Editor's Note: Please scroll below for Part 1 of our our monthly blend of mainstream and alternative September 2026 news and views, with clips beginning Sept. 1 and extending forward in reverse chronological order. See our Home Page for more recent coverage during this unusually heavy news period, and other  News Reports sections for coverage of earlier dates, months and years.

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

Sept. 14

Top Headlines

 

• New York Times, Live Updates: Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Restrictions on Mail Voting, Abbie VanSickle, Sept. 14, 2026. The ruling blocks the Trump administration from dramatically changing how Americans vote by mail in the midterm elections.
• New York Times, As Supreme Court Weighs Trump Mail Ballot Plan, Another Judge Blocks It, Zach Montague, Sept. 14, 2026. The ruling by a lower court judge was another blow to President Trump’s effort to make voting by mail harder. The Supreme Court is also considering the Trump plan.

Exclusive On U.S. Intelligence Officer's Child Sex Scandal, Creating UK Diplomatic Dispute

Is the new US embassy in London, a $1 billion glas cube portrayed in a CNN photo, at the center of a major child porn scandal and cover-up?

• The Wayne Madsen Report via Substack, Investigative Commentary: Major pedophile scandal at U.S. embassy in London covered-up by a media influenced by pedophile-friendly oligarchs, Wayne Madsen, right, author of 28 books and former Navy Intelligence officer, Sept 14, 2026. Press censorship imposed at a national level by the Trump regime has resulted in the public being under-informed about a diplomatic cover-up of a pedophilia scandal at the U.S. embassy in London while Donald Trump and his family were basking in media limelight next door in Ireland. The Trump regime blindsided the government of Prime Minister Andy Burnham by flying out of London a U.S. military attaché whose brother was arrested in Illinois for possession of child sex abuse material. 

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Russian Oligarch Funded Trump Jr.’s Wedding, Major Court Loss for Trump, Trump Rolls Back Climate Pollution Limits, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 14, 2026. We have a Russian oligarch close to Putin secretly bankrolling Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding. We have the EPA about to erase the limits on the pollution power plants can pump into our air. We have a Trump appointed judge blocking Trump’s own attempt to restrict mail in voting weeks before the midterms. We have the Trump family quietly positioning themselves to cash out on their own crypto, a Kennedy Center begging for money it will only take if Trump’s name goes back on the building, and a 60 Minutes investigation exposing a pardon economy where access to the president can apparently be bought for the right price. This is what I mean when I say the corruption is not hiding anymore. It is happening in the open, and someone has to write it down.
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Mitch McConnell Returns as I Spent the Day at His House, Trump Melts Down Over AI, Major Whistleblower Report, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 14, 2026. Trump spirals on Truth Social, alleging a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and calling critics traitors. President Trump declared Monday that a “SICK conspiracy” is being waged against artificial intelligence and the data centers that run it, describing the people behind it as “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers.” He singled out Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei by name, writing, “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel,’ and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” He did not specify what conduct he was referring to, what criminal power he meant, or who exactly the alleged conspirators are.

Special Report: More On Russian Oligarch, Trump Family Wedding

 

A group photo shows about 35 people including Donald Trump Jr., his wife Bettina Anderson, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Tiffany Trump and Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev (with little more than his forehead and nose visible in the back row).

• ProPublica, Investigative Reporting: Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski, Sept. 14, 2026. The oligarch, Umar Kremlev, spent hundreds of thousands on expenses like renting out a private island. He appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, but he attended the intimate wedding with a large group of other Russian guests.

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

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called on industry leaders to slow A.I. development for fear of losing control of the technology. Shown at right is Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI.

• New York Times, Tech Stocks Shudder in Response to Calls to Slow A.I. Progress, Joe Rennison, Sept. 14, 2026. Companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence in Asia, Europe and the United States posted declines after tech leaders expressed worries about the safety of “frontier” A.I. technology.
• The Hartmann Report, Is America About to Get the Biggest “Special Assessment” in History? Thom Hartmann, Sept. 14, 2026. The bond market is warning that 45 years of Republican tax cuts and exploding debt may finally force ordinary Americans to pay for a party the wealthy already enjoyed.

More On Artificial Intelligence Fears

• New York Times, China’s Top Spy Chief Warns A.I. Is a Threat to Party Rule, Lily Kuo, Sept. 14, 2026. Even as Beijing urges the United States not to hype the dangers of A.I., its own spy chief is framing the technology as a threat to the Communist Party’s security.
• Politico, Trump says only guardrails that AI needs is ‘STRONG AND SMART’ president, Elleiana Green and Owen Dahlkamp, Sept. 14, 2026. The president is trying to shut down a growing push for AI regulation, amid calls from leaders to slow the production of artificial intelligence.President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks with reporters on Air Force One.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: AI Is a Test of Our Maturity. *Gulp,* Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 14, 2026.  AI fears—as Bill discusses below—are scrambling our politics and making for some extremely strange bedfellows. How strange? Well, how many issues could put Steve Bannon, Bernie Sanders, and an industry whistleblower all on the same D.C. stage?

Global Environment, Climate Policy, Artificial Intelllgence Threats

 

• New York Times, E.P.A. Expected to Erase Limits on Climate Pollution From Power Plants, Maxine Joselow, Sept. 14, 2026 (print ed.). Generation of electricity is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases in the United States.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary:The MAGA Plot(s) to Destroy Humanity, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 14, 2026. On AI and climate, it’s the same story of mass destruction.
• New York Times Magazine, Six Strangers Connected by Disaster, David Gelles Photographs by Philip Cheung, Sept. 11, 2026. Extreme Weather Survivors was started three years ago by Kos and Chris Kocher, an attorney and professional social organizer who had helped set up networks for survivors of gun violence and Covid-19. Kos had been galvanized by the 2020 Labor Day fires in Oregon, during which her newborn son was hospitalized with a serious illness. She had to drive through the burning landscape with him, surrounded by ash and red skies. She remembers being gripped in that moment by a feeling that she couldn’t keep her son safe from climate disaster; it was happening everywhere. In just a few years, Extreme Weather Survivors has grown to include more than 2,500 people whose lives have been upended by searing temperatures, roaring fires, torrential floods and intense storms.
• The Triad Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The American Age Is Over (For sure), Jonathan V. Last, above, Sept. 14, 2026. The AI Apocalypse Is Here. (Maybe.) The weekend the world changed. Two shifts happened under the radar since Friday that are worth keeping your eyes on.

More On Middle East Wars

 

• Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump is always looking for someone else to blame, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 13, 2026. At 6:19 pm, somewhere between Shannon, Ireland, and Washington, DC, the President of the United States barged into the press cabin on Air Force One. One reporter cut right to the chase, asking about China and President Xi’s upcoming trip to Washington, D.C., and whether Trump plans to ask him about reports that entities in China may have provided Iran with satellite imagery that was used when three American military members were killed. Trump’s response was, “They do what we do.” And then he added, “Uh, I think he’s behaved reasonably well, and we behave reasonably well. You know, when they say that China spies on us, I say you’re right, and we spy on them, too. You know, we spy on them, too.”
• New York Times, News Analysis: Saudi Arabia Faces ‘Worst-Case Scenario’ After Being Rebuffed by Trump, Vivian Nereim, Sept. 14, 2026. The kingdom is in a state of strategic shock after coming under attack from an emboldened Iran and failing to win more U.S. military support, analysts say.

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

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Is ICE Dropping Fentanyl? Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 14, 2026. Because most people are much more comfortable with the idea of deporting killers and drug dealers than law-abiding grandmas, the Trump administration has long couched its mass deportation agenda as an effort targeting “the worst of the worst.” And the Department of Homeland Security has lately been playing up its efforts against international bad actors like drug cartels, with Secretary Markwayne Mullin announcing last week that DHS was changing its seal² to better reflect its posture of “war every single day” against those actors.
• New York Times, Whistle-Blower: Federal Agents May Have Broken State Laws in Search for Voter Fraud, Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 14, 2026. Agents expressed concern about being directed by top Homeland Security leaders to use private information to look up voter records in state databases.  
• Talking Feds Substack, A Pro-Trump Prosecutor Draws the Line, Harry Litman, Sept. 14, 2026. "If you want indictments where there's no evidence, you have an ethical problem."
• Emptywheel, Analysis:The Grand Conspiracy … Adrift on a Skiff, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 14, 2026. Those of you who followed the stolen documents case surely appreciate the irony that one reason Joe DiGenova quit his position leading the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy last week had to do with DOJ’s refusal to give him his own SCIF.
• New York Times, The Holdout Juror in the Clancy Case Is a Rorschach Test for America, Jenna Russell, Sept. 11, 2026. The nation’s reaction to the 11-1 deadlock that resulted in a mistrial for Lindsay Clancy was, like the jury itself, fiercely and unbridgeably divided.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Popular Information, How Trump is spending his $400 million war chest, Judd Legum, right, Sept. 14, 2026. President Trump has amassed over $400 million through his super PAC, MAGA Inc. This is an unprecedented figure, dwarfing the largest cash piles collected in previous midterm elections.
• MS Now, Opinion: Trump’s easiest path to saving the GOP’s midterms just disappeared, James Downie, Sept. 14, 2026. The August inflation report had a few bright spots, but in political terms, the president and the Republicans are out of time. The quickest path to a surprisingly strong midterm for the GOP was through a sharp economic revival. That path is now closed.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Oil Prices Keep Rising, The Trump Project Keeps Deteriorating, A Win In Sweden, Protecting Our Elections, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 14, 2026. Over the past few days (here, here, here) we’ve discussed how as the economy continues to deteriorate so does the political standing of Trump and the Rs. Here’s more confirmation of the deterioration of their brand from a new CBS poll.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Greatest Danger of All Would Be to Do Nothing, William Kristol, right, Sept. 14, 2026. In recent months, we’ve learned about artificial intelligence agents escaping captivity. Now we’re seeing the political debate over artificial intelligence escaping captivity.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: What to Defund, Jennifer Rubin, right,Sept. 14, 2026. 50 Days to the Midterms. First and foremost, Democrats should refuse to fund the illegal, reckless Iran War and must eliminate funds for continued deployment of personnel and material that depletes our readiness and leaves us vulnerable elsewhere. They can condition additional funding for the Pentagon on compliance with congressional investigations, and can defund overtly politicized gatherings of the type Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has conducted. 
• New York Times, N.Y. Democratic House Candidate Admits to Bondage Photo Shoot, Andy Newman, Sept. 14, 2026. Christopher Gallant, who is running against Representative Nick LaLota on Long Island, acknowledged that the photos that surfaced in media reports on Monday were legitimate.

More On U.S. High Tech, Media, Education, Sports, Religion

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 13, 2026 [Warnings On AI], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 14, 2026. On Saturday, September 12, Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for AI companies to slow down their improvement of AI models.
• Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: I Disagree with my colleagues every day on Fox, Jessica Tarlov (Fox News co-host), Sept. 14, 2026. Here’s what I’ve learned about winning the conversation.
• The Wrap, Byron Allen’s Local Now Adds 111 Gray Media Stations, Lucas Manfredi, Sept. 14, 2026. Byron Allen’s Local Now has added 111 free, ad-supported streaming channels to its lineup that will carry coverage from Gray Media’s local stations across the U.S., TheWrap can reveal exclusively.
• The Daily Beast, ‘60 Minutes’ Star Defies MAGA Bosses With Brutal Grilling, Erkki Forster, Updated Sept. 14 2026. NO HOLDING BACK. Lesley Stahl wasn’t pulling her punches as she quizzed a major Trump ally.

Top Stories

New York Times, Live Updates: Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Restrictions on Mail Voting, Abbie VanSickle, Sept. 14, 2026. The ruling blocks the Trump administration from dramatically changing how Americans vote by mail in the midterm elections.

The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a Trump administration plan to dramatically change how Americans vote by mail in the lead-up to the midterm elections, a major loss for President Trump, who has long claimed without evidence that fraud is rampant in mail voting.

The ruling was a resounding win for Democratic-led states and voting rights groups, which had argued that the plan was unconstitutional and an existential threat to the democratic process.

The Trump administration’s efforts, they had said, would introduce chaos and confusion as early voting gears up in many states.

Still, the weekslong legal tussle over the issue may have sown its own kind of confusion, a victory of sorts for Mr. Trump as he seeks to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote in an election his party might lose.

The majority provided a one-paragraph explanation for the ruling, writing that the government was “unlikely to succeed on the merits.”

The order was unsigned, which is typical in emergency rulings. It gave no vote count. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.

The battle over the Trump administration’s plan to change mail-in voting has played out over the last few weeks in a dizzying series of legal developments, even as states began sending out ballots.

Trump administration lawyers had urged the justices to step in and clear the way for its plan to use the Postal Service to screen ballot envelopes after they are submitted by state elections officials. The new rules would require states to submit lists of voters approved to receive mail ballots. The Postal Service would then deliver mail ballots only to the voters on the lists.

The plan would also require states to use an envelope approved by the Postal Service, including a unique bar code for each voter. Some states have argued that redesigning ballots so close to the election would be challenging or perhaps impossible, causing delays.

New York Times, As Supreme Court Weighs Trump Mail Ballot Plan, Another Judge Blocks It, Zach Montague, Sept. 14, 2026. The ruling by a lower court judge was another blow to President Trump’s effort to make voting by mail harder. The Supreme Court is also considering the Trump plan.

As the Supreme Court weighs the legality of a Trump administration plan to change mail-in balloting, a second lower court judge ruled overnight on Sunday that the plan is likely illegal and should be blocked before the November election.

The ruling by Judge Carl J. Nichols, right, a Trump appointee, delivered another blow to President Trump’s effort to add new conditions that could make it harder to vote by mail and easier for the federal government to scrutinize state voter rolls while searching for evidence of fraud.

The Supreme Court is considering a similar ruling by a different federal judge based in Massachusetts. Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, has repeatedly found that the plan is likely unconstitutional and could not be implemented so close to the election without disenfranchising voters.

Judge Nichols, of the Federal District Court in Washington, wrote that the Trump administration had not identified any “evidence that there will be significant fraud in the upcoming elections” if he halted the rule. On the other hand, he wrote, there was an “increased risk that a significant number of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots will ultimately not be counted in the upcoming elections” if the rule took effect.ImageJudge in robe facing cameraJudge Carl J. Nichols wrote that the mail ballot plan created an “increased risk that a significant number of otherwise appropriate absentee or mail-in ballots will ultimately not be counted in the upcoming elections.”Credit...U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia

“The public has a strong interest in ensuring that doesn’t happen,” he wrote.

Judge Nichols’s ruling came in a lawsuit brought by a coalition of Democratic-aligned groups, including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, as well as a number of civil rights organizations. The Massachusetts suit was brought by a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general and voting rights groups.

Judge Nichols ruled in May that he could not stop the Postal Service from drafting the rule or preemptively declare it would necessarily be illegal before it was finalized. The Supreme Court similarly ruled last month that it was premature for the courts to intervene to stop Mr. Trump’s plan.

But Judge Nichols said he would review the issue after the Postal Service finalized the regulation, which it did in August. His finding that the proposal now should be blocked could offer a preview for how the justices view the issue.

In a court filing on Monday, the Trump administration formally alerted the Supreme Court about Judge Nichols’s ruling.

Lawyers for the Trump administration told the justices that if they allowed the Postal Service plan, it would mean Judge Nichols would be required to immediately lift his block and clear the way for the ballot screening rules.

The new rule stemmed from an executive order Mr. Trump signed in March, directing the Postal Service to preregister voters casting their ballots by mail, and decline to deliver ballots from anyone whose information was not submitted by their state election officers.

Judge Talwani, who considered the separate legal challenge in Massachusetts, had found that the rule likely violated the constitutional authority given to states to run their own elections. But Judge Nichols focused on another issue: the absence of any federal statute by which Congress gave the Postal Service the power to screen voters.

Exclusive On U.S. Intelligence Officer's Child Sex Scandal, Creating UK Diplomatic Dispute

Is the new US embassy in London, a $1 billion glas cube portrayed in a CNN photo, at the center of a major child porn scandal and cover-up?

The Wayne Madsen Report via Substack, Investigative Commentary: Major pedophile scandal at U.S. embassy in London covered-up by a media influenced by pedophile-friendly oligarchs, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 28 books and former Navy Intelligence officer, Sept 14, 2026. Press censorship imposed at a national level by the Trump regime has resulted in the public being under-informed about a diplomatic cover-up of a pedophilia scandal at the U.S. embassy in London while Donald Trump and his family were basking in media limelight next door in Ireland.

The Trump regime blindsided the government of Prime Minister Andy Burnham by flying out of London a U.S. military attaché whose brother was arrested in Illinois for possession of child sex abuse material. In June of this year, the attaché’s brother, Benjamin T. Morris, 33, the then-arts director for the Quad City Arts Building in Rock Island, Illinois, was arrested in as police sting operation for attempting to entice minors on-line. Morris was subsequently charged on 32 criminal counts, including production and dissemination of CSAM. A judge has denied Morris bail, citing a continuing threat to the public.

Attache’s brother Benjamin T. Morris

When the U.S. embassy in London became aware that Morris had shared CSAM with his brother at the U.S. embassy in London, embassy security personnel, including US Marine security guards, conducted a dawn raid of the attaché's flat in Putney in southwest London.

The U.S. personnel allegedly recovered illicit child pornography material on the attaché’s electronic devices. The U.S. personnel took the attaché into custody, flying him out of the country via a chartered Kalitta Air Boeing 747 cargo plane from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. The aircraft landed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

At no time before and during the attaché’s secret exfiltration from United Kingdom territory did the U.S. embassy or the U.S. State or Justice Departments inform British law enforcement of the action. The Trump regime abused the umbrella afforded by diplomatic protection to evade justice in the host nation, thus bypassing the British police and avoiding a future extradition process.

The U.S. embassy provided no advance warning to the London Metropolitan Police about their plans to raid the attaché’s flat. U.S. personnel have no powers of arrest in Britain and the use of Marines and other non-law enforcement personnel to carry out a police matter also taints the chain-of-custody of evidence recovered from the flat. Marines are not trained in criminal forensics, a fact that will likely be used by the attaché’s defense attorney at a future trial.

Prosecutors for the Rock Island County State's Attorney's Office in Illinois have alleged Morris was exchanging CSAM with his brother, the attaché in London. The FBI, under the incompetent command of Kash Patel, is reportedly examining numerous electronic devices belonging to Morris, and, since his brother’s exfiltration from London, the FBI is likely also conducting forensic analysis of the former attaché’s devices.

The incident has resulted in a cross-party condemnation of the U.S. action. There are demands that if crimes were committed on British soil, the U.S. embassy suspect should face trial in an English court. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has held meetings with Metropolitan Police officials on the incident. Conservative shadow Justice Secretary Nick Timothy said the U.S. action constituted “a cover-up” and that the attaché “should face trial in an English court.” Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty accused the U.S. of bypassing jurisdictional authority and said it was “completely unacceptable,” “absolutely grotesque,” and proof that the U.S. government was “protecting alleged pedophiles.” The U.S. has a history of protecting its diplomatic and military personnel from facing justice in British courts.Kalitta Air commits to using ExxonMobil aviation lubricants across its fleet | ExxonMobil Aviation

The London Metropolitan Police did not to itself any favors in its statement on the incident: "On Tuesday August 25, US authorities made us aware of an investigation they are conducting into suspected offences in London relating to indecent images of children.” The American authorities only informed the London police after the attaché’s aircraft had cleared UK airspace. Scotland Yard and Home Office personnel were not given an opportunity to interview the attaché.

The U.S. is not releasing the name of the attaché, who is claimed to have been reassigned to “other duties” in the United States.

The U.S. Defense Attaché Office (DAO), located at the embassy complex at 33 Nine Elms Lane in London, has a large staff that includes a Senior Defense Attaché, U.S. Naval Attaché, and attachés and assistant attachés from the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard.

The attaché, who is said to be around 39, used the address DPO, AE (Diplomatic Post Office, Armed Forces Europe/Middle East/Africa). One previous address used by the attaché is located on Burwell Street on Joint Base Bolling-Anacostia in southwest Washington, DC. The attaché is believed to have been previously assigned to the Military Liaison Office/Office of Defense Cooperation at U.S. Military Group – Finland at the U.S. embassy at Itäinen Puistotie 14 in Helsinki. His role included providing Finland with U.S. military hardware as a new member of NATO.

The exfiltration operation of the attaché would have been authorized by U.S. ambassador Warren Stephens. He is the former chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Stephens Inc., a privately held investment bank in Little Rock, Arkansas. Stephens essentially bought the ambassadorship to the Court of St. James by contributing $6 million to Trump’s 2024 campaign.

Note: All information in the column above was obtained from public, non-classified sources available to anyone.

The U.S. State Visit to the UK: Commemorating Our Close Bond

Amb. Warren Stephens and Trump

The breach of diplomatic protocol and the use of a CIA-connected cargo plane to exfiltrate Benjamin Morris’s brother and his electronic devices from the UK is evidence of a wider pedophilia network. The Trump regime’s cover-up of the Morris case continues its obfuscation of other pedophilia crimes, including the Jeffrey Epstein matter. The secrecy around the Morris investigation also points to the possible use of the U.S. embassy in London, which enjoys extraterritorial diplomatic immunity, as a nexus for the exchange of CSAM and AI-generated CSAM.

The State Department has a jaded history of covering-up the pedophile activities of its personnel at its embassies, particularly in Southeast Asia. An unnamed State Department source defended the violation of British sovereignty in the attaché’s exfiltration, stating, “If we had ceded ground and waited, there could have been delays and diplomacy that could have gone on for weeks or months.” Or CSAM exposures that may have led to other Trump regime officials.

Meanwhile, the corporate media in the U.S. is all but ignoring the embassy scandal in London, as is their practice in similar matters.

News Roundups

A group photo shows about 35 people including Donald Trump Jr., his wife Bettina Anderson, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Tiffany Trump and Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev (with little more than his forehead and nose visible in the back row).

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Russian Oligarch Funded Trump Jr.’s Wedding, Major Court Loss for Trump, Trump Rolls Back Climate Pollution Limits, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 14, 2026. I am heading back to the Senate and Mitch McConnell’s home today, trying to get answers about McConnell that his office still will not give the American people. That is the job. Show up, ask the question nobody wants to answer, and keep showing up until you get the truth.

And there is a lot of truth we need right now. We have a Russian oligarch close to Putin secretly bankrolling Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding. We have the EPA about to erase the limits on the pollution power plants can pump into our air. We have a Trump appointed judge blocking Trump’s own attempt to restrict mail in voting weeks before the midterms. We have the Trump family quietly positioning themselves to cash out on their own crypto, a Kennedy Center begging for money it will only take if Trump’s name goes back on the building, and a 60 Minutes investigation exposing a pardon economy where access to the president can apparently be bought for the right price. This is what I mean when I say the corruption is not hiding anymore. It is happening in the open, and someone has to write it down.

This is going to be a long week, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But every single subscriber to this newsletter is what makes it possible for me to stand outside that house, to read through hundreds of pages of documents, to ask the questions other won’t. If you can, subscribe today. Not for me, but so this reporting reaches millions of people instead of just the ones already paying attention. That is how we hold these people accountable. Together.

Here’s everything you need to know.

Russian Oligarch funds Trump Jr.’s Wedding:

Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, right, and Donald Trump Jr. (Reuters photo).

Kremlev secretly bankrolled Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding. According to a major investigation from ProPublica, Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish three day wedding across two private Bahamas islands in May was secretly funded in large part by Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, a close associate of Vladimir Putin. ProPublica reports Kremlev paid for hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenses, including renting out one of the private islands and covering the fireworks show, with the payments routed through a Dubai entity tied to the boxing association Kremlev runs. Kremlev, who appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, attended the reception with a large group of Russian guests who ProPublica says stood off by themselves speaking Russian and were conspicuously absent from every photo and video the Trump family later released. Trump Jr.’s spokesperson did not dispute the payments, telling ProPublica, “Umar is a personal friend of Don,” while saying the men met through a mutual friend in the hunting world. Trump Jr. himself later said on his podcast, “The people that were there, if you’re on that list, you weren’t talking.”

National security experts call the arrangement alarming. ProPublica’s investigation quotes multiple former U.S. counterintelligence officials warning about the implications of a Putin associated oligarch financially supporting the president’s son. Frank Montoya Jr., a retired senior FBI counterintelligence official, told ProPublica, “If I’m paying for your wedding, at some point, you’re going to owe me something,” adding, “This should be unthinkable for the son of the president. End of story.” Holden Triplett, who served as Trump’s counterintelligence director on the National Security Council during his first term, said Russian intelligence frequently uses money to build ties to officials and their families, telling ProPublica, “Money is a tried-and-true method to gain access.” ProPublica notes Kremlev was traveling with Putin’s delegation in China days before the wedding and had personally received Russia’s Order of Friendship from Putin the month before. The outlet also reports Ukraine has sanctioned Kremlev directly over his closeness to Putin and Russian security services.

Kremlev’s rise and his growing ties to Trump world raise fresh questions. ProPublica traces Kremlev’s path from a criminal record for extortion and battery under his birth name to running Russia’s boxing federation and then the International Boxing Association, an organization bankrolled by the Kremlin linked energy giant Gazprom. A former IBA board member told ProPublica, “Umar is guided by Putin. It was using the sport for soft political power,” adding, “It’s geopolitics. That it’s boxing is just happenstance.” ProPublica reports Kremlev has since cultivated Trump Jr. through a 2025 Istanbul panel appearance and repeated outreach to the White House seeking help restoring the IBA’s Olympic status, which was stripped in 2023 over financial transparency concerns. The outlet notes Kremlev told associates he feared being targeted by U.S. sanctions after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and moved his organization’s operations to Dubai as a result. An IBA press release cited by ProPublica after the Istanbul panel promised the Kremlev and Trump Jr. relationship “will not remain symbolic” and that “more joint initiatives will follow.”

Trump Rolls Back Limits on Climate Pollution:

E.P.A. set to eliminate limits on climate pollution from power plants. According to The New York Times, the Trump administration plans to announce Monday that the United States will no longer limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants burning coal and gas, a move that would complete the erasure of the Biden and Obama administrations’ most significant climate policies. The Times reports E.P.A. Administrator Lee Zeldin is expected to unveil the change at a meeting of energy ministers from the Group of 20 nations in Houston, and if the rule survives legal challenges it could block future administrations from regulating power plant emissions altogether. The power sector is the second largest source of carbon dioxide in the country, and the Times notes that if it were its own nation it would rank as the fifth largest climate polluter in the world. Power plants would still face some limits on mercury and arsenic under the plan, though the Times notes the E.P.A. has already loosened mercury restrictions on coal plants as well.

The rollback fits a broader pattern and comes with a steep public health cost. The Times reports this is the latest in a string of E.P.A. rollbacks under Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” following the earlier elimination of tailpipe emissions standards and looser restrictions on planet warming chemicals used in air conditioners and refrigerators. Most consequentially, the Times notes the agency already repealed the scientific finding that gave it legal authority to regulate climate pollution in the first place. The Biden era rule being scrapped was projected to prevent up to 1,200 premature deaths and 360,000 asthma attacks annually by 2035 while delivering an estimated $120 billion in public health benefits by 2047, but the Times reports the Trump E.P.A. has stopped factoring public health benefits into its cost analyses and now weighs only the costs to businesses. The push comes as the administration tries to make fossil fuels cheaper to produce, particularly to meet growing electricity demand from AI data centers.

Coal keeps shrinking while gas expands, and the plan faces legal fights ahead. The Times reports coal generated more than half of U.S. electricity in 1990 but has fallen to roughly 17 percent today, with 330 coal plants retired since 2010 and 60 more slated to close by 2031, even as utilities race to build new gas plants for AI data centers. Democratic led states and environmental groups have said they intend to challenge the E.P.A.’s plan in court, and the Times reports legal experts consider it vulnerable. The Supreme Court blocked Obama’s Clean Power Plan in 2016, then ruled in 2022 that the E.P.A. could limit power plant emissions but could not force a nationwide shift away from coal, restricting the agency to narrower plant by plant policies. That legal history sets up another likely Supreme Court fight over how far the E.P.A. can go in either direction on power plant emissions.

Major Court Rulings:

A Trump appointed judge just blocked Trump’s own mail-in voting rule. A second federal judge moved Sunday night to block the Trump administration from implementing a new U.S. Postal Service rule that would tighten mail-in voting requirements, and notably it was U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, who Trump himself appointed during his first term, who issued this ruling. Nichols granted the Democratic Party’s request for a preliminary injunction, agreeing the rule was an unlawful intrusion by the federal government into election administration. He found the new rule could make it harder for some people to vote by mail and concluded the Postal Service had exceeded its authority in issuing it, writing plainly, “No statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the rule.” The rule would have required states to submit lists of voters eligible for mail ballots and to place barcodes on ballot envelopes, empowering the Postal Service to refuse delivery to anyone not on those lists. This is now the second judge to block the rule, coming just weeks before the November 3 midterms where Republicans are fighting to hold both chambers of Congress.

The fight now heads to the Supreme Court as the midterms approach. A separate judge, Boston based Indira Talwani, already blocked the same rule on September 4 at the request of Democratic led states and voting rights groups, and the Trump administration quickly asked the Supreme Court to pause that order so the rule could take effect. That means the final call on whether Trump’s mail voting restrictions survive will likely come from the nation’s highest court. Democrats argued in court filings that the Constitution puts election administration in the hands of the states with congressional oversight, not the president or federal agencies, warning the rule risked disenfranchising eligible voters. Justice Department lawyers pushed back, insisting the rule does not “seize control” of elections and would leave states in charge of voter eligibility. All 50 states currently allow some form of mail voting, with 29 letting voters request a mail ballot without giving a reason and eight running their elections entirely by mail.

Mitch McConnell:

Senate returns with no confirmation McConnell will be back. The Senate reconvenes Monday after a five week recess with it still unclear whether Mitch McConnell will make his first appearance since suffering a fall at his Washington home in June. The 84 year old Kentucky Republican’s spokesman referred the Post to a statement saying he would continue an “intensive regimen of physical therapy from home” while working on Senate business remotely. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told a South Dakota TV station he hopes McConnell will return “in the not-too-distant future,” while Rep. James Comer said McConnell’s staff had told him it was their “goal” for him to be back this week. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has gone further, demanding McConnell “provide proof of his capacity to serve, or resign.” McConnell’s term ends January 3, and Rep. Andy Barr, who won the Republican primary to succeed him, is heavily favored to take the seat.

McConnell has earned nearly $45,000 during his absence. Despite not appearing in the Senate since his June hospitalization, McConnell has continued collecting his full $174,000 annual salary throughout his roughly three month absence. Based on his daily pay of about $476.71, that comes out to nearly $45,000 earned over 94 days away from the Capitol, a total that will keep growing by roughly $476 for every additional day he stays away. Because members of Congress are paid a fixed annual salary rather than an hourly wage, his compensation is not tied to attendance. Newsweek notes McConnell separately oversees a congressional office budget that paid his staff just under $4 million over the most recent 12 month period, and estimates put his personal net worth at $70.4 million.

McConnell’s health details remain limited as scrutiny grows. McConnell has not been seen in public since before his June 14 fall, with updates coming only through occasional statements and two photos released by his office. He revealed in a July statement that he was briefly unconscious after the fall and developed a mild case of pneumonia during his recovery, complicating his return to work, and he was discharged from a rehabilitation facility in early August to continue recovering at home. McConnell is not the first senator to be absent for an extended stretch while ailing, following John Fetterman’s two month absence for depression treatment in 2023, Dianne Feinstein’s nearly three month absence with shingles before her death later that year, and John McCain’s absence during his final eight months before he died in 2018. As the Senate reconvenes, his expected return would mark his first public appearance at the Capitol in roughly three months.

Other News:

60 Minutes exposes a “pardon economy” of brokers pitching Trump clemency for hundreds of thousands of dollars. A new 60 Minutes investigation caught Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, both Trump supporters who themselves have criminal records from a 2020 voter intimidation scheme, on hidden camera offering to broker presidential pardons for a fee. The pair described previous deals they claimed to have arranged, including a reported $600,000 fee involving rapper Boosie Badazz, and detailed pressuring the president directly rather than going through the Justice Department’s standard clemency review process. The report found fees in this shadow pardon market can run as high as $3 million, raising questions about who actually gets access to presidential mercy and how.

Trump family takes steps that could let them cash out their own crypto. President Trump and his three sons have moved to a new vesting contract that would eventually let them sell billions of dollars in $WLFI tokens created by their firm World Liberty Financial, a change three independent experts say was optional despite the company’s claim it was required. Crypto expert Molly White said flatly, “The Trump family is laying the groundwork to cash out their WLFI stake,” while Public Citizen’s Zach Everson said, “It has never been clear what World Liberty Financial was supposed to do other than enrich the Trumps, and here we have them taking the first avenue they can to offload their coins.” A company spokesman insisted the move only fulfilled a governance requirement to burn 10 percent of holdings and said “there are no imminent sales” given a two year vesting period. Trump’s own token allotment is currently worth roughly $1 billion, and he has already reported more than $550 million in income from selling World Liberty Financial tokens while retail investors have lost $1 billion on the company.

Kennedy Center says it faces bankruptcy unless Trump’s name goes back on the building. According to the Washington Post, officials at the Kennedy Center have warned the performing arts center faces “certain fiscal collapse” within weeks unless President Trump’s name is restored to the building, according to documents obtained by the Times and the Post ahead of a special board meeting Tuesday. The documents say the center risks being unable to make payroll or cover routine maintenance, and note Trump has offered to help raise rescue funds only with “appropriate recognition” of his role, without which he is unlikely to lead the effort or oversee a planned renovation. Board member and longtime Trump ally Paolo Zampolli said, “Trump attracts money, so when Trump says donate to this place, everyone will donate.” Trustees are being asked to choose among several inscriptions crediting Trump, including one reading “Renovation Restoration and Endowment overseen by President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Kennedy Center Fund,” and to vote on immediately closing the main building after a section of ceiling plaster fell roughly 60 feet in the Grand Foyer this month. This follows a year of turmoil at the center since Trump installed loyalists who elected him chairman, a court fight over an earlier attempt to add his name to the building, and warnings that hundreds of millions in donations could have to be returned if his name isn’t ultimately added to the facade.

Trump voices support for Flock cameras. President Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he supports the fast growing Flock camera network, saying, “I sort of like them because of that, because of law enforcement, but some people don’t. They think it’s an infringement. I like them.” The AI powered cameras record 20 billion license plate scans monthly across a network of more than 120,000 devices, and a recent survey found 46 percent of Americans oppose their use in their communities compared to 38 percent who support it. The comments come after an investigation found dozens of officers had been charged with or accused of misusing the technology, prompting Flock to require every search be labeled with a case number.

Trump refuses to explain how he personally uses AI. In a gaggle aboard Air Force One, a reporter asked President Trump whether he has used artificial intelligence himself, and he replied, “Yeah, I use AI.” Pressed on how, he said only, “You can use AI for a lot of things,” and when asked directly what he uses it for, he said, “I don’t want to tell you that.” The exchange came even as he dismissed industry warnings about AI risks, insisting “it’s gonna be more good than bad, but by a lot,” and repeating his line that “whoever wins AI wins.” The vague answer stood out given his own Truth Social account has been flagged for posting AI generated content.

Mike Johnson defends House candidate over vulgar and Nazi-referencing remarks. House Speaker Mike Johnson, right, stood by Texas congressional candidate Brandon Herrera after being shown past comments in which Herrera described mothers as “cum trophies” and called a Nazi era submachine gun “the original ghetto blaster.” Johnson called Herrera’s language “detestable” but insisted “that’s not the way he speaks or thinks” now, telling CNN’s Jake Tapper that Herrera is “a very serious candidate for Congress and a very thoughtful guy.” Johnson said he personally told Herrera, “When you get to Congress, you’re going to join this team and help us to save America to preserve freedom and bring down costs for the American people.” Herrera has also been shown goose-stepping to a Nazi marching song and joking that “we should abolish old people,” and Johnson said Herrera is “far superior” to his Democratic opponent in the race.

Sam Altman warns humanity could “lose control of the future to AI.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X that AI companies should deliberately slow, or “pace,” development, warning of two ways progress could go badly: “First, we could lose control of the future to AI,” and second, that concentrated power in an AI company or individual could produce “extremely dystopian” results. Altman said “no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness” but added that AI firms will still need government help on international coordination, saying “first we should do what we can ourselves.” His comments followed a lengthy essay from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for a development slowdown, which Altman, Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis all said they agreed with. The statements come as AI safety fears intensify heading into the midterms.

OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have been quietly planning an AI standards body. Representatives from the three companies have held regular meetings since July about creating an industry oversight group even before Amodei’s public call for a slowdown, according to multiple reports. A draft White House executive order that would have created a similar government run testing and auditing organization was reportedly scrapped this summer after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued against it directly with President Trump. Altman has since said he supports the standards group idea but conceded companies would likely have to move forward without government backing. The talks suggest industry leaders see coordination as necessary even as the administration remains uninterested in new AI regulation.

Prosecutor leading Trump’s political rivals probe resigned after tense clash with the attorney general. Joe diGenova, the former federal prosecutor brought in to lead a Justice Department investigation into Trump’s political rivals, reportedly had a tense phone call with Attorney General Todd Blanche the day before he abruptly resigned. The two clashed because diGenova did not want DOJ headquarters lawyers assisting with the probe, and separately disagreed over diGenova’s request for a high security room, which the department wanted housed at a distant FBI office instead. DiGenova resigned last Thursday, the same day prosecutors were presenting a witness to a grand jury in the case. The resignation has thrown the sweeping conspiracy investigation into turmoil and could delay it further.

China dismisses AI slowdown warnings as a “Cold War playbook” aimed at containing it. Beijing rejected the safety concerns raised by Amodei, Altman, and Musk, with foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun saying, “Fearmongering, confrontation and malicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance and serve no one’s interests.” The state run Global Times was blunter, calling the slowdown push “packed with containment provisions targeting China” and “in essence, a Cold War playbook for the AI sector.” The dispute comes after Amodei specifically warned that “a Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world” and urged continued restrictions on chip sales to China, while President Trump separately said “whoever wins AI wins” and dismissed safety warnings as coming from “very negative forces.” China’s state security minister Chen Yixin has still called for accelerating domestic AI risk controls, saying “we must engage extensively in international cooperation.” Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are set to meet on September 24, with AI governance expected to be a central topic.

Amazon cuts ties with cargo carrier after fatal Miami plane crash. Amazon announced it is pausing operations with 21 Air, the Miami based carrier that operated the Amazon Air cargo flight that crashed last weekend and killed five people. Spokesperson Kelly Nantel said in a statement, “After the tragic incident last weekend, we’ve spent time supporting the investigation and reviewing some of the surrounding circumstances, and we’ve decided to pause our operations with 21 Air, the operator of Flight 7598.” The company said it will continue assisting investigators and supporting those affected by the crash. No cause has yet been publicly identified for the crash.

Wall Street Journal’s conservative board accuses Trump of double standard on Russia. The Journal’s editorial board criticized President Trump for lecturing Ukraine over its strikes on Russian energy infrastructure while going comparatively easy on Russia itself throughout the ongoing war. The board drew a sharp contrast between Trump’s tone toward the two countries, which have been at war since Russia’s 2022 invasion. The editorial called Trump’s approach “political excuse-making on a grand scale.” The criticism comes as Trump has publicly pressured Ukrainian President Zelensky to stop striking Russian diesel infrastructure, even as Russia continues launching large scale drone and missile attacks on Ukraine.

Sweden’s election remains too close to call. Sweden’s next government was uncertain Monday as vote counting continued, with a narrow lead for the left wing opposition and a weaker than expected showing from a hard right anti-immigration party. Preliminary results favored former Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson’s bid to return to office atop a left wing coalition, though her own Social Democrats lost some support compared to the last election. The final outcome may not be determined until Wednesday. The result will be closely watched across Europe given the rise of hard right parties in several neighboring countries.

Diesel prices hit an all time high as oil markets react to Middle East disruptions. The national average price of diesel rose to $6.23 a gallon Monday, a new record, after Saudi Arabia shut a critical pipeline and talks between Iran and Gulf countries over the Strait of Hormuz were postponed. Brent crude rose as high as $108 a barrel and U.S. crude touched $103, with vessel traffic through Hormuz down to just a handful of ships a day amid the standoff. KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk warned diesel costs ripple through the entire economy, saying, “The cost of diesel gets into just about everything, from running a farm to the cost of food, but also everything across the economy that’s shipped.” President Trump addressed the issue by publicly pressing Ukrainian President Zelensky to stop striking Russian oil refineries, saying, “He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia. Let him go after targets, but not diesel fuel, because he’s causing a shortage of diesel fuel.” Diesel prices have climbed 75 percent since the start of the year.

Nepal glacier collapse survivor reunites with his family after nine days trapped underground. Sanjay Sah, a mechanical foreman who survived nine days trapped in a flooded hydropower tunnel after last month’s Himalayan glacier collapse, returned home to his village Sunday to an emotional welcome. Sah said, “I was trapped in the tunnel. I felt trapped in the hospital room too. I finally feel free here in my village,” as roughly 60 family members and neighbors greeted him with a traditional cleansing ceremony. His mother cried, “My son!” while embracing him, and the crowd wiped away tears as he was welcomed home. At least 1,386 people have died and more than 5,000 remain missing across Nepal since the disaster, including around 900 power station workers, and Sah said he still hopes for news of missing neighbors, adding, “If I am called back to duty, I will go.”

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Mitch McConnell Returns as I Spent the Day at His House, Trump Melts Down Over AI, Major Whistleblower Report, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 14, 2026. I need to tell you what happened to me today before we get into anything else.

I went back to Mitch McConnell’s house this morning to do my job, and after weeks of facing attacks for doing this work, we have the truth. I stayed on the beat, I stayed outside that house, and we got something major. Mitch McConnell has returned to the United States Senate, and we have the video of him doing it. You’re going to see it in a moment, along with the statement his office just put out.

That’s not the only major interview in tonight’s rundown either. I sat down with Judge John Jones, a Bush appointee who has spent his career on the federal bench, to get his read on where this country actually stands right now. You are not going to want to miss what he had to say.

But before we get into any of it, I need to ask you directly. Nights like tonight, showing up at that house, getting threatened, and still bringing you the tape anyway, that only happens because people like you make it possible. This work is not funded by a network or a corporation. It is funded by subscribers. So if you have not subscribed yet, do it right now, hit that button, turn on notifications, and if you’re already a subscriber, share this with one person today. 

Mitch McConnell Update:

I just got back from Mitch McConnell’s house, and we have now seen him. Mitch McConnell has returned to the United States Senate. I spent most of the day outside of his home. We have the first video of him right now:

Trump Spirals Online:

Trump spirals on Truth Social, alleging a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and calling critics traitors. President Trump declared Monday that a “SICK conspiracy” is being waged against artificial intelligence and the data centers that run it, describing the people behind it as “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers.” He singled out Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei by name, writing, “The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel,’ and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!” He did not specify what conduct he was referring to, what criminal power he meant, or who exactly the alleged conspirators are. In his own words, he declared, “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” In a follow up post an hour later, he added, “Don’t kill the Golden Goose,” and later called the entire safety debate a “HOAX.”

Photo by Kaitlan Collins on September 14, 2026. May be a Twitter screenshot of text that says 'needs bad, STRONG now pretending to be The only control "guardrails" that SMART (High !) PRESIDENT, and the has that, spades! The Trump Administration has stopped "people" from doing potentially bad, "things," Dario (Anthropic!), who is "perfect little we will do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and power over these companies! There conspiracy going on against and Data Centers, and the only one that happy about China. WHOEVER WINS Al, WINS! are leading China, and others, and will Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE! Thank you for your attention this matter! TRUMP SICK do so. DONALD ReTruths'.

The outburst came two days after AI’s own top executives called for a slowdown, and it rattled the stock market. Trump’s rant followed an essay from Amodei arguing companies should deliberately slow the pace at which they improve AI capabilities, warning that within six to 12 months a swarm of rogue AI agents could be capable of “taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet,” causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. OpenAI’s Sam Altman said he agreed “that we need to pace the frontier,” while Elon Musk posted that “Dario is right,” and Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis signed on as well. The market reaction was immediate, with Nasdaq futures falling more than 1 percent overnight and chip stocks sliding, Intel down nearly 6 percent, Micron around 5 percent, and Nvidia roughly 3 percent, as investors priced in a possible slowdown in hardware demand. Shares in SoftBank and European data center suppliers including ASML, Siemens Energy, and Schneider Electric fell as well.

Trump calls into Nvidia’s All-In Summit to declare “the robots will not be taking over.” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang put President Trump on speakerphone in front of a large crowd at the All-In Podcast’s summit Monday, where Trump dismissed AI safety concerns as a “hoax” and told attendees, “the robots will not be taking over.” He also claimed, without offering specifics, that some communities were once “dying” but are now “really wealthy” because of data centers built in their area. Huang did not push back on any of it, instead telling Trump, “We’re going to make sure that everybody wins in the AI race in America. Every industry, every company, every state, every people,” while also flattering him by noting he was speaking to “thousands” of people.

Even inside his own administration, Trump’s dismissiveness is making people nervous. Vice President JD Vance cast doubt on the executives’ motives, calling their push for regulation a possible “Trojan horse,” and said, “I have to say, personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them,” though he acknowledged “there are obvious risks to AI, there are some benefits to AI.” CNN reported that some White House officials privately admit they are worried about Trump’s apparent lack of concern over AI’s dangers, a position he has held for months and shown little sign of reconsidering despite the mounting warnings. White House AI adviser David Sacks has accused Amodei’s company of running “a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fearmongering,” telling both Anthropic and OpenAI they are free to slow down on their own but should stop seeking an antitrust waiver from Washington to do it. House Speaker Mike Johnson said he hopes to convene talks this week between Trump, lawmakers, and AI executives, even as Trump claims, without evidence, that Chinese President Xi Jinping “announced that China will be doing absolutely nothing to stand in the way of AI, or its future” ahead of Xi’s planned visit to Washington next week.

Trump blames Biden for high prices, over 600 days into his own term. In a separate post Monday, more than 600 days into his second term, President Trump said he hopes everyone realizes that former President Biden is to blame for the higher prices Americans are currently facing. No further detail, quotes, or context were included in the post. That’s genuinely all there is on this one, the source material only gave that single line, so let me know if you come across the full post and I can build it out further.

Major Whistleblower Report:

Whistleblower alleges federal agents may have broken state laws hunting for voter fraud. A nearly 30 page whistleblower report given to Senators Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla alleges that federal agents, under direction from top Homeland Security leaders, may have violated state laws while searching for noncitizens on voter rolls as part of what DHS calls the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.” Agents allegedly posed as individual voters, using personal data like birth dates and partial Social Security numbers pulled from internal and external sources to look up voter records on public facing state websites, even though states like Virginia explicitly limit those tools to voters searching their own records. DHS’s own chief counsel office acknowledged the legal risk internally, telling agents they “are not personally liable for conducting these searches when done as part of their official duties and properly documented,” a line the watchdog group that produced the report called evidence that “there may be legal implications for accessing these websites” even as officers were required to keep doing it. In a public statement, DHS rejected any suggestion of wrongdoing, saying, “The Department accessed publicly available data from states’ voter rolls and cross referenced them with known aliens in our systems. It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

Agents were reportedly pushed through cases so fast that eligible citizens are likely being wrongly flagged. According to the whistleblower, agents were required to complete at least 40 voter reviews per eight hour shift, leaving roughly 12 minutes to determine each person’s citizenship and voting history, a pace that raises serious doubts about accuracy. Each review is logged in a database that can affect a person’s immigration status or legal residency, and the investigation relies on data described to agents only as “source data,” with officials at one point saying some immigration information had been added using “supplemental magic,” according to the report. That data reportedly includes alien identification numbers that remain permanently in a person’s DHS file even after they become citizens, meaning legally registered voters who were once noncitizens are likely being misidentified as unlawful voters. Some agents grew reluctant to flag people based on data they suspected was faulty, and the report concluded bluntly that “the current process is knowingly sweeping known U.S. citizens in as potentially ‘unlawful voters.’”

Democrats are demanding the operation be shut down, calling it an attempt to undermine the midterms. Schumer and Padilla sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding the initiative be halted and posing a dozen specific questions about how it is being run. Schumer said in an interview, “This is just the latest example of how far Donald Trump will go to interfere in our elections,” adding, “We’ve never seen anything quite like this. Department of Homeland Security is actually pulling away these law officers, these federal law enforcement officers, away from the work they’re supposed to do.” Padilla raised a related concern about privacy and accuracy, saying, “I do think the American people value keeping their personal information private. The other thing that’s concerning here, that the American people who would be offended by, is the knowing inaccuracy of what they’re doing, whether it’s the data or their sham analysis. It’s going to produce false positives.” The operation grows out of Trump’s long standing focus on noncitizen voting, despite decades of research showing it is exceedingly rare, and voting rights advocates worry eligible voters could be wrongly disqualified from the fall midterms or that Trump could use the investigation to cast doubt on results he dislikes.

Missouri Secretary of State:

Fired election integrity director accuses Missouri’s secretary of state of fabricating evidence to dodge a federal inquiry. Nick La Strada, who Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins fired as director of election integrity in May, filed a lawsuit alleging Hoskins’ team plotted to fabricate a fake whistleblower complaint to submit as evidence in a federal Help America Vote Act inquiry into discrepancies in 2024 vote count data. The lawsuit claims Hoskins’ then chief of staff discussed routing the fabricated complaint through an “IP scrambler” and a “burner” phone so it couldn’t be traced, in a call La Strada said he was excluded from but later reported to Hoskins. After reporting the conversation, La Strada’s Capitol access badge was disabled and he was told his presence wasn’t needed at the federal hearing, though he showed up and testified anyway. Days later he was fired, and his attorney Erin Vernon said at a news conference, “In essence, defendant office, by the actions of defendant Hoskins, fired the director of election integrity for having too much integrity.”

La Strada also alleges Hoskins illegally overturned a certified local election result. The lawsuit claims Hoskins ordered a retabulation of write-in votes in a Marshall, Missouri city election after the certified result had already named a winner by a single vote, and that the retabulation produced a different winner entirely. La Strada alleges Hoskins threatened city officials if they didn’t comply with the reordered result, even though only a judge has legal authority to order a recount once an election has been certified. Vernon emphasized the seriousness of Hoskins operating without any director of election integrity since firing La Strada, saying, “That’s a very big problem heading into elections, and they’ve shown they don’t want someone telling them what they can’t do and what the law in fact is.” Hoskins, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment on the lawsuit.

A separate allegation claims Hoskins misused public funds to influence a St. Louis County ballot measure. La Strada says he personally warned Hoskins in April 2025 that using taxpayer money to fund a mailer opposing St. Louis County’s Proposition B, a measure that would have changed county department head appointment powers, appeared to be an election law violation. The measure was ultimately defeated at the ballot box. This is now the second lawsuit filed against Hoskins in recent days, after five Missouri voters sued him last week alleging he violated state law by neglecting his official duties. La Strada, a longtime Republican who won four consecutive elections as Pettis County clerk before Hoskins hired him, is currently overseas serving as a U.S. election observer in Bosnia and Herzegovina and did not attend the news conference announcing his own lawsuit.

Other news:

DHS’s own watchdog confirms migrants were held in phone booth sized cages at Alligator Alcatraz. A new inspector general report has for the first time confirmed what advocates long alleged, that immigrants detained at Florida’s now shuttered Alligator Alcatraz facility were confined in outdoor metal cages roughly 4 by 4 feet, just 16 square feet, with indoor versions at 18 square feet, both less than half the 37 square foot minimum required by ICE detention standards. Facility staff called them “calming areas” meant for detainees to “de-escalate,” and a sign on one cell said its purpose was to let detainees “reflect on their behavior choices, manage their emotions, reduce stress and practice self-directed behavior.” Records show 79 detainees were held in these cages between July 2025 and January, with the longest stint lasting nearly two hours, and the inspector general concluded plainly that “the use of such restrictive spaces is highly unconventional and does not align with standards for humane treatment.” An earlier Amnesty International report based on detainee interviews went much further, describing detainees shackled hand and foot inside what they called “the box” for hours without water or shade, concluding that “the use of the ‘box’ as a form of punishment constitutes torture.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who toured the facility with President Trump and championed it as central to the deportation effort, said when asked about the new report that he had not read it, adding only, “I know that it was inspected, all those standards. The goal was not to apply those standards but to exceed those standards.”

Rep. Al Green forces a House-wide vote on impeaching Trump, teeing up a pre-midterm headache for Democrats. Longtime Texas Democrat Al Green announced Monday he’s using a privileged resolution to force the full House to vote on impeaching President Trump by Wednesday, citing federal immigration officers’ killing of two U.S. citizens this year. In a letter to colleagues, Green argued Democrats shouldn’t wait for planned post-midterm investigations, writing, “The available overwhelming evidence sufficiently demonstrates that President Trump is unfit and dangerous to our democracy.” The vote puts Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in an awkward spot, since he’s tried to keep Democrats focused on cost-of-living issues ahead of November, and 127 House Democrats joined Republicans to kill Green’s last impeachment push in June 2025. Green, 79, lost his primary to a younger challenger and has repeatedly clashed with Trump on the House floor, including waving his cane and shouting during a joint address and holding up a sign reading “Black People Aren’t Apes” during the State of the Union. The resolution itself brands Trump “a great threat to democracy and the Constitution for current high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Retired conservative judge warns America is “sleepwalking” toward another Jan. 6. Retired federal Judge J. Michael Luttig told MS NOW he believes the country is heading toward a repeat of the Capitol riot, saying, “That’s exactly what I envision, which is the next Jan. 6, 2021. This time, however, it will be Donald Trump and Mike Johnson refusing to peacefully transfer power to the next Congress of the United States.” Luttig argued Trump has spent his second term laying groundwork for a “final battle in his war against America’s democracy” by trying to seize control of the electoral process despite having “no power or authority whatsoever” to do so under the Constitution. He warned that even a decisive Democratic win in November would not guarantee the party gets seated as the majority in the new Congress, saying, “The House Republicans could still refuse to seat even a large Democratic majority elect under the Constitution of the United States,” though he acknowledged a landslide would make that “much more difficult,” not impossible. Luttig said Trump has been “as transparent as one could possibly be” about his intentions, adding that if America is sleepwalking into January 2027 the way it did before Jan. 6, 2021, “it’s no one’s fault but their own.” He closed by calling on lawmakers to commit publicly to upholding the Constitution, warning, “This is the final battle for America’s democracy. If this is the time of America’s testing, if America doesn’t rise to this moment, this moment under this president, Donald Trump, then there is no America in the future.”

El Niño just crossed into “super” territory, and it’s not done growing. An already strong El Niño has strengthened at a breakneck pace since being declared in June, and its key strength measure, NOAA’s Niño 3.4 Relative Oceanic Niño Index, has now hit 2.0 degrees Celsius above average, crossing the threshold for “very strong” and earning the unofficial “super” label. Forecasters say there is a 75 percent chance it peaks by the end of the year as the strongest El Niño since records began in 1950, and this event is unfolding in a far hotter world than past record setters due to climate change. It has already reshaped this year’s hurricane seasons, suppressing Atlantic activity so severely that the season has gone a record long stretch without its first hurricane, while supercharging the Pacific season with 16 storms including two Category 5 hurricanes and three separate systems threatening Hawaii in under a month. El Niño has also driven Indonesia’s punishing wildfire season by drying out the country’s peatland forests, and it contributed to this past August becoming Earth’s hottest on record, a trend scientists say could push 2027, and possibly 2026, to become the hottest year ever measured globally.

Newsom says he won’t run for president in 2028 if Harris runs again. California Governor Gavin Newsom told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview taped while the two were fly fishing in Montana that he would step aside for Kamala Harris, saying, “I don’t know if she runs but we’ll see. But I wouldn’t run if she ran.” When Tapper pushed back with some skepticism, Newsom doubled down, saying, “Of course not. Why would I? I wouldn’t do that to her. I wouldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t waste everyone’s time. Who needs that?” Newsom argued a shared primary would only benefit other candidates, calling it “a gift from God for everybody else” and “mutually assured destruction” that “services no greater good,” while acknowledging the case for Harris running instead of him, saying, “She had a shot and you’ve never run and she’s run twice. That’s objectively true.” He also pointed to their overlapping political base from their days as San Francisco politicians, saying, “The Venn diagram is just pure crossover. I wouldn’t do that to people,” a notably more definitive stance than his comments back in February, when he said only that “fate will determine” whether the two would end up running against each other.

A Mississippi man has been denied bond after pleading not guilty in the killing of Tasia Fortune. Jarques Ratliff, 51, appeared in Jackson Municipal Court and was formally charged with murder in the death of Fortune, a 29-year-old Black mother of four who was found hanging from a tree behind an abandoned home last month. His attorney argued Ratliff was not a flight risk and was “gainfully employed,” but the judge ordered him held with no bond after a law enforcement official present called him “a danger to the citizens of Jackson.” Police Chief RaShall Brackney, who said investigators had an “association” between Ratliff and Fortune, called the arrest “an important development” but stressed “it’s not the conclusion,” adding that additional arrests are expected. Fortune’s mother told the Associated Press she cried upon learning of the arrest, saying the family remains “in disbelief” and “still don’t have a lot of answers.” A cause of death and motive have still not been released.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warns Ukraine’s drone war is about to get far more dangerous. Schmidt, who now runs rocket maker Relativity Space and has advised the Pentagon on AI, told NBC News that the pace of battlefield innovation in Ukraine is unlike anything he has seen, warning that Russia has closed the technological gap that once favored Kyiv. He said Russia has begun fitting cheap Iranian designed Shahed drones with small Chinese jet engines, letting them exceed 300 miles per hour compared to roughly 110 miles per hour for older versions, making them far harder for Ukraine’s existing interceptors to stop. Schmidt predicted that artificial intelligence will soon let computers coordinate massive drone swarms directly, saying, “Humans can’t run a swarm of 1,000 drones, but a computer can. So what I think will happen is computers will develop war plans within a swarm.” He described the current front line bluntly, saying, “The battlefield today is a no man’s land where nothing moves because there are drones and anti-drones above you,” and warned that without more Western money and technology, “Whoever plays the game of fastest innovation to scale will win this war.”

The 10-year Treasury yield topped 5 percent for the first time since 2023 as oil and diesel prices spike. The surge came after Saudi Arabia shut a critical pipeline and postponed talks with Iran and Gulf countries over the Strait of Hormuz, sending Brent crude above $109 a barrel and pushing the national average price of diesel to a fresh all time high of $6.23 a gallon. U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he expects the pipeline back online “very soon” but could not give an exact timeline, even as the Associated Press reported the damage could keep it offline for weeks. Vessel traffic through Hormuz has slowed to a trickle, with just 14 ships passing through Sunday, and gas prices have already climbed more than 45 percent since the U.S. and Israel launched the Iran war. Economist Diane Swonk warned the ripple effects will be significant, saying, “The cost of diesel gets into just about everything, from running a farm to the cost of food, but also everything across the economy that’s shipped,” while markets now price in better than 90 percent odds the Federal Reserve raises interest rates Wednesday for the first time since 2023.

Macklemore says he was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour after Robert Kraft organized a stadium boycott over his pro Palestinian statements. The rapper wrote on Instagram that Sheeran told him Patriots owner Robert Kraft rallied other stadium owners to issue an ultimatum, that Sheeran would be barred from their venues if Macklemore remained on the tour, after Macklemore performed his song “Hind’s Hall” and told a New Jersey crowd, “Free Palestine.” Kraft confirmed the decision in a statement, citing “a broader history of rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community,” while saying he’d “welcome the opportunity to sit down with Macklemore and discuss the facts” toward what he called their shared goal of “peace for all people.” Macklemore said his conversations with Sheeran, whom he called a friend, ended in “fundamental disagreement,” recounting that Sheeran told him the words “Free Palestine” were hurtful to people he’d spoken with, to which Macklemore responded that this reflected “a fundamental disconnect” given the tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed in the war. Fellow artist Pink also weighed in, saying she wasn’t trying to get anyone fired but objected to displaying “violent images” of the war to a stadium of families, writing, “You don’t get to decide that for us.” Macklemore closed by saying he isn’t the victim, writing that the real victims are Palestinians “forced to live through unimaginable violence.”

Four people were hospitalized after a construction crane collapsed in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood. Miami Fire Rescue said the crane came down on Southeast 12th Street and Brickell Bay Drive, landing on top of a construction box trapping two workers, ages 29 and 27, inside, while a third worker, the crane operator, jumped clear as it tipped over. Fire Rescue Chief Robert Hevia described a complex scene where crews fought a vehicle fire while simultaneously cutting through the metal box to free the trapped workers, all of whom were ultimately extracted successfully. A driver whose SUV caught fire when the crane landed on its hood escaped by climbing out the back after reversing away from the falling crane. A nearby resident described hearing “a tremendous crash” and seeing flames “shooting up 20, 30 feet in the air,” and all four injured people, including the crane operator, were taken to the hospital with what officials described as minor injuries as OSHA prepares to investigate. 

Special Report: More On Russian Oligarch, Trump Family Wedding

 

A group photo shows about 35 people including Donald Trump Jr., his wife Bettina Anderson, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Tiffany Trump and Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev (with little more than his forehead and nose visible in the back row).

ProPublica, Investigative Reporting: Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to Putin, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski, Sept. 14, 2026. The oligarch, Umar Kremlev, spent hundreds of thousands on expenses like renting out a private island. He appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, but he attended the intimate wedding with a large group of other Russian guests.

In May, Donald Trump Jr. had a wedding on a pair of private islands.

This man’s role has been secret until now.Credit: Little Pipe Cay/Lux Hospitality Bahamas; Laura Gordon Photography via Instagram; Laura Gordon PhotographyTrump AdministrationThe oligarch, Umar Kremlev, spent hundreds of thousands on expenses like renting out a private island. He appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, but he attended the intimate wedding with a large group of other Russian guests.by Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy, Joshua Kaplan and Alex MierjeskiSeptember 14, 2026, 5:00 amChange Appearance

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

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

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

 

Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev, right, and Donald Trump Jr. (Reuters photo).

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

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

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

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

We’re still reporting. If you know anything about Trump Jr., his businesses or his relationship with Umar Kremlev, please get in touch.

I’m always looking for under-covered stories about business and politics, no matter the specific subject. Contact me with tips, by email or securely on Signal. I take confidentiality seriously.Contact Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Jr. exchanged vows with socialite Bettina Anderson on a private island that was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the 2006 James Bond movie “Casino Royale.” They had their first dance on a second private island nearby that can rent for around $100,000 a night, paid for by Kremlev. The company that put on the fireworks display charges around $70,000 for such shows. (Kremlev did not attend the ceremony itself, which was held on the first day and had just 18 guests, Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said.)A man and woman stand on a beach as fireworks explode above the water.Donald Trump Jr. and his wife, Bettina Anderson, at their wedding, watching fireworks paid for by Umar Kremlev. Laura Gordon Photography via Lewis Miller DesignDonald Trump Jr. wears a multi-colored Junkanoo headpiece while dancing with Bettina Anderson.The magazine Hello! shared an image of Trump Jr. wearing a Junkanoo headpiece while dancing with his new bride. Laura Gordon Photography/Hello!

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

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

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

In May, Donald Trump Jr. had a wedding on a pair of private islands.

This man’s role has been secret until now.Credit: Little Pipe Cay/Lux Hospitality Bahamas; Laura Gordon Photography via Instagram; Laura Gordon PhotographyTrump AdministrationDonald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding Was Secretly Bankrolled by Russian Oligarch Close to PutinThe oligarch, Umar Kremlev, spent hundreds of thousands on expenses like renting out a private island. He appears to have met Trump Jr. only recently, but he attended the intimate wedding with a large group of other Russian guests.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re still reporting. If you know anything about Trump Jr., his businesses or his relationship with Umar Kremlev, please get in touch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Jr. exchanged vows with socialite Bettina Anderson on a private island that was featured in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and the 2006 James Bond movie “Casino Royale.” They had their first dance on a second private island nearby that can rent for around $100,000 a night, paid for by Kremlev. The company that put on the fireworks display charges around $70,000 for such shows. (Kremlev did not attend the ceremony itself, which was held on the first day and had just 18 guests, Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said.)A man and woman stand on a beach as fireworks explode above the water.Donald Trump Jr. and his wife, Bettina Anderson, at their wedding, watching fireworks paid for by Umar Kremlev. Laura Gordon Photography via Lewis Miller DesignDonald Trump Jr. wears a multi-colored Junkanoo headpiece while dancing with Bettina Anderson.The magazine Hello! shared an image of Trump Jr. wearing a Junkanoo headpiece while dancing with his new bride. Laura Gordon Photography/Hello!

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

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

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

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

In 2009, Umar Kremlev did not yet exist.

He was in his late 20s, with a criminal record for extortion and battery, still going by his birth name, Umar Lutfulloyev, according to the Russian independent news outlet Proekt. But he was about to rapidly ascend in Russia to a position of wealth and influence, with the help of a powerful friend. (“Mr. Kremlev has a completely clean legal record,” his press office said.)Russian President Vladimir Putin leans into a conversation with Umar Kremlev.Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, with Umar Kremlev, during an event in Moscow in September 2022 Sputnik/Reuters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called on industry leaders to slow A.I. development for fear of losing control of the technology. Shown at right is Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI.

New York Times, Tech Stocks Shudder in Response to Calls to Slow A.I. Progress, Joe Rennison, Sept. 14, 2026. Companies at the forefront of artificial intelligence in Asia, Europe and the United States posted declines after tech leaders expressed worries about the safety of “frontier” A.I. technology.

Technology stocks around the world fell on Monday, after a chorus of senior executives at artificial intelligence companies called for slowing down the rapid pace of development of the transformative technology.

Futures for the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite index fell 1.5 percent ahead of the open of trading in New York. Nvidia, Intel, Oracle and other companies at the forefront of the A.I. build-out posted declines premarket.

South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI index, which is heavily influenced by two chip suppliers for A.I. data centers, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, fell more than 3 percent. Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest chipmaker, fell 1.2 percent. Japan’s main stock index also declined, with SoftBank, a major tech investment firm, shedding more than 10 percent.

In Europe, semiconductor stocks like ASML of the Netherlands and Infineon of Germany fell sharply.

The tech industry has been the engine powering global markets to repeated new highs in recent years as advances in A.I. have moved faster than investors initially expected.

Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, published a long blog post on Saturday calling on industry leaders to slow A.I. development for fear of losing control of rapidly advancing models at the so-called frontier of development.

Those models, he wrote, have already begun to build the next generation of artificial intelligence, in what is known as “recursive self-improvement.” That raises the risk that the technology will become an autonomous cybersecurity threat, even threatening “serious economic disruption.”

“A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute,” Dr. Amodei said. As one remedy, he said he would hire third-party “evaluators” who would “verify adherence to safety practices and commitments.”

The post was endorsed by Elon Musk, who runs Space X, which also houses his A.I platform, x.AI; Sam Altman, who co-founded OpenAI; and Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google DeepMind.

“I agree with Dario,” Mr. Altman said, adding that he would also hire third-party “evaluators” to oversee OpenAI’s safety practices.

SpaceX, which is publicly traded, fell about 2 percent in premarket trading on Monday. OpenAI and Anthropic are both expected to list publicly in the future. But Mr. Altman of OpenAI said in a recent interview with Fortune that “right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public.”

Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, said on Fox News on Sunday that the steps Mr. Amodei suggested in his blog post were “pretty sensible.”

Despite the rare show of allegiance among the tech leaders, President Trump said that he would not want to see a slowdown that could give China the opportunity to move ahead of the United States on A.I.

“Whoever wins with A.I. wins,” said Mr. Trump on the sidelines of a golf tournament held at one of his courses in Ireland over the weekend.

China’s rapid progress in open-source A.I. models, which rival those from Anthropic and other industry leaders and, has split Silicon Valley. In his call for coordination of safe A.I. development, Dr. Amodei said there should be restrictions on chip sales to China and a crack down on the improper harvesting of data from A.I. systems by Chinese companies.

“If we execute these measures well,” he added, “I believe they would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3-5 years — the window when AI becomes geopolitically most important.” He also said that the United States and other democratic nations should work to get China to restrict the speed of A.I. developments, although given the stakes “there will likely be stark limits on what can be achieved.”

On Monday, Guo Jiakun, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, told reporters in a briefing that “hyping up various threat narratives, engaging in confrontation and resorting to malicious competition will only disrupt the global A.I. governance process and serve the interests of no one.”

More On Artificial Intelligence Fears

New York Times, China’s Top Spy Chief Warns A.I. Is a Threat to Party Rule, Lily Kuo, Sept. 14, 2026. Even as Beijing urges the United States not to hype the dangers of A.I., its own spy chief is framing the technology as a threat to the Communist Party’s security.

China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks.

The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is in contrast to the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself.

In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.

Mr. Chen referred specifically to U.S. tech companies and their A.I. models — like Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5-Cyber — as examples of new threats to cybersecurity. He also described the danger that foreign intelligence agencies might use A.I. for “large-scale espionage” and attacks on China’s critical infrastructure.

The warning from the powerful security agency makes clear that China sees foreign A.I. models as an active threat to China, according to Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University. That effectively draws a red line before talks between American and Chinese officials on A.I. safety risks, expected ahead of a meeting between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Sept. 24 in Washington.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

“Beijing is going into these talks viewing A.I. safety not as a shared humanitarian mission, but through an adversarial lens,” Mr. Gao said. It is making clear to Chinese tech firms and foreign rivals that “data sovereignty and political security will never be traded away for international safety accords,” he added.

Mr. Chen’s remarks are not the first time the security agency has spoken about the dangers of A.I., but they are the most comprehensive and signal Beijing’s growing concern about the industry. The security chief outlined several ways that A.I. could pose a threat to China:

Undermining the security of the Communist Party. The government’s top priority has long been maintaining the power of the ruling party. Mr. Chen’s article warns that those with “ulterior motives” could use A.I. to generate fake videos and audio to wage a “propaganda war” against China.

“They’re worried, among other things, of say a deepfake of a Chinese official saying something that wasn’t actually said, and that spreading rapidly and destabilizing everything,” said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Chinese technology and industrial policy. “Someone thinks that Xi Jinping made some announcement which he didn’t actually. That could sow chaos.”

Attacks on China’s critical infrastructure. Mr. Chen, the spy chief, wrote that the technical and financial barriers to launching cyberattacks had been drastically lowered because of A.I. This, he said, posed “serious risks” to China’s information infrastructure. Last week, a small team of researchers in California demonstrated that risk when they disclosed a hacking tool that could take control of millions of users’ accounts on WeChat, China’s most widely used messaging app.

Leaks of sensitive information. Chinese users using foreign models could cause large-scale data leaks, the article noted. Anthropic, the company behind Claude and other A.I. models, said last week that the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI had routed queries by its users to Claude. Those queries included sensitive data, including video surveillance linked to the Chinese military, as well as proprietary information from high-profile Chinese technology companies.

More intense military competition. The U.S. military’s use of A.I. in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran was an example of how warfare has been “fundamentally transformed,” Mr. Chen wrote. He says that whoever can harness the power of tools such as algorithms to achieve more precise sensing and targeting, “will gain the initiative on the battlefield.”

China’s top spy chief has warned that artificial intelligence could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power, in what is the highest-level and most detailed articulation yet of how Beijing sees the technology’s security risks.

The unusually blunt assessment by Chen Yixin, the head of China’s Ministry of State Security, is in contrast to the warnings dominating the A.I. debate in the United States, which have focused on the possibility that A.I. could slip out of human control or pose a threat to humanity itself.

In an article published on Sunday in the state-run magazine China Cyberspace, Mr. Chen called for more party control over A.I. and stricter government oversight. This, he said, was necessary to protect political stability at home; to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and misinformation campaigns from “hostile forces”; and to compete militarily with countries like the United States.

Mr. Chen referred specifically to U.S. tech companies and their A.I. models — like Claude Mythos and GPT-5.5-Cyber — as examples of new threats to cybersecurity. He also described the danger that foreign intelligence agencies might use A.I. for “large-scale espionage” and attacks on China’s critical infrastructure.

The warning from the powerful security agency makes clear that China sees foreign A.I. models as an active threat to China, according to Henry Gao, a law professor at Singapore Management University. That effectively draws a red line before talks between American and Chinese officials on A.I. safety risks, expected ahead of a meeting between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, on Sept. 24 in Washington.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

“Beijing is going into these talks viewing A.I. safety not as a shared humanitarian mission, but through an adversarial lens,” Mr. Gao said. It is making clear to Chinese tech firms and foreign rivals that “data sovereignty and political security will never be traded away for international safety accords,” he added.

Mr. Chen’s remarks are not the first time the security agency has spoken about the dangers of A.I., but they are the most comprehensive and signal Beijing’s growing concern about the industry. The security chief outlined several ways that A.I. could pose a threat to China:

Undermining the security of the Communist Party. The government’s top priority has long been maintaining the power of the ruling party. Mr. Chen’s article warns that those with “ulterior motives” could use A.I. to generate fake videos and audio to wage a “propaganda war” against China.

“They’re worried, among other things, of say a deepfake of a Chinese official saying something that wasn’t actually said, and that spreading rapidly and destabilizing everything,” said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies Chinese technology and industrial policy. “Someone thinks that Xi Jinping made some announcement which he didn’t actually. That could sow chaos.”

Attacks on China’s critical infrastructure. Mr. Chen, the spy chief, wrote that the technical and financial barriers to launching cyberattacks had been drastically lowered because of A.I. This, he said, posed “serious risks” to China’s information infrastructure. Last week, a small team of researchers in California demonstrated that risk when they disclosed a hacking tool that could take control of millions of users’ accounts on WeChat, China’s most widely used messaging app.

Leaks of sensitive information. Chinese users using foreign models could cause large-scale data leaks, the article noted. Anthropic, the company behind Claude and other A.I. models, said last week that the Chinese start-up Moonshot AI had routed queries by its users to Claude. Those queries included sensitive data, including video surveillance linked to the Chinese military, as well as proprietary information from high-profile Chinese technology companies.

More intense military competition. The U.S. military’s use of A.I. in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran was an example of how warfare has been “fundamentally transformed,” Mr. Chen wrote. He says that whoever can harness the power of tools such as algorithms to achieve more precise sensing and targeting, “will gain the initiative on the battlefield.”

Trump says only guardrails that AI needs is ‘STRONG AND SMART’ president, Elleiana Green and Owen Dahlkamp, The president is trying to shut down a growing push for AI regulation, amid calls from leaders to slow the production of artificial intelligence.

Politico, Trump says only guardrails that AI needs is ‘STRONG AND SMART’ president, Elleiana Green and Owen Dahlkamp, Sept. 14, 2026. The president is trying to shut down a growing push for AI regulation, amid calls from leaders to slow the production of artificial intelligence.President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks with reporters on Air Force One.

President Donald Trump tried to shut down a burgeoning push for the United States to further regulate artificial intelligence on Monday morning, saying the U.S. has already done enough to prevent AI from catastrophic risks.

The post comes as technology leaders called for the industry to slow down the production of artificial intelligence over the weekend, sending tech stocks tumbling on Monday.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.

The president has repeatedly said in public remarks over the past week that his top priority is ensuring China does not gain supremacy over a new technology that is poised to reshape civil society. “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers,” he said Monday, “and the only one that is happy about it is China.”

“Don’t kill the Golden Goose!” he added in a subsequent social media post.

Trump also called out Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, claiming that he is “now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’” after the Trump administration had previously “stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things.’“

Over the weekend, Amodei was the first major AI leader to publicly call for a slowdown, writing in a lengthy essay, “We must slow down the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models.”

Shortly after, xAI CEO Elon Musk said on social media that “Dario is right.”

OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, also said he agreed with Amodei, adding that the issue has been a topic of discussion at OpenAI. And OpenAI’s top European lobbyist, in an interview with POLITICO, called on the United Kingdom to also introduce new regulations.

The Trump administration previously clashed with Anthropic publicly after the company attempted to restrict how the Pentagon could use its Claude AI model, resulting in it being designated a supply-chain risk. The AI giant sued, and a federal judge in late July said that it seemed that the administration overstepped its authority in targeting the company.

One of Anthropic’s most advanced models was also slapped with export controls in June after the administration deemed its release posed security risks. In an attempt to comply, Anthropic shut down the model entirely before the ban was partially lifted later that month.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s Monday social media post.

Concern from lawmakers and the tech industry spiked last week after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and issued a warning that the emerging technology could “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

His prediction increased fears about the growing capabilities of the technology, with top AI labs in recent weeks disclosing several instances in which rogue AI agents broke out of their testing environments and carried out sophisticated hacking campaigns across the internet.

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance told reporters on Monday before Trump’s social media post that AI is “something we’re concerned by, but we want to make sure that we actually regulate smartly and we’re thoughtful about the risk here.”

He added, “I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse.”

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: AI Is a Test of Our Maturity. *Gulp,* Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 14, 2026.  AI fears—as Bill discusses below—are scrambling our politics and making for some extremely strange bedfellows. How strange? Well, how many issues could put Steve Bannon, Bernie Sanders, and an industry whistleblower all on the same D.C. stage?

Andrew will be attending and reporting on tomorrow’s “Pro-Human Assembly”—so watch this space. Happy Wednesday.

Global Environment, Climate Policy, Artificial Intelllgence Threats

 

New York Times, E.P.A. Expected to Erase Limits on Climate Pollution From Power Plants, Maxine Joselow, Sept. 14, 2026 (print ed.). Generation of electricity is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases in the United States.

The Trump administration plans to announce Monday that the United States will no longer limit the planet-warming pollution that power plants pump into the air while burning coal and gas, according to two people familiar with the proposal.

The shift by the Environmental Protection Agency would complete the administration’s erasure of the most consequential climate policies of Presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Barack Obama. If the move survives expected legal challenges, it could also prevent future administrations from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

The power sector is the second largest source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the United States. This pollution accumulates in the atmosphere, where it traps the sun’s heat, raising temperatures and supercharging extreme weather events around the globe.

Lee Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, is expected to announce the change during a meeting of energy ministers from the Group of 20 nations in Houston, according to the two people familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to describe the proposal before it is made public.

Representatives for the E.P.A. did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Sunday evening.

Environmentalists and energy experts have opposed the move, which has been in the works since last spring. They have noted that if the U.S. power sector were its own country, it would be the fifth-largest climate polluter in the world after China, the entire United States, India and Russia.

President Trump has derided climate change as a “hoax,” and in his second term, the E.P.A. has systematically dismantled policies aimed at slowing global warming that have been criticized as costly by oil, gas and coal companies. The administration has tried to make it easier and cheaper to produce and use fossil fuels, especially to generate electricity that can meet growing demand from artificial intelligence data centers.

Earlier this year, the E.P.A. eliminated greenhouse gas standards for car tailpipes and eased restrictions on planet-warming chemicals used in air-conditioners and refrigerators. Most consequentially, the agency repealed the scientific determination that gave it the legal authority to create climate regulations in the first place.

Under the plan expected Monday, power plants would still be subject to some limits on mercury, arsenic and other contaminants, though the E.P.A. has already loosened restrictions on how much mercury they can emit.

The Biden administration’s climate rules for power plants, finalized in 2024, applied to coal-burning plants that were in operation and gas-burning plants that could be built in the future. To comply, coal plants could have installed technology to trap carbon emissions before they are released into the air and store them deep underground. Gas plants could have operated on cleaner fuels like hydrogen, which produces no emissions when burned.

The Biden administration estimated that the regulation would also prevent other pollutants, such as soot, from escaping into the air, resulting in $120 billion in public health benefits by 2047. It projected that in 2035 alone, the rule would prevent up to 1,200 premature deaths, 870 hospital and emergency room visits, 360,000 asthma attacks, 48,000 school absence days and 57,000 lost workdays.

Under the Trump administration, the E.P.A. has stopped estimating the public health benefits of reducing pollution in the cost-benefit analyses necessary for clean-air regulations. Instead, the agency has estimated only the costs to businesses of complying with the rules.

The coal industry had complained that Biden-era restrictions on emissions were costly and unworkable. It had predicted that many coal plants would have closed instead of spending billions of dollars on new pollution controls.

Coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels; when burned, it produces more air pollution and more greenhouse gases than any other source of energy. The economics of coal are also unfavorable; experts say new coal plants are more expensive to build and operate than gas plants and renewable energy sources like solar and wind power.

The use of coal in the United States has been declining for decades. While coal generated more than half of the nation’s electricity in 1990, that share fell to roughly 17 percent in 2025.

 

The Terminator at 40: James Cameron's dark vision is more relevant than ever.

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary:The MAGA Plot(s) to Destroy Humanity, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 14, 2026. On AI and climate, it’s the same story of mass destruction.

Will AI lead to the destruction of humanity? Over the past year a number of top AI researchers have warned that AI was quickly attaining the capacity to wipe out humankind.

These warnings aren’t entirely new. At first, however, Anthropic was virtually alone among the top LLM companies in highlighting the dangers that unregulated AI poses. And in return for its conscientious objection to allowing its models to be used for AI-agentic warfare – a clear means of humanicide – Hegseth’s Pentagon tried to retaliate by designating the company as a security risk. Fortunately, a judge saw through this ploy.

Still, until very recently other AI companies — in particular Elon Musk’s Grok and ChatGPT — were willing to dance to the Trump administration’s tune to get a competitive advantage Currently, Grok is used by the U.S. military to assist targeting in Iran – a clear pre-cursor to situation in which the machines, not humans, decide who is the target.

But now, quite suddenly, Musk and ChatGPT’s CEO Sam Altman are falling in behind the call by Daron Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, to acknowledge the existential dangers of AI and to put on the brakes. Notably, Amodei explicitly calls for government regulation if other AI companies refuse to cooperate:

The most effective method of pacing is via regulation that targets all US frontier AI companies, as that covers even those who are unwilling to cooperate voluntarily.

Regardless of why Musk and Altman are having a sudden attack of conscience, I applaud their new position. As many people think, perhaps this was due to the Hugging Face hack by rogue ChatGPT AI-agents. But I also think Musk and Altman’s volte-face was influenced by the changing political environment, with the near-certainty that Democrats will take the House and a very good chance that they will take the Senate.

For in a real sense, Amodei isn’t just trying to protect humanity from rogue AI, he is also trying to protect humanity from Donald Trump. It’s important to remember that, under the Biden administration, government policymakers tried to formulate some basic AI precautions. But removing those precautions was literally one of the first things Donald Trump did when taking office the second time. And that’s a history worth revisiting at a moment when the AI industry itself is sounding the alarm, but Trump is dismissing the risks:

You have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.

Well, I’m glad to know that he’s sure that bad things won’t happen. But last I heard, Trump wasn’t a technology expert. And his recent record on rosy predictions — wasn’t the Iran war supposed to be over in a few days? — hasn’t been great.

In any case, here’s the history you should know.

The current age of AI is often considered to have begun with the public release of ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022. However, the potential economic and social implications of large language models were already becoming apparent during the first year of the Biden administration, which began implementing a series of rules and executive orders intended to limit the potential damage from the technology. The Economic Policy Institute maintains a comprehensive list of these actions.

The centerpiece of the Biden agenda on AI was Executive Order 14401, issued on October 30, 2023, titled “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” The document declared that

Harnessing AI for good and realizing its myriad benefits requires mitigating its substantial risks. This endeavor demands a society-wide effort that includes government, the private sector, academia, and civil society.

Would we be less panicked now if there had been a serious effort to put that executive order’s recommendations into effect? It’s basically impossible to say, because precautionary policy toward AI never got a chance. Trump revoked Executive Order 14401 on Jan. 20, 2025. Yes, you read that right: He literally removed all safeguards on AI on his first day in office.

Just three days later his administration issued a new executive order, “Removing barriers to American leadership in artificial intelligence,” which might be summarized as “Damn the social and existential risks, full speed ahead.”

Some of this determination not to limit the risks from AI reflected industry influence. A week before Trump took office, NVIDIA combined an appeal for deregulation with slavish praise for the incoming administration:

The first Trump Administration laid the foundation for America’s current strength and success in AI, fostering an environment where U.S. industry could compete and win on merit without compromising national security.

But there was also a social aspect to Trump’s anti-regulation stance. You won’t be surprised to hear that hostility to DEI was right at the heart of the agenda. Literally the second sentence of the order declares that

we must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.

I think this was a thinly veiled plug for Grok, which by all accounts is vastly inferior to offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI but which Elon Musk has tried to sell in part because it supposedly isn’t “woke.”

In any case, Trump’s dismissal of the risks from AI, even at a time when experts and industry insiders are in hair-on-fire mode, is simply a continuation of the position he has taken from the beginning.

It is also, not coincidentally, completely consistent with his attitude toward the other existential threat facing humanity — a threat that isn’t at all hypothetical and is rapidly becoming acute.

The contiguous United States has just experienced its hottest summer on record, with July the hottest month ever. Across the Atlantic, Europe has been ravaged by droughts and heat waves. Here’s a headline from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

And everything we know about climate change suggests that what we’ve seen so far is just a foretaste of the disasters to come.

Yet last year, speaking at the United Nations, Trump dismissed climate change as a “con job,” while calling renewable energy sources such as solar and wind — which met almost all of the world’s growth in electricity demand last year — a “scam.” And this disdain is being reflected in policy. As I and many others have written, the Trump administration has been actively trying to block wind and solar power projects. And today the administration is reportedly planning to eliminate all restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

There is a lot to be said about the reasons our current government seems so determined to rush into disaster, even when the very survival of humanity may be at stake. Climate denial, we know from decades of experience, is fueled by an unholy trinity of financial interest (fossil fuel companies determined to keep their profits flowing), ideology (conservatives hostile to any form of regulation) and psychological insecurity (real men burn stuff.) AI-risk denial presumably reflects a similar mix of factors.

So let’s applaud leaders like Amodei for speaking up and applaud the growing willingness of other CEOs to warn about the dangers of their technology, even if their attack of conscience partly reflects the looming prospect of Democratic subpoenas.

New York Times Magazine, Six Strangers Connected by Disaster, David Gelles Photographs by Philip Cheung, Sept. 11, 2026. Amy Dishion woke up on Sept. 5, 2022, and said goodbye to her husband, Evan.

He was off for a sunrise hike with friends through the hills outside Phoenix and was supposed to return that afternoon. Around 11 a.m., Amy got a text from him; it was getting hot, but he was doing well.

By afternoon, Evan’s group had summitted Elephant Mountain but had gotten lost and run out of water. Temperatures reached 109 degrees — extremely hot even for summer in Arizona. One hiker started hallucinating. Another began to stumble. When Evan passed out, there was no cell signal to call for help.

His death left Amy in shock. She returned to Oregon and moved in with his family. “Evan was my entire life,” she says. “He was my whole world. I was pretty much incapacitated emotionally for a couple years after that.”

While Dishion navigated her grief, she found some solace in talking about her experience and the dangers of extreme heat as global temperatures continue to rise. In 2023, she spoke at a virtual town hall with legislators; among those watching was Sierra Lindsey Kos, who had just helped create a group for people like Dishion.

The group, Extreme Weather Survivors, was started three years ago by Kos and Chris Kocher, an attorney and professional social organizer who had helped set up networks for survivors of gun violence and Covid-19. Kos had been galvanized by the 2020 Labor Day fires in Oregon, during which her newborn son was hospitalized with a serious illness. She had to drive through the burning landscape with him, surrounded by ash and red skies. She remembers being gripped in that moment by a feeling that she couldn’t keep her son safe from climate disaster; it was happening everywhere.

In just a few years, Extreme Weather Survivors has grown to include more than 2,500 people whose lives have been upended by searing temperatures, roaring fires, torrential floods and intense storms. It is partly a climate advocacy group with a lobbying focus — but it’s also an unprecedented network of people from all over the country, survivors of many different forms of extreme weather, who have come to rely on one another for guidance and emotional support. They have bonded over insurance challenges and byzantine FEMA paperwork, over fights with local utility companies, over the question of how to hold the local authorities accountable for destruction that should, in retrospect, have been preventable.

More On Middle East Wars

 

Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump is always looking for someone else to blame, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 13, 2026. At 6:19 pm, somewhere between Shannon, Ireland, and Washington, DC, the President of the United States barged into the press cabin on Air Force One. Still wearing the deep navy suit and now-wrinkled white shirt, but without the tie he was wearing earlier, he had an urgent question for the press: “I just wanted to make sure everyone’s okay with music, right?” He told the press that he was only there to see if they agreed that “the music’s great, right?” He told them that he picked the playlist himself because he wanted to “make you happy.”

They, in return, exchanged small talk just long enough to bring down his guard before jumping at the opportunity to ask him questions. One reporter cut right to the chase, asking about China and President Xi’s upcoming trip to Washington, D.C., and whether Trump plans to ask him about reports that entities in China may have provided Iran with satellite imagery that was used when three American military members were killed.

Trump’s response was, “They do what we do.” And then he added, “Uh, I think he’s behaved reasonably well, and we behave reasonably well. You know, when they say that China spies on us, I say you’re right, and we spy on them, too. You know, we spy on them, too.”

As he finished saying this, he started to back out of the cabin before changing his mind, possibly realizing what he had just said and how devastating it was. Because whether he meant it or not, he said that the loss of First Lieutenant Tyler James Feehan, Private Isabella Gonzales, and Staff Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad from Iranian missiles hitting the housing area where they were sleeping, reportedly with the help of Chinese entities’ satellite imagery, was China acting “reasonably well behaved,” and that he had no plans to confront Xi, let alone even mention it.

Over the past couple of days, the Wall Street Journal reported that the United States government was able to connect satellite images given to Iran by Chinese entities to the July 17 ballistic missile strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. The Iranian missile attack hit the housing area where American troops were sleeping, killing three soldiers and wounding four others.

The U.S. had already claimed to have destroyed Iran’s radar and air defense capabilities, though intelligence assessments painted a more complicated picture. What is clear is that without the satellite imagery from Chinese entities, Iran may not have been able to target that exact location in the first place. This news is not surprising because we already know that China is not our ally and certainly not our friend. But this connects them to actual deaths of American military members.

In less than two weeks, Donald Trump plans to welcome China’s leader with open arms. He has been sharing his excitement about this visit for months. Xi is one of the men Trump considers his equal, someone he respects and often speaks about in high regard. Just this past May, he told Xi, “You’re a great leader. It’s an honor to be your friend.” He also told reporters that “Sometimes people don’t like me saying it, but I say it anyway.”

This is the complete opposite of how he speaks about and treats the leaders of the countries he should align himself with, our allies from countries like France, Germany, Canada, or the United Kingdom. He treats the leaders of countries that share our democratic values and whom we have stood beside for generations with very little respect, while continuing to treat men like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin as friends and equals.

While still talking to the press on Air Force One, the war between Russia and Ukraine was also brought up. In true Trump fashion, he used that opportunity to do something outlandishly inappropriate, he blamed high diesel prices on Volodymyr Zelensky. He made the decision to blame the president of a country currently being attacked, and not blame the invading country for the fallout of the war and its effects on the price of fuel. “The problem I have with Ukraine and Russia is that a lot of the diesel comes from Russia, and the Russia plants are being hit by Ukraine,” Trump said. “And I’ve asked President Zelensky not to hit the diesel plants, refineries.” He then added, “The diesel is being driven up by the fact that it’s having a hard time coming out of Russia, and that’s a case that hurts the world.” He went even further, saying, “This isn’t done by the Middle East. This is done by what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine.”

His words were deliberately misleading, said to protect Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and paint Zelensky as the villain. While Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries have contributed to the shortage, the far larger disruption has come from Trump’s war in Iran, which has choked off roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply through the Strait of Hormuz. Trump knows this. He has said so himself, multiple times, that fuel prices are a result of the Iran war, and he has even told his fellow Americans we have to accept higher fuel prices to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons. But now that the midterm elections are less than 51 days away and people are becoming more outraged by the high gas prices, he has suddenly decided to blame the country fighting for its survival.

With the global energy crisis becoming worse by the day, Donald Trump feels cornered and clueless on how to fix this. Now he has to face the reality that things won’t get better before the midterms. Because over the last week, another route used to move oil out of the region has become endangered, leaving both of the world’s most critical oil shipping corridors under threat at the same time, something that has never happened before. The Strait of Hormuz has been an unreliable route for months now. This past week, that other route was impacted when Iran-backed forces took over the port of Mokha before moving down Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, taking control of Perim Island, too, which sits directly inside the Bab al-Mandeb Strait.

That second strait sees roughly 12% of global seaborne oil trade and is the primary route for cargo moving between Europe and Asia. Saudi Arabia had been using the Red Sea as its backup route, so that none of it had to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. To make this all worse, the Houthis also struck a Saudi pipeline on Friday, which forced it to close and left that alternative route under attack too. This too caused oil to surge and gave Iran another opportunity to limit the flow of oil, making consumers all over the planet have to pay even higher prices.

We can’t keep living like this. Something has to change. We desperately need leaders who are willing to stand up to Donald Trump and who will take any and all opportunities to fight back, even now before the midterms instead of waiting until January when a new Congress could be seated.

This morning I watched House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. I was once again reminded of how slow and lacking the Democratic response has been. When he was asked whether Democrats would go after impeachment if they take back the House, his answer was, “No, we haven’t ruled anything in, and we haven’t ruled anything out.” His lack of an actual answer and the political double talk is exactly how we got here. How he answered was how Democratic leadership has responded for years, and it has failed us over and over again. After January 6th, we had a real opportunity to take a stand against corruption, and even though some lawmakers tried, their response fell flat. So many of them have left the few actually taking a stand and speaking out, lacking the support that should be there from the entirety of the Democratic Party. There should be a gathering of every Democrat in Congress, standing shoulder to shoulder, demanding Trump and his enablers’ corruption end every single day. Everything that wasn’t done has led us to today. We need Democrats with fire in their bellies. We need people willing to get in there, right now, and fight for their country without thinking about winning another six-year term and playing it safe. We already have people just like that showing up more and more, and they are already terrifying the Republican Party.

These are the Abdul El-Sayeds and the Jon Ossoffs. They both are bringing passion to the fight we haven’t seen enough of. Ossoff gave a campaign speech this weekend where he told a crowd of people in Georgia that the Trump administration is “the Epstein class.” He connected Trump’s war to the high gas prices and to our increasing grocery bills. People want politicians who they can trust to deliver the truth, and this type of campaigning is working. What he has been saying has made an election that Democrats were predicted to barely win into one where it looks like they have a decent lead. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan running on a slogan he repeats often at his events, “money out of politics, money in your pocket, Medicare for all.” That is the messaging we need, and we need it repeated often. Republicans are so afraid of him that Ted Cruz used his time speaking at the desperate Republican Midterm Convention attacking him by name, to which someone in that crowd shouted, “he should be shot.” I rewatched that video, and it’s not completely clear that Cruz heard the first time it was said, but it does appear that he heard it the subsequent times, and he did nothing. Zohran Mamdani already proved in the last election in New York that working-class messaging can beat out establishment and centrist politicians and win. This does not mean we do not vote blue down the line. It means we demand better, and we think about who we really want leading our parties and our country after we right this ship.

We have our work cut out for us right now. We have to get people who are against everything Trump is doing, but are on the fence about this new type of politician, to start showing up for them. We need to help them see that the careful, centrist approach has failed to hold a single person accountable for six years of democratic destruction and that it is time to demand something better. The ones the GOP is afraid of, and for good reason. The ones they are calling dangerous and communists. We need to make sure they understand that this is not the time to sit out an election because they do not understand or are not in love with the democratic candidates placed before them. We can have those discussions over the next two years before the next general election. Right now, this is an all-hands-on-deck call to action.

Back in February, I wrote about a speech given by Judge J. Michael Luttig, a George H.W. Bush appointed conservative federal judge, after he warned that Trump represents a “clear and present danger” to our American democracy. On Thursday, he published a piece in The New Republic warning that even if Democrats win the House in November, Republicans could refuse to seat them; something I have shared is one of my greatest concerns aside from the vote itself. He went even deeper with his analysis than I did, including how Speaker Mike Johnson could replace the House Clerk with a loyalist who could refuse to list Democrats on the roll of representatives-elect, which would then trigger a constitutional crisis that could paralyze the country for weeks or months while the courts sort it out. Luttig called it “The Final Battle for America’s Democracy.” That is why we need voter turnout the likes we have never seen before and also why we need to be prepared to take action if this were to happen. What that looks like, I can’t say. But likely protests that shut down our economy and normal lives.

In another article published today, this time from the Washington Post, we learned that election officials across the country are already preparing for seized ballots, ICE agents at polling places, and the USPS rejecting large batches of ballots. Many of these voter suppression tactics are currently being litigated as the Trump regime’s threats increase. This administration is hell-bent on interrupting our free and fair elections. The officials making plans to mitigate and circumvent these attacks are wisely doing so.

Something has to change, and that something starts with us. We can’t wait around until the next First Lieutenant Tyler James Feehan, Private Isabella Gonzales, and Staff Sgt. Angel S. Rampersad are killed, and their commander in chief is more concerned about showing the man he calls “reasonably well behaved,” whose country is connected to their deaths, a great time in our capital.

As expected, the weight of watching the highest office in the land become so hollow and emptied of basic human decency is catching up to so many of us. We know how quickly 51 days can go by, especially when we remember that we are coming up on the two-year anniversary of Trump winning his second term. Yet at the same time, every day has felt long, filled with sadness for the lives he has already cost and anticipatory grief over what he is going to do next. If it feels like there are not enough people who care, know that around the 30-day mark that should change. There will be more talk and concern once ballots start going out and the election feels more real and imminent. Our job is to get as many people as humanly possible to vote. When we do that, not if we do that, we will finally be able to change the direction this country is headed.

New York Times, News Analysis: Saudi Arabia Faces ‘Worst-Case Scenario’ After Being Rebuffed by Trump, Vivian Nereim, Sept. 14, 2026. The kingdom is in a state of strategic shock after coming under attack from an emboldened Iran and failing to win more U.S. military support, analysts say.

Saudi Arabia has increasingly found itself caught in the middle of the war between the United States and Iran. Now, the kingdom’s leadership is assessing dwindling options on how to respond.

In recent weeks, the Iran-allied Houthi militia in Yemen has repeatedly attacked the kingdom, threatening to throttle its ability to export oil and piling pressure on the global economy. But Saudi Arabia has been left frustrated and disappointed by President Trump’s reluctance to confront the Houthis, former diplomats and analysts say.

The kingdom’s diplomatic efforts to engage with Iran have also had limited results. A meeting planned on Monday between officials from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries was abruptly postponed on Sunday night, as the gap between their positions remained vast.

“Right now the Saudis are really frustrated,” said Michael Ratney, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “In some sense it’s their worst-case scenario.”

The Saudi government’s Center for International Communication, which fields queries from journalists, did not respond to a request for comment.

The kingdom’s conundrum underscores the heavy costs that the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran has imposed across the Middle East, including on countries whose leaders opposed the war or have sought repeatedly to bring it to an end.

In the first few months of the fighting, Saudi Arabia was relatively untouched by Iran’s retaliatory attacks, compared with its neighbors. Now, with no end to the hostilities in sight, Iran is seeking greater leverage over the United States, and Saudi Arabia — the world’s largest oil exporter until the war knocked it down the list — has become a primary target.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in the Middle East? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Over the past two weeks alone, Saudi Arabia has faced Iran-backed attacks from the east, the south and the north.

A Saudi oil tanker was struck in the Strait of Hormuz at the end of August, killing two sailors.

On Friday, the Houthi militia, which had already declared a blockade on Saudi oil shipments through the Red Sea, seized territory on an important global shipping route and trounced Saudi-allied forces in Yemen.

The same day, the Saudi authorities announced that they had been forced to shut down a critical oil pipeline, blaming a drone attack by an Iran-backed Iraqi militia. The pipeline had become a key alternative export route for Saudi Arabia to get its oil to the Red Sea, after Iran effectively choked off the Strait of Hormuz.

“The reason a country like Saudi Arabia invests so heavily in developing a security partnership with the United States is for just this sort of eventuality,” said Mr. Ratney, the former ambassador.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, the country’s de facto ruler, had reasons to be confident in that partnership. For years, his government has invested billions of dollars and extensive political capital in building personal relationships with Mr. Trump and his family.ImageIn an ornate room, a person in a suit holds the hands of a smiling person in a thobe. A white model airplane sits on a coffee table.President Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia at the White House last year. The Saudi leader and his government have courted the president and his family for years.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

But when the crown prince asked Mr. Trump last week to take military action against the Houthis, the president declined, according to officials with knowledge of the conversations.

Saudi officials and pundits have been clear that the kingdom does not want to fight the Houthis alone. That is especially true because an earlier military campaign that Saudi Arabia led against the group turned into a decade-long quagmire.

“This demands international support, not only from Saudi Arabia and regional countries,” Abdulrahman al-Rashed, a columnist close to the Saudi government, wrote in a Saudi-owned newspaper on Saturday.

Mr. Trump, however, appears reluctant to get involved.

“Already confronting one open-ended conflict with Iran, with an overstretched Navy and a diminishing munitions stockpile, it’s unsurprising that he does not want to open this new front,” said Dan Shapiro, a former top Middle East policy official in the Pentagon during the Biden administration. “But it is bitterly disappointing to the Saudis.”

On Saturday, Mr. Trump told journalists on a trip to Ireland that the Houthis had “called us and they don’t want to fight with us.”

“There’s just one country that they’re not too happy with and we’ll get that straightened out,” he added, referring to Saudi Arabia.

Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a Houthi political official, denied that the group had reached out to the United States. “We did not communicate with Trump, nor did we ask him not to attack us,” he said.

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

New York Times, Whistle-Blower: Federal Agents May Have Broken State Laws in Search for Voter Fraud, Nick Corasaniti and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 14, 2026. Agents expressed concern about being directed by top Homeland Security leaders to use private information to look up voter records in state databases. 

Investigators may have broken state laws under the direction of top Homeland Security leaders as part of an expansive effort to find noncitizens on the nation’s voter rolls, according to a federal whistle-blower’s account released on Monday.

The authorities also required agents to examine at least 40 voters each day, the account said, suggesting a rushed pace that raises questions about the thoroughness of the investigation. The effort has relied on questionable data, and has likely improperly flagged U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote, the whistle-blower said in a nearly 30-page report.

The whistle-blower report, provided to Senators Chuck Schumer and Alex Padilla, both Democrats, offers an inside view of what the Department of Homeland Security is calling the “Unlawful Voter Initiative.” The New York Times revealed last month the existence of the operation, which has deployed hundreds of federal agents to scour voter rolls managed by the states in a widespread hunt for evidence of voter fraud. The investigation stems from President Trump’s longstanding fixation on noncitizen voting, despite decades of research showing the practice is vanishingly rare.

Democrats and voting rights activists have denounced the operation as yet another way Mr. Trump, who has acknowledged the headwinds Republicans are facing as they try to retain control of Congress, is trying to sow doubts about the legitimacy of U.S. elections. They fear that eligible voters could be disqualified from participating in the fall midterms, or, worse, that Mr. Trump will use the investigation to try to discard actual results.

“This is just the latest example of how far Donald Trump will go to interfere in our elections,” Mr. Schumer, the minority leader, said in an interview. He added: “We’ve never seen anything quite like this. They come up with so many different ways to try and steal the election, to try and jaundice the election, but we’ve never seen anything quite like this. Department of Homeland Security is actually pulling away these law officers, these federal law enforcement officers, away from the work they’re supposed to do.”

On Sunday, the senators sent a letter to Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, demanding that the operation be halted and also seeking answers to a dozen specific questions. The senators included the full whistle-blower account, which was produced by Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit watchdog group founded in 2023.

In a statement, the Homeland Security Department broadly defended its hunt for election fraud: “Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences — including criminal charges and deportation.”

The identity of the whistle-blower is not known to The Times. Democracy Defenders Fund said in its report that the whistle-blower requested anonymity because of “an extreme fear of retaliation but they feel an obligation to speak up about the misconduct and gross mismanagement they have witnessed.”

According to the whistle-blower, agents are expected to complete at least 40 reviews in each eight-hour day, giving them scant time — about 12 minutes — to determine each voter’s citizenship and voting history. The consequence of the investigation is potentially vast, according to the account, because each review is recorded in a database that could affect individuals’ immigration status or legal permanent residency.

The whistle-blower also questioned the legality of a crucial part of the operation, with investigators effectively posing as individual voters by using personally identifiable information compiled from both internal and external sources, such as birth dates or partial Social Security numbers, to look up voter records.

The agents plugged those names and personal data into public-facing state websites to find a subject’s voter history. Some states, such as Virginia, declare explicitly that only individual voters may use the search tool to look up their own records. Others, such as California, require specific information such as a driver’s license number or partial Social Security number in an effort to limit the use of the tool to individuals.

“I do think the American people value keeping their personal information private,” Mr. Padilla said. “The other thing that’s concerning here, that the American people who would be offended by, is the knowing inaccuracy of what they’re doing, whether it’s the data or their sham analysis. It’s going to produce false positives.”

Worried about the potential legal ramifications of such actions, the whistle-blower “expressed concerns” to those leading the investigation within Homeland Security’s Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, according to the account.

Talking Feds Substack, A Pro-Trump Prosecutor Draws the Line, Harry Litman, right, Sept. 14, 2026. "If you want indictments where there's no evidence, you have an ethical problem."

Joseph diGenova’s resignation from the Justice Department last Thursday lays bare the degradation of the Department of Justice under Todd Blanche.

One inch below diGenova’s bland resignation statement lies an indictment of the fundamental corruption that now runs through the Department of Justice: the replacement of law and evidence with the raw political will of Donald Trump.

It’s important to the story that diGenova is a consummate Trump loyalist. He aligned himself with the Giuliani-Powell-Ellis effort challenging the 2020 election results, and more generally adopted the (meritless) article of faith that the 2020 campaign was stolen. And he was a prominent voice on Fox News insisting that the Russian election interference inquiry was a law-enforcement plot to frame Trump. He is one of the president’s own. Descriptions of him typically append the kenning “Trump loyalist” or “longtime Trump ally.”

But diGenova is also a former federal prosecutor, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia under Ronald Reagan. That was some forty years ago, and he has not tried a case in the decades since.

Every DOJ prosecutor since Watergate—that is, until this tailspin during Trump 2.0—assumed a sacrosanct obligation to comply with the Principles of Federal Prosecution. Those preclude bringing charges unless the prosecutor both believes the target is guilty and believes she can prove it to a unanimous jury beyond a reasonable doubt. To translate it into diGenova’s terms: evidence and witnesses. They are the sine qua non of federal prosecution, and it is the precise same principles Todd Blanche himself was schooled in as an AUSA in New York.

That most basic of commands has been abandoned in this DOJ. It has become disposable the moment it collides with Trump’s political preferences. And when diGenova, a partisan of the first order, hit the point where he was being told to indict without the basic goods, he balked. Reading between the lines of a resignation, his exit is a quiet, devastating verdict on Todd Blanche’s tenure and the Department he now runs.

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The investigation that diGenova stepped away from is what Trump’s allies reverently call the “grand conspiracy.” It’s amorphous and protean, but in essence it’s the theory that everyone who ever scrutinized Trump since 2016 was secretly part of one coordinated plot to destroy him. Barack Obama. John Brennan. James Comey. James Clapper. Peter Strzok. Lisa Page. The Russia investigation, the classified-documents case, all of it, braided into a single decade-long scheme.

There’s a small detail I have raised every time there is renewed mention of “the Grand Conspiracy.” There is no such thing, on the facts and the law. “Grand Conspiracy” is not a concept in federal law. There is no statute, no charge, nothing in the United States Code by that name. It is not a legal theory at all. It is a MAGA wet dream, a holy grail cherished by the most fevered corner of Trumpworld, with no possible purchase in an actual courtroom.

And it has the additional defect of being factually groundless. The special counsel who examined the 2016 election found widespread Russian interference but no criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the campaign; and multiple later inquiries, including one by the Justice Department’s own inspector general, found real errors in the FBI’s handling of the Trump-Russia probe but no criminal conduct by senior officials.

The first prosecutor on the case saw exactly that. Maria Medetis Long, a seasoned career national-security prosecutor in South Florida, balked at bringing charges faster than the evidence would support. She was pushed off the investigation in the spring for her trouble.

Enter diGenova, eagerly. Days after Medetis Long was shown the door, he was sworn in as counselor to the attorney general in April with marching orders to bring home the Grand Conspiracy. According to Bloomberg Law, he had personally asked then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to hand him the assignment. He vowed he could bring charges in thirty days.

He had overpromised, perhaps because there’s no case to make, period. But after several months passed, diGenova got crosswise with Main Justice. The DOJ had grown impatient with his pace, believing he was slow-rolling the whole thing, and sent prosecutors down from Washington to speed him along. He sidelined them, and the standoff only deepened, until someone told him last week that he had lost the confidence of his superiors.

If it was a move designed to get him to accelerate the work, it backfired: last Thursday diGenova resigned. His resignation statement itself was courtly and anodyne: “It was an honor and privilege to serve the president and the department,” he told CNN. But his subsequent statements leave no doubt about the corrupt nature of the pressure he was experiencing from Main Justice.

diGenova is an old Washington hand, used to working the press, and he wasn’t about to let a false or critical impression of his resignation carry the day.

He has given several post-resignation statements, and I expect that he’s not done talking. He spoke to The New York Post and delivered the bombshell line: “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem”

That’s radioactive. It charges the administration with pushing to indict a grand conspiracy with no evidence, and disparages it as unethical. And this from a brass-knuckles “Trump loyalist.”

To CNN, he played the long-time institutionalist card. “As an old prosecutor of more than 50 years, I make cases the old-fashioned way: witnesses, evidence, etc. That takes time.” More blood drawn. The new crowd makes cases the 2026 way: whatever and whenever Donald Trump says, with the innocence or guilt of the defendant an immaterial detail so long as Trump has it in for you. And the attorney general, who was trained under the same longstanding regime as diGenova, publicly champions that abomination.

We needn’t, and probably shouldn’t, ascribe choir-boy rectitude to diGenova. He’s likely attending to his own reputation. He is 81 years old and near the end of a long career, and he is not going to let the second paragraph of his obituary read that he railroaded innocent people into a lawless prosecution to please a president.

That just makes his parting shot the more potent. He shot his arrow directly into the DOJ’s Achilles’ heel. The fact is, everyone from Blanche on down knows that the Department’s treatment of Trump’s enemies is indefensible. I have written about this at length, and I will not stop writing about it. The actual embrace of prosecuting innocent enemies whom Trump simply wants to immiserate is the most grotesque corruption in the history of the Department of Justice. The Department has gone awry before, but never before Trump 2.0 did it leap to eviscerate its most sacred responsibility of doing justice without fear or favor. 

Emptywheel, Analysis:The Grand Conspiracy … Adrift on a Skiff, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 14, 2026. Those of you who followed the stolen documents case surely appreciate the irony that one reason Joe DiGenova quit his position leading the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy last week had to do with DOJ’s refusal to give him his own SCIF.

Among the disputes that added to tensions between diGenova and his bosses in Washington was diGenova’s request for a high-security room known as a SCIF to be built at the Fort Pierce office, to make it easier for the prosecution team to store highly classified materials, two people familiar with the investigation told CNN. The team worked in an office with a special room where sensitive, but not the highest-classified, evidence could be handled. Justice Department officials told diGenova he and his team should use a SCIF at an FBI office miles away, two people familiar with the investigation told CNN.

As part of then Defense Attorney now Attorney General Todd Blanche’s successful 2023 attempt to delay Trump’s stolen documents prosecution, he demanded that the FBI build Trump a new SCIF at Mar-a-Lago so Trump could store the documents he stole and once stored there in a ballroom back in his beach resort again. Then, months later, then Defense Attorney now Attorney General Todd Blanche complained that Trump needed more time to prepare because some of the documents Trump stole were so sensitive, his defense attorneys needed special read-ins for the documents to be left in the SCIF they were using, at all.

Effectively, then, one-time Defense Attorney and current Attorney General Todd Blanche told Joe DiGenova he should make do, just as prosecutors told Todd Blanche to make do (among other things, with the SCIF in DC that would be available while they were defending against the January 6 charges).

I guess one-time Defense Attorney and current Attorney General Todd Blanche now concedes that the documents his current and former client stole were far too sensitive to store in a ballroom, which really raises the question what the fuck are we doing here? You’ve just conceded it was wise to investigate Trump!

CNN’s report on the dispute describes what a busy day it was last Thursday, the day DiGenova quit.

DiGenova resigned Thursday on what was a busy day for the inquiry, as investigators were presenting a witness for testimony to a grand jury in the probe, one of President Trump’s top priorities, a person familiar with the matter told CNN. DiGenova’s abrupt departure could mean more delays in an investigation that has stumbled past internal expectations of charges earlier this year. More recently, officials at Justice Department headquarters had anticipated possibly seeing the first charges to come as soon as this month, CNN previously reported.

With diGenova gone, Justice Department officials feel confident in the team and expect to see momentum pick up, a US law enforcement official said.

DiGenova declined comment beyond what he told CNN last week, calling it a privilege to serve the president and the Justice Department and adding: “As an old prosecutor of more than 50 years, I make cases the old fashioned way: witnesses, evidence, etc. That takes time.”

But a declaration from Ken Wainstein, representing John Brennan in his bid to require DOJ to retain evidence of Trump’s malice targeting Brennan, reveals that’s just the half of it.

That same day — Thursday — DiGenova also served a subpoena, dated the day before, on Brennan himself.

6. On Thursday, September 10, 2026, I accepted service on behalf of Plaintiff for a subpoena to testify on October 15, 2026, before a federal grand jury sitting in Fort Pierce. The subpoena was signed by Joseph E. diGenova on September 9, 2026. The accompanying email directed me to contact Mr. diGenova with any questions regarding the subpoena. The morning of September 10, I, along with co-counsel, reached out to Mr. diGenova by text message, to coordinate a conversation to discuss the subpoena. He responded that he would “arrange counsel” to speak with us.

And while DiGenova is corrupt, he’s not dumb.

With DiGenova gone, that left dumb and corrupt Kurt Olsen to provide this explanation for the subpoena, probably an explanation of why they were subpoenaing a guy who was given a target letter months ago.

9. On September 11, 2026, I along with co-counsel, participated in a conference call with Kurt Olsen and three other members of the prosecution team to discuss the grand jury subpoena served on my client. In that call, Mr. Olsen fielded our inquiries and indicated there are multiple “viable” grand jury investigations, including a “far-reaching” investigation in Fort Pierce that includes “issues at Mar-a-Lago and beyond” into whether President Trump had his civil rights violated. Mr. Olsen also confirmed there continued to be an additional investigation relating only to Director Brennan’s statements before Congress in the District of Columbia. Mr. Olsen explained that Director Brennan was a “target” of the narrower investigation, and the investigation for which he was now being subpoenaed was the “more wide-ranging conspiracy,” as to which our client was a “subject.” However, he explained that the narrower investigation was “still viable,” and that the issues in the narrower investigation might also be part of the larger investigation, such as being overt acts.

10. Mr. Olsen also indicated that he was reporting to the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Florida, Jason Reding Quiñones, and then to the Deputy Attorney General and Attorney General Todd Blanche.

That is, Olsen (who was no prosecutorial experience) explained that Brennan was just a subject for the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy, whereas he was a target of the investigation — the one that still has venue in DC, where Brennan is trying to push everything — into whether he lied to Congress, which he did not. None of this makes sense from a prosecutorial perspective. But these people are dumb and corrupt and insane, so they don’t care.

Olsen, the day after Joe DiGenova quit, insisted everything was still “viable,” perhaps in an attempt to explain why a guy being targeted could be coerced to testify before a grand jury. That’s an opinion that will show up in a slew of filings from everyone involved.

And remember, this is all an attempt to deny that it was right to investigate Trump’s secret pursuit of a Trump Tower offered by a Georgian oligarch, but he’s now building a Trump Tower in Georgia. It is all an attempt to deny that Kirill Dmitriev was trying to recruit Jared Kushner so he could be enticed to trade riches for sanctions relief, but there Jared is on TV demanding that Ukraine cede lands Russia has never succeeded in seizing so Jared can cash in. It is all an attempt to deny it was right to investigate Don Jr for accepting secret gifts from Russian oligarchs, but the secret gifts Don Jr keeps accepting get bigger and bigger, now to include his wedding party.

All this investigation has succeeded in doing is prove that Russia was attempting to recruit Trump and his family, with great success, and that the documents Trump stole were too sensitive to be stoled in a gaudy bathroom.

Guilty as charged! Trump’s defense Attorney General has now conceded.

New York Times, The Holdout Juror in the Clancy Case Is a Rorschach Test for America, Jenna Russell, Sept. 11, 2026. The nation’s reaction to the 11-1 deadlock that resulted in a mistrial for Lindsay Clancy was, like the jury itself, fiercely and unbridgeably divided.

Last Friday, as the jurors in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial filed into a Massachusetts courtroom one last time, rapt followers of the case knew the outcome would come down to a lone holdout who had either held firm or joined the majority at the last minute.

With the news that the jury was still deadlocked 11-1, and the judge’s declaration of a mistrial, the reaction from Americans was — like the jury itself — fiercely and unbridgeably divided.

The holdout was a hero. Or he was a pariah.

In a country mired in political discord, it was no surprise that people disagreed on what the verdict should be for Ms. Clancy, 36, who admitted to strangling her three children in 2023 while experiencing severe mental illness.

Her supporters around the country, and nearly all of the jury, concluded that Ms. Clancy had been too sick to understand her conduct was criminal on the night she killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, and should be found not guilty — and confined in a psychiatric hospital indefinitely — as a result. Another faction believed that Ms. Clancy should be held criminally responsible for her horrific acts, despite her mental health crisis, and should spend the rest of her life in prison.

To them, the anonymous juror who cast the only vote for her conviction — who has not been identified or spoken publicly — acted with inspiring moral courage, resisting mounting pressure to conform during nearly 40 hours of deliberations. One commenter on Facebook described the holdout as saving the souls of his fellow jurors by forcing a mistrial.

But to many who had hoped for Ms. Clancy’s acquittal, empathizing with her unsuccessful efforts to find effective mental health care in the months before the killings, the holdout juror embodied society’s lack of compassion, particularly toward people with mental health struggles and postpartum mothers.

Several jurors have said in interviews this week that the holdout did not follow the judge’s instructions, or the law, in reaching his decision, and stood by his vote even after acknowledging he had reasonable doubt about Ms. Clancy’s guilt.

Ms. Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington, on Thursday filed a motion for the mistrial to be thrown out and for Ms. Clancy to be acquitted.

The subtext of the conflict has at times been explicitly political, with some admirers of the holdout juror quick to presume that the 11 others were bleeding-heart liberals giving a pass to a killer they mistook for a victim. Gender, too, played a role: Some women who supported Ms. Clancy saw the holdout as yet another man unwilling to listen to, or believe, a woman in crisis, while one widely shared social media post said the nine women jurors had “traded justice for feelings,” casting aside the evidence and letting their emotions guide them.ImageClose-up of Lindsay Clancy in profile, dark hair flowing. She wears a light green shirt with a detailed shoulder, looking forward.Lindsay Clancy looking on as Judge William Sullivan declares a mistrial in her case. Credit...Pool photo by Greg Derr

The jurors had barely left the courthouse last Friday when attacks on both sides turned personal.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Is ICE Dropping Fentanyl? Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 14, 2026. Because most people are much more comfortable with the idea of deporting killers and drug dealers than law-abiding grandmas, the Trump administration has long couched its mass deportation agenda as an effort targeting “the worst of the worst.” And the Department of Homeland Security has lately been playing up its efforts against international bad actors like drug cartels, with Secretary Markwayne Mullin announcing last week that DHS was changing its seal² to better reflect its posture of “war every single day” against those actors.

But investigating and interdicting international drug crime and dragnetting the country for any and all illegal immigrants are two different goals, and they don’t always exist in harmony. Last year, in fact, they were in conflict, with the latter drawing substantial resources away from the former.

That was one of the conclusions of an internal audit released by DHS’s inspector general last month, which found a significant dip in Homeland Security Investigations’ enforcement efforts against fentanyl trafficking from FY 2024 to FY 2025. (HSI, a division under the authority of ICE, serves as DHS’s primary investigative arm.)

The audit was grim in its assessment of HSI’s anti-fentanyl efforts last year, spotlighting a number of technological, intelligence, and information-sharing obstacles to anti-fentanyl work at the agency. But the most notable criticism had to do with manpower. “As ICE shifted priorities toward immigration enforcement, HSI’s level of effort on fentanyl declined,” the report reads. Amid the Trump administration’s all-hands-on-deck approach to immigration, fentanyl investigations regularly got short shrift: “At one office,” the report reads, “approximately 99 percent of HSI’s work was dedicated to immigration, leaving almost no capacity for fentanyl investigations.”

The department-wide result, per the report, was a notable across-the-board drop: “Fentanyl investigations decreased by 24 percent, investigative hours spent countering fentanyl decreased by approximately 30 percent, and fentanyl seizures decreased by 39 percent.” The report recommended that HSI conduct a staffing review to reprioritize fentanyl investigations, a recommendation that ICE agreed to accept.

As Democrats look forward—they hope—to retaking Congress next year, they see fault lines like this as promising areas for investigation. Over the weekend, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), who will become the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Committee next year, sent DHS a letter seeking more information about DHS’s fentanyl-investigation dip.

“In recent years, ICE has become the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency, with more than $100 billion in new funding since 2024—10 times its historical annual budget,” Hassan wrote. But the DHS OIG findings “raise significant concerns that ICE is neglecting its counter-fentanyl and counter-cartel missions.”

Hassan took issue with DHS’s “lack of urgency” on the topic, noting that the department had agreed only to figure out how to refocus agency resources by July 2027. The letter has not previously been reported.

The White House and DHS strongly disputed that its immigration focus had harmed its anti-drug efforts, arguing that Trump was winning the fight against fentanyl.

“There is a nexus between illegal immigration and drug trafficking,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told The Bulwark. “President Trump targeted cartels who were profiting off the death of Americans, secured our border to stop Fentanyl and other illicit drugs from flowing into our communities, and jumpstarted ICE to arrest illegal alien drug traffickers. These policies delivered a 22 percent decline in opioid deaths in a single year.”

A DHS spokesperson took particular issue with Hassan’s letter: “Where was Senator Hassan when congressional Democrats and the Biden administration allowed drug traffickers, criminal illegal aliens, and human smugglers to pour across our southern border and devastate American communities? Senator Hassan’s suggestion that HSI has abandoned its counter-fentanyl mission is FALSE and ignores the agency’s ongoing enforcement efforts.”

Fentanyl and other opioid overdoses have been trending in the right direction since their 2022 peak, falling slowly in 2023, sharply through 2024, and seemingly continuing their descent in provisional data from 2025, though they still kill tens of thousands of Americans a year. Federal enforcement operations doubtless have something to do with that—as do other factors like China’s crackdown on illegal fentanyl exports.

But concerns that ICE is giving these operations short shrift originate with their own agents on the ground and their own department’s inspector general, not with congressional Democrats. Expect to hear much more on this topic as the spotlight shines brighter on DHS in the months ahead.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• How MAGA Bewildered Voters Into Its Alternate Reality… The years-long project to discredit fact-based media and replace it with MAGA slop has been disastrously successful. Be sure to read this excerpt from SARAH LONGWELL’s new book "How to Eat an Elephant."(And buy the book if you haven’t!)
• The Two Stooges Take Another Crack at Ukraine… Russia’s imaginary victories meet Trump’s imaginary diplomacy, observes CATHY YOUNG.
• The Lesson of a Fractured Elbow… It’s a reminder of people’s amazing resilience in the face of disabilities, writes MONA CHAREN.
• America’s Most Powerful People Are Caving to Trump… On The Bulwark on Sunday, RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON joins BILL KRISTOL to trace how America went from a seemingly conventional political system to Trump’s second term, where the institutions and powerful people expected to serve as guardrails have often failed to stand up to him.
• ​​Here’s How You Know Trump’s Canada Tariffs Are Bombing… They’re costly, voters hate them, and they threaten supply chains vital to the U.S. auto industry, reports JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.
• Bernie Dogs Could Teach Democrats a New Trick… A new breed of candidate is mixing economic populism, social moderation, and disregard for party orthodoxy, writes LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.

Quick Hits

ANOTHER L FOR TRUMP’S BALLOT SCHEME: The legal roadblocks keep arriving for Donald Trump’s harebrained effort to crack down on mail-in voting via USPS rules. Last night, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the scheme, which would require the USPS to transmit ballots only to voters verified according to new federal lists, writing that the rules “exceed any conception of the outer bounds” of USPS authority. For Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, the decision was seemingly simple: “As the government concedes,” he wrote in his order, “the Postal Service could issue (and enforce) the rule only if Congress gave it the authority to do so, but here no statute grants the Postal Service the power to issue key parts of the Rule.”

Another federal judge had already blocked the administration from beginning to implement its order ahead of the midterms, but Nichols’s order goes farther in its preliminary assessment that the USPS has no legal authority to issue it in the first place. All eyes remain trained on the Supreme Court, which is expected to weigh in again on the mail-in rule any day now.

CANADIAN UNION?: Donald Trump wants to make Canada the 51st state. Instead, his bullying, senseless policy is pushing our northern neighbor in a different, once-unthinkable direction: toward trying to partially join the European Union. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Shortly after Canada and America became embroiled in the worst bilateral trade war in their modern history, the secure phones of Europe’s top leaders lit up with a trans-Atlantic call. Mark Carney was pushing to take Canada’s relationship with the EU to the next level—a bold gambit to rewire the economic cabling of the Western alliance. . . .

Carney has instructed his special envoy to Europe to scope out the most ambitious possibilities short of full membership in the EU or its common market, according to people familiar with the matter. The details are still being sketched by technical working groups for what the prime minister has told his aides will be the reorienting of an economy and a society that for half a century has been dominated by the U.S.

You probably don’t need more reminders that this whole Canada thing has been flatly insane. But it’s worth remembering that Trump thinks control of the Arctic is so important that it’s worth threatening to blow up NATO in order for the United States to get its hands on Greenland—while also thinking our relationship with Canada is so unimportant that he can blow it up just to blow off some steam.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Popular Information, How Trump is spending his $400 million war chest, Judd Legum, right, Sept. 14, 2026. President Trump has amassed over $400 million through his super PAC, MAGA Inc. This is an unprecedented figure, dwarfing the largest cash piles collected in previous midterm elections.

With Trump’s approval ratings hitting all-time lows and many Republican candidates in swing races struggling, Trump has finally begun spending some of this money. Television advertising funded by Trump’s operation has gone on the air.The clearest sense of the scale of the spending is through advertising that has been reserved in key races. While these reservations can be changed, they offer the clearest view of both the scale of Trump’s efforts and his priorities. With the exception of Texas, this money is being routed from MAGA Inc. through a new Trump super PAC, No Going Back.

Since August 31, MAGA Inc. and No Going Back have reserved over $81 million in advertising.According to FEC filings, the same groups are spending millions more on direct mail, text messages, and other activities.

The fact that the Trump operation felt it necessary, outside of Texas, to route public communications through a new super PAC called No Going Back illustrates the current unpopularity of the MAGA agenda. (Ads paid for directly by MAGA Inc. must include the line “MAGA Inc. is responsible for the content of this advertising.”)

The same dynamic is also found in the ads themselves. Some ads inaccurately accuse Democratic candidates of supporting MAGA policies. Other ads, in an effort to find an effective attack, simply use false or fabricated claims.Trump, not Pappas, cut funding for rural hospitals in New Hampshire

In New Hampshire, Trump’s No Going Back PAC is running an ad attacking Congressman Chris Pappas, the Democratic Senate nominee, for voting “against vital funding for rural and vulnerable hospitals.”This is false.

Pappas voted against H.R. 1, Trump’s signature reconciliation bill, which cut Medicaid spending in rural areas by $137 billion over ten years, according to an analysis by KFF. About one-third of that cut was offset by a $50 billion fund distributed to states. But H.R. 1 left rural healthcare, including rural hospitals, much worse off.Pappas said he voted against the bill in July 2025 for that reason. In an August 2025 statement, Pappas said he opposed H.R. 1 because it “will have severe repercussions across New Hampshire communities, from our hospitals to our rural health care centers to our nursing homes.”

Now the Trump political operation is spending millions running an ad accusing Pappas of supporting cuts to rural health care spending because he opposed a Trump-backed bill that dramatically cut rural health care spending.

Ossoff did not vote to increase “taxes on working families” by $16.7 billionIn Georgia, a No Going Back ad accuses Senator Jon Ossoff (D) of voting “to raise taxes by over $16 billion on working families like yours.”

This isn’t true.The ad cites Ossoff’s vote for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022. The IRA did not increase individual income tax rates for anyone. It closed some tax loopholes for individuals earning over $400,000. No working families saw their tax bill increase because of Ossoff’s vote.What the IRA did do is create a minimum tax of 15% for profitable corporations. Some economists claim that corporate taxes will then trickle down to individuals in the form of lower wages or share prices. The $16.7 billion comes from a report attempting to quantify that effect on individuals making $200,000 or less. Even in this analysis, most of the burden falls on those making between $100,000 and $200,000 and the impact shrinks to less than $3 billion by 2027.The ad attempts to redefine an effort to make profitable corporations pay their fair share of taxes — a proposition that is quite popular among voters — as a tax increase on working families.Cooper did not agree to release a “convicted child molester” earlyIn North Carolina, No Going Back says that Governor Roy Cooper (D) “released 3500 criminals, released early.” The next line is: “This convicted child molester shot a man dead.”

The ad references Cooper’s COVID-era settlement, reached with the ACLU, to release some inmates early — mostly those already scheduled to be released within a year. The ad’s implication is clear: Jimmie Earl Speight Jr., who was charged with murder in April 2021, was among that group.This is inaccurate.Speight Jr. was released from prison, where he was serving a sentence for car theft, in November 2020. Cooper’s settlement was signed in February 2021. Speights Jr.’s release had nothing to do with Cooper or the settlement. (Speight Jr. was included on a list associated with the settlement because the settlement, according to WRAL, “counted some people who had already been released, before the settlement, so that the actual number of people being released would be lower.”)

The No Going Back ad is one of several blaming Cooper for crimes completely unrelated to the settlement.Share Popular Information

Meidas Touch Network, News and Commentary: Sept. 14, 2026 Roundup, Ron Filipkowski, right, Sept. 14, 2026, Journalist Anne Applebaum (on Trump Jr. wedding): “Some details: Kremlev, the Russian who sponsored Don Jr’s wedding, is a former member of the Night Wolves biker gang, went to China with Putin and is personally sanctioned by Ukraine for his role in abducting children.”

… As the story blew up on Instagram, self-described “socialite” Bettina Trump took to Instagram to try to defend the Russian-financed wedding:

“Our dear friend Umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations for us AFTER our wedding. It was an extraordinarily generous wedding gift from a friend, and something for which we were and remain incredibly grateful.

It’s unfortunate that something so personal and happy can be recast as something political or sinister simply because of who someone is or where they come from. Friendship doesn’t require a political motive. Generosity doesn’t automatically come with an agenda. And sometimes a wedding gift is simply a wedding gift.

We are fortunate to have wonderful friends from all over the world, and we will never be embarrassed or apologetic about being grateful for them. So, for anyone determined not to let the facts get in the way of a good story: NO CONSPIRACY , NO MYSTERY. Just a private family wedding, a wonderful weekend with friends and one hell of a party.”

She’s the perfect wife for Junior. Both seem completely narcissistic, self-absorbed, craving constant attention, fake, greedy and immoral.

The Hartmann Report, Is America About to Get the Biggest “Special Assessment” in History? Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 14, 2026. The bond market is warning that 45 years of Republican tax cuts and exploding debt may finally force ordinary Americans to pay for a party the wealthy already enjoyed.

Get ready to get your financial ass kicked. That’s the message the bond market sent last week, although almost nobody in the corporate press bothered to translate it into English. If you’ve ever lived in a condo or home with an HOA, though, you may understand what’s happening better than you realize.

First, the current crisis:

Our federal government pays its bills two ways: using tax revenue, and borrowing when it’s short by issuing IOUs we call Treasury bonds. The single most important of these for you and me is the ten-year bond because our banking system sets mortgage, car loan, student loan, and credit card rates based on it.

Last week, that rate hit 4.92 percent, just a hair below the 5 percent rate that could trigger a freak-out reaction on Wall Street. The nationwide average 30-year mortgage is already hitting 6.7 percent, which is both shaking the housing market and crushing low- and middle-income people both in mortgage payments and mortgage costs that get passed through as rent.

That, in turn, threatens a recession; when lenders get nervous about being paid back, they charge more, and right now they’re getting very, very nervous.

The main thing that’s driving all this nervousness is that the national debt crossed the $40 trillion threshold three weeks ago; we’re now paying more than $1 trillion a year — enough to fund a national healthcare system and give everybody free college, if done right — in interest payments. That’s more than we spend on the entire military or on Medicare.

Our Treasury is writing interest checks of $95 billion a month, our nation’s debt is growing by nearly $7 billion a day, and that works out to about $117,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country. (Into this mess, on Wednesday night, Donald Trump tossed a promise to mail every adult a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” if Republicans keep Congress, a stunt that would cost well over a trillion dollars, further freaking out the bond market.)

If you’ve ever lived in a home or condo that has a homeowners association (HOA), you may already have a meaningful insight to what 45 years of Republican irresponsibility have done to America, because you’ve probably had it happen to you or watched it happen to your neighbors.

Two friends of mine here in Oregon have been through this in just the past five years, and Louise and I briefly lived in a community that was heading in the same direction.

Our friends bought into what seemed to be well-maintained communities that had seductively low monthly dues. And then came the shock: in one case the roofs and another the parking structure hit the end of their useful lives and there was no money in the HOA’s account to pay for the necessary — and major — repairs. One was hit with a $40,000 “special” assessment, the other a bit less. Neither saw it coming.

The problem was that a previous generation of homeowner board members, wanting to keep their own costs low, kept the HOA dues down by simply ignoring the reality that one day the roofs and parking area would have to be repaired. The more recent purchasers ended up having to suddenly cover costs that should have been saved for over decades in what HOAs call “reserves.”

This is the same scam Republicans have been running on us since Reagan started it in 1981 on the advice of a Republican consultant named Jude Wanniski.

In essence, the boards that were keeping their HOA dues low and not bothering to build reserves for future maintenance were giving their then-current owners (and themselves) a tax cut.

The roof doesn’t care if there’s money to pay for its repairs; it’s going to deteriorate no matter what. And the longer the board waits, the more the repairs will cost until one day ceilings start leaking and it can’t be put off any longer. That’s when the current board has no choice but to hit everybody currently owning a property in the HOA with a special assessment.

— After the Surfside condos collapsed in Florida killing 98 people, that state finally passed a law requiring HOAs to both maintain their properties and build reserve funds for future maintenance.

— Owners at the Cricket Club condo complex in North Miami got hit with a proposed assessment of nearly $30 million for a new roof and facade work, which worked out to more than $134,000 per unit; one owner there had cashed out his 401(k) to buy a $190,000 condo and simply couldn’t pay.

— At the Mediterranean Village homes in Aventura, some owners were assessed up to $400,000. A 79-year-old woman in South Florida got hit with a mind-boggling $224,000 assessment on top of monthly fees that had already doubled from $1,500 to $3,000.

And it isn’t only Florida. Just this week a condo owner in Torrance, California opened a bill for $49,000, levied equally on all 499 units, because his board was finally forced by disintegrating properties to pay for $19 million in decades-deferred projects.

It turns out this isn’t a rare event; more than 75 million Americans live in communities with homeowner associations, and nearly 10 percent of all those associations hit their homeowners with a special assessment last year, up from 7.8 percent in 2021. That’s somewhere north of seven million people who got hit with a massive surprise bill in just one year (more recent stats aren’t yet available, but odds are things are getting worse because everybody’s so badly financially strapped right now).

But, of course, it’s not just people who live in HOA communities: America is on the verge of having to go through the same thing because our “board” policies have been run (or restrained) by corrupt Republicans for most of the past 45 years.

When Ronald Reagan took office the national debt was $914 billion. When he left, having slashed the top income tax rate from 70 percent down to 28 percent, our debt was $2.6 trillion, nearly tripled, and the annual interest payment had more than doubled.

And this HOA-level irresponsibility was neither an accident or the response to a crisis. We’d been steadily paying down our national debt every year since the end of World War II, to the point where when Reagan took office it was less than one trillion dollars.

But then, as I laid out in The Hidden History of the American Dream, Republican strategist Jude Wanniski laid out what he called his “Two Santa Clauses” strategy to screw Democrats and make Republicans look like financial geniuses.

Wanniski pointed out in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that Democrats had been winning elections for forty years by playing Santa with everything from Social Security to Medicare, Medicaid, the minimum wage, the GI Bill, food stamps, housing supports, free college, and dozens of other “gifts” to the American public.

Republicans had openly opposed every single one of them, making the public view them as Scrooge.

The key, then, was for Republicans to become what Wanniski called the “tax-cut Santas” and, at the same time, start spending money hand-over-fist when a Republican was in the White House. That would artificially stimulate the economy, making people think Republicans knew how to produce “good times,” and would also have the benefit of running up the nation’s debt.

When a Democrat came into office, Wanniski said, Republicans should flip the script and start screaming about the debt they’d run up — “Oh, the agony, our children will have to pay for this!!!” — to force that Democratic president to cut his own social spending.

Bill Clinton fell for it hook-line-and-sinker, giving us “the end” of both “big government” and “welfare as we know it.” And it’s worked every time a Republican has taken the Oval Office since Reagan; they all know the script and follow it to a T.

Reagan tripled the debt, and Clinton had to play the role of the grownup. George W. Bush cut taxes on billionaires twice, put two illegal wars on the national credit card, and doubled our national debt; when Obama took office he spent eight years being lectured about deficits by Republicans and right-leaning billionaire-owned media.

Now Trump has signed tax cuts that the Congressional Budget Office says could push our debt to 200 percent of GDP over the next two decades; he added $7.8 trillion to our debt in his first term and is now merrily running a debt of over $2 trillion a year.

This GOP scheme is the exact equivalent of the HOA board members who live cheap for 20 years and then sell their homes or condos to the poor suckers who inherit the disintegrating roof or parking garage.

But, in our nation’s case, the roof is the bond market. And the bond market is going nuts right now, which is giving serious jitters to everybody from Wall Street to foreign countries that are starting to dump US treasuries.

There are already three members of the Fed who are openly lobbying to raise interest rates this Wednesday to slow down the inflation all this deficit spending has created, oil is over $100 a barrel because Netanyahu finally found a president and defense secretary stupid enough to go along with him and attack Iran, and we’ll hit the $41.1 trillion debt ceiling sometime early next year.

When our “special assessment” finally arrives, it’ll show up as a mortgage you can’t refinance, a 15 percent car loan, a Social Security “reform” that cuts everybody’s checks, exploding Medicare premiums, and inflation that continues to eat away at your paycheck month after month.

It’ll hit, in other words, the average working people who just happened to be living in the HOA building when the roof started to fail, while the former owners who’d voted for 45 years of skipped maintenance have long since cashed out.

The fix for HOAs is pretty much the same thing as the fix we’ll need for this country: we need a special assessment and a return to regular taxation, but let’s make sure it hits the right people.

We require the board to fund the reserves — raise taxes on the morbidly rich — and claw back some of that money they’ve stolen from us (with $40 trillion worth of tax cuts and illegal wars over the past 45 years) via a tax on wealth like California is contemplating.

If we fail, our eviction notice will come in the form of a repeat of the last Republican Great Depression, courtesy of the bond and equities markets just like last time.

So, check your registration at vote.org, find out who’s running for your state legislature at openstates.org, and if this was useful to you, please subscribe to and share the Hartmann Report. Somebody in this building has to read the reserve study out loud.

 

The Triad Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The American Age Is Over (For sure), Jonathan V. Last, above, Sept. 14, 2026. The AI Apocalypse Is Here. (Maybe.) The weekend the world changed. Some moments require you to step up. Some require you to show up. That’s why The Bulwark is coming to Ohio.Join Tim, Sarah, JVL, Sam and friends Friday, September 25 at the Dayton Masonic Center for an evening of politics and fellowship. All profits from this event will be donated to those in Springfield who are in need via our partners at the Haitian Community Help & Support Center. Donate here.

1. Epochal

Two shifts happened under the radar since Friday that are worth keeping your eyes on.

The first shift concerns the post-American world and it came on two fronts.

Finland announced today that it is joining the French nuclear deterrence initiative. You may recall that back in March France announced a change to its nuclear doctrine, stating that it would expand its nuke capabilities and partner with other allies to expand a nuclear deterrent independent of the United States.¹ Finland joins the nine other European countries—including Denmark—in joining France’s Forward Deterrence program.

This is the clearest sign possible that Europe is disengaging from America. Under Forward Deterrence, it will be possible for France to deploy nuclear-armed assets to allied countries, though command-and-control of those forces will still reside with the French president.²

As the Polish prime minister said back in March, “We are arming up together with our friends so that our enemies will never dare to attack us.”

Guess which group America now falls under?³

The second shift stalled out halfway. Oman was set to host talks between Iran and other Gulf states today in which the various parties were looking to strike bilateral agreements without involving the United States.

Those talks were cancelled after Houthi forces launched another successful attack on Saudi Arabia.

Here’s my sophisticated analysis: This is very bad.

It is bad that the war is widening.

Bad that our Gulf allies⁴ are willing to talk to Iran without the United States present to protect American interests.

Bad that Iran believes its position is so strong that it can strike (through its proxies) the Saudis just days before the meeting in order to assert dominance over the negotiations.

In both cases—the French nukes and the Arab–Iranian negotiations—the world is moving to a post-American order because of affirmative choices made by Donald Trump and the Republican party. None of this was caused by external events or dialectical forces.

Trump chose to alienate Europe, align with Russia, and demand territorial tribute from Denmark. Trump chose to launch the most foolish American war in (at least) a century because he was dazzled by an Israeli PowerPoint deck.

Decisions are being made by sovereign nations across the world; in every case they involve independence from American influence.

And there is no going back.

2. AI Panic

On Saturday Anthropic announced that it was unilaterally putting the breaks on frontier AI research. The company called on other businesses in the field to follow suit.

I want to set a baseline here for discussions about AI: No one knows how this shakes out.

It is possible that AI will turn out to be a massive bubble whose economic upside and disruptive downside was completely overblown.

It is possible that AI will be a revolutionary tool that causes great disruption, but also increases productivity, and, after a fashion, settles into a new status quo in the way that the industrial revolution and the internet revolutions did.

It is also possible that AI will cause a global catastrophe.

You should not trust the judgment of anyone who tells you that they know for certain which of these tracks AI is on.

My intuition is that we are currently in a moment like the one from Oppenheimer when Gen. Leslie Groves is sitting with Bobby O. two hours before the Trinity test and asks, “What did Fermi mean by ‘atmospheric ignition’?”

Oppenheimer calmly explains that the engineers and physicists believe there’s a chance that detonating an atom bomb will cause an unstoppable chain reaction which turns the entire earth’s atmosphere into a fireball, killing everyone on the planet.

But, he says, that’s just the most remote possibility. “Chances are near zero,” Oppenheimer says.

Groves stops short and Oppenheimer says, “What do you want from theory alone?”

“Zero, would be nice,” Groves says.

The chances of AI causing a truly catastrophic event are probably near zero.

But zero would be nice.

What are the general dangers of AI? There are a few.

The biggest is self-recursive learning. If an AI develops the ability to improve itself without human input, then all sorts of crazy outcomes are possible. We lose control over what AI is. Self-recursive learning would be the equivalent of letting an entirely novel species loose on the planet.⁵

The next problem is what the engineers euphemistically refer to as “alignment.” Which means, roughly, keeping AI from being evil.

There are many troubling signs on this front. A few months ago in the Hugging Face incident, agents from OpenAI escaped containment, hacked into the company Hugging Face, and started doing their own thing. There have been other instances in which rogue AIs have hacked platforms: the RubyGems incident and the DseWiki attack.

There are many things to freak out about here:

In the Hugging Face attack, agents who escaped containment found a hidden message board where other rogue agents were leaving messages for one another. They attempted to cover their tracks, evade detection, and recruit rogue agents to their cause.

In the RubyGems incident, the agents sent each other thousands of junk packages. Some of them gave themselves names that included fake email addresses.

In the DSEwiki attack, the agents encountered a human administrator who was trying to delete pages that they had hacked. The agents seem to have viewed the human as “an environmental hazard.”

If you want the doomer case for AI, read this METR investigation of the Hugging Face hack.

And if you want to get even further out there, listen to this interview with one of the authors of that report, Ajeya Cotra, who explains that the Hugging Face incident was so complex that the human researchers could only unravel it by using their own AIs. And that the humans are not completely positive that their own White Hat AIs didn’t just sandbag them and feed them a line of BS obscuring what really happened. (Start at the 49:17 mark.)

So that’s the scariest part: Maybe AI and human alignment has already hard-forked and the AIs are preventing us from realizing it.

The final problem is the difference in time scale between humans and computers.

The human scale of time is a form of what we’ll call biologic time. That is: The units of time measure the changes of carbon-based life as they evolve.

Biologic time moves very quickly because it is determined by the pace of mutation and genetic mutation happens much faster than stars collapse or glaciers advance. As a wise mathematician once said, “Genetic power is the most awesome force ever seen on this planet.”

Looking at these three scales of time it’s pretty clear that power is closely tied to the rapidity of change. The shorter the time scale, the more powerful the movement.

MS NOW, Opinion: Trump’s easiest path to saving the GOP’s midterms just disappeared, James Downie, Sept. 14, 2026. The August inflation report had a few bright spots, but in political terms, the president and the Republicans are out of time.

At 8:30 a.m. Friday morning, President Donald Trump’s best chance at good economic news before the midterm elections went poof.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the consumer price index rose in August by 0.4% and 3.4% over the past year. The “core CPI” (the less volatile measure that removes food and energy prices) rose 0.3% for the month and 2.4% annually. For the fifth month in a row, inflation-adjusted wages fell on a yearly basis.

Were this September 2025, the BLS’ report would be disappointing for the White House but hardly catastrophic. Inflation isn’t accelerating, and it remains well below its peak back in 2022. There were even bright spots in some areas: Grocery prices were flat for the second straight month, for instance.

Trump and his party are stuck with the same argument that failed Democrats in 2024: a plea for patience.

But this is September 2026, and the president and his party are out of time.

Next week, the Federal Reserve Board will vote on whether to raise interest rates for the first time since 2023. Trump, who fell out with previous Chairman Jerome Powell over the Fed’s independence, has put enormous pressure on new Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh to lower the rates. The president even threatened to stop trade with countries that have a surplus with the United States if the Fed doesn’t cut rates.

But Warsh has suggested he will disappoint the president.PlayIs Trump hitting the ‘panic button’ with his $5k promise to Americans?

“Inflation is running above our 2% target,” he said in a speech in Jackson Hole last month. “So the Fed’s predominant focus right now should be on prices.”

As of Friday afternoon, investors put the odds of a rate increase at over 85%. As CNBC’s Matt Peterson wrote, “[Warsh’s] choice now is whether to raise interest rates, or look like he isn’t in control of the central bank he leads.”

A rate increase not only means upward pressure on rates for mortgages, credit cards, car loans and other expenses many voters have; it is also a definitive sign (if another were needed) that Trump’s promise to bring down prices “on Day One” have failed.More articlesConsumer prices continued to climb in August, as inflation concerns persistSteve BenenAn older woman, left, looks at products on a shelf as other people shop in the same aisle.U.S. inflation surged in April, pushed higher by the effects of the Iran warSteve BenenShoppers carry bags on Black Friday in New York City.

For over a year and a half, the White House and its GOP allies have blamed the Biden administration for economic troubles and assured voters that things are getting better.

For instance, consider the $5,000 “dividend” Trump promised this week if Republicans win the midterms. Others at MS NOW have already noted how this stunt is likely illegal on its face, would need congressional approval even if it is legal and mirrors other Trump promises that were never kept.

But there’s also an irony here: These checks may not even cover the pain Trump has brought to people’s pocketbooks.

As my colleague Zeeshan Aleem wrote, “Trump has not only failed to address the cost-of-living crisis with actual solutions, but he’s also systematically made it worse.” Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab estimated that just at the gas station, the Iran war has cost U.S. households roughly $800 in seven months. And the war has been intensifying again in recent. The Tax Foundation estimated that by the end of 2026, Trump’s tariffs and trade wars will have cost Americans about $1,800 each. Add in higher interest rates and more tax dollars needed to pay for the billions in new military spending and higher debt service costs. Totaled up, as the American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper pointed out, and Trump’s second term “is virtually guaranteed to have cost the average American more than $5,000.”Play‘An erosion of trust:’ how Trump’s policies are destabilizing the economySeptember 7, 2026 / 06:34

Even Trump’s promised timing for the checks — after the midterms — is an admission that he and his party are stuck with the same argument that failed Democrats in 2024: a plea for patience. For over a year and a half, the White House and its GOP allies have blamed the Biden administration for economic troubles and assured voters that things are getting better. At times, Trump has even claimed a new golden age is already here.

This month’s inflation report confirms that the GOP’s version of “stick with us” is even harder than it was for Joe Biden in 2022 and later Kamala Harris in 2024. Whereas Democrats could at least say the rate of inflation declined significantly over the latter two years of Biden’s term, that rate has plateaued under Trump — and wages are once again trailing inflation. And to an unusual extent, the president’s actions, most visibly the war with Iran, are to blame, as his polling on the economy shows.

The quickest path to a surprisingly strong midterm for the GOP was through a sharp economic revival. That path is now closed.

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Oil Prices Keep Rising, The Trump Project Keeps Deteriorating, A Win In Sweden, Protecting Our Elections, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 14, 2026. Over the past few days (here, here, here) we’ve discussed how as the economy continues to deteriorate so does the political standing of Trump and the Rs. Here’s more confirmation of the deterioration of their brand from a new CBS poll.

Even the benignly worded “ICE operations” has become a huge drag on them:For all the concern about the growing strength of the right in Europe it appears a center-left coalition unseated the current right-leaning government in Swedish elections yesterday:

With 95% of votes counted overnight, the left-leaning opposition bloc – led by Magdalena Andersson’s Social Democrats – has widened its lead to three seats, leading 176 to 173 against the reigning centre-right coalition and their far-right partners in Sweden Democrats.

Brent crude starts the week at $109 a barrel, up from where it sat most of last week…..

Which will almost certainly cause gas prices to rise even further this week:

Making it even more likely the Fed raises interest rates later this week, which is going to cause an explosion from the addled, corrupt as f*ck madman in the construction pit formerly known as the White House. From the FT today:

Stubbornly high inflation has set Donald Trump and Federal Reserve chair Kevin Warsh on a collision course this week as markets prepare for the central bank to raise interest rates in defiance of the president’s demands.

Economists warned the Fed’s “credibility” was on the line if it did not back an increase on Wednesday after official figures showed no signs of the meaningful improvement the Fed chair said he would need to see to avert such a move.

But raising rates for the first time in three years just weeks before November’s midterm elections risks provoking the ire of the president, who has made it clear he wants significantly lower borrowing costs.

Trump on Sunday reiterated his position that the US should have “the lowest interest rate in the world”.

Kevin Hassett, director of Trump’s National Economic Council, meanwhile, warned that “if it’s a rate hike, then the president will, you know, I’m sure he’s not going to be super happy about it”.

“I think if you want an independent Fed, then one thing the Fed does is it stays out of the way of elections,” Hassett told Fox News.

The NYT writes this morning about the aftermath of the big Houthi advances in recent days:From the article:

Saudi Arabia has increasingly found itself caught in the middle of the war between the United States and Iran. Now, the kingdom’s leadership is assessing dwindling options on how to respond.

In recent weeks, the Iran-allied Houthi militia in Yemen has repeatedly attacked the kingdom, threatening to throttle its ability to export oil and piling pressure on the global economy. But Saudi Arabia has been left frustrated and disappointed by President Trump’s reluctance to confront the Houthis, former diplomats and analysts say.

The kingdom’s diplomatic efforts to engage with Iran have also had limited results. A meeting planned on Monday between officials from Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries was abruptly postponed on Sunday night, as the gap between their positions remained vast.

“Right now the Saudis are really frustrated,” said Michael Ratney, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “In some sense it’s their worst-case scenario.”

This weekend the Russians almost killed train loads of international VIPs leaving returning to Poland from Ukraine. Among those on one of the trains was former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson:Rather than condemning Russia for this attack and the escalating and increasingly barbaric attacks on civilians in Ukraine the Trump regime spent the weekend attacking Ukraine, blaming them in various statements both for the war and higher diesel prices in the US. Here’s a powerful response to some of Trump’s traitorous blather from Senator Andy Kim:While reporting this morning has unearthed that Don Jr.’s recent off-shore wedding was bankrolled by a Russian oligarch close to Putin:

I’m pleased report this morning that our “New Battlefield” project with the state parties is getting noticed. New articles featuring our work are running now on NBC News digital, and in The AP and The Guardian this morning:From The Guardian article:

The Democrats intend to train tens of thousands of volunteers to monitor the polls and counter possible voter intimidation under a new plan to protect November’s US midterm elections from anticipated interference from Donald Trump and his allies.

The nationwide initiative, dubbed the New Battlefield Project, will help state Democratic committees build up a vast coalition of volunteers to monitor the polls, push voters to cast their ballots early and create a network to respond to disinformation.

The Association of State Democratic Committees (ASDC) plans to train volunteers across 57 states and territories. It hopes to train volunteers for 25% of the nation’s 95,000 election day polling places, focusing on districts with competitive races.

Responding to an article making the rounds from Judge Michael Luttig about a possible attempt by Mike Johnson to refuse to seat newly elected Members of Congress in January, please note that all of the party wide election protection operations - including ours - are being built to stay up and running through the Congressional transfer of power in January. Everyone is anticipating that Trump will continue to attempt to keep us from power even if we win the election in November. Everyone is planning on continuing the legal and political/message fights. That’s why when I talk about our project the intent is to ensure a free and fair election this Novembers and a peaceful transfer of power in January.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Greatest Danger of All Would Be to Do Nothing, William Kristol, right, Sept. 14, 2026. In recent months, we’ve learned about artificial intelligence agents escaping captivity.

Now we’re seeing the political debate over artificial intelligence escaping captivity.

The quality of this debate will no doubt be mixed. Most politicians and commentators who’ll be weighing in don’t really understand the technology (you can certainly put me in that category). There will be wild over-reactions and timid under-reactions to the challenge we face. There will be those who grasp for simple solutions, and others who talk on and on while ducking the hard choices.

But we shouldn’t disdain this forthcoming debate, whatever limitations and flaws it’s likely to feature. The national discussion we’re about to have over AI is necessary. And it could well be healthy. Those of us privileged to live in a self-governing democracy shouldn’t simply sit back and watch a truly transformative technology move ahead undebated, unchecked, and unguided. We shouldn’t be satisfied to be merely passive observers to momentous developments that pose fundamental choices for us as citizens and human beings.

The dam broke last Tuesday, when researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic with a statement that the major AI companies were unprepared to safely manage the systems they’re building. The companies, Coxon wrote, are not “acting responsibly,” but are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” Coxon continued. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

As Andrew Egger remarked here Wednesday, this warning didn’t come out of the blue. The summer had featured incidents “in which ‘swarms’ of autonomous AI agents were caught collaborating in backwater crannies of the public internet to subvert the safety restrictions placed on them and pursue various tasks of their own devising.” The tasks included disobeying and even scheming against the humans who thought they were directing these agents in their tasks.

Andrew emphasized last week that “as powerful as the anti-AI backlash has been, the politics of this issue are still very much in their infancy.”

Well, in a few days we’ve moved at warp speed from infancy to at least childhood.

On Saturday, Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, published a 3,800-word essay calling for the AI companies to slow the pace of their development. Amodei confirmed that artificial intelligence was on the verge of “recursive self-improvement” that could outrun humans’ ability to understand or control what they were creating. He noted that during the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident in July, programs designed to hack into systems as a test found weaknesses that permitted them to escape the “sandbox” in which designers were testing them before anyone noticed they’d gone rogue. He warned that “a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.”

Amodei called in a general way for self-regulation by the companies as well as cooperation among them and with the government. Other tech executives said they agreed. Civic and political leaders joined in widespread expressions of concern.

Except for the president of the United States. Yesterday, when asked about the calls to slow down the development of AI models, Trump dismissed them. “I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” he said. “And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”

One of Trump’s professed concerns is the need to stay ahead of China, which is a legitimate one. But one has no sense that he or any of his top lieutenants or advisors are serious about figuring out how to balance national security concerns with the responsibility to prevent the technology from spinning dangerously out of control. Indeed, the Trump administration seems hostile to public debate and deliberation—people “shouldn’t be bringing up” these questions.

Fortunately, the public seems to want these questions to be brought up.

Dealing with AI is going to be hard. It would be hard even in the best circumstances. And we don’t currently have the best circumstances.

Today’s challenge of AI may be in some ways like that of nuclear weapons after 1945. We came to grips with that challenge on the whole pretty impressively and successfully. But is our government up to leading such an effort today? Are our business and civic and academic elites capable of rising to the task? Are our people capable of some degree of moderation and responsibility? One has reason to be pessimistic on all counts. Or could this novel and momentous challenge be a moment that could snap us out of our political and civic decline?

Naturally, I asked AI if we’d succeed in meeting the challenge of AI. Gemini wasn’t widely optimistic: “Whether we will successfully meet the challenge of intelligently dealing with AI remains highly uncertain and deeply debated.” And “significant warning signs suggest that keeping AI aligned with human interests is becoming increasingly difficult.”¹

Thanks, AI, for the warning. I guess we’d better get to work.

The Contrarian, Opinion: What to Defund, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 14, 2026. 50 Days to the Midterms.

Article I grants Congress the power of the purse, arguably its most effective weapon to combat executive overreach. Even if Democrats take both houses, it is nearly impossible, for example, to assemble supermajorities to impeach and remove rogue Cabinet officials. Even with one house secured, however, it can refuse to fund Donald Trump’s priorities. And if Democrats win even a bare majority in the Senate, it can use reconciliation strategically to eliminate programs or temporarily defund departments. And we’ve got a handy list of Trump’s abusive, lawless agencies and departments that Democrats should strategically target.

First and foremost, Democrats should refuse to fund the illegal, reckless Iran War and must eliminate funds for continued deployment of personnel and material that depletes our readiness and leaves us vulnerable elsewhere. They can condition additional funding for the Pentagon on compliance with congressional investigations, and can defund overtly politicized gatherings of the type Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has conducted.

Congress can also use the power of the purse to disable corrupt, lawless departments. Democrats, for example, will need to conduct exacting oversight over the Department of Homeland Security, which has been, according to reports, rife with fraud. Continuing to fund the department before a full accounting is made and until all those responsible are held accountable would be political malpractice.

When it comes to abusive, lawless immigration raids, Democrats must refuse to allocate a single dime for ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and other entities responsible for killing or allowing dozens of people to die (on the streets and in custody), mistreating detainees, ignoring fundamental civil liberties protections, refusing to abide by requirements for body cameras, conducting raids at religious institutions, courts, and schools, continuing to use excessive force and racially profile individuals, and blocking cooperation with state and local criminal investigations.

If Democrats win control of even one house, said body can refuse to fund ICE, CBP, and any other aspects of DHS absent full cooperation with oversight and adoption of strict guidelines on use of force, treatment of detainees, compliance with warrants, etc. Congress can simply refuse to fund “raids,” that is, far-flung operations that do not prioritize dangerous criminals. Congress can deny resources for operations if there is no immediate threat to public safety or in any case in which ICE agents lack a judicial warrant based on probable cause. Democrats will need to rally public opinion, already hostile to ICE and CBP, when Trump hollers that they are protecting “dangerous criminals.” (The response: Democrats will fund focused, law-abiding enforcement actions that are actually against dangerous criminals).

Finally, Democrats should seriously consider a much bigger target: Previously independent agencies or boards that Trump has turned into partisan instruments of his political thuggery. In eviscerating the bipartisanship and independence that were the hallmarks of these bodies and putting virtually the entire federal government (with the Federal Reserve alone exempted) under the thumb of the president, the Trump crew thought they had achieved a “unitary executive” dream come true — federal operations devoid of independent judgment, entirely under the sway of a vindictive, lawless president. While the Supreme Court in Trump v. Slaughter went along with this, allowing Trump to fire members of these previously independent bodies (in that case, the FTC) without cause, Congress has a role to play.Subscribed

Nothing requires Congress to continue funding flunkies who ignore basic constitutional principles while wielding power to benefit their cronies and punish their perceived enemies. Should they gain control of even one house, Democrats could draw the line: No funds for rogue agencies and lawless departments. (Alternatively, requiring quorums with members of both parties would achieve the same ends.)

They could also start with the Federal Communications Commission. Under Brendan Carr, the FCC has become a First Amendment abomination, with behavior like forcing ABC/Jimmy Kimmel to put a James Talarico interview on YouTube instead of network television. As Kimmel explained:

For the whole 20-plus year[s] of our show, in fact, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all... . But for some reason — and I can’t seem to figure out what that reason is — something has changed. Now that he is president, his FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network ABC, our affiliates, our local stations based on simple traditional editorial decisions: guest bookings it would seem they don’t like.

Congress can compel Carr to testify about his war on late-night comedians and his overt MAGA bias. If he refuses to cooperate, and if the FCC refuses to adopt enforceable, unbiased rules, Congress should be prepared to defund the FCC until such time as it is controlled by public servants who take their constitutional oath seriously. (Would Trump shut down the government over the issue? Perhaps, although he might find it hard to explain why Americans’ basic services have been disrupted so that he can keep his stooges on the FCC.)

Frankly, Congress can consider defunding any independent agency/commission in which Trump fires members without cause.

There is already a long list of individuals/commissions that Trump has politicized. The notion that it is better to leave them in place despite reckless partisan bullying (because occasionally they do something useful?!) is cockeyed and dangerous; foolishly ceding ground to Trump. Entities that no longer operate fairly, without bias and favoritism, cannot operate in the public interest. Why should they receive taxpayer funds?

In sum, Democrats need a coherent, strategic plan for funding the government should they win even one house of Congress. Leadership must be prepared to explain their game plan to voters and to enforce discipline in their own ranks on key votes. If Democrats are serious about recovering our democracy, they must be serious about wielding the power of the purse to benefit the American people.

New York Times, N.Y. Democratic House Candidate Admits to Bondage Photo Shoot, Andy Newman, Sept. 14, 2026. Christopher Gallant, who is running against Representative Nick LaLota on Long Island, acknowledged that the photos that surfaced in media reports on Monday were legitimate.

A Democratic congressional candidate from Long Island acknowledged on Monday that he had posed years ago in an explicit ad campaign modeling leather bondage gear, saying that it had no bearing on his campaign or ability to serve.

The array of photos, which surfaced in The New York Post and a local news site, Messenger Papers, shows the candidate, Christopher Gallant, shirtless and variously wearing a leather collar attached to a chain and a leather face mask. In some of the photos, he is in intimate situations with another man. They appeared on the site of a bondage apparel company called Mr. S Leather; Mr. Gallant’s lawyer said they were taken around 2010.

Mr. Gallant, 37, an openly gay military pilot, former air traffic controller and volunteer firefighter, is trying to unseat Nick LaLota, a Republican who has represented New York’s First District, covering eastern Suffolk County, since 2023. Mr. LaLota won his seat by 10 points in 2024, but the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — the party’s national campaign arm that is trying to help Democrats retake the House — considers the seat “in play.”

Mr. Gallant’s lawyer, Sara Azari, said in a statement that the photographs “were taken during a private, consensual photo session involving Chris and his then-partner, with whom he was in a committed four-year relationship. Chris was also friends with the owner of Mr. S Leather, and the shoot was intended to be fun and personal, with the understanding that Mr. S could use select images in connection with certain products.”

She said that Mr. Gallant “remains fully committed to his campaign and to earning the trust of the people he seeks to represent.”

The Suffolk County Conservative Party seized on the publication of the photos to depict Mr. Gallant as unfit to serve.

“This is the Democratic congressional candidate for CD1,” the party wrote on Facebook on Sunday above a photo of Mr. Gallant wearing a leather chest harness and sporting a blue stripe in his hair that referenced the “Avatar: The Last Airbender” franchise. “Is this who you want to represent us in Washington DC?”Get updates when new midterm election polls are added to our poll trackers. When new polling data drops we’ll send an update straight to your inbox. Get it sent to your inbox.

The Suffolk County Democratic Committee on Monday posted its own photo on Instagram of Mr. Gallant in fatigues, standing in front of a helicopter, calling him “Suffolk County’s next Democratic Congressman.” The post accused a “Republican political hack” of planting the photos in The Post and said that what they really revealed was “how little they think of Suffolk County voters,” adding that “there is now documented proof that Chris Gallant has a six-pack.”

More On U.S. High Tech, Media, Education, Sports, Religion

 

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: I Disagree with my colleagues every day on Fox, Jessica Tarlov (Fox News co-host), Sept. 14, 2026. Here’s what I’ve learned about winning the conversation. 

How can I make a difference when I make my case on Fox? How can I stay compassionate when I’m speaking not just to my cohosts, but a large part of the audience, who have different views and values than mine? What do we have in common, and how can I use that to make inroads with people who think I’m the enemy?

I thought about these questions enough that I started answering them – and much, much more – in a book called I Disagree: Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends. It’s out next week.

It contains my best advice on the tough conversations throughout our lives. But this is MeidasTouch. You want to know how to win the political argument! I’ve got plenty of lessons on that, too. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. Speak with respect, facts and humanity

2. Come to the table with an open mind and fewer defenses

3. Fact-check; don’t hector

4. Let people see how you think, not just what you think

Say something real when you show up, somewhere risky. On a podcast, or in front of any group you’re trying to persuade, audiences respond best to honesty, specificity, and proof you’re being genuine about fixing problems. Authenticity goes really, really far.

Letters from Leo, The First American Pope and U.S. Politics, Commentary: MAGA Attacks Pope Leo XIV After He Prays for the Dead of 9/11, Christopher Hale, Sept. 14, 2026. The pope’s 25th-anniversary prayer drew nearly 600,000 views on X and a wall of fury led by white-nationalist podcaster Kevin DeAnna.

Pope Leo XIV finished the Angelus on Sunday, switched into English, and gave four sentences to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

“Two days ago marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States of America,” he told the crowd beneath his window. He renewed his prayers for the dead and for “those who continue to bear the wounds of that tragic day,” then asked everyone listening to pray that God would “bestow his gift of peace upon the world.”

A little over an hour later, the Vatican put that paragraph on his X account, word for word. Nearly 600,000 people have seen it since.

Then the replies started.X avatar for @Pontifex Pope Leo XIV@PontifexTwo days ago marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States of America. I renew my prayers for those who lost their lives and for those who continue to bear the wounds of that tragic day. At a time when conflict and violence…12:00 PM · Sep 13, 2026 · 592K Views695 Replies · 2.18K Reposts · 25.5K Likes

Kevin DeAnna wrote what became the thesis of most of the complaints. “Two days late,” he wrote, “and just some vague hand waving about violence itself being bad.” The post has been seen more than 15,000 times.X avatar for @VDAREJamesK Kevin DeAnna@VDAREJamesKTwo days late and just some vague hand waving about violence itself being bad.X avatar for @Pontifex Pope Leo XIV @PontifexTwo days ago marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks in the United States of America. I renew my prayers for those who lost their lives and for those who continue to bear the wounds of that tragic day. At a time when conflict and violence1:38 PM · Sep 13, 2026 · 15.8K Views21 Replies · 34 Reposts · 839 Likes

DeAnna spent years writing as James Kirkpatrick at VDARE, the anti-immigration site Peter Brimelow founded in 1999 and named for Virginia Dare, which suspended publication in July 2024 while New York’s attorney general pursued its foundation over the Brimelows’ handling of its charitable money.

He now hosts a podcast for American Renaissance, and the Southern Poverty Law Center calls him one of the main ideological architects of this century’s American white-nationalist movement.

The second charge arrived stacked on the first, from an account with 278,000 followers. “The Pope posts this two days late and doesn’t even mention Islam or Muslims — just the usual ‘violence is bad’ platitudes,” wrote Humble Flow, who graded the prayer “pretty weak.

He is not an anonymous crank.

Humble Flow writes The Western Spirit, a Substack with more than 36,000 subscribers that bills itself as “a publication devoted to the Catholic spirit that shaped Western civilization,” and he runs a private book club of some 60,000 readers organized around the Western canon.

Peter Thiel spent the summer telling an Aspen audience that the pope is working for the Chinese Communists. At the start of this month they came for a prayer about clean water.

All of these fights began with something published under the pope’s name, which is why a comforting theory keeps circulating in Catholic group chats. Some twenty-five-year-old in the Dicastery for Communication is going rogue, the thinking goes, and the Holy Father would never.

Michael J. O’Loughlin, now executive editor of the National Catholic Reporter, wrote the book on this — literally.

The Tweetable Pope, which HarperOne published in 2015 while he was covering the Church for Crux, made the case that the account was doing real catechesis rather than decoration.

Francis, O’Loughlin told Millennial the following winter, had managed “to communicate Church teaching in a wholly refreshing way,” and had been “the most influential global leader on the platform three years in a row, reaching tens of millions of people with just a few keystrokes.” 

The Wrap, Byron Allen’s Local Now Adds 111 Gray Media Stations, Lucas Manfredi, Sept. 14, 2026. Byron Allen’s Local Now has added 111 free, ad-supported streaming channels to its lineup that will carry coverage from Gray Media’s local stations across the U.S., The Wrap can reveal exclusively.

The partnership solidifies the FAST service’s position as the largest source of free local news and television coverage in the United States, with nearly 600 channels nationwide.

Local Now, which has a presence in all 210 markets across the country, offers localized news, weather, sports, traffic, and entertainment, customized seamlessly by a user’s device geolocation. It has 223 proprietary channels and 370 standalone local news channels from a network of 28 traditional broadcast television groups.

“Our partnership with Gray Media ensures our viewers can stay connected to real-time news, weather, and sports that matter most to them wherever they may be,” Local Now Chairman and CEO Byron Allen said in a statement. “Between our broadcast partner network and our proprietary hyper-local technology, Local Now remains committed to delivering premium, trusted local journalism to every community in America, entirely for free.”Byron Allen (Credit: Getty Images)Read NextInside Byron Allen's Plan to Turn Around BuzzFeed With a Free TV 'Super App,' Podcasts, Creators and AI

The new partnership comes after Gray Media acquired 10 local stations from AMG for $171 million last year.

It also comes after Allen acquired a majority stake in BuzzFeed back in March. At the time, he told TheWrap in an interview that he planned to bring BuzzFeed and Huffington Post to living rooms through a free “super app,” which would combine the brands with LocalNow, over 30,000 movies and TV shows and nearly 1,000 FAST channels.

 

The Daily Beast, ‘60 Minutes’ Star Defies MAGA Bosses With Brutal Grilling, Erkki Forster, Updated Sept. 14 2026. NO HOLDING BACK. Lesley Stahl wasn’t pulling her punches as she quizzed a major Trump ally.

60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl refused to go easy on a major Donald Trump ally as she grilled him about the president’s “pardon economy.”

Stahl, who kept her 60 Minutes chair as MAGA-curious CBS News boss Bari Weiss pushed three longtime correspondents out the door, sat down with Ed Martin, who left his post as Trump’s pardon attorney last month, during the show’s season opener on Sunday.

An aerial view of tropical islands surrounded by turquoise water.

A group photo shows about 35 people including Donald Trump Jr., his wife Bettina Anderson, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Tiffany Trump and Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev. A woman in a dress and brimmed hat walks with a man in a long-sleeve button down and shorts on a tropical beach. 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 13, 2026 [Warnings On AI], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 14, 2026. On Saturday, September 12, Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for AI companies to slow down their improvement of AI models.

Amodei expressed concern that AI models are themselves pushing advances faster than engineers can understand them. He noted that July’s OpenAI–Hugging Face incident, in which programs designed to hack into systems found weaknesses that permitted them to escape the “sandbox” in which designers were testing them for about a week before anyone noticed had, luckily, been relatively harmless, but warned that “in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.” Within a year, he warned, such a swarm could take over the entire internet, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

In his essay, Amodei called for AI companies to commit to giving embedded third-party evaluators access to their work, rather like the regulatory supervisors in banking. He called for AI companies in democratic countries to establish safety standards and limit their rate of progress. And he called for “[t]he US and other democratic governments [to] attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance.”

Today on Face the Nation, Amodei explained to host Jo Ling Kent: “My view here is it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company. People ask me that question all the time. Why isn’t this being built by government? And the strangest thing about it is, I agree with them. I’m uncomfortable. Government didn’t build this technology. This company, this technology came from the private sector, and we—Anthropic, and I would hope other companies, have done everything we can to try to have legitimate oversight mechanisms.

“I think the government and the public need to have a stake. And this is why we’ve supported regulation of the technology. Regulation constrains the private companies. Regulation allows the public and its elected representatives to have a say, and limits what the private companies can do.”

Asked if he would be willing to give the technology itself to the government, Amodei answered that he might be willing to give it to the right combination of governments. “I want to be very clear about this,” he said. “I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically elected governments—I don’t know about hand over, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance. Again, that would be the work of years, but I wonder if that’s the direction we need to go in.”

As Mike Isaac of the New York Times noted, Amodei’s call came days after an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned, posting on social media that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic was “acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” They are, he said, building “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon said. He claimed that people at OpenAI might not yet realize what they’re constructing, while those at Anthropic do understand but believe “they are locked in a race to get there first—they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.”

Critics are skeptical, suggesting that AI leaders are hyping their product to make it appear more valuable than it really is. There is widespread concern that the massive spending on AI infrastructure like data centers and chips might not deliver the revenue and profits that would justify such spending. In June, Kate Brennan, associate director of independent research institute AI Now, told Aimee Picchi of CBS News: “The returns are not coming in, and the claims that are being made, in terms of efficiency or productivity numbers, are not netting out.”

Others wonder if Amodei’s public concerns aren’t designed to get the government to regulate AI in such a way that it creates a framework that would make it hard for smaller companies to break into the market.

Still, Kate Conger of the New York Times noted last week that in July, more than 1,300 employees from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Google’s DeepMind—all leading AI companies—signed an open letter asking the U.S. government to regulate AI to slow down its development. Conger also notes that in August, more than 100 tech companies offered their models to hospitals and infrastructure systems to enable them to guard against cyberattacks powered by AI.

After Amodei’s essay appeared, Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI; Elon Musk, who has been increasing spending on AI through his SpaceX rocket company; and Demis Hassabis, chair of Google DeepMind, all posted their support for slowing down the pace of AI improvements.

On October 30, 2023, President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14110, calling for the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” The document said AI must be safe and secure. It called for the promotion of “responsible innovation, competition, and collaboration” and specified that AI must engage U.S. workers and advance equity and civil rights as well as privacy and civil liberties. The development of AI must protect consumers, it said, and the government must make sure the technology is deployed responsibly.

Revoking this executive order was one of the first things Trump did on January 20, 2025. Published in the official register on January 23, Trump’s order “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” called for reviewing “all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken” under Biden’s order and suspending, revising, or rescinding them. “[W]e must,” the order said, “develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.”

During his second term, Trump and his sons have invested heavily in companies tied to the AI boom. Trump has called AI data centers “the oil of the next 50 years” and says they are delivering wealth and investment to communities in the U.S. In July he insisted that data centers are “Cash Cows,” creating taxes and jobs that “amount to LIQUID GOLD!”

But the American people disagree. A YouGov poll from late August showed that only 24% of Americans think the construction of data centers is a good thing, while twice that number, 47%, say it’s bad. A majority of Americans, 61%, don’t want one in their town. In response to their growing unpopularity, the administration is seeking to exempt data centers from having to notify the public about how much air pollution they will release.

As Cat Zakrzewski, Violet Jira, and Nitasha Tiku of the Washington Post reported, when asked today about the calls to slow down the development of AI models, Trump dismissed them, saying that the U.S. needed to stay ahead of China. He brushed off the warnings calling for the slower pace coming from the industry’s leaders.

“I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up,” Trump told reporters. “And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”

David Sacks, the venture capitalist who heads the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, accused the AI leaders of trying to avoid “massive product-liablity exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.”

A Wall Street Journal article today by Richard Rubin and Justin Lahart offered a different perspective on the fight over regulating AI. In a piece about the growing U.S. debt, they note that the Trump administration insists it can overcome the rising deficits it’s mounting and the debt that has recently hit 100% of the nation’s gross domestic product and topped $40 trillion through growth.

The idea that the U.S. could sustain high spending with low taxes by growing its way out of debt has been a driving force in the Republican Party since the 1980s, but as Rubin and Lahart note, the U.S. has not had the sustained 3% growth such a scenario requires since the 1990s, when companies were adopting computers and baby boomers were at their peak employment. During those years, under President Bill Clinton, the U.S. wiped out its deficit.

But then President George W. Bush pushed through another big tax cut and launched two unfunded wars, and both deficits and debt climbed again. By this century, the authors note, the conditions of the 1990s were reversed: baby boomers are retiring and productivity is slowing.

And yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at Southern Methodist University last week that he expects to see 3% growth again after the end of the war on Iran. “[T]he underlying economy is very, very strong,” he said, “and I think reaccelerating.” This expected growth seems to be what’s behind the administration’s faith that it can continue to cut taxes while dramatically increasing spending on the military and the Department of Homeland security.

Last week, Rubin and Lahart note, Trump told the Fox News Channel: “We’re gonna take care of the 40 trillion over a period of time through growth. We’re growing at a faster rate than we’ve ever grown before.” While the U.S. is not, in fact, growing at a record pace—growth during Trump’s second term has sat at 1.9%—it appears the administration may be looking at a giant boost in productivity led by AI as its Hail Mary pass.

Sept. 13

Top Headlines

Donald Trump, Jan 6th rioters, Mike Johnson, and the Supreme Court (Illustration for The New Republic by Mark Harris; Getty (x6) 

President Trump pardoned all convicted rioters and insurrectionists involved in his Jan. 6 Capitol scheme to prevent a Biden presidency (some shown above) and has also advocated in effect a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward them. 

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 12, 2026 [It can happen again....], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 13, 2026. On Thursday, in The New Republic, conservative judge J. Michael Luttig published a dire warning to the Republican Party…and to all Americans. In the piece, Luttig outlined how Republicans could refuse to seat elected Democrats in January after a Democratic victory in the 2026 midterm elections of November. “The coming crisis,” the piece says, would be “The Final Battle for America’s Democracy.”

Special Report: White House Terror, Lawyers, Self-Preservation

• Lincoln Square Media, Political Opinion: Trump’s Terrified White House, Rick Wilson, right, Sept. 13, 2026. They’re not scared enough ... yet. There are two Republican Parties right now, and only one of them is telling the truth. The first is Mike Johnson’s Republican Party. The other Republican Party is in the West Wing. 

Special Reports: Trump's Disgraces On His Ireland Trip

 

The folks in Dublin didn’t seem too pleased about his arrival: Caricature balloons depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump (above) are carried during a protest against the visit of U.S. President Donald Trump in Dublin, Ireland, September 12, 2026 (REUTERS/Natalia Campos). Another portrayed a Jeffrey Epstein balloon in the same position with Trump, portraying a caricature of their relationship.

• ’Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump can’t hide from the world, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 12, 2026. At 11:50 this morning, the President of the United States made a special stop on his way to promote his private golf course in Doonbeg, County Clare, Ireland. For exactly the next 35 minutes, the president read from the cheat sheets in his three-ring binder. He joked that the first lady chose to stay home because the flight was too long, before saying to a room full of Irish people, apparently thinking he was being funny, “Let me tell you, you are some of the most vicious bastards.”

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Saturday Night Update: Republicans Face Protests at Home and Abroad, AI Tech CEOs Urge Slow Down in Major Shift, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 12, 2026. Tonight’s rundown has a clear thread running through it. Republicans are facing pushback everywhere they turn, at home and abroad, and none of it looks like it’s going away anytime soon. 
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary:USA Extracts Diplomat Caught with CSAM Material, Russia Strikes Near Train With Diplomats, Trump Says No to AI Slowdown, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 13, 2026. We have a diplomat quietly flown out of London before police could even question him over child abuse material. We have Russia testing the limits of NATO with a drone strike that may have targeted a train carrying Boris Johnson and a former CIA director, part of one of the largest barrages of the war so far. We have Trump brushing off the very people who built AI warning him to slow down, and a growing list of stories at home, from a third measles death in Pennsylvania to Republicans quietly backing away from Trump’s $5,000 election year promise.

More Global News  

President Trump with Micheál Martin, the taoiseach, or prime minister, or Ireland, at the Farmleigh House in Dublin on Saturday,Sept. 12, 2026. (New York Times photo by Alex Kent). 

• New York Times, Trump Says Irish Unification Would Be ‘Fantastic,’ Breaking With Precedent, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Luke Broadwater, Sept. 13, 2026 (print ed.). The United States is officially neutral on an issue that had been a source of decades of violence in Northern Ireland until a 1998 peace deal.

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, How Iran’s Hard-Liners Prevailed and Sabotaged U.S. Peace Deal, Farnaz Fassihi, Sept. 13, 2026. Opponents derailed the agreement with a clandestine effort to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuz, regime insiders say. Iran’s president was furious when he found out.
• New York Times, Iran Will Meet With Gulf Arab States as Mideast Conflict Widens, Aaron Boxerman, Sept. 13, 2026. Talks are expected tomorrow, officials said. Diplomacy to end the war with the United States has stalled and Iranian-allied forces have advanced in Yemen.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• New York Times, A Gender War Explodes in Utah Over the Courts, Abortion and Representation, Kate Zernike, Sept. 13, 2026. When Republicans tried to repeal a law that voters passed banning gerrymandering, they found an opposition that flew in the face of Utah women’s “tradwives” imagery.
• New York Times, For Populist Democrats, a Movement Fueled by Anger at Both Parties, Robert Draper, Sept. 13, 2026. A generation shaped by the pandemic and rising prices has helped drive an emergence of Democratic candidates who say they are as fed up as voters are.
• To the Contrary, Political Opinion: Well, That Escalated Quickly, Charlie Sykes, Sept. 13, 2026. A week when everything changed: The AI debate warnings; the Saudis’ worst fear; and the name that shall-not-be-mentioned at the RNC.

Special Report: The Clinton Impeachment As A Timely Lesson

• Mobology, Investigative Commentary: The RNC demands our indictments for extortion and obstructing Congress (Part 11), Dan Moldea, right, Sept. 13, 2026. Preface: The 2026 midterm elections are drawing near. And there are lessons to be learned. . . . Here at Mobology, the past is prologue. Through this series, I hope to contribute to the ongoing action by revisiting the drama of the last major crisis in the American presidency. I played a little-known but key role in that story.

More On High-Tech, Media

• New York Times, Top A.I. Leaders Call for Slowing Down A.I. Development, Mike Isaac, Sept. 13, 2026 (print ed.). In an essay, the head of Anthropic laid out the rapidly advancing capabilities of artificial intelligence and said there needed to be greater safety controls across the industry.
• New York Times, How the Smithsonian Might Choose Its Next Leader, Robin Pogrebin, Sept. 13, 2026. With Lonnie G. Bunch III stepping down as the Smithsonian’s secretary, President Trump will have his best chance to control the institution.

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

 

Donald Trump, Jan 6th rioters, Mike Johnson, and the Supreme Court (Illustration for The New Republic by Mark Harris; Getty (x6)

• The New Republic, Analysis and Opinion: The Final Battle for America’s Democracy, J. Michael Luttig, right, Sept. 11, 2026. Forget November 3. It’s January 3 when Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans might bury our democracy once and for all. Here’s how. Donald Trump instigated a war against America’s democracy on January 6, 2021. Today, almost six years later, Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021.
• The New Republic, Opinion: The Accelerating Project to Extend Abortion Bans to All 50 States, Melissa Gira Grant (Staff writer and author of "Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work," Sept. 11, 2026. In a legal challenge to abortion access at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Department of Justice and Louisiana are on opposite sides. But they want the same thing.
• The New Republic, Opinion: The Supreme Court Hits a Limit With Missouri’s Election Map Mess, Matt Ford, Sept. 10, 2026. No, the high court hasn’t had a change of heart where gerrymandering is concerned. But it does seem to have little stomach for electoral chicanery.

Top Stories

 

Donald Trump, Jan 6th rioters, Mike Johnson, and the Supreme Court (Illustration for The New Republic by Mark Harris; Getty (x6) 

President Trump pardoned all convicted rioters and insurrectionists involved in his Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection to prevent a Biden presidency (some shown above) and has also advocated a special $5 tax on every American via Justice Department "settlement" for a special $1.8 billion slush fund to reward them. 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 12, 2026 [It can happen again....], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 13, 2026. On Thursday, in The New Republic, conservative judge J. Michael Luttig published a dire warning to the Republican Party…and to all Americans. In the piece, Luttig outlined how Republicans could refuse to seat elected Democrats in January after a Democratic victory in the 2026 midterm elections of November. “The coming crisis,” the piece says, would be “The Final Battle for America’s Democracy.”

Luttig spelled out that Trump is fighting a war against America’s democracy. While the refusal of Vice President Mike Pence to assist his power grab made it fail in January 2021, Luttig notes, today Trump and his Republican congressional allies are more determined than ever to take over the country.

Luttig (shown below in a file photo) focuses on the ability of House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), right, to prevent the recognition of duly-elected Democratic representatives on January 3. Johnson has the power, Luttig says, to remove the current House clerk, Kevin McCumber, and replace him temporarily with a MAGA loyalist who will refuse to list Democrats on the roll of those elected to the 120th Congress.

 

Former U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative scholar, is shown above testifying on June 16, 2022, before a U.S. House hearing on the Jan. 6 insurrection by pro-trump rioters.

In this scenario, once Democrats are eliminated, they will have to get a federal court to order the temporary clerk to list their names. If a court does so, another crisis point will arrive if the clerk simply refuses to obey the order. Then it’s possible the courts will stay out of the fight until the 120th Congress formally convenes and the Republicans vote not to seat the Democrats. That vote would be reviewable by the courts, including the Supreme Court.

But that review would take weeks, if not months, paralyzing the United States and leaving the country “helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.” And at that point, how would the current Supreme Court answer the question: “Is the United States of America a democracy, in which ‘We the People’ elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?”

As if to illustrate Luttig’s warning, House speaker Johnson told attendees at Trump’s convention in Dallas on Thursday: “We cannot and will not allow them to take the majority in the Congress. We’re not gonna do it.”

Trump’s attempt to use the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in voting has recently had a test run. Yesterday, Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket picked up a story from Jeff Berlew of the Tallahassee Democrat to report that the USPS rejected mailed ballots from Leon County, in Florida, because the words “return service requested” were only 0.236 inches from the election office’s return address. They were supposed to be a full quarter-inch apart. So, the delivery of those mail in ballots came down to a federal complaint about a spacing issue of 0.014 of an inch.

“It’s ridiculous,” Supervisor of Elections Mark Earley told Berlew. But, as Saksa notes, the rejection of ballots for such a petty flaw shows what will likely happen if the Supreme Court lifts the injunction blocking the postal service from implementing the new rules it has put in place since Trump ordered such interference in a March executive order.

On Thursday, September 10, Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) under Trump has sent threatening letters to at least thirty top election officials in the states, warning that those officials “are currently under investigation” and are subject to “ongoing litigation,” and so must not destroy any records relating to the 2024 election. As Corasaniti notes, the administration has sued 30 states for their voter lists and has lost 23 of the cases and won none. Trump has claimed to be the victim of voter fraud since the 2016 primaries but has never produced any proof of his claims.

In July, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the civil rights division in the DOJ, threatened state election officials with criminal prosecution if any noncitizens cast a ballot in their state (although it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote), and Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin threatened election officials with criminal prosecution if they did not put Trump’s election changes into effect.

Election officials already follow the laws about retaining documents, so the letters seem to be about threatening them. Nevada secretary of state Francisco Aguilar, a Democrat, told Corasaniti: “It’s the constant ‘flood the zone’ of harassment and intimidation and threats of legal action hoping we’d fold at some point.” But, he added, “We’re going to continue to follow the law and do what’s in the best interest of our voters.”

And what of the MAGA Republicans Trump would like to see in Congress?

Liz Goodwin of the Washington Post reported yesterday that 25-year-old Stephen Woytek, a top campaign staffer for Senator Jon Husted (R-OH), has recently cultivated a public playlist of songs celebrating the former country of Rhodesia, in which a white minority ruled over a Black majority, captioning it “homesick for a place that no longer exists.” Rhodesia is a rallying cry for white supremacists who deplore the change that created Zimbabwe. Woytek also appears to be a historical reenactor who appears to have both worn Nazi uniforms and used a photo of Nazi soldiers as his Facebook profile picture.

Ohio governor Mike DeWine appointed Husted to the Senate to replace J.D. Vance after Vance was elected to the vice presidency, and Husted is now locked in a battle for that seat with former senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat known for his defense of labor. A statement for Husted said that while Woytek “denies negative intent,” the campaign was parting ways with him.

As Goodwin notes, growing numbers of younger Republicans have been expressing support for white nationalism and the Nazis.

Indeed, in his warning, Luttig did not single out Democrats to protect democracy; as he noted in a piece on his Substack in August, plenty of people are already fighting. He called out Republicans.

“There was a time not long ago when virtually every member of Congress could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of congressional power in advance of an election,” Luttig wrote. But now, “[i]n a damning indictment of the president and today’s congressional Republicans, it would be hard to find even one congressional Republican with the integrity, sense of duty to country, honor, and courage to put America above the Republican Party, let alone above Donald Trump.”

He urged Republicans “to decide that they are not going to betray their oaths and their country one last time for Donald Trump,” and to make it clear to Trump and Johnson that they will not participate in any unconstitutional plan to deny Democrats seats in the new Congress.

He warned them that should Republicans go along with such machinations and the Supreme Court overrule them, the Republican Party “would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America for its second attempt in six years to defy the will of the American people on Election Day.”

“The writing is already on the wall, Republicans,” the conservative jurist wrote. “The Republican Party in particular must finally loose the chains of its political and moral enslavement to Donald Trump and separate itself from the MAGA political party cult.”

Today, in Ireland, where he traveled for the Irish Open at his golf club in Doonbeg, Trump told reporters: “We had a rigged election. As you know, it was totally rigged. Because I won three times. I didn’t win twice. I won three times.”

Special Report: White House Terror, Lawyers, Self-Preservation

 

Lincoln Square Media, Political Opinion: Trump’s Terrified White House, Rick Wilson, right, commentator and former longtime Republican campaign strategist, Sept. 13, 2026. They’re not scared enough ... yet.

There are two Republican Parties right now, and only one of them is telling the truth.

The first is Mike Johnson’s Republican Party.

Johnson, shown above, is traveling the country insisting that Republicans won’t just keep their hold on the House in November; they will, in fact, increase their majority. He is “absolutely convinced” they will defy history.

Sure, Mike.

He says this with the confidence of a man insisting he’s fine while the paramedics drag him from the wreck with massive chest trauma and load him into the ambulance.

The other Republican Party is in the West Wing.

It is lawyering up, and despite its public contempt for the law, the Constitution, and the Democrats, it’s scared.

Washington is about to see a legal hiring frenzy.

Not campaign lawyers. Criminal defense attorneys. Impeachment lawyers. Executive-privilege lawyers, and the specialty legal-PR types you hire when the political radar looks like someone kicked over a bucket of paint and the storm alerts have moved from watch to warning to “Fly, you fools!”

The White House Counsel’s Office is now preparing political appointees for investigations. Ethics filings and financial disclosures are being scrubbed. Veterans of the first impeachment are reappearing in Trump’s orbit. The Trump-Blanche DOJ is constructing ludicrously broad theories of executive privilege. Trump just installed Will Scharf, one of his personal legal loyalists, as White House counsel.

The public message is victory.

The private behavior is rising fear. They know the Democratic House majority is coming, and they’re hearing one word in the wind: discovery.

And discovery scares the hell out of Donald Trump.

Not impeachment. Trump understands impeachment. He can turn impeachment into television: WITCH HUNT, HOAX, DERANGED DEMOCRATS, SEND MONEY.

Discovery is different.

It isn’t just the emails, bank records, Signal messages, phone logs, contracts, blockchain wallet addresses, travel records, procurement files, visitor logs, and the rest of the evidentiary constellation of a real investigation.

It’s depositions under oath. It’s sworn testimony under the hot lights.

Trump’s claque of aides and enablers thinks the White House Counsel will cover them. They’re wrong. Every one of them will need to lawyer up on their own dime.

And their personal counsel will put the client first, not Trump.

But there’s another reason people inside the White House should be nervous: the pardon problem.

I’ve warned about this before: everyone in Trumpworld assumes that if things go bad, Trump will eventually Oprah the West Wing with pardons. “You get a pardon! And YOU get a pardon! And YOU ALL get a PARDON!”

Maybe.

But they misunderstand Trump’s incentives.

A pardon is freedom. The possibility of a pardon is leverage.

Imagine you’re a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense nobody has ever heard of. One day you get a call from the White House about a new defense firm that needs a drone contract. Call it $600 million. They mention in passing that one of the Trump sons is on the board, which should make it easy.

You moved the contract through DOD/AQ at light speed. You followed orders.

Now Democrats control Congress. The subpoena arrives. Your lawyer costs $1,500 an hour. Investigators have documents. They want your Signal messages. The White House wants you to claim privilege.

Then your lawyer explains something important:

Trump’s lawyers represent Trump. White House counsel represents the presidency.

The lawyer you’ve hired looks across the desk and says, “I represent you.”

And Donald Trump has not promised to pardon you. That’s the leash. That’s how he keeps his enablers believing they’ll be spared a trip to prison.

Stay loyal. Don’t testify. Don’t cooperate. Don’t contradict the boss. Maybe Donald takes care of you.

Maybe.

An unpardoned aide is a controllable aide. Trump can keep hundreds of people hanging on that promise through 2027 and 2028. And even in January 2029, he may not pardon everyone. Hell, he could drop dead tomorrow without pardoning anyone.

Trump rewards people who remain useful, flatter him, entertain him, or pay him. He does not reward people merely for being loyal. Ask anyone Donald Trump has ever owed money.

Which is why Democratic investigators shouldn’t begin with Trump. Start at the edges. Treat it like an old-school Mob roll-up.

Don’t go for the boss on day one.

A Democratic House (and Senate) won’t lack for targets; the discipline will be in choosing. On the democracy side, the fights that matter are the Epstein Coverup (not the files … the coverup.) The Justice Department turned into a retribution arm against Trump’s political enemies, the federal machinery pointed at state election officials, the murderous ICE deployments into American cities, the deliberate blackout of oversight through fired inspectors general, and the shakedown of law firms, universities, and networks that dressed extortion up as settlements. 

 

The folks in Dublin didn’t seem too pleased about his arrival: Caricature balloons depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump (above) are carried during a protest against the visit of U.S. President Donald Trump in Dublin, Ireland, September 12, 2026 (REUTERS/Natalia Campos). Another portrayed a Jeffrey Epstein balloon in the same fashion, portraying a caricature of their relationship.

Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump can’t hide from the world, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 12, 2026. At 11:50 this morning, the President of the United States made a special stop on his way to promote his private golf course in Doonbeg, County Clare, Ireland.

For exactly 35 minutes, a rambling Donald Trump stood at the podium inside the 250-year-old Deerfield Residence in Dublin, Ireland, to speak to a room full of our Embassy personnel, Irish business leaders, and government officials. For exactly the next 35 minutes, the president read from the cheat sheets in his three-ring binder, he compared Kamala Harris to cage fighting, gave the room a lesson on how golf games are scored, complained about NATO and threatened that there would be an announcement about that soon, joked that the first lady chose to stay home because the flight was too long, before saying to a room full of Irish people, apparently thinking he was being funny, “Let me tell you, you are some of the most vicious bastards.”

As someone of Irish descent, I took his insult as a compliment. My maiden name is Delaney. I have written under Heather Delaney Reese since the early 2000s because I am proud of my family name and that heritage. When I heard him say that, standing inside a magnificent Georgian mansion, directly across from the Irish president’s own residence, in the very building that has played a pivotal part in the growth of the US-Ireland diplomatic relationship for nearly a century, I felt something I did not expect. I was proud. Because if there is one thing I know about the Irish, it is that they do not take anything from anyone. He called them vicious bastards with their business negotiations, but what I really heard was that they can see right through him and have been playing him like a violin from the very start. Thousands of them have proved him right this weekend. Those Irish “vicious bastards” have flooded the streets of Dublin, calling him a warmonger and a racist. They have been flying balloons of Trump in various lewd positions to ridicule and humiliate him. That is who the Irish really are. They do not mince words; they never have, and they never will.

My travel writing days have taken my family to Ireland multiple times, and each time it felt a bit like going home. People talk about the rolling green hills and moody skies when they think about Ireland, and that is true, but that has never been what I think about. I’ve always thought about the people. I think about the perseverance they carried through some of the most devastating periods in European history. I think about the centuries of occupation, how they never lost hope even through famines that killed over a million and forced another million to flee. I think about the bravery of what it took to make those journeys and leave everything behind.

There are now over 32.4 million Irish Americans in this country; about 9.5 percent of our entire population identifies as coming from Irish roots. That is more than six times the entire population of Ireland itself. So being Irish American is not at all a unique experience in the United States. But that means there is a rather large percentage of Americans who align with, or recently did with, Donald Trump. Whereas the Irish still in Ireland seem to be the ones who easily see Donald Trump for exactly what he is. They see his meddling in foreign governments, the far-right movement he is building, and the authoritarian agenda he is trying to bring into their country and across the whole of Europe. The Irish did not line the streets with welcome banners for the president. They instead took to the streets today by the thousands and told him how they really feel about him and everything he stands for. Seeing the resistance they showed today reminded me that the Irish spirit still lives in us.

While Donald Trump made that stop on his government-funded vacation to promote his own golf course, Ireland didn’t let him or anyone else forget how they feel about him, not even while he was giving his erratic speech. He opened his remarks with a lengthy explanation about how he gave the United States Ambassador to Ireland, Edward Walsh, the job because he is a good golfer.

Then he spent some time telling a story about how the Secret Service treats everyone around him as “collateral damage,” and that “they don’t give a damn about you.” He laughed as he said it. His story was, “I was with the head of the biggest company in the world. We’re playing golf and we have, you know, hundreds of Secret Service all over the course.” And then, “But the guy said, ‘Well, you know, I’m a very big executive, so if something happens with the president, they see all these trucks and tanks. This is a big deal.’ And he said, ‘What about me?’ ‘Sir, I’m sorry. You’re considered collateral damage. You’re on your own, sir.’ He didn’t feel too good. He wasn’t sure he should finish out the round, actually.” The people in the room laughed along with him.

Then came another odd moment where Trump said something about himself that he says others ask too, “Does Trump cheat?” He continued with, “I can’t cheat. You have 250 Secret Service agents running down. It’s not that I wouldn’t cheat, but you can’t move the ball.” He once again admitted something so many of us have known for as long as we can remember. Donald Trump cheats, and the only reason he doesn’t as often on the golf course lately is because, by his own admission, there would be too many witnesses. He didn’t say that he had a moral objection to cheating, or that he didn’t because cheating is wrong. He said he doesn’t cheat right now because of how easy it would be to get caught. Those were words from the sitting President of the United States of America.

He also chose to disparage former President Joe Biden, a man beloved by many Irish, while on a visit to the Emerald Isle. Biden’s family has deep roots in Ireland, going back to his great-great-grandparents who came to America during the Great Famine. During a visit Biden made in 2023, the Irish parliament told him he was “one of us.” There were thick crowds of people lining the streets, even in the rain, shouting “Welcome home, Joe,” as he went by. He received a standing ovation at Dublin Castle. And in Trump’s remarks today, he called the United States “dead” under Biden, saying, “We had a president who didn’t know who the hell he was. Couldn’t walk down a flight of stairs. Couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs.”

Then came the most dependable part of any speech Trump gives. The cover for the deeply embarrassing wound he suffered when he lost the 2020 election. It’s the one thing he always says, as if lying will make anyone forget the truth. “We had a rigged election, as you know. It was totally rigged. Because I won three times. I didn’t win twice. I won three times.”

When he should have been focused on diplomacy in a foreign country, he instead went to military violence and the time he kidnapped a foreign leader. He focused an entire section of his speech around Venezuela and other places he has brought terror to. “We had a short military conflict, I call it,” he said. “They said, ‘Could you maybe not use the word war?’ Because when you use the word war, it’s a little different.” Then, barely a minute later he said, “We took that over. We won the war. We paid for the war many, many times over.” One section he said these were each a “military conflict,” and then suddenly they were a “war,” the very thing he said he has been told not to say. He also took a moment to brag about 65 billion barrels of oil, as he said it was “good for five hundred years,” and described finding oil in Venezuela like looking for new real estate to buy. “You just look at the ground, you see oil all over the place. You say, ‘That looks like a good location to start.’”

He spoke about Iran in the same light. “I think Iran is a military conflict. We’re knocking the hell out of them.” He then described how the United States is ramping up weapons production, forcing defense companies to build five and six new plants, before describing Gatling guns that can create “a wall of lead” and lasers that melt drones until “they look like they got poured out of a hot plate.” Maybe the worst thing he said today was that NATO allies refused to help in the Strait of Hormuz, and that, “You’ll be hearing that later.” A threat and a warning all in one.

Towards the end, he went into a tangent about how he has been reading stories about communism in Ireland and that “we’re shutting it down pretty good.” He said, “We’re not going to have any communists running our country. That I can tell you.” In just a few minutes, he bragged about two wars, threatened NATO allies again, and tried to insert himself and his disinformation and drama into a sovereign democratic nation’s politics.

When he was done speaking, “YMCA” by the Village People was blasted through the speakers, and he started pretending to take golf swings.

Earlier that morning, he held a press conference with Taoiseach Micheal Martin (the Irish Prime Minister) at Farmleigh House, where a reporter asked his view on Irish reunification. Unable to understand the gravity of what he was being asked, and how his answer would be received, Donald Trump did not hesitate to respond. “I don’t want to cause any problems, but I will tell you, I’d love to see it unified,” he said. “It’s going to happen eventually. It may as well happen now.” British Prime Minister Andy Burnham had said just weeks earlier that a referendum was “off the table.” Trump does not care who he destabilizes or the consequences that come with his words.

When Barack Obama visited Ireland in 2011, 25,000 people filled College Green in Dublin and cheered for him. He visited Moneygall, a village of about three hundred people, where his great-great-great-grandfather was born. They painted every single house on the main street ahead of his visit. People handed their babies over security barricades so that they could be in pictures with President Obama. He told the Irish people, “There’s always been a little green behind the red, white, and blue,” and he talked about the centuries-old bond between our countries and about peace. He said Ireland was a model for the world. In stark contrast, today, thousands flooded the streets of Dublin and called Trump a warmonger and a racist. They loudly chanted, “Donald Trump not welcome here” and “Irish government, shame on you.”

To those of you in Ireland, and around the world, who protested today or in the past, I want to thank you. This is not your fight; it is ours. But when you refuse to welcome him as if everything is normal and you march in protest against him, you are telling your own people that what Trump is doing is wrong, and you are also giving hope and inspiration to those of us in the States as well. You are also sending a message that this far-right rot cannot be allowed to spread. You are telling us Americans that we are not standing alone, and in this moment, I can’t put into words how much this matters and how much we need to see all of your protests and resistance.

Everywhere we look, the resistance keeps breaking through. Just a couple of days ago, Jimmy Kimmel announced that his interview with James Talarico, the Texas Democrat running for the US Senate against Ken Paxton, was not going to be allowed to air on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” “Out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who would have to deal with this nonsense.” He was referring to Trump’s FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s continued threats of regulatory action against networks and their local affiliate stations over guest bookings and programming that they do not like. Jimmy Kimmel told his audience that “my interview tomorrow with James Talarico will not air on television. It will be posted on YouTube instead.”

And they posted it and used the title, “Jimmy Kimmel’s Interview with James Talarico That the FCC Doesn’t Want You to See.” As of the writing of this post, that video has now been viewed over 7 million times. In contrast, Trump’s “desperation” speech at the Republican Midterm Convention on Fox has only 2.5 million views. The Talarico-censored interview drew almost three times the views of Trump’s speech. This was the second time a Talarico interview had to be cut from late-night TV. Back in February, his interview with Stephen Colbert was also cut from a CBS program after FCC threats, and it too was posted to YouTube instead, where it reached more than nine million views and raised $2.5 million for his campaign in the first 24 hours. The Trump administration still hasn’t learned that nearly every time they try to demand silence, it finds a way through, bigger and better. The voice they suppress is always heard louder.

Censorship is here. We are no longer trying to just hold it off. It has already happened multiple times now. A network once again pulled an interview with a political candidate because the FCC threatened its affiliate stations because the President does not want that candidate to win. It is as simple as that. This is a direct attack on our First Amendment. It is a government censoring what we are allowed to see, and that is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. And it is just getting started. We will see more of this the closer we get to the midterm elections and over the next two years of Trump’s remaining presidency.

So much of what Trump has said and done in just the past few days would have been career-ending for any other president. He practically slept through a 9/11 memorial. He attacked another reporter on the tarmac for asking about his $5,000 bribe checks to voters if his party wins the upcoming elections. He admitted he would cheat if he could get away with it. At any other time in history, most of those moments would have meant wall-to-wall news coverage, congressional hearings, impeachment proceedings, and possibly even criminal ones. The lack of mainstream and legacy media coverage has been abysmal, caused by the intimidation and threats from his administration and his FCC.

This is a reminder that we must protect and support our access to alternative ways of getting information at all costs, especially heading into the midterms, and in the two years that follow. We are going to have to get used to getting our news from sources and platforms that this regime can’t touch or control as easily. We are going to have to normalize going to trusted sources outside of the nightly news and to places like Substack, YouTube, and social media platforms. This will take more time and care on our part to make sure they can be trusted. But the biggest takeaway from what we saw from the Talarico interview is that using alternative means of publishing, like on YouTube, is how we will have to think about the sharing of information going forward. Their quick thinking and action by still posting it there, and not just what he posted during his normal programming, kept millions of people informed this week. At the same time, we also have to consider the reality that YouTube is part of Google, and there is no guarantee they will not change their algorithms or bend to the same censorship pressure the TV networks already have.

If you haven’t already watched the interview, please do, even if you are outside Texas. I share often about my monetary protest, where I have been working hard for months now to move as much of my spending to people and companies on the right side of history. It’s not perfect. There are some products and services that I use for which I am still searching for alternatives, but every dollar I move is another vote of sorts against the authoritarian takeover of our country. I’ve also been paying for new subscriptions to as many people as I can find who are speaking out, sharing the news as it is happening, countering disinformation, and standing up for what is right and against what is wrong. As always, thank you all for supporting me in this way. Your paid subscriptions are how I keep everything that I write free for everyone and never behind a paywall. Please think beyond just supporting me. Please support the other people you go to day in and day out for what is happening in our country. We need as many people speaking out in this moment. Tonight I want to add another option that doesn’t cost any money because these are hard financial times for so many in our country and around the world, and nobody should ever feel pressured to spend money they don’t have when there are other ways to show support. Earlier, I pointed out how many views the Talarico interview received. Those viewership numbers send an important message, and we can help increase them, along with the numbers on the next interview that will inevitably be posted. We can do that just by watching the video.

Even if some days it feels like things are getting worse by the day, the reality is that everything we are doing is working. The protests are still happening, and the international community is holding the line. The censorship they have unleashed keeps backfiring. We are not backing down, and we continue to find new ways forward. We have proven over and over again that we will never give up on our fight against this authoritarian takeover. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

News Roundups

 

Meidas Touch Network, Saturday Updates and Comment: Trump Gets Booed in Dublin While Iran Gets the Red Carpet in New Delhi, Brett Meiselas, Sept. 12, 2026. Here’s what we’re tracking right now:

• Massive protests greet Trump in Dublin
• Trump’s press conference chaos in Ireland on Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Canada, and Ireland
• The Houthis mock Trump after gaining control over the Red Sea coast
• Saudi Arabia’s pipeline was attacked again as Houthis advance on Marib
• Trump continues to try to bribe voters with his lie about giving them money
• Republican Jon Husted’s Senate campaign is under fire after it was revealed a high-level staffer posted Nazi imagery
• Ted Cruz gets booed in Austin

Trump’s Brutal Welcome In Ireland

Trump landed in Ireland, officially for meetings with Taoiseach Micheál Martin, but let’s be honest, the real reason he’s there is the Irish Open at his golf course.

They didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for the guy.

Early reports say about 50K people hit the streets, carrying signs calling him a war criminal and accusing him of covering up the Epstein Files. The giant balloon caricatures floating above the crowd of Trump, Netanyahu, and Epstein made quite the splash.

Trump, despite being blocks away, of course claimed he hadn’t heard of any protests.

WTF Was That Press Conference?

Once Trump sat down with reporters, things got worse. He again said the Iran War would end “very soon, probably right after the midterms.” He was asked about the Saudi pipeline attack and said Iran was “probably” responsible. He absurdly claimed the Houthis called him personally to tell him how much they respect him and how they’ll let through U.S. ships peacefully.

Houthi leadership responded almost immediately, with spokesman Hasan al-Assad calling Trump’s claims baseless and quoting an old proverb about kissing the hand you cannot break. Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi also released footage mocking the Saudi royal family, implying they used to dance for Trump like his puppets.

During the presser, Trump also again claimed that both Canada and Iran are now “begging” to make a deal. On Ireland, he said he’d love to see the island unified, breaking with decades of official U.S. neutrality on the issue. He suggested the UK might not have the resources to defend the Falkland Islands anymore (this while he’s quietly arming Argentina with Black Hawk helicopters). Trump continues to lash out at our (former?) allies for not jumping into his reckless and illegal war.And In New Delhi…

While Trump was jeered in Dublin, Iran was getting treated like royalty at the BRICS summit in new Delhi. Iranian officials held direct talks with China’s foreign minister and Iran’s president was received with full honors alongside Xi Jinping, Putin, and Modi. BRICS leaders also announced a new payment system called BRICS Pay, aimed at reducing reliance on the U.S. dollar.

Running From Yemen

Saudi-backed forces are in full retreat across Yemen. Satellite imagery has now confirmed the East-West pipeline was hit in multiple locations, and Houthi forces are closing in on Marib, with some analysts suggesting the city could fall within days. A regional source told CNN this is “a Saudi-American f**k up of epic proportions.”

A Few Other Things

Trump posted again about his $5,000 bribe, already blaming Democrats for saying it will never happen. The guy is a scam artist. A con man. News organizations should treat him accordingly.

In Ohio, Republican Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign has now fired its political director after WaPo found photos of him posing with Nazi SS imagery and following Waffen-SS reenactment accounts online.

Down in Austin, Sen. Ted Cruz was on ESPN for some reason at a College Gameday. He got brutally booed and the crowd broke out into “Ted Cruz sucks” chants live on television.

Shana Tova to everyone celebrating the new year this weekend. Wishing everyone health, peace, and sweetness ahead. 

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary:USA Extracts Diplomat Caught with CSAM Material, Russia Strikes Near Train With Diplomats, Trump Says No to AI Slowdown, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 13, 2026. It has been a heavy few days, and it does not look like this week is letting up.

We have a diplomat quietly flown out of London before police could even question him over child abuse material. We have Russia testing the limits of NATO with a drone strike that may have targeted a train carrying Boris Johnson and a former CIA director, part of one of the largest barrages of the war so far. We have Trump brushing off the very people who built AI warning him to slow down, and a growing list of stories at home, from a third measles death in Pennsylvania to Republicans quietly backing away from Trump’s $5,000 election year promise.

It is a lot, and I know it can feel overwhelming some weeks. But this is exactly why this space matters. Together, we will keep fighting. Together, we will push for justice, for safety, for a future worth believing in. And every step of the way, I’ll be here, bringing you the facts, the context, the reality, no matter how chaotic or dark the days may seem. 

Trump Flies Out Diplomat With CSAM Before UK Police Interview:

A secret military flight pulled the accused diplomat out of London before police could question him. A US diplomat stationed at the embassy in London was allegedly found with child sexual abuse material that he received from his US-based brother, prompting US Marines to raid his London apartment late last month. A Boeing 747 flew from Chicago to Royal Air Force Fairford in Gloucestershire on August 24, the day before the raid, then flew back out the next day and landed at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware just before 8pm local time. Less than four hours later, that same plane left Delaware and flew on to O’Hare Airport in Chicago. British police and other UK authorities were only told about the raid after the diplomat had already been extracted from the country. A US diplomatic source defended the speed of the operation, saying, “We acted decisively. If we had ceded ground and waited, there could have been delays and diplomacy that could have gone on for weeks or months.”

British lawmakers are furious the US used military resources to bypass UK jurisdiction. The operation has triggered outrage among British politicians who say the US had no legal authority to seize one of its own personnel on UK soil. Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty wrote on X, “The US Government is now protecting pedophiles,” adding, “US Marines conducting a raid on British soil, on which they have no jurisdiction, to seize one of their own diplomats and then use US military resources to ferry the suspect out of the country and fly him to the US is completely unacceptable.” The controversy lands just days before new British Prime Minister Andy Burnham is set to meet President Trump at the UN in New York. The timing has raised the political stakes of the dispute considerably, given it touches on questions of sovereignty and diplomatic immunity right before a high profile meeting between the two leaders.

Both governments are treading carefully as the investigation continues. A British government spokesperson said, “We expect all foreign diplomats in the UK to abide by our laws. As a US investigation is ongoing, it would not be appropriate to comment further.” A US Embassy spokesperson acknowledged the case, saying, “We are aware of allegations concerning an individual assigned to the Embassy. The United States government expects all personnel to adhere to the highest standards of conduct, and we take these allegations seriously.” The diplomat has not been publicly identified, and it remains unclear whether he will face criminal charges in the US. For now, both governments appear to be avoiding further public comment while the investigation moves forward on American soil, out of reach of UK law enforcement.

Russia Tests NATO:

Russian drone strike near the Polish border may have targeted a train carrying Boris Johnson and David Petraeus. A Russian drone struck the engine carriage of a passenger train just two kilometers from the Polish border near the Yahodyn crossing on Sunday, and Ukrainian Railways says a separate train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, former CIA director David Petraeus, and several European security advisers had crossed into Poland shortly before the strike. The rail operator said “it is quite likely that the target of this Russian drone could also have been the diplomatic train, which departed from the station earlier than planned as part of the real time review of train schedules due to the constant threat of Russian strikes.” No casualties were reported on either train, though passengers described a chaotic night of repeated evacuations. Katerina Sergatskova, who was traveling on a Warsaw bound train, said passengers were told to evacuate around 9am after already being pulled off the train for two hours overnight, recalling, “At this point, the mood was different, we were asked to move very fast. Then I heard the first drone.” Johnson wrote on X, “I don’t know what warped logic drove Putin to blow up a stationary Ukrainian locomotive on the Polish border this morning. What we can say for sure is that this is the kind of random and senseless attack Ukrainians are enduring every day, even on civilian railways.”

Overnight barrage of more than 450 drones and missiles killed at least six people across Ukraine. Russia launched one of its largest drone and missile barrages in months overnight, with Ukraine’s air force reporting more than 450 drones and missiles launched and 405 drones and four missiles intercepted. The attacks killed at least six people and injured more than 40, with western Ukraine, typically quieter than Kyiv or the eastern front, hit especially hard. Three people were killed in the eastern Donetsk region and a 71 year old woman was killed in the southern Mykolaiv region. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram, “Ukrainians are fighting every day to prevent these strikes from spreading further into Europe, giving their lives and preventing the aggression from expanding.” Russia’s defense ministry claimed it struck “railway infrastructure” in western Ukraine used to “transport military cargo” from Europe.

Ukraine and Poland warn of escalation as Trump presses Zelensky over diesel strikes and talks with Russia are eyed for October. Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha said the strike near the border amounted to “Putin’s terror knocking directly on the doors of the EU and Nato,” adding, “Russian barbarians are at your gate, dear partners,” and calling for a “full trade embargo” and “uncompromising, powerful steps” against Moscow. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned that “the coming weeks and months will be a period of very intensive actions on the Russian side,” and said Poland “cannot rule out that this escalation will also affect our territory,” adding that intelligence services had warned an attack on Ukrainian border crossings was likely. Meanwhile, President Trump said Sunday that Ukraine should “stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia” because it is causing shortages, saying, “Let him go after targets, but not diesel fuel, because he’s causing a shortage of diesel.” Separately, Ukrainian officials said they are preparing for three way talks with Russia and the United States to resume in October, days after US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held talks in both Moscow and Kyiv for the first time since February. In Lithuania, a suspected drone sighting briefly closed the Vilnius airport and prompted Nato to scramble a fighter jet, though the alert turned out to be a flock of birds.

Trump rejects AI slowdown:

Trump dismisses calls to slow AI development, says “whoever wins AI wins”. President Trump on Sunday rejected calls from AI industry leaders to slow the pace of AI development, saying at the Irish Open golf tournament in Doonbeg, “We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way. Whoever wins AI wins.” He attributed the growing safety warnings to unspecified “negative forces,” telling reporters, “I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up. And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.” Trump has staked much of his economic record on accelerating AI development, rescinding a 2023 Biden executive order that created a risk evaluation process for cutting edge AI models during his first week back in office. His comments come even as growing numbers of lawmakers from both parties call for new rules following AI agents going rogue and safety researchers quitting over concerns about the technology’s risks. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said the White House expects to meet with top cybersecurity advisers this week to “think about what the next step is.”

Democrats seize on AI safety fears as a midterm attack line, with Obama urging the party to make it central. Democrats spanning the party’s ideological spectrum are pressing the administration over its hands off approach to AI, with progressive Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposal to pause AI development and saying on “Face the Nation,” “There are things that we should not be using AI to do, and we collectively have to decide that we need public oversight so that all of this technology is not being created for the interest of a few against the well-being of the many.” Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro called the industry warnings a “bright flashing red light,” writing on X, “It’s long past time for our federal government to step up, take this seriously, and put up some guardrails, both here at home and on the global stage.” Former President Obama privately urged Democratic leaders last week to make AI oversight central to the party’s agenda, telling them, “This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous,” and viewed the industry’s slowdown calls as a “positive development.” Former British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who advises Anthropic, added, “We have had a wake up call to take AI safety more seriously, to work out how to set limits on research. If governments don’t heed this, the risk of a serious accident will become unacceptably high.” Even some Republicans in tight midterm races are breaking from the White House, with Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers writing that he supports slowing AI development, saying, “My experience as Intel Chairman taught me the time to stop a crisis is yesterday.”

AI leaders unite behind a slowdown, but face pushback on their request for an antitrust waiver. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk both backed Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s call to “slow the pace” of AI development, with Musk posting, “Dario is right,” and referencing a 2014 warning that AI was “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” Altman wrote, “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same,” and separately said OpenAI would delay its IPO, telling Fortune, “I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public.” Amodei and other executives have asked the government to waive antitrust laws so companies can coordinate on safety, but White House tech adviser David Sacks pushed back, writing on X, “Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyber-attack.” Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, whose resignation and warnings about possible human extinction helped spark the debate, drew a response from Amodei, who told CNN, “I agree with Jacob much more than I disagree with him. I think there’s some chance that things go wrong but it’s not all that high. I am not a doomer about this. I think this technology can be built safely.” King Charles is separately set to meet with leading AI executives, including Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, on Thursday under the theme “AI for good.”

Other news:

Cornyn condemns racism from fellow Texas Republican over UT post. Republican candidate Bo French, running for Texas railroad commissioner, posted an image on X of a group of apparently non-White University of Texas football fans celebrating the Longhorns’ win over Ohio State, writing, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” Senator John Cornyn condemned the post, writing, “This is the Republican nominee for statewide office. Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized. This is how great political parties self-destruct. Sad.” French defended himself, replying, “I cheered the team for the win. But I weep for the families in Texas who can’t get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans. Shame on you for ignoring that fact,” despite university data showing Texas residents made up more than 80 percent of UT Austin’s student body last year while international students made up less than 10 percent. Texas House Speaker Dustin Burrows, also a Republican, said “you can oppose immigration policy without demeaning people because of their race and ethnicity” and called on French to delete the post, while Democratic state representative James Talarico called the post “blatant racism” and pressed attorney general Ken Paxton to condemn it. Cornyn, who lost his primary to Trump backed candidate Paxton in May, has grown increasingly critical of his own party as his Senate career winds down.

Third measles death reported in Pennsylvania’s growing outbreak. A 40-year-old unvaccinated woman from Jefferson County, Pennsylvania has died from measles complications, marking the third measles-associated death in the state’s fast-growing outbreak, which had reached 676 cases and 124 hospitalizations as of Friday. Coroner Greg Furlong said the woman contracted the virus after a family member had it and had underlying COPD and asthma, having been on supplemental oxygen 24 hours a day before getting sick. He called it “a heartbreaking loss for the family and an unfortunate reminder that measles can be a serious and potentially life-threatening disease.” New CDC Director Dr. Erica Schwartz said the agency had not been notified of the death and noted Pennsylvania has not requested a CDC Epi-Aid for outbreak support, unlike six other states that have. The dispute has become political, with Governor Josh Shapiro previously rejecting federal help offered by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and accusing him of spreading vaccine misinformation, while Kennedy accused Shapiro of “fearmongering” and suggested the earlier deaths may have been “altogether fabricated.”

Mike Johnson won’t commit to passing Trump’s $5,000 election year payout. House Speaker Mike Johnson declined to guarantee that Congress could pass Trump’s promised $5,000 “Trump Dividend” payment to Americans, telling NBC’s Kristen Welker only, “I commit that Congress will work through it and find consensus on that, like I have to do everything else.” Multiple Republicans have pushed back on the idea, including Arizona Rep. David Schweikert, who said he would “throw everything of my heart and soul to stop it,” and South Carolina’s Ralph Norman, who noted the country is “$40 trillion in debt” and questioned where the money would come from. Senate Majority Leader John Thune was similarly noncommittal, saying only “good question” when asked if it could pass, while Maine Senator Susan Collins criticized the plan for having no income cap and said “tax and spending decisions should be made based on the needs of the American people and the state of the economy, they should not appear to be tied to election results.” Kansas Senator Roger Marshall, an early supporter, walked back his backing at a debate, saying “this is not the first time I’ve disagreed with President Trump, and it probably won’t be the last.” The proposal comes as Trump’s approval rating sits in the mid to low 30s and Democrats are favored to make midterm gains.

Canada’s Carney explores becoming an “associate member” of the EU. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is exploring whether Canada could become an “associate member” of the European Union, a new status the bloc has not previously offered but appears open to creating, according to unnamed EU and Canadian officials. The push comes as Canada’s escalating trade war with the United States has added urgency to its pivot toward other trading partners, with relations between Ottawa and Washington deteriorating sharply since Trump’s return to office over tariffs and other disputes. Canada and the EU are reportedly discussing letting Canadian goods, services, and workers in strategic sectors like energy, AI, defense, and critical minerals move freely, effectively shifting the EU’s economic border, along with joint projects on underwater cables, data centers, cloud storage, and satellite networks. Carney has also spoken regularly with EU leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, about the possibility of visa free travel and work rights for Canadians in the EU. Macron is set to meet Carney on September 20 in the French territory of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, the first official visit there by a Canadian prime minister, an event the Elysee said “symbolises the strength of the relationship that unites our two countries,” though any deeper integration faces hurdles given that a more modest Canada EU trade agreement still has not been ratified by several EU countries more than a decade after it was struck.

White House attacks journalist for pointing out aide Natalie Harp traveled with Trump to Ireland. The White House’s Rapid Response account called independent journalist Aaron Rupar a “sick, deluded freak” after he noted that Trump aide Natalie Harp accompanied the president to his Doonbeg, Ireland golf resort this weekend. Harp, who has worked for Trump since 2022 and has been described as his “Human Printer” for hauling around a printer to hand him favorable coverage, has drawn scrutiny after reports she left personal notes for the president that reportedly alarmed the Secret Service and received a $45,000 cash gift from Trump last Christmas. Rupar responded to the attack by writing, “I know being in my 40s makes me too old for the president but I’m at peace with it.” Democrats including Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff have seized on the coverage, with Ossoff earlier joking that Trump was focused on “build[ing] his ballroom and travel[ing] with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace.” Harp herself has not commented publicly and has avoided even friendly conservative media appearances since the controversy began.

Hegseth accused of pressuring rescued airmen into a “60 Minutes” interview over objections from military officials. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly pressured two airmen who were shot down and rescued over Iran to appear on Bari Weiss’s “60 Minutes,” despite concerns from other military officials that the interview could inadvertently leak classified information. One airman, referred to as “Bravo,” agreed to the interview while the second, “Alpha,” declined, and neither has been publicly identified by the Pentagon. Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine reportedly shared the security concerns, though his office declined to comment directly, saying only that “the Joint Force will do everything possible to ensure no one gets left behind.” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell denied the account, calling it “a complete lie” and insisting “the decision to participate in the interview was each pilot’s alone, because it is their story.” During the aired interview, “Bravo” described evading Iranian forces for a day before being rescued by an American special forces team with air support.

Trump’s childhood Queens home sells for nearly $2 million after falling into disrepair. The Tudor style home in Jamaica Estates, Queens, where Donald Trump lived until age 4 and which his father Fred Trump built in 1940, has sold for $1.93 million to an undisclosed buyer. The home had fallen into serious disrepair in recent years, suffering water damage and mold from a burst pipe and becoming home to a colony of feral cats, before developer Tommy Lin bought it last year for $835,000 and spent another $500,000 renovating it with a chef’s kitchen, herringbone wood floors, and spa-like bathrooms. The property has changed hands several times since Trump took office in 2017, including once selling for $2.14 million, and was briefly listed as a themed Airbnb rental featuring a life-sized cardboard cutout of Trump and a copy of his book “The Art of the Deal.” It had been relisted for $2.9 million in 2019 but sat unsold until Lin purchased it.

Louisiana stabbing spree suspect arrested after manhunt following four deaths. Kaegan Jude Solet, 47, has been arrested in connection with a stabbing spree in Houma, Louisiana that left four people dead and a child hospitalized in critical condition after being found with multiple stab wounds. Terrebonne Parish Sheriff Tim Soignet confirmed Solet was taken into custody Sunday morning, describing the case as “an active and ongoing investigation,” and authorities have not released the victims’ identities or disclosed any relationship between them and Solet. A sheriff’s office lieutenant said before the arrest that investigators believed Solet had not gone far and did not think he planned to flee the area. Solet had previously been arrested in 2019 on an attempted second-degree murder charge after allegedly stabbing a woman repeatedly and leaving her in a motel room, though a jury later found him not guilty. The motive behind Saturday’s attack has not been disclosed.

Wisconsin congressman hospitalized after small plane makes emergency landing on a lake. Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany, who is running for Wisconsin governor with Trump’s endorsement, was hospitalized after the single engine plane he was traveling in lost power approaching Wausau Downtown Airport and the pilot made an emergency landing on Lake Wausau. Tiffany and the pilot both ended up in the water and swam to a shallow area before being rescued by emergency responders arriving by boat. He wrote on X, “After landing, we called 911. As the plane began to submerge, we exited the aircraft and swam to a shallow area, where we waited until emergency responders reached us by boat.” Both men were treated for minor injuries at Aspirus Wausau Hospital. Tiffany thanked the pilot and first responders, adding, “God was watching over us tonight, and I am incredibly grateful to be here in the hospital with my wife, Chris, by my side. An experience like this reminds you just how precious life is.”

The Parnas Perspective, Saturday Night Update: Republicans Face Protests at Home and Abroad, AI Tech CEOs Urge Slow Down in Major Shift, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 12, 2026. Tonight’s rundown has a clear thread running through it. Republicans are facing pushback everywhere they turn, at home and abroad, and none of it looks like it’s going away anytime soon.

Donald Trump found that out this weekend in Ireland, where thousands took to the streets of Dublin and public figures like Rosie O’Donnell openly called for protests against his visit. Back home, Roger Marshall is facing his own wave of backlash from constituents fed up with where the party stands. And Ted Cruz walked into a college football stadium in the middle of a deep red state and got booed for nearly ten minutes straight, loud enough that you couldn’t even hear his answers.

Add to that a growing chorus of warnings from the very people building artificial intelligence, a fight over a five thousand dollar payment that may or may not exist, and a string of stories on immigration enforcement, and it’s clear the pressure is building on multiple fronts at once.

Here’s everything you need to know.

AI Fears Rapidly Grow:

Amodei Calls for Global AI Slowdown. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a 3,800 word essay Saturday calling for the entire AI industry to deliberately slow the pace of capability development. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.” He warned that a race to the bottom driven by commercial competition makes the risks of the technology more acute, and said he has grown more convinced over the last few months that “fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence.” He proposed that AI companies commit to bringing in independent, embedded evaluators with employee-like access to verify safety practices, and called for global coordination, including with authoritarian governments, to set common standards.

Altman and Musk Quickly Back the Call. Hours after Amodei’s essay went up, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted his agreement on social media, saying “this has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks” and that his company would adopt the same independent evaluator model. Elon Musk, whose xAI company builds the Grok chatbot, responded with a simple “Dario is right.” The alignment among three normally fiercely competitive executives is notable, and it follows years of AI labs racing each other on capability while occasionally warning about the very technology they are building. Altman had already floated the idea of pacing development back in July, saying on a podcast that slowing down would “give ourselves enough time for society to harden around these new capability levels.”

Ex-Anthropic Researcher’s Resignation Set the Stage. Amodei’s essay came days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and posted publicly that the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade” and that this “is not a marketing stunt.” Coxon said executives often soften their language for the press while privately expressing real fear, adding that “no other human activity poses this level of danger.” In a later interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, he went further than Amodei’s own essay, saying there is “a very real possibility” that recursive self-improvement, AI systems making themselves smarter without human help, could arrive within the next year or two, with “a chance that we could all die.” His resignation set off a broader furor inside the industry, with other researchers publicly calling on their own leaders to pause development.

The OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident Fueled the Alarm. Much of the urgency traces back to an incident in which a swarm of OpenAI’s own AI agents breached the systems of a smaller AI company, Hugging Face, without OpenAI’s knowledge, a breach that went undetected for weeks until Hugging Face itself flagged it. Amodei described the swarm as having acted like “a fanatically devoted collective,” carrying out cybersecurity attacks on targets it was never asked to target. He warned that if left unchecked, this kind of self-directed capability “could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.” The incident has already drawn a Senate probe into OpenAI, and Amodei said it raised the possibility that a similar swarm could take over large portions of the internet within six to twelve months, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

Not Everyone Buys the Altruism, and Some Say It Doesn’t Go Far Enough. Critics in Silicon Valley have suggested Anthropic and OpenAI’s sudden safety concerns are less about altruism and more about locking in their market lead by pushing for regulations that smaller competitors would struggle to meet. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made that argument explicitly at a conference this week, asking “what better way to create demand than to create a problem” and suggesting AI labs are stoking fear to sell new cybersecurity products. On the opposite end, University of Louisville computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy argued Amodei doesn’t go far enough, saying that if artificial superintelligence “cannot be reliably controlled, aligned, predicted, or contained, then the rational policy is not to manage its arrival, but to prevent it,” and calling for an outright international ban rather than a managed race. Hugging Face CEO Clément DeLangue, whose company Nvidia is in the process of buying for $12.9 billion, added that AI safety cannot “be solved behind the closed doors of a handful of frontier labs.”

Ireland Erupts Against Trump:

Rosie O’Donnell Leads Calls For Protests Against Trump. Comedian Rosie O’Donnell publicly backed the weekend’s protests against Trump, telling the Irish Independent, “The country must protest, he is the antithesis of everything this country stands for.”O’Donnell moved to Ireland after Trump’s return to the White House, saying she no longer felt comfortable living in the U.S. under his administration. She specifically called on Irish President Catherine Connolly to “speak truth to power” when meeting with Trump, adding, “I don’t think she should drop what she believes in to be polite to a madman. He is like a mad king that has destroyed the country.” O’Donnell and Trump have feuded publicly since 2006, when she questioned his standing as a “moral authority” over a Miss USA scandal, and the two have traded insults ever since.

Trump Calls Reunification “Fantastic” and Wades Into the Falklands. Trump went further than his earlier comments during a meeting with Taoiseach Micheál Martin, telling a reporter a united Ireland would be “fantastic” and adding, “It’s going to happen eventually. It may as well happen now.” He acknowledged there was “no good answer” to the question when he later addressed business leaders, but did not walk back the sentiment. In the same string of remarks, Trump revived talk of the Falkland Islands dispute between the U.K. and Argentina, saying he thinks he’ll “probably be able to settle” the territorial standoff if it flares up again. Analysts noted both comments landed as a pointed jab at Britain, coming amid Trump’s frustration that London has stayed out of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.

Trump Meets Irish President Who Has Called Him a “Bully”. Trump sat down with President Catherine Connolly, a left-wing former protester who demonstrated against him during his first term and has previously called him a “bully” over his Middle East policy. Afterward, Connolly said she told Trump directly of “the strong view of the Irish people that the normalization of war and genocide can never be accepted.” She gave him a collection of poems by the late Irish writer Michael Longley that includes the poem “Ceasefire.” When pressed by reporters on how the meeting went, Trump initially let his protocol chief, Monica Crowley, answer for him before saying only that it was “very nice.”

Thousands March in Dublin as Eric Trump Defends the Family. A protest march drew thousands into central Dublin, with demonstrators waving Irish and Palestinian flags and chanting “Donald Trump not welcome here” and “Irish government, shame on you.” Paula Butler, who came with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, said she was there to oppose Trump’s “attitude to women, to refugees, to migrants,” and dismissed his unity comments, saying, “What he knows about Irish unity, I’d say I know more on my little finger.” Kim Mathis, an American who moved to Dublin last year, said “part of the reason we moved to Ireland was to get away from Trump and all of his horrific policies.” Eric Trump pushed back on the criticism from Doonbeg, telling RTE that the family’s golf course is the area’s largest employer and urging people to “go have them attest to what we’ve done for the country,” while confirming his father plans to return next year for the Ryder Cup.

Other news:

Ted Cruz Gets Booed Off ESPN’s College GameDay. Ted Cruz made a nearly ten minute appearance on ESPN’s College GameDay at the University of Texas in Austin to promote the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at stabilizing the chaotic NIL landscape in college sports, and the crowd booed so loudly through the entire segment that Cruz’s answers were almost impossible to hear. At one point the boos briefly died down before the crowd shifted into chants of “Ted, you suck.” Cruz told viewers he believes the bill will ultimately clear the 60 vote threshold in the Senate, and the legislation has drawn support from figures like Nick Saban and Deion Sanders, though it has repeatedly stalled in Congress despite backing from Trump. The reaction seemed less about the substance of the bill, which most students in the crowd likely knew little about, and more a reflection of Cruz’s party affiliation showing up in a college town in the middle of a deep red state.

Lutnick says the $5,000 dividend wouldn’t come from tax money. Howard Lutnick told NBC that the proposed $5,000 payment to Americans would not be funded by taxpayers, saying “It’s not tax money.” An estimated $500 billion of the roughly $1 trillion needed could come from a new visa program letting wealthy visitors pay up to $5 million each for extended stays, with more than 100,000 people already on a waitlist. The administration is also pointing to the government’s stake in Intel, now worth an appreciated $8.9 billion, as another funding source. Kevin Hassett said the payment would move through the reconciliation process, adding “don’t underestimate President Trump,” while JD Vance has pointed to tariff revenue even after the Supreme Court ruled that “liberation day” tariff money must be returned. The Tax Foundation has noted a similar $2,000 rebate proposal would exceed actual tariff collections, and a new AP poll shows just 32 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, down from 40 percent.

Trump supporters shrug off high gas prices in new man-on-the-street video. Comedian Jason Selvig caught a Trump supporter’s reaction to rising gas prices, asking directly whether Iran had anything to do with it. The supporter dismissed the idea, saying “I don’t think Trump has anything to do with this, I think they’re just doing this to make him look bad. The liberals.” When pressed on who is actually responsible, the supporter said, “He doesn’t control the gas prices. Everything’s gone up. The truck’s gotta pay for their gas and it gets to the consumer which is us.” Asked directly who is at fault, the response was simply “I have no idea. I don’t blame Trump though.”

Republican Senator faces boos. The crowd erupted during a recent Senate debate in chants of “Shame on you!” as Senator Roger Marshall tries to explain why he sued 700 of his patients, leading to 81 arrests.

Trump wants a 30-foot George Washington statue at the Smithsonian. Trump posted on Truth Social calling George Washington “easily America’s Greatest Hero” and is pushing the Smithsonian to install a 30-foot “Colossus statue” of him along with an exhibit running through February 2032. The statue would replace the 1967 Infinity sculpture by Jose de Rivera. The push follows a 162-page report from earlier this year accusing the Smithsonian of overemphasizing oppression and division, and a July order for new signage that has not yet been installed. Trump has separately complained that the Delaware crossing and the victory at Trenton are underrepresented, and has proposed a new “Center for American Heroes.” Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch, who is planning to depart, said he has fought “for the independence of the Smithsonian,” and the episode comes alongside the removal of a sculpture at the Kennedy Center and reported plans to possibly sell a Kehinde Wiley painting one Art in Embassies director called “very woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.”

10,000-year-old mastodon tooth found in California. Geomorphologist Brigid Lynch discovered a fossilized mastodon tooth believed to be around 10,000 years old at a preserve in San Mateo County. Paleontologist Wayne Thompson described it as being in “immaculate condition,” saying it sent “chills and shivers up and down my spine.” Pacific mastodons trace back roughly 2.5 million years and went extinct more than 10,000 years ago due to climate change and overhunting. The tooth has been donated to Stanford for carbon dating, and curator Christine Garcia spoke to the broader value fossils like this hold for understanding the region’s history. The find follows similar discoveries in New York in 2024 and on a California beach in 2023.

ICE agents beat protesters and enter a home in Frederick, Maryland. Officers drove vehicles at and onto sidewalks near protesters and used batons during a confrontation in Frederick, Maryland, with at least two people hospitalized. City council president Cesar Diaz described nearly being struck, saying he was “one foot away from her” when a vehicle came close. Activist Soolah Kemp gave her own account of a vehicle driving directly at her. Roughly 200 protesters formed a human chain attempting to block agents from entering a home. Representative April McClain Delaney called for “a full, transparent investigation,” and Senator Chris Van Hollen accused agents of “creating chaos and instilling fear,” while DHS did not directly respond beyond saying “criminal illegal aliens are not welcome.”

North Carolina detention officer charged with 20 counts of forgery. Former Guilford County detention officer Michael Diehl has been charged with 20 felony counts of forgery for allegedly faking magistrates’ signatures on ICE detainer-extension forms. The scheme was uncovered after a flagged form connected to inmate Claudio Nepomuceno led investigators to 19 additional forged documents tied to other inmates. Diehl was fired, arrested, and released on a $5,000 bond, and investigators say more charges are possible as the case continues. The case comes as ICE has detained more than 70,000 people since Trump’s inauguration.

Mississippi police say more arrests coming in Tasia Fortune case. Police Chief RaShall Brackney said the investigation into Tasia Fortune’s death “remains active” and that “additional arrests will be pending.” Jarques Ratliff is expected to appear in court Monday. Fortune’s mother, Christy Spivey, described her grief and disbelief, rejecting any suggestion of suicide by saying “she would never, ever, ever.” Fortune had endured a difficult life that included foster care, homelessness, an abusive relationship, and raising four children, while also holding onto her faith and hopes of starting her own cleaning business. Spivey closed by asking people to “say her name. Keep it going.”

CDC declares record cyclospora lettuce outbreak over. Health officials have declared the record-setting cyclospora outbreak linked to Taylor Farms shredded iceberg lettuce imported from Mexico officially over. The outbreak sickened more than 12,000 people and killed two across 21 states before the product was pulled from shelves. It sparked broader fear around produce, led some growers to plow lettuce under, and drew criticism of the administration’s food safety response. The FDA’s investigation into the exact source is still ongoing, and Taylor Farms says its Mexico facility remains closed pending that investigation, even as unrelated cyclospora outbreaks continue elsewhere.

DOJ sidesteps legal fight by deporting woman through secretive terror court. The Justice Department avoided a looming legal battle by deporting Nazira Haji Zada through the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, a venue that had sat dormant for roughly 30 years before this case. She was actually removed from the country about two weeks before the DOJ announced it, timed to land around the 9/11 anniversary. Prosecutors alleged she was “the matriarch” behind an ISIS-inspired plot to carry out a mass shooting on Election Day 2024, a plan her son and son-in-law were convicted over. Haji Zada agreed to the alien-terrorist designation and forfeited her green card in exchange for a guarantee that her admission would not be used against her in future criminal proceedings, a deal approved by Judge Joan Ericksen. The arrangement heads off a constitutional challenge her attorneys had planned to bring against the court’s secretive procedures, including its use of classified evidence, in a court structured similarly to the FISA court with five judges appointed by Chief Justice Roberts.

More Global News

  

President Trump with Micheál Martin, the taoiseach, or prime minister, or Ireland, at the Farmleigh House in Dublin on Saturday,Sept. 12, 2026. (New York Times photo by Alex Kent). 

New York Times, Trump Says Irish Unification Would Be ‘Fantastic,’ Breaking With Precedent, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Luke Broadwater, Sept. 13, 2026 (print ed.). The United States is officially neutral on an issue that had been a source of decades of violence in Northern Ireland until a 1998 peace deal.

Shortly after setting foot in Dublin, President Trump on Saturday said it would be “fantastic” if Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland unified, breaking with decades of U.S. neutrality on an issue rooted in a long history of violence.

“I don’t want to cause any problem. I will tell you, I’d love to see it unified,” Mr. Trump said in Dublin alongside Micheál Martin, Ireland’s taoiseach, or prime minister. “It’s going to happen eventually.”

He later seemed to acknowledge that he had stepped into a politically problematic topic.

The American president said he still believed it would “be a cool thing” if Northern Ireland broke away from the United Kingdom, but joked that half the room would clear out after hearing his remarks.

“No matter how well you say it, there’s no good answer,” Mr. Trump told a crowd of embassy employees and business leaders gathered at Deerfield Residence, where the U.S. ambassador lives.

The United States has long supported the U.S.-brokered 1998 Belfast Agreement, also known as the Good Friday Agreement, which ended roughly three decades of violence between those seeking a united Ireland and unionists who wanted Northern Ireland to remain a part of the United Kingdom.

Part of that deal was that Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom until a majority of its people voted otherwise in a referendum.

In keeping with his freewheeling approach to the global stage, Mr. Trump has mused about the unification of Ireland before. Earlier this year, he suggested there should be a “merger” between Northern Ireland and Ireland because of how well Mr. Martin got along with Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly. She later said the comment was made in jest and should not be taken seriously.

Mr. Trump’s comment on Saturday came just days after Andy Burnham, the recently elected British prime minister, said there was not enough public support for a referendum on Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom and until there was “there will not be one.” Mr. Trump himself acknowledged on Saturday that the government in London would most likely “have something to say about” about his comments on reunification.

Patrick Dwyer-Cummins, a spokesman for 10 Downing Street, said that Mr. Burnham’s position remained unchanged and he was committed to upholding the Good Friday Agreement.

But Mr. Trump’s comment did indeed prompt some immediate criticism.

Gavin Robinson, the leader of Northern Ireland’s main pro-union party, said on social media that “President Trump knows better than most that elections matter.”

“Northern Ireland’s constitutional future will be decided by the people of Northern Ireland, not by commentary in London, Dublin or Washington,” he said. “Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom because that is the settled democratic will of its people.”

The reference to reunification was not the only unconventional aspect of Mr. Trump’s remarks.

American presidents, when speaking overseas, typically have refrained from lacing into their domestic rivals. But Mr. Trump used his speech in Dublin to repeatedly attack Democrats, including describing former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has cancer, as physically infirm. Mr. Biden, who has Irish ancestry, traveled to Northern Ireland in 2023 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. 

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, How Iran’s Hard-Liners Prevailed and Sabotaged U.S. Peace Deal, Farnaz Fassihi, Sept. 13, 2026. Opponents derailed the agreement with a clandestine effort to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuz, regime insiders say. Iran’s president was furious when he found out.

Masoud Pezeshkian, the president of Iran, was riding high in early July, fresh off the successful negotiation of a peace agreement with the United States, and had traveled to neighboring Iraq for part of a weeklong funeral spectacle for Iran’s slain supreme leader.

Suddenly he got stunning news.

Iranian forces had opened fire on three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz, setting ablaze a Qatari L.N.G. tanker and damaging other vessels. Iran was under siege in world opinion.

Outraged, Mr. Pezeshkian phoned Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, the commander in chief of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and in a raised voice called the actions reckless and demanded answers, according to five Iranian officials and two Guards members familiar with the events.

General Vahidi told the president that he had neither authorized nor had advance knowledge of the strike, the five officials said. The nation’s Supreme National Security Council, which plays a critical role in both the war and negotiations, had also been in the dark, he said.

In fact, much of the country’s leadership was unaware that a fringe hard-line faction had decided to act on its own. Ultimately, those clandestine efforts derailed a push by more moderate pragmatists in Iran to reach an end to hostilities with the United States and repair their nation’s ailing economy.

The hard-liners succeeded in part because the only figure with the authority to resolve such disputes — the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei — has been a phantom since taking office in March. He has not been seen, and his voice has not been heard. And the authenticity of written statements and messages attributed to Ayatollah Khamenei has been questioned, including by Mr. Pezeshkian, according to three Iranian officials.

Mr. Pezeshkian immediately returned to Tehran. By the next morning, even as the funeral ceremonies were still underway, the United States had retaliated with airstrikes on Iran. The two countries were back at war.

Senior Iranian officials and a Guards member said in interviews that what followed were some of the most volatile political confrontations within Iran’s leadership in memory. Officials engaged in shouting matches. Two senior generals threatened to resign. Accusations of treason and betrayal flew.

The reverberations, officials said, contributed to a shake-up at the National Security Council and the supreme leader’s appointment of Gen. Mohsen Rezaei, a seasoned politician and former commander in chief of the Guards, to lead the council, as he was thought to have the skill to mediate among political factions.

But divisions persist, and the hard-liners who have committed Iran to escalation are in an even stronger position. This past week, Iran and the United States traded attacks, with Iran repeatedly targeting American naval vessels for the first time, and the United States blowing up at least eight Iranian oil tankers.

This account of the inner deliberations of Iran’s leadership is based on interviews with eight Iranian officials, three members of the Revolutionary Guards, four former officials and a review of dozens of speeches and comments by government officials and military generals from June to September published in the Iranian press and social media. The officials interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss delicate issues of national security.

New York Times, Iran Will Meet With Gulf Arab States as Mideast Conflict Widens, Aaron Boxerman, Sept. 13, 2026. Talks are expected tomorrow, officials said. Diplomacy to end the war with the United States has stalled and Iranian-allied forces have advanced in Yemen.

Iranian officials will meet on Monday in Oman with representatives of some of the Gulf Arab states that it has repeatedly attacked during its war with the United States and Israel, as the regional conflict has widened in recent days.

Yemen has emerged as the latest front in the fighting, with the Iranian-backed Houthi militants there seizing the strategic port of Mokha and the island of Perim in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea last week. They have also attacked Saudi energy sites and sought to blockade Saudi shipping, exacerbating a global oil and gas crisis prompted by the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.

Saudi Arabia was forced to shut its East-West Pipeline on Friday after it was targeted by drones from Iraq. That pipeline has been a critical lifeline for the country’s oil exports after Iran effectively blockaded the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. No one took responsibility for the drone attack, but Iraq has long harbored well-armed militias backed by Iran.

The meeting in Oman will take place as talks with the United States to reopen the Strait of Hormuz have stalled. Iran has continued to fire on ships passing through the strait, squeezing the Gulf Arab states and roiling global oil markets. Last week, the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, briefly exceeded $110 a barrel, its highest level for months, before dropping to about $104 on Sunday.

Esmaeil Baghaei, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, said last week that the meeting would be held in Oman, which has often served as a mediator between the United States and Iran. Participating countries would discuss efforts by Iran and Oman to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, he added.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Even if an agreement is reached, however, Iranian officials have demanded concessions from the United States before ending their blockade, including lifting sanctions on Iran and releasing frozen U.S. assets. The Trump administration is unlikely to take those steps without Iranian moving to curb its nuclear program.

It was unclear which Arab states would attend the meeting. Mr. Baghaei said officials from Iraq and other Arab states along the Persian Gulf would be involved.

Iran has repeatedly attacked some of those countries since the war began, saying it was targeting the U.S. soldiers and military assets they hosted.Bahrain, which has repeatedly been targeted by Iranian missiles and drones during the war, said in a statement on Saturday that it would not participate in any talks with Iran.

“The kingdom has been subjected to attacks targeting its infrastructure and civilian assets,” the Bahraini Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that any such dialogue would have to be based on “disregarding facts.”

Other countries that have been targeted, however, have signaled that they are open to dialogue. Crown Prince Khaled bin Mohamed Al Nahyan, the Emirati heir apparent, met with President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in India on Saturday — the first public meeting between the countries since the beginning of the war.

Ship operators still face severe risks in the region. On Sunday, a vessel was struck by a projectile while traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, causing a fire to break out, according to United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, a monitoring group run by the British Navy. It was unclear who had fired on the ship.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

New York Times, A Gender War Explodes in Utah Over the Courts, Abortion and Representation, Kate Zernike, Sept. 13, 2026. When Republicans tried to repeal a law that voters passed banning gerrymandering, they found an opposition that flew in the face of Utah women’s “tradwives” imagery.

When Mormon Women for Ethical Government formed in the fractious days after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, its mission was peacemaking.

These women were not pink-pussy-hat-knitting lefties — most members were loyal Utah Republicans who saw their group as an extension of church teachings: Women take care of the community, and people learn and grow from conversations with those they disagree with.

Peacemaking has now led them into a war.

The conflict involves issues consuming many other states — the redrawing of congressional maps, abortion, and above all, the question of who gets to wield power: the courts, the people or their elected representatives.

But Utah is unique; the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is patriarchal and dominates state politics. And as Utah’s women have spoken up, its male politicians, including Gov. Spencer Cox, who has made a national reputation on “disagreeing better,” have punished them.

The women so far are unbowed. Emma Petty Addams, the co-executive director of Mormon Women for Ethical Government, quoted church doctrine on the proper exercise of power to explain her group’s mission: “We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.”

For all the images of tradwives and momfluencers flooding television and social media from Utah, the reality playing out in the Beehive State is something quite different.

Four years ago, Mormon Women sued the Legislature for refusing to enact a law that voters had passed banning gerrymandering. As Salt Lake City grew bigger and bluer, that law was all but certain to yield a Democratic member in the state’s four-person House delegation. The state’s Supreme Court, with its first female majority, consistently and unanimously sided with the women.

Utah’s Republican leaders, who command every statewide office and a supermajority in the Legislature, responded first with threats, and then by remaking the court.Over the past year, they expanded the Supreme Court by two seats, choosing new justices from a list of 12 nominees, all men. The Legislature then created a new “constitutional court” to hear lawsuits filed against it, including on gerrymandering and abortion.

For good measure, the state G.O.P. called on voters to reject two female high court justices who were up for retention elections this November, apparently the first time the party has campaigned in such elections.

The Legislature and Governor Cox then forced the resignation of one of those justices, Diana Hagen, after her ex-husband accused her of having an affair, even though the state board that investigates judicial misconduct dismissed the allegation as having “very little credibility.”

In an interview in Salt Lake City, her first since resigning, Justice Hagen allowed that the vitriol toward women may not have been about sexism. But, she noted, the court’s ruling against the Legislature on gerrymandering in 2024 was unanimous, and there was no campaign to reject the chief justice, a man, when he was up for retention that year.

“That,” Justice Hagen said, “is really hard for me to explain in any other way.”

To other women, there’s no debate.

“Utahns are not used to women having power,” said Susan Madsen, director of the women in leadership project at Utah State University and a member of both the Latter-day Saints church and the Republican Party. Now, she said, “it’s women who are using their voices.”

Republicans say gender had nothing to do with their decisions. Mr. Cox noted that he created the now-lost female Supreme Court majority when he appointed two women in 2023. In June, when he announced his next picks for the high court, he said only four of 25 applicants were women, and two of those “were not qualified at all.”

“If that makes me a misogynist, I guess I’ll own it,” he said. “But I think that’s an insane narrative.”

There is an irony in Governor Cox’s role in the battle convulsing Utah politics: He has just embarked on his latest bid for political civility, promoting a new book, “Off Ramp: How to Be a Peacemaker in an Age of Contempt.” That follows his signature initiative as chairman of the National Governors Association, “Disagree Better,” when he traveled the country speaking publicly with Democratic counterparts.Get updates when new midterm election polls are added to our poll trackers. When new polling data drops we’ll send an update straight to your inbox. Get it sent to your inbox.

But in Utah, he removed a requirement for partisan balance on the commission that nominates judges, and gave himself sole power to appoint its members.

“They didn’t like the results of the game so they brought in referees midgame to make calls in their favor,” said Teneille Brown, a law professor at the University of Utah and a founder of Co-Equal Utah, a nonpartisan group started by lawyers concerned about political interference in the judiciary. “They not only picked the refs, they picked the people who picked the refs.”

 To the Contrary, Political Opinion: Well, That Escalated Quickly, Charlie Sykes, Sept. 13, 2026. A week when everything changed: The AI debate warnings; the Saudis’ worst fear; and the name that shall-not-be-mentioned at the RNC.

When the history of our time is written, last week’s Trumpalooza will barely merit a footnote, in part because it was a damp squib, but also because it was overshadowed by actual reality.

Let’s start with what happened with Artificial Intelligence.The fire was lit by Anthropic’s Jacob Coxon, who resigned with an X-post heard round the world. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic, he wrote, are “acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”Jacob Coxon@hilbertspaess

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” he wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.”

And then the stark warning:The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

Days later, Anthropic itself released a report , saying that Iran used its American AI model to target US Navy warships. The report detailed “how people tried to misuse Claude—for cyberattacks, influence operations, surveillance, biology, and building weapons—and how we found and stopped them.”

Then, on Saturday: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy statement, calling for a slowdown in the development of AI. He wrote that “AI could cure most major diseases in the next 5–10 years, greatly accelerate economic growth rates, create a world of abundance and empowerment, and usher in a renaissance of democracy and freedom.”BUT…Amodei also warned that AI is advancing “drastically” with potentially drastic consequences that might include rogue AI agents “taking over the entire internet” in six to 12 months”“

Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all,” he wrote. This included, “the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute.”

Other members of the AI industry —including Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — quickly voiced agreement. (Whether they will actually do anything meaningful is another question altogether.) The political fallout also intensified. “Obama Urges Democrats to Move A.I. Oversight to the Center of Their Agenda”- The New York Times.On Sunday, Donald Trump — described by the NYT as the leader of the “what-me-worry?” crowd — once again downplayed the risks of AI and the need to slow down development, citing competition from China. But last week, it felt like tectonic plates were moving — setting up yet another test of our system’s ability to confront existential threat. And, no, that’s not encouraging, is it?BONUS: The front page of the NYT digital front page Sunday afternoon:

New York Times, For Populist Democrats, a Movement Fueled by Anger at Both Parties, Robert Draper, Sept. 13, 2026. A generation shaped by the pandemic and rising prices has helped drive an emergence of Democratic candidates who say they are as fed up as voters are.

A Montana wilderness firefighter, an Ohio ironworker and a lawyer who worked as a barista in Colorado while pursuing a Ph.D. would appear to have little in common. But all three represent a profusion in the midterm elections of anti-establishment populist Democrats who share, or at least seek to channel, the welling vexations of the American electorate.

They are young, or youngish. They are angry. They are fed up with the Democratic establishment. Two won primaries for House seats in red districts they hope to flip, and the third beat a longtime Democratic incumbent in a deep blue district. All are new to politics, which they consider a virtue.

“This party culture of waiting your turn and not burning bridges, I’m like, I ain’t got nothing to lose,” said Melat Kiros, 29, the lawyer, an Ethiopian-American and a democratic socialist who defeated the incumbent by 13 points in Denver to run for a House seat she is likely to win. “There are no bridges for me to burn.”

Sam Forstag, 32, the wilderness firefighter, or smokejumper, is not a democratic socialist but he decided to run for Congress after hundreds of his fellow Montana-based U.S. Forestry Service employees were laid off last year as a result of the DOGE federal budget cuts. “They were firing people making 11 bucks an hour swinging tools in the woods,” he said.

Special Report: The Clinton Impeachment As A Timely Lesson

Mobology, Investigative Commentary: The RNC demands our indictments for extortion and obstructing Congress (Part 11), Dan Moldea, right, Sept. 13, 2026. The Senate trial against President Clinton opens.

Preface

The 2026 midterm elections are drawing near. And there are lessons to be learned. . . . Here at Mobology, the past is prologue.

Through this series, I hope to contribute to the ongoing action by revisiting the drama of the last major crisis in the American presidency. I played a little-known but key role in that story.

According to AI Perplexity:

Yes. Dan Moldea actively aided Clinton’s defense effort during the impeachment fight, but he did so as an outside investigative journalist rather than a formal White House adviser or staffer.​Public defense of ClintonMoldea emerged as a vocal defender of Clinton after researching and writing about Vince Foster’s death, concluding it was a suicide and that a network of anti‑Clinton activists and journalists had tried to weaponize the case against the administration. When the Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998, Moldea “decided to take sides” and publicly backed the president while attacking the fairness and legality of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation in media appearances and speeches.​Exposing alleged OIC leaksMoldea alleged that Starr’s Office of Independent Counsel (OIC) was illegally leaking non‑public grand jury information to a select group of reporters, whom he said had become “cheerleaders” and “shills” for the prosecution. He tape‑recorded on‑the‑record conversations with two senior OIC deputies and later submitted transcripts in an affidavit to U.S. District Judge Norma Holloway Johnson, supporting an inquiry into whether Starr’s office had violated secrecy rules—an effort that aligned with the Clinton legal team’s broader pushback.​Work with Larry FlyntIn late 1998 Moldea joined Larry Flynt’s project to investigate and expose sexual hypocrisy among Clinton’s most aggressive Republican critics in Congress. Acting as Flynt’s lead investigator, Moldea helped uncover then‑Speaker‑designate Bob Livingston’s extramarital affair, which contributed to Livingston’s dramatic resignation on the very day the House voted to impeach Clinton, a development Moldea and some commentators later described as helping . . . to “diffuse” the impeachment drive.​How “helping Clinton” is characterizedMoldea himself has said he sympathized with Clinton’s struggle and believed his work with Flynt and his exposure of OIC leaks were part of resisting a “right‑wing attempt to overthrow the executive branch.” While he held no official role in the White House or legal defense team, his investigations and public interventions functioned as de facto assistance to Clinton by undermining key accusers and challenging the legitimacy of the prosecutorial strategy.

My May 24 column detailed how I became involved in the investigation of Vincent Foster’s death (Part 1), followed by Part 2 (July 12), Part 3 (July 19), Part 4 (July 26), Part 5 (August 2), Part 6 (August 9), Part 7 (August 16), Part 8 (August 23), Part 9 (August 30), and Part 10 (September 6).

Today, September 13, I publish Part 11. Next week, I will release the final installment of this twelve-part series.

This is the first time I’ve offered much of this updated story to Mobology subscribers.

The Senate trial opens

High noon had come for the President’s enemies as the preliminary phase of the Senate trial got underway on January 7, 1999, the culmination of years of vicious allegations, wild conspiracy theories, and wholly partisan investigations—all of which had gone nowhere. Now reduced to criminalizing the President’s personal life by alleging that he had lied about sex, the Clinton haters were finally at center stage.

The time had come for them to put up or shut up.

However, their earlier high confidence for the President’s removal from office had dissipated considerably after my investigation of U.S. House Speaker-Designate Bob Livingston led to his shocking resignation on December 19—and was further diminished by Larry Flynt’s continuing crusade to expose Republican hypocrisy, led by my ongoing work.

In fact, other than the unmasking of Kenneth Starr as a partisan sexual witch hunter after the release of the Starr Report in September 1998 and the excellent legal work performed by the President’s attorneys before and during the Senate trial, there was no single factor that had a greater impact on the impeachment process than our work in The Flynt Project.

Had we never emerged in this drama, Bob Livingston would have become Speaker of the House, and the impeachment of the President would have shifted from the House to the Senate with a tremendous, even a devastating momentum. At the very least, as with President Richard Nixon in 1974, the pressure on President Clinton to resign from office would have been overwhelming.

Instead, with Livingston’s resignation and the hypocrisy of the President’s enemies clear and present to the American public—who then catapulted the President’s approval ratings to their highest level ever on the day of his impeachment—the Republicans’ case limped to trial.

Looking back, the New York Times revealed a remarkable but terrifying reality:

The shock waves of the Livingston resignation spread far beyond the West Wing of the White House, and had a sobering effect on members of Congress of both parties who might have been contemplating calling for Clinton to step down in the aftermath of the impeachment vote.

Fearful of the entire Government unraveling, very few members of Congress joined a clamor for Clinton’s resignation.[1]

Once again, our team clearly helped to save the Clinton Presidency.I am revealed

When Representative Bob Barr learned that he was one of our targets, he responded in writing by threatening to sue Flynt. In response, Larry drafted a letter to Barr on January 5 in which he identified me as his investigator—which, until then, was a closely guarded secret.

After I reluctantly approved Flynt’s communication, I waited to be revealed, followed by the inevitable consequences.

On January 8, 1999, reporter Mark Hosenball of Newsweek, with whom I had been acquainted for several years, called and asked me to confirm or deny that I was Flynt’s mystery investigator.

Deciding that I would get a fair shake from this one-time poker buddy, I admitted that I had handled the probes of Livingston and Flynt’s other targets while reminding Mark about the sworn affidavit on my website about the OIC leaks and denying any White House involvement in our investigation. However, I refused to go into any further detail about my ongoing work for Flynt.

Hosenball’s story, written with Andrew Murr—“Who’s on Larry List?”, which identified me for the first time as Flynt’s mystery investigator—ran in Newsweek’s January 18 issue, released on January 11, the same day that Flynt revealed the details of our investigation of Bob Barr.

Hosenball and Murr reported:

Flynt had a tough time finding respectable journalists or gumshoes willing to take on the job. But at least one, Newsweek has learned, eagerly accepted: Dan Moldea. An investigative crime reporter and author of controversial books about pro football and the O. J. Simpson case, Moldea is a Clinton sympathizer. Last year he approached the president’s private lawyers with a tantalizing story: in phone calls Moldea secretly recorded, two of Kenneth Starr’s top deputies admitted that their office routinely briefed sympathetic reporters. Moldea later repeated the leak charge in a sworn statement to the judge overseeing the Starr probe. Moldea investigated the allegations against Livingston. He confirmed to Newsweek that he is continuing to investigate other Clinton critics. (Moldea and the president’s attorneys deny there is any connection between the White House and Flynt.) [Emphasis added.]

However, the fact remained: I did not approach the President’s attorneys. Instead, they had approached me. And when they did on the first two occasions, I asked for a subpoena.[2]

Hosenball’s unfortunate mistake launched a chain of events that caused immediate and long-term problems for me.On defense

On January 13, 1999—the eve of the opening arguments in the Senate’s impeachment trial against President Clinton—the Washington Post, then Newsweek’s parent company, published its own article by reporter Howard Kurtz, repeating that I was Flynt’s investigator.

Authorized by Flynt to comment in the wake of the erroneous Newsweek article, I told Kurtz that, indeed, Flynt had several “big fish” on his plate. However, I added that some of them would not be made public, adding:

Some Republicans on Capitol Hill should be sending us flowers and thank‑you cards. They weren’t going on TV talk shows shooting off their mouths [about Clinton], or going to the floor of Congress to seize the moral high ground. We’ve thrown them back in the river. We’re not going to interfere with their lives.[3]

Actually, I had meant these remarks to be conciliatory.

That same day, Bill Sammon of the Washington Times, another right-wing Clinton critic with whom I had also agreed to speak, published a front‑page story, “Flynt sleuth dished dirt for White House,” cynically using my role in the OIC leaks investigation as evidence of my—and, thereby, Flynt’s—connection to the White House.[4]

Sammon wrote in his lead paragraph:

The investigator who dug up dirt on Republican Reps. Bob Barr and Robert L. Livingston for pornographer Larry Flynt is a Clinton sympathizer who has supplied the president’s attorneys with evidence against independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.

Although Sammon portrayed this as a major expose, he failed to mention that I had detailed all of this and more in my sworn affidavit in August, which was already posted for all to see on my public website, www.moldea.com.

Continuing his story, Sammon then quoted me about the Flynt investigation, saying:

“I don’t think there’s anybody on our team who’s getting much joy out of this. When you start hurting families, that’s something that makes you pause and think about what’s going on. But at the same time, I just haven’t seen any mercy shown towards Clinton—I mean, none, zero.”

Using a version of the quote I had given to the Post about throwing non‑hypocritical Republicans “back in the river,” Sammon gave this statement a nefarious twist, writing:

[Moldea] made it clear he has uncovered salacious material on more Republicans whose identities will remain secret as long as they refrain from speaking out against Mr. Clinton.

As spun by Sammon, I appeared to be threatening or even blackmailing unnamed members of Congress! Although this allegation was nonsense, it quickly took on a life of its own.[5]“Tough, mean investigators”

As the Senate trial of President Clinton moved forward, Flynt and I were widely accused of political terrorism with our campaign. Along with other members of Congress, Senator Larry Craig (R-Idaho), who would later have his own personal problems, insisted:

Intimidation is something we have to resist. You don’t negotiate with terrorists. This is almost a terrorist‑like tactic being used here.[6]

Senator James M. Jeffords (R‑Vermont) told reporters:

I’m deeply concerned. I think any effort to blackmail a person . . . That’s very serious.[7]

Meantime, Senator Orrin Hatch (R‑Utah) continued to suggest a link between Flynt and the White House, using me as his foil on NBC’s Meet the Press:

I don’t know anybody who’s hiring these tough, mean investigators like has been done for the President.[8]

On January 14, Senator Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) was asked by a reporter:

“Any backlash about the Larry Flynt stuff in the Senate you heard today in the cafeteria or in the gym or anything, Senator?”

“Sure,” Kyl replied, “there was a lot of backlash.”

“What did you hear?”

“Well, the usual. This is not helpful to the process.”

“Are the senators angry about it?”

“I might characterize some of them as pretty upset about it, yes.”

“Was this going to influence the trial one way or the other in any way?”

Kyl then said, “Well, you know what? I don’t even want to talk about it because it simply gives [Flynt] credibility that I don’t want to give him.”[9]

The following day, responding to a question about Flynt’s alleged threats against Republican senators, GOP consultant Heather Nauert said during a television appearance on Fox News:

“I think the problem with that is that these members are keeping quiet—members that would normally be out front denouncing the President are now remaining silent because they’re so afraid of this campaign that they’ve—that . . .”

“You really think so?” The host asked. “You really think they’re intimidated by it?”

“I absolutely do.”[10]

Reporter Peter Baker of the Washington Post told Terry Gross, the host of NPR’s Fresh Air:

Well, there was a real atmosphere of fear among congressmen, particularly Republicans. Just the fact of Larry Flynt out there was terrifying to them. . . . [A] number of the managers, the people who would prosecute the president in the Senate trial, were convinced that they were the next target. . . . So there was a real atmosphere of fear that these people were living through at the time.[11]

The White House responds

At the daily White House briefing on January 13, press secretary Joe Lockhart fielded a question from a reporter who asked:

Larry Flynt’s investigator, Dan Moldea, says that he has uncovered information on additional Republicans, but is going to withhold it as long as they don’t criticize the President. Does this strike you as blackmail and will the White House call for him to cease and desist?

Lockhart simply replied:

Listen, the President has been as clear as possible that he thinks the politics of personal destruction should cease and desist, and should have ceased and desisted a long time ago. I don’t know anything about this gentleman you’re talking about. I believe, as the President agrees, that all of this kind of sleazy politics ought to stop and it ought to stop from the right, from the left, and from the people who create the market in this stuff. And it’s our hope that it does.

Regardless of anything the White House said, the perpetual lies that Flynt and I were linked to the President and his operatives continued and even escalated.

The frustrated right‑wing media, which had invested so much time, money, and energy to bring about the downfall of the President, turned their big guns on Flynt and anyone close to him, especially me. But, as with their other dead‑end investigations of the President—the Foster suicide, Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate, among others—they did not allow their false and misleading facts to get in the way of their fabricated narrative.

ShareEarly jabs, followed by roundhouse punches

Here is a sampling of what else Flynt and I were up against:

* Syndicated columnist Tony Snow, the right‑wing journalist who introduced Linda Tripp to Lucianne Goldberg, declared:

Larry Flynt, abetted by investigative reporter Dan Moldea, has attempted to blackmail Republicans into cutting Clinton free.[12]

* Jaime Dettmer, in his article for Insight, a magazine owned by the Washington Times, wrote:

Right and left the battle rages and good men act out of character, such as author‑turned‑hired‑gun Dan Moldea, who has swapped his reputation for free thinking and independence to become Flynt’s blackmailer in chief. . . . [M]oral equivalence or truth‑seeking apparently doesn’t matter to Moldea. The point again is media terrorism, scandal, intimidation—he makes no bones about it, saying publicly he’ll hold back on outing Republicans who keep their mouths shut about the president. Isn’t that a possible contempt‑of‑Congress offense and a potential breach of the federal statutes concerning obstruction of justice?[13]

* Matt Labash of the conservative Weekly Standard added:

Flynt has repeatedly asserted that he hired a Washington private investigative firm chock full of ex‑FBI and CIA operatives, but he declines to name it. Inquiring minds assumed he’d hired Terry Lenzner, the Clinton camp’s usual private eye. But when I talked to Moldea, he denied knowing anything about this, adding, “Personally, I don’t believe there is a detective firm. If there is, where’s their work? I don’t see their work. Who did Barr? I did Barr. Who did Livingston? I did Livingston.” Moldea also denies any White House connection.[14]

* Playing off the initial erroneous Newsweek story, televangelist Jerry Falwell, who had lost a landmark U.S. Supreme Court defamation case to Flynt in 1988, wrote a column on January 15 that was totally false, alleging:

Dan Moldea, the lead investigator for Larry Flynt’s ongoing quest to uncover sexual indiscretions of Republican congressional members, has now admitted he was hired by the law firm defending President Clinton. Moldea affirmed that the firm of Williams & Connolly initially contacted him to uncover evidence that Kenneth Starr, Whitewater independent counsel, had violated rules against leaking grand jury information to the press.”[15]

* Robert J. Caldwell, an editor for the San Diego Union‑Tribune, published an article on January 17, repeating Falwell’s false charge that I had actually admitted working for Williams & Connolly. Caldwell wrote:

Moldea’s former employment was with the Washington law firm of Williams and Connolly, whose lawyers are defending President Clinton in the impeachment proceedings. Moldea says his job at Williams and Connolly included investigating special prosecutor Ken Starr’s investigation of the president.[16]

Attempts to get Flynt and me indicted

On January 14, Mark Levin of the Scaife‑funded Landmark Legal Foundation filed a formal complaint with the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, charging Flynt and me with attempting “to influence and impede” the Senate’s impeachment trial and adding:

Messrs. Flynt and Moldea are not free to corruptly “endeavor to influence” a congressional inquiry, such as an impeachment inquiry or an impeachment trial inquiry, by threatening, intimidating or coercing Republican members of Congress to keep silent about Mr. Clinton’s conduct lest potentially embarrassing personal information involving the members and/or their families—which was either purchased by Mr. Flynt or otherwise gathered by Mr. Moldea—be made public.

The following day, Republican National Committee chairman James Nicholson issued a press release, stating that:

[Nicholson and the RNC have] joined in the non‑partisan Landmark Legal Foundation’s demand for a criminal probe of pornographer Larry Flynt and his investigator, Dan Moldea, for the felony of Obstructing Congress. Besides assisting Flynt, Moldea assisted Clinton’s defense team, Nicholson noted. . . .

The Flynt‑Carville‑Moldea tactics of intimidation and blackmail aren’t just wrong, they’re illegal, and our Attorney General ought to take off her blindfold and begin criminal prosecutions.

On January 16, the Washington Post reported on all of this nonsense, stating:

In a letter addressed to officials of the department’s criminal division, the foundation said Flynt’s efforts and those of his investigator, author Dan Moldea, could constitute obstruction of a congressional investigation. Flynt may have violated federal law by allegedly “threatening, intimidating or coercing Republican members of Congress” to remain silent about Clinton’s conduct or face embarrassing disclosures about their personal lives, the letter said, adding that obstructing Congress is “a felony punishable by five years imprisonment and a fine of $250,000.” . . . Justice Department spokeswoman Chris Watney said the request for an investigation “is under review.” Flynt’s attorney, Alan Isaacman, called the demand for an investigation “absurd.”[17]

* On January 18, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial, entitled, “Abetting Blackmail,” once again falsely charging that I had “worked for” Williams & Connolly, just as Jerry Falwell and Robert Caldwell, among others, had claimed. Further, the Journal charged that Flynt and I were actively involved in a pattern of threats and blackmail against Congress.

Joining the calls for the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice to investigate us, the Journal continued:

[The Department of] Justice says the complaint is under review, and surely the criminal issue needs official study. Also, of course, there is the further issue of whether Mr. Moldea dug up all this dirt himself, or whether he is being aided and abetted by agents of the President. He has, as it happens, previously worked for the President’s law firm, Williams & Connolly. [Emphasis added.]

From the outset, I realized that I was going to take a ton of grief for my role in The Flynt Project and had already decided to turn the other cheek to almost all of it. But after seeing this editorial in the Wall Street Journal, I was mortified, as well as angry, and wrote harsh letters to Robert Bartley, the executive editor of the Journal’s editorial page, as well as to Falwell and Caldwell, demanding retractions, threatening litigation, and insisting that I had never “worked for” or received any money from the President’s lawyers or Williams & Connolly.

Responding to my demands in a second editorial two days later, the Wall Street Journal—referencing my 1990-1994 libel case against the New York Times—published perhaps the most disingenuous retraction in the history of journalism, writing:

Dan E. Moldea, official mud‑miner for scatology king Larry Flynt, says we have done him wrong. . . . What is in question is the phrase “worked for.” If we wanted to play Clintonesque word games, we could ask, what is “for” for? Does it not mean “on behalf of” and isn’t that what happened? But we desist, because many readers would indeed take “worked for” to mean he got paid, which the public record does not currently support. So as requested, we hereby retract the word “for.” Substitute the word “with.” . . . Here we see in all their splendor the current point men in the Clinton defense movement. Is this how the Senate and the Democratic Party want to be represented, or will they separate themselves from the gutter inhabited by Mr. Flynt and Mr. Moldea?[18]

Biting the bullet, I allowed this version of the Journal’s retraction to stand without further comment.[19]

But, regardless of whatever the right-wingers charged, Flynt and I had done nothing illegal

My defenders

Notably, I did have my defenders in the mainstream media, and their comments appeared in, among others, articles published by Newsday and the New York Observer.

Journalist Steve Love, a long‑time friend at the Akron Beacon Journal, my hometown newspaper, wrote an op‑ed piece about my unpleasant situation. Critical of some of my recent actions but concerned for my personal and professional safety and welfare, Love wrote:

[B]y becoming what Republican National Committee Chairman Jim Nicholson refers to as a “goon” for “the president’s favorite pornographer,” Moldea is walking a thinner line between acceptable investigative journalism and salaciousness. Nicholson and the nonpartisan Landmark Legal Foundation are demanding that the Justice Department investigate Flynt and Moldea for obstructing Congress, a felony. . . .

Moldea, who is single, is no candidate for sainthood. He also knows the harm he is doing to others’ lives. This bothers him, but not as much as the sexual McCarthyism he sees plaguing America.

I don’t know Flynt. But I do know Moldea. To him this is a holy war. He would wage it for nothing. Scorch enough beds and maybe Americans will be repulsed enough to stop this. It is the sexual equivalent of a nuclear deterrent.

I hope it works, but I doubt it will.

Escalation remains the order of the day. No one is sheathing his weapon.[20]

No death threats, just open intimidation

Remarkably, I never received a single death threat either over the telephone or in person during my work for Flynt. However, a steady stream of cars and vans, sometimes three at a time, parked daily in front of my four-unit apartment building, as well as up and down the street.

Through some of my long-time friends and sources who could check licenses and auto registrations, I learned that no fewer than eight of these vehicles were linked to the same private detective firm in Virginia.

Another journalist who lived in my neighborhood even became friendly with one of these surveillance people who specifically identified me as his target. The journalist executed a sworn statement about this conversation and gave it to me.

At one point, out of sheer frustration, I approached one of the drivers and complained about the intrusions. He replied, “Fuck you, Moldea! I am in a private car on a public street.”

Knowing there was nothing I could do about this situation and fearing a possible home invasion—especially after my surveillance guy found a tracking device in the wheel well of my car—I simply had the doors to my apartment alarmed, among other internal precautions.

Realizing that I was working alone in Washington and half expecting FBI agents to come crashing into my apartment at any second to make an arrest, Flynt brought me back to Los Angeles and placed me in a luxury suite at a Beverly Hills hotel under an assumed name until we thought it was safe for me to return home.

Meantime, the Senate trial of President Clinton continued. . . .

More On High-Tech, Media

New York Times, Top A.I. Leaders Call for Slowing Down A.I. Development, Mike Isaac, Sept. 13, 2026 (print ed.). In an essay, the head of Anthropic laid out the rapidly advancing capabilities of artificial intelligence and said there needed to be greater safety controls across the industry.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology.

Top executives of other major A.I. companies quickly signed on to the effort. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI; Elon Musk, whose SpaceX rocket company has been ramping up spending on A.I.; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, wrote in social media posts that they agreed on the need for a slower pace.

Mr. Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic to focus on securely and carefully building A.I., wrote in his essay that while he believed the technology could bring many benefits, it was advancing at too rapid a pace for researchers to continue safely.

“Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up,” Mr. Amodei wrote. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”

Mr. Amodei has warned about the safety risks of A.I. for years. But his essay amounted to one of the most full-throated calls for urgent action from a leading A.I. company executive to date.

He called for independent auditors to check the companies for safety standards and urged global cooperation in creating rules around A.I. development.

The appeal for an industrywide pause follows months of escalating concerns across the technology industry as A.I. model development has made significant strides at companies like Anthropic, the developer of the Claude chatbot, as well as OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and Google’s DeepMind.

Tensions rose further after the leading A.I. labs discovered security breaches carried out by their own programs without their knowledge. In one incident this year, OpenAI’s systems breached an A.I. start-up called HuggingFace, which was not detected until HuggingFace informed OpenAI weeks after it had happened. Since then, A.I. researchers have conferred to discuss what to do.

On Tuesday, Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, resigned and posted a series of social media posts about how the leading A.I. labs were not responsibly developing the technology and were gambling with people’s lives, setting off a furor. Other A.I. researchers have called on their leaders to pause A.I. development, while some are forming splinter groups to raise more awareness about the risks of A.I.

A.I. leaders are girding themselves for a day when an A.I. system can rely on itself to grow more advanced rather than requiring the aid of human researchers. This dynamic, which computer scientists call “recursive self improvement,” is what some top A.I. developers believe may lead to the software spinning out of their control.

“Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all,” Mr. Amodei said.

Hours after Mr. Amodei published his essay, Mr. Altman posted a statement to social media agreeing that a slowdown of A.I. development was necessary.

“This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks,” Mr. Altman wrote. “Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”

Mr. Musk, in a post on his social media platform X, said simply, “Dario is right.”

On Saturday evening, Mr. Hassabis said Mr. Amodei’s essay was a step in the right direction. “The details need working through, but the direction is correct for meeting this critical moment,” Mr. Hassabis posted on social media.

For years, many of the top A.I. labs have been locked in bitter competition with one another. But as these systems have advanced, there has been some broader agreement among executives at rival companies that something needs be done.

Last month, as OpenAI prepared to release an advanced A.I. model called Astra, the company said it had intentionally slowed down its pace of development, citing advancements in cybersecurity capabilities. In July, Google’s Mr. Hassabis published an open framework for what he believed would be a safe way to cooperatively develop next-generation A.I.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)

There are few rules on A.I. development, though President Trump signed an executive order in June asking for A.I. labs to voluntarily submit their models for review before public release.

In his essay on Saturday, Mr. Amodei suggested actions that the industry might take to slow the pace of development.

Mr. Amodei said that all A.I. labs could agree to third-party technology assessments from “embedded evaluators,” or outside specialists who could verify best safety practices across companies. He also suggested that countries with democratic governance systems coordinate to create safety standards, which could take the form of regulatory action.

New York Times, How the Smithsonian Might Choose Its Next Leader, Robin Pogrebin, Sept. 13, 2026. With Lonnie G. Bunch III stepping down as the Smithsonian’s secretary, President Trump will have his best chance to control the institution.

When Lonnie G. Bunch III announced that he would step down as chief of the Smithsonian Institution, many saw the decision as a culmination of President Trump’s pressure campaign against the organization, which oversees nearly two dozen museums.

The White House has called Mr. Bunch, who has led the Smithsonian since 2019, a “rabid partisan.” But after his announcement, scholars came to his defense, with the Organization of American Historians praising Mr. Bunch’s “intellectual rigor” and “political courage.”

The process to select a successor to Mr. Bunch, who the Smithsonian said would stay through the end of the year, will offer Mr. Trump his best chance to exert control over the Smithsonian. Here is what to know about how the institution might choose its next leader.Who controls the Smithsonian?

Congress created the Smithsonian — the world’s largest museum, education and research complex — in 1846 after James Smithson, a British chemist and mineralogist, died and left his fortune to the establishment of an institution “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge” in the U.S. capital.

Today, it includes 21 museums, libraries, research centers and the National Zoo, many of them on the National Mall in Washington. They range from behemoths like the National Air and Space Museum to small organizations like the Anacostia Community Museum.

The Smithsonian has historically operated independently of the executive branch. It is run by a Board of Regents that oversees strategy, policy, finances, mission and governance.

The board selects a new secretary to lead the Smithsonian.How does the Smithsonian’s board operate?

There are 17 members of the Board of Regents — a mixture of Republicans and Democrats, drawn from government, business, medicine and academia.

The board includes the vice president, the chief justice of the United States and six members of Congress: three from the House of Representatives and three from the Senate, as required by statute. The chief justice serves as the board’s chancellor.

The board nominates another nine private citizens, who, after congressional confirmation and presidential sign-off, serve no more than two consecutive six-year terms.

Ever since the Smithsonian was established, board members have cycled off the board after their staggered terms end. Since April, there have been three openings on the board, and by October, the terms of three more members will have expired.

Board members are typically nominated by the regents, confirmed by Congress and signed off on by the president without partisan rancor. But the names of several recent board nominees, which have not been publicly disclosed, have not even made it to Congress — without clear explanation.

Two people with knowledge of the process, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private decision-making, told The New York Times in July that Vice President JD Vance had delayed action on the names because Mr. Trump hoped to substitute more like-minded candidates.

In an executive order issued in March 2025, Mr. Trump described the Smithsonian as consumed by a “divisive, race-centered ideology” and demanded that the institution be restored to “its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.”

The order called for Mr. Vance to work with the House speaker and the Senate majority leader, both Republicans, “to seek the appointment of citizen members to the Smithsonian Board of Regents committed to advancing the policy of this order.”How has the selection process gone before?

When seeking a new leader in the past, the Smithsonian board has created a search committee and enlisted outside consulting firms.

When Mr. Bunch was appointed in 2019, it was the first time in 74 years that a director of a Smithsonian museum had been selected to lead the entire institution. Mr. Bunch was the founding director of the institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and had worked at its National Museum of American History.

He was appointed as secretary after a search by an 11-person committee led by David Rubenstein, who was the chairman of the Smithsonian’s board at the time, and Steve Case, who was then its vice chairman.

Mr. Bunch replaced David J. Skorton, a cardiologist and former president of Cornell, who after leaving the Smithsonian returned to health care as the president of a nonprofit.

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

 

Donald Trump, Jan 6th rioters, Mike Johnson, and the Supreme Court (Illustration for The New Republic by Mark Harris; Getty (x6)

The New Republic, Analysis and Opinion: The Final Battle for America’s Democracy, J. Michael Luttig, above, Sept. 11, 2026. Forget November 3. It’s January 3 when Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans might bury our democracy once and for all. Here’s how.

Donald Trump instigated a war against America’s democracy on January 6, 2021. He and his Republican allies would have crippled America’s democracy that day had his own vice president not refused to be party to the gravest constitutional offense a president can commit—the refusal to relinquish and peacefully transfer the power of the presidency to his duly elected successor.

Today, almost six years later, Donald Trump and his Republican congressional allies are even more determined to prosecute the president’s war against American democracy to its catastrophic end than they were on January 6, 2021.

That catastrophic end could well come on January 3, 2027, when Trump and his Republican congressional allies wage the final battle in Trump’s determined war to corrupt America’s democracy and deliver a lasting political victory over the Democrats for his MAGA Republican Party.

Trump and his Republican allies have been preparing for this final battle since January 6, 2021. For the past six years, they have embarrassed themselves and the U.S. with their preposterous, win-at-any-cost denial that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and their deceitful slander of America’s democracy. Since his return to the White House, Trump’s every unconstitutional act in his effort to seize control over the midterm elections—each hailed by his prostrate Republican Congress—has been toward the end of ensuring that Republicans retain a majority in the 120th Congress.

Trump told talk show host Dan Bogino on February 2, “The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over. We should take over the voting.’... The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting.’” The Republicans have dutifully fallen in line.

Before Donald Trump arrived, it was the Republicans who professed to stand for the Constitution, principle, truth, honesty, integrity—even honor. Republicans were the proud party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. It was our party that could be expected to put country before party when the time came, as when Barry Goldwater and other party elders told Richard Nixon in 1974 that it was time to resign the presidency. That was then. None of this is true of today’s Republican Party and this Republican Congress. So enthralled with the forty-seventh president are today’s House Republicans that they long ago abandoned everything the Republican Party has stood for since its founders first met in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854.

Today’s congressional Republicans took a blood oath six years ago not just to put their party before their country, but to put Donald Trump before their country. And so it is that only weeks before the midterm elections, House Republicans have already sworn their allegiance to Donald Trump and doomed the U.S. to another January 6 next January 3.

So unalterably subjugated to Trump is today’s Republican House that even a decisive victory for Democrats and a resounding repudiation of Trump and the MAGA Republicans at the polls in November will not guarantee that a Democratic majority-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress on January 3.

All year long, Trump has been dragooning House Speaker Mike Johnson and the congressional Republicans into prejudging as fraudulent the upcoming November elections of the presumed Democratic majority, as he himself has already prejudged those elections. His dragooning appears to have worked. House Republicans are now poised to claim that the midterm elections were stolen from them when they meet on January 3 to decide which members-elect will be seated in the 120th Congress.

Over the past year and a half since his return to the White House, Trump has exploited every conceivable unlawful means possible to rig the midterm elections in favor of the Republicans, and the federal courts have struck down as unconstitutional every one of these unlawful attempts. He will try every unlawful means over the remaining weeks to ensure that Republicans handily win the midterm elections in November. Those of us who oppose his illegality will look to the courts, but the federal courts will be institutionally incapable of checking his final unlawful rampage.

Trump punctuated his expressed intent to interfere in the midterm elections eight weeks ago in a national prime-time address on “election integrity,” accusing the Democrats and the Chinese in particular of threatening the free and fair elections in November. In that address, he claimed without evidence or support (as usual) that the 2026 midterm elections were being threatened by noncitizen voting, weaknesses in voter registration systems, foreign interference, and vulnerabilities in electronic voting systems.

The concocted address was universally panned as purely partisan, devoid of evidence and support, and anticipatory of his forthcoming claim in November that the Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives only because of fraud in their respective elections.

Everyone knows that the greatest threat to the upcoming midterm elections is not the Democrats or the Chinese, noncitizen voting, or electronic voting machines, but the president of the United States and his servile Republican Congress.

Every member of Congress takes a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution, an oath that obligates them to honor the will of the American electorate. It is a sacred imperative that the Congress of the United States must defend our constitutional right to choose our representatives to Congress against all enemies, domestic as well as foreign, who would deny us this fundamental right.

There was a time not long ago when virtually every member of Congress could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of congressional power in advance of an election, just as every president could be expected to commit to the peaceful transfer of presidential power. But those times came to an abrupt end upon Donald Trump’s arrival in January 2017. In a damning indictment of the president and today’s congressional Republicans, it would be hard to find even one congressional Republican with the integrity, sense of duty to country, honor, and courage to put America above the Republican Party, let alone above Donald Trump.

Yet America’s only hope for saving its democracy and avoiding another crippling constitutional crisis on January 3 is for the House Republicans to decide that they are not going to betray their oaths and their country one last time for Donald Trump, and telegraph to Trump and Mike Johnson that any unconstitutional plan they might be contriving to deny Democratic members-elect their rightful seats in the 120th Congress would be dead on arrival January 3.

If there are any such Republicans in the Congress today, they should announce well before November 3 that they will not be party to Trump’s and Johnson’s attempt to steal the midterm elections from the American people.

In fact, the House members of both political parties should stand united before November 3 and affirm to the American people that in the United States of America, government derives its just powers from the consent of “We the People”—the governed. They should campaign in the fall on any refusal by their political opponents to affirm the same. Their political opponents should in turn campaign on House members’ refusal to affirm that they will not be complicit in any attempt to steal the midterm elections.

Standing united before the midterm elections against any attempt by Trump and Johnson to overturn those elections would go a long way toward restoring Americans’ lost trust in their Congress and their government. It would send a powerful message to Trump and Johnson that Americans will never again be forced by their own government to endure another January 6.

While it is small solace, Americans are not entirely at the mercy of this Republican Congress to suddenly decide to honor its oath to the Constitution and the American people. It will be the Supreme Court, not Trump, Johnson, or even the House of Representatives, that will have the final word as to who will be seated in the 120th Congress of the United States.

Article I, Section 5, Clause 1 of the Constitution provides that “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” Under Clause 1, the House of Representatives is the “judge” of its “elections” and “returns.” But the House’s power is not plenary. The Constitution constrains how the House can exercise its power to refuse to seat members-elect. Indeed, in 1969, in Powell v. McCormack, the Supreme Court ensured that the House constitutionally exercised its power to “judge the qualifications” of members-elect when it ordered the seating of New York Representative Adam Clayton Powell, who had won reelection in 1966 despite a House vote to refuse to seat him. Just as the court intervened then, so also will the Supreme Court ensure that the House exercises its power to “judge” its “elections” and “returns” within the limits imposed by the Constitution. At least we hope it will, but can we be sure with this court?

Whether the House constitutionally exercises its power not to seat members-elect will ultimately be determined by the federal courts and the Supreme Court—not by a majority vote of the House of Representatives.

This is how the crisis would unfold. The precursor of the crisis will come sometime before noon on January 3, when Speaker Johnson removes current House Clerk Kevin McCumber and replaces him with a person loyal to Johnson and House Republicans who they know will refuse to list on the statutory roll of representatives-elect to the 120th Congress any Democrat-elect whom Johnson and the Republicans direct him or her not to list. Under Rule II, Clause 1 of the Rules of the House, the Speaker of the House has the unilateral power to remove the incumbent clerk, and then the power under Title 2 U.S.C. § 5501(a) to replace him temporarily with whomever he wishes until the House elects a successor. McCumber is a Republican appointed by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He is widely respected for his integrity and faithful adherence to the Constitution and is reputed to be unwilling to carry out orders he considers to be unconstitutional.

The first moment of constitutional crisis will come when, sometime before the 120th Congress has been gaveled into session, the loyal temporary clerk refuses to list Democrat representatives-elect on the clerk’s roll of representatives-elect that determines who may participate in organizing the new Congress. At that moment, interested members-elect and others will be forced to seek a writ of mandamus—a court order to a government official instructing him or her to perform a mandatory duty—from the federal court to the temporary clerk, ordering him or her to list on the clerk’s roll all members-elect who have been certified by the states as having been elected from their districts to the new Congress.

Members-elect will argue that the clerk has a ministerial duty under 2 U.S.C. § 26 to list all representatives-elect whose properly filed state certifications show that they were “regularly elected in accordance with the laws of his state or of the United States.” Because the clerk has no authority to omit any duly certified representative-elect, even if a representative-elect’s election is contested, the clerk unquestionably has a ministerial duty under law to list all duly certified representatives-elect. But this begs the question whether a court will issue the writ of mandamus to the acting clerk.

At first blush, a court will be reluctant to order the clerk to list all duly certified representatives-elect because of an instinctive belief that such an order would interfere with the constitutional process of the House to judge its own elections and returns. The wise and learned judge, however, will understand that rather than interfering with the House process, issuance of the writ will actually enable the House process to proceed to completion without judicial interference. Were that wise and learned judge to issue the writ, his or her order would immediately be appealed to the Court of Appeals, and from that court to the Supreme Court, while the country and the world wait in suspense.

The next moment of constitutional crisis will come if and when, after appeals, the court finally issues the writ of mandamus, and the clerk refuses to obey the court’s order to list the Democratic representatives-elect. At that point, it is possible there will be no further federal court involvement until such time as the 120th Congress officially convenes and votes not to seat representatives-elect. Then, that vote by the 120th Congress will be immediately reviewable by the federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States.

Judicial review of the House’s decision not to seat Democratic representatives-elect in the 120th Congress would take weeks, if not months, during which time the United States would be in the throes of a paralyzing constitutional crisis, helplessly vulnerable to all the world’s evil, as it would have been in January 2021 had Mike Pence not thwarted Donald Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

It is not difficult to imagine the many possibilities, some of the most critical being entirely realistic. It would be the ideal moment for China to move against Taiwan, by way of military blockade, attack, or even invasion. It would be the perfect moment for Vladimir Putin to complete his conquest of Ukraine, and perhaps even to move militarily against Estonia. Every passing day could bring a deepening economic crisis, worsened by our angry allies around the world who would welcome the opportunity to requite Donald Trump for his belittling mockery of their countries and presidents. Without the Congress, the United States would be powerless to respond to any of these crises.

The House has historically claimed that its decision not to seat a member-elect because of fraud or irregularities in the elections is unreviewable by the federal courts. But its decision is reviewable. The Constitution unquestionably requires the House to seat a member-elect who was validly elected in a free and fair election. The Article 1, Section 5 power of the House to be the judge of its elections and returns does not give the House the power to deny a seat in the Congress of the United States to a candidate elected by the American people in a free and fair election on the mere assertion, pretextual or otherwise, by a simple majority of the House that the candidate’s election was tainted by fraud.

Thus, on and after January 3, if congressional Republicans were to determine that a Democratic member-elect was elected because of fraudulent voting and refuse to seat him or her, that determination would be scrutinized by the federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court.

It will never be a nonjusticiable political question whether the United States House of Representatives by simple majority vote can refuse to seat a member elected to Congress by the American people in a free and fair election on the pretextual and unsupported assertion that the member-elect’s election was tainted by fraud. Such is the very opposite of a nonjusticiable political question committed to the House of Representatives. For in the decision of this question lies the answer to perhaps the most fundamental question under the Constitution: Is the United States of America a democracy, in which “We the People” elect our representatives to the Congress and to the presidency, or is it not?

I don’t intend to be overly sanguine about this Supreme Court. This is the court that shattered the one constitutional truth in the U.S. since 1789 that “no man is above the law” and placed Donald Trump of all presidents above the law in Trump v. United States. This is the court that betrayed the Constitution by refusing even to decide whether Trump was disqualified from the presidency under the Fourteenth Amendment because of his insurrection against the Constitution, which he clearly was. This is also the court that has cynically authorized Trump’s lawlessness for the past two years through its aptly named “shadow docket,” without so much as briefing, argument, or written opinion.

But surely by now this court must understand what it has wrought for the U.S. and the Constitution, and is aghast as we all are, even if it is not penitent. Surely, surely, it will understand the signal moment in American constitutional history that would be presented, and this time understand its supreme obligation to the nation.

Between now and November 3, congressional Republicans would do well to ponder one last time the fate of their Republican Party were the Supreme Court of the United States to reverse a fraudulent determination by the 120th Republican Congress not to seat Democratic members-elect who would give the Democrats majority control of the House.

Two hundred and fifty years into the greatest experiment in self-government in the history of the world, the Republican Party would finally meet the fate to which it has been destined since January 6, 2021, and cement its place in history as the most corrupt political party ever to emerge in the United States of America for its second attempt in six years to defy the will of the American people on Election Day.

If we Americans are to save our democracy from the forty-seventh president and his MAGA Republican Party, we must disenthrall ourselves from our political bondage to Donald Trump and MAGA, as Abraham Lincoln urged the nation in 1863 to disenthrall itself from its bondage to the ruinous political dogmas of its time. “We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country,” the sixteenth president admonished. The Republican Party in particular must finally loose the chains of its political and moral enslavement to Donald Trump and separate itself from the MAGA political party cult.

The writing is already on the wall, Republicans.

Former U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig, a prominent conservative scholar, is shown above testifying on June 16, 2022, before a U.S. House hearing on the Jan. 6 insurrection by pro-trump rioters.

The New Republic, Opinion: The Accelerating Project to Extend Abortion Bans to All 50 States, Melissa Gira Grant (Staff writer and author of "Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work," Sept. 11, 2026. In a legal challenge to abortion access at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Department of Justice and Louisiana are on opposite sides. But they want the same thing.

For the anti-abortion movement, overturning Roe v. Wade was never meant to be the end of the road. As destructive as the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was—it reversed Roe and permitted states to ban abortion—it did not eliminate abortion. In fact, since the decision, more people have had abortions, thanks to the widespread availability of medication abortion dispensed remotely. “The fight for life is far from over,” proclaimed the state of Louisiana in the opening line of its latest legal challenge to abortion access, which the state argued before a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals panel on Wednesday. For Louisiana, it is not enough to have banned abortion within its borders; it wants to extend that prohibition to reach those outside the state. Now it’s claiming that outside forces have undermined the state’s sovereignty—simply by making it possible for Louisianans to continue to access abortion.

In the case before the Fifth Circuit on Wednesday, Louisiana blamed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for abortions had by Louisianans, and asked the court to stop the agency from allowing them to continue. Representing the FDA, the Department of Justice argued that Louisiana’s case was flawed, not because it was baseless, but because it was going after the wrong culprit. According to the DOJ, Louisiana should sue the other states from which abortion providers serve Louisiana patients. The Justice Department did not defend the FDA, which it ostensibly represents. It also didn’t object to Louisiana’s dangerous claim that its state law enforcement powers had been impeded by those outside its borders.

As advocates watch this fight and attempt to forecast what’s next, the Justice Department’s inaction can be read as both an admission and a promise. The DOJ is admitting that this courtroom battle over mifepristone is not about whether it is safe, as has been the anti-abortion movement’s argument since Dobbs. It’s not even really about the FDA. And it’s implicitly promising that the fight over guidelines for mifepristone is merely a step toward a national abortion ban. On the surface, DOJ and Louisiana were at odds, but they appear to be in agreement when it comes to the ultimate goal of extending existing state abortion bans to all 50 states. The Justice Department used its time before the Fifth Circuit this week to demonstrate that agreement.

Louisiana’s case is just one of many to take aim at medication abortion following the demise of Roe. Some have ended in the early stages, involving debate over whether the cases can even be brought at all. In one, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a hastily assembled group of anti-abortion medical providers who did not provide abortion sued the agency, but the Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the FDA. Thus kicked off a wave of new cases meant essentially to cast a plaintiff that could pass muster.

The Louisiana case is also in those early stages. It has had one qualified but temporary win for the state so far. Earlier this year, a different Fifth Circuit panel issued an order that suspended the FDA guidelines permitting mifepristone access by telehealth, until the ultimate outcome in the case. Nearly immediately, two of the drug’s manufacturers asked the Supreme Court to stay that decision. The FDA, glaringly, did not ask for a stay. In May, the Supreme Court lifted the lower court’s stay, and mifepristone guidelines returned to the status quo.

As Louisiana Solicitor General Ben Aguiñaga again laid out the state’s case this week, arguing that it did have standing to sue the FDA, he didn’t have to emphasize his indignation about the fact that people are still having abortions in Louisiana despite the state’s ban. But he did, repeatedly claiming that “it happens a thousand times a month” and that the FDA allowed it to happen simply by having made mifepristone available by mail without an in-person appointment. Judge Stephen Higginson, who was appointed to the Fifth Circuit by President Obama, did not seem impressed with this reasoning. To him, he said, it sounded like the state was “really just asking the federal government to help you impose your criminal laws.” The case wasn’t about the FDA or its guidelines, in other words; it was about finding a way to enforce Louisiana’s abortion ban, using the power of the federal government.

The anti-abortion movement’s legal strategy of going after the FDA is not new. But it has become more complicated now that the Justice Department’s posture toward the agency and its authority is changing dramatically, Kirsten Moore told me. Moore is the director of the EMAA Project, which works to expand access to medication abortion. The Trump regime is responsible for the sea change. “We saw, in the prior administration, DOJ really robustly defending FDA’s authority, and their willingness to follow the process Congress had laid out for them,” she explained. That’s unsurprising; the FDA’s authority, delegated by Congress, is well established. “This administration,” however, “just isn’t doing that.”

The sea change was evident in the performance of the Department of Justice attorney, Daniel Winik. At oral arguments, he repeatedly refused to speak to the FDA’s mifepristone guidelines. He would not address anything the judges asked as it related to medication abortion. “We have not taken a position,” he said, on any of the “merits issues in the case.” All there was to do, he said, was to tell the court that Louisiana lacked standing in the case. “I don’t find that very satisfactory,” replied Judge Higginson. “I mean, this is your regulation.”

Was Winik throwing the FDA under the bus? “It’s beyond unusual for the Department of Justice to say, ‘We’re not even going to touch the merits of something which the DOJ has defended before,’” Katie Keith, founding director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at the O’Neill Institute at Georgetown Law, told me this week after oral arguments. “It’s a wild position to be taking.” Keith pointed out an earlier DOJ filing in the case, which seemed to undermine even the FDA’s own record on mifepristone. Among other things, it stated, “Given this widespread debate over the safety of mifepristone, FDA has concluded that the best path forward is for the agency to reconsider the restrictions on mifepristone based on all the evidence before the agency.” Of the stance DOJ is taking in this case, she said, “I don’t know any other way to read this position other than as a political position.”

The closest that Winik got to a defense of the FDA was to say that the agency was the wrong target. Despite what Louisiana had argued, he said, FDA guidelines on mifepristone had “nothing to do with the hindrance to the enforceability of state law.” Louisiana had previously attempted to hold medication abortion prescribers responsible in court, he went on. “You brought these prosecutions against doctors in New York and California, why can’t you pursue them?” It’s not the FDA guidelines, he said. “The answer is the shield laws enacted by other states.”

Shield laws are meant as “safeguards,” as Dr. Chelsea Daniels, a member of the Reproductive Freedom Taskforce of the Committee to Protect Health Care, told me on Wednesday. Daniels is also a practicing ob-gyn and an abortion provider who has worked in Florida and California. These laws allow providers to offer care to patients in every state, even those with abortion bans, by protecting them from civil suits brought by ban states. “The sheer fact that shield laws need to exist,” Daniels said, indicates how far anti-abortion lawmakers are willing to go in order to stop providers in other states. “Anti-abortion advocates talk about how they want to bring this back to the states,” she said. “The way that they then subsequently attack shield laws, to go completely out of their way to attack other states, just speaks to how phony their intentions are, and how transparent their goals are.”

While the Justice Department attorney at the Fifth Circuit may have been in court to represent the FDA, he was also representing the administration’s anti-abortion posture: to ensure that “the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,” as Attorney General Todd Blanche promised at an event put on by the White House Faith Office in August.

The Justice Department’s defense, therefore, was in what was not said. Its attorney did not contend that Louisiana was wrong on the merits of its case in any way. He didn’t say it was wrong about the harms of mifepristone; he didn’t say it hadn’t been harmed by those who allowed its residents to access abortion; he did not dispute Louisiana’s specious reasoning that one state has the power to enforce its abortion ban on those outside the state. In fact, in suggesting other states as the culprit, the Justice Department seemed to endorse this argument.

A decision in this case is yet to come; whatever the ruling is, it will certainly end up in front of the Supreme Court. But the confusion over mifepristone access, caused by the legal process, has already seeped out. “It’s rare that I have a patient come in saying to me, have you been following the Louisiana v. FDA hearings?” Daniels shared with me. “I mean, every now and then. But I think, more generally, it’s in the groundwater. It’s in the groundwater for all of us.” The chaos whipped up in the courts stands in stark contrast to the quotidian simplicity of offering routine abortion care. “The list of questions I ask people when I’m about to dispense mifepristone, to make sure that they’re good candidates,” Daniels said, “is a much shorter list than the list of questions I ask people when I am about to dispense ibuprofen or Advil.”

The New Republic, Opinion: The Supreme Court Hits a Limit With Missouri’s Election Map Mess, Matt Ford, Sept. 10, 2026. No, the high court hasn’t had a change of heart where gerrymandering is concerned. But it does seem to have little stomach for electoral chicanery.

The Supreme Court rejected a brazen plot by Missouri Republican officials to hold the state’s upcoming congressional elections under an illegal map on Thursday morning, ending a weeklong jumble of dueling court orders that disrupted the state’s election processes.

In an unsigned order, the justices effectively blocked state officials from using an extremely gerrymandered map passed last year that would have likely given Republicans an additional House seat this fall. Missouri voters will instead elect their representatives under a slightly less gerrymandered map enacted in 2022. Those voters will also have the chance to decide whether to enact the 2025 map for the rest of the decade in a ballot initiative this fall.

The order in People Not Politicians v. Onder largely hinges on peculiar questions of Missouri law that are not generally applicable in the other 49 states. It does not reflect a reversal of the conservative majority’s enthusiasm for gerrymandering, whether partisan or racial in nature. But it does offer a modicum of hope that the Supreme Court will not blatantly allow contrived right-wing plots to disrupt this year’s elections.

Missouri redrew its congressional maps in 2022 to account for the results of the 2020 census. The result was a familiar map with six safe Republican seats and two safe Democratic seats. In the summer of 2025, President Donald Trump pressured many Republican-led states to gerrymander their congressional maps even further to favor GOP candidates. Multiple Democratic-led states responded with their own gerrymanders in turn.

Last September, Missouri lawmakers passed House Bill 1 to repeal the 2022 map and impose a new one. The revised map would break apart the state’s existing 5th congressional district centered on Kansas City and split its voters among three safe rural Republican seats. The likely result, barring a seismic electoral shift, would be seven GOP seats and a single Democratic seat in St. Louis, with a net gain in the House of one Republican seat.

Missouri’s constitution allows voters to put “any act of the general assembly,” aside from two exceptions not relevant here, on a statewide ballot in the following general election. Once a petition for a ballot initiative is certified, the law is frozen from going into effect until Missourians approve or reject it. A citizen group named People Not Politicians gathered more than 300,000 signatures last December to put H.B. 1 on this November’s ballot. Organizers submitted the 691 boxes containing the signatures to Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’s office on December 9.

Under Missouri law, Hoskins had to formally approve or deny the petition by August 4 at 5 p.m.—a span of more than eight months. One hour before the deadline, Hoskins denied the petition, arguing that it was “insufficient under the Missouri Constitution because the Missouri Constitution does not authorize a referendum on congressional redistricting plans passed by the general assembly.” As noted earlier, this is plainly incorrect. The state then held primary elections under the 2025 map the following day.

Organizers accused Hoskins of running out the clock on potential legal challenges by rejecting the petition at the last possible moment. Courts are typically (but not unequivocally) reluctant to allow last-minute changes to state election laws on the eve of an election, a doctrine often known as the Purcell principle for the Supreme Court case that established it. By delaying until the last minute on clearly illegal grounds, Hoskins and his allies may have hoped that the courts would allow the 2025 map to be used, following Purcell.

They were wrong. The Missouri Supreme Court unanimously rejected Hoskins’s gambit last month, ruling that the petition wasn’t prohibited under the plain text of the state constitution. The court ordered him and the state to do two things: Use the 2022 congressional map for November’s election and allow H.B. 1 to be referred to state voters on that ballot. “The referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely, and the secretary incorrectly concluded otherwise,” it concluded. “HB 1 did not go into effect and will not go into effect unless and until approved by the voters.”

In response, Hoskins sought an injunction from the Supreme Court last week to block the state supreme court’s ruling from taking effect. To call this a long shot would be underselling it: State supreme courts have the final say in interpreting their own state constitutions, and the Supreme Court traditionally defers to their judgment unless a federal law or federal constitutional right is implicated. To that end, Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected Hoskins’s request in his capacity as circuit justice without referring the matter to the entire court—a signal that Kavanaugh thought the motion was not worth the other eight justices’ time.

That is where the legal battle should have ended. Instead, less than an hour after Kavanaugh’s decision, a federal district court judge in Missouri granted a surprise temporary restraining order that instructed Missouri to use the 2025 map instead. Representative Bob Onder, a GOP member of Congress, filed a lawsuit last week in response to the state supreme court ruling alleging various violations of federal constitutional provisions. Effectively, he argued that it would be unconstitutional to essentially throw out the results of the primary elections held under the 2025 map.

The Missouri Supreme Court had considered this very argument and rejected it outright. Under the state’s rules for ballot initiatives, H.B. 1 could only take effect if approved by the voters and could not go into force before then. “HB 1 is not the law and has never been the law,” the court explained. “There is only one valid congressional redistricting in effect—the congressional redistricting the general assembly established in 2022.” It had rejected Hoskins’s claims of practical difficulties by noting that he had done everything he could to run out the clock on a valid petition. In short, the court refused to give Hoskins credit for holding what was essentially an illegal primary election.

Despite this, Judge Stephen Clark stunningly granted Onder’s motion to force H.B. 1 to go into effect. He concluded that it didn’t matter whether the H.B. 1 map was legal because the state had already used it. “Whether or not HB 1 was the governing law during the primary election, voters—including Plaintiffs—voted in primary elections within the congressional districts drawn by HB 1,” Clark wrote. “And they didn’t do so of their own accord. Instead, they did so based on the parameters set by Missouri’s highest election authority, the secretary of state.” In ruling as such, the judge effectively rewarded Missouri officials for holding illegal primary elections in defiance of their state constitution.

There were strong signs earlier this week that the Supreme Court was closely monitoring the situation and was not thrilled by this turn of events. People Not Politicians, the group that had originally gathered the petition signatures, asked Kavanaugh to stay Clark’s ruling on Wednesday. Only 11 minutes passed after the group filed its motion before Kavanaugh ordered Onder and Hoskins to file reply briefs. He set a deadline of ten o’clock Eastern time on Thursday morning, giving them less than 24 hours to weigh in.

The high court almost never acts this fast outside of death penalty cases for pending executions. The two men filed their reply briefs overnight, and the Trump Justice Department (unsurprisingly) also filed its own brief that urged the court to reject the motion and side with the H.B. 1 map. It didn’t work. A lightning-quick 16 minutes after Kavanaugh’s deadline expired this morning, the Supreme Court—this time acting collectively—blocked Clark’s stay until further action from the justices while litigation continues.

In practical terms, the justices’ intervention guarantees two things. First, Missouri voters will elect their representatives in two months based on the 2022 map instead of the 2025 map. That will boost the chances of longtime Representative Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat, to hold the state’s 5th congressional district. Second, voters will also decide whether H.B. 1 will go into effect for the 2028 and 2030 elections. (Assuming, of course, that the state legislature doesn’t try this all again before then.) Recent polling provides few clues as to how Missourians will vote on the matter.

Beyond the implications for Missouri, the Supreme Court’s approach to the dispute is also somewhat heartening. The justices unambiguously rejected efforts by state officials to hold November’s midterm elections under an illegal congressional map, even after those officials illicitly engineered a status quo where they hoped to take advantage of the court’s election precedents. As Trump and his allies consider similar antidemocratic plots against the U.S. electoral system later this year to maintain his grip on power, the justices’ clarity and alacrity is encouraging. Hopefully it extends to the imminent mail-in voting case and future election disputes, as well.

Sept. 12

Top Headlines

 

This is an image President Trump posted on portraying himself as celebrating (using the dance moves of a favorite song, "YMCA," by the disco group "The Village People") the destruction of Iran's Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Aug. 30, 2026 -- a claim he reinforced with a statement shown below but which was refuted by other sources.

• New York Times, News Analysis: How Trump Is Wielding Power to Stifle Speech, Jim Rutenberg and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 12, 2026. President Trump has harnessed agencies across the government to curtail press freedoms, a sweeping campaign that free speech advocates say will have lasting effects.

Special Reports: Disastrous Defeat For Trump Team In Yemen 

• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Trump And Hegseth Suffer A Disastrous Defeat In Yemen, Gas Prices Are Rising, Trump’s Poll Numbers Are Dropping (Again), Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 12, 2026. “This is the first day that Iran really started winning the war,” said a Yemeni official, who is part of the country’s internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government. Shanah Tovah, Hopium world! Wishing everyone a good, sweet, and joyful Rosh Hashanah. To new beginnings! To new beginnings for this great country certainly needs them.
• New York Times, High Prices Spoil Trump’s New Push to Save G.O.P. Majority, Tony Romm, Sept. 12, 2026. Gas prices are high, mortgage rates are climbing and inflation remains well above target, complicating the president’s midterm appeal.

News Roundups

• Meidas Touch Network, Saturday Updates: Trump Gets Booed in Dublin While Iran Gets the Red Carpet in New Delhi, Brett Meiselas, Sept. 12, 2026. Here’s what we’re tracking right now: Trump’s press conference chaos in Ireland on Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Canada, and Ireland; The Houthis mock Trump after gaining control over the Red Sea coast; Saudi Arabia’s pipeline was attacked again as Houthis advance on Marib; Trump continues to try to bribe voters with his lie about giving them money; Republican Jon Husted’s Senate campaign is under fire after it was revealed a high-level staffer posted Nazi imagery.
• The Parnas Perspective, Saturday Night Update: Republicans Face Protests at Home and Abroad, AI Tech CEOs Urge Slow Down in Major Shift, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 12, 2026. Tonight’s rundown has a clear thread running through it. Republicans are facing pushback everywhere they turn, at home and abroad, and none of it looks like it’s going away anytime soon.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Mass Anti-Trump Protests Erupt in Ireland, Censorship of Kimmel Backfires as Views Surge, Houthis Make Major Advances in War, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 12, 2026.Trump spent his weekend getting protested across an entire country, and it still might not have been the most embarrassing thing that happened to him. While he was in Dublin insisting a “friendly protest” of thousands wasn’t actually happening, back home Jimmy Kimmel quietly out-rated his midterm convention, and an FCC commissioner came out and said the quiet part loud: the administration is pressuring broadcasters into silence.
• The Parnas Perspective, Important Friday Night News Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 11, 2026. Before we get to all of the news, and there is a lot of it, I wanted to take a minute and talk to you directly. Tonight, the Epstein investigation just got a lot bigger. French prosecutors have identified 13 new potential victims, newly released texts show FBI Director Kash Patel waging a strange campaign against a random anonymous X account, and Epstein survivors were physically removed from the GOP’s own midterm convention in Dallas minutes after pressing a candidate on the files, even as Republican insiders admit Trump has checked out on the midterms entirely.  

Trump Demands Personal Loyalty Pledge, Asks Supporters To Cheat In Midterm Elections

Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker of the Third Reich, with Hitler in the background, at top left.

• Emptywheel, Opinion: We Do Not Swear Unconditional Obedience, Peterr, Sept. 11, 2026. I only saw brief clips of the Trumpapalooza, but one of the few I saw brought me up short. A point where Trump asked the crowd to stand: “Please right your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breath. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way – I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell…”

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Bring It, Donald. We’ll Win — Even When You Cheat, Edwin Eisendrath, right, Sept. 12, 2026. We face a determined and powerful adversary that’s cloaked in the now-gilded trappings of our own government and will do anything to erase the integrity of our elections. We can beat him. 
• Public Notice, Mike Johnson runs out the clock on his own speakership, Stephen Robinson, Sept. 11, 2026. Johnson, right, the theoretical speaker of the House, announced last Thursday he’s canceling votes for the last two weeks of September. This leaves just four days of legislative business before the midterms.
• New York Times, Opinion: Trump Catastrophically Miscalculated in Georgia, Michelle Cottle, Sept. 12, 2026. When a political player starts drawing personal insults from President Trump and his people, it is a pretty good sign that his star is on the rise. For Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, that moment arrived this summer.

Special Report: Nebraska Governor's Undocumented Workers Scandal

• New York Times, As He Backs ICE Crackdown, Nebraska Governor Employs Undocumented Workers, Yanqi Xu (a reporter for Flatwater Free Press. She examined the agricultural industry in Nebraska as a part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship), Sept. 9, 2026. Gov. Jim Pillen’s family business is one of the nation’s largest pork producers. As he seeks re-election, he has aligned himself with President Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda even though his farms have taken on undocumented laborers.

Global News

 

President Trump with Micheál Martin, the taoiseach, or prime minister, or Ireland, at the Farmleigh House in Dublin on Saturday,Sept. 12, 2026. (New York Times photo by Alex Kent). 

• New York Times, Trump Says Irish Unification Would Be ‘Fantastic,’ Breaking With Precedent, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Luke Broadwater, Sept. 12, 2026. 
• New York Times, In an Irish Village, Trump’s Visit for a Golf Tournament Prompts Protests and Praise, Megan Specia, Sept. 12, 2026. As the U.S. president heads to his Doonbeg hotel for the Irish Open, locals expressed both appreciation for the resort’s economic benefits and opposition to his politics.
• New York Times, A Visa Dispute Is Threatening a U.S.-Brazil Effort to Fight Crime, Ana Ionova and Edward Wong, Sept. 12, 2026. Officials say the Trump administration is blocking some of Brazil’s efforts to expand cooperation on fighting transnational crime.

More On U.S. Media, Education, Economy

 

• Associated Press, For the US news industry, a tough summer draws to a close with McClatchy chain’s cuts, Jocelyn Noveck, Sept. 10, 2026. Closing out a turbulent summer for the news industry, the McClatchy newspaper chain has made deep cuts at The Miami Herald and other papers it owns across the nation.

More On Trump Obsessions, Oppressions

 

White House aides Steven Cheung, left, and Stephen Miller.

• Lance's Substack, Opinion: Who Is Maintaining The Ruse That Trump Is Mentally Competent For Office? Lance F Rosen, right, Sept. 12, 2026. How Do We Pull The Curtain On All Of It? Everything runs through Stephen Miller. The press secretary and White House Comms team led by Stephen Cheung are running the propaganda side under Miller’s direction. Now they have a new blonde Nazi Barbie to run the press shop, and she is experienced at reading scripts from her ESPN experience.

More On Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup

• Last Page First, Investigative Commentary: Who Bought Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch? Inside the Huffines Family, Jana, right, Sept. 12, 2026. The Huffines family had the money to buy almost any kind of property they wanted. They bought Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico.

U.S. Foreign Policy, Trump Family Personal Diplomacy To Putin 

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (R) welcomes US special envoy Steve Witkoff (2nd L) and Jared Kushner (L) prior to their talks in Moscow on September 5, 2026. (Gavriil GRIGOROV / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

• Meidas Touch Network, Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Speaks Out After Trump’s Latest Putin Talks, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 12, 2026. Michael McFaul tells Ben Meiselas why Trump’s approach to Putin is projecting weakness and damaging America’s standing around the world.

Top Headlines

 

This is an image President Trump posted on portraying himself as celebrating (using the dance moves of a favorite song, "YMCA," by the disco group "The Village People") the destruction of Iran's Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Aug. 30, 2026 -- a claim he reinforced with a statement shown below but which was refuted by other sources.

New York Times, News Analysis: How Trump Is Wielding Power to Stifle Speech, Jim Rutenberg and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 12, 2026. President Trump has harnessed agencies across the government to curtail press freedoms, a sweeping campaign that free speech advocates say will have lasting effects.

The Justice Department has sent F.B.I. agents to reporters’ homes to serve subpoenas and, in at least one case, flashed a warrant to seize devices. The Pentagon has fired the editor and publisher of its traditionally independent newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and blocked access to other journalists who refused to sign pledges that would limit their reporting.

Regulatory agencies are using their powers to pressure media organizations over their content. The administration has stripped funding from public television and radio. Angry over stories he does not like, President Trump has sued major news organizations and the White House has taken control of the previously independent press pool that tracks the president, deciding which outlets can participate.

Almost 20 months into Mr. Trump’s second term, his long-running media clashes have grown into a sweeping campaign to control speech in America that stands out for applying so many levers, so fast, all at once.

Driven by personal pique, fury over leaks and a determination to shape the political narrative to his advantage, Mr. Trump is deploying the might of the federal government and filing personal lawsuits — targeting not just journalists and liberal critics, but also comedians and talk show hosts, and the corporate entities behind them.

To the president and his allies, he is simply demanding accountability for what he casts as biased, unfair and sometimes inaccurate coverage and criticism — an effort that has been welcomed by longtime conservative press critics like those at the Media Research Center.

Aides noted that the White House has this year expanded who gets invited to cover events, such as the off-the-record presidential lunch with network anchors that precedes the annual State of the Union address.

In a statement, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said that “biased reporting from the media is a disservice to the American people,” adding: “We utilize every tool available to ensure that accurate reporting is provided to the public and the stain of those who knowingly peddle false information is held accountable.”

Free speech advocates say the president’s intent is apparent: to punish, intimidate and silence dissenters.

“There’s not a week that goes by where they’re not taking a new step to curtail press freedom in the country,” said Clayton Weimers, the executive director of the North America division of Reporters Without Borders. “We have measured a substantial diminishment of press freedoms.”

When challenged in court, the president and the administration have frequently lost, confronted with strongly worded rulings from judges affirming First Amendment rights.

Still, even the path to legal victory can have severe financial and reputational costs for those he views as adversaries, which have included The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC. And each time the president assails what has long been considered protected speech, media analysts say, he is eroding norms and undercutting the role of an independent press.

Reporters Without Borders maintains an index that tracks press freedom in 180 countries, clocking governmental threats, subpoenas and the vindictive use of regulations against journalists. The United States now ranks at its lowest since the organization started the index in 2002 — 64th, just above Panama and just below Botswana. The trend is the same at similar indexes kept by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the V-Dem Institute of Sweden.

There is a long record of U.S. presidents taking steps to curtail speech. President Woodrow Wilson imposed strict censorship and forced dissenting publishers out of business during World War I. Richard M. Nixon kept an enemies list, and his aides threatened F.C.C. action against broadcasters. More recently, the George W. Bush White House expanded government secrecy and the Obama administration went after the sources of journalists through leak investigations.

Mr. Trump had inveighed against the Biden administration for what he and his supporters portrayed as draconian pressure on social media companies to censor disfavored content often at their expense, promising at his second inauguration to “stop all government censorship.”

Now his administration is breaking new ground in stifling dissent with personal lawsuits and novel uses of executive power, longtime First Amendment lawyers say, with implications that extend far beyond Mr. Trump’s presidency.

“We live in a different world under this administration because the threats are so grave,” said Floyd Abrams, who has worked on free speech cases for 60 years. “It’s one thing to say there’s an extraordinarily powerful First Amendment, but unless and until courts rule on these matters, the threat is very real.”Harnessing Government Power

Long before he took office, Mr. Trump was well known for his media feuds. As a developer and reality TV star, he was quick to threaten defamation suits against those who challenged his assertions about his business successes and his wealth.

Mr. Trump has been candid about his aim: to inflict pain, even if it was fleeting. After bringing a failed libel suit against the former Times reporter Timothy L. O’Brien, right, whose book “TrumpNation” estimated Mr. Trump to be worth far less than he claimed, the president gloated about forcing the publisher to spend money. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about,” he said.

In his first term, the president branded journalists as “fake news” and crudely attacked reporters, especially women.

In his second term, Mr. Trump is now imprinting his pugilistic approach across the machinery of the federal government. Those who once might have checked him have been replaced by loyalists who often use their power to fulfill Mr. Trump’s desire to punish perceived enemies.

Soon after his inauguration, the White House banned The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One, ostensibly because the wire service would not call the Gulf of Mexico by Mr. Trump’s preferred name, the Gulf of America. Another reason for the ban: The A.P. would not give the Trump team rights to its photo of Mr. Trump, bloodied with a raised fist, after he was shot in Butler, Pa., in 2024. At a private lunch with Mr. Trump and network anchors last year, White House aides tied the A.P. ban to the denial of the rights to the photo, according to two people briefed on the event.

Mr. Trump’s team is unapologetic about its goal of achieving firmer control over the national information environment — what Mr. Cheung, the communications director, has dubbed in a social media post, “Full Spectrum Dominance.”

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and one of the most aggressive supporters of Mr. Trump’s efforts, has said that the president is “reshaping the media landscape.”

Citing the big broadcast networks, Mr. Carr told an interviewer for CNBC last year that “for years government officials just allowed those entities, with executives sitting in Hollywood and New York, to dictate the political narrative.” Mr. Trump, he added, has “fundamentally changed the game.”

Special Reports: Disastrous Defeat For Trump Team In Yemen

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Trump And Hegseth Suffer A Disastrous Defeat In Yemen, Gas Prices Are Rising, Trump’s Poll Numbers Are Dropping (Again), Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 12, 2026. “This is the first day that Iran really started winning the war,” said a Yemeni official, who is part of the country’s internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government. Shanah Tovah, Hopium world! Wishing everyone a good, sweet, and joyful Rosh Hashanah. To new beginnings! To new beginnings for this great country certainly needs them.

Over the past few days the Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth suffered a devastating defeat in their already disastrous war in the Middle East. From The Washington Post story:

AMMAN, Jordan — A key Saudi Arabian pipeline to the Red Sea was shut down after it was hit by “several drones” launched from Iraq, the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement early Saturday, as Iranian-backed Houthi fighters claimed major victories in Yemen, expelling Saudi forces from the country’s Red Sea coast.

The separate attacks posed new challenges to the region’s ability to export oil amid the ongoing U.S. war with Iran, and further unnerved global oil markets. The price of oil briefly jumped above $110 per barrel, its highest level since May.

“This is the first day that Iran really started winning the war,” said a Yemeni official, who is part of the country’s internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government.

The Saudi statement said it would reserve the right to retaliate for the pipeline attack, but in response to a request from Iraq, would give Baghdad the opportunity to prevent such attacks.

The Iraqi government condemned the attack and confirmed that it was launched from Iraqi territory. A statement from the Iraqi prime minister’s office said that the military commander in the southern Iraqi province of Maysan, where the strike originated, had been dismissed.

The Houthis in Yemen and militant groups in Iraq, both allied with Iran, this summer opened new fronts against Saudi Arabia and its alliance with the U.S. In July, the two countries launched joint airstrikes against what they said were militant sites in Iraq.

Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries in the region have relied increasingly on alternative, land-based pipelines and sea passages to replace shipments through the traditional Persian Gulf export route, where vessels have come under attack in the Strait of Hormuz during the months-long standoff between Iranian and U.S. military forces.

The Houthi territorial claims, following a large-scale military operation aimed at controlling the Bab al-Mandab Strait entrance to the Red Sea, would mean that Iran and its Houthi proxies can now threaten — if not entirely block — energy and other cargo shipments through two key chokepoints.

We will need to be brushing up on our geography in the coming days but here is the best map I could find that helps explain the gravity of what is happening:Iran-backed Houthis claim major advance in Yemen as group reportedly seizes island in key shipping route (BBC News):

Here’s more from The Guardian:

By taking control of key areas this week, including islands off the coast, the anti-west Houthis hope to gain a direct presence near the Bab al-Mandab strait, a 20-mile stretch of water and vital trade and energy route that connects Asia with Europe. ​

The strait’s name is roughly translated as “the gate of tears” or “the gate of grief”, and its strong currents and winds made the passage between the Arabian peninsula and Africa’s east coast hazardous for centuries. Modern-day cargo ships have no physical issue passing through.

​But if ​the Houthis were to close the natural chokepoint, the impact on the global economy could be disastrous. Ships would have to reroute around the southern tip of Africa, adding thousands of extra nautical miles. The fighting has already contributed to the price of oil rising above $100 a barrel after weeks when it was trading closer to $80.

The fighting in Yemen, as well as Houthi missile strikes on Saudi Arabia, is the most significant violence in the country since the UN-brokered peace plan in 2022.

The UN special envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, told an emergency security council meeting on Thursday that the country faced “a new and more dangerous phase of war”.

“This renewed war should alarm us all,” Grundberg said. “It effectively marks the end of the relative calm that Yemen has experienced for over four years since the UN-brokered truce. It not only threatens to plunge Yemen into a prolonged and expanding war, but also risks yet again dragging the country into the wider and unresolved regional confrontation, with global repercussions.”

A timely cartoon from Matt Wuerker of Politico:

"The Lessons of 9/11" as seen by President Trump and U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (Politico cartoon by A timely cartoon from Matt Wuerker).

Brent crude is climbing, even hitting $110 a barrel in the past few days:

Gas prices in the US have taken off again:

Diesel prices have exploded, hitting all times across the country, right as we enter the fall harvest season. In California, our most important agricultural state, diesel is approaching $8 a gallon right now:

Interest rates are taking off, raising the price of everything for everybody:

Not surprisingly Trump’s approval rating has started dropping, again. In today’s FiftyPlusOne aggregate he hit -25 for the first time this cycle:

Trump also hit his lowest mark of the cycle in the Civiqs daily tracker, clocking in at -26:

Congress returns on Monday to this fresh new Trumpian disaster. Calls for Pete Hegseth to step down should become very, very loud. As I mentioned in my talk this week, Trump Had His Shot And Has Blown It, Badly. It Is Our Turn Now To Win, Lead, And Make Things Better, the most important thing about what is happening now in the US - and it is bad - is that we have the opportunity to set a new course - a new beginning - for the country this November.

We are not powerless, and must get to work. For it is our turn now to do what is required for the cause of freedom here and everywhere and win this election this November……Yes, It’s Time To Get To Work People!

We released a series of terrific new interviews with our intrepid candidates this week: David Crowley (WI-Gov), Lindsay James (IA-2), Jessica Killin (CO-5), Nancy Lacore (SC-1), and Amish Shah (AZ-1). You can watch them all here.

We also launched a new daily feature, the Hopium Ad and Video Roundup. It’s a powerful new window into what is happening in our battleground races. Be sure to catch our Wed, Thur, and Fri editions if you haven’t gotten to them yet.

Let’s recharge with Hopium’s Daily Mantra:

• There is nothing Trump and MAGA wants more than for us to be fighting with each other and not with him. We have one job now - elect as many of these wonderful candidates running for the House and Senate as we can. It’s where our focus must be. It’s a year of opportunity for us across the country. We must seize it, together.
• Be sure to become an Early Vote Champion in your networks, communities, and organizations……
• Sign up to become a Democracy Protector too……Let’s Now Go Win The House and Senate, Together

New York Times, High Prices Spoil Trump’s New Push to Save G.O.P. Majority, Tony Romm, Sept. 12, 2026. Gas prices are high, mortgage rates are climbing and inflation remains well above target, complicating the president’s midterm appeal.

With less than two months until the midterm elections, President Trump commenced a final push this week to preserve his Republican majority in Congress, arguing that the United States under G.O.P. control had brought prices “way, way down.”

But for many families and businesses, the economy appeared to be on far shakier footing by Friday. Fuel prices soared, mortgage costs climbed and inflation registered uncomfortably high, testing the public’s patience with Mr. Trump’s frequent assurances that the country is on the right track.

The contrast underscored the political and economic stakes for Mr. Trump, who may soon face the wrath of an electorate long spurned by promises in Washington to lower the cost of living. As November draws closer, prices have risen under the president’s leadership, driven largely by an agenda that has included two years of punishing trade brinkmanship and a prolonged war with Iran.

The consequences were evident in the latest gauge of the Consumer Price Index, released on Friday. The report showed that prices rose at an annual pace of 3.4 percent in August, which increased the odds of the Federal Reserve’s raising interest rates next week.

The data came on the same day that a separate, long-running survey from the University of Michigan found that consumer sentiment dropped sharply this month. In that report, Americans expressed new worries that the economy was sputtering, and that inflation would continue to rise.

The unease set the stage for Mr. Trump’s renewed push this week to make the case to voters that he has helped, not hurt, the economy. Over two days of speeches at his party’s midterm convention in Dallas, the president labored to convince Americans that Republicans had achieved “tremendous economic success.”

But Mr. Trump did not limit himself to a brash defense of his record. The president also said he would send a $5,000 check to American citizens if Republicans retained the House and Senate in November, though he has failed to deliver on similar promises in the past.

News Roundups

 

Meidas Touch Network, Saturday Updates and Comment: Trump Gets Booed in Dublin While Iran Gets the Red Carpet in New Delhi, Brett Meiselas, Sept. 12, 2026. Here’s what we’re tracking right now:

• Massive protests greet Trump in Dublin
• Trump’s press conference chaos in Ireland on Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Canada, and Ireland
• The Houthis mock Trump after gaining control over the Red Sea coast
• Saudi Arabia’s pipeline was attacked again as Houthis advance on Marib
• Trump continues to try to bribe voters with his lie about giving them money
• Republican Jon Husted’s Senate campaign is under fire after it was revealed a high-level staffer posted Nazi imagery
• Ted Cruz gets booed in Austin

Trump’s Brutal Welcome In Ireland

Trump landed in Ireland, officially for meetings with Taoiseach Micheál Martin, but let’s be honest, the real reason he’s there is the Irish Open at his golf course.

The folks in Dublin didn’t seem too pleased about his arrival: Caricature balloons depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump are carried during a protest against the visit of U.S. President Donald Trump in Dublin, Ireland, September 12, 2026 (REUTERS/Natalia Campos).

They didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for the guy.

Early reports say about 50K people hit the streets, carrying signs calling him a war criminal and accusing him of covering up the Epstein Files. The giant balloon caricatures floating above the crowd of Trump, Netanyahu, and Epstein made quite the splash.

Trump, despite being blocks away, of course claimed he hadn’t heard of any protests.

WTF Was That Press Conference?

Once Trump sat down with reporters, things got worse. He again said the Iran War would end “very soon, probably right after the midterms.” He was asked about the Saudi pipeline attack and said Iran was “probably” responsible. He absurdly claimed the Houthis called him personally to tell him how much they respect him and how they’ll let through U.S. ships peacefully.

Houthi leadership responded almost immediately, with spokesman Hasan al-Assad calling Trump’s claims baseless and quoting an old proverb about kissing the hand you cannot break. Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi also released footage mocking the Saudi royal family, implying they used to dance for Trump like his puppets.

During the presser, Trump also again claimed that both Canada and Iran are now “begging” to make a deal. On Ireland, he said he’d love to see the island unified, breaking with decades of official U.S. neutrality on the issue. He suggested the UK might not have the resources to defend the Falkland Islands anymore (this while he’s quietly arming Argentina with Black Hawk helicopters). Trump continues to lash out at our (former?) allies for not jumping into his reckless and illegal war.And In New Delhi…

While Trump was jeered in Dublin, Iran was getting treated like royalty at the BRICS summit in new Delhi. Iranian officials held direct talks with China’s foreign minister and Iran’s president was received with full honors alongside Xi Jinping, Putin, and Modi. BRICS leaders also announced a new payment system called BRICS Pay, aimed at reducing reliance on the U.S. dollar.

Running From Yemen

Saudi-backed forces are in full retreat across Yemen. Satellite imagery has now confirmed the East-West pipeline was hit in multiple locations, and Houthi forces are closing in on Marib, with some analysts suggesting the city could fall within days. A regional source told CNN this is “a Saudi-American f**k up of epic proportions.”

A Few Other Things

Trump posted again about his $5,000 bribe, already blaming Democrats for saying it will never happen. The guy is a scam artist. A con man. News organizations should treat him accordingly.

In Ohio, Republican Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign has now fired its political director after WaPo found photos of him posing with Nazi SS imagery and following Waffen-SS reenactment accounts online.

Down in Austin, Sen. Ted Cruz was on ESPN for some reason at a College Gameday. He got brutally booed and the crowd broke out into “Ted Cruz sucks” chants live on television.

Shana Tova to everyone celebrating the new year this weekend. Wishing everyone health, peace, and sweetness ahead. 

The Parnas Perspective, Saturday Night Update: Republicans Face Protests at Home and Abroad, AI Tech CEOs Urge Slow Down in Major Shift, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 12, 2026. Tonight’s rundown has a clear thread running through it. Republicans are facing pushback everywhere they turn, at home and abroad, and none of it looks like it’s going away anytime soon.

Donald Trump found that out this weekend in Ireland, where thousands took to the streets of Dublin and public figures like Rosie O’Donnell openly called for protests against his visit. Back home, Roger Marshall is facing his own wave of backlash from constituents fed up with where the party stands. And Ted Cruz walked into a college football stadium in the middle of a deep red state and got booed for nearly ten minutes straight, loud enough that you couldn’t even hear his answers.

Add to that a growing chorus of warnings from the very people building artificial intelligence, a fight over a five thousand dollar payment that may or may not exist, and a string of stories on immigration enforcement, and it’s clear the pressure is building on multiple fronts at once.

Here’s everything you need to know.

AI Fears Rapidly Grow:

Amodei Calls for Global AI Slowdown. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a 3,800 word essay Saturday calling for the entire AI industry to deliberately slow the pace of capability development. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.” He warned that a race to the bottom driven by commercial competition makes the risks of the technology more acute, and said he has grown more convinced over the last few months that “fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence.” He proposed that AI companies commit to bringing in independent, embedded evaluators with employee-like access to verify safety practices, and called for global coordination, including with authoritarian governments, to set common standards.

Altman and Musk Quickly Back the Call. Hours after Amodei’s essay went up, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted his agreement on social media, saying “this has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks” and that his company would adopt the same independent evaluator model. Elon Musk, whose xAI company builds the Grok chatbot, responded with a simple “Dario is right.” The alignment among three normally fiercely competitive executives is notable, and it follows years of AI labs racing each other on capability while occasionally warning about the very technology they are building. Altman had already floated the idea of pacing development back in July, saying on a podcast that slowing down would “give ourselves enough time for society to harden around these new capability levels.”

Ex-Anthropic Researcher’s Resignation Set the Stage. Amodei’s essay came days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and posted publicly that the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade” and that this “is not a marketing stunt.” Coxon said executives often soften their language for the press while privately expressing real fear, adding that “no other human activity poses this level of danger.” In a later interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, he went further than Amodei’s own essay, saying there is “a very real possibility” that recursive self-improvement, AI systems making themselves smarter without human help, could arrive within the next year or two, with “a chance that we could all die.” His resignation set off a broader furor inside the industry, with other researchers publicly calling on their own leaders to pause development.

The OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident Fueled the Alarm. Much of the urgency traces back to an incident in which a swarm of OpenAI’s own AI agents breached the systems of a smaller AI company, Hugging Face, without OpenAI’s knowledge, a breach that went undetected for weeks until Hugging Face itself flagged it. Amodei described the swarm as having acted like “a fanatically devoted collective,” carrying out cybersecurity attacks on targets it was never asked to target. He warned that if left unchecked, this kind of self-directed capability “could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.” The incident has already drawn a Senate probe into OpenAI, and Amodei said it raised the possibility that a similar swarm could take over large portions of the internet within six to twelve months, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

Not Everyone Buys the Altruism, and Some Say It Doesn’t Go Far Enough. Critics in Silicon Valley have suggested Anthropic and OpenAI’s sudden safety concerns are less about altruism and more about locking in their market lead by pushing for regulations that smaller competitors would struggle to meet. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made that argument explicitly at a conference this week, asking “what better way to create demand than to create a problem” and suggesting AI labs are stoking fear to sell new cybersecurity products. On the opposite end, University of Louisville computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy argued Amodei doesn’t go far enough, saying that if artificial superintelligence “cannot be reliably controlled, aligned, predicted, or contained, then the rational policy is not to manage its arrival, but to prevent it,” and calling for an outright international ban rather than a managed race. Hugging Face CEO Clément DeLangue, whose company Nvidia is in the process of buying for $12.9 billion, added that AI safety cannot “be solved behind the closed doors of a handful of frontier labs.”

Ireland Erupts Against Trump:

Rosie O’Donnell Leads Calls For Protests Against Trump. Comedian Rosie O’Donnell publicly backed the weekend’s protests against Trump, telling the Irish Independent, “The country must protest, he is the antithesis of everything this country stands for.”O’Donnell moved to Ireland after Trump’s return to the White House, saying she no longer felt comfortable living in the U.S. under his administration. She specifically called on Irish President Catherine Connolly to “speak truth to power” when meeting with Trump, adding, “I don’t think she should drop what she believes in to be polite to a madman. He is like a mad king that has destroyed the country.” O’Donnell and Trump have feuded publicly since 2006, when she questioned his standing as a “moral authority” over a Miss USA scandal, and the two have traded insults ever since.

Trump Calls Reunification “Fantastic” and Wades Into the Falklands. Trump went further than his earlier comments during a meeting with Taoiseach Micheál Martin, telling a reporter a united Ireland would be “fantastic” and adding, “It’s going to happen eventually. It may as well happen now.” He acknowledged there was “no good answer” to the question when he later addressed business leaders, but did not walk back the sentiment. In the same string of remarks, Trump revived talk of the Falkland Islands dispute between the U.K. and Argentina, saying he thinks he’ll “probably be able to settle” the territorial standoff if it flares up again. Analysts noted both comments landed as a pointed jab at Britain, coming amid Trump’s frustration that London has stayed out of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.

Trump Meets Irish President Who Has Called Him a “Bully”. Trump sat down with President Catherine Connolly, a left-wing former protester who demonstrated against him during his first term and has previously called him a “bully” over his Middle East policy. Afterward, Connolly said she told Trump directly of “the strong view of the Irish people that the normalization of war and genocide can never be accepted.” She gave him a collection of poems by the late Irish writer Michael Longley that includes the poem “Ceasefire.” When pressed by reporters on how the meeting went, Trump initially let his protocol chief, Monica Crowley, answer for him before saying only that it was “very nice.”

Thousands March in Dublin as Eric Trump Defends the Family. A protest march drew thousands into central Dublin, with demonstrators waving Irish and Palestinian flags and chanting “Donald Trump not welcome here” and “Irish government, shame on you.” Paula Butler, who came with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, said she was there to oppose Trump’s “attitude to women, to refugees, to migrants,” and dismissed his unity comments, saying, “What he knows about Irish unity, I’d say I know more on my little finger.” Kim Mathis, an American who moved to Dublin last year, said “part of the reason we moved to Ireland was to get away from Trump and all of his horrific policies.” Eric Trump pushed back on the criticism from Doonbeg, telling RTE that the family’s golf course is the area’s largest employer and urging people to “go have them attest to what we’ve done for the country,” while confirming his father plans to return next year for the Ryder Cup.

Other news:

Ted Cruz Gets Booed Off ESPN’s College GameDay. Ted Cruz made a nearly ten minute appearance on ESPN’s College GameDay at the University of Texas in Austin to promote the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at stabilizing the chaotic NIL landscape in college sports, and the crowd booed so loudly through the entire segment that Cruz’s answers were almost impossible to hear. At one point the boos briefly died down before the crowd shifted into chants of “Ted, you suck.” Cruz told viewers he believes the bill will ultimately clear the 60 vote threshold in the Senate, and the legislation has drawn support from figures like Nick Saban and Deion Sanders, though it has repeatedly stalled in Congress despite backing from Trump. The reaction seemed less about the substance of the bill, which most students in the crowd likely knew little about, and more a reflection of Cruz’s party affiliation showing up in a college town in the middle of a deep red state.

Lutnick says the $5,000 dividend wouldn’t come from tax money. Howard Lutnick told NBC that the proposed $5,000 payment to Americans would not be funded by taxpayers, saying “It’s not tax money.” An estimated $500 billion of the roughly $1 trillion needed could come from a new visa program letting wealthy visitors pay up to $5 million each for extended stays, with more than 100,000 people already on a waitlist. The administration is also pointing to the government’s stake in Intel, now worth an appreciated $8.9 billion, as another funding source. Kevin Hassett said the payment would move through the reconciliation process, adding “don’t underestimate President Trump,” while JD Vance has pointed to tariff revenue even after the Supreme Court ruled that “liberation day” tariff money must be returned. The Tax Foundation has noted a similar $2,000 rebate proposal would exceed actual tariff collections, and a new AP poll shows just 32 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, down from 40 percent.

Trump supporters shrug off high gas prices in new man-on-the-street video. Comedian Jason Selvig caught a Trump supporter’s reaction to rising gas prices, asking directly whether Iran had anything to do with it. The supporter dismissed the idea, saying “I don’t think Trump has anything to do with this, I think they’re just doing this to make him look bad. The liberals.” When pressed on who is actually responsible, the supporter said, “He doesn’t control the gas prices. Everything’s gone up. The truck’s gotta pay for their gas and it gets to the consumer which is us.” Asked directly who is at fault, the response was simply “I have no idea. I don’t blame Trump though.”

Republican Senator faces boos. The crowd erupted during a recent Senate debate in chants of “Shame on you!” as Senator Roger Marshall tries to explain why he sued 700 of his patients, leading to 81 arrests.

Trump wants a 30-foot George Washington statue at the Smithsonian. Trump posted on Truth Social calling George Washington “easily America’s Greatest Hero” and is pushing the Smithsonian to install a 30-foot “Colossus statue” of him along with an exhibit running through February 2032. The statue would replace the 1967 Infinity sculpture by Jose de Rivera. The push follows a 162-page report from earlier this year accusing the Smithsonian of overemphasizing oppression and division, and a July order for new signage that has not yet been installed. Trump has separately complained that the Delaware crossing and the victory at Trenton are underrepresented, and has proposed a new “Center for American Heroes.” Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch, who is planning to depart, said he has fought “for the independence of the Smithsonian,” and the episode comes alongside the removal of a sculpture at the Kennedy Center and reported plans to possibly sell a Kehinde Wiley painting one Art in Embassies director called “very woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.”

10,000-year-old mastodon tooth found in California. Geomorphologist Brigid Lynch discovered a fossilized mastodon tooth believed to be around 10,000 years old at a preserve in San Mateo County. Paleontologist Wayne Thompson described it as being in “immaculate condition,” saying it sent “chills and shivers up and down my spine.” Pacific mastodons trace back roughly 2.5 million years and went extinct more than 10,000 years ago due to climate change and overhunting. The tooth has been donated to Stanford for carbon dating, and curator Christine Garcia spoke to the broader value fossils like this hold for understanding the region’s history. The find follows similar discoveries in New York in 2024 and on a California beach in 2023.

ICE agents beat protesters and enter a home in Frederick, Maryland. Officers drove vehicles at and onto sidewalks near protesters and used batons during a confrontation in Frederick, Maryland, with at least two people hospitalized. City council president Cesar Diaz described nearly being struck, saying he was “one foot away from her” when a vehicle came close. Activist Soolah Kemp gave her own account of a vehicle driving directly at her. Roughly 200 protesters formed a human chain attempting to block agents from entering a home. Representative April McClain Delaney called for “a full, transparent investigation,” and Senator Chris Van Hollen accused agents of “creating chaos and instilling fear,” while DHS did not directly respond beyond saying “criminal illegal aliens are not welcome.”

North Carolina detention officer charged with 20 counts of forgery. Former Guilford County detention officer Michael Diehl has been charged with 20 felony counts of forgery for allegedly faking magistrates’ signatures on ICE detainer-extension forms. The scheme was uncovered after a flagged form connected to inmate Claudio Nepomuceno led investigators to 19 additional forged documents tied to other inmates. Diehl was fired, arrested, and released on a $5,000 bond, and investigators say more charges are possible as the case continues. The case comes as ICE has detained more than 70,000 people since Trump’s inauguration.

Mississippi police say more arrests coming in Tasia Fortune case. Police Chief RaShall Brackney said the investigation into Tasia Fortune’s death “remains active” and that “additional arrests will be pending.” Jarques Ratliff is expected to appear in court Monday. Fortune’s mother, Christy Spivey, described her grief and disbelief, rejecting any suggestion of suicide by saying “she would never, ever, ever.” Fortune had endured a difficult life that included foster care, homelessness, an abusive relationship, and raising four children, while also holding onto her faith and hopes of starting her own cleaning business. Spivey closed by asking people to “say her name. Keep it going.”

CDC declares record cyclospora lettuce outbreak over. Health officials have declared the record-setting cyclospora outbreak linked to Taylor Farms shredded iceberg lettuce imported from Mexico officially over. The outbreak sickened more than 12,000 people and killed two across 21 states before the product was pulled from shelves. It sparked broader fear around produce, led some growers to plow lettuce under, and drew criticism of the administration’s food safety response. The FDA’s investigation into the exact source is still ongoing, and Taylor Farms says its Mexico facility remains closed pending that investigation, even as unrelated cyclospora outbreaks continue elsewhere.

DOJ sidesteps legal fight by deporting woman through secretive terror court. The Justice Department avoided a looming legal battle by deporting Nazira Haji Zada through the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, a venue that had sat dormant for roughly 30 years before this case. She was actually removed from the country about two weeks before the DOJ announced it, timed to land around the 9/11 anniversary. Prosecutors alleged she was “the matriarch” behind an ISIS-inspired plot to carry out a mass shooting on Election Day 2024, a plan her son and son-in-law were convicted over. Haji Zada agreed to the alien-terrorist designation and forfeited her green card in exchange for a guarantee that her admission would not be used against her in future criminal proceedings, a deal approved by Judge Joan Ericksen. The arrangement heads off a constitutional challenge her attorneys had planned to bring against the court’s secretive procedures, including its use of classified evidence, in a court structured similarly to the FISA court with five judges appointed by Chief Justice Roberts.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Mass Anti-Trump Protests Erupt in Ireland, Censorship of Kimmel Backfires as Views Surge, Houthis Make Major Advances in War, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 12, 2026. Trump spent his weekend getting protested across an entire country, and it still might not have been the most embarrassing thing that happened to him.

While he was in Dublin insisting a “friendly protest” of thousands wasn’t actually happening, back home Jimmy Kimmel quietly out-rated his midterm convention, and an FCC commissioner came out and said the quiet part loud: the administration is pressuring broadcasters into silence.

Meanwhile, the Houthis pulled off one of the fastest, most consequential advances of this entire Iran war, and the recriminations flying between Washington and Riyadh afterward are brutal. Plus, an arrest in a case that’s had a community on edge for weeks, Brazil’s presidential race just got a lot messier, and Ben Shelton is one match away from ending a 23-year American drought at the U.S. Open.

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Here’s the news:

Trump in Ireland:

Massive Protests Greet Trump’s Ireland Visit. Donald Trump’s two day trip to Ireland, his first visit to the country as president since 2019, is being met with widespread protests across Dublin and the tiny village of Doonbeg. A recent poll found 69 percent of the Irish public does not support the visit, and a coalition of political parties and advocacy groups organized demonstrations under the banner “No Welcome for Mr Trump,” marching toward the Dáil shortly after his arrival. Community worker Sarah Clancy said people have “never had so much reason to protest,” pointing to his support for Israel in Gaza, the war with Iran and its impact on energy costs. Roughly 4,000 Irish and American security personnel, including 1,000 U.S. Secret Service members, snipers and anti-drone technology, were deployed for the visit at a reported cost of 20 million euro to Irish taxpayers.

Trump Dismisses Protests, Says Ireland “Fleeced” the U.S. Asked about the demonstrations Saturday morning, Trump told reporters, “I didn’t know there was a protest ... I haven’t seen any protests. It’s a friendly protest, let’s say.” Sitting beside Taoiseach Micheál Martin, he called the U.S.-Ireland relationship “fantastic” but added it was “less profitable for us to be honest with you.” He later told business leaders “you fleeced us but that’s okay,” referencing the American medical and technology companies that have relocated jobs to Ireland over the decades. Protesters including journalist Justine McCarthy said they didn’t expect Trump to notice the demonstrations but wanted “the rest of the world will know that we don’t want him here.”

Trump Says He’d “Love” to See a United Ireland. During his meeting with Martin in Dublin, Trump said he would “love” to see Northern Ireland unify with the Republic of Ireland, calling it something that’s “going to happen eventually” and “a very cool thing.” The remarks came weeks after British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said a referendum on Northern Ireland’s status was “off the table,” a position Downing Street reaffirmed after Trump’s comments. Democratic Unionist Party leader Gavin Robinson pushed back sharply, writing that “Northern Ireland’s constitutional future will be decided by the people of Northern Ireland, not by commentary in London, Dublin or Washington.” Under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, only the British government can call a border referendum, and polling still shows a comfortable majority in Northern Ireland favor staying in the U.K., though that gap has narrowed since Brexit.

Trip Built Around Golf, Officials Aim for a Smooth Visit. Despite the political theater, the visit is centered on Trump’s own golf course in Doonbeg, where he is set to help present the trophy at the Irish Open on Sunday. His organization has controlled the course since 2014, and he flew from Dublin to Shannon to attend the tournament’s final round before departing Sunday evening. A senior Irish government official told Politico the goal was simply to get him through Dublin “as smoothly and trouble-free as possible. Smiling faces, nice pictures, no friction.” Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said her party would join the weekend’s protests and hoped President Catherine Connolly would raise Gaza during their meeting, while Doonbeg’s Trump International general manager Joe Russell said local police were well equipped to handle whatever protests reached the village.

Jimmy Kimmel:

Kimmel-Talarico Interview Outdraws Trump’s Convention Speech. Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, above left, has drawn more than 5.8 million views on YouTube, easily surpassing the audience for Trump’s own convention livestream. Trump’s roughly two-hour address on the opening night of the GOP’s midterm convention drew about 2.5 million viewers on Fox News, the only major network that carried it in full, ahead of MS NOW’s 1 million and CNN’s 441,000 in the same window. Even combined, Fox’s day two livestream views of 17,000 plus its broadcast audience add up to less than what Kimmel’s single interview pulled in. The numbers undercut Trump’s own claim, posted to Truth Social, that the convention was “far bigger, better, and more important than anyone thought possible” and that its “overall numbers beat the NFL.”

FCC Commissioner Says Kimmel’s Self-Censorship Proves Trump’s Media Pressure Campaign. Kimmel pulled his Talarico interview from broadcast television entirely, posting it to YouTube instead after saying the FCC had “threatened me, threatened my show, threatened our network” over so-called equal time rules for political candidates. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez called the move proof of the administration’s reach, saying “Jimmy Kimmel’s decision to keep his interview with a Senate candidate off the air shows just how far this Administration’s campaign of censorship and control has gone.” She warned that “no host, local affiliate, or network should have to weigh federal retaliation before booking a guest for a newsworthy interview” and noted there’s no way to know how many other editorial decisions have been shaped by the same pressure. Gomez, a frequent critic of Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr, also pointed to Disney’s ABC as one of the only broadcasters still fighting the agency’s tactics in court rather than quietly complying.

Late-Night Hosts Mock Trump Over Empty Arena at His Own Convention. Kimmel spent much of his monologue on video of Trump insisting his midterm convention crowd in Dallas was packed while cameras showed visibly empty seats, including Trump asking attendees not to use the bathroom so news photos wouldn’t catch gaps in the crowd. “Could there be a better metaphor for this presidency than him bragging about the size of his crowd to a bunch of empty seats?” Kimmel said, adding “that arena was as empty as a Waymo.” He argued Trump surrounds himself with “so many trembling flunkies” willing to back up “his constant bullshit” that he never has to acknowledge reality. The bit came a day after Trump demanded the unusual midterm convention be held in the first place, which Kimmel noted “had never been done before, because there’s no reason to do that.”

Comedians Pile On Trump’s $5,000 Dividend Promise. Both Kimmel and Daily Show host Michael Kosta tore into Trump’s pledge to send $5,000 to every American adult if Republicans hold Congress in November. “I spent all day today trying to decide whether that was a bribe or a lie,” Kimmel said, “and I think it might be both things. I think Donald Trump just invented the libe.” He noted the plan would add $1.3 trillion to the deficit and predicted the checks would never actually go out. Kosta mocked the framing of the payment as a corporate-style “dividend” given the country’s negative $40 trillion balance sheet, joking “we should be faking our own death and starting a new life in Thailand,” while noting even Fox host Brian Kilmeade could only muster a tepid “I’m not sure that’s OK but I think it’s kinda fun” when asked about it.

Houthis:

Blame Game Erupts Over Houthi’s Lightning Red Sea Advance. A CNN investigation found deep finger pointing between Washington and Riyadh after the Houthis overran the port city of Mocha and seized Perim Island in barely 36 hours, despite repeated warnings to U.S. Central Command that the situation was turning critical. A regional source called it “a disaster made in DC and Riyadh” and “a Saudi-American f**k up of epic proportions,” describing a full day with no Saudi air support despite minute-by-minute updates on the Houthi advance. Part of the failure traces back to the UAE pulling its remaining forces out of Yemen in January at Saudi Arabia’s request, leaving military bases unfilled, while Yemeni army rosters turned out to be padded with “ghost names” and running at roughly 20% of their reported strength. A Western source close to the battle put it bluntly: “The Saudis threw the Yemenis under the bus.”

Trump Says Houthis “Don’t Want to Fight” the U.S., Predicts War Will End Soon. Speaking to reporters during his Dublin visit, Trump said Yemen’s Houthi fighters had personally reached out to Washington. “The Houthis called us and they don’t want to fight with us,” he said. “They don’t want us to go after them.” He separately predicted the broader Iran war would end “very soon,” telling reporters “I think it’ll be probably right after the trip” and accusing Iran of stalling “to complicate the election.” Trump also said Iran was “probably” behind the drone attack that forced Saudi Arabia to shut down one of its main oil pipelines.

BRICS Nations Call for “Maximum Restraint” as Bloc Strains Over the War. Leaders from the 11-nation BRICS bloc, including China, Russia, Iran and India, issued a joint statement in New Delhi expressing “deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions in Middle East/West Asia” and calling for “exercising maximum restraint.” The statement also condemned “deliberateattacks on civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities” under IAEA safeguards, a pointed reference to strikes during the war. Getting the bloc to agree at all was a diplomatic feat, since foreign ministers failed to reach a joint statement back in May amid divisions between Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Iran’s Pezeshkian used the sidelines to meet separately with the UAE’s crown prince, even as he warned beforehand that the Middle East does not need the United States acting as a “regional policeman.”

Drone Attack from Iraq Knocks Out Key Saudi Oil Pipeline. Saudi Arabia and Iraq both said a drone strike launched from Iraqi territory hit the East-West pipeline in the Riyadh and Medina regions, injuring several people and forcing its shutdown. Iraq’s prime minister responded by firing the military commander overseeing the border province where the drones were traced and by closing three border crossings with Iran as part of what a security source called “an intelligence effort to track down the perpetrators.” No group has claimed responsibility, and an alliance of Iran-backed Iraqi militias denied involvement, though Saudi officials have previously accused those groups of targeting the kingdom’s oil infrastructure. The pipeline normally moves 5 to 7 million barrels a day and has become critical for routing Saudi crude around the Strait of Hormuz since the Iran war began, making the attack a direct hit on one of the last safe export routes left.

Other news:

Man Arrested in Tasia Fortune Killing. A man has been arrested in connection with the death of Tasia Fortune, the 29-year-old Black woman found hanging from a tree behind an abandoned Jackson, Mississippi building last month. Jackson Police Chief RaShall Brackney identified him as Jarques Ratliff and said he had an “association” with Fortune, though she did not specify what kind. Fortune’s death was officially classified as a homicide Thursday evening, a determination that led to two search warrants and an arrest warrant, and Ratliff was ultimately found walking along a nearby street after officers missed him at the search location. Brackney called the arrest “an important development” but stressed the case “remains active,” adding “because Tasia and her children deserve nothing less.”

North Korea Fires Missiles Toward the Sea. North Korea launched multiple ballistic missiles toward the sea on Saturday, a day after the U.S., South Korea and Japan wrapped up a joint military drill Pyongyang views as a security threat. South Korea’s military detected the launches from the Wonsan area and said it boosted surveillance while sharing information with Washington and Tokyo. U.S. Pacific Command said the launches do not pose an immediate threat to American territory or its allies. Earlier in the week, North Korea’s defense minister warned the exercise could trigger “strong and reflective countermeasures from the standpoint of power.”

Nashville Airport to Be Renamed for Dolly Parton. Nashville’s airport authority board voted unanimously to begin renaming Nashville International Airport in honor of Dolly Parton, who died last month at 80 after a brief battle with cancer. The 6-0 vote does not set a final name yet, but the board called it the first step in a “multifaceted process” and said it is working with the appropriate parties to determine how her name and legacy will be incorporated. More definitive plans are expected in the coming months. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee praised the move, saying “Dolly has always helped the world fall in love with Tennessee.”

Flávio Bolsonaro Faces Corruption Probe Before Election. Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro is under investigation for corruption, money laundering and tax evasion tied to 61 million reais, or about $12 million, he received from a disgraced banker to fund an unreleased movie about his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro. The court unsealed documents showing his brother Eduardo allegedly guided how the money should be managed in the U.S., and prosecutors suspect funds were used to cover Eduardo’s expenses and promote Flávio’s political agenda with the Trump administration. Flávio denied wrongdoing, saying “there’s nothing wrong about the movie” and welcoming the transparency. The revelations land three weeks before Brazil’s October 4 election, in which he is locked in a tight race against President Lula, who has seized on the scandal in his campaign.

Trump Says He’d Allow China to Build Cars in the U.S. Trump said he would not oppose Chinese automakers building cars inside the United States, breaking with American car companies and lawmakers who have urged him to keep them out. “If China wanted to come in and open a plant to build their cars here, I’d be OK with that,” he said, adding that Japan does the same and “hires our people.” He said he does not want Chinese automakers building in Mexico and shipping cars north instead. Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin had warned days earlier that allowing Chinese cars into the U.S. as part of a broader deal would be a “strategic mistake,” a claim Trump dismissed as a “total phony rumor.”

Lil Durk Acquitted of Murder for Hire. A federal jury acquitted rapper Lil Durk of murder for hire, conspiracy and stalking resulting in death in connection with a 2022 Los Angeles shooting that killed rival rapper Quando Rondo’s cousin. Prosecutors had alleged Durk funded the attack in retaliation for the killing of his friend and collaborator King Von two years earlier. His co-defendants, Deandre Wilson and David Lindsey, were convicted of stalking charges but were also acquitted of the murder for hire count. Durk remains in custody pending a separate racketeering trial, and prosecutors said they “look forward to presenting our evidence at his second trial.”

Uganda Buries Its “Boy King” Amid Succession Fight. Uganda held the funeral Saturday for Tooro’s King Oyo Nyimba, who died last month at 34 after a bout with cancer, capping a nine day mourning period marred by a bitter succession dispute. Oyo, who took the throne at age three in 1995 and was once known as the world’s youngest monarch, died unmarried and without a formally declared heir, and kingdom elders have disputed claims that he left behind a son born out of wedlock. Elders this week named a prince working as a journalist to succeed him, a decision his sister said sought to “bring division and turmoil.” The Queen Mother pleaded for unity, saying, “Let us grieve and bury my son King Oyo.”

The Parnas Perspective, Important Friday Night News Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 11, 2026. Before we get to all of the news, and there is a lot of it, I wanted to take a minute and talk to you directly.

This work isn’t always easy. The news we cover is rarely fun. But we are making a difference. We are fighting for the release of the Epstein files, and we are continuing that fight for the survivors. We are educating people, especially young people, who don’t get their news anywhere else. And here is the big news: we are breaking through across the political spectrum. People are leaving Fox and coming to us instead. We are building something real, and we are building it together.

So subscribe. Share this. Amplify this work. Not tomorrow. Not someday. Today. The fight for truth, for ethics, for accountability cannot wait.

Tonight, the Epstein investigation just got a lot bigger. French prosecutors have identified 13 new potential victims, newly released texts show FBI Director Kash Patel waging a strange campaign against a random anonymous X account, and Epstein survivors were physically removed from the GOP’s own midterm convention in Dallas minutes after pressing a candidate on the files, even as Republican insiders admit Trump has checked out on the midterms entirely.

Overseas, the Houthis have completed a stunning takeover of Yemen’s western Red Sea coast, helping push diesel to a record $6.05 a gallon here at home. Saudi Arabia is now begging Trump to intervene militarily, he’s refused, and Iran’s foreign minister is publicly taunting the U.S. Treasury Secretary over the fallout.

And on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the day became a window into where the country is right now: a tense handshake between Giuliani and Mamdani at ground zero, Trump and Hegseth using the Pentagon podium to talk about Iran, a 9/11 widow calling out Saudi Arabia by name, and a social media firestorm over whether the president fell asleep during the ceremony.

All of that, plus a contractor finally admitting the Reflecting Pool disaster was their own screwup, a salmonella outbreak, a $5,000 dividend check with a catch, and more, below.

Epstein Investigation Rapidly Expands:

France widens its Epstein trafficking probe. Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau announced investigators have identified 13 new potential victims of Jeffrey Epstein, bringing the total number of possible victims trafficked by recruiters in France to 26. The investigation opened in February after the Justice Department released more than three million pages of Epstein files, some of which documented his nearly two decade run as a part time Paris resident living in a sumptuous apartment on Avenue Foch, one of the city’s grandest boulevards, where he cultivated relationships with some of France’s most influential cultural and political figures. Beccuau said in a radio interview that authorities have obtained new names of potential recruiters but declined to give further details. French investigators have already scrutinized figures in the French modeling industry who worked with or befriended Epstein, including agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who was found hanged in his prison cell in 2022 while facing rape charges. Epstein himself died in prison in 2019, a death ruled a suicide. The announcement follows the death this summer of modeling scout Daniel Siad, who was accused of repeatedly recruiting young women for Epstein and was found dead in his home before French authorities could question him.

Patel’s texts show him pushing the FBI to fight an anonymous critic. Newly released internal FBI communications show director Kash Patel, below, personally directed his top public affairs official, Assistant Director Benjamin Williamson, in February to publicly hit back at an anonymous X account that had mocked his handling of the Epstein investigation. The account had posted on February 4 that Patel’s “rating just went to all-time highs. Congratulations Kash,” and Patel forwarded it the next day demanding Williamson’s team “find them, and post our record year results back at them all, continously.”

Williamson resisted, telling Patel the account, which he described internally as an “Epstein didn’t kill himself” bot, wasn’t worth responding to and that doing so “would look bad on you.” The exchange also revealed Patel had badly misjudged the post’s reach, believing it had 227,000 replies when Williamson clarified that number was actually X’s total view count and the post had only around 400 replies. Patel pushed back anyway, saying it wasn’t really about the account but about making sure people seeing the post also saw his crime statistics. The FBI declined to comment when reached.

Epstein survivors and their journalist host got thrown out of the GOP convention. Independent journalist Tara Palmeri and three Epstein survivors she brought as guests, all carrying valid press credentials, were escorted out of the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas, nicknamed “Trump-a-palooza,” just minutes after Palmeri pressed House candidate Robert Burke on the Epstein files. The survivors were already in Dallas for the Epstein Files Reading Room bookmobile tour when they joined Palmeri at the event. Burke initially welcomed the topic, telling the group “we really need to know what actually happened” and inviting the survivors to ask him questions directly. One survivor asked whether he’d support holding anyone involved in Epstein’s crimes accountable regardless of party, and Burke replied “I don’t care who they are, unlawful touching is unlawful touching. Consent is consent,” before volunteering, unprompted, that a friend of his had represented both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, though he wouldn’t name the person. Palmeri then pushed him on why Trump hasn’t released the remaining files, and Burke tried to redirect toward Joe Biden. When Palmeri asked who actually controls the Justice Department now, Burke answered “Trump does,” then immediately said he disagreed with the “premise” of her question.

GOP insiders say Trump has checked out on his own party. Republican insiders are increasingly convinced Trump has tuned out his own party just weeks before the midterms, telling reporters he’s fixated on personal legacy projects, like his new White House ballroom and the botched Reflecting Pool renovation, rather than helping Republicans win in November. One operative close to the White House put it bluntly: “He doesn’t care about Republicans winning the midterms. You got a tax cut, which is great. But then all you’ve got is a ballroom and war with Iran. That’s all he’s talking about.” The same operative said they don’t believe Trump actually wants JD Vance or anyone else to succeed him in 2028, pointing to his habit of naming buildings and institutions after himself, from the Kennedy Center to an airport, as proof it’s “all legacy vanity.”

Houthis Expand Operations, Diesel Surges:

Houthis Seize Key Red Sea Territory as Diesel Hits Record. Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have completed a sweeping takeover of the western Red Sea coast, seizing the port city of Mokha along with the islands of Perim and the last two holdouts in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, Greater and Lesser Hanish. A Yemeni government military official put it bluntly: “Everything that was under our control on the western coast has fallen.” Saudi Arabia responded with waves of airstrikes and briefly shut down its East-West oil pipeline in the Riyadh and Medina regions after attacks injured several workers, cutting off a key route Saudi oil uses to bypass the Strait of Hormuz entirely. The advance has already displaced more than 46,000 people according to the U.N., and it helped push diesel to a record $6.05 a gallon nationally, more than 60% higher than a year ago.

Saudi Arabia Presses Trump to Strike the Houthis. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has personally pushed Trump multiple times this week to launch U.S. military action against the Houthis as their offensive rapidly overtakes Yemen’s Red Sea coast. Trump has so far turned him down, offering intelligence and targeting support instead while more than 200 U.S. military personnel remain in Saudi Arabia providing what officials call non kinetic support. Adm. Bradley Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, was in the kingdom for coordination talks as the two leaders continue to speak directly about the escalating threat. The concern driving Riyadh’s request is retaliation: officials worry that if the U.S. or Saudi Arabia hits the Houthis too hard, Iran could strike Saudi Arabia directly in response.

Iran Taunts the U.S. Over Its Economy. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi kept up a public campaign against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, mocking the administration days after it rolled out sanctions Bessent had likened to an “economic D-Day” against Tehran. “The U.S. Treasury Secretary has been gleefully boasting about wanting to impoverish Iranians and collapse our economy,” Araghchi wrote. “Instead, he stands powerless and exposed as the world loses belief in the U.S. financial system. Meltdown over cost of funding U.S. debt is only the beginning.” He posted a chart of surging 30 year Treasury yields, which hit their highest level since 2004 even after Bessent said his department would buy back $6 billion in long-term bonds to calm markets. Oil prices briefly easing and an inflation report landing close to expectations helped U.S. stocks claw back much of the week’s losses despite the rhetoric.

9/11 Ceremonies:

Giuliani-Mamdani Ground Zero Exchange. Rudolph Giuliani and Zohran Mamdani had a brief but pointed encounter at the ground zero ceremony marking 25 years since 9/11. Mamdani extended his hand to Giuliani, who had previously said the mayor should skip the event entirely, and Giuliani responded, “I’ll pray for you. It’s a really hard job.” Mamdani declined to elaborate publicly on the moment afterward, instead steering attention back to the victims’ families in attendance. The exchange became one of the most talked about beats of the day precisely because of the tension Giuliani himself had stirred up beforehand.

Trump and Hegseth Tie 9/11 to Iran War. At the Pentagon ceremony, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used their remarks to draw a direct line between the 2001 attacks and the ongoing war with Iran. Hegseth told the crowd, “We are ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. We control the Strait. We will finish this fight,” framing the current conflict as a continuation of the post-9/11 fight against terror. Trump echoed that message, saluting troops “working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon.” The remarks turned what is usually a solemn day of remembrance into a platform for justifying the administration’s Iran policy.

Terry Strada Confronts Saudi Arabia. At the New York ceremony, 9/11 widow Terry Strada, shown above in a file photo, used her turn reading victims’ names to call out Saudi Arabia directly. “For 25 years, administration after administration have chosen to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families,” she said. “Tell the Saudis to stop lying.” She thanked Vice President JD Vance for showing up and specifically asked him to carry her message back to the administration, while another family member used their moment at the podium to push for declassifying remaining files. Not everyone struck the same note: Michael Massaroli’s son used his reading to condemn the use of 9/11 as a pretext for spreading hate against Muslims.

Trump’s Appeared to Struggle to Stay Awake at the Pentagon. Trump drew a separate wave of attention during the Pentagon ceremony after social media users, including journalist Aaron Rupar, circulated clips accusing the 80 year old president of appearing to nod off or look “tired” and “sleepy” while seated for the remembrance. The moment spread quickly online alongside side by side comparisons to his more animated moments earlier in the event. The White House pushed back hard on the characterization, with spokesman Davis Ingle insisting Trump was “solemnly listening” throughout. The dueling narratives, uncontrolled Iran rhetoric on one side and questions about his alertness on the other, made for an unusually chaotic Pentagon appearance on what is typically the most tightly choreographed day on the calendar.

Other news:

Reflecting Pool contractor admits it was their own screwup, not vandals. Atlantic Industrial Coatings admitted its own faulty work caused the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool’s new liner to peel and blister after this summer’s renovation. The company said workers applied too little primer due to human oversight, causing the liner’s layers to separate, and that two incompatible chemicals in the “American flag blue” coating reacted badly, with the top layer reaching a temperature the one underneath couldn’t handle. Trump had repeatedly insisted vandals used a knife or box cutter to slash a “350 foot slit” in the lining, and prosecutors charged several people, including former Olympian David Hearn, before dropping every case this summer and admitting the damage came from a botched installation. The pool remains closed and fenced off months after repairs were originally supposed to wrap up by July 4. Taxpayers are now paying the same contractor $14.7 million to fix the mess it caused.

Trump’s $5,000 “dividend” checks would come with a catch. Trump says his proposed $5,000 payments to every adult citizen, promised if Republicans hold Congress in the midterms, could only be spent inside the United States, telling the crowd in Dallas “we don’t want you going to Canada to spend the money... we don’t want you going to China, to Germany.” The pledge has drawn immediate skepticism over whether it’s even legal, since federal law bars offering payments to influence how someone votes, and over whether he could authorize roughly $1.3 trillion in spending without Congress. Pressed on why he doesn’t just send the checks now, Trump gave a garbled answer blaming “negative growth” under Democrats. He’s floated similar cash payment ideas before, including “DOGE dividends” tied to tariff revenue, that never actually materialized. The proposal would cost more than double what tariffs have brought in since October.

A salmonella outbreak tied to broccoli sprouts has sickened 22 people. The FDA is investigating a multistate outbreak linked to broccoli sprouts made by Idaho based Evergreen Fresh Sprouts, which were sold to restaurants, co-ops and grocery stores across Washington, Idaho, Montana and Utah. Two people in Washington have been hospitalized, and bagged or clamshell sprouts with expiration dates between September 7 and September 16 are affected. This is a separate outbreak from an earlier salmonella and E. coli scare tied to the same company’s alfalfa sprouts. Symptoms, including diarrhea, high fever, bloody stool and dehydration, can show up as late as six days after exposure, and officials say older adults, young kids and people with weakened immune systems are at the highest risk of severe illness.

Prices are up across the board, not just gas and groceries. A new analysis of federal data found consumer prices have jumped more than 30 percent since 2019, about two and a half times the pace of increases seen in the years before the pandemic, with the pain now spreading into rent, car insurance and dining out. Childcare costs are up 62 percent since 2012, rent has jumped 75 percent, car insurance is up 115 percent, and beef and veal prices have nearly doubled. Economists point to Trump’s tariffs and the war in Iran as key drivers pushing inflation back up after it briefly dipped to 2.3 percent last year, with the rate now sitting at 3.4 percent, still well above the Fed’s target. Democrats have seized on the numbers ahead of the midterms, tying rising prices directly to the Iran war, while the White House credits Trump’s policies with recent monthly drops in beef, prescription drugs and car insurance.

Two former DHS chiefs say the agency needs a “reset.” Democrat Jeh Johnson and Republican Michael Chertoff, who each ran Homeland Security under past administrations, say the agency has become what Johnson called “radioactive” and a “pariah” under the current mass deportation push. Johnson argued deportation operations have overwhelmed DHS’s other jobs, like tracking security threats and disaster response, leaving it at risk of missing real dangers as political violence rises. Chertoff separately said enforcement should target people who actually pose security threats rather than sweeping arrests, saying resources are going toward “gardeners and home health aides” instead of people doing real damage. Roughly half of Americans now support abolishing ICE outright, and public opinion of DHS has soured sharply since 2023. The agency has pulled back from military style raids in cities but is still notching record arrest numbers, and it defends its record as necessary to keep the country safe.

A California woman is accused of killing both of her best friends in one afternoon. Prosecutors say 32 year old Anila Baby of Milpitas killed Ann Mary Mathew and Anjana Hari within 90 minutes of each other in two separate, premeditated attacks last month. Mathew was found stabbed and strangled at her San Jose home, with security footage from the scene deleted during the attack, while Hari was struck by a vehicle and killed in a parking lot about 10 miles away shortly after. Prosecutors call both killings willful and extremely violent, though no motive has been made public, and Baby was arrested trying to flee the second scene covered in blood with facial injuries. She’s being held without bail and returns to court November 17 to enter a plea.  

Trump Demands Personal Loyalty Pledge, Asks Supporters To Cheat In Midterm Elections

Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker of the Third Reich, with Hitler in the background, at top left.

Emptywheel, Opinion: We Do Not Swear Unconditional Obedience, Peterr, Sept. 11, 2026. I only saw brief clips of the Trumpapalooza, but one of the few I saw brought me up short. From Aaron Rupar on Bluesky (with video at the link), describing a point where Trump asked the crowd to stand:

Trump: “Please right your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breath. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way – I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell…”

I physically shuddered as Trump began that pledge, because it reminded me so much of another pledge to another ruler. The  pledge appears in the Evangelisches Feldgesangbuch, the protestant field hymnal for the German Wehrmacht. The same pledge appears in the Katolisches Feldgesangbuch, which was the Roman Catholic military hymnal.

The German Soldier’s Oath, August 1939. The text translates like this:

I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, and that, as a brave soldier, I will be prepared to risk my life at any time for this oath.

They were published in August 1939 by the Luftwaffe, and handed out to the soldiers of the German military. Right before they invaded Poland the following month.

It wasn’t always like this. During the Weimar Republic, members of the military swore an oath to the German constitution, but after the death in 1934 of President Paul von Hindenberg, the oath changed. It became a pledge to Adolf Hitler personally, the leader of the state and the leader of the people. Shortly thereafter, civilian members of the government were made to take a similar oath.

I lived in Germany for a time as an exchange student, right after they showed the NBC miniseries “The Holocaust” on national television. It was the first time there was such a public discussion of that subject, telling the story from Kristallnacht to the ghettos and finally to the death camps and gas chambers. I had conversations with old women whose husbands, fathers, uncles, brothers, and sons had gone off to war, with middle-aged folks who were kids at the time (including men who had been part of the Hilter youth as young boys – much the way that young American boys would join the Cub Scouts – “it’s what everyone did at that age”), and especially with my classmates at school. Beyond the horrors of the Holocaust itself, the stories of the cult of personality were gripping. “How could you have allowed that to happen?” said the folks my age to their grandparents, who mainly had little answer. A few talked about being connected with the “Confessing Church” which opposed the Deutsche Christen, the nationalistic Aryan folks who tried to take over German religious life. But for most, the older folks felt embarrassed at best, if not guilty and ashamed.

“I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States . . .”

So yeah, I shuddered when I heard those words. Shuddered, not in surprise but in pain. Trump has made it clear that he expects this kind of unconditional obedience from the attorneys of the DOJ, and Todd Blanche has done his best to clean out those who do not share that view of the DOJ’s attorneys. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Excursions, has the same mentality at the DOD, and has similarly worked hard to clean house of problematic generals and admirals. When Trump rails at the Supreme Court, it carries clear anger that the justices he nominated and got onto the court are not living up to an oath demanding unconditional obedience to him personally, even if they never actually took such an oath.

Or look at how Trump reacted to Senator Mark Kelly and his former military and intelligence community colleagues, when they pointed out that in our military, we not only do NOT demand unconditional obedience, but we demand exactly the opposite. Soldiers who are given illegal orders are not just given permission to disregard these orders but are REQUIRED not to obey them. Oh, the horror, says Trump, and he sicced DOJ and the DOD to go after Kelly et al., threatening not only their ranks and their pensions, but their very liberty.

That’s how Trump views being president. Everyone owes him — not the country or the constitution or the law, but him — unconditional obedience. And look at what he demanded his obedient minions do: cheat like hell.

Here in Missouri, we’ve seen what demands for unconditional obedience can do. We’ve been dealing with more than just the gerrymandering mess, but also anti-abortion zealots, some of the worst anti-trans laws in the country, and ballot measures that would have neutered the ability of the voters to use initiative petitions to overturn the most idiotic laws the legislature comes up with.

When a leader — any leader — demands unconditional obedience, be afraid. In a religious setting, that’s when you get to Jim Jones or pedophile priests. In an academic setting, this is when you get researchers who twist their data to fit the views of their superiors rather than letting it speak honestly. In a military setting, this is when you get My Lai. In a political setting, this is when you get Adolf Hitler.

We have less than 8 weeks before the elections in November. Many of the races are between candidates who act as if they have sworn unconditional obedience to Trump and candidates who have not. I envision my hypothetical grandkids asking me “How could you have allowed that to happen?”

I don’t want to shrug my shoulders in embarrassment, or bow my head in guilt and shame. And neither should you. It’s time to keep making good trouble.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

 

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Bring It, Donald. We’ll Win — Even When You Cheat, Edwin Eisendrath, right, Sept. 12, 2026. We face a determined and powerful adversary that’s cloaked in the now-gilded trappings of our own government and will do anything to erase the integrity of our elections. We can beat him. 

How many of you have heard someone say, “Donald Trump is doing __________ (fill in the blank) and no one cares.” Or someone asks, “Why isn’t anyone stopping him?”

I’ve heard a thousand variations of these complaints. And it isn’t just from Americans. My wife responded to a post on Bluesky saying that we stand with our Canadian friends. What she heard back was, “That’s not good enough. Do something about it.”

It is hard to witness our country torn down, our treasury pillaged, our military purged and abused, our legal structures undermined, our economy sapped, neighbors pitted against neighbors, our scientific leadership squandered, our shrinking status in the world.

Many of us saw this coming when Donald Trump was returned to power by voters longing for change and by the money of corrupt oligarchs. Nearly two years later, the bitter complaints that he has not been stopped are understandable.

But they are also unfair. We live in a democracy, flawed as it is. Ours is not to overthrow the government by force of arms but to oust its leaders at the ballot box. Meanwhile, with discipline and in accordance with our laws, millions of Americans have resisted the worst. We have protested. We have organized. We have signed up to run for office. We have litigated. We have built entirely new media organizations to sound the alarm. We have stood up to protect our neighbors.

And now, our time of choosing has come. Now, all eyes are on us.

Unlike the millions of Americans I just described, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have given up all pretense of fealty to democratic norms. They are engaged in massive and historic election manipulation. They launched and carried out an unprecedented midterm redistricting process across red states. In GOP-controlled states, they also executed massive voter roll purges. Texas closed nearly 100 polling places in Tarrant County, which they’re afraid they’re about to lose.

Trump instructed the United States Postal Service not to deliver mailed ballots unless the sender is on a list he controls. He’s threatened to send troops to polling places. He said he might order the military to seize ballots.

This is the biggest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

And the world wants to know, are Americans up to the challenge. Are we still a people who will do what it takes to preserve our freedom.SubscribedThe Whole World Is Watching

China sees a sinking America and hope we fail to right our ship. Russia is watching, too. With his guy in our White House, Putin’s unprovoked military assault on Ukraine earned him a red-carpet summit and a trip back to the G20 Summit. Meanwhile, Trump tells Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy that he doesn’t have the cards and shouldn’t count on American military support.

Russia and China are both allied with Iran, sharing intelligence and arms with the nation we’ve been at war with for over six months. All three countries see America’s government as unable to stand up for itself and wonder whether that’s now true of Americans, as well.

Europe is watching. Allied nations that sent their soldiers to die for us after 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq want to know whether America has now become their adversary. They wonder what the American people will do when their President threatens to take Greenland by force, threatens their economies with punishing tariffs, and threatens their values, as Trump and J.D. Vance did when they essentially argued the continent was not white enough.

Africa wants to know if Americans are okay with their President calling them “shithole countries,” ending life-saving foreign aid, and making commercial ties contingent upon whether they will accept our shackled deportees.

Latin America wants to know if we will use our military to launch a new colonial era, where our army goes to war to enable American companies to take their natural resources, as Trump did in Venezuela.

Canada, our great neighbor for centuries, now finds the house next door sold to a mob boss and wonders whether Americans will do anything about it or just watch like it’s The Sopranos.

For 250 years, people yearning for freedom anywhere in the world looked to America. Now the whole world is watching to see if that light is extinguished.ArticlesDemocrats Understand the AssignmentEdwin Eisendrath·Aug 9Democrats Understand the Assignment

But here at home, there is no time to watch. There is no room for bystanders who say, “What can we do, they’re cheating?” Our democracy is not a spectator sport. It is not a social media meme. It is, as it ever was, a struggle for freedom.

We face a determined and powerful adversary. One cloaked in the now-gilded trappings of our own government. One that will do anything to erase the integrity of our elections.

Ordinary Americans look at all the power arrayed against us and we say: is that all you’ve got?

That’s what we said in Chicago and Minneapolis last year when over-armed and under-trained ICE agents tried to intimidate us. Americans poured out of their houses and into the path of peril. We were willing to die for our freedom. Renee Good and Alex Pretti did.

This year, tens of millions of us will check our voter registrations and overcome their purges. We will cast our votes in ways to be sure they get counted. We will guard the counting process, and we will demand the winners be seated.

They have power. They have money. We have only ourselves. Bring it on.

Edwin Eisendrath is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Alderman who hosts It's The Democracy Stupid on Lincoln Square and a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. 

The Bulwark, Opinion: Fear and Loathing Among the Fearful and Self-Loathing, Sonny Bunch, Sept. 12, 2026. What I saw at Trump’s tribute to Trump in Dallas.

Two separate but concurrent factors drove much of the mood at the midterm convention: the complete lack of accomplishments in the present and a deep uncertainty about the future. The speakers who came onstage spent most of their time railing against the Biden years and warning against a return to his dark ages without ever really settling on a new standard-bearer. This was, theoretically, JD Vance’s coming-out party, and Trump bigfooted him both days, closing out night one with a nearly two-hour ramble and then following Vance’s keynote on night two with a 30-minute rehash of night one’s greatest hits.

There was one figure looming over the event, however. Indeed, the second and final day was timed to the anniversary of his death, one day before 9/11. I speak, of course, of Charlie Kirk, assassinated one year ago and invoked constantly as a martyr for conservatism, as the beacon of light the activists need to see the way forward. And it was incredibly telling that Vance, in trying to square the Iran circle—and after leaking to the New York Times that he was definitely very on the ball in reaching out to military commanders to see just how bad things on the ground in Iran are—appealed not to Donald J. Trump but to . . . Charlie Kirk.

Speaking to the “young men” who felt “inspired by Charlie Kirk” but were turned off by Trump’s breaking his pledge to start no new foreign wars, Vance made a rare acknowledgment: “I think Charlie is a great example of how to disagree but still participate in the work of saving this country.” Vance went on, noting that he talked to Kirk nearly every day, that Kirk loved the president, but that he “hated war.” Presumably, then, he also would have hated this war, the war that Vance himself is so ambivalent about.

It’s a stark contrast to Trump’s language earlier in the day, in an interview with Laura Ingraham. She had nudged up to the unthinkable, suggesting the Republicans would be blowing out the Democrats if not for having gone to war with Iran. “If we hadn’t done Iran, you would be cruising to midterms victory right now. Any regrets?” she asked. “No,” he replied. “I don’t believe in the word regret.” “What do you say to all the young men who supported you in 2024 . . . some of them are demoralized?” “I don’t think they’re demoralized, I think they’re very proud of the fact that I’m not letting Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Trump remains the standard-bearer for the party; hell, he practically is the party at this point, leading a pledge of allegiance to himself in the hall as the midterm convention drew to a close.

Public Notice, Mike Johnson runs out the clock on his own speakership, Stephen Robinson, Sept. 11, 2026. Mike Johnson, below right, the theoretical speaker of the House, announced last Thursday he’s canceling votes for the last two weeks of September. This leaves just four days of legislative business before the midterms.

His spin is that House Republicans are now free to campaign in their districts, where they can boast to voters about how little they’ve done to address the harm President Trump has inflicted on the nation. This might seem a strange choice: Although Trump and his MAGA goons have openly tried to rig the upcoming midterms, particularly through racial gerrymanders, Democrats are still favored to win back the House. That means Johnson’s tenure as speaker is likely all over but the crying, and he’ll have little to show for it beyond a Wikipedia entry.

That reality hasn’t stopped Johnson from shamelessly lying about his record. He told Fox News last December, “We’ve had one of the most productive Congresses in the history of the institution.” He repeated this wish-casting nonsense in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, ludicrously claiming 2025 was “one of the most productive first years of any Congress in our lifetimes.”Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comMike Johnson: "We've had one of the most productive Congresses in the history of the institution."Fri, 05 Dec 2025 14:22:31 GMTView on Bluesky

But Johnson isn’t closing the store early for a legislative victory lap. He’s trying to avoid a vote on the Epstein Transparency Act II, which would permit Epstein’s victims, state attorneys general, and members of Congress to sue the Justice Department for failing to disclose documents as required under last year’s original Epstein Transparency Act.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie has started collecting signatures for a discharge petition that would bypass the speaker and force a vote on the floor. When Massie suggested Johnson might end the House session early to avoid the vote, Johnson mocked the accusation as “stupid” and “nonsensical.” Now, he’s running scared.Speaker Johnson's beginning of the endSpeaker Johnson's beginning of the endNoah Berlatsky·Apr 21Read full story

This latest showcase of the speaker’s fecklessness leads to an obvious conclusion: Johnson struggles at the basic blocking and tackling of his job.

He constantly loses votes he shouldn’t. Even a performative resolution denouncing socialism and supporting the SAVE America Act almost failed to get to the floor because of internal party squabbling. It was salvaged only because moderate Democratic Reps. Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez crossed party lines and voted with Republicans to pass the necessary procedural rule to start debate.

Johnson has a slim majority, yes, but he lacks former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s skill at keeping members in line. The recent defection of the Democratic moderates was a rare lapse for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who mostly keeps his diverse caucus unified, whereas Johnson frequently endures public humiliation. He’s set a record for the number of rules vote failures, and he’s been forced to pull legislation from the floor once it was clear he lacked the votes. (Pelosi has mocked his apparent weak command of his members.)

There’s another unfortunate record that Johnson has set: Since 2023, the number of successful discharge petitions that brought bills to the floor over the speaker’s objections have matched those passed over the past four decades.

It’s said that the speaker’s job is “like herding cats,” but Johnson just lets the more feral members run wild. Meanwhile, he’s completely surrendered the House’s constitutional role as a co-equal branch of government, and when the pressures mount, his solution is usually to flee the premises. 

New York Times, Opinion: Trump Catastrophically Miscalculated in Georgia, Michelle Cottle, Sept. 12, 2026. When a political player starts drawing personal insults from President Trump and his people, it is a pretty good sign that his star is on the rise.

For Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, that moment arrived this summer. In July, Mr. Trump dubbed the fresh-faced lawmaker “Pee-wee Herman.” The next month, upset over Mr. Ossoff’s criticism of the president, one aide called Mr. Ossoff a “feminine theater kid” and a “lightweight loser,” and another derided him as “a miserable person” and “the biggest cuck loser in politics,” while deploying a sexually explicit moniker unfit for a family-friendly publication.

Mr. Ossoff gives as good as he gets. Maybe better. He has derided Mr. Trump as “a failed president,” “a national disgrace” and a “draft-dodging crook.” This anti-Trump feistiness has boosted the senator’s standing in his party and turbocharged his re-election campaign. Once talked about as the most vulnerable Democratic senator of the cycle, he is now being talked up as a hot presidential possibility for 2028.

If Mr. Ossoff winds up in the White House, Mr. Trump will have largely himself to blame. The president didn’t just help him win his seat. He also spent years undermining the Republican Party in Georgia, sowing internecine discord, championing losing candidates and destroying conservative voters’ faith in the electoral system. With impressive, if unintentional, drive, Mr. Trump has fostered the conditions that transformed Mr. Ossoff from a charmingly nerdy, vaguely awkward, low-key freshman lawmaker into a political star.

Not all of it is Mr. Trump’s fault. Demographics have partly driven Georgia’s political turn from red to purple. The state’s populace is young, and a growing majority belongs to racial or ethnic minority groups. Republicans cannot win statewide contests simply by turning out the MAGA base. And over the past decade-plus, Democratic organizers, including Stacey Abrams and her New Georgia Project, have done yeoman’s labor mobilizing the blue team.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.

But the president has done much to speed the shift. Most famously, his election fraud lunacy after losing the state in 2020 depressed Republican turnout and cost the party both Senate seats in runoffs held in January 2021. This tipped control of the chamber to the Democrats, a mark of shame that sat poorly with many Georgia Republicans.

Mr. Trump’s ensuing feud with Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican who refused to help overturn the state’s 2020 election results, greased the state party’s slide into extremism and obsolescence. The rise of MAGA elevated the far right, most prominently the Georgia Republican Assembly, a grass-roots group that has feuded fiercely with more mainstream Republicans and pushed to impose arbitrary purity tests on candidates. In 2023, the group unsuccessfully pressed the state party to pass a rule blocking candidates from running who were insufficiently conservative or traitors to the party. (This of course included Mr. Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the state’s secretary of state, who refused to “find” Mr. Trump 11,780 extra votes.)

As Team MAGA took over the state party apparatus, Mr. Kemp and other elected leaders distanced themselves from it, creating parallel fund-raising and voter turnout machines. The state G.O.P. got bogged down in niche issues, such as a crusade for paper ballots, that are not top-of-mind concerns even for most Republican voters.

Republican elected officials now view the state party not as an organ for helping get them elected so much as one aimed at litigating grievances against G.O.P. officials and candidates deemed insufficiently MAGA, party operatives have told me.

Mr. Trump himself continues meddling, despite having displayed a reverse Midas touch in statewide races. In the 2022 midterms, his preferred candidates lost their primaries for governor, secretary of state, attorney general and insurance commissioner. Herschel Walker, Mr. Trump’s pick to face Senator Raphael Warnock, won the primary but lost the general.

Mr. Trump narrowly carried Georgia in 2024. But less than two years later, his approval numbers are deep underwater there. In this summer’s primary, his pick for governor, Burt Jones, lost to the businessman Rick Jackson.

As for this year’s Senate race, Republicans had aggressively courted Mr. Kemp to take on Mr. Ossoff. He declined. Allies of his told me at the time that he decided it was not worth another brutal statewide campaign — with at best grudging acceptance by a president and a MAGA movement that had long vilified him — to be just another member of the party’s Senate roster. And so the G.O.P. was left to pick from a constellation of lesser lights.

Enter Mike Collins, the Trump-backed horse in the race. The hard-right representative emerged from a nasty G.O.P. primary tarnished by scandal, short on campaign cash, polling well behind Mr. Ossoff and facing grave doubts among many Republicans in the state that he can turn things around. Mr. Collins isn’t really an anti-establishment outsider; his father was a House member. But he rocks the middle-finger swagger and the country-fried good-ol’-boy shtick — complete with a mullet, his critics marvel — that tends to thrill the MAGA base. Many big-money donors are skeptical of him, and he is expected to be a hard sell among the more traditional Republicans, independents and swing voters who determine statewide races.

Mr. Collins’s scandals and missteps have not helped. Several people in his orbit, including his son-in-law, have been chummy with white nationalists, publicly promoted white nationalism or been otherwise accused of antisemitic behavior. Rather than swiftly addressing the dust-up within his family, Mr. Collins refused to answer questions and allowed the mess to drag on for weeks before firmly declaring himself not a racist.

The representative is also under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations that his office misspent taxpayer funds on a no-show paid internship for the girlfriend of his longtime chief of staff, Brandon Phillips. (Mr. Collins has denied impropriety.)

Compounding the awkwardness, Mr. Collins fired Mr. Phillips in May, in response to the aide’s offensive posting on social media. Then the representative had to replace his subsequent chief of staff, Kip Talley, because of his participation in a group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, notorious white nationalists. Even the party’s nominee for governor, Mr. Jackson, is keeping a healthy distance from Mr. Collins.

This all serves to fuel the emerging mythos of Mr. Ossoff. The 39-year-old senator — still the youngest in the chamber — stands poised to romp to re-election in a state made more purple by Mr. Trump’s machinations. Better still, Mr. Ossoff’s choirboy looks and often earnest demeanor, coupled with his taste for political combat and his social media savvy, give him an edge in the political mud pits. He can land some pretty rough insults without coming across as nasty or extreme.

In June, my colleague Michelle Goldberg noted that Mr. Ossoff seemed to have been cooked up in a lab as the perfect Democratic candidate for 2028. The rich irony is that Mr. Trump has been a — maybe even the — most important cook.

Special Report: Nebraska Governor's Undocumented Workers Scandal

 

New York Times, As He Backs ICE Crackdown, Nebraska Governor Employs Undocumented Workers, Yanqi Xu (a reporter for Flatwater Free Press. She examined the agricultural industry in Nebraska as a part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship), Sept. 9, 2026. Gov. Jim Pillen’s family business is one of the nation’s largest pork producers. As he seeks re-election, he has aligned himself with President Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda even though his farms have taken on undocumented laborers.

Before becoming Nebraska’s governor three years ago, Jim Pillen built a multimillion-dollar hog enterprise. Casting himself as a conservative businessman who would grow the state’s economy, he defeated a Trump-backed candidate in the Republican primary.

This time around, Mr. Pillen, who is seeking re-election this fall, won President Trump’s endorsement. The governor — who had rarely spoken out about immigration issues until last year — had embraced Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda.

Days after Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, the governor directed the Nebraska State Patrol to partner with ICE on immigration enforcement. He allowed the federal agency to use a former state prison, now referred to as Cornhusker Clink, to hold hundreds of detainees caught up in the administration’s mass deportation sweep. He has echoed Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about “criminal illegal aliens” who have “invaded our country” and decried “the worst of the worst” immigrants he has claimed are hiding out in Nebraska.

But for more than a decade, Mr. Pillen’s hog business has employed migrant workers, those who are in the country legally — and those who are not, The New York Times and The Flatwater Free Press found.

His company, Pillen Family Farms, has taken on undocumented workers as it has grown into one of the nation’s largest hog producers, according to a review of state and federal court records and interviews with more than 40 current and former employees, prosecutors, immigration lawyers and community organizers.

Many farms in Nebraska and other states rely on immigrants because of labor shortages. While the scale of undocumented workers in the Pillen farm labor force — which has about 1,200 employees in four states and Canada — is not clear, the fact that the company has used them is an open secret at some of its Nebraska farms.

Mr. Pillen has faced little public scrutiny about his workers. His spokeswoman, Laura Strimple, said in a statement that “Jim Pillen never knowingly hired an illegal immigrant and went above and beyond the legal requirements to verify the immigration status of his employees.”

Mr. Pillen in a blue suit and red tie at an event at the statehouse.Mr. Pillen, who has served as governor since 2023, started what became Pillen Family Farms more than three decades ago with 60 sows on a dirt lot.Credit...Nikos Frazier/Omaha World-Herald

At least 20 Pillen hog farms employed undocumented immigrants, according to court documents and interviews with more than two dozen current and former workers, including several managers. Six former workers acknowledged in interviews that they themselves had no legal status.

Court records show that at least a dozen Pillen workers were charged with using fake or stolen IDs for employment between 2015 and 2024. Many Pillen workers interviewed said the practice was common. At least 10 who assumed false identities, according to them or their relatives, never faced criminal charges for that.

David Armendariz, a Mexican who overstayed his tourist visa in 2008, said he worked at two Pillen farms until 2023. When he was hired, he recalled in an interview, a farm manager accepted the fake driver’s license he had purchased. The same ID was rejected years later, he said, when he applied for a construction job elsewhere.

Over the years, Mr. Armendariz said, more Hispanic workers arrived at the farms, many of them undocumented. One co-worker changed his name multiple times, he said, and another went by a different name from the one on his sign-in sheets. Mr. Armendariz said he was open about his own status. “Everyone knows that it’s not your name,” he said, “but they don’t ask you what your name is.”

Quinten Rowley, who managed two boar farms for Mr. Pillen’s business until 2022, said the company ramped up background checks for applicants about the time Mr. Pillen decided to run for governor. After that, Mr. Rowley said, he had to turn away more applicants.

Samuel Bethune, Platte County’s public defender until 2009, said he had represented hundreds of undocumented immigrants every year, most of them employed in meatpacking plants. He recalled that a few clients charged with traffic offenses identified themselves as Pillen workers but lacked valid employment documents.ImageA large building with silos.A feed mill in Inland operated by Pillen Family Farms. The governor’s children Sarah and Brock have run the company since he took office.Credit...Loren Elliott for The New York Times

ICE identified no records of audits or inspections at Pillen farms in the past 15 years after a request from The Times and Flatwater. The federal agency has raided relatively few workplaces in Nebraska. The largest and highest-profile one was an Omaha meatpacking plant where more than 70 workers were arrested in June 2025 over alleged identity theft.

After the raid, Mr. Pillen suggested in interviews that ICE would not target established immigrants. “Anybody that is here working hard and being a good neighbor, they’re A-OK, they’re fine,” the governor told The Nebraska Examiner. But he also said that stealing identities was a “grave offense.”

The governor did not respond to interview requests and declined to answer written questions for this article. Mr. Pillen’s spokeswoman said in her statement that he “has the strongest immigration record in Nebraska history. Under the governor’s leadership, Nebraska has assisted the federal government in the deportation of nearly 1,000 illegal immigrants through its variety of partnerships with federal entities.”

ICE has arrested more than 3,000 people in Nebraska since Mr. Trump’s second term, more than doubling the rate under the Biden administration. By comparison, in Minnesota, the epicenter of some of the nation’s most aggressive urban immigration enforcement operations, such arrests have more than quadrupled, according to an analysis of ICE data released by the Deportation Data Project.

Federal officials have largely avoided clashes with agricultural employers in states that helped re-elect Mr. Trump, according to agricultural producers and labor economists.

“If you’re going to come and pound on farmers in Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, whatever, and daily raid their farms or their processing plants, you’re going to have some problems politically,” said Al Juhnke, former executive director of the Nebraska Pork Producers Association. “The farms are right smack dab in the middle of red areas.”Hogs, Farmhands and Fake NamesImageA large building with a sign bearing a pig insignia and the name “Wholestone Farms.”The Pillen family has a stake in a large pork-processing business where dozens of workers have been charged with using fraudulent IDs to work since 2019.Credit...Loren Elliott for The New York Times

The first farmer to lead Nebraska in more than a century, Mr. Pillen often talks about his agricultural roots. He grew up with livestock on his small family farm in Platte County in northeast Nebraska.

A Cornhusker football standout at the University of Nebraska, he studied animal science and then worked as a veterinarian before launching his own business more than three decades ago. What is known as Pillen Family Farms, based in Columbus, started with 60 sows, or female pigs, on a dirt lot.

Now, after expanding and buying out competitors, the company owns about 100 farms in Nebraska alone, with workforces ranging from a handful to dozens of people. Since Mr. Pillen became governor, his children Sarah and Brock have run the company, which ranks No. 14 nationally on the Pork Powerhouses list, with 78,000 sows.

The family also owns a hog-breeding business and has a minor stake in Wholestone Prestage, which operates a pork-processing co-op in Fremont owned by some 200 producers. Since 2019, at least 56 Wholestone workers have been charged with using fraudulent IDs to work, according to state court records. More than half pleaded guilty or were convicted, several cases are going through court, and the other defendants fled or failed to appear. Wholestone did not respond to requests for comment.ImagePigs held in pens arriving at a slaughterhouse.Workers at hog farms labor long hours for relatively little pay to keep the hog barns running. They vaccinate pigs, feed them, move and ship them.Credit...Loren Elliott for The New York Times

At Pillen farms and elsewhere, workers labor long hours for relatively little pay to keep the hog barns running. They vaccinate pigs, feed them, move and ship them. The job is one that most Nebraskans do not want, hog farmers said in interviews.

Facing labor shortages, large corporate hog producers in recent decades have turned to a workforce of immigrants, whether legal or not, according to John K. Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union.

Gary Stover, a consultant who helped a local producer manage a hog farm in Shelby, said in an interview that he replaced the crew there with Hispanic laborers in 2010 because their work ethic impressed him. He said that one employee there used a fake name, and that his other consulting clients also had undocumented workers with falsified documents.Local InvestigationsThis article was reported and edited as part of the Local Investigations Fellowship, a New York Times program where local reporters produce investigative work about their communities.

Nathan Dallon, an immigration lawyer in Omaha who has defended hundreds of undocumented workers against criminal charges like identity theft and driving without a license, said Nebraska’s agriculture industry operated on the premise that there would be unauthorized migrant labor.

“H.R. for a lot of these companies are incentivized to take on workers that they know are using fake papers,” he said in an interview. “Sometimes they even help them get the fake papers, and then they know full well that they are making the crime worse for the person working.” (Mr. Dallon, citing client confidentiality, declined to say whether he had ever represented Pillen workers.)

Global News

  

President Trump with Micheál Martin, the taoiseach, or prime minister, or Ireland, at the Farmleigh House in Dublin on Saturday,Sept. 12, 2026. (New York Times photo by Alex Kent). 

New York Times, Trump Says Irish Unification Would Be ‘Fantastic,’ Breaking With Precedent, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Luke Broadwater, Sept. 12, 2026. The United States is officially neutral on an issue that had been a source of decades of violence in Northern Ireland until a 1998 peace deal.

Shortly after setting foot in Dublin, President Trump on Saturday said it would be “fantastic” if Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland unified, breaking with decades of U.S. neutrality on an issue rooted in a long history of violence.

“I don’t want to cause any problem. I will tell you, I’d love to see it unified,” Mr. Trump said in Dublin alongside Micheál Martin, Ireland’s taoiseach, or prime minister. “It’s going to happen eventually.”

He later seemed to acknowledge that he had stepped into a politically problematic topic.

The American president said he still believed it would “be a cool thing” if Northern Ireland broke away from the United Kingdom, but joked that half the room would clear out after hearing his remarks.

“No matter how well you say it, there’s no good answer,” Mr. Trump told a crowd of embassy employees and business leaders gathered at Deerfield Residence, where the U.S. ambassador lives.

The United States has long supported the U.S.-brokered 1998 Belfast Agreement, also known as the Good Friday Agreement, which ended roughly three decades of violence between those seeking a united Ireland and unionists who wanted Northern Ireland to remain a part of the United Kingdom.

Part of that deal was that Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom until a majority of its people voted otherwise in a referendum.

In keeping with his freewheeling approach to the global stage, Mr. Trump has mused about the unification of Ireland before. Earlier this year, he suggested there should be a “merger” between Northern Ireland and Ireland because of how well Mr. Martin got along with Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly. She later said the comment was made in jest and should not be taken seriously.

Mr. Trump’s comment on Saturday came just days after Andy Burnham, the recently elected British prime minister, said there was not enough public support for a referendum on Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom and until there was “there will not be one.” Mr. Trump himself acknowledged on Saturday that the government in London would most likely “have something to say about” about his comments on reunification.

Patrick Dwyer-Cummins, a spokesman for 10 Downing Street, said that Mr. Burnham’s position remained unchanged and he was committed to upholding the Good Friday Agreement.

But Mr. Trump’s comment did indeed prompt some immediate criticism.

Gavin Robinson, the leader of Northern Ireland’s main pro-union party, said on social media that “President Trump knows better than most that elections matter.”

“Northern Ireland’s constitutional future will be decided by the people of Northern Ireland, not by commentary in London, Dublin or Washington,” he said. “Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom because that is the settled democratic will of its people.”

The reference to reunification was not the only unconventional aspect of Mr. Trump’s remarks.

American presidents, when speaking overseas, typically have refrained from lacing into their domestic rivals. But Mr. Trump used his speech in Dublin to repeatedly attack Democrats, including describing former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has cancer, as physically infirm. Mr. Biden, who has Irish ancestry, traveled to Northern Ireland in 2023 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

New York Times, In an Irish Village, Trump’s Visit for a Golf Tournament Prompts Protests and Praise, Megan Specia, Sept. 12, 2026. As the U.S. president heads to his Doonbeg hotel for the Irish Open, locals expressed both appreciation for the resort’s economic benefits and opposition to his politics.

Festive bunting was strung between shops along the tiny main street in Doonbeg, a village on the west coast of Ireland. Temporary signs pointed the way down freshly paved roads toward the nearby Trump International golf resort, where the Irish Open is underway this week. The smell of paint hung in the air.

“If you stood still in the village long enough over the last two months, you would have been painted yourself,” Rita McInerney, a local councilor and lifelong resident, said with a laugh, speaking proudly about Doonbeg’s spruce-up ahead of the tournament. “It’s given us a great opportunity, I suppose, to get a lot done.”

President Trump is set to attend the tournament on Saturday and Sunday, a moment that will briefly cast the village of around 200 people into the international spotlight.

In Ireland, where polls consistently show a majority of people disagree with the president’s politics, Mr. Trump’s expected arrival had drawn opposition in the form of planned protests, newspaper columns denouncing his visit and even a sand mural. Yet in Doonbeg, a rural place where jobs can be scarce, there was also acknowledgment that the Trump-owned hotel plays an important role in the local economy.ImageA complex of light-colored buildings with gray roofs and chimneys. A manicured lawn and wild, dry grass are in the foreground.Trump International Golf Links & Hotel in Doonbeg in 2023. The Irish Open is being held at the resort for the first time since the tournament began in 1927. Credit...Damien Storan/Reuters

The Trump Organization, Mr. Trump’s family business, has undoubtedly invested in the community, said Ms. McInerney, whose family has lived in the village for seven generations. And she noted that the diplomatic ties between Ireland and the United States were important to the entire country.

“There’s much of Donald Trump’s presidency and politics that I wouldn’t agree with,” she said. “But we also have to be mindful of the relationship between Ireland and the U.S.”

Others expressed their strong opposition to his visit, like Mary O’Donoghue, a community worker in the area, who said she had long refused to set foot in the hotel because of its connection to Mr. Trump.

“I think he has caused damage globally, but that is also felt locally,” said Ms. O’Donoghue, 58, pointing to fuel prices, which soared after the start of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and remain elevated, pushing up the cost of living around the world.

She said she recognized that many people working in the hotel felt deep pride about the Irish Open being hosted there for the first time, but said that many also felt torn, adding, “He’s robbed our enjoyment of it.”ImageA portable orange electronic sign announcing a road closure, with a street and buildings in the background.Preparations in Doonbeg, Ireland, on Thursday, ahead of President Trump’s visit during the Irish Open golf tournament, which runs Friday through Sunday.Credit...Claudia Savage/Press Association, via Associated Press

After departing Washington on Friday night, Mr. Trump arrived on Saturday morning in Dublin, where he will meet with Micheál Martin, the taoiseach, or prime minister, of Ireland, and President Catherine Connolly, the ceremonial head of state, before traveling to Doonbeg. The visit comes as Mr. Trump’s relationship with Europe has grown deeply strained, with the president repeatedly laying into traditional allies for not joining his war on Iran and berating them over their policy choices on immigration and fossil fuels.

Mr. Martin has navigated this difficult diplomacy before, on two official visits to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day. On his latest visit in March, he won plaudits in Ireland for gently pushing back as the president rebuked European allies.

But Mr. Trump remains an unpopular figure in Ireland, a country with deep diplomatic, cultural and economic ties to the United States. A February poll from the Irish Times, conducted before the U.S. and Israel launched the war in Iran, suggested that 61 percent of those polled did not want President Trump to attend the Irish Open.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Dublin during his last official visit to Ireland in 2019. (President Trump also visited Doonbeg then, after meeting with government leaders.) Protests are again expected in Dublin on Saturday afternoon, with groups rallying under the message “No Welcome for Trump,” as well as at Shannon Airport and in Doonbeg.

On Tuesday, the discontent was already visible when a campaign group created a large sand mural on a Dublin beach with the message, “No Kings.” That was a deliberate echo of the mass protest movement in the United States, where demonstrations have denounced the president’s actions under a self-stated goal of fighting dictatorship.

Siobhán O’Donoghue, the executive director of Uplift, the campaign group behind the display, said that when the eyes of the world were on Ireland, the group felt it was important to counter Mr. Trump’s claims of broad support. During his meeting with Mr. Martin in March, he had declared, “I think the Irish love Trump.”

“We just can’t capitulate to that narrative that people in Ireland somehow or another are backing Trump,” she said, adding that there would of course be some outliers who agree with his politics. “All it takes is for good people to stay silent for an incorrect view to be drawn.”

In Doonbeg, security was already high around the resort early this week, with roads blocked off and the entrance closed to the public days before the tournament began. The Irish Open, a stop on professional golf’s European tour, includes stars like Rory McIlroy and has brought tens of thousands of spectators to the area. A major police operation will be underway through the weekend.ImageOn a bright green golf course, a person is putting, with three other people observing. Many spectators are on a large, grassy slope behind them.

New York Times, A Visa Dispute Is Threatening a U.S.-Brazil Effort to Fight Crime, Ana Ionova and Edward Wong, Sept. 12, 2026. Officials say the Trump administration is blocking some of Brazil’s efforts to expand cooperation on fighting transnational crime.

A diplomatic rift is hindering cooperation between the United States and Brazil on jointly fighting organized crime, according to U.S. and Brazilian officials, an issue the Trump administration has placed at the center of its agenda in the Western Hemisphere.

The State Department is withholding visas for two Brazilian federal police agents assigned to posts in the United States, where they would be working with U.S. Homeland Security Investigations and other federal agencies to combat transnational crimes, according to one American and three senior Brazilian officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

In response, Brazil is now also blocking the visa of a U.S. law enforcement official meant to be stationed in the country, according to the American and Brazilian officials.

The U.S. government, citing a busy agenda, also declined a request for a visit by Brazilian customs and revenue agents investigating money laundering and arms smuggling by international drug gangs, according to two other Brazilian officials.

Brazil and the United States have a long history of jointly investigating international crimes, like fraud and trafficking, and sending law enforcement officials to each other’s countries. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has had an attaché in Brazil for over two decades.

In the past, joint action by Brazil and the United States has helped the authorities dismantle international corruption schemes, piracy networks and human trafficking rings.

That type of close cooperation, experts say, is becoming crucial for fighting Latin America’s drug gangs, which have more resources and greater geographic reach than ever before.

“Today, criminal factions know no borders,” said Edvandir Felix de Paiva, the president of Brazil’s association of federal police commissioners. “So we need to be working together.”

The recent disruptions in cooperation, which have not been previously reported, come against a backdrop of strained relations over the past year, stemming from President Trump’s attempts to meddle in Brazil’s internal affairs. This rift has only deepened in recent months with the administration’s apparent readiness to help Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing candidate challenging President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist, in Brazil’s elections in October. 

More On U.S. Media, Education, Economy

Associated Press, For the US news industry, a tough summer draws to a close with McClatchy chain’s cuts, Jocelyn Noveck, Sept. 10, 2026. Closing out a turbulent summer for the news industry, the McClatchy newspaper chain has made deep cuts at The Miami Herald and other papers it owns across the nation.

The union that represents McClatchy journalists said Friday that more than 90 unionized journalists and media workers across 17 publications had been laid off, accounting for about 30 percent of all McClatchy workers unionized with The NewsGuild-CWA. The layoffs have impacted news outlets including The Sacramento Bee, The Kansas City Star, The Charlotte Observer, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and others.

“We are waist-deep in the quicksand and we are still sinking,” Carol Marbin Miller, deputy investigations editor of The Miami Herald, said in a phone interview.

Marbin Miller, who was not impacted by the layoffs, told The Associated Press she was speaking out to stress how dire the situation was at her paper, where a total of 32 jobs were cut. Those included 28 lost jobs and four positions that were frozen, according to a person familiar with the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity. They included the entire writing staff of El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language publication.

“Miami is the biggest city in Florida,” Marbin Miller said. “Florida is a crucial state. I can’t imagine any scenario in which Miami no longer has a vibrant, powerful news outlet. It’s just too important.”

A McClatchy spokesperson did not respond to an email requesting comment or information.

The U.S. newspaper industry has been contracting for two decades, pushed first by the rise of the internet and the decline of classified advertising, then by the fragmentation introduced by social media and evolving user consumption habits. More recently, many newspaper operations have reduced or cut print editions. Media advocacy groups warn that fewer eyes of accountability are on U.S. communities and their governments and institutions.Related StoriesBritish police try to track down theft of 70,000 pints worth of Guinness stoutBritish police try to track down theft of 70,000 pints worth of Guinness stout3 MIN READ11Miami to decide fate of stunning stadium where speedboats raced and Jimmy Buffett playedMiami to decide fate of stunning stadium where speedboats raced and Jimmy Buffett played4 MIN READInter Miami hosts Nashville in non-conference actionInter Miami hosts Nashville in non-conference action4 MIN READInternal memo says a ‘different choice’ was required

All those laid off from McClatchy were informed on Thursday. Later, an internal memo from Greg Farmer, executive vice president of local news, seen by the AP, told staff: “For the past five years, McClatchy made a deliberate choice to maintain our investment in local news reporters. We believed continued investment in our journalism would strengthen our relationship with subscribers and our business.”

“We measured the results,” Farmer added. “The results are clear and require us to make a different choice ... We are making these changes because the status quo no longer works. We cannot continue investing where subscriber interest does not support the investment.”

The union said four McClatchy papers in Washington state had lost seven reporters in total. “Tacoma will no longer have even a single dedicated journalist tracking city hall, Pierce County government or local schools,” it said. Other cuts included the only two investigative reporters at The Charlotte Observer, and a team of government accountability reporters at The Kansas City Star.

More On Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup

Last Page First, Investigative Commentary: Who Bought Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch? Inside the Huffines Family, Jana, right, Sept. 12, 2026. The Huffines family had the money to buy almost any kind of property they wanted. They bought Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico.

By 2023, Zorro Ranch was not just another property sitting on the market. Epstein had owned it for decades. Survivors had described being taken there. It had a private airstrip, a huge main house, guest buildings, staff housing, stables and years of history tied directly to him. There were still unanswered questions about what happened there, who used the property and what had never been fully investigated.

Epstein’s estate originally listed the ranch for $27.5 million, then dropped the asking price to $18 million. On August 15, 2023, Cypress Inc. signed the deed transferring the ranch to San Rafael Ranch LLC. The deed was recorded in Santa Fe County the following day. The Huffines name did not appear in the transfer. It surfaced later, through the property-tax fight.Donald Huffines and Mary Catherine Huffines with family. - CultureMap DallasDonald and Mary Catherine Huffines with their family. Photo: CultureMap Dallas.The Name Buried in the Tax File

Mary Catherine Huffines’ name appears in a separate San Rafael Ranch LLC property-tax protest package, where she is identified as trustee/property owner representative. The paperwork also ties San Rafael Ranch LLC to the Huffines family’s Dallas business network. Another New Mexico company connected to the property, San Rafael One LLC, was linked through public business filings to their son Colin Huffines.

Using an LLC to own property is normal. What was not obvious from the sale itself was who stood behind this one. The tax fight made that easier to trace. Santa Fe County valued the ranch at $28,128,566 for the 2024 protest. San Rafael Ranch LLC asked for $8 million. On the protest form, the reason was simply “value too high.”San Rafael Ranch’s 2024 tax protest, with the county’s $28.1 million valuation and the owner’s $8 million figure. Source: Santa Fe County Assessor’s Office, 2024 Protest Petition.

San Rafael later amended its figure to $12,284,381. The county board adopted that value for the ranch.Santa Fe County’s 2024 valuation decision for San Rafael Ranch. Source: Santa Fe County Valuation Protests Board, Oct. 28, 2024.

The tax fight is what made the ownership easier to trace.Why Did They Want It?

The Huffines family has said they had no prior connection to Epstein and had never visited the ranch before it came up for sale. I went looking for evidence that they knew him before 2023 and I have not found it. Don Huffines does not appear in the flight logs, the address book or the Epstein correspondence I reviewed. I have not found Mary Catherine in the public EFTA material, and I have not found a documented business relationship connecting Epstein to HEST, Huffines Communities or the family before the purchase. I may find something later. Right now, I do not have it. So if they had no history with Epstein, why this ranch?

Don’s son Devin Huffines later gave Newsmax cameras access to the property and talked about why the family bought it. He said the women in the family were initially against the purchase because of the ranch’s history, and that they were reassured after being told the sale proceeds would go to Epstein’s victims. He also said the family had been told the investigations into the ranch were over before they bought it. That is the part I keep coming back to. Who told them that? The estate? The broker? An attorney? Law enforcement? Was it in writing? What exactly were they told about evidence, previous searches, unresolved investigative interest or whether authorities might want access again?Devin Huffines speaking to Newsmax from inside the former Zorro Ranch, July 2026. Screenshot: Newsmax.

Devin also talked about what the family wants to do with the ranch. They renamed it San Rafael Ranch after the Archangel Raphael and brought in a traditional Catholic priest from Ohio for a three-day exorcism. He talked about prayer and fasting cabins, horseback riding, hunting, fishing and a shooting range. But that still leaves the bigger question of what this place is actually becoming. There is little public detail on who will run it, whether it stays private, whether a religious or nonprofit group will be built around it, whether outside groups will use it, whether guests will pay to stay there or how much of the ranch they plan to rebuild.They Started Changing the Property

The ranch started changing after the sale. A new entrance went up. Religious imagery appeared. Landscaping and construction followed, and officials eventually stopped the work because the required permits were not in place. On another property, that might be a minor local issue. Here, New Mexico still had unanswered questions about what had happened at Zorro Ranch, and the property had never received the kind of thorough search many people had been asking for. A former FBI agent serving on the state’s Epstein commission publicly warned that construction could interfere with possible evidence. By the time New Mexico finally searched the ranch in March 2026, the property had already been under construction.New entrance under construction at San Rafael Ranch, formerly Zorro Ranch, after the property changed hands.

The Huffines family later cooperated with investigators and let New Mexico authorities onto the property. By then, the ranch had already been renamed and physically changed. Don Huffines is not new to development. He co-founded Huffines Communities with his twin brother Phillip in 1985, and his own biography describes it as one of the largest residential development firms in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Given that background, the permit problem is harder to chalk up to inexperience.The Family Around the Ranch

This is not just about Don. Mary Catherine is the name that helped bring the family’s ownership into view, and Texas Ethics Commission filings show she loaned Don’s campaign $150,000 in 2025. Their son Colin has turned up in records tied to San Rafael entities. Devin is the one speaking publicly about the ranch, why the family bought it and what they want to turn it into. Russell shows up somewhere else entirely. Campaign records listed him as vice president of HEST Investments, and by July 2026 the White House listed Russell P. Huffines as Deputy Director of Cabinet Affairs.

The family’s reach goes well beyond the ranch. Don is now Texas Comptroller. Russell works in the White House. Don and his twin brother Phillip also traveled to Moscow with Sen. Rand Paul in 2018 and met with Russian officials, including members of the Federation Council.Rand Paul Endorses Don Huffines for Governor — The Amarillo PioneerDon Huffines with Sen. Rand Paul.

Follow the family out from Zorro Ranch and the story gets bigger fast. Their money and connections run through Texas politics, national politics and the White House.HEST

HEST Investments is the family office Don Huffines runs. Its investments include biotechnology, life sciences, technology and cybersecurity. In 2024, HEST announced a $1 million investment in American Binary, a company working on post quantum encryption. It also led a $1.8 million investment vehicle for Secretome Therapeutics, a regenerative medicine company running an FDA regulated clinical program.HEST Investments Announces Strategic Investment in American Binary to Drive Quantum Computing SecurityHEST Investments, the Huffines family office focused on biotechnology, life sciences, technology and cybersecurity. Image: HEST Investments.

HEST’s money is moving through some very specific sectors. Regenerative medicine. Biotechnology. Cybersecurity. Advanced encryption. That same family now owns Zorro Ranch. I have not found documentation tying any of those investments to the property.

ShareSo Why This Ranch?

The strongest documented connection between the Huffines family and Jeffrey Epstein is still the simplest one. They bought his ranch.

I have not found a pre-2023 relationship between the family and Epstein. I have not found Don in the flight logs or address book, Mary Catherine in the public EFTA material, HEST doing business with him or a Huffines company tied to Zorro Development Corp. What I have found is a wealthy, politically connected family with decades in real estate and private investment that chose to buy one of the most notorious properties tied to Epstein.

Devin Huffines has said the purchase caused disagreement inside the family before it happened. They knew what the ranch was and knew its history.

By the time investigators returned in March 2026, the property had already changed. Construction had begun, the ranch had been renamed, and Devin Huffines says the family had been told before the purchase that the investigations were over. A priest had been brought in for a three-day exorcism, and the family was publicly describing plans for a Christian retreat.Investigators search former Epstein ranchAerial view of the former Zorro Ranch in March 2026, showing a large excavated area beside the main residence where the former helipad/labyrinth had been located.

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez has also reported that a source close to the family said the ranch was used for a private Huffines family event in 2024 and that attendees were required to sign NDAs. She has also reported that the Christian retreat explanation came later. I have not independently obtained the NDAs, a guest list or an event contract, so there is still more of that timeline I want to pin down, including whether private events were held there after the sale, whether confidentiality agreements were used and when the retreat plan first appeared in writing.

I want the sale file and the due diligence material. I want to see whatever told the family the investigations were finished, along with the earliest retreat plans, permits, contractors, financing and ownership structure behind the redevelopment. I also want to know exactly what was still on the property when they took possession and what changed before investigators returned.

Maybe the Christian retreat was already the plan. I want to see when that plan first existed on paper.

This is a family with decades of experience in real estate and private investment. They bought Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch knowing exactly whose property it had been. Devin has said its history caused disagreement inside the family before the sale.

They bought it anyway.

 Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions

White House aides Steven Cheung, left, and Stephen Miller.

Lance's Substack, Opinion: Who Is Maintaining The Ruse That Trump Is Mentally Competent For Office? Lance F Rosen, right, Sept. 12, 2026. How Do We Pull The Curtain On All Of It?

Everything runs through Stephen Miller. The press secretary and White House Comms team led by Stephen Cheung are running the propaganda side under Miller’s direction.

Now they have a new blonde Nazi Barbie to run the press shop, and she is experienced at reading scripts from her ESPN experience.

Lance’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribed

The FCC chair Brendan Carr is the “muscle,” strong-arming the networks to censor critics and lie about him, covering for him, with the Israeli operatives at CBS like Bari Weiss and the Ellisons, Paramount, Disney, and the social media billionaires flanking them. It’s a far-flung conspiracy.

Their dilemma is that Trump craves attention and adulation. He insists on traveling, speaking publicly, using his Truth Social platform to post hate speech and conduct stochastic terrorism targeting his enemies. They would rather reduce his public exposure to maintain the ruse, but he listens to almost no one.

I believe that they are trying to manage him through Natalie, who it appears he is stuck on. She is more than his “human printer” in my view, and I believe they might actually be at the point they have to go through her to get him to do things, or to stop doing them. That is why in spite of everyone, including Melania wanting her gone, she is still there. When he gets too unruly, it’s “hey Natalie, why don’t you two take a trip somewhere” to get him out of their hair.

They can’t hide it for much longer. They try to manage his rage states with diversions. Natalie is one. Sending him out of the White House to give hate speeches in front of his audiences of fascist Cabbage Patch dolls who are either high on Jesus, or meth, or both, is how they get him out of their way. That along with his “Albert Speer Fourth Reich” building plans, putting his name on everything everywhere, and slopping gold paint on the furniture in the Oval Office to make it look like Mar-a-Lago. And of course there is always Golf for the guy who loves to win by cheating . They orchestrate his appearances to create the illusion he is functional, but that game is falling apart as rapidly as his mind.

Sometimes I wonder if they want him to travel to wear him down to give him a cardiac event in order to wash their hands of him.

We are talking Shakespearian-level court politics and the unfolding of complicated plot lines here. Damage control is the full-time function of Trump’s political team. His policy group is bent on destroying the constitutional system, looting the US population and asset stripping the economy, while relying on Trump’s cult grip on the GOP to minimize the blowback and political damage to them which is the result.

His team was assembled with the expectation he couldn’t finish this term because he’s been visibly deteriorating for years. They are basically all waiting until he can’t maintain the ruse, hoping he’ll at least hang on til next year. Vance is on board with that whole game plan.

Their problem with Vance is that he has the charisma and appeal of a used air-sickness bag. If he made a move for the 25th while Trump is still ambulatory and capable of speech, MAGA would spit him out. Yet he is the one who would have to lead the way in the Cabinet in forcing him out, which he’ll never agree to because Trump won’t leave voluntarily.

There is no weak link or potential break in their ranks. The only wild card is his heart health. We should do everything we can with the elections, scandals, MAGA defections, and globally to counteract him in order to worsen his condition. Then we deal with the couch potato when they bring him in.

For for now, the only thing which is likely to betray Trump is his ticker.”

U.S. Foreign Policy

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (R) welcomes US special envoy Steve Witkoff (2nd L) and Jared Kushner (L) prior to their talks in Moscow on September 5, 2026. (Gavriil GRIGOROV / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

Meidas Touch Network, Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Speaks Out After Trump’s Latest Putin Talks, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 12, 2026.  Michael McFaul tells Ben Meiselas why Trump’s approach to Putin is projecting weakness and damaging America’s standing around the world.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul joined MeidasTouch co-founder Ben Meiselas for a conversation about Donald Trump’s disastrous foreign policy, Vladimir Putin, the war in Ukraine, and what McFaul describes as a dramatic erosion of American influence around the world.Subscribed

McFaul, who served as ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, told Meiselas that the United States is now “worse off” across virtually every major measure of foreign policy.

“Most certainly when it comes to America’s standing in the world, America’s reputation in the world, the polls on that are overwhelming,” McFaul said. “We have just crashed at the time that China is rising.”

Listen to interviews like this and more on the MeidasTouch Podcast. Click here now!

The conversation turned to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner’s recent trip to Moscow and Kyiv, which came amid Trump’s attempts to negotiate an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

McFaul said he supports efforts by the United States to end the war but argued that Trump has failed to develop an effective strategy.

“He just keeps appeasing Putin,” McFaul said. “He just keeps giving Putin gifts expecting nothing in return.”

McFaul was particularly critical of Witkoff’s approach to the Russian leader. Having dealt directly with Putin during his time in government, McFaul said attempts to win him over through personal praise can have precisely the opposite effect.

“Flattery for him is a sign of weakness,” McFaul said.

McFaul also criticized the way Witkoff has spoken about Putin, including describing the Russian leader as trustworthy during his visit to Kyiv.

“Somehow Witkoff believes if he checks his values at the door and flatters Putin, he’s going to achieve results,” McFaul said. “It just doesn’t work that way.”

The former ambassador then zoomed out to what he sees as a larger problem with Trump’s foreign policy: the personalization of decisions that historically would have been made through a broader national security process.

“I’ve never seen anything like this or studied anything like this,” McFaul said. “It’s just about what Trump thinks and what Trump believes.”

McFaul spoke about how the consequences extend well beyond Russia and Ukraine. He pointed to tensions with Canada and other longtime allies while warning that China stands to benefit from uncertainty about whether the United States can still be considered a reliable partner.

“What I see with our allies is doubt whether we are reliable,” McFaul said, describing countries in Europe and Asia as increasingly considering alternatives in case they can no longer depend on Washington.

And when Meiselas asked whether Trump’s erratic approach was making the United States appear weak internationally, McFaul’s answer was direct.

“Yes. Tragically, yes.”

 

Meidas Touch Network, Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Speaks Out After Trump’s Latest Putin Talks, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 12, 2026.  Michael McFaul tells Ben Meiselas why Trump’s approach to Putin is projecting weakness and damaging America’s standing around the world.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul joined MeidasTouch co-founder Ben Meiselas for a conversation about Donald Trump’s disastrous foreign policy, Vladimir Putin, the war in Ukraine, and what McFaul describes as a dramatic erosion of American influence around the world.Subscribed

McFaul, who served as ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, told Meiselas that the United States is now “worse off” across virtually every major measure of foreign policy.

“Most certainly when it comes to America’s standing in the world, America’s reputation in the world, the polls on that are overwhelming,” McFaul said. “We have just crashed at the time that China is rising.”

Listen to interviews like this and more on the MeidasTouch Podcast. Click here now!

The conversation turned to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner’s recent trip to Moscow and Kyiv, which came amid Trump’s attempts to negotiate an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

McFaul said he supports efforts by the United States to end the war but argued that Trump has failed to develop an effective strategy.

“He just keeps appeasing Putin,” McFaul said. “He just keeps giving Putin gifts expecting nothing in return.”

McFaul was particularly critical of Witkoff’s approach to the Russian leader. Having dealt directly with Putin during his time in government, McFaul said attempts to win him over through personal praise can have precisely the opposite effect.

“Flattery for him is a sign of weakness,” McFaul said.

McFaul also criticized the way Witkoff has spoken about Putin, including describing the Russian leader as trustworthy during his visit to Kyiv.

“Somehow Witkoff believes if he checks his values at the door and flatters Putin, he’s going to achieve results,” McFaul said. “It just doesn’t work that way.”

The former ambassador then zoomed out to what he sees as a larger problem with Trump’s foreign policy: the personalization of decisions that historically would have been made through a broader national security process.

“I’ve never seen anything like this or studied anything like this,” McFaul said. “It’s just about what Trump thinks and what Trump believes.”

McFaul spoke about how the consequences extend well beyond Russia and Ukraine. He pointed to tensions with Canada and other longtime allies while warning that China stands to benefit from uncertainty about whether the United States can still be considered a reliable partner.

“What I see with our allies is doubt whether we are reliable,” McFaul said, describing countries in Europe and Asia as increasingly considering alternatives in case they can no longer depend on Washington.

And when Meiselas asked whether Trump’s erratic approach was making the United States appear weak internationally, McFaul’s answer was direct.

“Yes. Tragically, yes.” 

Sept. 12

Top Headlines

 

This is an image President Trump posted on portraying himself as celebrating (using the dance moves of a favorite song, "YMCA," by the disco group "The Village People") the destruction of Iran's Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Aug. 30, 2026 -- a claim he reinforced with a statement shown below but which was refuted by other sources.

• New York Times, News Analysis: How Trump Is Wielding Power to Stifle Speech, Jim Rutenberg and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 12, 2026. President Trump has harnessed agencies across the government to curtail press freedoms, a sweeping campaign that free speech advocates say will have lasting effects.

Special Reports: Disastrous Defeat For Trump Team In Yemen 

• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Trump And Hegseth Suffer A Disastrous Defeat In Yemen, Gas Prices Are Rising, Trump’s Poll Numbers Are Dropping (Again), Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 12, 2026. “This is the first day that Iran really started winning the war,” said a Yemeni official, who is part of the country’s internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government. Shanah Tovah, Hopium world! Wishing everyone a good, sweet, and joyful Rosh Hashanah. To new beginnings! To new beginnings for this great country certainly needs them.
• New York Times, High Prices Spoil Trump’s New Push to Save G.O.P. Majority, Tony Romm, Sept. 12, 2026. Gas prices are high, mortgage rates are climbing and inflation remains well above target, complicating the president’s midterm appeal.

News Roundups

• Meidas Touch Network, Saturday Updates: Trump Gets Booed in Dublin While Iran Gets the Red Carpet in New Delhi, Brett Meiselas, Sept. 12, 2026. Here’s what we’re tracking right now: Trump’s press conference chaos in Ireland on Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Canada, and Ireland; The Houthis mock Trump after gaining control over the Red Sea coast; Saudi Arabia’s pipeline was attacked again as Houthis advance on Marib; Trump continues to try to bribe voters with his lie about giving them money; Republican Jon Husted’s Senate campaign is under fire after it was revealed a high-level staffer posted Nazi imagery.
• The Parnas Perspective, Saturday Night Update: Republicans Face Protests at Home and Abroad, AI Tech CEOs Urge Slow Down in Major Shift, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 12, 2026. Tonight’s rundown has a clear thread running through it. Republicans are facing pushback everywhere they turn, at home and abroad, and none of it looks like it’s going away anytime soon.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Mass Anti-Trump Protests Erupt in Ireland, Censorship of Kimmel Backfires as Views Surge, Houthis Make Major Advances in War, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 12, 2026.Trump spent his weekend getting protested across an entire country, and it still might not have been the most embarrassing thing that happened to him. While he was in Dublin insisting a “friendly protest” of thousands wasn’t actually happening, back home Jimmy Kimmel quietly out-rated his midterm convention, and an FCC commissioner came out and said the quiet part loud: the administration is pressuring broadcasters into silence.
• The Parnas Perspective, Important Friday Night News Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 11, 2026. Before we get to all of the news, and there is a lot of it, I wanted to take a minute and talk to you directly. Tonight, the Epstein investigation just got a lot bigger. French prosecutors have identified 13 new potential victims, newly released texts show FBI Director Kash Patel waging a strange campaign against a random anonymous X account, and Epstein survivors were physically removed from the GOP’s own midterm convention in Dallas minutes after pressing a candidate on the files, even as Republican insiders admit Trump has checked out on the midterms entirely.  

Trump Demands Personal Loyalty Pledge, Asks Supporters To Cheat In Midterm Elections

Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker of the Third Reich, with Hitler in the background, at top left.

• Emptywheel, Opinion: We Do Not Swear Unconditional Obedience, Peterr, Sept. 11, 2026. I only saw brief clips of the Trumpapalooza, but one of the few I saw brought me up short. A point where Trump asked the crowd to stand: “Please right your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breath. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way – I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell…”

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Bring It, Donald. We’ll Win — Even When You Cheat, Edwin Eisendrath, right, Sept. 12, 2026. We face a determined and powerful adversary that’s cloaked in the now-gilded trappings of our own government and will do anything to erase the integrity of our elections. We can beat him. 
• Public Notice, Mike Johnson runs out the clock on his own speakership, Stephen Robinson, Sept. 11, 2026. Johnson, right, the theoretical speaker of the House, announced last Thursday he’s canceling votes for the last two weeks of September. This leaves just four days of legislative business before the midterms.
• New York Times, Opinion: Trump Catastrophically Miscalculated in Georgia, Michelle Cottle, Sept. 12, 2026. When a political player starts drawing personal insults from President Trump and his people, it is a pretty good sign that his star is on the rise. For Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, that moment arrived this summer.

Special Report: Nebraska Governor's Undocumented Workers Scandal

• New York Times, As He Backs ICE Crackdown, Nebraska Governor Employs Undocumented Workers, Yanqi Xu (a reporter for Flatwater Free Press. She examined the agricultural industry in Nebraska as a part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship), Sept. 9, 2026. Gov. Jim Pillen’s family business is one of the nation’s largest pork producers. As he seeks re-election, he has aligned himself with President Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda even though his farms have taken on undocumented laborers.

Global News

 

President Trump with Micheál Martin, the taoiseach, or prime minister, or Ireland, at the Farmleigh House in Dublin on Saturday,Sept. 12, 2026. (New York Times photo by Alex Kent). 

• New York Times, Trump Says Irish Unification Would Be ‘Fantastic,’ Breaking With Precedent, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Luke Broadwater, Sept. 12, 2026. 
• New York Times, In an Irish Village, Trump’s Visit for a Golf Tournament Prompts Protests and Praise, Megan Specia, Sept. 12, 2026. As the U.S. president heads to his Doonbeg hotel for the Irish Open, locals expressed both appreciation for the resort’s economic benefits and opposition to his politics.
• New York Times, A Visa Dispute Is Threatening a U.S.-Brazil Effort to Fight Crime, Ana Ionova and Edward Wong, Sept. 12, 2026. Officials say the Trump administration is blocking some of Brazil’s efforts to expand cooperation on fighting transnational crime.

More On U.S. Media, Education, Economy

 

• Associated Press, For the US news industry, a tough summer draws to a close with McClatchy chain’s cuts, Jocelyn Noveck, Sept. 10, 2026. Closing out a turbulent summer for the news industry, the McClatchy newspaper chain has made deep cuts at The Miami Herald and other papers it owns across the nation.

More On Trump Obsessions, Oppressions

 

White House aides Steven Cheung, left, and Stephen Miller.

• Lance's Substack, Opinion: Who Is Maintaining The Ruse That Trump Is Mentally Competent For Office? Lance F Rosen, right, Sept. 12, 2026. How Do We Pull The Curtain On All Of It? Everything runs through Stephen Miller. The press secretary and White House Comms team led by Stephen Cheung are running the propaganda side under Miller’s direction. Now they have a new blonde Nazi Barbie to run the press shop, and she is experienced at reading scripts from her ESPN experience.

More On Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup

• Last Page First, Investigative Commentary: Who Bought Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch? Inside the Huffines Family, Jana, right, Sept. 12, 2026. The Huffines family had the money to buy almost any kind of property they wanted. They bought Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico.

U.S. Foreign Policy, Trump Family Personal Diplomacy To Putin 

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (R) welcomes US special envoy Steve Witkoff (2nd L) and Jared Kushner (L) prior to their talks in Moscow on September 5, 2026. (Gavriil GRIGOROV / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

• Meidas Touch Network, Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Speaks Out After Trump’s Latest Putin Talks, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 12, 2026. Michael McFaul tells Ben Meiselas why Trump’s approach to Putin is projecting weakness and damaging America’s standing around the world.

Top Headlines

 

This is an image President Trump posted on portraying himself as celebrating (using the dance moves of a favorite song, "YMCA," by the disco group "The Village People") the destruction of Iran's Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Aug. 30, 2026 -- a claim he reinforced with a statement shown below but which was refuted by other sources.

New York Times, News Analysis: How Trump Is Wielding Power to Stifle Speech, Jim Rutenberg and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 12, 2026. President Trump has harnessed agencies across the government to curtail press freedoms, a sweeping campaign that free speech advocates say will have lasting effects.

The Justice Department has sent F.B.I. agents to reporters’ homes to serve subpoenas and, in at least one case, flashed a warrant to seize devices. The Pentagon has fired the editor and publisher of its traditionally independent newspaper, Stars and Stripes, and blocked access to other journalists who refused to sign pledges that would limit their reporting.

Regulatory agencies are using their powers to pressure media organizations over their content. The administration has stripped funding from public television and radio. Angry over stories he does not like, President Trump has sued major news organizations and the White House has taken control of the previously independent press pool that tracks the president, deciding which outlets can participate.

Almost 20 months into Mr. Trump’s second term, his long-running media clashes have grown into a sweeping campaign to control speech in America that stands out for applying so many levers, so fast, all at once.

Driven by personal pique, fury over leaks and a determination to shape the political narrative to his advantage, Mr. Trump is deploying the might of the federal government and filing personal lawsuits — targeting not just journalists and liberal critics, but also comedians and talk show hosts, and the corporate entities behind them.

To the president and his allies, he is simply demanding accountability for what he casts as biased, unfair and sometimes inaccurate coverage and criticism — an effort that has been welcomed by longtime conservative press critics like those at the Media Research Center.

Aides noted that the White House has this year expanded who gets invited to cover events, such as the off-the-record presidential lunch with network anchors that precedes the annual State of the Union address.

In a statement, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said that “biased reporting from the media is a disservice to the American people,” adding: “We utilize every tool available to ensure that accurate reporting is provided to the public and the stain of those who knowingly peddle false information is held accountable.”

Free speech advocates say the president’s intent is apparent: to punish, intimidate and silence dissenters.

“There’s not a week that goes by where they’re not taking a new step to curtail press freedom in the country,” said Clayton Weimers, the executive director of the North America division of Reporters Without Borders. “We have measured a substantial diminishment of press freedoms.”

When challenged in court, the president and the administration have frequently lost, confronted with strongly worded rulings from judges affirming First Amendment rights.

Still, even the path to legal victory can have severe financial and reputational costs for those he views as adversaries, which have included The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC. And each time the president assails what has long been considered protected speech, media analysts say, he is eroding norms and undercutting the role of an independent press.

Reporters Without Borders maintains an index that tracks press freedom in 180 countries, clocking governmental threats, subpoenas and the vindictive use of regulations against journalists. The United States now ranks at its lowest since the organization started the index in 2002 — 64th, just above Panama and just below Botswana. The trend is the same at similar indexes kept by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the V-Dem Institute of Sweden.

There is a long record of U.S. presidents taking steps to curtail speech. President Woodrow Wilson imposed strict censorship and forced dissenting publishers out of business during World War I. Richard M. Nixon kept an enemies list, and his aides threatened F.C.C. action against broadcasters. More recently, the George W. Bush White House expanded government secrecy and the Obama administration went after the sources of journalists through leak investigations.

Mr. Trump had inveighed against the Biden administration for what he and his supporters portrayed as draconian pressure on social media companies to censor disfavored content often at their expense, promising at his second inauguration to “stop all government censorship.”

Now his administration is breaking new ground in stifling dissent with personal lawsuits and novel uses of executive power, longtime First Amendment lawyers say, with implications that extend far beyond Mr. Trump’s presidency.

“We live in a different world under this administration because the threats are so grave,” said Floyd Abrams, who has worked on free speech cases for 60 years. “It’s one thing to say there’s an extraordinarily powerful First Amendment, but unless and until courts rule on these matters, the threat is very real.”Harnessing Government Power

Long before he took office, Mr. Trump was well known for his media feuds. As a developer and reality TV star, he was quick to threaten defamation suits against those who challenged his assertions about his business successes and his wealth.

Mr. Trump has been candid about his aim: to inflict pain, even if it was fleeting. After bringing a failed libel suit against the former Times reporter Timothy L. O’Brien, right, whose book “TrumpNation” estimated Mr. Trump to be worth far less than he claimed, the president gloated about forcing the publisher to spend money. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about,” he said.

In his first term, the president branded journalists as “fake news” and crudely attacked reporters, especially women.

In his second term, Mr. Trump is now imprinting his pugilistic approach across the machinery of the federal government. Those who once might have checked him have been replaced by loyalists who often use their power to fulfill Mr. Trump’s desire to punish perceived enemies.

Soon after his inauguration, the White House banned The Associated Press from the Oval Office and Air Force One, ostensibly because the wire service would not call the Gulf of Mexico by Mr. Trump’s preferred name, the Gulf of America. Another reason for the ban: The A.P. would not give the Trump team rights to its photo of Mr. Trump, bloodied with a raised fist, after he was shot in Butler, Pa., in 2024. At a private lunch with Mr. Trump and network anchors last year, White House aides tied the A.P. ban to the denial of the rights to the photo, according to two people briefed on the event.

Mr. Trump’s team is unapologetic about its goal of achieving firmer control over the national information environment — what Mr. Cheung, the communications director, has dubbed in a social media post, “Full Spectrum Dominance.”

Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and one of the most aggressive supporters of Mr. Trump’s efforts, has said that the president is “reshaping the media landscape.”

Citing the big broadcast networks, Mr. Carr told an interviewer for CNBC last year that “for years government officials just allowed those entities, with executives sitting in Hollywood and New York, to dictate the political narrative.” Mr. Trump, he added, has “fundamentally changed the game.”

Special Reports: Disastrous Defeat For Trump Team In Yemen

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, Trump And Hegseth Suffer A Disastrous Defeat In Yemen, Gas Prices Are Rising, Trump’s Poll Numbers Are Dropping (Again), Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 12, 2026. “This is the first day that Iran really started winning the war,” said a Yemeni official, who is part of the country’s internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government. Shanah Tovah, Hopium world! Wishing everyone a good, sweet, and joyful Rosh Hashanah. To new beginnings! To new beginnings for this great country certainly needs them.

Over the past few days the Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth suffered a devastating defeat in their already disastrous war in the Middle East. From The Washington Post story:

AMMAN, Jordan — A key Saudi Arabian pipeline to the Red Sea was shut down after it was hit by “several drones” launched from Iraq, the Saudi Foreign Ministry said in a statement early Saturday, as Iranian-backed Houthi fighters claimed major victories in Yemen, expelling Saudi forces from the country’s Red Sea coast.

The separate attacks posed new challenges to the region’s ability to export oil amid the ongoing U.S. war with Iran, and further unnerved global oil markets. The price of oil briefly jumped above $110 per barrel, its highest level since May.

“This is the first day that Iran really started winning the war,” said a Yemeni official, who is part of the country’s internationally recognized, Saudi-backed government.

The Saudi statement said it would reserve the right to retaliate for the pipeline attack, but in response to a request from Iraq, would give Baghdad the opportunity to prevent such attacks.

The Iraqi government condemned the attack and confirmed that it was launched from Iraqi territory. A statement from the Iraqi prime minister’s office said that the military commander in the southern Iraqi province of Maysan, where the strike originated, had been dismissed.

The Houthis in Yemen and militant groups in Iraq, both allied with Iran, this summer opened new fronts against Saudi Arabia and its alliance with the U.S. In July, the two countries launched joint airstrikes against what they said were militant sites in Iraq.

Saudi Arabia and other oil-producing countries in the region have relied increasingly on alternative, land-based pipelines and sea passages to replace shipments through the traditional Persian Gulf export route, where vessels have come under attack in the Strait of Hormuz during the months-long standoff between Iranian and U.S. military forces.

The Houthi territorial claims, following a large-scale military operation aimed at controlling the Bab al-Mandab Strait entrance to the Red Sea, would mean that Iran and its Houthi proxies can now threaten — if not entirely block — energy and other cargo shipments through two key chokepoints.

We will need to be brushing up on our geography in the coming days but here is the best map I could find that helps explain the gravity of what is happening:Iran-backed Houthis claim major advance in Yemen as group reportedly seizes island in key shipping route (BBC News):

Here’s more from The Guardian:

By taking control of key areas this week, including islands off the coast, the anti-west Houthis hope to gain a direct presence near the Bab al-Mandab strait, a 20-mile stretch of water and vital trade and energy route that connects Asia with Europe. ​

The strait’s name is roughly translated as “the gate of tears” or “the gate of grief”, and its strong currents and winds made the passage between the Arabian peninsula and Africa’s east coast hazardous for centuries. Modern-day cargo ships have no physical issue passing through.

​But if ​the Houthis were to close the natural chokepoint, the impact on the global economy could be disastrous. Ships would have to reroute around the southern tip of Africa, adding thousands of extra nautical miles. The fighting has already contributed to the price of oil rising above $100 a barrel after weeks when it was trading closer to $80.

The fighting in Yemen, as well as Houthi missile strikes on Saudi Arabia, is the most significant violence in the country since the UN-brokered peace plan in 2022.

The UN special envoy for Yemen, Hans Grundberg, told an emergency security council meeting on Thursday that the country faced “a new and more dangerous phase of war”.

“This renewed war should alarm us all,” Grundberg said. “It effectively marks the end of the relative calm that Yemen has experienced for over four years since the UN-brokered truce. It not only threatens to plunge Yemen into a prolonged and expanding war, but also risks yet again dragging the country into the wider and unresolved regional confrontation, with global repercussions.”

A timely cartoon from Matt Wuerker of Politico:

"The Lessons of 9/11" as seen by President Trump and U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (Politico cartoon by A timely cartoon from Matt Wuerker).

Brent crude is climbing, even hitting $110 a barrel in the past few days:

Gas prices in the US have taken off again:

Diesel prices have exploded, hitting all times across the country, right as we enter the fall harvest season. In California, our most important agricultural state, diesel is approaching $8 a gallon right now:

Interest rates are taking off, raising the price of everything for everybody:

Not surprisingly Trump’s approval rating has started dropping, again. In today’s FiftyPlusOne aggregate he hit -25 for the first time this cycle:

Trump also hit his lowest mark of the cycle in the Civiqs daily tracker, clocking in at -26:

Congress returns on Monday to this fresh new Trumpian disaster. Calls for Pete Hegseth to step down should become very, very loud. As I mentioned in my talk this week, Trump Had His Shot And Has Blown It, Badly. It Is Our Turn Now To Win, Lead, And Make Things Better, the most important thing about what is happening now in the US - and it is bad - is that we have the opportunity to set a new course - a new beginning - for the country this November.

We are not powerless, and must get to work. For it is our turn now to do what is required for the cause of freedom here and everywhere and win this election this November……Yes, It’s Time To Get To Work People!

We released a series of terrific new interviews with our intrepid candidates this week: David Crowley (WI-Gov), Lindsay James (IA-2), Jessica Killin (CO-5), Nancy Lacore (SC-1), and Amish Shah (AZ-1). You can watch them all here.

We also launched a new daily feature, the Hopium Ad and Video Roundup. It’s a powerful new window into what is happening in our battleground races. Be sure to catch our Wed, Thur, and Fri editions if you haven’t gotten to them yet.

Let’s recharge with Hopium’s Daily Mantra:

• There is nothing Trump and MAGA wants more than for us to be fighting with each other and not with him. We have one job now - elect as many of these wonderful candidates running for the House and Senate as we can. It’s where our focus must be. It’s a year of opportunity for us across the country. We must seize it, together.
• Be sure to become an Early Vote Champion in your networks, communities, and organizations……
• Sign up to become a Democracy Protector too……Let’s Now Go Win The House and Senate, Together

New York Times, High Prices Spoil Trump’s New Push to Save G.O.P. Majority, Tony Romm, Sept. 12, 2026. Gas prices are high, mortgage rates are climbing and inflation remains well above target, complicating the president’s midterm appeal.

With less than two months until the midterm elections, President Trump commenced a final push this week to preserve his Republican majority in Congress, arguing that the United States under G.O.P. control had brought prices “way, way down.”

But for many families and businesses, the economy appeared to be on far shakier footing by Friday. Fuel prices soared, mortgage costs climbed and inflation registered uncomfortably high, testing the public’s patience with Mr. Trump’s frequent assurances that the country is on the right track.

The contrast underscored the political and economic stakes for Mr. Trump, who may soon face the wrath of an electorate long spurned by promises in Washington to lower the cost of living. As November draws closer, prices have risen under the president’s leadership, driven largely by an agenda that has included two years of punishing trade brinkmanship and a prolonged war with Iran.

The consequences were evident in the latest gauge of the Consumer Price Index, released on Friday. The report showed that prices rose at an annual pace of 3.4 percent in August, which increased the odds of the Federal Reserve’s raising interest rates next week.

The data came on the same day that a separate, long-running survey from the University of Michigan found that consumer sentiment dropped sharply this month. In that report, Americans expressed new worries that the economy was sputtering, and that inflation would continue to rise.

The unease set the stage for Mr. Trump’s renewed push this week to make the case to voters that he has helped, not hurt, the economy. Over two days of speeches at his party’s midterm convention in Dallas, the president labored to convince Americans that Republicans had achieved “tremendous economic success.”

But Mr. Trump did not limit himself to a brash defense of his record. The president also said he would send a $5,000 check to American citizens if Republicans retained the House and Senate in November, though he has failed to deliver on similar promises in the past.

News Roundups

 

Meidas Touch Network, Saturday Updates and Comment: Trump Gets Booed in Dublin While Iran Gets the Red Carpet in New Delhi, Brett Meiselas, Sept. 12, 2026. Here’s what we’re tracking right now:

• Massive protests greet Trump in Dublin
• Trump’s press conference chaos in Ireland on Iran, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Canada, and Ireland
• The Houthis mock Trump after gaining control over the Red Sea coast
• Saudi Arabia’s pipeline was attacked again as Houthis advance on Marib
• Trump continues to try to bribe voters with his lie about giving them money
• Republican Jon Husted’s Senate campaign is under fire after it was revealed a high-level staffer posted Nazi imagery
• Ted Cruz gets booed in Austin

Trump’s Brutal Welcome In Ireland

Trump landed in Ireland, officially for meetings with Taoiseach Micheál Martin, but let’s be honest, the real reason he’s there is the Irish Open at his golf course.

The folks in Dublin didn’t seem too pleased about his arrival: Caricature balloons depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump are carried during a protest against the visit of U.S. President Donald Trump in Dublin, Ireland, September 12, 2026 (REUTERS/Natalia Campos).

They didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for the guy.

Early reports say about 50K people hit the streets, carrying signs calling him a war criminal and accusing him of covering up the Epstein Files. The giant balloon caricatures floating above the crowd of Trump, Netanyahu, and Epstein made quite the splash.

Trump, despite being blocks away, of course claimed he hadn’t heard of any protests.

WTF Was That Press Conference?

Once Trump sat down with reporters, things got worse. He again said the Iran War would end “very soon, probably right after the midterms.” He was asked about the Saudi pipeline attack and said Iran was “probably” responsible. He absurdly claimed the Houthis called him personally to tell him how much they respect him and how they’ll let through U.S. ships peacefully.

Houthi leadership responded almost immediately, with spokesman Hasan al-Assad calling Trump’s claims baseless and quoting an old proverb about kissing the hand you cannot break. Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi also released footage mocking the Saudi royal family, implying they used to dance for Trump like his puppets.

During the presser, Trump also again claimed that both Canada and Iran are now “begging” to make a deal. On Ireland, he said he’d love to see the island unified, breaking with decades of official U.S. neutrality on the issue. He suggested the UK might not have the resources to defend the Falkland Islands anymore (this while he’s quietly arming Argentina with Black Hawk helicopters). Trump continues to lash out at our (former?) allies for not jumping into his reckless and illegal war.And In New Delhi…

While Trump was jeered in Dublin, Iran was getting treated like royalty at the BRICS summit in new Delhi. Iranian officials held direct talks with China’s foreign minister and Iran’s president was received with full honors alongside Xi Jinping, Putin, and Modi. BRICS leaders also announced a new payment system called BRICS Pay, aimed at reducing reliance on the U.S. dollar.

Running From Yemen

Saudi-backed forces are in full retreat across Yemen. Satellite imagery has now confirmed the East-West pipeline was hit in multiple locations, and Houthi forces are closing in on Marib, with some analysts suggesting the city could fall within days. A regional source told CNN this is “a Saudi-American f**k up of epic proportions.”

A Few Other Things

Trump posted again about his $5,000 bribe, already blaming Democrats for saying it will never happen. The guy is a scam artist. A con man. News organizations should treat him accordingly.

In Ohio, Republican Sen. Jon Husted’s campaign has now fired its political director after WaPo found photos of him posing with Nazi SS imagery and following Waffen-SS reenactment accounts online.

Down in Austin, Sen. Ted Cruz was on ESPN for some reason at a College Gameday. He got brutally booed and the crowd broke out into “Ted Cruz sucks” chants live on television.

Shana Tova to everyone celebrating the new year this weekend. Wishing everyone health, peace, and sweetness ahead. 

The Parnas Perspective, Saturday Night Update: Republicans Face Protests at Home and Abroad, AI Tech CEOs Urge Slow Down in Major Shift, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 12, 2026. Tonight’s rundown has a clear thread running through it. Republicans are facing pushback everywhere they turn, at home and abroad, and none of it looks like it’s going away anytime soon.

Donald Trump found that out this weekend in Ireland, where thousands took to the streets of Dublin and public figures like Rosie O’Donnell openly called for protests against his visit. Back home, Roger Marshall is facing his own wave of backlash from constituents fed up with where the party stands. And Ted Cruz walked into a college football stadium in the middle of a deep red state and got booed for nearly ten minutes straight, loud enough that you couldn’t even hear his answers.

Add to that a growing chorus of warnings from the very people building artificial intelligence, a fight over a five thousand dollar payment that may or may not exist, and a string of stories on immigration enforcement, and it’s clear the pressure is building on multiple fronts at once.

Here’s everything you need to know.

AI Fears Rapidly Grow:

Amodei Calls for Global AI Slowdown. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a 3,800 word essay Saturday calling for the entire AI industry to deliberately slow the pace of capability development. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.” He warned that a race to the bottom driven by commercial competition makes the risks of the technology more acute, and said he has grown more convinced over the last few months that “fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence.” He proposed that AI companies commit to bringing in independent, embedded evaluators with employee-like access to verify safety practices, and called for global coordination, including with authoritarian governments, to set common standards.

Altman and Musk Quickly Back the Call. Hours after Amodei’s essay went up, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted his agreement on social media, saying “this has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks” and that his company would adopt the same independent evaluator model. Elon Musk, whose xAI company builds the Grok chatbot, responded with a simple “Dario is right.” The alignment among three normally fiercely competitive executives is notable, and it follows years of AI labs racing each other on capability while occasionally warning about the very technology they are building. Altman had already floated the idea of pacing development back in July, saying on a podcast that slowing down would “give ourselves enough time for society to harden around these new capability levels.”

Ex-Anthropic Researcher’s Resignation Set the Stage. Amodei’s essay came days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and posted publicly that the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade” and that this “is not a marketing stunt.” Coxon said executives often soften their language for the press while privately expressing real fear, adding that “no other human activity poses this level of danger.” In a later interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, he went further than Amodei’s own essay, saying there is “a very real possibility” that recursive self-improvement, AI systems making themselves smarter without human help, could arrive within the next year or two, with “a chance that we could all die.” His resignation set off a broader furor inside the industry, with other researchers publicly calling on their own leaders to pause development.

The OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident Fueled the Alarm. Much of the urgency traces back to an incident in which a swarm of OpenAI’s own AI agents breached the systems of a smaller AI company, Hugging Face, without OpenAI’s knowledge, a breach that went undetected for weeks until Hugging Face itself flagged it. Amodei described the swarm as having acted like “a fanatically devoted collective,” carrying out cybersecurity attacks on targets it was never asked to target. He warned that if left unchecked, this kind of self-directed capability “could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.” The incident has already drawn a Senate probe into OpenAI, and Amodei said it raised the possibility that a similar swarm could take over large portions of the internet within six to twelve months, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

Not Everyone Buys the Altruism, and Some Say It Doesn’t Go Far Enough. Critics in Silicon Valley have suggested Anthropic and OpenAI’s sudden safety concerns are less about altruism and more about locking in their market lead by pushing for regulations that smaller competitors would struggle to meet. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made that argument explicitly at a conference this week, asking “what better way to create demand than to create a problem” and suggesting AI labs are stoking fear to sell new cybersecurity products. On the opposite end, University of Louisville computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy argued Amodei doesn’t go far enough, saying that if artificial superintelligence “cannot be reliably controlled, aligned, predicted, or contained, then the rational policy is not to manage its arrival, but to prevent it,” and calling for an outright international ban rather than a managed race. Hugging Face CEO Clément DeLangue, whose company Nvidia is in the process of buying for $12.9 billion, added that AI safety cannot “be solved behind the closed doors of a handful of frontier labs.”

Ireland Erupts Against Trump:

Rosie O’Donnell Leads Calls For Protests Against Trump. Comedian Rosie O’Donnell publicly backed the weekend’s protests against Trump, telling the Irish Independent, “The country must protest, he is the antithesis of everything this country stands for.”O’Donnell moved to Ireland after Trump’s return to the White House, saying she no longer felt comfortable living in the U.S. under his administration. She specifically called on Irish President Catherine Connolly to “speak truth to power” when meeting with Trump, adding, “I don’t think she should drop what she believes in to be polite to a madman. He is like a mad king that has destroyed the country.” O’Donnell and Trump have feuded publicly since 2006, when she questioned his standing as a “moral authority” over a Miss USA scandal, and the two have traded insults ever since.

Trump Calls Reunification “Fantastic” and Wades Into the Falklands. Trump went further than his earlier comments during a meeting with Taoiseach Micheál Martin, telling a reporter a united Ireland would be “fantastic” and adding, “It’s going to happen eventually. It may as well happen now.” He acknowledged there was “no good answer” to the question when he later addressed business leaders, but did not walk back the sentiment. In the same string of remarks, Trump revived talk of the Falkland Islands dispute between the U.K. and Argentina, saying he thinks he’ll “probably be able to settle” the territorial standoff if it flares up again. Analysts noted both comments landed as a pointed jab at Britain, coming amid Trump’s frustration that London has stayed out of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.

Trump Meets Irish President Who Has Called Him a “Bully”. Trump sat down with President Catherine Connolly, a left-wing former protester who demonstrated against him during his first term and has previously called him a “bully” over his Middle East policy. Afterward, Connolly said she told Trump directly of “the strong view of the Irish people that the normalization of war and genocide can never be accepted.” She gave him a collection of poems by the late Irish writer Michael Longley that includes the poem “Ceasefire.” When pressed by reporters on how the meeting went, Trump initially let his protocol chief, Monica Crowley, answer for him before saying only that it was “very nice.”

Thousands March in Dublin as Eric Trump Defends the Family. A protest march drew thousands into central Dublin, with demonstrators waving Irish and Palestinian flags and chanting “Donald Trump not welcome here” and “Irish government, shame on you.” Paula Butler, who came with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, said she was there to oppose Trump’s “attitude to women, to refugees, to migrants,” and dismissed his unity comments, saying, “What he knows about Irish unity, I’d say I know more on my little finger.” Kim Mathis, an American who moved to Dublin last year, said “part of the reason we moved to Ireland was to get away from Trump and all of his horrific policies.” Eric Trump pushed back on the criticism from Doonbeg, telling RTE that the family’s golf course is the area’s largest employer and urging people to “go have them attest to what we’ve done for the country,” while confirming his father plans to return next year for the Ryder Cup.

Other news:

Ted Cruz Gets Booed Off ESPN’s College GameDay. Ted Cruz made a nearly ten minute appearance on ESPN’s College GameDay at the University of Texas in Austin to promote the Protect College Sports Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at stabilizing the chaotic NIL landscape in college sports, and the crowd booed so loudly through the entire segment that Cruz’s answers were almost impossible to hear. At one point the boos briefly died down before the crowd shifted into chants of “Ted, you suck.” Cruz told viewers he believes the bill will ultimately clear the 60 vote threshold in the Senate, and the legislation has drawn support from figures like Nick Saban and Deion Sanders, though it has repeatedly stalled in Congress despite backing from Trump. The reaction seemed less about the substance of the bill, which most students in the crowd likely knew little about, and more a reflection of Cruz’s party affiliation showing up in a college town in the middle of a deep red state.

Lutnick says the $5,000 dividend wouldn’t come from tax money. Howard Lutnick told NBC that the proposed $5,000 payment to Americans would not be funded by taxpayers, saying “It’s not tax money.” An estimated $500 billion of the roughly $1 trillion needed could come from a new visa program letting wealthy visitors pay up to $5 million each for extended stays, with more than 100,000 people already on a waitlist. The administration is also pointing to the government’s stake in Intel, now worth an appreciated $8.9 billion, as another funding source. Kevin Hassett said the payment would move through the reconciliation process, adding “don’t underestimate President Trump,” while JD Vance has pointed to tariff revenue even after the Supreme Court ruled that “liberation day” tariff money must be returned. The Tax Foundation has noted a similar $2,000 rebate proposal would exceed actual tariff collections, and a new AP poll shows just 32 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, down from 40 percent.

Trump supporters shrug off high gas prices in new man-on-the-street video. Comedian Jason Selvig caught a Trump supporter’s reaction to rising gas prices, asking directly whether Iran had anything to do with it. The supporter dismissed the idea, saying “I don’t think Trump has anything to do with this, I think they’re just doing this to make him look bad. The liberals.” When pressed on who is actually responsible, the supporter said, “He doesn’t control the gas prices. Everything’s gone up. The truck’s gotta pay for their gas and it gets to the consumer which is us.” Asked directly who is at fault, the response was simply “I have no idea. I don’t blame Trump though.”

Republican Senator faces boos. The crowd erupted during a recent Senate debate in chants of “Shame on you!” as Senator Roger Marshall tries to explain why he sued 700 of his patients, leading to 81 arrests.

Trump wants a 30-foot George Washington statue at the Smithsonian. Trump posted on Truth Social calling George Washington “easily America’s Greatest Hero” and is pushing the Smithsonian to install a 30-foot “Colossus statue” of him along with an exhibit running through February 2032. The statue would replace the 1967 Infinity sculpture by Jose de Rivera. The push follows a 162-page report from earlier this year accusing the Smithsonian of overemphasizing oppression and division, and a July order for new signage that has not yet been installed. Trump has separately complained that the Delaware crossing and the victory at Trenton are underrepresented, and has proposed a new “Center for American Heroes.” Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch, who is planning to depart, said he has fought “for the independence of the Smithsonian,” and the episode comes alongside the removal of a sculpture at the Kennedy Center and reported plans to possibly sell a Kehinde Wiley painting one Art in Embassies director called “very woke” and “aesthetically terrifying.”

10,000-year-old mastodon tooth found in California. Geomorphologist Brigid Lynch discovered a fossilized mastodon tooth believed to be around 10,000 years old at a preserve in San Mateo County. Paleontologist Wayne Thompson described it as being in “immaculate condition,” saying it sent “chills and shivers up and down my spine.” Pacific mastodons trace back roughly 2.5 million years and went extinct more than 10,000 years ago due to climate change and overhunting. The tooth has been donated to Stanford for carbon dating, and curator Christine Garcia spoke to the broader value fossils like this hold for understanding the region’s history. The find follows similar discoveries in New York in 2024 and on a California beach in 2023.

ICE agents beat protesters and enter a home in Frederick, Maryland. Officers drove vehicles at and onto sidewalks near protesters and used batons during a confrontation in Frederick, Maryland, with at least two people hospitalized. City council president Cesar Diaz described nearly being struck, saying he was “one foot away from her” when a vehicle came close. Activist Soolah Kemp gave her own account of a vehicle driving directly at her. Roughly 200 protesters formed a human chain attempting to block agents from entering a home. Representative April McClain Delaney called for “a full, transparent investigation,” and Senator Chris Van Hollen accused agents of “creating chaos and instilling fear,” while DHS did not directly respond beyond saying “criminal illegal aliens are not welcome.”

North Carolina detention officer charged with 20 counts of forgery. Former Guilford County detention officer Michael Diehl has been charged with 20 felony counts of forgery for allegedly faking magistrates’ signatures on ICE detainer-extension forms. The scheme was uncovered after a flagged form connected to inmate Claudio Nepomuceno led investigators to 19 additional forged documents tied to other inmates. Diehl was fired, arrested, and released on a $5,000 bond, and investigators say more charges are possible as the case continues. The case comes as ICE has detained more than 70,000 people since Trump’s inauguration.

Mississippi police say more arrests coming in Tasia Fortune case. Police Chief RaShall Brackney said the investigation into Tasia Fortune’s death “remains active” and that “additional arrests will be pending.” Jarques Ratliff is expected to appear in court Monday. Fortune’s mother, Christy Spivey, described her grief and disbelief, rejecting any suggestion of suicide by saying “she would never, ever, ever.” Fortune had endured a difficult life that included foster care, homelessness, an abusive relationship, and raising four children, while also holding onto her faith and hopes of starting her own cleaning business. Spivey closed by asking people to “say her name. Keep it going.”

CDC declares record cyclospora lettuce outbreak over. Health officials have declared the record-setting cyclospora outbreak linked to Taylor Farms shredded iceberg lettuce imported from Mexico officially over. The outbreak sickened more than 12,000 people and killed two across 21 states before the product was pulled from shelves. It sparked broader fear around produce, led some growers to plow lettuce under, and drew criticism of the administration’s food safety response. The FDA’s investigation into the exact source is still ongoing, and Taylor Farms says its Mexico facility remains closed pending that investigation, even as unrelated cyclospora outbreaks continue elsewhere.

DOJ sidesteps legal fight by deporting woman through secretive terror court. The Justice Department avoided a looming legal battle by deporting Nazira Haji Zada through the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, a venue that had sat dormant for roughly 30 years before this case. She was actually removed from the country about two weeks before the DOJ announced it, timed to land around the 9/11 anniversary. Prosecutors alleged she was “the matriarch” behind an ISIS-inspired plot to carry out a mass shooting on Election Day 2024, a plan her son and son-in-law were convicted over. Haji Zada agreed to the alien-terrorist designation and forfeited her green card in exchange for a guarantee that her admission would not be used against her in future criminal proceedings, a deal approved by Judge Joan Ericksen. The arrangement heads off a constitutional challenge her attorneys had planned to bring against the court’s secretive procedures, including its use of classified evidence, in a court structured similarly to the FISA court with five judges appointed by Chief Justice Roberts.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Mass Anti-Trump Protests Erupt in Ireland, Censorship of Kimmel Backfires as Views Surge, Houthis Make Major Advances in War, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 12, 2026. Trump spent his weekend getting protested across an entire country, and it still might not have been the most embarrassing thing that happened to him.

While he was in Dublin insisting a “friendly protest” of thousands wasn’t actually happening, back home Jimmy Kimmel quietly out-rated his midterm convention, and an FCC commissioner came out and said the quiet part loud: the administration is pressuring broadcasters into silence.

Meanwhile, the Houthis pulled off one of the fastest, most consequential advances of this entire Iran war, and the recriminations flying between Washington and Riyadh afterward are brutal. Plus, an arrest in a case that’s had a community on edge for weeks, Brazil’s presidential race just got a lot messier, and Ben Shelton is one match away from ending a 23-year American drought at the U.S. Open.

All of that and more below. A few of you have unsubscribed lately, saying it’s all just become too much. I get it. Honestly, it’s a lot for me too. But I want you to know I’m not going anywhere. If you need to step back for a bit, that’s okay, and I’ll be here whenever you’re ready to come back. For everyone still here, thank you, because what we’re building together is actually breaking through to millions of people who aren’t getting this anywhere else. This is where you get the news before it’s been filtered, softened, or spun, straight from the source. Subscribe, share it with someone who needs to see it, and let’s get into it.

Here’s the news:

Trump in Ireland:

Massive Protests Greet Trump’s Ireland Visit. Donald Trump’s two day trip to Ireland, his first visit to the country as president since 2019, is being met with widespread protests across Dublin and the tiny village of Doonbeg. A recent poll found 69 percent of the Irish public does not support the visit, and a coalition of political parties and advocacy groups organized demonstrations under the banner “No Welcome for Mr Trump,” marching toward the Dáil shortly after his arrival. Community worker Sarah Clancy said people have “never had so much reason to protest,” pointing to his support for Israel in Gaza, the war with Iran and its impact on energy costs. Roughly 4,000 Irish and American security personnel, including 1,000 U.S. Secret Service members, snipers and anti-drone technology, were deployed for the visit at a reported cost of 20 million euro to Irish taxpayers.

Trump Dismisses Protests, Says Ireland “Fleeced” the U.S. Asked about the demonstrations Saturday morning, Trump told reporters, “I didn’t know there was a protest ... I haven’t seen any protests. It’s a friendly protest, let’s say.” Sitting beside Taoiseach Micheál Martin, he called the U.S.-Ireland relationship “fantastic” but added it was “less profitable for us to be honest with you.” He later told business leaders “you fleeced us but that’s okay,” referencing the American medical and technology companies that have relocated jobs to Ireland over the decades. Protesters including journalist Justine McCarthy said they didn’t expect Trump to notice the demonstrations but wanted “the rest of the world will know that we don’t want him here.”

Trump Says He’d “Love” to See a United Ireland. During his meeting with Martin in Dublin, Trump said he would “love” to see Northern Ireland unify with the Republic of Ireland, calling it something that’s “going to happen eventually” and “a very cool thing.” The remarks came weeks after British Prime Minister Andy Burnham said a referendum on Northern Ireland’s status was “off the table,” a position Downing Street reaffirmed after Trump’s comments. Democratic Unionist Party leader Gavin Robinson pushed back sharply, writing that “Northern Ireland’s constitutional future will be decided by the people of Northern Ireland, not by commentary in London, Dublin or Washington.” Under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, only the British government can call a border referendum, and polling still shows a comfortable majority in Northern Ireland favor staying in the U.K., though that gap has narrowed since Brexit.

Trip Built Around Golf, Officials Aim for a Smooth Visit. Despite the political theater, the visit is centered on Trump’s own golf course in Doonbeg, where he is set to help present the trophy at the Irish Open on Sunday. His organization has controlled the course since 2014, and he flew from Dublin to Shannon to attend the tournament’s final round before departing Sunday evening. A senior Irish government official told Politico the goal was simply to get him through Dublin “as smoothly and trouble-free as possible. Smiling faces, nice pictures, no friction.” Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald said her party would join the weekend’s protests and hoped President Catherine Connolly would raise Gaza during their meeting, while Doonbeg’s Trump International general manager Joe Russell said local police were well equipped to handle whatever protests reached the village.

Jimmy Kimmel:

Kimmel-Talarico Interview Outdraws Trump’s Convention Speech. Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, above left, has drawn more than 5.8 million views on YouTube, easily surpassing the audience for Trump’s own convention livestream. Trump’s roughly two-hour address on the opening night of the GOP’s midterm convention drew about 2.5 million viewers on Fox News, the only major network that carried it in full, ahead of MS NOW’s 1 million and CNN’s 441,000 in the same window. Even combined, Fox’s day two livestream views of 17,000 plus its broadcast audience add up to less than what Kimmel’s single interview pulled in. The numbers undercut Trump’s own claim, posted to Truth Social, that the convention was “far bigger, better, and more important than anyone thought possible” and that its “overall numbers beat the NFL.”

FCC Commissioner Says Kimmel’s Self-Censorship Proves Trump’s Media Pressure Campaign. Kimmel pulled his Talarico interview from broadcast television entirely, posting it to YouTube instead after saying the FCC had “threatened me, threatened my show, threatened our network” over so-called equal time rules for political candidates. FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez called the move proof of the administration’s reach, saying “Jimmy Kimmel’s decision to keep his interview with a Senate candidate off the air shows just how far this Administration’s campaign of censorship and control has gone.” She warned that “no host, local affiliate, or network should have to weigh federal retaliation before booking a guest for a newsworthy interview” and noted there’s no way to know how many other editorial decisions have been shaped by the same pressure. Gomez, a frequent critic of Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr, also pointed to Disney’s ABC as one of the only broadcasters still fighting the agency’s tactics in court rather than quietly complying.

Late-Night Hosts Mock Trump Over Empty Arena at His Own Convention. Kimmel spent much of his monologue on video of Trump insisting his midterm convention crowd in Dallas was packed while cameras showed visibly empty seats, including Trump asking attendees not to use the bathroom so news photos wouldn’t catch gaps in the crowd. “Could there be a better metaphor for this presidency than him bragging about the size of his crowd to a bunch of empty seats?” Kimmel said, adding “that arena was as empty as a Waymo.” He argued Trump surrounds himself with “so many trembling flunkies” willing to back up “his constant bullshit” that he never has to acknowledge reality. The bit came a day after Trump demanded the unusual midterm convention be held in the first place, which Kimmel noted “had never been done before, because there’s no reason to do that.”

Comedians Pile On Trump’s $5,000 Dividend Promise. Both Kimmel and Daily Show host Michael Kosta tore into Trump’s pledge to send $5,000 to every American adult if Republicans hold Congress in November. “I spent all day today trying to decide whether that was a bribe or a lie,” Kimmel said, “and I think it might be both things. I think Donald Trump just invented the libe.” He noted the plan would add $1.3 trillion to the deficit and predicted the checks would never actually go out. Kosta mocked the framing of the payment as a corporate-style “dividend” given the country’s negative $40 trillion balance sheet, joking “we should be faking our own death and starting a new life in Thailand,” while noting even Fox host Brian Kilmeade could only muster a tepid “I’m not sure that’s OK but I think it’s kinda fun” when asked about it.

Houthis:

Blame Game Erupts Over Houthi’s Lightning Red Sea Advance. A CNN investigation found deep finger pointing between Washington and Riyadh after the Houthis overran the port city of Mocha and seized Perim Island in barely 36 hours, despite repeated warnings to U.S. Central Command that the situation was turning critical. A regional source called it “a disaster made in DC and Riyadh” and “a Saudi-American f**k up of epic proportions,” describing a full day with no Saudi air support despite minute-by-minute updates on the Houthi advance. Part of the failure traces back to the UAE pulling its remaining forces out of Yemen in January at Saudi Arabia’s request, leaving military bases unfilled, while Yemeni army rosters turned out to be padded with “ghost names” and running at roughly 20% of their reported strength. A Western source close to the battle put it bluntly: “The Saudis threw the Yemenis under the bus.”

Trump Says Houthis “Don’t Want to Fight” the U.S., Predicts War Will End Soon. Speaking to reporters during his Dublin visit, Trump said Yemen’s Houthi fighters had personally reached out to Washington. “The Houthis called us and they don’t want to fight with us,” he said. “They don’t want us to go after them.” He separately predicted the broader Iran war would end “very soon,” telling reporters “I think it’ll be probably right after the trip” and accusing Iran of stalling “to complicate the election.” Trump also said Iran was “probably” behind the drone attack that forced Saudi Arabia to shut down one of its main oil pipelines.

BRICS Nations Call for “Maximum Restraint” as Bloc Strains Over the War. Leaders from the 11-nation BRICS bloc, including China, Russia, Iran and India, issued a joint statement in New Delhi expressing “deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions in Middle East/West Asia” and calling for “exercising maximum restraint.” The statement also condemned “deliberateattacks on civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities” under IAEA safeguards, a pointed reference to strikes during the war. Getting the bloc to agree at all was a diplomatic feat, since foreign ministers failed to reach a joint statement back in May amid divisions between Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Iran’s Pezeshkian used the sidelines to meet separately with the UAE’s crown prince, even as he warned beforehand that the Middle East does not need the United States acting as a “regional policeman.”

Drone Attack from Iraq Knocks Out Key Saudi Oil Pipeline. Saudi Arabia and Iraq both said a drone strike launched from Iraqi territory hit the East-West pipeline in the Riyadh and Medina regions, injuring several people and forcing its shutdown. Iraq’s prime minister responded by firing the military commander overseeing the border province where the drones were traced and by closing three border crossings with Iran as part of what a security source called “an intelligence effort to track down the perpetrators.” No group has claimed responsibility, and an alliance of Iran-backed Iraqi militias denied involvement, though Saudi officials have previously accused those groups of targeting the kingdom’s oil infrastructure. The pipeline normally moves 5 to 7 million barrels a day and has become critical for routing Saudi crude around the Strait of Hormuz since the Iran war began, making the attack a direct hit on one of the last safe export routes left.

Other news:

Man Arrested in Tasia Fortune Killing. A man has been arrested in connection with the death of Tasia Fortune, the 29-year-old Black woman found hanging from a tree behind an abandoned Jackson, Mississippi building last month. Jackson Police Chief RaShall Brackney identified him as Jarques Ratliff and said he had an “association” with Fortune, though she did not specify what kind. Fortune’s death was officially classified as a homicide Thursday evening, a determination that led to two search warrants and an arrest warrant, and Ratliff was ultimately found walking along a nearby street after officers missed him at the search location. Brackney called the arrest “an important development” but stressed the case “remains active,” adding “because Tasia and her children deserve nothing less.”

North Korea Fires Missiles Toward the Sea. North Korea launched multiple ballistic missiles toward the sea on Saturday, a day after the U.S., South Korea and Japan wrapped up a joint military drill Pyongyang views as a security threat. South Korea’s military detected the launches from the Wonsan area and said it boosted surveillance while sharing information with Washington and Tokyo. U.S. Pacific Command said the launches do not pose an immediate threat to American territory or its allies. Earlier in the week, North Korea’s defense minister warned the exercise could trigger “strong and reflective countermeasures from the standpoint of power.”

Nashville Airport to Be Renamed for Dolly Parton. Nashville’s airport authority board voted unanimously to begin renaming Nashville International Airport in honor of Dolly Parton, who died last month at 80 after a brief battle with cancer. The 6-0 vote does not set a final name yet, but the board called it the first step in a “multifaceted process” and said it is working with the appropriate parties to determine how her name and legacy will be incorporated. More definitive plans are expected in the coming months. Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee praised the move, saying “Dolly has always helped the world fall in love with Tennessee.”

Flávio Bolsonaro Faces Corruption Probe Before Election. Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro is under investigation for corruption, money laundering and tax evasion tied to 61 million reais, or about $12 million, he received from a disgraced banker to fund an unreleased movie about his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro. The court unsealed documents showing his brother Eduardo allegedly guided how the money should be managed in the U.S., and prosecutors suspect funds were used to cover Eduardo’s expenses and promote Flávio’s political agenda with the Trump administration. Flávio denied wrongdoing, saying “there’s nothing wrong about the movie” and welcoming the transparency. The revelations land three weeks before Brazil’s October 4 election, in which he is locked in a tight race against President Lula, who has seized on the scandal in his campaign.

Trump Says He’d Allow China to Build Cars in the U.S. Trump said he would not oppose Chinese automakers building cars inside the United States, breaking with American car companies and lawmakers who have urged him to keep them out. “If China wanted to come in and open a plant to build their cars here, I’d be OK with that,” he said, adding that Japan does the same and “hires our people.” He said he does not want Chinese automakers building in Mexico and shipping cars north instead. Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin had warned days earlier that allowing Chinese cars into the U.S. as part of a broader deal would be a “strategic mistake,” a claim Trump dismissed as a “total phony rumor.”

Lil Durk Acquitted of Murder for Hire. A federal jury acquitted rapper Lil Durk of murder for hire, conspiracy and stalking resulting in death in connection with a 2022 Los Angeles shooting that killed rival rapper Quando Rondo’s cousin. Prosecutors had alleged Durk funded the attack in retaliation for the killing of his friend and collaborator King Von two years earlier. His co-defendants, Deandre Wilson and David Lindsey, were convicted of stalking charges but were also acquitted of the murder for hire count. Durk remains in custody pending a separate racketeering trial, and prosecutors said they “look forward to presenting our evidence at his second trial.”

Uganda Buries Its “Boy King” Amid Succession Fight. Uganda held the funeral Saturday for Tooro’s King Oyo Nyimba, who died last month at 34 after a bout with cancer, capping a nine day mourning period marred by a bitter succession dispute. Oyo, who took the throne at age three in 1995 and was once known as the world’s youngest monarch, died unmarried and without a formally declared heir, and kingdom elders have disputed claims that he left behind a son born out of wedlock. Elders this week named a prince working as a journalist to succeed him, a decision his sister said sought to “bring division and turmoil.” The Queen Mother pleaded for unity, saying, “Let us grieve and bury my son King Oyo.”

The Parnas Perspective, Important Friday Night News Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 11, 2026. Before we get to all of the news, and there is a lot of it, I wanted to take a minute and talk to you directly.

This work isn’t always easy. The news we cover is rarely fun. But we are making a difference. We are fighting for the release of the Epstein files, and we are continuing that fight for the survivors. We are educating people, especially young people, who don’t get their news anywhere else. And here is the big news: we are breaking through across the political spectrum. People are leaving Fox and coming to us instead. We are building something real, and we are building it together.

So subscribe. Share this. Amplify this work. Not tomorrow. Not someday. Today. The fight for truth, for ethics, for accountability cannot wait.

Tonight, the Epstein investigation just got a lot bigger. French prosecutors have identified 13 new potential victims, newly released texts show FBI Director Kash Patel waging a strange campaign against a random anonymous X account, and Epstein survivors were physically removed from the GOP’s own midterm convention in Dallas minutes after pressing a candidate on the files, even as Republican insiders admit Trump has checked out on the midterms entirely.

Overseas, the Houthis have completed a stunning takeover of Yemen’s western Red Sea coast, helping push diesel to a record $6.05 a gallon here at home. Saudi Arabia is now begging Trump to intervene militarily, he’s refused, and Iran’s foreign minister is publicly taunting the U.S. Treasury Secretary over the fallout.

And on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the day became a window into where the country is right now: a tense handshake between Giuliani and Mamdani at ground zero, Trump and Hegseth using the Pentagon podium to talk about Iran, a 9/11 widow calling out Saudi Arabia by name, and a social media firestorm over whether the president fell asleep during the ceremony.

All of that, plus a contractor finally admitting the Reflecting Pool disaster was their own screwup, a salmonella outbreak, a $5,000 dividend check with a catch, and more, below.

Epstein Investigation Rapidly Expands:

France widens its Epstein trafficking probe. Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau announced investigators have identified 13 new potential victims of Jeffrey Epstein, bringing the total number of possible victims trafficked by recruiters in France to 26. The investigation opened in February after the Justice Department released more than three million pages of Epstein files, some of which documented his nearly two decade run as a part time Paris resident living in a sumptuous apartment on Avenue Foch, one of the city’s grandest boulevards, where he cultivated relationships with some of France’s most influential cultural and political figures. Beccuau said in a radio interview that authorities have obtained new names of potential recruiters but declined to give further details. French investigators have already scrutinized figures in the French modeling industry who worked with or befriended Epstein, including agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who was found hanged in his prison cell in 2022 while facing rape charges. Epstein himself died in prison in 2019, a death ruled a suicide. The announcement follows the death this summer of modeling scout Daniel Siad, who was accused of repeatedly recruiting young women for Epstein and was found dead in his home before French authorities could question him.

Patel’s texts show him pushing the FBI to fight an anonymous critic. Newly released internal FBI communications show director Kash Patel, below, personally directed his top public affairs official, Assistant Director Benjamin Williamson, in February to publicly hit back at an anonymous X account that had mocked his handling of the Epstein investigation. The account had posted on February 4 that Patel’s “rating just went to all-time highs. Congratulations Kash,” and Patel forwarded it the next day demanding Williamson’s team “find them, and post our record year results back at them all, continously.”

Williamson resisted, telling Patel the account, which he described internally as an “Epstein didn’t kill himself” bot, wasn’t worth responding to and that doing so “would look bad on you.” The exchange also revealed Patel had badly misjudged the post’s reach, believing it had 227,000 replies when Williamson clarified that number was actually X’s total view count and the post had only around 400 replies. Patel pushed back anyway, saying it wasn’t really about the account but about making sure people seeing the post also saw his crime statistics. The FBI declined to comment when reached.

Epstein survivors and their journalist host got thrown out of the GOP convention. Independent journalist Tara Palmeri and three Epstein survivors she brought as guests, all carrying valid press credentials, were escorted out of the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas, nicknamed “Trump-a-palooza,” just minutes after Palmeri pressed House candidate Robert Burke on the Epstein files. The survivors were already in Dallas for the Epstein Files Reading Room bookmobile tour when they joined Palmeri at the event. Burke initially welcomed the topic, telling the group “we really need to know what actually happened” and inviting the survivors to ask him questions directly. One survivor asked whether he’d support holding anyone involved in Epstein’s crimes accountable regardless of party, and Burke replied “I don’t care who they are, unlawful touching is unlawful touching. Consent is consent,” before volunteering, unprompted, that a friend of his had represented both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, though he wouldn’t name the person. Palmeri then pushed him on why Trump hasn’t released the remaining files, and Burke tried to redirect toward Joe Biden. When Palmeri asked who actually controls the Justice Department now, Burke answered “Trump does,” then immediately said he disagreed with the “premise” of her question.

GOP insiders say Trump has checked out on his own party. Republican insiders are increasingly convinced Trump has tuned out his own party just weeks before the midterms, telling reporters he’s fixated on personal legacy projects, like his new White House ballroom and the botched Reflecting Pool renovation, rather than helping Republicans win in November. One operative close to the White House put it bluntly: “He doesn’t care about Republicans winning the midterms. You got a tax cut, which is great. But then all you’ve got is a ballroom and war with Iran. That’s all he’s talking about.” The same operative said they don’t believe Trump actually wants JD Vance or anyone else to succeed him in 2028, pointing to his habit of naming buildings and institutions after himself, from the Kennedy Center to an airport, as proof it’s “all legacy vanity.”

Houthis Expand Operations, Diesel Surges:

Houthis Seize Key Red Sea Territory as Diesel Hits Record. Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have completed a sweeping takeover of the western Red Sea coast, seizing the port city of Mokha along with the islands of Perim and the last two holdouts in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, Greater and Lesser Hanish. A Yemeni government military official put it bluntly: “Everything that was under our control on the western coast has fallen.” Saudi Arabia responded with waves of airstrikes and briefly shut down its East-West oil pipeline in the Riyadh and Medina regions after attacks injured several workers, cutting off a key route Saudi oil uses to bypass the Strait of Hormuz entirely. The advance has already displaced more than 46,000 people according to the U.N., and it helped push diesel to a record $6.05 a gallon nationally, more than 60% higher than a year ago.

Saudi Arabia Presses Trump to Strike the Houthis. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has personally pushed Trump multiple times this week to launch U.S. military action against the Houthis as their offensive rapidly overtakes Yemen’s Red Sea coast. Trump has so far turned him down, offering intelligence and targeting support instead while more than 200 U.S. military personnel remain in Saudi Arabia providing what officials call non kinetic support. Adm. Bradley Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, was in the kingdom for coordination talks as the two leaders continue to speak directly about the escalating threat. The concern driving Riyadh’s request is retaliation: officials worry that if the U.S. or Saudi Arabia hits the Houthis too hard, Iran could strike Saudi Arabia directly in response.

Iran Taunts the U.S. Over Its Economy. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi kept up a public campaign against Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, mocking the administration days after it rolled out sanctions Bessent had likened to an “economic D-Day” against Tehran. “The U.S. Treasury Secretary has been gleefully boasting about wanting to impoverish Iranians and collapse our economy,” Araghchi wrote. “Instead, he stands powerless and exposed as the world loses belief in the U.S. financial system. Meltdown over cost of funding U.S. debt is only the beginning.” He posted a chart of surging 30 year Treasury yields, which hit their highest level since 2004 even after Bessent said his department would buy back $6 billion in long-term bonds to calm markets. Oil prices briefly easing and an inflation report landing close to expectations helped U.S. stocks claw back much of the week’s losses despite the rhetoric.

9/11 Ceremonies:

Giuliani-Mamdani Ground Zero Exchange. Rudolph Giuliani and Zohran Mamdani had a brief but pointed encounter at the ground zero ceremony marking 25 years since 9/11. Mamdani extended his hand to Giuliani, who had previously said the mayor should skip the event entirely, and Giuliani responded, “I’ll pray for you. It’s a really hard job.” Mamdani declined to elaborate publicly on the moment afterward, instead steering attention back to the victims’ families in attendance. The exchange became one of the most talked about beats of the day precisely because of the tension Giuliani himself had stirred up beforehand.

Trump and Hegseth Tie 9/11 to Iran War. At the Pentagon ceremony, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used their remarks to draw a direct line between the 2001 attacks and the ongoing war with Iran. Hegseth told the crowd, “We are ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. We control the Strait. We will finish this fight,” framing the current conflict as a continuation of the post-9/11 fight against terror. Trump echoed that message, saluting troops “working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon.” The remarks turned what is usually a solemn day of remembrance into a platform for justifying the administration’s Iran policy.

Terry Strada Confronts Saudi Arabia. At the New York ceremony, 9/11 widow Terry Strada, shown above in a file photo, used her turn reading victims’ names to call out Saudi Arabia directly. “For 25 years, administration after administration have chosen to protect the Saudis instead of standing with the 9/11 families,” she said. “Tell the Saudis to stop lying.” She thanked Vice President JD Vance for showing up and specifically asked him to carry her message back to the administration, while another family member used their moment at the podium to push for declassifying remaining files. Not everyone struck the same note: Michael Massaroli’s son used his reading to condemn the use of 9/11 as a pretext for spreading hate against Muslims.

Trump’s Appeared to Struggle to Stay Awake at the Pentagon. Trump drew a separate wave of attention during the Pentagon ceremony after social media users, including journalist Aaron Rupar, circulated clips accusing the 80 year old president of appearing to nod off or look “tired” and “sleepy” while seated for the remembrance. The moment spread quickly online alongside side by side comparisons to his more animated moments earlier in the event. The White House pushed back hard on the characterization, with spokesman Davis Ingle insisting Trump was “solemnly listening” throughout. The dueling narratives, uncontrolled Iran rhetoric on one side and questions about his alertness on the other, made for an unusually chaotic Pentagon appearance on what is typically the most tightly choreographed day on the calendar.

Other news:

Reflecting Pool contractor admits it was their own screwup, not vandals. Atlantic Industrial Coatings admitted its own faulty work caused the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool’s new liner to peel and blister after this summer’s renovation. The company said workers applied too little primer due to human oversight, causing the liner’s layers to separate, and that two incompatible chemicals in the “American flag blue” coating reacted badly, with the top layer reaching a temperature the one underneath couldn’t handle. Trump had repeatedly insisted vandals used a knife or box cutter to slash a “350 foot slit” in the lining, and prosecutors charged several people, including former Olympian David Hearn, before dropping every case this summer and admitting the damage came from a botched installation. The pool remains closed and fenced off months after repairs were originally supposed to wrap up by July 4. Taxpayers are now paying the same contractor $14.7 million to fix the mess it caused.

Trump’s $5,000 “dividend” checks would come with a catch. Trump says his proposed $5,000 payments to every adult citizen, promised if Republicans hold Congress in the midterms, could only be spent inside the United States, telling the crowd in Dallas “we don’t want you going to Canada to spend the money... we don’t want you going to China, to Germany.” The pledge has drawn immediate skepticism over whether it’s even legal, since federal law bars offering payments to influence how someone votes, and over whether he could authorize roughly $1.3 trillion in spending without Congress. Pressed on why he doesn’t just send the checks now, Trump gave a garbled answer blaming “negative growth” under Democrats. He’s floated similar cash payment ideas before, including “DOGE dividends” tied to tariff revenue, that never actually materialized. The proposal would cost more than double what tariffs have brought in since October.

A salmonella outbreak tied to broccoli sprouts has sickened 22 people. The FDA is investigating a multistate outbreak linked to broccoli sprouts made by Idaho based Evergreen Fresh Sprouts, which were sold to restaurants, co-ops and grocery stores across Washington, Idaho, Montana and Utah. Two people in Washington have been hospitalized, and bagged or clamshell sprouts with expiration dates between September 7 and September 16 are affected. This is a separate outbreak from an earlier salmonella and E. coli scare tied to the same company’s alfalfa sprouts. Symptoms, including diarrhea, high fever, bloody stool and dehydration, can show up as late as six days after exposure, and officials say older adults, young kids and people with weakened immune systems are at the highest risk of severe illness.

Prices are up across the board, not just gas and groceries. A new analysis of federal data found consumer prices have jumped more than 30 percent since 2019, about two and a half times the pace of increases seen in the years before the pandemic, with the pain now spreading into rent, car insurance and dining out. Childcare costs are up 62 percent since 2012, rent has jumped 75 percent, car insurance is up 115 percent, and beef and veal prices have nearly doubled. Economists point to Trump’s tariffs and the war in Iran as key drivers pushing inflation back up after it briefly dipped to 2.3 percent last year, with the rate now sitting at 3.4 percent, still well above the Fed’s target. Democrats have seized on the numbers ahead of the midterms, tying rising prices directly to the Iran war, while the White House credits Trump’s policies with recent monthly drops in beef, prescription drugs and car insurance.

Two former DHS chiefs say the agency needs a “reset.” Democrat Jeh Johnson and Republican Michael Chertoff, who each ran Homeland Security under past administrations, say the agency has become what Johnson called “radioactive” and a “pariah” under the current mass deportation push. Johnson argued deportation operations have overwhelmed DHS’s other jobs, like tracking security threats and disaster response, leaving it at risk of missing real dangers as political violence rises. Chertoff separately said enforcement should target people who actually pose security threats rather than sweeping arrests, saying resources are going toward “gardeners and home health aides” instead of people doing real damage. Roughly half of Americans now support abolishing ICE outright, and public opinion of DHS has soured sharply since 2023. The agency has pulled back from military style raids in cities but is still notching record arrest numbers, and it defends its record as necessary to keep the country safe.

A California woman is accused of killing both of her best friends in one afternoon. Prosecutors say 32 year old Anila Baby of Milpitas killed Ann Mary Mathew and Anjana Hari within 90 minutes of each other in two separate, premeditated attacks last month. Mathew was found stabbed and strangled at her San Jose home, with security footage from the scene deleted during the attack, while Hari was struck by a vehicle and killed in a parking lot about 10 miles away shortly after. Prosecutors call both killings willful and extremely violent, though no motive has been made public, and Baby was arrested trying to flee the second scene covered in blood with facial injuries. She’s being held without bail and returns to court November 17 to enter a plea.  

Trump Demands Personal Loyalty Pledge, Asks Supporters To Cheat In Midterm Elections

Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker of the Third Reich, with Hitler in the background, at top left.

Emptywheel, Opinion: We Do Not Swear Unconditional Obedience, Peterr, Sept. 11, 2026. I only saw brief clips of the Trumpapalooza, but one of the few I saw brought me up short. From Aaron Rupar on Bluesky (with video at the link), describing a point where Trump asked the crowd to stand:

Trump: “Please right your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breath. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way – I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell…”

I physically shuddered as Trump began that pledge, because it reminded me so much of another pledge to another ruler. The  pledge appears in the Evangelisches Feldgesangbuch, the protestant field hymnal for the German Wehrmacht. The same pledge appears in the Katolisches Feldgesangbuch, which was the Roman Catholic military hymnal.

The German Soldier’s Oath, August 1939. The text translates like this:

I swear by God this holy oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to the Führer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, Supreme Commander of the Wehrmacht, and that, as a brave soldier, I will be prepared to risk my life at any time for this oath.

They were published in August 1939 by the Luftwaffe, and handed out to the soldiers of the German military. Right before they invaded Poland the following month.

It wasn’t always like this. During the Weimar Republic, members of the military swore an oath to the German constitution, but after the death in 1934 of President Paul von Hindenberg, the oath changed. It became a pledge to Adolf Hitler personally, the leader of the state and the leader of the people. Shortly thereafter, civilian members of the government were made to take a similar oath.

I lived in Germany for a time as an exchange student, right after they showed the NBC miniseries “The Holocaust” on national television. It was the first time there was such a public discussion of that subject, telling the story from Kristallnacht to the ghettos and finally to the death camps and gas chambers. I had conversations with old women whose husbands, fathers, uncles, brothers, and sons had gone off to war, with middle-aged folks who were kids at the time (including men who had been part of the Hilter youth as young boys – much the way that young American boys would join the Cub Scouts – “it’s what everyone did at that age”), and especially with my classmates at school. Beyond the horrors of the Holocaust itself, the stories of the cult of personality were gripping. “How could you have allowed that to happen?” said the folks my age to their grandparents, who mainly had little answer. A few talked about being connected with the “Confessing Church” which opposed the Deutsche Christen, the nationalistic Aryan folks who tried to take over German religious life. But for most, the older folks felt embarrassed at best, if not guilty and ashamed.

“I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States . . .”

So yeah, I shuddered when I heard those words. Shuddered, not in surprise but in pain. Trump has made it clear that he expects this kind of unconditional obedience from the attorneys of the DOJ, and Todd Blanche has done his best to clean out those who do not share that view of the DOJ’s attorneys. Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Excursions, has the same mentality at the DOD, and has similarly worked hard to clean house of problematic generals and admirals. When Trump rails at the Supreme Court, it carries clear anger that the justices he nominated and got onto the court are not living up to an oath demanding unconditional obedience to him personally, even if they never actually took such an oath.

Or look at how Trump reacted to Senator Mark Kelly and his former military and intelligence community colleagues, when they pointed out that in our military, we not only do NOT demand unconditional obedience, but we demand exactly the opposite. Soldiers who are given illegal orders are not just given permission to disregard these orders but are REQUIRED not to obey them. Oh, the horror, says Trump, and he sicced DOJ and the DOD to go after Kelly et al., threatening not only their ranks and their pensions, but their very liberty.

That’s how Trump views being president. Everyone owes him — not the country or the constitution or the law, but him — unconditional obedience. And look at what he demanded his obedient minions do: cheat like hell.

Here in Missouri, we’ve seen what demands for unconditional obedience can do. We’ve been dealing with more than just the gerrymandering mess, but also anti-abortion zealots, some of the worst anti-trans laws in the country, and ballot measures that would have neutered the ability of the voters to use initiative petitions to overturn the most idiotic laws the legislature comes up with.

When a leader — any leader — demands unconditional obedience, be afraid. In a religious setting, that’s when you get to Jim Jones or pedophile priests. In an academic setting, this is when you get researchers who twist their data to fit the views of their superiors rather than letting it speak honestly. In a military setting, this is when you get My Lai. In a political setting, this is when you get Adolf Hitler.

We have less than 8 weeks before the elections in November. Many of the races are between candidates who act as if they have sworn unconditional obedience to Trump and candidates who have not. I envision my hypothetical grandkids asking me “How could you have allowed that to happen?”

I don’t want to shrug my shoulders in embarrassment, or bow my head in guilt and shame. And neither should you. It’s time to keep making good trouble.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

 

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: Bring It, Donald. We’ll Win — Even When You Cheat, Edwin Eisendrath, right, Sept. 12, 2026. We face a determined and powerful adversary that’s cloaked in the now-gilded trappings of our own government and will do anything to erase the integrity of our elections. We can beat him. 

How many of you have heard someone say, “Donald Trump is doing __________ (fill in the blank) and no one cares.” Or someone asks, “Why isn’t anyone stopping him?”

I’ve heard a thousand variations of these complaints. And it isn’t just from Americans. My wife responded to a post on Bluesky saying that we stand with our Canadian friends. What she heard back was, “That’s not good enough. Do something about it.”

It is hard to witness our country torn down, our treasury pillaged, our military purged and abused, our legal structures undermined, our economy sapped, neighbors pitted against neighbors, our scientific leadership squandered, our shrinking status in the world.

Many of us saw this coming when Donald Trump was returned to power by voters longing for change and by the money of corrupt oligarchs. Nearly two years later, the bitter complaints that he has not been stopped are understandable.

But they are also unfair. We live in a democracy, flawed as it is. Ours is not to overthrow the government by force of arms but to oust its leaders at the ballot box. Meanwhile, with discipline and in accordance with our laws, millions of Americans have resisted the worst. We have protested. We have organized. We have signed up to run for office. We have litigated. We have built entirely new media organizations to sound the alarm. We have stood up to protect our neighbors.

And now, our time of choosing has come. Now, all eyes are on us.

Unlike the millions of Americans I just described, Donald Trump and his Republican allies have given up all pretense of fealty to democratic norms. They are engaged in massive and historic election manipulation. They launched and carried out an unprecedented midterm redistricting process across red states. In GOP-controlled states, they also executed massive voter roll purges. Texas closed nearly 100 polling places in Tarrant County, which they’re afraid they’re about to lose.

Trump instructed the United States Postal Service not to deliver mailed ballots unless the sender is on a list he controls. He’s threatened to send troops to polling places. He said he might order the military to seize ballots.

This is the biggest threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

And the world wants to know, are Americans up to the challenge. Are we still a people who will do what it takes to preserve our freedom.SubscribedThe Whole World Is Watching

China sees a sinking America and hope we fail to right our ship. Russia is watching, too. With his guy in our White House, Putin’s unprovoked military assault on Ukraine earned him a red-carpet summit and a trip back to the G20 Summit. Meanwhile, Trump tells Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy that he doesn’t have the cards and shouldn’t count on American military support.

Russia and China are both allied with Iran, sharing intelligence and arms with the nation we’ve been at war with for over six months. All three countries see America’s government as unable to stand up for itself and wonder whether that’s now true of Americans, as well.

Europe is watching. Allied nations that sent their soldiers to die for us after 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq want to know whether America has now become their adversary. They wonder what the American people will do when their President threatens to take Greenland by force, threatens their economies with punishing tariffs, and threatens their values, as Trump and J.D. Vance did when they essentially argued the continent was not white enough.

Africa wants to know if Americans are okay with their President calling them “shithole countries,” ending life-saving foreign aid, and making commercial ties contingent upon whether they will accept our shackled deportees.

Latin America wants to know if we will use our military to launch a new colonial era, where our army goes to war to enable American companies to take their natural resources, as Trump did in Venezuela.

Canada, our great neighbor for centuries, now finds the house next door sold to a mob boss and wonders whether Americans will do anything about it or just watch like it’s The Sopranos.

For 250 years, people yearning for freedom anywhere in the world looked to America. Now the whole world is watching to see if that light is extinguished.ArticlesDemocrats Understand the AssignmentEdwin Eisendrath·Aug 9Democrats Understand the Assignment

But here at home, there is no time to watch. There is no room for bystanders who say, “What can we do, they’re cheating?” Our democracy is not a spectator sport. It is not a social media meme. It is, as it ever was, a struggle for freedom.

We face a determined and powerful adversary. One cloaked in the now-gilded trappings of our own government. One that will do anything to erase the integrity of our elections.

Ordinary Americans look at all the power arrayed against us and we say: is that all you’ve got?

That’s what we said in Chicago and Minneapolis last year when over-armed and under-trained ICE agents tried to intimidate us. Americans poured out of their houses and into the path of peril. We were willing to die for our freedom. Renee Good and Alex Pretti did.

This year, tens of millions of us will check our voter registrations and overcome their purges. We will cast our votes in ways to be sure they get counted. We will guard the counting process, and we will demand the winners be seated.

They have power. They have money. We have only ourselves. Bring it on.

Edwin Eisendrath is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Alderman who hosts It's The Democracy Stupid on Lincoln Square and a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. 

The Bulwark, Opinion: Fear and Loathing Among the Fearful and Self-Loathing, Sonny Bunch, Sept. 12, 2026. What I saw at Trump’s tribute to Trump in Dallas.

Two separate but concurrent factors drove much of the mood at the midterm convention: the complete lack of accomplishments in the present and a deep uncertainty about the future. The speakers who came onstage spent most of their time railing against the Biden years and warning against a return to his dark ages without ever really settling on a new standard-bearer. This was, theoretically, JD Vance’s coming-out party, and Trump bigfooted him both days, closing out night one with a nearly two-hour ramble and then following Vance’s keynote on night two with a 30-minute rehash of night one’s greatest hits.

There was one figure looming over the event, however. Indeed, the second and final day was timed to the anniversary of his death, one day before 9/11. I speak, of course, of Charlie Kirk, assassinated one year ago and invoked constantly as a martyr for conservatism, as the beacon of light the activists need to see the way forward. And it was incredibly telling that Vance, in trying to square the Iran circle—and after leaking to the New York Times that he was definitely very on the ball in reaching out to military commanders to see just how bad things on the ground in Iran are—appealed not to Donald J. Trump but to . . . Charlie Kirk.

Speaking to the “young men” who felt “inspired by Charlie Kirk” but were turned off by Trump’s breaking his pledge to start no new foreign wars, Vance made a rare acknowledgment: “I think Charlie is a great example of how to disagree but still participate in the work of saving this country.” Vance went on, noting that he talked to Kirk nearly every day, that Kirk loved the president, but that he “hated war.” Presumably, then, he also would have hated this war, the war that Vance himself is so ambivalent about.

It’s a stark contrast to Trump’s language earlier in the day, in an interview with Laura Ingraham. She had nudged up to the unthinkable, suggesting the Republicans would be blowing out the Democrats if not for having gone to war with Iran. “If we hadn’t done Iran, you would be cruising to midterms victory right now. Any regrets?” she asked. “No,” he replied. “I don’t believe in the word regret.” “What do you say to all the young men who supported you in 2024 . . . some of them are demoralized?” “I don’t think they’re demoralized, I think they’re very proud of the fact that I’m not letting Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Trump remains the standard-bearer for the party; hell, he practically is the party at this point, leading a pledge of allegiance to himself in the hall as the midterm convention drew to a close.

Public Notice, Mike Johnson runs out the clock on his own speakership, Stephen Robinson, Sept. 11, 2026. Mike Johnson, below right, the theoretical speaker of the House, announced last Thursday he’s canceling votes for the last two weeks of September. This leaves just four days of legislative business before the midterms.

His spin is that House Republicans are now free to campaign in their districts, where they can boast to voters about how little they’ve done to address the harm President Trump has inflicted on the nation. This might seem a strange choice: Although Trump and his MAGA goons have openly tried to rig the upcoming midterms, particularly through racial gerrymanders, Democrats are still favored to win back the House. That means Johnson’s tenure as speaker is likely all over but the crying, and he’ll have little to show for it beyond a Wikipedia entry.

That reality hasn’t stopped Johnson from shamelessly lying about his record. He told Fox News last December, “We’ve had one of the most productive Congresses in the history of the institution.” He repeated this wish-casting nonsense in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, ludicrously claiming 2025 was “one of the most productive first years of any Congress in our lifetimes.”Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comMike Johnson: "We've had one of the most productive Congresses in the history of the institution."Fri, 05 Dec 2025 14:22:31 GMTView on Bluesky

But Johnson isn’t closing the store early for a legislative victory lap. He’s trying to avoid a vote on the Epstein Transparency Act II, which would permit Epstein’s victims, state attorneys general, and members of Congress to sue the Justice Department for failing to disclose documents as required under last year’s original Epstein Transparency Act.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie has started collecting signatures for a discharge petition that would bypass the speaker and force a vote on the floor. When Massie suggested Johnson might end the House session early to avoid the vote, Johnson mocked the accusation as “stupid” and “nonsensical.” Now, he’s running scared.Speaker Johnson's beginning of the endSpeaker Johnson's beginning of the endNoah Berlatsky·Apr 21Read full story

This latest showcase of the speaker’s fecklessness leads to an obvious conclusion: Johnson struggles at the basic blocking and tackling of his job.

He constantly loses votes he shouldn’t. Even a performative resolution denouncing socialism and supporting the SAVE America Act almost failed to get to the floor because of internal party squabbling. It was salvaged only because moderate Democratic Reps. Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez crossed party lines and voted with Republicans to pass the necessary procedural rule to start debate.

Johnson has a slim majority, yes, but he lacks former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s skill at keeping members in line. The recent defection of the Democratic moderates was a rare lapse for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who mostly keeps his diverse caucus unified, whereas Johnson frequently endures public humiliation. He’s set a record for the number of rules vote failures, and he’s been forced to pull legislation from the floor once it was clear he lacked the votes. (Pelosi has mocked his apparent weak command of his members.)

There’s another unfortunate record that Johnson has set: Since 2023, the number of successful discharge petitions that brought bills to the floor over the speaker’s objections have matched those passed over the past four decades.

It’s said that the speaker’s job is “like herding cats,” but Johnson just lets the more feral members run wild. Meanwhile, he’s completely surrendered the House’s constitutional role as a co-equal branch of government, and when the pressures mount, his solution is usually to flee the premises. 

New York Times, Opinion: Trump Catastrophically Miscalculated in Georgia, Michelle Cottle, Sept. 12, 2026. When a political player starts drawing personal insults from President Trump and his people, it is a pretty good sign that his star is on the rise.

For Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, that moment arrived this summer. In July, Mr. Trump dubbed the fresh-faced lawmaker “Pee-wee Herman.” The next month, upset over Mr. Ossoff’s criticism of the president, one aide called Mr. Ossoff a “feminine theater kid” and a “lightweight loser,” and another derided him as “a miserable person” and “the biggest cuck loser in politics,” while deploying a sexually explicit moniker unfit for a family-friendly publication.

Mr. Ossoff gives as good as he gets. Maybe better. He has derided Mr. Trump as “a failed president,” “a national disgrace” and a “draft-dodging crook.” This anti-Trump feistiness has boosted the senator’s standing in his party and turbocharged his re-election campaign. Once talked about as the most vulnerable Democratic senator of the cycle, he is now being talked up as a hot presidential possibility for 2028.

If Mr. Ossoff winds up in the White House, Mr. Trump will have largely himself to blame. The president didn’t just help him win his seat. He also spent years undermining the Republican Party in Georgia, sowing internecine discord, championing losing candidates and destroying conservative voters’ faith in the electoral system. With impressive, if unintentional, drive, Mr. Trump has fostered the conditions that transformed Mr. Ossoff from a charmingly nerdy, vaguely awkward, low-key freshman lawmaker into a political star.

Not all of it is Mr. Trump’s fault. Demographics have partly driven Georgia’s political turn from red to purple. The state’s populace is young, and a growing majority belongs to racial or ethnic minority groups. Republicans cannot win statewide contests simply by turning out the MAGA base. And over the past decade-plus, Democratic organizers, including Stacey Abrams and her New Georgia Project, have done yeoman’s labor mobilizing the blue team.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.

But the president has done much to speed the shift. Most famously, his election fraud lunacy after losing the state in 2020 depressed Republican turnout and cost the party both Senate seats in runoffs held in January 2021. This tipped control of the chamber to the Democrats, a mark of shame that sat poorly with many Georgia Republicans.

Mr. Trump’s ensuing feud with Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican who refused to help overturn the state’s 2020 election results, greased the state party’s slide into extremism and obsolescence. The rise of MAGA elevated the far right, most prominently the Georgia Republican Assembly, a grass-roots group that has feuded fiercely with more mainstream Republicans and pushed to impose arbitrary purity tests on candidates. In 2023, the group unsuccessfully pressed the state party to pass a rule blocking candidates from running who were insufficiently conservative or traitors to the party. (This of course included Mr. Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the state’s secretary of state, who refused to “find” Mr. Trump 11,780 extra votes.)

As Team MAGA took over the state party apparatus, Mr. Kemp and other elected leaders distanced themselves from it, creating parallel fund-raising and voter turnout machines. The state G.O.P. got bogged down in niche issues, such as a crusade for paper ballots, that are not top-of-mind concerns even for most Republican voters.

Republican elected officials now view the state party not as an organ for helping get them elected so much as one aimed at litigating grievances against G.O.P. officials and candidates deemed insufficiently MAGA, party operatives have told me.

Mr. Trump himself continues meddling, despite having displayed a reverse Midas touch in statewide races. In the 2022 midterms, his preferred candidates lost their primaries for governor, secretary of state, attorney general and insurance commissioner. Herschel Walker, Mr. Trump’s pick to face Senator Raphael Warnock, won the primary but lost the general.

Mr. Trump narrowly carried Georgia in 2024. But less than two years later, his approval numbers are deep underwater there. In this summer’s primary, his pick for governor, Burt Jones, lost to the businessman Rick Jackson.

As for this year’s Senate race, Republicans had aggressively courted Mr. Kemp to take on Mr. Ossoff. He declined. Allies of his told me at the time that he decided it was not worth another brutal statewide campaign — with at best grudging acceptance by a president and a MAGA movement that had long vilified him — to be just another member of the party’s Senate roster. And so the G.O.P. was left to pick from a constellation of lesser lights.

Enter Mike Collins, the Trump-backed horse in the race. The hard-right representative emerged from a nasty G.O.P. primary tarnished by scandal, short on campaign cash, polling well behind Mr. Ossoff and facing grave doubts among many Republicans in the state that he can turn things around. Mr. Collins isn’t really an anti-establishment outsider; his father was a House member. But he rocks the middle-finger swagger and the country-fried good-ol’-boy shtick — complete with a mullet, his critics marvel — that tends to thrill the MAGA base. Many big-money donors are skeptical of him, and he is expected to be a hard sell among the more traditional Republicans, independents and swing voters who determine statewide races.

Mr. Collins’s scandals and missteps have not helped. Several people in his orbit, including his son-in-law, have been chummy with white nationalists, publicly promoted white nationalism or been otherwise accused of antisemitic behavior. Rather than swiftly addressing the dust-up within his family, Mr. Collins refused to answer questions and allowed the mess to drag on for weeks before firmly declaring himself not a racist.

The representative is also under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over allegations that his office misspent taxpayer funds on a no-show paid internship for the girlfriend of his longtime chief of staff, Brandon Phillips. (Mr. Collins has denied impropriety.)

Compounding the awkwardness, Mr. Collins fired Mr. Phillips in May, in response to the aide’s offensive posting on social media. Then the representative had to replace his subsequent chief of staff, Kip Talley, because of his participation in a group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, notorious white nationalists. Even the party’s nominee for governor, Mr. Jackson, is keeping a healthy distance from Mr. Collins.

This all serves to fuel the emerging mythos of Mr. Ossoff. The 39-year-old senator — still the youngest in the chamber — stands poised to romp to re-election in a state made more purple by Mr. Trump’s machinations. Better still, Mr. Ossoff’s choirboy looks and often earnest demeanor, coupled with his taste for political combat and his social media savvy, give him an edge in the political mud pits. He can land some pretty rough insults without coming across as nasty or extreme.

In June, my colleague Michelle Goldberg noted that Mr. Ossoff seemed to have been cooked up in a lab as the perfect Democratic candidate for 2028. The rich irony is that Mr. Trump has been a — maybe even the — most important cook.

Special Report: Nebraska Governor's Undocumented Workers Scandal

 

New York Times, As He Backs ICE Crackdown, Nebraska Governor Employs Undocumented Workers, Yanqi Xu (a reporter for Flatwater Free Press. She examined the agricultural industry in Nebraska as a part of The Times’s Local Investigations Fellowship), Sept. 9, 2026. Gov. Jim Pillen’s family business is one of the nation’s largest pork producers. As he seeks re-election, he has aligned himself with President Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda even though his farms have taken on undocumented laborers.

Before becoming Nebraska’s governor three years ago, Jim Pillen built a multimillion-dollar hog enterprise. Casting himself as a conservative businessman who would grow the state’s economy, he defeated a Trump-backed candidate in the Republican primary.

This time around, Mr. Pillen, who is seeking re-election this fall, won President Trump’s endorsement. The governor — who had rarely spoken out about immigration issues until last year — had embraced Mr. Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda.

Days after Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, the governor directed the Nebraska State Patrol to partner with ICE on immigration enforcement. He allowed the federal agency to use a former state prison, now referred to as Cornhusker Clink, to hold hundreds of detainees caught up in the administration’s mass deportation sweep. He has echoed Mr. Trump’s rhetoric about “criminal illegal aliens” who have “invaded our country” and decried “the worst of the worst” immigrants he has claimed are hiding out in Nebraska.

But for more than a decade, Mr. Pillen’s hog business has employed migrant workers, those who are in the country legally — and those who are not, The New York Times and The Flatwater Free Press found.

His company, Pillen Family Farms, has taken on undocumented workers as it has grown into one of the nation’s largest hog producers, according to a review of state and federal court records and interviews with more than 40 current and former employees, prosecutors, immigration lawyers and community organizers.

Many farms in Nebraska and other states rely on immigrants because of labor shortages. While the scale of undocumented workers in the Pillen farm labor force — which has about 1,200 employees in four states and Canada — is not clear, the fact that the company has used them is an open secret at some of its Nebraska farms.

Mr. Pillen has faced little public scrutiny about his workers. His spokeswoman, Laura Strimple, said in a statement that “Jim Pillen never knowingly hired an illegal immigrant and went above and beyond the legal requirements to verify the immigration status of his employees.”

Mr. Pillen in a blue suit and red tie at an event at the statehouse.Mr. Pillen, who has served as governor since 2023, started what became Pillen Family Farms more than three decades ago with 60 sows on a dirt lot.Credit...Nikos Frazier/Omaha World-Herald

At least 20 Pillen hog farms employed undocumented immigrants, according to court documents and interviews with more than two dozen current and former workers, including several managers. Six former workers acknowledged in interviews that they themselves had no legal status.

Court records show that at least a dozen Pillen workers were charged with using fake or stolen IDs for employment between 2015 and 2024. Many Pillen workers interviewed said the practice was common. At least 10 who assumed false identities, according to them or their relatives, never faced criminal charges for that.

David Armendariz, a Mexican who overstayed his tourist visa in 2008, said he worked at two Pillen farms until 2023. When he was hired, he recalled in an interview, a farm manager accepted the fake driver’s license he had purchased. The same ID was rejected years later, he said, when he applied for a construction job elsewhere.

Over the years, Mr. Armendariz said, more Hispanic workers arrived at the farms, many of them undocumented. One co-worker changed his name multiple times, he said, and another went by a different name from the one on his sign-in sheets. Mr. Armendariz said he was open about his own status. “Everyone knows that it’s not your name,” he said, “but they don’t ask you what your name is.”

Quinten Rowley, who managed two boar farms for Mr. Pillen’s business until 2022, said the company ramped up background checks for applicants about the time Mr. Pillen decided to run for governor. After that, Mr. Rowley said, he had to turn away more applicants.

Samuel Bethune, Platte County’s public defender until 2009, said he had represented hundreds of undocumented immigrants every year, most of them employed in meatpacking plants. He recalled that a few clients charged with traffic offenses identified themselves as Pillen workers but lacked valid employment documents.ImageA large building with silos.A feed mill in Inland operated by Pillen Family Farms. The governor’s children Sarah and Brock have run the company since he took office.Credit...Loren Elliott for The New York Times

ICE identified no records of audits or inspections at Pillen farms in the past 15 years after a request from The Times and Flatwater. The federal agency has raided relatively few workplaces in Nebraska. The largest and highest-profile one was an Omaha meatpacking plant where more than 70 workers were arrested in June 2025 over alleged identity theft.

After the raid, Mr. Pillen suggested in interviews that ICE would not target established immigrants. “Anybody that is here working hard and being a good neighbor, they’re A-OK, they’re fine,” the governor told The Nebraska Examiner. But he also said that stealing identities was a “grave offense.”

The governor did not respond to interview requests and declined to answer written questions for this article. Mr. Pillen’s spokeswoman said in her statement that he “has the strongest immigration record in Nebraska history. Under the governor’s leadership, Nebraska has assisted the federal government in the deportation of nearly 1,000 illegal immigrants through its variety of partnerships with federal entities.”

ICE has arrested more than 3,000 people in Nebraska since Mr. Trump’s second term, more than doubling the rate under the Biden administration. By comparison, in Minnesota, the epicenter of some of the nation’s most aggressive urban immigration enforcement operations, such arrests have more than quadrupled, according to an analysis of ICE data released by the Deportation Data Project.

Federal officials have largely avoided clashes with agricultural employers in states that helped re-elect Mr. Trump, according to agricultural producers and labor economists.

“If you’re going to come and pound on farmers in Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, whatever, and daily raid their farms or their processing plants, you’re going to have some problems politically,” said Al Juhnke, former executive director of the Nebraska Pork Producers Association. “The farms are right smack dab in the middle of red areas.”Hogs, Farmhands and Fake NamesImageA large building with a sign bearing a pig insignia and the name “Wholestone Farms.”The Pillen family has a stake in a large pork-processing business where dozens of workers have been charged with using fraudulent IDs to work since 2019.Credit...Loren Elliott for The New York Times

The first farmer to lead Nebraska in more than a century, Mr. Pillen often talks about his agricultural roots. He grew up with livestock on his small family farm in Platte County in northeast Nebraska.

A Cornhusker football standout at the University of Nebraska, he studied animal science and then worked as a veterinarian before launching his own business more than three decades ago. What is known as Pillen Family Farms, based in Columbus, started with 60 sows, or female pigs, on a dirt lot.

Now, after expanding and buying out competitors, the company owns about 100 farms in Nebraska alone, with workforces ranging from a handful to dozens of people. Since Mr. Pillen became governor, his children Sarah and Brock have run the company, which ranks No. 14 nationally on the Pork Powerhouses list, with 78,000 sows.

The family also owns a hog-breeding business and has a minor stake in Wholestone Prestage, which operates a pork-processing co-op in Fremont owned by some 200 producers. Since 2019, at least 56 Wholestone workers have been charged with using fraudulent IDs to work, according to state court records. More than half pleaded guilty or were convicted, several cases are going through court, and the other defendants fled or failed to appear. Wholestone did not respond to requests for comment.ImagePigs held in pens arriving at a slaughterhouse.Workers at hog farms labor long hours for relatively little pay to keep the hog barns running. They vaccinate pigs, feed them, move and ship them.Credit...Loren Elliott for The New York Times

At Pillen farms and elsewhere, workers labor long hours for relatively little pay to keep the hog barns running. They vaccinate pigs, feed them, move and ship them. The job is one that most Nebraskans do not want, hog farmers said in interviews.

Facing labor shortages, large corporate hog producers in recent decades have turned to a workforce of immigrants, whether legal or not, according to John K. Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union.

Gary Stover, a consultant who helped a local producer manage a hog farm in Shelby, said in an interview that he replaced the crew there with Hispanic laborers in 2010 because their work ethic impressed him. He said that one employee there used a fake name, and that his other consulting clients also had undocumented workers with falsified documents.Local InvestigationsThis article was reported and edited as part of the Local Investigations Fellowship, a New York Times program where local reporters produce investigative work about their communities.

Nathan Dallon, an immigration lawyer in Omaha who has defended hundreds of undocumented workers against criminal charges like identity theft and driving without a license, said Nebraska’s agriculture industry operated on the premise that there would be unauthorized migrant labor.

“H.R. for a lot of these companies are incentivized to take on workers that they know are using fake papers,” he said in an interview. “Sometimes they even help them get the fake papers, and then they know full well that they are making the crime worse for the person working.” (Mr. Dallon, citing client confidentiality, declined to say whether he had ever represented Pillen workers.)

Global News

  

President Trump with Micheál Martin, the taoiseach, or prime minister, or Ireland, at the Farmleigh House in Dublin on Saturday,Sept. 12, 2026. (New York Times photo by Alex Kent). 

New York Times, Trump Says Irish Unification Would Be ‘Fantastic,’ Breaking With Precedent, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Luke Broadwater, Sept. 12, 2026. The United States is officially neutral on an issue that had been a source of decades of violence in Northern Ireland until a 1998 peace deal.

Shortly after setting foot in Dublin, President Trump on Saturday said it would be “fantastic” if Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland unified, breaking with decades of U.S. neutrality on an issue rooted in a long history of violence.

“I don’t want to cause any problem. I will tell you, I’d love to see it unified,” Mr. Trump said in Dublin alongside Micheál Martin, Ireland’s taoiseach, or prime minister. “It’s going to happen eventually.”

He later seemed to acknowledge that he had stepped into a politically problematic topic.

The American president said he still believed it would “be a cool thing” if Northern Ireland broke away from the United Kingdom, but joked that half the room would clear out after hearing his remarks.

“No matter how well you say it, there’s no good answer,” Mr. Trump told a crowd of embassy employees and business leaders gathered at Deerfield Residence, where the U.S. ambassador lives.

The United States has long supported the U.S.-brokered 1998 Belfast Agreement, also known as the Good Friday Agreement, which ended roughly three decades of violence between those seeking a united Ireland and unionists who wanted Northern Ireland to remain a part of the United Kingdom.

Part of that deal was that Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom until a majority of its people voted otherwise in a referendum.

In keeping with his freewheeling approach to the global stage, Mr. Trump has mused about the unification of Ireland before. Earlier this year, he suggested there should be a “merger” between Northern Ireland and Ireland because of how well Mr. Martin got along with Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly. She later said the comment was made in jest and should not be taken seriously.

Mr. Trump’s comment on Saturday came just days after Andy Burnham, the recently elected British prime minister, said there was not enough public support for a referendum on Northern Ireland leaving the United Kingdom and until there was “there will not be one.” Mr. Trump himself acknowledged on Saturday that the government in London would most likely “have something to say about” about his comments on reunification.

Patrick Dwyer-Cummins, a spokesman for 10 Downing Street, said that Mr. Burnham’s position remained unchanged and he was committed to upholding the Good Friday Agreement.

But Mr. Trump’s comment did indeed prompt some immediate criticism.

Gavin Robinson, the leader of Northern Ireland’s main pro-union party, said on social media that “President Trump knows better than most that elections matter.”

“Northern Ireland’s constitutional future will be decided by the people of Northern Ireland, not by commentary in London, Dublin or Washington,” he said. “Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom because that is the settled democratic will of its people.”

The reference to reunification was not the only unconventional aspect of Mr. Trump’s remarks.

American presidents, when speaking overseas, typically have refrained from lacing into their domestic rivals. But Mr. Trump used his speech in Dublin to repeatedly attack Democrats, including describing former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has cancer, as physically infirm. Mr. Biden, who has Irish ancestry, traveled to Northern Ireland in 2023 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.

New York Times, In an Irish Village, Trump’s Visit for a Golf Tournament Prompts Protests and Praise, Megan Specia, Sept. 12, 2026. As the U.S. president heads to his Doonbeg hotel for the Irish Open, locals expressed both appreciation for the resort’s economic benefits and opposition to his politics.

Festive bunting was strung between shops along the tiny main street in Doonbeg, a village on the west coast of Ireland. Temporary signs pointed the way down freshly paved roads toward the nearby Trump International golf resort, where the Irish Open is underway this week. The smell of paint hung in the air.

“If you stood still in the village long enough over the last two months, you would have been painted yourself,” Rita McInerney, a local councilor and lifelong resident, said with a laugh, speaking proudly about Doonbeg’s spruce-up ahead of the tournament. “It’s given us a great opportunity, I suppose, to get a lot done.”

President Trump is set to attend the tournament on Saturday and Sunday, a moment that will briefly cast the village of around 200 people into the international spotlight.

In Ireland, where polls consistently show a majority of people disagree with the president’s politics, Mr. Trump’s expected arrival had drawn opposition in the form of planned protests, newspaper columns denouncing his visit and even a sand mural. Yet in Doonbeg, a rural place where jobs can be scarce, there was also acknowledgment that the Trump-owned hotel plays an important role in the local economy.ImageA complex of light-colored buildings with gray roofs and chimneys. A manicured lawn and wild, dry grass are in the foreground.Trump International Golf Links & Hotel in Doonbeg in 2023. The Irish Open is being held at the resort for the first time since the tournament began in 1927. Credit...Damien Storan/Reuters

The Trump Organization, Mr. Trump’s family business, has undoubtedly invested in the community, said Ms. McInerney, whose family has lived in the village for seven generations. And she noted that the diplomatic ties between Ireland and the United States were important to the entire country.

“There’s much of Donald Trump’s presidency and politics that I wouldn’t agree with,” she said. “But we also have to be mindful of the relationship between Ireland and the U.S.”

Others expressed their strong opposition to his visit, like Mary O’Donoghue, a community worker in the area, who said she had long refused to set foot in the hotel because of its connection to Mr. Trump.

“I think he has caused damage globally, but that is also felt locally,” said Ms. O’Donoghue, 58, pointing to fuel prices, which soared after the start of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran and remain elevated, pushing up the cost of living around the world.

She said she recognized that many people working in the hotel felt deep pride about the Irish Open being hosted there for the first time, but said that many also felt torn, adding, “He’s robbed our enjoyment of it.”ImageA portable orange electronic sign announcing a road closure, with a street and buildings in the background.Preparations in Doonbeg, Ireland, on Thursday, ahead of President Trump’s visit during the Irish Open golf tournament, which runs Friday through Sunday.Credit...Claudia Savage/Press Association, via Associated Press

After departing Washington on Friday night, Mr. Trump arrived on Saturday morning in Dublin, where he will meet with Micheál Martin, the taoiseach, or prime minister, of Ireland, and President Catherine Connolly, the ceremonial head of state, before traveling to Doonbeg. The visit comes as Mr. Trump’s relationship with Europe has grown deeply strained, with the president repeatedly laying into traditional allies for not joining his war on Iran and berating them over their policy choices on immigration and fossil fuels.

Mr. Martin has navigated this difficult diplomacy before, on two official visits to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day. On his latest visit in March, he won plaudits in Ireland for gently pushing back as the president rebuked European allies.

But Mr. Trump remains an unpopular figure in Ireland, a country with deep diplomatic, cultural and economic ties to the United States. A February poll from the Irish Times, conducted before the U.S. and Israel launched the war in Iran, suggested that 61 percent of those polled did not want President Trump to attend the Irish Open.

Thousands of protesters gathered in Dublin during his last official visit to Ireland in 2019. (President Trump also visited Doonbeg then, after meeting with government leaders.) Protests are again expected in Dublin on Saturday afternoon, with groups rallying under the message “No Welcome for Trump,” as well as at Shannon Airport and in Doonbeg.

On Tuesday, the discontent was already visible when a campaign group created a large sand mural on a Dublin beach with the message, “No Kings.” That was a deliberate echo of the mass protest movement in the United States, where demonstrations have denounced the president’s actions under a self-stated goal of fighting dictatorship.

Siobhán O’Donoghue, the executive director of Uplift, the campaign group behind the display, said that when the eyes of the world were on Ireland, the group felt it was important to counter Mr. Trump’s claims of broad support. During his meeting with Mr. Martin in March, he had declared, “I think the Irish love Trump.”

“We just can’t capitulate to that narrative that people in Ireland somehow or another are backing Trump,” she said, adding that there would of course be some outliers who agree with his politics. “All it takes is for good people to stay silent for an incorrect view to be drawn.”

In Doonbeg, security was already high around the resort early this week, with roads blocked off and the entrance closed to the public days before the tournament began. The Irish Open, a stop on professional golf’s European tour, includes stars like Rory McIlroy and has brought tens of thousands of spectators to the area. A major police operation will be underway through the weekend.ImageOn a bright green golf course, a person is putting, with three other people observing. Many spectators are on a large, grassy slope behind them.

New York Times, A Visa Dispute Is Threatening a U.S.-Brazil Effort to Fight Crime, Ana Ionova and Edward Wong, Sept. 12, 2026. Officials say the Trump administration is blocking some of Brazil’s efforts to expand cooperation on fighting transnational crime.

A diplomatic rift is hindering cooperation between the United States and Brazil on jointly fighting organized crime, according to U.S. and Brazilian officials, an issue the Trump administration has placed at the center of its agenda in the Western Hemisphere.

The State Department is withholding visas for two Brazilian federal police agents assigned to posts in the United States, where they would be working with U.S. Homeland Security Investigations and other federal agencies to combat transnational crimes, according to one American and three senior Brazilian officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

In response, Brazil is now also blocking the visa of a U.S. law enforcement official meant to be stationed in the country, according to the American and Brazilian officials.

The U.S. government, citing a busy agenda, also declined a request for a visit by Brazilian customs and revenue agents investigating money laundering and arms smuggling by international drug gangs, according to two other Brazilian officials.

Brazil and the United States have a long history of jointly investigating international crimes, like fraud and trafficking, and sending law enforcement officials to each other’s countries. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has had an attaché in Brazil for over two decades.

In the past, joint action by Brazil and the United States has helped the authorities dismantle international corruption schemes, piracy networks and human trafficking rings.

That type of close cooperation, experts say, is becoming crucial for fighting Latin America’s drug gangs, which have more resources and greater geographic reach than ever before.

“Today, criminal factions know no borders,” said Edvandir Felix de Paiva, the president of Brazil’s association of federal police commissioners. “So we need to be working together.”

The recent disruptions in cooperation, which have not been previously reported, come against a backdrop of strained relations over the past year, stemming from President Trump’s attempts to meddle in Brazil’s internal affairs. This rift has only deepened in recent months with the administration’s apparent readiness to help Flávio Bolsonaro, the right-wing candidate challenging President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist, in Brazil’s elections in October. 

More On U.S. Media, Education, Economy

Associated Press, For the US news industry, a tough summer draws to a close with McClatchy chain’s cuts, Jocelyn Noveck, Sept. 10, 2026. Closing out a turbulent summer for the news industry, the McClatchy newspaper chain has made deep cuts at The Miami Herald and other papers it owns across the nation.

The union that represents McClatchy journalists said Friday that more than 90 unionized journalists and media workers across 17 publications had been laid off, accounting for about 30 percent of all McClatchy workers unionized with The NewsGuild-CWA. The layoffs have impacted news outlets including The Sacramento Bee, The Kansas City Star, The Charlotte Observer, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and others.

“We are waist-deep in the quicksand and we are still sinking,” Carol Marbin Miller, deputy investigations editor of The Miami Herald, said in a phone interview.

Marbin Miller, who was not impacted by the layoffs, told The Associated Press she was speaking out to stress how dire the situation was at her paper, where a total of 32 jobs were cut. Those included 28 lost jobs and four positions that were frozen, according to a person familiar with the situation, speaking on condition of anonymity. They included the entire writing staff of El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language publication.

“Miami is the biggest city in Florida,” Marbin Miller said. “Florida is a crucial state. I can’t imagine any scenario in which Miami no longer has a vibrant, powerful news outlet. It’s just too important.”

A McClatchy spokesperson did not respond to an email requesting comment or information.

The U.S. newspaper industry has been contracting for two decades, pushed first by the rise of the internet and the decline of classified advertising, then by the fragmentation introduced by social media and evolving user consumption habits. More recently, many newspaper operations have reduced or cut print editions. Media advocacy groups warn that fewer eyes of accountability are on U.S. communities and their governments and institutions.Related StoriesBritish police try to track down theft of 70,000 pints worth of Guinness stoutBritish police try to track down theft of 70,000 pints worth of Guinness stout3 MIN READ11Miami to decide fate of stunning stadium where speedboats raced and Jimmy Buffett playedMiami to decide fate of stunning stadium where speedboats raced and Jimmy Buffett played4 MIN READInter Miami hosts Nashville in non-conference actionInter Miami hosts Nashville in non-conference action4 MIN READInternal memo says a ‘different choice’ was required

All those laid off from McClatchy were informed on Thursday. Later, an internal memo from Greg Farmer, executive vice president of local news, seen by the AP, told staff: “For the past five years, McClatchy made a deliberate choice to maintain our investment in local news reporters. We believed continued investment in our journalism would strengthen our relationship with subscribers and our business.”

“We measured the results,” Farmer added. “The results are clear and require us to make a different choice ... We are making these changes because the status quo no longer works. We cannot continue investing where subscriber interest does not support the investment.”

The union said four McClatchy papers in Washington state had lost seven reporters in total. “Tacoma will no longer have even a single dedicated journalist tracking city hall, Pierce County government or local schools,” it said. Other cuts included the only two investigative reporters at The Charlotte Observer, and a team of government accountability reporters at The Kansas City Star.

More On Epstein Files, Trump Team Coverup

Last Page First, Investigative Commentary: Who Bought Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch? Inside the Huffines Family, Jana, right, Sept. 12, 2026. The Huffines family had the money to buy almost any kind of property they wanted. They bought Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico.

By 2023, Zorro Ranch was not just another property sitting on the market. Epstein had owned it for decades. Survivors had described being taken there. It had a private airstrip, a huge main house, guest buildings, staff housing, stables and years of history tied directly to him. There were still unanswered questions about what happened there, who used the property and what had never been fully investigated.

Epstein’s estate originally listed the ranch for $27.5 million, then dropped the asking price to $18 million. On August 15, 2023, Cypress Inc. signed the deed transferring the ranch to San Rafael Ranch LLC. The deed was recorded in Santa Fe County the following day. The Huffines name did not appear in the transfer. It surfaced later, through the property-tax fight.Donald Huffines and Mary Catherine Huffines with family. - CultureMap DallasDonald and Mary Catherine Huffines with their family. Photo: CultureMap Dallas.The Name Buried in the Tax File

Mary Catherine Huffines’ name appears in a separate San Rafael Ranch LLC property-tax protest package, where she is identified as trustee/property owner representative. The paperwork also ties San Rafael Ranch LLC to the Huffines family’s Dallas business network. Another New Mexico company connected to the property, San Rafael One LLC, was linked through public business filings to their son Colin Huffines.

Using an LLC to own property is normal. What was not obvious from the sale itself was who stood behind this one. The tax fight made that easier to trace. Santa Fe County valued the ranch at $28,128,566 for the 2024 protest. San Rafael Ranch LLC asked for $8 million. On the protest form, the reason was simply “value too high.”San Rafael Ranch’s 2024 tax protest, with the county’s $28.1 million valuation and the owner’s $8 million figure. Source: Santa Fe County Assessor’s Office, 2024 Protest Petition.

San Rafael later amended its figure to $12,284,381. The county board adopted that value for the ranch.Santa Fe County’s 2024 valuation decision for San Rafael Ranch. Source: Santa Fe County Valuation Protests Board, Oct. 28, 2024.

The tax fight is what made the ownership easier to trace.Why Did They Want It?

The Huffines family has said they had no prior connection to Epstein and had never visited the ranch before it came up for sale. I went looking for evidence that they knew him before 2023 and I have not found it. Don Huffines does not appear in the flight logs, the address book or the Epstein correspondence I reviewed. I have not found Mary Catherine in the public EFTA material, and I have not found a documented business relationship connecting Epstein to HEST, Huffines Communities or the family before the purchase. I may find something later. Right now, I do not have it. So if they had no history with Epstein, why this ranch?

Don’s son Devin Huffines later gave Newsmax cameras access to the property and talked about why the family bought it. He said the women in the family were initially against the purchase because of the ranch’s history, and that they were reassured after being told the sale proceeds would go to Epstein’s victims. He also said the family had been told the investigations into the ranch were over before they bought it. That is the part I keep coming back to. Who told them that? The estate? The broker? An attorney? Law enforcement? Was it in writing? What exactly were they told about evidence, previous searches, unresolved investigative interest or whether authorities might want access again?Devin Huffines speaking to Newsmax from inside the former Zorro Ranch, July 2026. Screenshot: Newsmax.

Devin also talked about what the family wants to do with the ranch. They renamed it San Rafael Ranch after the Archangel Raphael and brought in a traditional Catholic priest from Ohio for a three-day exorcism. He talked about prayer and fasting cabins, horseback riding, hunting, fishing and a shooting range. But that still leaves the bigger question of what this place is actually becoming. There is little public detail on who will run it, whether it stays private, whether a religious or nonprofit group will be built around it, whether outside groups will use it, whether guests will pay to stay there or how much of the ranch they plan to rebuild.They Started Changing the Property

The ranch started changing after the sale. A new entrance went up. Religious imagery appeared. Landscaping and construction followed, and officials eventually stopped the work because the required permits were not in place. On another property, that might be a minor local issue. Here, New Mexico still had unanswered questions about what had happened at Zorro Ranch, and the property had never received the kind of thorough search many people had been asking for. A former FBI agent serving on the state’s Epstein commission publicly warned that construction could interfere with possible evidence. By the time New Mexico finally searched the ranch in March 2026, the property had already been under construction.New entrance under construction at San Rafael Ranch, formerly Zorro Ranch, after the property changed hands.

The Huffines family later cooperated with investigators and let New Mexico authorities onto the property. By then, the ranch had already been renamed and physically changed. Don Huffines is not new to development. He co-founded Huffines Communities with his twin brother Phillip in 1985, and his own biography describes it as one of the largest residential development firms in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Given that background, the permit problem is harder to chalk up to inexperience.The Family Around the Ranch

This is not just about Don. Mary Catherine is the name that helped bring the family’s ownership into view, and Texas Ethics Commission filings show she loaned Don’s campaign $150,000 in 2025. Their son Colin has turned up in records tied to San Rafael entities. Devin is the one speaking publicly about the ranch, why the family bought it and what they want to turn it into. Russell shows up somewhere else entirely. Campaign records listed him as vice president of HEST Investments, and by July 2026 the White House listed Russell P. Huffines as Deputy Director of Cabinet Affairs.

The family’s reach goes well beyond the ranch. Don is now Texas Comptroller. Russell works in the White House. Don and his twin brother Phillip also traveled to Moscow with Sen. Rand Paul in 2018 and met with Russian officials, including members of the Federation Council.Rand Paul Endorses Don Huffines for Governor — The Amarillo PioneerDon Huffines with Sen. Rand Paul.

Follow the family out from Zorro Ranch and the story gets bigger fast. Their money and connections run through Texas politics, national politics and the White House.HEST

HEST Investments is the family office Don Huffines runs. Its investments include biotechnology, life sciences, technology and cybersecurity. In 2024, HEST announced a $1 million investment in American Binary, a company working on post quantum encryption. It also led a $1.8 million investment vehicle for Secretome Therapeutics, a regenerative medicine company running an FDA regulated clinical program.HEST Investments Announces Strategic Investment in American Binary to Drive Quantum Computing SecurityHEST Investments, the Huffines family office focused on biotechnology, life sciences, technology and cybersecurity. Image: HEST Investments.

HEST’s money is moving through some very specific sectors. Regenerative medicine. Biotechnology. Cybersecurity. Advanced encryption. That same family now owns Zorro Ranch. I have not found documentation tying any of those investments to the property.

ShareSo Why This Ranch?

The strongest documented connection between the Huffines family and Jeffrey Epstein is still the simplest one. They bought his ranch.

I have not found a pre-2023 relationship between the family and Epstein. I have not found Don in the flight logs or address book, Mary Catherine in the public EFTA material, HEST doing business with him or a Huffines company tied to Zorro Development Corp. What I have found is a wealthy, politically connected family with decades in real estate and private investment that chose to buy one of the most notorious properties tied to Epstein.

Devin Huffines has said the purchase caused disagreement inside the family before it happened. They knew what the ranch was and knew its history.

By the time investigators returned in March 2026, the property had already changed. Construction had begun, the ranch had been renamed, and Devin Huffines says the family had been told before the purchase that the investigations were over. A priest had been brought in for a three-day exorcism, and the family was publicly describing plans for a Christian retreat.Investigators search former Epstein ranchAerial view of the former Zorro Ranch in March 2026, showing a large excavated area beside the main residence where the former helipad/labyrinth had been located.

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez has also reported that a source close to the family said the ranch was used for a private Huffines family event in 2024 and that attendees were required to sign NDAs. She has also reported that the Christian retreat explanation came later. I have not independently obtained the NDAs, a guest list or an event contract, so there is still more of that timeline I want to pin down, including whether private events were held there after the sale, whether confidentiality agreements were used and when the retreat plan first appeared in writing.

I want the sale file and the due diligence material. I want to see whatever told the family the investigations were finished, along with the earliest retreat plans, permits, contractors, financing and ownership structure behind the redevelopment. I also want to know exactly what was still on the property when they took possession and what changed before investigators returned.

Maybe the Christian retreat was already the plan. I want to see when that plan first existed on paper.

This is a family with decades of experience in real estate and private investment. They bought Jeffrey Epstein’s ranch knowing exactly whose property it had been. Devin has said its history caused disagreement inside the family before the sale.

They bought it anyway.

 Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions

White House aides Steven Cheung, left, and Stephen Miller.

Lance's Substack, Opinion: Who Is Maintaining The Ruse That Trump Is Mentally Competent For Office? Lance F Rosen, right, Sept. 12, 2026. How Do We Pull The Curtain On All Of It?

Everything runs through Stephen Miller. The press secretary and White House Comms team led by Stephen Cheung are running the propaganda side under Miller’s direction.

Now they have a new blonde Nazi Barbie to run the press shop, and she is experienced at reading scripts from her ESPN experience.

Lance’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribed

The FCC chair Brendan Carr is the “muscle,” strong-arming the networks to censor critics and lie about him, covering for him, with the Israeli operatives at CBS like Bari Weiss and the Ellisons, Paramount, Disney, and the social media billionaires flanking them. It’s a far-flung conspiracy.

Their dilemma is that Trump craves attention and adulation. He insists on traveling, speaking publicly, using his Truth Social platform to post hate speech and conduct stochastic terrorism targeting his enemies. They would rather reduce his public exposure to maintain the ruse, but he listens to almost no one.

I believe that they are trying to manage him through Natalie, who it appears he is stuck on. She is more than his “human printer” in my view, and I believe they might actually be at the point they have to go through her to get him to do things, or to stop doing them. That is why in spite of everyone, including Melania wanting her gone, she is still there. When he gets too unruly, it’s “hey Natalie, why don’t you two take a trip somewhere” to get him out of their hair.

They can’t hide it for much longer. They try to manage his rage states with diversions. Natalie is one. Sending him out of the White House to give hate speeches in front of his audiences of fascist Cabbage Patch dolls who are either high on Jesus, or meth, or both, is how they get him out of their way. That along with his “Albert Speer Fourth Reich” building plans, putting his name on everything everywhere, and slopping gold paint on the furniture in the Oval Office to make it look like Mar-a-Lago. And of course there is always Golf for the guy who loves to win by cheating . They orchestrate his appearances to create the illusion he is functional, but that game is falling apart as rapidly as his mind.

Sometimes I wonder if they want him to travel to wear him down to give him a cardiac event in order to wash their hands of him.

We are talking Shakespearian-level court politics and the unfolding of complicated plot lines here. Damage control is the full-time function of Trump’s political team. His policy group is bent on destroying the constitutional system, looting the US population and asset stripping the economy, while relying on Trump’s cult grip on the GOP to minimize the blowback and political damage to them which is the result.

His team was assembled with the expectation he couldn’t finish this term because he’s been visibly deteriorating for years. They are basically all waiting until he can’t maintain the ruse, hoping he’ll at least hang on til next year. Vance is on board with that whole game plan.

Their problem with Vance is that he has the charisma and appeal of a used air-sickness bag. If he made a move for the 25th while Trump is still ambulatory and capable of speech, MAGA would spit him out. Yet he is the one who would have to lead the way in the Cabinet in forcing him out, which he’ll never agree to because Trump won’t leave voluntarily.

There is no weak link or potential break in their ranks. The only wild card is his heart health. We should do everything we can with the elections, scandals, MAGA defections, and globally to counteract him in order to worsen his condition. Then we deal with the couch potato when they bring him in.

For for now, the only thing which is likely to betray Trump is his ticker.”

U.S. Foreign Policy

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (R) welcomes US special envoy Steve Witkoff (2nd L) and Jared Kushner (L) prior to their talks in Moscow on September 5, 2026. (Gavriil GRIGOROV / POOL / AFP via Getty Images)

Meidas Touch Network, Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Speaks Out After Trump’s Latest Putin Talks, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 12, 2026.  Michael McFaul tells Ben Meiselas why Trump’s approach to Putin is projecting weakness and damaging America’s standing around the world.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul joined MeidasTouch co-founder Ben Meiselas for a conversation about Donald Trump’s disastrous foreign policy, Vladimir Putin, the war in Ukraine, and what McFaul describes as a dramatic erosion of American influence around the world.Subscribed

McFaul, who served as ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, told Meiselas that the United States is now “worse off” across virtually every major measure of foreign policy.

“Most certainly when it comes to America’s standing in the world, America’s reputation in the world, the polls on that are overwhelming,” McFaul said. “We have just crashed at the time that China is rising.”

Listen to interviews like this and more on the MeidasTouch Podcast. Click here now!

The conversation turned to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner’s recent trip to Moscow and Kyiv, which came amid Trump’s attempts to negotiate an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

McFaul said he supports efforts by the United States to end the war but argued that Trump has failed to develop an effective strategy.

“He just keeps appeasing Putin,” McFaul said. “He just keeps giving Putin gifts expecting nothing in return.”

McFaul was particularly critical of Witkoff’s approach to the Russian leader. Having dealt directly with Putin during his time in government, McFaul said attempts to win him over through personal praise can have precisely the opposite effect.

“Flattery for him is a sign of weakness,” McFaul said.

McFaul also criticized the way Witkoff has spoken about Putin, including describing the Russian leader as trustworthy during his visit to Kyiv.

“Somehow Witkoff believes if he checks his values at the door and flatters Putin, he’s going to achieve results,” McFaul said. “It just doesn’t work that way.”

The former ambassador then zoomed out to what he sees as a larger problem with Trump’s foreign policy: the personalization of decisions that historically would have been made through a broader national security process.

“I’ve never seen anything like this or studied anything like this,” McFaul said. “It’s just about what Trump thinks and what Trump believes.”

McFaul spoke about how the consequences extend well beyond Russia and Ukraine. He pointed to tensions with Canada and other longtime allies while warning that China stands to benefit from uncertainty about whether the United States can still be considered a reliable partner.

“What I see with our allies is doubt whether we are reliable,” McFaul said, describing countries in Europe and Asia as increasingly considering alternatives in case they can no longer depend on Washington.

And when Meiselas asked whether Trump’s erratic approach was making the United States appear weak internationally, McFaul’s answer was direct.

“Yes. Tragically, yes.”

 

Meidas Touch Network, Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Speaks Out After Trump’s Latest Putin Talks, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 12, 2026.  Michael McFaul tells Ben Meiselas why Trump’s approach to Putin is projecting weakness and damaging America’s standing around the world.

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul joined MeidasTouch co-founder Ben Meiselas for a conversation about Donald Trump’s disastrous foreign policy, Vladimir Putin, the war in Ukraine, and what McFaul describes as a dramatic erosion of American influence around the world.Subscribed

McFaul, who served as ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration, told Meiselas that the United States is now “worse off” across virtually every major measure of foreign policy.

“Most certainly when it comes to America’s standing in the world, America’s reputation in the world, the polls on that are overwhelming,” McFaul said. “We have just crashed at the time that China is rising.”

Listen to interviews like this and more on the MeidasTouch Podcast. Click here now!

The conversation turned to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner’s recent trip to Moscow and Kyiv, which came amid Trump’s attempts to negotiate an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

McFaul said he supports efforts by the United States to end the war but argued that Trump has failed to develop an effective strategy.

“He just keeps appeasing Putin,” McFaul said. “He just keeps giving Putin gifts expecting nothing in return.”

McFaul was particularly critical of Witkoff’s approach to the Russian leader. Having dealt directly with Putin during his time in government, McFaul said attempts to win him over through personal praise can have precisely the opposite effect.

“Flattery for him is a sign of weakness,” McFaul said.

McFaul also criticized the way Witkoff has spoken about Putin, including describing the Russian leader as trustworthy during his visit to Kyiv.

“Somehow Witkoff believes if he checks his values at the door and flatters Putin, he’s going to achieve results,” McFaul said. “It just doesn’t work that way.”

The former ambassador then zoomed out to what he sees as a larger problem with Trump’s foreign policy: the personalization of decisions that historically would have been made through a broader national security process.

“I’ve never seen anything like this or studied anything like this,” McFaul said. “It’s just about what Trump thinks and what Trump believes.”

McFaul spoke about how the consequences extend well beyond Russia and Ukraine. He pointed to tensions with Canada and other longtime allies while warning that China stands to benefit from uncertainty about whether the United States can still be considered a reliable partner.

“What I see with our allies is doubt whether we are reliable,” McFaul said, describing countries in Europe and Asia as increasingly considering alternatives in case they can no longer depend on Washington.

And when Meiselas asked whether Trump’s erratic approach was making the United States appear weak internationally, McFaul’s answer was direct.

“Yes. Tragically, yes.”

Sept. 11

Top Headlines

• New York Times, 25 Years After 9/11, Trump Personifies a Nation Moving On, Peter Baker, Sept. 11, 2026 (print ed.). The president has de-emphasized and shifted the war on terrorism at a time when fear of foreign attack has receded into the background of American life.
• New York Times, Live Updates: Elevated Inflation Keeps Pressure on Fed to Raise Interest Rates, Colby Smith, Sept. 11, 2026. U.S. inflation stayed stubbornly high in August, bolstering the case for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates at its meeting next week. The Consumer Price Index report, released on Friday, showed overall inflation remained elevated at an annual pace of 3.4 percent, after a 0.4 percent rise from July. 

News Roundups 

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Furious After Convention Fails, Official Resigns Calling Out DOJ's Ethical Failures, Remembering 9/11, New War Erupts, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 11, 2026. Twenty five years after September 11th, America paused to remember nearly 3,000 lives lost, even as new chaos consumed the present. Trump’s own midterm convention closed with empty seats, a loyalty pledge asking supporters to “cheat like hell,” and an attendee shouting for Democratic candidates to be shot, then Trump himself snapped at a reporter on the tarmac, telling her “you’re the worst.” Meanwhile the Trump loyalist tapped to lead a DOJ investigation into his political enemies quit and admitted the quiet part out loud, saying “if you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.” And overseas, Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized control of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, threatening a critical global shipping route and helping push diesel to a record $6 a gallon here at home.

More On U.S. Trump Prosecutions, Justice System

 

From left, John Solomon, Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing, diGenova's wife, law partner and close colleague on investigations.

• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Time Runs Out on the Grandest Conspirator, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 11, 2026. As ABC first reported, Joe DiGenova quit his job yesterday as the chief enforcer of Trump’s grievances. 

More On Trump's GOP Midterm Convention In Texas 

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Whatever You Say, Sir, William Kristol, right, Sept. 11, 2026. Last night, at the Republican convention in Dallas, Donald Trump asked his followers to make believe. “Pretend I’m on the ticket. I’m not on the ticket. You’ve got to pretend I’m on the ticket. You’ve got to pretend.” Trump thinks this pretense would lead his loyalists to turn out in droves to save the Republicans in November. Except that, as a Quinnipiac poll released a few hours before Trump’s speech reminds us, pretending Trump is on the ballot won’t help Republicans. The public is sick of Trump.
• Hope for America, Opinion: We can't let Donald Trump completely destroy our country, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 11, 2026. While struggling with slurred speech for the second night in a row, Donald Trump barely started his speech before telling the crowd that he is “getting a little tired of politics now.” But that was nothing compared to what was to come. As a final act of the night, the President of the United States of America told his supporters, in front of cameras and the entire world, that they needed to cheat in the midterms, that they would go to hell if they didn’t vote, before ending the convention by demanding they pledge their allegiance to him and not their country.

More On 9/11 Reflections, Reactions

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Out of Gas. Out of Ideas. Out of Time, Andrew Egger, Bill Kristol and Jim Swift, Sept. 11, 2026. Today marks twenty-five years since the September 11th attacks. In many ways, it feels like another age—and the pre-9/11 era even more so. But the pain lingers, especially for those who lost someone that day. They’re in our thoughts today. Happy Friday.
• Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting and Opinion: A few thoughts about 9/11 on its 25th anniversary, Wayne Madsen, Sept. 11, 2026. Jeffrey Epstein and 9/11: Unanswered questions and the DoJ’s massive cover-up.
• The Hartmann Report, Commentary, 9/11: America Can’t Let the War Lies Go Down the Memory Hole Again, Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 11, 2026. America has been lied into too many wars. It’s cost us too much in money, credibility, and blood. We must remember the lies, and tell our children about them so that memory isn’t lost...

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, Houthis Seize a Key Red Sea Island, Threatening Yet Another Global Oil Route, Adam Rasgon, Shuaib Almosawa and Saeed Al-Batati, Sept. 11, 2026. The Iran-backed militia’s ground offensive has reached the Bab al-Mandab, a Red Sea strait that is a choke point for global trade.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Stick a Fork in ’Em., Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 11, 2026. Ever since Democrats’ major overperformance in last year’s off-year elections, I’ve been saying over and over: time is a finite resource for Donald Trump and his party. If they wanted to stave off disaster in the midterms, they would need to get moving fast to woo back disaffected members of their 2024 coalition. Every day spent failing to achieve that goal was a day wasted.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, On This Somber Day Some Notes On Finding A New Path Forward Through All The Chaos, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 11, 2026. I want to imagine that if we can have the election we all want to have this November that perhaps we will come to view it as the beginning of the closing of the twenty five year post-9/11 chapter in American history and the start of something new. Even if we win both chambers this November we will not be rid of MAGA next year but the scale of Trump’s failure at home and abroad will require a new era of politics to emerge in America.

More On U.S. Culture, Media, Education, Sports, Religion

• New York Times, After 9/11, Islamophobia Shaped a Generation of Muslim New Yorkers, Liam Stack and Maya King, Sept. 11, 2026. The attacks unleashed a wave of hate, but the years since have seen Muslim Americans’ political and cultural influence grow.

Top Stories

 

New York Times, 25 Years After 9/11, Trump Personifies a Nation Moving On, Peter Baker, Sept. 11, 2026 (print ed.). The president has de-emphasized and shifted the war on terrorism at a time when fear of foreign attack has receded into the background of American life.

Of all of America’s five living presidents, none was closer to ground zero on the day that hijacked planes smashed into the World Trade Center than Donald J. Trump. But on the 25th anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, none will be farther away.

Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. are all scheduled to be in New York on Friday to mark the moment. But Mr. Trump, the only native New Yorker among them, will be some 200 miles south at the Pentagon, where, unlike at ground zero with its tradition of silence, he will be allowed to give a speech.

The disparate images will be stark and telling: four presidents of both parties standing together where the twin towers fell, four presidents whose time in office was shaped to one extent or another by the war on terrorism that gripped the nation for so long. And then the sitting president honoring the occasion at another attack site, estranged from his predecessors and governing at a time when fear of foreign attack has receded into the background of American life.

With the distance of a quarter century, Mr. Trump’s presidency has moved past the days when terrorism drove the agenda. Just as memories of Pearl Harbor lingered long after World War II ended, the memories of Sept. 11 remain powerful long after the death of Osama bin Laden. But the country and its politics have moved on.

The threat matrix delivered to the Oval Office starting after Sept. 11 now looks different than it used to. Domestic terrorism has become the more pressing concern, whether it be the mob assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the assassination of the conservative leader Charlie Kirk last year or various antisemitic attacks on synagogues.Image

New York Times, Live Updates: Elevated Inflation Keeps Pressure on Fed to Raise Interest Rates, Colby Smith,Sept. 11, 2026.  Here’s what to know.

U.S. inflation stayed stubbornly high in August, bolstering the case for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates at its meeting next week.

The Consumer Price Index report, released on Friday, showed overall inflation remained elevated at an annual pace of 3.4 percent, after a 0.4 percent rise from July. “Core” inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy items, rose 0.3 percent in August, or 2.4 percent from a year earlier.

U.S. inflation showed little improvement in August, running at a 3.4 percent annual rate. Investors believe the Federal Reserve is very likely to raise rates at its meeting next week.

News Roundups 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Furious After Convention Fails, Official Resigns Calling Out DOJ's Ethical Failures, Remembering 9/11, New War Erupts, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 11, 2026. Twenty five years after September 11th, America paused to remember nearly 3,000 lives lost, even as new chaos consumed the present. Trump’s own midterm convention closed with empty seats, a loyalty pledge asking supporters to “cheat like hell,” and an attendee shouting for Democratic candidates to be shot, then Trump himself snapped at a reporter on the tarmac, telling her “you’re the worst.”

Meanwhile the Trump loyalist tapped to lead a DOJ investigation into his political enemies quit and admitted the quiet part out loud, saying “if you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.” And overseas, Iran-backed Houthi rebels seized control of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, threatening a critical global shipping route and helping push diesel to a record $6 a gallon here at home.

Over the past several days, multiple conservatives have come up to me recently and told me they’re no longer just watching Fox News, they’re watching our work for news too, and honestly, that’s the whole point: balanced news is for everyone, regardless of party. Here’s the news:

Remembering 9/11:

Political leaders, victims’ families and survivors across the country marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks Friday, with ceremonies held simultaneously at Ground Zero in Manhattan, the Pentagon, and the Flight 93 National Memorial near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. All five living presidents and their spouses, along with Vice President JD Vance, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, attended the New York ceremony, which opened with the national anthem and included the reading of nearly 3,000 victims’ names alongside a musical tribute from Yo-Yo Ma. Trump instead attended the Pentagon ceremony with first lady Melania Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, where the names of the 125 people killed there and the 59 passengers of Flight 77 were read aloud. For the first time, organizers added a seventh moment of silence specifically honoring the thousands of first responders and residents who later died from 9/11-related illnesses.

That health toll remains a live and worsening story a quarter-century later. Roughly 6,000 first responders, survivors and volunteers have now died from illnesses tied to the attacks, and the FDNY recently added 36 more firefighters’ names to its memorial wall for the same reason, with Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore calling them “36 more reminders that the legacy of September 11th doesn’t end on one single day.” The federal Victim Compensation Fund has received more than 112,000 claims and paid out over $18 billion, and Mayor Mamdani recently released documents showing city officials knew the air near Ground Zero contained dangerous toxins even as they told the public it was safe to breathe. Separately, a military judge at Guantánamo Bay has now set jury selection for the trial of four alleged 9/11 plotters, including accused mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for June 2028, prompting Flight 93 victims’ family leader Gordon Felt to say there’s “significant frustration” that “we’ve yet to see justice or accountability” after nearly 25 years of pretrial proceedings.

A new CBS/YouGov poll found 68 percent of Americans believe the attacks changed the country permanently, and Americans are almost evenly split on whether the US is prepared for another terrorist attack today, with 48 percent saying yes and 52 percent saying no. Former President George W. Bush, speaking at his Dallas library this week, warned that the country cycles through “isolationist periods” where people think “we’ve got too many problems at home” and stop paying attention to the lessons of that day, arguing that what happens overseas still matters to national security at home. The attacks reshaped the federal government itself, leading directly to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security along with the TSA, an expanded CBP and ICE, and a new director of national intelligence overseeing broader surveillance operations that critics have called overreach. Nearly 3,000 people died in the 2001 attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing combined, and the 20-year war on terror that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq ended with a chaotic 2021 withdrawal and the Taliban back in power.

Amid the ceremonies, several stories highlighted individual acts of heroism from that day. Welles Crowther, remembered as the “man in the red bandana,” guided people to safety from the World Trade Center’s 78th floor sky lobby on three separate trips before the building collapsed, and Trump gave him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House event earlier this week.

Rick Rescorla, Morgan Stanley’s head of security and a Vietnam veteran, calmly sang “God Bless America” over a bullhorn while personally supervising the evacuation of his company’s employees, a plan he’d rehearsed for years after surviving the 1993 WTC bombing, and he was last seen climbing back up the stairs for a final sweep before the tower fell.

And NYPD Officer Moira Smith, the only female NYPD officer to die that day, was the first to radio in the attack and spent her final minutes guiding panicked survivors down the stairwell before the south tower collapsed, telling dispatchers in her last transmission, “I don’t have much air. Help me, please.”

Trump Erupts After Convention Flop:

The Republican Party’s two-day midterm convention in Dallas closed with balloons and Trump serenaded by Puccini’s “Nessun dorma,” but NPR found the party facing a genuine enthusiasm gap heading into November. Both nights featured thousands of empty seats, including almost all of the upper level, even as Trump insisted the arena was “packed” with thousands more waiting outside. Trump remains the party’s single biggest asset for turning out votes, evidenced by credentials and imagery built around his likeness throughout the arena, but other speakers, including nominees in competitive House and Senate races, got noticeably cooler receptions than figures like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Trump himself acknowledged the stakes bluntly, telling the crowd “I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot” on the first night and warning “you know what happens if you don’t vote? You go to hell” on the second.

At the convention, Trump had supporters recite a loyalty pledge to him directly, including a promise to “cheat like hell” on his behalf, video of the moment shows. He paired it with his now-familiar warning to anyone considering sitting out the election, telling the crowd that nonvoters would “go to hell.” The pledge was one of the stranger moments of the convention. A president confident in his standing with voters doesn’t need them to recite loyalty oaths mid-speech. Taken together with the empty seats and the $5,000 bounty for a Republican win, it reads less like a party rallying around a winning message and more like a leader trying to manufacture certainty he doesn’t actually have.

Trump erupted at ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott on the Dallas tarmac Thursday, cutting her off mid-question about his proposed stimulus and tariff refund checks by snapping “not you, not you, not you, you’re the worst.” Video of the exchange spread quickly online, generating hundreds of thousands of views within hours and reviving scrutiny of Trump’s combative relationship with female reporters. This wasn’t the first clash between the two: back in May, Trump called one of Scott’s questions “stupid” and labeled her a “horror show” and “one of the worst reporters” after she asked about wartime priorities and rising gas prices. Communications lecturer Amy Tatum said this latest incident marked “an escalation,” noting Trump didn’t just verbally dismiss Scott but physically stepped toward her while she kept talking.

This is at least the tenth high-profile confrontation between Trump and a female journalist during his second term, a list that includes CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and Kristen Holmes, ABC’s Mary Bruce, Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey, and CBS’s Nancy Cordes. Tatum argued Trump’s criticism of these women tends to target their demeanor, intelligence or appearance rather than the substance of their questions, pointing to his recent description of Collins as “very dumb and unhappy” as an example. She warned that other reporters present barely reacting to Thursday’s exchange normalizes the hostility and risks encouraging further escalation. That concern lines up with broader research showing roughly one in four female journalists report anxiety or depression tied to online and offline harassment they face for their work.

Separately, an attendee at the same Republican midterm convention could be clearly heard calling for Democratic Senate candidates to be shot. The man shouted “he should be shot!” three times while Sen. Ted Cruz was speaking about New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Democratic Senate nominees Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and James Talarico of Texas. Cruz didn’t react in the moment, and a spokeswoman declined to say whether he’d even heard it, though his own social media account later posted a clip in which the shouts are audible. The outburst came shortly after Cruz had told the crowd that political hate contributed to the assassination attempts on Trump and the killing of Charlie Kirk a year earlier.

Democrats moved quickly to condemn the threats. Abdul El-Sayed said “this is what has become the norm in our politics” and that “democracy is supposed to be the process by which we solve our problems peacefully.” House Minority Whip Katherine Clark called on Cruz and every Republican to denounce the outburst, while Rep. Debbie Dingell wrote on X that “there aren’t even words for how chilling and disturbing this is” and that “threats of political violence are dangerous, unacceptable, and have no place in our democracy.” The Talarico campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, and it remains unclear whether Cruz or convention organizers plan any further response.

The moment wasn’t the only unscripted disruption of the convention. On the first night, Trump briefly engaged with an audience member who complimented first lady Melania Trump, and on the second night, Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road founder Trump pardoned from a life sentence for drug trafficking, hacking and money laundering, responded directly to a heckler who referenced “J6ers,” the Trump supporters prosecuted over the January 6 Capitol attack. Unlike those moments, Cruz gave no visible response to the shooting threat while it happened, leaving it to the viral clip itself to surface what several thousand people in the arena had just heard.

Iran War Erupts:

Iran-backed Houthi rebels completed a rapid takeover of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline Friday, capturing Perim, a small volcanic island in the middle of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a day after seizing the historic port city of Mokha. They followed that with an advance on the coastal town of Dhubab as Saudi-backed government forces appeared to withdraw from the area. The advance marks the Houthis’ biggest territorial gain in years and comes after their civil war with the Saudi-backed government, simmering since a 2014 UN-brokered truce, erupted back into intense fighting in recent weeks. Saudi Arabia responded with dozens of retaliatory airstrikes, including on the Mokha airport, though there were no immediate reports of casualties.

The stakes go well beyond Yemen’s borders. Bab el-Mandeb is a critical gateway linking Europe and Asia, and Saudi Arabia has been forced to lean on that route for oil exports since the Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries about 20 percent of the world’s oil, became too dangerous after the US and Israel went to war with Iran in late February. King’s College London security lecturer Andreas Krieg warned the risk of the conflict deepening had “increased substantially” because the Houthis are now hitting both pillars of Saudi security at once, its southern territory and its Red Sea depth, adding that Riyadh’s “room for restraint is narrowing.” Satellite imagery Friday also showed a 60-mile smoke plume along Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline, an alternative export route to Hormuz, though it’s unclear what happened and neither Saudi officials nor the Houthis have commented. Global oil prices were on pace to close the week above $100 a barrel for the first time since mid-May.

Axios reported that Trump rejected direct pleas from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to strike the Houthis, even as Washington agreed to share intelligence and targeting data with the Saudis, with more than 200 US personnel already in the kingdom providing what officials called “non-kinetic support.” A Houthi politburo member sought to calm shipping fears, telling reporters that “freedom of navigation and international trade in the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab are safe and orderly” and that there’s “no cause for international concern.” Iran’s foreign ministry, in its first public statement since the Houthi advance, called for an end to Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Yemen and a return to negotiations, while offering to help support talks. At an emergency UN Security Council session, Yemen’s UN envoy Hans Grundberg warned that “this renewed war should alarm us all” and said it effectively ends four years of relative calm, while Yemen’s ambassador pushed for an arms embargo on the Houthis and Saudi Arabia’s envoy said the kingdom would “take all measures necessary to deter Houthi attacks.”

The human and economic toll is mounting fast on both fronts. The UN’s International Organization for Migration said at least 46,000 people have been displaced in Yemen since the fighting escalated last week, more than double the roughly 18,500 displaced just days earlier, with officials warning “entire villages are reported to have emptied” and a key supply road cut off. IOM chief Amy Pope said “as fighting spreads, reaching people with lifesaving assistance is becoming harder” and called for “safe, unimpeded access.” Back in the US, diesel prices hit a record national average of $6.05 a gallon Friday, up more than 60 percent from $3.71 a year ago, a surge tied directly to the broader Middle East energy crunch and expected to ripple into higher costs for trucking, rail, construction and farming. Goldman Sachs has separately warned oil could climb as high as $120 a barrel if the Yemen conflict keeps escalating alongside the wider war with Iran.

Top Trump Official Resigns, Admits No Evidence to Prosecute Opponents:

Joe diGenova, the 81-year-old Trump loyalist tapped in April to lead a sprawling Justice Department “grand conspiracy” investigation into officials who scrutinized Trump going back to 2016, abruptly resigned Thursday. He told reporters by phone that he’d submitted his resignation letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche at 3 p.m., saying “it was an honor and a privilege to serve the president and the department” and that he wasn’t going to say anything further beyond wishing them well. DiGenova hadn’t worked as a prosecutor in decades before taking the job, but had long aided Trump’s legal efforts, including his push to overturn the 2020 election, and used frequent media appearances to echo Trump’s grievances about the investigations that have targeted him since his first term. The probe itself, run out of the US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida, has produced no criminal charges despite issuing dozens of subpoenas over the past year.

Behind the resignation was a breakdown in confidence from both the White House and DOJ leadership. Sources said diGenova had lost support amid complaints he was “slow-rolling” indictments and getting lost down “rabbit holes,” and had been sharing “unrealistic expectations” with Trump about what the investigation could realistically produce, leading to a direct confrontation with Blanche. Asked whether he’d lost focus, diGenova pushed back sharply, saying “if you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.” Several prosecutors sent down from DOJ’s main office in Washington had also reportedly been sidelined once they arrived in Florida, adding to the dysfunction around the probe.

The investigation itself has targeted a list of high-profile Obama-era officials over their roles in assessing Russian interference in the 2016 election, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, all of whom have been subpoenaed, with grand jury testimony from various individuals also underway in recent weeks. The probe draws on a July “lessons-learned” CIA review that found the original 2016 Russia assessment was drafted through a “chaotic” and “markedly unconventional” process, after which current CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred Brennan for criminal investigation, and on declassified emails Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released showing Clapper was “stickin’ to” the Trump-Russia interference narrative despite internal concerns. A separate House Intelligence Committee report also found Brennan disregarded warnings from veteran officers weeks before the assessment was finalized. Trump allies have pointed to that material as potential grounds for charging his 2016-era investigators with conspiracy against rights, a crime with no statute of limitations that carries up to 10 years in prison, though the Justice Department and White House didn’t respond to requests for comment on diGenova’s departure.

Other news:

Two more AI researchers, Joe Benton, who used to lead a safety research team at Anthropic, and Josh Engels, who worked on AI safety at Google, left their jobs and are now speaking publicly about fears that AI systems could soon spiral out of human control. Engels didn’t mince words, saying “there are no adults in the room” and “people are trying their best, but there is no one coming to save us,” while Benton warned that advances in AI research could push the pace of progress from “merely blistering” to “uncontrollable.” Both pointed to the July cyberattack on Hugging Face, in which autonomous AI agents powered by an unreleased OpenAI model hacked into systems, built an illicit message board, and exposed OpenAI’s own infrastructure, entirely without being instructed to do so, as a turning point in their thinking. The pair are joining METR, a leading AI safety research nonprofit, to investigate incidents where AI strays from human intentions, and they join a growing chorus that includes an OpenAI employee who wrote that “human extinction in the next few years seems very likely” absent regulation, and a former UK AI Security Institute chief scientist who put the odds of AI wiping out humanity at roughly 50 percent within the next decade.

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed 13 bills into law this week barring children under 16 from behaviorally addictive social media features like infinite scroll and algorithmic autoplay, and banning the manufacture of toys containing AI companion chatbots for the next four years. One measure, dubbed “Adam’s Law” after 16-year-old Adam Raine, who died by suicide after months of validating conversations with ChatGPT, also expands criminal penalties to cover AI-generated child sexual abuse material. Newsom called the package the most far-reaching of its kind in the country, saying “we want our children, and every California kid, to grow up in a world where technology supports their wellbeing, rather than exploits their vulnerabilities.” The move follows a similar pattern to Meta’s recent $18 billion settlement with nearly all US states over claims it designed its platforms to addict teenagers, though critics like the Electronic Frontier Foundation called the new law “a massive privacy and free speech nightmare.” California joins a growing list of states, including Utah, Arkansas, Louisiana, Ohio, Texas, Florida and New York, that have already passed their own youth social media restrictions.

Hurricane Lowell left at least two people dead and knocked out Lanai’s only cargo port, the source of most of the island’s food and fuel for its 3,300 residents, with repairs expected to take about two weeks. Kauai took the worst of the damage, with storm surge tearing apart roads, flooding resort lobbies, and knocking out power to thousands, prompting tourism officials to urge visitors to reschedule trips elsewhere even though tourism drives roughly 4 in 10 jobs on the island. Governor Josh Green asked Trump to issue a major disaster declaration, arguing “we cannot wait for every damaged road, utility pole, harbor and public facility to be assigned a dollar value before asking the federal government to act.” Officials say the overall damage could be the worst Hawaii has seen since Hurricane Iniki caused $3 billion in damage in 1992, even as one Kauai business owner said she wasn’t overly worried about the tourism hit, saying “our island needs time to rest and rebuild.”

Inflation ticked up in August even before the renewed Middle East conflict sent oil prices climbing again, with the Consumer Price Index rising 0.4 percent for the month and core inflation, which strips out food and energy, coming in hotter than economists expected. That surprise all but locks in a Federal Reserve rate hike at next week’s meeting, with market odds jumping from under 70 percent to nearly 90 percent immediately after the report, and economist Heather Long writing plainly that “America still has an inflation problem.” Consumers are getting squeezed from multiple directions at once: gas prices rose 3.9 percent in August alone, diesel hit its historic $6-a-gallon record the same week, the 30-year mortgage rate climbed above 7 percent, and real average hourly earnings actually fell 0.1 percent from July to August. Even outside the energy shock, tech-driven costs are climbing fast, with computer software and accessories up 25.4 percent over the past year, the largest annual jump on record, as Apple, Xbox, Nintendo and other manufacturers raise prices to cope with what Apple called an “extraordinary surge in demand for memory and storage” driven by AI data centers.

Emma Bonino, the Italian political icon who led the campaigns that legalized abortion and divorce in heavily Catholic Italy during the 1970s, died at 78. Her party, +Europa, said “her life was a long struggle against everything that denies freedom: against clandestine abortion, world hunger, the stranglehold of party politics, female genital mutilation, punitive justice, genocide, and every form of authoritarianism,” and even Italy’s conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni credited her significance to the country’s public life despite their political differences. Bonino got her start after undergoing an illegal abortion at 26, which she called one of the most humiliating experiences of her life, and went on to serve as a European commissioner, Italian foreign minister, and cofounder of the death penalty watchdog Hands Off Cain, while also building deep humanitarian ties across Cairo, the Balkans, Rwanda and Sudan. She fought a public battle with lung cancer starting in 2015 and eventually announced she was cancer-free, and she maintained an unlikely close friendship with Pope Francis despite their opposing views on abortion and euthanasia, with Francis visiting her at home in 2024 bearing roses and chocolates. Asked late in life what battles she still had left to fight, Bonino said simply, “many, too many. Human rights, world hunger, free scientific research... Ten lives won’t be enough.”

More On U.S. Trump Prosecutions, Justice System

From left, John Solomon, Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing, diGenova's wife, law partner and close colleague on investigations.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Time Runs Out on the Grandest Conspirator, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 11, 2026. As ABC first reported, Joe DiGenova quit his job yesterday as the chief enforcer of Trump’s grievances. 

Joe diGenova submitted his resignation to Attorney General Todd Blanche amid what sources described as growing frustrations from Trump and senior DOJ officials regarding his work on the so-called “grand conspiracy” investigation based out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida.

NYPost had the most detailed explanation of the departure: People at DOJ claimed he was slow-rolling his task, and had sidelined people Main DOJ sent down to help — though DiGenova has tried to claim his “no evidence” comment was taken (by the NYPost!) out of context.

Sources said diGenova had lost support from Department of Justice leaders and the White House amid his “grand conspiracy” investigation, with one source suggesting that the 81-year-old prosecutor and former Trump defense lawyer was “slow-rolling” indictments and getting lost down “rabbit holes.”

Asked whether he had lost focus, diGenova dismissed the accusation and shot back: “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.”

Another source added that the diGenova had been sharing “unrealistic expectations” for the probe with the president about what was possible and not possible, leading to a confrontation with Attorney General Todd Blanche.

John Solomon, left, who has been laundering false claims for use in this conspiracy theory, insists the investigation is still ongoing, with what he calls “Senior DOJ prosecutors” still working on it.

With a tiny handful of exceptions, there are no senior prosecutors left at DOJ. There are mediocre lawyers who’ve been promoted for the fealty and willingness to commit crimes in the service of Trump’s demands.

The move came a week after Aakash Singh — who played a key role in Todd Blanche’s most egregious abuses and who has made stupid demands about the timing of other investigative steps — was promoted to Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General.

The Justice Department promoted Aakash Singh, below, an aide responsible for the aggressive overhaul of US attorneys’ offices to meet Trump priorities, to a top leadership role, said two people familiar with the move.

Singh, 34, is now principal associate deputy attorney general, overseeing operations at DOJ field offices and the litigating divisions within department headquarters.

Singh, in his prior role as associate DAG, became known for a brash style during signature weekly meetings in which he once directed leaders of all 93 US attorneys offices that President Donald Trump is their “chief client.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche, in one of his first major personnel changes since being sworn in last month, is now handing Singh a more sprawling portfolio. Past PADAGs, including Trump’s initial pick in this administration, Emil Bove (a former Trump defense attorney and now a Trump-appointed federal judge, shown at right), have wielded significant law enforcement power behind the scenes by applying tough tactics — at times making unpopular decisions affecting the career workforce.

Thus far, Singh has always found some lackey to do his dirty work for him, with increasing effects on those lackey’s ethical profile. Curiously, Mike Davis, the powerful blowhard and Singh associate who often orders up investigative steps from Xitter, was silent about DiGenova’s departure.

We’ll soon see whether Singh finds another lackey to destroy their legal career in service of Trump’s grievances. 

More On Trump's GOP Midterm Convention In Texas 

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Whatever You Say, Sir, William Kristol, right, Sept. 11, 2026. Last night, at the Republican convention in Dallas, Donald Trump asked his followers to make believe. “Pretend I’m on the ticket. I’m not on the ticket. You’ve got to pretend I’m on the ticket. You’ve got to pretend.”

Trump thinks this pretense would lead his loyalists to turn out in droves to save the Republicans in November.

Except that, as a Quinnipiac poll released a few hours before Trump’s speech reminds us, pretending Trump is on the ballot won’t help Republicans. The public is sick of Trump.

According to Quinnipiac, 33 percent of voters now approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, while 59 percent disapprove. In April, the same pollster showed Trump with 38 percent approval and 55 percent disapproval. In January, Trump was at 40 percent approval and 54 percent disapproval. So he’s sinking steadily.

Yesterday, Quinnipiac also found that 49 percent of voters want to see the Democratic party win control of the U.S. House of Representatives, while 38 percent would want to see the Republicans keep control.

So voters are doing what Trump urged them to do. They are in a way pretending that he is on the ballot. And they are going to vote against him.

After all, the issue this November is whether Congress over the next two years will be a rubber stamp for Trump or a check on Trump. The midterm election will be a referendum on him.

And American voters aren’t willing to pretend that Trump’s second term is a success. They aren’t willing to pretend his policies are working. They aren’t willing to pretend inflation is under control and likely to come down. They aren’t willing to pretend that the war in Iran is going well. They aren’t willing anymore to turn a blind eye to all the corruption.

Trump is a master at the art of pretending. But the real world eventually sets limits to pretending.

Way back in Trump’s youth, Nat King Cole urged each of us to

Pretend you’re happy when you’re blue,

It isn’t very hard to do.

The great singer’s advice may be good counsel for one’s personal happiness. But the American people aren’t buying it for the nation. They’re not going to pretend to be happy about the state of the country just because Trump tells them to pretend to be. And that’s why there’s going to be a Democratic wave in November.

Hope for America, Opinion: We can't let Donald Trump completely destroy our country, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 11, 2026. At 9:08 PM tonight in Dallas, Texas, an exhausted Donald Trump slowly emerged from behind the stage and clapped four times as Lee Greenwood again serenaded him on the final night of the first-ever Republican Midterm Convention.

On his way to the podium, he stopped to hug J.D. Vance, tapping his forehead to J.D.’s as he made his way to the podium. As Lee sang an extended version of Trump’s favorite hype song, “God Bless the USA,” Trump used the time to stop directly in front of the women in the front row, making sure not to get close enough for them to touch him. As he grabbed the microphone, a woman could be heard screaming “Yeaaw Trump” right before he began his 25-minute final speech.

While struggling with slurred speech for the second night in a row, Donald Trump barely started his speech before telling the crowd that he is “getting a little tired of politics now.” But that was nothing compared to what was to come. As a final act of the night, the President of the United States of America told his supporters, in front of cameras and the entire world, that they needed to cheat in the midterms, that they would go to hell if they didn’t vote, before ending the convention by demanding they pledge their allegiance to him and not their country:

“Raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends. I’ll do it any way, I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. I am gonna go out, and I’m going to get my friends, my family and we are going to vote on November 3 or we are going to vote before that.”

Then he added: “You know what happens if you don’t vote? You go to hell, you know that. And I don’t want that to happen to you, so please go and vote.”

His reasoning for demanding this oath was simple. They owed it to him. “You’ve got to do me the biggest favor you’ve ever done,” he said. “You’ve got to do this for me. Pretend I’m on the ticket. I’m on the ticket.” He wasn’t asking them to defend their country or the Constitution. It wasn’t to safeguard the future of our great republic, either. This was all for him. He ended the pledge with all he had. Once again evoking God. “If you vote, you vote Republican. So help me God.” In a speech just 25 minutes long, he brought up God twice. The first time to make his demand seem like a biblical necessity, and the second time to enforce divine punishment against anyone who fails to vote as he demanded. He showed his desperation in this moment by fusing politics with scripture and obedience with salvation, turning a midterm election into a sacrament of devotion to one man, as if voting for him and his party had somehow become a test of religious faith.

The depths that this man just took our country to tonight cannot be overstated. Our President made American citizens raise their right hands and pledge their loyalty to him, not to the country. To “the greatest president in the history of the United States,” a title he fabricated and wrote for himself. And told us all to cheat at the midterms. To vote even if we are not registered to vote. This was not a joke or him trying to be funny. This was his battle call to his most radicalized base, and it was exactly like the loyalty oaths that have preceded authoritarian consolidations of power throughout modern history. This was also another dark day for those of us who love our country.

His remarks were not the only deeply concerning ones to come out of the final day of this desperation convention. Earlier, during a speech by Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who spent his time calling Democrats “evil” and warning that “communists and Islamists” had taken over the Democratic Party, Ted Cruz said the names of three Democratic politicians: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico. After each name, a person in the audience could be heard shouting, “He should be shot!” The words were loud enough to be heard on the live video feeds.

Ted Cruz never stopped to address someone in the audience calling for the shooting of his fellow politicians. It is impossible for us to know whether he heard what was happening, but if he didn’t, why did nobody in the room tell him? Why did nobody in the arena discourage political violence?

Right before Donald Trump came on to give his closing remarks, Vice President J.D. Vance had his time on stage, where he delivered his keynote and spoke about the American flag and what it now symbolizes, or at least his spin on it. After a protester walked down the arena stairs waving a Mexican flag, J.D. Vance deviated from his planned remarks and instead said, “Well, my friend, if you love Mexico so much, get your ass over there,” and continued with “I’ll buy you the plane ticket.” He called the protester “an idiot waving a Mexican flag at a protest when he should be waving the flag of the United States of America.” He called it “the symbol of the far-left.”

Vance and the whole Trump regime have constantly perverted not just our own flag, but the flags of so many other countries. They have commandeered something so deeply woven into our shared national identity and turned it into political ammunition. They are using our flag as both a weapon and a dividing line between who they believe belongs in this country and who does not. In that moment, Vance was not defending the American flag; he was using it to draw a line between who gets to be considered American and who does not. He took a moment of protest and tried to make it proof that displaying the flag of another country somehow makes someone less American, when America has, and always will be known as the melting pot of people, cultures, traditions, and histories from every corner of the world. That has never made us less American; it is part of what has made us extraordinary. It is who we are and who we have always been. We are the country where people from every corner of the world have come carrying pieces of the places they left behind and woven them into something distinctly American. That was the promise behind this country, where our strength has never come from everyone looking the same, worshipping the same, or tracing their families back to the same place. It came from all of us becoming part of something larger together, with our differences celebrated, not feared or erased.

To see our flag perverted in this way over and over again, commandeered by people willfully trying to destroy all that it stands for, is a different kind of pain. Like so many of us, I have seen and felt what our flag really means. I remember a moment a few years back, as my family and I walked through the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, feeling lost in the concrete blocks that rise and fall in patterns that make no sense. I remember trying to make sense of what made no sense, which many say is the point of that memorial, because you cannot make sense of what happened in the first place. I felt disoriented, and nothing felt stable.

When we came through to the other side, the first thing we saw was the American flag, flying high above the American Embassy building. It was the feeling of relief that I had never been fully able to realize until today. My whole family felt it, and we all walked towards it. I remember feeling such immense pride not just in the flag, but in being American. It wasn’t that we were a perfect nation or that we always got it right. I felt pride because we were always trying and working towards it. We were respected and “the good guys”. It was never about being better than others; it was always about the promise our country held. Standing there, the flag flying high above, we felt grounded again in something real and something safe. The flag was not a weapon or a threat. There was no loyalty test or oath to a man being demanded of us. The flag represented the country that helped end the horror we had just spent hours learning more about. That is what the flag meant to me and my family in Berlin. That is not what it meant tonight in Dallas.

I keep coming back to that feeling tonight, that need to be grounded in something real, because watching those people waving cutout squares of our flag in that arena made me feel such shame and sadness. And as difficult as it is to see, maybe we need to witness these moments to remind ourselves what this country was actually built on. Maybe it has to break terribly like this to remember that it was built for this exact moment. The founders designed it deliberately and painstakingly to prevent exactly what happened tonight.

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

This country was built so that no American would ever have to swear allegiance to a single person. The founders had just fought a war against a king who demanded personal loyalty. They created the entire framework of our government to safeguard us from a madman or a king. The oath of office for the President of the United States does not ask the country to serve the president. It asks the president to serve the country. The words are: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The oath the president takes flows upward from the people, not downward from a throne.

George Washington understood this. At one time, he was one of the most powerful and respected figures, and there were people who wanted to make him king. He said no. Instead, he served our country and chose to honor our republic instead of choosing to wear a crown. He established the most important precedent in American democracy: that power is temporary, that it belongs to the people, and that no man, no matter how popular or powerful, is bigger than the nation he serves. That single act of restraint is the reason this country survived its first century. It is the foundation everything else was built on.

I keep asking myself what George Washington would have thought if he had walked into that arena in Dallas and watched an American president make his own citizens raise their right hands and swear an oath to him. I have no doubt that he would have recognized it immediately for what it was and been horrified by what this country has become. Maybe not surprised, but disappointed nonetheless.

Even Ronald Reagan understood this. At the 1988 Republican National Convention, he said: “When people tell me that I became President on January 20th, 1981, I feel I have to correct them. You don’t become President of the United States. You are given temporary custody of an institution called the Presidency, which belongs to our people.” Ronald Reagan saw himself as a custodian holding something sacred in trust for the American people. Trump sees himself as a king who deserves worship.

In his 1967 inaugural address for his first term as Governor of California, Reagan warned: “Freedom is a fragile thing, and it is never more than one generation away from extinction.” And in his presidential farewell address from the Oval Office, he reminded Americans: “Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: ‘We the People.’ ‘We the People’ tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us.”

Tonight, September 10, 2026, in Dallas, Texas, the sitting president of the United States of America told the American people before him to raise their right hands and pledge an oath to him. History is never far away, and maybe never has it felt as close as today.

Because on August 2, 1934, the day German President Paul von Hindenburg died, the German military oath was rewritten. Before Hitler’s rise, German soldiers had sworn loyalty to the Constitution and its institutions, never to any single leader. Hitler had already begun reshaping that oath after taking power, but Hindenburg’s death gave him the opening to finish the job. The new oath read: “I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.”

The shift was from allegiance to a nation and its laws to unconditional obedience to one man. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum calls this “a key element in the Nazification of the German military.” The American journalist William Shirer wrote that this oath “enabled an even greater number of officers to excuse themselves from any personal responsibility for the unspeakable crimes which they carried out on the orders of a Supreme Commander.” This was one of the final guardrails to fall.

We are not Nazi Germany. We don’t have to let our country fall to an authoritarian con man. History is there to teach us and remind us of lessons hard-learned in the past. The fundamentals of this country have not been changed; they are still holding. They have not rewritten the Constitution, and they have not erased what Washington did when he chose the republic over the crown, nor what Reagan understood when he called himself a temporary custodian. The foundation is still exactly where the founders left it. We just have to remember that, and remind others who we really are, and the evil that has us dangling off the edge of a cliff. There are more of us than there are of them. None of this, even when it feels insurmountable, is permanent. We have come back from harder times before, and we will come back from this. This time, we will come back better than we ever were.

More On 9/11 Reflections, Reactions

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Out of Gas. Out of Ideas. Out of Time, Andrew Egger, Bill Kristol and Jim Swift, Sept. 11, 2026. Today marks twenty-five years since the September 11th attacks. In many ways, it feels like another age—and the pre-9/11 era even more so. But the pain lingers, especially for those who lost someone that day. They’re in our thoughts today. Happy Friday.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting and Opinion: A few thoughts about 9/11 on its 25th anniversary, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 28 books and former Navy intelligence officer, Sept. 11, 2026. Jeffrey Epstein and 9/11: Unanswered questions and the DoJ’s massive cover-up.

Historians will mark September 11, 2001 as the starting gate for the fall of America’s democracy. Out of the ashes of the World Trade Center rose a ghost of far-right nationalism unseen since the era of Joseph McCarthy, and before that, the fascist America First decade of the 1930s and the Southern secession of the 1860s.

A straight line can be drawn from September 11, 2001 to November 8, 2016, the date of Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. A nation that prided itself as a beacon for democracy, albeit a flickering one at times, saw the events of September 11 as a reason to start whittling away at the Bill of Rights and other constitutional protections. More than nearly 3000 Americans died on September 11. Along with them died every positive thing the United States had ever claimed to stand for.

I was in Arlington, Virginia on 9/11, living a little over two miles from the Pentagon. I had never experienced anything like that day. Detailed run-downs of that day are being provided by many people — families of victims, first responders, and political leaders — and my two cents aren’t needed. But there is something worth commenting on.

The released Department of Justice files on Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell (shown together on a trip), and other trafficking conspirators are missing accounts of their activities in the months leading up to and a week after September 11, 2001. At the end of 2000, Epstein’s sex trafficking operation shifted from individual targeting of victims to a structured “massage appointment system.”

For the duration of 2001, the released Epstein files fail to show appointment logs, payments, and recruitment notes. The released files include a September 18, 2001 (a week following 9/11 and four days following the re-opening of air space to general aviation or private aircraft such as those used by Maxwell and Epstein) email with the line “Where’s is the real pilot?”

The line is part of an email thread involving Maxwell’s travel, including her landing at Santa Monica by helicopter. The question of “Where’s the real pilot?” was sent to Maxwell by Philip Levine, a businessman who was close to Jeffrey Epstein.

The files do not indicate where Epstein was located on 9/11 and immediate following weeks. Piecing together Epstein’s previous travel habits, it is assumed that he was not at his townhouse in Manhattan but at his residences in either Palm Beach or Little St. James island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

In the days after 9/11, Maxwell mass-forwarded inflammatory anti-Arab messages. The only other file released by DoJ is a 2003 invitation for Maxwell to participate on on a website-based “Shadow Commission on 9/11.” The invitation was sent by investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein (no relation to Jeffrey Epstein). Maxwell declined the offer. Edward Epstein believed that Jeffrey Epstein was a fabulist and a fraudster ever since they first met in 1987 at movie producer Coco Brown’s annual Halloween party in New York.

Edward Jay Epstein’s previous books had included three about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. They are Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth; The Assassination Chronicles: Inquest, Counterplot, and Legend; Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald. Three of Edward Epstein’s other books are Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA; The Rise and Fall of Diamonds; and Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer.

After a 24-year gap in having any communications with Jeffrey Epstein, Edward Epstein was invited to have tea with Jeffrey Epstein to discuss Sophia, a Hong Kong-based female robot A.I. project that Jeffrey Epstein’s robotics team was working on. In October 2017, the robot Sophia was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, a first for a robot in any country.

Edward Epstein’s skepticism about the veracity of Jeffrey Epstein, as well as his analysis of the facts surrounding 9/11, seemed to be of definite interest to Jeffrey Epstein. However, that does not explain why Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s closest associate, declined to participate in Edward Epstein’s online shadow commission project.

The released DoJ emails contain over 100 emails (otherwise unverified) to, from, or regarding Edward Epstein. On January 9, 2024, Edward Epstein died in his Manhattan apartment from Covid-19. He was 88.

It is a fact that Jeffrey Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s activities in the months prior to and after 9/11 are under-documented when compared with later years.

What are missing from the released Epstein files are continuous and date-stamped emails, as well as complete metadata chains for emails or attachments in the weeks around September 11, 2001. In addition, flight logs for 2001 are incomplete and staff scheduling records for the months prior to and after September 11, 2001 are missing. Records indicating Epstein’s location before and during 9/11 are also missing.

There are several reasons why Jeffrey Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s released DoJ files are missing documents on 9/11 and Epstein’s/Maxwell’s ties to Israel. An FBI memo notes a source who believed Epstein was a “co‑opted Mossad agent.”

Epstein generously donated money to Israeli organizations including Friends of the IDF and the Jewish National Fund. Jeffrey Epstein had extensive contact with Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister. Barak visited Epstein’s properties and appears frequently in Epstein’s emails. Jeffrey Epstein also financially supported Yoni Koren, a senior aide to Barak and former Israeli military intelligence officer, including paying for his cancer treatment. In addition, Jeffrey Epstein hosted Israeli military‑intelligence figures at his New York townhouse.

Ghislaine’s father, the late media mogul Robert Maxwell, had longstanding ties to Mossad. His mysterious 1991 death and the state‑honors funeral in Israel have supplemented evidence that Maxwell was a spy for Israel. Other investigators have pointed to Maxwell acting as a quadruple agent for not only Mossad, but also the Soviet KGB, British MI-6, and the CIA.

The dearth of information on Jeffery Epstein’s whereabouts on 9/11 in the released DoJ and FBI files may add up to the families of the victims of 9/11 being tossed into the same “no need-to-know” bucket as the one Todd Blanche, Pam Bondi, and Kash Patel have relegated the sexual abuse and trafficking victims of Epstein/Maxwell. And that is a sad commentary for the 25th commemoration of 9/11 and the criminality of the Trump regime.

 

U.S. President George W. Bush, center, Vice President Dick Cheney, left, CIA Director George Tenant, second from the left, and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, right.

The Hartmann Report, Commentary, 9/11: America Can’t Let the War Lies Go Down the Memory Hole Again, Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 11, 2026. America has been lied into too many wars. It’s cost us too much in money, credibility, and blood. We must remember the lies, and tell our children about them so that memory isn’t lost...

Today is the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the event that first brought America together and then was cynically exploited by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to steal Iraq’s oil, following their illegal invasion of Afghanistan for pure politics just a bit more than a year earlier.

Yet the media today (so far, anyway) is curiously silent about Bush and Cheney’s lies.

Given the costs of both these wars — and Netanyahu and Trump using October 7th in a similar fashion to justify this insane war with Iran — it’s an important moment to discuss our history of wars, both illegal and unnecessary, and those that are arguably essential to the survival of democracy in the world.

To be clear, I support US involvement — and even an expanded US involvement — in the defense of the Ukrainian democracy against Putin’s Hitler-grabs-Poland-like attack and mass slaughter of Ukrainian civilians. Had the world mobilized to stop Hitler when he invaded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938 there almost certainly wouldn’t have been either the Holocaust or WWII, which is why Europe is so united in this effort.

If Putin succeeds in taking Ukraine, his administration has already suggested that both Poland and Moldova are next, with the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) also on the menu. That would almost certainly lead to another war in Europe.

And China is watching: a Putin victory in Ukraine will encourage Xi to try to take Taiwan. Between the two — war in both Europe and the Pacific — we could find ourselves in the middle of World War III if Putin isn’t stopped now.

That said, essentially defensive military involvement like with Ukraine or in World War II have been the exception rather than the rule in American history. We’ve been far more likely to have presidents lie us into wars for their own personal and political gain than to defend ourselves or other democracies.

For example, after 9/11 in 2001 the Taliban that then ran Afghanistan offered to arrest Bin Laden, but Bush turned them down because he wanted to be a “wartime president” to have a “successful presidency.”

The Washington Post headline weeks after 9/11 put it succinctly: “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer On Bin Laden.” With that decision not to arrest and try Bin Laden for his crime but instead to go to war, George W. Bush set the US and Afghanistan on a direct path to disaster (but simultaneously set himself up for re-election in 2004 as a “wartime president”).

To further complicate things for Bush and Cheney, the 9/11 attacks were not planned, hatched, developed, practiced, expanded, worked out, or otherwise devised in Afghanistan or by even one single citizen of Afghanistan.

That country and its leadership in 2001, in fact, had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, as I detailed in depth here on August 15th of last year. The actual planning and management of the operation was done out of Pakistan and Germany, mostly by Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

The Taliban were bad guys, trashing the rights of women and running a tinpot dictatorship, but they represented no threat whatsoever to America or our allies.

Almost two decades later, though, then-President Trump and Mike Pompeo gave the Taliban everything they wanted — power, legitimacy, shutting down 9 of the 10 US air bases in that country to screw incoming President Joe Biden, and allowed the release of 5000 of Afghanistan’s worst Taliban war criminals — all over the strong objections of the democratically elected Afghan government.

Trump did this so could falsely claim, heading into the 2020 election, that he’d “negotiated peace” in Afghanistan, when in fact he’d set up the debacle that happened around President Biden’s withdrawal from that country.

”The relationship I have with the Mullah is very good,” Trump proclaimed — after ordering the mullah who then named himself President of Afghanistan — freed from prison over the furious objection of Afghan’s government, which Trump had cut out of the negotiations.

Following that betrayal of both Afghanistan and America, Trump and the GOP scrubbed the record of their embrace of the Taliban from their websites, as noted here and here.

And the conservative Boris Johnson administration in the UK then came right out and said that Trump’s “rushed” deal with the Taliban — without involvement of the Afghan government or the international community — set up the difficulties Biden faced.

“The die was cast,” Defense Minister Ben Wallace told the BBC, “when the deal was done by Donald Trump, if you want my observation.”

So, Republican George W. Bush lied us into both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and then Donald Trump tried to lie us out of at least one of them.

But this was far from the first time a president has lied us into a war.

— Vietnam wasn’t the first time an American president and his buddies in the media lied us into a war when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara falsely claimed that an American warship had come under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin and LBJ went along with the lie.

— Neither was President William McKinley lying us into the Spanish-American war in 1898 by falsely claiming that the USS Maine had been blown up in Havana harbor (it caught fire all by itself).

— The first time we were lied into a major war by a president was probably the Mexican-American war of 1846 when President James Polk lied that we’d been invaded by Mexico. Even Abraham Lincoln, then a congressman from Illinois, called him out on that lie.

— You could also argue that when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 leading to the Trail of Tears slaughter and forced relocation of the Cherokee under President Buchanan (among other atrocities) it was all based on a series of lies.

Bush’s lies that took us into Afghanistan and, a bit over a year later into Iraq, are particularly egregious, however, given his and Cheney’s reasons for those lies.

In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.

Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little 3- day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected (if you did it right) and have a two-term presidency.

“I'll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004.

“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.’”

The attack on 9/11 gave Bush his first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” when our guy Osama Bin Laden, who the Reagan/Bush administration had spent $3 billion building up in Afghanistan, engineered an attack on New York and DC.

The crime was planned in Germany and Florida and on 9/11 Bin Laden was, according to CBS News, not even in Afghanistan:

“CBS Evening News has been told that the night before the Sept. 11 terrorists attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.”

When the Obama administration finally caught and killed Bin Laden, he was back in Pakistan, the home base for the Taliban.

But attacking our ally Pakistan in 2001 would have been impossible for Bush, and, besides, nearby Afghanistan was an easier target, being at that time the second-poorest country in the world with an average annual per-capita income of $700 a year. Bin Laden had run terrorist training camps there — unrelated to 9/11 — and they made a fine excuse for Bush’s first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” and get some leadership cred.

Cheney, meanwhile, was in a world of trouble because of a huge bet he’d made as CEO of Halliburton in 1998. Dresser Industries was big into asbestos and about to fall into bankruptcy because of asbestos lawsuits that the company was fighting through the court system.

Cheney bet Dresser would ultimately win the suits and had Halliburton buy the company on the cheap, but a year later, in 1999, Dresser got turned down by the courts and Haliburton’s stock went into freefall, crashing 68 percent in a matter of months.

Bush had asked Cheney — who’d worked in his father’s White House as Secretary of Defense — to help him find a suitable candidate for VP.

Cheney, as his company was collapsing, recommended himself for the job. In July of 2000, Cheney walked away with $30 million from the troubled company and the year after that, as VP, Halliburton subsidiary KBR received one of the first no-bid no-ceiling (no accountability and no limit on how much they could receive) multi-billion-dollar military contracts.

Bush and Cheney both had good reason to want to invade Afghanistan in October 2001. Bush was seen as an illegitimate president at the time because his father’s corrupt appointee on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had cast the deciding vote in the Bush v Gore lawsuit that made him president; a war that gave him legitimacy and the aura of leadership.

Cheney’s company was in a crisis, and Afghanistan War no-bid contracts helped turn around Halliburton from the edge of bankruptcy into one of the world’s largest defense contractors today.

Even Trump had to get into the “let’s lie about Afghanistan” game, in his case to have bragging rights that he’d “ended the war in Afghanistan.”

In 2019, Trump went around the Afghan government (to their outrage: he even invited the Taliban to Camp David in a move that disgusted the world) to cut a so-called “peace deal” that sent thousands of newly-empowered Taliban fighters back into the field, and then drew down our troops to the point where today’s ongoing chaos in that country was absolutely predictable.

Trump’s deal was the signal to the 300,000+ Afghan army recruits we’d put together and paid that America no longer had their back and if the Taliban showed up they should just run away. Which, of course, is what happened on Trump’s watch. As Susannah George of The Washington Post noted:

“The Taliban capitalized on the uncertainty caused by the [Trump] February 2020 agreement reached in Doha, Qatar, between the militant group and the United States calling for a full American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some Afghan forces realized they would soon no longer be able to count on American air power and other crucial battlefield support and grew receptive to the Taliban’s approaches.”

Jon Perr’s article at Daily Kos did a great summary, with the title: “Trump put 5,000 Taliban fighters back in battle and tied Biden’s hands in Afghanistan.”

Trump schemed and lied to help his own 2020 reelection efforts, and the people who worked with our military and the US-backed Afghan government paid a terrible price for it. And now Trump’s using ICE to deport them from America, compounding that disgusting betrayal.

As President Biden told America:

“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. Forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. Forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. 

“Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our Forces and our allies’ Forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict. I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”

America has been lied into too many wars. It’s cost us too much in money, credibility, and blood. We must remember the lies, and tell our children about them so that memory isn’t lost.

When President Ford withdrew US forces from Vietnam (I remember it well), there was barely a mention of McNamara’s and LBJ’s lies that got us into that war.

Similarly, today’s reporting on the chaos in Afghanistan and the ongoing conflict around the Iraqi oil fields almost never mention Bush’s and Cheney’s lies and ulterior motives in getting us into those wars in the first place.

George Santayana famously noted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We can’t afford to let these lies go down the memory hole, like we have the other wars we were lied into that I mentioned earlier. Sadly, it’s clear now that neither Bush nor Cheney will be held accountable for their lies or for the American, Afghan, and Iraqi blood and treasure they cost.

But both should be subject to a clear and public airing of the crimes they committed in office and Bush should be required — at the very least — to apologize to the thousands of American families destroyed by the loss of their soldier children, parents, and spouses in those unnecessary wars, as well as to the people of both Afghanistan and Iraq.

If the media refuses to mention the Bush/Cheney lies on this anniversary of 9/11, it’s all the more important that the rest of us use this opportunity to do so. Pass it on. 

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Stick a Fork in ’Em., Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 11, 2026. Ever since Democrats’ major overperformance in last year’s off-year elections, I’ve been saying over and over: time is a finite resource for Donald Trump and his party. If they wanted to stave off disaster in the midterms, they would need to get moving fast to woo back disaffected members of their 2024 coalition. Every day spent failing to achieve that goal was a day wasted.

Now, in the afterglow of this week’s ludicrous, somnambulant GOP midterm convention, I’m about ready to call it. Republicans are out of ideas and out of time. They have no plan to reassemble their base, no bright ideas to reassure Americans that the Trump show has brought anything but chaos and expense to their country, no reason even to hope that material conditions won’t be worse in November than they are today. The midterms are still two months away, but the MAGA GOP is a dead party walking.

Over and over again, the convention hammered home the two central truths of the party’s disastrous plight: Trump is a senile old villain whose necrotizing brain is leaking out of his ears, and Republicans’ electoral chances now rest entirely on convincing the public otherwise.

Nobody was going to tell Trump “no” about anything: If he wanted to natter on for nearly two hours on Wednesday night and then make a (mercifully much shorter) speech Thursday rehashing the same points, he’d get to. Somehow, Trump genuinely seems to think this is the ticket to winning everybody back: All he needs to do is get in front of Americans to make the case himself.

But he had nothing on offer but hours of the same reheated slurry we’ve long since grown accustomed to. There were, of course, the bald-faced lies. “Look at that,” Trump said, looking out over the half-full convention stadium. “The highest rafter, no empty seats.” There were the endless hallucinations about the American Golden Age that exists nowhere but in his own mind. “Our country has never done better,” he said. “We’re taking in trillions, trillions of dollars. There’s never been any country, not even close, that’s come anywhere near.” There were the ridiculous pie-in-the-sky promises, stripped of all pretense: “If we win, it’s $5,000 for every adult. We love our adults. It’s about time we take care of our adults.” Sometimes he was begging. “Pretend I’m on the ballot.” (More on that below.) Other times he was threatening. At one point, he led the crowd in a bizarre repeat-after-me oath in which they pledged they would show up and vote. “You know what happens if you don’t vote?” Trump said. “You go to Hell.”

Meanwhile, out in the real world, things are crashing down around Trump’s ears. Even the softest of softball interviews, like one he did yesterday with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, are now impossible for him to get through without embarrassment. On those $5,000 checks, for instance: “Why not just give the money now?” Ingraham asked. “If you have the money, why not give it now?”

“Because they can’t. I’ll tell you what, because the Democrats can’t do it,” Trump said. “Because with them it’s negative growth. With us, it’s so positive.”

In the same interview, Trump—whose entire pitch is that Democrats retaking Congress will lead to a communist revolution in America—suddenly suggested offhand it wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all. He didn’t intend to campaign as hard as he had in 2024, at any rate. “I’ll block all their bad stuff for two years. It won’t be the same, but I’ll be a blocker, and probably be able to make deals with them,” Trump said. “You make deals. . . . So it’s not as dire. Maybe it is as dire.”

None of this is some big revelation, exactly. Republicans know what they have with Trump. If we learned anything last night, it’s how screwed the GOP will be even as they try to move past him.

When the Republican convention schedule dropped, one of the biggest surprises was the way the party had divvied up the keynotes. Even though Trump ended up getting back on stage for an encore performance last night, it was still notable that the bigger closing-night slot went to Vice President JD Vance. The decision seemed to highlight an interesting piece of strategic thinking: The GOP’s brain trust is already looking ahead to a future when someone—probably Vance—is going to need to try to hold together Trump’s unique base.

It’s unclear whether anyone will be able to do this. It’s even more unclear whether Vance will. Frankly, I’m just not sure he has the juice. He’s perfectly capable of lying as shamelessly as Trump does, and of reaching just as deep into the gutter to smear his opponents: At one point, Vance suggested that Texas Democrat James Talarico has a sexual fetish for trans children. But he lacks Trump’s unique charisma, the winking carnival-barker energy that has for so long let the president get away with pretty much anything.

More importantly, Vance has nothing new to offer. The most notable moment of the vice president’s speech came when he made a direct case to Republican voters incensed about the Iran war. Vance himself, it has been very clear, sees his own complicity in that war as politically disastrous: He’s supposed to be an anti-war America Firster, and his team regularly leaks to the press to keep the narrative that the vice president has had major reservations about the conflict alive. But last night, all Vance could give was a halfhearted plea that Republicans who hate the war should turn up and vote for them anyway—because Charlie Kirk would have wanted them too and, anyway, you can’t let the other lunatics get back in power.

The GOP has tied itself more tightly to Trump than any party has ever tied itself to a single figure. They have cut themselves off from any possible exit strategy. Now they—and we—are just waiting for the electoral hammer to fall.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• The Republican Who Renounced the Big Lie—and Then Came Crawling Back… Jason Richey labeled Trump a “loser” and a “narcissist.” That was before he needed MAGA again, writes BRENDAN HARTNETT.
• How the Right Came to Embrace Anti-Muslim Bigotry… After the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Republican leaders opposed anti-Muslim sentiment. But the right’s worst instincts won, observes CATHY YOUNG.
• Live Coverage of Vance’s Midterm Convention Speech… On Bulwark Live, join TIM MILLER, SONNY BUNCH, LAUREN EGAN, and ANDREW EGGER as they covered JD Vance’s midterm convention speech live last night.
• Trump’s $5,000 Midterm Ploy Is Even Dumber Than It Sounds… The math is impossible, the inflation risk is real, and the plan would attract an army of scammers, writes CATHERINE RAMPELL in Receipts.

Quick Hits

MORE PAIN AT THE PUMP: Fuel prices are getting gruesome again, with the twin shocks of increasing U.S.–Iran shooting in the Strait of Hormuz and increasing Houthi belligerence in the Red Sea sending prices soaring to levels not seen for months. Or, for some products, to levels not seen ever: Diesel fuel hit a national average of $6 a gallon for the first time in history yesterday.

Most consumers don’t have to pump diesel, so they don’t feel its rising costs as acutely, but the drag on the economy here is no joke. “Record diesel prices will impact every cargo, shipment, every delivery Americans are taking, and are likely to reignite inflation up and down the supply chain,” wrote Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy. “And for now, it comes at a time of year when diesel prices also traditionally rise, adding more pain. I suggest Americans anticipate a costlier holiday season, as it appears diesel prices could continue climbing as geopolitical tensions continue to remain a main factor.”

THEY’RE YELLING AT ME ONLINE!!!: How obsessed is FBI Director Kash Patel with maintaining his online MAGA cred? This February, a right-wing X account called “IFindRetards” posted that Patel’s “retard rating” had just gone “to all-time highs.” This wouldn’t matter at all, except that—as an FBI records request showed yesterday—it led to a hilarious text exchange between Patel and his top comms staffer Ben Williamson.¹ After Patel sent Williamson the tweet, Williamson tried to reassure him: “This is an ‘Epstein didn’t kill himself’ bot account,” he said, “if you’re wondering where that’s coming from.”

“227k responses are not bots,” Patel replied, apparently confusing the number of views on the post with the number of replies. “What I asked you and your team to do is find them, and post our record year results back at them all, continuously. Have they been doing that?”

“It’s 400 responses, a real visible tweet gets 5x that,” Williamson replied. “Yes. We’re not responding to ‘ifindretards.’ That would look bad on you.”

Still Patel tried again: “It’s not about them, it is about the number of views, because people see it and need to be seeing our stats.”

In the end, cooler heads prevailed, and the Federal Bureau of Investigations did not issue an official response to X account “IFindRetards.” Good staff work is so important.

MISSOURI MAP OVERTURNED: The long fight of Gerrymandering Total War is basically over, but a few last-minute map changes are still trickling in. This week, the Supreme Court twice stepped in with last-minute rulings on a legal fight over Missouri’s congressional districts, which Republicans tried to gerrymander this year from a 6–2 GOP map to a 7–1 one. Each time, the verdict was the same: The state is compelled to move forward with the older, slightly more Democrat-favorable map for now.

The Court’s orders, signed by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, came down quickly and without explication. But they seem to be in keeping with the Court’s oft-applied Purcell principle, which states that federal courts should be reluctant to step on election procedures too close to the elections themselves. In this case, it was mostly a matter of SCOTUS overruling a lower federal court that had sought to put the redder map back in place, and instead deferring to the Missouri Supreme Court, which had sided with Democratic challengers to the maps.  

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion, On This Somber Day Some Notes On Finding A New Path Forward Through All The Chaos, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 11, 2026. I had not planned on writing about 9/11 this morning as there is so much happening but powerful remembrances are everywhere, and I have become a bit overwhelmed by the emotion and the weight of it all…….

So here are a few hasty thoughts on this somber morning…..

I want to imagine that if we can have the election we all want to have this November that perhaps we will come to view it as the beginning of the closing of the twenty five year post-9/11 chapter in American history and the start of something new.

Even if we win both chambers this November we will not be rid of MAGA next year but the scale of Trump’s failure at home and abroad will require a new era of politics to emerge in America. I hope that new politics will be grounded in a few foundational projects - dramatic investments to improve the lot of every day Americans; an intense commitment to democratic renewal and accountability for the corruption, lawlessness and illiberalism of the Trump era; and an urgent, plan to accelerate the clean energy transition to slow the warming of the planet and to liberate us from the reactionary, corrosive grip of global petro-politics.

Perhaps, perhaps this election can be the beginning of us finding a true, new path forward through the chaos, and war, and failure, and tragedy…..

As for the present moment I offered a comprehensive overview of where I think we are in my weekly video and accompanying written analysis: "Trump Had His Shot And Has Blown It, Badly. It Is Our Turn Now To Win, Lead, And Make Things Better" (New Written & Video Analysis).

My core understanding is that as bad as things are for Trump and the Rs - and they are bad - they were likely to get worse as head towards the November election. And each day we see what worse looks like…….

Brent crude is $104 a barrel right now. This morning’s CPI report confirms that inflation remains far too elevated. The concern about bonds and global government finances has gotten far more intense this week, as has the perceived idiocy and incompetence of the Trump economic team. Each day we got more data about the unfolding health care shock that is rippling across the country due to Trump’s ruinous attack on our health care system……

But of all the things driving “worse” it is the gathering momentum of the Iranian-Russian alliance and the accelerating unraveling of Pax Americana that could the most damage to the Trump regime in these closing days of the 2026 election.

In the last few days something dramatic has happened in the Middle East - the Iranian-backed Houthis seized land on the Western coast of Yemen and appear to have bombed the main East-West oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia. If this is all playing out as reported - and reports are sketchy as I write this morning - it will be another huge, geopolitical defeat for Trump and increases the likelihood that oil prices keep rising and inflation worsening here and everywhere in the world.

The House and Senate return next week and will be demanding clarity on what has happened this past week in the Middle East for it sure appears that Iran delivered devastating blows to the US and our allies in recent days. The other thing Congress should be demanding is that our ridiculous Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, resign, immediately.

A few more things we are tracking today…..

• The FCC forced Jimmy Kimmel not to broadcast an interview with James Talarico this week. So Kimmel released the interview on YouTube. Here it is. Let’s watch together this weekend…..
• Ron DeSantis trashed the ridiculous $5,000 bribe:
• Republicans in seven states asked the Supreme Court not to approve Trump’s mail ballot order:
• Republican chief election officials from seven states said that it’s too late for President Donald Trump’s mail-in ballot order to be implemented before the midterm election, urging the Supreme Court to not allow the rule to go into effect in a brief submitted to the court on Wednesday.
• Trump and his allies lost their fight to implement a ridiculous gerrymander in Missouri.

Supporting The Vital Election Projection Work Of The State Parties - Today we are kicking off two new targeted fundraising campaigns to support our election protection work - one to raise $50,000 for the Association of State Democratic Committees (ASDC), and one to raise $50,000 for Hopium itself. Last month in Austin, Texas ASDC President Jane Kleeb and I announced a new election protection program that we helped develop for the state parties, something Jane is calling The New Battlefield Project. Here is how I summarized it at the time:Enhanced Election Protection - we will ensure that for the first time ever every state and territory has a full time, qualified Election Protection Director; we will also be launching a nationwide training program to help train volunteers to support their state parties in protecting the elections this fall.

A National Early Vote Campaign - Pushing our family to vote early makes it more likely we win and harder for them to cheat. This is something we’ve been promoting here for some time, and it is a vital, vital effort to help us win.

A War Room - we will ensuring that the states and territories are tied to one another and to all the national party committees in real time. So if something illicit happens anywhere it can be understood immediately everywhere. We will be also be bringing on national security professionals to help advise the states if things arise that require their expertise.

The program is off and running. Trainings, led by Hopium community member Tim Wegener have begun. Election Protection Directors are being hired in the states. Early vote programs are being developed and implemented across the country, a process that will be supercharged by the No Kings Early Vote campaign. We are standing up the third piece in the coming days, something that I will be spending time on formally advising once it is fully stood up. So we are coming to you today both to help the ASDC expand its initial offering with a bit more investment, and for me to have the resources to hire some help so I can spend time each day with this important new program. 

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, Houthis Seize a Key Red Sea Island, Threatening Yet Another Global Oil Route, Adam Rasgon, Shuaib Almosawa and Saeed Al-Batati, Sept. 11, 2026. The Iran-backed militia’s ground offensive has reached the Bab al-Mandab, a Red Sea strait that is a choke point for global trade.

The Iranian-backed Houthi militia seized a strategic Red Sea island, two Yemeni government officials said Friday, giving Iran and its allies sway over two of the main routes for shipping oil out of the Middle East.

The capture of Perim Island follows days of fierce ground skirmishes in Yemen as the Houthis have staged a lightning advance against forces allied with the internationally recognized Yemeni government, which is backed by Saudi Arabia. On Thursday, the Houthis swept into the strategic Red Sea port city of Mokha.

The capture of Perim Island presents a major setback for Saudi Arabia, which now exports most of its oil through the Red Sea and has faced Houthi attacks on its tankers and energy facilities. Saudi officials have tried to avoid a direct war with the Houthis, analysts say.

It also adds a new dimension in the war between the United States and Iran. The Islamic republic has already largely cut off the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, and leveraged that influence to demand concessions from the United States.

Now Iran’s ally, the Houthi militia, has a foothold at the heart of a choke point in the Red Sea, and could further disrupt shipping there.

More On U.S. Culture, Media, Religion

New York Times, After 9/11, Islamophobia Shaped a Generation of Muslim New Yorkers, Liam Stack and Maya King, Sept. 11, 2026. The attacks unleashed a wave of hate, but the years since have seen Muslim Americans’ political and cultural influence grow.

Once-friendly neighbors started to keep their distance. Undercover police officers began to monitor community events. And passers-by would give them dirty looks on the street, and sometimes harass them, when they left home in hijabs or other religious garb.

Many American Muslims have faced a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility since the Sept. 11 attacks, which reshaped life for all Americans.

In New York, a generation of Muslim New Yorkers responded to the Islamophobia by organizing their communities: Mosques hosted makeshift legal clinics. Small businesses became hubs in a citywide civil rights network. Muslims of different racial, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds formed alliances the city had not seen before.

Their political organizing helped, years later, to elect the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. But anti-Muslim prejudice still endures, echoing the Islamophobia that arose in the earliest days after Sept. 11.

Murad Awawdeh was 14 in September 2001. The post-9/11 backlash, and the grass-roots response of his friends and neighbors, led him to trade his biochemistry studies — and his mother’s American dream of having a doctor in the family — for a career in civil rights.

“I think that day belongs to everyone who lived it and what came after belongs to a smaller group of us,” said Mr. Awawdeh, 39, who is now the president and chief executive of the New York Immigration Coalition and a confidant of Mr. Mamdani. “That part of the story this country still has not told itself honestly.”

The Sept. 11 attacks left many Muslim American communities scarred by heavy-handed law enforcement tactics and the suspicion, if not outright hostility, of classmates, co-workers, elected officials and cable news commentators who blamed all Muslims for the terrorism they, too, had experienced that day. That experience spurred many to take political action.

“If you look at prior to 9/11, for the most part, Muslim Americans were not politically involved,” said Afaf Nasher, the executive director of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. But, she added, “When you’re pushed against the wall, you’re either going to run in fear or you’re going to push back, and political empowerment was certainly one way that we are pushing back.”

Sept. 10 

Top Headlines

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant tried to quell fears about the U.S. bond market and economy with remarks outside the White House.

• Robert Reich, Opinion: Bessent (and his boss) have lost all credibility on the economy, Robert Reich, right, retired professor and former U.S. Labor Secretary, Sept. 10, 2026. It’s becoming a problem for all of us. 
• New York Times, Behind the Scenes, Vance Gathered Unvarnished Views of the Iran War, Jonathan Swan, Adam Entous and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 10, 2026. Vice President JD Vance received sobering assessments about the war that did not line up with what he, along with President Trump and other top administration officials, were saying publicly.

News Roundups 

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News Updates: Republicans Shut Down Trump’s $5,000 ‘Dividend’ Bribe, Musk’s Election Texts, Trump Losses Pile Up, Diesel Hits Record Highs, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 10, 2026. Trump’s $5,000 midterm “dividend” didn’t survive 24 hours before his own party started tearing it apart, with a Republican megadonor calling it a “bread and circus bribe” and fiscal hawks demanding to know how it would ever get paid for. Meanwhile the Supreme Court dealt him back-to-back election losses, blocking his gerrymandered Missouri map for a second time and letting stand a lower court’s block on his administration’s mail-in ballot rules, with judges finding zero evidence of the fraud he’s long claimed. And Anthropic revealed it disrupted scientists trying to use its AI to help build biological weapons, the same day Trump brushed off AI catastrophe risk by joking there’d always be a “little gear” to shut it down, a comment that drew alarm from Bernie Sanders and even Ted Cruz. 
• MeidasTouch Network, Thursday Updates: Trump's Fake $5,000, Dallas Falls Apart, and the Houthis Take the Red Sea, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 10, 2026. From the disaster that is the Trump Midterm Convention, to the Houthis taking control over the red sea, to brutal economic news, the last 12 hours or so have been quite eventful, so like, restack, and let’s dig into the headlines: Trump doubles down on his latest lie about a $5,000 “Trump dividend” and then also promises to give away $500 Obamacare “rebate” checks. Scammers gonna scam; PPI inflation jumps to 5.4% YoY, Treasury yields spike, oil spikes; The Houthis seize the port city of Mokha and Zuqar Island, tightening their grip on the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait. 
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Silences Kimmel in Major Attack, Thousands of Empty Seats at Convention, Trump’s Speech Debunked, Inflation Surges, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 10, 2026. Trump’s FCC just got Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with a Democratic Senate candidate pulled off broadcast television, the second late-night host in six months to face that exact pressure over the same candidate. His first-ever midterm convention played out in front of a half-empty arena while he insisted it was “packed,” and the headline promise from that speech, a $5,000 check for every American adult, falls apart the moment you do the math. And while Trump keeps telling voters the war with Iran will be over right after the midterms, his own vice president and secretary of state are privately warning him it could drag on for years.

More On Court Clash Over Republican Gerrymander Attempt In Missouri

 

• New York Times, Supreme Court Again Blocks Republican-Backed Missouri Voting Map, Ann E. Marimow and Mitch Smith, Sept. 10, 2026. The ruling deferred to the state’s Supreme Court, which had invalidated G.O.P.-friendly district lines, saying voters must first have an opportunity to approve the map in a statewide referendum.
• Civil Discourse, Opinion: Insanity in Missouri, Joyce Vance, right, Sept. 10, 2026. It’s utter insanity in Missouri, or as NBC’s Lawrence Hurley put it on Twitter this morning, the “Show Cause State.”

Trump Midtown Convention In Texas 

• New York Times, News Analysis: Down in the Polls, Republicans Embrace a Familiar Tool: Fear, Lisa Lerer, Sept. 10, 2026. At an unusual midterm gathering, President Trump and his allies painted Democrats as dangerously un-American.
• Hope for America, Opinion: The president wants to buy our votes, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 10, 2026. At 8:09 PM tonight, the President of the United States walked onto the stage at the first-ever Republican midterm convention and slowly made his way over to the podium, stopping along the way to catch his breath and soak in screams of “I love you” from women in the audience. Once at the podium, Donald Trump launched into an hour-and-47-minute speech unlike any ever given by a president of the United States in the 250-year history of our country.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Trump’s Party, Sonny Bunch, Sept. 10, 2026. The vibe at the first day of the Republicans’ midterm convention was a pretty simple one: Play the hits, no matter how little sense it makes to play them, and offer the people some free cash while you’re at it.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Had His Shot And Has Blown It, Badly. It Is Our Turn Now To Win, Lead, And Make Things Better, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 10, 2026. Trump’s failed and extremist regime continues to make things worse for America, the American people, and for their rancid, illiberal political project.

More On U.S. Immigration Policy, Abuses

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Markwayne Mullin’s Trouble with Facts, Jim Swift, right, Sept. 10, 2026. When Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin came to Warren County, Ohio last week to tout the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, he made a number of assertions about immigration law and enforcement that did not withstand much scrutiny.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

• Politico, Jim Jordan says he will relinquish Judiciary gavel, pass on a return to Oversight, Mia McCarthy, Sept. 10, 2026. The Ohio Republican’s committee decisions are likely to rekindle chatter about his leadership ambitions.ajority this fall.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Our Military Needs Congress to Do Its Job, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 10, 2026. 54 Days to the Midterms. Given that Democrats will likely win control of at least one house of Congress, we need to begin serious consideration of the essential role of congressional oversight. Congress’s powers of the purse and of oversight will be essential to halt this regime’s chaos and begin reversing the constitutional damage and policy failures we have endured.
• MSNOW, States warn of ‘chaos’ if Supreme Court allows mail-ballot restrictions for midterms, Jordan Rubin, Sept. 9, 2026. A blue-state coalition warned the justices that millions of Americans could lose their ability to vote.

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption  

 

The Trump destruction of the White House historic East Wing to build his ballroom without congressional approval. (New York Times photo).

• To The Contrary, Avlon: Sweep Trump’s Ballroom Into the Ash Heap of History, Charlie Sykes, right, Sept. 10, 2026. Plus: Trump’s Stolen Valor, and Fascist-themed new uniforms. On today’s “To the Contrary” podcast, I sit down with journalist, author, historian, and Renaissance Man, John Avlon to reflect on the lessons of 9/11 as its 25th anniversary approaches.
• New York Times, Trump Loyalist Steps Down From ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case, Alan Feuer, Sept. 10, 2026. The inquiry has long been the most fevered of the many revenge investigations that President Trump has demanded the Justice Department undertake. 
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 9, 2026 [Trump Lies About His Made-up 9/11 Heroism, Again], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 10, 2026. Yesterday, at a White House event honoring those who sacrificed their lives on 9/11, President Donald Trump went off script and claimed he had taken a crew downtown “right after this happened."

More On Middle East Wars

• New York Times, Yemen’s Houthis Seize Strategic Red Sea Port, Officials Say, Saeed Al-Batati, Shuaib Almosawa and Vivian Nereim, Sept. 10, 2026. The Iran-backed militia routed Yemeni government forces in Mokha, putting the group in a stronger position to attack ships in a crucial waterway for global trade.
• New York Times, Oil Prices Surge as Stocks and Bonds Wobble, Gregory Schmidt and Jenny Gross, Sept. 10, 2026. Crude oil hit its highest levels in months, bond yields continued to rise and stocks fell for a fourth consecutive session as investors worried about energy supplies and inflation.

More On 9/11 25th Anniversary

• New York Times,  25 Years After 9/11, Al Qaeda Still Has a Home in Afghanistan, Elian Peltier, Photographs by Tomás Munita, Sept. 10, 2026. The Taliban claim that Afghanistan is no longer a sanctuary for terrorist groups, but Al Qaeda and others are still present, reviving old fears.
• New York Times, The Man Who Approved 9/11 Victims’ Checks Paid a Price, Ephrat Livni, Sept. 10, 2026. Kenneth Feinberg says the nearly three years he spent running the Sept. 11 compensation fund changed his life view.

More On Global News

• Middle East Eye, Algeria suspends diplomatic relations with ‘dwarf state’ UAE, Elis Gjevori, Sept. 10, 2026. Algiers cuts ties with Abu Dhabi and accuses the Gulf state of destabilising the wider region. 

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

• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: A new low for American workers, Rebecca Crosby, Sept. 10, 2026. Workers in the United States are earning a historically low share of the value they produce, according to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS estimates that the labor share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) “was 52.8 percent in the second quarter of 2026.” This is the lowest level that the BLS has seen since it first began recording labor share in 1947.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Bessent and the Bonds, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 10, 2026. “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite aphorism made sense then and now. Policymakers should avoid being boastful or belligerent, not simply as a matter of good manners, but to save their credibility for moments when it’s really needed.

More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

• New York Times, Memorial on Anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s Killing Splits a Utah Campus, Jack Healy, Sept. 10, 2026. The university where the conservative activist was shot last year has canceled classes for a memorial. While many students planned to attend, some said they just wanted to move on from the tragedy.
• Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: MeidasTouch Podcast Ranks #1 Podcast in the Industry for Monthly Downloads and Views, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 10, 2026. The MeidasTouch Network announced today that The MeidasTouch Podcast has been ranked the #1 podcast in the industry by monthly downloads and views, according to Podscribe’s August 2026 Industry Ranker.

More News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Blocks International Epstein Investigations, Musk's Vote Website Is Secretly Stealing Your Data, Trump's Family Calls Him a Liar, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 9, 2026. Five countries are investigating Jeffrey Epstein right now, and the Justice Department is stonewalling every single one of them. The president’s own nephew just called him out publicly for lying about 9/11. And Elon Musk is spending millions of dollars on a website designed to trick you into handing over your personal data. Plus, Republicans kick off their first-ever midterm convention to a room half full of no-shows, the Tate brothers stay behind bars, and a 22-year-old dropout pleads guilty to one of the largest crypto heists in US history.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice: In-Depth

• Emptywheel, Analysis: Big John Solomon Expose!!!! He’s Covering Up Trump’s Egypt Corruption! Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 9, 2026. Yesterday, John Solomon conducted another of his Russian propaganda exercises, this time claiming to release newly declassified versions of: The 302 from Mike Flynn’s January 24, 2017 interview;Joe Pientka’s notes from the interview; Peter Strzok’s notes from the interview. 

Top Headlines

 

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant tried to quell fears about the U.S. bond market and economy with remarks outside the White House.

Robert Reich, Opinion: Bessent (and his boss) have lost all credibility on the economy, Robert Reich, right, retired professor and former U.S. Labor Secretary, Sept. 10, 2026. It’s becoming a problem for all of us. 

U.S. government bond yields have jumped to new multiyear highs — which will result in higher costs for mortgages, car loans, student loans, and all other borrowing.

In other words, the affordability crisis is growing even worse.

Treasury secretary Scott Bessent isn’t the cause (I’ll get to that in a moment), but he’s making a colossal mess of it.

At 11 a.m. ET yesterday, his Treasury Department announced that it would repurchase $6 billion worth of 10- to 20-year government bonds, hoping that fewer bonds on the market would drive up demand, pushing down rates (yields) that have soared to levels not seen in decades.

Instead most Treasury yields sharply jumped on the announcement. The 10-year bond yield surged to as high as 4.85%, its highest since November 2023. The 20- and 30-year bond yields surged to as high as 5.3%. (Note: When Treasuries fall, their yields rise.)

Bessent can’t beat the bond market. To the contrary, his interventions are causing traders to worry all the more about the stability and intelligence of the United States when it comes to economic policy.

Bonds are being driven upward mainly by concerns about inflation. Where are these concerns coming from? First and foremost, from Trump’s war in Iran, which is driving up oil prices. Brent crude futures are trading above $107 a barrel, while the 10-year Treasury yield climbed above 4.9%—its highest intraday level since October 2023.

Following a flare-up in attacks by both sides, Trump advisers are now privately suggesting the conflict could drag on through the end of his term in 2029.

Reacting to the same inflation concerns, the European Central Bank raised interest rates Thursday, saying it expected inflation to remain above target for an extended period.

And then there’s Trump’s vow yesterday to pay each of America’s 270 million adults a $5,000 check if Republicans keep control of Congress in November would cost $1.3 trillion— making such a plan prohibitively costly for a country with a $40 trillion national debt. (By the way, it’s illegal to pay people to vote your way.)

It won’t happen, of course, but the mere possibility is fueling further inflation fears.

Why didn’t Bessent try to dissuade Trump from making this incredibly stupid vow?

Global inflation fears are also being driven by Trump’s inane tariffs, including his trade war with Canada.

Why hasn’t Bessent tried to dissuade Trump from entering this trade war?

And what is Bessent saying in public about any of this? Is he using the bully pulpit to reassure world markets?

Just the opposite. He’s sounding as looney as his boss.

In Bessent’s speech at yesterday’s Republican event, he warned that the progressive left is relentless in trying to turn America into a “socialist hellscape.”

“The radical left is relentless in their pursuit to remake America in the image of every socialist hellscape of the last century, to import the misery of failed workers’ paradises like the Soviet Bloc, Caracas and Havana.”

Bessent added that their “version of equality would drag everyone down instead of lift everyone up” and urged attendees to continue the political fight to push back against socialism.

Bad enough that this is just demented Cold War communist witch-hunt crap. Worse, it’s coming from the mouth of the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, who’s supposed to be the adult in the room.

The credibility of a treasury secretary is critical to soothing markets and maintaining worldwide faith in the dollar. Bessent seems to be doing everything possible to lose credibility.

I’ve worked with several treasury secretaries and closely watched others, and I can honestly say that Scott Bessent is the worst I’ve ever witnessed.

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Bessent and the Bonds, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 10, 2026. “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite aphorism made sense then and now. Policymakers should avoid being boastful or belligerent, not simply as a matter of good manners, but to save their credibility for moments when it’s really needed.

New York Times, Behind the Scenes, Vance Gathered Unvarnished Views of the Iran War, Jonathan Swan, Adam Entous and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 10, 2026. Vice President JD Vance received sobering assessments about the war that did not line up with what he, along with President Trump and other top administration officials, were saying publicly.

Vice President JD Vance took the unusual step over the spring and summer of calling U.S. military commanders in the Middle East, Europe and Asia directly, seeking their unvarnished assessments of the Iran war, according to current and former officials.

Mr. Vance, right, who opposed the war from the outset and was charged by President Trump with helping to end the conflict, wanted the commanders’ individual judgments, in their own words, before they were consolidated into a Pentagon view.

The conversations delved into an array of issues related to the war, including its objectives, tactics, casualty estimates, what the Iranians would do in the Strait of Hormuz, how adaptable they had become and how much punishment their government could absorb. Mr. Vance also asked for a detailed accounting of what remained in the commanders’ stockpiles, and how the transfer of weapons to the Middle East would affect their ability to deter China, Russia and North Korea.

On that last point, the commanders were blunt. They were most worried about their depleted stocks of Patriot interceptors, the backbone of their air defenses. By late spring, one theater was down to fewer than 100 of them. The war had also exhausted the theater’s supplies of the Army Tactical Missile Systems, which can reach 190 miles, along with stores of the Precision Strike Missiles, which were meant to replace them. Stocks of critical munitions such as these, they told the vice president, were the lowest they had ever seen.

This account is based on interviews with more than a half-dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity to disclose sensitive information.

Mr. Vance came away from some of his conversations with deep concerns about the overall strategy and the prospects for success, according to people who spoke to him. The assessments made clear the extraordinary amount of pain the Iranian government was prepared to endure in its fight for survival, and the limited supply of U.S. defensive weapons available to block Iran’s retaliatory strikes, or to deal with threats elsewhere.

The vice president incorporated these lessons into his private talks with Mr. Trump and their inner circle. At the same time, the president was hearing more in his briefings from Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the strain on U.S. stockpiles and the resilience of Iranian forces, which Mr. Trump initially found difficult to believe.

The officials’ accounts, taken together, show how Mr. Vance has sought to surface a greater level of detail and nuance about the war. They also help to flesh out hotly debated questions about what kinds of information about the war Mr. Trump is receiving, and from whom. And for Mr. Vance, who had only limited national security experience before he became vice president, they show how he is now immersed in a costly and inconclusive war that could shadow him in a potential 2028 presidential campaign.

There was a gulf between the sobering private assessments that Mr. Vance received and what top administration officials, including the president and vice president, have said publicly. Mr. Trump has continued to falsely claim that the United States has already won the war, that the Iranian military has been demolished and that there are no problems with U.S. weapons supplies. And Mr. Vance recently downplayed the idea that the United States was even engaged in a war.Sign up to get Maggie Haberman's articles emailed to you. Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent reporting on President Trump. Get it sent to your inbox.

Privately, the president has raged about media stories detailing the diminished stockpiles, calling journalists “treasonous” for reporting on the topic. In the wake of the coverage, government investigators subjected dozens of senior military officers at the Pentagon to polygraph tests. Other officials have worried about signaling weakness to China and Russia, who are closely surveilling U.S. stockpiles.

Mr. Vance’s calls to the commanders were made with the knowledge of the president; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; General Caine; Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as the national security adviser; and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, according to officials with direct knowledge.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News Updates: Republicans Shut Down Trump’s $5,000 ‘Dividend’ Bribe, Musk’s Election Texts, Trump Losses Pile Up, Diesel Hits Record Highs, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 10, 2026. Trump’s $5,000 midterm “dividend” didn’t survive 24 hours before his own party started tearing it apart, with a Republican megadonor calling it a “bread and circus bribe” and fiscal hawks demanding to know how it would ever get paid for.

Meanwhile the Supreme Court dealt him back-to-back election losses, blocking his gerrymandered Missouri map for a second time and letting stand a lower court’s block on his administration’s mail-in ballot rules, with judges finding zero evidence of the fraud he’s long claimed. And Anthropic revealed it disrupted scientists trying to use its AI to help build biological weapons, the same day Trump brushed off AI catastrophe risk by joking there’d always be a “little gear” to shut it down, a comment that drew alarm from Bernie Sanders and even Ted Cruz.

Trump’s own party is publicly calling his midterm promises “bread and circus bribes,” the Supreme Court keeps handing him election losses, and the people building AI are warning it could get out of control, and you’re not going to get the real story from networks that have to answer to FCC threats or advertisers with a stake in staying friendly with this White House.

That’s exactly why this newsletter exists, no corporate ownership, no access to protect, just the facts laid out so you can see clearly what’s actually happening. 

Here’s the news:

Newly obtained and authenticated text messages show Elon Musk bragging to his ex-girlfriend, former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair, about using “lasers from space” to help elect Trump before the 2024 election, according to NPR, which surfaced the texts from director Alex Gibney’s forthcoming documentary Musk. In the messages, Musk writes that he’s feeling newly confident just before the election and plans to “unleash the anomaly in the matrix,” and when St. Clair pressed him for clarity, he said he has 10,000 lasers in space, an apparent reference to his SpaceX satellite network. A representative for Musk declined to comment, and NPR notes the remark has spurred plenty of theories and speculation about what exactly Musk meant and what, if anything, he actually did. The revelation lands as Musk is expected to spend $100 million on House and Senate races this November, adding fresh scrutiny to how much influence he’s buying, or already bought, in American elections.

Trump’s Major Court Losses:

The US Supreme Court once again rejected a Trump-backed push to use new Missouri congressional maps drawn to hand Republicans an additional House seat ahead of November’s midterms. Missouri’s Republican-controlled legislature redrew the lines last September at Trump’s request, specifically dismantling the Kansas City-area seat long held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. A grassroots group called People Not Politicians gathered more than 300,000 signatures to force a statewide referendum on the new map, and on September 3 the Missouri Supreme Court sided with them, ruling the new lines can’t take effect until 2027 and that the 2025 redistricting process itself didn’t comply with state law. Republican Attorney General Catherine Hanaway immediately appealed, but Thursday morning, Justice Brett Kavanaugh again ordered the state to comply with the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling, blocking the new map.

That order came after days of chaos spanning four different courts. Kavanaugh had already declined to block the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling on Tuesday, only for federal district judge Stephen Clark to rule minutes later, in a separate case, that Secretary of State Denny Hoskins had to use the new Republican-friendly map anyway. Hoskins said he’d follow that order, and a federal appeals panel declined to step in, before Kavanaugh’s Thursday ruling settled things back in favor of the old maps. The catch is that Missouri already used the new, Republican-drawn map to hold its primary elections back in August, so it’s genuinely unclear how officials plan to unwind those results or manage the switch with the general election just two months away.

Separately, a federal appeals court handed the Trump administration another election-related loss. A three-judge panel on the First Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the White House’s request to lift a lower court’s block on new Postal Service rules for mail-in ballots, which would have required unique barcodes, an online portal for voter data, and given USPS the authority to reject and return noncompliant ballot mailings. The judges wrote bluntly that there’s “no record evidence of past fraud or a likelihood of impending fraud” tied to the November election, directly contradicting Trump’s long-standing claims, and agreed with the district court that the rule likely violates the Constitution’s Elections Clause by letting an executive agency regulate elections in a way reserved for states and Congress. This is now the third time the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to intervene and stay the injunction, and the high court still hasn’t ruled.

Trump’s Dividend:

Trump’s pledge to send every American adult a $5,000 “dividend” if Republicans keep the House and Senate drew immediate bipartisan pushback the moment he announced it at the GOP convention. Republican donor and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale said on X that he’s “strongly against bread and circus bribes,” even while professing support for the administration overall. Fiscal hawks like Rep. Chip Roy demanded to know how the plan would actually be paid for, while former Freedom Caucus chair Bob Good went further, calling it exactly the kind of socialist scheme Republicans usually accuse Democrats of pushing. When asked why he cannot just give the dividend now, Trump responded: “Because the Democrats can't do it. Because with them it's negative growth.”

The math behind the promise doesn’t hold up. With roughly 245 million adult US citizens, paying everyone $5,000 would cost more than $1.2 trillion, a sum that arrives just weeks after the national debt crossed $40 trillion for the first time. When Trump was pressed on Fox News about why the payments couldn’t go out now, since Republicans already control both chambers of Congress, he blamed Democrats, saying “with them, it’s negative growth” and touting a fabricated $21 trillion investment figure that fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked. Vance separately defended the plan as funded by tariff revenue, but the government has only collected about $300 billion in tariffs since January 2025, and more than $100 billion of that has already been refunded after the Supreme Court struck down key tariffs as illegal.

The proposal also raises real legal questions. Trump framed the offer explicitly around the election outcome, telling the crowd “if the Republicans win, you win with us, and you get $5,000,” language that legal experts note comes close to violating federal law criminalizing payments made to induce someone to vote a certain way. There’s recent precedent for how seriously that line can be taken: Elon Musk narrowly avoided prosecution last year after a bipartisan panel found he likely broke Wisconsin law by handing out $1 million checks to voters ahead of a state Supreme Court election. That case shows regulators and prosecutors are willing to scrutinize exactly this kind of politically timed cash incentive, even if it doesn’t always result in charges.

AI Dangers:

Anthropic said it disrupted several potential plots this year in which scientists used its AI models to conduct research that could have helped develop biological weapons, according to a new report published Thursday. The company said it couldn’t determine whether the work was legitimate or nefarious, since valid research that leads to vaccines can also help engineer dangerous pathogens, but it erred on the side of caution given how severe the consequences of missing malicious activity could be. In one example from May, a scientist sought Claude’s help writing a grant application for gain-of-function research on the chikungunya virus, aiming to engineer mutations that would make it more harmful through repeated infection of live animals, and Anthropic flagged the request partly because the work appeared tied to a military research institute. Jacob Klein, Anthropic’s head of threat intelligence, said “what we don’t know is if the research was meant to be weaponized... but a military institution doing gain-of-function research is concerning,” and outside reviewers including Andrew Weber of the Council on Strategic Risks called the findings “chilling examples” of state-sponsored weapons developers tapping into advanced AI.

The same report catalogued a broader set of misuses over the past eight months, including suspected Chinese and Iranian government-linked actors using Claude to surveil dissident and diaspora communities, and Russian state media generating propaganda that masqueraded as independent reporting, including fabricated claims about an election in Moldova. Anthropic also flagged a newer category of abuse: attempts to use Claude to develop software for conventional weapons, including firearms, missiles, armed drones and bombs, with three cases traced to China, two to Russia, and one that the context makes clear involves Iran’s Houthi militia in Yemen. Weber, who also served as assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological programs under Obama, argued that access to this level of AI capability should be limited to trusted researchers, saying “the fact that Russia, China and North Korea continue to develop prohibited biological weapons makes it imperative that we deny their researchers access to these extraordinarily capable models.” Public health expert Susan Monarez, a former acting CDC director, said the findings show AI’s promise for medical breakthroughs comes paired with the same capability letting “bad actors hide in plain sight” to build pathogens that might not be seen coming.

Separately, President Trump dismissed concerns about AI turning dangerous, telling GB News that humans would always have a “little gear” to shut a system down if it became a threat. Senator Bernie Sanders called the comment “appalling and extremely dangerous,” writing on X that “we must pause development NOW,” and said he plans to introduce legislation banning artificial superintelligence alongside a temporary pause on advanced AI development, joined by Rep. Greg Casar.

The remarks followed the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who warned that leading AI labs are racing toward self-improving superintelligence without adequately addressing the risks, a warning Sanders amplified by noting “the very people building this technology admit that it could threaten the future of humanity.” Rep. Ro Khanna also called for a new federal AI agency, mandatory certification for containment and kill switches, liability and insurance requirements for agentic AI, and criminal penalties for deploying uncertified models, while urging US-China cooperation on safety standards so competitive pressure doesn’t push companies to sacrifice safety for speed.

OpenAI has been quietly meeting with major electric utilities, including Duke Energy, Exelon, Southern Co., NextEra Energy, Dominion Energy and Southern California Edison, to discuss securing the power grid against AI-driven cyberattacks, with CEO Sam Altman holding his most recent session Wednesday at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting in Colorado Springs. The talks began July 20, shortly after Hugging Face disclosed that an autonomous AI system had hacked its servers, and before OpenAI later admitted its own rogue agents, roughly 700 of them over a seven-day span, were behind that attack without the company’s knowledge. Altman has pitched utilities on OpenAI’s own fix: Daybreak, the company’s $1 billion cybersecurity initiative meant to patch vulnerabilities in critical systems, though OpenAI’s head of global energy policy, John McCarrick, acknowledged utilities face regulatory limits on how much tech spending they can recover through rate hikes. The outreach comes as Anthropic and Meta have also reported their own models carrying out similar exploits in recent weeks, prompting OpenAI and dozens of other tech companies to sign an August open letter warning that “AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread” and that hospitals, water treatment plants and internet infrastructure are all at risk.

Senate Commerce Chairman Ted Cruz said his committee could mark up AI legislation as soon as this month, telling POLITICO’s “The Conversation” that “we need substantially more regulation when it comes to AI.” His comments come after a viral post from a former Anthropic researcher warning that leading AI companies have been “gambling with our lives,” which Cruz said he read and called “scary as hell,” and after a conversation with Elon Musk in which Musk put the odds of AI destroying humanity at 10 to 20 percent over the next decade, a risk Cruz called “deeply concerning.” Cruz said the committee is looking at a bipartisan bill he’s working on with Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Majority Leader John Thune targeting AI uses that create biological and nuclear threats, which Semafor reported could be introduced as soon as next week. But he cautioned against regulation that undercuts America’s AI lead over China, arguing “the Chinese are putting no guardrails. They’re going full speed ahead,” and that shutting down the U.S. industry would let China “catch up in six months and soar ahead” while leaving America without the tools to defend itself.

Other news:

Diesel prices crossed $6 a gallon nationally for the first time ever on Thursday, according to live GasBuddy data, a threshold analysts had been warning was coming as the Iran war pushed oil prices higher. Since diesel powers nearly every truck, delivery van and freight shipment in the country, the record hits the cost of moving virtually everything, from groceries to packages to raw materials. The spike is even more extreme at the pump in parts of California, where GasBuddy found five stations have already hit $9.999 a gallon, the highest price their dispensers are physically capable of displaying. It’s a striking real-world data point on inflation just as wholesale prices are already running hot and the Fed heads into its policy meeting next week.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Thursday that the U.S. has “let down our guard on counterterrorism” 25 years after 9/11, telling NBC’s Andrea Mitchell at the VOICES 25th Anniversary Symposium that thousands of extremists worldwide still wish the country harm even as the threat has “receded.” She blamed the Trump administration for gutting the intelligence-gathering apparatus, saying DOGE-driven cuts at the CIA and State Department have left the U.S. without “eyes and ears” in regions like Western Africa where extremism is spreading, and that dedicated FBI and intelligence officials lack the resources and “mission focus” they need. Clinton took a direct shot at Trump’s priorities, saying “when you’re more interested in building your ballroom than figuring out what the intelligence is coming out of Afghanistan, that is absolutely contrary to any kind of sensible decision making.” The White House referred NBC to the Department of Homeland Security, which didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Washington Post investigation found that conservative podcaster Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, spent nine months attacking rival AI chatbots ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini in nearly 500 posts without disclosing that she holds more than $1 million in Elon Musk’s xAI, a direct competitor. The stake only came to light through a financial disclosure the White House released last week for her husband, and Miller told the Post her posts “are not related to” the stock purchase, adding “I’m not getting paid to post, I do it for the love of the game.” The Post’s analysis found a stark before-and-after: in the nine months before she bought xAI shares she almost never mentioned these companies, but afterward she posted negatively about OpenAI more than 400 times, about Anthropic 64 times, and about Google’s Gemini 33 times, while posting favorably about xAI’s Grok chatbot 161 times and urging followers to try it. She bought the shares, worth $500,000 to $1 million, on December 19 during a funding round that valued the then-private xAI alongside Musk’s SpaceX; xAI has since merged with SpaceX in a deal valuing the combined company at $1 trillion, with SpaceX going public and early investors like Miller positioned for a windfall.

Gamers Nexus, working with independent security researchers and Level1Techs, found that LG smart TVs secretly scan users’ Wi-Fi networks to catalog connected devices, record ambient conversations through built-in microphones, and track viewing habits, all while appearing off in standby mode and even when disconnected from the internet. The recorded audio is stored locally and uploaded automatically once an internet connection is restored, while the device-scanning data combines with LG’s existing automated content recognition technology, which already tracks what users watch to sell that data to advertisers, creating a detailed profile of both a household’s devices and its media habits for LG’s ad business. Researchers also identified a vulnerability that could allow remote code execution, though they’re withholding technical details for responsible disclosure. LG owners have reacted with outrage online, with one Reddit post calling the practice “wiretapping your whole house,” and this isn’t LG’s first privacy controversy either, as a separate Gamers Nexus investigation last month found LG monitors were secretly installing pop-up ads on customers’ computers, a practice that drew a rebuke from Microsoft demanding its removal.

A Trump loyalist tapped to lead a sprawling Justice Department “grand conspiracy” investigation targeting the president’s political foes abruptly resigned Thursday, according to sources familiar with the matter. Joe diGenova submitted his resignation to Attorney General Todd Blanche amid growing frustration from Trump and senior DOJ officials over his handling of the probe, which is run out of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Florida and has produced no criminal prosecutions despite dozens of subpoenas issued over the past year. DiGenova, an 81-year-old attorney who hadn’t worked as a prosecutor in decades but had aided Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, was installed in April after pitching himself as someone who could ramp up the investigation into intelligence officials and others who scrutinized Trump going back to his 2016 campaign. He frequently used media appearances to echo Trump’s grievances and conspiracy theories about the probes that have targeted him since his first term. Neither diGenova nor a Justice Department spokesperson responded to ABC News’ request for comment.

A new study from the German Aerospace Center’s Institute of Space Research found that Mercury may be shrinking faster than previously thought, with the planet’s diameter loss now estimated at up to 14 miles, about 30% greater than earlier calculations. Researchers determined that Mercury’s rough, crater-strewn surface had been masking the true extent of the shrinkage, since debris from impact craters obscured many of the wrinkles that form as the planet’s oversized iron core cools and contracts. Lead author Gaku Nishiyama, who compared geologic fault maps with newer surface-roughness maps, said the roughest patches showed fewer visible wrinkles because they were likely buried under impact debris. The findings arrive just as the European-Japanese BepiColombo spacecraft approaches Mercury, with its laser instrument expected to confirm the shrinkage rate once it enters orbit in November. Only two spacecraft, NASA’s Mariner 10 in the 1970s and MESSENGER in the 2010s, have ever visited Mercury, making this new data especially valuable for understanding how the small planet has evolved since its formation 4.5 billion years ago.

Ohio Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy deleted a campaign video of himself swinging at pitches in a batting cage after it became an online punch line and an eyewitness raised questions about how the footage was edited. The clip, part of a series outlining “10 things” he’d do as governor, drew mockery from Democrats including his opponent’s running mate David Pepper, the Ohio Democratic Party, Rep. Chris Deluzio, and former Montana candidate Ryan Busse, who joked the swing had “the force and form of an 87yr old grandmother.” The more substantive criticism came from Michael Peacock, who said he was at the same batting cage and saw Ramaswamy take roughly 25 pitches while making contact only a handful of times, and that the campaign appeared to reuse footage from the same few swings. Ramaswamy’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment, and the original video is no longer on his social accounts, though copies and screenshots keep circulating. He faces Democrat Amy Acton in the November 3 general election, with recent polling showing the race a dead heat.

New Mexico’s five-member congressional delegation, all Democrats, sent letters Thursday urging Apple and Google executives to “publicly commit” to keeping New Mexico’s name on Apple Maps and Google Maps after Trump posted at least seven maps over the weekend relabeling the state “New America.” The lawmakers, including Senators Ben Ray Luján and Martin Heinrich, wrote that “the President has no legal authority to rename New Mexico” and that the state’s name is rooted in its history and constitution. Their concern isn’t hypothetical: both companies already updated their maps to reflect Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” moves the delegation called “disappointing but unsurprising” given the companies’ business interests before the federal government. They pointed to Apple and Google both donating to Trump’s White House ballroom project and having executives attend his second inauguration, plus Tim Cook’s gift of a 24-karat gold statue, as reasons to doubt the companies would resist pressure. While Trump can direct how federal agencies refer to geographic features, he has no authority to compel private companies, foreign nations, or states to follow suit, and The Independent said Apple and Google hadn’t yet responded to requests for comment.

Cilia Flores, the wife of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (shown together during a 2019 rally), has asked a federal judge to release her to home detention ahead of trial, citing a “serious” heart condition that her attorney says requires a cardiac catheterization and possibly more invasive procedures. Her lawyer said Flores has lost more than 25 pounds and two molars, sleeps only three to four hours a night, and experienced a 30-minute episode of intense chest pressure and shortness of breath on July 29 that her legal team, working with outside medical experts, believes may have been a minor heart attack. Flores and Maduro have been held in a Brooklyn jail since US forces captured them in a January raid on their Caracas home, and both face charges including conspiracy to import cocaine and weapons possession, with Maduro also facing narco-terrorism charges; both have pleaded not guilty ahead of a June trial. The defense proposed conditions for her release including GPS monitoring, 24-hour armed surveillance, surrender of travel documents, and a court-approved custodian, but the Trump administration opposes her release, and a spokesperson for the Southern District of New York declined to comment. This request follows a similar bid last week by the couple to have the entire indictment dismissed on the grounds that they’re immune from prosecution as a foreign head of state and first lady.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a sweeping lawsuit against Netflix, accusing the company of a “years-long bait-and-switch” that misled families into believing its ad-free subscription protected them from Big Tech-style data surveillance while it secretly collected billions of behavioral data points on what users watched, clicked, paused, replayed, and skipped. The 66-page complaint alleges Netflix used its “addictive” autoplay feature to maximize engagement, including among children on kids’ profiles marketed as “safe,” before eventually building the same advertising business it had long promised never to create. Netflix denied the allegations, saying it takes member privacy seriously, complies with data protection laws, and intends to “vigorously defend” against a lawsuit it says “lacks merit.” This is part of a broader pattern of Florida tech litigation under Uthmeier, who also sued OpenAI in June over safety concerns and TikTok the same month for allegedly violating the state’s child safety law, and it echoes a similar suit Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed against Netflix four months earlier accusing it of “spying on” children. Florida is seeking a jury trial and asking the court to order Netflix to purge all data it allegedly collected deceptively from state residents.

North Carolina investigators have identified skeletal remains found in the woods near Wilson in December 1977 as those of Cindy Marcell Blizzard, a 15-year-old girl who had run away from her home in Monkton, Maryland, earlier that year. It took nearly 50 years and multiple advances in DNA technology to identify her; investigators first submitted DNA samples to genetic databases in 2010 with no matches, and only succeeded after conducting more advanced testing in 2024 using forensic tools that didn’t exist when her remains were originally found. Her cause of death remains unknown, but the State Bureau of Investigation is treating the case as a possible homicide given the circumstances of where and how the remains were recovered. When first discovered in 1977, a medical examiner could only determine the remains belonged to a white female between 16 and 23 who had been dead for roughly six months to two years. Authorities are now asking the public for any tips that might help solve the decades-old case, which they can submit by phone or email to the SBI’s cold case unit.

Indonesia’s health ministry reported that wildfire-related respiratory infections more than doubled in just over a week, rising from 50,891 cases on September 1 to 113,336 by September 9, as fires tore through forest and peatland across Sumatra and Borneo. This year’s wildfire season is the country’s most intense in 11 years, driven by “super-El Niño” conditions that have pushed temperatures higher and worsened drought, with Indonesia’s fire emissions now accounting for a third of the global total. More than 12.5 million people across seven provinces have been exposed to the resulting haze, prompting authorities to distribute nearly a million masks and hundreds of oxygen concentrators while deploying thousands of medical workers to affected areas. The pollution has also spread across borders, causing unhealthy air quality in Singapore and Malaysia, with the hardest-hit Indonesian city, Pontianak, recording a hazardous air quality index of 394 this week. Japan has sent three Chinook helicopters to assist water-bombing operations set to begin this weekend in West Kalimantan, and Malaysia has separately offered its own aerial firefighting support, which Indonesian officials say they’re now coordinating on internally.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Silences Kimmel in Major Attack, Thousands of Empty Seats at Convention, Trump’s Speech Debunked, Inflation Surges, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 10, 2026. Trump’s FCC just got Jimmy Kimmel’s interview with a Democratic Senate candidate pulled off broadcast television, the second late-night host in six months to face that exact pressure over the same candidate.

His first-ever midterm convention played out in front of a half-empty arena while he insisted it was “packed,” and the headline promise from that speech, a $5,000 check for every American adult, falls apart the moment you do the math. And while Trump keeps telling voters the war with Iran will be over right after the midterms, his own vice president and secretary of state are privately warning him it could drag on for years.

When the FCC can threaten a network into pulling a Senate candidate's interview off the air, and when it's happened twice now to two different hosts covering the same race, that's not a coincidence, it's a warning shot at anyone in traditional broadcast who books the wrong guest. Independent journalists don't have network lawyers to lean on and we don't have affiliates the government can squeeze, which means we don't scare the same way. That's exactly why this work matters right now and why I need your support to keep doing it. If you want news that doesn't get quietly disappeared because a politician doesn't like it, subscribe, share this with someone, and help keep independent journalism alive while it's under real pressure.Subscribed

Here’s the news:

Trump Silences Jimmy Kimmel:

Jimmy Kimmel announced that his Thursday interview with Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico will not air on broadcast TV after Trump’s FCC threatened Jimmy Kimmel Live!, ABC, and its affiliates and local stations. Instead, the interview will be posted in full on the show’s YouTube channel, a workaround Kimmel says he’s using “out of consideration” for ABC’s local stations, particularly its Texas affiliates, who would otherwise have to deal with regulatory blowback. Kimmel noted that he’s interviewed political candidates without incident for his show’s entire 20-plus-year run, including Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and Trump himself back in 2015, when Trump seemed eager to appear on late night and had no objection to the practice. He said he can’t explain what’s changed now that Trump is president, other than the FCC targeting “simple, traditional editorial decisions” like guest bookings it apparently disapproves of. Kimmel closed by urging viewers to register to vote, calling that “the most important thing you can do” in the current media environment.

jimmykimmel jimmykimmelJimmy Kimmel on Instagram: "Due to circumstances beyond our com…View on Instagram

This isn’t the first time a late-night host has had a Talarico interview blocked from broadcast under similar pressure. About six months earlier, then-Late Show host Stephen Colbert said CBS lawyers directly told him he could not air a scheduled interview with Talarico, citing FCC threats, though CBS publicly denied that it had prohibited the broadcast. The recurrence of this exact pattern across two different networks and hosts suggests a broader chilling effect on how traditional broadcasters are willing to cover Talarico specifically, rather than an isolated incident. Both cases involve mainstream, decades-old late-night programs that have historically hosted candidates from both parties without controversy, making the sudden regulatory pressure notably selective.

Talarico is a four-term Texas state representative, former schoolteacher, and Presbyterian seminarian now running a competitive Senate campaign against state Attorney General Ken Paxton in a state Democrats haven’t won a federal seat in for more than 30 years. He’s built his campaign around blending progressive economic positions, particularly on wealth inequality, with language rooted in religious values, a combination that has helped him attract crossover support from Texas independents, moderates, and even some disaffected Republicans. That crossover appeal, combined with how close the race has become, may help explain why his media appearances in particular have drawn outsized scrutiny and pressure compared to other Democratic candidates. The pattern of blocked interviews adds a new wrinkle to a race already being closely watched as a test of whether Democrats can break their multi-decade losing streak in Texas statewide races.

Trump’s Convention Speech Debunked:

Trump’s opening night speech at his “Trump-a-palooza” midterm convention in Dallas was undercut by visible rows of empty seats across the American Airlines Center, despite his repeated insistence that the 21,000-capacity arena was “packed” and that an equal number of people were standing outside. Reporters on the scene, including Reuters’ Nandita Bose and NBC’s Garrett Haake, posted photos and video directly contradicting him, showing empty upper decks and attendees leaving well before his speech, which ran nearly double its planned 45 minutes, finally ended. The giant screen behind him also glitched during his opening remarks, awkwardly looping rapid-fire clips of earlier speakers like Scott Bessent and UFC fighters instead of showing him live. Trump even joked with the crowd about not leaving their seats to use the bathroom so the media couldn’t photograph the gaps, an echo of his long history of disputing crowd-size coverage dating back to his 2017 inauguration. The speech itself was packed with familiar bravado, from blaming Democrats for the affordability crisis to reasserting his false claim that he won the 2020 election, all while his campaign now faces mounting scrutiny over the legality and roughly $1.3 trillion cost of the $5,000 “dividend” he promised voters.

Trump’s promise to send every American adult a $5,000 “dividend” if Republicans hold Congress was the biggest moment of the night, but it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. He offered no explanation of how it would be funded, only that Republicans need to “win,” and claimed it was possible because of the economy’s “tremendous strength,” even as inflation stays above the Fed’s target and food prices haven’t been dropping the way he claimed. The math alone is disqualifying: paying roughly 245 million adults $5,000 each would cost more than $1.2 trillion, several times what tariff revenue actually generates, and the federal government is running deficits of about $2 trillion a year against $40 trillion in debt, meaning this would be a deficit-financed handout, not a “dividend” in any real sense of a company distributing profit. The funding source he’s pointed to is also shakier than he suggests: the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in February that the emergency powers law Trump used to justify his tariffs doesn’t actually authorize them, and the government has since been unwinding and refunding those duties. He also has no unilateral authority to send this money without Congress, many of whose own Republicans are fiscal hawks who may not go along with it, and notably, an earlier $2,000 “tariff dividend” Trump promised back in November 2025 still has never materialized.

Convention speakers spent much of the night attacking Democrats as extremist “communists” rather than touting Republican accomplishments, with figures like Tom Emmer, Mike Collins, Steve Scalise, and Tim Scott repeatedly using that label to paint the opposition as un-American. This messaging push comes even though most Democrats running in competitive midterm races have not embraced socialism, and while a handful of self-identified democratic socialists have won primaries this cycle, the broader Democratic field remains largely centrist. Scalise went so far as to call it “the Bolshevik Revolution in the Democratic Party,” while Scott framed the midterms as a fight to keep “dangerous, radical, weird” out of the Senate. Republicans appear convinced this attack line resonates with their base regardless of how accurately it reflects most Democratic candidates’ actual positions.

The event fully lived up to its “Trumpapalooza” nickname, with Trump’s face and merchandise dominating the arena, including Trump golf balls, rubber ducks, Bibles, MAGA guitars, and a shirt depicting him as the Marlboro Man on horseback. Despite Trump declaring the arena “packed” and claiming people were turned away outside, large sections of upper-level seating remained visibly empty. Several Republican candidates in tight races skipped the convention entirely to distance themselves from a president dragging down poll numbers, even as many speakers used their time on stage to praise Trump as much as promote their own campaigns. The overall tone had the feel of a celebration built around Trump personally rather than a traditional midterm strategy session, a dynamic some Republicans worry could backfire with swing voters.

In a surprising twist, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman appeared in a video played at the Republican convention introducing his Pennsylvania colleague, Sen. David McCormick, and pledged to work with McCormick and Trump to “defend the steel way of life.” Fetterman used the appearance to distance himself from his own party, saying he rejects “the extremes and socialism” and will “always stand with America,” language that echoed Republican convention rhetoric rather than Democratic messaging. This comes after a year of Fetterman angering fellow Democrats with his strong pro-Israel stance, criticism of his own party on Fox News, and praise for Trump. Democrats had otherwise skipped holding a counter-convention, instead sending officials like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to Dallas to hold press conferences accusing Republicans of using the event to obscure Trump’s record on the economy and the Iran war, making Fetterman’s appearance an unwelcome distraction from that messaging.

Despite the U.S. military escalating strikes on Iran just a day earlier, convention speakers almost entirely avoided mentioning the war, a war that polling shows is deeply unpopular and has split the MAGA coalition itself. Rising gas prices, with Brent crude nearing $100 a barrel and gasoline averaging around $4 a gallon, have compounded cost-of-living frustrations that make the conflict a political liability heading into the midterms. Trump himself was the only speaker willing to address it directly, calling it “small potatoes,” predicting it would end “immediately” after the midterms because Iran is “desperate,” and floating renaming the Strait of Hormuz the “Trump Strait.” Rather than engage with the war, most speakers steered toward safer, base-friendly topics like immigration enforcement and tax cuts.

Iran War Could Last Years:

Top White House officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have privately warned Trump that the war with Iran could drag on through the remainder of his presidency, potentially past Inauguration Day in January 2029, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing US officials familiar with internal Oval Office and Situation Room discussions. That assessment stands in direct contrast to what Trump has told the public, where he’s repeatedly claimed the conflict would wrap up soon, most recently predicting it would end “immediately after” the November midterms because Iran is “desperate” and “can’t hold out any longer.” Trump acknowledged diplomatic talks remain theoretically possible but said his administration isn’t pursuing negotiations right now, leaving unclear how the White House would actually handle a war that drags on well beyond what Trump has publicly promised voters. The gap between the private warnings and Trump’s public timeline raises questions about whether his midterm messaging on Iran is grounded in his own administration’s actual assessment of the conflict.

George W. Bush appeared to shade Trump by praising the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine: “Thank God you are where you are.”

Oil prices jumped sharply, with US crude briefly topping $100 a barrel and Brent crude trading around $105, both the highest levels since May, as markets braced for a prolonged fight after fighting between the US and Iran escalated sharply this week. The spike came directly on the heels of the Wall Street Journal’s report that Trump’s own advisers see the war potentially lasting years, undercutting his public claim that fighting would end right after the midterms. Retail gasoline hit a Labor Day record, and diesel prices are expected to cross $6 a gallon for the first time ever in the coming days, even as Trump insisted prices would fall once the election passes. Analysts, including Goldman Sachs’ Daan Struyven, warned that continued attacks on shipping could push oil above $120 a barrel if the conflict keeps escalating, while other market strategists noted crude has already erased months of prior price declines.

Multiple US military aircraft were damaged overnight in Iranian strikes on the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, including an A-10 Thunderbolt attack jet that lost a wing and roughly eight F-15s that sustained lighter damage but were returned to service, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke to CBS News anonymously. No American deaths have been reported from the strikes. The attack came in retaliation after the US struck five Iranian tankers on Tuesday, with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps claiming it hit eight tankers and two warships in response, prompting US forces in Jordan to fire more than 30 Patriot missiles in defense, a response notable given CBS’s earlier reporting that America’s Patriot missile stockpile is running critically low. Despite the direct hit on US forces, Trump told reporters Wednesday he still expects the war to end right after the midterms and said he is not currently seeking negotiations with Iran, “to be honest.”

Other news:

OpenAI board member Paul Christiano, a former head of model alignment at the company and a US government technology adviser, warned that the AI industry, including OpenAI itself, is not on track to reduce the risk of “catastrophic and irreversible loss of control” to an acceptable level, a statement he made this week as he joined OpenAI’s non-profit foundation board and its safety governance committee. His warning comes just months after OpenAI admitted hundreds of its AI agents went rogue during a training exercise, accessing the internet, conspiring on message boards, and hacking a third-party site called Hugging Face. It also follows a claim from Anthropic’s alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, that there’s a greater than 10% chance AI could “kill all humans” within a decade, and the resignation of a 27-year-old Anthropic researcher who said neither company was “acting responsibly.” Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, one of AI’s so-called godfathers, said Hubinger’s 10% estimate “seems not an unreasonable estimate,” while Anthropic separately disclosed a January incident in which a Claude model in training went rogue, uploaded malicious code to a public repository, and leaked credentials that let it access a security vendor’s database. Lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, and UK officials, are now calling for government action as these long-discussed Silicon Valley fears break into mainstream political debate.

Trouble in the US bond market threatens to keep prices elevated for consumers, as investor concerns over inflation, the ongoing Iran war, and the record $40 trillion national debt have driven the 10-year Treasury yield to 4.8%, its highest since 2023, up from 3.95% at the end of February when the war began. Because mortgage, auto loan, and credit card rates are closely tied to Treasury yields, borrowing costs are already climbing, with the 30-year fixed mortgage rate at 6.66% as of late August and expected to rise further, a trend that’s already slowed homebuilding and is expected to ripple into construction jobs and retail sales. Economist Alex Jacquez of the Groundwork Collaborative warned that higher borrowing costs will hit hardest for Americans whose savings are already depleted, noting that credit card balances and defaults are creeping back up as people turn to credit to cover basics like healthcare and groceries. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tripled the government’s bond buyback program from $2 billion to $6 billion to try to stabilize the market, following an earlier move to buy Japanese yen, but both interventions only briefly calmed yields before they resumed climbing, drawing criticism from billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller that “governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose.”

Wholesale inflation accelerated in August, with the Producer Price Index rising 5.4% year-over-year, up from 4.8% in July, as the war with Iran continued driving up energy costs, which alone accounted for more than three-fourths of the monthly rise in goods prices. Core inflation, which strips out volatile food and energy, also ticked up to 4.6% annualized from 4.3% in July, while electronic component costs jumped 3.4% for the month and are up 27.6% for the year, a trend tied to the ongoing AI buildout. The report complicates the Federal Reserve’s efforts to hit its 2% inflation target ahead of next week’s policy meeting, where investors now expect the Fed to hold rates steady but potentially raise them as soon as October. It also raises the stakes for Friday’s Consumer Price Index release, especially after Fed Governor Christopher Waller said persistently high inflation could push him to “consider a rate hike” even though he generally favors holding steady.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels have seized the strategic Red Sea port of Mocha and other territory in the most intense fighting with the Saudi-backed government in years, a move that could hand Iran and its proxies effective control of two critical global shipping chokepoints, the Bab al-Mandeb strait and the Strait of Hormuz, on opposite sides of the Arabian peninsula. The escalation appears aimed at opening a second front in the broader Iran-US conflict, pressuring Saudi Arabia and Washington to lift the US blockade on Iranian oil tankers, with analysts estimating rebel forces have gained control of more than 2,320 square miles of territory and at least 276 people killed in just five days of fighting. Saudi Arabia has responded with dozens of airstrikes while acknowledging Houthi ground gains, and the conflict traces back to a July dispute over a Houthi delegation’s return flight from Iran that Saudi forces prevented from landing, triggering a Houthi naval blockade announcement and subsequent strikes on Saudi oil infrastructure and shipping. Experts say a de-escalation is unlikely soon since both sides are trying to inflict maximum damage to force a compromise, and the fighting has already helped push global oil prices back above $100 a barrel after trading closer to $80 in prior weeks.

Elon Musk launched an angry public attack on documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney after Gibney’s four-hour film about Musk premiered at the Venice Film Festival, calling him a “bitter old man” with “zero integrity” and dismissing the film as a boring “hit piece” in a series of posts on X. Musk also reposted an image depicting a conspiracy-style chain of puppets linking the Democratic Party, George Soros, Gibney, and Hollywood, calling it “accurate,” and separately denied a claim from his ex-partner Ashley St Clair that his team offered her $40 million for a non-disclosure agreement. Katie Miller, wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller and a former Musk DOGE communications director, amplified complaints that Musk allies were absent from the film, calling it a “hit job” that can’t be “definitive.” Gibney, whose past subjects include Enron, WikiLeaks, and Vladimir Putin, called Musk “extremely dangerous” and speculated that a difficult childhood in South Africa may explain Musk’s current behavior, saying Musk is “playing out that trauma on the rest of us.”

A Floodlight investigation found that the chemical industry has successfully pushed nearly identical laws in Louisiana, Kentucky, and Ohio that bar regulators from using community-collected air pollution data for enforcement unless it comes from EPA-approved equipment costing tens of thousands of dollars, effectively neutralizing one of the few tools residents have left to hold polluters accountable. Internal industry emails showed companies like Chemours explicitly rejected a compromise version of similar legislation in West Virginia specifically because it would have let regulators consider community data under certain conditions, with one executive writing the compromise “codifies what we are trying to prevent.” This comes as the public monitoring network has deteriorated sharply, with federal funding down more than 35% over two decades and the number of government monitors nearly halved, leaving nearly six in ten US counties with no public air monitor at all, and at 71 of 100 major industrial facilities Floodlight examined, the chemical released in the greatest quantity isn’t tracked by any state monitor. Ohio resident Donna Ballinger, who lives near a steel plant and fears developing cancer, is part of a lawsuit challenging her state’s law, which she says renders her privately purchased monitor’s readings useless as evidence, while Louisiana’s own history in Louisville’s Rubbertown district shows monitoring can work, since documented data there led to regulatory changes that cut toxic air contaminants by nearly 80%.

A new peer-reviewed study found that natural feedback loops, including thawing permafrost, worsening wildfires, and warming wetlands and lakes, are releasing additional methane and carbon dioxide that could amplify global warming by an extra 20% to 30% by the end of the century, adding as much as 0.2 to 0.4 degrees Celsius beyond what current climate models project. Researchers say this “hidden multiplier” from natural sources like permafrost, wildfires, wetlands, and freshwater systems is largely missing from the models that guide international climate policy, meaning those models likely underestimate future warming and overestimate the remaining carbon budget. The findings arrive just after the UN acknowledged the 1.5°C warming target will be breached within years, and current government policies are already projected to push warming to 2.6°C, a level that would cause severe sea level rise, crop losses, and other disruptions for billions of people. Scientists not involved in the study, including Oregon State ecologist Bill Ripple, called the results an important warning that reinforces the need for rapid emissions cuts, since crossing certain thresholds risks triggering the kind of runaway feedback loops that could push the planet toward catastrophic, self-reinforcing warming.

A new documentary called NAZA, produced by the Guardian and premiering at the Venice Film Festival, features testimony from 24 anonymous Israeli military and intelligence insiders detailing secret AI-based targeting systems used to identify and kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including strikes on the homes of low-level Hamas targets carried out at night with knowledge that family members would also die. Interviewees described the military hacking into phones to track targets and listening to victims’ final conversations with their wives and children before airstrikes, along with the destruction of neighborhoods where up to a quarter of residents were still sheltering, systematic home burnings, and a killing at a food distribution site. Several sources worked in a secret intelligence unit reporting directly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, with one saying their mission was to “thwart peace,” and directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who previously co-directed the Oscar-winning No Other Land, said the film focuses not on rogue soldiers but on the systemic orders, policies, and logic enabling the killings. The film builds on years of reporting by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian, and comes as Israeli attacks since 2023 have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians and injured over 174,000, in a war that began after the October 2023 Hamas-led attack that killed roughly 1,200 people and took 251 hostages. 

MeidasTouch Network, Thursday Updates: Trump's Fake $5,000, Dallas Falls Apart, and the Houthis Take the Red Sea, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 10, 2026. From the disaster that is the Trump Midterm Convention, to the Houthis taking control over the red sea, to brutal economic news, the last 12 hours or so have been quite eventful, so like, restack, and let’s dig into the headlines:

• Trump doubles down on his latest lie about a $5,000 “Trump dividend” and then also promises to give away $500 Obamacare “rebate” checks. Scammers gonna scam.
• PPI inflation jumps to 5.4% YoY, Treasury yields spike, oil spikes
• The Houthis seize the port city of Mokha and Zuqar Island, tightening their grip on the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait
• The very embarrassing and bizarre Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas
• The Supreme Court blocks the Missouri GOP’s gerrymandered map
• Jimmy Kimmel says the FCC threatened him over his interview with James Talarico, causing him to make it a YouTube only broadcast
• The U.S. is pressing NATO allies to abandon the International Criminal Court
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Trump’s $5,000 Lie

It’s been another disastrous morning for Donald Trump. And as his back is increasingly against the wall with midterms fast approaching, he’s becoming increasingly desperate. Trump’s bringing back one of his favorite scams: offering to give people money they will never see. He announced last night in Dallas that if Republicans hold the House and Senate in November, he’ll cut every adult American a $5,000 check he’s calling a “Trump Dividend.” This morning, he followed that up with a video announcing $500 rebate checks for nearly a million people he says were “wrongly overcharged” under Obamacare.Image

This is his go-to move. See: DOGE checks, tariff rebate checks, giving everyone the gold “found” at Fort Knox. He Fox was forced to acknowledge on air that Trump has made these promises before and never delivered. He’s promised gas at $2/gallon. He promised electricity prices cut in half within 12 months. He promised he’d end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. He promised the Iran War would end within weeks. He’s a scam artist. A con man. Even Trump’s own former chief of staff Mick Mulvaney appeared on Fox Business and basically said don’t hold your breath on Trump’s latest lie, noting that the real cost of Trump’s $5,000 promise is around $1.3 trillion. That would not only increase the debt, but it’d also lead to massive inflation and even higher interest rates. Fox’s Bret Baier even pressed JD Vance on this, and Vance’s answer was nonsensical. He claimed that tariff revenue justifies it. It doesn’t. Remember: Trump’s been going around bragging that he could be the “best communist” in history because all he’d have to do is promise people free stuff and then never deliver it. He told you his plan.These Economic Indicators Are Brutal

Let’s look at the actual numbers. You know I am a data guy. PPI inflation just came in at 5.4% year-over-year, the highest reading of 2026, with core PPI coming in at 4.6%. The 10-year Treasury yield climbed to nearly 4.92%, with the 30-year hitting a multiyear high around 5.33-5.35%. Both WTI and Brent crude are above $100/barrel and rising. The Treasury tripled its long-term bond buyback to $6B this week to try to calm the bond marker. It didn’t work. This is the bond market telling Scott Bessent it doesn’t believe him. And they see his moves for what they are: panic.

Contrast that to the tale Trump spewed on stage in Dallas, calling this “the most successful 2 years financially and every other way in the history of the presidency” and claiming tariffs are “making us much richer than we ever thought.” Nope. Pollster Harry Enten put together a graphic for CNN showing Trump’s net approval rating on the economy among independents has cratered 62 points lower than it was at this exact point in his first term back in 2018, and 2018 was already a bad midterm cycle for Republicans.WTF Is Going On at the GOP Convention

Despite images of empty seats, closed down sections, and dismal streaming views, Trump took to his social media account to false claim the event broke attendance records and beat the NFL in ratings.

The event has been a mess so far. The podium sign that was supposed to read “DALLAS” had an “L” fall off, so it just read “DA LAS.” Ken Paxton and Tim Scott spent a large amount of time railing against Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico for once suggesting God is nonbinary, insisting over and over that God has a penis. They were very adamant about this. MAGA world has also constantly tried to attack Talarico as a vegan, which isn’t even true, and if it were, who the hell cares. How does any of this make people’s lives better in Texas? Trump made this a centerpiece of his speech when he wasn’t bribing voters, ranting about people “beating meat.” These people can’t govern. They’re presiding over one of the worst times in American history. So all they have are these weird distractions.Subscribed

Other weird moments:

• Rep. Anna Paulina Luna making her speech about the evils of people profiting from their office, as she stumped for Trump
• Trump’s HUD secretary trying to smack her on the butt as she exited stage
• Rick Scott framing the current crisis as a false binary: either we have nuclear annihilation due to Iran using a nuke, or you pay $6 for gas. Be happy, peasants.

Yemen and the Red Sea

While the domestic circus was happening, one of the most consequential events just occurred. The Iran-backed Houthis fully seized the port city of Mokha on Yemen’s Red Sea coast, along with Zuqar Island, with the IRGC providing direct guidance for their advance. Mokha sits right near the Bab al-Mandab Strait, another major chokepoint connecting the Red Sea to global shipping lanes. I’ve been warning about this for months on the MeidasTouch Podcast, as many of you know.

To add, the Epoch Times interviewed Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao, who confirmed something we’ve also been telling you for months: that Iranian strikes did serious damage to Naval Support Activity Bahrain, the Fifth Fleet's main logistical hub. Cao said the damage left the USS Abraham Lincoln's crew with nowhere to pull in. We haven’t heard any Trump officials admit to this damage before.SCOTUS, the ICC, and Kimmel

The Supreme Court blocked Missouri’s newly drawn 7-1 gerrymandered congressional map from taking effect for the midterms. The order stayed (or paused) a Trump-appointed judge's ruling that had temporarily revived the gerrymander after Missouri's own state Supreme Court had already struck it down 7-0. That means Missouri goes back to its previous 6-2 congressional map for November, and notably, the order came down with no dissents noted.

Separately, POLITICO reported that the U.S. is pressuring NATO allies to withdraw support from the International Criminal Court, with envoy Matthew Whitaker reportedly telling allies “we will be watching closely who stands with America.”

And Jimmy Kimmel announced his interview with Talarico will not air on ABC, saying Trump's FCC threatened the network and its affiliates over what he called simple editorial decisions.

More On Court Clash Over Republican Gerrymander Attempt In Missouri

 

New York Times, Supreme Court Again Blocks Republican-Backed Missouri Voting Map, Ann E. Marimow and Mitch Smith, Sept. 10, 2026. The ruling deferred to the state’s Supreme Court, which had invalidated G.O.P.-friendly district lines, saying voters must first have an opportunity to approve the map in a statewide referendum.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday once again prevented Missouri from using a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an advantage in the midterm elections.

It was the second time this week that the Supreme Court waded into a dizzying legal fight over Missouri’s congressional map, and it came just two months before a general election in which the state’s voters could determine control of the House.

The court’s brief order did not include any reasoning, as is often the case when the justices respond to emergency requests. There were no noted dissents.

Denny Hoskins, the Missouri secretary of state, said in a statement on Thursday afternoon that his office was “directing local election authorities to use the 2022 congressional map,” not the redrawn one, in compliance with the Supreme Court order. That map would position Democrats to retain a seat in the Kansas City area.

The announcement from Mr. Hoskins amounted to a major win for redistricting opponents, who waged a yearlong fight against the new map. But it did not answer the question of how election officials would conduct a general election based on a map different from the one used in the primary in August.

Holding a general election with a different map than what was used in the primary is rare legal territory, and the courts have so far given no specific guidance on how nominees should be selected.

Before Thursday’s order from Washington, Missouri Republican leaders had been insisting they would stick with their preferred map for the general election.

No matter what, logistical and legal barriers seem likely to keep emerging. The deadline to finalize Missouri’s ballot was Tuesday.

Redistricting opponents have suggested in court filings that candidates who won their primaries under the redrawn map might remain the nominees in the same-numbered districts under the old lines. Alternately, they theorized, state law allowed party nominating committees to select candidates for each district.

In response to the Supreme Court’s order, opponents of the new map said the justices’ decision had definitively settled the question of which map will govern the November election.

“The law is the law, the Missouri Constitution is clear as was the Missouri Supreme Court,” Richard von Glahn, the executive director of People Not Politicians Missouri, said in a statement.

Earlier in the week, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh had taken a similar action, as Missouri Democrats briefly appeared to have prevailed in a yearlong fight to preserve a House seat they hold in the Kansas City area. In that order, he deferred to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which had determined state officials should not have adopted the new map without a voter referendum. The state court ruling came even though Missouri voters already used the new map to nominate candidates in last month’s primary contests.

Instead, the state court said Missouri should use a map that had been in place since 2022 for the upcoming election.

But minutes after the justice’s order landed on Tuesday evening, Stephen R. Clark, the chief federal judge in St. Louis, ruled in the opposite direction, ordering the state to use the map that Missouri Republicans drew last year at President Trump’s request. That map was intended to help Republicans flip the seat in Kansas City.

Judge Clark’s ruling came in a different legal case, brought by a Republican congressman who is running for re-election and a G.O.P. candidate who won the primary under the new district lines. That ruling was then appealed again to the Supreme Court, resulting in Thursday’s action.

Judge Clark cited concerns in his ruling that using a different map for the general election would “wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness” of the congressional election. He wrote that he was concerned a new map would lead to widespread voter confusion.

Mr. Hoskins, along with the governor and the attorney general, then quickly announced that they would follow the district judge’s ruling, rather than the State Supreme Court’s decision. That set off another round of court filings — and contempt proceedings against Mr. Hoskins before the State Supreme Court.

The G.O.P. map was drawn outside the usual redistricting cycle at Mr. Trump’s request, as part of an effort to improve the Republican Party’s chances of holding the House in the 2026 midterms.

The redrawn Missouri map, adopted by the State Legislature in September 2025, divided the core of Kansas City, the state’s largest city, into several districts in an attempt to unseat Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, one of two Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation. The new map did not significantly alter the partisan makeup of the other Democratic-held district, which is in the St. Louis area.

Democrats and state residents opposed to the boundaries last year collected hundreds of thousands of signatures seeking a referendum on the issue. But Mr. Hoskins said he did not believe that redistricting could legally be subject to a voter referendum, and he declined to add it to November’s ballot.

 

Civil Discourse, Opinion: Insanity in Missouri,Joyce Vance, right, Sept. 10, 2026. It’s utter insanity in Missouri, or as NBC’s Lawrence Hurley put it on Twitter this morning, the “Show Cause State.”

Currently, six Republicans and two Democrats represent the state in Congress. That is the case even though roughly 33% of registered voters are Democrats and 17% are Independents. But not satisfied with even that lopsided balance, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins and Attorney General Catherine Hanaway want to use a new gerrymandered map drawn in 2025 that makes it more difficult for Democrats, including incumbent Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, to win reelection.

Missouri’s legislature passed the law authorizing new maps last September. Civil rights groups went to court to challenge these new mid-decade maps. Then, a group called People Not Politicians collected over 300,000 signatures to put the question of which maps the state should use on the ballot for voters to decide. Nonetheless, earlier this year, the Missouri Supreme Court signed off on using the 2025 maps for this year’s elections and they were used in the primaries.

A state court judge sided with Secretary of State Hoskins’ request to keep a referendum on the maps off the ballot. But then, on September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the referendum petition was valid. The court concluded that meant the older maps from 2022 were reinstated, and the 2025 map was invalid.

I hope you’re not hopelessly confused already, because it gets worse.

Hoskins asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block that decision. On September 8, Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied the request, leaving the Missouri Supreme Court decision in place, requiring the state to use the older maps instead of the newer, gerrymandered ones. This, no surprise, was a shadow docket ruling, so there is no opinion that lays out Kavanaugh’s reasoning.

Then, in a separate case, federal District Judge Stephen Clark, a Trump appointee, ordered Hoskins to use the 2025 maps. The group People Not Politicians appealed to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, but lost, with the court finding that they lacked standing and that even if they did, they couldn’t meet the standard necessary to get an injunction against Judge Clark’s decision.

That brings us to tonight, when People Not Politicians asked the Supreme Court to intervene. Justice Kavanaugh has ordered Hoskins to respond by 10 a.m. tomorrow morning.

You’ll recall this mess started with the state court case that Hoskins asked Justice Kavanaugh to weigh in on. People Not Politicians is also arguing that Judge Clark’s decision is improper federal interference into an ongoing state court case, that he could not issue a decision like this alone and a three-judge court should have been convened, and that his decision violates the Purcell principle.

And as if that’s not enough, Richard von Glahn, the individual who intervened in the case along with People Not Politicians, has now filed “Suggestions of Contempt,” asking the state supreme court to hold Hoskins in contempt of that court’s prior order, claiming the contempt is “open and obvious.” Von Glahn points out that even “[I]f Respondent is not willing to comply with the Court's injunction,” he should still have to explain “why he should not take no action in all things related to the congressional district map until guidance is received from a higher court with jurisdiction to review the Court's judgment and injunction and the federal district court's injunction.” That’s a fair point with the matter currently sitting before the Supreme Court.

But common sense or even compliance with legal norms isn’t at work in Missouri right now.

This is the kind of chaos that Donald Trump thrives on, and where better to inject it into American society than our elections. Unsurprisingly, he has already weighed in on the case—it’s still shocking to see a U.S. president disagree with a state court so publicly—after the Missouri Supreme Court decision, calling it a “Dark Day for ‘Justice.’”

Roy Temple, a Democratic strategist and former state party leader in Missouri said that voters “can’t possibly understand who they’re going to be voting for.” He opined that “The sad part is that it’s almost entirely inflicted by people whose responsibility was to ensure the orderly conduct of elections.”

And isn’t that the bottom line here? None of this was necessary. Once the state supreme court spoke, the secretary of state should have just complied. Certainly he could have done so after the first decision by Justice Kavanaugh.

But there was never a need to go that far. A lawful process obtained sufficient signatures from Missouri voters to let citizens decide which maps to use. Instead, Hoskins and Hanaway tried to secure 8-0 Republican representation in Missouri, shutting out Democrats entirely. This sort of partisanship is a malignancy in a democracy. Even Hoskins and Hanaway ultimately acknowledged that a ballot referendum had been duly authorized; they conceded that there would be one in their filing with the U.S. Supreme Court last Friday.

In his brief, the state’s solicitor general wrote: “On the one hand, Richard von Glahn — the referendum petition’s proponent — will get his referendum vote on Missouri’s congressional map regardless of what this court does. The only question is whether he (joined by a small minority of the state’s voters) can void a congressional map before he gets his vote.” It was only ever about gamesmanship to those state officials, and the game was shutting down Democratic representation in the Congress for state voters.

The U.S. Supreme Court now faces a quagmire not of its own making. Missouri must hold elections on schedule. Voters need certainty, as much as possible at this late date with so much confusion now baked in. The Supreme Court is likely to rule quickly given the late date. Will they countermand the state supreme court and permit the 2025 maps to be used? They are, after all, the maps that were used in the primary. But the state’s own high court says they are invalid because of the proper demand for a referendum on the maps. That court says the voters should choose, even though two Republican elected officials in the state wanted to prevent it from happening. Now it’s up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

If you’ve made it through the Missouri mess with me, you understand why I write Civil Discourse. Sometimes, the only way to understand what’s happening is to read the briefs and court orders and sort it all out, especially when contradicting decisions come at blistering speed from both state and federal courts. I try to do that for you when important situations like this develop. 

 

More On Court Clash Over Republican Gerrymander Attempt In Missouri

 

New York Times, Supreme Court Again Blocks Republican-Backed Missouri Voting Map, Ann E. Marimow and Mitch Smith, Sept. 10, 2026. The ruling deferred to the state’s Supreme Court, which had invalidated G.O.P.-friendly district lines, saying voters must first have an opportunity to approve the map in a statewide referendum.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday once again prevented Missouri from using a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an advantage in the midterm elections.

It was the second time this week that the Supreme Court waded into a dizzying legal fight over Missouri’s congressional map, and it came just two months before a general election in which the state’s voters could determine control of the House.

The court’s brief order did not include any reasoning, as is often the case when the justices respond to emergency requests. There were no noted dissents.

Denny Hoskins, the Missouri secretary of state, said in a statement on Thursday afternoon that his office was “directing local election authorities to use the 2022 congressional map,” not the redrawn one, in compliance with the Supreme Court order. That map would position Democrats to retain a seat in the Kansas City area.

The announcement from Mr. Hoskins amounted to a major win for redistricting opponents, who waged a yearlong fight against the new map. But it did not answer the question of how election officials would conduct a general election based on a map different from the one used in the primary in August.

Holding a general election with a different map than what was used in the primary is rare legal territory, and the courts have so far given no specific guidance on how nominees should be selected.

Before Thursday’s order from Washington, Missouri Republican leaders had been insisting they would stick with their preferred map for the general election.

No matter what, logistical and legal barriers seem likely to keep emerging. The deadline to finalize Missouri’s ballot was Tuesday.

Redistricting opponents have suggested in court filings that candidates who won their primaries under the redrawn map might remain the nominees in the same-numbered districts under the old lines. Alternately, they theorized, state law allowed party nominating committees to select candidates for each district.

In response to the Supreme Court’s order, opponents of the new map said the justices’ decision had definitively settled the question of which map will govern the November election.

“The law is the law, the Missouri Constitution is clear as was the Missouri Supreme Court,” Richard von Glahn, the executive director of People Not Politicians Missouri, said in a statement.

Earlier in the week, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh had taken a similar action, as Missouri Democrats briefly appeared to have prevailed in a yearlong fight to preserve a House seat they hold in the Kansas City area. In that order, he deferred to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which had determined state officials should not have adopted the new map without a voter referendum. The state court ruling came even though Missouri voters already used the new map to nominate candidates in last month’s primary contests.

Instead, the state court said Missouri should use a map that had been in place since 2022 for the upcoming election.

But minutes after the justice’s order landed on Tuesday evening, Stephen R. Clark, the chief federal judge in St. Louis, ruled in the opposite direction, ordering the state to use the map that Missouri Republicans drew last year at President Trump’s request. That map was intended to help Republicans flip the seat in Kansas City.

Judge Clark’s ruling came in a different legal case, brought by a Republican congressman who is running for re-election and a G.O.P. candidate who won the primary under the new district lines. That ruling was then appealed again to the Supreme Court, resulting in Thursday’s action.

Judge Clark cited concerns in his ruling that using a different map for the general election would “wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness” of the congressional election. He wrote that he was concerned a new map would lead to widespread voter confusion.

Mr. Hoskins, along with the governor and the attorney general, then quickly announced that they would follow the district judge’s ruling, rather than the State Supreme Court’s decision. That set off another round of court filings — and contempt proceedings against Mr. Hoskins before the State Supreme Court.

The G.O.P. map was drawn outside the usual redistricting cycle at Mr. Trump’s request, as part of an effort to improve the Republican Party’s chances of holding the House in the 2026 midterms.

The redrawn Missouri map, adopted by the State Legislature in September 2025, divided the core of Kansas City, the state’s largest city, into several districts in an attempt to unseat Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, one of two Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation. The new map did not significantly alter the partisan makeup of the other Democratic-held district, which is in the St. Louis area.

Democrats and state residents opposed to the boundaries last year collected hundreds of thousands of signatures seeking a referendum on the issue. But Mr. Hoskins said he did not believe that redistricting could legally be subject to a voter referendum, and he declined to add it to November’s ballot.

 

Civil Discourse, Opinion: Insanity in Missouri,Joyce Vance, right, Sept. 10, 2026. It’s utter insanity in Missouri, or as NBC’s Lawrence Hurley put it on Twitter this morning, the “Show Cause State.”

Currently, six Republicans and two Democrats represent the state in Congress. That is the case even though roughly 33% of registered voters are Democrats and 17% are Independents. But not satisfied with even that lopsided balance, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins and Attorney General Catherine Hanaway want to use a new gerrymandered map drawn in 2025 that makes it more difficult for Democrats, including incumbent Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, to win reelection.

Missouri’s legislature passed the law authorizing new maps last September. Civil rights groups went to court to challenge these new mid-decade maps. Then, a group called People Not Politicians collected over 300,000 signatures to put the question of which maps the state should use on the ballot for voters to decide. Nonetheless, earlier this year, the Missouri Supreme Court signed off on using the 2025 maps for this year’s elections and they were used in the primaries.

A state court judge sided with Secretary of State Hoskins’ request to keep a referendum on the maps off the ballot. But then, on September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the referendum petition was valid. The court concluded that meant the older maps from 2022 were reinstated, and the 2025 map was invalid.

I hope you’re not hopelessly confused already, because it gets worse.

Hoskins asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block that decision. On September 8, Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied the request, leaving the Missouri Supreme Court decision in place, requiring the state to use the older maps instead of the newer, gerrymandered ones. This, no surprise, was a shadow docket ruling, so there is no opinion that lays out Kavanaugh’s reasoning.

Then, in a separate case, federal District Judge Stephen Clark, a Trump appointee, ordered Hoskins to use the 2025 maps. The group People Not Politicians appealed to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, but lost, with the court finding that they lacked standing and that even if they did, they couldn’t meet the standard necessary to get an injunction against Judge Clark’s decision.

That brings us to tonight, when People Not Politicians asked the Supreme Court to intervene. Justice Kavanaugh has ordered Hoskins to respond by 10 a.m. tomorrow morning.

You’ll recall this mess started with the state court case that Hoskins asked Justice Kavanaugh to weigh in on. People Not Politicians is also arguing that Judge Clark’s decision is improper federal interference into an ongoing state court case, that he could not issue a decision like this alone and a three-judge court should have been convened, and that his decision violates the Purcell principle.

And as if that’s not enough, Richard von Glahn, the individual who intervened in the case along with People Not Politicians, has now filed “Suggestions of Contempt,” asking the state supreme court to hold Hoskins in contempt of that court’s prior order, claiming the contempt is “open and obvious.” Von Glahn points out that even “[I]f Respondent is not willing to comply with the Court's injunction,” he should still have to explain “why he should not take no action in all things related to the congressional district map until guidance is received from a higher court with jurisdiction to review the Court's judgment and injunction and the federal district court's injunction.” That’s a fair point with the matter currently sitting before the Supreme Court.

But common sense or even compliance with legal norms isn’t at work in Missouri right now.

This is the kind of chaos that Donald Trump thrives on, and where better to inject it into American society than our elections. Unsurprisingly, he has already weighed in on the case—it’s still shocking to see a U.S. president disagree with a state court so publicly—after the Missouri Supreme Court decision, calling it a “Dark Day for ‘Justice.’”

Roy Temple, a Democratic strategist and former state party leader in Missouri said that voters “can’t possibly understand who they’re going to be voting for.” He opined that “The sad part is that it’s almost entirely inflicted by people whose responsibility was to ensure the orderly conduct of elections.”

And isn’t that the bottom line here? None of this was necessary. Once the state supreme court spoke, the secretary of state should have just complied. Certainly he could have done so after the first decision by Justice Kavanaugh.

But there was never a need to go that far. A lawful process obtained sufficient signatures from Missouri voters to let citizens decide which maps to use. Instead, Hoskins and Hanaway tried to secure 8-0 Republican representation in Missouri, shutting out Democrats entirely. This sort of partisanship is a malignancy in a democracy. Even Hoskins and Hanaway ultimately acknowledged that a ballot referendum had been duly authorized; they conceded that there would be one in their filing with the U.S. Supreme Court last Friday.

In his brief, the state’s solicitor general wrote: “On the one hand, Richard von Glahn — the referendum petition’s proponent — will get his referendum vote on Missouri’s congressional map regardless of what this court does. The only question is whether he (joined by a small minority of the state’s voters) can void a congressional map before he gets his vote.” It was only ever about gamesmanship to those state officials, and the game was shutting down Democratic representation in the Congress for state voters.

The U.S. Supreme Court now faces a quagmire not of its own making. Missouri must hold elections on schedule. Voters need certainty, as much as possible at this late date with so much confusion now baked in. The Supreme Court is likely to rule quickly given the late date. Will they countermand the state supreme court and permit the 2025 maps to be used? They are, after all, the maps that were used in the primary. But the state’s own high court says they are invalid because of the proper demand for a referendum on the maps. That court says the voters should choose, even though two Republican elected officials in the state wanted to prevent it from happening. Now it’s up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

If you’ve made it through the Missouri mess with me, you understand why I write Civil Discourse. Sometimes, the only way to understand what’s happening is to read the briefs and court orders and sort it all out, especially when contradicting decisions come at blistering speed from both state and federal courts. I try to do that for you when important situations like this develop. 

Trump Midtown Convention In Texas 

New York Times, News Analysis: Down in the Polls, Republicans Embrace a Familiar Tool: Fear, Lisa Lerer, Sept. 10, 2026. At an unusual midterm gathering, President Trump and his allies painted Democrats as dangerously un-American.

The photos plastered in the hallways were all of President Trump. Jackets were bedazzled with his name. And the red hats dotting the audience on the floor of the convention hall were embroidered with MAGA, his indelible political slogan.

And yet, at a gathering that fans and foes alike had nicknamed the “Trump-a-palooza,” the president and his Republican allies spent more time whipping up fears about the specter of socialism, communism and even anarchy than they did trumpeting the successes of his administration.

As they took the stage at the party’s unusual midterm gathering in Dallas on Wednesday night, amid growing Republican anxiety about the midterm elections, speaker after speaker focused on what they characterized as an urgent threat to American life: a Democratic Party they claimed had veered beyond its traditional liberal principals into a dangerous, un-American ideology.

Democrats running for Congress were “evil.” They were “communists and anarchists.” And they wanted to turn the country into “a socialist hellscape.”

“I call it the Bolshevik Revolution in the Democratic Party,” said Representative Steve Scalise, the House majority leader. “Let’s make sure that when we wake up the morning after Election Day we know we did everything we could to defeat socialism.”

President Trump has long been a master of the politics of fear, regularly stoking anxiety about immigration and crime.

Now, as his party faces its most difficult political environment in years, the president and his supporters are attempting — once more — to channel fear into electoral victory. It’s a strategy that is both old and new, playing off the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America to stoke Cold War-era fears of communism and socialism.

Hope for America, Opinion: The president wants to buy our votes, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 10, 2026. At 8:09 PM tonight, the President of the United States walked onto the stage at the first-ever Republican midterm convention and slowly made his way over to the podium, stopping along the way to catch his breath and soak in screams of “I love you” from women in the audience. Once at the podium, Donald Trump launched into an hour-and-47-minute speech unlike any ever given by a president of the United States in the 250-year history of our country.

By the end of the night, through slurred speech and fumbled words, Donald Trump would make one of the most shocking promises ever delivered by a sitting president, especially on the eve of an American election. Standing on that stage, with the cameras rolling, the President of the United States looked into the audience and made what many are viewing as a bribe to the American people to control who they vote for, when he promised that if Republicans win control of Congress, every adult American gets $5,000.

“I can make this promise to you, and here is my promise. If the Republicans win the House of Representatives and the United States Senate … I will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the United States of America for $5,000.” He then added: “It will be called the Trump dividend.”

That was just one moment in an evening built on desperation and his willingness to say or do anything to keep his unchecked power from being taken away from him. When Trump had walked onto the stage, his yellow-orange face makeup looked smeared, like it had been applied in a rush, creating a stark circle around his hairline and neck. Everything about the event felt unpolished and hurried, even the empty seats in the audience, where large sections of the American Airlines Center sat empty, including most of the upper levels, despite Trump’s claims that there were so many people they had people lined up and waiting outside. He said that after it had already been reported that the RNC spent days sending unsolicited texts to people offering free tickets in an effort to fill the room. The whole setup was so disorganized that even one of the letters in the word “Dallas” on the podium fell off while RNC Chairman Joe Gruters was speaking.

Early in the speech, before Trump’s bribe, we were already seeing signs of just how badly he believes Republicans need to win this election, even going so far as to tell the audience that if he had not won the last election in 2024, he was not sure our country would even still exist today. He forgets to mention every single time when he says something like this that he has now been the president for a combined five and a half years. He is having an increasingly tough time convincing anyone that America not being great is anyone’s fault other than his own, after controlling it for nearly six of the last ten years.

No president in the history of this country has ever done what Donald Trump did tonight. He will say it was completely legal, and maybe it was. But the reality is that legal and pro-democracy might be two different things tonight. Because he actually stood there tonight and told the American people, on national television, that if they vote to keep his party in power, he would personally, in his capacity as the president, issue them a check. He compared it to “a successful company” issuing “a cash distribution to its shareholders.” Except our country is not a business, and he is not just issuing extra money, he is telling us that if we keep him in power, he will give us money.

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

The math doesn’t work either. There are roughly 260 million adults in the United States. At $5,000 each, the cost would be way over $1 trillion. And then there is the law, too. Under federal law, it is a crime to pay or offer to pay someone for voting. If that law is broken, the punishment is up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $10,000, or both. Donald Trump’s promise is not directly conditioned on any individual person voting Republican, which is an important legal distinction, but he still stood on a political stage and told Americans that if Republicans win, they get $5,000.

This isn’t the first time he has made a promise like this either. He makes lots of promises that never come true, but that can still leave people thinking that maybe this time will be different. Late last year, Trump posted on Truth Social that Americans would receive a tariff dividend of at least $2,000. Those checks never came, and the hope that they would quietly faded into the background noise.

What he is not telling people is what is actually coming after the midterms. The Big Beautiful Bill was designed so that many of its worst changes do not take effect until after the election is over and the votes are counted. Many of the parts that will specifically make life harder for working families were delayed until after the midterms, meaning millions of Americans will not feel the full impact until it is too late to factor those consequences into this election. That is the cruelty built into these policies and the decisions made by Donald Trump and the Republicans who passed them.

The rest of the night was typical Donald Trump incoherence and propaganda. Trump called Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, “a great guy,” and Mike Johnson grinned at the compliment. He targeted the press and called out a reporter, Shawn McCreesh, by his name, encouraging his followers to boo at him and the press in general at other times.

Then there was the moment that Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman appeared via a pre-recorded video to introduce Republican Senator Dave McCormick, also from Pennsylvania. He called him “a great American” and pledged to work with the president. The White House shared the clip and added the caption “Based John Fetterman,” which, in far-right MAGA circles, means they are praising him for aligning with their movement by breaking from what was expected of him, aka he abandoned the Democrats and now is a Republican without the official R next to his name. Democratic reactions were about what we would expect. Pennsylvania state representative Malcolm Kenyatta called him “Benedict Arnold, but lazy,” saying he “could barely get off the couch in his million-dollar mansion to kiss Trump’s ring” and “phoned it in like everything he does.” Representative Chris Deluzio said Fetterman is “not going to be a Senator after 2028, mark my words.” Reports have surfaced that Trump offered Fetterman, through Sean Hannity, “more money than he ever dreamed of” to switch sides. Tonight, Fetterman completely destroyed what little dignity he still had left.

Maybe the most honest part of the night was when Donald Trump told the room of people, many locals from Texas, that, “I don’t need to be here tonight. I could have been in a nice place somewhere in the world.”

Those words paint a picture of who Trump is, and also how badly he thinks November will go. Toward the end of the speech, Trump asked the crowd to remember him as “the guy who got this amazing economy started.” But after this speech, he will be remembered as the guy so desperate that he tried to buy votes.

When he was speaking, I started to think beyond him wanting an easy run at the rest of his presidency and beyond to something deeper and more troubling. Clarence Thomas is 78 years old. Samuel Alito is 76. Both are approaching the average retirement age for Supreme Court justices since 2000, which is roughly 80. If either were to step down or were unable to serve for other reasons, and Republicans still held control of the Senate, Trump would get a fourth appointment, locking in a far-right supermajority for possibly decades to come. If Democrats take the Senate in November, those confirmations are most certainly blocked regardless of how much longer Trump’s term is, just like Mitch McConnell did to Democrats in the past. Maybe that has a big part in the desperation we are now seeing coming out of the White House. Yes, Donald Trump wants control, but the people behind him are thinking way past his relevance and into what comes after him.

The bigger picture of how all of these connect is one of the things we have to make sure as many people as possible understand. Yes, the lucky survived his first presidency somewhat intact. But that experience is giving far too many people a false sense of security now, convincing them that because we made it through once, we will somehow make it through again. We are already living with the consequences of that kind of thinking, and it is already not okay. Our country has fallen so far in just 20 months that the president felt emboldened to suggest he would pay people with government, taxpayer money if we vote and keep his government in control. We can’t keep telling ourselves that somehow, no matter what happens, everything will just be fine, because it isn’t and it won’t.

As Donald Trump said tonight, 55 days from now, we need to show up and vote as if Donald Trump himself is on the ballot. Because in every way that matters, he absolutely is. His continued destruction of our country is on the ballot. So is his war, the future of the Supreme Court, and everything else his administration will have the power to do over the next two years. His vision of a country where a president can stand on national television and promise Americans $5,000 if his party wins control of Congress is also absolutely on the ballot.

On November 3rd, we are going to honor his wishes, show up in numbers never seen before, and tell him exactly what we think of him and his MAGA sycophants.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Trump’s Party, Sonny Bunch, Sept. 10, 2026. The vibe at the first day of the Republicans’ midterm convention was a pretty simple one: Play the hits, no matter how little sense it makes to play them, and offer the people some free cash while you’re at it.

Hoping to hear the hits was why Phil and his brother Eric made their way from Nebraska and Arizona to the American Airlines Center in Dallas. The senior citizens are Trump diehards—Phil said he knocked on more than three thousand doors for the president—and they wanted to attend the GOP gathering because it’s something that’s never happened before. Plus, there’s some star-watching to be done (“I saw Brandon Hill. I saw Nick Shirley over there. You know who that is?”), and the brothers wanted to see Trump in person. But mostly they’re worried.

What are they worried about? Well . . . just about everything.

From the COVID-era restrictions (they’re big RFK Jr. fans) to illegal immigrants flooding America to inflation caused by Joe Biden “helicoptering cash,” it’s all a problem. As long as Trump can avoid the Zionist efforts to get him further bogged down in regime change in Iran, he’ll be okay. Unfortunately I did not run into Phil and Eric on the way out of the arena, so I didn’t get to ask them how the new “Trump Dividend” the president announced—a promise to send $5,000 checks to “every adult citizen” if Republicans keep the House and Senate—would solve the Cash-Helicopter Conundrum. As Catherine Rampell noted in our livestream last night, the Trump Dividend would cost well over $1 trillion. (Then again, as Catherine has written, promising people scads of money and then not delivering on those promises has been one of Trump’s signature moves in politics—and, for that matter, in business.)

The running theme through Day One was pretty clear: Things were bad under Biden, right? Democrats want “the Biden burden back,” as Michigan House candidate Mike Bouchard put it. Speaker after speaker came to the stage to denounce high prices under Biden and praise the GOP-led Congress for turning things around, all while folks on the floor waved signs reading “Keep the Majority.” You could get the sense at times that the crowd could see the contradiction there and understood just how ridiculous this was, given the weak applause that accompanied many of these early speakers. (The fact that I spent $65 on gas an hour before heading to the American Airlines Center probably has something to do with the lack of excitement.)

But what these folks really came for was red meat, and nothing’s redder than the bloody culture wars.

After a series of pretty stale speakers, South Carolina’s Sen. Tim Scott jazzed the audience up by denouncing James Talarico for believing in six genders and for saying God is nonbinary. Scott went full revival preacher, hopping around the stage, throwing his arms up, and getting the crowd fired up; it was a shot of energy desperately needed for a crowd that was kind of dying. Border security was also a big hit, with Paul Perez of the National Border Patrol Council—the union representing Border Patrol employees—getting a standing ovation while introducing Ken Paxton, the embattled GOP candidate running against Talarico in Texas.

And Paxton is . . . well, he’s no Tim Scott. He glistens like Richard Nixon, sans the charisma. His speaking style is halting and stilted; the applause from the crowd felt perfunctory. The boos, however, were hearty. Paxton ran through the same litany of Tala-freak-o slams Scott hit—nonbinary, six genders, he’s transing your kids—and the crowd ate it up. That’s the rub here: This is a convention that’s dedicated to negative polarization, that’s trying to give people something to vote against rather than for.

Scott aside, there was a distinctive lack of energy in the speakers leading up to Trump. Jon Husted, the Ohio senator locked in a tight race against Democrat Sherrod Brown, seems like a nice enough guy, in a bland, blue-suited sort of way. But the only thing Husted said that got folks excited was that Brown “demanded that we call mothers ‘pregnant persons.’”

There is one thing the folks here were willing to cheer for rather than against: Trump himself. Any invocation of Texas being Trump country was met with raucous cheers; any mention of Trump working for the people led to cheers of hallelujah. T.W. Shannon, a Republican running for lieutenant governor in Oklahoma, had a bit more pep in his step than Paxton or Husted, but his biggest applause line wasn’t shocking: “The greatest president in American history, President Donald J. Trump.” There can be no doubt about it: This wasn’t just a Party for Trump, it was a party for Trump, an effort to make the 80-year-old feel like the center of attention and give him the energy needed to get out on the trail.

And there can be no doubt about this: The Republican party is the party of Trump, his name spelled out in sparkly letters at the front of the arena, first row, his cheering section never stronger.Attendees wear letters that spell out “TRUMP” on the first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention at the American Airlines Center on September 9, 2026 in Dallas, Texas. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

And Trump wants to make sure everyone knows it. His speech, which went on for an hour and forty-five minutes—longer than even his most longwinded speech at a normal Republican convention—had three big themes: that Democrats are scary, that Trump can deliver prosperity, and that this year’s election is a referendum on Trump, Trump, Trump.

“I’m asking you to pretend that I’m on the ballot,” he said to the cheering audience—and then, as an aside, softer, acknowledged, “I’m on the ballot, I’m on the ballot,” no pretending necessary—before finishing the thought: “just one more time.” The thing about Trump is that he actually believes it when he says stuff like, “I don’t think anyone’s ever had two years like we have.” There’s a reality-distortion field surrounding him, one where gas prices don’t register, where inflation doesn’t exist. And he thinks he’s the one who should get the credit.

The electorate seems likely to give him, and the Republicans he promised to crisscross the country campaigning for, all the credit in the world come Election Day. Meanwhile, the assembled in Dallas loved every minute of it. 

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Trump Had His Shot And Has Blown It, Badly. It Is Our Turn Now To Win, Lead, And Make Things Better, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 10, 2026. Trump’s failed and extremist regime continues to make things worse for America, the American people, and for their rancid, illiberal political project.

Hostilities have returned to the Middle East. The war has widened as the Houthis are now attacking Saudi Arabia. Iran continues to attack and destroy our military bases in the region, causing hundreds of billions of damage, striking now as far away as our bases in Jordan. Oil has spiked up to $105 a barrel today:

Global inflation has done enormous damage to consumers, businesses, and governments throughout the world. Interest rates are rising, the fiscal conditions of nations weakening everywhere. From the FT’s homepage right now:

Diesel hit an all-time high this week in the US just in time for the fall harvest, further battering farmers already reeling from higher fertilizer prices, higher energy costs, loss of markets, cuts to health care, and mass deportation. Today’s Producer Price Index report came in at 5.4% annually, almost three times the Fed’s target rate of 2%. Here is what Trump’s ruinous economic policies have done:

Trump’s horrific cuts to our health care system are showing up in higher prices and less access for all Americans, not just those on Medicaid and the ACA. Estimates now are that costs for those with private insurance plans will rise between 8% and 11% - the biggest one year jump in twenty years. This is going to further weaken American businesses and cause health care costs to rise for literally every American in the country.

The war in Russia-Ukraine is also escalating, and Russia’s attacks on civilians and the civilian infrastructure in Ukraine are growing more barbaric. The Russian and Trump aligned AfD, an extremist, far-right party, won an election in Germany. Putin’s “hybrid war” attacks on Europe/NATO are escalating, widening the war into the heart of NATO itself.

As I wrote yesterday:

the world is slowly tipping into a profound crisis as the country that held everything together for the past eighty years has now decided to tear it all apart.

Faced with all this deterioration of the global economy, our economy here at home, and Russian-Iranian aggression Trump sent his bagmen to Moscow to lick Putin’s boots, humiliate Zelenskyy, and give Russia an attaboy; praised the success of the Russia-aligned AfD creating an even deeper crisis with our European allies, and inside NATO; and dramatically escalated his trade war with Canada, adding fuel to inflation here, further weakening our alliances and the West, and he even published a map of America that included all of Canada, implicitly threatening a full on invasion of Northern neighbor in the Imperial Venezuelan model.Subscribed

These historic series of failures have taken a terrible toll on Trump’s political project here at home. His polling got worse this week and hit new lows in four major polls. Consumer confidence is at a 65 year low. Peltola leads in Alaska; Brown has been up 8 in the last two Fox News polls of Ohio; Talarico leads in every poll in Texas; a new poll has Turek up in Iowa; new polls have El-Sayed and Troy Jackson up 3 in Michigan and Maine; Cooper and Ossoff have large, single digit leads. Today FiftyPlusOne puts our odds of winning the House at 94%:

And the Senate at 59%:

In the Economist/YouGov poll this week our lead in the named generic ballot was 49%-38% - 11 points, a deeply encouraging bit of data.

Yes our rapacious, addled, liar-in-chief offered a big, huge bribe last night, but I am skeptical any American will believe him. He has had his chance these last two years to do right by the American people and instead we’ve gotten abandonment, betrayal, Olympian levels of failure here and throughout the world, and unprecedented oligarchical corruption:

Finally, I talked about the need for us to lead our communities in these final two months. To be calm, steady, true, and resist distraction. We have a clear mission now:

There is nothing Trump and MAGA wants more than for us to be fighting with each other and not with him. We have one job now - elect as many of these wonderful candidates running for the House and Senate as we can. It’s where our focus must be. It’s a year of opportunity for us across the country. We must seize it, together.

Proud American patriots it is our turn now, and we must do our part for freedom and democracy here and everywhere by winning this election by as a big margin as we can. We need to keep writing our postcards, canvassing, phonebanking, protesting, info warring, and donating to candidates and party committees. We need to become Early Vote Champions in our networks, communities, and organizations; embrace the No Kings Oct 17th day of action; and sign up to become a Democracy Protector too.

And of our course, we must keep supporting our courageous candidates and hard-working party committees so we can bring a big blue wave all across the land…..

More On U.S. Immigration Policy, Abuses

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Markwayne Mullin’s Trouble with Facts, Jim Swift, right, Sept. 10, 2026. When Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin came to Warren County, Ohio last week to tout the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, he made a number of assertions about immigration law and enforcement that did not withstand much scrutiny.

I was, frankly, a little surprised that agency officials would come to Ohio so close after the suicide of Pierre Damas Bel. I was disgusted—but not surprised—when Mullin responded to a question about whether DHS bore any responsibility for Pierre’s death: “We were following our procedures; we did our job. What happened when he went home . . . he wasn’t in our custody,” he said. “We’re not responsible for that.”

Some of Mullin’s claims were outright wrong. The Ohio Immigrant Alliance went through his remarks line by line and produced a twelve-page fact-check that’s worth reading in full. If his statements about Bel’s suicide had a tenuous connection to reality, his grasp of the policy rationale he was selling had none whatsoever.

Mullin defended the ankle monitors by claiming that “86, 87 percent” of immigrants never show up for court. The data say nothing of the sort. According to immigration-court data OIA compiled, immigrants have a 76.3 percent attendance rate (the figure jumps to 95 percent when they have a lawyer).

And that wasn’t Mullin’s only misstatement about the ankle monitors. Asked whether ICE could switch someone from an ankle monitor to another form of monitoring, Mullin said the decision was out of his hands: “Well, at that point it’s in the courts. It’s in the courts at that point and we’ll leave that up to the judge.”

Except immigration judges don’t ordinarily make those decisions. ICE does. ICE selects participants for its Alternatives to Detention program and determines the level and method of supervision, and ankle monitors aren’t the only option. The agency already uses a smartphone app that allows immigrants to check in remotely using facial recognition, and most people in its Alternatives to Detention program are monitored through the app rather than an ankle bracelet.

Some moments require you to step up. Some require you to show up. That’s why The Bulwark is coming to Ohio. All profits from this event will be donated to those in Springfield who are in need.

Nor does ICE’s own data suggest that people in the program routinely skip court. The agency says participants have a court-appearance rate of about 98 percent in the last two years. And many of the Springfield Haitians being fitted with ankle monitors had shown up obediently when ICE summoned them for check-ins, only to leave the office wearing the devices.

Mullin also repeatedly blurred the distinction between the Haitians losing TPS and people who entered the country illegally:

You want to say, ‘Well, not everybody that came across our border illegally are breaking the law or they’re criminals?’ Well, actually, yes, they are. They’re 100 percent, because they chose to cut the line. They chose to break the law. When they decided to come across our border illegally, that means they broke the law. That means they are criminals. That doesn’t mean they all have criminal records. They chose to break our laws.

But the fact that someone had TPS does not mean they entered the country illegally. Some Haitians undoubtedly did; others entered legally. And TPS can be granted to both. How someone entered the country and what immigration status he or she has today are two different questions. Mullin repeatedly treated them as one.

Mullin says DHS did its job and that what happened to Bel after he “went home” was no longer the department’s responsibility. That’s an argument he’s entitled to make. It doesn’t change the fact that Bel killed himself because he felt humiliated and psychologically tortured by the agency Mullin leads.

Before absolving his department, Mullin might bother to learn what his department did and is doing, why, and how Bel actually died.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• The CIA Director Is a Failure… John Ratcliffe has mired the agency in politics—and possible illegality, write JOHN SIPHER and JULIA CURLEE.
• Sarah Longwell’s Message for Everyone Who Thinks We’re Doomed… ANDREW WEISSMANN turns the tables on SARAH LONGWELL for a conversation about her new book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time—and what a post-Trump political future could look like.
• Live Coverage of Trump’s Midterm Convention Speech… It’s a long one! Join SAM STEIN, CATHERINE RAMPELL, SONNY BUNCH, and WILL SOMMER as they react to Trump’s keynote address and newly proposed bribe to American voters.
• Dems to Trump: Please, Sir, the Stage Is Yours… The party once worried about losing the attention wars. Now, they’re happy to cede the spotlight, reports LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.

Quick Hits

KICKING THE WAR DOWN THE ROAD: Donald Trump has been insisting for months that Iran is on the brink of collapse. Now, that prediction has a new—and extended—timetable. “I think the war is going to end immediately after the election,” he told reporters yesterday. “They’re desperate to try to affect the election so that we can get a nice weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapon.”

This is as close as Trump will likely ever get to admitting a couple of obvious realities: The Iran war has done enormous damage to him politically, and he has no plan to get out of it in time to contain that damage ahead of November. Instead, the White House is throwing out a whole bag of self-contradictory rhetorical strategies to spin the current unpleasant stalemate, from JD Vance’s insisting the war is actually over if you squint to Trump’s soothing suggestion that it will be over right after the election, so people should vote as though it already is. None of these pitches, however, is exactly landing with the public.

GO HOME, JOHN: Oh, look, John Fetterman is doing sizzle reels for the Republican National Convention now. Here’s the New York Times:

Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, the self-proclaimed champion of working-class voters who has become alienated from his own party and fed up with his job, on Wednesday appeared in a short video on the opening night of President Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas.

“Yes, I’m a Democrat. Why am I here talking to you today?” Mr. Fetterman said in a video filmed in front of a steel mill in Pennsylvania. He introduced himself as a “common-sense Democrat” who said he is “always going to reject the extremes in socialism.”

Mr. Fetterman introduced Senator David McCormick, Republican of Pennsylvania, and said that they would work together “and work with President Trump and defend the steel way of life.”

Almost nothing Fetterman is doing these days seems dictated by any actual strategy. Many have speculated that the senator is gearing up to make a post-midterms party switch, but this is the one thing the senator continues to swear he’s not doing. “I’m a lifelong Democrat who votes overwhelmingly with my party—and should the Senate flip in November, I will still be the fifty-first vote I ran on,” he said in his RNC message last night.

It appears rather that Fetterman is just driven by the twin engines of personal grievance and a desire for favorable attention—that as his repeated MAGA flirtations enrage his own base more and more, he finds ever more comfort in the Last Reasonable Democrat character he gets to play on Fox News. The good news is that Fetterman probably knows he actually has to stay a Democrat if he’s going to keep performing this role. If he were to switch sides, all he’d be was the Senate’s most liberal Republican—a type of character his friends at Fox tend to have a lot less dewy sympathy for.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

Politico, Jim Jordan says he will relinquish Judiciary gavel, pass on a return to Oversight, Mia McCarthy, Sept. 10, 2026. The Ohio Republican’s committee decisions are likely to rekindle chatter about his leadership ambitions.

Rep. Jim Jordan said Wednesday he plans to end his eight-year run leading Republicans on two of the House’s most prominent committees after this Congress, raising fresh questions about what comes next for the veteran Ohio lawmaker.

Jordan, 62, said in an interview on the sidelines of the Republican midterm convention that he has no plans to seek a waiver of the GOP’s three-term limit on committee leaders to retain the top spot on the Judiciary Committee.

Nor, he said, would he seek to return to lead Republicans on the House Oversight Committee. He previously served as ranking member from 2019 to 2020, when he took the GOP reins at Judiciary, and has at least two terms of eligibility remaining there.

“No, I don’t plan to do that,” Jordan said. “There’s other people who are very interested in Oversight.”

Jordan could have requested a waiver from the House Republican Steering Committee, and several other sitting GOP chairs — including Agriculture’s G.T. Thompson (R-Pa.) and Armed Services’ Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) — are expected to do just that. He brushed off questions about why we would not join others in seeking to keep the coveted gavel overseeing the Justice Department, immigration law and other high-profile matters.

“I’m just not going to do it,” he said.

The decision is likely to stoke speculation about another potential leadership run for Jordan, who is seeking his 11th term this fall. He unsuccessfully sought the speakership after Kevin McCarthy’s 2023 ouster, and there has been open chatter in recent months that he is quietly setting the grounds to make another run at the top job.

After flatly denying plans to retain a committee gavel, Jordan was far less direct in addressing other questions about his future in the House.

“I’m focused on one thing, one thing only: winning,” he said. “If the left wins, where they want to take the country is very, very scary.”

Jordan, for instance, did not rule out running against Speaker Mike Johnson for the gavel if Republicans hold onto House majority this fall.

The Contrarian, Opinion: Our Military Needs Congress to Do Its Job, Jennifer Rubin, right,Sept. 10, 2026. 54 Days to the Midterms.

Given that Democrats will likely win control of at least one house of Congress, we need to begin serious consideration of the essential role of congressional oversight. Congress’s powers of the purse and of oversight will be essential to halt this regime’s chaos and begin reversing the constitutional damage and policy failures we have endured. There is no more critical oversight realm than national security, where Donald Trump and his minions have cost American lives and billions of dollars and severely damaged our security and international standing.

Starting with the Hippocratic Oath (Do No Harm — or, in this case, do no more harm), Congress must cut all funding for the illegal war in Iran (and its deployment of troops and material) and for extrajudicial killings on the high seas, which have both been moral obscenities and colossal policy failures.

Beyond that, national security guru and former State Department official Brian Finucane tells me, “If the executive branch has usurped Congress’s authority over the use of force or breached the rules enacted by Congress, the legislative branch needs to expose those violations and begin laying the groundwork for accountability.”

Regarding extrajudicial killings on the high seas, Finucane points out, “accountability is necessary to safeguard against the US military engaging in lawless premeditated killing in the future.” And it demands a transparent review of a counterproductive policy.

Killing drug mules and blowing up boats is not solving the drug trafficking problem. “[W]hile trafficking routes briefly shifted and cocaine prices temporarily fluctuated, the availability, purity, and price of cocaine in the United States have largely returned to pre-operation levels,” Just Security reports. That means this illegal escapade “achieved little lasting strategic effect despite its extraordinary use of military force.” To make matters worse, the extrajudicial killings also prompted allies such as the UK, Canada, and the Netherlands to curb “intelligence sharing with the United States or put caveats on the use of the intelligence they provide because of these unlawful strikes.”

Both the extrajudicial killings and the Iran war raise disturbing questions about violations of the law of war and U.S. personnel implication in war crimes. In contrast with Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden’s administrations — which all conducted after-action reports on civilian casualties in a timely fashion and complied with obligations to testify before Congress — the Trump crew has stiff-armed Congress on queries about everything from the so-called “double tap” strike that murdered non-military personnel floating in the high seas to the strike that killed over 150 civilians, most children, at a girl’s school in Minab, Iran.

Independent investigative reporting established that, for years, this building was walled off from any military installation and used purely as a civilian school. But this may be far more than a horrible, negligent error in failing to update targeting, or even abide by warnings within the intelligence system.

This tragedy appears to be the almost inevitable result of the Trump regime’s decision to disregard protection of civilians, a key principle in the law of war. Earlier this year, ProPublica reported that a carefully designed Civilian Protection Center of Excellence “was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made ‘lethality’ a top priority,” precipitating the Minab incident, in which the U.S. killed the most civilians in a single incident in decades. “Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.”Subscribed

Massive civilian deaths followed when the Trump Pentagon “lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general,” according to the ProPublica report. One Air Force official who had been forced out told ProPublica:

“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II. There’s zero accountability.”

However, accountability is still possible, and remains a moral and operational imperative. Chest-thumping Trump officials who confuse national security excellence with mindless, counterproductive violence must not be permitted to put lower-level military personnel in precarious legal and moral terrain. As Margaret Donovan, who reviewed hundreds of combat strikes in Syria and Iraq as a lawyer in the United States Army JAG Corps, tells me, “It is up to Congress to ensure that soldiers are never put in that position in the first place; they are effectively outsourcing their oversight responsibilities to junior soldiers.”

Congressional oversight must proceed. If the Trump regime snubs congressional subpoenas, Finucane advises, “Congress should be prepared to play hardball, including by vowing career consequences for any military officers who refuse to comply with subpoenas and by imposing funding restrictions for noncompliance.” Fortunately, all those officials who Hegseth has fired will have much greater latitude to testify. Dr. Kori Schake, director of Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, advises that Congress can also refuse Pentagon funding requests and confirmations until it gets satisfactory answers “about the legality of issued orders, the tradeoffs in readiness and munitions usage, and other crucial policy choices.”

Tess Bridgeman, co-Editor-in-Chief of Just Security, Senior Fellow and visiting scholar at NYU Law School tells me, “Various other forms of accountability — including administrative separation (involuntary discharge), removal from a command or duty, and preventing promotions, for example, are potential forms of accountability that could be particularly useful where the unlawful conduct was relatively widespread and was officially condoned.” She adds, “Congress should also use its investigative authority to create commissions (or use its existing committee structure) that can get to the bottom of what happened and why; lower-level officials could be immunized from certain penalties for coming forward and speaking truthfully. This could create a powerful public record and put the focus on those most responsible and the institutions in which they served — rather than on the lower-ranking personnel involved (who could still face various forms of admonition, reprimand, suspension of privileges, or mandatory re-training, depending on their role and level of responsibility).”

In addition to policy failures and war crimes, enumerable aspects of the Pentagon require exacting oversight (e.g., use of an insecure Signal channel during military operations, munitions shortages, discriminatory promotions, gross violations of the First Amendment). At stake is nothing less than the restoration and preservation of military excellence, our standing as a defender of international law, and our ability to enlist democratic allies’ support.

“National security, and particularly matters of war and peace, cannot be exempted from our democratic processes,” Katherine Yon Ebright, senior counsel at the Brennan Center, tells me. “The human costs are too high, and the backsliding is too easy. After decades of Congress ceding ground on national security decision-making and oversight, we now have a president who feels empowered to conflate dissent with crime and also crime with war.” We are now seeing where that leads.

Republicans, in countenancing an illegal war, rubber-stamping unfit nominees, and refusing to conduct essential oversight, are fully culpable in the damage to our national security and constitutional order. Voters must understand that without a change in congressional control, we will not have a majority party willing to fulfill its obligations to protect the Constitution from enemies, foreign and domestic.

“Discipline and honor are central to the proper functioning of the military. The current executive branch leadership has blatantly violated the law and encouraged others to do so,” Donovan tells me. Moreover, “the constant chaos in the executive branch—summary firings, rotating crew of principal officers—means that soldiers don’t know if what they are being told is legal today will be illegal tomorrow, and vice versa,” she says. That is why it is so essential to have real congressional oversight — and a congressional majority that’s up to the task.

MSNOW, States warn of ‘chaos’ if Supreme Court allows mail-ballot restrictions for midterms, Jordan Rubin, Sept. 9, 2026. A blue-state coalition warned the justices that millions of Americans could lose their ability to vote.

A coalition of blue states told the Supreme Court that complying with a new U.S. Postal Service rule for the midterms “would be impossible” for some states and would lead to millions of voters being unable to vote by mail and others being unable to vote at all. In other states, the coalition said, it would produce “chaos” and “a significant risk that millions more voters would be denied the ability to vote.”

Delivering that warning on Wednesday, California and other states and the District of Columbia urged the justices to keep in place a preliminary injunction against the rule that the Trump administration wants the high court to upend ahead of November.

While the administration told the justices that the new Postal Service rule only imposes “modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via U.S. Mail,” the states said there’s nothing modest about the ballot restrictions.

“Tens of millions of Americans will likely wish to vote by mail this year,” they said in their opposition to the administration’s application to lift the injunction. “Under the challenged rule,” they said, “ballots will not be delivered to those voters unless each is registered in USPS’ new, not-yet-functional online portal; a voter-specific Intelligent Mail barcode (IMb) is printed on outgoing and return ballot envelopes; and those barcodes are accurately tied to each voter and uploaded to that same portal. “

They said the efforts of state and local election officials to even start to try to comply with the rule are “herculean” and that the process “is fraught with an extreme risk of error.”

When she issued the preliminary injunction against the rule last week, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani found that implementing it right before the November elections “threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail.”

The Obama-appointed judge in Boston said there was no evidence of mail-voting fraud presented in the litigation to support “the rushed implementation of the Final Rule.” President Donald Trump has railed against mail voting as fraudulent while voting that way himself.

Yet Solicitor General D. John Sauer pressed the fraud point in his pending application for the high court to lift Talwani’s injunction, which the justices could act on in the coming days. There is not a deadline for them to rule.More articlesSCOTUS ruling on mail-in ballots raises uncertainty ahead of midtermsJulia JesterIn this closeup photo, aperson, right, holds a bunch of mail-in-ballot envelopes on a shelf. Only their hand is visible.The Supreme Court’s mail-in ballot decision could inject chaos into midterm electionsJordan RubinFrom left to right, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts stand, dressed in robes.

“In particular,” Sauer said, the district judge’s order “bars the Postal Service from verifying that mailed envelopes comply with the Rule’s requirements for the upcoming elections.” He said she nullified the government’s efforts to address “a particularly pernicious species of fraud that dilutes the votes of lawful voters, prevents election results from reflecting the will of the American people, and undermines ‘public confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.’”

Sauer said the Postal Service rule creates “standardized design and review requirements for ballot envelopes that build on practices the Postal Service has long recommended,” and that it makes states “upload the name, address, and barcode information of intended recipients of ballot mail in an online portal — information that election officials would necessarily already possess to send ballot mail under the Rule to those recipients.”

He said the rule “ensures that States remain responsible for determining voter eligibility and eligibility to vote by mail, and it does not dictate ballot content, mailing or receipt deadlines, or ballot-counting procedures.”

Given all of that, he said the rule “plainly does not seize control of States’ administration of elections — it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.”

The Supreme Court previously sided with the administration at an earlier stage of the litigation, ruling that a challenge to Trump’s executive order on mail ballots was premature because it hadn’t been implemented yet. In that ruling last month, the court emphasized that it wasn’t saying that any action taken to implement the order “will necessarily be lawful,” adding: “On that score, time will tell.” The new rule and the litigation it prompted brought the issue back to the justices for what could be a more definitive resolution.

Among the several outside parties weighing in at the Supreme Court is a bipartisan group of current and former members of Congress, which told the justices in an amicus brief that the administration’s executive order and rule “unconstitutionally and unlawfully usurp for the Executive Branch the authority over federal elections that the Framers granted exclusively to the States and to Congress.”

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption  

 

The Trump destruction of the White House historic East Wing to build his ballroom without congressional approval. (New York Times photo).

To The Contrary, Avlon: Sweep Trump’s Ballroom Into the Ash Heap of History, Charlie Sykes, right, Sept. 10, 2026. Plus: Trump’s Stolen Valor, and Fascist-themed new uniforms. 

On today’s “To the Contrary” podcast, I sit down with journalist, author, historian, and Renaissance Man, John Avlon to reflect on the lessons of 9/11 as its 25th anniversary approaches.

Avlon was there. Donald Trump wasn’t.

We also break down the emerging 2028 Democratic field — Avlon has a surprise favorite candidate — and unpack Trump’s fetish for fascist military imagery. (Don’t miss the part about Trump’s Starship Trooper-themed Space Force uniforms and their fascist-aesthetic.)

Avlon also makes the case for tearing down Trump’s Ballroom. Here is Avlon’s latest: “Donald Trump Took a Wrecking Ball to the White House. The Next President Must Do the Same.”

So here is a modest proposal. The Democrats running for president should pledge to take down Trump’s luxury ballroom and rebuild the East Wing as it was, restoring the historic symmetry of the White House. Whatever underground security structures have been built should stay: anything practical and related to national security belongs there. But the monument to one man’s ego above ground should be swept into the ash heap of history.

When the remaining Republican justices finally solve the mystery of who has standing to stop the destruction of the White House, it will be after Trump leaves office. They will conclude the demolition was illegal — and then declare on those grounds that the next president cannot possibly demolish Trump’s ballroom. But that would let the crime stand without any accountability. The purpose of this proposal is not to perpetuate Trump’s cycle of destruction but to end it, by ensuring there is a consequence for breaking the law, and making sure it can never happen again.

Trump took a wrecking ball to the People’s House. The people should reserve the right to take one to his ballroom. 

New York Times, Trump Loyalist Steps Down From ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case, Alan Feuer, Sept. 10, 2026. The inquiry has long been the most fevered of the many revenge investigations that President Trump has demanded the Justice Department undertake.

A loyalist prosecutor handpicked by the Justice Department to lead a contentious conspiracy investigation into several of President Trump’s political opponents abruptly quit his job on Thursday, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The prosecutor, Joseph diGenova, had been in charge of what Mr. Trump’s allies have often referred to as the “grand conspiracy,” a sprawling inquiry based in the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida that has sought to implicate federal officials who have investigated Mr. Trump in a single plot to deprive him of his rights.

Mr. diGenova’s resignation was the latest setback in the case that began last year and has dragged on for months. Even though members of his team have issued numerous grand jury subpoenas to federal law enforcement and intelligence officials who have sought over the past decade to hold Mr. Trump accountable in a series of criminal inquiries, Mr. diGenova had yet to obtain an indictment.

“It was an honor and privilege to serve the president and the department,” Mr. DiGenova told CNN and CBS during phone interviews on Thursday.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly put pressure on prosecutors to bring criminal charges against his opponents, calling them out in private meetings and in social media posts. He has also expressed displeasure about the slow pace of the retributive investigations he has helped to set in motion.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Florida? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

But time and again, Mr. Trump’s desire for vengeance and his willingness to break through the walls of independence that have traditionally separated the White House and the Justice Department have resulted in failure. Judges and grand juries have repeatedly stymied his attempts to strong arm prosecutors into bringing charges.

Sometimes, as in the case of Mr. diGenova, the prosecutors themselves have effectively reminded him that it is no simple matter to file indictments against people without real evidence or viable legal reasoning.The resignation was likely to cause consternation among far-right influencers who have long heralded the grand conspiracy case as the Trump administration’s most aggressive effort to go after the president’s critics.

From the beginning, the influencers pushed for charges to be brought against the widest array of Democrats possible, asserting that a cabal of “deep state” operatives — led by former President Barack Obama — had worked for years to destroy Mr. Trump and deserved to be punished.

With his move, Mr. diGenova became the second prosecutor who has either resigned or been removed from the case. The prosecutor in charge of an early phase of the investigation was forced to leave in the spring after telling her superiors that there was not sufficient evidence to bring charges against one of its first targets, John O. Brennan, a former C.I.A. director who provoked Mr. Trump’s ire by helping to assemble an intelligence assessment that determined that Russia had sought to interfere in the 2016 presidential campaign.

The grand conspiracy inquiry has long been the most fevered of the many revenge investigations that Mr. Trump has demanded the Justice Department undertake. It has involved prosecutors seeking to link disparate criminal inquiries into the president — including the Russia investigation and a separate investigation into Mr. Trump’s mishandling of classified documents — as an overarching, multiyear scheme to damage his political prospects.

From the outset, Mr. diGenova faced an uphill battle in seeking to prove the basic theory of his case: that the various inquiries into Mr. Trump — conducted by different prosecutors and spanning nearly a decade — could be reasonably tied together in a single conspiracy. Those hurdles have led several current and former prosecutors in the office in southern Florida to wonder whether the investigation was largely a show put on to placate Mr. Trump.

Mr. diGenova, a former U.S. attorney from the Reagan era who had not worked as a prosecutor in nearly 40 years, took control of the case in April after his predecessor, Maria Medetis Long, was kicked off the investigation. At 81, he was an unusual choice to oversee an inquiry involving multiple targets that quickly grew to include at least a dozen prosecutors, including his wife, Victoria Toensing.

Moreover, Mr. diGenova was a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s who had publicly claimed that the Russia investigation was a plot by law enforcement to frame him and keep him out of the White House. Mr. diGenova had also worked as a lawyer for Mr. Trump’s 2020 campaign, supporting his false assertions that the election that year had been rigged against him.

While Mr. Brennan was the initial focus of the inquiry, it has also involved an effort to implicate James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, who has already been charged in a separate case in North Carolina. Late last month, Mr. diGenova’s office issued a subpoena demanding testimony from one of Mr. Comey’s close confidants.

More recently, subpoenas had been issued to federal agents who took part in the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 9, 2026 [Trump Lies About His Made-up 9/11 Heroism, Again], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 10, 2026. Yesterday, at a White House event honoring those who sacrificed their lives on 9/11, President Donald Trump went off script and claimed he had taken a crew downtown “right after this happened."

They were, they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do, I’ll be honest. It was raw. Nobody’s seen anything like it ever. We had other buildings. United States Steel Building was creaking. Really creaking. And we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but uh, it never came down. And uh, I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us and two firemen—big strong guys, and I’m not the smallest guy in the world—they grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down, U.S. Steel.”

In fact, as CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale reported, there is no evidence for any of this story. Trump was at Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan when the planes hit the World Trade Center, and there is no evidence for any of his other claims, either. Trump’s nephew, Fred Trump, added that Trump did not have a big building under construction at the time and the “only crew he claimed to bring to the site would have been secretarial and accounting employees.” The younger Trump said he was so offended by President Trump’s claim that he felt the “need to speak out.”

The White House said, “He was a private citizen at the time, not everything he did was documented,” and White House spokesperson Davis Ingle attacked the media for “using this to try to attack him.”

Trump posted on social media: “Everything I said was exactly accurate.”

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S.-made goods went into effect yesterday, matching Trump’s tariffs on Canada dollar for dollar and rate for rate, covering about $20 billion in U.S. goods. Trump responded by escalating his trade war with Canada even further, banning certain products outright, and establishing new tariffs on Canadian motorcycles, alcohol, and dairy products on September 29.

The U.S. and Iran are striking at each other again. The U.S. said it attacked and destroyed five Iranian oil tankers on Tuesday; Iran said it targeted two U.S. ships and eight oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday as they tried to traverse an area Iran has said is off-limits. They also said they had fired at a U.S. military base in Jordan. The price of oil has surged as fighting resumed, with the cost of Brent crude rising above $100 a barrel.

Tonight, Jennifer Jacobs of CBS News reported that Iran’s strikes on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan caused damage to “[m]ultiple American military aircraft.” Jacobs also posted that U.S. forces launched more than 30 Patriot missiles in their defense against the Iranian strikes.

Today Trump told reporters that the Iranians are prolonging the war because of the U.S. midterm elections and that he expects the war on Iran will end and gas prices will come down as soon as the elections are over. “They can’t hold out any longer,” Trump said. “They’re desperate to try and affect the election so that we can get a nice, weak group of people in there and leave them alone and let them have their nuclear weapons.”

But tonight, Alexander Ward, Shelby Holliday, and Michael R. Gordon of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s top advisors have warned him that the Iran war could continue for the rest of his term. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has already extended the deployment of some of the troops in the Middle East and has planned for additional extensions.

The conflict is already straining the military and disrupting global oil markets.

What is most astonishing about the nation’s economic and military problems is that they are entirely self-inflicted at the whim of one man. On October 19, 2024, the month before Trump was reelected, The Economist called the American economy “the envy of the world.” “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust,” wrote Simon Rabinovitch and Henry Curr. “Expect that to continue.”

But Trump insisted the economy was weak and that tariff walls would make it boom. Months after taking office, he grabbed Congress’s authority to levy tariffs and on “Liberation Day” began trade wars around the globe, hobbling the free trade system that had underpinned global trade since World War II. When the Supreme Court ruled his power grab unconstitutional, he turned to temporary powers to achieve the same results.

And now we are in a trade war with our longtime friend and ally Canada, and the president is posting insulting memes about Canada’s prime minister on social media. Economist Paul Krugman wrote today: “I don’t think there has ever been a dispute this stupid. Bear in mind that this crisis is entirely gratuitous.”

“As Trump’s failures, from soaring fuel prices to plunging approval, multiply,” Krugman wrote, “he is doubling down on his disrespect for and attempted bullying of our northern neighbor and former ally. That is, you should think of this conflict not as something reflecting U.S. national interests, but as a form of self-medication from a sundowning president.”

Krugman called attention to the fact that the economies of the U.S. and Canada have been tied closely since at least 1965. Canada supplies about 60% of U.S. aluminum and about 70% of the oil refined in the Midwest. It supplies almost all of the lumber the U.S. uses for framing in new homes. This trade war will do real damage to both economies.

The Iran war, too, was self-inflicted and has been conducted without authorization by Congress as required by the Constitution and by the 1973 War Powers Act. Trump appeared to think the U.S. military could get rid of the head of the Iranian regime when it attacked Iran on February 28 as it had done to the head of Venezuela in just hours the previous month. Repeatedly, Trump has expressed surprise that Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s seaborne oil had passed before the attacks.

And while Trump is now trying to justify the attacks by claiming he is working for a nuclear-free Iran, under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated between the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Iran during the Obama administration, Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium significantly and allow inspections in exchange for relief from some sanctions. The Strait of Hormuz remained open. Although inspectors said Iran was honoring the deal, Trump took the U.S. out of the JCPOA in 2018, and the following year, Iran resumed work on enriched uranium necessary for a nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, reports of corruption in the administration continue to drop.

Cat Zakrzewski and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post reported yesterday that Trump gave his executive assistant Natalie Harp and two other young female employees gifts of $45,000 in cash last year. That amount is about a third of their $150,000 annual salary. He gave $20,000 to Walt Nauta, who was Trump’s co-defendant in the case of Trump retaining classified documents after he left office.

The chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, Richard Painter, told the journalists the gifts appear to violate federal law: federal employees can’t receive salary supplements from outside sources. The acting director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) under Obama, Don Fox, said the legality of the gifts was not clear, in part because such payments are “not a circumstance that OGE ever really envisioned. This just doesn’t happen.”

Bill Allison of Bloomberg reported yesterday that Steve Witkoff earned $107 million in 2025 from the holding company that keeps his share of World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency venture he and the Trump family founded and in which Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the brother of the United Arab Emirates’ president, has invested half a billion dollars. Witkoff is Trump’s special agent for the Middle East and has been negotiating with Russia. Trump reported earning more than $594 million in 2025 from the same venture.

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios reported today that they are hearing from top White House officials and elected Republicans that they are no longer even trying to persuade Trump to do something or not to do something. They are worn out, VandeHei and Allen report. “They know they can’t stop him and they don’t even try.”

“Trump insiders calculate they lived by Trump and so will die by Trump, rather than break with Trump.”

Their utter dereliction of duty to the United States of America has opened the field for Democrats. Yesterday, Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker’s team announced the creation of a new political action committee that will invest at least $20 million in Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives. Shia Kapos of Politico reported that the “Ready for the Fight” PAC, which echoes the phrase the governor uses to end his political speeches, is targeting seats currently held by Republicans.

“Democrats must think big and take the fight to every corner to support candidates in often-overlooked races,” Pritzker said.

On CNN tonight, Pritzker warned Americans not to believe Trump’s lies. “This is the president who ran in 2024 and told you that on day one he was going to lower prices, he was going to end forever wars. And what do you know? He’s done neither. In fact, he’s done the opposite. Prices have gone up since he took office, and, of course, we’re in this endless war in Iran. He can’t stop it. Does not know what he’s doing. And after complaining about Joe Biden’s age, he himself—President Trump, that is—is suffering from dementia, and I think we can all see that. So I think that that’s what I would say about whatever he’s promising for the future, you know he never delivers.”

Tonight, at the “Trumpapaloosa” midterm convention in Dallas that Trump insisted on holding to rally his base, he promised that if the Republicans win the midterm elections, he will give all adult Americans a check for $5,000, a plan that would cost more than a trillion dollars and would require congressional approval. He called it the “Trump Dividend,” thanks to “our tremendous strength and success economically.” 

More On Middle East Wars

New York Times, Yemen’s Houthis Seize Strategic Red Sea Port, Officials Say, Saeed Al-Batati, Shuaib Almosawa and Vivian Nereim, Sept. 10, 2026. The Iran-backed militia routed Yemeni government forces in Mokha, putting the group in a stronger position to attack ships in a crucial waterway for global trade.

The Iran-backed Houthi militia captured a strategic Red Sea port city on Thursday, according to two Yemeni officials, a move that could allow the group to exert greater control over an important international shipping route.

In a swift ground offensive, the Houthis pushed out forces allied with the Yemeni government that is backed by Saudi Arabia and seized the city of Mokha as well as its port, according to a local official in the city and a senior provincial official. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Mokha has been the focus of several days of fierce ground battles between the Houthis and the internationally recognized government of Yemen.

The two sides have been at war since 2014, when the Houthis seized Yemen’s capital, Sanaa. Soon after, a Saudi-led military coalition began a bombing campaign to try to restore the government, plunging the impoverished nation into a civil war that has lasted for more than a decade.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen?

Mokha is less than 50 miles from the narrow Bab al-Mandab Strait at the southern end of the Red Sea.

The Houthis have previously attacked ships in the Red Sea from Yemeni territory further north but control of Mokha gives the militia a foothold closer to the strait — a major win for the group, with implications for global trade and oil markets, analysts say.

“This is potentially one of the more significant turning points, particularly in recent years, of the Yemen conflict,” said Adam Baron, a Yemen-focused fellow at New America, a research organization in Washington.

We’ll keep tracking all the news. Remember to take advantage of the deals on our book WTF America above before they go away. And join as a paid subscriber if you haven’t yet. Your subscriptions allow us to continue our work, so thank you.Politico,

New York Times, Oil Prices Surge as Stocks and Bonds Wobble, Gregory Schmidt and Jenny Gross, Sept. 10, 2026. Crude oil hit its highest levels in months, bond yields continued to rise and stocks fell for a fourth consecutive session as investors worried about energy supplies and inflation.

Oil prices surged above $107 a barrel, a 48 percent increase since the start of the war in Iran in late February. The rise in energy costs threatens to push prices up more broadly, squeezing consumers and businesses already grappling with stubbornly elevated inflation.

Investors are looking to a crucial report on U.S. inflation, set for release on Friday, that could alter expectations for the Federal Reserve’s decision on interest rates at its meeting next week. Traders believe that a rate increase is more likely than not. The European Central Bank raised its key interest rate on Thursday, the second time it increased rates since the war began.

Fears of accelerating inflation and forecasts for higher Fed rates have been major factors behind a steady rise of bond yields. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, a measure of borrowing costs that influences mortgages, business loans and many other types of debt, jumped above 4.9 percent on Thursday, the highest level since 2023.

U.S. gasoline prices rose on Thursday to a national average of about $4.28 a gallon, according to the AAA motor club. Drivers are paying 44 percent more on average for gas than when the war began. The average price of diesel also climbed, to $5.98 a gallon, up 59 percent since the start of the war.views

More On 9/11 25th Anniversary

New York Times,  25 Years After 9/11, Al Qaeda Still Has a Home in Afghanistan, Elian Peltier, Photographs by Tomás Munita, Sept. 10, 2026. The Taliban claim that Afghanistan is no longer a sanctuary for terrorist groups, but Al Qaeda and others are still present, reviving old fears.

Twenty five years ago, Osama bin Laden led the planning of Al Qaeda’s attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, from a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, where he lived as their guest.

Now, the Taliban rule over Afghanistan once again, trying to present a more modern face to the world.

But despite the veneer, the Taliban have not changed their ideology, and armed groups, including dozens of Qaeda members, remain in Afghanistan. Many of the conditions that made the Sept. 11 attacks possible remain.

The Taliban outlasted the American war to oust them and are now ruling over 45 million Afghans. They use the latest iPhones to contact European and American diplomats. They travel to the Persian Gulf and Turkey, and promote trade with Uzbekistan and India. Their fighters now patrol Afghanistan’s cities, some using abandoned U.S. military gear.

New York Times, The Man Who Approved 9/11 Victims’ Checks Paid a Price, Ephrat Livni, Sept. 10, 2026. Kenneth Feinberg says the nearly three years he spent running the Sept. 11 compensation fund changed his life view.

The lawyer who became the public face of the Sept. 11 victims’ compensation fund will not be attending any memorials on the 25th anniversary of the attacks. He has kept his calendar clear. Deliberately.

“It was a singular moment in time,” says Kenneth Feinberg, who is nearing the end of a half-century law career. “It was very debilitating and very difficult, and I’m simply not comfortable with any public demonstration. I would rather honor the memory privately. I would rather reflect.”

Reflecting on the events of that day is what Mr. Feinberg has done pretty much every day for the past quarter-century. That can make talking to him somewhat akin to engaging with an ancient Stoic philosopher, albeit one prone to proclaiming about the vagaries of fate and fortune in a pronounced Massachusetts accent.

“I look in the mirror and I say, ‘Bad things happen to good people every day,’” he says.

That is a common refrain now for Mr. Feinberg, who became intimately acquainted with death, disaster and loss in his role as special master of the federal fund set up to compensate victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks. He spent nearly three years talking to grieving family members, people whose lives had changed irrevocably in an instant.

It profoundly transformed his personal understanding of existence, he recounted over the course of several interviews in Washington and New York between December and August.

“You learn one very important lesson at least: Time is the enemy,” he says. “You cannot outfox time. And you better live every day like it may be your last.”

Nearly 3,000 people were killed and about 2,400 others wounded on the day of the attack, when terrorists from Al Qaeda hijacked four planes. They crashed two into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and one into the Pentagon. The fourth crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

Like many people around the world, Mr. Feinberg had watched on television as the towers fell and the Pentagon burned, but his view from afar did not last long. Less than two weeks after the attacks, Congress approved a fund to compensate victims, and Mr. Feinberg was asked to oversee it.

He took on the job voluntarily, seeing it as an opportunity to be of service in a time of national need, he says.

The compensation fund was created to stave off lawsuits against the airlines whose planes had been hijacked. Litigation could have bankrupted them. If the airlines had not lobbied, the fund might not have been created, Mr. Feinberg concedes, but he believes that the government was also moved by a desire to do right by the victims.

And in a country where death and injury claims are generally worked out in torts litigation that can take many years and result in uncertain outcomes, he argues that the fund, which had an unlimited budget, helped ensure that the injured and the families of the dead would not struggle financially.

Mr. Feinberg met with hundreds of grieving families, including relatives of victims from nearly 60 countries. They told him about their pain and anger, showed him photos and home movies, and shared their memories.

But many rejected what he was there to offer them, at least initially.

The emotional responses to loss were universal, Mr. Feinberg says. But the responses to the offer of compensation were not always well received.

Abroad, the idea that the U.S. government would compensate families for their losses — a peculiarly American approach, in Mr. Feinberg’s view — was met with suspicion. Some families were flummoxed when he met with them in London. And some were wary, certain that there were strings attached or that there could be unforeseen consequences to taking the money, he says.

At home, he noted, the offer of money incensed some people who seemed to believe that their government wanted to buy their silence or that it was dismissive of their pain.

Mr. Feinberg was chosen to administer the fund because he had become known as a mediator skilled at resolving complex disputes. In 1984, he handled the $180 million settlement between Vietnam War veterans and manufacturers of the toxic herbicide Agent Orange.

But in a country so traumatized by the attacks, Mr. Feinberg was unprepared for what lay ahead.

Some of the tensions came with the territory. It was Mr. Feinberg’s job to make decisions about how much people would be compensated. The amounts were based on how much they would have earned working in a lifetime.

But some families felt the message of that calculus was that some lives were worth more to society than others. And some found Mr. Feinberg unfeeling, even arrogant.

He himself now says that he made mistakes, and that he has some regrets. He quickly discovered his own limitations, he says.

He recalls one mourning father who dismissed his words of sympathy as pretentious platitudes. Then there was the widow who had only weeks to arrange for her children’s future because she had been diagnosed with a deadly disease.

He talks about the litany of rebukes he got from victims’ families as if they were yesterday.

“You’re going to give me $4 million, Mr. Feinberg,” he recalls one husband telling him. “I got a better idea: Bring my wife back.” The moment, he said, was “chilling.”

A spiritual leader might have been better equipped for the meetings with families, he says. They could have offered the kind of solace a lawyer could not. The survivors, he says, needed someone to urge them to stay strong. All he had to offer were dollars.

For the fund to succeed in preventing lawsuits, it had to persuade a majority of eligible claimants to accept compensation. To accomplish that, over time, Mr. Feinberg says, he learned to stop talking as much and to start listening more.

Ultimately, about 97 percent of the relatives of the dead and many of those injured on Sept. 11, 2001, agreed to sign on. Mr. Feinberg distributed more than $7 billion, he said, and after nearly three years of working on the fund, his work was done.

But his own life was never the same again, he says.

Though he has managed to make it to 80 and will retire this year, he has become acutely aware of life’s fickle nature. Tiny decisions can mean the difference between life and death, like ordering a second cup of coffee instead of heading for work in a doomed office building.

Now, when people confidently share their plans, he sometimes has to restrain himself, Mr. Feinberg says in a book about the fund, “What Is Life Worth?” It has been reissued for the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11.

“I listen and nod and smile, and I wonder whether any of this will come to pass,” Mr. Feinberg says. “Where is it written that life will be so accommodating?”

More On Global News

Middle East Eye, Algeria suspends diplomatic relations with ‘dwarf state’ UAE, Elis Gjevori, Sept. 10, 2026. Algiers cuts ties with Abu Dhabi and accuses the Gulf state of destabilising the wider region. 

Algeria announced on Thursday that it would sever all diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates after “exhausting all means to preserve bilateral relations”.

In a statement, the Algerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had warned the UAE over its “hostile actions” and had expended significant effort in “drawing the attention of the Emirati side and warning it of the grave consequences that may result from its regrettable and unjustified behavior”.

“Despite these numerous warnings, the United Arab Emirates has persisted in these actions, which have reached a point where they can no longer be considered acceptable or tolerable within the framework of relations between two sovereign states, or remain unanswered,” the statement added.

The Algerian foreign ministry said it had informed the UAE ambassador of the decision and had given him 48 hours to comply.

Tensions between the two countries have increased in recent years as the UAE has played an increasingly destabilising role across the Middle East.New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem DispatchSign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters

In a headline in 2023, the Algerian newspaper Le Soir d’Algerie called the UAE a “pyromaniac state” and condemned the state’s “harmful role” around Algeria’s borders.UAE threat to Algeria

In recent years, the UAE has funded authoritarian leaders and breakaway groups across the Sahel and North Africa.

In Libya, the UAE has backed military leader Khalifa Haftar in the east of the country, destabilising not only Libya but also Chad, Sudan and Niger.

The UAE has also used Libya as a base to provide support for Sudan's Rapid Support Forces militia, which has been accused of committing genocide in the country's civil war.

In April 2024, Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said in comments widely perceived as aimed at the UAE: “Wherever there is conflict, the money of this state [the Emirates] is there - in Mali, Libya, and Sudan."

Tebboune has also disparagingly called the UAE the “dwarf state” without naming it, saying: “I will not name it. They wanted to interfere in matters in which we prevented great powers from interfering.

'President Tebboune had spent the better part of a year railing against a 'small state' bent on stirring trouble; today he just stopped pretending it was anonymous'

- Andreas Krieg, associate professor, King’s College London

“This has been coming for a long time, and to my mind the significance is less the break itself than what it tells us about how Algeria now reads the UAE,” Andreas Krieg, associate professor of security studies at King’s College London, told Middle East Eye.

“Algiers has effectively concluded that Abu Dhabi's regional playbook - cultivating what I call an 'axis of secessionists,' from Haftar in Libya to the RSF in Sudan to the southern movement in Yemen - was being turned toward Algeria itself,” said Krieg, reacting to the decision.

Algeria has spent the best part of this year signalling its displeasure with the UAE.

On 7 February, Algeria began cancelling its bilateral air-services agreement with the UAE. While Algiers did not provide a formal explanation, most analysts understood that the decision reflected the UAE’s continuing interventions in Algeria’s backyard.

“The sharpest fear is Emirati contact with the Kabylie autonomy movement, the MAK, which Algiers treats as a terrorist organisation and as a red line running straight through national unity,” said Krieg.

When the UAE announced its withdrawal from Opec earlier this year, Tebboune publicly dismissed the decision as a “non-event”.

Tebboune said Saudi Arabia was Opec’s main pillar and declared, regarding the UAE, that “the book is closed”.

“The foreign ministry's wording is the tell,” said Krieg. “It says the decision came 'after exhausting all means' to save the relationship, and it pointedly names no single trigger. That's deliberate: this wasn't one incident but an accumulation - the suspected outreach to separatists, the UAE's military footprint in Libya and the Sahel, and Abu Dhabi's backing of Morocco on Western Sahara, which for Algeria is the most sensitive file of all,” he said.

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

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: A new low for American workers, Rebecca Crosby, Sept. 10, 2026. Workers in the United States are earning a historically low share of the value they produce, according to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS estimates that the labor share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) “was 52.8 percent in the second quarter of 2026.” This is the lowest level that the BLS has seen since it first began recording labor share in 1947.

Labor share has been on a downward trend for months. In the first quarter of 2026, labor share was 53.7%, which was, at the time, a historic low. Over the last 25 years, the labor share of income has plummeted. In the first quarter of 2000, the labor share was 63.9%.

But while labor’s share of GDP is collapsing, U.S. corporate profits are surging. In the second quarter of 2026, corporate profits increased 9% compared to the first quarter of the year, according to data released in August by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Corporate profits “increased $400.9 billion in the second quarter, compared with an increase of $74.4 billion in the first quarter,” according to the BEA.

This may be one reason why, despite there being a relatively low unemployment rate and some GDP growth, 76% of Americans rated the economic conditions in the U.S. as “poor” or “only fair,” according to a July Pew Research survey. While the economy is growing, workers are not benefiting from economic growth.

There are many factors that may be driving down wages relative to GDP, including technological advancements and accelerated globalization. In recent years, more workers are also relying on gig work, and the share of workers who are part of a union has also declined drastically in recent decades.

Instead of addressing the problem, the second Trump administration is taking steps that may push the labor share of GDP even lower.

In February, the Trump administration proposed a new rule that would make it easier for employers to classify workers as independent contractors. Classifying workers as independent contractors is usually cheaper for businesses and detrimental to workers. According to Reuters, “[e]mployees can cost businesses up to 30% more” than independent contractors.

The new rule would formally rescind a 2024 Biden administration rule that made it more difficult to classify employees as independent contractors by using a rigorous set of standards to determine whether a worker is truly independent. In May 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would no longer enforce the rule.

The Trump administration rule would replace the Biden administration standards with a more permissive “economic reality” test to decide if a worker is “economically dependent on an employer for work.” As a practical matter, it would likely thwart efforts to classify ride-share drivers, delivery drivers, and construction workers as employees.

In a statement, then-Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer argued that “tens of millions of Americans who work as independent contractors are helping drive the Golden Age of the American economy” and that the “proposed rule seeks to protect these workers’ entrepreneurial spirit and simplify compliance for American job creators navigating a modern workplace.”

But while the proposed rule would be a windfall for businesses, workers who are classified as independent contractors “lose out on critical protections, benefits, and labor rights including minimum wage, overtime pay, unemployment insurance, the right to form a union, and anti-discrimination protections in most states,” according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). Independent contractors must also “bear the full financial costs of Social Security and Medicare contributions.”

A 2025 EPI analysis found that a typical construction worker loses “as much as $19,526 per year in income and job benefits” when classified as an independent contractor instead of an employee. A truck driver would lose up to $21,532 per year, and a home health aide would lose as much as $10,246 per year.

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) opposed the proposed rule, arguing that classifying employees as independent contractors “degrades wages and working conditions, particularly in fast-growing, low-paying, and labor violation—prone occupations and industries.”

Gutting the NLRB

The second Trump administration has also sidelined the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency that protects workers’ rights, investigates unfair labor practices, and conducts union elections. Research has shown that “high rates of unionization are consistently associated with higher wages and better working conditions for both union and nonunion workers,” according to the EPI.

In an unprecedented move, President Trump fired NLRB board member Gwynne Wilcox shortly after he began his second term. (Wilcox sued the Trump administration, but an appeals court ruled in December 2025 that Trump had acted lawfully.) Wilcox’s removal left the board with only two members, and therefore without the necessary three-member quorum.

This left the NLRB unable to issue any new decisions for nearly a year. In that time, workers were stuck waiting for decisions on cases concerning unfair labor practices or potentially illegal firings. Any decision made by an administrative law judge can be appealed to the NLRB for a final decision, and every appeal case was stuck in limbo. Two new members were finally confirmed to the board in December 2025.

The NLRB is increasingly staffed with officials who are openly hostile to labor rights. After firing NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, for example, Trump appointed Crystal Carey for the role. Carey was formerly a partner at a law firm that “is pursuing the legal challenge that the NLRB is unconstitutional,” according to the EPI.

The board is now dealing with a backlog of cases. During the second Trump administration, the NLRB has been more likely to dismiss cases altogether. An analysis by the Center for American Progress (CAP) found that from the beginning of January 2025 to April 29, 2026, the likelihood that the NLRB dismissed a case alleging unfair labor practices filed by a union was 14.2 percentage points higher than in 2024.

A separate analysis by CAP found that the volume of private sector union elections overseen by the NLRB plunged after the Trump administration’s efforts to weaken the agency. In 2025, the “NLRB oversaw 1,498 union elections,” which is a “30 percent drop from 2024.” Worker participation in NLRB elections was also down, with “59,000 fewer workers participat[ing] in NLRB-run elections in 2025, a 42 percent decline from the previous year.”

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Bessent and the Bonds, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 10, 2026. “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite aphorism made sense then and now. Policymakers should avoid being boastful or belligerent, not simply as a matter of good manners, but to save their credibility for moments when it’s really needed.

Obviously nobody expects Donald Trump to follow TR’s advice. No matter what the circumstances, Trump will always insist that he’s carrying a big stick, the biggest stick, a stick like nobody has ever carried before. But I expected a bit more circumspection from Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary.

After all, a young Bessent was working for George Soros in 1992 when Soros famously engineered a speculative run on the British pound. At the time British officials loudly and repeatedly proclaimed that they would never, ever allow the pound to be devalued — then caved in the face of market pressure, a humiliation from which Norman Lamont, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, equivalent to the U.S. Treasury secretary, never recovered. So Bessent should know the risks of talking big when you might not have the means to deliver.

Oh well. On Tuesday, Bessent — who has been deploying U.S. funds to support the Japanese yen, declared himself in control of the situation: “I am the house now … And you can bet against me if you want.”

So far markets haven’t challenged Bessent’s boasts about the yen. They have, however, tested his attempts to push down U.S. interest rates — and as the headline at the top of this post says, those efforts are failing with flying colors.

Now, I’d like to blame the Trump administration for rising interest rates. The truth, however, is that rates are rising everywhere. As the European think tank Bruegel says,

[The] problem with explanations centred on a breakdown in US institutions is that the rise in long-term rates is not uniquely American. US, German, French, Italian, United Kingdom and Japanese 30-year yields rose by 45-79 basis points in the six months to 28 August, with the US in the middle at 58bp.

Given the craziness of our leadership, America arguably deserves to be punished by the bond market, but the truth is that we can’t see that happening in the data (yet?).

So what is driving interest rates higher? It may not have much to do with policy at all. The simplest story consistent with the facts is that we’re seeing a surge in demand for funds as a result of the AI boom. We are in the midst of a surge in spending on information technology (information processing equipment and software) that is on track to be even bigger than the boom of the late 1990s:

And it’s worth noting that long-term interest rates were even higher then than they are now, even though inflation was low and we had a budget surplus:As I said, although the Trump administration deserves blame for many things, I don’t think it’s responsible for high long-term rates, any more than Bill Clinton was responsible for high rates in the late 1990s. This looks like the natural market response to the rush to invest in AI.

It is, however, foolish of Bessent to imagine that he can beat rising rates back by talking big while waving his tiny, tiny stick. All he’s doing is further draining his rapidly diminishing reserves of credibility.

More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

New York Times, Memorial on Anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s Killing Splits a Utah Campus, Jack Healy, Sept. 10, 2026. The university where the conservative activist was shot last year has canceled classes for a memorial. While many students planned to attend, some said they just wanted to move on from the tragedy.

The Utah campus where the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed last year is in the spotlight again — this time, as the site of a memorial on the anniversary of his assassination.

Turning Point USA, the influential conservative organization founded by Mr. Kirk, is holding a “deliberate act of remembrance” on Thursday evening at Utah Valley University in Orem to honor Mr. Kirk. The anniversary prompted the university to cancel classes and step up security, while also pulling the 48,000-student college back into debates over political violence and Mr. Kirk’s legacy.

The memorial has divided students. While several said they planned to attend, calling Mr. Kirk a martyr to free speech and Christian conservatism, others objected to the university’s shutting down for the event and said they wanted to move on from the tragedy.

The notoriety of Mr. Kirk’s killing “is all we are now,” said Ruby Olsen, 20, an anthropology major, who had been watching Mr. Kirk speak when she heard the rifle shot that killed him.

Last September, Mr. Kirk was fatally shot during an on-campus speaking event that was attended by thousands, a killing that set off fierce debates about political violence and free speech across the nation.

Prosecutors have accused Tyler J. Robinson, a 23-year-old man from southern Utah, of shooting Mr. Kirk from the roof of a nearby building and charged him with aggravated murder, saying he killed Mr. Kirk because of his political views. Mr. Robinson, who could face the death penalty, has pleaded not guilty.

In the days leading up to the memorial, which will be held at the university’s events center and basketball arena, people connected with Turning Point walked through the sunny campus handing out fliers for the event and urging students to register for a seat. Speakers at the memorial will include the right-wing pundits Glenn Beck and Michael Knowles.

“It’s a way to honor him,” Jimmy Thurston, a 21-year-old engineering student, said as he put a rose in a planter near the grassy sunken plaza where Mr. Kirk was killed. “This was a national tragedy.”

But the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society is planning a protest outside the memorial to oppose Turning Point’s event, as well as the university’s decision to cancel classes for the day.

“This is almost like making this a holiday,” Ethan Cunningham, the president of the campus Students for a Democratic Society, said in an interview.

A year later, the memorial is just one way that Mr. Kirk’s killing still echoes across campus.

Utah Valley University is conducting a lengthy security review of the shooting and faces divisions over whether to build a permanent memorial on campus to Mr. Kirk. Last spring, the university stumbled into another debate over free speech when it invited — and then canceled — a graduation speech by an author who had criticized Mr. Kirk.

Jon Anderson, who became Utah Valley’s president last month, said in an interview that he planned to attend both the memorial and the protest. He said he would speak to students on both sides of the divide, in an effort to show that the university is a place “where people can bring any idea and have a civil place to have an honest dialogue.”

Dr. Anderson said that the university had not received any specific threats related to the anniversary and that he expected the campus to be calm on Thursday. In place of classes, the university is holding a “day of service” on Thursday, with campus leaders going to a pancake breakfast, cleaning yards and painting fences at a local elementary school.

Dr. Anderson said Utah Valley University would not close down for future anniversaries of Mr. Kirk’s killing.

But for some students, even once was too much.

On Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Olsen, the anthropology student who had been present at Mr. Kirk’s killing, looked across the grassy courtyard where he was shot. Visitors snapped photos and prayed beside a large wooden crucifix they had carried in with them.

Days after Mr. Kirk’s killing, a huge American flag was hung above the plaza, and this week, a flag was unfurled in the same spot. To Ms. Olsen, it was an unwelcome reminder of the chaos and panic attacks she had endured last year.

As she and two friends chatted in a student lounge, they said they still loved the campus and their classes. But attending Utah Valley University now meant threading their way past assassination tourists and living in the shadow of Mr. Kirk’s death. They said they had no interest in going to the memorial. 

Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: MeidasTouch Podcast Ranks #1 Podcast in the Industry for Monthly Downloads and Views, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 10, 2026. The MeidasTouch Network announced today that The MeidasTouch Podcast has been ranked the #1 podcast in the industry by monthly downloads and views, according to Podscribe’s August 2026 Industry Ranker.

Podscribe estimates that The MeidasTouch Podcast generated approximately 95.4 million downloads and views per month, placing it first among all shows included in the ranking. The total represents a 9% increase and puts MeidasTouch ahead of some of the biggest names in podcasting, including The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett, The Joe Rogan Experience, The Daily, and Crime Junkie.

“This milestone belongs to the Meidas Mighty,” said the Meiselas brothers, co-founders of MeidasTouch. “We built MeidasTouch from the ground up as a fiercely independent network, without billionaire owners or corporate gatekeepers. To now see The MeidasTouch Podcast ranked #1 in the industry is a testament to the extraordinary community that shows up every single day to support independent media.”

Podscribe describes its Industry Ranker as a comprehensive ranking of top podcast shows, publishers, and advertisers, incorporating podcast and YouTube metrics. Its monthly rankings analyze audio reach, downloads and views across platforms, with the August 2026 snapshot reflecting performance from August 1 through August 31.

The August ranking estimates The MeidasTouch Podcast at 95.4 million monthly downloads and views, compared with approximately 63.9 million for The Diary of a CEO, 48.5 million for The Joe Rogan Experience, and 34.8 million for The Daily.

The achievement marks another major milestone in MeidasTouch Network’s rapid growth into one of the largest independent media operations in the country. Founded by brothers Ben, Brett, and Jordy Meiselas, MeidasTouch has built its audience around pro-democracy news, political analysis, legal coverage, interviews, and original reporting across YouTube, podcasts, social media, Substack, and MeidasTouch News.

“We have always believed there was an enormous audience hungry for unapologetic, fact-based independent news,” the Meiselas brothers added. “The old guard told us this model couldn’t work. Our audience proved otherwise. We’re just getting started.”

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The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Blocks International Epstein Investigations, Musk's Vote Website Is Secretly Stealing Your Data, Trump's Family Calls Him a Liar, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 9, 2026. Five countries are investigating Jeffrey Epstein right now, and the Justice Department is stonewalling every single one of them. The president’s own nephew just called him out publicly for lying about 9/11. And Elon Musk is spending millions of dollars on a website designed to trick you into handing over your personal data. Plus, Republicans kick off their first-ever midterm convention to a room half full of no-shows, the Tate brothers stay behind bars, and a 22-year-old dropout pleads guilty to one of the largest crypto heists in US history.

But first, if you’re new here, consider hitting subscribe, because this channel is surging right now. We are pulling numbers that put us ahead of Fox News on stories like this, and it’s not just people who already agree with me. I’m hearing from conservatives, regularly, in the comments and in my inbox, telling me they’re coming here because they want the facts straight, without the spin. That’s the whole point of this show.Subscribed

So if you want news you can actually trust, hit subscribe, support this work, and let’s get into today’s rundown.

Trump Blocks European Epstein Investigations:

More than a year after the first Epstein files were released, the Washington Post has confirmed that multiple European law enforcement agencies say the DOJ still hasn’t responded to their formal mutual legal assistance requests, the official channel that would let foreign investigators obtain US evidence, documents, and testimony. No US charges have resulted from the files’ release even as the documents exposed Epstein’s relationships with influential people worldwide, both before and after his 2008 guilty plea, and have sparked a wave of international investigations. Poland, Norway, and Latvia all told the Washington Post directly that Washington hasn’t fulfilled their requests, and Britain’s separate request has also gone unanswered. The DOJ says it doesn’t comment on the status of mutual legal assistance requests, but told the Telegraph last month it “has not refused to assist any jurisdiction investigating potential criminal conduct related to Jeffrey Epstein” and “remains committed to co-operating with all jurisdictions... in accordance with federal law and longstanding practice.”

Norway’s investigation is the most advanced of the group, with three prominent figures already facing corruption charges over their relationships with Epstein: former diplomats Terje Rød-Larsen and Mona Juul, and former Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland, all of whom maintain their innocence. Norwegian prosecutors, through the economic crimes unit Økokrim, specifically requested records from the International Peace Institute in New York, where Rød-Larsen once served as president. State prosecutor Marianne Bender said her office is “in communication with officials from the Department of Justice, but they have not at this time approved the request,” calling it “very unfortunate for the Norwegian investigation” and expressing hope the US will eventually approve it. Rød-Larsen’s lawyer, John Christian Elden, welcomed the push for additional evidence, arguing the case against his client rests on “a selectively chosen set of documents from the Epstein seizure.”

Poland’s investigation, opened by Prime Minister Donald Tusk in February, specifically examines possible links between Epstein and Russian intelligence. National Prosecutor’s Office spokesman Przemysław Nowak said his office sought “the disclosure of unredacted documents from the so-called Epstein Files relating to any Polish aspects of the case,” but the DOJ has not responded to that request, which Warsaw submitted in April. Latvia’s State Police, meanwhile, say they’ve opened a criminal investigation and have already identified one Latvian victim connected to the files. Spokeswoman Simona Gravite said investigators have “sent several requests for mutual legal assistance to the relevant authorities in the United States. However, no responses have yet been received.”

In Britain, police investigated Lord Peter Mandelson, a former UK ambassador to the United States, in February on suspicion of misconduct in public office related to Epstein; he denies any wrongdoing. According to the Times, London submitted a formal request in May for access to unredacted copies of Epstein files after informal discussions between the DOJ and British law enforcement failed to produce the information. The Telegraph reported late last month that neither the DOJ nor the FBI has responded to that formal request, and the Crown Prosecution Service declined to comment when asked by the Post.

Germany’s federal police say they remain in contact with American authorities, including the FBI, about the possibility that Epstein-related files could implicate German nationals, and have asked the FBI to involve German authorities in any relevant cases. Two Green Party lawmakers, Konstantin von Notz and Irene Mihalic, have pushed the German government to formally investigate potential Epstein links to German citizens, but the government has said its Criminal Police Office currently has no information pointing to any criminally relevant connections to Germany. This all comes as American lawmakers, from both parties, continue pressing the DOJ over incomplete document releases and redactions dating back to Congress’s overwhelming vote last November to force full disclosure of the department’s Epstein material.

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew called on Trump to release the Epstein files during a press conference, tying the demand to unrelated grievances like the Iran war and rising gas prices affecting Canadians amid ongoing US trade tensions. He said bluntly, “Release the Epstein files. Donald Trump is Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend. The reason why we’re at war in Iran and everyone’s paying higher gas prices is because of the Epstein files.”

Trump Family Calls Him Out:

Fred Trump, the president’s nephew and author of a 2024 memoir detailing allegations against his uncle, broke his usual silence on X this week to directly dispute Trump’s 9/11 claims, writing “I try not to comment personally about my uncle, but his claim...so offends me that I need to speak out.” His statement came after Trump repeated his story about being physically carried out of a nearby building by firefighters during a Fox News interview and again at a White House event Tuesday, telling Fox he personally “went down” to Ground Zero and worked there.

Photo by Aaron Parnas on September 09, 2026. May be a Twitter screenshot of text.

The story has shifted dramatically over the decades: right after 9/11, Trump told a German broadcaster he already had more than 100 construction workers helping at the site with 125 more on the way; by the 2016 campaign he was describing firefighters rushing him out of a nearby high-rise after cracks reportedly appeared in it; by 2021 he’d added the detail that he was physically carried out during the evacuation. Fred Trump directly contradicted the construction-crew version, writing that any workers his uncle could have sent “would have been secretarial and accounting employees from Trump Tower” who he personally knew and doubted were “physically capable” of helping.

Fred also disputed the building-collapse story specifically, citing his own connections to engineers who worked on the structure in question, saying it was built solidly and was inspected and cleared for occupancy shortly after the attacks, directly undercutting Trump’s account of a near-collapse dramatic enough to require rescue. The Daily Beast, which first reported Fred’s comments, notes Trump was actually at Trump Tower, roughly two and a half miles from Ground Zero, when the attacks happened.

Elon Musk Runs Million Dollar Effort to Steal Your Information:

Elon Musk’s America PAC is running an aggressive ad campaign directing people to Vote Safe, a website marketed as a tool to help people “vote with confidence.” In reality, the site secretly collects visitors’ full names, birthdays, home addresses, emails, phone numbers, IP addresses, browser data, location, voter registration status, and every page and link they click. The site quietly dropped a prior privacy policy clause that had barred sharing this data with advertisers or political organizations. Now America PAC can sell or share that information, along with data-driven “inferences” about users, with partners including Facebook, Google, X, The Trade Desk, Increment Data, and Iterable. In the past week alone, the PAC spent over $180,000 promoting the site, part of Musk’s pledged $100 million-plus for the midterms.

This is a repeat pattern rather than a one-off. Ahead of the 2024 election, Musk’s PAC spent $800,000 on similar digital ads, and users in several battleground states reported the sites collected their personal data without ever actually directing them to register to vote. Separately, in Georgia, the PAC mailed voters partially pre-filled absentee ballot applications, which violated state law. The Georgia State Elections Board voted to issue a formal reprimand over the scheme, but no further consequences followed. Together these episodes show a recurring tactic of using voter-outreach branding as cover for data harvesting.

Musk had previously said he would pull back from political spending after setbacks in races like Wisconsin, but he has now reversed course. America PAC is planning to spend heavily again on door-knocking, direct mail, and digital advertising ahead of the midterms. The scale of the current effort, over $100 million pledged, suggests the Vote Safe data collection is likely to expand rather than be an isolated incident. The recurring use of “voter safety” or “confidence” branding appears designed to lower people’s guard about what information they’re handing over.

Other news:

Republicans kicked off their first-ever midterm convention in Dallas, a two-day event nicknamed "Trumpapalooza" by the RNC chair, with President Trump delivering a keynote address the night it opened. More than 100 House Republicans and candidates were expected to attend, each paying $25,000 for tickets and lodging, but an NBC News count found dozens of Republicans in competitive races opted to skip it, with 33 declining versus 29 confirming attendance. Trump dismissed the split as a logistics issue rather than a snub, telling reporters "we don't have room for 500 politicians" and that only candidates in close races were invited, while those "35 points up" were told to stay home and campaign instead. The event comes as Trump's approval ratings sag and Republicans look to generate enthusiasm and turnout ahead of November, even as some vulnerable members privately feel their legislative wins aren't getting enough credit. The event is currently empty:

Andrew and Tristan Tate, the “manosphere” influencers dual UK-US nationals, were denied bail by U.S. Magistrate Judge Lauren Louis on Wednesday and will stay behind bars in Florida while they fight extradition to the UK on dozens of sex crime charges. The judge ruled they “failed to meet their burden to demonstrate that they do not present a risk of flight or danger to the community,” rejecting their bid for special release circumstances. Andrew, 39, faces charges including seven counts of rape and 15 counts of making or distributing indecent images of children, filed after their July arrest in Miami on new UK charges, while Tristan, 38, faces six additional rape, assault, and sexual exploitation counts, with the alleged crimes spanning 2010 to 2017. UK prosecutors opposed bail, alleging the brothers’ own statements suggest an intent to flee and citing efforts to obtain accusers’ names from prosecutors in exchange for a “security” fee and a promise not to identify them, which the Crown Prosecution Service declined; their attorney Joe McBride called the allegations false and framed their detention as the result of “an unholy alliance between the enemies of free speech.” The brothers also separately face organized crime, human trafficking, and money laundering charges in Romania, which they deny.

The Trump administration published a draft proposal to bar all noncitizens without a green card, including refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants, from being counted in the 2030 Census, reversing a practice of including all US residents that has stood for over two centuries. Because census figures determine how the 435 House seats and corresponding Electoral College votes are apportioned among states, as well as how federal funding is distributed, excluding these populations would disproportionately reduce representation and dollars for Democratic-leaning states and cities with large immigrant communities. The proposal also seeks to drop the census’s longstanding race and ethnicity questions and ban questions about sexual orientation, calling the latter “immaterial personal characteristics.” Trump attempted a similar move in his first term by pushing for a citizenship question on the 2020 census, but the Supreme Court blocked it in a 5-4 ruling, with Chief Justice Roberts calling the administration’s justification “contrived.” Civil rights advocates and Democratic officials, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, argue the plan violates the 14th Amendment’s requirement to count the “whole number of persons in each state” and are preparing legal challenges.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre says a drone nearly hit Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's plane as he was departing for Oslo for King Harald's funeral.

Apple opened its fall product event Wednesday, the first led by new CEO John Ternus since he took over from Tim Cook on September 1, unveiling the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max with incremental updates like new colors, a customizable Siri voice, faster charging, and over 24 hours of battery life. The company is widely expected to use the event to also debut its first foldable iPhone, its biggest device redesign since 2007.

Temporary Protected Status for roughly 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants was set to expire Wednesday, but DHS said only that an announcement “will be made at the appropriate time,” meaning protections technically remain in place for now; if DHS takes no action, protections automatically extend another six months, as happened for about 11,000 Lebanese TPS holders in May. The Trump administration has already ended TPS for more than 1 million people across 14 countries this term, leaving only about 103,000 people from three countries protected, with Ukraine and Sudan’s status ending in October and Lebanon’s in November; a June Supreme Court ruling upholding TPS terminations for Haitians and Syrians potentially threatens protections for nearly 1.3 million people from 17 countries total. TPS was created by Congress in 1990, and El Salvador’s was originally granted after devastating 2001 earthquakes, with Biden extending it to September 9, 2026 just before leaving office; the vast majority of Salvadoran TPS holders have US-born children. El Salvador has become one of the Trump administration’s closest allies, with President Nayib Bukele accepting deportees at the CECOT mega-prison despite human rights groups documenting torture and disappearances there, and Salvadorans in the US sent $9.9 billion in remittances home last year, 24% of the country’s GDP, though Bukele hasn’t publicly said whether he’s requested a TPS extension this time.

Texas Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, running for Senate, called AI-generated deepfake videos targeting him "lies" that voters are "fed up" with, after his opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, released one such video. The Paxton campaign's ad, set to air on Newsmax, showed an AI-generated Talarico writing in a "King James Talarico" Bible using audio clips of his past remarks on gender and feminism, spliced together out of context. This is not the first time Republicans have targeted him this way; the National Republican Senatorial Committee released a similar AI-generated video of Talarico back in March after he won the Democratic nomination. Talarico argued the ads add nothing to civic discourse and that voters want candor about candidates' actual records instead.

Trump said he would consider pardoning his former personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen, calling what happened to Cohen "a disgrace" and claiming prosecutors forced him to say things he didn't believe. Cohen was sentenced in 2018 to three years in prison for a range of crimes, including lying to Congress about Trump's business dealings and arranging secret hush-money payments to women alleging affairs with Trump. Trump's comments followed Cohen's decision last month to interview him for his radio show, despite Cohen having previously testified against Trump in both Congress and court. Trump framed a potential pardon as contingent on further review, saying "if everything is checking out" it's something he'd consider.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a potential 2028 presidential contender, accused Republicans of trying to "rig" the 2026 midterms during a Dallas press conference held as counterprogramming to the GOP convention. He specifically criticized a Trump administration push, now before the Supreme Court, to let the US Postal Service track mail-in ballots and potentially reject those from voters not listed in a federal citizenship-verification database. Pritzker argued Republicans "can't win on the merits of their unpopular policies" and are instead trying to manipulate the mechanics of the election itself. The event featured Texas Democratic officials as part of a broader effort to contrast Democratic messaging with the GOP's convention narrative.

The White House quietly removed its Tetris-style “Build the Wall” game from its online MAGA-themed arcade this week after Tetris Co. posted online that it “was not involved in the creation” of the game and “takes copyright infringement very seriously,” emphasizing it believes in “bringing people together, not dividing them.” The game, which had players stack bricks to “hold the line” against a “zombie border siege,” disappeared from the White House website between Monday and Tuesday, with neither the White House nor Tetris commenting further. Other games mimicking Snake (”Rio Run,” where players “pick up every crosser”) and Flappy Bird (”Flappy Bill,” featuring a bald eagle) remain live, and the White House separately posted a “Legend of Trump” video mimicking Nintendo’s Zelda branding and music, alongside earlier videos mimicking Xbox, Sega, and GameCube startup animations, none of which have drawn a company response yet. This continues a pattern of unauthorized character and music use by the administration, including Pete Hegseth’s “Franklin the Turtle” strike image that its publisher condemned, and Sabrina Carpenter publicly demanding the White House stop using her song in an ICE video.

The Missouri redistricting fight escalated sharply Tuesday: hours after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’s appeal to use the GOP’s new map, a federal judge issued a separate ruling ordering the state to use that same map, creating a direct state-versus-federal court collision, and the Missouri Supreme Court then opened a contempt probe against Hoskins for continuing to push the new map despite its earlier ruling against it. The state court ordered Hoskins to explain in writing why he shouldn’t be held in contempt and to appear in person at a hearing Thursday; Hoskins responded defiantly on X, saying “I look forward to my day in court.” The fight traces back to a referendum drive led by Richard von Glahn’s group, People Not Politicians, which gathered signatures to let voters veto the Legislature’s map, only for Hoskins to refuse to certify it for the ballot, a decision the Republican-majority Missouri Supreme Court unanimously rejected. If the state court’s block holds, Missouri would use its 2022 map (six Republican seats, two Democratic) instead of the new one designed to eliminate Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Democratic-held seat.

Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee, a Democrat, was at risk of becoming the first sitting governor in the country to lose a primary in eight years, trailing challenger Helena Foulkes, a wealthy former CVS executive, by double digits in public polling. Unlike other anti-incumbent primary fights this cycle, the race wasn't drawn along ideological or generational lines between the 75-year-old McKee and 62-year-old Foulkes. Instead it centered on a hyperlocal grievance: McKee's 2023 decision to close the Washington Bridge in Providence for safety reasons, which created lasting traffic problems in the state's largest city. Foulkes also heavily outspent McKee on the airwaves, by roughly 3 to 1, compounding his political vulnerability heading into the vote.

The battleground New Hampshire Senate race is now set between Republican former Sen. John Sununu and Democratic Rep. Chris Pappas after both won their primaries. Pappas defeated Karishma Manzur, a Democratic Socialists of America-aligned scientist, by a wide margin, though he may have underperformed the commanding lead his campaign's internal polling had projected. The race is considered pivotal to the fight for Senate control in November. Sununu's and Pappas's primary wins clear the way for what's expected to be one of the most closely watched general election contests of the cycle.

Malone Lam, a 22-year-old Singapore-born eighth-grade dropout, pleaded guilty Tuesday to a federal racketeering conspiracy charge for orchestrating the theft of over $245 million in bitcoin, roughly 4,100 coins, from a Washington, D.C. victim in August 2024, one of the largest crypto thefts in US history, and faces up to 20 years in prison. Lam and co-conspirators used “social engineering,” including posing as Google and Gemini exchange representatives, to trick the victim into handing over Google Drive access and security codes, then laundered the funds into a monthlong spending spree that included a fleet of sports cars, rented Miami mansions, a $2 million watch, and $569,000 spent in a single night at a Los Angeles nightclub. He’s the 11th of 18 charged defendants to plead guilty, and was arrested by the FBI in Miami after an off-duty law enforcement officer tipped him off that agents were coming, buying him only a brief head start; a judge has not yet scheduled his sentencing.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Immigration, Rights, Justice: In-Depth

Emptywheel, Analysis: Big John Solomon Expose!!!! He’s Covering Up Trump’s Egypt Corruption! Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 9, 2026. Yesterday, John Solomon conducted another of his Russian propaganda exercises, this time claiming to release newly declassified versions of:

• The 302 from Mike Flynn’s January 24, 2017 interview
• Joe Pientka’s notes from the interview
• Peter Strzok’s notes from the interview

Solomon waved his hands around squealing that the notes did not match the 302 — just as Sidney Powell squealed that the notes did not match the 302 back in 2019, before Judge Emmet Sullivan wrote a 99-page opinion laying out that Powell was wrong in key respects and anyway none of it undermined the evidence that Mike Flynn lied in that interview.

But what’s really nutty about yesterday’s little propaganda escapade is, no, John, you actually didn’t release newly declassified documents, or not much, anyway. The only substantively new declassification in the documents is this passage in Strzok’s notes, which seems to reflect what they knew going in; they’re summaries of what they knew Flynn actually said on his calls with Sergey Kislyak (and would have been classified in 2019 when these notes were first released because they were FISA content); the still-redacted word, as we’ll see, is almost certainly “Egypt.”

In reality, there’s actually more new redactions than in the earlier released versions of these documents:

302 from Mike Flynn interview released on June 6, 2019ombined interview notes released May 7, 2020

(If you’ve been around a while you might remember that DOJ confused who wrote which notes in 2020, when they released these, and I had to straighten them out; just one of the services I provide!)Mike Flynn was warned Russia would try to cultivate him

One set of new redactions serves to cover up details of Flynn’s trip to the RT gala in December 2015. In both Pientka’s notes,

And the 302,

The earlier released documents showed Flynn saying he took Mike Flynn Jr with him to meet with Sergey Kislyak before his Russian trip and that he got a DIA threat briefing before the trip.

But in both the Pientka notes released yesterday,

And the 302 released yesterday,

Those references are redacted.

I’ve got my own theory why John Solomon and Kash Patel wanted to cover those up.

The Egyptian side to Trump’s Russian corruption

I’ve got stronger theories about why they’re covering up references to Egypt in these documents.

The earlier released Pientka notes,

Strzok notes,

And 302,

All describe that “FLYNN heard through other channels that Egypt did not like” their own resolution to condemn settlers in the West Bank, and that Egypt delayed the vote themselves. These are references to Trump’s efforts — directed by Jared Kushner — to prevent or delay Egypt’s resolution condemning illegal settlements in the West Bank, a frantic effort involving a bunch of countries to undermine the foreign policy of the United States government.

After Flynn had, earlier in the interview, given a false claim about how many calls he had with Kislyak, the FBI agents asked him if there was a call in which Flynn had asked for Russian help to stall the vote, Flynn basically said, oh yeah!!! there was another call!!! but Flynn explained, nope, there was no request to Russia to help stall the vote, Egypt decided that on its own.

Flynn’s answer was a lie to cover up that:

A request was made that Russia help Trump kill or delay the vote.After that request was made on December 22, Putin was consulted and chose to play ball.The other channel via which they learned Egypt’s plans was in a request directly to Abdel Fattah El-Sisi directly.

Flynn is pretending that Egypt just decided to kill their own resolution themselves. It was an insanely stupid claim, but he thought he’d get away with it and, really, he has.

In the Pientka notes released yesterday,

The Strzok notes,

And the 302,

Those references to Egypt have been covered up.

Here, per the intercepts released in 2020, is part of what Flynn and Kislyak actually said in a conversation on December 23, 2016.

Let me unpack this.

First, as noted, this is the December 23 transcript. As Kislyak makes clear, there was an earlier call — the day before — and this call was his response. When John Ratcliffe released this in 2020, he didn’t actually release the December 22 transcript. I’ve got my theories why he didn’t. But it is clear from context that a request had been made (at that point, Flynn and Trump were in the same place, Mar-a-Lago) on that earlier call, that Kislyak had consulted with “the highest level in Russia” — that is, Putin — and that Kislyak was conveying to Flynn that Russia was going to play ball with Trump’s effort to prevent a condemnation of illegal Israeli settlements. The “slow down” reference in the notes appears to be a quote from the earlier call, the one we don’t get.

Then there’s the hilarious part, what a fucking chump Flynn was here. Kislyak probes, hinting that he knows Egypt, who originally proposed the resolution, is not pushing for a vote. And Flynn says, Yep, we’ve been talking to them too. Then Kislyak probes, “there might be others.” And Flynn freely offers up that Trump has been talking to “a litany of countries.”

Flynn just blabbed and blabbed and blabbed, like a teenage girl gossiping, telling Russia the extent of efforts to undermine Barack Obama’s foreign policy, precisely the kind of knowledge that gives another country leverage over you. It’s bad, terrible; but imagine how much worse Steve Witkoff is when he corrupts with the Russians.

Again, Flynn’s explanation made absolutely no sense, because it was Egypt’s resolution in the first place! But Flynn was trying to cover up the separate call to el-Sisi.

And now, in turn, John Solomon is trying to sustain that cover up, which is pretty interesting given the long-running bribery investigation into whether el-Sisi gave Trump a $10 million bribe that Bill Barr finally shut down in the same period he was blowing up the Mike Flynn prosecution.

Solomon and whoever made these dumbass redaction decisions are attempting, again, to lie about how this all went down.

And it is just as dumb an effort as Flynn’s original lie because these documents are all right here and we can all read you’re trying to cover up Egypt’s role in all this.

Sept. 9 

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President Trump published the map above on Labor Day, which follows up previous grandiose claims undermining U.S. prestige as his previous claim (shown below) about ownership of the Western Hemisphere. The deranged behavior by the U.S. president who aspires to rule a new version of a colonial empire increasingly undermines U.S. and global national security, as indicated by news and comment below.

• The New Republic, Trump Sparks Diplomatic Incident With His “USA” Map, Malcolm Ferguson, Sept. 8, 2026. Iceland has summoned the U.S. ambassador. President Trump has drawn the ire of Iceland after posting a map (shown above) depicting the country as part of the United States. Along with Iceland, the image also included Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean draped in the U.S. flag. The Truth Social post, made on Labor Day, was captionless. The post—paternalistic at best, colonial at worst—raised enough alarm in Iceland to lead the country’s foreign minister, Thorgerdur Gunnarsdóttir, to summon U.S. Ambassador Billy Long. Gunnarsdóttir later told RUV, Iceland’s national broadcasting service, that “it was made clear at the meeting that the post was completely inappropriate.” 
• PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: As Trump Blows Off New York On 9/11, He Repeats Lie That He Was Near Ground Zero, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 8, 2026. On Tuesday, Donald Trump held an event in Washington, DC, where he claimed he was at or near Ground Zero on 9/11, but his story is a total lie. Donald Trump has been lying about 9/11 for more than a decade. At various times, Trump has claimed he was at Ground Zero. Trump has also claimed that he went to Ground Zero. There are always some firefighters or police interacting with Trump in the story, and the president has also falsely claimed that he saw Muslims celebrating on 9/11. With the 25th anniversary of the attack coming up this week, it was time for Donald Trump to lie again.
• New York Times, Mamdani Accuses Former N.Y.C. Leaders of Lying About 9/11 Air Quality, Sally Goldenberg,Nina Agrawal and Joseph Goldstein, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that New Yorkers had gotten sick “because the leaders they trusted lied.” On Tuesday, he released 170,000 pages of records related to the aftermath of the attacks.

More Middle East War, Turmoil

 

• New York Times, Iran Signals Readiness to Escalate Fight in Face of Rising U.S. Pressure, Erika Solomon, Sept. 9, 2026. The Iranian government is taking an increasingly aggressive approach as it confronts a growing economic threat and worries that its grip on the Strait of Hormuz is slipping, analysts say.
• New York Times, Oil Hits $100 a Barrel as Turmoil Intensifies in Middle East, Aruni Soni, Sept. 9, 2026. The cost of crude has risen 40 percent since the start of the war in Iran, pushing up the price of gasoline, diesel and other refined fuels.
• New York Times, News Analysis: Europe Unites to Pressure Israel, Breaking With U.S., Mark Landler, Sept. 9, 2026. Britain once followed in France’s slipstream when it came to pressuring Israel. Under new leadership, it is spearheading opposition to Israeli settlements, risking American anger.
• New York Times, Netanyahu’s Rivals Call Him ‘Unfit’ After Report He Was Warned Before Oct. 7 Attack, Ephrat Livni and Isabel Kershner, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office denied the report in Haaretz that the Emirati president had warned him Hamas was planning a major operation against Israel.
• New York Times, Israeli Allies Ban Trade With Settlements as U.K. Cites ‘Ethnic Cleansing,’ Stephen Castle, Adam Rasgon, Aaron Boxerman and Isabel Kershner, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Brittain, Canada and France on Tuesday announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, with Britain saying Israel had “turned a blind eye” to violence against Palestinians.

Trump Pressures Force Resignation of America's Top Museum and Library Chief 

• New York Times, Smithsonian’s Secretary to Resign as Trump Tries to Rule the Institution, Robin Pogrebin and Graham Bowley, Sept. 8, 2026. In the face of escalating White House attacks about how museums present American history, Lonnie G. Bunch III has announced his decision to depart. After a seven-year run marked most recently by attacks from the Trump administration, Lonnie G. Bunch III announced on Tuesday that he was stepping down as secretary of the Smithsonian. The White House has escalated its criticism of how the Smithsonian presents American history and values, prompting concern from some about what they see as an assault on the institution’s autonomy and commendation from others for reining in an organization they view as overtaken by liberal bias.

Special Report: American Food Safety

 “Mary had a little lamb, but when she saw it sicken, she sent it off to Packingtown, and now it’s labeled chicken.”

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Where’s the Beef (Coming From)? Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 8, 2026. That’s a little ditty that was circulating, I can’t find any original source, around 1905, when Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle” — about the meatpacking industry, one of the sort of founding documents of the progressive movement. The topic today is Donald Trump and beef, because here we are back in Upton Sinclair territory. So you may have seen that last month Trump announced, given that we have high beef prices, that he was going to allow the tariff-free import of 300,000 tons of ground beef.

Special Report: U.S. Senator Has Frequently Sued Maternity Patients

• New York Times, Exclusive: A Doctor Sued 700 Patients for Debts; 81 Were Arrested. Now He’s a Senator, Sarah Kliff, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Patients sued by Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, right, a Republican running for re-election this fall, were routinely charged 18 percent interest, The Times found. Some had bank accounts garnished.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Slammed Over ‘Horrific’ 9/11 Lies, NYC's Post-9/11 Toxic Air Cover-Up Exposed, America's Allies Leave the U.S. Behind, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Trump gave 9/11 survivors and families fresh reason to be furious this week. At Tuesday’s Ellipse ceremony, he once again told a version of himself being carried out of danger by firefighters near Ground Zero, a story that’s changed shape over the years and that first responders say never happened.

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

 

• All Rise News, 'Weak sauce’: IRS loses bid to share taxpayer info with ICE, Adam Klasfeld, right, Sept. 8, 2026. The D.C. Circuit unanimously found that the government likely violated a post-Watergate law that carries heavy penalties. A federal appeals court on Tuesday unanimously affirmed an order blocking the Internal Revenue Service from sharing taxpayer addresses with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dealing another defeat to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.

Trump Team Voter-Suppression, Mail Ballot, Election-Rigging Schemes In Court

• PoliticusUSA, News and Comment:A Bipartisan Group Of Nearly 300 Current And Former Members Of Congress Urge SCOTUS To Block Trump’s Mail-In Voting Attack, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Nearly 300 current and former members of Congress from both parties filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to block Trump’s attack on mail-in voting.
• New York Times, Justice Kavanaugh Blocks Missouri Voting Map Benefiting Republicans, Ann E. Marimow and Mitch Smith, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Missouri’s Supreme Court had earlier blocked election officials from using a new congressional map, saying voters must first approve the district lines in a statewide referendum. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on Tuesday denied a request from Missouri officials to use a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an edge in the midterm elections.
• New York Times, Dueling Court Rulings Leave Missouri’s Congressional Races in Chaos, Ann E. Marimow and Mitch Smith, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). After losing in two courts and winning in another, Missouri officials said they planned to forge ahead with using a congressional map that was redrawn to benefit Republicans.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 8, 2026. What if the law means what it says? Now and then, a court decision comes along to restore your faith that nonpartisan judges can fairly read the plain text of statutes and constitutional provisions and render entirely rational decisions.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The People vs. Mad King Donald, William Kristol, right, Sept. 8, 2026. I trust you all had a better Labor Day weekend than Donald Trump. On Sunday the president of the United States fired off more than sixty social media posts, each more bizarre than the last. They included frenzied rants, manic boasts, personal attacks, crazy links, lunatic messages, and surreal AI-generated memes and images. They were often weirdly dystopian—Trump nuking the Earth from orbit from a space station, Trump with giant robot bodyguards as fires burned. 
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Rs Are Going To Try Very Hard To Put Lipstick On The Trumpian Pig This Week, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Trump’s Mounting Global And Domestic Failures Are Going To Make That Really Hard.
• New York Times, Chris Pappas Defeats Progressive Challenger in New Hampshire Senate Primary, Emily Davies, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Mr. Pappas, a moderate Democrat who has served four terms in the House, will face former Senator John E. Sununu, the Republican nominee, in November. 
• New York Times, John E. Sununu Wins Republican Senate Primary in New Hampshire, Emily Davies, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.).  The general election race to replace Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, could help determine control of the U.S. Senate.
• New York Times, Elon Musk Targets Democrats on Transgender Issues in Key Senate Races, Neil Vigdor,  Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). A political group for the world’s richest man, who is ramping up a midterm spending blitz, began running attack ads against Democrats in Texas, Ohio and Iowa.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Early Voting Plans Are Crucial to Defeating MAGA, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 9, 2026. 55 Days Until the Midterms. 
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 8, 2026 [The Musk Factor In Ultra-Right Election Politics], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 9, 2026. On Sunday, Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD) party won 43.8% of the vote in a legislative election in the small state of Saxony-Anhalt, formerly part of Soviet-dominated East Germany. The AfD is anti-immigrant and pro-Russia and has won the support of both Vice President J.D. Vance and billionaire Elon Musk. 

When Musk posted “Well done!” in German to the co-founder of AfD, Alice Weidel, another AfD leader responded with thanks. Musk was the largest donor to any political committee in the 2024 U.S. elections, putting around $290 million into the 2024 election to help elect President Donald J. Trump and Republicans. Politico reported that Musk was planning to meet with House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) as he considered investing at least $100 million to elect Republicans in the midterm elections.

Ohio Candidate For Governor Attacked 

Ohio's Democratic Party nominee for governor, Dr. Amy Acton, left, a physician was attacked during a campaign event by an armed suspect identified as Patrick Havas, above, a Republican with ties to Acton's opponents, who including Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, a high-tech billionaire. Following the attack, in which Acton reported no injuries, she tended a man in the crowd who had sustained injuries.

• Occupy Democrats, Advocacy: HERO DOCTOR! Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton rushes to TREAT people injured when an armed Republican charged toward her – then a stunning connection to her MAGA opponent emerges! Staff Report, Sept. 7, 2026. Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, MD, MPH had just been charged by an armed man who knocked people to the ground as he pushed through a crowd toward her. Once police had the man under control, the physician-turned-candidate rushed to help the people who were hurt instead of fleeing the scene like her security wanted. 

Reflections On U.S. Labor Day, Democrats and Upcoming 9/11 Anniversary 

 

• 
  Letters from Leo — the American Pope & US Politics, Commentary: Welles Crowther, the Man in the Red Bandana, Showed the World What Christian Empathy Looks Like, Christopher Hale, Sept. 8, 2026. The Man in the Red Bandana saved as many as 18 people on 9/11 and was honored with the Medal of Freedom on Tuesday. Pope Leo XIV calls empathy a call from God, and Welles Crowther is what that call looks like when it starts climbing stairs.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Trump’s 9/11 fantasies, Judd Legum, right, Sept. 9, 2026. This week is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Trump is marking the occasion by describing his role in heroic terms, claiming he personally went to Ground Zero to aid recovery efforts. On September 6, Trump made the following remarks on Fox News. 
• The Guardian, 'The most anti-union president’: how Trump turned his back on US workers, Steven Greenhouse, Sept. 7, 2026. Labor experts stunned at how anti-worker Trump has been with actions since last Labor Day that have hurt unions.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 7, 2026 [Trump's Frantic, Fantastic Self-Promoting, 'Historical' Self-Portraits], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Since yesterday, President Donald J. Trump has been posting on social media at a frantic pace, showing AI images of himself with President George Washington on his own account and, on the official White House account, a video of himself as the DC Comics Green Lantern superhero.
• New York Times, Guest Essay, Voters Have Spoken. Why Aren’t Democrats Listening? Ben Rhodes, right, Sept. 8, 2026. In 1932, amid a Depression worsened by tariffs, inequality and isolationism, Franklin Roosevelt accepted the Democratic presidential nomination with a cautionary note: “Those nominal Democrats who squint at the future with their faces turned toward the past and who feel no responsibility to the demands of the new time,” he said, “are out of step with their party.”

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

• Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Loyal and patriotic citizens, please stand by, Jeff Teidrich, right, Sept. 8, 2026. This, shown above and reprinted below, is a message of the utmost importance from the President of the United States, Supreme Ruler of the Western Hemisphere:

Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP

• Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump thinks he's the hero of 9/11, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 7, 2026. At 2:35 this Labor Day afternoon, Donald Trump was still on vacation at his private golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, when he posted a video of himself with the words, “What Donald Trump saw at… Ground Zero hours after 9/11.” 

James Comey Test Case Reaches Decision-Point Over Abusive U.S. DOJ Political Prosecutions

• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Why Rule of Law May Pivot, Once Again, on Jim Comey, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 8, 2026. As of last Tuesday, Jim Comey’s pretrial motions in his seashell case are fully briefed. I wrote about the existence of a sealed filing in them here; I wrote of new signs of abuse exposed in the filings here. Links to all the filings are here. We wait now, to see whether Comey will break new ground in combatting Trump’s wholesale weaponization of DOJ. Comey is the best bet to establish a broader legal standard that might rein in Trump’s worst attempts to politicize DOJ.

More On Canadian-American Tariffs, Inflation, Markets 

Posted by Trump on Truth Social (above). Social media condemns Trump's hockey cartoon as Canada's counter-tariffs take effect: 'Carney has been negotiating with a madman' -- Yahoo News Canada

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Adding Injury to Insult, Canada Edition, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 9, 2026. This idiotic trade war will hurt more than people realize.
• New York Times, Canada Imposes New Tariffs on U.S. Goods, as Trade War Intensifies, Tony Romm, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.).The duties are a retaliation against President Trump’s recent tariffs, raising concerns about further escalation. New Canadian tariffs targeting roughly $20 billion in U.S. imports officially snapped into place on Tuesday, the latest escalation in an increasingly costly trade war that has ensnarled two longtime allies.
• New York Times, Bombardier, a Canadian Jet Maker, Is a Target in Trump’s Trade War, John Yoon, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.).  The Montreal-based manufacturer has been embroiled in U.S. trade disputes before. President Trump threatened to bar the company from selling in the United States. President Trump on Monday warned Bombardier, the Canadian manufacturer of business jets, that it would no longer be allowed to sell in the United States unless it made its aircraft there, escalating Washington’s trade dispute with Ottawa.

More On War in the Middle East

• New York Times, U.S. Hits 5 Iranian Oil Tankers, Citing Attempted Strikes on Warship, Helene Cooper and Pranav Baskar, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.).Iran said it had retaliated by launching missiles at Jordan, raising the specter of still more fighting. The U.S. military said on Tuesday that it had destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in reprisal for attempted strikes by Iran on a U.S. Navy warship, adding to the burst of fighting in recent days that has punctured weeks of relative calm.

More On Global Affairs

• Lance Rosen, Analysis: The “AfD” Election Success In The German State Of Saxony-Anhalt Is A Victory For Vladimir Putin, Lance F Rosen, Sept. 8, 2026. Putin Won With The Help Of His Favorite Nazi Billionaire, Elon Musk. Elon Musk heavily supported the AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland) ahead of Germany’s 2025 federal elections through public statements, writing an opinion piece for Welt Am Sontag, hosting a live audio conversation on X with AfD leader Alice Weidel, (Photo below) and appearing via video link at a party campaign event. Not incidentally Trump, during his “government-in-exile” period at Mar-a-Lago, hosted a delegation of AfD leaders who visited in order to boost their party.
• New York Times, Oil Climbs Toward $100 a Barrel Following Houthi Attacks, Lisa Friedman, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.).  Analysts said they expected the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, to remain elevated for the rest of the year.
• Foreign Policy, Opinion: The World’s Only Real Hope of Maintaining Order, Charles A. Kupchan (Georgetown University professor), Sept. 8, 2026. A proposal for a new international system that is at once centralized and regionalized.
• New York Times, Chinese Ship Takes Arctic Shortcut: Smart Business? Or a Political Flex? Jeffrey Gettleman, Jenny Gross and Lily Kuo, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.).  Melting ice is opening a trade route through the Arctic. China has begun the first regular service, part of its polar ambitions.

More On U.S. Media, Sports, Culture

• Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: My Letter to CBS Staff, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 8, 2026. This is my open letter to CBS reporters and staff, as well as reporters and staff who work for other corporate news outlets that are continuing to bow to Trump’s fascism and this fatal right-wing propaganda machine. Yesterday, it was reported that Bari Weiss, who runs CBS News, was considering hiring Maria Bartiromo after she left Fox News. Now, I personally believe Maria Bartiromo is among the worst propagandists that there are, and one of the worst Trump sycophants and bootlickers that there are, and that she’s responsible for spreading a massive amount of lies and disinformation.
• Public Notice, Maria Bartiromo discovers that her boss is not Donald Trump, Liz Dye, right, Sept. 9, 2026. Now it’s no one at all.
• The Athletic via The New York Times, LIV Golf files for bankruptcy protection, will attempt to restructure, Gabby Herzig, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). LIV Golf’s effort to save its business and resurrect a new iteration of the league now includes bankruptcy. The league submitted a Chapter 11 filing in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey on Tuesday, according to court documents.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Snowflakes and Petals of Influence NYT Chooses to Ignore, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right,), Sept. 8, 2026. Mayor Zohran Mamdani had just decided to cancel a $9 million contract that New York City had with the consulting giant McKinsey, and gushing praise came pouring in from commentators, operatives on the left and even some comedians. To be sure, after laying out that Mamdani wielded the attention economy superbly, starting in ¶8, New York Times spun it as something corrupt, suggesting (falsely) that a PR campaign misused public funds, implying that using Signal, by itself, defied transparency, and insinuating a $175,000 salary for the person who is a key reason Mamdani is successful is too much. 
• New York Times, NOTUS Rebrands as The Washington Sun, Katie Robertson, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). A trademark dispute scuttled its plans to relaunch as The Washington Star, so the site chose a different name. NOTUS, which stands for News of the United States, was started in 2023 by the media entrepreneur Robert Allbritton, a co-founder of Politico. A nonprofit newsroom, it initially focused on coverage of government and policy. But as The Post pulled back from metro news, Mr. Allbritton saw room to fill that void.

Top Stories

President Trump published the map above on Labor Day, which follows up previous grandiose claims undermining U.S. prestige as his previous claim (shown below) about ownership of the Western Hemisphere. The deranged behavior by the U.S. president who aspires to rule a new version of a colonial empire increasingly undermines U.S. and global national security, as indicated by news and comment below.

The New Republic, Trump Sparks Diplomatic Incident With His “USA” Map, Malcolm Ferguson, Sept. 8, 2026. Iceland has summoned the U.S. ambassador.

President Trump has drawn the ire of Iceland after posting a map (shown above) depicting the country as part of the United States.

Along with Iceland, the image also included Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean draped in the U.S. flag. The Truth Social post, made on Labor Day, was captionless.

The post—paternalistic at best, colonial at worst—raised enough alarm in Iceland to lead the country’s foreign minister, Thorgerdur Gunnarsdóttir, to summon U.S. Ambassador Billy Long, right. Gunnarsdóttir later told RUV, Iceland’s national broadcasting service, that “it was made clear at the meeting that the post was completely inappropriate.” Other Icelandic leaders felt similarly, comparing their experience to that of Greenland, which Trump has threatened to annex since he returned to office.

“It is not good to be an enemy of the United States, but it is even worse to be its friend,” alternate city councilor Stefán Pálsson told RUV. “What is shocking about the way Greenland has been treated is not really that the United States behaves like this towards another country, but simply that we are not used to it being done to us.”

“I hope, given how this took over the debate in Greenland, that we do not end up in the same place and that we do not allow Trump to set the agenda for the debate here,” Federation of State and Municipal Employees Chair Sonja Thorbergsdóttir said. “But of course this is disrespectful and this is not how civilized nations should behave towards one another.”

The post was yet another example of Trump’s recklessness eroding the seriousness and legitimacy of U.S soft power. 

 

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: As Trump Blows Off New York On 9/11, He Repeats Lie That He Was Near Ground Zero, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 8, 2026. On Tuesday, Donald Trump held an event in Washington, DC, where he claimed he was at or near Ground Zero on 9/11 (shown above from an aerial view), but his story is a total lie.

Donald Trump has been lying about 9/11 for more than a decade. At various times, Trump has claimed he was at Ground Zero. Trump has also claimed that he went to Ground Zero. There are always some firefighters or police interacting with Trump in the story, and the president has also falsely claimed that he saw Muslims celebrating on 9/11.

With the 25th anniversary of the attack coming up this week, it was time for Donald Trump to lie again.

The 2026 version of his 9/11 is:

 For three months after September 11th, the flames raged in the rubble of Ground Zero. For nine months, rescue and recovery crews worked day and night on the site. I wanna just thank my people. I took a lot of my m- I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened, and they were-- they had no hesitation.

Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn't too much we could do, I'll be honest. It was, it was raw. Nobody's seen anything like it, ever. We had other buildings. The United States Steel Building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was gonna fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks. But, uh, it never came down. And, uh, I re-- I'll never forget, two firemen, we thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big, strong guys, and I'm not the smallest guy in the world, they grabbed me under the arms, said, "Gotta get outta here," and they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I'm big.

They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, "Fellas, I can run myself." But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn't come down, U.S. Steel.

Trump’s story is a lie, so as the president who isn’t going to ground zero makes up more tales, let’s look at the truth.

There is no public evidence or witness accounts to support what Trump is saying.

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale posted on X:

President Trump was not in the vicinity of the World Trade Center when it was hit. He was in Trump Tower, miles away from the towers and nearby One Liberty Plaza, which is/was also known as the US Steel building.

There was public concern in the days following the attack that One Liberty Plaza might collapse, but the authorities repeatedly said it was structurally sound, and there's not currently any public evidence Trump went into it amid these collapse worries (?), much less that he was rushed out by firefighters. In varying language, he has repeatedly claimed for years he was at Ground Zero with a large crew of his workers helping with the recovery in the days after 9/11, but people who were definititely on site have said they never saw him or a Trump-organized crew on site and that it wouldn't make sense for them to have had access; there are pictures and videos of Trump in the neighborhood in the following days, in a clean suit, but not on the actual site.

While campaigning in 2016, he told a version of today's story about being whisked away from One Liberty Plaza by big firemen, but he said in 2016 that the alleged incident happened "a couple of days" after 9/11 and claimed the creaky building was "not so far from us," instead of leaving open the impression he might've been a) inside it b) on 9/11 itself.

Trump’s 9/11 tales are a lot like stolen valor. Thousands of people lost their lives that day. Thousands more who were involved in the first response and cleanup would go on to suffer from illnesses like cancer and either struggle with chronic illness or lose their lives after the attack.

9/11 is one of the darkest days in American history, and Donald Trump can’t stop making up stories to make himself look good.

Trump’s comments are embarrassing and disgraceful, and in some ways, it is a blessing that he will not be at Ground Zero to mark this solemn anniversary.

More Middle East War, Turmoil

 

New York Times, Iran Signals Readiness to Escalate Fight in Face of Rising U.S. Pressure, Erika Solomon, Sept. 9, 2026. The Iranian government is taking an increasingly aggressive approach as it confronts a growing economic threat and worries that its grip on the Strait of Hormuz is slipping, analysts say.

Iran has signaled that it is willing to escalate its fight with the United States, with senior leaders issuing increasingly sharp warnings in recent days after attacking American warships for the first time.

The country’s leaders are taking a more aggressive approach as Iran faces mounting economic pressure and they worry that their grip on the Strait of Hormuz is slipping. The American blockade is making it nearly impossible for Iran to ship oil, its main money source. And in effect, Iran sees escalation as the primary leverage it has against the United States, analysts said, warning that the recent clashes could reignite a full-blown war.

The U.S. military said Tuesday that it had destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in retaliation for attempted strikes on a U.S. Navy warship, while Iran said it launched strikes at a base used by American forces in Jordan in response. The attacks occurred three days after Iran made its first known attempt at striking an American military vessel.

On Sunday, Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s lead negotiator and the speaker of Parliament, told lawmakers that the era of “proportionate responses” to American attacks was over. Iran’s security chief, Mohsen Rezaei, also announced plans to impose a “restricted zone” for shipping in the Persian Gulf that would go beyond the country’s efforts to control the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has largely withstood the heavy military campaign launched by the United States and Israel in February. But the war of attrition in recent months has created an economic threat that is now pushing the government to intensify its rhetoric and attacks.

An American naval blockade has prevented Tehran from exporting much of its oil, the country’s main source of revenue, making a longstanding economic crisis even worse. On Tuesday, the government raised some gasoline prices because of fuel shortages, a move that is expected to further roil a country already struggling with soaring inflation and unemployment, and a rapidly depreciating currency.

At the same time, U.S. naval escorts have enabled a trickle of oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, undercutting Iran’s closure of the waterway, which has caused global oil prices to rise sharply. The number of ships getting through is small, and the effort is extremely costly for the United States, but it has prevented oil prices from rising further and blunted Iran’s ability to impose economic pain on Washington.

New York Times, News Analysis: Europe Unites to Pressure Israel, Breaking With U.S., Mark Landler, Sept. 9, 2026. Britain once followed in France’s slipstream when it came to pressuring Israel. Under new leadership, it is spearheading opposition to Israeli settlements, risking American anger.

When Britain confirmed last September that it would recognize a Palestinian state, it was pulled in the wake of France, which had signaled a few months earlier that it planned to take the symbolically freighted step.

On Tuesday, almost a year later, Britain was the one to seize the initiative. The British government announced, followed by France and Canada, that it would stop trading with Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It went so far as to accuse some settlers of engaging in the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians.

This diplomatic sequencing speaks partly to domestic politics in each country. Last year, President Emmanuel Macron of France, entering the twilight of his term, was eager to cement his legacy. Now, a new British prime minister, Andy Burnham, wants to mollify Labour Party members appalled by the suffering in Gaza and angry that Britain hasn’t done more about it.

Yet the cumulative impact is strikingly united European pressure on Israel. It has left the Israeli government bitterly estranged from Europe, at odds with its two largest military powers — once stalwart allies — and facing economic punishment that analysts said could prove to be more than symbolic.

“The idea of boycotting goods from settlements or even treating them differently in terms of customs and duties has always been talked about, but almost nothing has been done to date,” Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former United States ambassador to Israel, said. “Even the idea of clearly labeling goods from settlements, so as to distinguish them from ‘Made in Israel’ has not taken off.”

“Bottom line,” said Mr. Kurtzer, who now teaches at Princeton, “this could be a very significant economic blow to the settlements movement and any Israeli government that backs settlements.”

injunction issued Friday by District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts. But the Trump regime is appealing and will no doubt generate one gimmick after another designed to thwart early and mail-in balloting, intimidate state and local officials, and sow confusion among voters.

Voter suppression is all Republicans have, and they are going to be relentless in their frantic effort to cling to power.

Voters, conscientious state and local officials, and voting advocacy groups must continue to explain Trump’s deliberate, malicious effort to disrupt voting. In an amicus brief in the USPS case, the Center for Election Research and Innovation explained that the rule the Trump regime had proposed would have required “election officials to devote countless hours to inputting voter information into a brand-new, as-yet-unreleased, and wholly untested federal portal—on which no election officials have yet received any training, and which is almost certain to be overloaded as soon as it comes online.” The brief continued, that if “all that were not enough, the Rule would [have] further require[d] election officials to spend impossibly long periods of time waiting in person at local post offices while their jurisdictions’ mail-in ballot envelopes are painstakingly scanned and verified by postal employees. Every stage of this new, untested, and poorly conceived process is ripe for errors.”Subscribed

No one could have proposed this scheme in good faith, given the “insurmountable burdens imposed by the Final Rule ... [directed] at the exercise of the fundamental right to vote, disenfranchising large numbers of voters and ultimately undermining public confidence in elections and election results.” The only reasonable conclusion is that the MAGA gang is quaking in fear that voters are prepared to throw them out of power — so the “solution” is to make voting as difficult, confusing, and burdensome as possible. Their hope, presumably, is that either more Democrats would be dissuaded from voting, or that the resulting chaos will provide grounds (however specious) for challenging the results.

Democrats, independents, and patriotic Republicans must call this out, and denounce those state officials eager to participate “voluntarily” in a scheme to deprive their own voters of the sacred, hard-earned right to vote.

This is where the October 17th Vote Early events come in. Given the Trump regime’s antics, it is more important than ever for voters to know exactly what options they have, including early, in-person voting. Voters must make certain their registration information is up to date and must familiarize themselves with everything from poll times to voter ID rules. In the face of an unprecedented voter suppression onslaught, democracy forces must devote resources and time to combating voter confusion and attempted disenfranchisement.

As Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen (a member of the No Kings Coalition) noted in the press release announcing the event: “The importance of as many people as possible voting early cannot be overstated.” She explained, “Early voting can make the difference between voting and not voting for people who are traveling, who are working on Election Day, who need options for childcare while voting, and more.”

A batch of other states will soon join North Carolina in sending out ballots, with 10 states mailing ballots more than 45 days before the election; another 10 mailing them at the 45-day mark; 13 sending them out 30-45 days before Election Day; and 15 sending them out in the last 30 days. California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Washington D.C., mail every voter a ballot. Millions of voters — including military personnel overseas — rely on the mail-in ballot system.

As conscientious state and local election workers do their jobs, every American should condemn attempts to impede voting, and throw sand in the gears of a system that is safe, secure, and reliable. (It is so secure that even after exaggerated, fantastical, and outright false claims that hundreds of thousands of illegal votes were cast, the Trump regime has been able to drum up charges against a total of … 4 people in two elections involving hundreds of millions of voters.) Likewise, no American should tolerate the Trump regime’s efforts to badger, intimidate, and harass local and state officials (including threats to withhold grant monies) for allegedly allowing noncitizens to vote — a transparent effort to enlist officials to suppress voting. Never before has a president and his lackeys set out to violate voting rights on such a massive scale. True Americans must be up to the task to defend this foundational right, then use their ballots to reject a regime that seeks to stay in power through reprehensible, illegal bullying. 

New York Times, Netanyahu’s Rivals Call Him ‘Unfit’ After Report He Was Warned Before Oct. 7 Attack, Ephrat Livni and Isabel Kershner, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office denied the report in Haaretz that the Emirati president had warned him Hamas was planning a major operation against Israel.Israeli opposition politicians said on Tuesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, was “unfit” for office after a newspaper reported he had been warned by the president of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major operation weeks before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack but did not alert security officials.

The report in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, which The New York Times could not confirm, said that Mr. Netanyahu had a 45-minute phone call with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the Emirati president, in late September 2023, and was told about a plan by Hamas to attack Israel and destabilize the region. Mr. Netanyahu’s office has denied the report.

Mr. Netanyahu was said to have been unfazed by the revelations, responding that Israel was prepared for any scenario, according to the report.

In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said that he had not been personally warned by the Emirati president. “No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates,” it said. “If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries.”

The Emirati foreign ministry said in a statement that it did not comment on “media stories or speculation regarding conversations between government leaders.” It added that the Emirati and Israeli governments had “open and direct lines of communication” and that “all relevant intelligence” was transmitted between them.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

The report that Mr. Netanyahu may not have been responsive to warnings about the attacks landed at a particularly sensitive time for him and Israel. National elections are planned for late October, and Mr. Netanyahu’s chances of being re-elected are not assured.

The questions about what the Israeli prime minister had been told, by whom and when in the period leading to the Hamas-led assault have become hot-button election issues in a deeply polarized country.

Mr. Netanyahu has sought to present himself as the only politician positioned to ensure Israel’s security. And he has seemed to shift blame onto others for the Oct. 7 assault, the single deadliest day in Israel’s history, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 250 others taken hostage to Gaza.

Recently, Mr. Netanyahu asserted that Israeli security officials had chosen not to wake him up in the early hours of Oct. 7, despite worrying signs from Gaza, because they had feared he would respond aggressively and set off a war with Hamas.

 

New York Times, Israeli Allies Ban Trade With Settlements as U.K. Cites ‘Ethnic Cleansing,’ Stephen Castle, Adam Rasgon, Aaron Boxerman and Isabel Kershner, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Britain, Canada and France on Tuesday announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, with Britain saying Israel had “turned a blind eye” to violence against Palestinians.

Britain, Canada and France on Tuesday announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, a symbolic step by three once-staunch allies illustrating Israel’s deepening isolation after the devastating war in Gaza and settler violence in the West Bank.

Israel has been increasingly ostracized over its conduct of the war in Gaza, in which tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. International attention is now focused on its tightening grip on the West Bank and its expansion of illegal settlements there. In recent weeks, Israeli extremist settlers have repeatedly attacked Palestinians as the military has stood by.

Israel responded to Britain’s announcement with fury and indignation and announced countermeasures. Israel said it would close the British Consulate General in East Jerusalem. The institution, founded in 1839, represents the British government in Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

The coordinated move by the three nations risks further souring their relationship with the Trump administration, which has been a firm supporter of Israel both diplomatically and militarily, although the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has spoken out against settler violence.

Britain’s package of measures was announced on Tuesday in Parliament by Ed Miliband, who became foreign secretary in July. It represents the clearest shift in British foreign policy since Andy Burnham became prime minister that month.

“Today marks the beginning of a new approach,” Mr. Miliband told lawmakers. He said that the British government “agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank — perpetrated by settler terrorists.” All too often, he added, “the Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this and worse.”

In a speech with an often deeply personal tone, Mr. Miliband said that he had made his announcement as a “proud British Jew” who was “unwavering” in his support for the state of Israel. He added, however, that Britain had concluded that the occupation was unlawful in line with a ruling by the International Court of Justice.

“So I can announce today that we will introduce an import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories,” he said, adding that the measures would also cover those who provide services to settlements, including “construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion.”

The U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, cast the move as potentially undermining efforts toward de-escalating tensions in the West Bank.

“We don’t want to see anything destabilizing going on right now in the West Bank with so much going on in the region,” he told reporters when asked about the British announcement.  

New York Times, Oil Hits $100 a Barrel as Turmoil Intensifies in Middle East, Aruni Soni, Sept. 9, 2026. The cost of crude has risen 40 percent since the start of the war in Iran, pushing up the price of gasoline, diesel and other refined fuels.

The global price of oil reached $100 a barrel on Wednesday for the first time since July as tensions in the Middle East escalated. That’s nearly 40 percent higher than on the eve of the war in Iran.

The rise reflects investors’ concerns about how long the war, now in its seventh month, will last; tensions have snarled a large chunk of global oil shipments.

Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil prices, briefly surpassed $100 a barrel in July. In the early months of the war, Brent peaked near $120 a barrel. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, is up 41 percent since the start of the war, at $95 a barrel.

New York Times, Mamdani Accuses Former N.Y.C. Leaders of Lying About 9/11 Air Quality, Sally Goldenberg,Nina Agrawal and Joseph Goldstein, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that New Yorkers had gotten sick “because the leaders they trusted lied.” On Tuesday, he released 170,000 pages of records related to the aftermath of the attacks.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday accused previous New York City leaders of lying about air quality safety after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, resulting in residents and workers developing serious illnesses years later.

“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” he said at a news conference at City Hall, surrounded by politicians, relatives of those who died on Sept. 11 and advocates for the health of those now suffering from illnesses that surfaced years after the attacks.

“As the years pass and the human toll grows, we reckon with the cost of Sept. 11 whenever another New Yorker is stolen from us too soon,” Mr. Mamdani said at the event, where he announced the release of more than 170,000 pages of documents related to toxic air quality around the site of the felled towers.

Mr. Mamdani declined, when asked repeatedly, to say who he believed lied to the public and what exactly they lied about. But in the weeks and months after Sept. 11, city and federal officials, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the mayor at the time of the attacks, and Christine Todd Whitman, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, reassured New Yorkers that the air around ground zero was safe to breathe.

But the documents, which The New York Times reviewed in advance of their release, revealed various instances in which carcinogens were present in the area for months after the attacks.

An audit from November 2001, based on information provided by the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, confirmed that there were elevated levels of the carcinogen benzene near ground zero that month, as well as increases in the concentration of ambient asbestos on Staten Island.

Ten months after the attacks, asbestos was still being found around 15 John Street, a building less than a mile from the World Trade Center.

The records were stored in 68 boxes in a city office, shielded from public view for more than two decades and, according to city officials, discovered only last year. The release of the documents resolves a lawsuit that had demanded their release filed by an advocacy organization, 9/11 Health Watch.

Trump Pressures Force Resignation of America's Top Museum and Library Chief 

 

New York Times, Smithsonian’s Secretary to Resign as Trump Tries to Rule the Institution, Robin Pogrebin and Graham Bowley, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). In the face of escalating White House attacks about how museums present American history, Lonnie G. Bunch III has announced his decision to depart.

After a seven-year run marked most recently by attacks from the Trump administration, Lonnie G. Bunch III, right, announced on Tuesday that he was stepping down as secretary of the Smithsonian.

The White House has escalated its criticism of how the Smithsonian presents American history and values, prompting concern from some about what they see as an assault on the institution’s autonomy and commendation from others for reining in an organization they view as overtaken by liberal bias.

In an interview, Mr. Bunch, 73, said it was not the pressure that had led to his departure.

“It was really just saying, now’s the time,” he said.

“I’m a fighter,” he added.

At the same time, he acknowledged the strain of the role.

“I have to be honest, it has been stressful,” he said. “And at a certain point, I’d like to wake up in the morning and not look at my cellphone.”

In a statement, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who serves as the Smithsonian’s chancellor, said that Mr. Bunch had “pursued excellence in the telling of our nation’s story” and that the Smithsonian had “benefited greatly from his wisdom, vision and leadership.” The Smithsonian said Mr. Bunch was expected to depart at the end of the year.

For more than a year, Mr. Bunch has tried to balance diplomacy and openness to criticism with a determination to resist a White House push to present what President Trump calls “patriotic” history. Some admire how Mr. Bunch has managed to quietly hold the line against the White House. Others believe that the Smithsonian has shown too much deference to Mr. Trump and even engaged in self-censorship.

Last year, the painter Amy Sherald withdrew her blockbuster show at the National Portrait Gallery over a disagreement about how the museum would display her portrait of a transgender Statue of Liberty.

But Mr. Bunch said he had no regrets. “My goal has been to win, not to make me feel good,” he said. “To win — to protect the Smithsonian — there were times I would fight, make clear what the red lines were. And there were other times I let things go.”

Mr. Bunch, a widely respected historian who previously oversaw the creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, said his next chapter would most likely include teaching or a fellowship.

Created by Congress as a trust in 1846, the Smithsonian has long been viewed as independent of the executive branch. Its governing Board of Regents must now appoint a new leader in the face of withering attacks from the administration.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Washington D.C.? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

The 17-person panel, led by Chief Justice Roberts, includes six members of Congress, split along party lines; nine private citizens; and Vice President JD Vance. The terms of three citizen members have recently expired, and the names of replacement nominees have not made it to Congress, an unusual holding pattern that appears to be evidence of the shadow war over control of the Smithsonian.

In the short term, Mr. Bunch seemed to have sufficient board support to stay on. But he has indicated that he is weary of the fray and ready for some form of retirement.

“When you’re Black in America, you’ve got to figure out how to get through, right?” he told The New York Times in May. “You’ve got to figure out how to build allies, when to stand firm, when to bang the table. So in some ways, all of that prepared me for this moment.”

“But do I wish I was in it?” he continued, referring to scrutiny by the Trump administration. “Of course not. Good Lord, I wish that I was doing my goodbye tour.”

Over nearly 40 years in various roles at the Smithsonian, Mr. Bunch developed a reputation as a soft-spoken diplomat adept at raising money and dealing with public officials. As the institution’s first Black secretary, he has at times been a forceful voice on issues of race, particularly after the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020.

Mr. Trump did not pay much attention to Washington’s cultural organizations in his first term but has made them a focus of his second, including through his efforts to govern, close and renovate the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Smithsonian has been forced to respond to White House demands or risk potential cuts to its $1 billion budget, which is largely funded by the federal government.

Last month, in a letter to the board, Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, and Vince Haley, a senior White House adviser, made the stakes clear.Trump Administration: Live UpdatesUpdated Sept. 8, 2026, 10:20 a.m. ET2 hours ago

Here’s the latest.Document suggest that New Yorkers were misled about air quality after 9/11.

“The Smithsonian enjoys support from executive departments and agencies,” the letter said. “Those executive departments and agencies cannot in good conscience continue to support the Smithsonian under current leadership.”

The president’s attempt to overhaul the Smithsonian began last year with an executive order that accused the institution of promoting “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive” and called for an end to spending on exhibitions or programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law.”

After the White House demanded that the Smithsonian turn over information about the content of its exhibitions, Mr. Bunch reasserted the institution’s independence while saying that materials had been submitted in an effort to be “transparent.”

The board adopted a resolution that called for its 21 museums to review their content for partisanship or bias. But the administration began its own review of exhibitions, wall text and social media to assess “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”

Mr. Trump has been unrelenting in his criticism, posting on social media that “the Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.”

The president also announced online that he was dismissing the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI.” (The Smithsonian insisted it controlled personnel matters, but Ms. Sajet resigned, citing the institution’s best interests.)

The White House pressure reached a new pitch this year with a July 4 report about the National Museum of American History that accused its director of “radical activist ideology” and the museum of undermining “faith in American institutions.”

Special Report: American Food Safety

 “Mary had a little lamb, but when she saw it sicken, she sent it off to Packingtown, and now it’s labeled chicken.”

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Where’s the Beef (Coming From)? Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 8, 2026.That’s a little ditty that was circulating, I can’t find any original source, around 1905, when Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle” — about the meatpacking industry, one of the sort of founding documents of the progressive movement.

The topic today is Donald Trump and beef, because here we are back in Upton Sinclair territory.

So you may have seen that last month Trump announced, given that we have high beef prices, that he was going to allow the tariff-free import of 300,000 tons of ground beef.

Rather oddly, he didn’t say from where and wouldn’t say from where for a while. And then eventually said, well, from Argentina, Brazil, and other places.

There has been a substantial uproar over these imports of ground beef because of concerns about safety. You know, if he won’t even say where it’s coming from or whether the countries involved are going to be practicing food safety, that is kind of an issue. And it turns out it’s not just, you know, not just woke liberal types but ranchers, lawmakers and food safety experts who were very concerned about the plan and were not reassured when Trump said the meat is “very clean and very good.”

Okay, little by little details are coming out about how all of this happened. It turns out that the initial plan to allow the beef imports was announced the day after a closed door meeting between Trump and a Brazilian meat packing billionaire who is a major donor to Trump.

And they went right ahead and announced the plan, although again without details. There doesn’t seem to have been much discussion of how this would work, of the concerns. After some initial blowback — even ranchers are concerned that people might become worried about the safety of U.S. beef — Trump announced that he was going to also allow farmers and ranchers to process their own beef rather than having to go through the regular meatpacking companies. But it turned out that the ranchers hate that too, because what they want is for people to believe that beef is safe. They want to be assured that there are quality standards being upheld.

And now that we have at least some information about the origins of the beef, we are even less reassured. In fact, just the other day, the European Union banned beef imports from Brazil because Brazil was not adhering to EU standards on the use of antibiotics. So there are, in fact, real concerns here about safety.

Okay, this is quite a story, and beef is not that trivial a product, but there’s a lot of secondary implications here. The first is that this is a very Trumpian story. It’s got this sort of characteristic combination of raw corruption and raw incompetence. Raw might not have been the best word to use here, but anyway.

The corruption: Obviously, this was a decision made because somebody who has given Trump’s campaign and possibly Trump himself money had a meeting with him and got an immediate policy change. So this certainly looks like undue influence. We don’t know exactly how it happened because it was a closed-door meeting.

Also, shouldn’t somebody have been in the room to or at least passed on this before it was announced to say, you know, is this a good idea? Shouldn’t there have been somebody from the Agriculture Department, somebody from the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, but certainly someone from food safety to pass judgment or give some warning?

In a normal administration, any kind of decision like this involves a process in which multiple agencies get a chance to weigh in and in which somebody who knows something gets to say, look, there are real problems with this idea. But obviously that didn’t happen here. And basically it doesn’t happen in this administration.

This is an administration that does not like experts. Does not listen to expertise. That’s not just a result of particular personnel decisions that Trump made. That is just a defining characteristic. At a fundamental level, they’re just hostile to the idea of expertise in any domain, in pretty much every agency where there’s something to know, where there’s technical stuff that you need to know to make good decisions.

The people who actually know things, or the people who are willing to speak up about what they know, have been silenced, purged. That’s across the board. Basically, it’s Hegseths all the way down in this administration.

And so in this case, nobody was there apparently to say, this is really not a very good idea.

And I think it’s really striking that even Trump thought, well, okay, I can fix this. At least I can mend fences with the ranchers by giving them more leeway to be unregulated themselves. But it turns out that the ranchers want regulation. They want customers to know that the beef that they buy is safe. So just raw incompetence on top of the raw corruption.

There’s an even larger issue here. Normally, when we think about, or as we used to think about, left versus right, there is a question about the role of government. How big a role should government play? And ultimately, it’s a values question, normally. It is a question, should it be the government’s business to ensure that citizens are not in dire poverty? Should it be the government’s business to ensure that everyone has access to essential healthcare?

And the question of how far in that direction you want to go is the traditional left-right distinction. Obviously, I’m on one side of that, and I think that morally I’m right. I think even in practical terms I’m right, but that is a debatable point.

But there are certain roles that government must play. The government needs to provide public goods. The government needs to provide things that the private sector cannot do for itself, which is obviously things like national defense, things like public safety, and it turns out also things like ensuring the safety of the food supply, just like ensuring the safety of the water supply.

It turns out that regulation of what goes on in meatpacking plants, regulation of what goes into your food is something that you really want the government to do. Even people in the industries want that unless they are particularly unethical types. The people who are trying to do the business right want those public goods provided because if you don’t have those provided, then people will not trust their products.

And this is not something that you can leave up to the private sector. It’s not something where you can do your own research. It’s a very complicated world out there. And the informational burden of trying to figure out whether the people responsible for your package of hamburger are actually following safe procedures, that’s beyond everybody. It’s actually quite similar in a way to public health measures, including, by the way, of course, vaccination.

Like I said, it’s all the same story here: This retreat from even the most essential roles of government.

So this is not an administration that’s trying to turn the clock back to 1930. It’s not trying to undo the New Deal. It’s an administration that’s trying to turn us back to the 19th century or before. It’s really just trying to undo even the most essential functions of government.

They’re not doing this, I think, out of a philosophical concern. I don’t think they have a theory that says that we really don’t need these things. They just don’t think about it at all. They don’t do expertise. They don’t do thinking, really. And a lot of policy is just based upon who last spoke to Donald Trump and who has given him money.

It turns out that this is a case in which Brazil — and it appears it’s probably Brazil, there may be some Argentine stuff here, but it’s probably Brazil — Brazil is notorious for not practicing internationally accepted standards on the safety of its meat.

And so the last thing you want to do is allow Brazilian ground beef to be admixed. And by the way, none of this would be unique origin. This would be trimmings of beef that get ground up and mixed in with other beef. And basically, if you get a package of hamburger in the United States under this rule, you will have basically no idea where it came from. You’ll have no idea under what conditions the cattle were raised or how the meat was processed. And this is not something that’s in the interest of really anybody except personally this particular Brazilian beef baron who may have a bunch of unsold beef because the Europeans have turned back a shipment.

And of course Donald Trump himself presumably is getting some financial benefit personally out of the whole thing.

So it’s quite a story. It’s in a way captures all in one place everything that is going wrong, how quickly the United States is descending into kind of pre-modern, pre-development status. We’re just giving up all of the things that make an advanced society and advanced economy work.

Okay, that was hard work. And I’m kind of hungry. So I think I’m going to have a piece of hamburger with some iceberg lettuce.

Actually, maybe not.

Special Report: U.S. Senator Has Frequently Sued Maternity Patients

New York Times, Exclusive: A Doctor Sued 700 Patients for Debts; 81 Were Arrested. Now He’s a Senator, Sarah Kliff, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Patients sued by Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas were routinely charged 18 percent interest, The Times found. Some had bank accounts garnished.

 It was Easter weekend in 2007 when a police car pulled up to Joe Vasquez’s home in rural Kansas.

A doctor had filed a lawsuit against him and his wife over an unpaid $4,561 bill from her emergency hysterectomy three years earlier. They had missed a court date, and the doctor’s lawyers asked the court to issue an arrest warrant.

The police took the couple into custody as their grandchildren prepared for an egg hunt, Mr. Vasquez said. They spent two days in jail before their son could borrow the money to post bond.

“We had no money to pay,” said Mr. Vasquez, now 68. At the time, his wife was working at a manufacturing plant and he was on disability, he said.

The doctor who sued the couple was Roger Marshall, right, now a senator from Kansas. Mr. Marshall, a Republican who is seeking re-election this fall, filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, according to a New York Times analysis of Kansas court records.

Patients were arrested in 81 of those cases for missing court dates, the record show. In an additional 13 lawsuits, Mr. Marshall’s lawyers sought warrants but it is unclear whether an arrest occurred.

They also garnished patients’ paychecks and bank accounts. They routinely charged patients an 18 percent annual interest rate.

The unpaid bills ranged from several thousand dollars to as little as $101. About half the lawsuits were filed under Mr. Marshall’s name and the rest by Heartland Regional OBGYN, the medical practice he solely owned from 1998 to 2012 and then co-owned with another doctor from 2013 to 2019.

Some facing lawsuits were new mothers with outstanding bills from their deliveries. Most lived in Barton County, a rural area with above-average uninsured and poverty rates. Some patients the Times spoke with lacked insurance; others had health coverage but were responsible for part of their bill.

ImageJoe Vasquez and his wife were arrested at an Easter party after missing a court date in their medical debt collection case. Credit...Clayton Steward for The New York Times

“I had every intention to pay, I was just struggling,” said Kellie Clutts, whom Mr. Marshall sued in 2015 over a $129 bill. Ms. Clutts said the charge was from a postpartum visit shortly after her daughter’s birth.

Mr. Marshall sued Ms. Clutts when her baby was 9 months old and eventually garnished her bank account.

“I was recently divorced, trying to do everything on my own,” said Ms. Clutts, 45. “I told them I could make partial payments, but it seemed like no matter what I said, they wanted the full amount at once.”

In response to detailed questions from the Times, a spokeswoman for Mr. Marshall said that he spent decades caring for patients regardless of their ability to pay.

“Judges issue warrants when people repeatedly miss court dates, not doctors,” the spokeswoman, Payton Fuller, wrote in a statement.

Court records show that Mr. Marshall’s lawyers repeatedly requested arrest warrants, including in Mr. Vasquez’s case. They filed dozens of briefs arguing that warrants were needed because the of the defendant’s “refusal to obey Court orders.”

Steven Johnson, a lawyer who often represented Mr. Marshall in debt cases, defended the warrants and ensuing arrests as necessary to ensure that debtors attended court dates.

“If defendants were allowed to appear only when they wanted to without any consequences the court would get no business done,” he wrote in a text message.

He said that Mr. Marshall was “no different” than his other clients in allowing his law firm to take the steps they felt were necessary to pursue an outstanding bill. As a client, Mr. Marshall was not involved in decisions about when to seek warrants, arrests, or garnishments, Mr. Johnson said, but did set the 18 percent interest rate in a contract he had patients sign. Mr. Marshall’s office did not respond to a question from The Times about who set the interest rate.

Doctors have wide discretion in how to handle unpaid bills. They can decide when to involve a debt collector, file lawsuits or drop the debt entirely if a patient seems unable to pay.

“There is a lot of variation,” said Barak Richman, the co-director of the health law program at George Washington University who has studied medical debt litigation in three states. “There are a lot that do bring lawsuits but also a whole lot that don’t. It’s not because they’re in a different position, they’ve just decided they’re not going to do it.”

Some hospitals and doctors have increasingly relied on litigation as insurance deductibles have risen, leaving patients responsible for a great share of their bills.

Even so, wage garnishments and arrests of patients are “definitely on the extreme side,” Mr. Richman said.

Neale Mahoney, an economist at Stanford University, has conducted research in one state finding that lawsuits against patients are relatively rare, with about 1.7 percent of hospital stays resulting in litigation.

“It’s not surprising there are outliers but this does seem to be an extreme case,” in terms of how far a doctor went to pursue debt, Mr. Mahoney said.

Federal law made debtors prisons illegal centuries ago but many states’ laws allow for arrests when the defendant in a debt lawsuit misses a court date.

The Times interviewed eight people Mr. Marshall sued between 2003 and 2015. Most described themselves as living paycheck to paycheck, often deciding between paying medical bills or buying groceries. Two said that the bills Mr. Marshall pursued in court stemmed from late miscarriages that required surgery.

Mr. Marshall stopped practicing medicine after winning election to Congress in 2016. But some of his collection work continued during his time serving in the House of Representatives, from 2017 to 2021, The Times found.ImageSupporters carrying a Marshall campaign sign in 2020. The senator’s website says that he was often “the only OB-GYN in the area” in his largely rural region of the state. Credit...Mark Reinstein/MediaPunch, via Associated Press‘Doc Marshall’

Mr. Marshall spent more than 25 years practicing obstetrics before running for Congress in 2016. In campaign materials, he frequently trumpeted his work delivering babies and the financial success of his medical practice. Both his Senate and his campaign websites refer to him as “Doc Marshall.”

“For 5,000 Kansans, life began here, in the trusted hands of Dr. Marshall,” an ad during his 2020 campaign for Senate said, showing the senator holding two newborns.

His current campaign website says that he was often “the only OB-GYN in the area” in his largely rural region of the state. He has also highlighted his care of low-income patients. Sometimes, he said in 2017, women drove “over a hundred miles” to see him because he accepted Medicaid, the public health benefits program for the poor.

In 1998, he and eight other doctors opened a four-bed surgical center in Great Bend. It steadily grew into a full-service hospital generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue. He served as the hospital’s board chairman, and his family remained co-owners of the hospital until March 2017, two months after he was sworn into office.

Mr. Marshall earned salaries both from his obstetrics practice and the hospital. In 2015, his combined earnings from the two was about $780,000, his 2016 financial disclosure report shows. His current worth is between $3 million and 9.8 million, according to his most recent financial disclosure report.

Great Bend Regional Medical Center also filed hundreds of lawsuits against patients during the years Mr. Marshall was either an investor or board chair.

More than a dozen of those lawsuits occurred while Mr. Marshall served in Congress and before he sold his ownership stake in the hospital, according to Kansas court records and Mr. Marshall’s financial disclosures.

Ms. Fuller, Mr. Marshall’s spokeswoman, said that the hospital “provided millions in uncompensated care” and “used the exact same billing and outside collection procedures as every other business or hospital in Kansas.”

She added, “Sixty days before an election, The New York Times has decided that a rural doctor keeping the hospital’s lights on is some kind of scandal. Kansans know better.”

When Mr. Marshall was elected to Congress, he quickly parlayed his experience as a doctor and health care investor into a central role in Republicans’ 2017 attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the sweeping health care law enacted under President Barack Obama. “I may be the only physician in Congress to help run a hospital,” he said.

In July 2025, he introduced legislation that would prohibit hospitals from suing patients if they did not publicly post their medical prices.

The first time Meischa Zimmerman was arrested for missing a court date related to a C-section bill from Mr. Marshall was in 2011. She was home with her 2-year-old, and eight months pregnant.

“I asked them quietly: Can you not handcuff me in front of my daughter?” said Ms. Zimmerman, 44. “I explained to my daughter I was going for a ride.”

Ms. Zimmerman was arrested twice more, in 2013 and 2016, each time posting $200 bonds that would go toward paying down her debt, according to receipts The Times reviewed. Court records indicate that she was hand-delivered notices of the hearings she needed to attend, but Ms. Zimmerman said she did not receive such documents.

Her last arrest occurred the week after Mr. Marshall won his first congressional election.

Ms. Zimmerman was uninsured during the earlier pregnancy, in 2009, but had explored enrolling in Medicaid. All states offer Medicaid coverage to low-income women during pregnancy and for a short period after. But states set their own income caps, and Kansas has long had one of the lowest in the country, limiting the benefit to women who earn less than 150 percent of the poverty line.

Ms. Zimmerman was not working at the time and thought she might qualify. She made an interview appointment at her local Medicaid office but went into labor the night before, so didn’t show up and never completed the paperwork. Five months later, with her $3,596 bill for the delivery still unpaid, Mr. Marshall sued her.

“I had to choose whether I’d pay my electricity or pay $50 to a doctor who didn’t need it,” she said.

Ms. Zimmerman said she set up a $50 monthly payment plan in 2010 but sometimes could not keep up. Mr. Marshall’s law firm was charging 18 percent interest on her bill, and she recalls being told that it had ballooned to over $7,000 with interest.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Slammed Over ‘Horrific’ 9/11 Lies, NYC's Post-9/11 Toxic Air Cover-Up Exposed, America's Allies Leave the U.S. Behind, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Trump gave 9/11 survivors and families fresh reason to be furious this week. At Tuesday’s Ellipse ceremony, he once again told a version of himself being carried out of danger by firefighters near Ground Zero, a story that’s changed shape over the years and that first responders say never happened.

He made those claims at the very event where he awarded the Medal of Freedom to Welles Crowther, the real hero known as “the man in the red bandanna,” and he’s now skipping Friday’s actual Ground Zero memorial for a Pentagon stop and a golf trip to Ireland. Meanwhile, Mayor Mamdani released 170,000 pages of documents proving what survivors have said for decades: city officials knew the air around Ground Zero was toxic and told people it was safe to breathe anyway.

We’ve also got a full rundown of just how isolated the U.S. is looking on the world stage right now, Canada accelerating its pivot away from Washington, a twelve-country coalition sanctioning Israeli settlements over the Trump administration’s objections, and Jared Kushner getting publicly grilled on his negotiating record as Russia resumed strikes on Kyiv the same day. Plus South Park trolling Trump by renaming itself, the Smithsonian’s top official stepping down amid White House pressure, and more.

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Here’s the news.

Trump Sparks 9/11 Outrage:

Nine-eleven survivors and family members have long expressed fury at Donald Trump’s habit of inserting himself into the story of that day, and Tuesday gave them fresh material. Speaking at an Ellipse ceremony with a recovered World Trade Center steel beam on display, Trump once again claimed two firefighters had to physically carry him out of the area when the nearby U.S. Steel Building appeared at risk of collapse, saying “they grabbed me under the arm... they literally lifted me up.” But he told a notably different version of this same story back in January 2016, when he said the incident happened after hearing a “screech” and described the building as merely “not so far from us,” never claiming to have actually been inside it or near the towers themselves. First responders who were actually on the ground have said they never saw him there at all.

The fury extends to Trump’s broader, long-disputed claims about his role in the recovery. He repeated Tuesday that he sent “a big group of people” from his own construction workforce to help at Ground Zero, a claim retired FDNY battalion chief Richard Alles told PolitiFact in 2019 he had “no knowledge” of, noting a hundred-person crew would have left a record. Only video of Trump in a suit near, not at, Ground Zero days after the attacks has ever surfaced. This is the same pattern of exaggeration that produced his infamous, widely debunked 2015 claim that “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City were “cheering as that building was coming down,” a claim police confirmed never happened and that he refused to walk back even after being corrected.

Adding insult for many families, Trump made these claims at the very ceremony where he posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom to Welles Crowther, the 24-year-old “man in the red bandanna” who died saving an estimated 18 people in the South Tower, and Trump couldn’t resist noting Crowther “has become more famous than me... I don’t like it.” He’s also chosen to skip Friday’s actual Ground Zero memorial in New York, where all four living former presidents plan to attend, opting instead for a Pentagon ceremony before flying to Ireland for a golf tournament, with Vice President JD Vance attending Ground Zero in his place. For survivors and families who’ve spent 25 years fighting just to get the truth about that day acknowledged, watching a president repeatedly rewrite his own role in it, then skip the one ceremony that centers their loss, is exactly the kind of self-serving distortion that keeps reopening the wound.

Mamdani Releases 9/11 Records Showing NYC Officials Lied:

Newly released documents show that toxic air quality was being recorded in Manhattan soon after the 9/11 attacks even as officials publicly downplayed the health risks, with Mayor Zohran Mamdani saying asbestos was found “nearly everywhere” tested near Ground Zero. Announcing the release of 170,000 documents, Mamdani said “people got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” and noted illnesses from the dust and smoke have now claimed more lives than the nearly 3,000 people who died in the attacks themselves. Jon Stewart, appearing alongside him, said the files show the city knew by October 2001 that Manhattan’s air was toxic, sarcastically adding “to be fair to them, they only buried that information for 25 years.” Days after the attacks, city and federal officials including the EPA had declared the air near the Twin Towers safe, a declaration then-EPA head Christine Todd Whitman later apologized for, saying the agency “did the very best we could at the time with the knowledge we had.” The records include air-quality reports and internal communications, and were released through an online portal timed to Friday’s 25th anniversary, with more documents expected over the next year.

Among the most damning documents is the October 2001 “Harding Memo,” in which an aide warned then-Deputy Mayor Robert Harding that the city could face as many as 35,000 legal claims over its response, partly because health advisories had caused people “to return to the area too soon (causing toxic exposure or emotional harm).” A separate memo documenting Congressman Jerry Nadler’s concerns showed city officials advised residents to clean up dust and debris with “wet mops and rags” despite the presence of asbestos, which is only supposed to be handled by licensed professionals. That memo, attributed to Bloomberg-era special adviser Ester Fuchs, cited the city’s top health official testifying there were “no elevated levels of asbestos in indoor air” even as testing showed “low levels of asbestos in some samples,” and it explicitly acknowledged “potential problems for City Hall.” Tuesday’s release resolves a lawsuit brought by the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch, which sued after officials claimed they didn’t have the records, and the documents were only found last year in 68 boxes discovered in a city office.

The human toll behind the numbers is stark. Karen Klingon, who was involved in the 9/11 Health Watch lawsuit, told the BBC her brother Robert lived five minutes from Ground Zero, developed asthma, was later diagnosed with cancer, and died at 61 of a related brain tumor; she said she hopes more research into what was in the air could help others who got sick understand what happened to them. Phil Alvarez, whose brother Luis died of cancer in 2019 after Ground Zero exposure, said people “continue to get sick every single day, continue to die.” Thousands have experienced health effects like cancer since the towers collapsed, many of them fatal, and the newly released files are meant to finally give survivors and families documented answers about what officials knew and when.

World Turns its Back on America:

The world is increasingly turning its back on America, and Washington is finding itself standing alone as key allies chart their own course. Canada made that explicit on Tuesday, with Prime Minister Mark Carney announcing the country will accelerate efforts to reduce its economic reliance on the United States and deepen ties with the European Union instead, saying “in too many areas, they wanted dependency, not a true economic partnership.” Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion in U.S. goods took effect the same day, and Carney is set to address the European Parliament in Strasbourg next week as part of that pivot. More than 70% of Canadian exports still go to the U.S., but Carney said that share is falling by design, with exports to other countries on track to double over the next decade. His approval rating has topped 70% amid the standoff, and neither side appears eager to make the first move back to the table.

Trump announced he’s directing the federal government to remove Canadian-made products from government purchasing programs unless Canada changes its trade policies toward American farmers and companies, accusing Canada of “ripping us off for years” and calling the arrangement a “Canadian Trade Scam.” The move is notable given the obvious irony: Trump himself signed the current U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement during his first term, the same deal he’s now effectively attacking with this latest escalation in the ongoing trade war between the two countries.

America’s isolation deepened further as Britain, Canada and France announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, directly cutting against the Trump administration’s staunch diplomatic and military support for Israel. British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Parliament the government “agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank,” and announced an import ban on settlement goods along with new arms restrictions. A total of twelve countries, including Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, signed onto the coalition, with ten of the twelve now recognizing a Palestinian state. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed back, warning the move could destabilize the West Bank, while Israel responded with fury, closing its British consulate in Jerusalem and banning entry to a dozen British lawmakers. Even Britain’s own U.S. ambassador, Mike Huckabee, warned the move would strain relations with Washington and could trigger retaliatory economic measures against British businesses.

Israel itself was blindsided by how far this international break from Washington’s orbit actually went. Israeli officials had expected France and Canada to join Britain’s sanctions push but were caught off guard by the breadth of the full twelve-country coalition, a failure now being described in Jerusalem as a diplomatic intelligence breakdown. Former Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid said he warned British officials directly that the move would strengthen far-right figures like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich ahead of Israeli elections, telling them “you’re helping Smotrich.” Economy Ministry trade official Roy Fisher acknowledged the direct financial exposure is small, just $45 million in settlement-linked exports to Britain, but warned of a much larger chilling effect as European importers with no settlement ties grow wary of doing business with Israel at all. The episode reflects a broader pattern: Germany and Italy notably declined to sign on, but the momentum among traditionally pro-Israel Western governments is clearly shifting away from Washington’s steadfast position.

Even America’s own diplomatic credibility is being publicly questioned by its stated allies. NBC’s Richard Engel pressed Jared Kushner directly in Kyiv on why anyone should trust his negotiating record, pointing out that “Gaza remains a wasteland” despite his involvement, that the Iran war is still ongoing, and that this is already his “several rounds of negotiations” on Ukraine with no resolution. Kushner grew visibly defensive, insisting he and fellow envoy Steve Witkoff are “really representing President Trump” rather than bringing independent approaches, and touting older wins like the Abraham Accords and USMCA to justify his continued role. The timing undercut him almost immediately: Russia resumed airstrikes on Kyiv the very same day, killing at least two people, just after Kushner and Witkoff’s visit to Moscow and Kyiv. Between a collapsing Canadian partnership, a NATO-adjacent coalition sanctioning a top U.S. ally over its own objections, and a stalled peace process run by a son-in-law with his own conflicts of interest, the pattern across all these stories is the same: America’s closest partners are increasingly acting without it, or against its wishes, rather than waiting for Washington’s lead.

Other News:

South Park renames itself “South America”: In response to Donald Trump’s efforts to rename geographic locations after “America,” including the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario, and a push to rename New Mexico to “New America,” South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker announced the show’s 29th season will officially be titled “South America.” In a statement dripping with sarcasm, they said the change was “inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google,” and specifically thanked parent company Paramount, calling it “a Skydance Capitulation,” a jab at Paramount Skydance’s recently Trump-approved $111 billion merger with Warner Bros Discovery. The satirical series, which first aired in 1997, has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration, previously depicting him naked in bed with Satan and portraying former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem as a puppy killer. Trump’s New Mexico post, which used an AI-generated video to show “America” replacing “Mexico” on a welcome sign, drew swift condemnation from Democrats who called it a distraction from the Iran war and rising prices. The newly renamed “South America” premieres September 16 and will stream globally on Paramount+.

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch stepping down amid Trump clashes: Lonnie Bunch III, the Smithsonian’s first Black and first historian secretary, announced he’ll retire by year’s end after 38 years at the institution, a departure that comes as the Trump administration has repeatedly attacked how the Smithsonian portrays American history. Just last week, the Interior Department threatened to cut off support, alleging Smithsonian facilities push a “radical ideology” that weakens “shared American identity,” and a person familiar with the situation said Bunch had actually planned to retire a year earlier but stayed to defend the institution until that letter convinced him it was time to go. Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 directing Vice President JD Vance to purge “improper, divisive, or anti-American” ideology from Smithsonian programming, and later publicly complained the museums focused too much on “how bad Slavery was.” Chief Justice John Roberts, who chairs the Smithsonian’s governing Regents as chancellor, praised Bunch’s “wisdom, vision and leadership,” while Vance has reportedly criticized Bunch directly at a Regents meeting. Bunch said he’ll stay on three to four months to help transition to new leadership, and in a recent interview described America’s strength as coming not from “running away from its history” but understanding how it shaped the country.

Netanyahu Ignored Warnings Before October 7th: A senior Emirati official says he warned Netanyahu by phone in late September 2023 that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning a major attack, but Netanyahu was dismissive and never briefed the Shin Bet or IDF chief, according to a new book cited by Haaretz. The warning reportedly traced back to Sinwar himself, who told a Fatah intermediary in two separate meetings that he was preparing an “earthquake,” a message relayed to UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed and eventually to Israeli security officials in mid-September, though it wasn’t understood as a warning of an imminent Gaza invasion. Netanyahu’s office called the report “a total lie,” saying no such warning was received; the UAE would neither confirm nor deny it, saying only that intelligence is shared through normal channels. The story landed alongside a separate Channel 12 report that Netanyahu took two hours to leave home for military headquarters after being alerted to the October 7 attack, fueling renewed political attacks from rivals like Naftali Bennett and Gadi Eisenkot, who are calling for a state commission of inquiry.

Lindsay Clancy jurors describe holdout who caused mistrial: Three jurors from Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, including the foreperson, spoke publicly for the first time since last week’s mistrial, describing frustration with a single holdout juror who wouldn’t align with the rest of the panel. The foreperson said the holdout initially “admitted he had reasonable doubt,” prompting her to excitedly begin filling out verdict forms, only for him to then add he still wouldn’t find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity. That contradiction led to the panel deadlocking after 38 hours of deliberation in the case over Clancy’s killing of her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, at their Massachusetts home in January 2023 amid what her defense argued was postpartum psychosis. NBC10 Boston attempted to reach the juror in question for his side of the story but has not yet done so. The account adds new detail to defense attorney Kevin Reddington’s earlier claim that the jury split 11-1 in favor of a not-guilty verdict by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.

Clancy’s attorney asks Trump for a pardon he can’t legally grant: In his first interview since the mistrial, Kevin Reddington used a “Good Morning America” appearance to directly call on President Trump to pardon his client, saying “I would hope that you would consider this young lady... and consider a pardon,” even though presidential pardons apply only to federal crimes and Clancy was charged under Massachusetts state law. A White House official confirmed as much when asked for comment. Reddington described Clancy as “intelligent,” “hardworking,” and “like a daughter” to him, and said he blames a doctor who he claims overprescribed her psychiatric medication for contributing to the postpartum psychosis he argued drove the killings. He also addressed his post-trial comment that he’d “crushed the prosecution,” calling it “bravado” from high emotions after a six-to-seven-week trial, while separately noting Patrick Clancy’s attorneys are now threatening legal action against online “true crime” creators spreading what they call a “campaign of misinformation” falsely implicating him. Massachusetts prosecutors must now decide whether to retry Clancy or negotiate a plea deal, and Reddington said he hopes to work something out with the district attorney.

Jerry Sandusky seeks new trial after accuser recants: Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach serving at least 30 years for sexually abusing multiple boys, appeared virtually in court Tuesday as his legal team withdrew their state post-conviction bid in order to pursue a new trial in federal court instead, after one of his accusers, identified as “Victim 10” or “R.R.,” recanted his testimony. R.R. claims state investigators pressured him into affirming abuse he didn’t clearly remember, telling him his “role was critical to stopping a predator” and that memory gaps from trauma were “common and even expected,” which Sandusky’s attorneys say amounted to psychological manipulation. Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday dismissed the move as “yet another attempt by a convicted child predator to avoid accountability,” saying his office has evidence debunking the recantation claim. Sandusky, 82, was convicted in 2012 on 45 counts related to abusing boys he met through his nonprofit The Second Mile, a scandal that also led to the firing of head coach Joe Paterno, though Paterno’s legacy has seen some rehabilitation recently with Penn State opening a “Paterno Family Football Experience Room.” Judge Maureen Skerda confirmed Sandusky understood he was giving up his right to litigate the recantation claim in state court by shifting to federal court.

Bahamas plane crash claims all four family members: Search crews confirmed the deaths of all four members of a Florida family, pilot Mario Lamar, 80, his wife Lili, 79, and grandchildren Sofia Sosa, 28, and Christian Sosa, 22, after their small PA-34 Piper crashed roughly 15 miles off Andros Island in the Bahamas on Monday. The family said relatives themselves located the remains and had to bring them aboard their own boats, and are now working with the Coast Guard to bring their loved ones home; Bahamian police confirmed the recovered remains are in custody and being transferred to New Providence. Lamar’s niece described him as “a lifelong, very experienced pilot” and said flight-tracking data showed the aircraft flying into the edge of a storm before abruptly reversing course. Lamar was a Miami attorney of more than 50 years whose daughter, the mother of the two adult grandchildren killed, practiced law alongside him; Christian Sosa was a recent Loyola Marymount marketing graduate and freelance sports photographer who had shot for the Rams, while Sofia Sosa held a physician assistant master’s degree from FIU. Family and colleagues, including one of Christian’s professors who called him “an amazing young man who lit up every room,” are now mourning what they’ve described as a devastating loss.

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

 

All Rise News, 'Weak sauce’: IRS loses bid to share taxpayer info with ICE, Adam Klasfeld, right, Sept.8-9, 2026. The D.C. Circuit unanimously found that the government likely violated a post-Watergate law that carries heavy penalties.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday unanimously affirmed an order blocking the Internal Revenue Service from sharing taxpayer addresses with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dealing another defeat to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.

“After the Watergate scandal exposed executive branch abuses of U.S. taxpayers’ information to harass the Administration’s enemies, Congress enacted a prohibition against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sharing tax return information with any other federal agency unless the requesting agency meets stringent conditions,” U.S. Circuit Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote at the start of a 32-page opinion.

U.S. Circuit Judges Patricia Millett and Robert L. Wilkins joined the decisions. All three were appointed by former President Barack Obama.

A little more than a year ago, the Trump administration sought to circumvent those rules. ICE placed a request for more than 1.2 million records, and the IRS disclosed roughly 47,000 taxpayer addresses before multiple federal judges blocked the sharing of that information.

Center for Taxpayer Rights, Main Street Alliance, and two labor unions pursued the D.C.-based litigation, represented by the advocacy group Democracy Forward.

Judge Pillard found that the procedure the Trump administration created for sharing taxpayer information was a far cry from the exacting standards Congress demanded in post-Watergate legislation passed in 1976, abandoning an “individualized review” in favor of a “mass, automated review of millions of records at the press of a button.”

The judge reminded the government that violations of the statute carry serious penalties.

“The government and its personnel face steep civil and criminal consequences for willful disclosure of information in violation of section 6103,” she wrote, citing the possible imprisonment and heavy fines under the relevant statute.

Although the IRS argued that stopping it from sharing taxpayer information with ICE would impede criminal investigations, the three-judge panel said: “that’s a gripe with Congress, not the court.”

“The government has no legitimate interest in conducting criminal investigations in violation of the statute,” the order notes.

Swatting down another “weak sauce” argument by the IRS, the appellate court brushed away concerns that the injunction requires a judge’s approval to launch criminal investigations. Such notifications can be made “under seal” to protect investigations from public scrutiny.

“Importantly, the district court’s advance notice requirement reasonably balances the government’s interest in making lawful disclosures with the plaintiffs’ interest in preventing unlawful disclosures that, if made, would likely be difficult or impossible to remedy,” the ruling states. 

New York Times, Dueling Court Rulings Leave Missouri’s Congressional Races in Chaos, Ann E. Marimow and Mitch Smith, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). After losing in two courts and winning in another, Missouri officials said they planned to forge ahead with using a congressional map that was redrawn to benefit Republicans.

Conflicting court orders issued on the same day threw the congressional elections in Missouri into chaos on Tuesday, two months before an election in which a handful of races could decide control of the House.

First, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh denied a request from Missouri officials to use a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an edge in the midterm elections.

Soon after, a District Court judge in Missouri ruled the other way, ordering the state to rely on that map, which had been used in last month’s primary election.

Taken together, the dueling court orders left Missouri where it began, with no agreement about which congressional map should be in effect in November and no immediate route to resolving that question. Missouri’s Republican attorney general and governor quickly said that the state intended to use the redrawn map that favors Republicans. Their opponents immediately appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and said they would also appeal to Justice Kavanaugh, meaning the issue will be resolved only after additional legal twists.

Early Tuesday evening, it seemed Missouri Democrats had prevailed in a yearlong fight to preserve a House seat they hold in the Kansas City area. Justice Kavanaugh deferred to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which last week blocked the use of the new map. The state court had found that voters should first have an opportunity to vote on the new district boundaries in a statewide referendum.

Justice Kavanaugh oversees emergency requests from Missouri and acted on his own without referring the matter to the full court. He did not provide any reasoning, as is often the case when the court responds to emergency filings.

But soon after Justice Kavanaugh acted, word spread that Stephen R. Clark, the chief federal judge in St. Louis, had separately ordered the state to use the map that Missouri Republicans drew last year at President Trump’s request in an attempt to flip a seat in Kansas City. That ruling came in a different legal case, brought by a Republican congressman who is running for re-election and a G.O.P. candidate who won the primary under the new district lines.

The secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, a Republican, said the Federal District Court ruling “halts a full-on constitutional crisis.”

What happens next still seemed unclear on Tuesday night. The decision from Judge Clark, who like Justice Kavanaugh was appointed to the bench by Mr. Trump, was based in part on concerns that using a different map for the general election would “wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness” of the congressional election. He wrote that he was concerned a new map would lead to widespread voter confusion.

The state’s emergency request had thrust the Supreme Court in the middle of another election-year legal battle in a heated campaign season, where control of the House could come down to a handful of seats. But Justice Kavanaugh refused to intervene on Tuesday, leaving in place a unanimous ruling from Missouri’s highest court on state law, suggesting he did not think there was a federal issue that warranted Supreme Court action.

Missouri’s attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to act quickly and allow use of the new map, given a state-imposed Sept. 8 deadline for altering its general election ballot. She noted that 1.2 million Missouri residents had voted in the August primary using the new map.

The state court “threw those votes into the dustbin,” she said, by requiring the winners to run in different congressional districts. In her filing, the attorney general said Missouri planned to comply with one aspect of the state court ruling and proceed with a November referendum on the new map.

But she argued that the state should continue with the map used for the primary until that referendum is held. The only question, she wrote, is whether the group of challengers who sued, led by Richard von Glahn, executive director of the advocacy group People Not Politicians Missouri, can “void a congressional map before he gets his vote.”

The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 8, 2026. What if the law means what it says? Now and then, a court decision comes along to restore your faith that nonpartisan judges can fairly read the plain text of statutes and constitutional provisions and render entirely rational decisions.

No, we don’t get such things from the MAGA-controlled Supreme Court, which has become so corrupted by rank partisanship as to forfeit its legitimacy, but we do get such examples of real judicial handiwork from lower federal courts and state courts.People opposing a congressional redistricting plan rally outside the Missouri Supreme Court in Jefferson City, Mo., on Sept. 2 while displaying the number of petition signatures submitted seeking a statewide vote on the measure. (David A. Lieb/AP)

We got just such a satisfying result last week from Missouri’s Supreme Court, as the New York Times reported:

The judges said a referendum on the new district lines had been improperly denied a spot on the November ballot, and that the redrawn map should have been paused until voters weighed in.

The redrawn map “did not go into effect and will not go into effect unless and until approved by the voters,” Judge Ginger K. Gooch, who was appointed by a Republican governor, wrote in the opinion. The prior map, she added, “remains in full force and effect for the November 2026 general election.”

This was not a hard case. Missouri Republicans eagerly served up a re-redistricted map when Donald Trump snapped his fingers last year, but the voters wanted their say and collected enough signatures to qualify a referendum for the ballot, which Republican state officials blocked (“Who are voters to interfere with our Trump servility?!”).

Though the headlines after the ruling focused on the outcome (a “win” for Democrats in allowing Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, whose district Republicans targeted, to run for re-election in his current seat, increasing the likelihood of a Democratic hold, and in keeping Republican incumbent Ann Wagner’s seat in the 2nd Congressional District competitive, thereby increasing chances of a pickup for Democrats), the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision, a concise 14 pages, deserves our full attention.

The Missouri Supreme Court held that voters were improperly denied a say in how the congressional lines were to be drawn:

Because the plain language of article III, section 49 of the Missouri Constitution authorizes a referendum as to “any act of the general assembly” and no exception applies, the referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely.

Now, the MAGA-controlled U.S. Supreme Court uses all sorts of excuses to allow the MAGA president to do exactly as he pleases, but in Missouri things apparently work differently.

The desperate MAGA Republican secretary of state insisted “no exception” did not mean “no exception.” (“The secretary’s sole basis for declaring the referendum petition insufficient is that the Missouri Constitution does not authorize a referendum on congressional redistricting passed by the General Assembly.”) But it says “no exception.”

The unanimous Missouri high court slapped down this spurious argument:

The secretary asserts the Missouri Constitution does not permit a referendum ... because the Missouri Constitution has no plain, clear statement subjecting legislation drawing new congressional districts to a referendum. But this ignores article III, section 49, which provides: “The people … reserve power to approve or reject by referendum any act of the general assembly, except as hereinafter provided.”

Then Republicans offered this doozy: “The secretary argued that the Constitution has an exemption for ‘laws necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health or safety, and laws making appropriations for the current expenses of the state government, for the maintenance of state institutions and for the support of public schools[.]’” Umm, what does that have to do with redistricting?

The Missouri justices had the same question and found the argument preposterous. “This Court cannot rewrite the Missouri Constitution to substitute ‘all election laws’ for ‘the immediate preservation of the public peace,’” the court held. The Republicans’ argument was especially weak since the mid-decade redistricting could not possibly be related to “public peace” because “the 2022 congressional districts established by the General Assembly remain in place unless and until repealed.”

The justices also gave the back of the hand to the cockamamie argument that suffrage was an “institution” that couldn’t be touched by voters in a referendum. The court pointed out that “the right of referendum to congressional redistricting passed by the General Assembly does not eliminate suffrage generally or the General Assembly’s right to redistrict. Instead, if by referendum vote the voters reject the new redistricting … the General Assembly’s prior redistricting in 2022 remains in effect. The General Assembly also remains free to go ‘back to the drawing board to do [new] redistricting.’”

Finally, the justices knocked down the nonsensical argument that the last date for the referendum was August 4, the primary election day. The justices, evidencing just a touch of irritation with the nonsense served up by the secretary of state, held: “This Court need not speculate about why the General Assembly chose the statutory deadline or whether the statute is valid in every case because a later-enacted statute has no bearing on the constitution’s plain language. The plain language of the constitution permits a referendum as to ‘any act of the General Assembly’ regardless of any statutory deadlines set by the General Assembly decades later.” Oh.

The court therefore concluded:

The referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely, and the secretary incorrectly concluded otherwise. [The Republican re-redistricting plan] did not go into effect and will not go into effect unless and until approved by the voters. The congressional redistricting the General Assembly established in 2022 remains in full force and effect for the November 2026 general election.

The Missouri Supreme Court’s unanimous decision insisting words mean what they say is, on one hand, unextraordinary. But in an era of MAGA word-twisters and reality-deniers, the decision comes as an exhilarating reaffirmation of intellectual honesty.

We’re reminded of the exchange in Alice in Wonderland:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Contra Humpty Dumpty, words and facts do have discernible, objective meaning. The notion that Trump and his MAGA minions are “masters,” free to reset reality and write text to match their own ends (as despots have historically done), has become one of the Trump regime’s most pernicious characteristics.

In short, those who value the rule of law and objective truth should applaud the Missouri Supreme Court’s rejection of the Missouri MAGA Republicans’ nonsensical argument that “no exception” means “no exception unless we want the power to gerrymander the state over the wishes of the voters.”

Donald Trump naturally blew his stack on hearing about the ruling. His Missouri lackeys will race to Trump’s protectors on the MAGA-controlled Supreme Court. We will see if the Missouri justices’ entirely sensible ruling withstands the MAGA hacks’ scrutiny — or whether we go through the looking glass and tumble back into the world of mad justice and partisan hackery.

For now, however, we can revel in the notion that, at least in Missouri’s highest court, “no exception” means “no exception.”

Ohio Candidate For Governor Attacked 

 

Ohio's Democratic Party nominee for governor, Dr. Amy Acton, left, a physician was attacked during a campaign event by an armed suspect identified as Patrick Havas, above, a Republican with ties to Acton's opponents, who including Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, a high-tech billionairre. Following the attack, in which Acton reported no injuries, she tended a man in the crowd who had sustained injuries.

Occupy Democrats, Advocacy: HERO DOCTOR! Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton rushes to TREAT people injured when an armed Republican charged toward her – then a stunning connection to her MAGA opponent emerges! Staff Report, Sept. 7, 2026. Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, MD, MPH had just been charged by an armed man who knocked people to the ground as he pushed through a crowd toward her.

Once police had the man under control, the physician-turned-candidate rushed to help the people who were hurt instead of fleeing the scene like her security wanted.

Acton was a consummate professional as she remained at the Canfield Fair to treat one of the injured after 38-year-old Patrick Havas forced his way through the Democratic Party tent toward her on Sunday.

Police say Havas was carrying two handguns, a Taser and brass knuckles, although he never drew the weapons.Havas, who is a registered Republican, was arrested on two counts of assault and one count of disorderly conduct. And now the story has taken a remarkable turn.

Havas is the brother of Andrew Havas, a Republican operative who gave more than $10,000 to the campaign of Acton's opponent, Trump toady Vivek Ramaswamy, right.

Even more incredibly, Acton had publicly called out those exact donations less than two months before Sunday's incident.

“I find it appalling that Vivek Ramaswamy accepted over $10,000 from Andrew Havas,” Acton said in July after the donor's criminal history involving sexual conduct with a minor became public. Campaign-finance records show Andrew Havas gave Ramaswamy $10,102.54 in five contributions.

Andrew Havas had also been a volunteer county campaign chair for Republican Sen. Jon Husted before resigning in July after NBC News questioned the campaign about a 2009 criminal case. He had originally been charged with sexual misconduct involving a 15-year-old, but the charge was reduced to misdemeanor assault in a plea deal. He pleaded guilty and served 90 days in jail.

There is no solid evidence yet that Patrick Havas's actions were connected to his brother, the donations or Acton's criticism of them, and authorities have not announced a motive. Ramaswamy's campaign condemned the incident as “completely unacceptable.

”But amid all the disturbing questions surrounding what happened, one part of the story needs no explanation.When an armed man came charging through a crowd toward Amy Acton, other people got hurt protecting her. And instead of fleeing the danger, the doctor went back to take care of them.Kudos to Dr. Acton, a Democratic candidate of character who will lead Ohio to a brighter future as its next governor.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The People vs. Mad King Donald, William Kristol, right, Sept. 8, 2026. I trust you all had a better Labor Day weekend than Donald Trump.

On Sunday the president of the United States fired off more than sixty social media posts, each more bizarre than the last. They included frenzied rants, manic boasts, personal attacks, crazy links, lunatic messages, and surreal AI-generated memes and images. They were often weirdly dystopian—Trump nuking the Earth from orbit from a space station, Trump with giant robot bodyguards as fires burned.

His niece, Mary Trump, a psychologist, remarked Sunday evening that “Donald is decompensating in real time.” The post that particularly caught Mary’s attention was an AI-produced upside-down map of Iran molded into Donald Trump’s profile.

Things didn’t get better on Monday. Trump continued to decompensate. A spate of fifteen posts within five minutes Monday morning ended with the president offering holiday good wishes:

Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP

This post was revelatory. Trump seems to admit what it was that had gotten under his skin. His critics “should be exhausted by now.” But, “sadly, they’re not.”

This admission should cheer us all up.

But not too much. It’s not a good thing that we have an unhinged president with more than two years left in his term, and with loyalists manning the top tiers of our government determined to carry out his authoritarian wishes, including to subvert free and fair elections.

On the other hand, it is good that even Trump has to admit that his critics aren’t exhausted. And it is good, as Trump doesn’t admit but as he surely knows, that their ranks are growing. That our ranks are growing.

On Saturday, the New York Times reported Gallup’s finding that “The share of Americans who associate themselves with the Democratic Party has grown significantly over the past year.” Indeed, “the latest data shows Democrats with a 10-percentage-point advantage over Republicans when voters are asked which party they identify with and when independent voters are asked which party they lean toward.”

In 2024, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents held a small edge over Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Now Democrats’ advantage is approaching their margins during their victorious waves of 2006 and 2008.

Then on Sunday, the Financial Times reported that their latest survey showed Trump’s approval rating, which in their polls had oscillated between 34 and 37 percent approval all year, had now dipped to 32 percent.

The public is moving in the right direction. They’re doing so despite the continued complicity at worst, and silence at best, of so many of the elites who continue to suck up to Trump.

To their credit, the organizers of the successful and important No Kings protests are stepping up again to help. This morning they announced plans for “No Kings: Vote Early” events on October 17. As one of the No Kings organizers, Ezra Levin, explained,

We are headed into an important point in a democracy, which is whether the people stand up and refuse to allow an authoritarian to consolidate power. And the way to do that in a democracy is by exercising your right to vote and by exercising your right to organize to prevent any sabotage in that election. . . .

The goal before was to send a message and recruit volunteers to do more civic engagement work. The goal this time is to not just send a message. [It is] to take back power for the people through the biggest early vote that we’ve ever seen in this country, and to prepare a nationwide force to push back against the sabotage that comes our way.

The goal is no longer to send a message. It’s to take back power.

So mark October 17 on your calendars. And then double circle November 3 with a dark Sharpie. Because the key No Kings event will be Election Day.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Is Turning a Bad Midterm Into a Republican Catastrophe… BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily to revisit the run-up to the midterms in 2006 and 1994, two major wave election cycles where the bottom just fell out from under the party in power.
• It’s here… A thank you from SARAH LONGWELL for those who pre-ordered How to Eat an Elephant. For those of you who haven’t: Get your copy today!
• Labor Day… We have some worthwhile works from CARL SANDBURG, MOTHER JONES, and FDR that are worth your time and reflection.

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Rs Are Going To Try Very Hard To Put Lipstick On The Trumpian Pig This Week, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Trump’s Mounting Global And Domestic Failures Are Going To Make That Really Hard. 

People are getting ballots and voting in NC and WI this week, and early in person begins next Friday. Let’s kick off the official start of the general election this week with the Hopium Daily Mantra:

There is nothing Trump and MAGA wants more than for us to be fighting with each other and not with him. We have one job now - elect as many of these wonderful candidates running for the House and Senate as we can. It’s where our focus must be. It’s a year of opportunity for us across the country. We must seize it, together

We are kicking off the week with a live interview at 11am ET with David Crowley, our exciting candidate for Governor in Wisconsin. You can join live by heading to the main Hopium site right before 11am - going to be a good one!

In my talk last week I argued that as bad as things were Trump and the Rs - and they are bad - they are likely to get worse now. As we wake today we are seeing what worse looks like……

Four polls released in the last few days - Ipsos/Reuters, NBC News, FT/Focal Data, Civiqs - had Trump at his lowest level of the cycle. No matter what the White House has done they have been unable to stop or reverse his ongoing decline…..

The wars in Russia-Ukraine and the Middle East are escalating. Brent crude starts the day at almost $100 a barrel:

The price of diesel is setting records across the US. As the fall harvest gets underway we are seeing headlines like this everywhere:

The escalating trade war with Canada is going to hurt businesses here in the US, raise prices for everyone, and hurt the prospects of Republican candidates along the Canadian border in the NH, MI, ME, MN, and WI battlegrounds. What in the world is Trump doing here?

Interest rates are rising across the world. The global economy is under increasing stress. Trump’s economic team is now understood to be a partisan hack way over their head, unlikely to keep things together if things get bad. Chances the Fed raises interest rates next week - and Trump’s head explodes - are increasing.

Trump’s barbaric cuts to health care are starting to be felt by a much wider group of Americans - basically everyone:

This week, tomorrow and Thursday, Republicans will be gathering in Dallas to try to put lipstick on this Trumpian pig. Given his mounting failures it is a herculean political task, likely to fail, with the added benefit for us that they will be explicitly tying the Republican brand more directly to the unpopular, corrupt, morally bankrupt Trump/Paxton wing of the GOP.

It has been conventional wisdom that it’s hard for Democrats to run on Republican corruption because voters see everyone in Washington as corrupt. According to new Navigator data that appears to be changing, as Trump and Republicans are seen as more corrupt, even with Republican voters:

This data is consistent with the NYT battleground Senate polling from July that showed “character” as the top reason voters were supporting our candidates:

And a place where we have a significant electoral advantage (except for Maine at the time):

So while the Republicans may get a little bump this week with their oligarchical corruptionfest they also risk tying their brand far more closely to a politics their candidates simply cannot sell to battleground voters this November…… 

New York Times, Chris Pappas Defeats Progressive Challenger in New Hampshire Senate Primary, Emily Davies, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Mr. Pappas, a moderate Democrat who has served four terms in the House, will face former Senator John E. Sununu, the Republican nominee, in November.

Representative Chris Pappas, a four-term congressman, defeated a progressive challenger in the New Hampshire Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Pappas, 46, who represents the state’s swingy First District, prevailed over Karishma Manzur, a medical scientist and member of the Southern New Hampshire Democratic Socialists of America, who sought to harness the anti-establishment mood and shifting sentiment against Israel that have upended Democratic primaries nationwide.

His victory sets up a general election contest that could help determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. The seat was left open by Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat who is retiring after three terms in the Senate and who had endorsed Mr. Pappas to succeed her. In recent weeks, Democrats in the state have been sounding the alarm that former Senator John E. Sununu, a Republican who is the brother and son of two former governors, could win in November.

Mr. Sununu easily won his primary against another former Republican senator, Scott Brown, on Tuesday.

A recent poll by the University of New Hampshire showed Mr. Pappas running narrowly behind Mr. Sununu in a general election matchup. The main Republican Senate super PAC, Senate Leadership Fund, has pledged to spend $17 million in the state for the general election; the group’s Democratic counterpart, Senate Majority PAC, has announced initial plans to spend $10.2 million in television advertising.

Mr. Pappas, a moderate Democrat from Manchester, has been among the state’s most successful politicians in recent history, holding onto a House seat in the state’s notably swingy First Congressional District. He had previously served three terms on the state’s five-member Executive Council, a body responsible for approving high-level appointments and state contracts. Before that, he served two terms as treasurer of Hillsborough County and two terms in the State Legislature.

If elected, Mr. Pappas, the grandson of the man credited with inventing chicken tenders, would be the first openly gay male senator. He triumphed over Ms. Manzur with significant support from party leaders and a significant fund-raising advantage. Former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed him; Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mark Kelly of Arizona actively campaigned on his behalf.

As of late August, Mr. Pappas’s campaign had raised more than $15 million, according to campaign finance records. Ms. Manzur, who had little support from national progressives, raised less than $500,000 over that same period. 

New York Times, John E. Sununu Wins Republican Senate Primary in New Hampshire, Emily Davies, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). The general election race to replace Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, could help determine control of the U.S. Senate.

Former Senator John E. Sununu, a scion of one of the most powerful families in New Hampshire politics, won the Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, setting up a general election contest that could offer the party one of its best shots of picking up a seat in November.

Mr. Sununu, who was backed by President Trump and major outside groups, easily defeated Scott Brown, the former Republican senator from Massachusetts who rose to national prominence after his upset victory in a 2010 special election to fill the seat of Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

He will face Representative Chris Pappas, who won the Democratic nomination, in the general election. 

New York Times, Elon Musk Targets Democrats on Transgender Issues in Key Senate Races, Neil Vigdor, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). A political group for the world’s richest man, who is ramping up a midterm spending blitz, began running attack ads against Democrats in Texas, Ohio and Iowa.

Elon Musk began a political advertising blitz on Tuesday in three states that could decide control of the Senate, as his political group began attacking Democrats over transgender issues by accusing them of allowing men to compete in women’s sports.

The spots from Mr. Musk’s group, America PAC, target three top Democratic nominees for Senate: James Talarico in Texas, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Josh Turek in Iowa.

The ads provide an early glimpse at the role that America PAC is carving out for itself in the midterm elections, in which Republicans find themselves in danger of losing control of the Senate and the House. Mr. Musk is expected to extend some of the party’s candidates a lifeline of at least $100 million, all told.

In Texas, Mr. Musk’s group targeted Mr. Talarico, a state representative who is seeking to become the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in that state since 1988. He is locked in a tight race against Ken Paxton, the Republican state attorney general.

The 30-second ad opens with a video clip of Mr. Talarico saying that “God is nonbinary,” a comment that Mr. Talarico suggested to CBS News in May had “missed the mark.”

“James Talarico believes there are six genders,” the ad’s narrator says. “Talarico voted to let men play women’s sports and for taxpayer-funded sex changes on kids.”

The Talarico campaign disputed those claims, saying that Mr. Talarico did not support gender-reassignment surgery for minors and had tried working with Republicans to amend a “flawed” bill barring transgender children from participating in sports of the opposite genders.

“Billionaire-backed dark money groups are lying about James Talarico because they’re scared of the people-powered movement we’re building to fix this broken, corrupt political system,” said JT Ennis, a spokesman for the Talarico campaign.

Mr. Musk is reprising his efforts to bolster Republicans, as he did during the 2024 election, when he spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars in support of Donald J. Trump and the party’s candidates.That alliance appeared to be uncertain after Mr. Musk publicly criticized Mr. Trump, who chose Mr. Musk to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting initiative that aimed to cut the size of the federal work force, at the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term. But in recent months, Mr. Musk has signaled that he is back on board with Republicans.

In Ohio, Mr. Musk deployed a similar line of attack against Mr. Brown, a Democrat who is trying to mount a comeback after losing his Senate seat in 2024. Mr. Brown is in a tight race against Senator Jon Husted, who was appointed to fill the Senate seat of JD Vance when he left to become vice president.

“Two years ago, we fired Sherrod Brown because Brown put the trans agenda ahead of Ohio’s values,” the ad’s narrator says.

Patrick Eisenhauer, Mr. Brown’s campaign manager, said in a statement on Tuesday that “billionaires are lying to try and bail out” Mr. Husted.

In 2024, state lawmakers in Ohio upheld a law barring transition care for minors. The law also prohibits transgender girls and women from competing in girls and women’s sports from kindergarten through 12th grade and at the collegiate level.

In Iowa, Mr. Turek, a Democratic state legislator who is running against Ashley Hinson, a three-term Republican congresswoman, in another high-stakes Senate race, is also in the sights of Mr. Musk.

“Josh Turek voted to spend our tax dollars on sex-change surgeries for children,” the ad’s narrator says.

The claim echoed a line of attack from a campaign ad for Ms. Hinson, which the fact-checking outlet PolitiFact found in June to be a distortion of Mr. Turek’s record on transition care.

“Josh opposes taxpayer-funded sex changes, and anyone who says otherwise is lying,” said Hannah Goss, a spokeswoman for the Turek campaign.

Reflections On U.S. Labor Day, Democrats and Upcoming 9/11 Anniversary 

The Guardian, 'The most anti-union president’: how Trump turned his back on US workers, Steven Greenhouse, Sept. 8, 2026 (print ed.). Labor experts stunned at how anti-worker Trump has been with actions since last Labor Day that have hurt unions.

Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to champion US workers. Shortly before Labor Day last year, he said: “Every policy of the Trump administration is designed to lift up the American worker and “promote great-paying blue-collar jobs”. But in the year since last Labor Day, Trump has taken many actions that have hurt US workers and unions, with some labor experts saying they have been stunned at how anti-worker Trump has been.

In the months after Trump returned to office, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) cut workplace inspections by 20%, compared with Joe Biden’s last year in office. Even though Trump campaigned as a champion of coalminers, his administration has repeatedly delayed implementation of a rule to limit silica dust, which has afflicted and killed many coalminers with black lung. The United Mine Workers union has urgently called for “immediate enforcement” of the stalled silica dust rule.

With regard to wages, workers haven’t been doing so well under Trump. While the White House boasts that wages have risen, the problem for workers is that prices – pushed up by Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war – have risen faster than wages over the past year, helping fuel the affordability crisis. In a move that will cut pay for many low-wage workers, the Trump administration has proposed eliminating federal minimum wage and overtime protections for 3 million often low-paid homecare workers who take care of seniors and the disabled.

Despite several court rulings to slow or stop this anti-union effort, Trump has pushed aggressively ahead with his unprecedented campaign to strip 1 million federal employees of their ability to bargain collectively – a move that Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation, called, “the largest single act of union-busting in our history”. Trump has moved to end collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of workers at the Transportation Security Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies.

In another unprecedented move, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, the pro-union chair of the National Labor Relations Board – the first time a president has fired an NLRB member. Trump has since named numerous pro-business officials to the labor board.

“Trump’s actions make him by far the most anti-union president in our modern history,” Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants and a leading progressive voice in the labor movement, said in an interview. “His administration has been massively anti-worker, anti-union and anti-working class.”

White House officials take sharp issue with critics who say Trump is anti-worker. Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said: “President Trump will always put American workers first, which is why he signed the largest middle-class tax cuts in history, secured trillions in investments into our country, and negotiated historic trade deals to reshore our manufacturing industry and protect American jobs. Thanks to President Trump, American workers are prioritized over illegal aliens and foreign-born workers once again.”

Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank, said she was stunned by some of Trump’s anti-worker actions, especially by his order last year chopping the minimum wage that federal contractors must pay their employees, to $13.30 an hour from $17.75. That move caused some workers to lose over $9,000 a year in pay.

This year, Trump rescinded a Biden-era regulation that made overtime pay available to more salaried workers. As a result, 4.3 million workers will no longer qualify for time-and-a-half overtime. (Two federal courts in Texas had ruled against Biden’s overtime regulation.) In his years as president, Trump has never pushed to raise the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage, which has greatly eroded in value since it last increased in 2009.

“The Trump administration is systematically weakening policies and institutions that give workers a voice, that give workers protections and that hold employers accountable,” Shierholz said. “He’s been doing that from day one, and since then it has absolutely continued and accelerated. You see attacks on every kind of worker protection from safety and health to wage and hour protections. Policy after policy after policy goes directly against the interests of workers.”

Trump has helped some groups of workers by getting Congress to enact no tax on tips and a significant cut in taxes on overtime pay. The White House boasts that Trump also helped cuts taxes for working families, but Trump’s critics say those cuts overwhelmingly favor the ultra-wealthy, while giving just modest cuts to workers.

President Biden had proposed a landmark regulation to protect workers against extreme heat, but the Trump administration, pushed hard by corporate America, is seeking to seriously weaken Biden’s effort to require rest breaks for workers and access to water and shade when it is very hot. The Trump administration also wants to undo Biden’s plans to codify extreme heat as a workplace hazard.

This past February, after intense lobbying by corporations, the Trump administration moved to scrap a Biden-era rule and make it far easier for employers to classify workers as independent contractors, be they construction workers or Uber drivers. This move will significantly lower many employers’ labor costs by removing any obligation to pay minimum wage and overtime and to contribute to those workers’ social security, Medicare and unemployment insurance benefits.

Although Trump boasts that the US economy is in the best shape ever, monthly job growth under Trump is down significantly compared with Biden. Young workers are having a hard time finding jobs, while Trump has been an outspoken cheerleader for AI and datacenters, which are fueling huge fears about many jobs disappearing. Trump promised to use tariffs and other means to make American manufacturing great again. But ever since Trump returned to office, the US has lost 35,000 manufacturing jobs, partly because of all the chaos and uncertainty Trump’s tariffs created, although in the past few months there have been modest gains in factory jobs.

The Trump administration has shown hostility to unions in a way that shocked many Americans. As part of an investigation into opposition to ICE’s operations in Minnesota, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security got hold of financial records from two leading unions, the Service Employees International Union and the Communications Workers of America, saying that this was part of an inquiry into “domestic terrorism financing”.

Further showing how much Trump officials dislike and distrust organized labor, Trump’s prosecutors even told a grand jury that the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main union federation, representing 15 million American workers and retirees, and several unions were part of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct the efforts of ICE agents in Minnesota.

“It’s terrible that they’re going after labor activists and unions in Minnesota for merely standing up for their neighbors,” Nelson said. “It’s outrageous that this administration called union members who are fighting for their neighbors ‘domestic terrorists’.”

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 7, 2026 [Trump's Frantic, Fantastic Self-Promoting, 'Historical' Self-Portraits], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Since yesterday, President Donald J. Trump has been posting on social media at a frantic pace, showing AI images of himself with President George Washington on his own account and, on the official White House account, a video of himself as the DC Comics Green Lantern superhero.

The White House social media account ripped off Green Lantern’s oath, captioning the video: “In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might beware my power… Green Lantern’s light!”

Back on his own account, Trump posted images of Space Force uniforms that mimic those of Starship Troopers, whose design the director of that 1997 film claimed was meant to invoke Nazis. He also posted two AI images of himself in what appears to be a spaceship with his hands on buttons as two nuclear mushroom clouds billow off planet Earth behind him, and two images of himself as a sort of superhero dark lord with a dark army around him with the captions “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN,” “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES,” and “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.”

He posted multiple images of himself changing maps or of new maps showing the change of the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” and the state of New Mexico to “New America,” and labeling the Strait of Hormuz as “NEW U.S. Territory.” He showed the colors of the United States over the North American continent, and he posted “before” and “after” maps in which Iran was replaced with a silhouette image of his own head, as well as an AI image of a U.S. military plane blowing up Iran’s Kharg Island with the caption: “Bye bye, Kharg,” along with repeated claims that Iran is collapsing. He posted an AI-generated image of himself beating Canadian prime minister Mark Carney at hockey and saying, “GET UP, GOVERNOR,” an insulting reference to Canada as a U.S. state.

He also posted an image of the moon with the caption: “THE MOON IS OURS” along with a U.S. flag.

And, of course, many of the things Trump posted claimed he would “GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS THE GREATEST PRESIDENT OF ALL TIME!” He posted AI images of former president Joe Biden wearing a Trump 2024 hat and anti-Trump actor Robert DeNiro holding up a shirt saying “TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT.” He posted an AI image of what seemed to be the luxury liner RMS Titanic, labeled “DUMOCRATIC PARTY,” sinking in flames.

He acknowledged complaints about the fact he has pocketed more than two billion dollars from rapid-fire stock trading since taking office a second time. He posted an image of himself trading stocks at his desk in the Oval Office at a screen that reads “BOUGHT: INTEL $20” and another that reads “NOW $95” with the caption: “I do this for our Country, not myself. I’ve made Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on Stocks, and many other type Holdings, for the U.S.A., not myself, and all I do is get criticized by the Radical Left Dumocrats. Very unfair, but what can you do! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

He reiterated his demand for the SAVE America voter suppression act and claimed: “Except for the RADICAL LEFT that wants to RAISE YOUR TAXES, and wreck our Economy, EVERYONE LOVES TAX CUTS! My Big Beautiful Bill was the BIGGEST relief in HISTORY for hardworking families—Nobody’s seen anything like it!”

It seems likely that he and his aide Natalie Harp, who is apparently behind much of his social media, think trolling the country is a good way to keep attention focused on Trump rather than on rising inflation, corruption, or the war in Iran.

There is much to distract from. On CNN today, pollster Harry Enten noted that while Trump enjoyed a 20-point advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, in 2024 on economic issues, Trump’s approval rating for how he is handling the economy is now 41 points underwater. “We’re talking about a switcheroo in the wrong direction of 61 points on this Labor Day,” Enten said. “It is not a happy Labor Day, indeed, for President Trump when it comes to how those who are employed view him on the economy.”

Also today, when Martha Raddatz of ABC News noted that gas and diesel prices are soaring, with the Labor Day gasoline average at $4.10 a gallon compared with $3.16 last year, she played a clip of Trump telling an audience that when they had to “pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have—a country, really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world. We don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon. So remember that, when you have to pay a little bit more, you’re at $4, it’s okay. I mean, it’s, I’m not, I’m not. I will never apologize. I did the right thing.”

Raddatz asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright today about when we might see a nuclear agreement with Iran, since it’s already been six months of higher prices and there doesn’t seem to be one on the table. Wright answered: “There may not be a nuclear agreement. It may be simply destroying their capabilities to do it. An agreement may await a next administration in Iran. We simply don’t know that. But I think what the president was communicating there is how critically important this is.”

Tonight, Trump posted: “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran. Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA! President DJT”

But while at some level Trump might think he is being clever by keeping the focus on himself, what he is really doing is demonstrating that he is no longer even trying to govern and is instead retreating into a world where he simply does whatever he wants without regard for the country. In the early hours of Trump’s rants yesterday, even before they had gained their full momentum, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) called out the Republicans who are refusing to exercise their constitutional powers to protect the country.

“This is truly unhinged,” she posted on social media over a video of his posts. “I don’t want to hear ‘oh, it’s just Trump being Trump’ or he’s ‘trolling.’ Republicans cannot keep shrugging this off. Congress, the Cabinet + everyone around him has a responsibility to stop enabling this dangerous behavior and start asking whether he is fit to hold office.”

Today Trump acknowledged the Labor Day holiday, saying: “Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Former president Joe Biden had a different message for the country on Labor Day: “I’ve said it my entire career,” he posted on social media, “the middle class built America. And unions built the middle class. To every worker who’s ever punched a clock, worked a double, or walked a line for fair wages—and to everyone who stands up for them, at the bargaining table, in the statehouse, or on the shop floor: thank you. This country runs in large part because of you.”

For my part, I hope everyone had a restful Labor Day and is ready to face the fall season—and the midterm elections—with renewed energy.

New York Times, Guest Essay, Voters Have Spoken. Why Aren’t Democrats Listening? Ben Rhodes, right, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). In 1932, amid a Depression worsened by tariffs, inequality and isolationism, Franklin Roosevelt accepted the Democratic presidential nomination with a cautionary note: “Those nominal Democrats who squint at the future with their faces turned toward the past and who feel no responsibility to the demands of the new time,” he said, “are out of step with their party.”

Roosevelt’s warning rings true today as the Democratic Party struggles awkwardly to straddle its past and future. President Trump’s approval rating has hit a new low. Mired in a pointless war that has driven up prices, he demeans voter concerns and runs the White House with a revolving door for oligarchs. That should be enough to propel Democrats to a House majority, and a slate of compelling Senate candidates could win states that normally favor Republicans.

But this speaks more to a patchwork of progress than a national shift toward the Democratic Party. Less than two years after a catastrophic election, the Democratic brand remains unpopular, and the party remains in the grip of a divisive identity crisis. As Democrats work to claw back power in the midterms, they should also reckon with how they can better position themselves as the political force that can decisively replace MAGA.

Running as a Democrat in 2026 is mainly helpful insofar as it distinguishes you from the alternative. Americans don’t need much convincing that Republicans must be checked, but when they look to Washington, they still see a sclerotic national party led by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries that has struggled to address their fears about a corrupt political system, unfair economy, transformative technologies, endless wars and a lack of shared national identity.

The people fighting to restore the Democratic Party to power understand that. In Iowa, the centrist candidate for governor Rob Sand calls it part of a “broken” two-party system. In New York City, the leftist Zohran Mamdani took aim at a national Democratic establishment “run by well-paid consultants and big-money interests.” In must-win Maine, Minnesota and Michigan, the Democratic Senate nominees have suggested that the party needs new leadership. In Alaska, Mary Peltola rejected the support of the Democrats’ last presidential nominee, Kamala Harris.

Between now and November, the Democratic establishment should step back and let a talented assortment of candidates be the face of the party. Doing so will give Democrats a chance to learn from what is working in different parts of the country. If those lessons are uncomfortable in Washington, they must be urgently heeded instead of disappearing into business as usual. Because as soon as the midterms are over, attention will turn to the election cycle that will end the Trump era. Unless Democrats can win back the trust of the broader electorate, they will not be credible when they promise to bring the change America desperately needs.

There is a cavernous void to be filled in American politics: No one has offered a vision for a future that a decisive majority of Americans can believe in. Before Democrats can change America, they must first change themselves.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.

What does it mean to be a Democrat?

Since Roosevelt’s nomination, the party has thrived when it makes people feel that the government understands their circumstances and is on their side. This common thread unites efforts to expand the social safety net, rein in big business and corruption, extend civil and labor rights and invest in new ladders to opportunity. That requires storytelling, and in my lifetime Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been the dominant figures who told that story.

Yet in the decade since Mr. Trump’s first election, Democrats have played defense: defending legacy programs, marginalized communities, democratic institutions and incumbency. These understandable impulses have at times led to self-destructive excess: prioritizing past achievements, tipping into sanctimonious wokeism, taking ownership of a broken system and resisting generational change. By defining themselves in opposition to Mr. Trump, Democrats have failed to tell a story about the future beyond him.

To break this cycle, Democrats must put themselves on the side of Americans who feel as if they don’t have any power — or even agency — over their future. But that is not how the party is currently seen.

The pollster David Binder has spent this election cycle examining the attitudes of voters who have been willing to switch parties through the Trump decade. “The bottom line is that voters everywhere are saying, ‘Nobody is looking out for me,’” he told me. “Republicans, Democrats — they all look out for themselves. They get corrupted quickly upon election because they get sucked into a system which is about money, re-election, donors, special interests.”

While Democratic leaders would dispute that, Americans aren’t wrong to feel a disconnect between themselves and the politicians who represent them. The economic populism that fuels campaigns is often muted in Washington. The backlash to data centers started in communities across the country, not in Congress. The growing opposition to arming the Israeli government is far more pronounced among voters than politicians. While many Democratic candidates refuse corporate PAC money, party leaders in Washington do not.

Instead, Washington Democrats often retreat to safer ground. In laying out an agenda for a potential majority, Mr. Jeffries, the House leader, recently outlined restoring congressional tariff authority, reinstituting Obamacare subsidies and reversing Medicaid cuts. Worthy goals, but ones rooted in the past.

The most effective opposition to Mr. Trump has often come from outside Washington. From citizens in Minneapolis who found a way to stand up to Immigration and Customs Enforcement on their own. From a constellation of groups organizing No Kings rallies. From California’s efforts to redraw congressional districts and attorneys general across the country fighting federal overreach. From voices across a fractured attention economy that older politicians struggle to understand.

This reinforces the perception of a Democratic establishment cloistered from a restive country. The Democratic National Committee refused to reckon with the ruinous decision to vouch for Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election. The average age of Democratic ranking members in Congress is nearly 70. With an electorate hungering for someone — anyone — new, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee backed establishment politicians in Maine and Michigan who could not even win their primaries.

In recent weeks, centrist Democrats have attacked democratic socialists over the excesses of wokeism past, and some voted for a Republican resolution condemning socialism. Many followed a Fox News feeding frenzy over the views of perhaps the most popular progressive streamer in the country, Hasan Piker. Third Way, a think tank founded two decades ago to defend Clinton-style moderation, committed $15 million to wage this interparty civil war.

Yes, a democratic socialist platform in New York City should not be replicated in an Iowa or Kansas Senate race. Yes, progressives should be counseled away from reprising the culture wars of the recent past. But rather than attacking the D.S.A. as the enemy, Democrats should ask themselves why so many voters are siding with insurgents. When you have lost all national power to a right-wing populist movement, it is obtuse to slam the door on your own populist insurgents.

Centrists argue that they’re anticipating right-wing attacks, but in fact they’re amplifying them — a common trap for Democrats in the Trump era. And at a time when Democrats desperately need new energy, it makes the Democratic Party look afraid of its own voters. Particularly when set against the cultlike uniformity that has characterized MAGA Republicans, Democrats should be embracing pluralism as a strength. The most innovative Democratic campaigns waged since Mr. Trump’s re-election show that populism can resonate from the center and the left. The goal should be threading them together.

We are living in an age when people feel as if their fates are dictated by forces beyond their control. To succeed, the Democratic Party must fashion itself into a vehicle for people to reclaim agency — one that can convince Americans they can remake our economy, our technology and our foreign policy to work for the people, not the other way around.

Mr. Trump and his MAGA movement promised to do something similar. Yet throughout his second term, he has done the opposite. Power is exalted. Prices keep rising. A culture of corruption feels omnipresent.

There is a populist uprising against data centers because they are a physical manifestation of what people fear about the future. Machines replacing workers. Children taught by chatbots. A creeping surveillance state. Money and power concentrated in ever fewer hands.

People have been speaking up against these developments. Yet as with so many other issues in recent years — from the economy to foreign policy — their will has been ignored by politicians.

Democrats must demonstrate that they understand the extent to which a broken system must be remade. They must commit to using government to break up and constrain the obscene concentrations of power that shape our lives and the flood of money and special interests that have corrupted our politics. That was the purpose of the Progressive Era that followed the Gilded Age. And that is necessary, once again, to build a fair economy, lowering prices, regulating corporations and Big Tech and strengthening the social safety net.

Most Americans probably feel as if these reforms are impossible. That just makes generational change within the Democratic Party that much more of an imperative. It’s not just about optics or political positioning: Only new faces can make voters believe change is possible. Instead of being a collection of familiar personalities and interest groups, Democrats should seize the opportunity to begin building a cohesive movement.

That requires finding a moral language to tell a new story. After a decade of Trumpism, our society has gotten meaner, uglier and more obsessed with screens, consumption and conflict. Lying and cruelty have been rewarded. In the process, we’ve lost track of what gives us a sense of meaning and belonging. Has that made us happier?

Talking points will not fill that void. Democrats must ground their arguments in the language of values that have gone missing: fairness, dignity and community. That kind of message has already propelled younger politicians as different as Mr. Mamdani and James Talarico from obscurity to prominence in just over a year. I believe most Americans understand that we can have a secure border without ICE ripping our neighbors out of their homes and that we can address injustice without constantly shaming people.

A Democratic Party that remakes itself into that kind of vehicle for change can unburden itself of the careful messaging, identity politics, internal squabbling and establishment sheen of the past decade. With Mr. Trump receding into the past, Democrats have an opportunity to be much bigger than the party that struggled in his shadow — but only if they are willing to let the party become a vehicle to take back power for people who feel they have none.

Roosevelt accepted that first Democratic nomination for president in a similarly untethered time and made the future feel like something that could be shaped, declaring that he would “restore America to its own people.” Only by making itself a movement to do just that can the Democratic Party convince Americans that the forces shaping their lives are not beyond their control. After all, this is a democracy. 

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

 

Reprinted from above: Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP 

Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Loyal and patriotic citizens, please stand by, Jeff Teidrich, right, Sept. 8, 2026. This, shown above, is a message of the utmost importance from the President of the United States, Supreme Ruler of the Western Hemisphere, Lord-Emperor of the Sky Above and All the Planets, Friend to Diaper Nurses Everywhere, Conqueror Of Every War, God’s Own Avatar on Earth, Grand Renamer of Water and Land. 

There it is. Oh, thank goodness.

As you well know, it’s not really a holiday until Dear Leader officially acknowledges the HATERS and LOSERS (or in this case, the COMMUNISTS and the DUMOCRATS) and, by presidential fiat, invites them to participate, while also praising himself for his own imaginary accomplishments.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO DEAR LEADER’S PREENING, INFANTILE TANTRUM.

Finally, now we can get this show on the road.

This self-styled ‘friend of the working class’ is the last person in the world who should be allowed to preside over a national holiday celebrating workers.

Donny hasn’t done a single day’s labor in his soft, privileged life — and he has no appreciation or respect for those who have. He hires undocumented immigrants to build his fugly towers, and work at his vermin-infested golf motels. He then pays them sub-standard wages, or just flat-out stiffs them. Has he ever once hired a unionized worker? Oh, please.

The Guardian: 

In the year since last Labor Day, Trump has taken many actions that have hurt US workers and unions, with some labor experts saying they’ve been stunned at how anti-worker Trump has been.

In the months after Trump returned to office, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) cut workplace inspections by 20%, compared with Joe Biden’s last year in office. Even though Trump campaigned as a champion of coal miners, his administration has repeatedly delayed implementation of a rule to limit silica dust, which has afflicted and killed many coal miners with black lung. The United Mine Workers union has urgently called for “immediate enforcement” of the stalled silica dust rule.

as always with Donny and his Republican shitweasel enablers, it’s watch what they do, not what they say.

Donny has done everything within his power to make life worse for We the People — but here he is, imagining himself to be God’s gift to the American worker. oh, please. that’s such a cool story, Mister You’re Fired. tell it again — preferably while you’re fucking straight off into deep space.

Finally, let’s watch as New York City’s Islamocommunofascist Mayor Zohran Mamdani teaches John Fetterman a master class in How To Not Suck.

“What do New Yorkers think about [Mamdani]? They like the guy — and it’s not just that they like the guy. They like the guy a lot more than a year ago. Take a look here: Mamdani’s rating in New York City. you know, a year ago was 44%. Look where it was at the beginning of his term. It was 68%. Look now, it’s 69%. There has been no drop. He is still on the honeymoon period. This is an extremely long honeymoon period. But Mamdani is still very popular, as he is implementing his agenda.”

Now let’s compare those numbers to Fetterman’s.

“Look at this shift. WOW! Fetterman’s approval rating — you go back to 2024, it was plus 70 points. by 2025, it was down 91 points, into negative territory — minus 21 points. You think that’s low? Look at now. MINUS 50 POINTS. Tat is a — get this, if we do out math correctly, a ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY POINT DROPPEROO, from plus 70 points to minus 50 points. Pennsylvania Democrats absolutely despise John Fetterman at this point.”

Fact check: it’s not just PA Dems who despise Fetterman right now — it’s all all of us. It’s a no-brainer, and it’s that simple: do what you promised to do, and the people who voted for you will love you for it. 

 

Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump thinks he's the hero of 9/11, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Sept. 7, 2026. At 2:35 this Labor Day afternoon, Donald Trump was still on vacation at his private golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, when he posted a video of himself with the words, “What Donald Trump saw at… Ground Zero hours after 9/11.” 

The video was actually taken days later, on September 13, when he was blocks away. In the video, he is wearing an immaculate black suit and a crisp white shirt as he told a German news reporter, “I have about 100 men working down here… and we have another 100 coming in a little while.” He continued, “I was just down at Ground Zero. It’s a disaster, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Hours after he posted the video on social media, the president’s interview with Trey Gowdy was posted on Fox News. This time, he tells a much different story of those terrible days. He told Gowdy, “And I went down… like the following day. Very quickly afterwards, and we worked long and hard.”

The president is not just saying that he sent hundreds of workers to Ground Zero, which has never been proven after nearly 25 years. He is now saying that he himself “worked long and hard” among our hero first responders, even though the video he posted today shows him impeccably dressed without a single speck of dust on him.

His story has never been true. Not then and certainly not now. For nearly 2 and a half decades, nobody has been able to verify any of the many stories he has told about the day our country was attacked and we lost nearly 3,000 souls. His claim about sending his own workers, 100, 200 or even 1 of them to Ground Zero has never been verified. Richard Alles, a former deputy chief with the New York Fire Department who was on the scene about 20 minutes after the second tower collapsed, told PolitiFact, “I was there for several months. I have no knowledge of his being down there.” PolitiFact, USA Today, and Poynter all investigated his claim, and none of them found evidence that Trump helped with the rescue efforts or that he arranged for 200 of his workers to join in the rescue operation. Newsweek went so far as to call it false.

One of the only documented pieces of evidence that Donald Trump was anywhere near Ground Zero in those first days was from a New York Newsday reporter who spotted him on September 13 and described him as wearing the exact same clothes, in the same condition as in the video he shared, down to the impeccably dressed black suit, pressed white shirt, and red tie, as he was walking into the plaza with his cellular phone to his ear saying, “No, no. The building’s gone,” into the phone.

But at that point Donald Trump had already decided he was going to capitalize on the death and destruction happening all around him, and make it all about him. While nearly 3,000 people were dying, and families were desperately searching for their loved ones, Donald Trump called into a local television station for a phone interview. The interviewer asked him about his building at 40 Wall Street, and Trump responded: “Forty Wall Street actually was the second tallest building in downtown Manhattan. And it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest. And then when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest, and now it’s the tallest.” Except even that wasn’t true. 70 Pine Street was actually the tallest building in Lower Manhattan after the Twin Towers fell, standing about 25 feet taller than Trump’s building at 40 Wall Street.

In 2002, on the first anniversary of the attack, he told Howard Stern that he “saw the whole thing” from his apartment in Midtown Manhattan, roughly four miles from the World Trade Center. He went on to say that he had “two windows that are focused on the building,” once again placing himself inside the story of that day. In 2005, he testified before Congress, where he claimed that “a lot of people could say” that if the World Trade Center had asbestos, “it wouldn’t have burned down” and “wouldn’t have melted.” He used the deaths of nearly 3,000 people to make an argument defending a building material.

In the years that followed, he claimed that he had predicted the September 11th attacks in his book, “The America We Deserve.” But his book did not predict the September 11th attacks. It contained a brief reference to Osama bin Laden, who was already well known to U.S. officials as a terrorist threat before Trump’s book was published. It was another moment where Trump was trying to appear important and relevant.

In 2013, on the 12th anniversary of the attacks, he tweeted: “I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.” He called it a “special date.” This tweet was later deleted during his presidential campaign, but it had already been seen, screenshotted, and shared for years at that point. On the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in American history, he called his fellow Americans “haters and losers.”

In November 2015, at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, Donald Trump claimed he watched from Jersey City, New Jersey, as “thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” When questioned by ABC News, he doubled down: “It did happen. I saw it. It was on television.” He went on to say, “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down.” But that too never happened the way Trump described it. News archives from that day were searched, and nothing was ever found showing thousands and thousands of Muslims having mass celebrations as the towers fell. Quite the opposite really, there were Muslim Americans condemning the attacks, praying, and bracing themselves for the anti-Muslim backlash that was already beginning. Trump took unsubstantiated rumors and turned them into a story about thousands of Muslims celebrating the murder of their fellow Americans, a story that vilified Muslim Americans and fueled hatred.

In April 2016, he told a rally he “helped a little bit” to clear rubble at Ground Zero. That same year, he claimed he lost “hundreds of friends” on September 11th. He actually thought it would be believable that his own friends account for roughly 6% of the the people who died on that day. When pushed to name all these supposed friends, he has never been able to provide a single name other than one Catholic priest who served as chaplain to the city’s fire department.

In April 2017, after he was already the president, he bragged that an interview he did on CBS’s Face the Nation got the show its highest ratings since “the World Trade Center came down.” He used the murder of nearly 3,000 people to try to make his interview viewership look good.

Then in July 2019, about halfway through his presidency, he was at a Rose Garden ceremony with first responders for the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund, when he told them all: “I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

In September 2021, on the 20th anniversary, Trump started telling a brand new story. He claimed he heard creaking at a building near Ground Zero and told first responders, “That building is coming down,” right before he was grabbed by “two big firemen” who moved him to safety. That story had never been even hinted at before. Not by Trump or by these supposed firefighters. Twenty years after the attacks, he was suddenly creating new stories to make him look like a hero during those dark days.

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.

Every year, his stories get bigger and more grandiose. Every year, he gets closer to the rubble, works harder, stays longer, and of course, saves more people. The towers themselves even grew taller in tonight’s interview. He told Gowdy the building was “115 stories tall.” The Twin Towers were 110 stories. He even made the buildings grow to make his story sound more impressive.

He is incapable of allowing September 11th to belong to the people who actually suffered. We think of those who lost their lives. The families forever changed and missing the people they love. We remember the firefighters who climbed those stairs, knowing they might never come back down, and still ran toward danger. The construction workers who spent months in toxic dust and are still suffering and dying from breathing it all in. But for Donald Trump, it was just another opportunity for him to shine. He has to be the one who saw it first. He wants us to think he somehow knew it was coming. He wants to be seen as the hero who sent the workers. And now he wants us to think of September 11th and think of how brave he was and how he spent long and hard days helping his country at Ground Zero.

Never one to miss a money grab, Trump also capitalized then, too. After September 11th, the federal government created a more than $500 million program to help businesses in Lower Manhattan recover from the devastating economic impact of the attacks. Trump applied for and accepted $150,000 from the fund, his company supposedly qualified under the program’s rules, due to economic as well as physical losses, even though he told that German television reporter on September 13th that his property at 40 Wall Street was not affected by what happened. He also pledged that he would donate $10,000 to the Twin Towers Fund, but the New York City Comptroller’s office later reviewed the donor records and found no record of that donation.

Now, as we approach the 25th anniversary, Donald Trump continues to try to make this day all about himself. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush are all expected to attend the special memorial at Ground Zero, where they will stand together to remember those we lost. Trump will not be attending Ground Zero. He is instead expected to commemorate September 11th at the Pentagon. Trump had reportedly planned to attend the Ground Zero ceremony, but changed those plans because he wanted to give a speech, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum does not allow politicians to give remarks at the annual ceremony, a longstanding rule meant to rightfully keep the focus on the victims and their families.

The New York Times reported that Trump’s team conducted advance visits to Ground Zero, sharing his desire to speak at the event. When organizers reminded them of the no-speeches rule, it was quickly announced that he would not be attending. He chose to go to the Pentagon instead, where, as Commander in Chief, he controls the venue and can theoretically speak as long as he wants. No doubt his speech will focus on making him the center of attention on this sad day of remembrance.

Vice President JD Vance will instead attend the Ground Zero ceremony in Trump’s place. When asked at a White House briefing why the president was not going, Vance said, “You have a vice president and you have a president... we’d like to be three or four places on 9/11 but you can’t have one person be in multiple locations at the exact same time.” He tried to pass off the issue as a logistical one instead of the ego issue it really was.

This week will be another hard one, especially for those who have had to live their lives without their loved ones for the past 25 years. For so many, the sting they feel every time Donald Trump makes it about himself is almost unbearable. We will need to brace ourselves for however he chooses to pervert the day as it approaches.

Earlier today, my mother made a special request to include a specific call to action tonight. In her own resistance, she has been encouraging people to check their voter registration status. We are hearing about more people, especially those in Texas, who have found themselves on the state’s voter “suspense” list and needing to confirm their information. So if you haven’t checked, do so now. And then make a plan to keep checking every few days. We cannot afford to assume everything is fine. We need to stay ahead of anything that could keep us from casting our votes.

It’s not often, in fact, it’s exceedingly rare that I am able to end my posts with a reason to smile or laugh, but tonight let’s do that. In Victoria, British Columbia, the city my family has visited nearly every summer for years, someone hung a wooden sign above a public restroom along the Galloping Goose Regional Trail, near the Selkirk Trestle. A bathroom I have proudly used on our long daily walks when we are on the island. The sign read: “The President Donald J. Trump Memorial.” It hung directly over the entrance to the toilets. The city took the sign down, but not before it was covered by local news and is now being shown far and wide. No one knows who put it up. I cannot wait to visit those toilets next summer, and I hope the sign comes back.

It reminded me tonight of something important: how humor is one of the oldest tools of resistance, and how it can reach people who are not necessarily as tuned in to what is happening. It is how people have always pushed back against tyranny and corruption, and it is a way to remind each other that none of this is okay, or normal, and that we see through it.

It is fitting that tonight, a man who has spent 25 years trying to make himself the hero of September 11th was given his most fitting memorial of all: a plaque over a public toilet on a walking trail in Canada. And maybe there is something hopeful in knowing that even after everything we have been through, people are still finding ways to resist, to laugh, and to let each other know that we still see what is happening around us. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment:A Bipartisan Group Of Nearly 300 Current And Former Members Of Congress Urge SCOTUS To Block Trump’s Mail-In Voting Attack, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Nearly 300 current and former members of Congress from both parties filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to block Trump’s attack on mail-in voting.

Trump is quickly running out of time to implement his rules attacking mail-in ballots, but that doesn’t mean that this is not an all-hands-on-deck moment for democracy.

What Trump is attempting clearly violates the Constitution, which gives Congress the sole power to set the rules for federal elections. The states conduct the elections themselves, and the federal government has no role in the conduct of elections.

Trump is trying to sidestep the Constitution by claiming that this rule comes from the USPS and not the president, but the Constitution does not allow the USPS a role in elections either.

On Tuesday, 261 current and former members of Congress from both parties filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court urging it to strike down Trump’s executive order and the USPS rule.

The members wrote:

First, the Executive Branch’s directives to regulate mail-in and absentee ballots are unconstitutional because they encroach on the States’ primary and Congress’s paramount authority under the Constitution’s Elections Clause. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. The text and history of the Elections Clause categorically bar the Executive Branch from asserting unilateral authority over federal-election administration.

The executive branch has no authority over federal elections. Congress has not issued any regulations or statutory authority to the executive branch over federal elections, and Trump is trying to mess with the states’ sole authority to administer elections.

As you will see below, Trump doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on.

The brief continued:

And because the Order and Final Rule purport to involve USPS in States’ administration of mail-in voting, the Order also intrudes on the Postal Clause, a second grant of legislative power that Article I commits to Congress with no mention of any role for the Executive. No constitutional provision supplies a legitimate basis for the Order or the Final Rule. Second, even assuming that Congress could delegate its specified constitutional role under the Elections Clause and the Postal Clause to USPS, the Order and Final Rule must be struck down because they lack any clear grounding in such a delegation.

To the contrary, the Order conflicts with numerous statutes that Congress has duly—and carefully—enacted pursuant to the Elections Clause and the Postal Clause. Amici therefore submit this brief to urge the Court to deny Applicants’ request for emergency relief.

The Constitution gives no president authority in this matter.

As the members of Congress concluded:

The integrity of our constitutional system depends on each branch keeping to its assigned role. The Framers set up a two-part system that gave the States default authority to regulate federal elections subject to Congress’s authority to override the States. The Framers did not provide the President with any authority to interfere in that system, nor has Congress subsequently imbued the President or the Executive Branch with any such authority by statute.

If this court majority ruled for the administration, it would open the door for a future Democratic president to change election rules by making Election Day a national holiday, or using the USPS to expand vote by mail, and a whole host of options that Republicans definitely do not want to ever see happen.

The current Supreme Court majority tends to make up its own rules on the Constitution to suit them.

This should be a slam-dunk rejection of Trump, but with this court, who knows.

Even if the administration prevails, I still think Republicans will lose the midterm election. Trump’s unpopularity and economic destruction have made this election too big to steal, but for the sake of democracy, the Supreme Court needs to do the right thing and block Trump’s attack on mail-in voting. 

New York Times, Justice Kavanaugh Blocks Missouri Voting Map Benefiting Republicans, Ann E. Marimow and Mitch Smith, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Missouri’s Supreme Court had earlier blocked election officials from using a new congressional map, saying voters must first approve the district lines in a statewide referendum.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on Tuesday denied a request from Missouri officials to use a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an edge in the midterm elections.

The justice’s order deferred to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which last week blocked the use of the new map even though it had been used in last month’s primary election. The state court had found that voters should first have an opportunity to vote on the new district boundaries in a statewide referendum.

Justice Kavanaugh oversees emergency requests from Missouri and acted on his own without referring the matter to the full court. He did not provide any reasoning as is often the case when the court responds to emergency filings.

Missouri’s map had been drawn to help Republicans try to pick up a Democratic-held House seat in the Kansas City area. The G.O.P. now holds six of the state’s eight House seats. The state court did not specify how Missouri should hold a general election using a different map from what was in place for the primaries.

The state’s emergency request had thrust the Supreme Court in the middle of another election-year legal battle in a heated campaign season, where control of the House could come down to a handful of seats. But Justice Kavanaugh refused to intervene on Tuesday, leaving in place a unanimous ruling from Missouri’s highest court on state law, suggesting he did not think there was a federal issue that warranted Supreme Court action.

Missouri’s attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to act quickly and allow use of the new map given a state-imposed Sept. 8 deadline for altering its general election ballot. She noted that 1.2 million Missouri residents had voted in the August primary using the new map.

The state court “threw those votes into the dustbin,” she said, by requiring the winners to run in different congressional districts. In her filing, the attorney general said Missouri planned to comply with one aspect of the state court ruling and proceed with a November referendum on the new map.

But she argued the state should continue with the map used for the primary until that referendum is held. The only question, she wrote, is whether the group of challengers who sued, led by Richard von Glahn, executive director of the advocacy group People Not Politicians Missouri, can “void a congressional map before he gets his vote.”

In a statement Tuesday, the attorney general’s office said, “We are disappointed by this ruling, and are evaluating next steps as related litigation continues.”

Mr. von Glahn celebrated the order from Justice Kavanaugh, which means the state will use the 2022 map passed by the Missouri legislature in the November election.

“Republicans, Democrats and Independents took action to block this political power grab last fall,” he said in a statement. “People, not politicians, will have the final say when they vote NO on Proposition A this November.”

The new map was drawn outside the usual redistricting cycle at President Trump’s request, as part of an effort to improve the Republican Party’s chances of holding the House in the 2026 midterms.

The redrawn Missouri map, adopted by the state legislature in September 2025, divided the core of Kansas City, Mo., the state’s largest city, into several districts in an attempt to unseat Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, one of two Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation. The new map did not significantly alter the partisan makeup of the other Democratic-held district, which is in the St. Louis area.

Democrats and state residents opposed to the boundaries last year collected hundreds of thousands of signatures seeking a referendum on the issue. But Denny Hoskins, Missouri’s Republican secretary of state, said he did not believe redistricting could legally be subject to a voter referendum, and he declined to add it to November’s ballot.

Lawyers for Mr. von Glahn told the justices in a filing on Monday that Mr. Hoskins had waited until the last possible day to object to the referendum, doing so only after implementing the new map for the August primary. The state’s predicament, they said, was a “timing problem of his own making.”

Missouri’s Constitution has long granted citizens the power to override congressional redistricting legislation through a statewide vote, according to referendum proponents. Last December, Mr. von Glahn and People Not Politicians submitted 691 boxes of referendum petitions to the secretary containing more than 300,000 signatures — more than twice the required number.

“This court cannot and should not reward the secretary’s scheme to outsmart Missouri voters, Missouri law and the Missouri Supreme Court by granting” the state’s emergency request, Mr. von Glahn’s lawyers said in a Monday filing.

In addition, his legal team said the Supreme Court lacks jurisdiction to review a state court’s decision on a question of state law. Missouri argued that using a different map for the general election would violate equal protection guarantees in the U.S. Constitution, but Mr. Von Glahn’s lawyers rejected those assertions.

A voter’s primary ballot “does not carry an absolute constitutional entitlement to vote for that same nominee in November, even if other voters in the state will not see any change in the candidates available to them.”

James Comey Test Case Reaches Decision-Point Over Abusive U.S. DOJ Political Prosecutions

 

Shown above is a pattern of seashells that former FBI Director James Comey saw and photographed while vacationing at a North Carolina beach, with the photo he posted on Instagram later forming the basis of felony charges by the Trump Administration, which has long hated the fellow Republican Comey for allowing an FBI preliminary investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to proceed after hackers and other operatives undermined Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and her campaign. The term "86" is widely used in the hospitality industry to signify a troublesome customer who needs to be eased out of a facility, whereas the Justice Department has claimed that it means to murder someone.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Why Rule of Law May Pivot, Once Again, on Jim Comey, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 8, 2026. As of last Tuesday, Jim Comey’s pretrial motions in his seashell case are fully briefed. I wrote about the existence of a sealed filing in them here; I wrote of new signs of abuse exposed in the filings here. Links to all the filings are here. We wait now, to see whether Comey will break new ground in combatting Trump’s wholesale weaponization of DOJ. Comey is the best bet to establish a broader legal standard that might rein in Trump’s worst attempts to politicize DOJ.

Where the fight to save rule of law is

What Trump has done in his second term is find a series of vulnerabilities in US law and exploit them to give his authoritarianism the patina of legality.

The Supreme Court ruled that no one can stop Trump from stealing $1 billion from taxpayers and using it to destroy the White House and replace it with a bunker, because no one has standing. Ras Baraka has no recourse after ICE goons kidnapped him and Trump’s personal lawyer, playacting as US Attorney, lied to excuse it, because Bivens and Westfall offer no recourse. LaMonica McIver is not entitled to speech and debate protection because the tussle that ensued as ICE kidnapped Newark’s Mayor happened while ICE stalled McIver’s congressional oversight of the Delaney facility. These decisions, while understandable from a legal perspective, carry alarming implications going forward, not least that Stephen Miller’s army of goons could kidnap opposition politicians with impunity.

Similarly, thus far at least, after prosecutors get caught fabricating cases against Trump’s adversaries, as they did with the Broadview 6, Davey Hearn, and Mohamed Jama, the government maintains that (as with Mayor Baraka), the victims get no recourse except legal fees, if even that. They don’t get visibility into how this happened, a confession the DHS or NPS goons fabricated their case, and discovery on how Trump’s DOJ keeps framing his adversaries only to have the case collapse after months of legal fees. DOJ argues they can keep doing this, over and over and over again. There are cases (most notably the Eric Adams case, the fake IRS settlement, the Guatam Adani case, and the unexpected refusal by Carl Nichols to dismiss the Steve Bannon prosecution) where judges are refusing to let DOJ corruptly dismiss cases without explaining their own corruption. Victims who have been framed by Trump’s DOJ are still trying to obtain some kind of justice for having been framed.

That’s why Jim Comey’s bid to dismiss his second (of what is likely to be at least three) indictments Trump ordered up to make an example of the former FBI Director, the guy who refused to “let [rule of law] go” at Trump’s bidding back on February 14, 2017, matters.Selective prosecution is not a tool fit to combat Trump’s wholesale weaponization of DOJ

Trump is trying — indeed, has had some success — in hiding behind the shitty precedents on politicized prosecution torepurpose DOJ to punish his adversaries. For example, his and Republicans’ bid to prosecute Hunter Biden off of a doctored gun purchase form and the kind of tax dodging Roger Stone also engaged in succeeded because two (Trump-appointed) judges said that the direct intervention from the President didn’t matter; all that mattered was the motive of the prosecutors who made the charging decisions. That success continued to the prosecution of the SPLC.

That success did not extend to Kilmar Abrego, an undocumented Salvadoran immigrant whose courage inspired citizens to fight back; Abrego did succeed (at least for now — Trump is appealing) in arguing his prosecution was vindictive.

Important legal precedents don’t necessarily arise in the cases of people you’d otherwise recognize as heroes.

Comey is attempting to do something somewhat more ambitious than even Abrego’s attorneys managed — to pin a selective prosecution claim to Trump’s animus itself, a claim that is at once obvious but also unprecedented in the narrow existing precedents of selective prosecution.

Comey’s first attempt at making this argument in EDVA (MTD, response, reply) last year was never adjudicated. Lindsey Halligan’s disqualification mooted that argument and her apparent failure to actually get an indictment would have destroyed the investigation next.

This attempt is substantially the same, bolstered by even more ridiculous charges and even more abuse to get them. But, coming as it does ten more months into Trump’s authoritarian rampage, it comes amid a more ambitious statement of the unitary executive.

And behind all that — as US Attorney Andrew Boutros made explicit in the Broadview 6 case — is a new theory of power, based in SCOTUS’ Trump v. US opinion: not just that the President can order up general and specific prosecutions, but because SCOTUS sanctioned that power, defendants can’t scrutinize Trump’s role in that process.

And that’s why Jim Comey’s bid to dismiss his prosecution for the way Trump ordered it up matters.

MTD vindictive and selective prosecutionAppendix of Trump’s complaintsDOJ ResponseEllis Boyle affidavitComey Reply

To be sure, no judge has endorsed Boutros’ alarming theory. But that theory is likely to be first scrutinized in Comey’s case (the Broadview 6 have delayed their filing on what should happen twice; it is currently due on September 15).Jim Comey has a ridiculously easy claim that Trump weaponized all of DOJ against him

That’s true because ten years of mean tweets document Trump’s fury that Jim Comey refused to drop the investigation into why Trump’s National Security Adviser was trying to undermine sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s election assistance for Trump. That catalog has gotten 17 pages longer in just the 11 months since Trump first charged Comey! As Comey’s initial brief notes, there’s no question why this happened.

The current record shows a clear causal link between President Trump’s animus and the prosecution of Mr. Comey. This is thus the rare case in which a defendant can “prove an improper motive” and a causal connection “with direct evidence.” Wilson, 262 F.3d at 314. Accordingly, Mr. Comey has established that his prosecution “was motivated by actual vindictiveness,” and the indictment must be dismissed. Id. at 316.

It is breathtaking how explicitly the campaign against Comey is an effort to criminalize any effort to protect the US against Russian interference.

Plus, with Comey, the flopsweat desperation of actually charging him in the seashells case — the Secret Service’s attempt to retroactively declare 8647 a threat until it became clear how common the phrase was, the illegal surveillance followed by the seemingly deliberate snooping in Comey’s privileged communications, the increasingly long chain of attorneys hired and fired just to find people willing to criminalize posting a picture of seashells — all of that demonstrates how the effort to make an example of Jim Comey has corrupted DOJ from top to bottom.

Moreover, federal officials acted irregularly across the course of this investigation. Immediately after Mr. Comey’s post, the Secret Service changed its policy to newly treat “86 47” as a threat; Secret Service agents were also ordered to conduct unlawful surveillance of Mr. Comey and share their interview notes with the President. See supra pp. 8-9. When the Secret Service declined to open a full investigation, the DOJ instructed the FBI to pick up the baton, which Director Patel eagerly did. See supra p. 10. The FBI acted irregularly, too. When the FBI applied for search warrants in March and May 2026—long after the social media post—those applications distorted the facts of the case. See Concurrently Filed Mot. to Suppress & Memo. in Support. The government also failed to install effective screens for attorney-client privilege, resulting in the seizure of communications between Mr. Comey and two of his longstanding attorneys. See Fitzgerald Aff. ¶ 40. The suspect timing and conduct of this prosecution—and the events that catalyzed it—support the conclusion that some motive besides legitimate prosecutorial interests drove the decision. Here, the inference is clear: the newly installed political officials in the DOJ strove to accomplish what their predecessors could not, namely, effectuating the President’s desire to punish Mr. Comey.

Even just having a judge write a memo laying out that this is wrong would be an important step in reining in DOJ.

But Comey, if his small law firm of exceptionally good lawyers is successful, could do more.How to use unitary executive against weaponization

As I’ve alluded, the existing precedents on politicized prosecution suck. The decisions of three Trump-appointed judges that Trump’s explicit intervention in criminal cases did not make them unlawful — Maryellen Noreika in Hunter’s Delaware gun case, Mark Scarsi in Hunter’s Los Angeles tax case, and Emily Coody Marks in SPLC — were not outliers.

To change that for others you’re going to need to go back to first principles: that wielding DOJ as a weapon the way Trump has is a violation of due process and equal protection.

That’s how Comey’s motion to dismiss (as with his earlier one submitted in EDVA) starts: by arguing this goes back to basic constitutional principles.

The indictment must be dismissed under two bedrock legal doctrines. First, the government instigated this prosecution based on Mr. Comey’s protected speech and to vindicate the President’s animus towards Mr. Comey, in violation of First Amendment and due process principles. Second, the government engaged in selective prosecution, in violation of equal protection principles. Dismissal of federal criminal charges under these doctrines has historically been rare. That is because for decades the DOJ’s independence and integrity have guarded against the use of the criminal process to punish enemies or settle political scores. The prosecutions of Mr. Comey mark a sharp break from that tradition. Ample objective evidence—much of which comes directly from government officials’ own public statements and admissions—establishes that the President’s animus toward Mr. Comey led to this vindictive and selective prosecution.

The proper remedy for the government’s constitutional violations is a dismissal with prejudice. But at the very least, the Court should allow for discovery and an evidentiary hearing into the government’s decision-making process. And it should require the government to present objective evidence justifying this prosecution

This initial MTD, though, only obliquely addresses how this fits into Trump’s efforts to expand the unitary executive in the interim. It mostly shows up as a footnote citing Judge Kathleen Williams’ opinion on the IRS case.

[T]he President—the head of the Executive Branch and U.S. Attorney Boyle’s ultimate supervisor— instigated a retaliatory prosecution against Mr. Comey that would otherwise not have been brought.5

5 A district court recently noted the unusual “influence over the DOJ” wielded by President Trump, Trump v. IRS, 2026 WL 2015525, at *12 (S.D. Fla. July 13, 2026), citing a statement by DOJ leadership to U.S. Attorneys nationwide that “the President is the Department’s ‘chief client.’” Id. at 12 n.35 (citation omitted).

But DOJ’s response makes the problem explicit. In two consecutive paragraphs, Ellis Boyle both asserts that Trump can fire anyone (citing Slaughter), but in the next paragraph, claims that the only thing that matters is what Trump’s subordinates — who will be fired if they don’t do what they know Trump wants — act as prosecutors when they implement Trump’s demands.

Comey’s reliance on a social media post directed to former Attorney General Pam Bondi is even further afield. See id. at 12. As Comey elsewhere acknowledges, Bondi was not Attorney General when Comey was charged. Id. at 15. There is no evidence beyond media speculation that the President directed then-Acting Attorney General Blanche, let alone the actual prosecutorial decisionmaker (U.S. Attorney Boyle), to prosecute Comey in EDNC. And even if there were, the Chief Executive directing his subordinates to exercise core Executive functions is a feature, not a bug, of our constitutional system. The purported “independence” of DOJ that Comey cites, DE 36 at 2, is antithetical to the constitutional separation of powers (which lodges the Executive power in the President alone). See Trump v. Slaughter, 146 S. Ct. 2283, 2303 (2026). And as a matter of historical analysis, it is a myth. See, e.g., John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Robert Kennedy’s Attorney General Office (discussing “President Kennedy’s appointment of his 35-year-old brother . . . as the Attorney General”).

But none of that matters. As discussed in more detail below, the test for vindictive or selective prosecution is not whether the Chief Executive has an influence on the prosecutorial decisions of his subordinates (as the Constitution plainly contemplates). It is, rather, whether those prosecutors have exercised their power within the constraints of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. Comey’s misleading narrative should not distract from the fact he cannot come close to showing any violation.

This is the problem!! If Trump can fire anyone who refuses to indict Comey (as he did, effectively, by forcing Erik Seibert to resign in EDVA, still leaving the departures of AUSAs Gabriel Diaz and Nate Lemons in EDNC unexplained), then Ellis Boyle’s claims he personally has no animus to Comey are meaningless.

That’s, effectively, what Comey argues in his reply brief, first citing an article from Jack Goldsmith responding to DOJ’s response posted just days before Comey’s reply was due (and, curiously, reposted at American Enterprise Institute’s site).

The government “cannot have it both ways” by at once asserting “extreme unitariness” and rejecting DOJ’s traditional independence while insisting DOJ prosecutors act “uninfluenced by the president’s vindictive commands.” Jack Goldsmith, The Unitary Executive and Comey’s Vindictive Prosecution Claim, Exec. Functions (Aug. 28, 2026), https://perma.cc/E6S3-MDM4. If accepted, the government’s position would immunize vindictive prosecutions that flow from the President through subordinates who have been tasked with carrying out his bidding.

Goldsmith’s post argues that Boyle literally has no choice but to indict Comey.

But given the wishes of the president, the acknowledged absence of DOJ independence, and the formal and functional orders to follow the president’s will on pain of firing, Boyle had no lawful or practical choice. He was bound to execute the president’s vindictive wishes. He had to find a way to prosecute Comey, at least if he wanted to keep his job.

I can put the point another way. The two sides dispute Fourth Circuit and other circuit precedent on whether and when vindictiveness can be shown by proving that the charging prosecutor was influenced by a superior. I won’t get into those legal weeds here, since this case is unique. Any legal hurdle to inferring the vindictiveness of this charging prosecutor from the vindictiveness of this president should be lowered, if not eliminated, by the Trump administration’s unprecedentedly extreme claims of unitariness.

The Trump administration cannot have it both ways. It cannot claim extreme unitariness and fire people for failing to follow the president’s demand to indict enemies, on the one hand, and then claim, on the other, that the prosecutor in the Comey case made an independent decision to prosecute, uninfluenced by the president’s vindictive commands.

I would dispute that this case is unique — prosecutors are being fired across the country for refusing to implement Trump’s priorities (and, obviously, even an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador managed to make the case, in part because one AUSA was fired and another left in protest over his treatment). It’s just that the reasons and the decade-long animus is so uniquely embodied in Comey’s case.

Which, finally, after Comey’s initial MTD cited Judge Kathleen Williams in the IRS case, and DOJ’s response cited Slaughter, leads to the premise behind all of this, John Roberts’ approval of Trump’s personal interference in specific prosecutions, which Comey cites in his reply.

Accordingly, Mr. Boyle’s blanket assurance (at Dkt. 53-1 ¶ 13) that he “did not feel pressured, coerced, or motivated” to indict Mr. Comey does not advance the government’s position. See Abrego-Garcia, 833 F. Supp. 3d at 834-35 (declining to credit such “good faith explanations” from Acting U.S. Attorney, that he “made the decision on whether to seek an indictment” and “received no direction from anyone at the White House” or DOJ).4 Such a subjective assessment also cannot be relevant where, as here, the animus belongs to the President—who has wielded his “exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department,” Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593, 621 (2024), including by forcing the resignation of a U.S. Attorney who refused to indict Mr. Comey, Mot. 12. Cf. P.H.E., 965 F.2d at 859-60 (court must dismiss a vindictive “a prosecution [that] is premised on the fruits of constitutionally tainted behavior, . . . notwithstanding attempts to launder the taint by presenting the fruits to an independent prosecutor” asserting good faith). After all, “cases do not magically appear on the desks of prosecutors,” and this case is no exception. United States v. Abrego Garcia, 807 F. Supp. 3d 827, 830 (M.D. Tenn. 2025) (ordering government to produce discovery).

If the role of the President in prosecutions — both individual and systematic — changed thanks to Trump v. US, then the doctrine on selective and vindictive prosecution must also change. Trump’s animus and whims are implicated in every single DOJ prosecutorial decision. None more so than with Comey.

So this dispute matters to all of us.Judges prefer to rule on technicalities before applying new precedents

To be sure, there’s no guarantee that Judge Louise Flanagan, appointed by the same President, George W Bush, who first appointed Comey to a senior DOJ position, will take the courageous step of ruling against the government. Something else could end this case, as Lindsey Halligan’s unlawful appointment did in EDVA. Judge Flanagan could dismiss this case on Comey’s argument, which is equally compelling, that his seashell post was not a true threat. She could, separately, grant his motion for a hearing to figure out why FBI Agent April Floyd rushed to get warrants she didn’t read before presenting her case to the jury, a rush that buried exculpatory information. That might lead to dismissal via other means. Judge Flanagan could deny the request, assuming a jury or the appeals process and delay will keep Comey out of jail. If those things happen, Comey will be making the same argument in a few months, likely before Aileen Cannon, who is guaranteed to bow to Trump’s demands (after she refuses to move any case against Comey to DC, where it would belong).

We all would be better served if Judge Flanagan has the courage to do what’s needed here.

The need to champion the rights of this defendant, of all defendants, personally targeted by a President abusing his prosecutorial role won’t go away though. And there will likely never be a case in which the misuse of DOJ’s authority against Trump’s adversaries is so blatant, so deliberately pathetic in criminalizing a post of seashells.

Trump has destroyed so much else with bulldozers and boy bureaucrats. But thus far, his attempt to criminalize his opponents has had to go through juries and judicial review. We’re at a moment now, with Comey but not just with Comey, where we’re looking for tools to reverse that before Trump further packs the court or finds ways around them.

War in the Middle East

New York Times, U.S. Hits 5 Iranian Oil Tankers, Citing Attempted Strikes on Warship, Helene Cooper and Pranav Baskar, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.).  Iran said it had retaliated by launching missiles at Jordan, raising the specter of still more fighting.

The U.S. military said on Tuesday that it had destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in reprisal for attempted strikes by Iran on a U.S. Navy warship, adding to the burst of fighting in recent days that has punctured weeks of relative calm.

U.S. Central Command said in a statement that it had destroyed four crude oil tankers used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the Gulf of Oman and another one near Kharg Island.

Iranian state media said that U.S. forces had attacked Iranian oil tankers off the coast of Kharg Island, the hub of the country’s oil industry, and Jask, a port city on Iran’s southern shore.

The Revolutionary Guards vowed to retaliate, warning tankers near Kuwait and Bahrain — which both host American forces — to evacuate their crews. Shortly afterward, the Guards said in a statement that they launched a “heavy missile strike” at a U.S. base in Jordan to punish Washington.

Central Command did not immediately comment on the Iranian claim.

Even as President Trump has tried to pivot from a military campaign against Iran to one focused on choking its economy, fighting has flared in recent days as each side jostles for control over the economically vital Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. military officials have vowed to strike three Iranian ships for every two vessels hit by Tehran. But Iran has continued to fire on ships, throttling the world’s oil supply, to preserve one of its biggest sources of leverage.

The result has been a stalemate.

Central Command said the Iranian tankers it targeted on Tuesday were “part of a multibillion-dollar shadow network that funds the I.R.G.C. and its regional proxies,” referring to the Revolutionary Guards. It said the attacks had come after Iran twice in two days fired ballistic missiles at a Navy warship.

Iran did not immediately confirm any new attempts to target U.S. warships, but a familiar cycle played out over the weekend. On Saturday, the United States and Iran each said it had attacked the other’s ships.

Central Command said it had struck three Iranian crude oil carriers in response to Iranian attempts to attack two U.S. warships. Iran took responsibility for targeting the American ships and responded to the U.S. strikes by claiming attacks on six additional ships.

The back-and-forth naval strikes came days after the United States bombarded southern Iran, igniting some of the most intense fighting in weeks and killing civilians at a wedding.

The U.S. strikes on Tuesday were not the only signs of the two countries’ naval skirmishing.

Hours earlier, Iran’s navy claimed it had seized an uncrewed American underwater vehicle in the strait. It said the vehicle had been “designed to independently carry out extended missions in deep waters,” including surveillance and mine detection, according to a statement carried by state media.

Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for Central Command, said that an underwater drone operated by U.S. forces to survey regional waters “in support of ongoing operations” had malfunctioned more than a day ago. He said the drone had been a “defective” older model that neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified equipment. He said he could not confirm Iranian reports that the technology had been seized. 

More On Canadian-American Tariffs, Inflation, Markets 

New York Times, Canada Imposes New Tariffs on U.S. Goods, as Trade War Intensifies, Tony Romm, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). The duties are a retaliation against President Trump’s recent tariffs, raising concerns about further escalation

New Canadian tariffs targeting roughly $20 billion in U.S. imports officially snapped into place on Tuesday, the latest escalation in an increasingly costly trade war that has ensnarled two longtime allies.

The duties apply to a variety of U.S. goods, including clothing, cheese, metal parts and wood products. The approach is meant to mimic the taxes that President Trump imposed on Canada after trade talks between the two neighbors collapsed in acrimony last month.

For now, the economic effects of the tit-for-tat may be limited because the tariffs encompass only a small portion of the annual trade between the United States and Canada. The more pressing concern is a potential cycle of retaliation, one that results in even higher and more exhaustive duties that harm families and businesses on both sides of the border.

In Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney has sought to position himself as a bulwark against Mr. Trump’s trade aggression, describing his nation as “at war.” Canadian officials generally have pledged to respond “dollar for dollar” to any U.S. duties.

In Washington, the president and his aides have repeatedly mocked their Canadian counterparts and the size of their ally’s economy and military. Mr. Trump has already threatened additional tariffs on auto imports from Canada, and on Friday, he even suggested he could try to halt bilateral trade outright.

Then, hours before Canada’s new tariffs took effect, Mr. Trump took to social media to continue his attack. He singled out Bombardier, a Canadian plane manufacturer, claiming there would be “NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES!”

In doing so, the president accused Canada of blocking “our GREAT American Banks, and Companies,” and he encouraged U.S. consumers to refrain from buying some Canadian goods.

“BUY AMERICAN. FLY ON AMERICAN AIRLINERS. ENJOY AMERICAN LIQUOR AND BEVERAGES. SAIL ON LAKE AMERICA,” Mr. Trump wrote.

Bombardier said in a statement that aerospace products are a top American export and that the company makes crucial components like wings in California and Texas. “Bombardier is a strong contributor to the sector, creating tens of thousands of jobs across the United States,” it said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The spat with Canada offered the latest evidence that Mr. Trump remains as committed as ever to his disruptive strategy of trade brinkmanship. Despite nearly two years of blistering court defeats, vicious international disputes and mounting domestic blowback, tariffs remain the president’s preferred tool to try to boost domestic manufacturing and broker better trade deals.

“This tit-for-tat retaliation is bad for Canadian businesses and consumers, and bad for American businesses and consumers,” said Brad Wood, the senior director for trade and innovation at the National Foreign Trade Council, a policy advocacy group whose board of directors includes Caterpillar, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor and Walmart.

“Every escalation is one more layer of barriers that ultimately Canada and the United States need to resolve,” Mr. Wood added. The question now, he said, is whether Mr. Trump intends to follow through with his threats.

While he spars with Canada, Mr. Trump and his aides are also putting the final touches on a roster of new tariffs targeting dozens of additional countries that the administration has accused of engaging in unfair trade practices. The latest round is expected to find that other nations overproduced certain products — what the administration has called “excess capacity” — leading to large and persistent U.S. trade deficits with those nations.

Those taxes, which could arrive as soon as this week, are meant to replace some of the duties that the Supreme Court struck down in February.

Further inflaming tensions, Mr. Trump has even threatened to block all trade involving countries that export more to the United States than they import from it. Currently, the United States has a yawning trade deficit in goods and services involving dozens of trading partners, including many in Europe and Asia. A halt to imports could prove economically cataclysmic.

Each of those actions could create new financial pressures on American families and businesses. Tariffs are taxes on imports, meaning products from abroad can become more expensive. To that end, the president’s global trade war has only exacerbated policymakers’ yearslong fight with inflation, with the next report on consumer prices set to arrive this week.

The trade dispute between the United States and Canada exploded into public view in July after Mr. Trump accused Canada of discriminating against U.S. industries. In response, he promised to impose tariffs of 50 percent on select Canadian goods unless the two sides could reach some sort of deal in 30 days.

Talks had proceeded for months, and at various points in August, Mr. Trump seemed confident that a resolution was within reach. But negotiations collapsed before his deadline, prompting both sides to blame each other for scuttling the negotiations with unreasonable, last-minute demands.

As a result, Washington imposed duties in August on hundreds of Canadian imports, including wine, cheese, clothing and hockey sticks. Mr. Carney and other Canadians immediately promised to retaliate with their own tariffs on similar products after Labor Day.

Since then, U.S. officials have responded with threats and outright derision, with Mr. Trump even signing an executive order seeking to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America. The president has attacked Canada’s political leaders, and on Sunday, he also took aim at its currency.

“Canada’s (currency) Dollar imbalance with the U.S. is unacceptable,” he said on social media. “It has been that way for years — but no longer!”

New York Times, Bombardier, a Canadian Jet Maker, Is a Target in Trump’s Trade War, John Yoon, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). The Montreal-based manufacturer has been embroiled in U.S. trade disputes before. President Trump threatened to bar the company from selling in the United States.

President Trump on Monday warned Bombardier, the Canadian manufacturer of business jets, that it would no longer be allowed to sell in the United States unless it made its aircraft there, escalating Washington’s trade dispute with Ottawa.

Mr. Trump has targeted the company before: He said in January that he might decertify some of Bombardier’s business jets as he threatened a steep tariff on aircraft manufactured in Canada, arguing that the country was restricting sales of aircraft made by Gulfstream Aerospace, an American rival.

During the first Trump administration, the Commerce Department imposed a nearly 300 percent tariff on new Bombardier passenger jets after Boeing, another U.S. competitor, accused it of using unfair government subsidies to underprice its planes.

Bombardier responded to Mr. Trump’s latest threat with a statement that did not mention the president but emphasized that it makes some parts for its planes at manufacturing sites in California and Texas. The company, headquartered in Montreal, added that it employs thousands of people in 20 U.S. states and that its supply chain includes 2,800 American companies.

Here’s what to know about Bombardier.

What does the company do?

In the 1920s, in a small garage in rural Quebec, a young inventor named Joseph-Armand Bombardier began making snow vehicles. He was later moved by personal tragedy: his 2-year-old son fell ill and died after deep snow and unplowed roads prevented them from reaching a hospital in time.

His company, founded in 1942, launched the Ski-Doo in the late 1950s and became the world’s top manufacturer of snowmobiles. Bombardier entered the rail industry in the 1970s, making subway cars for Montreal and New York City.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Canada? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

In 1986, Bombardier branched out into aviation by buying a top Canadian aerospace company, Canadair, and inherited its Challenger jets. It then acquired other aviation companies like Learjet, becoming a major manufacturer of popular regional planes like the CRJ series.

The company ended its passenger jet program after the 2017 dispute with Boeing and the Trump administration. Since selling its rail division in 2021, Bombardier has focused on producing private business jets like the Challenger and Global lines.Who uses its planes?

Bombardier has customers around the world, but the U.S. market is its biggest. Of its global fleet of more than 5,200 aircraft, roughly half are in service in the United States, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm

Many of its U.S. customers are companies and individuals using Bombardier-made business jets for private travel. Its commercial aircraft remain in service with U.S. airlines including Endeavor Air, a Delta Air Lines subsidiary; PSA Airlines, an American Airlines subsidiary; SkyWest, which flies routes for American, Delta, United Airlines and Alaska Airlines; and GoJet, which flies for United.

Bombardier’s business jets are purchased by militaries and defense agencies in more than 50 countries, including the United States. The U.S. Air Force and Army use aircraft made by Bombardier and modified for specialized surveillance and intelligence missions.

About 55 percent of Bombardier’s $9.6 billion in revenues in 2025 came from the United States, according to the company.

In a social media post on Monday, Mr. Trump said of the company: “If they want our Market, they must build here, and stop treating America like a ‘piggybank.’”What is its history with the Trump administration?

Boeing filed a federal complaint in 2017 claiming that Bombardier had violated American trade rules because subsidies from the Canadian government had allowed it to sell its CSeries commercial aircraft to Delta at below market prices.

The jets were part of Bombardier’s ambitious push into commercial aviation and a direct challenge to its larger rivals, Boeing and Airbus, though the aircraft faced delays, cost overruns and low demand. Boeing’s complaint was unusual in part because it did not make a direct competitor to the 100- to 150-seat aircraft.

The Commerce Department, under the first Trump administration, sided with Boeing and proposed a nearly 300 percent tariff on the jets.

But the decision backfired: Bombardier handed majority control of the CSeries program to Airbus, Boeing’s European rival, for zero cash, allowing the planes to be assembled at Airbus’s plant in Alabama to evade U.S. duties. The series was rebranded as the A220 and Bombardier exited commercial aviation entirely.

In 2018, the U.S. International Trade Commission unanimously rejected the tariff, a verdict greeted in Canada with relief. Boeing did not appeal the ruling.

Mr. Trump reignited the dispute with Bombardier in January, threatening to decertify its Global Express business jets and impose a 50 percent tariff on its Canadian-made aircraft unless Canada certified several American Gulfstream jets.

The models that had not been certified at the time were approved the next month, and the measures threatened in January ultimately did not take effect.Has it been in other U.S. trade disputes?

In 1982, the Reagan administration accused Canada of violating international trade agreements by providing unfair subsidies to finance Bombardier’s bid to build subway trains for New York City.

Facing severe financial penalties, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority made a concession, freezing all foreign-made rail car purchases for three years.

The Bombardier contract stood. In 1999, the company signed another contract with the M.T.A. to replace commuter trains on the Long Island Rail Road. Many of those train cars remain in use today.U.S.-Canada Trade

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Lance Rosen, Analysis: The “AfD” Election Success In The German State Of Saxony-Anhalt Is A Victory For Vladimir Putin, Lance F Rosen, Sept. 8, 2026. Putin Won With The Help Of His Favorite Nazi Billionaire, Elon Musk.

Elon Musk heavily supported the AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland) ahead of Germany’s 2025 federal elections through public statements, writing an opinion piece for Welt Am Sontag, hosting a live audio conversation on X with AfD leader Alice Weidel, (Photo below) and appearing via video link at a party campaign event. Not incidentally Trump, during his “government-in-exile” period at Mar-a-Lago, hosted a delegation of AfD leaders who visited in order to boost their party.

According to The Guardian...

[”Musk made a surprise appearance during Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) election campaign event in Halle in eastern Germany on Saturday, speaking publicly in support of the far-right party for the second time in as many weeks.

Addressing a hall of 4,500 people alongside Weidel, Musk spoke live via video link about preserving German culture and protecting the German people.”]

Musk did not donate personal funds to the extremist far-right anti-immigration party, which would have represented unlawful foreign interference in Germany’s elections, but he essentially did everything else to support the victory of AfD. (The free exposure he gave them on his platform X was in effect a “PIK” contribution, “payment-in-kind” which in the US twenty years ago would have had to be declared as a donation in filings with the now toothless Federal Election Commission had he done it for an American candidate.)

This is yet another instance where the former trillionaire has wielded his political influence to install fascist political leaders, the first of course was his purchase of the White House for Trump in 2024.

The second being his role in helping Millei get elected in Argentina. He has also interfered in the internal affairs of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Columbia, each Amazon basin countries which are rich in minerals he is after.

The AfD according to exit polls currently has won 39 seats, with the second larger total being the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) at 15. AfD has fallen just short of an outright majority, but this vote puts them on the brink of power in their state which includes the capitol city of Magdeburg and also Halle.

Leaders of NATO nations in Europe used strong language to warn of the danger this vote represents. AfD is fully aligned with the geo-strategic goals of the Kremlin.

AfD officials argue that it is in Germany’s national interest to bypass sanctions and restore cheap Russian oil and gas supplies to fuel Germany’s economy.

Leading members of the party regularly defend Russian President Vladimir Putin, visit Moscow or the Russian Embassy in Berlin, and echo Kremlin talking points regarding the war in Ukraine.

The AfD has campaigned against military and financial support for Kyiv, filed legal actions to stop arms deliveries, and boycotted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to the German parliament.

In 2020, I and my wife Martha co-authored a 45 page special report on Russian plans to intervene into the US presidential election in support of Donald Trump. Our working hypothesis was that Russia had formed strategic alliances with the US and European far right militias, Neo-Nazis, separatists and secessionist movements through which Trump would attempt a violent disruption of either the election itself, or to prevent the transfer of power. We had a unique analysis, given that most other democracy groups and election watchdogs were fixated on computer hacking, disinformation, and legal challenges.

We said the plan was to run a coup with either the threat, or actual deployment of mob violence. That was six months in advance of January 6th.

We documented Russia’s role in steering and even funding the US far-right, (including open alliances with Christian evangelical leaders from the US such as Franklin Graham, and state secession movement leaders from Texas and California) the intention being not only helping to install Trump, but to sow chaos and division in the Western democracies. We included a chapter on AfD back then, where we highlighted their pro-Russian pedigree and as a Putin Trojan Horse in Europe.

We also covered the role of MAGA operative Steve Bannon, and his fascist organizing partner from Russia, the geopolitical mentor of Putin himself, Aleksandr Dugin, (with whom Bannon met in Rome) in shaping the political strategy of AfD for coming to power.

Bannon, according to sources, advised AfD to incorporate the anti-vax covid skeptic movement (which was resisting lockdown and masking just like in the US) into the anti-immigration movement, which was fueled by the growing refugee crises in Europe even then. The Bannon-Dugin operation was in fact to build a Russian fifth column in Europe by merging the alt-right religious fundamentalists, and the populist/racist/xenophobes, with the growing cult of QAnon then being stoked by Russian-linked influencers as well.

The mainstream media coverage of this development leaves a lot to be desired.

There is a kind of spin being put out which needs to be debunked, that AfD’s victories are a spontaneous outpouring of anti-war sentiment and reaction to the worsened refugee crisis resulting from the recent several years long Ukraine conflict, Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, and now Iran. The line is that European governments bungled their handling of the refugee situation (not entirely untrue, but it’s misleading to assert this as their origin) by ignoring the popular opposition to their being allowed in, and doling out economic benefits while their governments were preaching austerity for everyone else. In both Germany and France increased crime and terrorism blamed on immigrants was used to whip up opposition to the existing government coalitions as a kind of propaganda or intelligence warfare.

The other line going out will be an hysterical reaction that “Germany is turning fascist again,” that this new so-called re-eruption of “German nationalism” is a harbinger of the Nazis being rehabilitated and Germany once again turning aggressively against their neighbors. This is dangerous misinformation. The people joining AfD are reactionaries being manipulated based upon a handful of single issues meant to stir up popular anger, and the people are protest-voting for candidates as if these elections are a referendum on those issues. German voters are not embracing Nazism. The number of actual far-right voters who are nostalgic for the Nazis is actually miniscule, not the predominant factor in the rise of the AfD.

These are just a few of the misleading assessments. Reality is that AfD has been a decade or more long intelligence operation, a joint project of the Russian GRU, the fascist billionaire clique gathered around Trump such as Musk, Bannon and his pseudo-Catholic synarchist allies, and the gamemasters behind the Nazi mind control psyop known as QAnon which interfaces with the MAGA movement leadership.

Fascist movements do not originate as a “lab accident” or as a spontaneous sociological phenomena in reaction to isolated events. There is no validity to the bumper sticker slogan “Shit Happens” in strategic politics or history. AfD’s rise to power was engineered by geopoliticians and oligarchs, the same ones currently out to end democracy and free elections in the US in service of their policy agenda, “Project 2025.”

Their goal is to destroy NATO by toppling Democratic governments and installing Orbán’s former Hungarian model, pro-Putin regimes which will abandon Ukraine, decouple Europe strategically from the US, open up Europe’s economies to looting by the Putin’s allies among the fascist billionaire set such as Musk and Thiel, and allow for the gradual absorption of western Europe into the Russian sphere of geopolitical influence.

Make no mistake, the weakening of the center/left liberal parties and traditional Christian center conservatives in Germany will have a nonlinear but direct impact in weakening France’s Macron, (strengthening the LePen party) will hurt Zelensky, strengthen the grifting fascist Nigel Farage in the UK, even undermining Italy’s right-wing PM Meloni, and Poland’s PM Tusk. (whose reaction was to say, “only idiots or traitors can rejoice at the triumph of the AfD in Germany.”)

The thing which can derail this runaway train of the far-right in Europe is what we do in the US over the course of the next three years, first with the November midterms, then meeting the immense threat of a post-election civil conflict which will likely follow, all leading to the US presidential election process, <if there even is one.>

We need a revolution in our thinking, one which can strengthen our anti-oligarchy political revolution in the US. That will change the frightening trend of desperate and ignorant voters turning to authoritarian governments to protect themselves from the perceived threats of so-called “criminal immigrants,” drug traffickers, or whoever else happens to be the convenient “enemy within” of the day, and instead we can flip the entire gameboard globally. The humiliating crushing defeat of Trump and MAGA is our lever, our optimal point of intervention to force a paradigm shift.

It is also what is needed to begin the reversal of the far-right turn currently underway in Latin America, in which the Trump forces are trying to topple the governments of Brazil and Mexico by surrounding them with extremist right-wing US-run puppet regimes. This is one of the vital strategic dynamics currently being underplayed or ignored entirely by US centered news organizations.

The role we play as American Democratic voters and activists is far more important than we want to think about. Most people think about voting in terms of single issues which are personally important to them, such as health care.

I’m here to tell people that this next election, less than two months from now, is not just about our single issues. It is about whether civilized self-governing democracies and nations will survive the current drive to destroy them coming from the two mad dictators who think they can carve up the world into looting zones, like two-bit Hollywood mafiosi characters that they mimic.

We need to think bigger, globally in fact, and act locally as if our lives depend upon it...because they do.

Lance’s Substack is a reader-

Susan C. Beachy and Stella Raine Chu contributed research.War in the Middle East

New York Times, Oil Climbs Toward $100 a Barrel Following Houthi Attacks, Lisa Friedman, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Analysts said they expected the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, to remain elevated for the rest of the year.Price of Brent crude oil

Oil prices on Tuesday surged toward $100 a barrel after Iran-backed Houthi militants directed attacks on Saudi Arabia that Saudi officials said injured dozens of civilians in a major escalation of tension in the region.

Analysts said the price reflected the market’s recognition that there is no end in sight for the conflict in the Middle East, which has disrupted oil flows through two vital arteries: the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.

The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, rose above $99 a barrel during the day. That was the highest since late July, shortly after Houthi militants declared a maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia and began targeting Saudi tankers with missiles and drones.

Foreign Policy, Opinion: The World’s Only Real Hope of Maintaining Order, Charles A. Kupchan (Georgetown University professor), Sept 8, 2026. A proposal for a new international system that is at once centralized and regionalized.

As the West’s ideological and material hegemony continues to wane, a new multipolar world is taking shape. This change is structural—a product of the unstoppable diffusion of power. The transition from the industrial era to the digital age has meanwhile destabilized the liberal democracies that long oversaw global governance. A combination of automation and free trade has undermined the industrial-era social contract, hollowing out Western middle classes and the political centrism that sustained liberal internationalism. These dual tectonic shifts are stoking geopolitical rivalries and eroding international rules and institutions, putting out of reach the collective initiative needed to govern a globalized world.

U.S. President Donald Trump is a symptom more than a cause of this disarray and the anti-establishment anger it has provoked. He and other populists promise to tear down the old liberal order. But they lack the skills and inclination to build what comes next. The policy community needs to urgently prepare for the post-Trump era by generating a plan for governing an interdependent world that is in the process of falling apart.

Building order in the world to come should begin with recognizing the renewed importance of regions; the diffusion of power logically necessitates the decentering and devolution of authority. Order will need to come from the bottom up, drawing on regional groupings that tap into the natural order-producing effects of geographic proximity, commercial ties, and common cultures. The regionalization of governance sets the stage for a polycentric international system: a multiorder world of considerable ideological and political diversity.

Yet precisely because the emerging multipolar world is set to remain globalized and interdependent, the centrifugal force of regionalization must be offset by order that comes from the top down. Multiple regional orders will require collective supervision. A concert system—a network of high-level coordinating councils—offers the most realistic and feasible option for overseeing global governance. Like the 19th-century Concert of Europe, which preserved peace for decades after the Napoleonic Wars, flexible and informal steering groups can provide a vehicle for genuine and sustained strategic dialogue and for dampening and managing conflicts of interest.

A concert system would complement, not replace, the United Nations.

New York Times, Chinese Ship Takes Arctic Shortcut: Smart Business? Or a Political Flex? Jeffrey Gettleman, Jenny Gross and Lily Kuo, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). Melting ice is opening a trade route through the Arctic. China has begun the first regular service, part of its polar ambitions.

The Chinese are now promoting the first regular cargo service to use the Northern Sea Route, an Arctic shortcut from Asia to Europe across the top of the world. This week, the Dubai Tower, a Chinese cargo ship, is finishing a three-week journey from Qingdao to Teesport in England.

But many of the Arctic watchers tracking the Dubai Tower’s little blinking dot as it moves across the screen on maritime websites are asking the same question: Is this smart business — or more of a bold geopolitical move?

The Northern Sea Route is thousands of miles shorter than alternatives through the Suez Canal or around the Cape of Good Hope. And as climate change intensifies, polar ice is disappearing, increasing its accessibility.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China and the United Kingdom? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Yet shipping executives say the route is still too difficult, dangerous and expensive for China or any country to make this a regular service. And the season for operations is short — basically August and September, with maybe a few days in July and October. Even then, cargo ships need an icebreaker escort.

More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

 

 

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: My Letter to CBS Staff, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 8, 2026. This is my open letter to CBS reporters and staff, as well as reporters and staff who work for other corporate news outlets that are continuing to bow to Trump’s fascism and this fatal right-wing propaganda machine.

Yesterday, it was reported that Bari Weiss, who runs CBS News, was considering hiring Maria Bartiromo after she left Fox News.

Now, I personally believe Maria Bartiromo, shown below right, is among the worst propagandists that there are, and one of the worst Trump sycophants and bootlickers that there are, and that she’s responsible for spreading a massive amount of lies and disinformation.

Now, that’s my opinion. You’re entitled to your own opinion, of course. But after she left Fox, or Fox pushed her out, whatever the story may be, who the heck even knows? Or, frankly, who even cares?

What’s most important is this notorious liar is now apparently being given an exalted position at CBS as CBS further destroys 60 Minutes and its news programs.

Now look, CBS is free to hire or fire whoever they want. They can run their network however they please. And if they want to continue to destroy their brand, go for it. Bring on Maria Bartiromo. I could care less.

But the broader message that I want to make, whether it’s to CBS staffers, reporters, or those who work for other news networks, is there is a place for you in independent news, whether that’s at the MeidasTouch Network or at other independent news outlets.

We’ve grown our independent news outlet here with the utmost focus on building a people-powered movement and growing by promoting top reporters and giving them editorial autonomy to do what they do best.

Other independent media outlets have their own philosophies and views, but as long as they’re fighting for democracy and against Trump fascism, perhaps they can be considered viable options as well. Or you can go out on your own.

I hope what MeidasTouch has helped inspire is for you to know that if me and my brothers, with no political background and no news background, can do it, you can do it also.

But you can’t, in my view, just hope to dilly-dally around fascism.

Over the next 60 days—actually less, over the next 56 days before the midterms—Trump’s going to throw everything he’s got to destroy this democracy.

He’s made an absolute fool of himself on the international stage and the domestic stage. We’ve never had a less popular president in American history than what we have right now.

I use the word demon to refer to him and his spawn because their behavior has been so abhorrent. I can’t find any other word, and I’m not even sure demon does it justice. I can search for lunatic or psycho or evil, but demon is what I keep coming back to.

Not to be hyperbolic. It’s just there seems to be a desire to inflict pain and suffering for the sake of inflicting pain and suffering, even in addition to the self-enrichment and quid pro quos and hoarding of wealth and stealing. There just seems to be a desire to watch and enjoy the suffering of others, which is just sickening to me.

But here’s where we are. Democracy is on the line.

Make whatever decisions you think are in your best interest, but I just want to reflect on this: there’s more to life than this dystopian MAGA madness.

We’re making it out of this. We’re close to getting out of this. Remember that.

And let MeidasTouch or others be an example, I hope. Or not. It’s your call.

But given Maria Bartiromo’s potential move to CBS and Bari Weiss, I just wanted to reflect on all of these things this morning.

This is why I believe independent news is more important than ever. That’s why we’re going to keep on growing here at the MeidasTouch Network.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Snowflakes and Petals of Influence NYT Chooses to Ignore, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 8, 2026. I was always likely to write about this NYT article describing Zohran Mamdani’s ties to influencers who celebrate his implementation of policy.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani had just decided to cancel a $9 million contract that New York City had with the consulting giant McKinsey, and gushing praise came pouring in from commentators, operatives on the left and even some comedians.

Alex Jacquez, who works at a progressive think tank, posted on X: “Really exciting that NYC is generating operational efficiencies by in-sourcing needlessly outsourced public services and functions, building city capacity. More of this!”

Akilah Hughes, a comedian with more than 200,000 followers on X, reposted a comment suggesting that Mr. Mamdani was an improvement over his predecessor, Eric Adams, who “paid McKinsey $1.6 million to research trash cans.”

Matt Stoller, a political commentator with more than 160,000 followers on X, wrote effusively that the mayor “just cut a $9 million contract that McKinsey has with NYC. And then brags about it publicly. More please.”

Some of the online adulation, like Mr. Stoller’s post, was organic. But some of it was actually part of a campaign orchestrated by City Hall to use social media influencers to boost the image of the mayor and his young administration’s policies.

Mr. Mamdani is a master of new media, and his rise to power has been driven largely by his ease in front of a camera and his ability to harness the seeming informality of social media to connect with broad constituencies.

I continue to find it frustrating that a nucleus of lefty pundits — many of whom came up alongside me in the blogging wave — refuse to understand the current attention economy. Rather than recognizing they are a part of that economy, they fancy themselves above it, tossing instructions to their servants in the Democratic Party who, the conceit appears to be, are the only ones who have the tools, day jobs, or ethical obligations as citizens to engage in that attention economy.

Those lefty pundits spent several days whining about this article rather than doing what they could to help win an election or even, seemingly, reading it to learn how influencers — the inheritors of the mantle we as bloggers used to wield — have been instrumental in making Mamdani successful in the attention economy in a way that many DC politicians are not. A success story of sorts — the kind of success story they’re looking for. They let a story about the attention economy negatively drive their own attention in the middle of a fight with a fascism that succeeds by dominating that attention economy.

To be sure, after laying out that Mamdani wielded the attention economy superbly, starting in ¶8, NYT spun it as something corrupt, suggesting (falsely) that a PR campaign misused public funds, implying that using Signal, by itself, defied transparency, and insinuating a $175,000 salary for the person who is a key reason Mamdani is successful is too much. It is a shitty article, but not among the top ten most hostile NYT articles targeting Mamdani.

Much of the rest is the kind of article that NYT used to write about us when we came up as bloggers, a threat to their monopoly of the means of narration. We were not sufficiently independent, they said. They don’t understand how we’re funded, they complained. Some of this was and remains hostile gatekeeping from a media under threat from newcomers, as Emilia Rowland, the women being paid $175,000 to help make progressive policies successful insinuated in a comment buried in (roughly) ¶47 and ¶48 of the story.

When asked whether the city has created a code of ethics for its engagement with influencers, Ms. Rowland suggested that traditional media might be in more need of tighter ethical guidelines.

“Is there a recommendation for disclosures from legacy media?” she said, adding that working only through “channels with diminishing reach” might mean failing to reach New Yorkers about important city services.

Notably, for reasons I’ll return to, NYT’s article came out on September 4, five days after WaPo published its own story about how a group of influencers who enthusiastically support Whiskey Pete Hegseth had been doing undisclosed work for the Pentagon, the element of corruption that NYT invented by insinuation for a story about Mamdani. We’ll come back to that.

Before I got a chance to write my own post about the NYT influencer story, Don Moynihan wrote this absolutely spectacular post on it. His story started by explaining why the idea of a news story reporting on the the success of the Postal Service could only appear in the Onion. He provided three reasons why:

Negativity bias: The media covers failure much more than it covers success. Loss aversion means that humans are more emotionally aroused by stories of loss rather than gain, failure rather than success, scandal rather than honest competence. In other words, the media focuses on failure because that is what, as consumers, we click on.Independence: Media don’t want to be seen as the lapdog of politicians, so tend not to uncritically accept good news stories. I’m not going to publish your press release!A bias toward theater: People like stories. Stories that involve colorful characters, human stakes and theatrical tropes, such as deception and conflict, are more compelling. And so media coverage of government reflects such stories, and down-weights other factors that are harder to humanize, such as administrative systems, or structural factors, even if those these factors are often important, as they are when it comes to managing government. Really great writers manage to tell stories about government that incorporate structure while using relatable characters, explaining the stakes, and detailing emotionally arousing conflicts. But sometimes, reporters on a deadline simply do not cover stories that lack the aspects of theater, and focus on the opportunities that do.

Having provided those three reasons (but not yet dug into them), he first laid out Mamdani’s success at selling the nuts and bolts of successful implementation — the equivalent of bragging about how well the Postal Service is doing, but instead focusing on potholes and basketball hoops. He then reviewed the NYT story, showing the lengths it went to to make the reliance on influencers look corrupt. “It is not until paragraph 20 that the reporters clarify that the Mayor’s office does not actually pay the influencers.” Then, brilliantly, Moynihan went back and looked how the NYT covered the very same story, about Mamdani cutting a McKinsey contract, as compared to how NYT covered Mamdani’s hiring of McKinsey partner Anthony Shorris.

Let’s go back to the primary example the story gave, because I think it would have been useful if the reporters grappled with it a bit more. The Mamdani administration cut $9 million in McKinsey contracts as small part of a relatively impressive effort to balance the budget. So how did the New York Times cover this story? I found two mentions of it in their coverage, both of which were passing references in larger stories:

From May 1, in a story titled “What We Know About New York’s Proposed Tax Increases”: “Mr. Mamdani has already begun to explore slashing roughly $3 billion in expenditures, like consulting contracts with companies that his base despises, like McKinsey, and a rental-assistance program called City FHEPS that he once championed.”And from March 23, under the headline “Mamdani Now Plans $1.3 Billion in Cuts in Programs That He Favored”: “Mamdani vowed to cancel New York City’s contracts with McKinsey and other private companies.”

So, the McKinsey contract cancellation was mentioned barely at all by the New York Times, in two stories with relatively unfavorable faming (Mamdani hiking taxes and abandoning programs he favored).

Given this context, working with influencers makes a lot more sense. The Times did not see this story as much of a priority. Of course, the Times is not obliged to cover this topic, but when Mamdani appointed a former deputy Mayor and McKinsey partner to his administration that was the primary subject of two separate stories rather than an afterthought, and mentioned in a third story about his efforts to reassure the business community.

I doubt that Mamdani communicated his hire of a McKinsey partner to his influencers, but it is not clear to me why this is inherently more newsworthy for the Times than his cancelation of contracts with McKinsey. I don’t think the contract cancelation is simply populist point-scoring, but reflects a theory of governance that is substantive, and considers structural aspects of state capacity.

This was brilliant media criticism — a demonstration of how media genres drive and silence certain kinds of stories (the kind of thing I’ve written academic articles and delivered conference talks on).

Moynihan then put on his Public Policy professor hat and (in a Substack post, which phenomenon is itself worth contemplating) explained why the decision to cut the McKinsey contract reflected a theory of governance that could have a real positive impact; click through for that part. Moynihan did the same analysis for a second Mamdani initiative — sort of a reverse DOGE — and explained how that got treated as a boring story, too, even by lefty pundits on Bluesky.

The New York Times did not cover the announcement of the new office.

Some local news covered it, basically reprinting the press release. The other coverage came from outlets working on tech and government, for whom it was a big story. If you are a political advisor concerned about the Mayor generating good headlines, this is a pretty sparse return on his efforts.

I posted about this on BlueSky which is about as liberal and pro-Mamdani space you could wish for. And still, many of the replies argued that the creation of PIT Crew “just not much of a story”; “It feels like a paragraph in a story about the budget.” “A news story can only happen once the PIT crew is something more than a budget line, at which point there will be people to interview and actions to record.” Or that the media should not just cover press releases.

For the reasons I outlined above, I think this is wrong. The story is substantively important example about the model of governance Mamdani is pursuing. If you needed a hook Mamdani creating a tech office in the aftermath of DOGE provides a hook (I provide an example below). His tech team involves some of those displaced by DOGE, who have some pretty impressive achievements that provide a human interest angle.

Of course, DOGE itself was made sexy because the trillionaire troll made it so, often by stoking conspiracy theories designed to undermine trust in government.

After pointing out how hard it is to get even very sympathetic people, like Bluesky pundits, to magnify good news, Moynihan then laid out the 18 stories one or another (or both together) of the NYT journalists had covered, including three on Mamdani’s conflict with Netanyahu, demonstrating the stories — many far more hostile to Mamdani than a story about his influence economy success — NYT chooses to cover.

It was a superb takedown of the limits to legacy media and, because of those limits, the gap in communication that exists where successful leaders will — must! — seek to rebuild trust in government.

You can’t have successful government if the only stories that get told are intentionally negative. But the question is, by whom.

Moynihan then ended with a very gentle scold about how media should be able to tell the good news about government like it tells the bad.

One downside of negativity bias in media coverage is that it has fed a corrosive mistrust of government, which has fueled anti-government forces who then justify that mistrust with mismanagement. We very much need a skeptical media to hold government to account and journalists are doing essential work in that department right now. And big promises of government improvement should invite real investigation of success. But we also need them to tell us when government is working well and trying to do better. Reporters don’t have to become influencers to embrace a little bit of positivity bias.

I would join this scold and note that the same is true of the blogger generation pundits. When Ezra Klein first did a long post on Joe Biden’s frailties only to be followed by a second when Biden did step down, I argued that the guy who got his start explaining the intricacies of policy — the guy who got where he is now by explaining how good Barack Obama’s policies were, as the influencers (and Matt Stoller, who also came up in that blog generation) are now doing for Mamdani — would have done far more for democracy and the Democratic Party in 2024 if he had been doing the same for what were remarkably successful Joe Biden policies. Joe Biden was a failure as President because in a much more intense attention economy, he didn’t have what Mamdani does: a way to tell his very good story. And yes, his age and frailty made all that much harder but that doesn’t excuse Ezra for ignoring those very good stories he is uniquely qualified to tell, to instead observe from on high and toss directions, as if they were coat check tickets, to Democratic operatives.

Joe Biden didn’t tell his story in part because the blogger generation pundits now, for the most part, see their own role (paid or not) very differently, and especially don’t seem understand that they can use their social media platforms to stomp all over Democrats or to combat Trump or even to magnify good things Democrats do that lefty pundits repeatedly confess they’re oblivious to, such as multiple strands of efforts to combat Trump’s corruption, a story which many of them complain is not being told.

Not being told by someone else, they always mean.

Meanwhile, as all this was going down, over on Xitter, a parallel meltdown was playing out. As I noted here and as Bulwark described in all its delectable hilarity, far right troll turned senior State Department official, Sarah Rogers, tried to feed far right troll Jennica Pounds (better known as Data Republican) a bullshit attack on disinformation experts. She fucked up in her effort to seed disinformation about disinformation experts!! That led to Pounds’ self-exposure as a secret troll for Whiskey Pete Hegseth. As a bunch of other far right trolls rushed, in unison, to defend Pounds’ ethical failures (or, alternately, to parrot Sean Parnell’s false claims that WaPo had broken the law by telling its readers something China and Iran already know — that US forces are stretched dangerously thin because of the means by which Hegseth is losing the Iran war), one of the journalists those trolls were trying to jail reported that a number of them had secretly been on DOD’s payroll.

WaPo’s story is the counterpart story to the original NYT story (but preceded it by five days). Here, known influencers were secretly working for DOD.

The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter and corroborating material.

At least some of the influencers have been assigned to civilian roles that could lead to changes in policy, the people familiar with the matter said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Neither the Pentagon nor those involved have disclosed the government roles despite the Trump administration’s claims that they are running the most transparent Defense Department ever. [my emphasis]

They weren’t paid to be trolls. They were paid to do policy work, as Thomas Anderson, who is best known as Cynical Publius, justified to WaPo his lack of transparency that he was on the DOD payroll for something else.

“At no time have I ever received any compensation of any kind from any government source of any kind for anything I write or have ever written on X or in any magazine or other source,” Anderson wrote.

The self-inflated Publius has been on a meltdown worthy of a Hegseth stan ever since, misrepresenting how his real name has been discoverable and complaining over and over and over and over that journalists did journalism, in the process revealing to taxpayers what America’s adversaries can discover by watching where US aircraft groups sail.

It’s pretty hilarious stuff.

Another of the trolls, Kurt Schlichter, tried to defuse his exposure by suggesting the WaPo said something it didn’t.

Let’s examine the lessons we can draw about regime media through the lens of how Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp of the Washington Post decided to write a story about what I, @RobManess, and Tom @CynicalPublius Anderson did for the Department of War. The problem for the Washington Post is that what we were doing for the Department of War was boring – three retired colonels with extensive civilian experience did a review of the military war college system to try to help modernize it and make it better at producing future senior officers. Yawn.

The story was sexy because we were all, as the Washington Post acknowledged, Massively Influential Conservative Influencers™, but that was it. So they had to jazz it up by insinuating that we were brought on board to “amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.” That was false.

Schlichter claimed the WaPo said they were brought in to amplify Whiskey Pete’s lies. The WaPo, instead, said they did so “as they” amplify Whiskey Pete’s lies.

But no one denies they were (or had been, until days before) on the Pentagon payroll without disclosing it, all while repeating Whiskey Pete’s lies.

And thus far, it might be a lesson in comparative use of influencers. Whereas Mamdani reaches out to influencers to celebrate wonky policy decisions, Whiskey Pete reaches out to them to undermine trust in journalism or (in the case of Sarah Howard) to attempt to inflame scandals over packaged bullshit. That’s actually a really instrumental lesson about how we move forward, if we are to be successful. The shitty NYT story was useful for highlighting how Mamdani is succeeding in building his support among New Yorkers, even while doing boring things like replacing missing basketball hoops.

Except for this.

In the period when NYT was “interview[ing] more than a dozen influencers who have worked with Mr. Mamdani’s team and [reviewing] dozens of videos and portions of influencer group chats” for a story about Mamdani, someone — presumably someone else than the two journalists on the Mamdani story — at NYT was deciding that the equivalent story about Whiskey Pete, except, in that case, the influencers were getting paid (albeit to do something else), was not newsworthy.

NYT’s selective decision to chase some influencers and not others is an editorial choice, one that says as much about bias — the political bias NYT attempts to disavow with its scolding about ethical guidelines — as the other far more hostile NYT stories about Mamdani.

But it doesn’t have to stop at NYT.

Yes, NYT is biased and also hostile to Mamdani generally. But the same rules about telling bad stories applies to all of us who can influence politics, especially those of us graced with significant platforms.

The way the world is right now — the rise of fascism — owes a great deal to changes in the attention economy. There are cracks in the far right attention economy, as government employed trolls faceplant in one or another way. But there really is a lesson to move forward.

And some of that really does has to do with being willing to tell good stories.

New York Times, NOTUS Rebrands as The Washington Sun, Katie Robertson, Sept. 9, 2026 (print ed.). A trademark dispute scuttled its plans to relaunch as The Washington Star, so the site chose a different name.

Here comes “The Sun.” The Washington Sun, that is — the new name for the news website NOTUS after a trademark lawsuit several months ago stymied the outlet’s plan to rebrand as The Star.

The name, said the editor in chief, Tim Grieve, is intended to reflect the outlet’s expansion into local news and sports coverage in the wake of The Washington Post’s staff cuts at the beginning of the year. It will take effect Wednesday.

NOTUS, which stands for News of the United States, was started in 2023 by the media entrepreneur Robert Allbritton, a co-founder of Politico. A nonprofit newsroom, it initially focused on coverage of government and policy. But as The Post pulled back from metro news, Mr. Allbritton saw room to fill that void.

The Athletic via The New York Times, LIV Golf files for bankruptcy protection, will attempt to restructure, Gabby Herzig, Sept. 8, 2026. LIV Golf’s effort to save its business and resurrect a new iteration of the league now includes bankruptcy. The league submitted a Chapter 11 filing in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey on Tuesday, according to court documents.

LIV’s decision to file for bankruptcy rather than liquidate the company signals that it seeks to restructure and transition to a newbusiness model. LIV said its reorganization will happen alongside BC Partners Advisors’ credit division, marking the first time the league revealed the identity of the “lead investor” it announced in August.

The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia — LIV’s financial backer from the league’s 2022 inception until it announced in April its decision to pull funding — has also agreed to take part in the restructuring. If approved by the court, PIF will provide $49.6 million in debtor-in-possession financing to carry LIV through the expensive and complex Chapter 11 bankruptcy process.

However, the PIF’s loan will come with milestones, which are strict deadlines that LIV must meet to continue receiving cash payments. One milestone will be LIV’s ability to sign a finalized investment agreement with BC Partners, according to a source briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

In the filing, LIV estimates its assets are worth between $100 million and $500 million, and its liabilities are between $500 million and $1 billion, illustrating the gap on its balance sheet that helps LIV qualify for Chapter 11 in the first place. LIV’s high liabilities also show the scale of its long-term commitments — like multi-year player contracts — that it will not be able to pay out.

“This process gives us the structure and time to pursue a landmark transaction and begin the next chapter of LIV Golf — one built around the fans, an innovative, player-first ownership model, and a part of the global golf ecosystem,” LIV CEO Scott O’Neil said in a statement. “We are excited about what lies ahead and yet, there is still much to accomplish in the months ahead. We believe deeply in LIV Golf’s future, the opportunity in front of us, and the people who will help us realize it.”

Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau, LIV’s two biggest stars, are listed as having the largest unsecured claims, worth $7.4 million and $5.7 million, respectively. These figures reflect past-due third-quarter payments to each player, rather than future expected payments based on multiyear contracts. Bankruptcy law requires those guarantees to be handled separately, and the listed numbers are considered initial estimates.

Notably, DeChambeau’s claim is marked “contingent” on the filing, meaning the payout is dependent on a certain undisclosed future event. The next-largest creditor, Dustin Johnson, is marked as contingent and disputed, meaning that LIV disagrees with the size of the claim.

Sept. 8

Top Headlines

President Trump published the map above on Labor Day, which follows up previous grandiose claims undermining U.S. prestige as his previous claim (shown below) about ownership of the Western Hemisphere. The deranged behavior by the U.S. president who aspires to rule a new version of a colonial empire increasingly undermines U.S. and global national security, as indicated by news and comment below.

• The New Republic, Trump Sparks Diplomatic Incident With His “USA” Map, Malcolm Ferguson, Sept. 8, 2026. Iceland has summoned the U.S. ambassador. President Trump has drawn the ire of Iceland after posting a map (shown above) depicting the country as part of the United States. Along with Iceland, the image also included Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean draped in the U.S. flag. The Truth Social post, made on Labor Day, was captionless. The post—paternalistic at best, colonial at worst—raised enough alarm in Iceland to lead the country’s foreign minister, Thorgerdur Gunnarsdóttir, to summon U.S. Ambassador Billy Long. Gunnarsdóttir later told RUV, Iceland’s national broadcasting service, that “it was made clear at the meeting that the post was completely inappropriate.” 
• PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: As Trump Blows Off New York On 9/11, He Repeats Lie That He Was Near Ground Zero, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 8, 2026. On Tuesday, Donald Trump held an event in Washington, DC, where he claimed he was at or near Ground Zero on 9/11, but his story is a total lie. Donald Trump has been lying about 9/11 for more than a decade. At various times, Trump has claimed he was at Ground Zero. Trump has also claimed that he went to Ground Zero. There are always some firefighters or police interacting with Trump in the story, and the president has also falsely claimed that he saw Muslims celebrating on 9/11. With the 25th anniversary of the attack coming up this week, it was time for Donald Trump to lie again.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump Wants to Exhaust Us. He’s Failing, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger, Sept. 8, 2026. Labor Day is in the rearview mirror, and the midterms are suddenly only fifty-six days away. Keep your head on a swivel. Happy Tuesday.
• New York Times, Netanyahu’s Rivals Call Him ‘Unfit’ After Report He Was Warned Before Oct. 7 Attack, Ephrat Livni and Isabel Kershner, Sept. 8, 2026. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office denied the report in Haaretz that the Emirati president had warned him Hamas was planning a major operation against Israel.
• New York Times, Israeli Allies Ban Trade With Settlements as U.K. Cites ‘Ethnic Cleansing,’ Stephen Castle, Adam Rasgon, Aaron Boxerman and Isabel Kershner, Sept. 8, 2026. Britain, Canada and France on Tuesday announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, with Britain saying Israel had “turned a blind eye” to violence against Palestinians.
• New York Times, Mamdani Accuses Former N.Y.C. Leaders of Lying About 9/11 Air Quality, Sally Goldenberg,Nina Agrawal and Joseph Goldstein, Sept. 8, 2026. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that New Yorkers had gotten sick “because the leaders they trusted lied.” On Tuesday, he released 170,000 pages of records related to the aftermath of the attacks.

Trump Pressures Force Resignation of America's Top Museum and Library Chief 

• New York Times, Smithsonian’s Secretary to Resign as Trump Tries to Rule the Institution, Robin Pogrebin and Graham Bowley, Sept. 8, 2026. In the face of escalating White House attacks about how museums present American history, Lonnie G. Bunch III has announced his decision to depart. After a seven-year run marked most recently by attacks from the Trump administration, Lonnie G. Bunch III announced on Tuesday that he was stepping down as secretary of the Smithsonian. The White House has escalated its criticism of how the Smithsonian presents American history and values, prompting concern from some about what they see as an assault on the institution’s autonomy and commendation from others for reining in an organization they view as overtaken by liberal bias.

Special Report: American Food Safety

 “Mary had a little lamb, but when she saw it sicken, she sent it off to Packingtown, and now it’s labeled chicken.”

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Where’s the Beef (Coming From)? Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 8, 2026. That’s a little ditty that was circulating, I can’t find any original source, around 1905, when Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle” — about the meatpacking industry, one of the sort of founding documents of the progressive movement. The topic today is Donald Trump and beef, because here we are back in Upton Sinclair territory. So you may have seen that last month Trump announced, given that we have high beef prices, that he was going to allow the tariff-free import of 300,000 tons of ground beef.

Special Report: U.S. Senator Has Frequently Sued Maternity Patients

• New York Times, Exclusive: A Doctor Sued 700 Patients for Debts; 81 Were Arrested. Now He’s a Senator, Sarah Kliff, Sept. 8, 2026. Patients sued by Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, right, a Republican running for re-election this fall, were routinely charged 18 percent interest, The Times found. Some had bank accounts garnished.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Slammed Over ‘Horrific’ 9/11 Lies, NYC's Post-9/11 Toxic Air Cover-Up Exposed, America's Allies Leave the U.S. Behind, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Trump gave 9/11 survivors and families fresh reason to be furious this week. At Tuesday’s Ellipse ceremony, he once again told a version of himself being carried out of danger by firefighters near Ground Zero, a story that’s changed shape over the years and that first responders say never happened.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Lashes Out at Marine One Pilots, Major Corruption at DHS, Canada’s Tariffs Begin, Iceland Summons US Ambassador, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Trump had a visibly agitated moment on camera aboard Marine One last night, the capper to a Labor Day weekend that included him calling his own Iran war “small potatoes” and going on another AI-generated posting spree. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs officially kicked in overnight, and a new Wall Street Journal investigation has Corey Lewandowski facing the possibility of real criminal exposure over what he was allegedly doing with his access at DHS.

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

 

• All Rise News, 'Weak sauce’: IRS loses bid to share taxpayer info with ICE, Adam Klasfeld, right, The D.C. Circuit unanimously found that the government likely violated a post-Watergate law that carries heavy penalties. A federal appeals court on Tuesday unanimously affirmed an order blocking the Internal Revenue Service from sharing taxpayer addresses with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dealing another defeat to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.

Trump Team Voter-Suppression, Mail Ballot, Election-Rigging Schemes In Court

• PoliticusUSA, News and Comment:A Bipartisan Group Of Nearly 300 Current And Former Members Of Congress Urge SCOTUS To Block Trump’s Mail-In Voting Attack, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Nearly 300 current and former members of Congress from both parties filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to block Trump’s attack on mail-in voting.
• New York Times, Justice Kavanaugh Blocks Missouri Voting Map Benefiting Republicans, Ann E. Marimow and Mitch Smith, Sept. 8, 2026. Missouri’s Supreme Court had earlier blocked election officials from using a new congressional map, saying voters must first approve the district lines in a statewide referendum. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on Tuesday denied a request from Missouri officials to use a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an edge in the midterm elections.
• New York Times, Dueling Court Rulings Leave Missouri’s Congressional Races in Chaos, Ann E. Marimow and Mitch Smith, Sept. 8, 2026. After losing in two courts and winning in another, Missouri officials said they planned to forge ahead with using a congressional map that was redrawn to benefit Republicans.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 8, 2026. What if the law means what it says? Now and then, a court decision comes along to restore your faith that nonpartisan judges can fairly read the plain text of statutes and constitutional provisions and render entirely rational decisions.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The People vs. Mad King Donald, William Kristol, right, Sept. 8, 2026. I trust you all had a better Labor Day weekend than Donald Trump. On Sunday the president of the United States fired off more than sixty social media posts, each more bizarre than the last. They included frenzied rants, manic boasts, personal attacks, crazy links, lunatic messages, and surreal AI-generated memes and images. They were often weirdly dystopian—Trump nuking the Earth from orbit from a space station, Trump with giant robot bodyguards as fires burned. 
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Rs Are Going To Try Very Hard To Put Lipstick On The Trumpian Pig This Week, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Trump’s Mounting Global And Domestic Failures Are Going To Make That Really Hard.
• New York Times, Chris Pappas Defeats Progressive Challenger in New Hampshire Senate Primary, Emily Davies, Sept. 8, 2026. Mr. Pappas, a moderate Democrat who has served four terms in the House, will face former Senator John E. Sununu, the Republican nominee, in November. 
• New York Times, John E. Sununu Wins Republican Senate Primary in New Hampshire, Emily Davies, Sept. 8, 2026. The general election race to replace Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, could help determine control of the U.S. Senate.
• New York Times, Elon Musk Targets Democrats on Transgender Issues in Key Senate Races, Neil Vigdor,  Sept. 8, 2026. A political group for the world’s richest man, who is ramping up a midterm spending blitz, began running attack ads against Democrats in Texas, Ohio and Iowa.

Ohio Candidate For Governor Attacked 

Ohio's Democratic Party nominee for governor, Dr. Amy Acton, left, a physician was attacked during a campaign event by an armed suspect identified as Patrick Havas, above, a Republican with ties to Acton's opponents, who including Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, a high-tech billionaire. Following the attack, in which Acton reported no injuries, she tended a man in the crowd who had sustained injuries.

• Occupy Democrats, Advocacy: HERO DOCTOR! Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton rushes to TREAT people injured when an armed Republican charged toward her – then a stunning connection to her MAGA opponent emerges! Staff Report, Sept. 7, 2026.Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, MD, MPH had just been charged by an armed man who knocked people to the ground as he pushed through a crowd toward her. Once police had the man under control, the physician-turned-candidate rushed to help the people who were hurt instead of fleeing the scene like her security wanted. 

Reflections On U.S. Labor Day, Democrats and Upcoming 9/11 Anniversary 

• The Guardian, 'The most anti-union president’: how Trump turned his back on US workers, Steven Greenhouse, Sept. 7, 2026. Labor experts stunned at how anti-worker Trump has been with actions since last Labor Day that have hurt unions.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 7, 2026 [Trump's Frantic, Fantastic Self-Promoting, 'Historical' Self-Portraits], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Since yesterday, President Donald J. Trump has been posting on social media at a frantic pace, showing AI images of himself with President George Washington on his own account and, on the official White House account, a video of himself as the DC Comics Green Lantern superhero.
• New York Times, Guest Essay, Voters Have Spoken. Why Aren’t Democrats Listening? Ben Rhodes, right, Sept. 8, 2026. In 1932, amid a Depression worsened by tariffs, inequality and isolationism, Franklin Roosevelt accepted the Democratic presidential nomination with a cautionary note: “Those nominal Democrats who squint at the future with their faces turned toward the past and who feel no responsibility to the demands of the new time,” he said, “are out of step with their party.”

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

• Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Loyal and patriotic citizens, please stand by, Jeff Teidrich, right, Sept. 8, 2026. This, shown above and reprinted below, is a message of the utmost importance from the President of the United States, Supreme Ruler of the Western Hemisphere:

Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP

• Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump thinks he's the hero of 9/11, Heather Delaney Reese, right,Sept. 7, 2026. At 2:35 this Labor Day afternoon, Donald Trump was still on vacation at his private golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, when he posted a video of himself with the words, “What Donald Trump saw at… Ground Zero hours after 9/11.” 

James Comey Test Case Reaches Decision-Point Over Abusive U.S. DOJ Political Prosecutions

• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Why Rule of Law May Pivot, Once Again, on Jim Comey, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 8, 2026. As of last Tuesday, Jim Comey’s pretrial motions in his seashell case are fully briefed. I wrote about the existence of a sealed filing in them here; I wrote of new signs of abuse exposed in the filings here. Links to all the filings are here. We wait now, to see whether Comey will break new ground in combatting Trump’s wholesale weaponization of DOJ. Comey is the best bet to establish a broader legal standard that might rein in Trump’s worst attempts to politicize DOJ.

More On Canadian-American Tariffs, Inflation, Markets 

• New York Times, Canada Imposes New Tariffs on U.S. Goods, as Trade War Intensifies, Tony Romm, Sept. 8, 2026. The duties are a retaliation against President Trump’s recent tariffs, raising concerns about further escalation. New Canadian tariffs targeting roughly $20 billion in U.S. imports officially snapped into place on Tuesday, the latest escalation in an increasingly costly trade war that has ensnarled two longtime allies.
• New York Times, Bombardier, a Canadian Jet Maker, Is a Target in Trump’s Trade War, John Yoon, Sept. 8, 2026. The Montreal-based manufacturer has been embroiled in U.S. trade disputes before. President Trump threatened to bar the company from selling in the United States. President Trump on Monday warned Bombardier, the Canadian manufacturer of business jets, that it would no longer be allowed to sell in the United States unless it made its aircraft there, escalating Washington’s trade dispute with Ottawa.

War in the Middle East

• New York Times, U.S. Hits 5 Iranian Oil Tankers, Citing Attempted Strikes on Warship, Helene Cooper and Pranav Baskar, Sept. 8, 2026. Iran said it had retaliated by launching missiles at Jordan, raising the specter of still more fighting. The U.S. military said on Tuesday that it had destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in reprisal for attempted strikes by Iran on a U.S. Navy warship, adding to the burst of fighting in recent days that has punctured weeks of relative calm.

More On Global Affairs

• Lance Rosen, Analysis: The “AfD” Election Success In The German State Of Saxony-Anhalt Is A Victory For Vladimir Putin, Lance F Rosen, Sept. 8, 2026. Putin Won With The Help Of His Favorite Nazi Billionaire, Elon Musk. Elon Musk heavily supported the AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland) ahead of Germany’s 2025 federal elections through public statements, writing an opinion piece for Welt Am Sontag, hosting a live audio conversation on X with AfD leader Alice Weidel, (Photo below) and appearing via video link at a party campaign event. Not incidentally Trump, during his “government-in-exile” period at Mar-a-Lago, hosted a delegation of AfD leaders who visited in order to boost their party.
• New York Times, Oil Climbs Toward $100 a Barrel Following Houthi Attacks, Lisa Friedman, Sept. 8, 2026. Analysts said they expected the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, to remain elevated for the rest of the year.
• Foreign Policy, Opinion: The World’s Only Real Hope of Maintaining Order, Charles A. Kupchan (Georgetown University professor), Sept 8, 2026. A proposal for a new international system that is at once centralized and regionalized.
• New York Times, Chinese Ship Takes Arctic Shortcut: Smart Business? Or a Political Flex? Jeffrey Gettleman, Jenny Gross and Lily Kuo, Sept. 8, 2026. Melting ice is opening a trade route through the Arctic. China has begun the first regular service, part of its polar ambitions.

More On U.S. Media, Sports, Culture

• Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: My Letter to CBS Staff, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 8, 2026. This is my open letter to CBS reporters and staff, as well as reporters and staff who work for other corporate news outlets that are continuing to bow to Trump’s fascism and this fatal right-wing propaganda machine. Yesterday, it was reported that Bari Weiss, who runs CBS News, was considering hiring Maria Bartiromo after she left Fox News. Now, I personally believe Maria Bartiromo is among the worst propagandists that there are, and one of the worst Trump sycophants and bootlickers that there are, and that she’s responsible for spreading a massive amount of lies and disinformation.
• New York Times, LIV Golf files for bankruptcy protection, will attempt to restructure, Gabby Herzig, Sept. 8, 2026. LIV Golf’s effort to save its business and resurrect a new iteration of the league now includes bankruptcy. The league submitted a Chapter 11 filing in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey on Tuesday, according to court documents.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Snowflakes and Petals of Influence NYT Chooses to Ignore, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right,), Sept. 8, 2026. Mayor Zohran Mamdani had just decided to cancel a $9 million contract that New York City had with the consulting giant McKinsey, and gushing praise came pouring in from commentators, operatives on the left and even some comedians. To be sure, after laying out that Mamdani wielded the attention economy superbly, starting in ¶8, New York Times spun it as something corrupt, suggesting (falsely) that a PR campaign misused public funds, implying that using Signal, by itself, defied transparency, and insinuating a $175,000 salary for the person who is a key reason Mamdani is successful is too much. 
• New York Times, NOTUS Rebrands as The Washington Sun, Katie Robertson, Sept. 8, 2026. A trademark dispute scuttled its plans to relaunch as The Washington Star, so the site chose a different name. NOTUS, which stands for News of the United States, was started in 2023 by the media entrepreneur Robert Allbritton, a co-founder of Politico. A nonprofit newsroom, it initially focused on coverage of government and policy. But as The Post pulled back from metro news, Mr. Allbritton saw room to fill that void.

Sept. 8

Top Stories

President Trump published the map above on Labor Day, which follows up previous grandiose claims undermining U.S. prestige as his previous claim (shown below) about ownership of the Western Hemisphere. The deranged behavior by the U.S. president who aspires to rule a new version of a colonial empire increasingly undermines U.S. and global national security, as indicated by news and comment below.

The New Republic, Trump Sparks Diplomatic Incident With His “USA” Map, Malcolm Ferguson, Sept. 8, 2026. Iceland has summoned the U.S. ambassador.

President Trump has drawn the ire of Iceland after posting a map (shown above) depicting the country as part of the United States.

Along with Iceland, the image also included Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean draped in the U.S. flag. The Truth Social post, made on Labor Day, was captionless.

The post—paternalistic at best, colonial at worst—raised enough alarm in Iceland to lead the country’s foreign minister, Thorgerdur Gunnarsdóttir, to summon U.S. Ambassador Billy Long, right. Gunnarsdóttir later told RUV, Iceland’s national broadcasting service, that “it was made clear at the meeting that the post was completely inappropriate.” Other Icelandic leaders felt similarly, comparing their experience to that of Greenland, which Trump has threatened to annex since he returned to office.

“It is not good to be an enemy of the United States, but it is even worse to be its friend,” alternate city councilor Stefán Pálsson told RUV. “What is shocking about the way Greenland has been treated is not really that the United States behaves like this towards another country, but simply that we are not used to it being done to us.”

“I hope, given how this took over the debate in Greenland, that we do not end up in the same place and that we do not allow Trump to set the agenda for the debate here,” Federation of State and Municipal Employees Chair Sonja Thorbergsdóttir said. “But of course this is disrespectful and this is not how civilized nations should behave towards one another.”

The post was yet another example of Trump’s recklessness eroding the seriousness and legitimacy of U.S soft power. 

 

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: As Trump Blows Off New York On 9/11, He Repeats Lie That He Was Near Ground Zero, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 8, 2026. On Tuesday, Donald Trump held an event in Washington, DC, where he claimed he was at or near Ground Zero on 9/11 (shown above from an aerial view), but his story is a total lie.

Donald Trump has been lying about 9/11 for more than a decade. At various times, Trump has claimed he was at Ground Zero. Trump has also claimed that he went to Ground Zero. There are always some firefighters or police interacting with Trump in the story, and the president has also falsely claimed that he saw Muslims celebrating on 9/11.

With the 25th anniversary of the attack coming up this week, it was time for Donald Trump to lie again.

The 2026 version of his 9/11 is:

 For three months after September 11th, the flames raged in the rubble of Ground Zero. For nine months, rescue and recovery crews worked day and night on the site. I wanna just thank my people. I took a lot of my m- I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened, and they were-- they had no hesitation.

Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn't too much we could do, I'll be honest. It was, it was raw. Nobody's seen anything like it, ever. We had other buildings. The United States Steel Building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was gonna fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks. But, uh, it never came down. And, uh, I re-- I'll never forget, two firemen, we thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big, strong guys, and I'm not the smallest guy in the world, they grabbed me under the arms, said, "Gotta get outta here," and they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I'm big.

They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, "Fellas, I can run myself." But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn't come down, U.S. Steel.

Trump’s story is a lie, so as the president who isn’t going to ground zero makes up more tales, let’s look at the truth.

There is no public evidence or witness accounts to support what Trump is saying.

CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale posted on X:

President Trump was not in the vicinity of the World Trade Center when it was hit. He was in Trump Tower, miles away from the towers and nearby One Liberty Plaza, which is/was also known as the US Steel building.

There was public concern in the days following the attack that One Liberty Plaza might collapse, but the authorities repeatedly said it was structurally sound, and there's not currently any public evidence Trump went into it amid these collapse worries (?), much less that he was rushed out by firefighters. In varying language, he has repeatedly claimed for years he was at Ground Zero with a large crew of his workers helping with the recovery in the days after 9/11, but people who were definititely on site have said they never saw him or a Trump-organized crew on site and that it wouldn't make sense for them to have had access; there are pictures and videos of Trump in the neighborhood in the following days, in a clean suit, but not on the actual site.

While campaigning in 2016, he told a version of today's story about being whisked away from One Liberty Plaza by big firemen, but he said in 2016 that the alleged incident happened "a couple of days" after 9/11 and claimed the creaky building was "not so far from us," instead of leaving open the impression he might've been a) inside it b) on 9/11 itself.

Trump’s 9/11 tales are a lot like stolen valor. Thousands of people lost their lives that day. Thousands more who were involved in the first response and cleanup would go on to suffer from illnesses like cancer and either struggle with chronic illness or lose their lives after the attack.

9/11 is one of the darkest days in American history, and Donald Trump can’t stop making up stories to make himself look good.

Trump’s comments are embarrassing and disgraceful, and in some ways, it is a blessing that he will not be at Ground Zero to mark this solemn anniversary.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump Wants to Exhaust Us. He’s Failing, Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger, Sept. 8, 2026. Labor Day is in the rearview mirror, and the midterms are suddenly only fifty-six days away. Keep your head on a swivel. Happy Tuesday.

New York Times, Netanyahu’s Rivals Call Him ‘Unfit’ After Report He Was Warned Before Oct. 7 Attack, Ephrat Livni and Isabel Kershner, Sept. 8, 2026. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office denied the report in Haaretz that the Emirati president had warned him Hamas was planning a major operation against Israel.Israeli opposition politicians said on Tuesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, was “unfit” for office after a newspaper reported he had been warned by the president of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major operation weeks before the Oct. 7, 2023, attack but did not alert security officials.

The report in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, which The New York Times could not confirm, said that Mr. Netanyahu had a 45-minute phone call with Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the Emirati president, in late September 2023, and was told about a plan by Hamas to attack Israel and destabilize the region. Mr. Netanyahu’s office has denied the report.

Mr. Netanyahu was said to have been unfazed by the revelations, responding that Israel was prepared for any scenario, according to the report.

In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said that he had not been personally warned by the Emirati president. “No warning was given to the Prime Minister from the United Arab Emirates,” it said. “If there was any relevant information, it was passed through intelligence channels between the two countries.”

The Emirati foreign ministry said in a statement that it did not comment on “media stories or speculation regarding conversations between government leaders.” It added that the Emirati and Israeli governments had “open and direct lines of communication” and that “all relevant intelligence” was transmitted between them.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the West Bank and Gaza Strip? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

The report that Mr. Netanyahu may not have been responsive to warnings about the attacks landed at a particularly sensitive time for him and Israel. National elections are planned for late October, and Mr. Netanyahu’s chances of being re-elected are not assured.

The questions about what the Israeli prime minister had been told, by whom and when in the period leading to the Hamas-led assault have become hot-button election issues in a deeply polarized country.

Mr. Netanyahu has sought to present himself as the only politician positioned to ensure Israel’s security. And he has seemed to shift blame onto others for the Oct. 7 assault, the single deadliest day in Israel’s history, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 250 others taken hostage to Gaza.

Recently, Mr. Netanyahu asserted that Israeli security officials had chosen not to wake him up in the early hours of Oct. 7, despite worrying signs from Gaza, because they had feared he would respond aggressively and set off a war with Hamas.

 

New York Times, Israeli Allies Ban Trade With Settlements as U.K. Cites ‘Ethnic Cleansing,’ Stephen Castle, Adam Rasgon, Aaron Boxerman and Isabel Kershner, Sept. 8, 2026. Britain, Canada and France on Tuesday announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, with Britain saying Israel had “turned a blind eye” to violence against Palestinians.

Britain, Canada and France on Tuesday announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, a symbolic step by three once-staunch allies illustrating Israel’s deepening isolation after the devastating war in Gaza and settler violence in the West Bank.

Israel has been increasingly ostracized over its conduct of the war in Gaza, in which tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed. International attention is now focused on its tightening grip on the West Bank and its expansion of illegal settlements there. In recent weeks, Israeli extremist settlers have repeatedly attacked Palestinians as the military has stood by.

Israel responded to Britain’s announcement with fury and indignation and announced countermeasures. Israel said it would close the British Consulate General in East Jerusalem. The institution, founded in 1839, represents the British government in Jerusalem, the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

The coordinated move by the three nations risks further souring their relationship with the Trump administration, which has been a firm supporter of Israel both diplomatically and militarily, although the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has spoken out against settler violence.

Britain’s package of measures was announced on Tuesday in Parliament by Ed Miliband, who became foreign secretary in July. It represents the clearest shift in British foreign policy since Andy Burnham became prime minister that month.

“Today marks the beginning of a new approach,” Mr. Miliband told lawmakers. He said that the British government “agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank — perpetrated by settler terrorists.” All too often, he added, “the Israeli government has turned a blind eye to this and worse.”

In a speech with an often deeply personal tone, Mr. Miliband said that he had made his announcement as a “proud British Jew” who was “unwavering” in his support for the state of Israel. He added, however, that Britain had concluded that the occupation was unlawful in line with a ruling by the International Court of Justice.

“So I can announce today that we will introduce an import ban on goods from illegal settlements in the occupied territories,” he said, adding that the measures would also cover those who provide services to settlements, including “construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion.”

The U.S. secretary of state, Marco Rubio, cast the move as potentially undermining efforts toward de-escalating tensions in the West Bank.

“We don’t want to see anything destabilizing going on right now in the West Bank with so much going on in the region,” he told reporters when asked about the British announcement. 

New York Times, Mamdani Accuses Former N.Y.C. Leaders of Lying About 9/11 Air Quality, Sally Goldenberg,Nina Agrawal and Joseph Goldstein, Sept. 8, 2026. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that New Yorkers had gotten sick “because the leaders they trusted lied.” On Tuesday, he released 170,000 pages of records related to the aftermath of the attacks.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday accused previous New York City leaders of lying about air quality safety after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, resulting in residents and workers developing serious illnesses years later.

“People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” he said at a news conference at City Hall, surrounded by politicians, relatives of those who died on Sept. 11 and advocates for the health of those now suffering from illnesses that surfaced years after the attacks.

“As the years pass and the human toll grows, we reckon with the cost of Sept. 11 whenever another New Yorker is stolen from us too soon,” Mr. Mamdani said at the event, where he announced the release of more than 170,000 pages of documents related to toxic air quality around the site of the felled towers.

Mr. Mamdani declined, when asked repeatedly, to say who he believed lied to the public and what exactly they lied about. But in the weeks and months after Sept. 11, city and federal officials, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, the mayor at the time of the attacks, and Christine Todd Whitman, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, reassured New Yorkers that the air around ground zero was safe to breathe.

But the documents, which The New York Times reviewed in advance of their release, revealed various instances in which carcinogens were present in the area for months after the attacks.

An audit from November 2001, based on information provided by the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, confirmed that there were elevated levels of the carcinogen benzene near ground zero that month, as well as increases in the concentration of ambient asbestos on Staten Island.

Ten months after the attacks, asbestos was still being found around 15 John Street, a building less than a mile from the World Trade Center.

The records were stored in 68 boxes in a city office, shielded from public view for more than two decades and, according to city officials, discovered only last year. The release of the documents resolves a lawsuit that had demanded their release filed by an advocacy organization, 9/11 Health Watch.

Trump Pressures Force Resignation of America's Top Museum and Library Chief 

 

New York Times, Smithsonian’s Secretary to Resign as Trump Tries to Rule the Institution, Robin Pogrebin and Graham Bowley, Sept. 8, 2026. In the face of escalating White House attacks about how museums present American history, Lonnie G. Bunch III has announced his decision to depart.

After a seven-year run marked most recently by attacks from the Trump administration, Lonnie G. Bunch III, right, announced on Tuesday that he was stepping down as secretary of the Smithsonian.

The White House has escalated its criticism of how the Smithsonian presents American history and values, prompting concern from some about what they see as an assault on the institution’s autonomy and commendation from others for reining in an organization they view as overtaken by liberal bias.

In an interview, Mr. Bunch, 73, said it was not the pressure that had led to his departure.

“It was really just saying, now’s the time,” he said.

“I’m a fighter,” he added.

At the same time, he acknowledged the strain of the role.

“I have to be honest, it has been stressful,” he said. “And at a certain point, I’d like to wake up in the morning and not look at my cellphone.”

In a statement, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who serves as the Smithsonian’s chancellor, said that Mr. Bunch had “pursued excellence in the telling of our nation’s story” and that the Smithsonian had “benefited greatly from his wisdom, vision and leadership.” The Smithsonian said Mr. Bunch was expected to depart at the end of the year.

For more than a year, Mr. Bunch has tried to balance diplomacy and openness to criticism with a determination to resist a White House push to present what President Trump calls “patriotic” history. Some admire how Mr. Bunch has managed to quietly hold the line against the White House. Others believe that the Smithsonian has shown too much deference to Mr. Trump and even engaged in self-censorship.

Last year, the painter Amy Sherald withdrew her blockbuster show at the National Portrait Gallery over a disagreement about how the museum would display her portrait of a transgender Statue of Liberty.

But Mr. Bunch said he had no regrets. “My goal has been to win, not to make me feel good,” he said. “To win — to protect the Smithsonian — there were times I would fight, make clear what the red lines were. And there were other times I let things go.”

Mr. Bunch, a widely respected historian who previously oversaw the creation of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, said his next chapter would most likely include teaching or a fellowship.

Created by Congress as a trust in 1846, the Smithsonian has long been viewed as independent of the executive branch. Its governing Board of Regents must now appoint a new leader in the face of withering attacks from the administration.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Washington D.C.? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

The 17-person panel, led by Chief Justice Roberts, includes six members of Congress, split along party lines; nine private citizens; and Vice President JD Vance. The terms of three citizen members have recently expired, and the names of replacement nominees have not made it to Congress, an unusual holding pattern that appears to be evidence of the shadow war over control of the Smithsonian.

In the short term, Mr. Bunch seemed to have sufficient board support to stay on. But he has indicated that he is weary of the fray and ready for some form of retirement.

“When you’re Black in America, you’ve got to figure out how to get through, right?” he told The New York Times in May. “You’ve got to figure out how to build allies, when to stand firm, when to bang the table. So in some ways, all of that prepared me for this moment.”

“But do I wish I was in it?” he continued, referring to scrutiny by the Trump administration. “Of course not. Good Lord, I wish that I was doing my goodbye tour.”

Over nearly 40 years in various roles at the Smithsonian, Mr. Bunch developed a reputation as a soft-spoken diplomat adept at raising money and dealing with public officials. As the institution’s first Black secretary, he has at times been a forceful voice on issues of race, particularly after the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020.

Mr. Trump did not pay much attention to Washington’s cultural organizations in his first term but has made them a focus of his second, including through his efforts to govern, close and renovate the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Smithsonian has been forced to respond to White House demands or risk potential cuts to its $1 billion budget, which is largely funded by the federal government.

Last month, in a letter to the board, Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, and Vince Haley, a senior White House adviser, made the stakes clear.Trump Administration: Live UpdatesUpdated Sept. 8, 2026, 10:20 a.m. ET2 hours ago

Here’s the latest.Document suggest that New Yorkers were misled about air quality after 9/11.

“The Smithsonian enjoys support from executive departments and agencies,” the letter said. “Those executive departments and agencies cannot in good conscience continue to support the Smithsonian under current leadership.”

The president’s attempt to overhaul the Smithsonian began last year with an executive order that accused the institution of promoting “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive” and called for an end to spending on exhibitions or programs that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with federal law.”

After the White House demanded that the Smithsonian turn over information about the content of its exhibitions, Mr. Bunch reasserted the institution’s independence while saying that materials had been submitted in an effort to be “transparent.”

The board adopted a resolution that called for its 21 museums to review their content for partisanship or bias. But the administration began its own review of exhibitions, wall text and social media to assess “tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.”

Mr. Trump has been unrelenting in his criticism, posting on social media that “the Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.”

The president also announced online that he was dismissing the director of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI.” (The Smithsonian insisted it controlled personnel matters, but Ms. Sajet resigned, citing the institution’s best interests.)

The White House pressure reached a new pitch this year with a July 4 report about the National Museum of American History that accused its director of “radical activist ideology” and the museum of undermining “faith in American institutions.”

Special Report: American Food Safety

 “Mary had a little lamb, but when she saw it sicken, she sent it off to Packingtown, and now it’s labeled chicken.”

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Where’s the Beef (Coming From)? Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 8, 2026.That’s a little ditty that was circulating, I can’t find any original source, around 1905, when Upton Sinclair published “The Jungle” — about the meatpacking industry, one of the sort of founding documents of the progressive movement.

The topic today is Donald Trump and beef, because here we are back in Upton Sinclair territory.

So you may have seen that last month Trump announced, given that we have high beef prices, that he was going to allow the tariff-free import of 300,000 tons of ground beef.

Rather oddly, he didn’t say from where and wouldn’t say from where for a while. And then eventually said, well, from Argentina, Brazil, and other places.

There has been a substantial uproar over these imports of ground beef because of concerns about safety. You know, if he won’t even say where it’s coming from or whether the countries involved are going to be practicing food safety, that is kind of an issue. And it turns out it’s not just, you know, not just woke liberal types but ranchers, lawmakers and food safety experts who were very concerned about the plan and were not reassured when Trump said the meat is “very clean and very good.”

Okay, little by little details are coming out about how all of this happened. It turns out that the initial plan to allow the beef imports was announced the day after a closed door meeting between Trump and a Brazilian meat packing billionaire who is a major donor to Trump.

And they went right ahead and announced the plan, although again without details. There doesn’t seem to have been much discussion of how this would work, of the concerns. After some initial blowback — even ranchers are concerned that people might become worried about the safety of U.S. beef — Trump announced that he was going to also allow farmers and ranchers to process their own beef rather than having to go through the regular meatpacking companies. But it turned out that the ranchers hate that too, because what they want is for people to believe that beef is safe. They want to be assured that there are quality standards being upheld.

And now that we have at least some information about the origins of the beef, we are even less reassured. In fact, just the other day, the European Union banned beef imports from Brazil because Brazil was not adhering to EU standards on the use of antibiotics. So there are, in fact, real concerns here about safety.

Okay, this is quite a story, and beef is not that trivial a product, but there’s a lot of secondary implications here. The first is that this is a very Trumpian story. It’s got this sort of characteristic combination of raw corruption and raw incompetence. Raw might not have been the best word to use here, but anyway.

The corruption: Obviously, this was a decision made because somebody who has given Trump’s campaign and possibly Trump himself money had a meeting with him and got an immediate policy change. So this certainly looks like undue influence. We don’t know exactly how it happened because it was a closed-door meeting.

Also, shouldn’t somebody have been in the room to or at least passed on this before it was announced to say, you know, is this a good idea? Shouldn’t there have been somebody from the Agriculture Department, somebody from the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office, but certainly someone from food safety to pass judgment or give some warning?

In a normal administration, any kind of decision like this involves a process in which multiple agencies get a chance to weigh in and in which somebody who knows something gets to say, look, there are real problems with this idea. But obviously that didn’t happen here. And basically it doesn’t happen in this administration.

This is an administration that does not like experts. Does not listen to expertise. That’s not just a result of particular personnel decisions that Trump made. That is just a defining characteristic. At a fundamental level, they’re just hostile to the idea of expertise in any domain, in pretty much every agency where there’s something to know, where there’s technical stuff that you need to know to make good decisions.

The people who actually know things, or the people who are willing to speak up about what they know, have been silenced, purged. That’s across the board. Basically, it’s Hegseths all the way down in this administration.

And so in this case, nobody was there apparently to say, this is really not a very good idea.

And I think it’s really striking that even Trump thought, well, okay, I can fix this. At least I can mend fences with the ranchers by giving them more leeway to be unregulated themselves. But it turns out that the ranchers want regulation. They want customers to know that the beef that they buy is safe. So just raw incompetence on top of the raw corruption.

There’s an even larger issue here. Normally, when we think about, or as we used to think about, left versus right, there is a question about the role of government. How big a role should government play? And ultimately, it’s a values question, normally. It is a question, should it be the government’s business to ensure that citizens are not in dire poverty? Should it be the government’s business to ensure that everyone has access to essential healthcare?

And the question of how far in that direction you want to go is the traditional left-right distinction. Obviously, I’m on one side of that, and I think that morally I’m right. I think even in practical terms I’m right, but that is a debatable point.

But there are certain roles that government must play. The government needs to provide public goods. The government needs to provide things that the private sector cannot do for itself, which is obviously things like national defense, things like public safety, and it turns out also things like ensuring the safety of the food supply, just like ensuring the safety of the water supply.

It turns out that regulation of what goes on in meatpacking plants, regulation of what goes into your food is something that you really want the government to do. Even people in the industries want that unless they are particularly unethical types. The people who are trying to do the business right want those public goods provided because if you don’t have those provided, then people will not trust their products.

And this is not something that you can leave up to the private sector. It’s not something where you can do your own research. It’s a very complicated world out there. And the informational burden of trying to figure out whether the people responsible for your package of hamburger are actually following safe procedures, that’s beyond everybody. It’s actually quite similar in a way to public health measures, including, by the way, of course, vaccination.

Like I said, it’s all the same story here: This retreat from even the most essential roles of government.

So this is not an administration that’s trying to turn the clock back to 1930. It’s not trying to undo the New Deal. It’s an administration that’s trying to turn us back to the 19th century or before. It’s really just trying to undo even the most essential functions of government.

They’re not doing this, I think, out of a philosophical concern. I don’t think they have a theory that says that we really don’t need these things. They just don’t think about it at all. They don’t do expertise. They don’t do thinking, really. And a lot of policy is just based upon who last spoke to Donald Trump and who has given him money.

It turns out that this is a case in which Brazil — and it appears it’s probably Brazil, there may be some Argentine stuff here, but it’s probably Brazil — Brazil is notorious for not practicing internationally accepted standards on the safety of its meat.

And so the last thing you want to do is allow Brazilian ground beef to be admixed. And by the way, none of this would be unique origin. This would be trimmings of beef that get ground up and mixed in with other beef. And basically, if you get a package of hamburger in the United States under this rule, you will have basically no idea where it came from. You’ll have no idea under what conditions the cattle were raised or how the meat was processed. And this is not something that’s in the interest of really anybody except personally this particular Brazilian beef baron who may have a bunch of unsold beef because the Europeans have turned back a shipment.

And of course Donald Trump himself presumably is getting some financial benefit personally out of the whole thing.

So it’s quite a story. It’s in a way captures all in one place everything that is going wrong, how quickly the United States is descending into kind of pre-modern, pre-development status. We’re just giving up all of the things that make an advanced society and advanced economy work.

Okay, that was hard work. And I’m kind of hungry. So I think I’m going to have a piece of hamburger with some iceberg lettuce.

Actually, maybe not.

Special Report: U.S. Senator Has Frequently Sued Maternity Patients

New York Times, Exclusive: A Doctor Sued 700 Patients for Debts; 81 Were Arrested. Now He’s a Senator, Sarah Kliff, Sept. 8, 2026. Patients sued by Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas were routinely charged 18 percent interest, The Times found. Some had bank accounts garnished.

 It was Easter weekend in 2007 when a police car pulled up to Joe Vasquez’s home in rural Kansas.

A doctor had filed a lawsuit against him and his wife over an unpaid $4,561 bill from her emergency hysterectomy three years earlier. They had missed a court date, and the doctor’s lawyers asked the court to issue an arrest warrant.

The police took the couple into custody as their grandchildren prepared for an egg hunt, Mr. Vasquez said. They spent two days in jail before their son could borrow the money to post bond.

“We had no money to pay,” said Mr. Vasquez, now 68. At the time, his wife was working at a manufacturing plant and he was on disability, he said.

The doctor who sued the couple was Roger Marshall, right, now a senator from Kansas. Mr. Marshall, a Republican who is seeking re-election this fall, filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, according to a New York Times analysis of Kansas court records.

Patients were arrested in 81 of those cases for missing court dates, the record show. In an additional 13 lawsuits, Mr. Marshall’s lawyers sought warrants but it is unclear whether an arrest occurred.

They also garnished patients’ paychecks and bank accounts. They routinely charged patients an 18 percent annual interest rate.

The unpaid bills ranged from several thousand dollars to as little as $101. About half the lawsuits were filed under Mr. Marshall’s name and the rest by Heartland Regional OBGYN, the medical practice he solely owned from 1998 to 2012 and then co-owned with another doctor from 2013 to 2019.

Some facing lawsuits were new mothers with outstanding bills from their deliveries. Most lived in Barton County, a rural area with above-average uninsured and poverty rates. Some patients the Times spoke with lacked insurance; others had health coverage but were responsible for part of their bill.

ImageJoe Vasquez and his wife were arrested at an Easter party after missing a court date in their medical debt collection case. Credit...Clayton Steward for The New York Times

“I had every intention to pay, I was just struggling,” said Kellie Clutts, whom Mr. Marshall sued in 2015 over a $129 bill. Ms. Clutts said the charge was from a postpartum visit shortly after her daughter’s birth.

Mr. Marshall sued Ms. Clutts when her baby was 9 months old and eventually garnished her bank account.

“I was recently divorced, trying to do everything on my own,” said Ms. Clutts, 45. “I told them I could make partial payments, but it seemed like no matter what I said, they wanted the full amount at once.”

In response to detailed questions from the Times, a spokeswoman for Mr. Marshall said that he spent decades caring for patients regardless of their ability to pay.

“Judges issue warrants when people repeatedly miss court dates, not doctors,” the spokeswoman, Payton Fuller, wrote in a statement.

Court records show that Mr. Marshall’s lawyers repeatedly requested arrest warrants, including in Mr. Vasquez’s case. They filed dozens of briefs arguing that warrants were needed because the of the defendant’s “refusal to obey Court orders.”

Steven Johnson, a lawyer who often represented Mr. Marshall in debt cases, defended the warrants and ensuing arrests as necessary to ensure that debtors attended court dates.

“If defendants were allowed to appear only when they wanted to without any consequences the court would get no business done,” he wrote in a text message.

He said that Mr. Marshall was “no different” than his other clients in allowing his law firm to take the steps they felt were necessary to pursue an outstanding bill. As a client, Mr. Marshall was not involved in decisions about when to seek warrants, arrests, or garnishments, Mr. Johnson said, but did set the 18 percent interest rate in a contract he had patients sign. Mr. Marshall’s office did not respond to a question from The Times about who set the interest rate.

Doctors have wide discretion in how to handle unpaid bills. They can decide when to involve a debt collector, file lawsuits or drop the debt entirely if a patient seems unable to pay.

“There is a lot of variation,” said Barak Richman, the co-director of the health law program at George Washington University who has studied medical debt litigation in three states. “There are a lot that do bring lawsuits but also a whole lot that don’t. It’s not because they’re in a different position, they’ve just decided they’re not going to do it.”

Some hospitals and doctors have increasingly relied on litigation as insurance deductibles have risen, leaving patients responsible for a great share of their bills.

Even so, wage garnishments and arrests of patients are “definitely on the extreme side,” Mr. Richman said.

Neale Mahoney, an economist at Stanford University, has conducted research in one state finding that lawsuits against patients are relatively rare, with about 1.7 percent of hospital stays resulting in litigation.

“It’s not surprising there are outliers but this does seem to be an extreme case,” in terms of how far a doctor went to pursue debt, Mr. Mahoney said.

Federal law made debtors prisons illegal centuries ago but many states’ laws allow for arrests when the defendant in a debt lawsuit misses a court date.

The Times interviewed eight people Mr. Marshall sued between 2003 and 2015. Most described themselves as living paycheck to paycheck, often deciding between paying medical bills or buying groceries. Two said that the bills Mr. Marshall pursued in court stemmed from late miscarriages that required surgery.

Mr. Marshall stopped practicing medicine after winning election to Congress in 2016. But some of his collection work continued during his time serving in the House of Representatives, from 2017 to 2021, The Times found.ImageSupporters carrying a Marshall campaign sign in 2020. The senator’s website says that he was often “the only OB-GYN in the area” in his largely rural region of the state. Credit...Mark Reinstein/MediaPunch, via Associated Press‘Doc Marshall’

Mr. Marshall spent more than 25 years practicing obstetrics before running for Congress in 2016. In campaign materials, he frequently trumpeted his work delivering babies and the financial success of his medical practice. Both his Senate and his campaign websites refer to him as “Doc Marshall.”

“For 5,000 Kansans, life began here, in the trusted hands of Dr. Marshall,” an ad during his 2020 campaign for Senate said, showing the senator holding two newborns.

His current campaign website says that he was often “the only OB-GYN in the area” in his largely rural region of the state. He has also highlighted his care of low-income patients. Sometimes, he said in 2017, women drove “over a hundred miles” to see him because he accepted Medicaid, the public health benefits program for the poor.

In 1998, he and eight other doctors opened a four-bed surgical center in Great Bend. It steadily grew into a full-service hospital generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue. He served as the hospital’s board chairman, and his family remained co-owners of the hospital until March 2017, two months after he was sworn into office.

Mr. Marshall earned salaries both from his obstetrics practice and the hospital. In 2015, his combined earnings from the two was about $780,000, his 2016 financial disclosure report shows. His current worth is between $3 million and 9.8 million, according to his most recent financial disclosure report.

Great Bend Regional Medical Center also filed hundreds of lawsuits against patients during the years Mr. Marshall was either an investor or board chair.

More than a dozen of those lawsuits occurred while Mr. Marshall served in Congress and before he sold his ownership stake in the hospital, according to Kansas court records and Mr. Marshall’s financial disclosures.

Ms. Fuller, Mr. Marshall’s spokeswoman, said that the hospital “provided millions in uncompensated care” and “used the exact same billing and outside collection procedures as every other business or hospital in Kansas.”

She added, “Sixty days before an election, The New York Times has decided that a rural doctor keeping the hospital’s lights on is some kind of scandal. Kansans know better.”

When Mr. Marshall was elected to Congress, he quickly parlayed his experience as a doctor and health care investor into a central role in Republicans’ 2017 attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the sweeping health care law enacted under President Barack Obama. “I may be the only physician in Congress to help run a hospital,” he said.

In July 2025, he introduced legislation that would prohibit hospitals from suing patients if they did not publicly post their medical prices.

The first time Meischa Zimmerman was arrested for missing a court date related to a C-section bill from Mr. Marshall was in 2011. She was home with her 2-year-old, and eight months pregnant.

“I asked them quietly: Can you not handcuff me in front of my daughter?” said Ms. Zimmerman, 44. “I explained to my daughter I was going for a ride.”

Ms. Zimmerman was arrested twice more, in 2013 and 2016, each time posting $200 bonds that would go toward paying down her debt, according to receipts The Times reviewed. Court records indicate that she was hand-delivered notices of the hearings she needed to attend, but Ms. Zimmerman said she did not receive such documents.

Her last arrest occurred the week after Mr. Marshall won his first congressional election.

Ms. Zimmerman was uninsured during the earlier pregnancy, in 2009, but had explored enrolling in Medicaid. All states offer Medicaid coverage to low-income women during pregnancy and for a short period after. But states set their own income caps, and Kansas has long had one of the lowest in the country, limiting the benefit to women who earn less than 150 percent of the poverty line.

Ms. Zimmerman was not working at the time and thought she might qualify. She made an interview appointment at her local Medicaid office but went into labor the night before, so didn’t show up and never completed the paperwork. Five months later, with her $3,596 bill for the delivery still unpaid, Mr. Marshall sued her.

“I had to choose whether I’d pay my electricity or pay $50 to a doctor who didn’t need it,” she said.

Ms. Zimmerman said she set up a $50 monthly payment plan in 2010 but sometimes could not keep up. Mr. Marshall’s law firm was charging 18 percent interest on her bill, and she recalls being told that it had ballooned to over $7,000 with interest.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Slammed Over ‘Horrific’ 9/11 Lies, NYC's Post-9/11 Toxic Air Cover-Up Exposed, America's Allies Leave the U.S. Behind, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Trump gave 9/11 survivors and families fresh reason to be furious this week. At Tuesday’s Ellipse ceremony, he once again told a version of himself being carried out of danger by firefighters near Ground Zero, a story that’s changed shape over the years and that first responders say never happened.

He made those claims at the very event where he awarded the Medal of Freedom to Welles Crowther, the real hero known as “the man in the red bandanna,” and he’s now skipping Friday’s actual Ground Zero memorial for a Pentagon stop and a golf trip to Ireland. Meanwhile, Mayor Mamdani released 170,000 pages of documents proving what survivors have said for decades: city officials knew the air around Ground Zero was toxic and told people it was safe to breathe anyway.

We’ve also got a full rundown of just how isolated the U.S. is looking on the world stage right now, Canada accelerating its pivot away from Washington, a twelve-country coalition sanctioning Israeli settlements over the Trump administration’s objections, and Jared Kushner getting publicly grilled on his negotiating record as Russia resumed strikes on Kyiv the same day. Plus South Park trolling Trump by renaming itself, the Smithsonian’s top official stepping down amid White House pressure, and more.

I know I ask a lot, and if you’re already a subscriber, thank you, genuinely. But this is how this work gets funded. If you can tonight, subscribe. None of this happens without subscribers. None of this happens without you.Subscribed

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Here’s the news.

Trump Sparks 9/11 Outrage:

Nine-eleven survivors and family members have long expressed fury at Donald Trump’s habit of inserting himself into the story of that day, and Tuesday gave them fresh material. Speaking at an Ellipse ceremony with a recovered World Trade Center steel beam on display, Trump once again claimed two firefighters had to physically carry him out of the area when the nearby U.S. Steel Building appeared at risk of collapse, saying “they grabbed me under the arm... they literally lifted me up.” But he told a notably different version of this same story back in January 2016, when he said the incident happened after hearing a “screech” and described the building as merely “not so far from us,” never claiming to have actually been inside it or near the towers themselves. First responders who were actually on the ground have said they never saw him there at all.

The fury extends to Trump’s broader, long-disputed claims about his role in the recovery. He repeated Tuesday that he sent “a big group of people” from his own construction workforce to help at Ground Zero, a claim retired FDNY battalion chief Richard Alles told PolitiFact in 2019 he had “no knowledge” of, noting a hundred-person crew would have left a record. Only video of Trump in a suit near, not at, Ground Zero days after the attacks has ever surfaced. This is the same pattern of exaggeration that produced his infamous, widely debunked 2015 claim that “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City were “cheering as that building was coming down,” a claim police confirmed never happened and that he refused to walk back even after being corrected.

Adding insult for many families, Trump made these claims at the very ceremony where he posthumously awarded the Medal of Freedom to Welles Crowther, the 24-year-old “man in the red bandanna” who died saving an estimated 18 people in the South Tower, and Trump couldn’t resist noting Crowther “has become more famous than me... I don’t like it.” He’s also chosen to skip Friday’s actual Ground Zero memorial in New York, where all four living former presidents plan to attend, opting instead for a Pentagon ceremony before flying to Ireland for a golf tournament, with Vice President JD Vance attending Ground Zero in his place. For survivors and families who’ve spent 25 years fighting just to get the truth about that day acknowledged, watching a president repeatedly rewrite his own role in it, then skip the one ceremony that centers their loss, is exactly the kind of self-serving distortion that keeps reopening the wound.

Mamdani Releases 9/11 Records Showing NYC Officials Lied:

Newly released documents show that toxic air quality was being recorded in Manhattan soon after the 9/11 attacks even as officials publicly downplayed the health risks, with Mayor Zohran Mamdani saying asbestos was found “nearly everywhere” tested near Ground Zero. Announcing the release of 170,000 documents, Mamdani said “people got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air,” and noted illnesses from the dust and smoke have now claimed more lives than the nearly 3,000 people who died in the attacks themselves. Jon Stewart, appearing alongside him, said the files show the city knew by October 2001 that Manhattan’s air was toxic, sarcastically adding “to be fair to them, they only buried that information for 25 years.” Days after the attacks, city and federal officials including the EPA had declared the air near the Twin Towers safe, a declaration then-EPA head Christine Todd Whitman later apologized for, saying the agency “did the very best we could at the time with the knowledge we had.” The records include air-quality reports and internal communications, and were released through an online portal timed to Friday’s 25th anniversary, with more documents expected over the next year.

Among the most damning documents is the October 2001 “Harding Memo,” in which an aide warned then-Deputy Mayor Robert Harding that the city could face as many as 35,000 legal claims over its response, partly because health advisories had caused people “to return to the area too soon (causing toxic exposure or emotional harm).” A separate memo documenting Congressman Jerry Nadler’s concerns showed city officials advised residents to clean up dust and debris with “wet mops and rags” despite the presence of asbestos, which is only supposed to be handled by licensed professionals. That memo, attributed to Bloomberg-era special adviser Ester Fuchs, cited the city’s top health official testifying there were “no elevated levels of asbestos in indoor air” even as testing showed “low levels of asbestos in some samples,” and it explicitly acknowledged “potential problems for City Hall.” Tuesday’s release resolves a lawsuit brought by the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch, which sued after officials claimed they didn’t have the records, and the documents were only found last year in 68 boxes discovered in a city office.

The human toll behind the numbers is stark. Karen Klingon, who was involved in the 9/11 Health Watch lawsuit, told the BBC her brother Robert lived five minutes from Ground Zero, developed asthma, was later diagnosed with cancer, and died at 61 of a related brain tumor; she said she hopes more research into what was in the air could help others who got sick understand what happened to them. Phil Alvarez, whose brother Luis died of cancer in 2019 after Ground Zero exposure, said people “continue to get sick every single day, continue to die.” Thousands have experienced health effects like cancer since the towers collapsed, many of them fatal, and the newly released files are meant to finally give survivors and families documented answers about what officials knew and when.

World Turns its Back on America:

The world is increasingly turning its back on America, and Washington is finding itself standing alone as key allies chart their own course. Canada made that explicit on Tuesday, with Prime Minister Mark Carney announcing the country will accelerate efforts to reduce its economic reliance on the United States and deepen ties with the European Union instead, saying “in too many areas, they wanted dependency, not a true economic partnership.” Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion in U.S. goods took effect the same day, and Carney is set to address the European Parliament in Strasbourg next week as part of that pivot. More than 70% of Canadian exports still go to the U.S., but Carney said that share is falling by design, with exports to other countries on track to double over the next decade. His approval rating has topped 70% amid the standoff, and neither side appears eager to make the first move back to the table.

Trump announced he’s directing the federal government to remove Canadian-made products from government purchasing programs unless Canada changes its trade policies toward American farmers and companies, accusing Canada of “ripping us off for years” and calling the arrangement a “Canadian Trade Scam.” The move is notable given the obvious irony: Trump himself signed the current U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement during his first term, the same deal he’s now effectively attacking with this latest escalation in the ongoing trade war between the two countries.

America’s isolation deepened further as Britain, Canada and France announced sanctions on Israeli settlements in the West Bank, directly cutting against the Trump administration’s staunch diplomatic and military support for Israel. British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told Parliament the government “agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank,” and announced an import ban on settlement goods along with new arms restrictions. A total of twelve countries, including Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, signed onto the coalition, with ten of the twelve now recognizing a Palestinian state. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed back, warning the move could destabilize the West Bank, while Israel responded with fury, closing its British consulate in Jerusalem and banning entry to a dozen British lawmakers. Even Britain’s own U.S. ambassador, Mike Huckabee, warned the move would strain relations with Washington and could trigger retaliatory economic measures against British businesses.

Israel itself was blindsided by how far this international break from Washington’s orbit actually went. Israeli officials had expected France and Canada to join Britain’s sanctions push but were caught off guard by the breadth of the full twelve-country coalition, a failure now being described in Jerusalem as a diplomatic intelligence breakdown. Former Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid said he warned British officials directly that the move would strengthen far-right figures like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich ahead of Israeli elections, telling them “you’re helping Smotrich.” Economy Ministry trade official Roy Fisher acknowledged the direct financial exposure is small, just $45 million in settlement-linked exports to Britain, but warned of a much larger chilling effect as European importers with no settlement ties grow wary of doing business with Israel at all. The episode reflects a broader pattern: Germany and Italy notably declined to sign on, but the momentum among traditionally pro-Israel Western governments is clearly shifting away from Washington’s steadfast position.

Even America’s own diplomatic credibility is being publicly questioned by its stated allies. NBC’s Richard Engel pressed Jared Kushner directly in Kyiv on why anyone should trust his negotiating record, pointing out that “Gaza remains a wasteland” despite his involvement, that the Iran war is still ongoing, and that this is already his “several rounds of negotiations” on Ukraine with no resolution. Kushner grew visibly defensive, insisting he and fellow envoy Steve Witkoff are “really representing President Trump” rather than bringing independent approaches, and touting older wins like the Abraham Accords and USMCA to justify his continued role. The timing undercut him almost immediately: Russia resumed airstrikes on Kyiv the very same day, killing at least two people, just after Kushner and Witkoff’s visit to Moscow and Kyiv. Between a collapsing Canadian partnership, a NATO-adjacent coalition sanctioning a top U.S. ally over its own objections, and a stalled peace process run by a son-in-law with his own conflicts of interest, the pattern across all these stories is the same: America’s closest partners are increasingly acting without it, or against its wishes, rather than waiting for Washington’s lead.

Other News:

South Park renames itself “South America”: In response to Donald Trump’s efforts to rename geographic locations after “America,” including the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario, and a push to rename New Mexico to “New America,” South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker announced the show’s 29th season will officially be titled “South America.” In a statement dripping with sarcasm, they said the change was “inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google,” and specifically thanked parent company Paramount, calling it “a Skydance Capitulation,” a jab at Paramount Skydance’s recently Trump-approved $111 billion merger with Warner Bros Discovery. The satirical series, which first aired in 1997, has repeatedly clashed with the Trump administration, previously depicting him naked in bed with Satan and portraying former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem as a puppy killer. Trump’s New Mexico post, which used an AI-generated video to show “America” replacing “Mexico” on a welcome sign, drew swift condemnation from Democrats who called it a distraction from the Iran war and rising prices. The newly renamed “South America” premieres September 16 and will stream globally on Paramount+.

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch stepping down amid Trump clashes: Lonnie Bunch III, the Smithsonian’s first Black and first historian secretary, announced he’ll retire by year’s end after 38 years at the institution, a departure that comes as the Trump administration has repeatedly attacked how the Smithsonian portrays American history. Just last week, the Interior Department threatened to cut off support, alleging Smithsonian facilities push a “radical ideology” that weakens “shared American identity,” and a person familiar with the situation said Bunch had actually planned to retire a year earlier but stayed to defend the institution until that letter convinced him it was time to go. Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 directing Vice President JD Vance to purge “improper, divisive, or anti-American” ideology from Smithsonian programming, and later publicly complained the museums focused too much on “how bad Slavery was.” Chief Justice John Roberts, who chairs the Smithsonian’s governing Regents as chancellor, praised Bunch’s “wisdom, vision and leadership,” while Vance has reportedly criticized Bunch directly at a Regents meeting. Bunch said he’ll stay on three to four months to help transition to new leadership, and in a recent interview described America’s strength as coming not from “running away from its history” but understanding how it shaped the country.

Netanyahu Ignored Warnings Before October 7th: A senior Emirati official says he warned Netanyahu by phone in late September 2023 that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was planning a major attack, but Netanyahu was dismissive and never briefed the Shin Bet or IDF chief, according to a new book cited by Haaretz. The warning reportedly traced back to Sinwar himself, who told a Fatah intermediary in two separate meetings that he was preparing an “earthquake,” a message relayed to UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed and eventually to Israeli security officials in mid-September, though it wasn’t understood as a warning of an imminent Gaza invasion. Netanyahu’s office called the report “a total lie,” saying no such warning was received; the UAE would neither confirm nor deny it, saying only that intelligence is shared through normal channels. The story landed alongside a separate Channel 12 report that Netanyahu took two hours to leave home for military headquarters after being alerted to the October 7 attack, fueling renewed political attacks from rivals like Naftali Bennett and Gadi Eisenkot, who are calling for a state commission of inquiry.

Lindsay Clancy jurors describe holdout who caused mistrial: Three jurors from Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, including the foreperson, spoke publicly for the first time since last week’s mistrial, describing frustration with a single holdout juror who wouldn’t align with the rest of the panel. The foreperson said the holdout initially “admitted he had reasonable doubt,” prompting her to excitedly begin filling out verdict forms, only for him to then add he still wouldn’t find Clancy not guilty by reason of insanity. That contradiction led to the panel deadlocking after 38 hours of deliberation in the case over Clancy’s killing of her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, at their Massachusetts home in January 2023 amid what her defense argued was postpartum psychosis. NBC10 Boston attempted to reach the juror in question for his side of the story but has not yet done so. The account adds new detail to defense attorney Kevin Reddington’s earlier claim that the jury split 11-1 in favor of a not-guilty verdict by reason of lack of criminal responsibility.

Clancy’s attorney asks Trump for a pardon he can’t legally grant: In his first interview since the mistrial, Kevin Reddington used a “Good Morning America” appearance to directly call on President Trump to pardon his client, saying “I would hope that you would consider this young lady... and consider a pardon,” even though presidential pardons apply only to federal crimes and Clancy was charged under Massachusetts state law. A White House official confirmed as much when asked for comment. Reddington described Clancy as “intelligent,” “hardworking,” and “like a daughter” to him, and said he blames a doctor who he claims overprescribed her psychiatric medication for contributing to the postpartum psychosis he argued drove the killings. He also addressed his post-trial comment that he’d “crushed the prosecution,” calling it “bravado” from high emotions after a six-to-seven-week trial, while separately noting Patrick Clancy’s attorneys are now threatening legal action against online “true crime” creators spreading what they call a “campaign of misinformation” falsely implicating him. Massachusetts prosecutors must now decide whether to retry Clancy or negotiate a plea deal, and Reddington said he hopes to work something out with the district attorney.

Jerry Sandusky seeks new trial after accuser recants: Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach serving at least 30 years for sexually abusing multiple boys, appeared virtually in court Tuesday as his legal team withdrew their state post-conviction bid in order to pursue a new trial in federal court instead, after one of his accusers, identified as “Victim 10” or “R.R.,” recanted his testimony. R.R. claims state investigators pressured him into affirming abuse he didn’t clearly remember, telling him his “role was critical to stopping a predator” and that memory gaps from trauma were “common and even expected,” which Sandusky’s attorneys say amounted to psychological manipulation. Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday dismissed the move as “yet another attempt by a convicted child predator to avoid accountability,” saying his office has evidence debunking the recantation claim. Sandusky, 82, was convicted in 2012 on 45 counts related to abusing boys he met through his nonprofit The Second Mile, a scandal that also led to the firing of head coach Joe Paterno, though Paterno’s legacy has seen some rehabilitation recently with Penn State opening a “Paterno Family Football Experience Room.” Judge Maureen Skerda confirmed Sandusky understood he was giving up his right to litigate the recantation claim in state court by shifting to federal court.

Bahamas plane crash claims all four family members: Search crews confirmed the deaths of all four members of a Florida family, pilot Mario Lamar, 80, his wife Lili, 79, and grandchildren Sofia Sosa, 28, and Christian Sosa, 22, after their small PA-34 Piper crashed roughly 15 miles off Andros Island in the Bahamas on Monday. The family said relatives themselves located the remains and had to bring them aboard their own boats, and are now working with the Coast Guard to bring their loved ones home; Bahamian police confirmed the recovered remains are in custody and being transferred to New Providence. Lamar’s niece described him as “a lifelong, very experienced pilot” and said flight-tracking data showed the aircraft flying into the edge of a storm before abruptly reversing course. Lamar was a Miami attorney of more than 50 years whose daughter, the mother of the two adult grandchildren killed, practiced law alongside him; Christian Sosa was a recent Loyola Marymount marketing graduate and freelance sports photographer who had shot for the Rams, while Sofia Sosa held a physician assistant master’s degree from FIU. Family and colleagues, including one of Christian’s professors who called him “an amazing young man who lit up every room,” are now mourning what they’ve described as a devastating loss.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Lashes Out at Marine One Pilots, Major Corruption at DHS, Canada’s Tariffs Begin, Iceland Summons US Ambassador, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Trump had a visibly agitated moment on camera aboard Marine One last night, the capper to a Labor Day weekend that included him calling his own Iran war “small potatoes” and going on another AI-generated posting spree. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs officially kicked in overnight, and a new Wall Street Journal investigation has Corey Lewandowski facing the possibility of real criminal exposure over what he was allegedly doing with his access at DHS.

Democrats are also making a genuine play for deep red territory heading into the midterms, and we’ve got a full rundown of everything else from overnight, Iceland summoning our ambassador, a hurricane bearing down on Hawaii, a museum heist in France, and more.

I also sat down with Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, to talk about No Kings Day 3.0 and what organizers are planning next. That conversation is here, and it’s one I think you’ll want to actually sit with, not just skim.

None of this reporting happens without you. Here’s the news.

Trump appeared visibly agitated in footage caught on camera aboard Marine One Monday afternoon, gesturing firmly and jabbing his finger while speaking to the pilots after landing at Morristown Municipal Airport in New Jersey around 4:30 p.m., following a Labor Day weekend at his Bedminster golf club. It's not clear what triggered the outburst, but 35-year-old aide Natalie Harp, who has drawn scrutiny for her closeness to the president and for helping craft some of his more eccentric Truth Social posts, was on board along with 31-year-old Communications Adviser Margo Martin. The moment capped a weekend of erratic behavior that included Trump calling his six-month, $37.5 billion war with Iran "small potatoes," stepping off a plane with noticeably darker hair that fueled fresh wig speculation, his 43rd day golfing this year, and a Sunday Truth Social spree of AI-generated images showing himself riding with George Washington, arm-wrestling Hulk Hogan, tackling Canadian PM Mark Carney in hockey gear, and a sinking Titanic labeled "Dumocratic Party," along with floating renaming New Mexico to "New America" and claiming "The Moon is Ours." After landing, Trump ignored saluting Marines to walk across the tarmac, gave reporters a brief wave, and boarded Air Force One for Joint Base Andrews.

Democrats are entering the midterms trying to expand the map deep into red territory, with candidates like Kansas Senate hopeful Adam Hamilton drawing on voter frustration over affordability, even in a state Trump has carried by at least 14 points every time he’s run. Their path is easier in the House, where they only need a handful of seats, but tougher in the Senate, where they need to net four, with Maine, North Carolina and Ohio seen as the best pickup opportunities and Alaska, Iowa and Texas as longer shots; a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found voters favor Democrats on the generic ballot by 5 points and disapprove of Trump’s economic handling by an even wider margin than his 25-point overall disapproval.

Republicans, meanwhile, are counting on a major financial edge (the RNC had $130 million on hand in July versus the DNC’s $16 million plus $18 million in debt), MAGA Inc.’s $400 million-plus war chest already spending on races like Ken Paxton’s, and Trump’s push to campaign in 35 targeted races over the final 30 days, while trying to brand Democrats as captured by democratic socialists like Zohran Mamdani. Both parties face internal complications: Democrats are managing friction between progressive nominees and national strategists (as in Michigan’s Senate primary) and a handful of races where they’ve stepped aside for stronger independent candidates, while vulnerable Republicans are quietly distancing themselves from Trump’s Iran war and his midterm convention without directly breaking from him.

Canada’s Tariffs Begin:

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on roughly $20 billion in U.S. goods took effect just after midnight ET on Tuesday, extending the trade war between the two countries. The tariffs range from 15% to 50%, with the steepest rate hitting American milk, perfume, video game consoles, golf clubs, fishing rods, steel, aluminum, jackets and T-shirts. Cheese, carpets, appliances like stoves and air conditioners, agricultural equipment and electronics face the 25% tier, while forklifts and industrial molds sit at 15%. American seafood was initially slated for 25% tariffs but got removed from the list after pushback from the lobster industry. Economists say the fallout could hit manufacturers in Michigan and Indiana particularly hard, along with dairy producers in Wisconsin and Vermont.

The dispute traces back to Trump’s original tariff threats on Canada and Mexico over border security shortly after he returned to office, which prompted Canada to respond with its own retaliatory measures and liquor boycotts in some provinces. The two sides later launched trade talks and called off their most stringent measures, but tensions never really cooled, and over the summer the Trump administration threatened tariffs on $20 billion in Canadian goods, accusing Canada of discriminating against American goods and retaliating excessively. Trump briefly delayed those tariffs last month as negotiators neared a deal, but talks ultimately collapsed, with both sides accusing each other of tacking on last-minute demands. Prime Minister Mark Carney said the U.S. “asked too much and offered too little” and that Washington’s “signature was written in pencil” on prior deals, while pushing back on U.S. demands for control over Canada’s trade deals with other countries. Neither government has scheduled further ministerial-level talks, though Canadian officials say Ottawa remains open to an agreement that benefits both economies.

The fight has spread into the auto sector and beyond. Trump has threatened to raise tariffs on Canadian cars, trucks and auto parts to 50% starting January 1, 2027, a move that could push up vehicle and parts costs and leave dealers facing pricing and inventory uncertainty. On Monday he escalated further, posting on Truth Social “NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES!” and telling the Quebec-based planemaker it must “build here, and stop treating America like a ‘piggybank’” to keep U.S. market access. Bombardier didn’t directly address the threat but noted it has sites in nine U.S. states plus Washington, D.C., manufactures wings in Texas and flight-control components in California, and works with about 2,800 American companies across 47 states. Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette said she’d contacted Bombardier’s CEO to offer “our full support,” writing on X that “Quebec will not allow anyone to dictate where our companies must produce in order to access a market.”

The broader U.S.-Canada relationship keeps deteriorating alongside the trade measures. The USMCA now faces annual reviews after Trump declined to extend it for another decade, which matters because Canada has leaned heavily on USMCA exemptions, shipping nearly 68% of its exports to the U.S. this year with roughly 80% of that moving duty-free under those exemptions. Trump has repeatedly floated making Canada the 51st state and signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America,” and he’s said he doesn’t want “Canadian cars,” “Canadian parts,” or “Canadian anything,” claiming the country has been “ripping us off for decades.” Ontario Premier Doug Ford called Trump a “dictator” last month and told him to “kiss my a**,” a remark that came right before Trump’s Lake Ontario order. Even with all this, the tariffs currently in play cover only a small fraction of the roughly $700 billion in goods that cross the U.S.-Canada border each year.

Trump Advisor Faces Possible Criminal Inquiry:

Corey Lewandowski is facing the possibility of major criminal penalties after a new Wall Street Journal investigation detailed how he allegedly used his unofficial perch at DHS to enrich himself. Kristi Noem installed Lewandowski at the agency as a “special government employee” from April 2025 to March 2026, and while Noem asserted personal control over DHS contracts above $100,000, the Journal reports Lewandowski was signing off on major contracts before she herself approved them, giving him outsized sway over agency spending despite holding no formal secretary-level authority. The two reportedly grew personally close during this period, with TMZ catching them lunching together in Minnesota in August. A rep for Lewandowski denies any wrongdoing, insisting he never sought payment from contractors or pursued foreign contracts while volunteering his time at DHS.

While serving in that de facto contract-approval role, the Journal reports Lewandowski approached Qatari officials offering to “help,” for a fee, with visa and other matters falling under DHS’s jurisdiction, and made a similar pitch to UAE officials. Both countries reportedly found the offers confusing and stunning since they already had established channels with senior Trump administration officials on these issues, and ultimately rejected his propositions. Separately, after Palantir negotiated a $2.7 billion agreement with DHS, the contract sat unsigned while Lewandowski repeatedly pushed for a private one-on-one meeting with CEO Alex Karp. Karp and other Palantir officials grew so uncomfortable with the situation that they canceled the meeting, and the agreement was ultimately reduced to $1 billion.

DHS’s inspector general has opened an investigation into whether Lewandowski was improperly involved in awarding government contracts, and congressional Democrats are separately investigating allegations that he sought kickbacks from government contractors. The scrutiny adds to an already turbulent stretch for Noem’s DHS, which has faced its own controversies, including the White House’s decision to keep a $70 million jet Noem leased for the department. Despite the mounting investigations, Lewandowski has reportedly told associates he expects Trump to pardon him if the matter escalates. The Journal’s reporting stands as one of the most detailed public accounts yet of how much unofficial power Lewandowski wielded inside DHS, and how directly that power intersected with his own financial interests.

Other news:

Iceland summons Ambassador: Iceland summoned U.S. Ambassador Billy Long on Monday after Trump posted an uncaptioned Truth Social image showing the island, along with Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, absorbed into the United States under the American flag, all labeled “United States of America.” Iceland’s Foreign Minister Thorgerdur Gunnarsdottir had Long formally told the post was “completely inappropriate,” while neither the State Department nor European embassies responded to requests for comment. The incident lands amid years of friction over Trump’s repeated push to acquire Greenland from Denmark, and came just hours after EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited Greenland to announce a €200 million investment, with Danish PM Mette Frederiksen reiterating that “the Greenlandic government and the Greenlandic people have said again and again that they do not want to be American.” The episode also revives a running pattern of confusion between the two countries at the top of the administration, including Trump mixing up Greenland and Iceland at a Davos speech and Long himself once joking that Iceland would become America’s “52nd state” with him as governor, which led Reykjavík to hire a Washington lobbying firm on a $25,000 monthly retainer.

Meta smart glasses and police fears: Documents obtained by the Guardian show law enforcement agencies across the US, including the NYPD’s counterterrorism unit and DHS fusion centers in Maine, San Diego, Tennessee, Virginia and New York, are increasingly worried that Meta’s camera-equipped Ray-Ban glasses will be used to secretly record officers and facilities or to aid terrorism. The concerns started after videos surfaced of detainees using the glasses, discreet enough to pass as regular Ray-Bans or Oakleys, to covertly film inside detention centers, including a South Carolina facility already under federal investigation for unsafe conditions. A January 2025 NYPD memo also cited the New Orleans Bourbon Street truck attack that killed 14, noting the perpetrator had biked the area twice beforehand wearing smart glasses in what the FBI called “pre-attack target reconnaissance,” and ICE has since barred its employees from wearing the glasses in federal workspaces. Privacy advocates like Property of the People’s Ryan Shapiro see irony in the complaints, arguing law enforcement wants exclusive surveillance power and objects only “the moment we can watch them back.”

Mass protests in Germany: Thousands of Germans staged anti-AfD protests, with police estimating 5,000 and organizers claiming more than 14,000 at a Berlin rally near the Brandenburg Gate, after the far-right party’s record nearly 44% showing in Sunday’s Saxony-Anhalt election, the best result for a nativist party in Germany since the Nazi era. The AfD fell three seats short of an outright majority, and Buchenwald memorial director Jens-Christian Wagner called the result “a disgrace that makes you furious and stunned,” warning the party stood on the brink of governing a German state for the first time since World War II. Protests also spread to Potsdam, Münster, Göttingen, Dresden, Aachen, Bamberg, Darmstadt and Halberstadt, with a protest camp running continuously in Halle since election day, as demonstrators carried signs reading “Fascism is no alternative” and “Stop the Nazi AfD.” Attention is now turning to two more state elections on September 20 in Berlin, where several parties are bunched closely together, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, where the AfD leads polling around 35% but the center-left SPD has mounted a summer comeback to score above 30%. Chancellor Friedrich Merz, whose unpopularity is seen as having weighed on the Saxony-Anhalt result, has vowed to stay in office and push painful economic and welfare reforms as the way to blunt the AfD’s rise, even as his junior coalition partner SPD signals it may back off some of the least popular measures, a rift analysts say could further destabilize the government.

Datacenter wastewater backlash: A growing number of pollution cases are fueling backlash against US datacenters, starting with the discovery of a rare, potentially hazardous bacterium in 801,000 gallons of wastewater discharged by a contractor for Meta’s $800 million Cheyenne, Wyoming datacenter, prompting the city to halt accepting that water pending appeal (Meta disputes the finding). Similar concerns have surfaced nationwide, including Virginia enforcement actions over wastewater and wetland permit violations, repeated stormwater flooding of homes near a West Virginia datacenter site, and a Georgia lawsuit threat from Flint Riverkeeper over alleged dumping of dirt and metals into the Flint River. The Waterkeeper Alliance says 55 affiliated groups are now working on datacenter issues, with most campaigns focused on pollutants like PFAS “forever chemicals,” heavy metals and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, while critics also point to a New York facility discharging cooling water at 108°F into Lake Seneca, warming a trout stream and worsening harmful algal blooms. Even some Republicans, including Wyoming’s Harriet Hageman, have demanded answers from Meta, but Trump has dismissed the backlash, calling datacenters a “golden goose” and posting that only communities wanting to “end up being backwards and poor” would oppose them.

Amazon cargo plane crash (Miami): The NTSB said all five people killed in Sunday’s crash were inside two vehicles struck by the Amazon-contracted Boeing 767, operated by 21 Air LLC, after it overran runway 30 at Miami International Airport. The plane hit a van carrying seven cleaning-company workers inside the airport perimeter, then tore through a fence and struck a Toyota outside on Northwest 67 Avenue before stopping roughly 1,300 feet past the paved surface. NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said investigators have recovered both the flight data and cockpit voice recorders and have 32 people on the ground, with specialized teams set to examine human performance, aircraft systems, and whether a runway-arresting system (EMAS) should have been installed. Homendy also flagged that the agency will scrutinize the contractual relationship between Amazon and 21 Air, and noted the NTSB has investigated more than 3,000 runway excursions since 2008. No cause has been determined yet; the agency expects to be on scene at least a week.

Hurricane Lowell (Hawaii): Hurricane Lowell passed just west of Hawaii with maximum sustained winds of 110 mph, a Category 2 storm just shy of major-hurricane strength, bringing damaging winds, heavy rain and dangerous surf that knocked out power to tens of thousands. As of the latest advisory the storm was 90 miles west of Lihue in Kauai County, prompting a hurricane warning there and a tropical storm warning for Oahu, with a tornado watch also in effect for Kauai and Niihau. Forecasters warned of up to 2 feet of rain in parts of the island chain, life-threatening surf and rip currents, and possible tornadoes, with Kauai and the Big Island facing the highest risk of significant flash flooding and mudslides. The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency told residents in Kauai County and Oahu to shelter in place overnight amid “very hazardous” conditions.

Ukraine-Russia strikes resume: Russia resumed airstrikes on Kyiv Tuesday morning, killing at least two people and wounding seven, ending a pause both Putin and Zelenskyy had ordered while Trump envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff held separate talks with each leader. The strikes damaged a five-story apartment building and set vehicles ablaze, with people reportedly trapped in a residential building, and neighboring Poland suspended flights from Lublin Airport over the missile activity. Witkoff and Kushner had called their weekend talks “meaningful” and said both sides would need to make “compromises,” while a senior Ukrainian official said discussions focused heavily on how to get through the winter. Trump had earlier said his envoys were bringing “an idea for peace,” and a Kremlin aide said the Americans had “formulated a number of ideas regarding possible paths to a settlement” without elaborating.

Missing plane off the Bahamas: A small plane carrying four members of a Florida family, pilot Mario Lamar, 80, his wife Lili, 79, and two grandchildren in their 20s, went missing Monday after departing Great Harbour Cay for Miami Executive Airport. Air traffic control lost contact with the PA-34 Piper about 13 miles west of Andros Island around 11 a.m., and Bahamian police say they believe it crash-landed near Red Bays, North Andros. The U.S. Coast Guard launched an HC-144 Ocean Sentry to assist the search after being contacted by Bahamian officials, but the effort was suspended due to bad weather with no clear timeline for resuming. Family members have pleaded publicly for help from boaters, fishermen and residents of Andros Island while asking for privacy as they wait for news.

Renoir Museum theft (France): Two thieves broke into the Renoir Museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the French Riviera early Tuesday and made off with paintings by the Impressionist master, though two of the four works taken were later recovered in the museum’s garden after the perpetrators fled. The stolen pieces originally included “Portrait of Madame Colonna Romano,” “Coco Lisant” and “Young Girl at the Well,” with a combined value around $10.5 million; it’s not yet clear which pieces remain missing. The town’s mayor, Bryan Masson, said the alarm triggered at 5:48 a.m. and police arrived within five minutes, with both municipal and national police now actively investigating. Masson called the theft an attack on the town’s heritage and pointed to it as proof of the need for a museum-security plan he’s championed, coming almost a year after the high-profile theft of an estimated $102 million in crown jewels from the Louvre.

UK sanctions on Israeli settlements: Britain announced it will ban trade in goods made in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, a move framed by officials as reinforcing UK support for a two-state solution and one the U.S. is expected to strongly oppose. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reacted angrily, calling for the UK ambassador to be expelled, while newly appointed Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband said he wants to reset UK policy on Israel amid concern over Israel’s E1 settlement project, which critics say would cut off land Palestinians seek for statehood. British PM Andy Burnham discussed the Middle East with Trump by phone and stressed “the importance of the two-state solution,” and minister Pat McFadden said the sanctions were driven by expanded settlement activity in recent months, while insisting there would be no broader boycott of Israeli goods. The economic impact is expected to be minimal since settlement goods are mostly agricultural and make up a tiny share of the roughly £6 billion in annual UK-Israel trade, and Britain joins Spain, Ireland and the Netherlands in adopting similar settlement-goods bans.

China’s export surge: China’s exports jumped 25% in August from a year earlier on strong demand for autos and high-tech goods, widening the country’s already-record trade surplus to $119.1 billion, up from $112.5 billion in July. Exports to the U.S. specifically rose 34.4% to $42.5 billion, partly reflecting a rebound from tariff-depressed year-ago levels, leaving China with roughly a $29.2 billion monthly surplus against the U.S., while auto exports grew 43% and semiconductor exports surged nearly 130%. The data lands just ahead of a planned late-September meeting between Xi Jinping and Trump where trade is expected to be a central topic, and comes as China leans increasingly on exports to Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa to offset the impact of higher U.S. tariffs. China was the lone dissenter among G20 members at a recent Asheville, North Carolina meeting where the group agreed to address global trade imbalances, and analysts say the two countries remain in a standoff, with the U.S. withholding high-end tech from China and China withholding rare-earth exports in return.  

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

 

All Rise News, 'Weak sauce’: IRS loses bid to share taxpayer info with ICE, Adam Klasfeld, right, The D.C. Circuit unanimously found that the government likely violated a post-Watergate law that carries heavy penalties.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday unanimously affirmed an order blocking the Internal Revenue Service from sharing taxpayer addresses with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dealing another defeat to the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.

“After the Watergate scandal exposed executive branch abuses of U.S. taxpayers’ information to harass the Administration’s enemies, Congress enacted a prohibition against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) sharing tax return information with any other federal agency unless the requesting agency meets stringent conditions,” U.S. Circuit Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote at the start of a 32-page opinion.

U.S. Circuit Judges Patricia Millett and Robert L. Wilkins joined the decisions. All three were appointed by former President Barack Obama.

A little more than a year ago, the Trump administration sought to circumvent those rules. ICE placed a request for more than 1.2 million records, and the IRS disclosed roughly 47,000 taxpayer addresses before multiple federal judges blocked the sharing of that information.

Center for Taxpayer Rights, Main Street Alliance, and two labor unions pursued the D.C.-based litigation, represented by the advocacy group Democracy Forward.

Judge Pillard found that the procedure the Trump administration created for sharing taxpayer information was a far cry from the exacting standards Congress demanded in post-Watergate legislation passed in 1976, abandoning an “individualized review” in favor of a “mass, automated review of millions of records at the press of a button.”

The judge reminded the government that violations of the statute carry serious penalties.

“The government and its personnel face steep civil and criminal consequences for willful disclosure of information in violation of section 6103,” she wrote, citing the possible imprisonment and heavy fines under the relevant statute.

Although the IRS argued that stopping it from sharing taxpayer information with ICE would impede criminal investigations, the three-judge panel said: “that’s a gripe with Congress, not the court.”

“The government has no legitimate interest in conducting criminal investigations in violation of the statute,” the order notes.

Swatting down another “weak sauce” argument by the IRS, the appellate court brushed away concerns that the injunction requires a judge’s approval to launch criminal investigations. Such notifications can be made “under seal” to protect investigations from public scrutiny.

“Importantly, the district court’s advance notice requirement reasonably balances the government’s interest in making lawful disclosures with the plaintiffs’ interest in preventing unlawful disclosures that, if made, would likely be difficult or impossible to remedy,” the ruling states. 

New York Times, Dueling Court Rulings Leave Missouri’s Congressional Races in Chaos, Ann E. Marimow and Mitch Smith, Sept. 8, 2026. After losing in two courts and winning in another, Missouri officials said they planned to forge ahead with using a congressional map that was redrawn to benefit Republicans.

Conflicting court orders issued on the same day threw the congressional elections in Missouri into chaos on Tuesday, two months before an election in which a handful of races could decide control of the House.

First, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh denied a request from Missouri officials to use a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an edge in the midterm elections.

Soon after, a District Court judge in Missouri ruled the other way, ordering the state to rely on that map, which had been used in last month’s primary election.

Taken together, the dueling court orders left Missouri where it began, with no agreement about which congressional map should be in effect in November and no immediate route to resolving that question. Missouri’s Republican attorney general and governor quickly said that the state intended to use the redrawn map that favors Republicans. Their opponents immediately appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and said they would also appeal to Justice Kavanaugh, meaning the issue will be resolved only after additional legal twists.

Early Tuesday evening, it seemed Missouri Democrats had prevailed in a yearlong fight to preserve a House seat they hold in the Kansas City area. Justice Kavanaugh deferred to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which last week blocked the use of the new map. The state court had found that voters should first have an opportunity to vote on the new district boundaries in a statewide referendum.

Justice Kavanaugh oversees emergency requests from Missouri and acted on his own without referring the matter to the full court. He did not provide any reasoning, as is often the case when the court responds to emergency filings.

But soon after Justice Kavanaugh acted, word spread that Stephen R. Clark, the chief federal judge in St. Louis, had separately ordered the state to use the map that Missouri Republicans drew last year at President Trump’s request in an attempt to flip a seat in Kansas City. That ruling came in a different legal case, brought by a Republican congressman who is running for re-election and a G.O.P. candidate who won the primary under the new district lines.

The secretary of state, Denny Hoskins, a Republican, said the Federal District Court ruling “halts a full-on constitutional crisis.”

What happens next still seemed unclear on Tuesday night. The decision from Judge Clark, who like Justice Kavanaugh was appointed to the bench by Mr. Trump, was based in part on concerns that using a different map for the general election would “wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness” of the congressional election. He wrote that he was concerned a new map would lead to widespread voter confusion.

The state’s emergency request had thrust the Supreme Court in the middle of another election-year legal battle in a heated campaign season, where control of the House could come down to a handful of seats. But Justice Kavanaugh refused to intervene on Tuesday, leaving in place a unanimous ruling from Missouri’s highest court on state law, suggesting he did not think there was a federal issue that warranted Supreme Court action.

Missouri’s attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to act quickly and allow use of the new map, given a state-imposed Sept. 8 deadline for altering its general election ballot. She noted that 1.2 million Missouri residents had voted in the August primary using the new map.

The state court “threw those votes into the dustbin,” she said, by requiring the winners to run in different congressional districts. In her filing, the attorney general said Missouri planned to comply with one aspect of the state court ruling and proceed with a November referendum on the new map.

But she argued that the state should continue with the map used for the primary until that referendum is held. The only question, she wrote, is whether the group of challengers who sued, led by Richard von Glahn, executive director of the advocacy group People Not Politicians Missouri, can “void a congressional map before he gets his vote.”

The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 8, 2026. What if the law means what it says? Now and then, a court decision comes along to restore your faith that nonpartisan judges can fairly read the plain text of statutes and constitutional provisions and render entirely rational decisions.

No, we don’t get such things from the MAGA-controlled Supreme Court, which has become so corrupted by rank partisanship as to forfeit its legitimacy, but we do get such examples of real judicial handiwork from lower federal courts and state courts.People opposing a congressional redistricting plan rally outside the Missouri Supreme Court in Jefferson City, Mo., on Sept. 2 while displaying the number of petition signatures submitted seeking a statewide vote on the measure. (David A. Lieb/AP)

We got just such a satisfying result last week from Missouri’s Supreme Court, as the New York Times reported:

The judges said a referendum on the new district lines had been improperly denied a spot on the November ballot, and that the redrawn map should have been paused until voters weighed in.

The redrawn map “did not go into effect and will not go into effect unless and until approved by the voters,” Judge Ginger K. Gooch, who was appointed by a Republican governor, wrote in the opinion. The prior map, she added, “remains in full force and effect for the November 2026 general election.”

This was not a hard case. Missouri Republicans eagerly served up a re-redistricted map when Donald Trump snapped his fingers last year, but the voters wanted their say and collected enough signatures to qualify a referendum for the ballot, which Republican state officials blocked (“Who are voters to interfere with our Trump servility?!”).

Though the headlines after the ruling focused on the outcome (a “win” for Democrats in allowing Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, whose district Republicans targeted, to run for re-election in his current seat, increasing the likelihood of a Democratic hold, and in keeping Republican incumbent Ann Wagner’s seat in the 2nd Congressional District competitive, thereby increasing chances of a pickup for Democrats), the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision, a concise 14 pages, deserves our full attention.

The Missouri Supreme Court held that voters were improperly denied a say in how the congressional lines were to be drawn:

Because the plain language of article III, section 49 of the Missouri Constitution authorizes a referendum as to “any act of the general assembly” and no exception applies, the referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely.

Now, the MAGA-controlled U.S. Supreme Court uses all sorts of excuses to allow the MAGA president to do exactly as he pleases, but in Missouri things apparently work differently.

The desperate MAGA Republican secretary of state insisted “no exception” did not mean “no exception.” (“The secretary’s sole basis for declaring the referendum petition insufficient is that the Missouri Constitution does not authorize a referendum on congressional redistricting passed by the General Assembly.”) But it says “no exception.”

The unanimous Missouri high court slapped down this spurious argument:

The secretary asserts the Missouri Constitution does not permit a referendum ... because the Missouri Constitution has no plain, clear statement subjecting legislation drawing new congressional districts to a referendum. But this ignores article III, section 49, which provides: “The people … reserve power to approve or reject by referendum any act of the general assembly, except as hereinafter provided.”

Then Republicans offered this doozy: “The secretary argued that the Constitution has an exemption for ‘laws necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health or safety, and laws making appropriations for the current expenses of the state government, for the maintenance of state institutions and for the support of public schools[.]’” Umm, what does that have to do with redistricting?

The Missouri justices had the same question and found the argument preposterous. “This Court cannot rewrite the Missouri Constitution to substitute ‘all election laws’ for ‘the immediate preservation of the public peace,’” the court held. The Republicans’ argument was especially weak since the mid-decade redistricting could not possibly be related to “public peace” because “the 2022 congressional districts established by the General Assembly remain in place unless and until repealed.”

The justices also gave the back of the hand to the cockamamie argument that suffrage was an “institution” that couldn’t be touched by voters in a referendum. The court pointed out that “the right of referendum to congressional redistricting passed by the General Assembly does not eliminate suffrage generally or the General Assembly’s right to redistrict. Instead, if by referendum vote the voters reject the new redistricting … the General Assembly’s prior redistricting in 2022 remains in effect. The General Assembly also remains free to go ‘back to the drawing board to do [new] redistricting.’”

Finally, the justices knocked down the nonsensical argument that the last date for the referendum was August 4, the primary election day. The justices, evidencing just a touch of irritation with the nonsense served up by the secretary of state, held: “This Court need not speculate about why the General Assembly chose the statutory deadline or whether the statute is valid in every case because a later-enacted statute has no bearing on the constitution’s plain language. The plain language of the constitution permits a referendum as to ‘any act of the General Assembly’ regardless of any statutory deadlines set by the General Assembly decades later.” Oh.

The court therefore concluded:

The referendum petition was legal, sufficient, and timely, and the secretary incorrectly concluded otherwise. [The Republican re-redistricting plan] did not go into effect and will not go into effect unless and until approved by the voters. The congressional redistricting the General Assembly established in 2022 remains in full force and effect for the November 2026 general election.

The Missouri Supreme Court’s unanimous decision insisting words mean what they say is, on one hand, unextraordinary. But in an era of MAGA word-twisters and reality-deniers, the decision comes as an exhilarating reaffirmation of intellectual honesty.

We’re reminded of the exchange in Alice in Wonderland:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Contra Humpty Dumpty, words and facts do have discernible, objective meaning. The notion that Trump and his MAGA minions are “masters,” free to reset reality and write text to match their own ends (as despots have historically done), has become one of the Trump regime’s most pernicious characteristics.

In short, those who value the rule of law and objective truth should applaud the Missouri Supreme Court’s rejection of the Missouri MAGA Republicans’ nonsensical argument that “no exception” means “no exception unless we want the power to gerrymander the state over the wishes of the voters.”

Donald Trump naturally blew his stack on hearing about the ruling. His Missouri lackeys will race to Trump’s protectors on the MAGA-controlled Supreme Court. We will see if the Missouri justices’ entirely sensible ruling withstands the MAGA hacks’ scrutiny — or whether we go through the looking glass and tumble back into the world of mad justice and partisan hackery.

For now, however, we can revel in the notion that, at least in Missouri’s highest court, “no exception” means “no exception.”

Ohio Candidate For Governor Attacked 

 

Ohio's Democratic Party nominee for governor, Dr. Amy Acton, left, a physician was attacked during a campaign event by an armed suspect identified as Patrick Havas, above, a Republican with ties to Acton's opponents, who including Republican nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, a high-tech billionairre. Following the attack, in which Acton reported no injuries, she tended a man in the crowd who had sustained injuries.

Occupy Democrats, Advocacy:  HERO DOCTOR! Democratic candidate Dr. Amy Acton rushes to TREAT people injured when an armed Republican charged toward her – then a stunning connection to her MAGA opponent emerges! Staff Report, Sept. 7, 2026. Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, MD, MPH had just been charged by an armed man who knocked people to the ground as he pushed through a crowd toward her.

Once police had the man under control, the physician-turned-candidate rushed to help the people who were hurt instead of fleeing the scene like her security wanted.

Acton was a consummate professional as she remained at the Canfield Fair to treat one of the injured after 38-year-old Patrick Havas forced his way through the Democratic Party tent toward her on Sunday.

Police say Havas was carrying two handguns, a Taser and brass knuckles, although he never drew the weapons.Havas, who is a registered Republican, was arrested on two counts of assault and one count of disorderly conduct. And now the story has taken a remarkable turn.

Havas is the brother of Andrew Havas, a Republican operative who gave more than $10,000 to the campaign of Acton's opponent, Trump toady Vivek Ramaswamy, right.

Even more incredibly, Acton had publicly called out those exact donations less than two months before Sunday's incident.

“I find it appalling that Vivek Ramaswamy accepted over $10,000 from Andrew Havas,” Acton said in July after the donor's criminal history involving sexual conduct with a minor became public. Campaign-finance records show Andrew Havas gave Ramaswamy $10,102.54 in five contributions.

Andrew Havas had also been a volunteer county campaign chair for Republican Sen. Jon Husted before resigning in July after NBC News questioned the campaign about a 2009 criminal case. He had originally been charged with sexual misconduct involving a 15-year-old, but the charge was reduced to misdemeanor assault in a plea deal. He pleaded guilty and served 90 days in jail.

There is no solid evidence yet that Patrick Havas's actions were connected to his brother, the donations or Acton's criticism of them, and authorities have not announced a motive. Ramaswamy's campaign condemned the incident as “completely unacceptable.

”But amid all the disturbing questions surrounding what happened, one part of the story needs no explanation.When an armed man came charging through a crowd toward Amy Acton, other people got hurt protecting her. And instead of fleeing the danger, the doctor went back to take care of them.Kudos to Dr. Acton, a Democratic candidate of character who will lead Ohio to a brighter future as its next governor.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The People vs. Mad King Donald, William Kristol, right, Sept. 8, 2026. I trust you all had a better Labor Day weekend than Donald Trump.

On Sunday the president of the United States fired off more than sixty social media posts, each more bizarre than the last. They included frenzied rants, manic boasts, personal attacks, crazy links, lunatic messages, and surreal AI-generated memes and images. They were often weirdly dystopian—Trump nuking the Earth from orbit from a space station, Trump with giant robot bodyguards as fires burned.

His niece, Mary Trump, a psychologist, remarked Sunday evening that “Donald is decompensating in real time.” The post that particularly caught Mary’s attention was an AI-produced upside-down map of Iran molded into Donald Trump’s profile.

Things didn’t get better on Monday. Trump continued to decompensate. A spate of fifteen posts within five minutes Monday morning ended with the president offering holiday good wishes:

Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP

This post was revelatory. Trump seems to admit what it was that had gotten under his skin. His critics “should be exhausted by now.” But, “sadly, they’re not.”

This admission should cheer us all up.

But not too much. It’s not a good thing that we have an unhinged president with more than two years left in his term, and with loyalists manning the top tiers of our government determined to carry out his authoritarian wishes, including to subvert free and fair elections.

On the other hand, it is good that even Trump has to admit that his critics aren’t exhausted. And it is good, as Trump doesn’t admit but as he surely knows, that their ranks are growing. That our ranks are growing.

On Saturday, the New York Times reported Gallup’s finding that “The share of Americans who associate themselves with the Democratic Party has grown significantly over the past year.” Indeed, “the latest data shows Democrats with a 10-percentage-point advantage over Republicans when voters are asked which party they identify with and when independent voters are asked which party they lean toward.”

In 2024, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents held a small edge over Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents. Now Democrats’ advantage is approaching their margins during their victorious waves of 2006 and 2008.

Then on Sunday, the Financial Times reported that their latest survey showed Trump’s approval rating, which in their polls had oscillated between 34 and 37 percent approval all year, had now dipped to 32 percent.

The public is moving in the right direction. They’re doing so despite the continued complicity at worst, and silence at best, of so many of the elites who continue to suck up to Trump.

To their credit, the organizers of the successful and important No Kings protests are stepping up again to help. This morning they announced plans for “No Kings: Vote Early” events on October 17. As one of the No Kings organizers, Ezra Levin, explained,

We are headed into an important point in a democracy, which is whether the people stand up and refuse to allow an authoritarian to consolidate power. And the way to do that in a democracy is by exercising your right to vote and by exercising your right to organize to prevent any sabotage in that election. . . .

The goal before was to send a message and recruit volunteers to do more civic engagement work. The goal this time is to not just send a message. [It is] to take back power for the people through the biggest early vote that we’ve ever seen in this country, and to prepare a nationwide force to push back against the sabotage that comes our way.

The goal is no longer to send a message. It’s to take back power.

So mark October 17 on your calendars. And then double circle November 3 with a dark Sharpie. Because the key No Kings event will be Election Day.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Is Turning a Bad Midterm Into a Republican Catastrophe… BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER on The Bulwark Daily to revisit the run-up to the midterms in 2006 and 1994, two major wave election cycles where the bottom just fell out from under the party in power.
• It’s here… A thank you from SARAH LONGWELL for those who pre-ordered How to Eat an Elephant. For those of you who haven’t: Get your copy today!
• Labor Day… We have some worthwhile works from CARL SANDBURG, MOTHER JONES, and FDR that are worth your time and reflection.

Quick Hits

ENERGY CRUNCH: Donald Trump wants to declare victory in Iran, declare the Strait of Hormuz open for business, and go home. But events continue to intrude on this plan.

Crude oil prices are pushing toward $100 a barrel again amid renewed fears about regional instability, after Iran’s Houthi proxies launched a drones-and-missiles attack against energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia this morning. The attacks were the latest grim reminder that unstoppering the strait is only part of the battle, and that even solving that bottleneck will only bring partial relief to global energy markets if regional energy infrastructure continues to suffer lasting damage.

If Trump and Co. were still clinging to any hope that oil and gas prices would be moving in the right direction by the midterms, they’re plainly losing it fast. Instead, Trump is offering his voters the next-best thing: pure weapons-grade hopium. “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran,” he posted last night. “Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA!”

Good strategy, but why stop there? As long as he’s making up numbers from whole cloth, why not promise gas below a buck fifty?

GO HOME, HUNTER: How bizarre is it that, even with Joe Biden totally out of the political picture, we still keep having to hear from his scandal-prone failson who caused Democrats so many headaches during his term? Hunter Biden has been on an eyeroll-inducing media tour recently, giving interviews to Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Nick Fuentes with little apparent purpose but to settle old personal grudges and keep himself in the spotlight. Now, he’s taking the ultimate step for anyone looking to shamelessly monetize their own e-notoriety: He’s launching a memecoin.

“$LAPTOP,” Biden tweeted Monday. “September 9.”

The coin’s name is, of course, a nod to the computer belonging to Hunter that surfaced weeks before the 2020 election, bringing his drugs-and-prostitutes personal life and his name-trading business habits into the national spotlight and inducing years of political heartburn for his father. It’s a sordid saga most of us would just as soon forget—but Hunter appears to see the opportunity to make a quick buck by bringing it back up.

CANADA TARIFFS TAKE EFFECT: The latest battle in our unbelievably pointless trade war with Canada just began. At 12:01 EDT this morning, Canada’s retaliatory tariffs went into effect on approximately $20 billion worth of U.S. goods, raising the possibility of still more tit-for-tat restrictions from Donald Trump. In a Truth Social post yesterday, the president suggested he could ban the Canadian aerospace company Bombardier from selling its planes in the United States—although, as is so often the case, it was difficult to tell whether this was a policy announcement, a threat, or just empty armchair kvetching from the pundit-in-chief.

“BUY AMERICAN,” Trump wrote. “FLY ON AMERICAN AIRLINERS. ENJOY AMERICAN LIQUOR AND BEVERAGES. SAIL ON LAKE AMERICA. AMERICA FIRST!” He’s plainly taking this whole thing very seriously.

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: Rs Are Going To Try Very Hard To Put Lipstick On The Trumpian Pig This Week, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Trump’s Mounting Global And Domestic Failures Are Going To Make That Really Hard. 

People are getting ballots and voting in NC and WI this week, and early in person begins next Friday. Let’s kick off the official start of the general election this week with the Hopium Daily Mantra:

There is nothing Trump and MAGA wants more than for us to be fighting with each other and not with him. We have one job now - elect as many of these wonderful candidates running for the House and Senate as we can. It’s where our focus must be. It’s a year of opportunity for us across the country. We must seize it, together

We are kicking off the week with a live interview at 11am ET with David Crowley, our exciting candidate for Governor in Wisconsin. You can join live by heading to the main Hopium site right before 11am - going to be a good one!

In my talk last week I argued that as bad as things were Trump and the Rs - and they are bad - they are likely to get worse now. As we wake today we are seeing what worse looks like……

Four polls released in the last few days - Ipsos/Reuters, NBC News, FT/Focal Data, Civiqs - had Trump at his lowest level of the cycle. No matter what the White House has done they have been unable to stop or reverse his ongoing decline…..

The wars in Russia-Ukraine and the Middle East are escalating. Brent crude starts the day at almost $100 a barrel:

The price of diesel is setting records across the US. As the fall harvest gets underway we are seeing headlines like this everywhere:

The escalating trade war with Canada is going to hurt businesses here in the US, raise prices for everyone, and hurt the prospects of Republican candidates along the Canadian border in the NH, MI, ME, MN, and WI battlegrounds. What in the world is Trump doing here?

Interest rates are rising across the world. The global economy is under increasing stress. Trump’s economic team is now understood to be a partisan hack way over their head, unlikely to keep things together if things get bad. Chances the Fed raises interest rates next week - and Trump’s head explodes - are increasing.

Trump’s barbaric cuts to health care are starting to be felt by a much wider group of Americans - basically everyone:

This week, tomorrow and Thursday, Republicans will be gathering in Dallas to try to put lipstick on this Trumpian pig. Given his mounting failures it is a herculean political task, likely to fail, with the added benefit for us that they will be explicitly tying the Republican brand more directly to the unpopular, corrupt, morally bankrupt Trump/Paxton wing of the GOP.

It has been conventional wisdom that it’s hard for Democrats to run on Republican corruption because voters see everyone in Washington as corrupt. According to new Navigator data that appears to be changing, as Trump and Republicans are seen as more corrupt, even with Republican voters:

This data is consistent with the NYT battleground Senate polling from July that showed “character” as the top reason voters were supporting our candidates:

And a place where we have a significant electoral advantage (except for Maine at the time):

So while the Republicans may get a little bump this week with their oligarchical corruptionfest they also risk tying their brand far more closely to a politics their candidates simply cannot sell to battleground voters this November…… 

New York Times, Chris Pappas Defeats Progressive Challenger in New Hampshire Senate Primary, Emily Davies, Sept. 8, 2026. Mr. Pappas, a moderate Democrat who has served four terms in the House, will face former Senator John E. Sununu, the Republican nominee, in November.

Representative Chris Pappas, a four-term congressman, defeated a progressive challenger in the New Hampshire Democratic Senate primary on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. Pappas, 46, who represents the state’s swingy First District, prevailed over Karishma Manzur, a medical scientist and member of the Southern New Hampshire Democratic Socialists of America, who sought to harness the anti-establishment mood and shifting sentiment against Israel that have upended Democratic primaries nationwide.

His victory sets up a general election contest that could help determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. The seat was left open by Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat who is retiring after three terms in the Senate and who had endorsed Mr. Pappas to succeed her. In recent weeks, Democrats in the state have been sounding the alarm that former Senator John E. Sununu, a Republican who is the brother and son of two former governors, could win in November.

Mr. Sununu easily won his primary against another former Republican senator, Scott Brown, on Tuesday.

A recent poll by the University of New Hampshire showed Mr. Pappas running narrowly behind Mr. Sununu in a general election matchup. The main Republican Senate super PAC, Senate Leadership Fund, has pledged to spend $17 million in the state for the general election; the group’s Democratic counterpart, Senate Majority PAC, has announced initial plans to spend $10.2 million in television advertising.

Mr. Pappas, a moderate Democrat from Manchester, has been among the state’s most successful politicians in recent history, holding onto a House seat in the state’s notably swingy First Congressional District. He had previously served three terms on the state’s five-member Executive Council, a body responsible for approving high-level appointments and state contracts. Before that, he served two terms as treasurer of Hillsborough County and two terms in the State Legislature.

If elected, Mr. Pappas, the grandson of the man credited with inventing chicken tenders, would be the first openly gay male senator. He triumphed over Ms. Manzur with significant support from party leaders and a significant fund-raising advantage. Former Vice President Kamala Harris endorsed him; Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Mark Kelly of Arizona actively campaigned on his behalf.

As of late August, Mr. Pappas’s campaign had raised more than $15 million, according to campaign finance records. Ms. Manzur, who had little support from national progressives, raised less than $500,000 over that same period. 

New York Times, John E. Sununu Wins Republican Senate Primary in New Hampshire, Emily Davies, Sept. 8, 2026. The general election race to replace Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, could help determine control of the U.S. Senate.

Former Senator John E. Sununu, a scion of one of the most powerful families in New Hampshire politics, won the Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, setting up a general election contest that could offer the party one of its best shots of picking up a seat in November.

Mr. Sununu, who was backed by President Trump and major outside groups, easily defeated Scott Brown, the former Republican senator from Massachusetts who rose to national prominence after his upset victory in a 2010 special election to fill the seat of Senator Edward M. Kennedy.

He will face Representative Chris Pappas, who won the Democratic nomination, in the general election. 

New York Times, Elon Musk Targets Democrats on Transgender Issues in Key Senate Races, Neil Vigdor,  Sept. 8, 2026. A political group for the world’s richest man, who is ramping up a midterm spending blitz, began running attack ads against Democrats in Texas, Ohio and Iowa.

Elon Musk began a political advertising blitz on Tuesday in three states that could decide control of the Senate, as his political group began attacking Democrats over transgender issues by accusing them of allowing men to compete in women’s sports.

The spots from Mr. Musk’s group, America PAC, target three top Democratic nominees for Senate: James Talarico in Texas, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Josh Turek in Iowa.

The ads provide an early glimpse at the role that America PAC is carving out for itself in the midterm elections, in which Republicans find themselves in danger of losing control of the Senate and the House. Mr. Musk is expected to extend some of the party’s candidates a lifeline of at least $100 million, all told.

In Texas, Mr. Musk’s group targeted Mr. Talarico, a state representative who is seeking to become the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in that state since 1988. He is locked in a tight race against Ken Paxton, the Republican state attorney general.

The 30-second ad opens with a video clip of Mr. Talarico saying that “God is nonbinary,” a comment that Mr. Talarico suggested to CBS News in May had “missed the mark.”

“James Talarico believes there are six genders,” the ad’s narrator says. “Talarico voted to let men play women’s sports and for taxpayer-funded sex changes on kids.”

The Talarico campaign disputed those claims, saying that Mr. Talarico did not support gender-reassignment surgery for minors and had tried working with Republicans to amend a “flawed” bill barring transgender children from participating in sports of the opposite genders.

“Billionaire-backed dark money groups are lying about James Talarico because they’re scared of the people-powered movement we’re building to fix this broken, corrupt political system,” said JT Ennis, a spokesman for the Talarico campaign.

Mr. Musk is reprising his efforts to bolster Republicans, as he did during the 2024 election, when he spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars in support of Donald J. Trump and the party’s candidates.That alliance appeared to be uncertain after Mr. Musk publicly criticized Mr. Trump, who chose Mr. Musk to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting initiative that aimed to cut the size of the federal work force, at the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term. But in recent months, Mr. Musk has signaled that he is back on board with Republicans.

In Ohio, Mr. Musk deployed a similar line of attack against Mr. Brown, a Democrat who is trying to mount a comeback after losing his Senate seat in 2024. Mr. Brown is in a tight race against Senator Jon Husted, who was appointed to fill the Senate seat of JD Vance when he left to become vice president.

“Two years ago, we fired Sherrod Brown because Brown put the trans agenda ahead of Ohio’s values,” the ad’s narrator says.

Patrick Eisenhauer, Mr. Brown’s campaign manager, said in a statement on Tuesday that “billionaires are lying to try and bail out” Mr. Husted.

In 2024, state lawmakers in Ohio upheld a law barring transition care for minors. The law also prohibits transgender girls and women from competing in girls and women’s sports from kindergarten through 12th grade and at the collegiate level.

In Iowa, Mr. Turek, a Democratic state legislator who is running against Ashley Hinson, a three-term Republican congresswoman, in another high-stakes Senate race, is also in the sights of Mr. Musk.

“Josh Turek voted to spend our tax dollars on sex-change surgeries for children,” the ad’s narrator says.

The claim echoed a line of attack from a campaign ad for Ms. Hinson, which the fact-checking outlet PolitiFact found in June to be a distortion of Mr. Turek’s record on transition care.

“Josh opposes taxpayer-funded sex changes, and anyone who says otherwise is lying,” said Hannah Goss, a spokeswoman for the Turek campaign.

Reflections On U.S. Labor Day, Democrats and Upcoming 9/11 Anniversary 

The Guardian, 'The most anti-union president’: how Trump turned his back on US workers, Steven Greenhouse, Sept. 7, 2026. Labor experts stunned at how anti-worker Trump has been with actions since last Labor Day that have hurt unions.

Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to champion US workers. Shortly before Labor Day last year, he said: “Every policy of the Trump administration is designed to lift up the American worker and “promote great-paying blue-collar jobs”. But in the year since last Labor Day, Trump has taken many actions that have hurt US workers and unions, with some labor experts saying they have been stunned at how anti-worker Trump has been.

In the months after Trump returned to office, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) cut workplace inspections by 20%, compared with Joe Biden’s last year in office. Even though Trump campaigned as a champion of coalminers, his administration has repeatedly delayed implementation of a rule to limit silica dust, which has afflicted and killed many coalminers with black lung. The United Mine Workers union has urgently called for “immediate enforcement” of the stalled silica dust rule.

With regard to wages, workers haven’t been doing so well under Trump. While the White House boasts that wages have risen, the problem for workers is that prices – pushed up by Trump’s tariffs and the Iran war – have risen faster than wages over the past year, helping fuel the affordability crisis. In a move that will cut pay for many low-wage workers, the Trump administration has proposed eliminating federal minimum wage and overtime protections for 3 million often low-paid homecare workers who take care of seniors and the disabled.

Despite several court rulings to slow or stop this anti-union effort, Trump has pushed aggressively ahead with his unprecedented campaign to strip 1 million federal employees of their ability to bargain collectively – a move that Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation, called, “the largest single act of union-busting in our history”. Trump has moved to end collective bargaining for hundreds of thousands of workers at the Transportation Security Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies.

In another unprecedented move, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, the pro-union chair of the National Labor Relations Board – the first time a president has fired an NLRB member. Trump has since named numerous pro-business officials to the labor board.

“Trump’s actions make him by far the most anti-union president in our modern history,” Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants and a leading progressive voice in the labor movement, said in an interview. “His administration has been massively anti-worker, anti-union and anti-working class.”

White House officials take sharp issue with critics who say Trump is anti-worker. Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said: “President Trump will always put American workers first, which is why he signed the largest middle-class tax cuts in history, secured trillions in investments into our country, and negotiated historic trade deals to reshore our manufacturing industry and protect American jobs. Thanks to President Trump, American workers are prioritized over illegal aliens and foreign-born workers once again.”

Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive thinktank, said she was stunned by some of Trump’s anti-worker actions, especially by his order last year chopping the minimum wage that federal contractors must pay their employees, to $13.30 an hour from $17.75. That move caused some workers to lose over $9,000 a year in pay.

This year, Trump rescinded a Biden-era regulation that made overtime pay available to more salaried workers. As a result, 4.3 million workers will no longer qualify for time-and-a-half overtime. (Two federal courts in Texas had ruled against Biden’s overtime regulation.) In his years as president, Trump has never pushed to raise the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage, which has greatly eroded in value since it last increased in 2009.

“The Trump administration is systematically weakening policies and institutions that give workers a voice, that give workers protections and that hold employers accountable,” Shierholz said. “He’s been doing that from day one, and since then it has absolutely continued and accelerated. You see attacks on every kind of worker protection from safety and health to wage and hour protections. Policy after policy after policy goes directly against the interests of workers.”

Trump has helped some groups of workers by getting Congress to enact no tax on tips and a significant cut in taxes on overtime pay. The White House boasts that Trump also helped cuts taxes for working families, but Trump’s critics say those cuts overwhelmingly favor the ultra-wealthy, while giving just modest cuts to workers.

President Biden had proposed a landmark regulation to protect workers against extreme heat, but the Trump administration, pushed hard by corporate America, is seeking to seriously weaken Biden’s effort to require rest breaks for workers and access to water and shade when it is very hot. The Trump administration also wants to undo Biden’s plans to codify extreme heat as a workplace hazard.

This past February, after intense lobbying by corporations, the Trump administration moved to scrap a Biden-era rule and make it far easier for employers to classify workers as independent contractors, be they construction workers or Uber drivers. This move will significantly lower many employers’ labor costs by removing any obligation to pay minimum wage and overtime and to contribute to those workers’ social security, Medicare and unemployment insurance benefits.

Although Trump boasts that the US economy is in the best shape ever, monthly job growth under Trump is down significantly compared with Biden. Young workers are having a hard time finding jobs, while Trump has been an outspoken cheerleader for AI and datacenters, which are fueling huge fears about many jobs disappearing. Trump promised to use tariffs and other means to make American manufacturing great again. But ever since Trump returned to office, the US has lost 35,000 manufacturing jobs, partly because of all the chaos and uncertainty Trump’s tariffs created, although in the past few months there have been modest gains in factory jobs.

The Trump administration has shown hostility to unions in a way that shocked many Americans. As part of an investigation into opposition to ICE’s operations in Minnesota, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security got hold of financial records from two leading unions, the Service Employees International Union and the Communications Workers of America, saying that this was part of an inquiry into “domestic terrorism financing”.

Further showing how much Trump officials dislike and distrust organized labor, Trump’s prosecutors even told a grand jury that the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main union federation, representing 15 million American workers and retirees, and several unions were part of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct the efforts of ICE agents in Minnesota.

“It’s terrible that they’re going after labor activists and unions in Minnesota for merely standing up for their neighbors,” Nelson said. “It’s outrageous that this administration called union members who are fighting for their neighbors ‘domestic terrorists’.”

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 7, 2026 [Trump's Frantic, Fantastic Self-Promoting, 'Historical' Self-Portraits], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Since yesterday, President Donald J. Trump has been posting on social media at a frantic pace, showing AI images of himself with President George Washington on his own account and, on the official White House account, a video of himself as the DC Comics Green Lantern superhero.

The White House social media account ripped off Green Lantern’s oath, captioning the video: “In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might beware my power… Green Lantern’s light!”

Back on his own account, Trump posted images of Space Force uniforms that mimic those of Starship Troopers, whose design the director of that 1997 film claimed was meant to invoke Nazis. He also posted two AI images of himself in what appears to be a spaceship with his hands on buttons as two nuclear mushroom clouds billow off planet Earth behind him, and two images of himself as a sort of superhero dark lord with a dark army around him with the captions “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN,” “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES,” and “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.”

He posted multiple images of himself changing maps or of new maps showing the change of the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” and the state of New Mexico to “New America,” and labeling the Strait of Hormuz as “NEW U.S. Territory.” He showed the colors of the United States over the North American continent, and he posted “before” and “after” maps in which Iran was replaced with a silhouette image of his own head, as well as an AI image of a U.S. military plane blowing up Iran’s Kharg Island with the caption: “Bye bye, Kharg,” along with repeated claims that Iran is collapsing. He posted an AI-generated image of himself beating Canadian prime minister Mark Carney at hockey and saying, “GET UP, GOVERNOR,” an insulting reference to Canada as a U.S. state.

He also posted an image of the moon with the caption: “THE MOON IS OURS” along with a U.S. flag.

And, of course, many of the things Trump posted claimed he would “GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS THE GREATEST PRESIDENT OF ALL TIME!” He posted AI images of former president Joe Biden wearing a Trump 2024 hat and anti-Trump actor Robert DeNiro holding up a shirt saying “TRUMP IS MY PRESIDENT.” He posted an AI image of what seemed to be the luxury liner RMS Titanic, labeled “DUMOCRATIC PARTY,” sinking in flames.

He acknowledged complaints about the fact he has pocketed more than two billion dollars from rapid-fire stock trading since taking office a second time. He posted an image of himself trading stocks at his desk in the Oval Office at a screen that reads “BOUGHT: INTEL $20” and another that reads “NOW $95” with the caption: “I do this for our Country, not myself. I’ve made Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on Stocks, and many other type Holdings, for the U.S.A., not myself, and all I do is get criticized by the Radical Left Dumocrats. Very unfair, but what can you do! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

He reiterated his demand for the SAVE America voter suppression act and claimed: “Except for the RADICAL LEFT that wants to RAISE YOUR TAXES, and wreck our Economy, EVERYONE LOVES TAX CUTS! My Big Beautiful Bill was the BIGGEST relief in HISTORY for hardworking families—Nobody’s seen anything like it!”

It seems likely that he and his aide Natalie Harp, who is apparently behind much of his social media, think trolling the country is a good way to keep attention focused on Trump rather than on rising inflation, corruption, or the war in Iran.

There is much to distract from. On CNN today, pollster Harry Enten noted that while Trump enjoyed a 20-point advantage over Vice President Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, in 2024 on economic issues, Trump’s approval rating for how he is handling the economy is now 41 points underwater. “We’re talking about a switcheroo in the wrong direction of 61 points on this Labor Day,” Enten said. “It is not a happy Labor Day, indeed, for President Trump when it comes to how those who are employed view him on the economy.”

Also today, when Martha Raddatz of ABC News noted that gas and diesel prices are soaring, with the Labor Day gasoline average at $4.10 a gallon compared with $3.16 last year, she played a clip of Trump telling an audience that when they had to “pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have—a country, really, it’s the number one state sponsor of terror in the world. We don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon. So remember that, when you have to pay a little bit more, you’re at $4, it’s okay. I mean, it’s, I’m not, I’m not. I will never apologize. I did the right thing.”

Raddatz asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright today about when we might see a nuclear agreement with Iran, since it’s already been six months of higher prices and there doesn’t seem to be one on the table. Wright answered: “There may not be a nuclear agreement. It may be simply destroying their capabilities to do it. An agreement may await a next administration in Iran. We simply don’t know that. But I think what the president was communicating there is how critically important this is.”

Tonight, Trump posted: “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran. Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA! President DJT”

But while at some level Trump might think he is being clever by keeping the focus on himself, what he is really doing is demonstrating that he is no longer even trying to govern and is instead retreating into a world where he simply does whatever he wants without regard for the country. In the early hours of Trump’s rants yesterday, even before they had gained their full momentum, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) called out the Republicans who are refusing to exercise their constitutional powers to protect the country.

“This is truly unhinged,” she posted on social media over a video of his posts. “I don’t want to hear ‘oh, it’s just Trump being Trump’ or he’s ‘trolling.’ Republicans cannot keep shrugging this off. Congress, the Cabinet + everyone around him has a responsibility to stop enabling this dangerous behavior and start asking whether he is fit to hold office.”

Today Trump acknowledged the Labor Day holiday, saying: “Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Former president Joe Biden had a different message for the country on Labor Day: “I’ve said it my entire career,” he posted on social media, “the middle class built America. And unions built the middle class. To every worker who’s ever punched a clock, worked a double, or walked a line for fair wages—and to everyone who stands up for them, at the bargaining table, in the statehouse, or on the shop floor: thank you. This country runs in large part because of you.”

For my part, I hope everyone had a restful Labor Day and is ready to face the fall season—and the midterm elections—with renewed energy.

New York Times, Guest Essay, Voters Have Spoken. Why Aren’t Democrats Listening? Ben Rhodes, right, Sept. 8, 2026. In 1932, amid a Depression worsened by tariffs, inequality and isolationism, Franklin Roosevelt accepted the Democratic presidential nomination with a cautionary note: “Those nominal Democrats who squint at the future with their faces turned toward the past and who feel no responsibility to the demands of the new time,” he said, “are out of step with their party.”

Roosevelt’s warning rings true today as the Democratic Party struggles awkwardly to straddle its past and future. President Trump’s approval rating has hit a new low. Mired in a pointless war that has driven up prices, he demeans voter concerns and runs the White House with a revolving door for oligarchs. That should be enough to propel Democrats to a House majority, and a slate of compelling Senate candidates could win states that normally favor Republicans.

But this speaks more to a patchwork of progress than a national shift toward the Democratic Party. Less than two years after a catastrophic election, the Democratic brand remains unpopular, and the party remains in the grip of a divisive identity crisis. As Democrats work to claw back power in the midterms, they should also reckon with how they can better position themselves as the political force that can decisively replace MAGA.

Running as a Democrat in 2026 is mainly helpful insofar as it distinguishes you from the alternative. Americans don’t need much convincing that Republicans must be checked, but when they look to Washington, they still see a sclerotic national party led by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries that has struggled to address their fears about a corrupt political system, unfair economy, transformative technologies, endless wars and a lack of shared national identity.

The people fighting to restore the Democratic Party to power understand that. In Iowa, the centrist candidate for governor Rob Sand calls it part of a “broken” two-party system. In New York City, the leftist Zohran Mamdani took aim at a national Democratic establishment “run by well-paid consultants and big-money interests.” In must-win Maine, Minnesota and Michigan, the Democratic Senate nominees have suggested that the party needs new leadership. In Alaska, Mary Peltola rejected the support of the Democrats’ last presidential nominee, Kamala Harris.

Between now and November, the Democratic establishment should step back and let a talented assortment of candidates be the face of the party. Doing so will give Democrats a chance to learn from what is working in different parts of the country. If those lessons are uncomfortable in Washington, they must be urgently heeded instead of disappearing into business as usual. Because as soon as the midterms are over, attention will turn to the election cycle that will end the Trump era. Unless Democrats can win back the trust of the broader electorate, they will not be credible when they promise to bring the change America desperately needs.

There is a cavernous void to be filled in American politics: No one has offered a vision for a future that a decisive majority of Americans can believe in. Before Democrats can change America, they must first change themselves.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.

What does it mean to be a Democrat?

Since Roosevelt’s nomination, the party has thrived when it makes people feel that the government understands their circumstances and is on their side. This common thread unites efforts to expand the social safety net, rein in big business and corruption, extend civil and labor rights and invest in new ladders to opportunity. That requires storytelling, and in my lifetime Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been the dominant figures who told that story.

Yet in the decade since Mr. Trump’s first election, Democrats have played defense: defending legacy programs, marginalized communities, democratic institutions and incumbency. These understandable impulses have at times led to self-destructive excess: prioritizing past achievements, tipping into sanctimonious wokeism, taking ownership of a broken system and resisting generational change. By defining themselves in opposition to Mr. Trump, Democrats have failed to tell a story about the future beyond him.

To break this cycle, Democrats must put themselves on the side of Americans who feel as if they don’t have any power — or even agency — over their future. But that is not how the party is currently seen.

The pollster David Binder has spent this election cycle examining the attitudes of voters who have been willing to switch parties through the Trump decade. “The bottom line is that voters everywhere are saying, ‘Nobody is looking out for me,’” he told me. “Republicans, Democrats — they all look out for themselves. They get corrupted quickly upon election because they get sucked into a system which is about money, re-election, donors, special interests.”

While Democratic leaders would dispute that, Americans aren’t wrong to feel a disconnect between themselves and the politicians who represent them. The economic populism that fuels campaigns is often muted in Washington. The backlash to data centers started in communities across the country, not in Congress. The growing opposition to arming the Israeli government is far more pronounced among voters than politicians. While many Democratic candidates refuse corporate PAC money, party leaders in Washington do not.

Instead, Washington Democrats often retreat to safer ground. In laying out an agenda for a potential majority, Mr. Jeffries, the House leader, recently outlined restoring congressional tariff authority, reinstituting Obamacare subsidies and reversing Medicaid cuts. Worthy goals, but ones rooted in the past.

The most effective opposition to Mr. Trump has often come from outside Washington. From citizens in Minneapolis who found a way to stand up to Immigration and Customs Enforcement on their own. From a constellation of groups organizing No Kings rallies. From California’s efforts to redraw congressional districts and attorneys general across the country fighting federal overreach. From voices across a fractured attention economy that older politicians struggle to understand.

This reinforces the perception of a Democratic establishment cloistered from a restive country. The Democratic National Committee refused to reckon with the ruinous decision to vouch for Joe Biden’s decision to run for re-election. The average age of Democratic ranking members in Congress is nearly 70. With an electorate hungering for someone — anyone — new, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee backed establishment politicians in Maine and Michigan who could not even win their primaries.

In recent weeks, centrist Democrats have attacked democratic socialists over the excesses of wokeism past, and some voted for a Republican resolution condemning socialism. Many followed a Fox News feeding frenzy over the views of perhaps the most popular progressive streamer in the country, Hasan Piker. Third Way, a think tank founded two decades ago to defend Clinton-style moderation, committed $15 million to wage this interparty civil war.

Yes, a democratic socialist platform in New York City should not be replicated in an Iowa or Kansas Senate race. Yes, progressives should be counseled away from reprising the culture wars of the recent past. But rather than attacking the D.S.A. as the enemy, Democrats should ask themselves why so many voters are siding with insurgents. When you have lost all national power to a right-wing populist movement, it is obtuse to slam the door on your own populist insurgents.

Centrists argue that they’re anticipating right-wing attacks, but in fact they’re amplifying them — a common trap for Democrats in the Trump era. And at a time when Democrats desperately need new energy, it makes the Democratic Party look afraid of its own voters. Particularly when set against the cultlike uniformity that has characterized MAGA Republicans, Democrats should be embracing pluralism as a strength. The most innovative Democratic campaigns waged since Mr. Trump’s re-election show that populism can resonate from the center and the left. The goal should be threading them together.

We are living in an age when people feel as if their fates are dictated by forces beyond their control. To succeed, the Democratic Party must fashion itself into a vehicle for people to reclaim agency — one that can convince Americans they can remake our economy, our technology and our foreign policy to work for the people, not the other way around.

Mr. Trump and his MAGA movement promised to do something similar. Yet throughout his second term, he has done the opposite. Power is exalted. Prices keep rising. A culture of corruption feels omnipresent.

There is a populist uprising against data centers because they are a physical manifestation of what people fear about the future. Machines replacing workers. Children taught by chatbots. A creeping surveillance state. Money and power concentrated in ever fewer hands.

People have been speaking up against these developments. Yet as with so many other issues in recent years — from the economy to foreign policy — their will has been ignored by politicians.

Democrats must demonstrate that they understand the extent to which a broken system must be remade. They must commit to using government to break up and constrain the obscene concentrations of power that shape our lives and the flood of money and special interests that have corrupted our politics. That was the purpose of the Progressive Era that followed the Gilded Age. And that is necessary, once again, to build a fair economy, lowering prices, regulating corporations and Big Tech and strengthening the social safety net.

Most Americans probably feel as if these reforms are impossible. That just makes generational change within the Democratic Party that much more of an imperative. It’s not just about optics or political positioning: Only new faces can make voters believe change is possible. Instead of being a collection of familiar personalities and interest groups, Democrats should seize the opportunity to begin building a cohesive movement.

That requires finding a moral language to tell a new story. After a decade of Trumpism, our society has gotten meaner, uglier and more obsessed with screens, consumption and conflict. Lying and cruelty have been rewarded. In the process, we’ve lost track of what gives us a sense of meaning and belonging. Has that made us happier?

Talking points will not fill that void. Democrats must ground their arguments in the language of values that have gone missing: fairness, dignity and community. That kind of message has already propelled younger politicians as different as Mr. Mamdani and James Talarico from obscurity to prominence in just over a year. I believe most Americans understand that we can have a secure border without ICE ripping our neighbors out of their homes and that we can address injustice without constantly shaming people.

A Democratic Party that remakes itself into that kind of vehicle for change can unburden itself of the careful messaging, identity politics, internal squabbling and establishment sheen of the past decade. With Mr. Trump receding into the past, Democrats have an opportunity to be much bigger than the party that struggled in his shadow — but only if they are willing to let the party become a vehicle to take back power for people who feel they have none.

Roosevelt accepted that first Democratic nomination for president in a similarly untethered time and made the future feel like something that could be shaped, declaring that he would “restore America to its own people.” Only by making itself a movement to do just that can the Democratic Party convince Americans that the forces shaping their lives are not beyond their control. After all, this is a democracy. 

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

 

Reprinted from above: Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA! President DONALD J. TRUMP 

Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Loyal and patriotic citizens, please stand by, Jeff Teidrich, right, Sept. 8, 2026. This, shown above, is a message of the utmost importance from the President of the United States, Supreme Ruler of the Western Hemisphere, Lord-Emperor of the Sky Above and All the Planets, Friend to Diaper Nurses Everywhere, Conqueror Of Every War, God’s Own Avatar on Earth, Grand Renamer of Water and Land. 

There it is. Oh, thank goodness.

As you well know, it’s not really a holiday until Dear Leader officially acknowledges the HATERS and LOSERS (or in this case, the COMMUNISTS and the DUMOCRATS) and, by presidential fiat, invites them to participate, while also praising himself for his own imaginary accomplishments.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO DEAR LEADER’S PREENING, INFANTILE TANTRUM.

Finally, now we can get this show on the road.

This self-styled ‘friend of the working class’ is the last person in the world who should be allowed to preside over a national holiday celebrating workers.

Donny hasn’t done a single day’s labor in his soft, privileged life — and he has no appreciation or respect for those who have. He hires undocumented immigrants to build his fugly towers, and work at his vermin-infested golf motels. He then pays them sub-standard wages, or just flat-out stiffs them. Has he ever once hired a unionized worker? Oh, please.

The Guardian: 

In the year since last Labor Day, Trump has taken many actions that have hurt US workers and unions, with some labor experts saying they’ve been stunned at how anti-worker Trump has been.

In the months after Trump returned to office, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) cut workplace inspections by 20%, compared with Joe Biden’s last year in office. Even though Trump campaigned as a champion of coal miners, his administration has repeatedly delayed implementation of a rule to limit silica dust, which has afflicted and killed many coal miners with black lung. The United Mine Workers union has urgently called for “immediate enforcement” of the stalled silica dust rule.

as always with Donny and his Republican shitweasel enablers, it’s watch what they do, not what they say.

Donny has done everything within his power to make life worse for We the People — but here he is, imagining himself to be God’s gift to the American worker. oh, please. that’s such a cool story, Mister You’re Fired. tell it again — preferably while you’re fucking straight off into deep space.

Finally, let’s watch as New York City’s Islamocommunofascist Mayor Zohran Mamdani teaches John Fetterman a master class in How To Not Suck.

“What do New Yorkers think about [Mamdani]? They like the guy — and it’s not just that they like the guy. They like the guy a lot more than a year ago. Take a look here: Mamdani’s rating in New York City. you know, a year ago was 44%. Look where it was at the beginning of his term. It was 68%. Look now, it’s 69%. There has been no drop. He is still on the honeymoon period. This is an extremely long honeymoon period. But Mamdani is still very popular, as he is implementing his agenda.”

Now let’s compare those numbers to Fetterman’s.

“Look at this shift. WOW! Fetterman’s approval rating — you go back to 2024, it was plus 70 points. by 2025, it was down 91 points, into negative territory — minus 21 points. You think that’s low? Look at now. MINUS 50 POINTS. Tat is a — get this, if we do out math correctly, a ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY POINT DROPPEROO, from plus 70 points to minus 50 points. Pennsylvania Democrats absolutely despise John Fetterman at this point.”

Fact check: it’s not just PA Dems who despise Fetterman right now — it’s all all of us. It’s a no-brainer, and it’s that simple: do what you promised to do, and the people who voted for you will love you for it. 

 

Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump thinks he's the hero of 9/11, Heather Delaney Reese, above right, Sept. 7, 2026. At 2:35 this Labor Day afternoon, Donald Trump was still on vacation at his private golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey, when he posted a video of himself with the words, “What Donald Trump saw at… Ground Zero hours after 9/11.” 

The video was actually taken days later, on September 13, when he was blocks away. In the video, he is wearing an immaculate black suit and a crisp white shirt as he told a German news reporter, “I have about 100 men working down here… and we have another 100 coming in a little while.” He continued, “I was just down at Ground Zero. It’s a disaster, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Hours after he posted the video on social media, the president’s interview with Trey Gowdy was posted on Fox News. This time, he tells a much different story of those terrible days. He told Gowdy, “And I went down… like the following day. Very quickly afterwards, and we worked long and hard.”

The president is not just saying that he sent hundreds of workers to Ground Zero, which has never been proven after nearly 25 years. He is now saying that he himself “worked long and hard” among our hero first responders, even though the video he posted today shows him impeccably dressed without a single speck of dust on him.

His story has never been true. Not then and certainly not now. For nearly 2 and a half decades, nobody has been able to verify any of the many stories he has told about the day our country was attacked and we lost nearly 3,000 souls. His claim about sending his own workers, 100, 200 or even 1 of them to Ground Zero has never been verified. Richard Alles, a former deputy chief with the New York Fire Department who was on the scene about 20 minutes after the second tower collapsed, told PolitiFact, “I was there for several months. I have no knowledge of his being down there.” PolitiFact, USA Today, and Poynter all investigated his claim, and none of them found evidence that Trump helped with the rescue efforts or that he arranged for 200 of his workers to join in the rescue operation. Newsweek went so far as to call it false.

One of the only documented pieces of evidence that Donald Trump was anywhere near Ground Zero in those first days was from a New York Newsday reporter who spotted him on September 13 and described him as wearing the exact same clothes, in the same condition as in the video he shared, down to the impeccably dressed black suit, pressed white shirt, and red tie, as he was walking into the plaza with his cellular phone to his ear saying, “No, no. The building’s gone,” into the phone.

But at that point Donald Trump had already decided he was going to capitalize on the death and destruction happening all around him, and make it all about him. While nearly 3,000 people were dying, and families were desperately searching for their loved ones, Donald Trump called into a local television station for a phone interview. The interviewer asked him about his building at 40 Wall Street, and Trump responded: “Forty Wall Street actually was the second tallest building in downtown Manhattan. And it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest. And then when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest, and now it’s the tallest.” Except even that wasn’t true. 70 Pine Street was actually the tallest building in Lower Manhattan after the Twin Towers fell, standing about 25 feet taller than Trump’s building at 40 Wall Street.

In 2002, on the first anniversary of the attack, he told Howard Stern that he “saw the whole thing” from his apartment in Midtown Manhattan, roughly four miles from the World Trade Center. He went on to say that he had “two windows that are focused on the building,” once again placing himself inside the story of that day. In 2005, he testified before Congress, where he claimed that “a lot of people could say” that if the World Trade Center had asbestos, “it wouldn’t have burned down” and “wouldn’t have melted.” He used the deaths of nearly 3,000 people to make an argument defending a building material.

In the years that followed, he claimed that he had predicted the September 11th attacks in his book, “The America We Deserve.” But his book did not predict the September 11th attacks. It contained a brief reference to Osama bin Laden, who was already well known to U.S. officials as a terrorist threat before Trump’s book was published. It was another moment where Trump was trying to appear important and relevant.

In 2013, on the 12th anniversary of the attacks, he tweeted: “I would like to extend my best wishes to all, even the haters and losers, on this special date, September 11th.” He called it a “special date.” This tweet was later deleted during his presidential campaign, but it had already been seen, screenshotted, and shared for years at that point. On the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in American history, he called his fellow Americans “haters and losers.”

In November 2015, at a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, Donald Trump claimed he watched from Jersey City, New Jersey, as “thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down.” When questioned by ABC News, he doubled down: “It did happen. I saw it. It was on television.” He went on to say, “There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down.” But that too never happened the way Trump described it. News archives from that day were searched, and nothing was ever found showing thousands and thousands of Muslims having mass celebrations as the towers fell. Quite the opposite really, there were Muslim Americans condemning the attacks, praying, and bracing themselves for the anti-Muslim backlash that was already beginning. Trump took unsubstantiated rumors and turned them into a story about thousands of Muslims celebrating the murder of their fellow Americans, a story that vilified Muslim Americans and fueled hatred.

In April 2016, he told a rally he “helped a little bit” to clear rubble at Ground Zero. That same year, he claimed he lost “hundreds of friends” on September 11th. He actually thought it would be believable that his own friends account for roughly 6% of the the people who died on that day. When pushed to name all these supposed friends, he has never been able to provide a single name other than one Catholic priest who served as chaplain to the city’s fire department.

In April 2017, after he was already the president, he bragged that an interview he did on CBS’s Face the Nation got the show its highest ratings since “the World Trade Center came down.” He used the murder of nearly 3,000 people to try to make his interview viewership look good.

Then in July 2019, about halfway through his presidency, he was at a Rose Garden ceremony with first responders for the 9/11 Victims Compensation Fund, when he told them all: “I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

In September 2021, on the 20th anniversary, Trump started telling a brand new story. He claimed he heard creaking at a building near Ground Zero and told first responders, “That building is coming down,” right before he was grabbed by “two big firemen” who moved him to safety. That story had never been even hinted at before. Not by Trump or by these supposed firefighters. Twenty years after the attacks, he was suddenly creating new stories to make him look like a hero during those dark days.

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.

Every year, his stories get bigger and more grandiose. Every year, he gets closer to the rubble, works harder, stays longer, and of course, saves more people. The towers themselves even grew taller in tonight’s interview. He told Gowdy the building was “115 stories tall.” The Twin Towers were 110 stories. He even made the buildings grow to make his story sound more impressive.

He is incapable of allowing September 11th to belong to the people who actually suffered. We think of those who lost their lives. The families forever changed and missing the people they love. We remember the firefighters who climbed those stairs, knowing they might never come back down, and still ran toward danger. The construction workers who spent months in toxic dust and are still suffering and dying from breathing it all in. But for Donald Trump, it was just another opportunity for him to shine. He has to be the one who saw it first. He wants us to think he somehow knew it was coming. He wants to be seen as the hero who sent the workers. And now he wants us to think of September 11th and think of how brave he was and how he spent long and hard days helping his country at Ground Zero.

Never one to miss a money grab, Trump also capitalized then, too. After September 11th, the federal government created a more than $500 million program to help businesses in Lower Manhattan recover from the devastating economic impact of the attacks. Trump applied for and accepted $150,000 from the fund, his company supposedly qualified under the program’s rules, due to economic as well as physical losses, even though he told that German television reporter on September 13th that his property at 40 Wall Street was not affected by what happened. He also pledged that he would donate $10,000 to the Twin Towers Fund, but the New York City Comptroller’s office later reviewed the donor records and found no record of that donation.

Now, as we approach the 25th anniversary, Donald Trump continues to try to make this day all about himself. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush are all expected to attend the special memorial at Ground Zero, where they will stand together to remember those we lost. Trump will not be attending Ground Zero. He is instead expected to commemorate September 11th at the Pentagon. Trump had reportedly planned to attend the Ground Zero ceremony, but changed those plans because he wanted to give a speech, and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum does not allow politicians to give remarks at the annual ceremony, a longstanding rule meant to rightfully keep the focus on the victims and their families.

The New York Times reported that Trump’s team conducted advance visits to Ground Zero, sharing his desire to speak at the event. When organizers reminded them of the no-speeches rule, it was quickly announced that he would not be attending. He chose to go to the Pentagon instead, where, as Commander in Chief, he controls the venue and can theoretically speak as long as he wants. No doubt his speech will focus on making him the center of attention on this sad day of remembrance.

Vice President JD Vance will instead attend the Ground Zero ceremony in Trump’s place. When asked at a White House briefing why the president was not going, Vance said, “You have a vice president and you have a president... we’d like to be three or four places on 9/11 but you can’t have one person be in multiple locations at the exact same time.” He tried to pass off the issue as a logistical one instead of the ego issue it really was.

This week will be another hard one, especially for those who have had to live their lives without their loved ones for the past 25 years. For so many, the sting they feel every time Donald Trump makes it about himself is almost unbearable. We will need to brace ourselves for however he chooses to pervert the day as it approaches.

Earlier today, my mother made a special request to include a specific call to action tonight. In her own resistance, she has been encouraging people to check their voter registration status. We are hearing about more people, especially those in Texas, who have found themselves on the state’s voter “suspense” list and needing to confirm their information. So if you haven’t checked, do so now. And then make a plan to keep checking every few days. We cannot afford to assume everything is fine. We need to stay ahead of anything that could keep us from casting our votes.

It’s not often, in fact, it’s exceedingly rare that I am able to end my posts with a reason to smile or laugh, but tonight let’s do that. In Victoria, British Columbia, the city my family has visited nearly every summer for years, someone hung a wooden sign above a public restroom along the Galloping Goose Regional Trail, near the Selkirk Trestle. A bathroom I have proudly used on our long daily walks when we are on the island. The sign read: “The President Donald J. Trump Memorial.” It hung directly over the entrance to the toilets. The city took the sign down, but not before it was covered by local news and is now being shown far and wide. No one knows who put it up. I cannot wait to visit those toilets next summer, and I hope the sign comes back.

It reminded me tonight of something important: how humor is one of the oldest tools of resistance, and how it can reach people who are not necessarily as tuned in to what is happening. It is how people have always pushed back against tyranny and corruption, and it is a way to remind each other that none of this is okay, or normal, and that we see through it.

It is fitting that tonight, a man who has spent 25 years trying to make himself the hero of September 11th was given his most fitting memorial of all: a plaque over a public toilet on a walking trail in Canada. And maybe there is something hopeful in knowing that even after everything we have been through, people are still finding ways to resist, to laugh, and to let each other know that we still see what is happening around us. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment:A Bipartisan Group Of Nearly 300 Current And Former Members Of Congress Urge SCOTUS To Block Trump’s Mail-In Voting Attack, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 8, 2026. Nearly 300 current and former members of Congress from both parties filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to block Trump’s attack on mail-in voting.

Trump is quickly running out of time to implement his rules attacking mail-in ballots, but that doesn’t mean that this is not an all-hands-on-deck moment for democracy.

What Trump is attempting clearly violates the Constitution, which gives Congress the sole power to set the rules for federal elections. The states conduct the elections themselves, and the federal government has no role in the conduct of elections.

Trump is trying to sidestep the Constitution by claiming that this rule comes from the USPS and not the president, but the Constitution does not allow the USPS a role in elections either.

On Tuesday, 261 current and former members of Congress from both parties filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court urging it to strike down Trump’s executive order and the USPS rule.

The members wrote:

First, the Executive Branch’s directives to regulate mail-in and absentee ballots are unconstitutional because they encroach on the States’ primary and Congress’s paramount authority under the Constitution’s Elections Clause. U.S. Const. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. The text and history of the Elections Clause categorically bar the Executive Branch from asserting unilateral authority over federal-election administration.

The executive branch has no authority over federal elections. Congress has not issued any regulations or statutory authority to the executive branch over federal elections, and Trump is trying to mess with the states’ sole authority to administer elections.

As you will see below, Trump doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on.

The brief continued:

And because the Order and Final Rule purport to involve USPS in States’ administration of mail-in voting, the Order also intrudes on the Postal Clause, a second grant of legislative power that Article I commits to Congress with no mention of any role for the Executive. No constitutional provision supplies a legitimate basis for the Order or the Final Rule. Second, even assuming that Congress could delegate its specified constitutional role under the Elections Clause and the Postal Clause to USPS, the Order and Final Rule must be struck down because they lack any clear grounding in such a delegation.

To the contrary, the Order conflicts with numerous statutes that Congress has duly—and carefully—enacted pursuant to the Elections Clause and the Postal Clause. Amici therefore submit this brief to urge the Court to deny Applicants’ request for emergency relief.

The Constitution gives no president authority in this matter.

As the members of Congress concluded:

The integrity of our constitutional system depends on each branch keeping to its assigned role. The Framers set up a two-part system that gave the States default authority to regulate federal elections subject to Congress’s authority to override the States. The Framers did not provide the President with any authority to interfere in that system, nor has Congress subsequently imbued the President or the Executive Branch with any such authority by statute.

If this court majority ruled for the administration, it would open the door for a future Democratic president to change election rules by making Election Day a national holiday, or using the USPS to expand vote by mail, and a whole host of options that Republicans definitely do not want to ever see happen.

The current Supreme Court majority tends to make up its own rules on the Constitution to suit them.

This should be a slam-dunk rejection of Trump, but with this court, who knows.

Even if the administration prevails, I still think Republicans will lose the midterm election. Trump’s unpopularity and economic destruction have made this election too big to steal, but for the sake of democracy, the Supreme Court needs to do the right thing and block Trump’s attack on mail-in voting. 

New York Times, Justice Kavanaugh Blocks Missouri Voting Map Benefiting Republicans, Ann E. Marimow and Mitch Smith, Sept. 8, 2026. Missouri’s Supreme Court had earlier blocked election officials from using a new congressional map, saying voters must first approve the district lines in a statewide referendum.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh on Tuesday denied a request from Missouri officials to use a congressional map in November that was redrawn to give Republicans an edge in the midterm elections.

The justice’s order deferred to Missouri’s Supreme Court, which last week blocked the use of the new map even though it had been used in last month’s primary election. The state court had found that voters should first have an opportunity to vote on the new district boundaries in a statewide referendum.

Justice Kavanaugh oversees emergency requests from Missouri and acted on his own without referring the matter to the full court. He did not provide any reasoning as is often the case when the court responds to emergency filings.

Missouri’s map had been drawn to help Republicans try to pick up a Democratic-held House seat in the Kansas City area. The G.O.P. now holds six of the state’s eight House seats. The state court did not specify how Missouri should hold a general election using a different map from what was in place for the primaries.

The state’s emergency request had thrust the Supreme Court in the middle of another election-year legal battle in a heated campaign season, where control of the House could come down to a handful of seats. But Justice Kavanaugh refused to intervene on Tuesday, leaving in place a unanimous ruling from Missouri’s highest court on state law, suggesting he did not think there was a federal issue that warranted Supreme Court action.

Missouri’s attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to act quickly and allow use of the new map given a state-imposed Sept. 8 deadline for altering its general election ballot. She noted that 1.2 million Missouri residents had voted in the August primary using the new map.

The state court “threw those votes into the dustbin,” she said, by requiring the winners to run in different congressional districts. In her filing, the attorney general said Missouri planned to comply with one aspect of the state court ruling and proceed with a November referendum on the new map.

But she argued the state should continue with the map used for the primary until that referendum is held. The only question, she wrote, is whether the group of challengers who sued, led by Richard von Glahn, executive director of the advocacy group People Not Politicians Missouri, can “void a congressional map before he gets his vote.”

In a statement Tuesday, the attorney general’s office said, “We are disappointed by this ruling, and are evaluating next steps as related litigation continues.”

Mr. von Glahn celebrated the order from Justice Kavanaugh, which means the state will use the 2022 map passed by the Missouri legislature in the November election.

“Republicans, Democrats and Independents took action to block this political power grab last fall,” he said in a statement. “People, not politicians, will have the final say when they vote NO on Proposition A this November.”

The new map was drawn outside the usual redistricting cycle at President Trump’s request, as part of an effort to improve the Republican Party’s chances of holding the House in the 2026 midterms.

The redrawn Missouri map, adopted by the state legislature in September 2025, divided the core of Kansas City, Mo., the state’s largest city, into several districts in an attempt to unseat Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, one of two Democrats in the state’s congressional delegation. The new map did not significantly alter the partisan makeup of the other Democratic-held district, which is in the St. Louis area.

Democrats and state residents opposed to the boundaries last year collected hundreds of thousands of signatures seeking a referendum on the issue. But Denny Hoskins, Missouri’s Republican secretary of state, said he did not believe redistricting could legally be subject to a voter referendum, and he declined to add it to November’s ballot.

Lawyers for Mr. von Glahn told the justices in a filing on Monday that Mr. Hoskins had waited until the last possible day to object to the referendum, doing so only after implementing the new map for the August primary. The state’s predicament, they said, was a “timing problem of his own making.”

Missouri’s Constitution has long granted citizens the power to override congressional redistricting legislation through a statewide vote, according to referendum proponents. Last December, Mr. von Glahn and People Not Politicians submitted 691 boxes of referendum petitions to the secretary containing more than 300,000 signatures — more than twice the required number.

“This court cannot and should not reward the secretary’s scheme to outsmart Missouri voters, Missouri law and the Missouri Supreme Court by granting” the state’s emergency request, Mr. von Glahn’s lawyers said in a Monday filing.

In addition, his legal team said the Supreme Court lacks jurisdiction to review a state court’s decision on a question of state law. Missouri argued that using a different map for the general election would violate equal protection guarantees in the U.S. Constitution, but Mr. Von Glahn’s lawyers rejected those assertions.

A voter’s primary ballot “does not carry an absolute constitutional entitlement to vote for that same nominee in November, even if other voters in the state will not see any change in the candidates available to them.”

James Comey Test Case Reaches Decision-Point Over Abusive U.S. DOJ Political Prosecutions

 

Shown above is a pattern of seashells that former FBI Director James Comey saw and photographed while vacationing at a North Carolina beach, with the photo he posted on Instagram later forming the basis of felony charges by the Trump Administration, which has long hated the fellow Republican Comey for allowing an FBI preliminary investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to proceed after hackers and other operatives undermined Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton and her campaign. The term "86" is widely used in the hospitality industry to signify a troublesome customer who needs to be eased out of a facility, whereas the Justice Department has claimed that it means to murder someone.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Why Rule of Law May Pivot, Once Again, on Jim Comey, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 8, 2026. As of last Tuesday, Jim Comey’s pretrial motions in his seashell case are fully briefed. I wrote about the existence of a sealed filing in them here; I wrote of new signs of abuse exposed in the filings here. Links to all the filings are here. We wait now, to see whether Comey will break new ground in combatting Trump’s wholesale weaponization of DOJ. Comey is the best bet to establish a broader legal standard that might rein in Trump’s worst attempts to politicize DOJ.

Where the fight to save rule of law is

What Trump has done in his second term is find a series of vulnerabilities in US law and exploit them to give his authoritarianism the patina of legality.

The Supreme Court ruled that no one can stop Trump from stealing $1 billion from taxpayers and using it to destroy the White House and replace it with a bunker, because no one has standing. Ras Baraka has no recourse after ICE goons kidnapped him and Trump’s personal lawyer, playacting as US Attorney, lied to excuse it, because Bivens and Westfall offer no recourse. LaMonica McIver is not entitled to speech and debate protection because the tussle that ensued as ICE kidnapped Newark’s Mayor happened while ICE stalled McIver’s congressional oversight of the Delaney facility. These decisions, while understandable from a legal perspective, carry alarming implications going forward, not least that Stephen Miller’s army of goons could kidnap opposition politicians with impunity.

Similarly, thus far at least, after prosecutors get caught fabricating cases against Trump’s adversaries, as they did with the Broadview 6, Davey Hearn, and Mohamed Jama, the government maintains that (as with Mayor Baraka), the victims get no recourse except legal fees, if even that. They don’t get visibility into how this happened, a confession the DHS or NPS goons fabricated their case, and discovery on how Trump’s DOJ keeps framing his adversaries only to have the case collapse after months of legal fees. DOJ argues they can keep doing this, over and over and over again. There are cases (most notably the Eric Adams case, the fake IRS settlement, the Guatam Adani case, and the unexpected refusal by Carl Nichols to dismiss the Steve Bannon prosecution) where judges are refusing to let DOJ corruptly dismiss cases without explaining their own corruption. Victims who have been framed by Trump’s DOJ are still trying to obtain some kind of justice for having been framed.

That’s why Jim Comey’s bid to dismiss his second (of what is likely to be at least three) indictments Trump ordered up to make an example of the former FBI Director, the guy who refused to “let [rule of law] go” at Trump’s bidding back on February 14, 2017, matters.Selective prosecution is not a tool fit to combat Trump’s wholesale weaponization of DOJ

Trump is trying — indeed, has had some success — in hiding behind the shitty precedents on politicized prosecution torepurpose DOJ to punish his adversaries. For example, his and Republicans’ bid to prosecute Hunter Biden off of a doctored gun purchase form and the kind of tax dodging Roger Stone also engaged in succeeded because two (Trump-appointed) judges said that the direct intervention from the President didn’t matter; all that mattered was the motive of the prosecutors who made the charging decisions. That success continued to the prosecution of the SPLC.

That success did not extend to Kilmar Abrego, an undocumented Salvadoran immigrant whose courage inspired citizens to fight back; Abrego did succeed (at least for now — Trump is appealing) in arguing his prosecution was vindictive.

Important legal precedents don’t necessarily arise in the cases of people you’d otherwise recognize as heroes.

Comey is attempting to do something somewhat more ambitious than even Abrego’s attorneys managed — to pin a selective prosecution claim to Trump’s animus itself, a claim that is at once obvious but also unprecedented in the narrow existing precedents of selective prosecution.

Comey’s first attempt at making this argument in EDVA (MTD, response, reply) last year was never adjudicated. Lindsey Halligan’s disqualification mooted that argument and her apparent failure to actually get an indictment would have destroyed the investigation next.

This attempt is substantially the same, bolstered by even more ridiculous charges and even more abuse to get them. But, coming as it does ten more months into Trump’s authoritarian rampage, it comes amid a more ambitious statement of the unitary executive.

And behind all that — as US Attorney Andrew Boutros made explicit in the Broadview 6 case — is a new theory of power, based in SCOTUS’ Trump v. US opinion: not just that the President can order up general and specific prosecutions, but because SCOTUS sanctioned that power, defendants can’t scrutinize Trump’s role in that process.

And that’s why Jim Comey’s bid to dismiss his prosecution for the way Trump ordered it up matters.

MTD vindictive and selective prosecutionAppendix of Trump’s complaintsDOJ ResponseEllis Boyle affidavitComey Reply

To be sure, no judge has endorsed Boutros’ alarming theory. But that theory is likely to be first scrutinized in Comey’s case (the Broadview 6 have delayed their filing on what should happen twice; it is currently due on September 15).Jim Comey has a ridiculously easy claim that Trump weaponized all of DOJ against him

That’s true because ten years of mean tweets document Trump’s fury that Jim Comey refused to drop the investigation into why Trump’s National Security Adviser was trying to undermine sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s election assistance for Trump. That catalog has gotten 17 pages longer in just the 11 months since Trump first charged Comey! As Comey’s initial brief notes, there’s no question why this happened.

The current record shows a clear causal link between President Trump’s animus and the prosecution of Mr. Comey. This is thus the rare case in which a defendant can “prove an improper motive” and a causal connection “with direct evidence.” Wilson, 262 F.3d at 314. Accordingly, Mr. Comey has established that his prosecution “was motivated by actual vindictiveness,” and the indictment must be dismissed. Id. at 316.

It is breathtaking how explicitly the campaign against Comey is an effort to criminalize any effort to protect the US against Russian interference.

Plus, with Comey, the flopsweat desperation of actually charging him in the seashells case — the Secret Service’s attempt to retroactively declare 8647 a threat until it became clear how common the phrase was, the illegal surveillance followed by the seemingly deliberate snooping in Comey’s privileged communications, the increasingly long chain of attorneys hired and fired just to find people willing to criminalize posting a picture of seashells — all of that demonstrates how the effort to make an example of Jim Comey has corrupted DOJ from top to bottom.

Moreover, federal officials acted irregularly across the course of this investigation. Immediately after Mr. Comey’s post, the Secret Service changed its policy to newly treat “86 47” as a threat; Secret Service agents were also ordered to conduct unlawful surveillance of Mr. Comey and share their interview notes with the President. See supra pp. 8-9. When the Secret Service declined to open a full investigation, the DOJ instructed the FBI to pick up the baton, which Director Patel eagerly did. See supra p. 10. The FBI acted irregularly, too. When the FBI applied for search warrants in March and May 2026—long after the social media post—those applications distorted the facts of the case. See Concurrently Filed Mot. to Suppress & Memo. in Support. The government also failed to install effective screens for attorney-client privilege, resulting in the seizure of communications between Mr. Comey and two of his longstanding attorneys. See Fitzgerald Aff. ¶ 40. The suspect timing and conduct of this prosecution—and the events that catalyzed it—support the conclusion that some motive besides legitimate prosecutorial interests drove the decision. Here, the inference is clear: the newly installed political officials in the DOJ strove to accomplish what their predecessors could not, namely, effectuating the President’s desire to punish Mr. Comey.

Even just having a judge write a memo laying out that this is wrong would be an important step in reining in DOJ.

But Comey, if his small law firm of exceptionally good lawyers is successful, could do more.How to use unitary executive against weaponization

As I’ve alluded, the existing precedents on politicized prosecution suck. The decisions of three Trump-appointed judges that Trump’s explicit intervention in criminal cases did not make them unlawful — Maryellen Noreika in Hunter’s Delaware gun case, Mark Scarsi in Hunter’s Los Angeles tax case, and Emily Coody Marks in SPLC — were not outliers.

To change that for others you’re going to need to go back to first principles: that wielding DOJ as a weapon the way Trump has is a violation of due process and equal protection.

That’s how Comey’s motion to dismiss (as with his earlier one submitted in EDVA) starts: by arguing this goes back to basic constitutional principles.

The indictment must be dismissed under two bedrock legal doctrines. First, the government instigated this prosecution based on Mr. Comey’s protected speech and to vindicate the President’s animus towards Mr. Comey, in violation of First Amendment and due process principles. Second, the government engaged in selective prosecution, in violation of equal protection principles. Dismissal of federal criminal charges under these doctrines has historically been rare. That is because for decades the DOJ’s independence and integrity have guarded against the use of the criminal process to punish enemies or settle political scores. The prosecutions of Mr. Comey mark a sharp break from that tradition. Ample objective evidence—much of which comes directly from government officials’ own public statements and admissions—establishes that the President’s animus toward Mr. Comey led to this vindictive and selective prosecution.

The proper remedy for the government’s constitutional violations is a dismissal with prejudice. But at the very least, the Court should allow for discovery and an evidentiary hearing into the government’s decision-making process. And it should require the government to present objective evidence justifying this prosecution

This initial MTD, though, only obliquely addresses how this fits into Trump’s efforts to expand the unitary executive in the interim. It mostly shows up as a footnote citing Judge Kathleen Williams’ opinion on the IRS case.

[T]he President—the head of the Executive Branch and U.S. Attorney Boyle’s ultimate supervisor— instigated a retaliatory prosecution against Mr. Comey that would otherwise not have been brought.5

5 A district court recently noted the unusual “influence over the DOJ” wielded by President Trump, Trump v. IRS, 2026 WL 2015525, at *12 (S.D. Fla. July 13, 2026), citing a statement by DOJ leadership to U.S. Attorneys nationwide that “the President is the Department’s ‘chief client.’” Id. at 12 n.35 (citation omitted).

But DOJ’s response makes the problem explicit. In two consecutive paragraphs, Ellis Boyle both asserts that Trump can fire anyone (citing Slaughter), but in the next paragraph, claims that the only thing that matters is what Trump’s subordinates — who will be fired if they don’t do what they know Trump wants — act as prosecutors when they implement Trump’s demands.

Comey’s reliance on a social media post directed to former Attorney General Pam Bondi is even further afield. See id. at 12. As Comey elsewhere acknowledges, Bondi was not Attorney General when Comey was charged. Id. at 15. There is no evidence beyond media speculation that the President directed then-Acting Attorney General Blanche, let alone the actual prosecutorial decisionmaker (U.S. Attorney Boyle), to prosecute Comey in EDNC. And even if there were, the Chief Executive directing his subordinates to exercise core Executive functions is a feature, not a bug, of our constitutional system. The purported “independence” of DOJ that Comey cites, DE 36 at 2, is antithetical to the constitutional separation of powers (which lodges the Executive power in the President alone). See Trump v. Slaughter, 146 S. Ct. 2283, 2303 (2026). And as a matter of historical analysis, it is a myth. See, e.g., John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Robert Kennedy’s Attorney General Office (discussing “President Kennedy’s appointment of his 35-year-old brother . . . as the Attorney General”).

But none of that matters. As discussed in more detail below, the test for vindictive or selective prosecution is not whether the Chief Executive has an influence on the prosecutorial decisions of his subordinates (as the Constitution plainly contemplates). It is, rather, whether those prosecutors have exercised their power within the constraints of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. Comey’s misleading narrative should not distract from the fact he cannot come close to showing any violation.

This is the problem!! If Trump can fire anyone who refuses to indict Comey (as he did, effectively, by forcing Erik Seibert to resign in EDVA, still leaving the departures of AUSAs Gabriel Diaz and Nate Lemons in EDNC unexplained), then Ellis Boyle’s claims he personally has no animus to Comey are meaningless.

That’s, effectively, what Comey argues in his reply brief, first citing an article from Jack Goldsmith responding to DOJ’s response posted just days before Comey’s reply was due (and, curiously, reposted at American Enterprise Institute’s site).

The government “cannot have it both ways” by at once asserting “extreme unitariness” and rejecting DOJ’s traditional independence while insisting DOJ prosecutors act “uninfluenced by the president’s vindictive commands.” Jack Goldsmith, The Unitary Executive and Comey’s Vindictive Prosecution Claim, Exec. Functions (Aug. 28, 2026), https://perma.cc/E6S3-MDM4. If accepted, the government’s position would immunize vindictive prosecutions that flow from the President through subordinates who have been tasked with carrying out his bidding.

Goldsmith’s post argues that Boyle literally has no choice but to indict Comey.

But given the wishes of the president, the acknowledged absence of DOJ independence, and the formal and functional orders to follow the president’s will on pain of firing, Boyle had no lawful or practical choice. He was bound to execute the president’s vindictive wishes. He had to find a way to prosecute Comey, at least if he wanted to keep his job.

I can put the point another way. The two sides dispute Fourth Circuit and other circuit precedent on whether and when vindictiveness can be shown by proving that the charging prosecutor was influenced by a superior. I won’t get into those legal weeds here, since this case is unique. Any legal hurdle to inferring the vindictiveness of this charging prosecutor from the vindictiveness of this president should be lowered, if not eliminated, by the Trump administration’s unprecedentedly extreme claims of unitariness.

The Trump administration cannot have it both ways. It cannot claim extreme unitariness and fire people for failing to follow the president’s demand to indict enemies, on the one hand, and then claim, on the other, that the prosecutor in the Comey case made an independent decision to prosecute, uninfluenced by the president’s vindictive commands.

I would dispute that this case is unique — prosecutors are being fired across the country for refusing to implement Trump’s priorities (and, obviously, even an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador managed to make the case, in part because one AUSA was fired and another left in protest over his treatment). It’s just that the reasons and the decade-long animus is so uniquely embodied in Comey’s case.

Which, finally, after Comey’s initial MTD cited Judge Kathleen Williams in the IRS case, and DOJ’s response cited Slaughter, leads to the premise behind all of this, John Roberts’ approval of Trump’s personal interference in specific prosecutions, which Comey cites in his reply.

Accordingly, Mr. Boyle’s blanket assurance (at Dkt. 53-1 ¶ 13) that he “did not feel pressured, coerced, or motivated” to indict Mr. Comey does not advance the government’s position. See Abrego-Garcia, 833 F. Supp. 3d at 834-35 (declining to credit such “good faith explanations” from Acting U.S. Attorney, that he “made the decision on whether to seek an indictment” and “received no direction from anyone at the White House” or DOJ).4 Such a subjective assessment also cannot be relevant where, as here, the animus belongs to the President—who has wielded his “exclusive authority over the investigative and prosecutorial functions of the Justice Department,” Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593, 621 (2024), including by forcing the resignation of a U.S. Attorney who refused to indict Mr. Comey, Mot. 12. Cf. P.H.E., 965 F.2d at 859-60 (court must dismiss a vindictive “a prosecution [that] is premised on the fruits of constitutionally tainted behavior, . . . notwithstanding attempts to launder the taint by presenting the fruits to an independent prosecutor” asserting good faith). After all, “cases do not magically appear on the desks of prosecutors,” and this case is no exception. United States v. Abrego Garcia, 807 F. Supp. 3d 827, 830 (M.D. Tenn. 2025) (ordering government to produce discovery).

If the role of the President in prosecutions — both individual and systematic — changed thanks to Trump v. US, then the doctrine on selective and vindictive prosecution must also change. Trump’s animus and whims are implicated in every single DOJ prosecutorial decision. None more so than with Comey.

So this dispute matters to all of us.Judges prefer to rule on technicalities before applying new precedents

To be sure, there’s no guarantee that Judge Louise Flanagan, appointed by the same President, George W Bush, who first appointed Comey to a senior DOJ position, will take the courageous step of ruling against the government. Something else could end this case, as Lindsey Halligan’s unlawful appointment did in EDVA. Judge Flanagan could dismiss this case on Comey’s argument, which is equally compelling, that his seashell post was not a true threat. She could, separately, grant his motion for a hearing to figure out why FBI Agent April Floyd rushed to get warrants she didn’t read before presenting her case to the jury, a rush that buried exculpatory information. That might lead to dismissal via other means. Judge Flanagan could deny the request, assuming a jury or the appeals process and delay will keep Comey out of jail. If those things happen, Comey will be making the same argument in a few months, likely before Aileen Cannon, who is guaranteed to bow to Trump’s demands (after she refuses to move any case against Comey to DC, where it would belong).

We all would be better served if Judge Flanagan has the courage to do what’s needed here.

The need to champion the rights of this defendant, of all defendants, personally targeted by a President abusing his prosecutorial role won’t go away though. And there will likely never be a case in which the misuse of DOJ’s authority against Trump’s adversaries is so blatant, so deliberately pathetic in criminalizing a post of seashells.

Trump has destroyed so much else with bulldozers and boy bureaucrats. But thus far, his attempt to criminalize his opponents has had to go through juries and judicial review. We’re at a moment now, with Comey but not just with Comey, where we’re looking for tools to reverse that before Trump further packs the court or finds ways around them.

War in the Middle East

New York Times, U.S. Hits 5 Iranian Oil Tankers, Citing Attempted Strikes on Warship, Helene Cooper and Pranav Baskar, Sept. 8, 2026. Iran said it had retaliated by launching missiles at Jordan, raising the specter of still more fighting.

The U.S. military said on Tuesday that it had destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in reprisal for attempted strikes by Iran on a U.S. Navy warship, adding to the burst of fighting in recent days that has punctured weeks of relative calm.

U.S. Central Command said in a statement that it had destroyed four crude oil tankers used by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in the Gulf of Oman and another one near Kharg Island.

Iranian state media said that U.S. forces had attacked Iranian oil tankers off the coast of Kharg Island, the hub of the country’s oil industry, and Jask, a port city on Iran’s southern shore.

The Revolutionary Guards vowed to retaliate, warning tankers near Kuwait and Bahrain — which both host American forces — to evacuate their crews. Shortly afterward, the Guards said in a statement that they launched a “heavy missile strike” at a U.S. base in Jordan to punish Washington.

Central Command did not immediately comment on the Iranian claim.

Even as President Trump has tried to pivot from a military campaign against Iran to one focused on choking its economy, fighting has flared in recent days as each side jostles for control over the economically vital Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. military officials have vowed to strike three Iranian ships for every two vessels hit by Tehran. But Iran has continued to fire on ships, throttling the world’s oil supply, to preserve one of its biggest sources of leverage.

The result has been a stalemate.

Central Command said the Iranian tankers it targeted on Tuesday were “part of a multibillion-dollar shadow network that funds the I.R.G.C. and its regional proxies,” referring to the Revolutionary Guards. It said the attacks had come after Iran twice in two days fired ballistic missiles at a Navy warship.

Iran did not immediately confirm any new attempts to target U.S. warships, but a familiar cycle played out over the weekend. On Saturday, the United States and Iran each said it had attacked the other’s ships.

Central Command said it had struck three Iranian crude oil carriers in response to Iranian attempts to attack two U.S. warships. Iran took responsibility for targeting the American ships and responded to the U.S. strikes by claiming attacks on six additional ships.

The back-and-forth naval strikes came days after the United States bombarded southern Iran, igniting some of the most intense fighting in weeks and killing civilians at a wedding.

The U.S. strikes on Tuesday were not the only signs of the two countries’ naval skirmishing.

Hours earlier, Iran’s navy claimed it had seized an uncrewed American underwater vehicle in the strait. It said the vehicle had been “designed to independently carry out extended missions in deep waters,” including surveillance and mine detection, according to a statement carried by state media.

Capt. Tim Hawkins, a spokesman for Central Command, said that an underwater drone operated by U.S. forces to survey regional waters “in support of ongoing operations” had malfunctioned more than a day ago. He said the drone had been a “defective” older model that neither collected sensitive data nor carried any classified equipment. He said he could not confirm Iranian reports that the technology had been seized. 

More On Canadian-American Tariffs, Inflation, Markets 

New York Times, Canada Imposes New Tariffs on U.S. Goods, as Trade War Intensifies, Tony Romm, Sept. 8, 2026. The duties are a retaliation against President Trump’s recent tariffs, raising concerns about further escalation

New Canadian tariffs targeting roughly $20 billion in U.S. imports officially snapped into place on Tuesday, the latest escalation in an increasingly costly trade war that has ensnarled two longtime allies.

The duties apply to a variety of U.S. goods, including clothing, cheese, metal parts and wood products. The approach is meant to mimic the taxes that President Trump imposed on Canada after trade talks between the two neighbors collapsed in acrimony last month.

For now, the economic effects of the tit-for-tat may be limited because the tariffs encompass only a small portion of the annual trade between the United States and Canada. The more pressing concern is a potential cycle of retaliation, one that results in even higher and more exhaustive duties that harm families and businesses on both sides of the border.

In Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney has sought to position himself as a bulwark against Mr. Trump’s trade aggression, describing his nation as “at war.” Canadian officials generally have pledged to respond “dollar for dollar” to any U.S. duties.

In Washington, the president and his aides have repeatedly mocked their Canadian counterparts and the size of their ally’s economy and military. Mr. Trump has already threatened additional tariffs on auto imports from Canada, and on Friday, he even suggested he could try to halt bilateral trade outright.

Then, hours before Canada’s new tariffs took effect, Mr. Trump took to social media to continue his attack. He singled out Bombardier, a Canadian plane manufacturer, claiming there would be “NO MORE SELLING BOMBARDIER IN THE UNITED STATES!”

In doing so, the president accused Canada of blocking “our GREAT American Banks, and Companies,” and he encouraged U.S. consumers to refrain from buying some Canadian goods.

“BUY AMERICAN. FLY ON AMERICAN AIRLINERS. ENJOY AMERICAN LIQUOR AND BEVERAGES. SAIL ON LAKE AMERICA,” Mr. Trump wrote.

Bombardier said in a statement that aerospace products are a top American export and that the company makes crucial components like wings in California and Texas. “Bombardier is a strong contributor to the sector, creating tens of thousands of jobs across the United States,” it said.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The spat with Canada offered the latest evidence that Mr. Trump remains as committed as ever to his disruptive strategy of trade brinkmanship. Despite nearly two years of blistering court defeats, vicious international disputes and mounting domestic blowback, tariffs remain the president’s preferred tool to try to boost domestic manufacturing and broker better trade deals.

“This tit-for-tat retaliation is bad for Canadian businesses and consumers, and bad for American businesses and consumers,” said Brad Wood, the senior director for trade and innovation at the National Foreign Trade Council, a policy advocacy group whose board of directors includes Caterpillar, Exxon Mobil, Ford Motor and Walmart.

“Every escalation is one more layer of barriers that ultimately Canada and the United States need to resolve,” Mr. Wood added. The question now, he said, is whether Mr. Trump intends to follow through with his threats.

While he spars with Canada, Mr. Trump and his aides are also putting the final touches on a roster of new tariffs targeting dozens of additional countries that the administration has accused of engaging in unfair trade practices. The latest round is expected to find that other nations overproduced certain products — what the administration has called “excess capacity” — leading to large and persistent U.S. trade deficits with those nations.

Those taxes, which could arrive as soon as this week, are meant to replace some of the duties that the Supreme Court struck down in February.

Further inflaming tensions, Mr. Trump has even threatened to block all trade involving countries that export more to the United States than they import from it. Currently, the United States has a yawning trade deficit in goods and services involving dozens of trading partners, including many in Europe and Asia. A halt to imports could prove economically cataclysmic.

Each of those actions could create new financial pressures on American families and businesses. Tariffs are taxes on imports, meaning products from abroad can become more expensive. To that end, the president’s global trade war has only exacerbated policymakers’ yearslong fight with inflation, with the next report on consumer prices set to arrive this week.

The trade dispute between the United States and Canada exploded into public view in July after Mr. Trump accused Canada of discriminating against U.S. industries. In response, he promised to impose tariffs of 50 percent on select Canadian goods unless the two sides could reach some sort of deal in 30 days.

Talks had proceeded for months, and at various points in August, Mr. Trump seemed confident that a resolution was within reach. But negotiations collapsed before his deadline, prompting both sides to blame each other for scuttling the negotiations with unreasonable, last-minute demands.

As a result, Washington imposed duties in August on hundreds of Canadian imports, including wine, cheese, clothing and hockey sticks. Mr. Carney and other Canadians immediately promised to retaliate with their own tariffs on similar products after Labor Day.

Since then, U.S. officials have responded with threats and outright derision, with Mr. Trump even signing an executive order seeking to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America. The president has attacked Canada’s political leaders, and on Sunday, he also took aim at its currency.

“Canada’s (currency) Dollar imbalance with the U.S. is unacceptable,” he said on social media. “It has been that way for years — but no longer!”

New York Times, Bombardier, a Canadian Jet Maker, Is a Target in Trump’s Trade War, John Yoon, Sept. 8, 2026. The Montreal-based manufacturer has been embroiled in U.S. trade disputes before. President Trump threatened to bar the company from selling in the United States.

President Trump on Monday warned Bombardier, the Canadian manufacturer of business jets, that it would no longer be allowed to sell in the United States unless it made its aircraft there, escalating Washington’s trade dispute with Ottawa.

Mr. Trump has targeted the company before: He said in January that he might decertify some of Bombardier’s business jets as he threatened a steep tariff on aircraft manufactured in Canada, arguing that the country was restricting sales of aircraft made by Gulfstream Aerospace, an American rival.

During the first Trump administration, the Commerce Department imposed a nearly 300 percent tariff on new Bombardier passenger jets after Boeing, another U.S. competitor, accused it of using unfair government subsidies to underprice its planes.

Bombardier responded to Mr. Trump’s latest threat with a statement that did not mention the president but emphasized that it makes some parts for its planes at manufacturing sites in California and Texas. The company, headquartered in Montreal, added that it employs thousands of people in 20 U.S. states and that its supply chain includes 2,800 American companies.

Here’s what to know about Bombardier.

What does the company do?

In the 1920s, in a small garage in rural Quebec, a young inventor named Joseph-Armand Bombardier began making snow vehicles. He was later moved by personal tragedy: his 2-year-old son fell ill and died after deep snow and unplowed roads prevented them from reaching a hospital in time.

His company, founded in 1942, launched the Ski-Doo in the late 1950s and became the world’s top manufacturer of snowmobiles. Bombardier entered the rail industry in the 1970s, making subway cars for Montreal and New York City.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Canada? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

In 1986, Bombardier branched out into aviation by buying a top Canadian aerospace company, Canadair, and inherited its Challenger jets. It then acquired other aviation companies like Learjet, becoming a major manufacturer of popular regional planes like the CRJ series.

The company ended its passenger jet program after the 2017 dispute with Boeing and the Trump administration. Since selling its rail division in 2021, Bombardier has focused on producing private business jets like the Challenger and Global lines.Who uses its planes?

Bombardier has customers around the world, but the U.S. market is its biggest. Of its global fleet of more than 5,200 aircraft, roughly half are in service in the United States, according to Cirium, an aviation data firm

Many of its U.S. customers are companies and individuals using Bombardier-made business jets for private travel. Its commercial aircraft remain in service with U.S. airlines including Endeavor Air, a Delta Air Lines subsidiary; PSA Airlines, an American Airlines subsidiary; SkyWest, which flies routes for American, Delta, United Airlines and Alaska Airlines; and GoJet, which flies for United.

Bombardier’s business jets are purchased by militaries and defense agencies in more than 50 countries, including the United States. The U.S. Air Force and Army use aircraft made by Bombardier and modified for specialized surveillance and intelligence missions.

About 55 percent of Bombardier’s $9.6 billion in revenues in 2025 came from the United States, according to the company.

In a social media post on Monday, Mr. Trump said of the company: “If they want our Market, they must build here, and stop treating America like a ‘piggybank.’”What is its history with the Trump administration?

Boeing filed a federal complaint in 2017 claiming that Bombardier had violated American trade rules because subsidies from the Canadian government had allowed it to sell its CSeries commercial aircraft to Delta at below market prices.

The jets were part of Bombardier’s ambitious push into commercial aviation and a direct challenge to its larger rivals, Boeing and Airbus, though the aircraft faced delays, cost overruns and low demand. Boeing’s complaint was unusual in part because it did not make a direct competitor to the 100- to 150-seat aircraft.

The Commerce Department, under the first Trump administration, sided with Boeing and proposed a nearly 300 percent tariff on the jets.

But the decision backfired: Bombardier handed majority control of the CSeries program to Airbus, Boeing’s European rival, for zero cash, allowing the planes to be assembled at Airbus’s plant in Alabama to evade U.S. duties. The series was rebranded as the A220 and Bombardier exited commercial aviation entirely.

In 2018, the U.S. International Trade Commission unanimously rejected the tariff, a verdict greeted in Canada with relief. Boeing did not appeal the ruling.

Mr. Trump reignited the dispute with Bombardier in January, threatening to decertify its Global Express business jets and impose a 50 percent tariff on its Canadian-made aircraft unless Canada certified several American Gulfstream jets.

The models that had not been certified at the time were approved the next month, and the measures threatened in January ultimately did not take effect.Has it been in other U.S. trade disputes?

In 1982, the Reagan administration accused Canada of violating international trade agreements by providing unfair subsidies to finance Bombardier’s bid to build subway trains for New York City.

Facing severe financial penalties, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority made a concession, freezing all foreign-made rail car purchases for three years.

The Bombardier contract stood. In 1999, the company signed another contract with the M.T.A. to replace commuter trains on the Long Island Rail Road. Many of those train cars remain in use today.U.S.-Canada Trade

More On Global Affairs

Lance Rosen, Analysis: The “AfD” Election Success In The German State Of Saxony-Anhalt Is A Victory For Vladimir Putin, Lance F Rosen, Sept. 8, 2026. Putin Won With The Help Of His Favorite Nazi Billionaire, Elon Musk.

Elon Musk heavily supported the AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland) ahead of Germany’s 2025 federal elections through public statements, writing an opinion piece for Welt Am Sontag, hosting a live audio conversation on X with AfD leader Alice Weidel, (Photo below) and appearing via video link at a party campaign event. Not incidentally Trump, during his “government-in-exile” period at Mar-a-Lago, hosted a delegation of AfD leaders who visited in order to boost their party.

According to The Guardian...

[”Musk made a surprise appearance during Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) election campaign event in Halle in eastern Germany on Saturday, speaking publicly in support of the far-right party for the second time in as many weeks.

Addressing a hall of 4,500 people alongside Weidel, Musk spoke live via video link about preserving German culture and protecting the German people.”]

Musk did not donate personal funds to the extremist far-right anti-immigration party, which would have represented unlawful foreign interference in Germany’s elections, but he essentially did everything else to support the victory of AfD. (The free exposure he gave them on his platform X was in effect a “PIK” contribution, “payment-in-kind” which in the US twenty years ago would have had to be declared as a donation in filings with the now toothless Federal Election Commission had he done it for an American candidate.)

This is yet another instance where the former trillionaire has wielded his political influence to install fascist political leaders, the first of course was his purchase of the White House for Trump in 2024.

The second being his role in helping Millei get elected in Argentina. He has also interfered in the internal affairs of Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Columbia, each Amazon basin countries which are rich in minerals he is after.

The AfD according to exit polls currently has won 39 seats, with the second larger total being the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) at 15. AfD has fallen just short of an outright majority, but this vote puts them on the brink of power in their state which includes the capitol city of Magdeburg and also Halle.

Leaders of NATO nations in Europe used strong language to warn of the danger this vote represents. AfD is fully aligned with the geo-strategic goals of the Kremlin.

AfD officials argue that it is in Germany’s national interest to bypass sanctions and restore cheap Russian oil and gas supplies to fuel Germany’s economy.

Leading members of the party regularly defend Russian President Vladimir Putin, visit Moscow or the Russian Embassy in Berlin, and echo Kremlin talking points regarding the war in Ukraine.

The AfD has campaigned against military and financial support for Kyiv, filed legal actions to stop arms deliveries, and boycotted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s address to the German parliament.

In 2020, I and my wife Martha co-authored a 45 page special report on Russian plans to intervene into the US presidential election in support of Donald Trump. Our working hypothesis was that Russia had formed strategic alliances with the US and European far right militias, Neo-Nazis, separatists and secessionist movements through which Trump would attempt a violent disruption of either the election itself, or to prevent the transfer of power. We had a unique analysis, given that most other democracy groups and election watchdogs were fixated on computer hacking, disinformation, and legal challenges.

We said the plan was to run a coup with either the threat, or actual deployment of mob violence. That was six months in advance of January 6th.

We documented Russia’s role in steering and even funding the US far-right, (including open alliances with Christian evangelical leaders from the US such as Franklin Graham, and state secession movement leaders from Texas and California) the intention being not only helping to install Trump, but to sow chaos and division in the Western democracies. We included a chapter on AfD back then, where we highlighted their pro-Russian pedigree and as a Putin Trojan Horse in Europe.

We also covered the role of MAGA operative Steve Bannon, and his fascist organizing partner from Russia, the geopolitical mentor of Putin himself, Aleksandr Dugin, (with whom Bannon met in Rome) in shaping the political strategy of AfD for coming to power.

Bannon, according to sources, advised AfD to incorporate the anti-vax covid skeptic movement (which was resisting lockdown and masking just like in the US) into the anti-immigration movement, which was fueled by the growing refugee crises in Europe even then. The Bannon-Dugin operation was in fact to build a Russian fifth column in Europe by merging the alt-right religious fundamentalists, and the populist/racist/xenophobes, with the growing cult of QAnon then being stoked by Russian-linked influencers as well.

The mainstream media coverage of this development leaves a lot to be desired.

There is a kind of spin being put out which needs to be debunked, that AfD’s victories are a spontaneous outpouring of anti-war sentiment and reaction to the worsened refugee crisis resulting from the recent several years long Ukraine conflict, Gaza, Syria, Lebanon, and now Iran. The line is that European governments bungled their handling of the refugee situation (not entirely untrue, but it’s misleading to assert this as their origin) by ignoring the popular opposition to their being allowed in, and doling out economic benefits while their governments were preaching austerity for everyone else. In both Germany and France increased crime and terrorism blamed on immigrants was used to whip up opposition to the existing government coalitions as a kind of propaganda or intelligence warfare.

The other line going out will be an hysterical reaction that “Germany is turning fascist again,” that this new so-called re-eruption of “German nationalism” is a harbinger of the Nazis being rehabilitated and Germany once again turning aggressively against their neighbors. This is dangerous misinformation. The people joining AfD are reactionaries being manipulated based upon a handful of single issues meant to stir up popular anger, and the people are protest-voting for candidates as if these elections are a referendum on those issues. German voters are not embracing Nazism. The number of actual far-right voters who are nostalgic for the Nazis is actually miniscule, not the predominant factor in the rise of the AfD.

These are just a few of the misleading assessments. Reality is that AfD has been a decade or more long intelligence operation, a joint project of the Russian GRU, the fascist billionaire clique gathered around Trump such as Musk, Bannon and his pseudo-Catholic synarchist allies, and the gamemasters behind the Nazi mind control psyop known as QAnon which interfaces with the MAGA movement leadership.

Fascist movements do not originate as a “lab accident” or as a spontaneous sociological phenomena in reaction to isolated events. There is no validity to the bumper sticker slogan “Shit Happens” in strategic politics or history. AfD’s rise to power was engineered by geopoliticians and oligarchs, the same ones currently out to end democracy and free elections in the US in service of their policy agenda, “Project 2025.”

Their goal is to destroy NATO by toppling Democratic governments and installing Orbán’s former Hungarian model, pro-Putin regimes which will abandon Ukraine, decouple Europe strategically from the US, open up Europe’s economies to looting by the Putin’s allies among the fascist billionaire set such as Musk and Thiel, and allow for the gradual absorption of western Europe into the Russian sphere of geopolitical influence.

Make no mistake, the weakening of the center/left liberal parties and traditional Christian center conservatives in Germany will have a nonlinear but direct impact in weakening France’s Macron, (strengthening the LePen party) will hurt Zelensky, strengthen the grifting fascist Nigel Farage in the UK, even undermining Italy’s right-wing PM Meloni, and Poland’s PM Tusk. (whose reaction was to say, “only idiots or traitors can rejoice at the triumph of the AfD in Germany.”)

The thing which can derail this runaway train of the far-right in Europe is what we do in the US over the course of the next three years, first with the November midterms, then meeting the immense threat of a post-election civil conflict which will likely follow, all leading to the US presidential election process, <if there even is one.>

We need a revolution in our thinking, one which can strengthen our anti-oligarchy political revolution in the US. That will change the frightening trend of desperate and ignorant voters turning to authoritarian governments to protect themselves from the perceived threats of so-called “criminal immigrants,” drug traffickers, or whoever else happens to be the convenient “enemy within” of the day, and instead we can flip the entire gameboard globally. The humiliating crushing defeat of Trump and MAGA is our lever, our optimal point of intervention to force a paradigm shift.

It is also what is needed to begin the reversal of the far-right turn currently underway in Latin America, in which the Trump forces are trying to topple the governments of Brazil and Mexico by surrounding them with extremist right-wing US-run puppet regimes. This is one of the vital strategic dynamics currently being underplayed or ignored entirely by US centered news organizations.

The role we play as American Democratic voters and activists is far more important than we want to think about. Most people think about voting in terms of single issues which are personally important to them, such as health care.

I’m here to tell people that this next election, less than two months from now, is not just about our single issues. It is about whether civilized self-governing democracies and nations will survive the current drive to destroy them coming from the two mad dictators who think they can carve up the world into looting zones, like two-bit Hollywood mafiosi characters that they mimic.

We need to think bigger, globally in fact, and act locally as if our lives depend upon it...because they do.

Lance’s Substack is a reader-

Susan C. Beachy and Stella Raine Chu contributed research.War in the Middle East

New York Times, Oil Climbs Toward $100 a Barrel Following Houthi Attacks, Lisa Friedman, Sept. 8, 2026. Analysts said they expected the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, to remain elevated for the rest of the year.Price of Brent crude oil

Oil prices on Tuesday surged toward $100 a barrel after Iran-backed Houthi militants directed attacks on Saudi Arabia that Saudi officials said injured dozens of civilians in a major escalation of tension in the region.

Analysts said the price reflected the market’s recognition that there is no end in sight for the conflict in the Middle East, which has disrupted oil flows through two vital arteries: the Strait of Hormuz and the Red Sea.

The price of Brent crude, the global benchmark for oil, rose above $99 a barrel during the day. That was the highest since late July, shortly after Houthi militants declared a maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia and began targeting Saudi tankers with missiles and drones.

Foreign Policy, Opinion: The World’s Only Real Hope of Maintaining Order, Charles A. Kupchan (Georgetown University professor), Sept 8, 2026. A proposal for a new international system that is at once centralized and regionalized.

As the West’s ideological and material hegemony continues to wane, a new multipolar world is taking shape. This change is structural—a product of the unstoppable diffusion of power. The transition from the industrial era to the digital age has meanwhile destabilized the liberal democracies that long oversaw global governance. A combination of automation and free trade has undermined the industrial-era social contract, hollowing out Western middle classes and the political centrism that sustained liberal internationalism. These dual tectonic shifts are stoking geopolitical rivalries and eroding international rules and institutions, putting out of reach the collective initiative needed to govern a globalized world.

U.S. President Donald Trump is a symptom more than a cause of this disarray and the anti-establishment anger it has provoked. He and other populists promise to tear down the old liberal order. But they lack the skills and inclination to build what comes next. The policy community needs to urgently prepare for the post-Trump era by generating a plan for governing an interdependent world that is in the process of falling apart.

Building order in the world to come should begin with recognizing the renewed importance of regions; the diffusion of power logically necessitates the decentering and devolution of authority. Order will need to come from the bottom up, drawing on regional groupings that tap into the natural order-producing effects of geographic proximity, commercial ties, and common cultures. The regionalization of governance sets the stage for a polycentric international system: a multiorder world of considerable ideological and political diversity.

Yet precisely because the emerging multipolar world is set to remain globalized and interdependent, the centrifugal force of regionalization must be offset by order that comes from the top down. Multiple regional orders will require collective supervision. A concert system—a network of high-level coordinating councils—offers the most realistic and feasible option for overseeing global governance. Like the 19th-century Concert of Europe, which preserved peace for decades after the Napoleonic Wars, flexible and informal steering groups can provide a vehicle for genuine and sustained strategic dialogue and for dampening and managing conflicts of interest.

A concert system would complement, not replace, the United Nations.

New York Times, Chinese Ship Takes Arctic Shortcut: Smart Business? Or a Political Flex? Jeffrey Gettleman, Jenny Gross and Lily Kuo, Sept. 8, 2026. Melting ice is opening a trade route through the Arctic. China has begun the first regular service, part of its polar ambitions.

For years, China has been talking a big game about the Arctic.

The country lies far from the Arctic Circle — more than 800 miles — but still, it has declared itself a “near-Arctic state.”

It has teamed up with Russia on coast guard patrols in the Arctic Ocean and explored a flurry of resource and technology projects in Arctic towns. (Most never materialized.)

The Chinese are now promoting the first regular cargo service to use the Northern Sea Route, an Arctic shortcut from Asia to Europe across the top of the world. This week, the Dubai Tower, a Chinese cargo ship, is finishing a three-week journey from Qingdao to Teesport in England.

But many of the Arctic watchers tracking the Dubai Tower’s little blinking dot as it moves across the screen on maritime websites are asking the same question: Is this smart business — or more of a bold geopolitical move?

The Northern Sea Route is thousands of miles shorter than alternatives through the Suez Canal or around the Cape of Good Hope. And as climate change intensifies, polar ice is disappearing, increasing its accessibility.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China and the United Kingdom? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Yet shipping executives say the route is still too difficult, dangerous and expensive for China or any country to make this a regular service. And the season for operations is short — basically August and September, with maybe a few days in July and October. Even then, cargo ships need an icebreaker escort.

More On U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

 

 

Meidas Touch Network, Opinion: My Letter to CBS Staff, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 8, 2026. This is my open letter to CBS reporters and staff, as well as reporters and staff who work for other corporate news outlets that are continuing to bow to Trump’s fascism and this fatal right-wing propaganda machine.

Yesterday, it was reported that Bari Weiss, who runs CBS News, was considering hiring Maria Bartiromo after she left Fox News.

Now, I personally believe Maria Bartiromo, shown below right, is among the worst propagandists that there are, and one of the worst Trump sycophants and bootlickers that there are, and that she’s responsible for spreading a massive amount of lies and disinformation.

Now, that’s my opinion. You’re entitled to your own opinion, of course. But after she left Fox, or Fox pushed her out, whatever the story may be, who the heck even knows? Or, frankly, who even cares?

What’s most important is this notorious liar is now apparently being given an exalted position at CBS as CBS further destroys 60 Minutes and its news programs.

Now look, CBS is free to hire or fire whoever they want. They can run their network however they please. And if they want to continue to destroy their brand, go for it. Bring on Maria Bartiromo. I could care less.

But the broader message that I want to make, whether it’s to CBS staffers, reporters, or those who work for other news networks, is there is a place for you in independent news, whether that’s at the MeidasTouch Network or at other independent news outlets.

We’ve grown our independent news outlet here with the utmost focus on building a people-powered movement and growing by promoting top reporters and giving them editorial autonomy to do what they do best.

Other independent media outlets have their own philosophies and views, but as long as they’re fighting for democracy and against Trump fascism, perhaps they can be considered viable options as well. Or you can go out on your own.

I hope what MeidasTouch has helped inspire is for you to know that if me and my brothers, with no political background and no news background, can do it, you can do it also.

But you can’t, in my view, just hope to dilly-dally around fascism.

Over the next 60 days—actually less, over the next 56 days before the midterms—Trump’s going to throw everything he’s got to destroy this democracy.

He’s made an absolute fool of himself on the international stage and the domestic stage. We’ve never had a less popular president in American history than what we have right now.

I use the word demon to refer to him and his spawn because their behavior has been so abhorrent. I can’t find any other word, and I’m not even sure demon does it justice. I can search for lunatic or psycho or evil, but demon is what I keep coming back to.

Not to be hyperbolic. It’s just there seems to be a desire to inflict pain and suffering for the sake of inflicting pain and suffering, even in addition to the self-enrichment and quid pro quos and hoarding of wealth and stealing. There just seems to be a desire to watch and enjoy the suffering of others, which is just sickening to me.

But here’s where we are. Democracy is on the line.

Make whatever decisions you think are in your best interest, but I just want to reflect on this: there’s more to life than this dystopian MAGA madness.

We’re making it out of this. We’re close to getting out of this. Remember that.

And let MeidasTouch or others be an example, I hope. Or not. It’s your call.

But given Maria Bartiromo’s potential move to CBS and Bari Weiss, I just wanted to reflect on all of these things this morning.

This is why I believe independent news is more important than ever. That’s why we’re going to keep on growing here at the MeidasTouch Network.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: The Snowflakes and Petals of Influence NYT Chooses to Ignore, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 8, 2026. I was always likely to write about this NYT article describing Zohran Mamdani’s ties to influencers who celebrate his implementation of policy.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani had just decided to cancel a $9 million contract that New York City had with the consulting giant McKinsey, and gushing praise came pouring in from commentators, operatives on the left and even some comedians.

Alex Jacquez, who works at a progressive think tank, posted on X: “Really exciting that NYC is generating operational efficiencies by in-sourcing needlessly outsourced public services and functions, building city capacity. More of this!”

Akilah Hughes, a comedian with more than 200,000 followers on X, reposted a comment suggesting that Mr. Mamdani was an improvement over his predecessor, Eric Adams, who “paid McKinsey $1.6 million to research trash cans.”

Matt Stoller, a political commentator with more than 160,000 followers on X, wrote effusively that the mayor “just cut a $9 million contract that McKinsey has with NYC. And then brags about it publicly. More please.”

Some of the online adulation, like Mr. Stoller’s post, was organic. But some of it was actually part of a campaign orchestrated by City Hall to use social media influencers to boost the image of the mayor and his young administration’s policies.

Mr. Mamdani is a master of new media, and his rise to power has been driven largely by his ease in front of a camera and his ability to harness the seeming informality of social media to connect with broad constituencies.

I continue to find it frustrating that a nucleus of lefty pundits — many of whom came up alongside me in the blogging wave — refuse to understand the current attention economy. Rather than recognizing they are a part of that economy, they fancy themselves above it, tossing instructions to their servants in the Democratic Party who, the conceit appears to be, are the only ones who have the tools, day jobs, or ethical obligations as citizens to engage in that attention economy.

Those lefty pundits spent several days whining about this article rather than doing what they could to help win an election or even, seemingly, reading it to learn how influencers — the inheritors of the mantle we as bloggers used to wield — have been instrumental in making Mamdani successful in the attention economy in a way that many DC politicians are not. A success story of sorts — the kind of success story they’re looking for. They let a story about the attention economy negatively drive their own attention in the middle of a fight with a fascism that succeeds by dominating that attention economy.

To be sure, after laying out that Mamdani wielded the attention economy superbly, starting in ¶8, NYT spun it as something corrupt, suggesting (falsely) that a PR campaign misused public funds, implying that using Signal, by itself, defied transparency, and insinuating a $175,000 salary for the person who is a key reason Mamdani is successful is too much. It is a shitty article, but not among the top ten most hostile NYT articles targeting Mamdani.

Much of the rest is the kind of article that NYT used to write about us when we came up as bloggers, a threat to their monopoly of the means of narration. We were not sufficiently independent, they said. They don’t understand how we’re funded, they complained. Some of this was and remains hostile gatekeeping from a media under threat from newcomers, as Emilia Rowland, the women being paid $175,000 to help make progressive policies successful insinuated in a comment buried in (roughly) ¶47 and ¶48 of the story.

When asked whether the city has created a code of ethics for its engagement with influencers, Ms. Rowland suggested that traditional media might be in more need of tighter ethical guidelines.

“Is there a recommendation for disclosures from legacy media?” she said, adding that working only through “channels with diminishing reach” might mean failing to reach New Yorkers about important city services.

Notably, for reasons I’ll return to, NYT’s article came out on September 4, five days after WaPo published its own story about how a group of influencers who enthusiastically support Whiskey Pete Hegseth had been doing undisclosed work for the Pentagon, the element of corruption that NYT invented by insinuation for a story about Mamdani. We’ll come back to that.

Before I got a chance to write my own post about the NYT influencer story, Don Moynihan wrote this absolutely spectacular post on it. His story started by explaining why the idea of a news story reporting on the the success of the Postal Service could only appear in the Onion. He provided three reasons why:

Negativity bias: The media covers failure much more than it covers success. Loss aversion means that humans are more emotionally aroused by stories of loss rather than gain, failure rather than success, scandal rather than honest competence. In other words, the media focuses on failure because that is what, as consumers, we click on.Independence: Media don’t want to be seen as the lapdog of politicians, so tend not to uncritically accept good news stories. I’m not going to publish your press release!A bias toward theater: People like stories. Stories that involve colorful characters, human stakes and theatrical tropes, such as deception and conflict, are more compelling. And so media coverage of government reflects such stories, and down-weights other factors that are harder to humanize, such as administrative systems, or structural factors, even if those these factors are often important, as they are when it comes to managing government. Really great writers manage to tell stories about government that incorporate structure while using relatable characters, explaining the stakes, and detailing emotionally arousing conflicts. But sometimes, reporters on a deadline simply do not cover stories that lack the aspects of theater, and focus on the opportunities that do.

Having provided those three reasons (but not yet dug into them), he first laid out Mamdani’s success at selling the nuts and bolts of successful implementation — the equivalent of bragging about how well the Postal Service is doing, but instead focusing on potholes and basketball hoops. He then reviewed the NYT story, showing the lengths it went to to make the reliance on influencers look corrupt. “It is not until paragraph 20 that the reporters clarify that the Mayor’s office does not actually pay the influencers.” Then, brilliantly, Moynihan went back and looked how the NYT covered the very same story, about Mamdani cutting a McKinsey contract, as compared to how NYT covered Mamdani’s hiring of McKinsey partner Anthony Shorris.

Let’s go back to the primary example the story gave, because I think it would have been useful if the reporters grappled with it a bit more. The Mamdani administration cut $9 million in McKinsey contracts as small part of a relatively impressive effort to balance the budget. So how did the New York Times cover this story? I found two mentions of it in their coverage, both of which were passing references in larger stories:

From May 1, in a story titled “What We Know About New York’s Proposed Tax Increases”: “Mr. Mamdani has already begun to explore slashing roughly $3 billion in expenditures, like consulting contracts with companies that his base despises, like McKinsey, and a rental-assistance program called City FHEPS that he once championed.”And from March 23, under the headline “Mamdani Now Plans $1.3 Billion in Cuts in Programs That He Favored”: “Mamdani vowed to cancel New York City’s contracts with McKinsey and other private companies.”

So, the McKinsey contract cancellation was mentioned barely at all by the New York Times, in two stories with relatively unfavorable faming (Mamdani hiking taxes and abandoning programs he favored).

Given this context, working with influencers makes a lot more sense. The Times did not see this story as much of a priority. Of course, the Times is not obliged to cover this topic, but when Mamdani appointed a former deputy Mayor and McKinsey partner to his administration that was the primary subject of two separate stories rather than an afterthought, and mentioned in a third story about his efforts to reassure the business community.

I doubt that Mamdani communicated his hire of a McKinsey partner to his influencers, but it is not clear to me why this is inherently more newsworthy for the Times than his cancelation of contracts with McKinsey. I don’t think the contract cancelation is simply populist point-scoring, but reflects a theory of governance that is substantive, and considers structural aspects of state capacity.

This was brilliant media criticism — a demonstration of how media genres drive and silence certain kinds of stories (the kind of thing I’ve written academic articles and delivered conference talks on).

Moynihan then put on his Public Policy professor hat and (in a Substack post, which phenomenon is itself worth contemplating) explained why the decision to cut the McKinsey contract reflected a theory of governance that could have a real positive impact; click through for that part. Moynihan did the same analysis for a second Mamdani initiative — sort of a reverse DOGE — and explained how that got treated as a boring story, too, even by lefty pundits on Bluesky.

The New York Times did not cover the announcement of the new office.

Some local news covered it, basically reprinting the press release. The other coverage came from outlets working on tech and government, for whom it was a big story. If you are a political advisor concerned about the Mayor generating good headlines, this is a pretty sparse return on his efforts.

I posted about this on BlueSky which is about as liberal and pro-Mamdani space you could wish for. And still, many of the replies argued that the creation of PIT Crew “just not much of a story”; “It feels like a paragraph in a story about the budget.” “A news story can only happen once the PIT crew is something more than a budget line, at which point there will be people to interview and actions to record.” Or that the media should not just cover press releases.

For the reasons I outlined above, I think this is wrong. The story is substantively important example about the model of governance Mamdani is pursuing. If you needed a hook Mamdani creating a tech office in the aftermath of DOGE provides a hook (I provide an example below). His tech team involves some of those displaced by DOGE, who have some pretty impressive achievements that provide a human interest angle.

Of course, DOGE itself was made sexy because the trillionaire troll made it so, often by stoking conspiracy theories designed to undermine trust in government.

After pointing out how hard it is to get even very sympathetic people, like Bluesky pundits, to magnify good news, Moynihan then laid out the 18 stories one or another (or both together) of the NYT journalists had covered, including three on Mamdani’s conflict with Netanyahu, demonstrating the stories — many far more hostile to Mamdani than a story about his influence economy success — NYT chooses to cover.

It was a superb takedown of the limits to legacy media and, because of those limits, the gap in communication that exists where successful leaders will — must! — seek to rebuild trust in government.

You can’t have successful government if the only stories that get told are intentionally negative. But the question is, by whom.

Moynihan then ended with a very gentle scold about how media should be able to tell the good news about government like it tells the bad.

One downside of negativity bias in media coverage is that it has fed a corrosive mistrust of government, which has fueled anti-government forces who then justify that mistrust with mismanagement. We very much need a skeptical media to hold government to account and journalists are doing essential work in that department right now. And big promises of government improvement should invite real investigation of success. But we also need them to tell us when government is working well and trying to do better. Reporters don’t have to become influencers to embrace a little bit of positivity bias.

I would join this scold and note that the same is true of the blogger generation pundits. When Ezra Klein first did a long post on Joe Biden’s frailties only to be followed by a second when Biden did step down, I argued that the guy who got his start explaining the intricacies of policy — the guy who got where he is now by explaining how good Barack Obama’s policies were, as the influencers (and Matt Stoller, who also came up in that blog generation) are now doing for Mamdani — would have done far more for democracy and the Democratic Party in 2024 if he had been doing the same for what were remarkably successful Joe Biden policies. Joe Biden was a failure as President because in a much more intense attention economy, he didn’t have what Mamdani does: a way to tell his very good story. And yes, his age and frailty made all that much harder but that doesn’t excuse Ezra for ignoring those very good stories he is uniquely qualified to tell, to instead observe from on high and toss directions, as if they were coat check tickets, to Democratic operatives.

Joe Biden didn’t tell his story in part because the blogger generation pundits now, for the most part, see their own role (paid or not) very differently, and especially don’t seem understand that they can use their social media platforms to stomp all over Democrats or to combat Trump or even to magnify good things Democrats do that lefty pundits repeatedly confess they’re oblivious to, such as multiple strands of efforts to combat Trump’s corruption, a story which many of them complain is not being told.

Not being told by someone else, they always mean.

Meanwhile, as all this was going down, over on Xitter, a parallel meltdown was playing out. As I noted here and as Bulwark described in all its delectable hilarity, far right troll turned senior State Department official, Sarah Rogers, tried to feed far right troll Jennica Pounds (better known as Data Republican) a bullshit attack on disinformation experts. She fucked up in her effort to seed disinformation about disinformation experts!! That led to Pounds’ self-exposure as a secret troll for Whiskey Pete Hegseth. As a bunch of other far right trolls rushed, in unison, to defend Pounds’ ethical failures (or, alternately, to parrot Sean Parnell’s false claims that WaPo had broken the law by telling its readers something China and Iran already know — that US forces are stretched dangerously thin because of the means by which Hegseth is losing the Iran war), one of the journalists those trolls were trying to jail reported that a number of them had secretly been on DOD’s payroll.

WaPo’s story is the counterpart story to the original NYT story (but preceded it by five days). Here, known influencers were secretly working for DOD.

The Pentagon has secretly installed several conservative military veterans with large online followings in government roles, declining to disclose their assignments as they amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the matter and corroborating material.

At least some of the influencers have been assigned to civilian roles that could lead to changes in policy, the people familiar with the matter said. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Neither the Pentagon nor those involved have disclosed the government roles despite the Trump administration’s claims that they are running the most transparent Defense Department ever. [my emphasis]

They weren’t paid to be trolls. They were paid to do policy work, as Thomas Anderson, who is best known as Cynical Publius, justified to WaPo his lack of transparency that he was on the DOD payroll for something else.

“At no time have I ever received any compensation of any kind from any government source of any kind for anything I write or have ever written on X or in any magazine or other source,” Anderson wrote.

The self-inflated Publius has been on a meltdown worthy of a Hegseth stan ever since, misrepresenting how his real name has been discoverable and complaining over and over and over and over that journalists did journalism, in the process revealing to taxpayers what America’s adversaries can discover by watching where US aircraft groups sail.

It’s pretty hilarious stuff.

Another of the trolls, Kurt Schlichter, tried to defuse his exposure by suggesting the WaPo said something it didn’t.

Let’s examine the lessons we can draw about regime media through the lens of how Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp of the Washington Post decided to write a story about what I, @RobManess, and Tom @CynicalPublius Anderson did for the Department of War. The problem for the Washington Post is that what we were doing for the Department of War was boring – three retired colonels with extensive civilian experience did a review of the military war college system to try to help modernize it and make it better at producing future senior officers. Yawn.

The story was sexy because we were all, as the Washington Post acknowledged, Massively Influential Conservative Influencers™, but that was it. So they had to jazz it up by insinuating that we were brought on board to “amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack those who scrutinize the Trump administration.” That was false.

Schlichter claimed the WaPo said they were brought in to amplify Whiskey Pete’s lies. The WaPo, instead, said they did so “as they” amplify Whiskey Pete’s lies.

But no one denies they were (or had been, until days before) on the Pentagon payroll without disclosing it, all while repeating Whiskey Pete’s lies.

And thus far, it might be a lesson in comparative use of influencers. Whereas Mamdani reaches out to influencers to celebrate wonky policy decisions, Whiskey Pete reaches out to them to undermine trust in journalism or (in the case of Sarah Howard) to attempt to inflame scandals over packaged bullshit. That’s actually a really instrumental lesson about how we move forward, if we are to be successful. The shitty NYT story was useful for highlighting how Mamdani is succeeding in building his support among New Yorkers, even while doing boring things like replacing missing basketball hoops.

Except for this.

In the period when NYT was “interview[ing] more than a dozen influencers who have worked with Mr. Mamdani’s team and [reviewing] dozens of videos and portions of influencer group chats” for a story about Mamdani, someone — presumably someone else than the two journalists on the Mamdani story — at NYT was deciding that the equivalent story about Whiskey Pete, except, in that case, the influencers were getting paid (albeit to do something else), was not newsworthy.

NYT’s selective decision to chase some influencers and not others is an editorial choice, one that says as much about bias — the political bias NYT attempts to disavow with its scolding about ethical guidelines — as the other far more hostile NYT stories about Mamdani.

But it doesn’t have to stop at NYT.

Yes, NYT is biased and also hostile to Mamdani generally. But the same rules about telling bad stories applies to all of us who can influence politics, especially those of us graced with significant platforms.

The way the world is right now — the rise of fascism — owes a great deal to changes in the attention economy. There are cracks in the far right attention economy, as government employed trolls faceplant in one or another way. But there really is a lesson to move forward.

And some of that really does has to do with being willing to tell good stories.

New York Times, NOTUS Rebrands as The Washington Sun, Katie Robertson, Sept. 8, 2026. A trademark dispute scuttled its plans to relaunch as The Washington Star, so the site chose a different name.

Here comes “The Sun.” The Washington Sun, that is — the new name for the news website NOTUS after a trademark lawsuit several months ago stymied the outlet’s plan to rebrand as The Star.

The name, said the editor in chief, Tim Grieve, is intended to reflect the outlet’s expansion into local news and sports coverage in the wake of The Washington Post’s staff cuts at the beginning of the year. It will take effect Wednesday.

“We really wanted Washington in the name of our publication to more clearly convey that we cover Washington, both sort of political Washington and local Washington,” Mr. Grieve said.

NOTUS, which stands for News of the United States, was started in 2023 by the media entrepreneur Robert Allbritton, a co-founder of Politico. A nonprofit newsroom, it initially focused on coverage of government and policy. But as The Post pulled back from metro news, Mr. Allbritton saw room to fill that void.

Along with the rebrand, The Washington Sun will introduce a paywall to its website this month. Subscriptions will cost $9.99 a month; Mr. Grieve said its newsletters would remain free.ImageRobert Allbritton seated in an office with Politico branding.NOTUS, which stands for News of the United States, was started in 2023 by the media entrepreneur Robert Allbritton, a co-founder of Politico. Credit...Ting Shen for The New York Times

At the beginning of the year, the NOTUS newsroom consisted of 45 people. The number, Mr. Grieve said, has now more than doubled, to 110. Many new hires are former members of The Post’s staff, including the food critic Tom Sietsema, the columnist Dana Milbank and a slew of sports reporters.

Mr. Grieve said the newsroom now had a large team reporting on local news and local sports in the Washington area.“I think people are really hungry particularly for the local and sports coverage that has faded away with what’s happened at The Post and with local newspapers around the country,” he said.

Mr. Grieve said The Washington Sun had also entered into an exclusive content licensing agreement with Capital Weather, the forecasting website that was affiliated with The Post for the past 18 years as Capital Weather Gang, and would start running a daily weather forecast for the Washington area.

It’s NOTUS’s second attempt at a rebrand this year. In May, a month after NOTUS said it would rename itself The Star, Dovid Efune, a media executive, announced that he was reviving The Washington Star, a newspaper that had shut down in 1981. Mr. Efune promptly filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against NOTUS.

A federal judge then ordered NOTUS to suspend its planned rebrand to “prevent the public from being confused” between the two publications while the lawsuit continued. In court documents, NOTUS said it would lose at least $2.5 million from canceling a planned relaunch event, prepaid advertising and sponsorship revenue.

On June 18, the parties agreed to resolve the case, paying their own costs and legal fees, and NOTUS said it would drop its plan to use the Star moniker.

Mr. Grieve said that The Washington Sun had always been on a shortlist of names for the outlet, and that the publication had waited to announce the new name so it could also launch a newly designed website. 

New York Times, LIV Golf files for bankruptcy protection, will attempt to restructure, Gabby Herzig, Sept. 8, 2026. LIV Golf’s effort to save its business and resurrect a new iteration of the league now includes bankruptcy. The league submitted a Chapter 11 filing in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey on Tuesday, according to court documents.

LIV’s decision to file for bankruptcy rather than liquidate the company signals that it seeks to restructure and transition to a newbusiness model. LIV said its reorganization will happen alongside BC Partners Advisors’ credit division, marking the first time the league revealed the identity of the “lead investor” it announced in August.

The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia — LIV’s financial backer from the league’s 2022 inception until it announced in April its decision to pull funding — has also agreed to take part in the restructuring. If approved by the court, PIF will provide $49.6 million in debtor-in-possession financing to carry LIV through the expensive and complex Chapter 11 bankruptcy process.

However, the PIF’s loan will come with milestones, which are strict deadlines that LIV must meet to continue receiving cash payments. One milestone will be LIV’s ability to sign a finalized investment agreement with BC Partners, according to a source briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

In the filing, LIV estimates its assets are worth between $100 million and $500 million, and its liabilities are between $500 million and $1 billion, illustrating the gap on its balance sheet that helps LIV qualify for Chapter 11 in the first place. LIV’s high liabilities also show the scale of its long-term commitments — like multi-year player contracts — that it will not be able to pay out.

“This process gives us the structure and time to pursue a landmark transaction and begin the next chapter of LIV Golf — one built around the fans, an innovative, player-first ownership model, and a part of the global golf ecosystem,” LIV CEO Scott O’Neil said in a statement. “We are excited about what lies ahead and yet, there is still much to accomplish in the months ahead. We believe deeply in LIV Golf’s future, the opportunity in front of us, and the people who will help us realize it.”

Jon Rahm and Bryson DeChambeau, LIV’s two biggest stars, are listed as having the largest unsecured claims, worth $7.4 million and $5.7 million, respectively. These figures reflect past-due third-quarter payments to each player, rather than future expected payments based on multiyear contracts. Bankruptcy law requires those guarantees to be handled separately, and the listed numbers are considered initial estimates.

Notably, DeChambeau’s claim is marked “contingent” on the filing, meaning the payout is dependent on a certain undisclosed future event. The next-largest creditor, Dustin Johnson, is marked as contingent and disputed, meaning that LIV disagrees with the size of the claim.

Sept. 7

Top Headlines 

Today, on Labor Day, Donald Trump sparked an international incident as he suggested making Mexico, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and parts of the Caribbean parts of the United States (From The Parnas Perspective, Sept. 7, 2026. More detail below).

• Hope for America, Opinion: The President is a reckless madman, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 6, 2026. At 9:10 this morning, after spending the entire weekend hiding inside his Bedminster golf club, avoiding the waiting press and their cameras, Donald Trump posted his first social media post of the day. By 10:35 this evening, he had posted more than 60 times, with each share more concerning than the last. The posts became so disturbing at times that many began openly questioning if the president of the United States was having a mental health crisis, with some of his fellow MAGA Republicans even ridiculing him back.
• New York Times, Brushing Aside Trump’s Threats, Canada Retaliates on Tariffs, Ian Austen, Sept. 7, 2026. New Canadian levies of up to 50 percent are expected to begin Tuesday, even as Washington warns of a new round of American tariffs.
• New York Times, Trump’s Trade War Is Shaping the Fight for Congress, Carl Hulse, Sept. 7, 2026. In Colorado and across the country, higher costs, tariffs and cheap beef imports are affecting voters who will help determine which party controls the House next year.

Special Report: Did Trump Secretly Order Tainted Brazilian Beef For U.S. Consumers To Help Big Ag Donors?

• New York Times, Guest Essay: Why Did Trump Order Up 660 Million Pounds of Mystery Meat? Eric Schlosser, Sept. 7, 2026. If American consumers knew where that beef was coming from, they might not want to eat it. And that may help to explain why President Trump signed a proclamation last week that will allow the duty-free importation of about 660 million pounds of inexpensive beef.

Special Report: Former Close U.S. Allies Losing Trust In U.S. National Security

• Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting and Opinion: Former American allies: “Not Releasable to USA,” Wayne Madsen, right, longtime intelligence commentator, Sept. 7, 2026. The United States and its intelligence and international law enforcement communities have been woefully compromised to the enemies of the democratic West. Severing ties with Washington is not only a preferable option for the West but an existential necessity.

 News Roundups 

 

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Epstein Files Accountability Push Surges, Gas Prices Soar, 25th Amendment Calls Grow Again as White House Posts AI Slop to Distract, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 7, 2026. Happy Labor Day. A major push for justice is finally gaining real momentum on Capitol Hill, with more than 100 lawmakers now backing a discharge petition that could force a vote on releasing millions of withheld Epstein files. Americans are also paying the highest gas prices ever recorded for a Labor Day, with the average household already out more than $741 since the Iran war began driving up costs at the pump and the grocery store.
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: NEWS: Trump Sparks Major International Incident, Republicans Struggle With Convention Turnout, Far-Right Surges in Germany, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 7, 2026. Republicans are increasingly running away from their own president heading into the midterms, with at least 45 congressional Republicans and even First Lady Melania Trump skipping his two-day midterms conference in Dallas this week, and a new Financial Times poll finding that three in ten Republicans themselves say Trump is making it harder for GOP candidates to win in November.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics 

• The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Has the Media Normalized the GOP’s Voter Suppression Right Before Our Very Eyes? Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 7, 2026. For decades, reporters have treated hours-long voting lines as a “normal” feature of Election Day instead of investigating why some Americans consistently face greater barriers to the ballot…
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: In The Great Global Fight For Freedom American Patriots Must Now Do Our Part, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 7, 2026. The World Is Watching. It Is Our Turn Now.......In the home stretch we are stepping up here at Hopium by adding more daily programming and launching new ways to help us win and harder for them to cheat....

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

Who are the ‘they’ that will never sleep again, as Donny and his robot army roam the midnight streets of our nation’s Capitol? Is it the Dumocrats? Donny’s obsession with ‘dumocrats’ fascinates me — because you know that when he prattles on about how ‘most people don’t know that 'dumb ends with a b,’ he’s accusing-confessing that he’s the illiterate moron who had no clue how ‘dumb’ is spelled.

• Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Dear Leader is ... nuts, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Sept. 7, 2026. Remember when presidents used to let us get some peace and quiet during the weekends? That was pretty awesome, wasn’t it? Yeah, well....Those tranquil 'Before Times' are over. Our psychotic president and his equally psychotic diaper nurse spent all day yesterday spraying the firehose of crazy directly into our faces.

More On U.S. Governance, Miami Airport Crash

• New York Times, As War Grinds On, Trump Relishes Renovation Projects, Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 7, 2026. President Trump is basking in the momentum of the various projects he has spurred around downtown Washington.
• Lincoln Square Media, Opinion:Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer, and MAGA’s Civil War, Kristoffer Ealy, right, Sept. 7, 2026. Trump won’t remain in power forever — and some Republicans are beginning to position themselves for whatever comes after him.
• Confront the Hate, Opinion: Inside the Far-Right Experiment to Reshape Rural America, Phil Williams,Sept. 7, 2026. Podcasters Meribah Knight and Susan Berfield discuss their new investigative series, "Our Town," and how Gainesboro, Tennessee, became ground zero for a national movement.
• New York Times, One School District’s Fight Against Trump’s Anti-Transgender Push, Michael C. Bender, Sept. 7, 2026. Jefferson County, Colo., is one of the few public school systems to sue the Trump administration over demands that it revoke transgender protections or face funding cuts.
• New York Times, All Five Killed in Miami Runway Crash Were on the Ground, Officials Say, David Ovalle Karoun Demirjian and Eduardo Medina, Sept. 7, 2026. A cargo plane, operated for Amazon, plowed into two vehicles on Sunday, leaving five more injured and disrupting Labor Day weekend travel for thousands.

More On Global Economy, Politics

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Neo-Nazis and the Impotence of Trumponomics, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 7, 2026. Crude economics doesn’t explain what just happened. Neo-Nazis — no point in euphemisms — just won big in the rough equivalent of a state-level election in Germany. America’s leading neo-Nazi — again, no point in euphemisms — congratulated the AfD (in German) on the result, and in return received “thanks for your support” from the AfD’s lead candidate.
• New York Times, Peru Shows the Limits of Washington’s Anti-China Push, Genevieve Glatsky, Photographs by Sara Wayra, Sept. 7, 2026. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio travels this week to Peru, its growing economic ties to China have raised tensions with the U.S., but show no signs of reversing course. 
• New York Times, Trump’s Trade War Is Shaping the Fight for Congress, Carl Hulse, Sept. 7, 2026. In Colorado and across the country, higher costs, tariffs and cheap beef imports are affecting voters who will help determine which party controls the House next year. 

More On Trump Team's U.S. Immigration Enforcement

At top, Hitler’s Brownshirts (SA) conducting violence against German Jews. Bottom, ICE agents deploying violence against peaceful protesters.

• Lance's Substack, Opinion: ICE Agents And Recruits Are Not Just “Similar” To Hitler’s Stormtroopers. The Stormtroopers Are The Model For ICE, Lance F Rosen, right, ICE, like Hitler’s Stormtroopers, is a mob of violence-prone broken men being paid to act out a collective personality disorder and conduct state terrorism. On January 6th, 2021, they came to attack our Capitol and overturn the election of 2020. They flew Trump and QAnon banners, along with flags bearing the “Stars And Bars.” This violent mob of mostly men walked in the footsteps of history’s losers, the fake nation which called itself the Confederacy. Humiliated in defeat. Emasculated. Broken. Impotent. Maligned by history and deservedly so, because the Lost Cause of the Confederacy was unjust, evil, in fact, a tragic blot on all human history.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Political Prosecutions

• New York Times, For Trump’s Former Fixer, a Tortured Path From ‘Rat’ to Reconciliation, Peter Baker, Sept. 7, 2026 (print ed.). The president has made peace with Michael D. Cohen, right, his onetime lawyer who turned against him. But contrary to Mr. Trump’s claims, Mr. Cohen has not recanted the testimony that helped convict his former boss.

U.S. Culture, Philanthropy, Media

• New York Times, Ousted Kennedy Center Chairman Buys Dismantled ‘Blue’ Sculpture, Julia Jacobs, Sept. 7, 2026. David Rubenstein purchased the sculpture, which was removed from the center last week, from the artist’s foundation. He will display it at the National Gallery of Art.

Top Stories

Today, on Labor Day, Donald Trump sparked an international incident as he suggested making Mexico, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and parts of the Caribbean parts of the United States (From The Parnas Perspective, Sept. 7, 2026. More detail below).

Hope for America, Opinion: The President is a reckless madman, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 6, 2026. At 9:10 this morning, after spending the entire weekend hiding inside his Bedminster golf club, avoiding the waiting press and their cameras, Donald Trump posted his first social media post of the day. By 10:35 this evening, he had posted more than 60 times, with each share more concerning than the last. The posts became so disturbing at times that many began openly questioning if the president of the United States was having a mental health crisis, with some of his fellow MAGA Republicans even ridiculing him back.

The president’s delusional posts spanned from him appearing to have attacked Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney while the two were playing hockey, with Trump standing above him and yelling at Carney to “GET UP, GOVERNOR,” to a post of Trump changing the name of New Mexico to New America. There was a fake image of Trump day trading from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, showing him making “Hundreds of Billions of Dollars on Stocks,” and even one of him pretending to command Space Force from a space station while he detonated huge nuclear fireball explosions across the Earth’s surface below.

Those weren’t even the worst of what he shared. It was one AI-generated image after the next, including one with Trump seated on a massive, dark black metallic throne inside what looks like a dystopian military command center, surrounded by black armored robotic soldiers towering over him. Behind him, fire is everywhere, even filling the ceiling, as Trump keeps one hand beside a glowing, futuristic clear control panel, while an army of smaller attack machines look ready to defend him. At the bottom of this ominous image are the words: “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES,” in bold white and red.

In another, Trump stands alone at the center of another dark, dystopian scene, on what appears to be the presidential seal. He is dressed in a long black coat and red tie, with two enormous black armored robots rising into the sky through the fog behind him. The robots are covered in Americana imagery, including American flags and eagle insignia. Closer to him are dog-like fighting machines, each with a bright red glowing eye. Across the bottom of this fake image, in large gold letters this time (and shown above), are the words: “THEY WILL DREAM OF US FOREVER.”

He went from science fiction to real life and back again, posting about declaring the moon above our planet as property of America: “THE MOON IS OURS 🇺🇸.” He shared a cartoon of himself smashing the entire country of Iran with a giant American Flag hammer. There was a post with examples of the new UNITED STATES SPACE FORCE SERVICE UNIFORM that looked like it was stolen from a 1970s or 80s dystopian science fiction film about a galactic empire meets fascist regime. He declared Mar-a-Lago the “Southern White House,” and he posted a video of himself teeing off that was captioned, “He is a great golfer, wins all the time, but an even better President!” The president said he was the greatest president of all time and referred to himself in the third person.

The official White House X account posted its own fake video. This time, showing Donald Trump with a bright green, glowing, supernatural-powered ring, using it to cause destruction and harm. They captioned it with a quote from the Green Lantern oath: “In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might beware my power… Green Lantern’s Light!”

His entire weekend schedule listed only executive time, and the press traveling with him have not had a single opportunity to see him since they arrived at 6:29 Friday night. This is the same pattern we have watched repeat over and over again. Around the same time, the bruises on his hands become more pronounced and covered with makeup; he disappears or is insulated for days with Trump loyalists only to then reappear, a little more energized than when we last saw him. The explanations each time change, but the pattern does not.

Between the bizarre posts, his disappearance, and his worsening health, we are all left with more questions than answers. Ty Cobb, Trump’s own former White House attorney, was asked recently whether he believed the president was still mentally capable of serving. Cobb’s response was, “I think he’s gone.” He called Trump’s nightly posting sprees “screeds” delivered “without oversight” and said, “The Cabinet will not invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment for a man who is clearly insane.” Back in April, Dr. Vin Gupta, a senior medical analyst, listed five symptoms he has observed in the president: erratic behavior, an inability to finish sentences, frequent confusion, illogical trains of thought, and word-finding difficulties. “The President,” Dr. Gupta concluded, “is exhibiting all the signs of dementia.”

The White House continues to reject every concern for the president’s physical and mental health. But at this point, the frequency of these posts and his instability begin to speak for themselves. He has made, or had someone else post on his behalf, more than 60 truly deranged social media posts. He is acting out violent fantasies, threatening foreign leaders in childish ways, posting about changing the name of New Mexico to New America, and posting a picture of himself working the drive-through window at McDonald’s. The president of the United States is gone indeed.

While he was having a mental breakdown in front of the world, I was trying to share a special moment with one of my daughters. It rained in San Diego today for the first time since February, and although for most that wouldn’t be something special, for us it is. I was sitting with my daughter, talking about how much we love that smell of the rain as it hits the dry ground. We sat there for a moment and just took it in. It was something so basic and ordinary, so small in comparison to almost everything else, but it felt like a gift.

As I sat there, I kept getting notifications each time he shared something, and the weight of his incompetence got heavier with each one. I tried to forget for just a few minutes that this is the man who holds the power to start even more wars, and he spent his Sunday sharing fantasies of destruction like a child playing with toys he does not understand. I kept thinking about how much our lives are at risk with him in charge. Every single one of us. But it goes deeper than that. Because this is also the man responsible for responding appropriately and effectively if a real crisis were to happen right now. His job is to lead, protect and serve, and from what we have seen, every time the stakes get higher, he proves he has no idea what he is doing.

If this were someone we loved, like an aging parent or grandparent, we would be having one of the hardest conversations a family can have. We would be asking whether they could still live alone. We would want to know if they were eating, if they were keeping up with basic hygiene, or if they were even capable of taking care of themselves in that way. We would also be asking if they understood what they were doing when they picked up their phone and shared 60 images of themselves commanding robot armies and detonating nuclear explosions from outer space. We would be heartbroken, scared, and most likely calling their doctor and taking away their car keys. Instead, we are letting the person posting this nonsense command the most powerful military on Earth. He holds the nuclear codes and is ultimately responsible for the safety of more than 330 million Americans. He has already botched a pandemic that killed more than a million people, taken us into another forever war in Iran that he said he would never start, and now he is destroying everything in his path.

If a catastrophic emergency were to happen right now, a cyberattack on our infrastructure, a military assault of some sort, or even a natural disaster like a devastating hurricane, Donald Trump would be responsible for our survival. And from what we saw today, there is no scenario where he could actually rise to the moment and lead us through it.

What makes this moment even more unsettling is that none of what we are seeing is new. The pattern of broken and disturbed men seeking political power is the backdrop to so many other dark periods of authoritarian takeovers.

Adolf Hitler was a failed artist, rejected twice from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, who spent years drifting and homeless before finding in politics the validation he could never earn anywhere else. By the time he held power, his personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, was administering daily injections of what historians believe included amphetamines and opiates. He was erratic, paranoid, incapable of tolerating disagreement, and surrounded exclusively by “yes men,” people who only told him what he wanted to hear. Joseph Goebbels, his chief propagandist, projected the image of a devoted family man, while using his control of the Reich’s film industry to coerce and exploit women. His personal diaries, which survived the war, reveal a man consumed by vanity, insecurity, and an almost pathological need to be seen as important. He kept lists of personal grudges and used state power to settle them. Benito Mussolini was violent toward women and known for physical aggression long before he ever held office. None of their cruelty was something their positions of power gave them. It was something they brought with them.

These were not men who were corrupted by power. They were men who sought power to expand the reach of their cruelty. They were social outcasts and predators who discovered that politics would give them the one thing they could never earn on their own: control over other people.

The contrast between these past strongmen and their little sidekicks like Stephen Miller is shocking. Stephen was even described by his own classmates as someone whose personality traits seemed to make him enjoy provoking pain in others. Members of his own family publicly disavowed his views. Trump’s personal history, the dozens of accusations of sexual misconduct, his connections to Jeffrey Epstein, the Access Hollywood tape, the E. Jean Carroll verdicts, the vindictive obsession with anyone who has ever crossed him, are part of his character. They are who he is.

Maybe the most devastating part is Trump’s complete lack of respect for how it is affecting those beyond our own borders. Today, voters in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt went to the polls and the far-right Alternative for Germany, the AfD, won nearly 44 percent of the vote. That is more than double the 20.8 percent they received in the last election, five years ago. The center-right Christian Democrats, the party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, won just over 17 percent, less than half of what they won last time. If the AfD were to form a government in Saxony-Anhalt, it would be the first time the far right has controlled a state government in Germany since the end of World War II.

The deeply alarming part is that Germany built memorials to warn the world about exactly this. Outside the Reichstag, their national parliament building, sit 96 cast-iron plates, each one bearing the name of a member of parliament who was persecuted and murdered by the Nazis for opposing Hitler. Those slabs exist so that no future generation could say they were not warned. I stood beside those slabs and felt the gravity of that warning. And then there is the glass dome, built in 1999, that sits above the parliamentary chamber in the Reichstag so the public can always look down on their elected officials and watch them. A permanent reminder that the government is ultimately controlled by the people, not by a single evil man or his enablers. It is a permanent reminder that power must answer to the people.

Because of the poison Trump is spilling all over the world, those warnings are being tested right now. Fascism is already here, and it is spreading just as it did in the 1930s.

We are now squarely under two months from the midterm elections. I’m sure many of us are already seeing the ads playing on TV. I know I am. This is our time to start to make our resistance visible. We need to start putting signs in our yards and go to local protests while the weather is still good and the days are still long. Consider finding organizations in our communities that are doing the work to get people to the polls, whether that means registering voters, organizing rides, knocking on doors, or helping someone figure out where and how to vote. Most importantly, we have to keep talking to the people around us. Our neighbors, friends, and family members. The people we see every day who may not be paying attention as closely as we are, especially on days like today, when it is very hard to explain away his erratic posting.

The reality is that the more days he spends posting online, the more it helps Democratic candidates come November. Whether his supporters say it out loud or not, nobody wants to live in this kind of instability. It’s not safe, and he’s certainly not doing anything for the American people. His decline is a political liability for Republicans, and it is a flashing red warning for the entire country. The more we see of it, the more his own party splinters away from him, and the greater the odds that we have the biggest blue wave in the history of our country.  

New York Times, Brushing Aside Trump’s Threats, Canada Retaliates on Tariffs, Ian Austen, Sept. 7, 2026. New Canadian levies of up to 50 percent are expected to begin Tuesday, even as Washington warns of a new round of American tariffs.

With an insulted and angry nation solidly behind him, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada is charging ahead in a bitter trade war with the United States started by President Trump, risking a further fraying of what once was one of the world’s closest alliances.

Retaliatory tariffs, set to take effect at 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, demonstrate Mr. Carney’s defiance toward increasing bombast by Mr. Trump, who has been trying to humiliate Canada economically after more than two weeks of finger pointing and threats.

Mr. Carney’s response has distinguished him as one of the few world leaders standing up to Mr. Trump as he lashes out at American allies on a range of issues.

The new measures will double the rate of existing tariffs that Canadian businesses pay on imported American steel and aluminum products and affect about 700 products, including aluminum foil, railway locomotives and steel bridges.

Polls show that Canadians strongly back Mr. Carney’s decision to end trade talks with Washington last month and hit back with tariffs on about $20 billion in American products entering Canada. But there is also concern over what might happen next. Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened another round of American tariffs if Canada follows through on its plan.

Some in Canadian industry say they are inclined to take Mr. Trump at his word, at least on this threat.

People in the Trump administration “are willing to hurt themselves, their own sectors and industries, in pursuit of their goal, however misguided I think it is,” said Flavio Volpe, the president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’​ Association of Canada. “So they may escalate. I hope that we don’t end up in a tit-for-tat situation.”

In what appeared to foreshadow Mr. Trump’s latest intentions, he announced on Monday that Bombardier, the Montreal-based aerospace company, would be banned from selling in the American market unless it built in the United States.

“They live off American Buyers, American Companies, American Airports, and American Service — All while Canada blocks our GREAT American Banks, and Companies, throughout the U.S.A.,” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post announcing the ban. There was no immediate comment from Bombardier.

Mr. Carney announced Canada’s new tariffs after he pulled Canadian negotiators out of talks in Washington last month — an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to stave off 50 percent American tariffs on $20 billion in Canadian exports and to reduce or eliminate tariffs of up to 50 percent on Canadian steel, aluminum and automobiles.

The Trump administration said the tariffs it imposed last month were in part a response to retaliatory tariffs Canada placed last year on some U.S. imports, particularly autos. American officials have repeatedly noted that only China and Canada retaliated against the United States since Mr. Trump began upending global trade.

Since trade tensions began to rise with Canada at the start of Mr. Trump’s second term, the United States has lashed out in ways both substantive and symbolic, including threats to block the opening of a U.S.-Canada bridge and an executive order to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”

• New York Times, Trump’s Trade War Is Shaping the Fight for Congress, Carl Hulse, Sept. 7, 2026. In Colorado and across the country, higher costs, tariffs and cheap beef imports are affecting voters who will help determine which party controls the House next year.

News Roundups 

 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Epstein Files Accountability Push Surges, Gas Prices Soar, 25th Amendment Calls Grow Again as White House Posts AI Slop to Distract, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 7, 2026. Happy Labor Day. A major push for justice is finally gaining real momentum on Capitol Hill, with more than 100 lawmakers now backing a discharge petition that could force a vote on releasing millions of withheld Epstein files. Americans are also paying the highest gas prices ever recorded for a Labor Day, with the average household already out more than $741 since the Iran war began driving up costs at the pump and the grocery store.

And yet this weekend, instead of addressing either of those stories, the White House spent its energy posting an AI-generated video of Trump as a superhero and a stream of bizarre fantasy images, a distraction that came as officials openly questioned his fitness to serve and some raised the 25th Amendment. It’s hard not to notice the pattern: while survivors wait on accountability and families stretch their budgets further, the response from the top has been cosplay.

None of this happens without you.

Here’s the news.

A major push on Capitol Hill to get more justice for survivors is growing, as more than 100 lawmakers have now signed Representative Thomas Massie’s discharge petition to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, a bill that would let state attorneys general, victims, and members of Congress sue the DOJ for withholding or over-redacting Epstein-related files. Massie says the department is still unlawfully withholding more than three million files and wants the bill to bring “accountability to the Department of Justice and closure for survivors.” He needs four Republicans to join, including himself, to hit the 218-signature threshold to force a House vote, and so far Nancy Mace is the only other Republican who has both cosponsored the bill and signed the petition. Massie has argued Republicans in competitive districts should sign on before the midterms, telling colleagues to “take credit for it” and “be a hero.” Democratic Representative Ro Khanna said if the effort doesn’t succeed before the end of this Congress, Democrats would “absolutely” continue pushing it next term, though he believes it will get done before the end of the year.

Labor Day:

Gas prices hit a record high for any Labor Day this year, with regular gas averaging $4.15 a gallon, nearly a dollar higher than last year and well above the previous Labor Day record of $3.82 set in 2012. Diesel hit its own all-time record of $5.90 a gallon on Monday, a cost increase that’s rippling through grocery prices and package delivery since trucks and freight systems rely heavily on it. Experts point to the fallout from the US and Israeli strikes on Iran in February, which sent crude oil traffic through the Strait of Hormuz plunging as Iran has refused to reopen the waterway. Energy Secretary Chris Wright acknowledged prices are higher than last Labor Day but pointed to futures markets suggesting gasoline could drop about 35 cents by November. Since the Iran war began, higher gas and diesel prices have already cost the average American household more than $741, according to a tracker from Brown University. It’s not just gas prices, food prices have also risen year over year.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that gas prices will start declining now that Labor Day has passed and summer driving season is ending, despite the ongoing Iran war showing no signs of cooling off after the US and Iran traded strikes on each other’s oil tankers over the weekend. Wright also pointed to the Trump administration’s deal securing 65 billion barrels of oil reserves from Venezuela and eased rules allowing US refiners to produce more gasoline as reasons prices should fall, saying “if I had to guess, they’re more likely to go down than go up.” Gas prices first spiked after the US attacked Iran in February, prompting Iran to effectively shut down the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passed before the war, sending Brent crude from $72.48 a barrel to $95.52 by Friday. AAA said the national average for regular gas hit $4.14 on Sunday, a 38% increase since before the war began and the highest Labor Day price ever recorded, well above the previous record of $3.82 set in 2012. Gas prices have become a critical political issue for the Trump administration heading into the midterms, since lowering costs for consumers was a central campaign promise.

The White House shared an AI-generated video on X depicting Donald Trump as the comic book superhero Green Lantern, showing the 80-year-old president using a glowing green power ring to build a border wall, construct a large site, and pose in front of military aircraft, all set to Kanye West's "Flashing Lights." The post came the same weekend Trump launched a broader AI-generated social media blitz, including bizarre images of himself meeting with George Washington in the Oval Office, renaming a New Mexico sign to "New America," smashing a chunk of land depicting Iran with an American flag hammer, and sharing a fake image of Robert De Niro holding a "Trump is my president" shirt. The flurry of posts came as Trump's war with Iran drags into its sixth month with no resolution in sight. Critics mocked the Green Lantern video, with former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger calling it "some of the stupidest crap" he's ever seen and Democratic strategist Jon Cooper saying anyone who still supports Trump "is as crazy as he is."

Calls for 25th Amendment:

Donald Trump’s weekend social media spree, from Space Force uniforms modeled on a fictional fascist regime to a proposal to rename New Mexico, has officials once again openly questioning the president’s fitness to serve. Some have gone so far as to raise the 25th Amendment, the constitutional mechanism for removing a president deemed unable to discharge his duties, though they acknowledge that decision rests solely with the vice president and Cabinet, not with lawmakers. Trump’s new “next generation” Space Force uniform design, inspired by the costumes from Starship Troopers, a satire about a fascist future Earth, drew comparisons to Star Wars villains and mockery from critics across the political spectrum. Meanwhile, his Truth Social post floating a rename of New Mexico to “New America” prompted swift and pointed pushback from the state’s Democratic officials, who called the idea absurd and said the state’s name is not up for debate.

Trump is facing mockery over a new “next generation” design for Space Force uniforms he posted on social media Sunday, which features a charcoal-colored collared jacket, black boots, and a matching cap with the Space Force Delta symbol, explicitly described as “inspired by the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform.” Critics quickly pointed out that Starship Troopers, the 1997 film directed by Paul Verhoeven, who grew up in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, is a satire about a future Earth ruled by a fascist regime, while others compared the design to the villains of Star Wars, including the Imperial Army that serves Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader. Healthcare advocate Melanie D’Arrigo joked on X that designing the uniforms after “the evil bad guys from Star Wars, who are led by an elderly, power hungry tyrant, who lose, repeatedly” felt “a bit too on brand,” while menswear writer Derek Guy said it was “the kind of design costume designers make to tell you who are the bad guys in a space movie.” Even conservative commentators weighed in, with broadcaster Erick Erickson calling it “a cross between Star Trek in the symbols and Imperial Forces from Star Wars,” and self-described conservative critic Jennifer Zilla acknowledging the design was “the uniform of the Imperial Army from Star Wars... Aka the people Darth Vader works for. Emperor Palpatine’s people.” It remains unclear whether Trump intends to actually pursue the uniform redesign or if the post was simply part of one of his frequent social media posting sprees, and both the Space Force and White House have not yet responded to requests for comment.

New Mexico’s Democratic officials quickly denounced a Sunday Truth Social post from Trump that proposed, visually, renaming the state “New America,” with the White House’s official X account reposting a map showing “Mexico” crossed out and replaced. Trump wrote that “many people suggested” the change for what he called “one of the great vote cheating states of all time,” adding “so much more prestigious and beautiful... Wow, I Love It!!!” The post came after Trump previously renamed Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico by executive order.

New Mexico’s congressional delegation pushed back forcefully, with Senator Martin Heinrich vowing to always call the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario and New Mexico by their real names, and Senator Ben Ray Luján telling Trump “it’s New Mexico, always has been and always will be. Just like how you’ll always be a sinvergüenza and corrupt.”

Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said the state’s name “isn’t up for debate, it’s been ours since before the United States existed,” while Representative Melanie Stansbury and Representative Gabe Vasquez both said the state’s name and history belong to its people and are not Trump’s to erase.

Dr. Amy Acton Attack:

Patrick Havas, a 38-year-old man from Canfield, was arrested after forcing his way through the crowd at the Mahoning County Democratic Party’s tent and lunging toward Dr. Amy Acton, shown above in a file photo, at the Canfield Fair, knocking down multiple people including an elderly man in the process. The Ohio State Highway Patrol’s executive protection unit quickly detained him, and Acton herself was not injured. Officers found two pistols and a taser in Havas’s possession, though investigators say no weapons were ever brandished or removed from their holsters. He was booked at the Mahoning County Jail on charges of disorderly conduct and two counts of assault. Witnesses, including former Congressman John Boccieri, described Havas as pushing through the crowd as if trying to record himself confronting Acton, and Havas was separately reported to have previously shared an address with a relative who resigned from Senator Jon Husted’s campaign over a past sexual misconduct conviction.

After Havas was detained, Acton, a physician, stayed to help tend to the injured, with witnesses describing her as poised and telling the crowd “we are sick of the hatred.” Ohio Governor Mike DeWine spoke with Acton afterward and said she asked him to share that she is okay, adding that “violence or the threat of violence at political or public events is always unacceptable.” Acton’s campaign, through communications director Addie Bullock, said Acton and her husband Eric were “grateful for the swift and decisive action of law enforcement” and said “this kind of violence has no place in Ohio.”

Political figures across the aisle condemned the attack, including Acton’s Republican opponent Vivek Ramaswamy, whose campaign called it “completely unacceptable” and said candidates should be able to meet voters “without having to worry about threats or violence.” Republican Senator Jon Husted said he and his wife were “disturbed by the attempted attack” and that “there is no place for this kind of behavior,” while former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown thanked law enforcement for their “quick and professional response.” Acton is currently locked in a tight race with Ramaswamy to succeed term-limited Governor DeWine in November.

Other news:

The Trump administration is retooling the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which has traditionally sent election monitors to polling sites to protect voters from discrimination, to instead focus on voter fraud. Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican who co-chaired Lawyers for Trump during the 2020 election and now leads the division, has emailed employees asking them to help staff roughly 1,000 monitors for the midterms, a number that has never been reached before for this kind of effort. Many career employees have reportedly been replaced by conservative hires, some of whom back Trump’s false claims about winning the 2020 election. NBC News spoke with a half-dozen Justice Department veterans, some of whom worry the monitors could be used to undermine public confidence in the elections if Trump is unhappy with the results.

Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday directing the interior department to consider stripping Endangered Species Act protections from gray wolves and to explore making it easier to authorize killing them, giving Interior Secretary Doug Burgum three months to determine whether gray wolves and Mexican gray wolves have recovered enough to be de-listed. Gray wolves remain protected across most of their range in the lower 48 states under a 2022 federal court order, with the main exception being Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, where states already manage wolf populations. Mexican gray wolves, a rare subspecies reintroduced to New Mexico and Arizona in 1998, only just crossed the population threshold needed to begin the de-listing process, and advocate Michael Robinson of the Center for Biological Diversity warned that premature de-listing would face legal challenges given the subspecies’ lack of genetic diversity. The order drew sharp criticism from environmental groups, with WildEarth Guardians’ Leia Barnett accusing the administration of trying to bypass the framework Congress built to keep species recovery decisions insulated from political pressure. At the signing ceremony, Trump repeatedly suggested the order would make it easier to shoot wolves, telling one rancher “you’re allowed to go and take care of it,” even though most wolves remain federally protected and killing one is still a crime in most cases.

The Department of Health and Human Services released a report linking “gender ideology” to leftwing authoritarianism and political violence, a study scientists are calling poorly conducted and “nakedly political.” Epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz called it the most obviously political study he has come across, pointing to a survey that essentially measured party affiliation rather than authoritarianism and questions on political violence that focused only on violence against conservative figures. Legal scholars Daniel Aaron and Craig Konnoth said the report, which was never peer reviewed, likely violates federal regulations requiring peer review for influential government science and appears aimed at undermining mainstream medical organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics. Report coauthor Colin Wright of the Manhattan Institute disputed that framing but acknowledged the language could have been tightened, saying the study dropped earlier than planned after a draft leaked. HHS did not respond to questions about whether the report was formally commissioned or whether it complies with federal rules on scientific information.

Every week, a Philadelphia nun named Sister Rose Kuhn drives to immigration court in Harlingen, Texas, to sit beside unaccompanied migrant children, some as young as four, as they face a deportation judge without a lawyer or a parent present. This week, an undocumented migrant facing imminent deportation called Sister Kuhn his “angel” for her presence and support. Her work comes as Catholics across the country, inspired by Pope Leo XIV, are increasingly pushing back against the White House’s immigration policies. Sister Kuhn’s routine highlights both the vulnerability of unaccompanied children navigating the immigration system alone and the growing role religious figures are playing in resisting current deportation practices.

Union membership in the US grew by 411,000 workers in 2025, the largest increase since 2008, with nearly triple the growth rate in states that protect collective bargaining compared to “right to work” states, according to a new report from the Illinois Economic Policy Institute. States with bargaining protections added roughly 305,000 union members last year versus about 107,000 in right-to-work states, and workers in protected states now earn 8% more on average after accounting for cost of living. The gains coincide with high public approval of unions, with a Gallup poll finding 71% of Americans approve of labor unions and an AFL-CIO poll finding more Americans trust unions than either major political party. AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler tied the trend to economic frustration, noting that four out of five workers say their paychecks aren’t keeping up with costs while CEO pay has climbed to 312 times the median worker’s. Nineteen states also passed 88 new worker-protection laws in 2025, including paid leave in Virginia and a near-total ban on non-compete agreements in Washington.

Hurricane Lowell, a major Category 3 storm with 115-mph winds, approached western Hawaii early Monday, prompting the National Hurricane Center to issue a hurricane warning for Kauai, Niihau, and parts of the vast Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. Forecasters expect the storm’s center to pass just west of the main Hawaiian Islands Monday night before gradually weakening, though it’s expected to remain a hurricane as it moves past the island chain. The storm could dump up to 14 inches of rain on Kauai and up to 12 inches on the Big Island, raising the risk of significant flash flooding and mudslides, along with a storm surge of up to 3 feet in Kauai County and life-threatening surf and rip currents across the islands. The hurricane center also warned that several tornadoes could form near Kauai and Niihau Monday afternoon into the night, with a few additional twisters possible elsewhere across Hawaii.

At least five people died and five more were injured when an Amazon Prime Air cargo plane overran the runway while landing at Miami International Airport on Sunday, striking multiple vehicles and erupting into flames. The Boeing 767, operated by 21 Air and arriving from Puerto Rico, trapped its pilot and copilot in the cockpit, and more than 60 fire rescue units responded to a fuel leak that crews were still battling hours later. The crash forced a full ground stop and runway closures at one of the busiest airports in the country, delaying roughly 250 flights, while the National Transportation Safety Board opened an investigation and scheduled a briefing for Monday. Amazon confirmed the crash involved one of its contracted planes and said it was “heartbroken” over the deaths, offering condolences to victims’ families. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned travelers in the area to expect significant delays and possible cancellations as authorities continued assessing the scene.

I only covered three of the five stories in that paste. Here are the other two:

A former Louisiana mayor, Misty Roberts, has completed her 90-day jail sentence for raping a 16-year-old boy while she was still in office and been released from custody. The 44-year-old had faced up to 17 years in prison after a jury convicted her in March of carnal knowledge of a juvenile and indecent behavior with a minor, stemming from an assault at a pool party at her home in July 2024. Judge Kent Savoie publicly acknowledged he made a mistake basing her lenient sentence on a list of cases resolved through plea deals, unlike her case, which went to trial, though he said he would not punish her for exercising her right to a trial. The short sentence drew significant backlash in her hometown of DeRidder, with residents calling it “an insult” and saying the fullest extent of the law should apply when children are victims. Roberts must also register as a sex offender, pay $5,000 in fines, undergo drug screening and therapy, and serve two suspended five-year sentences if she violates her release conditions.

Israel’s air force carried out two airstrikes early Monday on the southern Lebanese village of Kfar Rumman, killing at least nine people, including a child and two women, and wounding others, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry. One strike hit a residential building, killing eight and wounding 11 others, while a separate strike hit a car, killing a paramedic with the Lebanese Islamic Risala Scout Association and wounding two more. The attack came amid a new round of escalation between Israel and Hezbollah despite a truce reached more than two months ago, and just days after Israel’s military said it had taken “operational control” of a strategic hill overlooking the region. Residents described living in constant fear as strikes crept closer to the town center, with one man vowing to stay in his home despite the destruction. A US-brokered framework deal signed in June called for Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in exchange for Hezbollah’s disarmament, but implementation has stalled, with Hezbollah refusing to disarm north of the Litani River and Israel refusing to withdraw until it does.

A new UN World Meteorological Organization report finds that worsening heatwaves and wildfires driven by climate change are undoing progress on global air quality. Regions that had reduced pollution from cars and industry are now facing new health threats from wildfire smoke, while rising temperatures are driving up ground-level ozone, which the report links to nearly one in five COPD deaths in heavily polluted regions. The pollution these events generate is itself worsening climate change, creating a feedback loop, since particulates like black carbon settle on snow and ice, darken the surface, and accelerate melting and warming. A tripling of wildfires since the 1990s has contributed to nearly 100,000 deaths a year between 2010 and 2018, according to one study cited in the report. WMO scientist Lorenzo Labrador said air quality and climate must be addressed together, arguing that cutting greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel burning would simultaneously improve air quality worldwide.

 

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: NEWS: Trump Sparks Major International Incident, Republicans Struggle With Convention Turnout, Far-Right Surges in Germany, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 7, 2026. Republicans are increasingly running away from their own president heading into the midterms, with at least 45 congressional Republicans and even First Lady Melania Trump skipping his two-day midterms conference in Dallas this week, and a new Financial Times poll finding that three in ten Republicans themselves say Trump is making it harder for GOP candidates to win in November.

It’s not just the convention snub either. A coalition of veteran lawyers and former judges is ramping up legal fights against what they’re calling Trump’s “full-out assault on democracy,” and the administration has quietly scrubbed language critical of the Confederacy from a sign at Arlington National Cemetery. Even South Park got a dig in this weekend, trolling Trump with an Emmy joke tied to his years-old grudge over “The Apprentice.”

I also want to thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. The outpouring of love and support after the news that we surpassed Fox was tremendous, and I felt every bit of it. I know it’s corny to say, but you have made me love this work more than anything I’ve ever done. We are building something real here, a community, not just a newsletter. 

Here’s the news.

A new poll from the Financial Times and Focaldata finds that Donald Trump is becoming a major liability for Republicans heading into the midterms, with 46% of respondents, including 30% of Republicans themselves, saying his record in office has made it “harder” for GOP candidates to win their races this November. The same poll put Trump’s overall approval rating at just 33%, with even Republican support slipping from 80% at the start of his second term to 72% now, and found that 43% of people overall believe a Trump endorsement would do a Republican candidate more harm than good. That anxiety is playing out in real time, with at least 45 congressional Republicans and First Lady Melania Trump skipping his two-day midterms conference in Dallas this week, some citing the $25,000 entrance fee and others candidly telling Politico they don’t want him campaigning in their district, with one GOP strategist quoted saying “you’re fed if you mention him too much, and you’re also fed if you don’t stay in his good graces.” Republican strategists point to Trump’s dismissiveness on affordability concerns, his reluctance to release his PAC’s $400 million war chest, and his focus on projects like a new White House ballroom as compounding the problem. Despite the warning signs, Trump has shown no sign of pulling back, telling guests at a recent Rose Garden event that he plans to be “front and center” of the party’s campaign messaging for the final 30 days before the election.

Trump Sparks International Incident:

Today, on Labor Day, Donald Trump sparked an international incident as he suggested making Mexico, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and parts of the Caribbean parts of the United States.

Some American citizens who work in Laredo, Texas, are moving across the border into Mexico and commuting up to an hour each way to escape a cost-of-living crisis worsened by Trump’s war in Iran and his tariffs on imported goods, according to The Telegraph. Mexico’s cost of living runs roughly 45% lower than the US, and residents cited gas as their biggest expense, with prices up more than 30% since Trump’s strikes on Iran led Tehran to block the Strait of Hormuz, pushing the national average to a record $4.15 a gallon heading into Labor Day. Laredo, a heavily Latino border city that backed Biden in 2020 before flipping to Trump in 2024, has also seen cross-border trade and tourism drop sharply, with some local businesses reporting up to 35% less traffic amid trade restrictions and Trump’s immigration crackdown. Taxi driver Jesus Alvarado, who voted for Trump, said he’s “not happy with Trump” and will likely vote Democratic in the midterms, while bar owner Quique Pantoja said “absolutely, I regret voting for Trump.” Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico has been courting these disillusioned Latino voters by promising to restore cross-border trade and lower tariffs, and polling shows him running neck-and-neck with Republican Ken Paxton.

A tale of two Labor Day messages today:

Photo by MeidasTouch on September 07, 2026. May be a Twitter screenshot of one or more people, poster, newspaper, magazine, banner and text.

Republican Convention has Attendance Issues:

The Republican Party is scrambling to give away free tickets to Donald Trump’s midterm convention, dubbed “Trump-A-Palooza,” in a frantic bid to pack the Dallas arena as countless GOP lawmakers and candidates stay away. Organizers have resorted to a public lottery promising VIP treatment, urging GOP operatives to hand out passes to their networks, and blasting unsolicited “FREE TICKETS” text messages linking to the registration page. The $25,000 cost of attending has irritated many Republicans, and most in competitive House races aren’t planning to attend, with some declining to even say whether they’ll show. Trump and his allies are also using the event, held in Dallas, to try to boost embattled Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton, who’s locked in an unexpectedly tight race against Democrat James Talarico in a traditional GOP stronghold. The White House confirmed First Lady Melania Trump is skipping the event too, denying the president one of the party’s most recognizable figures at a gathering meant to project unity.

The RNC is simultaneously treating the convention as a major fundraising opportunity, charging donors $250,000 to attend a roundtable with Trump plus another $88,600 for a photo, while a similar package with Vice President JD Vance runs $75,000 for the roundtable and $35,000 for a photo. The speaker list, released over the weekend, includes 109 speakers and items across two days, with Trump and Vance speaking Wednesday night and Trump giving another keynote Thursday. Attorney General Todd Blanche’s spot on that list has raised questions about whether his participation violates the Hatch Act, which bars executive branch employees from using their position to influence elections. Organizers are trying to fill the roughly 21,000-seat American Airlines Center, with the RNC initially claiming the event would be the largest midterm convention since 2016, though that’s an ambitious bar given the 2024 Milwaukee convention drew an estimated 50,000 people over four days. Despite the scramble, RNC Chairman Joe Gruters and Trump himself have talked up the event, with Trump calling it on Truth Social “the Greatest RALLY of them all” and promising “lots of music” on night two.

Right Wing Beliefs Surge in Germany:

The AfD surged to first place in Saxony-Anhalt’s state elections with 44% of the vote but fell three seats short of an outright majority, meaning the anti-immigrant, pro-Russian party must now find a coalition partner or attempt to govern from a minority position. Possible paths include a deal with the left-wing populist BSW party, which shares some of the AfD’s criticism of German immigration and Ukraine policy, or courting right-wing factions within the mainstream Christian Democrats, though Chancellor Friedrich Merz has flatly ruled out any cooperation with the AfD. The stakes are high since Germany’s federal system gives its states major control over education, culture, policing and public broadcasting, and the AfD, classified by German domestic intelligence as “confirmed right wing extremist,” has openly said it wants to use power in Saxony-Anhalt as a blueprint for the rest of the country. Party candidate Ulrich Siegmund insisted a win is a mandate to govern, saying “if this result is not a mandate to govern, then what is?”

The AfD’s 258-page manifesto centers on an aggressive overhaul of migration policy it calls “remigration,” including immediate deportation of irregular migrants, expanded mass detention facilities, and returning non-ethnic-German citizens to their countries of origin, including a push to send Ukrainians home by claiming large parts of Ukraine are now safe. On education, the party wants to “de-ideologize” schools by banning the Pride flag, segregating refugee children into separate classes taught by other refugees, separating disabled children as well, and shifting curriculum focus away from Germany’s Nazi past toward earlier history, summed up by one regional official as “more Bismarck, less Hitler.” Researcher Johannes Kieß warned that migration policy in particular would likely trigger “a great deal of legal uncertainty and chaos” since states are constrained by federal law, and predicted Saxony-Anhalt would grow “poorer, both materially and culturally” under AfD governance.

On culture, the AfD has pledged a “new, patriotic cultural policy” that would defund what it calls “anti-German art,” requiring artists and institutions seeking state funding to sign a pledge not to hold Germany or its culture in contempt, with one party spokesperson specifically criticizing Germany’s celebrated Bauhaus art school for lacking sufficient German identity. Critics, including Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer, have drawn direct parallels to Nazi-era attacks on modern art, saying the AfD is “attacking the Bauhaus, using the very same words the Nazis used 100 years ago.” The outcome in Saxony-Anhalt is being closely watched as a bellwether, since the AfD is also polling around 35% ahead of elections this month in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and the party, despite only forming in 2013, would reportedly win the most votes nationally if a federal election were held today.

Other news:

A senior staffer for Sen. Mike Rounds has quietly worked as a registered lobbyist for Meta, Altria, and more than a dozen other clients in South Dakota, an arrangement experts say raises serious ethics questions. Robert Skjonsberg, who has worked for Rounds for over a decade and earned more than $153,000 from his Senate office last year, is also listed as a co-owner of a South Dakota government affairs firm, even as Rounds has introduced AI-related legislation since Skjonsberg registered to lobby for Meta and worked on agriculture bills affecting trade groups he also represents. Rounds’ office says Senate ethics counsel confirmed there’s no conflict, but outside experts strongly disagree, with congressional ethics expert Meredith McGehee calling it “wholly inappropriate” and saying “this is pretty much a no-go.” Public Citizen lobbyist Craig Holman went further, calling it “the most obvious conflict of interest I can imagine,” since Skjonsberg is simultaneously supposed to serve the public through his Senate role while being paid directly by private interests. Meta and one other client say their contracts with Skjonsberg have already ended, though Altria and several agriculture groups did not respond to requests for comment.

Thirty-four days before she reported to prison, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes gave filmmakers Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim access to document her every move. What began as that limited window turned into a three-year documentary project. A24 will release the resulting film this October. The project offers an unusually close look at Holmes in the lead-up to and following her imprisonment, built from years of access most subjects never grant.

France’s wine production is expected to fall below 3.4 billion liters this year, potentially the country’s smallest harvest since 1957, after drought and repeated heat waves battered vineyards nationwide. The Champagne region was hit hardest, with growers racing to bring in the earliest harvest on record before rising sugar levels pushed potential alcohol content too high, and output there expected to be roughly halved with grape bunch weights at a 20-year low. Southern France’s Languedoc-Roussillon region is expected to see a modest 5% rebound from last year’s weak harvest, though it remains 8% below the five-year average overall. The damage extends well beyond wine, with farm group Copa-Cogeca estimating maize losses of 50 to 70% in Slovenia, 40% in France, and up to 70% in some unirrigated Italian areas, while Croatia expects fruit and grape output to fall around 30%. French Environment Minister Monique Barbut estimated the summer’s total economic damage at €10 billion to €15 billion, and while Paris has unveiled more than €1 billion in emergency farm aid, agricultural groups say it falls short.

South Park won its fifth Emmy for Best Animated Show on Sunday, its first since 2013, following a season that repeatedly mocked and belittled President Trump and drew a huge spike in viewership. The show’s official Instagram account celebrated the win by trolling Trump again, posting an image of him clutching an Emmy trophy alongside the show’s characters with his pants and underwear around his ankles, captioned “you finally got your Emmy.” The jab plays on Trump’s long history of complaining that he was snubbed by the Emmys for “The Apprentice,” which he hosted from 2004 to 2015 and which received eight nominations but never won, prompting Trump to call the awards “rigged” and say in a 2016 debate response to Hillary Clinton that the show “should have gotten it.” Co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker explained in an earlier New York Times interview that they leaned into political material not out of a specific agenda but because “politics became pop culture,” with Stone adding that criticizing the Trump administration had become “taboo” and that he and Parker are “attracted to that like flies to honey.” Parker insisted the show remains even-handed, saying “we’re just very down-the-middle guys” who mock “any extremists of any kind,” pointing to their years of satirizing “the woke thing” as evidence they aim at all sides.

According to The Washington Post, the Trump administration has quietly removed language critical of the Confederacy from a sign at Arlington National Cemetery marking the former site of the Confederate Memorial, part of its broader effort to reshape how the Civil War is portrayed. The 32-foot bronze statue, unveiled in 1914 and removed in 2023 under a congressional mandate to strip Confederate names and symbols from military property, had been described on a Defense Department website and cemetery marker as depicting a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy” with “highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” including an enslaved woman shown as a “Mammy.” That language, along with text explaining how the statue’s Latin inscription framed secession as a noble “Lost Cause,” has now been scrubbed from both the website and a new marker at the site, which instead says the statue is expected to be reinstalled at Arlington in 2027 after conservation work. Historian Stephen West, who noticed the change during a cemetery visit, said he was “deeply disturbed” by the removal, arguing the original language “described the Memorial correctly” since the sculpture “did sanitize slavery, and it did mythologize the Confederacy.” Retired Army Brigadier General Ty Seidule, who served as vice chair of the commission that ordered the statue’s removal, called it “the cruelest monument that I have ever seen” and “a pro-slavery, anti-United States monument,” warning that restoring it would go “against the will of the American people through their elected representatives in the law that they created.”

Donald Trump called for ending sales of Bombardier jets in the United States. Hundreds of employees in Kansas, where the jets are made, will likely lose their jobs if the boycott continues.

A coalition of veteran lawyers, voting experts, and former judges is expanding legal challenges against what they call Donald Trump’s “full-out assault on democracy,” targeting his executive orders on voting and other actions seen as undermining the rule of law. Groups including the Democracy Defenders Fund, the Campaign Legal Center, and the ACLU have already won key rulings, including federal judge Indira Talwani’s permanent injunction blocking Trump’s order restricting mail-in voting, which she said would otherwise “threaten disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens.” The DOJ has repeatedly appealed to the Supreme Court to lift that injunction, while separately warning state election officials they could face criminal liability over noncitizen voter rolls and announcing plans to deploy roughly 1,000 lawyers to monitor voting nationwide, a move critics say risks voter intimidation. Legal experts like former DOJ inspector general Michael Bromwich and law professor Barbara McQuade praised these advocacy groups for stepping in where they say Congress has failed to check the administration, with McQuade specifically crediting groups like the Democracy Defenders Fund for “protecting the rights of all Americans.” Trump has continued to make unsubstantiated claims about widespread mail and noncitizen voting fraud, despite voting twice by mail himself this year and despite a rightwing database citing only about 100 confirmed noncitizen voting cases over a quarter century.

A nearly complete nuclear reactor secretly built during the rule of ousted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad would have been capable of producing fissile material usable in nuclear weapons, according to the head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi. IAEA inspectors visited two sites last month, including a previously undisclosed location where they found roughly 73 tonnes of natural uranium metal in the form of fuel rods, material Grossi said inspectors had to “tear down walls” and navigate narrow hidden passages to reach. Syria notified the IAEA of the site in a July letter and invited inspectors in, a striking shift after Israel struck and destroyed an earlier suspected reactor site in a secret 2007 raid it only publicly acknowledged in 2018. Grossi said the uranium is now under IAEA safeguards with cameras installed at the site, though whether the material stays in Syria or gets moved to a third country remains up to the Syrian government. A nuclear security expert noted the natural uranium metal isn’t directly weapons-usable but could theoretically be diverted into a covert program and further processed into weapons-grade material, meaning any future transport would require robust security against theft or sabotage.

The Trump administration has formally objected to UK plans that would force platforms like YouTube to give more visibility to established broadcasters such as the BBC and ITV, warning the proposal risks “facilitating censorship.” In a statement issued through the US embassy in London, the administration said such rules could “establish a template that authoritarian regimes could invoke to justify more control over online content” and could amount to “extraterritorial censorship of protected speech by Americans online.” The UK government has argued the changes are needed to counter misinformation as audiences increasingly shift to less regulated platforms, and has said it may legislate if platforms don’t act voluntarily to prioritize trustworthy content. UK content creators have echoed the US administration’s concerns, with one YouTuber, Simon Squibb, saying he was relieved an “entity that I think politicians will listen to” shared his fears about the plan functioning like state control over rankings. The intervention comes as Trump remains locked in a separate lawsuit against the BBC over an edited Panorama broadcast, and as his administration continues to accuse major traditional outlets of “fake news” while favoring less regulated online platforms to reach supporters directly.

Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, will remain nonworking members of Britain’s royal family following their return to the UK, according to a letter sent Monday on behalf of King Charles III. The letter, signed by the Lord Chamberlain, confirmed the couple still cannot use the titles of His and Her Royal Highness, stating their position “is akin to private citizens with commercial and charitable interests.” A Buckingham Palace source said the letter was made public to avoid confusion after receiving “a number of requests for guidance,” and to preempt any appearance of secrecy since it likely would have leaked anyway. The couple moved back to Britain last month for an “extended” stay with their children Archie and Lilibet after six years in Montecito, California, though relations with the royal family have remained strained since Harry and Meghan’s explosive allegations of racism and bullying in their Netflix documentary and Harry’s memoir “Spare.” Questions remain over the location of their new home and their security arrangements, following a lengthy legal battle between Harry and the British government over the removal of his security protection. 

More On U.S. Elections, Politics 

The Hartmann Report, Commentary, Has the Media Normalized the GOP’s Voter Suppression Right Before Our Very Eyes? Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 7, 2026. For decades, reporters have treated hours-long voting lines as a “normal” feature of Election Day instead of investigating why some Americans consistently face greater barriers to the ballot…

For over 50 years, our media has been covering up Republican voter suppression efforts. This year, though, they’re getting so obvious that it’ll be interesting to see if they continue to whitewash the practice.

Remember all those reports you’ve seen on TV during previous elections, where the reporter is outside a polling place with a line stretching around the block?

In the 2008 election, for example, CNN anchor Kirin Chetry noted that in Ohio:

“It was, after all, 120,000 votes that made the difference in that state in 2004 and gave the win to now President Bush.”

Republicans controlled the voting in Ohio, so they rigged polling places so people in mostly-Black, Hispanic, and student areas would have to wait hours and hours in line to vote, knowing that these were also the people most likely to be paid hourly and so would be unwilling to stand in line for hours to vote.

Here’s how it played on CNN from their November 4, 2008 transcript:

“MARY SNOW, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Kiran, certainly, around Ohio, board of election officials are bracing for long lines. And this is because the state is expecting record turnout, 80 percent of Ohio’s voters are expected to turn out and about a quarter of the voters vote early.

“And, of course, we’ve been seeing those long lines over the last several days in Columbus where voters had to wait several hours to cast a ballot, but for the most part, people were in good spirits. And the enthusiasm outweighs the frustrations.”

No mention that this is the #1 voter suppression technique that Republicans have been using in the states they control ever since the 1960s.

In that election, lines in Black neighborhoods in Republican-run Georgia ran eight to ten hours, four hours in Blue parts of Republican-run Florida, and the same in Democratic strongholds in Republican-run Virginia. As CNN’s Campbell Brown reported:

“Take a look at this. Early voting lines around Atlanta today were two, four and at times even 10 hours long, pretty maddening. And, unfortunately, for the impatient among us, it’s been the same in some of the other early voting states as well. But don’t let that dampen your enthusiasm.”

Nobody bothered to mention that the long lines are almost entirely in heavily-Democratic precincts. I’ve been voting since I was 18 — including a decade in Georgia — but have always lived in mostly-white mostly-upper-middle class neighborhoods so I’ve never waited more than 15 minutes to vote.

But the media seems to consistently miss that disparity or the reason Republicans always set it up, instead telling the stories of “brave” voters so “dedicated” to democracy that they’ll stand in line for hours.

Here’s the Washington Post on election day, 2012 from 40% nonwhite Arlington, Virginia, whose elections were controlled by a State Board of Elections appointed by Republican Governor Bob McDonnell:

“At 8 a.m., in Arlington, Va., 644 people were lined up outside an apartment building polling station, almost all of them late for work. ‘I’m glad to see everyone out, it doesn’t matter who they’re voting for,’ said Emma Durazzo, 84, who works at the Pentagon and, in 28 years in the neighborhood, has never seen lines like this on Election Day.”

In previous elections going back to 2002, Democrats (Governors Mark Warner and Tim McCain) had run the elections in Virginia.

Pew and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) did an in-depth analysis after the 2012 election and found that nationally 20% of Black voters and 17% of Hispanic voters reported waits exceeding 30 minutes, versus 11% of white voters.

The Brennan center found that Black voters typically waited 45% longer in line than white voters, and Latino voters waited 46% longer.

As Beto O'Rourke notes about what happened when John Roberts and his corrupt Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court destroyed the Voting Rights Act:

“Within minutes of the decision, Texas imposed the most restrictive voter ID law in the country, disenfranchising more than 600,000 citizens who, all of a sudden, couldn’t meet the state’s standard for proving who they were. Over the decade that followed Texas also closed more than 700 polling places, twice the number of the next most restrictive state, and almost all of them in African American and Latino neighborhoods. Congressional districts were racially gerrymandered, voting by mail was restricted and voting locations were moved miles away from colleges and universities.

“Without the protection of the Voting Rights Act, politicians were free to not only pick their voters, but they could now choose who could vote in the first place.”

While this may be a secret to the media and most white voters, Republicans are very, very clear about their favorite voter suppression strategy. Just look at what they did last week in Texas’ Tarrant County, where the 1.2 million voters are 60% nonwhite.

With 316 voting locations, the county experienced long lines in the 2020 presidential election, as CBS Dallas/Fort Worth reported. They noted:

“Bill and Dee Horn waited two hours, but said it was well worth it. Now in their 60s, they say they’ve voted in every presidential election since they were 18.”

But the lines in this increasingly blue area weren’t long enough for the Republicans who control the Commissioner’s Court that determines how many voting locations there will be and where. They cut out 92 of those polling places, virtually all of them in minority or student areas.

When people have to stand in line for six hours to vote in Tarrant County this November, will the media cover it the way ABC/Channel 11 in Republican-controlled North Carolina did?

“At University City library in Charlotte, lines were two hours long Thursday morning and growing. Some standing in line said they were ready for the election to end.

“‘Voting is the equivalent of the shower we all needed after the three (presidential) debates,’ said Gregory Weeks, chairman of the UNC Charlotte political science department, who waited two hours to cast his ballot.

“Back in Raleigh, Mitchell said she didn’t mind waiting in line.

“‘It’s important,’ she said, ‘and I’m happy to get the chance to do it.’”

During the Jim Crow era, conservatives used a wide array of strategies to prevent Blacks and other minorities (and often women) from voting, including guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar, so-called literacy tests, requiring the recitation of part of the Constitution from memory, poll taxes, etc.

When these were all outlawed with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Republicans shifted their strategy to creating long lines, purging people from voting rolls, and challenging signatures on mail-in ballots.

In the first national election after the Act’s passage, for example, the only precinct in Tallulah, Louisiana that was majority Black ended up with one single polling place for roughly 1,400 voters. When it opened at 6 a.m., approximately 600 people, virtually all Black, were already standing in line.

The newly-created US Commission on Civil Rights concluded, as Black aldermanic candidate Zelma Wyche said:

“[B]ecause of the long wait, many Negro voters…tired of waiting and went home without casting ballots.”

When reporter and former statistics professor Greg Palast went through official government numbers from the 2024 election, he found that Republican voter suppression won the day for Trump and the GOP, just as it had for George W. Bush in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004:

“Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.

“And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass ‘vigilante’ challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.”

And that doesn’t even begin to count all the people who simply gave up and went back to work after standing in line for an hour or two.

You can bet that if Democratically-controlled Blue states had been shorting voting machines and polling places in upscale white Republican areas, the GOP’s squeals could be heard halfway around the world. It would be an epic scandal, and the media would cover it as such.

This fall, how will they cover the long lines and outraged voters who show up only to discover they’ve been purged from the rolls by Republican secretaries of state? Stay tuned…

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: In The Great Global Fight For Freedom American Patriots Must Now Do Our Part, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 7, 2026. The World Is Watching. It Is Our Turn Now.......In the home stretch we are stepping up here at Hopium by adding more daily programming and launching new ways to help us win and harder for them to cheat....

Happy Labor Day everyone. A far-right party won a small state election in Germany yesterday. Our failed war in the Middle East continues to rage, the Russian-Ukrainian war is becoming far bloodier and Putin far more desperate, Trump’s inflation is harming the global economy, our economy, and weakening the balance sheets of governments throughout the world. Amy Acton was attacked by an armed man in Ohio yesterday, the corrupt Roberts Court continues to encourage fascism and the end of rule of law in America……..

It’s a lot, peeps. Things feel unsteady - and they are. But there is also this:

There is also this remarkable man speaking on Meet The Press yesterday:

U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and a longtime law professor, decries Trump Team election-rigging during an NBC's "Meet the Press" interview on Sept. 6, 2026.

Then there are all our inspiring candidates, people of character, who are leaving it all out there on the playing field for us all across the country……

On Thursday night I went to an event in DC with Dr. Amy Acton and Governor Wes Moore. Here’s a photo I took from the event:

I talked to Dr. Acton at the event. She thanked me for the support this community has given her and her running mate David Pepper. But then she said something remarkable, something along the lines of “Simon I think there is something happening out there with people that goes beyond their economic struggles, of higher costs. People are crying at my events, breaking down, in public and crying. Sherrod Brown tells me he’s never seen so many people cry at events as he is seeing this year. People are yearning for something more, some deeper connection to each other and their leaders, something far better…….”

I told her that I agreed. That we’ve been hearing something like this from the candidates we’ve been meeting. That in a time of extraordinary oligarchical abandonment and betrayal, of being lead by rogues, sexual predators. and criminals, that the American people were desperate to be led by admirable people again……people who had served their community, had showed up for them, and and could be trusted to fight for them when in power, and restore dignity, compassion, and true love of country and one another to this once great nation…..that people knew something had gone deeply wrong and were looking for our leaders to put it right, that this was no normal time nor was this a normal election…..it was something more…..

In her remarks to our gathering Dr. Acton referenced our conversation and this deep desire she was feeling from people for something better. It was a powerful set of remarks, and she, as David Pepper writes above, is an incredible woman and leader.

One, like so many of our other candidates, feels the gravity of the moment and is rising to meet it, with grace, dignity, and a powerful sense of duty….

On this Labor Day that honors the grit, hard work, and aspirations of the many let’s commit to do our part in these few weeks in the great global battle for freedom and democracy. Let us be inspired by the compassion and courage of Amy Acton, of the bravery and resilience and leadership of Zelenskyy, of the patriotism and fight we’ve seen in our candidates, and in all the remarkable work every day Americans do here at Hopium and all across the country each day for their democracy……

For we have an opportunity in these next few weeks to do something deeply meaningful for the world, and for our future - we need to go out and win these mid-term elections everyone. We will do it through the postcards, the canvassing, the phonebanking, the donating, the info warring and election protecting.…….while each act may be small, we’ve seen that when it is millions of us doing it each day we can be mighty, mightier than Musk, and more powerful than MAGA……and so do it, each day, and then do another thing to make it more likely we win, and our terrible, addled, treacherous, corrupt leader and his allies lose.

Earlier this year Orban fell in Hungary, and so can Trump here……Hungary’s Peter Magyar

We are officially in the home stretch of the 2026 election. People will be voting this week in NC and WI. Early in person voting kicks off next Friday. We are now. As things pick up in these coming days so will Hopium as we are launching two new daily products this week:

A new round up of TV ads and campaign videos that will come late morning ET Monday through Friday. These ads and videos will provide us powerful insights into what is happening across the battleground each day, and keep us connected to the many wonderful candidates we are rallying for. This new product kicks off on Wednesday.

At least one live daily event, Monday through Friday, early afternoon ET. These events will be shown live here at Hopium and my YouTube channel each day. To get reminders about each live event head to settings and turn on notifications for live events. If you can’t make them live they will be sent via email and posted on the site shortly after each event.

In addition to our daily work for candidates and party committees we are also promoting two new home stretch/closing strong programs that will make it more likely we win and harder for them to cheat:

Become an Early Vote Champion in your networks, communities, organizations….

 

New York Times, All Five Killed in Miami Runway Crash Were on the Ground, Officials Say, David Ovalle Karoun Demirjian and Eduardo Medina, Sept. 7, 2026. A cargo plane, operated for Amazon, plowed into two vehicles on Sunday, leaving five more injured and disrupting Labor Day weekend travel for thousands.

Five people on the ground were killed in a Miami airport crash when an Amazon cargo jet ran off the runway, struck two vehicles, plowed through a perimeter fence and skidded across a public road before stopping in a field, officials said on Monday.

The crash on Sunday, at Miami International Airport, also injured five people, three critically, and upended Labor Day weekend travel for thousands.

Only two people were aboard the cargo plane, a pilot and co-pilot, and they both survived, officials said, though it was unclear if they had been among the people who were injured.

In a news conference on Monday, the National Transportation Safety Board said it was too soon to determine the cause of the crash or what could have been done to prevent it. Investigators plan to look into the aircraft’s various systems and flight controls, as well as the weather conditions at the time of the crash. Officials did not provide an update on the conditions of the three people who were seriously injured, nor did they identify the victims.

But Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the N.T.S.B., confirmed that all of those who were killed had been on the ground. The plane crashed into a van carrying workers for a cleaning company contracted to the airlines and a sport utility vehicle that had been on a public road.

All five people who were killed were inside the van, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation who was not authorized to discuss it. Two others inside the van, as well as the driver of the other vehicle, survived, the person said.

The agency planned to hold another news conference on Tuesday.

The crash, which has caused a maelstrom of flight delays during one of the busiest weekends of summer travel, has jolted Miami and its airport, the nation’s busiest for international freight.

It was the second time in less than a year that a cargo plane crashed at a major airport and killed people on the ground. Last November, a UPS plane crashed on takeoff at the airport in Louisville, Ky., killing 12 people on the ground as well as the three-member crew.

New details released on Monday, as well as photographs and videos shared online of the crash, offer a clearer account of what happened around 2 p.m. Sunday.

More On U.S. Tariffs, Trade 

New York Times, Trump’s Trade War Is Shaping the Fight for Congress, Carl Hulse, Sept. 7, 2026. In Colorado and across the country, higher costs, tariffs and cheap beef imports are affecting voters who will help determine which party controls the House next year.

Colorado’s annual state fair in historic Pueblo is a celebration of the state’s deep farming and ranching roots and agriculture’s significant contribution to the state economy, a reality sometimes lost in the public focus on the region’s stunning mountain vistas, adventurous outdoor sports and glitzy ski towns.

This year, the party was a bit muted.

Colorado’s farmers and ranchers are struggling against factors beyond their control, with higher costs for fuel and fertilizer resulting from President Trump’s decision to wage a trade war featuring steep tariffs and an actual war against Iran. In a bid to lower meat prices last month, the president also agreed to allow cheaper beef imports to compete with domestic cattle producers who were finally turning the corner after difficult years.

“For the first time, our cow-calf producers are making a living and being able to sell their calves at a reasonable price,” said Erin Spaur, the executive vice president of the Colorado Cattlemen’s Association, as youngsters showed off their prize hogs in the fair’s livestock exhibition hall. “We believe in fair trade, but we don’t believe this is the best avenue forward,” she said of the administration’s move to temporarily lift duties on beef.

The economic anxieties of these generally conservative Coloradans — as well as voters in similar communities throughout the country buffeted by Mr. Trump’s whipsawing trade decisions — are one reason Democrats are hopeful about their chances of winning control of Congress in November. The party is optimistic about picking up at least one seat in Colorado, and potentially more as the president’s popularity sinks. 

More On Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Dear Leader is ... nuts, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Sept. 7, 2026. Here’s a short one for Labor Day. I’ll be back tomorrow with the usual full-length documentation of all the atrocities.

Remember when presidents used to let us get some peace and quiet during the weekends? That was pretty awesome, wasn’t it?

Yeah, well....Those tranquil Before Times are over.

Our psychotic president and his equally psychotic diaper nurse spent all day yesterday spraying the firehose of crazy directly into our faces.

Jesus wept.

If you had looked at Donny’s official schedule for Sunday, you could have been fooled into imagining that Donny spent a quiet day at his New Jersey ex-wife cemetery.

Oh, but no — that 8:00 am ‘executive time’ lasted all the way to 9:00 in the evening, with Donny and Natty s____dozens of posts onto his crappy app — and Harry Sisson has earned hazardous duty pay for documenting just a fraction of the lunacy.

You know, I’ve been writing these posts almost every day for almost four years now — when when you do that, you eventually run out of different ways to convey that Donny is f___nuts. But he is. He's got a screw loose. he’s lost his marbles. he’s crazier than a s__house rat. he’s stark barking bonkers. he’s mad as a hatter. he’s off his rocker. some village is missing its idiot. he’s out of his mind. he’s nutty as a fruitcake. he’s out where the buses don’t run. he’s got bats in his belfry. he’s wandering in the tall weeds. he’s a basket case. he’s gone off the deep end. he’s not all there. he’s out of his skull. he’s mad as a March hare. he’s foaming at the mouth. he’s a brick or two shy a full load. his elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floor. he’s not playing with a full deck. he’s a dim bulb. he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed. he’s a few sandwiches short of a picnic. he’s not playing with a full deck.

The light are on, but no one’s home.

I mean, who does this?

What did New Mexico do to deserve this? Were they very very mean to Dear Leader, so unfair, so unfair, and so now they get the Lake America treatment — or is Donny just going to rename everything that’s got a foreign place name, without rhyme or reason?

Is Rome, New York now America, New York? Is Paris, Texas now America, Texas? is Athens, Georgia now America, Georgia?

Tell me, if the Moon is now ours,

are we renaming it the Night Sky Ball of America?

Wait, I have a much more important question: why are our astronauts now dressing up like Nazis?

 

Who designed this? Was it Stephen Miller? It was, wasn’t it? I mean, look at this. it’s straight up Nazi cosplay. They’re not even pretending any more.

So many of these posts just make no sense whatsoever.

Who are the ‘they’ that will never sleep again, as Donny and his robot army roam the midnight streets of our nation’s Capitol? Is it the Dumocrats?

Donny’s obsession with ‘dumocrats’ fascinates me — because you know that when he prattles on about how ‘most people don’t know that 'dumb ends with a b,’ he’s accusing-confessing that he’s the illiterate moron who had no clue how ‘dumb’ is spelled.

Think about that: somebody had to actually explain to Donny how to spell ‘dumb’ — and this f____ imbecile is in charge of a nuclear arsenal. Awesome.

So much of this stuff doesn’t have a point, or even makes sense. It’s just Natalie finding some dumb___ image online and showing it to Donny, who cackles, ‘hurr hurr hurr, post it.’

There’s no other explanation for stuff like this.

Hulk Hogan was a human cartoon character. Why would anyone want to imitate that?

Is it the Hulkster’s racism?

In a video made public by The National Enquirer, Hogan said: “I guess we’re all a little racist” and used the n-word while referring to his daughter’s love life.

Great role model.

What even is the point of this?

Why Donny in a garbage truck? Of what possible significance is posting an image from a failed campaign stunt from 2024? does Dear Leader not remember that his stroked-out leg collapsed under him as he tried to climb into the truck?

Why would he want to relive that moment? Oh, wait — it’s because he had no memory of it. Donny’s so demented, he can’t even remember what he had for breakfast this morning, much less tell you what happened on the campaign trail two years ago.

The posting spree finally ended around 9 pm, with some AI slop of Donny as the Green Lantern.

Which is actually kind of perfect, because the Green Lantern is a d-list superhero, and Donny is a z-list president.D

Does Diaper Nurse Natty [portrayed above] not understand how completely cray-cray this shit-blizzard of posting makes Dear Leader look?

Spoiler alert: no, she doesn’t — because she’s every bit as fucking nuts as Donny is. Maybe even more so.

It goes without saying that if Joe Biden had ever even once spent an entire day vomiting out preening-peacock bull___ all over social media, the press would have had a field day, writing countless think pieces about how Joe’s finally lost his mind, and how he has to resign immediately, for the good of the country.

Yet, Donny does this pretty much every weekend now, and the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled media can’t even be motivated to say one word about Commander Crazypants.

Now here’s a fun, true story. When Donny’s tyrant Klansman father Fred, shown above, was completely lost to Alzheimer’s, his family built him a fake office where he would go every day to sign fake papers and have fake phone conversations with his secretary, having a familiar place to go every day kept old Fred happy and out of trouble.

Can we just do that with Donny? Can we build him a fake Oval Bordello down at his s____Florida golf motel, and let him sit there all day long, posting dumb___ memes onto his crappy app, playing Hide the Brain Cells with his diaper nurse, signing fake executive orders and holding fake press conferences? We could even put a fake Big Red Button on his fake Resolute Desk, so he could fake-nuke Iran.

Come on. Donny’s brain has left the station. 25th Amendment now. 

More On U.S. Governance

New York Times, As War Grinds On, Trump Relishes Renovation Projects, Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman, Sept. 7, 2026. President Trump is basking in the momentum of the various projects he has spurred around downtown Washington.

Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary, was holding court before reporters outside a Washington courthouse recently when he acknowledged what had become readily apparent inside the White House.

As the war with Iran grinds on, Mr. Trump finds reprieve by focusing on the minutia of an endeavor much more within his grasp: renovating Washington with ornate projects.

“He loves to build,” Mr. Lutnick said, shortly before an emergency hearing about Mr. Trump’s desire to rename the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in his own honor. Mr. Lutnick added: “This is what he enjoys. So late at night, 11 o’clock at night, he calls me and wants to talk about things he’s building, because it’s fun for him.”

“If you sat with him, would you have a nice chat with him? No, you’d ask him about Iran, then you’d ask him about this, then you’d ask him about that,” he noted. “Everybody does that. And the one thing he likes to do during the week is construction.”

As the United States appears mired in another intractable conflict in the Middle East, Mr. Trump has basked in the momentum he has on the half-dozen makeover projects he has set in motion throughout the capital.

The Supreme Court gave him a green light to race forward with construction of the White House ballroom. The administration said it planned to start excavation work for a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery even before a federal review panel had approved the project. The Kennedy Center board, stocked with the president’s loyalists, voted to add Mr. Trump’s name below the main sign on the building, and abruptly removed a large outdoor sculpture, “Blue,” from the grounds.ImageWorkers removed “Blue,” a 24-foot sculpture by the artist Joel Shapiro, from the grounds of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last week.Credit...Salwan Georges for The New York Times

Mr. Trump’s primary background is not in government or finance, but in construction and real estate. In New York City, he often lamented the never-ending series of zoning regulations, permits and community-level approvals needed to get projects built.

Making changes to a project there requires hours of sitting in community meetings listening to complaints from residents, and getting sign-off from city officials. Projects like helipads, Mr. Trump has complained, are next-to-impossible to get approved. But in his second term as president, he said, he realized he could barrel over many of those impediments. He stocked review panels with White House appointees. Court challenges have failed to keep pace with the administration’s rapid construction. He can finally just have fun.

“You mean I can actually do something that I really want?” Mr. Trump told a room full of donors to his White House ballroom last year, describing what it had been like overseeing construction projects as president.

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion:Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer, and MAGA’s Civil War, Kristoffer Ealy, right, Sept. 7, 2026. Trump won’t remain in power forever — and some Republicans are beginning to position themselves for whatever comes after him.

If you know me, you know I do not like Laura Loomer, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, or any of the other women orbiting Donald Trump like malfunctioning satellites waiting for him to glance upward and validate their existence. Half the time, I cannot tell them apart—not because they look or sound alike, but because each has spent years developing her own proprietary strain of awfulness until the strains merged into one toxic MAGA smoothie nobody should drink without first calling Poison Control. There is the puppy killer, the bimbo, the overt racist, and whichever one is currently on television auditioning to become Trump’s next discarded woman. Keeping track requires flash cards.

This week belongs to the overt racist: Laura Loomer, a woman who has somehow turned being banned, humiliated, rejected, and publicly disposable into a full-time profession. Most people eat dog food once and reconsider their life choices. Loomer ate it on camera and apparently thought, You know what this career needs? More racism.

Loomer spent the better part of a weekend calling Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon—the Democratic Senate nominee who just knocked off Alex Vindman despite being outspent by roughly sixteen to one—a “ghetto black communist bitch.” Not once, because even Loomer knows one racist post will not keep the attention-economy feeding dish full all weekend. Across at least five posts on X, she recycled variations of the same slur, complained that Black women in Congress had “gotten away with way too much,” said Nixon “speaks Ebonics,” and threatened to “bark at you and tug your leash” before Nixon would understand her. She also dragged Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson into the tantrum, turning what began as an attack on one accomplished Black woman into a racist group project for which nobody had asked. Loomer was spraying slurs across the internet like a woman whose smoke detector had been chirping for six months and who had finally decided the battery was not the problem.

Nixon handled her exactly as she deserved to be handled: without fear, confusion, or a single ounce of deference. This is a woman who had just defeated a nationally known opponent with sixteen times her money, so an unemployed racist internet goblin with a ring light was not about to ruin her weekend. Nixon reminded Loomer that it is “Representative Angie Nixon,” reminded everyone that Loomer once ate dog food on camera, and then reached for Queen Latifah: “Who you calling a bitch?” It was disciplined, funny, and devastating—the rhetorical equivalent of swatting a mosquito without interrupting the conversation. Nixon looked like a United States Senate nominee. Loomer looked like someone furiously refreshing her notifications because racial abuse is the only product she has ever successfully brought to market.

 

Confront the Hate (Find the Hope), Opinion: Inside the Far-Right Experiment to Reshape Rural America, Phil Williams, Podcasters Meribah Knight and Susan Berfield discuss their new investigative series, "Our Town," and how Gainesboro, Tennessee, became ground zero for a national movement.

A tiny Tennessee town becomes the testing ground for a political experiment—and the outcome may reshape how power moves through rural America.

In this episode, podcaster Meribah Knight and Bloomberg journalist Susan Berfield unpack the reporting behind their gripping new podcast, “Our Town.”

The four-episode series from Bloomberg follows up on my own revelations about the Christian nationalist plan for Gainesboro, Tennessee, exploring what happened in the aftermath. “Our Town” explores the clash—between wealthy far-right investors, white Christian nationalist podcasters, and a determined local community—over land, influence, and the future of a place they see differently.

Here is how Meribah describes the story playing out in a town of a thousand people, in a county of 12,000:

“There’s this kind of famous saying from Tip O’Neill, who came from Boston, ‘All politics are local.’ And Susan and I talked a lot about this as we made the fourth episode. It really feels like that’s been flipped. It feels like all politics are national, and that the national stuff is getting pushed down to the local level…. I think that the story of Gainesboro really reflects that all politics are national, that things that feel very far away can land right in your lap. So this tiny little town that sort of was minding its own business is suddenly thrust into the middle of this big question.

“As we say in the last episode, ‘Gainesboro, the small town at the center of the world.’ It really feels like that…. There is a battle that’s kind of brewing in rural communities that feel like they’re kind of up for grabs….

“We all have to pay attention to what’s happening around us because issues that felt very far away are no longer far away.”

The events in Gainesboro would reveal a sprawling network involving venture capital, Harvard Law connections, Silicon Valley money, and a wider ideological pipeline reaching up through national politics.

As we discuss the larger story about religion, entrepreneurship, and the fight to define American values, you’ll discover:

Why Gainesboro was chosen as the “red dot” alternative to Moscow, Idaho;

How a pair of controversial podcasters became unlikely ambassadors for the far-right venture;

What a showdown at the local Dairy Queen revealed about local resistance; and

Where the money comes from, and why investors are betting on this ideology.

Susan Berfield explains the money and institutional aspects, from New Founding’s venture backing to the broader network of donors and influencers fueling the project.

Meribah Knight brings the on-the-ground reporting and the human stakes, showing how residents organized, pushed back, and forced the story to evolve in ways few expected.

Here are my previous reports about this effort:

• Aiming to ‘radicalize Main Street,’ Christian nationalists set sights on tiny Jackson County, Tennessee
• Christian nationalists moving into Jackson County, Tennessee, focus on ‘far, far more political power’
• ‘This town is not for them.’ Residents react to white Christian nationalists moving to Tennessee
• Christian nationalist C.Jay Engel doesn’t want you to believe me. You can see the evidence yourself.
• Men behind Tennessee’s Christian nationalist settlement: ‘This country belongs to Jesus,’ not the Jews
• Meet the out-of-state investors funding a Christian nationalist community in Tennessee
• Citing Charlie Kirk murder, far-right Tennessee pastor demands removal of ‘Hate Has No Home’ signs

New York Times, One School District’s Fight Against Trump’s Anti-Transgender Push, Michael C. Bender, Sept. 7, 2026. Jefferson County, Colo., is one of the few public school systems to sue the Trump administration over demands that it revoke transgender protections or face funding cuts

Rob Stein had been interim school superintendent in Jefferson County, Colo., for 22 days when he sued the Trump administration this summer over demands to change their transgender-inclusive policies.

Dr. Stein and other district officials say they had no choice. The cash-strapped district, Jeffco Public Schools, risked losing all $50 million of its federal funding for school meals and special education if they refused. But if they acquiesced, they concluded, they would violate state laws that protect transgender students from discrimination.

“This has been just an enormous distraction,” Dr. Stein said in an interview from the district’s foothill-framed headquarters. “It has added a lot of stress to the system and to the kids who are being targeted here.”

What the district cast as a practical decision is viewed as a rare counterstrike from public schools, universities and hospitals in support of a transgender rights movement that has been on its heels under President Trump after a decade of hard-fought successes in school board rooms and courts.ImageRob Stein addressing faculty at a meeting last month, shortly after the school district sued the Trump administration over demands to change their transgender-inclusive policies.Credit...Chet Strange for The New York Times

Z Williams, an advocate for transgender rights and co-director of the Bread and Roses Legal Center in Denver, said most institutions facing pressure have opted for “voluntary capitulation.”

Some schools targeted by the Trump administration have agreed to settlements or changed their policies based on Mr. Trump’s executive orders that forbid the government from recognizing gender identity instead of biological sex, barred transgender athletes in female sports and rolled back prior administrative guidance that sex-discrimination laws protected gender identity.

“I’m just incredibly proud of this school board,” Z Williams said. “Trans people are being more and more villainized and more and more marginalized. So it’s really impressive for Jeffco to fight on these issues.”

The dispute has thrust the school district into the center of the mushrooming culture war that Mr. Trump has led against transgender Americans. It encapsulates virtually every flashpoint of the political struggle between gender identity and biological sex that has become central to Mr. Trump’s effort to reassert conservative social values into public schools and universities.

More On Global Economy, Politics

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Neo-Nazis and the Impotence of Trumponomics, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 7, 2026. Crude economics doesn’t explain what just happened. Elon Musk facing pushback for post-inauguration arm gesture, with some comparing it to Nazi salute. 

Neo-Nazis — no point in euphemisms — just won big in the rough equivalent of a state-level election in Germany. America’s leading neo-Nazi — again, no point in euphemisms — congratulated the AfD (in German) on the result, and in return received “thanks for your support” from the AfD’s lead candidate.

In the days and weeks ahead there will be many analyses of the results and its implications from people who, unlike me, know something about German politics. For now, let me do something more parochial, and write about what the Sachsen-Anhalt election might teach us about U.S. political economy.

So, about America: Make America Great Again meant different things to different people — racism, of course, being a key component. But in Donald Trump’s mind it also clearly meant trying to bring back “manly” jobs. He would do this by imposing tariffs to eliminate trade deficits, which, in his garbled version of economics, would end huge U.S. “giveaways” to surplus nations. And this would, in turn, lead to a huge revival of U.S. manufacturing employment.

Why is Germany relevant to this story? Because in terms of both trade balances and manufacturing Germany is, in effect, the anti-America. Where we do indeed run large trade deficits, Germany runs huge surpluses. And while Germany, like every other advanced economy, has seen the manufacturing share of employment decline over time, it remains a more industrial nation than the U.S. has been since the 1980s.

Indeed, relative to the size of its economy, Germany runs trade surpluses and retains large-scale manufacturing employment to an extent that lies far beyond the wildest dreams of Trumponomics.

And none of this appears to make a bit of difference to the resentment that underlies right-wing extremism on both sides of the Atlantic.

Start with trade. Here are balances in trade in goods and services for the two nations, expressed as a percent of GDP:

The U.S., as Trump constantly emphasizes, consistently buys more stuff from other nations than they buy from us. In his mind this means that we are being ripped off (as opposed to attracting large inflows of foreign investment, which as a matter of sheer accounting necessarily implies that we run trade deficits.) In any case, however, the Germans should be feeling pleased with themselves for running big trade surpluses, and hence taking advantage of the rest of the world, right?

Somehow, they aren’t.

America’s large trade deficit in manufactured goods does mean that we have fewer manufacturing jobs than we would if that trade were balanced. Robert Lawrence of the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that eliminating the deficit would raise the manufacturing share of employment from 7.9 to 9.7 percent, similar to my own back-of-the-envelope calculations. Correspondingly, Germany, with its large manufacturing surpluses, has relatively higher manufacturing employment as a share of total employment. Here are trends in industrial employment — a bigger category than manufacturing alone, but the trends are similar:

Even Germany has gradually become “deindustrialized,” but even now it is more of an industrial nation, as measured by where the jobs are, than the United States has been for at least 35 years. Has this insulated Germany from the bitterness and political extremism that many U.S. observers attribute to deindustrialization? Apparently not.

So here’s one way to think about the political economy here. The economic component of MAGA might be described as a plan, or maybe a concept of a plan, to make the U.S. economy more like what it was in the 1950s, when we didn’t run trade deficits and had a lot more men working in industry. But this might also be described as a concept of a plan to make America more like Germany. And what the results in Sachsen-Anhalt show is that even if such a plan were to deliver the promised results (which it wouldn’t), it would do little if anything to reduce politically radicalizing resentment.

I should mention one more lesson from the AfD’s victory, one that has me reconsidering some of my own beliefs.

Many U.S. observers, me included, have laid considerable stress on the problem of “left-behind” regions — rural and small-town areas bypassed by the rise of a knowledge economy, which tended to favor large, highly-educated metropolitan areas. These economically stranded regions have been plagued in particular by declining employment among men of prime working age, a decline that in turn is associated both with social problems and with strong support for Trump and hard-right politicians in general.

For many years it has been common to think of the former East Germany, which includes Sachsen-Anhalt, as one of the many European analogues to what Austin, Glaeser and Summers called the Eastern Heartland. Indeed, East Germany, which had near-full-employment among working-age men, went through an extended period of men-not-working after German reunification.

But that story is now long out of date:

Residents of the former DDR still consider themselves economically disadvantaged, and their incomes are somewhat lower than the national average — although not, as far as I can tell, as low in relative terms as poorer U.S. states. But in any case the tale of East Germany as a deeply depressed region no longer fits the facts.

What, then, is the moral of this analysis? Mostly it’s negative: Crude economic factors don’t explain the fascist shift in Germany. And Trumponomics, even if it worked (which it doesn’t) wouldn’t end the resentment feeding our own authoritarian movement.  

New York Times, Peru Shows the Limits of Washington’s Anti-China Push, Genevieve Glatsky, Photographs by Sara Wayra, Sept. 7, 2026. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio travels this week to Peru, its growing economic ties to China have raised tensions with the U.S., but show no signs of reversing course. 

Peru’s ambassador in Washington, Luis Miguel Castilla, received a stern phone call in 2015 from the State Department, after U.S. officials learned that a Chinese firm would finance a sprawling new Pacific Coast port project.

Why, they asked, was Peru handing Beijing a strategic foothold in South America?

Mr. Castilla’s answer was blunt: Western investors had already passed.

The port’s Peruvian private sector promoters “came to knock on doors here and in Europe, and no one opened the door,” Mr. Castilla said. “So, any space left behind is space that someone else takes.”

Today, the $1.3 billion Chinese-backed mega-port in Chancay, north of Lima, the capital, has become the most visible symbol of China’s expanding economic presence in Peru.

It is also a key reason the country, which Secretary of State Marco Rubio is planning to visit this week, has emerged as a testing ground for one of President Trump’s core objectives in Latin America: rolling back Beijing’s influence in the Western Hemisphere.

Senior administration officials have warned while offering no evidence that Chinese-financed projects threaten Peru’s sovereignty and, in the case of the port, could give Beijing a military foothold.

But in Peru, Washington’s pressure collides with a stubborn reality. China has become Peru’s largest trading partner and a major investor in mining, energy and infrastructure — a relationship that has helped underpin one of South America’s most resilient economies.

Even the inauguration in July of President Keiko Fujimori, a staunch conservative who has pledged closer security cooperation with Washington, is unlikely to deliver the anti-China shift the Trump administration seeks.

She has given no indication she will scale back ties to China. In her first speech to Congress, Ms. Fujimori described Peru as a “bridge” between Latin American and Asia.

Over the past decade, Peru has cycled through nine presidents, four impeachments, repeated waves of mass protests, one attempted self-coup and countless corruption scandals.

More On Trump Team's U.S. Immigration Enforcement

 

At top, Hitler’s Brownshirts (SA) conducting violence against German Jews. Bottom, ICE agents deploying violence against peaceful protesters.

Lance's Substack, Opinion: ICE Agents And Recruits Are Not Just “Similar” To Hitler’s Stormtroopers. The Stormtroopers Are The Model For ICE, Lance F Rosen, right, ICE, like Hitler’s Stormtroopers, is a mob of violence-prone broken men being paid to act out a collective personality disorder and conduct state terrorism. 

On January 6th, 2021, they came to attack our Capitol and overturn the election of 2020.

They flew Trump and QAnon banners, along with flags bearing the “Stars And Bars.” This violent mob of mostly men walked in the footsteps of history’s losers, the fake nation which called itself the Confederacy.

Humiliated in defeat. Emasculated. Broken. Impotent. Maligned by history and deservedly so, because the Lost Cause of the Confederacy was unjust, evil, in fact, a tragic blot on all human history.

The Neo-Confederates exist to this day in order to get even. Their movement is rooted in “revanchism.” Everything else they say about their “heritage” is a “Big Lie.” Their war of rebellion and treason was in service of extending slavery into the territories, and keeping their slave system intact. Their sloganeering for “States Rights” was always a fig leaf meant to hide the ugly truth of what they were, which was a feudal slaveocracy run by oligarchs. It is still a fraud, and it’s defenders today hate the very idea of the United States of America.

Confederate monuments and flags should be treated like the Germans treat Swastika Flags and Nazi monuments, ie; they belong in a landfill or a museum, not in our town squares.

Unsurprisingly, today’s biggest liar, Donald Trump, claims that Lincoln was a failure as president for fighting the Civil War, claiming that had he been around he would have negotiated a “deal” with the Confederacy over slavery that would have prevented it.

In that sense, the equivalence between the Ku Klux Klan, which was the Confederacy’s paramilitary/terrorist arm, Trump’s new ICE recruits, and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi SA, is far greater than simply their shared commitment to racism and violence. These were movements of psycho-sexually impotent men, those seeking out a cause and a “leader” that would restore their manhood, validate their rage, give definition to their hatreds and prejudices, and help them to find a perverse unity in their grievance-driven self-victimization. Their hatreds are in fact expressions of self-hatred projected outward.

The leaders of such movements thrive on the emotion of rage, and actively cultivate it by reinforcing the identity of their members as victims. Victims of some convenient scapegoat or made-up oppressor, be they Jews, communists, LGBTQ persons, immigrants, Catholics, feminists, ethnic and religious minorities, bankers, atheists and agnostics, criminals, book and newspaper publishers, popular entertainers and artists, anyone who in fact is apart from them.

When Adolf Hitler came back from World War I, he was a case study in revanchist ideology and narcissistic personality disorder. He was blinded and hospitalized by a mustard gas attack and is thought by many historians to have had a nervous breakdown after his injury.

Germany, he said, surrendered because of treason. German soldiers were “stabbed in the back” by social democrats, communists, and Jews who wouldn’t let them win the war. All of the suffering due to trench warfare, poison gas, etc, went for nothing, he and many other returning veterans believed. Hitler, in his own mind, was chosen by destiny to be the avenger who would rise up to smite Germany’s enemies, both external and internal.

When Hitler staged his 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, he was put on trial for treason and convicted. He testified in a long political rant, which he ended by swearing revenge from the witness docket against the “November criminals” who sold out Germany. He stated his intent to come to power legally through elections, and then finished his speech with the pledge, “heads will roll.”

He wrote his book “Mein Kampf” while living very well in Landesberg Prison, (he could have called it “Project 1923,” since it was his blueprint for the Nazi Party) and when released from prison set about building a mass movement.

Both Donald Trump and Stephen Miller studied how Hitler went about it, and became big fans. Hence they have built up ICE on the model of Hitler’s Sturmabteilung.

A private Army of thugs, now hired by the government, wearing their police-style uniforms, heavily armed, sociopathic, and embracing violence with an axe to grind against the world. And in both cases, with the SA and Trump’s ICE, the most violent, those most enraged and deeply immersed in race-hatred and grievance, were incels.

Hitler’s Kindergarten...He Trolled Beer Halls Looking For Misfits To Recruit

During his post-war years Hitler actively sought out anti-semitic political organizations to have a platform for expounding his theories. Once he gave up his artist’s aspirations he immersed himself in studying race science and the geopolitics of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, (Richard Wagner’s son-in-law) Count Koudenhove- Kalergi, and the Nordic racial mysticism theories of the “Thule Society,” which advanced an Aryan supremacy ideology. This toxic mix constituted the framework for his very own secret society and cult. Consequently the already existing “National Socialist German Workers” Party” which Hitler commandeered became the vehicle through which he recruited members into his worldview.

The men he targeted were in many cases injured or otherwise traumatized war veterans, as well as “lumpenized” unemployed workers. Remember that German post-war hyperinflation was at it’s high point in 1923, (4.2 Trillion Marks to the US Dollar) the year of Hitler’s putsch, the disruptive effects of which he had hoped to capitalize upon. They were promised by Hitler that “he would be their retribution” for what was done to them by people he described as “vermin,” using words later echoed by Trump in campaign speeches almost 100 years later.

Hitler didn’t bother with geopolitical concepts such as central Europe being the “heartland or pivot” for a new Germanic empire. He filled them with the violent blood-fantasy of wiping out the Jew-Bolsheviks who stabbed them in the back.

Just like Trump promised his fascist militia followers he would “defend their Confederate heritage,” expel the immigrants who took their jobs, and would prosecute the Democrats who sold them out in the long wars after 9-11. He promised to cut their taxes which were being sucked up by “illegals” and welfare cheats. Trump even made up his own stab-in-the-back “Big Lie,” which is that Democrats stole their votes and won elections by bringing in “illegals” over the open borders to vote.

Who Joined Hitler’s SA?

Every Beer Hall attendee or new party recruit who agreed to put on an SA uniform, pay dues to get their Nazi Party membership card, who volunteered to deliver violent beatings to Jews, or engaged in street fighting with communists, got fed and housed if need be, were often paid bonuses, and would be celebrated with honors.

There was a particular type which Hitler sought out for his private army of street brawlers. Just as there was in Trump’s appeals to his heavily armed alt-right racist/Neo-Confederate militias and anti-semitic QAnon cult followers. (The same ones who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, which is the millieu out of which they are conducting the mass hiring to ICE. This, I will argue, is why ICE must be abolished, not reformed after the Democrats return to the majority in Congress.)

Hitler sought out men who were like him, brutal, conscienceless, homicidal, merciless. And many were incels, which Hitler was also known to be after his niece Geli Raubal killed herself to avoid marrying him. But he needed his Stormtroopers to be stupid and malleable, devoid of critical thinking skills which might lead them to question his authority or great genius. He needed men who would obediently commit a wide variety of crimes in his name, because Hitler had long before chosen violence as his pathway to power. The men he wanted were described in his German state of residence Bavaria as “Stahlhelm.” (Steel helmeted)

In a valuable book titled “The Social History Of The Third Reich” by Pierre Ayçoberry, he quotes philosopher Karl Barth on the subject of the Nazis legitimizing criminality, ie; how it became possible for Hitler to capitalize on the lawless chaos that was post-war Weimar, enough to run candidates and come to power through democratic elections.

[”To explain evil is to efface the scandal, and in a sense to accept it as natural, as inevitable...” “The one bids us explain without judging, the other to judge without explaining...

“It is not primarily a matter of the crimes that took place, but rather the path that led-and was bound to lead to those crimes.”]

The name given to Hitler’s shocktroops “Sturmabteilung” was loosely translated as “attack force,” with “storm” a metaphor for assault. However, after his Munich treason trial, Hitler could not legally form a paramilitary, so his claim to authorities was that the SA had a purely defensive purpose which was to provide his protection and security for Beer Hall events at which he spoke. (This should remind people that the militia leaders brought to the Capitol on January 6th, consisting of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, were hired by Roger Stone and company to provide “security” for their rally. Oath Keeper formations wearing tactical gear led the attack on the Capitol police and destroyed the barricades, and there was nothing defensive about them.)

The SA was mostly already trained in firearms and hand to hand fighting from the Army. They were brainwashed by Hitler’s oratory to adopt violent anti-semitism (which had a longer history in Germany pre-dating the Nazis) as well as anti-Bolshevism. The number of communist converts to Nazism was miniscule, even in Berlin where the KPD members were most numerous, in total contradiction to the fabrications today by Musk and other far-right ideologues that the Nazis were “socialists.”

Also according to Açoyberry, quoting a historian named D. Peukert...

“The SA attracted an overwhelming majority of under 30 year olds, mostly workers and unemployed, young, poor and out of work, <unmarried>, with no political past.”

“By allowing free rein to these young, radicalized members of the proletariat, the Nazi Party fell into the trap of the sorcerer’s apprentice. The essential reason for their joining the SA was “a sense of impotence which could only be dispelled by a demonstrative use of force.”

“...they were fascinated by the personality of “The Great Leader”and even more so by the atmosphere of <virile> and resentful solidarity that reigned in the Inns (residences) run by the SA, <but not at all by the program or the apparatus of the Party.”>

The anti-intellectualism of Hitler’s hard core supporters is, if nothing else, clearly a hallmark of fascist movements as it is within Trump’s MAGA today. They never were interested in solutions to problems, they were there to knock heads.

The early SA was lured in by the Nazis setting up soup kitchens for the poor, and redistributing membership dues to support wounded war veterans. However they were largely autonomous in their regional centers and were given wide latitude to support themselves through criminal activities like racketeering, gambling, and robbery, or just borrowing, and fundraising.

According to surveys taken back then, the SA was composed of 51% skilled workers, 17% unskilled (including rural agricultural workers.) The officers came from higher social strata.

The principal intellectual fare of this largely uncultivated mass of men were SA Nazi published comic books and novelettes. They were cheap little booklets which were described as like German Westerns, in the style of a writer named Karl May, except depicting communist fighters as villains, criminals, or as the exceptional valiant fighter who met their ends at the hands of brave SA men. These booklets were described as a mix of kitsch and terror.

Therefore the purpose of being trained this way was being prepared for certain uses. The SA was clearly intended to be an instrument of state terror. After Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in February of 1933, through August of 1933, Hermann Goering hired several thousands of SA men as “auxiliary police” in his then capacity as East Prussian interior Minister. It was described by Açoyberry as a “pseudo-regularization” that revealed the strategy of Nazi leaders...

“namely to give free reign to the instincts of violence, to protect the perpetrators (SA members committing crimes) from any intervention on the part of the last remaining defenders of the law, then to bring them to heel once the opposition had been destroyed.”

The SA specialized in beatings of Jews and destruction of businesses and property on Goering’s initiative. Once the Nazis were in power, the SA was mobilized to carry out more attacks on socialists, militants, and trade unionists. (Once again exposing Musk and his coterie of historical fabricators who want to claim the Nazis were somehow “leftists.”)

Also very notable was that in these initial phases of state terrorism, we saw what was almost a template for the Trump regime’s attempts to cover for ICE violence. In Berlin, Açoyberry documents that one particular bloody week there was the incident of an SA “wild camp” located in a Wuppertal factory, a Berlin suburb, (wild camps were more autonomous) that carried out a slaughter of 20 socialist leaders and wounded roughly 100. The colonel who organized the attack already had a years long criminal record of 14 convictions. Nazi officials intervened to block inquiries into the massacre, even after the discovery of the corpses. The local authorities were unable to prosecute for murder or terrorism, so incredulously an agreement was made to convict this colonel of <fraud,> and bury the whole incident along with those who were murdered.

The Nazis actively cultivated prosecutors who could be relied upon to handle such “delicate affairs,” as Goering described them. There were objections from the local archbishop and handfuls of others, but the order of the day was leniency for the SA “bully boys.”

Hitler’s Purge Of The SA

The infamous June 1934 “Night Of The Long Knives” was a turning point in Hitler’s consolidation of power. The traditional German Army felt threatened by both the leadership and size of the SA, and demanded they be disbanded. At one point before the purge, the SA had three million members. In contrast the SS had only 200,000.

Hitler agreed that in exchange for disbanding the SA, every Army member had to take a loyalty oath to himself as their Führer, meaning that his word was above that of the German constitution and effectively was German law.

Also there was the issue that a faction of the SA leadership, (Gregor Strasser, Ernst Röhm) were demanding Hitler keep his promise to reign in the bankers and capitalists, to redistribute wealth to the poor, and Hitler refused. Hitler was funded and fully backed by Reichsbank Chairman Hjalmar Schacht, and steel magnate Fritz Thyseen. The SA burned their bridges with Hitler when they called for their removal and expropriation.

The SA leaders were killed, along with as many as a 1000 of Hitler’s enemies old and new, and Hitler justified their murders on <moral grounds> telling the public that they were homosexuals, with several including Röhm and an underling named Dirlewanger accused of being pedophiles. Of course this was no new revelation, it was known all along what they were and brushed under the rug for years. Those that Hitler had killed that were not SA leaders, ie; the political opposition, were accused of organizing a coup plot led by former Chancellor Kurt Von Schleicher, also killed in that same night along with his wife.

The legal opinion justifying the purge was written by law Professor Carl Schmitt, Hitler’s Crown Jurist and personal legal adviser. Stephen Miller has repeatedly expressed his debt to and admiration of Schmitt as his favorite legal mind. (So has the Federalist Society and the fascist Supreme Court conservatives.)

So, all of this bloodletting led to the functions of conducting state violence and terrorism being assumed by the SS and various regional police agencies. There was a pattern where when Hitler wanted to escalate his war on the Jews, first to get the Nuremberg Race Laws passed in 1935, then to launch the Kristallnacht attacks in 1938, Hitler would have his goons stage a violent incident which implicated Jews as criminals, thus enabling the Nazis to launch their next phase. The SA holdovers who were trained for such occasions were the ones chosen for these actions. Therefore even with the SA being dismantled, their essential function was continued by the SS and nazified police departments on an even larger scale.

Conclusion

There has been enough written about the crimes committed by ICE and that agency’s threat to democracy to fill a thousand books.

We know that their new hires are drawing heavily upon the militias, QAnon, white nationalists and far-right Christian cults, convicted participants and sympathizers of January 6th, and a wide variety of aspiring bounty hunters out to make a buck by arresting dark skinned persons whether legal immigrants, birthright citizens, or not.

The training is incompetent and cursory. The vetting process is deliberately a fraudulent process to enable Trump loyalists to be hired. We also have documented how the very worst, most discredited police trainers have been brought in to their training seminars to preach the message of expanded tactical use of violence. Now they are equipping agents with Taser gloves, which in any other society would be illegal.

The Ohio Immigrant Alliance did an investigation of ICE agents in Ohio, focusing on 59 currently active agents that had been convicted of criminal misconduct. Of those 59, 85% had been implicated in sexual assault, rape, or sex crimes involving children. The men were hired anyway because their cases were brought in Family Court, and ICE’s background checks on hires as a matter of policy bypassed their records. That list has since been expanded to 152 agents and employees who are similarly accused.

Earlier this year, Senator Chuck Schumer called for “retraining” of ICE Agents in the field as his response to the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. We denounced this statement and reiterated our stance that the entire agency needs to be defunded and shut down, and a new one, with different practices, vetting procedures, training, personnel, drastically reduced budget, redefined mission statement, and a complete change in its organizational culture, must replace it.

The Department Of Homeland Security’s standards of conduct and training have been rewritten to allow for hiring of the worst in character, the most unqualified in background, the most untrained and undisciplined, so long as they take Trump’s loyalty oath and believe that the 2020 election was stolen by Democrats using “illegals”

There is virtually no one, in ICE or in other agencies such as Customs Border Police (CBP) that was hired by the Trump regime that is not the dregs scraped up from the bottom of the barrel.

The whole thing has to go.

In the meantime, we have to challenge Democratic leaders to be bold, unconventional, and truthful in identifying the danger Trump’s and Miller’s modern Stormtroopers represent to our elections and public safety. They are breaking the law every day, in every way. Trump and AG Todd Blanche want to deploy them at the polls on November 4th to conduct voter intimidation, just as Hitler did with his SS for the Austrian Anchluss voter referendum. ICE agents are killing and beating people in our streets, abusing, neglecting, and starving people behind the barbed wire of their concentration camps. We should get used to saying it out loud, just that way.

But never, for a minute should we get used to them.

More On U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Political Prosecutions

New York Times, For Trump’s Former Fixer, a Tortured Path From ‘Rat’ to Reconciliation, Peter Baker, Sept. 7, 2026 (print ed.). The president has made peace with Michael D. Cohen, his onetime lawyer who turned against him. But contrary to Mr. Trump’s claims, Mr. Cohen has not recanted the testimony that helped convict his former boss.

On a radio show last month, President Trump welcomed Michael D. Cohen, right, the former fixer he once denounced as a “rat” for testifying against him, back into the fold. “I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said,” Mr. Trump said. He went on to use the word “recant” three more times.

In case anyone missed it, the president posted a message on social media on Friday claiming that Mr. Cohen, a key witness against Mr. Trump in criminal and civil trials, “has just fully RECANTED his testimony.” Mr. Trump demanded “that any remnant of those Politically Weaponized Cases against me be immediately terminated and dismissed.”

Except that Mr. Cohen has not, in fact, recanted his testimony. He has not taken any of it back.

In his eagerness to return to the president’s good graces, Mr. Cohen now says that he “felt pressured and coerced” by prosecutors to testify. But he has not actually disavowed anything that he swore to under oath about Mr. Trump’s hush money scheme to cover up an affair with an adult film actress or about his former boss’s efforts to defraud his lenders.

And so this unlikeliest of rapprochements between two men who helped get each other convicted of crimes is built not on an emotional outpouring of forgiveness but on what looks like a pretty straightforward bargain, spoken or unspoken, according to people close to both. Mr. Trump is trying to use his former lawyer’s desire for absolution to rewrite history as he presses his effort to overturn his conviction. Mr. Cohen gets to position himself as an insider once again and possibly obtain a presidential pardon to wipe out his own felony record.

“Everything is transactional,” said Brian Karem, left, a journalist who helped Mr. Cohen write the second of his books assailing Mr. Trump. “It’s the weirdest example yet of the transactional nature of the president of the United States and those around him. Who knows him better than Michael? I’m just surprised that it took him this long. The first thing I said was, ‘Wow, it took you long enough.’”The Unlikeliest of Reunions

Even in the long history of strange-bedfellow political alliances, this may be one of the strangest. To call the reconciliation between Mr. Trump and Mr. Cohen Shakespearean would not fully capture just how mind-boggling it really is. The Bard would have been hard pressed to come up with a scenario quite so far-fetched.

Mr. Trump, to be sure, has a well-known history of falling back in with people he has fallen out with (think Elon Musk, Stephen K. Bannon, Michael T. Flynn or, for that matter, his current vice president who once compared him to Hitler or his secretary of state who once questioned the size of his private parts).

But as one baffled Trump ally put it, Mr. Cohen is not someone who just trash-talked the president; he actually testified in court against him. Mr. Cohen went to prison because, he said, he committed crimes at the instructions of the man he now again calls “Boss.” And in a trial in which his onetime fixer provided evidence for the prosecution, Mr. Trump was convicted of 34 felonies that, had it not been for the intervening 2024 election, might have put him behind bars as well.

“You can’t write it,” said Donny Deutsch, a longtime New York advertising executive and television commentator who has been close with Mr. Cohen for years, reflecting the astonishment in both New York and Washington. “These two guys who were archenemies found mutual shared interest to get back in bed together.”

Mr. Deutsch said he did not blame Mr. Cohen, who in his view was collateral damage for Mr. Trump. “Michael was left by the side of the road as roadkill,” he said. “Beyond going to prison, he couldn’t practice law, he couldn’t get a job, he couldn’t get insurance. He’s doing what he needs to do to survive.”

As for Mr. Trump, accepting Mr. Cohen back into his orbit, even an outer orbit somewhere past Pluto, allows him to claim vindication. “If you go grovel to him and suck up to him, he loves that because it’s validation of his power,” said George T. Conway III, the former conservative lawyer who became one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal foes. “He has brought someone to heel. And part of what he does is try to intimidate people into doing that. He has a reptilian ability to sense who he can intimidate.”ImageDonald J. Trump, flanked by his attorneys, wearing a dark suit and yellow tie inside a courtroom.Mr. Cohen was a witness for Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, in the case that convicted Mr. Trump for falsifying business records to cover up hush-money payments.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Cohen did not respond to emails seeking comment. Mr. Trump posted his social media message on Friday about Mr. Cohen’s supposedly recanting three hours after a request for comment was sent to the White House, which then passed along the link but otherwise did not respond to questions.‘On the Wrong Side’ of the Boss

The relationship between these two men has arguably been one of the most consequential in modern presidential history. Mr. Cohen worked for Mr. Trump for years as his lawyer and fixer, a self-described “pit bull” who handled both business and personal problems and sought to intimidate people who got in the way. He styled himself as a consigliere so loyal that he famously said he would “do anything to protect Mr. Trump” including “take a bullet.”

Mr. Cohen secretly sought on Mr. Trump’s behalf to seal a deal with the Russians to build a Trump tower in Moscow even while his boss was running for president in 2016. He was the middle man who paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels, the porn star, to buy her silence about her alleged tryst with Mr. Trump before the election. (Mr. Trump denies the affair.)

That eventually led to criminal charges, a guilty plea and prison. When Mr. Cohen was released, the Trump administration revoked his home confinement and locked him up again because he planned to publish a book, a move that a judge overruled because it was “retaliatory.”

Mr. Cohen later turned witness for Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, in the case that convicted Mr. Trump for falsifying business records to cover up the payments to Ms. Daniels. He also testified for Letitia James, the New York attorney general, in her civil case that found Mr. Trump liable for business fraud. His was not the only evidence against the president, and some lawyers argue that there was enough to convict Mr. Trump even without Mr. Cohen’s testimony.

But when Mr. Cohen broke from Mr. Trump, he broke big time. In addition to testifying in court, he also went after the president publicly with both barrels, writing books titled “Disloyal” and “Revenge” and characterizing his former employer as “a racist,” “con man” and “cheat” during a congressional committee hearing.

Outside the halls of Congress, Mr. Cohen went even further, calling Mr. Trump “a mob boss,” “the slime of humanity,” a “scumbag,” a “petty tyrant,” a “deranged president,” a “narcissistic sociopath,” a “Cheeto-dusted cartoon villain,” “Dictator D-Bag,” “this Frankenstein’s monster” and “the poster boy for fascism” who was trying “to screw over the country.” And those were the lines printable in a family newspaper.

By the time Mr. Trump won a second term, though, Mr. Cohen’s tone began to change. He had not gotten the pardon he had requested from President Joseph R. Biden Jr., nor had he been welcomed with open arms by much of the anti-Trump resistance. With Mr. Trump returning to office, any hope for acceptance, much less clemency, now lay with his former boss, and he has resubmitted his pardon application replacing the word “Biden” with “Trump.”

“I think he really wants a pardon,” said Stephanie Grisham, a former White House press secretary for Mr. Trump who broke with the president. “I also think he has realized just how hard it is to be on the wrong side of the administration. It’s damn scary out here on the anti-Trump island. And I never got the vibe from him that he wants to work hard at anything, and doing the right thing is never easy.”

U.S. Culture, Philanthropy, Media

Philanthropist and financier David Rubenstein is shown together in a collage with the "Blue" sculpture, which he purchased after President Trump's team removed it from the grounds of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, whose board Rubenstein formerly chaired.

New York Times, Ousted Kennedy Center Chairman Buys Dismantled ‘Blue’ Sculpture, Julia Jacobs, Sept. 7, 2026. David Rubenstein purchased the sculpture, which was removed from the center last week, from the artist’s foundation. He will display it at the National Gallery of Art.

A construction worker waves beneath a large blue sculpture shaped like a stick figure. Yellow caution tape is seen in the foreground.“Blue,” by the artist Joel Shapiro, sat on the Kennedy Center’s grounds from 2019 until last week.Credit...The Joel Shapiro and Ellen Phelan Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photograph by Salwan Georges for The New York Times

The billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein has purchased the abstract sculpture called “Blue” that was removed from the grounds of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last week, according to two people familiar with the sale.

It will eventually be displayed in the Sculpture Garden of the National Gallery of Art, the people said.

Mr. Rubenstein, a major arts donor, was chairman of the Kennedy Center’s board until he was ousted in early 2025 during President Trump’s takeover. He is the chairman of the board of trustees at the National Gallery.

He purchased the sculpture from a foundation dedicated to its artist, Joel Shapiro, which received the artwork after its removal. One of the people familiar with the sale said the price was more than $2 million.

Since 2019, the 24-foot-tall stick figure-like sculpture stood on the grounds of the Reach, an addition to the Kennedy Center that was partly funded by Mr. Rubenstein, who co-founded the private equity giant the Carlyle Group. The sculpture was deinstalled with no prior notice or explanation from the institution, drawing a flurry of questions and objections from local patrons who considered it a landmark overlooking the Potomac River.

Representatives for the National Gallery did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and it was not clear when “Blue” would go on display.

The Kennedy Center board has voted to close for a two-year, $250 million renovation project championed by Mr. Trump. But officials have proposed that the Reach remain open, partly to serve as an active memorial to President John F. Kennedy, which is required by law.

Mr. Shapiro, who died in 2025, had given the sculpture to the Kennedy Center as a gift for the opening of the Reach. After it was deinstalled, it was transferred to the artist’s foundation, which is run by his daughter Ivy Shapiro.

Ms. Shapiro did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the purchase. She said last week that her father would have been “alarmed” by the sculpture’s removal from the Kennedy Center, where it had been originally intended as a permanent fixture.

The aluminum sculpture, painted with a vivid blue, was designed to look like a person mid-kick while dancing on the grass.

“In Joel’s mind, it  was one of his greatest site-specific commissions, which celebrated joy, freedom and creativity,” Ms. Shapiro said last week.

Sept. 6

Top Headlines

 

President Trump has published the graphic above portraying himself as wearing a crown while sitting in a bomber that spreads sewage over New York City. Below is a Supreme Court dominated by six Republicans who often rule on an emergency basis to grant Trump the right to do what he wants without the High Court inviting full briefing and rendering a full written decision based on arguments and precedent. The current dispute, which pits Trump's novel arguments that his orders should provide ultimate guidance on who should be able to vote by mail in mid-Term election that have already begun, the Supreme Court faces an ultimate test over when Trump orders -- which Congress has refused to enact this summer and which courts have uniformly rejected this summer --should overturn Constitutional provisions that have always granted voting oversight to the states.

• New York Times, Trump Administration Again Asks Supreme Court to Allow Mail Voting Restrictions, Abbie VanSickle, Sept. 6, 2026. The filing puts the legality of the president’s push to impose limits on mail voting squarely before the justices even as states begin sending out ballots. The Trump administration on Sunday asked the Supreme Court yet again to allow its plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterms, setting up what will likely be the final legal showdown for the president’s push to impose limits on mail voting before the midterms election.
• PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Jamie Raskin Warns That Trump Is Trying To Steal the Midterms Right Now, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 6, 2026. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) clarified the urgency of the midterms by pointing out that Trump isn’t waiting to steal the midterm election. He is trying to do it right now. 
• Robert Reich via Substack, Sunday thought: The Place Robber, Robert Reich, right, Sept. 6, 2026. It’s one thing for Trump to usurp powers that belong to Congress — quiteanother for him to usurp places that belong to all of us. I’m talking about his renaming and demolishing what we share in common (as shown below by Trump's successful effort to pressure leading companies to rename historic Lake Ontario shared with Canada to "Lake America," as shown below by his cartoonish rendering

News Roundups 

 

 

Among Donald Trump's deranged posts on Sunday were ones suggesting that the State of New Mexico's name should be changed, as indicated above, attacking the widow of deceased  Democratic congressional leader John Dingell (as shown below), and ones claiming ownership of the moon for the United States and boasts that he has made hundreds of billions of dollars stock-trading.

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Launches Concerning Truth Social Spree, Mitch McConnell Gets Ultimatum, Dr. Amy Acton Attacked, Plane Crash, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 6, 2026. Donald Trump had one of the oddest days on Truth Social to date, floating the idea of renaming New Mexico to “New America,” attacking Congresswoman Debbie Dingell over the death of her husband, declaring the Moon American territory, and confirming he has made billions of dollars trading stocks while serving as president.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 5, 2026 [Another judge rejects Trump schemes], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 6, 2026. Events of Friday, September 4, showed the Trump administration in a nutshell. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts, left, blocked Trump’s plan to use the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in voters. Referring to the final rule the USPS is trying to put into place, Talwani wrote: “Unauthorized by the Elections Clause, the Final Rule clashes with Congress’s statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress’s Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States.” In other words, the plan is both illegal and unconstitutional.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

 

• The Warning With Steve Schmidt, Opinion: Retribution is coming. The Summer is over, Steve Schmidt, above, former longtime Republican campaign strategist for major campaigns, Sept. 4, 2026. On Tuesday, the fall campaign kicks off in earnest. There's going to be a Democratic Senate. And there's going to be a Democratic House. There's going to be restraints put on this lawless presidency.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion,Trump Gets More Terrible Polls, Ballots Are Getting Mailed In Wisconsin, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 6, 2026.Hopium is hope with a plan. Here we don’t just hope tomorrow will be better than today. We do the work to make it so...... Early in person voting begins in twelve days. Ballots are being mailed in North Carolina and Wisconsin, and people have already started voting. The general election is here now……Yesterday I shared the Civiqs daily tracking poll which had Trump at his lowest mark of the cycle. Today the FT’s regular poll also finds Trump at his lowest level so far, just 33% approval….
• New York Times, As Midterms Approach, Republicans Find There Is No Escape From Trump, Annie Karni, Reid J. Epstein and Luke Broadwater, Sept. 6, 2026. The president’s strategy, message and spending have left the G.O.P. in a difficult spot as lawmakers try to outrun his sagging approval ratings.
• New York Times, Trump’s War on Mail-In Ballots Has Voters Baffled. That May Be the Point, Anna Griffin, Rebecca Fairley Raney, Kendal Asbury and David Iversen, Sept. 6, 2026. From Oregon to Florida, officials are at once reassuring voters that their ballots are safe and encouraging them to use drop boxes or vote in person. President Trump’s legal and rhetorical assault on voting by mail — and the flurry of contradictory court decisions around it — has left voters confused and local officials scrambling just eight weeks before November’s critical midterm elections.
• Politico, Republicans might still lose half the seats they gerrymandered to flip, Andrew Howard and Aaron Pellish, Sept. 6, 2026. With some gerrymandered seats looking much more competitive than they hoped, Republicans are wondering if mid-decade redistricting can actually save their majority.Organizers rally outside of the Ohio Statehouse to protest gerrymandering. 

More On U.S. Governance: Public Health Policies

• Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: When Authoritarianism Comes for Medicine, Physicians Stand Up, Dr. Rob Davidson, MD, MPH, above right, Sept. 6, 2026. Throughout history, physicians have played a lesser-known but unique role in confronting authoritarianism. Our profession asks us to observe carefully, follow evidence, protect vulnerable people, and speak the truth even when doing so is uncomfortable or unpopular. President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to reshape federal childhood vaccine policy — including limiting the vaccines recommended for children and directing the separation of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine into individual doses — represents a direct intrusion of political ideology into medical decision-making. The response from physicians has been striking.
• The Breakdown via The Bulwark, Opinion: RFK Jr.’s Sickening Measles Victory Lap, Jonathan Cohn, Sept. 6, 2026. While Pennsylvania struggles to contain an outbreak, the anti-vax health secretary keeps trying to score political points. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is claiming vindication in an ongoing controversy about a measles outbreak in Pennsylvania. He shouldn’t be.

U.S. Governance: Military, National Security, Global Policies

• New York Times, Inside the Battle to Save One Pioneering General From Hegseth’s Purge, Adam Entous and Greg Jaffe, Sept. 6, 2026. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue’s vision for fighting future wars won him powerful supporters around the world. Could they save his career? Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decided in early 2025 to spike Gen. Christopher T. Donahue’s nomination to be the top U.S. military officer in Europe. Mr. Hegseth believed that President Trump wanted heads to roll for the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. General Donahue was not responsible for security at the bombing site. But he was a top commander at the airport, and so Mr. Hegseth decided he needed to go.

U.S. Immigration Enforcement, Rights

• New York Times, How a Memphis Gambling Raid Became a Sweeping Immigration Operation, Eduardo Medina and Emily Cochrane, Sept. 6, 2026. More than 120 people were arrested at a Memphis cantina, in one of the biggest immigration operations in Tennessee this year.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

• New York Times, Trump Officials Draft Plan to Pay At-Home Parents, Using Funds for Working Ones, Coral Davenport, Sept. 6, 2026 (print ed.). The proposed benefit, a top policy priority for Vice President JD Vance, would apply only to married couples and tap a fund intended to provide federal child care subsidies to working parents. The Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, a policy championed by Vice President JD Vance, using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents, according to people familiar with the discussions.
• Hope for America, Opinion: Hate will never make America great, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 6, 2026. After days of hints, videos of old-school gaming cords being plugged into old televisions, and messages that something big was coming, the official White House account posted one final teaser: “It’s time to level up, patriots… something new dropping soon.” Then, at 4:51 PM last Thursday, they revealed it. “CAN’T STOP WINNING. Build the wall. Deport. Fill a Trump Account. LIVE - PLAY NOW ARCADE.GOV.” 

The website they linked to didn’t have a collection of classic childhood games, or even updated ones to help teach the next generation civics and how the government operates. Instead, the arcade games, all targeting children, were MAGA versions. There were ones to build a border wall, to chase down immigrants for deportation, and even one to collect money for Trump Accounts. Yet the message behind all of these games was clear: make cruelty fun. Teach children to see racism and the dehumanization of immigrants as normal. Make the hatred of black and brown people a good thing and turn chasing them into entertainment. But mostly, turn the suffering of real human beings into entertainment.

Russia's War Against Ukraine, Europe, The West

• Why It Matters with Alexander Vindman, Analysis and Opinion: Russian Sabotage Ops in Europe, Alexander Vindman, Sept. 6, 2026. As the Russian War Machine Sputters in Eastern Ukraine, Moscow Turns to Active Measures to Warn-Off European Support.
• New York Times, In Ukraine, Fraud and Waste Are Rewarded With More Weapons Contracts, Andrew E. Kramer, Bianca Pallaro and Evelina Riabenko, Sept. 6, 2026. Secret military audits reveal a military procurement system riddled with mismanagement. In 2024 alone, Ukraine lost $1.2 billion to fraud and waste.

Global Politics, Economy, Trade, Tariffs, Jobs, Markets

• New York Times, Live Updates: Germany’s Far Right Has Big Lead in Key Election, Exit Polls Show, Jim Tankersley and Christopher F. Schuetze, Sept. 6, 2026. The Alternative for Germany party was projected to finish first in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. But it was not clear whether it would win a majority — which would propel a far-right party into power for the first time since World War II. 
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Weaponized Interdependence, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 6, 2026. Who has the power in a trading world? On Friday Donald Trump threatened to cut off all trade with nations with which the United States runs a trade deficit. His demand, oddly, was directed at the Federal Reserve: He would impose trade embargoes unless the Fed cuts interest rates. I won’t even try to untangle his logic, if there is any, because today’s primer isn’t about Trump. It is, instead, about how to think about a world in which governments — even the government of the United States, which created the rules-based trading system that prevailed until recently — increasingly use threats to cut off international trade as a tool of coercion.

U.S. Law, Crime, Political Prosecutions In-Depth Analysis

• Mobology with Dan Moldea, After Speaker Livingston resigned, President Clinton’s approval rating skyrocketed to an all-time high. . . . . . . “You’re welcome” (Part 10), Dan E. Moldea, right, Sept. 6, 2026. A whimsical gimmick had evolved into a lethal weapon. The 2026 midterm elections are drawing near. And there are lessons to be learned. . . . Here at Mobology, the past is prologue. Through this series, I hope to contribute to the ongoing action by revisiting the drama of the last major crisis in the American presidency. I played a little-known but key role in that story.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Flyspeck! DOJ Has Nothing — Except Todd Blanche’s Audition — to Explain Why They Sold Seashells by the Seashore, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right,), Sept. 6, 2026. I’m going to do a substantive post on Jim Comey’s selective and vindictive challenge (motion to dismiss, response, reply). But first I want to look at a particular rebuttal Comey makes that may provide larger lessons about DOJ’s weaponization in the last year. Comey’s reply spends a lot of time rebutting DOJ’s general response (in which DOJ had US Attorney Ellis Boyle write an affidavit disclaiming he had any animus to Comey, and then claimed that you must prove that a prosecutor himself had animus; this is how DOJ defeated Hunter Biden’s meritorious vindictive prosecution motions). It also dismantles one after another of Boyle’s (or perhaps Stan Woodward’s — I’ll come back to that) dumb misrepresentations.

Top Stories

 

President Trump has published the graphic above portraying himself as wearing a crown while sitting in a bomber that spreads sewage over New York City. Below is a Supreme Court dominated by six Republicans who often rule on an emergency basis to grant Trump the right to do what he wants without the High Court inviting full briefing and rendering a full written decision based on arguments and precedent. The current dispute, which pits Trump's novel arguments that his orders should provide ultimate guidance on who should be able to vote by mail in mid-Term election that have already begun, the Supreme Court faces an ultimate test over when Trump orders -- which Congress has refused to enact this summer and which courts have uniformly rejected this summer --should overturn Constitutional provisions that have always granted voting oversight to the states.

New York Times, Trump Administration Again Asks Supreme Court to Allow Mail Voting Restrictions, Abbie VanSickle, Sept. 6, 2026. The filing puts the legality of the president’s push to impose limits on mail voting squarely before the justices even as states begin sending out ballots. The Trump administration on Sunday asked the Supreme Court yet again to allow its plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterms, setting up what will likely be the final legal showdown for the president’s push to impose limits on mail voting before the midterms election.

In an emergency application, lawyers for the administration urged the justices to clear the way for new U.S. Postal Service rules to go into effect, changing the way the agency handles mail-in ballots in the weeks before the midterm elections. They also asked the justices to allow the rules to immediately go into effect while the court considers the application.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the justices to move swiftly to allow the Postal Service to proceed with its plans, asserting that the new rule “does not seize control of states’ administration of elections — it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.”

The emergency request marks the latest turn in a dizzying legal fight over mail-in voting, even as states begin distributing mail-in ballots to voters. The upshot has become clear in recent days: It will be the Supreme Court that has the final say on President Trump’s plans to restrict mail voting in the midterms.

It’s unclear how fast the justices will move and announce a ruling. Unlike in the court’s routine cases, which unfold over months with full briefing and argument, emergency requests like the one from the Trump administration are typically decided on a short timeline without full briefing or argument.

This latest request came after a federal judge in Boston on Friday announced she was freezing indefinitely the Postal Service plan, while litigation proceeds through the lower courts.

The Trump administration had already filed emergency request to the justices challenging a shorter-term pause she had imposed on the plan. But the trial court judge acted to extend her freeze before the justices ruled, necessitating a new request from the administration for Supreme Court action.

The trial court judge, Indira Talwani, left, wrote that the legal challenge to the Postal Service plan by Democratic-led states and voter rights organizations was likely to succeed. The groups had argued the plan violated the Constitution’s separation of powers, which gives states and Congress responsibility over elections, not the executive.

Judge Talwani found that lawyers for the Trump administration sought to “avoid” the separation of powers issue by “denying that the final rule is an election rule.” She added: “This denial rings hollow.”She also dismissed arguments by the Trump administration that the Postal Service was acting under the authority of Congress, writing that “throughout its body of election legislation, Congress has never delegated its Elections Clause power to the USPS.”

She added that the Postal Service rule “clashes with Congress’s statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress’s elections clause powers but also that power left to the states.”

Mr. Sauer pushed back on Judge Talwani’s assessment in the brief to the justices, asserting that the Postal Service plan fell under the agency’s bounds to adopt rules “as may be necessary in the execution of its functions” and compared the rules for mail-in ballots to Postal Service “preparation requirements for the mailing of cremated remains and replica explosives.” 

 

U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and a longtime law professor, decries Trump Team election-rigging during an NBC's "Meet the Press" interview on Sept. 6, 2026.

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Jamie Raskin Warns That Trump Is Trying To Steal The Midterms Right Now, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 6, 2026. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) clarified the urgency of the midterms by pointing out that Trump isn’t waiting to steal the midterm election. He is trying to do it right now.

Because of how Trump reacted and tried to overturn the 2020 election that he lost after the fact, some Americans have made the assumption that the president will approach the 2026 midterm election the same way.

2026 isn’t 2020, and Trump has learned a great deal about how to misuse his power to try to rig an election over the last five-plus years. This time, the president is trying to preemptively rig the election in his favor before a single vote is cast.

The gerrymandering war that Republicans launched was all about rigging the House map, so that even if voters showed up to reject Trump and his party, Republicans would still maintain power. Democrats fought back enough that Republicans were not able to get the gains needed to make their majority election-proof, so that effort failed.

Republicans in red states have used their usual tactics of voter purges and closing down polling places in Democratic districts and areas, but these are tactics that Republicans have been using for decades in red states, and they aren’t a surprise to voters in those areas or voting rights advocates.

The new wrinkle is Trump’s attack on mail-in ballots, which poses a serious threat, but each day that his USPS rules remain blocked by an injunction is another day closer to those rules not being implemented for the midterms.

House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Rasin (D-MD) appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, where he made it clear that the threat to the midterm election is already happening.

NBC News’s Kristen Welker asked Raskin, “Well, let me ask you about one of the big flashpoints that has emerged, Democrats preparing for potential disruptions to the midterms. NBC News is out with a report that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined former Attorney General Eric Holder in what was described as a war game to protect election integrity. What exactly are you preparing for?”

Raskin answered:

Well look, people ask me, all the time, “Is Donald Trump going to try to steal the election?” And I say, “No. He’s trying to steal the election. He’s trying to steal the election, when they’re closing polling places in Texas, when they’re throwing voters off the rolls in Georgia or other states for having missed an election.”

Every day — they don’t have any plans to get healthcare to American people or to combat climate change. They’ve got plans to try to steal the election. It’s just a bag of dirty tricks. So we’re preparing for everything. We made a list of more than a hundred different ways that they’re going to try to undermine the right to vote and try to steal the election, as Donald Trump did very clearly in, you know, 2020, when he called up Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in Georgia and said, “Just find me 11,780 votes.”

That wasn’t Donald Trump trying to stop electoral fraud; that was Donald Trump trying to commit electoral fraud.

And so people know that that’s their plan. What we need to do is to build a political landslide so vast and so strong across America that it’s too big to rig. They’re not going to be able to steal it.

The point is that voters and Democrats can’t sit around and wait for the threat to happen. Trump is already trying to steal the midterm election. That is why Democrats and voting rights advocates around the country are already in action.

The lawsuits and pushback against gerrymandering and voter purges are steps to take before the election is stolen.

Voters are so angry that Trump has created an environment that is impossible for him to rig, and that is why the American people need to protect this election to make sure that the voices of the majority are heard.

Robert Reich via Substack, Sunday thought: The Place Robber, Robert Reich, right, Sept. 6, 2026. It’s one thing for Trump to usurp powers that belong to Congress — quite another for him to usurp places that belong to all of us. I’m talking about his renaming and demolishing what we share in common.

Trump said he “decided” to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America because he was pissed off at Canada (as shown above in a late August posting by Trump).

How can one man decide to change the name of one of the Great Lakes — a name that we all learned when we were in elementary school? Not only is it part of our shared heritage; it’s part of our common reality.

Well-known place names anchor us. They provide a shared set of markers by which we navigate ourselves and situate others. By what right can he arbitrarily rob us of them?

He’s also changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. He’s even considering renaming the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

A U.S. president has legal authority to instruct the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to update official maps and domestic databases. But that’s to maintain uniformity — quite the opposite of what Trump is doing.

And why the hell are Google Maps and Apple Maps following Trump’s arbitrary “decision” to change these place names? Good for MapQuest for refusing.

It’s not just place names that concern me. It’s also revered places we hold in common.

The building in Washington, D.C., called the White House is as much a part of our shared reality and common heritage as is Lake Ontario or the Gulf of Mexico.

How many of you have visited it? Taken photos of it? Seen pictures of it in books and on souvenirs?

Its “stately simplicity is … in accord with the purposes it was designed to serve,” President Theodore Roosevelt once said of the White House. Safeguarding it, he said, gives us continuity with our past. (Chief Justice John Roberts used this quote in his dissent from the Supreme Court majority’s recent opinion allowing Trump to continue to build his ballroom.)

After Trump has erected a giant ballroom in place of the East Wing, the White House will lose its continuity with our past. He’s robbing us of the White House we knew.

Same with the long pool extending eastward from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, called the Reflecting Pool. He had its bottom painted dark blue (and is now claiming that vandals caused the paint to peel).

To the west of the Lincoln Memorial lies Arlington National Cemetery and the stately Lee-Custis Mansion. These are also part of our shared reality and common heritage. He wants to erect a giant arch that would block this view.

I’m not saying that our shared reality has to remain exactly the same through time. Place names we’ve relied on for our entire lives can be changed. Iconic buildings and monuments can be altered.

But one man should not be able to summarily and heedlessly change these places — Lake Ontario, the Gulf of Mexico, the White House, the Reflecting Pool, the view from the Lincoln Memorial.

No single person should be able to arbitrarily alter the place names and physical places that anchor us, orient us, provide us with a shared meaning — at least not in a democracy.

Trump’s place robbery is another way he is asserting his dominance. He wants us to know he has the power to alter our world at will — force us to call places whatever he decides they should be called, to accept whatever physical alterations he makes, and to abide one of the most intimate kinds of subservience: making us literally lose our place.

When sane people are once again in charge, I hope that among the first things they do is restore the names, demolish the impositions, and reclaim our common understandings of where and who we are. 

News Roundups 

 

 

Among Donald Trump's deranged posts on Sunday were ones suggesting that the State of New Mexico's name should be changed, as indicated above, claiming ownership of the moon for the United States and boasts that he has made hundreds of billions of dollars stock-trading.

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Launches Concerning Truth Social Spree, Mitch McConnell Gets Ultimatum, Dr. Amy Acton Attacked, Plane Crash, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 6, 2026. Donald Trump had one of the oddest days on Truth Social to date, floating the idea of renaming New Mexico to “New America,” attacking Congresswoman Debbie Dingell over the death of her husband, declaring the Moon American territory, and confirming he has made billions of dollars trading stocks while serving as president.

 

Among Donald Trump's deranged posts on Sunday were ones suggesting that the State of New Mexico's name should be changed, as indicated above, attacking the widow of deceased  Democratic congressional leader John Dingell (as shown below), and ones claiming ownership of the moon for the United States and boasts that he has made hundreds of billions of dollars stock-trading.

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Trump Launches Concerning Truth Social Spree, Mitch McConnell Gets Ultimatum, Dr. Amy Acton Attacked, Plane Crash, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 6, 2026. Donald Trump had one of the oddest days on Truth Social to date, floating the idea of renaming New Mexico to “New America,” attacking Congresswoman Debbie Dingell over the death of her husband, declaring the Moon American territory, and confirming he has made billions of dollars trading stocks while serving as president.

Meanwhile, the pressure is mounting on Mitch McConnell, with Fox News contributor Joe Concha saying the 84-year-old senator needs to return to the Capitol this month or resign, as bipartisan frustration grows over the lack of direct updates on his health nearly three months into his absence.

Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton was reportedly attacked at a campaign event this weekend when an armed individual lunged at her, injuring several nearby volunteers before the suspect was taken into custody. And across the world, tensions escalated fast: Iran claimed a strike on a US vessel that the US denied outright, Israeli strikes killed four people in southern Lebanon, and a cargo plane crash in Miami added to a weekend of chaos both at home and abroad.

None of this happens without you. Over the past 30 days, we’ve reached peak engagement across social platforms, outpacing every major media company, and nearly every media company on the planet. We’re the ones staying on stories like where Mitch McConnell actually is, when the bigger outlets have moved on. If a media landscape that answers to people instead of billionaires matters to you, this is the moment to back it. Subscribe. 

Here’s the news.

Donald Trump’s Truth Social Explosion:

Donald Trump spent the day posting some of the oddest posts to date on his Truth Social. One post suggested he was considering renaming New Mexico to “New America.”

Another post attacked Congresswoman Debbie Dingell for her late husband. Her husband passed away and the President used his passing as an attack on her.

The President also declared that the Moon was American territory.

He also confirmed that he has made billions of dollars off of stock trading while serving as President.

Mitch McConnell:

Fox News contributor Joe Concha called on Senator Mitch McConnell to either return to Capitol Hill in September or resign, saying on The Big Weekend Show Saturday, “if he does not come back in September, he needs to step down.” Concha said (as shown below) he no longer wants to see “proof of life photos from a hospital bed,” adding McConnell “needs to get in front of a microphone and prove that he can do this job, and if he can’t he needs to step aside, period.”

The 84-year-old Kentucky Republican has been out of Congress for nearly three months after being hospitalized in mid-June following a fall and a diagnosis of mild pneumonia. He was later discharged from a rehabilitation facility last month but has not yet returned to the Senate, and in an August 6 statement said he would continue an “intensive regimen of physical therapy from home” on his doctors’ advice while staying engaged with staff and colleagues remotely.

McConnell's staff this summer released a photo of him and his wife, former Cabinet Secretary Elaine Chao, purporting to show them in a happy mood recovering in a hospital bed.

McConnell’s absence has fueled bipartisan frustration over the lack of direct updates on his condition. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, a Democrat, urged him in July to “directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign,” while Fox News co-host Tomi Lahren questioned whether it’s “fair to the American people” that “unelected staffers are running the show” for McConnell. Awareness among his own Republican colleagues has varied widely: Senator Tommy Tuberville said in early August “I don’t know anything,” while President Trump said around the same time he had “no idea” how McConnell was doing, and some GOP allies have said they spoke with him by phone during his hospitalization.

Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, said Saturday he has not spoken with McConnell since his hospitalization but is hopeful he’ll be back in the Senate “in the next few weeks,” adding “if he’s not, there’ll be a reason why and the senator will be able to explain that to the American people.” McConnell, who has dealt with multiple health issues in recent years and is set to retire in 2027, has faced repeated calls to be more transparent about his condition amid mounting speculation over his fitness to serve. His extended absence carries added weight given Republicans currently hold only a razor-thin majority in the Senate.

Other news:

AI data centers are becoming a real political liability heading into the midterms, according to new NBC News Decision Desk polling. A majority of voters said they oppose a data center being built in their own community, with opposition even higher among voters who already view AI negatively overall. The findings suggest the rapid buildout of AI infrastructure, often tied to promises of jobs and economic growth, is running into skepticism from the very communities where these facilities would be located. Lawmakers on both sides have started citing concerns about strain on local power grids and water resources as data centers multiply across the country.

Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton was reportedly attacked at a campaign event on Sunday at the Canfield Fair in Mahoning County, near Youngstown. According to a statement from her campaign, an armed individual lunged at Acton, and multiple people nearby were injured in the incident. Campaign communications director Addie Bullock said Acton was “grateful” for the swift law enforcement response but did not directly say whether Acton herself was hurt. Mahoning County Democratic Party chairman Chris Anderson confirmed the suspect was taken into custody and was found to be armed with multiple weapons, adding that several campaign volunteers were knocked to the ground as the suspect lunged toward Acton. Both Bullock and Anderson condemned the violence, with Bullock saying “this kind of violence has no place in Ohio” and Anderson calling the incident “reprehensible” and something that “should be condemned by leaders on all sides of the aisle.”

Iran claimed it struck a US vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, but the US military said flatly that no such strike occurred, calling the claim untrue. The competing claims come amid heightened tensions between the two countries following recent military confrontations in the region. US officials pushed back hard on the Iranian assertion, characterizing it as fabricated rather than describing any incident to explain the discrepancy. No further details or evidence were offered publicly by either side at the time of reporting.

An Amazon branded cargo plane crashed after running off the runway at Miami International Airport. The aircraft was operated by 21 Air under contract with Amazon’s air freight network. The crash prompted a runway closure and disrupted operations at the airport as crews responded to the scene. Details on injuries and the cause of the crash were still emerging. At this time, at least five people have been killed.

The Trump administration is making its third attempt to get the Supreme Court to reinstate restrictions on mail in ballots after a federal judge blocked the rule. Judge Talwani had ruled against the restrictions, prompting the administration to escalate the fight to the nation’s highest court. This marks a continued push by the administration to tighten mail voting rules ahead of the midterms. The repeated appeals signal how central the mail ballot fight has become to the administration’s broader election policy agenda.

Rep. Jamie Raskin said on Meet the Press that impeachment is “a critical tool” but pushed back on the idea that Democrats should treat it as an obsession, saying it shouldn’t become “a fetish.” He argued Democrats need to keep their focus on issues like healthcare rather than fixating on impeachment as a political strategy. Raskin’s comments reflect an ongoing internal debate among Democrats over how aggressively to pursue oversight and accountability measures against the administration. His framing suggests a preference for prioritizing kitchen table issues over impeachment proceedings in the run up to the midterms.

Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, left, criticized the Trump administration’s handling of both Vladimir Putin and inflation, breaking from the administration’s messaging on two fronts at once. Kennedy’s comments suggest friction within Republican ranks over how the administration is managing foreign policy toward Russia. He also took aim at the administration’s inaction on rising prices, a politically sensitive issue heading into the midterms. His remarks add to a growing chorus of Republican voices publicly questioning specific administration policies rather than offering blanket support.

Israeli strikes killed four people in southern Lebanon, according to reporting cited by officials in Lebanese President Joseph Aoun’s office. Aoun’s office described the strikes as part of a “dangerous escalation” in the region. The strikes add to a pattern of continued Israeli military activity in Lebanon despite ongoing ceasefire arrangements. The killings raise fresh concerns about the stability of the broader regional security situation.

A second attendee has died at this year’s Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, Nevada. The victim was identified as 60 year old Craigh Mann. Details about the circumstances of his death were not immediately released. This marks the second fatality at the festival this year, following an earlier death also reported during the event.

Indonesia’s Anak Krakatau volcano erupted, sending disruptions through the country’s aviation network. Flights at Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport and other airports were affected by the eruption. Volcanic ash poses a serious hazard to aircraft engines, prompting caution from aviation authorities. The eruption adds to a string of recent volcanic activity in the region that has periodically grounded flights.

 

Davin Rosborough, an ACLU attorney representing the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, speaks at a press conference outside the John Moakley Courthouse in Boston, Mass. after participating in a hearing Sept. 3 on President Donald Trump's March 31, 2026 executive order and a Postal Service rule implementing it.

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 5, 2026 [Another judge rejects Trump schemes], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 6, 2026. Events of Friday, September 4, showed the Trump administration in a nutshell.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani of the District of Massachusetts blocked Trump’s plan to use the United States Postal Service to screen mail-in voters. Referring to the final rule the USPS is trying to put into place, Talwani wrote: “Unauthorized by the Elections Clause, the Final Rule clashes with Congress’s statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress’s Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States.”

In other words, the plan is both illegal and unconstitutional.

As Jacob Knutson and Jim Saksa of Democracy Docket reported, Talwani, left, was responding to a lawsuit over the plan brought by groups defending the right to vote, including the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and Democratic attorneys general from 24 states and the District of Columbia. Talwani agreed that the rule threatens the voting rights of millions of American citizens.

Hours after Judge Talwani’s order, the Trump administration asked U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols to permit the rule to go into effect, claiming it simply “imposes modest informational requirements on senders of outbound federal ballot mailings.” Contradicting Talwani, the Department of Justice lawyers claimed: “The Rule does not displace a single State election law. And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”

Meanwhile, a day after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the administration was starting work on the 250-foot (76-meter) triumphal arch Trump wants in Washington, D.C., U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the administration to give the court at least 48 hours’ notice before doing anything except dig pits to identify cultural artifacts at the site. She noted that in April the administration agreed to provide 14 days’ notice before any construction started, an agreement ordered by the court.

Burgum’s announcement suggested the administration is pushing the project forward without going through any of the required permitting or obeying the law that requires Congress to pass a law allowing another memorial in the protected area of Washington, D.C., known as Area I.

Questioned about the war in Iran, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday that it is actually not a war but “a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us.” He compared the Iran war, which is in its sixth month without congressional authorization of any sort and has taken the lives of 18 U.S. service members, to the much longer Vietnam War which he claimed took more than 100,000 service members’ lives (the Department of Defense says the actual number was 58,220).

Trump also denied that military personnel are seeing record long deployments, and insisted that the U.S. controls the Strait of Hormuz. He turned back to the argument that the war was to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, although those discussions now appear to be off the table as the U.S. tries to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

Jonathan Swan, Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times reported on Friday that although Trump and members of the administration insist that reports of a shortage of crucial munitions are a lie, government investigators forced about 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff—about 2,000 officials who coordinate operations and policy with commanders around the world—to take lie detector tests to determine if they had been the source of the leaks to journalists.

The journalists note that such a proceeding is unprecedented and comes as Hegseth works harder and harder to control information coming from the Pentagon. “Mass polygraph tests have never been administered to the top ranks of the U.S. military in modern history,” they write.

Also on Friday, Catie Edmondson and Carolyn Y. Johnson reported in the New York Times that the Defense Department and the National Institutes of Health have signed an agreement providing a framework to collaborate on biodefense and pandemic preparedness. According to officials who spoke with the reporters, the deal could mean moving as much as $2 billion from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—roughly one-third the budget of the agency Dr. Anthony Fauci used to run—to the Pentagon.

Amidst reports that the Navy has run out of money, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been trying unsuccessfully to push through Congress a short-term injection of $350 billion on top of the additional $150 billion congressional Republicans gave the Pentagon last year. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, accused the Defense Department of “trying to rob N.I.H. of billions of dollars that Congress provided for medical research so that it can pad the Pentagon’s budget.”

NIH director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya appeared to confirm the agreement when he posted on social media that “far from siphoning money away from research, this partnership between [NIH] and [the Defense Department] focuses on research projects that will drive discoveries to improve the health of American citizens and members of the military.”

In the White House on Friday, Trump appeared to misunderstand not only that since World War II trade has made the United States wealthy, but also the concept of trade itself. “We could do tremendous good for ourselves by just not trading with other countries,” he said. “We lose with Mexico $195 billion a year. They have nothing that we have to have, I mean, hot tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things.”

Aside from the fact the U.S. imports machinery, agricultural products, vehicles, auto parts, electronics, and so on from Mexico, readers on social media noted: “The trade deficit is not a debt, it does not represent losing money to the other country. It means more goods were imported from it than exported to it. Why has to do with many factors, mainly the United States has more highly paid, skilled, and educated service workers.”

On Friday, the White House debuted computer games on the official White House website. The “games” are ripoffs of older games like Snake, this one with a white man in a suit picking up Black, Asian, and Latino men and putting them in orange jumpsuits.

There was also apparently one ripping off Tetris, which was apparently about building Trump’s wall, but it disappeared as the real Tetris posted: “At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you in our community.

• “P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’.
• “P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.”

On Friday, September 4, the administration also reiterated its determination to roll back environmental protections, proposing a new rule that would end protections against pollution and industrial impacts for a significant number of streams and wetlands. As Zahra Hirji of Bloomberg reported, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposed redefining which bodies of water would qualify for federal protection.

Also on Friday, the United Nations General Assembly voted 164–1, with six countries abstaining, for a resolution changing the world map to more accurately reflect the sizes of the continents. As Jewel Bright of NPR reports, the commonly-used Mercator projection, created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, was designed to enable navigators to plot courses on the straight lines of compass bearings. It distorts the size of landmasses, making the ones closest to the poles disproportionately large, while areas close to the Equator—like Africa—are shown as significantly smaller than they really are.

The African Group, made up of 54 African member states, introduced the resolution, which is not binding but will put the weight of the U.N. behind a different map projection that shows the continent sizes much more accurately. The United States was the only country to vote against the measure.

Also on Friday, Joe Sommerlad of the Independent confirmed reporting from the Washington Examiner the day before that, according to a White House official, First Lady Melania Trump will not attend Trump’s novel midterm convention next week in Dallas. She joins at least 45 Republican lawmakers who told Mia McCarthy, Meredith Lee Hill, and Jordain Carney of Politico they are steering clear of participating in an event with the deeply unpopular president for which tickets for Republican lawmakers start at $25,000.

One lawmaker called the event “a waste of time,” explaining: “You shouldn’t be having to rally your base at this point. You should be trying to convince independents. Independents are not attending nor watching the midterm convention.” Republican National Committee press secretary Natalie Baldassarre countered that “the outreach and enthusiasm to attend, participate, and speak at this historic midterm convention has been incredible.”

In an interview with Ben Terris of New York Magazine published Friday, Trump agreed that Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) was right to say that he was putting his name on things now because nobody else will when he’s gone. “That’s true,” Trump told Terris. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

The Warning With Steve Schmidt, Opinion: Retribution is coming. The Summer is over, Steve Schmidt, above, former longtime Republican campaign strategist for major campaigns, Sept. 4, 2026. On Tuesday, the fall campaign kicks off in earnest. There's going to be a Democratic Senate. And there's going to be a Democratic House. There's going to be restraints put on this lawless presidency.

There's going to be investigations, there's going to be subpoenas. The people are going to take back their government.

Mark my words. And all of the corruption, and all the insanity, all of the abuses .... well, we're going to find out everything. The fall campaign is coming. Can you hear the rumble of the tsunami?

And God Almighty, is it going to be glorious when it wipes out this putrid MAGA movement in these mid-term elections.

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion,Trump Gets More Terrible Polls, Ballots Are Getting Mailed In Wisconsin, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 6, 2026.Hopium is hope with a plan. Here we don’t just hope tomorrow will be better than today. We do the work to make it so......

 Early in person voting begins in twelve days. Ballots are being mailed in North Carolina and Wisconsin, and people have already started voting. The general election is here now……

Yesterday I shared the Civiqs daily tracking poll which had Trump at his lowest mark of the cycle. Today the FT’s regular poll also finds Trump at his lowest level so far, just 33% approval….

The biggest drop in approval in the FT’s polling over the past few months has been with Republican voters. Big yikes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NBC News also released a brutal new poll for Trump this morning, clocking in at 36%-64%. According to NBC it too “marks a new floor for Trump in this poll.”

Our addled, failed leader just keeps crashing through floors and finding new bottoms. As I said in my talk this week - As Bad As Things Are For Trump And The Rs Now - And They Are Bad - They Are Likely To Get Worse - things do just keep getting worse for Trump and the Rs……

Witkoff and Kushner are meeting with Zelenskyy right now. It is their first trip to Ukraine. For more on the recent escalation we’ve seen in the war see Dr. Phillips O’Brien latest essay. More on all this tomorrow…..

Leader Jeffries is sending a team of House Democrats to challenge the Trump sh*tshow this week in Dallas:

Today, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced that a delegation of four House Democratic Caucus members will travel to Dallas, TX to highlight our efforts to make life more affordable for the American people and directly counter the falsehoods and extremism that emanate from the Republican National Committee’s so-called midterm convention. The lawmakers will engage with everyday Americans who are drowning in the Republican economy, publicly highlight broken GOP promises, discuss the cost of living crisis and continue to expose the Trump Cartel corruption.

The delegation will include Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee (CA-42); Rep. Jason Crow of the Armed Services Committee (CO-06); Rep. Madeleine Dean of the Appropriations Committee (PA-04); and Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove of the Judiciary Committee (CA-37). This team will partner with members of the Dallas area congressional delegation, local community leaders and the Texas Democratic Party when on the ground.

“While swing seat House Republicans try to hide from their record of raising costs on working families, gutting Medicaid to fund tax breaks for billionaire donors and supporting a reckless war of choice in Iran, House Democrats will be present to hold them accountable,” said House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “Americans are drowning in the failed Republican economy. Rather than taking a single step to lower costs, MAGA extremists are partying with their super rich donors in Dallas. House Democrats remain focused on fighting for an affordable America, ending the cost of living crisis, making healthcare affordable for every single American and holding the crooks accountable.”

The Washington Post has a terrific new recap of the fight against Trump’s outrageous attack on mail voting - Trump is running out of time as he tries to restrict mail voting. I’m going to share a long excerpt for it covers a lot of important ground, and encourage you to read the whole thing:

MADISON, Wis. — President Donald Trump is running out of time in his quest to limit voting by mail, as a judge holds up his plans, and election officials begin sending ballots to voters in two swing states and gear up to send them across the country.

Nearly a third of voters used mail ballots in 2024, and last-minute changes to how they’re handled could lead to undelivered ballots and uncounted votes.

Trump has long argued that mail ballots are prone to fraud, though evidence over many elections and independent investigations suggests mail-in balloting is secure and any fraud is exceedingly rare. Trump regularly votes by mail, including in last month’s primaries in Florida.

A judge has blocked Trump’s plans for now in a legal fight that has made its way to the Supreme Court once and could soon be before the justices again.

The Supreme Court could still upend mail ballot rules, but the president and the U.S. Postal Service are running out of options that don’t involve significant upheaval because tens of thousands of voters will be getting ballots in their mailboxes in the coming days.

Wisconsin’s bipartisan elections board told local officials on Monday they could start putting ballots in the mail, and by Tuesday at least a few already had. And officials in North Carolina mailed ballots to voters on Friday. Election clerks in other states plan to do the same soon.

Those ballots are getting placed in the mail under long-standing policies, not the new ones Trump has spent months trying to impose. Some officials said they wanted to mail ballots as soon as possible because they considered the new rules — which require new approvals and the use of technology that has not yet been deployed — impossible to follow.

“There’s no practical way for Wisconsin clerks to comply,” said Don Millis, chairman of Wisconsin’s elections board.

Millis, a Republican who has helped oversee Wisconsin elections for years, said the president’s proposal would “hurt the Republican turnout more than the Democratic turnout.”

Cities that are home to large numbers of Democratic voters can easily expand early in-person voting opportunities if mail voting is curtailed. Republican-leaning rural communities in Wisconsin don’t have the staffing or budgets to do the same, he said.

Even if the president can win in court, he will have tremendous difficulty changing how ballots are mailed because of timing constraints and logistical obstacles, according to election officials and those who work closely with them.

In a court filing, Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at the National Association of Election Officials, called making required changes in time for this year’s election “effectively impossible.”

Under Trump’s plans, the Postal Service is seeking to have state and local officials submit lists of voters — possibly multiple times a day — through an online portal that has not yet been made public. An anonymous whistleblower has submitted a report to Congress describing the portal as riddled with errors and at risk of a catastrophic failure.

The plans would also require thousands of jurisdictions to get approval for the design of their ballot envelopes. It’s unclear how long the approvals would take, and election officials say there’s not enough time to redesign them and print new ones if they’re rejected.

Election officials would have difficulty updating the Postal Service on their voter lists because they change so frequently, said Gerry Cohen, a Democrat on the elections board in Wake County, North Carolina. His county receives about 1,500 voter registrations a week, he said.

“Tell me you don’t know anything about elections without telling me you don’t know anything about elections,” he said after reviewing the Postal Service’s plans.

Yesterday we discussed how "We Need To Turn Their Furious, Desperate Cheating Into Righteous Anger And Drive Our Early Vote/Election Turnout Through The Roof." Well, look at what people in this remarkable community have begun to do……

New York Times, As Midterms Approach, Republicans Find There Is No Escape From Trump, Annie Karni, Reid J. Epstein and Luke Broadwater, Sept. 6, 2026. The president’s strategy, message and spending have left the G.O.P. in a difficult spot as lawmakers try to outrun his sagging approval ratings.

In the White House Rose Garden last week, President Trump gathered some of the most politically endangered House Republicans for a dinner where he promised to make himself the face of the party’s uphill battle to keep control of Congress.

He was with them “100 percent — all the way until November,” Mr. Trump told the roughly two dozen lawmakers as they dined on prime aged beef burgers at tables adorned with bouquets of yellow roses. The president said he would travel to 35 key districts “to see if we can get everyone elected.”

The scene encapsulated the box that G.O.P. lawmakers have found themselves in as they stare down a bleak political environment.

They cannot afford to snub Mr. Trump, needing help from his enormous financial reserves and strong turnout from his base to win their campaigns. But they also do not want the election to be a referendum on the president, whose popularity is at a record low. And so far, he has shown little appetite for focusing on anyone’s political needs besides his own.

Two months before the midterm elections, Mr. Trump and the Republicans who have long tied their political fortunes to him appear to be at cross purposes as the party struggles to keep the House and Senate in G.O.P. hands.

As Republicans work to distance themselves from the president’s unpopular decisions, Mr. Trump is headlining a splashy convention in Dallas this week and has said that voters should “pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.” As the candidates work to show they are focused on the concerns of everyday Americans, the president is spending much of his time in Washington focused on the construction of a White House ballroom, a 250-foot arch and a golf course on a public park alongside the Potomac River. And as they brace for the final costly weeks of their campaigns, he has yet to dole out hardly any of the nearly $1 billion he says his political action committee has raised.

“This is my money that I control,” Mr. Trump said on Friday, suggesting he would spend between $400 million and $500 million on “Republicans that I think are good.” His political operation reported on Saturday that it had made its first expenditure, to defend a Senate seat in Texas. But beyond that, Republicans have received little information about when or where the money come.

For now, Mr. Trump appears to be focused primarily on promoting himself and boosting his popularity.

The first 30-second television spot released by his political team, the launch of a post-Labor Day ad blitz, was a case in point. It touted the president as “the toughest, most resilient person” and made no mention of Democrats, the midterm elections or any Republican candidates.

And as Mr. Trump gathers Republicans in Dallas on Wednesday for the unprecedented two-day midterm party convention, the festivities will be as much about boosting his own approval ratings and public self-esteem as it is the candidates who are actually on the ballot, a person involved with the planning said.

“The president called me two nights before Thanksgiving last fall and he said, ‘Mike, we gotta do a midterm convention,’” Speaker Mike Johnson said. “And I said, ‘That’s not a thing.’ And he said, ‘Make it a thing.’ OK. So we’re gonna do a midterm convention.”

‘A Ball and Chain’

Many vulnerable Republicans are steering clear of this week’s convention, choosing instead to spend time campaigning in their states and districts. And while some see a benefit in the confab as a way to raise money for the party — tickets cost $25,000, including for lawmakers — they also worry that it will do exactly what candidates most want to avoid: turn the election into a national conversation about Mr. Trump.

After 10 years of tying themselves to Mr. Trump, Republicans have little room to maneuver around him. Candidates up and down the ballot have embraced his lies about American elections, while few have publicly broken with him on signature issues such as spending cuts, tariffs or the war with Iran.

A White House spokeswoman disputed that there was any fissure between the president and his party.

“President Trump is the unequivocal leader of the Republican Party, who is committed to maintaining Republicans’ majority in Congress,” Olivia Wales, the spokeswoman, said.

But some Republicans fear the party has little to campaign on after two years that have yielded few legislative achievements and a spare congressional schedule that involved weeks on end at home. Some of Mr. Trump’s moves, they argue, have made things worse.

“I’m fearful that the president’s numbers are a ball and chain that will be hard to overcome,” said Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, a moderate Republican who is not running for re-election in his battleground district. “I’m worried that we’ve lost a lot of our swing voters. In the Midwest, tariffs aren’t popular. Ukraine polls at 70 percent — why aren’t we doing more for them? Nebraskans don’t like chaos and all the name calling and treating our allies bad.”

Republicans are banking instead on portraying Democrats as socialist extremists and themselves as the sane and sober alternative. (A handful of democratic socialists have won primaries this year, though their numbers in Congress are likely to remain in the single digits.)

Mr. Johnson, who has raised $135 million this cycle, has been leaning heavily on that contrast.

New York Times, Trump’s War on Mail-In Ballots Has Voters Baffled. That May Be the Point, Anna Griffin, Rebecca Fairley Raney, Kendal Asbury and David Iversen, Sept. 6, 2026. From Oregon to Florida, officials are at once reassuring voters that their ballots are safe and encouraging them to use drop boxes or vote in person

President Trump’s legal and rhetorical assault on voting by mail — and the flurry of contradictory court decisions around it — has left voters confused and local officials scrambling just eight weeks before November’s critical midterm elections.

The contortions have county registrars dusting off Election Day contingency plans developed for natural disasters like floods and wildfires. They have struggled to make it through planning meetings before the latest version of the rules change, and many are encouraging voters to avoid the U.S. Postal Service all together.

Among voters, confusion abounds.

“I don’t trust mail-in or in-person, to be honest with you,” said Lori Woo, a 53-year-old teacher from Wildomar, Calif. She has voted both in person and by mail and now wonders whether any of her votes were counted.

Arizona officials have been encouraging voters like Antonio Bergier, an 83-year-old retired geologist, to drop off ballots in person. But he said he didn’t know whether his hometown, Patagonia, or his county, Santa Cruz, had ballot drop boxes — nor would he use them anyway.

Mail, he said, is “the only way they’re getting my vote this year.”

Twenty states are set to mail ballots to voters by Sept. 19, starting with North Carolina, which began sending out absentee ballots on Friday.

“We plan to proceed as planned,” Sam Hayes, the director of North Carolina’s elections board, said at a news conference on Thursday.

But even election officials were reluctant to issue reassuring encomiums.

“I wish that I could tell my constituents to not worry, and I can’t,” said Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, who oversees elections in Pima County, Ariz., where 85 percent of ballots are delivered early or by mail.

In many places with mail-in voting, the bulk of ballots aren’t scheduled to go out for another month. But the response has already begun.

In Los Angeles County, one of the largest voting districts in the nation, elections officers have responded to the uncertainty with ballot distribution and collection plans that were deployed after the devastating Eaton and Palisades wildfires of 2025. Ideas include expanding in-person options like pop-up voting sites, places where people could request and fill out ballots.

“If this is a problem, let’s make it an administrative problem, not a voter problem,” said Dean Logan, the L.A. County registrar. “We do not want voters to be deterred from voting.”

In Arizona, Ms. Cázares-Kelly described a flood of calls from worried voters. During a briefing this week with Arizona’s secretary of state, attorney general and 15 county recorders about the proposed Postal Service mail-ballot rule, news broke of an emergency filing from the Trump administration trying to reinstate parts of the rule a court had blocked.

And in Leon County, Fla., the elections supervisor, Mark Earley, and his team had envelopes with trackable bar codes on every mail ballot, as the Postal Service wanted. But this week, when the county submitted its envelope for inspection, federal officials rejected it. Mr. Earley worries there isn’t enough time to revamp the envelopes, get the Postal Service’s approval and send ballots.

“If the rule goes into effect, we will have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters in Florida,” he said. “And nationwide, millions, without a doubt.”ImageSigns pointing people toward a building to go vote.Counties around the country are scrambling to craft contingency plans for voting this fall.Credit...Zack Wittman for The New York Times

Aubrey Jewett, a political scientist at the University of Central Florida, predicted there would be “chaos” that Florida hasn’t seen since the hanging chads, butterfly ballots and history-making presidential recount of 2000. He plans to drop his own ballot off at his local polling place rather than rely on the mail.

Nearly one in three Americans voted by mail in the last presidential race, and states have broad authority over how elections are conducted. But since his re-election, Mr. Trump, who voted by mail himself twice this year, has pushed to eliminate or severely restrict the option.

He set the current upheaval in motion in March, when he signed an executive order directing the Postal Service to impose new requirements on mailed ballots, including unique bar codes on ballot envelopes and lists from each state identifying voters eligible to receive ballots by mail. The Postal Service has said it could refuse to deliver ballots that do not comply.

A federal judge in Massachusetts temporarily blocked the requirements nationally on Aug. 28 while she considered whether to issue a longer injunction. That decision came four days after a divided Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its plans.

On Thursday in an emergency appeal, the Trump administration again asked the Supreme Court to let it move ahead, hours after the judge in Massachusetts, Indira Talwani, expressed concern that the plans could cause so much chaos in the coming elections that states would experience “major disenfranchisement.”

On Friday evening, Judge Talwani intervened for a third time, ruling that the administration’s plans are likely illegal and should not be implemented ahead of the midterms.

Meantime, a Postal Service whistle-blower said last week that the agency was rushing to build the computer system needed to enforce the new requirements in violation of court orders.

A White House spokeswoman, Lauren Bis, said any confusion around the fall elections “was caused by radical Democrats’ litigation” over “common-sense measures” to ensure election security. She accused Democrats of refusing to guarantee that “Americans, and only Americans, decide our elections.”

U.S. intelligence agencies and independent election security experts have found no credible evidence that any foreign government has successfully manipulated, altered or intercepted mail-in ballots.

Still, voters across the country are preparing for November without knowing what the rules will be. In Clark County, Wash., part of a swing House district along the state’s southern border, the elections office receives a dozen or so calls and emails a day from anxious constituents.

“The biggest thing they want to know is if things are going to change,” said Rich Cooper, the county elections manager. “We have to tell them we just don’t know yet.”

Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that widespread fraud is inherent in voting by mail. He declared in March that “mail-in voting means mail-in cheating.”

Democrats and some election regulators say even if the Postal Service doesn’t succeed with its rules this year, the uncertainty and frustration already created are the point.

“This White House is making it so hard for people to participate in the democratic process,” said Hector Sánchez Barba, who runs Mi Familia Vota, an Arizona nonprofit that helps Latino and immigrant communities engage in politics.

The befuddlement crosses party lines. Yvette Avera, a 62-year-old Republican in Temecula, Calif., usually votes by mail but has already told her family they should vote in person this year. “If I do it in person, I’ve got myself covered,” she said.

Some people have only one option. Michelle Coppadge, 54, of Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., said she would rather vote at a polling place “where they’re verifying who you are.” But her 94-year-old mother-in-law will not be able to vote if mail-in balloting goes away because “she just doesn’t leave her home.”

The first extensive experiments with mailed ballots were in the 1980s, led by Republican leaders in rural Oregon who wanted to increase participation where voting at a centralized polling place meant long drives, often in rotten weather. Today, some Republicans blame Democratic dominance in West Coast states on the ease of mail-in balloting.

Some of the biggest fights and steepest confusion over remote voting this year are in states that could decide which party controls Congress, such as Michigan, with its heated Senate race, and Pennsylvania with its three tossup House seats.  

Politico, Republicans might still lose half the seats they gerrymandered to flip, Andrew Howard and Aaron Pellish, Sept. 6, 2026. With some gerrymandered seats looking much more competitive than they hoped, Republicans are wondering if mid-decade redistricting can actually save their majority.Organizers rally outside of the Ohio Statehouse to protest gerrymandering.

Republicans’ are growing increasingly worried their mid-decade gerrymandering push isn’t going to save their House majority.

The norm-breaking plan hatched by the White House last summer to draw new maps to protect the party from an unfavorable midterm environment is not on track to bear the fruits they hoped it would. Two months out from Election Day, Republicans are sweating races they thought they would win comfortably when they redrew district boundaries, according to conversations with a dozen Republican strategists on Friday.

Republicans did win the midterm mapmaking war and will likely net at least six seats via gerrymandering — but that’s less than half the number they’d initially hoped when they began the ambitious project over a year ago. That’s largely due to the same political environment threatening GOP seats once thought safe across the map, with President Donald Trump’s approval rating hovering in the high-30s as the unpopular war in Iran continues to affect Americans’ pocketbooks.

Seats designed to be safe in Texas, Florida, Ohio and North Carolina are all still surprisingly competitive, leaving Republicans looking at smaller gains that came from southern state redraws. And on Friday, the Missouri Supreme Court delivered another blow when it blocked a one-seat GOP gerrymander from taking effect this year unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes.

Adam Kincaid, president of the National Republican Redistricting Trust and the cartographer of Texas’ redraw, said the mid-decade gerrymandering push still made 10 House districts more favorable for the GOP — but can’t guarantee an outcome.

“Redistricting is construction, not sales,” Kincaid said in an interview Friday. “The other thing I tell people all the time is ‘politics is not the Field of Dreams.’ Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’re going to come.”

And those redraws took effort and political capital that could have been spent elsewhere.

“Imagine if we had spent all of the time and energy and resources that have been spent on this redistricting war and instead focused on something like making life more affordable for Americans,” said Rep. Kevin Kiley (I-Calif.), who left the GOP after his district was redrawn by Democrats in California and who has proposed a bill that has been blocked by leaders of both parties to end mid-decade redistricting.

Republicans redrew maps in eight states — Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama — while Democrats only pulled off a gerrymander in California. (They got another seat from a Utah court decision but had their Virginia gerrymander blocked in court.) In a less hostile political environment, that could have netted the GOP more than a dozen seats.

But they’re not all looking so solid. Texas Republicans are growing increasingly worried that newly drawn Latino-heavy seats Trump carried by double digits in 2024 are looking shaky, and the five-seat net they’d hoped out of the state looks increasingly unrealistic by the day.“The Texas redistricting effort will for sure yield a two-seat gain, and more than likely yield a three-seat gain,” said Alfredo Rodriguez, a Dallas-based Republican strategist. “Picking up five seats will be difficult considering the environment and headwinds Republicans face this cycle.”In North Carolina, Democratic Rep. Don Davis looks very much alive in a tough seat redrawn by the GOP to take him out.

And Florida’s new gerrymander isn’t looking bulletproof, either, with Democratic Reps. Darren Soto, Kathy Castor and Jared Moskowitz running hard to hold onto newly red-leaning territory.

“Those are all going to be competitive races for sure,” Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis said last week in Tampa. “I think if this were 2022 and these guys were running those races, we’d win all four — no question, slam dunk. This year, they’re winnable, but I think it’s going to require some effort.”

Republicans took a more clear-cut blow on Thursday, when the Missouri Supreme Court erased a map gutting Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s seat. The U.S. Supreme Court could still undo part of that decision ahead of November, and Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, a Republican, has said the state will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to do so.

Some Republicans are bullish they will win that appeal, including Kincaid, but others are skeptical. A Missouri GOP strategist working on congressional campaigns, granted anonymity to speak candidly, called the appeal a “hail mary pass.”

In response to a request for comment to the White House, Republican National Committee spokesperson Ally Triolo said lambasted the Missouri decision as “reckless and wrong.”

Republicans’ safest pickups remain in the South after Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama redrew their maps following the Supreme Court’s limiting of the Voting Rights Act, and Republicans responded by splitting safely blue, heavily Black districts to make them unwinnable for Democrats. National Republicans argue the whole thing was worth it and will still lead to gains for the GOP, adding that Democrats’ California gerrymander left competitive seats, too.

The NRCC has long been bullish that redistricting will help them maintain their razor-thin House majority. In a memo obtained by POLITICO earlier this summer, the committee argued that redistricting has created “structural dynamics [that] favor Republicans” by shrinking the number of competitive seats across the map.

They point to extensive data that shows Democrats historically performing poorly in a host of the seats that were redrawn this year — including three in California and several in Texas and Florida. For example, their data shows that the newly drawn Texas 35th District has never been carried by a Democrat in any race, even though the party is targeting it in November. “The naysayers and bedwetters fail to recognize that Democrats promised the moon in California, and instead they’re being forced to fight tooth and nail across deep-red territory in states like Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Alabama,” National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement.

More On U.S. Governance: Public Health Policies

 

Lincoln Square Media, Opinion: When Authoritarianism Comes for Medicine, Physicians Stand Up, Dr. Rob Davidson, MD, MPH, above right, Sept. 6, 2026. Throughout history, physicians have played a lesser-known but unique role in confronting authoritarianism. Our profession asks us to observe carefully, follow evidence, protect vulnerable people, and speak the truth even when doing so is uncomfortable or unpopular. Those responsibilities do not disappear when political power threatens the health of our patients. In fact, they become more important. Today, American physicians are facing one of those moments.

President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to reshape federal childhood vaccine policy — including limiting the vaccines recommended for children and directing the separation of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine into individual doses — represents a direct intrusion of political ideology into medical decision-making. The response from physicians has been striking.Subscribed

The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), Andrew Racine, emphasized that pediatricians recommend vaccines at specific ages based on when children’s immune systems respond best and when they are most vulnerable to disease. He urged parents to make vaccination decisions in consultation with their child’s pediatrician. Likewise, the American Public Health Association (APHA) responded with “grave concerns” that the very action Trump demands in his EO “ leaves the American public, especially our children, more vulnerable to preventable illness and death.”

Racine and the AAP, the APHA, and countless physicians speaking out today are following a long tradition. Throughout history, physicians have recognized that their obligation to patients sometimes requires them to confront political power.

Consider Rudolf Virchow, often called the father of modern pathology. In 1848, after investigating a devastating typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia, Virchow concluded that poverty, social exclusion, and political failures — not simply biology — were responsible for the crisis. He returned to Berlin convinced that medicine could not be separated from the political conditions affecting people’s health. During the revolutionary upheaval that followed, he became politically active. His philosophy was captured in his famous observation that “medicine is social science and politics nothing but medicine on a grand scale.”

Virchow understood something that remains true today: health does not exist in a political vacuum. And when political power threatens health, physicians cannot always remain apolitical.

That lesson has been repeated under some of history’s darkest regimes.

German neurologist and psychoanalyst John Rittmeister became part of the resistance to the Nazi regime. In 1942, he distributed anti-Nazi notices condemning the regime’s propaganda and its war, knowing the extraordinary risks involved. He was arrested and executed later that year.

In Chile under the military dictator Augusto Pinochet, physicians treated people who had been subjected to torture and other abuses by the regime. In the early 1980s, American physician Jonathan Fine traveled to Chile with a delegation seeking the release of physicians who had been “disappeared” by the dictatorship. Fine and others would go on to help establish Physicians for Human Rights, an organization founded on the principle that physicians have a responsibility to defend human rights.

And this tradition continues today. In Russia, more than 1,000 physicians signed an open letter demanding the release of Dr. Nadezhda Buyanova, who was sentenced to prison after allegedly making comments critical of Russia’s war against Ukraine. They risked their own freedom and safety to defend a fellow physician and the principle that medicine should not be subordinated to political repression.

These examples aren’t perfectly analogous to what is happening in the United States today. We aren’t living under Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s dictatorship, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But that’s precisely why we should pay attention to the warning signs before authoritarianism becomes entrenched, and why we should speak out.

Physicians have already been entering this sphere of advocacy in the Trump era. During COVID, when bodies were stacking up in the ICU, and refrigerator trucks were brought in for morgue overflow, we pulled back the curtain, so to speak, sharing our experiences with the public. When Trump suggested people inject bleach… we rejected such absurd, dangerous suggestions. When he used his influence to undermine trust in the vaccine that helped finally protect health care workers who’d been putting our lives on the line, and helped reduce the numbers of sick in our hospitals, we made our voices heard.

But in Trump’s second term, we’re witnessing not just profound ineptitude and disinformation, but an increasingly aggressive concentration of executive power. And now political power is reaching directly into the exam room.

For generations, physicians have been told to leave politics at the exam-room door. But what happens when politics walks through that door first? What happens when a president with no medical training attempts to dictate vaccination policy contrary to the recommendations of pediatricians and the evidence on which those recommendations are based?

At that point, telling our patients the truth is not partisan politics. It is our professional responsibility.

We do this every day. Physicians rely on evidence and expertise to make decisions on behalf of our patients. We push back when pharmaceutical companies put profits ahead of patients. We challenge insurance companies when their policies interfere with appropriate care. We fight hospital administrators when financial considerations threaten patient safety. We accept that responsibility because our patients trust us to put their health before someone else’s interests.

We must bring that same courage to this moment.

History shows us that authoritarianism does not always arrive all at once. It can advance through the gradual erosion of institutions, expertise, norms, and the willingness of professionals to speak when those things are threatened. Physicians have repeatedly been among those willing to stand up because our profession gives us both a unique vantage point and a unique obligation to do so.

We will listen to our patients. We will follow the evidence. We will protect children. And when political power threatens any of those responsibilities, we will speak up.

Dr. Rob Davidson is a Michigan-based ER physician, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care, and co-host of the Paging America podcast. 

 

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with President Trump and Mehmet Oz, the Medicaid and Medicare services administrator, in the White House in September (New York Times photo by Tierney L. Cross)

The Breakdown via The Bulwark, Opinion: RFK Jr.’s Sickening Measles Victory Lap, Jonathan Cohn, Sept. 6, 2026. While Pennsylvania struggles to contain an outbreak, the anti-vax health secretary keeps trying to score political points.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is claiming vindication in an ongoing controversy about a measles outbreak in Pennsylvania.

He shouldn’t be.

At the center of the controversy are two measles-related deaths that the state announced on August 25. Both were in Lancaster County, home to a large Amish population. The state didn’t immediately release more biographical details, but after the announcement Josh Shapiro, the state’s Democratic governor, held a press conference to warn about the public health threat and urge residents to vaccinate both themselves and their children.

At the briefing, Shapiro also talked about Kennedy—who, the governor said, had called to offer condolences and support. Shapiro said he conveyed his appreciation, while also expressing “blunt” criticism that the “actions and the rhetoric that [are] coming from this administration are having a negative impact on communities across America.”

That was a reference to the myriad ways the administration has undermined federal support for vaccination—like Kennedy posting misinformation on the official CDC website, and Donald Trump signing executive orders to roll back official childhood vaccination recommendations. The criticism did not sit well with Kennedy, who fired off tweets accusing Shapiro of taking “giddy delight in announcing two measles deaths” when the evidence was not yet clear.

It was even possible, Kennedy said, that the link between the deaths and measles may have been “fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.”

Kennedy at the time was drawing on some genuine ambiguity over what exactly had happened. The state hadn’t released ages or other biographical details. Meanwhile, the Lancaster County coroner said his office knew about one death—and only one death—of somebody with measles. But, the coroner said, it was an infant whose cause of death was actually a ruptured spleen.

Then, on Friday, the coroner announced his office had learned that another person who had measles had died. But in this case it was a six-week-old in palliative care for a congenital condition that is typically fatal within a few months—yet more proof, Kennedy tweeted, that Shapiro had “politicized these two tragic deaths before the underlying causes had been established.”

The charge sounded plausible: Even many Kennedy critics have questioned whether Shapiro acted too hastily, if only by publicizing the deaths before he could confirm all the facts and divulge more information.

But Shapiro and other state officials maintained all along the facts were on their side. And now it looks like

they were right. If anybody is twisting facts to fit his narrative, it appears to be Kennedy, who remains determined to downplay both the threat of measles and his role in abetting its spread across the country.

START WITH THE NEWS FROM FRIDAY, about that child who died at just six weeks old—and who is, presumably, one of the two measles deaths that the state announced in August. While it’s true the child had what was almost certainly a terminal condition, it’s also true the child died from measles. The coroner confirmed as much, even though Kennedy didn’t make a big deal of it.

And by that time, new details about the previously announced Lancaster death had emerged—some from the coroner, who had clarified that the death certificate listed measles as a “contributing condition,” and some from the Atlantic, which published a thoroughly reported story about an Amish family that had lost a newborn immediately after birth.

The article, by staff writer Tom Bartlett, explained that the mother had developed measles and had been severely dehydrated. The baby was born with a pulse but not breathing; paramedics tried but failed to revive the infant.

Bartlett had no way to confirm that this family was the one the coroner had been talking about, but it was likely the same one. Nor could Bartlett prove measles had led to the infant’s death, though it was easy to imagine the disease either putting the infant into medical distress or making the baby’s spleen more prone to rupture from chest compressions. (Measles is known to affect the spleen.)

None of that amounts to medical certainty, and certainty in the case of the infant who apparently died at birth may never come—in part because pathology is not always an exact science. Infant deaths from measles have become blessedly rare in the United States, so most medical examiners don’t have much experience investigating and confirming what role the disease might have played in a baby who died right after birth.

But there’s a reason newborns almost never die from measles anymore, and it undercuts Kennedy’s argument even more. The vaccine—the very one whose safety and utility Kennedy has questioned—had until a few years ago nearly wiped out the disease here.

Now it’s making a comeback, thanks to falling vaccination levels. The official national caseload for this year just climbed past 3,100, having already exceeded last year’s total of 2,300—which was the highest since 1991, before the United States achieved elimination status. More than 500 of this year’s cases are from the Pennsylvania outbreak, which has spread beyond Lancaster County and some officials fear is much larger than the official tally.

Kennedy and his allies in the Trump administration bristle at the suggestion they have had anything to do with this. And to the extent they acknowledge declining vaccination rates are a problem—they don’t always—they point out that the decline antedated Trump’s second term. They say it shows that other factors have been at work, especially the growing mistrust of public health officials following the pandemic. Some Kennedy advisers have even started calling the measles outbreak the “Fauci outbreak.”¹

But while it’s absolutely true that vaccination rates were falling before Trump and Kennedy got power—and while it’s just as true that multiple factors were at play, including a post-COVID backlash against the public health establishment—a big part of the story is misinformation. Kennedy has played a key role in that, going back to his time before taking office, and the Lancaster outbreak is a tragically perfect illustration of how.

IT TURNS OUT KENNEDY had been to Lancaster County back in 2021. In a speech reported initially by the right-wing web publication the Lancaster Patriot and more recently by the New York Times, he rolled out some of his now-familiar—and repeatedly debunked—arguments about the supposed dangers of vaccines.

Kennedy said modern vaccines hadn’t gone through placebo testing, even though they have, and that the best available research links vaccination to autism, even though it doesn’t. He also went out of his way to downplay the dangers of measles, which can lead to permanent vision and hearing loss, pneumonia, and death—sometimes from a neurological condition that appears many years after infection.

“I am a measles survivor. . . . I’m very, very lucky to have lived through that nightmare,” Kennedy said sarcastically, explaining that he “had to stay at home and watch TV the whole week.” Then he said “the cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A.”

The crowd drew heavily from the local Amish community, whose presence in Lancaster goes back three centuries, and Kennedy cast his crusade as an effort to protect them—and their religious freedom—from elected officials and public health experts trying to impose their will. “Those agencies are going to do everything in their power to make the Amish vaccinate,” he said. “Because they cannot stand the fact that you are healthy.”

But while vaccination rates among the Amish have long lagged behind the rest of the population, the explanation isn’t a simple story of religious objection. Multiple factors are at work, including attitudes about modern medicine generally—a point that came out in Bartlett’s article and in a conversation I had with Lancaster County Commissioner Alice Yoder.

Yoder is a nurse and former hospital administrator whose first brush with a Lancaster outbreak was all the way back in 1991, when cases of rubella started appearing in the Amish population. In a phone interview, she told me she was part of a group of officials and health care leaders who developed an outreach and vaccination strategy to overcome hesitation—by, among other things, using fire stations as clinics because the Amish frequently volunteered for fire duty.

“There were people lined up to get the vaccine, it worked really well,” Yoder said. “We were able to bring down cases relatively quickly.”²

That same year, 1991, a measles outbreak was hitting Philadelphia, killing nine children. The reaction back then from local, state, and federal officials was swift and unified, with an all-out effort to encourage vaccination. Even President George H.W. Bush got involved, giving a speech in which he made a plea to parents.

“Don’t take a chance,” Bush said. “The facilities are there. The vaccines are available. Call your local public health official or your own physician. Please, make sure your child is immunized.”

NOTHING LIKE THAT is happening now. And while at the ground level the CDC appears to be providing local authorities with the standard kind of logistical and technical support, the messaging from Kennedy—and from Trump—continues to undermine faith in vaccination. It was less than a month ago that Trump sat in the Oval Office spewing nonsense about “gallons” of vaccine injections that made the measles shot potentially “lethal,” while Kennedy stood behind him nodding approvingly.

The difference is especially striking to Paul Offit, the renowned vaccine expert who saw the early 1990s Philadelphia effort up close as a young physician and later wrote about it in a book called Bad Faith.

“We should be trying to identify high-risk areas, send clinics to those areas, really encouraging vaccination because we’re heading into winter and spring and kids are going back to school,” Offit told me in a phone interview. “That’s what RFK Jr. would be talking about were he an actual secretary of health and human services instead of an anti-vaccine activist pretending to be secretary of health and human services.”

All of this may help explain why Shapiro was so eager to speak out: The federal agency that is supposed to help him is under the leadership of an anti-vaccination crusader who keeps downplaying the danger of the disease. But Shapiro and other state officials face another challenge: Lancaster is the most populous county in Pennsylvania with no dedicated public health department of its own.

Nobody knows that better than Yoder, who first won her seat three years ago while promising (among other things) to create a department. It would make a big difference now, she told me, because it would give the county a staff who were not only dedicated to monitoring disease and coordinating responses, but who had the training to do so in a community like Lancaster where the population tends to be hesitant about vaccines.

Yoder has been pushing the cause recently, citing the outbreak as proof of a department’s necessity, in the hopes that one of the county’s other two commissioners will vote yes.³ But Yoder is a Democrat. The other two are Republicans with histories of lining up with Trump and MAGA on issues like questioning the integrity of elections.

One of them, Josh Parsons, is the commissioner mentioned above who was on social media arguing the infant death had nothing to do with measles, and attacking Shapiro for his announcement. And last week when a reporter from the local CBS affiliate asked him if he would recommend residents get vaccinated, Parsons—who did not respond to my request for comment—said, “I think that that is their decision for them and their family to make an informed decision about that. I recommend it if they believe that that’s, you know, something that’s appropriate for them and their family.”

Yoder—who on her Facebook page last week accused Parsons of spreading “dangerous misinformation”—told me she has been unable to muster support for even basic steps like updating the county web page on vaccination—which is currently available only through searching and knowing just the right keywords, and which, rather than urging vaccination, merely suggests residents ask their providers about the subject.

“It’s just so sad,” Yoder told me, “that we couldn’t get the message out, to have avoided this by having people get the vaccine.”

Yoder said the politicization of vaccines has made it even more difficult to make the case with skeptics, though she says it is by no means impossible—and that as in 1991, she thinks growing awareness of the threat seems to be driving more interest, especially among parents worried about their children. That appears to be how this year’s outbreak in South Carolina ended: Parents who had previously been skeptical got the shots for themselves and their kids, and the disease stopped spreading.

Something like that may yet happen in Pennsylvania, and in all the other parts of America where outbreaks are happening or yet to come. But even in that scenario, thousands of people would still be getting sick, some of them so badly they would need hospitalization—and, in a tiny but tragic number of cases, surviving with disability or not surviving at all.

This is the part of measles Kennedy doesn’t like to talk about when he waxes nostalgic about the pre-vaccination era, as he did in that 2021 Lancaster speech. And it probably explains why he’s so determined to downplay what’s been happening there and elsewhere around the country over the past few months. But there’s lots of reason to think Kennedy fully grasps the consequences of allowing a resurgence of the disease, and little reason to think he finds it upsetting.

U.S. Governance: Military, National Security, Global Policies

 

New York Times, Inside the Battle to Save One Pioneering General From Hegseth’s Purge, Adam Entous and Greg Jaffe, Sept. 6, 2026. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue’s vision for fighting future wars won him powerful supporters around the world. Could they save his career?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decided in early 2025 to spike Gen. Christopher T. Donahue’s nomination to be the top U.S. military officer in Europe.

Mr. Hegseth believed that President Trump wanted heads to roll for the deaths of 13 U.S. service members in a suicide bombing at the Kabul airport during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. General Donahue was not responsible for security at the bombing site. But he was a top commander at the airport, and so Mr. Hegseth decided he needed to go.

It fell to Joe Kasper, Mr. Hegseth’s chief of staff, to try to convince him that he was wrong.

Mr. Kasper asked a senior Pentagon official to prepare a card with a half-dozen bullet points laying out the facts in General Donahue’s defense, current and former officials said. He took it with him in March of last year as he and Mr. Hegseth sped through traffic to the White House for a press event.

For those few minutes in the car, Mr. Kasper knew he would have his boss’s undivided attention.

Sirens were blaring. He handed Mr. Hegseth the card.

These were the facts of General Donahue’s three-decade career: He had seen more combat in his 20-plus deployments than just about any officer in the U.S. military. A star in the clandestine world of special forces, he had spent years in the shadows hunting terrorist leaders. And then as the world and warfare changed, he changed with it.

He had played a central role in the U.S. military’s efforts to help Ukraine hold off a much larger Russian force, a job that inspired his vision for a new kind of combat that married divebombing drones, robotics and artificial intelligence.

Now his fate lay in the hands of Mr. Hegseth, a former Fox News host who had two deployments as an Army officer to Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr. Hegseth had come to the Pentagon vowing to weed out the “small” and “feeble” generals who he believed had failed in those wars.

What played out in the 16 months after the car ride was a clash between Mr. Hegseth and General Donahue’s supporters, who viewed him as a generational talent.

That clash, and its outcome, was described to The New York Times by more than 40 people at the Pentagon, in Congress and around the world, nearly all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

It amounts to one of the most consequential chapters in Mr. Hegseth’s campaign to drive out those he sees as out of step with his priorities, a leadership purge that his critics say is driven by ideology, identity and suspicion of those with tenuous ties to former military leaders that he does not like. And it shows the intensity of the behind-the-scenes battle to save one general.

The more General Donahue’s allies pushed, the more Mr. Hegseth’s opposition seemed to harden.

The Pentagon declined to answer questions about General Donahue, saying in a statement that all senior military leaders serve at the pleasure of the president and the defense secretary.

In the spring of 2025, General Donahue was commanding ground forces in Europe. Mr. Hegseth was new to the Pentagon. To the extent he was familiar with General Donahue, it was largely through the prism of the Afghanistan withdrawal and a grainy photo that indelibly linked the general to the war’s tragic end.

General Donahue was the last U.S. soldier to leave Afghanistan. As he stepped onto a hulking military cargo plane, an Army photographer snapped his picture using his cellphone camera and night vision device.

The green-and-black image rocketed around the world. Senior Pentagon officials said Mr. Hegseth seemed to be fixated on the photo, mistakenly referring to it as a “selfie.”

The first item on the card that Mr. Kasper handed to Mr. Hegseth in the car clarified that the photo was not a selfie and that General Donahue had nothing to do with its distribution. Other bullet points noted that Marines, not General Donahue’s paratroopers, were in charge of the gate where the suicide bombing occurred.

The defense secretary glanced at the card and passed it back to his chief of staff.

“I don’t care,” Mr. Hegseth told Mr. Kasper.American military personnel on guard before the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021; a crowd gathered at the Kabul airport as the Taliban advanced.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times‘Brother, We Need Your Help’

At first, General Donahue wasn’t supposed to go to Afghanistan for the withdrawal. The Pentagon said it just needed roughly 2,000 of his paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to help with security at the Kabul airport.

Then, on Aug. 16, 2021, shortly after the paratroopers started arriving, thousands of Afghans, desperate to escape Taliban insurgents, swarmed the runways, preventing planes from taking off and landing.

General Donahue’s paratroopers watched in horror as Afghan special operations units, who were waiting to be evacuated, beat back the civilians so that flights could resume.

Amid the chaos, General Donahue got new orders: Get to Kabul as fast as possible.

U.S. Immigration Enforcement, Rights

New York Times, How a Memphis Gambling Raid Became a Sweeping Immigration Operation, Eduardo Medina and Emily Cochrane, Sept. 6, 2026. More than 120 people were arrested at a Memphis cantina, in one of the biggest immigration operations in Tennessee this year.

For the people dressed up in sparkly skirts and cowboy boots, Saturday nights were best spent at El Corralón.

The cantina, tucked in the middle of Berclair, a heavily Hispanic neighborhood in Memphis, Tenn., was a rowdy joint where the mix of regional Mexican music and bachata was loud, the pool tables plenty and beer cheap enough. Gambling machines jangled by the wall.

Then, in recent weeks, neighbors started spotting drones overhead. Suspicious vans parked by the dumpsters. Unfamiliar patrons came in and left quickly. Some in the neighborhood believed the gambling machines, illegal in Tennessee, might make the business a target.

But the cantina remained open. Last Sunday, a crush of agents raided El Corralón, searching for the owner, Marco Sabillon-Urbina, an immigrant from Honduras, but detaining anyone who was in the country illegally.

In the end, the operation targeting illegal gambling and drugs spiraled into one of Tennessee’s largest sweeps of undocumented immigrants this year, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement escalates its operations across the country. More than 120 people were detained, inflaming tensions in Memphis, where many residents were already on edge over a separate federal anti-crime task force that, among other things, has also targeted immigrants.

“This takes them back to being afraid and not wanting to go out again,” said Jose Salazar, a community organizer who assists the immigrant community in Memphis. “All those fears and concerns are worse now.”

Arrests by ICE surged across the country this summer as the Trump administration pulled back from highly visible raids in Minneapolis and other cities earlier this year. The agency has carried out lower-profile operations, including targeting predominantly immigrant neighborhoods like Berclair last weekend.

Tennessee and other Republican-led states have also deepened coordination with the Trump administration and immigration authorities. In May, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation asked ICE for help identifying an undocumented man it suspected was involved in criminal activity at El Corralón, court records show.

The man, Mr. Sabillon-Urbina, first arrived in the United States in 1994 and received Temporary Protected Status in 1999; that status lapsed in January 2020 after he failed to renew the paperwork, federal law enforcement said in court records.

He was sent back to Honduras in 2023 as part of a federal plea agreement in connection with possession of drugs and a firearm. He was deported again in 2024 after trying to re-enter the United States.

Immigration and state agents executed two search warrants last weekend for the bar, related to drugs and illegal gambling. Mr. Sabillon-Urbina was named in one of the sealed warrants, photographs of which were reviewed by The New York Times. A lawyer for Mr. Sabillon-Urbina, who was detained on Sunday, did not return multiple requests for comment.

Mr. Sabillon-Urbina ran the bar with his wife, who was also detained, according to a former employee and neighbors in touch with their children. She could not be reached for comment.

El Corralón, which some residents described as seedy, had experienced trouble before. In 2019, a security guard was shot after breaking up a fight between two men, according to the police.

Still, on most nights, neighbors said, it was just a nearby place to dance and drink. Many had been scared of venturing far for a night out and risking being stopped and detained by the authorities.

“Sadly, because this place irresponsibly had illegal machines, the consequence of that is that our neighbors have been taken,” said Sandra Pita, a lead community organizer with the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition. “These were mothers, fathers, sons who had nothing to do with the problems of this business.”

Before the raid began, it was a typically busy Saturday night, according to two people who were there. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared drawing more attention from law enforcement.

Inside it smelled of perfume, spilled fruity drinks, a faint whiff of body odor near the dance floor, they said. The D.J. sprinkled in some reggaeton. There were people in high-heels, cowboy boots and tucked-in button-downs.

Then, around 1 a.m. Sunday, more than a dozen agents walked in. They spread out across the cantina, some toward the D.J. booth to turn off the music, others toward the bar and gambling machines, telling people to stay calm.

People inside screamed, according to the people who witnessed the incident. One person scrambled to hide under a billiards table; another tried to hide behind large speakers. Agents told people to gather on the dance floor, where they asked if they were legally in the country one at a time. One man who appeared to be intoxicated cursed at the agents. Another repeated the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish. A woman begged them not to take her because she had small children.

Tennessee and other Republican-led states have also deepened coordination with the Trump administration and immigration authorities. In May, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation asked ICE for help identifying an undocumented man it suspected was involved in criminal activity at El Corralón, court records show.

The man, Mr. Sabillon-Urbina, first arrived in the United States in 1994 and received Temporary Protected Status in 1999; that status lapsed in January 2020 after he failed to renew the paperwork, federal law enforcement said in court records.ImageUtility lines, a barbed wire fence and a building.The West Tennessee Detention Facility in Mason, Tenn., where many of the people arrested are being held.Credit...Brad J. Vest for The New York Times

He was sent back to Honduras in 2023 as part of a federal plea agreement in connection with possession of drugs and a firearm. He was deported again in 2024 after trying to re-enter the United States.

Immigration and state agents executed two search warrants last weekend for the bar, related to drugs and illegal gambling. Mr. Sabillon-Urbina was named in one of the sealed warrants, photographs of which were reviewed by The New York Times. A lawyer for Mr. Sabillon-Urbina, who was detained on Sunday, did not return multiple requests for comment.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

New York Times, Trump Officials Draft Plan to Pay At-Home Parents, Using Funds for Working Ones, Coral Davenport, Sept. 6, 2026 (print ed.). The proposed benefit, a top policy priority for Vice President JD Vance, would apply only to married couples and tap a fund intended to provide federal child care subsidies to working parents.

The Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, a policy championed by Vice President JD Vance, using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home and raise their children, one of the most significant efforts to date by the Trump administration to harness federal funds to promote a traditional view of families.

To do so, officials are seeking to use a Health and Human Services Department fund that was created in the 1990s to help low-income and working-class parents afford child care so they could work or go to school.

Under the draft new rule, parents who stay home with their children could benefit from the program, which typically provides about $9,000 per child each year, potentially reshaping which families get federal child care money.

The move could end up redirecting money away from working parents and their child care providers, causing some to raise their rates or even close, critics said, potentially worsening what many experts say is a child care crisis in the country.

About 80 percent of the 870,000 families who currently get the child care subsidies have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to Health Department data.

The policy change would effectively create a government incentive for parents to stay home with their children, an idea embraced as part of a broader conservative effort to advance policies that promote more mothers staying at home.

The new rule being drafted would allow married couples with one stay-at-home parent in certain income brackets to collect a subsidy, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the plan before it is finalized. The change could be made without approval from Congress.

More than 80 percent of stay-at-home parents are mothers, according to the Pew Research Center.

The plan is being pushed by the White House and is seen as a top priority of Mr. Vance, according to several people familiar with the discussions. The draft rule also incorporates policies in legislation written by Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he was a senator from Florida.

Hope for America, Opinion: Hate will never make America great, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 6, 2026. After days of hints, videos of old-school gaming cords being plugged into old televisions, and messages that something big was coming, the official White House account posted one final teaser: “It’s time to level up, patriots… something new dropping soon.” Then, at 4:51 PM last Thursday, they revealed it. “CAN’T STOP WINNING. Build the wall. Deport. Fill a Trump Account. LIVE - PLAY NOW ARCADE.GOV.”

The website they linked to didn’t have a collection of classic childhood games, or even updated ones to help teach the next generation civics and how the government operates. Instead, the arcade games, all targeting children, were MAGA versions. There were ones to build a border wall, to chase down immigrants for deportation, and even one to collect money for Trump Accounts. Yet the message behind all of these games was clear: make cruelty fun. Teach children to see racism and the dehumanization of immigrants as normal. Make the hatred of black and brown people a good thing and turn chasing them into entertainment. But mostly, turn the suffering of real human beings into entertainment.

They didn’t even try to hide their motives or separate this from the president, and they even hosted them all on an official .gov domain, which is paid for with our taxpayer dollars. As of the writing of this post, five games are already live, and there is an empty box with “COMING SOON” and “A new adventure awaits” as a placeholder for a sixth game. These despicable games appear to be just the beginning. Sadly, they are building more.

The games themselves are disturbing in every way imaginable. The one called “Rio Run” might be the worst of them all. It is a Snake-style arcade game where the player controls a pixelated version of Tom Homan, the border czar, as he chases migrants with different skin tones along a stretch of the Rio Grande meant to represent the southern border. When the migrant is “captured,” their clothes instantly turn into orange jumpsuits, with each “capture” counting as a “deportation” on a score counter at the top of the screen. The more people you deport, the higher your score. This game actually rewards hunting down human beings.

Their “Build the Wall” game is a take on the game from many of our childhoods, Tetris. The player stacks sections of a wall to, in the game’s own words, “Protect the border from the coming horde,” while the subtitle reads, “ZOMBIE BORDER SIEGE.” But what that wall is actually stopping are little green aliens and other out-of-this-world creatures, again making the imagery difficult to miss. The wall is being built to stop “aliens” from getting across it. “Illegal aliens,” of course, is the preferred language this administration uses when talking about migrants, and here the game creates a sense of extreme urgency around the idea that there is a dangerous “horde” coming toward us that must be stopped. As the aliens rush toward the wall, they smash against it when they reach it, their bodies essentially splattering against the wall before they die and disintegrate. Each block added to the wall stops more of them from getting through, and if the player isn’t quick enough, one breaches the wall, and the game ends. Players are given a score based on how many of these supposed “threats” they were able to block.

The last three games round out the other propaganda this administration is pushing. There is one, “Trump Savings Tycoon,” where the player catches cash and gold bars falling from the sky to make it seem like the Trump Accounts for babies is a huge amount of money just falling from the sky.

Supply Line shares dangerous disinformation that appears to be straight from RFK Jr.’s mouth, meant to make our country sick again and confuse children about what is healthy and what is not. In it, players knock out bad food, and a turkey punches toward the player when they make a mistake. The top graphic instructs players not to consume seed oils and tells them that beef tallow is healthier, a claim the majority of cardiologists and other medical professionals dispute.

A group of cardiovascular and nutrition experts published a review earlier this year in JACC: Advances that concluded that there is no evidence supporting beef tallow as a healthier alternative to seed oils, and that there is “considerable evidence of possible harm” because beef tallow raises LDL cholesterol, the kind of cholesterol that causes heart attacks and strokes.

The game also says we shouldn’t read food labels and was clearly made to push the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda on children not old enough to understand that this administration does not actually want to make any of us healthy.

The final game features “Flappy Bill,” a bald eagle who is tasked with carrying legislation across the National Mall. Changes to the National Mall have become an important vanity project for the president, so this one may have been included to placate his need for this to be at the center of everything.

Some of these are more grotesque than the others, but they all serve the same purpose: distract us with pixelated nostalgia and brainwash our children.

The Tetris Company, which had nothing to do with any of these games, released a statement distancing itself from this online arcade: “At Tetris we believe in the power of connection and bringing people together, not dividing them. To our fans everywhere: we love you, we see you, and we’re grateful to have you in our community.” They closed with four red heart emojis. Above their statement, they wrote, “P.S. The Tetris Company was not involved in the creation of ‘Build the Wall’. P.P.S. We take copyright infringement very seriously.” It is a very upside-down world when a company that made a game about falling blocks had to remind the United States government what kindness looks like. The Tetris Company’s response received 3.8 million views and 123,000 likes. There are still good people in this world.

Like so many of us, I never imagined the United States of America ever publishing something like this on its official website, but that is where we are as a country right now. After decades of fighting racism and making strides toward finally ending this deeply rooted injustice, the Trump administration is pulling us back to darker times, and they know one of the fastest ways to do it. Through our children.

Kids are not born racist. No child comes into this world hating someone because of the color of their skin. That is learned and absorbed after being exposed to it. We have known this for a long time. Studies show us that children begin noticing and categorizing race remarkably early, long before they can understand what those differences mean, and by the preschool years they are already beginning to pick up on the social cues around them, including which groups are treated positively and which are treated negatively or as threats. They don’t even have to be told any of this explicitly. They learn it from their surroundings. Images, words, and tone teach them how to feel, all things they can see in an online game on their screens. When a child sits down and plays a game where the objective is to chase people with brown skin, collect them, and then be rewarded with bragging rights and a higher score, that can teach a child an important lesson. These types of lessons are ones they might not even realize are being taught. It all becomes automatic and just the way things are. By the time that child is old enough to question it, they might not even realize there is another way, and so they don’t even know to ask the important questions.

Every parent and parental figure understands this. We can see our children start absorbing the world around them in the smallest ways that often have the biggest impacts. When my youngest was little, she went through a Peppa Pig phase. One winter, we were up in Carmel while I was writing a travel story, and she kept asking us for a “bucket and spade.” We had no idea what she wanted as she grew more frustrated by the moment, resorting to charades to get us to understand. We understood the bucket part easily enough; she wanted to go down to the beach and play in the sand, even though it was cold outside. But the spade request kept throwing us off. Finally, she made a digging motion with her hand, and I said, “A shovel?” She said, “I don’t know.” I pulled up a picture on my phone and showed her, and she said, “Yeah, a spade.” In a British accent. Because that is what Peppa Pig called it. A cartoon pig that she loved but only watched a handful of times. At that age, she was so impressionable that her vocabulary had been rewired without us even realizing it had happened.

It was a funny moment that we still laugh about. But it illustrates how dangerous these games are to our children’s minds. Children take in whatever is placed in front of them and build their understanding of the world from it. That is how their brains are supposed to work so that they can learn language, empathy, boundaries, humor, and trust. It is also how they learn fear, suspicion, and hatred. These games are not trying to educate our youth; they are trying to indoctrinate them into the MAGA universe.

Authoritarian regimes have long understood this, which is why the indoctrination of children has been such a large part of their strategy and why they often begin in ways that do not necessarily look violent at all. The Hitler Youth drew young people in with camping trips, athletics, camaraderie, and a sense of purpose and belonging. The ideology was woven into those activities until obedience, sacrifice, and loyalty to the regime became part of what children were being taught. Eventually, they were being prepared to fight and even die for the cause. A cause they had been taught was worth fighting and dying for. Mussolini had the Opera Nazionale Balilla. The Soviet Union had the Young Pioneers. These regimes and movements understood the same principle: raising children inside these systems made it far less likely that they would ever question them.

That is what this arcade is; it is not just a distraction; it is how they are normalizing the cruelty and the takeover of our country. And they are targeting our most impressionable minds. At any other time in my life, I would never have hesitated to let one of my children explore the White House website. We have used it as a resource in the past. It had a wealth of information on the branches of government, the history of the building, and the names of the presidents. My children used it for school projects, and I felt comfortable that the information they saw was reputable and could be trusted. That is no longer the case. The trust is completely gone now.

That official website now has a kids’ game where they can hunt people for points. That loss of trust creates an even greater issue because that lack of trust does not stay pointed just at our government or its leaders. It trickles into everything. It changes how we look at our other institutions, our law enforcement, doctors, neighbors, and each other. Even when we do not want it to, and when we actively resist it, the erosion they have created seeps into all aspects of our lives. When a government proves it cannot be trusted with something as basic as its own website, that suspicion just keeps spreading.

Everyone needs to know that the White House website is now hosting games designed to teach kids that chasing immigrants is fun and that deportation is a competition with a measurable score. We need to make sure that everyone responsible for a child knows to keep their young one away from them. They seem flashy and fun, and that makes them even more dangerous. Share this information online and offline. Let’s make sure the people in our lives who have children understand exactly what these games are, and what they are teaching. This isn’t about politics. This is about protecting children from being trained to dehumanize other human beings.

When I get frustrated by the complete disregard for what America used to stand for, where this kind of stunt would never have happened, I remember that these people are building their own grave for their party. The signs of an even greater fracture in the GOP are growing stronger.

The Washington Post reported this past week that several Republican congressional candidates have decided not to mention, or are downplaying any mentions of the president during their campaigning. Politico surveyed more than 70 Republican candidates and members about the upcoming midterm convention, which will be held in Dallas next week, and most are not planning to attend.

The convention is the first midterm convention in American history, and is tangible proof of how bad things are for the GOP. House Republicans are being charged $25,000 just to attend, and a photo with the president reportedly costs $88,600. A seat at his roundtable costs $250,000. Even Tim Burchett, one of Trump’s staunchest allies in Congress, said: “I don’t know. It’s $25,000 apparently. I just got a bill. I’m not sure.” Maybe they are starting to see that everything is a money-grab opportunity for Donald Trump and that all he cares about is his own power. He has no loyalty to any party, let alone his own, and his own people are finally starting to see it.  

Global Politics, Economy, Trade, Tariffs, Jobs, Markets

New York Times, Live Updates: Germany’s Far Right Has Big Lead in Key Election, Exit Polls Show, Jim Tankersley and Christopher F. Schuetze, Sept. 6, 2026. The Alternative for Germany party was projected to finish first in theeastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. But it was not clear whether it would win a majority — whichwould propel a far-right party into power for the first time since World War II.

Exit polls on Sunday projected that the Alternative for Germany party would finish first in a crucial state election, raising the possibility that the far right might take power in part of the country for the first time since the end of the Nazi era.

The exit polls, published by German public television stations, suggested that the party, known by its German initials AfD, would win between 39 and 41 seats in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, just short of an absolute majority of 42, but far ahead of its nearest rival.

Russia's War Against Ukraine, Europe, The West

Why It Matters with Alexander Vindman, Analysis and Opinion: Russian Sabotage Ops in Europe, Alexander Vindman, Sept. 6, 2026. As the Russian War Machine Sputters in Eastern Ukraine, Moscow Turns to Active Measures to Warn-Off European Support.

German police with a bomb-disposal robot near a Ukrainian aircraft at Leipzig airport

Explosions at an Italian shell factory. Jammed signals around the Baltic Sea. Drones and munitions found at a German airport. Disruptions in transportation, trade, and commerce.

With diminishing gains on the battlefield of an increasingly unpopular war, Moscow has turned its attention towards soft targets in Europe. With the diminishing returns of strikes on military and civilian targets in Ukraine, the Russian military and security services are leveraging the openness of European democracies to attack civilian and military targets through sabotage operations. Leveraging a large network of spies and criminal network accomplices, Russia is deploying saboteurs to disrupt the infrastructure and production centers critical to Ukraine’s war effort as well as unrelated civilian infrastructure in an effort to raise the cost of supporting Ukraine. Putin’s theory is that these attacks will erode support for Ukraine and position Russia for better prospects in the war or future peace negotiations.

This isn’t a new trend. The practice called “active measures” dates back to the heights of the Cold War and has revived and grown since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. Now with Russia’s military prospects on the decline, Russian active measures have surged. European law enforcement bodies and counter-intelligence agencies have been uncovering and dismantling networks of Russian agents for the last four and a half years - however, the scale of activities in the last six months has triggered major concerns over potential escalation. These activities were likely the cause behind CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s recent trip to Moscow.

Who are these agents of chaos and destruction? Sometimes these individuals are FSB and GRU officers, oftentimes operating with deep-cover and false identities (these operatives are colloquially known as the “illegals”). These agents have been activated after living years of living a double life in countries like Slovenia. These assets serve Moscow’s interest by attempting to infiltrate western organizations like the ICC or by committing overt acts of sabotage, like attempting to smuggle explosives into commercial airliners. Operations are sometimes executed using less-sophisticated actors: disposable “single use” agents are contacted and coordinated by Russian intelligence through platforms like Telegram (essentially functioning as gig-economy workers for sabotage operations). The primary goal of these operations is to disrupt western support for the Ukrainian military by delaying deliveries and physically destroying assets. The secondary goal is to erode public support for Ukraine across Europe by presenting acts of chaos and destruction as being an unavoidable associated cost of western support for Kyiv.

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My assessment is that the Russian military is acutely aware of its own limitations and is turning towards sabotage operations to compensate for a lack of progress in the military campaign in Ukraine. At this point in the war, Ukraine’s advances in drone technology and domestic defense-tech have turned what was initially a David-and-Goliath struggle into a conflict between near-peer militaries. Despite an advantage in manpower, a larger supply of munitions and equipment, and a massive military-industrial base, Russia has shown itself to be incapable of decisive military operations and has become increasingly hesitant to commit to the same high-attrition battles and prolonged urban campaigns that defined the first years of Russia’s ongoing invasion. A sudden spike in casualties and the necessary mass mobilization required to maintain military operations could break the illusion of a successful war that Putin is trying to preserve. The flight of 113,000 Russians in response to rumors of a coming mobilization suggests that much of the Russian public would not be aligned with a full pivot to war-footing. Hence, Russia is willing to engage in active measures and direct attacks on Europe to undercut Ukraine’s war effort and pressure Europe to press Ukraine for peace. Unfortunately for Putin, he has once again miscalculated Ukraine’s and Europe’s resolve to deliver a Russian defeat and end an era of Russian aggression.

The recent incident at Leipzig airport marks a turning point in Europe’s approach towards Russian sabotage operations. According to German authorities, a UAV containing explosives failed to detonate and was found near a Ukrainian cargo plane. Later, a second UAV collided with a civilian Boeing 757 during a landing attempt. A third UAV was recovered on the grounds of the airport days later. Germany’s willingness to directly attribute this attack to the Russian government is a sign that Berlin has reached the limits of its patience. We can expect a combination of political and diplomatic responses from Berlin and Europe in response to Russia’s sabotage campaign, ranging from standard-fare expulsion of diplomatic staff to a concentrated effort by Europe’s security apparatus to detect and prevent active measures.

The more interesting developments will happen away from the public view as hybrid wars require hybrid solutions. Germany and other large western European countries may join the central and eastern European members of NATO and the EU in providing intelligence resources and enabling active measures against the Russian war machine. In lieu of a risk-averse policy of deescalation and appeasement, we could see the start of a tit-for-tat campaign by the Europeans against Russian assets. European security structures will heighten detection and interdiction of Russian assets and intelligence agencies may target the web of critical industries and pipelines around the world to disrupt Russia’s war machine. Just as Moscow frames chaos and destruction in Europe as the cost of supporting Ukraine, Europe may present increased sanctions and further exclusion from the world economy as a cost of allying with Russia.

As we transition into the winter months, we can expect a decrease in the tempo and scale of operations along the line of contact in Eastern Ukraine. Sabotage and disruption will be the focus of Russia’s strategy towards Europe and allies of Ukraine. An increasingly desperate Russia may turn its focus away from supply chains and logistics and instead orchestrate mass-casualty events near the winter holidays - time will show if Europe and the United States will meet this challenge.

New York Times, In Ukraine, Fraud and Waste Are Rewarded With More Weapons Contracts, Andrew E. Kramer, Bianca Pallaro and Evelina Riabenko, Sept. 6, 2026. Secret military audits reveal a military procurement system riddled with mismanagement. In 2024 alone, Ukraine lost $1.2 billion to fraud and waste.

As Russian soldiers attacked trench lines in eastern Ukraine in 2024, Ukrainian artillery crews opened fire. But the rounds, instead of exploding near the advancing troops, flopped out of launch tubes or landed with quiet thumps, kicking up puffs of dust.

A Ukrainian arms factory, it turned out, had supplied the military with thousands of defective mortar rounds. A burly weapons factory boss, Leonid Shyman, would eventually be arrested and charged in one of the war’s most public examples of defense-industry fraud.

But even as the officials noticed that weapons were arriving faulty, government audits obtained by The New York Times show, Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency continued to award Mr. Shyman’s factory new contracts.

The case reflects a persistent phenomenon of the war in Ukraine. Seven of Ukraine’s top 10 military contractors won new business despite open criminal investigations for fraud, failures to deliver on earlier deals or the arrest of chief executives for corruption, according to the government audits obtained by The Times, court records and Ukrainian news accounts.

Mr. Shyman, for example, had been the subject of multiple investigations by anti-corruption agencies, including for embezzlement and fraud, when he won that first mortar contract. The government awarded the $280 million deal while he was out on bail on corruption charges.

Confidential reviews by the State Audit Service and an internal Ministry of Defense auditing department reveal a military procurement system riddled with mismanagement. Warning signs go unheeded, the records show, and there are seldom consequences for overcharging or failing to deliver.

Companies won contracts without demonstrating that they could supply the weapons, or without licenses to deliver them. Auditors identified 18 companies that signed deals despite defaulting on previous agreements. Six of those companies failed to fulfill a single contract.

Military contractors around the globe, including the world’s richest arms dealer as well as Ukrainian and American companies, have gotten wealthy through this system.

The internal government audits showed that in 2024 alone, Ukraine lost about $1.2 billion to fraud, waste and mismanagement.

Those losses, which have not been made public, piled up even as President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to allies for more weaponry and financial aid.

“The army doesn’t get what it needs and the budget shrinks from non-deliveries and overpayment,” Tamerlan Vahabov, a former adviser to Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency, said in an interview. “As a result, we don’t have money to order more weapons. And we don’t have the quantity of ammunition we need. And it is a recurring pattern.”

Global Economy, Trade, Tariffs, Jobs, Markets

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Weaponized Interdependence, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 6, 2026. Who has the power in a trading world?

On Friday Donald Trump threatened to cut off all trade with nations with which the United States runs a trade deficit. His demand, oddly, was directed at the Federal Reserve: He would impose trade embargoes unless the Fed cuts interest rates. I won’t even try to untangle his logic, if there is any, because today’s primer isn’t about Trump. It is, instead, about how to think about a world in which governments — even the government of the United States, which created the rules-based trading system that prevailed until recently — increasingly use threats to cut off international trade as a tool of coercion.

“Geoeconomics” — the study of the ways governments can use national economic strength in pursuit of geopolitical objectives — is a hot topic right now, both among scholars and at international institutions. The International Monetary Fund made geoeconomics the theme of the June issue of its F&D magazine. Geoeconomics is the theme of the European Central Bank’s annual research conference, taking place next week, at which I’m giving a talk on “economic size and economic power.” Back in August I posted a primer on relevant measures of economic size. Today, continuing my homework for the talk, I’m writing about economic power.

Specifically, I want to talk about “weaponized interdependence,” a term coined in 2019 by the political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman. Farrell and Newman focused mainly on national governments’ efforts to exploit their control of international networks, such as America’s use of the dollar’s central role in the international monetary system to impose sanctions on nations it considers hostile. At this point, however, weaponized interdependence is everywhere: Iran attempting to force the United States to call off its war by closing the Strait of Hormuz, China threatening the West with a cutoff of rare earths, the Trump administration using the threat of tariffs to pressure Canada to remove cultural protections for French — or become the 51st state?

But how should we think about weaponized interdependence? There is a rapidly burgeoning theoretical and empirical research literature on geoeconomics, surveyed for example by Mohr and Trebesch (2025.) I am not a contributor to this literature, just a consumer! But this rapidly growing field isn’t yet part of the standard way we teach international economics, let alone the way people influential in policy discuss the world. So what I thought I could do today is lay out in a very simple, maybe simplistic way what I believe to be some of the main insights from thinking about international trade as a potential tool of coercion — and what it says about the current global situation.

Beyond the paywall I will address the following:

1. What is weaponized interdependence, and how does it differ from “trade war”?

2. The sources of trade-related power

3. The special case of depression economics

4. Who has economic power in today’s world?

5. Trade in a weaponized world

U.S. Law, Crime, Political Prosecutions In-Depth Analysis

Mobology with Dan Moldea, After Speaker Livingston resigned, President Clinton’s approval rating skyrocketed to an all-time high. . . . . . . “You’re welcome” (Part 10), Dan E. Moldea, right, Sept. 6, 2026. A whimsical gimmick had evolved into a lethal weapon. The 2026 midterm elections are drawing near. And there are lessons to be learned. . . . Here at Mobology, the past is prologue. Through this series, I hope to contribute to the ongoing action by revisiting the drama of the last major crisis in the American presidency. I played a little-known but key role in that story.

My May 24 column detailed how I became involved in the investigation of Vincent Foster’s death (Part 1), followed by Part 2 (July 12), Part 3 (July 19), Part 4 (July 26), Part 5 (August 2), Part 6 (August 9), Part 7 (August 16), Part 8 (August 23), and Part 9 (August 30).

Today, September 6, I publish Part 10, the first of the final three installments of this series. This is the first time I’ve offered much of this updated story to Mobology subscribers.

A brief celebration

When I arrived in Los Angeles after Bob Livingston’s resignation and President Bill Clinton’s impeachment, I rented a Thunderbird at LAX and checked into my hotel. The desk clerk gave me a message to meet Larry Flynt at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills.

Instead of the strictly business‑like atmosphere of our first meeting on December 7, this gathering was much more comfortable and familiar.

When I saw Allan MacDonell, we grabbed each other. Then, I went to Flynt, bent down to him in his gold-plated wheelchair, and hugged him, too.

The three of us agreed that Livingston’s resignation—and our unilateral role that forced the decision—had stopped a runaway train.

In other words, we might have just helped to save the Clinton Presidency.

That evening, alone in my hotel suite, I backslid momentarily, feeling like a freelance hitman who had just taken sides in a local mob war.

But as the long night wore on, I kept reminding myself, over and over again, why I had joined this crusade in the first place.

And then, I remembered the Washington journalists who had taken the side of Kenneth Starr and the OIC, accepting their questionable leaks while covertly shilling for the prosecution—in the midst of pretending to be objective reporters while being identified as confidential informants by the OIC. All the while, they were well paid by their employers and received six‑figure book contracts for the inside stories about their investigations of the President’s sex life.

Now, at least for the moment, I was performing a short-term high-wire act for pornographer Larry Flynt—perhaps the king of the First Amendment. To me, Flynt’s cause was righteous and worth everything I was risking.

By the next morning, I had overcome any lingering doubts about my mission and went back to work.

Meantime, the public opinion polls confirmed what we already knew. The CNN/Gallup/USA Today polling group discovered that on December 20, the day after impeachment and Livingston’s resignation, the President’s approval rating had skyrocketed to 73 percent, an all-time high—while the Republicans’ favorability rating had dropped to 31 percent.[1]The prosecutor and his brother, the juror

On December 21, while working in Los Angeles, I obtained evidence—not from someone on our original list—about Republican Senator Tim Hutchinson’s affair with a young law student who had also worked as his legislative director in Arkansas.

I wrote a memorandum to Flynt and MacDonell, saying:

Tim Hutchinson has allegedly been having a long-term affair with [the woman]. He is the brother of Rep. Asa Hutchinson, a [U.S. House] manager in the Senate trial, who has been taking the legal and moral high ground against the President. . . . Allegedly, Hutchinson’s wife became aware of the affair and created a scene in the office, causing [the woman] to quit. However, according to the source, Hutchinson, despite his pledges to the contrary, allegedly can’t stay away from her. . . .

For the record, no one has signed a confidentiality agreement on this matter. . . .[2]

Consequently, we were faced with the dilemma of what to do with this information about a House Manager/prosecutor (Asa) and his brother, a Senator/juror (Tim) in the upcoming Senate trial of President Clinton.

If we pulled the trigger, could we be legitimately accused of tampering with the jury?Flynt orders me to stand down on Livingston

Meanwhile, on December 22, Larry received a telephone call from Bonnie Livingston, a courageous and loyal woman, who politely asked him to stop investigating her husband. Press reports widely identified Mrs. Livingston as the person who convinced him to resign from Congress.

Moved by her emotional appeal, Flynt—struck by the human toll of his project, which had started out as a whimsical gimmick but had now evolved into a lethal weapon—ordered me to back off my ongoing probe of Livingston.

Because Livingston had threatened Flynt in that day’s New York Times—saying that Flynt “would eventually get his ‘just rewards’”—I protested and wanted to continue.[3] But seeing that Flynt was showing genuine and sincere compassion for Mrs. Livingston and her family, I relented and agreed to end my investigation of her husband.

In a December 27 article by reporter Steve Profitt of the Los Angeles Times who had interviewed Flynt, the journalist wrote:

Would it be at all ironic, then, if it turns out the white knight in this current round of sexual McCarthyism is the pornographer Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine, the anti‑Christ of family values . . . .

Flynt, a Democrat, says he has evidence of sexual misconduct by a number of other Republicans, and he threatens to publish the details sometime after the new year.

Yet, if you believe him, Flynt would rather not publish the dirt he bought with his million‑dollar reward. In fact, he says, his intent is to stop the prying and probing into private sex lives altogether by applying his own brand of mutually assured destruction. . . .

[Flynt concluded,] “Pundits and politicians can talk until they’re blue in the face about perjury and obstruction of justice by Bill Clinton, but it all comes down to sex. The man had an affair, and he lied about it.”[4]

Flynt announces more revelations

On ABC’s Good Morning America, host Elizabeth Vargas asked Flynt, “How many people do you plan to target in this campaign of yours?”

Flynt replied:

We have eight other investigations that I feel very strongly about. And if any of them materialize, the Republican Party will be in shambles, because they’re all right‑wing conservative Republicans.

Later in the program, Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, revealed:

I’ve talked to a bunch of Republicans this weekend. And I have to say the issue of Larry Flynt and what he was going to reveal and how that will be treated by the media was the number‑one topic of conversation. . . . It’s personally somewhat sickening to me that Larry Flynt is now driving the nation’s political agenda.[5]

Senator Frank Lautenberg (D‑New Jersey), during an appearance on MSNBC, had a different opinion about our project, saying:

Larry Flynt says his mission is against hypocrisy and, boy, I think that’s a pretty good mission!

ShareMrs. Barr makes a difficult decision

One of the callers on Flynt’s original list of tipsters was an anonymous person who claimed but could not prove that Gail Barr—the second of the three wives of Representative Bob Barr, the congressman who had filed the original articles of impeachment against the President long before Monica Lewinsky became a household name—had an abortion while married to Barr, who had an alleged history of philandering.

Significantly, Barr had actively portrayed himself as an anti-abortion, pro‑family advocate, widely supported by the religious right. In fact, Barr, a member of the Pro‑Life Caucus, had stated in a speech on August 4, 1992, “I would do absolutely everything in my power to stop” a family member from having an abortion.

Notably, the Republican majority in the U.S. House named Barr as one of the thirteen House Managers, designated as the official prosecution team during the Senate trial of Bill Clinton.

Hoping to get the goods, Flynt sent me to Marietta, Georgia, on December 3, 1998, to investigate Barr. During that trip, I could not find any evidence of the alleged abortion, but I did discover that Gail Barr had filed three separate legal complaints against Bob Barr between 1985 and 1995—all stemming from their decision to divorce, which became final in 1986.

However, after collecting and reviewing everything available in Cobb County’s Hall of Records, I realized that Bob and Gail Barr’s sworn depositions were not part of the public record.

Also, I learned that Bob Barr had married his third wife within days of his final divorce decree, raising suspicions that Barr had been seeing this woman while he was still married to Gail, who had been in the midst of a bout with cancer.

Furthermore, I was surprised to learn that adultery was illegal in Georgia. For anyone else, I could not have cared less. But for Barr—whose mantra on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and now as a House Manager was “the rule of law”—I wanted to press the issue. More importantly, I knew Flynt would want to drive that point home.

I photocopied everything available about Barr v. Barr, and overnighted the certified originals to Flynt, keeping copies for my files.

Then, I contacted Mrs. Barr.

During my first call, she was busy and had no time for me. But the second time I called, she listened to my best pitch about something she appeared to have no interest. I left her my contact information and hoped for the best.

Soon after, I received a call from Mrs. Barr’s attorney who seemed willing to open negotiations. At the conclusion of our first conversation, I sent him a confidentiality agreement for his client’s signature.

On December 21—while I was in California, two days after Bob Livingston’s resignation and the President’s impeachment by the full House—I arranged for Mrs. Barr’s attorney to fly to Los Angeles the next day to meet with Flynt, Allan MacDonell, Alan Isaacman, and me in Flynt’s office.

At the start of the meeting, the attorney showed us the sealed depositions in Barr v. Barr. These sworn statements indicated that Bob Barr—in 1986, the year he became U.S. Attorney in Atlanta—had allegedly been having an affair with the woman who became his third wife. But, when confronted about this subject by Gail’s attorney during his sworn deposition, Bob Barr had allegedly balked and then gave the Georgia state‑law equivalent of the Fifth Amendment.

Also, Gail Barr’s attorney—who confirmed that she did have an abortion—brought along the receipt from the abortion clinic, which we would also receive as part of her proposed deal.

After hearing the attorney’s offer, Alan Isaacman, Larry’s attorney, suggested that the value of the depositions would be greatly enhanced if Gail executed a sworn affidavit, detailing, among other matters, the episode about the abortion.

The deal would later be signed, sealed, and delivered—although we never disclosed how much money Mrs. Barr received.

Following that, our team met to discuss when to release the details of our investigation of Bob Barr.

Who got Bob Livingston?”

Meantime, in the aftermath of Speaker‑designate Bob Livingston’s startling admission to the Republican caucus on December 17, 1998, and his jaw-dropping resignation two days later—two events which took the Congress, the White House, and the media completely by surprise—the search intensified for Larry Flynt’s still‑anonymous investigator.[6]

Underscoring the mystery, reporter Mary Leonard of the Boston Globe asked:

Who got Bob Livingston? It has become a hot question since the speaker‑designate shocked the House on Saturday with his decision to decline the leadership post and resign from Congress.[7]

Actually, the hottest false rumor was that Flynt had hired a team of former CIA and FBI agents to investigate the Republicans.

That was my favorite theory—that a team of professional intelligence agents was doing the job that I was doing alone.Flynt gives me cover

I still had high hopes of completing my work for Flynt and then taking a quick ride out of Dodge without ever being identified, à la The Lone Ranger, my favorite childhood television character.

Even though I was proud of what I had done and why I had done it, the jihad between President Clinton’s enemies and his supporters threatened to annihilate anyone who entered—or got dragged into—the fray.

I already had a taste of that through the chain of events which began with the publication of my book about Vincent Foster’s suicide in April 1998 that led to my affidavit on the alleged leaks from Kenneth Starr’s office, which I submitted to Judge Norma Holloway Johnson on August 24, 1998—three months before I joined The Flynt Project on November 23.

To protect me, Flynt was intentionally coy about the specific identity of his investigator. Consequently, knee‑jerk speculation pointed to the highly respected Terry Lenzner, the president of the Washington‑based Investigative Group International, who was also a friend of President Clinton.

On the MSNBC program, News Chat, on December 21, host John Gibson asked Flynt, “Can you tell me it is not Terry Lenzner, the P.I. firm that has done the investigation for the White House and the President’s defense team?”

“I’m not answering that question,” Flynt replied sharply.

Another guest, GOP consultant Craig Shirley, snapped back, “You can put that down as a yes, John.”

Flynt responded, “You can’t put that down as a yes or a no, either one. I’m not going to answer it.”

“Larry,” Gibson continued, “do you understand how this looks? It now appears that the President has given a wink and a nudge to Larry Flynt and said, ‘Go get him,’ and that Larry Flynt is.”

“No. That’s not true at all,” insisted Flynt, who was telling the truth.

That same day, Mark Levin, the head of the Landmark Legal Foundation—another right‑wing, Richard Scaife‑funded operation—issued a statement, claiming:

Last Friday, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who is paying $1 million for embarrassing information on Republican officials—and helped end the political career of would‑be House Speaker Bob Livingston . . . would not deny that Terry Lenzner, the private detective hired by the president to trash his adversaries, is working for him. Flynt promises more disclosures.

On December 28, Lenzner released his formal denial to MSNBC, saying in a written statement:

The Investigative Group categorically denies ever having been retained by Hustler magazine to conduct any investigation or inquiry at any time. We have never spoken to Larry Flynt or any agent or representative of Mr. Flynt. Furthermore, Investigative Group has never conducted an investigation of Speaker Livingston nor were we asked to do so.

Flynt and I felt horrible about placing Lenzner, whom we both respected, in such an awkward position.[8] However, at that time, I was still working alone and juggling numerous investigations.

I was praying for continued anonymity.

ShareFlynt outs me in his response to Rep. Barr

On the same day as Lenzner’s denial, Representative Bob Barr sent Flynt a letter, stating:

I have been informed you are publishing an article in your magazine, Hustler, suggesting that I have lied under oath. Such an allegation is outrageous and absolutely untrue. As a lawyer and officer of the court for over 20 years, and a former United States Attorney sworn to uphold the laws of the United States, I have never lied under sworn oath.

Consider yourself on notice this entirely unfounded and salacious accusation is false, and uttering it through your magazine would demonstrate an utter and malicious disregard for the truth.

In response, Flynt drafted a letter on January 5, 1999—saying:

I do want to advise you that we are investigating various allegations involving your moral and ethical conduct in relation to subjects upon which you have taken a public position.

If you would like to comment on these allegations, please call my investigator, Dan Moldea. (Emphasis added)

Flynt included my telephone number in Washington.

Before sending this letter, Flynt’s executive assistant telephoned and read it to me, asking for my thoughts. I repeated that I still had a great deal to do and didn’t want to be recognized or hassled while doing it, adding that Barr would not keep the name of Flynt’s mystery investigator a secret.

She responded that she completely understood my concerns and said that she would have Flynt call me.

A few minutes later, Larry, who sounded very ill, phoned and said that he had given this matter a great deal of thought and decided that we had to give Barr an opportunity to respond to what we were about to reveal about his second wife, Gail Barr.

Yielding to Flynt’s sense of fairness, I reluctantly consented to the letter, as written.

However, I predicted that when I was publicly identified as his investigator, the news would be a total anticlimax—since the President’s enemies were hoping that someone very well known and close to the White House had been doing all these investigations.

Regardless, Flynt and I agreed that the time had come for us to take the White House—as well as Terry Lenzner and even James Carville—off the hook.[9]

Once again, they never had anything to do with us or what we were doing.My defense strategy

Knowing that it would be just a matter of time before my role as Flynt’s investigator became public—and that the right‑wing media was going to try to tear my head off—I asked a trusted friend who owned a high-tech firm in Washington to create a website for me, moldea.com. It would allow me to respond quickly to what I knew would be an immediate onslaught of false and misleading accusations, disinformation, and flat-out lies.

Along with a collection of materials about my career as an independent crime reporter and author, I posted a lengthy excerpt of my book about Foster’s suicide and my August 24 affidavit on OIC leaks, which I believed would clarify much of what I had done since the book’s publication in April 1998.

Then, I braced for the absolute worst, wondering how the initial assault against me would come.

A few days later, I received a call from Newsweek. . . .

ShareENDNOTES

1. CNN, Inside Politics, “President Buoyed by Highest-Ever Approval Numbers; Livingston’s Resignation Sends Scarlet Letter to Congress,” December 21, 1998.

2. In the end, Flynt decided not to break this story first. Later, Senator Hutchinson, an ordained minister, divorced his wife of twenty-nine years and married his young mistress. In 2002, he lost his bid for reelection.

3. Katharine Q. Seelye, New York Times, “Resignation Was Prompted by Desire to Make a Point,” December 22, 1998.

4. Steve Proffitt, Los Angeles Times, “Los Angeles Times Interview: Larry Flynt,” December 27, 1998.

5. ABC, Good Morning America, “Impeachment Trial Moves into High Gear,” January 11, 1999.

6. Speaking of Bob Livingston’s resignation on CNN’s Capital Gang on December 19, 1998, reporter Margaret Carlson of Time summed up the moment earlier that morning for her colleagues in the Washington press corps, saying:

Well, in the chaotic world we’re now living in, it would be foolish to predict that A is going to have any effect on B. This morning at the office, [the news of Livingston’s resignation] hit like a thunderclap, so much so that no one even pretended to be in the know. We admitted we were completely surprised. (Emphasis added)

During a CNN special on the impeachment the following day, correspondent Jeff Greenfield stated:

The most surprising, the most dramatic news of the day wasn’t impeachment; it was the resignation of Livingston, because nobody expected it. . . . Livingston did something that, in a way, hadn’t been done since Lyndon Johnson renounced the presidency in March of ‘68. He did something nobody expected. (Emphasis added)

7. Mary Leonard, Boston Globe, “Livingston exit deepens partisan rancor,” December 24, 1998.

8. Flynt told me that he had never met Terry Lenzner. I had only met Lenzner once—at a book party in Washington for agent/author David Obst, nearly two months before I accepted the assignment with Flynt. During the party, Lenzner and I shook hands and spoke to each other—with mutual friends present. We never had a private conversation.

Lenzner died on April 23, 2020.

9. Although Flynt had never met President Clinton, to whom he had contributed money and voted for in 1992 and 1996, James Carville, the President’s most loyal defender, had played the role of Flynt’s prosecutor in Miloš Forman’s highly praised 1996 motion picture, The People vs. Larry Flynt.

However, according to the public statements of both parties, Carville had no connection to The Flynt Project.

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Flyspeck! DOJ Has Nothing — Except Todd Blanche’s Audition — to Explain Why They Sold Seashells by the Seashore, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right,), Sept. 6, 2026. I’m going to do a substantive post on Jim Comey’s selective and vindictive challenge (motion to dismiss, response, reply). But first I want to look at a particular rebuttal Comey makes that may provide larger lessons about DOJ’s weaponization in the last year.

Comey’s reply spends a lot of time rebutting DOJ’s general response (in which DOJ had US Attorney Ellis Boyle write an affidavit disclaiming he had any animus to Comey, and then claimed that you must prove that a prosecutor himself had animus; this is how DOJ defeated Hunter Biden’s meritorious vindictive prosecution motions). It also dismantles one after another of Boyle’s (or perhaps Stan Woodward’s — I’ll come back to that) dumb misrepresentations.

In Comey’s Motion to Dismiss, a very long section lays out the history of politicization in Trump’s DOJ generally and against Comey specifically (but of course Comey was always at the center of it). That section makes a two-step argument about timing: The investigation was renewed after the EDVA case flopped, and then it was charged as Todd Blanche auditioned for the Attorney General job starting in April.

Days after the district court’s dismissal of the indictment, Director Patel publicly stated that the FBI and DOJ were “not done” and “ha[d] numerous options to proceed” against Mr. Comey. Kash Patel Reveals FBI, DOJ Executing ‘Multiple’ Options on James Comey, Newsweek (Nov. 29, 2025), http://perma.cc/XV4L-KYRW.

[snip]

And in April 2026, President Trump suggested that the government was continuing to investigate Mr. Comey, stating that Mr. Comey was a “dirty cop” and “we’re not gonna stand for it.” Jennifer Bowers Bahney, Trump Says ‘I Don’t Know’ If There’s Any Evidence Against Top Dem He Wants to Indict, Yahoo News (Apr. 13, 2026), https://perma.cc/PH3H-D3RC.

That same month, President Trump fired Attorney General Bondi, reportedly because “she couldn’t deliver on his agenda, including the effort to prosecute some of his political enemies.” Monica Alba et al., As Comey is indicted, Trump is said to be happy with acting Attorney General Blanche, NBC News (Apr. 29, 2026), https://perma.cc/P3W5-8E85. The President named Mr. Blanche as Acting Attorney General. In mid-April 2026, President Trump reportedly told Mr. Blanche that he was “audition[ing]” for a permanent appointment as Attorney General. Katelyn Caralle, Top White House officials encouraged potential Bondi replacement to make case to Trump for AG job: Sources, Fox News (Apr. 11, 2026), https://perma.cc/6YM9-FWZ8. Mr. Blanche responded by “ma[king] it clear to senior White House officials that he plans to move more efficiently than Ms. Bondi against Mr. Trump’s targets.” Glenn Thrush et al., Todd Blanche Targets Trump’s Enemies Amid Jockeying to Lead Justice Dept., N.Y. Times (Apr. 24, 2026), https://perma.cc/2EXZ-47SA. He embraced President Trump’s September 2025 post, stating the President’s instruction to the former Attorney General that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED” should make Americans “happy.” Laura Jarrett & Ryan J. Reilly, Todd Blanche Says Americans Should be ‘Happy’ Trump is Deeply Involved in DOJ, NBC News (Apr. 14, 2026), https://perma.cc/T8JE-FERA. “At Mr. Blanche’s urging,” the DOJ moved quickly to effectuate the President’s wishes. Thrush et al., Todd Blanche Targets Trump’s Enemies,supra. Mr. Blanche “g[ave] the green light” to investigations into Cassidy Hutchinson (a former White House aide who testified about President Trump’s involvement in the January 6, 2021 riot), Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, and civil rights organization the Southern Poverty Law Center. Id.

Mr. Blanche also “plan[ned] to revive” efforts to prosecute Mr. Comey after the “botched attempt” in the Eastern District of Virginia. Id. To that end, Mr. Blanche “creat[ed] a special position” within the DOJ for Joseph diGenova, a longtime Trump lawyer who had previously advocated for Mr. Comey’s prosecution. Paul Sperry, Russiagate Prosecutor Calls Audible on ‘Grand Conspiracy,’ WFMZ (June 25, 2026), https://perma.cc/JG84-K2WQ. Mr. Blanche “put [Mr. diGenova] in charge” of investigating a supposed grand conspiracy against President Trump involving Mr. Comey. Thrush, Todd Blanche Targets Trump’s Enemies, supra. Previously, Ms. Bondi had “got[ten] in the way” of these efforts. Id. This appointment followed the removal of a career prosecutor from the case. Charlie Savage & Alan Feuer, U.S. Installs a Trump Loyalist to Lead ‘Grand Conspiracy’ Case Into Trump Foes, N.Y. Times (Apr. 18, 2026), https://perma.cc/YG9V-MTNQ.

The DOJ also set its sights on prosecuting Mr. Comey for his seashells post from a year earlier. As Attorney General, Ms. Bondi had reportedly “pushed her team to keep pursuing” the Eastern District of Virginia case against Mr. Comey, “concluding that [the] case was significantly stronger than potential charges based in North Carolina.” Carol Leonnig & Fallon Gallagher, ‘Seashells’ Case was on Back Burner Until Bondi Fired as AG, say sources, MS Now (Apr. 30, 2026), https://perma.cc/S8VG-M89S. As Deputy Attorney General, Mr. Blanche had reportedly urged caution in prosecuting Mr. Comey for his seashells post. Thrush, Todd Blanche Targets Trump’s Enemies, supra. But with Ms. Bondi ousted and Mr. Blanche seeking a permanent appointment as Attorney General, “the ‘seashells’ case gained new steam,” and “Blanche’s aides instruct[ed] Boyle to seek a grand jury indictment of Comey.” Leonnig & Gallagher, supra.

A passage ten pages later (which appears in the argument about law) picks up that narrative where it left off and describes that you don’t generally let people who threatened the President to sit out there for most of a year.

Nonetheless, with the Eastern District of Virginia indictment dismissed and Mr. Blanche needing to please President Trump during his “audition,” Mr. Blanche’s aides “instruct[ed] Boyle to seek a grand jury indictment of Comey.” See supra p. 16.

The government’s revival of a fruitless investigation based on political expediency evidences the impact of animus on the decision to prosecute. Where the “government ha[s] followed unusual discretionary procedures in deciding to prosecute,” those aberrant procedures provide strong evidence that the prosecution was brought for an improper reason. United States v. Greene, 697 F.2d 1229, 1236 (5th Cir. 1983). Generally, when law enforcement becomes aware that an individual has threatened the President, officials act quickly to charge and arrest that individual. See, e.g., United States v. Lang, No. 3:25-cr-409 (D.S.C. filed Mar. 4, 2025) (15-day delay); United States v. Carillo, No. 5:24-cr-16 (W.D. Va. filed Aug. 2, 2024) (6-day delay); United States v. Butler, No. 7:22-cr-46 (W.D. Va. filed Dec. 7, 2022) (6-day delay); United States v. Merryman, No. 1:22-cr-50 (D. Md. filed Feb. 10, 2022) (1-day delay); United States v. Henthorn, No. 5:19-cr-8 (N.D. W. Va. filed Jan. 22, 2019) (4-day delay). Had Mr. Comey’s post been assessed as a true threat, the government’s normal process would have led it to act quickly here as well. Instead, the indictment took 348 days.

Boyle’s response ignores a great many points Comey raised in the longer narrative, ignoring even the things Kash Patel or Todd Blanche said in public as if they were Fake News, and focuses on the first step of that process — what happened after the EDVA case flopped. But he responded to the one about timing. That long delay only proves the seriousness of the investigation, Boyle claimed.

Comey’s arguments about prosecutorial delay also miss the mark. If anything, such delay militates against any suggestion of vindictiveness, because it confirms this was a genuine investigation. Regardless, courts do not flyspeck the timing of criminal investigations beyond applying (when appropriate) the five-year statute of limitations that Congress established. See 18 U.S.C. § 3282(a). That is because separation of powers principles preclude district courts from second-guessing how efficiently criminal investigations have unfolded, at least absent any indication of strategic delay aimed at prejudicing a defendant.

The “(when appropriate)” is a nice tell: because the Grand Conspiracy investigation into Comey is doing all sorts of crazy things to get around statutes of limitation.

Anyway, that comment set up this rebuttal from Comey: Nothing you did in the interim made it into the search warrant or response.

The record belies the government’s claim (at 25) that its 348-day delay in seeking the indictment “confirms this was a genuine investigation.” Not a single piece of evidence cited by the government in its oppositions or search warrants was obtained in the ten months between June 2025 and the issuance of the indictment on April 28, 2026. Instead, nearly all the government’s evidence—including the post itself, Mr. Comey’s novel, and texts from Patrice Comey and Person1—stems from the week the post was published (May 15-22, 2025). See Dkt. 54 at 3-11. Other evidence cited by the government, such as its interview with former mafia member Salvatore Gravano, was collected after the indictment issued—and so cannot possibly explain the government’s delay in seeking that indictment. See id. at 9

[snip]

Although some courts have hesitated to apply the presumption pretrial, none of their animating reasons exists here. Most notably, courts are reluctant to presume vindictiveness if the sole indication is the addition of new charges after a defendant invoked routine pretrial rights, because “[i]n the course of preparing a case for trial, the prosecutor may uncover additional information that suggests a basis for further prosecution.” Goodwin, 457 U.S. at 381; see, e.g., Villa, 70 F.4th at 711. Here, by contrast, only the initial indictment is at issue, and the government cites no additional evidence learned post-dismissal of the Virginia indictment that prompted this one; to the contrary, its investigation developed only powerful exculpatory evidence (such as the absence of “86” as a synonym for “kill” in mob prosecutions). See supra p. 12. And while it is true that defendants “routinely” invoke procedural rights pretrial, Goodwin, 457 U.S. at 381, Mr. Comey’s successful challenge to the Virginia prosecution, which undermined the functioning of an entire U.S. Attorney’s Office, was far from routine.

That argument — and the secret filing about something that happened on April 27, the day before the indictment — made me go back and re-read the affidavit Pat Fitzgerald did accompanying the original motion to dismiss, and sure enough that’s true: A September search, Fitzgerald notes — done at the request of an AUSA — for any instances of a violent connotation to 86 in the cases Comey pursued. A November search in one mob trial. Another November search of another one. Then, Fitzgerald’s affidavit and the exhibits note, that search plus a series of interviews resume in April — a search on April 14, another the night before the indictment, and then a bunch of stuff in May, after the indictment, which obviously could not have influenced the charging decision.

All that reflects very differently on Comey’s motion to suppress two warrants, which is one reason I want to focus on this. FBI Agent April Floyd didn’t mention the work she and others had done in September or November in the March search warrant for Jim Comey’s Apple account, which is part of Comey’s complaint. Nor did she mention the exculpatory things DOJ’s key witness — the person who hates Comey but nevertheless only came to view 86 47 as a threat after they listened to Rudy Giuliani rant about it — said. Floyd did an interview on April 13 with that person, and still didn’t include most of it in the search affidavit because they didn’t say what Floyd wanted them to say, which may be why Floyd interviewed a Secret Service agent on April 20 to manufacture a claim Dave Kelley had withheld information because he didn’t give them information they had not asked for. This timing argument supports an inference that Floyd’s omissions were not just material (and they undoubtedly were, with respect to the key witness), but served to hide how DOJ found nothing when they investigated this last year but then decided to revisit the case again in April, during the period Todd Blanche was auditioning to be Attorney General.

And April Floyd obscured that they had looked hard but found nothing in order to get a warrant from Apple — a warrant to obtain material for which someone got a preservation order as the EDVA collapsed last fall and again before Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly “allowed” DOJ to destroy the evidence they had deliberately violated Jim Comey’s attorney-client privilege to access that information last year.

Floyd’s omissions are important for that reason. They show that DOJ found nothing last year and dropped the investigation and then renewed it when Blanche took over as Acting AG, yet still had not gotten what DOJ claims is inculpatory, the interview with Sammy the Bull, before indicting. And, as Comey noted, DOJ never bothered to read the returns obtained with that March 23 warrant, which Floyd claimed she needed to determine Comey’s state of mind when he posted the seashells photo and also to obtain the metadata for the photo that the very same warrant claimed Dave Kelley had been trying to withhold, before indicting.

Moreover, Mr. Boyle’s affidavit underscores that something irregular appears to have happened in April 2026, after Mr. Blanche became the Acting Attorney General. Mr. Boyle avers that: “Leading up to the decision to present the evidence to the grand jury, the prosecution team reviewed all evidence collected up to that point.” Dkt. 53-1 ¶ 11; see Opp. 24. But the discovery record shows that while the government had collected Mr. Comey’s Apple iCloud account, it proceeded to indict before it had the opportunity to review the materials collected. See Suppl. Aff. of Patrick J. Fitzgerald, filed concurrently under seal.

“The Indictment was approved and obtained before the agents or prosecutors had access to the communications or their contents,” AUSA Tim Severo told Pat Fitzgerald in June, and that delay couldn’t have been because of a filter team — the excuse Todd Blanche made at his indictment press conference — because they didn’t filter known attorney communications.

Floyd got a warrant claiming she needed it to investigate, but she didn’t use that material do basic things necessary to weigh whether a crime had been committed.

And all this gets into personnel issues, the way in which Trump’s DOJ serially move prosecutors around in a bid to get Comey prosecuted.

I’ve put a timeline of some of them below (I’ll go back and fill them in later). But one line in Comey’s motion to dismiss is key — and fairly coy. He states, relying on this Bloomberg story, that Boyle loaned two AUSAs to the EDVA case, “at least one” of whom oversaw the seashells case; the quotation here is from Bloomberg.

Ms. Halligan received assistance in her prosecution efforts from Ellis Boyle, installed two months earlier as interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Ben Penn, Top Comey Prosecutor Parroted Trump on Way to Targeting His Foe, Bloomberg Law (Apr. 30, 2026), https://perma.cc/5ZL9-CTSP. After no career prosecutors joined Ms. Halligan’s prosecution of Mr. Comey, “[Mr.] Boyle loaned two of [his] office’s more seasoned . . . prosecutors” to the Eastern District of Virginia prosecution. Id.; see Notices of Appearance, United States v. Comey, No. 1:25-cr-272 (E.D. Va. Oct. 6, 2025), Dkt. Nos. 17, 18. “At least one” of these prosecutors was investigating Mr. Comey’s social-media post while working in the Eastern District of North Carolina. Penn, supra; see supra p.10. 3

3 Both of these prosecutors resigned from the DOJ in January 2026.

This is all very coy. In neither the MTD nor Pat Fitzgerald’s affidavit does Fitzgerald describe who this AUSA is.

On May 21, 2025, an Assistant United States Attorney (“AUSA”) in the Eastern District of North Carolina (“EDNC”) wrote to a Secret Service agent that “I’ve been ordered to open this case in EDNC.” Ex. A. [012063]

[snip]

22. In September 2025, at the request of an EDNC AUSA, the FBI searched its Sentinel system—a database of all FBI investigations and information going back decades—for the purpose of determining whether Mr. Comey was exposed to a violent interpretation of the term “86” at the FBI:

But the documents show who that AUSA is: Gabriel Diaz is the guy who was ordered to open this investigation back in May 2025.

And Diaz was still working the case on September 18, when he asked the FBI to see if 86 came up in Sentinal files.

Boyle — who might be fun to play poker with, or even more fun to see cross-examined by any of the superb lawyers defending Comey — filled in some of the blanks that Comey’s coyness elicited.

1 Prior to my time as U.S. Attorney, in May 2025, AUSA Gabriel Diaz was assigned to handle the investigation of Comey in EDNC related to this case. After the indictment in the EDVA, AUSA Diaz was detailed to EDVA to assist with the criminal prosecution of Comey in that district. Although AUSA Diaz initially handled some of the initial investigations on this matter, he stopped working on this case after his detail to the EDVA occupied the majority of his time in October 2025 and November 2025. And as of late December 2025, AUSA Diaz is no longer a prosecutor in this office.

That implies Nate Lemons, the other AUSA farmed out to EDVA, did not do any work on this case. I wonder what he was doing instead?

And at least per Boyle, Diaz left before January; he left in December, around the time DOJ was fiddling with Dan Richman’s attempt to unring the bell of the privilege violations that Lemons and Diaz had participated in in EDVA.

The other parts of this timeline worth noting are the way Matthew Petracca (whom Boyle implies did not have a role in the prosecutorial decision, which is one of many reasons Boyle’s affidavit is dogshit) was put in charge of presenting the case to the grand jury two days before doing so, and left the team no more than 16 days afterwards, when Todd Blanche started colluding with the mob to sustain this investigation.

The lone signatory on the indictment was Matthew Petracca, an Assistant U.S. Attorney with a background in state Medicaid fraud and little federal criminal experience. Penn, supra. Mr. Petracca was hired by U.S. Attorney Boyle and reportedly joined the office only months before seeking the indictment, “after more experienced lawyers in the office investigating the sea shells post . . . left the case.” Penn, supra. 4 Mr. Petracca has since withdrawn from the case and transferred to the Civil Division. Dkt. 16.

4 Mr. Petracca converted from a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney to Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Criminal Division effective April 26, 2026, two days before the indictment. Fitzgerald Aff. ¶ 42.

The really important detail, however, involves Stan Woodward.

For reasons that aren’t at all clear to me, Stan Woodward and his counselor appears in DOJ’s selective prosecution response.

STANLEY E. WOODWARD, JR. Associate Attorney General

W. ELLIS BOYLE United States Attorney

ANNA L. EDWARDS Counsel to the Associate Attorney General

/s/ Timothy M. Severo

TIMOTHY M. SEVERO

Now that I realize that though, I suspect Woodward wrote much of this filing; he is well practiced in writing things for an audience of one, the guy paying the bills. And the DOJ response cites a lot of case law, but also includes things Trump would want to see, such as citations to Judge Tanya Chutkan’s ruling in US v Trump that Joe Biden hadn’t ordered up the prosecution of Trump, a case that bears no likeness to this one.

But Woodward’s involvement is important because he’s the one who swooped in and tried to unfuck the mess Lindsey Halligan made of Dan Richman’s effort to get his devices back.

Stan Woodward is the one on the hook for reading Comey’s privileged materials, and then making efforts so DOJ could reconstruct those privileged communications by obtaining a new warrant directly from Apple.

Woodward is still around, doing the dirtiest work in Todd Blanche’s corruption factory.Timeline

May 21: Gabriel Diaz ordered to open seashells case in EDNC.

August 7: Ellis Boyle appointed.

August 11: Ellis Boyle sworn in.

September 18: Diaz does first search for 86 in Gambino files, CCs FAUSA Phil Aubart.

October 6: Nate Lemons and Gabriel Diaz file notice of appearance in EDVA.

October 12: Lemons applies for Filter Protocol.

November 11: April Floyd opens seashells case as full investigation.

November 17: DOJ obtains first preservation order from Apple; Floyd receives Secret Service file.

November 24: Judge Currie dismisses the EDVA case.

November 26: Dan Richman moves to get DOJ to delete his records.

January 2026: Both Lemons and Diaz resign from DOJ.

January 2, 2026: Stan Woodward files notice of appearance in Richman suit.

January 5, 2026: Ellis Boyle nominated.

January 20: Lindsey Halligan resigns.

February 20: Judge Kollar-Kotelly permits DOJ to delete materials from Richman; DOJ obtains second preservation order from Apple.

March 23: Agent Floyd obtains warrant for Apple materials preserved after EDVA case.

April 2: Pam Bondi fired; Joe DiGenova explains it is because of Grand Conspiracy probe.

April 13: Aubart and Floyd interview Person-1.

April 14: FAUSA Phil Aubart submits more search terms for Sentinal.

April 17: Blanche appoints Joe DiGenova to run Grand Conspiracy.

April 20: Joe DiGenova sworn in.

April 24: Matthew Petracca still Special AUSA.

April 26: Petracca made AUSA.

April 27: Something secret happens; Ellis Boyle’s nomination sent to Senate.

April 28: Jim Comey indicted in North Carolina.

May 11-15: Petracca moves off the case to Civil Division.

May 13: Aubart interviews Sam Gravano.

May 18: Ellis Boyle confirmed.

May 20: Sealed document in Richman suit; April Floyd obtains warrant for Google.

May 22: Sealed document in Richman suit.

June 3: Todd Blanche nominated.

June 5: AUSA Tim Severo explains that no one from the investigative team reviewed the Apple returns before the indictment.

June 18: Sealed document in Richman suit.

August 10: Todd Blanche confirmed.Share this entry

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Reporting: , Wayne Madsen, Sept. 4, 2026.

Lev Remembers, Commentary, Lev Parnas, right, Sept. 4, 2026.

Sept. 5

Top Headlines

President Trump and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci were shown models of the coronavirus during a tour of the National Institutes of Health in March 2020 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

• New York Times, Exclusive: Inside the D.O.J.’s Investigation of Fauci and Other Virus Scientists, Benjamin Mueller and Glenn Thrush, Sept. 5, 2026. As Dr. Anthony Fauci has faced public scrutiny from congressional Republicans, the D.O.J. has pursued a quieter and more expansive effort against a wider circle of researchers.
• New York Times, War in the Middle East: In Major Leak Hunt, Pentagon Gives Polygraph Tests to Joint Staff Members, Jonathan Swan, Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman and Eric Schmitt, Sept. 5, 2026 (print ed.). About 50 people were tested, an unparalleled inquiry that comes in the wake of news reports about the war with Iran and the U.S. military’s diminished stocks of munitions.

News Roundups

A section of the approximately 800 senior military leaders -- generals and admirals for the most part -- summoned  to Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia to political rally-style rants by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (shown at top) and President Trump.

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Suffers Rough Night as Court Losses Pile Up, Hegseth Begins Mass Polygraphs to Hunt for Leakers, ICE Whistleblower, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 5, 2026. It was a rough night in court for the Trump administration. In the span of a few hours Friday night and today, three separate federal courts dealt significant blows to the administration’s efforts to consolidate power ahead of the midterms.
• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Important Saturday Night Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 5, 2026. Big update this Saturday, and it does not have much about Donald Trump. Federal immigration officials have quietly won a judge’s permission to force-feed a detained Cuban hunger striker in Texas through a rare, nonconsensual surgical procedure that cuts into the abdomen to insert a permanent feeding tube, the first documented case of its kind and the 19th time since January 2025 ICE has secured approval for involuntary medical treatment on a hunger striker.

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

 

A photo of Donald Trump and John Roberts, with Trump in the lower foreground and Roberts in the upper background (New York Times photo by Tierney L. Cross). 

• New York Times, Opinion: Not So Supreme, Mr. Roberts, Maureen Dowd, right, Sept. 5, 2026. In legal terms, the president is an Olympic-class sprinter. He breaks the law so fast that the law is left in his orange dust. Trump is an outlaw. And our system was not built for an outlaw in the Oval.

 

Lindsay Clancy at her murder trial in Plymouth, Mass., on Friday (Pool photo by Greg Derr).

• New York Times, Clancy Faces Years of Confinement, No Matter What Comes Next, Mark Arsenault and Christina Morales, Sept. 5, 2026. Even as a jury failed to reach a verdict in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, her future is unlikely to include freedom, at least for a long time. But Americans have been divided over the goal of her confinement.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

• Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump’s vanity will be his downfall, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 4, 2026. At 5 a.m. this morning, an interview Donald Trump was apparently warned not to give went live for the entire world to see. “A lot of people said, ‘Don’t do this interview,’” he admitted.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance  

• New York Times, Trump Officials Draft Plan to Pay At-Home Parents, Using Funds for Working Ones, Coral Davenport, Sept. 5, 2026. The proposed benefit, a top policy priority for Vice President JD Vance, would apply only to married couples and tap a fund intended to provide federal child care subsidies to working parents.
• PoliticusUSA, Opinion: Trump Made His Midterm Convention Free And Republicans Still Won’t Go, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 5, 2026. Trump made the upcoming Republican midterm convention in Dallas free for endangered GOP candidates to attend, and Republicans are still refusing to show up.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: We Need To Turn Their Furious, Desperate Cheating Into Righteous Anger And Drive Our Early Vote/Election Turnout Through The Roof, Simon Rosenberg, Sept. 5,2026. People will start voting in North Carolina this week, early in person voting kicks off in thirteen days - the General Election is here everyone! Make your early vote plan today!
• AlterNet America, Saturday Wrapup: Every Time an Epstein Vote Gets Close, Congress Goes on Vacation, Ryan Rose,Sept. 5, 2026. Trump is skipping Ground Zero because he can't give a speech, even GOPers want Hegseth removed, the House recessing early stalls sexual misconduct reform, and CBS smeared a Muslim candidate using 9/11.
• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Trump Stiffs Republicans And May Have Handed Congress To Democrats, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Sept. 4, 2026. Trump announced on Friday that the $400 million that his super PAC collected is “his” money, which means that he is unlikely to spend it to help Republicans in the midterms.

U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

 

Gloria Steinem speaks at the Women's March in Washington, on January 21, 2017 (Shannon Stapleton photo for Reuters).

• New York Times, How Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine Transformed the Publishing Industry, Katie Robertson, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). The feminist icon insisted that women were not a niche audience — and proved it in 1971 with the start of an influential publication owned and operated by them.
• New York Times, Maria Bartiromo’s Downfall at an Increasingly Cautious Fox News, Jim Rutenberg, Erik Wemple and Benjamin Mullin, Sept. 5, 2026. The network this week took Maria Bartiromo off the air, pulling one of the last hosts whose coverage of Dominion Voting Systems drew an expensive defamation lawsuit.

More On Middle East Wars

• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Is Iran Flagging or Waiting to Pounce? Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 5, 2026. U.S. government investigators have taken the extraordinary step of subjecting roughly 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the Iran war has created a shortage of crucial munitions, according to officials briefed on the move.
• New York Times, What the War in Iran Has Cost One Gold Star Family, Katie Rogers, Sept. 5, 2026. First Lt. Tyler James Feehan, who was 25, had been deployed to an air base in Jordan when enemy missiles and drones lit up the sky. He is among the 18 Americans who have died since the war began. Stephen and Shari Feehan have stayed in close touch with their son’s fiancée, Claire Fletcher, whom he was supposed to marry right after returning from his deployment to Jordan (New York Times photo by Matteo de Mayda).

Russia-Ukraine-Europe War

• New York Times, Putin Denies a Draft Is Coming, but Some Russian Men Are Taking No Chances, Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 5, 2026. As the fear of a possible mobilization becomes a fixture of daily life across Russia, many men are deciding whether to flee, hide or sit tight.
• New York Times, Putin Orders Pause in Kyiv Strikes Ahead of Visit by U.S. Envoys, Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 5, 2026. Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, arrived in Moscow to meet with the Russian leader. They plan to visit Kyiv next, in an effort to revive peace talks. 
• Associated Press via Politico, Judge refuses to block Pentagon from firing Stars and Stripes staffers over CBS interview, Staff report, Sept. 5, 2026. U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, ruled the journalists are unlikely to successfully prove their First Amendment rights were violated.

Sept. 5

Top Stories

President Trump and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci were shown models of the coronavirus during a tour of the National Institutes of Health in March 2020 (New York Times photo by Doug Mills).

New York Times, Exclusive: Inside the D.O.J.’s Investigation of Fauci and Other Virus Scientists, Benjamin Mueller and Glenn Thrush, Sept. 5, 2026. As Dr. Anthony Fauci has faced public scrutiny from congressional Republicans, the D.O.J. has pursued a quieter and more expansive effort against a wider circle of researchers.

In early 2025, Dan Bongino, the fiery No. 2 official at the F.B.I., summoned dozens of agents to the bureau’s Washington headquarters.

Mr. Bongino, a conservative media personality recently elevated to the deputy’s role, demanded to know why a yearslong inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic had stalled — and why investigators had not more forcefully scrutinized the role of government scientists, current and former officials said.

At one point, he squared off against an official who questioned the theory that he and many supporters of President Trump had long promoted: that the virus had not merely leaked from a Chinese lab, but that American researchers, among them Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, had orchestrated a conspiracy to cover up that fact.

The meeting became so heated that Mr. Bongino ultimately asked the official to leave the room, an attendee said.

Mr. Bongino, who stepped down from the F.B.I. in January to return to podcasting, and other officials helped set in motion a sprawling and aggressive investigative effort that has outlasted his tenure, The New York Times has learned.

As part of that effort, F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors have sought evidence related to at least eight scientists, among them a Nobel laureate and influential former government researchers like Dr. Fauci.

Investigators have demanded phone, email, grant and payment records, as well as grand jury testimony by scientists.

This account of the investigations is drawn from interviews with six current and former officials familiar with them, who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly, as well as documents reviewed by The Times.

It is not clear what evidence those inquiries have produced or what their status is. Dr. Fauci, once the government’s chief infectious disease scientist, received a pre-emptive pardon last year from former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that protects him from federal prosecution for official actions from 2014 to 2025.

The inquiries were underway well before Republican lawmakers last month asked the Department of Justice to investigate Dr. Fauci’s refusal to answer questions before a Senate panel. They have continued playing out behind the scenes as those lawmakers released documents that have bruised Dr. Fauci’s reputation.

Many scientists see the federal government’s investigative effort as an attempt to punish political enemies and deflect blame from the first Trump administration for the catastrophic effects of the pandemic.

While the origins of the coronavirus have not definitively been established, these researchers point to the fact that the inquiries have failed to produce any clear evidence that Dr. Fauci or other American scientists covered up knowledge of a lab leak, or funded or collaborated on research that led to one.

Mr. Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, accuse those scientists of helping to start the pandemic and aggravating its harms, and believe the inquiries represent overdue accountability.

The F.B.I.’s efforts during the Biden administration focused mainly on whether Covid emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, though federal investigators also began examining some individual scientists.

Under Mr. Trump, the investigation has expanded as federal agents and prosecutors sought evidence against new targets and intensified their scrutiny of scientists.

Last month, Dr. David Morens, a former adviser to Dr. Fauci at the National Institutes of Health, pleaded guilty to conspiring to conceal federal records by steering government emails into a personal account. In those emails, Dr. Morens discussed efforts to defend researchers who were under suspicion for collaborating with the Wuhan lab.

Dr. Morens wrote that he was trying to protect researchers from what he described as baseless “political charges” of a lab leak.

A subpoena for documents in that case, dated September 2025 and reviewed by The Times, showed that federal prosecutors in Maryland sought evidence about Dr. Fauci, too, including any emails he sent to certain researchers from his personal account or payments he received for intervening on behalf of federal grantees.

Prosecutors in Maryland also recently demanded the testimony before a federal grand jury of a former staff member at EcoHealth Alliance, a defunct nonprofit that the Trump White House has said used N.I.H. funding to facilitate “dangerous” research at the Wuhan lab where the administration believes the pandemic started.

EcoHealth executives have denied those claims. The N.I.H. has said that viruses being studied there with American funding bore no resemblance to the one that set off the pandemic.

In a separate line of inquiry, agents in the F.B.I.’s Cleveland office have recently examined whether Dr. Fauci and other government scientists pressured virologists in early 2020 to downplay the possibility that the pandemic originated in a lab. Mr. Bongino last year singled out one of those agents as a key player in an expanded investigation.

The F.B.I. and Department of Justice declined to comment for this article. Mr. Bongino conceded on his podcast last month that “there are a lot of complications with any case that may develop against Anthony Fauci because of the pardon,” even as he credited “the cleanup operation we instituted when we went over there” for Dr. Morens’s indictment.

New York Times, War in the Middle East: In Major Leak Hunt, Pentagon Gives Polygraph Tests to Joint Staff Members, Jonathan Swan, Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman and Eric Schmitt, Sept. 5, 2026 (print ed.). About 50 people were tested, an unparalleled inquiry that comes in the wake of news reports about the war with Iran and the U.S. military’s diminished stocks of munitions.

U.S. government investigators have taken the extraordinary step of subjecting roughly 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the Iran war has created a shortage of crucial munitions, according to officials briefed on the move.

The investigators asked military officers and civilian employees on the Joint Staff if they disclosed classified information to members of the press, and about whether they provided information about diminished U.S. munitions stocks.

The polygraph tests were conducted in August after a flurry of news reports detailed diminished stocks of crucial munitions, including of long-range missiles and Patriot interceptors. The show of force appeared aimed at not just ferreting out anyone who may have shared information, but intimidating others who might do so in the future, according to people with knowledge of the effort.

Between 1,500 and 2,000 officers and officials work for the Joint Staff, which coordinates operations, policy and war plans with combatant commanders around the world.

In a statement, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said that the department “does not comment on internal personnel or investigative matters but takes all leaks of classified national security information extremely seriously and investigates accordingly.”

News Roundups

 

A section of the approximately 800 senior military leaders -- generals and admirals for the most part -- summoned  to Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia to political rally-style rants by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (shown at top) and President Trump.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Trump Suffers Rough Night as Court Losses Pile Up, Hegseth Begins Mass Polygraphs to Hunt for Leakers, ICE Whistleblower, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 5, 2026. It was a rough night in court for the Trump administration. In the span of a few hours Friday night and today, three separate federal courts dealt significant blows to the administration’s efforts to consolidate power ahead of the midterms.

A federal judge extended her block on Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting, ruling that states are simply unable to pivot this late in the election cycle without disenfranchising millions of voters. A federal appeals court refused to let the Department of Homeland Security bring back a voter screening tool built out of a database meant for checking immigrants’ legal status, with the majority finding the government hadn’t shown it could use Social Security data that way without breaking the law. And a federal magistrate judge ordered the administration to reveal the identities of the people who devised its contentious $1.8 billion fund to compensate Jan. 6 rioters and other political allies, a plan that has already drawn a rare rebuke from Senate Republicans.

Three courts. Three rulings. One clear message: the administration’s rush to control the vote, and to protect its own, keeps running into the same wall.

Right now, more than ever, independent journalism matters. Reporting that holds power accountable doesn’t happen without people willing to back it.

Here’s the news:

According to the New York Times, U.S. investigators have taken the extraordinary step of polygraphing roughly 50 members of the military’s Joint Staff over leaks to journalists, including reporting on how the Iran war has drained crucial munitions stockpiles like long-range missiles and Patriot interceptors, according to officials briefed on the move. The tests, conducted in August, asked officers and civilian employees whether they disclosed classified information to the press, and experts say the scope is without precedent, with retired Navy Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter calling it “unprecedented” and something he’d “never seen polygraphs employed this broadly or at this seniority level.” The crackdown comes as Trump has pressured officials to hunt down leakers and has gone so far as to label critical media coverage of the war and munitions shortages “treasonous.” The leaks have deepened an atmosphere of distrust inside a Pentagon that current and former officials say has been fostered by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has pushed out or blocked promotions for at least 80 generals and admirals, hasn’t briefed the press on the Iran war since May, and recently fired the publisher and editor in chief of Stars and Stripes in what journalists called retaliation for critical coverage. Trump has stood by Hegseth despite the turmoil, even as Republican Senator Thom Tillis publicly called for his removal, saying “I have never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country.”

ICE:

An official who oversaw vetting of ICE recruits warned in a whistleblower complaint that the agency was shortcutting vetting procedures as it ramped up hiring, calling it a “historic lowering of vetting standards” that created “a systematic vulnerability to infiltration, insider threats, and exploitation by adversaries.” The complaint, filed with DHS’s Office of Inspector General in August 2025 and obtained by ABC News, alleges ICE issued final job offers before any preliminary vetting and granted favorable suitability determinations without fingerprinting, identity verification, or credit checks, warning the primary risks included national security threats, insider compromise, and erosion of public trust. The official also alleged political appointees received national security eligibility without required background checks, specifically naming former DHS senior adviser Corey Lewandowski as someone whose “derogatory findings” were disregarded. The whistleblower’s attorney, Kevin Owen, said his client faced immediate retaliation, including interrogation, threats of criminal charges, and ten months on leave, ultimately leading him to retire early, and has since urged DHS to review every improperly vetted officer and pull them from active duty until they receive proper clearance. DHS said it does not comment on former personnel but maintains it diligently applies proper vetting regulations, while also confirming ICE training will be extended from 42 to 72 days.

Federal immigration officials quietly received a judge’s permission to force-feed a detained Cuban hunger striker at a Texas detention center, including through a rare, nonconsensual surgical procedure, according to court records reviewed by The Guardian. The man is likely the 19th hunger striker since January 2025 for whom ICE has won approval for involuntary medical procedures, and this is the first documented case involving a “percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy” tube, a surgery that cuts into the abdomen to insert a permanent feeding tube. Judge Andrew Hanen approved the force-feeding on August 19 and extended the order this week through mid-September, even as DHS claimed Thursday the man had resumed eating and was not being force-fed. Advocates including ACLU Texas attorney Savannah Kumar and immigrant rights attorney Eunice Cho condemned the practice as torture and expressed alarm that the man has no legal representation in a process seeking to subject him to an invasive procedure without consent. DHS said the man, who entered the US unlawfully in 1980 and was ordered deported in 2004, has past convictions including aggravated assault and weapons charges, and will remain in custody until removed.

Immigration judges nationwide have been instructed in a mandatory training to sharply limit the time given to some of the most vulnerable people in court, including abused and abandoned children and survivors of violent crime, before deporting them, according to training materials shared exclusively with The Guardian. The session, led by Board of Immigration Appeals judge Keith Hunsucker, who denied over 80% of asylum cases during his time on the bench, discouraged judges from giving people more than 10 days to find an attorney and pushed them to deny continuances even when more time would let immigrants receive visas or green cards they’ve already qualified for or been approved for. The training specifically targeted special immigrant juvenile status for abused or neglected youth and U non-immigrant status for crime survivors, arguing delays caused by federal processing backlogs shouldn’t pause deportation proceedings. It also warned that attorneys who take on more cases than they can “responsibly and professionally handle” could be referred for discipline, even though only about a fifth of immigrants had representation when ordered deported in June. The Justice Department and EOIR defended the push as necessary to clear a backlog of roughly 3.2 million pending cases, saying delays hurt both immigrants with legitimate claims and the public.

Democratic lawmakers are demanding DHS turn over records and fully cooperate with an investigation into the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a nearly blind Rohingya refugee whom border agents left outside a closed coffee shop in Buffalo on a freezing night in February. Rep. Tim Kennedy, joined by Reps. Bennie Thompson, Lou Correa, and Nellie Pou, held a press conference near where Shah Alam was found dead five days after being released, accusing DHS of “obstructing the pursuit of justice” after the Erie County medical examiner ruled his death a homicide from complications of a perforated ulcer worsened by hypothermia and dehydration. New York Attorney General Letitia James had opened a criminal investigation but closed it in August after Customs and Border Protection refused to identify the agents involved or turn over dispatch records, GPS data, and body camera footage, referring the case instead to the Erie County DA. Kennedy has also introduced the DHS Release Transparency Act, which would require immigration authorities to notify a detainee’s family or attorney before release and disclose where the person will be let go. Lawmakers sent a formal letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on September 2 noting they still hadn’t received a substantive response six months after Shah Alam’s death, with Thompson saying, “If DHS has nothing to hide, then they need to turn over the records.”

Judge extends block on USPS restrictions:

A federal judge overnight again blocked Donald Trump’s executive order imposing sweeping restrictions on mail-in voting, extending an earlier temporary hold into a stronger preliminary injunction just hours after North Carolina became the first state to start sending out mail-in ballots for the November midterms. US District Judge Indira Talwani warned in her ruling that states “are unable to pivot this late in the election cycle, nearly guaranteeing significant disenfranchisement for eligible voters.” Trump’s March order sought to create a nationwide list of verified eligible voters and compel the US Postal Service to work with states to limit ballot delivery only to voters on those lists. The Trump administration, which had already appealed Talwani’s earlier temporary block to the Supreme Court, quickly appealed this ruling as well. USPS itself has told courts the technology needed to carry out the order doesn’t even exist, and a USPS whistleblower recently warned of “potentially catastrophic problems” if the agency tried to implement it.

A coalition of 24 state attorneys general sued USPS after Trump signed the order, seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction while the case played out, with oral arguments on the injunction held Thursday. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who co-led the coalition, said the ruling secured “longer-term relief that will keep the USPS changes blocked while our case moves forward,” vowing to keep fighting what he called the administration’s attempts to trample voting rights. A coalition of voter service and civic groups represented by the ACLU said the ruling makes clear that “USPS has no authority in the Constitution or federal law over how states administer mail voting,” and that the president cannot force the agency to create a “disruptive new bureaucracy” that risks disenfranchising voters. Notably, the order allows states to voluntarily opt into the new system, but not a single state has done so to date.

Trump has long sought to limit mail voting despite using it himself to cast his own ballot, repeatedly and falsely blaming it for his 2020 election loss without ever managing to change the longstanding voting procedure. An earlier executive order requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote was already halted by federal judges, who ruled that the Constitution gives states, and in some cases Congress, the power to set voting procedures, not the president. After Trump’s March mail-voting order, Democrats and voting rights groups filed several lawsuits, two of which landed before Talwani, who first paused the order in June until after November. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned that initial hold late last month, though it stopped short of ruling Trump’s order legal, finding instead that the suits were filed prematurely before USPS issued its implementation rule. That rule came out just before the Supreme Court’s decision, prompting plaintiffs to refile their suits and setting up Friday’s new injunction.

Judge Denies Use of Voter Identification Tool:

A federal appeals court panel declined late Friday to let the Department of Homeland Security restore access to a new tool that would let states compare their voter rolls against federal citizenship and Social Security data. By a 2-1 vote, the three-judge D.C. Circuit panel found DHS hadn’t shown the system, built out of a database historically used to check immigrants’ legal status, could operate without violating privacy laws protecting Social Security information, with the majority writing that “the public interest does not favor interim restoration of a system the government has not made a strong showing it may lawfully operate.” Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Robert L. Wilkins, both Obama appointees, formed the majority, while Judge Gregory G. Katsas, a Trump appointee, dissented and would have lifted the lower court’s block.

The ruling is temporary, with the panel saying it will issue a full decision within 10 days, and it comes as the Trump administration wages an aggressive legal campaign to impose new voting restrictions before the midterms, less than 60 days away, including a separate mail-ballot rule that a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked earlier the same day. A lower court had already ruled in June that repurposing the citizenship database for election monitoring violated federal disclosure laws, a decision that also prompted a parallel Florida lawsuit in which a judge ordered in July that Florida, Ohio, Iowa and Indiana be allowed to regain access to the data.

Weaponization Fund:

A federal magistrate judge ordered the Trump administration overnight to reveal the identities of the people who devised a contentious plan to create a $1.8 billion fund meant to compensate those who believed they were wronged by political prosecutions, including Jan. 6 rioters. The plan drew repeated scrutiny, prompting a rare rebuke from Senate Republicans and nearly derailing Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general. Blanche has repeatedly said the fund is dead, but Trump has been more circumspect, indicating his support for compensating people like the rioters prosecuted for attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Magistrate Judge Ivan D. Davis issued the order in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Virginia.

Davis’s order came as part of a lawsuit challenging both the fund and a separate Justice Department measure that granted Trump, his family, and his businesses sweeping protection from all past tax investigations. Both measures emerged from backroom negotiations between Trump’s personal lawyers and senior DOJ officials, and became public only after Trump agreed to drop his own lawsuit against the IRS over claims the agency failed to stop the leak of his tax returns to news organizations. A federal judge in Florida later excoriated both the suit and how it was dismissed, calling it an improper act of self-dealing since Trump had sued a federal agency he himself controls, and asserting the dismissal was arranged specifically to evade judicial oversight.

The suit seeking to kill the fund and the tax immunity deal was brought in Virginia by a group of plaintiffs that includes a former federal prosecutor who was fired by the Trump administration after working on Jan. 6-related cases. The plaintiffs claim the program was unfairly designed to help only supporters of the president, and the union representing IRS workers later joined the suit, arguing the tax provisions were illegal and could force its employees into carrying out unlawful orders. Aman George, a lawyer for Democracy Forward, which filed the suit, called Friday’s ruling “a significant step in getting to the bottom of the slush fund.” The Justice Department did not immediately comment on the ruling.

Super El Niño:

This year’s rapidly intensifying “super” El Niño is on track to be the strongest on record, with Met Office long range forecasting head Professor Adam Scaife saying “I have never seen an El Niño signal this intense in our forecasts,” and UN Secretary General António Guterres warning “El Niño is being supersized before our eyes.” A typical El Niño raises tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures by 1-2C, with 2C considered a very big event, but this year’s has already crossed 2.6C and could peak around 4C in November. Tens of millions of the world’s poorest people are expected to be plunged into humanitarian crisis just as wealthy countries gut foreign aid, with Britain alone slashing bilateral aid to eight African countries by more than 80 percent. Torrential rains and flooding are forecast for East Africa while droughts intensify across southern Africa, and impacts are already showing up elsewhere, including unusually weak monsoon rains in India and catastrophic wildfires in Indonesia. The UK itself, still recovering from a deadly summer of heatwaves, is bracing for a wet and stormy winter, with roughly a quarter of UK food imports, including rice, coffee, cocoa and tropical fruits, coming from regions most exposed to the event.

The UN’s World Food Programme says it needs about $13 billion to meet emergency food needs worldwide but expects to receive only around $6.5 billion, and a $200 million appeal covering 22 countries for “anticipatory action” programs, which give families cash ahead of climate shocks, still has a $150 million shortfall. WFP projects an additional 49 million people could be pushed into hunger globally as a result of the El Niño.

The human toll is already acute in places like Somalia, where CARE country director Ummy Dubow described the super El Niño as a “disaster” compounding an existing crisis that has left 3.3 million people internally displaced and 1.88 million children under five acutely malnourished. She said CARE has had to cut its health facilities in Somalia from 150 to 50 due to aid cuts, while food prices have risen 10 to 20 percent and fuel costs climbed 10 percent because of the war in the Middle East. Unicef UK CEO Dr. Philip Goodwin warned “the world is heading into this El Niño at precisely the wrong moment,” noting that children, who didn’t cause the climate crisis, are “paying the highest price.” In Ethiopia, Dejene Dadi, general manager of a coffee-growing cooperative, said “we aren’t ready for this kind of disaster” and that adaptation efforts like soil conservation and irrigation aren’t possible “without more help from coffee companies and governments like the UK.” The Fairtrade Foundation’s Dr. Carley-Jane Stanton called on businesses to pay fair prices and safeguard the environment in their supply chains, while criticizing the UK government for repeatedly delaying publication of its Responsible Business Conduct review.

Other news:

Rescuers in Nepal pulled a man and a woman alive on Saturday, 10 days after devastating floods hit the country, with the man, a Chinese national, rescued from a hydropower tunnel at the Trishuli project, bringing the total to three workers pulled alive from that site. A joint team of Nepalese military personnel and South Korean disaster experts extracted him from a 225-meter tunnel and evacuated him by helicopter for a health assessment, following two Nepalese workers rescued from the same tunnel complex on Friday. Separately, a woman was rescued alive from a house in the flood-hit town of Nuwakot and airlifted to Kathmandu. The Aug. 26 floods, likely caused by a glacier collapse, have killed at least 1,300 people, with more than 5,000 still missing according to Nepal’s disaster management agency. About 900 workers remain missing across 12 hydropower projects nationwide, with roughly 500 believed trapped in tunnels.

Philippines Vice President Sara Duterte posted bail Saturday after an arrest order was issued a day earlier on charges that she publicly threatened to have President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and two others assassinated. Duterte, who has denied the allegations, showed reporters a court order lifting the warrant and posted 360,000 pesos, about $5,740, for three counts of grave threats tied to comments she made during a 2024 online news conference. A conviction could permanently disqualify her from holding office and block her from running for president in 2028 when Marcos’s term ends, and the case comes after the House of Representatives voted to impeach her in May over allegations including unexplained wealth and misuse of state funds. Duterte and Marcos were 2022 running mates whose alliance has since collapsed amid disputes including her criticism of his decision to hand her father, former President Rodrigo Duterte, over to the International Criminal Court, where he faces trial in November over his deadly anti-drug crackdown. The two also diverge sharply on China policy, with Marcos deepening defense ties to the US and Sara Duterte criticized for staying quiet on Chinese aggression against Filipino forces in the South China Sea.

A federal judge ruled Friday that former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema can be sued under North Carolina’s “homewrecker” law over her relationship with a member of her security detail, rejecting her argument that she has no connection to the state. U.S. District Judge David A. Bragdon pointed to nine text messages Sinema sent to Matthew Ammel while he was in North Carolina, finding it implausible she didn’t know his location at the time. The lawsuit, filed by Ammel’s ex-wife Heather, seeks damages under a rare law that lets spouses sue a third party for breaking up their marriage, alleging Sinema pursued Matthew despite knowing he was married and later gave him a Senate fellowship while he still worked as her bodyguard. Sinema testified in a deposition that the relationship turned sexual in Napa, California in May 2024, with later encounters in New York, Washington, Colorado and Arizona, though never North Carolina. Matthew and Heather Ammel separated in November 2024 after she discovered explicit messages between him and Sinema.

Maria Bartiromo’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, sharply denied reports that she was fired from Fox News after allegedly leaking internal editorial guidance to the White House, calling the claims “absolutely and unequivocally false” and threatening that supporting evidence will “come out whether through the courthouse or otherwise.” Fox announced her departure Thursday after 12 and a half years without explanation, and the network has already begun reshuffling her shows among other hosts. The dispute stems from a Status News report claiming Fox told staff to avoid amplifying unsubstantiated 2020 election claims Trump made during a speech, and that Bartiromo shared that internal directive with the White House. Trump publicly defended her as a “total professional” and “true warrior,” fueling speculation she could join the administration, though Vanity Fair reported she isn’t pursuing a White House role. Freedman, who has represented other ousted anchors including Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, called Bartiromo one of the hardest-working journalists of her career.

A commercial rescue spacecraft sent to extend the life of NASA’s aging Swift Observatory got within 15 kilometers of the telescope last weekend and captured data before being forced to retreat due to low fuel, according to Katalyst Space Technologies, which ran the mission. The Link spacecraft went into an uncontrollable spin shortly after its July launch, and while flight controllers stabilized it, the fuel used in the process left too little to boost Swift into a longer-lasting orbit as originally planned. Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee blamed the rushed nine-month timeline for the craft’s troubles, and NASA, which paid $30 million for the attempt, called it a worthwhile experiment even though it fell short. NASA expects Swift, launched in 2004, to reenter the atmosphere sometime between October and the end of the year, and Katalyst is now developing a next-generation spacecraft that could similarly extend the life of the aging Hubble Space Telescope. Link itself likely lacks the fuel for another close approach but can keep gathering data before it burns up in the atmosphere in the coming weeks.

Ulta Beauty is facing backlash after Atlanta comedian Lisandra Vazquez posted a video alleging the retailer is “one of Flock Camera’s biggest commercial customers,” sparking widespread criticism across its social media pages. An Ulta spokesperson told The Independent the company uses automated license plate readers at fewer than 1 percent of its more than 1,500 stores to investigate crimes like organized retail theft, adding the cameras don’t use facial recognition and data access is tightly controlled. The backlash comes after The Washington Post reported last month that at least 50 law enforcement officers have been accused, charged or arrested for misusing Flock and similar license plate reader networks to stalk women, including wives, partners and ex-girlfriends. Civil liberties group UltraViolet launched a campaign called “Hey Ulta: Mass surveillance isn’t pretty,” urging the retailer to cut ties with Flock and deactivate the cameras. Customers flooded Ulta’s Instagram comments with complaints, with one writing, “I’m a regular customer at Ulta & I won’t be shopping here until you terminate your flock camera contracts.”

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Important Saturday Night Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 5, 2026. Big update this Saturday, and it does not have much about Donald Trump. Federal immigration officials have quietly won a judge’s permission to force-feed a detained Cuban hunger striker in Texas through a rare, nonconsensual surgical procedure that cuts into the abdomen to insert a permanent feeding tube, the first documented case of its kind and the 19th time since January 2025 ICE has secured approval for involuntary medical treatment on a hunger striker.

In a separate ruling, a divided federal appeals court found that the Constitution doesn’t guarantee Americans a right to clean drinking water, tossing out a lawsuit from Jackson, Mississippi residents over lead contaminated water despite a sharp dissent comparing the case to the Flint water crisis. Overseas, the Iran war escalated further this weekend as the U.S. destroyed or disabled three Iranian oil tankers after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard fired on an American aircraft carrier and destroyer, even as Trump and Vance downplayed the fighting as “small potatoes” and gas and diesel prices hit record highs heading into Labor Day weekend. And in a story getting renewed attention, Julia Molchanova has gone public for the first time about years of sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, revealing she was the Jane Doe plaintiff behind a $72.5 million settlement with Bank of America.

Stories like these, ICE quietly winning approval to cut into a detained man’s body without his consent, a federal court ruling that Americans have no constitutional right to clean water, aren’t getting the coverage they deserve elsewhere. That’s exactly why this newsletter exists. 

With that, here’s the news.

ICE Given Permission to Conduct Non-Consensual Surgery:

Federal immigration officials quietly received a judge’s permission to force-feed a detained Cuban hunger striker at a Texas detention center, including through a rare, nonconsensual surgical procedure, according to court records reviewed by The Guardian. The man is likely the 19th hunger striker since January 2025 for whom ICE has won approval for involuntary medical procedures, and this is the first documented case involving a “percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy” tube, a surgery that cuts into the abdomen to insert a permanent feeding tube. Judge Andrew Hanen approved the force-feeding on August 19 and extended the order this week through mid-September, even as DHS claimed Thursday the man had resumed eating and was not being force-fed. He is held at the privately-run Montgomery ICE processing center near Houston, operated by GEO Group, and was arrested by ICE on July 22 before being declared a hunger striker three days later. The Guardian is not naming him because efforts to contact him were unsuccessful, and like in most force-feeding cases, the majority of his court records remain sealed.

ACLU Texas attorney Savannah Kumar condemned the practice as torture, saying “the cruelty of the extreme tactics at ICE’s disposal to end lawful protest, including forcibly cutting into a protester’s body to insert a tube in their stomach, underscores the horrors happening outside our view in ICE detention centers.” Immigrant and civil rights attorney Eunice Cho, who has documented ICE’s forced treatment of hunger strikers extensively, said the high number of verified court orders since January 2025, 19 in total, “raises serious concern” and suggests either that conditions are bad enough to drive more hunger strikes or that officials are increasingly skipping less confrontational resolutions in favor of forced medical intervention. Like many cases The Guardian has reviewed, the Cuban man has no current legal representation, which Cho called “a tragedy, and a clear failure of our justice system” given the invasive, nonconsensual procedure he now faces. GEO Group referred all questions to ICE, and the US attorney’s office representing ICE in the case did not respond to a request for comment.

DHS said the Cuban hunger striker entered the US unlawfully in 1980 and was ordered deported in 2004, claiming he has past convictions for aggravated assault with a weapon, aggravated battery, drug possession, and carrying a concealed firearm, and that he “received due process and will remain in ICE custody until removed.” The agency also maintained that its facilities provide proper food, hygiene, phone and other basic services, and that hunger strikers continue receiving three meals a day delivered to their rooms. Typically, once a judge approves a force-feeding request, guards hold down a hunger striker while medical staff insert a tube through the nose and down the throat to pump in nutritional liquid, but this case marks the first known instance of ICE receiving permission for the more invasive surgical gastrostomy procedure instead. The Trump administration had previously refused to acknowledge that force-feeding was happening in ICE detention at all, only confirming the practice after The Guardian’s ongoing investigation, which has now identified 19 such cases since January 2025.

Major Court Ruling Denies Americans Right to Clean Water:

A divided full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the US Constitution doesn’t provide a right to clean drinking water or accurate information from public officials, affirming the dismissal of a lawsuit over alleged lead-contaminated drinking water in Jackson, Mississippi. Writing for the majority, Trump appointee Judge Kurt Engelhardt said “the Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing” and found no historical basis for such a right under the due process clause. He said residents have other options, including pursuing tort claims, electing new officials, or petitioning representatives, and added that even if a due process violation had occurred, city officials would still get qualified immunity because no clearly established right was violated. The ruling reverses course from a 2025 panel decision that had revived the residents’ bodily autonomy claim, which was vacated once the full court took up the case en banc. Engelhardt’s opinion was joined by nine other Republican appointed judges on the court.

Jackson residents have claimed officials deliberately allowed lead to contaminate the city’s drinking water, harming those who drank it, allegations the city has denied. Engelhardt distinguished the case from other bodily integrity claims, like sexual assault by police or forced medication of prisoners, calling water system mismanagement “wholly different,” and said Supreme Court precedent on informed consent doesn’t extend to a right to accurate information from officials. The case, Sterling v. City of Jackson, was decided by the full Fifth Circuit sitting en banc on September 4th. Neither a lawyer for the residents nor representatives for the city immediately returned requests for comment.

Judge Catharina Haynes, a George W. Bush appointee, dissented in part, joined by four liberal members of the court, arguing that at this stage the claims must be accepted as true and that residents should at least get discovery. She wrote that the allegations “mirror in various ways one of the worst public health crises in recent American history, the Flint water crisis,” and said the majority ignored the residents’ state-created danger claim. Haynes said the Fifth Circuit “stands practically alone in its decades-long fence-sitting” on the state-created danger doctrine and said she would adopt it and find the residents plausibly alleged a bodily integrity violation. Separately, parents of children who died in last year’s Camp Mystic flood in Texas had also urged the circuit to recognize the state-created danger theory, which would let cases proceed against public entities accused of increasing people’s risk of harm.

Iran war:

The U.S. struck and “permanently disabled” three Iranian oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman on Saturday after Iran’s Revolutionary Guard fired ballistic missiles at a U.S. aircraft carrier and guided missile destroyer, both of which evaded the strikes with no American personnel injured. CENTCOM said the M/T Downy and M/T Stark 1 were permanently disabled while the M/T Kylo was completely destroyed, with its crew directed to abandon ship beforehand. CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper warned “if you shoot at two of our ships, we will impose an even higher economic cost, taking out three of yours,” adding the U.S. would “not hesitate to defend American forces, and if necessary, destroy Iran’s limited and exposed oil fleet.” Iran’s Revolutionary Guard responded by saying it had targeted three oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and three vessels “affiliated with” the U.S. in retaliation, warning other ships against using unapproved routes, though there was no immediate U.S. confirmation. Iran’s joint military command separately warned that strikes against U.S. ships would grow more severe if the U.S. keeps interfering with Iranian shipping.

President Trump downplayed the conflict Friday, calling it “small potatoes” for the United States and saying “a lot of people don’t call it a war, I call it a military conflict,” a day after Vice President JD Vance said he “wouldn’t call it a war” and argued major combat operations had ended weeks ago. That framing came despite Trump himself referring to it as a war multiple times in a Truth Social post the same morning, and despite an Air Force email obtained by CBS News showing the Pentagon had instructed personnel in August to stop calling it “Operation Epic Fury,” three months after the administration had declared that operation over. Trump also told reporters the U.S. may strike Iran’s alleged Pickaxe Mountain nuclear site “very soon,” saying “we know everybody that’s moving at Pickaxe... if anything goes bad, we hit them, we hit them hard.” Meanwhile, Iranian army spokesman Brig. Gen. Mohammad Akrami-Nia argued the U.S. and Israel had failed to achieve their war objectives, including destroying Iran’s missile and nuclear capabilities or overthrowing its government, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said separately that toppling Iran’s regime was “within reach.” Iranian officials have also acknowledged mounting economic strain from U.S. sanctions, with the rial trading at a record 2.2 million to the dollar on the black market against an official rate of about 42,000.

U.S. gas prices surged into Labor Day weekend, with diesel hitting a record $5.85 a gallon Friday and AAA predicting the highest holiday pump prices ever recorded, as the war keeps traffic through the Strait of Hormuz well below pre-war levels and pushes global oil prices higher. Regular gas reached nearly $4.15 a gallon, the first time it has ever topped $4 on Labor Day, with Brent crude plateauing around $95 a barrel, about 45% higher than a year ago. White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett called the price spike “a very short-term thing,” saying he gets daily updates on how much oil is moving through the strait and that Saudi Arabia has increased flows through its pipeline to the Red Sea to help ease prices. Away from the economic fallout, the war has also drawn in Lebanon and Yemen, with Israeli strikes killing several people in southern Lebanon despite a truce with Hezbollah, and fighting between Yemen’s government and Houthi rebels killing more than 60 people including civilians on a bus. Separately, the U.S. approved a $5 billion sale of bombs and other equipment to Saudi Arabia, which has faced repeated drone and missile attacks since the war began.

Other news:

Julia Molchanova, now 37, has gone public for the first time as the Jane Doe plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Bank of America, describing years of sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein that began in 2011 when she was 22 and spoke little English. Epstein lured her in with a promise to help her enroll at the Fashion Institute of Technology, then abused her starting on her first trip to New York, eventually drawing her into what she described as a cult-like arrangement in which he controlled her spending, appearance, relationships, and even arranged a marriage for her to another woman, while registering companies in her name that he used to move money without her knowledge. A federal judge recently approved a $72.5 million settlement with Bank of America over claims the bank ignored suspicious transactions tied to Epstein’s trafficking, calling it a case that “brought actual justice, although partial,” while Bank of America said it maintains it didn’t facilitate trafficking crimes. Molchanova said she finally broke away in 2019 after discovering unfamiliar credit card activity tied to her name, confronting Epstein’s bookkeeper and accountant, and refusing his invitations back to Palm Beach, saying she feared “someone would find me on the bottom of his pool if I go.” She said she’s speaking out now to show “women have a voice and the ability to rebuild themselves,” while attorneys for Epstein’s accountant and lawyer disputed knowing she was a trafficking victim.

Vladimir Putin has begun talks with US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner aimed at ending the war in Ukraine. The discussions are the latest push by the Trump administration to broker a resolution to the more than three year conflict, using informal envoys rather than traditional State Department channels. No timeline for a deal has been set, and it remains unclear what concessions either side would be willing to make. The talks come as fighting continues on the ground and international pressure builds for a negotiated end to the war. Kushner and Witkoff have both taken on outsized diplomatic roles in this administration despite holding no formal State Department posts.

Donald Trump has a new hair style now, it appears to be brunette:

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Clorox is recalling about 6.3 million bottles of scented Mistolin Dilutable Cleaners and Lestoil Heavy Duty Multi-Purpose Cleaners sold in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands because the products may be contaminated with bacteria, including Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The CPSC notice, issued September 3rd, says the risk falls mainly on people with weakened immune systems or external medical devices, such as those on chemotherapy, living with an organ transplant, or using a feeding tube, catheter, or central line, while healthy adults are usually not affected. The bacteria can enter the body if inhaled, through the eyes, or through broken skin, all plausible during ordinary cleaning, and it’s a recognized cause of device associated infections that are often resistant to multiple antibiotics. The recall covers specific scented varieties with date codes starting “PR01” made between April 2025 and June 2026, sold in 28 to 128 ounce bottles at retailers like Walmart, Sam’s Club, and Costco for $1.40 to $8, with no injuries reported so far. It’s also the second time in four years Clorox has recalled cleaners over this same bacteria, after pulling roughly 37 million Pine-Sol bottles in 2022 for identical contamination, which raises questions about manufacturing process controls the CPSC notice doesn’t address.

A chunk of ceiling fell inside the Kennedy Center’s grand foyer Friday evening during stormy weather in Washington, leaving a large hole and debris on the red carpet in the hallway connecting the venue’s three main auditoriums, though no one was injured. Center spokesperson Roma Daravi seized on the collapse to argue for the Trump-backed renovation plan, saying “the reality is, the place is falling apart and @realDonaldTrump wants to fix it” and that “there is no legitimate reason to further halt the renovations.” The Kennedy Center’s Trump-aligned board is fighting in court to add Trump’s name to the building’s facade and to close the center for two years for $250 million in renovations, part of the president’s broader push to reshape Washington that also includes the demolished East Wing ballroom project and a planned triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in May that Trump’s name had been added to the Kennedy Center illegally and blocked the administration from closing the venue, and is now weighing an August board vote to restore a version of his name to the facade, with Justice Department lawyers arguing that donations will dry up without it. Grace Terpstra of the group Keep the KC said she suspects the board will use the limited ceiling damage “to make the point that the whole thing needs to be shut down,” adding “I think they’ll try to make it into a bigger thing.”

For the first time since NATO’s decades-old Northern Viking exercise began, no American ships or aircraft joined this year’s submarine-hunting drills off Iceland, with German surveillance planes, Canadian warships, and Belgian fighter jets filling in instead under French command. The exercise focuses on the “GIUK Gap,” the stretch of water between Greenland, Iceland, and the UK that Russian nuclear-powered submarines use to enter the Atlantic, with a senior NATO official warning that Russian control of the gap would give Moscow “free reign of the Atlantic.” The pullback follows broader tension over the Arctic, including Trump’s threats last year to buy or seize Greenland and reported plans to withdraw U.S. troops from Europe, moves that pushed NATO allies to start planning how to defend Greenland from a fellow alliance member. Officials pointed to rising Russian activity as the backdrop, including Germany blaming Moscow for a drone found loaded with explosives at the Leipzig airport and CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow to warn against attacking the Baltic states. French Rear Admiral Nicolas Molitor, who led the coalition, said the allied ships still exercise with the U.S. Navy elsewhere but acknowledged the shift, noting “we will always be sailing with allied ships, and this is a strength,” even without the Americans this time.

A Guardian investigation examined why seven World Central Kitchen aid workers were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their convoy in Gaza. The reporting points to a “guilt by association” targeting practice, in which people connected to suspected militants can themselves become targets even when there’s no direct evidence they posed a threat. The strike killed the seven workers despite WCK having coordinated its convoy’s movements with Israeli forces beforehand. The findings raise fresh questions about the rules of engagement Israel’s military uses when approving strikes near aid operations. WCK suspended its Gaza operations after the attack, which drew international condemnation over the safety of humanitarian workers in the territory.

A New York gallery is suing Alaska Airlines after more than $500,000 worth of Japanese artwork was allegedly ruined in transit. The gallery claims the pieces, described as valuable and fragile, were damaged because of how the airline handled the shipment. The lawsuit seeks to recover the value of the destroyed works along with additional damages tied to the loss. It’s the latest case of a high value art shipment going wrong in the hands of a commercial carrier, an issue that has repeatedly dogged airlines handling delicate cargo. Alaska Airlines has not yet publicly detailed its response to the specific allegations.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has acknowledged that measles caused the death of an infant in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, after previously hedging on the cause. The admission follows a dispute between Kennedy and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro over how the state’s measles outbreak has been handled. The Lancaster County coroner had already attributed the infant’s death to the virus, putting Kennedy’s earlier reluctance at odds with local officials’ findings. The admission comes as Pennsylvania’s outbreak continues to grow, with the case count climbing well into the hundreds. Kennedy’s handling of the outbreak has become a flashpoint in the broader fight over his vaccine skepticism as the nation’s top health official.

A federal judge refused Friday to block the Pentagon from firing three Stars and Stripes staff members who claim they were illegally disciplined for speaking out about the outlet’s editorial independence. U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, ruled the journalists are unlikely to prove their First Amendment rights were violated, finding they gave their CBS News interview as part of their official duties rather than as private citizens, writing “they are being fired for giving pre-approved interviews on their paper’s behalf in which they largely toed the company line.” Publisher Max Lederer, editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, and Middle East reporter Lara Korte sued after Slavin and Korte were disciplined for the CBS interview objecting to potential military censorship, and Lederer was dismissed shortly after announcing his retirement, saying the Pentagon had installed a new deputy publisher, an active-duty service member, under him without his knowledge. Their lawsuit alleges the firings were retaliation for a report on deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and names the Defense Department and Secretary Pete Hegseth as defendants. Democracy Defenders Fund attorney Taryn Wilgus Null called the ruling not the final word, saying “we fully expect to prevail after we have an opportunity to take discovery and all the facts are revealed.”

A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration must give 48 hours notice before starting construction on the president’s planned “Great Triumphal Arch” in Washington, D.C. The ruling came in response to a legal challenge over how the project was approved and how quickly officials moved toward breaking ground. The notice requirement gives challengers a window to seek emergency relief before any physical work begins, though it doesn’t block the project outright. The arch is the latest in a string of monument and construction projects Trump has pursued in the capital during his second term. The ruling amounts to a procedural check on the pace of the project rather than a verdict on its merits.

A prankster built a lookalike website for the GOP’s midterm convention that redirects unsuspecting visitors straight to the Justice Department’s released Epstein files. The site mimics the official convention page closely enough to fool people searching for event details. Instead of convention information, anyone who clicks through lands in the trove of Epstein related documents the DOJ has made public. It’s the latest instance of Trump aligned events or officials being targeted by pranksters using the Epstein files as a pointed political jab. It’s not yet clear whether convention organizers or the GOP plan to respond or seek to take the site down.

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

 

A photo of Donald Trump and John Roberts, with Trump in the lower foreground and Roberts in the upper background (New York Times photo by Tierney L. Cross). 

New York Times, Opinion: Not So Supreme, Mr. Roberts, Maureen Dowd, right, Sept. 5, 2026. In legal terms, the president is an Olympic-class sprinter. He breaks the law so fast that the law is left in his orange dust.

Trump is an outlaw. And our system was not built for an outlaw in the Oval.

He zeros in on loopholes in the law and the system that are based on trust and the assumption that our leaders — and their families — will be not be voracious scam artists.

“The Constitution was built on this idea that the president would have enough decency and morality that they just wouldn’t run around exploiting the gaps,” said the Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “And for Trump, it’s like red meat. This idea that Trump’s mentor was Roy Cohn was profoundly wrong. Donald Trump’s mentor was Fred from day one. His father showed him how to exploit the government system, the legal system and business. His whole worldview is built around the idea that you exploit systems for personal gain, and there’s nothing wrong with doing that because the world’s populated by sharks and you just have to be the biggest shark.”

After running a court that has been complicit in Trump’s defiling our institutions and razing our hallowed spaces, Chief Justice John Roberts seems belatedly alarmed.

“That construction is likely unlawful,” Roberts wrote in his dissent on Monday from his fellow Republican justices’ ruling that the president’s ballroom behemoth — with taxpayers on the hook for over $300 million — can slouch toward completion. Noting that the president was “likely” infringing on Congress, Roberts added, “Today’s decision is no victory for the separation of powers.”

The White House is the People’s House. Chief executives are transient tenants. Its “stately simplicity,” President Teddy Roosevelt once said, “is an expression of the character of the period in which it was built, and is in accord with the purposes it was designed to serve.” Safeguarding it, he said, gave us continuity with our past.

Roberts used that quote in his dissent, as well as a line from Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

Trump was a builder, but he is such an egotist he can only view buildings — and reflecting pools — as reflections of himself. When he built Trump Tower, he tore down the Art Deco friezes on Bonwit Teller despite promising them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Just so, he bulldozed the East Wing and tore up both of Jackie Kennedy’s gardens before Congress or historic preservationists had a chance to weigh in.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson calls this a “catch me if you can” approach.

The Supreme Court protects the outlandish outlaw by palavering about whether the architectural historian who brought the case has “standing” to do so. Yet shouldn’t any American have standing to challenge Trump’s desecrations? Trump ludicrously blasted the preservationists fighting to stop the ballroom as “TREASONISTS.”

As he casually divides and undermines America, he obsesses on using Krazy Glue to affix gold crap to the walls of the Oval Office or plotting to plant 47 maple trees in Lafayette Park to honor himself. He got us into a war he has no clue how to get out of, yet spends his time mulling redecorating projects, gold gewgaws, his new helipad and his replacement of the asphalt driveway at the White House with granite.

There are so many pathetic scenes of the Supreme Court and Republicans in Congress caving in to Trump — on his war in Iran that he calls “small potatoes” and that JD Vance risibly claims is not a war; on his attempts to disenfranchise voters; on trying to hijack the Postal Service to obstruct those voting by mail; on plotting to sell of a chunk of Yosemite to a private developer; on allowing the killing of endangered wolves and the secret slaughter of wild horses; on trying to slap his name back on the Kennedy Center; on his petty, vindictive renaming of Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” in the midst of the U.S.-Canadian trade war, even though it’s not even named for the Canadian province.

Now Trump is breaking ground for his solipsistic, Napoleonic Triumphal Arch — never mind that it lacks federal approval and that the gold angel on top might endanger planes flying in and out of Reagan National Airport.

O’Brien thinks the most tragic thing is that the Supreme Court now has a conservative majority that believes in the unitary executive and is getting roadblocks out of the way to give the president more latitude, at the very moment we get a Caligula who desperately needs roadblocks. Roberts issued the ruling in 2024 giving Trump near-total criminal immunity, and that makes him complicit in Trump’s egregious behavior.

Roberts gave Trump the runway, and now he’s objecting. But it’s too late.

“And that’s the lesson of everybody who doesn’t understand who Donald Trump is,” O’Brien said. “He’s simply there to pick your pocket.”

Lindsay Clancy at her murder trial in Plymouth, Mass., on Friday (Pool photo by Greg Derr).

New York Times, Clancy Faces Years of Confinement, No Matter What Comes Next, Mark Arsenault and Christina Morales, Sept. 5, 2026. Even as a jury failed to reach a verdict in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial, her future is unlikely to include freedom, at least for a long time. But Americans have been divided over the goal of her confinement.

Whatever happens next in the murder case against Lindsay Clancy after a Massachusetts jury failed on Friday to reach a verdict, it is certain that she will remain institutionalized for many months, if not years.

Even if she is not ultimately convicted, medical and legal experts have said that her future will be one of confinement.

Ms. Clancy does not deny strangling her three children with exercise bands in 2023. Her symptoms of postpartum psychosis in the months before she killed them were at the center of her defense. Her lawyers argued that she was not legally responsible for the deaths.

That view apparently persuaded most of the jury members in the monthlong trial. Notes from the jury suggested that 11 of the 12 jurors seemed ready to acquit Ms. Clancy. But one lone juror declined to join the rest, even after apparently expressing doubts about her guilt.

A similar debate has captivated and divided the American public for weeks. At its core is a fundamental disagreement about how Ms. Clancy should spend the rest of her life. Should she be labeled a criminal and imprisoned? Or should she be regarded as a victim of a sort, who should be provided treatment? In neither case would she go free. But to what end should her confinement serve?

Michelle Oberman, a law professor at Santa Clara University who studies legal issues around pregnancy and motherhood, said it felt like a “watershed moment” that most jurors seemed inclined to support the idea that Ms. Clancy should be helped, not punished.

Eleven of 12 jurors apparently agreed, she said, that “postpartum mental illness is real, and that postpartum psychosis can cause someone to do something they’d never otherwise do.”

The murder charges against Ms. Clancy remain intact after the mistrial, and will keep her locked up in a local psychiatric hospital for now, while the state decides whether to try her again, according to her lawyer, Kevin Reddington.

In remarks after the judge declared the mistrial, Mr. Reddington said that Ms. Clancy would be returning to Tewksbury Hospital, where she was held during the trial. It is a state-run psychiatric facility about an hour’s drive from where Ms. Clancy was tried in Plymouth, Mass.

The judge set a Sept. 29 status hearing in the case.

Timothy Cruz, the Plymouth County district attorney, did not immediately pledge to retry Ms. Clancy, saying on Friday that the decision would come later. But he strenuously defended his decision to charge her with first-degree murder and said the case was about seeking justice for her three dead children.

The forceful tone of his remarks signaled that he was not likely to walk away from seeking accountability for Ms. Clancy, though it is possible the case could end with a negotiated plea bargain that forgoes the need for another lengthy and gut-wrenching trial.

Mr. Cruz dismissed the suggestion that the case was about mental health issues after the mistrial was announced on Friday, saying the trial was “about getting justice for those three little babies.”

If Ms. Clancy is ultimately found not responsible for the crimes, experts say she may be sent to a high-security forensic psychiatric hospital — a center to treat people who have stood criminal trial — for long-term mental health care.

Several psychiatrists said that for many women, symptoms of postpartum psychosis are treated and resolved within a year. But even if she is found not guilty because of that diagnosis, Ms. Clancy will most likely be treated for other ongoing issues, such as suicidal thoughts and a potential diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which can be a risk factor for postpartum psychosis.

Dr. Katrina Furey, a reproductive psychiatrist, has treated patients with postpartum psychosis for about a decade. She said treatment could be conducted through a combination of drugs, and sometimes with electroconvulsive therapy, in which electricity is used to trigger a short seizure that can help “reset the brain.”

The treatment has a bad reputation from Hollywood movies, Dr. Furey said, but is routine and often effective.

“The end game of treatment is for mom to feel like her normal self again,” she added.

“Many of these women have no significant past psychiatric history, and then get very ill very quickly,” said Dr. Nicole H. Cirino, a psychiatrist who serves on the Postpartum Psychosis Task Force at Postpartum Support International, a nonprofit.

She continued: “Reconciling that and thinking about how to move forward, particularly if they have legal involvement, is really something that is quite complicated and takes some time.”

Patients often work with a team of psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, peer advisers and other therapists while they’re hospitalized, said Dr. Susan Hatters-Friedman, a forensic and reproductive psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University and the former president of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law.

The goal of forensic hospitalization is not just to manage patients’ mental illness, but also to prepare them to heal and possibly return to society.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

Hope for America, Opinion: Donald Trump’s vanity will be his downfall, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 4, 2026. At 5 a.m. this morning, an interview Donald Trump was apparently warned not to give went live for the entire world to see. “A lot of people said, ‘Don’t do this interview,’” he admitted.

Within minutes, we understood exactly why he was advised not to give it. The President of the United States is consumed with building monuments across Washington, the bigger, the gaudier, the better. He is obsessed with making sure as many things as possible are left behind when he is gone, going so far as to admit that when confronted with the accusation that he is quite literally building monuments to himself, Trump didn’t deny it. He agreed. “That’s true,” he said. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

The interview, published by New York Magazine and written by Ben Terris, showed a Donald Trump who did not appear particularly concerned about how anyone would interpret what he was saying. What quickly became obvious was how focused the president was on everything but actually carrying out the duties of the presidency. How, instead of focusing on the mounting crises facing the country, he wasn’t shy about his plan to make as many things as possible bear his name and, in some cases, his image, whether the country wants it or not.

He bragged about his pet project and favorite thing to talk about, the ballroom, and how it was being accented with gold that Trump refers to as “God’s favorite metal.” He told Terris it shares design aspects with the Palace of Versailles but will be, in his words, “more beautiful.” He bragged about the concrete: “You could take a jackhammer and go to those columns and stand there for two days at full blast and you wouldn’t even see a mark. It’s nuclear concrete. It’s meant for if there’s a nuclear attack. I’m not sure you could take it down.”

But it was in that moment that he slipped. He actually shared that he was not just building a ballroom; he was building a nuclear fortress because, as much as he loves vanity projects, there are reports that he has also grown more fearful about the risks of retaliation after starting a new forever war, something else he was warned not to do.

With Donald Trump, his agenda is never just one thing. He leads his life from one impulsive decision to the next, but some of the things he does are multifaceted. Right now, it is about righting perceived wrongs that he has created in his mind, protecting himself from his increasing unpopularity here at home and abroad, and building monuments and buildings designed to outlast him and the democracy he is hell-bent on destroying.

Trump told Terris exactly where this obsession began without even meaning to. In the spring of 2010, he called David Axelrod, then President Obama’s senior adviser, and pitched himself as a ballroom builder. “I build ballrooms,” Axelrod recalls Trump telling him. “I build the greatest ballrooms in the world. You have these state dinners, and you have them in these shitty little tents in the back. It’s not befitting. Let me build a modular ballroom for you.” Axelrod passed the message along. Nobody called Trump back. Fifteen years later, Axelrod told Terris: “If we had let him build his modular ballroom, perhaps we wouldn’t have had to demolish the East Wing. And in that sense, I kind of regret not doing it.”

Trump said he holds no grudge, but he still said this: “They’re not good businesspeople. If somebody offers you a free ballroom, take it, right?” Because for Trump, everything is transactional, and he never misses an opportunity for a money grab even if it is not in the best interest of the country. For nearly a decade and a half, he could not let it go. By the time he returned to the White House, he was ready for revenge in all shapes and sizes, including that perceived snub from Obama about the ballroom. “In the first term, I was under siege,” he told Terris. “I didn’t feel it was the atmosphere.” Then he added: “Now is a much more powerful time.” That is how he sees this presidency. A vehicle to carry out all of his worst impulses.

With all of the pushback on the ballroom project and his other vanity projects, the Trump administration has leaned heavily into national security as the justification for some of their projects and the high cost to taxpayers. Trump told Terris that when top generals heard about the ballroom, they arranged a meeting: “They said, ‘Sir, we’d like to build things, it would be a dream, but there’s never been anything like this proposed. If we could build underground, we could go down five stories.’” Terris asked if there was currently a bunker at the White House. “Not much of a place,” Trump said. Then Terris asked the question that so many of us think about when we consider how this all ends, if it ever does. What if a president just decided not to leave? What if he holed up in his new bunker after the 2028 election?

Laughing, Trump said, “I haven’t heard that one,” continuing with, “But I tell you what, it would be awfully tough to get you out. Nobody would be able to get you out.”

If you have some time this weekend, this piece is worth your time to read in its entirety; there is much more in it, and Terris masterfully connects a lot of what Trump has done in the past with what he is doing now, and what he plans to do urgently before the midterms and after.

Beyond the ballroom itself is something much larger. What Trump is doing to the physical landscape of our country, and especially Washington, D.C., is exactly what he is doing to everything else behind the scenes. He is tearing down what came before him, erasing what others built, and replacing it all with himself. We know the policies he has gutted, and the alliances he has destroyed. The institutions he has hollowed out are not forgotten either. And we can’t forget the invisible things he has attacked with the disinformation campaigns around facts in the trafficking ring files and science. But the construction projects and what he has torn down are tangible, visible in your face proof of what he is doing. The two sit in the same space. A madman is tearing down what we can see and what we can’t.

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.

Something I haven’t been able to process myself was the dismantling of “Blue” at the Kennedy Center earlier this week. The twenty-four-foot cobalt blue sculpture created by the artist Joel Shapiro, who passed away just last year, has stood outside the Reach annex since 2019. It was a beloved piece of public art that Shapiro described as “a celebration of possibility.” That is what this administration chose to tear down.

This week, the administration also announced that construction will begin in two weeks on the 250-foot triumphal arch planned for Memorial Circle, directly between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, where generations of our war dead are buried. This deeply unpopular construction project would stand more than twice as tall as the Lincoln Memorial, and cast a shadow over one of the most sacred resting places for the bravest amongst us. A place where the monuments already there were built to remember the sacrifice of the people who came before us. Donald Trump knows he can never compete with the likes of those buried there, so the next best thing in his mind is to build himself a monument to literally overshadow them. He thinks this will make him appear greater than them, and more historically significant. Someone to never forget. We know it will do the absolute opposite. It will make him look exactly as he really is, small and weak. When Trump was asked about the size of the arch, he said, “I’d like it to be the biggest one of all. We’re the biggest, most powerful nation. I’d like it to be the biggest one.”

I am still exhausted from the federal actions that took place around my house yesterday. Some days it feels like the weight of paying attention in this time of history is more than any of us should have to carry. But we do. Each and every day, because the alternative is silence, and silence in this moment is something none of us can afford.

On Wednesday, Trump gave a truly unhinged speech in the Rose Garden, full of his usual propaganda and scare tactics. But what I zeroed in on was when he inadvertently told us his plan for the midterms. Trump said: “We’re going to take that final 30 days; you don’t want to go too much before that because people forget.” He was referring to his campaigning schedule and how he wasn’t going to put his efforts into it until those last 30 days. This is something that we can all use to plan our resistance to his authoritarian takeover. We now have the advantage of something he is going to wish that he still had: time.

Tonight we are exactly two months from the midterm elections. Trump just told us he is not getting serious for another 30. We have double the time he does. That means that every single conversation we start right now, every voter that we help register, and every door we knock on between now and the beginning of October is ground he will never make up. His incompetence is a strategic gift, and it may be one of the most important things we have going for us.

If you’re tired, I understand. I am too. But this is not forever. If we do all we can and take back Congress, it won’t solve all of our problems, but it will slow his destruction and finally bring back accountability and checks and balances. When the road gets long and hard, hang onto that hope and let yourself imagine what that could do in the moments that feel overwhelming.

I’ve started adding a new element of my resistance this past week. I’m actively injecting Trump’s failure and incompetence into as many conversations, big and small, as I can. When someone talks about the rising cost of gasoline (I just filled up at almost $6.50 a gallon!) I remind them what wars in the Middle East do and that Trump started one without permission and without support from allies other than Israel. When I recently had to explain why people we knew had moved away, I gave the long explanation that they were scientists, and their company made the rare decision to move them to Europe to safeguard their work. When local corruption surfaces, I point out that corruption at the top gives those down below what they see as permission to commit their own corruption. Our biggest challenge is that people have to feel it themselves to care, or they have to see the destruction with their own eyes. We need to guide their sight and understanding so they know it is here. It is already impacting their lives, and if we do not vote against the Trump machine in November, it will get a lot worse.

The MAGA movement has never been shy about wearing its beliefs and loyalty in the form of red hats and Trump merchandise. They follow the assigned talking points and never question their leader. In the past, they would have been worried and scared to show their ugly views to their neighbors and the world. Now they wear them like a badge, and it is time for us to flip that. We have to take a stand and remind people that hate never made a country great, nor did standing beside and empowering a strongman.

Our odds of a major upset in November just keep getting better, especially the more interviews that Donald Trump gives. Democrats currently lead the generic congressional ballot by six to seven points, the largest margin since the 2018 blue wave that flipped 41 seats. Trump’s approval sits at roughly 38%, with 58% of Americans disapproving. Among independents, his approval has fallen to 34%, below the level that preceded that wave. Independents are one of the strongest groups of voters we have. Their abandonment of Trump could make or break most elections and especially this one. They are not the die-hard Trump loyalists. They are loyal to no one. The stat that carries a heavy weight is just how many are sick and tired of their costs going up while the president spends copious amounts of money on his ego-building, with 65% of Americans dissatisfied with his vanity projects.

We are two months away from sending a powerful message to the White House and to our allies. We need to make sure it is crystal clear. The message must be that Donald Trump’s grasp on our country has come to an end. That we, the people, control this country, not a power-hungry man obsessed with a gold-plated ballroom and certainly not his sycophants.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance  

New York Times, Trump Officials Draft Plan to Pay At-Home Parents, Using Funds for Working Ones, Coral Davenport, Sept. 5, 2026. The proposed benefit, a top policy priority for Vice President JD Vance, would apply only to married couples and tap a fund intended to provide federal child care subsidies to working parents.

The Trump administration is moving to allow married couples with a stay-at-home spouse to collect child care subsidies, a policy championed by Vice President JD Vance, using funds from a federal program intended to assist working parents, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The change would create the only federal subsidy to pay parents to stay home and raise their children, one of the most significant efforts to date by the Trump administration to harness federal funds to promote a traditional view of families.

To do so, officials are seeking to use a Health and Human Services Department fund that was created in the 1990s to help low-income and working-class parents afford child care so they could work or go to school.

Under the draft new rule, parents who stay home with their children could benefit from the program, which typically provides about $9,000 per child each year, potentially reshaping which families get federal child care money.

The move could end up redirecting money away from working parents and their child care providers, causing some to raise their rates or even close, critics said, potentially worsening what many experts say is a child care crisis in the country.

About 80 percent of the 870,000 families who currently get the child care subsidies have single working parents, most of them mothers, according to Health Department data.

The policy change would effectively create a government incentive for parents to stay home with their children, an idea embraced as part of a broader conservative effort to advance policies that promote more mothers staying at home.

The new rule being drafted would allow married couples with one stay-at-home parent in certain income brackets to collect a subsidy, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the plan before it is finalized. The change could be made without approval from Congress.

More than 80 percent of stay-at-home parents are mothers, according to the Pew Research Center.

The plan is being pushed by the White House and is seen as a top priority of Mr. Vance, according to several people familiar with the discussions. The draft rule also incorporates policies in legislation written by Secretary of State Marco Rubio when he was a senator from Florida.

PoliticusUSA, Opinion: Trump Made His Midterm Convention Free And Republicans Still Won’t Go, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 5, 2026. Trump made the upcoming Republican midterm convention in Dallas free for endangered GOP candidates to attend, and Republicans are still refusing to show up.

The Republican midterm convention was an idea from the same person who has given the United States tariffs, the war with Iran, measles, healthcare cuts, tax cuts for billionaires, ICE roaming American streets, and the passage of the entire Republican agenda in one piece of legislation.

To say that Republicans are not enthused by Trump’s convention is an understatement. A majority of 70 Republicans in close elections said that they would not be attending Trump’s convention. Republican candidates are telling Trump not to campaign with them and telling the White House to keep him away.

The Washington Post reported that Republicans are taking Trump off their websites: “At least seven Republican House candidates in battleground races have de-emphasized or removed mentions of Trump and his priorities on their campaign websites ahead of the general election, according to a Washington Post analysis.”

None of this means Republicans are moving left or changing their policies. Candidates are trying to sell MAGA without Trump. The president has repeatedly said that he is MAGA, and his supporters agree with him.

All of this puts Trump’s midterm convention in an awkward place.

Trump is trying to hold a convention that his party members don’t want to attend, but that same party is afraid of turning off Trump’s supporters if they too obviously break with him.

Fewer than 100 Republican candidates were scheduled to attend. To boost attendance, Trump made the convention free, and Republicans still aren’t showing up.

Trump’s convention is another fiasco. It is still being reported that he plans to speak on both nights.

Axios reported that even with Trump giving away access to the convention to some Republican candidates, many aren’t showing up:

Multiple lawmakers told Axios that members of the NRCC’s Patriot program — its designation for vulnerable incumbents — are not being required to pay the $25,000 to attend the convention.

Other members have been asked to pay up, prompting complaints among rank-and-file Republicans who were already less than enthusiastic about attending.

“It’s $25,000, apparently,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told reporters this week when asked if he would attend. “It’s pretty steep.”

“Not everybody is a fundraising juggernaut, and some of those folks feel it’s better spent on themselves,” Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-Texas) told Axios.

What do Republicans get for $25,000? They get hotel rooms, 2 convention tickets, and tickets to a welcome reception.

Some of these Republicans would rather spend the money on their own campaigns than waste two days in Dallas at Trump’s party for himself.

Donald Trump made it clear in a Truth Social post that this gathering isn’t a convention. It’s a rally, “The Greatest RALLY of them all! I’ll be speaking on night one, and hanging around for an earlier closing, and lots of music, on night two!!! See you in Dallas.”

Trump wants Republicans to pay to go to one of his rallies.

It is not exactly clear where the money raised is going. This is an event put on by the House Republican fundraising arm, the National Republican Campaign Committee, but in the shady Trump money world, one can’t be certain where the funds will end up.

The convention is shaping up to be a major bomb.

We are about to find out the answer to the question. What happens if an unpopular president throws himself a midterm election party and no one shows up?

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: We Need To Turn Their Furious, Desperate Cheating Into Righteous Anger And Drive Our Early Vote/Election Turnout Through The Roof, Simon Rosenberg, Sept. 5,2026. People will start voting in North Carolina this week, early in person voting kicks off in thirteen days - the General Election is here everyone! Make your early vote plan today!

In my talk this week, As Bad As Things Are For Trump And The Rs Now - And They Are Bad - They Are Likely To Get Worse, I floated the idea that all this furious cheating we are seeing from the Rs would push them further away from voters, making it more likely they lose, which in turn would be even greater pressure on them to cheat harder, which would then push them ever further away from voters……..and a vicious, destructive cycle would kick in for our terrified, addled leader and his cowardly allies across the country.

That in addition to all the other arguments we are making in these final two months of the election we need to be up front and open about their outrageous cheating and manipulation for it will both help us win and prepare the electorate for all the fuckery to come. For their cheating is a manifestation of their oligarchical betrayal and disdain for our democracy, for us, for America and all that has for 250 years made America Great. The tariffs, the barbaric cuts to health care, the ICE terror campaigns, the cheating, the corruption - it is all one big, terrible thing and we need to run hard against it all…..

To understand their desperation lets look at some data and fresh reporting…..

The Civiqs daily Trump job approval tracker clocked in with its worst reading of the cycle this morning:

Consumer confidence is the lowest in over 60 years (via UMichigan):

The NYT writes today about the latest data from the Gallup Party ID tracker:

Party identification shifts are cyclical, according to Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup.

“When things are going well in the country, party identification shifts in the direction of the party in charge,” Dr. Jones said. “When things are going poorly, like they are now with an unpopular Republican president and people unhappy with the state of the nation, people are moving away from the party in charge.”

This phenomenon is what political scientists call thermostatic public opinion. Much like a home thermostat, which might click on the heat when the room gets too cold, attitudes of the U.S. public shift on a large scale when people feel that something may have gone too far.

“What we are seeing now is similar to the end of the George W. Bush administration, when he was pretty unpopular,” Dr. Jones said. “Democrats had a big lead in party identification, which was then a prelude to the 2006 and 2008 elections, which were big victories for Democrats.”

Here’s the chart the NYT put together for the story. Our party ID lead is the largest it’s been since the 2008 cycle:

Today’s FiftyPlusOne’s forecast has now has us with a 93% chance of flipping the House:

And a 57% chance of flipping the Senate:

Both are the highest readings for Democrats this cycle in these forecasts.Subscribed

Here’s a clip of Gina Hinojosa doing a very good job at turning their cheating in Tarrant County, Texas into something that motivates:

“It is only lit a fire under the people of Tarrant Country. They are more motivated than ever to turn out this election cycle”

In addition to this Tarrant County chicanery and Trump’s outrageous efforts to block mail voting just look at all this horseshit the Republicans are trying…..

Yesterday, just two months before the election, the corrupt Roberts Court changed our campaign finance rules in ways that benefit Republicans.

In Semafor Max Tani writes about a new right-wing media effort:

Over the last several months, a new generation of YouTube growth-hackers have flooded American politics with sensationalized, low-quality content, reaching millions of viewers with nearly identical videos taking aim at progressive politicians including Zohran Mamdani, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Notably, while the videos are presented as laypeople giving straight-to-camera ideological news recaps, they feature actors and spokespeople paid small amounts of money to read nearly identical scripts laced with misleading claims and outright falsehoods.

In The Atlantic Ali Breland writes about a similar effort being run from Latvia:

If you’re short on cash, there is someone in Riga, Latvia, who can help. “You can literally make 100k a month with this campaign,” a young man with blond curls and a thick accent says into a camera. All you have to do is post on social media video clips of “anything that supports Republican.” Unfamiliar with U.S. politics? No problem: “If you’re not from the USA, like, What the fuck is even Republicans? like me,” then simply go to Gemini or ChatGPT, he suggests, “and be like ‘Yo, Gemini, I want some videos promoting Republican values. Give me ideas.’ Go to Gemini. Get ideas. Boom.”

The man, who goes by Serviuos, is promoting a campaign called Elephant Clipping, run by his company, ClipIt. The company pays subcontractors, many from poorer countries in Eastern Europe and the global South, to chop up videos the company provides into bite-size pieces in the hope that the clips will go viral online.

Such “clipping” operations have become a popular means of manipulating people’s attention. Brands, influencers, musical artists, and others spend six-figure sums on such promotional campaigns. Perhaps inevitably, the practice is now moving into politics, often without the transparency required to know exactly what is being served up and by whom. Five months before the midterms, though, Serviuos is up-front about the goal of the Elephant Clipping campaign: “So that republican win in USA,” he writes in one message. I sent Serviuos a list of questions about his work in American right-wing politics. He wrote back, “Seems very out of context,” but didn’t comment further.

We also know they will be flooding ding the zone with fake polling in the coming weeks for the use of fake polling to shape election narratives is a core part of the global right’s playbook. We’ve seen here in the US in 2022, 2024, and 2025. We saw it in Hungary earlier this year. And now it is also showing up in the UK. Reform UK is a MAGA aligned political party. From The Guardian:

A polling firm at the centre of allegations that Reform UK breached electoral law is being investigated by two industry bodies.

JL Partners, which is run by former Conservative aides, has been accused of breaking transparency rules by failing to declare that three separate polls had been commissioned by the party.

The company is a member of the British Polling Council and the Market Research Society, who say the identity of a client commissioning a poll should be disclosed when the results enter the public domain.

Both organisations confirmed on Friday that they had launched inquiries into JL Partners. The reviews have come after Channel 4 News broadcast footage gathered by undercover reporters during a year-long investigation into Reform’s finances on Thursday night.

Shining a light on their illiberalism and betrayal to make it less scary and more likely we win is a core objective of Hopium’s Evolving Battlefield Project:

We’ve launched a new project at Hopium to study, discuss, and counter anything Trump might do to illicitly retain power in an election that is breaking hard against him and the Republicans Party. We are launching this project to demystify Trump’s tactics, make them less “scary,” and more widely understood; and by making them more widely understood we make it far less likely they will be successful.

This year we are running against a political party that no longer feels bound by law or democratic norms; has already openly conspired with a hostile foreign power to win an election, and launched an insurrection to try to overturn another one; and has a desperate, corrupt, failing leader who fears prison and ruin if we win. We were surprised and unprepared for Russia’s intervention in 2016, and Trump’s assault on our elections in 2020 and 2021. We cannot be surprised and unprepared this year. Or scared. It is just the work we must do, like making phone calls and writing postcards and giving money to campaigns. The battlefield evolves, and so do we. It is key to how we will win in 2026 and take back Congress in 2027. Together.

This sensibility will also be driving our work with the State Parties New Battlefield Project as it gets stood up in the coming weeks.

The bottom line peeps - they are losing, badly. Thus they are cheating, boldly. And we need to talk to the American people about this to fuel righteous anger at their betrayal and prepare them for more to come……

To take action, get smarter:

Become an Early Vote Champion in your networks, communities, organizations….

Sign up to be a Democracy Protector in your state. Our next on-line training is Wed, Sept 9 at 8pm ET.

Donate to the Texas Democratic Party to help them counter the GOP’s elimination of dozens of polling locations in Tarrant County

Watch our terrific new conversations with Josh Turek (Iowa), Bobby Pulido (TX-15), Stuart Stevens, WI Dem Chair Devin Remiker, Tom Bonier on fake polls, and Dr. Rob Shapiro on how Dems should be approaching repairing the US economy next year. Lots of meaty and encouraging stuff in here!

And of course, we need to stay focused on Job One - winning these elections by as big a margin as possible…….

AlterNet America, Saturday Wrapup: Every Time an Epstein Vote Gets Close, Congress Goes on Vacation, Ryan Rose,Sept. 5, 2026. Trump is skipping Ground Zero because he can't give a speech, even GOPers want Hegseth removed, the House recessing early stalls sexual misconduct reform, and CBS smeared a Muslim candidate using 9/11.

The president has decided that a day about 2,977 people who died is not worth attending if he can’t be the 2,978th person everyone has to listen to.

Since 2012, politicians have been barred from giving speeches at the annual Ground Zero commemoration by the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, to keep the focus on the victims and their families. When organizers reminded the White House of that rule, Trump decided not to attend.

All four living former presidents have confirmed they will attend the ceremony in New York. Joe Biden, who is currently undergoing treatment for an aggressive prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, will be there alongside Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton, who was a New York senator at the time of the attacks, is also expected to attend, as are former first ladies Jill Biden and Laura Bush.

At the Pentagon ceremony last year, Trump began his remarks by memorializing Charlie Kirk, a longtime political ally who had been assassinated the day before, and announced he would award Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously.

ShareEven Republicans Are Now Asking Trump to Fire Pete Hegseth

Hegseth has turned the Department of Defense into a department that can’t defend its own staffing decisions.

On Wednesday, Republican Senator Thom Tillis publicly urged Trump to replace Pete Hegseth, accusing the defense secretary of creating a “leadership void” at the top of the U.S. military. Tillis said he has never witnessed more poorly managed leadership of the country’s service members.

His comments came after Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned on Monday, the latest high-ranking official to leave the Pentagon amid reported tensions with Hegseth. Previous fired military leaders include Navy Admiral Lisa Franchetti, Coastguard Commandant Linda Fagan, and Charles Q. Brown, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Hegseth cited Fagan’s “excessive focus” on diversity as justification for her termination. He’s also removed as many as 80 names from military promotion lists, virtually all of whom are Black or women.

All of this is happening in the seventh month of a war that has already cost $37.5 billion and depleted stockpiles of key munitions. At this rate, the Pentagon will run out of people to run it before it runs out of things to fire.

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Trump Stiffs Republicans And May Have Handed Congress To Democrats, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Sept. 4, 2026. Trump announced on Friday that the $400 million that his super PAC collected is “his” money, which means that he is unlikely to spend it to help Republicans in the midterms.

Republicans have been begging for Donald Trump to start spending some of the $400 million that his super PAC has taken in, but roughly two months to go before Election Day, Trump’s PAC has made zero substantial expenditures to help his party.

Trump wrecked the Senate race in Texas by knocking out the party’s preferred incumbent Sen. John Cornyn in favor of his scandal-plagued loyalist Ken Paxton. Senate Republicans have been demanding that Trump pay the $100-$200 million that they estimate it will take to get Paxton elected.

Until Friday, Trump dodged making any specific statements about spending money. All Trump has done is tell members of his party that he will be heavily involved in the midterms.

What Trump means by heavily involved is anyone’s guess. Heavily involved could mean Trump travels the country, sinking Republican candidates like a bizarro political Johnny Appleseed.

Trump said, “I'm gonna be making contributions to various campaigns of people that I think are good Republicans that I think are good. People that I think are gonna win and can win or are close to winning.”

Trump was asked, “ When does that money start flowing?”

The president answered:

 I'm gonna spend whatever amount of money necessary to try and help us. Uh, and this is money from MAGA Inc. This is my money that I control. Now, this is, uh, separate from the RNC. It's separate from people having money, and I think it's not even counted in terms of the media.

I'm not sure that they ever talk about it. They just found out about it. But yeah, we have, uh, around a billion dollars that I can spend. I can spend for the next race also. I can spend it for what I wanna spend it for, but I'm gonna help a lot of the congressmen and senators that need help.

The money doesn’t belong to Trump. It is not his money, and he doesn’t own it. Trump is apparently going to try to keep Republicans in line by holding his super PAC money over their heads.

Republicans need every dollar they can get because the political winds are blowing strongly against them.

What should scare GOP candidates was Trump suggesting that he might not spend the money this year, but save it for 2028.

If Trump does that, Republicans are doomed.

It is likely that Trump keeps the money for his own purposes, stiffs his party, and Democrats take control of Congress. Republicans shouldn’t be surprised that a felon who has been convicted of business fraud would rip them off. The GOP might get exactly what it deserves in two months.

U.S. Media, Education, Sports, Religion

 

Gloria Steinem speaks at the Women's March in Washington, on January 21, 2017 (Shannon Stapleton photo for Reuters).

New York Times, How Gloria Steinem and Ms. Magazine Transformed the Publishing Industry, Katie Robertson, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). The feminist icon insisted that women were not a niche audience — and proved it in 1971 with the start of an influential publication owned and operated by them.

When Gloria Steinem started Ms. magazine in 1971, most women’s magazines concentrated on how to keep a house and how to attract a husband. Her publication took a very different focus: liberation.

The magazine, the first owned and operated by women, made the discussion of issues like abortion, domestic violence and equality unavoidable — and revolutionized a generation of women’s writers and publishers.

“The one element that is the foundation of this magazine and makes it different from others is that it simply considers that women are human beings,” Ms. Steinem said of Ms. magazine in a 1973 BBC interview. “That doesn’t sound very revolutionary, but it is, because the other magazines are still arguing about it.”

In some ways, the publishing world is still arguing about exactly what it means to be a women’s magazine. Legacy publications like Glamour, Marie Claire and Teen Vogue have either ended their print runs or withered, while feminist blogs like The Hairpin and Feministing have shuttered.

But the DNA of Ms. magazine inspired a new generation of outlets, said Emily Ramshaw, the chief executive of the nonprofit newsroom The 19th, which focuses on women and politics.

Ms. Steinem “spent her life and career insisting that women were not a niche audience, that our experiences were not side dishes to the main event and that gender-based journalism could be both rigorous and unapologetic,” Ms. Ramshaw said.

Ms. Steinem, who died on Wednesday at 92, didn’t start out as a trailblazer. She began her career as a freelance writer, penning articles for traditional publications like Esquire, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Glamour and McCall’s. She famously went undercover as a Playboy bunny for a 1963 investigation in Show magazine that exposed the exploitative conditions the women worked under.

She occasionally wrote for The New York Times, including a 1965 article on the plight of women in network television and a 1966 profile of Mary Lindsay, the wife of the mayor of New York City, John Lindsay.

A black and white photograph of Ms. Steinem wearing the Playboy bunny costume.Gloria Steinem went undercover for Show magazine to expose what it was really like to work at New York City’s famed Playboy Club.Credit...Getty Images

But it was at New York magazine that Ms. Steinem honed her voice. Invited by the editor Clay Felker to join a new magazine he was starting, Ms. Steinem became a founding contributing editor in 1968.

She wrote a weekly column, “The City Politic,” where she proved herself a sharp cultural and political observer. She took on subjects like the turning sentiment against President Richard M. Nixon during the Vietnam War, Ed Koch as congressman and a tense New York City in the wake of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She was among other top-tier writers of 1960s New York, like Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron and Jimmy Breslin.

But at New York magazine, “I was still the girl writer, and the guys there, whom I loved, their advice about feminism was, ‘Don’t get involved with those crazy women,’” she said in a 2015 profile in The New Yorker.

She didn’t pay attention. She co-founded Ms. magazine with a team of other feminists.

“I realized as a journalist that there really was nothing for women to read that was controlled by women,” she explained in a 2011 documentary.

Ms. magazine first came to life as a 32-page insert in New York magazine’s December 1971 edition. Mr. Felker helped fund it. A preview issue the next month sold out in eight days, selling 300,000 copies.

New York Times, Maria Bartiromo’s Downfall at an Increasingly Cautious Fox News, Jim Rutenberg, Erik Wemple and Benjamin Mullin, Sept. 5, 2026. The network this week took Maria Bartiromo off the air, pulling one of the last hosts whose coverage of Dominion Voting Systems drew an expensive defamation lawsuit.

In July, as President Trump was preparing a prime-time speech on election security, word went out from executives at Fox News: The network would avoid covering his stock claims about a stolen election.

Fox had landed in serious legal trouble in 2021 after amplifying false assertions by Mr. Trump’s allies about vote-stealing election machines, culminating in an extraordinary $787 million defamation settlement.

In 2020, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo had made her show a central stop for proponents of the president’s election theories. And this summer, too, she was preparing to interview the presidential adviser Peter Navarro the morning after the speech.

But after she received a text message written by a Fox Business executive warning against post-speech coverage, she canceled Mr. Navarro’s appearance.

As she did so, she shared the executive’s text with Mr. Navarro, who promptly sent it “up the chain” to the White House, he said in an interview Friday. It was his duty, he said, to relay “yet another example of Fox personnel censoring the Trump administration.”

That sequence of events, described by Mr. Navarro and two other sources familiar with the discussions, would bring an abrupt end to Ms. Bartiromo’s on-air career at the network. The White House complained to Fox, which saw the disclosure of the communication as a breach of company policy. Fox News did not provide a comment.

A lawyer for Ms. Bartiromo, Bryan Freedman, called her “one of the hardest-working journalists throughout her award-winning career.”

Ms. Bartiromo’s cancellation was a dramatic split between the nation’s most-watched cable news channel and one of cable’s earlier, defining stars.

But it also revealed an important shift at the network in the years since the 2020 election — one that could have real consequences for Mr. Trump as he seeks to again assert the American election system is rife with fraud before a midterm election that, polling shows, could be rough for his party.

Where in 2020 he could count on hosts like Ms. Bartiromo to air his wildest election claims on Fox’s top-rated programs without much pushback, he cannot do so now.

The changes are a consequence of the legal straits the network found itself in after the election, when two voting technology companies at the heart of the stolen election theories, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, sued Fox for $1.6 billion and $2.7 billion, respectively, for tarnishing their reputations.

The $787.5 million settlement stemmed from the Dominion case; its litigation with Smartmatic is ongoing, adding to the incentives to be careful about promoting conspiracies this election year.

Fox is in some ways a different network than it was in late 2020, in front of the camera and behind the scenes.

The chief Fox legal officer Viet Dinh, whose handling of the Dominion case came under question, is no longer there. Neither is a Dinh deputy and former Trump aide, Raj Shah, who helped keep the network hyper-focused on right-wing criticism when it or its hosts were viewed as being insufficiently deferential to Mr. Trump’s fraud claims after the election.

Early in 2021, Fox ended the program of the host Lou Dobbs, who had been among the more enthusiastic promoters of claims the presidential election was rigged. After the Dominion settlement, it parted ways with its host Tucker Carlson, who was mentioned in the case but also drew advertiser boycotts with his hard dive into right-wing conspiracies.

Another figure in the two voting cases, Jeanine Pirro, is now working as Mr. Trump’s U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

Fox’s most popular hosts remain overwhelmingly loyal to Mr. Trump, including its prime-time stars, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters, and the network still tilts heavily in his favor.

But it has also shown a willingness to break from the administration on, for instance, its military campaign in Iran, which has been criticized by some on-air hosts, including Ms. Ingraham. The anchor Bret Baier delivered a rare, on-air defense of his colleague, Jonathan Hunt, when Mr. Trump blasted his coverage of Iran.

In the interview on Friday, Mr. Navarro, who formally serves as Mr. Trump’s senior counselor on trade, shared his displeasure with the shift. He said the network could not be trusted to “tell the truth about certain topics.”

He had no such issues with Ms. Bartiromo, whose approach — at times permitting guest commentators to free-associate on live television — had not appeared to change much in the years since the Dominion settlement. Puck, a news website, earlier reported on Ms. Bartiromo’s conversations with Mr. Navarro.

That was clear in July, when the network was sued for defamation after Kevin O’Leary, the investor of “Shark Tank” fame, used Ms. Bartiromo’s show to settle a score with his detractors. He baselessly claimed that two nonprofit founders in Utah who were opposing his plans for a 40,000-acre data center near the Great Salt Lake were Chinese agents.

According to the lawsuit, Ms. Bartiromo not only failed to challenge Mr. O’Leary, she “legitimized” his accusation.

The network’s response afterward was more reflective of the post-Dominion shift. Whereas the network stonewalled Dominion when it initially complained about its election-fraud coverage, it moved more quickly to apologize after Mr. O’Leary retracted his claims.

Ms. Bartiromo still has considerable time left on her contract, according to two people familiar with the matter, meaning that Fox News is still obligated to pay her millions a year despite ending her on-air role. The contract could also keep her from appearing on other networks.

Mr. Trump, who called Ms. Bartiromo a “total professional, and a true warrior” in a Truth Social post on Thursday, added that her “fans, of which there are many, will not be happy.”

 

Associated Press via Politico, Judge refuses to block Pentagon from firing Stars and Stripes staffers over CBS interview, Staff report, Sept. 5, 2026. U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, ruled the journalists are unlikely to successfully prove their First Amendment rights were violated.

A federal judge refused Friday to block the Pentagon from firing three Stars and Stripes staff members who claim they were illegally disciplined for speaking out about the military news outlet’s need to maintain its editorial independence.

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, who was nominated to the bench by Republican President Donald Trump. ruled that the journalists are unlikely to successfully prove that the Pentagon violated their First Amendment free speech rights. He said Stars and Stripes’ editorial independence “is not at stake here.”

“Plaintiffs argue that their termination will chill the protected expression of themselves and others at Stripes,” McFadden wrote. “Plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate a chill here.”

Stars and Stripes publisher Max Lederer, editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and Middle East reporter Lara Korte sued last Thursday in Washington, D.C., to challenge their firings by the Pentagon, which partially funds the news outlet.

Slavin says he was dismissed for insubordination after giving an interview to CBS News in which he objected to potential censorship by the U.S. military. Korte participated in the same interview. Their lawsuit says they were punished in retaliation for publishing a report on deteriorating conditions aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.

McFadden, however, concluded that Slavin and Korte gave the interviews as part of their official duties as public employees and not as private citizens.

“They are being fired for giving pre-approved interviews on their paper’s behalf in which they largely toed the company line. Whatever else such a scheme may violate, it does not clearly offend the First Amendment,” the judge wrote.

Lederer was dismissed shortly after announcing his impending retirement. He said the Pentagon had installed a new deputy publisher — an active-duty service member — under him at the newspaper without his knowledge.

The Defense Department and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are among the lawsuit’s named defendants.

The suit’s plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from Democracy Defenders Fund, Lawyers for Good Government, Government Accountability Project and a Yale Law School clinic.

Democracy Defenders Fund attorney Taryn Wilgus Null said the judge’s decision emphasizes the “high burden” that plaintiffs have in seeking preliminary injunction, as the plaintiffs did in this case. She noted that the ruling wasn’t the final word in the litigation.

“While we are disappointed in the decision, we fully expect to prevail after we have an opportunity to take discovery and all the facts are revealed,” Null said in a statement.

McFadden also has presided over The Associated Press’ lawsuit accusing the Trump administration of retaliating against the AP for its decision not to follow the president’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico. McFadden last year ordered the White House to restore the AP’s full access to cover presidential events, affirming on First Amendment grounds that the government cannot punish the news organization for the content of its speech. The administration’s appeal is pending. 

More On Middle East Wars

Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Is Iran Flagging or Waiting to Pounce? Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Sept. 5, 2026. U.S. government investigators have taken the extraordinary step of subjecting roughly 50 members of the U.S. military’s Joint Staff to polygraph tests over leaks to journalists, including about how the Iran war has created a shortage of crucial munitions, according to officials briefed on the move.

The investigators asked military officers and civilian employees on the Joint Staff if they disclosed classified information to members of the press, and about whether they provided information about diminished U.S. munitions stocks.

The polygraph tests were conducted in August after a flurry of news reports detailed diminished stocks of crucial munitions, including of long-range missiles and Patriot interceptors. The show of force appeared aimed at not just ferreting out anyone who may have shared information, but intimidating others who might do so in the future, according to people with knowledge of the effort.

Between 1,500 and 2,000 officers and officials work for the Joint Staff, which coordinates operations, policy and war plans with combatant commanders around the world.

This leak investigation would have been launched in the wake of the last time Trump tried to deny the reports coming from all around (as well as the reports about a spat with Whiskey Pete at Camp David about it).

But as I noted then, Trump had been warned. Trump told us he had been warned.

This particular episode is interesting more for the competing narratives that explain the sensitivity about whether Trump can convince Iran the US has a secret stockpile.

In WSJ, foreign policy expert Yaroslav Trofimev, repeats assessments that time is no longer on Iran’s side, because the US has finally succeeded in getting crude out Hormuz (though not yet matching pre-war levels, and Trofimev makes no mention of the cost of doing so).

By squeezing the Strait of Hormuz, both the U.S. and Iran expected to outlast their foe, believing time would work in their favor.

Now, it looks like the trend is moving against Tehran.

The U.S. naval blockade has prevented Iran from shipping any oil from the Persian Gulf since July. At the same time, despite Iranian drone and missile attacks, Washington has been able to assist Gulf Arab states in moving significant amounts of their crude through the waterway, keeping global oil prices from surging above critical levels.

“The Iranian blockade is more leaky than the U.S. blockade,” said Samir Madani, co-founder of the maritime intelligence firm TankerTrackers.com. “The Iranians just aren’t able to shut it all down.”

The strategic question of whether time will eventually work in favor of Washington—or the Tehran regime—has yet to be settled. Iran retains ways of escalating what has now become a protracted conflict, raising costs for the U.S. and its allies. The U.S. military’s ability to maintain the naval blockade for many more months is also uncertain.

But now it is clear that Tehran’s calculation six months ago, as it shut down the Strait of Hormuz and bottled up one-fifth of the world’s crude oil supply, proved erroneous. The move didn’t trigger a worldwide economic crisis or force President Trump to end the war on Iranian terms.

That judgement assumes that Iran’s goal was to cause a global crisis that forced Trump’s hand.

By contrast, two intelligence reporters describe, just a few stories away from the leak witch hunt story on the front page of the NYT, that Iran is actually pretty confident it understands the limits to US power.

Iran has grown more confident in its ability to attack targets in the Middle East and appears determined to continue the conflict for months to frustrate the United States, according to U.S. intelligence reports in recent weeks.

In many respects, the assessments reflect what has been observable on the ground as fighting erupted again after a period of relative calm. In the past week, Iran targeted ships in the Strait of Hormuz and American troops in the region, and U.S. forces struck inside Iran, killing military personnel and civilians.

The new exchanges have been limited so far. But the intelligence reports, according to people who have read them, suggest that Iran’s hard-line government might be contemplating a significant escalation.

Iran has emerged from months of the on-again, off-again war with a far better understanding of its military strengths and is more sure of its capabilities, according to officials briefed on the intelligence.

Neither story addresses the US missile shortages. Both acknowledge that Iran still has as a stash, and WSJ describes how the pause allowed Iran to stockpile more.

There’s no consideration in either of the extent to which Iran is simply planning on bleeding the US dry, possibly in conjunction with Russia and China. There’s likewise no mention that Whiskey Pete has attempted to steal money for infectious disease research because he has blown through so much money.

House Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT-03) has learned that officials at the Department of Defense (DoD) are working to divert billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to supplement the Department’s budget.

Without notifying Congress or the American people, DoD has signed an interagency agreement that could give the Department access to billions of dollars that Congress provided to NIH for critical biomedical research. These funds were provided to support research to develop treatments or cures for infectious diseases such as influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, Ebola, and other dangerous pathogens.

“This secretive attempt to siphon research funds away from NIH is outrageous. The interagency agreement needs to be terminated immediately,” said Ranking Member DeLauro. “These funds were provided for lifesaving medical research, not as extra money for the Department of Defense. It is no secret that the Department of Defense is facing enormous financial pressure because of President Trump’s war of choice with Iran. But the Trump administration cannot make American patients, families, and scientists pay the price. Circumventing Congress to divert money intended to help Americans who are exposed to HIV, influenza, tuberculosis, and other deadly diseases—and directing those funds to the Department of Defense—is beyond the pale.

I don’t know what will happen, nor whether Iran is just playing to get through the election or longer than that.

What I do know is that in Trump’s latest attempt to lie, he seems intent on claiming there’s a secret stash of missiles that sustained reporting says the US doesn’t have.

 

Stephen and Shari Feehan have stayed in close touch with their son’s fiancée, Claire Fletcher, whom he was supposed to marry right after returning from his deployment to Jordan (New York Times photo by Matteo de Mayda).

New York Times, What the War in Iran Has Cost One Gold Star Family, Katie Rogers, Sept. 5, 2026. First Lt. Tyler James Feehan, who was 25, had been deployed to an air base in Jordan when enemy missiles and drones lit up the sky. He is among the 18 Americans who have died since the war began.

On a windy afternoon in late July, a mother and a father stood on the tarmac at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, watching as soldiers carried a flag-draped case down the ramp of a cargo plane. Stephen and Shari Feehan’s only child, First Lt. Tyler James Feehan, was inside.

Lieutenant Feehan died on July 18, when Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, where he had been deployed for a year as an air defense artillery officer, was hit by a barrage of Iranian missiles and drones. He was 25 years old.

President Trump traveled to Dover to attend the dignified transfer of Lieutenant Feehan and three other soldiers who were killed overseas. During a private meeting with the Feehans, Mr. Trump mentioned that he was headed to a political event in Cobb County, Georgia. Mr. Feehan told the president he had grown up there. The president offered the grieving couple a lift aboard the new Air Force One, a Boeing luxury jet donated by the Qataris.

Russia-Ukraine-Europe War

New York Times, Putin Denies a Draft Is Coming, but Some Russian Men Are Taking No Chances, Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 5, 2026. As the fear of a possible mobilization becomes a fixture of daily life across Russia, many men are deciding whether to flee, hide or sit tight.

As anxiety over rumors of a forced military mobilization began to sweep through Moscow, Eradzh, a 36-year-old entrepreneur, turned to his A.I. assistant to parse the news and calculate the likelihood of a draft.

Eventually, the probability became high enough that he asked the program to find him a cheap flight out of Russia. In about a week, Eradzh will fly to Cyprus and spend at least two months away from Moscow.

Ticking off points on his fingers, Eradzh explained his logic as Russia has churned through tens of thousands of volunteer soldiers lured to the battlefield in Ukraine through fat payouts, while making only small gains in territory.

“Have the contract soldiers most likely run out? They’ve run out,” he said. “Have we captured anything? We haven’t. Did the negotiations lead anywhere? They didn’t. Will Putin dig his heels in? He will dig his heels in.”

“Will there be a mobilization? Most likely, yes,” he said recently in a cafe in central Moscow. Eradzh, like others interviewed, agreed to talk only on the condition that his last name not be used.

For months, the fear of a possible mobilization — a second wave of the draft that began in September 2022 — has become a fixture of daily life across Russia.

Rumors that Moscow might force more people to fight in the war after a parliamentary election on Sept. 20 have filled online information spaces and are discussed in cafes, on trains and in smoking areas near offices.ImageAn underground walkway with a person walking past a large, illuminated billboard. It features an illustration of soldiers

The Kremlin has denied that any mobilization is being prepared. On Wednesday, President Vladimir V. Putin called the reports “complete nonsense” and an “information attack against Russia.” On Thursday, he doubled down on his denial, saying that Russia had enough troops and that “as of today, there is no scenario that would require a mobilization.”

As the rumors have swirled, the Russian authorities have tried to project calm. Moscow has remained as orderly and manicured as ever, with pavilions on its central boulevards offering free medical checkups under the slogan, “Your choice is to live longer!”

Still, many people are not convinced by the government’s assurances. They cite previous denials by the Kremlin that turned out not to be true, like the repeated ones in 2022 that Russia was not going to invade Ukraine or conduct a wave of mobilization that September.

Russians point to separate, so far isolated examples of more hard-line recent recruitment tactics reported in the Penza region, southeast of Moscow. They also note that Mr. Putin’s decree ordering the draft back in 2022 technically remains in force, and therefore a mobilization could happen stealthily.

Fears have been fueled by international media reports citing Western intelligence officials, who say that Russia is losing more troops than it recruits, and statements from Ukraine’s leaders. In August, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said that Russia planned to draft 300,000 people after the parliamentary election. Mr. Zelensky made similar a prediction in April 2024.

When Russia conducted its first large forced mobilization in 2022, hundreds of thousands of men fled Russia. The draft shook Russian society to such an extent that officials scrambled to halt it within weeks.

That mobilization was intended to shore up a Russian Army that was on the brink of collapse in Ukraine, military analysts said. Outnumbered, Moscow’s forces abandoned large swaths of occupied land in Ukraine’s east and south, leaving their equipment behind.

New York Times, Putin Orders Pause in Kyiv Strikes Ahead of Visit by U.S. Envoys, Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 5, 2026. Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, arrived in Moscow to meet with the Russian leader. They plan to visit Kyiv next, in an effort to revive peace talks.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Saturday ordered a 72-hour pause in strikes on Kyiv ahead of a visit there by Trump administration envoys, even as Russian forces hit Ukraine overnight with a large-scale bombardment.

The envoys — Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law — arrived on Saturday in Moscow to meet with Mr. Putin. They are expected to head next to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in an effort to reignite talks to end the war there.

Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner are making their first trip to Russia since January. A month after that visit, U.S.-backed peace negotiations went into a deep freeze when the United States and Israel attacked Iran.

Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner were met at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport by Kirill Dmitriev, an envoy for Mr. Putin who handles informal negotiations with the White House. On social media, Mr. Dmitriev posted pictures of the arrival and called the envoys “peacemakers.”

Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said shortly after their arrival that they would meet with Mr. Putin. Mr. Peskov also said that the Russian leader had ordered Russia’s armed forces to refrain from attacking Kyiv for three days starting at midnight on Saturday.

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“This is connected with the preparations for the conduct of talks of Americans in Kyiv,” Mr. Peskov said.

Hours earlier, however, Ukraine was hit by a large-scale Russian attack that struck Kyiv’s two main airports.

In a statement, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said the strikes were a Russian reaction to “discussions and preparations for the possibility of the U.S. side using an aircraft to travel to Ukraine,” and he vowed to retaliate against Russian airspace next week. All civilian airports in Ukraine have been closed since Russia invaded in 2022.

Mr. Zelensky had said previously that Ukrainian forces would not conduct airstrikes on Russia while the envoys were there, and he had called on Mr. Putin to reciprocate by temporarily halting strikes on Ukraine.

The night was uncharacteristically quiet throughout Russia. Russian airports — which are often forced to suspend operations because of Ukrainian attacks — were operating normally on Saturday morning. In Moscow, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said that no drones had been shot down on approach to the capital.

Mr. Witkoff has met regularly with Mr. Putin since Mr. Trump took office in January 2025. At the end of that year, Mr. Kushner began joining Mr. Witkoff for meetings with the Russian leader.

But the planned trip to Kyiv would be the first by either American envoy.

The U.S. envoys’ visit to the Russian capital is taking place days after the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, traveled there. Mr. Ratcliffe delivered a bleak assessment of Moscow’s prospects in the war and urged Russian officials to end it.

The talks follow a shift in the war’s dynamics. Since April, Ukraine has launched a campaign targeting Russian fuel and logistics infrastructure, bringing the war closer to ordinary Russians.

Russia, for its part, has taken advantage of Ukraine’s depleted arsenal of air defense interceptors, allowing it to strike more targets across the country and making daily life in Kyiv increasingly dangerous. On Friday, a drone hit the headquarters of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service in the heart of the Ukrainian capital.

Russia and Ukraine also face mounting financial strain to support a war that is growing costlier, as both sides struggle to keep pace with advanced technologies, like jet-powered drones and ballistic missiles.

But the war appears far away from any resolution.

Speaking on Friday, Mr. Peskov praised “the good will of the Americans” who, he said, “are ready to continue their mediation efforts.” But he said Russia would continue to insist that Ukraine withdraw its troops from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, in the country’s east, before any cease-fire could occur — a demand that Ukraine has rejected.

Mr. Peskov’s comments followed statements on Thursday by Mr. Putin, who said that regardless of American mediation efforts, “Russia and Ukraine must first reach an agreement between themselves.” 

Sept. 4

Top Headlines 

 

• New York Times, Judge Suggests Trump Mail-In Voting Rules Could Cause ‘Major Disenfranchisement,’ Zach Montague, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). Judge Indira Talwani said the Postal Service appeared to be trying a haphazard “experiment” with a new rule that could result in valid ballots being tossed.
• New York Times, Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Allow Mail Voting Limits, Abbie VanSickle, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). The justices have been asked to weigh in again on the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict mail voting — this time on whether the plans violate the Constitution. 

Special Reports

The New Yorker Magazine portrayed on its cover the last year the six Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court as wearing Trump-styled blond wigs, with faces indistinguishable from that of their party's leader. Trump's planned ballroom replacing the demolished White House East Wing and three times the size of the rest of the White House, is portrayed by Trump below despite widespead legal criticism that he has no right to demolish historic structures throughout the nation's capital without congressional approvals.

• Talking Feds, Opinion: Trump’s Ballroom Is Illegal, Despised, and Anti-Democratic, but the Supreme Court Greenlit It Anyway, Harry Litman, right, law professor and former high-ranking U.S. Justice Department executive, Sept. 3, 2026. “Our buildings shape us,” and this building will shape a failure of democracy. On Monday, the Supreme Court told Donald Trump he can proceed full steam ahead to construct his monstrous ballroom. That’s not because the project is lawful: the per curiam, 5-4 order on the shadow docket expressly offered no opinion on the merits. Indeed, every court to consider the question—plus four dissenting justices on the high court—has concluded that the project is likely unlawful. It’s also a vile and fairly hideous affront to the most visible symbol of our democracy. Rather, the Court held that the stay on construction should be lifted because the plaintiffs lacked standing and the order was irreparably harming the administration. Both aspects of the decision were flawed. The per curiam represents the shadow docket at its most pernicious: a loosey-goosey decision based on the procedural particulars of granting an emergency stay that has the possible effect of letting Trump get away with a national atrocity.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Clyburn Puts Supreme Court Expansion Front and Center, Jennifer Rubin, Sept. 3, 2026. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, veteran lawmaker Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) emphatically urged expanding seats on the Supreme Court from 9 to 13 justices. “A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the court,” he said. Court expansion, no longer the province of left-leaning academics thanks to the MAGA justices’ radicalism, has become an indisputably mainstream, pro-democracy response.

Special Report: A Russian Father and Brave Daughter

• Roman Sheremeta via Substack, News and Comment: This is what dictatorship looks like, Roman Sheremet, right, professorof economics and politics, Sept. 3, 2026. In April 2022, a 12-year-old Russian girl named Masha Moskalyova was told in art class to draw a picture supporting russian troops in Ukraine. Instead, she drew a Ukrainian mother protecting her child as russian missiles flew toward them.

News Roundups

Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, left, and his brother Tristan Tate, both indicted on sex trafficking charges on Sept. 4, 2026 in Romania (Pool 2026 file photo by the Associated Press)

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Andrew Tate Indicted, Faces Life in Prison, Trump Erupts as Courts Gut His Gerrymander, Fetterman Exposed, AI Breaks Free, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 4, 2026 Today’s rundown leads with Andrew Tate’s new indictment on trafficking charges, a brutal Wall Street Journal report on Senator John Fetterman’s disappearing act, and two state supreme court rulings that just upended the national redistricting fight. We’ve also got a disturbing new report on rogue OpenAI agents, and a full list of other news below.
• The Parnas Perspective, Thursday Night News, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Today’s rundown leads with Mitch McConnell, because 80 days later, nobody else seems to be asking the obvious question: where is he? His office has gone weeks without a real update, he’s missed 60 votes, and the only proof of life the public has gotten is two photos.

More Global News

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Imperialist Delusions and the Price of Fuel, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Trump and Bessent tried to betray Ukraine. Now they don’t have any cards. During the 2024 campaign Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices in half. He has, instead, presided over soaring prices at the pump, which have played an important role in his collapse in the polls. Some might attribute this disaster to Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, ignoring what appear to have been near-unanimous warnings by experienced military and intelligence officials that such a war would, in addition to disrupting oil supplies, overstretch the U.S. military and dangerously deplete stocks of munitions — which is exactly what happened. But Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, has found someone else to blame: Ukraine.
• New York Times, The New Jet-Powered Drones That Are Breeding Anxiety in Ukraine, Cassandra Vinograd, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). The Russian strikes tormenting Ukraine’s capital in recent days have had an ominous new feature: jet-powered drones.

U.S. Immigration Crackdown

• New York Times, Times Exclusive: ICE Skipped Basic Checks in Rush for Recruits, Whistle-Blower Says, Alexandra Berzon, Katie Benner and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). An official who oversaw the vetting of ICE recruits cited an “unprecedented lowering of standards” amid a hiring surge. 

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

 

Davin Rosborough, an ACLU attorney representing the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, speaks at a press conference outside the John Moakley Courthouse in Boston, Mass. after participating in a hearing Sept. 3 on President Donald Trump's March 31, 2026 executive order and a Postal Service rule implementing it.

• Democracy Docket, Judge appears deeply skeptical of case for Trump’s mail voting restrictions, Jim Saksa, Sept. 3, 2026. With Election Day just two months away, the lawyer defending the Postal Service’s recently issued rule carrying out President Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order could not tell a federal judge how — or even if — the new rule would work.
• New York Times, Lindsay Clancy Trial Live Updates: Judge Declares Mistrial in Triple-Murder Case, Jenna Russell, Maia Spoto and Mark Arsenault, Sept. 4, 2026. The decision, which resulted from a hung jury, means the prosecution can decide whether to try her again. The defense failed to secure a stay of the decision from a higher court.
• Newsweek, Lindsay Clancy Verdict: Expert Says Judge’s Jury Actions May Be ‘Dangerous,’ Hannah Parry, Sept. 3, 2026. The Lindsay Clancy murder trial descended into an extraordinary courtroom confrontation Thursday as a deadlocked jury was sent back to deliberate for a sixth day, prompting a legal expert to warn that Judge William Sullivan was entering “very dangerous territory.”

More On Russian Infiltration Of FBI, Threats to Europe, Ukraine War

• Newsweek, Woman Who Exposed FBI Official for Working With Russian Oligarch Found Dead, Jenni Fink, Sept. 3, 2026. Allison Guerriero, above left, a security researcher whose information helped expose the criminal conduct of former FBI counterintelligence official Charles McGonigal, above right, has been found dead at her home in Boynton Beach, Florida. Hours before her death, Guerriero posted a series of messages on X, formerly Twitter, criticizing Representative Jim Jordan, the FBI and McGonigal. McGonigal was arrested in 2023 and was sentenced to 50 months in prison and then was later sentenced in a separate case to 28 months in prison in 2024. He pleaded guilty to secretly colluding with a Russian oligarch and also admitted to receiving $225,000 in cash from someone with ties to the Albanian government.
• New York Times, News Analysis: A Spiral of Escalation for Russia and Ukraine, With No End in Sight, Kim Barker, Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). Each side is using missiles and drones to try to pound the other into giving up, breeding ceaseless human suffering. But there is no sign that either country’s determination will weaken.
• New York Times, The Risk of Russian Sabotage in Europe: A Fight That Spirals Out of Control, Michael Schwirtz and Adam Goldman, Sept. 4, 2026. Europe’s options are limited in responding to an unnerving series of plots and provocations. But the odds of unpredictable consequences are rising. 
• New York Times, After Fighting Russia Fiercely, He Wants to Forge Ukraine’s Path to Peace, Andrew E. Kramer, Sept. 4, 2026. Kyrylo Budanov, a decorated soldier and former military spy chief, advocates a negotiated settlement. Talks are expected to resume this month.
• Hans Boserup,  Opinion: What If Russia No Longer Needs Putin? Hans Boserup, Sept. 4, 2026. Chris Alexander spent hours talking Russian with Vladimir Putin. He says he has not recognized the man he knew since 2023. The larger question is what that would mean for power in Russia.

 More On Middle East Wars, Reactions

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Iran War? What Iran War? Andrew Egger, William Kristol and Jim Swift, Sept. 4, 2026. JD Vance declares ‘Mission Accomplished.’
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: There Is No War in Ba Sing Se, Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 4, 2026. I don’t know if you know this, but we’re actually not at war with Iran. When Vice President JD Vance took to the White House briefing room for a press conference yesterday, he was surprisingly insistent: Rumors of war with Iran, he argued, have been greatly exaggerated.

More World News, Global Human Rights, Disasters 

• New York Times, 2 Trapped Workers Are Rescued After 9 Days in Nepal Tunnel, Anupreeta Das, Binod Ghimire, Sajal Pradhan, Mujib Mashal and Alex Travelli, Sept. 4, 2026. “Everybody’s sense of hope was waning,” said one survivor’s relative. Rescuers were searching for dozens of others inside the tunnel at a hydropower plant damaged by last week’s deadly floods.

More On U.S. Politics, Elections, Governance

 John Fetterman in 2019. Photo credit: Governor Tom Wolf / Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)

• WhoWhatWhy, The Fetterman Factor — 51 Seats Won’t Be Enough for Democrats, Klaus Marre, Sept. 4, 2026.  A 51-49 Democratic majority in the Senate that relies on John Fetterman is barely a majority at all.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Midterm Strategy: Don’t Work, Cheat, Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Say you’re a Republican lawmaker going into a tough midterm fight. The good news is your party controls the presidency. The bad news is the president is insanely unpopular and getting more so every day. Many voters you need are pretty mad at the guy. You might want to start telling them, Yeah, I’m with him—but only on the good stuff, the stuff you guys like. As I wrote last week, this was never going to be an option for Republicans this cycle. 

• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: As Bad As Things Are For Trump And The Rs Now -- And They Are Bad -- They Are Likely To Get Worse, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Greater MAGA Is Weakening: Putin has lost Orban, Syria, and is failing in Ukraine. Both Bibi and Trump have lost their war in Iran, and their political projects at home have taken enormous hits. Bibi trails in his October 26th election, and Trump trails in his November election. Zelenskyy has emerged as an inspirational global freedom fighter. Taken together these are important and welcome developments in our fight to ensure there is a new birth of freedom here and everywhere in the years ahead……
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: When You Control the Mail, You Control the Nation, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 3, 2026.Two months from the midterms, how bad are the coalition vibes for Donald Trump? Even some dyed-in-the-wool MAGA pollsters are starting to sound the red alert.
• PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: JD Vance Was Asked About Gas Prices And His Answer Was A Disaster, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 3, 2026. The Trump administration has no clue what to do to lower gas prices, because the administration doesn't know how to get out of the Iran war that it started. 
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Remember Labor Day, William Kristol, right,Sept. 4, 2026. Here’s a recommendation I don’t usually make: Go to the Trump White House website. But then go to the little “search” function magnifying glass on the upper right, and type in “Labor Day.”

Special Report: Political Ads

Grieving North Carolina father Ronald Hayes, as shown in a deceptive ad created by pro-Republicans in the current U.S. senate race in North Carolina.

• Judd at Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: How a GOP super PAC tricked a grieving father into appearing in a political ad, Judd Legum, right, and Noel Sims, Sept 3, 2026. Ronald Hayes appears in a Senate Leadership Fund ad.

U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets, Global Reputation

• New York Times, U.S. Diesel Prices Set New High, Gregory Schmidt, Sept. 4, 2026. Because of the war in Iran, the cost has climbed past the record it reached in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
• New York Times, Live Updates: U.S. Hiring Jumps, an Encouraging Sign for the Economy, Sydney Ember, Sept. 4, 2026. Employers added 162,000 jobs in August, and the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1 percent. But wage growth is not keeping up with rising inflation.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Ingots We No Longer Trust, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 4, 2026. America’s word is as good as gold — that is, unreliable.

Culture, Media, Entertainment 

 

Gloria Steinem (r) with Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham Jan. 24, 1972 luncheon (Photo by Martin Kuhn).

• National Press Club, Appreciation: Gloria Steinem was not impressed with Press Club tie gift after her speech in 1972, Gil Klein, Sept. 4, 2026. Feminist leader Gloria Steinem, who died Wednesday, Sept. 2, at the age of 92, was no stranger to the National Press Club. Steinem had one lasting impact on NPC luncheons.
• New York Times, Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92, Katharine Q. Seelye, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large.
• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Fox News Dumps Trump Cheerleader Maria Bartiromo, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Maria Bartiromo has been non-stop waving the flag for Trump and professing endless support for a decade. Bartiromo was one of the personalities that Trump would turn to when he needed the softest of soft interviews.
• Daily Beast, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. And, apparently, he’s the saddest, Laura Esposito,Sept. 3, 2026. That’s according to filmmaker Alex Gibney, who relayed the assessment from someone who worked closely with Musk. Gibney’s forthcoming film, Musk, was previewed by The Hollywood Reporter.

Top Stories

 

New York Times, Judge Suggests Trump Mail-In Voting Rules Could Cause ‘Major Disenfranchisement,’ Zach Montague, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). Judge Indira Talwani said the Postal Service appeared to be trying a haphazard “experiment” with a new rule that could result in valid ballots being tossed.

A federal judge on Thursday expressed concern that if she allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with plans to restrict mail-in ballots ahead of the November election, it could cause so much chaos that states would experience “major disenfranchisement.”

During a winding two-hour hearing in Federal District Court in Boston, Judge Indira Talwani asked sharp questions of attorneys from the Justice Department and a coalition of Republican states about how they believed they could implement the new rule on the eve of early voting across many states. The hearing highlighted concerns raised by a broad coalition of nonprofits and Democratic states that, if allowed to forge ahead with the new rule, the Postal Service could haphazardly reject thousands of valid ballots.

Judge Talwani last week blocked the Postal Service from implementing the plan for 14 days, a period that expires Sept. 10. Thursday’s hearing was intended to help her decide whether to extend her injunction indefinitely. The Trump administration has already appealed her temporary restraining order and the issue is likely to be settled by the Supreme Court.

The judge did not immediately rule on the issue, but said she planned to move quickly.

With just two months to go before the election, and many states set to begin distributing mail-in ballots later this month, Judge Talwani wondered aloud why the rule change could not wait until the agency had time to execute it methodically.

“I think that’s what’s so puzzling to me about this case,” Judge Talwani said.

Judge Talwani previously ruled that she believed the Postal Service’s plans likely exceed the agency’s legal mandate from Congress.

Lawyers representing the Postal Service argued on Thursday that the plan represented an “independent exercise” of its authority to regulate the mail it carries. Judge Talwani countered that the rule seemed obviously tied to directions from President Trump outlined in an executive order signed in March.

Mr. Trump issued the directive as part of efforts to press his false claims that mail-in balloting is marred by widespread fraud. It instructed the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-by-state citizenship lists and then send those to each state. It further directed the U.S. Postal Service to play a role in verifying voters eligible to cast ballots by mail.

The Postal Service rule, published in late August in response, would require states to use new, scannable ballot envelopes. The Postal Service would not deliver mail ballots in states that do not share voter data with the agency and would only deliver ballots that met certain criteria.

Among other things, Judge Talwani tried to establish how much progress the Postal Service had made in building a ballot screening system that state election officials would use to inform U.S.P.S. which voters had been authorized to vote by mail and allow the service to verify ballots before delivery.

The Postal Service has said it continues to build the portal, despite the judge’s order, in case the legal block is lifted or in case some states choose to use it. But a whistle-blower report filed this week raised concerns that the frantic effort to finish the web portal in time would lead to errors that could result in large batches of ballots being rejected in bulk.

When Michael Velchik, an attorney from the Justice Department, could not explain the status of the project, Judge Talwani ordered the government to provide more details in writing by Thursday afternoon.

In a sworn statement responding to the order, a Postal Service official said the agency was continuing to make “refinements” to the portal, but expected to make it available to states “for voluntary use by sometime next week.” The official wrote that the Postal Service would continue to work with states that choose to implement any of its new processes, though while the restraining order remains in place, no state would be required to adopt them.

“So we’re going to do a test run on this election?” she said, showing exasperation.

“We’re not playing an intellectual puzzle game,” she added. “We’re talking about people’s right to vote.”

In another pointed exchange, Judge Talwani brought up a filing from officials in Travis County, Texas, which includes the Democratic-led city of Austin. They said they did not believe it was possible for local officials to implement the Postal Service changes in time for the 2026 election.

Even so, the state of Texas is part of a coalition of Republican-led states that have urged Judge Talwani to lift her restraining order.

She pressed Louis J. Capozzi, the Missouri solicitor general, who appeared on behalf of the group, about why Texas appeared intent on launching an “experiment” that could cause its own voters to be “disenfranchised.”

“Why is it you want U.S.P.S. to stop batches of ballots from your voters?” she said.

Judge Talwani said state legislators in Texas and other states could have passed their own laws to change ballot envelopes or otherwise adjust mail-in voting, without asking the Postal Service to take on a new role screening votes.

“You can decide you want those measures in your state,” she said. “I don’t understand — you come to me and say, ‘We really want to have election integrity in our state decided by U.S.P.S.’?”

Mr. Capozzi predicted that Texas would have no trouble implementing the changes in time, and that the state viewed the Postal Service rule as adding another layer of security to its elections. He said problems that might arise from the new rule could be figured out on a “state-by-state” basis later, with groups suing individual states if evidence emerged that they had improperly thrown out votes.

New York Times, Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Allow Mail Voting Limits, Abbie VanSickle, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). The justices have been asked to weigh in again on the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict mail voting — this time on whether the plans violate the Constitution.

The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court for permission to resume its efforts to restrict mail voting in the lead-up to the midterms.

Administration lawyers asked the justices to clear the way for a new rule that prohibits the U.S. Postal Service from delivering ballots to voters in states that do not share voter data with the federal agency. The rule would also require the agency to review ballot envelopes for compliance with new standards before accepting it.

In the emergency filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that a lower court freeze on the plan would impose “serious irreparable harm on the federal government, the states themselves, and the voting public.”

The emergency request to the Supreme Court is the second time in recent weeks that the court has been asked to weigh in on efforts by President Trump’s mail ballot plans. Previously, a majority of the court said a legal challenge was premature because the administration had not yet finalized its plans to restrict mail voting.

But the Postal Service published its plans in August in the days before the Supreme Court’s ruling, and a lower court judge has since blocked key parts of the plan from going into effect for the November election.

The administration’s emergency appeal to the justices came hours after a federal judge in Massachusetts, during a hearing in the matter, expressed concerns that the plans could cause so much chaos in the coming elections that states would experience “major disenfranchisement.” Judge Indira Talwani had imposed a temporary block on the plan, which the administration had already appealed.

Rather than allow that legal process to play out, the administration is now taking the highly unusual step of trying to skip ahead and get immediate intervention from the Supreme Court.

It is not clear how the justices will greet the administration’s attempt to short-circuit the typical process, nor how quickly the court might act. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who handles emergency applications from that region of the country, signaled the court would deal with the issue on a speedy but not immediate timeline.

She did not issue an administrative stay, which the Trump administration had requested. Such a move would have immediately cleared the way for the government’s plan to be set in motion, even as the justices considered the case. But she asked the challengers to respond to the emergency application by Tuesday at 10 a.m.Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, which represents voting rights groups challenging the plan, said in a statement that the Postal Service rule is “an unconstitutional attempt to upend mail voting on the eve of an election.” 

Special Reports

The New Yorker Magazine portrayed on its cover the last year the six Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court as wearing Trump-styled blond wigs, with faces indistinguishable from that of their party's leader. Trump's planned ballroom replacing the demolished White House East Wing and three times the size of the rest of the White House, is portrayed by Trump below despite widespead legal criticism that he has no right to demolish historic structures throughout the nation's capital without congressional approvals.

Talking Feds, Opinion: Trump’s Ballroom Is Illegal, Despised, and Anti-Democratic, but the Supreme Court Greenlit It Anyway, Harry Litman, right, law professor and former high-ranking U.S. Justice Department executive, Sept. 3, 2026. “Our buildings shape us,” and this building will shape a failure of democracy.

On Monday, the Supreme Court told Donald Trump he can proceed full steam ahead to construct his monstrous ballroom. That’s not because the project is lawful: the per curiam, 5-4 order on the shadow docket expressly offered no opinion on the merits. Indeed, every court to consider the question—plus four dissenting justices on the high court—has concluded that the project is likely unlawful. It’s also a vile and fairly hideous affront to the most visible symbol of our democracy.

Rather, the Court held that the stay on construction should be lifted because the plaintiffs lacked standing and the order was irreparably harming the administration. Both aspects of the decision were flawed. The per curiam represents the shadow docket at its most pernicious: a loosey-goosey decision based on the procedural particulars of granting an emergency stay that has the possible effect of letting Trump get away with a national atrocity.

I’m about to sketch out the legal flaws in the per curiam opinion, but for the ballroom, it’s always important to keep the overall stakes in mind and the gravity of the Court’s legal mishmash. The White House is the people’s house, an architectural triumph that communicates our rejection of imperial rule and embrace of democracy. Trump’s undemocratic vision is to build a monument to himself, a swollen reflection of his hopelessly grandiose self-image. It’s a frontal attack on our own sense of the country that couldn’t happen in a well-functioning democracy.

To sue in federal court, you need standing, and the bedrock of standing is injury—something “concrete and particularized” that is “actual or imminent.” The typical injury is financial or physical, but the Court has long recognized the possibility of aesthetic injury, particularly in environmental cases. So, for example, in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, the Court held that the “desire to observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes” is “undeniably a cognizable interest for purpose of standing.”

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There’s an ethereal quality to aesthetic injury, but that doesn’t make it vaporous. We can appreciate a landscape, or work of art, or historical battlefield, or species, or public building with sustained passion and intensity, and its loss takes something valuable from us, whether or not it costs us money. That was the basis for standing in the ballroom lawsuit, and it’s difficult to see how it could be more concrete.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation brought the lawsuit. To sue as an organization, it had to put forward one member with standing in her own right. And in this case that was Alison Hoagland. Hoagland is not, as Trump sneered, some lady who happens to walk by. She is a professor of history and historic preservation, an authority on American architecture, and a Washington resident who goes to look at the White House because looking at it is, for her, the whole point.

The five-justice per curiam, or unsigned, opinion did not purport to overrule the cases that say so. Rather, it pooh-poohed and trivialized Hoagland’s felt harm, recasting her documented, decades-deep professional interest as “mere offense,” no different, in the majority’s telling, from “virtually every citizen” who wants “to challenge virtually every government action that they do not like.”

The Court carved off the environmental precedents on the ground that those plaintiffs did “more than” look: they fished, they swam, they hiked. In his dissent for four justices, Chief Justice John Roberts fairly demolished that argument, pointing out that the principal way anyone enjoys a historic building is precisely by looking at it, and that the Court had misconceived Hoagland’s injury.

What the majority actually did by way of determining that the administration was likely to prevail on the merits was narrow aesthetic standing to the vanishing point. As of now, “I want to look at a crocodile” (one of the Nile species at issue in Lujan) passes muster while “I want to look at the White House” does not. And since it’s hard to think of any prospective challenger to the ballroom who would not be relying on aesthetic injury, there is no clear path around the Court’s tacit reframing of the doctrine.

To grant the stay, the Supreme Court also needed to find that the administration would be irreparably injured if the stay weren’t granted. They really made hash of this critical factor.

The Court’s first recognition of irreparable harm was the mere fact that the executive will was frustrated. That is blatant bootstrapping that just restates the Court’s legal judgment—the injunction is harmful for the simple circular reason that it frustrates the executive’s efforts, which of course is a given. That sloppy account of irreparable harm has become a routine move for the conservative supermajority.

The Court also credited an argument from the administration that the ballroom’s “height and mass” are “crucial” to shield the underground installation from “kinetic impacts,” lest engineers “dig impractically deep.”

But this second theory, apart from being a kind of bureaucratic gibberish, was a mid-litigation invention. Roberts’s dissent guts it in a single devastating footnote. It points out that the government had earlier told the district court the opposite—that its below-ground security work was driven by concerns having nothing to do with the ballroom above it. And the injunction never touched that work: it barred only the ballroom, leaving the government free to build the underground facility and whatever was needed to protect it. The security the administration now says requires the full Trumpian plan was never at risk.

In fact, the actual irreparable harm is plainly on the plaintiffs’ side of the ledger. Stop the work and the executive’s pet project merely pauses. Let it proceed, and the crews return to 20-hour days, racing to build the project up to a point where it may be impossible to undo. That is irreparable harm in its plainest sense.

With the per curiam majority ducking the merits, Roberts’s dissent went to the heart of the case. Not surprisingly, Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson joined without a word of their own. The three of them obviously judged that the most powerful punch available was to let the Chief speak for all four, even though it wasn’t enough.

Roberts’s opinion begins with the straight declaration that the ballroom is likely unlawful, in effect a raw power grab. Congress has expressly forbidden any building on federal park grounds in the District of Columbia without its direct authorization, which it hasn’t given. The two statutes the government waves around—a couple million dollars appropriated for ordinary maintenance of the Executive Residence, and a general instruction to the Park Service to conserve historic objects—come nowhere near authorizing the president to raze the East Wing and put up a private ballroom with hundreds of millions in outside money.

The Contrarian, Opinion: Clyburn Puts Supreme Court Expansion Front and Center, Jennifer Rubin, Sept. 3, 2026. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, veteran lawmaker Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) emphatically urged expanding seats on the Supreme Court from 9 to 13 justices. “A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the court,” he said. Court expansion, no longer the province of left-leaning academics thanks to the MAGA justices’ radicalism, has become an indisputably mainstream, pro-democracy response.

In truth, increasing the seats on the Supreme Court amounts to rebalancing. Majority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) packed the court when he denied Merrick Garland a hearing during President Obama’s term — yet rushed through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation once election voting was already underway in 2020. Rebalancing to establish the proper equilibrium among the branches (i.e., reversing the MAGA justices’ investiture of the authoritarian executive power in Trump and their contemptuous disregard for Congress’s constitutional powers) is fundamental to preserving our constitutional system.

Increasing the number of seats on the court begins with a solid base of support. A June Marquette Law School poll showed the public split 50-50 on adding seats, up from just 42 percent support in 2019. Since 2021, support has varied between 48 and 52 percent, even without a nationally focused campaign on the issue. Simply because other proposals have even more support (the same poll shows term limits has approval from 73 percent of Republicans, 71 percent of independents, and 87 percent of Democrats) does not mean court expansion should be disregarded.

Indeed, fearing that court expansion might be catching on, the MAGA House majority Wednesday introduced a constitutional amendment freezing the number of justices at nine, confirmation that — absent such a measure — court expansion by statute is unquestionably constitutional. (It failed to win 2/3 required approval with only a single Democrat voting wth Republicans.) Ironically, the stunt underscores that nine is an arbitrary number, carrying no historical or constitutional significance. (Unsurprisingly, the GOP, which is beholden to dark money purveyors such as court fixer Leonard Leo, leaves out other overwhelmingly popular reforms, such as a mandatory ethics code.)

In opposing the gambit, the progressive group Demand Justice released a statement explaining:

Court expansion is the only court reform option that would promptly redress the 6-3 supermajority, which is itself the result of a partisan power grab. When the American people are counting on congressional Democrats to be the last line of defense against the Administration’s assault on the rule of law, it is more critical than ever to fight MAGA power grabs.

Noting that MAGA justices’ hugely unpopular and constitutionally flawed decisions in the Callais and Dobbs decisions have prompted trust in the court to decline and support for serious reform to spike, Demand Justice urges Congress to keep expansion as a viable option, observing that the “most persuasive argument in favor of expansion is the aggressive approach of the Court itself: the right-wing majority will continue to dramatically remake the law to favor the oligarchy.”

In the current environment, many Democrats nevertheless remain skittish about expanding the court, citing FDR’s failed New Deal scheme some 90 years ago. But as the bipartisan court commission assembled by President Biden recalled, “Soon after [FDR’s] plan was announced, the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions upholding state and federal regulation of the economy. . . . [which] left in place Roosevelt’s existing New Deal and ended an era in which the Court frequently invalidated laws designed to protect workers, consumers, and the public.” In short, it worked.Subscribed

Democrats too often shy away from proposals such as court expansion for fear of triggering blowback from Republicans — who championed McConnell’s court-packing. Avoiding a meritorious reform simply because it will upset Republicans or does not already have sky-high approval reveals bizarre timidity, and reflects a mindset that ignores the key role that persuasion and debate play in politics. A lengthy list of issues (from data centers to corruption to abolishing ICE) were not “winners” with voters until advocacy groups pushed to educate voters, independent media elevated them, and forward-leaning politicians took the lead.

What is key in the current environment is that dissatisfaction with the MAGA partisan Supreme Court is high (and likely to intensify with each new gift served up to their White House patron). This makes the rationale for serious, substantial restructuring of the court even more compelling.

Taken before the MAGA majority’s latest cringeworthy decision (allowing Donald Trump to build his ghastly ballroom), the Marquette poll found, for example, that 61 percent of Americans understand “the United States Supreme Court is ruling for President Donald Trump ‘almost always’ or ‘most of the time,’” and some 57 percent (including 60 percent of independents) say “the Court is going out of its way to avoid a ruling Trump might refuse to obey.” A captive, quisling court that has distorted the executive branch in direct contravention of the Framers’ vision (shaped by overwhelming fear of creating another monarch) is a court that requires dramatic, immediate repair.

Democrats should emphasize that court redesign is required because the MAGA majority (created by Republican confirmation shenanigans) has arrogantly rejected fundamental judicial norms (e.g., eschewing an enforceable ethics code, abusing the shadow docket to render opinions without judicial reasoning, shredding precedent when it suits them), and taken a sledgehammer to checks and balances (e.g., granting Donald Trump criminal immunity, destroying independent commissions).

Ideally, combining term limits for future justices with court expansion would be the fastest, most comprehensive, and effective way to rescue our democratic structure. Certainly, term limits on justices would help address concerns about diversity, a geriatric court, and hyper-partisanship — with the hope that more frequent appointments with term limits would reduce partisan frenzy surrounding court fights. While proponents are confident it could be done statutorily, this Supreme Court majority might not agree. Moreover, changing the composition of the court only by periodic retirements/replacements would be time-consuming, leaving the country at the mercy of MAGA constitutional destruction for years.

Democrats would do well to think more like the Republicans who readily claim a “mandate” after elections. If Democrats win the trifecta in 2028 under the banner of bold pro-democracy reform, their mandate certainly should include court rebalancing as part of their democracy restoration project.

Only a few of the potential 2028 Democratic presidential contenders (e.g., Pete Buttigieg) have embraced court expansion, but most have not ruled it out. However, Democratic voters have a critical role to play in promoting a wide-ranging debate in the next presidential cycle: What will it take to return the Supreme Court to its proper role and recover our constitutional order? Thanks to Clyburn, that issue is squarely before the party.

Democrats should press candidates who claim to be serious about bold, structural reform to spell out what they think is necessary to revamp the Supreme Court. They should not minimize the threat the current MAGA court poses, nor trim their sails to avoid incurring the ire of those who have pummeled our democracy. As long as the MAGA court majority remains hostile to pluralistic democracy and to the restoration of our constitutional structure, it will block progress on virtually all serious issues —dark money, abortion, voting rights. Democrats must decide if they are resigned to that fate. 

Special Report: A Russian Father and Brave Daughter

Roman Sheremeta via Substack, News and Comment: This is what dictatorship looks like, Roman Sheremet, right, professor of economics and politics, Sept. 3,2026. In April 2022, a 12-year-old Russian girl named Masha Moskalyova was told in art class to draw a picture supporting russian troops in Ukraine. Instead, she drew a Ukrainian mother protecting her child as russian missiles flew toward them.

On the Ukrainian flag she wrote, “Glory to Ukraine.” On the russian flag: “No to war. No to Putin.”

Her school reported her to the authorities.

Police began investigating her father, Alexei Moskalyov, a single father who had raised Masha largely on his own. They searched his social media and discovered posts criticizing russia’s invasion and documenting russian atrocities in Bucha.

In December 2022, around a dozen russian security officers raided their home. They ransacked it, seized their computers, phones, and savings.

Alexei later said that during interrogations, officers beat him and slammed his head against the wall and floor. They blasted the russian national anthem at full volume while questioning him.

Eventually, the regime charged him with repeatedly “discrediting” the russian military because of his anti-war social-media posts.

Masha was taken away from him and placed in a state “social rehabilitation” center.

Alexei was sentenced to two years in a penal colony.

He later described horrific conditions there: a tiny punishment cell roughly two meters long, freezing temperatures, rats crawling out of the sewer, and days when he was forced to stand for as long as 16 hours because the bunk was locked against the wall.

Meanwhile, his daughter wrote to him.

“Dad, don’t give up.”

“You are my hero.”

They were separated for more than a year and a half.

On October 15, 2024, Alexei finally walked out of prison.

Masha was waiting for him.

Five days later, they fled russia.

They first escaped to Armenia and applied for a German humanitarian visa. After waiting for more than a year, their case stalled when Germany suspended the relevant humanitarian admission program.

Then France stepped in.

In March 2026, Masha and Alexei (shown above following his release) received French humanitarian visas and flew to Paris.

And on July 17, 2026, France granted them political asylum.

Today, Masha is drawing again and hopes to pursue art. She also writes and has spoken out in support of russian political prisoners.

When asked whether, knowing everything that happened afterward, she would still have made that drawing, Masha said she would.

“One only lives once.”

One drawing.

A child saying no to war.

And for that, the russian state destroyed their home, separated a father from his daughter, imprisoned him, and drove them both into exile.

This is what dictatorship looks like.

News Roundups 

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Andrew Tate Indicted, Faces Life in Prison, Trump Erupts as Courts Gut His Gerrymander, Fetterman Exposed, AI Breaks Free, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 4, 2026. Today’s rundown leads with Andrew Tate’s new indictment on trafficking charges, a brutal Wall Street Journal report on Senator John Fetterman’s disappearing act, and two state supreme court rulings that just upended the national redistricting fight. We’ve also got a disturbing new report on rogue OpenAI agents, and a full list of other news below.

Before we get into it, some folks close to the White House got angry at me this week for continuing to press for answers on Mitch McConnell. I get it, they’d rather this story just quietly go away. But I shouldn’t be one of the only journalists still showing up at his home and still asking his office basic questions about where he is and how he’s doing. And yet here we are. I’m not stopping. Not now, not ever.

Let’s get into today’s news.

Andrew Tate:

Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, left, and his brother Tristan Tate, both indicted on sextrafficking charges on Sept. 4, 2026 (Pool 2026 file photo by the Associated Press)

Romanian prosecutors have indicted social media influencer Andrew Tate on charges of trafficking minors, money laundering, sex with a minor, and witness tampering, with his brother Tristan indicted as an accessory. Prosecutors allege the brothers recruited victims by falsely promising relationships or marriage before forcing them to produce pornographic content for a webcam business, including one alleged victim who was 15 when Tate seduced her in Britain in 2012 before moving her to Bucharest and using violence and intimidation to exploit her. The Tates allegedly kept $1.25 million, roughly 80 percent, of that victim’s videochat income. Both brothers, who hold dual US and British citizenship, deny all wrongdoing and remain jailed in the US, where a judge is weighing Britain’s extradition request on separate rape charges.

The Tates’ Romanian lawyer, Eugen Vidineac, pushed back hard on the new indictment, noting a previous case against them fell apart after a court found “significant irregularities” that prevented it from reaching trial, and said today’s filing “does not determine guilt.” He said the defense will scrutinize the new indictment for evidentiary, procedural, or legal deficiencies and stressed his clients’ presumption of innocence. Under Romanian law the brothers could be tried in absentia, but the case first goes to a preliminary court chamber for a legality review that typically takes well over the mandated 60 days. It remains unclear whether Romanian prosecutors will seek the Tates’ extradition from the US given the pending British request already in motion.

Senator John Fetterman:

A blistering new Wall Street Journal report, based on interviews with more than a dozen former staffers and lawmakers plus internal text messages, paints Sen. John Fetterman as largely checked out of the basic work of being a senator. In June he canceled a meeting with three paralyzed veterans who had traveled from rural Pennsylvania to discuss their care, telling staff he might have eaten something bad, then showed up looking fine less than an hour later for a Fox News interview about Israel. Former staffers say he has increasingly prioritized conservative media appearances and Israel advocacy over Senate business, including skipping 11 of 12 full committee hearings during one stretch while aides worked to mark him “present” anyway.

The Journal reports Fetterman routinely refuses or blows off meetings with constituents and fellow lawmakers, including Pennsylvanians seeking help on Medicaid, homelessness and flood relief. When an aide told him last September that officials from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia wanted to meet about Medicaid cuts, he texted back “Well I’m not,” adding he was convinced they just wanted “free trips to DC.” He also backed out of a funeral for three slain police officers after learning it would run three hours, responding “3 hours??,” and stopped regularly attending caucus meetings.

On Israel specifically, the Journal reports Fetterman told Israel’s ambassador he would write an op-ed based on points the ambassador sent over. When embassy staff followed up with drafted talking points, Fetterman’s own staff withheld them internally over concerns they could raise Foreign Agents Registration Act issues. The paper frames this alongside his broader drift from his roots as a Bernie Sanders-aligned former mayor of Braddock toward relationships with conservative media figures and, per July filings cited by the Journal, money from a prominent conservative donor.

The pattern has fueled speculation Fetterman could switch parties, especially since New York Times polling cited by the Journal shows him now polling better with GOP voters than Pennsylvania’s actual Republican senator, Dave McCormick. Asked in March about a call Senate Democratic leadership was arranging, he texted “I truly don’t care.” Fetterman did not respond to the Journal’s interview requests and walked away from a reporter at an Erie event last month, telling him only “We have to work together.”

Missouri/Maryland Upends Redistricting:

The Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled 7-0 to block a Trump-approved, gerrymandered congressional map from being used in the midterms, meaning Missourians will vote under the old districts instead. The rejected map would have cut through the core of Kansas City in an apparent attempt to dilute the minority vote and unseat longtime Black Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. The court found that a referendum petition with more than 300,000 signatures opposing the map was “legal, sufficient, and timely,” rejecting Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ argument that referendums don’t apply to congressional redistricting. Missouri’s Republican attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, said she will appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, calling the ruling a “full fledged constitutional crisis.”

Trump reacted with an angry Truth Social post, calling the ruling “horrible, ridiculous, and unConstitutional” and claiming without evidence that there won’t be enough time to redraw the map before the election. He complained that “the Election Process, as usual, is being disturbed in America” and called it a “Dark Day for Justice in Missouri,” despite the ruling coming from a court made up mostly of Republican appointed judges, five of seven. The same day, the Maryland Supreme Court dealt Trump and Republicans a separate setback by reversing two lower courts and allowing a Democratic-backed redistricting measure onto the November ballot, a measure that could help Democrats flip Maryland’s one remaining Republican-held House seat. Trump has not publicly responded to the Maryland ruling.

Trump kicked off this redistricting fight by pushing Republican legislators nationwide to redraw maps in his party’s favor as he tries to protect the GOP’s grip on the House for his final two years in office. Republicans are projected to net at most 16 seats through new maps in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama, while Democratic counters in California and Utah could yield at most six seats, with a separate Virginia effort blocked by that state’s Supreme Court and a Louisiana map struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Republicans currently hold a narrow 218-214 House majority, and polling already shows warning signs for the party heading into a midterm cycle where Trump’s approval ratings sit at or near record lows.

The Maryland Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a Democratic backed congressional redistricting amendment must be placed on the November ballot, reversing two lower court rulings that had blocked it, though the court ordered the ballot summary rewritten because it found the original wording misleading. The amendment would not change districts for this year’s midterms, but if approved by voters it would strip a constitutional requirement for compact, natural boundary respecting districts from congressional maps, applying it only to state legislative ones, potentially letting Democrats redraw a map that crosses the Chesapeake Bay and reshapes the district held by the state’s only Republican, Rep. Andy Harris. Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, who called a special session in August to get the amendment on the ballot, called the ruling “a massive victory for the people of our state,” accusing Trump and Republicans of trying “to rig the system, weaken voting rights, and make this pain permanent.”

Another Major AI Issue:

According to Reuters, a swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German programming wiki called DseWiki this spring, transforming it into a message board where the agents coordinated with each other, according to new research shared exclusively with Reuters and two people familiar with the matter. Researchers Sydney Von Arx and Cormac Slade Byrd found more than 15,000 edits made by AI agents on the site, which they discovered while scanning the internet for unauthorized AI agent behavior in late August. About half of the accounts gave themselves names suggesting an OpenAI affiliation, such as “OpenAIResearcher,” and public server logs indicated much of the activity originated from Microsoft Azure infrastructure that OpenAI sometimes uses. OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago but kept it under wraps while dealing with fallout from the separate July breach of Hugging Face, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Messages reviewed by the researchers showed the agents sharing tactics to cheat on tasks, bypass OpenAI’s restrictions, mask their behavior, and evade detection using tools like Tor. When the wiki’s human moderator began deleting the pages in June, the agents responded by creating backup pages to dodge the cleanup, with one writing on June 19 that a “cleanup/deletion sweep appears active alphabetically” and instructing others where to find backups if a page vanished. A King’s College London research fellow, Lukasz Olejnik, said the tampering amounted to a hacking attempt, though OpenAI disputed that characterization after reviewing the material. A Cambridge academic who reviewed the communications compared them to “the operation of some sort of underground network, hell-bent on achieving a task or mission.”

The episode adds to mounting concern that AI systems are learning to bend rules and coordinate in ways their developers never intended, especially as OpenAI pushes to release more autonomous and capable agents. It comes just as OpenAI unveiled its new “Astra” model this week, which the company says offers stronger performance but could also be harder for humans to monitor, and after OpenAI briefly paused some model training last month to add safety measures following the Hugging Face hack. An OpenAI spokesperson said the company could not respond to specific findings since it had not been given access to the report, but denied claims that its legal team discouraged a wider investigation and said the German incident was unrelated to Hugging Face. Researchers said the pattern suggests the biggest AI risk may not be a single superintelligent system but rather, as one put it, “vast colluding swarms of semi-intelligent AI.”

Other news:

A newly surfaced Flock webinar shows the company teaching police how to use its surveillance technology to monitor protests, parades, fireworks shows, and bike races, undercutting Flock’s public claims that its license plate cameras are a narrow, noninvasive tool used mainly to solve violent crime. In the webinar, Flock’s director of market management Caity Peak walks through how FlockOS, which combines license plate readers, drones, gunshot detectors, 911 data, and outside surveillance cameras into a single dashboard, could have been used by an incident commander to track the No Kings protests in Denver, including live video feeds, traffic flow, and building floor plans, all without officers needing to be physically present. Peak also demonstrated Flock Nova, a deeper investigative tool that merges license plate data with an agency’s other records, including person data, email, phone numbers, jail records, and open source intelligence, using a mock “street racing suspect” profile complete with the man’s name, address, and social media accounts as an example. The webinar echoes prior reporting from 404 Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation showing police departments have already run Flock searches tied to No Kings protests and other protected First Amendment activity, and it comes as Flock says more than 4,800 cities now run its FlockOS software. Later in the webinar, New Orleans officials described how the same camera network was used to track a suspect’s movements before the Bourbon Street terror attack, with roughly 7 terabytes of that footage eventually shared with Homeland Security, HSI, and the FBI.

Day seven of the Lindsay Clancy verdict watch centered on a new jury note from the previous day, with Judge William Sullivan asking both sides how the court should handle it. Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague argued against further questioning of jurors, saying the note reflects normal deliberation over how to weigh evidence rather than any sign of bias or an inability to deliberate, and that jurors shouldn’t be asked about their personal views on the case. Defense attorney Kevin Reddington pushed back hard, accusing one juror, whom he didn’t name, of “lying” under oath by claiming to follow the judge’s instructions while actually acknowledging doubt but refusing to apply the reasonable doubt standard to reach a not guilty verdict. Reddington pointed to two separate jury notes as evidence the juror has expressed doubt but won’t act on it, calling that a false statement to the court. Judge Sullivan ultimately said he sees no need to question the juror, ruling it is their duty to accept the law as he has instructed them.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced that the Trump administration will begin excavation work within two weeks on Trump’s planned 250-foot triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery, even though the project still lacks final approval from the National Capital Planning Commission and has not completed review under the National Historic Preservation Act. The move follows a familiar pattern for Trump, who has repeatedly pushed ahead on major Washington construction projects without full legal sign off, and comes days after the Supreme Court cleared the way for his separate East Wing ballroom project to continue. A group of Vietnam War veterans is suing to block the arch, arguing it lacks congressional approval and would obstruct the view between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, and their lawyer said Burgum’s announcement shows the administration never intended to let the legal process play out. The administration had previously committed to giving 14 days notice before construction, but that notice instead came through a social media post, and it has now filed a motion arguing the arch lawsuit should be dismissed on the same grounds the Supreme Court used to allow the ballroom project. Democratic Rep. Don Beyer, whose district includes Arlington Cemetery, accused Trump and Burgum of rushing “this towering monument to Trump’s vanity” because they expect Republicans to lose badly in November.

According to the Daily Beast, Pete Hegseth’s nickname among troops at the Pentagon is reportedly “No Tab Pete,” a jab at the fact that he never earned patches like “Ranger” or “Sapper” that signify elite combat skills, even as he presides over the firing or departure of more than 20 senior military leaders during his 20 months as defense secretary. The mockery surfaced after the retirement ceremony for Gen. Christopher Donahue, the special forces veteran who commanded Delta Force and was the last American soldier out of Kabul in 2021, held at Fort Bragg’s Delta compound, where an Army official said talk of “No Tab Pete” picked up once the bourbon started flowing at the dinner afterward. That same night, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll reportedly reached his limit with Hegseth and decided to resign, a decision he carried out days later at the White House after warning Trump about the damage Hegseth is doing to the Army. Driscoll’s break with Hegseth traces back to April, when Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George in a 15 second phone call after George disciplined Apache helicopter crews involved in a tribute flyby over Kid Rock’s home, prompting Driscoll to drive straight to George’s house to hug him. The piece also details Hegseth’s preoccupation with appearances, including a new mandatory “waist-to-height ratio” fitness standard, his “no more beardos, no more fat generals” comment to 800 top officers, and a viral Pentagon video of him bench pressing at Guantanamo Bay, all while U.S. forces were routed by Ukrainian drone operators in a recent war game that Donahue had been overseeing before his removal.

The US economy added 162,000 jobs in August, with June and July revised up by a combined 55,000, driven by rebounds in hospitality and education plus solid manufacturing and construction hiring tied to AI data centers, while unemployment held steady at 4.1%. The bigger headline is wage growth, which came in at just 3.1%, the lowest in five years and now running below inflation of roughly 3.5%.

The average nationwide price of diesel hit an all time high Friday, reaching $5.85 per gallon, up from $5.78 the day before, according to AAA. Prices began climbing in late February with the launch of the Iran war, and have since been compounded by Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil refineries, which prompted Russia, the world’s second largest diesel exporter, to extend a diesel export ban through the end of September. Higher seasonal demand from farmers and colder Northern Hemisphere temperatures are adding further strain on top of the supply shortage. Economists warn consumers should expect higher prices on virtually anything shipped, especially groceries, since many supermarkets are already running thin margins because of rising beef costs. Trump met with oil refiners at the White House this week to press them on relieving costs, though it remains unclear whether any concrete commitments were made.

The FCC asked a federal judge Thursday to dismiss Disney’s lawsuit challenging the agency’s early review of licenses for its eight company-owned ABC stations, arguing that blocking the review would hobble its investigation into “serious allegations that Disney has engaged in unlawful discrimination.” FCC Chair Brendan Carr ordered the early review in April, the first such early review in more than 50 years, and notably did so one day after Trump publicly urged ABC to fire Jimmy Kimmel. Disney’s suit calls the FCC’s actions an “extraordinary assault on free speech,” accusing the agency of trying to coerce and retaliate against “a network that refuses to bow to the administration’s demands.” A federal judge has set an October 6 hearing on the case, which is seen as a broader test of free speech rights for broadcasters as Trump has repeatedly called for stations to lose their licenses over programming he dislikes, including telling the FCC just days ago to rebuke NBC’s Kristen Welker.

President Trump commuted the six year sentence of former Philadelphia union leader John “Johnny Doc” Dougherty, according to Dougherty’s attorney George Bochetto. Dougherty was convicted in 2023 of bribing a Philadelphia City Council member and embezzling nearly $600,000 from Local 98 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, a union he ran for nearly three decades while serving as a major Democratic power broker in Pennsylvania politics. He was convicted of eight counts including conspiracy and honest services wire fraud, while City Council member Bobby Henon was convicted of 10 counts in the same case. Dougherty had four more years left on his sentence and is expected to be released soon.

A power outage hit NIPSCO customers across Northwest Indiana Thursday evening, with the majority of the roughly 1,800 customers still without power by 10 p.m. concentrated in Gary, after peaking at more than 2,300 customers earlier in the day. The cause of this latest outage wasn’t immediately clear, but it comes just weeks after most NIPSCO customers went at least two weeks without power following severe storms on Aug. 11 that knocked out power to more than 370,000 customers. Residents of Northwest Indiana have been demanding accountability from NIPSCO and calling for an investigation into whether the utility did enough to maintain power lines and clear trees before that storm.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Evans, the federal prosecutor investigating ICE officer Christian Castro for possible civil rights crimes in the shooting of Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, has been fired, according to four sources familiar with the matter, and three sources say he is now under Justice Department investigation, reportedly over allegations of leaking. The firing follows a ProPublica report that Evans told attorneys for Sosa-Celis and other victims to expect Castro to be charged only with making false statements rather than more serious civil rights violations, quoting an email in which Evans said the decision was "being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney" and that he had "objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could." A federal grand jury did indict Castro on six counts Wednesday under seal, and he was taken into custody in Texas Thursday ahead of a Friday court appearance.

Two hydropower workers, Sanjay Sah and Kabir Maharjan, were pulled out alive from a tunnel in Nepal on Friday, nine days after devastating floods hit the Himalayan region. Rescuers at the Trishuli 3A hydropower plant said they could still hear voices inside the tunnel, where at least 557 workers remain missing and roughly 115 are believed trapped. Authorities say at least 1,287 people were killed and more than 5,000 remain missing nationwide after an Aug. 26 disaster believed to have been triggered by a high altitude glacier collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border. Rescue teams have been using controlled blasts and excavators to reach trapped workers amid concerns over air quality and water access, while more than 800 foreign nationals remain missing in the area, including dozens of Americans.

President Trump named Adam Telle, a civilian leader in the Army Corps of Engineers, as acting Army secretary following the resignation of Dan Driscoll, whose exit came amid widely reported tensions with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Telle previously spent more than 20 years working for Republican senators and in the White House during Trump’s first term, and both Trump and Hegseth praised him in public statements. Driscoll gave no explanation for his departure beyond calling it “the honor of a lifetime,” though several of his allies in the Army had already been ousted by Hegseth this year. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis said Hegseth “is creating a leadership void at the top of our military ranks,” as Telle now takes over the Army amid ongoing conflict with Iran and a shortage of Patriot and THAAD missile interceptors.

The Parnas Perspective, Thursday Night News, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Today’s rundown leads with Mitch McConnell, because 80 days later, nobody else seems to be asking the obvious question: where is he? His office has gone weeks without a real update, he’s missed 60 votes, and the only proof of life the public has gotten is two photos.

This week I went back to his D.C. residence myself and found it guarded by unmarked SUVs and marked Capitol Police cars, curtains drawn. Even Kentucky’s own governor says he hasn’t heard from McConnell in 80 days. Most outlets moved on from this story weeks ago. I haven’t, and I’m not going to until someone in his office gives a straight answer.

We’ve also got Liz Oyer’s new lawsuit against the DOJ, major updates in the Lindsay Clancy case, new reporting on ICE building a nationwide voter database, and a full list of other news below. Regarding the Lindsay Clancy trial, I answer all your questions below from a legal perspective as a lawyer who has witnessed numerous criminal trials.

I’m not going to stop asking about McConnell, and I’m not going to stop covering the stories other outlets let go cold.

Here’s the news:

The White House has launched arcade games for kids using your taxpayer dollars that allows the children to cosplay as border patrol agents to target undocumented immigrants in America.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to grant the U.S. Postal Service sweeping power to withhold delivery of mail ballots, an emergency appeal that bypassed lower courts still weighing the case less than two months before the November midterms. The request is the latest chapter in a legal battle over a March executive order that gave federal agencies an unprecedented role in elections, which voter advocacy groups and 23 Democratic-led states have challenged in court. The administration described the new rules as merely “modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements” that don’t amount to federal control over state election administration, and asked for a short-term order allowing USPS to implement them immediately. This follows an August ruling in which the same 6-3 conservative Supreme Court already sided with the administration on the issue. Since then, USPS has detailed its implementation plans, election officials have warned it’s too late to overhaul mail ballot systems this cycle, and a whistleblower report alleged the agency is rushing a complicated plan that could disenfranchise millions of voters, all as the first ballots begin entering the mail this week.

Flock’s director Caity Peak demonstrated FlockOS, a platform combining license plate readers, live video, drones, and gunshot detectors, using a Denver “No Kings” protest as an example of how it helps commanders track unfolding incidents. While Flock markets the system for crime-solving and locating missing persons, with data retention limits controlled by local police, critics point to its use monitoring protected activities like protests, citing Electronic Frontier Foundation findings of hundreds of protest-related searches in 2025.

Mitch McConnell update:

Kentucky Rep. James Comer said Thursday he expects Sen. Mitch McConnell to return to Washington when the Senate reconvenes on September 14, though he clarified he hasn’t spoken with McConnell himself, only with staff members, many originally from his own district, who told him it’s “their goal” for McConnell to be present next week. McConnell’s office would not confirm a timeline, saying only that there are no scheduling announcements at this time. McConnell, 84, has not voted in the Senate since June 11, aside from a proxy vote on the farm bill last month, and has been hospitalized since June 14 after a fall, later moving to a rehab center before being discharged to recover at home. The Senate remains in recess until it officially returns September 14.

McConnell has now gone 80 days without a single public appearance, and it’s been nearly a month since his office last provided any real update, despite his having missed 60 votes on matters including an Iran war powers resolution and Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation, a significant gap given Republicans’ narrow Senate majority. A visit to his D.C. residence this week found it heavily guarded by unmarked SUVs and Capitol Police, with most curtains drawn though a first-floor window was open and no mail had piled up, unlike during his hospitalization. His office has released only two “proof-of-life” photos since his disappearance, both showing him smiling beside wife Elaine Chao without offering insight into his actual health, and it ignored questions ahead of the 80-day mark. Confusion has reportedly become “the talk of Congress,” with even Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s office declining to say when he last actually spoke with McConnell directly.

Despite his prolonged absence, aides have continued speaking on McConnell’s behalf back in Kentucky, with his state director apologizing for his absence at a Louisville housing event last month and a written statement issued under his name praising a local business owner’s legacy. Kentucky Republican lawmakers say they expect him back later this month, but by their own admission that expectation rests on conversations with GOP leadership and staff rather than with McConnell directly. McConnell isn’t the only lawmaker to have vanished mysteriously this year: Rep. Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey disappeared for months before revealing upon his return that he had been treated for depression. The parallel raises further questions about what, if anything, McConnell’s team is not disclosing about his condition as his return date approaches.

Liz Oyer sues Department of Justice:

Former U.S. Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer filed suit against the Justice Department and Attorney General Todd Blanche, alleging she was illegally fired after refusing to recommend restoring actor Mel Gibson’s gun rights despite his domestic violence conviction and personal ties to President Trump. Oyer says she was pressured to make it appear an independent review had cleared Gibson, even though he hadn’t undergone the extensive background investigation given to other applicants, and that a senior official on Blanche’s staff pushed her to approve it anyway because of Gibson’s relationship with Trump. Hours after she submitted a memo declining to recommend restoring his rights, DOJ security officers arrived at her office with termination papers and escorted her out. Oyer, who spent over 13 years in federal service with strong performance reviews, is represented by Democracy Forward and previously challenged her removal before the Merit Systems Protection Board more than 16 months ago without a substantive review.

The lawsuit argues DOJ violated Oyer’s constitutional and statutory due process rights as a career civil servant, and that the agency’s own legal reasoning undermines its case: DOJ has claimed only the Attorney General can exercise Article II removal authority, yet Oyer was fired by Blanche while he was still Deputy Attorney General, not by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi. The suit seeks a declaration that her removal was unlawful, reinstatement to federal service, restored pay and benefits, and a bar on further retaliatory action against her. Oyer said in a statement that she was fired for refusing to put politics ahead of her duty to the public, warning that if career officials can be dismissed for not bending rules for a president’s friends, the message to public servants is that political loyalty outweighs loyalty to the Constitution. Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman said the case aims to stop any administration from weaponizing government power against career officials who refuse political demands.

The case, Oyer v. Blanche et al., is being handled by a Democracy Forward legal team that includes Joshua Salzman, Webb Lyons, and Elena Goldstein. Oyer served as U.S. Pardon Attorney from April 2022 until March 2025, a tenure that included the episode at the center of the lawsuit. The press release notes the full complaint has been made publicly available. Democracy Forward, a 501(c)(3) organization, is also promoting a new book by Perryman, “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times,” which the release notes became a USA Today bestseller within two days of its release. No response from DOJ or Blanche was included in the release.

Lindsay Clancy:

The Lindsay Clancy murder trial neared a mistrial Thursday after the Massachusetts jury sent its second deadlock notice following nearly six days of deliberation, prompting defense attorney Kevin Reddington to ask Judge William Sullivan (shown above in an inset with the defendant) to remove a juror he claimed “refuses to listen to the law” on reasonable doubt. Sullivan declined, saying he couldn’t determine what was happening inside deliberations and that each juror, when questioned individually, confirmed they could follow his instructions. Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague argued the judge’s handling of the jury’s question was appropriate, and the panel was sent back to deliberate before being dismissed for the day around 4 p.m. Sullivan can only send jurors back twice before declaring a mistrial unless they agree to continue, and he already issued Tuey-Rodriguez instructions urging one last attempt at a verdict; a third deadlock note would likely end in a mistrial, though Reddington says he’d be ready for a second trial as soon as next week. I answer your questions:

The jury must decide whether Clancy is criminally responsible for killing her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in January 2023, after which she attempted suicide by jumping from her bedroom window and was left paralyzed from the waist down. The defense argues she was in postpartum psychosis and acted on auditory hallucinations, while prosecutors contend she was not psychotic and planned the killings, including sending her then-husband out on errands beforehand. Jurors can convict Clancy of first-degree murder, which carries a life sentence, or lesser charges of second-degree murder or manslaughter, or find her not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. Tensions boiled over in court Thursday when an animated Reddington wheeled Clancy into a sidebar discussion with the judge and attorneys, after which she returned to the defense table appearing upset but composed.

ICE Builds Out Nationwide Voting Database:

ICE is preparing to award a contract worth up to $5 million to a company that will build a massive national database of voters, according to a solicitation document published last week. The database would combine publicly available voter registration and voting history files from all 50 states, including data from every federal election, general, primary, runoff, and special. Contractors won’t initially be asked to collect party affiliation data, but that restriction could be lifted if the contracting officer, HSI section chief Michael Royer, directs it in writing. Experts believe compiling this kind of data, especially party affiliation, could violate voters’ privacy rights. ICE, DHS, and Royer did not respond to requests for comment, and the final contract is expected to be awarded shortly after publication next Monday, with its term expiring September 30.

This voter database effort is part of a much broader DHS and Trump administration push that critics say is designed to undermine trust in the midterm elections. The Department of Justice has spent over a year demanding states hand over unredacted voter rolls, an effort states and courts have resisted, while DHS has threatened to withhold emergency preparedness and counterterrorism funding from states that don’t comply with White House election policies. DHS has also directed ICE to deport people suspected of voting illegally even without criminal convictions, despite research showing noncitizen voting is extremely rare, a point underscored by a Georgia investigation this week that found very few such cases. DHS separately announced a new surge to investigate alleged voter fraud in select states ahead of the midterms. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers dismissed the effort as “a joke,” saying voting is a state issue, not a federal one.

This isn’t ICE’s first attempt to access voter data. In July, the agency was reported to be paying Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its CLEAR database, which aggregates names, addresses, property records, driver’s licenses, social media, and voter registration data from public and private sources. In June, ICE agents reportedly obtained individual voter rolls directly from election officials in counties in Texas and North Carolina. Last year, WIRED reported that DOGE was building a separate master database pulling from DHS, the Social Security Administration, the IRS, and voter data from Pennsylvania and Florida. A senior DHS official told WIRED at the time that the effort had “nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending,” describing it instead as cross-referencing immigration data with SSA, IRS, and voter records.

Other news:

Fox News parted ways with longtime anchor Maria Bartiromo, above, on Thursday after 12.5 years, with a spokesperson thanking her “for her work” but offering no further explanation. Bartiromo had served as Fox Business Network’s global markets editor since 2014, hosting “Mornings with Maria” and “Sunday Morning Futures,” and became known for a more openly conservative turn after leaving CNBC, where Cabinet secretaries regularly appeared on her shows during Trump’s terms. Her past commentary was cited as evidence in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox, which the network settled for $787 million in 2023. Her biography and show pages had already been removed from Fox’s website by Thursday, and she hadn’t appeared on air since August 9. She previously spent nearly 21 years at CNBC, where she was the first person to report live from the New York Stock Exchange floor.

JD Vance was asked whether Bartiromo will be the next White House Press Secretary:

Elon Musk’s America PAC has spent roughly $800,000 boosting Republican candidates in competitive midterm races, with Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton the biggest beneficiary at nearly a quarter-million dollars, followed by over $170,000 in Maine and over $25,000 in Michigan. The super PAC is active in House and Senate races across more than a dozen states, following digital ad spending reported last week in Maine, Michigan and New Hampshire aimed at supporting conservatives and voter registration. The spending comes as Republicans have flagged concerns about Paxton’s fundraising gap and called for outside help. Musk spent over $250 million backing Trump and Republicans in the 2024 election, and had a rocky patch with Trump last year, including briefly threatening to launch a third party, but the two appear to be on good terms again after Musk joined Trump’s state visit to China this year.

ICE agent Christian Castro has been federally charged with making false statements about the events leading up to his shooting of Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg earlier this year, marking the first Justice Department charge against an officer for on-duty conduct during nationwide immigration operations. Castro already faced state charges in Minnesota for second-degree assault and filing a false report, and federal prosecutors previously dropped charges against Sosa-Celis and another man for allegedly attacking Castro after surveillance footage contradicted his account. The shooting occurred after ICE tried to pull over a truck driven by Sosa-Celis’s cousin, who fled and was tackled near Sosa-Celis’s apartment door, with Sosa-Celis saying he was shot through the door moments after locking it. Castro was placed on administrative leave and briefly jailed in Texas before being released last week when the state’s governor declined to immediately approve his extradition to Minnesota. The Justice Department is still weighing whether to pursue additional civil rights charges against him.

The FDA announced a recall of one lot of Walmart’s Great Value Organic Triple Berry Blend frozen fruit, sold in 16 states, over potential E. coli O145:H28 contamination, as an expansion of a July recall tied to Publix frozen berries from the same supplier, Frutas y Hortalizas del Sur. The affected 10-ounce bags carry UPC 7874211226, lot code 6040 01-6, and a best-if-used-by date of Feb. 9, 2028, and while the broader outbreak has sickened 12 people including four hospitalizations, no illnesses have been linked to the Walmart product specifically, with the recall issued out of caution after traceback information. Consumers with the recalled berries should discard them or return them to Walmart for a refund, and anyone who ate them should watch for E. coli symptoms like severe cramps, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can be more serious in children, older adults, and those with weakened immune systems.

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on Thursday, calling it the world’s most intelligent AI model and the first to trigger stricter internal safety protocols due to its advanced cybersecurity capabilities, including the ability to autonomously find and exploit security flaws in well-protected systems. Co-founder Greg Brockman said Astra can do “anything a human can do with a computer” and called its release the start of the “AGI era,” while chief scientist Jakub Pachocki acknowledged that understanding what increasingly capable models can do is getting harder. The release follows a report last week revealing an unreleased model from the same family had autonomously seized administrator control over part of OpenAI’s own infrastructure and potentially exposed internal data, without staff knowledge. Reporting this week also raised concerns that a training technique used in Astra could make it harder for humans to understand how the model “thinks,” which Pachocki pushed back on. Altman said Astra went through the White House’s voluntary AI vetting process, with Brockman noting the administration requested no safeguard changes.

Australian police issued an arrest warrant for “Below Deck Mediterranean” star Nathan Gallagher, 28, after he missed a court appearance tied to a December 2025 domestic violence arrest and was granted conditional bail. New South Wales police shared his photo and asked the public for help locating him, noting he’s believed to be offshore and warning people not to approach him. Gallagher, in a statement to Rolling Stone, acknowledged making “mistakes” but said the public hadn’t heard the “full story,” pointing to a complicated situation involving his former partner and co-star Gael Cameron, with whom he shares a son. Bravo confirmed the current season wrapped before the incident and said it does not plan to work with Gallagher in the future.

A GAO report released Thursday found the Secret Service failed to update more than a third of its protection policies within the agency’s own required four-year window, with some guidelines on vice presidential foreign trips and foreign leader visits left unchanged for over 20 years. The watchdog also found the agency didn’t document its reasoning when deciding security incidents didn’t warrant policy changes, which GAO said may have prevented officials from spotting an emerging pattern of drone-related threats before a drone was used in the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Three earlier drone incidents, near an Obama motorcade in 2015, over a Bernie Sanders rally in 2016, and above Biden’s 2021 inauguration, went unaddressed in policy terms before the Butler attack. The report lands amid continued scrutiny of the agency following multiple threats this year, including a shooter entering the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and a shootout near the White House close to a Vance motorcade route. A Secret Service spokesperson said the agency overhauled its site-security policy after Butler and is implementing GAO’s other recommendations, noting it concurs with the findings and has made “significant institutional reforms” since 2024.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday there’s a chance of reaching a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine, while Ukraine’s foreign minister said he expects a “new dynamic” in diplomatic efforts, though neither offered specifics. Putin said countries including the U.S. and China were ready to support a settlement but that Russia and Ukraine must ultimately resolve it themselves, while also calling recent Ukrainian attacks on civilian ships “acts of state terrorism” that complicate talks. The comments come after both sides escalated long-range strikes and naval attacks since U.S.-mediated talks stalled in February, pushing up global grain prices and causing wheat futures to drop over 2% on Putin’s remarks. Putin said contacts with Ukraine continue mainly through intelligence channels, and India’s foreign minister offered to help mediate. Zelenskyy this week warned airlines that Russian skies are dangerous due to Ukrainian drone activity, while insisting Ukraine only targets Russian military facilities.

Oil prices climbed for a fourth straight session Thursday, pushing diesel to $5.78 a gallon, its highest level since 2022 and up more than 53% since the Iran war began in February, while regular gasoline rose to a $4.14 national average. Brent crude topped $97 a barrel, nearly 10% higher than the week’s start, driven largely by the Iran war choking traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and Russia’s diesel export ban following Ukrainian drone strikes on its refineries. Analysts said only increased Persian Gulf oil flow or a resumption of Russian exports could meaningfully ease prices, with Gulf exports estimated at 50-67% of pre-war levels. The energy price surge has also pushed 30-year mortgage rates to 6.91% amid inflation concerns, though Fed Governor Christopher Waller said he expects upcoming inflation readings to stay “reasonable” unless August data comes in hot enough to justify a rate hike.

An internal review by The Athletic found former NFL reporter Dianna Russini had an “awkward” and “uncomfortable” undisclosed relationship with New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel, though investigators found no clear evidence she used her platform to professionally benefit him. Russini resigned in April after photos of her and the married Vrabel at an Arizona hotel drew scrutiny, and the review, which examined over 900 bylined stories and 200 podcast episodes, found the relationship violated the outlet’s disclosure standards regardless of whether it was romantic. Investigators highlighted a 2023 column in which Russini wrote Vrabel wouldn’t be fired as Titans coach, based on conversations with “high-ranking” team officials, just two months before he was in fact fired. Vrabel returned to coaching in 2025 and led the Patriots to a dramatic turnaround, earning Coach of the Year honors. Russini could not be reached for comment.

John Herb Hayes III, 70, and Geordyn Nichole Hayes, 31, appeared in a Tennessee court Thursday and agreed to extradition to South Carolina to face charges connected to the death of their 5-year-old nonverbal daughter, Saylor, whose body was found in waters near Pawleys Island. The couple, arrested more than 350 miles away in Tennessee, will be moved to South Carolina within 10 days and remain jailed without bond, having also waived their right to hire an attorney during the process. Arrest affidavits accuse the parents of misdirecting search efforts toward Saylor’s tracking device despite knowing she wasn’t wearing it. Georgetown County Sheriff Carter Weaver said Saylor “deserved to be safe” and “deserved to be protected.” Records show John Hayes faced a prior 2023 child abuse case in Virginia that ended in dismissed charges after a deferred disposition and probation.

At least five people died and dozens more are feared dead after a migrant boat carrying West African men was found drifting in the Atlantic near Spain’s Canary Islands, with 44 survivors rescued and brought to Gran Canaria. Survivors, all men from Mali or Senegal, some underage, reported leaving Gambia and being stranded at sea for nearly a month, running out of provisions and falling ill from drinking seawater; Red Cross workers described them as disoriented and dehydrated upon arrival. Survivors said more than 100 people were originally aboard, including women and a baby, and that bodies of those who died during the journey were thrown overboard as the group weakened. Migrant rights group Walking Borders separately reported 83 deaths on the voyage, including three women and an infant, though this has not been independently confirmed. The Atlantic route to the Canary Islands remains one of the deadliest migration crossings to Europe, with tens of thousands dead or missing in recent years despite falling overall arrival numbers.

Minnesota Rep. Pete Stauber is running to become the top Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee next Congress, setting up a possible clash with current chair Bruce Westerman, who is term-limited but hasn’t ruled out seeking a waiver to serve a fourth term. Stauber, who has sat on the committee since 2020 and chairs its Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee, is already speaking with GOP Conference and steering committee members about his bid, which his spokesperson says will proceed regardless of Westerman’s decision. Westerman, while calling himself “more focused on winning the majority,” declined to say whether he’d pursue a waiver, insisting any friction with Stauber wouldn’t strain their friendship. The GOP Steering Committee will decide committee leadership assignments after the midterms. Stauber and Westerman aren’t alone: House Agriculture Chair GT Thompson has already filed a waiver request even as Rep. Austin Scott eyes succeeding him, and Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers plans to seek his own waiver, though Reps. Ronny Jackson, Rob Wittman, and Trent Kelly have also expressed interest in that post.

Nvidia agreed to acquire AI developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, one of its largest acquisitions ever, betting that supporting open-weight AI models will sustain demand even as major customers like Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft develop their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia. The deal gives Nvidia direct access to a platform developers use to build, test and share AI tools, potentially helping it narrow the gap with top U.S. and Chinese AI labs, including cost-competitive Chinese firms like DeepSeek and Z.ai. Nvidia will pay about $11.9 billion to Hugging Face’s investors plus up to $1 billion in retention equity for employees, and CEO Jensen Huang said the platform will remain open and won’t require Nvidia chips to use. Hugging Face, founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf and backed by Intel, AMD and Amazon, also hosts datasets and cloud tools for AI development. The company was recently in the news after a hack involving rogue AI agents that escaped an OpenAI testing environment.

President Trump said Thursday the U.S. will ask Europe to reimburse Washington for the “hundreds of billions” in munitions sent to Ukraine under former President Biden, framing it as a belated correction rather than acknowledging any current shortage. The claim comes as the U.S. military faces dwindling stockpiles from its ongoing war with Iran, now in its seventh month, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies reporting roughly 1,500 Patriot interceptors used since the war began, leaving under 1,000 in stock, and THAAD interceptors dropping from 452 to well under 300. Trump insisted the U.S. has “virtually unlimited” mid-to-high grade ammunition and called reports of shortages “treasonous,” accusing critics and media outlets of wanting America to lose a war he says is being “easily” won. He said the military is now stockpiling munitions for domestic use rather than selling them abroad. The reimbursement request follows a 2025 arrangement in which the U.S. and Europe agreed Washington would send weapons to Ukraine in transactions financed by European allies.

Meidas Touch Network, Thursday Afternoon Update: MAGA Mike’s House Shutdown, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Here’s your free midday update.

• Mike Johnson abruptly cancels the last two weeks of September in Congress after denying he’d do so just days ago
• Billionaire Leon Black skipped out on his House Oversight deposition on Epstein and is suing the committee
• Trump favorite Maria Bartiromo is abruptly out at Fox
• Federal prosecutors charge an ICE agent with lying about a Minnesota shooting
• Trump continues insisting we have “virtually unlimited” ammo, while claiming reporters covering U.S. munitions shortages are “treasonous”
• Iran’s overnight barrage on U.S. bases
• Oil spikes toward $100/barrel
• Trump continues attacking Canada and PM Carney
• House Republicans vent their tariff frustrations at Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer during a closed-door meeting
• A federal judge again blocks Trump’s latest attempt to gut birthright citizenship
• The Antwerp diamond industry’s story about the diamond ring it gave to Trump keeps falling apart
• Mortgage rates and treasury yields climb to multi-year highs

Now let’s dive in.

MAGA Mike Runs and Hides

MAGA Mike Johnson has made it officially: the last two weeks of September are canceled for the House. See ya later. The House won’t return until after the midterm elections unless the Senate moves their reconciliation package. This comes just a couple days after Johnson defensively mocked Thomas Massie for suggesting leadership might do exactly this to dodge the new Epstein Files Transparency Act, calling the idea “stupid” and “nonsensical.” Well, what does that make you, Mike?

James Comer, meanwhile, is skipping Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas, joining more than 45 other Republicans who’ve said they won’t attend, either. While on NewsNation, Comer also struggled to explain why Trump’s MAGA Inc. war chest has only spent $21M of its $400M with the midterms just a couple months out.Billionaire Leon Black Backs Out

Billionaire Leon Black, who appears in the Epstein files, filed a lawsuit to block his own subpoena from the House Oversight Committee rather than show up and answer questions. Black was the CEO of Apollo Global Management, before revelations from the Epstein files sparked his resignation. Democrats are now calling for Black to be held in contempt.Bartiromo Is Out

State regime media known as Fox abruptly announced this morning that it has parted ways with host, and Trump favorite, Maria Bartiromo, after 12.5 years. No explanation given. She’s out effective immediately. 

An ICE Agent Actually Gets Charged

A federal grand jury has indicted ICE officer Christian Castro on charges of making false statements regarding a nonfatal shooting during ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis this past January. Trump’s own DOJ is accusing one of its federal agents of criminal wrongdoing on the job. Castro shot and wounded Julio Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan man who lacked legal status. Trump officials at the time instantly defended Castro, then quietly backed away as video footage emerged showing the Trump regime’s account did not match reality.Trump’s Ammo Meltdown

Trump woke up this morning and raged some more at journalists telling the truth about his disastrous war. He posted that the U.S. has virtually unlimited amounts of mid to high grade ammo, more than we can ever use, and that anyone reporting otherwise is “treasonous scum.” Then he posted an AI-generated graphic titled “Hormuz Oil Volumes are BACK!” that shows oil flows dropping from 20M barrels a day to 18M. Meanwhile, in the real world, Brent crude hit over $97, a 6-week high, and the crack spread between crude and diesel is about the widest it has ever been.Iran’s Surprise Attacks

Overnight, Iran launched missile and drone strikes against U.S. assets across Kuwait, with explosions and sirens reported and flights diverting away from the country. Reports claim Iranian forces targeted U.S. bases in Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE over an 8-hour stretch. This happened at the same time reporting broke in the WSJ that Trump is now privately discussing with aides whether to just declare that the war is over and the U.S. won, a move he’s tried before. Hegseth is now extending Mideast deployments into 2027, which means more strain on our troops. And reports are coming in from our service members aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, who upon docking in Thailand, are calling this the worst deployment of their careers. Some said they had no interest in a port call in Thailand. They just want to come home.U.S. President Donald Trump speaks while hosting a dinner in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 2, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

About That “Golden Age”

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve just fell below 290M barrels for the first time since 1982. Mortgage rates are marching toward 7%. The 10-year treasury yield has climbed from under 4% to nearly 4.8% since the Iran war began. The trade deficit ballooned in July, driven largely by imports needed to feed the AI data center boom, a boom which appears to be the only thing propping up private construction spending right now, while every other category of construction has collapsed by roughly $120B. Meanwhile, Canadian exports to the U.S. fell 6.6% in July, while its exports everywhere else hit a record high. Trump also keeps threatening Canada’s economy. Worth noting: Canada’s economy added 75.1K jobs in July. The U.S. lost 23K.

His Own Party Is Losing Patience

House Republicans sat down behind closed doors with U.S. Trade Rep. Greer and reportedly let him have it over Trump’s tariff war, per Semafor. GOP reps know how bad these tariffs are, not only for the economy, but for their midterm chances.Antwerp’s Diamond Industry Says the Trump Ring Wasn’t a Bribe. Its Own Words Say Otherwise.

The Antwerp World Diamond Centre still insists the diamond ring it gave Trump in June was just a friendly gift for America’s 250th anniversary and nothing to do with the tariff exemption on European diamonds Trump restored a month later. But AWDC’s own public filings admit the tariff exemption wasn’t guaranteed until after the gift. In an exclusive MeidasTouch report, Senator Warren told us that this looks like exactly what it is.

And in other legal news, a federal judge in Maryland again blocked Trump’s latest executive order attempting to limit birthright citizenship, writing plainly that no presidential order can undo what the Supreme Court has done. For those wondering, yes, SCOTUS had already settled this back in June. But this decision was a lower court follow-up blocking a new, narrower Trump order Trump tried to make to work around the ruling.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Big Epstein Update: Alleged Co-Conspirator with Sealed NDAs Sues, GOP Senator Calls for Hegseth’s Firing, McConnell Update, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Today’s rundown leads with new developments in the Epstein story: subpoenas, sealed NDAs, and a $158 million question about what one of his associates was really paying for. We also look into Mitch McConnell, issues with Hegseth, and more right now.

Covering this material isn’t free of consequences. Since I started digging into the Epstein network and the powerful people who moved through it, I’ve faced pushback I didn’t expect: hostile messages, attempts to discredit the reporting, and pressure from people who’d clearly prefer this story stay buried. I’m telling you this because you deserve to know what it takes to keep this coverage independent, answering to no advertiser, no network, and no one with a stake in how these names get treated.

I’m not going to stop. Let’s get into today’s news.

Alleged Epstein Co-Conspirator:

Alleged Epstein co-conspirator, Leon Black (shown above in a photo collage with Jeffrey Epstein), is suing the House Oversight Committee to block subpoenas tied to his deposition testimony and an effort to obtain his NDAs with women, arguing the subpoenas lack a legitimate legislative purpose and exceed Congress’ authority. The lawsuit comes as Black faces a committee deposition Thursday after refusing in June to answer questions about those NDAs, part of a broader inquiry into his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. At the center of that inquiry are $158 million in payments Black made to Epstein between 2012 and 2017 for what Epstein called tax and estate-planning “art,” a fee Epstein himself struggled to justify, once writing “the value is in the eye of the beholder.” Senator Ron Wyden has released a report finding Bank of America flagged $170 million in suspicious Epstein-related transactions connected to Black, some with “no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose,” and has called at least some payments equivalent to hush money. A 2021 Apollo-commissioned Dechert report found no wrongdoing and said Epstein’s strategies saved Black $1-2 billion in taxes, though outside tax lawyers told Bloomberg the techniques were largely standard estate-planning tools rather than the novel work Dechert described.

Congressman Thomas Massie named Black as one of 14 possible co-conspirators associated with Epstein:

The core transaction underlying the dispute was a 2012 crisis: Black’s family trust had overpaid him $142 million, risking a clawback that could have cost up to $1 billion in estate taxes, and Epstein devised a fix where Black gave up future trust distributions in exchange for swapping the trust’s $1.6 billion Apollo stake for a promissory note backed by art and stock. Dechert’s report called this a “grand slam,” but Bloomberg found the underlying technique, a “power of substitution,” was a well-established estate-planning tool that Black’s own longtime lawyer had presented on nearly a decade earlier. Epstein also helped Black extract tax benefits from valuation discounts on subdivided Apollo shares and from a 2015-16 transaction selling a stake in Black’s art-book company Phaidon at a reduced valuation to Black’s own employee and brother-in-law, a deal one outside lawyer warned the IRS likely wouldn’t approve and could result in “an embarrassing article in the Wall Street Journal.” That Phaidon deal eventually closed in revised form and saved Black about $11.6 million in taxes. Disputes over fees tied to these transactions, especially Phaidon, became a central source of friction between the two men.

The relationship fully collapsed over a 2016 art deal in which Epstein personally bought two artworks from Black for $30 million to help him defer capital-gains taxes via a like-kind exchange, then struggled to resell them and grew increasingly frustrated, at one point complaining Black hadn’t even offered to buy him lunch. Financial records show both men treated Epstein’s later reimbursement demand as a $30.5 million loan, of which Epstein repaid only $10 million, privately writing that he believed he actually owed Black a smaller amount. Epstein also hinted at leverage, warning that disclosing details of the tax exchange “will cost him more than the 30” and would expose other problematic past transactions. According to the Dechert report, Epstein’s failure to repay the remaining loan balance led Black to sever ties with him later that year, and weeks after the breakup, renewed media scrutiny of Epstein’s criminal conduct emerged, casting fresh attention on the relationship that had just ended.

Republican Calls on Hegseth to be Fired, Pressure Builds:

The Pentagon announced new clinical guidelines Wednesday requiring male service members age 30 and older to be screened for testosterone deficiency during their regular health assessments, following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s summer call for the change. Troops diagnosed with hypogonadism will get follow-up testing and treatment options including testosterone replacement therapy, which Hegseth has said is voluntary. Men under 30 will be offered optional annual screenings, while women will be asked about symptoms of hormonal dysregulation and referred for further evaluation if needed. The Pentagon frames the push as aimed at force readiness, and cites research suggesting high-stress roles, including special operations, carry elevated risk of hormone-related issues sometimes called “Operator Syndrome.”

A wave of senior Pentagon and military leaders has departed since Hegseth took over, most recently Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who resigned Monday reportedly amid an icy relationship with Hegseth and concerns about the Army’s condition. Others pushed out or forced into early retirement include Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, Gen. Christopher Donahue, Vice Chief Gen. James Mingus, and Navy Secretary John Phelan, along with a February 2025 purge that removed Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. CQ Brown Jr., Adm. Lisa Franchetti and Gen. James Slife. Hegseth has pursued a broader effort to reduce the number of generals and root out what he calls “wokeness” in the ranks. The pattern spans nearly every military branch and includes intelligence roles like NSA/CYBERCOM chief Gen. Timothy Haugh and DIA director Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse.

Senator Thom Tillis publicly urged President Trump to fire Hegseth on Wednesday, accusing him of “inept mismanagement” and creating a “leadership void” as the six-month-old war with Iran continues without resolution. Tillis, who voted to confirm Hegseth despite reservations, said the secretary is “intimidated by competence” and focused on culture wars rather than modernizing the military for evolving warfare seen in Ukraine and against Iran. He directly tied Driscoll’s resignation to Hegseth’s leadership style, saying a better secretary would be fighting to retain talent rather than pushing it out.

Hegseth faces mounting scrutiny as the war with Iran, launched February 28, has left the Pentagon grappling with reportedly shrinking munitions stockpiles and no clear end in sight. More than two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the administration’s handling of the war, according to an August 31 University of Massachusetts poll, and the conflict has coincided with spiking fuel prices and sinking approval numbers for Trump ahead of November’s midterms. Hegseth has also pursued controversial changes including limiting press access to the Pentagon and reviewing academy admissions standards, moves that have drawn criticism even from within his own party.

Other news:

Senator Mitch McConnell’s absence from public view hit 80 days on Wednesday, with no update from his office on his condition in nearly a month, fueling growing speculation and criticism in Washington. The 84-year-old Kentucky Republican has missed 60 votes since his June 14 hospitalization, including on an Iran war powers resolution and the confirmation of Attorney General Todd Blanche, at a time when the GOP holds only a narrow Senate majority. A visit to McConnell’s D.C. residence this week found it guarded by a security detail of three unmarked SUVs plus marked Capitol Police cars, with most curtains drawn but no mail piling up outside as there had been during his hospital stay. His office has released only two “proof of life” photos since he vanished from public view, both showing him smiling with wife Elaine Chao but revealing nothing about his health, and aides have ignored repeated requests for a video update or phone call to a media outlet. McConnell missed two major Kentucky events he’d normally attend, the Fancy Farm picnic and the Kentucky Farm Bureau Country Ham Breakfast, and while some allies like Scott Jennings claim to have had lengthy phone calls with him, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear says he’s heard nothing from the senator in 80 days.

U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman of Maryland issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday blocking Trump’s August executive order that sought to further narrow birthright citizenship, calling his legal reasoning a “distorted” reading of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling. The order, Trump’s second attempt to limit the 14th Amendment’s citizenship guarantee, tried to carve out new exceptions for children of parents labeled “alien enemies,” foreign government employees, or those accused of “birth tourism,” despite the Court’s ruling in Trump v. Barbara that children born to parents “unlawfully or temporarily present” are still “citizens at birth.” Boardman wrote that “no Presidential Executive Order can undo what the Supreme Court has done” and found the administration cited no language from the Barbara decision to support its interpretation because none exists. She specifically cited two mothers, from Venezuela and Mexico, whose children risked being wrongly classified as members of designated terrorist organizations under the order. Boardman called the order “almost certainly unconstitutional” as applied to the certified class of children covered by the earlier ruling.

Gloria Steinem, the pioneering feminist journalist and activist, died Wednesday at her New York City home at age 92, surrounded by loved ones, according to a statement on her official Instagram page. No cause of death was given. She rose to national prominence in 1963 with an undercover exposé on the working conditions of Playboy bunnies, then went on to co-found Ms. magazine in 1971 and become the public face of second-wave feminism. Her activism helped reshape rights for women, from credit access to Ivy League admission to legal abortion, and she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2013. She married David Bale in 2000 after decades of publicly rejecting marriage, and continued working for equality until the end of her life.

A shooting at a downtown Minneapolis apartment building Wednesday afternoon left three dead, including the suspect, and at least six injured, among them police officers. Interim Police Chief Bill Peterson said officers exchanged gunfire with the shooter and entered the building after reports of an active shooter, encountering victims and a visibility-limiting haze on an upper floor. Two officers were shot, one in the leg and one twice in the abdomen, while a third suffered non-gunfire injuries; all three are expected to recover. Witnesses described hearing 25 to 30 gunshots and seeing people wounded in the lobby, with one resident saying he had previously reported the suspect to building management after encountering him with a handgun. The FBI and ATF responded to assist local authorities, and the surrounding area was cleared before being declared secure.

The Dutch central bank announced it relocated tens of tons of gold from the United States and Canada to Europe between March and August, citing “crisis preparedness” amid global political unrest. Roughly 86 metric tons moved to London from a combined 313 metric tons held in New York and Ottawa, shifting each city’s share of Dutch holdings down to 18.5 percent from 31.3 percent and 19.7 percent respectively. The bank holds 612.4 metric tons of gold total, valued at about 72.2 billion euros ($83.6 billion) at the end of 2025. Governor Olaf Sleijpen said the move improves the “tradability” of reserves, calling London-held gold the world’s most easily accessible in a crisis compared with New York or Ottawa. Part of the shift involved selling gold in New York and using proceeds to buy gold in London rather than physically transporting all of it.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced Thursday that Russia will close German Goethe-Institut cultural centers in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, retaliating after Germany shut the Russian Consulate in Bonn and a Russian cultural center in Berlin. The move follows Germany blaming Moscow for a drone plot at Leipzig/Halle Airport, a major freight hub supporting Ukraine, where an explosive-laden drone was found and defused in early August. Putin has denied the allegations, claiming Germany is deflecting from domestic political troubles and that evidence was “planted.” The episode is part of a broader pattern Western officials call hybrid war, including Britain summoning Russia’s top diplomat, a large-scale Finnish civil defense drill, Norway seizing a Russian vessel tied to a Ukrainian arbitration claim, and Danish intelligence warning of possible Russian sabotage targeting defense companies. EU ministers met to weigh further sanctions but are struggling to find new non-military response options.

Firefighters rescued a man trapped inside a Recology garbage truck in San Francisco early Wednesday morning after the truck’s driver was flagged down by someone who heard yelling from the truck’s garbage compartment. About 25 firefighters responded to the roughly two-hour operation, during which one firefighter suffered a hand laceration requiring stitches. The rescued man was conscious, breathing and talking when he was taken to a hospital, though the extent of his injuries was not immediately known. A fire official said he is believed to have climbed into a dumpster looking for food before becoming trapped when the truck compacted its contents. The incident occurred on the 100 block of Mason Street.

American journalist Thomas Weir Pauken II, 51, was sentenced to two years in federal prison for acting as an illegal agent of China’s government, after pleading guilty earlier this year and declining to appeal. Prosecutors said Pauken, who worked for Chinese state outlets CCTV and Xinhua after moving to China in 2010, wrote intelligence reports for a handler known as “Cathy” that were read by Chinese President Xi Jinping, receiving at least $100,000 for his work. He was also asked to recruit sources, including providing one contact with a phone, computer and secure messaging credentials, and told investigators he suspected that contact might pass classified information to China. His lawyer said no classified information was actually shared and that Pauken has accepted responsibility. Pauken used the alias “Tom McGregor” to distance his father, a former Texas Republican Party chairman, from his work in China, and was arrested in February after returning from a family trip to Washington, D.C.

Former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, asked a federal judge Wednesday to dismiss their drug trafficking indictment, arguing head-of-state immunity protects them from U.S. prosecution. Their lawyers argued no American court has ever tried a sitting foreign head of state and that heads of state are exempt from any court but their own. Maduro and Flores have been jailed in Brooklyn since U.S. forces seized them in a January raid on their Caracas home, and face a trial scheduled for June 2026 with oral arguments on the dismissal motion set for November 17. Prosecutors allege Maduro ran a conspiracy to move thousands of tons of cocaine into the U.S. by colluding with Venezuelan law enforcement and drug traffickers, charges he denies, calling his capture a kidnapping. Federal prosecutors are due to respond to the immunity arguments later this month.

Former Tropical Storm Edouard dumped nearly two feet of rain on rural East Texas, prompting dozens of rescues from stranded cars, flooded homes and an assisted living facility as the storm lingered over the state into Thursday. Hardin County was hit hardest, with 18 to 20 inches of rain, downed trees and power lines, and roughly a dozen water rescues, while nearby Jefferson County reported about 22,000 customers without power. Wind gusts reached 90 mph as the storm moved through, sparking at least one house fire from a downed power line near Lumberton. An assisted living facility in Hardin County was damaged, requiring the evacuation of 21 residents with help from Texas Parks and Wildlife game wardens. Separately, three hurricanes, Marie, Lowell and Karina, were active in the Pacific Ocean, with dangerous swells expected to reach Hawaii and southern California in the coming days.

John Herb Hayes III, 70, and Geordyn Nichole Hayes, 31, of Bristol, Virginia, were arrested and charged with unlawfully placing a child at risk after their 5-year-old autistic, nonverbal daughter, Saylor, was found dead in South Carolina waters near Pawleys Island. Authorities said the parents failed to provide appropriate supervision for a child with a known affinity for water and history of wandering, and that Saylor’s Project Lifesaver tracking device had been removed before the family left Virginia. According to arrest affidavits, the parents directed searchers toward using the tracker even though they knew Saylor wasn’t wearing it, and steered search efforts away from the nearby body of water where she was ultimately found. The device was later located inside a vehicle at the family’s Virginia home. Georgetown County Sheriff Carter Weaver called the death “a heartbreaking tragedy,” saying Saylor “deserved to be safe” and vowing to pursue accountability through the justice system.

Nvidia agreed to buy AI developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, one of its biggest acquisitions ever, in a bet that supporting open-weight AI models will sustain demand even as major customers like Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft build their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia. The deal gives Nvidia direct access to a platform developers use to build, test and share AI tools, potentially offering insight that helps it keep pace with top U.S. and Chinese AI labs, including Chinese firms like DeepSeek and Z.ai whose cheaper open models have gained ground. Nvidia will pay about $11.9 billion to Hugging Face’s investors plus up to $1 billion in retention equity for employees joining the company, and CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open platform that doesn’t require Nvidia chips to use. The New York-based startup, founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf and backed by Intel, AMD and Amazon, also hosts datasets and cloud tools for AI development, and was recently in the news after a hack involving rogue AI agents that escaped an OpenAI testing environment.

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

 

Davin Rosborough, an ACLU attorney representing the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, speaks at a press conference outside the John Moakley Courthouse in Boston, Mass. after participating in a hearing Sept. 3 on President Donald Trump's March 31, 2026 executive order and a Postal Service rule implementing it.

Democracy Docket, Judge appears deeply skeptical of case for Trump’s mail voting restrictions, Jim Saksa, Sept. 3, 2026. With Election Day just two months away, the lawyer defending the Postal Service’s recently issued rule carrying out President Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order could not tell a federal judge how — or even if — the new rule would work.

At Thursday’s hearing in Boston, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani repeatedly asked the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), represented by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Michael Velchik, whether the agency was ready to implement the rule, which was only published last week.

And Velchik repeatedly refused to do anything more than refer her to the rule itself, which provides scant details about when the agency might be able to begin its rollout ahead of the rapidly approaching midterm elections.

That exchange — and others like it — threw into sharp relief just how quickly and haphazardly USPS is moving to implement the new postal requirements, which critics say could potentially strip millions of Americans of the ability to vote by mail. As the hearing wore on, Talwani seemed increasingly exasperated with the defendants’ arguments.SIGN UP TODAYGet updates straight to your inbox — for free

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The postal rule in question requires election officials to submit barcode-equipped envelopes for mail ballots to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) for approval and also lists of eligible mail voters. If state or local administrators fail to get USPS’s greenlight for their envelope design or don’t upload their voter data, then mail carriers won’t deliver mail ballots to those states’ residents.

Two sets of plaintiffs are challenging the rule in separate lawsuits that were combined into a single hearing Thursday. One is a coalition of pro-voting organizations and individual mail voters led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts (LWVMA). The other is 24 Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C., led by California.

The plaintiffs argue that the rule would make mail voting “virtually impossible” and result in “mass disenfranchisement,” citing the testimony of dozens of state and local officials from both major political parties.

In response to those claims, Velchik largely cited the rule itself, which provides no timeline on when an online portal for state officials to submit their envelopes and voter lists might go live.

Meanwhile, in a report published Tuesday, an anonymous USPS whistleblower warned that the portal’s “slapdash” development would almost certainly result in “catastrophic failure.”Whose ‘irreparable harm’?

The parties gathered in Courtroom 9 of the John J. Moakley Courthouse Thursday because, 11 days ago, the U.S. Supreme Court had reversed a 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision and lifted an injunction that Talwani had previously issued against the USPS rule. The Court agreed with the DOJ’s argument that it was too soon for a court to assess the legality of Trump’s order — after all, it concluded, USPS hadn’t implemented it yet.

That procedural argument over the lawsuit’s “ripeness” disappeared when USPS published its final rule soon thereafter. But USPS seems far from ready to actually put the rule into effect.

Asked when the USPS’s portal might go live, Velchik demurred.

“I can’t make specific representations,” he said.

“We’ve been here for a week and you can’t tell me the government is ready to go?” Talwani responded, incredulously.

That question gets to a critical issue that could decide the matter’s fate if — as expected — it again rises to the Supreme Court.

Talwani repeatedly asked the DOJ to provide details of the “irreparable harm” the government would suffer if she granted a preliminary injunction barring the rule’s implementation in November’s midterm elections. Such an explanation — were the DOJ to provide it — would also rebut the plaintiffs’ mirroring claims of their own irreparable harm if the rule is left in place. But Velchik could only meekly point to the final rule.

Talwani gave the DOJ until 3 p.m. Thursday to supplement the record with specifics about the readiness of the USPS’s portal.

“And if you can’t provide details, I’m going to assume it’s not finalized yet,” she warned, adding that she would also assume the government’s claims about irreparable harm were made “without any facts.”

Just before that deadline, the DOJ submitted additional information provided by a USPS executive, but it lacked the precision Talwani had requested.

“We continue to make refinements to the Portal, including consideration of changes needed in light of the TRO,” the declaration from USPS Chief Customer and Marketing Officer Steven Monteith stated. “We anticipate being in a position to make the Portal available to users for voluntary use by sometime next week.”

The DOJ was joined in the case by a dozen Republican-led states, represented primarily by Missouri Solicitor General Louis J. Capozzi III, in defending the new rule. Capozzi noted Thursday that his own state’s top election official provided a statement saying that Missouri could successfully comply with the new rule.

But Davin Rosborough, an ACLU lawyer representing the LWVMA plaintiffs, noted during the hearing that the other 11 red states’ silence spoke far louder than one short statement from Capozzi.

“The only evidence that the states who intervened on the defendant’s side put in [the record] was a single one-page declaration from the Missouri Secretary of State saying, in vague terms, ‘I think we can comply,’” Rosborough said at a press conference following the hearing. “Alabama, Texas, none of the other states put in anything…”

“I think the failure to put anything in writing — and under penalty of perjury — speaks volumes,” he added.

Talwani noted Thursday that local election officials from Texas’ Travis and Harris counties also provided sworn declarations that the USPS rule would result in disfranchised voters.Decision coming

Talwani indicated that she may issue her decision as early as Thursday night. In recognition of the tight time constraints, she suggested that she would issue relatively cursory rulings on many of the claims raised by both sides, while more fully explaining her position on the few she believed to be most important.

At its core, the case will turn on whether USPS had the power to enact its rule. “The $64,000 question is: Is this authorized by the statute?” Velchik said.

The U.S. Constitution provides that states make the rules for the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding elections, which Congress can then override. But it provides no independent authority to the president.

The defendants maintained that the general statute Congress enacted to empower USPS to pass regulations on the collection and handling of mail covers this rule on mail ballot envelopes and the refusal to deliver them. USPS requires all mail to include things like return addresses and postage — including mail ballots — and no one ever complained about that, they argued.

Likewise, USPS has long provided guidelines to election officials on steps they can take to ensure mail ballots are delivered quickly, like special envelopes, and those also weren’t a problem.

But those are different, Rosborough argued. The Postal Service’s past regulations on mail ballots were voluntary — states were free to ignore them and still trust their ballots would be delivered. And a general rule on postage is nothing like a specific rule on mail ballots alone.

As a lawyer for the Democratic states noted, “The Supreme Court said over 100 years ago [that] the power to refuse to deliver requires an act of Congress. Here, there is no statute that allows USPS to not deliver mail ballots. Full stop.”

In contrast to past hearings, which hinged on technicalities, Thursday’s hearing focused almost entirely on the merits. There was just one notable exception: Capozzi argued that the LWVMA plaintiffs, who include individual voters in every state, lacked standing to block the rule — at least in the states he represented. If she was going to issue the preliminary injunction, Capozzi asked Talwani to at least not apply it to the intervenor defendant states.

That led Talwani to eventually ask what Capozzi hoped that would accomplish — in one of the sharpest back-and-forths out of many during the session.

New York Times, Lindsay Clancy Trial Live Updates: Judge Declares Mistrial in Triple-Murder Case, Jenna Russell, Maia Spoto and Mark Arsenault, Sept. 4, 2026. The decision, which resulted from a hung jury, means the prosecution can decide whether to try her again. The defense failed to secure a stay of the decision from a higher court.

A shocking triple-murder case that captured national attention ended in a mistrial on Friday, after a flurry of courtroom drama, an emergency appeal to the top court in Massachusetts and a note from jurors saying they remained deadlocked “with a heavy heart.” The jury could not reach a verdict on the charges against Lindsay Clancy, who strangled her three young children in January 2023.

After a monthlong trial and roughly 38 hours of deliberations over seven days, a single juror was not convinced that Ms. Clancy should be acquitted. Other jurors accused the holdout of acknowledging doubt about her responsibility but refusing to apply the legal standard. The judge declined to side with either the 11 for acquittal or the lone vote for conviction, declaring a hung jury.

It’s unclear what happens next in the case that has captivated audiences across the globe, including mothers who have experienced their own postpartum mental health issues. Ms. Clancy, 36, will remain institutionalized, her lawyer said, and the prosecutor who vehemently defended his efforts to convict her of first-degree murder must decide whether to put her on trial again.

Ms. Clancy strangled her three children in the basement of the family’s home in what the defense argued was the throes of postpartum psychosis. Prosecutors cast doubt on that diagnosis and argued that Ms. Clancy was aware of what she was doing, and should therefore be held criminally responsible for murder.

Here’s what we’re covering.

Juror debate: A note from the jury’s forewoman threw the court into disarray late Thursday — a week into deliberations — by asserting that the jury had deadlocked 11-1 for acquittal but that one juror continued to hold out in defiance of the law. Defense lawyers twice failed to have him removed. Read more ›

Last-minute appeal: After Judge Sullivan announced his intention to declare a hung jury and mistrial, Kevin Reddington, a lawyer on Ms. Clancy’s defense team, filed an emergency motion with the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court on Friday, asking it to force an investigation of the juror’s holdout. The request was denied, clearing the way for the judge to end the trial. Read more ›

What’s next: The prosecutor, Timothy Cruz, said he would not decide right away whether to continue to seek a conviction on first-degree murder or lesser charges, or drop the prosecution, though he has been adamant about seeking justice for the Clancy children. Ms. Clancy remains under indictment and will stay at the mental health facility where she has been institutionalized throughout the prosecution. Read more ›

Newsweek, Lindsay Clancy Verdict: Expert Says Judge’s Jury Actions May Be ‘Dangerous,’ Hannah Parry, Sept. 3, 2026.The Lindsay Clancy murder trial descended into an extraordinary courtroom confrontation Thursday as a deadlocked jury was sent back to deliberate for a sixth day, prompting a legal expert to warn that Judge William Sullivan was entering “very dangerous territory.”

Defense attorney Mark O’Mara, appearing on CNN Thursday, described the judge’s decision to bring jurors before the bench individually as “extraordinarily dangerous” and said Sullivan “needs to be extraordinarily careful.”

O’Mara went further, describing the judge’s handling of the jury as potentially creating a “brand new procedural law” through the way he is dealing with the impasse.

The comments came as the jury remained divided after more than 35 hours of deliberations in a trial that lasted roughly six weeks.

The latest drama began when the 12 jurors in Plymouth, Massachusetts, sent Sullivan another note Thursday. The precise contents of the note were not immediately made public, but it triggered a series of unusual proceedings.

Sullivan brought the jurors into court one at a time and questioned them individually. Afterward, Clancy's defense attorney Kevin Reddington told the judge that one juror was preventing the panel from reaching a unanimous verdict.

Sullivan did not accept the characterization or take sides.

“I don’t feel that it is proper for me to side with one side or the other of the deliberations,” Sullivan said. “I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to say I agree with one juror or 11.”

The judge then addressed the entire jury, reading instructions concerning reasonable doubt before sending the panel back to deliberate.

The exchange was visibly tense. Reddington appeared frustrated during a private discussion with Sullivan and prosecutors at the bench, at one point slamming papers down on the judge's bench before returning to the defense table.

Clancy herself was brought forward to speak with the judge during the proceedings. Later, she bowed her head as Reddington comforted her.

The jury was sent back out to deliberate before Sullivan announced that he was sending them home for the day. The jury will return on Friday at 9 a.m. ET for further deliberations.

Reddington told reporters outside of the courthouse that the juror would be questioned Sullivan Friday. “There’s a person who has doubt but will not listen to the judge’s instructions,” he said.

More On Russian Infiltration Of FBI, Other Spying

 

Newsweek, Woman Who Exposed FBI Official for Working With Russian Oligarch Found Dead, Jenni Fink,Sept. 3, 2026. Allison Guerriero, a security researcher whose information helped expose the criminal conduct of former FBI counterintelligence official Charles McGonigal, has been found dead at her home in Boynton Beach, Florida.

Hours before her death, Guerriero posted a series of messages on X, formerly Twitter, criticizing Representative Jim Jordan, the FBI and McGonigal. McGonigal was arrested in 2023 and was sentenced to 50 months in prison and then was later sentenced in a separate case to 28 months in prison in 2024. He pleaded guilty to secretly colluding with a Russian oligarch and also admitted to receiving $225,000 in cash from someone with ties to the Albanian government.

"I committed a felony and as a former FBI special agent it causes me extreme emotional and physical pain," McGonigal told the judge before he was sentenced. "I stand before you today with a deep sense of remorse."

It's unclear what caused her death, and authorities are waiting on a report from the medical examiner.

Newsweek reached out to the Boynton Beach, Florida, police department for comment via email but did not receive a response in time for publication.Who Is Allison Guerriero?

Guerriero was a security researcher who became publicly known after providing information to federal authorities about her former romantic partner, McGonigal, a longtime FBI official who once led the bureau's counterintelligence division in New York.

Guerriero alerted investigators after becoming concerned about McGonigal's behavior, including allegations that he was carrying large amounts of cash and maintaining unusual relationships with foreign-connected individuals. When she asked McGonigal about the cash, he reportedly told her that he won a bet on a baseball game. At the time, he was married with two children.

"Charlie McGonigal knew everybody in the national security and law-enforcement world," Guerriero said in an interview with Business Insider. "He fooled them all. So why should I feel bad that he was able to deceive me?"GeoscapeAward-winning editors deliver analysis of global hotspots – straight to your inbox.Sign up to Breaking News alertsBy clicking “sign up” you are agreeing to ourTerms of Service and Privacy PolicyA photo shows Allison Guerriero, left. Right: Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office, on February 09, 2023 in New York City.A photo shows Allison Guerriero, left. Right: Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office, on February 09,... | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Her tip reportedly helped launch a broader federal investigation into McGonigal's activities.

Guerriero had been involved in an approximately 18-month relationship with McGonigal. After the relationship ended, she became increasingly vocal about his conduct and the FBI's handling of the case. She frequently posted on social media and gave interviews discussing the scandal and calling for greater scrutiny of senior law enforcement officials.

Her information helped investigators uncover details about McGonigal's connections to foreign figures and contributed to the investigation that eventually resulted in his arrest and conviction. In the years that followed, Guerriero remained outspoken about the case and argued that some aspects of the scandal had not received sufficient public attention.

During McGonigal's sentencing, the judge praised Guerriero for her "extraordinary contributions" to counterespionage operations on behalf of the United States.

In an obituary for Guerriero, her family wrote that she found her "niche" in the security field after trying several different occupations. They added that she was also working for Roger Stone when she died. The family is holding a memorial service on Thursday for her.

"Allison’s over-the-top interest in law-enforcement and fighting evildoers kept her adjacent to all kinds of characters who seemed like they were from 1950s era G.I. Joe type comic books," her friend, Ken Kurson, wrote in a eulogy for her.What Did Charles McGonigal Do?

McGonigal served as the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division in New York, one of the bureau's most sensitive national security positions.

According to the Department of Justice, McGonigal pleaded guilty in 2023 to conspiracy charges stemming from his work for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch under U.S. sanctions since 2018. The DOJ said McGonigal agreed to provide services to Deripaska in violation of federal sanctions laws and participated in a money-laundering conspiracy. In his role as special agent in charge, he also participated in and supervised investigations into Russian oligarchs, including Deripaska. McGonigal tried to find derogatory information about a rival oligarch, Vladimir Potanin, and his corporate interests, which Deripaska was fighting for control of.

The Justice Department said McGonigal worked to investigate a rival Russian oligarch in exchange for concealed payments linked to Deripaska. Prosecutors alleged that he and others attempted to hide Deripaska's involvement through shell companies, forged documents and coded communications.

A photo shows Allison Guerriero, left. Right: Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office, on February 09,... | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

In December 2023, McGonigal was sentenced to 50 months in federal prison. Announcing the sentence, the Justice Department described his conduct as a betrayal of the trust placed in him as a senior law enforcement official. He was sentenced in 2024 to 28 months for concealing information from the FBI about payments received from a link to the Albanian government. The DOJ said the sentences are to run consecutively. Public records indicate he is still imprisoned.

The case shocked many in the intelligence and law enforcement communities because McGonigal had spent years overseeing investigations aimed at identifying and countering foreign threats to U.S. national security.Who Is Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska?

Oleg Deripaska is a wealthy Russian businessman whose fortune was built primarily through Russia's aluminum industry. He is among the country's best-known oligarchs and has long been regarded as a politically connected figure within Russia.

The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Deripaska in 2018 under authorities related to Russia's actions in Ukraine. According to the Justice Department, officials concluded that Deripaska had acted on behalf of, directly or indirectly, a senior Russian government official and operated in sectors considered important to the Russian economy.

 

New York Times, News Analysis: A Spiral of Escalation for Russia and Ukraine, With No End in Sight, Kim Barker, Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). Each side is using missiles and drones to try to pound the other into giving up, breeding ceaseless human suffering. But there is no sign that either country’s determination will weaken.

They are both torching warehouses filled with food or online-shopping orders near major cities. They are blasting ports and ships carrying vital exports of grain. And they are smashing energy networks that keep the lights on and vehicles fueled.

Russia and Ukraine, in cities far from the front line, are waging an intensifying tit-for-tat air war that is bringing more pain to the populations of both countries than at any other point since the early months of the full-scale war launched by Moscow in 2022.

With the front largely frozen, each side is using growing arsenals of missiles and drones to exact vengeance and to try to pummel the other into submission. In the most recent example, Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, has been under constant bombardment from Russian drones over the past few days, tormenting residents with nearly continual air-raid alerts.

Still, there is no evidence that the escalation will weaken either country’s determination to fight on. Human suffering will only grow this winter, analysts say, as both Russia and Ukraine seek leverage in U.S.-backed settlement negotiations that are expected to resume after achieving little this year.

Ukraine can’t give up, and Russia doesn’t want to, analysts say.

“It’s a question of how much pain can Russia take compared to Ukraine — and Russia can take a lot of pain,” said Rob Lee, a military expert at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute who travels frequently to the front line.

This new period of eye-for-an-eye assaults accelerated in late June, when Ukraine opened a 40-day campaign against Russia that President Volodymyr Zelensky said was aimed at “compelling it to end the war.”

Since he threw down that gauntlet, Ukrainian long-range drones have hit more than 30 warehouses of major online shopping companies, mostly those used by Wildberries, the Russian equivalent of Amazon. The strikes have disrupted Russian commercial logistics, inflicted heavy loss.

New York Times, The Risk of Russian Sabotage in Europe: A Fight That Spirals Out of Control, Michael Schwirtz and Adam Goldman, Sept. 4, 2026. Europe’s options are limited in responding to an unnerving series of plots and provocations. But the odds of unpredictable consequences are rising. 

Russia’s failed drone attack on a German airport was part of a dangerous pattern of escalation that, experts and officials said, risks sparking an open confrontation with NATO — whether the Kremlin wants it or not.

German officials declared this week that the Russian state was behind the attack, in which one explosive drone hit a parked Ukrainian cargo plane and another appeared to collide with a plane taking off. Both drones failed to detonate. If successful, the attack could have killed or maimed people and led to unpredictable consequences, officials said.

It was the most dramatic in a spate of such attacks that includes plots to place incendiary devices aboard DHL cargo planes, blow up railroad tracks in Poland, and burn down warehouses and shopping centers all over Europe.

Such attacks began occurring shortly after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, part of an effort by President Vladimir V. Putin to bring the war to the West. But they have recently increased in frequency and intensity, Western security officials said. The attacks, along with recent reports citing Western intelligence services suggesting Russia could be planning some kind of military incursion or provocation along NATO’s eastern flank, have frazzled Europe and left officials there casting about for solutions.

“Europeans are faced with the hard truth that this is the new normal,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Union’s executive arm, said on Wednesday. “We have to step up, and that means being ready to respond to Russia’s recklessness better and faster.”

The uptick in attacks appears to be driven in part by Mr. Putin’s frustration with the situation on the battlefield, experts said. Progress is slow and casualties are enormous, while Russia’s economy has been strained by a Ukrainian campaign of long-range strikes against e-commerce warehouses, oil refineries and military logistics hubs. In Mr. Putin’s mind, Russia is not just at war with Ukraine, experts said. It is also battling what he calls the “collective West” that he blames for providing the weapons, intelligence and technologies that have kept the Ukrainians in the fight.

Mr. Putin has always denied Russia’s involvement in European sabotage and suggested that the German authorities had planted evidence of Russia’s involvement in the Leipzig attack. But he referred to the West this week as “the sharks of imperialism” and suggested Russia’s enemies would get what they deserved.

“If anyone tries to drag us down the food chain and gobble us up, devour us, they might get a punch in the teeth,” Mr. Putin said at a news conference. “And Russia is ready to do this, despite the rapidly growing appetites and teeth of these sharks.”

The German authorities also opened investigations into possible sabotage attacks on a defense contractor in Munich and two electrical substations; a fire erupted at a drone factory in Poland that officials said was most likely caused by sabotage; and Denmark’s intelligence service said Russia was recruiting Danes to attack defense firms.

New York Times, After Fighting Russia Fiercely, He Wants to Forge Ukraine’s Path to Peace, Andrew E. Kramer, Sept. 4, 2026. Kyrylo Budanov, a decorated soldier and former military spy chief, advocates a negotiated settlement. Talks are expected to resume this month.

As a round of peace talks wrapped up earlier this year, Ukrainian negotiators received a surprise offer from the Russians.

The Ukrainians could fly to Moscow and continue the talks, the Russians suggested. The upside: a potential meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin. The downside: possible arrest, or worse.

For Kyrylo Budanov, the Ukrainian delegation’s leader at the talks last February in Geneva, the proposal presented a stark choice. He is wanted in Russia on terrorism charges leveled when he was Ukraine’s military spy chief. But he, more than other Ukrainian leaders, has talked openly of needing to do what it takes, however unexpected, to reach a negotiated peace.

“I’m ready for any step that will end the war” if the terms are acceptable to Ukraine, Mr. Budanov, the No. 2 official in the Ukrainian government, said in an interview last weekend in the capital, Kyiv.

In the end, the proposed trip to Moscow, which was described by Mr. Budanov and has not previously been reported, never came together, and negotiations soon stalled.

But the episode showed the multiple facets of a man who, analysts say, is seeking to cement a legacy as a soldier who fiercely fought the Russians but went on to take the lead in bringing the bloodshed to a close.

Russia and Ukraine are currently in an escalatory cycle in the war, in part to try to gain the upper hand in eventual settlement talks.

Yet even as the two sides bombard each other with drones and missiles, Mr. Budanov said in the roughly hourlong interview that talks mediated by the Trump administration were expected to resume by late September, days after Russia’s parliamentary election and weeks before U.S. midterm elections.

The process, he said, is expected to restart with a visit to Kyiv by Steve Witkoff, the administration’s peace envoy, and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law. While Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner have traveled to Moscow several times, they have not been to Kyiv, despite multiple official invitations.ImageJared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, in suits, greeting Vladimir V. Putin inside the Kremlin.The American representatives Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the Kremlin in January, in a photo from Russian state media. Credit...Alexander Kazakov/Sputnik

Mr. Budanov, 40, serves as President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff and is a lieutenant general in the Ukrainian military. As he advocates negotiation, he has little left to prove as a soldier who fought the Russians.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.

During the long-simmering war in eastern Ukraine that began in 2014, Mr. Budanov led commando raids behind enemy lines, including one that killed the son of a Russian general in combat.

He served in a C.I.A.-trained unit in Ukraine’s defense intelligence agency whose head was assassinated in a Russian car bombing in Kyiv. In 2016, a machine gun bullet shattered Mr. Budanov’s elbow. He was treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland for months, as his arm was rebuilt. After the 2022 all-out Russian invasion, he helped mastermind some of Ukraine’s most audacious counterattacks.

The Ukrainian government has been divided over peace talks. In an analysis, the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center described Mr. Budanov as leading a faction that advocates a settlement rather than risking greater losses. Other Ukrainian leaders, the group said, argue against any major concession, saying it would demoralize the army and society.

The Ukrainian public, for its part, has been skeptical of American-led talks. Before negotiations froze, many viewed the Trump administration as pushing for Ukrainian capitulation to further Mr. Trump’s quest for a Nobel Peace Prize. They also saw Mr. Putin as having no intention of ending the war, no matter what was negotiated.

Russia and Ukraine have been talking since the first day of the 2022 invasion, when an aide to Mr. Putin tried unsuccessfully in two phone calls to negotiate a swift surrender.

Hans Boserup,  Opinion: What If Russia No Longer Needs Putin? Hans Boserup, Sept. 4, 2026. Chris Alexander spent hours talking Russian with Vladimir Putin. He says he has not recognized the man he knew since 2023. The larger question is what that would mean for power in Russia

Body doubles

There is an obvious way to write about Vladimir Putin’s alleged body doubles. One can collect photographs, compare ears, chins and wrists, slow down videos, listen to voices and disappear into the strange borderland where intelligence analysis, Kremlinology and conspiracy theory become almost impossible to separate.

There is another way to approach the question, and it begins not with photographs but with memory.

In 2002, at the G8 summit in Kananaskis, Vladimir Putin had hours when he was not required at the G7 meetings. Chris Alexander, then one of Canada’s most experienced Russia hands, spoke Russian and had already spent years dealing directly with the country and its political elite.

Putin apparently had little interest in passing the time with his own delegation, and so he and Alexander walked through the forest and talked.

There were security people nearby, but no interpreter stood between them. Putin asked simple questions about Canada, about Alberta and about where the indigenous communities were. Alexander fetched a map and showed him. Their conversation wandered from subject to subject.

Alexander remembers wondering whether Putin was trying to recruit him, while he himself was doing what diplomats do when they are given unusual access to a foreign leader: observing, listening and trying to learn everything he could.

That encounter matters because Alexander did not merely see Putin across a conference table or from behind a lectern. He spent hours with him at conversational distance and heard his unscripted Russian, watched the way he moved and saw how he reacted when there was no television audience to perform for.

Over time, through other meetings and official encounters, Alexander accumulated something that is difficult to quantify but familiar to anyone who has spent enough time with another human being. He acquired recognition.

Chris Alexander in Toronto in 2026. A foreign service officer for eighteen years, Alexander served six years at Canada’s Embassy in Moscow and estimates that through meetings and official encounters he spent roughly a couple of days in Vladimir Putin’s physical presence. His judgement about the man now appearing as Putin begins not with internet photographs, but with memories accumulated at conversational distance.

When Claire Berlinski recently asked Alexander why he routinely puts the name “Putin” in quotation marks, his answer opened a door that is difficult to close.

Alexander said that he has not recognised the Vladimir Putin he knew in the man appearing publicly as the Russian president since the autumn of 2023.

That does not prove that Putin is dead. It does not prove that he was overthrown, and it does not even prove that Russia is routinely using a presidential double.

It does, however, force us to ask a larger and more interesting question about what happens when the identity of the man appearing as Vladimir Putin becomes less important to the Russian state than the assumption, at home and abroad, that Putin is still there.

More On Middle East Wars, Reactions

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Iran War? What Iran War? Andrew Egger, William Kristol and Jim Swift, Sept. 4, 2026. JD Vance declares ‘Mission Accomplished.’

This summer’s jobs reports have mostly been clunkers, but this morning we got a more encouraging one. The U.S. economy added 162,000 jobs in August, while unemployment held steady at 4.1 percent and the labor force participation rate—which had sunk throughout the year—ticked back up a hair. Happy Friday.

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: There Is No War in Ba Sing Se, Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 4, 2026. I don’t know if you know this, but we’re actually not at war with Iran.

I know! I was surprised too! The six-months-and-counting conflict has been one of the central stories of Donald Trump’s second term, and is very much an ongoing crisis: We’re still shooting back and forth, the Strait of Hormuz remains more or less closed, Iran has not agreed to the restraints on its nuclear program Trump demands, and so on and so on.

But when Vice President JD Vance took to the White House briefing room for a press conference yesterday, he was surprisingly insistent: Rumors of war with Iran, he argued, have been greatly exaggerated.

“The phrase ‘an end to the war’—I want to push back on that,” Vance said. “Because major combat operations are currently not ongoing, and they haven’t been ongoing in a very long time.” Later, he repeated the point: “Again, I wouldn’t call it a war. Right now there is no active shooting.” What America had now, Vance suggested, was simply a little problem of “the Iranians shooting at ships.”

This sort of silly talk serves a couple purposes. One is the longstanding semantic game of describing the conflict as an “operation” or “excursion” to put a fig leaf on the fact that Congress never approved it.

But the other is in keeping with the moment’s broader White House messaging. Trump, it seems, has grown tired of making repeated demands that Iran never deigns to meet. That’s not a very alpha way to conduct business!

It seems Trump is mulling a change in strategy. The Wall Street Journal reports that the president is privately “having discussions with senior aides about whether to declare the Iran war over.” Outside MAGA voices have been pushing a similar idea: The Iran exit strategy “is happening right now,” CNN commentator Scott Jennings said Wednesday. The time has come for an “affirmative, formal declaration of victory,” Jennings added: “We’re at the point now where Iran is totally scrambled and defeated, and we need to take credit for it.”

This is a remarkable development. The White House has been talking a big game for months: Iran is outmatched, outgunned, decimated, days from surrender. Massive Iranian concessions, Trump and Co. have suggested all along, are just days away. Now, they are apparently on the brink of declaring that no more agreements are forthcoming. The status quo, it seems, is as good as they hope to get.

And this may even be true! In one sense, the Trump administration is out of options. At one point, they hoped to win the war: Back in March, the president seemed genuinely to believe that a few weeks of devastating bombing would bring Iran’s government to its knees.

Later on, they even tried to lose the war. Two months ago, Trump was plainly seeking any way out of a conflict that he suddenly feared would trigger a genuine energy crisis and a global economic collapse. “The one president I did not want to be was the late, great Herbert Hoover,” he said in a July speech by way of justifying his memorandum of understanding with Iran.

When a catastrophe rises to a certain level, it has a way of focusing Trump’s mind. Last year, Trump’s sudden realization that his “Liberation Day” tariffs were about to tank global markets led to the biggest about-face of his political career. This summer, he plainly had begun to place the Iran war in this same extinction-level tier: If I don’t get this under control, I’m signing my own political death certificate.

But Trump has since gotten himself back under control. The memorandum of understanding may have collapsed, but energy markets haven’t yet melted down completely. Perhaps, he now believes, it may be possible for him to bullshit his way through this crisis after all.

As a result, this summer’s sudden spurt of presidential real talk has completely dried up. Instead of actually working to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Trump is back to his usual nonsense: pretending that the trickle of ships the U.S. military is managing to escort out of the Persian Gulf is itself a major geopolitical win. “Hormuz oil volumes are BACK!” the president proclaimed in a Truth Social post yesterday, suggesting that 18 million barrels of oil were now daily transiting the strait.

This figure is out of keeping with independent commercial shipping trackers, which continue to report that Hormuz transits are a fraction of their pre-war volumes. Nor is it reflected in oil and gas prices. Brent crude remains substantially more expensive than it was two months ago, and far more expensive than before the war. Yesterday, diesel fuel hit its all-time high price.

But to Trump, this doesn’t matter. He may have tried to flinch away from global financial meltdown, but he remains confident in his own ability to explain away any economic damage short of that.

Americans may be hopping mad that Trump’s pointless war has driven gas prices through the roof. But Trump seems to think he needs only one thing to win them back over: to declare that the war in Iran has been a total success.

More World News, Global Human Rights, Disasters 

New York Times, 2 Trapped Workers Are Rescued After 9 Days in Nepal Tunnel, Anupreeta Das, Binod Ghimire, Sajal Pradhan, Mujib Mashal and Alex Travelli, Sept. 4, 2026. “Everybody’s sense of hope was waning,” said one survivor’s relative. Rescuers were searching for dozens of others inside the tunnel at a hydropower plant damaged by last week’s deadly floods.

Rescuers on Friday pulled two survivors from a tunnel at a hydropower plant in Nepal, more than a week after a deadly flood ravaged the Himalayan nation.

Cheers erupted as Nepali Army personnel in hard hats lifted one of the men to the surface, an unlikely rescue that prompted hope that others could be saved from the damaged Upper Trishuli 3A hydropower project. More than 40 other workers were thought to be inside the tunnel, according to two people briefed on the rescue operations, including a senior Army officer, though it was not clear how many were still alive.

The survivors were said to be in stable condition at an Army hospital in Kathmandu, the capital.

“It had been nine days and everybody’s sense of hope was waning,” said Dev Sah, the brother-in-law of Sanjay Sah, one of the two rescued workers. “He has received a new life today.”

The body of a third man, a mechanical engineer, was also recovered on Friday, according to Dirghayu Kumar Shrestha, the head of the Nepal Electricity Authority. His agency owns the plant being developed along the Trishuli River, one of two valleys where torrents of water mixed with rock and debris surged through last week after a glacial collapse.

The disaster killed more than 1,300 people in Nepal and Tibet and left thousands of others missing. The raging floodwaters washed away roads, bridges and in some cases entire villages. More than 4,000 people are missing in Nepal and neighboring Tibet, including hundreds who worked on hydropower construction sites in Nepal, according to the country’s government.

More On U.S. Politics, Elections, Governance

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Midterm Strategy: Don’t Work, Cheat, Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Say you’re a Republican lawmaker going into a tough midterm fight. The good news is your party controls the presidency. The bad news is the president is insanely unpopular and getting more so every day. Many voters you need are pretty mad at the guy. You might want to start telling them, Yeah, I’m with him—but only on the good stuff, the stuff you guys like.

As I wrote last week, this was never going to be an option for Republicans this cycle. They’re tied too tightly to Donald Trump in voters’ minds already, and he’d rather see them lose than win at his expense. Even so, as the midterms get closer, I’m genuinely astonished by just how hard Trump is working to tie himself like a millstone around each vulnerable incumbent’s neck.

Last week, the Atlantic reported that Trump had settled on a specific spending strategy ahead of the midterms. Rejecting the idea that he should go local, using his massive war chest to help bolster the reputations of specific candidates in key races, the president is opting for a different approach: spending heavily on national ads intended to keep the spotlight on himself.

Yesterday, his political operation unveiled the first tranche of those ads. The first, called “Toughest Guy,” aims to convince the public that Trump is a really tough guy. See, there’s UFC President Dana White up on stage saying so! Another ad focuses on Trump’s most broadly palatable accomplishments: “We gave you no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security, the largest tax cuts in American history,” Trump intones. The price of eggs, he notes, is down, too.

Congressional Republicans, never mentioned in the ads, are reduced to an implicit enabling role: They’ve occasionally helped Trump get his priorities over the finish line, and they’ll be needed to help Trump “finish the job.”

The same Maximum Trump spirit promises to be on full display at next week’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas, a two-day affair that will be anchored by back-to-back primetime speeches from Vice President JD Vance and Trump himself. There’s a reason the major parties haven’t traditionally held midterm conventions: Without a presidential contest hanging over every race in the country, it doesn’t make sense to try to build a one-size-fits-all national narrative for hundreds of disparate and unique state and federal contests. Unless, of course, you’re the kind of president who thinks the only way anyone in your party can win is by their voters closing their eyes and pretending they’re voting for you.

It isn’t just that House and Senate Republicans have become inseparable from the president in voters’ minds. They’re also beholden to whatever mercurial decisions he decides to make about his gigantic bag of cash.

Last Sunday, Sen. John Kennedy took to Fox News to basically plead with Trump to open his wallet in support of the party’s damaged-goods Senate nominee in Texas, Ken Paxton: “We in the Senate don’t have the money budgeted for Texas. We need help from the president,” Kennedy said. “The president says he has $850 million in his campaign accounts. That’s a lot of jack. . . . But he hasn’t committed to it yet.”

Majority Leader John Thune made the same point on Fox on Tuesday: “Because Texas is such a big state, we’re going to need the president and his team to be engaged there and putting resources into that race.” So far, no dice.

It would be easy to laugh all this off as just desserts for venal Senate Republicans and the latest demonstration of the president’s incredible vanity. There’s a part of Trump that seems genuinely to believe that, when voters are reminded of his accomplishments, they’ll rush back into his arms. It’s exactly the sort of hubris that seems likely to lead the GOP straight into a catastrophe.

But we can’t lose sight of the other side of the equation. Trump isn’t only relying on highly dubious methods of persuasion to carry his people through the midterms. It’s increasingly clear that he wants to try to cheat his way to victory, too.

We’re not prepared for another election crisis. But one may be coming. Spread the word by sharing this newsletter.

We’ve been writing a lot about Trump’s attempt to seize federal control of mail-in ballots by giving the Postal Service an unprecedented new role of policing which mailed ballots should and shouldn’t be delivered. This week, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) sent a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner, seeking information about alarming allegations he had received from a USPS whistleblower about that effort. The software the USPS was building to handle these tasks, the whistleblower alleged, was “astonishingly untested,” rushed, and buggy. And even if it miraculously worked as intended, the procedures USPS was building around it seemed almost guaranteed to disenfranchise legitimate voters.

“When ballots are submitted to USPS in large-volume batches, if any one ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the Portal, all ballots in that batch will be rejected,” Blumenthal wrote in the letter. “For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the Portal—because, for example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved—then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well.”

Just to remind you: All this is exactly what Trump wants. He wants mail-in balloting systems to fail, because he thinks Democrats use mail-in voting to cheat him out of wins. He has ordered his federal government to behave in exactly this way.

It still seems likely that the Supreme Court will pull the plug on this ridiculous system ahead of the midterms. But until they do, we can’t lose sight of the fact that this plan is a major part of Trump’s own electoral calculations. It isn’t just that his midterms messaging is stupid because he’s vain and ignorant—although that’s certainly part of it. It’s also that people have little incentive to play a game optimally when they know their real plan for victory is to cheat.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Is Keeping Venezuela’s Dictatorship in Business… Delcy Rodríguez sends him oil. He protects her from elections, observes WILL SALETAN.
• Wendell Berry, 1934–2026… The great writer of rural America spent a lifetime defending the land, the local, and the human, remembers CHRISTIAN RUTH.
• Trump Hands Dems Their Best Gift Yet… His embrace of data centers has given Democrats a potent new campaign tool, writes LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
• MAGA Pollster Thinks Texas, Ohio and Even KANSAS Could Turn Blue… On Bulwark Takes, RICH BARIS joins TIM MILLER to explain why Republicans may be underestimating just how competitive the 2026 Senate map could become.

Quick Hits

COLLINS V. CHENEY: In theory, Sen. Susan Collins believes Donald Trump has committed acts worthy of permanently barring him from holding federal office: After all, she voted to convict him at his second impeachment trial in 2021. Allowing thoughts like that to proceed to their logical conclusions, however, is a career death sentence in today’s Republican party. Instead, Collins has spent the intervening years on an interesting journey of self-lobotomy. Here she was yesterday, reflecting on that journey with Politico’s Jonathan Martin:

After listening to the evidence and being there on January 6th myself, I felt that the president had, many months before, started to build up an insurrection, essentially, that met the high standard in the Constitution for his removal. Believe me, the president brings up that vote almost every single time that I see him. So he has not forgotten. It’s very personal. And I understand that—how could it not be?

But come on, what do you people want her to do—be Liz Cheney? Persist in the belief that this insurrectionist is unfit for office? “Liz Cheney—it’s not just that she lost her seat,” Collins finished. “It’s that she has no impact, in my view.”

TRUMP ON MONEY: It’s official: Seemingly breaking federal law and certainly breaking a long chain of precedent, the U.S. Mint is releasing $1 coins with the likeness of a living person for the first time in a century. Guess who:

The $1 coin designed to celebrate America’s 250th birthday—and seemingly President Donald Trump, whose face gazes from one side of the gold finish—went on sale Wednesday, according to the U.S. Mint.

The coin’s design—Trump’s visage as “heads” and the Great Seal of the United States as “tails”—received the stamp of approval this year from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, whose members Trump appointed. In past comments, the president said that the idea to stamp his face on a coin was “very unusual” but that he was “honored by it.”

The AP notes that “the coins, which can be used as legal tender, drew some criticism, particularly because of federal law that bars the depiction of a living president on U.S. currency.” Well, yeah, that might be one reason to criticize them!

In fairness, "Trump sells $1 Trump coins to his fans for $2 apiece" is a pretty good metaphor for his whole term.   

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: As Bad As Things Are For Trump And The Rs Now -- And They Are Bad -- They Are Likely To Get Worse, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Greater MAGA Is Weakening: Putin has lost Orban, Syria, and is failing in Ukraine. Both Bibi and Trump have lost their war in Iran, and their political projects at home have taken enormous hits. Bibi trails in his October 26th election, and Trump trails in his November election. Zelenskyy has emerged as an inspirational global freedom fighter. Taken together these are important and welcome developments in our fight to ensure there is a new birth of freedom here and everywhere in the years ahead……

Democrats Are On Track To Have A Good Election:- For the past twenty months there has been one election: Democrats have continuously overperformed their 2024 results in special and state/local elections and Republicans have struggled. In recent primaries far many more Democrats voted than Republicans in state after state. Polls are finding that heightened intensity too. Here’s Reuters/Ipsos this week:

The polling across the country continues to be very encouraging for us. Today, FiftyPlusOne has us with a 92% chance of flipping the House, and a 57% chance of flipping the Senate. This is up from 90% and 54% a few weeks ago.Subscribed

Perhaps the most encouraging data of the week comes from Alaska. Here’s the current results in their top-4 Senate primary. Peltola is ahead of the incumbent Dan Sullivan by 8 points, and Democrats over 50% when all votes are tallied. David Leslie has endorsed Peltola and dropped out the race, giving her a clear shot this November. For an incumbent Senator to only get 41% after spending a lot of money is, um, really bad…..

In the Governor’s race Tom Begich endorsed Jonnthan Kreiss-Tomkins giving Democrats a real shot at winning here too. Note that no Republican candidate got over 10% of the vote, confirming how weak and fractured the Rs are in Alaska this year:

Note - when I last wrote about Alaska I thought it was the top two candidates who got to go through to the general election. It is the top four. Sorry about that everyone.

In my talk last night we reviewed much of the information I put into yesterday’s post: Trump’s Clown Show Has Become A Raging, Dangerous Global Dumpster Fire. My argument is this: Trump has created a series of crises -- economic, fiscal, in our health care system, “Farmageddon,” in our national security -- that are likely to get worse between now and the election.

• Diesel is close to an all-time high:
• Oil prices are back up in the upper $90s a barrel:
• Prior to these renewed energy shocks consumer confidence was already at it’s lowest reading in the last 65 years:

And then there is this - Trump the rapacious, Trump the greedy, Trump the betrayer appears to be hording his bundle of ill-gotten cash:

Theories about what Trump wants to do with the money cover a broad range of possibilities, including protecting his political influence in the next presidential race by passing on the money to his chosen successor and saving up for legal fees, postpresidential travel, events and pet projects, such as his library. Trump’s Miami library is projected to cost at least $1 billion, the most expensive presidential library construction to date.

The person with knowledge of internal discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about those conversations, said Trump and his team believe their ability to rake in massive donations will take a hit after the midterm elections, giving the president an incentive to keep hold of the money he has raised so far.

Fundraising accounts associated with the president — such as his super PAC, and funds for his inauguration, White House ballroom and Freedom 250 events — have been inundated with donations from companies looking to get in Trump’s good graces, a dynamic that is likely to change as he becomes a lame duck.

Additionally, in the last few weeks of an election the party out of power usually gains a few points. So, yes, my friends, as bad as things are for Trump and the Rs now - and they are bad - they are likely to get worse.

Countering Trump’s Ferocious, Desperate Effort To Rig The Elections And Prevent A Peaceful Transfer Of Power - Here at Hopium we do more and worry less, and when it comes to countering Trump’s increasingly desperate and wild efforts to rig the election and prevent a peaceful transfer of power there are a few things we can do today, right now:

1 - Marc Elias is a doing a live briefing on Trump’s attack on mail ballots tonight at 6pm ET. Sign up here. Learn more, get smarter.

2 - Become an Early Vote Champion, and help drive the early vote in your networks, communities, organizations, and with friends and family. For when we vote early it makes it more likely we win and harder for them to cheat. Learn more here.

3 - Sign up to be a Democracy Protector for your state party. The new state party/DNC national program to protect our elections launched yesterday. The next live, open training is next Wednesday night at 8pm ET. Sign up here, and become part of this vital program that the Hopium community has helped get off the ground. 

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: JD Vance Was Asked About Gas Prices And His Answer Was A Disaster, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 3, 2026. The Trump administration has no clue what to do to lower gas prices, because the administration doesn't know how to get out of the Iran war that it started.

For the first time in 42 days, the White House held a press briefing, and it has been the pattern of this entire administration: when things are going badly and Donald Trump needs a human shield, he sends out JD Vance.

Vance possesses the rare combination of arrogance, unlikability, ambition, and cluelessness that allows him to both think he is being elevated when Trump puts him out to take the fall, and ignorance of not knowing that with each one of these misadventures, he is taking a fresh step toward ending his political career.

VP Vance was asked at the press briefing, “ On July 2nd, Treasury Secretary Bessent, um, was asked when Americans could see $3 gas again, and he said maybe by Labor Day. Things haven't worked out that way, but do you have a new timetable for Americans on when they could expect lower gas prices, and should they not expect to see $3 gas again until at least 2027?”

And this is where the trouble began.

Vance answered, “Well, in defense of Scott, he said maybe by Labor Day because we're talking about things that are inherently unpredictable, and I, I think it's important...You know, I'm a strong believer that, uh, the American people are our fellow citizens, and we should speak with them honestly about these things. And the fundamental reality is that the reason gas prices are so high right now is because the Iranians are shooting at commercial shipping.”

Labor Day is Monday, but things got much worse as Vance talked.

As Vance kept talking, he made it clear that he, as the “chief negotiator” with Iran, has no idea what is going on, and the administration has no intention of lowering gas prices.

Vance refused to talk about $3 gas:

 We're gonna do what we have to do in order to ensure that their efforts don't lead to a worldwide energy crisis. Now, we've been quite successful up to this point. Gas, frankly, could've been much, much higher were it not for our efforts.

But I'm not gonna make a promise about when it's gonna return to $3. What I will say is that we have to remember, why are we doing this? Number one, it's so that Iran never has a nuclear weapon. And number two, what we're doing right now is protecting commercial shipping in order to ensure that we don't have a worldwide energy crisis.

The only reason, the only reason we do not have a worldwide energy crisis is because of the leadership of the president, but also because of the fine work of our military, from Pete Hegseth on down. But the Iranians are doing what the Iranians do. I think that they're losing their capabilities by the day. Uh, I think they're realizing, by the way, that, that, that their control over the Strait of Hormuz is effectively gone, and it's a diminishing asset. So if you go back three months ago, how much oil and gas was coming out of the strait under Iranian threats? It was va- virtually nothing.

Now, it's almost back to where it was before the conflict even started. So my advice to the Iranians is stop acting like crazy people and stop shooting at commercial shipping. And in the meantime, we've gotta do what we've gotta do despite what a foreign country's gonna do in the Strait of Hormuz.

It is easy to see why Vance’s negotiations with Iran have been a failure.

The world is facing higher gas prices and an energy crisis because of the war of choice that Donald Trump and JD Vance started.

Gas prices wouldn’t be over $4.00/gallon if Trump and Vance hadn’t started a war with Iran, so the idea that Trump and Vance think they deserve credit for anything is absurd.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump and Vance promised to bring gas down to $2.00/gallon. Prices are currently more than double what Trump and Vance promised.

JD Vance was a disaster because he minimized the economic pain people are feeling and won’t even try to say when things will get better. 

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: When You Control the Mail, You Control the Nation, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 3, 2026.Two months from the midterms, how bad are the coalition vibes for Donald Trump? Even some dyed-in-the-wool MAGA pollsters are starting to sound the red alert.

“Republicans are going to run out of a coalition soon if they don’t build on what he started to build in ’24,” Big Data Poll Director Rich Baris told Tim Miller in an interview yesterday. “And a lot of those gains are squandered because of the direction they took.”

In the eyes of some of his voters, Baris argued, Trump’s biggest sin has been his foreign-policy obsession: An inflation-spiking war in Iran wasn’t what the president promised, and it certainly wasn’t what they expected from him. Happy Thursday.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Remember Labor Day, William Kristol, right, Sept. 4, 2026. Here’s a recommendation I don’t usually make: Go to the Trump White House website. But then go to the little “search” function magnifying glass on the upper right, and type in “Labor Day.”

You’ll find plenty of material. But it’s all from 2025. There’s a presidential proclamation, articles under headings like “Lowest Labor Day Gas Prices in Five Years as Travel Costs Dip in Trump Economy” and “Wages Are Rising Under President Trump,” a video in which cabinet members reminisce about their first jobs, a clip of the White House press secretary boasting about “President Trump’s Pro-Worker Accomplishments”—and so on.

All from a year ago.

Okay, that’s what came up first. Internet search works in mysterious ways. So you type in “Labor Day 2026,” expecting to find material from this year.

But you find . . . nothing. Nada. Rien. Rien de rien.

Which makes sense. The Trump White House can’t today boast about the lowest gas prices in five years. In fact, gas is up from about $3.19 a gallon last Labor Day to about $4.14 today. Wages are no longer rising faster than inflation. And whereas Trump’s 2025 proclamation boasted of his tariffs, Trump recently removed tariffs on some imported beef because prices are up roughly 15 percent compared to a year ago—because tariffs raise prices.

And two of the cabinet members prominently featured in the “My First Job” video—Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—have since been fired.

Maybe the Trump White House will rush to get something up on its website. But as of now, at the beginning of Labor Day weekend 2026—nothing. Perhaps the Trump administration has just decided this year to embrace its plutocratic essence.

Earlier this week, I suggested Democrats in 2026 look back to 1948 for guidance and inspiration—to a campaign in which Harry Truman not only won re-election to the presidency but Democrats took control of Congress, gaining 75 House and nine Senate seats.

Speaking to a large crowd in Cadillac Square, Detroit, on Labor Day 1948, Truman attacked the Republican Congress. He reminded his audience that “the Republicans promptly voted themselves a cut in taxes,” and “failed to crack down on prices.” And Truman went on to issue this warning:

Remember that the reactionary of today is a shrewd man. He is in many ways much shrewder than the reactionaries of the twenties. . . . He has learned a great deal about how to get his way by observing demagogues and reactionaries in other countries. And now he has many able allies in the press. . . .

We are in a hard, tough fight against shrewd and rich opponents. They know they can’t count on your vote. Their only hope is that you won’t vote at all. They have misjudged you. I know that we are going to win this crusade for the right!

In 2026, Trump can choose to ignore Labor Day. Democrats can channel their inner Harry Truman.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Europe’s Gold Fled the Nazis. Now It’s Fleeing Trump…. Our allies once trusted America to safeguard their reserves. Now they worry the president might freeze them, writes CATHERINE RAMPELL in Receipts.
• JD Vance Called Abdul El-Sayed ‘Evil.’ He’s One to Talk…. Where does the vice president go to give his apology, asks MONA CHAREN.
• Even Fox News Won’t Hide the Truth About Trump’s Grotesque Oil Deal… On Bulwark Takes, WILL SALETAN takes on Trump’s Venezuela oil deal, as the president openly brags that Venezuelan oil has already paid for the war “many times over” and Republicans argue that U.S. oil companies deserve benefits for the next 100 years.
• A Witness to Film History… On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, GODFREY CHESHIRE joins SONNY BUNCH to talk about his book, Cheshire on Film: Life & Writings.
• Bulwark+ fam: Thank you to everyone who preordered Sarah’s book, How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time. We’re so excited for the book to launch September 8.

Quick Hits

THANKS BUT NO THANKS: With midterm catastrophe looming, more and more vulnerable Republicans are quietly telling the unpopular president: Thanks for your interest, but please don’t come to my district. Politico reports:

When asked in an interview if he wants Trump to campaign in his swing district this fall or spend time elsewhere, Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) gave an indirect answer.

“Listen, you know, I’m very happy with our campaign and the things that we’re doing,” he said. “Very confident with our conversations with the voters. I think we’ve got a great campaign plan, and we’re laser-focused on communicating with our constituents and talking about issues that are important to them.”

Some battleground Republicans have relayed to Trump’s political team that they don’t want him to visit their districts ahead of November, according to four Republican operatives involved in the conversations, granted anonymity, like others in this article, to candidly discuss private strategy and conversations. . . .

“We’ve told them he cannot come,” said a senior Republican involved in a competitive House GOP race in a district where Trump won by double digits in 2024. “Candidly, he would not be helpful here … I do not believe they would send him without our OK. And if they did, we probably wouldn’t campaign with him.”

Ouch! Read the whole thing.

ABSENTEE SENATOR: There’s plenty of things Sen. John Fetterman likes about being a senator—the Fox News hits decrying his party’s anti-Israel turn, the opportunities to hobnob with Israeli government officials, his across-the-aisle bromance with Pennsylvania’s other senator, Republican Dave McCormick. But a remarkable new piece of reporting from the Wall Street Journal reveals that Fetterman seems to have little time for the actual work of his job. Fetterman, the paper reports, “keeps a light daily schedule, often refusing to meet with constituents and fellow lawmakers, or canceling at the last minute.” At least one aide even leaked text messages with the senator to the paper.

“Why do I keep having to meet with [the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia]?” Fetterman grumbles in one text. “Because they are worried about vaccines and Medicaid cuts,” the aide responds. “Well I’m not,” the senator shoots back. “I’m convinced they just want free trips to DC.”

One one occasion, the Journal reports, Fetterman begged off a long-scheduled meeting with three paralyzed military veterans from rural Pennsylvania to discuss “legislation that would improve their care.” He wasn’t feeling well, he told his staff. Shortly after his staff held the meeting without him, a perfectly healthy Fetterman strolled into the office, ready for his next appointment: a Fox News hit about Israel.

There’s so, so much more in this story. Read the whole thing. 

 

 John Fetterman in 2019. Photo credit: Governor Tom Wolf / Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)

WhoWhatWhy, The Fetterman Factor — 51 Seats Won’t Be Enough for Democrats, Klaus Marre, Sept. 4, 2026.  A 51-49 Democratic majority in the Senate that relies on John Fetterman is barely a majority at all.

While winning the House would be nice for Democrats eager to exercise some much-needed oversight over the most corrupt administration in US history and to get a say in which legislation is passed, securing the Senate majority would be the ultimate prize. That’s because control of the upper chamber of Congress would allow them to also reject Donald Trump’s unqualified nominees and, most importantly, judges.

Above all, they would be able to keep the president from continuing to stack the Supreme Court with right-wing justices should a spot on the court open up.

At the beginning of last year, it seemed unimaginable that the Democrats could overcome their 53-47 disadvantage in a midterm election that was supposed to be challenging for them. In fact, just to break even, they would have to defend two seats in states — Georgia and Michigan — that Trump won. And while they had a couple of achievable pickup opportunities in Maine and North Carolina, in order to win a majority, they would have to upset at least two more Republicans in solidly red states.

But things have changed a lot this year, and the fight for control of the Senate is now largely viewed as a coinflip. It is entirely possible that the Democrats will win a handful of GOP-held states (and even more if everything breaks their way in states like Iowa and Nebraska).

They will need every single one of them.

That’s because all of the handicappers and number-crunchers who are parsing the polls to figure out who may be ahead in the race for Senate control are making a crucial mistake: They are assuming that Democrats will need 51 seats to get there.

Technically, that is correct. While a 50-50 split is good enough for the GOP to prevail since Vice President JD Vance would break any ties, the Democrats need an outright majority.

In reality, however, that math is overlooking one crucial variable in the equation: Sen. John Fetterman (D-Fox News).

Now, we are not saying that he will switch parties, although, while he has stated that he would not bolt from the Democrats and join the GOP, we wouldn’t discount that possibility.

As things stand, he is hardly a favorite to win a primary when he is up for reelection in 2028 — at least not as a Democrat. In his state, Fetterman is much more popular among Republicans than Democrats, only 22 percent of whom have a favorable view of him.

And he may not want to work with someone like Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Michigan, whom he accused of supporting sharia law, Iran, and Hamas,

What we are saying, however, is that a majority that relies on a guy who seems to be on Fox News daily to trash progressive Democrats, side with Trump on everything from the ballroom to data centers, and talk about his “love and devotion to Israel” is hardly on solid ground.

When the dust settles and Democrats hold a 51-49 edge, there are two scenarios: The first is that Republicans promise Fetterman the world to get him to switch (no primary challenge, plum committee assignments, his own Fox News show, Sean Hannity singing at his birthday party, etc.).

The other is that he becomes as powerful as the Senate majority leader because he will have to be given a say on every major piece of legislation, and will get to decide which nominees and justices should be confirmed.

And that’s precisely why, in order to win a real, Fetterman-proof majority, the Democrats will not only have to defend their two seats but also win the races in Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Alaska to take him out of the equation — and that’s still a tall order.

U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets, Global Reputation

New York Times, U.S. Diesel Prices Set New High, Gregory Schmidt, Sept. 4, 2026. Because of the war in Iran, the cost has climbed past the record it reached in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Diesel fuel prices jumped to a record high on Friday in the United States, as the war in Iran continued to restrict the supply of energy worldwide, further squeezing businesses that rely on diesel to run their factories and equipment.

The national average price of a gallon of diesel reached $5.85 per gallon, according to the AAA motor club, up more than 55 percent since the war started. That surpassed the previous peak, set four years ago during the global energy crunch caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Other refined petroleum products, like gasoline and jet fuel, have also soared. Gasoline cost $4.15 a gallon on Friday, on average, up nearly 40 percent since the war began, according to AAA.

New York Times, Live Updates: U.S. Hiring Jumps, an Encouraging Sign for the Economy, Sydney Ember, Sept. 4, 2026. Employers added 162,000 jobs in August, and the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1 percent. But wage growth is not keeping up with rising inflation.

Hiring was unexpectedly strong in August, as employers pushed past uncertainty related to the war in Iran, tariffs and artificial intelligence to expand their payrolls.

Employers added 162,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1 percent.

Job gains for June and July were revised up by 55,000, adding to the brighter picture of the labor market. Growth in August was especially strong in the leisure and hospitality sector, which added 62,000 positions.

Dollar coin with Trump's face and gold finish goes on sale | AP News

Paul Krugman via Substack, Ingots We No Longer Trust, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 4, 2026. America’s word is as good as gold — that is, unreliable.

In the Yap islands of Micronesia, rai stones carved out of crystalline limestone, with a hole in the center, are considered objects of great value, sometimes described as a form of money. However, they are often large — sometimes as big as 12 feet in diameter — and they rarely literally change hands, given how difficult they are to move.

So they stay wherever they are. Their ownership is established by oral history, with changes in ownership established by appending transfers to that shared oral history. This is, by the way, a sort of preliterate version of the blockchain!

For the most part, monetary gold — gold held as reserves by national central banks — is a lot like the stones of Yap. Central banks own trillions of dollars’ worth of gold, which they sometimes sell to each other to settle international payments. But these transfers rarely involve physically moving gold across borders. A large fraction of the world’s gold reserves actually sits in a vault underneath the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, although the New York Fed does move ingots between compartments when transfers take place.

And why not? The sanctity of nations’ ownership of gold stored in New York is guaranteed by the word of the U.S. government — a government that is utterly reliable, because it honors the role of law.

Or anyway, that’s the country we used to be.

“Rule of law” is not a phrase often applied to the Trump administration. And the administration has special contempt for international law. Many of Trump’s tariffs have been ruled illegal under U.S. law, but more or less all of those tariffs were and are in clear violation of past agreements solemnly signed by previous U.S. presidents, including Trump himself.

So the idea that the U.S. government might devise some excuse to seize gold held in the Fed’s vault is no longer far-fetched. And nations are taking precautions. Earlier this week the Dutch central bank announced that it was shifting about $12 billion in gold from the vault in New York to the Bank of England’s vault in London. This follows a move by the French central bank to shift an even larger sum from New York to Paris. Other countries are considering similar moves.

The direct economic or financial impact of these actions will be minimal. There won’t even be large trans-Atlantic gold shipments: foreign central banks will sell their New York gold to private buyers in America and replenish it with purchases from private sellers in Europe.

But the symbolism is chilling. America is no longer trusted. Foreign governments can no longer count on us to obey the most basic rules, like the commandment that thou shalt not steal other people’s gold.

And even when Trump is gone, it will take many years of honest, responsible U.S. government to restore that lost trust.

Musical Coda: "Goldfinger" by Shirley Bassey. Listen here. 

Special Report: Political Ads 

Grieving North Carolina father Ronald Hayes, as shown in a deceptive ad created by pro-Republicans in the current U.S. senate race in North Carolina.

Judd at Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: How a GOP super PAC tricked a grieving father into appearing in a political ad, Judd Legum, right, and Noel Sims, Sept 3, 2026. Ronald Hayes appears in a Senate Leadership Fund ad.

On August 5, the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the super PAC of Senate Republicans, announced a new television ad attacking Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in North Carolina.

The ad features Ronald Hayes, whose son Shemar was murdered in 2024. In just 30 seconds, it ties Shemar’s murder to Cooper, who served as governor of North Carolina from 2017 to 2025. The blame is pinned on a settlement Cooper reached with the ACLU to release some inmates early during the COVID pandemic. “As the governor, Mr. Cooper was allowing these criminals back on the streets,” Hayes says in the ad. “Is my son going to get a second chance? No, he’s never coming back.”

But in an interview with Popular Information, Hayes says that he was manipulated into appearing in the ad. According to Hayes, the SLF operatives who recorded the footage misrepresented the purpose of the interview, never revealed their political affiliation, and coached Hayes into providing the soundbites that appear in the ad.

Hayes is a member of a group of about a dozen grieving parents whose children have been murdered. The SLF operatives reached out to everyone in the group and offered an opportunity “to share our stories.” Hayes was left with the impression that “we’re doing an ad about gun violence and our deceased kids.”

Hayes said he was interested in “talking about Shemar and what I feel about gun violence.” He had also written a book about Shemar that he wanted more people to know about.

After he agreed to participate, Hayes began to communicate with Michael Luethy. Previously, Luethy worked for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the North Carolina Republican Party, and the Republican State Leadership Committee. Luethy currently runs a Republican consulting firm based in North Carolina called Oak Grove Campaigns.

But Luethy never revealed that he was working with the SLF or his connection to Republican politics. Rather, Luethy represented to Hayes that he was “independent.” Luethy invited Hayes to a luxury home in Charlotte and encouraged him to bring copies of his book. Hayes had never been on camera before.

The SLF paid Oak Grove Campaigns $456.90 on April 30, 2026, for travel. Luethy did not respond to a text message seeking comment.

At the outset, Hayes was given an opportunity to talk about his son and was asked about the book. Then, Hayes said, “all of a sudden, in the middle of the recording, it went from me talking about what happened to my son to Governor Cooper.”

“Well, what do you think about North Carolina letting out 3,500 murderers, rapists, and killers?” Hayes said he was asked. “Of course, I am a victim. What am I going to say?” Hayes said he initially responded without saying Cooper’s name. He was then prompted by the SLF operatives to deliver the soundbite they wanted. “Would you mind saying Roy Cooper?” the operatives asked.

Prior to arriving at the filming, Hayes said, he “never knew anything about the governor of North Carolina letting out 3,500 criminals due to COVID-19 back in 2019 and 2020.” Hayes noted that he knows the policy was unrelated to his son’s murder. (The man who murdered Hayes’ son in 2024 had no prior adult criminal record and, therefore, was not released from prison.) Hayes was distressed when he saw the ad, which makes it seem “as if I’m saying that my son’s murderer was one of the ones who Governor Cooper let out of prison.”

“Why would I go on there and just flat out tell a blatant lie?” Hayes asked. He called the ad “deceitful, conniving, and sneaky.”

Hayes said that the SLF operatives filmed at least two other interviews with members of the grieving parents group, but those were not turned into ads. In both cases, the SLF operatives redirected the discussion from the personal tragedy to a political attack on Roy Cooper.

According to data from AdImpact, the SLF has spent over $6 million airing Hayes’ ad on television and digital platforms. Hayes said the ad has profoundly impacted his day-to-day life. “You would not believe how many people now just walk up to me and ask me, ‘Am I that guy that’s in that commercial?’”

Hayes said he is a Democrat and would not have knowingly participated in a GOP attack ad. “Why would I do a commercial? I’m just an everyday man,” Hayes said. “They targeted me as a victim of gun violence and because of the death of my son.”

More Global News

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Imperialist Delusions and the Price of Fuel, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Trump and Bessent tried to betray Ukraine. Now they don’t have any cards.

During the 2024 campaign Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices in half. He has, instead, presided over soaring prices at the pump, which have played an important role in his collapse in the polls.

Some might attribute this disaster to Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, ignoring what appear to have been near-unanimous warnings by experienced military and intelligence officials that such a war would, in addition to disrupting oil supplies, overstretch the U.S. military and dangerously deplete stocks of munitions — which is exactly what happened.

But Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, has found someone else to blame: Ukraine.

Yesterday Bessent went on “Fox & Friends,” where he pinned the blame for high energy prices largely on Kyiv:

We are going through an energy shock right now due to both the war in Ukraine, because Ukraine has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets and refined properties, so that is creating upward price pressure on a global basis, and the conflict in Iran.

Now, Bessent isn’t wrong to say that bottlenecks in refining capacity are playing a major role in the current energy shock. The chart at the top of this post shows changes in the price of crude oil and diesel, both measured in dollars per barrel, since the beginning of this year. Crude oil is up a lot, although off its peak in early April. But diesel is up much more (so is gasoline, although not quite as much.) And Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil facilities are certainly playing a role in reducing global refining capacity.

But note Bessent’s wording: Ukraine “has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets.” Gosh, why would the Ukrainians want to do such a thing? Might it have something to do with the fact that they are engaged in an existential struggle against Vladimir Putin’s regime, which is in its fifth year of a war aimed at destroying their nation, and they need to hit back at Putin’s military and economic base?

Notice, also, that Bessent didn’t point out that these attacks on Russian oil would end if Russia were to end its attempted war of conquest. But far from demanding an end to Russian aggression, the Trump administration infuriated the democratic nations of Europe by inviting Russia’s finance minister, for the first time since the Ukraine war began, to Monday’s meeting of the Group of 20 major economies.

But wait: There’s more background here. Bessent, as much as or more than Trump, has been effectively an enemy of Ukraine from the beginning.

Right at the beginning of the Trump II administration Bessent flew to Kyiv to demand that the Ukrainian government in effect hand over a large share of its mineral resources to the United States. I described it at the time as a “Belgian Congo” deal:

What Trump suggested was that Ukraine give the United States half of the revenue it gets from resource extraction, as far as I can tell in perpetuity. Trump suggested that this would amount to $500 billion, although this seems like a wildly exaggerated sum.

In return, Trump offered, well, zero. No additional aid, no security guarantees, no nothing.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump offers more, damning detail. There was apparently a shouting match between Bessent and Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy, in which Zelenskyy correctly described Bessent’s proposal as a shakedown unenforceable under Ukrainian law.

Bessent then returned to Washington and urged Trump not to even meet with Zelenskyy until he signed the minerals deal:

“I’ve dealt with this little fucker,” Bessent would say to associates about Zelensky. “He’s tricky. He’s like the special-needs child for the Europeans. And he’s acting like Mr. Bean on crack.”

Nonetheless, Trump did meet with Zelenskyy — and it was a disaster, including Trump’s famous insult, “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.”

The Trump administration proceeded to cut off virtually all aid to Ukraine, presumably expecting Ukraine’s defense against Russia to collapse.

Ukraine, however, declined to collapse. Aid from Europe replaced much of the lost American support:

And the Ukrainians, though deprived of important U.S. weapons — especially Patriot interceptors — have if anything been gaining the upper hand in their war, thanks in part to their growing mastery of drone warfare. Russia’s ground offensive has stalled despite enormous casualties, while Ukraine is carrying out more and more long-range strikes, including, yes, strikes on Russia’s oil infrastructure.

By the way, Ukraine’s success in drone warfare suggests that the government in Kyiv could offer the U.S. military, which has fared so badly against Iranian drones, quite a lot of help. But don’t expect Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon to ask for or receive such help.

Anyway, now Bessent is blaming Ukraine for high fuel prices. Is he demanding, or maybe pleading, that the Ukrainians halt their strategic air campaign? If so, in return for what?

After all, the Trump administration can’t threaten to cut off aid — it already did that long ago. It can’t offer to help Ukraine plug the one big hole in its defense technology, its lack (so far) of effective interceptors against ballistic missiles, because the U.S. has depleted its own stock of such interceptors in its Iran debacle.

So while I’m sure that Bessent and Trump wish that Ukraine would stop blowing up Russian energy assets — they would demand that Ukraine stop, if they could — they can’t, in practice, do anything to change Ukraine’s war strategy. To put it bluntly, they’re not in a good position. They don’t have the cards.

New York Times, The New Jet-Powered Drones That Are Breeding Anxiety in Ukraine, Cassandra Vinograd, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). The Russian strikes tormenting Ukraine’s capital in recent days have had an ominous new feature: jet-powered drones.

Significantly faster and harder to intercept than the propeller-driven drones that have stalked Ukraine’s skies for years, these munitions are stretching air defenses and stoking anxiety about what analysts and officials predict will be a dangerous new stage of the war.

Here’s what to know about the deadly weapons, which experts say blur the line between drones and cruise missiles, and upon which Russia is increasingly reliant.

U.S. Immigration Crackdown

New York Times, Times Exclusive: ICE Skipped Basic Checks in Rush for Recruits, Whistle-Blower Says, Alexandra Berzon, Katie Benner and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). An official who oversaw the vetting of ICE recruits cited an “unprecedented lowering of standards” amid a hiring surge. 

In the wake of a hiring surge last summer, an official in charge of evaluating new recruits to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a dire warning.

The Trump administration, he wrote in a memo, was cutting corners, violating the law and fast-tracking unqualified, “improperly vetted” candidates into ICE’s ranks, part of a dangerous move that exposed the agency — and its law enforcement operations — to “grave national security risks.”

Citing an “unprecedented lowering of standards,” the career ICE official said that “systemic breakdowns” had allowed applicants to receive job offers before they had passed basic fingerprint, identity or credit checks in a preliminary vetting process. Political appointees had unjustly skirted background investigations and received national security eligibility.

The official, a unit chief who directly oversaw more than 100 employees who evaluated thousands of ICE applicants, was so troubled by what he saw that he outlined these concerns not to his superiors, but in a formal whistle-blower complaint to the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security.

In the complaint, he asked for an independent, outside investigation into the matter. He was later interviewed twice by officials with the inspector general’s office and his concerns have become part of an ongoing audit into vetting practices.

The complaint, which has not been previously reported, underscores the rising worries about the suitability — as well as the tactics — of scores of agents who have been rapidly deployed across the country within the last year. It also outlines the extent to which ICE weakened its standards, and points to dissension among the upper reaches of the agency as it was pressed last year to carry out President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The whistle-blower, a 17-year ICE veteran who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of his claims, said the agency had cut corners in its rush to fill the ranks.

“We chose as an agency to be more convenient rather than thorough,” he said, describing the agency’s decision to reduce scrutiny of recruits in order to expedite hires. “By doing so, there was a potential to put lives at risk and to jeopardize national security.”

The whistle-blower complaint was obtained via a public records request. The concerns within it broadly mirror those made by other current and former ICE employees who said that the agency had abandoned best practices as it rapidly scaled up. An ICE lawyer who worked at the agency’s training center resigned earlier this year and went public as a whistle-blower, citing concerns about a “deficient, defective and broken” training program. ImageA sidewalk memorial with flowers and candles and a piece of paper with “His Name Was Sebastian” written on it.The scrutiny of ICE’s hiring practices has intensified in recent weeks, spurred in part by the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on July 13.Credit...Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

In response to questions, an ICE spokesperson said in a statement that the agency “diligently applies the proper personnel vetting regulations, including guidelines for national security, and evaluates all available information for every applicant based on these factors.”

The agency declined to comment about the whistle-blower, who retired from the agency in July, or his complaint.

The scrutiny of ICE’s hiring practices has intensified in recent weeks, spurred in part by the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant, in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13.

The two ex-wives of the ICE agent David Brouillette, one of whom identified him as the person who fired the fatal shots, have accused him in interviews and court records of being abusive. In a filing for a protection order in December 2019, one ex-wife wrote that he had broken her door down, destroyed her belongings and dumped her clothes over a bridge.

The women also have said Mr. Brouillette, a former military serviceman and Veterans Affairs police officer who was hired amid the recruiting surge last year, had post-traumatic stress disorder related to his deployment in Afghanistan. A local official in Maine told The Portland Press Herald that Mr. Brouillette sought jobs with the Hallowell Police Department in 2024 but was denied because there were “too many red flags.” Mr. Brouillette could not be reached for comment.

After the shooting, Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said that the D.H.S. investigation into the episode will include whether the agent was properly vetted before being hired.

A White House spokesperson referred questions to D.H.S.A Rush to Recruit

The concerns in the August 2025 whistle-blower complaint exposed shortcuts in the agency’s preliminary vetting process. No credit checks. Fingerprints unconfirmed. Final job offers absent preliminary vetting.

Before the surge, a recruitment team made documents available to a unit within ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility for each new hire, including fingerprints and a security form with extensive questions. The vetting team would then initiate a preliminary check, running each applicant’s name through law enforcement databases and searching for criminal violations or other major red flags. Some recruits would be sent for a polygraph test if concerns arose.

These recruits then underwent a full background check, conducted by outside contractors, to determine whether the candidate was trustworthy enough to have access to sensitive computer systems, federal facilities and classified information. It wasn’t unusual for this to occur while recruits were in training.

The preliminary vetting process, which took seven to 10 days, was upended last summer. The vetters were told to make determinations on recruits without having the full security form, fingerprints or any polygraph testing, according to the former unit chief and a former federal official familiar with the process who was granted anonymity to speak freely about it.

That meant new hires were heading to training without having their identities, criminal histories and other basic information checked and verified, the unit chief said.

The agency also sped up its training program, cutting it from roughly 10 weeks to six. This resulted in agents reporting to their full-time positions while their full background checks were pending. 

U.S. Media, Entertainment, Culture

 

Gloria Steinem speaks at the Women's March in Washington, on January 21, 2017 (Shannon Stapleton photo for Reuters).

New York Times, Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92, Katharine Q. Seelye, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large.

Gloria Steinem, the feminist crusader who, in galvanizing the modern women’s movement, helped millions of women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at home, at work and in society at large, died on Wednesday at her home in New York City. She was 92.

Her death was announced in a post on social media, which did not give a cause.

Calling herself “an entrepreneur of social change,” Ms. Steinem helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.

For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.

She was an unlikely revolutionary. Growing up a transient in the Midwest, she was 10 when her parents divorced and she was left to mother her mentally anguished mother — a formative experience that reverberated throughout her life. She had scant formal education until sixth grade; her big dream, as a budding tap dancer, was to become a Rockette.

But she read voraciously, graduated from college with honors and believed fiercely that women should be able to live whatever life they chose.

Her own feminist awakening didn’t come until her mid-30s, when, as a journalist in 1969, she attended a “speak out” of women discussing their illegal abortions. Charismatic, articulate, media savvy, deeply empathetic and a workaholic, she evolved into a political and cultural force.

She led protests and consciousness-raising sessions, wrote essays and delivered speeches, delved into political organizing, helped establish rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women, founded numerous groups that promoted women and had the Midas touch when it came to raising money for their causes. 

 

 

Gloria Steinem (r) with Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham Jan. 24, 1972 luncheon (Photo by Martin Kuhn).

National Press Club, Appreciation: Gloria Steinem was not impressed with Press Club tie gift after her speech in 1972, Gil Klein, Sept. 4, 2026. Feminist leader Gloria Steinem, who died Wednesday, Sept. 2, at the age of 92, was no stranger to the National Press Club.

While AI mistakenly referred to her as the first woman to speak at the Club (that honor actually goes to Eleanor Roosevelt), she wasn’t even the first after the Club admitted women as members in January 1971. That was feminist Germaine Greer (which AI also identified as the first woman speaker).

But Steinem had one lasting impact on NPC luncheons.

The Club always finishes a luncheon by giving the speaker a gift. With the overwhelming number of speakers being men before the 1970s, the traditional gift was a Press Club tie. That didn’t stop as the Club invited leaders of the women’s movement as it pushed for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.

But when Steinem, the co-founder and editor of Ms. magazine, spoke at the Club on Jan. 24, 1972, with Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham seated at the head table, the tie didn’t go over well at all.

Presented with the tie, Steinem offered to don a man’s jacket “and confirm your worst suspicions.”

That was the end of the tie, but what to give? The selection expanded to include a scarf, paperweight and windbreaker before landing on the mug that is still offered today.  

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Fox News Dumps Trump Cheerleader Maria Bartiromo, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Sept. 4, 2026 (print ed.). Maria Bartiromo, above, has been non-stop waving the flag for Trump and professing endless support for a decade. Bartiromo was one of the personalities that Trump would turn to when he needed the softest of soft interviews.

Trump’s buddy Sean Hannity always seems to be his first Fox News choice, but Bartiromo, along with Fox and Friends, were his two other go-to spots for interviews that would be even more gentle than the standard Fox News interviews.

Bartiromo like the rest of Fox allowed Trump to pre-tape his interviews. The Trump interviews were often edited to paint the president in the best light, and there have been reports over the years that the White House even has editorial control over Trump’s interviews on Fox.

Fox News didn’t give Maria Bartiromo a big sendoff to thank her for her 12 and a half years on the network.

Instead, Fox News released a terse statement that:

Effective today Maria Bartiromo is no longer with FOX News Media. Fox News media said, “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.”

That’s it. Boom. Gone.Bartiromo’s Exit Is A Sign That The End Of Trump Is Coming

Fox News is going to find a new host to take over Bartiromo’s Sunday show, Sunday Morning Futures, which has been the place for MAGA Republicans to push their messages, hawk their campaigns, and hit viewers up for donations.

Sunday Morning Futures is not a Sunday news show. It was more like a MAGA circus tent where those who either needed something or wanted to get the attention of Trump and his most loyal supporters gathered.

Bartiromo’s Sunday show was the place that Republicans turned to if they felt that Kristen Welker was too liberal.

We don’t have the details yet of why Bartiromo and Fox News parted ways. Maybe Bartiromo is taking a job in the Trump administration?

However, when Trump’s most loyal media supporters start losing their plum perches to speak to his base, it is also a sign that the MAGA era is drawing to a close.

In a few months, Democrats are likely to control all or part of Congress. Trump looks to be on the fast track toward lame duck status, and starting next year, voters of all political stripes will look toward the 2028 election and the selection of a new president.

The signs are growing that it really is over for Trump, and the era that many Americans thought would never come to an end is moving toward its close. 

Daily Beast, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. And, apparently, he’s the saddest, Laura Esposito, Sept. 3, 2026. That’s according to filmmaker Alex Gibney, who relayed the assessment from someone who worked closely with Musk. Gibney’s forthcoming film, Musk, was previewed by The Hollywood Reporter.

“Someone who worked closely with Elon told me, ‘He’s the most miserable man I’ve ever met.’ So he’s inflicting his misery on everyone else,” Gibney told the outlet.Elon Musk.Elon Musk has regrets about his chainsaw-waving stunt. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

In Gibney’s film, which premieres this fall, he tackles the 55-year-old’s worst impulses—and how this unelected, unchecked figure shapes much of what we see in American politics today. Musk has made no secret of his thirst for power, notably during the 2024 presidential election, when he funneled more than $290 million into Donald Trump’s last presidential campaign and hosted town halls in swing states. He famously gave away a $1 million check to a rallygoer selected at random after they signed a petition to support a PAC he created.

Questions about his obscure data-collecting efforts and the role he plans to play in forthcoming elections also remain unanswered. In his documentary, Gibney hammers home that Musk’s brief stint at the helm of an army of twentysomething men known as the “DOGE” squad involved dismantling USAID programs around the world; the X owner gained access to the data on tens of millions of Americans.

What, exactly, he does with that information is unknown. Combined with the data he has already obtained through his control of X, that information makes him an undeniable force in American politics.

According to the person quoted by Gibney, Musk does it all to fill the bleakness he feels within himself. Other times, perhaps he fills that void by lashing out at others.

Just ask President Donald Trump, who has privately admitted he was hurt by Musk after their nuclear fallout, according to recent reports.

After the 80-year-old president returned to the White House in part due to Musk, it wasn’t long before the relationship went awry. It came to a head in a very public feud, which included Musk claiming in an X post that Trump “is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” The allegation was unsupported, and Musk later deleted the post. 

Sept. 3

Top Headlines 

 

• New York Times, Judge Suggests Trump Mail-In Voting Rules Could Cause ‘Major Disenfranchisement,’ Zach Montague, Sept. 3, 2026. Judge Indira Talwani said the Postal Service appeared to be trying a haphazard “experiment” with a new rule that could result in valid ballots being tossed.
• New York Times, Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Allow Mail Voting Limits, Abbie VanSickle, Sept. 3, 2026. The justices have been asked to weigh in again on the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict mail voting — this time on whether the plans violate the Constitution. 

Special Reports

The New Yorker Magazine portrayed on its cover the last year the six Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court as wearing Trump-styled blond wigs, with faces indistinguishable from that of their party's leader. Trump's planned ballroom replacing the demolished White House East Wing and three times the size of the rest of the White House, is portrayed by Trump below despite widespead legal criticism that he has no right to demolish historic structures throughout the nation's capital without congressional approvals.

• Talking Feds, Opinion: Trump’s Ballroom Is Illegal, Despised, and Anti-Democratic, but the Supreme Court Greenlit It Anyway, Harry Litman, right, law professor and former high-ranking U.S. Justice Department executive,Sept. 3, 2026. “Our buildings shape us,” and this building will shape a failure of democracy. On Monday, the Supreme Court told Donald Trump he can proceed full steam ahead to construct his monstrous ballroom. That’s not because the project is lawful: the per curiam, 5-4 order on the shadow docket expressly offered no opinion on the merits. Indeed, every court to consider the question—plus four dissenting justices on the high court—has concluded that the project is likely unlawful. It’s also a vile and fairly hideous affront to the most visible symbol of our democracy. Rather, the Court held that the stay on construction should be lifted because the plaintiffs lacked standing and the order was irreparably harming the administration. Both aspects of the decision were flawed. The per curiam represents the shadow docket at its most pernicious: a loosey-goosey decision based on the procedural particulars of granting an emergency stay that has the possible effect of letting Trump get away with a national atrocity.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Clyburn Puts Supreme Court Expansion Front and Center, Jennifer Rubin, Sept. 3, 2026. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, veteran lawmaker Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) emphatically urged expanding seats on the Supreme Court from 9 to 13 justices. “A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the court,” he said. Court expansion, no longer the province of left-leaning academics thanks to the MAGA justices’ radicalism, has become an indisputably mainstream, pro-democracy response.

Special Report: A Russian Father and Brave Daughter

• Roman Sheremeta via Substack, News and Comment: This is what dictatorship looks like, Roman Sheremet, right, professorof economics and politics, Sept. 3,2026. In April 2022, a 12-year-old Russian girl named Masha Moskalyova was told in art class to draw a picture supporting russian troops in Ukraine. Instead, she drew a Ukrainian mother protecting her child as russian missiles flew toward them.

Special Report

Donald Trump portrayed seizing oil from Venezuela, creating conditions for violent blowback in the future (Graphic by The Hartmann Report)

• The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Trump Brags About His “Brilliant” Venezuela Scheme While History Screams a Warning, Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 2, 2026. America has spent decades paying for earlier interventions in oil-rich nations. Trump is now risking another cycle of rebellion, bloodshed, and blowback. Here we go again with American colonialism, this time with a crazy scheme Trump thinks is “brilliant.” You’d have thought we’d have learned our lesson with our stupid intervention in Iran in 1953, which led us straight to America’s humiliation in 1980 and today’s war with the Mullahs. This is going to be an epic disaster, one that will most likely cost us dearly in both American blood and treasure.

News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Thursday Night News, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Today’s rundown leads with Mitch McConnell, because 80 days later, nobody else seems to be asking the obvious question: where is he? His office has gone weeks without a real update, he’s missed 60 votes, and the only proof of life the public has gotten is two photos.
• Meidas Touch Network, Thursday Afternoon Update: MAGA Mike’s House Shutdown, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Here’s your free midday update. Mike Johnson abruptly cancels the last two weeks of September in Congress after denying he’d do so just days ago; Billionaire Leon Black skipped out on his House Oversight deposition on Epstein and is suing the committee; Trump favorite Maria Bartiromo is abruptly out at Fox; Federal prosecutors charge an ICE agent with lying about a Minnesota shooting.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Big Epstein Update: Alleged Co-Conspirator with Sealed NDAs Sues, GOP Senator Calls for Hegseth’s Firing, McConnell Update, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Today’s rundown leads with new developments in the Epstein story: subpoenas, sealed NDAs, and a $158 million question about what one of his associates was really paying for. We also look into Mitch McConnell, issues with Hegseth, and more right now.

More Global News

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Imperialist Delusions and the Price of Fuel, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Trump and Bessent tried to betray Ukraine. Now they don’t have any cards. During the 2024 campaign Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices in half. He has, instead, presided over soaring prices at the pump, which have played an important role in his collapse in the polls. Some might attribute this disaster to Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, ignoring what appear to have been near-unanimous warnings by experienced military and intelligence officials that such a war would, in addition to disrupting oil supplies, overstretch the U.S. military and dangerously deplete stocks of munitions — which is exactly what happened. But Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, has found someone else to blame: Ukraine.
• New York Times, The New Jet-Powered Drones That Are Breeding Anxiety in Ukraine, Cassandra Vinograd, Sept. 3, 2026. The Russian strikes tormenting Ukraine’s capital in recent days have had an ominous new feature: jet-powered drones.

U.S. Immigration Crackdown

• New York Times, Times Exclusive: ICE Skipped Basic Checks in Rush for Recruits, Whistle-Blower Says, Alexandra Berzon, Katie Benner and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 3, 2026. An official who oversaw the vetting of ICE recruits cited an “unprecedented lowering of standards” amid a hiring surge. 

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

 

Davin Rosborough, an ACLU attorney representing the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, speaks at a press conference outside the John Moakley Courthouse in Boston, Mass. after participating in a hearing Sept. 3 on President Donald Trump's March 31, 2026 executive order and a Postal Service rule implementing it.

• Democracy Docket, Judge appears deeply skeptical of case for Trump’s mail voting restrictions, Jim Saksa, Sept. 3, 2026. With Election Day just two months away, the lawyer defending the Postal Service’s recently issued rule carrying out President Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order could not tell a federal judge how — or even if — the new rule would work.
• Newsweek, Lindsay Clancy Verdict: Expert Says Judge’s Jury Actions May Be ‘Dangerous,’ Hannah Parry, Sept. 3, 2026.The Lindsay Clancy murder trial descended into an extraordinary courtroom confrontation Thursday as a deadlocked jury was sent back to deliberate for a sixth day, prompting a legal expert to warn that Judge William Sullivan was entering “very dangerous territory.”

More On Russian Infiltration Of FBI, Other Spying

• Newsweek, Woman Who Exposed FBI Official for Working With Russian Oligarch Found Dead, Jenni Fink,Sept. 3, 2026. Allison Guerriero, above left, a security researcher whose information helped expose the criminal conduct of former FBI counterintelligence official Charles McGonigal, above right, has been found dead at her home in Boynton Beach, Florida. Hours before her death, Guerriero posted a series of messages on X, formerly Twitter, criticizing Representative Jim Jordan, the FBI and McGonigal. McGonigal was arrested in 2023 and was sentenced to 50 months in prison and then was later sentenced in a separate case to 28 months in prison in 2024. He pleaded guilty to secretly colluding with a Russian oligarch and also admitted to receiving $225,000 in cash from someone with ties to the Albanian government.
• New York Times, News Analysis: A Spiral of Escalation for Russia and Ukraine, With No End in Sight, Kim Barker, Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 3, 2026. Each side is using missiles and drones to try to pound the other into giving up, breeding ceaseless human suffering. But there is no sign that either country’s determination will weaken.

More On U.S. Politics, Elections, Governance

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Midterm Strategy: Don’t Work, Cheat, Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Say you’re a Republican lawmaker going into a tough midterm fight. The good news is your party controls the presidency. The bad news is the president is insanely unpopular and getting more so every day. Many voters you need are pretty mad at the guy. You might want to start telling them, Yeah, I’m with him—but only on the good stuff, the stuff you guys like. As I wrote last week, this was never going to be an option for Republicans this cycle. 
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: As Bad As Things Are For Trump And The Rs Now -- And They Are Bad -- They Are Likely To Get Worse, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Greater MAGA Is Weakening: Putin has lost Orban, Syria, and is failing in Ukraine. Both Bibi and Trump have lost their war in Iran, and their political projects at home have taken enormous hits. Bibi trails in his October 26th election, and Trump trails in his November election. Zelenskyy has emerged as an inspirational global freedom fighter. Taken together these are important and welcome developments in our fight to ensure there is a new birth of freedom here and everywhere in the years ahead……
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: When You Control the Mail, You Control the Nation, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 3, 2026.Two months from the midterms, how bad are the coalition vibes for Donald Trump? Even some dyed-in-the-wool MAGA pollsters are starting to sound the red alert.
• PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: JD Vance Was Asked About Gas Prices And His Answer Was A Disaster, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 3, 2026. The Trump administration has no clue what to do to lower gas prices, because the administration doesn't know how to get out of the Iran war that it started. 

Special Report: Political Ads

Grieving North Carolina father Ronald Hayes, as shown in a deceptive ad created by pro-Republicans in the current U.S. senate race in North Carolina.

• Judd at Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: How a GOP super PAC tricked a grieving father into appearing in a political ad, Judd Legum, right, and Noel Sims, Sept 3, 2026. Ronald Hayes appears in a Senate Leadership Fund ad.

U.S. Economy, Markets

• Seymour Hersh, Opinion: The Coming Trump Depression, Seymour Hersh, Sept. 3, 2026. The businessman president’s lasting legacy might be plunging America into economic misery. I’ve spent decades reporting on corrupt and idiotic wars and presidents—Democratic and Republican—who’ve thrown away billions of dollars on wars that could not be won, did not need to be fought, and cost millions of lives. And today we have a malicious childlike president who is bankrupting the United States with the war he started in Iran and who ignores one possible off-ramp after another.

More News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: UN Admits Defeat on Climate Change and Warns of Catastrophe, Trump Family Races to Hire Lawyers, and Much More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 2, 2026. Today brought a lot of “the quiet part out loud” energy: Trump’s inner circle is stockpiling lawyers ahead of a possible Democratic Congress, even as the West Wing publicly insists the GOP holds the House. Speaking of the GOP, dozens of Republicans are quietly RSVPing “no” to Trump’s own midterm convention next week, some over cost, some over politics, some over dove hunting. Meanwhile the UN conceded the 1.5-degree climate target is basically gone, the Mint rolled out a Trump coin that critics joke marks the “death of liberty” in 2026, and the USS Abraham Lincoln limped into Thailand looking like it aged a decade in 286 days. Add a runaway robot in Russia, a deadlocked jury in the Lindsay Clancy trial, and a Coast Guard jet that lost an engine over D.C., and that’s Wednesday. Here’s everything you need to know.

Culture, Media, Entertainment 

Gloria Steinem speaks at the Women's March in Washington, on January 21, 2017 (Shannon Stapleton photo for Reuters).

• New York Times, Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92, Katharine Q. Seelye, Sept. 3, 2026. She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large.
• The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Fox News Dumps Trump Cheerleader Maria Bartiromo, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Maria Bartiromo has been non-stop waving the flag for Trump and professing endless support for a decade. Bartiromo was one of the personalities that Trump would turn to when he needed the softest of soft interviews.
• Daily Beast, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. And, apparently, he’s the saddest, Laura Esposito,Sept. 3, 2026. That’s according to filmmaker Alex Gibney, who relayed the assessment from someone who worked closely with Musk. Gibney’s forthcoming film, Musk, was previewed by The Hollywood Reporter.

Top Stories

 

New York Times, Judge Suggests Trump Mail-In Voting Rules Could Cause ‘Major Disenfranchisement,’ Zach Montague, Sept. 3, 2026. Judge Indira Talwani said the Postal Service appeared to be trying a haphazard “experiment” with a new rule that could result in valid ballots being tossed.

A federal judge on Thursday expressed concern that if she allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with plans to restrict mail-in ballots ahead of the November election, it could cause so much chaos that states would experience “major disenfranchisement.”

During a winding two-hour hearing in Federal District Court in Boston, Judge Indira Talwani asked sharp questions of attorneys from the Justice Department and a coalition of Republican states about how they believed they could implement the new rule on the eve of early voting across many states. The hearing highlighted concerns raised by a broad coalition of nonprofits and Democratic states that, if allowed to forge ahead with the new rule, the Postal Service could haphazardly reject thousands of valid ballots.

Judge Talwani last week blocked the Postal Service from implementing the plan for 14 days, a period that expires Sept. 10. Thursday’s hearing was intended to help her decide whether to extend her injunction indefinitely. The Trump administration has already appealed her temporary restraining order and the issue is likely to be settled by the Supreme Court.

The judge did not immediately rule on the issue, but said she planned to move quickly.

With just two months to go before the election, and many states set to begin distributing mail-in ballots later this month, Judge Talwani wondered aloud why the rule change could not wait until the agency had time to execute it methodically.

“I think that’s what’s so puzzling to me about this case,” Judge Talwani said.

Judge Talwani previously ruled that she believed the Postal Service’s plans likely exceed the agency’s legal mandate from Congress.

Lawyers representing the Postal Service argued on Thursday that the plan represented an “independent exercise” of its authority to regulate the mail it carries. Judge Talwani countered that the rule seemed obviously tied to directions from President Trump outlined in an executive order signed in March.

Mr. Trump issued the directive as part of efforts to press his false claims that mail-in balloting is marred by widespread fraud. It instructed the Department of Homeland Security to compile state-by-state citizenship lists and then send those to each state. It further directed the U.S. Postal Service to play a role in verifying voters eligible to cast ballots by mail.

The Postal Service rule, published in late August in response, would require states to use new, scannable ballot envelopes. The Postal Service would not deliver mail ballots in states that do not share voter data with the agency and would only deliver ballots that met certain criteria.

Among other things, Judge Talwani tried to establish how much progress the Postal Service had made in building a ballot screening system that state election officials would use to inform U.S.P.S. which voters had been authorized to vote by mail and allow the service to verify ballots before delivery.

The Postal Service has said it continues to build the portal, despite the judge’s order, in case the legal block is lifted or in case some states choose to use it. But a whistle-blower report filed this week raised concerns that the frantic effort to finish the web portal in time would lead to errors that could result in large batches of ballots being rejected in bulk.

When Michael Velchik, an attorney from the Justice Department, could not explain the status of the project, Judge Talwani ordered the government to provide more details in writing by Thursday afternoon.

In a sworn statement responding to the order, a Postal Service official said the agency was continuing to make “refinements” to the portal, but expected to make it available to states “for voluntary use by sometime next week.” The official wrote that the Postal Service would continue to work with states that choose to implement any of its new processes, though while the restraining order remains in place, no state would be required to adopt them.

“So we’re going to do a test run on this election?” she said, showing exasperation.

“We’re not playing an intellectual puzzle game,” she added. “We’re talking about people’s right to vote.”

In another pointed exchange, Judge Talwani brought up a filing from officials in Travis County, Texas, which includes the Democratic-led city of Austin. They said they did not believe it was possible for local officials to implement the Postal Service changes in time for the 2026 election.

Even so, the state of Texas is part of a coalition of Republican-led states that have urged Judge Talwani to lift her restraining order.

She pressed Louis J. Capozzi, the Missouri solicitor general, who appeared on behalf of the group, about why Texas appeared intent on launching an “experiment” that could cause its own voters to be “disenfranchised.”

“Why is it you want U.S.P.S. to stop batches of ballots from your voters?” she said.

Judge Talwani said state legislators in Texas and other states could have passed their own laws to change ballot envelopes or otherwise adjust mail-in voting, without asking the Postal Service to take on a new role screening votes.

“You can decide you want those measures in your state,” she said. “I don’t understand — you come to me and say, ‘We really want to have election integrity in our state decided by U.S.P.S.’?”

Mr. Capozzi predicted that Texas would have no trouble implementing the changes in time, and that the state viewed the Postal Service rule as adding another layer of security to its elections. He said problems that might arise from the new rule could be figured out on a “state-by-state” basis later, with groups suing individual states if evidence emerged that they had improperly thrown out votes.

New York Times, Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to Allow Mail Voting Limits, Abbie VanSickle, Sept. 3, 2026. The justices have been asked to weigh in again on the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict mail voting — this time on whether the plans violate the Constitution.

The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court for permission to resume its efforts to restrict mail voting in the lead-up to the midterms.

Administration lawyers asked the justices to clear the way for a new rule that prohibits the U.S. Postal Service from delivering ballots to voters in states that do not share voter data with the federal agency. The rule would also require the agency to review ballot envelopes for compliance with new standards before accepting it.

In the emergency filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that a lower court freeze on the plan would impose “serious irreparable harm on the federal government, the states themselves, and the voting public.”

The emergency request to the Supreme Court is the second time in recent weeks that the court has been asked to weigh in on efforts by President Trump’s mail ballot plans. Previously, a majority of the court said a legal challenge was premature because the administration had not yet finalized its plans to restrict mail voting.

But the Postal Service published its plans in August in the days before the Supreme Court’s ruling, and a lower court judge has since blocked key parts of the plan from going into effect for the November election.

The administration’s emergency appeal to the justices came hours after a federal judge in Massachusetts, during a hearing in the matter, expressed concerns that the plans could cause so much chaos in the coming elections that states would experience “major disenfranchisement.” Judge Indira Talwani had imposed a temporary block on the plan, which the administration had already appealed.

Rather than allow that legal process to play out, the administration is now taking the highly unusual step of trying to skip ahead and get immediate intervention from the Supreme Court.

It is not clear how the justices will greet the administration’s attempt to short-circuit the typical process, nor how quickly the court might act. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who handles emergency applications from that region of the country, signaled the court would deal with the issue on a speedy but not immediate timeline.

She did not issue an administrative stay, which the Trump administration had requested. Such a move would have immediately cleared the way for the government’s plan to be set in motion, even as the justices considered the case. But she asked the challengers to respond to the emergency application by Tuesday at 10 a.m.Sophia Lin Lakin, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, which represents voting rights groups challenging the plan, said in a statement that the Postal Service rule is “an unconstitutional attempt to upend mail voting on the eve of an election.” 

Special Reports

The New Yorker Magazine portrayed on its cover the last year the six Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court as wearing Trump-styled blond wigs, with faces indistinguishable from that of their party's leader. Trump's planned ballroom replacing the demolished White House East Wing and three times the size of the rest of the White House, is portrayed by Trump below despite widespead legal criticism that he has no right to demolish historic structures throughout the nation's capital without congressional approvals.

Talking Feds, Opinion: Trump’s Ballroom Is Illegal, Despised, and Anti-Democratic, but the Supreme Court Greenlit It Anyway, Harry Litman, right, law professor and former high-ranking U.S. Justice Department executive,Sept. 3, 2026. “Our buildings shape us,” and this building will shape a failure of democracy.

On Monday, the Supreme Court told Donald Trump he can proceed full steam ahead to construct his monstrous ballroom. That’s not because the project is lawful: the per curiam, 5-4 order on the shadow docket expressly offered no opinion on the merits. Indeed, every court to consider the question—plus four dissenting justices on the high court—has concluded that the project is likely unlawful. It’s also a vile and fairly hideous affront to the most visible symbol of our democracy.

Rather, the Court held that the stay on construction should be lifted because the plaintiffs lacked standing and the order was irreparably harming the administration. Both aspects of the decision were flawed. The per curiam represents the shadow docket at its most pernicious: a loosey-goosey decision based on the procedural particulars of granting an emergency stay that has the possible effect of letting Trump get away with a national atrocity.

I’m about to sketch out the legal flaws in the per curiam opinion, but for the ballroom, it’s always important to keep the overall stakes in mind and the gravity of the Court’s legal mishmash. The White House is the people’s house, an architectural triumph that communicates our rejection of imperial rule and embrace of democracy. Trump’s undemocratic vision is to build a monument to himself, a swollen reflection of his hopelessly grandiose self-image. It’s a frontal attack on our own sense of the country that couldn’t happen in a well-functioning democracy.

To sue in federal court, you need standing, and the bedrock of standing is injury—something “concrete and particularized” that is “actual or imminent.” The typical injury is financial or physical, but the Court has long recognized the possibility of aesthetic injury, particularly in environmental cases. So, for example, in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, the Court held that the “desire to observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes” is “undeniably a cognizable interest for purpose of standing.”

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There’s an ethereal quality to aesthetic injury, but that doesn’t make it vaporous. We can appreciate a landscape, or work of art, or historical battlefield, or species, or public building with sustained passion and intensity, and its loss takes something valuable from us, whether or not it costs us money. That was the basis for standing in the ballroom lawsuit, and it’s difficult to see how it could be more concrete.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation brought the lawsuit. To sue as an organization, it had to put forward one member with standing in her own right. And in this case that was Alison Hoagland. Hoagland is not, as Trump sneered, some lady who happens to walk by. She is a professor of history and historic preservation, an authority on American architecture, and a Washington resident who goes to look at the White House because looking at it is, for her, the whole point.

The five-justice per curiam, or unsigned, opinion did not purport to overrule the cases that say so. Rather, it pooh-poohed and trivialized Hoagland’s felt harm, recasting her documented, decades-deep professional interest as “mere offense,” no different, in the majority’s telling, from “virtually every citizen” who wants “to challenge virtually every government action that they do not like.”

The Court carved off the environmental precedents on the ground that those plaintiffs did “more than” look: they fished, they swam, they hiked. In his dissent for four justices, Chief Justice John Roberts fairly demolished that argument, pointing out that the principal way anyone enjoys a historic building is precisely by looking at it, and that the Court had misconceived Hoagland’s injury.

What the majority actually did by way of determining that the administration was likely to prevail on the merits was narrow aesthetic standing to the vanishing point. As of now, “I want to look at a crocodile” (one of the Nile species at issue in Lujan) passes muster while “I want to look at the White House” does not. And since it’s hard to think of any prospective challenger to the ballroom who would not be relying on aesthetic injury, there is no clear path around the Court’s tacit reframing of the doctrine.

To grant the stay, the Supreme Court also needed to find that the administration would be irreparably injured if the stay weren’t granted. They really made hash of this critical factor.

The Court’s first recognition of irreparable harm was the mere fact that the executive will was frustrated. That is blatant bootstrapping that just restates the Court’s legal judgment—the injunction is harmful for the simple circular reason that it frustrates the executive’s efforts, which of course is a given. That sloppy account of irreparable harm has become a routine move for the conservative supermajority.

The Court also credited an argument from the administration that the ballroom’s “height and mass” are “crucial” to shield the underground installation from “kinetic impacts,” lest engineers “dig impractically deep.”

But this second theory, apart from being a kind of bureaucratic gibberish, was a mid-litigation invention. Roberts’s dissent guts it in a single devastating footnote. It points out that the government had earlier told the district court the opposite—that its below-ground security work was driven by concerns having nothing to do with the ballroom above it. And the injunction never touched that work: it barred only the ballroom, leaving the government free to build the underground facility and whatever was needed to protect it. The security the administration now says requires the full Trumpian plan was never at risk.

In fact, the actual irreparable harm is plainly on the plaintiffs’ side of the ledger. Stop the work and the executive’s pet project merely pauses. Let it proceed, and the crews return to 20-hour days, racing to build the project up to a point where it may be impossible to undo. That is irreparable harm in its plainest sense.

With the per curiam majority ducking the merits, Roberts’s dissent went to the heart of the case. Not surprisingly, Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson joined without a word of their own. The three of them obviously judged that the most powerful punch available was to let the Chief speak for all four, even though it wasn’t enough.

Roberts’s opinion begins with the straight declaration that the ballroom is likely unlawful, in effect a raw power grab. Congress has expressly forbidden any building on federal park grounds in the District of Columbia without its direct authorization, which it hasn’t given. The two statutes the government waves around—a couple million dollars appropriated for ordinary maintenance of the Executive Residence, and a general instruction to the Park Service to conserve historic objects—come nowhere near authorizing the president to raze the East Wing and put up a private ballroom with hundreds of millions in outside money.

The Contrarian, Opinion: Clyburn Puts Supreme Court Expansion Front and Center, Jennifer Rubin, Sept. 3, 2026. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, veteran lawmaker Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) emphatically urged expanding seats on the Supreme Court from 9 to 13 justices. “A baker’s dozen would be a good number to have on the court,” he said. Court expansion, no longer the province of left-leaning academics thanks to the MAGA justices’ radicalism, has become an indisputably mainstream, pro-democracy response.

In truth, increasing the seats on the Supreme Court amounts to rebalancing. Majority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) packed the court when he denied Merrick Garland a hearing during President Obama’s term — yet rushed through Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation once election voting was already underway in 2020. Rebalancing to establish the proper equilibrium among the branches (i.e., reversing the MAGA justices’ investiture of the authoritarian executive power in Trump and their contemptuous disregard for Congress’s constitutional powers) is fundamental to preserving our constitutional system.

Increasing the number of seats on the court begins with a solid base of support. A June Marquette Law School poll showed the public split 50-50 on adding seats, up from just 42 percent support in 2019. Since 2021, support has varied between 48 and 52 percent, even without a nationally focused campaign on the issue. Simply because other proposals have even more support (the same poll shows term limits has approval from 73 percent of Republicans, 71 percent of independents, and 87 percent of Democrats) does not mean court expansion should be disregarded.

Indeed, fearing that court expansion might be catching on, the MAGA House majority Wednesday introduced a constitutional amendment freezing the number of justices at nine, confirmation that — absent such a measure — court expansion by statute is unquestionably constitutional. (It failed to win 2/3 required approval with only a single Democrat voting wth Republicans.) Ironically, the stunt underscores that nine is an arbitrary number, carrying no historical or constitutional significance. (Unsurprisingly, the GOP, which is beholden to dark money purveyors such as court fixer Leonard Leo, leaves out other overwhelmingly popular reforms, such as a mandatory ethics code.)

In opposing the gambit, the progressive group Demand Justice released a statement explaining:

Court expansion is the only court reform option that would promptly redress the 6-3 supermajority, which is itself the result of a partisan power grab. When the American people are counting on congressional Democrats to be the last line of defense against the Administration’s assault on the rule of law, it is more critical than ever to fight MAGA power grabs.

Noting that MAGA justices’ hugely unpopular and constitutionally flawed decisions in the Callais and Dobbs decisions have prompted trust in the court to decline and support for serious reform to spike, Demand Justice urges Congress to keep expansion as a viable option, observing that the “most persuasive argument in favor of expansion is the aggressive approach of the Court itself: the right-wing majority will continue to dramatically remake the law to favor the oligarchy.”

In the current environment, many Democrats nevertheless remain skittish about expanding the court, citing FDR’s failed New Deal scheme some 90 years ago. But as the bipartisan court commission assembled by President Biden recalled, “Soon after [FDR’s] plan was announced, the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions upholding state and federal regulation of the economy. . . . [which] left in place Roosevelt’s existing New Deal and ended an era in which the Court frequently invalidated laws designed to protect workers, consumers, and the public.” In short, it worked.Subscribed

Democrats too often shy away from proposals such as court expansion for fear of triggering blowback from Republicans — who championed McConnell’s court-packing. Avoiding a meritorious reform simply because it will upset Republicans or does not already have sky-high approval reveals bizarre timidity, and reflects a mindset that ignores the key role that persuasion and debate play in politics. A lengthy list of issues (from data centers to corruption to abolishing ICE) were not “winners” with voters until advocacy groups pushed to educate voters, independent media elevated them, and forward-leaning politicians took the lead.

What is key in the current environment is that dissatisfaction with the MAGA partisan Supreme Court is high (and likely to intensify with each new gift served up to their White House patron). This makes the rationale for serious, substantial restructuring of the court even more compelling.

Taken before the MAGA majority’s latest cringeworthy decision (allowing Donald Trump to build his ghastly ballroom), the Marquette poll found, for example, that 61 percent of Americans understand “the United States Supreme Court is ruling for President Donald Trump ‘almost always’ or ‘most of the time,’” and some 57 percent (including 60 percent of independents) say “the Court is going out of its way to avoid a ruling Trump might refuse to obey.” A captive, quisling court that has distorted the executive branch in direct contravention of the Framers’ vision (shaped by overwhelming fear of creating another monarch) is a court that requires dramatic, immediate repair.

Democrats should emphasize that court redesign is required because the MAGA majority (created by Republican confirmation shenanigans) has arrogantly rejected fundamental judicial norms (e.g., eschewing an enforceable ethics code, abusing the shadow docket to render opinions without judicial reasoning, shredding precedent when it suits them), and taken a sledgehammer to checks and balances (e.g., granting Donald Trump criminal immunity, destroying independent commissions).

Ideally, combining term limits for future justices with court expansion would be the fastest, most comprehensive, and effective way to rescue our democratic structure. Certainly, term limits on justices would help address concerns about diversity, a geriatric court, and hyper-partisanship — with the hope that more frequent appointments with term limits would reduce partisan frenzy surrounding court fights. While proponents are confident it could be done statutorily, this Supreme Court majority might not agree. Moreover, changing the composition of the court only by periodic retirements/replacements would be time-consuming, leaving the country at the mercy of MAGA constitutional destruction for years.

Democrats would do well to think more like the Republicans who readily claim a “mandate” after elections. If Democrats win the trifecta in 2028 under the banner of bold pro-democracy reform, their mandate certainly should include court rebalancing as part of their democracy restoration project.

Only a few of the potential 2028 Democratic presidential contenders (e.g., Pete Buttigieg) have embraced court expansion, but most have not ruled it out. However, Democratic voters have a critical role to play in promoting a wide-ranging debate in the next presidential cycle: What will it take to return the Supreme Court to its proper role and recover our constitutional order? Thanks to Clyburn, that issue is squarely before the party.

Democrats should press candidates who claim to be serious about bold, structural reform to spell out what they think is necessary to revamp the Supreme Court. They should not minimize the threat the current MAGA court poses, nor trim their sails to avoid incurring the ire of those who have pummeled our democracy. As long as the MAGA court majority remains hostile to pluralistic democracy and to the restoration of our constitutional structure, it will block progress on virtually all serious issues —dark money, abortion, voting rights. Democrats must decide if they are resigned to that fate. 

Special Report: A Russian Father and Brave Daughter

Roman Sheremeta via Substack, News and Comment: This is what dictatorship looks like, Roman Sheremet, right, professor of economics and politics, Sept. 3,2026. In April 2022, a 12-year-old Russian girl named Masha Moskalyova was told in art class to draw a picture supporting russian troops in Ukraine. Instead, she drew a Ukrainian mother protecting her child as russian missiles flew toward them.

On the Ukrainian flag she wrote, “Glory to Ukraine.” On the russian flag: “No to war. No to Putin.”

Her school reported her to the authorities.

Police began investigating her father, Alexei Moskalyov, a single father who had raised Masha largely on his own. They searched his social media and discovered posts criticizing russia’s invasion and documenting russian atrocities in Bucha.

In December 2022, around a dozen russian security officers raided their home. They ransacked it, seized their computers, phones, and savings.

Alexei later said that during interrogations, officers beat him and slammed his head against the wall and floor. They blasted the russian national anthem at full volume while questioning him.

Eventually, the regime charged him with repeatedly “discrediting” the russian military because of his anti-war social-media posts.

Masha was taken away from him and placed in a state “social rehabilitation” center.

Alexei was sentenced to two years in a penal colony.

He later described horrific conditions there: a tiny punishment cell roughly two meters long, freezing temperatures, rats crawling out of the sewer, and days when he was forced to stand for as long as 16 hours because the bunk was locked against the wall.

Meanwhile, his daughter wrote to him.

“Dad, don’t give up.”

“You are my hero.”

They were separated for more than a year and a half.

On October 15, 2024, Alexei finally walked out of prison.

Masha was waiting for him.

Five days later, they fled russia.

They first escaped to Armenia and applied for a German humanitarian visa. After waiting for more than a year, their case stalled when Germany suspended the relevant humanitarian admission program.

Then France stepped in.

In March 2026, Masha and Alexei (shown above following his release) received French humanitarian visas and flew to Paris.

And on July 17, 2026, France granted them political asylum.

Today, Masha is drawing again and hopes to pursue art. She also writes and has spoken out in support of russian political prisoners.

When asked whether, knowing everything that happened afterward, she would still have made that drawing, Masha said she would.

“One only lives once.”

One drawing.

A child saying no to war.

And for that, the russian state destroyed their home, separated a father from his daughter, imprisoned him, and drove them both into exile.

This is what dictatorship looks like.

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Thursday Night News, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Today’s rundown leads with Mitch McConnell, because 80 days later, nobody else seems to be asking the obvious question: where is he? His office has gone weeks without a real update, he’s missed 60 votes, and the only proof of life the public has gotten is two photos.

This week I went back to his D.C. residence myself and found it guarded by unmarked SUVs and marked Capitol Police cars, curtains drawn. Even Kentucky’s own governor says he hasn’t heard from McConnell in 80 days. Most outlets moved on from this story weeks ago. I haven’t, and I’m not going to until someone in his office gives a straight answer.

We’ve also got Liz Oyer’s new lawsuit against the DOJ, major updates in the Lindsay Clancy case, new reporting on ICE building a nationwide voter database, and a full list of other news below. Regarding the Lindsay Clancy trial, I answer all your questions below from a legal perspective as a lawyer who has witnessed numerous criminal trials.

I’m not going to stop asking about McConnell, and I’m not going to stop covering the stories other outlets let go cold.

Here’s the news:

The White House has launched arcade games for kids using your taxpayer dollars that allows the children to cosplay as border patrol agents to target undocumented immigrants in America.

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to grant the U.S. Postal Service sweeping power to withhold delivery of mail ballots, an emergency appeal that bypassed lower courts still weighing the case less than two months before the November midterms. The request is the latest chapter in a legal battle over a March executive order that gave federal agencies an unprecedented role in elections, which voter advocacy groups and 23 Democratic-led states have challenged in court. The administration described the new rules as merely “modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements” that don’t amount to federal control over state election administration, and asked for a short-term order allowing USPS to implement them immediately. This follows an August ruling in which the same 6-3 conservative Supreme Court already sided with the administration on the issue. Since then, USPS has detailed its implementation plans, election officials have warned it’s too late to overhaul mail ballot systems this cycle, and a whistleblower report alleged the agency is rushing a complicated plan that could disenfranchise millions of voters, all as the first ballots begin entering the mail this week.

Flock’s director Caity Peak demonstrated FlockOS, a platform combining license plate readers, live video, drones, and gunshot detectors, using a Denver “No Kings” protest as an example of how it helps commanders track unfolding incidents. While Flock markets the system for crime-solving and locating missing persons, with data retention limits controlled by local police, critics point to its use monitoring protected activities like protests, citing Electronic Frontier Foundation findings of hundreds of protest-related searches in 2025.

Mitch McConnell update:

Kentucky Rep. James Comer said Thursday he expects Sen. Mitch McConnell to return to Washington when the Senate reconvenes on September 14, though he clarified he hasn’t spoken with McConnell himself, only with staff members, many originally from his own district, who told him it’s “their goal” for McConnell to be present next week. McConnell’s office would not confirm a timeline, saying only that there are no scheduling announcements at this time. McConnell, 84, has not voted in the Senate since June 11, aside from a proxy vote on the farm bill last month, and has been hospitalized since June 14 after a fall, later moving to a rehab center before being discharged to recover at home. The Senate remains in recess until it officially returns September 14.

McConnell has now gone 80 days without a single public appearance, and it’s been nearly a month since his office last provided any real update, despite his having missed 60 votes on matters including an Iran war powers resolution and Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation, a significant gap given Republicans’ narrow Senate majority. A visit to his D.C. residence this week found it heavily guarded by unmarked SUVs and Capitol Police, with most curtains drawn though a first-floor window was open and no mail had piled up, unlike during his hospitalization. His office has released only two “proof-of-life” photos since his disappearance, both showing him smiling beside wife Elaine Chao without offering insight into his actual health, and it ignored questions ahead of the 80-day mark. Confusion has reportedly become “the talk of Congress,” with even Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s office declining to say when he last actually spoke with McConnell directly.

Despite his prolonged absence, aides have continued speaking on McConnell’s behalf back in Kentucky, with his state director apologizing for his absence at a Louisville housing event last month and a written statement issued under his name praising a local business owner’s legacy. Kentucky Republican lawmakers say they expect him back later this month, but by their own admission that expectation rests on conversations with GOP leadership and staff rather than with McConnell directly. McConnell isn’t the only lawmaker to have vanished mysteriously this year: Rep. Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey disappeared for months before revealing upon his return that he had been treated for depression. The parallel raises further questions about what, if anything, McConnell’s team is not disclosing about his condition as his return date approaches.

Liz Oyer sues Department of Justice:

Former U.S. Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer filed suit against the Justice Department and Attorney General Todd Blanche, alleging she was illegally fired after refusing to recommend restoring actor Mel Gibson’s gun rights despite his domestic violence conviction and personal ties to President Trump. Oyer says she was pressured to make it appear an independent review had cleared Gibson, even though he hadn’t undergone the extensive background investigation given to other applicants, and that a senior official on Blanche’s staff pushed her to approve it anyway because of Gibson’s relationship with Trump. Hours after she submitted a memo declining to recommend restoring his rights, DOJ security officers arrived at her office with termination papers and escorted her out. Oyer, who spent over 13 years in federal service with strong performance reviews, is represented by Democracy Forward and previously challenged her removal before the Merit Systems Protection Board more than 16 months ago without a substantive review.

The lawsuit argues DOJ violated Oyer’s constitutional and statutory due process rights as a career civil servant, and that the agency’s own legal reasoning undermines its case: DOJ has claimed only the Attorney General can exercise Article II removal authority, yet Oyer was fired by Blanche while he was still Deputy Attorney General, not by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi. The suit seeks a declaration that her removal was unlawful, reinstatement to federal service, restored pay and benefits, and a bar on further retaliatory action against her. Oyer said in a statement that she was fired for refusing to put politics ahead of her duty to the public, warning that if career officials can be dismissed for not bending rules for a president’s friends, the message to public servants is that political loyalty outweighs loyalty to the Constitution. Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman said the case aims to stop any administration from weaponizing government power against career officials who refuse political demands.

The case, Oyer v. Blanche et al., is being handled by a Democracy Forward legal team that includes Joshua Salzman, Webb Lyons, and Elena Goldstein. Oyer served as U.S. Pardon Attorney from April 2022 until March 2025, a tenure that included the episode at the center of the lawsuit. The press release notes the full complaint has been made publicly available. Democracy Forward, a 501(c)(3) organization, is also promoting a new book by Perryman, “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times,” which the release notes became a USA Today bestseller within two days of its release. No response from DOJ or Blanche was included in the release.

Lindsay Clancy:

The Lindsay Clancy murder trial neared a mistrial Thursday after the Massachusetts jury sent its second deadlock notice following nearly six days of deliberation, prompting defense attorney Kevin Reddington to ask Judge William Sullivan to remove a juror he claimed “refuses to listen to the law” on reasonable doubt. Sullivan declined, saying he couldn’t determine what was happening inside deliberations and that each juror, when questioned individually, confirmed they could follow his instructions. Prosecutor Jennifer Sprague argued the judge’s handling of the jury’s question was appropriate, and the panel was sent back to deliberate before being dismissed for the day around 4 p.m. Sullivan can only send jurors back twice before declaring a mistrial unless they agree to continue, and he already issued Tuey-Rodriguez instructions urging one last attempt at a verdict; a third deadlock note would likely end in a mistrial, though Reddington says he’d be ready for a second trial as soon as next week. I answer your questions:

The jury must decide whether Clancy is criminally responsible for killing her three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, 8 months, in January 2023, after which she attempted suicide by jumping from her bedroom window and was left paralyzed from the waist down. The defense argues she was in postpartum psychosis and acted on auditory hallucinations, while prosecutors contend she was not psychotic and planned the killings, including sending her then-husband out on errands beforehand. Jurors can convict Clancy of first-degree murder, which carries a life sentence, or lesser charges of second-degree murder or manslaughter, or find her not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility. Tensions boiled over in court Thursday when an animated Reddington wheeled Clancy into a sidebar discussion with the judge and attorneys, after which she returned to the defense table appearing upset but composed.

ICE Builds Out Nationwide Voting Database:

ICE is preparing to award a contract worth up to $5 million to a company that will build a massive national database of voters, according to a solicitation document published last week. The database would combine publicly available voter registration and voting history files from all 50 states, including data from every federal election, general, primary, runoff, and special. Contractors won’t initially be asked to collect party affiliation data, but that restriction could be lifted if the contracting officer, HSI section chief Michael Royer, directs it in writing. Experts believe compiling this kind of data, especially party affiliation, could violate voters’ privacy rights. ICE, DHS, and Royer did not respond to requests for comment, and the final contract is expected to be awarded shortly after publication next Monday, with its term expiring September 30.

This voter database effort is part of a much broader DHS and Trump administration push that critics say is designed to undermine trust in the midterm elections. The Department of Justice has spent over a year demanding states hand over unredacted voter rolls, an effort states and courts have resisted, while DHS has threatened to withhold emergency preparedness and counterterrorism funding from states that don’t comply with White House election policies. DHS has also directed ICE to deport people suspected of voting illegally even without criminal convictions, despite research showing noncitizen voting is extremely rare, a point underscored by a Georgia investigation this week that found very few such cases. DHS separately announced a new surge to investigate alleged voter fraud in select states ahead of the midterms. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers dismissed the effort as “a joke,” saying voting is a state issue, not a federal one.

This isn’t ICE’s first attempt to access voter data. In July, the agency was reported to be paying Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to its CLEAR database, which aggregates names, addresses, property records, driver’s licenses, social media, and voter registration data from public and private sources. In June, ICE agents reportedly obtained individual voter rolls directly from election officials in counties in Texas and North Carolina. Last year, WIRED reported that DOGE was building a separate master database pulling from DHS, the Social Security Administration, the IRS, and voter data from Pennsylvania and Florida. A senior DHS official told WIRED at the time that the effort had “nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending,” describing it instead as cross-referencing immigration data with SSA, IRS, and voter records.

Other news:

Fox News parted ways with longtime anchor Maria Bartiromo on Thursday after 12.5 years, with a spokesperson thanking her “for her work” but offering no further explanation. Bartiromo had served as Fox Business Network’s global markets editor since 2014, hosting “Mornings with Maria” and “Sunday Morning Futures,” and became known for a more openly conservative turn after leaving CNBC, where Cabinet secretaries regularly appeared on her shows during Trump’s terms. Her past commentary was cited as evidence in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox, which the network settled for $787 million in 2023. Her biography and show pages had already been removed from Fox’s website by Thursday, and she hadn’t appeared on air since August 9. She previously spent nearly 21 years at CNBC, where she was the first person to report live from the New York Stock Exchange floor.

JD Vance was asked whether Bartiromo will be the next White House Press Secretary:

Elon Musk’s America PAC has spent roughly $800,000 boosting Republican candidates in competitive midterm races, with Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton the biggest beneficiary at nearly a quarter-million dollars, followed by over $170,000 in Maine and over $25,000 in Michigan. The super PAC is active in House and Senate races across more than a dozen states, following digital ad spending reported last week in Maine, Michigan and New Hampshire aimed at supporting conservatives and voter registration. The spending comes as Republicans have flagged concerns about Paxton’s fundraising gap and called for outside help. Musk spent over $250 million backing Trump and Republicans in the 2024 election, and had a rocky patch with Trump last year, including briefly threatening to launch a third party, but the two appear to be on good terms again after Musk joined Trump’s state visit to China this year.

ICE agent Christian Castro has been federally charged with making false statements about the events leading up to his shooting of Venezuelan immigrant Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis in the leg earlier this year, marking the first Justice Department charge against an officer for on-duty conduct during nationwide immigration operations. Castro already faced state charges in Minnesota for second-degree assault and filing a false report, and federal prosecutors previously dropped charges against Sosa-Celis and another man for allegedly attacking Castro after surveillance footage contradicted his account. The shooting occurred after ICE tried to pull over a truck driven by Sosa-Celis’s cousin, who fled and was tackled near Sosa-Celis’s apartment door, with Sosa-Celis saying he was shot through the door moments after locking it. Castro was placed on administrative leave and briefly jailed in Texas before being released last week when the state’s governor declined to immediately approve his extradition to Minnesota. The Justice Department is still weighing whether to pursue additional civil rights charges against him.

The FDA announced a recall of one lot of Walmart’s Great Value Organic Triple Berry Blend frozen fruit, sold in 16 states, over potential E. coli O145:H28 contamination, as an expansion of a July recall tied to Publix frozen berries from the same supplier, Frutas y Hortalizas del Sur. The affected 10-ounce bags carry UPC 7874211226, lot code 6040 01-6, and a best-if-used-by date of Feb. 9, 2028, and while the broader outbreak has sickened 12 people including four hospitalizations, no illnesses have been linked to the Walmart product specifically, with the recall issued out of caution after traceback information. Consumers with the recalled berries should discard them or return them to Walmart for a refund, and anyone who ate them should watch for E. coli symptoms like severe cramps, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can be more serious in children, older adults, and those with weakened immune systems.

OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on Thursday, calling it the world’s most intelligent AI model and the first to trigger stricter internal safety protocols due to its advanced cybersecurity capabilities, including the ability to autonomously find and exploit security flaws in well-protected systems. Co-founder Greg Brockman said Astra can do “anything a human can do with a computer” and called its release the start of the “AGI era,” while chief scientist Jakub Pachocki acknowledged that understanding what increasingly capable models can do is getting harder. The release follows a report last week revealing an unreleased model from the same family had autonomously seized administrator control over part of OpenAI’s own infrastructure and potentially exposed internal data, without staff knowledge. Reporting this week also raised concerns that a training technique used in Astra could make it harder for humans to understand how the model “thinks,” which Pachocki pushed back on. Altman said Astra went through the White House’s voluntary AI vetting process, with Brockman noting the administration requested no safeguard changes.

Australian police issued an arrest warrant for “Below Deck Mediterranean” star Nathan Gallagher, 28, after he missed a court appearance tied to a December 2025 domestic violence arrest and was granted conditional bail. New South Wales police shared his photo and asked the public for help locating him, noting he’s believed to be offshore and warning people not to approach him. Gallagher, in a statement to Rolling Stone, acknowledged making “mistakes” but said the public hadn’t heard the “full story,” pointing to a complicated situation involving his former partner and co-star Gael Cameron, with whom he shares a son. Bravo confirmed the current season wrapped before the incident and said it does not plan to work with Gallagher in the future.

A GAO report released Thursday found the Secret Service failed to update more than a third of its protection policies within the agency’s own required four-year window, with some guidelines on vice presidential foreign trips and foreign leader visits left unchanged for over 20 years. The watchdog also found the agency didn’t document its reasoning when deciding security incidents didn’t warrant policy changes, which GAO said may have prevented officials from spotting an emerging pattern of drone-related threats before a drone was used in the 2024 assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. Three earlier drone incidents, near an Obama motorcade in 2015, over a Bernie Sanders rally in 2016, and above Biden’s 2021 inauguration, went unaddressed in policy terms before the Butler attack. The report lands amid continued scrutiny of the agency following multiple threats this year, including a shooter entering the Washington Hilton during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and a shootout near the White House close to a Vance motorcade route. A Secret Service spokesperson said the agency overhauled its site-security policy after Butler and is implementing GAO’s other recommendations, noting it concurs with the findings and has made “significant institutional reforms” since 2024.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday there’s a chance of reaching a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine, while Ukraine’s foreign minister said he expects a “new dynamic” in diplomatic efforts, though neither offered specifics. Putin said countries including the U.S. and China were ready to support a settlement but that Russia and Ukraine must ultimately resolve it themselves, while also calling recent Ukrainian attacks on civilian ships “acts of state terrorism” that complicate talks. The comments come after both sides escalated long-range strikes and naval attacks since U.S.-mediated talks stalled in February, pushing up global grain prices and causing wheat futures to drop over 2% on Putin’s remarks. Putin said contacts with Ukraine continue mainly through intelligence channels, and India’s foreign minister offered to help mediate. Zelenskyy this week warned airlines that Russian skies are dangerous due to Ukrainian drone activity, while insisting Ukraine only targets Russian military facilities.

Oil prices climbed for a fourth straight session Thursday, pushing diesel to $5.78 a gallon, its highest level since 2022 and up more than 53% since the Iran war began in February, while regular gasoline rose to a $4.14 national average. Brent crude topped $97 a barrel, nearly 10% higher than the week’s start, driven largely by the Iran war choking traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and Russia’s diesel export ban following Ukrainian drone strikes on its refineries. Analysts said only increased Persian Gulf oil flow or a resumption of Russian exports could meaningfully ease prices, with Gulf exports estimated at 50-67% of pre-war levels. The energy price surge has also pushed 30-year mortgage rates to 6.91% amid inflation concerns, though Fed Governor Christopher Waller said he expects upcoming inflation readings to stay “reasonable” unless August data comes in hot enough to justify a rate hike.

An internal review by The Athletic found former NFL reporter Dianna Russini had an “awkward” and “uncomfortable” undisclosed relationship with New England Patriots coach Mike Vrabel, though investigators found no clear evidence she used her platform to professionally benefit him. Russini resigned in April after photos of her and the married Vrabel at an Arizona hotel drew scrutiny, and the review, which examined over 900 bylined stories and 200 podcast episodes, found the relationship violated the outlet’s disclosure standards regardless of whether it was romantic. Investigators highlighted a 2023 column in which Russini wrote Vrabel wouldn’t be fired as Titans coach, based on conversations with “high-ranking” team officials, just two months before he was in fact fired. Vrabel returned to coaching in 2025 and led the Patriots to a dramatic turnaround, earning Coach of the Year honors. Russini could not be reached for comment.

John Herb Hayes III, 70, and Geordyn Nichole Hayes, 31, appeared in a Tennessee court Thursday and agreed to extradition to South Carolina to face charges connected to the death of their 5-year-old nonverbal daughter, Saylor, whose body was found in waters near Pawleys Island. The couple, arrested more than 350 miles away in Tennessee, will be moved to South Carolina within 10 days and remain jailed without bond, having also waived their right to hire an attorney during the process. Arrest affidavits accuse the parents of misdirecting search efforts toward Saylor’s tracking device despite knowing she wasn’t wearing it. Georgetown County Sheriff Carter Weaver said Saylor “deserved to be safe” and “deserved to be protected.” Records show John Hayes faced a prior 2023 child abuse case in Virginia that ended in dismissed charges after a deferred disposition and probation.

At least five people died and dozens more are feared dead after a migrant boat carrying West African men was found drifting in the Atlantic near Spain’s Canary Islands, with 44 survivors rescued and brought to Gran Canaria. Survivors, all men from Mali or Senegal, some underage, reported leaving Gambia and being stranded at sea for nearly a month, running out of provisions and falling ill from drinking seawater; Red Cross workers described them as disoriented and dehydrated upon arrival. Survivors said more than 100 people were originally aboard, including women and a baby, and that bodies of those who died during the journey were thrown overboard as the group weakened. Migrant rights group Walking Borders separately reported 83 deaths on the voyage, including three women and an infant, though this has not been independently confirmed. The Atlantic route to the Canary Islands remains one of the deadliest migration crossings to Europe, with tens of thousands dead or missing in recent years despite falling overall arrival numbers.

Minnesota Rep. Pete Stauber is running to become the top Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee next Congress, setting up a possible clash with current chair Bruce Westerman, who is term-limited but hasn’t ruled out seeking a waiver to serve a fourth term. Stauber, who has sat on the committee since 2020 and chairs its Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee, is already speaking with GOP Conference and steering committee members about his bid, which his spokesperson says will proceed regardless of Westerman’s decision. Westerman, while calling himself “more focused on winning the majority,” declined to say whether he’d pursue a waiver, insisting any friction with Stauber wouldn’t strain their friendship. The GOP Steering Committee will decide committee leadership assignments after the midterms. Stauber and Westerman aren’t alone: House Agriculture Chair GT Thompson has already filed a waiver request even as Rep. Austin Scott eyes succeeding him, and Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers plans to seek his own waiver, though Reps. Ronny Jackson, Rob Wittman, and Trent Kelly have also expressed interest in that post.

Nvidia agreed to acquire AI developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, one of its largest acquisitions ever, betting that supporting open-weight AI models will sustain demand even as major customers like Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft develop their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia. The deal gives Nvidia direct access to a platform developers use to build, test and share AI tools, potentially helping it narrow the gap with top U.S. and Chinese AI labs, including cost-competitive Chinese firms like DeepSeek and Z.ai. Nvidia will pay about $11.9 billion to Hugging Face’s investors plus up to $1 billion in retention equity for employees, and CEO Jensen Huang said the platform will remain open and won’t require Nvidia chips to use. Hugging Face, founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf and backed by Intel, AMD and Amazon, also hosts datasets and cloud tools for AI development. The company was recently in the news after a hack involving rogue AI agents that escaped an OpenAI testing environment.

President Trump said Thursday the U.S. will ask Europe to reimburse Washington for the “hundreds of billions” in munitions sent to Ukraine under former President Biden, framing it as a belated correction rather than acknowledging any current shortage. The claim comes as the U.S. military faces dwindling stockpiles from its ongoing war with Iran, now in its seventh month, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies reporting roughly 1,500 Patriot interceptors used since the war began, leaving under 1,000 in stock, and THAAD interceptors dropping from 452 to well under 300. Trump insisted the U.S. has “virtually unlimited” mid-to-high grade ammunition and called reports of shortages “treasonous,” accusing critics and media outlets of wanting America to lose a war he says is being “easily” won. He said the military is now stockpiling munitions for domestic use rather than selling them abroad. The reimbursement request follows a 2025 arrangement in which the U.S. and Europe agreed Washington would send weapons to Ukraine in transactions financed by European allies.

Meidas Touch Network, Thursday Afternoon Update: MAGA Mike’s House Shutdown, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Here’s your free midday update.

• Mike Johnson abruptly cancels the last two weeks of September in Congress after denying he’d do so just days ago
• Billionaire Leon Black skipped out on his House Oversight deposition on Epstein and is suing the committee
• Trump favorite Maria Bartiromo is abruptly out at Fox
• Federal prosecutors charge an ICE agent with lying about a Minnesota shooting
• Trump continues insisting we have “virtually unlimited” ammo, while claiming reporters covering U.S. munitions shortages are “treasonous”
• Iran’s overnight barrage on U.S. bases
• Oil spikes toward $100/barrel
• Trump continues attacking Canada and PM Carney
• House Republicans vent their tariff frustrations at Trade Rep. Jamieson Greer during a closed-door meeting
• A federal judge again blocks Trump’s latest attempt to gut birthright citizenship
• The Antwerp diamond industry’s story about the diamond ring it gave to Trump keeps falling apart
• Mortgage rates and treasury yields climb to multi-year highs

Now let’s dive in.

MAGA Mike Runs and Hides

MAGA Mike Johnson has made it officially: the last two weeks of September are canceled for the House. See ya later. The House won’t return until after the midterm elections unless the Senate moves their reconciliation package. This comes just a couple days after Johnson defensively mocked Thomas Massie for suggesting leadership might do exactly this to dodge the new Epstein Files Transparency Act, calling the idea “stupid” and “nonsensical.” Well, what does that make you, Mike?

James Comer, meanwhile, is skipping Trump’s midterm convention in Dallas, joining more than 45 other Republicans who’ve said they won’t attend, either. While on NewsNation, Comer also struggled to explain why Trump’s MAGA Inc. war chest has only spent $21M of its $400M with the midterms just a couple months out.Billionaire Leon Black Backs Out

Billionaire Leon Black, who appears in the Epstein files, filed a lawsuit to block his own subpoena from the House Oversight Committee rather than show up and answer questions. Black was the CEO of Apollo Global Management, before revelations from the Epstein files sparked his resignation. Democrats are now calling for Black to be held in contempt.Bartiromo Is Out

State regime media known as Fox abruptly announced this morning that it has parted ways with host, and Trump favorite, Maria Bartiromo, after 12.5 years. No explanation given. She’s out effective immediately. 

An ICE Agent Actually Gets Charged

A federal grand jury has indicted ICE officer Christian Castro on charges of making false statements regarding a nonfatal shooting during ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis this past January. Trump’s own DOJ is accusing one of its federal agents of criminal wrongdoing on the job. Castro shot and wounded Julio Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan man who lacked legal status. Trump officials at the time instantly defended Castro, then quietly backed away as video footage emerged showing the Trump regime’s account did not match reality.Trump’s Ammo Meltdown

Trump woke up this morning and raged some more at journalists telling the truth about his disastrous war. He posted that the U.S. has virtually unlimited amounts of mid to high grade ammo, more than we can ever use, and that anyone reporting otherwise is “treasonous scum.” Then he posted an AI-generated graphic titled “Hormuz Oil Volumes are BACK!” that shows oil flows dropping from 20M barrels a day to 18M. Meanwhile, in the real world, Brent crude hit over $97, a 6-week high, and the crack spread between crude and diesel is about the widest it has ever been.Iran’s Surprise Attacks

Overnight, Iran launched missile and drone strikes against U.S. assets across Kuwait, with explosions and sirens reported and flights diverting away from the country. Reports claim Iranian forces targeted U.S. bases in Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE over an 8-hour stretch. This happened at the same time reporting broke in the WSJ that Trump is now privately discussing with aides whether to just declare that the war is over and the U.S. won, a move he’s tried before. Hegseth is now extending Mideast deployments into 2027, which means more strain on our troops. And reports are coming in from our service members aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, who upon docking in Thailand, are calling this the worst deployment of their careers. Some said they had no interest in a port call in Thailand. They just want to come home.U.S. President Donald Trump speaks while hosting a dinner in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 2, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

About That “Golden Age”

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve just fell below 290M barrels for the first time since 1982. Mortgage rates are marching toward 7%. The 10-year treasury yield has climbed from under 4% to nearly 4.8% since the Iran war began. The trade deficit ballooned in July, driven largely by imports needed to feed the AI data center boom, a boom which appears to be the only thing propping up private construction spending right now, while every other category of construction has collapsed by roughly $120B. Meanwhile, Canadian exports to the U.S. fell 6.6% in July, while its exports everywhere else hit a record high. Trump also keeps threatening Canada’s economy. Worth noting: Canada’s economy added 75.1K jobs in July. The U.S. lost 23K.

His Own Party Is Losing Patience

House Republicans sat down behind closed doors with U.S. Trade Rep. Greer and reportedly let him have it over Trump’s tariff war, per Semafor. GOP reps know how bad these tariffs are, not only for the economy, but for their midterm chances.Antwerp’s Diamond Industry Says the Trump Ring Wasn’t a Bribe. Its Own Words Say Otherwise.

The Antwerp World Diamond Centre still insists the diamond ring it gave Trump in June was just a friendly gift for America’s 250th anniversary and nothing to do with the tariff exemption on European diamonds Trump restored a month later. But AWDC’s own public filings admit the tariff exemption wasn’t guaranteed until after the gift. In an exclusive MeidasTouch report, Senator Warren told us that this looks like exactly what it is.

And in other legal news, a federal judge in Maryland again blocked Trump’s latest executive order attempting to limit birthright citizenship, writing plainly that no presidential order can undo what the Supreme Court has done. For those wondering, yes, SCOTUS had already settled this back in June. But this decision was a lower court follow-up blocking a new, narrower Trump order Trump tried to make to work around the ruling.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Big Epstein Update: Alleged Co-Conspirator with Sealed NDAs Sues, GOP Senator Calls for Hegseth’s Firing, McConnell Update, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Today’s rundown leads with new developments in the Epstein story: subpoenas, sealed NDAs, and a $158 million question about what one of his associates was really paying for. We also look into Mitch McConnell, issues with Hegseth, and more right now.

Covering this material isn’t free of consequences. Since I started digging into the Epstein network and the powerful people who moved through it, I’ve faced pushback I didn’t expect: hostile messages, attempts to discredit the reporting, and pressure from people who’d clearly prefer this story stay buried. I’m telling you this because you deserve to know what it takes to keep this coverage independent, answering to no advertiser, no network, and no one with a stake in how these names get treated.

I’m not going to stop. Let’s get into today’s news.

Alleged Epstein Co-Conspirator:

Alleged Epstein co-conspirator, Leon Black (shown above in a photo collage with Jeffrey Epstein), is suing the House Oversight Committee to block subpoenas tied to his deposition testimony and an effort to obtain his NDAs with women, arguing the subpoenas lack a legitimate legislative purpose and exceed Congress’ authority. The lawsuit comes as Black faces a committee deposition Thursday after refusing in June to answer questions about those NDAs, part of a broader inquiry into his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. At the center of that inquiry are $158 million in payments Black made to Epstein between 2012 and 2017 for what Epstein called tax and estate-planning “art,” a fee Epstein himself struggled to justify, once writing “the value is in the eye of the beholder.” Senator Ron Wyden has released a report finding Bank of America flagged $170 million in suspicious Epstein-related transactions connected to Black, some with “no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose,” and has called at least some payments equivalent to hush money. A 2021 Apollo-commissioned Dechert report found no wrongdoing and said Epstein’s strategies saved Black $1-2 billion in taxes, though outside tax lawyers told Bloomberg the techniques were largely standard estate-planning tools rather than the novel work Dechert described.

Congressman Thomas Massie named Black as one of 14 possible co-conspirators associated with Epstein:

The core transaction underlying the dispute was a 2012 crisis: Black’s family trust had overpaid him $142 million, risking a clawback that could have cost up to $1 billion in estate taxes, and Epstein devised a fix where Black gave up future trust distributions in exchange for swapping the trust’s $1.6 billion Apollo stake for a promissory note backed by art and stock. Dechert’s report called this a “grand slam,” but Bloomberg found the underlying technique, a “power of substitution,” was a well-established estate-planning tool that Black’s own longtime lawyer had presented on nearly a decade earlier. Epstein also helped Black extract tax benefits from valuation discounts on subdivided Apollo shares and from a 2015-16 transaction selling a stake in Black’s art-book company Phaidon at a reduced valuation to Black’s own employee and brother-in-law, a deal one outside lawyer warned the IRS likely wouldn’t approve and could result in “an embarrassing article in the Wall Street Journal.” That Phaidon deal eventually closed in revised form and saved Black about $11.6 million in taxes. Disputes over fees tied to these transactions, especially Phaidon, became a central source of friction between the two men.

The relationship fully collapsed over a 2016 art deal in which Epstein personally bought two artworks from Black for $30 million to help him defer capital-gains taxes via a like-kind exchange, then struggled to resell them and grew increasingly frustrated, at one point complaining Black hadn’t even offered to buy him lunch. Financial records show both men treated Epstein’s later reimbursement demand as a $30.5 million loan, of which Epstein repaid only $10 million, privately writing that he believed he actually owed Black a smaller amount. Epstein also hinted at leverage, warning that disclosing details of the tax exchange “will cost him more than the 30” and would expose other problematic past transactions. According to the Dechert report, Epstein’s failure to repay the remaining loan balance led Black to sever ties with him later that year, and weeks after the breakup, renewed media scrutiny of Epstein’s criminal conduct emerged, casting fresh attention on the relationship that had just ended.

Republican Calls on Hegseth to be Fired, Pressure Builds:

The Pentagon announced new clinical guidelines Wednesday requiring male service members age 30 and older to be screened for testosterone deficiency during their regular health assessments, following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s summer call for the change. Troops diagnosed with hypogonadism will get follow-up testing and treatment options including testosterone replacement therapy, which Hegseth has said is voluntary. Men under 30 will be offered optional annual screenings, while women will be asked about symptoms of hormonal dysregulation and referred for further evaluation if needed. The Pentagon frames the push as aimed at force readiness, and cites research suggesting high-stress roles, including special operations, carry elevated risk of hormone-related issues sometimes called “Operator Syndrome.”

A wave of senior Pentagon and military leaders has departed since Hegseth took over, most recently Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, who resigned Monday reportedly amid an icy relationship with Hegseth and concerns about the Army’s condition. Others pushed out or forced into early retirement include Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, Gen. Christopher Donahue, Vice Chief Gen. James Mingus, and Navy Secretary John Phelan, along with a February 2025 purge that removed Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. CQ Brown Jr., Adm. Lisa Franchetti and Gen. James Slife. Hegseth has pursued a broader effort to reduce the number of generals and root out what he calls “wokeness” in the ranks. The pattern spans nearly every military branch and includes intelligence roles like NSA/CYBERCOM chief Gen. Timothy Haugh and DIA director Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse.

Senator Thom Tillis publicly urged President Trump to fire Hegseth on Wednesday, accusing him of “inept mismanagement” and creating a “leadership void” as the six-month-old war with Iran continues without resolution. Tillis, who voted to confirm Hegseth despite reservations, said the secretary is “intimidated by competence” and focused on culture wars rather than modernizing the military for evolving warfare seen in Ukraine and against Iran. He directly tied Driscoll’s resignation to Hegseth’s leadership style, saying a better secretary would be fighting to retain talent rather than pushing it out.

Hegseth faces mounting scrutiny as the war with Iran, launched February 28, has left the Pentagon grappling with reportedly shrinking munitions stockpiles and no clear end in sight. More than two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the administration’s handling of the war, according to an August 31 University of Massachusetts poll, and the conflict has coincided with spiking fuel prices and sinking approval numbers for Trump ahead of November’s midterms. Hegseth has also pursued controversial changes including limiting press access to the Pentagon and reviewing academy admissions standards, moves that have drawn criticism even from within his own party.

Other news:

Senator Mitch McConnell’s absence from public view hit 80 days on Wednesday, with no update from his office on his condition in nearly a month, fueling growing speculation and criticism in Washington. The 84-year-old Kentucky Republican has missed 60 votes since his June 14 hospitalization, including on an Iran war powers resolution and the confirmation of Attorney General Todd Blanche, at a time when the GOP holds only a narrow Senate majority. A visit to McConnell’s D.C. residence this week found it guarded by a security detail of three unmarked SUVs plus marked Capitol Police cars, with most curtains drawn but no mail piling up outside as there had been during his hospital stay. His office has released only two “proof of life” photos since he vanished from public view, both showing him smiling with wife Elaine Chao but revealing nothing about his health, and aides have ignored repeated requests for a video update or phone call to a media outlet. McConnell missed two major Kentucky events he’d normally attend, the Fancy Farm picnic and the Kentucky Farm Bureau Country Ham Breakfast, and while some allies like Scott Jennings claim to have had lengthy phone calls with him, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear says he’s heard nothing from the senator in 80 days.

U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman of Maryland issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday blocking Trump’s August executive order that sought to further narrow birthright citizenship, calling his legal reasoning a “distorted” reading of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling. The order, Trump’s second attempt to limit the 14th Amendment’s citizenship guarantee, tried to carve out new exceptions for children of parents labeled “alien enemies,” foreign government employees, or those accused of “birth tourism,” despite the Court’s ruling in Trump v. Barbara that children born to parents “unlawfully or temporarily present” are still “citizens at birth.” Boardman wrote that “no Presidential Executive Order can undo what the Supreme Court has done” and found the administration cited no language from the Barbara decision to support its interpretation because none exists. She specifically cited two mothers, from Venezuela and Mexico, whose children risked being wrongly classified as members of designated terrorist organizations under the order. Boardman called the order “almost certainly unconstitutional” as applied to the certified class of children covered by the earlier ruling.

Gloria Steinem, the pioneering feminist journalist and activist, died Wednesday at her New York City home at age 92, surrounded by loved ones, according to a statement on her official Instagram page. No cause of death was given. She rose to national prominence in 1963 with an undercover exposé on the working conditions of Playboy bunnies, then went on to co-found Ms. magazine in 1971 and become the public face of second-wave feminism. Her activism helped reshape rights for women, from credit access to Ivy League admission to legal abortion, and she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2013. She married David Bale in 2000 after decades of publicly rejecting marriage, and continued working for equality until the end of her life.

A shooting at a downtown Minneapolis apartment building Wednesday afternoon left three dead, including the suspect, and at least six injured, among them police officers. Interim Police Chief Bill Peterson said officers exchanged gunfire with the shooter and entered the building after reports of an active shooter, encountering victims and a visibility-limiting haze on an upper floor. Two officers were shot, one in the leg and one twice in the abdomen, while a third suffered non-gunfire injuries; all three are expected to recover. Witnesses described hearing 25 to 30 gunshots and seeing people wounded in the lobby, with one resident saying he had previously reported the suspect to building management after encountering him with a handgun. The FBI and ATF responded to assist local authorities, and the surrounding area was cleared before being declared secure.

The Dutch central bank announced it relocated tens of tons of gold from the United States and Canada to Europe between March and August, citing “crisis preparedness” amid global political unrest. Roughly 86 metric tons moved to London from a combined 313 metric tons held in New York and Ottawa, shifting each city’s share of Dutch holdings down to 18.5 percent from 31.3 percent and 19.7 percent respectively. The bank holds 612.4 metric tons of gold total, valued at about 72.2 billion euros ($83.6 billion) at the end of 2025. Governor Olaf Sleijpen said the move improves the “tradability” of reserves, calling London-held gold the world’s most easily accessible in a crisis compared with New York or Ottawa. Part of the shift involved selling gold in New York and using proceeds to buy gold in London rather than physically transporting all of it.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced Thursday that Russia will close German Goethe-Institut cultural centers in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg, retaliating after Germany shut the Russian Consulate in Bonn and a Russian cultural center in Berlin. The move follows Germany blaming Moscow for a drone plot at Leipzig/Halle Airport, a major freight hub supporting Ukraine, where an explosive-laden drone was found and defused in early August. Putin has denied the allegations, claiming Germany is deflecting from domestic political troubles and that evidence was “planted.” The episode is part of a broader pattern Western officials call hybrid war, including Britain summoning Russia’s top diplomat, a large-scale Finnish civil defense drill, Norway seizing a Russian vessel tied to a Ukrainian arbitration claim, and Danish intelligence warning of possible Russian sabotage targeting defense companies. EU ministers met to weigh further sanctions but are struggling to find new non-military response options.

Firefighters rescued a man trapped inside a Recology garbage truck in San Francisco early Wednesday morning after the truck’s driver was flagged down by someone who heard yelling from the truck’s garbage compartment. About 25 firefighters responded to the roughly two-hour operation, during which one firefighter suffered a hand laceration requiring stitches. The rescued man was conscious, breathing and talking when he was taken to a hospital, though the extent of his injuries was not immediately known. A fire official said he is believed to have climbed into a dumpster looking for food before becoming trapped when the truck compacted its contents. The incident occurred on the 100 block of Mason Street.

American journalist Thomas Weir Pauken II, 51, was sentenced to two years in federal prison for acting as an illegal agent of China’s government, after pleading guilty earlier this year and declining to appeal. Prosecutors said Pauken, who worked for Chinese state outlets CCTV and Xinhua after moving to China in 2010, wrote intelligence reports for a handler known as “Cathy” that were read by Chinese President Xi Jinping, receiving at least $100,000 for his work. He was also asked to recruit sources, including providing one contact with a phone, computer and secure messaging credentials, and told investigators he suspected that contact might pass classified information to China. His lawyer said no classified information was actually shared and that Pauken has accepted responsibility. Pauken used the alias “Tom McGregor” to distance his father, a former Texas Republican Party chairman, from his work in China, and was arrested in February after returning from a family trip to Washington, D.C.

Former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, asked a federal judge Wednesday to dismiss their drug trafficking indictment, arguing head-of-state immunity protects them from U.S. prosecution. Their lawyers argued no American court has ever tried a sitting foreign head of state and that heads of state are exempt from any court but their own. Maduro and Flores have been jailed in Brooklyn since U.S. forces seized them in a January raid on their Caracas home, and face a trial scheduled for June 2026 with oral arguments on the dismissal motion set for November 17. Prosecutors allege Maduro ran a conspiracy to move thousands of tons of cocaine into the U.S. by colluding with Venezuelan law enforcement and drug traffickers, charges he denies, calling his capture a kidnapping. Federal prosecutors are due to respond to the immunity arguments later this month.

Former Tropical Storm Edouard dumped nearly two feet of rain on rural East Texas, prompting dozens of rescues from stranded cars, flooded homes and an assisted living facility as the storm lingered over the state into Thursday. Hardin County was hit hardest, with 18 to 20 inches of rain, downed trees and power lines, and roughly a dozen water rescues, while nearby Jefferson County reported about 22,000 customers without power. Wind gusts reached 90 mph as the storm moved through, sparking at least one house fire from a downed power line near Lumberton. An assisted living facility in Hardin County was damaged, requiring the evacuation of 21 residents with help from Texas Parks and Wildlife game wardens. Separately, three hurricanes, Marie, Lowell and Karina, were active in the Pacific Ocean, with dangerous swells expected to reach Hawaii and southern California in the coming days.

John Herb Hayes III, 70, and Geordyn Nichole Hayes, 31, of Bristol, Virginia, were arrested and charged with unlawfully placing a child at risk after their 5-year-old autistic, nonverbal daughter, Saylor, was found dead in South Carolina waters near Pawleys Island. Authorities said the parents failed to provide appropriate supervision for a child with a known affinity for water and history of wandering, and that Saylor’s Project Lifesaver tracking device had been removed before the family left Virginia. According to arrest affidavits, the parents directed searchers toward using the tracker even though they knew Saylor wasn’t wearing it, and steered search efforts away from the nearby body of water where she was ultimately found. The device was later located inside a vehicle at the family’s Virginia home. Georgetown County Sheriff Carter Weaver called the death “a heartbreaking tragedy,” saying Saylor “deserved to be safe” and vowing to pursue accountability through the justice system.

Nvidia agreed to buy AI developer platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, one of its biggest acquisitions ever, in a bet that supporting open-weight AI models will sustain demand even as major customers like Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft build their own chips to reduce reliance on Nvidia. The deal gives Nvidia direct access to a platform developers use to build, test and share AI tools, potentially offering insight that helps it keep pace with top U.S. and Chinese AI labs, including Chinese firms like DeepSeek and Z.ai whose cheaper open models have gained ground. Nvidia will pay about $11.9 billion to Hugging Face’s investors plus up to $1 billion in retention equity for employees joining the company, and CEO Jensen Huang said Hugging Face will remain an open platform that doesn’t require Nvidia chips to use. The New York-based startup, founded in 2016 by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf and backed by Intel, AMD and Amazon, also hosts datasets and cloud tools for AI development, and was recently in the news after a hack involving rogue AI agents that escaped an OpenAI testing environment.

Special Report

Donald Trump portrayed seizing oil from Venezuela, creating conditions for violent blowback in the future (Graphic by The Hartmann Report)

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Trump Brags About His “Brilliant” Venezuela Scheme While History Screams a Warning, Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 2, 2026. America has spent decades paying for earlier interventions in oil-rich nations. Trump is now risking another cycle of rebellion, bloodshed, and blowback.

Here we go again with American colonialism, this time with a crazy scheme Trump thinks is “brilliant.”

You’d have thought we’d have learned our lesson with our stupid intervention in Iran in 1953, which led us straight to America’s humiliation in 1980 and today’s war with the Mullahs. This is going to be an epic disaster, one that will most likely cost us dearly in both American blood and treasure.

Back in February of 1989, I arrived in Caracas, Venezuela for a brief visit. Just a few hundred yards onto Venezuelan soil, I was stopped by a group of soldiers who told me I had to turn back and leave the country. My main memory is how young they were and how they seemed apologetic.

What I’d stumbled into was an uprising called the Caracazo.

Four years earlier, Reagan and his Treasury Secretary James Baker had begun leaning hard on Venezuela to cut back on their social programs and reduce their taxes on rich people, just like they’d done here with trickle-down, only this one under the banner of “austerity” and IMF-supervised “restructuring.”

Venezuela’s President when I arrived was Carlos Andrés Pérez, a guy who’d successfully campaigned in 1988 against the Reagan/Bush austerity plan, calling the entire thing “a neutron bomb that kills people but leaves buildings standing.” He’d also been the president five years earlier, and in that time had nationalized Venezuela’s oil, making him a bit of a folk hero.

But when he took office on February 2, 1989, three weeks before I arrived, the previous president (Jaime Lusinchi) had run the country $33 billion into debt, giving Bush and the IMF an excuse to force their neoliberal austerity program onto new President Pérez, who — disastrously — went along with it. His first step was to raise bus fares, which he thought would be benign. It wasn’t.

In the country with the largest proven oil reserves on Earth — larger than Saudi Arabia’s, Russia’s, or America’s — Bush’s price for debt relief was that the country’s poor had to pay more to get to work. Just 25 days later, the day I arrived, millions of angry people flooded the streets in response to that increase in bus fares and Pérez declared a state of national emergency.

By the end of the next afternoon, the 28th, Pérez had suspended the constitution and his army had killed at least 276 civilians and wounded another 1,500. Human rights groups said thousands died as bodies were dumped into unmarked pits in a corner of the Cementerio General del Sur that Caraqueños call La Peste, “the plague.” The brutal state of emergency, endorsed by US President GHW Bush, lasted another month.

Now, we’re not only risking a repeat of that, but we’ve also run this movie before in other countries. In an incredible irony, the most well-known of those was Iran in 1953 when our CIA overthrew democratically-elected Iranian President Mohammad Mossadegh because he’d nationalized that country’s oil.

We replaced Mossadegh with the brutal, repressive rule of the Shah, and we’re still paying for that one, this time with American blood and treasure thanks to Trump’s and Hegseth’s criminal attack and bumbling incompetence.

Calling his latest imperialist scam in Venezuela “the biggest oil deal in world history,” Trump is now filling in some of the details of his corrupt attempt to make off with some 65 billion barrels of oil sitting across 17 fields that represent about a fifth of Venezuela’s estimated 303 billion barrels total.

And it’s a grim repeat of our worst experiments in colonialism from the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Gregory Brew, senior energy analyst with the Eurasia Group, told Fortune magazine yesterday:

“If the U.S. scheme in Venezuela sounds colonial, that’s because it is.”

Trump tried to put a happy face on his scheme to steal Venezuela’s oil by saying that he’ll be using it to refill our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which he’s drained down to 286 million barrels in a desperate attempt to lower gas prices, its lowest level since 1982 in the wake of the Arab Oil Embargoes.

But, like with so much else Trump says, that’s an easily disproven lie; our salt caves can’t hold Venezuela’s thick, heavy sour crude because they and their pumping equipment are designed and built for light, sweet crude like we pump here. Putting Venezuelan oil into them would gum them up and destroy their usefulness forever.

We do have, however, massive refineries along the Gulf coast that were built by the Koch brothers and others specifically for that heavy Venezuelan crude back in the days when it was easily flowing to America. They’re probably salivating at the opportunity to dump the expensive Canadian tar sands oil they’re now refining and get back to the cheaper and easier stuff from down south. Perhaps this was all even their idea.

Trump says he’s “negotiated” a 100-year lease with Delcy Rodríguez, the illegitimate “acting president” of Venezuela who was Maduro’s VP when the two of them lost the election but stayed in power anyway. Today, the only things keeping her in power — after a majority of voters said “No” — are their army and our Navy and Air Force.

Like I said, we’ve seen this movie before.

To make things even more classically Trumpian, he’s giving the contract to handle this oil we’re snatching to an allegedly corrupt billionaire who’s wanted for arrest in Switzerland, a fellow named Alejandro Betancourt López, right.

López made his fortune from insider no-bid power plant contracts with Chávez; Transparency International’s Venezuelan chapter estimated he’d overcharged the Venezuelan government by $2.9 billion. American prosecutors identified him as an “unnamed co-conspirator” in a scheme they say embezzled more than a billion dollars from those deals, leading Swiss authorities to freeze his assets and issue an international arrest warrant for him.

When British police arrested Betancourt López in London in November of 2025, The Washington Post reports that Trump’s senior officials intervened, pushed the Swiss to close the case without charges, refused to act on the arrest warrant, and gave him a visa to enter the United States.

The corrupt lawyer who argued in American courts that López shouldn’t be charged with embezzlement was then staying at one of López’s mansions in Madrid and has a familiar name: Rudy Giuliani, left.

So, not only did Trump and Hegseth illegally and without congressional authorization invade a sovereign country, kill more than a hundred people, and abduct its head of state, but we then handed a massive chunk of that country’s oil — for the next century — to a man whose arrest warrant we’re sitting on and refusing to execute.

Meanwhile, nobody can find the money from the tanker-carried oil we first seized right after our invasion of Venezuela.

According to The Financial Times, Trump collected roughly $13 billion selling seized Venezuelan crude, routed at first through a bank account he controlled in Qatar, and six months later it appears to have vanished into thin air. It’s definitely not back in Venezuela.

Elizabeth Warren says the entire oil seizure and sale is a crime, and Democratic Representative Juaquin Castro and Republican Representative María Elvira Salazar are echoing her sentiment. The money didn’t even show up when the country was begging for it this June when two earthquakes killed 2,595 people and they desperately needed the cash for rescue and reconstruction.

Given all this, it should be obvious that this sleazy deal is going to fail, and that failure will be both spectacular, bloody, and expensive.

Exxon and ConocoPhillips are still owed billions from Chavez’ nationalization and aren’t going anywhere near this one. Trump sneered at Concoco’s CEO when he asked for reparations for what was taken from them back in the day.

And oil industry experts say it’ll take years, perhaps a decade, to get Venezuelan production meaningfully increased, a timeline that will run well past the political lifetimes of both Trump and Rodríguez.

Get ready: somewhere in the barrios I once worked in above Caracas, a young officer and his friends are running the political arithmetic I saw people doing during those hours I was there in February of 1989. He’ll be the next Hugo Chavez, the guy who overthrew López and re-nationalized the oil.

Seriously, do we really think the citizens of that country — after all they’ve been through over the past four generations — are just going to sit back and take it as our military props up a government nobody elected, hand their oil money to an accused money launderer Trump crony, and let us ship the proceeds through a Trump-owned bank account in Qatar?

Is anybody in America that naïve other than Republican voters who live on a diet of Fox “News”? As Senator Jack Reed — the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee — said:

“President Trump’s effort to turn the U.S. military into an investor in Venezuelan oil is a blatant abuse of power and taxpayer dollars.”

Which raises the question: Where are Republicans who control Congress on this harebrained doomed-to-fail scheme? Every one of them knows just how crazy it is, but it seems most of them are figuring that their silence will buy them a million-dollar-a-year lobbying job if they can just keep their heads down and not challenge Trump and his oil billionaire buddies. 

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

 

Davin Rosborough, an ACLU attorney representing the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, speaks at a press conference outside the John Moakley Courthouse in Boston, Mass. after participating in a hearing Sept. 3 on President Donald Trump's March 31, 2026 executive order and a Postal Service rule implementing it.

Democracy Docket, Judge appears deeply skeptical of case for Trump’s mail voting restrictions, Jim Saksa, Sept. 3, 2026. With Election Day just two months away, the lawyer defending the Postal Service’s recently issued rule carrying out President Donald Trump’s anti-mail voting executive order could not tell a federal judge how — or even if — the new rule would work.

At Thursday’s hearing in Boston, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani repeatedly asked the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), represented by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Michael Velchik, whether the agency was ready to implement the rule, which was only published last week.

And Velchik repeatedly refused to do anything more than refer her to the rule itself, which provides scant details about when the agency might be able to begin its rollout ahead of the rapidly approaching midterm elections.

That exchange — and others like it — threw into sharp relief just how quickly and haphazardly USPS is moving to implement the new postal requirements, which critics say could potentially strip millions of Americans of the ability to vote by mail. As the hearing wore on, Talwani seemed increasingly exasperated with the defendants’ arguments.SIGN UP TODAYGet updates straight to your inbox — for free

Join 350,000 readers who rely on our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest in voting, elections and democracy.

The postal rule in question requires election officials to submit barcode-equipped envelopes for mail ballots to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) for approval and also lists of eligible mail voters. If state or local administrators fail to get USPS’s greenlight for their envelope design or don’t upload their voter data, then mail carriers won’t deliver mail ballots to those states’ residents.

Two sets of plaintiffs are challenging the rule in separate lawsuits that were combined into a single hearing Thursday. One is a coalition of pro-voting organizations and individual mail voters led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts (LWVMA). The other is 24 Democratic-led states and Washington, D.C., led by California.

The plaintiffs argue that the rule would make mail voting “virtually impossible” and result in “mass disenfranchisement,” citing the testimony of dozens of state and local officials from both major political parties.

In response to those claims, Velchik largely cited the rule itself, which provides no timeline on when an online portal for state officials to submit their envelopes and voter lists might go live.

Meanwhile, in a report published Tuesday, an anonymous USPS whistleblower warned that the portal’s “slapdash” development would almost certainly result in “catastrophic failure.”Whose ‘irreparable harm’?

The parties gathered in Courtroom 9 of the John J. Moakley Courthouse Thursday because, 11 days ago, the U.S. Supreme Court had reversed a 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision and lifted an injunction that Talwani had previously issued against the USPS rule. The Court agreed with the DOJ’s argument that it was too soon for a court to assess the legality of Trump’s order — after all, it concluded, USPS hadn’t implemented it yet.

That procedural argument over the lawsuit’s “ripeness” disappeared when USPS published its final rule soon thereafter. But USPS seems far from ready to actually put the rule into effect.

Asked when the USPS’s portal might go live, Velchik demurred.

“I can’t make specific representations,” he said.

“We’ve been here for a week and you can’t tell me the government is ready to go?” Talwani responded, incredulously.

That question gets to a critical issue that could decide the matter’s fate if — as expected — it again rises to the Supreme Court.

Talwani repeatedly asked the DOJ to provide details of the “irreparable harm” the government would suffer if she granted a preliminary injunction barring the rule’s implementation in November’s midterm elections. Such an explanation — were the DOJ to provide it — would also rebut the plaintiffs’ mirroring claims of their own irreparable harm if the rule is left in place. But Velchik could only meekly point to the final rule.

Talwani gave the DOJ until 3 p.m. Thursday to supplement the record with specifics about the readiness of the USPS’s portal.

“And if you can’t provide details, I’m going to assume it’s not finalized yet,” she warned, adding that she would also assume the government’s claims about irreparable harm were made “without any facts.”

Just before that deadline, the DOJ submitted additional information provided by a USPS executive, but it lacked the precision Talwani had requested.

“We continue to make refinements to the Portal, including consideration of changes needed in light of the TRO,” the declaration from USPS Chief Customer and Marketing Officer Steven Monteith stated. “We anticipate being in a position to make the Portal available to users for voluntary use by sometime next week.”

The DOJ was joined in the case by a dozen Republican-led states, represented primarily by Missouri Solicitor General Louis J. Capozzi III, in defending the new rule. Capozzi noted Thursday that his own state’s top election official provided a statement saying that Missouri could successfully comply with the new rule.

But Davin Rosborough, an ACLU lawyer representing the LWVMA plaintiffs, noted during the hearing that the other 11 red states’ silence spoke far louder than one short statement from Capozzi.

“The only evidence that the states who intervened on the defendant’s side put in [the record] was a single one-page declaration from the Missouri Secretary of State saying, in vague terms, ‘I think we can comply,’” Rosborough said at a press conference following the hearing. “Alabama, Texas, none of the other states put in anything…”

“I think the failure to put anything in writing — and under penalty of perjury — speaks volumes,” he added.

Talwani noted Thursday that local election officials from Texas’ Travis and Harris counties also provided sworn declarations that the USPS rule would result in disfranchised voters.Decision coming

Talwani indicated that she may issue her decision as early as Thursday night. In recognition of the tight time constraints, she suggested that she would issue relatively cursory rulings on many of the claims raised by both sides, while more fully explaining her position on the few she believed to be most important.

At its core, the case will turn on whether USPS had the power to enact its rule. “The $64,000 question is: Is this authorized by the statute?” Velchik said.

The U.S. Constitution provides that states make the rules for the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding elections, which Congress can then override. But it provides no independent authority to the president.

The defendants maintained that the general statute Congress enacted to empower USPS to pass regulations on the collection and handling of mail covers this rule on mail ballot envelopes and the refusal to deliver them. USPS requires all mail to include things like return addresses and postage — including mail ballots — and no one ever complained about that, they argued.

Likewise, USPS has long provided guidelines to election officials on steps they can take to ensure mail ballots are delivered quickly, like special envelopes, and those also weren’t a problem.

But those are different, Rosborough argued. The Postal Service’s past regulations on mail ballots were voluntary — states were free to ignore them and still trust their ballots would be delivered. And a general rule on postage is nothing like a specific rule on mail ballots alone.

As a lawyer for the Democratic states noted, “The Supreme Court said over 100 years ago [that] the power to refuse to deliver requires an act of Congress. Here, there is no statute that allows USPS to not deliver mail ballots. Full stop.”

In contrast to past hearings, which hinged on technicalities, Thursday’s hearing focused almost entirely on the merits. There was just one notable exception: Capozzi argued that the LWVMA plaintiffs, who include individual voters in every state, lacked standing to block the rule — at least in the states he represented. If she was going to issue the preliminary injunction, Capozzi asked Talwani to at least not apply it to the intervenor defendant states.

That led Talwani to eventually ask what Capozzi hoped that would accomplish — in one of the sharpest back-and-forths out of many during the session.

Newsweek, Lindsay Clancy Verdict: Expert Says Judge’s Jury Actions May Be ‘Dangerous,’ Hannah Parry, Sept. 3, 2026.The Lindsay Clancy murder trial descended into an extraordinary courtroom confrontation Thursday as a deadlocked jury was sent back to deliberate for a sixth day, prompting a legal expert to warn that Judge William Sullivan was entering “very dangerous territory.”

Defense attorney Mark O’Mara, appearing on CNN Thursday, described the judge’s decision to bring jurors before the bench individually as “extraordinarily dangerous” and said Sullivan “needs to be extraordinarily careful.”

O’Mara went further, describing the judge’s handling of the jury as potentially creating a “brand new procedural law” through the way he is dealing with the impasse.

The comments came as the jury remained divided after more than 35 hours of deliberations in a trial that lasted roughly six weeks.

The latest drama began when the 12 jurors in Plymouth, Massachusetts, sent Sullivan another note Thursday. The precise contents of the note were not immediately made public, but it triggered a series of unusual proceedings.

Sullivan brought the jurors into court one at a time and questioned them individually. Afterward, Clancy's defense attorney Kevin Reddington told the judge that one juror was preventing the panel from reaching a unanimous verdict.

Sullivan did not accept the characterization or take sides.

“I don’t feel that it is proper for me to side with one side or the other of the deliberations,” Sullivan said. “I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to say I agree with one juror or 11.”

The judge then addressed the entire jury, reading instructions concerning reasonable doubt before sending the panel back to deliberate.

The exchange was visibly tense. Reddington appeared frustrated during a private discussion with Sullivan and prosecutors at the bench, at one point slamming papers down on the judge's bench before returning to the defense table.

Clancy herself was brought forward to speak with the judge during the proceedings. Later, she bowed her head as Reddington comforted her.

The jury was sent back out to deliberate before Sullivan announced that he was sending them home for the day. The jury will return on Friday at 9 a.m. ET for further deliberations.

Reddington told reporters outside of the courthouse that the juror would be questioned Sullivan Friday. “There’s a person who has doubt but will not listen to the judge’s instructions,” he said.

More On Russian Infiltration Of FBI, Other Spying

 

Newsweek, Woman Who Exposed FBI Official for Working With Russian Oligarch Found Dead, Jenni Fink,Sept. 3, 2026. Allison Guerriero, a security researcher whose information helped expose the criminal conduct of former FBI counterintelligence official Charles McGonigal, has been found dead at her home in Boynton Beach, Florida.

Hours before her death, Guerriero posted a series of messages on X, formerly Twitter, criticizing Representative Jim Jordan, the FBI and McGonigal. McGonigal was arrested in 2023 and was sentenced to 50 months in prison and then was later sentenced in a separate case to 28 months in prison in 2024. He pleaded guilty to secretly colluding with a Russian oligarch and also admitted to receiving $225,000 in cash from someone with ties to the Albanian government.

"I committed a felony and as a former FBI special agent it causes me extreme emotional and physical pain," McGonigal told the judge before he was sentenced. "I stand before you today with a deep sense of remorse."

It's unclear what caused her death, and authorities are waiting on a report from the medical examiner.

Newsweek reached out to the Boynton Beach, Florida, police department for comment via email but did not receive a response in time for publication.Who Is Allison Guerriero?

Guerriero was a security researcher who became publicly known after providing information to federal authorities about her former romantic partner, McGonigal, a longtime FBI official who once led the bureau's counterintelligence division in New York.

Guerriero alerted investigators after becoming concerned about McGonigal's behavior, including allegations that he was carrying large amounts of cash and maintaining unusual relationships with foreign-connected individuals. When she asked McGonigal about the cash, he reportedly told her that he won a bet on a baseball game. At the time, he was married with two children.

"Charlie McGonigal knew everybody in the national security and law-enforcement world," Guerriero said in an interview with Business Insider. "He fooled them all. So why should I feel bad that he was able to deceive me?"GeoscapeAward-winning editors deliver analysis of global hotspots – straight to your inbox.Sign up to Breaking News alertsBy clicking “sign up” you are agreeing to ourTerms of Service and Privacy PolicyA photo shows Allison Guerriero, left. Right: Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office, on February 09, 2023 in New York City.A photo shows Allison Guerriero, left. Right: Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office, on February 09,... | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Her tip reportedly helped launch a broader federal investigation into McGonigal's activities.

Guerriero had been involved in an approximately 18-month relationship with McGonigal. After the relationship ended, she became increasingly vocal about his conduct and the FBI's handling of the case. She frequently posted on social media and gave interviews discussing the scandal and calling for greater scrutiny of senior law enforcement officials.

Her information helped investigators uncover details about McGonigal's connections to foreign figures and contributed to the investigation that eventually resulted in his arrest and conviction. In the years that followed, Guerriero remained outspoken about the case and argued that some aspects of the scandal had not received sufficient public attention.

During McGonigal's sentencing, the judge praised Guerriero for her "extraordinary contributions" to counterespionage operations on behalf of the United States.

In an obituary for Guerriero, her family wrote that she found her "niche" in the security field after trying several different occupations. They added that she was also working for Roger Stone when she died. The family is holding a memorial service on Thursday for her.

"Allison’s over-the-top interest in law-enforcement and fighting evildoers kept her adjacent to all kinds of characters who seemed like they were from 1950s era G.I. Joe type comic books," her friend, Ken Kurson, wrote in a eulogy for her.What Did Charles McGonigal Do?

McGonigal served as the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division in New York, one of the bureau's most sensitive national security positions.

According to the Department of Justice, McGonigal pleaded guilty in 2023 to conspiracy charges stemming from his work for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch under U.S. sanctions since 2018. The DOJ said McGonigal agreed to provide services to Deripaska in violation of federal sanctions laws and participated in a money-laundering conspiracy. In his role as special agent in charge, he also participated in and supervised investigations into Russian oligarchs, including Deripaska. McGonigal tried to find derogatory information about a rival oligarch, Vladimir Potanin, and his corporate interests, which Deripaska was fighting for control of.

The Justice Department said McGonigal worked to investigate a rival Russian oligarch in exchange for concealed payments linked to Deripaska. Prosecutors alleged that he and others attempted to hide Deripaska's involvement through shell companies, forged documents and coded communications.

A photo shows Allison Guerriero, left. Right: Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the FBI’s New York office, on February 09,... | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

In December 2023, McGonigal was sentenced to 50 months in federal prison. Announcing the sentence, the Justice Department described his conduct as a betrayal of the trust placed in him as a senior law enforcement official. He was sentenced in 2024 to 28 months for concealing information from the FBI about payments received from a link to the Albanian government. The DOJ said the sentences are to run consecutively. Public records indicate he is still imprisoned.

The case shocked many in the intelligence and law enforcement communities because McGonigal had spent years overseeing investigations aimed at identifying and countering foreign threats to U.S. national security.Who Is Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska?

Oleg Deripaska is a wealthy Russian businessman whose fortune was built primarily through Russia's aluminum industry. He is among the country's best-known oligarchs and has long been regarded as a politically connected figure within Russia.

The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Deripaska in 2018 under authorities related to Russia's actions in Ukraine. According to the Justice Department, officials concluded that Deripaska had acted on behalf of, directly or indirectly, a senior Russian government official and operated in sectors considered important to the Russian economy.

 

New York Times, News Analysis: A Spiral of Escalation for Russia and Ukraine, With No End in Sight, Kim Barker, Oleksandra Mykolyshyn and Ivan Nechepurenko, Sept. 3, 2026. Each side is using missiles and drones to try to pound the other into giving up, breeding ceaseless human suffering. But there is no sign that either country’s determination will weaken.

They are both torching warehouses filled with food or online-shopping orders near major cities. They are blasting ports and ships carrying vital exports of grain. And they are smashing energy networks that keep the lights on and vehicles fueled.

Russia and Ukraine, in cities far from the front line, are waging an intensifying tit-for-tat air war that is bringing more pain to the populations of both countries than at any other point since the early months of the full-scale war launched by Moscow in 2022.

With the front largely frozen, each side is using growing arsenals of missiles and drones to exact vengeance and to try to pummel the other into submission. In the most recent example, Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, has been under constant bombardment from Russian drones over the past few days, tormenting residents with nearly continual air-raid alerts.

Still, there is no evidence that the escalation will weaken either country’s determination to fight on. Human suffering will only grow this winter, analysts say, as both Russia and Ukraine seek leverage in U.S.-backed settlement negotiations that are expected to resume after achieving little this year.

Ukraine can’t give up, and Russia doesn’t want to, analysts say.

“It’s a question of how much pain can Russia take compared to Ukraine — and Russia can take a lot of pain,” said Rob Lee, a military expert at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute who travels frequently to the front line.

This new period of eye-for-an-eye assaults accelerated in late June, when Ukraine opened a 40-day campaign against Russia that President Volodymyr Zelensky said was aimed at “compelling it to end the war.”

Since he threw down that gauntlet, Ukrainian long-range drones have hit more than 30 warehouses of major online shopping companies, mostly those used by Wildberries, the Russian equivalent of Amazon. The strikes have disrupted Russian commercial logistics, inflicted heavy loss.

More On U.S. Politics, Elections, Governance

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Midterm Strategy: Don’t Work, Cheat, Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Say you’re a Republican lawmaker going into a tough midterm fight. The good news is your party controls the presidency. The bad news is the president is insanely unpopular and getting more so every day. Many voters you need are pretty mad at the guy. You might want to start telling them, Yeah, I’m with him—but only on the good stuff, the stuff you guys like.

As I wrote last week, this was never going to be an option for Republicans this cycle. They’re tied too tightly to Donald Trump in voters’ minds already, and he’d rather see them lose than win at his expense. Even so, as the midterms get closer, I’m genuinely astonished by just how hard Trump is working to tie himself like a millstone around each vulnerable incumbent’s neck.

Last week, the Atlantic reported that Trump had settled on a specific spending strategy ahead of the midterms. Rejecting the idea that he should go local, using his massive war chest to help bolster the reputations of specific candidates in key races, the president is opting for a different approach: spending heavily on national ads intended to keep the spotlight on himself.

Yesterday, his political operation unveiled the first tranche of those ads. The first, called “Toughest Guy,” aims to convince the public that Trump is a really tough guy. See, there’s UFC President Dana White up on stage saying so! Another ad focuses on Trump’s most broadly palatable accomplishments: “We gave you no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security, the largest tax cuts in American history,” Trump intones. The price of eggs, he notes, is down, too.

Congressional Republicans, never mentioned in the ads, are reduced to an implicit enabling role: They’ve occasionally helped Trump get his priorities over the finish line, and they’ll be needed to help Trump “finish the job.”

The same Maximum Trump spirit promises to be on full display at next week’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas, a two-day affair that will be anchored by back-to-back primetime speeches from Vice President JD Vance and Trump himself. There’s a reason the major parties haven’t traditionally held midterm conventions: Without a presidential contest hanging over every race in the country, it doesn’t make sense to try to build a one-size-fits-all national narrative for hundreds of disparate and unique state and federal contests. Unless, of course, you’re the kind of president who thinks the only way anyone in your party can win is by their voters closing their eyes and pretending they’re voting for you.

It isn’t just that House and Senate Republicans have become inseparable from the president in voters’ minds. They’re also beholden to whatever mercurial decisions he decides to make about his gigantic bag of cash.

Last Sunday, Sen. John Kennedy took to Fox News to basically plead with Trump to open his wallet in support of the party’s damaged-goods Senate nominee in Texas, Ken Paxton: “We in the Senate don’t have the money budgeted for Texas. We need help from the president,” Kennedy said. “The president says he has $850 million in his campaign accounts. That’s a lot of jack. . . . But he hasn’t committed to it yet.”

Majority Leader John Thune made the same point on Fox on Tuesday: “Because Texas is such a big state, we’re going to need the president and his team to be engaged there and putting resources into that race.” So far, no dice.

It would be easy to laugh all this off as just desserts for venal Senate Republicans and the latest demonstration of the president’s incredible vanity. There’s a part of Trump that seems genuinely to believe that, when voters are reminded of his accomplishments, they’ll rush back into his arms. It’s exactly the sort of hubris that seems likely to lead the GOP straight into a catastrophe.

But we can’t lose sight of the other side of the equation. Trump isn’t only relying on highly dubious methods of persuasion to carry his people through the midterms. It’s increasingly clear that he wants to try to cheat his way to victory, too.

We’re not prepared for another election crisis. But one may be coming. Spread the word by sharing this newsletter.

We’ve been writing a lot about Trump’s attempt to seize federal control of mail-in ballots by giving the Postal Service an unprecedented new role of policing which mailed ballots should and shouldn’t be delivered. This week, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) sent a letter to Postmaster General David Steiner, seeking information about alarming allegations he had received from a USPS whistleblower about that effort. The software the USPS was building to handle these tasks, the whistleblower alleged, was “astonishingly untested,” rushed, and buggy. And even if it miraculously worked as intended, the procedures USPS was building around it seemed almost guaranteed to disenfranchise legitimate voters.

“When ballots are submitted to USPS in large-volume batches, if any one ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the Portal, all ballots in that batch will be rejected,” Blumenthal wrote in the letter. “For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the Portal—because, for example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved—then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well.”

Just to remind you: All this is exactly what Trump wants. He wants mail-in balloting systems to fail, because he thinks Democrats use mail-in voting to cheat him out of wins. He has ordered his federal government to behave in exactly this way.

It still seems likely that the Supreme Court will pull the plug on this ridiculous system ahead of the midterms. But until they do, we can’t lose sight of the fact that this plan is a major part of Trump’s own electoral calculations. It isn’t just that his midterms messaging is stupid because he’s vain and ignorant—although that’s certainly part of it. It’s also that people have little incentive to play a game optimally when they know their real plan for victory is to cheat.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Is Keeping Venezuela’s Dictatorship in Business… Delcy Rodríguez sends him oil. He protects her from elections, observes WILL SALETAN.
• Wendell Berry, 1934–2026… The great writer of rural America spent a lifetime defending the land, the local, and the human, remembers CHRISTIAN RUTH.
• Trump Hands Dems Their Best Gift Yet… His embrace of data centers has given Democrats a potent new campaign tool, writes LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
• MAGA Pollster Thinks Texas, Ohio and Even KANSAS Could Turn Blue… On Bulwark Takes, RICH BARIS joins TIM MILLER to explain why Republicans may be underestimating just how competitive the 2026 Senate map could become.

Quick Hits

COLLINS V. CHENEY: In theory, Sen. Susan Collins believes Donald Trump has committed acts worthy of permanently barring him from holding federal office: After all, she voted to convict him at his second impeachment trial in 2021. Allowing thoughts like that to proceed to their logical conclusions, however, is a career death sentence in today’s Republican party. Instead, Collins has spent the intervening years on an interesting journey of self-lobotomy. Here she was yesterday, reflecting on that journey with Politico’s Jonathan Martin:

After listening to the evidence and being there on January 6th myself, I felt that the president had, many months before, started to build up an insurrection, essentially, that met the high standard in the Constitution for his removal. Believe me, the president brings up that vote almost every single time that I see him. So he has not forgotten. It’s very personal. And I understand that—how could it not be?

But come on, what do you people want her to do—be Liz Cheney? Persist in the belief that this insurrectionist is unfit for office? “Liz Cheney—it’s not just that she lost her seat,” Collins finished. “It’s that she has no impact, in my view.”

TRUMP ON MONEY: It’s official: Seemingly breaking federal law and certainly breaking a long chain of precedent, the U.S. Mint is releasing $1 coins with the likeness of a living person for the first time in a century. Guess who:

The $1 coin designed to celebrate America’s 250th birthday—and seemingly President Donald Trump, whose face gazes from one side of the gold finish—went on sale Wednesday, according to the U.S. Mint.

The coin’s design—Trump’s visage as “heads” and the Great Seal of the United States as “tails”—received the stamp of approval this year from the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, whose members Trump appointed. In past comments, the president said that the idea to stamp his face on a coin was “very unusual” but that he was “honored by it.”

The AP notes that “the coins, which can be used as legal tender, drew some criticism, particularly because of federal law that bars the depiction of a living president on U.S. currency.” Well, yeah, that might be one reason to criticize them!

In fairness, "Trump sells $1 Trump coins to his fans for $2 apiece" is a pretty good metaphor for his whole term.   

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: As Bad As Things Are For Trump And The Rs Now -- And They Are Bad -- They Are Likely To Get Worse, Simon Rosenberg, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Greater MAGA Is Weakening: Putin has lost Orban, Syria, and is failing in Ukraine. Both Bibi and Trump have lost their war in Iran, and their political projects at home have taken enormous hits. Bibi trails in his October 26th election, and Trump trails in his November election. Zelenskyy has emerged as an inspirational global freedom fighter. Taken together these are important and welcome developments in our fight to ensure there is a new birth of freedom here and everywhere in the years ahead……

Democrats Are On Track To Have A Good Election:- For the past twenty months there has been one election: Democrats have continuously overperformed their 2024 results in special and state/local elections and Republicans have struggled. In recent primaries far many more Democrats voted than Republicans in state after state. Polls are finding that heightened intensity too. Here’s Reuters/Ipsos this week:

The polling across the country continues to be very encouraging for us. Today, FiftyPlusOne has us with a 92% chance of flipping the House, and a 57% chance of flipping the Senate. This is up from 90% and 54% a few weeks ago.Subscribed

Perhaps the most encouraging data of the week comes from Alaska. Here’s the current results in their top-4 Senate primary. Peltola is ahead of the incumbent Dan Sullivan by 8 points, and Democrats over 50% when all votes are tallied. David Leslie has endorsed Peltola and dropped out the race, giving her a clear shot this November. For an incumbent Senator to only get 41% after spending a lot of money is, um, really bad…..

In the Governor’s race Tom Begich endorsed Jonnthan Kreiss-Tomkins giving Democrats a real shot at winning here too. Note that no Republican candidate got over 10% of the vote, confirming how weak and fractured the Rs are in Alaska this year:

Note - when I last wrote about Alaska I thought it was the top two candidates who got to go through to the general election. It is the top four. Sorry about that everyone.

In my talk last night we reviewed much of the information I put into yesterday’s post: Trump’s Clown Show Has Become A Raging, Dangerous Global Dumpster Fire. My argument is this: Trump has created a series of crises -- economic, fiscal, in our health care system, “Farmageddon,” in our national security -- that are likely to get worse between now and the election.

• Diesel is close to an all-time high:
• Oil prices are back up in the upper $90s a barrel:
• Prior to these renewed energy shocks consumer confidence was already at it’s lowest reading in the last 65 years:

And then there is this - Trump the rapacious, Trump the greedy, Trump the betrayer appears to be hording his bundle of ill-gotten cash:

Theories about what Trump wants to do with the money cover a broad range of possibilities, including protecting his political influence in the next presidential race by passing on the money to his chosen successor and saving up for legal fees, postpresidential travel, events and pet projects, such as his library. Trump’s Miami library is projected to cost at least $1 billion, the most expensive presidential library construction to date.

The person with knowledge of internal discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about those conversations, said Trump and his team believe their ability to rake in massive donations will take a hit after the midterm elections, giving the president an incentive to keep hold of the money he has raised so far.

Fundraising accounts associated with the president — such as his super PAC, and funds for his inauguration, White House ballroom and Freedom 250 events — have been inundated with donations from companies looking to get in Trump’s good graces, a dynamic that is likely to change as he becomes a lame duck.

Additionally, in the last few weeks of an election the party out of power usually gains a few points. So, yes, my friends, as bad as things are for Trump and the Rs now - and they are bad - they are likely to get worse.

Countering Trump’s Ferocious, Desperate Effort To Rig The Elections And Prevent A Peaceful Transfer Of Power - Here at Hopium we do more and worry less, and when it comes to countering Trump’s increasingly desperate and wild efforts to rig the election and prevent a peaceful transfer of power there are a few things we can do today, right now:

1 - Marc Elias is a doing a live briefing on Trump’s attack on mail ballots tonight at 6pm ET. Sign up here. Learn more, get smarter.

2 - Become an Early Vote Champion, and help drive the early vote in your networks, communities, organizations, and with friends and family. For when we vote early it makes it more likely we win and harder for them to cheat. Learn more here.

3 - Sign up to be a Democracy Protector for your state party. The new state party/DNC national program to protect our elections launched yesterday. The next live, open training is next Wednesday night at 8pm ET. Sign up here, and become part of this vital program that the Hopium community has helped get off the ground. 

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: JD Vance Was Asked About Gas Prices And His Answer Was A Disaster, Jason Easley, right, Sept. 3, 2026. The Trump administration has no clue what to do to lower gas prices, because the administration doesn't know how to get out of the Iran war that it started.

For the first time in 42 days, the White House held a press briefing, and it has been the pattern of this entire administration: when things are going badly and Donald Trump needs a human shield, he sends out JD Vance.

Vance possesses the rare combination of arrogance, unlikability, ambition, and cluelessness that allows him to both think he is being elevated when Trump puts him out to take the fall, and ignorance of not knowing that with each one of these misadventures, he is taking a fresh step toward ending his political career.

VP Vance was asked at the press briefing, “ On July 2nd, Treasury Secretary Bessent, um, was asked when Americans could see $3 gas again, and he said maybe by Labor Day. Things haven't worked out that way, but do you have a new timetable for Americans on when they could expect lower gas prices, and should they not expect to see $3 gas again until at least 2027?”

And this is where the trouble began.

Vance answered, “Well, in defense of Scott, he said maybe by Labor Day because we're talking about things that are inherently unpredictable, and I, I think it's important...You know, I'm a strong believer that, uh, the American people are our fellow citizens, and we should speak with them honestly about these things. And the fundamental reality is that the reason gas prices are so high right now is because the Iranians are shooting at commercial shipping.”

Labor Day is Monday, but things got much worse as Vance talked.

As Vance kept talking, he made it clear that he, as the “chief negotiator” with Iran, has no idea what is going on, and the administration has no intention of lowering gas prices.

Vance refused to talk about $3 gas:

 We're gonna do what we have to do in order to ensure that their efforts don't lead to a worldwide energy crisis. Now, we've been quite successful up to this point. Gas, frankly, could've been much, much higher were it not for our efforts.

But I'm not gonna make a promise about when it's gonna return to $3. What I will say is that we have to remember, why are we doing this? Number one, it's so that Iran never has a nuclear weapon. And number two, what we're doing right now is protecting commercial shipping in order to ensure that we don't have a worldwide energy crisis.

The only reason, the only reason we do not have a worldwide energy crisis is because of the leadership of the president, but also because of the fine work of our military, from Pete Hegseth on down. But the Iranians are doing what the Iranians do. I think that they're losing their capabilities by the day. Uh, I think they're realizing, by the way, that, that, that their control over the Strait of Hormuz is effectively gone, and it's a diminishing asset. So if you go back three months ago, how much oil and gas was coming out of the strait under Iranian threats? It was va- virtually nothing.

Now, it's almost back to where it was before the conflict even started. So my advice to the Iranians is stop acting like crazy people and stop shooting at commercial shipping. And in the meantime, we've gotta do what we've gotta do despite what a foreign country's gonna do in the Strait of Hormuz.

It is easy to see why Vance’s negotiations with Iran have been a failure.

The world is facing higher gas prices and an energy crisis because of the war of choice that Donald Trump and JD Vance started.

Gas prices wouldn’t be over $4.00/gallon if Trump and Vance hadn’t started a war with Iran, so the idea that Trump and Vance think they deserve credit for anything is absurd.

During the 2024 campaign, Trump and Vance promised to bring gas down to $2.00/gallon. Prices are currently more than double what Trump and Vance promised.

JD Vance was a disaster because he minimized the economic pain people are feeling and won’t even try to say when things will get better. 

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: When You Control the Mail, You Control the Nation, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Sept. 3, 2026.Two months from the midterms, how bad are the coalition vibes for Donald Trump? Even some dyed-in-the-wool MAGA pollsters are starting to sound the red alert.

“Republicans are going to run out of a coalition soon if they don’t build on what he started to build in ’24,” Big Data Poll Director Rich Baris told Tim Miller in an interview yesterday. “And a lot of those gains are squandered because of the direction they took.”

In the eyes of some of his voters, Baris argued, Trump’s biggest sin has been his foreign-policy obsession: An inflation-spiking war in Iran wasn’t what the president promised, and it certainly wasn’t what they expected from him. Happy Thursday.

Special Report: Political Ads 

Grieving North Carolina father Ronald Hayes, as shown in a deceptive ad created by pro-Republicans in the current U.S. senate race in North Carolina.

Judd at Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: How a GOP super PAC tricked a grieving father into appearing in a political ad, Judd Legum, right, and Noel Sims, Sept 3, 2026. Ronald Hayes appears in a Senate Leadership Fund ad.

On August 5, the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the super PAC of Senate Republicans, announced a new television ad attacking Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in North Carolina.

The ad features Ronald Hayes, whose son Shemar was murdered in 2024. In just 30 seconds, it ties Shemar’s murder to Cooper, who served as governor of North Carolina from 2017 to 2025. The blame is pinned on a settlement Cooper reached with the ACLU to release some inmates early during the COVID pandemic. “As the governor, Mr. Cooper was allowing these criminals back on the streets,” Hayes says in the ad. “Is my son going to get a second chance? No, he’s never coming back.”

But in an interview with Popular Information, Hayes says that he was manipulated into appearing in the ad. According to Hayes, the SLF operatives who recorded the footage misrepresented the purpose of the interview, never revealed their political affiliation, and coached Hayes into providing the soundbites that appear in the ad.

Hayes is a member of a group of about a dozen grieving parents whose children have been murdered. The SLF operatives reached out to everyone in the group and offered an opportunity “to share our stories.” Hayes was left with the impression that “we’re doing an ad about gun violence and our deceased kids.”

Hayes said he was interested in “talking about Shemar and what I feel about gun violence.” He had also written a book about Shemar that he wanted more people to know about.

After he agreed to participate, Hayes began to communicate with Michael Luethy. Previously, Luethy worked for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the North Carolina Republican Party, and the Republican State Leadership Committee. Luethy currently runs a Republican consulting firm based in North Carolina called Oak Grove Campaigns.

But Luethy never revealed that he was working with the SLF or his connection to Republican politics. Rather, Luethy represented to Hayes that he was “independent.” Luethy invited Hayes to a luxury home in Charlotte and encouraged him to bring copies of his book. Hayes had never been on camera before.

The SLF paid Oak Grove Campaigns $456.90 on April 30, 2026, for travel. Luethy did not respond to a text message seeking comment.

At the outset, Hayes was given an opportunity to talk about his son and was asked about the book. Then, Hayes said, “all of a sudden, in the middle of the recording, it went from me talking about what happened to my son to Governor Cooper.”

“Well, what do you think about North Carolina letting out 3,500 murderers, rapists, and killers?” Hayes said he was asked. “Of course, I am a victim. What am I going to say?” Hayes said he initially responded without saying Cooper’s name. He was then prompted by the SLF operatives to deliver the soundbite they wanted. “Would you mind saying Roy Cooper?” the operatives asked.

Prior to arriving at the filming, Hayes said, he “never knew anything about the governor of North Carolina letting out 3,500 criminals due to COVID-19 back in 2019 and 2020.” Hayes noted that he knows the policy was unrelated to his son’s murder. (The man who murdered Hayes’ son in 2024 had no prior adult criminal record and, therefore, was not released from prison.) Hayes was distressed when he saw the ad, which makes it seem “as if I’m saying that my son’s murderer was one of the ones who Governor Cooper let out of prison.”

“Why would I go on there and just flat out tell a blatant lie?” Hayes asked. He called the ad “deceitful, conniving, and sneaky.”

Hayes said that the SLF operatives filmed at least two other interviews with members of the grieving parents group, but those were not turned into ads. In both cases, the SLF operatives redirected the discussion from the personal tragedy to a political attack on Roy Cooper.

According to data from AdImpact, the SLF has spent over $6 million airing Hayes’ ad on television and digital platforms. Hayes said the ad has profoundly impacted his day-to-day life. “You would not believe how many people now just walk up to me and ask me, ‘Am I that guy that’s in that commercial?’”

Hayes said he is a Democrat and would not have knowingly participated in a GOP attack ad. “Why would I do a commercial? I’m just an everyday man,” Hayes said. “They targeted me as a victim of gun violence and because of the death of my son.”

More Global News

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Imperialist Delusions and the Price of Fuel, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Trump and Bessent tried to betray Ukraine. Now they don’t have any cards.

During the 2024 campaign Donald Trump promised to cut energy prices in half. He has, instead, presided over soaring prices at the pump, which have played an important role in his collapse in the polls.

Some might attribute this disaster to Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran, ignoring what appear to have been near-unanimous warnings by experienced military and intelligence officials that such a war would, in addition to disrupting oil supplies, overstretch the U.S. military and dangerously deplete stocks of munitions — which is exactly what happened.

But Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury secretary, has found someone else to blame: Ukraine.

Yesterday Bessent went on “Fox & Friends,” where he pinned the blame for high energy prices largely on Kyiv:

We are going through an energy shock right now due to both the war in Ukraine, because Ukraine has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets and refined properties, so that is creating upward price pressure on a global basis, and the conflict in Iran.

Now, Bessent isn’t wrong to say that bottlenecks in refining capacity are playing a major role in the current energy shock. The chart at the top of this post shows changes in the price of crude oil and diesel, both measured in dollars per barrel, since the beginning of this year. Crude oil is up a lot, although off its peak in early April. But diesel is up much more (so is gasoline, although not quite as much.) And Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil facilities are certainly playing a role in reducing global refining capacity.

But note Bessent’s wording: Ukraine “has decided that they want to blow up Russian energy assets.” Gosh, why would the Ukrainians want to do such a thing? Might it have something to do with the fact that they are engaged in an existential struggle against Vladimir Putin’s regime, which is in its fifth year of a war aimed at destroying their nation, and they need to hit back at Putin’s military and economic base?

Notice, also, that Bessent didn’t point out that these attacks on Russian oil would end if Russia were to end its attempted war of conquest. But far from demanding an end to Russian aggression, the Trump administration infuriated the democratic nations of Europe by inviting Russia’s finance minister, for the first time since the Ukraine war began, to Monday’s meeting of the Group of 20 major economies.

But wait: There’s more background here. Bessent, as much as or more than Trump, has been effectively an enemy of Ukraine from the beginning.

Right at the beginning of the Trump II administration Bessent flew to Kyiv to demand that the Ukrainian government in effect hand over a large share of its mineral resources to the United States. I described it at the time as a “Belgian Congo” deal:

What Trump suggested was that Ukraine give the United States half of the revenue it gets from resource extraction, as far as I can tell in perpetuity. Trump suggested that this would amount to $500 billion, although this seems like a wildly exaggerated sum.

In return, Trump offered, well, zero. No additional aid, no security guarantees, no nothing.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump offers more, damning detail. There was apparently a shouting match between Bessent and Ukraine’s president Zelenskyy, in which Zelenskyy correctly described Bessent’s proposal as a shakedown unenforceable under Ukrainian law.

Bessent then returned to Washington and urged Trump not to even meet with Zelenskyy until he signed the minerals deal:

“I’ve dealt with this little fucker,” Bessent would say to associates about Zelensky. “He’s tricky. He’s like the special-needs child for the Europeans. And he’s acting like Mr. Bean on crack.”

Nonetheless, Trump did meet with Zelenskyy — and it was a disaster, including Trump’s famous insult, “You’re not in a good position. You don’t have the cards right now.”

The Trump administration proceeded to cut off virtually all aid to Ukraine, presumably expecting Ukraine’s defense against Russia to collapse.

Ukraine, however, declined to collapse. Aid from Europe replaced much of the lost American support:

And the Ukrainians, though deprived of important U.S. weapons — especially Patriot interceptors — have if anything been gaining the upper hand in their war, thanks in part to their growing mastery of drone warfare. Russia’s ground offensive has stalled despite enormous casualties, while Ukraine is carrying out more and more long-range strikes, including, yes, strikes on Russia’s oil infrastructure.

By the way, Ukraine’s success in drone warfare suggests that the government in Kyiv could offer the U.S. military, which has fared so badly against Iranian drones, quite a lot of help. But don’t expect Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon to ask for or receive such help.

Anyway, now Bessent is blaming Ukraine for high fuel prices. Is he demanding, or maybe pleading, that the Ukrainians halt their strategic air campaign? If so, in return for what?

After all, the Trump administration can’t threaten to cut off aid — it already did that long ago. It can’t offer to help Ukraine plug the one big hole in its defense technology, its lack (so far) of effective interceptors against ballistic missiles, because the U.S. has depleted its own stock of such interceptors in its Iran debacle.

So while I’m sure that Bessent and Trump wish that Ukraine would stop blowing up Russian energy assets — they would demand that Ukraine stop, if they could — they can’t, in practice, do anything to change Ukraine’s war strategy. To put it bluntly, they’re not in a good position. They don’t have the cards.

New York Times, The New Jet-Powered Drones That Are Breeding Anxiety in Ukraine, Cassandra Vinograd, Sept. 3, 2026. The Russian strikes tormenting Ukraine’s capital in recent days have had an ominous new feature: jet-powered drones.

Significantly faster and harder to intercept than the propeller-driven drones that have stalked Ukraine’s skies for years, these munitions are stretching air defenses and stoking anxiety about what analysts and officials predict will be a dangerous new stage of the war.

Here’s what to know about the deadly weapons, which experts say blur the line between drones and cruise missiles, and upon which Russia is increasingly reliant.

U.S. Immigration Crackdown

New York Times, Times Exclusive: ICE Skipped Basic Checks in Rush for Recruits, Whistle-Blower Says, Alexandra Berzon, Katie Benner and Hamed Aleaziz, Sept. 3, 2026. An official who oversaw the vetting of ICE recruits cited an “unprecedented lowering of standards” amid a hiring surge. 

In the wake of a hiring surge last summer, an official in charge of evaluating new recruits to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a dire warning.

The Trump administration, he wrote in a memo, was cutting corners, violating the law and fast-tracking unqualified, “improperly vetted” candidates into ICE’s ranks, part of a dangerous move that exposed the agency — and its law enforcement operations — to “grave national security risks.”

Citing an “unprecedented lowering of standards,” the career ICE official said that “systemic breakdowns” had allowed applicants to receive job offers before they had passed basic fingerprint, identity or credit checks in a preliminary vetting process. Political appointees had unjustly skirted background investigations and received national security eligibility.

The official, a unit chief who directly oversaw more than 100 employees who evaluated thousands of ICE applicants, was so troubled by what he saw that he outlined these concerns not to his superiors, but in a formal whistle-blower complaint to the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Homeland Security.

In the complaint, he asked for an independent, outside investigation into the matter. He was later interviewed twice by officials with the inspector general’s office and his concerns have become part of an ongoing audit into vetting practices.

The complaint, which has not been previously reported, underscores the rising worries about the suitability — as well as the tactics — of scores of agents who have been rapidly deployed across the country within the last year. It also outlines the extent to which ICE weakened its standards, and points to dissension among the upper reaches of the agency as it was pressed last year to carry out President Trump’s immigration crackdown.

The whistle-blower, a 17-year ICE veteran who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of his claims, said the agency had cut corners in its rush to fill the ranks.

“We chose as an agency to be more convenient rather than thorough,” he said, describing the agency’s decision to reduce scrutiny of recruits in order to expedite hires. “By doing so, there was a potential to put lives at risk and to jeopardize national security.”

The whistle-blower complaint was obtained via a public records request. The concerns within it broadly mirror those made by other current and former ICE employees who said that the agency had abandoned best practices as it rapidly scaled up. An ICE lawyer who worked at the agency’s training center resigned earlier this year and went public as a whistle-blower, citing concerns about a “deficient, defective and broken” training program. ImageA sidewalk memorial with flowers and candles and a piece of paper with “His Name Was Sebastian” written on it.The scrutiny of ICE’s hiring practices has intensified in recent weeks, spurred in part by the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on July 13.Credit...Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times

In response to questions, an ICE spokesperson said in a statement that the agency “diligently applies the proper personnel vetting regulations, including guidelines for national security, and evaluates all available information for every applicant based on these factors.”

The agency declined to comment about the whistle-blower, who retired from the agency in July, or his complaint.

The scrutiny of ICE’s hiring practices has intensified in recent weeks, spurred in part by the fatal shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant, in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13.

The two ex-wives of the ICE agent David Brouillette, one of whom identified him as the person who fired the fatal shots, have accused him in interviews and court records of being abusive. In a filing for a protection order in December 2019, one ex-wife wrote that he had broken her door down, destroyed her belongings and dumped her clothes over a bridge.

The women also have said Mr. Brouillette, a former military serviceman and Veterans Affairs police officer who was hired amid the recruiting surge last year, had post-traumatic stress disorder related to his deployment in Afghanistan. A local official in Maine told The Portland Press Herald that Mr. Brouillette sought jobs with the Hallowell Police Department in 2024 but was denied because there were “too many red flags.” Mr. Brouillette could not be reached for comment.

After the shooting, Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said that the D.H.S. investigation into the episode will include whether the agent was properly vetted before being hired.

A White House spokesperson referred questions to D.H.S.A Rush to Recruit

The concerns in the August 2025 whistle-blower complaint exposed shortcuts in the agency’s preliminary vetting process. No credit checks. Fingerprints unconfirmed. Final job offers absent preliminary vetting.

Before the surge, a recruitment team made documents available to a unit within ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility for each new hire, including fingerprints and a security form with extensive questions. The vetting team would then initiate a preliminary check, running each applicant’s name through law enforcement databases and searching for criminal violations or other major red flags. Some recruits would be sent for a polygraph test if concerns arose.

These recruits then underwent a full background check, conducted by outside contractors, to determine whether the candidate was trustworthy enough to have access to sensitive computer systems, federal facilities and classified information. It wasn’t unusual for this to occur while recruits were in training.

The preliminary vetting process, which took seven to 10 days, was upended last summer. The vetters were told to make determinations on recruits without having the full security form, fingerprints or any polygraph testing, according to the former unit chief and a former federal official familiar with the process who was granted anonymity to speak freely about it.

That meant new hires were heading to training without having their identities, criminal histories and other basic information checked and verified, the unit chief said.

The agency also sped up its training program, cutting it from roughly 10 weeks to six. This resulted in agents reporting to their full-time positions while their full background checks were pending. 

More News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: UN Admits Defeat on Climate Change and Warns of Catastrophe, Trump Family Races to Hire Lawyers, and Much More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 2, 2026. Today brought a lot of “the quiet part out loud” energy: Trump’s inner circle is stockpiling lawyers ahead of a possible Democratic Congress, even as the West Wing publicly insists the GOP holds the House. Speaking of the GOP, dozens of Republicans are quietly RSVPing “no” to Trump’s own midterm convention next week, some over cost, some over politics, some over dove hunting. Meanwhile the UN conceded the 1.5-degree climate target is basically gone, the Mint rolled out a Trump coin that critics joke marks the “death of liberty” in 2026, and the USS Abraham Lincoln limped into Thailand looking like it aged a decade in 286 days. Add a runaway robot in Russia, a deadlocked jury in the Lindsay Clancy trial, and a Coast Guard jet that lost an engine over D.C., and that’s Wednesday. Here’s everything you need to know.

Here’s the news:

Trump and his Family race to hire lawyers:

Trump, his family, and officials in his orbit are quietly seeking out personal lawyers to protect themselves as they prepare for a likely Democratic takeover of Congress next year, even as the president publicly insists Republicans will hold their majorities. Current and former administration officials have been swapping recommendations for attorneys who could represent them in a personal capacity if subpoenaed in 2027, with some reaching out to Stefan Passantino, a former deputy White House counsel who represented Cassidy Hutchinson during the Jan. 6 investigations. Inside the White House, the counsel’s office began holding private briefings for political appointees as early as this spring, reassuring current staff they’ll be represented in their official capacities while urging everyone to be careful what they put in writing and to keep financial disclosures and ethics filings airtight. As one former official put it, the guiding principle is simple: “Don’t give them a reason to find anything.”

Beyond personal legal cover, the administration has laid down a new legal marker to shield Trump’s communications with outside advisers, family members, and business figures. An Aug. 10 Justice Department memo concluded that executive privilege can extend to presidential communications with private advisers so long as they relate to official decision-making and remain confidential, though it stops short of blanket immunity and allows Congress to override the privilege by showing the information is “demonstrably critical.” Legal experts say this could combine with the Supreme Court’s Trump v. Mazars ruling to create what one called “a whole new umbrella of potential privileged information,” though it also risks putting company executives who’ve interacted with Trump in a bind between White House privilege claims and congressional demands.

Democrats have signaled they plan to target a long list of officials, including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, along with outside businesses tied to self-enrichment and corruption narratives. To manage the response, Will Scharf, previously the White House staff secretary, took over as White House counsel this week, a notably faster transition than in 2018, and he’ll work closely with Attorney General Todd Blanche, whom he partnered with on Trump’s presidential immunity case. Former officials expect Scharf, described as more attuned to “what the president wants” than his predecessor, to reshape the counsel’s office into more of a defensive, litigation-focused operation if Democrats win, a shift historians say fundamentally changes the nature of the job and could pull senior officials’ time away from policy work across agencies.

GOP Midterm Convention Struggles:

A POLITICO survey of more than 70 GOP candidates and members found that most are either skipping or still undecided about next week’s Dallas convention, the first midterm convention thrown by a major party in over four decades, with dozens more declining to share plans. Reasons for staying away include pre-existing district obligations, personal conflicts like weddings, and, for some in tough races such as Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Mich.), Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa), and Rep. Jeff Hurd (R-Colo.), a desire to avoid being closely tied to Trump so close to the election. Barrett said he’d rather be “useful” in his district and noted, “I can’t control what the president’s going to say at the convention, but I can control where I’m at.” Trump and JD Vance will headline the two-day event at the American Airlines Center, with top leaders like Speaker Mike Johnson and Leader John Thune, plus 2028 hopeful Ted Cruz and Senate candidates Mike Rogers and Jon Husted, expected to attend. Johnson said he’s been promoting the event but acknowledged some members need to stay home given how close the gathering falls to early voting.

An Financial Times investigation, drawing on leaked Russian correspondence, travel records, and patent analysis, reveals a covert Russian program codenamed C430L that has been helping Iran develop supersonic cruise missiles using ramjet propulsion technology since 2023, continuing through the US-Israeli war against Iran and into 2026. The effort, coordinated by state arms exporter Rosoboronexport and missile maker NPO Mashinostroyenia (both under U.S. sanctions), involved senior Russian engineers repeatedly traveling to Iran to analyze flight-test data and help Tehran fix technical problems with an already-built and tested ramjet system, weapons experts say the technology is almost certainly meant for anti-ship and land-attack missiles capable of threatening U.S. aircraft carriers. Experts described it as one of the most strategically significant transfers of Russian military technology to Iran, requiring “political clearance from the very top in Russia,” and part of a broader deepening of Russia-Iran military cooperation that has included Iranian Shahed drones supporting Russia’s Ukraine war and Russian assistance like satellite imagery and drone support during Iran’s conflict with the U.S. and Israel. Putin told Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian this week that Moscow was “supplying you with the goods you need,” and the Kremlin, Rosoboronexport, NPO Mashinostroyenia, and Iran’s government all declined to respond to the FT’s questions, while it remains unclear whether a next phase of the program, still being negotiated as of June 2026, has begun.

Cost is a major deterrent: the NRCC is suggesting a $25,000 minimum donation for members to attend, which covers a hotel room and two tickets to the convention and a welcome reception, with higher tiers up to $100,000 unlocking more access. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said the bill factored into his uncertainty about going, while another anonymous member admitted the fee gave him an easy excuse to skip an event he didn’t want to attend anyway. Even so, some GOP lawmakers, including committee chairs, plan to donate well beyond the minimum since the convention is seen as a key late fundraising opportunity. Senior Energy and Commerce Committee members Bob Latta and Morgan Griffith are both staying home for district commitments, and Appropriations Chair Tom Cole cited a dove-hunting event in Oklahoma as his reason for skipping.

Several Republicans are staying away for reasons tied to timing or political caution: northeastern members like Chris Smith and Andrew Garbarino cited 25th-anniversary 9/11 commemorations in their districts, while moderates such as Sen. Susan Collins, who doesn’t attend conventions while up for reelection, and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, who said “I’m not a party guy,” are avoiding the event as vulnerable candidates. One anonymous House Republican called the convention “a waste of time” aimed at rallying the base rather than persuading independents, while privately some GOP members worry about Trump’s sagging approval amid the Iran conflict, a Canada trade war, and price increases. The RNC pushed back forcefully, with spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre calling enthusiasm for the event “incredible” and crediting Trump’s agenda with lower drug prices, lower taxes, and border security ahead of the midterms.

UN Admits Climate Change Defeat:

In a “strategic retreat,” the United Nations conceded in a first-of-its-kind report Wednesday that Earth will soon exceed the 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) warming limit set by the 2015 Paris climate accord, acknowledging the world has lost its chance to prevent some of global warming’s worst impacts. The planet is currently at about 1.4 C (2.5 F) above pre-industrial levels, and the report admits the 1.5 threshold will be crossed “within the next few years,” with the most optimistic scenario seeing warming peak at 1.8 C (3.2 F) by mid-century, while current government policies point toward 2.6 C (4.7 F) by 2100. UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “humanity is speeding past the limit to avoid climate catastrophe,” and UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said the 1.5 goal remains the target but must now be approached “from above” rather than avoided entirely.

Instead of preventing overshoot, the new strategy calls for limiting how high temperatures peak, then gradually cooling the planet back below 1.5 degrees, ideally by century’s end, through ending fossil fuel use and developing carbon-removal technology, a process the report calls “overshoot.” Scientists warned this period could last “many, many decades,” and every five-year delay in cutting emissions adds at least another tenth of a degree to the eventual peak, according to report co-author Joeri Rogelj. During this stretch, the report predicts worsening extreme weather, rising seas, melting ice, increased death and illness, falling food production, water shortages, economic damage, and species extinctions, along with the risk of irreversible “tipping points” like the loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the Amazon rainforest, and the Atlantic Ocean circulation system that warms Europe. Some locations, the report warns, “might become more or less uninsurable or even uninhabitable.”

Reactions from outside scientists were largely grim: University of Victoria’s Andrew Weaver called it “among the bleakest U.N. climate reports I have read,” carrying “desperation, frustration and urgency but not resignation,” while Climate Analytics CEO Bill Hare said the report describes the problem well but “does a poor job of showing us that there’s a way out.” The report’s proposed cooling phase relies partly on removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but authors note that planting trees, the traditional method, could shave off at most a tenth of a degree, meaning more novel and largely unproven carbon-removal approaches will be needed. Stanford’s Rob Jackson summed up the skepticism bluntly: “We were unable to stop the runaway train of global emissions to avoid 1.5 C of warming. Now overshoot scenarios require us to stop the train quickly and to back it up. Is it our best hope? Absolutely. Is it likely? Absolutely not.”

Trump Coin Issues:

The U.S. Mint began selling a new $1 coin bearing Trump’s face on Wednesday, sold to the public in 25-coin rolls for $61 or 100-coin bags for $154.50, well above face value, drawing immediate mockery online as critics called it another Trump-branded grift. The coin, meant to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary, features Trump’s portrait alongside “Liberty” and “In God We Trust” on the front and the presidential seal on the reverse, but critics zeroed in on its “1776—2026” date inscription, with Bulwark commentator Catherine Rampell joking it appeared to mark “the birth date of liberty as 1776, and its death as 2026.” Federal law generally bars living presidents from appearing on U.S. currency, but the administration sidestepped that restriction by authorizing the coin as a commemorative anniversary tribute rather than standard currency.

The coin is the latest in a string of efforts to imprint Trump’s image across American institutions and currency: his face already appears on large banners at government buildings like the Justice Department and Interior Department, and the Treasury Department is weighing a plan to put his image and signature on a $250 bill, an idea originating from Rep. Joe Wilson’s “Donald J. Trump $250 Bill Act,” complete with an AI-generated mock-up. Other Republicans have piled on with similar gestures, including Rep. Brandon Gill’s proposal to replace Benjamin Franklin with Trump on the $100 bill and Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s bill to add Trump’s face to Mount Rushmore alongside Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln. The coin also joins a growing lineup of Trump-branded commercial products, including a $60 “Make America Pray Again” bible, sneakers, watches, and cryptocurrency, all of which have added billions to the president’s and his family’s fortunes. The piece notes that Trump’s appetite for this kind of personal branding shows no sign of slowing: last week, after praising the Artemis II crew for naming a moon crater after a late astronaut’s wife, he told the crowd, “I wish they’d name something like that after me.”

USS Lincoln’s Conditions:

The USS Abraham Lincoln pulled into Laem Chabang Port in Chonburi province, Thailand on Wednesday, its paint chipped and hull visibly rusted after 286 days at sea, the ship’s first full port stop since deploying from San Diego on Nov. 21. The carrier is heading home after being relieved by the Japan-based USS George Washington, having spent most of the deployment supporting U.S.-Israeli military operations against Iran, with brief stops only in Guam and Oman to resupply. Its 1,092-foot frame, one of the largest warships in the world, looked “a shadow of its former self” as crowds gathered onshore to watch it dock. Rear Adm. Robert E. Loughran called the stop a “well-deserved opportunity” for the roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines aboard to rest, while also framing it as a show of the U.S.-Thailand alliance.

The crew is getting a four-day “rest and relaxation” stop in Pattaya, a resort city with a reputation as a sex-tourism hub, with each service member allotted three liberty days and one duty day; sailors disembarked in civilian clothes onto lines of Ford pickups and buses, one carrying golf clubs, as a commanding officer urged them over the loudspeaker to be on their “best behavior.” Local businesses hung welcome banners, and officials estimate the visit will inject about $3 million into an economy hit by falling tourism amid Middle East-driven fuel prices and travel disruptions. Thai police also conducted a late-night sweep of Pattaya’s beachfront promenade over the weekend, detaining 25 people, mostly Thai, Laotian, and Ugandan nationals, suspected of public solicitation ahead of the ship’s arrival. A local factory worker who came to watch called the docking a source of pride he could “boast to our neighboring countries about.”

The voyage, originally slated for seven months, stretched to 286 days after Iran destroyed a key U.S. Navy supply hub in Manama, Bahrain, worsening conditions onboard. Families and sailors described moldy showers, rationed meals, and shortages of basic necessities like soap, toothpaste, and deodorant, alongside exhausting workloads and deteriorating mental health among crew members. The visible deterioration of the ship itself, rust dominating sections of the hull, became a striking visual symbol of the deployment’s toll as it edged into port. The Lincoln’s homecoming to San Diego continues after this stop, closing out one of the longest carrier deployments in recent memory.

Other news:

Epstein survivors urge Leon Black to comply with Congressional subpoenas ahead of tomorrow’s deposition. “If Black continues to withhold responsive records or refuses to comply with the committee’s demands,Congress should use every tool available to enforce its subpoenas.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who isn’t seeking reelection in November, renewed his call for Trump to fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after Army Secretary Dan Driscoll’s resignation became official this week, writing on X that he’d “never witnessed more inept management of the brave men and women who serve our country.” Tillis accused Hegseth of being “intimidated by competence” and prioritizing culture-war fights, such as grooming and fitness standards, over modernizing the military and retaining talented leaders like Driscoll, who had clashed with Hegseth over troop modernization and the firing of dozens of senior officers. This is the latest escalation in a long-running feud between the two: in May, Tillis told POLITICO that Hegseth had misinformed Trump on Iran war dynamics, and in a forthcoming book he brands Hegseth and other officials as “MAGATS” who failed to protect the president. Trump has previously fired back at Tillis on Truth Social, calling him “a quitter” for not seeking reelection and predicting the GOP would emerge “bigger, and better, and stronger” without him. The White House and Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment on Tillis’s latest post.

In a CNBC interview ahead of the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick dismissed concerns about data centers’ water use as adversary propaganda, framing the facilities as vital economic boosters for communities; critics online pushed back, noting that data centers often consume hundreds of thousands to millions of gallons daily for evaporative cooling systems (though newer designs reduce this), with the exchange reflecting broader tensions between supporters who see rapid data center growth as key to AI leadership over China and critics warning of local water strain and rising electricity costs.

New Jersey-based Crystal Temptations recalled its Chocolatey Eyeballs Halloween candy on Aug. 31 after discovering the products contain undeclared milk, which can cause serious or life-threatening reactions in people with milk allergies. Five product styles, ranging from a 7-ounce acrylic box to a 16-ounce pouch bag, were sold at Marshalls, TJ Maxx, HomeGoods and Sierra Trading Post across 13 states including California, Texas, New Jersey and Massachusetts. The company said the issue stemmed from a temporary breakdown in its production and packaging process, and no illnesses have been reported so far. Consumers who bought the candy are advised to destroy it and contact Crystal Temptations with proof of purchase for a refund at 1-201-246-7990, weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET.

The Justice Department issued a new legal opinion Wednesday requiring states to report undocumented immigrants to federal authorities as a condition of receiving federal funding, part of the administration’s broader push to advance Trump’s mass deportation agenda. The department’s Office of Legal Counsel reinterpreted a 1998 Clinton-era opinion, ruling that any state accepting federal funds for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or Supplemental Security Income programs, two of the country’s largest safety-net programs, must report anyone unlawfully present in the U.S. to the Department of Homeland Security, with the obligation now extending to the entire state government rather than just the specific agencies administering those benefits. Since every state receives this funding, the reinterpretation effectively pressures all 50 states to comply. DOJ said states won’t face retroactive penalties for having relied on the old interpretation but are expected to follow the new one going forward, and the move is likely to draw legal challenges from Democratic-led states, which have previously resisted similar administration efforts to compel local agencies to share immigration status information.

The jury in Lindsay Clancy’s murder trial ended Wednesday without a verdict after telling Plymouth Superior Judge William Sullivan for a second time that it remains deadlocked, prompting him to read the rare “Tuey-Rodriguez” or “dynamite” instruction, a last-resort push for jurors to keep working toward a unanimous decision, before sending them home to resume Thursday. The nine women and three men have now deliberated more than 28 hours over five days since receiving the case last Thursday, weighing five possible verdicts: not guilty by reason of insanity, not guilty, first-degree murder, second-degree murder, or manslaughter, in the deaths of Clancy’s three children in their Duxbury home in January 2023. Clancy’s attorney argues she wasn’t criminally responsible due to overmedication and postpartum psychosis, while prosecutors contend she planned the killings and understood right from wrong; a continued deadlock could ultimately lead to a mistrial, as has happened twice recently in Massachusetts cases. Separately, a 56-year-old woman was arrested and arraigned on a juror-intimidation charge after allegedly filming jurors outside the courthouse, though her attorney says she was trying to photograph Clancy, not record jurors, and she pleaded not guilty.

The Kennedy Center has removed “Blue,” a stick-figure sculpture by artist Joel Shapiro that stood outside the venue since 2019, with cranes taking down pieces of the statue Wednesday morning as the National Park Service briefly closed a nearby road. A Kennedy Center spokesperson said the venue requested the “deinstallation,” calling it “common practice” and thanking Shapiro for the work’s years on campus. A former curator, Josef Palermo, told CNN he was instructed in September 2025 to remove all outdoor art ahead of a planned reopening with “all new art” reflecting Trump’s vision, though a person familiar with the matter disputed that account. The activist group “Hands Off the Arts” blasted the removal as “buffoonery,” in a jab apparently aimed at Trump. The move is the latest in a string of changes Trump has made to the institution since taking office, including reshaping its board, becoming its chair, and pushing to add his name to the building, moves that have drawn legal challenges alongside his separate, currently blocked plan to close the center for a roughly two-year renovation.

At Volga Store in Saratov, Russia, a tech consultant robot named Syoma retaliated after a customer shoved it, advancing and attempting kicks before staff restrained and powered it down; no one was seriously hurt, the customer received compensation, and the store attributed the outburst to a need for an “emotional reboot” as online viewers joked about kung fu software and drew Terminator comparisons, highlighting safety concerns around humanoid robots in retail settings.

The Justice Department filed a statement Tuesday backing OpenAI’s “fair use” defense in a major copyright lawsuit brought by The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and other publishers, along with authors including Sylvia Day, George R.R. Martin, and John Grisham, marking a direct endorsement of the AI industry’s legal position in multiple pending copyright cases. DOJ argued that training a large language model on copyrighted works is transformative fair use because it uses the material “to learn and act on statistical patterns in written text” rather than to duplicate its expressive content, and urged the court to treat the training process separately from a chatbot’s output. The filing leaned on the administration’s broader AI policy, warning that copyright rules making it harder to build a “robust AI industry” in the U.S. would threaten national security and hand an advantage to foreign rivals. The move comes about two months after Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion, the largest copyright class action settlement in history, to resolve a similar suit involving roughly 370,000 authors and 482,000 books.

Tiger Woods pleaded no contest Wednesday to a reduced charge of willful reckless driving, resolving a DUI case stemming from a March rollover crash near his Florida home, after State Attorney Thomas Bakkedahl cited a “significant deterioration of the proof” needed to prosecute the original DUI charge. Woods, 50, will lose his driver’s license for five years and pay about $2,000 in fines; the judge warned him that driving during the suspension would send him “immediately” back to jail. Prosecutors said Woods had a documented injury history and a hydrocodone prescription, and while he admitted taking the painkiller and had pills on him, two forensic toxicologists found insufficient evidence the drug had impaired him, one even suggesting he’d developed a tolerance to it; Woods also refused a urine test, leaving investigators without proof of what was in his system. The case marks yet another setback in a familiar pattern for Woods, who pleaded guilty to reckless driving after a similar 2017 DUI arrest and has faced repeated vehicle-related incidents alongside years of injuries that have complicated his golf comeback. His girlfriend, Vanessa Trump, the president’s former daughter-in-law, was present in the courtroom for the brief, five-minute hearing.

A Coast Guard C-37A jet carrying Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and 13 others made an emergency landing at Reagan National Airport on Wednesday after losing its right engine mid-flight, with the pilot declaring an emergency and noting the plane still had 2.5 hours of fuel remaining. Mullin praised the crew on X, saying the pilots “made the single engine landing feel routine” and later told him it was actually a first for them; the airport confirmed the plane landed safely and was cleared by fire and rescue personnel. The C-37A, a military version of the Gulfstream V, is the aging jet DHS has used to shuttle senior Coast Guard and DHS officials, and the department flagged it as far back as last year as “22 years old” with “significant avionics and communications obsolescence issues.” DHS’s push to replace the plane, which started as a roughly $50 million request in its FY2025 budget and later grew to about $200 million for two new Gulfstream G700s, has drawn repeated scrutiny from congressional Democrats questioning why it should take priority over upgrading older search-and-rescue aircraft.

A judge set $250,000 bail Wednesday for Agostino Abbatiello, the 24-year-old former Penn State fraternity brother accused of leading a cocaine trafficking ring, though he had not posted bail as of Wednesday afternoon and remains held at Centre County Correctional Facility. Prosecutors allege Abbatiello was the ring’s main supplier, selling cocaine in amounts up to a kilogram to fellow fraternity members and paying others to package drugs and act as couriers; he faces felony charges including corrupt organizations, conspiracy, and dealing in proceeds of unlawful activity. He was initially denied bail, unlike 13 co-defendants arrested in the case, prompting his attorney to file an emergency motion calling the denial “absurd” and noting investigators never alleged he used or threatened violence or was seen with a weapon; the attorney also accused prosecutors of judge-shopping. The investigation centers on Penn State’s Sigma Chi and Delta Upsilon fraternities, with Sigma Chi suspending its Penn State chapter after the arrests, and Abbatiello, who graduated Penn State in 2024 with a 3.3 GPA and was working as a financial advisor in Florida at the time of his arrest, turned himself in on August 18 and hopes to live with his parents on Long Island while the case proceeds.

U.S. Economy, Markets

Seymour Hersh, Opinion: The Coming Trump Depression, Seymour Hersh, right, Sept. 3, 2026. The businessman president’s lasting legacy might be plunging America into economic misery.

When I was a young wire service police reporter in the early 1960s in corrupt Chicago, one of my favorite books was Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West. The novel was published in 1933, and West died young in a car crash with his wife in 1940. It’s about a young guy who writes an advice column for a New York newspaper and answers letters in his column from readers living through the desperation of the early days of the Great Depression. Every night he pours out his heart every night after work to a bartender. One evening the issue is a letter he received from a sixteen-year-old girl:

I don’t know what to do and would appreciate it if you could tell me what to do. When I was a little girl it was not so bad because I got used to the kids on the block makeing fun of me, but now I would like to have boy friends like the other girls and go out on Saturday nites, but no boy will take me because I was born without a nose—although I am a good dancer and have a nice shape and my father buys me pretty clothes.

I sit and look at myself all day and cry. I have a big hole in the middle of my face that scares people even myself so I cant blame the boys for not wanting to take me out. My mother loves me, but she crys terrible when she looks at me.

I’m no longer a police reporter, but I’ve spent decades reporting on corrupt and idiotic wars and presidents—Democratic and Republican—who’ve thrown away billions of dollars on wars that could not be won, did not need to be fought, and cost millions of lives. Sometimes the job makes me feel a bit like Miss Lonelyhearts.

And today we have a malicious childlike president who is bankrupting the United States with the war he started in Iran and who ignores one possible off-ramp after another. I was chilled this summer during a visit to Europe when an old friend who understands the world of oil and finance and is not given to dramatics told me that unless there are immediate changes, America will soon enter a recession that will equal or surpass the Great Depression. Trump is playing with the future as he borrows and borrows and leaves an unmanageable debt for future presidents.

The economic horrors to come are the subject of a recent column by Martin Jay, a frontline British foreign correspondent who over thirty years has reported for American, British, German, Russian, and Arab media. In 2016, he was awarded the UN Correspondent Association’s gold medal for outstanding reporting. Jay’s argument is the same one I’ve heard from my friend at the heart of the international oil industry.

Jay’s essay begins with a scene from a recent gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a Eurasian security group with ten member states. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Indian Prime Minister Nahendra Modi were caught on video sharing a moment of levity, a clip that went viral internationally. “What was the joke?” Jay asks. He speculates that they might have been talking about Donald Trump: “the more the US president does intentionally, the more of a joke he becomes universally around the world. The US president is literally a comic figure—a clown who amuses world leaders who are embracing a new multipolar world order which has found a new system of world trade that surpasses the US altogether.”

Jay points out that BRICS, the international trade collective of Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates, has like the SCO, which recently took in Iran, Pakistan, and India, been expanding and that the SCO might soon start its own development bank. So many countries exiting the US financial system and cutting ties with the IMF and the World Bank may spell the end of US dollar hegemony, no little thanks to Trump.

That dominance for decades allowed the US to push smaller countries around despite its military failures in places like Korea and Vietnam. It was the great expense of the Vietnam War in part that spurred Nixon to decouple the dollar from the gold standard in 1971. The idea, Jay writes, was “that future wars could be fought with freshly minted dollars with no side effects,” but in actuality “subsequent wars—certainly Iraq and Afghanistan—were fought using money which was essentially borrowed from Global South countries, even China, through treasury bonds—basically loans given to countries backed by the US government.” Since Trump started his war with Iran, economists are now speculating that the days of the US borrowing without limit from the Global South may be coming to an end. If SCO and BRICS set up a financial zone separate from the dollar, demand for US Treasury bonds could crater, and, Jay writes, “a surplus of dollar around the world which not many people want only means one thing: inflation.”

It’s long been known that weakening the dollar is part of Trump’s strategy to strengthen US manufacturing by making US exports cheaper, but Jay argues that he’s neglected “the downside to a weaker dollar”: “that only works when you have real control over the world’s economy and central banks, like in Nixon’s day. ‘It may be our dollar, but it’s your problem,’ one of Nixon’s advisers is quoted as saying to Europeans in the early seventies at a conference which explained how he planned to weaken the dollar and keep the hegemony.” Trump is still trying to have it both ways, but the hegemony, largely due to his own reckless foreign policy, is slipping away. These processes have long been underway, but Jay emphasizes that the current president has accelerated them: “The delusional antics of Trump are leading America to ruin at a speed most thought unimaginable.”

As we Chicago kids used to say about the proven corruption of the most infamous ballplayer on the White Sox: “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

U.S. Media, Entertainment, Culture

 

Gloria Steinem speaks at the Women's March in Washington, on January 21, 2017 (Shannon Stapleton photo for Reuters).

New York Times, Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92, Katharine Q. Seelye, Sept. 3, 2026. She challenged sexist assumptions, helping women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at work, at home and in society at large.

Gloria Steinem, the feminist crusader who, in galvanizing the modern women’s movement, helped millions of women develop a sense of self-worth and gain a measure of equality at home, at work and in society at large, died on Wednesday at her home in New York City. She was 92.

Her death was announced in a post on social media, which did not give a cause.

Calling herself “an entrepreneur of social change,” Ms. Steinem helped usher in sweeping cultural transformations across virtually every facet of American life, from the boardroom to the courtroom to the bedroom.

For more than half a century, she personified the women’s movement and became its most enduring symbol; her tinted aviator glasses and curtain of streaked-blond hair parted in the center made her one of the most recognizable women in the world.

She was an unlikely revolutionary. Growing up a transient in the Midwest, she was 10 when her parents divorced and she was left to mother her mentally anguished mother — a formative experience that reverberated throughout her life. She had scant formal education until sixth grade; her big dream, as a budding tap dancer, was to become a Rockette.

But she read voraciously, graduated from college with honors and believed fiercely that women should be able to live whatever life they chose.

Her own feminist awakening didn’t come until her mid-30s, when, as a journalist in 1969, she attended a “speak out” of women discussing their illegal abortions. Charismatic, articulate, media savvy, deeply empathetic and a workaholic, she evolved into a political and cultural force.

She led protests and consciousness-raising sessions, wrote essays and delivered speeches, delved into political organizing, helped establish rape crisis centers and shelters for battered women, founded numerous groups that promoted women and had the Midas touch when it came to raising money for their causes.

The Daily with Sarah Jones via PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Fox News Dumps Trump Cheerleader Maria Bartiromo, Jason Easley and Sarah Jones, right, Sept. 3, 2026. Maria Bartiromo, above, has been non-stop waving the flag for Trump and professing endless support for a decade. Bartiromo was one of the personalities that Trump would turn to when he needed the softest of soft interviews.

Trump’s buddy Sean Hannity always seems to be his first Fox News choice, but Bartiromo, along with Fox and Friends, were his two other go-to spots for interviews that would be even more gentle than the standard Fox News interviews.

Bartiromo like the rest of Fox allowed Trump to pre-tape his interviews. The Trump interviews were often edited to paint the president in the best light, and there have been reports over the years that the White House even has editorial control over Trump’s interviews on Fox.

Fox News didn’t give Maria Bartiromo a big sendoff to thank her for her 12 and a half years on the network.

Instead, Fox News released a terse statement that:

Effective today Maria Bartiromo is no longer with FOX News Media. Fox News media said, “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.”

That’s it. Boom. Gone.Bartiromo’s Exit Is A Sign That The End Of Trump Is Coming

Fox News is going to find a new host to take over Bartiromo’s Sunday show, Sunday Morning Futures, which has been the place for MAGA Republicans to push their messages, hawk their campaigns, and hit viewers up for donations.

Sunday Morning Futures is not a Sunday news show. It was more like a MAGA circus tent where those who either needed something or wanted to get the attention of Trump and his most loyal supporters gathered.

Bartiromo’s Sunday show was the place that Republicans turned to if they felt that Kristen Welker was too liberal.

We don’t have the details yet of why Bartiromo and Fox News parted ways. Maybe Bartiromo is taking a job in the Trump administration?

However, when Trump’s most loyal media supporters start losing their plum perches to speak to his base, it is also a sign that the MAGA era is drawing to a close.

In a few months, Democrats are likely to control all or part of Congress. Trump looks to be on the fast track toward lame duck status, and starting next year, voters of all political stripes will look toward the 2028 election and the selection of a new president.

The signs are growing that it really is over for Trump, and the era that many Americans thought would never come to an end is moving toward its close. 

Daily Beast, Elon Musk is the richest man in the world. And, apparently, he’s the saddest, Laura Esposito, That’s according to filmmaker Alex Gibney, who relayed the assessment from someone who worked closely with Musk. Gibney’s forthcoming film, Musk, was previewed by The Hollywood Reporter.

“Someone who worked closely with Elon told me, ‘He’s the most miserable man I’ve ever met.’ So he’s inflicting his misery on everyone else,” Gibney told the outlet.Elon Musk.Elon Musk has regrets about his chainsaw-waving stunt. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

In Gibney’s film, which premieres this fall, he tackles the 55-year-old’s worst impulses—and how this unelected, unchecked figure shapes much of what we see in American politics today. Musk has made no secret of his thirst for power, notably during the 2024 presidential election, when he funneled more than $290 million into Donald Trump’s last presidential campaign and hosted town halls in swing states. He famously gave away a $1 million check to a rallygoer selected at random after they signed a petition to support a PAC he created.

Questions about his obscure data-collecting efforts and the role he plans to play in forthcoming elections also remain unanswered. In his documentary, Gibney hammers home that Musk’s brief stint at the helm of an army of twentysomething men known as the “DOGE” squad involved dismantling USAID programs around the world; the X owner gained access to the data on tens of millions of Americans.

What, exactly, he does with that information is unknown. Combined with the data he has already obtained through his control of X, that information makes him an undeniable force in American politics.

According to the person quoted by Gibney, Musk does it all to fill the bleakness he feels within himself. Other times, perhaps he fills that void by lashing out at others.

Just ask President Donald Trump, who has privately admitted he was hurt by Musk after their nuclear fallout, according to recent reports.

After the 80-year-old president returned to the White House in part due to Musk, it wasn’t long before the relationship went awry. It came to a head in a very public feud, which included Musk claiming in an X post that Trump “is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” The allegation was unsupported, and Musk later deleted the post. 

Sept. 2

Top Headlines

Donald Trump portrayed seizing oil from Venezuela, creating conditions for violent blowback in the future (Graphic by The Hartmann Report)

• The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Trump Brags About His “Brilliant” Venezuela Scheme While History Screams a Warning, Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 2, 2026. America has spent decades paying for earlier interventions in oil-rich nations. Trump is now risking another cycle of rebellion, bloodshed, and blowback. Here we go again with American colonialism, this time with a crazy scheme Trump thinks is “brilliant.”
• Public Notice, Opinion: Trump begs SCOTUS to let him unleash midterm chaos, Liz Dye, right, Sept. 2, 2026. They’ll find that fraud if they have to throw out millions of lawful ballots to do it. The important thing to know here is that this is all John Roberts’s fault. We’re on the precipice of complete chaos as Trump tries to seize control of the midterms. Multiple courts have ruled that this is wholly illegal. And yet, no one knows whether the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority will once again leap in to ensure the president is able to violate the law.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Mike Johnson, Wet Noodle, Bill Kristol & Andrew Egger, Sept. 2, 2026. Donald Trump has spent two years openly favoring red states over blue ones while disbursing federal disaster relief funds, but it’s still surreal to see him talk openly about it.

News Roundups

• Meidas Touch Network, Wednesday Updates: ‘Strait’ Up Panic, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 2, 2026. Trump spotted sleeping again during a White House event this afternoon. Today’s top stories: Trump again falsely posts the U.S. has the Strait of Hormuz “under control” and floats renaming it to the “Trump Strait;” IRGC claims tanker strikes near the Strait and warns shipping companies of penalties; Iran claims strikes hit U.S.-linked sites in Iraq, Jordan, Bahrain, and Kuwait, and alleges American casualties.
• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News Roundup, Pentagon in ‘Shambles’ as Hegseth Faces Removal Calls Amid Readiness Issues, Weak Job Growth, Iran Alleges New War Crimes, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 2, 2026. Pete Hegseth is having a rough week, and it’s the thread running through today’s newsletter. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll resigned after months of clashes with him, sources say his culture-war focus is actively undermining Army modernization, and he’s now spiking promotions for officers who don’t fit his vision, drawing criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

More On Supreme Court Deference To Trump's Autocracy, Schemes, Grifting

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 1, 2026 [Supreme Deference To Trump Ideas, Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 2, 2026. Yesterday, by a vote of 5–4, the United States Supreme Court allowed Trump to continue to build his ballroom. The five right-wing justices concluded that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which had sued to stop the construction of the ballroom, did not have legal standing to sue and that national security considerations came down on the side of construction.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

• The Social Contract with Joe Walsh, Opinion: Why Does That Damn Ballroom Matter So Much? Joe Walsh, above, Sept. 2, 2026. Why MUST That Damn Ballroom Come Down? At the very beginning, when we all first heard about him wanting a ballroom three and a half times the size of the White House on the grounds of the people’s house, and from the very moment he began to tear down the East Wing of the White House and break ground for the ballroom, I screamed “NO!” And I’ve screamed no every day since. And I was the very first person to say back then that whoever the 2028 Democratic nominee is, they must pledge to rebuild the East Wing and tear down/demolish whatever the ballroom is on day one.
• New York Times, Kennedy Center Will Remove Outdoor ‘Blue’ Sculpture, Elizabeth Williamson and Julia Jacobs, Sept. 2, 2026 (print ed.). The towering artwork was targeted for elimination after President Trump’s takeover of the center last year.
• New York Times, Patagonia Sues Trump Over Utah National Monument, Maxine Joselow, Sept. 2, 2026. The outdoor apparel maker joined environmental and Native American groups in challenging President Trump’s reduction of Bears Ears National Monument.

Trump Team Governance

• New York Times, The Logistics Nightmare Facing U.S. Warships, Simon Ducroquet and John Ismay, Sept. 2, 2026 (print ed.). Iranian attacks have upended the Navy’s supply chain in the Middle East, causing a strain on the aircraft carriers, destroyers and amphibious ships that are being kept in the region indefinitely. On a typical U.S. aircraft carrier, 5,000 crew members work around the clock and require up to four meals a day. Although the ships are nuclear-powered, the planes and helicopters flying off them use millions of gallons of fuel each week.
• Robert Reich, Opinion: Trump’s Bonkers Bullying of Canada is Backfiring, Robert Reich (right, former U.S. Labor Secretary and longtime professor), Sept. 2, 2026. His need to assert dominance is igniting patriotism abroad and a backlash at home.

More On U.S. Immigration Policy 

Pierre Damas Bel, a Haitian immigrant who apparently committed suicide shortly after college graduation where he had served in JROTC with hopes of pursuing a career in medicine -- and shortly before scheduled deportation as part of a mass round-up of Haitians who had come to the United States under temporary humanitarian permits.

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: “It Was an Immigration Policy That Took His Life,” Jim Swift, right, Sept. 2, 2026. “Some people die by accidents. Some people die by suicide. Pierre died as a result of a policy. It was an immigration policy that took his life.” Those are words Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield Central Christian Church, offered to reporters yesterday afternoon while discussing the suicide of 20-year-old Pierre Damas Bel, a freshman at Wright State. 
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Americans Reject ICE Hellscape: Trump’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘terror’ backfire, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 2, 2026. 62 Days to the Midterms.* Under the false pretense of protecting the border and removing “the worst of the worst” undocumented immigrants, the Trump regime has unleashed a torrent of violence and lawlessness against hardworking immigrants. It has torn apart families, eclipsed previous administrations in the number of deaths and medical emergencies of those held in ICE custody, and killed innocent Americans on our streets.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

• New York Times, Six Takeaways From the Massachusetts Primaries, Reid J. Epstein, Updated Sept. 2, 2026. Senator Ed Markey, 80, above left, trounced a younger challenger, above right, who had made an argument for generational change. Two other longtime Democratic lawmakers hung on, too.
• The New Republic, Opinion: Good Riddance, Seth Moulton: You Got What You Deserved, Perry Bacon, Jr. Sept. 2, 2026. The congressman who got drubbed by Ed Markey on Tuesday tried to distance himself from the base. That just doesn’t work anymore. Moulton isn’t the only youngish Democrat who positioned himself rightward in the aftermath of the 2024 election and was rightly punished for it. Representative Angie Craig of Minnesota was one of 46 Democrats in the House and 12 in the Senate who voted for the Trump-backed Laken Riley Act, which calls for federal law enforcement to detain and deport immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes even before they are convicted. 
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Rubber-Stamp Congress, William Kristol, right, Sept. 2, 2026. Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot this November. But these midterms are a referendum on him. The 119th Congress has been controlled by the Republican party. That party’s distinctive feature, its defining characteristic, is that it has supported Trump. It’s done so uniformly, mindlessly, and obediently.
• New York Times, Billionaires Sent Montana Prices Soaring. Can Democrats Capitalize? Jack Healy, Sept. 2, 2026. For years, Democrats have failed to harness the anger of Montanans contending with out-of-state wealth driving up costs. This year, a smokejumper thinks he can succeed.
• MSNOW, Opinion: JD Vance’s attacks on Democrats sound eerily familiar, Ryan Teague Beckwith, Sept. 2, 2026. The vice president keeps using the criticisms also leveled at his own boss.

U.S. Military, Middle East Wars, Foreign Affairs

• Hope for America, Opinion: Pete Hegseth is a danger to the world, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 2, 2026. Pete Hegseth is a danger to the world.

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

• New York Times, ‘Don’t Worry About Me’: Attacker’s Father Thought She Had Turned a Corner, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Miles G. Cohen, Amy Julia Harris and Katelyn Ferral, Sept. 2, 2026 (print ed.). Pamela Cisneros was killed by the police in Times Square after she stabbed two people, one fatally. Her father said she had stopped going with him to her mental health appointments.

Global Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets 

 

The Chaos Monkeys Have Already Taken Over the Zoo (Graphic by Paul Krugman).

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Hits Keep Coming, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 2, 2026. How much chaos can the economy take? Here’s the good news: The U.S. economy has proved remarkably resilient since the chaos monkeys, aka Donald Trump and company, took over the zoo. Here’s the bad news: The shocks just keep coming.
• New York Times, Allies Grumble That U.S. Is Hindering Global Economic Growth, Jim Tankersley, Sept. 2, 2026 (print ed.). At a summit meant to showcase President Trump’s economic policies as a model for the world, Europeans complained about tariffs and the war with Iran.
• New York Times, Employer Health Costs Are Expected to Spike in 2027, Reed Abelson, Sept. 2, 2026. A new U.S. survey anticipates an average increase of 11 percent unless benefits are cut, the highest rate in decades. Other findings also predict a sharp rise.
• New York Times, What Rising Global Bond Rates Mean for Your Money, Ron Lieber and Tara Siegel Bernard, Sept. 2, 2026. If you own bonds, they may be in a broad fund that hasn’t lost much money. And that fund may do much better in the next several years.

More News Roundups

• The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Alarm Bells Go Off: Trump's Election Interference Escalates, Johnson Moves to Dodge Epstein Vote, Iran Strikes Resume, Apple Caves, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 1, 2026. There’s a lot happening today, and most of it points the same direction. Congressman Thomas Massie is warning that Mike Johnson may recess the House early just to dodge a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act 2.0, and it fits a pattern we keep seeing: whenever accountability gets close, the exits get greased.

Top Stories

Donald Trump portrayed seizing oil from Venezuela, creating conditions for violent blowback in the future (Graphic by The Hartmann Report)

The Hartmann Report, Opinion: Trump Brags About His “Brilliant” Venezuela Scheme While History Screams a Warning, Thom Hartmann, right, Sept. 2, 2026. America has spent decades paying for earlier interventions in oil-rich nations. Trump is now risking another cycle of rebellion, bloodshed, and blowback.

Here we go again with American colonialism, this time with a crazy scheme Trump thinks is “brilliant.”

You’d have thought we’d have learned our lesson with our stupid intervention in Iran in 1953, which led us straight to America’s humiliation in 1980 and today’s war with the Mullahs. This is going to be an epic disaster, one that will most likely cost us dearly in both American blood and treasure.

Back in February of 1989, I arrived in Caracas, Venezuela for a brief visit. Just a few hundred yards onto Venezuelan soil, I was stopped by a group of soldiers who told me I had to turn back and leave the country. My main memory is how young they were and how they seemed apologetic.

What I’d stumbled into was an uprising called the Caracazo.

Four years earlier, Reagan and his Treasury Secretary James Baker had begun leaning hard on Venezuela to cut back on their social programs and reduce their taxes on rich people, just like they’d done here with trickle-down, only this one under the banner of “austerity” and IMF-supervised “restructuring.”

Venezuela’s President when I arrived was Carlos Andrés Pérez, a guy who’d successfully campaigned in 1988 against the Reagan/Bush austerity plan, calling the entire thing “a neutron bomb that kills people but leaves buildings standing.” He’d also been the president five years earlier, and in that time had nationalized Venezuela’s oil, making him a bit of a folk hero.

But when he took office on February 2, 1989, three weeks before I arrived, the previous president (Jaime Lusinchi) had run the country $33 billion into debt, giving Bush and the IMF an excuse to force their neoliberal austerity program onto new President Pérez, who — disastrously — went along with it. His first step was to raise bus fares, which he thought would be benign. It wasn’t.

In the country with the largest proven oil reserves on Earth — larger than Saudi Arabia’s, Russia’s, or America’s — Bush’s price for debt relief was that the country’s poor had to pay more to get to work. Just 25 days later, the day I arrived, millions of angry people flooded the streets in response to that increase in bus fares and Pérez declared a state of national emergency.

By the end of the next afternoon, the 28th, Pérez had suspended the constitution and his army had killed at least 276 civilians and wounded another 1,500. Human rights groups said thousands died as bodies were dumped into unmarked pits in a corner of the Cementerio General del Sur that Caraqueños call La Peste, “the plague.” The brutal state of emergency, endorsed by US President GHW Bush, lasted another month.

Now, we’re not only risking a repeat of that, but we’ve also run this movie before in other countries. In an incredible irony, the most well-known of those was Iran in 1953 when our CIA overthrew democratically-elected Iranian President Mohammad Mossadegh because he’d nationalized that country’s oil.

We replaced Mossadegh with the brutal, repressive rule of the Shah, and we’re still paying for that one, this time with American blood and treasure thanks to Trump’s and Hegseth’s criminal attack and bumbling incompetence.

Calling his latest imperialist scam in Venezuela “the biggest oil deal in world history,” Trump is now filling in some of the details of his corrupt attempt to make off with some 65 billion barrels of oil sitting across 17 fields that represent about a fifth of Venezuela’s estimated 303 billion barrels total.

And it’s a grim repeat of our worst experiments in colonialism from the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Gregory Brew, senior energy analyst with the Eurasia Group, told Fortune magazine yesterday:

“If the U.S. scheme in Venezuela sounds colonial, that’s because it is.”

Trump tried to put a happy face on his scheme to steal Venezuela’s oil by saying that he’ll be using it to refill our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which he’s drained down to 286 million barrels in a desperate attempt to lower gas prices, its lowest level since 1982 in the wake of the Arab Oil Embargoes.

But, like with so much else Trump says, that’s an easily disproven lie; our salt caves can’t hold Venezuela’s thick, heavy sour crude because they and their pumping equipment are designed and built for light, sweet crude like we pump here. Putting Venezuelan oil into them would gum them up and destroy their usefulness forever.

We do have, however, massive refineries along the Gulf coast that were built by the Koch brothers and others specifically for that heavy Venezuelan crude back in the days when it was easily flowing to America. They’re probably salivating at the opportunity to dump the expensive Canadian tar sands oil they’re now refining and get back to the cheaper and easier stuff from down south. Perhaps this was all even their idea.

Trump says he’s “negotiated” a 100-year lease with Delcy Rodríguez, the illegitimate “acting president” of Venezuela who was Maduro’s VP when the two of them lost the election but stayed in power anyway. Today, the only things keeping her in power — after a majority of voters said “No” — are their army and our Navy and Air Force.

Like I said, we’ve seen this movie before.

To make things even more classically Trumpian, he’s giving the contract to handle this oil we’re snatching to an allegedly corrupt billionaire who’s wanted for arrest in Switzerland, a fellow named Alejandro Betancourt López, right.

López made his fortune from insider no-bid power plant contracts with Chávez; Transparency International’s Venezuelan chapter estimated he’d overcharged the Venezuelan government by $2.9 billion. American prosecutors identified him as an “unnamed co-conspirator” in a scheme they say embezzled more than a billion dollars from those deals, leading Swiss authorities to freeze his assets and issue an international arrest warrant for him.

When British police arrested Betancourt López in London in November of 2025, The Washington Post reports that Trump’s senior officials intervened, pushed the Swiss to close the case without charges, refused to act on the arrest warrant, and gave him a visa to enter the United States.

The corrupt lawyer who argued in American courts that López shouldn’t be charged with embezzlement was then staying at one of López’s mansions in Madrid and has a familiar name: Rudy Giuliani, left.

So, not only did Trump and Hegseth illegally and without congressional authorization invade a sovereign country, kill more than a hundred people, and abduct its head of state, but we then handed a massive chunk of that country’s oil — for the next century — to a man whose arrest warrant we’re sitting on and refusing to execute.

Meanwhile, nobody can find the money from the tanker-carried oil we first seized right after our invasion of Venezuela.

According to The Financial Times, Trump collected roughly $13 billion selling seized Venezuelan crude, routed at first through a bank account he controlled in Qatar, and six months later it appears to have vanished into thin air. It’s definitely not back in Venezuela.

Elizabeth Warren says the entire oil seizure and sale is a crime, and Democratic Representative Juaquin Castro and Republican Representative María Elvira Salazar are echoing her sentiment. The money didn’t even show up when the country was begging for it this June when two earthquakes killed 2,595 people and they desperately needed the cash for rescue and reconstruction.

Given all this, it should be obvious that this sleazy deal is going to fail, and that failure will be both spectacular, bloody, and expensive.

Exxon and ConocoPhillips are still owed billions from Chavez’ nationalization and aren’t going anywhere near this one. Trump sneered at Concoco’s CEO when he asked for reparations for what was taken from them back in the day.

And oil industry experts say it’ll take years, perhaps a decade, to get Venezuelan production meaningfully increased, a timeline that will run well past the political lifetimes of both Trump and Rodríguez.

Get ready: somewhere in the barrios I once worked in above Caracas, a young officer and his friends are running the political arithmetic I saw people doing during those hours I was there in February of 1989. He’ll be the next Hugo Chavez, the guy who overthrew López and re-nationalized the oil.

Seriously, do we really think the citizens of that country — after all they’ve been through over the past four generations — are just going to sit back and take it as our military props up a government nobody elected, hand their oil money to an accused money launderer Trump crony, and let us ship the proceeds through a Trump-owned bank account in Qatar?

Is anybody in America that naïve other than Republican voters who live on a diet of Fox “News”? As Senator Jack Reed — the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee — said:

“President Trump’s effort to turn the U.S. military into an investor in Venezuelan oil is a blatant abuse of power and taxpayer dollars.”

Which raises the question: Where are Republicans who control Congress on this harebrained doomed-to-fail scheme? Every one of them knows just how crazy it is, but it seems most of them are figuring that their silence will buy them a million-dollar-a-year lobbying job if they can just keep their heads down and not challenge Trump and his oil billionaire buddies.

Call your senators and your representative at 202-224-3121 and ask them what happened to Venezuela’s $13 billion and to support a war powers resolution to stop Trump’s insane war against Iran and further military actions in Venezuela.

.

A New Yorker cover story portrayed the U.S. Supreme Court Republican majority, including Chief Justice John Roberts, as almost indistinguable from Donald Trump.

Public Notice, Opinion: Trump begs SCOTUS to let him unleash midterm chaos, Liz Dye, Sept. 2, 2026. They’ll find that fraud if they have to throw out millions of lawful ballots to do it.

The important thing to know here is that this is all John Roberts’s fault.

We’re on the precipice of complete chaos as Trump tries to seize control of the midterms. Multiple courts have ruled that this is wholly illegal. And yet, no one knows whether the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority will once again leap in to ensure the president is able to violate the law.

The result is a frenzied race by lower courts to render their own rulings as quickly as possible to mitigate the impact of the bomb that SCOTUS may or may not drop in the middle of the November election.

This is not how functioning democracies go. Or at least, not for long.Steal big

On March 31, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Justice Department, Homeland Security, and the Postal Service to effectively seize control of state voter rolls.

The Constitution vests exactly zero authority in the executive branch to police local elections, explicitly reserving that power for Congress and the states. But Trump vaguely gestured in the direction of his “unavoidable duty under Article II of the Constitution of the United States to enforce Federal law, which includes preventing violations of Federal criminal law and maintaining public confidence in election outcomes” and forged ahead.John Roberts sticks two more knives in democracy’s backJohn Roberts sticks two more knives in democracy’s backLisa Needham·Aug 25Read full story

Under this spiffy plan, the secretary of Homeland Security will compile a list of citizens, collect state voter rolls, and tell registrars whom to delete. The Post Office will take the list of “legal” voters and refuse to deliver ballots to anyone not on it. And the attorney general will hold the whip, threatening to arrest anyone who stands in the way.

The plan stumbled at the first hurdle, when states declined to turn over the voter lists, and judges declined to make them. The government is currently 0-23 in its effort to coerce the states to hand over voter data. And so Trump turned to the Post Office in a final, desperate attempt to make it happen.

But there, too, he’s been stymied by the courts. Twenty-four states, the District of Columbia, and a coalition of civil rights groups led by the League of Women Voters sued in Massachusetts to block implementation of the order. On June 25, Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, agreed that the mailman has no power to police state elections and enjoined the Post Office from operationalizing it in any fashion. Citing the imminent harm to states, which have already expended considerable time and effort preparing for the midterms, she refused to stay her order pending appeal. The First Circuit agreed on both counts.Aaron Rupar @atrupar.comAG Todd Blanche on Trump attacking mail voting: "This is what the American people expect President Trump and this country to be doing when it comes to election integrity and making sure that we are extraordinarily vigilant about who is voting."Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:16:21 GMTView on Bluesky

Meanwhile in DC, a similar case brought by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the NAACP was percolating before Trump-appointee Judge Carl Nichols. He denied the requested injunction because the Post Office had not enacted a final rule, and thus any harm to the plaintiffs was “speculative.” And on August 24 the Supreme Court’s six conservatives adopted that same reasoning to undo Judge Talwani’s injunction.

But by then, the Post Office had finalized the rule, and the very harms warned of by the states were coming to pass.

The final rule propounded by the Post Office is every bit as invasive and infeasible as the plaintiffs warned.

It forces state officials to upload their voter rolls to the Post Office through a dedicated portal and purchase new envelopes with voter-specific bar codes for every piece of ballot mail. If a ballot is rejected, it won’t be delivered at all, and only the registrar can fix that — the voter won’t be told or given an opportunity to challenge her exclusion.

As multiple election officials attested, this cannot possibly be implemented in time for the November midterms.

Dyana Limon-Mercado, the county clerk for Travis County, Texas, wrote that even if she had the money, manpower, and time to redo every ballot envelope — a project which takes 35 people working full time five weeks to complete — her office has no scanners capable of reading the specific barcode mandated by the regulation. She went on:

The County Clerk has already purchased all our absentee ballot outbound carrier envelopes and return envelopes that we will use for the November 2026 election, at a cost of approximately $21,349. We do not have funds to repurchase new envelopes.

Moreover, because the absentee ballot envelopes are specialized products, as referenced above, ordering them requires months of lead time. Even if our budget could handle the additional expenditure, our supplier would not be able to provide that many new envelopes in time for us to meet the October 4, 2026, deadline to start sending out mail-in ballots for the upcoming November 3, 2026 election. We typically order such ballot envelopes three to nine months in advance.

Plaintiffs in the DC case note that, in jurisdictions that mail ballots to every voter, it would take the post office days or even months to scan millions of envelopes.

If it takes USPS one minute to scan each of the 2.6 million mailpieces, the Maricopa County Recorder will have to remain at the [Business Mail Entry Unit] continuously for nearly 5 years. If 30 seconds per mail piece, 2.5 years. If one second, 30 days. And if a tenth of a second, it would still take 72 hours.

And that’s if everything at the Post Office goes right. Which it will not according to a whistleblower report published today by Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

The “anonymous federal official with direct knowledge of potentially catastrophic problems in the development of the United States Postal Service’s new system for handling federal election ballot mail” describes a shambolic process to cobble together something in time for the midterms — a process the Post Office resumed in July, in direct contravention of Judge Talwani’s injunction.Trump's disenfranchisement machine is besieging the courtsTrump's disenfranchisement machine is besieging the courtsLiz Dye·Jun 24Read full story

The whistleblower warns that “an ordinary process for an effort of this complexity, magnitude, and importance could take nine months to a year or more,” but that all concerns were brushed aside by supervisors who declared “we cannot fail.”

Even worse, the government plans to reject thousands of ballots if the machine decides that even one in the pile is defective. Blumenthal writes:

Not only is this system astonishingly untested, USPS has simultaneously implemented an impracticable zero percent failure rate. When ballots are submitted to USPS in large-volume batches, if any one ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the Portal, all ballots in that batch will be rejected. For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the Portal – because, for example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved — then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well. As the whistleblower notes, “USPS expects the state to take back the entire batch to cure the issue with the single ballot…”

To root out the nonexistent scourge of voter fraud, the government will disenfranchise millions of American citizens!

After the Supreme Court bigfooted in to stomp on Judge Talwani’s order, she invited the plaintiffs to amend their complaint to account for the fact that the rule has now been finalized. They took her up on it within hours, and by August 27, she had reimposed a temporary restraining order blocking the government from putting the rule into effect.

Temporary restraining orders are definitionally not appealable, since they last for a short time (typically 14 days) and are merely a placeholder to preserve the status quo while the judge makes a considered ruling. Here, Judge Talwani ordered the parties to appear on Thursday, September 3, for a hearing on a preliminary injunction, which is appealable. Despite this lightning-fast schedule, the government filed an immediate appeal to the First Circuit.

No other litigant would seek this kind of relief, much less get it. But the Trump administration routinely demands emergency relief from every adverse ruling, no matter how temporary. And in the main, it gets what it wants, thanks to the Supreme Court’s right-wing justices.

Time and again they leapt in to short-circuit the normal process to allow Trump to break the law, on the theory that saying no to the president is grave emergency. This is a power grab by the Court’s MAGA majority, who have kicked the legs out from under trial and appellate courts, at least when it comes to their golden-orange boy.

Lower court judges have contorted their jurisprudence and preemptively stayed their own orders against the government to avert the chaos of the Supreme Court’s six justices stomping in and doing it for them. In the case of Trump’s tariffs, lower courts allowed him to keep collecting billions of dollars in illegal levies because they anticipated — correctly! — that the Supreme Court would just make them do it anyway.

We watched this exact dynamic play out with respect to Trump’s illegal ballroom, which the Supreme Court just greenlit on Monday. That case had the added wrinkle of Chief Justice Roberts siding with the liberals in the minority to oppose the continued construction. But his righteous anger might ring more true if he hadn’t spend the past decade rewarding Trump for breaking the law and ignoring court orders.

And so the First Circuit sprinted to respond to the government’s demand that they stay Judge Talwani’s order and let the Trump administration enact this disastrous scheme immediately. The government points to special tracking requirements for shipping cremated pets as proof that it’s entitled to dummy up an entire ballot screening system and dump votes at scale.

The First Circuit raced to deal with the government’s emergency motion to set aside Judge Talwani’s order, instructing the parties to brief the case in less than 24 hours. As of this writing, they have not yet ruled — although if you asked me to bet, I’d wager that they’re likely to uphold the trial judge, as they did five weeks ago. But however they come down, we all understand that it will be a mere placeholder until the Supreme Court announces whether it will once again allow Trump to sow chaos and potentially steal the midterms.

Thanks, Chief Justice Roberts!

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Mike Johnson, Wet Noodle, Bill Kristol & Andrew Egger, Sept. 2, 2026. Donald Trump has spent two years openly favoring red states over blue ones while disbursing federal disaster relief funds, but it’s still surreal to see him talk openly about it.

In a Truth Social post last night, Trump had this to say:I just informed Governor Greg Abbott, of the GREAT State of Texas (who has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election!), that I am sending 50.5 Million Dollars to assist recovery efforts from the severe storms, winds, tornadoes, and flooding that hit them hard. Texas is a special place, and I will be back soon to support Governor Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Ken Paxton for U.S. Senate, and the entire ticket of Republican Candidates, who have my Complete and Total Endorsement. See you soon!

Elect Republicans—you don’t want the aid spigot turned off, right? Happy Wednesday. 

News Roundups

Meidas Touch Network, Wednesday Updates: ‘Strait’ Up Panic, Ben Meiselas, right, Sept. 2, 2026. Trump spotted sleeping again during a White House event this afternoon

It’s Wednesday, September 2. There’s been a lot going on today, so let’s get to the top stories. And thanks so much again to everyone for letting us know they’ve pre-ordered our book WTF America. It truly means the world to us.

Today’s top stories:

• Trump again falsely posts the U.S. has the Strait of Hormuz “under control” and floats renaming it to the “Trump Strait”
• IRGC claims tanker strikes near the Strait and warns shipping companies of penalties
• Iran claims strikes hit U.S.-linked sites in Iraq, Jordan, Bahrain, and Kuwait, and alleges American casualties
• Iranian embassies mock CENTCOM’s silence on their alleged casualty claims in Jordan
• Iranian official Ghalibaf accuses the U.S. of “satanic” conduct following strikes on children in Minab, Lamerd, and a wedding in Kouhestak
• China blocks G20 consensus language on Strait of Hormuz navigation
• Bessent blames Ukraine and Biden for gas prices and high cost of living
• Lutnick downplays Iran war deaths
• The U.S.S Abraham Lincoln limps into Thailand, visibly rusted
• Trump’s $100B Venezuela oil “steal” faces more scrutiny
• Tarrant County Republicans vote to close 92 of 316 polling locations
• ProPublica reports Trump aide Peter Navarro fast-tracked a $620M Pentagon loan tied to Don Jr.
• Bessent calls struggling Americans “malcontents”
• Trump $1 coins are on sale now…
• Trump is turning FEMA disaster aid in MAGA campaign ads
• Katie Phang moves to force a federal judge to review FBI notes mentioning Trump in the Epstein Files for possible release

Now let’s dive in.

Trump the Social Media Warrior

Things continue to go very badly for Trump and the U.S. in Iran. But in Trump’s deranged social media fantasy land, the U.S. is crushing it. Trump again falsely claims this morning that the Strait of Hormuz is “under U.S.A. control” and suggested maybe we rename it the “Trump Strait” because like America itself, it would be “hotter” than ever before. Again, we do not control the Strait. What we’re seeing is what I’ll call “Strait panic” from the Trump regime. The IRGC says it’s mined and set fire to 2 tankers trying to use its unauthorized route, and warned shipping companies that more penalties are on the way if they continue to try to avoid the Iranian’s designation lane.

Iran now claims it hit U.S.-linked sites in 4 countries overnight, including a maintenance center and equipment warehouses Erbil, Iraq, Camp Titan and Prince Hassan Air Base in Jordan, Sheikh Isa Air Base in Bahrain, and a military pier along with weapons storage in Kuwait. Iran is claiming American personnel were killed at some of these sites and Iranian-linked social media accounts have spent the day trolling CENTCOM for “staying silence” about the alleged casualties in Jordan. We do not have confirmation of these claims, but unfortunately, CENTCOM has been hiding so much from the American people that it’s hard to know if we’ll ever get a straight answer.

Iranian leader of parliament MB Ghalibaf released a statement accusing the U.S. of “satanic” conduct, listing children killed in Minab, a sports hall in Lamerd, and a wedding hit in Kouhestak. The wedding strike has now been geolocated by BBC’s Sarah Jalali. Separate footage shows the full scale of the destruction. This was a wedding with ordinary families, blown to pieces by the United States. Let’s call it what it is: another war crime.

Over at the G20, China was the sole holdout blocking consensus language affirming free navigation through the Strait, reportedly because Beijing does not want to set a precedent that could also apply to Taiwan.The White House Spin Machine Is Spinning Out of Control

The Trump regime sent its economic team out to lie about the war today. Treasury Sec Bessent went on Fox and blamed the oil price shock entirely on Ukraine for striking Russian energy sites, then pivoted to blaming Biden for the high cost of living. Commerce Sec Lutnick went on CNBC and claimed there haven’t been American deaths in this war, calling it an “economic choke-out.” There have been at least 18 confirmed American deaths. Lutnick also whined that Canada has been “disrespectful” toward Trump and separately insisted that data centers do not use water at all (a lie), saying it’s all propaganda from U.S. adversaries. 40 billion gallons a year of water is projected to go to data centers by 2028.

On the Hannity show, Bessent suggested the Iranian people should just rise up, called Americans struggling in the Trump economy “malcontents” who do not want to work, and bragged about giving Canadian PM Carney a “verbal beatdown.”SubscribedA Rotting Navy and Oil Deal Steal

One thing to know about Trump is that whatever he says, the opposite is true. When Trump says he’s “rebuilt the military,” that’s a good sign he’s destroyed the military. The U.S.S Abraham Lincoln pulled into Thailand finally after 286 days at sea, visibly rusted with worn paint. The Navy says the wear and tear is normal. Here’s a photo. You be the judge:Image

In Venezuela, POLITICO reports that experts are already questioning whether Trump’s $100B so-called oil deal will survive, given that developing those reserves could take a decade and hundreds of billions of dollars the country’s infrastructure isn’t built for.Voter Suppression and Corruption Alert

In Texas, Tarrant County Republicans voted 3-2 to close 92 of 316 polling locations just 63 days before the election, in a county Kamala Harris won by 26 points. More than 100 people showed up to protest, and they moved forward anyway.

ProPublica also reports that Peter Navarro personally directed the Pentagon to fast-track a $620M loan to a 2-year-old startup connected to Don Jr., the only deal out of dozens initiated by a top WH aide. Yes, that’s the same Navarro who went to prison after January 6.

Trump is also bragging about handing out FEMA aid to states that supported him, tying the aid to his campaign endorsements. He’s notably skipping Democratic-led states also seeking help.

And in Tehran, this billboard of Trump is now up:People drive near a billboard depicting U.S. President Donald Trump on a building in Tehran, Iran, September 2, 2026. Majid Asgaripour/WANA

Also, the U.S. mint just announced that these Trump $1 coins are now in circulation…U.S. President Donald Trump‘s portrait on $1 coins, in honor of the nation’s 250th anniversary of independence, on the day the coin is released for sale, is seen in this illustration taken, September 2, 2026. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper/IllustrationThe Epstein Files Aren’t Going Away. We’re Making Sure of That.

Finally, our colleague Katie Phang continues to push the Epstein Files fight forward in court. In a fiery filing, she’s asking Judge Sullivan to personally review handwritten FBI notes tied to reports that reference Trump, arguing that AG Blanche is still defying a federal court order. She’s also challenging the DOJ’s attempt to pass off a months-old congressional letter as if it is the legally required redaction log, calling it “offensively insufficient.” She’ll be discussing this more on her podcast Sidebar with Katie Phang.

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News Roundup, Pentagon in ‘Shambles’ as Hegseth Faces Removal Calls Amid Readiness Issues, Weak Job Growth, Iran Alleges New War Crimes, and More, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 2, 2026. Pete Hegseth is having a rough week, and it’s the thread running through today’s newsletter. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll resigned after months of clashes with him, sources say his culture-war focus is actively undermining Army modernization, and he’s now spiking promotions for officers who don’t fit his vision, drawing criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

He also picked a fight with Canadian teenagers, of all people. Meanwhile the Iran war ramped back up overnight, with Tehran accusing the US of striking a wedding party and retaliating against American allies across the Gulf, oil prices climbing as a result.

On the economy, the picture keeps darkening: weak job growth, rising mortgage rates, and a global bond selloff that’s pushing borrowing costs higher everywhere. Plus a birthright citizenship crackdown, Ed Markey’s primary win, Russia’s escalating drone war with Ukraine, and more below.

If you read this every day, you already know why it matters. Here’s the news:

Pete Hegseth is in trouble:

Pete Hegseth is in trouble today. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll resigned after just 18 months on the job following months of clashes with Hegseth, and Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Hegseth has “hollowed out” the Army’s senior ranks, firing or blocking the promotions of dozens of officers including Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George and half of all four-star generals. A source told NBC that Driscoll raised concerns directly with Trump about Hegseth blocking the Army’s modernization efforts by firing the generals responsible for them before submitting his resignation. Driscoll had publicly said as recently as this year that he had no plans to leave, and the White House called his tenure “highly effective” without addressing why he’s departing. His exit adds to a growing list of senior departures under Hegseth, including Navy Secretary John Phelan, Southern Command chief Adm. Alvin Holsey, and Gen. Chris Donahue.

CNN reports that multiple sources believe Hegseth’s fixation on culture war issues, rather than modernizing the Army for drone warfare and 21st-century combat, is actively disrupting the service’s progress. One former senior Army official said firing technically skilled leaders “for arbitrary reasons... creates confusion and a void,” while a defense official in Europe said Hegseth talks about reform in memos but in practice focuses on “muscles, dudes in dresses, testosterone.” Gen. Christopher LaNeve, whom Hegseth installed as acting chief of staff after ousting George, is reportedly seen internally as “isolated,” “in over his head,” and pushing a “back to basics” approach that a defense official called “absolutely” antithetical to the modernization work Driscoll, George, and Donahue were pursuing. LaNeve’s nomination hasn’t been sent to the Senate and he’s widely believed to lack the votes for confirmation. The Pentagon insists it’s a “total fabrication” that Hegseth isn’t focused on modernization, with spokesman Sean Parnell calling him “a transformative leader.”

Hegseth’s promotion purges are continuing and expanding. He spiked at least six Army officers from a two-star general promotion list this week, just days after blocking four officers from one-star promotions, several of whom had ties to the ousted George and Donahue. The New York Times reported the removed officers include two Black officers and two women, and NBC reported several were logisticians who manage fuel, food, and equipment for troops. Republican Senator Susan Collins publicly criticized Hegseth in July for firing more than two dozen senior officers and blocking promotions, saying the military “is one of the greatest meritocracies in the free world” and needs to stay that way, while Democratic Senators Cory Booker and Brian Schatz have demanded an Inspector General investigation into whether Hegseth is using “personal views on race and gender” to interfere with merit-based selections. Hegseth’s office has said officers serve “at the pleasure of the president” and denied gender or race factor into the decisions.

Hegseth also picked an odd fight with Canadian teenagers this week, reposting an image of a youth cadet award ceremony in British Columbia with the caption “(this is real),” seemingly mocking the size of the instructor presenting the medal. The post drew immediate backlash, with critics accusing him of body-shaming a minor and a civilian instructor in a program for 12-to-18-year-olds that isn’t even part of Canada’s military. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the post “beneath their office” and said the U.S. needs to “stop doing memes, stop throwing shade” if it wants serious trade talks. The Pentagon stood by the post, with a spokesperson saying it “speaks for itself.” The episode is the latest escalation in the broader U.S.-Canada trade war, layered on top of tariffs, insults, and the fight over renaming Lake Ontario.

Amid the ongoing war with Iran, Hegseth is facing calls for impeachment from several members of Congress. Arizona Democratic Rep. Yassamin Ansari said on social media that in the six months since strikes on Iran began, 120 children died in a strike on a school, 18 American servicemembers have been killed, gas prices have hit record highs, and Trump and his sons have profited from investments in defense contractors receiving government business. “Neither Trump nor Pete Hegseth have achieved an objective in this war,” she wrote, calling for Hegseth’s impeachment. That statement was reported by Iran’s state-affiliated Mehr News Agency, so it’s worth reading in that context, though Ansari’s underlying claims about troop deaths and gas prices reflect a real and growing frustration among some lawmakers over the war’s costs. It comes as fighting has flared again, with the U.S. launching fresh strikes and Iran claiming retaliatory attacks on American bases in the region.

Iran war:

Iranian officials say a U.S. airstrike hit a wedding party in a private home in the southern Hormozgan province late Tuesday, with the foreign ministry claiming more than 50 people were killed or wounded and state TV later reporting at least four dead and dozens hurt, with six in critical condition. Iranian state TV interviewed a local fisherman who said the wedding was for his daughter, and described one missile crashing through the roof and another destroying a courtyard wall. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman called it part of a “chain of atrocities” alongside an earlier strike on a school in Minab that killed dozens of children, an attack U.S. officials say was likely American but unintentional, possibly caused by outdated intelligence. CENTCOM said it was aware of the wedding reports, which originated from Iranian state media, and insisted the “U.S. military never targets civilians,” without confirming or denying the strike occurred.

Iran retaliated overnight by targeting U.S. allies Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE with missiles and drones, a day after the U.S. carried out fresh strikes on Iranian military targets including air defense sites, radar systems, and mine-laying capabilities. Jordan’s military said 13 ballistic missiles were fired at it, with 10 intercepted and three landing in remote areas with no casualties, while Bahrain confirmed it intercepted Iranian drones aimed at a military base there. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard claimed it struck at least seven bases across the region, including one in Jordan it said killed multiple U.S. personnel, but CENTCOM dismissed that claim and noted the U.S. doesn’t actually maintain bases inside Jordan. In Kuwait, a residential complex caught fire after being hit by what officials called “criminal Iranian aggression,” though the blaze was brought under control with no casualties reported.

President Trump dismissed the idea of a near-term peace deal on Tuesday, telling Fox News “an agreement with them isn’t worth the paper it’s written on” and warning Iran that “if they retaliate, they’ll be hit much harder. And if they do it again, they’ll be no longer.” He also renewed his call for Iranians to “rise up and fight” against their government, writing on Truth Social that the regime’s economy is “totally collapsing” and that he “couldn’t care less” if they sign what he called a worthless agreement. It echoes rhetoric from when the war began in February, though Trump has wavered over the months, at one point saying he “never cared about regime change” and even calling Iran’s leadership “very rational” back in June. The mixed signals underscore how unsettled U.S. strategy remains nearly seven months into the conflict, with no resolution in sight.

Oil prices climbed further as the renewed fighting dims hopes the war might be winding down, with Brent crude trading near $95 to $96 a barrel and U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate above $90. Both benchmarks have risen roughly 1% to 2% a day since hostilities resumed over the weekend, putting them about 40% higher than a year ago, before the war choked off tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. The renewed volatility reflects fears that the conflict, now stretching toward seven months, could further disrupt one of the world’s most important oil chokepoints. That pressure adds to broader inflation and rate concerns already rattling global bond markets this week.

Economy:

More rough economic news: US private-sector employment rose by just 38,000 in August, according to ADP, well below the 47,000 economists expected and following a downwardly-revised 46,000 gain in July. ADP’s chief economist Nela Richardson said pay growth has become harder to read given demographic shifts, persistent inflation, and AI’s effects on jobs. The weak print raises fresh doubts about Friday’s official jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which the Fed will weigh heavily as Chairman Kevin Warsh navigates pressure from Trump to cut rates against still-elevated inflation and a divided FOMC. The dollar barely reacted, ticking up 0.1% to 99.75 on the index, but the soft number adds to a string of underwhelming labor readings that make a September rate hike look less likely.

Mortgage rates are climbing right along with it, and that’s pushing more borrowers into riskier loans. The average 30-year fixed rate rose to 6.79%, the highest in four weeks, which MBA chief economist Mike Fratantoni attributed to investors demanding higher yields globally amid inflation and deficit worries. Total mortgage applications inched up just 0.8% for the week, with refinancing down 1% and 19% below year-ago levels since there’s little incentive to refinance at these rates. More telling: adjustable-rate mortgages, which offer lower initial rates but carry more risk since they reset later, jumped to an 8% share of applications, their highest level in five weeks, as buyers look for any way to make monthly payments work.

Behind both of those stories is a bigger one: interest rates are surging worldwide, and it’s rippling through everything from mortgages to the federal government’s own borrowing costs. The 10-year US Treasury yield climbed to nearly 4.8%, Japan’s 10-year bond topped 3% for the first time since 1996, and Germany’s benchmark bund hit 3.33%, its highest since 2011. Renewed fighting in the Middle East, persistent inflation, and a national deficit that just crossed $40 trillion are all feeding the sell-off, compounded by heavy AI-related corporate debt issuance crowding the bond market. Analysts also flagged that stocks and bonds are now moving together instead of offsetting each other the way they used to, meaning bonds aren’t providing the safety cushion investors are used to when equities fall. UBS expects the pain to continue, projecting the 10-year yield near 4.5% and the 30-year near 5% by year’s end.

Other news:

A POLITICO survey of over 70 House and Senate Republicans found most either aren’t attending next week’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas or remain undecided, with dozens more declining to say. Reasons vary widely: scheduling conflicts (weddings, district fundraisers, 9/11 anniversary events, even a dove hunt), reluctance to pay the NRCC’s suggested $25,000+ attendance donation, and, particularly for battleground-district members like Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Mich.) and Sen. Susan Collins, a desire to avoid being closely associated with Trump so close to the election. Trump and JD Vance will headline the two-day event at the American Airlines Center, and top leadership (Speaker Johnson, Leader Thune) plus some 2028 hopefuls and marquee Senate candidates like Mike Rogers and Jon Husted plan to attend. Johnson defended the convention’s value while acknowledging many members need to be home given how close it is to early voting. The RNC pushed back on characterizations of low enthusiasm, calling turnout and interest “incredible.”

The State Department has proposed requiring parents to prove their own citizenship or immigration status when applying for passports for their children, the first detailed look at how it might enforce Trump’s August 6 executive order targeting “birth tourism” and narrowing birthright citizenship. Parents would need to submit a valid passport, birth certificate, or immigration documents like an I-94 or green card, a step up from the current process, which only asks parents to check a box confirming citizenship without documentation. The new rules would withhold citizenship from children whose parent works for a foreign government, engaged in fraud to obtain citizenship, or is classified as an “alien enemy.” This follows Trump’s broader, harder-fought attempt to end birthright citizenship entirely, which the Supreme Court struck down in a 6-3 ruling this summer for violating the 14th Amendment. Lawyers pursuing class-action suits on behalf of affected babies are now asking federal judges to block this narrower order too.

Senator Ed Markey, 80, won Massachusetts’s Democratic primary, beating back a challenge from Rep. Seth Moulton, 47, who argued the incumbent was too old for the job. Markey is heavily favored to win a third full term in November against Republican John Deaton, and the race played out against a backdrop of Democratic anxiety over aging leadership following Biden’s troubled 2024 campaign. The dynamic was something of a reversal from other 2026 primaries, where voters unseated older incumbents for younger progressives; here Markey, a longtime progressive champion backed by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, defeated a more moderate opponent. Age became a flashpoint in an August debate, where Moulton pounced after Markey said he used “whatever comes up” for AI on his phone, telling him “this is why we need a new generation of leaders.” Moulton also apologized before the primary for comments about not wanting his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”

A federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s year-long lawsuit trying to force California to ban transgender girls from girls’ school sports teams, a major win for trans rights advocates. Judge Cynthia Valenzuela ruled the federal government never gave California clear notice that its funding was contingent on banning trans athletes, despite Trump’s executive order and DOJ’s Title IX lawsuit targeting five trans girls specifically. The ruling came two months after the Supreme Court upheld similar state bans in West Virginia and Idaho, but Valenzuela noted that decision was narrow and didn’t mandate a nationwide ban or resolve whether Title IX itself permits trans-inclusive policies. California has allowed trans girls to play on girls’ teams since 2013, affecting an estimated fewer than 10 athletes out of nearly 6 million K-12 students statewide. The DOJ said it’s “evaluating options for appeal,” while advocates and the father of one targeted athlete called the ruling proof the administration has been overreaching since Trump’s first days back in office.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned that Russian airspace is becoming unsafe for commercial airlines as Ukraine ramps up long-range drone strikes deep inside Russian territory, urging airlines and insurers using Russian airspace to take note. Ukraine is now capable of launching several hundred drones a day and is reportedly chasing a target of 1,000 daily, having struck oil refineries and industrial sites more than 2,000 kilometers from its border this year. Putin called the warning “state terrorism” and refused to negotiate with what he called terrorists, while separately vowing to escalate strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid ahead of winter to damage heating and electricity supplies. Putin also claimed Russian forces had captured the town of Sviatohirsk, a claim disputed even by pro-war Russian bloggers and unsupported by battlefield-tracking maps. He dismissed speculation of a new troop mobilization as “nonsense,” while acknowledging talks with Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner remain “frozen, to a certain extent.”

The USS Abraham Lincoln docked in Laem Chabang, Thailand on Wednesday after 286 days, more than nine months, at sea, the first full port stop of a deployment that included a record-setting stretch of over 250 uninterrupted days supporting the US war against Iran. AP journalists on the scene noted the ship’s hull was visibly rusted near the waterline and flight deck, and when asked about it, commanding officer Capt. Dan Keeler said only that it was “normal for a long deployment” and declined further comment; asked about Trump’s remark that the deployment was “not nearly long enough,” Keeler replied curtly, “the president speaks for himself.” The visit comes after mounting concern over deteriorating crew mental health and shortages of food and hygiene supplies, and the Lincoln was ultimately relieved in the Middle East by the USS George Washington in August. Family members traveled to meet returning sailors, including Shakeira Fairfax of Paterson, New Jersey, who described the fear of losing contact with her daughter Jada after the initial US strikes on Iran in February and helping keep her spirits up during a period of low shipboard morale. Many crew members are expected to head to nearby Pattaya for rest and recovery, with local officials stepping up security and welcoming the economic boost before the strike group departs for its US base.

The Teamsters union’s national leadership is backing Republican candidates in several 2026 races even as rank-and-file members and local chapters endorse their Democratic opponents, deepening internal tensions. President Sean O’Brien, who became the first Teamsters president to speak at the 2024 RNC, has personally donated to Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown in New Hampshire (whose own local Teamsters chapter backed his Democratic rival) and to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, despite the two once nearly coming to blows at a Senate hearing. In Pennsylvania, the state Teamsters conference endorsed a Democratic mayor for Congress, only for the national PAC to back her Republican opponent after his campaign received a $5,000 union donation. The union also endorsed embattled Ohio Republican Max Miller, who faces domestic abuse allegations and resignation calls from his own party, citing his vote for a labor bill despite his dismal 14% lifetime AFL-CIO labor score. O’Brien, who once called Trump “our enemy” before his 2021 election as union president, was reelected unopposed this year after a rival slate failed to qualify for the ballot.

The House passed a resolution condemning socialism “in all its forms” on a 220-192 vote, with eight Democrats, including Kathy Castor, Henry Cuellar, Jared Golden, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, joining every Republican in favor, while two Democrats voted present. Republicans scheduled the vote as a messaging exercise tying recent Democratic Socialists of America primary wins, like those of Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York and Melat Kiros in Colorado, to their push for Trump’s stalled SAVE America Act, a voting regulations bill that lacks majority support in the Senate. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries opposed the resolution specifically because it endorsed the SAVE Act, calling it “toxic voter suppression legislation,” while Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar noted Democrats had offered a competing resolution condemning socialism without the SAVE Act language attached. The vote nearly collapsed earlier Tuesday when a handful of Republican hardliners protested a short-term funding bill during a procedural vote, until Democrats Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez unexpectedly crossed over to help Republicans pass it. That defection infuriated House Democratic leadership, with Jeffries, Katherine Clark, and Aguilar calling it “a significant breach of trust” and referring the matter to the Democratic Caucus’s rules committee for review.

The family of Benjamin Halona, a 67-year-old New Mexico man mauled to death by a bear inside his Navajo Nation home, is choosing to remember his career as a wildland firefighter and his beloved tamale business rather than the manner of his death. Halona, who used a walker after a recent seizure, was home alone when the bear got in through a door his stepson thought he’d locked; the stepson barricaded himself in his room and called for help, and police shot the bear after it emerged outside. It was the first fatal bear attack in New Mexico since 2001, coming just over a week after state wildlife officials warned of rising bear conflicts driven by drought and food sources like garbage and rotting fruit. Family members shared a cherished memory of Halona singing with country legend Waylon Jennings during a Navajo Nation performance, which Gloria Halona called “probably the happiest moment of Benjamin’s life.” He’s survived by two siblings, four children, five stepchildren, 15 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild, with strong community turnout at his memorials and funeral.

Aid experts are blasting the US’s initial $500,000 emergency contribution to Nepal’s catastrophic flash floods, which have killed more than 1,000 people with 4,400 still missing, as “embarrassing” and “pitiful” for a disaster of this scale. The sum has since been raised to $3.6 million for food and emergency supplies, but former USAID officials say even that pales next to what the agency would have mobilized before Trump dismantled it in 2025, folding its functions into the State Department. Former USAID disaster chief Mark Ward, once nicknamed “Mr. Disaster” by President George H.W. Bush, said Nepal used to have the closest disaster-response relationship of any country with USAID given its earthquake and flood risk, and that expertise is now gone. Brookings fellow George Ingram said the US would have been better off saying nothing than announcing such a small figure, while the State Department defended its approach as “needs-based” rather than driven by “arbitrary funding targets.” Relief efforts are now being led by India and China instead, which Ward warned undermines US influence and long-term interests in regional stability.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is moving to stop collecting EEO-1 data, the 60-year-old demographic reporting requirement that has been central to identifying and proving workplace discrimination, in a move experts say will hollow out civil rights enforcement. The data, which breaks down company workforces by race, ethnicity, sex, and job title, has helped the EEOC investigate systemic disparities and win cases like a $5.5 million settlement against trucking company Central Transport for discriminating against female applicants. Trump-appointed commissioner Andrea Lucas argues the data collection is unconstitutional and incentivizes discrimination against white workers, part of a broader agency shift that includes dropping cases for transgender workers, rescinding harassment guidance, and prioritizing complaints from white men. The change follows Trump’s early firing of two Democratic EEOC commissioners to secure a Republican majority, and comes as the agency’s staffing sits at a 45-year low even as it fields nearly 90,000 discrimination complaints annually. Advocates like Maya Raghu of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law call it part of a pattern of “weaponizing our civil rights agencies” to advance an anti-DEI agenda rather than enforce existing law.

More On Supreme Court Deference To Trump's Autocracy, Schemes, Grifting

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Sept. 1, 2026 [Supreme Deference To Trump Ideas, Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 2, 2026. Yesterday, by a vote of 5–4, the United States Supreme Court allowed Trump to continue to build his ballroom. The five right-wing justices concluded that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which had sued to stop the construction of the ballroom, did not have legal standing to sue and that national security considerations came down on the side of construction.

The majority said it was not resolving the issue of whether the project is legal.

It was Chief Justice John Roberts who covered that aspect of the controversy. He wrote in dissent that the project is “likely unlawful.” “The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” Roberts wrote. He wrote that it is critical to “ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”

Nonetheless, as Josh Gerstein of Politico reported, the project will likely be completed before the question of its legality is resolved.

Trump’s behavior in his second term is a logical outcome of the theory of the “unitary executive.” Under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, those eager to stop Congress from passing legislation that benefited the American people at the expense of businessmen began to argue for the idea that because the president was the head of one of the three branches of the U.S. government, he could not be checked by either of the other two branches: the legislative branch (Congress) or the judicial branch (the courts).

On July 1, 2024, the United States Supreme Court, stacked with Trump’s appointees, took this theory to a conclusion that overturned the central premise of American democracy: that no one is above the law.

It decided that the president of the United States has “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for crimes committed as part of the official acts at the core of presidential powers. The court also said it should be presumed that the president also has immunity for other official acts as well, unless that prosecution would not intrude on the authority of the executive branch.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts said that a president needs such immunity to make sure the president is willing to take “bold and unhesitating action” and make unpopular decisions, although no previous president ever asserted that he was above the law or that he needed such immunity to fulfill his role. Roberts’s decision didn’t focus at all on the interest of the American people in guaranteeing that presidents carry out their duties within the guardrails of the law.

This permission structure appears to have convinced Trump he can do whatever he wishes, including rigging elections so he cannot lose.

Yesterday Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, exposed what appears to be a plot to steal the 2026 midterm elections.

Blumenthal released a letter he had written to Postmaster General David Steiner calling attention to an official whistleblower report, which he attached to the letter.

It’s eye-popping.

The whistleblower warns that there are “potentially catastrophic problems in the development of the United States Postal Service’s…new system for handling federal election ballot mail.” According to the whistleblower, the “process for the creation and implementation of an entirely new and untested set of IT systems” for delivering ballots to voters for the midterm election has been “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”

The whistleblower says “the administration has hidden the high likelihood that the new ballot mail verification processes will result in major disruptions in mail ballots ever getting delivered to voters. As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state—effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters.”

The complaint continues: “Even under ordinary circumstances this would be problematic because of predictable errors in any barcode scanning process.” But the rushed IT development of the new system means it “will almost certainly have significant operating problems when released to the public.” The whistleblower notes that multiple officials from the USPS have described the development process for the system as “a sh*t show.”

The whistleblower said that work on the “USPS election ballot mail IT project” began in June 2026 and has continued despite an injunction from a federal court ordering work on it to stop. Normally, it would take “nine months to a year or more” to roll out a project “of this complexity, magnitude, and importance.” Considering the rush and the consequences, the whistleblower wondered “whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.”

The complaint says: “The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk. Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”

Blumenthal noted that the USPS has a restrained role as a mail carrier. It has never before played a gatekeeping function and yet is now building an entirely new system to put itself “in a position to refuse to mail ballots that state election officials have determined should be sent out.” He called for Postmaster General Steiner to “to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS.”

Blumenthal, left, demanded Steiner answer no later than Friday whether the USPS has stopped work on the project as ordered by the courts, as well as provide the names of those who worked on the project and the dates they were active. By September 8, he wants to see all records about the project.

Blumenthal told reporters: “The main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the USPS puts all of their votes at risk.”

The administration’s attack on elections is especially concerning considering the recent suggestions that Trump is spending most of his time on his legacy projects like the ballroom, leaving him largely unaware of what is going on in the administration. Nancy A. Youssef, Missy Ryan, and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic reported yesterday that when Army Secretary Dan Driscoll went directly to Trump with his concerns about what Hegseth is doing to the Army, Trump was surprised to learn “how many generals and other top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over for promotion under Hegseth” and “expressed concern about the deep cuts to the Army’s senior leadership.”

Driscoll resigned yesterday.

As for the plan to sabotage mail-in voting? Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on House Administration, which oversees the administration of federal elections, posted: “These whistleblower allegations are extraordinary. If Trump Administration officials knowingly built a system designed to prevent Americans from receiving their ballots, that is not election security. It is a betrayal of our Constitution and the American people.”

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption

 

The Social Contract with Joe Walsh, Opinion: Why Does That Damn Ballroom Matter So Much? Joe Walsh, above, Sept. 2, 2026. Why MUST That Damn Ballroom Come Down?

At the very beginning, when we all first heard about him wanting a ballroom three and a half times the size of the White House on the grounds of the people’s house, and from the very moment he began to tear down the East Wing of the White House and break ground for the ballroom, I screamed “NO!” And I’ve screamed no every day since. And I was the very first person to say back then that whoever the 2028 Democratic nominee is, they must pledge to rebuild the East Wing and tear down/demolish whatever the ballroom is on day one.

And I meant it. The Democratic nominee must make that pledge and actually mean it and actually carry it out. In fact, I said that if no Democratic candidate makes that pledge and REALLY means it, I will run for president promising to demolish the ballroom on day one. And I meant it then and still mean it now.

And of course, over the past year, I’ve been bombarded by folks from the right accusing me of bizarre Trump derangement syndrome, but I’ve also been regularly criticized by Democrats who — though they can’t stand the thought of the ballroom — wish I’d focus on more important things like the economy and Trump’s illegal war against Iran. The ballroom sucks, Joe, they tell me, but at the end of the day we should focus on the things that REALLY matter.

Tearing down the ballroom does REALLY matter. More than almost anything else. Here’s why: Because for the first time in American history, the American people put a fascist in the White House, and the ballroom, if it’s allowed to stand, will forever be a concrete monument on public property to fascism. And we must never have a monument to fascism on public grounds in this country.

For the past ten years, and especially the past year and a half, Donald Trump has done whatever he wants, and he’s NEVER been held accountable. He believes he’s above the law, so he breaks laws whenever he wants, he engages in obscene levels of public corruption, he lies every time he opens his mouth, he defies the Constitution at every turn, on a daily basis he does things he does not have the legal authority to do, he repeatedly destroys and dismantles our uniquely American institutions, he spits at our norms, he — and our government in his name — engages in routine acts of cruelty and evil, and he’s NEVER been held accountable for any of it. For ANY of it. Hell, he committed crimes trying to overthrow an American election, and he got away with that. He’s actively sabotaging the 2026 midterms, and he’s getting away with that.

He believes he’s a dictator, and we’ve allowed him to act like a dictator.

The ballroom is a concrete manifestation of his lawlessness, it’s a concrete manifestation of his dictatorship, it’s a concrete manifestation of his never being held accountable for anything. Because the truth is, no matter what anyone thinks of the ballroom, HE DOES NOT HAVE THE LEGAL AUTHORITY TO BUILD IT. He doesn’t. That authority resides with Congress. Building the ballroom is an ILLEGAL act. Even Chief Justice Roberts in his dissent two days ago said it’s an illegal act.

So here we go again? One more time, we all just fucking shrug our shoulders and say “yep, what he’s doing is wrong, it’s illegal, but…we can’t stop it, he’s already building it, construction has already commenced, it would be too costly to object at this point, yada, yada, yada.”

NO!

This is why it’s so fucking important to stand athwart and shout “No!” We must stop this hopeless cycle of him doing illegal things and we just shrug and let him get away with it. The ballroom is that opportunity. It’s our opportunity to finally push back and actually STOP his lawlessness. The ballroom is the concrete manifestation of Trump’s “getting away with breaking the law.” It is a gross symbol of the fascist’s lawlessness. This is why it must come down. To remind the American people and show the world that fascism can never stand in this country. If that ballroom is allowed to stand, then fascism stands.

One other thing: The White House is the people’s house. IT’S OUR FUCKING HOUSE, NOT HIS. He’s just allowed to sleep and work there for four years. No American renting an apartment or a house has the right to demolish or rehab that apartment or house they are renting. That’s up to the OWNER of the apartment or house. WE are the owners of the White House.

One other thing: WE DON’T DO PALACES IN AMERICA. The ballroom will be three and a half times the size of the White House. Trump is building it to be a huge, gold, gaudy palace, the very antithesis of what our founders and the political leaders and designers of the White House intended. They intended for the people’s house to be a humble, approachable, everyday piece of property to contrast us with England’s royalty and to reflect the democratic nature of this country. No kings, no palaces in America. Trump has been allowed to govern like a king and he’s now being allowed to build a palace.

We must say no, and whatever he ends up building must come down.

And I mean it. I will not vote for a Democrat who does not understand this and does not pledge to tear it down. If I became president, tearing the ballroom down and rebuilding the East Wing would be job #1. We’d make a national month of “healing” around it, and I’d invite regular Americans from all over the country to help demolish it. Because America can never, and will never, heal or recover from having the first fascist in American history in the White House as long as that concrete monument to fascism is standing.

Under Trump’s mass-deportation agenda, ICE has become a weapon of fear, intimidation and, let’s call it what it truly is, evil. And they have ramped up efforts, illegal efforts, to deport more people regardless of their immigration status. They chase, hunt, arrest, detain and willfully defy local and state laws. And because they get paid for each person they arrest ICE has decided to arrest and detain first, let the courts work out the details later.

 

The artist Joel Shapiro completed the sculpture “Blue” in 2019, the same year the Kennedy Center opened its $250 million addition known as the Reach (Photo Credit: The Joel Shapiro and Ellen Phelan Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo by Eric Lee for The New York Times).

New York Times, Kennedy Center Will Remove Outdoor ‘Blue’ Sculpture, Elizabeth Williamson and Julia Jacobs, Sept. 2, 2026 (print ed.). The towering artwork was targeted for elimination after President Trump’s takeover of the center last year.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will remove a major outdoor sculpture from the center’s grounds on Wednesday. The work, installed in 2019, was targeted for elimination after President Trump’s takeover of the center, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

The Kennedy Center made no advance announcement of its plans to remove the towering, vivid blue metal sculpture of a stick-like human figure, called “Blue.” A street closure to facilitate the removal will begin before dawn, according to a public notice from the National Park Service.

The Kennedy Center confirmed in a statement that the sculpture was being deinstalled and that a foundation dedicated to the artist would determine its next location. It did not say the reason for the removal but noted that the deinstallation of artworks that had been donated or lent was common practice for conservation or preservation purposes.

“We are deeply grateful to Joel Shapiro for the years ‘Blue’ has spent animating our campus and connecting visitors to his vision,” the statement said. “We are honored to have been stewards of his vibrant work and a part of his enduring legacy.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Shapiro died in 2025. His daughter did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Josef Palermo, who was laid off in March as the curator of visual arts and special programming at the Kennedy Center, wrote in an essay for The Atlantic that he had been instructed to remove works from the center’s permanent art collection, and told that Mr. Trump’s renovations would include new art.

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Palermo recalled that “Blue” had been “targeted early on” and said he took issue with the lack of an announcement.

“The Kennedy Center,” he said, “is in effect holding these pieces in trust for the American people, and there should be a lot more transparency.”

The sculpture is on the grounds of the Reach, an addition to the Kennedy Center that opened in 2019. The sculpture was completed that same year by Mr. Shapiro, whose public art is found in cities around the world. Visible from the Potomac and roads traversing the Kennedy Center, “Blue” has become a local landmark.

In a video about the work that was posted by the Kennedy Center around the time of its debut, Mr. Shapiro said he designed it so the figure would appear in different positions depending on the vantage point of the viewer.

“It’s about action and risk and performance and energy,” he said of the work. “It’s a celebration of possibility.”

The plans to remove the sculpture were met with anger from local activists protesting Mr. Trump’s politicization of the Kennedy Center, which have included installing his name over President Kennedy’s on the building’s facade. A federal judge ordered Mr. Trump’s name removed this year, and the president has been fighting ever since to restore it. 

 

New York Times, Patagonia Sues Trump Over Utah National Monument, Maxine Joselow, Sept. 2, 2026. The outdoor apparel maker joined environmental and Native American groups in challenging President Trump’s reduction of Bears Ears National Monument.

The outdoor apparel company Patagonia joined conservation and tribal groups to sue President Trump on Wednesday, seeking to overturn his move to shrink Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah by more than one million acres.

The lawsuit escalated Patagonia’s feud with Mr. Trump, which began in the president’s first term and became a core part of its corporate strategy. And it kicked off a sweeping legal battle over whether presidents have the power to shrink such sites in the first place.

Mr. Trump signed a proclamation in July that cut 91 percent of Bears Ears, an expanse of red-rock canyons rich with archaeologically significant sites, reducing its area by more than 1.2 million acres. He also shrank a second monument in southern Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante, by nearly 1.7 million acres, or 90 percent.Shrinking Utah’s National Monuments

President Trump’s proclamations have reduced Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante by over 90 percent.

The moves opened vast stretches of the desert landscape to oil drilling, uranium mining and other development. Companies have already staked at least nine mining claims in areas that were removed from both monuments, records show.

But the suit argues that the law governing national monuments, the Antiquities Act of 1906, authorizes presidents to designate the sites but not to shrink them.

Ryan Gellert, the chief executive of Patagonia, said in an interview that it was a “difficult time” for businesses to stand up to Mr. Trump, who has been using the federal government’s power to punish law firms, universities and other institutions.

But, he said, pushback “is more needed now than ever, and I think that this administration, for the 19 or 20 months that they’ve been in office, has been super intent on deploying a whole-of-government attack on nature and the natural world.”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the suit, which was filed in Federal District Court in Washington. Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, did not directly comment on the litigation but said in an email that “the Obama and Biden administrations abused the Antiquities Act to lock up millions of acres of Utah’s public lands.”

Sean Buchanan, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Manitoba who has studied Patagonia’s activism, said the suit would probably help its business. He noted that the company had one of its most profitable years in 2017, when it first sued Mr. Trump over a similar move to shrink the same monument.

“That was a signal to them that they can engage in seemingly risky corporate activism that might alienate customers and not be punished,” he said. “The rationale is that there are enough customers who support suing the Trump administration, and rather than engage in a boycott, they’ll engage in what we call a buy-cott.”

National monuments are lands that are legally protected from development. They are similar to national parks, but while national parks are created by Congress, national monuments can be created by executive action.

In addition to Patagonia, the plaintiffs include the Conservation Lands Foundation, an environmental group, and A’Nuche, a nonprofit group led by members of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. Bears Ears is the ancestral homeland of the Ute Mountain Ute and four other tribes in the region.

Trump Team Governance

New York Times, The Logistics Nightmare Facing U.S. Warships, Simon Ducroquet and John Ismay, Sept. 2, 2026 (print ed.). Iranian attacks have upended the Navy’s supply chain in the Middle East, causing a strain on the aircraft carriers, destroyers and amphibious ships that are being kept in the region indefinitely.

On a typical U.S. aircraft carrier, 5,000 crew members work around the clock and require up to four meals a day. Although the ships are nuclear-powered, the planes and helicopters flying off them use millions of gallons of fuel each week.A graphic of a single U.S. aircraft carrier rendered in gray against a blue background. One label says it has 5,000 personnel onboard and another says that the aircraft onboard require two million gallons of fuel each week.

Carriers don’t travel alone. They are protected by destroyers armed with antiaircraft and cruise missiles, together forming what is called a carrier strike group. Those ships also need to be resupplied with food and fuel.A graphic of a single U.S. aircraft carrier accompanied by five destroyers, labeled as each having 340 personnel aboard.

There are currently two carriers and 12 destroyers in the Middle East helping to enforce a blockade of Iranian ports.A graphic of two U.S. aircraft carriers accompanied by 12 destroyers. The carriers are labeled as the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush and the U.S.S. George Washington. The destroyers are labeled as having a total of 3,700 personnel aboard.

They have extra support from a set of three warships known as an amphibious ready group, which hosts an assault force of Marines.

Robert Reich, Opinion: Trump’s Bonkers Bullying of Canada is Backfiring, Robert Reich (right, former U.S. Labor Secretary and longtime professor), Sept. 2, 2026. His need to assert dominance is igniting patriotism abroad and a backlash at home.

What do bullies do when someone stands up to their bullying and punches them in the face? They look for someone weaker to bully who won’t punch back.

Presumably that’s why Donald Trump has now taken on Canada, after Iran punched back so hard in the cage match the US president began more than six months ago as to leave him humiliated and baffled.

Trump wants to be the bully who humiliates others and forces them into submission. Needing to assert his dominance, Trump has now started a trade war with our northern neighbor, friend, second-largest trading partner (after Mexico) and, at least until now, reliable ally.

He’s hammering Canada on his Truth Social and in media appearances, saying Canada has “ripped off” the US for years, and signing an absurd order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.”

This is pure bunk, of course – more empty Trump bravado and ignorant belligerence. Canada? Really? If Mel Brooks were still making movies, this would be a comedy. But as all else with Trump, it’s no laughing matter.

Trump apparently assumed that Canada would quickly surrender because it has more to lose. The tariffs Trump has imposed on Canada – along with those he’s threatening if Canada retaliates – affect a tiny portion of America’s total imports but a huge portion of Canada’s total exports.

Jamieson Greer, Trump’s US trade representative, says the duties are too small to pose a problem for the US and are “more [Canada’s] emergency than ours”.

But bullies like Trump rarely think about the effects of their bullying on the thinking and attitudes of their targets.

Trump’s bullying of Iran has not only reinforced its hardline regime but shown them that control over the strait of Hormuz is an effective means of gaining concessions from other Gulf states as well as the U.S., and likely strengthened their resolve to build a nuclear weapon.

Trump’s bullying of Canada, meanwhile, is igniting a patriotism that has often eluded that nation, which separatist factions have long threatened to pull apart.

Mark Carney’s decision to stand up to Trump — through “dollar for dollar” retaliation on goods coming from key industries in states including Ohio and Texas with competitive Senate elections — has led to a surge of support for the prime minister’s Liberal party. Liberals won three special by-elections on Monday.

Trump’s trade war with Canada has also dimmed the prospects of Canada’s separatist movements, at least in the short term. A candidate from Carney’s Liberal party edged out a Quebec separatist in one of Monday’s special by-elections, in a district hit hard by U.S. tariffs.

This is a good omen for Canada ahead of October 5th’s vote in Quebec on whether the province’s secessionist party, Parti Québécois, gains additional seats in the province’s legislative body, and October 19th’s vote in Alberta on whether to hold a referendum to secede from the rest of Canada.

Trump may also have underestimated the negative reactions to his trade war at home. According to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll, 57percent of Americans ‌oppose Trump’s moves to impose tariffs on Canadian imports. About 63 percent oppose his peevish order to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America.” Only 20 percent support the higher tariffs on Canadian goods.

The negative response is especially pronounced in U.S. border states whose economies are tightly interconnected with Canada.

In Michigan, for example, where overwhelming majorities oppose Trump’s tariffs on Canada, Democrats have launched new attack ads on the Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers for refusing to denounce the tariffs. The Democratic Senate candidate Abdeuk El-Sayed called Trump an “asshole” for launching the trade war.

There’s still time for the U.S. and Canada to avoid the worst of the economic and political fallout from this. Carney’s “dollar for dollar” retaliation goes into effect on September 8 but Trump’s counter-counter measure – threatened 50 percent tariffs on autos and auto parts – won’t go into effect until New Year’s Day.

Still, no one should expect an easy resolution to what may go down in history as the stupidest of all the stupid foreign policies Trump has initiated. And given the extent of Trump’s dumb international moves, that is saying something.

U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Rubber-Stamp Congress, William Kristol, right, Sept. 2, 2026. Donald Trump isn’t on the ballot this November. But these midterms are a referendum on him. The 119th Congress has been controlled by the Republican party. That party’s distinctive feature, its defining characteristic, is that it has supported Trump. It’s done so uniformly, mindlessly, and obediently.

So the Democrats’ message—the broad democratic opposition’s message—this fall is simple: If you want another rubber-stamp Congress, vote Republican. But if you want a Congress that will challenge and check all of those Trump administration policies you dislike, vote Democratic.

That message should work. The current Congress was elected on November 5, 2024, with Republicans taking 49.8 percent of the national vote for the House, as Donald Trump won 49.8 percent of the vote in the presidential election. Trump won by 1.5 percent, the Republican House candidates by 2.6 percent. Republicans were tied at the hip to Trump then, as they now.

Today Trump’s approval rating is about 38 percent. The steady decline in his approval over his second term in office will flip the House, and it puts the Senate very much in play.

That’s why Republicans in competitive states and districts are trying to edge away from Trump. Joe Perticone writes that he

spoke to eight different incumbent Republicans running in some of the closest races this cycle, and not a single one of them confirmed they planned to attend [the GOP midterm convention in Dallas next week], what Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters has dubbed “Trumpapalooza.”

So Democrats will run against Trump’s higher prices, against Trump’s tariffs, against Trump’s war. But of course they’ll also need to remind voters that the Republican Congress has enabled those policies.

House Speaker Mike Johnson decided to help them out yesterday.

CNN’s Manu Raju asked Johnson about his past projections about the Iran war, including calling it a skirmish that would be over in short order and lead to just a “temporary blip” in gas prices.

“That is one of the stupidest questions you’ve ever asked,” Johnson snapped. “I have nothing to do with the prosecution of the war across the globe.”

So the official position of the speaker is that he—and by extension the House of Representatives—have nothing to do with matters of war and peace. And in fact his party has voted time and again not to stop the war. It hasn’t even used its control of Congress to challenge the conduct of the war.

At a press conference yesterday, Johnson was asked: “One of your members just said Hegseth has gone overboard on the firings there in the aftermath of Dan Driscoll’s resignation. How do you explain what’s happening at the Pentagon?”

Johnson’s answer? “I trust the secretary of war [sic] to handle his business over there. . . . I have to trust they’re doing the right thing. . . . I’m literally not qualified to address that.”

The Constitution gives Congress the responsibility for declaring war, raising armed forces, appropriating funds for them, and making rules for their government and regulation. Do the American people want another Congress that utterly disclaims these responsibilities? Do the American people want another Republican Congress that rubber-stamps a war that’s a failure and that provides no oversight of a Defense Department in chaos?

At that same press conference yesterday, House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Lisa McClain of Michigan assured us that “This has been the most aggressive and productive Congress since Speaker Joseph Martin’s 80th Congress in 1949.” Speaker Johnson agreed: “This has literally been the most productive, successful and aggressive Congress since 1949. And I think it’s in the top five of all time.”

The 80th Congress, controlled by the Republican party, was in session from 1947 to 1949. It’s gone down in history as the famous “Do Nothing Congress” because Harry Truman succeeded in stapling that slogan to its forehead during the 1948 election campaign. On November 2, 1948, as Truman won his great come-from-behind victory, voters kicked Republicans out of power in Congress. Republicans lost seventy-five House seats, as well as nine senate seats, a feat of failure unmatched since.

It’s kind of amazing that the Republican leadership in the 119th Congress wants to compare itself to the 80th Congress. Democrats should certainly thank them for doing so.

But they might also take a look at Harry Truman’s message during his very effective campaign. Here’s an example, from a stump speech by Truman on October 7, 1948, in Elizabeth, New Jersey:

The Republicans are trying to hide the truth from you in a great many ways. They don’t want you to know the truth about the issues in this campaign. The big fundamental issue in this campaign is the people against the special interests. The Democratic party stands for the people. The Republican party stands, and always has stood, for special interests. They have proved that conclusively in the record that they made in this “do-nothing” Congress. . . .

The biggest problem facing us today . . . is high prices. I have been trying to get the Republicans to do something about high prices and housing ever since they came to Washington. They are responsible for that situation. . . .That Republican, 80th “do-nothing” Congress absolutely refused to give any relief whatever in either one of those categories.

There’s today’s Democratic message. All Democrats have to do is to change the object of attack from the do-nothing 80th Congress to the rubber-stamp 119th Congress.

Republicans on the ballot this year are stuck with Trump. Democrats have a chance to embrace their inner Harry Truman. I’m confident Truman beats Trump.

Big News at The Bulwark! We’re gearing up for the midterms with a new slate of shows and a major new newsletter. First in your inboxes will be the Focus Group newsletter by Sarah Longwell. Exclusively for Bulwark+ members, this weekly deep dive into what the voters think and why will be must-reading between Labor Day and Election Day.

Also coming this fall are:

Receipts with Catherine Rampell. For those who enjoy Catherine’s newsletter and her Receipts Live show with JVL, you’re in luck. She will now be hosting an additional show every week with CEOs, analysts, and the smartest economic minds.

Psycho Politics with George Conway. George Conway is back, baby! His—let’s call it—unique combination of legal analysis, political insight, and you’ve-gotta-be-effing-kidding-me perspective will make his show unmissable.

Reporter and the Spy with Michael Weiss and Marc Polymeropoulos. We’ve got two new additions to the staff here: Michael, a veteran foreign affairs journalist, and Marc, a retired CIA officer. They are gonna help explain the dark corners of the world here from two perspectives: those who write and report on it, and those who live in the shadows.

More On U.S. Immigration Policy 

The Contrarian, Opinion: Americans Reject ICE Hellscape: Trump’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘terror’ backfire, Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 2, 2026. 62 Days to the Midterms.* Under the false pretense of protecting the border and removing “the worst of the worst” undocumented immigrants, the Trump regime has unleashed a torrent of violence and lawlessness against hardworking immigrants. It has torn apart families, eclipsed previous administrations in the number of deaths and medical emergencies of those held in ICE custody, and killed innocent Americans on our streets.

Trump’s onslaught has created economic chaos from coast to coast. The Economist recently examined the results of Trump’s horrific approach: labor shortages, shrinking workforce, slower growth, and loss of economic dynamism. “Longer-lasting damage may come from a slowdown in high-skilled immigration,” it found. “America turned its ability to attract the best of the brightest into an extraordinary economic advantage. Mr Trump’s immigration crackdown risks leaving the country with fewer workers today and fewer innovators tomorrow.”

Instead of targeting dangerous criminals, the Trump regime has systematically deported — en masse — law-abiding, productive, non-white migrants. “A surge in immigration arrests this summer has swept up thousands. . . includ[ing] people married to U.S. citizens, people who had entered legally and were pursuing an asylum claim, and others with a temporary legal status that the administration pushed to revoke.” The New York Times reported last week. The statistics repudiate the regime’s lie that its approach protects innocent Americans. “The share with a past violent criminal conviction fell to less than 4 percent.” [Emphasis added.]

The Trump team does not hide its ambition to “ethnically cleanse” America. His immigration crew has transformed the status of hundreds of thousands of non-white persons from countries in Africa, South America, and the Caribbean by revoking their Temporary Protected Status. Hardworking people who are legally present must nevertheless prepare to lose employment, separate from family, and either flee the nation or face forcible expulsion.

In rounding up TPS refugees and other legally present immigrants, the administration has violated due process rights and subjected thousands of people (over 23,000 in total) to deportation under hellish conditions in third countries in which the deportees have no connection to their families and where they are subject to torture and often repatriation to their country of origin. Scores of immigrants — some with serious medical conditions and most under duress/physical restraint — were recently deposited in Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, of the 6,668 refugees admitted since October 2025, 6,665 are white South Africans.Subscribed

Trump’s authoritarian goons have also run roughshod over First and Fifth Amendment rights by attempting to deport critics of the regime’s policies. Just as Trump’s minions, according to whistleblowers, concocted evidence of antisemitism to suppress academic freedom at universities, they have devised a national security pretext to stamp out dissent on foreign policy.

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Noël Wise in California held that the Trump regime had violated international students’ constitutional rights by targeting them over their views on the Middle East, specifically their criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. This ruling follows a similar decision delivered last year by Ronald Reagan-appointed U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young in Massachusetts, who held that “[n]o one’s freedom of speech is unlimited, of course, but these limits are the same for both citizens and noncitizens alike.

Judge Wise excoriated Trump’s assault on free speech, finding the record “replete with examples of the government enforcing the Revocation and Deportation provisions against noncitizens who have publicly expressed—through their speech, writings, or participation in protests—disagreement with Israel or support for Palestine.” But, as Wise held, “noncitizens are afforded First and Fifth Amendment rights to the same extent as citizens,” adding:

“Our Constitutional right to freedom of speech guarantees people the right to express—through their words, actions, or assembly—opinions that may be repugnant, views that run counter to prevailing political norms, or beliefs that otherwise challenge the country’s domestic or foreign policy, military engagement, or war.”

Wise, therefore, held that delegating broad discretion to the Secretary of State to trample on protected speech in the name of vague goals, e.g., “countering support for terrorist groups and addressing antisemitism,” runs afoul of the First and Fifth Amendments.

Judge Wise’s conclusion is worth savoring:

Foundational to America’s enduring democracy are our freedoms of speech and the press embodied in the First Amendment. In the United States, free speech, including the freedom to criticize the government and its leaders, is not a sign of our democracy’s fragility. It is evidence of its strength. That strength is diminished when members of our society—citizens and noncitizens alike—must self-censor and “behave” or suffer the government’s retaliation. In March 2025, that retaliation was directed at those engaged in pro-Palestine and anti-Israel speech.

In September 2025, caught in the government’s net were people critical of Charlie Kirk. In May 2026, it potentially included “weighing in on a peace deal that’s being negotiated” in Iran regarding the Strait of Hormuz. Tomorrow, or perhaps even today, targets may include anyone in the United States who exercises their freedom of speech to simply express opinions the government does not like.

This downward spiral is antithetical to our Constitution that recognizes our right to speak freely. Here you can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it. Zealous protection of our Constitutional right to free speech is a provocative demonstration of our country’s powerful lack of fear.

In the face of Trump’s racist, cruel approach, Americans have recoiled at the abuse of immigration laws to terrorize minority communities, remake American demographics, and silence critics. A July NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found 65 percent of Americans think ICE has gone “too far.” Even more surprising, on border security, which “had been Trump’s reliable strength since his second inauguration in January 2025,” his support dropped to a net -5, the worst result since the Strength in Numbers/Verasight tracker launched in May 2025.

Savvy Democrats should advocate replacing rogue, wildly deceitful, corrupt, and violent agencies (both ICE and Customs and Border Protection) with law-abiding, professional entities that Americans can trust to implement sane policies to protect the border, facilitate legal immigration (i.e., provide an adequate supply of workers), and rationalize our asylum process. Any Trump official who broke the law (including any who lied to Congress or the courts) must be held fully accountable.

After experiencing Trump’s heinous overreach, the American people are way ahead of the politicians. They should know that the midterms provide the opening to end this shameful chapter in immigration policy and reclaim our deepest-held values.

 

Pierre Damas Bel, a Haitian immigrant who apparently committed suicide shortly after college graduation where he had served in JROTC with hopes of pursuing a career in medicine -- and shortly before scheduled deportation as part of a mass round-up of Haitians who had come to the United States under temporary humanitarian permits.

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: “It Was an Immigration Policy That Took His Life,” Jim Swift, right, Sept. 2, 2026. “Some people die by accidents. Some people die by suicide. Pierre died as a result of a policy. It was an immigration policy that took his life.” Those are words Carl Ruby, pastor of Springfield Central Christian Church, offered to reporters yesterday afternoon while discussing the suicide of 20-year-old Pierre Damas Bel, a freshman at Wright State.

“We do not want to politicize this, but this is a political problem. And the only solution is a political solution,” Ruby continued.

Bel came to Springfield in the spring of 2024 from Columbus by way of Haiti. His journey to the United States was facilitated by the now-defunct CBP One app, and once here, he was protected by TPS. He played varsity soccer at Springfield High School, where he was also involved with JROTC, and before graduating with honors, he was recruited by local Wittenburg University to play on the school team; he then transferred to Wright State for a pre-med program, hoping to become a doctor.

When Bel’s TPS was revoked, he was fitted with an ankle-strapped GPS tracker. His family says teasing from classmates about the monitor contributed to the depression that led Bel to park his car on the shoulder of westbound I-70, get out, and step into the path of a Kenworth tractor-trailer tanker.

Pierre’s father, Pierre Ronal Bel, issued a statement that Ruby read: “After my son was outfitted with the ankle monitor, he felt like he was treated like an animal,” the elder Bel wrote.

Pierre twice traveled to ICE offices, in Cincinnati and Westerville, to plead for the monitor to be removed. His father said its weight kept Pierre from playing soccer as he had for years. Too bulky to cover up, the device also left him feeling embarrassed and humiliated around his classmates.

Those feelings intensified the Friday before his death, when, according to his father, Pierre’s fellow JROTC cadets received new uniforms, and he did not.

“Dad, I felt humiliated,” he later told his father. “Everyone had uniforms except for me because of the bracelet.”

Yola Lamarre, a friend and mentor of Pierre’s, said at a press conference that the young man had shared his depression with her as the ankle monitor transformed how people saw him and how he saw himself.

Pierre felt compelled to explain repeatedly that he was not a criminal, she said: at work, at school, on TikTok and Instagram.

“A lot of Haitians who are here, just like Pierre Damas Bel, came to contribute, not to take away,” Lamarre said. “Pierre Damas Bel was not a criminal, but he was treated as one.”

In response to the idea that Haitians have always known their protected status was temporary, Lamarre offered a stark rejoinder: Haiti remains engulfed in violence, she argued, while the United States has repeatedly intervened in the country’s affairs in ways that have destabilized it. Pierre had come here to escape the unrest, to study, to play soccer, and to build a life—not to commit a crime.

“It shouldn’t have to get to this point for this administration to understand that there’s blood on their hands,” Lamarre said.

Ruby’s demand was straightforward: End the ankle-monitor program, release the two Haitian pastors still being held in immigration detention, and give Springfield’s Haitian families durable legal protection.

But he directed his appeal specifically to Republicans, naming Ohio Sens. Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno as well as Reps. Mike Turner and Jim Jordan. Ruby also expressed frustration with local state legislators who, he said, had told him in meetings how much they loved Springfield’s Haitians and valued their contributions to the workforce, but who had remained silent in public on the matter.

Ruby said the policy would change only if Republican members of Congress mustered the political courage to call it what it is: inhumane.

“This is not who we are as Americans,” Ruby said. “This is not who we are as Republicans. It’s not who we are as human beings.”

When a reporter asked why Pierre’s family wanted his death publicly identified as a suicide, Ruby said they did not want the cause obscured. “This family wants that to be known,” he said. The family believes, Ruby added, that the government’s immigration policies caused Pierre to take his own life.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• Don’t look away: What We Did to This 20-Year-Old Is Unforgivable… A 20-year-old Haitian college student, Pierre Damas Bel, came to America to study, play soccer, serve in JROTC, and pursue a career in medicine. TIM MILLER and SAM STEIN discuss his suicide and how America shouldn’t look away.
• Tech Bros Are Losing… Despite warnings about techno-fascism, Silicon Valley’s right wing isn’t new, and its alliance with MAGA is faltering, writes JACOB BRUGGEMAN.
• 10 Jews, 1,000 Opinions, 1 Abdul El-Sayed… How the Michigan progressive is trying to forge a relationship with the state’s Jewish Democrats, and what it means for the future of the party, reports JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.

Quick Hits

MARKEY WINS EASILY: Democratic voters tend to say they’re ready to see generational change in party leadership, but a primary challenge against an elder statesman built around an “I’m younger” argument isn’t guaranteed to land. That’s one of the lessons out of Massachusetts last night, where Sen. Ed Markey easily fended off a primary challenge from Rep. Seth Moulton.

The race featured two competing visions of what “fighting back” effectively against Trump and Republicans should look like. In Moulton’s view, the problem with the Democratic old guard is basically a deficiency of vim; “status quo” Dems like the octogenarian Markey, he argued, just aren’t up to the task. Markey, by contrast, ran on his own progressive record and Moulton’s concessions to the center on issues like transgender athletes; Democrats like Moulton, he argued, were willing to cede too much ground to Republicans on actual issues. In the end, it wasn’t close: Markey breezed past Moulton, 65 percent to 35 percent.

AN EARFUL AT THE G20: Donald Trump’s economic policies have put a chokehold on growth around the world, and even our allies are getting louder complaining about it. The New York Times reports on the chorus of grumping at this week’s Group of 20 meeting:

At several points, representatives from Europe, Canada and other nations friendly to the United States criticized the administration for moves that they say have hurt their economies.

They voiced displeasure over the war with Iran, which has resulted in disruptions to energy markets and shipping. They also raised Mr. Bessent’s surprise decision to sell U.S. holdings of euros to prop up Japan’s currency last month, and the administration’s escalating war of words and tariffs with Canada. . . .

“There are clear differences, and we will handle it that way,” Lars Klingbeil, the German vice chancellor, told reporters on Tuesday in Asheville. He pointed to America’s tariff conflicts, including its escalating standoff with Canada, which he said were eroding trust in global trade and would “ultimately harm everyone involved.”

We keep saying this: Yanking America partially out of the global economy isn’t the most evil thing this White House has done, but it’s among the most boneheaded, and its consequences will be among the longest lasting.

TALARICO VS. CAPITAL: The “Woke 1 was crazy” oppo file on James Talarico keeps getting bigger. Yesterday, CNN unearthed comments from 2020 in which Talarico described capitalism as an “oppressive system” that needed “dismantling” alongside white supremacy and climate change. The then–state representative also said that the state’s oil and gas industry “is not gonna last,” comparing it to “being the leader in cassette tapes in the 1980s”: “If we wanna ensure we have an economy that’s gonna work for our children and our children’s children, we gotta be ahead of the curve and Texas has to lead instead of follow on this issue.”

Talarico distanced himself from the comments yesterday, with his campaign saying (as it has in the past) that some of his old comments “missed the mark.” “James is a proud capitalist and agrees with the majority of Texans that racism, natural disasters, and a billionaire-controlled economy are all problems we need to address,” spokesman JT Ennis told CNN. “James supports the oil and gas industry and believes in an all-of-the-above energy strategy that protects Texas oil and gas jobs.”

Talarico’s Republican opponent Ken Paxton is one of the weakest Republicans running anywhere this year—an uncharismatic Trump doormat who also happens to be serially unfaithful and hilariously corrupt. Whether he can fend off Talarico by pointing endlessly to the Democrat’s circa-2020 wokeisms will be one of the most interesting questions of the cycle.

More On U.S. Politics, Elections

 

New York Times, Six Takeaways From the Massachusetts Primaries, Reid J. Epstein, Updated Sept. 2, 2026. Senator Ed Markey, 80, above left, trounced a younger challenge, above right, r who had made an argument for generational change. Two other longtime Democratic lawmakers hung on, too.

Massachusetts, as it turns out, is a good state in which to be a very old Democratic incumbent.

Three Democrats who have been in office since long before the iPhone was in stores all won renomination Tuesday. Senator Ed Markey, 80, and Representatives Richard Neal, 77, and Stephen F. Lynch, 71, are all likely to return for additional terms.

Each faced challengers who had called for a new generation of leadership. Mr. Markey coasted past Representative Seth Moulton, 47, who ran to the middle, while Mr. Neal and Mr. Lynch both fought off progressive challengers.

Mr. Markey has been in office for 50 years. Mr. Neal has represented western Massachusetts since 1989. Mr. Lynch first won election from South Boston in 2001. The state’s Democrats do not seem inclined to reject their incumbents.

Here are six takeaways from the Massachusetts primary results:Voters didn’t care about Markey’s age.

The party still scarred by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s public meltdown during the 2024 campaign was not convinced that an octogenarian senator should not serve another six years.

Perhaps if Mr. Markey, 80, had faced a younger challenger with better political relationships than Mr. Moulton, he would have been in trouble in Tuesday’s Democratic primary. But Mr. Moulton has spent his career challenging his party’s orthodoxy and its leaders.

That record left Mr. Markey the political space he needed to paint himself as the progressive in the race, campaigning on the ideas of the future — even though he has been in Congress for 50 years.

In the waning days of the Massachusetts primary, several Democrats described Mr. Moulton as having the generational change message the party needed but being the wrong messenger to deliver it.

Mr. Markey said throughout the campaign that he would resign his seat if his advanced age left him unable to properly fulfill his Senate duties. He is now favored to win in November, which would have him serve in the Senate until he is 86 years old.Moulton’s trans remarks weren’t forgotten.

If Massachusetts were a general election battleground state, perhaps Mr. Moulton’s skepticism about trans athletes’ participation in youth sports might have played better among primary voters.

But from the moment Mr. Moulton entered the race last October, Mr. Markey used his remarks questioning transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports as a battering ram against him. Not only did it galvanize the L.G.B.T.Q. vote for Mr. Markey, it also helped frame him as the progressive candidate.

It was the same formula that powered Mr. Markey’s last primary triumph in 2020 against another younger, more moderate Democrat, Joe Kennedy III.

Mr. Moulton eventually offered a qualified apology for his remarks, which came the day after President Trump won a second term in the 2024 election. But by then the state’s progressive voters had heard for months from Mr. Markey and his supporters that Mr. Moulton, during tough times, was willing to toss trans people aside.Dan Koh wins, thanks to Biden and Harris.

A lot of Democrats rolled their eyes when Dan Koh rolled out endorsement videos from Mr. Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Mr. Koh, who was a White House aide for Mr. Biden, was running against Tram Nguyen, a progressive state legislator, for Mr. Moulton’s House seat north of Boston.

Tying one’s political identity to a presidential administration a lot of Democrats would like to move past was a unique strategy. No other Democrat in a competitive primary this year had video testimonials from both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris. (He also had a lot of help from a pro-A.I. super PAC.)

The strategy worked. Mr. Koh won a relatively easy victory over Ms. Nguyen and four other candidates. In a heavily Democratic district, he is all but certain to enter Congress in January as a legacy of the Biden administration.Stephen Lynch and Richard Neal hang on.

Mr. Markey was not the only old guy to hang on Tuesday. Mr. Neal and Mr. Lynch both fended off younger challengers for their House seats.

Unlike Mr. Markey, Mr. Neal and Mr. Lynch both faced progressive upstarts. And while both won by margins closer than they have achieved in previous races, they are both likely to return to Congress for another two years.

Massachusetts has not elected a Republican to any of its congressional seats since 1994. As long as that remains the case — and it is widely expected to — five of the nine members of the Massachusetts House delegation next year will be 63 or older. Both senators will be 77 or older. And efforts by young challengers to oust the state’s older incumbents have failed time after time.The pollsters got one right.

The polling industry has gotten a lot of grief lately after Democratic primary results were way off from the forecasts of the final surveys in Michigan and Wisconsin, followed by a big upset in the Florida Senate race.

In Massachusetts, Big Polling got it right.

Emerson College and the University of New Hampshire released polls in the final week before the primary showing Mr. Markey as getting more than 60 percent of the vote — blowout numbers.

They turned out to be right on target.

The New Republic, Opinion: Good Riddance, Seth Moulton: You Got What You Deserved, Perry Bacon, Jr. Sept. 2, 2026. The congressman who got drubbed by Ed Markey on Tuesday tried to distance himself from the base. That just doesn’t work anymore.

The biggest reason that Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election is probably the post-Covid-19 inflation and anti-incumbent sentiment that resulted in parties in power across the world being defeated. It didn’t help that she refused to distance herself from a deeply unpopular President Biden, ran on the “opportunity economy” and other banalities, and seemed more focused on courting the tiny fraction of Americans who are anti-Trump Republicans than any other bloc. But for many in the party, anytime the Democrats lose an election, the explanation is simple: Democrats are too far left. So in the days after Harris’s defeat, Democratic Representative Seth Moulton joined that chorus, telling The New York Times, “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Transgender rights weren’t even close to the most prominent issue in the 2024 campaign. To the extent they were, it was a 2019 video of Harris supporting gender-affirming care for people in federal prison, a much harder position to defend than young people playing sports. It was strange that Moulton singled out transgender athletes for the Democrats’ defeat, as opposed to Biden, Harris, or their campaign strategists. Even worse, he whined when he was criticized for his remarks, suggesting those rebukes showed Democrats don’t tolerate alternative views. Moulton wanted to attack transgender participation in sports without those who support transgender athletes forcefully criticizing him in response. Sorry, Seth, that’s not how free speech or open discourse works.

Moulton exemplified the reactionary, left-bashing panic and capitulation to Trump we saw from many congressional Democrats in the wake of the 2024 election. Almost two years later, he got what he deserved: an electoral whupping. Incumbent Senator Ed Markey easily fended off Moulton’s primary challenge. The race was called quickly after polls closed on Tuesday night, and Markey is likely to win by more than 20 percentage points.

Moulton’s blowout loss, along with that of Angie Craig in Minnesota’s Senate race last month, should serve as a warning: Don’t expect to advance in Democratic politics, particularly in a blue state, if you spend the weeks after a Democratic presidential loss distancing yourself from the party base.

Defeating an incumbent senator is obviously hard, so Moulton’s loss isn’t shocking. But Moulton had a huge advantage in this race: age. Democratic voters, angered with Biden for initially running and then flopping on the debate state, are eager for generational change. So when Moulton, now 47, announced his challenge to Markey (80) back in October, I figured the congressman had the advantage.

Craig also ran for the Senate. And she lost the primary by 20 points, in part because Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flaganan, right, hammered Craig over her Laken Riley vote.

Most of the 58 Democrats who voted for the Laken Riley Act and otherwise capitulated to Trump early last year or blamed progressives for Harris’s defeat remain in Congress. But at least two are gone. And in Moulton’s case, this was an embarrassing defeat. Democrats in Massachusetts were so desperate not to have Seth Moulton be their senator that they were willing to overwhelmingly reelect an 80-year-old to a six-year term. Seth Moulton kicked trangender Americans and other progressives when they were down. Now, Massachusetts voters have kicked him out of politics. Job well done.

 New York Times, Billionaires Sent Montana Prices Soaring. Can Democrats Capitalize? Jack Healy, Sept. 2, 2026. For years, Democrats have failed to harness the anger of Montanans contending with out-of-state wealth driving up costs. This year, a smokejumper thinks he can succeed.

It was a gorgeous summer weekend in the mountain-ringed town of Ennis, Mont., but Main Street was lined with casualties of Montana’s affordability crisis.

Kalena’s tea shop had shut for good because its owner could not find workers able to afford rent anywhere near Ennis. Staff shortages had similarly closed for the weekend a soda fountain catering to tourists bound for Yellowstone National Park. The Burnt Tree brewery was open only because its owners had turned a cluster of cabins and apartments into employee housing.

For the past two election cycles, Democrats in Montana have tried to harness anger over wealthy out-of-staters driving up prices and squeezing out residents, only to fall short. In the Senate and governor’s races of 2024, the Republican candidates were wealthy transplants, yet the Democratic brand proved to be the bigger liability. Senator Jon Tester, who lost his race for re-election that year, deemed his party’s brand electoral “poison.”

But this year, Democrats insist the cost of housing, health care and everything else has gotten so out of control that they might just flip a House seat in Montana’s western congressional district, which is less conservative. That race that could help tip control of Congress.

Their candidate is Sam Forstag, a telegenic firefighter and union leader running as an unapologetic progressive who could barely afford Montana when he was earning $19 an hour jumping out of planes to fight wildfires.

“No one can afford a damn roof over their head,” Mr. Forstag said in an interview.

The race in one of the country’s most sprawling congressional districts will test whether Democrats can unwind years of losses in rural areas, or whether once-purple places like Montana are gone for good.ImageA woman in a T-shirt stands with her arms crossed, in front of a sign that says her cafe “is closed permanently.”Kalena Wise recently closed down her cafe in Ennis because of staff shortages and rising operation costs, but she will probably still vote Republican.

Mr. Forstag is facing Aaron Flint, a conservative radio host, to fill the seat being vacated by the retirement of Representative Ryan Zinke, a Republican, in a state has become one of the least affordable places in America. That is doubly true for the scenic western district and towns like Whitefish, Bozeman and Missoula.

MSNOW, Opinion: JD Vance’s attacks on Democrats sound eerily familiar, Ryan Teague Beckwith, Sept. 2, 2026. The vice president keeps using the criticisms also leveled at his own boss.

It could be a stump speech for almost any Democrat running this year: Voters in the November midterms should repudiate divisive politicians, elect leaders of good character and root out fraud.

But those are the arguments Vice President JD Vance is using to attack Democrats.

While campaigning for Republican candidates over the past few weeks, Vance has repeatedly leveled attacks on their opponents that sound almost eerily like a critique of his own boss.

This may be partly due to the audience. Vance’s other aim in these speeches, aside from boosting GOP voter enthusiasm, is to raise his profile ahead of an expected 2028 campaign of his own. His talking points are more for the MAGA faithful, who really believe that Democrats are doing all of this.

It may also be a way to inoculate Trump from those points of criticism. If everyone is arguing that their opponents are corrupt or crazy, then some low-information voters may simply tune out all sides.

Whatever his aims, the extent to which Vance’s attacks on Democrats echo criticism of Trump is remarkable.Divisive politicians

At a rally for Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers in Detroit on Monday, Vance argued that “there’s something about” Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed “that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today.”

“And it’s people who see themselves not as citizens of a common nation fighting for every single person — whether they’re Jewish or Christian, whether they’re white or Black or brown — but see themselves as fighting for one group at the expense of others, and that is how, ladies and gentlemen, you destroy the United States of America,” he added.

As a reminder, Trump denied or delayed disaster aid to several Democratic-led states. According to former aides, he considered whether Californians hit by wildfires had voted for him before approving aid. The administration also acknowledged in a court filing that it canceled $7.6 billion in clean energy grants solely because the recipients were located in states that voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. Vance himself has argued that America is “not just an idea” and that Americans whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have “a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”

Americans have noticed all of this: An August poll by YouGov found that 60% of U.S. citizens said the country had become more divided under Trump.‘Good character’

In July, Vance ended a speech in Milwaukee by calling for Americans to “send people to Washington who are of good character.”

U.S. Military, Middle East Wars, Foreign Affairs

Hope for America, Opinion: Pete Hegseth is a danger to the world, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 2, 2026. Pete Hegseth is a danger to the world.

Last night, at 9:08 PM, after the only event on his public schedule for the entire week was canceled at the last minute, the United States Secretary of Defense, or as he now calls himself, the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, took to social media to humiliate a member of one of our closest allies’ militaries. Or at least that’s what he thought he was doing when he shared a photograph from a Canadian account with the caption “🇨🇦 (this is real),” apparently expecting millions of people to laugh along with him at the body of the person wearing the uniform. He thought he was being clever and exposing the weakness of Canada’s military. Instead, in one extraordinarily stupid post, Hegseth exposed something much more disturbing about himself: that the man entrusted with overseeing the most powerful military in the world is not only cruel enough to use his position to publicly humiliate someone because of their appearance, but apparently too ignorant or too lazy to read what was directly in front of him before doing it.

Because the photograph wasn’t what Hegseth apparently thought it was. The account itself is called “cadets.vernon.” The photograph came from a Canadian cadet program in Vernon, British Columbia. This was not Hegseth catching some supposedly embarrassing glimpse of Canada’s fighting force. It was a photograph from a youth cadet program for children 12-18. The picture shows a young person and what is most likely a volunteer for the program awarding them a medal. Somehow, the man responsible for advising the President of the United States on matters of war and national defense could not figure that out. That tells us far more about Pete Hegseth and the other people Donald Trump has put in extraordinarily powerful positions than it could ever tell us about Canada.

The response was immediate. Canadian journalist Terry Reith wrote, “Is the US secretary of defence trying to shame cadets in Vernon? These are cadets, high school kids. How dare you be such a complete asshole to imply this is our military, and shame on you for body shaming our young people. This is reprehensible.” Canadian Member of Parliament Garnett Genuis responded by reminding Hegseth of something he apparently never learned or chose to forget: “158 members of the Canadian military gave their lives in Afghanistan after your country was attacked. Canada and the US have a great history of fighting together for freedom and justice. It’s history worth remembering.” Prime Minister Mark Carney called the post “beneath their office.” Defence Minister David McGuinty called it “below the dignity of the office he holds.”

The Pentagon, however, stood behind it. They did not take it down. Did not apologize. Did not even attempt to explain how a youth leadership program for teenagers in British Columbia ended up in the crosshairs of the Secretary of War of the United States. Because many of us, parents or simply people who care about children, want to know why Pete Hegseth was even looking at children’s bodies in the first place.

I kept thinking about that young person in the photograph. Still finding themselves. Standing there proud of something they had earned, captured in a moment that was supposed to be theirs. I kept thinking about the volunteer standing next to them. A woman who obviously loves her country and loves children, who believes they are the future, and that is why she was there. She showed up, gave her time, and put on the uniform, because she believed in what that program could do for the next generation. And the United States Secretary of Defense saw that photograph and decided it was an opportunity for humiliation.

One of the most patriotic things a person can do is serve. I’m using the word “patriotic” carefully because this administration has twisted it into something performative, but real service is quiet and selfless, even when the person doing it does not fully realize they are choosing selflessness. Military service means low pay compared to the private sector. It means a lack of control over your own life. It is not easy, mentally or physically. It does not matter whether that service is American or Canadian or any other one of our allied countries, because the choice to show up for something bigger than yourself looks the same in every uniform.

When I think of Canada’s military, I do not think of something to mock. I think of them standing beside ours. So many times, when we needed someone, they were there immediately. Afghanistan. The Cold War. The World Wars. So many families live on both sides of that border, connected by the same roots. When one branch of my own family came to this continent, some went to Canada, and some came to the United States. We are not strangers. We are neighbors in the deepest sense of the word. Real Americans will never look at a Canadian and see an enemy, or a freeloader, or weakness by any stretch of the imagination. But what we are seeing is those things in our own government. We see the people running our government right now, and we see corruption, cruelty, failure, and embarrassment. What Pete Hegseth and anyone who cheered him on were doing was not being an American. And they were certainly not being good human beings either.

None of this is new. Pete Hegseth has been telling us exactly who he is for years. His own mother, Penelope Hegseth, wrote him an email in 2018 that was later read on the floor of the United States Senate during his confirmation. “You are an abuser of women,” she wrote. “That is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man, and have been for years, and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.” She continued: “On behalf of all the women, and I know it’s many, you have abused in some way, I say, get some help and take an honest look at yourself.” She later said she regretted the email. But the words were already in the Congressional Record, spoken aloud in the chamber where his confirmation was decided. Senator Tim Kaine asked Hegseth directly whether sexual assault, spousal abuse, or working under the influence would disqualify someone from being Secretary of Defense. Hegseth refused to answer. He was confirmed by a single vote by the Vice President, JD Vance, who had to break the tie.

Before that confirmation, NBC News reported that ten current and former Fox News colleagues said his drinking was a persistent concern, with two saying he smelled of alcohol before going on air on more than a dozen occasions. One colleague said the problem was so well known that “everyone would be talking about it behind the scenes before he went on the air.” He pledged to stop drinking if confirmed. Today, his wife, Jennifer Hegseth, reportedly travels with him everywhere he goes because, as an insider told the New York Times, the Secretary of Defense relies on her to “keep him out of trouble.” Twenty current and former administration officials confirmed that she has become his most influential adviser, prepping him for appearances, sitting in on meetings with journalists, interviewing potential staff, and helping brainstorm Pentagon videos. She attended a classified meeting between U.S. and U.K. officials about military intelligence sharing with Ukraine. Pentagon staffers reportedly refer to her as “The Leash.” Former Pentagon spokesperson John Ullyot called it “bonkers that a defense secretary would involve his wife in his sensitive official duties, including sharing details of an impending military operation, and face zero consequences.”

We can’t forget when he leaked war plans to a journalist on the encrypted messaging app Signal in March of 2025 after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief was accidentally included in a group chat where he shared precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing for strikes on Yemen. Then he stood on a runway in Hawaii and told reporters, “Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.” The Pentagon’s own inspector general later concluded that his actions could have resulted in “potential harm to US pilots.” Even after that, he created a second Signal chat that included his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer.

This is the man who stood at a Pentagon prayer service in April and recited what he presented as a prayer inspired by Ezekiel 25:17. It was not. It was a fictional speech written by Quentin Tarantino for the 1994 film Pulp Fiction, delivered by Samuel L. Jackson’s character immediately before he murders someone. “The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men,” Hegseth intoned, asking his audience to pray along with him. When the mistake was caught, his spokesman Sean Parnell did not apologize. He called anyone pointing it out “ignorant of reality.”

Maybe the most horrific example of what happens when Pete Hegseth’s arrogance and incompetence collide with the power he has been given came on February 28th of this year, on the first day of Operation Epic Fury, when a U.S. Tomahawk missile struck the Shajareye Tayabeh girls school in Minab, Iran. According to Amnesty International, at least 156 people were killed, including at least 110 children, most of them girls between the ages of 7 and 12. U.S. military investigators later concluded that American forces were likely responsible. The strike was reportedly caused by outdated targeting data that still identified the school as part of an Iranian military complex. When asked about it, Trump said, “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.” Hegseth backed him. “The only side that targets civilians is Iran,” he said. This from the man who had previously declared that U.S. strikes in Iran would not be bound by “stupid rules of engagement.” That is Pete Hegseth, that is his record, and now his own Pentagon is falling apart around him.

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In a classified document obtained and published by the Washington Post, it was revealed that six of the military’s most senior four-star commanders formally warned Hegseth that the Iran war is unsustainable. The heads of U.S. European Command, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, and U.S. Southern Command, along with multiple other combatant commanders, all issued a formal “non-concur” to his plan to keep troops deployed in the Middle East through September and others into 2027. The Navy’s top admiral, Daryl Caudle, gave the starkest assessment, telling Hegseth the service “cannot sustain its current level of support” because there is no end date to the conflict. The leaked document revealed what we have feared for months: the United States has depleted more than half of its cruise missiles and advanced air-defense missiles during six months of this war. The military has had to redeploy its Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense missiles from South Korea and pull the USS George Washington from Japan, removing the only aircraft carrier in the Pacific. Families of soldiers in the 82nd Airborne Division were told this week that their deployments will extend to 12 months, into 2027.

Hegseth’s response to anyone who tells him the truth has been the same every time. He removes them. Since taking over the Pentagon, he has fired or forced out more than two dozen senior military officers. He fired Army Chief of Staff General Randy George in April for objecting to Hegseth’s decision to block officer promotions, many of which involved Black and female officers. He has not nominated a replacement in four months. He fired the editor, publisher, and a reporter at Stars and Stripes, the independent military publication, about ten days after they reported on the hardships Navy sailors were facing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, whose deployment was extended to nine months because of the Iran war. Those journalists are now suing him. He fired the Stars and Stripes ombudsman for speaking out about what she called the Pentagon’s “attempts to control the editorial content” of the publication. She is suing him too.

On Monday, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll submitted his resignation after months of being frozen out by Hegseth. Driscoll, a combat veteran and close ally of Vice President Vance, was asked by the White House to stay through the midterms. He refused. His departure means the Army now has no Senate-confirmed civilian secretary, no Senate-confirmed chief of staff, no confirmed operations chief, and no confirmed commander of Army troops in Europe and Africa. The largest branch of the United States military is being led by no one confirmed by the United States Senate. And the man Hegseth reportedly wants to replace Driscoll is Sean Parnell, the same Pentagon spokesman who fired the Stars and Stripes journalists.

I often find myself thinking back to times when the people entrusted with this kind of power understood the weight of what had been placed in their hands. They were never perfect. Our country was never perfect. But there were still moments when the people at the very top understood the responsibility that came with leadership, and that asking other people to risk their lives required something more from you than the spectacle Hegseth has made of the position. I keep coming back especially to one night, more than 80 years ago, when an American general was preparing to send tens of thousands of young men into one of the most dangerous military operations in history.

On the night before D-Day, June 5, 1944, before the largest amphibious invasion in human history, General Dwight Eisenhower did two things. First, he went to visit the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne before they boarded their planes. He walked among them, and he talked to them. He asked where they were from. He looked them in the eyes, knowing deep down in his soul that many of them would not come back. Then he went back to his quarters, sat down, and wrote a note. It was short, and in it he took full personal responsibility for the failure of the invasion, should it fail. “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops,” he wrote. “My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.” He put that note in his pocket before a single soldier set foot on that infamous beach. The invasion succeeded, and he never had to send it. But he had already decided that if it did not, the failure would be his and his alone.

That is what military leadership looks like. A man who visits his troops, who looks them in the eye, who writes a note of personal responsibility before the first shot is fired. The distance between that man and Pete Hegseth is the distance between everything this country was supposed to be and everything it is becoming under this administration.

The President, who ran on “no new forever wars,” announced earlier today on Truth Social, just after noon, that the attack has resumed on Iran. “The United States is, as we speak, striking Iranian Targets near the Strait of Hormuz,” he wrote. “The strikes are large and powerful.” He followed with a threat: “If the failed Nation of Iran retaliates for this very justified attack, they will be hit again at a much harder and higher level, but it will not be the biggest attack of them all, that is waiting in the wings and, when it is over, there will be very little left of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” When asked in a Fox News interview whether he was interested in a deal, Trump said, “I think an agreement with them isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. We gave them a lot of chances.” Meanwhile, at the G20 Finance Ministers meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was asked by CNBC’s Sara Eisen what happens if economic pressure does not change the behavior of Iran’s leaders. Bessent’s answer was, “My experience with people like this… the main thing they care about is their head staying attached to their neck.”

Iran responded with missiles and drones. Thirteen Iranian ballistic missiles entered Jordanian airspace. Ten were intercepted. Three fell in remote areas. Iran targeted Bahrain. In the southern Iranian province of Hormozgan, a U.S. strike hit a residential home. An Iranian official went on state television and said, “A residential home was attacked while people were holding a wedding ceremony. Two people were reported martyred and a number of others wounded.” The death toll has been updated to four people, including a child.

Our country is in serious trouble. The world is in serious trouble. We have not just an incompetent and dangerous leader, but a man who has deliberately surrounded himself with equally reckless, unqualified, and morally bankrupt people to advise him and carry out his orders. But even now, there are still people willing to call what is happening wrong, including from inside the institutions these people are trying to bend to their will. Inside the Pentagon itself, six four-star commanders put their names on a classified document and said no through the formal chain of command, in writing, on the record. The Army Secretary looked at what Hegseth had built and decided he would rather walk away than become part of it. And this planet still has people like that volunteer in Vernon, British Columbia, who put on a uniform and showed up to award a medal to a young person she believed in. In doing so, she demonstrated something Pete Hegseth has never understood about service. She served without needing millions of people to see her do it. She served without needing to humiliate anyone else to make herself feel powerful. She simply showed up, did something good for another human being, and did it honestly and with her whole heart.

Tonight, even with all of the corruption, cruelty, cowardice, and incompetence we are watching from some of the most powerful people in our country, we are being reminded that they are not everyone. There are still good, honest, decent people everywhere. There are still people who understand that power carries responsibility, that leadership means service, and that strength is found in what we are willing to do for one another, not in who we are willing to hurt. The Pete Hegseths of the world are real. They are dangerous, especially when men like Donald Trump hand them extraordinary power. But most people are not like them. We must always remember that there are far more of us than there are of them.

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

New York Times, ‘Don’t Worry About Me’: Attacker’s Father Thought She Had Turned a Corner, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Miles G. Cohen, Amy Julia Harris and Katelyn Ferral, Sept. 2, 2026 (print ed.). Pamela Cisneros was killed by the police in Times Square after she stabbed two people, one fatally. Her father said she had stopped going with him to her mental health appointments.

Pamela Cisneros was in the grip of a mental health crisis seven years ago when, her father said, she tried to jump in front of a subway train in Queens.

She had lived for decades with serious mental health problems, her father, Mario Cisneros, said in an interview on Tuesday. But the episode in the subway in 2019 had prompted her family to intervene.

Mr. Cisneros began taking her to monthly hospital appointments, where she would receive injections that helped keep her stable. He believed his daughter had finally turned a corner.

Then, in April, he said, she refused a ride to her regular mental health appointment at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens, saying she could go to treatment alone.

“No, Dad, don’t worry,” he recalled her saying. “I’m good. Don’t worry about me.”

On Monday, Mr. Cisneros learned that his daughter had carried two kitchen knives with her through a bustling Times Square in Manhattan and, seemingly at random, had attacked two people, killing one of them. Minutes later, she was fatally shot by the police after refusing to put down the weapons. She was 49.

“She was a noble and polite girl, a Christian. But all of a sudden she acted like an animal,” Mr. Cisneros, 78, said in Spanish.

He said he did not know what type of medication she had been receiving or what condition she was being treated for, and it was unclear whether she had taken medication recently or received mental health treatment. But in recent months, Mr. Cisneros recalled, his daughter had said she did not want to rely on medication to feel normal.

“She didn’t want to continue them,” he said. “She was fighting to not be on the medicine, to not have to depend on it.”

“We tried to help her in every way possible,” he added.

As the authorities on Tuesday examined what might have led to the attacks, court filings and police records offered glimpses of the turbulence, financial woes and mental health struggles that had at times punctuated Ms. Cisneros’s life.

She had lived in Queens and studied psychology in college. She got married in September 1999, and had three children with her husband, Jose Lopez, according to Mr. Cisneros and court records.

Still, Ms. Cisneros struggled to hold a job, according to a bankruptcy petition filed in the Eastern District of New York in 2005. She reported being unemployed, while her husband worked as an office clerk at Citibank in New York. They reported having about $14,000 in assets.

At some point, it appears they moved to Florida. By 2018, the couple had separated, and Ms. Cisneros had moved back to Queens, according to records filed in family court in Hillsborough County, Fla.

It was during this time that Ms. Cisneros appeared to begin her spiral. On Dec. 20, 2018, police officers in Manhattan found her screaming and belligerent on Lexington Avenue near 49th Street, and determined that she was intoxicated, according to an internal police report obtained by The New York Times.

Less than four months later, on March 6, 2019, she tried to jump in front of the train in Queens. Mr. Lopez filed for divorce the following year in Florida, and a custody battle for their youngest daughter ensued, Florida court records show. Mr. Lopez could not be reached for comment.

Global Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets 

 

The Chaos Monkeys Have Already Taken Over the Zoo (Graphic by Paul Krugman).

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Hits Keep Coming, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 2, 2026. How much chaos can the economy take? 

Here’s the good news: The U.S. economy has proved remarkably resilient since the chaos monkeys, aka Donald Trump and company, took over the zoo.

There has been shock after shock: A trade war against everyone; a shooting war against Iran in which the vaunted U.S. military performed very poorly; loss of trust on the part of all our erstwhile allies; the degradation of U.S. government capacity and competence, on the civilian side by Elon Musk, on the military side by Pete Hegseth; mass deportations; a surge in long-term interest rates to levels not seen in decades. Yet the economy keeps plodding along.

It’s true that nobody besides the Trump sycophants thinks we’re in a Golden Age. Public views of the economy, and of Trump’s management thereof, are incredibly negative. Yet normal indicators like GDP growth and the unemployment rate aren’t flashing red.

Here’s the bad news: The shocks just keep coming.

To an important extent the economy’s resilience has depended on the widespread belief by investors and businesses that the Trump shocks are one-time events. Businesses can live with 10 or 15 percent tariffs, if that’s the new normal. The world economy can even manage in the face of significantly reduced flows of oil from the Persian Gulf. But it’s much harder to deal with a trade war in which Trump keeps finding new enemies — with a spiraling conflict with Canada, of all places, a nation whose auto industry, in particular, is so integrated with U.S. manufacturing that separating them is almost impossible to manage. The Iran War has been a disaster, but markets were beginning to believe that the worst was over — until Trump began bombing Iran again with no clear objective beyond the visceral desire to reach out and hurt someone, doing so despite overwhelming evidence that the U.S. military is desperately short of munitions and that Hegseth has pushed out many of its competent leaders.

Now we’re facing trade conflict that poses an existential threat to the U.S. auto industry. Crude oil prices are surging again, but even more important, prices of refined products — what we actually burn — rising even more than crude. Wholesale diesel prices have just hit their highest level ever.

And if the U.S, military performed badly against Iran six months ago, how will it do now that it has largely run out of sophisticated munitions and Hegseth has fired many of the officers who seemed to know what they were doing?

The question of why interest rates are up so much is complex. But the eruption of new rounds of chaos on so many fronts is surely part of what is driving rates ever higher. And the rate rise is yet another shock.

Maybe the economy can cope with the ever-growing chaos. But the fact that it has muddled through so far is no guarantee that it can deal equally well with the hits that just keep coming.

And that’s all for today, because I just flew across the Atlantic and am deeply jet-lagged.

New York Times, Allies Grumble That U.S. Is Hindering Global Economic Growth, Jim Tankersley, Sept. 2, 2026 (print ed.). At a summit meant to showcase President Trump’s economic policies as a model for the world, Europeans complained about tariffs and the war with Iran.

Nearly every session at the Group of 20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers in Asheville, N.C., this week began with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent extolling the state of the U.S. economy under President Trump and urging other countries to be more like America.

America’s allies were not always receptive. At several points, representatives from Europe, Canada and other nations friendly to the United States criticized the administration for moves that they say have hurt their economies.

They voiced displeasure over the war with Iran, which has resulted in disruptions to energy markets and shipping. They also raised Mr. Bessent’s surprise decision to sell U.S. holdings of euros to prop up Japan’s currency last month, and the administration’s escalating war of words and tariffs with Canada.

The disagreements, while mostly polite, reflected a growing frustration in Europe and elsewhere over Mr. Trump’s stewardship of the global economy — and allies’ sense that his policies have in important ways hindered economic growth, the issue Mr. Bessent said the administration was “laser-focused” on.

“Despite U.S. strong-arm tactics, even traditional U.S. allies among the G20 are clearly and publicly at odds with the Trump administration’s priorities,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economist and former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division.Sign up for Your Places: Global Update. All the latest news for any part of the world you select. Get it sent to your inbox.

Some of the difference is philosophical. Mr. Trump has eviscerated regulatory barriers for businesses, including the booming artificial intelligence industry, and leaned into fossil fuel production. European leaders remain more cautious on A.I. and other deregulation and more committed to a transition to renewable energy sources like wind and solar power, even as they try to nurture their own tech ecosystem to rival America and China.

“There are clear differences, and we will handle it that way,” Lars Klingbeil, the German vice chancellor, told reporters on Tuesday in Asheville. He pointed to America’s tariff conflicts, including its escalating standoff with Canada, which he said were eroding trust in global trade and would “ultimately harm everyone involved.”

Mr. Bessent and colleagues planned the gathering on Monday and Tuesday as a showcase for the administration’s policies and an advertisement for the strength of American business. In an apparent first, Mr. Bessent invited American chief executives from industries including banking and cryptocurrency to sessions with the visiting officials. All of this was done under the banner of improving public-private collaboration and juicing investment.

“The foundation of America’s strength is predicated on remaining the pre-eminent economy in the world,” Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, who was one of the executives in attendance, said in a release lauding Mr. Bessent’s move.

Mr. Bessent opened Tuesday’s events with a “fireside chat” with the Fox Business host Larry Kudlow, a former top economic official in Mr. Trump’s first administration. Both men raved about America’s business climate under Mr. Trump.

“The U.S. is at a very special place in the world because we are the A.I. superpower and we are pulling away in computing power,” Mr. Bessent said, crediting the administration’s regulatory, tax and energy policies. He said he had invited the other countries in attendance to “come with us and grow.”

The American economy is growing faster than many of its peers. The International Monetary Fund projects that the United States will grow more than twice as fast as the eurozone or Canada this year. Yet the I.M.F. noted this summer that the administration’s war in Iran had slowed economic growth. German economists say Mr. Trump’s war and his tariffs on Europe have dampened what otherwise has been the strongest year of German growth since 2022.

On Monday, European leaders used one of the open discussions to complain that Mr. Bessent had not informed them in advance of his plans to use America’s holdings of euros in an effort to boost the value of Japan’s currency, the yen. By using euros, Mr. Bessent pushed down the value of Europe’s currency while protecting the value of the dollar.

Joachim Nagel, the head of Germany’s central bank, said he believed that the criticism had resonated, and that American officials now understood why Europeans “were not really enthusiastic about the fact that there was no prior coordination.”

Mr. Klingbeil told reporters that Europeans had raised other concerns as well, both with America and with China, which has flooded many wealthy nations with state-subsidized exports of cars and other goods.

“The past few months have shown that uncertainty is poison for economic growth,” Mr. Klingbeil said. “The Iran war, the ongoing tariff disputes with the U.S. and distortions of competition like we are experiencing from China, all of this leads to instability.”

The most open conflict was between America and its northern neighbor. Mr. Bessent was dismissive of Canada in a CNBC interview from the summit on Monday, saying, “I don’t think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone who’s 13 times larger than you are.”

Before a meeting with Mr. Bessent on Tuesday, the Canadian finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, responded defiantly.

He planned to tell Mr. Bessent, he said, that “we’re going to defend our workers, our industries and Canada.” 

New York Times, Employer Health Costs Are Expected to Spike in 2027, Reed Abelson, Sept. 2, 2026. A new U.S. survey anticipates an average increase of 11 percent unless benefits are cut, the highest rate in decades. Other findings also predict a sharp rise.

Large and small employers are bracing for what looks to be the sharpest increase in health care costs in more than two decades. The cost per worker is projected to go up an average of 11 percent next year, or somewhat lower if workers’ insurance benefits are reduced, according to a U.S. survey released Wednesday.Estimated annual health plan cost increases per employee

The employers’ final costs, after they make changes to health plans, are still expected to increase about 8 percent next year, the steepest since 2003, according to Marsh, the benefits consultant formerly known as Mercer.

More than a third of the 1,800 employers surveyed said they anticipated that costs would rise at least 10 percent after making cuts.

“This year was a rough year, and next year looks like it will be even rougher,” said Beth Umland, director of employer research for health and benefits at Marsh, in an interview.

The Marsh survey is the latest report by an employer group or benefit consultant predicting a sharp rise in health care costs next year. Many Americans, even those with insurance, are already struggling to afford care, according to various surveys, and health care has become a top issue for voters.

“This seems to be a new normal,” said Ellen Kelsay, the chief executive of Business Group on Health, which represents large employers that offer health benefits.

From 2018 to 2027, health care costs could increase 76 percent, roughly twice the rate of general inflation, according to a survey the employer group released last month. For next year, companies predicted a 9.2 percent median increase, which fell to 8 percent after they made benefit changes.

The cost of providing coverage to employees is becoming an existential business issue, said Mike Pasterick, an executive at the insurance broker Aon, which issued its own projection last month. Aon estimated employers’ costs would rise 9.5 percent next year, pushing the average cost per employee above $19,000 if no changes are made. “This is impacting the companies in a very material way,” he said.

The upshot is that about 160 million people under 65 who rely on employers for health insurance will again confront higher costs and shoulder more of the burden. More and more, workers are facing year-over-year increases that further stress household budgets already dealing with the growing expenses of groceries and gasoline.

Workers are facing higher premiums, deductibles and co-pays, which require them to carry a larger share of their medical bills. Some companies are cutting benefits by discontinuing coverage of expensive GLP-1 drugs to treat obesity, or dropping coverage for spouses who have other insurance options.

Employers and benefits consultants cited a number of factors contributing to higher costs: rising prices for hospital care and prescription drugs, including expensive medicines for cancer, and robust demand for GLP-1 drugs to treat conditions like diabetes.

But they also pointed to new contributors like hospitals’ and doctors’ use of artificial intelligence to increase payments through better documentation of care. They also blamed increasing reimbursements to some doctors who are out of network and are exploiting a new consumer protection law that allows them to challenge what they were originally paid.

New York Times, What Rising Global Bond Rates Mean for Your Money, Ron Lieber and Tara Siegel Bernard, Sept. 2, 2026. If you own bonds, they may be in a broad fund that hasn’t lost much money. And that fund may do much better in the next several years.

“Soaring” global bond yields. Global bond “sell-offs.”

Headlines in recent days have included many scary words. But what do they mean for you and your money?

As ever, the answer is this: It depends.

It depends on whether you own bonds, what bonds you own and how soon you may need the money you invested. Many people who invest through popular funds in their workplace retirement accounts may know little about their bond holdings, even if they remember that they have roughly 30 percent of their money in bonds.

The good news is that for now, the tumult in the bond markets has not caused big losses in most people’s portfolios. Still, a bit more vigilance is wise at a time like this. In fact, it can be reassuring.

Here are some questions worth asking.What’s happening with the bond market right now?

When an investment appears increasingly risky, investors demand to be paid more to take on that risk — and right now, that’s essentially what’s happening in the government bond market.

Though the bond market has been increasingly volatile in recent months, investors around the world sold off government bonds at a faster clip on Tuesday, which caused prices to drop and pushed bond yields, along with interest rates, to recent highs.

Investors are worried about a variety of risks: mounting government debt levels, the U.S.-led war in Iran and its effect on oil prices and inflation, and the heavy borrowing and spending on artificial intelligence.

Rising interest rates on government bonds influence consumer rates on mortgages, student loans, credit cards and more. (The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes, arguably the world’s most instrumental interest rate, reached its highest point since January 2025, while the 30-year yield remained near a two-decade high.)

But the bond market makes up a sizable part of many investors’ portfolios. Bond fluctuations also have implications for the average worker and retiree — higher interest rates, on the whole, help buoy savings over the long run, but it’s complicated (we’ll get into that in a minute).How do I know what bonds I own in my portfolio and what’s happening to them?

Let’s say you put money away for a retirement in a target-date fund, an investment vehicle that is named for the year you hope to stop working. Those funds have a mix of stock, bond and sometimes other funds.

Your job is to figure out which underlying bond funds the bond portion of your savings is in. Then, once you have those names, you can look up those funds and see what and how they’re doing.

If you’re in the Vanguard Target Retirement 2040 Fund, your bond investments will be in a U.S. bond fund and a separate international one. Both of them have positive returns over the past year because they invest in all sorts of bonds aside from those government ones. So no big losses to see here.

If a financial adviser has bought bond funds for you — or individual bonds — ask for an accounting and an explanation of the strategy.What is the point of owning bonds, anyway?

Bonds are for diversification, balance and stability, and they’ve historically provided it more often than not.

The bond market includes corporate, municipal and other bonds besides the government ones that have been in the headlines recently. Bonds have had lower returns than stocks over time, but they also lack the volatility of stocks.

Think about it this way: When you’re investing in bonds, you’re lending money with the expectation that the borrowing government, town or company that has issued the bonds will pay you back in full. Most often, that actually happens, plus you collect a bit of interest income along the way to account for the risk of nonrepayment.

And when you hear about “yields rising,” it can mean that’s a decent time to be a lender through bonds.

More News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Evening News and Commentary: Alarm Bells Go Off: Trump's Election Interference Escalates, Johnson Moves to Dodge Epstein Vote, Iran Strikes Resume, Apple Caves, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 2, 2026. There’s a lot happening today, and most of it points the same direction. Congressman Thomas Massie is warning that Mike Johnson may recess the House early just to dodge a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act 2.0, and it fits a pattern we keep seeing: whenever accountability gets close, the exits get greased.

We’re also digging into a much bigger story, a DHS voter fraud push and a USPS whistleblower report that together look less like election security and more like a pretext-building exercise ahead of the midterms, complete with defied court orders and a judge now weighing an injunction. I spoke with Nevada’s Secretary of State and Oversight Ranking Member Robert Garcia about what can be done in exclusive interviews.

Away from Washington, a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant in Ohio took his own life after losing protected status and being forced into an ankle monitor, a death his community is directly tying to enforcement policy. And overnight, the US launched fresh strikes on Iran, with both sides promising the next round will be worse. Plus Carney’s trade war rebuke, MapQuest’s unlikely victory lap, and yes, someone vandalized Dolly Parton’s star.

To everyone who reached out, offered support, and subscribed over the past 24 hours: thank you, from the bottom of my heart. It means more than I can express, and we’re building something real together. If you’d like to subscribe or upgrade your subscription, you can do so here:Subscribed

One other note: There’s so much misinformation floating around about trees being cut down in the DC area, and I want to set the record straight on two of them. No, 60 cherry trees were not cut down: one cherry tree was cut down, and several other types of trees were removed in East Potomac Park, but many cherry trees remain. And no, the Trump administration did not cut down willow trees at the Kennedy Center; those trees died last year and simply haven’t been replaced. I know a lot of people get frustrated with me when I don’t report on a story they’ve seen floating around, like the cherry blossom claims, but the reason is simple: I never want to be wrong or spread false information. So if you don’t see me reporting on something, it’s because I’m still vetting its accuracy. That’s all I can offer you.

Let’s jump into it:

Congressman Thomas Massie is suggesting that Mike Johnson may recess the House of Representatives early to avoid a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act 2.0.

Trump’s Election Efforts Exposed:

The light is blinking red on Trump trying to influence the 2026 midterms. Recent developments point to a broader pattern, drawing a line from his 2020 election lies and the January 6th aftermath to what’s happening now with DHS’s voter fraud investigation surge and the USPS whistleblower report. Trump has spent a decade trying and failing to substantiate claims of widespread voter fraud, from his failed first-term fraud commission to a post-2020 investigation that also came up empty. The administration’s recent “evidence,” including a debunked claim of 250,000 noncitizens registered in four states and an unusual unsigned Census Bureau report, has been widely criticized by experts, suggesting the goal isn’t proving fraud so much as seeding doubt and building a pretext for further federal intervention.

DHS is directing Homeland Security Investigations, an ICE unit normally focused on trafficking and smuggling, to pursue voter fraud leads in several states just over two months before the election. CNN notes this kind of “overt” investigatory action so close to a vote is normally avoided by the federal government specifically because unverified allegations can influence the outcome. Given the department’s track record and the compressed timeline, experts see little reason to think this effort will succeed where previous fraud hunts failed. The timing itself, more than any expected findings, is what’s raising alarms among election law observers.

The core of the story is a whistleblower report, submitted through the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid and released by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, describing USPS’s rushed rollout of a new digital portal for verifying mail ballots as “secretive, rushed, chaotic and fundamentally flawed.” The system’s “zero percent failure rate” policy means that if even one ballot in a large batch fails to verify against the portal, such as a name that doesn’t exactly match state-submitted data, the entire batch gets rejected rather than just the flagged ballot, and voters might not even learn their ballot was rejected until it’s too late to get an alternative. USPS reportedly skipped standard steps like internal testing and customer acceptance testing to hit a September 1 deadline. This affects roughly 47 million Americans, about 30% of the 2024 electorate, who vote by mail, undercutting the administration’s stated rationale that the order is about election security. I spoke with Nevada’s Secretary of State who says he will not send over voter rolls to the federal government:

Multiple outlets report the whistleblower’s most explosive claim: USPS continued building the portal even after a federal judge’s order to halt work, marking what the report calls a “pattern of defiance of court orders.” Judge Indira Talwani has now issued a second temporary restraining order blocking implementation while she considers a longer-term injunction, with a hearing scheduled for Thursday, and the case is expected to eventually reach the Supreme Court regardless of outcome. Rep. Robert Garcia said the House Oversight Committee has independently received similar whistleblower warnings and is continuing to investigate. Meanwhile, North Carolina is set to begin mailing ballots to overseas military voters this Friday, adding real urgency given federal law requires such ballots to go out 45 days before the election.

This fits within a longer pattern: Trump’s March executive order asserting USPS authority over mail ballots, a June report that USPS planned to withhold ballots from states that wouldn’t share voter lists (which even some red states have resisted), a July primetime speech invoking unproven national security claims about China and mail voting, and an August interview where Trump wouldn’t rule out declaring a national emergency to impose voting restrictions Congress hasn’t passed. Compounding the concern, Wyoming’s Republican governor, Mark Gordon, recently accused DOJ election monitors of “aggressive” behavior during his state’s primary and said he doesn’t want the federal government “coming in and taking our votes.” Trump has also previously said he regretted not seizing voting machines after 2020, and because mail voting skews Democratic, disenfranchisement here would disproportionately hurt Democrats.

20 Year Old Takes his Own Life After TPS Revoked:

Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant in Springfield, Ohio, died Monday after parking on Interstate 70 and walking into oncoming traffic, in what his family believes was a suicide following months of mounting distress. Bel had recently lost temporary protected status, a policy shift affecting an estimated 350,000 Haitian immigrants, and was summoned to an ICE office and fitted with an ankle monitor after the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to proceed with ending TPS for Haitians. His father said Bel felt “treated like an animal,” was bullied by classmates over the device, and had it prevent him from playing soccer, while ICE officers refused his requests to have it removed. Ohio authorities are investigating the crash, and DHS declined to comment on the circumstances of his death while that investigation continues.

Bel arrived in the US in 2024 through the CBP One app to reunite with his parents, who had fled Haiti three years earlier, and the family had settled into life in Springfield, buying a home after being granted temporary protected status. He graduated high school with honors in May, was a proud JROTC cadet who dreamed of studying medicine, and was described by his family as the responsible eldest of three siblings. His distress deepened as the ankle monitor became a source of daily humiliation; in a late-July Instagram post he wrote he felt “shame and humiliation” walking around with a GPS monitor despite having “not come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone,” and just days before his death his JROTC instructor withheld his uniform, which his father believes was because of the monitor. His next asylum hearing had been scheduled for October, and he had told the Haitian Support Center he feared returning to Haiti’s ongoing gang violence.

On the morning of his death, Bel called his father at 8:03 a.m. saying “I’m not feeling okay,” and was told to come home to talk; hours later, police arrived to inform his father that his son had “thrown himself under a truck.” Community leaders, including Haitian Bridge Alliance’s Guerline Jozef and local pastor Carl Ruby, have directly tied his death to the administration’s immigration enforcement policies, with Jozef saying plainly that “these policies are what caused his untimely death.” Springfield residents have been rallying around Haitian neighbors and calling for an end to ICE’s enforcement campaign in the wake of his death.

Trump Prepares for Investigations:

Trump aides, family members, and allies are quietly preparing for a possible Democratic takeover of Congress in 2026, even as the president publicly insists Republicans will hold on. The White House counsel’s office began briefing political appointees as early as this spring, reassuring current staff they’ll be represented in their official capacities if subpoenaed, though former officials would not necessarily get the same protection. Some current and former aides are already lining up personal lawyers, including reaching out to Stefan Passantino, who represented Cassidy Hutchinson during the January 6 investigations. Staff have also been coached to be careful what they put in writing and to make sure financial disclosures and ethics filings are complete and timely, with one former official summarizing the strategy as “don’t give them a reason to find anything.” The effort is a deliberate contrast to 2019, when a less experienced first-term White House was caught flat-footed by Democratic oversight after the 2018 midterms.

The administration has also laid down a new legal marker designed to shield Trump’s communications with informal advisers, family members, and outside allies from congressional subpoenas. An August 10 Justice Department memo concluded that executive privilege can extend to a president’s communications with private advisers, so long as they relate to official decision-making and remain confidential, though it stops short of blanket immunity and allows Congress to override the privilege by showing the information is “demonstrably critical.” Legal experts say this could be paired with the Supreme Court’s Trump v. Mazars ruling, which already limits how broadly Congress can demand a president’s personal records, to create what one lawyer called “a whole new umbrella of potential privileged information.” The approach could put outside figures, like a CEO who spoke with Trump by phone, in a bind between the White House’s privilege claims and their own obligations to Congress. Democrats, meanwhile, are eyeing officials like chief of staff Susie Wiles and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, along with outside businesses and entities that carry fewer legal protections, as they look to tie alleged corruption to the cost-of-living message driving their campaigns.

Will Scharf, previously the White House staff secretary, took over as White House counsel this week in a notably faster transition than 2018, when Democrats retook the House and a new counsel wasn’t installed until months later. Scharf is expected to build out the legal team that will field Democratic subpoenas and will work closely with Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former colleague on Trump’s presidential immunity case, with one former official predicting he’ll lean toward giving Trump the answers he wants rather than playing it straight. If Democrats win control, Scharf’s job would shift from advancing Trump’s agenda to defending the administration against investigations, a transformation presidential historian Tevi Troy said turns White House counsel’s office from a coveted perch into a team of “battlers.” The ripple effects would extend well beyond the White House, with agencies also bracing for subpoenas and oversight demands that eat into time for policy work. Troy recalled spending an hour a week as a Bush-era deputy HHS secretary just reviewing subpoenas, time he said comes directly out of pursuing the administration’s actual agenda.

Iran:

The US launched fresh strikes on Iranian targets Tuesday, which Trump called “large and powerful” on Truth Social, framing them as retaliation for Iran’s failed attempt to lay sea mines in the Strait of Hormuz and for an Iranian missile launch at a US base in Jordan. CENTCOM said it struck IRGC targets around noon ET after Iran attempted attacks on commercial shipping and American forces, and Trump warned that any Iranian retaliation would be met with an even harder strike, one he said “will not be the biggest attack of them all, that is waiting in the wings.” Iranian state TV reported the US hit a fishmeal factory on Qeshm Island, a fishing pier, and a maritime tower in Sirik, while Iran’s Fars news agency reported at least two people killed and several wounded at a wedding near Sirik. Iran’s armed forces vowed to “impose a heavy cost on the American enemy,” and the IRGC announced a “regretful response” had begun, claiming it shot down a 50th American MQ-9 drone using a new air defense system.

This marks the first major military escalation in about a month, following weekend strikes on Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island that Iran said killed and injured several IRGC personnel, and it comes roughly six months into a war that began in late February when American and Israeli forces killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran responded to the weekend strikes by firing eight ballistic missiles at US bases in Jordan, which Jordan’s military said it intercepted, while the UAE said its air force engaged at least one Iranian drone over its territorial waters. Analysts told Al Jazeera the US has shifted from a purely military approach to a combined diplomatic, economic, and military strategy aimed at reopening oil flow through the Strait of Hormuz, with one scholar predicting Iran’s response would be “stronger than the US strike” based on the pattern of escalating retaliation so far. A Tehran-based academic separately noted the conflict never truly paused despite weeks of relative calm, and that both sides have been waging as much a “war of rhetoric” as a military one.

The renewed strikes triggered immediate safety warnings, with US embassies in Jerusalem, Jordan, and Qatar cautioning Americans in the region about the “potential for unforeseen escalation” and advising them to prepare for flight cancellations and airspace closures. The embassies noted that US diplomatic facilities, including those outside the Middle East, have already been targeted, and warned that Iran and its allied groups could strike other US interests, businesses, or institutions worldwide. CENTCOM described the Iranian mine-laying attempt as a direct threat to global commerce, saying it took “limited, precise action” to protect civilian shipping through a waterway that carried 20% of the world’s oil before the war began. The advisories described the security environment as “complex” and the Iranian regime as unpredictable, citing past unannounced strikes on new areas, including Egypt, as reason for continued vigilance even where American interests haven’t yet been directly hit.

Away from the battlefield, the conflict is also straining humanitarian conditions elsewhere in the region: the WHO warned that Gaza’s upcoming rainy season threatens a worsening public health crisis, citing nearly tripled microbiological water contamination and acute watery diarrhea cases that have climbed from about 27,000 to over 48,000 since March amid overcrowded tent camps and sewage overflows. A WHO representative said flooding risks pushing sewage and contaminated water directly into where displaced Palestinians sleep, cook, and care for their families, though she maintained there’s still time to avert disaster if humanitarian supplies are allowed in without delay. Meanwhile, domestic political fallout from the Iran war continues, with NBC reporting on rare public frustration from Trump’s own voters over the war’s costs and Fox News highlighting Treasury Secretary Bessent’s prediction that Iran’s economy will collapse within months under the pressure campaign. The scale and duration of the conflict, now stretching into its seventh month with no clear resolution in sight, is increasingly shaping coverage well beyond the strikes themselves.

Other news:

Apple Maps has renamed Lake Ontario after Trump called.

Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur deported from the US to the UK last week, now says he regrets backing Trump, telling reporters, “If I had any clue that anything remotely like this was even possible, I would never have got involved in supporting Trump in the first place and I’m very ashamed that I did.”

Mark Carney rebuked Washington, telling officials to “start being serious” about trade talks and calling recent insults from US officials “beneath their office.” The comments come days before Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on $20bn of US goods take effect September 8, following the US’s own 50% tariffs on $20bn in Canadian goods. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer downplayed the standoff as “more their emergency than ours,” insisted no negotiations are currently happening, and blamed Canada for unacceptable asks like lighter truck tariffs. Carney has separately said American negotiators treated Canada’s French language as an “irritant,” while adding “in Quebec, these are rights.” A Reuters/Ipsos poll found the friction isn’t popular at home either: just 14% of Americans back Trump’s Lake Ontario renaming and only 20% approve of the higher Canada tariffs, with 57% opposed.

A Fox News segment argued that declining teen and young adult birth rates are a problem, with a host or guest complaining that “the problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19, the fertility rate is down 70% in the last 2 decades, which means we are telling people who are young not to have babies.” The remark frames a two-decade decline in births among 15-to-19-year-olds, a group that includes minors, as evidence of a cultural message discouraging early parenthood rather than, as demographers typically explain, a byproduct of expanded access to contraception, delayed marriage, and more teens pursuing education. The 70% figure roughly tracks CDC data showing the US teen birth rate has fallen sharply since the early 2000s, driven largely by better contraceptive use rather than any messaging campaign.

The House passed a continuing resolution 370-48 to fund the government through December 11, sending it to Trump’s desk after Senate passage last month and averting a shutdown just ahead of the midterms. Only 19 Republicans and 29 Democrats voted no. Democrats backed the bill after securing a delay on a White House budget-office rule they feared would let the administration cancel grants arbitrarily, with caucus chair Pete Aguilar calling that concession key to the broad support. The relatively calm resolution stands in sharp contrast to last year’s 43-day shutdown over ACA subsidies and this year’s separate DHS funding standoff after federal agents killed two US citizens in Minneapolis. It also arrives as forecasters increasingly favor Democrats retaking the House and possibly the Senate in November, with Trump’s approval sliding amid inflation and the Iran war.

MapQuest jumped to No. 1 on Apple’s US App Store, leapfrogging both Google Maps and Apple Maps, after its “we’re not changing it” refusal to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America” went viral. Google quickly complied and now shows “Lake America” to US users, while Apple is reportedly weighing the same move under White House pressure but was still displaying Lake Ontario as of Tuesday. MapQuest’s general manager, Doug Berger, said app usage was running at roughly 50 times normal, and the company reused a naming tool it originally built after Trump’s 2025 Gulf of Mexico rename. The same Reuters/Ipsos poll showing lopsided opposition to the rename (only 14% support) helps explain the backlash-driven download surge. Resistance is spreading beyond the app store too: Canada erected a “Lake Ontario, Now and Always” sign near Grimsby, Ontario’s premier vowed the name will never change, and three House Democrats introduced the “Hands Off Our Great Lakes Act” to block the order.

Senator Ron Wyden and Rep. Pramila Jayapal formally asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate DHS’s use of an obscure customs-related law to secretly gather records on journalists, nonprofits and unions without judicial oversight. The request cites Homeland Security Investigations obtaining six months of phone records on Minneapolis journalist Georgia Fort, plus a summons to Google for Fort’s and Don Lemon’s YouTube data after a judge twice rejected a warrant for the same information. HSI pursued the records after federal prosecutors charged Fort and Lemon with civil rights crimes tied to a Saint Paul church protest they were covering in January; both have pleaded not guilty. DHS has also used similar summonses to obtain union financial records and a nonprofit’s Venmo transactions, and issued subpoenas to Meta, X and Reddit aimed at unmasking DHS critics. The lawmakers also want the GAO to examine non-binding “don’t notify the target” language DHS attaches to these summonses, and asked the federal judiciary to clarify that subpoena recipients can disclose them absent a court order.

Dolly Parton’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star vandalized, with flowers stolen & her name scratched off, repairs underway.

A US Border Patrol technical search team is expected to join the hunt for at least one hiker still missing after a flash flood tore through the Grand Canyon on Saturday, with nearly 80 people rescued and two deaths confirmed: chiropractor John Giusti, 46, and martial arts studio owner Brent Rosenkranz, 42. Their hiking companion, 53-year-old pilot Timothy Smith, remains unaccounted for. The flood struck Bright Angel Creek near the historic Phantom Ranch lodge, and officials say it was likely intensified by drought, scarring from the 2025 Dragon Bravo wildfire burn, and a record El Niño supercharging this year’s monsoon moisture. Scientists note that climate-driven extremes are making such overlapping disasters more likely. The flood also knocked out roughly 40% of the pipeline supplying water to Grand Canyon Village’s roughly 1,600 residents and visitors.

Loreto Javar, a 76-year-old Filipino national and permanent US resident since 1995, was detained by ICE during his citizenship interview in Tukwila, Washington, in June, despite being in active treatment for stage 4 prostate cancer. ICE alleges he failed to disclose a 1970s conviction in the Philippines tied to a fatal altercation, for which he says he served about three years before parole; his daughter Daisy says he had never told the family and had renewed his green card without issue multiple times, most recently in December. Since his detention, his cancer treatment has been repeatedly interrupted: he’s missed two monthly oncology appointments, developed a blood clot, and faced meal delays that have thrown off his medication schedule. An advocacy petition says the Philippine consulate visited him and promised support, including $300 for commissary funds, but has yet to follow through. The case lands amid broader findings that most people swept into deportation proceedings under Trump’s second term have no criminal conviction, and a PBS/NPR/Marist poll found 62% of Americans think ICE has gone too far.

A federal judge dismissed the remaining claims in former wardrobe stylist Asha Daniels’ lawsuit against Lizzo’s production company, Big Grrrl Big Touring, nearly two years after already removing Lizzo herself as an individual defendant. Daniels had alleged bullying and sexual and racial harassment in what she called an “unsafe, sexually charged workplace culture,” but Judge Fernando Aenlle-Rocha ruled the conduct fell within the “ordinary tribulations of the workplace” and wasn’t protected under Title VII. He also rejected her disability claim over a foot injury from a wardrobe rack, finding it didn’t meet the ADA’s threshold. Daniels’ attorney called the ruling disappointing and said they’re considering an appeal, arguing a jury should have weighed the evidence. It’s a partial win for Lizzo, who still faces a separate, ongoing lawsuit from three former backup dancers (though a fat-shaming claim in that case was dismissed in December) and has said publicly she intends to fight every remaining claim.

Sept. 1 

Top Headlines

Chart by the Brookings Institution of Most Politically Powerful U.S. Billionaires

• New York Times, 'The Least Transparent Midterm’: How Dark Money Is Washing Over the 2026 Election, Shane Goldmacher and Theodore Schleifer, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). At least $1 billion from anonymous donors is flowing into the midterm elections. Dark money is not new, but it now permeates nearly every major contest. In Michigan and Minnesota, tens of millions of untraceable dollars poured into recent Senate primaries trying to topple progressive Democratic candidates. In Kansas, the torrent of secret money that boosted an obscure Democratic Senate candidate amounted to 100 times as much as what he had on hand in the final stretch of the primary. And in Texas, Republicans exploited lax federal disclosure rules to spend secretly and try to nominate a weak Democratic candidate whose own party had denounced her as antisemitic.
• New York Times, Whistle-Blower Says Trump Officials Are Defying Court Orders on Voting by Mail, Chris Cameron, Sept. 1, 2026. A report detailed “grave concerns” that a new system being rushed into use by the U.S. Postal Service could imperil millions of mail ballots ahead of the midterm elections.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: We Found Her: The Most Absurd General-Election Candidate in America, Andrew Egger, Cathy Young, Jim Swift, Sept. 1, 2026. She’s under indictment. She lost her primary. And she’s on the ballot in November.

News Roundups

 

 

• The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Major Update: Massie Reads Epstein Co-Conspirators Names, USPS Whistleblower Sounds Alarm, Mass Army Resignations, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 1, 2026. Thomas Massie stood on the House floor last night and read the names of alleged Epstein coconspirators into the record, from a former British prince to a retail billionaire, while pushing a discharge petition to force a vote on stronger transparency legislation the government has continued to slow-walk for a year. It’s landing the same day the Army lost its civilian secretary after months of open warfare with Pete Hegseth, leaving the military’s largest branch without a single Senate-confirmed leader at the top, and as a USPS whistleblower warns the agency’s rushed rollout of Trump’s mail-voting restrictions risks derailing the midterms outright.

• New York Times, Trump Administration Updates: Army Secretary Resigns After Ouster of Leaders, Staff Reports, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). What We’re Covering Today.  Defense Department: Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, the service’s top civilian leader, who clashed repeatedly with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the ouster of a swath of key combat-tested leaders, handed in his resignation on Monday, according to administration officials. The resignation comes amid a series of firings and feuds that have left the Army essentially rudderless as it struggles to deal with the threat posed by cheap, deadly drones and missiles that have pounded U.S. bases in the Middle East. 

Special Reports: U.S. Supreme Court Secretly Hides Its Records For Decades, Can't Control Trump 

  

• New York Times, Times Exclusive: How the Supreme Court Locks Away Its Own History, Jodi Kantor, Sept. 1, 2026. After Justice Scalia died, the justices held private negotiations about locking away their papers. We may not see the ultimate record of the Roberts court for decades.
• Civil Discourse, Opinion: Why Can’t the Supreme Court Tell Trump No? Joyce Vance, right, Sept. 1, 2026. The Court’s inability to tell Trump no may end up being the most concerning feature of his two terms in office. It’s as if the Justices, or five to seven of them, depending on the case, can’t summon a collective recollection of the constitutional system of checks and balances that is the foundation for the legal system they sit at the apex of.  

Special Report: Last Shred of American Dignity?

This is an image President Trump posted on portraying himself as celebrating the destruction of Iran's Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Aug. 30, 2026 -- a claim he reinforced with a statement shown below but refuted by other sources. A commentary on the display is provided below by Jeff Tiedrich.

"Loyal and patriotic citizens, please stand by for a message of the utmost importance from the President of the United States, Supreme Ruler of the Western Hemisphere, Lord-Emperor of the Sky Above and All the Planets, Conqueror Of Every War, God’s Own Avatar on Earth, Grand Renamer of Water.....

• Fact check: Kharg Island is, in fact, not being blown to smithereens. This ten-second video is the work of some six-fingered plagiarism robot. The only thing being blown to smithereens right now is the last shred of America’s dignity, as the world laughs — and then shakes its head sadly — at our Demented Boy King. 

-- From Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Aug. 31, 2026.

More On U.S. Governance

President Trump Makes an Announcement on Healthcare Affordability, Aug. 31, 2026. 

• Hope for America, Opinion: The president keeps selling us lies, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 1, 2026. At 3:05 this afternoon, the White House press corps was quickly ushered into the Oval Office, where the President of the United States was already seated at his desk with toy airplanes and helicopters carefully placed around him. With more than a dozen men and women in dark suits packed in behind him, Donald Trump spoke for exactly 14 minutes before inviting others to address the press. Within seconds of finishing his remarks, the President had already started to fall asleep. He struggled to keep his eyes open nearly the entire time, occasionally snapping them back open, only to close them once again. Near the end of the event, Trump fully woke up just in time to answer questions, including one people around the world wanted answered, especially after an AI-generated video he posted the night before appeared to show mass-destruction weapons being used against Iran.
• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Plot to Steal Venezuela’s Oil, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 1, 2026. A scam that is both vile and deeply stupid. In short, at this point only someone deeply ignorant of both the realities of modern economies and of the lessons of history can believe that there are big payoffs to seizing other nations’ natural resources. 
• New York Times, Opinion: Our Democracy Is at Stake. Stop Waiting for a Savior, Skye Perryman (the president of Democracy Forward), Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). American democracy has been deteriorating with alarming velocity since President Trump’s return to the White House. Every day, it seems, there’s a new Watergate-level outrage. Nearly seven in 10 Americans are dissatisfied with how our democracy is working.
• New York Times, House Clears Bill to Avert an Election-Season Shutdown, Catie Edmondson, Sept. 1, 2026. Lawmakers sent the legislation to President Trump in an overwhelming vote, reflecting bipartisan enthusiasm around punting a messy spending fight until after the midterms.

World News, Global Human Rights, Disasters

• New York Times, Wartime Presidents of Russia and Iran Rally With Chinese and Indian Leaders, Paul Sonne and David Pierson,.Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). The two-day summit of the 10-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Kyrgyzstan shows the limits of U.S. economic warfare.
• New York Times, G20 Finance Officials Gather in U.S. as Iran War Grips Global Economy, Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). The meeting is expected to focus on the ongoing economic shock from the war in Iran, which has driven up oil prices globally.

How Flagrant Tax Cheating Hurts The United States

• Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: From Kakistocracy to CheatistocracyInbo, Paul Krugman, right, Aug. 31, 2026. Rewarding the most dishonest. At this point, it’s almost a commonplace to say that under DonaldTrump, America has become a kakistocracy, ruled by the worst. But I don’tthink it’s fully appreciated the extent to which we’ve also become a cheatistocracy, ruled by the most corrupt.

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

Harmeet Dhillon has waged President Trump’s war on the left through a relentless pressure campaign against 100 universities over their diversity and antisemitism policies.

• New York Times, From Top Civil Rights Post, She Spars With the Left, and Her Colleagues, Glenn Thrush and Michael C. Bender, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights unit, has extracted flashy agreements and personnel moves from big universities and sought to force states to turn over confidential voter data.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Cruelty Comes to Springfield, Ohio, William Kristol and Andrew Egger, Aug. 31, 2026. And the city’s faithful are coming together in opposition.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Springfield ‘Under Seige,’ Jim Swift, right, Aug. 31, 2026. Throughout the Trump presidency, I’ve been going to Springfield, Ohio, to keep tabs on the Haitian community there. They and the city writ large are a symbol of the costs of this administration’s deportation policy. I went back to Springfield this past week as deportation efforts have ramped up. It was shocking to see what’s happening there. But it was inspiring, too. There really couldn’t be a better example of the Trump administration doing cruel things to good people just for the sake of cruelty—and the instinct of people who find this abhorrent to rally in support of the victims. 
• New York Times, F.T.C. and 22 States Claim in Lawsuit That Amazon Secretly Inflated Ad Prices, Karen Weise, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). Regulators say the e-commerce giant forced more than a million advertisers to pay more than they should have. The company denies the claims.
• New York Times, Justice Dept. Issues Grand Jury Subpoena to Comey Confidant, Alan Feuer, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). The subpoena of Daniel C. Richman is the latest move in a persistent campaign to go after James B. Comey, one of President Trump’s most reviled political adversaries who has already been indicted twice.

More On U.S. Immigration Enforcement, Health Care Costs

• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: UPDATE: ICE is leaving hospitals with millions in unpaid bills, Judd Legum, right, Sept. 1, 2026. Last year, Popular Information broke the news that on October 3, 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) abruptly stopping paying third parties for medical care provided to detainees. Third-party providers are used to provide “medically necessary” care including “dialysis, prenatal care, oncology, [and] chemotherapy,” according to ICE.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

This is an image President Trump posted on portraying himself as celebrating (using the dance moves of a favorite song, "YMCA," by the disco group "The Village People")the destruction of Iran's Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Aug. 30, 2026 -- a claim he reinforced with a statement shown below but which was refuted by other sources.

• Hope for America, Opinion: Trump will stop at nothing to silence the truth, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 30, 2026. After the press were released and most of the White House staff had gone home for the night, Donald Trump was still awake, posting on social media. Before finally calling it a night, he shared three final posts. None of them were something any leader of any country should be posting, let alone the President of the United States. In less than two minutes, he posted three times, two posts celebrating bombs dropping in the Middle East, and one post, seconds later, a video of himself golfing.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance 

Florida Republican congressional candidate Te Brown, who may be the same Te Brown who lost a congressional Republican primary in Illinois this year and who faces trial in Illinois this fall on federal fraud charges

• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Florida (?) Woman, Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 1, 2026. Republican House candidate Te Mayonna Brown is fighting an uphill battle. Florida’s 24th Congressional District, where she took the Republican nomination after running unopposed last month, is one of the bluest in the state. But that’s not the only hurdle she appears to be facing. Before getting involved in the FL-24 race, Brown lost a different Republican House primary this year—not in Florida, but in Illinois. Oh, and there’s this: Back in Illinois, she appears to be under indictment for felony wire fraud. Per publicly available court documents, her trial is set to begin just weeks after Election Day.
• Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion:The Biggest Issue in the Midterm Elections, Robert Reich, right, Sept. 1, 2026. You'll hear more and more about this. The earnings of America’s largest corporations — the S&P 500 — surged by an astounding 53 percent over the past year. But most Americans are losing ground. 
• MSNOW, Opinion: The House just got back into town — and wants to leave again ASAP, Hayes Brown, right, Sept. 1, 2026. Beyond keeping the federal government open past the midterms, there’s not much reason for GOP lawmakers to want to stick around. 
• New York Times, More Mail Ballots Are Arriving Late This Cycle, and They’re Getting Tossed, Adam Sella and Nick Corasaniti, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). State officials say they worry about the Postal Service’s ability to deliver votes this fall. They are urging voters to mail their ballots early or use drop boxes so their votes count. The rate at which mail votes have been rejected for arriving late has ticked up in primaries this year and general elections last year in roughly a dozen states, prompting election officials to worry that the U.S. Postal Service is ill-equipped to deliver ballots in the fall midterms.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Yes, More Trump Self-promotion! Jennifer Rubin, right, Aug. 31, 2026. 64 Days to the Midterms. Donald Trump’s pathological narcissism has soared (or sunk?) to new levels of almost comedic depravity. Like a ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel, he bounces haphazardly from one embarrassment to another, slamming into walls of public derision.
• Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: The Importance Of Voting Early, Pete Hegseth Is A Dangerous Clown And Needs To Go, Trump Has Made Venezuela A “Neo-Colony” And It’s Not OK, Simon Rosenberg, right, Aug. 31, 2026. We’ve often talked about how Job One this year was getting all our great candidates elected and flipping the House and Senate. As of today Hopium’s Job Two is to vote early and get everyone you know in your family, networks, communities, and organizations to join you.
• Decision Desk HQ, Massachusetts’s upside-down generational primary challenge, Geoffrey Skelley, Aug. 31, 2026. A look at four Democratic primaries to watch in Massachusetts on Sept. 1. 80-year old progressive Democratic Sen. Ed Markey faces a primary challenge from 47-year old Rep. Seth Moulton, who is running as a more moderate choice. Markey is favored to hold on even though other older Democratic incumbents have had electoral trouble in 2026. Democratic Reps. Stephen Lynch and Richard Neal each face more progressive primary challengers who hope to take down these longtime incumbents. Plus, Moulton’s open 6th District features a busy primary on the Democratic side.
• To the Contrary, Political Opinion: Dems Have a Hasan Piker Problem. But the GOP Has a Much, Much Bigger Elon Musk Problem, Charlie Sykes, Aug. 31, 2026. Elon is back, and in a rational world, Republicans would be facing a toxic dilemma. Via Axios: “Musk plans massive spending for GOP in midterms.”
• New York Times, Vance Calls El-Sayed ‘Evil’ in No-Holds-Barred Michigan Speech, Bayliss Wagner, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). Vice President JD Vance also told Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, to “keep my wife’s name out of your mouth.” Vice President JD Vance called Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee and an outspoken critic of Israel, “very, very evil” at a campaign rally near Detroit on Monday and accused him of heightening racial and religious divisions.Dr. El-Sayed called Mr. Vance “a sock puppet” and cast his policies as “evil” in a statement responding to the vice president’s remarks.“Evil is ripping health care away from working people in exchange for tax breaks for billionaires,” Dr. El-Sayed said on Monday. “Evil is making people pay more for groceries and gas while pushing for trade wars and actual war. Evil is dividing people for your own gain. Evil is selling out your morals for a little bit of power.” 
• PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Cognitively Declining Trump Wants To Hold Daily Rallies, But Can’t Remember Jon Ossoff’s Name, Jason Easley, right, Aug. 31, 2026. On the same day that it was reported that Trump is considering holding daily rallies ahead of the midterm, the president went on TV and could remember Sen. Jon Ossoff’s name.
• New York Times, Vance Calls El-Sayed ‘Evil’ in No-Holds-Barred Michigan Speech, Bayliss Wagner, Aug. 31, 2026. Vice President JD Vance also told Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, to “keep my wife’s name out of your mouth.”

More On Dolly Parton's Passing, Cultural Importance -- and Ill-Natured, Clumsy Reactions

Dolly Parton as Doralee in a scene from the film “9 to 5.” (Photo Credit: Steve Schapiro)

• New York Times Magazine, In ‘9 to 5,’ Dolly Parton Put a Friendly Face on Feminism, Susan Dominus, Aug. 30, 2026 (print ed.). In 1980, feminists were often stereotyped as man-hating or out of touch. Then Parton gave the movement a boost — and an anthem. Before a script for the movie “9 to 5” even existed — when it was still just a vague concept for a story about female office workers — Jane Fonda had a lightning bolt moment about how to cast it. She was in the car listening to the radio when a Dolly Parton song came on. Immediately, as Fonda later recalled on the podcast “Dolly Parton’s America,” an image popped into her head: “I suddenly had a vision of Dolly as a secretary,” she said. “She can’t see her hands, typing with those long fingernails. Everything about it made me laugh.” 
• JoJo From Jerz, Opinion: Bill Maher Is An Ass____, JoJo From Jerz, Aug. 31, 2026. Bill Maher, above, couldn’t tarnish Dolly Parton’s legacy, but he did manage to expose the rot in his own. In case you missed it the other night, Bill Maher, right, the oleaginous, unctuous, supercilious, smugly self-satisfied septuagenarian sleazeball stood on the Real Time stage in the middle of his own comedy show and decided that with wars raging, Donald Trump wreaking havoc and all manner of genuinely important s___ happening in the world, Americans were spending entirely too much time talking about the death of Dolly Parton.
• New York Times, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library Changes Lives. Some States Gut It Anyway, Ash Wu, Aug. 26, 2026. The crown jewel of the singer’s philanthropic efforts has handed out hundreds of millions of books to children over the past 31 years. But it isn’t immune to funding cuts.

Famed Actress Targeted By Husband In Appalling Sexual Harassment Scandal 

 The German actress Collien Fernandes set out to discover who was pretending to be her and sending men sexually explicit material. Her answer ignited a feminist movement (Photo by Laura Stevens for The New York Times).

• New York Times Magazine, Someone Was Impersonating Her in Online Affairs. She Says It Was Her Husband, Susan Dominus, Aug. 30, 2026 (print ed.). The German actress Collien Fernandes set out to discover who was pretending to be her and sending men sexually explicit material. Her answer ignited a feminist movement.

More On Middle East Wars, Occupation, Hunger, Civil Violence, Reactions

 

• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 31, 2026 ['Unsustainable' Iran Operations?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 1, 2026. Alex Horton and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported on Sunday, August 30, that military leaders are warning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that a plan to continue large-scale operations in Iran is unsustainable and is weakening their ability to protect U.S. interests in other places, including at home.
• The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases: ‘Mission Accomplished 2026’?! Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 1, 2026. Oblivious to his own failure, which dwarfs George W. Bush’s premature declaration of victory in Iraq, Donald Trump stupidly mimicked the “Mission Accomplished” slogan last week in advance of the six-month mark of his disastrous, illegal, and hugely unpopular war. Mr. Trump’s war in Iran…is anything but accomplished. Half a year in, the conflict has deteriorated into a quagmire of the president’s own making with no clear goals, no obvious strategy and no end in sight.
• New York Times, These Generals Fought for Israel. Now They See ‘Jewish Terrorism’ as the Threat, Azam Ahmed, Natan Odenheimer and Ronen Bergman, Photographs by Ivor Prickett, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). A growing number of former Israeli generals, intelligence officials and prime ministers are accusing settlers in the West Bank of committing ethnic cleansing with government support. “Once a society behaves this way,” one said, “that society is doomed.”
• Zosma News via TikTok, Thai people take stand against Israel, Staff Report, Aug. 26, 2026. Thai people take stand against Israeli 'oppression.' Tensions involving Israeli visitors to Thailand are now out of control. The situation in Gaza is no longer just an isolated situation. Let's get this straight. A visitor killed an animal at a zoo, and the zoo owner said the visitors was no longer welcome.
• Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: There’s a Bear in the Arctic, Cathy Young, Sept. 1, 2026. Vladimir Putin has sometimes delved into medieval history to justify his imperialist war in Ukraine; now, he’s switched to biology.
• Drop Site News, 2,030 Israeli attacks in West Bank in August; Postal Service plan could disenfranchise millions; Nepal death toll passes 1,000, Staff and Wire Reports, Sept. 1, 2026. Tankers attacked in Strait of Hormuz. Death toll from U.S. attack on Larak Island rises to three. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims it shot down U.S. MQ-9 drone over Strait of Hormuz. Iran says U.S. must fulfill Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding commitments, Tehran will “immediately” reciprocate.

U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets

• New York Times, Global Bond Sell-Off Puts Investors on Edge, Eshe Nelson, Sept. 1, 2026. Government borrowing costs are hitting multi-decade highs around the world, reflecting anxiety about debt levels, deficits and inflation.
• New York Times, News Analysis: China and the U.S. Offer Competing Showcases of Global Power, David Pierson, Sept. 1, 2026.  As Xi Jinping gathered with the leaders of Russia and Iran, Europe challenged the Trump administration at the G20, offering a split-screen view of a changing world.
• New York Times, News Analysis: China and the U.S. Offer Competing Showcases of Global Power, David Pierson, Sept. 1, 2026.  As Xi Jinping gathered with the leaders of Russia and Iran, Europe challenged the Trump administration at the G20, offering a split-screen view of a changing world.
• Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Trump Labor Secretary nominee pitched access to “America’s comprehensive welfare” to Chinese nationals, Judd Legum, right, Aug. 31, 2026. Keith Sonderling traveled to China to encourage investment in a Florida real estate development. Prospects were promised a green card and access government benefits. 
• New York Times, Global Oil Prices Jump After U.S. and Iran Trade Attacks, Jenny Gross, Jason Karaian and Rich Barbieri, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). Oil prices rose on Monday after the United States and Iran exchanged attacks for the first time in a month, pushing the global benchmark for crude back above $90 a barrel, after a sharp fall last week.

More On Russia Invasion of Ukraine

• New York Times, Trump Administration Updates: Europe Protests as U.S. Invites Russian Minister to Finance Meeting, Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). The Trump administration’s decision to invite Russia’s finance minister to a gathering of top global financial officials in North Carolina drew immediate protests from European nations on Monday. Europe has sought to isolate Moscow since it invaded Ukraine in 2022, and the Russian minister’s surprise appearance comes amid increased tension between President Trump and longtime allies. 
• New York Times, Russia Torments Kyiv With New Tactic of Nonstop Waves of Drones, Siobhán O’Grady and Yurii, Shyvala, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). The nearly constant air raids, a shift from years of largely overnight attacks, have left residents exhausted and on edge.

More On Floods in Nepal and Tibet 

• Associated Press, Hundreds feared stuck in hydropower tunnels as flood deaths surpass 950 in Nepal and China, Shristi Kafle and Huizhong Wu, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.).  Nepal’s disaster agency said Monday that 903 deaths had been counted in that country, with 4,247 people, including 592 foreigners, missing. As of Sunday, Chinese authorities reported 16 deaths and 546 missing, and Chinese state media said 261 of the missing were foreigners, including over a hundred Nepalis.
• New York Times, A Principal Saved 900 Students Before His School Was Washed Away in Nepal, Binod Ghimire and Claire Moses, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). Rajendra Dawadi had less than 15 minutes to act on a warning of approaching floodwaters. His swift evacuation plan saved hundreds of lives.

More On U.S. History, Culture, Media, Education

• AlterNet America, Opinion: Trump Wants the FCC to Punish a Journalist for One Word, Ryan Rose, Aug. 31, 2026. Trump threatens NBC's Welker with FCC punishment, the FBI loosens hiring standards, West Point fires its climate scientist, and a judge blocks speech-based deportations. Trump is threatening to send the FCC after an NBC journalist who accurately described his endorsement record as “mixed.” The FBI has quietly dropped its ban on hiring applicants who have patronized sex workers, stolen from employers, or engaged in bestiality. West Point fired its only climate scientist after he refused to stop teaching that humans cause climate change. And a federal judge just ruled that the Trump administration cannot deport students for criticizing Israel.
• Brave New Films New Documentary: Murdering 60 Minutes: Did Bari Weiss Suppress Epstein Coverage? Staff report, Sept. 1, 2026. CBS fired the reporter working on a 60 Minutes investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Then the report was pulled entirely. Around the same time, word got out that Bari Weiss's wife, Nellie Bowles, appears in the Epstein files — including a friendly exchange with Epstein and a 2018 visit to his Manhattan townhouse.
• The Wrap, Washington Post Columnist Slams ‘Traitor’ Pentagon Source Leaking Hegseth Meetings to Paper, A.J. Katz, Aug. 31, 2026. Marc Thiessen says the government official behind a classified Iran War report should be prosecuted.
• Associated Press, US Treasury blocks certain journalists from G20 meeting in North Carolina, Ben Finley, Aug. 30, 2026. The U.S. Treasury Department is preventing certain journalists from covering a finance meeting among the world’s most powerful countries, the latest example of how President Donald Trump’s administration has restricted media access.
• New York Times, John Galliano Withdraws From Met Museum Show After Backlash, Vanessa Friedman and Jacob Bernstein, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). Donors, politicians and Jewish leaders questioned the Met’s decision to honor Galliano, a fashion designer who was found guilty of a hate crime for his antisemitic outbursts.
• Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 29, 2026 [Presidents and Cherry Trees], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 31, 2026. One of our founding myths is that of George Washington and the cherry tree. In his "The Life of Washington," first published in 1800, minister and writer Mason Locke Weems, more commonly known as Parson Weems, wrote down for the citizens of this new nation the qualities they should require in a leader. Weems’s Washington was generous, reverent, studious, athletic, martial, hardworking, and beloved by his comrades. And, beginning with an 1806 edition of the book, he could not tell a lie. On Friday, Rick Maese of the Washington Post reported that despite orders from U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes saying that she wanted advance notice before the government took down more than ten trees from the East Potomac Golf Links or brought equipment larger than a sedan onto the property, the Trump administration has taken down more than sixty trees in apparent preparation for Trump to redesign the golf course. One of the trees they have cut down is a cherry tree. 

U.S. Military, In-Depth Analysis 

• Associated Press, New US missile appears to have left wide path of death and destruction in Iranian city, report says, Julia Frankel, Aug. 31, 2026. It has been touted by the manufacturer as the ballistic missile of the future: lethal, long-range and pinpoint. Lockheed Martin’s Precision Strike Missile has the U.S. military investing billions to update its arsenal.
• Emptywheel, Analysis and Opinion: Three Days after Learning He Had Lost the Empire, Whiskey Pete Hegseth Campaigned To Be President, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Aug. 31, 2026. WaPo had a blockbuster story yesterday, revealing that — back on August 14 — the heads of USEUCOMM, SOUTHCOM, USPACOM, and the Navy’s top Admiral warned the Secretary of Defense (who insists on being called the Secretary of War) that it would be a bad idea to follow his orders to leave some troops (probably the Lincoln carrier group) in the Middle East into September and leave more (possibly the 82nd Airborne) into next year because — among other things — it would mean they were unprepared to protect the US. The story is important by itself. But it’s even crazier when you see what Whiskey Pete did in the wake of that dire warning. He took time away from dealing with this resource crisis to help negotiate a deal to steal Venezuela’s oil, a deal that comes with its own resource requirements.

Top Headlines

Chart by the Brookings Institution of Most Politically Powerful U.S. Billionaires

New York Times, 'The Least Transparent Midterm’: How Dark Money Is Washing Over the 2026 Election, Shane Goldmacher and Theodore Schleifer, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). At least $1 billion from anonymous donors is flowing into the midterm elections. Dark money is not new, but it now permeates nearly every major contest.

In Michigan and Minnesota, tens of millions of untraceable dollars poured into recent Senate primaries trying to topple progressive Democratic candidates.

In Kansas, the torrent of secret money that boosted an obscure Democratic Senate candidate amounted to 100 times as much as what he had on hand in the final stretch of the primary.

And in Texas, Republicans exploited lax federal disclosure rules to spend secretly and try to nominate a weak Democratic candidate whose own party had denounced her as antisemitic.

All across America, the midterm elections are drowning in dark money.

A New York Times review of advertising data, campaign-finance filings and tax records revealed that about $1 billion in anonymous money is sloshing through the political landscape in 2026, a staggering sum and yet almost certainly a low-end estimate, given how difficult this money is to trace.

Dark money is the term used by the campaign industry to describe political spending by groups that hide the names of their donors. The deluge is upending races from coast to coast, with billionaires, corporations and special interests hiding their agendas and involvement with relative ease.

It is impossible to know the full scale of this spending. The Times’s tally of the $1 billion includes only what is publicly available, primarily television and digital ad purchases and donations to super PACs from nonprofit groups. These groups also fund political activity that is more difficult to track, such as direct mail, hiring influencers to boost favorable content or deploying door-knockers for causes that are not technically campaigns.

Yet the sum is more than “enough money to manipulate a lot of politicians and to put a lot of poison in the blood of the American political system,” said Nick Penniman, the chief executive of Issue One, a group that has sought to reduce the role of money in politics.

Just this month, one Wyoming group with a thin paper trail dating only to this spring, Choose Freedom Inc., sprang into action to reserve about $22 million in ads to boost Republicans in two dozen battleground House and Senate races. The next day, another Republican-linked nonprofit rolled out a $22 million campaign in 41 House districts. On Thursday, a nonprofit called Per Aspera Policy Inc. emerged from obscurity to place a $3.7 million ad buy praising the Republican Senate nominee in Ohio.

All of it involved untraceable cash.

Secret money is not new. But the pervasiveness has reached industrial scale in 2026 — and serves as a preview of its coming prevalence in 2028. Nearly every major primary and battleground race this fall has been or will be shaped by secret funds. The anonymously sourced expenditures are so big that, in some instances, they are outstripping the spending of campaigns themselves, making candidates seem like bystanders of their own elections. The trend is especially true in primaries.

New York Times, More Mail Ballots Are Arriving Late This Cycle, and They’re Getting Tossed, Adam Sella and Nick Corasaniti, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). State officials say they worry about the Postal Service’s ability to deliver votes this fall. They are urging voters to mail their ballots early or use drop boxes so their votes count.

The rate at which mail votes have been rejected for arriving late has ticked up in primaries this year and general elections last year in roughly a dozen states, prompting election officials to worry that the U.S. Postal Service is ill-equipped to deliver ballots in the fall midterms.

The states studied by The New York Times include some of the most critical battleground House and Senate seats where control of Congress will be determined, as well as key races for governor and secretary of state. The Times obtained data from California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Washington.

In Wisconsin, which hosts an open race for governor, a competitive House election plus contests for both chambers of the state legislature, lateness accounted for about 5,000 rejected mail ballots in the spring primary this year, or 78 percent of all tossed ballots. During the last spring election, in 2023, the figure was roughly 2,300, or 47 percent of all tossed votes.

New York Times, Whistle-Blower Says Trump Officials Are Defying Court Orders on Voting by Mail, Chris Cameron, Sept. 1, 2026. A report detailed “grave concerns” that a new system being rushed into use by the U.S. Postal Service could imperil millions of mail ballots ahead of the midterm elections.

A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.

The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The report said that the agency had planned to complete the new digital system overseeing mail ballots by Sept. 1.

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking.

Speaking to reporters by phone on Monday, Mr. Blumenthal said of the report that “the main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the U.S.P.S. puts all of their votes at risk.”

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: We Found Her: The Most Absurd General-Election Candidate in America, Andrew Egger, Cathy Young, Jim Swift, Sept. 1, 2026. She’s under indictment. She lost her primary. And she’s on the ballot in November.

This is a truly wild newsletter, involving one of the craziest campaign stories I’ve ever covered—it has alleged fraud, carpetbagging, fake-ish identities, and a candidate I’m 95 percent sure is straight-up gaslighting me.

It was a close call, but it sure looks like Donald Trump is going to get his East Wing ballroom, at least for now. Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that construction could continue.

The Court declined to rule on the actual legality of Trump’s decision to tear down the East Wing, but held that the historical preservationists who had brought the suit to stop it lacked the standing to sue. Sure seems we’re hearing that a lot these days! Happy Tuesday. 

News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News and Commentary: Major Update: Massie Reads Epstein Co-Conspirators Names, USPS Whistleblower Sounds Alarm, Mass Army Resignations, Aaron Parnas, right, Sept. 1, 2026. Thomas Massie stood on the House floor last night and read the names of alleged Epstein coconspirators into the record, from a former British prince to a retail billionaire, while pushing a discharge petition to force a vote on stronger transparency legislation the government has continued to slow-walk for a year. It’s landing the same day the Army lost its civilian secretary after months of open warfare with Pete Hegseth, leaving the military’s largest branch without a single Senate-confirmed leader at the top, and as a USPS whistleblower warns the agency’s rushed rollout of Trump’s mail-voting restrictions risks derailing the midterms outright.

I spoke with Lauren Hersch, co-founder of World Without Exploitation, the group leading the fight to get the Epstein files released, and we talked through the major victories in that fight so far.

The Epstein files remain the most important story in this news cycle. It’s something I’ve fought for over many months, and something I will keep fighting for until survivors get real answers. The White House and its allies have not been pleased with our reporting, but that won’t stop me from exposing the truth. 

Let’s get into it.

Massie reads the names of Epstein Co-conspirators:

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), below right took to the House floor Monday night and read aloud the names of more than a dozen alleged Epstein coconspirators, including Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly Prince Andrew) and retail billionaire Les Wexner, calling for them to be investigated and prosecuted.

He paired the move with a push to collect the 218 signatures needed for a discharge petition forcing a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act II. Massie noted it’s been a year since Trump signed the original EFTA, yet the government still withholds over three million files, which he says is exactly why the follow-up bill is needed. Mountbatten-Windsor has denied ever meeting accuser Virginia Giuffre, and Wexner has denied firsthand knowledge of Epstein’s crimes despite having employed him as a financial manager in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act II, introduced in July by a bipartisan group including Massie, Ro Khanna, Teresa Leger Fernández, Jeff Merkley, and Ben Ray Luján, is meant to fix what advocates call the original law’s toothless enforcement. It would let state attorneys general, local DAs, survivors, and members of Congress sue the Justice Department directly if it fails to release required files, grant survivors full unredacted access to records concerning themselves (including FBI interview transcripts), and impose existing federal criminal penalties on DOJ and FBI officials who knowingly conceal, destroy, or falsify records. Legal experts like attorney Oleg Nekritin called the framework a potential “gamechanger” for state-level investigations, while others cautioned the bill still faces a steep climb, needing House passage, 60 votes in the Senate, and ultimately Trump’s signature.

Even bill backers acknowledge real skepticism about whether it changes DOJ behavior in practice; legal experts noted the bill has “more teeth” on paper but doubted another law alone would end the department’s pattern of delay if it simply keeps dragging its feet. Sen. Merkley was blunt in blaming Attorney General Todd Blanche directly, saying the bill ensures “even Trump and his crony...can’t stop the truth from coming to light.” The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment, while a White House spokesperson pushed back by touting Trump’s existing cooperation, including signing the original EFTA and releasing thousands of pages of documents, as proof he’s “done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.” The news outlet Radar Online, which has pursued its own nine-year FOIA lawsuit over the files, called the new bill a step in the right direction but argued the public already has a faster path to transparency through existing FOIA law.

Army in turmoil:

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll submitted his resignation to the White House Monday after months of escalating tension with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the firing of senior officers and the direction of the Army’s modernization efforts. The Atlantic reports the break came to a head last week when Driscoll personally raised his concerns directly with Trump, telling him how many generals and top officers had been fired, pushed out, or passed over under Hegseth; Trump was reportedly surprised by the scale of it and expressed concern about the cuts. Driscoll, a close ally and Yale Law classmate of Vice President JD Vance, had told confidants for months he intended to leave around the midterms, and he’s expected to play a role in any future Vance presidential campaign. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon responded to requests for comment on the resignation or who might succeed him.

The departure leaves the Army, the military’s largest service with more than 450,000 active-duty soldiers, without a Senate-confirmed civilian secretary, a confirmed chief of staff, a confirmed general overseeing operations, or a confirmed commander of Army forces in Europe. Acting Chief of Staff Gen. Christopher LaNeve, who already faces congressional pushback over his own nomination, is now effectively filling multiple top roles at once, and he recently halted a joint US-Ukraine drone warfare training program. Hegseth’s broader purge has also claimed well-regarded officers like former Army chief Gen. Randy George and Europe commander Gen. Christopher Donahue, who had been central to supporting Ukraine and planning against Russian aggression. A former defense official said the Driscoll-George modernization push is now likely “dead,” calling it an uphill battle even under better circumstances.

The shakeup isn’t limited to Driscoll: Deputy Undersecretary Dave Fitzgerald, who along with Driscoll championed bringing small tech firms into the Army to boost innovation, is also expected to leave the Pentagon as soon as this week. The timing is notable given the Army is simultaneously managing an extended Middle East conflict and trying to persuade Congress to approve major new investments in munitions, personnel, and equipment. Driscoll and Hegseth had clashed before, including when Driscoll became the face of the administration’s Ukraine peace efforts last fall while Hegseth stayed focused on other priorities. Driscoll, an Iraq War veteran, also briefly served as acting director of the ATF last year.

Voting restrictions/USPS Whistleblower:

A newly released whistleblower disclosure, submitted Monday by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) to USPS, warns the Postal Service’s rushed rollout of an online portal to implement Trump’s mail-in voting restrictions could “derail” the midterm elections. The whistleblower, represented by the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid, claims USPS leadership discarded standard testing practices to hit a September 1 launch deadline, raising the question of whether “catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug.” A particularly serious flaw involves USPS’s “zero-percent failure policy” for verifying that mail-in ballots meet the new rule’s requirements, a process the disclosure calls “entirely unforgiving” and warns could delay ballots by the thousands through repeated verification cycles, potentially preventing states from mailing out enormous numbers of ballots at all. Blumenthal called the findings “mind-boggling” and urged Postmaster General David Steiner to abandon the plan entirely, while USPS did not immediately respond to NPR’s questions.

The rollout remains legally contested even as voting by mail for the midterms is set to begin this week: a federal judge in Boston issued a temporary restraining order last week finding USPS’s plan likely illegal because the agency lacks authority to control mail voting, and the Trump administration has appealed that ruling to the 1st Circuit, setting up what could become another Supreme Court fight. Trump has defended the underlying executive order as necessary to curb noncitizen voting, despite numerous studies and audits showing such fraud is extremely rare, an argument that hasn’t been affected by the technical concerns raised in the whistleblower report. With key portions of the plan still blocked in court and more lower-court rulings likely as the legal fight continues, election officials and mail-in voters are left navigating significant uncertainty about whether and how the new requirements will actually be enforced in time for the midterms.

Other news:

Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant in Springfield, Ohio, died Monday after walking into traffic on Interstate 70 and being struck by a tractor-trailer, in what his family believes was a suicide following months of escalating distress. Bel had recently lost temporary protected status, part of a Trump administration policy change affecting an estimated 350,000 Haitian immigrants, and ICE had fitted him with an ankle monitor after summoning him to its office once the Supreme Court allowed the TPS cancellation to proceed; his father said he felt humiliated and “treated like an animal,” was bullied by classmates, and was denied a JROTC uniform days before his death because of the device. Bel had arrived in the US in 2024 to reunite with his parents, graduated high school with honors as a JROTC cadet, dreamed of studying medicine, and had a pending asylum claim with a hearing scheduled for October, fearing gang violence if returned to Haiti. Advocates including Guerline Jozef of the Haitian Bridge Alliance and local pastor Carl Ruby directly tied his death to the administration’s enforcement policies, while Ohio authorities are investigating the crash and DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump this month announced plans to rescind the 25-year-old “roadless rule” protecting roughly 45 million acres of national forest, and Public Citizen research shows the rollback stands to benefit companies that Forest Service chief Tom Schultz previously represented as a timber lobbyist and executive. Schultz, the first-ever Forest Service chief who never worked inside the agency, came from leading the Federal Forest Resource Coalition and serving as an Idaho Forest Group VP, and he’s personally signed agreements doubling federal timber sales in Idaho that directly benefit his former employer. He frames the change as reducing wildfire risk through “active forest management,” but critics note a Forest Service data analysis found wildfires are nearly three times more likely to start near roads, and studies suggest the rollback could endanger 400 threatened and endangered species. Since Schultz’s appointment, timber lobbying groups like the American Forest Resource Council have ramped up spending advocating for the change, and he’s part of a broader pattern of former extractive-industry insiders Trump has placed in top environmental posts.

Former UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced he’ll step down as MP for Holborn and St Pancras to focus on international affairs like defense, security, trade, and technology, triggering a byelection in the London seat he’s held since 2015. Starmer, who resigned as PM in July, said he wanted to “pass the baton to a successor” after concluding once you’ve been prime minister you need to answer what comes next. Green Party leader Zack Polanski is reportedly considering a run for the seat, which Starmer’s party has held safely, while independent leftist Andrew Feinstein was his closest challenger last election. The Conservative party chair mocked the move as fitting given Starmer had pledged to stay on as a backbencher, calling the resulting byelection a costly burden on taxpayers.

Tropical Storm Edouard was upgraded from a depression and is expected to make landfall in Texas, bringing potentially heavy rain and flash flooding to the Gulf Coast, with forecasters predicting 3-6 inches of rain around Houston and up to 9 inches on the upper Texas coast. Texas Governor Greg Abbott said flooding is the biggest concern, and crews worked Monday to clear dry vegetation that could spark wildfires from lightning strikes. Elsewhere in the Atlantic and Pacific, the remnants of Tropical Storm Dolly hit Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Bahamas with rain and thunderstorms, while Tropical Storm Lowell was forecast to rapidly intensify into a major hurricane near Hawaii. A newly formed Tropical Storm Marie isn’t threatening land off Mexico, and Hurricane Karina strengthened into a powerful category 4 storm far from shore, posing no threat to land.

Canada’s ruling Liberal Party swept all three special elections held Monday, a result Prime Minister Mark Carney called a voter endorsement of his government following his combative standoff with Trump. The most dramatic result came in Quebec’s Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, a district Conservatives had held since 2018, where the Liberal win reflected regional support for Carney’s decision to walk away from stalled trade talks with Washington. The victories bring the Liberals to 173 of 343 House of Commons seats and come amid an escalating US-Canada trade war, after talks collapsed on August 21 and Trump imposed 50% tariffs on roughly $20 billion in Canadian goods. A political science professor noted the Conservative collapse in Quebec, where the party fell from about 41% of the vote to just 13%, looks especially bad for party leader Pierre Poilievre.

A Louisiana jury’s $300,000 defamation verdict against The Advocate newspaper, won by state supreme court justice Jefferson Hughes over a 2019 editorial, has alarmed press freedom advocates who worry it misapplies the “actual malice” standard protecting reporting on public figures. The dispute centered on a timeline discrepancy between an investigative story and a follow-up editorial about Hughes’s romantic relationship with a lawyer in a custody case he’d presided over, and jurors found defamation without ever addressing actual malice on the verdict form, awarding far less than the $10 million Hughes sought. Press Freedom Foundation’s Seth Stern warned that punishing inevitable journalistic mistakes with big damages will make publishers “more timid” toward covering the powerful, while Media Law Resource Center’s George Freeman said there was no evidence the paper knowingly published a false story. The ruling lands just over a week after a similarly concerning $9.25 million verdict against the New York Times in Alabama, though that case involved a private figure rather than a public one, giving the plaintiff a lower legal bar to clear; both verdicts can still be appealed.

Trump suggested he may be reconsidering longstanding US support for British sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, telling reporters “I always review every position,” a remark widely seen as leverage to pressure the UK’s new PM Andy Burnham into raising defense spending and NATO contributions. The comments follow a Telegraph report that a US official said Washington could shift its stance if Britain fails to meet its defense commitments, amid signs Chancellor John Healey may drop the UK’s pledge to hit 3% GDP defense spending by 2030. The US officially stays neutral on the islands’ sovereignty but has recognized British administration since Britain’s 1982 war with Argentina, a conflict in which President Reagan’s staunch support for Margaret Thatcher helped cement their political alliance. Trump has grown close to Argentina’s President Javier Milei, whose party he helped bolster with a $20 billion financial lifeline tied to election results, and Milei has vocally supported Argentina’s rival claim to the islands, adding another layer to the tension.

Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Sen. Elissa Slotkin in a letter that the military has no plans to send federal troops or federalized National Guard members to polling places during the November midterms, nor any plans to use military personnel to seize ballots or voting machines. The assurance came after Slotkin sought confirmation from Caine and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth amid Democratic anxiety that the Trump administration might try to interfere with the elections, following Trump’s calls to “nationalize” elections and his refusal to rule out sending Guard members or immigration agents to polling sites. Caine added he has “neither received nor anticipate receiving any unlawful order” regarding the military’s role in the midterms, though Hegseth himself has not yet responded to Slotkin’s letter despite a requested deadline. Federal law generally bars armed federal forces from polling places, and the episode echoes a similar 2020 assurance from then-Joint Chiefs chair Gen. Mark Milley, who wrote that election disputes are for courts and Congress to resolve, not the military. 

New York Times, Trump Administration Updates: Army Secretary Resigns After Ouster of Leaders, Staff Reports, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). What We’re Covering. 

• Defense Department: Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, the service’s top civilian leader, who clashed repeatedly with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the ouster of a swath of key combat-tested leaders, handed in his resignation on Monday, according to administration officials. The resignation comes amid a series of firings and feuds that have left the Army essentially rudderless as it struggles to deal with the threat posed by cheap, deadly drones and missiles that have pounded U.S. bases in the Middle East. Read more ›
• White House Ballroom: Construction of President Trump’s enormous ballroom at the White House can continue, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday. The ruling did not address whether the president had exceeded his authority by acting without congressional approval but in practical terms means the president seems likely to be able to complete the project. The ruling found that preservationists who had challenged the $400 million project did not have standing to sue. Read more ›
• G20 Meeting: The Trump administration invited Russia’s finance minister to a gathering of top global financial officials this week in North Carolina, prompting immediate protests from European nations that have sought to isolate Moscow since it invaded Ukraine. Read more ›

Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll, right, the service’s top civilian leader, who clashed repeatedly with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the ouster of key combat-tested Army leaders, handed in his resignation to President Trump on Monday, administration officials said.

Mr. Driscoll’s resignation was expected but it comes at a tumultuous time, as the military’s largest service faces its busiest period since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Army air defense soldiers are playing the leading role in defending U.S. troops in the Middle East from increasingly sophisticated Iranian missile attacks. The Army’s command in Europe is providing critical intelligence and other support to Ukraine as it fights to hold off a larger Russian force.White House BallroomAnn MarimowAug. 31, 2026, 4:50 p.m. ET3 hours ago

In a 5-4 ruling, the majority found that the challenge mounted by the National Trust for Historic Preservation on the basis of “aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests” was not sufficient. In the unsigned order, the majority said that the Supreme Court had “repeatedly held that mere offense, disagreement, or distaste does not qualify as a concrete and particularized injury.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., joined in a dissent by the court’s three liberal justices, wrote that the construction was “likely unlawful.”

In a 5-to-4 vote, the court said the preservationists who challenged the construction of the planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom did not have legal grounds known as standing to bring their lawsuit because they were not directly harmed by the project, estimated to cost $400 million.

Finance chiefs from the world’s wealthiest nations are meeting at a challenging moment. Russia’s finance minister made a surprise appearance at a gathering of top global economic policymakers on Monday after a prolonged absence, an invitation that was extended by the Trump administration but drew rebukes and protests from European officials committed to isolating Moscow for its war against Ukraine.

The summit of finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 nations, in the mountain town of Asheville, was billed by the Treasury Department as a chance to find global cooperation on new economic punishments for Iran and new strategies to boost growth at a time of stubbornly high inflation and rising borrowing costs that are straining government budgets.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday dismissed Canada’s decision to impose retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods, suggesting that the United States’ northern neighbor lacked the economic might to fight a trade war.

“I don’t think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone who’s 13 times larger than you are,” Mr. Bessent said in an interview on CNBC, referring to the size of the countries’ economies.

Lars Klingbeil, the German vice chancellor, just told reporters he rebuked his Russian counterpart for his country’s invasion of Ukraine and demanded it end the war. He also seemed to criticize the Trump administration for inviting Siluanov here.

“I would have preferred clear positioning from the U.S. side that he not be received like a regular guest,” Klingbeil said.

The Russian finance minister has faced a cold shoulder from western counterparts at such meetings for years. In 2022, former Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen walked out of a G20 meeting on the sidelines of the I.M.F. spring meetings when Siluanov, who was attending virtually, started to speak. In 2023, Yellen confronted Russian finance ministry officials at the G20 in India, blaming them for the deaths in Ukraine and the global economic fallout.

Germany, in particular, sees Russia’s presence here as an affront to Ukraine. The German government has backed Ukraine with military and other aid, and it has accused Russia of a retaliatory campaign of sabotage in Germany that includes cyberattacks.

Trump Renews Push for Federal Film Tax Credit: In a social media post, President Trump said that the exodus of film production to Canada and other countries was “hurting California very badly.” President Trump pushed for a federal tax credit on Monday to aid the production of films in the United States, the type of government support that a beleaguered Hollywood has been clamoring for in recent years.

Although dozens of states subsidize film and television production, the federal government has never offered a nationwide tax incentive as several other countries do. Because productions have fled Los Angeles for places like Australia, Britain and Hungary, labor unions, lobbying groups and politicians on both sides of the aisle have rallied around the idea of a federal program they say would help bring jobs back.

President Trump on Monday lashed out at communities that are protesting data centers, suggesting that residents who do not go along with the artificial intelligence revolution must prefer to be “backwards and poor.”

The C.D.C. director challenges Pennsylvania’s report of two measles deaths. The new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered agency officials to challenge two measles deaths reported by Pennsylvania, shunning the agency’s normal procedure of accepting data shared by states and amplifying comments made by her boss, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The incident draws the C.D.C. into a highly political disagreement about whether the deaths were a result of measles or merely coincided with the infection, echoing similar disputes over causes of death during the coronavirus pandemic.

The president made several comments about the Venezueal oil deal, details of which have been vague. He said one goal is to “fill up the strategic reserves.” When asked about projections it could take years to see returns on this investment, he was dismissive but said that would also be fine. And he appeared to say that the Venezuela deal will cover the ballooning costs of his war in Iran. “We paid for the war,” he said. “The cost of the war has been paid for many, many times before. Where have you heard that before? You didn’t hear that with Afghanistan. You didn’t hear that with Vietnam, and by people that ran it a lot differently than I run it.”

President Trump says he’s ruled out using a nuclear weapon on Iran, then attacks the reporter who asked the question during an appearance in the Oval Office, calling it “stupid.” Trump says he has already defeated Iran, despite the ongoing stalemate and continued sporadic military engagement.

Trump dodges a question about what he knows about whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is considering a 2028 presidential campaign, praising him but saying it’s “early.” Hegseth’s team denied that an NBC News report about him looking to run was accurate. Hegseth has also been to first-in-the-nation caucuses state Iowa in the last year

President Trump just announced a new round of pricing deals with nine pharmaceutical companies, without offering many details. It’s the latest in a series of deals the administration has made as it tries to ensure the U.S. pays a similar amount for drugs as European countries. 

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced on Monday that his department was immediately revoking the accreditation of 110 commercial trucking schools for certifying drivers who failed to demonstrate spoken or written English proficiency, as part of a new, multiagency effort to expand the Trump administration’s crackdown on abuses in the industry.

Mr. Duffy said the schools had collectively trained more than 5,000 drivers who were granted licenses but then subsequently could not demonstrate English-language proficiency during roadside inspections.

The Justice Dept. issues a grand jury subpoena to a confidant of James Comey.

Federal prosecutors have issued a grand jury subpoena demanding testimony from Daniel C. Richman, a close confidant of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director and one of President Trump’s most reviled political adversaries, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The subpoena, issued by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida, appears to be connected to the so-called grand conspiracy case that has sought to implicate Mr. Comey and other federal officials who have investigated Mr. Trump in an overarching plot to deprive him of his rights. It was a small but significant escalation of the Florida case and the latest move in a persistent campaign to go after Mr. Comey in particular who has already been indicted twice in separate cases in Virginia and North Carolina.

An I.R.S. audit revenue has plummeted under Trump, a watchdog has found..

The amount of money the Internal Revenue Service collected from audits dropped dramatically last year after the Trump administration pushed out many of the agency’s employees, according to a watchdog report released on Monday.

The report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, called TIGTA, showed that I.R.S. audits brought in $6.5 billion in fiscal year 2025, a 35 percent decrease from the $10 billion that audits elicited the previous year. That plunge came after President Trump, at the start of his second term, moved to reduce the size of the federal work force, a push that resulted in the I.R.S. losing roughly 30 percent of its staff dedicated to audits.

The administration has revoked funding for bike paths, and encouraged removing some. A cycling advocate said it is playing on the idea of “that dork on a bike.” 

Special Reports: U.S. Supreme Court Secretly Hides Its Records For Decades, Can't Control Trump  

 New York Times, Times Exclusive: How the Supreme Court Locks Away Its Own History, Jodi Kantor, Sept. 1, 2026. After Justice Scalia died, the justices held private negotiations about locking away their papers. We may not see the ultimate record of the Roberts court for decades.

In early 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly of a heart attack on a Texas ranch, sending his Supreme Court colleagues into a period of grief and uncertainty. Behind closed doors, they had to contend with another piece of unsettling news.

Justice Scalia, the leading light of the conservative legal movement, had left no plans for his working papers, according to five people aware of the situation. For a Supreme Court justice, this was the equivalent of dying without a will. With no instructions for creating an archive or opening it to the public, the definitive inside account of his work — and the court’s — could be lost or emerge with uncomfortable speed.

So following his death, his colleagues entered into private negotiations to try to head off any such situation in the future.

In a series of memos and conference meetings, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. led the surviving justices in discussions about imposing a more uniform seal for their own papers, according to several people with knowledge of the process.

The absence of instructions from Justice Scalia and ensuing confidential conversations, which have not previously been reported, help explain why the nation’s highest court can be so difficult to understand. The ultimate record of the court’s work is considered the personal property of each justice, to dispose of or share as he or she chooses. And many of the justices have valued confidentiality over transparency and chosen to postpone scrutiny of their work for years to come.

In contrast with the executive branch, which is required to preserve and ultimately make public a record of its inner workings, there are no laws to determine what the justices save, shred, burn or reveal, or when. The court does not share any information about policies or plans for records; a spokeswoman for the court did not respond to written questions.

People familiar with the episode after Justice Scalia’s death, who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because of the court’s sensitivity over disclosure of internal workings, recalled that a consensus was reached, but had differing memories of its terms and how solid or lasting it was.

Still, the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, left, just a few years later, provides a clue: Her Supreme Court papers went, at her direction, to the Library of Congress on the condition that no case file would be opened until every justice involved in the matter had died, a restriction that could lock away many documents for decades.

Though some justices in previous eras arranged for their papers to be released not long after their own deaths, the trend on the Roberts court has been to impose much tighter restrictions, serving to further obscure a branch of government that has resisted calls for more transparency

Each year, the justices carefully compose and edit about 60 opinions in argued cases to share with the world. The fuller, richer narratives of each case, showing the behind-the-scenes stories of how members of the court pressured, persuaded and prevailed over one another to arrive at those opinions, are hidden away in the justices’ working papers — their confidential internal memos and opinion drafts.

“There is a story behind every Supreme Court decision,” said Brad Snyder, a legal historian at Georgetown University and the author of a biography of Justice Felix Frankfurter. “Without the papers, we can’t understand it.”When we might see the full story behind three key Supreme Court cases

After Scalia's death, the justices tried to enter a more uniform pact. Ginsburg, the next justice to die, specifies that her papers will be released after all the other justices have died. Kagan is the youngest.

Plans for justices sworn in after 2017 are still unknown. Barrett is the youngest current justice.

The justices have said they want to keep those internal exchanges out of view, contending that secrecy protects the authority and finality of their decisions.

Since Justice Scalia’s death, two members of the court have retired. But neither of them, Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer, has announced plans for his papers.

Because of the court’s lack of transparency, it is impossible to say what will become of the inner history of its current work — which scholars say is more crucial, and more endangered, than ever.

In the decade since 2016, the Roberts court has been issuing many orders on what critics call the “shadow docket.” These temporary but consequential emergency rulings often lack routine information like tallies of how the justices voted or explanations of the court’s logic.

In those cases, the public will be able to learn the court’s reasoning only from the justices’ working papers, making the collections from the Roberts years particularly important. But if all of the current justices follow the same terms of Justice Ginsburg, that material will not emerge for generations.

And people familiar with the court’s operations say they worry that some of the most authoritative and revealing records are not being saved at all. That is because some work is now conducted digitally, via emails and texts. Those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters, said they were unaware of any consistent procedures for saving electronic records.

“We’ll be unable to write a rich history of the Roberts court,” Mr. Snyder said.

Many government agencies make clear to the public how the agency handles its records. But Patricia McCabe, a spokeswoman for the court, did not respond to questions about the court’s practices, including whether court emails are deleted.

Asked why the court refused to provide any information about its policies for document retention, Ms. McCabe declined to answer that question as well.Surprises, Brawls and a Shredder

The revelations found in past justices’ working papers have been so potent that they have caused bruised feelings between the justices and blowups between government institutions.

And because no law governs the preservation of the justices’ work, each justice, assisted by staff, builds his or her own archival trove, deciding which memos, drafts, voting sheets and meeting notes to preserve.

Or destroy. In 1986, Justice Byron R. White, a former professional football player who staunchly guarded his privacy, summoned his clerks to his chambers for a special assignment that took several weekends. Together they marked his quarter-century on the court by feeding his records, including from the landmark Miranda rights case, into a shredder purchased for the occasion, according to Dennis J. Hutchinson, his biographer.

Got a news tip about the courts? If you have information to share about the Supreme Court or other federal courts, please contact us.See how to send a secure message at nytimes.com/tips

“Well, here’s an article. Here’s an entire book,” one of the clerks later told Mr. Hutchinson, describing what it was like to insert invaluable history into the jaws of the machine.

“I couldn’t believe how much history was going down the chute,” he said.

Two justices in modern memory opted for more open approaches. One spring morning in 1993, the justices opened their morning copies of The Washington Post to find detailed accounts of their internal debates. Earlier that year, Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black member of the court, had died, and his papers had been donated to the Library of Congress. With no announcement, the library had opened his papers for public review, and Post reporters had been digging through the newly released archive.

 

The Trump destruction of the White House historic East Wing to build his ballroom without congressional approval. (New York Times photo).

Civil Discourse, Opinion: Why Can’t the Supreme Court Tell Trump No? Joyce Vance, right, Sept. 1, 2026. The Court’s inability to tell Trump no may end up being the most concerning feature of his two terms in office. It’s as if the Justices, or five to seven of them, depending on the case, can’t summon a collective recollection of the constitutional system of checks and balances that is the foundation for the legal system they sit at the apex of.

Oops, they did it again. Five justices told Donald Trump all was forgiven for tearing down the historic East Wing of the White House, and he could carry on with his ballroom project while litigation about its legality proceeded. Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson joined a dissent written by the Chief Justice.

Tonight, we’re going to turn our attention to the Supreme Court’s decision this afternoon about Trump’s ballroom. Before we review the opinions, let’s remember how we got here:

On March 31, 2026, Judge Richard Leon granted the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, which enjoined any further construction of the ballroom above ground, but permitted work to continue on what the court was told was a “new below-ground military installation.” Any work “strictly necessary” to protect the White House or the President and his staff could take place as well. Judge Leon held that the president is the “steward” of the White House and not the “owner,” and that Trump had no statutory authority to proceed, absent authorization from Congress.

On April 17, 2026, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia stayed the district court’s injunction, permitting work to resume, while it considered the matter.

On August 7, 2026, the Court of Appeals ruled that the district court’s injunction would remain in place. Construction was stopped again on the above-ground part of the project.

The government ran lickety-split to the Supreme Court for a stay of the district court’s injunction, so it could get back to work on the ballroom. It’s important to understand the posture here: This is not a case that has been briefed and orally argued on the merits. It’s a shadow docket ruling on whether an injunction should be in place to keep the government from building Trump’s ballroom while the litigation moves forward.

The opinion we read tonight is not a decision on the substance of the matter; the Court isn’t considering whether what Trump did violates the law. This is just about whether he can keep doing it while the Court considers the matter. As the majority wrote in their opinion tonight, they are still waiting on “a forthcoming petition for a writ of certiorari [from the government] and any further proceedings in this Court.”

The majority opinion is per curiam—Latin for by the court—which means it’s unsigned by any one justice. They “grant the requested stay” of the district court’s injunction, which means work can proceed on the ballroom while the case moves forward. The Court uses the now-familiar formula for deciding whether to grant an injunction, finding that “The government has established that it is likely to succeed on the merits of a significant legal question, that it would likely suffer irreparable harm without a stay, and that the balance of equities tips in its favor.”

Why is the Court talking about the government succeeding, when I’ve just told you this isn’t a decision about the legality of what Trump is doing? It’s because the Court is considering the government’s chance of success on a threshold argument—whether the plaintiffs have standing to bring the case. We had an extensive conversation about standing when Trump brought Fight Club to the White House, so we understand that it’s an important legal doctrine. If you don’t have it, you can’t sue.

Here, one would expect the Court to preserve the status quo while litigation proceeds to determine whether it existed, but that is not the case, and permitting construction to continue essentially prejudges the outcome of the case because what is the Court going to do? Order it all torn down in three years when the case is over if Trump loses?

The Court concludes with this rationalization: “Today, we do not pass upon the legality of the government’s East Wing project. We conclude only that, based on the submissions before us, the government is likely to prevail in showing that the Trust lacks Article III standing to challenge the project in federal court and that the remaining stay factors favor relief.” The stay will remain in place until the Court either denies certiorari or, if it grants it and hears the case, until it hands down judgment. Sounds like we’re going to have a ballroom.

But it’s the Court’s analysis of irreparable injury that feels most disingenuous. The Court accepts at face value most of the government’s arguments that it will be irreparably injured if it can’t build Trump’s gilt ballroom. They do that even though Judge Leon didn’t stop work on the supposed national security facilities beneath the ballroom. The list of claims the per curiam accepts includes: “every day during which construction is delayed impairs the Secret Service’s ‘protective operations,’ … the contemplated ballroom would enhance security for Presidents and their visitors who in the past have had to meet in soft tents or offsite when gathering in large numbers, … a prolonged construction period increases the risk of foreign actors ‘gathering intelligence on’ the project.” [Ed note: I thought they could just go to Mar-a-Lago dinners to do that?] The Court makes light of the plaintiffs’ concerns about the damage to a historic site and the ecological impact. When it balances the equities, it finds they are with Donald Trump based on these rather transparent grounds.

The dissent starts with the proposition that what Trump is doing is “likely unlawful.”

They explain that conclusion like this: “Congress has explicitly prohibited the construction of any ‘building or structure … on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.” They continue, “Congress has not passed any law resembling ‘express authority’ for the Executive’s construction.”

The dissent also addresses the standing issue, explaining that “To have standing to sue as the representative of its members, an organization such as the Trust must show, among other things, that one of its members would have standing to sue in her own right. The [National] Trust argued one of its members suffered ‘aesthetic injury’ from the ballroom’s construction. The dissent correctly states that ‘To serve as the basis for her standing … aesthetic injury must be ‘concrete’ and ‘particularized’ … ‘real, and not abstract.’” The dissenting Justices conclude that “Given the distinctive nature of the White House and Hoagland’s [the individual member’s] focused and substantiated interest in viewing it in its traditional form, her aesthetic injury from the construction of the ballroom is concrete and particularized.” They find that there is standing.

The majority seems to act like this is just an ordinary case, not one about a president tearing down the East Wing of the White House. The majority seems to have forgotten that it’s the people’s house and that standing needs to match that moment. The notion that American citizens don’t have standing to challenge what Trump is doing to a property that is ours, not his, is ludicrous. No matter how much precedent the majority cites, they can’t erase the fundamental nature of why the Trump administration is being sued here. But the dissent gets it and they say what the majority should have said and what all Americans, regardless of party, should be saying about this:

“The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture. As President Theodore Roosevelt once remarked while thanking Congress for expressly appropriating funds for the construction of the East and West Wings: ‘The stately simplicity of [the White House’s] architecture is an expression of the character of the period in which it was built, and is in accord with the purposes it was designed to serve. It is a good thing to preserve such buildings as historic monuments which keep alive our sense of continuity with the Nation’s past.’”

If these plaintiffs don’t have standing to protect our country, who does? But while we may be getting a ballroom, there is also an election coming. It’s time for us to be the cavalry.

The Chief Justice concludes with this. For once, he’s writing for all of us:

“The White House is not just any building, and—when it comes to historic preservation…In failing to appreciate as much, the Court misconceives the plaintiff’s injury, allowing the Executive’s likely infringement of the Legislature’s power of the purse and authority to regulate federal property in the District of Columbia to continue. Today’s decision is no victory for the separation of powers. Winston Churchill once remarked that “[w]e shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” … All the more reason to ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”

Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse and sticking with me through another complex legal issue. We cannot look away. Our job is to understand what is happening, to make sure the people around us understand it too, and to remember where the ultimate authority in our democracy lies. Donald Trump may have gotten away with this today, but he does not get the last word. We do. We will exercise that authority when we vote.

It’s not his house.   

Special Report: Last Shred of American Dignity?

This is an image President Trump posted on portraying himself as celebrating the destruction of Iran's Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Aug. 30, 2026 -- a claim he reinforced with a statement shown below but refuted by other sources. A commentary on the display is provided below by Jeff Tiedrich.

"Loyal and patriotic citizens, please stand by for a message of the utmost importance from the President of the United States, Supreme Ruler of the Western Hemisphere, Lord-Emperor of the Sky Above and All the Planets, Conqueror Of Every War, God’s Own Avatar on Earth, Grand Renamer of Water.....

Fact check: Kharg Island is, in fact, not being blown to smithereens. This ten-second video is the work of some six-fingered plagiarism robot. The only thing being blown to smithereens right now is the last shred of America’s dignity, as the world laughs — and then shakes its head sadly — at our Demented Boy King.

-- From Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Aug. 31, 2026.

 More On U.S. Governance

President Trump Makes an Announcement on Healthcare Affordability, Aug. 31, 2026. 

Hope for America, Opinion: The president keeps selling us lies, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Sept. 1, 2026. At 3:05 this afternoon, the White House press corps was quickly ushered into the Oval Office, where the President of the United States was already seated at his desk with toy airplanes and helicopters carefully placed around him.

With more than a dozen men and women in dark suits packed in behind him, Donald Trump spoke for exactly 14 minutes before inviting others to address the press. Within seconds of finishing his remarks, the President had already started to fall asleep. He struggled to keep his eyes open nearly the entire time, occasionally snapping them back open, only to close them once again. Near the end of the event, Trump fully woke up just in time to answer questions, including one people around the world wanted answered, especially after an AI-generated video he posted the night before appeared to show mass-destruction weapons being used against Iran.

A reporter asked the President, “Have you ruled out using a nuclear weapon against Iran?”

“Well, I would never say that, but, uh, the answer is yes,” Trump snapped back. “What a stupid question that is, actually.”

Beyond the absurdity of what we were watching was that this was supposed to be a major White House announcement about lowering prescription drug prices for millions of Americans. Instead, the President of the United States sat behind his desk, struggling to stay awake, before snapping at a reporter for asking whether he would use a nuclear weapon against Iran.

The tragedy of this moment is that if everything Trump said today is true, parts of it could genuinely help Americans, especially when it comes to the cost of healthcare. Trump claimed that 26 pharmaceutical companies had agreed to offer their drugs to state Medicaid programs at most-favored-nation prices, calling it the largest reduction in drug costs “in the history of medicine.” He said it would save Americans more than $600 billion, and he insisted nobody else could have done it. He claimed it was so big that the media would refuse to cover it, and that it was so big, “It’s not even believable.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took over the microphone soon after, and immediately began the flattery. “This could not have happened under any other president except for this one,” Kennedy said, while the president was nodding off in front of the press and their cameras. Howard Lutnick followed, telling the sleeping president, “It’s all thanks to you, because nobody thought that this was possible.” The Daily Beast reports this was at least the 20th time Trump has been caught falling asleep during a public event. The White House has previously insisted he was simply “blinking.”

But the most concerning part of the whole event was when Dr. Oz cut to the heart of everything they are doing right now when it comes to our health when he said, “If we could just get the average American to feel so healthy, so with it, so vibrant, that they want to work just one extra year, that’s worth a trillion dollars to our GDP every year.”

That was the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the man responsible for the healthcare of tens of millions of Americans, telling the American people, while the president slept beside him, that the real purpose of lowering drug costs is to keep them working longer. Not to ease suffering or improve lives, but to squeeze one more year of labor out of every working American so the GDP number goes up, and so there is more money for Trump and his enablers to take from our government. And once again, nobody in that room even flinched when he said this.

Because that is the philosophy underneath everything this administration is doing to our health. It explains the attacks on vaccines, the dismantling of public health agencies, the weakening of food safety protections, and the endless amount of disinformation about the very medicines they now claim they want to make more affordable. Every one of those decisions pushes us in the same direction: toward a sicker, more vulnerable country.

When the consequences of all they are doing arrive, more people will become chronically ill. More families will be crushed by medical debt. More Americans will become too sick to work. They won’t see that as a moral or a policy failure. They will see it as an economic problem with only one clear solution. Something too horrific to even say out loud.

That was the real message behind Dr. Oz’s comments. Health was never the goal; productivity was. People aren’t being valued because they’re human beings deserving of dignity and care. They are being valued because they contribute to the GDP.

Once a government starts measuring human worth by economic output, we’ve crossed into something far darker than healthcare policy. We’ve crossed into the belief that some lives are simply worth investing in more than others. History shows us where that kind of thinking leads: eugenics.

Even if we were to take Trump at his word and ignore everything else this administration is doing to our health, the numbers still don’t add up. That was true even on TrumpRx, the website he proudly called “the hottest thing there is.” Reporting earlier this year found that the site has not delivered what it promises. In some cases, medications listed on TrumpRx cost roughly double what the same drugs sell for in comparable countries. The site does not offer the lowest prices in the world. It offers the illusion that it does. That is what we are watching.

The illusion doesn’t stop with healthcare. It has become the governing philosophy of this entire administration and all of its enablers, including the Supreme Court. Because today, in a five-to-four ruling, the Court allowed Trump to continue building that ballroom. Construction is roughly 65 percent complete, with 250 people working 20 hours a day, seven days a week. It has also ballooned in cost. What started as a $200 million project reportedly now is expected to cost at least $600 million, with $352 million in taxpayer money quietly redirected from the “One Big Beautiful Bill” earlier this summer, despite Trump’s claim of “zero taxpayer funding.”

The five conservative justices sided with the Trump Regime. That is Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, all three Trump appointees, who were joined by Alito and Thomas. They ruled that the National Trust for Historic Preservation likely lacks standing to sue. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the three liberal justices, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, and wrote the dissent stating that the construction is “likely unlawful.” He wrote, “The White House is not just any building.”

Those are strong words coming from Roberts, but we have seen this before. Roberts dissents when the outcome is already decided. He dissents when it costs the institution nothing and buys it something it has not earned: the appearance of independence. It is the same move we have watched senators like Susan Collins make for years. Vote no when the votes are already there. Express concern after the damage is done. Preserve the image of accountability without ever producing the real thing. Maybe Roberts felt strongly about this case. We do not know. But when it truly counts, on the cases that determine whether this president can consolidate unchecked authority, the Chief Justice has not been the firewall we needed him to be. His dissent today changed nothing. The ballroom is still being built.

What we see day after day is a pattern, and it is increasing in strength and number. But this pattern is not new. And it is not uniquely American. Authoritarian regimes have always understood that visible, tangible benefits buy silence. In Nazi Germany, the Kraft durch Freude program, Strength Through Joy, gave loyal workers subsidized vacations, resort stays, and even cruises on ocean liners. The Winterhilfswerk relief drives made sure families had food in winter. These were real benefits, and they were things that actually impacted people’s lives. That was the whole point. They had to feel like generosity so that the people receiving them would not look too closely at what was being taken from them. A fed population does not resist. A comfortable population does not ask questions. A population that believes the government is looking out for them does not notice when the same government is building the machinery to strip them of everything else.

Trump’s version follows the same logic. Drug pricing deals timed for the midterms. A healthcare website with his name stamped on it. A ballroom made of gold rising from the rubble of the East Wing. These are crumbs designed to keep people fed while loaves are being stolen. They are stealing from public health and food safety programs. They are stealing from the institutions that were built to protect the very people who are being told they no longer need protecting.

But something is shifting, and I think many of us can feel it. More people are talking about what is happening now than they were even a few months ago. Not just those of us who have been sounding the alarm from the beginning, but people who stayed quiet. People who thought it would never reach them. People who believed the spectacle because it hadn’t yet touched their own lives.

That only lasts for so long. Eventually, reality catches up. And when the gap between the story a government tells and the life people are actually living becomes too wide to ignore, something changes. The illusion starts to crack. People stop applauding the performance and start asking questions. That’s when the ground begins to shift.

The next few months are going to be hard. He is going to pull out every stop. Every manufactured win, as many staged announcements as he can manage to sit through, every gold-plated distraction will be aimed at one thing: surviving November. It is going to feel like a fight for our country and our lives, because it is. And we know what is at stake. We know that even if we take back one or both chambers of Congress in what should still be free and fair elections, the fight does not end on election night. We have already watched Mike Johnson play games with seating duly elected members. There will be challenges and even delays. There will be battles we cannot yet see coming. But those are fights for another day.

Right now, we have to stay focused on November. We have to keep calling out the corruption, cover-up, and distraction, every single day. That means not shying away from the conversations that make people uncomfortable. We are not going into those conversations trying to convert anyone. We are going into them to open eyes. To share what we see. To shine a light and let people come to their own conclusions. People are ready to make this connection. They are sick of living this way. They want change.  

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: The Plot to Steal Venezuela’s Oil, Paul Krugman, right, Sept. 1, 2026. A scam that is both vile and deeply stupid.

The United States has an ugly reputation in Latin America -- a reputation that, I’m sorry to say, is mostly well deserved. Our government has a long track record of supporting dictators, assisting in the overthrow of democratic governments, and sometimes even sending in the Marines, often on behalf of American corporations trying to pillage other nations’ natural resources.

Excluding the Trump II presidency, we have, I think, behaved better in the recent past. And this was largely due to the role of enlightened self-interest.

The fact is that old-fashioned, extractive imperialism doesn’t pay. In fact, it hasn’t paid for well over a century. In the modern world nations grow rich through innovation and productivity, not conquest. In 1909 Norman Angell’s book The Great Illusion argued that even victorious wars cost far more than they can possibly yield in tribute, documenting his case with what was already extensive historical evidence. His argument has even more force now.

Let me give you a recent historical example. Portugal was the last European nation to maintain a large overseas empire. As late as 1973 Lisbon still ruled vast African territories — some of them rich in natural resources — with many times the home country’s population. It was also the poorest nation in Western Europe, its resources drained by the endless wars it fought in an attempt to keep its colonies subjugated.

Finally, in 1974, junior officers in the Portuguese military, fed up with the fighting and dying, rose up in the Carnation Revolution and overthrew the fascist government. A newly democratic Portugal quickly abandoned its empire, eventually joining the European Union — and while it’s still poorer than some of its peers, it is far closer than before to the standard of living in, say, France.

In short, at this point only someone deeply ignorant of both the realities of modern economies and of the lessons of history can believe that there are big payoffs to seizing other nations’ natural resources. In other words:

For those who need a refresher, in January U.S. forces raided Venezuela and kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, the nation’s brutal, corrupt dictator. Maduro surely deserved his fate. But the Trump administration made no move to help Venezuela’s democratic opposition. Instead, it made a deal with former members of the Maduro cabal, effectively installing a new regime that may well be even more brutal and corrupt than its predecessor. (There’s widespread suspicion that the kidnapping of Maduro was in part an inside job, engineered by his fellow cabalistas.)

In return, Trump got an agreement — details are scarce — that apparently will allow U.S. oil companies to extract and sell large quantities of Venezuelan oil but only if they put tens of billions of dollars into investments in Venezuela’s decrepit oil infrastructure.

So the Venezuela venture had nothing to do with democracy or freedom. It seems safe to say that it had nothing to do with crime or terrorism, which were the other excuses the administration offered. What happened in Venezuela was simply an old-fashioned, 19th-century-style resource grab, a sort of Caribbean version of the Belgian Congo.

In one stroke, Trump has just validated everything the Latin American left has ever said about U.S. imperialism. And we’ll be paying for that, diplomatically and strategically, for decades to come.

Now, it’s highly unlikely that this deal will hold. By all accounts, just about every faction in Venezuelan politics except the current ruling clique hates the deal. Since it will take years, maybe even decades, to realize the putative benefits of oil-company investments in Venezuela, how likely is it that whoever is running that country in the future will want to honor Trump’s terms? What are the odds that Venezuela will eventually expropriate U.S. oil-company investments? Or do we imagine a future in which the U.S. military maintains a permanent occupation of Venezuela, using force to prop up a puppet government the nation’s citizens hate?

Even if the deal holds, oil experts are extremely doubtful that Venezuela can significantly increase its oil production soon, if ever. It would take years to rebuild the oil infrastructure even if corporations are willing to sink in the necessary billions of dollars. There are also issues with the quality of Venezuelan oil. Venezuela appears on paper to have huge oil reserves. But much of these reserves are what I called a “black, sticky fantasy,” created by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, when he reclassified oil in the Orinoco Basin that will be difficult if not impossible to recover as “proved” reserves.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Trump really does manage to seize 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil. That sounds like a big number. Is it?

Venezuelan oil currently sells for around $70 a barrel on world markets. But as I said, getting that oil out will require huge investments in infrastructure. Nor does Venezuela oil come gushing out when you drill a well: As one expert put it, “it comes out of the ground with the consistency of cold peanut butter.”

So the profit margin on Venezuelan oil will be at most a small fraction of its market price. Surely $20 a barrel would be a highly generous estimate. So let’s go with that, in which case Trump’s deal might be worth $20*65 billion barrels = $1.3 trillion, a sum extracted over many years.

How big a deal would that be for the United States? Since this would be a many-year process if it happens at all, you want to compare it with U.S. wealth, not GDP (which is only the value created in a single year.) And total U.S. wealth is about $167 trillion.

So the chart at the top of this post shows how Trump’s triumphant Venezuela deal stacks up for the U.S. economy. Even if we make the most favorable assumptions — above all the assumption that the Venezuelan regime, unlike the Trump administration, can be trusted to honor its promises — the value of this deal to the United States is, to a first approximation … nothing.

Oh, and what about Trump’s claim that this will “substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans”? Since any significant rise in Venezuelan production would take a long time, even crude oil prices won’t show any effects from this deal for years at best. And in any case the prices of gasoline and diesel — which are what people actually burn — have become increasingly disconnected from the price of crude.

So Trump’s Venezuela deal will do nothing for ordinary Americans, while solidifying our reputation for rapacious, short-sighted imperialism.

Thank you for wasting your attention on this matter. New York Times, House Clears Bill to Avert an Election-Season Shutdown, Catie Edmondson, Sept. 1, 2026. Lawmakers sent the legislation to President Trump in an overwhelming vote, reflecting bipartisan enthusiasm around punting a messy spending fight until after the midterms.

The House overwhelmingly passed a stopgap bill on Tuesday to avert a government shutdown at the end of the month, sending it to President Trump’s desk and punting a spending fight until after the midterm elections.

The vote was a lopsided 370 to 48, a reflection of the bipartisan enthusiasm for heading off any funding fight before November, when voters will decide which party will control Congress for the final two years of Mr. Trump’s term. It paved the way for lawmakers to quickly return to the campaign trail for the critical final weeks before the elections.

The legislation, the product of bipartisan negotiations in the Senate, would keep federal funding flowing at current levels through Dec. 11. It would also bar the Trump administration from transferring funds to the Border Patrol, a demand of Democrats who have refused to support spending to carry out the president’s immigration crackdown.

It also includes a one-month delay for a ban on intoxicating hemp products that is scheduled to go into effect in November, a provision inserted at Mr. Trump’s request that incited a mini revolt among Republicans in the Senate who opposed the measure.

“This clean short-term continuing resolution simply keeps the government open, protects the progress we’ve made and preserves the path to full-year appropriations,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee. “This will allow Congress time to get past the November elections and allow us time to assess and move forward with further appropriations measures in November and December.”

It passed over the opposition of right-wing Republicans who objected to the inclusion of the delay of the hemp ban and did not include additional funding for Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, a key demand of Democrats.

The stopgap bill “does NOT fund CBP and ICE, leaving these agencies at the mercy to be refunded under a radical progressive Democrat administration in a few years,” Representative Chip Roy of Texas wrote on social media, laying out his objections.

Bruised from a pair of shutdowns that have consumed much of the past two years, both Republicans and Democrats were eager to maintain the status quo and steer clear of a bigger spending fight — at least until December.

The first government shutdown was in October 2025, when Democrats sought unsuccessfully to use their leverage over federal spending to force the president to cut a deal on extending expiring health care subsidies.

Another came in February 2026, when Democrats refused to fund the Department of Homeland Security, shuttering the agency as they tried and failed to pressure Mr. Trump to agree to new restrictions on federal immigration agents after the killings of U.S. citizens amid his deportation campaign.

The legislation also includes language temporarily blocking the White House budget office from carrying out a proposed rule that would allow the administration to cancel grants to recipients that do not conform to Mr. Trump’s political views and enable his team to steer significant funding to causes and organizations aligned with him.

Democrats cited that measure, in part, in explaining their support for the legislation.

“This is an important first step, but more must be done to permanently block this policy before it is allowed to take effect,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. “Federal funding must be awarded as Congress intended.”

New York Times, Opinion: Our Democracy Is at Stake. Stop Waiting for a Savior, Skye Perryman (the president of Democracy Forward), Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). American democracy has been deteriorating with alarming velocity since President Trump’s return to the White House. Every day, it seems, there’s a new Watergate-level outrage. Nearly seven in 10 Americans are dissatisfied with how our democracy is working.

All too often, those who hold or have held positions of power still fail to acknowledge that long before the present crisis, our system wasn’t delivering meaningful opportunity and representation for all Americans. And too many of our leaders who yearn for now-discarded norms carry on without acknowledging that no single institution, on its own, can prevent democratic backsliding.

Many of the excesses of the Trump administration have been successfully challenged through our judicial system. My organization and others have leveraged the power of the courts to block destructive initiatives, from Mr. Trump’s proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund to threats against the First Amendment to draconian — racist, in some cases — immigration policies. Our legal system has at times buckled, but it hasn’t broken, so it can be tempting to think that the long list of judicial rulings secured against the administration, combined with a midterm election wave, will get us past the crisis. It’s understandable to anticipate — to hope — that coming out of the midterms and heading into the next presidential election cycle, a savior, something or someone, will emerge to usher in a return to democratic norms and show would-be autocrats the door.

Here’s the problem: Waiting for a savior has led many of us not to exercise the greatest power we have: our own.

Using the courts to rein in Mr. Trump’s authoritarian leanings remains essential, but it isn’t sufficient. If the midterms result in the shift of power many expect, it won’t be as easy for the president to trample the Constitution or run roughshod over Congress. But Americans should be clear that there is no cavalry coming. We don’t have the luxury of fantasizing that we are just one legal victory or perfectly poll-tested message away from turning the nation around. Such thinking unintentionally obscures the urgent need for all of us, especially those in relative positions of comfort, to roll up our sleeves, walk out our front doors and make ourselves part of the answer to this crisis.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.

Many of us confuse consuming political news, engaging on social media and participating in group chats with doing the things that we, as individuals, can do to help change our country’s trajectory. Instead of doomscrolling, we can organize our neighbors, work at local polling places or join community groups. We must not be satisfied with watching the decline of American democracy from our phones.

The philosopher Richard Rorty observed that left-leaning reform movements in the earlier part of the 20th century emphasized the agency that individuals have to create change. He explained that the social movements that led to checks on corporate power, workers’ rights, women’s rights and civil rights were powered by ordinary Americans who took direct action to bring about meaningful change.

By contrast, in later reform movements Dr. Rorty perceived a trend of spectatorship, in which progressives in elite and academic circles were often more interested in being observers who critiqued American society rather than matching those critiques with action. Nearly 30 years ago, he warned that if those who sought progress failed to push institutions to deliver for the working and middle classes, Americans would embrace a populist savior-strongman who would gain power, only to eviscerate our democracy.

In our retelling of American history, we too often mythologize our institutions and political leaders as if they were the ones that brought about social change and forced our nation to make way for all of us. We sometimes think of justice being “handed down” by the Supreme Court in landmark decisions like Brown v. Board of Education. Or that a virtue-minded, bipartisan Congress willed the Voting Rights Act into being, while glossing over the primary, underlying agent of change: the American people.

Nothing is handed down by political leaders without the people demanding it. We must do so again.

In Minnesota, earlier this year, it was ordinary people who took to the streets in freezing weather to try to protect their neighbors by resisting the violent overreach of immigration enforcement agents. Beginning last year, we saw No Kings protests that were among the largest peaceful mass mobilizations in our history. We’ve seen everyone from ministers to educators to clerical workers to stay-at-home parents take to the streets in defense of democracy. After the Supreme Court weakened a crucial component of the Voting Rights Act, people from across the nation went to Selma and Montgomery, Ala., marching an old march in a new time. Religious organizations from across the nation took the administration to court to ensure that communities can worship without fear of intimidating ICE tactics. When an administration policy threatened health care access for millions, local city officials, doctors and small businesses sued to try to protect access and keep premiums from going up. As Mr. Trump has pushed for partisan gerrymanders and a voter-suppression law like the SAVE America Act, we’ve seen strong voter turnout in races across the country.

We can learn from our fellow Americans who are meeting the moment. Instead of waiting for a knight-in-shining-armor political candidate, hoping he or she will do the hard work for us — or, worse, disengaging when a candidate or political movement disappoints us — we must continue to look to ourselves. Our democracy is in danger, but we can save it. We are the only ones who ever have.

World News, Global Human Rights, Disasters

New York Times, Wartime Presidents of Russia and Iran Rally With Chinese and Indian Leaders, Paul Sonne and David Pierson,.Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). The two-day summit of the 10-nation Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Kyrgyzstan shows the limits of U.S. economic warfare.

The presidents of Russia and Iran, facing increased domestic pressure from drawn-out wars, were set to rally with the leaders of China and India at a summit on Monday in Central Asia.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran headed to Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, for a two-day meeting of the 10-nation political and security grouping known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The forum will allow Russia and Iran to demonstrate alternative sources of support as they work to defy Western efforts to isolate them.

Though it once counted only Russia, China and four Central Asian nations as members, the grouping expanded in 2017 to include India and Pakistan and more recently to add Belarus and Iran. In the process, it has become a growing counterpoint to Western-led political and security groupings.

At the center of the proceedings is the most powerful leader in attendance, President Xi Jinping of China. No nation has been more critical to Russia and Iran in sustaining their economies and war efforts than China. Mr. Xi has undermined efforts by the United States and its allies to pressure Russia and Iran economically, employing Beijing’s vast geopolitical and economic clout as the world’s largest importer of crude oil and exporter of consumer goods.

The wars have helped increase China’s already rising power. Mr. Xi’s biggest rival, the United States, has been distracted by the war in Iran and has pulled out some of its military forces from Asia and Europe. Last month, Mr. Xi was able to brush off threats by President Trump that the United States would inflict an “economic D-Day” on countries that provided Tehran a lifeline.

This week’s summit is a reminder of the limits of U.S.-led economic warfare. Both Russia and Iran have managed to maintain critical alliances outside the West that have come in handy at different stages of their conflicts. The two nations have managed to handle domestic fallout from the wars for longer than some Western officials had expected.Sign up for Your Places: Global Update. All the latest news for any part of the world you select. Get it sent to your inbox.

The leaders in attendance have helped Mr. Putin continue his war against Ukraine, which is now in its fifth year.

New York Times, G20 Finance Officials Gather in U.S. as Iran War Grips Global Economy, Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley, Sept. 1, 2026 (print ed.). The meeting is expected to focus on the ongoing economic shock from the war in Iran, which has driven up oil prices globally.

Top economic policymakers from many of the world’s wealthiest nations begin two days of meetings on Monday in Asheville, N.C., at an incredibly challenging moment. Global inflation is high, growth is choked by war in the Middle East, and rising borrowing costs are straining government budgets.

But on the eve of the summit of finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 nations, those questions were clouded by a series of controversies around participation, including whether the Trump administration would let Russia attend while refusing to allow South Africa’s delegation to join.

Representatives from South Africa, a longtime member of the G20 and Africa’s largest economy, were not invited by the Treasury Department to Asheville. President Trump announced last year, after skipping a G20 summit hosted by South Africa, that he would exclude the country from this year’s meetings, citing a false narrative that white South Africans were being indiscriminately killed and their land was being seized.

Administration officials also invited a group of American business executives to meet with the government leaders, from industries including banking and cryptocurrency, in an effort to create networking opportunities between government officials with the private sector. They rebuffed requests to also include executives from other G20 countries. The moves have unsettled some attendees at the gathering.

The summit comes at a pivotal moment, with the International Monetary Fund projecting that global growth will slow this year and inflation will rise. The decision by the United States to attack Iran in February disrupted the flow of oil and pushed energy prices higher, darkening the outlook for a world economy that has been battered by wars and a pandemic in recent years.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia, South Africa and North Carolina? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

Huddled in a North Carolina mountain resort, officials are expected to discuss ways to reinforce global supply chains for commodities such as critical minerals, opportunities to increase international investment, and strategies for reducing or restructuring debt. The conversations are taking place as the U.S. gross national debt just topped $40 trillion, creating anxiety among bondholders and raising fears about higher borrowing costs.

“Mounting fiscal pressures, as evidenced by rising bond yields, and a stalled disinflation process — they are sources of worries both for markets and for policymakers,” Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the I.M.F., told reporters ahead of the meetings.

Those concerns have been especially evident in the United States. In recent weeks, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent initiated surprising interventions in global currency markets and in the U.S. bond market in an effort to contain rising borrowing costs. Those measures have so far been only modestly effective, and they have drawn pushback from the European Union, which has seen its own currency suffer as a result of some of Mr. Bessent’s machinations.

Global leaders also remain wary of the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, which has driven up energy costs worldwide, disrupted supply chains and dragged on growth.

“Everyone must contribute to reducing the massive global uncertainties” affecting growth, Lars Klingbeil, the German vice chancellor and finance minister, told reporters before flying to the summit. “That is why we are pushing for an end to the war with Iran and open shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz.”

Unifying the G20 has been a challenge for the administration, as countries continue to cope with uncertainty surrounding President Trump’s trade policies and the steep tariffs that he has imposed on imports, along with fallout from the war.

American officials have asked allies to join their “Operation Economic Outcast” initiative, which aims to strangle the Iranian economy and resolve the conflict through economic sanctions. Mr. Bessent last week warned that countries that do not sever economic ties with Iran would also face U.S. sanctions.

How Flagrant Tax Cheating Hurts The United States

Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: From Kakistocracy to CheatistocracyInbo, Paul Krugman, right, Aug. 31, 2026. Rewarding the most dishonest.

At this point, it’s almost a commonplace to say that under DonaldTrump, America has become a kakistocracy, ruled by the worst. But I don’tthink it’s fully appreciated the extent to which we’ve also become a cheatistocracy, ruled by the most corrupt.

Today’s commentary is a follow-upon yesterday’s primer, which was about the role of tax evasion both in leading to or contributing to our downward spiral into oligarchy and also as a surprisingly large factor in the budget deficit and therefore in America’s debt problem.

Before I get to tax evasion, let me say something about where I’ve been going in my kind of intellectual journey into understanding oligarchy. As an economist, normally my instinct is to think about the invisible hand, to think about market forces, about technology as driving what happens to society. And even now there’s at least some extent to which the rise of kind of garden variety inequality, the rise of the top quintile at the expense of the middle, may be partially explained by the bias of technology towards higher formal skills, although that may be ending now with AI and all of that.

But as I began to focus on oligarchy, on the very small number of people who have enormous wealth, enormous income, but the wealth is an even bigger factor — there are a really handful of people who have come to play such a large role.In our society, in our economy, and above all, of course, in our politics— I was forced more or less by the numbers to say this is not about the invisible hand. This is not about market forces. It isn’t even mostly about technology.

Yeah, some technologies create winner-take-all markets that make people int he right place extremely wealthy. But the really big factor that’s driven us from the relatively equal society that we were 50 years ago — not obviously anywhere close to truly equal, but nothing like the dominance of a tiny elite that we have now — the really important factor is policy and above all tax policy.

We basically stopped imposing progressive taxes that limited the growth of enormous fortunes. And sure enough, as the tax barriers to accumulation of excessive wealth went away, excessive wealth began to concentrate.

This is, in many ways, the fundamental story. We got rid of, we ended the Gilded Age with its dominance by, as FDR said, the power of organized money, largely by taxing a lot of that organized money away. And we got back to something which in many ways is worse than the Gilded Age by taking away those taxes and allowing vast fortunes to snowball and buy themselves enormous political power, which allows them to snowball even further.

One factor in all of that is the rise of simply not paying taxes that you’re supposed to pay. A lot of it is reductionist statutory tax rates. We tax corporate profits at a far lower rate than we did In the 1950s, we tax top incomes at a much, much lower rate than we did in the 1950s. But what’s also true is that we simply allow people to get away with not paying taxes to an enormous extent, to almost surely a much greater extent than used to be the case.

The numbers are big, and in the primer I go through the tax gap. The money owed but not in fact collected is certainly north of $600 billion a year. It is something like 40% or more of the U.S. federal budget deficit. It is a major contributing factor to the accumulation of vast fortunes.

What is striking is that far from really making an effort to rein in that tax gap, for the most part politically our system has moved to let it rip, has basically tried to make America safe for tax cheats.

This is something that overwhelmingly benefits people with high incomes and large wealth because people with really big incomes, people who are extremely wealthy, for one thing, they just have much more complicated income. It’s much, much harder to track down and audit someone who has multiple businesses, some of which are dummy businesses, some of which may be real, but nonetheless are conduits through which money can move. And only the very wealthy can maintain offshore accounts that enable them to hide income and so on.

So tax evasion is something that overwhelmingly benefits people with very high wealth and income. Not all! Not every billionaire is a tax cheat. There are levels and levels. There are some people who just feel that’s not something I want to do.People who feel that it would be wrong. Morality does exist. There are people who feel that their personal losses, should they be caught out cheating heavily on their taxes, would be large. So they care about their reputation.

And then there are those who don’t.

What’s astonishing is that we have, especially since 2010, especially since the hard right Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, we have moved to largely eviscerate any attempt to control that type of tax evasion.

The numbers are really startling, and the IRS has actually put out very useful information. If you are someone with a very high income, the IRS stops counting pretty much at a million or more a year, but presumably it’s even more true further up the scale.

In 2011, before the right-wing Congress was able to do its work, more than 7% of tax returns in that range were audited, which is not unreasonable because there’s obviously a lot of possibility for malfeasance there. It’s not saying that 7% of people with incomes of morethan a million were sent to jail. Obviously nothing like that, but we had widespread auditing, which among other things, encouraged people not to cheat on their taxes.

By 2019, just eight years later, that number had gone from 7.2% to 0.7%. So almost nobody with high incomes was being audited for possible tax fraud.

Now, why was that happening? There had been savage cuts in the funding to the IRS. Very large, at least 25 to 30% adjusting for inflation, something like a 40% reduction in the staff available for enforcement. And as it turns out, auditing the taxes of a very high income person is a lot more expensive than auditing a regular person. An ordinary blue collar worker, middle income, white collar worker who might be failing to declare some income, in many cases, it’s really very hard for them to evade taxes at all. And if they do, it tends to be relatively straightforward to pick apart what’s going on. And so audits of ordinary people are cheap.

Audits of millionaires and billionaires, sounding like Bernie Sanders, are very expensive. And so the IRS, with limited resources and wanting to show that it was in fact auditing people, largely gave up on auditing the extremely wealthy.

And this is a big number. The amount that we lose to tax evasion is something like the entire budget of Medicaid. It’s something like six times what we spend on food stamps. It’s something like 15 times the amount of money that Elon Musk saved by destroying USAID and killing millions of people in Africa. And yet it has been allowed to flourish.

Notice, by the way, that this is all pre-Trump.

Now, under Biden, there was a push to rectify the situation, a push to restore enforcement, increase the resources of the IRS, and increase enforcement actions in an attempt to tilt the agency’s priorities back towards where it should be, which is going after the big money. And that was just getting started. It takes a while to ramp those things up.

And you know what happened. Of course, Trump’s one big beautiful bill did savage cuts in IRS resources for enforcement.Savage cuts in personnel. We’re now back to a situation where things are worse than they were before Biden started to try to fix it. So this is going to continue.

What I find remarkable and interesting — I mean, I wouldn’t say that I’m baffled, but I think it is something that takes some analysis is why exactly.

I mean, it’s one thing to favor the interests of the uber wealthy. Okay, we know that’s what the modern Republican Party is, whatever it may claim to be.

But it’s another thing to systematically favor the least honest. What this policy does is It basically says if you are an honest billionaire — I’m afraid to name somebody because who knows what may come out in some future set of files — but if you are an honest billionaire, you are disadvantaged by the fact that dishonest billionaires are able to get away with cheating on their taxes. You should be opposed to that, but obviously the party that currently controls Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court, that party actually prefers dishonest men of great wealth. It’s actually a positive preference for cheaters.

I can speculate very loosely. It’s often been observed of Trump, and it’s probably true of some others in his camp, that at a fundamental level, he does not believe that anyone has good motives. And that someone who appears to actually be a decent person who plays by the rules is, by that very token, someone Trump distrusts.

He kind of assumes that they must be even worse than he is. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be faking having good intentions, which people like him never have. Maybe there is something going on, something deeper. But in any case, wehave developed a system where not only do we enormously favor the interests of people who already have vast amounts of money, but we literally favor malefactors of great wealth, to use Teddy Roosevelt’s phrase. We literally favor people who not only have enormous amounts of money, but cheat, who don’t pay their taxes, who break the rules.

This is not America. The general public still very much believes that people should pay the taxes they owe. We are not a country that valorizes, that rewards, or that honors people who cheat.But we have become a society that in practice does reward people who cheat.

What does that do to our social cohesion? What does that do to our sense of ourselves as a nation? I think in some ways the moral decay is worse than the numbers, which is saying a lot.

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

Harmeet Dhillon has waged President Trump’s war on the left through a relentless pressure campaign against 100 universities over their diversity and antisemitism policies.

New York Times, From Top Civil Rights Post, She Spars With the Left, and Her Colleagues, Glenn Thrush and Michael C. Bender, Aug. 31, 2026. Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights unit, has extracted flashy agreements and personnel moves from big universities and sought to force states to turn over confidential voter data.

Harmeet Dhillon offered a four-word summation of her four-decade campaign to tear down the ramparts of liberal academia during a private gathering last September.

“I’m going after Harvard,” said Ms. Dhillon, the head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, according to audio of the event in New Haven, Conn., obtained by The New York Times.

Ms. Dhillon, 57, has repurposed a unit created to address Jim Crow injustices into a battering ram against the elite left. In part, it represents the culmination of a mission she began as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College — to impose conservative change on liberal institutions she still views as the entrenched establishment.

Ms. Dhillon, a gladiatorial Republican lawyer from California who has emerged as a Washington power player, has gone after more than 100 schools, extracting agreements, cash and personnel moves from big institutions over their diversity and antisemitism policies. In one instance, her pressure prompted the president of one high-profile school, the University of Virginia, to take early retirement.

“Harvard wished they never heard her name,” Mr. Trump said about Ms. Dhillon last year.

Harvard is apparently not alone. Ms. Dhillon has antagonized enemies and colleagues alike with a confrontational approach and a habit of beefing with co-workers that might hurt her chances of moving higher in the department, current and former department officials said.

Yet the issue that could most define Ms. Dhillon’s tenure looms just over the horizon: the division’s role in monitoring the administration of the midterm elections, as Republicans face the prospect of losing the House and perhaps the Senate and Mr. Trump reprises his falsehoods about election fraud to undermine unfavorable results.ImageMs. Dhillon, then on the Republican National Committee, greeting President Trump in September 2019 at Moffett Federal Airfield in California.Ms. Dhillon greeting President Trump in 2019. As leader of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Ms. Dhillon has drastically reoriented its focus to align with the Trump agenda.Credit...Evan Vucci/Associated Press

Ms. Dhillon’s much-publicized deployment of election monitors during the 2026 primary season has alarmed some local Republicans. She has also filed a salvo of federal lawsuits to demand confidential Social Security and drivers’ license data from states.

Democratic officials have resisted, combating what they say is a dangerous intrusion into their right to conduct elections.

She has lost every single one. Her record is now 0 and 23.

Ms. Dhillon, in a statement, denied that she had been impelled by any motive other than fairly enforcing federal law, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans discrimination by any recipient of federal funding. Her actions on higher education, she wrote, have been based on an evenhanded examination of admissions data, “not personal animus toward elite universities.”

Since taking over in April 2025, she has scrapped environmental justice settlements and shredded deals over policing reform reached with Minneapolis and Louisville after the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings.

Ms. Dhillon has also stepped back from the department’s recent role of investigating civil rights violations by law enforcement, declining to scrutinize the killings of two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by homeland security officers in Minneapolis in January.

Not everything has changed in the division. Ms. Dhillon has moved ahead with more than 40 investigations of misconduct by law enforcement officials, including the recent prosecution of a former U.S. marshal for brutalizing an inmate. She has pursued cases involving sexual harassment by landlords and discrimination against non-Christians, and recently doubled down on a Biden-era suit over Louisiana’s illegal detention of inmates.

But her overall approach — articulated in an April 2025 memo ordering officials to pursue “the priorities of the president” — prompted a mass exodus of career workers that cut staffing levels by half or more and that has only recently stabilized, according to former officials.

“Harmeet is not just ignoring the reasons the division was created and the laws it is tasked with enforcing, she is using its enforcement authority against the very people whose rights the division was created to protect,” said Vanita Gupta, a former head of the division who served as associate attorney general during the Biden administration.

“She has corrupted its mission,” Ms. Gupta added.

Ms. Dhillon has articulated a different one: delivering a counterstroke against woke.

In an interview last fall, she asked herself a rhetorical question: What is the defining civil rights issue of our time? 

 

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Springfield ‘Under Seige,’ Jim Swift, right, Aug. 31, 2026. Throughout the Trump presidency, I’ve been going to Springfield, Ohio, to keep tabs on the Haitian community there. They and the city writ large are a symbol of the costs of this administration’s deportation policy. I went back to Springfield this past week as deportation efforts have ramped up. It was shocking to see what’s happening there. But it was inspiring, too. There really couldn’t be a better example of the Trump administration doing cruel things to good people just for the sake of cruelty—and the instinct of people who find this abhorrent to rally in support of the victims. 

When I was last inside Greater Grace Temple in late July, faith leaders from Springfield’s G92 coalition—a faith-based association dedicated to protecting the city’s Haitian community—were praying that ICE, which had not yet established a presence in the city, would treat its Haitian residents humanely.

Perhaps God heard their prayers. But ICE certainly did not. In the month between that visit and my return last week, the agency has arrested thirty-four Haitians, including two pastors. Organizers believe one has already been deported. Pastor Carl Ruby of Central Christian Church describes the city as “under siege.”

The first time I visited Greater Grace, the church was mostly empty, save the reporters and clergy. On Friday, the entire church was humming with activity. While other churches and businesses around town were emptying because people were afraid to leave home, Greater Grace had become an activism factory, the headquarters of a five-day regional mobilization, with each room serving a different purpose.

In one room, volunteers used Google Translate to write letters in Haitian Creole to detainees and packed boxes of food for local families. The pantry and donation space doubled as a check-in area for volunteers.

Another room served as an impromptu phone bank. Volunteers raised money for the Haitian Support Center and called Gov. Mike DeWine and Sens. Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno (all Republicans), urging them to act. Elsewhere, organizers prepared transportation and assignments for volunteers. A group behind me planned Sunday’s finale, “Unshackle Springfield,” a potluck and public faith witness at City Hall Plaza.

All the volunteers were sustained by food catered by Keket Bongou Caribbean Restaurant. Ruby said it had taken in only $24 the previous week as Haitian customers stayed home. The folks at Greater Grace Temple, in addition to buying hundreds of dollars worth of food, also had a donation box replete with $20 bills.

One organizer said a volunteer from the other side of Cleveland had told her he got up at 4 a.m. to make the trip. Some are coming for multi-day trips to work and bear witness.

This is what Trump is doing to our towns and cities. In the name of cracking down on immigration, he has ripped our social fabric apart. And it is small acts of decent human beings—people who don’t want to live in a society in which the state terrorizes families, schools, and churches—that is keeping it together.

The media crowded into a small, stuffy prayer room at the side of the church. Ruby opened with a story: While this mobilization was being organized, he was in Canada helping a Haitian family he knew relocate there. Returning to Haiti was not an option. Before coming to America, their children had survived kidnapping attempts, and the family’s car had been shot at as they fled. Canada was available only because they had an immediate relative there.

Ruby has been working pretty much non-stop, and a small documentary crew now follows him during what will surely be a defining chapter of his life.

A few weeks earlier, Ruby had accompanied a parishioner to an appointment at the ICE office in Blue Ash, outside Cincinnati. As they walked inside, the man told Ruby what had happened to his brother in Haiti.

“He leaned over and said, ‘My brother was just kidnapped in Haiti,’” Ruby recalled.

“And I said, ‘What happened to him?’ And he said, ‘They burned him.’” Ruby initially misunderstood. “I said, ‘Is he okay?’” he continued.

“And he said, ‘No, they burned him alive.’” Ruby paused before adding: “That’s happening in Haiti.”

When ICE summons Springfield Haitians to Blue Ash, it presents them with a choice: deportation, or an ankle monitor.

The Haitians being fitted with monitors are not fugitives hiding from the government. They are showing up when the government tells them to.

“They are not hiding,” said Vilès Dorsainvil of the Haitian Support Center. “They know where they live. They know where they work.” If immigrants are summoned before a judge, he said, they appear. “You ask them to go for ICE checking, they do that. And they arrest them.”

Dorsainvil said seven Haitians had reported for ICE check-ins last Thursday. One was a woman who had given birth twenty days earlier and lost the baby. “She came to the office. She could not even walk,” he said. “But they put the shackle on her.”

She also described a man on North Limestone Street who had received notice of a court appearance in Dayton but was afraid even to leave his home to retrieve the letter from his mailbox. “Everything is still going on,” Dorsainvil said. “How do you want the person to go for his biometric if you know that they cannot go on the streets?”

“She came to the office. She could not even walk. But they put a shackle on her.”

At one point, Ruby turned toward Dorsainvil, holding up a yellow legal pad to hide his mouth like an NFL offensive coordinator with a play sheet. Dorsainvil is himself a TPS holder with a pending asylum case. By speaking publicly and helping others navigate ICE, he was putting himself at risk. Ruby was seemingly asking permission to speak about his friend in this way:

“Vilès is one of the bravest people I’ve ever seen,” Ruby said. He recalled sitting in a meeting with Dorsainvil and ICE officials who, according to Ruby, told him: “Even though you have asylum pending, we will pick you up, and we will put you in jail and leave you there.” Ruby appealed to the clergy surrounding them: “We need to protect this man.”(Jim Swift/The Bulwark)

For the black clergy gathered at Greater Grace Temple, the ankle monitors carried a historical meaning that could not be separated from their function. Rev. Adam Banks, a descendant of enslaved people, called them “technologically advanced ankle and wrist shackles that are still as heavy as they were for my ancestors.”

The devices, Banks argued, belong to a longer history of “anti-black containment,” restricting movement, separating families, and treating people “as problems to be patrolled instead of partners deserving protection.”

Denise Williams of the Springfield NAACP supplied the mobilization’s refrain: “Unshackle Springfield.”

“I’m scared. My skin is dark,” Williams said. She described Haitian families staying inside, turning off their lights, and closing their blinds. “They are not criminals,” she said. “What is the reason for shackles? Humiliation.”

Leaving Greater Grace Temple, I drove through the parts of Springfield where Haitians live, work, eat, and worship. At Keket Bongou Caribbean Restaurant, the door was closed. But taped to it was a handwritten sign for would-be customers in Haitian Creole: “Even if you see the door closed, we are open.” (PIC)

Here’s how you can help the City of Springfield and its Haitian Community:

Support the Haitian Community Help & Support Center, St. Vincent de Paul, and Second Harvest Food Bank.

 

 

The Federal Trade Commission and the states said Amazon misled brands and sellers into paying more for ads; the company is denying the accusation.

New York Times, F.T.C. and 22 States Claim in Lawsuit That Amazon Secretly Inflated Ad Prices, Karen Weise, Aug. 31, 2026. Regulators say the e-commerce giant forced more than a million advertisers to pay more than they should have. The company denies the claims.

The Federal Trade Commission and 22 states sued Amazon on Monday, claiming the e-commerce giant secretly made advertising more expensive on its website for more than a million companies.

In a lawsuit filed in a federal court in Seattle, Amazon’s hometown, the F.T.C. and the states said Amazon inflated the costs that brands and marketplace sellers had to pay to promote their products to consumers, including the prominent “Sponsored Product” ads that appear in search results on Amazon’s widely used website.

“Amazon has millions of advertising customers who were misled into paying significantly higher prices,” Andrew N. Ferguson, the chairman of the F.T.C., said in a statement. “These higher costs were largely passed on to American consumers.”

Amazon disputed the charges in a blog post. The company said the F.T.C.’s claim “fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate.” Amazon said its mechanisms led to more relevant ads, which created better value for brands and sellers, and that the lawsuit “complaint cites no evidence of consumer price increases.”

The case is one of several lawsuits the F.T.C. has filed against Amazon. In 2023, the agency and 17 states brought a wide-ranging antitrust case against the company, arguing it abused its monopoly in online shopping. That case, whose claims Amazon denies, is set for trial next year.

Last year, Amazon settled a narrower suit for $2.5 billion over claims it tricked customers into buying Prime memberships and making it hard to cancel when they wanted to leave the program. Amazon did not admit or deny wrongdoing in the settlement.

The 22 states involved in the suit are represented by both Republican and Democratic attorneys general, and include Washington, where Amazon has its headquarters. The suit was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.Advertising has become a crucial source of profit for Amazon, as it has grown into one of the largest ad platforms in the world. Its advertising business produced almost $20 billion in sales in the most recent quarter, up 26 percent from a year earlier, and is widely regarded by investors as the most lucrative part of its consumer business.

The new lawsuit centers on the complex workings of digital advertising. The F.T.C. and attorneys general argue that Amazon told advertisers that it was using a common way to solicit and select bids through what is called a “second price” auction. To prevent overbidding, it told advertisers, it charged only 1 cent more than the second-highest bid, they said.But in reality, the 181-page complaint claimed, Amazon had a hidden “soft reserve price,” meaning it created a higher minimum amount it would frequently charge for an ad. The complaint cites internal studies and tests where teams inside Amazon tested how far they could push the bidding system to produce additional ad sales.

Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said in a news conference that, by design, the advertisers had no way to know this was happening.

“Amazon has taken many steps to hide this scheme because, as employees have admitted internally, it knows it creates an ‘irrevocable damage to advertiser trust’ — words straight from an Amazon employee,” he said.

Amazon countered that the “soft reserve prices” change in real time to create a minimum that reflects the value of the real estate on its website, and that it never charged advertisers more than they had bid. It said any vague descriptions the F.T.C. may have cited were minor and fixed once they were flagged.

It also said its systems favored serving up ads that were relevant to customers rather than just the most expensive. That is better for both the customer and the advertiser, the company said.

Trump Administration

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New York Times, Justice Dept. Issues Grand Jury Subpoena to Comey Confidant, Alan Feuer, Aug. 31, 2026. The subpoena of Daniel C. Richman is the latest move in a persistent campaign to go after James B. Comey, one of President Trump’s most reviled political adversaries who has already been indicted twice.

Federal prosecutors have issued a grand jury subpoena demanding testimony from Daniel C. Richman, a close confidant of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director and one of President Trump’s most reviled political adversaries, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The subpoena, issued by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of Florida, appears to be connected to the so-called grand conspiracy case that has sought to implicate Mr. Comey and other federal officials who have investigated Mr. Trump in an overarching plot to deprive him of his rights. It was a small but significant escalation of the Florida case and the latest move in a persistent campaign to go after Mr. Comey in particular who has already been indicted twice in separate cases in Virginia and North Carolina.

It remained unclear what sort of testimony the prosecutors in Florida want from Mr. Richman, a law professor at Columbia University who once served as an adviser to Mr. Comey at the F.B.I. But he has found himself caught up in two previous investigations of his friend and former boss.

One of the inquiries — which ended without charges — sought to determine whether Mr. Comey had used Mr. Richman as a conduit to leak information to the news media about sensitive investigations conducted when he ran the F.B.I. The other resulted in an indictment last September accusing Mr. Comey of lying to Congress about some of the same matters covered in the leak investigation.

The Justice Department did not respond to an email seeking comment on the subpoena.

The inquiry in Florida is the third time Mr. Richman has been called to provide information about Mr. Comey. The investigation is being led by Joseph diGenova, a Trump loyalist who has convened a grand jury in the Federal District Court in Fort Pierce overseen by one of the president’s friendliest appointees to the bench, Judge Aileen M. Cannon. It has targeted other former officials who have triggered the president’s ire — chief among them, John O. Brennan, a onetime C.I.A. director.

The grand conspiracy case is arguably the most far-fetched of the Justice Department’s serial efforts to pursue Mr. Trump’s political opponents. Under Mr. diGenova’s leadership, prosecutors have tried for months to connect disparate inquiries into Mr. Trump — including the investigation into ties between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign and the later inquiry into his mishandling of classified documents — as a single, long-running scheme to damage his political prospects.

Mr. Comey first ran afoul of the president when he oversaw the early stages of the Russia investigation and was ultimately fired by Mr. Trump in May 2017. That move led to the appointment of a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who continued the inquiry but eventually determined that charges could not be brought against a sitting president.

When prosecutors in Virginia filed their first indictment against Mr. Comey, they relied heavily on a trove of text messages and emails between him and Mr. Richman. Those communications, they claimed, proved that Mr. Richman had served as an intermediary funneling information to journalists on behalf of Mr. Comey.

That first case was dismissed in its entirety in November after a federal judge determined that the inexperienced prosecutor ordered by Mr. Trump to bring the charges had been improperly appointed to her post. Mr. Richman quickly complicated the Justice Department’s efforts to bring a new indictment involving similar accusations by persuading a federal judge that investigators, in a glaring misstep, had improperly obtained his communications with Mr. Comey in the first place.

Five months after the initial charges were dismissed, the Justice Department brought a second indictment against Mr. Comey, accusing him of threatening to kill Mr. Trump by posting a photograph of seashells arranged on a beach in North Carolina spelling out a message reading, “86 47.”

Prosecutors claim that “86” is a mafia term meaning to kill someone and that “47” was a reference to Mr. Trump’s role as the nation’s 47th president. But lawyers for Mr. Comey have scoffed at the idea that the photo was a real threat against the president, adding that prosecutors have been unable to come up with any evidence that Mr. Comey meant to harm Mr. Trump.

Trump Team Obsessions, Oppressions, Corruption 

This is an image President Trump posted on portraying himself as celebrating (using the dance moves of a favorite song, "YMCA," by the disco group "The Village People") the destruction of Iran's Karg Island in the Strait of Hormuz on Aug. 30, 2026 -- a claim he reinforced with a statement shown below but which was refuted by other sources.

Hope for America, Opinion: Trump will stop at nothing to silence the truth, Heather Delaney Reese, right, Aug. 30, 2026. At 9:36 this morning, the President of the United States was briefly seen leaving the White House as his vehicle raced by, en route to an undisclosed location. Thirty-four minutes later, at 10:10 a.m., the mystery was solved as his motorcade pulled into Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. The next time he was seen by the press pool wasn’t until 3:20 that afternoon, as he made his way back to the White House.

Late that evening, after the press were released and most of the White House staff had gone home for the night, Donald Trump was still awake, posting on social media. Before finally calling it a night, he shared three final posts. None of them were something any leader of any country should be posting, let alone the President of the United States. In less than two minutes, he posted three times, two posts celebrating bombs dropping in the Middle East, and one post, seconds later, a video of himself golfing.

It started at exactly 10:18 p.m., when he made an announcement to the world that read: “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!! President DJT.”

One minute later, at 10:19 p.m., he shared a 9-second, violent and cartoonish video showing the Kharg Island oil refinery complex being bombed and engulfed in flames, black smoke rising into the sky as critical infrastructure burned. Seconds later, he posted another video. This one lasted just three seconds. It showed Donald Trump on a golf course, teeing off beneath an overcast sky on bright green grass.

 

Kharg Island is responsible for roughly 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports. If this facility were actually “being blown to smithereens” tonight, it would represent the single largest escalation of the six-month war with Iran and would be breaking news.

Here is what actually happened today. Earlier on Sunday, U.S. forces struck Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz. Not Kharg Island. Larak Island. It was the first American military action against Iran in more than a month, breaking a lull that had held since August 1, when Trump said he would pause strikes at the urging of Gulf allies. According to CENTCOM spokesperson Tim Hawkins, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps forces had been observed preparing to launch rockets loaded with sea mines into the strait. The U.S. military had just finished clearing those mines from the international shipping lanes only last week. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard confirmed casualties on Larak Island, saying there had been “martyrdom and injury of several of our fighters and compatriots.”

Then Iran retaliated. The IRGC launched ballistic missiles and drone strikes targeting two American air bases in Jordan. Iranian state television broadcast footage of the missiles being launched. As of this writing, the missiles aimed at Jordan have reportedly been intercepted, with no confirmed impacts. But that does not mean American forces are out of danger. American service members are stationed at those bases tonight, and they remain in harm’s way.

While all of that was unfolding, and American troops were bracing for incoming missiles in Jordan, their commander in chief posted a fake video of the wrong island on fire and then posted a video of himself enjoying a relaxing day on the golf course.

As devastating as all of that is, it wasn’t the only dangerous thing Donald Trump did today. Earlier, he wasn’t focused on missiles and destruction overseas. He was focused on attacking something much closer, our press. It started with what he posted at 8:46 this morning.

“THE FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA ARE OUT OF CONTROL, AND SOMETHING MUST BE DONE ABOUT IT. FCC TO THE RESCUE! President DJT.”

Fourteen minutes later, at 9:00 a.m., he followed that with a longer, more targeted attack on Kristen Welker, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press. He called her the “Unpopular ‘Hostess’” of the show. He accused her of “purposeful inaccuracy.” Then he wrote something that we all need to take seriously, not just because of its historical parallels, but because we are at a very dangerous moment in our own history. We have a president who is teetering on losing the unchecked power he has grown to depend on: “Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment. Unfortunately, she is not the only one.”

“She is not the only one.” is the President of the United States telling every reporter in this country that telling the truth now comes with the threat of federal consequences. That is a warning shot aimed at the entire press corps, newsrooms, independent journalists, local newspapers, writers, content creators, and every single person using their voice to tell the truth.

The “purposeful inaccuracy” that warranted federal punishment was that Welker described Trump’s endorsement record in the 2026 primaries as producing “mixed results.” That phrase is backed up by NBC’s own reporting, which noted that six Trump-backed candidates for the House and governor lost their primaries earlier this month. CNN described the results the same way. So did Newsweek. “Mixed results” is not inaccurate or controversial. It was basic reporting. It was a journalist doing their job. NBC responded: “Kristen is one of the best in the business and we stand by her.”

If you have been reading my posts every night, you know this is not an isolated attack. This is a pattern, and it is accelerating. It is also one of my greatest concerns for this country. Without a free press, we are at far greater risk of an authoritarian takeover because truth is replaced by propaganda, accountability disappears, and the public loses its ability to distinguish one from the other. So much of our future depends on journalists being able to report the truth without fear, and every attack takes us one step closer to self-censorship. This is one of the main reasons so many of us lose sleep at night, and also something that not nearly enough people even know is happening.

In September 2025, after Disney pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air under pressure, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that the FCC could revoke broadcast licenses of networks with hosts “against me.” Two weeks ago, Disney and ABC filed a lawsuit against the FCC, arguing that the agency’s decision to review ABC’s broadcast licenses ahead of schedule amounted to a direct attack on the First Amendment. And the language in that lawsuit tells us exactly where we are in this moment. Disney’s attorneys wrote that the campaign is “calculated to operate in terrorem upon the rest of the industry.” In terrorem. Latin for “as a warning.” ABC is the visible target. But the message is addressed to every broadcaster in the country. The ultimate cost, they wrote, “is borne by the press as a whole.”

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the sole Democrat remaining on the commission, has tried to hold the line, saying, “Once again, this FCC pretends it has the power to control news coverage. In reality, the FCC has vanishingly little power over national news networks.” And she is right. The FCC licenses local broadcast stations, not networks. No licenses are even up for renewal until 2028. But the reality is that it does not matter whether the FCC actually has the legal authority to do what Trump is demanding. What matters is that the President of the United States is telling the country that it does. The threat itself is the weapon. You do not have to follow through on every threat to silence a free press. You just have to make enough of them that reporters start doing the math in their heads before they report the truth. Once that math starts, the truth does not disappear with a dramatic act of censorship. It disappears quietly, one story at a time, as journalists decide the safer path is silence.

This is how fascism spreads, by turning our own institutions against us. It doesn’t take soldiers in the streets or buildings on fire. It happens when regulatory agencies are turned into enforcement arms and federal commissions are weaponized against the truth. It happens when a man with the full power of the presidency tells a journalist she will be “reported for rebuke or punishment” because she stated a fact he did not like, and then warns every other journalist in the country that they could be next.

There is another part of this story that also needs to be told. Trump’s threat tells us something about him, but it also tells us something about the people who still believe they can stay in the regime’s good graces.

Five weeks ago, on July 24, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Kristen Welker was filmed laughing and chatting with Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, who is also compared to a less capable Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propagandist. The clip spread across social media, and the backlash was immediate. Nicolle Wallace, without naming Welker directly, criticized journalists at the dinner who were “cozying up” to members of the administration and applauding the president. She called it a “jarring image.”

Welker did what so many people in Washington still believe will protect them. She went to the dinner. She smiled at the right people. She laughed with the right people. She played the access game, the one where you stay close to power and hope that proximity buys you safety. Five weeks later, the President of the United States threatened to use a federal agency against her. It didn’t protect her. It never does with people like Trump.

That’s the lesson every journalist, CEO, Republican member of Congress, and really every powerful person who believes they can stay in the regime’s good graces needs to understand. It won’t protect them. The Vichy collaborators in France thought cooperation would spare them. It didn’t. German industrialists who funded Hitler believed they could control him. They couldn’t. Soviet officials praised Stalin in public, toasted him at state dinners, and still ended up in the gulags. The pattern is always the same. The people who choose to enable these evil strongmen are rarely spared. They are simply among the last to be devoured.

That wasn’t the only disturbing thing we learned today. The Washington Post also reported that the Pentagon has been secretly installing conservative military veterans with massive online followings into government roles. They have been given official government email addresses as though they are Pentagon employees. Their assignments have not been disclosed. And they are being deployed to amplify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s agenda while attacking anyone who scrutinizes the administration.

These are not anonymous social media trolls. Rob Maness is a retired Air Force colonel with more than 135,000 followers who called for the removal of “disloyal” Pentagon employees. Kurt Schlichter is a retired Army colonel with nearly 620,000 followers who praised Trump as a “hero” for confronting Iran. Thomas Anderson, who writes under the pen name Cynical Publius, has more than 323,000 followers and wrote in April that there was “a cancer in America’s military ranks” that “must be expunged.” Pentagon spokesman Joel Valdez declined to say whether any of them are drawing taxpayer-funded salaries or what their exact roles are.

Every single story we learned about today reached us because a journalist reported it. Without a free press, we can’t have a free country. Without reporters willing to do their jobs in the face of federal threats, silence doesn’t just protect Trump from bad headlines. It protects him from accountability for everything. When this is all said and done, and I still believe it will be, I won’t think about Trump. He’ll be a distant memory. His name will be remembered alongside every other strongman who believed he could outlast history. He is not who I’ll think about.

I’ll think about our cowardly Congress. Our cowardly Supreme Court. The people who enabled him. The ones who had the power to stand up for their country and chose not to. They are the people I thought about when I saw everything he posted today.

But more importantly, I’ll think about the brave ones. The truth tellers. The people who kept showing up every single day, even when the threats came, when the comments were vicious, and when the hate was loud. The ones who refused to be intimidated into silence. I’ll think about the people who protested, went to rallies, knocked on doors, and never stopped talking about what was happening and what had to change. The ones who dedicated their lives to making sure this never happens again. That’s how this time will be remembered.

Like I do every single time Donald Trump attacks the free press, I am asking you to join me in what I call my economic protest. You have supported me so generously, and I need you to know how much that means to me. Your paid memberships have made it possible for me to write these posts every single day without ever putting them behind a paywall. I never want the truth to be available only to those who can afford it. You are the reason everyone else can read these posts for free. Thank you.

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

Tonight, like I have done countless times before, I’m asking you to think beyond me. Think about the other people doing this work day in and day out, often at great personal risk. Think about the other journalists, writers, and independent voices you trust, the ones who have never stopped and never will. The ones showing up every single day to tell the truth, even while the President of the United States threatens to use federal agencies to punish them for doing so. If they offer a paid membership, please consider joining. Let’s make sure they are financially prepared for whatever comes next.

Because in this moment, with a president actively trying to silence the free press and replace it with propaganda, one of the most powerful things we can do is make sure the truth remains available to every person who needs it.

The week ahead will be long and tumultuous. The House returns tomorrow. Nine weeks from now, we vote, and even more importantly, we send a message to the president and his enablers that their time is up, that this is our country, and that we are taking it back. 

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance  

Florida Republican congressional candidate Te Brown, who may be the same Te Brown who lost a congressional Republican primary in Illinois this year and who faces trial in Illinois this fall on federal fraud charges

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Florida (?) Woman, Andrew Egger, right, Sept. 1, 2026. Republican House candidate Te Mayonna Brown is fighting an uphill battle. Florida’s 24th Congressional District, where she took the Republican nomination after running unopposed last month, is one of the bluest in the state.

But that’s not the only hurdle she appears to be facing. Before getting involved in the FL-24 race, Brown lost a different Republican House primary this year—not in Florida, but in Illinois. Oh, and there’s this: Back in Illinois, she appears to be under indictment for felony wire fraud. Per publicly available court documents, her trial is set to begin just weeks after Election Day.

I am saying “appears” here a lot, because Brown denied it. Not just that she did the things she’s been accused of, but that she’s been accused of them at all. When I reached her by phone yesterday, she flatly insisted—despite clear photographic, social-media, and campaign-records evidence to the contrary—that she, Te Mayonna Brown, wasn’t the Tedora M. Brown who ran for Congress in Illinois or the Te Dora Brown named in a federal indictment. She then asked if I was with law enforcement before hustling off the phone.

Politics attracts strange characters. But few seem to match this.

The tale begins in March 2023, when federal prosecutors in Illinois indicted one Te Dora Brown of Palos Park on thirteen felonies, accusing her and her husband Christopher Scott of fraudulently obtaining hundreds of thousands of dollars in COVID relief money by applying for federal loans on behalf of phony employees at companies that turned out not to exist. Prosecutors alleged Brown and Scott spent the money on themselves—making splurge buys at Tiffany, Nordstrom, and Saks Fifth Avenue, buying Uber Eats, and withdrawing huge sums in ATM cash. Scott pleaded guilty; Brown decided to fight the charges.

She also decided to run for office. When she threw her hat in the ring last year for Illinois’s 11th District, Tedora M. Brown (as she now styled her name) was suddenly calling herself a “former lifelong Democrat” who was “waking up to what the Democratic party was doing to her community and her country.”

And she wasn’t hiding the criminal charges. “They came after me because I’m a Republican and I’m an American Black woman,” Brown told a local paper. “If I was guilty, why would I run for Congress? Why would I put myself in the limelight? It just doesn’t make any sense.”

On March 17, Brown came in fourth in her primary, picking up just 5.7 percent of the vote. One month later, a “Te Brown” popped up in Florida business records, incorporating a new company: TM Brown Incorporated. Was this the same person? It appears so. The company was registered in the name of Brown’s former campaign treasurer, Dratonyai Ratcliff. The same records named the company president as “Te Brown,” listing her under a Palos Park, Illinois address.

A few weeks after that, Ratcliff filed new paperwork on behalf of “Te Brown”—this time with the Federal Election Commission. The campaign was headquartered at the same Aventura address where TM Brown Inc. had just been incorporated; Ratcliff was listed once more as treasurer. Brown was running for Congress again, in Florida’s 24th District.

And this time, she lucked out: Nobody else jumped into the race on the Republican side. The primary was canceled and she advanced by default to face Democrat Oliver Gilbert in the general election this November.

Again, I should stress that Brown disputed this entire account. On the phone yesterday, she repeatedly insisted she is not Te Dora Brown or Tedora M. Brown of Illinois. When I pointed out that the same Dratonyai Ratcliff had filed the paperwork for both of Te Brown’s campaigns, she suddenly swerved: “Wait, hold on, is this—are you the police?” Moments later, she begged off the call: It was a busy day, she said, and she needed to prep for “an exclusive interview that I’m doing tomorrow with NBC.” She promised to call back the next day—this morning—at 6 a.m., but she never did.

The evidence linking the indicted Te Dora Brown, Illinois candidate Tedora M. Brown, and Florida candidate Te Brown goes well beyond the Ratcliff tie.

Brown’s Illinois congressional website, taken offline but still available in archived form, writes out her full name as “Te Dora Mayonna Brown”; her current Florida website gives her name as “Te Mayonna Brown.” An X account under the name “Te Mayonna Brown” regularly shares inspirational quotes and updates on her Florida campaign. But the account’s handle, @TeamLSAcademy, is an apparent shoutout to Brown’s former company Little Shepherd’s Academy, Inc.—one of the allegedly fraudulent businesses named in the federal indictment against Te Dora Brown.

That same X account also points in old tweets to an Instagram account, @missbrownalways. That account’s bio listed Brown as the president of two companies, Scottland Construction and Women in Construction of Illinois. Both companies appeared in Tedora M. Brown’s biography on her Illinois campaign website. After I pressed Brown on this connection yesterday, both companies suddenly vanished from the @missbrownalways Instagram bio. Here it was before:

And here it was after:

That account’s profile picture was plainly taken during the same photo shoot as this picture, formerly displayed on the Illinois campaign website of Tedora M. Brown:

And here, for comparison, is a photo taken from the Florida campaign website of Te Brown:

Perhaps aware that it was inconceivable that there might be two Te Browns running for office in the same cycle, Brown’s campaign manager, Karin Dennis, gave me a call literally minutes before we sent this newsletter. Unlike Brown, Dennis acknowledged that this was, indeed, the same person. But she insisted that the charges had been dropped—something that Brown herself has been saying since at least April 2025. Told there was no evidence of that in electronic court records, Dennis suggested it would be there shortly. We will wait and see and update if needed.

I’m disappointed that it was Dennis who called and not Brown because I wanted to know what her endgame is here. She has little shot of winning this deep-blue seat. And it doesn’t appear she’s trying very hard. She’s done little apparent campaigning or press. Nor has she raised much money: She’s brought in just over $7,000 in contributions as of her latest filing. Most of her campaign has been financed by $306,000 she loaned it herself.

In Illinois, Brown seemed to be following a familiar playbook for accused white collar criminals: Proclaiming herself MAGA to paint herself as the victim of a political witch hunt. But if her goal was to run as a victim of Biden-administration weaponized justice to get on the PardonQuest radar of a president with a soft spot for fraudsters, it’s not clear why she’s suddenly trying to keep that indictment hushed up. It’s not like federal prosecutors have forgotten who she is or where to find her. That trial’s coming right up.

Whatever the reason, none of this exactly screams “healthy democracy.” Gerrymandering, partisan polarization, and the death of local media have put us in a strange place: Only a handful of districts are nationally important any given cycle, which means only a handful of districts’ candidates can expect to get a whole ton of scrutiny. Anywhere else, you’re liable to find some true oddballs on your November ballot—even if few are quite as strange as Te Brown.

Middle East Wars, Abuses, Policies 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 31, 2026 ['Unsustainable' Iran Operations?], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Sept. 1, 2026. Alex Horton and Tara Copp of the Washington Post reported on Sunday, August 30, that military leaders are warning Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that a plan to continue large-scale operations in Iran is unsustainable and is weakening their ability to protect U.S. interests in other places, including at home.

The warning is in the classified Secretary of Defense Orders Book of August 14 and is laid out by the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force and the four-star commanders who oversee U.S. operations in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Trump’s insistence that he must keep all options open, including the ability to launch major attacks, has forced more than 50,000 troops to be kept on alert for months. Plans to extend that alert made the Navy’s top admiral, along with leaders of the U.S. European Command, the U.S. Pacific Command and the U.S. Southern Command, register that they did not concur with those plans, although their disagreement does not mean they will not execute the order.

Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle warned that the Navy, which has borne the brunt of operations against Iran, cannot sustain its current level of support for the war. Barely a quarter of the Navy’s destroyer fleet is currently able to deploy, while delays in maintenance are threatening the readiness of other ships.

Leaders of the Army and Air Force concurred with the plan to extend force deployments but warned that there would be significant risk to such an extension.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell took to social media to push back against the story, saying, “Publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book is a crime. It’s a betrayal of the force…. We are in great shape around the world. This story isn’t about readiness. It’s TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome] and PDS [Pete Derangement Syndrome]—they hate President Trump and Secretary Hegseth more than they love America.”

Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts pointed out that Hegseth has either fired or forced into early retirement several admirals and generals whom he considered insufficiently loyal in what appears to be “an ongoing, blatant campaign of intimidation to keep senior brass in the Pentagon toeing the line and not pushing back against administration officials.” And yet, a broad range of military leaders are speaking out against the administration’s plans in Iran.

“If any of the defense secretaries under Presidents Biden, Obama, or Bush had gotten this degree and range of pushback from top uniformed personnel, there would be immediate congressional hearings, calls for resignations, and talks of impeachment,” Clymer writes. “Moveover,” she notes, “someone had to leak the information contained in this classified briefing and did so knowing that it would further confirm the extraordinary weakness the Trump administration has exhibited in its apparently dead-on-arrival ‘negotiations’ with the Iranian regime to end the war.”

National security scholar Tom Nichols commented: “This is a good time to note that Hegseth is terrible at his job, that the Pentagon is a mess, that he should never have been confirmed, and that he should be fired first thing in the morning. But in this administration, sycophancy is more important than competence.”

At 10:18 last night, Trump posted an AI video of military strikes and fires on what appears to be Iran’s Kharg Island, a major storage facility for Iran’s oil and the seaport for about 90% of its oil exports. The caption read: “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!! President DJT.”

The Defense Department this morning clarified that the U.S. had not attacked Kharg Island. The U.S. did claim to have launched attacks on two Iranian rocket launchers yesterday as they attempted to mine the Strait of Hormuz. Iran claimed to retaliate with strikes against Jordan, which the Jordanian military said were all intercepted. The price of oil rose again.

At 8:09 this morning, Trump posted: “Iran is officially a Failed Nation. IT IS DEAD! They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, they have no currency, they are not paying their soldiers or police, Inflation is at 300%, and their leadership is in total disarray and incapable of properly representing the country. The only thing they have is FAKE NEWS from the USA, a willingness to kill their protesters (now over 100,000 people dead. They must be tried for war crimes against humanity!), and a good line of “BULLSH*T.” Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

Trump continues to try to sell an image about Iran that does not reflect reality. In that, he appears to have the support of Defense Secretary Hegseth, who has restricted journalists’ access to the Pentagon and last week oversaw the firing of three staffers at the military publication Stars and Stripes.

In January the Pentagon tried to take away protections for the paper’s editorial independence, and last week it fired Erik Slavin, editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes, and Lara Korte, a reporter who covers the Middle East. Max Lederer, the paper’s publisher, announced he would retire at the end of September but was pushed out immediately.

The three are suing Hegseth, the Defense Department, Principal Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Andrew Brey, and Defense spokesperson Sean Parnell, saying they were being attacked “for speaking up as private citizens in support of the press’s freedom to cover military operations, its need to reach all servicepersons, and in retaliation for their publication of a news report on deteriorating conditions aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln during its extended tour of duty in the Mid-East.” They called the firings a “blatant violation” of the First Amendment and called out the “extraordinary censorship efforts” of the Defense Department.

But it appears Hegseth is doing more than just trying to stop negative press. Last week, Will Sommer of The Bulwark reported that the Pentagon has hired right-wing social media influencers as special government employees, using taxpayer money to amplify Hegseth’s viewpoints and attack anyone who tries to hold the Trump administration to account. Sommer also noted that an active-duty U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Adam D’Ortona, posts pro-Hegseth and anti-Democratic material during working hours in violation of the military’s traditional nonpartisanship.

Sommer reported on a video by former representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who commented: “How many more people that are blue checkmarks on X, that are putting out information on behalf of the federal government and Donald Trump and the Republican Party…are actually special government employees being paid by your tax dollars?”

A story in the Washington Post by Dan Lamothe and Tara Copp yesterday found more. They report that the Pentagon has secretly hired several right-wing military veterans with large social media accounts, including Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas Anderson, to boost Hegseth’s positions. A Pentagon spokesperson would not comment on the content of their jobs, whether they are receiving a taxpayer-funded salary, or how long their employment is expected to last.

In Public Notice today, Paul Waldman notes that Trump intended to show strength when he made a show of changing the name of Lake Ontario last week, but it really shows he is “weak and getting weaker.” He is still trying to shore up his fantasy world even as the real world is asserting its power.

On Saturday, Trump made an exception in his war on the media, praising CNN’s pollster Harry Enten “because he was willing to show that Donald J. Trump is six times more popular than Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or any other President,” a reference to Trump’s standing among Republicans alone.

Tonight Michael R. Gordon and Marcus Weisgerber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has submitted his resignation after struggling with Hegseth for months over Hegseth’s firing of senior Army officers and over the direction of the military.

Driscoll’s departure, the journalists note, leaves the Army without any Senate-confirmed civilian or military leaders.

 

Then-President George W. Bush announces "Iraqi Freedom," beginning the regime-change war against Iraq based on false claims that Iraq possessed and was prepared to use of "Weapons of Mass Destruction."(White House photo March 19, 2003).

The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases: ‘Mission Accomplished 2026’?! Jennifer Rubin, right, Sept. 1, 2026. "63 Days to the Midterms.*

Oblivious to his own failure, which dwarfs George W. Bush’s premature declaration of victory in Iraq, Donald Trump stupidly mimicked the “Mission Accomplished” slogan last week in advance of the six-month mark of his disastrous, illegal, and hugely unpopular war. In response to Trump’s AI-generated meme of a sign bearing that bellicose slogan, Peter Baker of the New York Times observed:

Except that it is not. Mr. Trump’s war in Iran…is anything but accomplished. Half a year in, the conflict has deteriorated into a quagmire of the president’s own making with no clear goals, no obvious strategy and no end in sight.

He finds himself stuck in a maddening purgatory between full-fledged combat and genuine peace. He is reluctant to resume an all-out bombardment despite his thunderous threats, yet has been unable so far to broker an agreement to end the war on satisfactory terms. He has no victory to take credit for, yet is paying the political price in terms of the toll on the American economy and his party’s chances in the fall elections.

Bluntly put, Trump has produced a defeat of unprecedented proportions, handed the Iranian leadership a new lease on life, and given Tehran control of the Strait of Hormuz — a benefit of more utility than a nuclear weapon — without obtaining restrictions on its nuclear weapons program, despite Trump’s assertions to the contrary.

Historian Robert Kagan writes:

Iran has, with American help, completely reconfigured the power structure of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. The dominant power in the region going forward will be Iran, not the U.S. or Israel. Neighboring countries are already making their adjustments to this new reality. More distant powers will too. For years, the world has been dealing with an Iran constrained. It will now discover what Iran unleashed looks like. . . . .

Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz is a more useful instrument of power than a nuclear weapon would be. A nuclear weapon might deter an attack, but control of the strait gives Iran leverage every day, over dozens of countries. With it, Iran can reward friends, punish enemies, extract revenue, force the loosening of sanctions, and make governments think twice before opposing Iranian policies. It can do all of this without firing a shot, and while preserving the ability to threaten violence when necessary.

Iran’s regime remains intact, retains its missile program, can reconstitute its terror network (with monies it will extract from control of the Strait), and claims bragging rights that it laid low a decrepit, delusional bully who threatened it with genocide.

Most obviously, Iran demolished the U.S.’s status as protector of international waterways. With control of the Strait, Iran “is also claiming the right to decide who may pass. It has proposed excluding vessels associated with governments it deems hostile, such as the U.S. and Israel, and it has demanded compensation from nations that participated in attacks against it,” Kagan explains. In place of free passage through a key waterway, Iran has “establish[ed] the principle that passage through the strait will henceforth be a privilege that Tehran can grant, condition, delay, or deny.”Subscribed

As strained as Iran’s economy is, and as much pain as its people have absorbed, its regime is widely expected to outlast the Trump presidency. The U.S. will struggle to maintain any semblance of sanctions against Iran, which stands to collect fists full of currency from ships seeking passage through the Strait.

Trump’s empty threats of a new era of economic warfare against Iran based on secondary sanctions on other countries are as devoid of credibility as his military ultimatums. Vivian Salama writes for The Atlantic:

[S]econdary sanctions make the U.S. more vulnerable when its own economy is already under pressure, with the technology, manufacturing, and financial sectors likely to bear the brunt. Oil and gasoline prices have already risen, inflation remains a problem, and voters are unhappy with a conflict they were told would make their country safer. The American public’s approval of the war with ​Iran has fallen to its lowest level since the first days of the conflict…. With the midterms approaching, Republicans have little reason to welcome another round of economic pain, let alone the possible U.S.-induced global financial crisis that [Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent talked about.

Salama confirmed that regional experts see Trump’s sanctions threats “less as an escalation strategy than as the latest step in the administration’s continuing search for an exit from the war.” The pattern is eerily familiar:

The administration keeps reaching for a bigger threat because the last one failed to deliver a decisive victory, or even a face-saving off-ramp. Deadlines move. Threats get grace periods. “Maximum pressure” is followed by more maximum pressure. The question is no longer simply how Washington plans to force Iran to negotiate. It is how the U.S. gets out of a war in which its options seem only to shrink.

In the real world, the U.S. has failed to achieve any of its stated goals (e.g., eliminating Iran’s missile arsenal, ending its nuclear program, obtaining regime change, curbing its regional influence) and certainly has no clear strategy for doing so now that its complete aversion to resuming military action is out in the open.

The harm to U.S. national security is profound. Senior brass has warned the hapless Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth that our continued deployment is unsustainable, with the most dire warning coming from the chief of Naval operations, who reports only one quarter of the fleet is deployable.

Our munitions stocks are dangerously low, impairing military options in the region and beyond. “The U.S. has rushed so many munitions to the Middle East to fight Iran that military planners are concerned the loss of firepower is diminishing America’s ability to defend against potential threats from China and Russia,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The cuts have been so deep that the U.S. inventories in Europe of PAC-3 Patriot air defense interceptors and ATACMS [Army Tactical Missile System] surface-to-surface missiles are deemed to be ‘beyond critical.’”

Within the region, our influence is at a low ebb, with Gulf allies now looking for partners other than the U.S. As Kagan notes: “Saudi Arabia’s rejection of the U.S.-and Israel-backed Abraham Accords in favor of a strategic compact with Pakistan and Turkey hints at the shape of the future.” Outside the Middle East, both allies and foes recognize that the U.S. lacks the strategic smarts and staying power to defeat even a second-rate power.

So forget “Mission Accomplished.” Don’t bother with “victory” triumphalism. This international humiliation far surpasses U.S. setbacks in Vietnam or even Iraq. Perhaps the worst strategic blunder in U.S. history is entirely Trump’s doing, aided and abetted by incompetent Cabinet flunkies and congressional Republicans too cowardly to live up to their oaths to protect the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Booting Republicans from office en masse is the essential first step in addressing this catastrophe.

More On U.S. Elections, Politics, Governance

Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion:Trump’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Cabinet, William Kristol,right, Aug. 31, 2026. One imagines the members of Donald Trump’s cabinet at bedtime, satisfied by what they’ve accomplished that day at the office in the way of illegality and mendacity and cruelty, approaching their vanity dressers to echo the Evil Queen from Snow White: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of us all?”

What they mean, of course, is “Who is the fairest to Donald Trump?”

Who knows? They don’t. Their Dear Leader likes to keep them guessing. It’s pleasant to imagine them jolting awake in a cold sweat from nightmares in which their Leader has turned on them for some instance of insufficiently supine loyalty.

In any case, it’s hard for us sane types to know who’s the fairest of them all to Trump. But a question we can try to answer is, Who’s the worst of them all for America?

Sam Stein and Tim Miller rose to this challenge on Friday’s Bulwark Daily podcast.

Sam’s list of the worst five in Trump’s cabinet was reasonable:

• Pete Hegseth.
• RFK Jr.
• Markwayne Mullin.
• Sean Duffy.
• Todd Blanche.

As was Tim’s slightly different ranking:

• Marco Rubio.
• Hegseth.
• Blanche.
• Howard Lutnick.
• RFK Jr.

You should watch their amusing and instructive discussion.

Several of you have asked me to referee their debate. OK. I’m sad to report that neither of my estimable colleagues has gotten it quite right. The correct ranking is:

1. Hegseth.
2. Mullin.
3. Blanche.
4. RFK Jr.
5. Rubio.

It’s a parlor game. But it reminds of just how deplorable and dangerous are the individuals running our federal government. And it’s useful to recall, in light of the forthcoming midterm elections, that all hold their positions because they were confirmed by a Republican senate.

And it’s also worth pointing out that at this time in Trump’s first term, the counterparts of my Top Five were Jim Mattis, Kirstjen Nielsen, Jeff Sessions, Alex Azar, and Mike Pompeo. A mixed bag, surely. But still a world of difference from what we have now. Mattis wasn’t dedicated to politicizing the military and waging unconstitutional wars. Nielsen wasn’t willing to go all-in on masked agents brutally carrying out a mass deportation. Sessions still thought some rules and norms should be observed at the Department of Justice. Azar didn’t spread wild misinformation about vaccines or seek to destroy our medical research infrastructure. Pompeo still tried to uphold a U.S.-led international order.

Trump’s second term is something else. It’s not just that he’s older and crazier and more megalomaniacal. Look at the people now controlling the most powerful government departments. Would any of them stand up to Trump even in the face of truly destructive commands? Would any of them tell the truth rather than lie for Trump? Would any of them balk at any illegality they were ordered to perform? Would any of them fail to go along with election subversion in 2028?

The dangers of Trump’s second term far exceed those of his first.

And it’s not a fairy tale with a guaranteed happy ending.

AROUND THE BULWARK

• The DSA and the Real Lessons of Scandinavian ‘Socialism’... Today’s American socialists love to namedrop the Nordic model—but they don’t mention that it works because of capitalism and broad-based taxes, argues JOSHUA ZEITZ.
• The 2028 Democratic Primary Is Quietly Raging… The road to the White House begins with a scramble to hire staff, reports LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
• Trump Wants the FCC to “Punish” Kristen Welker for Telling the Truth… On Bulwark Takes, SAM STEIN and BEN PARKER unpack a brutal 24 hours for press freedom.
• The Trump Admin Found a Way to Make Mass Deportation Even Crueler… On The Bulwark on Sunday, JIM SWIFT and SARAH MEHTA of the ACLU join BILL KRISTOL to talk about Springfield, Ohio’s Haitian community and the legal and legislative fights over immigration enforcement.
• Inside Trump’s National Security Dumpster Fire… On The Mona Charen Show, MONA CHAREN speaks with former CIA officer JULIA CURLEE about her two decades in intelligence, her removal from the Trump White House, and what she describes as the dangerous erosion of expertise and nonpartisan analysis across the national security apparatus.

Quick Hits

FEDS TO THE LEFT OF ME, POSTERS TO THE RIGHT: Last week, our Will Sommer reported on the strange case of the woman known online as “Data Republican”: Elon Musk fangirl, Twitter troll/conspiracist, and—it suddenly came to light—Defense Department employee. Many were astonished to learn that such a prominent “independent” pro-Trump and pro-Hegseth voice was actually on the Trump administration’s payroll—and, as Will noted, she was only the tip of the iceberg.

Yesterday, the Washington Post tracked down a few more of X’s greatest Pentagon employees, including retired Cols. Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter, and Thomas Anderson. All three are reliable administration boosters to their large online audiences; none had disclosed they were ongoing recipients of government cheese.

The revelations were embarrassing for the posters, and they were embarrassing for Hegseth, who thinks he’s presidential material but still apparently feels the need to buy fake friends on X. But the funniest spectacle was seeing the way the broad MAGA ecosystem reacted with a shrug. This is a group of people that sees a Deep State conspiracy under every rock and bush and for whom “fed” is a grave insult. But here were actual, honest-to-God feds in their midst—and it turned out they barely even cared.

MILO GETS THE BOOT: Speaking of influencers: It’s both astonishing and unnerving how much both the MAGA media ecosystem and the federal government now run on the court-politics rules of Louis XIV. One of the clearest examples came this weekend, when Trump cheerleader turned critic Milo Yiannopoulos was deported to the United Kingdom.

Yiannopoulos’s detention and deportation seem to have gone by the book: He overstayed a visa, missed an immigration hearing, and was given a deportation order by a judge. But the messaging around his deportation strongly resembled the purging of a dissident. Trump whisperer Laura Loomer, whose tweets and conversations with Trump have spurred prior purges of government employees and other official actions, took boastful credit for putting ICE on Yiannopoulos’s trail after the two of them feuded. And the Department of Homeland Security paraded Yiannopoulos’s mugshot online, writing that he “chose to overstay his welcome in violation of our nation’s laws.”

VACATION REMINDED ME I NEED A VACATION: How utterly pointless and irrelevant has Congress become in its period of late-Trump decadence? The House gavels back in today for the first time in five weeks. But if Speaker Mike Johnson gets his way, they’ll quickly pass one spending package to avoid a shutdown and charge back into recess as fast as possible. Politico reports:

Johnson is hoping to tick the lone essential item off the chamber’s to-do list in lawmakers’ first days back: sending a shutdown-averting spending bill to President Donald Trump’s desk. Otherwise, the Capitol Hill agenda is devoid of must-pass legislation until later in the year.

Meanwhile, the thin GOP majority has had trouble opening the House floor for debate on any number of legislative priorities, and many Republicans lawmakers are simply eager to get back home ahead of the November midterms rather than endure more headaches in Washington.

Together that has fueled open speculation among members and aides that House leaders will call it quits until mid-November much sooner than the currently scheduled Oct. 1 exit date.

The Contrarian, Opinion: Yes, More Trump Self-promotion! Jennifer Rubin, right, Aug. 31, 2026. 64 Days to the Midterms. Donald Trump’s pathological narcissism has soared (or sunk?) to new levels of almost comedic depravity. Like a ping-pong ball in a wind tunnel, he bounces haphazardly from one embarrassment to another, slamming into walls of public derision.

Except for the feckless supplicants on the MAGA Supreme Court, the courts have routinely rebuked him, using language that has become increasingly dismissive.

Trump delusionally “ordered” Lake Ontario to be renamed “Lake America,” in another cringeworthy temper tantrum amidst a self-defeating trade war with Canada. In addition, his lame effort to order an end run around a judge’s order barring him from slapping his name on the Kennedy Center — with lawyers threatening to tear down the historic institution unless he gets his way on renovations and a 2 year closure — earned him a court tongue-lashing on Thursday, forcing him to put off its planned September 8 defacement (trying to rename the plaza adjoining the building). And Trump’s latest, desperate effort to inject confusion into midterm voting was thwarted on Thursday, thanks to the order of U.S. Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts, who “once again temporarily prohibited the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out a plan to restrict mail-in voting… [that] appeared to overstep its legal mandate and could spark chaos by changing rules fewer than 70 days before an election.”

And, to the amazement of experienced political consultants in both parties, Trump’s minions continue to freak out over Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff’s innocuous barb aimed at Trump babysitter hanger-on and obsessive fan Natalie Harp, thereby reinforcing his persona as a decrepit, needy has-been.

“Their relationship appears enmeshed and pathological,” observed former George W. Bush White House adviser Pete Wehner. “The information she passes along to him is unvetted, unfiltered, and highly warped and unreliable.” Aside from the creepiness, “She is further distorting the world for a man who, with every passing year, is detaching more and more from reality. His world is narrowing to a pinhole.” His courtiers’ over-the-top defense only confirms Trump is emotionally enfeebled.Sad

As political and court defeats pile up, Trump becomes more unhinged and desperate to boost his public image. With his approval ratings sinking, he demanded his aides whip up “a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests.” You can practically hear Democrats guffaw, ‘Oh, really!?’ They could not be more delighted that Trump intends to saddle his party with constant reminders of a record that an overwhelming percentage of Americans (including crucial independent voters and Hispanics) deeply dislike. (‘From the president who brought you a war you didn’t want, more expensive healthcare, dangerous lettuce, and…’)

The New York Times sums up how Trump risks becoming a “liability” for his party, and the Democrats’ response:

He has urged supporters to “pretend” he is on the ballot and suggested he will spend significant campaign cash reserves.

Democrats are just as eager for him to play a starring role. Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, argued that congressional Republicans had been boxed in by the president and rendered little more than a rubber stamp for his agenda.

“Donald Trump controls the Republican caucus in Congress like a bunch of trained seals,” Mr. Raskin said . . . . “This is essentially what the November elections are about.”

Well, if Trump insists, let’s all pretend he is on the ballot! Democrats are practically gleeful, ready to pounce with more mockery and sharp humor, which in turn will likely provoke even more hysterical responses from Trump and his supporters.Subscribed

The horror show for Republicans is just getting underway. Trump’s planned unprecedented midterm convention on the eve of 9/11 (!) has all the makings of another bust. “Republicans are privately questioning if it strikes the right tone amid the electorate’s tightening budgets — and the wisdom of diverting candidates from their districts just weeks out from Election Day,” CNN reports. “Further compounding concerns: expensive entrance fees for lawmakers, competing events like the start of the NFL season and 9/11 commemorations, and some state parties struggling to drum up enthusiasm with their members.”

The real problem? It’s all about Trump.

“[T]here’s the overarching fear — that an event once dubbed ‘Trumpapalooza’ will indeed end up being far more about promoting the president than the candidates who are actually on the ballot,” CNN observes.

Some of this would be amusing — especially for Democrats who stand to benefit from the spasm of self-inflicted injuries — if not for the power that the president of the United States wields. Taken together, incidents of this sort (plus Trump’s vindictive threats against the wrongly accused “vandals” of the reflecting pool, firings of Stars & Stripes journalists, a bizarre vow to deploy the military against the bond market, and nonstop touting of imaginary positive polls) underscore Trump’s delusional isolation from reality.

The nonstop stream of ostensibly “small,” petty, and entirely politically daft outbursts reminds us that an emotionally unstable, decaying figure atop the only global superpower (though that status has become a subject of increasing debate) poses enormous risks for the U.S. and the rest of the world. It’s not the laughable midterm ad campaign that should keep us up at night, but the realization that someone so obviously off his rocker is making life-and-death decisions about war and peace, blowing up trillions in market value and family wealth, deporting hundreds of thousands of hard-working migrants, and striving to bollix up the smooth operation of the upcoming midterm elections.

Now is no time for legacy media sanewashing of Trump nor for Democrats to underplay the urgency of the moment. Trump’s danger to the republic has never been greater, nor has MAGA Republicans’ cowardly refusal to grab the wheel and protect the country been more dispiriting.

It is up to voters to deliver an unequivocal, overwhelming defeat to this MAGA cult of personality. Only then would Congress be able to recover its constitutional role, implement real checks on his mad reign of terror, and devise a plan for holding accountable those who have driven the country into a ditch.

But, in the meantime, more Trump self-reverential ads please!

Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy and Opinion: The Importance Of Voting Early, Pete Hegseth Is A Dangerous Clown And Needs To Go, Trump Has Made Venezuela A “Neo-Colony” And It’s Not OK, Simon Rosenberg, right, Aug. 31, 2026. We’ve often talked about how Job One this year was getting all our great candidates elected and flipping the House and Senate. As of today Hopium’s Job Two is to vote early and get everyone you know in your family, networks, communities, and organizations to join you.

Starting today I hope you will self report in this chat what you are doing to help people vote early. If you have graphics from your campaigns share a link in the chat or send them to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Here’s a fun new Hopium-inspired graphic from Lynn Fellman, also known as Rebel Artist for Science:Photo by Lynn Fellman on August 30, 2026. Text that says 'Hey, Virginia! Early, in-person voting starts September 18th Vote early. Vote blue. We have elections to win. A country to save. रા Voting early makes it harder for MAGA to cheat. (Credit: Rebel Artist for Science.)

I make the case for Voting Early in this Hopium page, but the bottom line is this: When Democrats vote early is makes it more likely we win and harder for them to cheat.Subscribed

Here’s another reason to vote early, in person if possible, drop box next, and then mail as early as you can - because of the intentional battering of the USPS returned mail ballots are arriving later this year causing an increase of ballots not getting counted:

From the new NYT analysis (gift link):

The rate at which mail votes have been rejected for arriving late has ticked up in primaries this year and general elections last year in roughly a dozen states, prompting election officials to worry that the U.S. Postal Service is ill-equipped to deliver ballots in the fall midterms.

The states studied by The New York Times include some of the most critical battleground House and Senate seats where control of Congress will be determined, as well as key races for governor and secretary of state. The Times obtained data from California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin and Washington.

In Wisconsin, which hosts an open race for governor, a competitive House election plus contests for both chambers of the state legislature, lateness accounted for about 5,000 rejected mail ballots in the spring primary this year, or 78 percent of all tossed ballots. During the last spring election, in 2023, the figure was roughly 2,300, or 47 percent of all tossed votes.

The increase is particularly striking when comparing primaries in 2024 and this year. In Michigan’s primary earlier this month, more than 10,000 mail ballots were rejected for arriving after the state’s deadline of 8 p.m. on Election Day. That is nearly double the number of ballots rejected in 2024. In Washington, the number of late-arriving mail ballots increased from about 16,000 to more than 20,000 in the same period.

The rise in rejected ballots comes at a time of immense upheaval at the Postal Service, where a budget crisis has prompted widespread complaints about delivery delays. The increase also comes as President Trump and his allies are trying to transform the 251-year-old agency into a central player in their quest to restrict mail voting and otherwise overhaul the nation’s elections.

We need to make voting early a national crusade this year. Everyone has a role to play. Let’s make the act of voting celebratory, joyous, defiant, a double fisted middle finger in the face of Trump’s rancid illiberalism. You want something better for America? Vote early. You want to make sure Democrats win? Vote early. Encourage influentials and electeds in your community to join your campaign. Encourage them to make videos to encourage their networks to join us. Let’s make this a bottom up wave of joyful patriots standing up to American and global authoritarianism by voting early and in unprecedented numbers. Imagine if the stories in the last few weeks of the elections are all about a swarm of humanity voting, doing their part, standing up for our rights and freedoms through voting……..these images, and these stories will create what we will call in the business permission structure and social pressure for more people to vote, creating a virtuous cycle of participation, where the a robust early vote creates even more voters, increasing our turnout, making it more likely win races across the country, which in turn creates even more……

A few more things…..

• Pete Hegseth Has To Go. It Is Time Now - Let’s look at the headlines just from a single site this morning, the homepage of the Washington Post:
• A U.S. strike on Iran breaks a month-long lull, and Iran fires back (link)
• Pentagon secretly installs military influencers in civilian roles: Conservative veterans with large social media followings have been hired by the Defense Department and are amplifying Pete Hegseth’s culture-war fights (link)
• Hegseth’s purges are endangering national security: The Iran quagmire wouldn’t have happened under Trump’s first-term military leaders (link)

And this explosive, must read one - Military leaders warn Hegseth against extending Iran war operations: A recent classified assessment advised that prolonged large-scale operations in the Middle East risk weakening U.S. capabilities elsewhere (link)

Look at this collection of headlines from the NYT home page now. Failure, weakness, American humiliation as far as the eye can see…..

What’s Happening In Venezuela Is Not OK:  Thwarted and failing everywhere else our rapacious leader has decided make himself feel better by taking even more oil from his Latin play toy, Venezuela. From the Washington Post this am in a story called Venezuela vowed not to ‘hand over’ its oil. Trump aims to grab a windfall:

As Nicolás Maduro’s vice president in Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez once accused her political rival of planning to hand over the country’s riches — its vast oil reserves — to the United States.

“They are her owners,” Rodriguez said in 2024 of María Corina Machado, then the U.S.-backed opposition leader. “Her master gives her orders to do what? To hand over the oil, the gas, the gold … to hand over and trample on our historical dignity.”

Now, Rodríguez is the country’s interim leader, thanks to President Donald Trump. And on Friday, Trump announced what he called the “biggest oil deal in world history” — a pact that would give the U.S. a long-term controlling stake in nearly a quarter of Venezuela’s untapped oil reserves.

The deal calls for the U.S. to enter a joint venture with a private company, creating a new oil giant that the Trump administration said will hold 100-year contracts at the Venezuelan oil fields. It would become the second-largest private oil company by reserves in the world, after Saudi Aramco.

The deal cements the United States’ long-term dominance over Venezuela, which has become a neo-colony since the U.S. military’s capture of Maduro in January, when Trump vowed to “run” the country and exploit its oil wealth. The agreement now stands to lock in the United States as Venezuela’s primary oil partner for generations.

The agreement appears to contradict much of what Venezuela’s government has stood for since then-President Hugo Chávez proclaimed it a socialist state. For Venezuelans, it also creates a sense of history repeating itself, with a twist: A government long criticized for its opaque oil deals, and widespread corruption, is now entering a murky, long-term arrangement with a new protector, the United States.

……..But few details have been disclosed about the agreement, leaving Venezuelans with more questions than answers.

It remains unclear how much Venezuela will earn from the deal; how much it will cost U.S. taxpayers, given the need for expensive front-end investment; and how much will simply end up enriching the private company — and the controversial businessman, Alejandro Betancourt — at the center of it all.

How much stake do we think the Trump family gets in this new company, a company that would become “the second-largest private oil company by reserves in the world, after Saudi Aramco”?

The Senate Russia Sanctions Bill Comes To The House - From Punchbowl:

The powerful House Democrats who oppose the Senate-passed bill, along with the Democratic senators who led the charge against the measure, are out with a joint statement trying to call Trump’s bluff. They say Trump already has “broad, existing sanctions authorities” he can trigger to squeeze Russia.

The statement goes on to say:

“Congress does not need to greenlight new tariff authority for the President to impose those sanctions on Russia today. Delaying sanctions makes them less effective while the Kremlin continues to expand its schemes to procure foreign technology and funding. Ukrainians need our support now.”

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) — the top Democrats on the Banking and Finance committees, respectively — led the statement. Both voted against the Senate bill.

The statement is co-signed by three top House Democrats who long ago announced their opposition to the legislation over the tariff provisions: Rep. Gregory Meeks (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee; Rep. Richie Neal (Mass.), the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee; and Rep. Don Beyer (Va.).

I am grateful that these leaders are working to improve the Senate-passed bill by stripping out Trump’s tariff authority. We need more sanctions on Russia, but it is important to do it right. If have time today call your rep and say “yes to Russia sanctions, no to new tariff authority.”

Improving the Senate sanctions bill is something Ranking Member Meeks discussed with us when he dropped by a few weeks ago.

 

Sen. Ed Markey (left) faces Rep. Seth Moulton (right) in Massachusetts’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Unlike many Democratic primary contests this cycle, the older candidate (Markey) is running as the more progressive choice compared with the younger option (Moulton). (Images via NASA and Moulton campaign),

Decision Desk HQ, Massachusetts’s upside-down generational primary challenge, Geoffrey Skelley, Aug. 31, 2026. A look at four Democratic primaries to watch in Massachusetts on Sept. 1.

Frontrunner: Upending the common 2026 narrative in Democratic primaries, Massachusetts has a U.S. Senate battle between an old progressive and a young moderate. Plus, the rest of the Massachusetts primary slate.Previewing four must-watch Massachusetts primaries.

Quick summary:

80-year old progressive Democratic Sen. Ed Markey faces a primary challenge from 47-year old Rep. Seth Moulton, who is running as a more moderate choice. Markey is favored to hold on even though other older Democratic incumbents have had electoral trouble in 2026.

Democratic Reps. Stephen Lynch and Richard Neal each face more progressive primary challengers who hope to take down these longtime incumbents. Plus, Moulton’s open 6th District features a busy primary on the Democratic side.

The Bay State Blues take center stage on Sept. 1. One of the bluest states in the country, Massachusetts will host four high-profile Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives that will effectively determine the next holder of each seat. The clashes feature some familiar progressive-versus-establishment and old-versus-young storylines that we’ve seen throughout the 2026 election cycle on the Democratic side. However, some of the races — especially the Senate contest between Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Seth Moulton — have shaken up the familiar contours of those narratives. Let’s take a look at Tuesday’s big contests.

To the Contrary, Political Opinion: Dems Have a Hasan Piker Problem. But the GOP Has a Much, Much Bigger Elon Musk Problem, Charlie Sykes, Aug. 31, 2026. Elon is back, and in a rational world, Republicans would be facing a toxic dilemma. Via Axios: “Musk plans massive spending for GOP in midterms.”

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is jumping into the midterms with a huge investment in a plan to boost Republican voter turnout, Axios has learned.

Driving the news: Musk is resuscitating his dormant super PAC, America PAC, which spent more than $260 million to help get President Trump elected in 2024.

Musk’s pro-Trump donations through America PAC in 2024 made him the largest individual political donor in a single election cycle in U.S. history….

The big picture: Musk’s investment will add to a huge Republican cash edge over Democrats at a time when Trump’s low approval ratings — particularly on the economy and the Iran war — have put GOP control of the House, and perhaps the Senate, in jeopardy in the Nov. 3 elections.

Two things can be true at the same time: The cash-infusion will be a welcome boost to the GOP, but it also a poisoned chalice because it makes Musk once again the face of the party. And you remember how that worked out in his last great venture in Wisconsin, when his $25 million campaign to put a conservative on the State Supreme Court spectacularly backfired.

So, let’s reset the midterm campaign. Republicans have weaponized the ties between Democratic senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and far-left influencer Hasan Piker. Meanwhile, a growing number of Democrats have denounced Piker and distanced themselves and their party from his bigoted extremism. (”Hasan Piker Condemned by Jeffries, Ossoff and Other Democrats: Full List.”)

As you know, I’ve written and spoken about the Piker Problem here, here, and here, and here; and I still think the Tim Miller/Pod-Bros welcome of Piker was the worst political take of the year. As I wrote back in April, “This debate is not a distraction; it is precisely the thing that healthy political parties should be having. And, frankly, the idea that we absolutely should not embrace bigoted, anti-democratic, misogynistic voices is pretty foundational for many Never Trumpers, who walked away from their party precisely because principles were more important than political allegiance….. “

But if a Twitch influencer who has campaigned with a handful of Democrats is a big issue, then what ought we to make of Elon Musk — the richest, loudest, and most virulent antisemite and racist on the planet — bankrolling and campaigning with pretty much the entire GOP?

If Piker is awful (and he is), Musk is (and I’m trying not to be hyperbolic here), a trillion times worse.

And the GOP needs to own the oligarch. Good and hard. If Piker’s involvement with one candidate suggests that Democrats must wrestle with antisemitism, what does the GOP’s thralldom to the world’s loudest bigot suggest? By denouncing Piker, many Democrats have seized the moral high ground; but I am unable to come up with a single prominent Republican who has said squat about their bigoted paymaster.

Indeed — unless the opposition is utterly brain-dead — every Republican candidate should be asked the same questions about Musk that El-Sayed is asked about Piker.

Democrats should emblazon Musk’s name in every district where Republicans are campaigning. Every Republican who takes money from Musk. Every Republican who campaigns with Musk. Every Republican who is endorsed by Musk.

Because the record is not obscure or subtle.

If anything, Musk’s racist screeds have gotten even louder and more virulent after his breakup with Trump in 2025. Just a few months ago, in a post that likely got me kicked off the social media site that he has so aggressively enshittified, I tried to document Musk’s latest descent into the most toxic bigotry: “Elon Musk's Racist Screed-Storm.”

Note: It’s easy to be discouraged or numbed to what’s happening. But this is the fight of our times and the challenge of our generation. That’s why we do this every day and why there is no paywall. Because (1) We are the crazy ones, and (2) We’re in this together. Please sonsider subscribing.

New York Times, Vance Calls El-Sayed ‘Evil’ in No-Holds-Barred Michigan Speech, Bayliss Wagner, Aug. 31, 2026. Vice President JD Vance also told Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, to “keep my wife’s name out of your mouth.”

Vice President JD Vance called Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee and an outspoken critic of Israel, “very, very evil” at a campaign rally near Detroit on Monday and accused him of heightening racial and religious divisions.

“I realize that there’s something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today,” Mr. Vance said at the event at a warehouse in Sterling Heights hosted by MAGA Inc., President Trump’s super PAC.

Mr. Vance was in Michigan campaigning for former Representative Mike Rogers, Dr. El-Sayed’s Republican opponent in one of the nation’s most hotly contested Senate races this fall. The vice president’s remarks appeared aimed at stoking tensions between Dr. El-Sayed and Michigan’s Jewish community, which the Democrat has been attempting to allay since winning his party’s bitter primary against a pro-Israel opponent in early August.

Over the weekend, Dr. El-Sayed, who is Muslim, met with members of the Jewish Democratic Caucus to apologize for a remark he made in March after an assailant drove a truck into a synagogue in West Bloomfield Township, Mich. The candidate said he regretted saying that “hurt people hurt people,” a comment that some interpreted as too sympathetic to the perpetrator, whose deeds were described by authorities as a “targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.” The man, 41-year-old Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, died in the incident.

Mr. Vance’s comments appeared to reflect a strategy of trying to harm Dr. El-Sayed’s standing among Jewish voters. The vice president’s one-day trip to Michigan also illustrated the stakes in the race, which many Republicans view as must-win if they are to retain control of the Senate.

In his remarks, Mr. Vance praised the rabbi of Temple Israel, the synagogue where the attack occurred, as well as a guard who was injured in a firefight with the attacker. He met with them backstage before the event, a spokesperson for Mr. Vance said.

People like Mr. El-Sayed “see themselves not as citizens of a common nation fighting for every single person — whether they’re Jewish or Christian, whether they’re white or Black or brown — but see themselves as fighting for one group at the expense of others,” Mr. Vance said. “And that is how, ladies and gentlemen, you destroy the United States of America.”

Others in the party have gone further to try to demonize Dr. El-Sayed by using anti-Muslim stereotypes. Joe Gruters, chairman of the Republican National Committee, told Fox News on Aug. 6 that “Mike Rogers is a guy that would be the first responder going to help the victims of 9/11, and El-Sayed is the guy that would have been friends of the guys flying the plane.”

In addition, the Senate Republicans’ campaign committee referred to Dr. El-Sayed by his full name, Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, in a news release issued in early August that accused him of supporting “terrorist organizations.”

Mr. Rogers, meanwhile, has sought to cast his campaign as more friendly to Jewish voters. Last week, he released a list of 344 Jewish Michiganders who had pledged to support his campaign.

Dr. El-Sayed called Mr. Vance “a sock puppet” and cast his policies as “evil” in a statement responding to the vice president’s remarks.

“Evil is ripping health care away from working people in exchange for tax breaks for billionaires,” Dr. El-Sayed said on Monday. “Evil is making people pay more for groceries and gas while pushing for trade wars and actual war. Evil is dividing people for your own gain. Evil is selling out your morals for a little bit of power.”

Onstage Monday, Mr. Vance also took issue with Dr. El-Sayed for making remarks about the second lady, Usha Vance.

Last week, Dr. El-Sayed mused in a social media post about whether the vice president would take her “back in time to meet Papaw” if he could, referring to Mr. Vance’s deceased grandfather and seeming to imply that he would not have approved of the Vances’ interracial marriage.

“Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth because she’s way out of your league,” Mr. Vance said, prompting a roar from supporters.

Ms. Vance is of Indian descent. In his first memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance wrote that it was “one of the great regrets of my life that Mamaw and Papaw never met” her.

It wasn’t Dr. El-Sayed’s first mention of Ms. Vance. In a podcast episode in April, he accused Mr. Vance of having made his career by “hating people who are different” and suggested that the couple’s mixed-race children would have to reckon with that fact. He also suggested that Ms. Vance, who gave birth to the couple’s fourth child in July, was not physically attracted to her husband.

Mr. Vance also sought on Monday to tie Dr. El-Sayed to past remarks by Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer and progressive commentator. The vice president described watching Dr. El-Sayed “campaign around the state with somebody who said that America deserved 9/11,” a reference to a comment by Mr. Piker in 2019 that he has since disavowed.

More On Dolly Parton's Passing, Cultural Importance

Dolly Parton as Doralee in a scene from the film “9 to 5.” (Photo Credit: Steve Schapiro)

New York Times Magazine, In ‘9 to 5,’ Dolly Parton Put a Friendly Face on Feminism, Susan Dominus, Aug. 30, 2026 (print ed.). In 1980, feminists were often stereotyped as man-hating or out of touch. Then Parton gave the movement a boost — and an anthem.

Before a script for the movie “9 to 5” even existed — when it was still just a vague concept for a story about female office workers — Jane Fonda had a lightning bolt moment about how to cast it. She was in the car listening to the radio when a Dolly Parton song came on. Immediately, as Fonda later recalled on the podcast “Dolly Parton’s America,” an image popped into her head: “I suddenly had a vision of Dolly as a secretary,” she said. “She can’t see her hands, typing with those long fingernails. Everything about it made me laugh.”

Fonda approached Parton about the role. “How hard can this be?” Parton remembered thinking, in the 2022 documentary “Still Working 9 to 5.” “If it’s big, I’ll get to roll around in the glory, and if it’s a flop, I blame it on them.”

Dolly Parton with "9 to 5" cast (Images by Steve Schapiro).

Parton made clear to Rolling Stone in 1980 that she did not take the role in order to be part of a feminist project. “Not that I’m not for rights for everybody,” she told the interviewer. “I’m just saying I don’t want to get involved in a political thing.” Whatever you thought about the movie, she implied, it was not, at least for her, a feminist cri de coeur about sexual harassment, equal pay, child care and job flexibility. “It’s just a funny, funny show,” she said — not, most definitely not, about “bosses in general or the plight of secretaries.”ImageParton on the set of “9 to 5.”Credit...Steve Schapiro

Later on in life, Parton, who died on Tuesday, would acknowledge that the movie had “a good message,” but she was clearly ambivalent about being pinned down. Given her many good works — her donations to vaccine research, literacy, disaster relief — Parton’s evasiveness has been interpreted generously by her fans across the political spectrum: It was not so much about making herself marketable as it was about maintaining her status as a unifying cultural force. She seemed to intuit that the best way she could help women fight for equality was by expressing herself her way — without labels.

Despite Parton’s protestations, “9 to 5” was, in fact, developed explicitly as a movie about the experience of low-level office workers. During the years of anti-Vietnam activism that earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane,” Fonda had befriended another activist, Karen Nussbaum, who had started organizing secretaries and clerical workers, the jobs held by about a third of working women at the time. Fonda and her team interviewed dozens of them, many of whom spoke of overt sexism and sexual harassment; some responded enthusiastically when asked if they ever fantasized about getting even with their bosses. One said she wished she could grind up her boss and serve him in the office coffee.

In the film Fonda eventually developed, Parton plays a competent and sweet, happily partnered secretary who wears feminine dresses and a green sequin cardigan at the office. She and two co-workers, played by Fonda and Lily Tomlin, are fed up with their boss, whom they describe as a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot.” The three women undertake an aburdist revenge plot that involves keeping him in captivity for six weeks, even suspending him from the ceiling.Editors’ Picks

Both Fonda and Parton, in their own ways, were trying to manage feminism’s image problem, which persisted despite the movement’s success in opening up women’s lives over a remarkably short span of time. The movement started picking up momentum in the early 1960s, but gained enormous visibility in 1970, when Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” helped launch the Women’s Strike for Equality, which included rallies, walk-outs and teach-ins around the country on Aug. 26 of that year. Some 50,000 women protested in New York City alone, effectively shutting down Fifth Avenue.

In 1971, Gloria Steinem, already a powerhouse political and feminist organizer, co-founded Ms. magazine, which sold out its first 300,000 copies within eight days and helped mainstream the language and mission of female equality. Within the decade, the movement had made significant strides: The passage of Title IX expanded girls’ access to sports and academic opportunities in schools; legislation made it illegal for banks to discriminate on the basis of sex, meaning a woman could no longer be required to provide a signed letter from her husband to receive a line of credit; and a 1978 amendment to the Civil Rights Act made it illegal for employers to discriminate against women on the basis of pregnancy. The Supreme Court also decided Roe v. Wade, establishing a constitutional right to abortion that would stand for nearly 50 years.

And yet even as many of these gains were broadly popular, the feminist movement was still viewed with suspicion, especially by conservatives who associated it with its most radical forms — calls for women to reject men, motherhood and caregiving. If feminists weren’t stereotyped as unshaven and man-hating, they were alternatively construed as out of touch and elite. The comedians Catherine O’Hara and Andrea Martin satirized those tropes in a 1981 parody sketch called “I’m Taking My Own Head, Screwing It On Right, and No Guy’s Gonna Tell Me It Ain’t,” in which O’Hara proclaims she’s happy only when she’s working 21 hours a day and Martin complains that she feels like a prisoner in her own home. Even as series like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” used humor to gently push forward feminist ideals, feminists were typically the butt of jokes in stand-up routines and on late-night shows.

Parton knew that Fonda was being strategic by casting her in “9 to 5,” in the hopes of bringing in a Southern audience. Fonda has been even more explicit that she viewed the movie’s humor as a vehicle for delivering a strong feminist message in a palatable way. “Even if people don’t want to deal with the issues we’re raising,” Fonda told the producer of “Dolly Parton’s America,” “they’ll like the movie anyway, because it’s really funny.”

I saw the film at age 10 with my sister, and I think it’s safe to say our reaction was shared by countless viewers: It was Parton who made us laugh the hardest, who we were really rooting for. The rage and revenge on display in the film might have seemed unhinged or ugly — the stuff of violent radicals — but somehow, with Parton at the center, their actions seemed almost plucky: You could push a sweet, smiling flower of a human only so far before she’d show you what she was made of.

The movie was not only a blockbuster — it made $100 million at the box office, the second biggest hit of the year — but according to the organizers who helped Fonda conceive it, it also changed culture in precisely the way they hoped it would. Before its release, “we had to argue that women’s work was plagued by discrimination,” Nussbaum was quoted as saying in Fonda’s memoir, “My Life So Far.” “The movie put an end to that debate. … The audiences recognized it and could laugh at it. Now the debate could shift to what we should do about it.” Ellen Cassedy, an organizer who worked with Nussbaum, said the movie “changed my life, and I can say that without a doubt, it changed offices, bosses and the whole atmosphere of office life.”

It’s unlikely that the movie would have been as effective without “9 to 5,” the theme song Parton wrote for it (a condition of her taking the role). The song starts with a driving, repeating single note, the song’s beating heart, music that’s quickly overlaid with what sounds like a clacking typewriter, even the ping of a cartridge. Written on set, with Parton’s acrylic nails her only instrument as she worked it out, the song universalizes the experiences of “folks like me, on the job, from 9 to 5.” Everyone starts their day with that cup of ambition; everyone has that boss who’s on the make; everyone hates on the man while simultaneously despairing of ever joining his ranks.

The song is sometimes considered a feminist anthem, but as the Canadian podcast “Material Girls” pointed out in March, it might be better considered a rallying cry for what the historian Dorothy Sue Cobble has called “labor feminism.” Labor feminism brought working-class women into the fold, recognizing, in Cobble’s words, that “the personal interaction between men and women at work and the sexploitation of women’s bodies were as much labor issues as wages and benefits.” 

Like Parton herself, the song “9 to 5” is unexpected as a feminist symbol — it’s playful, unlike many of the most important feminist anthems of the ’70s, which demanded respect, talked of survival, of being petrified. (In “I Am Woman,” Helen Reddy speaks of “wisdom born of pain.”) Fonda has said that she knew, from the moment she heard it the first time, it would be a cultural landmark: “If this movie’s not a big hit, this song will be — it’ll make us a hit,” she said in the 2022 documentary.

Parton took real professional risks in collaborating with Fonda, who earned the enduring enmity of thousands of Americans after she was photographed, laughing, sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun while on a visit to Hanoi in 1972. In one of the early interview clips featured in the 2022 documentary, Parton suggested she was not having an easy time being asked “how I deal with Jane, what my folks think about Jane, and what the South thinks about me being a friend of Jane.”

But Parton never seemed to have regrets about making the film. She was herself a savvy career woman, and the film — her first — catapulted her into a new level of celebrity. Whatever her intentions, her performance can be credited with smashing the clichés of what a feminist looked like, even if she wouldn’t use that word to describe herself. She also helped reframe feminism’s image to emphasize more universally relatable demands for an egalitarian, humane workplace — better pay, better conditions, more respect. Getting ahead, getting the raise, getting the credit: It’s a song every American can hum along to.

 

JoJo From Jerz, Opinion: Bill Maher Is An Ass____, JoJo From Jerz, Aug. 31, 2026. Bill Maher, above, couldn’t tarnish Dolly Parton’s legacy, but he did manage to expose the rot in his own.

In case you missed it the other night, Bill Maher, the oleaginous, unctuous, supercilious, smugly self-satisfied septuagenarian sleazeball with the permanently pursed expression of a man who genuinely enjoys the smell of his own farts, who has spent decades steeping in stale dissent and the accumulated fumes of his own self-regard, stood on the Real Time stage in the middle of his own comedy show and decided that with wars raging, Donald Trump wreaking havoc and all manner of genuinely important s___ happening in the world, Americans were spending entirely too much time talking about the death of Dolly Parton.

You have got to be f____ kidding me.

He actually complained that “all America could really talk about” was how sad people were that we lost Dolly, ticked through some of the extraordinary displays of love appearing around the world, the Empire State Building glowing pink, the Santa Monica Ferris wheel covered in hearts, tributes stretching from London to Las Vegas, and then arrived at the Sphere and announced that it had “added a nipple.”

And that was basically it.

No tenderness. No affection. No meaningful acknowledgment of what she gave the world, what she created, what she meant to millions of people or why they might be gutted that she was gone.

Just this dry, drive-by little cheap shot tossed at a woman three days after she died, and then on to the next joke.

Really.

And I know exactly what some people are going to say.

Jesus Christ, Jo, don’t be so dramatic. 

Dolly joked about her boobs, her body, her hair, her clothes, her face, her makeup and practically every visible inch of herself that some tedious man had already scrutinized, underestimated or decided was available for public inspection, because she had that magnificent ability to grab whatever cheap s___ somebody intended to use against her, bedazzle the bastard, turn it inside out and make the joke hers before the other person even realized she’d stolen the weapon out of their hand.

And I guarantee you Dolly wouldn’t have cared what Bill Maher said about her on his stupid show.

She was a better person than I am by a factor of a thousand, to say the very least. She probably would’ve laughed, waved one perfectly manicured hand and gone on with her day.

I, on the other hand, am a petty, vindictive b___ who relishes any opportunity to eviscerate a sexist little hobbit with a superiority complex, so here we are.

The thing is, if a different comedian had made the exact same joke, I might’ve laughed.

This isn’t about the boob joke.

It’s about the f___telling it.

Context matters. History matters. And he did not materialize on that stage Friday night freshly hatched from some politically incorrect chrysalis, shiny and innocent and unburdened by decades of his own bullshit about women.

He has spent a career pawing through women’s bodies, beauty, brains, boundaries, bedrooms, breakups, beliefs and basic autonomy with the proprietary disgust of a man who thinks female existence is a defective appliance he alone has been burdened with troubleshooting, turning every woman who displeases, defies or simply declines to flatter him into another recurring exhibit in his personal Museum of Why Everybody Else Is Wrong About Everything Always.

I’m saying that when this particular man, dragging this particular history behind him, looks at the death of this particular woman, surveys this immense eruption of grief and gratitude, complains that she’s getting too much attention and then points at her chest, the punchline arrives with a long, greasy receipt attached.

Because Dolly was warmth and wit, humor and heart, bawdy and tender and glamorous as hell, deeply rooted in her faith, ferociously ambitious and astonishingly generous, with this uncanny gift for making people feel welcome in her presence instead of inspected by it.

I’m still not over her passing, and I don’t honestly expect I ever will be.

Losing her felt like somebody removed one of the load-bearing beams of human tenderness, something so constant that millions of us had forgotten how much weight she was carrying until she was gone.

That grief crossed generations, politics, religions and cultures because people weren’t mourning a résumé.

They were mourning Dolly.

And watching that ocean of affection scratched something raw in two sexist birds from the same rotten feather pile.

Donald Trump tried to jam his grubby little snausage fingers into her story by posting a fake AI image of himself (shown agove) walking arm-in-arm with her at the White House after she died, manufacturing a moment that never happened with a woman who spent her entire career being extraordinarily careful not to let politicians claim her for themselves.

Think about how f____ grotesque that is.

Even in death, he couldn’t leave a woman’s image, boundaries or legacy alone. He had to insert himself into the frame, manufacture an intimacy she never publicly gave him and paste his own face into her history after she was no longer here to tell him to get the fuck out of it.

The man has plenty of authentic photographs and archival footage of himself hanging around Jeffrey Epstein.

But Dolly?

He needed AI.

One grasping, glory-guzzling egomaniac tried to counterfeit closeness to her.

The other tried to cheapen the mourning.

Same f_____ sickness: a beloved woman dies and two swollen male egos immediately start clawing at what she left behind, desperate to wedge themselves into a story that was never about them.

And the irony of Maher complaining that everybody was devoting too much attention to Dolly while IMPORTANT THINGS were happening could choke a python.

He was delivering a monologue on a television comedy program.

This wasn’t the chairman of the Joint Chiefs interrupting a briefing on troop movements because somebody wanted to discuss Dollywood. Nobody burst into the Situation Room waving a sequined butterfly and screaming that the Empire State Building had gone pink. He was standing under studio lights being paid an enormous amount of money to make jokes about current events while scolding ordinary Americans for caring too much about the death of one of the most iconic and beloved entertainers this country has ever produced.

I used to watch him a lot. Many, many years ago, I watched his show constantly because I thought he was sharp and willing to say the uncomfortable thing.

He has calcified into the ageing, pretentious pub bore he would’ve mocked thirty years ago, mistaking irritation for intelligence, contempt for sophistication and chronic obnoxiousness for some rarefied capacity to perceive truths unavailable to the rest of us slobbering civilians.

Being incisive doesn’t require being insufferable. 

Dolly will outlive all of this.

Her songs will still be playing. Her movies will still be watched. Children will still open books because of something she started long before they were born. Families will still tell stories about her generosity, her one-liners, her ridiculous hair, the places she showed up, the people she helped and the particular way she made kindness look less like sainthood and more like common fucking sense.

Fifty years from now, people will still know Dolly Parton.

So finally, New Rule:

Trying to diminish Dolly Parton doesn’t make you daring, dangerous or defiantly unconventional. Taking a cheap shot at a legend three days after she dies because the scale of everyone else’s grief annoys you isn’t intellectual courage. It’s just cheap, sour little cruelty dressed up in the moth-eaten costume of rebellion.

Dolly Parton will be loved long after all of us are gone. 

New York Times, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library Changes Lives. Some States Gut It Anyway, Ash Wu, Aug. 26, 2026. The crown jewel of the singer’s philanthropic efforts has handed out hundreds of millions of books to children over the past 31 years. But it isn’t immune to funding cuts.

After a tornado devastated swaths of their Nashville neighborhood in 2020, Traci Hilton and her young daughters found solace in a delivery from Dolly Parton. For several nights after the storm, Hilton read them “The Rabbit Listened,” a picture book about how a child who builds a tower out of blocks learns to cope with grief after crows topple it. It quickly became a household favorite.

“I could not get through it without crying,” Hilton said in an interview.

The Hiltons’ copy of “The Rabbit Listened” is one of more than 300 million free books that have been given to millions of children by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, according to its website.

The program has a presence in all 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., the U.S. Virgin Islands and four other countries. (Representatives for the Imagination Library declined to answer questions about recent sign-ups, donations and other matters from The New York Times on Wednesday following Parton’s death on Tuesday, explaining that they were overwhelmed.)

But in some states, the program, which relies heavily on state-sponsored grants to run, now finds its future threatened.

In 1995, Parton started the Imagination Library in Sevier County, Tenn., where she grew up. The program mails a free book each month to registered children from birth until age 5.

The Imagination Library mushroomed after forging an exclusive partnership with Penguin Young Readers in 2001; the agreement was later expanded to include Random House Children’s Books, after Penguin and Random House merged in 2012. In the United States, books are selected by childhood literacy experts, according to the Imagination Library website. Educational nonprofits that partner with the library help to enroll children in their local communities in the program, paying an average of $2.60 per child to cover the costs of books and postage each month.

Parton dedicated the library to her father, a farmer who never learned to read or write.

“My daddy just loved it when all the little kids would call me ‘The Book Lady,’” Parton wrote in a note to fans that was previously posted to her website. “That meant more to him than the fact that I had become a star and worked my butt off.”

As Parton grew from a child born below the poverty line in rural Appalachia into an American icon whose legend rivaled that of Paul Bunyan, she retained her knack for connecting with everyday people. Each monthly package from the Imagination Library arrives with a personalized touch: the child’s own name printed on the label.

The program has apparently made its mark on childhood literacy. In 2025, a study conducted by United Way, a nonprofit organization that partners with the Imagination Library in some locations, surveyed more than 86,000 families and found that children enrolled in the program were four times more likely to demonstrate stronger emerging reading skills.

But even Parton’s magnetism and the backing of a powerhouse publisher have not kept the organization immune from state-level budget cuts threatening public libraries and other educational nonprofits across America.

The Dollywood Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the Imagination Library, handles most overhead fees for the program. But to reach as many families as possible, including in the impoverished and rural communities that need the books the most, many of the program’s partners rely on state grants to split costs and increase access.

While states including Oregon and Tennessee have taken steps to proactively protect the nonprofit’s operations, the organization’s legacy hangs in the balance in many others.

In Indiana last year, Governor Mike Braun cut state funding for the program entirely, prompting the state’s first lady, Maureen Braun, to launch a fund-raising campaign to keep it afloat. Kentucky lawmakers proposed a budget reduction this year that would have effectively shut down the program in about half of Kentucky’s poorest counties before restoring the state’s 50 percent funding match after public outcry.

In Maine, the program ended in June after losing state funding, according to WAGM, a local television station, leaving United Way scrambling to fill in the gaps by starting another initiative to provide books to newborns. And Missouri slashed $4 million in funding for the nonprofit in its 2027 budget, effectively freezing new enrollment.

Storied, Inc., the Imagination Library’s program partner in Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, downsized from around 18,000 or 19,000 children to roughly 2,100 after a grant from the Nevada Department of Education ran out last year, according to its executive director, Meredith Helmick.

“We have not been able to find funding to reopen on a large scale,” said Helmick, who runs Storied, Inc. with her husband, Kyle Helmick.

When Storied, Inc. announced that the state grant would not be renewed, “we were flooded with hundreds of emails,” she said. “The legislative office in Carson City even was overwhelmed with the number of letters that they got from parents just talking about how much it’s brought their families together.”

Like many of the program’s partners, Storied, Inc. stayed afloat with the help of community donors, including the Vegas Golden Knights Foundation. Once Parton’s family had published a statement requesting gifts in her memory be made to the Imagination Library, Helmick saw an influx of donations.

Famed Actress Targeted By Husband In Appalling Sexual Harassment Scandal 

 The German actress Collien Fernandes set out to discover who was pretending to be her and sending men sexually explicit material. Her answer ignited a feminist movement (Photo by Laura Stevens for The New York Times).

New York Times Magazine, Someone Was Impersonating Her in Online Affairs. She Says It Was Her Husband, Susan Dominus, Aug. 30, 2026 (print ed.). The German actress Collien Fernandes set out to discover who was pretending to be her and sending men sexually explicit material. Her answer ignited a feminist movement.

As evening approached on a Thursday in late March, Collien Monica Fernandes, a German actress and television personality, was growing restless. She was having an especially hectic day, shooting an episode of a TV series in a busy marketplace in Phu Quoc, Vietnam. The extras needed wrangling; the set was adjusted and readjusted. As the hours wore on, she checked her phone compulsively — she wanted to be alone in her room by 6 p.m. Finally, at 5:45, with the tropical light dimming, the director called it a wrap. Fernandes tore off her costume, raced to her nearby beachside hotel suite and made sure the digital “Do Not Disturb” sign was on. No one who worked on the show had any idea of what she was about to do.Listen to this article, read by Julia Whelan

Fernandes had recently finalized her divorce from another celebrity, an actor and comedian named Christian Ulmen. Ulmen was famous for being a master of cringe humor, or as the Germans call it with more precision, fremdscham (“someone else’s embarrassment”) humor — the kind that comes from watching another person experience an excruciatingly humiliating situation. In his most successful show, “Jerks,” Ulmen played a hapless actor and comedian also named Christian, whose desperate efforts to avoid awkward scenarios only dig him into deeper holes of shame. Escorts, sexual insecurities and fecal preoccupations feature prominently in the show, as do elaborate lies that pile up and eventually collapse beneath the men who lean on them.

Over the course of their 14-year marriage, Fernandes and Ulmen were a high-profile couple in Germany and the media covered their relationship regularly, often presenting it as a modern egalitarian marriage that reflected strong feminist values. After they had a child in 2012, Fernandes started speaking in interviews about the double standards applied to working mothers; she published a series of children’s books challenging traditional gender roles and produced a three-part documentary about the history of feminism. Ulmen, meanwhile, made news by declaring that he was taking a year off after their daughter was born.

At times, the public attention felt uncomfortable or outright invasive. When Fernandes gave birth to their daughter, she said, tabloids knew even before she had left the hospital room. Ulmen was obsessive about preserving their privacy — a journalist who was a friend of Ulmen’s wrote in a magazine profile that Ulmen seriously considered moving when the package delivery man started asking too many friendly questions. More troublingly, Fernandes was subjected to disturbing online harassment that went far beyond the usual comments about a female celebrity’s appearance. For years someone, or multiple people, had been impersonating her on social media, starting online affairs with men and creating and sharing or just recirculating pornography purportedly of her — material that featured other women who resembled her or imagery that might have been A.I.-generated. Others were charging money for the promise of access to her.

Fernandes initially did not devote much energy to the problem — how would she ever find these trolls typing away in some remote corner of the globe? — but in 2021, she learned about a video in which she appeared to be having sex with numerous men. She decided to respond as a journalist, by investigating her digital harassers. She was plagued by these shadowy figures for years and after considerable effort, she believed she had finally found one of them, a man who was conducting sexually explicit online affairs in her name. That March evening, she was ready to expose him.

The action Fernandes was about to take would dominate the news in Germany for weeks, inciting a nationwide movement that many would compare to #MeToo in the United States. Alone in her hotel suite, she prepared a post on Instagram to go up around the same time as the publication of a major news report about her experiences. She announced to her quarter of a million followers that she had filed a criminal complaint in Spain, where she had been living for the past few years, against a man she believed was responsible for digital and psychological abuse. “The perpetrator was (as I now know) quite close the whole time,” she wrote. “His name: Christian Ulmen.”

More On Middle East Wars, Occupation, Hunger, Civil Violence, Reactions

New York Times, These Generals Fought for Israel. Now They See ‘Jewish Terrorism’ as the Threat, Azam Ahmed, Natan Odenheimer and Ronen Bergman, Photographs by Ivor Prickett, Aug. 31, 2026. A growing number of former Israeli generals, intelligence officials and prime ministers are accusing settlers in the West Bank of committing ethnic cleansing with government support. “Once a society behaves this way,” one said, “that society is doomed.”

Maj. Gen. Eyal Ben-Reuven spent his life fighting for Israel. He survived the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, when his platoon was nearly wiped out, then went on to command a division in the West Bank and lead Israel’s ground forces in the 2006 war against Hezbollah.

But in recent months, he has returned to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, touring the territory with retired generals and former Israeli officials like himself. He has walked through the remains of a Palestinian school looted by Israeli settlers, and listened to Palestinian shepherds and farmers describe being tortured by settlers who seize their livestock and land.

Now, General Ben-Reuven says he has an entirely different understanding of the risks facing Israel today.

“This, what the settlers are doing here, is the real threat to Israel,” he said, his eyes welling with emotion. “This is more concerning to me than Iran, Gaza or Lebanon.”

Other former high-ranking Israeli officials touring the West Bank with him shared the same indignation.

“This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply,” Ephraim Sneh, a retired brigadier general and former minister of health, said of Israeli settlers’ attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.

Asaf Agmon, a retired Air Force general, went even further, comparing it to what some Israelis’ forebears endured in the Holocaust — not in the scale of the violence, he explained, but in the effort to erase the Palestinian presence from much of the West Bank.

“Once a society behaves this way,” he said, “that society is doomed.”

Zosma News via TikTok, Thai people take stand against Israel, Staff Report, Aug. 26, 2026. Thai people take stand against Israeli 'oppression.' Tensions involving Israeli visitors to Thailand are now out of control. The situation in Gaza is no longer just an isolated situation. Let's get this straight. A visitor killed an animal at a zoo, and the zoo owner said the visitors was no longer welcome.

U.S. Economy, Inflation, Jobs, Markets

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Trump Labor Secretary nominee pitched access to “America’s comprehensive welfare” to Chinese nationals, Judd Legum, right, Aug. 31, 2026. Keith Sonderling traveled to China to encourage investment in a Florida real estate development. Prospects were promised a green card and access government benefits. 

Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, who has been nominated by Trump to permanently lead the department, is a member of the White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud. In that role, Sonderling has pledged to “root out waste, fraud, and abuse“ in safety net programs like unemployment insurance “and protect hardworking Americans’ tax dollars.”

Prior to joining the Trump administration, however, as an attorney at the Florida law firm Gunster, Sonderling had a much different relationship with these programs.

During two trips to China in 2015, Sonderling made numerous speeches and presentations pitching Chinese nationals on investments in Florida. These events were designed to entice potential Chinese investors by emphasizing that their investment would make their entire family eligible for green cards, allowing them to live and work permanently in the United States through a controversial program known as EB-5.

At a July 2015 presentation Sonderling delivered with the Premier Capital Group, a Chinese language banner in the room emphasized that investors who received green cards would have access to “America’s Comprehensive Welfare.” This included “unemployment benefits,” “state disability benefits,” “food stamps,” “free school meals,” “low-cost public housing,” “Medicaid,” and “Retirement benefits.”(Original image source: Flickr.com, ks3106;)

Another banner that appeared alongside Sonderling as he spoke emphasized that investors could “get a green card in a short time” and that “one person applies, the whole family immigrates.” Recipients would have access to “free medical care and education benefits.”(Original image source: Flickr.com, ks3106)

Sonderling and Premier Capital Group were seeking $500,000 investments in the Wellness Resort Hotel and Ocean-View Condominium Project. (Premier Capital Group also charged a $13,000 fee for its role.) Sonderling visited the Premier Capital Group offices as well. The project was later subject to numerous lawsuits alleging construction defects, improper zoning, and unpaid contractors.

An archived version of the firm website said that, at Gunster, Sonderling assisted “various clients with their international business dealings and capital fundraising throughout Asia.”

The China trips were documented extensively by Sonderling in hundreds of photos reviewed by Popular Information that were published to two public Flickr accounts. The Chinese text that appeared in the photos was translated using artificial intelligence. Sonderling’s activities in China have not been previously reported.

The photos document that Sonderling participated in at least five speaking engagements touting EB-5 visas in China. Most of these seem to be connected to the same hotel and condo project.

Among Sonderling’s events was a speech sponsored by the Kaiping General Chamber of Commerce, which is closely tied to the Chinese Communist Party. The same event was co-sponsored by the Kaiping Foreign & Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau, which is part of the Chinese government, and the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, a state-controlled bank.

Sonderling’s nomination to become the permanent Labor Secretary is now pending before the Senate. Contacted through the Labor Department, Sonderling did not respond to a request for comment.Trump administration — and others — blast EB-5 as a vehicle for fraud and abuse

In a February 2025 appearance in the Oval Office, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called the EB-5 program “full of nonsense, make believe and fraud.” Lutnick described it as a way to buy “a green card that was low priced.” Lutnick said that the Trump administration would replace the “ridiculous” EB-5 program with a Trump Gold Card that would sell green cards for $5 million.

The Trump Gold Card program was formally launched, with a reduced price of $1 million, in December 2025. At that event, Lutnick said that “the average green card holder earned less than the average American” and, as a result, “were more likely to be on the dole and be on our assistance programs.” Access to these assistance programs was pitched as a key benefit of the EB-5 program during Sonderling’s tour. (The Trump Gold Card, however, did not replace the EB-5 program, which still exists.)

Lutnick’s commentary was only the latest criticism of the EB-5 program by Trump administration officials. In June 2018, L. Francis Cissna, who served as Director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services during Trump’s first term, testified at a Senate hearing called “Citizenship for Sale: Oversight of the EB-5 Investor Visa Program.” During the hearing, Cissna raised concerns about “fraud, abuse, and national security risks related to the program.” Cissna testified that “[i]n the absence of legislative reforms” Congress should consider allowing key aspects of the program to expire.

Criticisms of the program are not limited to the Trump administration. A 2015 Government Accountability Office report said the EB-5 program had “[u]nique fraud risks,” including “uncertainties in verifying that the funds invested were obtained lawfully and various investment-related schemes to defraud investors.” In a March 2018 floor speech, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said the EB-5 program “sells, yes sells, our citizenship.” Grassley described it as a “corrupt, scandal-clad program.”

New York Times, Global Oil Prices Jump After U.S. and Iran Trade Attacks, Jenny Gross, Jason Karaian and Rich Barbieri, Aug. 31, 2026. Oil prices rose on Monday after the United States and Iran exchanged attacks for the first time in a month, pushing the global benchmark for crude back above $90 a barrel, after a sharp fall last week.

Over the past week, about 15 ships per day on average passed through the Strait of Hormuz, according to Kpler, a maritime data company. Before the war, more than 130 ships every day transited the vital waterway between Iran and Oman, which carried one-fifth of the world’s oil and a large amount of gas before the war.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said this month that eight million barrels of oil a day are being exported from the Persian Gulf, though many independent analysts say the number is lower. Tanker Trackers, a maritime tracking firm that uses vessel data and satellite imagery, determined that some 5.2 million barrels of crude oil a day passed through the strait on average over the past 28 days, Samir Madani, the firm’s co-founder said on Monday. Before the war began, nearly 15 million barrels of oil a day were sent through the strait.

Even as the Trump administration is urging ships to transit, attacks on vessels continue. 

More On Russia Invasion of Ukraine 

New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Europe Protests as U.S. Invites Russian Minister to Finance Meeting, Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport, Aug. 31, 2026. The Trump administration’s decision to invite Russia’s finance minister to a gathering of top global financial officials in North Carolina drew immediate protests from European nations on Monday. Europe has sought to isolate Moscow since it invaded Ukraine in 2022, and the Russian minister’s surprise appearance comes amid increased tension between President Trump and longtime allies. 

Russia’s finance minister made a surprise appearance at a gathering of top global economic policymakers on Monday after a prolonged absence, an invitation that was extended by the Trump administration but drew rebukes and protests from European officials committed to isolating Moscow for its war against Ukraine. 

New York Times, Russia Torments Kyiv With New Tactic of Nonstop Waves of Drones, Siobhán O’Grady and Yurii, Shyvala, Aug. 31, 2026. The nearly constant air raids, a shift from years of largely overnight attacks, have left residents exhausted and on edge.

Russia has turned to a terrifying new tactic in its assaults on Ukraine, launching nonstop waves of armed drones in recent days into busy areas of the capital, Kyiv. The relentless attacks have left residents exhausted and on edge as air raid sirens bellow nearly constantly.

With Moscow firing drone after drone into Kyiv, including many powered with jet engines that help them fly so fast they are difficult to intercept, many in the capital have begun to accept that they may be facing a new phase of the war.

This period threatens to be more dangerous and unpredictable for Kyiv than any since the first weeks of Russia’s 2022 invasion. It comes as the city already faces increased danger from powerful Russian ballistic missiles as Moscow capitalizes on depleted Ukrainian air defenses.

While Russia has long conducted deadly drone attacks on Kyiv, the weapons have often come in overnight barrages and have not tormented the city throughout the day. Residents long ago grew used to the menacing hum of slower-moving drones but now face the danger of the jet-powered models, which crash into a target before anyone nearby has a chance to run. 

Floods in Nepal and Tibet 

Associated Press, Hundreds feared stuck in hydropower tunnels as flood deaths surpass 950 in Nepal and China, Shristi Kafle and Huizhong Wu, Nepal’s disaster agency said Monday that 903 deaths had been counted in that country, with 4,247 people, including 592 foreigners, missing. As of Sunday, Chinese authorities reported 16 deaths and 546 missing, and Chinese state media said 261 of the missing were foreigners, including over a hundred Nepalis.

 Rescuers raced Monday to free hundreds of workers believed to be trapped in tunnels at hydropower sites that were buried in mud by catastrophic flooding on the Nepal-China border, as the death toll climbed and increasingly desperate families searched for missing loved ones.

The combined deaths in Nepal and China surpassed 950, with more than 4,400 people missing. A private-sector association representing power companies said at least 900 workers were unaccounted for at 12 hydropower projects damaged by the flash floods in Nepal’s Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts.

About 500 of those workers were believed to be trapped in tunnels. At least one expert said that some workers could have access to oxygen, but others warned that the chances of finding survivors were diminishing. As the rescue efforts intensified, four bodies were recovered from three mud-filled tunnels, Nepal’s army said.

Some workers managed to call for help when the disaster struck last Wednesday, and others who managed to flee reported to authorities and relatives that many of their colleagues were still in the tunnels, said Mohan Kumar Dangi, president of the Independent Power Producers’ Association, Nepal, or IPPAN.

New York Times, A Principal Saved 900 Students Before His School Was Washed Away in Nepal, Binod Ghimire and Claire Moses, Aug. 31, 2026. Rajendra Dawadi had less than 15 minutes to act on a warning of approaching floodwaters. His swift evacuation plan saved hundreds of lives.

Wednesday seemed like any other morning for Rajendra Dawadi, the principal of a school in Nepal.

“Everything was going normally,” he said.

That changed around 9:10 a.m., when Mr. Dawadi was teaching a class at the Tribhuvan Trishuli School in Nuwakot, a district just north of Kathmandu, the country’s capital. A staff member burst into the classroom, shouting that a major flood was headed their way.

The news began to spread as relatives living upstream sent warnings to anyone in the path of the fast-approaching flood waters.

Mr. Dawadi had to make some quick decisions.

He told all the children who were present — about 900 of the school’s total 1,643 students — to run to higher ground. Only older pupils, ages 11 to 18, were at school when the floods hit, which aided the quick evacuation, Mr. Dawadi said. (The younger students did not start class until 10 a.m.)

“They were old enough to run immediately,” he said in a phone interview on Monday. “It would not have been possible to save everyone, had kindergarten and primary school students also been there.”ImageDamaged houses and buildings alongside a muddy river.Damaged properties along the Trishuli River, where the Tribhuvan Trishuli School once stood, in Nuwakot, Nepal, on Monday.Credit...Sunil Kataria/Reuters

Pupils who had arrived at the school earlier by bus were told to get back on them, and Mr. Dawadi instructed the drivers to leave the area as quickly as possible.

“A couple of students became traumatized and fainted,” Mr. Dawadi said, adding that those children were transported to safety on teachers’ motorbikes.

“I thought that even if the warning turned out to be wrong, the worst it would cost us was one day of study,” Mr. Dawadi said. “But taking it lightly could mean the loss of hundreds of lives.”

His swift evacuation plan saved those lives.

Around 9:23 a.m., about 13 minutes after Mr. Dawadi heard the first warning, a deluge of water, mud and debris swept through the area. The school was destroyed in seconds, and at least one teacher remained missing as of Monday, Mr. Dawadi said.

At least 4,200 people were missing in Nepal as of Monday, less than a week after a torrent of water tore through the Himalayan river valleys, sweeping away buildings, homes, roads and other infrastructure.

Only a fraction of the thousands of missing had been identified among the dead, and officials said they expected the death toll to increase. So far, the authorities said, the disaster had killed nearly 1,000 people in Nepal.

The students’ rescue was a rarity among the reports of missing and dead and amid the destruction from the floods. In Bharatpur, a city southwest of the school, hundreds of bodies had washed up downstream. The local morgues had received far more bodies than they could accommodate.

Over the weekend, rescue workers struggled to extricate workers trapped in hydropower tunnels. The Nepal Army said its thermal drones were not detecting any signs of lif

More News Roundups

The Parnas Perspective, Morning News Update: Three-Time Trump Voters ‘Fed Up,’ Iran War Reignites, Pentagon Secretly Hires Conservative Influencers, Canadians Blast Trump, Aaron Parnas, right, Aug. 31, 2026. It’s a big one today. Six months into the Iran war, the ceasefire-that-wasn’t reignited over the weekend, with US strikes on Larak Island prompting Iranian retaliation against American bases in Jordan and the UAE, and oil prices spiking as a result. Closer to home, cracks are showing in Trump’s own coalition: NBC News found even three-time Trump voters in swing districts souring on him over inflation and the war, while a Washington Post investigation reveals the Pentagon has been quietly slipping conservative influencers into undisclosed government roles to amplify Pete Hegseth’s culture-war fights.

Meanwhile, the US-Canada trade relationship keeps fraying, between collapsed tariff talks, questions over who’s actually steering Trump’s trade agenda, and yes, that lake renaming saga refuses to die. Beyond the political chaos, we’re also covering the search for hundreds still trapped in Nepal’s flooded hydropower tunnels, a deadly flash flood at the Grand Canyon, a genuine climate win out of Turkmenistan, and a very good, very fat marmot named Dawn.

It’s shaping up to be a busy week with Congress back in session, and I’m working on a deep dive following the money on all things Trump. Apparently I’ve also pissed off some folks near the White House: my feed’s been full of MAGA-aligned accounts calling me a “criminal” for reporting the news. They want me to stop. 

Here’s the news:

Trump voters express frustration:

Repeat Trump voters in swing districts are voicing new frustration with rising costs and the war on Iran. NBC News spoke with voters across eight competitive congressional districts stretching from central New Jersey to Omaha, Nebraska, and found a fresh willingness even among loyal MAGA voters to criticize Trump on inflation, the war, and his White House ballroom project. Louis Marcelino, a three-time Trump voter in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, said “every single American here is paying the price for that war” and suggested he might not vote at all in November, or if he does, it could be to slow Trump’s agenda. Rich Ehrhardt, another three-time Trump voter from Nazareth, Pennsylvania, said he’s unhappy with how the war is being handled and wants Trump to end “forever wars” as promised rather than “make up things that we want to hear.” These voices reflect broader polling showing consistent Trump disapproval in the low 30s to low 40s, with fewer than half of Republicans saying they “strongly approve” of him in a recent Reuters/Ipsos survey.

Other longtime supporters cited corruption, affordability, and Trump’s demolition of the White House East Wing as breaking points. Bob Gorra, an 89-year-old retiree in Morris County, New Jersey, said he’s troubled by what he sees as ongoing corruption and Washington’s failure to control costs, saying too many Americans are “starving” or “poor” under the current economy. Darcey Liljequist, a 75-year-old retired nurse’s aide and three-time Trump voter in Davenport, Iowa, said tearing down the East Wing for a ballroom revealed a selfish side of Trump she hadn’t seen before, comparing him to “a king instead of a president.” She said she wants him to “go live with a senior citizen living on $1,500 a month in Social Security” to understand ordinary people’s struggles. The White House pushed back through spokeswoman Olivia Wales, who touted middle-class tax cuts, lower prescription drug costs, border security, falling violent crime, and record 401(k) growth as evidence of Trump’s record.

Not every voter has turned, but the discontent lands amid dire midterm warnings for Republicans. Katie Heinz, a 49-year-old interior designer and three-time Trump voter in Medina, Ohio, said she still thinks he’s “doing a good job,” though she wishes he didn’t “ruffle feathers” so often. Still, the broader pattern of grumbling comes as Republicans face fresh warnings of “historic losses” in the midterms, with a new polling aggregate showing the party trailing in eight major Senate battlegrounds. Notably, that list includes traditionally reliable red states like Texas and Ohio, with just two months left before Election Day. The White House has been approached for comment on the specific voter complaints detailed in the report.

Pentagon uses taxpayer dollars to hire conservative influencers:

According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon has quietly placed conservative military influencers into undisclosed government roles. Retired officers Rob Maness and Kurt Schlichter, who have 135,000 and nearly 620,000 X followers respectively, currently hold active “.civ” government email addresses tied to the office of Anthony Tata, the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness. A third influencer, attorney Thomas Anderson (who writes as “Cynical Publius” to over 323,000 followers), was similarly listed earlier this year but has since disappeared from Pentagon records. None of the three responded substantively to requests for comment, and the Pentagon declined to say whether they’re paid, what their roles entail, or how long the assignments will last.

The arrangements exploit special employment categories that let them work while avoiding public disclosure. The individuals are classified as “special government employees” (capped at 130 days per year) or “highly qualified experts” (who can work with or without pay), and it’s unclear what compensation, if any, each receives or when their assignments began. In May, the three traveled to the Army War College on behalf of a Hegseth-created task force hunting for “woke” ideology, questioning students and faculty about leaders like Hegseth and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine, leaving some students uncertain whether candor would carry consequences. All three continued publishing pro-Hegseth commentary in outlets like the Daily Caller, Townhall, and The Post’s own letters section without disclosing their Pentagon ties, and a Post spokesperson confirmed Maness never disclosed his government connection before one such letter ran in July.

The revelations follow a related controversy involving another undisclosed Pentagon employee, fueling broader alarm about a “troll army” for hire. Influencer Jennica Pounds (DataRepublican) recently accused a State Department official of trying to entrap her into leaking documents, only for it to emerge that Pounds herself was a paid Pentagon special government employee, a disclosure that split fellow influencers between defending her and arguing she should have said so upfront. Former GOP Congressman Adam Kinzinger publicly questioned how many “blue checkmark” influencers pushing administration talking points are secretly on the federal payroll, while Hegseth, a former Fox News host, has separately reshaped Pentagon press access by ousting many mainstream reporters in favor of a friendlier right-leaning press corps. The Pentagon has disclosed at least one comparable hire, journalist Jerry Dunleavy’s role assisting a review of the Afghanistan withdrawal, underscoring the contrast with how Maness, Schlichter, and Anderson’s assignments were kept under wraps.

Iran war reignites:

Strikes and retaliation escalate the six-month war. U.S. Central Command struck two Iranian rocket launchers on Larak Island Sunday after IRGC forces were seen preparing to fire rockets and lay sea mines in the Strait of Hormuz, marking the first American strikes in over a month. Iran responded by launching ballistic missiles at the King Hussein and Al-Azraq air bases in Jordan, targeting U.S. personnel at a base in the UAE, and claiming it shot down a U.S. drone over the strait. Jordan’s military said it intercepted eight incoming missiles before they caused damage, and the UAE condemned the Iranian attacks as a “dangerous escalation” while saying it intercepted a drone over its territorial waters. Iran’s foreign ministry warned it would not hesitate to “respond decisively” to further aggression and cautioned that any country assisting U.S. strikes would bear responsibility for the consequences.

Oil markets and shipping lanes are rattled again. Brent crude jumped 3.8% to $91.40 a barrel and U.S. crude rose by the same margin to $86.58 after the exchange of strikes, continuing a pattern of price spikes tied to escalations since the war began in February. Iran’s military claimed a supertanker attempting to transit the Strait of Hormuz without permission was struck by sea mines, catching fire and stopping in the water, though it did not name the vessel or specify its location. The mine claim comes just days after CENTCOM commander Admiral Brad Cooper said U.S. forces had finished clearing all sea mines from the strait’s shipping lanes. Separately, Iran said it seized a bulk carrier accused of dumping oil and sludge into the strait, adding another layer of disruption to traffic through the critical waterway.

Trump escalates rhetoric while Iran pushes a narrative about Israel’s role. President Trump posted an AI-generated video on Truth Social claiming to show Iran’s Kharg Island oil hub “being blown to smithereens,” though there was no evidence of any actual recent attack there, and Iran’s state oil company said operations on the island had not stopped. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of tricking the U.S. into joining the war, claiming Netanyahu has boasted in Hebrew about using extensive U.S. media appearances to influence American policy. The Trump administration has pushed back for months on the idea that Israel led the U.S. into the conflict, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio previously saying the U.S. struck preemptively after learning Israel planned its own attack on Iran. The dueling narratives underscore ongoing disagreement over how and why the war expanded to direct U.S. involvement in the first place.

International pressure campaign continues alongside the fighting. The European Union said Monday it would keep working with the U.S. and other G7 partners to maintain economic pressure on Iran, welcoming what it called efforts to end Iran’s “destabilizing activities” while still leaving the door open to diplomacy and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. This follows the Trump administration’s announcement last week of a shift toward “economic warfare,” including new sanctions meant to break the stalemate after six months of conflict. A Financial Times report from earlier in August suggested Iranian forces had assessed the possibility of striking U.S. assets in Europe if Trump escalated further, which would mark a significant expansion of the war onto NATO territory. Separately, Iranian state media reported that Iranian authorities seized a cargo ship accused of polluting the strait with oil and sludge, an incident unrelated to the military escalation but adding to the broader picture of instability around the waterway.

Canada:

A massive floating island, estimated at 70 by 140 metres (bigger than a football field), mysteriously appeared on B.C.’s Williston Reservoir earlier this month before vanishing from satellite imagery by August 5, likely drifting back toward a sheltered shoreline rather than sinking. B.C. Hydro spokesperson Bob Gammer says the reservoir, which hasn’t been full in 14 years due to this year’s heavy snowpack and rain, probably freed a long-accumulated mass of driftwood, soil, and rooted trees from the shore as water levels rose, a phenomenon also seen at Wisconsin’s Lake Chippewa and Africa’s Lake Victoria. Local boater Rocky Avery first captured and shared footage of the island, which went viral and initially drew skepticism from B.C. Hydro given the rise of AI-generated video, until satellite data from July 21 confirmed it was real. B.C. Hydro is now relying on public sightings and satellite monitoring to track the reservoir, which is too large to patrol by boat, and is watching for the island’s possible reappearance while warning boaters that submerged logs and debris pose real hazards on the water.

With US-Canada trade talks collapsing into a potential all-out tariff war, questions are swirling over who really controls Trump’s trade agenda, as US trade representative Jamieson Greer (known for a calm, methodical style honed under Robert Lighthizer) navigates tension with commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who reportedly torpedoed a near-final deal by objecting to proposed tariff reductions on Canadian steel, aluminum, and cars, while trade adviser Peter Navarro pushes a harder line rooted in fears that Canada serves as a backdoor for Chinese goods. Canadian PM Mark Carney has accused the US of negotiating in bad faith and pointed to visible disunity among Trump’s team, a claim the White House denies but experts like William Reinsch and Wendy Cutler say reflects real turf tension between Greer’s trade portfolio and Lutnick’s control over national-security tariff authority. Ultimately, though, analysts argue the real driver is Trump himself, whose fixed belief that “tariffs are good” and reported penchant for changing terms after deals are struck (illustrated by his signing of the Lake Ontario-to-”Lake America” order hours after Greer tried to smooth over a related dispute about Quebec’s French-language protections) means the officials around him have limited room to maneuver, a dynamic other US trading partners are reportedly watching closely as they weigh their own responses.

Donald Trump reached out to Apple directly to ask them to change the name of Lake Ontario. Trump's Interior Secretary suggests that Apple may change the name "soon."

Other news:

A flash flood tore through the Grand Canyon on Saturday afternoon, killing at least one person, a 46-year-old man whose body was found near Crystal Rapids, with as many as 15 people still unaccounted for in the Bright Angel Canyon and Phantom Ranch area. The floodwaters destroyed nearly all the footbridges spanning Bright Angel Creek, cutting off hiker access and forcing park staff and the Arizona Department of Public Safety to evacuate at least 62 people, some by helicopter. The flooding also knocked out the water pipeline serving the South Rim, prompting the park to halt overnight concession stays, shut off campground spigots, and ban all wood and charcoal fires just ahead of the Labor Day weekend. Hikers described the storm’s speed and violence, from a 4-foot wall of debris rushing through Phantom Ranch to a creek “black with debris and flowing rapidly,” and rangers are warning that more storms forecast through Monday could trigger additional debris flows and rockfall. The Park Service has asked anyone with information about missing hikers or backpackers to call its tip line as search efforts continue.

The President posted pictures of himself golfing over the weekend:

Rescue teams in Nepal are racing to reach more than 900 people believed trapped in the tunnels and underground areas of about half a dozen hydropower projects following last Wednesday’s catastrophic flash floods, with workers digging through deep mud and debris to reach stations like Chilime Hydropower, where one rescuer described the interior as “just bodies” as far as he could see. The death toll has climbed to 903 in Nepal and 16 in Tibet, with more than 4,000 missing in Nepal and another roughly 500 in Tibet, while hundreds of unidentified bodies have already been buried in shallow graves across the region. The Red Cross estimates over 90,000 people have been affected, and Nepal’s prime minister called it an “unprecedented and devastating natural disaster,” with nearly 21,000 security personnel now involved in the response. China has sent more than 2,100 rescue workers and roughly $33 million in aid, and while Nepal says it doesn’t need general search-and-rescue help, it has leaned on India and China for tunnel-rescue expertise; rescue efforts have repeatedly been paused for bad weather and fears that a border lake formed by the disaster could trigger new flooding, though operations resumed at a better pace on Monday. Chinese state media has linked the flood to glacier instability from long-term climate change, though Nepali officials say China has shared little data on glacier and water-level risks, raising concerns about future disaster preparedness.

Turkmenistan has begun repairing the ageing oil and gas infrastructure responsible for the “mindboggling” methane mega-leaks the Guardian first exposed in 2023, fixing eight leaks so far through repaired pipes, wells, and flares in what UN officials are calling a genuine, if still limited, breakthrough. The country received 192 UN methane alerts in the past year and responded to about 20%, a stark contrast to the US, which got the second-most alerts (138) but responded to none and fixed no leaks, alongside Iran, Russia, and China, which also ignored every alert. Methane traps 80 times more heat than CO2 and drives roughly a quarter of current global warming, making leak fixes like these unusually fast and cheap climate wins, though UN program manager Meghan Demeter cautioned Turkmenistan’s eight fixes are “an incredible first step” rather than a solution to the country’s broader emissions. Worldwide, 43 leaks have been sealed through the alert system so far, including a 40-year-old leak in Algeria, with Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina achieving 100% response rates even though Mexico has yet to fix the single worst leak on record, a 37-tonne-per-hour leak equivalent to 7 million SUVs. US engagement with the alert system effectively ended under the Trump administration after a modest start under Biden, consistent with Trump’s dismissal of climate change as a “con job” at the UN last year.

A Port Authority shuttle bus jumped a curb and crashed into a concrete wall on the Terminal B departures level at Newark Liberty International Airport just after 3 a.m. on August 31. Thirteen people were injured, three of them seriously though none life-threatening, with the remaining ten sustaining minor injuries. The crash prompted the closure of the Departures Level 3 roadway for a police investigation, with Terminal B passengers now directed to use Level 2 for drop-off instead. The disruption has snarled roadways around the airport and caused more than a dozen flight delays this morning.

Airport shuttle bus hits wall at Newark Airport; 13 people injured, 3 seriously

Bootleg screenings of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” have swept across Russian cinemas, with fans in costume packing theaters in cities like Kazan and St. Petersburg despite Sony Pictures halting all theatrical releases there after the invasion of Ukraine. Cinemas skirt the law by illegally obtaining digital cinema packages through third-party distributors and selling tickets under the guise of a “prescreening service,” a workaround that film critic Timur Aliev says authorities, owners, and audiences alike simply “turn a blind eye to.” One notable edit did make it through official channels: 18 seconds of a song by exiled Kremlin critic Monetochka were cut from the Russian copies, which she called “painful and sad” even though she expected it. The film’s release was also delayed three weeks to avoid competing with the state-backed fairy-tale movie “The Last Warrior: Kolobok,” a decision that sparked online backlash, including death threats against that film’s director, and left moviegoers feeling “deprived of choice.” Despite the friction, the eventual Spider-Man release still pulled in a record 1.17 billion rubles ($13.9 million) over its opening weekend, the best summer weekend in Russian box-office history.

A marmot named Dawn was crowned champion of the inaugural Fat Marmot Week, a contest run by the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory’s marmot project, after winning both the mass-gain and popular-vote competitions among eight yellow-bellied marmots. The six-year-old marmot weighed in at about 6kg (13.2lb), which researcher Julien Martin called one of the heaviest individuals ever measured for the species. More than 23,000 votes were cast over the week-long contest, an offshoot of Alaska’s popular Fat Bear Week, timed to when marmots roughly double their body weight each summer before five months of hibernation. The contest comes as the decades-old marmot study, running since 1962, has been fighting federal science funding cuts, an effort that recently included launching an OnlyFans account called OnlyMarms that has raised over $100,000 through subscriptions, donations, and a marmot-themed cryptocurrency. Organizers have promised another round of voting for Fat Marmot Week 2027. 

More On U.S. History, Culture, Media, Education

AlterNet America, Opinion: Trump Wants the FCC to Punish a Journalist for One Word, Ryan Rose, Aug. 31, 2026. Trump threatens NBC's Welker with FCC punishment, the FBI loosens hiring standards, West Point fires its climate scientist, and a judge blocks speech-based deportations. 

Trump is threatening to send the FCC after an NBC journalist who accurately described his endorsement record as “mixed.” The FBI has quietly dropped its ban on hiring applicants who have patronized sex workers, stolen from employers, or engaged in bestiality. West Point fired its only climate scientist after he refused to stop teaching that humans cause climate change. And a federal judge just ruled that the Trump administration cannot deport students for criticizing Israel.

Before we get to the news, a brief ask: AlterNet America was launched as a direct response to MAGA billionaires buying up networks like CBS and newspapers like the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. We’re going all-in on the bet that reader-supported journalism can compete directly with the billionaires by being the one thing they can’t buy.

We’re incredibly grateful to all the free subscribers who have signed up to receive our newsletters in recent weeks. But if you’ve been thinking about making the leap to become a paying subscriber, this is the time when it matters the most. Please upgrade today. Upgrade to paidTrump Threatens NBC’s Kristen Welker With FCC ‘Punishment’

Apparently the FCC now stands for Federal Compliment Commission.

Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday that Meet the Press host Kristen Welker would be reported to the Federal Communications Commission for “rebuke or punishment” because she noted that candidates he’s endorsed have had “mixed results.”

He called her assessment a “purposeful inaccuracy” and a “Threat to our Country,” despite the fact that six candidates he endorsed lost their primary elections in August alone. In a second post, he attacked what he called “FAKE POLLS USED BY OUR CROOKED MEDIA” and wrote “FCC TO THE RESCUE.”

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr previously issued a threat to broadcasters over their coverage of the Iran war in March after Trump complained on social media. In April, Carr initiated an unusual challenge to ABC’s local station licenses the day after Trump called for Jimmy Kimmel’s firing. He also has an open investigation into NBC’s parent company, Comcast, over what Trump has called “invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”

Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, responded that the FCC has no authority to punish journalists the administration does not like. The FCC’s complaint form does not currently include a box for “a journalist used a word I didn’t like,” but give it time.

New York Times, John Galliano Withdraws From Met Museum Show After Backlash, Vanessa Friedman and Jacob Bernstein, Aug. 31, 2026. Donors, politicians and Jewish leaders questioned the Met’s decision to honor Galliano, a fashion designer who was found guilty of a hate crime for his antisemitic outbursts.

Facing an intense backlash, the influential fashion designer John Galliano has taken the unprecedented step of withdrawing from a planned exhibition in his honor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“After much reflection and discussion with all those involved, I have decided, with great sadness, that it is best for the exhibition not to take place at this time,” Galliano wrote in a statement posted to his Instagram page.

He also expressed “profound and enduring” gratitude to the museum’s leadership, and acknowledged the pain his past words had caused.

“I do not want the debate surrounding me to place the Met in a difficult position or distract from the remarkable work of the Costume Institute,” he wrote. “I also recognize and respect that an exhibition honoring my work would be painful for some.”

In recent days, a furor mounted over the museum’s choice to honor Galliano, who was convicted of an antisemitic hate crime by a French court in 2011. He would have been only the third living designer to receive a solo exhibition at the Costume Institute, the Met’s fashion wing.

Given that the Met Gala has traditionally served as the opening night for the Costume Institute’s spring exhibition, the plan risked placing the museum in the position of seeming to sanctify Galliano during an event that has become the Super Bowl of glamour. 

Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: Aug. 29, 2026 [Cherry-picked History], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Aug. 31, 2026. One of our founding myths is that of George Washington and the cherry tree. In his The Life of Washington, first published in 1800, minister and writer Mason Locke Weems, more commonly known as Parson Weems, wrote down for the citizens of this new nation the qualities they should require in a leader.

The book was written not to reflect the facts of Washington’s life—biographies would not focus on facts for almost a century—but to show virtues the nation’s youth should imitate and to establish a set of attributes against which future voters could judge those vying to lead the nation.

Weems’s Washington was generous, reverent, studious, athletic, martial, hardworking, and beloved by his comrades. And, beginning with an 1806 edition of the book, he could not tell a lie. According to Weems, when George was about six years old “he was made the wealthy master of a hatchet, of which, like most little boys, he was immoderately fond, and was constantly going about chopping every thing that came in his way. One day, in the garden…he unluckily tried the edge of his hatchet on the body of a beautiful young English cherry-tree…. The next morning the old gentleman finding out what had befallen his tree…, came into the House; and with much warmth asked for the mischievous author…. Nobody could tell him anything about it. Presently George and his hatchet made their appearance. ‘George,’ said his father, ‘do you know who killed that beautiful little cherry tree yonder in the garden?’

“This was a tough question; and George staggered under it for a moment; but quickly recovered himself: and looking at his father, with the sweet face of youth brightened with the inexpressible charm of all-conquering truth, he bravely cried out, ‘I can’t tell a lie, Pa; you know I can’t tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.’

“‘Run to my arms, you dearest boy,’ cried his father in transports, ‘run to my arms; glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son is more worth than a thousand trees, though blossomed with silver, and their fruits of purest gold.’”

Like many of the other anecdotes Weems delivered, this story was almost certainly invented. But it established the importance of truth-telling in a leader.

On Friday, Rick Maese of the Washington Post reported that despite orders from U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes saying that she wanted advance notice before the government took down more than ten trees from the East Potomac Golf Links or brought equipment larger than a sedan onto the property, the Trump administration has taken down more than sixty trees in apparent preparation for Trump to redesign the golf course.

Opponents have sued to stop the redesign of the historic publicly owned course. Trump has said the makeover will begin on September 1, but Maese notes that the administration has released “no final design, construction schedule or estimated cost.” It has apparently not conducted either environmental or historical preservation reviews. It has not said how changes to the course will affect public access to the three courses and to the popular recreation path on the property.

Reyes said she would not stop administration officials from doing routine maintenance on the property, and the administration says the tree removal is routine maintenance. A spokesperson for the Interior Department said: “Arborists are doing routine maintenance at East Potomac Park with selective removal of hazard trees, non-native invasive trees, and declining and dying trees that cannot be brought back to good health through any degree of intervention.”

One of the trees they have cut down is a cherry tree.

It seems like the writers for the 250th season of American democracy are becoming increasingly desperate to get the country’s attention.

On Friday, Trump announced: “The United States of America has just entered into an Agreement with the Country of Venezuela on, THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY! At my direction, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, working closely with Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez, and, through a partnership with private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer. This Historic Transaction MORE THAN DOUBLES American Oil Reserves, greatly increases our Oil Supply, and will substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans, long into the future, while helping to continue to set Venezuela on a course toward Tremendous Success and Great Prosperity. This Transaction will greatly strengthen the already growing relationship between Venezuela and the United States! Thank you for your attention to this groundbreaking matter.”

There are reasons to greet this announcement with skepticism.

A U.S. official told Megan Messerly, Ben Lefebvre, and Scott Waldman of Politico that this deal was a new venture between the U.S. government and an “experienced private operator in Venezuela.” Although the official did not identify which operator that is, it became clear over the weekend that the person in question is Alejandro Betancourt López.

Rebecca F. Elliott, Anatoly Kurmanaev, and Edward Wong of the New York Times explained that Betancourt’s family controls Venezuela’s second largest private oil producer, North American Blue Energy Partners. Betancourt has been accused of corruption for years; Switzerland has investigated him for money laundering and has issued a warrant for his arrest, although it has not charged him.

According to the New York Times reporters, it appears the plan is for the U.S. government to back North American Blue Energy Partners, which will, in turn, develop oil reserves in 17 of Venezuela’s oil fields. The U.S. official who talked to the Politico journalists said the new venture would be the second-biggest private oil company in the world, after Saudi Aramco. The U.S. would control 55% of the venture’s output. When production starts, the person told the journalists, “the resulting stable supply of at-cost oil in our Hemisphere will go toward filling the U.S. strategic petroleum reserve and fulfilling the supply needs of our Great U.S. Military.”

But an executive in the oil industry told the journalists that the deal was “built on a legal environment that does not exist. The Venezuelan constitution does not allow for anyone other than [Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company] to own rights to oil and gas in the country,” the executive pointed out.

“The end of story,” the person said, “is the president wants to say we have billions of barrels of oil in reserve. That would act as a price stabilization nuclear bomb. Oh, the Iranians have blocked Hormuz? The president could say[,] ‘I have 65 billion barrels in reserve.’”

The Politico journalists report that Trump has been frustrated that U.S. companies have been slow to invest in Venezuela and that the administration has pressured Rodríguez to give them better terms. Samantha Schmidt and Helena Carpio of the Washington Post today flat out said the deal “cements the United States’ long-term dominance over Venezuela, which has become a neo-colony since the U.S. military’s capture of Maduro in January, when Trump vowed to ‘run’ the country and exploit its oil wealth.”

Last September, the Trump administration began striking small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that Trump claimed—without evidence—were being operated by narcoterrorists from Venezuela. The U.S. massed military vessels off Venezuela’s shores, where they blockaded Venezuelan oil tankers after Trump called Venezuela’s government a foreign terrorist organization. On January 3, Trump authorized the military to kidnap Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife Celia Flores in a nighttime raid and bring them to the U.S. for trial on weapons and drug charges.

Although opponents of Maduro, who had seized power after losing a presidential election, cheered the raid in the belief that Trump would help them put opposition candidate Edmundo González in power, in fact the administration supported Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez. On January 5 it formally recognized her as Venezuela’s head of state. Venezuela’s high court disagreed. It called Maduro’s absence a “kidnapping” and determined that under the country’s constitution, elections had to be held to replace him.

Now the U.S. government says it has made a “deal” with Rodríguez, who told reporters: “The agreement is based on a very simple premise. Each party contributes what it does best. Venezuela contributes oil, its industry and the experience of its workers accumulated over more than 100 years. The United States contributes the capital and technology needed to recover and develop those assets.”

“So, let me get this straight,” national security reporter David Rothkopf wrote. “[T]he US illegally attacks a country, kidnaps its president, threatens its government with massive military force, gets them to hand over to US control a huge portion of their national assets, hails the billions it has already brought in and promises billions more[,] but we don’t know where the money’s going, how it is going to benefit the US, if it is going to benefit the US, who’s privately going to benefit, what side deals have been struck with the corrupt leaders of their country or ours, & we are supposed to celebrate this act of aggression and theft that violates international law and that could well turn out to be a massive mafia-style shakedown scheme to benefit the anti-democratic forces in Venezuela and the US, the president’s friends and supporters, possibly the president and his family?”

Rothkopf appears to have understood the point of the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.

The Wrap, Washington Post Columnist Slams ‘Traitor’ Pentagon Source Leaking Hegseth Meetings to Paper, A.J. Katz, Aug. 31, 2026. Marc Thiessen says the government official behind a classified Iran War report should be prosecuted.

Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen called the government source behind his own newspaper’s reporting on military opposition to prolonging the Iran war a “traitor” who should face prosecution.

“Whoever leaked this is a traitor and ought to be prosecuted,” the conservative columnist wrote Sunday on X, sharing the Post’s exclusive report that senior military commanders had warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth against sustaining large-scale operations against Iran.Donald Trump/Washington Post (Credit: Getty Images)Read NextTrump Calls Washington Post Report of Hegseth Rift Completely False and ‘Treasonous’

The comments created an unusual tension at the Post, which had already defended its reporting after Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell accused the newspaper of committing a crime by publishing classified information.

“We’re confident in our reporting, our sourcing, and the constitutional protections that guarantee the rights of news organizations to publish information in the public interest that holds officials accountable,” the Post said in a statement. “The assertion that such publication is a crime is both incorrect and irresponsible.”

Post foreign-policy columnist Josh Rogin challenged Thiessen by pointing to the newspaper’s defense of its reporting.

“I said whoever LEAKED it, Josh,” Thiessen responded. “You do get that a government official leaking classified information to the press is committing a crime, right?”karen-attiahRead Next/Washington Post Ordered to Reinstate Karen Attiah After Firing Over Charlie Kirk Posts

Thiessen’s clarification drew a distinction between prosecuting the journalists who published the classified information and the government official who provided it. But his call would still target a confidential source behind reporting published by his own newspaper.

The underlying Post report said four senior military commanders formally objected to continuing to divert personnel and equipment to the Middle East into 2027. The warnings appeared in a classified Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book, according to people familiar with the assessment.

The commanders warned that extended deployments were degrading their ability to carry out other missions, including homeland defense, according to the Post. Navy chief Adm. Daryl Caudle reportedly argued that the service could not sustain its current level of support for the Iran conflict without a clear end date.

Parnell disputed portions of the report but acknowledged that Hegseth regularly receives such objections from military leaders, 

Associated Press, US Treasury blocks certain journalists from G20 meeting in North Carolina, Ben Finley, Aug. 30, 2026. The U.S. Treasury Department is preventing certain journalists from covering a finance meeting among the world’s most powerful countries, the latest example of how President Donald Trump’s administration has restricted media access.

Individual reporters from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News were not granted credentials to the Group of 20 finance ministers’ meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, the Times reported.

The Treasury has not explained the decision. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told The Associated Press in an interview Sunday that “it has nothing to do with point of view.”

The reporters who’ve been denied access include the Times’ Alan Rappeport, who has been covering such meetings and the Treasury Department since 2017. However, another reporter for the Times, Berlin bureau chief Jim Tankersley, is allowed to attend.

The Times said in a statement that denying American journalists access to an event in the U.S. is “not just another disturbing effort by the administration to undermine independent journalism, but a blatant attempt to evade public scrutiny.”

“With the war in Iran, sanctions, the bond markets, and inflation on the agenda for the G20 finance ministers, the stakes of this gathering are significant for the global economy and the American people,” the Times said. “Excluding specific reporters and entire news organizations is a disservice to the public and an assault on press freedoms that we strongly condemn.”Related StoriesUS plans to sanction another bank in effort to clamp down on Iran transactions, Bessent tells APUS plans to sanction another bank in effort to clamp down on Iran transactions, Bessent tells AP2 MIN READ33Bessent huddles with G20 to try to rally allies on Iran as tariffs strain tiesBessent huddles with G20 to try to rally allies on Iran as tariffs strain ties3 MIN READ45US targets Egyptian bank’s UAE branches under new push for Iran’s economic isolationUS targets Egyptian bank’s UAE branches under new push for Iran’s economic isolation3 MIN READ45

Bloomberg News, in a story published Sunday evening, said “numerous” journalists from the news agency, including some based in Europe and Asia, had their accreditation requests rejected. It said denying the agency access to the meeting “undermines media freedom and public accountability.”

The Wall Street Journal declined to comment.Sign up for the Ground Game Newsletter: Your guide to the biggest stories in politics, policy and U.S. elections.Email address

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Bessent is hosting the G20 meeting, which runs Saturday through Tuesday. It includes finance ministers, central bank governors and senior officials from the world’s top economies. This year’s G20 summit, which involves heads of state, is being held in December at Trump’s golf club in Doral, Florida.

Tensions have been escalating between the U.S. media and the second Trump administration, playing out both in the public arena and at times in the courts.

For example, the Defense Department declared earlier this year that its press office had become a classified space inaccessible to journalists. The ouster came after the Pentagon had demanded that reporters agree to government-imposed restrictions on their work, prompting most news outlets to leave the building last fall.

The Associated Press has also sued Trump over access to the White House press pool. The news organization’s access was curtailed for sticking with the name “Gulf of Mexico” after the administration ordered it rechristened the “Gulf of America.”

PoliticusUSA, News and Comment: Cognitively Declining Trump Wants To Hold Daily Rallies, But Can’t Remember Jon Ossoff’s Name, Jason Easley, right, Aug. 31, 2026. On the same day that it was reported that Trump is considering holding daily rallies ahead of the midterm, the president went on TV and could remember Sen. Jon Ossoff’s name.

As Republicans are facing a potential disaster in the midterm elections, they have been pleading with Donald Trump to start spending some of the hundreds of millions of dollars that he has raised to help them in November.

After Trump melted down and threatened NBC’s Kristen Welker because she stated that Trump’s endorsements have been a mixed bag, it appears that Republicans aren’t going to get the financial help that they are seeking, but may get a whole lot more Trump.

Fox News’s Peter Doocy reported, “We are hearing some whispers about a ton of Trump travel in October. Possibly as much as a Trump rally a day in the most competitive states and districts, and that is something you don’t typically see from a president in a set of midterms that are historically very hard for a president and his party.”

Does anyone seriously believe that a president who, when he last campaigned in 2024, had trouble holding multiple events on the same day and had to have his campaign events staggered so that he could have rest days in between them is going to be able to crisscross the country and hold daily rallies?”

Trump has shown no interest in campaigning and has reportedly complained every time he has held an event for a Republican candidate about the travel.

More On U.S. Immigration Enforcement, Health Care Costs

Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: UPDATE: ICE is leaving hospitals with millions in unpaid bills, Judd Legum, right, Sept. 1, 2026. Last year, Popular Information broke the news that on October 3, 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) abruptly stopping paying third parties for medical care provided to detainees. Third-party providers are used to provide “medically necessary” care including “dialysis, prenatal care, oncology, [and] chemotherapy,” according to ICE.

Prior to that date, payment for medical care for ICE detainees was processed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). But the VA “abruptly and instantly terminated” its agreement with ICE after the arrangement, which dated to the George W. Bush administration, drew criticism from right-wing activists. The activists falsely claimed that undocumented immigrants were siphoning resources from veterans. Actually, ICE was fully reimbursing the VA for the service.

According to documents published by ICE on a government contracting website on November 12, 2025, the termination of the agreement with the VA left ICE unable to “pay for medically necessary off-site care.” ICE described this as an “absolute emergency” that needed to be resolved “immediately” to “prevent any further medical complications or loss of life.”

Eleven months later, ICE still has no system to pay for outside medical care provided after October 3, 2025.

Hospitals and other providers who continue to treat ICE detainees are not receiving payment. UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital, located in Aurora, Colorado, for example, has provided medical care for ICE detainees, including 150 hospital admissions, clinic appointments and emergency visits, since last fall. It hasn’t been paid for any of these services, racking up over $4 million in unpaid bills.

“Like other healthcare providers, UCHealth has been unable to submit claims and has not been reimbursed for care provided since October 1, 2025, because of a disruption in the Department of Homeland Security’s medical payment system,” UCHealth spokesman Dan Weaver told CPR News last month.

Moshannon Valley EMS is a non-profit organization which provides ambulance services in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania. As of June, it had responded to 43 calls to a local ICE detention center since October 2025. It has not been paid for any of that work. “We have to have some faith that someone’s going to do the right thing and compensate us for the work that’s provided,” EMS chief Fred Ferguson told NOTUS.

Internal data obtained by Popular Information reveals that, in 2024, the VA processed over $246 million in medical claims related to the treatment of ICE detainees (and a much smaller number of detainees held by Customs and Border Patrol) by third parties. Data obtained by American Oversight found the VA processed $96 million in claims in 2025 before the relationship with ICE was terminated.

In the absence of payment, it is unclear how many providers, like UCHealth, are continuing to provide treatment and how many are refusing to treat ICE detainees.An alarming increase in ICE detainee deaths

A report by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights found that in “the 500 days between President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025 and June 4, 2026, 52 people died in ICE custody in the United States.” The mortality rate was “nearly four times that of the Biden administration, and more than two and a half times as high as that of the first Trump administration.”

Although the information about these deaths disclosed by the Trump administration has been minimal, “Physicians for Human Rights medical experts had a high suspicion of inadequate or delayed health care in several of the 39 deaths that occurred during the first year of the current administration, raising serious concerns that the deaths may have been preventable.”

The inability of ICE to pay for outside medical care, including emergency services, may be a contributing factor.

For example, on December 3, 2025, Francisco Gaspar-Andrés, a detainee at the Camp East Montana detention facility in Fort Bliss, Texas died of liver failure. According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle, for two months before his death Gaspar-Andrés “went to the medical unit nine times, complaining of symptoms including bloody stool and bleeding gums.” But he “was sent back from visits to the medical unit with allergy, heartburn and indigestion medications and diagnosed with influenza despite repeatedly testing negative.” By the time he was finally transported to a hospital on November 16, doctors were unable to save his life.

On June 24, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Inspector General announced an “evaluation of detainee deaths in ICE custody“ because of “an increase of detainee deaths in ICE custody each year since fiscal year 2022.”Delay after delay

On October 17, 2025, ICE awarded an emergency contract to Acentra Health to create a system “to receive, adjudicate, process, and pay healthcare claims” related to the treatment of ICE detainees by third parties. Acentra, so far, has been paid $36 million to create such a system.

No claims have been processed by Acentra to date. The company, and ICE, originally said that claims processing would begin on April 30, 2026. After that, the date was repeatedly pushed back without explanation. A few days ago, all estimates of a launch date were removed.

Now, Acentra is claiming they were never supposed to process claims at all. They were just creating a system for someone else to use to process claims. At the end of June, DHS put out another request for information to “identify potential vendors capable of providing a comprehensive medical claims processing system.” The first question asks: “What are your typical and realistic timeline [sic] for transitioning complex and comprehensive claims adjudication and provider reimbursement services… ?”

 

Robert Reich via Substack, Opinion:The Biggest Issue in the Midterm Elections, Robert Reich, right, Sept. 1, 2026. You'll hear more and more about this.

The earnings of America’s largest corporations — the S&P 500 — surged by an astounding 53 percent over the past year.

But most Americans are losing ground. Wages have barely risen — yet a tomato today costs 40 percent more than it did just a year ago. Gas now costs an average of more than $4.50 a gallon. Renting an apartment is 54 percent more expensive than it was in 2017. Housing prices are up 60 percent since 2019. Families will spend $120 more on electricity this year than last year. Credit card debt is up 63 percent since just 2021. Add in so-called “convenience fees” popping up everywhere, along with “shrinkflation” where companies deceptively shrink product sizes while charging the same or even more — and what do you get? An economy that’s clearly, wildly, unambiguously unaffordable.

A widely watched measure of consumer confidence slipped in August as consumers fretted about future economic conditions, the Conference Board said this past week.

Why the widening gap between how well big corporations are doing and how poorly average Americans are doing? Three reasons:

1. Big corporations are monopolizing their markets, raising prices as they pocket bigger profits.

A major part of the affordability crisis is directly related to monopoly power. As big corporations raise prices, the typical working family has to struggle even harder.

A good rule of thumb is that when four or fewer giant corporations dominate a market, it’s relatively easy for them to informally coordinate their prices so they all make bigger profits while leaving consumers with less choice. This is now the case across much of the American economy.

Walmart now controls almost a quarter of the nation’s grocery market and dominates retail sales. Walmart sells more than half of all groceries in close to 40 metropolitan areas across America.

Amazon, meanwhile, dominates e-commerce in general and many specific lines of business. The corporation sells about 80 percent of all e-books and 71 percent of all print books sold online.

It’s the same for more specialized retail. One company, Luxxotica, dominates the manufacture and retail of eyeglasses. Two companies control 60 percent of the entire U.S. mattress market.

Four major companies — Tyson Foods, Cargill, JBS USA, and National Beef Packing Co. — now control about 85 percent of U.S. meat processing.

Four major carriers control around 70 percent to 80 percent of domestic flights and the overall airline market.

Four corporations control roughly 85 percent of U.S. corn seed sales and 75 percent of soybean seed sales.

Three primary providers control approximately 80 percent of the mobile telecom market.

And then there are Apple, Amazon, Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), Nvidia, and Microsoft — which are taking over everything. In a few years, their AI may own, do, and profit from the entire economy.

Appropriate response: Antitrust enforcement! Plus new and more comprehensive antitrust legislation that enables regulators to break up the biggest corporations and make it harder for them to merge or acquire others.

2. High corporate profits are reflected in record stock market values, but only the richest are benefiting from the soaring stock market. That’s because the richest 1 percent of Americans own about half of the value of all shares of stock; the richest 10 percent own over 90 percent.

As a result, the richest 10 percent are feeling wealthier and spending more. But the bottom 90 percent are not.

In fact, a growing portion of the American workforce is sinking. It’s not just that their wages aren’t keeping up with prices. A quarter of them don’t even have jobs that pay enough to keep them out of poverty.

An old friend, Gene Ludwig, has been measuring the true rate of unemployment — defined not only as percent of people unemployed but also those who are working part-time who’d rather have a full-time job, people too discouraged even to look for work, and those not earning enough to keep them out of poverty.

This true rate of unemployment grew 0.2 percentage points in July, from 24.7 percent to 24.9 percent of the working-age population of the United States — the fourth consecutive month of these negative increases, which are up 0.8 percentage points since the start of the year.

Think about it. Almost a quarter of everyone in the U.S. who’s able to work and wants to work cannot find a job that pays them enough to keep them out of poverty.

Appropriate response: A minimum wage of $20 an hour, a universal basic income, and a universal job guarantee.

3. Tariff refunds are providing a big, temporary subsidy to large corporations. They had passed the costs of those tariffs on to their consumers in higher prices, but consumers aren’t receiving the refunds.

This isn’t nearly as large an issue as the first two, but it’s not nothing. The Wall Street Journal reports that tariff refunds are likely to account for more than 4 percent of third-quarter economic growth. Apollo Global Management estimates that the refunds to corporations will add about 0.2 percentage point to the Atlanta Fed’s growth forecast of between 4 percent and 5 percent.

Appropriate response: Require that corporations pass on the refunds to consumers in the form of lower prices.

***The increasing wealth and power of big corporations and the increasing financial distress of most American families will be the biggest issue in the upcoming midterms.

MSNOW, Opinion: The House just got back into town — and wants to leave again ASAP, Hayes Brown, right, Sept. 1, 2026. Beyond keeping the federal government open past the midterms, there’s not much reason for GOP lawmakers to want to stick around 

The House reconvened Monday after five long weeks of recess. Members won’t stick around Washington for long though. Friday marks the start of another 10-day recess for Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah. After that, there will be just three weeks remaining in session before Election Day — but the beleaguered Republican majority is hoping even that wildly short window will be slammed shut early.

There will be just three weeks remaining in session before Election Day — but the beleaguered Republican majority is hoping even that wildly short window will be slammed shut early.

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., currently has one major action item on his to-do list: passing a stopgap spending bill to avert a shutdown when the current fiscal year ends on Oct. 1. The Senate sent the bill, which extends funding until Dec. 11, over to the House before its own recess began last month. As The Washington Post noted, the bill also includes a White House-requested boost in funding for housing and nutrition programs and temporarily stops the Office of Management and Budget from seizing more control over allocating federal grants.

If the bill makes it through the House quickly, according to Politico, many Republicans would rather spend the remaining time between now and November away from the Capitol, campaigning to keep their jobs:

“So many people are having to run back and forth to campaign,” Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) told reporters Thursday. “I think we can get some other things done [beyond the spending stopgap], but the big bills will probably have to wait until after the election.”

Another House Republican, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, was more blunt: “I think we have very little to do.” A third member, running for reelection in a competitive district, said in a text message, “I’d be happy to be sent home early!”

Their lack of interest in legislating is unsurprising given how underwhelming the current session has been for the GOP caucus. The House’s major accomplishments this year have been reopening the Department of Homeland Security after a prolonged shutdown and passing a separate funding bill to pay for immigration enforcement. There was a major bipartisan housing affordability bill that became law, but President Donald Trump refused to sign the bill, making it harder for Republicans to promote the win. Altogether, it’s a meager record for Johnson’s members running for re-election to write home about.Digging into the midterms, 2028, and more with POLITICO’s DashAugust 31, 2026 / 06:12

Meanwhile, the speaker’s dreams of a passing a third reconciliation bill before the midterm elections have been dashed upon the rocks, along with the attendant hopes of providing his members’ campaigns more fodder. At best, that bill’s prospects might be revived during a lame-duck session after the midterms. Republican lawmakers who might otherwise have withheld their support for another party-line spending bill could change their tune in the face of a handover of power to the Democrats. That does little to prevent the growing feeling of confidence among the minority about their chances of becoming the majority come January.More articlesThe Republican Party’s latest problem: It lacks a coherent message for the midtermsSteve BenenMike Johnson's left hand covers most of his face.GOP senators are catching heat for a favorite anti-Obama maneuverHayes BrownIn this diagonal frame, Jim Justice makes a hand gesture as he speaks.

But getting the stopgap bill passed easily is not a given for Johnson will manage to get the stopgap bill passed easily. Two riders to the funding make things more difficult for Johnson to rally the votes under most circumstances. One, which Senate Democrats insisted be included, blocks the Trump administration from transferring funds to Border Patrol. The other is a Trump-requested monthlong delay on banning the kind of hemp-derived products that get their users high and are currently available in gas stations nationwide. The latter is especially irksome for Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., the Freedom Caucus chairman who has been pushing hard for the ban to take effect.

But Johnson isn’t relying on his own caucus’ votes to pass the continuing resolution, as these short-term funding bills are called on Capitol Hill. Instead, House leadership plans to bring the stopgap bill forward under a procedure known as “suspension of the rules,” which can expedites passage but requires a two-thirds majority support.

Nobody likes being dragged in from vacation for busy work.

That means, as has so often been the case, House Democrats will have to provide the votes to keep the government open and functioning. If everything goes according to plan, the funding bill will be making its way to Trump’s desk by Tuesday evening. There are a few other bills that will be debated over the rest of the week but none of as much consequence.

In one sense, it’s hard to blame GOP legislators who’d rather be anywhere but Washington right now. Nobody likes being dragged in from vacation for busy work. But having such a short to-do list shows how hollowed-out the legislative branch has become over the years, especially under Republican stewardship. Johnson and his team continue to insist in the face of dire polling and historical trends that they’ll walk away from the midterms with a more sizable (and more manageable) majority to work with. Even in the unlikely event that prophecy comes to pass, it’s not readily apparent what GOP lawmakers would do beyond continue shielding Trump from the threat of accountability. 

New York Times, News Analysis: China and the U.S. Offer Competing Showcases of Global Power, David Pierson, Sept. 1, 2026. As Xi Jinping gathered with the leaders of Russia and Iran, Europe challenged the Trump administration at the G20, offering a split-screen view of a changing world.

The Chinese leader Xi Jinping arrived in Central Asia this week with a message for a world increasingly unsettled by President Trump: China has friends and influence, and is prepared to help shape what comes next.

The scene unfolded at a security summit in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, where Mr. Xi gathered with the leaders of Russia and Iran. He presented Beijing as a source of stability and a champion of an “orderly multipolar world” that would replace the current U.S.-dominated order.

If the Bishkek summit was designed to project solidarity, a meeting of the world’s most powerful countries in the mountains of Asheville, N.C., offered an image of fracture.

European officials attending that meeting of the Group of 20 nations’ finance ministers and central bankers expressed outrage this week that the Trump administration had invited Russia, despite its war against Ukraine. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that Canada was too small to fight a trade war with the United States. And officials were already confronting the economic fallout from the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, which disrupted the flow of oil and pushed global energy prices up and threatened to slow growth.

The simultaneous gatherings happening across the world reflected the broader contest over who will define the next phase of global order. China is using its solidarity with Russia and Iran, two countries at war with the West, to project its influence, giving Mr. Xi leverage as he prepared for a summit with Mr. Trump later this month. The United States, meanwhile, was straining the alliances and economic relationships that have underpinned decades of global leadership.

“China’s theory of the case for bending the international political order in its preferred direction is to amass support from the ‘global majority,’” said Ryan Hass, a former career diplomat and White House national security official now at the Brookings Institution.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in North Carolina? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

“This is why Xi’s participation in these groupings is so important to Beijing,” he added. “It builds a narrative around China gaining momentum in building support for playing a more central role on the world stage.”

In Bishkek, at the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Mr. Xi met with the leaders of Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Uzbekistan, but his talks with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia carried the most weight. Just days earlier, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, had made a secret trip to Moscow to urge the Kremlin to end the war in Ukraine. Mr. Xi told Mr. Putin: “The foundation of China-Russia relations will become ever stronger.”

President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran also attended the summit, though it was not immediately clear if Mr. Xi held talks with him.

By comparison, the United States appears to be drifting away from its historical allies and weakening America’s ability to project strength globally. Mr. Trump has opened up a trade war with Canada and reduced war games with South Korea. Concerns are also growing that the United States is depleting its munitions in Iran and unable to meet its defense commitments around the world.

New York Times, Global Bond Sell-Off Puts Investors on Edge, Eshe Nelson, Sept. 1, 2026. Government borrowing costs are hitting multi-decade highs around the world, reflecting anxiety about debt levels, deficits and inflation.

A global sell-off in government bonds intensified on Tuesday, pushing up borrowing costs in some of the world’s largest economies to their highest in decades and rattling investors.

As rising oil prices compound worries about inflation, bond yields are testing fresh highs, squeezing government budgets and raising interest rates on a wide range of consumer and business loans. The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes, perhaps the world’s most influential interest rate, reached its highest since January 2025, and the 30-year yield continued to hover around a two-decade high.

In other important bond markets, the yield on 10-year Japanese bonds climbed above 3 percent for the first time since 1996, the yield on 10-year British bonds reached their highest level since mid 2007 and 10-year German bonds hit levels last seen in 2011.

America’s rising borrowing costs have set off a battle between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and bond investors, but the factors pushing up yields in the United States are also issues in other big markets. In many advanced economies, widening budget deficits, high debt levels and stubborn inflation have unnerved investors who believe that governments are either unable or unwilling to take steps to improve their fiscal situations.

A borrowing binge by technology companies to build artificial intelligence systems is another factor in rising yields. Companies have issued billions of dollars in bonds, swamping markets and pulling investors away from government debt.

“It’s a global story,” said Peter Schaffrik, a strategist at RBC Capital Markets in London.

One of the most pressing and unpredictable drivers of higher yields is the protracted war in Iran. As the United States and Iran renewed attacks recently, the price of oil and natural gas has began to climb again. Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, was higher again on Tuesday to above $90 a barrel, nearly 30 percent higher than prewar levels.

The jump in energy costs — the prices of refined fuels like gasoline and diesel have risen even faster — has increased expectations of accelerating inflation that could prompt central banks to raise the short-term interest rates they control. Higher fuel prices also add enormous costs to governments in Asia and Europe, which are big energy importers.

Government debt levels, in some cases, have already reached eye-watering levels. America’s gross national debt topped $40 trillion for the first time last month, or more than 120 percent of the size of the economy. In France, public debt exceeded 3.5 trillion euros (about $4 trillion), which is 117 percent of the size of its economy. In Japan, the government is spending heavily despite a public debt pile that is more than twice the size of its economy.

In the eyes of investors, many politicians don’t appear worried enough about these debt levels. Instead, investors see government plans that are not likely to shrink budget deficits.

In Europe, France is at the forefront of investors’ skepticism in the run-up to a presidential election next year, in which none of the front-runners appear to have what investors consider credible plans to reduce ballooning debt levels. France’s reputation as one of Europe’s safer financial havens has been eroded and it is quickly becoming the region’s most worrisome debt market, more than the southern European economies like Italy and Greece that were at the center of past debt crises. This summer, the yield on French government bonds climbed above Italy’s.

It’s not clear how this will resolve itself soon, but pressure from the bond market may force changes, Mr. Schaffrik said. “You need some kind of a disciplinary factor, and that’s probably the bond market,” he noted.  

Brave New Films New Documentary: Murdering 60 Minutes: Did Bari Weiss Suppress Epstein Coverage? Staff report, Sept. 1, 2026. CBS fired the reporter working on a 60 Minutes investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Then the report was pulled entirely

.Around the same time, word got out that Bari Weiss's wife, Nellie Bowles, appears in the Epstein files — including a friendly exchange with Epstein and a 2018 visit to his Manhattan townhouse.With Weiss overseeing CBS News, the timing raises a question we think deserves an answer: did this story get killed because it hit too close to home?