. Meanwhile, the Iranian government has again closed the Strait of Hormuz, there are major new developments involving ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, an update on Mitch McConnell, and much more.

I will not stop pushing for answers. Thank you for your continued support as we report on the Epstein files and other stories that demand attention. The coming week will be especially busy with Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing and interviews with Epstein survivors. When you subscribe, you’re supporting independent journalism grounded in verified facts, not speculation, and reporting that answers only to the truth. If you’re not yet a subscriber, I hope you’ll consider joining us today.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

Epstein:

The Department of Justice spent the day fighting with me on Twitter over the Epstein files and the fact that the DOJ is actively impeding the only criminal investigation into the Epstein files.

Photo by Aaron Parnas on July 11, 2026. May be a Twitter screenshot of text that says 'DOJ Rapid Response @DOJRR47 X.com We are x.com/dojrr47/status.. 47/status Aaron Parnas Not enough people are talking about this. @AaronParnas· 18h The Trump Administration is impeding the only active criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. x.com/Reuters/status... status...'.

A court filing by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche acknowledges that the Justice Department intentionally withheld handwritten notes from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation, arguing they are largely duplicative of typed FBI reports and more difficult to redact without exposing victims' identities. The admission came in response to a lawsuit seeking the release of all remaining Epstein files under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The lawsuit argues the withheld notes may contain information omitted from the typed reports and therefore should be made public. The dispute is expected to become a major issue during Blanche's upcoming Senate confirmation hearing, where lawmakers are expected to question the DOJ's handling of the Epstein files.

Department of Homeland Security

A sweeping investigation describes a Department of Homeland Security gripped by fear as career officials say they were pressured to support immigration policies they believed were illegal or unethical or risk losing their jobs. More than three dozen current and former officials told investigators that dissenters were sidelined, blacklisted, reassigned, or pushed out while oversight offices responsible for refugees, asylum, and humanitarian protections were dismantled. Several officials said they eventually resigned because they felt they could no longer carry out their duties without compromising their principles. The report argues the changes fundamentally transformed DHS into an agency driven by political loyalty rather than professional expertise.

Multiple current and former DHS employees said they were subjected to lengthy polygraph examinations that they viewed as intimidation rather than legitimate security reviews. Some described being questioned for as long as six hours after being read their Miranda rights, leading them to believe they could be arrested despite never being told what they were accused of doing. Employees said refusing the exams could cost them their security clearances and careers, while many were later forced into reassignments far outside their areas of expertise. The report says these tactics created a climate where employees feared speaking out or challenging administration policies.

The investigation also details the human consequences of the administration’s immigration policies, including the dismantling of internal watchdog offices and humanitarian programs. One case highlighted the death of a three-year-old U.S. citizen after his deported mother was unable to take him with her to Honduras, despite repeatedly asking immigration officials for permission. Former officials and immigration advocates argue that the elimination of oversight offices left vulnerable families with nowhere to turn when problems arose. Current and former employees say the department continues to be directed largely from the White House, with Stephen Miller remaining the driving force behind its immigration agenda.

Trump’s health

Trump sparked fresh questions about his health after posting on Truth Social that he had “just finished a perfect physical at Walter Reed” and had requested another cognitive test, writing that he had taken it three times and “aced them all.” The White House later clarified he was referring to his physical from late May, not a new exam, despite Trump’s wording suggesting it had just occurred. Trump also claimed he undergoes physicals every six months and called himself “the only President” to have taken the cognitive test three times. The post renewed attention to his health because it came while he was golfing and appeared to describe a medical exam that had not actually taken place that day.

Trump lashed out on social media Monday morning, posting photos of the White House grounds and calling their condition "deplorable," comparing them to "our Country ... when I inherited it from Sleepy Joe Biden." The posts suggest Trump is frustrated with the appearance of the White House and is using the landscaping and maintenance as another contrast with the previous administration. His comments come amid broader efforts to reshape the White House grounds and ongoing renovations at several high-profile federal properties. The unusually personal complaints about the presidential residence quickly drew attention online as another example of Trump's focus on aesthetics and public image.

Freedom Fuel:

President Trump has promoted the new “Freedom Fuel Network,” a group of 25 gas stations in Pennsylvania and New Jersey selling gasoline for up to 50 cents below market prices, but the White House will not identify who is behind the company or explain how the discounts are being financed. Officials insist no outside entity is subsidizing the lower prices and claim the retailer is simply accepting smaller profit margins, even as industry experts say the economics do not add up.

The mystery has deepened because business records show the company was incorporated just days before Trump promoted it, many participating stations changed branding almost overnight, and fuel industry groups say they had never heard of the network before the White House announcement. Several participating stations sit on properties owned by affiliates of Blue Owl, although both the White House and Blue Owl deny the asset manager has any involvement.

Analysts say many of the stations appear to be selling gasoline at or below wholesale cost, raising questions about how long the discounts can last and whether the model is financially sustainable. The rollout comes as the administration faces pressure over rising fuel prices following the Iran conflict, while industry experts argue retailers are already operating on thin margins and cannot realistically maintain such steep discounts without another source of funding.

Other news:

In a major escalation, the Iranian military says it attacked a commercial vessel and has declared the Strait of Hormuz closed until further notice. The announcement came just hours after U.S. officials told reporters they expected Iran to publicly guarantee that the strait would remain open and safe for commercial shipping. Those expectations were widely reported as fact across much of the media without independent confirmation. Instead, Iran announced the opposite, dramatically raising tensions around one of the world's most critical maritime trade routes.

Image

The Daily Beast reports that one of Mitch McConnell's Washington, D.C., neighbors said they witnessed a troubling scene just days before the senator was hospitalized.

Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse says whistleblowers have alleged the Kennedy Center rushed renovations and ignored federal contracting standards so it would be ready for high-profile events, including Donald Trump receiving FIFA's "peace prize." The allegations include no-bid contracts, repainting work that is already failing, a reflecting pool that may need to be rebuilt, and a brand-new bathroom floor allegedly ripped out because Trump disliked the tile color. Whitehouse says the renovations prioritized Trump's personal preferences over legitimate maintenance and may have wasted taxpayer money, and he is demanding documents and answers from Kennedy Center leadership. The Kennedy Center denies the allegations, insisting its contracting practices were proper, while the White House says Trump is repairing years of neglect at the landmark.

Days after an ICE agent fatally shot 52-year-old Mexican immigrant Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a traffic stop in Houston, local officials say federal authorities are refusing to share key evidence, including the work van at the center of the shooting, fueling concerns about transparency. ICE says Salgado Araujo rammed a federal vehicle and ignored commands, forcing an agent to fire in self-defense, but witnesses, passengers, family members, and several Texas Democrats dispute that account, insisting the van never struck officers and that agents never identified themselves. The Harris County district attorney says his office is being forced to learn details through social media instead of direct coordination with federal agencies and is considering seeking a court order to obtain evidence. Multiple investigations are now underway as Salgado Araujo's family, local officials, and Mexican authorities demand accountability and a full independent review of the fatal shooting.

MSNOW interviewed a neighbor who lives about five houses from where Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed. The resident said federal agents were searching his property for bullet casings even though the pursuit ended near the memorial behind the reporter. MSNOW questioned why investigators were combing through the grass outside that home if the shooting had occurred several houses away. The report raises new questions about the scope of the investigation and exactly where evidence may have been found.

In Kansas City, immigration officials are reportedly stopping people walking down the street and demanding proof of their legal status. There is no general legal requirement for people to carry proof of immigration status with them at all times. Civil liberties advocates and immigration attorneys have raised concerns about these kinds of street stops and the legal standards used to justify them. The reports are fueling a broader debate over immigration enforcement, constitutional protections, and the balance between public safety and individual rights.

Rep. Ro Khanna says he and his delegation were detained for about 90 minutes by armed Israeli settlers while visiting a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank that had been damaged in previous settler attacks. Khanna said the settlers, carrying U.S.-made rifles, blocked their vehicle and that Israeli soldiers refused to intervene, leaving him feeling “powerless” despite being a member of Congress. He said the experience gave him firsthand insight into what Palestinians face under the occupation and criticized what he described as a culture of impunity for settler violence. The Israeli military said it responded to reports of settlers blocking vehicles, while Khanna said the group was only able to continue after contacting the U.S. Embassy and Israeli police.

X avatar for @RoKhanna Ro Khanna@RoKhannaIsraeli settlers, brandishing American made M4s, detained me & other Americans on my trip to Palestine. When the IDF arrived, they sided with the settlers & continued our detention. They made a huge mistake. You will be hearing more soon. nytimes.com/2026/07/11/us/…Image1:26 PM · Jul 11, 2026 · 263K Views418 Replies · 1.44K Reposts · 5.37K Likes

Martha Lillard, believed to be the last person in the United States who relied on an iron lung after contracting polio, has died at 78 in Oklahoma. Diagnosed with polio at age 5, she outlived doctors' predictions by decades, living a full life despite spending the last two years almost entirely inside the machine that helped her breathe. Her life spanned the era before and after the polio vaccine, which virtually eliminated the disease in the U.S. by 1979, and she became a living reminder of the devastating impact polio once had on thousands of American children. Her family said she ultimately died from chronic pulmonary failure and post-polio syndrome, with long Covid contributing to her declining health.

The Trump administration has finalized a major rollback of the Endangered Species Act by narrowing the definition of "harm," removing long-standing protections for habitats that endangered species depend on to survive. Environmental groups warn the change could open critical wildlife habitats to logging, mining, drilling, and development, threatening species including Florida manatees, monarch butterflies, and wolverines. Administration officials argue the previous rules unfairly burdened landowners and businesses and say direct harm to endangered animals will still be prohibited. Conservation organizations are preparing legal challenges, arguing the rollback contradicts decades of scientific research, public support, and Supreme Court precedent protecting endangered species' habitats.

Hunter Biden won a $1.7 million defamation judgment against former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne after a federal judge found Byrne fabricated claims that Biden sought an $800 million bribe from Iran in exchange for influencing his father to unfreeze Iranian assets. The judge ruled Byrne acted with "actual malice," finding he had no credible evidence for the allegations and had intentionally misrepresented the story despite repeated opportunities to substantiate it. Byrne was also sanctioned after failing to appear for trial and repeatedly delaying the case, prompting the court to enter a default judgment against him. Biden's attorney said the ruling confirms the bribery accusations were entirely fabricated and warned Byrne could face additional legal action if he repeats them.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Important Epstein Update, Trump Targets Journalists, Iran Vows to Avenge Leader's Death as Trump Fears Possible Assassination, Aaron Parnas, right, July 11, 2026. Trump is reportedly furious over revelations that the Qatari Air Force One jet does not meet U.S. security standards.

Now, in what critics are calling a major assault on the First Amendment, his administration is subpoenaing journalists at their homes. At the same time, the administration is obstructing key Epstein investigations, Kash Patel has been summoned to the White House, and Trump is reportedly preparing for the possibility of his own death by ordering missiles locked and loaded at Iran as Tehran vows to avenge the Ayatollah’s death.

I also spoke today with Epstein survivor Lara Blume McGee ahead of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing. For the first time, she shares her story on camera and says this Department of Justice has done nothing to protect survivors or deliver justice.

I told you I would never stop talking about the Epstein files, and I meant it. More interviews are coming. I know some people unsubscribe because I spend so much time covering this story, but I cannot stop until survivors get the justice they deserve.

If you believe this reporting matters, subscribe today or upgrade your subscription. Your support helps me keep bringing these stories to millions of people and keeps the pressure on those in power.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

Epstein News:

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez accused the Justice Department of obstructing the state's reopened criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's activities at Zorro Ranch by failing to provide requested unredacted federal records despite repeated requests since February. Torrez argues the withheld documents contain names of survivors, witnesses, and potential co-conspirators that are essential to pursuing state prosecutions, warning that delays are causing evidence to grow stale and investigative leads to disappear. While the Justice Department says it supports New Mexico's investigation and is prepared to assist, the dispute has complicated the state's renewed effort—which includes searches of the ranch, subpoenas, and a bipartisan truth commission—to fully investigate alleged crimes connected to Epstein's New Mexico property.

Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) urged acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to fully comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, arguing the Justice Department has failed to release all required unredacted Epstein records and has overused redactions without sufficient explanations. Their letter, sent ahead of Blanche’s Senate confirmation hearing, cites a recent court order requiring additional document disclosures and criticizes the DOJ for missing deadlines while maintaining it has already complied with the law. The lawmakers contend that protecting victim privacy should not be used to broadly withhold records, saying full compliance is necessary to ensure transparency, accountability, and justice for survivors.

First Amendment Attack:

Overnight, while many were asleep, the Trump administration issued subpoenas to several New York Times reporters following the newspaper’s reporting on security concerns involving President Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One. The subpoenas seek to compel the journalists to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan about an alleged violation of federal criminal law, though they provide few details. In some cases, federal agents delivered the subpoenas directly to reporters’ homes, an unusual step that the newspaper described as an escalation in the administration’s actions toward the press. The reporting in question cited anonymous sources discussing sensitive national security matters related to the aircraft.

Before one of the stories was published, an FBI official asked The New York Times to delay publication, citing national security concerns, and requested that the newspaper identify its confidential sources. The Times declined to reveal its sources and proceeded with publication. The newspaper strongly criticized the subpoenas, arguing they threaten press freedom and the public’s right to independent reporting. Statement from The New York Times: “Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used. This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

The subpoenas come amid broader tensions between the Trump administration and major news organizations. While both Democratic and Republican administrations have pursued leak investigations, subpoenas targeting journalists are relatively uncommon, and First Amendment advocates warn they may discourage investigative reporting. It also highlights other recent legal disputes involving The New York Times, including lawsuits over Pentagon access, an employment discrimination case that the newspaper says is retaliatory, and a separate defamation lawsuit brought by President Trump. Together, these events reflect an ongoing legal and political conflict between the administration and the news media.

Trump’s Death Planning:

Iran’s new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei vowed to avenge the death of his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, saying revenge “must certainly be carried out,” while President Trump warned that any Iranian assassination attempt against him would trigger a massive U.S. military response, claiming he had already issued orders to “completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran.”

It comes as fears grow in and around the White House about threats on Trump’s life. Trump said he has left standing "instructions" for the U.S. to respond with overwhelming military force if he is assassinated by Iran. In an interview with the New York Post, he claimed he has been a long-term target of Iranian threats and said that, if anything happens to him, the response should be to "literally bomb them at levels that they've never seen before." His comments come as the conflict with Iran continues into its fifth month and after he declared a recent ceasefire effectively over. Trump also repeated similar remarks he made earlier in his second term about Iran being "obliterated" if it carried out an assassination.

Overnight, Trump warned that if Iran carries out an assassination attempt against him, the U.S. military has standing orders to launch an overwhelming response, claiming "1000 Missiles are Locked and Loaded" and threatening to "completely decimate and destroy" Iran. His comments followed reports of an alleged Iranian assassination plot shared by Israeli intelligence and renewed threats from Iran's new Supreme Leader, while Trump said he has long been Iran's "No. 1 target" and confirmed he has already left instructions for a massive military retaliation if he is killed.

Israeli intelligence recently warned the United States of a specific alleged Iranian plot to assassinate President Trump, though U.S. officials had not independently verified the intelligence and some viewed it as potentially aimed at influencing Trump's decisions on Iran. U.S. intelligence has long assessed that Iran could target Trump in retaliation for the 2020 killing of General Qasem Soleimani, and officials say they continue to monitor multiple potential threats. The report comes as U.S.-Iran tensions remain high, with diplomacy continuing alongside military preparations despite the breakdown of a recent ceasefire.

Kash Patel:

According to MS Now, FBI Director Kash Patel abruptly canceled a planned trip to Chicago after being called to the White House, though administration officials disputed reports that he was summoned over internal frustration. According to the report, some White House officials were concerned about Patel's recent actions, including criticism over his use of FBI resources for travel, a combative social media post, and negative publicity surrounding trips tied to his girlfriend's performances.

Patel had planned to combine an official visit to the FBI's Chicago field office with attending his girlfriend's country music festival performance, prompting internal complaints that the work event was added to justify the travel. The White House said Patel's visit was for unrelated meetings, while the FBI declined to comment and defended his travel as compliant with federal rules. The report also says President Trump and some senior aides have grown frustrated with recurring controversies surrounding Patel because they believe they distract from the administration's broader agenda.

Patel responded to criticism over his reported use of government resources by posting on X, "Nah, my jet ski is gold plated… dumbass," after criticism that he should keep a lower profile amid growing scrutiny. Patel is facing questions from lawmakers about his travel, spending, and use of FBI resources, while the FBI has denied any wrongdoing and disputed the allegations. His social media response drew widespread criticism online, with many users arguing it reinforced concerns about his judgment and leadership rather than addressing the substance of the allegations.

Other news:

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced two consumer protection measures aimed at reducing hidden costs and subscription hassles: a Click-to-Cancel rule, taking effect October 1, that requires businesses to make canceling subscriptions as easy as signing up, and a proposed all-in pricing rule that would require upfront disclosure of total prices for services like hotels, event tickets, and deliveries. City officials estimate the cancellation rule could save New Yorkers up to $162.5 million annually, while businesses that violate the proposed pricing rule could face $525 fines and be required to issue refunds after a public hearing on August 7.

A federal judge granted the Justice Department's request to permanently dismiss the remaining convictions of four Proud Boys leaders (some shown above) involved in the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack, following President Trump's 2025 pardons and sentence commutations for many Jan. 6 defendants. Although Judge Timothy Kelly approved the dismissal because the executive branch chose to abandon the prosecution, he emphasized that his ruling should not be interpreted as agreement with that decision, noting the convictions were for serious crimes. The ruling closes one of the last major Jan. 6 criminal cases, with the defendants and former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio celebrating the outcome.

Dr. Mehmet Oz became the latest Trump administration official to post a workout video, demonstrating what he described as proper squat technique.

European governments are considering a proposal that would allow voluntary navigation service fees in the Strait of Hormuz, modeled on the Strait of Malacca, while rejecting any mandatory tolls that would give Iran control over international shipping. The discussions come as the U.S. presses Iran to publicly guarantee safe passage through the waterway, diplomatic efforts continue through Oman, and disagreements persist over the future governance of the strait following renewed U.S.-Iran tensions and recent attacks on commercial shipping.

Severe flooding in southeastern Missouri prompted the rescue of more than 200 children and staff from Camp Taum Sauk by National Guard Black Hawk helicopters after roads became impassable, while another 20 people were rescued from a campground where a building collapsed under floodwaters. Officials reported no confirmed fatalities, though one woman remained missing after her home was swept away, and Governor Mike Kehoe declared a state of emergency as rivers continued rising, major roads closed, and forecasters warned that additional heavy rain could worsen flooding.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 10, 2026 [Trump's Election Rigging Threat], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 11, 2026. Presumably afraid of investigations into his actions, President Donald J. Trump appears to have abandoned all pretense of governing for the good of the country and is focusing on rigging the 2026 election to keep Republicans in power.

This morning, as the National Association of Realtors reported that U.S. home prices have hit an all-time high, he announced that he will not sign the housing bill, which was designed to address the unaffordability of housing and which passed Congress with strong bipartisan majorities, “in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.”

As the Lincoln Project summed it up, the Republican Party’s message four months before the midterms appears to be, “You’re not getting affordable housing unless you give up your voting rights.”

His demand for the passage of a bill that most observers agree will suppress voting is only one of the ways that Trump is trying to rig the 2026 election.

After federal judges have repeatedly prohibited the administration from seizing state voter lists, apparently to run them through a program designed to identify noncitizens who are not eligible for certain federal programs (something federal judges have also prohibited), Trump’s appointees at the Department of Justice appear to have turned to trying to intimidate election officials.

On Tuesday the Department of Justice confirmed that it has sent letters to election officials in all fifty states and Washington, D.C., warning them that they could be criminally prosecuted if noncitizens vote. The letters came from Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, right, a Trump loyalist, and gave them five days to detail how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”

Utah lieutenant governor Deidre Henderson, a Republican, posted on social media: “Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution. I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts. This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.”

Last night, Trump fired the last two Democratic members of the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), an independent federal commission that helps state and local officials make sure elections are smooth and secure. Among other things, it certifies voting machines and maintains the national mail-voter registration forms. The only other current member of the EAC, a Republican, resigned. The fourth member of the EAC, a Republican, resigned earlier this year.

A White House official told Justin Papp of CNBC that the Supreme Court recognized Trump’s authority to fire the agency officials in its June 29 Trump v. Slaughter decision, which overturned more than 90 years of precedent to rubber stamp the president’s right to fire agency officials who are not aligned with his political agenda.

“The President, and head of the Executive Branch, reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted,” the official told Papp. “The Slaughter decision gives the President precedence to do so.”

Legal analyst Harry Litman says this interpretation of the Slaughter decision is a stretch. He noted that “[n]othing in the agency cases held that Trump could simply shut down an agency of Congress’s creation. That’s what he has done with the [E]lection Assistance [C]ommission which now lacks commissioners to act. It’s taking the court’s cases to the ultimate conclusion and just disabling an important agency.”

The nonpartisan, nonprofit League of Women Voters, which works to protect the right to vote, called the removal of the Election Assistance Commission officials “a direct attack on the independence of our nation’s election infrastructure…. The American people deserve elections administered by trusted professionals, not shaped by political interference. This is not a routine personnel decision—it is a dangerous escalation in the effort to weaken the safeguards that protect free and fair elections in the November midterms.”

This is the backdrop for the news from Betsy Klein and Kaitlan Collins of CNN today that the White House is fortifying the White House entrance at the North Portico during Trump’s renovation of the Ionic columns there.

In March, Trump’s appointee to the Commission on Fine Arts, which advises Trump on design matters, urged replacing the historic Ionic columns with more ornate Corinthian columns that would match the ones Trump picked out for his ballroom. The White House says the work on the North Portico is “standard restoration work,” but did not answer CNN’s question about whether there would be more substantial changes to the North Portico. Trump recently posted pictures of the Corinthian columns at his proposed ballroom, boasting that “When completed, there will be nothing like it anywhere in the World!”

While the focus has been on the historic columns and their possible replacement, it is not until now we have learned about the strengthening of the White House door. The portico is now covered with scaffolding that is covered with a drape, and a White House official told Klein and Collins that the renovations will include security enhancements at the request of the U.S. Secret Service.

Dan Diamond of the Washington Post also reported today that under the Trump administration, the Secret Service, the White House, and the Interior Department are seeking to place permanent eight- to nine-foot-tall fencing around Lafayette Square, where tourists and protesters congregate, in front of the White House. They are also considering fencing off the parts of Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House. In the past, when officials believed it was necessary to shut off access to Lafayette Square, they used temporary barriers to avoid the perception that they were restricting public access to what is known as the People’s House.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, the nonvoting congressional representative from the District of Columbia., objected. “More fencing around the President’s Park would send the wrong message to the nation and the world by continuing to transform our democracy from one that is accessible and of the people to one that is exclusive and fearful of its own citizens,” she said.

Tonight, at 11:59 PM, the housing bill became law without the president’s signature.

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

MSNOW, Advocacy and Opinion: The National Guard occupation that has been brutalizing Memphis must stop, Sheree Renée Thomas, July 11, 2026. Troops deployed to Memphis must recognize the dangerous absurdity of the mission. The strategies of a combat theater cannot be translated into civilian law enforcement or community life.

To walk through Memphis is to step into an eerie, simultaneous haunting, both visible and invisible. You see armed soldiers and federal agents everywhere in Memphis: an uncanny, disruptive presence woven into the mundane fabric of our daily lives. Since they arrived in September, they have become a disturbingly normalized fixture. Some roll through our neighborhoods in plain clothes, driving ordinary Sprinter vans, looking for all the world like tourists who got lost on their way to Beale Street. Others are suited out in khaki and camel-colored camouflage, standing like insolent, bored sentinels guarding the food court at the mall, or checking over shopping baskets at local chain stores. When they first arrived, they stood starkly in front of our small, independent businesses, their heavy presence strangling the life out of local commerce and destroying decades of hard-won community goodwill and trust.

The anger after Johnson’s homicide is an order of magnitude higher.

Even before the National Guard shot and killed 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson July 4 weekend, the reality of this dystopian visitation was laid bare by MLK50, which published dashcam and body camera footage documenting the seemingly pretextual traffic stop of 18-year-old Yasser Lopez Soza and three of his Memphis Business Academy classmates. The minors were headed to their season-opening soccer game when they were pulled over. The footage captures a Homeland Security agent riding shotgun inside a Memphis Police Department cruiser, evidence that exposed as a lie the city’s repeated vow that Memphis police would never assist in federal immigration dragnets.

But the anger after Johnson’s homicide is an order of magnitude higher. It happened at nearly 4 a.m. Sunday, July 5, the tail end of a weekend where thousands of Memphians were out in the summer night celebrating the Fourth of July. At the intersection of Ida B. Wells and Gayoso Avenue, in the literal shadow of AutoZone Park — where the city’s minor league baseball team plays and crowds routinely gather — local police officers and National Guard members reportedly joined a foot pursuit after reports of gunfire.‘Insult to service members’: Senator says sending National Guard to Memphis is not the answerJune 17, 2026 / 06:04

Officials say Johnson fled on foot with a handgun and turned toward the soldiers who fired and hit him twice in the chest. Johnson was a 20-year-old former Tennessee State University student and father with no criminal history. His grandfather, who’s demanded video of the fatal encounter, told The Associated Press that Johnson started carrying a gun after being “jumped” in Nashville recently. He was killed while reportedly running through the labyrinth of an occupied city. Even soldiers within the ranks must recognize the dangerous absurdity of the mission. They are not trained for this or for de-escalation. The strategies of a combat theater cannot be translated into civilian law enforcement or community life.

Johnson’s killing is the tragic, inevitable harvest of this tactical mismatch.

Behind this military vanguard lies a broader, bureaucratic travesty of democracy. Neither Memphis Mayor Paul Young nor the Shelby County Government ever requested these troops. When local legislators and Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris sued to halt this occupation and won a temporary injunction from a judge who recognized the state’s unilateral overreach as unlawful, the state machine pushed back. The Tennessee Court of Appeals overturned the block and kept soldiers on our streets against the explicit, legal will of our elected local leadership.

The deployment of troops to Memphis is part of a larger pattern of exploitation.

The deployment of troops to Memphis is part of a larger pattern of exploitation. The state’s leaders have permitted unchecked corporate overreach. Thus, we have xAI’s Colossus data center pumping unpermitted pollutants near historically Black neighborhoods in Southwest Memphis, even as the company expands its reach across the state line into Southaven, Mississippi. Backed by a $20 billion incentive package from the state, they have constructed a massive new facility, provocatively dubbed MACROHARDRR, a juvenile play on a tech competitor’s name that can also be heard as a jarring, phonetic dog whistle that makes local Black communities the victims of the joke.

The 1820 Census registers the baseline human ledger of Memphis’ beginnings as 103 enslaved Africans forced to fell ancient oaks, obliterate ancient Indigenous mounds, pack the heavy mud into bricks and to turn the wilderness of a Mississippi River bluff into an empire of commerce.DOJ moves to dismiss NAACP’s pollution lawsuit against Musk’s AI companyJune 17, 2026 / 06:04

That means ours is a city built on layers upon layers of historical crime, where wealth was extracted from human flesh and auction squares were plotted directly into public parks.

The irony has come full circle, but so has the resolve. The descendants of the original 103 souls who cleared this bluff will not be quiet spectators to their own disenfranchisement.

Our grief for Tyrin Johnson is inextricably bound to our unyielding demand for autonomy. True public safety requires investment in our schools, our infrastructure and our collective well-being, instead of sending armed enforcers to occupy our neighborhoods and stamp out our future. They forgot that the high clay of this bluff belongs to the hands that shaped the bricks. We are still here, holding the ground we built, waiting out the occupation.

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning author, poet and editor whose work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and the genius of the Mississippi Delta. Her most recent book is "Mojorhythm" (Third Man Books, 2025). 

New York Times, ICE Killing in Houston Puts Focus on Surge in Immigration Arrests, Jazmine Ulloa, Hamed Aleaziz and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, July 11, 2026 (print ed.). The shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo occurred as immigration enforcement has ramped up across the country, with thousands being arrested daily.

The fatal shooting of a man this week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Houston has brought into focus an aggressive ramp-up of immigration arrests across the country that has largely occurred outside the public eye.

From large cities like Chicago and Las Vegas to small suburbs outside Milwaukee and San Antonio, immigrants have been picked up and detained at courthouses, ICE check-ins and traffic stops, with daily arrests doubling in the last week of June and continuing to climb.

“The operations have purposely been done behind the scenes,” said Getsy Hernandez, a community organizer with Escucha Mi Voz Iowa, an immigrant-led advocacy group in Iowa City.

Then on Tuesday, federal immigration agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican construction worker and father of three who had lived in the country for more than 30 years without legal status. However, Mr. Salgado Araujo was not the initial target of the agents.

In the days since, the killing has galvanized thousands of protesters, led to calls from local leaders and Latino civil rights groups for independent investigations and prompted promises of legal action from President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico.ImagePeople holding candles.A Wednesday night vigil for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico who was shot by ICE officers during a traffic stop in Houston.Credit...Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

Mr. Salgado Araujo was killed during a traffic stop by immigration agents who had been searching for a different person, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman. When agents tried to stop the vehicle, the encounter quickly escalated, and an agent shot Mr. Salgado Araujo in the abdomen. He died at a hospital hours later.

Homeland Security officials said Mr. Salgado Araujo had tried to use his vehicle as a weapon, though three men who witnessed the killing disputed that account and said the victim had never tried to run over a federal agent. No video of the shooting has emerged. The agents were not wearing body cameras, the spokeswoman has said.

The Houston shooting has dragged ICE and the tactics used by immigration agents back into the national spotlight. Federal officials are defending their actions as part of highly focused operations, but Latino community leaders and immigration lawyers argue the incident follows a string of violent confrontations that have accompanied the surge in arrests. These clashes, they say, show federal agents are continuing to use their most aggressive tacticsFederal immigration agents have shot at more than 20 people since September, nearly all of them in their cars. Some of the shootings have been fatal.

The Trump administration is continuing to push for more deportations. A Republican-led package signed by President Trump last month has funded $31 billion for ICE activities, such as supporting local and state authorities that have signed cooperation partnerships with the agency, known as 287(g) agreements. For jurisdictions that refuse to cooperate, the funding package has earmarked another $350 million to expand enforcement operations.

In a period of five days at the end of June, ICE officers arrested more than 10,000 people, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. After a brief lull during the July 4 holiday weekend, arrests picked back up by Tuesday, the day Mr. Salgado Araujo was shot. From Tuesday through Thursday, ICE officers across the United States arrested more than 6,000 people, internal records show, a pace of about 2,000 arrests a day.

The effect of the push is being seen across the country.

In Chicago, immigrant rights groups and Hispanic community organizers in a news conference on Thursday had counted at least 70 people taken in three days, many around courthouses. Many of the immigrants apprehended had been charged with minor traffic violations or had been trying to make their appearances before immigration judges. Calls to one legal aid center alone had more than doubled to 1,700 in that time, organizers said.

U.S. Governance

New York Times, Whistle-Blowers Accuse Kennedy Center of Contracting Flaws Under Trump, Julia Jacobs and Zach Montague, July 12, 2026 (print ed.). Documents submitted to Congress detailed concerns about competitive bidding processes and a White House order to tear up new bathroom tile because of its color.

As the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts prepares for major renovations, former project managers there have sent Congress internal documents that they say show how the institution bypassed government contracting norms in work carried out under President Trump.

The documents — sent to a Senate and a House committee last month by lawyers for unidentified clients referred to as whistle-blowers — detail how vendors were selected for work without competitive bidding under rationales that are depicted as flawed.

In one case, a center official described a company chosen for flooring work as the “only identified firm on the Mid-Atlantic seaboard that maintains a fully vertically integrated model, vital for acoustic continuity, architectural uniformity, and operational agility.”

In a letter to the committees, lawyers for the former project managers say their clients question whether the business, located in South Carolina, was the only one available that was qualified to do the flooring work.

The letter says the center’s decision to skip bidding in another case was designed to help meet deadlines important to the president, such as the Kennedy Center Honors in December, which he hosted.

“Renovations were rushed to meet the deadlines driven by the president’s desire to host official events at the center,” the letter says. “Federal contracting laws and regulations were ignored.”

A statement from the Kennedy Center defended its practices, saying that the institution operates with rigorous financial oversight and that the assertions by the whistle-blowers that contracting standards had been bypassed were incorrect.

“As America’s cultural center, the institution makes every decision guided by responsible stewardship and an unwavering commitment to its patrons and the nation it proudly serves,” Roma Daravi, a spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We remain fully committed to transparency and to delivering the critical improvements that will preserve this institution for generations to come.”

Liz Huston, a White House spokeswoman, responded to the allegations by accusing past management of allowing the center to fall into disrepair.

“President Trump did what Democrats wouldn’t,” she said in a statement. “After decades of neglect, he committed the bold leadership and proper resources to fix the Kennedy Center and start the renovations of the finest performing arts facility in the world.”

Mr. Trump, a developer by trade, has taken an intense interest in remaking the center, helping to secure $257 million from Congress last year for renovations. In one case cited in the letter a new bathroom floor in one of the center’s three presidential boxes was ordered torn up last year and redone after the White House complained about the beige color of the tiles. (The email’s subject line was “tile emergency,” alongside a red siren emoji.)

“This is a big undertaking for my department to remove the floor tile that was just installed,” the Kennedy Center’s operations and maintenance director replied in a March 2025 email, noting that the beige tiles had been approved by a White House interior designer.

In a response email, a White House official confirmed the directive to replace the beige tile with white. (The work was unrelated to the South Carolina flooring company.)

The center said in a statement that the changes were a standard design adjustment that caused “zero unnecessary burden on the taxpayer.”ImagePresident Trump and Melania Trump in formal clothes on a red carpet.

The White House decided to remodel the presidential boxes days after Mr. Trump took over as chairman of the center’s board, according to the documents sent to Congress. The plans included gold plumbing fixtures in the bathrooms, gold covers for electric outlets, marble baseboards and the tile flooring paid for by the White House, with much of the labor provided by the center.

The 82-page submission to Congress was made under a law designed to protect federal employees who disclose allegations of wrongdoing from retaliation. The lawyers who sent it, David Seide and Dana Gold, work for a nonprofit that represents government whistle-blowers.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, which received the submission, wrote to the Kennedy Center on Thursday demanding information related to the renovations. Mr. Whitehouse, an ex officio member of the center’s board, said the submission raised “serious questions” about whether public funds were being spent properly.

Nothing in the submission suggests that the firms selected without bidding have any personal ties to Mr. Trump or his family, or that the vendors played any role in the decision-making process under which work was awarded.

Reached by phone, Kent Rogerson, who runs the South Carolina flooring company, declined to comment, citing a nondisclosure agreement.

Although the Kennedy Center is run as a nonprofit, it has, like Smithsonian museums, traditionally followed federal contracting rules because its building is federal property. But the documents include a new policy, adopted in November, that states the center was exempt from the federal rules and replaces them with new procedures.

Compared to federal contracting regulations, the new policy relaxes the requirements under which sole-source contracts can be awarded, according to several government procurement experts, by adding to the rationales for when it is permissible. Under the policy, contracts can be awarded without bidding when “circumstances beyond the center’s control require an immediate award” or “the requirement is unique or has a compelling business interest.”

The center said in its statement that it had confirmed with the Office of Management and Budget that, as an independent entity, it was not bound by federal contracting regulations and that it had updated its procurement policy to be both fair and agile when making renovations.

Mr. Trump announced that the center would be shuttered for two years for the project, starting around Independence Day. But a federal judge temporarily blocked the closure after finding that the center’s board, composed largely of the president’s aides and allies, had not properly scrutinized his plan before approving it. The White House statement on Friday accused the judge of being “radical” and allowing the center to remain in disrepair.

Kennedy Center officials have described renovations to address problems such as water leaks and outdated equipment as urgently needed. The president has said the work would elevate a “dilapidated” building to the “highest level of Success, Beauty, and Grandeur.”

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Trump Confirms: Accepting a Flying Bribery Palace Made Him Less Safe, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 11, 2026. From the moment Trump posted a tweet claiming he was sending his Flying Bribery Palace back separately from the NATO summit in Ankara, the entire world knew there was a problem with the jet Qatar gifted him.

That Trump offered a transparently stupid excuse — he wanted to show it off to the military — was no real fix. His expressed worry about being targeted by Iran only further confirmed that the Flying Bribery Palace might not stand up to an Iranian attack.

[W]hen pressed by reporters in Ankara about the reason for the change, Mr. Trump also repeatedly noted that he was Iran’s No. 1 target, and referred at one point to having seen or been briefed on a list of Tehran’s targets in recent days.

By the time NYT provided details of the Flying Bribery Palace’s shortcomings on Thursday, based in part on the observations of a former Air Force official, the outline of what they were had become fairly clear: The Flying Bribery Palace could not protect against an Iranian missile attack.

[O]fficials who have been briefed on the retrofitting of the Qatari jet, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe its security features, said it did not have the same counter-defensive capabilities of the previous model.

[snip]

The older planes that served as Air Force One included a defensive system designed to defeat heat-seeking missiles. That capacity is also planned to be included in the new Boeing planes, according to three former Pentagon officials.

Different parts of the defensive systems are visible on the old Air Force One, under the wing of the plane and on its tail. They are not observable in photographs of the new Qatari plane, according to a third former Air Force official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the security protocols. [my emphasis]

That Thursday story made clear that such shortcomings that had been discussed all along.

But in a statement it made when it announced that the donated jet was ready to transport the president, it acknowledged that the temporary plane did not have all the equipment usually found on an Air Force One.

“No risk was taken in security, safety or mission communications,” the Air Force said in a statement on June 19. “But the collective team made trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets that Boeing must deliver to support the next 40 years.”

To sum up:

Trump calls attention to a change in his plans by telling a transparent lie about it.His own comments confirm a concern about his safety.NYT provides one line about counter-defensive capabilities in a story relying in part on public observation and public statements.

And then Trump sent subpoenas to the four NYT journalists who worked on the story, thereby confirming that the story was correct — that Trump’s Flying Bribery Palace had inadequate equipment to counter a missile attack.

The subpoenas don’t do anything to alleviate the risk to Trump’s security he made clear by announcing the plane change. Indeed, the confirm, for all the world, that Trump’s Flying Bribery Palace is an easy target.

At each level of the story, Trump confirmed the story.

I don’t mean to minimize the abuse of subpoenaing the reporters. This is another alarming attack on the free press (and may be an attempt to find Congressional sources who have long pointed out the weaknesses of the Flying Bribery Palace).

But Trump is the one who disclosed his plane was inadequate to the task. The reporters only responded to Trump’s repeated signals that his plane was inadequate by filling in dots that had been in plane (ha!) sight since Trump accepted the bribe.

This is just like the arrests of people — including Davey Hearn, whom Jeanine Pirro indicted last week — who put their hands in Trump’s reflecting swamp: An effort to distract from the consequences of his own corruption.

Trump is criminalizing calling out his corruption.

He sure as hell is not keeping anyone safe. 

New York Times, Bipartisan Housing Bill Becomes Law Even Though Trump Refuses to Sign It, Michael Gold, Updated July 11, 2026. After a 10-day clock, the housing bill turned into law at midnight without the president’s signature. But his decision not to sign reflects a growing rift between him and Senate Republicans.

President Trump allowed a bipartisan housing bill to become law without his signature on Saturday, hours after he said he would refuse to sign it because Republicans had failed to pass an unrelated voting restriction bill that does not have enough support to clear the Senate.

“I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, referring to the elections bill.

Mr. Trump’s inaction was symbolic. The measure, the first major legislative effort to address the nation’s housing crisis in more than three decades, became law at midnight after a constitutionally mandated period without the president vetoing the measure.

But Mr. Trump’s pronouncement is still a remarkable dismissal by a president of efforts by his own party to address a major political vulnerability. And it reflected the growing rift between the president and Senate Republicans over the elections bill, which contains strict voter identification requirements and a raft of other measures the president has demanded.

The housing measure adjusts a host of federal regulations to make it easier and less expensive to build housing. That approach won broad support from economists and policy experts, and the bill passed Congress last month with overwhelming bipartisan support, an increasingly rare accomplishment in a starkly polarized legislature.

The bill, known as the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, was poised to deliver congressional Republicans a significant victory ahead of November’s midterm elections, as they try to blunt Democrats’ attacks over rising costs.

But Mr. Trump clouded the achievement. Hours before a planned signing ceremony at the Capitol last month that he abruptly canceled, he dismissed the bill as “of minor importance” and said he would sign it only if Congress passed the voting measure.

Mr. Trump’s focus on the elections bill has already derailed Republicans’ congressional agenda. House leaders were forced to scrap votes twice last month after a group of far-right lawmakers refused to let legislation come to the floor unless the Senate took action on the voting measure.

Most Republicans back voter identification requirements, though Mr. Trump’s restrictions are far greater. The bill would require Americans to show proof of citizenship to register to vote and would severely curtail voting by mail, a popular practice in many Republican-held states and districts.

Senate Republicans, including the majority leader, Senator John Thune of South Dakota, have repeatedly said they do not have the 60 votes needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster against the bill. They have also acknowledged that there is not enough support in their caucus to overhaul the filibuster and find a way to push the bill through over Democratic opposition.

Republican leaders did not expect Mr. Trump to block the housing bill, and Speaker Mike Johnson sent it to his desk on June 29, starting a 10-day clock for the president to sign the bill, veto it or allow it to automatically become law.

U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

New York Times, Times Journalists Subpoenaed as Trump Escalates Pressure on Media, Michael M. Grynbaum, July 11, 2026. The Justice Department is seeking to compel testimony from reporters who wrote about the new Air Force One. The Times called the move a “brazen act.”

The Trump administration issued subpoenas on Friday to several journalists for The New York Times, after the news outlet reported this week on security concerns involving President Trump’s new Qatari-donated Air Force One.

The subpoenas — which seek to force the reporters to testify before a federal grand jury in Manhattan on Wednesday — were an extraordinary escalation in President Trump’s efforts to threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.

In some cases, the subpoenas were delivered by federal agents who showed up at reporters’ homes.

The Times denounced the administration’s actions.

“The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” said David McCraw, The Times’s top newsroom lawyer, in a statement on Friday evening.

“Our journalists report the facts and advance the American public’s right to know how their government is operating and their taxpayer dollars are being used,” Mr. McCraw wrote. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

The subpoenas contain few specifics, asking only that the journalists testify “in regard to an alleged violation of federal criminal law.” They were issued by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan. Mr. Clayton, who leads one of the country’s most prominent law enforcement offices, was recently nominated by Mr. Trump to serve as director of national intelligence.

Representatives for the White House and the U.S. attorney in Manhattan did not immediately respond to inquiries on Friday evening.

The Times journalists who received subpoenas included Julian E. Barnes, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager and Eric Schmitt, who reported on Wednesday that Mr. Trump had departed Turkey on the old Air Force One as a security precaution at the urging of the Secret Service. On Thursday, The Times reported that the new Air Force One, a Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8, lacked some of the advanced security features of the older aircraft, including antimissile capabilities. Both articles cited sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues.

Before the Wednesday article was published, a senior official at the Federal Bureau of Investigation contacted The Times to ask that the article be held, calling it an issue of national security, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The F.B.I. official spoke with a reporter and a senior editor in The Times’s Washington bureau; the official declined to explain the security issue when asked. (A spokesman for The Times, Charlie Stadtlander, confirmed the account.)lMr. Trump has long been a harsh critic of the news media. But in his second term in office, he has moved aggressively to use the immense powers of the federal government in his efforts to attack the press.

Earlier this year, the Justice Department sought to compel testimony from journalists at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. The Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas after both news organizations fought back in sealed filings.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have initiated leak investigations into the disclosure of classified information. But subpoenas aimed at journalists are not common, and First Amendment advocates say they can chill the work of news gathering.

In January, F.B.I. agents took the rare step of searching the home of a Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, as part of an investigation into a government contractor’s handling of classified material. The agents seized phones, laptops and a smartwatch after executing a search warrant. Ms. Natanson had spent months speaking with government employees while reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink the federal work force.

The Times is a party to several lawsuits involving Mr. Trump and his administration.

The president sued The Times last year, accusing it of defaming him, disparaging his reputation and seeking to undermine his 2024 candidacy.

In December, The Times sued the Defense Department after it imposed restrictions on reporters who cover the military. The company sued again after the agency reduced reporters’ physical access to the Pentagon.

More On Iran War

New York Times, Israel Struck an Iranian Steel Facility. Was It a Valid Military Target? Yeganeh Torbati, July 11, 2026. l During the war, Israel attacked Iran’s steel plants, saying they provided forces with revenue and the means to make weapons, but it also hurt the civilian economy.

Over the course of the Iran war, U.S. and Israeli warplanes hit missile depots and launchers, security forces’ headquarters and air defense systems.

Yet not all of the targets during the six-week campaign were traditional military sites. On March 27, and again a few days later, Israeli airstrikes pounded a vast steel complex just outside Isfahan called Mobarakeh Steel, and another one in the southwest of the country.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel asserted that his country’s strikes had slashed Iran’s steel production capacity and eliminated revenue for the powerful Revolutionary Guards, whose repression underpins the Iranian government.

Companies like Mobarakeh illustrate the complexities inherent to Iran’s economy. While Iran’s clerical leadership and security forces are deeply enmeshed in the country’s most profitable and important businesses, those same companies are vital to the livelihoods of millions of ordinary Iranians, regardless of whether they have deep ideological allegiance to the government.

The attacks shut down major parts of the Isfahan plant for weeks, idling over 20,000 workers and choking off the supply of steel to domestic manufacturers. “I felt like my own home had been destroyed,” said Mostafa, a former employee, who asked to speak on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution by the government.

The United States and Iran have lurched between peace talks and exchanges of fire in recent weeks. Their negotiations were expected to cover the economic benefits Iran might receive in return for long-term limits on its nuclear program.

The interim cease-fire agreement, signed last month, could result in as much as $300 billion for Iran’s reconstruction and economic development. But that now seems a distant prospect, after President Trump said this week that he believed the temporary truce was “over.”

If any investment does flow to Iran, companies like Mobarakeh will undoubtedly come into focus because of their importance to Iran’s economy, as well as their affiliation with Iran’s most powerful security forces.

Mr. Trump has frequently threatened to attack Iranian infrastructure, and if war restarts, there will be scrutiny over any such strikes.

On Thursday, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps accused the United States of striking a railway bridge that connected the country with Turkmenistan. A spokesman for U.S. Central Command confirmed that the United States struck the railway bridge, describing it as military logistics infrastructure that enabled a flow of weapons and other military supplies to key areas.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

New York Times, Platner’s Rise and Fall Revives Old Questions About ‘Bernie Bros’ and Women, Patricia Mazzei and Kellen Browning, July 11, 2026. The collapse of Graham Platner’s Senate bid in Maine after a rape allegation renewed attention to a movement built by Senator Bernie Sanders that some say is too forgiving of male misconduct.

Last month, as accusations that Graham Platner of Maine had demeaned and threatened women consumed his Senate campaign, his left-wing allies closed ranks around him.

Representative Ro Khanna of California posted a video on social media sitting alongside Mr. Platner on a floating dock discussing “transformational politics.” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said Mr. Platner had “gotten his life together” despite his troubling past.

“There are no saints in the United States Senate,” Mr. Sanders said at the time.

This week, after one of those women accused Mr. Platner of rape, those same politicians withdrew their support, and Mr. Platner, who denied the accusation, announced Wednesday that he was suspending his campaign. The collapse of his meteoric candidacy has turned what had been a triumph for progressives into a moment of political crisis.

It has also set off a broader debate among Democrats around the country about the movement that Mr. Sanders leads: Is its embrace of a blunt and brawny populism too dismissive of women — and too forgiving of male misconduct? The question is not new, but it has grown more urgent this year, when the party has elevated inexperienced and authentic candidates, such as the flannel-clad Mr. Platner, to stir average Americans.

“What I have an issue with is not the policies,” said Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a gun-safety group, who was castigated online for not backing Mr. Platner. “It’s the lack of character. It’s being bombastic. It’s that you’re polarizing and alienating and, frankly, it’s also being denigrating toward women.”

Perhaps no one had as much riding on Mr. Platner’s stunning rise from small-town oyster farmer to candidate for Senate as Mr. Sanders, the best known figure of the political left, who has spent the past year helping catapult progressive newcomers in competitive midterm contests.

Mr. Platner’s collapse has left a blemish on that effort, and brought scrutiny to Mr. Sanders and others who embraced him.

How those leaders respond could determine not only the path forward for the progressive movement but also their own political trajectories. Mr. Sanders, who is 84 and serving his fourth term in the Senate, has been widely seen as attempting to burnish his legacy by anointing a new generation of leaders as he enters the final chapter of his own career.

Some of Mr. Platner’s backers have concluded publicly that they erred in backing a candidate whose personal history was riddled with warning signs.

“I made the wrong call,” Mr. Khanna said in an interview on Thursday. “I missed the signs. Are there any takeaways? Being even more sensitive to warning signs or red flags in candidates who may have those kinds of allegations show up.”

In a statement, Mr. Sanders admitted no missteps, though he seemed to acknowledge the criticism that is stirring up the left by noting that many of the candidates he has supported are women. This year, that group includes high-profile House candidates Rebecca Cooke in Wisconsin, Claire Valdez in New York and Melat Kiros in Colorado.

“The establishment is getting nervous,” Mr. Sanders said in the statement. “Working families across the country understand that we have a rigged economy and a corrupt campaign finance system. And that is why so many progressive candidates, including many talented women, are successfully taking on the greed of the billionaire class. Some of the outstanding members of Congress are women who I and the progressive movement have supported.”

Polls show that Mr. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, is one of the most popular figures in Democratic politics at a time when the party is struggling with its branding. Mr. Sanders has frequently jabbed at the news media and political establishment for focusing on candidates’ personal lives over their support for policies such as his proposal for universal health care, which he calls Medicare for all.

Still, Mr. Sanders’s movement has weathered criticism over the years for fostering a culture that has at times seemed intolerant of women. When he first sought the presidential nomination in 2016, his army of online supporters, known widely as “Bernie bros,” were condemned for bullying those supporting his main adversary, Hillary Clinton. Mr. Sanders said he did not condone the behavior.

Then, as he geared up for his 2020 run, some female staffers from Mr. Sanders’s 2016 campaign said that they had faced mistreatment and pay disparities and that their supervisors had ignored their concerns. He did not face similar complaints after 2020.

Also that year, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, his progressive rival in the primary, confirmed a report that Mr. Sanders had privately questioned in 2018 whether a woman could win the presidency. Mr. Sanders denied making such a comment, calling the suggestion “ludicrous.”

Jessica Mackler, the president of Emily’s List, a group that works to elect Democratic women, said political strategists have at times rushed to create “magical” candidates — “the mythical bearded man that is the one that’s going to connect with working class voters”— at the expense of experienced women who know their communities and can win elections.

“The online echo chamber that exists and is where often times these personas are cultivated — that’s not organic,” she said. “That is being created around people and being served to voters.”

Paige Loud, who worked on the Platner campaign before running unsuccessfully for Congress, said she raised concerns while on his team about the potential for allegations against the candidate and what she described as a dismissive attitude toward women.

Men from across the political spectrum can mistreat women, said Ms. Loud, 29, who is now vying to replace Mr. Platner as the Democratic Senate nominee. But on the left, she said, “They can do terrible things but then go, ‘Oh, but I support Medicare for all.’”

Mr. Sanders’s supporters say his movement has come a long way since 2016. This year, a number of progressive women of color that Mr. Sanders endorsed, many of them young political newcomers, won congressional primaries in New York, New Jersey and Colorado over establishment candidates with longer résumés. Mr. Sanders has also championed issues many women care about, including abortion rights and climate change.

Nida Allam, a North Carolina progressive who narrowly lost a bid to oust a Democratic congresswoman this year, said Mr. Sanders had been decade-long mentor who opened doors for her.

Young female candidates are “always pushed onto the sideline — you’re too inexperienced or too young,” said Ms. Allam, 33. “But Senator Sanders says, ‘Yeah, we need Muslim women and we need working moms, because they have the lived experience of the everyday American.’”Listen · 9:49

More On U.S. Immigration, Economy, Inflation, Jobs

White House Chronicle, Opinion: A British Immigrant’s Defense of Immigration, Llewellyn King, above, July 11, 2026. Migration, people moving to new lands, is as old as human history, and as fraught. Today it is a global problem complete with layered hypocrisy, cruelty and, always, hope among those on the move. War and extreme poverty collude in driving people to seek a livable future.

There is no simple solution, no slogan that encompasses a fair and reasonable course of action for the receiving country.

I moved from a British African colony, Southern Rhodesia, to the homeland, Britain, when that was our birthright, and to America a few years later. I did that because it was the place I wanted to be, the happening place, the place of all possibility and challenge.

I didn’t plan to stay, and now it is more than 60 years later. And, yes, I was elated to become a citizen.

In those days, if you were British, immigration was no harder than filling in some forms and swearing that you weren’t a communist and wouldn’t live in “moral turpitude” when you got to America. That reprehensible state wasn’t described.

To me, America was more than a country; it was, and remains, a state of mind.

At its best, America is generous, caring, open and empathetic to the world and its hurts. Yet, how human a country! It is replete with hideous mistakes from the Palmer Raids, to McCarthyism and the Red Scare, to the Vietnam War. The gash of slavery hasn’t healed, and racism has left its mark.

America’s genius is that it realizes itself as a work in progress.

Our major weakness, it always seemed to me, was the obverse of our strength: wishing our ways on others; wanting them to see the light we see.

Like so many others, my attitudes are conflicted, hypocritical and without a simple, elegant defense. About 30 years ago, I first raised the issue of immigration’s effect on the nation. My concern then was that Spanish was becoming a second language. If that were to happen, I feared the country would enter into the same debilitating, two-nation status that has divided Canada and Belgium.

Also, I have argued against the way immigration has left its mark on Europe, especially from North African migrants who have set up enclaves where there is no attempt to integrate and where their religion has maintained them in isolation; angry minorities in their urban strongholds. That undermines the value of the journey both to the migrant and the host country.

I have come to believe that Spanish isn’t the threat it appeared at that time, and that our ability to absorb and prosper as a result of immigration is at a real and present danger of being wasted, denying us the talent flow that has made us a beacon to the world.

Never forget that every deportation is a human disaster: a life and a family sent into an unknown purgatory.

Recently, I had a weeklong stay at a Rhode Island hospital and marveled at doctors who were from distant lands, including Iran and Arab countries. In the late reaches of one night, I had a crisis. My room was flooded with nurses and their assistants, all helping and caring. From their accents, I was certain that at least four of my angels weren’t born here. I was glad of them.

Just as I am glad that we lead the world in high tech and, at the apex of its leadership, sit immigrants. They dominate at the top tech behemoths.

Not every immigrant has added to America’s greatness; some have brought with them creeds that are hard to accommodate, some have brought crime. Overall, each wave of immigrants has lifted America and its people to new heights.

From those early settlers to the German filmmakers, to the Scandinavians who planted the Great Plains, to the Irish who have informed our culture, to the Italian builders, to the German filmmakers, who came in the 1920s and 1930s and created the Hollywood we know and treasure, to the Jewish refugees from Europe who gave us everything from great music to the magic of Broadway, to high science and lifesaving medical research.

When I first arrived in New York, I wrote to a friend, “This is an extraordinary place, less of a mixing bowl and more of a stew, where all of the ingredients remain intact and yet work together in a kind of wondrous unity.” I wouldn’t withdraw or amend a word of that more than 60 years later.

People move because they aspire to a better life for themselves and their families. Grabbing those who slipped in and sending them to all they sought to leave behind is, to this grateful immigrant, un-American.

We are a big country, big-hearted, too, and we have room for these big contributors to our future.

July 10

Top Headlines

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at top, rallies senior military leaders (shown above) looking on at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia.  

• New York Times, Two Days of U.S. Strikes in Iran Signal a Sharp Escalation, Eric Schmitt, July 10, 2026. U.S. forces hit more than 170 targets, including air defense systems, drone and missile storage sites, and military speedboats.
• Meidas Touch Network, Friday Afternoon News Updates: Trump’s Gulf of Tonkin Moment?  Ben Meiselas, right,July 10, 2026. Trump manufacturing a crisis in the Strait of Hormuz?
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: ICE Admits Killing Wrong Man as Narrative Falls Apart, Trump Purges Key Election Officials, Trump Boycotts Bipartisan Housing Bill, Aaron Parnas, right, July 10, 2026. There’s a lot of news to cover today. First, the story of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 10th person shot and killed by ICE agents since January 2025. ICE’s narrative is falling apart. The agency admitted it killed the wrong man, witnesses say ICE is lying, and new details continue to emerge. Also this morning: Trump says he will refuse to sign a key housing bill aimed at lowering housing costs, Trump fired the remaining bipartisan election officials in a late-night purge, Mitch McConnell was seen being taken away on a stretcher, and much more.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance  

• New York Times, Trump Administration Fires Members of Independent Election Group, Erica L. Green, July 10, 2026. The firings and a resignation render the Election Assistance Commission useless. The moves come as President Trump seeks to impose control over how ballots will be counted in the midterms.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 10, 2026. Defending Free and Fair Elections. In the face of Donald Trump’s non-stop, increasingly desperate efforts to bully state and local officials and undermine confidence in free and fair elections, we see courageous lower court judges — as well as voting rights activists and their litigation teams— have stepped up to preserve the sanctity of our elections. While diligence is always advisable, Trump’s shameless campaign to prevent the normal, free, secure, and fair process of voting under the auspices of local and state officials has largely been a colossal failure. But it has not been without a struggle.

More On Trump Team Waste, Obsessions, Oppressions

Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers for The Bulwark with photos via Wikimedia Commons.

• The Triad via The Bulwark, Opinion: The Red Menace Is Here! Jonathan V. Last, July 10, 2026 When socialism came to America, we got the worst of all worlds. Commie Gas. By now you have heard about the new red peril that is taking over American politics. Socialism is ascendant and taking over one of our political parties! This is dangerous and un-American! You realize we’re talking about Republicans, right? 
• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Is Losing It As Midterm Election Defeat Approaches, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right,July 10, 2026. Trump makes a fresh bad decision that will come back to haunt his party in November, as the president lost it on Friday, as he is showing signs of breaking as a midterm defeat approaches.
• New York Times, New Air Force One Lacks Defensive Countermeasures of Previous Model, Officials Say, Tyler Pager, Eric Lipton, Adam Goldman, Eric Schmitt and Julian E. Barnes, July 10, 2026 (print ed.). Experts said the lack of such capabilities poses a potential risk when the president travels overseas. The White House defended the aircraft’s safety.

Trump Team Immigration Enforcement Horrors

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was on his way to work when he was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on July 7 in Houston, Texas, his family said (Family photo from Ronaldo Salgado).

• New York Times, Man Killed by Federal Agent in Houston Was Not the Target of ICE Search, Edgar Sandoval and Hamed Aleaziz, Updated July 10, 2026. Officials say agents believed a passenger resembled one suspect, but the encounter quickly escalated into a fatal shooting.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Coverup Unravels, William Kristol, right, July 10, 2026. The coverup of Tuesday’s killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an ICE officer in Houston seems to be coming apart. First we had the totally unsubstantiated ICE claim—so often a lie when we’ve heard it from ICE in the past—that Araujo had “weaponized his vehicle.” And we had the normal ICE stonewalling—a refusal to release any actual information about what happened or to cooperate with local law enforcement. Then we learned that the ICE officers had taken Lorenzo’s personal property from him, including his wallet and phone, before putting him in the ambulance to a hospital. Which is why he was admitted as a John Doe and the hospital couldn’t notify his family that he was there. But the indecency here isn’t the point. Buying time to organize a coverup was.
• New York Times, What We Know About the ICE Shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Christina Morales, July 9-10, 2026, Mr. Araujo was a father, a husband and a business owner who had moved to the United States 35 years ago from Mexico.
• The Bulwark, Opinion: The Quiet Before the Assault, by Jim Swift, July 10, 2026. Springfield, Ohio: You’d think this town would be on the verge of panic. It’s not. At least, not in public. After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe two weeks ago paved the way for the Trump administration to deport from the United States perhaps hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees, I came here to observe a rally for the city and its Haitian community and gauge the mood. It was somber but not despondent. 

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

• Civil Discourse, Opinion: DOJ: Not Doing Justice, Joyce Vance, right, July 10, 2026. No one is safe. After a court appearance this morning, Norm Eisen, one of the attorneys representing former Olympian David Hearn, who was indicted by Jeanine Pirro’s Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office on charges of vandalizing the already damaged Reflecting Pool, said: “Today, Davey Hearn pled not guilty. Because he is not guilty. If Mr. Hearn can be charged with a felony for touching the reflecting pool, every American is at risk and every American should be alarmed at this prosecution.”
• Emptywheel, Analysis: Harmeet Dhillon Doxes the 100 People She Hired to Undermine Democracy, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 10, 2026. Even as evidence mounts that her team completely fabricated their case against Georgia Fort, in an effort to claim her office is not full of people who do such a thing, Harmeet just bragged about all the 100 people she hired at Civil Rights to replace the people who actually tried to defend civil rights before she removed them for that reason.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 6, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 10, 2026. Today marks the anniversary of a dramatic reworking of the U.S. constitutional order. On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation that brought the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life. They required the federal government to protect the equal rights of all American men.

More On Iran War 

• New York Times, Iran’s Supreme Leader Remains Absent, a Void at the Top of the Regime, Yeganeh Torbati, July 10, 2026. Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei did not appear at his father’s funeral this week, fueling speculation about his physical condition and leaving a power vacuum in a divided country.
• New York Times, Mediators Trying to Pull U.S. and Iran Back From Brink, Officials Say, Adam Rasgon and Euan Ward, July 10, 2026. Days of strikes by the two countries have given way to an uneasy pause as Qatari mediators seek to salvage the tattered U.S.-Iran truce.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance  

• The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 10, 2026. Defending Free and Fair Elections. In the face of Donald Trump’s non-stop, increasingly desperate efforts to bully state and local officials and undermine confidence in free and fair elections, we see courageous lower court judges — as well as voting rights activists and their litigation teams— have stepped up to preserve the sanctity of our elections. While diligence is always advisable, Trump’s shameless campaign to prevent the normal, free, secure, and fair process of voting under the auspices of local and state officials has largely been a colossal failure. But it has not been without a struggle.
• MS Now, Why Democrats might be able to salvage the race after Platner’s collapse, Zeeshan Aleem, July 9, 2026. The party still has a decent chance at unseating Republican Sen. Susan Collins — if it behaves sensibly.Potential Platner replacement discusses future of senate race in Maine.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: An Encouraging Encounter With Real Americans, Paul Krugman, right, July 10, 2026. What I did yesterday. Today i want to give you some encouraging news about the state of the heartland. Well, actually New Jersey, but you got a problem with that?
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: A Season of Death and Fear, Jim Swift, William Kristol, Andrew Egger and Benjamin Parker, July 10, 2026. From nervous Haitians in Ohio to a grieving family in Texas, the real-world effects of Trump’s assault on immigrants.

Top Headlines

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, at top, rallies senior military leaders (shown above) looking on at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia.  

New York Times, Two Days of U.S. Strikes in Iran Signal a Sharp Escalation, Eric Schmitt, July 10, 2026. U.S. forces hit more than 170 targets, including air defense systems, drone and missile storage sites, and military speedboats.

U.S. forces sharply ramped up their attacks against Iran this week, hitting more than 170 Iranian military targets on Tuesday and Wednesday, the Pentagon said. It was one of the most intense rounds of strikes since the war began more than four months ago.

Analysts said the Trump administration was sending a pointed message to the government in Tehran that the United States was willing to broaden its mission again and hit sites that have both military and civilian uses.

On Friday, President Trump said on social media that he had agreed to continue negotiating with Iran, but that “the Cease Fire is OVER!” It was unclear what his administration’s next steps might be.

The targets hit this week included air defense systems, drone and missile storage sites, and military speedboats along the southern coast of Iran near the Strait of Hormuz, a critical commercial shipping lane that has become a focus of recent fighting.

U.S. forces also appeared to hit a railway bridge in northeastern Iran more than 700 miles from the strait. Online video verified by The New York Times showed several people inspecting a crater at the site.

Current and former U.S. commanders and Pentagon officials said the strikes were a clear escalation as the United States and Iran appeared to edge closer to a return to full-scale war.

The attacks signaled that “Iran’s civilian infrastructure is vulnerable, and if Tehran continues to escalate, the U.S. military is capable, and willing, of targeting bridges and railways,” said Dana Stroul, the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy official in the Biden administration.

Mr. Trump made that point this week, saying U.S. forces could target civilian infrastructure in Iran, including electricity plants and bridges, even though that could constitute war crimes.

Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for Central Command, said in a phone interview that the United States struck Iranian military logistics infrastructure targets like the railway bridge that were far from the strait but that enabled Iran to flow weapons, munitions and other military supplies to the most contested area of the conflict.

The U.S. attacks killed at least 14 people and injured 78 others across five provinces, according to Iran’s Health Ministry.

Iran said it had responded by firing at U.S. military bases in Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. Jordan said it had also intercepted Iranian attacks.

This week’s spasm of tit-for-tat violence began after the Pentagon said Iran attacked three commercial ships, including a Saudi oil tanker and a Qatari vessel carrying liquefied natural gas. Iran has not claimed responsibility for the attacks.

Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that while the United States would probably hit Iran “hard,” he did not expect a return to all-out war. “I don’t think it’s going to start again,” he told reporters at a NATO summit in Turkey. “I think it’s going to go very quickly.”

But later in the day, he said in a social media post that if Iran attacked ships again, “it will get much worse!”

Congressional Democrats pounced on those remarks as evidence that the Trump administration has no coherent strategy to end the war.

“There has never been a true cease-fire,” Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. “President Trump changes his mind on a daily basis, prolonging the conflict without a strategic plan to end it.”

Analysts said the skirmishes, sandwiched between negotiations, are likely to be the new normal, as both sides struggle for control of the strait.

“The Trump team calculated that the extremely generous sanctions relief in the M.O.U. would be enough of an incentive for Iran to permit free navigation through Hormuz,” said Ms. Stroul, who is now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. She was referring to the memorandum of understanding that the United States and Iran signed last month.

“But that’s not what has happened — the Iranians have attempted to exert control and intimidate shippers into only going through the Iran-approved route,” she added.

Conversely, Ms. Stroul said, Iran has also misjudged badly. “Members of the regime underestimated Trump, and led themselves to believe that if they escalated and caused a crisis in navigation, they could extract more financial concessions from the United States,” she said. “But that’s not what is happening.”

Iran’s retaliatory strikes have not appeared to have caused major damage. Iran’s military said on Thursday that it had targeted Muwaffaq Salti Air Base — a Jordanian base also used by U.S. forces — with ballistic missiles. Jordan’s military said in a statement that it had intercepted eight missiles in its airspace and that they had not caused material damage.

Kuwait said that it had intercepted three ballistic missiles, a cruise missile and 10 drones early Thursday morning and that falling debris had injured one person and caused material damage. Bahrain’s military said it had intercepted and destroyed several drones and missiles after Iran launched attacks on Thursday.

Meidas Touch Network, Friday Afternoon News Updates: Trump’s Gulf of Tonkin Moment?  Ben Meiselas, right,July 10, 2026. Trump manufacturing a crisis in the Strait of Hormuz?

Here’s what we’re tracking today:

• Trump has gone dark, canceling all public events at the White House for the next three days
• New satellite tracking shows U.S. aircraft carriers positioned closer to Iran than at any point in this war
• WSJ reports Israel warned the U.S. of a fresh Iranian assassination plot against Trump
• Gas prices are climbing, and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is nearing a genuine crisis point
• Diplomatic efforts out of Qatar, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are trying to pull everyone back from the brink
• The White House is quietly renovating and scaffolding sections of the building, including near the West Wing
• The West Palm Beach airport was just renamed….after Trump
• A new bridge in Tennessee was unveiled bearing…Trump’s name
• The family of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo is demanding answers after ICE killed him in Houston, and it’s getting worse
• USDA had to walk back its own beef export numbers by 90 percent
• Rubio is inviting 60 countries to a meeting about antifa, of all things
• New polling shows Trump underwater almost everywhere, including states he just won in 2024
• Pennsylvania has lost food assistance for nearly 100,000 people due to GOP bill
• The White House is bragging about a “Freedom Fuel” gas station, and it is getting torched for it
• Smotrich is quoting Witkoff making a wild comment about Gaza
• And Trump says he won’t sign the bipartisan Housing Bill, out of pure spite
• Before I go any further, if you haven’t yet joined as a paid subscriber, consider doing so now by clicking here to support our work. This is how we grow. It will give you access to all recaps like this, our exclusive Ask-the-Editor series, and more. Plus, it is the best way to help support the growth of this network.

Okay. Let’s get into it.

Is Trump Manufacturing His Own Gulf of Tonkin?

I want to start with the thing that worries me most, because I think it explains almost everything else going on right now.

Trump has canceled every public event at the White House for the next three days. Closed press, closed press, closed press. That follows him shutting things down yesterday too. At the same time, satellite trackers have spotted the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS George H.W. Bush parked closer to the Iranian coast than they’ve been at any point since this war started over four months ago, a war Trump himself promised would wrap up in a matter of weeks.

Here’s my read on what’s happening, and I could be wrong, but the pattern is hard to ignore. Trump is running out of runway on this war. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is approaching what analysts are calling functional tank bottom, meaning the country’s emergency supply cushion is nearly gone. Gas prices just broke an eight-week streak of declines and are now climbing toward $3.85 a gallon nationally. He bombed Iran hoping that would force a surrender. It didn’t. And now, with the reserves running thin and the economy at risk, he needs an excuse to escalate further, or an excuse to be seen as the one who was attacked rather than the one attacking.

That is exactly the shape of the Gulf of Tonkin incident from 1964, when the U.S. claimed North Vietnamese boats attacked American destroyers, an attack that turned out never to have happened, and used it to justify years of war. I’m not the only one raising this. Watching two of America’s largest carriers parked within 250 kilometers of Iran’s coast, with virtually no shipping traffic moving through the Strait of Hormuz right now, sure looks like a setup for something.

Meanwhile, Trump posted this morning claiming Iran asked to resume talks and that he agreed, but that the ceasefire is over regardless. Iranian officials are directly denying that any such request was ever made, calling it fake news. So somebody is lying, and it isn’t hard to guess who.

There is a real diplomatic effort underway too. Qatari negotiators have traveled into Iran, and officials from Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have been burning up the phone lines trying to walk this back from the edge. Whether that succeeds before Trump gets his pretext is the question keeping me up at night.

Renovating While Rome Burns

While all this plays out overseas, Trump is still finding time to obsess over White House aesthetics. Scaffolding has gone up, a tarp was dropped over part of the structure near the West Wing, and Trump proudly announced new signage. Our very own Scott MacFarlane caught the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool still fenced off and still that same swampy green color it’s apparently going to stay. There’s also video from our other reporters showing brown water filling a fountain renovation project. Next up on the list, reportedly, are the White House columns.

Speaking of monuments to himself, the West Palm Beach airport was officially renamed after him this week. Eric Trump said his father put Palm Beach on the map. Perhaps from his days partying there with Jeffrey Epstein. Travelers weren’t shy about their reactions, calling it absurd and a waste of taxpayer money to celebrate someone currently sitting in the White House who is an adjudicated sexual abuser. There’s also now a Donald J. Trump Bridge in Tennessee, unveiled by Treasury Secretary Bessent this week. Republicans are sure focused on the important stuff! Definitely not a cult!

The Houston ICE Murder

I have to talk about Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. This is the man who was shot and killed by ICE agents in Houston while driving to work, a 35 year U.S. resident with a wife and three sons. His son Ronaldo has been out demanding an independent investigation, saying his father deserved to live his life, not be reduced to a headline or another statistic.

Now the New York Times is reporting that DHS has admitted Salgado Araujo wasn’t even the person ICE agents were looking for. Agents without body cameras killed him while searching for two other men who weren’t even in the vehicle. There were three other witnesses in that van, and according to a representative for the families, the government is now pressuring those witnesses to self-deport. Kamala Harris, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and others have all spoken out. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is reportedly pursuing criminal charges over the deaths of 17 Mexican nationals in ICE custody. ICE claimed originally that Araujo rammed into them with his car. Multiple eyewitnesses say that’s a lie. Completely made up. The officers say they didn’t have body cameras on. How convenient. This story is not going away, and it shouldn’t.

Data You Can No Longer Trust

Speaking of other agencies you can’t trust… Buried in all the chaos is a smaller story that matters more than it might seem. The USDA had to revise its own beef export numbers down 90 percent this week, after publishing numbers that were simply wrong. 90%. Reuters reports this follows serious staffing losses at the agency and comes after USDA already underestimated corn acreage last year and delayed a trade report that would have shown tariffs contributing to a bigger agricultural trade deficit. When you gut the people who collect the data, you lose the ability to trust the data. That’s not an accident. And it makes every piece of data that comes from this regime suspect.Freedom Fuel, or Just Expensive Gas With a Slogan

The White House bragged this week about a “Freedom Fuel” gas station in the Philadelphia area selling gas at $3.47 a gallon, as if that were some kind of victory. Except gas averaged $3.12 when Biden left office, and Google Street View shows this exact station selling gas for $3.05 back in April of last year. Commentators didn’t hold back, with one calling it an arsonist bragging about putting out a fire he started himself. Congressman Jim McGovern summed it up about as well as anyone: government subsidized grocery stores are apparently communism, but government branded gas stations are freedom.

The Housing Bill and the Midterms

Trump also announced he will not sign the bipartisan Housing Bill that Congress worked together to pass, saying he’s protesting the Senate’s failure to pass his voter suppression legislation instead. It’s worth remembering the bill still becomes law automatically at midnight unless he formally vetoes it, so this is mostly theater. But it’s also revealing. When Congress actually works together on something as basic as housing affordability, Trump would rather sabotage it than let it happen.

New polling from YouGov and The Economist shows just how unpopular all of this has made him, with negative approval numbers spreading even into states he won in 2024. Pennsylvania alone sits at negative 21 points, and that’s also the state where nearly 100,000 people just lost SNAP benefits as a direct result of the tax bill Republicans passed last year.

Meanwhile RNC Chair Joe Gruters is out there talking about Trump Derangement Syndrome and America Derangement Syndrome like those are real diagnoses, begging supporters for money and volunteer hours because, in his own words, the whole country is apparently under siege from socialism and the solution is to give your “treasure” to the Republican Party.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: ICE Admits Killing Wrong Man as Narrative Falls Apart, Trump Purges Key Election Officials, Trump Boycotts Bipartisan Housing Bill, Aaron Parnas, right, July 10, 2026. There’s a lot of news to cover today. First, the story of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, the 10th person shot and killed by ICE agents since January 2025. ICE’s narrative is falling apart. The agency admitted it killed the wrong man, witnesses say ICE is lying, and new details continue to emerge. Also this morning: Trump says he will refuse to sign a key housing bill aimed at lowering housing costs, Trump fired the remaining bipartisan election officials in a late-night purge, Mitch McConnell was seen being taken away on a stretcher, and much more.

All of the words of encouragement over the past 24 hours have meant so much to me. Thank you.

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Here’s the news:

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo:

ICE fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo during a Houston immigration operation, and the Department of Homeland Security have now acknowledged that he was not the intended target of the enforcement action. According to DHS, agents were looking for different individuals and stopped Salgado Araujo because they believed someone in his white van resembled their target. ICE has maintained that an officer fired in self-defense after alleging Salgado Araujo used his van as a weapon, but the agency has not released evidence supporting that claim, and witness accounts dispute it. The shooting is under investigation by the DHS inspector general.

The Washington Post has confirmed that the undocumented migrants who were in the van with Lorenzo Salgado Araujo dispute the Department of Homeland Security’s account that he tried to run over ICE officers before being fatally shot during an immigration operation in Houston. Through their attorney, they said ICE vehicles boxed them in, an agent quickly opened fire from the side of the van, and no officer was ever in front of the vehicle or in danger of being struck. The men, who are now in immigration detention and facing removal proceedings, say Salgado Araujo—a father of three who had lived in the U.S. for decades without a criminal record—was shot despite not resisting, and they are calling for an independent investigation. The incident has intensified criticism of ICE’s enforcement tactics, particularly because there were reportedly no body cameras worn by the officers and the witnesses’ accounts directly conflict with DHS’s public statement. Here is a statement from Lorenzo’s son, who found out that he was shot from Facebook:

The Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office has ruled Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death a homicide, adding to calls for an independent investigation into the fatal shooting by ICE agents.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo's fatal shooting by ICE agents in Houston marked the 10th fatal shooting by federal immigration officials since the start of President Trump's second term, reflecting a sharp rise in deadly encounters tied to the administration's immigration crackdown. Other victims include U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed during immigration enforcement operations in Minneapolis, and Ruben Ray Martinez, who was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Texas. In several of these cases, DHS initially claimed officers fired after victims used their vehicles as weapons, but those accounts were later challenged by video evidence or witness testimony. The growing number of fatal shootings has fueled calls from families, civil rights advocates, and elected officials for independent investigations and greater accountability from federal immigration agencies.

Election firings:

Donald Trump has removed the remaining members of the bipartisan U.S. Election Assistance Commission, leaving the independent agency without any commissioners just months before the 2026 midterm elections. The commission oversees election administration guidance, certifies voting systems, accredits testing laboratories, and maintains the national mail voter registration form. The White House has not explained how it plans to move forward, though the law establishing the commission allows the president to appoint replacements. The firings follow Trump’s continued efforts to reshape federal election policy after repeatedly challenging the administration of U.S. elections.

The move has drawn criticism from election officials, who warn it could disrupt election administration ahead of the midterms. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes called the decision “irresponsible and dangerous,” arguing it risks creating uncertainty for election officials nationwide. While the president has the authority to nominate new commissioners under the Help America Vote Act, it remains unclear when or whether those vacancies will be filled.

The Trump administration is escalating pressure on states to change election procedures by warning officials they could face criminal prosecution if noncitizens remain on voter rolls and by threatening to withhold portions of federal homeland security grants unless states adopt measures such as citizenship verification, expanded election audits, and a shift toward hand-marked paper ballots. The Justice Department has given states five days to explain how they will comply, while FEMA tied 20% of certain antiterrorism grants to meeting the election-related requirements.

Election law experts and Democratic state officials argue the moves exceed federal authority, revive unsubstantiated claims of widespread voter fraud, and could create confusion ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, though some Republican officials have defended the administration’s efforts as reinforcing existing election laws. The latest actions follow a series of legal setbacks for the administration, with multiple courts rejecting attempts to obtain voter and election worker data from states and the Supreme Court recently ruling that states may continue counting eligible mail ballots received after Election Day.

Mitch McConnell:

Newly obtained video by CNN and an eyewitness account show emergency responders loading Mitch McConnell, shown above in a years-old file photo, onto a stretcher and into an ambulance after being called to his Washington home on June 14 for what dispatch audio described as an unconscious person experiencing cardiac arrest. McConnell has remained hospitalized for about three weeks, but his office has not disclosed the reason for his hospitalization or provided details about his condition. A neighbor said emergency responders appeared calm and did not use sirens when leaving, while another witness reportedly identified the person on the stretcher as McConnell. Despite ongoing public speculation, several Republicans and associates say they have recently spoken with McConnell and that he sounded alert, though no official medical update has been released.

Mitch McConnell's prolonged hospitalization and absence from the Senate is complicating efforts to pass government funding bills ahead of the Sept. 30 deadline, particularly because he serves on the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee and chairs its defense subcommittee. Republicans and Democrats remain deadlocked over defense spending, including the Trump administration's request for an additional $87.6 billion tied largely to the war with Iran, and McConnell's absence leaves Republicans without their one-seat majority on the committee. Without his vote, tied committee votes could stall spending legislation, increasing the likelihood that Congress will need a temporary funding measure to avoid a government shutdown. McConnell has not voted since June 11, and while Senate leaders say they have spoken with him, his office has released few details about his condition, prompting calls for greater transparency from Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear.

Other News:

Trump said he will refuse to sign the Housing Bill, despite it having already passed both chambers of Congress, unless the Senate approves his proposed SAVE AMERICA Act. Under the Constitution, however, the bill is set to become law tomorrow regardless of whether Trump signs it, because the 10-day period for presidential action will expire while Congress remains in session. Trump claimed he was withholding his signature as a protest over the Senate’s failure to pass the legislation, which he said has overwhelming support among Republicans.

Scott MacFarlane reported that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool remains fenced off and inaccessible after Trump's July 4 event, saying the water has retained a "swampy" green appearance despite beginning to reflect again. He described the pool as looking "almost like it's quarantined in its green-like state," indicating it has yet to return to normal condition.

Trump departed Turkey aboard the older Air Force One while his newly retrofitted, Qatar-donated jet flew ahead to England, with U.S. officials citing security concerns related to heightened tensions with Iran. Officials said the older aircraft, which was purpose-built for presidential travel, offers more established defensive and communications capabilities, while the newer plane was modified more quickly and is still viewed by some as less suited for high-risk international missions. Trump publicly denied there were specific security concerns, saying the Qatari jet was sent ahead so U.S. service members could tour it, though he later acknowledged that threats related to Iran could be a factor. The $400 million Qatari aircraft has faced ongoing legal, ethical, and national security scrutiny since it entered service, even as the Air Force maintains that it is safe and secure for presidential use.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he would “fix” the temporary grounding of eight South Carolina National Guard Apache helicopter pilots who were suspended after conducting low-altitude flybys over crowded beaches during a July 4 airshow. The South Carolina National Guard has described the suspensions as a routine, non-punitive safety review while it investigates whether the pilots complied with flight procedures.

According to CNN, U.S. officials say Israel recently shared intelligence alleging that Iran had developed a new plot to assassinate President Donald Trump, though U.S. agencies had not independently verified the specific threat. Officials noted that the U.S. has long assessed that Iran could seek retaliation against Trump for the 2020 killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, but some believe the Israeli warning may also have been intended to influence Trump’s decisions on Iran. The report comes as tensions between the U.S. and Iran remain high, with military preparations continuing even as diplomatic efforts toward a nuclear agreement reportedly persist. Trump said he believes he is Iran’s top assassination target, while the White House pointed to his recent public comments rather than addressing the intelligence report directly.

China has become the second country after the United States to demonstrate recovery of an orbital-class rocket's first-stage booster through a controlled reentry and powered landing, with the Long March 10B booster landing on a recovery ship in the South China Sea using a net-and-hook system. The achievement marks a significant step in China's pursuit of reusable launch technology, though it still trails SpaceX, which has spent more than a decade advancing reusable rockets and is now focused on fully reusable Starship. The development underscores China's growing investment in closing the gap in launch capabilities. Meanwhile, Europe has lagged behind, with the European Space Agency and ArianeGroup's reusable rocket demonstrators—Themis and Callisto—still well behind both China's latest milestone and SpaceX's operational capabilities.

New York City will become the first U.S. city to ban deceptive subscription practices under a new rule taking effect Oct. 1, requiring businesses to provide a simple way for customers to cancel recurring charges or face fines of up to $525 per subscription. The New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection is also proposing a separate rule requiring businesses to advertise the full upfront price of goods and services, including mandatory fees, in an effort to eliminate so-called "junk fees." City officials say the measures are designed to stop companies from trapping consumers in unwanted subscriptions and hiding the true cost of products and services, including apartment rentals. The initiative, led by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Consumer Commissioner Samuel A. A. Levine, is part of a broader push to reduce costs for residents and strengthen consumer protections.

A Utah judge will decide in the coming weeks whether the murder case against Tyler James Robinson will proceed to trial after a five-day preliminary hearing over the 2025 killing of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University. Prosecutors presented DNA evidence allegedly linking Robinson to the firearm used in the shooting, along with surveillance footage they say shows him entering the campus and climbing to a rooftop before the attack. The court also heard testimony from Robinson's former roommate and romantic partner, who said Robinson expressed remorse the day after the shooting, reportedly saying he wished he "hadn't done it." Robinson's attorneys challenged the reliability of the DNA evidence as they sought to undermine the prosecution's case, while Judge Tony Graf indicated the hearing's focus should remain on whether sufficient probable cause exists to send the case to trial.

Environmental groups are urging the Trump administration to relist Pacific gray whales under the Endangered Species Act after the population fell from about 20,000 whales in 2019 to fewer than 13,000 this year amid what scientists describe as a catastrophic mortality event. Researchers say climate change is shrinking Arctic sea ice and depleting the whales’ food supply, leaving many stranded whales emaciated from starvation, while ship strikes, oil development, pollution, harmful algal blooms, and Russian harvesting may also be contributing to the decline. Conservationists warn that thousands of whales may have died this year alone and argue stronger federal protections could help reduce preventable threats such as vessel collisions. If federal officials reject or ignore the petition, the advocacy group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says it plans to sue to force a decision.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance  

New York Times, Trump Administration Fires Members of Independent Election Group, Erica L. Green, July 10, 2026. The firings and a resignation render the Election Assistance Commission useless. The moves come as President Trump seeks to impose control over how ballots will be counted in the midterms.

The Trump administration has forced out the three remaining members of an independent, bipartisan commission that supports states in administering their elections, the White House confirmed on Thursday. The move comes as President Trump seeks to cast doubt on the outcome of the upcoming midterms and impose control over how ballots are counted.

Mr. Trump terminated, effective immediately, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland, two members selected by congressional Democrats to serve on the ElectionAssistance Commission, and accepted the resignation of a Republican member, Christy McCormick.

The board has no other remaining members, as its fourth commissioner resigned this spring.

An unidentified White House official issued a statement saying that Mr. Trump reserved the right to remove individuals who “may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.” The White House official cast the dismissals as part of the federal government’s strategy to work across agencies to safeguard elections from fraud and abuse.

The official pointed to the recent decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump had the authority to fire most independent regulators for any reason, ushering in a vast expansion of presidential power. Mr. Trump had hailed the decision as “the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years.”

Mr. Trump has been laying the groundwork for months to claim that Republicans would face a tough midterm election, not because of the broadly unpopular war in Iran and plummeting approval ratings on the economy, but because the country’s election system is fraudulent.

Mr. Trump, who has falsely claimed that the election he lost in 2020 was “rigged,” has been pushing legislation that would impose stringent voter identification requirements. He has called for significantly curtailing the use of mail-in ballots, which he has claimed without evidence that Democrats have used to cheat. (Mr. Trump voted by mail in a special election in Florida in March.)

The E.A.C., which was established in 2002, is a crucial guardrail for ensuring election security across the country. According to its website, it guides states in ensuring they meet voting requirements, oversees testing and certification of voting systems and disperses funding to help states meet requirements. It serves as a national clearinghouse for information on election administration and maintains the national mail voter registration form established by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

Last year, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that calls on the Election Assistance Commission to require people to show government-issued proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and directs state or local officials to record and verify the information. It also seeks to require states to count ballots by Election Day. A judge permanently blocked the order, saying the president exceeded his authority.

Michael Waldman, the president and chief executive of the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, in a statement called the terminations “deeply concerning in light of President Trump’s relentless efforts to try to interfere in elections.”

The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 10, 2026. Defending Free and Fair Elections.

In the face of Donald Trump’s non-stop, increasingly desperate efforts to bully state and local officials and undermine confidence in free and fair elections, we see courageous lower court judges — as well as voting rights activists and their litigation teams— have stepped up to preserve the sanctity of our elections. While diligence is always advisable, Trump’s shameless campaign to prevent the normal, free, secure, and fair process of voting under the auspices of local and state officials has largely been a colossal failure. But it has not been without a struggle.

Recent litigation stemming from the unprecedented, wholly illegitimate seizure of ballots in Fulton County is a case in point. In a stellar, searing rebuke of Trump shenanigans, U.S. Judge William M. Ray II of the North District of Georgia, a Trump appointee, quashed an absurd subpoena the Trump gang tried to issue through the auspices of a grand jury. It sought the “name, position/function, residential and email addresses, and personal telephone numbers” of every election official who:

[R]eviewed Mail-in Ballots, were assigned to the Voter Review Panel/Board, assigned to any Mobile Voting Location, were involved in the transferring of results or transportation of ballot stock or media, worked in or for the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections generally, worked or volunteered on election day to review or tabulate ballots, worked or volunteered in the Risk Limiting Audit, worked or volunteered for the Recount, and/or served as precinct managers and assistant managers, for the November 2020 General Election in Fulton County.

Ray refused to play along with one of the higher-profile efforts to intimidate local officials and sow the seeds of chaos in advance of the midterms. Trump never came up with evidence to prove his cock-and-bull theory that he had been robbed of re-election — failing to get local officials to “find” 11,780 votes to make up the popular vote deficit — since, as Ray stressed, the election was long over and certified.

Even if these records led to the DOJ finding individuals who worked for Fulton County in the 2020 Election who support the theory that it was not free and fair, they would not yield “information that could be used to charge anyone with anything, at least not any viable charge,” Ray found.

Judge Ray also highlighted the authoritarian nightmare that awaits should courts permit this sort of fishing expedition: “Anyone in power (perhaps the next administration of a different party) could use the Grand Jury process similarly to subpoena personal information of citizens (perhaps that of their political opponents) with no legitimate law enforcement purpose,” Ray wrote. Were a private company to allow such information to be released, “such company would most likely be sued in a data breach class action lawsuit.”

Ray concluded that “everyone, whether you support the President or you do not, or whether you believe the 2020 Election was fair or believe that it was not, should be concerned about the DOJ’s ability to utilize the power of the Grand Jury to appropriate your private information without a legitimate purpose.”

He thus refused to become a handmaiden to Trump’s scheme to “investigate a time-barred crime, indict a defendant or defendants, and allow pretrial procedures to begin, when the conclusion is inevitable—the statute of limitations on the relevant crimes has run.”

For months, the Trump Justice Department goons have tried to create a phony, error-filled national voter roll, meddle with the U.S. Post Office’s delivery of ballots, and force states to turn over unredacted voter rolls (losing to date 0-11 in lower courts, 0-1 in appeals courts). Tenacious lower court judges have diligently defended the constitutional system in which states and localities have primary responsibility for the operation of elections.

This crucial work is all the more critical given the slim thread by which election law sanity hangs at the Supreme Court. Yes, it struck out at the Supreme Court in Watson v. Republican National Committee, allowing states to set their own rules regarding the deadline for receipt of mail-in ballots. But the closeness of the decision was beyond alarming. As Rick Hasen explained, Mississippi’s argument that it had the right to count ballots arriving soon after Election Day may have seemed “obvious,” but the four dissenters did not think it so obvious. In other words, we are one MAGA Supreme Court justice away from “a bonkers reading of a federal statute on the basis of voter-fraud fantasies… [that] would have signaled that the court would avoid text, history, and precedent to further constrict voting.”

Trump will not relent in his ever-more desperate scramble to find excuses for discrediting midterm elections that are threatening to wipe Republicans from power. He continues to bully, threaten, and extort local officials by, among other things, vowing to prosecute hardworking public servants and withhold funds for FEMA and other urgent purposes unless authorities turn their voting procedures upside down.

Given all this, John Keller and Chelsea Rice at Just Security point to the critical role federal magistrates now play in holding the line in defense of free and fair elections. It’s these judges who will review and, if common sense and the rule of law prevail, provide the “last meaningful check before a federal investigation can disrupt an election.”

As in so many other cases, the Trump regime should have forfeited the presumption of regularity (i.e., the benefit of the doubt that the government acts in good faith) through repeated, cynical, and outrageous maneuvers to disrupt the ordinary operation of elections. Keller and Rice advise judges “to apply heightened scrutiny: to ask whether the seizure is truly necessary, whether less intrusive means would serve the public’s interest, and whether approving a warrant without limiting the means of execution to copying and/or inspection would strip election officials of materials they need to count votes and certify results.”

When the MAGA regime is out of power, there will be ample opportunity to review and hold accountable Trump Justice Department flunkies’ gross illegality, professional malfeasance, and reckless disregard for democracy. In the meantime, Americans are in debt to judges such as William Ray, whose undaunted and courageous decisions have held the line against the most ludicrous attempts by any president to subvert elections and cling to power. They deserve our gratitude for serving as a critical line of defense for the most important elections of our lifetime. 

More On Trump Team Waste, Obsessions, Oppressions

Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers for The Bulwark with photos via Wikimedia Commons.

The Triad via The Bulwark, Opinion: The Red Menace Is Here! Jonathan V. Last, above, July 10, 2026. When socialism came to America, we got the worst of all worlds.

1. Commie Gas. By now you have heard about the new red peril that is taking over American politics. Socialism is ascendant and taking over one of our political parties! This is dangerous and un-American!

You realize we’re talking about Republicans, right?

The White House is promoting a chain of seemingly state-run gas stations selling gasoline at below-market costs.¹Who owns these gas stations? Why are the White House and Trump himself promoting them? How are they able to sell gas at a loss? Excellent questions!

Short answer: No one knows.

The White House comms office claims that the stations are privately owned and receive no government subsidies. But the White House has also claimed that Iran has no military capabilities—and yet we’re back in a shooting war with them. Which is to say: There is no reason to believe that the administration’s statements about Freedom Fuel are true.

The company itself is a mystery. It does not respond to press inquiries and accounts of its corporate structure differ—no one seems to know if it is a chain of independently owned operators or if the locations are all owned by a single entity.

The corporate parent, however, applied for its trademark on the same day Trump first posted about Freedom Fuel—which is either a remarkable coincidence or, you know, close coordination between the White House and this “private” business.

Also, the White House claims to know a great deal about the company’s business strategy:

A White House official told ABC News that the Freedom Fuel Network is a private company not associated with the president, that is “simply reducing their margin to make prices at the pump more affordable for drivers in Philadelphia and New Jersey.” . . .

"There is no other entity or person subsidizing the lower gasoline costs," the official said.

How would the White House official know this information? How would they know that Freedom Fuel stations are still profitable and that the cheap gas is only a reduction of profit margins? Or that no other person or entity was subsidizing a loss on sales?

Seems suspicious to me!

According to industry data reviewed by ABC News, selling gas at that price point, under the current market conditions, would likely eliminate any profit and potentially cost the 25 participating stations a total of more than quarter million dollars every month.

They’ll lose money on every sale, but make it up in volume?

In case you can’t tell, this looks like socialism to me. Someone—either the government or a private entity working in close conjunction with the government.—is subsidizing retail goods sold below market rates. They are doing so to serve what they see as a critical group of consumers whom they believe are being disadvantaged by structural problems in the local market.

Wait a minute. Where have I heard this before . . .

Share(Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers/The Bulwark | Photos: Wikimedia Commons)

You may recall that once upon a time Zohran Mamdani proposed opening five city-owned grocery stores in communities where a shortage of retail options made food prices disproportionately high. His idea was to increase access to affordable food, even if it meant subsidies and created a bit of distortion in the local market.

You may also recall that Republicans lost their ever-loving minds over this proposal.

And yet, here Trump is, doing the exact same thing—he’s just doing it under the cover of night.

I have not heard one word of complaint from the Friends of Adam Smith. Have you?

2. Better Dead than Red

And it’s worse than just the gas stations.

Trump has been doing real-deal, state control of business and markets since he walked back into office.

• He openly manipulates markets with pronouncements about war and peace.
• He levies broad tariffs and then has individual companies and sectors bribe him to get exceptions.
• He forces businesses to prostrate themselves before him in order to get merger approvals.
• He literally takes government stakes in companies and insists that he get say over hiring and firing, wages, and even the naming of the business.

As a New Yorker headline quipped, it’s socialism . . . but make it Trump.

Trump is reportedly in talks to take a 5 percent share of OpenAI for the U.S. government when the company goes public later this year.

So that’s where we are with socialism, folks.

It is funny to me that when socialism—real socialism—finally came to America it wasn’t the lefty, Scandinavian version with universal health care and free college. Oh no. Instead, we got a command economy à la Chinese communism and it was ushered in by the right.

But the biggest joke is that, even as this happened, the American public still saw “socialism” as a dirty word and worried that a handful of House members and candidates who want Medicare for All are outside the political mainstream and a danger to the Democratic party. 

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Opinion: Trump Is Losing It As Midterm Election Defeat Approaches, JasonEasley and Sarah Jones, right, July 10, 2026. Trump makes a fresh bad decision that will come back to haunt his party in November, as the president lost it on Friday, as he is showing signs of breaking as a midterm defeat approaches.

On some level, Donald Trump understands that he is doomed. The president, who may be the most self-deluded in history, appears to sense the hurricane-force political winds that are blowing against his party in the midterm election.

That is the only way to explain why Trump is pushing Republicans so hard to pass the doomed SAVE America Act. The word doomed is not used lightly in this context. The Senate has held weeks and weeks of debate on Trump’s massive voter suppression bill and has made zero progress because a group of Republican Senators doesn’t want to give any president control of elections, which would run counter to the Constitution.

Senate Republicans also don’t want to kill the filibuster, which would be necessary to pass Trump’s anti-voting agenda.

Senate Majority Leader Thune has repeatedly told Trump and his supporters that the SAVE America Act is dead, so Trump announced he will not sign any legislation the Senate sends him until they pass his desired legislation.

Trump has refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill that isn’t a massive game-changer, but it is a piece of legislation that Republicans needed politically to have something to take to voters to show that they care about affordability.

Then Trump got involved and showed signs of completely coming unglued on Friday.

The president posted on his Truth Social account on Friday

I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT, which is polling at 97% with the Republican Party, and very high with the non-politician Dumocrats.

The Act states, quite simply, that to Vote a person must show PHOTO VOTER I.D., PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP, AND THAT THERE WILL BE NO MORE CROOKED, CORRUPT, & DESTABILIZING MAIL-IN BALLOTS (EXCEPTIONS for Military, Disabled, Illness, and Travel!). THE SAVE AMERICA ACT’S non-passage is CRAZY, and a serious threat to any politician who votes against it! If the Dumocrats, or any RINO (or worse!) working with them, do not allow a positive Vote on SAVE AMERICA, TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, and pass this, and every other Bill that true Republicans have ever dreamt of (In addition to the upcoming Budget BOMB and the 1929 catastrophic style DEBT CEILING BILL!).

The Dumocrats will TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER, if and when they ever get the chance to do so, in their very first hour - And I will no longer be able to call them Dumocrats again! The title of DUMB will revert to the Republicans who allowed this horrible calamity to happen to our Party, and our Nation, itself! MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

The president’s post was a deranged tantrum.

How he described the SAVE America Act was inaccurate and left out the part where the legislation would allow him to compile a federal voter database and force the states to purge voters from their rolls.

That is why Trump really wants the bill to be passed. The legislation would federalize elections and give him control over who gets to vote.

Democrats aren’t going to completely eliminate the filibuster. That is a threat that Republicans made up all on their own. Democrats might make changes to it, but complete elimination does not seem to be on the table.

Trump is not going to get permission to rig the midterm, and it is causing him to melt down.

Trump is losing it because in a matter of months, he will be a lame duck presiding over a dying presidency as the nation moves on.

What do you think about Trump’s comments? Share your thoughts below.

Photo illustration by Sarah Rogers for The Bulwark with photos via Wikimedia Commons.

More On Iran War 

New York Times, Iran’s Supreme Leader Remains Absent, a Void at the Top of the Regime, Yeganeh Torbati, July 10, 2026. Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei did not appear at his father’s funeral this week, fueling speculation about his physical condition and leaving a power vacuum in a divided country.

Iran is grappling with a devastated economy, a restive population and the ever-present threat of a return to all-out war. And yet, there is a looming absence at the top of the government, with Iranians still waiting to see or hear directly from their supreme leader.

Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei was appointed to the role in March, days after U.S.-Israeli strikes at the outset of the war killed his father and predecessor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but he hasn’t been seen in public since. That has led some to wonder not only about the health of Mojtaba Khamenei, who was injured in the attack, but also whether he is really running Iran at this pivotal moment for the country.

He has offered no clear public guidance on a clash between the hard-liners who oppose any diplomacy with the United States, and the pragmatists, including Iran’s president and foreign minister, who agreed to a preliminary cease-fire deal with the United States last month.

Such fissures, while nothing new within the country’s fractured political class, are all the more urgent as Iran and the United States trade attacks and diplomacy efforts falter. They spilled into the open this week when Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, appeared to be jeered and harassed during the elder Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral procession.

The supreme leader is entrusted with commanding Iran’s military; deciding the head of the judiciary and various key positions; declaring war and peace; and other critical leadership functions. In Iran’s blended system of theocratic and republican elements, it is the office that holds ultimate primacy.

There was some expectation that Iran and the world would get their first glimpse of the new Ayatollah Khamenei this week, during his father’s funeral. But, on Thursday, the ceremonies concluded without an appearance.

Without a strong central authority like the elder Ayatollah Khamenei, it has become even more unpredictable which faction will eventually gain the upper hand — and how the country will navigate its many crises.

The Funeral of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali KhameneiIran’s new leaders are commemorating Ayatollah Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the U.S.-Israeli war against the country.July 4, 2026

Inherent in the peace talks are fundamental questions about the fate of the country. Those include the future of Iran’s relationship with the United States; its willingness to compromise on its nuclear program in order to secure relief from sanctions; and its effort to rebuild a long-struggling economy, now battered by war, that had already led to deep popular discontent.

“There’s no central authority in effect to reconcile the various factions that are fighting for control,” said Ali Ansari, a historian of Iran at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

New York Times, Mediators Trying to Pull U.S. and Iran Back From Brink, Officials Say, Adam Rasgon and Euan Ward, July 10, 2026. Days of strikes by the two countries have given way to an uneasy pause as Qatari mediators seek to salvage the tattered U.S.-Iran truce.

Regional mediators were scrambling again on Friday to pull the United States and Iran back from the brink of renewed war, as days of strikes by the two countries appeared to settle into an uneasy pause.

Qatar, which helped broker the U.S.-Iran truce last month, has been in talks with Washington and Tehran to de-escalate the crisis, according to two officials with knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. In recent days, several other regional countries — Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, all of which host U.S. military facilities — said they had come under Iranian attack.

The recent strikes have all but shattered the truce and followed a now familiar pattern of hostilities: attacks blamed on Iran against commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, followed by American retaliation, Iranian counterattacks and then a return to fragile stalemate.

Even as the fighting appeared to subside on Friday, it remained unclear whether the latest mediation efforts could prevent that cycle from repeating. It has become a dangerous test of wills, with each side trying to show that it can absorb the other’s attacks and respond forcefully, without tipping the conflict back into full-scale war.

Iran threatened on Thursday to expand its attacks to other U.S. military facilities in the region, if American attacks continue. A day earlier, President Trump said he thought the cease-fire was “over,” even as he suggested that negotiations to reach a lasting settlement would continue.

At the center of the crisis is the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most important energy corridors. The United States has accused Iran of targeting commercial vessels in the waterway, while Tehran has insisted that marine traffic adhere to a designated route through Iran’s territorial waters. The dispute has turned partly on the wording of the truce, which called on Iran to help arrange safe commercial passage through the strait, while leaving unclear exactly how.

The U.S. military said on Thursday that it had struck more than 170 targets in Iran during the previous 48 hours, a significant increase compared with earlier flare-ups during the cease-fire. The strikes were focused on military targets on the Iranian coast and were intended to degrade Iran’s ability to threaten commercial shipping in the strait, the military said.

The two days of attacks — which came during funeral ceremonies for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes on Feb. 28 — killed 14 people and injured 78 others, according to Iran’s health ministry, which did not give details about the victims.

Trump Team Immigration Enforcement Horror

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was on his way to work when he was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on July 7 in Houston, Texas, his family said (Family photo from Ronaldo Salgado).

New York Times, Man Killed by Federal Agent in Houston Was Not the Target of ICE Search, Edgar Sandoval and Hamed Aleaziz, Updated July 10, 2026. Officials say agents believed a passenger resembled one suspect, but the encounter quickly escalated into a fatal shooting.

Federal immigration agents who killed a man during a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday had been searching for a different person, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman.

The targets of the ICE investigation were two people from Guatemala, one of whom the agents believed was in a white van being driven by the man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, according to two people with knowledge of the matter who were not permitted to speak about the case.

But the Guatemalan immigrants were not in the van. Mr. Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in the United States without authorization for 35 years, was on his way to work with three other men.

When agents tried to stop the vehicle, the encounter quickly escalated, and an agent shot Mr. Araujo in the abdomen. He died at a hospital hours later.

Homeland security officials said Mr. Araujo had tried to use his vehicle as a weapon, though no video or other evidence for that claim has emerged.

Federal agents had surveilled an address connected to one of the two Guatemalans weeks before and had seen two white vans at the property, the spokeswoman said in a statement. When they returned to the address on Tuesday, she said, “they observed a white van with an individual who resembled the target,” and initiated the traffic stop.

The agents were not wearing body cameras, according to the spokeswoman. Before trying to stop the van, the agents had looked into its owner and learned it was Mr. Araujo, who did not have legal status in the United States, according to the two people familiar with the case.

The shooting is part of a growing number of similar violent interactions involving civilians and immigration agents. More than 20 people have been shot at since September, nearly all of them in their cars. Some cases have been fatal. The shooting also comes as the Trump administration has ramped up its deportation campaign.

The killing of Mr. Araujo has incited outrage in Texas and beyond. Mr. Araujo’s sons said during a news briefing on Wednesday that they believed their father tried to get away because he was being chased by unmarked cars. Ronaldo Salgado, his oldest son, and a growing number of elected officials and immigration activists have demanded an independent inquiry.“This is outrageous to me, and this is ridiculous to hear that no one in that van was a target of any sort of investigation,” Mr. Salgado said in response to the news that his father was not being sought by federal agents

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Coverup Unravels, William Kristol, right, July 10, 2026. The coverup of Tuesday’s killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an ICE officer in Houston seems to be coming apart.

First we had the totally unsubstantiated ICE claim—so often a lie when we’ve heard it from ICE in the past—that Araujo had “weaponized his vehicle.” And we had the normal ICE stonewalling—a refusal to release any actual information about what happened or to cooperate with local law enforcement.

Then we learned that the ICE officers had taken Lorenzo’s personal property from him, including his wallet and phone, before putting him in the ambulance to a hospital. Which is why he was admitted as a John Doe and the hospital couldn’t notify his family that he was there. But the indecency here isn’t the point. Buying time to organize a coverup was.

Then we learned that ICE thought Araujo was someone else when they tried to stop his work truck. ICE seems to have put out this piece of information themselves, perhaps figuring that some routine incompetence was a better story for the media to focus on than their malevolence.

Then we learned that ICE was doing its best to ensure the full story wouldn’t come out. Greg Sargent of the New Republic reported that the three people who were in the car with Araujo when the shooting took place and who remained in ICE’s custody were under pressure from ICE to sign self-deportation orders, presumably so they would be out of the country and less available to talk about what happened.

These three men have resisted the pressure and have courageously spoken out about what happened that Tuesday morning. It’s worth quoting at some length a Washington Post report from late last night:

The three men who were arrested during an immigration operation that resulted in the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo said a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle and that at no point did the driver veer in his direction. . . . They spoke from immigration detention with attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, who shared their written and oral accounts with The Washington Post.

DHS released a statement hours after the deadly shooting saying that Salgado Araujo had rammed an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle and “weaponized” his white work van “in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.”

“That is a lie,” wrote Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, in a handwritten statement. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over. . . . There were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.”

Balderas-Ibarra spoke to Rojas, Daniel Tirado Pantoja, 43, and the shooting victim’s brother, Victor Salgado, 44, and said he heard the same story from each as he interviewed them separately. The men are not being housed together, the attorney said. . . . “All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” Balderas-Ibarra said. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”

[After being shot by an agent] Salgado Araujo was able to stop the van and place it in park, the men said, but the officer or officers continued to unload additional rounds from the sides of the vehicle.

Rojas described the agents violently pulling Salgado Araujo out of the driver seat and throwing him to the ground. They put handcuffs on their wrists and feet.

Victor Salgado said his brother was yelling for help as he was bleeding out.

The three men lay helpless as their boss lay dying.

“Se querían escapar, verdad?” Victor Salgado recalled an ICE agent saying to him in a mocking tone. He relayed that memory to Balderas-Ibarra. “You wanted to escape, right?”

None of the ICE agents involved has been identified. None has stepped forward to contradict the witnesses’ account. No video or witness accounts or evidence of any sort has been provided by ICE.

Body cameras could help resolve who’s telling the truth, you say? Well, it turns out that the ICE officers were not wearing bodycams that morning.

It’s horrifying. Surely it’s not too much to ask Democratic members of Congress to make cooperation on any issue—whether procedural or substantive, whether an appropriation or a confirmation—contingent on getting at the truth of what happened here, and on some accountability for this atrocity. 

New York Times, What We Know About the ICE Shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Christina Morales, July 9-10, 2026, Mr. Araujo was a father, a husband and a business owner who had moved to the United States 35 years ago from Mexico.

The killing of a Mexican man living in the United States by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent during a traffic stop in Houston has become the latest fatal encounter as the Trump administration continues its mass deportation campaign.

The man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, was killed while on his way to work. In recent weeks, President Trump has renewed the deportation effort, which had slowed in the spring.

“He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” said Ronaldo Salgado, one of Mr. Araujo’s sons. “That’s how I want the world to know my father — not as someone who got shot and killed, but as a family man, a man who understood that good things come to those who put in hard work.”

Here’s what we know.ICE agents were searching for a different person.

Details of the interaction between Mr. Araujo and immigration agents were still murky on Thursday.

The federal authorities initially said that ICE agents stopped a vehicle around 6:50 a.m. on Tuesday and tried to arrest Mr. Araujo, whom they described as an “illegal alien.” They said he “weaponized his vehicle” and tried to run over an agent, who then fired at him.

Mr. Araujo suffered a gunshot to his abdomen and was taken to a hospital, where he died hours later, according to the Houston Fire Department.

But on Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration agents, said that Mr. Araujo was not the intended target of the operation. Federal officers had been looking for a Guatemalan man who they believed was in the passenger’s seat of a white van being driven by Mr. Araujo.

The authorities did not provide video footage of the encounter.

At the time of the stop, Mr. Araujo was on his way to work at a construction site with three others, including his brother. Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, Mr. Araujo’s younger brother, remains detained at an immigration detention center in Conroe, Texas.

The Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s office is investigating. The F.B.I.’s Houston office is also investigating, but its inquiry will focus on the accusations that Mr. Araujo assaulted a federal officer.

Mr. Araujo’s family members and civil rights activists have called for an independent investigation and have asked the public for any new images or videos of the encounter.

The Bulwark Morning Shots, Opinion: The Quiet Before the Assault, by Jim Swift, July 10, 2026.

Springfield, Ohio: You’d think this town would be on the verge of panic.

It’s not. At least, not in public.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe two weeks ago paved the way for the Trump administration to deport from the United States perhaps hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees, I came here to observe a rally for the city and its Haitian community and gauge the mood. It was somber but not despondent. But with today marking an important deadline—it’s the day on which work authorization under Temporary Protected Status is set to expire for refugees from Haiti and Syria—and the prospect of mass deportation drawing closer, I was curious to see if that mood had changed. How were people here adjusting to the fact that Springfield, which had built a future with its Haitian community, now has to wait to learn whether Washington will succeed in undoing it?

The people of Springfield—like many other cities across the country—now have to make some very difficult decisions. With those TPS work permits expiring today, employers will now have to choose between firing longtime employees or violating federal law.

And the temporary Ohio drivers licenses issued for those under TPS already expired earlier this week—which means that driving, for many of those people, is now illegal, and an easy way to get caught by DHS.

I visited the local branch of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, a Catholic charity dedicated to aid for the poor. Its thrift store is the engine for the organization’s community support hub next door, in a dated building with computer stations visible from the outside.

I noticed that the parking lot seemed pretty empty for a Wednesday afternoon. A multilingual sign explains the limit of items per customer in the free food pantry. I heard an employee named Chuck describe to the cashier what donations had just come in, as he lugged peanut butter and other goods toward the shelves.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who has longstanding ties to both Springfield and Haiti, told the local press earlier this week that the local Saint Vincent de Paul council was working to secure U.S. passports for the U.S.-born children of the Haitians here, as they are, without a doubt, U.S. citizens.

“A lot of great work has been done by a lot [of] good people in Springfield to help them do that,” DeWine said, emphasizing not only how good Ohio has been to these Haitians but how good the Haitians have been for Ohio. The surge of immigrants—estimated at upwards of 10,000—to Springfield from the earthquake-racked and violence-riddled Caribbean country was successfully absorbed thanks in large part to the local faith community and its charities.

That is, until 2024, when Donald Trump and JD Vance helped spread vile lies about Springfield’s Haitians supposedly eating their neighbors’ pets. Pastor Carl Ruby of Central Christian Church told me in February, “We [Springfield] typically get twenty . . . inquiries a year from businesses looking for a place to locate. We have not had a single one since the ‘cats and dogs’ comment.”

I visited with Rick, a Bulwark reader who has spent years walking alongside Springfield families during some of the most important moments of their lives, both in his day job in public health and in his faith community. That experience has given him a close view of the anxiety many are feeling.

Rick has counted the Haitians under TPS as both friends and neighbors. He’s learned a little French along the way, but told me that Springfield’s Haitians are “working really hard to assimilate and to learn the language and to do all the things that we so often say we expect of people.”

“They really want to be a part of a community,” Rick said, as we grabbed lunch at Charlo’s, a restaurant downtown.

He worried about biased news sources distorting people’s impressions of Springfield’s Haitians. “It’s hard to hear misinformation, knowing it’s harming people that I’ve met and have come to love,” he said. “We’re so isolated from each other. I feel like I can tell from day to day what news source people are watching.”

It’s not just the news media. The White House publishes its own alien-themed, error-laden website that the Ohio Immigrant Alliance says “creates a false impression of actual criminal activity.”

Some of the city’s Haitians have already been withdrawing from public life, stopping their attendance at church, or not appearing at work, according to people I interviewed. It’s not immediately clear if they’re staying home, like so many others across the United States from different communities fearing imminent deportation, or if they’ve left Ohio for other states, hoping to avoid the special scrutiny on this once-hopeful town. Thanks to the controversy over the Haitians in Springfield in particular—which, again, didn’t appear over more than a decade of immigration and assimilation, and really only exploded due to Trump and Vance’s agitation—the town has had to deal with bomb threats (mostly from abroad, it turns out), with school closures, hospital lockdowns, and general chaos.

The financial cost to Springfield if the city sees mass firings of its Haitian workers, let alone mass deportations conducted by DHS, will likely be hefty. According to one estimate, Ohio’s Haitian population has an economic output of $160 million per year, and contributes nearly $40 million in local, state, and federal taxes.

DeWine has stated that if DHS chooses to act, the state will get advance notice, and will not interfere. “We will do what the law tells us to do. We respect the law in Ohio.”

Nobody knows exactly what’s coming. But Rick is hopeful as we consider whether we’re dining in the last rays of this town’s latest golden age.

“I’m always hopeful,” he muses. I’m not sure it’ll thrive in the same way. . . . I just wonder if it won’t be what it could have been.”

As we prepared to head our separate ways, Rick brought up a song, “The Change” by Garth Brooks. He has returned to its message “again and again” in recent days. He remembered it coming out after the Oklahoma City bombing, when the images felt hopeless: rescue workers pulling people from the rubble.

“The chorus of the song says, ‘You’ll never change things. And no matter what you do, it’s still the same thing. But it’s not the world that I am changing. I do this so this world we know never changes me.’”

He paused for a moment before going on. “It does feel like the world is trying to overwhelm you. But we keep returning . . . not because we think we’re going to change anything, but because hopefully it won’t change us.”

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

Civil Discourse, Opinion: DOJ: Not Doing Justice, Joyce Vance, right, July 10, 2026. No one is safe.

After a court appearance this morning, Norm Eisen, one of the attorneys representing former Olympian David Hearn, who was indicted by Jeanine Pirro’s Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office on charges of vandalizing the already damaged Reflecting Pool, said: “Today, Davey Hearn pled not guilty. Because he is not guilty. If Mr. Hearn can be charged with a felony for touching the reflecting pool, every American is at risk and every American should be alarmed at this prosecution.”

When she announced the charges, Pirro said that Hearn was “forcefully and violently” pulling up the liner of the pool. She claimed that he “damaged approximately two square feet of sealant from the bottom of the pool.” She also claimed he was “rude” to Park Service employees (not a crime last time I checked). But Hearn told ABC News he was arrested after he touched some of the peeling blue pieces that are seen in the Reflecting Pool. "I did not remove, I did not damage, I did not rip, tear, break, destroy or harm any part of the Reflecting Pool," Hearn said.

We all know the story: Trump gave a $16 million no-bid contract to one of his Mar-a-Lago buddies to resurface the Reflecting Pool. But it began to turn green and the liner buckled almost as soon as it was painted, with algae and paint chips floating on the surface. And Trump drove down the Reflecting Pool in a motorcade of heavy vehicles, before the work had time to cure. So predictably, he tried to shift the blame onto “vandals” who he threatened with 10-year terms in prison.

ABC reported that “When asked if she could share a picture of the damage and the cuts, Pirro responded: ‘When I file a charge, I'll be happy to show you a picture, alright? What I'm trying to do, is we're trying to find out who did it, OK. And until we get to that point, I'm not going to be able to, you know, discuss anything more than there was tremendous damage that was caused.’" That evidence hasn’t surfaced so far. It wouldn’t be surprising to see DOJ try and slow-walk this case. It has its charges, but it seems unlikely they’ll be eager to try the case, which looks like yet another loser, brought to pacify the president, not to do justice.

The D.C. U.S. Attorney handles both federal and local cases. Hearn was arraigned on a single count of destruction of property amounting to more than $1,000 in damage.

“It is not a crime to touch the Reflecting Pool, to touch water in the United States of America,” Eisen said. The irony is rich, since Hearn’s Olympic career was touching water to represent his country. “This is a case that should never have been brought,” Eisen concluded.

Three other defendants were also arraigned yesterday. Cameron Thiers, Sophie Dennison-Gibby, and Justin Carreno were charged for allegedly removing pieces of paint from the Reflecting Pool.

Also today, we are learning more details about the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who was shot and killed by ICE agents on Tuesday. We discussed it first on the day it happened. At the time, I wrote, “This administration can no longer be trusted to clear its agents in civilian deaths before a full investigation is conducted. The government is supposed to be an extension of the people’s will, not an occupying, shooting force.”

Today’s news only confirms those concerns. None of the officers at the scene of Araujo’s death in Houston were wearing body cameras. That was according to two DHS officials and a source familiar with the investigation, which is being conducted by ICE’s Inspector General. ICE’s policy gives agents a lot of wiggle room over when body worn cameras must be used. But their absence in these circumstances gives rise to a whole host of questions.

Those questions appear to be borne out by the fact that video that emerged today contradicted ICE’s official version, which claimed Araujo “weaponized” his car and drove at agents. ICE said Araujo drove into an ICE vehicle and tried to run over an agent. But the van that was supposedly hit appears to be without any damage, or even marks, and the footage depicts ICE chasing Araujo and cutting him off. It feels like Minneapolis and Renee Good and Alex Pretti all over again.

The New York Times reported today that “Federal immigration agents who killed a man during a traffic stop in Houston on Tuesday had been searching for a different person, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman.” Nonetheless, Mr. Aruugo was shot in the abdomen by agents. The Times put his death in a larger context: “More than 20 people have been shot at since September, nearly all of them in their cars.”

Far too many Trump supporters on social media are making comments to the effect that because he was an “illegal alien,” he got what he deserved. I’m not going to dignify those comments with a response. But it’s worth noting that ICE frequently makes bad calls about who is and isn’t a U.S. citizen, and the rights of citizens have been routinely violated. No one is safe, whether it’s a Davey Hearn who touches the Reflecting Pool or a Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, who’s just trying to drive to work. In a world where neither of them is safe, none of us are either. Trump’s America.

Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse. Your support and paid subscriptions make all the difference. In a world where it’s hard to keep up with the unprecedented corruption, abuse of civil rights, and violation of the rule of law that are unfolding around us, independent journalism makes all the difference. Our community of smart, well-informed voices is essential to sharing what’s happening with the people around us.  

Award-winning journalist Georgia Fort, who received a bachelor's degree in business administration and management from the University of St. Thomas in 2010, is amplifying stories of racial justice. The Trump Justice Department has targeted her on criminal charges now being exposed in court as highly dubious and part of comprehensive plan under Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, shown in a collage below, to to target those working in the civil rights field.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Harmeet DhillonDoxes the 100 People She Hired to Undermine Democracy, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 10, 2026. Even as evidence mounts that her team completely fabricated their case against Georgia Fort, in an effort to claim her office is not full of people who do such a thing, Harmeet just bragged about all the 100 people she hired at Civil Rights to replace the people who actually tried to defend civil rights before she removed them for that reason.

That includes a picture of all the people being sworn in — which clearly identifies who these 100 people are.

This is the kind of public post that close chums of Harmeet — people like Bill Essayli — claim constitute criminal doxing (though Essayli had to drop the doxing charge against the Raygoza defendants because they had not, in fact, posted any real personal information about the ICE goon treated as a victim).

If you make any efforts to identify these 100 people, do not post the kind of restricted information — the Social Security number, the home address, home phone number, mobile phone number, personal email, or home fax number of — that might genuinely qualify as doxing under 18 USC 119, as Harmeet likes to charge people for doing the kinds of things she does herself.

But it would be really useful to identify what kinds of partisan riff raff she has brought in for her attack on democracy, as it will help demonstrate that she has no intent on enforcing the law equally (and indeed, Harmeet has done nothing to defends Muslims whom Trump and his top aides attack as Muslims even while squealing about any limits on Christian Nationalism).

In the very same thread, after all, she made clear she doesn’t care about their expertise. When a random person, self-identified as a “December grad,” asked if she was “interest[ed]” in a December grad to go to Minnesota, Harmeet seemed interested.

She wants the kind of people who’ll pursue her partisan goals — the kinds of people who might frame a journalist.

And even as she tries to criminalize Blue state election administration, she just got a bunch more of them.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 6, 2026 [14th Amendment Due Process Happy Anniversary], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 10, 2026. Today marks the anniversary of a dramatic reworking of the U.S. constitutional order.

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation that brought the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life. They required the federal government to protect the equal rights of all American men.

In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.

Northern Republican lawmakers refused to accept this caricature of freedom. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.

Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.

But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.

Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.

It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.

The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.

The Fourteenth Amendment overturned that idea, recognizing the federal government’s power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.

Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states.

The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.

Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.

Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”

At the time, Bork’s supporters expressed outrage at what they insisted was Kennedy’s smear campaign, for surely the right-wing attack on the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment would never so completely undermine modern society.

And yet in 2026, here we are.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance  

The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 10, 2026. Defending Free and Fair Elections.

In the face of Donald Trump’s non-stop, increasingly desperate efforts to bully state and local officials and undermine confidence in free and fair elections, we see courageous lower court judges — as well as voting rights activists and their litigation teams— have stepped up to preserve the sanctity of our elections. While diligence is always advisable, Trump’s shameless campaign to prevent the normal, free, secure, and fair process of voting under the auspices of local and state officials has largely been a colossal failure. But it has not been without a struggle.

Recent litigation stemming from the unprecedented, wholly illegitimate seizure of ballots in Fulton County is a case in point. In a stellar, searing rebuke of Trump shenanigans, U.S. Judge William M. Ray II of the North District of Georgia, a Trump appointee, quashed an absurd subpoena the Trump gang tried to issue through the auspices of a grand jury. It sought the “name, position/function, residential and email addresses, and personal telephone numbers” of every election official who:

[R]eviewed Mail-in Ballots, were assigned to the Voter Review Panel/Board, assigned to any Mobile Voting Location, were involved in the transferring of results or transportation of ballot stock or media, worked in or for the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections generally, worked or volunteered on election day to review or tabulate ballots, worked or volunteered in the Risk Limiting Audit, worked or volunteered for the Recount, and/or served as precinct managers and assistant managers, for the November 2020 General Election in Fulton County.

Ray refused to play along with one of the higher-profile efforts to intimidate local officials and sow the seeds of chaos in advance of the midterms. Trump never came up with evidence to prove his cock-and-bull theory that he had been robbed of re-election — failing to get local officials to “find” 11,780 votes to make up the popular vote deficit — since, as Ray stressed, the election was long over and certified.

Even if these records led to the DOJ finding individuals who worked for Fulton County in the 2020 Election who support the theory that it was not free and fair, they would not yield “information that could be used to charge anyone with anything, at least not any viable charge,” Ray found.

Judge Ray also highlighted the authoritarian nightmare that awaits should courts permit this sort of fishing expedition: “Anyone in power (perhaps the next administration of a different party) could use the Grand Jury process similarly to subpoena personal information of citizens (perhaps that of their political opponents) with no legitimate law enforcement purpose,” Ray wrote. Were a private company to allow such information to be released, “such company would most likely be sued in a data breach class action lawsuit.”

Ray concluded that “everyone, whether you support the President or you do not, or whether you believe the 2020 Election was fair or believe that it was not, should be concerned about the DOJ’s ability to utilize the power of the Grand Jury to appropriate your private information without a legitimate purpose.”

He thus refused to become a handmaiden to Trump’s scheme to “investigate a time-barred crime, indict a defendant or defendants, and allow pretrial procedures to begin, when the conclusion is inevitable—the statute of limitations on the relevant crimes has run.”

For months, the Trump Justice Department goons have tried to create a phony, error-filled national voter roll, meddle with the U.S. Post Office’s delivery of ballots, and force states to turn over unredacted voter rolls (losing to date 0-11 in lower courts, 0-1 in appeals courts). Tenacious lower court judges have diligently defended the constitutional system in which states and localities have primary responsibility for the operation of elections.

This crucial work is all the more critical given the slim thread by which election law sanity hangs at the Supreme Court. Yes, it struck out at the Supreme Court in Watson v. Republican National Committee, allowing states to set their own rules regarding the deadline for receipt of mail-in ballots. But the closeness of the decision was beyond alarming. As Rick Hasen explained, Mississippi’s argument that it had the right to count ballots arriving soon after Election Day may have seemed “obvious,” but the four dissenters did not think it so obvious. In other words, we are one MAGA Supreme Court justice away from “a bonkers reading of a federal statute on the basis of voter-fraud fantasies… [that] would have signaled that the court would avoid text, history, and precedent to further constrict voting.”

Trump will not relent in his ever-more desperate scramble to find excuses for discrediting midterm elections that are threatening to wipe Republicans from power. He continues to bully, threaten, and extort local officials by, among other things, vowing to prosecute hardworking public servants and withhold funds for FEMA and other urgent purposes unless authorities turn their voting procedures upside down.

Given all this, John Keller and Chelsea Rice at Just Security point to the critical role federal magistrates now play in holding the line in defense of free and fair elections. It’s these judges who will review and, if common sense and the rule of law prevail, provide the “last meaningful check before a federal investigation can disrupt an election.”

As in so many other cases, the Trump regime should have forfeited the presumption of regularity (i.e., the benefit of the doubt that the government acts in good faith) through repeated, cynical, and outrageous maneuvers to disrupt the ordinary operation of elections. Keller and Rice advise judges “to apply heightened scrutiny: to ask whether the seizure is truly necessary, whether less intrusive means would serve the public’s interest, and whether approving a warrant without limiting the means of execution to copying and/or inspection would strip election officials of materials they need to count votes and certify results.”

When the MAGA regime is out of power, there will be ample opportunity to review and hold accountable Trump Justice Department flunkies’ gross illegality, professional malfeasance, and reckless disregard for democracy. In the meantime, Americans are in debt to judges such as William Ray, whose undaunted and courageous decisions have held the line against the most ludicrous attempts by any president to subvert elections and cling to power. They deserve our gratitude for serving as a critical line of defense for the most important elections of our lifetime.

Graham Platner, Maine Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat, speaks during a campaign event.  

MS Now, Why Democrats might be able to salvage the race after Platner’s collapse, Zeeshan Aleem, July 9, 2026. The party still has a decent chance at unseating Republican Sen. Susan Collins — if it behaves sensibly.Potential Platner replacement discusses future of senate race in Maine.

The collapse of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in the wake of a sexual assault allegation has put Democrats in a bind. With Platner out of the race, the party only has until July 27 to find a replacement nominee for November’s election. But Democrats still have a decent chance at unseating Republican Sen. Susan Collins in this crucial midterm contest.

The polling suggests that even before the political earthquake of the sexual assault accusation that Politico first reported — and Platner denied — on Monday, the upstart populist wasn’t showing the kind of strength in the general election that he had shown in the Democratic primary.

Polling expert G. Elliott Morris has observed that Platner had been polling “quite poorly” compared to other Democratic candidates and House and Senate races across the country even before the news came out. A New York Times/Siena poll of likely Maine voters conducted between June 19-26, for instance, found that Platner was leading Collins by just 2 points. Only 45% of Maine voters held a favorable opinion of Platner, while 50% held an unfavorable view. This very well may have been due, at least in part, to his constant aura of controversy. As the Times noted in its write-up of the findings, “a clear majority of registered voters — including 29 percent of his own supporters — say all the controversies make them question whether they can support him.” That relentless stream of scandals could have dampened turnout or deterred swing voters in the election.

Fresh energy from a broadly appealing progressive Democrat nominee could conceivably help restore voter trust in the state party.

Fresh energy from a broadly appealing progressive Democrat nominee could conceivably help restore voter trust in the state party. And such a candidate could ride on a wave of goodwill after months of scandals and hand-wringing on the left about Platner.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: An Encouraging Encounter With Real Americans, Paul Krugman, right, July 10, 2026. What I did yesterday.

Today i want to give you some encouraging news about the state of the heartland. Well, actually New Jersey, but you got a problem with that?

But I did something kind of different yesterday — which has prevented me from producing a usual analytical Substack post — and it was actually a very uplifting experience.

What i did yesterday was participate in jury selection in Mercer County, New Jersey, where i am still a legal resident.

That is something I’ve done before: back in 2020 I spent 16 weeks on a grand jury. It was done remotely, because it was the depths of Covid.

It was a New Jersey grand jury, which is not high profile cases. It’s actually very ordinary cases in which the police want to bring someone to trial but 23 citizens must agree that they have provided sufficient evidence to bring the case to trial. You don’t have to judge guilt or innocence but you have to judge that there is sufficient evidence to warrant bringing charges.

It was enlightening. I got to see a lot of the negative side of life, obviously, but it was just it was a pretty good experience on the whole.

So I was summoned again this year. I wouldn’t have been able to do it, but I had to participate in the selection in order to explain to the judge, if necessary, why I could not be available during the period of this grand jury — a bunch of already agreed to conferences and talks in Europe.

So it wasn’t going to be something I could do, but I did the right thing and went through the whole procedure of listening to the explanation, being pronounced present, and waiting to see the judge and explain the issue.

Now, as it turned out, I didn’t even have to do that. By the time they had reached the people who had said they could not do it, including me and 77 other people, they already had filled the jury. So it ended up that it was time-consuming, okay, not a terrible thing, but it was a procedure that had to be done. And I did my citizenly duty and was released well into the afternoon.

But what was interesting about it was that those of us who had said we couldn’t do it — 78 people in a Zoom room — had a long wait while the judge did whatever she needed to do with the rest. And after a little while some people unmuted themselves and we started having a conversation. This was by definition kind of a random sample of people — of course people who have felony convictions are not part of this, people are not us citizens are not part of it, and to be fair it’s Mercer County which includes Princeton although it also includes Trenton. Still, it’s on average an affluent, highly educated county so this was not exactly typical America but it wasn’t exactly the elite either: This wasn’t a virtual room full of Princeton professors.

So conversation started. Obviously people are not fools so it wasn’t about politics, it wasn’t about current events, it started with people saying “anybody want to recommend some books that I should read?” and then turned to TV shows and movies and then somehow or other we got involved in a discussion of AI and applications and learning. Because there were several school teachers.

Not everyone spoke up — most people didn’t — but everyone was listening, it seemed fairly attentively. And it was a great conversation! People were reasonable, they were either well informed or were happy to say “I don’t know about this.” There was actually some discussion about “how should I where should I go for news now that everything is so polarized” — nobody talked politics but they did talk about the fact that news is kind of hard to parse these days.

The book recommendations, the TV and movie recommendations to the extent that I know them were pretty good. And the whole tone was, wow, it was civilized. I felt a little bit as if I was in the middle of a Norman Rockwell painting.

By the way, yes, people did recognize me and a couple said you know I read your Substack and I talked a little bit but I made a deliberate effort to step back and not play the celebrity there.

And that was good, because I got to listen to other people who were really level-headed, interesting, pretty well informed about a bunch of stuff. Oh, and just to say that this was New Jersey, so it was a very diverse group of people — a random selection of people from New Jersey, which meant that it was multi-racial and multi-ethnic. The clerk had some trouble with pronouncing everybody’s name, which was okay — I mean everybody was very forgiving of that.

So it was very much America as I see it — a country of lots of people who look very different, who sound different (except a fair number of people did have New Jersey accents.)

And it was just a far more hopeful scene — at least I found it much more hopeful —about the state of the country. It turns out that ordinary Americans — this is, again ordinary Americans from Mercer County, New Jersey, but still — ordinary Americans are a lot nicer, more thoughtful, more willing to hold interesting discussions than you might think.

And it does seem to me, given all the political news, there’s a lot of people out there, I would say primarily on the right, but not only on the right, who fundamentally hold ordinary Americans in contempt, who believe that you have to go with cheap slogans and that you can appeal to the baser instincts of everybody’s nature and that’s the way that you win.

And obviously they do sometimes win. But it’s worth going out there a little bit.

I mean I’m never going to be the kind of person who travels around and has conversations with the person in the street and reports back on what I’ve learned about the real America. But I actually did have, by accident, a pretty good selection of real Americans — because we’re all real Americans — and came out of it feeling just much lighter in mood.

You know, this country is actually okay if we can just get past some of the people who are trying to take us down a dark path. We’re not bad people — we’re mostly good people. And there’s a lot there’s a lot of uplift out here if you’re willing to see it.

For once if I say I’m ending on a happy note, I really am.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: A Season of Death and Fear, Jim Swift, William Kristol, Andrew Egger and Benjamin Parker, July 10, 2026. From nervous Haitians in Ohio to a grieving family in Texas, the real-world effects of Trump’s assault on immigrants.

A report this morning from the Navigator polling outfit contains new data from a national survey on attitudes toward the 2026 FIFA World Cup and U.S. viewership. It confirms that our enthusiasm at Bulwark HQ for the World Cup doesn’t make us oddballs. As of June 30, nearly half of Americans had watched a World Cup game, with more planning to watch as the tournament continues. And the numbers are the same for Democrats and Republicans. Bipartisan enthusiasm for globalization, ftw!

So enjoy today’s and tomorrow’s games—and next week’s semifinals and final. Happy Friday.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• From Hateful Hoax to Presidential Policy… As time runs out for Haitian refugees in the U.S., CATHY YOUNG takes a look back at JD Vance’s sick, racist lie about immigrants eating pets.
• Trump’s Own Judge Torched DOJ’s Insane Election Subpoena… On The Illegal News, ANDREW WEISSMANN joins SARAH LONGWELL to discuss a big week in legal news: DOJ’s stunning concession in a reporter’s lawsuit over the Epstein files, the questions senators must make Todd Blanche answer at his confirmation hearing, and the Trump-appointed judge who torched DOJ’s demand for the names of every 2020 election worker in Fulton County.
• Trump, Platner, and the Mistake America Keeps Making… On the latest Mona Charen Show, WILL SALETAN joins MONA CHAREN to analyze the Platner saga and have a few words about the World Cup.
• The Endangered Big Screen Comedy… SONNY BUNCH reviews The Invite and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, and is joined by renowned film historian DAVID THOMSON on The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood to discuss how the screen has changed us.
• Ravelstein Revisited… Saul Bellow’s last novel is brilliant, funny, and unsettling, JONATHAN MARKS writes. It also leaves an uncomfortable question hanging: What exactly did all that shamelessness buy us?

Quick Hits

THIS GUY: Graham Platner appears intent on running out every last second of his time in the political spotlight. The populist Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine announced Wednesday night that he was dropping his bid following reports that he had allegedly sexually assaulted an ex-girlfriend. But a video announcement saying you plan to leave the race is not the same as officially leaving the race. To do that, one needs to send in actual paperwork to the Maine secretary of state. According to press reports and his top aide, Platner is going to file that paperwork. But he’s apparently going to wait until Monday to do so. That is the drop-dead deadline for him to exit the race; were he to miss it, Democrats would lose the ability to run someone else on the party line for the Senate.

Technically, Platner has until 5 p.m. Monday to file the paperwork. He must also formally withdraw from the race by submitting a signed written notice to the elections office. But fret not: He doesn’t need to hitch a ride on an oyster boat or call an Uber to Augusta. According to the secretary of state’s office, the paperwork can be submitted without appearing in person.

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THAT GUY: A new report from the New York Times chronicles how local officials in the Sunshine State put a stop to Gov. DeSantis’s proposal to significantly reduce property taxes in the state.

In a speech last year, DeSantis was quoted as saying: “You buy a home, you pay off the mortgage, and yet, you still have to write a check to the government every year just for the privilege of living on your own private property. Is the property yours, or are you just renting it from the government?”

The idea of steeply cutting property taxes—which would take away a key source of funding for schools, fire departments, and other services in local communities across the state—is just the latest illustration of a larger movement among some conservatives to shift taxes away from income and property and toward consumption exclusively. Some even want to eliminate federal income taxes altogether in exchange for a national sales tax.

Were Florida’s proposal to go through, local leaders could find themselves in a position where they feel they must either go to the state shaking a tin cup or make cuts to essential services like police. DeSantis wants to offer those communities “grants.” But local Republicans like Jeff Brandes, a former state senator who now runs a think tank, saw right through that suggestion: “This was a pitch that started off as cutting taxes, but I don’t think it’s that anymore. I think it’s really shifted to control.”

DeSantis is now distancing himself from the measure, saying he would still vote in favor of it but likely won’t campaign for it.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Quiet Before the Assault, Jim Swift, right, July 10, 2026. Springfield, OhioYou’d think this town would be on the verge of panic.

It’s not. At least, not in public.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe two weeks ago paved the way for the Trump administration to deport from the United States perhaps hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees, I came here to observe a rally for the city and its Haitian community and gauge the mood. It was somber but not despondent. But with today marking an important deadline—it’s the day on which work authorization under Temporary Protected Status is set to expire for refugees from Haiti and Syria—and the prospect of mass deportation drawing closer, I was curious to see if that mood had changed. How were people here adjusting to the fact that Springfield, which had built a future with its Haitian community, now has to wait to learn whether Washington will succeed in undoing it?

The people of Springfield—like many other cities across the country—now have to make some very difficult decisions. With those TPS work permits expiring today, employers will now have to choose between firing longtime employees or violating federal law.

And the temporary Ohio drivers licenses issued for those under TPS already expired earlier this week—which means that driving, for many of those people, is now illegal, and an easy way to get caught by DHS.

I visited the local branch of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, a Catholic charity dedicated to aid for the poor. Its thrift store is the engine for the organization’s community support hub next door, in a dated building with computer stations visible from the outside.

I noticed that the parking lot seemed pretty empty for a Wednesday afternoon. A multilingual sign explains the limit of items per customer in the free food pantry. I heard an employee named Chuck describe to the cashier what donations had just come in, as he lugged peanut butter and other goods toward the shelves.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who has longstanding ties to both Springfield and Haiti, told the local press earlier this week that the local Saint Vincent de Paul council was working to secure U.S. passports for the U.S.-born children of the Haitians here, as they are, without a doubt, U.S. citizens.

“A lot of great work has been done by a lot [of] good people in Springfield to help them do that,” DeWine said, emphasizing not only how good Ohio has been to these Haitians but how good the Haitians have been for Ohio. The surge of immigrants—estimated at upwards of 10,000—to Springfield from the earthquake-racked and violence-riddled Caribbean country was successfully absorbed thanks in large part to the local faith community and its charities.

That is, until 2024, when Donald Trump and JD Vance helped spread vile lies about Springfield’s Haitians supposedly eating their neighbors’ pets. Pastor Carl Ruby of Central Christian Church told me in February, “We [Springfield] typically get twenty . . . inquiries a year from businesses looking for a place to locate. We have not had a single one since the ‘cats and dogs’ comment.”

I visited with Rick, a Bulwark reader who has spent years walking alongside Springfield families during some of the most important moments of their lives, both in his day job in public health and in his faith community. That experience has given him a close view of the anxiety many are feeling.

Rick has counted the Haitians under TPS as both friends and neighbors. He’s learned a little French along the way, but told me that Springfield’s Haitians are “working really hard to assimilate and to learn the language and to do all the things that we so often say we expect of people.”

“They really want to be a part of a community,” Rick said, as we grabbed lunch at Charlo’s, a restaurant downtown.

He worried about biased news sources distorting people’s impressions of Springfield’s Haitians. “It’s hard to hear misinformation, knowing it’s harming people that I’ve met and have come to love,” he said. “We’re so isolated from each other. I feel like I can tell from day to day what news source people are watching.”

It’s not just the news media. The White House publishes its own alien-themed, error-laden website that the Ohio Immigrant Alliance says “creates a false impression of actual criminal activity.”

Some of the city’s Haitians have already been withdrawing from public life, stopping their attendance at church, or not appearing at work, according to people I interviewed. It’s not immediately clear if they’re staying home, like so many others across the United States from different communities fearing imminent deportation, or if they’ve left Ohio for other states, hoping to avoid the special scrutiny on this once-hopeful town. Thanks to the controversy over the Haitians in Springfield in particular—which, again, didn’t appear over more than a decade of immigration and assimilation, and really only exploded due to Trump and Vance’s agitation—the town has had to deal with bomb threats (mostly from abroad, it turns out), with school closures, hospital lockdowns, and general chaos.

The financial cost to Springfield if the city sees mass firings of its Haitian workers, let alone mass deportations conducted by DHS, will likely be hefty. According to one estimate, Ohio’s Haitian population has an economic output of $160 million per year, and contributes nearly $40 million in local, state, and federal taxes.

DeWine has stated that if DHS chooses to act, the state will get advance notice, and will not interfere. “We will do what the law tells us to do. We respect the law in Ohio.”

Nobody knows exactly what’s coming. But Rick is hopeful as we consider whether we’re dining in the last rays of this town’s latest golden age.

“I’m always hopeful,” he muses. I’m not sure it’ll thrive in the same way. . . . I just wonder if it won’t be what it could have been.”

As we prepared to head our separate ways, Rick brought up a song, “The Change” by Garth Brooks. He has returned to its message “again and again” in recent days. He remembered it coming out after the Oklahoma City bombing, when the images felt hopeless: rescue workers pulling people from the rubble.

“The chorus of the song says, ‘You’ll never change things. And no matter what you do, it’s still the same thing. But it’s not the world that I am changing. I do this so this world we know never changes me.’”

He paused for a moment before going on. “It does feel like the world is trying to overwhelm you. But we keep returning . . . not because we think we’re going to change anything, but because hopefully it won’t change us.”

July 9

Top Headlines

• New York Times, Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Sink Into Violent Cycle After Latest Strikes, Tyler Pager, Shirin Hakim and Euan Ward, July 9, 2026. Attacks on ships were followed by new U.S. strikes on Iran, which responded by firing at Gulf nations. The pattern of hostilities has all but collapsed a cease-fire, with little sign that either side will step back.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: An American Life Cut Short, Bill Kristol, Benjamin Parker and Jim Swift, July 9, 2026. ICE ended Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s American Dream.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Epstein Investigation Escalates, America Becomes 'Post-Literate Society,' Mexico Takes Legal Action against US for Immigrant Deaths, Aaron Parnas, right, July 9, 2026. Today’s headlines are packed. America is slipping in literacy and increasingly becoming a post-literate society. On Capitol Hill, the Epstein investigation is accelerating ahead of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing. Democrats are calling it Trump’s Watergate, survivors are accusing a key witness of misleading Congress, and new developments continue to emerge. Overseas, the war with Iran is escalating, while Ukraine is intensifying its strikes deep inside Russia as pressure mounts on the Kremlin.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 9, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 9, 2026. After the U.S. resumed bombing Iran yesterday evening, Iranian forces retaliated early this morning with strikes on U.S. military facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait.

More On Trump Administration Obssessions, Lies, Corruption, Oppression 

• Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary: It’s a race to the bottom for Donald Trump, Heather Delaney Reese, right, July 8-9, 2026. At 3:43 p.m. local time in Turkey, the President of the United States grabbed the stairs to his plane with his swollen right hand while his bruised left hand hung motionless at his side.

More on U.S. Elections, Politics

• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Is Failing, He Is Wildly Unpopular, The Polls Are Encouraging, And We Have Elections To Win All Across The Country, Simon Rosenberg, right, July 9, 2026. We have one job now - the general election is here and we need remain focused on helping our battleground House and Senate candidates win. The proud, plucky patriots of this remarkable community gathered last night for our weekly get together, and as usual, it was a lively affair. A recording and rough transcript can be found here. 

More on Maine Successor To Scandal-Tainted Democratic Senate Nominee

Graham Platner, Maine Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat, speaks during a campaign event.  

• New York Times, ‘A Slow-Rolling Disaster’: Inside the Implosion of the Platner Campaign, Lisa Lerer, Katie Glueck and Michael Kruse, Updated July 9, 2026. Graham Platner’s bid for the Senate inspired progressive Democrats. But the campaign, which he suspended Wednesday, was messy, disorganized and ultimately doomed by a steady drip of scandal. The reporters spoke to more than 30 people for this article, including current and former campaign advisers, Democratic officials and others familiar with Graham Platner and his run for office.
• The Triad via The Bulwark, Opinion: Progressives Are Mad at the Wrong People, Jonathan V. Last, July 9, 2026. The last Graham Platner piece we’ll ever have to muddle through together.

U.S. Governance

• New York Times, Can Trump’s Arch Be So Tall? A Panel May Redefine a Law to Get to Yes, Luke Broadwater, Emily Badger and Junho Lee, July 9, 2026. The proposed 250-foot arch would violate a height limit on Washington structures under the traditional reading of the law. But the panel, now led by the president’s allies, has other ideas.
• Public Notice, News and Opinion: Trump's red-baiting won't work, Paul Waldman, right, July 9, 2026. He's campaigning on an even dumber version of McCarthyism.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: RFK Jr., Scientology, and the war on antidepressants, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, July 9, 2026. Kennedy as an ongoing financial connection to a Scientology-linked law firm suing antidepressant manufactures. 
• The Hartmann Report, Opinion: What Happens When Trump Voters Realize They Want the Same Thing Progressives are Working For?Thom Hartmann, right, July 9, 2026. They don't agree on politics. They do agree that the American Dream is slipping away, and that could change everything…
• Michael Fanone Show, Opinion: Mitch McConnell is STILL Missing What the Hell is Going On? Michael Fanone and Peter Rothpletz, July 9, 2026. On Tuesday, I wrote about the bizarre information blackout surrounding Kentucky Senator and anthropomorphic turtle Mitch McConnell. He’s been hospitalized since June 14, with no diagnosis disclosed. Since then, the story has moved.

More On U.S. Law, Courts, Crime

Former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum arrives at the federal courthouse in Tallahassee, Fla., on April 17, 2023 (Photo by Alicia Devine for USA Today Network via Reuters Connect).

• Associated Press via NBC News, Ex-Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum arrested on drug possession charges, Staff Report, July 8-9, 2026. Gillum, who was mayor of Florida’s capital from 2014 to 2018, came within less than a percentage point of being elected the state’s first Black governor, losing to Ron DeSantis by fewer than 34,000 votes.  

 More On U.S. Immigration, Rights, Justice 

Ronaldo Salgado, son of immigrant from Mexico slain by federal immigration agents, speaks Houston news conference (AP photo).

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: What We Learn from Immigrants, William Kristol, right, July 9, 2026. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, killed by agents of our government while driving to work early Tuesday morning in Houston, was fond of telling his three sons, “Que siempre le echemos ganas en esta vida.” The Washington Post offers this rough translation: Give it your all, and never give up. 

Global Economy, Climate Change

Measuring Temperature Change (Bloomberg chart).

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Heat Is On, Paul Krugman, right, July 9, 2026.  And the cost of climate change is getting serious. Last Friday extreme heat forced early closure of Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair. Fortunately, the fair was sparsely attended. As some wags put it, tens of people had to be evacuated from the National Mall. Even so, 44 people received health assistance and 11 were taken to hospitals due to the heat. OK, shutting down Trump’s shabby, dreary exercise in self-aggrandizement was no great loss. Yet the disruption of Trump’s festivities is a harbinger of many disruptions to come. 
• New York Times, A $3.2 Trillion Deal-Making Frenzy Is Spurred by the A.I. Economy, Lauren Hirsch, July 9, 2026. This year’s boom includes the most spent on global deal-making in a six-month period in a decade. But questions persist about whether it can continue.
• New York Times, As Consumers Pare Spending, Grocery Stores Race to Cut Prices, Julie Creswell and Kim Bhasin, July 9, 2026. While shoppers may get better deals on some items, it’s unlikely their overall grocery bill will fall.

Top Stories

New York Times, Live Updates: U.S. and Iran Sink Into Violent Cycle After Latest Strikes, Tyler Pager, Shirin Hakim and Euan Ward, July 9, 2026. Attacks on ships were followed by new U.S. strikes on Iran, which responded by firing at Gulf nations. The pattern of hostilities has all but collapsed a cease-fire, with little sign that either side will step back.

Here’s the latest.

The United States and Iran exchanged fire for a second consecutive night on Thursday, extending a pattern of hostilities that has all but collapsed their fragile truce and left the Middle East neither at war nor at peace.

Since last month’s cease-fire, periods of uneasy calm have been punctured by attacks on commercial shipping, blamed on Iran, which are followed by retaliatory American and Iranian strikes, more threats, conflicting signals over negotiations, then another uneasy pause. That cycle repeated itself overnight, with little immediate sign that either is prepared to step back.

Hours before the strikes, President Trump said further talks on a long-term peace deal were “a waste of time.” Iran’s top negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, warned, “Hit, and you’ll be hit.”

As oil markets wobbled, mediators scrambled yet again to prevent further escalation. Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani, spoke to Iran’s foreign minister and condemned the attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has sought to control.

In the latest flare-up of fighting, the U.S. military said overnight that it had struck around 90 targets in Iran in an effort to degrade Iran’s ability to attack commercial ships in the strait. Iran’s military said it had responded with drone and missile strikes at American military targets in Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, Gulf nations that have been repeatedly hit in the conflict. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps threatened to expand its attacks to other American bases in the region, according to a statement carried on Iranian state media.

The Iranian authorities said that American strikes had hit a stretch of railway connecting Tehran to the northeastern city of Mashhad, where Iran’s slain supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was expected to be buried later on Thursday. The U.S. military did not immediately comment on the claim.

Railway authorities said that buses would carry stranded passengers the rest of the way. The burial on Thursday follows days of funeral ceremonies for Ayatollah Khamenei, who was killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes at the start of the war. The events have been meticulously stage-managed by Tehran across several cities to project national unity and defiance to Iran’s enemies.

Mr. Trump said at a NATO summit in Turkey on Wednesday that the cease-fire was “over.” Hours later, as he flew back to the United States, he said that Iran had called because they “want to make a deal so badly.” Iran has not signaled that any new negotiations are underway.

Here’s what else to know:

• Energy markets: Oil prices remained elevated after the latest round of fighting. Brent crude, the international benchmark, traded at around $78 a barrel on Thursday, down from its peak during the war but above its pre-conflict level of around $72. Read more ›
• Funeral delays: The burial of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s late supreme leader, in the holy city of Mashhad was delayed by several hours on Thursday. The Iranian authorities said that large crowds in the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, where hundreds of thousands had gathered for the funeral procession on Wednesday, had led to the delay.
• Reprieve for Syria: The Trump administration notified Congress on Wednesday of plans to rescind the designation of Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. President Trump met with Syria’s new president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, on Wednesday at the NATO summit said he would lift the designation, which would open up more international trade for the country. 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: An American Life Cut Short, Bill Kristol, Benjamin Parker and Jim Swift, July 9, 2026. ICE ended Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s American Dream.

Whoever said “brevity is the soul of wit” never ran for Senate in Maine. Days after he was accused of sexual assault—and weeks after the first reports of his suspect behavior towards women raised worries that more serious allegations could emerge—Graham Platner announced yesterday that he was suspending his campaign.

But, in keeping with the train-wreck-in-quicksand vibe, his announcement video was long and discursive, and devoid of self-reflection or apologies. Maine Democrats are now planning a last-minute convention of roughly six hundred representatives from around the state to choose who will replace Platner on the November ballot. Happy Thursday

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Epstein Investigation Escalates, America Becomes 'Post-Literate Society,' Mexico Takes Legal Action against US for Immigrant Deaths, Aaron Parnas, right, July 9, 2026. Today’s headlines are packed. America is slipping in literacy and increasingly becoming a post-literate society. On Capitol Hill, the Epstein investigation is accelerating ahead of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing. Democrats are calling it Trump’s Watergate, survivors are accusing a key witness of misleading Congress, and new developments continue to emerge. Overseas, the war with Iran is escalating, while Ukraine is intensifying its strikes deep inside Russia as pressure mounts on the Kremlin.

I also woke up to find that I had lost multiple paid subscribers because I have spent so much time covering the Epstein files here on Substack.

That isn’t going to change. I will continue reporting on the Epstein files and giving survivors a platform because I believe this story deserves sustained scrutiny. Over the next week, I’ll be interviewing multiple survivors and providing comprehensive coverage of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing. When you subscribe, you’re supporting independent journalism grounded in verified facts, not speculation, and reporting that answers only to the truth. If you’re not yet a subscriber, I hope you’ll consider joining today.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

Mexico says it will pursue legal action against the United States after an ICE agent fatally shot a Mexican national during an immigration enforcement operation in Houston. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum condemned the killing, arguing that undocumented migrants should not lose their lives over immigration violations and vowing to take the case beyond diplomatic protests to international human rights bodies. ICE says the man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, rammed an agency vehicle and attempted to run over an agent, prompting the officer to fire in self-defense. The victim's family disputes the circumstances surrounding the shooting, noting he had lived in the United States for nearly 35 years and was working toward obtaining a legal work permit, while relatives and community leaders are calling for an independent investigation. This is from President Sheinbaum:

"Unfortunately, there has been another death of a Mexican national in the United States for being detained, when that person's only offense was lacking immigration documents, even though they had been hired by an American company"

America is increasingly becoming a post-literate society, where people consume more information than ever but spend less time engaging with long-form reading and critical analysis. Instead of books, newspapers, and in-depth reporting, information is increasingly absorbed through short videos, social media clips, podcasts, and AI-generated summaries, weakening attention spans and the ability to process complex ideas. The trend is reshaping politics, education, and public discourse by rewarding emotional, simplistic, and personality-driven communication over evidence-based reasoning. As one recent analysis argues, the challenge is no longer widespread illiteracy but "post-literacy"—a culture where sustained reading becomes a niche activity while deep comprehension, critical thinking, and independent analysis steadily erode.

A federal appeals court rejected President Donald Trump's emergency request to temporarily block the release of more than $5 million from the court registry to E. Jean Carroll's attorneys. The one-sentence order from the Second Circuit leaves in place Judge Lewis Kaplan's ruling, allowing the funds to be transferred while Trump's broader appeal continues. The decision does not resolve the merits of the underlying case but signals the appeals court saw no basis for granting immediate emergency relief. As a result, Carroll's legal team has already gained access to the funds while the litigation proceeds.

The Trump administration is preparing to host a meeting with officials from dozens of countries to discuss combating antifa, but the effort has sparked concern among some U.S. and European officials. Critics worry the initiative, led in part by counterterrorism official Sebastian Gorka, could expand the use of powerful counterterrorism authorities originally intended for foreign terrorist organizations to target left-wing activists inside the United States. Some administration officials have privately warned that creating such a precedent could allow a future Democratic administration to use the same authorities against conservatives. The White House rejected those concerns, saying it will not allow America’s counterterrorism capabilities to be weaponized for partisan purposes.

Epstein news: 

Future President Trump, above right, with his onetime best friend Jeffrey Epstein, left, along with Trump's now-notorious birhday greeting to Epstein. 

House Democrats are signaling that the Jeffrey Epstein investigation will become a major priority if they regain control of Congress after the 2026 midterms. Rep. Melanie Stansbury called the matter the Trump administration’s “Watergate,” arguing officials have helped shield the president from accountability and saying she wants key figures to testify under oath. Democrats point to the Oversight Committee’s decision to compel former President Bill Clinton to testify as a precedent that could support seeking testimony from other presidents, including Donald Trump. Trump has acknowledged knowing Epstein in the past but says they had a falling-out years before Epstein’s 2019 death, and he has not been charged with wrongdoing.

Republicans also expect the investigation to continue, though for different reasons. House Oversight Chair James Comer said each witness interview has produced additional leads, making it difficult to wrap up the probe. Lawmakers from both parties anticipate more depositions and subpoenas as investigators continue examining Epstein’s network, the Justice Department’s handling of the case, and whether any new evidence could warrant criminal referrals.

Multiple survivors of Jeffrey Epstein told CNN that his longtime assistant, Lesley Groff, gave false testimony during her June interview with the House Oversight Committee. Survivors said Groff personally met them on numerous occasions, discussed their ages, handled travel documents, distributed cash payments and Broadway tickets, and was present at Epstein’s New York townhouse—directly contradicting her claims that she never met the girls, never knew their ages, never handled passports, never paid them, and never entered the townhouse. The committee said it is reviewing Groff’s testimony against available evidence, while Democratic staff warned that lying to Congress is a crime.

Groff has never been charged with a crime, despite previously being identified as a potential co-conspirator in Epstein’s 2008 non-prosecution agreement, and she maintains that Epstein deceived her about his abuse. Survivors expressed frustration that, aside from Ghislaine Maxwell, few people connected to Epstein have been held accountable, saying repeated denials from former associates have hindered efforts to uncover the full truth. They argue Groff’s testimony minimizes her role and ignores years of firsthand interactions they say clearly demonstrated her awareness of Epstein’s operations. The House Oversight Committee has indicated it welcomes additional evidence as its investigation continues.

Iran war:

The United States and Iran exchanged another wave of major military strikes after President Trump declared the ceasefire “over” following Iranian attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. military said it struck roughly 90 Iranian military targets, including missile sites, air defenses, drone facilities, naval assets, and logistics infrastructure along Iran’s coast. Iranian state media reported additional U.S. strikes hours later, including explosions near the Bushehr nuclear power plant, while accusing Washington of targeting civilian infrastructure such as railway bridges. Iran’s Health Ministry said at least 14 people were killed and 78 wounded during two days of U.S. attacks.

According to Axios reporter Barak Ravid, citing a senior U.S. official, the U.S. Air Force deliberately bombed two railway bridges in Iran during Wednesday's strikes. The reported targets appear to match earlier reports of attacks on a rail line in Iran's northeastern Golestan Province near the border with Turkmenistan. The strikes suggest the U.S. expanded its campaign beyond military sites to include transportation infrastructure with potential strategic value. The U.S. has not publicly detailed the operational rationale for targeting the railway bridges.

Iran retaliated by launching attacks against U.S. allies across the Middle East, triggering security alerts in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Jordan. Jordan said it intercepted eight Iranian missiles as the conflict spread beyond Iran itself. The renewed fighting has effectively frozen negotiations that began after the two sides signed a memorandum of understanding in June aimed at ending the war. Those talks are now on hold as Iran holds funeral ceremonies for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed earlier in the conflict. Here is a video of an Iranian missile strike on Bahrain:

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced what it described as the first phase of a broader military campaign targeting U.S. military assets and regional partners. According to the IRGC, Iranian forces struck two U.S. bases in Kuwait, including Ali Al Salem Air Base, as well as U.S. military installations in Bahrain. The claims come as fighting between the United States and Iran continues to escalate following renewed U.S. strikes inside Iran. At the time of the announcement, there was no immediate confirmation from U.S. or Gulf officials regarding the reported attacks or the extent of any damage.

Trump defended the renewed military action, calling it retaliation for Iran’s attacks on shipping and warning that any further escalation would bring an even stronger response. While he questioned whether Iran could be trusted to honor any agreement, he also said Tehran still wants a deal and suggested negotiations could eventually resume. Analysts warned that both sides remain stuck in an unstable position where neither renewed war nor a lasting peace appears likely. Control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil previously passed, remains one of the central disputes driving the conflict.

International news:

Ukrainian drones launched a new wave of strikes on Russian oil infrastructure, setting oil depots and two tankers in the Sea of Azov ablaze as Kyiv intensified its campaign to disrupt Russia's fuel supplies. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the attacks part of Ukraine's strategy of imposing "long-range sanctions" on Russia, while Moscow said the strikes would only prolong the war and expand its military objectives. The escalation came a day after President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would license Ukraine to manufacture Patriot air defense systems, though Ukrainian officials cautioned it could take a year or more before domestic production begins. Both sides continued exchanging drone and missile attacks overnight, underscoring that despite renewed diplomatic efforts, the conflict remains far from a negotiated settlement.

After the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan surprised world leaders by giving each of them an engraved vintage Turkish-made revolver, complete with live ammunition, as a showcase of Turkey’s growing defense industry. The unusual gifts created logistical challenges, with leaders taking different approaches to handling them, including turning them over to police, storing them at embassies, donating them to museums, or waiting for customs clearance. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s gift reportedly included a cleaning kit and 500 rounds of ammunition. Turkey has become one of the world’s largest exporters of small arms, and the gifts highlighted Ankara’s efforts to promote its domestic weapons industry on the global stage.

At least 39 people have died and nine remain missing after severe flooding triggered by Tropical Storm Maysak devastated southern China, including the partial collapse of a reservoir dam in Guangxi province. Rescue crews have evacuated about 130,000 people and are working to reach thousands still stranded, including more than 10,000 students and teachers. Floodwaters also swept animals into surrounding communities, leaving more than 100 zoo animals missing and prompting warnings after snakes escaped from a farm. As recovery efforts continue, China and Taiwan are now preparing for Typhoon Bavi, which is expected to bring another round of heavy rain and flooding this weekend.

At least five children were killed and several others injured after monsoon-triggered landslides swept through an Islamic school inside a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district while classes were underway. Rescue crews continued searching the rubble, fearing additional victims remained buried. The tragedy comes just three days after separate landslides killed at least eight people in the same refugee camps, where more than one million Rohingya refugees live. Authorities have begun relocating more than 1,000 people from high-risk areas, but many refugees are reluctant to leave their makeshift homes despite forecasts of more heavy rain.

The International Criminal Court says it has made a major breakthrough in its investigation into war crimes and genocide committed during Sudan’s civil war in Darfur. Prosecutors say they have obtained new evidence linking atrocities in the cities of al-Geneina and al-Fashir to senior leadership, a critical step toward potentially bringing high-level officials to justice. Investigators have collected testimony describing executions, sexual violence, and attacks against non-Arab communities that U.N. experts say bear the hallmarks of genocide. While no new arrest warrants have been announced, the ICC says it is confident the investigation is moving toward concrete results in the coming months.

Other news:

A Trump-appointed federal judge ordered the release of Karina Alvarez San Juan, a nursing mother of four U.S. citizen children, after ruling that ICE failed to justify detaining her despite its own policy discouraging the detention of pregnant, postpartum, and nursing women. San Juan, who was arrested during a Florida traffic stop and transferred to a Louisiana detention center, had been separated from her three-month-old baby for more than three months while facing what her attorney described as poor detention conditions. The judge found the government failed to demonstrate compliance with its own policies, and the administration offered no additional evidence to support keeping her in custody. The case has intensified scrutiny of ICE's treatment of nursing mothers and family detention practices under the Trump administration.

As the U.S. resumed strikes on Iran, Trump briefly shifted attention to domestic matters by posting photos on Truth Social highlighting his latest renovations to the White House, including new West Wing signage, landscaping, and maple trees. The posts came amid a broader series of messages about the renewed military campaign, drawing criticism from opponents who questioned the timing and praised by supporters who welcomed the changes. The article also notes Trump's extensive redesign of the White House since returning to office, including changes to the Oval Office, Rose Garden, and other historic areas. Meanwhile, Trump continued to defend the renewed strikes on Iran, declaring the ceasefire effectively over while insisting Tehran still wants to negotiate despite the escalating conflict.

U.S. Olympian David Hearn is set to be arraigned on a felony destruction of property charge after prosecutors accused him of damaging the lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during its controversial renovation. Hearn denies the allegations, saying he merely touched an already-detached piece of the pool’s peeling blue coating while observing the project and did not damage anything. He is one of four people charged in connection with removing pieces of the deteriorating liner from the recently renovated pool, which has faced criticism after algae problems and costs ballooned to more than $14 million. Three others charged with misdemeanor property damage have already pleaded not guilty.

A federal crime-fighting task force in Memphis was involved in its second fatal shooting in four days after a DEA agent shot and killed a man while serving a drug warrant at a hotel. Authorities initially said the suspect pointed a handgun at officers after they forced entry when he refused to open the door, though the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation later said only that the situation escalated before the agent fired. The incident follows Sunday’s fatal shooting of 20-year-old Tyrin Johnson by National Guard members assigned to the same Memphis Safe Task Force during a downtown pursuit. Both shootings are now under investigation by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, with findings to be reviewed by the local district attorney.

Bonnie Tyler, the legendary Welsh singer behind hits like "Total Eclipse of the Heart," "Holding Out for a Hero," and "It's a Heartache," has died at the age of 75 after weeks of hospitalization in Portugal. Tyler had recently undergone emergency surgery for a perforated intestine and had spent time in a medically induced coma before her condition worsened. Her signature raspy voice made her one of the defining pop stars of the 1970s and 1980s, earning global acclaim, Grammy nominations, and more than a billion streams for "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Tributes have poured in from across the U.K. and music world, celebrating her enduring legacy and decades-long impact on popular music.

A Brown University economics professor suspects widespread AI cheating after his class’s average score on a take-home midterm reached an unprecedented 96%, with 40 students earning perfect scores, far above the historical average of 65-80%. Believing many students had relied on ChatGPT, he switched the final exam to an in-person test, prompting 27 students to drop or skip the exam, including 22 who had previously scored 100%. Among those who took the final, the average score plummeted to just 48%, reinforcing his belief that generative AI had been used extensively on the midterm. The professor has criticized what he sees as a weak institutional response, warning that widespread AI-enabled cheating undermines learning and could contribute to a “failed society” if universities fail to address it.

Graham Platner has suspended his Democratic Senate campaign in Maine after a woman accused him of sexual assault, an allegation he denies. His withdrawal allows the Maine Democratic Party to replace him before the state's deadline, with party leaders now planning a nominating convention to choose a new candidate to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins. National Democratic leaders and several prominent progressives withdrew their support and warned the party would not invest in the race if Platner remained the nominee. The race is considered one of Democrats' best opportunities to flip a Republican-held Senate seat, making the search for a replacement especially significant in the battle for Senate control.

Patrick Dempsey says he will not run for the U.S. Senate in Maine, despite speculation that he could replace Democratic nominee Graham Platner after Platner's campaign collapsed. The "Grey's Anatomy" actor said he seriously considered a run but ultimately concluded he could have a greater impact through his charitable work with the Dempsey Center, which supports cancer patients and their families. His announcement comes as Maine Democrats scramble to find a new nominee after Platner suspended his campaign amid a sexual assault allegation he denies. The state Democratic Party will now hold a nominating convention to choose a replacement candidate to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 9, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 9, 2026. After the U.S. resumed bombing Iran yesterday evening, Iranian forces retaliated early this morning with strikes on U.S. military facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait.

In Ankara, Türkiye, for a NATO summit, President Donald J. Trump told reporters that Iranian leaders are “scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re, they’re vicious, violent people,” Trump said in his comments earlier Wednesday. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars.… There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, [negotiations are] over.”

The U.S. then launched another round of strikes on Iran to “further degrade” its “ability to threaten freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Oil prices spiked over the course of the day, and Trump appeared to walk back his earlier words, saying: “I think anything that happens is going to be over very quickly, and we’ll only make it safer, including for oil. Oil is going to be very free, very easy, and it’s going to happen very fast. We have the Hormuz Strait; the boats have pulled out. I mean there’s a gusher of oil right now, we have a lot of oil.”

As Tom Nichols noted in The Atlantic, the U.S. emphatically does not have the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran, Not Trump, Is in Control of This War,” the title of Nichols’s article reads. It goes on to say that the Iranians are calling the shots in the war and “are routinely humiliating the American president.” The so-called ceasefire was likely intended to calm oil markets, Nichols says; neither side ever stopped shooting.

Like many other observers, Nichols noted that Trump was “incoherent” in Ankara. He referred to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Japan” and referred to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin.” In an off-with-their-heads! moment, he also announced he had ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off all trade with Spain.

According to Humeyra Pamuk and David Latona of Reuters, Trump repeatedly complained about Spain, whose leftist prime minister Pedro Sánchez refused to let the U.S. use its bases or airspace to attack Iran even though Spain has been dramatically increasing its NATO spending. Trump then told Bessent: “I don’t want to do any more trade with them, alright? Don’t even talk to them. They’re hopeless. They’re bad people.... They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less. I want no business with them.”

As economist Paul Krugman notes in his newsletter, cutting off trade with Spain is simply not going to happen. First of all, Trump does not have the authority to do any such thing. Second, the U.S. actually does a lot of business with Spain, and American businesses would not accept any such cuts. But even more, it is impossible because Spain is part of the European Union. As Krugman notes, this declaration is rather like Europe declaring it is going to cut off all trade with Florida.

Trump’s declaration is a “non-event,” Krugman notes. It is “not something that is real.”

What we should take from it, he says, is that the statement was “completely crazy.” “In any kind of normally functioning political system,” he said, “in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.”

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker agrees. He reposted Trump’s reference to the Islamic Republic of Japan with the comment: “Donald Trump is suffering from dementia. Someone needs to step in before it’s too late.”

Meanwhile, Jack Detsch and Paul McLeary of Politico reported that European officials at the NATO summit reacted to Trump’s announcement of new attacks on Iran just a day after he had praised Iranian leaders with the recognition that they can no longer rely on the United States.

A European official told the Politico reporters: “After seeing what’s happening in Iran and Ukraine, we first of all, have to build our own military might, and then everybody will respect us: Americans, Russians, Iranians or Chinese. The more muscles you have, the less political anger you show.”

A German official was more succinct: “Europeans don’t take Trump seriously any longer.”

Meanwhile, Steven Rattner of MS NOW noted today that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s sons have raised about $13 billion in investment capital from foreign governments, mostly in the Middle East, even as Kushner is working for Trump as special envoy to the region.

More On Trump Administration Obssessions, Lies, Corruption, Oppression  

Heather Delaney Reese, Commentary: It’s a race to the bottom for Donald Trump, Heather Delaney Reese, right, July 8-99, 2026. At 3:43 p.m. local time in Turkey, the President of the United States grabbed the stairs to his plane with his swollen right hand while his bruised left hand hung motionless at his side.

This was not the plane he had arrived on; his newly refurbished Qatari Air Force One, but instead the older presidential aircraft he had used before. The change was sudden and unexpected, and multiple reports indicated it was related to security concerns with Iran, even as Trump denied that was the reason while simultaneously contradicting himself, telling reporters traveling with him, that they are “on a dangerous flight,” and, “I’m number one on their list, before you,” before adding, “But if I go, you go. Perhaps someday you want to change professions.”

This was just a few minutes in Donald Trump’s day. By the time the day was over, he had confused world leaders and countries. Sitting beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier in the day, Trump mistakenly referred to him as “President Putin.” And while discussing the conflict with Iran, he declared, “We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan.” He had also, once again, signaled his determination to seize territory from a fellow NATO ally, and told more easily verifiable lies than perhaps any sitting president in American history. It was another reminder to the world that the most powerful office on Earth is now occupied by a man whose physical and mental condition appears to be deteriorating at an alarming speed, leaving the entire planet in harm’s way.

The NATO summit was supposed to project strength and unity among the Western alliance. Instead, it became a stage for one man’s unraveling. Trump opened his morning by sitting beside NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and declaring, in front of the international press, that he was “very upset with NATO.” He called Spain “a terrible partner” and “a wasted cause,” then turned to his Treasury Secretary and ordered him, on camera, to “cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits.” He added, “Don’t even talk to them. They’re hopeless, bad people.”

He then renewed his demand that the United States take control of Greenland, a territory belonging to NATO ally Denmark. “Greenland is very important for the United States, but it’s not important for Denmark,” he said, before invoking the Nazi occupation: “When Denmark was overrun by the Nazis in less than one day, Hitler beat them out in one day, took over, they asked us to take care of Greenland. In fact, we took Greenland, and then stupidly we gave it back.” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded by saying her country was “ready to defend every inch of NATO including our own territory” and that Greenland is “not for sale.”

But the most consequential moment of the day had nothing to do with alliances or defense spending. It had to do with war. Just three weeks after celebrating the signing of a memorandum of understanding with Iran at the Palace of Versailles, a deal he had called a triumph of his personal diplomacy, Trump declared that the agreement was “over.” He called Iranian leaders “scum” and “sick people.” He said continuing to negotiate was “a waste of time.” And he announced that U.S. forces had struck more than eighty targets inside Iran overnight, with more likely coming. “We hit them very hard last night,” he said. “Probably hit them hard again tonight.” Oil surged more than six percent. The Dow dropped six hundred points.

In the same stretch of remarks, while discussing his relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, he suddenly blurted out, “You know who’s No. 1 on Tic Tac (sic)? I am. I’m number one on TikTok. And all I talk about is how bad communism is.” He claimed to have “like 4 billion views or something like that.” In reality, Trump has roughly sixteen million TikTok followers, which does not place him in the top fifty accounts on the platform. And when some reporters expressed concern about TikTok’s influence, he waved them off: “People have to get their priorities straight.”

That is the sentence that captured the entire day. While ordering strikes on a nation that shares a border with the country he was standing in, while threatening to destroy civilian water and electricity systems, while demanding territory from an ally, the President of the United States bragged about his social media following. He then told the rest of us to get our priorities straight, because we are not sufficiently impressed by his follower count on an app he cannot correctly pronounce.

And all of that happened before he boarded the plane. Aboard Air Force One, after the press had to keep their blinds drawn and the plane shut off their transponder, Trump walked to the press cabin and spoke for fourteen minutes. What came out was a flood of fabrications so constant and so detached from reality that it became difficult to track where one lie ended and the next began.

He told reporters that “probably billions of votes” had disappeared in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. California has roughly twenty-three million registered voters. The entire population of Earth is eight billion. And this is the same man who demands voter ID to protect the integrity of our elections.

He claimed that prescription drug prices had come down “four hundred to five hundred to six hundred percent” under his leadership. A price cannot decline more than one hundred percent. One hundred percent means the price is zero.

Maybe the most telling moment was when he was talking about the conflict between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. Trump said, “I settled after fourteen years and about fifteen million people had their heads chopped off.”

Fifteen million people did not have their heads chopped off. Not in Rwanda. Not in the Congo. Not anywhere on Earth, in any era of recorded history. Fifteen million is roughly the entire current population of Rwanda. The broader Congo conflicts, spanning three decades, killed an estimated five to six million people, overwhelmingly from disease, displacement, and starvation. And he called it a settled war, even though his own administration acknowledged in March that the conflict is still ongoing.

I can’t stop thinking about what it means for us as a society when the President of the United States invents fifteen million beheadings, and says billions of votes vanished. These are lies. And they are coming from the man who controls our nuclear arsenal, commands our military, and is actively waging a war without consideration for his allies or permission from Congress.

And what makes all of it worse, what makes it dangerous instead of just absurd, is that it is not only dishonesty; it is showcasing how quickly his decline is accelerating.

Today, at a NATO summit, on the world stage, the President of the United States called Iran “Japan.” He called Zelenskyy “Putin.” He called TikTok “Tic Tac.” He called the JCPOA the “JCPOC.” He called Erdogan the leader of a “great company.” He stumbled over the word ‘denuclearization,’ first calling it ‘d-nuking’ before finding the actual word. His feet were so swollen that his ankles spilled over the sides of his shoes. His left hand, bruised and covered in makeup, hung limp at his side as he climbed the stairs until it jerked backward in an unnatural motion that was caught on video and circulated around the world. He is eighty years old. And when the White House was asked about all of it, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt issued a statement calling his performance “marathon” and “high-energy,” claiming the president “commanded every room.”

He did not command any room. He alarmed every room he entered. Retired Naval War College professor Tom Nichols said what so many are thinking: “There is something deeply wrong with him. His friends know it, his critics know it. His staff, I’m sure, knows it. The world knows it. World leaders know it. And most importantly, our enemies know it, which is why they don’t take him seriously.” Former Republican Congressman Joe Walsh called for invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Senator Chuck Schumer called it “an embarrassment to our country on the world stage.”

And still, no one around him acts. No one in his inner circle intervenes. No one invokes the constitutional mechanisms that exist for exactly this moment. Because what we are witnessing is not just a president in decline. It is the most significant cover-up and the deepest corruption our government has ever faced at this level. There is nothing in modern American history that compares. Every person propping him up knows exactly what we are all watching. Every enabler who stands behind him in that room. Every cabinet member who clears the press when he begins to lose coherence. Every Republican in Congress who looks the other way. They know. And they do it anyway, because they want to stay in power. That is the entire reason. They are not acting out of patriotism or principle. They are anti-American in the most fundamental sense of the word. They allow and enable all of this to stay close to power and profit.

And while they cover for him, he is destroying the architecture that has kept this country and its allies safe for generations. In a year and a half, he has shattered alliances that took nearly a century to build. Alliances that matter. Alliances that were forged on the graves of people who died to protect them. He called Spain’s people “hopeless” and ordered his Treasury Secretary to cut off all trade. He demanded Greenland from Denmark by invoking the Nazi occupation. He posted a mocking image of the Italian Prime Minister days before sitting across from her. He told the world he only attended this summit because his friend, the authoritarian leader of Turkey, was hosting it. He said he does not need NATO’s help. And he keeps saying it, over and over, that we are “far away” from the rest of the world, that “we have an ocean separating” us from danger.

We were not so far away when Pearl Harbor happened. We were not so far away when the towers fell. Things do not stay within imaginary borders. They never have. And what he is doing right now in Iran is not making us safer. He is attacking a country instead of helping its citizens free themselves from a regime that oppresses them. He is threatening to bomb infrastructure that provides water and electricity to ordinary people. And in doing so, he is creating the next generation of extremists who will grow up knowing that America destroyed their homes and their families. We will be the ones to pay for that. Not him or his enablers. Us. Our children and grandchildren. Our service members. The people who will be sent to fight the wars that his recklessness and his impairment have set in motion.

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

Because that is the truth no one around him will say out loud. He cannot govern this country. He simply cannot do the job. And the people who are supposed to protect us from exactly this kind of danger have chosen instead to protect themselves.

We simply must take back both chambers in November. And when we do, here is what becomes possible. Real subpoena power returns. Not just letters or requests. Not strongly worded statements released to the press and forgotten by morning. Subpoenas with the full force of congressional authority behind them, aimed at every decision, every contract, every military order that was issued by or on behalf of a president who was not capable of making them himself.

Impeachment and removal become possible. And the mechanism is specific. We remove Vance first. We leave the vice presidency empty. Then we remove Trump. And when he goes, the cabinet structure that has been propping him up collapses with him.

And then come the investigations. Not just into this president, but into every member of Congress who made this possible. Even the ones who are no longer serving and the ones who get voted out in November. We need to understand why they did what they did. Were they being threatened? Were their families being threatened? Were they promised money, positions, or protection? Or are they simply terrible people who wanted access to power and did not care what it cost their country? We need those answers. Because what they did was not a difference of opinion. It was not politics as usual. It was the deliberate abandonment of their oath of office and the willing destruction of the country they swore to serve. There must be accountability. Without it, the next version of this will be worse. And there will be a next version, unless we build the precedent now that what they did can never be done again.

We are watching a man who is physically breaking down, mentally unraveling, and morally bankrupt try to hold together a presidency that is being operated, behind the scenes, by people who were never elected and who answer to no one. The only thing standing between them and the future of this country is the midterm election. We have to remember that every seat and every vote matters.

And if today felt like nothing but darkness, look at what happened while Trump was stumbling through his NATO performance. A federal judge ordered the release of five point eight million dollars to E. Jean Carroll, the woman a jury found Trump sexually abused and defamed. Trump’s lawyers appealed within an hour. And then, hours later, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied his request to block the payment. He lost twice on the same case in a single day. Every court that has touched this case, from the trial court to the appeals court to the Supreme Court, has ruled against him. The system held.

And in Florida, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act,” ruling that restrictions on how race and gender can be taught in public universities violate the First Amendment. The court called it “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse.” And the judge who wrote that opinion was appointed by Donald Trump himself, during his first term. Even the judges he put on the bench are drawing the line.

On a day when his decline was visible to the entire world, when he embarrassed his country on the global stage, the courts back home still held firm. And that matters, because it sends a message to every loyalist, every enabler, every member of Congress who thinks they can ride this out and escape the consequences. He is not untouchable. And neither are they.

In November, they will be reminded that the power still belongs to the people. And that is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

More on U.S. Elections, Politics

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Is Failing, He Is Wildly Unpopular, The Polls Are Encouraging, And We Have Elections To Win All Across The Country, Simon Rosenberg, right, July 9, 2026. We have one job now - the general election is here and we need remain focused on helping our battleground House and Senate candidates win.

The proud, plucky patriots of this remarkable community gathered last night for our weekly get together, and as usual, it was a lively affair. A recording and rough transcript can be found here. There were a few key themes we explored, together……

Trump Remains Wildly Unpopular, The Republican Party Is An Incredible Mess, And The Renewed War Will Remind Everyone Of His Many Failures - Renewed war, bad jobs numbers last week, inflation still raging, the ridiculous disappearance of Mitch McConnell, intense infighting, the damage done by the health care cuts becoming more apparent, escalating in your face corruption, Trump pushing absurd nominees - four months before the election the Republican thing is an epic disaster, and voters know it.

Here’s Economist/YouGov this week. Trump drops 5 points over the past week, is 21%-71% with independents, and is now at his lowest level in this poll this cycle:

Polling Is Very Encouraging, And We Need To Stay Focused On Helping Our Candidates Win - The same overperformance we’ve been seeing in local and special elections this cycle is now manifesting in the general election.

Even with a very hard map Democrats have put the Senate in play:

We’ve seen a huge surge in people identifying with the Democratic Party, and PartyID is now at one of the highest levels of the past 35 years:

While we don’t have a lot of House polling, the SuperPAC of the House Dems just released a new poll of NY-17 that tracks what we are seeing in the national and Senate polling - Cait Conley leads Mike Lawler 51%-45%. Lawler’s favorability is 39%-55%, Trump’s is 38%-60%. While this is a partisan poll the data tracks the kind of shifts we are seeing across the country.

There is a lot swirling around in our family right now but we cannot lose sight of the extraordinary opportunity in front of us to take power away and weaken MAGA all across the country. The general election is here. Most of our nominees have been chosen, and we need to do everything we can to help them win. Job one now is to help the 40 or courageous Democrats running in battleground Senate and House races win. Winning or losing will come down to these 40 or so races. We have great candidates - now our job is to help them win.

We Have To Heed Marc Elias’ Wise Words - When Marc came to speak to us a few weeks ago here is what he said:

“The best way to prevent Trump from screwing around with the election is to win by as big a margin as possible.”

Maine - Platner has dropped out, and the Maine Democratic Party is working hard to create a fair and transparent process to select a new nominee under incredibly challenging circumstances. I am proud of how aggressively and adroitly the Maine Democratic Party has acted in recent days for it is year of opportunity for us in Maine - our gubernatorial candidate leads by 15, the generic ballot is +11 Dem - and Susan Collins can be beaten.

We’ve launched a fundraising drive to help Maine Dems cover the costs of their upcoming Convention - an expensive and time consuming process that is draining time and money from their vital general election work. We hit our initial goal of $25,000 raised last night - thank you all. We’ve set a new goal of $50,000 - please consider donating today and help the intrepid leaders of the Maine Democratic Party make this critical process a successful one!

If you want to see who is leading the charge in Maine here is my interview with Maine Chair Charlie Dingman from last fall. He’s a great guy and doing a remarkable job under very challenging circumstances right now:

Lessons From The Platner Disaster - In a series of essays over the past few days I’ve written about some of the current debates happening in our family, including the significance of the emergence of a new, more muscular Platner/Fight Agency/DSA/Bernie brand of politics:

• Some Thoughts On What’s Next For Maine And Our Fight To Flip The Senate
• It’s Time To Move On From The “Democrats Suck” Narrative - It’s Wrong, And We Have An Election To Win
• More Notes On The Importance Of Character In The 2026 Elections

I encourage you to review them when you can, and I do go into depth about it all in my talk if you watch/listen. Here’s the bottom line - I believe there are real limits to Platnerism. While it may work well in Democratic primaries in blue places, it has not proven to be successful in battleground states and districts. Even at his best days of polling Platner had the worst polling of any battleground candidate relative to the partisan lean of his state this cycle, and depending on how you cut the data he may have been the weakest battleground Senate candidate we’ve had over the last three cycles. Abdul El-Sayed, another candidate in his new DSA/Bernie mold, is also underperforming the partisan lean of Michigan right now, as you can see in the Senate data above and also in G. Elliott Morris’ new analysis that I cite in these essays.

I am open to the idea that with Trump things have changed, and that new realities that are birthing a new politics for us. I remain open to it. But the data is the data. G. Elliott Morris estimates that given the partisan lean of Maine Platner should have been up by 15 points, as Hannah Pingree is now in the gubernatorial race. The generic ballot in the NYT’s Maine poll was 53%-42%, +11. Platner’s polling lead averaged 7 points before the primary, 4 points below a generic Democrat. Even at his highest point he was running below a generic Democrat, and was the only battleground candidate in 2026 where that was the case.

As I wrote yesterday of all the gaslighting and bullshitting of the Platner campaign - and we now know it was epic - one of their most pernicious false narratives was about the relative strength of Platner’s politics. For as dominant as we was in the primary he was never a high-performing general election candidate, and in fact, may have been our weakest battleground Senate candidate of the last three cycles relative to the partisan lean of his state. 

More on Maine Successor To Scandal-Tainted Democratic Senate Nominee 

Graham Platner, Maine Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat, speaks during a campaign event.  

 New York Times, ‘A Slow-Rolling Disaster’: Inside the Implosion of the Platner Campaign, Lisa Lerer, Katie Glueck and Michael Kruse, Updated July 9, 2026. Graham Platner’s bid for the Senate inspired progressive Democrats. But the campaign, which he suspended Wednesday, was messy, disorganized and ultimately doomed by a steady drip of scandal. The reporters spoke to more than 30 people for this article, including current and former campaign advisers, Democratic officials and others familiar with Graham Platner and his run for office.

They told him that he was “the guy.”

Last July, in a small town in coastal Maine, a couple of progressive, self-styled recruiters of economic populists showed up at the blue-shingled house of Graham Platner, a little-known oyster farmer and Marine veteran who lived largely off government benefits.

They knew his name from local labor organizers and activists, and they had watched a video on the internet of him talking about oysters. Struck by his left-leaning ideology, his working-class affect and his gravelly voice, they became convinced that he could win a Senate seat in Maine — and quickly persuaded Mr. Platner of the same.

The initial headhunters, Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan, and then a third out-of-state operative they called up to Maine — Morris Katz — told Mr. Platner he was “the one,” a “hero of the movement,” “a historical figure” who could be “leading a revolution,” according to half a dozen people with knowledge of their conversations.

But a clutch of people who cared about Mr. Platner were telling him something else. They worried about his mental health, amid his ongoing efforts to heal from post-traumatic stress disorder after tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They feared this trio of out-of-state operatives was a dangerous combination of inexperienced and overconfident. The worst-case scenario, they thought, wasn’t running for Senate and losing — it was destroying the life he worked hard to build.

Until recently, Mr. Platner had seemed to prove the worriers wrong. His campaign was pumping out viral videos and broadcasting scenes from crowded town halls. He easily pushed a sitting governor out of the Democratic primary as voters embraced his message of economic populism and overlooked his checkered past. Progressives across the country heralded him as a new left-wing hero and saw him as their best opportunity to defeat Senator Susan Collins, a Republican, in a race that could decide control of the Senate.

But behind the scenes, his campaign was messy, disorganized and haphazardly run. Mr. Platner did not disclose explosive, politically damaging secrets to key members of his team. And he was guarded by an insular and zealously protective inner circle of advisers who did not always seem to grasp the seriousness — or strangeness — of what quickly became a steady drip of scandal, according to party strategists, Democratic officials and former staff members.

Repeatedly, Mr. Platner promised there was nothing else damaging from his past to come. And each time, he was wrong.

Mr. Platner, said Ronald Holmes III, his former national finance director, was “seriously flawed.” But he faulted Mr. Platner’s team for failing to “ask the right questions and get honest answers.”

In a statement, the campaign disputed the idea that there was a lack of planning or infrastructure as “simply false,” and said that the team “built the operation, strategy, and organization needed to create one of the strongest grass-roots campaigns Maine has ever seen.”

This report is based on interviews with more than 30 people who interacted with the campaign or Mr. Platner, many of whom were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

In June, as rumors swirled about a damaging story coming from The New York Times featuring several of Mr. Platner’s ex-girlfriends, Mr. Katz called a top national Democratic strategist, insisting that there were no issues in Mr. Platner’s past concerning his treatment of women, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversation.

Mr. Katz said he had asked Mr. Platner directly and repeatedly whether anyone had made sexual assault allegations against him and the candidate had said no, according to two people familiar with the discussion who described it on the condition of anonymity.

“It’s been a slow-rolling disaster instead of all happening at once — it’s been really drawn out and painful and difficult to watch,” added Mr. Holmes, who resigned last fall after raising concerns about the professionalism of the campaign’s senior leadership. “It’s like we’ve been watching a mile-long train derail at four miles an hour.”

That train finally crashed this week, when a woman who had dated Mr. Platner accused him of rape. He denied the allegation, but released a video saying he was taking time to “reflect” on his path forward.

Within roughly 24 hours, Democrats at every level had called for him to withdraw, and the Maine Democratic Party was on a war footing with its own nominee. Ambitious politicians were taking steps to try to succeed him on the ticket. And Democrats across the country wondered how one of their best chances to flip a Senate seat had imploded.A ‘Totenkopf’ tattoo

Before Mr. Platner became the Democrats’ biggest headache, his most ardent supporters spoke about him in strikingly lofty terms.

As his campaign was getting off the ground, Mr. Moraff likened him to Barack Obama in conversations with senior Democratic officials, according to two people with knowledge of the private conversations.

But there were early signs that Mr. Platner had serious political liabilities. Less than two weeks after he announced his bid, his wife, Amy Gertner, approached a top campaign aide. She wanted to disclose that Mr. Platner had been exchanging sexual messages with multiple women.

Mr. Platner was about to hold a campaign event with Senator Bernie Sanders, his first major endorser and a personal hero. Ms. Gertner told Genevieve McDonald, then the campaign’s political director, that she worried Mr. Sanders would think less of her husband if he later found out about the exchanges with other women, Ms. McDonald recalled.ImageAmy Gertner and Graham Platner walk arm in arm along the side of a road at night.Amy Gertner and Graham Platner canvassing in Ellsworth, Maine, last November. Credit...Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

Was that the extent of the controversy in Mr. Platner’s personal life or was there more to worry about? Campaign officials appeared not to know.

A top Platner adviser had promised a national Democratic strategist that they would not launch a campaign without completing a full investigation of Mr. Platner’s background. But, according to two people familiar with the campaign’s operations, no extensive effort was undertaken in one of the marquee races of the midterm cycle.

Instead, they conducted an expedited review, resulting in a short risk-assessment memo.

Mr. Platner’s campaign said that a research firm produced a vetting memo of nearly 50 pages that included searches of news reports, social media posts and public documents. They did not do exhaustive interviews with Mr. Platner.

“I said, ‘None of this will or should stop him from becoming a U.S. senator,’” Mr. Moraff told The Wall Street Journal.

But others had access to significantly more damaging information about Mr. Platner’s past.

In Northern Virginia, Lyndsey Fifield, a former girlfriend of Mr. Platner’s, texted a private group chat of friends last summer about a tattoo on his chest widely recognized as a Nazi symbol. He had gotten it while serving in the military and referred to it, she has said, as “my Totenkopf.”

The “Nazi tattoo on his chest,” Ms. Fifield suggested, was going to be a problem.

The existence of the tattoo, however, did not immediately become public. In the meantime, Mr. Platner’s campaign began to find an audience. He drew bigger and bigger crowds, crisscrossing the state for events and spending hours gabbing on podcasts.

Yet controversies kept arising. In October, CNN and other news outlets uncovered a trove of incendiary online posts that Mr. Platner had written between 2009 and 2021, which included dismissive comments about rape and sexual assault in the military.

Mr. Platner apologized, and has urged the public not to judge him for his worst moments on the internet.

The lack of disclosure about his past made Ms. McDonald, a former state legislator and lobbyist, uncomfortable. She quit the campaign in October.

Around the same time, photos of Mr. Platner’s tattoo from his wife’s Facebook account began leaking to news organizations.

The Platner team, hoping to defuse the potential damage, released video footage of a shirtless Mr. Platner with the tattoo visible to Pod Save America, a liberal podcast that supported his bid.

In a friendly interview, Mr. Platner dismissed the issue as little more than pearl-clutching by his opponents. “I am not a secret Nazi,” he said. “Lifelong opponent.”

At the time, Mr. Platner said in a statement that he did not know that his tattoo resembled a Nazi symbol until it became a campaign issue.

More staffers, including Mr. Holmes, left the campaign.“It’s not that complicated”

For months, there was little indication that any of the controversy was seriously hurting his candidacy.

As Mr. Platner’s star rose through the winter and early spring, Mr. Katz was privately promoting him as a future presidential candidate for as soon as 2028, if he won his Senate bid.

When Janet Mills, his chief Democratic primary opponent, produced tough ads featuring his comments about women and rape, it did little to change the trajectory of the race. Poll after poll showed Mr. Platner leading Ms. Mills, a two-term governor who was supported by national Democratic leaders, by double-digits.

Mr. Platner built a movement-like following, emerging as one of his party’s most powerful online fund-raisers. His campaign constructed an image of a working-class combat veteran who had returned to Maine to rebuild his life, who spoke movingly about the failings of American foreign policy and rallied voters with his promises to take on a political system dominated by corporations and billionaires. Democrats flocked to his town hall meetings.

Publicly, at least, the candidate expressed nothing but bravado.

In an April interview, he dismissed any jitters about going up against Ms. Mills — a former prosecutor — in a series of planned public debates.

The Triad via The Bulwark, Opinion: Progressives Are Mad at the Wrong People, Jonathan V. Last, right, July 9, 2026. The last Graham Platner piece we’ll ever have to muddle through together.

1. Platner Discourse. A certain type of progressive is very upset about the Graham Platner implosion.

Who are they upset at?

The Democratic party. Or Israel. Or oligarchs. Whatever. Some examples:Here’s more from Matt Stoller:

Let's be clear, the goal of pushing Platner aside is to destroy the agenda on which he was elected, which is about taming oligarchy and reorienting us from endless war. That is why the Maine Democrats aren't saying 'let's respect Platner voters and transition to someone else,' they are taking a sanctimonious 'he gets NO say in ANYTHING.' Those are not the actions of people who want to win a Senate seat, those are the actions of nasty insiders claiming factional power for themselves.

Here’s David Sirota:The bad guys in the Graham Platner saga are: corporate Democrats, oligarchs, Neera Tanden, AIPAC, Israel, the media, the elites, and the establishment.

I have a question: Why aren’t these people angry at Graham Platner?

There is one person and one person only to blame for the disaster unfolding in Maine: Graham Cunningham Platner.

This asshole knew who he was and what he’d done. He put himself forward anyway. He lied—over and over—to the public, to his supporters, to the media. He asked people to prostitute themselves for him and cover for him. He encouraged the Bernie Bro cult that coalesced around him.

Now everyone who went out on a limb for the guy is cut off. The Maine Democratic Party is in an impossible situation. And Susan Collins is seventeen weeks from her election and she doesn’t even have an opponent.

Think about that for a minute: In the single best chance to flip a Republican Senate seat, Democrats don’t even have a candidate.

This wasn’t a Neera Tanden–engineered coup. Graham Platner did it.

Whatever you want to call that wing of the progressive caucus—tankies, the Revolutionary Workers League, you pick—they ought be angry at Platner. He’s the guy they put their trust in; he’s the guy who did this.

Or maybe not? Maybe there are some other people who are responsible for the debacle?

The NYT has a postmortem on the Platner experiment and it wasn’t Platner’s idea to put himself forward. He was recruited by a trio of progressive operatives who saw him as a vehicle they could use to beat the Democratic establishment:

Last July, in a small town in coastal Maine, a couple of progressive, self-styled recruiters of economic populists showed up at the blue-shingled house of Graham Platner, a little-known oyster farmer and Marine veteran who lived largely off government benefits.

They knew his name from local labor organizers and activists, and they had watched a video on the internet of him talking about oysters. Struck by his left-leaning ideology, his working-class affect and his gravelly voice, they became convinced that he could win a Senate seat in Maine — and quickly persuaded Mr. Platner of the same.

The initial headhunters, Dan Moraff and Leanne Fan, and then a third out-of-state operative they called up to Maine — Morris Katz — told Mr. Platner he was “the one,” a “hero of the movement,” “a historical figure” who could be “leading a revolution,” according to half a dozen people with knowledge of their conversations.

But a clutch of people who cared about Mr. Platner were telling him something else. They worried about his mental health, amid his ongoing efforts to heal from post-traumatic stress disorder after tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. They feared this trio of out-of-state operatives was a dangerous combination of inexperienced and overconfident. The worst-case scenario, they thought, wasn’t running for Senate and losing — it was destroying the life he worked hard to build.

Yikes. This dovetails with earlier reporting from the New Yorker in September 2025. . .

“Within a few minutes of talking to him, I was, like, ‘This guy owes it to the country to run for Senate,’ ” [Morris] Katz recalled, of his first meeting with Platner.

. . . as well as our own Lauren Egan’s coverage from last month.

I understand getting excited about a new political figure and seeing the potential upsides. Especially if you’re an operative like Katz. That’s your livelihood. It’s why you get up in the morning.

But these progressive-labor-Bernie-Bro-whatevers were wrong. They picked a compromised guy. And instead of owning that fact and working to clean up the mess they made, they apparently tried to use Platner’s leverage to get another of their preferred candidates to succeed him. They had their candidate announcing his withdrawal yesterday and blaming his predicament on the “corporate media system” and “political establishment.”

Uh, no dude. You’re out of the race because you never should have run in the first place. You have no business holding political power. And the trio who asked you to run and claimed you were a world-historical figure waiting to happen were blinded by some combination of ideological interests, hubris, power-grabbing, or your mollusca kavorka.

I’m pretty pink when it comes to oligarchs, business regulation, and social-safety net stuff. But I do not trust anyone who talks about “the uniparty” and believes that there is no meaningful difference between the Republican and Democratic establishments.

The Democratic establishment is compromised in many ways—just as all establishments are. And during the Trump era it has frequently been unequal to the moment.

But it’s still a fundamentally liberal institution. It is committed to the rule of law, to pluralism, to processes.

There is a kind of progressive who views politics through a truly Marxist perspective in which everything is about the dialectic between capital and labor. And in this cosmic drama it hardly matters if Trump or Chuck Schumer is in charge because both of them are avatars of das Kapital.

In the view of these folks, defeating Republicans isn’t the point. The point is taking control of the Democratic party so that the workers can eventually win a glorious final victory.

In this way, these labor-progs are a lot like MAGA. They believe that seizing power from the Democratic party is the necessary first step—and if that means losing some winnable races to Republicans along the way, then so what? To these people, Susan Collins and Janet Mills are indistinguishable.

In normal times, this approach would merely be wrong. But we do not operate in normal times. We live under the shadow of an authoritarian attempt. Which makes such errors of judgment downright dangerous.

Leave a comment2. Not Always Right

Some people are dunking on me for a piece I wrote in May in which I argued that, if Platner beat Susan Collins, he would become an instant contender for the Democratic nomination.

I think maybe people didn’t actually read the piece? Because I certainly wasn’t saying that I wanted Platner to run for president or that he would be the nominee:

Right now, I give him something like a 1-in-3 chance to be the Democratic nominee. Before I make the case (and lay out some counterarguments), let me say this up front as clearly as I can: This is not a brief for (or against) Platner. I’m only trying to analyze what likely will happen, I’m not arguing for what should happen. . . .

Democrats like him and more than that, they seem to be invested in him. And not just in Maine. He’s the candidate Democrats all across the country are excited about this year. And for some of these folks, liking Platner is becoming a loyalty test. If you don’t love the guy, you’re suspect.

In this atmosphere, contrary evidence hardens his support. When people bring up, say, the Totenkopf tattoo, it is viewed by Platner supporters not as a reasonable caution flag, but as more of a reason to support him. They want to defend him.

That’s a powerful thing but I will be honest: I do not like it. Not one bit. I’ve seen that movie before. . . .

Is giving a guy from Maine who’s never won even a statewide election a 1-in-3 chance to be his party’s presidential nominee too bullish? Probably.

Maybe the right answer is 1-in-8. Or even 1-in-20. But the point is that thirty weeks from now, Graham Platner is likely to be a major national figure and one of perhaps fifty people in the country with a realistic shot to become president.

This was my conclusion: “If Platner beats Susan Collins like a drum—and I think he will—he goes straight to the head of the class of 2028 contenders and I don’t care what he says about his interests.”

Platner was not able to beat Susan Collins like a drum so I was wrong about that, the condition was not met. There’s an exception to every rule.

But I stand by the broader point that the Democratic base is champing at the bit for a fresh-faced outsider. Maybe someone else can fill that void or maybe nobody will emerge. But this was something the Platner team was clearly thinking about. And the fact that someone with this many red flags could get the support he did against a popular incumbent governor is evidence that the scenario I described is possible in 2028.

I think I was always pretty clear about my views of Platner, the man?

In June, I wrote this about him:

Platner is not—to our best knowledge and belief—a Nazi. He is not—to our best knowledge and belief—a rapist.

What is he? He’s somewhere on the scale between “jackass” and “sonofabitch.” At the least—the very least—he lied and continues to lie about knowing what his Nazi tattoo was. He was at one point a toxic boyfriend. Until recently he was betraying the trust of his wife.

That was true at the time and we can update it today: To our best knowledge and belief there now are credible allegations of rape against him.

Anyway: I am happy that Platner is gone and that the Great and Good People of Maine will not have to choose between sending a lying alleged rapist or a Trump enabler to the Senate. 

U.S. Governance

New York Times, Can Trump’s Arch Be So Tall? A Panel May Redefine a Law to Get to Yes, Luke Broadwater, Emily Badger and Junho Lee, July 9, 2026. The proposed 250-foot arch would violate a height limit on Washington structures under the traditional reading of the law. But the panel, now led by the president’s allies, has other ideas.

For decades, the planning commission reviewing construction projects in Washington has stood by the principle that the federal law limiting the height of buildings in the capital applies to federal projects.

But now that President Trump has proposed building a giant Triumphal Arch, the commission, which is led by Trump allies, is considering a different, more lenient view.

On Thursday, the National Capital Planning Commission will consider a new interpretation of the 1910 Height of Buildings Act: that it was never meant to apply to federal projects, and certainly not to Mr. Trump’s 250-foot arch.

The act “does not reference federal buildings,” the Interior Department wrote in a memo submitted to the panel, arguing that “Congress did not intend” for the law to be interpreted the way the commission had read it for nearly 90 years.

The effort to get around the Height of Buildings Act is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to bypass federal law or norms in pursuit of the president’s breakneck construction spree, which involves more than $1 billion in construction. If the commission changes its interpretation of the height law to ease approval of the arch, that would likely prompt a new legal fight, adding to the numerous lawsuits already trying to stymie the president’s projects.

The panel is set to approve preliminary site and building plans for the arch. A final approval would come later, and the future of the project remains uncertain. A group of Vietnam War veterans has sued to stop construction, citing the lack of congressional approval for the project and arguing that the arch would obstruct the carefully composed views between the Lincoln Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery and Robert E. Lee’s home.How Trump’s Proposed Arch Would Change D.C.

The Times created a 3-D model of the 250-foot monument to show how it would affect a symbolic sightline.

Democrats have said that the project violates three federal laws, including the Commemorative Works Act, which governs monuments on federal land in Washington, and a 1912 law that says buildings or structures “shall not be erected” on federal land in the capital “without express authority of Congress.”

But the Height of Buildings Act, which generally does not allow buildings more than 130 feet tall in Washington, has become the latest complication.

Will Scharf, the Trump-appointed chairman of the commission who also serves as the White House staff secretary, surprised many planning and architecture experts in the city by arguing last month that the height law did not apply to the federal government, and should be viewed instead as part of Washington’s local zoning code. Since the law was passed, and since the planning commission began applying it in 1938, it has seldom if ever been treated that way.ImageThe 250-foot arch would vastly exceed the general 130-foot limit on the height of buildings in Washington under the 1910 Height of Buildings Act.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

“For the vast majority of the history of the law, it only applied to the federal government,” said Harriet Tregoning, a former planning director for the city.

There was no locally elected government in Washington when the Height Act was passed in 1910. The city was run by federally appointed commissioners, and by Congress. Washington gained its current measure of local governance only in the 1970s. The idea that the height restrictions were a local zoning matter that the city imposed on the federal government — raising concerns about federal supremacy, in Mr. Scharf’s view — inverts that history. In fact, if the locally elected D.C. Council wanted to change the law today, it could not. Only Congress can.

The act has preserved the airy horizontal feel of the capital, where wide-open views and intentionally planned sightlines point to major civic buildings and monuments. The result has been the preservation of a rare major American city with no skyscraper — and few buildings taller than about 12 stories, even downtown.Buildings taller than 150 feet in Washington

The law has tied the height of buildings to the width of streets, allowing buildings up to 130 feet on the city’s broadest avenues. Buildings on narrower residential streets are capped at 90 feet, though local zoning laws often enforce lower heights. And buildings up to 160 feet are allowed on part of Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the White House. In 2014, a modest change to the law allowed an additional 20 feet of “penthouse” structures intended to be less visible from the street.

As a practical matter, it would have been hard for Congress to preserve the city’s low-slung skyline by limiting the height of buildings used by private businesses and local residents, but not the height of buildings used for federal purposes. Those uses can also shift over time. The Trump administration is currently working to offload a lot of federal property to private buyers.

The original text of the height act mentions no exception for federal buildings.

“What’s the citation that they are relying on?” said Nancy MacWood, a former chair of the Committee of 100 on the Federal City, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on planning and preservation in the capital. “I can’t find anything. Nobody else can find anything.”

The Interior Department memo points to an earlier 1899 law passed by Congress that did include an exception to height limits in the city for federal and municipal buildings. The 1910 law in force today repealed conflicting laws. But the administration argues that it did not explicitly repeal the federal exception, because it said nothing about federal buildings.Meghan Hottel-Cox, the general counsel for the National Capital Planning Commission, wrote her own memo explaining that the commission had consistently applied the law’s reference to “all buildings in the District of Columbia” to federal projects. And the commission has done that in a number of cases, including when reviewing the F.B.I. building on Pennsylvania Avenue that tops out at 160 feet.

A staff report prepared for Thursday’s meeting recommends that the commissioners ask the administration to revise the arch to comply with the law.

The staff suggested, however, that a 250-foot tall structure could still be possible. The dimensions would have to be adjusted, lowering the main structure to 130 feet, with a 20-foot observation level set back above it. The plan would shift more of the project’s height into the statue on top that would count as an architectural embellishment and not part of the building.  

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: What Happens When Trump Voters Realize They Want the Same Thing Progressives are Working For?Thom Hartmann, right, July 9, 2026. They don't agree on politics. They do agree that the American Dream is slipping away, and that could change everything…

Democratic primary elections, in particular, are showing us America is both in the midst of a deep crisis and is on the verge of what could be transformational, positive, life-altering political and economic change comparable to FDR’s New Deal.

It became obvious, really, in the first minute of New Year’s Day this year, when two things happened at once vividly showing us all the contrast and the crises around where America stands right now.

In a long-abandoned subway station deep under lower Manhattan, progressive Democrat Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City, largely on the simple promise that New York could once again become “a city we can afford.”

And at that very same midnight — because Republicans refused to extend them — the enhanced Obamacare subsidies expired for more than twenty million Americans, jacking their health insurance prices overnight into stratospheric amounts that are now pushing families to skip pills, skip meals, and skip the doctor entirely.

One honest man took office swearing that he’d help ordinary people afford to live, and at that same moment, millions of working class people lost the ability to afford their insurance because Republican politicians consistently put their morbidly rich individual and corporate donors above all else.

Even Newsweek, no one’s idea of a radical rag, noticed the thing our media generally misses: the same cost-of-living fury that carried Donald Trump back into the White House in 2024 was the same fury Mamdani rode to City Hall a year later.

When Louise and I lived in a boat in a marina in Washington, DC back during the 2016 election year, we knew quite a few people retired from the Navy and Coast Guard who generally called themselves Republicans, but were split between Trump and Bernie for their vote. Why? Because both were promising real, meaningful change.

I’ve told you before about my dad. Carl came home from the Second World War, finally got a good union job in a tool-and-die shop in Lansing, and on that one paycheck he raised us four boys, bought a house, put a new car in the driveway every couple of years, sent us toward college, took my mom on vacation, and retired with a pension that let the two of them travel the world.

That wasn’t wealth: that was the ordinary American middle class, and in 1981 — the year Reagan decided to destroy our unions, cut those “socialist benefits,” and freeze the minimum wage — two-thirds of us Americans lived in that middle class on a single income. Today it’s closer to only 40 percent of us, and it takes two full paychecks to reach what one paycheck used to buy.

Particularly over the past few years, America has politically bifurcated: One side is characterized by a guy in a red hat who’s dead certain that brown-skinned immigrants took his job and he wants them gone. The other is a young organizer knocking on doors for Medicare for All and tuition-free college.

Every cable network, every consultant, every party fundraiser will tell you these two are the opposite poles of our politics, the “far right” and the “far left” of our political spectrum. But in reality, they’re both looking at the same problem.

They’re both grieving the very same dead dream, reaching up for what my father had when I was a kid: a middle-class life. The difference is that one of them — the MAGA true believer — has been handed a Black/Hispanic/queer/female scapegoat while the other — the progressive — understands that we need to stop America’s oligarchs from their pillage.

But the financial pain underneath, the force driving both to want change, is largely identical, and it’s real.

The whole economic case Republicans made for mass deportation was that clearing out the immigrants would hand American workers a raise. It ignored the Republican destruction of the American union movement, and amplified the exploitable, often-nascent racism many in the GOP’s base already carried.

Trump’s own Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, put it plainly, insisting that illegal immigration had for years “artificially suppressed wages” and gutted the prospects of working-class Americans, especially young white men. That was the promise: a blue-collar wage boom, with a dose of cruelty to speed it up.

Then the receipts came in.

A Brookings analysis found that ICE operations wiped out roughly 668,000 jobs, and that somewhere between 51,000 and 297,000 of those jobs had belonged to workers born right here in the United States. Construction, hospitality, and food service, the very industries where those anxious young men actually work, got hit the hardest.

University of Colorado economists Chloe East and Elizabeth Cox went looking for the promised windfall from Miller’s imprisonment and deportation campaign and couldn’t find it. There was no boost in jobs or wages for U.S.-born workers.

If anything, the crackdown hurt working-class men in immigrant-heavy trades like construction, because when you rip a non-citizen bricklayer off a job site you also idle the American electrician and project manager who needed that wall to go up.

So the red-hat guy’s pain is real. His paycheck really did shrink, his rent really is crushing him, his kid really can’t afford the college my dad could.

But the story he was sold about who did it to him is a lie, the same lie they sold his great grandfather in the 1920s when they swore it was Black people coming for his job, or his father in the 1980s when Limbaugh said it was the “Feminazis” who wanted to displace him, now just repackaged with browner faces, tradwives, fake Christianity, and a border.

The pain of being a working person in an America — where Republicans have all but destroyed the union movement and bipartisan neoliberalism has moved millions of jobs overseas — is genuine: but the villain is manufactured. And it’s manufactured by the same people quietly emptying working people’s wallets.

You can see the shared wound the moment you take the labels off and ask people about what actual policies they support instead of which political tribe they belong to.

The Century Foundation surveyed working-class Americans, including the ones who voted for Trump in droves, alongside their college-educated neighbors who lean Democratic. On the policies that actually shape their economic lives the two groups were highly aligned, both of them overwhelmingly backing populist economics and hard limits on billionaire and corporate power.

The rest of the polling tells the same story. A CNN survey this spring found 76 percent of Americans naming the cost of living as their single biggest economic problem, with about three-quarters saying the system is rigged for the powerful and three-quarters saying it’s harder to get ahead than it was a generation ago.

A January New York Times and Siena poll found 65 percent of voters say a middle-class life is simply out of reach, and 77 percent say it’s harder to reach now than it was for their parents. That isn’t a “left” or “right” number: that’s my dad’s vanished paycheck and benefits, expressed as despair, across the whole country.

Which is precisely why the morbidly rich oligarchs and their lickspittle politicians, and the billionaire-owned media, work so hard to keep us in these neat little categories and at each others’ throats.

The irony is that while progressives have properly identified who killed the middle class (the title of my new book), Republican voters believe something entirely different, a story America’s oligarchs have spent literally billions to instill in them.

One rightwing story is that the enemy of the middle class are the Democratic politicians who Republicans are now calling communists: this very week, as I wrote yesterday, Trump is out branding Democrats as dangerous “communists” while democratic-socialist candidates keep winning primaries on Medicare for All, free college, and good union jobs.

And in a coarser corner of the rightwing world where racism is as much an animator (or more) than economic pain, the enemy Republicans are pushing are brown- or Black-skinned immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country, eating your dogs and cats, and coming for your daughter and your job.

Both are aimed at the same exhausted, squeezed, frightened American who’s living in a rightwing bubble, trapped by Fox “News” as his information source or constantly spoon-fed rightwing outrage via the secret algorithms driving billionaire-owned social media.

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And as long as those Americans are glaring sideways at a “democratic socialist” or an immigrant, they aren’t looking at the American oligarchs who actually ran off with all their money.

Because somebody did run off with it. The RAND Corporation added up the damage and found that roughly 50 trillion dollars was quietly shifted from the bottom 90 percent of us to the top 1 percent between 1975 and 2018. Since then it’s up to around $80 trillion.

If wages had simply kept pace with what American workers produce, the typical worker today would be pulling in well over a hundred thousand dollars a year instead of around fifty, and the economic force driving racism and bigotry would be much weaker.

That money didn’t evaporate. It didn’t get taken by a busboy or a barista or a bricklayer. It was hauled off, in broad daylight, by the architects of forty-five years of Reaganism and neoliberalism, the ones who broke the unions, shipped the factories overseas, and turned healthcare and college loans into profit centers.

That’s who took my father’s single paycheck: not the woman picking our lettuce. Not the kid who just wants to see a doctor or get an education without going bankrupt.

The entire con depends on voters on the right never turning around and realizing they’re mourning the same identical loss that progressive Democrats are trying so hard to repair.

The instant working people stop asking “who’s the enemy who looks, prays, or loves differently than I do” and start asking “who took my dad’s paycheck,” the whole game is over.

That’s the one conversation the billionaires and their bought-off lickspittle politicians are truly terrified of.

So have it. Have it at the summer picnic with your MAGA brother-in-law and your progressive niece sitting side by side, and watch what happens when you skip the slogans and ask them both what kind of country they actually want to live in.

You’ll find (outside of the unrepentant and largely unreachable racists) that they want the very same America back, the one where an honest week’s work bought a decent life.

Then stop grieving it and start organizing to take it back, because it was never lost. As I lay out in Who Killed The American Dream?, it was stolen, and stolen things can be recovered.

Michael Fanone Show, Opinion: Mitch McConnell is STILL Missing What the Hell is Going On? Michael Fanone and Peter Rothpletz, July 9, 2026. On Tuesday, I wrote about the bizarre information blackout surrounding Kentucky Senator and anthropomorphic turtle Mitch McConnell. He’s been hospitalized since June 14, with no diagnosis disclosed. Since then, the story has moved.

First, here’s where things stand. McConnell is now in his fourth week in the hospital. On the morning of June 14, emergency crews were dispatched to his Capitol Hill townhouse for an unconscious person, and dispatch audio indicated CPR was underway for a possible cardiac arrest. He’s 84, and hasn’t cast a vote since June 11.

His absence has already changed at least one outcome in the Senate — the resolution directing Trump to pull US troops out of the Iran war passed the Senate because McConnell wasn’t there to vote against it. His office’s cumulative public disclosures across 24 days amounts to three statements, the latest being that he “continues to improve, and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters.”

Now the new developments…

The governor of Kentucky has formally asked what’s going on. On Wednesday, Andy Beshear sent a letter to McConnell’s office requesting a health update. His language was careful and, frankly, hard to argue with: “As Governor — and a fellow public official who understands the commitment we’ve made to the people we serve — I am requesting the Senator provide an update on his current health status.” He added that “allowing speculation to continue in the media is not fair to the Senator or to Kentuckians,” and said Kentuckians have grown “increasingly concerned.” Note what Beshear is doing there: he’s offering McConnell’s office the friendliest possible exit. So far, no response.

The phone-call testimonials turn out to be a coordinated op. In my last piece, I noted that Scott Jennings’ twenty-minute call recap read like an over-rehearsed alibi. The Daily Caller obtained an email from McConnell’s own office showing that the strikingly similar statements from Senate Majority Leader John Thune (“lengthy and substantive conversation”), Majority Whip John Barrasso, and Jennings — each describing phone calls covering the same grab bag of national security topics and the Maine Senate race — were being collected and circulated by McConnell’s staff as part of a unified response. Even CNN’s own conservative commentator Brianna Lyman noticed this. Every one of these accounts covered everything except his medical condition, which she called “a weird talking point.”

His own colleagues say they’re in the dark. Senator Mike Lee, asked about the swirl of speculation, put it about as plainly as a member of the same party can: “Many of us aren’t speaking about Mitch McConnell’s condition because we know nothing about his condition.”

The scene at McConnell’s home is quiet — maybe too quiet… One of McConnell’s neighbors by his Capitol Hill townhouse told the Daily Beast she watched paramedics take him away on June 14 and has seen no one at the residence since — no staff, no visitors, no family. That tracks with earlier reporting that his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, remained in China during the initial weeks of his hospitalization, seeing no need for an immediate return. I’ll leave the family’s choices to the family, but none of it paints the picture of a man on the mend.

And the succession question has grown teeth. Under Kentucky’s 2024 vacancy law, a seat that opens before August 3rd triggers a special election, while a vacancy after it simply leaves the seat empty until the November winner, presumably Trump-endorsed Republican nominee Andy Barr, takes over in January. That’s because Kentucky has a law forbidding the governor from making appointments when a statewide office goes vacant.Subscribed

What’s new is that election-law experts are now flagging that the 2024 law may itself be unconstitutional. Section 152 of the Kentucky Constitution says the governor appoints when a statewide office goes vacant, and that conflict has never been tested in court. If the seat opens in the next few weeks, Kentucky could face an emergency state Supreme Court showdown.

Now, for all the “Massie is waiting in the wings” talk — including from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who’s endorsed him for the seat — Massie himself has not said he’d run in a special election, and whoever won one would serve only until January, when the November winner takes the seat anyway.

So that’s where things stand as we near the end of week four.

None of this requires believing any internet rumor about McConnell’s condition, and I don’t. The man served in that building for four decades, he’s entitled to privacy in a medical crisis, and I hope he recovers. But he is also one of a hundred votes in a 53–47 Senate, and Kentuckians — who are owed representation — deserve answers. And let’s be honest: I don’t believe for a second that Republicans would let this shit slide if a Democrat was behind it.

Public Notice, News and Opinion: Trump's red-baiting won't work, Paul Waldman, July 9, 2026. He's campaigning on an even dumber version of McCarthyism.

into an unexpected win. Deploying his two favorite emotions — hate and fear — he used his bully pulpit to flood the media with warnings about a dire threat to all that Americans hold dear.

It was 2018, and the threat was “caravans” of migrants heading through Central America, supposedly on their way to lay waste to our nation and even murder you and your family.

But despite Trump’s unmatched ability to seize public attention, the voters just didn’t buy it, and the sweeping Democratic victory that had been predicted came to pass.

With this year’s midterms just four months away, Trump is trying it again. But instead of migrant caravans, this year’s terrifying menace is … communism!

Given how Trump has moved the word into such heavy rotation, it deserves the exclamation point. In a series of recent speeches, not to mention his off-the-cuff remarks to reporters, Trump has brought up communism dozens of times, in both broad terms (“America will never be a communist country. Won’t happen. Communism is a loser, and it always will be”) and specifically with regard to the opposition.

Democrats, Trump claims, “are turning communist themselves. It’s becoming a communist party. These are not social Dumocrats, these are hardcore, godless communists. They’re godless communists.”

Other Republicans are following his lead. According to the Washington Post, mentions of “communism” from prominent conservatives on podcasts and social media are up 43 percent so far this year, and that will only increase as Trump continues his red-baiting.

If the rhetoric sounds outdated, that may be because in Trump’s mind it’s still the 1980s, when the dashing young real estate investor was all over the tabloid gossip pages and Ronald Reagan was taking it to the Russkies. But for most Americans, communism is a story out of history books or a fading memory.

You’d have to be at least 50 to have been aware of communism when the Warsaw Pact still existed — which excludes almost two-thirds of Americans. Of the few remaining communist countries, China is in some ways more capitalist than we are, and no one sees Cuba or North Korea as a threat to take over America.

Nevertheless, Trump always argues that external adversaries pale next to the terrifying threat from within — that is, Americans who don’t support him. Now he’s presenting voters with a syllogism: There is an ascendant wing of populist leftists within the Democratic Party, some of whom call themselves socialist; those Democrats are actually not socialists but communists; therefore all Democrats are communists.

It’s ludicrous, sure — but so are many arguments Trump has made, some of which were persuasive to significant numbers of voters. But refighting the grand battle between communism and capitalism won’t be easy.Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comTrump really thinks he's cooking by running against "communism" and saying it over and over during his speechesSun, 05 Jul 2026 03:41:56 GMTView on Bluesky

First, that particular argument ended decades ago, and capitalism pretty much won. Even the Americans who today call themselves “socialist” or “democratic socialist” are mostly Scandinavian-style social democrats. They aren’t advocating the abolishment of private property and the creation of a Politburo to run the government; what they want is essentially a free enterprise system with more robust regulation and a more comprehensive system of social supports.

More importantly, the argument now is about which version of capitalism we ought to have — and Trump is trying to create what may be the worst possible one.

Look at the list of economic concerns that are putting Americans in such a sour mood. High prices top the list, and though governments of all kinds have struggled to keep inflation in check over the last few years, capitalism doesn’t seem to have an answer.

The cost of health insurance keeps rising — and thanks to budget cuts delivered by Trump and Republicans, millions of Americans can no longer afford coverage.

We have a housing affordability crisis, which is after all just a function of supply and demand. Even Republicans are trying to find a way for the government to step in and use its power to address the failure of the market (Trump called the bipartisan housing bill “a big yawn”).

The idea that the economic system is rigged in favor of powerful interests is so obvious that it’s almost impossible to deny; three-quarters of Americans in a recent CNN poll agreed that it’s rigged. While Trump himself made that argument in 2016, he has done everything he could to rig it even further: cutting taxes for the wealthy, slashing regulations on behalf of corporations, eliminating consumer protections, and targeting every program in sight that offers respite or benefit to those without power, from food stamps to rural development to protection for people with disabilities.A golden age for scammersA golden age for scammersPaul Waldman·July 5, 2025Read full story

At the same time, Trump has allied himself closely with the increasingly unpopular tech industry and its repellent leaders, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. The ludicrous wealth of these centibillionaires has become a symbol of capitalism’s injustice and tendency toward inequality, while Americans grow livid about rapacious tech companies planning to eliminate their jobs with AI and planting data centers on every available patch of land.

On top of that, Trump has rapidly accelerated almost every aspect of what we might call the Scam Economy. Crypto schemes, ubiquitous gambling, hidden fees for everything, a mountain of social media cons — this administration’s attitude is to let it all bloom (especially if Trump and his family can cash in).

To add insult to injury, he has pardoned a long list of thieves, fraudsters, and inside traders. Why not, when he himself is one of the biggest con artists of them all? His recent financial disclosures revealed that he made $636 million on his $TRUMP meme coin alone — yet the value of the coin collapsed by 97 percent, and nearly a million investors lost their money, totaling billions.Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comTrump: "Every time I see a crypto guy where they dropped an investigation, I said, 'You're lucky I'm president.'"Mon, 06 Jul 2026 14:33:51 GMTView on Bluesky

The rampant corruption of the administration sends a clear message: Rules are for suckers, and people with power get to grab whatever they can. At the same time, Trump wants to argue that his version of capitalism has delivered prosperity for all. Which has many voters saying, Really? It can’t get any better than this?

In Trump’s America, “capitalism” doesn’t necessarily mean the glorious promise of the American Dream, which 78 percent of Americans said in a recent poll is harder to attain than in the past. Instead, to many it means big corporations maximizing their profits at the expense of workers and consumers, while they keep a firm grip on government to ensure that their wealth keeps expanding.Trump vs. algae is the feud we deserveTrump vs. algae is the feud we deserveNoah Berlatsky·Jul 7Read full story

Capitalism’s advocates have some work to do, and they’re giving it their best shot. At the University of Iowa, for instance, all students will now be required to take courses offered by the Center for Intellectual Freedom, which was created by the state’s Republican legislature. Among its offerings is a course called “Why Capitalism Rocks!” taught by the CEO of a midwestern hospitality corporation.

“The reason why capitalism generally makes humans better people and why capitalism is more fun will be explored,” the course description reads.

That certainly sounds like the kind of cringy propaganda guaranteed to make young people roll their eyes. But don’t count the capitalists out; they have a long and successful history of convincing ordinary people that taxes should be low, regulation is bad, worker power is dangerous, and businessmen are the most virtuous among us.

That doesn’t mean, however, that braying about communist infiltration will produce Republican wins in the fall. With capitalism failing so many Americans, it’s not enough for Trump to just shout “Commies!” and assume that the votes will follow. Especially when, in all his corruption and greed, he is the living embodiment of capitalism as he wants it to be.

The electorate may not be itching for communism, but the specter of it probably isn’t keeping them up nights either. And a little socialism may not sound so bad.

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: RFK Jr., Scientology, and the war on antidepressants, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, July 9, 2026. Kennedy as an ongoing financial connection to a Scientology-linked law firm suing antidepressant manufactures.

he Trump administration has engaged in a lengthy campaign to discourage the use of antidepressants. The effort has been led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spent years spreading misinformation about these types of medications. The Trump administration has specifically targeted selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which include medications like Prozac, Lexapro, and Zoloft.

Kennedy’s claims about antidepressants mirror those of the Church of Scientology, which has a long history of disdain for psychiatry and has targeted psychiatric medications for decades. Kennedy has an ongoing financial relationship with a law firm connected to Scientology that has pursued numerous lawsuits against antidepressant manufacturers.

At a 2023 Scientology event, the church’s current leader, David Miscavige, described psychiatry as “the greatest evil on Earth.” Scientology’s main vehicle for targeting this “evil” is a nonprofit it founded called the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). CCHR runs a museum in Los Angeles called “Psychiatry: Industry of Death” and has produced several documentaries. Among the group’s claims are that psychiatry was responsible for the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo, 9/11, and several mass shootings.

One documentary produced by CCHR focuses on the connection between antidepressants and mass shootings in the U.S. The documentary claims that many mass shooters take antidepressants and presents this as evidence that the medications are the cause. Experts say there is no evidence linking antidepressants to mass shootings. A study from Columbia found that around 4% of mass shooters had used antidepressants in their lifetime, which is less than the proportion of all adults in the U.S. who take antidepressants. The documentary also makes the false claim that “psychiatric drugs are among the most addictive on Earth” and compares some of them to cocaine.

Kennedy pushes many of the same myths about antidepressants. During his Senate confirmation hearing, Kennedy claimed that SSRIs were harder to quit than heroin. (Experts disagree with this comparison. “Antidepressants and heroin are in different universes when it comes to addiction risk,” Keith Humphreys, an addiction expert, told NPR.) Kennedy has also repeatedly suggested that SSRIs may be linked to mass shootings. In 2025, after a shooting at a school in Minnesota, Kennedy said in an interview on Fox News, “We’re launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence.”

In 2024, Kennedy said he wanted to create free “wellness farms” in rural areas where people “can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also legal drugs, other psychiatric drugs,” including SSRIs. This is similar to Narconon, a program run by Scientologists to help patients get off prescription medications they claim are addictive. Narconon facilities have faced multiple lawsuits from patients and families of patients who attempted or died by suicide after being taken off their psychiatric medication.Kennedy’s financial stake in the anti-psychiatry movement

Kennedy’s connection to Scientology’s views on antidepressants is more than ideological — it’s financial.

In CCHR’s anti-SSRI documentary, a lawyer named R. Brent Wisner said, “There’s no question that there’s people right now who are in jail after committing violent crimes who never would have done that if they hadn’t taken these drugs. There’s no question that people right now are dead because of these drugs.”

Wisner’s law firm, Wisner Baum, has led dozens of lawsuits against the manufacturers of psychiatric medications and other psychiatric tools that Scientology has targeted. Kennedy referred clients to the firm and has a contingency fee agreement with them in which he receives a percentage of the payout if they win their cases. During his 2025 nomination process, Kennedy reported receiving over $850,000 in fees from Wisner Baum. He did not specify which cases generated those fees.

After senators criticized the arrangement, Kennedy said he would assign most of his payouts from Wisner Baum to “a non-dependent, adult family member,” rather than giving up the payments entirely. One of Kennedy’s sons, Conor Kennedy, also works at Wisner Baum as an attorney.Kennedy’s campaign against SSRIs

Under Kennedy’s leadership, the Trump administration has launched a war on antidepressants.

On May 4, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced multiple initiatives to stop “psychiatric overprescribing” and encourage providers to deprescribe patients when appropriate. In a “Dear Colleague” letter, HHS encouraged providers to utilize “nonmedication approaches, such as family support, psychotherapy, nutrition, and physical activity.”

SSRIs, which are used to treat mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, can be life-saving. Around one in six adults in the U.S. are on some type of antidepressant medication. SSRIs are the most common type of antidepressant.

Overprescription, which can refer to issues such as patients taking medications longer than necessary, is a concern in the medical community. But while the American Psychiatric Association (APA) said it supported research on the issues with prescribing and deprescribing, it objected to the Trump administration “framing the nation’s mental health crisis as primarily a problem of ‘overmedicalization’ or ‘overprescribing,’” stating it “oversimplifies a complex crisis.” The APA noted that many patients already “cannot access timely, comprehensive care,” and the initiative fails to account for other factors such as “barriers to psychotherapy.”“Misrepresented evidence and spread misinformation”

The Trump administration efforts to discourage SSRI use began shortly after Trump started his second term. In a February 2025 order establishing Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, President Trump instructed the commission to “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by the prescription” of SSRIs and other medications to children. Multiple “MAHA” reports have since promoted the idea of the “overmedicalization” of children, including the usage of SSRIs.

In July 2025, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) hosted a panel discussion about the use of SSRIs during pregnancy. The majority of the panelists promoted claims that SSRIs can lead to serious health risks for the mother and baby. Multiple groups of healthcare providers condemned claims made by the panelists, stating that “it misrepresented evidence and spread misinformation,” NPR reported.

Two members of the panel have connections to Scientology through Wisner Baum or CCHR. David Healy is a psychiatrist who has served as an expert witness for Wisner Baum in their lawsuits against antidepressant manufacturers. Another member of the panel, psychologist Roger McFillin, has posted on Substack about the “mass psychiatric drugging of America’s poorest children,” citing data from FOIA requests that was shared with him by CCHR.“Scientology covert operative”

According to an article published by the Daily Beast, Wisner and Wisner Baum’s other partner, Michael L. Baum, are Scientologists. Popular Information could not independently verify their membership in the church, but there is evidence suggesting their involvement. Wisner is in the documentary produced by CCHR. Baum’s name appears in a stipulation of evidence from a criminal case against several prominent Scientologists over a 1970s conspiracy to steal records about Scientology and its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. The stipulation describes Baum as a “Scientology covert operative” and says he was directed to “make weekly entries into [an Interpol office] where [he was] to methodically examine each file cabinet for any Interpol documents.”

The Genetic Literacy Project (GLP), a science advocacy nonprofit, says it asked Wisner Baum in 2019 to explain the firm’s connection to Scientology. GLP says that Wisner Baum did not respond and instead posted an article attacking GLP.Scientology thanks Kennedy

Scientologists have praised Kennedy’s actions as HHS secretary to cast doubt on SSRIs.

The president of CCHR’s National Affairs Office called the May 4 initiative to stop “psychiatric overprescribing” an “extremely important step forward in correcting the nearly sole reliance on psychiatric drugs as mental health treatment—drugs which the latest scientific research finds do more harm than good.”

CCHR also issued a press release saying it “applauded the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for launching a significant initiative to address psychiatric drug prescribing,” though it encouraged HHS to go further.

Kennedy’s actions are a win a long time in the making for Scientologists.

Hubbard began waging war on the field of psychiatry in the mid-20th century after his book on the pseudoscientific psychological treatments at the core of Scientology was rejected by the medical establishment. In a 1969 article, Hubbard wrote that “the psychiatrist and his front groups operate straight out of the terrorist textbooks” and said that a psychiatrist “kidnaps, tortures and murders without any slightest police interference or action by western security forces.” He also wrote later that psychiatry was the cause of crime.

Today, Scientologists carry on Hubbard’s hatred of psychiatry. A page on the official Scientology website says “[psychiatry] is [a] staggeringly profitable business. But while psychiatrists rake in billions, society receives a new generation of life-long drug addicts and thus still more customers for psychotropic drugs.” The website claims the diseases antidepressants are meant to treat do not exist, calling it all “an elaborate and deadly hoax.” 

More On Law, Courts, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice 

Former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum arrives at the federal courthouse in Tallahassee, Fla., on April 17, 2023 (Photo by Alicia Devine for USA Today Network via Reuters Connect).

Associated Press via NBC News, Ex-Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum arrested on drug possession charges, Staff Report, July 8-9, 2026. Gillum, who was mayor of Florida’s capital from 2014 to 2018, came within less than a percentage point of being elected the state’s first Black governor, losing to Ron DeSantis by fewer than 34,000 votes

Former Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum has been arrested on drug possession charges in Alabama after police say they pulled him over for erratic driving and found marijuana and meth in his vehicle.

It’s the latest legal trouble for the ex-Tallahassee mayor, who narrowly lost to Republican Ron DeSantis for governor in 2018 and was once considered a rising star of the Democratic Party.

Gillum, 46, was arrested on July 2 in Daphne, about 11 miles (17.7 kilometers) east of Mobile on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. He is charged with marijuana possession and unlawful possession of a controlled substance, the Daphne Police Department said. Jail records show he was released on July 3.

Court records for Gillum’s case were not yet available, the Baldwin County Clerk of Court’s office said. Information on a lawyer who could speak on his behalf wasn’t immediately available.

A message seeking comment was left for the local district attorney’s office.

Gillum is a co-host of the politically themed Native Land Pod, which won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding News and Information Podcast in 2025. A message seeking comment was left for the podcast’s production company.

In a news release, the Daphne Police Department said officers stopped Gillum’s vehicle around 10:45 p.m. and initiated a probable cause search after one of them noticed a glass pipe on the center console.

They found several rolled marijuana cigarettes and three packages of a substance that tested positive for methamphetamine, police said.

Gillum, who served as mayor of Florida’s capital from 2014 to 2018, came within less than a percentage point of being elected the state’s first Black governor, losing to DeSantis by fewer than 34,000 votes.For SubscribersFORSUBSCRIBERSWho could replace Graham Platner as Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee?FORSUBSCRIBERSSmithsonian pushes back on Trump’s criticism of the American History museum

In 2020, Gillum was found in a Miami Beach hotel room with a man who had apparently overdosed on drugs. Police said Gillum himself was too inebriated to talk about what happened.

The man survived and no one was ever charged with a crime for the overdose, but Gillum withdrew from public life for months afterward while seeking treatment for alcohol abuse and depression. Months later, he told a TV interviewer that he had to come to grips with what he had done.

“So much of my recovery has been about trying to get over shame,” Gillum said on the Tamron Hall talk show in September 2020.

In 2022, Gillum was indicted on federal conspiracy and wire fraud charges for allegedly funneling tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations through third parties back to himself for personal use.

A 2023 trial ended in a hung jury on those charges and an acquittal on charges that Gillum lied to undercover FBI agents posing as developers who paid for a 2016 trip he took with his brother to New York, including hotel rooms, meals, a boat tour and a ticket to the hit Broadway show “Hamilton.”

Ronaldo Salgado, son of immigrant from Mexico slain by federal immigration agents, speaks Houston news conference (AP photo).

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: What We Learn from Immigrants, William Kristol, right, July 9, 2026. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, killed by agents of our government while driving to work early Tuesday morning in Houston, was fond of telling his three sons, “Que siempre le echemos ganas en esta vida.” The Washington Post offers this rough translation: Give it your all, and never give up.

This is a Mexican proverb. But who hasn’t heard similar sentiments expressed by other immigrants from other places at other times and in other languages? We native-born Americans often have it relatively easy. We can be quick to grumble when the going gets tough. It’s often our immigrants who remind us that the better response to life’s challenges is unstinting effort and determined perseverance.

And so it’s often immigrants who remind us about the importance of work. Ronaldo Salgado, Lorenzo’s eldest son, emphasized yesterday that his father was “a man who understood that good things come to those who put in hard work.”

It’s often immigrants who remind us about family. Araujo’s son said yesterday that his late father was “a family man” and that yesterday was “the first day without him for all of us, and it is heartbreaking to know that my mom did not make lunch for my dad before going to work—the first time in their 30+ year marriage.” Araujo worked hard throughout his three decades in the United States so that he could support his family and raise their three sons. “He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” Ronaldo said.

And it’s often from immigrants that we learn about generosity. According to the Post, Araujo was known as someone whose door you could knock on if you were looking for work, and he would help you. “He deserved to live a quiet life as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a husband, father and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American Dream,” Ronaldo Salgado said.

And it’s from immigrants that we often are reminded about the importance of education. Araujo and his wife had little formal education, but were determined that their three sons would go to college. Ronaldo told The Bulwark’s Adrian Carrasquillo that his father would remind him and his brothers “that we needed to do well in school so we don’t end up like him in the sun.” As Adrian reported, “Ronaldo, 29, graduated from the University of Houston; Lorenzo Jr., 27, from Tufts University; and their youngest brother is in college now.”

It is these young men who are calling for a full and honest investigation into why a peaceful and law-abiding man was killed while driving to work by agents of our government. It is they who are seeking the truth about what happened and asking the public to come forward with any new video or images that might shed light on their father’s death. It is they who are trying to hold our government to American standards of responsiveness and accountability and decency.

If you’re a fan of responsiveness and accountability and decency, join our pro-democracy community. Help us practice the kind of politics we wished everyone did.Subscribed

And it is our government that is stonewalling and covering up, refusing so far to provide any information at all about what happened Tuesday morning in Houston. It is our government that appears to be blocking independent investigations by the Justice Department or by local authorities. But not to worry: The Department of Homeland Security inspector general, we are assured, will add this case to the more than 600 complaints of misconduct by DHS employees that his office is now investigating.

We should be grateful that Ronaldo Salgado Araujo came to live here in the United States, to build houses for Americans, and to raise three American sons. Araujo was not yet an American citizen, though he had in the last eighteen months filled out paperwork and provided documentation, references, and fingerprints in an effort to regularize his immigration status. But he had lived as an American, de facto if not de jure, for the last thirty-five years. As his son said, he had sought to live the American Dream and to help others to do so.

His son also remarked, “My father was always a strong man and never wanted us to know if he was in pain. He never complained.” Our current government, by contrast, is led by weak men who constantly complain, and who benefit from exploiting other Americans’ weaknesses and anxieties. Our current leaders talk endlessly about American exceptionalism, while turning us into an unexceptional country presided over by thuggish apparatchiks.

I dare say Ronald Salgado Araujo was a better American than they are.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• How the Roberts Court Is Blowing Up American Politics… In the term just ended, the right-wing justices continued their campaign to elevate the presidency, while discarding vital protections and longstanding precedents, observes KIM WEHLE.
• Vance and Rufo Want You to Know That Nixon Is Back, Baby, and He’s Better Than Ever… The disgraced former president is undergoing a revival among the aggro New Right types, who admire his worst features, reports MICHAEL KONCEWICZ.
• Birthright Citizenship Is Not Just for Immigrants… It undergirds American equality, argues MONA CHAREN.
• Graham Platner Ends Campaign for U.S. Senate… And SAM STEIN and CATHERINE RAMPELL went live last night to discuss his bizarre 10 minute non-apology.

Quick Hits

IRAN WAR COSTS: There are many ways of tallying the costs of the Iran war. One is in the dollars it’s cost the U.S. government. Another is in the thirteen Americans who gave their lives and many more who sustained injuries. Iranians themselves are probably considering not only their own dead and wounded, but their oppressive government’s new sense of invincibility. The Pentagon is surely counting up the scarce munitions the war is eating up—as, no doubt, are the Iranians, the Chinese, the Russians, and others. One could point to the price of gas, or fraying American alliances in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

The International Monetary Fund has its own measure. The New York Times explains:

Global output growth is poised to fall to 3 percent in 2026 from 3.5 percent last year, according to an update for the I.M.F.’s World Economic Outlook. That is slightly slower than the fund’s April projection of 3.1 percent growth, underscoring the protracted nature of the conflict.

The global population is expected to grow much more slowly this year, at less than 1 percent. So overall GDP per capita will still probably rise, which is a good thing. But these estimates are all subject to, for example, renewed hostilities in and around the Strait of Hormuz, which seems to be a thing that happens about once a month, give or take.

As for the benefits of the Iran war, we’ll list those when there are some.

COME IN, MITCH: We wrote yesterday about the bizarre moment in which, in an apparent attempt to dispel Laura Loomer’s rumors¹ that Sen. Mitch McConnell was braindead, Sens. John Thune and John Barrasso told reporters that they had discussed Senate business and the Supreme Court with McConnell on the phone. “There is something inherently odd about all this,” we wrote yesterday. “McConnell could resolve a lot of confusion if he spoke publicly, even via a voice recording.”

Turns out we weren’t the only ones scratching our heads. So was Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who sent a letter to McConnell yesterday that read, in part,

Over the last several weeks, Kentuckians have grown increasingly concerned about the health and well-being of Sen. McConnell. As Governor—and a fellow public official who understands the commitment we’ve made to the people we serve—I am requesting the Senator provide an update on his current health status. . . 

Allowing speculation to continue in the media is not fair to the Senator or to Kentuckians, and my hope is that this provides him the opportunity to share the information in a transparent manner, direct from the source. I wish him a safe and speedy recovery. [Emphasis ours.]

As of publication time, McConnell had not responded. Nor, for that matter, had anyone else come forward to relay that they’d also spoken with him on the phone.

THE MULLAHS AND THE MONEY: CNN’s Aaron Blake has an analysis of why Trump’s Iran war feels like the same humiliating defeat over and over again:

[H]e seems to have repeatedly wagered that Iran was close enough to a deal that he could push their leaders over the finish line with some modest rhetorical concessions and just a little more time—only to be proven wrong over and over again.

There are countless signs of Trump’s misjudgment at this point. . . .

Perhaps most strikingly, he repeatedly threatened Iran with doom if it didn’t comply with his demands. But just about every time, those threats were revealed to be a bluff. Trump often claimed he was backing off because a deal was near, but that deal still hasn’t materialized in any lasting form. . . .

Trump said repeatedly a month ago that he feared Iran was “tapping us along.” And he signaled again Wednesday that might be the case.

“They’re saying they want to make a deal, but they don’t—you know, they ask for a timeout, they wanted to do the funeral of Khamenei, and I said give it to them,” he said at the NATO summit. “And they start shooting missiles. I mean, it’s a crazy thing.”

Read the whole thing. Yes, Trump definitely misread the Iranians’ capacity to endure pain against his own. But maybe, more precisely, he misidentified what kind of pain really hurt the Iranians by assuming it was the kind of pain that hurt him. Trump has repeatedly harped on Iran’s inability to sell oil because of the American blockade of Iran’s ports, threatened to seize Kharg Island with its oil export infrastructure, and boasted that “their economy is crashing” and “we’re making it fail.” He explained: “I hope it fails. . . . You know why? Because I want to win. You know, it takes getting pounded on by the military, I think, for more. But in addition to that, their—it is failing. You know, we have sanctions on them . . .”

Money clearly matters to Trump. It matters to every world leader to some extent, because it’s much easier to have it than not to. But a clique of violent religious fundamentalist fanatics who are willing to endure power shortages, water shortages, rampant inflation, and sanctions that the first Trump administration itself described as “maximum pressure” even before the war—those guys probably are less concerned about the profit/loss statement than Trump.

One way of thinking about the Iran war is that the austere religious zealots have been less sensitive to economic pain than the billionaire New York developer turned professional fraudster. Who’s surprised? 

Global Economy, Climate Change

Measuring Temperature Change (Bloomberg chart).

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Heat Is On, Paul Krugman, right, July 9, 2026.  And the cost of climate change is getting serious.

Last Friday extreme heat forced early closure of Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair. Fortunately, the fair was sparsely attended. As some wags put it, tens of people had to be evacuated from the National Mall. Even so, 44 people received health assistance and 11 were taken to hospitals due to the heat.

OK, shutting down Trump’s shabby, dreary exercise in self-aggrandizement was no great loss. Yet the disruption of Trump’s festivities is a harbinger of many disruptions to come. The brutal heat wave in the northeastern US — an event that would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change — followed an even more brutal heat wave in Europe.

These disasters represent the leading edge of serious damage — social, human, and economic — from a warming planet.

Projections of future climate change are often expressed in terms of averages: By 2050 average global temperatures are expected to be above pre-industrial levels by around 2.5° C — 4 ½ degrees Fahrenheit, while sea levels will be 10 incheshigher.

We should all treat these predictions as highly credible. Although fossil-fuel-financed climate denialism pervades right-wing politics and media, climate scientists who warned decades ago about future warming have been overwhelmingly vindicated. Indeed, in many cases their predictions have closely matched the actual numbers. So when climate scientists predict much more warming ahead, we should believe them.

Focusing on the average temperature increase can, however, lead people to underestimate the damage that lies ahead. If the typical day is a few degrees warmer, if the waves on a typical day are a few inches higher, what’s the big deal?

The rejoinder is that what may look like a modest change in these averages implies a large change in the risk of extreme weather events. A few degrees of average warming correspond to a huge increase in the frequency of heat emergencies like the ones we just saw on both sides of the Atlantic. A few inches added to sea levels corresponds to a huge rise in the probability of catastrophic storm surges.

And these extreme events are exacting an ever-growing human and economic toll. Europe suffered thousands of excess deaths as a result of the recent heat wave. The U.S. toll was smaller, although not zero, because our heat wave was less severe and because of the pervasiveness of air conditioning. Yet we are facing a future in which death and destruction from extreme weather events are certain to rise everywhere as the planet continues to warm.

Inevitably, the economic costs of climate change are also certain to rise. As that left-wing rag the Wall Street Journal recently explained,

Individual events are just beginning to be large enough to have a noticeable macroeconomic impact. One study estimates that European heat waves in the summer of 2025 reduced European Union GDP by 0.26 percent. That may not seem like a huge number, but it’s a very big deal if it happens every year — which it almost certainly will. The costs of this year’s heat will probably be even bigger. For example, France has lost millions of chickens. And the damage from climate change is just getting started.

In the U.S., the most notable economic impact of the heat wave that closed down Trump’s fair was a spike in power prices:

In fact, I’m very worried about the future of US electricity. Air conditioning saves lives during heat waves. But it also consumes a lot of electricity, piling additional demand on an energy grid that is already stressed by the rise of AI and its energy-hungry datacenters. And this surge in electricity demand is colliding with policies that are strangling growth inU.S. generating capacity.

Donald Trump and his officials have a fanatical hatred for renewable energy and indeed of anything that even sounds like an acknowledgement that climate change is real. So they are doing all they can to block solar and wind projects, while trying to force America to burn more coal. (They won’t succeed.)

They’re pushing their drill, baby, drill agenda even though renewables are clearly the energy sources of the future. Indeed, solar and wind power now account for almost all growth in electricity generation in the rest of the world:

The economic consequences of the MAGA attempt to keep us stuck in the energy past will be dire, for three reasons.

First, the U.S. is still an important emitter of greenhouse gases. True, we now account for less than 13 percent of global carbon emissions. But every little bit of climate dereliction hurts.

Second, we’re ceding the energy future to other countries, especially China. Electrotech — electricity powered cars and more, with solar and wind supplying the electrons — will rule the world, even if we refuse to be part of it.

Third, while the economic costs of climate change, which are now coming into focus, will be large whatever we do, they will be much bigger if America turns its back on renewable energy. True, gas turbines can supply part of the energy America needs in the near future. But they’re polluting, and at least some analysts are warning that supply shortages may lead to rising gas prices.

In addition to doing all it can to accelerate climate change, the Trump administration is actively placing Americans at risk by shuttering programs that help the nation prepare and recover from climate change catastrophes. Deep cuts to FEMA and the National Weather Service, along with cuts for programs that help build resilience, will inevitably leave Americans poorer and undermine communities. It’s like burning down the hospital because you don’t like the diagnosis.

And did you hear about last week’s Thermostat War? It wasn’t a huge incident in itself, but it was, I believe, deeply revealing about how political dysfunction will undermine our response to climate change.

Here’s what happened: During the heat emergency, New York mayor Zohran Mamdani urged the city’s residents to limit the burden on the grid by keeping their air conditioners at 78 degrees. Right-wing commentators went wild, denouncing his request as left-wing extremism — apparently only Communists believe in conserving energy during a crisis. But MS-NOW, among other media outlets, quickly noted that Mamdani’s suggestion echoed longstanding federal guidance.

And the Department of Energy immediately closed down its web pages offering that guidance.

Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, climate change is going to impose large economic costs, some of which are already baked — and I mean baked — in. But the Trump administration’s rejection of both science and basic energy economics, along with vandalism of programs meant to help Americans prepare and survive climate catastrophes, will make the damage to America much worse than it should have been.

New York Times, A $3.2 Trillion Deal-Making Frenzy Is Spurred by the A.I. Economy, Lauren Hirsch, July 9, 2026. This year’s boom includes the most spent on global deal-making in a six-month period in a decade. But questions persist about whether it can continue.

An ebullient stock market, huge bets on artificial intelligence and an open regulatory environment have fueled one of the biggest six-month booms in deal-making in years.

Through the end of June, there were about $3.2 trillion in global deals, a 45 percent jump from a year earlier, according to Dealogic, a data provider. That was the most spent on deal-making over a half-year period in at least a decade.

The frenzy heavily favored large companies, with 44 deals announced that were larger than $10 billion, including takeovers and large-scale fund-raising in the private markets. Those blockbusters pushed the overall value of deals higher even though the total number of transactions fell about 1 percent from last year, as companies with less financial firepower or those more vulnerable to geopolitical uncertainties stayed on sidelines.

Executives of many large companies, however, have brushed aside the uncertainties posed by tariffs and the war in the Middle East to pursue takeovers that are more likely to be approved by regulators under the Trump administration than they were during previous administrations.

Many companies “perceive they have a window in which to attempt to affect something transformational, and now is really the time to try to do it,” Matt McClure, a global co-head of investment banking at Goldman Sachs, said in an interview.

Bankers insist this time is different from previous booms, like the record-low-interest era of the Covid-19 pandemic, the leveraged buyouts of 2007 and the dot-com bubble in the 1990s.

The companies driving this year’s deal-making surge are among the world’s largest and best funded, and many of them are aiming to transform their business by doing big mergers, rather than making smaller acquisitions.

Some of this activity is propelled by a need to simply keep pace in an economy dominated by only a handful of giant corporations. Consider that companies need to be about twice as large to enter the S&P 500 as they did five years ago. Exxon Mobil, once the most valuable company in the United States, is about one-eighth the size of the largest of the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies.

“The definition of scale keeps moving, so companies need to be bigger and bigger, and big companies need to do bigger and bigger deals to have an impact,” said Ben Wilson, a co-head of North America mergers and acquisitions at J.P. Morgan.

NextEra’s $118 billion deal for Dominion Energy, which was announced in May, would create a utility giant aimed at supplying the increasing amounts of electricity needed to power artificial intelligence. SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition last month of Cursor, a start-up that makes code-writing software, is aimed at helping Elon Musk’s rocket company build its A.I. models.

Typically, companies are reluctant to take on big deals in times of turmoil. Disruptions to oil supplies because of the war with Iran and the White House’s open hostility toward America’s biggest trading partners in Europe show no signs of abating. Questions also persist around the A.I. build-out, such as the costs for computer chips, supply constraints and potential delays on when these A.I. companies might reap profits.

“What makes the current boom a little counterintuitive is it appears to be associated with maybe not unprecedented, but top-quartile-level uncertainty and volatility,’’ said Jonathan Knee, a Columbia Business School professor and senior adviser at the investment bank Evercore.

The deal activity has been a boon for banks, too, with details likely to emerge when they announce earnings next week. Bank of America expects its investment banking revenue in the latest quarter to be up 28 percent from a year earlier, while JPMorgan Chase expects a 10 percent increase, according to a research note from Jefferies.

New York Times, As Consumers Pare Spending, Grocery Stores Race to Cut Prices, Julie Creswell and Kim Bhasin, July 9, 2026. While shoppers may get better deals on some items, it’s unlikely their overall grocery bill will fall.

Competing for strained consumers, America’s grocery stores are cutting prices on some key products. That doesn’t mean overall grocery bills will be lower.

Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, said Monday that it would lower the price of ground beef rolls, fresh corn, cherries, potato chips and Coca-Cola as part of a slew of summertime discounts.

It’s the latest grocery chain to do so, increasing competition in a relatively low-margin industry reliant on people buying shopping carts packed with items, including some at more profitable prices.

The grocery industry has struggled over the past 18 months as higher food bills, reductions in food-stamp programs and the rise in the use of weight-loss medications has resulted in shoppers buying less. On top of that, elevated gas prices because of the war with Iran are also hitting shoppers’ wallets.

A May CNN poll found that 61 percent of Americans had changed which groceries they bought in order to stay within their budget.

High grocery prices have been a political issue for several years, so much so that President Trump sought to take credit for Walmart’s announcement, posting on social media that the retailer “will be lowering prices, by a lot, at my administration’s request to celebrate our great country’s 250th birthday.”

Walmart did not mention Mr. Trump or his administration in its press release.

But while shoppers may get better deals on some items, it’s unlikely their overall grocery bill will fall. Prices across all food categories are expected to rise 3.2 percent in 2026, according to the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.

While egg prices have dropped from last year’s record levels, the U.S.D.A. predicts that prices for beef, pork, poultry, sweets, nonalcoholic beverages, fresh vegetables and fresh fruit will increase this year. That comes on top of the 18 percent price increase in food consumed at home since the beginning of 2022, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Beef prices continue to hit record levels this year; Walmart said it would reduce the price of its one-pound log of ground beef to $5.94 from $6.74.

July 8

Top Headlines

• New York Times, Live Updates: Trump Lashes Out at Europe at NATO Summit, Ben Hubbard, Steven Erlanger, Tyler Pager and Shawn McCreesh, July 8, 2026. President Trump assailed allies for not joining the war in Iran, called Spain “hopeless” and repeated his desire to control Greenland. His criticism cast a pall over a meeting critical for NATO’s future. Here’s the latest.
• Paul Krugman, Opinion: The Pain in Spain is Mainly in Trump's Brain, Paul Krugman, right, July 8, 2026. This isn't about economics, it's about mental health. Yesterday, Donald Trump ordered Scott Bessent, the Secretary of theTreasury, to cut off all trade with Spain. This is not going to happen. It was completely crazy, and that’s the story that we should be taking from this. It’s not really at this point about economics. It doesn’t even make sense to talk about Trump Administration policies, let alone ideology.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: ICE Is Shooting People Again, Bill Kristol, Benjamin Parker and Jim Swift, July 8, 2026. Routinizing Trumpian cruelty. And so once more we’re at war. 

Maine Democrat Drops Senate Bid After Party Revolts At Rape Allegation

Graham Platner, Maine Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat, speaks during a campaign event.  

• Maine Public, Graham Platner drops out of U.S. Senate race, opening narrow path to replace him, Steve Mistler, July 8, 2026. U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, the political upstart who overwhelmingly secured the Democratic nomination just one month ago, has ended his candidacy. His withdrawal from the race now sets up a frantic scramble to replace him on the November ballot.
• New York Times, Opinion: Lessons From the Graham Platner Disaster, Michelle Goldberg, right, July 8, 2026 (print ed.). Hopefully, by the time you read this, Graham Platner will have dropped out of the Senate race in Maine. If he hasn’t, he needs to, immediately. His campaign, which started with such excitement and inspired so many people in Maine, has become a shameful catastrophe. What’s left — besides finding a Democrat to run in his place — is figuring out what, if anything, can be learned from this debacle.
• New York Times, Democrats Grow Frustrated as Platner Resists Dropping Out Quickly, Bayliss Wagner and Lisa Lerer, July 8, 2026. Two days after a woman accused Graham Platner of rape, he had not given up his nomination for Senate in Maine, raising worries about whether and how his party might find a replacement.
• New York Times, The Low-Key Lawyer at the Center of the Search for a Platner Replacement, Tim Balk, July 8, 2026. Charles Dingman, chair of the Maine Democratic Party and a progressive, would play a key role in choosing the state’s Democratic Senate candidate if Graham Platner leaves the race.

News Roundups

Donald Trump’s shaky, confused arrival in Ankara for the NATO summit, where Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan had to physically guide him around (Osmancan Gurdogan pool photos via Reuters)

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Erupts at NATO Summit—Cuts Off Trade With Spain, Declares Iran Deal "Over," Appears Visibly Confused Throughout, Aaron Parnas, right, July 8, 2026. Trump is erupting at the NATO summit in Turkey, calling the Iran deal “over,” cutting off all trade with Spain while calling the country “hopeless,” confusing Zelenskyy with Putin as Zelenskyy sat beside him, and referring to Japan as the “Islamic Republic of Japan.”

More On Iran War

• New York Times, Iran Live Updates: Trump Casts Doubt on Future of Cease-Fire After Latest Strikes, Leo Sands, Eric Schmitt and Hari Raj, July 8, 2026. “I think it’s over,” President Trump said, referring to the preliminary truce, and threatened to strike Iran again. The two sides traded attacks as their truce appeared to edge closer to collapse.
• New York Times, News Analysis: As Iran Cease-Fire Frays, Trump Faces a Muddled War and Unpalatable Options, David E. Sanger, July 8, 2026. The president appears to be confronting the consequences of a cease-fire deal cobbled together in haste, with little movement toward resolving the key issues driving the conflict.
• Popular Information, Guest Post on Accountability Journalism: The real cost of the Iran War: $103 billion in 120 days, Stephen Semler, July 8, 2026. Testifying before the House Appropriations Committee last week, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought said the US had spent $30 billion on the Iran War. The real cost is over $100 billion.

More On Trump World  

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Pathetic in Ankara, Paul Krugman, right, July 8, 2026. Who’s afraid of the big bad Trump? A recent report in the Wall Street Journal describes a tense meeting among European leaders early this year, convened after Donald Trump threatened to use military force to seize Greenland from Denmark. According to the Journal, heads of government were venting so emotionally about the 47th president that some of the nearly 30 leaders present would later call the session “therapy night.”
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 8, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 8, 2026. In Ankara, Türkiye, for a two-day summit of the countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), President Donald J. Trump told reporters he was “very disappointed with NATO” because it had not backed its war on Iran.
• New York Times, Drama and Spectacle as Trump Makes His NATO Entrance, Shawn McCreesh and Tyler Pager, July 8, 2026. The second President Trump landed in Turkey, the center of gravity shifted right to where he likes it best: himself.

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

A Manhattan jury awarded the multimillion-dollar judgment to the writer E. Jean Carroll in May 2023 (New York Times photo by Dave Sanders).

• New York Times, Judge Orders $5 Million Trump Judgment Be Released to E. Jean Carroll, Abbie VanSickle and Benjamin Weiser, July 8, 2026. Ms. Carroll had asked a federal judge to order the president to pay the judgment after a jury found he sexually abused and defamed her
• All Rise News, No jail for former Judge Dugan, Adam Klasfeld, right, July 8, 2026. Former Judge Dugan spared jail and praised for her 'extraordinary life'Judge Adelman called Dugan an "otherwise good person" made a "bad decision in the moment."
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Did These Men Deserve to Die?, William Kristol, right,July 8, 2026. “The cruelty is the point,” Adam Serwer memorably wrote eight years ago. That was during Donald Trump’s first term in office. In his second term, the cruelty remains the point. But it has now been institutionalized and routinized in key agencies of the federal government. Trump’s personal and performative indecency has become an entire administration’s sustained and systematic indecency.
• Emptywheel, Analysis: Harmeet Dhillon’s Team Appears To Have Already Started Framing People, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 8, 2026. I have laid out (one, two) the accumulating evidence that Harmeet Dhillon’s team fabricated virtually their entire case against Georgia Fort in the Cities Church case.
• Associated Pess via Politico, ‘Breathtaking assertion of power’: Appeals court slams door on Florida ‘Stop Woke’ law championed by DeSantis, Andrew Atterbury,July 8, 2026. The decision from a divided 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit is a devastating, possibly final blow to the so-called Stop WOKE act touted by the DeSantis administration.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• New York Times, Democrats Grow Frustrated as Platner Resists Dropping Out Quickly, Bayliss Wagner and Lisa Lerer, July 8, 2026. Two days after a woman accused Graham Platner of rape, he had not given up his nomination for Senate in Maine, raising worries about whether and how his party might find a replacement.
• New York Times, The Low-Key Lawyer at the Center of the Search for a Platner Replacement, Tim Balk, July 8, 2026. Charles Dingman, chair of the Maine Democratic Party and a progressive, would play a key role in choosing the state’s Democratic Senate candidate if Graham Platner leaves the race.

U.S. Culture, Religion, Media, Education 

Pope Leo XIV, a Chicago native and the first American-born Roman Catholic pope (Vatican Media photo).

• The Contrarian, Opinion:What MAGA Could Learn About America From Pope Leo, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 8, 2026. Leo gets America. As a president second to none in blasphemous self-depiction and besotted by venomous white Christian nationalism, Donald Trump and his MAGA authoritarian enablers have attempted to supplant separation of church and state with an authoritarian-imposed neo-Confederacy — a theoretically mandated rigid hierarchy in which white males hold the power. Unexpectedly, Pope Leo was among those articulating the most historically genuine expression of America. 

More Global News 

Nigel Farange, above right, a longtime "populist"reform advocate who led the United Kingdom's vote for Brexit but who is now emersed in a financial scandal, faces as his next election opponent a comedian named "Binface," shown above left, whom other parties appear to be uniting behind to ensure Farange's defeat in his seat in Parliament.

• Fraser Nelson's notebook, Opinion: Farage and the Binface factor, Fraser Nelson, July 8, 2026. Reform UK is starting to look like a plutoctatic version of the establishment it rails against. Nigel Farage is now forcing a by-election  but not over an issue affecting his constituents, or the people he purports to champion. This is all about him and his money. He dislikes answering question about it, and is holding the by-election in protest. As I write, only one confirmed candidate will face him: Count Binface. He stood in Makerfield and captured the public imagination: a walking, comic, tin-hatted rebuke to the whole circus. Kemi Badenoch has told Good Morning Britain that Binface might even win. Ladbrokes has him at 5:1. Cometh the hour, cometh the bin.
• New York Times, Work at Kushner-Linked Resort in Albania Could Affect Sensitive Landscape, Riley Mellen, Ainara Tiefenthäler, Alexander Cardia and Zach Caldwell, July 8, 2026. A New York Times analysis of satellite images shows the damage a proposed luxury resort near Zvernec, Albania could inflict on delicate natural habitats. The project is being developed by real estate partners of Jared Kushner.
• New York Times, The Alluring Albanian Island Inspiring Ivanka’s Fantasy, Andrew Higgins, July 8, 2026. A former military base in the Adriatic Sea, the island is in a beautiful setting but it is strewed with snakes, crumbling buildings and land mines.

Top Stories

New York Times, Live Updates: Trump Lashes Out at Europe at NATO Summit, Ben Hubbard, Steven Erlanger, Tyler Pager and Shawn McCreesh, July 8, 2026. President Trump assailed allies for not joining the war in Iran, called Spain “hopeless” and repeated his desire to control Greenland. His criticism cast a pall over a meeting critical for NATO’s future. Here’s the latest.

President Trump kicked off the second day of the NATO summit in Turkey on Wednesday by restating his “need” to control Greenland, blasting European allies as “hopeless” and threatening countries that did not support the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

The president called Spaniards “hopeless, bad people” and said he was cutting off trade with the country — even though the European Union’s 27 nations negotiate trade jointly. He mentioned France, Germany, Italy and Britain by name for not joining the war in Iran. He cast doubt on a temporary cease-fire aimed at ending the conflict and referred to Iran’s leaders as “evil, sick people” and “cancer.’’

“You know what you do?” he said. “You got to cut out cancer early.”

Mr. Trump’s remarks, in an extraordinary outburst to reporters as he sat next to Mark Rutte, the secretary general of NATO, cast a pall over a summit critical for the future of the military alliance.

In the run-up to the two-day leaders’ meeting in the Turkish capital, Ankara, NATO officials had sought to prevent blowups and keep the discussions focused on defense budgets and expanding the alliance’s military-industrial base. But Mr. Trump made clear on Wednesday that he was still angry that, as he sees it, the United States is doing and spending too much to protect allies who are doing and spending too little.

Before Mr. Trump’s spoke, NATO country officials told The New York Times that the alliance planned to issue a communiqué on Wednesday restating its commitment to collective defense and its support for Ukraine, promising $80 billion a year this year and next from Europe and Canada.

The communiqué was also expected to call for freedom of navigation, a nod to Iran’s effective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz during the war, according to the officials, who spoke anonymously to detail sensitive diplomacy.

After a gathering of NATO heads of state to discuss alliance business, Mr. Trump has further meetings scheduled Wednesday with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and President Ahmed al-Sharaa of Syria. He is expected to address the news media again before departing for Washington.

On Tuesday night, hours after arriving in Turkey, the president ordered American forces to bombard targets in Iran, in retaliation for what the Pentagon said were new Iranian strikes on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran struck back on Wednesday, targeting U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait.

Here’s what else we’re covering:

• NATO in transition: The summit comes as the United States pulls back from the alliance and as Europe and Canada are faced with doing more to defend against an aggressive, militarized Russia.
• Rutte’s comments: Mr. Rutte said on Wednesday that the latest American strikes against Iran were “absolutely necessary,” given what he said were Iran’s strikes on ships transiting the strait. Tehran has not claimed responsibility for the strikes. Follow the latest updates on the Iran war ›
• Past criticism: President Trump has rarely missed an opportunity to castigate NATO as weak and ineffective. Read more ›
• What Zelensky wants: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is expected to ask NATO allies for Patriot missiles and related defense systems to counter Russian ballistic missiles. Read more ›

Paul Krugman, Opinion: The Pain in Spain is Mainly in Trump's Brain, Paul Krugman, right, July 8, 2026. This isn't about economics, it's about mental health.

Yesterday, Donald Trump ordered Scott Bessent, the Secretary of theTreasury, to cut off all trade with Spain. Bessent said “Yes, sir.” Trump also said that this is because the Spaniards had stolen his strawberries.

Okay, I made up that second part, but he did in fact order Bessent to cut off all trade.

This is not going to happen.

Presidents have a lot of discretionary authority on tariffs and trade, more than they should, but you do not have the right as president to impose tariffs on a country just because you don’t like their defense spending or you think that they haven’t been nice enough to you.

So this would not fly even in the Trump administration. Even with a supine congress and a permissive Supreme Court this is not going to happen. Also Spain is part of the European Union. So this is like Europe declaring “we’re cutting off all trade with Florida”: they can’t do that. And also, there’s a lot of U.S. business with Spain. In fact, Spain is one of those countries with which we run a trade surplus. So U.S. business would be howling.

So this is all a non-event, this is is not something that is real. Except that the President of the United States did say this.

It was completely crazy, and that’s the story that we should be taking from this. It’s not really at this point about economics. It doesn’t even make sense to talk about Trump Administration policies, let alone ideology.

What we have is President Sundowner. I mean, this this is completely insane stuff. In any kind of normally functioning political system, in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.

And of course, instead, not only does everybody pretend that he’s still a rational human being, but the Republican Party, the Trump administration, is full-on engaged in trying to build a personality cult.

What this says to me is that the problem is a lot bigger than Trump. Something is fundamentally wrong with America, and at this point you don’t have to go through complicated justifications. You can just say something is wrong with a country and a system that lets this guy remain in a position of power.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: ICE Is Shooting People Again, Bill Kristol, Benjamin Parker and Jim Swift, July 8, 2026. Routinizing Trumpian cruelty.

And so once more we’re at war. Central Command announced yesterday afternoon it had conducted “a series of powerful strikes against Iran to impose heavy costs for targeting and attacking commercial shipping crewed by innocent civilians in an international waterway. . . . a clear violation of the ceasefire.”

The reasons various parts of the administration provided for these strikes were stultifyingly stupid. One official told Axios’s Barak Ravid, “As President Trump and the administration have repeatedly affirmed, the MOU in effect with Iran is entirely performance-based. Iran will only reap benefits if they exhibit good behavior.” Another unnamed administration official told NewsHour correspondent Nick Schifrin that Iran has “clearly demonstrated they’re not listening. We’re turning up the volume.”

Usually when these anonymous quotes about more intense fighting appear, President Trump quickly tries to calm the markets. But in this case, even he seemed to concede that the ceasefire had ended, albeit while also inviting negotiations for a new ceasefire. From his remarks overnight:

To me, I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. And they’re vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over. I’ll speak to our negotiators. They want to negotiate. They’re good people. Steve Witkoff. Jared Kushner. But they have to come back to me. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. . . . There’s something wrong with them, they’re coo-coo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over. . . . They can talk, but I think they’re wasting their time. They’re a bunch of lying guys.

One doesn’t have to read that many books to learn that bombs are remarkably inarticulate ways of sending messages, considering they always say the same thing and sometimes kill the people you want to receive the message. But if there were any administration that might actually be more articulate with high explosives than with words . . . Happy Wednesday.

News Roundups

Donald Trump’s shaky, confused arrival in Ankara for the NATO summit, where Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan had to physically guide him around (Osmancan Gurdogan pool photos via Reuters)

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Erupts at NATO Summit—Cuts Off Trade With Spain, Declares Iran Deal "Over," Appears Visibly Confused Throughout, Aaron Parnas, right, July 8, 2026. Trump is erupting at the NATO summit in Turkey, calling the Iran deal “over,” cutting off all trade with Spain while calling the country “hopeless,” confusing Zelenskyy with Putin as Zelenskyy sat beside him, and referring to Japan as the “Islamic Republic of Japan.”

Markets are tumbling as the U.S. prepares for another round of strikes on Iran. Meanwhile, the nation’s largest utility is warning Americans could face blackouts as early as next year because the power grid can’t keep up with AI data centers. The administration is draining the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool again, Republican lawmakers are facing angry constituents, and there’s much more.

On a personal note, I wanted to share something exciting. A month ago, I filmed an episode of PBS’s new series Breaking the Deadlock, where I talked about why today’s leaders need to set a better example for young Americans. You can watch it here.

There is so much misinformation online. Sometimes I won’t be the first to post a story because I’m waiting for it to be fully verified. That’s intentional. If I report something, it’s because it’s been vetted. And if I ever get something wrong—or the facts change—I’ll tell you. That’s my commitment to you

Here’s the news:

Trump Erupts at the NATO Summit:

Trump erupted at the NATO summit: President Donald Trump declared that the ceasefire with Iran was effectively “over” after Tehran launched fresh attacks on U.S. bases and commercial shipping in the Gulf. Speaking in Ankara, Turkey, he lashed out at Iran, calling its leaders “scum” and dismissing continued negotiations as a “waste of time,” though he said U.S. negotiators could keep talking if they wished.

Trump also criticized NATO allies over Greenland and Iran while threatening to halt trade with Spain over alliance disagreements. His remarks overshadowed the summit and heightened concerns that the conflict in the Middle East could widen.

Trump intensified tensions at the NATO summit by calling for the U.S. to cut off all trade with Spain, accusing the country of failing to contribute enough to NATO defense spending and refusing to support U.S. operations related to the Iran conflict. He labeled Spain a “terrible partner,” claimed it relied on other allies for protection, and predicted Madrid would “come running back” if trade were halted. Spain dismissed the remarks as “business as usual” and said it would maintain its strong trade relationship with the United States, while the dispute underscored Trump’s broader push for NATO members to increase defense spending.

The renewed violence followed a rapid escalation between the United States and Iran, with Iran retaliating against new U.S. strikes by attacking American military sites in the Gulf and targeting commercial vessels near the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. responded with additional strikes inside Iran, while Tehran declared that American and Israeli actions had undermined the agreement meant to end the war. Iranian officials also warned that any location supporting U.S. military operations would be considered a legitimate target. The exchange has cast serious doubt on prospects for a lasting ceasefire.

MAGA and those around the White House have grown concerned as Trump appeared visibly confused at times at the summit. During remarks, Trump appeared to misspeak, saying, "We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan," apparently confusing Iran with Japan while discussing the conflict in the Middle East. The gaffe quickly drew attention because Japan is a U.S. ally and has no connection to the missile attacks he was describing. Japan is also not an “Islamic Republic.”

Trump repeatedly referred to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as "President Putin" during their meeting, appearing to confuse the Ukrainian leader with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Trump struggled to recall the name of the Iran nuclear deal, referring to it as the “Obom” deal and “the JC... POC.”

Trump confirmed to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy suggesting the U.S. would let Ukraine manufacture Patriot missile systems, “We haven’t informed the company of that yet, but that’ll work out alright. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.” The comment implied the administration had not coordinated with the manufacturer before discussing a potential production license, prompting questions about whether the proposal reflected official policy or was an impromptu remark.

Trump asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy whether he would travel to Moscow, prompting Zelenskyy to quip, “It is difficult. There are lots of Ukrainian drones there. It’s dangerous.” The exchange drew attention as Zelenskyy used humor to underscore Ukraine’s expanding long-range drone campaign inside Russia, while highlighting the security risks posed by the ongoing war.

The deteriorating security situation rattled global markets and raised fears about energy supplies through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical route for worldwide oil shipments. Oil prices surged more than 6% after Trump’s comments, with Brent crude approaching $79 per barrel and U.S. crude climbing to around $75. International maritime officials condemned attacks on commercial ships, warning that innocent seafarers were being placed in grave danger. Governments across the Gulf region also condemned Iran’s missile and drone attacks on neighboring states.

NATO leaders faced mounting pressure as the summit became increasingly dominated by the Iran crisis instead of the alliance’s planned agenda. Trump met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and was scheduled to hold talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, while Denmark firmly rejected Trump’s renewed suggestion that the United States should control Greenland. European leaders emphasized support for regional stability and freedom of navigation, while expressing concern that the latest fighting had complicated already fragile peace negotiations. The summit highlighted growing tensions among allies over both security priorities and diplomacy.

Meanwhile, Iran continued nationwide funeral ceremonies for slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with massive processions taking place in Iraq’s holy cities as peace talks remained on hold. Iranian officials insisted they would not compromise on control of the Strait of Hormuz and defended their military actions as responses to U.S. attacks. Reports from inside Iran described additional strikes, casualties, and damage to military facilities, while neighboring countries intercepted missiles and drones without major losses. The combination of military escalation, political tensions, and economic disruption underscored the fragile and rapidly evolving state of the conflict. Watch this video from last night of the US strikes:

Energy Crisis

Electricity blackouts could begin as early as next year as the U.S. power grid struggles to keep pace with surging demand from AI data centers, according to Exelon CEO Calvin Butler. Butler warned, in an interview with the Financial Times, that power shortages in the Northeast and Midwest could force utilities to cut electricity to hundreds of thousands of customers during periods of extreme demand, noting the grid narrowly avoided widespread outages during last winter’s coldest days. Grid operator PJM is already projecting significant power supply deficits over the next decade, while U.S. electricity demand is expected to jump nearly 40% by 2035. Butler argued that without a rapid expansion of power generation and grid infrastructure, reliability risks will continue to grow.

Electricity costs are also set to rise as utilities seek billions of dollars to expand and modernize the grid to support AI-driven demand. Residential electricity prices have already climbed nationwide over the past two years, with some states—including New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania—seeing double-digit increases. Butler said higher utility bills are unavoidable because companies must invest in new transmission lines, aging infrastructure, and additional power capacity to meet growing demand. While politicians have pushed back against rate hikes and accused utilities of profiteering, Butler argued delaying increases would only result in even higher costs later.

The growing battle over who pays for the AI boom is becoming a major political and economic flashpoint. Butler said technology companies underestimated public resistance to the massive electricity demands of new data centers, leaving utilities to shoulder much of the criticism over rising power bills. He also argued current regulations discourage construction of new power plants because independent generators lack sufficient incentives to make long-term investments. Without policy changes to accelerate new generation and infrastructure spending, Butler warned lawmakers may not recognize the severity of the looming electricity crisis until widespread shortages and blackouts become a reality.

Other news:

The Trump administration has begun draining the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for a second time in three months after persistent problems including algae blooms, damaged lining, and discoloration, with officials again blaming vandalism despite not publicly releasing evidence. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, right, said crews will remove debris, repair the pool's lining, and refill it using the same contractor that previously received a more than $14 million no-bid contract. The renewed repairs have drawn scrutiny over the project's cost, repeated maintenance issues, and the administration's handling of the high-profile restoration.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is considering a vote on legislation aimed at ending "birth tourism"—the practice of pregnant women traveling to the U.S. to give birth so their children receive U.S. citizenship—as he tries to satisfy conservative Republicans demanding action on birthright citizenship. The measure would have little chance of becoming law because it would almost certainly fail in the Senate, but it would give House Republicans a symbolic vote after the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration's effort to limit birthright citizenship. Johnson faces growing pressure from hard-liners over immigration, even as moderates warn that politically divisive immigration votes could hurt Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.

A federal judge dismissed Trump Media's $3.8 billion defamation lawsuit against The Washington Post, ruling the company failed to show the newspaper acted with "actual malice," the legal standard required for public figures to win defamation cases. The lawsuit challenged a 2023 article about Truth Social's ownership, but the court found insufficient evidence that the Post knowingly published false information or recklessly disregarded the truth. Trump Media said it is considering an appeal, while the ruling marks another legal setback in the company's broader campaign against major news organizations, several of which have seen similar lawsuits dismissed.

Embattled Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner is signaling he may drop out of the race, as his campaign confirmed it has contacted the state Democratic Party to discuss the process for selecting a replacement. Party leaders accused Platner's team of trying to influence who would replace him if he withdraws, while the campaign insisted it only wanted to ensure voters and volunteers—not the party establishment—have a voice in the decision. Platner has faced mounting pressure to exit after allegations of sexual assault, which he denies, and under Maine law the state Democratic Party would choose a new nominee if he withdraws before the deadline.

Former Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan is set to be sentenced after being convicted of felony obstruction for helping a Mexican immigrant evade federal immigration agents, in a case that became a flashpoint in President Trump's immigration crackdown. Prosecutors are seeking a "serious sentence," arguing Dugan abused her judicial authority and endangered law enforcement, while federal guidelines recommend 15 to 21 months in prison. Dugan's attorneys contend she has already suffered significant consequences—including resigning from the bench and facing threats—and are asking for no additional jail time while planning to appeal. The case has become a national symbol of the clash between the Trump administration's immigration enforcement efforts and judicial independence.

The creator of the satirical Instagram account @CatsOnACouch has sued the Trump administration, alleging she was barred from attending Vice President JD Vance’s public events because of her online criticism, violating her First Amendment rights. Amanda McGonigle claims Secret Service agents denied her entry to a White House-promoted event in Maine after recognizing her account, telling her, “we know where you stand.” Represented by the ACLU, she is seeking a court order preventing the administration from excluding her from future public events based on her political views, while the White House and Secret Service have not yet responded to the lawsuit.

A 37-story Manhattan high-rise under renovation was declared “stable” after buckling steel support columns triggered emergency evacuations and fears of a partial collapse near Grand Central Terminal. The former Pfizer headquarters, which is being converted into a 1,500-unit luxury apartment building, was evacuated along with several neighboring buildings after construction workers discovered structural damage on the 21st floor. City officials said no injuries were reported and engineers successfully stabilized the structure with temporary supports, though the building will continue to be closely monitored while repairs are completed.

Oregon is seeking to delay Paramount’s proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. for 60 days, accusing the company of withholding records about its lobbying efforts and regulatory strategy. State Attorney General Dan Rayfield plans to ask a court to pause the merger while Oregon reviews documents related to the company’s internal “Project Warrior” campaign and its contacts with the Trump administration. Paramount argues the requested records are unrelated to antitrust concerns and insists the merger is lawful and pro-competitive, but Oregon joins several states preparing legal challenges over fears the deal could reduce competition and cost jobs across the media industry.

Former Jackson, Mississippi, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba and former City Council President Aaron Banks pleaded guilty to conspiracy in a federal bribery scheme just one week before their trial was set to begin. Prosecutors alleged the officials accepted bribes from undercover FBI agents posing as real estate developers in exchange for helping approve a development project, with former District Attorney Jody Owens and two other local officials also pleading guilty in the case. Lumumba, who had previously called the prosecution politically motivated, now faces up to five years in prison, with sentencing scheduled for October.

German prosecutors say a network of mainly Chinese men used Telegram groups to share rape videos, exchange advice on drugging women, and celebrate sexual assaults, in a case that has drawn comparisons to France's Gisèle Pelicot case. Investigators say the online groups, some with tens of thousands of members, used coded language to discuss attacks and led to multiple convictions, with additional suspects still on trial and more arrests possible. The investigation has also prompted broader international efforts to dismantle online networks promoting drug-facilitated sexual violence, while raising renewed scrutiny of Telegram over its failure to stop years of alleged criminal activity on its platform.

More On Iran War

New York Times, Iran Live Updates: Trump Casts Doubt on Future of Cease-Fire After Latest Strikes, Leo Sands, Eric Schmitt and Hari Raj, July 8, 2026. “I think it’s over,” President Trump said, referring to the preliminary truce, and threatened to strike Iran again. The two sides traded attacks as their truce appeared to edge closer to collapse.

Here’s the latest.

The U.S.-Iran truce that has been on shaky ground for weeks appeared to edge closer to collapse on Wednesday after the two sides traded new attacks and President Trump said he considered the deal to be over.

Speaking at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, Mr. Trump struck a belligerent tone amid the seemingly unyielding cycle of attacks and counterattacks, threatening to hit Iran again “hard” and floating the possibility of reinstating the U.S. Navy’s blockade on Iranian ports.

The overnight hostilities and pessimistic rhetoric followed weeks of brewing tension over shipping access through the Strait of Hormuz and occasional strikes.

In response to a question about the state of the nominal cease-fire, Mr. Trump had earlier responded: “To me, I think it’s over.” Mr. Trump also disparaged Iran’s leadership as “cuckoo,” even as he added that he was open to further talks. Soon after, the price of oil jumped to its highest level in weeks.

Earlier on Wednesday, Iran’s armed forces said that they had attacked U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait. Before those attacks, the United States carried out airstrikes against several targets in Iran and reimposed sanctions on Iranian oil sales.

The preliminary U.S.-Iran agreement to cease hostilities, which was signed more than three weeks ago, was intended to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital oil and gas shipping route, and allow more negotiations toward permanently ending the monthslong war.

As the countries have continued to exchange intermittent strikes, the United States has accused Iran of not adhering to its commitment to reopen the waterway. Iran has shown a consistent unwillingness to bend to the American demands, insisting that it maintain control over the strait.

The Pentagon said its earlier strikes were in response to Iranian attacks on three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran has not claimed responsibility for the attacks.

The central command of Iran’s military called the U.S. strikes in Iran’s south an “overt act of aggression.” In remarks carried on Iranian state media on Wednesday, it also warned the United States against interfering in Tehran’s management of the strait.

Hours later, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said that it had targeted 85 U.S. military sites in Bahrain and Kuwait. The Iranian military also shot down an American MQ-9 drone in the attack, the Guards Corps said in a statement published in state media.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s top negotiator and the speaker of its Parliament, on Wednesday accused the United States of major violations of the preliminary accord.

Negotiations between Iran and the United States had been paused until after the dayslong funeral ceremonies for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who was killed on the first day of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran.

Here’s what else to know:

• Energy prices: The price of oil rose 6 percent after Mr. Trump cast doubt on the cease-fire deal, to above $78 a barrel, its highest level in more than two weeks. That is down from its peak during the worst of the fighting but above its prewar price of around $72 a barrel. Read more ›
• Khamenei’s funeral: Iranian authorities projected an image of strength and unity at funeral processions for the supreme leader this week, offering an awkward juxtaposition against the backdrop of the renewed hostilities. The body of the supreme leader was taken on Wednesday to Najaf, a holy Shiite city in Iraq. Read more ›
• Strait of Hormuz: The uptick in violence is threatening to derail the fragile recovery of oil and gas shipments through the crucial waterway. On Wednesday, the International Maritime Organization warned ships against transiting the strait, citing the danger of further attacks. 

New York Times, News Analysis: As Iran Cease-Fire Frays, Trump Faces a Muddled War and Unpalatable Options, David E. Sanger, July 8, 2026. The president appears to be confronting the consequences of a cease-fire deal cobbled together in haste, with little movement toward resolving the key issues driving the conflict

Just two weeks ago, opening the Great American State Fair, President Trump triumphantly declared: “For the first time in 3,000 years, we are going to have peace in the Middle East.”

It was typical bravado for Mr. Trump. But the “peace” he was celebrating — the cease-fire with Iran that on Wednesday he declared “over” after less than a month — was already beginning to unravel. The result was perhaps predictable for a 14-paragraph memorandum of understanding that skirted major issues and was hastily assembled so Mr. Trump could declare he had reached a deal, any deal.

Now Mr. Trump appears to be confronting the consequences of his haste, and of his assumption, born of his time in the real estate business, that his adversary would prize economic benefits over the revolutionary ideology that has driven its politics since the 1979 Iranian revolution. That has left him facing a range of unpalatable options amid seemingly intractable sticking points over the fate of Iran’s nuclear program — to say nothing of its missile program, its support for terrorist groups and its repression of its own people.

At the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, on Wednesday after the two sides had exchanged strikes, he threatened major new combat operations. Those included seizing a key Iranian oil processing island and attacking the country’s infrastructure and desalination plants, which experts have said could constitute a war crime. (Mr. Trump did say he was most hesitant to hit the desalination facilities.)

But Mr. Trump has made such threats without following through before, and he added on Wednesday that he did not anticipate a return to full-scale war. Such a move has little domestic support, and some of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies fear the economic and political consequences less than four months before the midterm elections. No one is more aware of that calendar, or Mr. Trump’s hesitation to repeat the experience of the spring, than the Iranian leadership.

The president could instead reimpose the American blockade of Iranian ports, an attempt to cut off the country’s economic lifeline. But that would require a continued, intense American presence in the region, and while Mr. Trump contended in April that it would lead to Iranian economic collapse, his earlier imposition of it did not.

Or he could elect to live in a world of neither war nor peace, an era of episodic skirmishes in the Persian Gulf, punctuated by periodic negotiations, with traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil-shipping route, greatly reduced from the 130 or so ships that passed through each day before the war. The energy markets would most likely adjust; to some degree they already have.

But for a president who promised a quick, cost-free confrontation with an old adversary — “four to six weeks” was the White House prediction in the opening weeks — an ongoing conflict would amount to near-total failure on the mission he initially set out upon. And the price would be staggering: The Pentagon has already asked Congress for about $70 billion to cover the early operations around Iran, and the cost rises every week.Ships in the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year. Iran has continued to use access to the strait, a key oil-shipping route, as a point of leverage.Credit...Reuters

“The problem is that all the options — endure, escalate or agree — are unattractive in different ways,” Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former aide to Senator John McCain, said on Wednesday. “The likeliest outcome is a continuing series of low-level, tit-for-tat attacks, followed by frantic diplomacy by mediators, the emergence of a new and fragile cease-fire, and then probably another round of strikes.

Mr. Fontaine added: “It will be a long oscillation between cold war and low-level hot war.”

Many of the problems Mr. Trump is facing today were exacerbated by the cease-fire deal itself. It left unresolved, for a later negotiation that Mr. Trump now says he has little interest in pursuing, the fate of Iran’s stockpile of near-bomb-grade nuclear fuel, the most prominent among the administration’s shifting reasons for attacking Iran on Feb. 28.

The agreement appeared to hand Iran at least some control over passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the superweapon that Tehran, and specifically the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, has skillfully manipulated to drive up oil prices, and now has used to justify attacks on tankers and cargo ships not hewing to its new rules.

“What we’re seeing now is Iran, and more specifically the I.R.G.C., trying to exert control over the strait and declaring that this control is their sovereign right,” said Kevin Donegan, a retired Navy vice admiral who served as a Navy commander in the Middle East. “That’s the main card they have to play, and as a result we can expect they will continue to try to disrupt any ship traffic that uses routes different from the ones they have published.”

The deal was silent on Iran’s missile arsenal, the key issue for Israel. And it depended on a cease-fire in Lebanon, though the parties to that conflict, Israel and Hezbollah, were not signatories of the agreement. And it set an unrealistic deadline, 60 days, to deal diplomatically with those and other issues that months of active combat had failed to resolve.

There are, of course, many more turns ahead in this drama. Mr. Trump threatened again on Wednesday to try to seize Kharg Island, where giant tankers collect Iran’s oil and head to world markets. He may seek to seize the 60 percent enriched nuclear material deep underground at Isfahan, a mission for which Special Operations forces have trained extensively, though he dismissed the need for it on Wednesday.

“We’ve already got the nuclear material, because it’s so far underground,” he said, noting that the Iranians do not have the heavy equipment needed to unearth it.

If Mr. Trump is right about that, and many nuclear experts agree that the material would be enormously difficult to recover, it raises a fundamental question: If the nuclear fuel was successfully buried in the June 2025 American bombing of three major nuclear sites, why did he go to war to begin with? His statement on Wednesday, a repeat of comments he has made several times in recent months, undercuts the argument he made in the days after the initial attack in February that there was an “imminent” threat.

That initial justification has been overtaken by subsequent contradictions. Mr. Trump has periodically praised the new Iranian leadership, and even its new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the slain ayatollah, as more “reasonable.” He has said many times that, unlike their predecessors, the new leaders would open up the strait and dilute the nuclear stockpile because it will be in their economic interest.

Vice President JD Vance sounded exactly that note last month, when he was signing the memorandum of understanding in Switzerland.

“The coolest thing about the progress we’ve made over the last few weeks is that you see people within the Iranian system, senior leadership, even I.R.G.C. officials say, ‘You know what, we may have some animosity, we may have some mistrust, but we recognize the way that we’ve done business with the United States for 47 years is a mistake,’” he said.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump had a different word for those leaders: “scum.”

“They are sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re vicious, violent people,” he said, adding: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them.”

Popular Information, Guest Post on Accountability Journalism: The real cost of the Iran War: $103 billion in 120 days, Stephen Semler, July 8, 2026. Testifying before the House Appropriations Committee last week, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought said the US had spent $30 billion on the Iran War. The real cost is over $100 billion.

The Trump administration has offered Congress lowball war cost estimates before. On May 12, Pentagon comptroller Jay Hurst, testifying alongside Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, said the war had cost $29 billion. On April 29, Hurst said it was $25 billion. Despite repeated congressional requests, neither Hurst nor Hegseth has provided supporting documentation for the estimate. Vought hasn’t either.

The Trump administration itself has admitted that the war has cost far more than $30 billion. On June 24 — a week before Vought’s testimony — the White House formally requested $88 billion in supplemental funding from Congress, including $72 billion for the Iran War. No doubt Vought was aware of this funding request; after all, he wrote it — his signature appears on the second page.

Throughout the conflict, the cost of the Iran War has been habitually understated. Establishment media have parroted Hegseth’s defactualized cost estimates and similarly low estimates from establishment think tanks. The estimate that came closest to the Trump administration’s requested $72 billion for the war came from Popular Information. In May, we estimated the Iran War had cost $71.8 billion.

But that estimate was just for the war’s first 60 days, and the Trump administration plans on funding additional war costs through another reconciliation bill. In short — not all war costs are accounted for in that $72 billion figure. Another cost assessment is needed.Despite de-escalation, costs continue to mount

Through four months, the US has spent more than $103 billion on the Iran War — larger than all but three countries’ military budgets. The figure refers only to direct war costs — the immediate budgetary costs directly tied to the war, including operations, personnel, and matériel.

This table provides an overview of the $103 billion in direct war costs incurred from February 28 to June 27, 2026.

Despite a lack of full-scale conflict, the US accrued $31 billion in war costs from days 60 to 120. Costs stem from US forces maintaining a wartime posture in the Middle East, enforcing a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz (after Iran had already shut down the Strait), and firing hundreds of munitions, including at least 49 Tomahawk cruise missiles during the June 10 strikes alone (FY2027 unit cost: $3.7 million). Iranian drones and missiles have inflicted additional damage to US military bases in the region and destroyed more US military equipment.

Other cost increases are related to data availability: New satellite imagery has revealed far more extensive damage to US military bases than previously known. (Under government pressure, US satellite imagery companies like Planet Labs have withheld imagery of large swaths of the Middle East, concealing damage to US military property.) The Trump administration’s supplemental funding request disclosed war costs incurred by nonmilitary US agencies, including for the State Department — $1.9 billion for diplomatic protection, civilian evacuation, embassy fortification, and equipment replacement — and the Department of Homeland Security — an additional $2 billion for operational costs incurred by the Coast Guard in assuming roles vacated by US military units to fight in the Iran War.¹

Neither the Trump administration nor congressional Republicans have a plan to “pay for” the Iran War, either through a commensurate increase in taxes or reduction in spending.

Apparently, they don’t believe they ought to. “War is never paid for when you fight it,” House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-OK) said in a March interview. “We didn’t pay for World War II or Korea or World War I ... so I don’t think [the cost of the Iran war] should be offset.”

Rep. Cole is wrong. Taxes were levied in 1914, 1916, 1917, and 1919 to fund World War I; in 1940, 1941, 1942, and 1944 for World War II; and in 1950 and 1951 for the Korean War. Cutting taxes during major conflicts and financing them with the national debt is a post-9/11 contrivance, unique to the US wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran. “How do you pay for it?” is a question imposed on many policies, but war is not one of them.

Interest on the national debt is an example of the Iran War’s indirect costs, which cover broader budgetary and economic costs like veterans care and inflation. Incorporating the full spectrum of war costs sends the Iran War’s total beyond $1 trillion over the next decade, according to Harvard University professor and public finance expert Linda Bilmes. Meanwhile, establishment media outlets like the New York Times are reporting $132 billion in combined direct and indirect war costs, not much higher than our $103 billion estimate for only the direct costs.

The $103 billion in direct costs itemized above has gone to what has become the most unpopular US war in history. Few Americans believe the Iran War is worth the cost.

A detailed methodology for the $103 billion estimate is available HERE.

War cost estimates from establishment think tanks tend to largely omit operational costs, claiming that nearly all the war’s operational costs are already budgeted for. They are not. If they were, the Trump administration’s supplemental funding request wouldn’t include more than $20 billion for operational war costs in 2026 (including “$17.3 billion for Operational Costs” for the War Department), nor would the Pentagon’s CFO have said in April that the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion military spending request for 2027 excludes any funding for the Iran War.

More On Trump World  

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Pathetic in Ankara, Paul Krugman, right, July 8, 2026. Who’s afraid of the big bad Trump?

A recent report in the Wall Street Journal describes a tense meeting among European leaders early this year, convened after Donald Trump threatened to use military force to seize Greenland from Denmark. According to the Journal,

heads of government were venting so emotionally about the 47th president that some of the nearly 30 leaders present would later call the session “therapy night.”

Yesterday, soon after he arrived in Ankara for the NATO Summit, Trump reiterated his demand that Denmark hand him control of Greenland. But reactions were subdued. As far as I can tell, our erstwhile allies are now treating Trump as the senile uncle who says crazy, outrageous things, but shouldn’t be taken seriously.

What has changed? According to the Journal, European leaders have largely given up on hopes that they can bring back the America they used to know, and are quietly, in effect, declaring independence:

American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office. Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts.

Europeans are running studies on where they would store their data or process their payments should friction with the U.S. escalate, and how well their American-made weaponry would operate without Washington’s authorization. Nations whose empires once spanned the globe are now stuck trying to extricate themselves from their humbling dependency on American technology and military power, without provoking the U.S.

Their willingness to de-Americanize partly reflects recognition that reconciliation is hopeless: Trump is who he is, and a nation that elected him twice simply can’t be trusted.

However, Europe’s turn away from Trump also reflects plummeting perceptions of his power. At one time the world feared Trump although it never respected him. The silence that met his renewed demand for Greenland shows that the world no longer takes him seriously.

America remains an economic superpower with an enormous military budget. And the combination of a supine Republican Party, along with a Supreme Court that shamelessly greenlights Trump’s authoritarianism, has given this president more control over U.S. policy than any president has ever had, or ever should have. But while Trump is able to run roughshod over Americans, he can no longer bully the rest of the world. Thanks to Trump, the U.S. has seen its global influence plunge.

There are three big reasons for that precipitous decline.

First, there is the debacle in Iran. Not only did Trump’s war of choice fail in all its objectives, it revealed that U.S. military power is far more limited than almost anyone realized. The insistence by Trump and his lackeys that this humiliating defeat was a great victory shows that American foreign policy only serves to pander to Trump’s fragile ego. And when his ego meets reality, it slithers away.

In addition to showing the limits of U.S. military power, the war also showed the limits of U.S. financial power: It is increasingly easy for nations to bypass U.S. banks and the dollar using cryptocurrency — and Chinese yuan.

A second, in its way equally important, blow to U.S. prestige and influence has been Trump’s failure to deliver Ukraine to Vladimir Putin.

For make no mistake: everyone at that summit in Ankara knows that Trump, JD Vance and company both expected and hoped that their betrayal of Ukraine would lead to Russian victory. Surely, they imagined, Ukraine would be unable to hold off the onslaught from its much bigger neighbor without U.S. aid. To America’s everlasting shame, Trump told Volodymyr Zelenskyy that he didn’t “have the cards.”

Yet after Trump cut U.S. aid to Ukraine by 99 percent, Ukraine not only survived but began gaining the upper hand. Europe has stepped up financially, more or less replacing the lost American dollars. And Ukrainian military innovation has largely made up for the loss of American weapons.

The result has been to make the U.S. increasingly irrelevant. Put it this way: Iran taught foreign governments not to fear American might; China, along with the crypto industry, has taught rogue countries that they needn’t fear American financial control; and Ukraine has taught foreign governments that they don’t need American support.

Finally, Trump’s global power play rested on economics even more than on military force, above all on his belief that other nations would cower in fear at the prospect of facing U.S. tariffs. But Trump’s attempt to weaponize international trade has been a bust. Most notably, China’s economy has powered right through the Trump tariffs. Furthermore, it turns out that China has escalation dominance in the trade war: we need their rare earths more than they need access to our consumers.

And other nations — even Canada and Mexico, which have historically been highly dependent on the U.S. market — are moving to reduce their dependence. Canada’s move to build a new pipeline that will let it sell Alberta oil to Asia rather than the Midwest is just a highly visible symbol of a general world move toward bypassing America now that we have become an unstable, unreliable economic partner.

The combined effect of these humiliations for Trump and his minions has been a drastic reordering of America’s place in the world. For most of last year foreign leaders kept trying, desperately, to appease Trump. These days they’re mostly just humoring him, building a world in which his sundowning won’t matter.

It’s extremely unlikely that anything substantive will come out of this NATO meeting. And a year ago the prospect of a failed summit would have been a source of deep concern. Now it will be met with a shrug: Nobody expects anything but chaotic bluster from Trump, and what he does matters less and less.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: July 8, 2026 [], Heather Cox Richardson, right, July 8, 2026. In Ankara, Türkiye, for a two-day summit of the countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), President Donald J. Trump told reporters he was “very disappointed with NATO” because it had not backed its war on Iran.

“We weren’t treated well because we did something in Iran,” he said. “We don’t need anybody’s help. I didn’t even want their help. They said they wouldn’t be there. And we’ve invested trillions of dollars in NATO. Why? To protect European countries and others, Canada, et cetera, but to protect people, countries from generally speaking, it used to be the Soviet Union, now it’s Russia, and I say that’s fine, but you would think that they’d be very willing to do something to help us, and they really weren’t.”

Trump went on to claim his beef with NATO began over Greenland, which he wants “because Greenland doesn’t help Denmark…but it’s an important part for the United States. And it’s surrounded by China ships and Russian ships And that’s not going to happen. The ships is, it’s not going to happen. It was Greenland that, in my, and it continues to be, that should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark. And when they wouldn’t go along with it and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia and we don’t have to spend any money, we could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe because as you probably noticed, Europe’s a very different place than it was 20 years ago. A lot different. Much different. It’s a much different and they better be careful with immigration and energy. If they’re not careful with those two things, you’re not going to have a Europe anymore. Okay. Thank you very much everybody.”

NATO is the most effective alliance in human history. It is also a defensive, not an offensive, alliance.

Representatives from the the United States and eleven other nations in North America and Europe came together to sign the original NATO declaration on April 4, 1949. The alliance guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend each other against an attack by a third party. At the time, their main concern was resisting Soviet aggression, but as Trump noted, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, NATO resisted Russian aggression instead.

The alliance is effective because it calls for collective defense. Article 5 of the treaty requires every nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked militarily. That article has been invoked only once: in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.

On the day NATO went into effect, President Harry S. Truman said, “If there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.” In the years since 1949, his observation seems to have proven correct. NATO now has 32 member nations.

Crucially, NATO acts not only as a response to attack, but also as a deterrent, and its strength has always been backstopped by the military strength of the U.S., including its nuclear weapons. Trump has repeatedly attacked NATO and said he would take the U.S. out of it in a second term, alarming Congress enough that in 2023 it put into the National Defense Authorization Act a measure prohibiting any president from leaving NATO without the approval of two thirds of the Senate or a congressional law.

But as foreign policy specialist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic in 2024, even though Trump might have trouble actually tossing out a long-standing treaty that has safeguarded national security for 75 years, the realization that the U.S. is abandoning its commitment to collective defense would make the treaty itself worthless.

In place of the powerful NATO alliance that has protected all nations’ sovereignty, Trump appears to want the sort of world called for by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, in which great powers carve up the globe into spheres of influence.

In January, Robert Kagan, right, warned that Trump’s destruction of the order that has underpinned global security for the past 80 years was creating the most dangerous world since World War II. With the end of open access to global resources, markets, and strategic bases and without reliable friends or allies, the U.S. will need more military spending than ever.

“Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future,” Kagan warned. They are accustomed to the “basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world” and have come to think it is “the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.”

Everything will be up for grabs, Kagan wrote, with myriad “flash points for potential conflict.” “If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive,” Kagan wrote, “wait until they start paying for what comes next.”

Kagan published his article just two weeks after Trump had sent troops to Venezuela to seize the nation’s president and his wife and take control of the country’s oil fields. Since then, as Simon Romero of the New York Times reported yesterday, the Trump administration has taken an estimated $8 billion in oil revenue out of the country, although it has refused to say how it is using the funds.

In the wake of the devastating earthquakes that hit Venezuela on June 24, Romero reports that the U.S. has so far pledged only $300 million in aid. U.S. officials destroyed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), through which it would have distributed aid in the past, so the assistance is being funneled through the Red Cross, the United Nations, and religious organizations. The top U.S. diplomat in Venezuela, John Barrett, told Romero the U.S. will continue to prioritize using Venezuela’s oil resources to rebuild the nation’s economy.

Less than six weeks after The Atlantic published Kagan’s article, Trump attacked Iran in strikes he appeared to think would mirror the strikes against Venezuela, enabling him to replace Iran’s leadership with men willing to work with the U.S. and perhaps enabling the U.S. to take a stake in Iran’s oil production.

Instead, Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz in the aftermath of the strikes, choking off about 27% of the world’s globally traded oil and about a third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer. Rather than a quick strike, Trump’s war on Iran is now stretching into its fifth month, and attempts to end it, even on terms worse than when it began, are faltering.

Tonight, at 5:15, as NATO leaders met in Türkiye, U.S. Central Command announced that U.S. forces had launched “a series of powerful strikes against Iran to impose heavy costs for targeting and attacking commercial shipping crewed by innocent civilians in an international waterway.” It said the strikes were a “response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s demonstrated aggression was unwarranted, dangerous, and a clear violation of the ceasefire.”

It later said it had hit more than 80 targets.

New York Times, Drama and Spectacle as Trump Makes His NATO Entrance, Shawn McCreesh and Tyler Pager, July 8, 2026. The second President Trump landed in Turkey, the center of gravity shifted right to where he likes it best: himself.

When President Trump stepped off his plane in Ankara on Tuesday afternoon, he received an over-the-top welcome comparable only to the one the pope got when he visited Turkey late last year.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was there on the tarmac to greet him — the Turkish autocrat did this for none of the other more than 30 world leaders who arrived in Ankara for a NATO summit — accompanied by dozens of Turks on horseback. A band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” as cannons fired and fighter jets flew low overhead trailing streaks of red, white and blue smoke.

The second Mr. Trump landed on his Qatari-gifted jumbo jet, the center of gravity at the summit shifted right to where Mr. Trump likes it best: himself.

“He takes all the oxygen out of the room for everybody else,” Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, said Tuesday at a reception on the sidelines of the summit in the Turkish capital.

He added: “He’s bigger than life here.”

As usual, Mr. Trump’s idiosyncratic style of governing had ensured a spectacle on the world stage. Indeed, even before he arrived, he was creating big drama between himself and many of the people he would be coming face to face with here this week.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Turkey? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Last month, he said he would deign to take the 10-hour flight only because the summit was being hosted by his good friend Mr. Erdogan. And last week, he called the head of FIFA to ask him to review the red card given to the United States’ top goal scorer in the World Cup. The player was later reinstated for the game against Belgium, setting off fury in Brussels, the de facto capital of the European Union where NATO is headquartered.

Perhaps the most personal drama gripping NATO this week is Mr. Trump’s scrap with Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni — until very recently among the most Trump-aligned leaders in Europe. The president has been picking on her over her refusal to allow her country to be drawn into the war against Iran.

Mr. Trump has been all over the front pages of the Italian papers for weeks. “TRUMP È UN COGLIONE,” screamed the front page of the right-leaning newspaper Libero, using an Italian term of art that has many colorful translations — all of them vulgar.

But the feud really crescendoed this weekend, when Mr. Trump posted a doctored picture of Ms. Meloni staring at him longingly with the caption, “RESTRAINING ORDER NEEDED.”

It has all contributed to a carnivalesque quality at this year’s NATO.

After Mr. Trump arrived, he sat beside Mr. Erdogan at a bilateral meeting in the Turkish presidential complex and promptly stirred up some fresh drama. He criticized Denmark and reminded NATO leaders that he still had designs on Greenland; complained that Britain, France and Italy did not do enough to support the United States in its war against Iran; said Europe was a lot better 20 years ago; and mused on Ms. Meloni, characterizing his quarrel that has caused so much international agita as something verging on playful.

“I think she’s a nice person,” he said breezily. “I didn’t put a heavy press on her.”ImageMr. Trump and Mr. Erdogan seated in a formal room. A table with colorful flowers is prominent in the foreground.

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

A Manhattan jury awarded the multimillion-dollar judgment to the writer E. Jean Carroll in May 2023 (New York Times photo by Dave Sanders).

New York Times, Judge Orders $5 Million Trump Judgment Be Released to E. Jean Carroll, Abbie VanSickle and Benjamin Weiser, July 8, 2026. Ms. Carroll had asked a federal judge to order the president to pay the judgment after a jury found he sexually abused and defamed her.

A federal judge on Wednesday ordered that the writer E. Jean Carroll should promptly receive a $5 million jury award, days after the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by President Trump and despite his last-minute attempt to get the justices to reconsider.

In a two-page order, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Manhattan federal court cited the Supreme Court’s June 29 order denying Mr. Trump’s request that the justices review the matter. That cleared the way for the funds, which Mr. Trump had deposited with the court, to be released to Ms. Carroll.

A Manhattan jury awarded the multimillion-dollar judgment to Ms. Carroll in May 2023 after finding him liable for sexually assaulting her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s. The jury also found that Mr. Trump defamed Ms. Carroll by calling her allegations against him “a Hoax and a lie” on social media. He has continued to deny assaulting Ms. Carroll.

The Supreme Court did not announce its reasons for rejecting Mr. Trump’s appeal last week, which is typical when the court declines a petition to take on a case, and no public dissents were noted. Under the court’s rules, if the justices deny a petition, the parties have 25 days to request a rehearing.

Lawyers for Mr. Trump filed such a request earlier on Wednesday, again urging the justices to hear his appeal and saying they should take up the matter alongside a separate appeal in a second case involving Ms. Carroll.

It is rare but not unheard-of for the justices to grant such requests. But legal experts say in this case it might have been a last-ditch effort to stall Ms. Carroll from getting the jury’s award.

Stephen I. Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said that “some of this appears to be a transparent play for time.”

After the court’s rejection last week, Ms. Carroll had immediately asked a federal judge to order the president to pay her, asserting that Mr. Trump had “consistently sought to obstruct and delay payment” of the jury’s award.

The court wrapped up its term last week and is now in summer recess. Although the justices continue to hear emergency applications, they are not scheduled to meet to consider other cases until September. That is when the justices will convene as they prepare to begin a new term, which officially starts on the first Monday in October. As a result, they may not consider Mr. Trump’s new request for months.

By then, the court may also need to decide whether to review a second case related to Ms. Carroll and Mr. Trump. Lawyers for Mr. Trump said in their petition on Wednesday that the president “will imminently file” to ask the justices to step in and overturn the verdict of a separate jury, which in 2024 had ordered him to pay Ms. Carroll $83.3 million after concluding Mr. Trump had defamed her in 2019.

A Manhattan jury awarded the multimillion-dollar judgment to the writer E. Jean Carroll in May 2023.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

In the petition, Mr. Trump’s lawyers asserted that the two cases are intertwined and said the justices should decide whether to hear them both at the same time.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers on Wednesday filed a notice indicating they would appeal Judge Kaplan’s order.

O’Meara said that Dugan turned away a more lucrative career path to “defend the disabled, the oppressed, and those discriminated against.”

Then-Judge Hannah Dugan enters federal court in May 2025. (Photo by Scott Olson via Getty Images)

All Rise News, No jail for former Judge Dugan, Adam Klasfeld, right, July 8, 2026. Former Judge Dugan spared jail and praised for her 'extraordinary life'Judge Adelman called Dugan an "otherwise good person" made a "bad decision in the moment."

Former Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan received a non-jail sentence following her conviction for obstructing the arrest of an undocumented immigrant in her courthouse.

Commenting on what she described as “myths” surrounding the case, Dugan said: “I have been cast as a scofflaw and as a hero.” Rejecting those characterizations, she said: “I am a public servant who is just trying to do my job.”

U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman said of Dugan: “In short, this is a person who has done a lot of good in our community.”

Imposing a $5,500 fine, Adelman called Dugan an “otherwise good person” with “outstanding character” who made “a bad decision at the moment.”

Late last year, a federal jury delivered a surprising mixed verdict, clearing Dugan of a misdemeanor charge of concealing undocumented immigrant Eduardo Flores-Ruiz — but convicting her of obstructing the same person’s arrest.

The Trump Justice Department handcuffed and perp-walked her into two courthouses. Then-Attorney General Pamela Bondi called her “deranged,” and FBI director Kash Patel posted a photograph of her humiliation on social media.

Dugan’s attorney Steven Biskupic noted that the government tried to make her a “poster child” for judges defying ICE.

“What judge in the country is looking at this case and saying, ‘Yes, sign me up’?” Biskupic said.

Breaking her silence on the case for the first time during her sentencing, Dugan said: “My acts were not done with any malicious intent or to advance any personal interest.”

A devout Catholic, Dugan added that she acted “ in accordance with the Scriptures and my judicial oath.”

‘Passionate about the independence of the judiciary’

For many in Milwaukee County, Dugan’s trial became a reckoning on the Trump administration’s nationwide policy of ICE agents conducting arrests inside state, local and immigration courthouses. The jury heard testimony by the chief judge of her court that he feared the policy would chill immigrants from reporting crimes and accessing the system.

But First Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Frohling said the case wasn’t about whether the policy was “laudable, appropriate, or reprehensible.”

Two Marquette University Law School professors spoke on her behalf: Janine Geske and Greg O’Meara, who is also a Jesuit priest.

A former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice, Geske said: “I know of no other judge in this state who’s more attached to this community.” She urged Judge Adelman to give Dugan consideration for the “extraordinary life she led.”

“She’s passionate about the independence of the judiciary and the importance of the rule of law,” Geske said.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Harmeet Dhillon’s Team Appears To Have Already Started Framing People, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), July 8, 2026. I have laid out (one, two) the accumulating evidence that Harmeet Dhillon’s team fabricated virtually their entire case against Georgia Fort, a journalist shown above, in the Cities Church case.

To get warrants targeting Fort, they repeatedly claimed that she chanted along with protestors at the protest. DOJ has already confessed “The statement about Fort chanting was incorrect.”

Her attorneys laid out three more claims that — Fort’s attorneys claim — are false in the indictment:

The superseding indictment alleges that Ms. Fort purportedly engaged in “menacing and threatening behavior,” ECF 144, Overt Act #26, but that assertion is directly contradicted and disproven by video footage and numerous witness statements;The superseding indictment alleges that Ms. Fort attempted “to oppress and physically intimidate” the [redacted], ECF 144, Overt Act #35, but that contention is contradicted and disproven by video footage and his own statements; andThe superseding indictment alleges that Ms. Fort purportedly blocked a van while conducting an interview outside the church, ECF 144, Overt Act #41, but that averment is similarly contradicted and disproven by video footage and all available witness statements—all of which refer to a male doing so.

Not only did AUSA Robert Keenan waive any response to those complaints in his response to her motion to get grand jury transcripts, but a witness transcript (probably from the Pastor) seems wildly inconsistent those claims:

The witness said a man blocked the van which the indictment claims Fort blocked.

He said he did not feel physically threatened by Fort. He was not perturbed by Fort’s interview of him for fear of his personal safety, but because “they were blocking my view from seeing the rest of the church.” He “didn’t feel physically threatened,” a claim that not only is inconsistent with the indictment, but means DOJ has not met the required elements of the offense for either charged crime, at least with respect to Fort. And the witness viewed her, generally, as a journalist covering the protest, precisely what she says she was doing.

This appears to prove that the only claims made about Fort in the indictment — save her presence at it — are false:

Overt Act # 26: While inside the Church, defendants collectively oppressed, threatened, and intimidated the Church’s congregants and pastors, by physically occupying most of the main aisle and rows of chairs near the front of the Church, engaging in menacing and threatening behavior, (for some) chanting and yelling loudly at the pastor and congregants, and/or physically obstructing them as they attempted to exit and/or move about within the Church.

[snip]

Overt Act # 35: With other co-conspirators standing nearby, defendants LEMON, RICHARDSON, FORT, and BEUTE approached the pastor and largely surrounded him (to his front and both sides), stood in close proximity to the pastor in an attempt to oppress and intimidate him, and physically obstructed his freedom of movement while LEMON peppered him with questions to promote the operation’s message.

[snip]

Overt Act # 41: As a minivan full of congregants, including children, was preparing to depart from the Church, defendant KELLY walked in front of the minivan and angrily yelled at the congregants, and defendants ARMSTRONG and FORT stood in front of the minivan while FORT interviewed ARMSTRONG.

Having been told by two judges there was no probable cause to charge Fort (or Don Lemon), Harmeet Dhillon’s team went before a grand jury and made claims that appear to be entirely made up, fabricated to fit the elements of offense needed to charge the journalists.

Meanwhile, Harmeet [a Trump-backed high-level U.S. Justice Department official shown at right and ostensibly focused on protecting civil rights] is now threatening state officials with criminal prosecution if they do not engage in sufficient voter suppression to suit her partisan interests and North Carolina US Attorney Dan Bishop is improperly demanding lists of 2020 election workers from outside his district.

The fate of Georgia Fort matters well beyond Minnesota … because by all appearances, Harmeet’s team is preparing to make false claims to help right wing candidates in the election. 

Associated Pess via Politico, ‘Breathtaking assertion of power’: Appeals court slams door on Florida ‘Stop Woke’ law championed by DeSantis, Andrew Atterbury,July 8, 2026. The decision from a divided 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit is a devastating, possibly final blow to the so-called Stop WOKE act touted by the DeSantis administration.

Florida’s anti-woke law restricting how lessons on race and gender can be taught in colleges and universities — policies championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, above — violates the free speech rights of professors, a panel of appeals court judges ruled Tuesday.

The decision from a divided 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit is a devastating, possibly final blow to the so-called Stop WOKE Act touted by the DeSantis administration. The judges affirmed a 2022 decision that labeled Florida’s rules as “positively dystopian,” doubling down by arguing the law is “a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse” in the very classroom space where students are supposed to “puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth.”

“If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it,” Judge Britt C. Grant, an appointee of President Donald Trump, wrote in the opinion.

Grant was joined by Judge Charles R. Wilson, a Bill Clinton appointee, in the ruling. But another Trump-appointed judge, Barbara Lagoa — a former Florida Supreme Court judge picked by DeSantis — wrote a striking dissent of the decision, contending the First Amendment “does not compel all viewpoints to be worthy of state-sponsored endorsement.”

“This panel is not free to rewrite precedent simply because we dislike where it leads,” Lagoa wrote.

Florida’s Republican-led Legislature approved the “anti-woke” legislation, H.B. 7, or the Individual Freedom Act, in 2022. The state, though, has been blocked from enforcing the policies as it has been fighting in court ever since.

Directly inspired by DeSantis, the law expanded Florida’s anti-discrimination laws to prohibit schools and companies from leveling guilt or blame to students and employees based on race or sex. As such, it targets lessons over issues like “white privilege” by creating new protections for students and workers, including that a person should not be instructed to “feel guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” due to their race, color, sex or national origin. READ IN APP

A recent report in the Wall Street Journal describes a tense meeting among European leaders early this year, convened after Donald Trump threatened to use military force to seize Greenland from Denmark. According to the Journal,

heads of government were venting so emotionally about the 47th president that some of the nearly 30 leaders present would later call the session “therapy night.”

Yesterday, soon after he arrived in Ankara for the NATO Summit, Trump reiterated his demand that Denmark hand him control of Greenland. But reactions were subdued. As far as I can tell, our erstwhile allies are now treating Trump as the senile uncle who says crazy, outrageous things, but shouldn’t be taken seriously.

What has changed? According to the Journal, European leaders have largely given up on hopes that they can bring back the America they used to know, and are quietly, in effect, declaring independence: 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Did These Men Deserve to Die?, William Kristol, right, July 8, 2026. “The cruelty is the point,” Adam Serwer memorably wrote eight years ago.1 That was during Donald Trump’s first term in office. In his second term, the cruelty remains the point. But it has now been institutionalized and routinized in key agencies of the federal government. Trump’s personal and performative indecency has become an entire administration’s sustained and systematic indecency.

Yesterday morning, NBC News reported on the sudden death earlier this year of an Afghan national in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, 41, had fought for a decade alongside U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. He was evacuated when U.S. troops pulled out in 2021 and entered the U.S. legally. He became a truck driver, worked at a market and bakery, and had requested asylum to remain here. That claim was pending when ICE seized him for deportation at his home in Richardson, Texas, on the morning of March 13, as he was getting his children ready for school.

Paktiawal died the next day in ICE custody. His death certificate says he died from “an adverse drug reaction” to an unidentified substance which triggered anaphylaxis and exacerbated his asthma, and his death was ruled an accident. We do know from his wife that he relied on an inhaler for asthma. We also know that ICE agents rejected her attempt to give them the device when he was taken into custody. We also know that Texas authorities have refused to release his autopsy report, arguing its disclosure would interfere with a pending criminal investigation.

Mohammed Nazeer Paktiawal was not a criminal. He was not here illegally. He was a threat to no one—except perhaps the Taliban. There was no reason for ICE to detain him—except to meet its arrest and deportation quotas. There is no reason for most of the fifty deaths in ICE detention during Trump’s second term except that the Trump administration is unsparing in pursuit of its mass deportation agenda, an agenda that is as irrational as it is cruel.

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Soon after this NBC news report appeared, news broke of another death, this one yesterday morning, on the streets of Houston.

Here’s the Department of Homeland Security’s announcement of what happened:

On July 7, 2026, at approximately 6:50 AM CT, ICE law enforcement attempted to conduct a vehicle stop as part of a targeted enforcement operation to arrest an illegal alien. The driver of the vehicle, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo—an illegal alien from Mexico—attempted to evade arrest. From information we are receiving, he rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.

The driver was struck, and emergency services were immediately contacted. The driver was transported to the hospital where he passed away from his injuries. DHS-OIG is leading an investigation into the agent-involved shooting. FBI Houston is leading an investigation into the potential assault on a federal law enforcement officer. This is a developing situation, and we will update the public when more information is available.

As of now, DHS has provided no evidence for the claim that Araujo “weaponized his vehicle.” No details, no video, no firsthand testimony with a name attached. Just a vague reference to “information we are receiving.” But the claim of a “weaponized vehicle” is a familiar one. This is the same claim we heard about Renée Good six months ago in Minneapolis, and that has been made by DHS—and that has turned out to be false—in many other cases, as well.

DHS also describes Araujo as an “illegal alien from Mexico.” You wouldn’t know from DHS that Araujo lived here for 35 years, was working in construction to support his wife, mother, and three children, and that he was in fact on his way to a construction site early yesterday morning, driving peacefully through a residential neighborhood with three workers, including a brother, in his car, when he was stopped by the federal agents. This doesn’t seem like someone who would suddenly decide to try to kill a federal agent.A bouquet of flowers and a devotional candle are placed on the pavement where Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was fatally shot near the intersection of Wayside Drive and Canal Street in Houston, Texas, on July 7, 2026. (Photo by Reginald Mathalone/NurPhoto via Getty)

In fact, there doesn’t seem to have been any good reason for ICE to have stopped and tried forcefully to detain Araujo. There was, so far as one can tell, no reason to kill him. And based on past precedent, there’s no reason to believe ICE will tell the truth about what happened.

Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, wrote on Facebook yesterday,

My father, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a hardworking Mexican man, was the man killed this morning by ICE in the East End.

My father has been in this country for nearly 35 years, working in construction to provide for myself, my two brothers, and my mother.

He was in the process of obtaining his work permit through the legal process. He was on his way to work, picking up his workers.

My father did not deserve this.

Ronaldo Salgado is right. His father did not deserve to be killed by ICE agents. Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal did not deserve to die in ICE custody. These deaths—and many others like them—are a direct effect of Trump’s mass deportation policy. That policy, more than any other, is the embodiment of the cruelty of the Trump administration. There had been, up to this point, twenty-one documented deaths of people in ICE custody in 2026 alone, as documented by Austin Kocher of the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.

But we should recall that Trump campaigned on mass deportation, and that we then elected him. We as a nation are responsible for what’s happened. We can never fully make up for the human cost of what has been done in our name. All we can do now is to act as quickly and unambiguously as possible to reject these policies, and to defeat decisively the spirit of indecency and inhumanity that lies behind them.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• The One Word Trump Won’t Say in Turkey… While Recep Erdoğan reaps the fruits of hosting a NATO summit, Turkish democracy pays the price, argues ERIC EDELMAN.
• Many Gen Zers Rooted Against Team USA. Here’s Why. Some of the reasons were personal, but some were strongly political, writes RACHEL JANFAZA.
• Desperate Trumpists Try to Stir Up a Panic Over ‘Communists’... But while the new Red Scare is a fakeout, parts of the left do pose a problem for Democrats, writes CATHY YOUNG.
• The NATO Defense Spending Canard… There’s nothing magical—or strategic—about the 5 percent number, observes MARK HERTLING.

Quick Hits

RAY OF CLARITY: Back in January, when Tulsi Gabbard was still director of national intelligence, she showed up in Fulton County, Georgia with a troop of FBI agents, who seized ballot records from the 2020 election—which, as you may recall, was decided by just 11,780 votes in the Peach State.

The Justice Department investigation into—well, uh, something—in Fulton County continues, but it hit a major roadblock yesterday as a federal judge blocked a grand jury subpoena for information on election workers in Georgia. In fact, “blocked” is an understatement. He nuked it from orbit. CNN has the story:

US District Judge William Ray called the breadth of the subpoena seeking information about Fulton County election workers “staggering.” . . .

“In this Court’s view, the DOJ does not possess a need to enforce the Subpoena greater than the burden of disclosure on Fulton County, and as such, the Court will not enforce it,” he said. . . .

“No evidence has been presented to the Court that the actual Grand Jury in the Northern District of Georgia seeks this information, as opposed to the out-of-district prosecutors who the DOJ has appointed to lead this inquiry who have served this Subpoena in the name of the Grand Jury,” the judge wrote.

It’s generally unseemly to point out what president nominated this or that judge any time there’s a noteworthy or politically fraught decision. But in many of these cases, it is germane, including this one: Ray was appointed by Donald Trump.

LE PEN AGAIN: Of the various foreign franchises of the Trump phenomenon, few are as noxious as France’s Marine Le Pen. Her political platform mostly focuses on immigration restrictions and the “de-Islamization” of France, though it also has room for complaints that Ukraine has been “subjugated” by the United States and calls for a special relationship with Russia. That last point shouldn’t be surprising, considering her party, the National Rally, took out a €6 million loan from a Russian bank, which it only paid back when the political embarrassment became too much.

In France’s last two presidential elections—2017 and 2022—Le Pen challenged Emanuelle Macron and lost. But in last year’s legislative elections, her party picked up 53 seats, bringing its total to 142. That made it the third-largest party in the National Assembly. And now Macron is term-limited.

Last year, Le Pen was convicted of corruption charges (shocking) and barred from running for office. But yesterday, a French court—while upholding her conviction—cleared the way for her to run for president again. “This evening, I am a candidate in the presidential election,” she announced without delay.

The next French presidential elections are next year. Bonne chance.

GET MITCH OR DIE TRYING: Sen. Mitch McConnell has been hospitalized since June 14, though the reason why isn’t public. Before his hospitalization, he was using a wheelchair to navigate the Capitol and his hands were increasingly bruised. Rumors that the 84-year-old former majority leader was on death’s door were rocketing around Trumpworld—mostly fed by Laura Loomer, who tweeted that McConnell was “brain dead” on Monday.

On Tuesday, things changed, though we’re not entirely clear if the situation has become more or less opaque. Majority Leader John Thune and Majority Whip John Barrasso said they had spoken to McConnell on the phone; so too did longtime McConnell ally Scott Jennings of CNN. Spokespeople for the two non-hospitalized senators were eager to emphasize how engaged and sharp McConnell was. Per Politico:

Thune and McConnell “had a lengthy and substantive conversation that covered a variety of topics, including national security,” a spokesperson for the majority leader said in a statement Tuesday.

Kate Noyes, a spokesperson for Barrasso, said the No. 2 leader and McConnell “had a lengthy conversation early this afternoon,” speaking by phone for roughly 20 minutes.

“They caught up about the latest news impacting Senate races, the Graham Platner scandal and the recent Supreme Court ruling on coordinated spending limits,” as well as the Senate agenda, she added. “Senator McConnell was fully engaged and is eager to get back to the Senate.”

There is something inherently odd about all this. It’s not just that McConnell could resolve a lot of confusion if he spoke publicly, even via a voice recording. It’s also the content of these calls. After McConnell was admitted to the hospital under alarming circumstances and remained there for several weeks, Thune and Barrasso spent their twenty minutes on the phone with him talking about Senate races and Supreme Court rulings on coordinated spending? 

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Graham Platner, Maine Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat, speaks during a campaign event.  

Maine Public, Graham Platner drops out of U.S. Senate race, opening narrow path to replace him, Steve Mistler, July 8, 2026. U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, the political upstart who overwhelmingly secured the Democratic nomination just one month ago, has ended his candidacy. His withdrawal from the race now sets up a frantic scramble to replace him on the November ballot.

Platner announced Wednesday that he's quitting the race in a defiant video statement blamed the political establishment for his downfall, saying that it conspired against him.

"We believe that for the movement to continue, it can't be me," he said. "And for that reason we are suspending campaign operations."

He also framed his plight as one shared with his base of supporters.

"We live in a political system that is not built for normal people. It is built structurally so that movements like ours cannot flourish, that if they begin to succeed they can be crushed," he said, adding, "What we have accomplished here you made possible ... and I have all the faith in the world that we could win if we continue to harness that. But the brutal political reality is that they're going to take everything away from us."

The moves followed a report by POLITICO that detailed allegations that he sexually assaulted a former girlfriend five years ago. The oysterman and combat veteran strongly denied the report, but it quickly led to a cratering of support from national and local Democrats who had endorsed him. That included leaders in the Maine Democratic Party who will now decide who will replace him on the November ballot to run against Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

Platner also lost support from congressional Democrats who endorsed him during the primary campaign. His biggest backer, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., released a statement Tuesday saying Platner should withdraw from the race.

"I have spoken with Graham Platner about the best path forward for Maine," Sanders said in a statement. "In light of these very serious allegations, I have recommended that he step aside."

Platner's exit from the race is a remarkable development for a candidate who skyrocketed from political obscurity last summer and built a movement that swept him to the Democratic nomination in June, winning more votes than any previous Democratic senatorial candidate in state history. Along the way, he forced two-term Gov. Janet Mills out of the race and became the center of national media interest, first by intrigue then by scrutiny.

He also channeled Democrats' anti-establishment anger at a party that's failed twice to defeat President Donald Trump. That anger has become part of a factional fight over the direction of the Democratic Party between progressive firebrands and the centrist wing. His position there drew sharp criticism from establishment politicians and activists who repeatedly questioned his fitness to serve, especially as other controversies began accumulating last fall.

Under state law, party leaders now have until July 27 to choose another candidate, but they have yet to say exactly how that process will work. The stakes are high. The Maine Senate race is key to national Democrats retaking the majority next year and Platner's insurgent candidacy became a proxy fight between factions of the party jockeying for the upper hand in its future. Those same divisions could play out in the race to replace Platner, a progressive firebrand who was endorsed early by Sanders.

New York Times, Opinion: Lessons From the Graham Platner Disaster, Michelle Goldberg, right, July 8, 2026 (print ed.). Hopefully, by the time you read this, Graham Platner will have dropped out of the Senate race in Maine. If he hasn’t, he needs to, immediately.

His campaign, which started with such excitement and inspired so many people in Maine, has become a shameful catastrophe. What’s left — besides finding a Democrat to run in his place — is figuring out what, if anything, can be learned from this debacle.

As you probably know by now, Politico published a story on Monday about a woman, Jenny Racicot, who says that Platner raped her. According to Racicot, they’d been romantically involved, on and off, for more than two years when he showed up at her house drunk and uninvited one night in 2021, let himself in and forced himself on her.

She confided her ordeal to a man she dated after Platner, as well as to her therapist, and showed Politico text messages she sent in 2023 warning an acquaintance away from him. Her account is completely believable and completely devastating.

Platner denies Racicot’s accusations but seems to realize that his campaign may no longer be viable. In a video posted on social media, he said, “Regardless of the inaccuracy of the reporting, but mindful of the political reality it will inflict, we are taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.”

But that time needs to wrap up. According to Maine law, Platner has to drop out by next Monday for Democrats to replace him on the November ballot. The sooner this mess ends, the better.

The Platner campaign represented an electoral insurgency against the Democratic Party; now, there are going to be furious recriminations against those who launched it. There is plenty of blame to go around.

Most at fault, of course, is Platner himself. He allegedly victimized Racicot, and then his campaign victimized her again, putting her into a situation where she felt she had to go public. He betrayed his supporters by plunging into a campaign while knowing he had a closet full of skeletons and drawing people who believed in him into a doomed enterprise.

Maine Democrats were willing to overlook Platner’s Totenkopf tattoo, his terrible Reddit posts and his sexting with other women while he was married because they felt so invigorated by him and the movement he was creating. They went out on a limb for him, and he had every reason to know it was going to be sawed off.Also liable for this disaster are the progressive operatives who recruited Platner and were so infatuated with his identity — a gruff, handsome oysterman with social democratic politics — that they failed to do their due diligence.

The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Platner’s top strategist, Dan Moraff, didn’t want to spring for a thorough background check, which can take weeks and cost around $20,000. “Moraff asked for an expedited, cheaper review to be done within days,” The Journal said.

Moraff, who travels the country trying to recruit left-wing, working-class candidates, reportedly learned about some of Platner’s troubling Reddit posts but decided to charge forward anyway. “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats,” he told The Journal.

He’s correct about the appetite for unconventional candidates, but that is no excuse for such willful sloppiness. Before blithely assuming that voters would forgive a candidate’s flaws, he had a responsibility to try to find out what those flaws were.

This fiasco might seem to vindicate the establishment that Platner railed against, but Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who wanted to stop Platner, is also partly culpable here. Schumer badly misread the Democratic electorate and tried to clear the field for his preferred candidate, Maine’s 78-year-old governor, Janet Mills, leaving a vacuum that Platner filled.

As NOTUS reported last week, Dan Kleban, a co-founder of Maine Beer Company, had been preparing to launch a populist, anti-Wall Street Senate bid last summer, but the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee tried to dissuade him. “He and his campaign were left with the impression that if he ran, Democrats in Washington would make it difficult because they were holding their support for Maine Gov. Janet Mills,” NOTUS wrote. Kleban ended up delaying the start of his campaign, not getting in until Platner had already caught fire.

While I’m assigning blame, I shouldn’t leave out myself. Last October, when stories about Platner’s tattoo and Reddit posts first broke, I went to Maine to write about him. I tried to convey what I saw: a campaign that was electrifying angry Maine voters. But I deeply regret that, impressed by Platner’s political charisma, I wrote that he was “nothing like the edgelord caricature I encountered online.” If anything, he seems to be significantly worse.

One person who tried to alert Democrats was Platner’s former political director, Genevieve McDonald. She quit when the first Platner scandals emerged and has been increasingly outspoken against him. Progressive operatives made her seem like a vindictive person eager to curry favor with Maine’s political establishment. In retrospect, she looks much more like someone who took a profound professional risk to do the right thing. I can’t be the only one who regrets not taking her more seriously.

If there’s a lesson here, it might be about the importance of listening hard to the people telling you what you don’t want to hear. Many Democrats, disgusted by their party’s failure to contain Donald Trump, want representatives as furious as they are, and they no longer trust their leaders to tell them who is electable. That opens space up for outsider candidates who wouldn’t have had a chance a few years ago. It also makes it easier for unfit characters to escape proper vetting.

Platner offered many on the left something they’re desperate for: working-class aesthetics married to uncompromising lefty politics. Many progressives want to believe that with a sufficiently populist message and style, they can win over voters alienated from the Democratic Party, obviating the need for ideological concessions. Platner seemed to embody this possibility, and that made a lot of people look past a lot of red flags until it was almost too late. 

New York Times, Democrats Grow Frustrated as Platner Resists Dropping Out Quickly, Bayliss Wagner and Lisa Lerer, July 8, 2026. Two days after a woman accused Graham Platner of rape, he had not given up his nomination for Senate in Maine, raising worries about whether and how his party might find a replacement.

Democratic frustration and worries were growing on Wednesday as Graham Platner hung on to the party’s nomination for Senate in Maine nearly 48 hours after a woman accused him of rape.

Despite losing every prominent ally and major sources of party funding, Mr. Platner has seemed to hold out hope of influencing the choice of his replacement in the state’s crucial Senate race.

The Maine Democratic Party, which is facing a Monday legal deadline for him to drop out so it can pick a new nominee, has insisted he will have no say.

Mr. Platner plans to join a campaign staff call on Wednesday night and is expected to release a video indicating his path forward, according to a person briefed on the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal campaign discussions.

If Mr. Platner ends his bid, Maine Democrats face the daunting prospect of crunching down what would normally be a monthslong primary campaign into a rapid-fire nomination process by July 27, just under three weeks from now. Democrats are trying to unseat Senator Susan Collins, a longtime Republican, in a race widely viewed as one of the most important midterm contests.

“He needs to drop out so that the party and the voters of the state can move forward,” said David Farmer, a Democratic consultant in Maine. “The party can’t do anything until he withdraws.”

The conflict between the state party and Mr. Platner raged through Wednesday afternoon, when his campaign texted hundreds of volunteers asking for their feedback on the nomination process.

The campaign, which had denied in a statement on Tuesday night that it was trying to influence who would replace Mr. Platner, said it would collect responses for “the next 48 hours,” raising new questions about a timeline for his withdrawal.

“If the Democratic Party hopes to harness our movement,” Mr. Platner’s campaign manager, Ben Chin, wrote in the text, “it must consult the feedback and proposals of the people who built and sustained this.”

Minutes later, Devon Murphy-Anderson, the executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, said the party was “frustrated with Graham Platner’s continued efforts to manipulate this process” and assailed his campaign for “distracting from the job of defeating Susan Collins in November.”

But Ms. Murphy-Anderson — who a day earlier had released a direct-to-camera video declaring that Mr. Platner would have “no role” in the selection process — added that his supporters were “a vital part of our Party and deserve to participate in an open process to select Platner’s replacement.”

Many Democrats expected that Mr. Platner would drop out soon after Jenny Racicot accused him of sexually assaulting her in a Politico report published on Monday afternoon.

But some Platner allies moved to canvass national Democrats to assess whether he still had support. Former Senator Barbara Boxer of California said that a representative from the campaign reached out to her on Monday afternoon to see whether she would stand with Mr. Platner.

She refused.

As the party quibbles with Mr. Platner, several Maine politicians have begun jockeying for the nomination, including some who lost primary races in June for governor and for Maine’s Second Congressional District.

And major party figures are starting to push for influence. On Wednesday, Representative Ro Khanna of California — a former champion of Mr. Platner’s who has called on him to withdraw — endorsed Troy Jackson, a fellow progressive who came in third in the Democratic primary for governor in June.

Prominent figures in the state have had to quell speculation about a run, including the actor Patrick Dempsey of “Grey’s Anatomy” fame and Heather Cox Richardson, a historian and author of a popular political newsletter. A spokesman for Representative Jared Golden of Maine, who holds the most Republican-leaning seat of any Democrat in the House, told The New York Times on Tuesday night that he “would have put his name forward many months ago” if he wanted the nomination.

New York Times, The Low-Key Lawyer at the Center of the Search for a Platner Replacement, Tim Balk, July 8, 2026. Charles Dingman, chair of the Maine Democratic Party and a progressive, would play a key role in choosing the state’s Democratic Senate candidate if Graham Platner leaves the race.

If Graham Platner withdraws from the Senate race in Maine, the task of finding a new Democratic nominee will fall in part to Charles F. Dingman, below, a progressive with a soft-spoken, professorial style who is chair of the Maine Democratic Party.

Mr. Dingman, 72, a lawyer from rural Leeds, Maine, who enjoys hiking mountains — sometimes two a day — has been in his role for about a year and a half.

But now, with Mr. Platner’s campaign upended by a rape allegation that he denies, Mr. Dingman’s position has taken on a new urgency.

Mr. Platner, who has quickly bled support from his most important backers, has suggested he is considering leaving the race. If he were to do so, Mr. Dingman would preside over the process of finding a new candidate to run against the vulnerable incumbent Republican, Senator Susan Collins, in a race that will help determine control of the Senate.

Mr. Platner has until July 13 to withdraw, a deadline dictated by state law. The state party would then have until July 27 to name a new nominee. It is uncharted territory: There is no set process by which the party must choose a replacement.ImageA man with a white beard, glasses, a red hat, a yellow shirt and a camera on one shoulder.Charles F. DingmanCredit...Maine Democrats

Mr. Dingman has already played a central role in the Democratic pressure campaign to push Mr. Platner out of the race, leading a statement urging Mr. Platner to go, hours after a Politico report on Monday that described the sexual assault allegation. Mr. Dingman was on vacation when the news broke and was driving back to Maine on Tuesday, said Kathie Purdy, the chairwoman of the York County Democrats.

The executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, Devon Murphy-Anderson, said in a video posted on social media late Tuesday that the party was working “around the clock” to develop an open and fair process to replace Mr. Platner. “Unfortunately, Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like,” she said. “We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee.”

There has been talk of a statewide convention or some form of caucuses to pick a candidate. Tony Buxton, a former Maine Democratic Party chair, suggested Mr. Dingman could perhaps simply pick a candidate unilaterally if Mr. Platner quit, though that was not expected.

Mr. Buxton, who worked at a law firm with Mr. Dingman for decades, described him as “very liberal” and “very dedicated to high principles.”

“He’s not a traditional Democratic state chairman,” Mr. Buxton said. “He’s not a politician.”

Mr. Buxton predicted that Mr. Dingman would be “very intent on respecting the constituency” that elevated Mr. Platner in the primary. He also said he expected Mr. Dingman would take a consensus-based approach to finding a nominee.

“He’s a low-key consensus builder,” David Farmer, a Democratic strategist, said of Mr. Dingman, describing him as a “cool headed” and kind.

U.S. Culture, Religion, Media, Education

Pope Leo XIV, a Chicago native and the first American-born Roman Catholic pope (Vatican Media photo).

The Contrarian, Opinion:What MAGA Could Learn About America From Pope Leo, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 8, 2026. Leo gets America. 

As a president second to none in blasphemous self-depiction and besotted by venomous white Christian nationalism, Donald Trump and his MAGA authoritarian enablers have attempted to supplant separation of church and state with an authoritarian-imposed neo-Confederacy — a theoretically mandated rigid hierarchy in which white males hold the power. During his 250th Independence Day celebrations, we once again saw how dramatically that anti-constitutional, anti-American vision conflicts with our authentic democratic values expressed in our foundational documents and consistent with our deepest faith traditions.

Unexpectedly, Pope Leo was among those articulating the most historically genuine expression of America. Again, the leading voice to express to the world our constitutional traditions comes from the Vatican — by way of Chicago — not from the band at the White House, which remains temporarily occupied by constitutional ignoramuses and moral buffoons.

In his letter marking America’s Semiquincentennial, Pope Leo emphasized the creedal foundation of our nation: “that defining moment in the history of the United States of America, July 4, 1776, that gave enduring voice to the ideals of liberty, equality, the pursuit of happiness, justice and democratic self-government.” He explained that “among the principles that have guided the development of this country is the God-given dignity of every human life, each person being endowed with an inherent worth that calls for reverence, protection and care.”

One cannot imagine Trump grasping that concept, let alone expressing it to Americans, whom he treats as suckers and pawns in his game of self-enrichment.

Leo connected his guidance on America’s founding creed, as he has done throughout his papacy, to the defense of immigrants faced with Trump’s onslaught of abuse, violence, and dehumanization. Presumably by no coincidence, on July 4th, Leo visited the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, “the epicenter of Europe’s migration debate to honor the tens of thousands of people who have died trying to reach Europe to find freedom and prosperity,” the Associated Press reported. His seminal point addressed the willful disregard of immigration exclusionists: that America’s founding principle relies on the inherent value of all individuals, which obligates us to treat immigrants humanely and to continue incorporating them into our democratic experiment.

Pope Leo’s letter to America reiterated:

Defending human life also includes welcoming, protecting and assisting immigrants, whose hopes, sacrifices and contribution have formed part of the history of this country from its very beginning. In every generation, those who have arrived seeking freedom, opportunity and a place to belong have helped to shape the nation’s character. To receive them with compassion and generosity is not only an act of charity, but also a recognition of the dignity that belongs to every human person.

This is a complete and effective repudiation of the mean, racist, anti-historic, ungodly vision of America that Trump and his ilk advance. MAGA’s freakout in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling on birthright citizenship — threatening to bar pregnant women from entering America (!) — speaks to the moral insanity that has gripped its already warped ideology.Subscribed

In addition to Leo’s contribution to the 250th anniversary of America’s independence, Leo appeared remotely on July 3 to accept the Liberty Medal from the National Constitution Center. Again, the Pope’s deeper appreciation and understanding of the Constitution than the current Oval Office occupant speaks volumes about the latter’s utter unfitness for even temporary residence in the White House. With personal emotion that is entirely absent in the MAGA power elites, Leo spoke about his own connection to the Declaration:

From our youth, most of us have admired the eloquence of those words, with their resounding appeal to the law of nature and to nature’s God as the basis of their assertion that all men and women are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. While couched in the language of the Enlightenment, that claim is ultimately grounded in an understanding of the human person inspired by the great biblical vision of man and woman being created in the divine image. It is indeed here that we discover the basis of human dignity; dignity which precedes the establishment of any State, and whose custody constitutes its very purpose.

Without the arrogant denial of our nation’s imperfections or the harsh vitriol America’s critics use to skewer its imperfections — let alone rants against Communists or dehumanized migrants — Leo acknowledged that “the path to building a society that would embody those high ideals of liberty and justice for all was not always easy and, in many respects, is still a work in progress.” In calling for us to take up “anew in each generation and in the face of ever new challenges” of perfecting America, he speaks with humility about our obligations to one another, a sentiment that used to be entirely uncontroversial — until it was savaged by those who espouse a hateful, anti-democratic vision of exclusion and domination.

Leo paid a moving tribute to the message of E pluribus unum — another concept entirely beyond MAGA’s grasp and hence absent from Trump’s public discourse. “In order for a nation to flourish, it must be truly united; united not by goals bound to momentary endeavors, but by ideals that do not fade with the passing of time,” Leo explained. It’s those values, “a shared human dignity, equality and the rights laid out in the Declaration of Independence,” that Leo recognizes as the glue to bind Americans together. He understands that the American experience must be centered on values, not on power or wealth; in ideals, not personality; and in purpose, not in chest-thumping spectacle.

The core of the MAGA movement is utterly divorced from, indeed is hostile to, the uplifting, humanistic, and democratic vision that has been at the heart of the American experiment for 250 years. At the very least, many will find it karmically satisfying that an American Pope adept at public communication would come along at precisely the right time to demolish the bogus vision of a president entirely lacking in decency, humanity, or redeeming characteristics, yet who claims God spared him for the job.

On one hand, it is easy to be depressed by Americans’ folly in entrusting our precious democracy to Trump and his pack of moral, political, and intellectual dullards. On the other hand, the Pope’s ability to connect anew with millions of Americans on a plane that transcends politics (and utterly confounds Trump) gives one hope that we might find our way out of the thicket of hatred, corruption, and nonstop lies — and might one day move forward to a shared, treasured, and authentic understanding of America. 

More Global News

Nigel Farange, above right, a longtime "populist"reform advocate who led the United Kingdom's vote for Brexit but who is now emersed in a financial scandal, faces as his next election opponent a comedian named "Binface," shown above left, whom other parties appear to be uniting behind to ensure Farange's defeat in his seat in Parliament.

Associated Pess via Politico, ‘Breathtaking assertion of power’: Appeals court slams door on Florida ‘Stop Woke’ law championed by DeSantis, Andrew Atterbury,July 8, 2026. The decision from a divided 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit is a devastating, possibly final blow to the so-called Stop WOKE act touted by the DeSantis administration.

Fraser Nelson's notebook, Opinion: Farage and the Binface factor, Fraser Nelson, July 8, 2026. Reform UK is starting to look like a plutoctatic version of the establishment it rails against

I normally credit Nigel Farage with courage, energy, judgment and entrepreneurial flair that made him one of the most consequential figures of the postwar era. He has spent years making fools out of his opponents. But sometimes, leaders go into meltdown and their judgement collapses.

Farage is now forcing a by-election - but not over an issue affecting his constituents, or the people he purports to champion. This is all about him and his money. He dislikes answering question about it, and is holding the by-election in protest. We’re told how angry he is - outraged, even - that anyone found out about the £5m “gift” wired to him from a Thai-based crypto king: a sum he did not disclose to others in Reform UK. He seems genuinely shocked that my newspaper, The Times, would run an investigation exposing the property portfolio that he failed to disclose to parliament. He has now been reprimanded 17 times for not abiding by Commons financial disclosure rules, bridling at the accountability that comes with public office. He seems appalled, at times enraged, by the scrutiny and transparency expected of MPs. It makes you wonder how on earth he’d cope with the pressure of bring PM.

I was on BBC Newsnight last night with Laila Cunningham, who I regard as one of the most effective Reform UK broadcast performers and one of their best signings. I feel for her having to defend this madness. When I said that Nigel Farage had called a “hissy-fit” by-election, she accused me of borrowing Kemi Badenoch’s words. I replied that I had been using this phrase for years: always to attack Conservatives who called by-elections in an explosion of ego. An egregious abuse of public office, forcing them into a by-election at your own whim costing the taxpayer £350,000.

“When the Tories started treating constituents as if they were props for their careers and whims (Nadine Dorries’ hissy-fit by-election over her non-peerage, Chris Skidmore’s pre-election job offer) it was a sign of the end,” I wrote. I’ve long seen such hauteur as indefensible abuse of public office. I accused Zac Goldsmith of a “hissy fit” in 2016 when he forced a by-election in protest over Heathrow’s third runway runway. A law needs to be passed, I argued, to stop MPs calling by-elections out of pique. Farage likes to say his critics are partisan. I’ve been attacking such egotistical explosion for years.