A week ago I wrote about a new CNN poll and how it showed Democrats were pretty evenly divided over "left" vs "centrist" politics (should the Ds "move to the left" or "move to the center") but very united over fight vs accommodation. So focus on the latter and agree to disagree on the former. I also noted however that these terms are wildly over-determined and mostly don't mean very much. For this specific question, those polling results are still broadly valuable because those are the catchphrases by which a major intra-party debate is identified. So if that's the language being used and people split roughly down the middle, you know it's very divisive and no one side is going to beat the other. It's a standoff, and what you really want going into a critical midterm is unity.
But it's still important to remember how little these terms actually mean, and to consider the complexities and uncertainties they paper over. I was reminded of this when I saw Axios describing a Reuters poll which Mike Allen said showed that independents are "progressive-curious." The evidence was that substantial majorities of independents support higher taxes on corporations and billionaires (64%) and government-provided health care for all Americans (60%). But 43% are less likely to vote for a candidate who identifies as "democratic socialist."
If you study or spend much time thinking about public I don't think either of these findings will surprise you at all. They're both pretty textbook, in fact. And this quickly brings us up against the fact that most of the definitions and categories we use to discuss these factional and ideological debates are either fake and meaningless or confused. Even weirder is that most of us know this despite the fact that we use them. Let's start with the idea that "independent" voters are or tend to be "moderates" or "centrists" — something that is mainly not true. Most of those who self-label as independent are people who don't like to identify with a political party. You have people who by every marker are clearly Democrats or Republicans. They just don't like being owned by a political label.
The best descriptive use of "independent" is probably swing voters, voters who swing back and forth between parties. So they should be in the "center." Only they're not. Or rather, if you're familiar with public opinion data, you know that those people follow politics the least and have the least settled and least coherent political beliefs. They're all over the place, and tend to have very weird or inconsistent politics ideas in the view of people who follow politics closely.
Within the Democratic Party, we often talk about "establishment" Democrats vs the progressive left. I don't know any Democratic voter who identifies as "establishment." They may tend to vote for elected officials who can fairly be classed, in descriptive terms, as "establishment." But that's not the same thing. One of the backdrafts in this primary cycle has been complaints from progressives that Black voters are "establishment" and that gets in the way of the political left. Some Democratic voters identify as "moderate" or "centrist," but far fewer than did a generation ago. It's fairly telling that we don't actually have a word for the non-progressive left group in the Democratic Party that isn't either a line of attack or some version of pundit-speak. If really pressed most of those people would just call themselves "Democrats."
Of course we're not running a poli sci class here or trying to come up with the perfect political taxonomy. If we're just talking about semantics, who cares? But we're not. One of the things people find the hardest to accept in politics is that most problems can't be solved, only managed. The greatest sin of punditry is the idea that one clever guy can fix the big vexing challenge with one weird trick. But if you're going to manage these challenges effectively — and factional divisions among Democrats are one of those things — you have to understand them, accept their nuances beyond zero-sum binary oppositions. That gives you a sense of what definitely won't work and areas where creative solutions might allow people to work together, if not necessarily agree. A lot of these divisions come down to different instinctive attitudes about risk aversion, pragmatism and ideology. Another central division is more accommodating or oppositional attitudes toward traditional social mores and customs: trans rights, language politics, sexual morality, identity politics. To the extent people are fighting or trying to grab attention these points don't really matter. There's us and them, and we need to beat them. But if you want to keep things on the rails we usually want and need better and more creative solutions.
At 4:00 this morning, just before they left for a five-week recess, Senate Republicans confirmed Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to the position of Attorney General of the United States. This makes President Donald J. Trump’s personal criminal lawyer the top law enforcement officer of the country.
The attorney general is supposed to be the lawyer for the people of the United States.
Some Republicans, like 92-year-old Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley of Iowa, were enthusiastic about Blanche. “Mr. Blanche is a tough, fair prosecutor dedicated to the rule of law, and his leadership instills that same zeal throughout the entire Justice Department,” Grassley said.
Other Republicans were more skeptical but said if they didn’t confirm Blanche, Trump would choose someone worse. Perhaps in a permanent rather than an acting capacity, they said, he would be more likely to resist Trump’s pressure.
Republican senators played a very different role in the United States 52 years ago.
In late July 1974 the House Committee on the Judiciary had passed three articles of impeachment, charging the president with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress over his handling of the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.
The House would almost certainly send those articles of impeachment to the Senate, but what would happen there was not clear.
And then, on August 5, in response to a subpoena, the White House released a tape recorded on June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate break-in, that showed Nixon and his aide H.R. Haldeman plotting to invoke national security to protect the president.
Even Republican senators, who had not wanted to convict their president, knew the game was over. A delegation went to the White House to deliver the news to the president that he must resign or be impeached by the full House and convicted by the Senate.
On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon spoke to the American people to tell them he was resigning the presidency of the United States.
“Throughout the long and difficult period of Watergate, I have felt it was my duty to persevere, to make every possible effort to complete the term of office to which you elected me,” he said. “In the past few days, however,” he continued, “it has become evident to me that I no longer have a strong enough political base in the Congress to justify continuing that effort….”
“From the discussions I have had with Congressional and other leaders, I have concluded that because of the Watergate matter, I might not have the support of the Congress that I would consider necessary to back the very difficult decisions and carry out the duties of this office in the way the interests of the Nation will require.”
“To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body,” he said. “But as President, I must put the interests of America first. America needs a full-time President and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad….
“Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.”
Remember when Mondays in August were lazy, quiet summer days? Those were good times.
Today, though, Trump’s war on Iran is demanding a resolution, and it is crystal clear that the Iranians believe they are in a position to dictate terms to the United States.
Iran and Oman have been negotiating terms for travel through the Strait of Hormuz, which runs between the two countries. Iran closed the strait when Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu initiated strikes against Iran on February 28, 2026. Before the war, more than 20% of the world’s shipborne oil and even more than that of its shipborne fertilizer traveled through the strait, and their loss has dramatically impacted the global economy. Farmers around the world are having trouble obtaining fertilizer, and the price of oil—and the corresponding price of gasoline and diesel—have jumped dramatically.
On Saturday, Iranian officials laid out a series of demands the U.S. must meet before they will reopen the strait. They say the U.S. must lift the naval blockade of Iranian ports and withdraw the U.S. military, “permanently end the war against Iran and Iran’s allies in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, and Iraq,” and “never threaten nor insult Iran in any language,” essentially gagging Trump. They want an end to sanctions on Iran and the release of frozen Iranian assets. And they want reparations. All up front, as conditions for reopening the strait.
In the past, sanctions relief and the release of frozen assets were made conditional on an end to Iran’s nuclear program. Now such a negotiation doesn’t even appear to be on the table. And Iran is asserting its right to control traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for global trade. Tolls on ships using the strait would provide significant funding for the Iranian regime.
Foreign policy scholar and diplomat Philip Gordon, who served in the Biden White House, wrote: “U.S. acceptance of Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz is an extraordinary outcome only made conceivable by an administration that squandered legitimacy, alienated allies, attempted regime change in a war it had not adequately prepared for and that is being forced to accept a catastrophic outcome without viable alternatives.”
He suggested that “in other circumstances Iran’s closure of [the] Strait by brazenly attacking maritime traffic and neighbors’ civilian infrastructure would likely have justified and led to a united, global response—like the U.S.-led naval escort mission during the Iran-Iraq war, the global coalition that reversed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991, the multinational naval force enforcing UN sanctions in the Gulf in the 1990s, or the UN Security Council sanctions on the Iranian nuclear program in the 2010s—that led to the JCPOA.”
“Instead,” he wrote, “[the] US and other countries are now being forced to accept an outcome that would have been unthinkable before the war but seems to have become unavoidable because of it.”
Yesterday Trump told Barak Ravid of Axios, “We are low-keying it,” explaining: “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money.” He stressed that Iran’s in an economic crisis and that since oil prices have come down slightly in the U.S., gas prices have eased enough to provide some relief to consumers.
“It will work out,” Trump told Ravid. “It always works out. It’s like a chess game.”
But Trump’s mood had changed by today. At 12:31, he claimed Iranian negotiators had never before mentioned reparations for the damage done to Iran during the five month conflict, although the Memorandum of Understanding he signed on June 17 clearly calls for the establishment of a $300 billion fund for Iran’s reconstruction and economic development, suggesting either that Trump has forgotten what was in the agreement or didn’t know.
Trump posted: “I am likewise demanding compensation from Iran, for all of the people that they have killed and gravely wounded with their roadside bombs and many conflicts, for which they are famous…. I have instructed my representatives to put this firmly into any, and all, future negotiations.” An hour later, he added: “Also,…Iran should be responsible for the damages and death caused to the people of Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Gaza!”
Later, when a reporter asked Trump when he thought the Strait of Hormuz would open, he answered: “Well, it’s open now…. It’s open now. Look, the only one that has control of the Strait of Hormuz right now is the United States Navy.”
Iran apparently wants its part of the agreement up front because it doesn’t trust Trump to follow through once the strait is reopened, and there is reason to doubt that he will—or can—deliver on his promises. Yesterday, Netanyahu openly rejected the plan that Trump announced as a done deal less than two weeks ago to end the fighting in Gaza.
On July 30, Trump posted that his “Board of Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza” in exchange for the withdrawal of Israeli forces there. “This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY,” Trump wrote. “One year ago there was a violent raging war, humanitarian crisis and hostages kept in brutal captivity,” he wrote, but now there was a “historic breakthrough.” “CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL ON THIS AMAZING DEVELOPMENT, THAT EVERYBODY SAID COULD NEVER BE ACHIEVED!” he wrote.
At the time, Netanyahu expressed skepticism, but today he openly broke with Trump. When asked about the rejection, the White House told reporters to talk to the Board of Peace.
While much of the focus of the media has been on Trump’s bumbling in the Middle East, the administration has been busy working to reshape Latin American countries into right-wing protectorates of the United States. In Colombia’s recent election, Trump endorsed a right-wing millionaire lawyer who had never before run for office, Abelardo de la Espriella. De la Espriella holds both U.S. and Colombian citizenship and is a Republican who supports Trump.
De la Espriella won a close election, and as soon as he took office, replacing the leftist
Gustavo Petro, the U.S. pledged $1 billion in assistance to Colombia, “as part of a security package to support President (Abelardo) de la Esprilla’s administration in achieving our shared goals,” the White House said.
Tyler Pager, Julian E. Barnes, and Frances Robles of the New York Times reported on August 7 that the administration has been looking for a similarly cooperative leader for Cuba. In a search for “more regime alteration than regime change,” they write, the administration has “pressed its spy agencies to identify someone in the mold of Delcy Rodríguez, who became Venezuela’s interim president after U.S. forces captured the previous leader, Nicolás Maduro, in January. U.S. officials viewed Ms. Rodríguez as a pragmatist who could seamlessly assume power and would be willing to work closely with them,” the journalists report.
The plan appears to be to get Cuba to open its economy to private enterprise including U.S. businesses, buy oil from the U.S., and push out the Russian and Chinese intelligence operatives there. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Pager, Barnes, and Robles note, has secretly established a Cuba task force.
Their New York Times colleague Adam Entous reported on August 5 that the task force includes “case officers who recruit and manage spies, intelligence analysts, officers who conduct cyberoperations and officers who specialize in covert influence operations.” Sources told Entous that the plan appeared intended to create rifts among those in Cuba’s political elite to enable the rise of leaders willing to agree to Trump’s demands.
Trump’s assumption of control over Venezuela seems to have been the model for attempts to take over other countries. Last September the Trump administration began strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that Trump claimed—without evidence—were being operated by narcoterrorists from Venezuela. Then the U.S. began to seize vessels allegedly carrying sanctioned Venezuelan oil. On January 3, 2026, in a nighttime raid, the Trump administration conducted airstrikes in Venezuela and removed Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, taking them to New York to face federal narcoterrorism and drug-trafficking 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—exiled opposition leader María Corina Machado gave Trump her Nobel Peace Prize medal after the raid in an apparent attempt to create good will—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, Rodríguez could act as president for 90 days, a period the National Assembly could extend for another 90 days. But if Maduro didn’t return after either 90 or 180 days, the absence must be considered permanent. At that point, the constitution requires elections to be held in 30 days.
When Rodríguez’s first 90 days were over, there was no public announcement that the National Assembly, which is controlled by her political party, had extended her acting presidency. July 3 marked 180 days since Maduro’s kidnapping.
As Antonio María Delgado of the Miami Herald reported, in late July the U.S. Department of Justice asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida to dismiss a lawsuit filed by three Americans against Rodríguez accusing the Maduro government, which was well known for human rights abuses, of torture. The Justice Department called for the dismissal on the grounds that Rodríguez is entitled to immunity as Venezuela’s head of state, thus underscoring that Trump intends for her to run the country. Delgado called it an “extraordinary step.”
Negotiations are underway for a new election, but opposition leader Machado has been excluded from them. On August 6, seven Democratic senators led by Adam Schiff (D-CA) wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reiterating that Rodríguez is still the acting president rather than the head of state,and putting the administration on notice that its “increased support of the same officials who contributed to the Venezuelan government’s lengthy and well-documented record of human rights abuses and violations is alarming, and we urge the State Department to re-commit to its long-standing practice of calling attention to human rights violations committed by the Venezuelan regime and exerting pressure on regime officials to end these abuses.”
An exclusive story tonight by Dan Lamothe, John Hudson, Andrew Ba Tran, and Joyce Sohyun Lee in the Washington Post revealed the utter cowardice behind Trump’s authoritarian aspirations.
Leaving Türkiye on July 8 after the NATO summit, the day after he had renewed strikes on Iran, Trump made a show of switching from the newly outfitted plane given to the U.S. by Qatar to an older plane that had served as Air Force One before Trump got the Qatari jet. The journalists who were traveling with the president and some of the White House staff moved with the president to the older plane for the leg of the trip that would take them to Britain.
But the journalists report that Trump and some of his aides secretly left the older plane in a container lowered into an airport catering truck and were transferred to a smaller plane for the trip. There had apparently been credible Iranian threats against Trump’s life, and so officials turned to a plan to hide him, even from senior U.S. officials. To do so, they left the journalists and staff on the plane that would use the Air Force One call sign, turning them into a decoy for an Iranian strike. White House staffers instructed journalists to lower their shades when they entered the plane.
Trump secretly reboarded the bigger plane in Britain and was filmed coming down its stairs, suggesting he had been on the flight. Then he boarded the Qatari jet, along with the press pool and the staffers who had been on Air Force One, for the trip from Türkiye. On the flight, Trump briefly spoke to reporters, who asked why they had been asked to lower their window shades on the previous flight.
It was “because you’re probably on a dangerous flight because of the sleaze bags that we have to deal with,” Trump said. He added that there are threats against his life “all the time” and that “I’m number one on their list, before you. But if I go, you go. Right?” “Perhaps someday you want to change professions.”
Bluesky national security commenter Angry Staffer wrote: “So, I completely understand secreting POTUS away from a credible assassination attempt. But leaving the entire Air Force One crew, press pool, etc. to play decoy is some sick sh*t.”
One of our great doctrines here in the Editors' Blog is that all power is unitary. Lose or gain it in one place, and you lose or gain it in equal measure everywhere else. That's catching up with Donald Trump. He got into the Iran War as a way to escape the emotionally crushing experience of declining popularity and power at home. But his ebbing power went with him to the Persian Gulf. And now it's arrived in Israel, too. This was obscured for a while by the fact that the U.S. has almost unimaginable military power and a constitution which, as it has evolved if not how it was originally intended, puts almost no short-term limits on a president's ability to wage war. But the two were always umbilically connected. It was the pain of bad news at home that spurred Trump to jump so recklessly into his Iran debacle. And it is the same unpopularity that has him so desperate to end high gas prices and inflation before the midterms. They're all connected.
Trump has no poker face. To live in Trump's era is not only to see his inner life but to be engulfed by it. It's hard to think of a case in which the deciding player between warring powers has more clearly signaled his desperate desire to get out of a conflict on almost any terms. The Iranians have internet too. And they can see all of this. They have now issued a fresh set of new demands: end sanctions, leave the region, pay reparations, release frozen assets and more — in addition to make the Strait of Hormuz a permanent Iranian toll road. More or less total capitulation.
One could imagine a scenario in which there was a tacit meeting of the minds between Trump and the Iranian government. Yes, Trump wants out. But as much as Iran has gained at the United States's expense over the course of the war, it has also sustained a vast scale of damage to its civilian industrial base. Last winter's protests were spurred by the already bad economy. So economic revival of some sort is critical to the regime's medium and longterm survival. So Iran still has strong reasons to want to bring the conflict to an end. And yet they're not. Trump's desperation is so great that they are not taking that path. They're upping the ante again and again. They think they have Trump over a barrel and they're right. They want to hurt Trump as much as possible. And they don't think they'll pay much price for driving a hard and humiliating bargain.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now openly rejecting the proposal put together by Trump's "Board of Peace" which envisioned a staged process of disarmament by Hamas and Israeli withdrawals from Gaza. This is a more complicated story. In large part it is also a reflection of Trump's ebbing power. But it also intersects with Israel's election, which takes place on October 27.
Israeli politics have been in a state of crisis since 2022. For almost a year before the Hamas massacres in southern Israel, which began the war on and reoccupation of Gaza, weekly mass protests roiled the country. Since those attacks, Netanyahu has been consistently unpopular. But he had managed to claw back some of his support because of the Israeli successes against not only Iran but its proxies in the so-called "axis of resistance," especially Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. But in recent months, Netanyahu has felt the inevitable downside of his alliance with Trump and, on a longer time scale, his alliance with the U.S. Republican Party — a point we'll return to in another post.
Trump has made increasingly clear in public statements that he owns Netanyahu and, for that matter, Israel itself. He decides and Netanyahu complies, according to Trump. That is a particularly toxic claim in Israeli political culture, which prizes sovereignty and independence of action in the national security sphere almost above all else. That has taken all of Netanyahu's other sources of domestic unpopularity and added two critical new ones. The first is that Netanyahu has become Trump's poodle, according to Trump. The second is that Netanyahu placed all of Israel's bets on Trump and the GOP. Now that looks like a questionable bet. Trump has grown tired of Israel's demands. They've become inconvenient. And anti-Israel sentiment is growing within the GOP quite apart from Trump. The New York Times had this interesting article about how Israelis now fear that the loss of U.S. support isn't a rough patch but permanent — something that many liberal Zionists including myself have been warning about for a generation. (Again, for another post.)
It's in this context that Netanyahu has lots of reasons to resist this new deal. He might have done so anyway. He probably would have in substance. But Netanyahu is a past master at agreeing to and slow-rolling deals he wants to kill but can't quite do so openly. Openly rejecting this deal is a choice and one driven by very specific domestic electoral weaknesses.
Netanyahu needs to show that he doesn't answer to Trump. He needs to buttress and intensify support within the right-wing camp in Israel to have any hope of remaining in power after the next election. (The intensification of settler violence in the West Bank can also only be understood in electoral terms.) Picking a fight with Trump is critical to both aims. But if Trump didn't look so weak at home he wouldn't be doing it. As with Iran, Israel's refusal to bend to Trump's will goes back to his own declining popularity and power at home.
Over the past few days, the president has continued his crusade against one of the supposed vandals of the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool. In a lengthy post on Truth Social on Sunday, he alleged that “a National Park Service career employee, a highly credible witness,” had caught the former Olympic canoeist David Hearn in the act of “ripping and tugging at the Pool’s somewhat delicate coating.”
The problem is that the Department of Justice’s case against Hearn is already effectively over. More than a week earlier, federal prosecutors dropped the charges against him, citing information from the Department of the Interior; the damage to the Reflecting Pool was “the result of a botched installation and not vandalism,” the government’s motion to dismiss reads. That evidence—and the judgment of DOJ—has done little to stop Donald Trump from pursuing this debunked theory over and over again. In recent weeks, the president has repeatedly returned to the same few vendettas and personal obsessions, trying to push them forward no matter the evidence against them. His strategy is summed up by a self-assessment that he gave CNN more than a decade ago: “I am the most fabulous whiner,” he said. “I keep whining and whining until I win.”
Today, The Wall Street Journal reported that White House officials have asked the Justice Department to consider prosecuting Hearn a second time. By doubling down on his vandalism thesis, Trump is sending a strong message to one of his most ardent supporters, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, whom he already castigated last week for dropping the charges. “I guess she choked,” he told reporters at the time.
The rulings of the Supreme Court don’t seem to sway the president either. On Thursday, he doubled down on another mission of personal importance—limiting birthright citizenship—despite the Court’s recent decision to strike down a previous executive order on the subject. Trump has now issued two new orders that are narrower in scope. One seeks to expand the category of children whom the government can deny automatic citizenship, and the other targets “birth tourism,” a phenomenon in which people travel to the United States “for the purpose of giving birth on American soil”—something that the law already prohibits. These new attempts to upend more than a century of precedent are likely to face significant legal challenges. This tactic wasn’t Trump’s only option: Drawing on Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s June opinion, the president could potentially urge Congress to amend a particular statute or enact new legislation to limit birthright citizenship (although this legislation would be unlikely to pass). Instead, he chose to use the same tool in the hope of getting a different result.
Trump is also forging ahead on his attempts to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Nearly a year ago, the president tried to fire her over allegations of mortgage fraud. In June, the Court ruled that she couldn’t be fired, in part because the White House hadn’t given her a chance to contest the allegations. Last week, Trump’s longtime aide Dan Scavino sent Cook a letter warning her that she may still be removed and telling her in no uncertain terms that “this is your opportunity to respond.” In this case, Trump appears to be cooperating with the Court, although it’s uncertain whether this procedure will be enough to satisfy it. The note makes clear that the president isn’t letting up in his quest to oust Cook.
Trump’s tenacity in pursuing his own agenda is nothing new. Take, for example, his eight-year attempt to brand former FBI Director James Comey as a criminal, despite a lack of evidence; when, in the fall, the first set of charges against him didn’t stick, Trump’s Justice Department simply tried again. As David A. Graham wrote in his story last week about the birthright-citizenship orders, the president’s recent actions invoke a kind of déjà vu. The commitment to doubling down has become a one-size-fits-all strategy: Trump’s desire to fight back doesn’t necessarily correlate with the odds of victory in a given situation. My colleague Tom Nichols recently noted that the president’s push to prosecute Hearn has only emphasized “just how immune to evidence and logic his beliefs have become.” Trump’s fixation on the Reflecting Pool is also directing his focus away from the issues that midterm voters care about most, such as affordability.
Meanwhile, new setbacks are arriving all the time. On Friday, after an appeals court upheld the block on Trump’s attempts to build a new ballroom for the White House, the president promised to make his case to the Supreme Court. That fight, like so many others, is not over until Trump says it is.
[...]
Just week before Greenland Energy intended to sink its first wells into the tundra, the government said on Thursday: “The necessary regulatory process cannot be completed, and the necessary approvals cannot therefore be obtained before the planned start of drilling.”
It said that during talks Greenlandic officials had expressed concern that the timetable was too tight to assess the environmental and social impact.
The authorities will have to decide whether to sanction drilling in a protected wetland that is home to rare birds and the muskoxen on which local hunters depend. At the earliest, drilling could now commence in the winter of 2027, the government and the company said.
... ... ...
In Minnesota yesterday, close Trump ally Mike Lindell, the former chief executive officer of MyPillow, lost the Republican primary for governor to Republican state house speaker Lisa Demuth. This loss comes after Trump ally Representative Andy Ogles lost his primary in Tennessee. As Andrew Howard of Politico noted, Trump had endorsed both of them.
Trump continues to insist that voters are angry not at him, but at Republicans for not passing the measures he demands. But a new Economist/YouGov poll released yesterday found Trump’s job approval ratings dropping even further than the numbers the same poll had shown the previous week, with only 33% of Americans approving of his performance.
As Margie Cullen of the USA Today network reports, 60% of Americans think the president is “not honest and trustworthy,” and 69% feel that things in the country these days are “out of control.” Fifty-three percent of those polled think Trump is too old to be president.
Dr. Jonathan Reiner, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former cardiologist, shares that concern. In a New York Times op-ed today, he noted that the president “has not looked well” at times this year. His hands are bruised, his ankles are swollen, and he struggles to stay awake. Reiner listed a number of questions the White House should address to reassure Americans that Trump is able to perform the duties of the presidency.
“[T]he United States does not have a king,” Reiner wrote. “In a representative democracy, the people must have confidence in the health of their leader, and in the leader’s capacity to guide the nation. We have been kept in the dark too long.”
As if to underscore Reiner’s concerns, Trump appeared to be asleep at a White House event yesterday.
The Iran war appears to have undercut Trump’s power internationally, as well.
At 10:31 this morning, Trump posted: “ The U.S.A. has total control over the Strait of Hormuz. I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT! Our Naval Blockade is being called, by everyone, ‘A WALL OF STEEL,’ and there is nothing Iran can do about it. They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, their remaining soldiers are unpaid, the IRGC is decimated and fleeing, and their ‘Leadership’ is uncertain, at best! They have No Money—Their country is ‘shot.’ All they have is FAKE NEWS and 300% INFLATION, and getting worse! Iran is all talk and no action, the Bully of the Middle East No Longer. Praise be to Allah!”
In fact, Reuters reported that in the last week, about a single ship a day has passed through the strait. The prewar number was about 130 a day.
National security reporter David Rothkopf wrote: “The man who cowered hiding from the Iranians in a catering truck and who has personally done more to increase Iran’s strategic influence than anyone in its own government ever has, is now blathering nonsense via social media. The world sees him more as an impotent fool today than ever before.”
Trump’s inability to end his war on Iran has eroded U.S. credibility in the Middle East. Yesterday, Daniella Cheslow, Nahal Toosi, Phelim Kine, and Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing of Politico reported that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s public rejection of Trump’s Board of Peace plan for Gaza is also undermining allies’ faith in the ability of the U.S. to influence conditions and events in the Middle East. Netanyahu’s defiance of Trump appears to show that the U.S. no longer has leverage to impose its will on the region.
Referring to the Board of Peace that Trump has supported as an alternative to the United Nations, Zaha Hassan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told the journalists: “It’s really a Trump personal enterprise. So if it can’t get Israel to stand down in Gaza, to withdraw, to allow the Board of Peace to do its work, how can any other regional actor believe that the U.S. can restrain Israel in their neighborhood?”
As his popularity slumps, Trump appears to be collapsing his circle to those close to him personally. The scandal that Trump secretly used a small plane to leave Türkiye for Britain after credible Iranian threats of assassination, leaving journalists and White House staffers to act as a decoy, has provided a crystal clear view of the president. As writer and cartoonist Liza Donnelly summed it up in her Seeing Things: “To Save Himself, Trump Endangered Others.”
The choice of who left the decoy plane to travel with Trump also revealed that Trump opted to protect his loyal aides rather than any cabinet officials, prizing loyalists over members of the government. Dan Lamothe and Cat Zakrzewski of the Washington Post reported today that Trump left Secretary of State Marco Rubio behind on the decoy plane but took with him White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, executive assistant Natalie Harp, and director of Oval Office operations Walt Nauta.
The journalists report that Scavino, Harp, and Nauta worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago in between his presidencies after others distanced themselves. Nauta was indicted on six felony counts, including taking part in a conspiracy to obstruct justice, after allegedly helping Trump hide the classified documents he retained after leaving the White House.
Also traveling with the president was Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who cheered on Trump’s attack on Iran. Although Hegseth apparently retains Trump’s approval, Natalie Oliverio of Military Times reported yesterday that repeated extension of their tours of duty to more than 8 months while the condition of their ship has deteriorated, with broken showers and little food, has led sailors from the USS Abraham Lincoln to self-harm, including attempts to jump from the 60-foot-high deck. More than 200 family members have raised concerns about sailors’ mental health, exhaustion, and safety with Navy officials.
With Trump slipping both politically and personally, there is a frantic feeling in the air as members of the Trump administration and their allies appear to be trying to grab all they can before the midterm elections.
Today Jonathan O’Connell and Sarah Blaskey of the Washington Post reported that the renovations Trump is making to the White House campus will cost at least $927 million, with that money coming primarily from taxpayers. The administration has bypassed Congress to find the funding by channeling money from other agencies and private donors and sending it to an account typically used for routine maintenance.
On Sunday, reporter Scott MacFarlane of MacFarlane News reported that more than $323 million has been funneled from the National Park Service to Trump’s vanity projects on the White House grounds, even as Trump’s own Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, estimates a $30 billion backlog of deferred maintenance in the parks themselves. MacFarlane notes that the number is a nearly 5,000% (not a typo) increase over the $7.5 million spent at the White House in 2024, the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Another $100 million has been allotted to the National Mall this year. The $423 million allocated this year for projects at the White House and the National Mall is more money than had been allotted to Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Mammoth Cave, Zion, and Joshua Tree National Parks, Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the Statue of Liberty complex combined.
Outdoor writer Wes Siler of Wes Siler’s Newsletter reported on Monday that House Democrats Jared Huffman of California, the top-ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, and Maxine Dexter of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, are launching an investigation into possible insider trading over Trump’s 90% reduction of the national monuments Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante.
Huffman and Dexter wrote to Ross Bhappu, president and chief executive officer of Energy Fuels, noting that Bhappu and board chair Bruce Hansen bought the largest amount of company stock purchased by an insider in the company’s history just days before Trump’s announcement. That announcement opened almost 3 million acres of federal land to uranium mining that would benefit Energy Fuels, just as the company had been asking for since Trump’s first term in office.
Energy Fuels is a giant Canadian mining conglomerate whose leadership has boasted to investors about its close ties to the Trump administration. Huffman and Dexter noted that it has also received a $725 million loan from the Department of Defense to expand a uranium-processing facility near Bears Ears National Monument.
That mill, Huffman and Dexter point out, “has become a radioactive dumping ground, taking in waste from Superfund sites, the Manhattan Project, and even foreign countries, all while storing more than 700 million pounds of toxic material in outdated, single-liner pits that threaten nearby tribal communities and groundwater. Americans are rightfully outraged that spills have occurred along a school bus route and that the mill continues emitting radon and other dangerous pollutants linked to lung cancer, all without modern safeguards or meaningful transparency.”
Trump loyalists are not accepting Trump’s weakening position without a fight. Today, journalists like Sarah Davis of The Hill reported that Mike Lindell, who lost the primary by more than 10 percentage points, is refusing to concede. He claims his team is investigating irregularities in the vote totals.
Representative Ted Lieu ridiculed Lindell’s echo of the claims he and Trump had made about the 2020 election. “Many people say Venezuela rigged the election against Mike Lindell because they don’t like his pillows,” Lieu wrote. “Never seen anything like it.”
A case in point, say critics, has been the weak oversight of Binance, the world’s biggest crypto exchange that has benefited Trump’s World Liberty Financial.
WLF was tapped to play a central role in a $2bn investment by Abu Dhabi financial fund MGX that is backed by the United Arab Emirates in Binance. As part of the deal, the Abu Dhabi fund bought $2bn of a WLF stablecoin, dubbed USD1, to invest in Binance. Stablecoins are a popular type of cryptocurrency that are often pegged to the dollar.
The WLF deal came after Binance in 2023 pleaded guilty to violating US money-laundering laws and other violations and DOJ fined it a whopping $4.3bn.
Furthermore, Binance’s ex-CEO and founder, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty in the US to violating the Bank Secrecy Act and failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program.
Zhao, who still owns 90% of Binance, served a four-month jail term in 2024 and last year received a pardon from Trump. Despite Binance pledges to crack down on crime, internal investigators last year found that about $1.7bn in crypto reportedly moved through Binance to Iranian entities linked to terrorism.
Similarly, watchdog groups are sharply critical of Truth Social’s offer to sell Wall Street advance looks at Trump’s Truth Social posts for $100,000 per month.
“Using the presidency to channel nonpublic information to his media company’s major institutional customers for profit is not simply Trump’s newest act in self dealing,” said Virginia Canter, the chief counsel for ethics and anti-corruption with Democracy Defenders Action.
Today Trump’s handpicked Kennedy Center board voted to put Trump’s name back on the Kennedy Center, this time in letters saying the building was “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.” Trump is the chair of the Kennedy Center board; his loyalists elected him to that position.
Administration loyalists are not only cashing in as Trump’s power wanes, they are also grabbing ideological ground.
Although a YouGov poll released two days ago shows that only 40% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, the administration has ramped up its attacks on immigrants. Hamed Aleaziz and Miriam Jordan reported in the New York Times at the end of July that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has teamed up with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to enable ICE officers to arrest individuals with expired visas, many of whom are waiting for visa extensions or green cards and have valid work permits.
In the past, those people were usually detained only if they had committed crimes. But the Trump administration considers all those who have overstayed a visa to be criminals. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hopes to arrest 2,000 immigrants a day, sweeping in foreigners newly married to Americans, an engineer waiting for an extension of his work visa, and so on.
The administration is also moving cases through immigration courts as quickly as possible, leading to people missing court dates in historically high numbers. Having missed their court date, they are being ordered immediately deported. Valerie Gonzalez and Cybele Mayes-Osterman of the Associated Press reported on August 1 that overworked judges are often deciding hundreds of cases a day, often making decisions in less than five minutes.
The administration allowed a contract for legal representation for immigrant children to expire on July 31, then offered a $150 million no-bid contract to a small Texas law firm with no experience in the field but with close ties to Trump. When the story broke, outrage led the law firm to decline the contract.
Yesterday federal officials said a third immigrant detained at New Jersey’s Delaney Hall has died. They said Jose Chajon-Raxon experienced a medical emergency on July 19 and died in the hospital. As part of a new policy to stop reporting the deaths of detainees released from federal custody, DHS said Chajon-Raxon had been “released from ICE custody on July 22.”
On August 10, ICE published a notice that it would spend up to $20 million on shock gloves that deliver a painful charge of electricity to subdue individuals. Jeremy White of Wired reported today that the glove is supposed to subdue someone in three seconds or less and the manufacturer warns that the device should not be used for longer than 15 seconds; no more than one pair should be used at the same time on one person; that operators must touch only arms or legs, strictly avoiding head, face, throat, chest, and groin; that gloves must not be used on the elderly, children, pregnant women, or people with severe disabilities; and that the technology must not be used to stop people from talking back, as punishment, or to torture.
Senator Angus King (I-ME) released a statement saying: “At a time when the majority of Americans believe that Immigration and Customs Enforcement…has been irresponsible in its use of force, the new ICE announcement touting shock gloves begs a crucial question: is ICE genuinely focused on de-escalation or, what appears more likely, intimidation of anyone critical of their often unlawful conduct?
King urged “every single one of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to stand up, assert our constitutional authority, and demand immediate answers from ICE on their hiring practices, training, and tactics.”
He continued: “I never thought I would see the day when masked and armed men in unmarked cars would be roaming the streets and neighborhoods of America, acting in utter disregard of the legal constraints that are basic to our freedoms.
“It’s becoming more and more clear that the stated basis for this gross violation of our rights—that they are ridding our communities of ‘the worst of the worst’—is a lie, and the real purpose is to establish a national police force to do the bidding of a corrupt and lawless administration.”
“It is past time for Congress to do its duty and, for once,” he said, “put country ahead of party.”
The symbol of the administration’s immigration crackdown is the attack on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who came to the U.S. legally under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. During the 2024 presidential campaign, both Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance, then a senator from Ohio, claimed falsely that the Haitian immigrants who had come to Springfield to fill jobs in manufacturing and food packaging were eating the pets of their native-born neighbors. Although Republican governor Mike DeWine defended the immigrants, crediting them for the city’s economic renewal, Trump and Vance’s claims set off neo-Nazi marches and threats that forced schools to close.
Former DHS secretary Kristi Noem declined to renew TPS for Haitians and Syrians, and in June the U.S. Supreme Court upheld her determination, stripping about 350,000 Haitian immigrants of their legal status.
Stephen Starr of The Guardian reports that DHS has recently begun ordering Haitian immigrants in Springfield to come to a DHS facility, where they are fitted with ankle monitors. DHS did not answer Starr’s inquiries about why they were using the monitors, answering only: “Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe. DHS does not discuss ongoing or future operations.”
The administration claims to be building its border wall in Texas by bulldozing its way through Big Bend National Park, a remote area larger than the state of Rhode Island that receives only about 1% of the nation’s unauthorized border crossings. As Ed Lavandera, Ashley Killough, and Rachel Clarke of CNN reported today, in February, Noem waived federal laws related to wildlife protection, historic preservation, and the environment, saying there was “an acute and immediate need to construct additional physical barriers and roads” there.
Thaddeus Cleveland, a former U.S. Border Patrol officer and the Republican sheriff of Terrell County northeast of the park, told the CNN reporters that there had previously been little if any talk of a border barrier there. “We didn’t have to worry about any type of barrier. We had a God-made barrier,” he said. “But that’s definitely changed.”
The federal government has allotted $1.72 billion for the destruction, planning to add steel walls, hundreds of miles of new roads, and vehicle barriers. Retired park superintendent Bob Krumenaker called the whole project “insane.” “It’s just a tremendous erosion, if not violation, of the agreement that Texans and the American people made when they established that national park. The federal government that I worked for for 41 years is disrespecting its citizens in a huge way.”
Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Brad Heath, and Kristina Cooke of Reuters reported today that because of staffing shortages, funding cuts, and reassignment of agents to immigration enforcement as the administration attempts to purge the nation of Brown people, the Department of Justice’s investigations into sex trafficking have stalled, with charges falling to their lowest pace since 2010. The Justice Department has also dropped prosecutions of those involved in crimes like tax evasion and drug trafficking to focus on immigration.
Rebecca Beitsch of The Hill reported today that Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, and Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) want to know more about the purchase of twelve new planes, including one that came “fully equipped with a bedroom and other luxury amenities like a shower, kitchen, bar, and flatscreen TVs”—although the bedroom has apparently been removed—to ferry Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel and Trump’s border advisor Tom Homan. The FBI already has a plane for the director.
“This administration has lit taxpayer dollars on fire by acquiring new and unnecessary planes to jet Trump officials around in extreme luxury that the vast majority of Americans will never experience,” Murray and Murphy wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also grabbing ideological ground. Although he gained Senate confirmation by assuring Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a medical doctor, that he would not change the nation’s vaccine schedule, he began reworking it almost as soon as he was confirmed.
States have the authority to determine which vaccines will be required for attendance at public school, but in January the administration cut the number of vaccines the government recommended for children, ceasing to recommend vaccines against influenza, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, some forms of meningitis or RSV.
On Monday, even as measles outbreaks are growing in the U.S., Trump issued an executive order to force states to revise their recommendations on childhood vaccinations. The order calls for recommending that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine be separated into three single-disease shots to be administered at separate appointments, although such separate vaccinations aren’t even available in the U.S.
While Trump falsely claimed that “there could be a possibility that” the vaccines are “quite lethal” in an MMR shot—utter nonsense—he said that separating the vaccines means they will be “very effective.” In fact, years of evidence have proved that the MMR vaccine is safe and effective.
But what separating the vaccines would do is to guarantee that fewer children would be fully vaccinated. Separate vaccines mean more visits to the doctor, often spaced at specific intervals. Studies show that separating the vaccines makes children from poor families less likely to get the full schedule of vaccines, leaving them and their communities more vulnerable to disease than wealthier Americans.
The executive order will not change the recommendation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or, probably, insurance coverage. What it will do is sow confusion over vaccines, as Kennedy has done for years. Trump called the announcement a “major victory for parents rights, religious and constitutional rights, and for the gold standard science.”
When asked if he regretted his vote to confirm the anti-vaccination activist Kennedy to head the nation’s health department, Cassidy told CNBC’s Squawk Box: “If you’re going to tell me I was, somebody didn’t tell me the truth, and I should’ve, like, you know, seen in the future they were not gonna tell the truth, you can say, ‘Oh, Bill you should’ve seen into the future,’ in which case I’d be on your show talking about the futures of stocks as opposed to vaccine policy.”
The United States has borrowed more in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2026 than it did in all of fiscal year 2025. Today’s Treasury figures show we’re already $1.8 trillion in the red, suggesting we’re on track to borrow over $2 trillion this fiscal year.
In July alone, we borrowed $432 billion – that’s $14 billion per day.
