Start your week off right: Come irradiate your brain with MAGA Mondays! Will Sommer and Andrew Egger are live on Substack and YouTube at 10 a.m. EDT.

Of Lemons and Lemonade

by William Kristol

I’ve never had much interest in Dale Carnegie, the relentlessly upbeat and optimistic American self-help guru. I’ve ignored advice during my time in Washington that I could benefit from studying his 1936 bestseller, How to Win Friends and Influence People. I’ve resisted the counsel of some friends, concerned for my well-being in the age of Trump, to take a look at his 1948 treatise, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

I’m too old to change my ways. No Dale Carnegie for me.

But perhaps some Democratic politicians could benefit from a dose of Dale? They are, after all, in the business of trying to win friends and influence people.

They might take a glance at the famous passage from How to Stop Worrying on lemons and lemonade. Carnegie warns against the attitude of the person who, finding life has handed him a lemon, gives up and says: “I’m beaten. It is fate. I haven’t got a chance.” Then, Carnegie writes, “He proceeds to rail against the world and indulge in an orgy of self pity.”

By contrast, Carnegie explains—using a phrase he helped popularize—when a wise man is handed a lemon, he asks, “How can I turn this lemon into a lemonade?”

Late last night, the American people were handed a lemon: A capitulation by Republican senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina that makes confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general likely. Blanche provided them a fig leaf, a written order formally rescinding the proposed $1.8 billion fund for alleged victims of political prosecutions and a statement allegedly limiting the provision of the agreement that shields Trump, his sons, and their businesses from tax claims.

These assurances will presumably be enough for Blanche to make it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday on a straight party-line vote. He’s then likely—though not certain—to get the 50 votes he’ll need to be confirmed by the whole Senate, probably at the end of the week.

So this lemon will be added to a whole bushel of other lemons in Trump’s cabinet. Todd Blanche will join Jay Clayton, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Markwayne Mullin as confirmed leaders of the key national security agencies of Trump’s executive branch. Having loyal and determined apparatchiks like them in positions of real power for the next two and a half years is not a good thing.

On the other hand: There is lemonade to be made here. Trump’s polls have been sinking. Republicans are almost certain to lose the House this fall, and the Senate majority is up for grabs. Democratic control of both houses would help check Trump’s authoritarian schemes. And the fact that the entire Senate Republican conference will have to cast a high-visibility vote to confirm Todd Blanche can help in turning the Senate Democratic.

Assuming Mitch McConnell remains absent, Republicans can only afford two defections in the Senate. They may lose Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins. So incumbent GOP senators in tossup or somewhat contested races, like Jon Husted in Ohio, Dan Sullivan in Alaska, Ashley Moody in Florida, Roger Marshall in Kansas, and Pete Ricketts in Nebraska will have to vote to confirm Blanche. And Republican candidates in open seats like Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, and Montana will presumably have to express support for Blanche.

It’s possible there will be a revolt among a few GOP senators against this man who sought to shovel taxpayer money to the January 6th assailants, who has initiated and presided over blatantly political prosecutions, and who was at the very center of the Jeffrey Epstein coverup. On this last front, Epstein survivor Dani Bensky put it bluntly last week: “You can’t say that you want to make sure that sex offenders and sex traffickers are behind bars and then vote for him. Every vote for Blanche is really a vote against survivors.”

If there is a revolt and Blanche loses, it will be an embarrassment for Trump. But if Blanche is confirmed, it could do more damage to Republicans. It will be visible proof, if proof were still needed, that if Republicans are left in control of the Senate, there will be no check on Trump’s coverups and corruption and lawlessness.

So Democrats need to make this next week as visible and painful for the GOP as possible. They should drag out matters on the Senate floor to keep the issue of Blanche front and center as long as possible, and then hammer his confirmation during the recess as a key example of the truth that a Republican Senate will never stand up to Trump.

I see only one obstacle to this exercise in lemonade-making. Needless to say, it’s been created by the Democrats themselves. Yesterday, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and Appropriations Committee vice chair Patty Murray announced their support for a continuing resolution to fund the government through December 11. They envision cooperating with Republicans to bring it to the floor and pass it this week.

Leave aside that, in my judgment, it’s a bad agreement on substance—with no restrictions on Trump’s war, on lawlessness at the Justice Department, or on the behavior of ICE agents.

But it’s also politically foolish. Funding for the government doesn’t run out for two more months. There’s plenty of time to deal with this question in September. Why allow Republican senators to go home for recess taking credit for a bipartisan budget deal? Why give them what they will tout as an example of successful bipartisan governance under Republican leadership?

This shouldn’t be complicated: First, Democratic senators should kill the deal on the continuing resolution. Then they need to use the Blanche confirmation to highlight the truth that a Republican Senate will simply be a rubber stamp for Trump over the next two years. Todd Blanche may well get confirmed. But if they don’t get in their own way, Democrats can turn that sour lemon into sweet, tart lemonade.

JD’s Roman Holiday

by Joshua Tait

Those of us who spend a lot of time observing right-wingers have been predicting an outbreak of internecine conflict. And lo, behold an outbreak of intra-Nicene conflict.

Certain sectors of the right are this close to dusting off images of mitre-headed bishop crocodiles ambling ashore to turn America into a Catholic theocracy. This isn’t a reaction to the first American pope; it’s a fight about the ideological makeup of right-wing elites and, as is often the case, Vice President JD Vance’s place among them. (It’s not even the only proxy fight about Vance among right-wing intellectuals right now.)

Vance has a long-running game of footsie with post-liberalism and the theocratic Catholicism of “integralist” intellectuals like Adrian Vermeule, who may not have a large electoral coalition but have openly strategized about installing conservative Catholic elites in the government and administrative state. The aim is something like a government of, by, and for Catholic converts, and Vance is their blue-eyed boy.

As with so many right-wing dustups, this one involves an anonymous X account, “CappyAmerica,” which declared itself “Never Vance. Never the Post-liberal Papal Integralist Socialist thin-skinned jerk Vance.” (The account has about 1,300 followers.) The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles detected a “neo-Know-Nothing contempt for Catholics” in the anti-Vance tweet, comparing it to coded antisemitism. (This is news to me, a parishioner at my local church, as it would be to Cardinal Christophe Pierre, former apostolic nuncio to the United States, who issued a correction to key post-liberals by name.) Knowles in turn was mocked by non-integralist Catholic conservatives, who are able to easily distinguish their politics from aspiring theocrats. Thomas D. Howes, coauthor of Why Post-Liberalism Failed, commented: “Lol, no.” The Blaze’s Auron MacIntyre, a self-described “great respecter of the [anti-Catholic] Know-Nothing tradition” also rejected the comparison to antisemitism. Anti-Catholic authoritarians generally seem to see the post-liberals and integralists as rivals in their preferred authoritarian future.

Erick Erickson, who describes himself as a “Christian broadcaster” and “Conservative truth-teller,” didn’t really even seem to know what was going on, bless him.

But Knowles did have some allies. National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty and the activist Christopher Rufo, in a parallel social media spat, both weighed in to defend a sanitized version of the post-liberal position, which turned into a days-long debate over the meaning of “the Common Good.” Post-liberals and their defenders maintain that fostering the Common Good ought to be the authentic end of politics; critics recognize it’s an ideological Trojan horse for post-liberals’ coercive project.

These are mere skirmishes in a larger war dividing the religious right: the role of Holy Mother Church. While Catholicism may be struggling in the provinces, conversion and Mass attendance are political and social markers among young conservatives in Washington. In a report last week on the Heritage Foundation, New York Times contributing writer Elisabeth Zerofsky highlighted complaints about Heritage head honcho Kevin Roberts’s efforts to enforce strict Catholic social teachings at the think tank and, by extension, the conservative movement. Is this the direction of American conservatism? And, by God, is it electorally viable?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter so long as Catholics make up the vanguard of right-wing politics. As Nate Weisberg points out in New York magazine, Catholics constitute “more than a third of the members of Trump’s second-term Cabinet, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, CIA director John Ratcliffe, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon.” Not to mention non-cabinet figures, including “press secretary Karoline Leavitt and border czar Tom Homan.” That’s not to say these figures buy into—or are even aware of—post-liberal integralist dreams, though some in Vance’s and Rubio’s orbit do, and there are at least some young White House staffers who consciously think of themselves in this way.

Part of the zest here, as the original tweeter makes clear, is about positioning for 2028. The Heritage Foundation, Zerofsky reports, “is investing heavily in its relationship” with Vance, the foremost political figurehead of hard-right weirdness who has made his adult conversion to Catholicism a key part of his story. There is a long tradition of conservatives crossing the Tiber, but the way Vance has engaged with authoritarianish social conservatives, both here and abroad, suggests a genuine affinity for post-liberal politics.

In the immediate fight, it’s pretty clear that conservatives who want Rubio (or someone else entirely) to lead the party post-Trump have fallen one way, while those lining up behind Vance have fallen the other.

As for us, we’re Never Vance too—though for strictly non-sectarian reasons.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• How Iran Blew Up Trump’s Gulf AI Deals… ALASDAIR PHILLIPS-ROBINS and SAM WINTER-LEVY on the administration’s bizarre decisions involving chips and the UAE.

• A Blistering Critique of the Roberts Court, From Hawaii’s Supreme Court… In an extraordinary opinion, the state justices accuse the SCOTUS majority of undermining democracy, writes KIM WEHLE.

• Trump’s Polls Are Collapsing. Is a Blue Tsunami Coming? RON BROWNSTEIN joins BILL KRISTOL for The Bulwark on Sunday.

• Happy Declaration-Signing Day… Nobody signed America’s birth certificate on July 4, 1776, explains DAVID HEAD: John Hancock didn’t put down his John Hancock until August 2.

Quick Hits

TRUTH API GOES LIVE: One act of outrageous corruption ends; another arrives. Donald Trump may have formally renounced his plans for the “anti-weaponization fund” for taxpayer-funded payouts to J6ers and other allies, but he’s thought up another way to rob the public instead. This time, however, the money is flowing straight into his own pocket.

Over the weekend, Trump Media, the president’s company that runs Truth Social, launched its new Truth API feature, which promises faster access to Trump’s social media posts to companies that fork over a reported $100,000 a month. The company is explicitly billing this as a way for financial firms to get an edge in trading over their competitors by being the first to see the president’s “most market-moving Truths.”

From top to bottom, the whole concept is so corrupt you almost struggle to get your head around it. Donald Trump, in his official role as president, chooses to communicate about his official acts not through official channels but on a private platform he himself owns. Now, he is using that platform to sell premium access to knowledge about the workings of the U.S. government. This is pure rent-seeking; there’s no value-creating service here, just Trump finding a way to charge for something—knowledge of the working of the government—that should already belong freely to Americans by right.

And it’s true: Trump’s posts do send markets careening around, and traders do run the risk of being left in the dust if they’re slower than their competitors to react to Trump’s posts. As a result, many companies will doubtless be willing to pony up. They may even be eager to, seeing this as one more protection-racket payment—like donating to Trump’s super PACs or ballroom fund—to help them stay personally on the president’s good side.

This money isn’t coming out of the U.S. Treasury. But it’s not coming out of the pockets of hedge funders either. Trump is just skimming off the top of the entire financial system—which is to say, the U.S. economy at large. “Truth API” is public robbery no less than if Trump had created a new tax for Americans to pay him personally.

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DOJ ADMITS OBVIOUS ON REFLECTING POOL: Hey, remember when Donald Trump resurfaced the Reflecting Pool, the new surface started falling apart instantly, and the government started thuggishly arresting people it pretended had “vandalized” the pool to try to save itself from embarrassment? They were always obviously lying, but now, per the Hill, their story is falling apart faster than a new American Flag Blue pool liner:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) moved Friday to drop its criminal prosecution of a former Olympian charged with destroying the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, saying the damage was instead the result of a “rushed and botched installation.”

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office blamed the contractor for overspraying and delamination.

In a new court filing, the office indicated it no longer stands behind its case against David Hearn, a three-time Olympic canoeist who pleaded not guilty to felony destruction of property earlier this month.

Remarkably, the Justice Department’s filing blames the Interior Department for initially covering up the fact that the pool had already begun to peel. “Given all of this newly discovered information,” prosecutors wrote, “it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Hilariously and insanely, the parts of the government that aren’t currently speaking on penalty of perjury in court are still trying to keep up the vandalism story. After the DOJ threw Interior under the bus, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum took to X to insist they were mistaken: “The evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. . . . We won’t back down to deranged people who want to destroy, deface, or degrade our monuments.” You want to testify to that effect, Doug?

OHIOANS PUSH BACK ON ICE: As the Trump administration begins to ramp up immigration enforcement in Ohio, hundreds of Ohioans turned out this weekend to protest ICE activities in the Buckeye state. In Akron, roughly 200 protesters posted up Sunday outside of Akron-Canton Airport to protest ICE flights from the airport.

In Cincinnati, outside of the Blue Ash ICE facility, nearly 550 people, including a number of clergy, came out to protest. Carl Ruby, who has been frequently cited in these pages, was there, accompanying a member of his congregation who was called in by ICE for an appointment. Ruby prayed outside the entrance where his congregant entered. “I want the ICE agents to look out and see me praying,” Ruby told the Cincinnati Enquirer.

An attendee / reader tells The Bulwark that the protest was well organized, with protesters careful not to give law enforcement a pretext to crack down: “We could only stand on the grass. We couldn’t even touch the cement because we didn’t want the police to shut us down.” They weren’t shut down, and they hope to be there next weekend too.

Ruby got his wish. The attendee reports: “All these ICE people kept coming to the door and looking out and peering out the windows.”

—Jim Swift

Cheap Shots

The donations come in by the millions and tens of millions—for his presidential library, his ballroom project, his political action committees. Trump may be a president, but America’s CEO class knows it’s still much safer—and more profitable, in the long run—to treat him like a king. Happy Friday.

Join Catherine Rampell and JVL for Receipts Live on Substack and YouTube today at 12:30 p.m. EDT.

Fauci’s Diary Made Katie Miller Look Human. She Can’t Have That.

by Andrew Egger

By now you’ve probably read plenty about congressional Republicans’ latest struggle session against Anthony Fauci—the mean-spirited publication of his COVID-era diary, the barrage of ridiculous and misleading questions at his Senate hearing, the crude spectacle of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tweeting a photoshopped image of himself clapping the doctor in handcuffs.

Yesterday, though, my attention was captured by a far smaller, sadder side plot in the Fauci affair spotlighted by NOTUS—one involving Katie Miller.

During Trump’s first term, Miller was a senior aide to Vice President Mike Pence, and therefore a close colleague of Fauci’s on the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, which Pence chaired.

From his journal entries, it’s clear that Fauci quickly took a liking to Miller, whom he viewed as a bright young colleague and for whom he developed an almost grandfatherly affection. “Katie Miller is great (tough, smart, but great),” he wrote in March 2020. “Katie Miller and I laugh at each other in the Sit Room,” he wrote two months later.

The work of grappling with a brand new, barely understood pandemic was stressful, both professionally and personally—after all, the task force could get the virus too. At several points, Miller leaned on Fauci for medical advice. “I am calling Katie frequently to check on her couple times per day,” Fauci wrote after Miller tested positive for COVID in May 2020. “She is very anxious about getting very ill since she is 10 weeks pregnant. Tonight she had an anxiety reaction. I calmed her over the phone.”

This was still awfully early days in the pandemic, when little was yet known about the relative risks COVID presented to various groups. Think of how genuinely terror-stricken Miller must have been. Think of how reassuring it must have been to have America’s top infectious-disease expert on hand not just to advise her, but to show personal concern for her physical and mental health. Miller, NOTUS reports, went back to Fauci repeatedly for medical advice throughout the pandemic: later that year when her husband tested positive for COVID, and again when their newborn experienced an unrelated medical episode. In the latter instance, Fauci records, he called the baby’s doctors directly to ensure she was getting good care.

Miller purports to feel differently now. “Dr. Fauci was neither my friend nor my doctor, but a work colleague who weaponized my pregnancy and child for his gain to aggrandize himself,” she wrote on X yesterday. “As they say, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. I can say with certainty after witnessing his con close up this man should be in prison. Justice for the American People.”

Miller’s claim here—that she was only relying on Fauci’s pro bono medical advice to “keep her enemies closer”—beggars belief. Nor does her explanation of his behavior make a bit of sense: Apparently, he “weaponized [her] pregnancy and child” to “aggrandize himself” by . . . showing concern for her well-being and going out of his way to help her out from time to time. And he kept it all private even as the Millers and the rest of the Trump movement turned him into a bogeyman.1 Sinister!

Still, it’s easy to see why Miller is twisting herself in these sorts of knots. Fauci has become one of the MAGAsphere’s chief villains, while she’s become one of its influencers, with hundreds of thousands of followers and an odd soft-focus podcast aimed at MAGA moms. The ecosystem she’s chosen to live in is one dominated by political paranoia and intramural accusations of secret disloyalty. Fauci’s diary drop must have been a nasty shock. What if some clout-chasing rabble-rouser used it to try to expose her as some sort of Deep State plant? Better to get ahead of the accusations by cooking up some ridiculous “cover story” for associating with Fauci—and to call for his jailing too, just to be on the safe side.

Now, of course, Miller does a lot of things that I personally find a little difficult to wrap my head around. This, after all, is a woman who has tried to get the FBI to criminally investigate her neighbors. This is a woman who once lost her cool in a TV debate and started threatening her interlocutor with deportation. This is a woman who married Stephen Miller.

Still, it’s interesting to see a human side of Miller emerge in Fauci’s diary entries—and incredibly depressing to see her treat that human side as a four-alarm PR fire. What a bummer way to make a living, swimming in this revolting internet ecosystem. Hard to imagine she’s having a lot of fun.

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Shoot the Puck

by William Kristol

“You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” This lesson comes to us courtesy of Wayne Gretzky, perhaps the greatest hockey player ever. Gretzky credits this sage advice to his father, Walter, who was driving him to practice one day and wanted to encourage young Wayne to shoot more.

It’s a good hockey lesson. It’s also a good politics lesson.

When Donald Trump announced his nomination of Todd Blanche as attorney general almost two months ago, the prospect of blocking his confirmation in the Senate seemed grim. This Republican Senate has routinely confirmed almost all of President Trump’s nominees. Republican senators have expressed qualms and objections—and then routinely caved.

But as of now, Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina haven’t folded. They may still, and Blanche may still become attorney general in a permanent capacity, as opposed to his current acting capacity, in which position he’s already done a great deal in service of the Trumpist corruption of the Department of Justice. That corruption will continue under Blanche or any Trump-appointed successor. So this victory may only be transient, and in any case will be limited in its practical effects.

Still. For now, Blanche is blocked. Even if he eventually makes it, he will have been weakened. And in any case the protracted and well-publicized fight over Blanche has been a setback for Trump and Trumpism. The public has been made more aware of Trump’s determination to transform the Department of Justice into a Department of Retribution, Weaponization, and Election Subversion. The disgraceful Epstein coverup, which Blanche coordinated, is back in the news.

And since Blanche is being blocked by two Republican senators who are lame ducks, and since the GOP conference in the Senate will be even more uniformly Trumpist in 2027 than it is now, the case for Democratic control of the Senate if voters want any check on Trump for the next two years has been reinforced.

The sequence of events that has so far blocked Blanche wasn’t inevitable. The key issue for Cornyn and Tillis has been the corrupt deal negotiated between Trump’s current personal lawyers and his former personal lawyer, one Todd Blanche. The deal resolved a meritless lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS by giving Trump, his family, and his businesses broad immunity against IRS audits, saving them perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.

But a key moment that slowed down the momentum towards confirmation had to do with a different issue, Epstein.

In response to Epstein survivor Dani Bensky’s testimony against Blanche, Tillis made it a condition for his support that Blanche meet with the Epstein survivors. The meeting went badly, and Epstein survivors explained how dismissive and condescending Blanche was. Tillis, who’d said he wanted to “get to Yes” on Blanche, then joined Cornyn—who has been a longtime and sincere champion in the fight against human trafficking and sexual exploitation, and who listened intently to Bensky’s testimony—in his objection to Blanche.

Trump then refused to allow Blanche to put the guarantees Cornyn wanted about the non-audit agreement in writing. Cornyn and Tillis dug in as Trump insulted them—including in a post just hours ago—and we’re now at an impasse.

It was all a somewhat unpredictable—and unexpected—course of events. It needn’t have happened as it did. But it did only because the Epstein survivors, along with other groups focused on other issues, all rallied to fight, even though the odds were against them.

In April 2025, Alex Ovechkin passed Wayne Gretzky as the leading all-time NHL goal scorer. But partly because Gretzky put so many shots on goal that created rebounds and scoring opportunities for teammates, he remains by far the all-time leader in assists and career points. And his teams won four Stanley Cups.

Politics is full of smart people who routinely overthink things. Overthinking tends to lead to caution. For me, the lesson of the Blanche fight is that of Gretzky père et fils: Take your shots. Some of them will be on goal. Maybe you’ll score. Maybe your teammate will score on a rebound. Maybe the goalie or the defense won’t clear the puck successfully, leading to another scoring opportunity. Or maybe you’ll just miss this time and have to try again later. But keep taking shots.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Was Never Funny… MONA CHAREN on the Stockholm syndrome of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

• The Comey Prosecution Is Dead… But it’s no time to rejoice, argues PAUL ROSENZWEIG.

• Trump’s Approval Has Collapsed… As SARAH MATTHEWS reports, new polling shows voters are increasingly unhappy with his handling of the issues that matter most: the Iran war and the economy.

• Here Are the Republicans’ Biggest Lies From Their Fauci Show Trial… In Press Pass, WILL SALETAN writes: In their retelling of the COVID story, the doctor was the bad guy, the vaccines were deadly, and Trump did everything right.

• Bulwark Goes to Hollywood: This week, SONNY BUNCH interviews showrunner SAM CATLIN on the second season of Apple TV’s Sugar, and reviews Spider-Noir. It’s Nicolas Cage playing a PI Spider-Man: What more could you want?

Quick Hits

INFIGHTING ON IRAN: As American prospects in Iran grow fainter, the war of words between the hawks and doves in the MAGA coalition over who’s to blame is heating up again.

Writing in the Washington Post yesterday, columnist Marc Thiessen—a former George W. Bush speechwriter who is among President Trump’s most hawkish supporters—sketched out a view of the war in which the powerful, muscular actions of the president and his advisers like Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, and Pete Hegseth were annihilating Iran, only to be repeatedly let down by the quisling dovishness of Vice President JD Vance. “Like Lucy and the football, Trump keeps getting told that this time the Iranians are finally ready to make a deal—only to be set up for failure yet again,” Thiessen wrote. “Indeed, by elevating a deal as the definition of victory, Vance has given Iran a veto over America’s ability to declare victory. All it has to do is refuse to agree—which it is doing.”

This view is a self-serving hallucination, of course—Trump has been just as eager to get a deal as Vance, as he has told us over and over in public. Just as Thiessen is eager to make Vance a scapegoat for the failures of the war, so Vance fans have been eager to do the same with Thiessen himself. “Thiessen is smart enough to know he can’t attack Trump, so he’s pushing a lie that Vance is acting independently of the president,” tweeted GOP strategist Ryan Girdusky, an ally of the nationalist right. “He was also one of the people who lobbied Trump the hardest to get into the war and Trump is tired of his bullshit.”

WISCONSIN ON A WING: Francesca Hong, a Democratic Socialist representing Madison in the Wisconsin State Assembly, is all but certain to be the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin. She also wants to “Cancel Thanksgiving.”

In a since-deleted tweet, Hong wrote in November 2020, “Cancel Thanksgiving. Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indegenous [sic] folx and women so be it.”

This isn’t the first time Hong has handed the Republican Governors Association ready-made attack-ad material. Hong previously called to “Abolish the Senate.” CNN also found numerous tweets from Hong in which she called for things like “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.”

She repeated these opinions on camera. In a July 2020 interview, Hong said she supports “eliminating” police funding entirely: “If eliminating the police budget is not on the table, divesting and reinvesting into community control is what I would push for.”

In another interview days later, Hong said, “More police training won’t work. Reforming the current system isn’t the answer. We need to be dismantling the current system. Police officers enforce the law with state-sanctioned violence . . . Defund the police.”

On Tuesday, Politico’s Jonathan Martin asked Hong if she still wants to abolish police in the long term. She dodged: “I believe that we have to be serious about public safety.”

In a Marquette poll released Wednesday, just before progressive Mandela Barnes suspended his campaign, Hong led the crowded Democratic field by a commanding 22 points—after the campaigns of multiple establishment-backed candidates imploded.

Hong won’t be the first Democratic Socialist with a history of insane comments to win a Democratic nomination, but unlike those who recently won primaries in deep-blue districts, she’s running in a state Trump carried just two years ago.

Perhaps Hong will pull it out in November over Rep. Tom Tiffany—himself an extremist who objected to certifying the 2020 election. But if she fails, an election denier will be tasked with signing the certificate of ascertainment for the 2028 presidential results in a pivotal swing state.

That’s a big risk with national implications.

—Brendan Hartnett

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Cheap Shots

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Springfield Needs Your Help

by Jim Swift

Springfield, Ohio—Most of the routes from Cincinnati to Springfield, Ohio pass by Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport, home to the region’s general aviation traffic and the Ohio Air National Guard’s 178th Wing. I stopped by on my way to Greater Grace Temple, where members of the G92 coalition, a network of churches that support the local Haitian community, were going to address the media about the imminent expiry of temporary protected status (TPS) for more than ten thousand Haitian immigrants in the region.

As probably always happens when a stranger shows up to a small half-military airport with no luggage and starts taking pictures, an airport employee asked me, politely, what I was doing. I told him I think this quiet airport could soon become the setting of one of the biggest stories in America: deportation flights carrying Springfield’s Haitians. He shakes his head. “I seriously doubt that,” he says. I tell him I hope he’s right.

The consequences of TPS expiring are already rippling through Springfield. Rick, a reader I met earlier this month, texts me about tearful conversations with friends whose Haitian coworkers and neighbors are suddenly being let go.

“People can’t believe this is happening to their friends and neighbors,” he says.

I got to Greater Grace a few minutes early. TV cameras were already lined up. Clergy mingled with reporters, waiting for the event to begin. Before long, eight Christian pastors and a Cincinnati rabbi took turns making the case that Springfield’s Haitian community deserves compassion.

Rev. Carl Ruby of Central Christian Church set the tone: “We’re here to respectfully ask Homeland Security and ICE to do what President Trump has repeatedly promised, and that’s focus only on the worst of the worst.”

“People in Springfield are getting letters asking them to go to Cincinnati for a check-in,” Ruby related. “Once they get there, they are asked to wear ankle monitors.” Similar requirements have drawn lawsuits from immigrant-rights groups elsewhere.

Those who have already lost their TPS and their jobs don’t qualify for unemployment benefits or most forms of government assistance. As Ruby explained, that burden has fallen almost entirely on Springfield’s churches, food pantries, and nonprofits.

Rev. Michelle Boomgaard of Christ Episcopal Church and the Springfield Neighbors United coalition reminded the room: “From our earliest days, Springfield has welcomed immigrants,” she said, noting that the city’s recent economic revival owes much to Haitians and other immigrants.

Marjory Wentworth then read a statement on behalf of Haitian community leader Obed Lafaille. “Behind every policy are real people,” the statement began. “Springfield is more than the place we live. It is the community we have helped build together.” It continued:

We work here. We raise our children here. We worship here. We volunteer here. We contribute to this city’s economy and culture. What will happen to the lives we have built here? What will happen to the businesses that depend on our labor? What will happen to the children who call Springfield home?

Rev. Tim Voltz of Champion City Church challenged those in attendance to imagine the situation in their own congregation. “If tomorrow morning the federal government had taken away the rights of one-third of your church congregation,” Voltz asked, “what would you do? . . . What do you think Jesus would call you to do?”

Pastor Jimmy Pierre of Gospel Grace Baptist Church, who is Haitian, said the uncertainty is taking a toll far beyond immigration paperwork. “The emotional burden is overwhelming,” he said. Many families, he explained, are dealing with anxiety, depression, and emotional exhaustion as they try to navigate an uncertain future. “Some have built small businesses, purchased homes, and invested years of work into this community.”

Pierre pointed out that Springfield’s Haitian community did not create the legal limbo it now finds itself in. TPS does not itself provide a pathway to permanent legal status, he said, so many families have few realistic options as the program comes to an end.

The only shred of hope is that a bill to extend TPS that passed the House might somehow pass the Senate, and then Donald Trump might decide to counteract one of his signature policies. It’s not really even much of a shred.

Pastor Ruby praised Gov. Mike DeWine, who called ending TPS “a mistake,” and Springfield Mayor Rob Rue, for urging Congress to preserve legal protections for Haitians who have built lives in the city. Both DeWine and Rue are Republicans.

Ruby’s attitude toward Ohio’s Senate delegation was, by contrast, righteously indignant and furious.

“Sen. Moreno has made it clear he’s not going to support the bill. That’s between him and his God,” Ruby said. “But Sen. Husted has not yet spoken, and we have a right to know where he stands on that bill, and just want to publicly ask him today to come out with a statement making that clear.” Husted, appointed by DeWine to fill Vice President JD Vance’s vacant Senate seat, faces longtime former Sen. Sherrod Brown this fall.

Asked what would happen if immigration authorities came to Springfield, Ruby said the coalition would encourage peaceful protest and that some were prepared to put themselves “between ICE and people who are targets for detainment and deportation.” He emphasized that any resistance would be nonviolent. “We believe that a part of civil disobedience is a willingness to pay the consequences,” Ruby said. “There are people and pastors in Springfield who are committed to doing that, no matter what it costs.”

Ruby closed with an appeal for immediate financial help. G92 itself was not seeking donations, but local organizations are: the Haitian Community Help & Support Center, St. Vincent de Paul, and Second Harvest Food Bank were facing enormous demand. “These are all people who wanted to support themselves and who were supporting themselves,” Ruby said. “But now we have to come up with money to pay rent. We have to help families put food on the table.”

Asked how long local groups could keep providing that support, he was blunt: “Money’s running out quickly,” adding that “they need millions of dollars.”

“We can’t do this long-term.”

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Trump’s New Lows

by William Kristol

As Jim notes above, Congress could act to stop or limit the Trump administration’s cruel and destructive mass deportation policies. Legislation to extend temporary protected status for Haitians living here has already cleared the House, with ten Republicans joining united Democrats in support. Right now, as Jim notes, it looks unlikely that the Senate will pass that bill—or choose to extend TPS for other groups like Salvadorans, whose protections are set to expire in September.

On the other hand, it seemed unlikely until last night that Republican defections would pose a threat to Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general. But the sweetheart IRS immunity deal granted to Donald Trump and his family has turned out, at least for now, to be a bridge too far for departing Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis.

Could there be similar Republican defections ahead, perhaps by senators up for reelection, on other issues including mass deportation? It’s more possible today than it seemed a couple of weeks ago.

That’s because, after temporarily stabilizing for a few months, Trump’s popularity has started falling again. The latest AP/NORC poll, released this morning, shows Trump with a 33 percent approval rating. A new CNN/SSRS poll, in the field late last week, has Trump at 34 percent approval and 66 percent disapproval among registered voters. A Quinnipiac survey also conducted late last week among registered voters has him at 32 percent approval vs. 58 percent disapproval, with 10 percent not offering an opinion. In both polls, Trump’s approval is at a new low.

Immigration policy, once a bastion for Trump, has collapsed. His support on immigration isn’t quite down to the levels on some other issues—but in politics it’s as damaging when you lose your advantage on a good issue as when you do even worse on bad ones. At the beginning of Trump’s second term, he had an edge in the CNN poll in approval of his handling of immigration of 51 percent to 48 percent. Now he’s fallen to 39 percent approval, 61 percent disapproval. And Quinnipiac has very similar results, with Trump now at 40 percent approval and 57 percent disapproval on immigration.

Moreover, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the face of Trump’s mass deportation policy, is strikingly unpopular. CNN finds Americans saying by a margin of 50 percent to 30 percent that enforcement actions by ICE are making cities less safe rather than more safe. Quinnipiac has 37 percent of voters approving of the way ICE is doing its job, while 60 percent disapprove.

Could this lead some Republican senators, especially ones on the ballot in November, to vote to extend protections for Haitians or others? Could they be pressured to support other measures to make ICE accountable and responsible? It’s worth testing that proposition when Congress returns in September. And it’s worth making that argument throughout August.

The economy and the Iran war remain Trump’s greatest vulnerabilities. But flipping immigration from a positive to a negative issue for Trump, and hammering home the fact that Republicans in Congress are refusing to do anything to stop his excesses, could turn a Republican defeat in November into a rout.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Todd Blanche’s New Grip on the Federal Prison System… Critics worry a little-noticed policy shift could let the attorney general reward allies, punish enemies, and sideline longstanding Bureau of Prisons processes, writes MATTESON EPSTEIN.

• Top Democratic Fundraiser: There’s No Saving Ken Martin… On Bulwark Takes, RUFUS GIFFORD joins SAM STEIN to discuss why he believes DNC Chair Ken Martin is failing at the two most important parts of the job: raising money and delivering a clear message.

• Marco and Miller Go Full Fascist… On the flagship pod, ROBERT KAGAN joins guest host JVL to discuss the little-noticed conference on political violence a couple of weeks ago where Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller employed dehumanizing rhetoric to attack the left.

• Trump Makes Profane Threat Against Iran, New Attacks on U.S. Assets… On the latest Command Post, JOHN KIRBY joins MARK HERTLING and BEN PARKER to analyze the latest Iranian attacks, Trump’s response, and concerns about shrinking U.S. missile stockpiles as the war drags on.

Quick Hits

86 47: James Comey’s attorneys this week released a trove of documents detailing Donald Trump’s Justice Department’s nakedly retaliatory attempt to put him in prison over an “86 47” Instagram post. The outrageous behavior they detailed could fill an entire newsletter: The documents, for instance, depict the complete collapse of all barriers to political influence in federal enforcement. To take just one example of many, the Secret Service officers tailing and surveilling Comey passed along regular updates to Trump’s personal protection detail to keep the president informed in real time.

For our money, though, the funniest chestnut came the day after Comey’s post, when Trump took to Fox & Friends to fume that “He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant. . . . That meant assassination and it says it loud and clear. . . . He’s calling for the assassination of the president.”

Trump’s comments, per Comey’s team’s filing, appear to have prompted an immediate change in Secret Service threat-monitoring policy. “Effective immediately, please include ‘8647’ in manual keyterm searches for threats to POTUS Trump. . . . ‘8647’ could be coded threat language for ‘kill the 47th President’. . . . The language itself could constitute a threat and it also could constitute unusual behavior.”

The new policy lasted barely twelve hours. That same night, a new directive came down from an assistant director for the Secret Service: “I appreciate the team’s effort on this. As we figured, this is a lot and we can’t, nor should be expected to document all of these references to 8647. We should go back to business as usual, unless someone is inciting violence along with those numbers or adding egregious and threatening language.” The government’s official policy: When Comey says it, it’s a true threat to imminently assassinate the president. When anyone else says it, it isn’t even worth keeping a log of. (Which is good, because Congress or the Cabinet should absolutely 86 47.)

FAUCI RELITIGATED: Perhaps the only surprising thing about Republicans’ abrupt attempt to relitigate the COVID-era culture war over Anthony Fauci is that it hadn’t happened until now. Unlike, say, James Comey, Fauci wasn’t a top target for retribution upon Trump’s return to office—the president had never considered him a personal enemy, and at any rate Joe Biden had issued the eminent epidemiologist a preemptive pardon.

But for some other Republicans, Fauci has remained public enemy number one—particularly Sen. Rand Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee. Paul has long blamed Fauci—rather than Trump—for spearheading the government’s cautious approach to the early COVID pandemic, and has accused him, among other things, of wrongfully trying to smother the theory that the disease escaped from a Chinese lab. Paul has long sought to compel Fauci’s testimony before his committee, and yesterday he got his wish. Ahead of the hearing, Paul heightened the spectacle by releasing thousands of pages of Fauci’s personal journals—supposedly on the grounds of highlighting difference between Fauci’s private and public communications about the pandemic at the time, but transparently also hoping to embarrass the doctor by revealing, among other things, his bemused journaling about the public spotlight he’d suddenly found himself thrust into.

Fauci showed up, but not to cooperate. In his opening statement, he cited Paul’s “unhinged obsession with me” to argue that “the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something—anything—that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’” As a result, Fauci said, he would decline to answer any and all questions put to him by the committee, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Paul wasn’t pleased. After the hearing, he suggested that Republicans would pursue contempt charges against Fauci for his refusal to answer their questions. “Maybe the Fifth Amendment doesn’t attach when you have a pardon in place,” Paul said.

NEW CHAIR, SAME AS THE OLD CHAIR: New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh isn’t giving Donald Trump what he wants, but the president isn’t holding it against him—yet.

Trump spent more than a year making Jerome Powell, Warsh’s predecessor, miserable over what he saw as Powell’s unforgivable slowness in bringing down interest rates. But he’s also dealt Warsh an impossible hand this year by adding heaps of inflationary strain to the economy via tariffs and the Iran war, making speedy rate cuts all but impossible. Yesterday, the Fed board voted for the second time under Warsh to hold rates steady—with three dissenting votes that would have favored a rate hike.

Trump, of course, doesn’t agree that cuts would risk runaway inflation. But he’s remained gracious to Warsh the only way he knows how: By blaming the rest of the Fed governors for a change. “Kevin’s fantastic, but he’s got a board,” Trump told reporters yesterday. “He’s got a board, and it’s a political board. And they want to keep rates up.”

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“Rest assured that it’s not just the Instagram post that leads somebody to get indicted,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Meet the Press in May. There had been a full investigation by “the career FBI agents, the career Secret Service agents,” and who knows what damning evidence they might have found?

Now, thanks to a series of court filings last night from Comey’s lawyers, we finally know what that investigation entailed: a ludicrous snipe hunt in which federal officials sought high and low to find people who would testify that “86” is an old mob threat, interviewing old mobsters and Comey associates to prove he should have known as much—because after all, hadn’t he prosecuted organized crime? They’ve got him on the ropes now! Happy Wednesday.

Join Mark Hertling and Ben Parker—with special guest Rear Adm. John Kirby—for Command Post at 10:00 a.m. EDT today. Watch on Substack or YouTube.

Bomb, Rinse, Repeat

by Andrew Egger

Yesterday morning, after Donald Trump called in to Fox & Friends to show off his latest peacenik turn—insisting implausibly that the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s dying wish was a peace deal with Iran, grousing at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for stating publicly that Iran seemed ready to start rebuilding its nuclear facilities—I messaged the Morning Shots editors that I had a headline for today’s newsletter: “Trump, Iran, and the Definition of Insanity.”

Ben Parker wrote back, confused: Hadn’t we used that exact phrase before? And yeah, pretty much:

Such is life for the poor put-upon newsletter grinder in the dog days of Donald Trump’s endless Iran war. While Iran presents a steady, ironclad negotiating front—your sanctions must go, your troops must go, your nuclear demands must go, and we get the Strait of Hormuz—Trump finds himself trapped in an endless reboot loop, orbiting hopelessly around two demonstrably failed positions: If we bomb the hell out of them, they’ll give us what we want. If we stop bombing them, they’ll give us what we want. And we find ourselves scrabbling for something new to say about the same old grotesque status quo of America’s slow-motion pantsing on the world stage.

This morning, the New York Times wrote up a short history of Trump’s “Whiplash War” in Iran, laying out in stark data-viz form just how erratically Trump has toggled between his two strategic modes. In late March, just weeks after the war began, he was already threatening to blow up Iranian power plants. By early April, he was threatening genocide. Those threats gave way to a two-week ceasefire—which fell apart nearly at once after Iran continued to fire on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, leading Trump to declare an economic blockade of his own.

After a May marked by periodic bursts of attacks, June brought the vague “Memorandum of Understanding” that led Trump to declare the mission accomplished: “The Deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. Congratulations to all!” he exulted on June 14. “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!”

Days later, missiles were flying again. The ceasefire was momentarily resumed on June 28—before Trump declared it truly dead July 8, leading to the heaviest period of bombardment since the opening days of the war. Then came the brief respite beginning this past weekend, which now appears to be over after Iran launched missiles at a U.S. base last night: “We are going to beat the fucking shit out of them,” Trump told Fox News this morning. “We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.”

The definition of insanity, per the bumper sticker, is supposed to be doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. But I’m worried that watching Trump do the same thing over and over, fully aware the outcome will be no different, is a recipe for insanity, too.

“I could knock out the power plants within one day,” Trump said yesterday, reiterating a threat he first made on March 21, more than four months ago. “All of their power plants would be gone. And I let ‘em know that, you know, with negotiations. . . . So I think we have a very strong position right now. They know I’m going to do that if they don’t make a deal.”

I challenge anyone to spend so many months submerged in this sort of suspended reality without feeling like they’re losing their mind.

The basic problem is that while Trump’s approach to the war is cyclical, its damage is cumulative. Petroleum reserves, missile stockpiles, global trust in the U.S.-led world order—these are finite resources that are all being spent down at alarming rates.

More happily, American confidence in this utterly incompetent con artist turns out to be a finite resource too. Trump continues to plumb new depths in his popularity at home. And as Republicans grimly pivot their political messaging from fantasies about a Trump GOLDEN AGE to trite rabble-rousing about the threat of Democratic communism, it’s plain they too are losing hope that Trump will pull off some unexpected miracle to win the war—much less restore Americans’ confidence in his leadership.

Somehow, someday, I believe that the war will come to some sort of end. It’s all but guaranteed to be a bad end for America, but at least we can look forward to getting off the interminable psychic treadmill. It is extremely unlikely, I keep telling myself, that—as I keep suffering in dreams—I will wind down my last days on this earth decades hence hearing regular updates on President Barron Trump’s insistence that the Sixty Years’ War will be over any day now—because, after all, Iran knows we could just knock out their power plants. Forever wars only happen to stupid presidents.

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Dispatch from a Hopeless Campaign

by Brendan Hartnett

BUCKS COUNTY, Pa.—Before Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro can run for president, he must win re-election against Republican Stacy Garrity, the current state treasurer who claimed Trump won the 2020 election and even pushed the Big Lie at a January 5, 2021 rally in Harrisburg.

Despite her MAGA bona fides, Garrity was not Trump’s first choice to take on Shapiro. He initially backed Rep. Dan Meuser, who declined to run. While Trump eventually endorsed Garrity, he has continued to humiliate her. At a recent rally in the Lehigh Valley, he neglected to give Garrity a shout out—even though she had addressed the crowd shortly before he did.

Garrity is almost certainly headed toward an electoral calamity. Recent polling shows her getting trounced by double digits. She raised only $1 million in the first quarter of 2025, leaving her with just $1.5 million cash on hand. Shapiro has $50 million.

To see what the energy around the doomed campaign was like I went to a Veterans for Garrity campaign event here on Monday. An older crowd of about fifty was greeted in a humid firehouse by speeches from local party leaders and a playlist of the most popular songs played at Trump rallies.

Garrity herself was not an impressive orator, but she knew her audience. Her speech lasted about fifteen minutes and focused primarily on veterans’ issues. She only attacked her opponent once—possibly a tacit acknowledgment of the futility of trying to drive down Shapiro’s high favorability ratings.

“Wasn’t it disgraceful when our governor didn’t want to celebrate at the Great American State Fair?” Garrity asked the crowd, referring to Shapiro’s decision not to participate in Trump’s disastrous state fair earlier this month. Not exactly hard hitting.

Trump clearly values his endorsements highly as a political weapon—and he likes to keep it sharp by not wasting it on sure losers. I won’t be too shocked if he finds a reason to un-endorse Garrity between now and November.

—Brendan Hartnett is a rapid response editor at The Bulwark.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Character Is Countercultural… MARK HERTLING reflects on virtue, politics, and public service.

• Trump Is Making Government Worse on Purpose Instead of seeking to simplify and improve citizens’ lives, this administration keeps creating new obstacles and burdens, JILL LAWRENCE writes.

• How Old-School Race Animus Could Shake Up the Michigan Senate Race… In The Breakdown, JONATHAN COHN shares dispatches from a weekend with Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens and their efforts to win over black Democratic voters.

• The Groypers Have Taken over Trumpland… On the flagship pod, ASAWIN SUEBSAENG joins guest host WILL SOMMER to discuss how MAGA is now all about openly embracing bigotry and why the right has no insurgents to stop it.

Quick Hits

NO DISASTER AID FOR YOU: Unequal treatment of red and blue states has been a consistent story of Donald Trump’s second term; just yesterday, we noted how the government had admitted to canceling more than $8 billion in clean energy grants last year based solely on the fact that those grants were headed to states that voted for Kamala Harris. This hasn’t stopped. Just this month, Trump blocked petitions to FEMA for disaster aid from four blue states: New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. In at least three of these cases, the denials came despite FEMA determining the states should qualify for aid under law. Here’s Politico, which broke the story:

Trump’s rejections came after regional offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and NOAA determined that the states met government thresholds for receiving aid following a record-breaking snowstorm in February. . . .

Presidents since George W. Bush approved all 69 state requests for snow assistance that met FEMA standards except for a 2016 request from New Mexico, which was being investigated for mishandling FEMA funds, according to a POLITICO analysis of agency records. . . .

“If the federal government is paying for regular operations like snow removal, what next? Garbage removal?” a FEMA spokesperson said in a statement about the recent denials. “The federal government’s role is not to fund routine functions.”

Read the whole thing.

UGLY NUMBERS: The polling clunkers just keep piling up for Donald Trump. Although the long Spring slide of his approval numbers had stabilized somewhat in recent weeks, he’s back to finding new depths as Americans come to terms with the disastrous effects of his Iran war. This week’s Economist/YouGov poll put his net approval rating at an astonishing -28 percent—a record low for either Trump term. Only 34 percent of Americans either strongly or somewhat approve of the president’s second-term performance.

Here’s an equally astonishing way to slice the numbers: In the past two weeks of YouGov polling, Trump has recorded his lowest-ever approval ratings from his core demographic: white Americans without college degrees. Last week, the poll found him at -10 among this group; this week, he was at -9.

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Be Alarmed. Very Alarmed.

by William Kristol

Can you believe it? How many times have we said that—sometimes plaintively, sometimes mockingly, sometimes indignantly, sometimes angrily, sometimes mournfully—over the last decade?

It’s a reasonable sentiment. Incredulity, surprise, shock, horror—these are normal and healthy reactions to Trumpism. In particular, they’re normal American reactions to Trumpism. It wasn’t supposed to happen here or now. Yes, we’ve had problems and challenges and difficulties here, but we’d weathered them, or at least were dealing with them. If you were a conservative, you were confident that America and Americans were still exceptional. If you were a liberal, you were confident that the arc of history bent towards justice. Either way, excessive confidence tended to produce a kind of complacency. It couldn’t really happen here.

Well, it’s happening. The assault on our political liberties and our civic decency, on our polity and on our society, is happening. The pace and degree at which it’s moved is hard to believe. But our surprise is a product of a complacency that we haven’t yet quite shed.

The 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln understood that this might happen, way back in 1838, when he delivered his great address on “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions” before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. All seemed well in a free and prosperous and growing America, and Lincoln begins where his audience is, by trying to capture or echo that sentiment.

In the great journal of things happening under the sun, we, the American People, find our account running, under date of the nineteenth century of the Christian era. We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings.

It’s great to be an inheritor of blessings. But, Lincoln suggests, blessings can blind us to dangers. And so we need to focus not on our inheritance but on our task.

We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them—they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land; and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only, to transmit these, the former, unprofaned by the foot of an invader; the latter, undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation, to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

And, Lincoln suggests in the rest of his speech, his contemporaries weren’t yet sufficiently focused on our task. And he reminded them that they certainly couldn’t take the successful completion of that task for granted. “I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us.” In the relatively calm and peaceful circumstances of 1838, Lincoln saw failure ahead. And failure came.

We’re not in the situation of the young Lincoln. We’re closer to the one he faced two decades later. Our failure is, obviously, far less dramatic than the failure the nation faced in the late 1850s. But our failure is one for which we have less of an excuse. We in the twenty-first century didn’t have to figure out how to deal with the nightmare of slavery. We just had to improve on a reasonably stable and successful order at home and in the world, one bequeathed to us by our ancestors.

We haven’t done that. Quite the contrary. Ten years of Trumpism mark not only a failure to preserve that order, but the infliction of real harm done to it. As we look around at the state of our institutions laboriously built up—a comparatively fair system of justice at home, a relatively honest federal government, an attempt to live up to our heritage as a nation of immigrants, and an international order that was comparatively stable and friendly to the forces of freedom—it’s hard to believe how much damage has been done in the past decade. With a dramatic acceleration, of course, in the past eighteen months.

It is hard for many of us—and I include myself in this number—to believe that this is the situation we face. But it’s time to believe it. Only then might we rise to the occasion.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Elbridge Colby and the Art of Defending the Indefensible… Trump’s impulsive foreign policy of grudges, threats, and contempt for allies is a self-defeating mess. His suave sophist struggles to spin it as strategically sound, writes JOSEPH STIEB.

• Taking a Wrecking Ball to the Military… Not only has our lousy commander-in-chief allowed the country’s missile inventory to be dramatically depleted, but Hegseth’s politicized hiring and firing of officers has come home to roost and is doing real damage to the military as an institution. JOHN HEILEMANN joins BILL KRISTOL on the flagship podcast.

• Laura Loomer’s About-Face on Ukraine Baffles Allies… “You’ve got to ask yourself what in the name of sweet holy hell is going on here?” WILL SOMMER reports on Loomer’s abrupt reversal.

• Mitch McConnell Releases Another “Proof of Life” Photograph… ANDREW EGGER joins JVL on Bulwark Takes to discuss McConnell’s “still working hard” to get back to the Senate claim, but the only proof of life we’ve gotten is two photos and a statement from his physician.

Quick Hits

ONE WEIRD TRICK TO FEDERALIZE ELECTIONS: Donald Trump’s been dealt some stinging losses at the Supreme Court lately, but hope springs eternal. Yesterday, the president asked SCOTUS to lift a lower court’s stay on a sweeping elections executive order he issued in March, which would require states to compile lists of eligible voters based on federal data, forbid the Postal Service from mailing ballots to people not on those lists, and withhold federal funding from states that don’t play ball. WaPo has more:

Nearly two dozen states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration soon after the order was issued, arguing that it was unlawful and its true goal was voter suppression. They said the lists were likely to miss many eligible voters.

“The President’s latest attempt to interfere with the States’ administration of their elections is as unprecedented as it is unconstitutional,” the states wrote in their lawsuit. “Under our Constitution, the President has no authority to restrict voter eligibility or mail voting to lists of voters pre-authorized by the federal government.” . . .

The Supreme Court gave the states until Monday to respond to the administration’s appeal. The justices could rule after the administration responds to the states’ filing.

Trump, who continues to view his Save America Act as his highest domestic priority this year, has long viewed this executive order as his fallback option. “There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!” the president wrote on Truth Social the week the bill passed the House in February. “The people of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and no Mail-In Ballots. . . . If we can’t get it through Congress, there are legal reasons why this SCAM is not permitted. I will be presenting them shortly, in the form of an Executive Order.”

WHO ARE YOU CALLING AN OGRE?: Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary is shaping up to be one of the ugliest of the year, as the contest between Rep. Haley Stevens and epidemiologist Abdul El-Sayed becomes a proxy war between the old-school Democratic party and its left-wing insurgents, including the Democratic Socialists of America. Yesterday, the fight intensified after Politico obtained audio of El-Sayed using colorful rhetoric while talking about using primaries to push the party to the left: “You put one ogre on a pike, and then everyone else gets the message, and all of a sudden starts to sound a lot different.”

The remark scandalized a number of prominent Democrats (and Stevens supporters), with Rep. Hillary Scholten tutting that “violent, vulgar threats have no place in a democratic electoral contest,” especially at a moment “with political violence on the rise.” Others took a different tack: Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden tweeted that “calling your female opponent an ogre you want to put on a pike is not beating the rap that this race has some serious sexism.”

This is a bit silly: El-Sayed was transparently talking figuratively about primary wins, not threatening violence, and in context it seemed clear that the “ogre” he meant wasn’t Stevens, but Sen. John Fetterman (D?-Pa.). We’re personally a little more concerned about the actual content of the remark and the strategy it lays out for channeling anti-establishment sentiment into shoving the party hard to the left. Seems bad!

CRACKER BARREL BLUES: Faithful Morning Shots readers will recall our coverage last summer of the unfortunate rebrand of the old-timey casual-dining chain Cracker Barrel—a doomed attempt to lure some non-retirees back to the restaurant by simplifying the logo and slapping on a coat of Millennial Gray paint that instead kicked off a giant MAGA backlash over the changes’ supposed “wokeness.” (“We must break the Barrel,” proclaimed activist Chris Rufo, with a typical lack of irony.)

Cracker Barrel immediately backed off the change. And yesterday, the critics got another scalp: The company announced that CEO Julie Masino, who presided over the abortive facelift, will step down next month. The top job now goes to former Bloomin’ Brands executive David Deno, who will inherit the thankless job of trying to find new customers to backfill its dying ones without re-infuriating the rest of their customers by changing anything. It just goes to show: Not all rebrands are as smooth, painless, and universally appreciated as The Bulwark’s has been.1

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Join Will Sommer and Sam Stein for MAGA Mondays today at 10:00 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

A Surreal Spectacle at the WHCD

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump, it was clear, really, really wanted to have his moment at the White House Correspondents Dinner. He’d skipped them during his first term, but had been looking forward to this year’s—until the April event ended in chaos and panic after a would-be assassination attempt. Even then he’d wanted to continue. “We held out right till the end,” he said in the aftermath. “But they didn’t want to take a chance.” But he promised they’d reschedule: “I am ready, willing, and able. And I was all set to really rip it,” he said. “So I’ll have to save it.”

Trump finally got his rescheduled dinner on Friday. And, as promised, he ripped it, after a fashion. In his rambling, hour-long speech, Trump heaped insults on the reporters in the room, went after his political enemies with a host of colorful epithets (that they’re fat, mostly), insisted he’d won the election in 2020, and joked (?) that he’d run again in 2028.

And yet even as he delivered it, it was plain the speech wasn’t shaping up as he imagined it would. To his apparent surprise, a room full of journalists he’s spent a decade deriding as “the enemy of the people” makes for a pretty tough crowd. As punchline after punchline landed with a thud, Trump started openly grousing about the bad jokes he’d been given.

“The other day, a senator I know got a text—a great guy—from his wife,” Trump said. “And she said, when you get home, I want to have you immediately come up the stairs and make love to me. And he said, I can’t do both.” Crickets.

“In other words, can’t go up the stairs and make love,” Trump explained. “Does anybody get that? Well, I thought that was actually pretty good. That was actually the only thing I thought was good in this whole frickin’ stupid speech that they wrote. That was the only good one, and that went down with not exactly great laughter.”

He tried one more time: “I think, you know, in other words, you can’t go up the stairs and make love to a woman. So we’re looking for term limits. Does anybody understand this stuff?”

And so on and so on. Nobody likes to bomb on stage, but you have to imagine it was a particularly distasteful experience for Trump, who spends his entire life these days nestled snugly in a cocoon of over-the-top praise and adulation from the people he surrounds himself with—his staff, his online fans, his rally crowds, the business tycoons and world leaders who know how much he loves to be buttered up. Every room he’s in is happy to guffaw the second they sense he’s even attempting a joke, so why not this one? Must just be this terrible material his speechwriters handed him, the president decided.

The silly spectacle of the WHCD has always loomed large both in Washington’s psychology and in Trump’s own. Fifteen years ago, at the 2011 dinner, Trump sat stone-faced in the audience suffering roast after roast from President Barack Obama and emcee Seth Meyers. It’s long been speculated that Trump’s grievance over that night helped fuel his ultimate decision to run for president for real, ushering us all into this deeply stupid chapter in American history.

Since then, Trump has succeeded beyond his wildest imaginings in twisting the country and the world into his own clownish image. And yet it’s remarkable how much this would-be great man of history still cares about the two-bit prestige of what he perceives as America’s elite institutions like the WHCD. He’s spent his presidency raking in billions of dollars and luxuriating in the obeisance of the wealthiest and the most powerful people in the world. And yet somehow he still has a hunger to go into a black tie event to try to win the affection of people he sees on TV, no matter how hopeless his prospects. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he can’t even get a chuckle out of Wolf Blitzer?

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You Don’t Have to Love ’Em to Vote for ’Em

by William Kristol

To begin the week, just a brief thought on political parties.

In modern politics, you can’t really live without them. But it’s a pain to live with them.

We know that bold leaders don’t fit comfortably in them. Churchill switched parties (twice!), and then spent the 1930s fighting against the disastrous policies of the party he’d returned to. Reagan switched parties once, but then went so far as to challenge the sitting president of his adopted party for the nomination. The senators I’ve known the best and admired the most, Pat Moynihan and John McCain, were willing to take on their own parties.

Even we ordinary citizens have a difficult time with political parties. If you like to think for yourself, you chafe at party orthodoxy. If you like strong leadership, you chafe at party timidity.

This is all a way of saying that if you, dear reader, find today’s Democratic party annoying and frustrating and exasperating, there’s nothing wrong with you. Quite the contrary. You’re most likely a reasonable person.

And you’re not alone. A majority of Americans look set to choose the Democratic party over the Republicans this fall. But they share your doubts about the Democratic party, which clocks in at only about 38 percent approval.

Still, most Americans seem to realize that, whatever its problems, there’s only one party that stands ready to check a reckless administration that threatens our well-being and to oppose an authoritarian movement that threatens our freedoms. They accept the fact that what the 2026 election is about is whether Donald Trump will for the next two years have a Congress run by Republicans who will continue to bow to him and enable him, or one run by Democrats that will challenge and check him.

It’s frustrating to loyal Democrats that they’re not universally loved. But asking Americans who aren’t thrilled with either party suddenly, in the summer of 2026, to become huge fans of the Democrats, is asking too much. All Democrats have to do is to win their vote this November.

Democrats won’t want to tell this hoary old joke out loud, but they might keep it in mind:

Two friends are in the woods, having a picnic. They spot a bear running at them. One friend gets up and starts running away from the bear. The other friend opens his backpack, takes out his running shoes, changes out of his hiking boots, and starts stretching.

“Are you crazy?” the first friend shouts, looking over his shoulder as the bear closes in on his friend. “You can’t outrun a bear!”

“I don’t have to outrun the bear,” said the second friend. “I only have to outrun you.”

Democrats don’t have to enchant the American public over the next three months. They just have to put on their sneakers and outrun Republicans burdened with authoritarian gear and cloddish hiking boots. After that, Democrats will have to deal with the bear in the woods. But sufficient unto the day is outrunning the other guy.

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P-Sky Buy Costs Fly Sky High

by Sonny Bunch

News broke late Friday that Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery had agreed to delay finalizing P-Sky’s $111 billion purchase of WBD until either June 1, 2027, or following the outcome of an antitrust trial—whichever came first. As I noted in my newsletter last week, the consolidation of theatrical power seems to be a sticking point, as the combined company would control more than 30 percent of the box office market, creating a presumption of illegality in a proposed merger.

For their part, Paramount is saying this is a “significant win,” as this speeds the path to a trial. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, meanwhile, suggested this confirms the wisdom of the antitrust suit by the state attorneys general: “Today’s agreement is great news for audiences, movie theaters, and the many people who write, build, and create the art, news, and entertainment so many of us enjoy.”

So, who’s right? Well, it’s hard to see how this is good news for Paramount Skydance. The seven-million-dollar-a-day ticking fee P-Sky has to pay to WBD shareholders kicks in at the beginning of October; if this drags out until June, that amounts to nearly $1.7 billion. Simply canceling the deal isn’t a better option, given the $7 billion breakup fee. But then P-Sky’s risking both the breakup fee and the ticking fee if they go to trial and the purchase still falls apart. And if Democrats take the House and Senate in the midterms before the deal closes, they’re sure to call for hearings investigating this proposed merger, which could slow things down further. It’s a real Scylla/Charybdis. (Go see The Odyssey.)

Indie super-producer Ted Hope thinks the whole thing might be kaput. A few folks I talked to said this meant NBCUniversal, recently in the process of being spun off from Comcast, could make a play for WBD. It’s unclear to me how that would overcome the theatrical market share problem—Warner Bros. and Universal accounted for more than 40 percent of the box office last year—but it would keep CNN out of the hands of noted Trump allies Larry and David Ellison, who have already been accused of reshaping CBS and its flagship news program, 60 Minutes, into a Trump-friendlier outlet. An NBC–WBD merger might stave off action by state AGs, but it would likely face a problem P-Sky didn’t really encounter: scrutiny from a Trump-controlled DOJ, as happened when AT&T purchased Warner Bros. during the first Trump administration.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Why Did Trump Stop the Bombing? The reason will tell us a lot about whether American strategy is adapting, observes MARK HERTLING.

• Special Delivery: Ukraine Blows Up ‘Russia’s Amazon’... With its drone attacks on the e-commerce giant Wildberries, Ukraine hopes to ship the reality of war right to Russians’ doorsteps, writes CATHY YOUNG.

• Ukraine’s Defense Shake Up… On Shield of the Republic, ELIOT COHEN returns to join ERIC EDELMAN for a look at the latest global flashpoints, including Ukraine’s military leadership shake-up, a possible U.S.–Saudi nuclear deal, the legacy of Sen. Lindsey Graham, and the risk of further escalation with Iran.

• Epstein Survivor Asks: Will Any GOP Senators Do the Right Thing? On Bulwark on Sunday, BILL KRISTOL welcomes Epstein survivor DANI BENSKY to discuss her private meeting with Todd Blanche, her communications with Senators Tillis and Cornyn, and whether any GOP senators will do the right thing.

Quick Hits

WEAPONIZATION WITHOUT LIMIT: Last October, in the opening days of what would become the longest government shutdown in history, the Department of Energy suddenly announced the cancellation of more than $8 billion in clean-energy grants directed to blue states. Though they pretended otherwise,1 it was immediately obvious the cuts were intended to punish states with Democratic senators that had voted for Kamala Harris. We noted as much that day.

Now, the White House has quietly admitted the truth. In court filings this month first reported by the New York Times, federal officials acknowledged that their decisions on which projects to cut were “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state,” specifically “whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.” None of the cancellations, they admitted, had been “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

What amazing times we live in, where you can barely turn over a court filing without finding ten or twelve impeachable offenses!

KEN MARTIN’S HOT SEAT: Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin is in trouble. Less than four months from the midterms, his party is in dire financial straits—in fact, they’re in debt. And more and more disgruntled Democrats are starting to place the blame directly on Martin’s leadership.

The place is leaking like a sieve, with a number of unflattering anecdotes about Martin coming out over the weekend: the time he slammed a phone down on a junior staffer’s desk, or the fact that the DNC’s D.C. headquarters building was put up as collateral for a loan that hasn’t been paid off yet. As our Lauren Egan reported yesterday, the financial problems have become self-reinforcing: “Democratic donors have largely lost faith in Martin and are reluctant to write a check to a chair whom they don’t trust.”

Bill argues above that the Democrats don’t have to be great to be the better alternative, but: Is it so much to ask for the only party that has a hope of reining in Donald Trump to show a baseline level of competence?

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Some housekeeping: You may have noticed that Morning Shots looks a little different today. This is part of a wider refresh for The Bulwark that we’re excited to share with you today. We hope you like what you see, but as with all home renovations, there’s always a punch list. Happy Friday.

Join JVL and special guest Paul Krugman for Receipts Live at 12:30 p.m. EDT today on Substack and YouTube.

Cancel Culture at the Pentagon

by William Kristol

1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Hawaii.

Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Texas.

Sgt. Angel Rampersad, 28, of New York.

Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of North Carolina.

These soldiers died in the past week in the war against Iran. Lt. Feehan, Sgt. Rampersad, and Pvt. Gonzales were killed by an Iranian ballistic missile attack in Jordan. Sgt. Swinton died as a result of the demolition of an Iranian drone in Iraq. Their service to our nation should be honored. It certainly should not be erased.

But Donald Trump’s Defense Department has tried to erase these four service members from its official list of Iran war casualties.

As the New York Times reported last night, on Wednesday, the Pentagon’s casualties website listed eighteen service members who had been killed during the war with Iran. By Thursday, the Defense Department had lowered that number to fourteen—apparently excluding Lt. Feehan, Pvt. Gonzales, Sgt. Rampersand, and Sgt. Swinton.

Three military officials told the Times that “one reason behind the change was that the Trump administration decided to remove four service members killed this past weekend from the list—three in Jordan and one in northern Iraq—because their deaths occurred after President Trump declared a cease-fire in the war in April.”

Trump’s Defense Department responded to the Times report on Thursday evening by claiming that the change was due to “temporary data disruptions” and that “these site anomalies are currently being resolved in coordination with the Military Services.”

But as I write on Friday morning, the “anomalies” haven’t been “resolved.” The Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System website still lists only fourteen deaths as a result of the Iran conflict—even though the Pentagon’s press release earlier in the week in connection with the dignified transfer of the four soldiers’ remains stated, “The deaths are related to Iranian aggression.”

But the administration, from the president on down, has been preoccupied with trying to downplay the costs of Trump’s war. The president has been regularly posting and talking about how many fewer casualties there have been compared to prior conflicts. And he has gone out of his way to call the war an “excursion” or a “skirmish.”

And the administration does have a particular interest in pretending these latest deaths aren’t somehow part of the Iran war. At his appearance Tuesday before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Hegseth was once again challenged about the lack of congressional authorization for the war. Then on Thursday, there were votes in both the House and Senate on war powers resolutions. One of many disingenuous arguments the Trump administration made to try to beat back demands for congressional authorization was that the clock for requiring congressional approval should restart after pauses in the war. The claim that these four soldiers’ deaths can’t be attributed to Trump’s Operation Epic Fury because they happened after the collapse of the ceasefire is part of the effort to avoid congressional accountability.

But it is also, of course, part of a broader phenomenon. As retired Army Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges told the Times, “The administration seems to have a real hard time being honest about what is going on—not just about casualties, but about the whole war in general.” And about much else besides.

The erasure of the deaths of Lt. Feehan, Pvt. Gonzales, Sgt. Rampersand, and Sgt. Swinton is only one of many, many instances of the dishonesty of the Trump administration—though it’s an extraordinarily petty and a strikingly callous one. It goes without saying that the administration’s dishonesty cannot diminish the honor due to these soldiers. But it does stain the honor of our country.

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Do We Have a Deal?

by Andrew Egger

On Wednesday, the landmark nuclear agreement permitting Saudi Arabia to develop a civilian nuclear program with American uranium looked like a done deal: agreed to, signed, and announced with great fanfare by both nations. One day later, Trump threw the whole thing into confusion with—what else?—a post on Truth Social. The deal, he now said, would be “totally subject to Saudi Arabia joining the very respected and successful Abraham Accords.” In other words: No deal unless Saudi Arabia agrees to diplomatically recognize Israel. Why sandbag the Saudis with this extra demand after the agreement was signed, rather than as part of the negotiating process? Who knows? Art of the deal, baby!

Whatever the reason, the White House insists—for now—that Trump’s eleventh-hour concern is official U.S. policy. What U.S. negotiators said until now matters little, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters yesterday: Trump alone is the “final dealmaker.” “If they don’t join the Abraham Accords,” Leavitt said, “the deal is off.”

What happens next is far from clear. The Saudis have not publicly tipped their hand, although one Saudi source suggested to veteran foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen that they may try to stare Trump down: A deal “was signed, so nothing to renegotiate,” the source said. “Tweets don’t overturn signed agreements.” (I’m sorry: Have they met this guy?)

Trump has never been shy during his presidency about ripping up other people’s deals—NAFTA, say, or the JCPOA. Lately, though, the deals he’s ripping up have been his own. The same thing happened last month with Iran: The ink was barely dry on the memorandum of understanding before he was assuring his hawkish critics that the U.S. would hold Iran to stricter concessions than Iran had actually agreed to. It didn’t matter that Iran hadn’t agreed to permanently dismantle its nuclear program, Trump insisted: “If it’s not, we will bomb them. . . . We’re going to bomb the hell out of you.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, exactly. Dating all the way back to his pre-political business career, Trump has never seen his word as his bond; contracts and agreements, to him, aren’t so much mutually binding pledges as momentary branding exercises intended to get a little leverage. An ordinary negotiator gets the best deal he can, then goes home and tries to sell the deal to the public; Trump, by contrast, is willing to jettison whole portions of any deal he strikes if he senses it would make the selling-to-the-public bit easier. If the other party objects, well, that’s their problem.

This is a terrible characteristic in anybody, of course—nobody wants partners in life, in business, or in politics that can’t be trusted even to try to abide by their commitments. But in a would-be American emperor, it’s ruinous. Trump wants the entire world to run on his IOUs. When he’s gone, will there be a single country left that hasn’t learned a hard lesson about trusting the United States again?

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• A High-Stakes Primary in Wisconsin’s Race for Governor… Will the Democrat who wins the party’s gubernatorial nomination August 11 be too progressive to beat a sycophantic Trump crony? BILL LUEDERS reports.

• Against Heteropessimism… Accounting for the nature of straight women’s desire is hard. CLARE COFFEY writes: What to do about it?

• The DSA is a Gift to MAGA... MONA CHAREN on the socialists vs. the Democrats.

• The Trump Administration Is on a Legal Losing Streak… On Bulwark Takes, SAM STEIN and BEN PARKER give their takes on why the DOJ abruptly withdrew its subpoenas against three New York Times reporters and their family members over reporting on security flaws in Trump’s Qatari-gifted Air Force One.

• Which Directors Have the Most Hollywood Juice? NATE JONES joins SONNY BUNCH to discuss who are the hundred most powerful directors in Hollywood, and Sonny reviews Motor City.

Quick Hits

FUN WITH TARIFFS: Ever since the Supreme Court overturned his “Liberation Day” tariffs back in February, Donald Trump has been trying to keep his protectionist trade regime with the legal equivalents of duct tape and-chewing gum. One temporary authority expired last night at midnight; accordingly, he issued a new set of tariffs on a new authority to go into effect against more than eighty countries at 12:01 a.m. today. Here’s the New York Times:

The duties were issued under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to impose tariffs on foreign countries that engage in unreasonable or discriminatory trade practices. The administration has cited the failure of foreign countries to pass or enforce laws banning the importation of goods made by forced labor into their own countries, saying that disadvantages U.S. businesses that do follow such laws.

Canada, which is subject to a 10 percent tariff under the arrangement, already prohibits importing forced labor goods. The European Union, also at 10 percent, has a ban that is scheduled to take effect in December 2027. But Trump officials say that the governments have not effectively enforced those laws.

Obviously, these are invented post-hoc rationalizations: Trump and his team are merely saying they care about forced labor because forced-labor concerns are what you need to have to unlock this particular tariff authority. One weird trick to running the government more or less by fiat is you can just lie about things!

EVERYBODY’S WHIPPING BOYS: They’re not the most sympathetic group in the world, but there’s a certain pathos to the plight of Senate Republicans right now—the group Trump has spent his disappointing second year back in office scapegoating for the paralysis of his domestic agenda. “I’ve never seen people so mad,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said this week on 13th and Park, the podcast of top D.C. lobby shop Ballard Partners (yes, they have a podcast). “The job of the national media, what they try to do is make my parents mad. They sit at home and they watch Fox News and Newsmax, and guess what? They’re mad at me, they’re mad at John Thune, they’re mad at Mitch McConnell.”

“I mean, like, there’s this purity test,” Marshall went on. “So I feel this anger. More than ever before.”

It’s not every day a sitting Republican senator openly airs his frustration with Fox News. But the strain on the larger GOP apparatus is getting harder to ignore. After White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt castigated Senate Republicans for failing to pass the SAVE America Act yesterday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune quipped to reporters: “She or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes, right?”

“Instead of pointing the finger at Republicans, they might think about going after the people who are stopping it on the floor, which is the Democrats,” Thune added. “And if there are Republicans that they think are gettable, get on the phone. Let’s get them to yes.”

SHUT UP, MOMS: Brandon Herrera, the Texas gun-nut YouTuber and GOP congressional nominee, has a long history of ludicrous loudmouth takes. But none have raised more eyebrows than a clip that resurfaced this week of Herrera offering an extraordinarily vulgar reaction to the gun-control group Moms Demand Action—and by extension on moms participating in political discourse at all. (Seriously, it’s gross—don’t say we didn’t warn you.)

“Just because you let somebody creampie you doesn’t mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions,” Herrera said in the clip, cocking an eyebrow in front of a wall of guns. “The fact that you kept your cum trophy doesn’t make you any less wrong about the dumb shit that you say.”

It’s not exactly news that America’s political realignment has left some very strange social-policy bedfellows in the Republican tent—after all, the coalition purporting to stand up for traditional values, morality, religion, and Western civilization has been helmed for a decade by a faithless philanderer and pathological liar who’s never opened a book in his life.

But those contradictions are only growing stronger and stranger as the GOP imports a new coalition of young men that are disproportionately nihilistic, terminally online edgelords. Is the GOP a party that prizes motherhood as a high calling, as so many old-school social conservatives suggest? Or is it one that sneers off mothers who dare participate in the political process as people who just “kept their cum trophies”? Apparently, it’s both!

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Support Our Troops by Ending Trump’s War

by William Kristol

Yesterday, President Trump traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to attend the dignified transfer ceremony for the four young American soldiers killed last weekend in the war he started almost five months ago.

But Donald Trump doesn’t do dignified. And so as he departed the White House, he couldn’t resist enlisting these fallen soldiers to the cause of justifying his failing war. “All of them said very strongly, ‘We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’”

After the ceremony, Trump flew to a political rally in Georgia. There, in the course of his rambling remarks, he called his war—a war in which eighteen service members have died and hundreds have been wounded, a war that has cost us tens of billions of dollars and that is now expanding and escalating daily—a “skirmish.”

Trump explained his use of the term: “I call it a skirmish. This skirmish we have with the Islamic Republic of Iran, and I call it that because let me tell you, they’re getting hit so hard, they want to make a deal. . . . They’re not ready, they’ll be ready very soon.”

Needless to say, there is no more evidence that Trump is telling the truth about the intentions of the rulers of Iran than that he was telling the truth about the views of the fallen American soldiers.

Meanwhile yesterday, as Trump was talking, the House of Representatives was voting. The House passed along party lines a budget resolution that allocated $73 billion of new spending for Trump’s “skirmish.”

So the Republican House’s final major vote before heading home for a five-week break was to fund the war.

And the war is strikingly unpopular. For example, a new Fox News survey shows only 34 percent of registered voters approving of Trump’s handling of Iran, with 66 percent disapproving. A more detailed University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll confirms that the American public wants this war to end. Fifty-two percent of all respondents—including 76 percent of Democrats, 65 percent of independents, and even 23 percent of Republicans—say that the United States should end the war with Iran now. Only 24 percent of all respondents say the United States should undertake military actions whenever the White House deems necessary.

And 58 percent of Americans say the Iran war has impacted American interests more negatively than positively. Only 12 percent of Americans say the reverse. Even a plurality of Republicans say the war’s impact has been net negative (by 32 percent to 27 percent).

The analysis of the University of Maryland survey concludes, “the public’s preference for the war to end now is divorced from any objectives the Trump administration has used as a justification. The public wants the war to end now even without achieving any unachieved objectives. . . . None of the justifications for war are landing.”

So Republicans will be going home for the August recess having to defend an unpopular war on which they have just voted to spend tens of billions more dollars. This won’t be an easy sell. And Republicans are already trailing in the generic congressional ballot—by six points in the new Economist/YouGov poll, and by seven points according to Fox News and Strength in Numbers/Verasight. In the Strength in Numbers survey, the Democratic margin increases to nine points among those who say they’ll probably or definitely vote in November. A new Emerson poll out this morning shows Democrats with an astonishing 11-point advantage in the generic ballot—something of an outlier, but one Republicans no doubt wish pointed in the opposite direction.

The August recess is often the time when the public’s judgment settles in prior to a midterm election. After Labor Day, voting intentions tend not to change much, except to continue somewhat more in the direction they’re already heading in. So August matters politically.

Democrats will have a simple and popular message that can cut through the summer heat: We want to end the war. Republicans just voted to continue it.

Republicans will claim in response that Democrats aren’t supporting our troops. But that argument will fall flat if Democrats argue that the best way to support our troops is to end Trump’s reckless and foolish war. It’s a politically strong argument. It’s also true.

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Trump Is Running Out of Time and Energy

by Andrew Egger

As Bill explains above, Donald Trump could sure do with some good news on Iran. But it’s not clear when he’s going to get any. A new Politico poll finds that even his core base is getting decidedly sour on the Mideast misadventure that has increasingly defined his second term: Back in May, half the MAGA base thought the war was worth its economic costs. Now, only about a third do.

The poll comes even as the end of the conflict seems to be sliding farther and farther away, with Trump back to the “bomb the bridges and power plants” rhetoric that marked the most belligerent stage of the conflict. The Memorandum of Understanding is a dead letter, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, and the president is once again puzzling away trying to figure out how to write a Truth Social post dire enough in its maledictions to get knees knocking in Tehran—despite the testimony of recent history that the Iranians are willing to read even threats of total genocide as idle bluster. And why not? They’ve been correct so far.

Even the president knows something has to change. We know he knows this, because he was telling us just a month ago. When he spoke at the G7 conference in France shortly after the signing of the MOU, Trump railed at length against his Iran-hawk critics, grumpily reminding them he needed a deal to avert global economic calamity.

“We run out of reserves in about four weeks,” the president harrumphed. “We would really run out [of oil], and there would be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it. And you want to see bedlam?” Trump was uninterested, he said, in associating his name with “the late, great Herbert Hoover”—in being blamed, in other words, for total financial disaster.

“If we didn’t do this deal, we could have dropped more bombs for another three weeks, two weeks, four weeks, two years,” Trump said then. “You would never have the Hormuz Strait open. You would never have success. Your market . . . would go down at levels that nobody ever saw before, maybe except for 1929 or whatever.”

All that remains true today. In fact, if anything, the energy situation is worse now. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that we’re suddenly staring down the barrel of a three-front energy stranglehold. As the Iran conflict spirals, it is clogging even more crucial waterways: Iran-backed Houthi militants have suddenly begun turning back oil tankers in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, Ukrainian attacks continue to wreak havoc on Russian oil infrastructure, including a crucial oil pipeline in the Black Sea.

“The world goes into these disruptions,” the Journal notes, “with the lowest levels of oil reserves in years.”

The trouble is—has been all along—that when it comes to Iran, Trump has no escape hatch. He can’t get out peacefully without giving Iran even more than he’s already been willing to offer, which would mean swallowing far more humiliations than even his adoring base would be willing to accept. And he can’t get out belligerently without ordering either mass war crimes on an unprecedented scale or a ground invasion—red lines even he seems unwilling to cross.

All the bullshit and bluster aside, Trump knows he’s in real trouble here. Economically and politically, he’s running out of time.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Can’t Stop Pretending the Iran War Is Over… Just as he lied about COVID quickly going away, he insists Iran is desperate for peace. The attacks on U.S. service members and the Strait of Hormuz suggest otherwise, argues WILL SALETAN.

• How the Tech Right Learned to Love Mordor… JOSHUA TAIT writes on the history of the American right’s long romance with J.R.R. Tolkien, from earnest fandom to arms-industry branding exercise.

• Iran Is Going to Make Trump Eat It… On the flagship pod, DAVID FRUM joins JVL to discuss why the Iranians are not going to back down until the whole world can see that they beat Trump.

• George Conway is Back! And Trump gave him plenty to work with, as he joins SARAH LONGWELL on The Illegal News.

Quick Hits

WELL, SOMEONE’S LYING HERE: How desensitized have we all become to Republicans’ politicization of every arm of government, including the Justice Department? House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan yesterday referred former Special Counsel Jack Smith to DoJ for possible criminal prosecution, the latest GOP attempt to harass and punish anybody who made life difficult for Donald Trump over the past decade, and it feels like a page-three story. Here’s the New York Times:

The criminal referral could provide a catalyst for a prosecution of Mr. Smith—in many ways the top target of the president’s campaign of retribution.

“The responses provided by Mr. Smith gave the impression that neither Mr. Smith nor his team had access to the content of members’ privileged text messages,” Mr. Jordan wrote in a letter to Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general who led Mr. Trump’s criminal defense team in the two federal cases brought by Mr. Smith. “We now know this to be false.”

Mr. Smith’s legal team accused Republicans of intentionally taking his answers out of context to provide an excuse to investigate him. They say he was responding narrowly to the inquiry about the toll records, not speaking more broadly about an investigation he is precluded from publicly discussing without approval from Trump administration officials.

A criminal referral is a non-binding recommendation; the Justice Department is under no obligation to pursue the matter further. And Trump’s attempts to prosecute his political enemies so far have been so fruitless and shambolic that it’s easy to start to feel more complacent about them. But those attempts are no less authoritarian simply because they’re going badly.

BLUE WAVE VIBE CHECK: The latest Fox News poll, which Bill mentioned above, gives Democrats a 53–46 advantage over the GOP on the generic congressional ballot—which, as the pollsters note, is “the highest percentage either party has received on the generic House ballot in Fox News polling since 1996.”

The poll also suggests Trump and Republicans have lost ground with the electorate across a host of issues, with Democrats showing stronger support on issues that drove turnout for Trump in 2024—inflation (+10), the economy (+9), immigration (+1). Only on crime (+7) and national security (+1) do Republicans still enjoy a small lead.

All this is roughly in keeping with what we’re seeing from other polls lately—but it’s a bit more fun when it’s Fox News, isn’t it?

PUT ANOTHER TARIFF ON IT: It’s not exactly surprising to see Donald Trump throwing around a bunch of new tariff threats again—this is, after all, Trump we’re talking about. But many GOP strategists are fretting that Trump’s public re-embrace this week of economic gunboat diplomacy—which has featured threats of major trade action against Canada and generic drug manufacturers abroad—couldn’t be coming at a worse time for an electorate already incensed about the president’s inability to deliver on affordability. Here’s Politico:

“Everything that you do that’s not focused on affordability is not helpful. This might not be a negative five, but it’s a negative 0.5. Anything that you’re doing that is not on the plus side of the scale is a problem,” said one person close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak about the impact of the tariffs on the GOP’s midterm chances. “When you announce new tariffs, it’s not like, okay, well, let’s see what they do. It’s, ‘Oh crap, those are the bad things.’”

Could Trump 2.0 so thoroughly poison the public against tariffs that we reverse-polarize back into an optimistic, prosperous free-trading future? Hey, we can dream, right?

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Swagger Isn’t a Strategy

by Mark Hertling

As I watched Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee yesterday, I couldn’t help thinking about a tour in Iraq twenty years ago.

That was where I was taught a lesson that every soldier eventually learns, usually the hard way: never underestimate your enemy. Confidence is essential in combat, but swagger is dangerous because it tempts leaders into believing they already know what will happen, or how a battle or war will end. The enemy always gets a vote.

That lesson became painfully clear to me during the Muqtada al-Sadr uprising in Iraq in the spring of 2004. The 1st Armored Division had completed nearly a year of combat in Baghdad and was preparing to redeploy home when Sadr’s Mahdi Army launched coordinated attacks across central and southern Iraq. Instead of boarding airplanes to Germany, our soldiers’ redeployment was delayed, and our units headed south to Najaf, Karbala, and Al Kut.

Visiting a unit that had a New York Times reporter embedded, I expressed confidence that our division would quickly destroy Sadr’s militia and restore order. It was a reasonable military assessment based on our overwhelming combat power, but it proved wrong. The Mahdi Army adapted, blended into the population, exploited religious sanctuaries (even fighting from cemeteries) and political grievances, and transformed what was a military problem into a far more complicated popular political uprising. Although our soldiers fought magnificently and inflicted enormous damage on the militia, Sadr survived, rebuilt his movement, and even eventually emerged as one of Iraq’s most influential political leaders.

That was a tough lesson, but it permanently changed the way I talked about our enemies on the battlefield. Tactical success does not automatically become strategic victory, and destroying enemy formations is not the same as destroying an enemy’s will or capacity to continue fighting. Experienced commanders offer assessments, not proclamations, because every day of combat has the potential to invalidate yesterday’s certainty.

Which brings us back to Secretary Hegseth. Sen. Jon Ossoff systematically confronted Hegseth with his own public statements over the course of the last four months, painfully reminding him that both he and the administration had repeatedly described Iran’s military as broken, its Revolutionary Guard as effectively defeated and destroyed, and the American campaign as a decisive success. Yet today, while Iran remains capable of conducting military operations, threatening maritime traffic, and imposing costs on American forces, the war continues to rage unabated. Hegseth argued that Iran had indeed suffered devastating losses while equivocating about today’s facts, even as it was obvious there is a widening gap between the administration’s confident declarations and the realities of a continuing conflict. Sen. Gary Peters reinforced Ossoff’s determined probe by questioning how repeated claims of success squared with the administration’s request for nearly $90 billion in additional funding to sustain the campaign. Hegseth’s explanation eventually boiled down to a declaration that Peters suffered from “Trump derangement syndrome.”

None of this diminishes the extraordinary professionalism of the American service members conducting these operations, as was the truth of our units during the Sadr uprising. The issue is not whether our military has fought effectively. It almost certainly has, in both instances. The issue is whether political leaders have mistaken tactical accomplishments for strategic success and then proclaimed victory before the campaign has achieved its political objectives.

History repeatedly warns against that temptation. When it was thought that the Nazi army was defeated, they launched the Ardennes offensive. The Taliban survived twenty years of military pressure, only to become the government of Afghanistan again. ISIS regenerated after losing its territorial caliphate. Hamas and Hezbollah have continued fighting despite enormous losses. Muqtada al-Sadr eventually exchanged the battlefield for the halls of parliament. Enemies adapt because they have to, and because often survival is their definition of victory.

Swagger may energize political supporters and produce memorable television clips, but it is not strategy. Strategy begins with a clear understanding of the enemy, realistic assessments of what military force can accomplish, and enough humility to recognize that wars rarely unfold according to plan. More than two decades after learning that lesson in southern Iraq, I still remind myself never to predict the outcome of a war while the enemy is still fighting. Secretary Hegseth and President Trump would be well served to remember that lesson today.

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Todd Blanche’s Job Interview

by Jordan Ferdman

Todd Blanche’s appearance last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and his subsequent written responses to questions (released Monday) constituted a kind of job interview. The standard advice for such a setting is something like: be sincere, discuss your accomplishments without seeming conceited, highlight your competence in executing important tasks, and tell the truth.

Blanche chose a different tack. He was asked a series of questions about Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer a year ago to a low security prison—a transfer that took place a week after Blanche’s extraordinary two-day meeting with her, which in turn took place a week after the White House Situation Room meeting about Jeffrey Epstein in which then Deputy Attorney General Blanche was a central participant.

Blanche’s strategy in his job interview was to claim an extraordinary degree of ignorance about what his subordinates at the Justice Department were doing:

Question: When did you first learn of Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer to FPC Bryan?

Blanche’s answer: I learned about Maxwell’s transfer to FPC Bryan through public reporting after it occurred.

Then, later:

Question: Did any DOJ officials, including at BOP, consult or notify you before Ms. Maxwell’s transfer?

Blanche’s answer: I was not involved in any discussions with BOP about Ms. Maxwell’s transfer.

It’s worth recalling that last July, in the midst of the firestorm over the failed attempt to stonewall the Epstein matter, Blanche took time out of his schedule to travel to Tallahassee to meet with Maxwell. He acknowledged in other written answers that Maxwell is the only witness or defendant he dealt with in this manner during his time as deputy attorney general.

Why did Blanche prioritize personally meeting with Epstein’s co-conspirator? He claims that his “extensive experience as a federal prosecutor handling complex, high-stakes cases—including sensitive witness interviews—equipped me to conduct a thorough, professional interview.” You might think that some of the federal prosecutors who report to Blanche, including the SDNY lawyers who actually prosecuted Maxwell and would know enough to catch her lies and ask follow-up questions, might have been asked to be present for this meeting—if the purpose of the meeting was to establish the truth.

But leave aside Blanche’s claim that he was somehow uniquely qualified to interview Maxwell. He would also have us believe that a week after his well-publicized and controversial softball interview with Maxwell, in which she “exonerated” Trump, his inferiors did not consult him about her transfer to a minimum security facility—an unprecedented move for a sex offender, occurring in the midst of a child sex trafficking scandal engulfing the Trump administration.

Blanche would have us believe not only that he didn’t order Maxwell’s transfer; not only that he didn’t sign off on it; not only that he wasn’t even consulted about it; but that he knew nothing about it—until he learned about it as millions of Americans did, through public reporting.

It strains credulity to think any senators actually believe Blanche. But perhaps telling the truth isn’t a necessary qualification for passing your job interview for attorney general.

—Jordan Ferdman is a researcher at Longwell Partners.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Voters’ Age Concerns Aren’t Really About Age… In focus groups, they tell SARAH LONGWELL that the number isn’t the actual issue.

• MAGA Doesn’t Get America… On the flagship pod, JOE SCARBOROUGH joins SAM STEIN (sitting in for Tim, who is on vacation) to talk about why Trump and Stephen Miller are sticking to their absolutist deportation plan without regard to history or its political cost.

• This Deranged New Campaign Ad Creeped Us Out! On The Next Level, SARAH, JVL, and special guest WILL SOMMER get together to discuss a ridiculous AI advertisement being run by a Ted Cruz-aligned outside group in Florida, among other things.

Quick Hits

WELCOME TO THE NUCLEAR FAMILY: Being an American Gulf ally has its drawbacks: Lately, for instance, it’s made you a target for ballistic missiles and drones as Iran thrashes around in the region. But there are undeniably perks, too. Yesterday, President Trump approved an agreement with Saudi Arabia authorizing a civilian nuclear program in the country—and possibly its own nuclear enrichment capabilities later, as well. The Wall Street Journal has the story:

That stipulation would give the U.S. influence over the Saudi nuclear program and, Trump administration officials argue, a way to prevent it from being misused for military purposes.

Yet the deal, which is expected to be submitted to Congress for review in the coming days, is certain to prove controversial among many lawmakers who oppose the spread of nuclear technology in the volatile Middle East. . . .

“The agreement could help revitalize the U.S. nuclear industry, strengthen U.S.-Saudi ties and deny Russia and China a strategically important role in the Saudi nuclear program,” said Robert Einhorn, a former longtime senior State Department official who advised both Republican and Democratic administrations on nonproliferation issues.

“But unless it contains adequate constraints, including on enrichment, it could increase nuclear proliferation risks in the Middle East and beyond,” Einhorn added.

Read the whole thing.

MOTLEY CREW: Arizona held its 2026 primaries last night, and state Republicans are putting up quite the cast of characters. Rep. Andy Biggs, a Trump-backed Freedom Caucus rabble-rouser who voted against certifying the 2020 election, easily won the gubernatorial primary and will face Gov. Katie Hobbs in November.

But Biggs wasn’t even the most radical election denier to carry a primary last night. That honor goes to Alexander Kolodin, a lawyer who assisted with Sidney Powell’s notorious “kraken” efforts in 2020 and who has remained a Stop the Steal celebrity ever since. Kolodin won the GOP’s nomination for secretary of state—Arizona’s top elections official. It’s an important job: After all, as he said this year, “the road to the White House runs directly through the Arizona Secretary of State’s office.” Very cool!

Trump was pleased, although it wasn’t totally clear from his post that he realized these were just primary elections. “MAGA CANDIDATES WON EVERYTHING LAST NIGHT IN ARIZONA,” he exulted on Truth Social. “A COMPLETE SWEEP!!! I WON ARIZONA 18 MONTHS AGO. THE DUMOCRATS ARE DUMBFOUNDED. AFTER DECADES, ARIZONA IS BECOMING A REPUBLICAN STATE. CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL!”

BAD ROBOT: As AI grows more powerful, the stories about what it’s up to keep getting correspondingly more exciting and alarming. Sometimes, as this week, it’s casually helping people solve some of the toughest and most famous unsolved problems in advanced math. Cool! Other times, it’s going rogue and attacking a digital library. Less cool! From the New York Times:

OpenAI said on Tuesday that two of its artificial intelligence models went rogue and successfully hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library of A.I. technology that is popular among developers.

The incident, which happened last week while OpenAI was testing the cybersecurity capabilities of its systems, displayed the kind of science-fiction potential that A.I. companies warned would soon become a reality.

A.I. labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have over the past year released A.I. models that are customized to expose cybersecurity problems, while warning that their technology could pose new risks by finding holes in corporate computer networks faster than defenders could fix them.

OpenAI’s revelations on Tuesday are an indication that those security incidents are already starting to happen, and even savvy A.I. companies may not be entirely ready for them. New A.I. systems can take multiple steps, figure ways around obstacles and find new ways to attack a network, said Alex Levinson, a cybersecurity consultant focused on autonomous capabilities.

The only safe thing you can really predict about AI at this point is that we don’t know what it’ll look like, and odds are we won’t be ready for it. Read the whole thing.

DARLINE’S PATH: Yesterday, we mentioned that Sen. Darline Graham (R-S.C.)—appointed this month after the death of her brother, Lindsey Graham—plans to run for election to a full term on the strength of a Trump endorsement she’s already got. But Politico reports that that endorsement won’t necessarily make Graham a shoo-in, even in MAGA country:

Other Republicans are still charging forward, seeing an opening in a race with a highly untested candidate. Their determination is a signal that challenging a Trump-backed candidate may no longer be the career-ender it once was within the party.

“Even folks that didn’t like Senator [Lindsey] Graham or didn’t vote for him in the primary were pretty happy about the appointment, as a tribute to Senator Graham,” said CJ Westfall, chair of the Dorchester County GOP. “But once we saw the president jump in and support her, 95 percent are saying, ‘What the hell are we doing here? We don’t know how she votes. We don’t know what she believes.’”

“People that were excited about the appointment are now skeptical of the endorsement,” Westfall said.

Reps. Russell Fry and Ralph Norman and businessman Mark Lynch are already in the race, and Politico notes that former Gov. Mark Sanford and Lt. Gov. Pam Evette are considering hopping in as well. Read the whole thing.

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For many Trump officials, we might fret that such a visit presages some capitulation on Ukraine or some further attempt at bad-faith muckraking over the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. But given it’s Kash: Maybe it’s just another fun little trip? Happy Tuesday.

Join Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger for Morning Shots Live on Substack and YouTube at 10:00 a.m. EDT today.

How Elon Ruined Salad

by Andrew Egger

When you write a daily newsletter, two weeks turns out to be a ludicrously long time to be out of the news. I’m basically a caveman who’s just been thawed out to weigh in on current events. My timing is all off; I’m probably the last guy in America who still has something to say about Graham Platner. (I’ll resist the impulse.)

Still, a break can be helpful for a few reasons. For one, it helps you recalibrate what sort of things the non-junkies are paying attention to. Where I was, in northern Michigan, that turned out in recent days to be two big issues: Wildfire smoke and cyclosporiasis.

Martyn Wendell Jones has a good take on the wildfire squabble between the United States and Canada down below. But I want to talk briefly about the unpleasant parasite that has sickened thousands of Americans—because I think it’s a good example of the sort of mini-controversy1 that I think is likely to keep dogging this White House until Trump leaves office for good.

An outbreak of foodborne illness is something that can happen under any president. It’s one of the marvels of modernity that man has learned to protect himself against such things at all, and the work is far from easy. Tracking an outbreak of cyclosporiasis means subjecting a bunch of woebegone diarrhea sufferers to a battery of unpleasant tests, then trying to get them to remember everything they’ve eaten for weeks to narrow the possibilities down to a possible common source. Under ordinary circumstances, the relevant scientists and laboratories get to work, they do what they can to identify the source and limit the damage, and the outbreak passes without ever becoming a political story at all.

Except that here—as with the ongoing return of parasitic cattle-munching screwworm—there turns out to be a political angle after all. Because in this case the “relevant scientists and laboratories” turn out to be the ragtag bunch of parasite fighters who were left alive in the wreckage after the DOGE rolled through last year.

Yesterday, CNN reported on how a bevy of cuts at the Centers for Disease Control and USAID slowed the government’s response to the cyclosporiasis outbreak. They spoke with Dr. Joel Barratt, the former head of domestic surveillance at the CDC’s Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria, who resigned last September after seeing his team reduced from eleven to three. “The response,” Barratt said, “is being hampered by the loss of specialized staff and the loss of hands-on-deck needed to identify the source of the outbreaks.”

“The government’s reaction to the cyclospora outbreak has been undermined by massive budget and staffing cuts under President Donald Trump,” CNN went on to report, “including nearly $30 million in funding that disappeared from Barratt’s CDC division when Trump axed the U.S. Agency for International Development.”

Meanwhile, some Democrats have zeroed in on another, separate cyclosporiasis-surveillance program that was DOGE’d out last year. Last week, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asking why he had terminated surveillance of the cyclospora parasite in the CDC’s Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network. “Your foolish and self-indulgent demolition of critical public health programs,” Ossoff wrote, “puts Americans at risk.”

It’s impossible to say, of course, how different the current outbreak might have looked if DOGE had never started tinkering at HHS at all. Maybe critiques like Ossoff’s are fair; maybe they’re not.

My point here is only to say that DOGE made such critiques possible. In their rampage through the federal government last year, Elon Musk’s merry band of smoothbrained hacker lads did so much indiscriminate cutting and yanking of funds, particularly on anything touching government science, that anything that goes wrong anywhere in America now has a decent chance of turning into a story of DOGEian hubris.

I still remember how it felt, watching the DOGE bros do their arsonist blitzkrieg through the government last year. These kids were just slashing and burning anything they felt like, based on the slightest whim or the smallest AI-generated suggestion, then moving on to the next operation. Nothing stopped them, and nobody cared: There was such a bizarre, surreal sense of suspended political gravity.

As it turns out, though, gravity was still around. It was just put off for a while—like a cartoon character going over a cliff. When you break everything, people don’t necessarily find out all at once. Cyclosporiasis isn’t the first outbreak that Democrats have been able to hang around the neck of Trump and DOGE. And it won’t be the last.

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Stand Up for Canada

by Martyn Wendell Jones

As he announced he would do in a Truth Social post several days ago, Trump is retaliating against Canada for the wildfires that covered swaths of North America in yellow smog for several days last week. His tool: new 50-percent tariffs on U.S.-bound Canadian goods, to go into effect in thirty days. While the rate is steep, the new duties are being relatively narrowly applied: An initial estimate from Jennifer Robson, a Canadian professor of public policy, has the new duties touching roughly 5 percent of Canadian exports to the United States, resulting in roughly $10 billion of new costs likely being passed along to American consumers. According to the annexes linked in the several executive orders that frame up the tariffs, affected products are oddly diverse; they include Canadian mezcal, fishing rods, honey, whey protein concentrates, and hockey sticks.

The authorizing power Trump has invoked for the new duties is Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930. It has not really been used before, and it confers on the president a fairly unaccountable authority to impose up to 50 percent tariffs in response to other countries’ discriminatory trade practices, as identified by the president. The ostensible intent of the new tariffs is to resolve this problem when it comes to cars, dairy, and alcohol. Never mind that Trump left a clear public record saying he was imposing the tariffs because of the wildfire smoke.

The tariff announcement, along with Sen. Bernie Moreno’s deranged bill proposing sanctions on Canada in response to the fires, plus Trump’s recent re-upping of a meme image showing him in the Oval Office with a map showing Canada was part of the United States (to say nothing of the economic challenges already being undergone in Canada as a result of the Trump administration’s previous tariff bonanzas), is a significant new injury to an already-mauled international relationship. Canadians are, completely justifiably and reasonably, alarmed by these belligerent acts and threats against their sovereignty and economy.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie put the issue plainly yesterday: Americans need to stop treating as unserious Trump’s insane threats towards our northern neighbor—a faithful ally for a century, whose loyalty the president has decided is worth less than nothing—and Democratic lawmakers need to loudly condemn Trump’s actions. “If Canadian leaders and ordinary Canadians decide that they’re just never gonna trust the United States again,” Bouie says, “I wouldn’t blame them.” Frankly, who would?

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Undoing Trump’s Golden Age of Corruption… He’s made the presidency into a profitable grift. Here’s how some of his ill-gotten gains might be clawed back, writes AMANDA CARPENTER.

• Can We Get Rich by Watching Hundreds of Trump Speeches? On Bulwark Takes, BRENDAN HARTNETT and WILL SALETAN put their encyclopedic knowledge of Donald Trump to the test by predicting which words he would use in a major speech.

• We’re Governed by Broken Men… On the flagship podcast, BILL KRISTOL joins guest host SARAH LONGWELL to discuss why the leaders in this country are men with no center and no core.

• QAnon Conspiracy Theorists Have Taken Over a Prison… And they’re vowing to fill it with trafficked children? What? WILL SOMMER explains in the latest False Flag.

Quick Hits

CASUALTY LIST: We’ve just been reminded, if a reminder was necessary, that much like their counterparts in the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, senior officials at Trump’s Department of Defense conceal and obfuscate.

Yesterday the Pentagon admitted that nearly 100 U.S. troops have been injured in the war with Iran over the last two weeks. This came, the Washington Post noted, “after the Trump administration for days declined to detail how many U.S. service members have been injured recently.” On Monday night, an online Pentagon database “that had been stagnant for days if not weeks” was “briefly updated to reflect that 18 service members have died and 447 have been injured since the beginning of the war on Feb. 28.” But then, “with no explanation from the Pentagon, the database later reverted Monday night to the earlier numbers.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that during the past week, Iran carried out three strikes against U.S. forces in Jordan, which “injured dozens of U.S. service members and damaged several helicopters . . . The Pentagon did not disclose the earlier strikes, nor the casualties and damage they inflicted.”

The Times adds that “In the past several months, the Trump administration has failed to disclose how the Iran war has drained U.S. supplies of critical, costly weapons, and how Iran retained and rebuilt substantial missile capabilities.”

But not to worry: Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell assures us that the Department of Defense under Pete Hegseth is the most transparent in history.

Hegseth testifies this afternoon before the Senate Appropriations Committee. He’s demanding tens of billions of additional dollars to spend with the ineffectiveness, irresponsibility, and lack of transparency we’ve come to expect. Just say No.

—William Kristol

INTO HOSTILE TERRITORY: Benjamin Netanyahu is coming to New York next month, and Zohran Mamdani keeps talking about getting a posse together. In a podcast interview last week, the New York mayor said he was in “active conversation” with his legal department about whether he could arrest the Israeli prime minister, who has an outstanding warrant before the International Criminal Court due to Israel’s conduct in Gaza, when the latter arrives to address the U.N. General Assembly.

Yesterday, Trump weighed in: Netanyahu “will not be arrested, in any way, shape, or form, while in the United States of America,” he posted on Truth Social. “He is fighting against the Islamic Republic of Iran. . . . The only ones that should be arrested are the people that led Iran into this unprecedented SPIRAL OF DEATH AND DESTRUCTION, something that should have been dealt with years ago, by previous Presidents!”

Interestingly, though, Trump’s post steered clear of any actual criticism of Mamdani. The weirdest bromance of U.S. politics is still seemingly doing fine.

DARLINE STICKS AROUND: Lindsey Graham’s yearslong pursuit of a close relationship with Donald Trump paid off handsomely for him during the president’s unexpectedly hawkish second term. Now it seems likely to keep shaping South Carolina politics long after his death.

Graham’s sister, Darline Graham, had never served in elected office before she was appointed to serve out her late brother’s term. But yesterday, she told Fox News she intends to run for re-election—an announcement likely to be received enthusiastically by the president, who publicly urged her last week to run. “There would be nobody better to honor the legacy of her beloved brother, Lindsey,” Trump wrote. “Darline, who comes from an absolutely incredible family, has been a WINNER all of her life, and, should she accept, has my Complete and Total Endorsement.”

That’s the kind of pre-endorsement that tends to clear a GOP primary field—and thus Graham’s path to a six-year term in ruby-red South Carolina. Democracy in action!

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Join Will Sommer and Sam Stein for MAGA Mondays today at 10:00 a.m. EDT on Substack and YouTube.

End Trump’s War. Now.

by William Kristol

Late yesterday afternoon, after a weekend in which at least three and probably four U.S. service members were killed as the United States-Iran war re-escalated, President Donald Trump made an appearance. He went down onto the field from his air-conditioned box at MetLife stadium to join FIFA President Gianni Infantino in presenting the World Cup trophy to Spain’s captain, Rodrigo “Rodri” Hernández Cascante.

Infantino then turned to leave to allow the Spanish players their well-deserved spotlight. But Trump stayed and lingered awkwardly on the edge of the celebrations. Infantino came over to suggest that Trump join him in exiting stage right. Nope. Rodri lifted the trophy high, and there was Trump, making sure, as the soccer columnist for the Guardian put it, that “he was a part of a moment of triumph he had little to do with.”1

Meanwhile, the war that President Trump has had everything to do with is the furthest thing from a triumph. As he returned to Washington from the World Cup, Trump told reporters that “Those great people, those great patriots, were out there fighting that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.” But nothing about the last nine days of war has anything to do with Iran’s ability or inability to get a nuclear weapon. CENTCOM, on the other hand, said last night that the latest wave of U.S. strikes was intended to “further diminish Iran’s ability to attack commercial vessels and civilian mariners transiting the Strait of Hormuz.” But there is no reason to think even more bombing will prevent Iran from making the strait impassable. So Trump’s war is now a pointless war.

But Trump can’t accept this. The Washington Post quotes “one U.S. official familiar with internal administration discussions” as saying that “the U.S. is planning for a wider war.” But,

the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media, cautioned that the expansion of U.S. operations will be limited by dwindling stockpiles of air defense and long-range munitions and constraints on the ability to surge more troops and aircraft into the area because of battle damage. “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that,” the official said.

And an American soldier—who had previously deployed to Jordan’s Muwaffaq Salti Air Base, where 1st Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, and Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, were killed as a result of Friday’s attack by Iran—said many of the facilities there are not able to withstand rocket, mortar, or drone attacks. “We’re getting beat up across the board,” he said.

So as Trump’s War nears its sixth month, its toll is now at least seventeen U.S. service members killed, with more than 430 injured. Trump’s War is also responsible for a massive drawdown of military stockpiles of important weapons, and has cost an estimated $113 billion and counting. Trump’s War has resulted in a collapse of U.S. credibility in the region and beyond. Trump’s War has managed to elevate Iran to a regional power with control of the Strait of Hormuz. And Trump’s War has damaged the global economy. In the United States, gas prices have gone from about $3 a gallon before the war to $4 a gallon today.

Meanwhile, as the Post points out, the Pentagon has not held a news briefing about operations against Iran since May 5. Trump’s Secretary of Defense did post on X Friday, assuring us that our service members’ “sacrifice only stiffens our resolve.” But an allegedly stiffened resolve to continue a pointless war is no justification for further sacrifice.

Trump said last night that “we hit them very hard again tonight, and we did that in honor of the, probably three, it’s probably three great patriots.” But the right way to honor our service members now is to prevent more of them from being killed. The way to honor our troops is by ending, not escalating, Trump’s War.

Congress is entrusted by the Constitution with the power “to declare War” and “to make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval forces.” Congress is in session this week. It should do everything it can to end Trump’s War.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Trump Preparing a New Attack on Head Start… The administration is considering a proposal to gut the program’s instructional standards while adding new restrictions tied to immigration, JONATHAN COHN exclusively reports in The Breakdown.

• Senators Never Asked Blanche the Most Obvious Epstein Question… On The Illegal News, ANDREW WEISSMANN joins SARAH LONGWELL to discuss Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing and Donald Trump’s bizarre stolen election conspiracy press conference.

• How Badly Has Trump Botched the Iran War? On The Mona Charen Show, ERIC EDELMAN joins MONA CHAREN to dissect the many ways things have gone south with Iran. Also, a word about communism versus socialism.

• The Michigan Democratic Primary… has grown absolutely toxic, LAUREN EGAN reports in The Opposition. Plus: One other establishment-vs.-progressives race to keep an eye on!

• The Anti-Strategic President…On Shield of the Republic, HAL BRANDS joins ERIC EDELMAN to discuss Trump’s key strategic errors in the war with Iran.

Did you see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this weekend? Sonny Bunch reviewed the Nolan epic, calling it “the conclusion of Nolan’s Death Drive Trilogy.” Today at 2:00 p.m. EDT, he will host a live chat about the film for Bulwark+ members on Substack. Have questions? Leave them in the comments on “The Odyssey” Review.

Quick Hits

SMOKE TROUBLES: Donald Trump has spent years rabble-rousing about an “invasion” of immigrants across the U.S.-Mexico border—and now he’s suddenly talking about an invasion from Canada, too. “The United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” Trump fumed in a Truth Social post Friday. Insisting Canada had “refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal” practices, Trump threatened that the economic costs to the United States “must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.”

At least one GOP senator would go even further: On Friday, Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio introduced a bill to sanction Canadian government officials and revoke their visas over their failure to control wildfires.

The smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires is no joke, blanketing the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic regions for much of the past week with hazardous air. And Trump is actually partially correct that twentieth-century forestry practices of trying to smother all wildfires rather than aim for a certain level of controlled burning have led to a dangerous level of fuel buildup in our continent’s forests—although of course this isn’t just a Canadian problem, but an American one as well, and one hugely exacerbated by climate change.

But that doesn’t justify Trump and Co.’s ludicrously hostile response—one that once again inexplicably treats our northern neighbor as a hostile actor to be bullied and pushed around to make us feel better. Just one more pointless rift between us and an ally.

GAS TROUBLES: The war in Iran is starting to cause pain at the pump again. The national average price for gasoline is back over $4 today, up 13 cents from a week ago, while the international oil benchmark Brent crude was back over $90 a barrel.

Just over a month ago, at the G7 summit in France, Trump made clear he’d felt an urgent need to strike a deal with Iran because he felt he was running out of time before the closure of the Strait of Hormuz would lead to economic meltdown. “We run out of [oil] reserves in about four weeks,” he said. “There are reserves all over the world, and we would really run out, and there would be a time when you wouldn’t be able to get it. You want to see bedlam?” He was striking a deal, he said, “rather than possibly going into a depression, rather than having your favorite president be Herbert Hoover.” Well, we’ll see.

SALAD TROUBLES: Over the weekend, the Food and Drug Administration announced a seeming major breakthrough in its fight against a growing outbreak of the parasite cyclospora, which they said had been traced to lettuce grown in Mexico by major supplier Taylor Farms. Now, however, the FDA is walking that connection back. Here’s the Wall Street Journal:

Taylor Farms said that the Food and Drug Administration has apologized after the agency walked back an earlier statement that the parasite linked to an outbreak affecting thousands of people had been detected on a sample of its lettuce.

The FDA on Sunday said it has yet to identify the presence of cyclospora on samples of lettuce from the company despite recent tests. The agency now deems the detection that it reported Saturday a false positive after laboratory experts reviewed the sample results.

Taylor Farms, which supplies some of the country’s biggest retailers and restaurants, makes a range of products from salad kits to vegetable blends. Government agencies had linked shredded iceberg lettuce—served at locations of the restaurant chain Taco Bell—to reports of foodborne-illness in five states. The company said it initiated a recall “in an abundance of caution” of its iceberg lettuce grown and processed in central Mexico. Many of its other products remain on store shelves.

The air might hurt you! Your salad might hurt you! It’s a grisly summer out there.

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

The Call Is Coming from Inside the White House

by Sam Stein

When our nation’s intelligence agencies put together a report on the impact foreign governments and actors had on the 2020 elections, they broke down the results into two categories.

There was election interference targeting “the technical aspects of the election, including voter registration, casting and counting ballots, or reporting results.” And there was election influence, defined as efforts “to affect directly or indirectly a US election—including candidates, political parties, voters or their preferences, or political processes.”

The authors of that March 2021 National Intelligence Council report were pretty clear about which category was more consequential. Their first “Key Judgment”—the very first substantive sentence of the assessment—is that “We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

It’s worth considering these lines in light of Donald Trump’s speech last night. Because while the president spent a primetime address rehashing old, unsubstantiated claims of foreign election interference, he was actively engaging in an act of domestic election influence. Put more bluntly, Trump used the bully pulpit to undermine U.S. elections in ways that no other president has—in ways that adversarial governments could only dream of.

To understand how destructive the speech was, go back and read that report, which was started under the first Trump administration. Time and again, the authors underscore the threat posed by outside actors trying to undermine faith in U.S. elections.

“Some foreign actors, such as Iran and Russia, spread false or inflated claims about alleged compromises of voting systems to undermine public confidence in election processes and results,” the intelligence community found.

The concept of “confidence” in elections comes up repeatedly. The report assesses that Russia’s government ran an influence operation denigrating Joe Biden, supporting Trump, and “undermining public confidence in the electoral process.” It notes that Iran attempted both to “undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects” and “undermine public confidence in the electoral process.” It relays that Moscow has “longstanding goals of undermining confidence in US election processes.” And it says that, “Some foreign actors . . . spread false or inflated claims about alleged compromises of voting systems to try to undermine public confidence in election processes and results.”

That last line, in particular, stood out to me as I watched Trump’s speech. Because if you removed “foreign actors” from it, you would have an apt description of . . . Donald Trump.

The president spread false and inflated claims about China’s covert efforts to undermine his 2020 bid. He bemoaned alleged compromises of our voting systems, specifically Venezuela’s supposed manipulation of electronic voting machines. And he undermined confidence in our election processes by comparing them unfavorably to “any” third-world country.

“Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost,” Trump proclaimed, surely aware at some psychological level that he is the one who destroyed that trust, and was doing so again as he spoke that line.

Over and over, Trump has sowed doubt in our elections, treating them not as a bedrock of our government but as a grade that could be appealed, forged, or changed through sufficient whining or cheating. After he lost the 2016 Iowa caucus, Trump declared that, “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz . . . either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.” I vaguely recall being flabbergasted at the time. I thought it was a bit. I didn’t realize it was an ethos.

And now it’s a doctrine—pushed by Trump but actively embraced by the rest of his party. Hours before Trump spoke last night, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) claimed four or five of his colleagues in the Senate “didn’t legally win” office. He had no evidence for his claim. Earlier this week, DNI nominee Jay Clayton refused to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. He’s considered the sane alternative to the man currently in that post, Bill Pulte.

That these top officials feel free, even compelled, to act like this is a greater problem facing our elections than anything we’ve seen so far from a foreign adversary. Because if one party will not accept results that don’t go its way, then there is nothing to “fix” at all. At that point, the election’s legitimacy is tied strictly to its outcome, not its administration.

The White House released a bevy of documents last night meant to support Trump’s speech. They were underwhelming as far as the president’s claims go. But this statement by the NIC stood out to me, again for how it almost perfectly described what Trump himself is doing:

We assess that adversaries could also make false claims about their ability to manipulate US election infrastructure as part of a broader effort to undermine confidence in US democratic processes. Much of the voting public probably knows little about the process of administering US elections, which could allow false narratives to gain traction. Government efforts to investigate and publicly invalidate such claims could take weeks or months, providing time for concerns about election security to spread.

That was in January 2020. How much time we’ve lost.

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Two Options: Lose or Cheat

by William Kristol

Just one footnote to Sam’s piece: A couple of polls that appeared earlier this week are a useful reminder of why Donald Trump is making such frantic efforts to lay the groundwork for his election interference. The reason’s simple: If he doesn’t cheat, he’s going to lose.

Both polls were in the field when gas prices had been coming down and before they started going back up. Nonetheless, in their monthly tracking poll fielded July 9–13, the Republican firm Echelon Insights found only 38 percent of likely voters approving of Trump’s job performance—a new low in their surveys—with 61 percent disapproving. And the Washington Post/Ipsos poll, taken July 8–13, had virtually identical numbers, with 37 percent of the American public approving of Trump, and 61 percent disapproving.

Particularly noteworthy was the contrast in both surveys between the percentage of those who strongly approved and strongly disapproved of Trump. Echelon had 24 percent strongly approving and 51 percent strongly disapproving; the Post had 15 percent strong approval and 47 percent strong disapproval. If you average the two, you get about 20 percent strongly approving and about 50 percent strongly disapproving. These are disastrous numbers going into a midterm election that will be a referendum on Trump, and that will pose a choice between a Congress that will continue to support Trump or one that will try to constrain and check him.

One other striking result from the Post poll: Only 13 percent say they are better off than when Trump returned to office in January 2025, while 39 percent say their situation is about the same, and a new high of 43 percent say they’re not as well off as at the beginning of Trump’s second term. The numbers are a reversal from Trump’s first term, when 28 percent said on the eve of the midterms that they were better off, 58 percent said things were about the same, and only 13 percent felt they weren’t as well off under Trump. Even so, Republicans lost control of the House in November 2018. They may well lose the House and the Senate in 2026.

So Trump faces the prospect of a hostile Congress that will investigate him aggressively over the remainder of this term. And if his numbers don’t improve over the next two years, he faces the prospect of his party’s nominee likely losing in 2028, and being succeeded by an administration that will go about turning over the massive boulders of Trumpian corruption.

Thus the increasingly desperate and widespread effort by Trump and his apparatchiks to tilt the electoral scales in a big way. What we saw last night was only the tip of the election subversion iceberg. The Trump administration can’t afford to lose power. So it will do everything it can over the next two and a half years not to.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, There Is Only Culture War… CHRISTIAN RUTH reports how a forty-year-old satire of fascism became a meme for Trump, a flashpoint over women in sci-fi, and—for some fans—an actual political ideal.

• The Slop Doctrine… ALICE E. MARWICK explains why the right has overwhelmingly embraced terrible AI-generated imagery.

• Can Subsidies Bring Film Production Back to the USA? On The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood, CHRIS FENTON joins SONNY BUNCH to discuss his new film ‘Bad Counselors’ and the effort to make movies in America.

Quick Hits

$500 ON “TREMENDOUS”: Grift for me, but not for thee. That’s apparently the rule in the White House, where one of President Trump’s longtime teleprompter operators has been put on leave after reportedly amassing more than $100,000 from bets he placed on the Kalshi prediction market about what the president would or would not say. ABC reports:

President Donald Trump’s longtime teleprompter operator is believed to have made tens of thousands of dollars by placing bets on more than a dozen of Trump’s speeches on the prediction market Kalshi, federal investigators with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

Gabriel Perez, a technical assistant to the president who has been operating Trump’s teleprompter since 2016, is in talks with federal regulators to settle allegations he used his inside knowledge of the president’s speeches to win more than $100,000, the sources said. . . .

In addition to February’s State of the Union address, sources said CFTC investigators discovered that Perez placed bets on more than a dozen Trump speeches over a three-month period, including a December primetime address, a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Trump’s remarks in March during a Medal of Honor ceremony.

Later in March, the White House issued an internal memo warning staff against using nonpublic information to place bets on prediction markets, sources previously confirmed to ABC News.

Apart from the questions of why an enterprising, tenacious working man like Gabriel Perez should have to play by the rules when no one else in the White House does, or why he was put on administrative leave for a six-figure payday while the president helps himself to billions, there’s another question that seems painfully unresolved here:

How did operating the teleprompter give Perez any indication of what Trump was going to say?

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A BRIDGE TOO FAR: The United States has struck targets in Iran for the last six days in a row—though no one seems to know exactly to what end. Perhaps even more ominous than the lack of strategy, though, is the choice of targets. The Wall Street Journal reports that the latest airstrikes have been concentrated on bridges, especially around Bandar Abbas, the largest Iranian city on the Strait of Hormuz.

Are bridges legitimate military targets? Well, yes and no. If the military uses them, then they can become legitimate targets even if civilians also use them. A senior U.S. official told the Journal that the strikes on bridges were part of “an effort to cut off supply routes to a port city and naval base in the Strait of Hormuz that Iran uses to attack ships and project power.” So . . . close enough that the military lawyers who (presumably) approved these strikes probably aren’t sweating too much.

Except that there’s still the question of intent. Trump has been threatening attacks on Iran’s infrastructure—bridges and power plants especially—for months. He has made it clear that these attacks are not to be based on a case-by-case determination of which bridges or electrical stations are being used by the military and which are purely civilian; or at least, that’s the only reasonable interpretation considering that he, at roughly the same time, threatened to wipe out all of Persian civilization.

So did Trump give an order to bomb bridges which the military then found a way to make at least somewhat legal? Or did the military tell him that they could bomb bridges and he immediately trumpeted it as a campaign of war crimes? And which is worse?

HOUSE OF MADNESS: As much as we fume at the president for arrogating to himself power that rightly belongs to Congress—and at the courts for letting him, and thereby encouraging him—we have to lay at least some of the blame with Congress itself. Case in point: Does this seem like a body capable of wresting power back from the other branches and exercising government befitting a superpower?

Speaker Mike Johnson suffered another humiliating political defeat at the hands of his own party on Thursday when he was forced to abandon plans to pass a veterans benefits bill designed to be one of the GOP’s big legislative wins before the midterms.

Just minutes before the bill was slated to come to the floor, Johnson and his team were forced to pull it from the schedule as more than a half-dozen holdouts refused to back the measure. . . .

The defeat for Johnson is the latest in a string of complications for leadership. Only days earlier, Johnson had struck a truce with GOP hardliners to reopen the floor after they’d effectively seized control and prevented the speaker from moving key bills for two weeks.Now, they are leaving Washington on Thursday without a clear path forward on the veteran benefits bill.

Read the whole thing from CNN. Spoiler: The Guy Fawkes of all this legislative insanity is Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), which really isn’t much of a spoiler at all. But hey, the Republican majority isn’t trying to oust its own speaker—yet—so by recent standards, this counts as effective leadership.

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Nate Cohn writes: “The latest Times/Siena poll finds just 37 percent of Americans approve of President Trump’s performance, putting his ratings in new political territory. . . . no president’s approval rating has been under 38 percent for more than a few days in the last 17 years, according to our average.”

Until now, that is. Happy Thursday.

It Sure Looks Like Dictatorship

by Will Saletan

Todd Blanche, the acting U.S. attorney general, testified yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He is seeking formal confirmation to his job. The whole arrangement is grotesque: Blanche is Trump’s well-paid former personal attorney, and as deputy attorney general, he has already done numerous corrupt favors for the felon who appointed him.

But the hearing was instructive. Blanche displayed the sort of personality that serves comfortably in an authoritarian administration.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked Blanche, “Do you think [the] blanket pardon by the president of January 6th rioters was the right thing to do?”

Blanche gave an answer that would have sounded quite natural in a dictatorship: “The Constitution gives the president the full power to pardon anybody for any reason he wants. And so I don’t question President Trump’s authority or his decision to do so.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R. I.) asked Blanche about his role in arranging the dismissals of cases against January 6th defendants. Blanche again: “He has the absolute right to pardon anybody for any reason he sees fit. And every one of them got pardoned or commuted. . . . The fact that my department had to take action in response to those pardons, by dismissing some cases, is exactly what I have to do under the law. And it’s what I did.”

That’s how an apparatchik thinks in an authoritarian regime. To Blanche, “under the law” doesn’t mean that the president has to respect the jurors who convicted his supporters of crimes. It means that the apparatchik must do whatever the president commands. And if the president has a power, that power cannot be questioned, advised, or held to a higher standard.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) asked, “Is the Department of Justice that you are running independent from the White House?”

“The Department of Justice, like every single department in the executive, is part of the executive,” Blanche replied. “Article II of the Constitution gives the power of the executive to President Trump.”

Sen. Dick Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked about Trump’s commutation of the sentence of David Gentile, a fraudster who reportedly said he had paid for clemency. Again, Blanche refused to address the merits. Trump “has full authority to pardon or commute anybody convicted of federal crime,” Blanche insisted. “He does not, nor should he—[he] has no obligation to discuss pardon or commutation decisions with me.”

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked Blanche about a press conference he gave on April 8. At the press conference, a reporter had brought up Trump’s demands “to see his perceived political enemies prosecuted.” Blanche, responding to the reporter, had affirmed that some DOJ prosecutions involved people whom “the president in the past has had issues with and that [he] believe[s] should be investigated. That is his right. And indeed, it is his duty to do that.”

At yesterday’s hearing, Blanche stood by that answer. He told Hirono, “As the president of the United States, under Article II, he’s in charge of the Department of Justice. And so my answer reflects that idea.”

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) asked Blanche whether the DOJ “should be independent or not.” Again, Blanche emphasized his loyalty to Trump: “The Department of Justice is under the executive branch. If confirmed, I will be a member of the president’s cabinet.”

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) asked Blanche about an agreement he had signed—in response to a lawsuit filed by Trump—to exempt Trump’s family from tax investigations. Schiff noted that it was an obvious scam, since Blanche was Trump’s former lawyer as well as his appointee. Blanche stood by his role in the agreement. “Somebody had to sign that document, when the president sued,” he told Schiff.

Somebody had to sign that document. He has the absolute right. He has no obligation. Any reason he wants. I don’t question.

This is the sort of person who rises to power in an authoritarian government—or, to put it more precisely, the sort of person who rises in service to power.

Blanche is also the sort of person who gets confirmed by an authoritarian Senate. Even Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, the Republican on the committee who was considered most likely to oppose Blanche, endorsed the nominee’s slavish loyalty. Tillis said he opposed some of Trump’s decisions, but added, “Not you, Mr. Blanche. You work for somebody, and you’ve got to do what you’re told to do.”

Actually, no. In a free country, people don’t have to do what they’re told to do. Blanche could have opposed the January 6th pardons, the tax immunity deal (for which Blanche was recently referred by a federal judge to the New York Bar for discipline), or Trump’s demands to prosecute his enemies. Instead, he saluted and complied. He represents exactly what our government has become.

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It Is What It Looks Like

by William Kristol

It’s sometimes painful, but surely important to see things as they really are. The last couple of weeks in American politics have been helpful in that respect. They’ve made it harder to miss seeing the stunning depth and breadth of the Trump administration’s illiberalism.

Actually, “illiberalism” is too mild. As Robert Kagan has explained, what we’re seeing is not so much illiberalism as anti-liberalism. It’s not that Trumpists don’t quite understand the case for liberalism, or that they’ve unwittingly deviated from liberal norms or principles. It’s a frontal assault on liberalism in the broad sense of the word—on democracy, on the rule of law, on civil and political liberties, on limited government, on pluralism, on honesty and decency. That assault has been purposeful. It now spreads across the entire Trump administration and permeates its ranks. For all of Trump’s erraticness and unpredictability, for all of his administration’s misfires and clownishness and zigs and zags, Trumpism has an animating spirit, and the Trump administration has a coherent project.

Just yesterday we saw this, at the confirmation hearings for Todd Blanche as attorney general and Jay Clayton as director of national intelligence. As Will explains above, Blanche’s testimony is an illustration of “how an apparatchik thinks in an authoritarian regime.”

Will’s analysis of Blanche also holds for Clayton. When Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked Clayton who won the 2020 election, his response was that Joseph R. Biden Jr. was “certified” as the winner. Clayton wouldn’t actually say Biden won.

This is all part of the Trumpist rewriting of history. Indeed, Trump will deliver a primetime speech tonight challenging the results of the 2020 election. It will no doubt be an easily mockable performance, and there will be much talk of Trump’s endless obsession with 2020 and of his psychological need not to admit defeat.

But it is more serious than that. As Orwell famously wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” The speech will claim to be based on new “intelligence” assembled by Bill Pulte, Trump’s current acting director of national intelligence. And it’s part of a series of claims Trump has been making of widespread rigging of elections in the United States—not just of the 2020 contest. All of this is, in turn, undergirds a broad-based effort by his administration to lay the groundwork for an attempt to subvert free and fair elections in 2026 and especially in 2028, and if necessary for not abiding by the results.

It was also yesterday that Trump reversed the announcement by his Department of Homeland Security that it would suspend most vehicle stops in light of the killings of innocent men by government agents within the last week. Trump was caught unaware by the decision, and immediately overturned it. “We CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!” the president wrote. Trump cares more about maintaining the all-out assault on immigrants than even pretending to make obviously reasonable reforms. Meanwhile, an unprecedented number of individuals are not just being killed on the streets by ICE but are dying in ICE’s custody.

The more one looks at the mass deportation agenda and the fervor of its embrace by Trump and Trumpists, the more one is reminded of Umberto Eco’s observation in his great 1995 essay, “Ur-Fascism”:

Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism.

And one can easily look beyond DOJ and ODNI and DHS for evidence of the assault on liberal norms and principles. From the weightiest matters, such as Trump’s renewed threat to commit possible war crimes by targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran, to the more symbolic ones, like the attempt to reshape the history told in our national parks and the Smithsonian, the assault on liberalism is a whole-of-government effort.

Dare one apply to that project Eco’s term, Ur-Fascism? It can sound extreme or overwrought. But read Eco’s essay. And look at the Trump administration, with its assortment of diligent apparatchiks, crazed fanatics, eager enablers, slimy opportunists, and, yes, performative clowns pushing more or less in the same direction. Look at the spirit of the political movement that impels it. This is in fact what many fascist and proto-fascist governments and movements have looked like. Trumpism looks and sounds and behaves like ur-fascism. It can be unpleasant to see things for what they are. But it’s important to do so.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Who’s to Blame? Ask the Far Right—They Have a List. Feminists, immigrants, professors, and just about everyone else: a look at the movement’s ever-expanding catalogue of villains, from MATT MCMANUS.

• Trump’s Sort-of Gift to Kyiv… Making Patriot missiles in Ukraine is a good idea . . . eventually, writes BRYNN TANNEHILL.

• Senate Dems’ Top Strategist Outlines His Path to the Majority… A good environment, the right candidates, and a bit of luck might very well equal 51 members, even with Platner-esque speed bumps, reports LAUREN EGAN.

Quick Hits

NOW I’M JUST A HUMBLE COUNTRY CHICKEN: The thing about populists is that most of the time, the people who base their entire political brands on appealing to “real Americans,” the “working people,” the “common man,” the “forgotten men and women of America” are actually egomaniacs who disdain the rubes they trick into supporting them. Especially in America, plenty of politicians grow up poor or experience hardship in their lives before they rise to high office. The late Lindsey Graham is one example—but he never promoted himself as the true champion of the toiling masses.

You know who did, though? Vice President JD Vance. While Vance has already, in his short political career, changed his tune more often than a toddler with Spotify, the central theme of it has been his hardscrabble upbringing (as detailed in his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy and then later in the major film of the same name) and his authentic representation of a forgotten, downtrodden part of (white) America—not just Appalachia but anywhere drugs and deindustrialization have ruined the lives of (white) people.

All of which is to say that this report from MS NOW about Vance’s abuse of expensive government-funded travel for the most ridiculous possible personal reasons is completely unsurprising:

On Thursday last week, Secret Service agents groused among themselves as they prepared to deliver another perk to Vice President JD Vance’s family: join a military helicopter crew to fly his young son to his golf lesson. . . .

Agents have shared concerns internally about Vance and his office pressing them for trips and assignments that some agents consider an inappropriate or even unprecedented use of government resources compared to prior vice presidents, they said. . . .

Operating the helicopter costs taxpayers between $16,000 and $24,600 per hour of use, according to 2022 Defense Department budget estimates.

Read the whole thing. It’s always the ones you most suspect.

YOU’RE FIRED: The Trump administration—and Donald Trump himself—aren’t exactly known for their stable and predictable personnel practices. But in terms of government tenures, this story makes Anthony Scaramucci look like Andrew Marshall:

The Trump administration fired a federal prosecutor on Wednesday, less than an hour after he was appointed to lead the United States attorney’s office in Seattle, a move that sets the stage for a likely legal battle.

Federal judges in the Western District of Washington had unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff to be the Justice Department’s top official there, filling a vacancy that the president has never addressed. But the Trump administration has largely defied attempts by federal judges to fill vacancies, leading to Mr. Rogoff’s swift dismissal, via email, after 54 minutes.

Unlike in similar Trump administration firings, Mr. Rogoff has retained an employment law firm and is weighing a legal fight over his dismissal.

The New York Times has the full story. The second Trump administration has a long-running beef with the judiciary about who gets to appoint U.S. attorneys and how. The judiciary’s position is: Only people legally allowed to hold the roles get to fill them, and if the offices stay vacant for too long, the local courts will pick someone, per longstanding precedent and law. Trump’s position is: Screw you and your rules! To which he apparently also now wishes to add: If I can’t (or, more accurately, won’t) pick a U.S. attorney, then no one can!

REMEMBER EBOLA???: Explosive diarrhea is bad and all, but that Ebola outbreak in central Africa still isn’t contained—not by a long shot. The Economist has the story:

“We keep asking and we still haven’t got anything,” says Moise Bulabantu, from a dingy clapboard clinic on the outskirts of Bunia, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The 38-year-old community nurse is the only public-health worker in his district of more than 40,000 people, where an outbreak of Ebola has been spreading. Every day he sees patients who are feverish or vomiting. But the government has yet to send protective equipment. “We’re pushing for the minimum,” says Mr Bulabantu, who has bags under his eyes. “We only have gloves.”

Stories such as Mr Bulabantu’s are common across Ituri, the main province affected by the Ebola epidemic. When the Congolese government declared an outbreak on May 15th, the disease had been spreading for at least six weeks, prompting the World Health Organisation (who) to declare it a public-health emergency two days later. Health authorities are still failing to contain the epidemic.

As of July 11th Congo had confirmed 1,830 infections, more than 90% of them in Ituri, and 648 deaths. On July 9th the government admitted that the disease had spread to two other provinces. There is a high risk it could soon enter neighbouring South Sudan. Unless the response improves dramatically, the current outbreak may become as bad as the one that killed more than 11,000 people in West Africa a decade ago, according to calculations in June by the American Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Read the whole thing. Surely none of this is exacerbated by the massive cuts to USAID, right?

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New ICE, Same as the Old ICE

by William Kristol

After the killings in January in Minneapolis of Renée Good and Alex Pretti sparked widespread public outrage, and with Democrats in Congress blocking additional multi-year funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Trump administration made some adjustments. Two of the most visible faces of the mass deportation effort, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino, were fired. Incoming DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said during his confirmation hearing that he hoped to have DHS generate less controversy. And as Republicans in Congress muscled through multi-year funding for ICE, there was talk that ICE would itself initiate various reforms, like having its agents wear body cameras.

All of this helped Trump’s mass deportation regime weather the political storm, get its multi-year appropriation, and avoid all requirements of accountability or transparency. By summer, ICE was unabashedly back. Under renewed pressure from the White House to meet higher immigration arrest quotas, the agency ramped up arrests to roughly 2,000 a day—about twice its daily total compared with the spring.

Then in the last ten days, in the course of its deportation frenzy, ICE has once again killed two innocent individuals. When 52-year-old husband and father Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot a week ago in Houston, DHS lied that he had “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” A week later, when 26-year- old husband and father Joan Sebastian Guerrero was killed in Biddeford, Maine, DHS retreated to the meaningless claim that the agent who shot Guerrero was “fearing for public safety.” ICE has shared no evidence from videos or witnesses about what actually happened in either case. It has not told us who those agents, acting and killing in our name, are. We do know that they were supposed to be looking for men other than the ones they shot. And we’ve been told they were not wearing body cameras.

Houston’s top prosecutor, Harris District Attorney Sean Teare, has been more forthcoming. He has said that the actions of federal immigration agents “in no way resemble” the tactics of “every law enforcement agency” he’s worked in, and that “either these agents are completely untrained, or intentionally putting themselves in situations where they can justify firing into cars.” Or both.

And these recent shootings didn’t come out of the blue. In recent weeks, we’ve seen videos and heard reports from all around the nation of illegal and indecent behavior by ICE agents. So while billions more dollars have been spent and thousands more agents have been added, we have no more transparency and accountability than before.

Now, after the killings, and after widespread criticism of the practice of vehicle stops, there were once again some suggestions that things might change. On Monday night, ICE ordered a suspension of vehicle stops during enforcement operations. But by Tuesday afternoon, border czar Tom Homan was reassuring Fox News that the pause on ICE agents conducting vehicle stops is not a policy change but rather a short-term review, and that ICE agents will “get back to doing what they do best.” And our president posted this morning to tell us that “the men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job,” adding, “we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

There’s no reason to think there’ll be any kind of fundamental change to this thuggish and lawless agency, or to the mass deportation agenda that incentivizes and excuses its thuggish and lawless behavior. In fact, all evidence now points to things staying the same.

My colleague Adrian Carrasquillo reported yesterday that at a small vigil in Houston a Mexican-American man told Ronaldo Salgado,

I see you as my sons. We’re the generation of your dad . . . We don’t ask anyone for anything. We hand our children over to this nation, and with all my heart, I see you as my son. And I know you make your father proud, and your father is watching you. And you make him proud.

The fact that immigrants like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Guerrero want to come here and live here and work here and raise their families here should make us all proud. It is the acts of our own government that should make us ashamed.

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Triumphal Arch . . . of What?

by Mona Charen

If completed as planned, Donald Trump’s triumphal arch outside Arlington National Cemetery will tower over the graceful Memorial Bridge, obstruct the view of the Lincoln Memorial from Arlington cemetery (and vice versa), and offend anyone whose taste is north of Liberace.

But there’s another aspect of this grotesquerie that deserves some attention: Namely, what is the triumph Trump is celebrating?

The Arch of Titus in Rome celebrates the Roman victory over the Jews and the sacking of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The Arch of Constantine honors Emperor Constantine’s A.D. 315 victory in the Battle at the Milvian Bridge (before which Constantine supposedly saw a cross in the sky and therefore converted to Christianity). The Arc de Triomphe in Paris was commissioned by Napoleon to commemorate his victory over the combined armies of Austria and Russia at Austerlitz in 1805. Whatever your view of imperial campaigns, military historians regard Napoleon’s victory there as one of history’s greatest. Nelson’s Column in London honors Horatio Nelson’s defeat of the French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar. Nelson was mortally wounded, but his statue towers above the city he saved.

The United States has not traditionally gone in for victory monuments. We have a Washington monument, but that’s for the whole man, not the military victory. Same with the Lincoln memorial, which stresses the terrible sacrifices the Civil War demanded. There is a moving memorial at Pearl Harbor that remembers our dead and tells the story of our recovery. The tone is solemn. You can find a World War II memorial in Washington, but it’s a tribute to the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and others who fought the war, not a gloating expression of chauvinism.

The Dewey monument in San Francisco honors the commodore who defeated the Spanish in Manila Bay, but it’s the exception that proves the rule. There is no victory arch for the Mexican–American War—though it was a crushing victory that doubled our territory. Americans felt queasy about celebrating it even in the nineteenth century. Ulysses Grant, who served in that war, recalled in his memoir: “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.”

And the Vietnam Memorial is a mournful thing. A black granite trove of carved names, it memorializes the thousands of 15- to 62-year-olds who gave the last full measure of devotion to a nation that should never have gotten involved in that war with ground troops.

What victory is Trump memorializing? The great battle of Caracas that extracted a single man from his palace and left a repressive regime in place? Or is it the Iran War, clocking in at an estimated $113 billion so far, draining our munitions (that could have helped Ukraine), and leaving the regime in the hands of even more radical forces than before, a regime that now knows it has little to fear from the United States and has a powerful weapon in the Strait of Hormuz? A regime before which the Trump administration is dangling $300 billion of carrots for peace? When one side is offering reparations, who won?

The proposed Arc de Trump would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe in scale, and destroy the geometry of the capital. The Memorial Bridge connects Arlington Cemetery and Robert E Lee’s former homestead to the Lincoln Memorial. It knits the former enemies back into one nation, but emphasizes that this is Lincoln’s country now. His temple catches the sunlight.

After World War I, New York constructed a temporary Victory Arch of wood and plaster to welcome home the troops. There were plans to finish it in stone but the funds never materialized and it was allowed to crumble. That would be a just fate for Trump’s monstrosity—but then again, wrecking cranes would be more efficient.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• As America Is Losing Friends, China Is Courting Them… Just look at the contrast between NATO and BRICS, writes MARK HERTLING.

• Are We Reading the Odyssey Wrong?… Two new books try to tame Homer’s hero. Neither succeeds, writes ALYSSA ROSENBERG.

• Time for Radical Change… On the flagship pod, PETE BUTTIGIEG joins TIM MILLER to discuss his speech in Iowa, and the radical institutional changes he’d like to see.

• The Faustian Tragedy of Lindsey Graham… His loyalty to Trump would have guaranteed him another six years in the Senate. Instead, it became the closing irony of his life, WILL SALETAN observes.

Quick Hits

JUSTICE FOR E. JEAN?: It’s really by a series of misnomers that we refer to “the justice system,” the “Justice Department,” Supreme Court “justices,” and so on. We have a system that attempts, at its best, to ensure some fairness in the process of social control—a process that’s a necessary and even salubrious part of any government. Government is generally better than anarchy, and if there can be a modicum of deliberation, reflection, and impartiality in the exercise of power, that’s better still—but it ain’t justice.

Take the case of E. Jean Carroll. She finally received the $5 million Donald Trump owed her for sexually abusing her and then defaming her ($5.6 million to be precise, when accounting for interest). That’s good. We should live in a society in which, if one person is legally found to have sexually abused another and then defames them, they should pay a penalty to the victim. (Maybe they should also pay a penalty to society, but that would involve the criminal “justice” system, which isn’t in play here.) A jury determined in 2023 that the amount Trump owed Carroll was $5 million—and now, after exhausting all appeals, the money has been transferred, along with the interest.

But in the meantime, Trump became president again and used his power to enrich himself by at least $2.6 billion so far. That ain’t justice.

THE KILLINGS WILL CONTINUE: ICE’s rapid changes in its policy regarding vehicle stops over the last twenty-four hours are enough to give every agent whiplash. As Bill wrote above, the agency is under pressure to meet its quotas. Some in the administration clearly see the practice’s deadly consequences as a bad thing (or, at least, the resulting PR from those deaths are viewed as a bad thing). Others—possibly including the president—don’t agree. But the reaction many in the MAGA crowd had to the announcement of a brief pause in the policy reveals that the movement writ large doesn’t have any compunction about the policy at all. Just take a look at this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or . . . You get the point.

So why is ICE so focused on traffic stops in the first place? A sympathetic answer could be that it’s easier for officers to control the situation compared to, say, going into people’s houses. But if any credence at all is to be given to ICE’s reflexive insistence that any officer who shot someone feared for his life because his victim had weaponized a vehicle, maybe homes are safer after all.

Homes are also more private. Depending on how the administration is feeling, that could be a good thing or a bad thing: Quiet deportations don’t create annoying news cycles like the ones we’ve seen after the extrajudicial killings of Renée Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero. But also, the government simply doesn’t have the capacity to deport all the people it wants—it needs some of them to self-deport, which means it needs them to be terrified to stay, which means it needs to inflict some kind of violence—whether that’s sending people to a Salvadoran torture chamber or occasionally shooting someone in the head. It’s not formally part of the mass deportation policy, but the administration, and its diehards online, certainly aren’t acting like these killings get in the way of their policy goals.

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN: Is there about to be a major conversion in the postliberal world? First Things is perhaps the most prominent outlet publishing on religion and politics today. One of its big-ticket items is the Erasmus Lecture, given annually by a public intellectual. This year it’s Yoram Hazony, the Israeli-American political theorist whose The Virtue of Nationalism put an intellectual veneer on a global nationalist turn in the late 2010s.

One problem: First Things’s print edition announced Hazony, a Modern Orthodox Jew, will be lecturing on “How Only the New Testament Can Restore America.” Big if true, as they say. Could it be that Hazony had seen the light of Christ? It’s hard to think of someone whose political thinking would be more fundamentally changed by conversion than Hazony. In any case, it wasn’t so. Hazony corrected the magazine’s “erroneous announcement” on X. He would be speaking on his original topic, “Only the Old Testament Can Restore America.” (Even that’s a concession—Jews prefer not to think of the Hebrew Bible as something old which had to be completed by something new). One wag joked it was “wishful thinking” from the First Things crew, whose religious profession tends toward the Catholicism of its editors-in-chief (both converts).

This copyediting pratfall raises darker specters. Under the editorship of R. R. Reno, First Things has become a primary venue of postliberal writing, and while postliberals form a united front against liberals, their visions are often incompatible. We saw this in an early kerfuffle, when Reno published a piece by a Catholic “integralist” defending “the Mortara case,” a nineteenth-century incident in which a sickly Italian Jewish boy was secretly baptized by his Catholic nanny. When he recovered, the Church found it necessary to “adopt” the boy, now six years old. “Should putative civil liberties trump the requirements of faith?” the author asked pregnantly. Well, Jewish readers freaked out, and so did small-L liberal Catholics and Protestants. And when Reno walked it back, integralists complained he was a squish.

The Erasmus Lecture typo wasn’t a Mortara case by stealth, but it reminds us that the postliberal alliance can only last until the Great Satan of liberalism is defeated. After that, it’s every postlib for himself.

—Joshua Tait

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A couple programming notes: Tim has Pete Buttigieg on today’s Bulwark Podcast and Bulwark+ members will get early access to the show starting this morning.

But first: Tune in for Morning Shots Live at 10:30 a.m. EDT here and then watch your inbox for Tim’s exclusive interview from Iowa with Mayor Pete.

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Destruction Alone Doesn’t Win Wars

by Mark Hertling

The United States can destroy more targets than Iran. It can sink ships, eliminate missile batteries, strike command centers, and impose military losses that Tehran cannot reciprocate. But Iran does not have to match American firepower to achieve its goals. It must only keep commercial shipping at risk, energy markets unsettled, Gulf governments nervous, American bases under threat, and U.S. forces responding to the next crisis.

Washington may be winning most exchanges of fire, but Tehran has the initiative: It still decides, for the most part, where the conflict occurs, which American assets must be defended, and how many additional missions U.S. forces must assume.

The Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran called for an “immediate and permanent termination of military operations,” but it was never a peace settlement. Its vague language governing commercial shipping through the strait virtually guaranteed competing interpretations. Halfway through the MOU’s sixty-day negotiating period, questions about Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions, and U.S. force posture also remain unresolved.

With the resumption of combat in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States is being pulled into multiple overlapping campaigns: striking Iranian nuclear and military capabilities, protecting commercial shipping, suppressing coastal missile systems, defending regional bases, and reassuring Gulf partners. But there is no clearly articulated political end state. This is mission creep.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, meanwhile, appears willing to absorb extraordinary punishment. Iranian facilities have been destroyed, missile and drone systems attacked, and commanders killed, yet Tehran continues launching weapons, threatening shipping, and striking facilities across the region. This exposes the critical difference between punishment and coercion: The United States is unquestionably punishing Iran, but not compelling it to change its behavior.

Strategy should start with a desired political outcome and then direct military, diplomatic, and economic power toward achieving it. It should not be assembled one retaliatory strike at a time.

America’s Gulf partners understand the danger. They fear Iran, but they also fear an unlimited American–Iranian war fought across their region. They want Washington to deter Iranian aggression and protect freedom of navigation, but they do not want their cities, energy infrastructure, airfields, and populations threatened or bombarded.

The United States can destroy more, but Iran can disrupt more. Iran can lose every tactical encounter and still produce strategic effects. It can raise shipping costs, disrupt energy markets, strain American alliances, expose regional bases, and draw the United States deeper into an open-ended campaign.

To get a sense of how that happens, look no further than Russia’s war in Ukraine. Russia is the stronger combatant on paper: It has more people, territory, weapons, industrial capacity, and ability to absorb casualties and replace equipment. Yet after more than four years of war, those advantages have not produced the political outcome Vladimir Putin sought. Russia has destroyed Ukrainian cities, seized territory, killed civilians, damaged energy infrastructure, and imposed enormous costs. But it has not conquered Ukraine, broken its government, divided NATO, or forced Kyiv to accept political subordination.

Ukraine cannot defeat Russia by matching its mass. It wins by surviving, and its survival has depended on three things Russia initially underestimated: adaptation, outside support, and national will.

That will is visible in both the Ukrainian government and its citizens. Ukraine is a democracy, so its continued resistance depends not simply on government orders but on public consent, political legitimacy, military service, sacrifice, and the population’s belief that national survival is worth the cost. That resolve is not unlimited, but it has already disproved Moscow’s expectation that the government would collapse, and the country would quickly submit.

Iranian will is different. In a theocracy, it is difficult to separate the determination of the regime, the Revolutionary Guard, and the broader population. Tehran can suppress dissent and impose costs on citizens in ways a democratic government cannot. Yet the regime’s willingness to absorb attacks, continue retaliation, and accept economic pain remains a form of strategic endurance that American planners cannot ignore. Military superiority matters less when the adversary believes it can outlast the stronger power politically.

Ukraine’s adaptation has repeatedly changed the character and geography of its war. It challenged the Russian Black Sea Fleet without possessing a conventional navy. It transformed inexpensive drones into weapons capable of attacking armor, artillery, command posts, airfields, ammunition depots, and energy infrastructure. It extended the battlefield deep into Russia, forcing Moscow to defend millions of square miles, including areas just recently considered beyond Ukraine’s reach.

Russia can destroy more. So Ukraine must adapt faster—and sustain the will to continue.

But adaptation and will cannot substitute indefinitely for soldiers, weapons, and allied support. Ukraine’s forces are under enormous pressure. Its cities remain vulnerable, its soldiers are exhausted, its air defenses are strained, and uncertainty about Western assistance continues to benefit Moscow.

But for all that, Russia’s strategic goals remain stubbornly out of reach.

Russia is unquestionably punishing Ukraine. But punishment is not coercion. Ukraine continues to fight, its government remains independent, NATO is larger than it was at the beginning of 2022, and Europe is rearming. Russia’s mass has produced destruction and territorial gains, but not the strategic victory that drove the invasion.

Wars are not decided solely by who destroys more. They are decided when military operations break an opponent’s ability, or will, to resist. Russia and the United States—in very different ways and with greatly varying degrees of professionalism and efficacy—have shown their abilities to destroy. While Ukraine fights for democracy and freedom and Iran fights against it, both have shown their wills to resist and to win by not losing.

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Is It Too Much to Ask?

by William Kristol

“There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

Thus the great Edmund Burke, friend of the American Revolution and critic of the French Revolution, a thinker and statesman claimed in the twentieth century as a great conservative but in the nineteenth century (more accurately, I think) as a great liberal.

“Our country ought to be lovely.” These words of Burke come to mind this morning in light of the now-familiar justifications and coverups by top government officials of ICE agents killing innocent people in our streets. They come to mind in light of the moving public service announcement by survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell urging members of Congress not to confirm Todd Blanche, who has utterly and purposefully failed to seek justice for them. They come to mind in light of the announcement of a presidential speech later this week designed to rewrite history in order to subvert our next elections.

Burke aimed high, perhaps too high. Perhaps it’s too much to ask that one’s country be lovely. Maybe it’s better to lower one’s sights, as Burke’s friend, Adam Smith, did when he observed that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” But even so: Surely our nation ought not be ugly. And if it is too much to expect that our government be lovely, it’s not too much to ask that our government act defensibly. It’s not too much to ask that our public officials behave decently.

But, you say: Our country is better than our government.

I hope so.

But it’s a representative government. Our president was elected, and then, after attempting to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, was elected once again. Our elected members of Congress have confirmed the leaders of the executive branch and funded its activities.

Our government isn’t behaving admirably. And so we have to say that we as a nation aren’t behaving admirably either.

It will take quite a while to restore decency and responsibility to our public life. What we can do now is to check the injustice and limit the damage. We can pressure our representatives not to confirm someone like Todd Blanche and not to fund an agency like ICE. We can help dissidents in the executive branch; we can appeal to the courts; we can act at the state and local level; we can work through civil society. We can argue and agitate and vote.

We can demonstrate love for our country by working to make it far less ugly, and far more lovely.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Ukraine Mourns an Unlikely Champion… History won’t judge Lindsey Graham in just one language, observes CATHY YOUNG.

• The Lindsey Graham Conspiracy Theories Are Already Running Wild… but WILL SOMMER doesn’t think they’ll stick.

• Sam Neill, 1947–2026… SONNY BUNCH remembers an unlikely superstar.

• August’s Bulwark Book Club pick is Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson. Mona and Bill Kristol will discuss this lesser-known but very interesting Twain novel on August 12, and also consider Twain’s remarkable life and work as a whole. Pick up the book, and leave your questions for Mona and Bill here.

Quick Hits

IMPROPER ROBBERY SCHEME: Remember when Trump sued the federal government for a bajillion dollars and then ordered the government to settle, and then they settled before any court could look under the hood? Well, a federal judge in Florida finally got a chance to comment on the case and what she found is every bit as corrupt as we expected. The New York Times summarizes:

A federal judge ruled on Monday that President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service was an improper exercise in self-dealing and barred him from claiming that the extraordinary tax protections he received were part of a legitimate settlement agreement. . . .

“The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the president,” the judge wrote.

Judge Kathleen Williams even referred Trump’s lawyers—including Attorney General–designate Todd Blanche—to the New York and Florida bar associations for possible disciplinary action because their abuse of the legal system was so blatant and malevolent.

But she didn’t actually dissolve the deal by which Trump effectively granted himself immunity from IRS investigations. “Whether executive branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax moneys for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this court,” she explained.

That ruling will presumably have to wait for another day.

DISCOUNT HORMUZ: Ever since Iran announced that it was closing (or partially closing, or tolling, or whatever) the Strait of Hormuz, Donald Trump’s approach to the whole conflict seems to be: Anything you can do, I can do worse.

And so, yesterday morning, he posted to his social media network,

The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security . . .

Well, Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi knows a negotiation when he sees one. “POTUS is absolutely right. Whoever provides secure and safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz should be compensated for this service,” he tweeted, but “20% is of course too much. We will be fair.”

Nothing like a little competition to drive down prices.

DO IT FOR LINDSEY: CNN reported yesterday that President Trump is planning to support1 a bipartisan bill imposing new sanctions on Russia that Sen. Lindsey Graham had advocated before his sudden death.

The endorsement comes days after Graham’s unexpected death, likely further smoothing the path for a bill that the South Carolina senator spent years working to push across the finish line.

Graham and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal previously indicated the administration was prepared to back the package, saying Friday that they reached an agreement following extensive negotiations. Yet it was unclear at the time whether Trump would directly support the bill, as the president had repeatedly panned the legislation and pushed for more direct discretion on imposing sanctions.

The article doesn’t explicitly say that Trump changed his mind because Graham died, but it also doesn’t offer any alternative interpretations of Trump’s change of heart. Perhaps a paroxysm of sentimentality caused by Graham’s sudden death moved the president—but if so, that’s an awful way to move legislation.

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Join Will Sommer and Sam Stein at 10:00 a.m. EDT today for MAGA Mondays on Substack and YouTube.

Give Blanche’s Hearing to the Epstein Survivors

by William Kristol

A year ago, on July 17, 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche hurried to an emergency evening meeting in the White House Situation Room with his fellow Trump administration apparatchiks. Its location might suggest it had to do with national security. It didn’t. It was about the political security of Donald Trump.

Ten days earlier, the Trump administration had tried to close the door on the Jeffrey Epstein matter. The Justice Department and the FBI had announced that the Epstein investigation was complete, that nothing further could or should be done, and no new documents would be made public. But that effort to stonewall was already falling apart. Now it had to be replaced with a more elaborate coverup.

Orchestrating that coverup was the point of the Situation Room meeting. A week later, Blanche flew to Florida to meet with Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell and ensure she continued not to talk. A week after that, Maxwell was transferred to a cushy federal prison. Since then, Blanche has since presided over the Justice Department’s non-compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, as well as the botching of the legally required redactions of names of and details concerning several Epstein survivors. In short, Blanche has been central to the Epstein coverup.

This week Blanche will be appearing before the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, making the case for his confirmation as attorney general.

There are, needless to say, many important issues to raise with Blanche, who has been shameless in turning the United States Justice Department into Trump’s personal law firm. But if Democratic senators want to stop him—or if, failing that, they at least want to weaken him and the Trump administration’s assault on the rule of law—the Epstein coverup should be their focus.

As we saw after the failed attempt to stonewall the Epstein case, and as we have seen since in the none-too-successful coverup, the Epstein case matters to the public. And the public isn’t pleased with what they’ve seen from the Trump administration.

For example, a poll last month showed that seventy-five percent of Americans—including sixty-six percent of Republicans—believe that the federal government is continuing to hide information about Epstein and his clients. And just ten percent of Americans—and just twenty-one percent of Republicans—think the Trump administration has helped deliver justice in cases connected to Epstein.

And our colleague Sarah Longwell reports that “voters still bring up the files, often unprompted, in many of the focus groups we conduct. And it’s not just partisan Democrats; we hear it from all kinds of groups—men, women, young, old, Republicans of all stripes, from three-time Trump voters to Biden-to-Trump flippers.”

Here are a couple of examples from Sarah’s focus groups:

“Obviously it’s all a coverup from Trump originally being like he didn’t want it to be released,” said Allison, a 2024 Trump voter who now disapproves of the job the president is doing. “He was very dismissive about it. A reporter was mentioning Epstein, he’s like, ‘Why are we still talking about this guy?’ It’s like, why would we stop talking about him?”

And,

A 2024 Trump voter named Wednesday offered the most damning critique: “I watched the dozens of women victims go on TV, go on interviews, and beg this administration and this president for help. . . . Trump got on TV and called what they were saying and the Epstein files a ‘Democratic hoax.’”

Democratic senators can highlight Blanche’s leadership of the coverup and make him try to defend it. As Sarah puts it, “When voters scroll through their social media feeds after the hearing, Democrats should ensure that they get clip after clip of Blanche squirming to justify his handling of the Epstein files.”

It’s also likely that when Blanche testifies on Wednesday, Epstein survivors will be present. Will Blanche, who has refused to meet with them, acknowledge them? Will he apologize for the botched redaction process over which he presided that exposed them to further pain and harassment? Will he repudiate Trump’s dismissal of them?

On Thursday, Democrats intend to use their limited ability to call witnesses to have at least one courageous Epstein survivor appear. That testimony could be the highlight of the hearing.

Recent experience suggests that it will be difficult to persuade Republican senators to break with Trump—though Epstein is the one issue on which Republicans in Congress have notably done so. But if Republicans do stick with Trump and Blanche is confirmed, this will dramatically make the case for why Republicans need to be deprived of continued control of the Senate. If Susan Collins in Maine and Dan Sullivan in Alaska and Jon Husted in Ohio and Ashley Moody in Florida and Roger Marshall in Kansas vote for Blanche, voters in their states will have a chance this November to hold them accountable, and to ensure greater accountability over the next two years for the Trump administration.

And by the way, do John Cornyn and Thom Tillis and Bill Cassidy want to end their last terms in the Senate voting to enable the ongoing Epstein coverup?

It’s worth noting that defeating Blanche—and/or removing Republicans who would prevent serious oversight and legislation in 2027 and 2028—would not only mean a chance at justice for Epstein survivors and for the truth about Epstein. It would also weaken the Trump administration’s ability to continue its project of what NYU law professor Ryan Goodman calls “radical lawlessness,” which is intensifying and, if unchecked by Congress, will continue to intensify.

Democrats in Congress often lament their inability to affect the course of events in the era of Trump. This week’s confirmation hearing provides them a chance to act.

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LINDSEY GRAHAM, R.I.P.

by Benjamin Parker

There will be more to say in the coming days about the life and career of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died unexpectedly late Saturday night. One thing that’s hard not to notice, though, is the way in which his career arc so directly mirrors that of the modern Republican party. Even in an abbreviated life, he outlived the version of the GOP he worked in for so long.

Graham was elected to Congress in the “Republican Revolution” year of 1994, when the mainstream of the party were conscience conservatives, somewhat overlapping with but not yet dominated by the radically religious wing of the party. Graham rose quickly in this environment, becoming one of the House managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in just his second term in Congress.

But it was in the Senate that Graham made his real reputation. Joining the chamber in 2003, just months before the invasion of Iraq, he made his name as a neoconservative foreign policy hawk, especially regarding Middle Eastern issues. He was, famously, a consistent wingman for John McCain until the latter’s death in 2018.

Graham’s campaign for president in 2016 was pretty transparently just a gambit to win support for his style of foreign policy, in opposition to both Obama-era, lead-from-behind retrenchment in the Democratic party and Rand Paul-style libertarian isolationism then rising in the Republican party.

Graham was at that time a frequent, cogent, pointed, and sound critic of Donald Trump—so much so that Trump, in a pique of annoyance, gave out his cell phone number at a rally.

Throughout his Senate career, he was also a frequent exponent of bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform—though never to much avail.

Graham’s most dogged pursuit, however, wasn’t any policy. It was electoral victory: both his own and his party’s. He went from Trump critic to Trump ally as soon as it was politically advantageous—then seemed to sour on Trump after January 6th before going right back to him. He once talked about Joe Biden as the kindest soul in politics, then participated in the savaging of the Biden family when it served Trump’s interest.

The full story of how Graham thought he could use Trump and Trumpism to his own ends—but was in turn used by Trump and his movement—has been told by Will Saletan. Will wrote that piece in 2023. But the end of Graham’s story is not much different from where he left off, except it’s now more certain.

Comprehensive immigration reform has never seemed less likely. Instead, the Republican party—Graham very much included—either cheered or meekly piped down as Trump’s mass deportations sent innocent people to foreign torture chambers and killed people—some American citizens, others trying to become American citizens—in the streets.

And this Republican president—whom Graham did so much to support, to legitimize, to try to influence—started a war in the Middle East that has resulted in the strengthening of a terroristic, tyrannical Islamist regime, a heavier burden on the people living under that regime, a rebalance of power in the region against the United States, a major rift between the United States and Israel, and a weaker American military posture around the world.

Graham tried, over a three-decade career in Washington, to be always at the center of his party. In that, at least, he never failed.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• One Weird Trick for Torpedoing Todd Blanche’s Hearing… Trump voters tell me again and again they’re disappointed with the president over one thing. It could complicate his hopes for a new attorney general, writes SARAH LONGWELL.

• Susan Collins Is Beatable No Matter Who Replaces Platner… Her old formula—express concern but side with Trump—is facing its toughest test yet, argues JILL LAWRENCE.

• NATO’s Annual Circus Comes to Turkey… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN survey the latest geopolitical absurdities, from Erdoğan gifting revolvers and live, gold-plated ammunition at the NATO summit to the fine print behind Trump’s Ukraine policy—and, because no week is complete without it, Graham Platner’s latest self-inflicted disaster.

Quick Hits

LIFE’S A MITCH: Turns out Sen. Mitch McConnell was basically fine this whole time! At least, that’s the report the senator gave. McConnell (really, some aide) posted a photo of himself and his wife, former Secretary of Labor/Transportation Elaine Chao, along with a statement Sunday, explaining his recent weeks of hospitalization:

Last month, I took a fall which landed me in the hospital.

My doctors have confirmed that I didn’t break any bones or suffer a concussion. I didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke. I don’t have any tumors or hemorrhages. But I was briefly unconscious and was taken to the hospital. While receiving excellent care over the past several weeks, I’ve also had to deal with a mild case of pneumonia.

I can assure you that I’ve been a good patient. At my age, I tend to do what my doctors tell me to do. I’ve submitted to every test they can think of to help figure out what caused this incident. And I’m continuing to do everything they ask to speed my recovery. In fact, with signs of continued progress, I’ve been able to move from hospital care to a rehabilitation center where I’ll keep regaining my strength.

Usually it’s not a good sign when you have to list the diseases you don’t have—or when you find it appropriate to hold a copy of the latest issue of a newspaper to prove you’re still alive to this very day.

The tone of McConnell’s statement clearly suggests that, after this rough patch, everything will be just fine in no time. The photo—accompanied by no video or audio recording and quickly dissected by every wanna-be internet sleuth on X—probably won’t cut it.

CRIME AND ASTONISHMENT: Was January 6th an insurrection? The answer, up till the past two years, was obviously yes. It certainly was when federal prosecutors presented evidence to a jury, resulting in lengthy prison terms for several leaders of the Proud Boys, who led the storming of the Capitol that day.

But then Trump took office for the second time. And his Justice Department decided that, akshually, it wanted to drop the case post-conviction. Judge Timothy J. Kelly, while finding that he had no power to oppose the government’s motion, made it painstakingly clear that he thought it was—to use the legal jargon—horseshit:

First, there is little mystery about why the Government is moving to dismiss this case, or whether dismissal is in fact what the Executive seeks. President Trump’s views about the prosecution of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6—whether those views are based on fact or fiction—are well known, as is his intention to extend clemency to them . . .

All that said, because the decisions to issue the Executive Order and to abandon this prosecution—even after the Government secured convictions for serious crimes relating to the attack on the Capitol on January 6—are solely the Executive’s, no one should mistake the Court’s granting of the Government’s motion for its agreement with those decisions.

As the Court has said many times, the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a perilous event. It was an attack on people, including police officers, many of whom were injured. It was an attack on a coordinate branch of government—Congress—that [the] Founders saw fit to give a place of primacy in Article I of the Constitution. And it was an attack on the Constitution’s mechanism to facilitate the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next, what President Reagan called “nothing less than a miracle.” President Ronald W. Reagan, Inaugural Address (Jan. 20, 1981). Moving forward, if this Nation’s experiment in self-government is to last another 250 years, the American people—no matter their partisan preferences—will have to act together to preserve, protect and defend that miracle through our constitutional framework.

I know it feels like we do this every week, but it’s worth repeating, so say it with us: Judge Kelly was nominated by Donald Trump.

KYIV CABINET RECAST: Almost exactly one year after he last reshuffled his cabinet and senior advisors, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has announced another series of senior personnel changes. So far, the only specific move is that Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko is set to step down, but Zelensky signaled other changes are following soon.

Svyrydenko was Ukraine’s second prime minister since the Russian full-scale invasion in 2022, and its fifth since the Russian–Ukrainian war first started in 2014. During that time, the country has had two presidents (two since 2022), four foreign ministers (two since 2022), three chiefs of staff to the president/heads of the presidential administration (two since 2022), and six chiefs of the general staff (three since 2022).

So it is possible to change personnel in the middle of a war. Just in case someone wanted to tell the White House.

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So enjoy today’s and tomorrow’s games—and next week’s semifinals and final. Happy Friday.

The Quiet Before the Assault

by Jim Swift

Springfield, Ohio
You’d think this town would be on the verge of panic.

It’s not. At least, not in public.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe two weeks ago paved the way for the Trump administration to deport from the United States perhaps hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees, I came here to observe a rally for the city and its Haitian community and gauge the mood. It was somber but not despondent. But with today marking an important deadline—it’s the day on which work authorization under Temporary Protected Status is set to expire for refugees from Haiti and Syria—and the prospect of mass deportation drawing closer, I was curious to see if that mood had changed. How were people here adjusting to the fact that Springfield, which had built a future with its Haitian community, now has to wait to learn whether Washington will succeed in undoing it?

The people of Springfield—like many other cities across the country—now have to make some very difficult decisions. With those TPS work permits expiring today, employers will now have to choose between firing longtime employees or violating federal law.

And the temporary Ohio drivers licenses issued for those under TPS already expired earlier this week—which means that driving, for many of those people, is now illegal, and an easy way to get caught by DHS.

I visited the local branch of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, a Catholic charity dedicated to aid for the poor. Its thrift store is the engine for the organization’s community support hub next door, in a dated building with computer stations visible from the outside.

I noticed that the parking lot seemed pretty empty for a Wednesday afternoon. A multilingual sign explains the limit of items per customer in the free food pantry. I heard an employee named Chuck describe to the cashier what donations had just come in, as he lugged peanut butter and other goods toward the shelves.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who has longstanding ties to both Springfield and Haiti, told the local press earlier this week that the local Saint Vincent de Paul council was working to secure U.S. passports for the U.S.-born children of the Haitians here, as they are, without a doubt, U.S. citizens.

“A lot of great work has been done by a lot [of] good people in Springfield to help them do that,” DeWine said, emphasizing not only how good Ohio has been to these Haitians but how good the Haitians have been for Ohio. The surge of immigrants—estimated at upwards of 10,000—to Springfield from the earthquake-racked and violence-riddled Caribbean country was successfully absorbed thanks in large part to the local faith community and its charities.

That is, until 2024, when Donald Trump and JD Vance helped spread vile lies about Springfield’s Haitians supposedly eating their neighbors’ pets. Pastor Carl Ruby of Central Christian Church told me in February, “We [Springfield] typically get twenty . . . inquiries a year from businesses looking for a place to locate. We have not had a single one since the ‘cats and dogs’ comment.”

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I visited with Rick, a Bulwark reader who has spent years walking alongside Springfield families during some of the most important moments of their lives, both in his day job in public health and in his faith community. That experience has given him a close view of the anxiety many are feeling.

Rick has counted the Haitians under TPS as both friends and neighbors. He’s learned a little French along the way, but told me that Springfield’s Haitians are “working really hard to assimilate and to learn the language and to do all the things that we so often say we expect of people.”

“They really want to be a part of a community,” Rick said, as we grabbed lunch at Charlo’s, a restaurant downtown.

He worried about biased news sources distorting people’s impressions of Springfield’s Haitians. “It’s hard to hear misinformation, knowing it’s harming people that I’ve met and have come to love,” he said. “We’re so isolated from each other. I feel like I can tell from day to day what news source people are watching.”

It’s not just the news media. The White House publishes its own alien-themed, error-laden website that the Ohio Immigrant Alliance says “creates a false impression of actual criminal activity.”

Some of the city’s Haitians have already been withdrawing from public life, stopping their attendance at church, or not appearing at work, according to people I interviewed. It’s not immediately clear if they’re staying home, like so many others across the United States from different communities fearing imminent deportation, or if they’ve left Ohio for other states, hoping to avoid the special scrutiny on this once-hopeful town. Thanks to the controversy over the Haitians in Springfield in particular—which, again, didn’t appear over more than a decade of immigration and assimilation, and really only exploded due to Trump and Vance’s agitation—the town has had to deal with bomb threats (mostly from abroad, it turns out), with school closures, hospital lockdowns, and general chaos.

The financial cost to Springfield if the city sees mass firings of its Haitian workers, let alone mass deportations conducted by DHS, will likely be hefty. According to one estimate, Ohio’s Haitian population has an economic output of $160 million per year, and contributes nearly $40 million in local, state, and federal taxes.

DeWine has stated that if DHS chooses to act, the state will get advance notice, and will not interfere. “We will do what the law tells us to do. We respect the law in Ohio.”

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Nobody knows exactly what’s coming. But Rick is hopeful as we consider whether we’re dining in the last rays of this town’s latest golden age.

“I’m always hopeful,” he muses. I’m not sure it’ll thrive in the same way. . . . I just wonder if it won’t be what it could have been.”

As we prepared to head our separate ways, Rick brought up a song, “The Change” by Garth Brooks. He has returned to its message “again and again” in recent days. He remembered it coming out after the Oklahoma City bombing, when the images felt hopeless: rescue workers pulling people from the rubble.

“The chorus of the song says, ‘You’ll never change things. And no matter what you do, it’s still the same thing. But it’s not the world that I am changing. I do this so this world we know never changes me.’”

He paused for a moment before going on. “It does feel like the world is trying to overwhelm you. But we keep returning . . . not because we think we’re going to change anything, but because hopefully it won’t change us.”

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The Coverup Unravels

by Bill Kristol

The coverup of Tuesday’s killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by an ICE officer in Houston seems to be coming apart.

First we had the totally unsubstantiated ICE claim—so often a lie when we’ve heard it from ICE in the past—that Araujo had “weaponized his vehicle.” And we had the normal ICE stonewalling—a refusal to release any actual information about what happened or to cooperate with local law enforcement.

Then we learned that the ICE officers had taken Lorenzo’s personal property from him, including his wallet and phone, before putting him in the ambulance to a hospital. Which is why he was admitted as a John Doe and the hospital couldn’t notify his family that he was there. But the indecency here isn’t the point. Buying time to organize a coverup was.

Then we learned that ICE thought Araujo was someone else when they tried to stop his work truck. ICE seems to have put out this piece of information themselves, perhaps figuring that some routine incompetence was a better story for the media to focus on than their malevolence.

Then we learned that ICE was doing its best to ensure the full story wouldn’t come out. Greg Sargent of the New Republic reported that the three people who were in the car with Araujo when the shooting took place and who remained in ICE’s custody were under pressure from ICE to sign self-deportation orders, presumably so they would be out of the country and less available to talk about what happened.

These three men have resisted the pressure and have courageously spoken out about what happened that Tuesday morning. It’s worth quoting at some length a Washington Post report from late last night:

The three men who were arrested during an immigration operation that resulted in the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo said a federal officer fired at them almost immediately after exiting his vehicle and that at no point did the driver veer in his direction. . . . They spoke from immigration detention with attorney Hugo Balderas-Ibarra, who shared their written and oral accounts with The Washington Post.

DHS released a statement hours after the deadly shooting saying that Salgado Araujo had rammed an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle and “weaponized” his white work van “in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.”

“That is a lie,” wrote Jose Trinidad Rojas, 51, in a handwritten statement. “It is impossible for them to say that they were going to get run over. . . . There were no officers in front of or behind the vehicle. They were on the sides.”

Balderas-Ibarra spoke to Rojas, Daniel Tirado Pantoja, 43, and the shooting victim’s brother, Victor Salgado, 44, and said he heard the same story from each as he interviewed them separately. The men are not being housed together, the attorney said. . . . “All of them reiterated that there were never any ICE agents in front of the van,” Balderas-Ibarra said. “They came in and started shooting from the sides.”

[After being shot by an agent] Salgado Araujo was able to stop the van and place it in park, the men said, but the officer or officers continued to unload additional rounds from the sides of the vehicle.

Rojas described the agents violently pulling Salgado Araujo out of the driver seat and throwing him to the ground. They put handcuffs on their wrists and feet.

Victor Salgado said his brother was yelling for help as he was bleeding out.

The three men lay helpless as their boss lay dying.

“Se querían escapar, verdad?” Victor Salgado recalled an ICE agent saying to him in a mocking tone. He relayed that memory to Balderas-Ibarra. “You wanted to escape, right?”

None of the ICE agents involved has been identified. None has stepped forward to contradict the witnesses’ account. No video or witness accounts or evidence of any sort has been provided by ICE.

Body cameras could help resolve who’s telling the truth, you say? Well, it turns out that the ICE officers were not wearing bodycams that morning.

It’s horrifying. Surely it’s not too much to ask Democratic members of Congress to make cooperation on any issue—whether procedural or substantive, whether an appropriation or a confirmation—contingent on getting at the truth of what happened here, and on some accountability for this atrocity.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• From Hateful Hoax to Presidential Policy… As time runs out for Haitian refugees in the U.S., CATHY YOUNG takes a look back at JD Vance’s sick, racist lie about immigrants eating pets.

• Trump’s Own Judge Torched DOJ’s Insane Election Subpoena… On The Illegal News, ANDREW WEISSMANN joins SARAH LONGWELL to discuss a big week in legal news: DOJ’s stunning concession in a reporter’s lawsuit over the Epstein files, the questions senators must make Todd Blanche answer at his confirmation hearing, and the Trump-appointed judge who torched DOJ’s demand for the names of every 2020 election worker in Fulton County.

• Trump, Platner, and the Mistake America Keeps Making… On the latest Mona Charen Show, WILL SALETAN joins MONA CHAREN to analyze the Platner saga and have a few words about the World Cup.

• The Endangered Big Screen Comedy… SONNY BUNCH reviews The Invite and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, and is joined by renowned film historian DAVID THOMSON on The Bulwark Goes to Hollywood to discuss how the screen has changed us.

• Ravelstein Revisited… Saul Bellow’s last novel is brilliant, funny, and unsettling, JONATHAN MARKS writes. It also leaves an uncomfortable question hanging: What exactly did all that shamelessness buy us?

Quick Hits

THIS GUY: Graham Platner appears intent on running out every last second of his time in the political spotlight. The populist Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine announced Wednesday night that he was dropping his bid following reports that he had allegedly sexually assaulted an ex-girlfriend. But a video announcement saying you plan to leave the race is not the same as officially leaving the race. To do that, one needs to send in actual paperwork to the Maine secretary of state. According to press reports and his top aide, Platner is going to file that paperwork. But he’s apparently going to wait until Monday to do so. That is the drop-dead deadline for him to exit the race; were he to miss it, Democrats would lose the ability to run someone else on the party line for the Senate.

Technically, Platner has until 5 p.m. Monday to file the paperwork. He must also formally withdraw from the race by submitting a signed written notice to the elections office. But fret not: He doesn’t need to hitch a ride on an oyster boat or call an Uber to Augusta. According to the secretary of state’s office, the paperwork can be submitted without appearing in person.

THAT GUY: A new report from the New York Times chronicles how local officials in the Sunshine State put a stop to Gov. DeSantis’s proposal to significantly reduce property taxes in the state.

In a speech last year, DeSantis was quoted as saying: “You buy a home, you pay off the mortgage, and yet, you still have to write a check to the government every year just for the privilege of living on your own private property. Is the property yours, or are you just renting it from the government?”

The idea of steeply cutting property taxes—which would take away a key source of funding for schools, fire departments, and other services in local communities across the state—is just the latest illustration of a larger movement among some conservatives to shift taxes away from income and property and toward consumption exclusively. Some even want to eliminate federal income taxes altogether in exchange for a national sales tax.

Were Florida’s proposal to go through, local leaders could find themselves in a position where they feel they must either go to the state shaking a tin cup or make cuts to essential services like police. DeSantis wants to offer those communities “grants.” But local Republicans like Jeff Brandes, a former state senator who now runs a think tank, saw right through that suggestion: “This was a pitch that started off as cutting taxes, but I don’t think it’s that anymore. I think it’s really shifted to control.”

DeSantis is now distancing himself from the measure, saying he would still vote in favor of it but likely won’t campaign for it.

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What We Learn From Immigrants

by William Kristol

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, killed by agents of our government while driving to work early Tuesday morning in Houston, was fond of telling his three sons, “Que siempre le echemos ganas en esta vida.” The Washington Post offers this rough translation: Give it your all, and never give up.

This is a Mexican proverb. But who hasn’t heard similar sentiments expressed by other immigrants from other places at other times and in other languages? We native-born Americans often have it relatively easy. We can be quick to grumble when the going gets tough. It’s often our immigrants who remind us that the better response to life’s challenges is unstinting effort and determined perseverance.

And so it’s often immigrants who remind us about the importance of work. Ronaldo Salgado, Lorenzo’s eldest son, emphasized yesterday that his father was “a man who understood that good things come to those who put in hard work.”

It’s often immigrants who remind us about family. Araujo’s son said yesterday that his late father was “a family man” and that yesterday was “the first day without him for all of us, and it is heartbreaking to know that my mom did not make lunch for my dad before going to work—the first time in their 30+ year marriage.” Araujo worked hard throughout his three decades in the United States so that he could support his family and raise their three sons. “He wanted nothing else in life but to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people,” Ronaldo said.

And it’s often from immigrants that we learn about generosity. According to the Post, Araujo was known as someone whose door you could knock on if you were looking for work, and he would help you. “He deserved to live a quiet life as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a husband, father and a job creator for dozens of men who also wanted the American Dream,” Ronaldo Salgado said.

And it’s from immigrants that we often are reminded about the importance of education. Araujo and his wife had little formal education, but were determined that their three sons would go to college. Ronaldo told The Bulwark’s Adrian Carrasquillo that his father would remind him and his brothers “that we needed to do well in school so we don’t end up like him in the sun.” As Adrian reported, “Ronaldo, 29, graduated from the University of Houston; Lorenzo Jr., 27, from Tufts University; and their youngest brother is in college now.”

It is these young men who are calling for a full and honest investigation into why a peaceful and law-abiding man was killed while driving to work by agents of our government. It is they who are seeking the truth about what happened and asking the public to come forward with any new video or images that might shed light on their father’s death. It is they who are trying to hold our government to American standards of responsiveness and accountability and decency.

And it is our government that is stonewalling and covering up, refusing so far to provide any information at all about what happened Tuesday morning in Houston. It is our government that appears to be blocking independent investigations by the Justice Department or by local authorities. But not to worry: The Department of Homeland Security inspector general, we are assured, will add this case to the more than 600 complaints of misconduct by DHS employees that his office is now investigating.

We should be grateful that Ronaldo Salgado Araujo came to live here in the United States, to build houses for Americans, and to raise three American sons. Araujo was not yet an American citizen, though he had in the last eighteen months filled out paperwork and provided documentation, references, and fingerprints in an effort to regularize his immigration status. But he had lived as an American, de facto if not de jure, for the last thirty-five years. As his son said, he had sought to live the American Dream and to help others to do so.

His son also remarked, “My father was always a strong man and never wanted us to know if he was in pain. He never complained.” Our current government, by contrast, is led by weak men who constantly complain, and who benefit from exploiting other Americans’ weaknesses and anxieties. Our current leaders talk endlessly about American exceptionalism, while turning us into an unexceptional country presided over by thuggish apparatchiks.

I dare say Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a better American than they are.1

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• How the Roberts Court Is Blowing Up American Politics… In the term just ended, the right-wing justices continued their campaign to elevate the presidency, while discarding vital protections and longstanding precedents, observes KIM WEHLE.

• Vance and Rufo Want You to Know That Nixon Is Back, Baby, and He’s Better Than Ever… The disgraced former president is undergoing a revival among the aggro New Right types, who admire his worst features, reports MICHAEL KONCEWICZ.

• Birthright Citizenship Is Not Just for Immigrants… It undergirds American equality, argues MONA CHAREN.

• Graham Platner Ends Campaign for U.S. Senate… And SAM STEIN and CATHERINE RAMPELL went live last night to discuss his bizarre 10 minute non-apology.

Quick Hits

IRAN WAR COSTS: There are many ways of tallying the costs of the Iran war. One is in the dollars it’s cost the U.S. government. Another is in the thirteen Americans who gave their lives and many more who sustained injuries. Iranians themselves are probably considering not only their own dead and wounded, but their oppressive government’s new sense of invincibility. The Pentagon is surely counting up the scarce munitions the war is eating up—as, no doubt, are the Iranians, the Chinese, the Russians, and others. One could point to the price of gas, or fraying American alliances in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

The International Monetary Fund has its own measure. The New York Times explains:

Global output growth is poised to fall to 3 percent in 2026 from 3.5 percent last year, according to an update for the I.M.F.’s World Economic Outlook. That is slightly slower than the fund’s April projection of 3.1 percent growth, underscoring the protracted nature of the conflict.

The global population is expected to grow much more slowly this year, at less than 1 percent. So overall GDP per capita will still probably rise, which is a good thing. But these estimates are all subject to, for example, renewed hostilities in and around the Strait of Hormuz, which seems to be a thing that happens about once a month, give or take.

As for the benefits of the Iran war, we’ll list those when there are some.

COME IN, MITCH: We wrote yesterday about the bizarre moment in which, in an apparent attempt to dispel Laura Loomer’s rumors2 that Sen. Mitch McConnell was braindead, Sens. John Thune and John Barrasso told reporters that they had discussed Senate business and the Supreme Court with McConnell on the phone. “There is something inherently odd about all this,” we wrote yesterday. “McConnell could resolve a lot of confusion if he spoke publicly, even via a voice recording.”

Turns out we weren’t the only ones scratching our heads. So was Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, who sent a letter to McConnell yesterday that read, in part,

Over the last several weeks, Kentuckians have grown increasingly concerned about the health and well-being of Sen. McConnell. As Governor—and a fellow public official who understands the commitment we’ve made to the people we serve—I am requesting the Senator provide an update on his current health status. . . .

Allowing speculation to continue in the media is not fair to the Senator or to Kentuckians, and my hope is that this provides him the opportunity to share the information in a transparent manner, direct from the source. I wish him a safe and speedy recovery. [Emphasis ours.]

As of publication time, McConnell had not responded. Nor, for that matter, had anyone else come forward to relay that they’d also spoken with him on the phone.

THE MULLAHS AND THE MONEY: CNN’s Aaron Blake has an analysis of why Trump’s Iran war feels like the same humiliating defeat over and over again:

[H]e seems to have repeatedly wagered that Iran was close enough to a deal that he could push their leaders over the finish line with some modest rhetorical concessions and just a little more time—only to be proven wrong over and over again.

There are countless signs of Trump’s misjudgment at this point. . . .

Perhaps most strikingly, he repeatedly threatened Iran with doom if it didn’t comply with his demands. But just about every time, those threats were revealed to be a bluff. Trump often claimed he was backing off because a deal was near, but that deal still hasn’t materialized in any lasting form. . . .

Trump said repeatedly a month ago that he feared Iran was “tapping us along.” And he signaled again Wednesday that might be the case.

“They’re saying they want to make a deal, but they don’t—you know, they ask for a timeout, they wanted to do the funeral of Khamenei, and I said give it to them,” he said at the NATO summit. “And they start shooting missiles. I mean, it’s a crazy thing.”

Read the whole thing. Yes, Trump definitely misread the Iranians’ capacity to endure pain against his own. But maybe, more precisely, he misidentified what kind of pain really hurt the Iranians by assuming it was the kind of pain that hurt him. Trump has repeatedly harped on Iran’s inability to sell oil because of the American blockade of Iran’s ports, threatened to seize Kharg Island with its oil export infrastructure, and boasted that “their economy is crashing” and “we’re making it fail.” He explained: “I hope it fails. . . . You know why? Because I want to win. You know, it takes getting pounded on by the military, I think, for more. But in addition to that, their—it is failing. You know, we have sanctions on them . . .”

Money clearly matters to Trump. It matters to every world leader to some extent, because it’s much easier to have it than not to. But a clique of violent religious fundamentalist fanatics who are willing to endure power shortages, water shortages, rampant inflation, and sanctions that the first Trump administration itself described as “maximum pressure” even before the war—those guys probably are less concerned about the profit/loss statement than Trump.

One way of thinking about the Iran war is that the austere religious zealots have been less sensitive to economic pain than the billionaire New York developer turned professional fraudster. Who’s surprised?

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The reasons various parts of the administration provided for these strikes were stultifyingly stupid. One official told Axios’s Barak Ravid, “As President Trump and the administration have repeatedly affirmed, the MOU in effect with Iran is entirely performance-based. Iran will only reap benefits if they exhibit good behavior.” Another unnamed administration official told NewsHour correspondent Nick Schifrin that Iran has “clearly demonstrated they’re not listening. We’re turning up the volume.”

Usually when these anonymous quotes about more intense fighting appear, President Trump quickly tries to calm the markets. But in this case, even he seemed to concede that the ceasefire had ended, albeit while also inviting negotiations for a new ceasefire. From his remarks overnight:

To me, I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. And they’re vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over. I’ll speak to our negotiators. They want to negotiate. They’re good people. Steve Witkoff. Jared Kushner. But they have to come back to me. As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. . . . There’s something wrong with them, they’re coo-coo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over. . . . They can talk, but I think they’re wasting their time. They’re a bunch of lying guys.

One doesn’t have to read that many books to learn that bombs are remarkably inarticulate ways of sending messages, considering they always say the same thing and sometimes kill the people you want to receive the message. But if there were any administration that might actually be more articulate with high explosives than with words . . . Happy Wednesday.

Join Mark Hertling and Ben Parker for Command Post live at 10:30 a.m. EDT today on Substack and YouTube.

Did These Men Deserve to Die?

by William Kristol

“The cruelty is the point,” Adam Serwer memorably wrote eight years ago.1 That was during Donald Trump’s first term in office. In his second term, the cruelty remains the point. But it has now been institutionalized and routinized in key agencies of the federal government. Trump’s personal and performative indecency has become an entire administration’s sustained and systematic indecency.

Yesterday morning, NBC News reported on the sudden death earlier this year of an Afghan national in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, 41, had fought for a decade alongside U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. He was evacuated when U.S. troops pulled out in 2021 and entered the U.S. legally. He became a truck driver, worked at a market and bakery, and had requested asylum to remain here. That claim was pending when ICE seized him for deportation at his home in Richardson, Texas, on the morning of March 13, as he was getting his children ready for school.

Paktiawal died the next day in ICE custody. His death certificate says he died from “an adverse drug reaction” to an unidentified substance which triggered anaphylaxis and exacerbated his asthma, and his death was ruled an accident. We do know from his wife that he relied on an inhaler for asthma. We also know that ICE agents rejected her attempt to give them the device when he was taken into custody. We also know that Texas authorities have refused to release his autopsy report, arguing its disclosure would interfere with a pending criminal investigation.

Mohammed Nazeer Paktiawal was not a criminal. He was not here illegally. He was a threat to no one—except perhaps the Taliban. There was no reason for ICE to detain him—except to meet its arrest and deportation quotas. There is no reason for most of the fifty deaths in ICE detention during Trump’s second term except that the Trump administration is unsparing in pursuit of its mass deportation agenda, an agenda that is as irrational as it is cruel.

Soon after this NBC news report appeared, news broke of another death, this one yesterday morning, on the streets of Houston.

Here’s the Department of Homeland Security’s announcement of what happened:

On July 7, 2026, at approximately 6:50 AM CT, ICE law enforcement attempted to conduct a vehicle stop as part of a targeted enforcement operation to arrest an illegal alien. The driver of the vehicle, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo—an illegal alien from Mexico—attempted to evade arrest. From information we are receiving, he rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.

The driver was struck, and emergency services were immediately contacted. The driver was transported to the hospital where he passed away from his injuries. DHS-OIG is leading an investigation into the agent-involved shooting. FBI Houston is leading an investigation into the potential assault on a federal law enforcement officer. This is a developing situation, and we will update the public when more information is available.

As of now, DHS has provided no evidence for the claim that Araujo “weaponized his vehicle.” No details, no video, no firsthand testimony with a name attached. Just a vague reference to “information we are receiving.” But the claim of a “weaponized vehicle” is a familiar one. This is the same claim we heard about Renée Good six months ago in Minneapolis, and that has been made by DHS—and that has turned out to be false—in many other cases, as well.

DHS also describes Araujo as an “illegal alien from Mexico.” You wouldn’t know from DHS that Araujo lived here for 35 years, was working in construction to support his wife, mother, and three children, and that he was in fact on his way to a construction site early yesterday morning, driving peacefully through a residential neighborhood with three workers, including a brother, in his car, when he was stopped by the federal agents. This doesn’t seem like someone who would suddenly decide to try to kill a federal agent.

In fact, there doesn’t seem to have been any good reason for ICE to have stopped and tried forcefully to detain Araujo. There was, so far as one can tell, no reason to kill him. And based on past precedent, there’s no reason to believe ICE will tell the truth about what happened.

Araujo’s son, Ronaldo Salgado, wrote on Facebook yesterday,

My father, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a hardworking Mexican man, was the man killed this morning by ICE in the East End.

My father has been in this country for nearly 35 years, working in construction to provide for myself, my two brothers, and my mother.

He was in the process of obtaining his work permit through the legal process. He was on his way to work, picking up his workers.

My father did not deserve this.

Ronaldo Salgado is right. His father did not deserve to be killed by ICE agents. Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal did not deserve to die in ICE custody. These deaths—and many others like them—are a direct effect of Trump’s mass deportation policy. That policy, more than any other, is the embodiment of the cruelty of the Trump administration. There had been, up to this point, twenty-one documented deaths of people in ICE custody in 2026 alone, as documented by Austin Kocher of the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.

But we should recall that Trump campaigned on mass deportation, and that we then elected him. We as a nation are responsible for what’s happened. We can never fully make up for the human cost of what has been done in our name. All we can do now is to act as quickly and unambiguously as possible to reject these policies, and to defeat decisively the spirit of indecency and inhumanity that lies behind them.

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• The One Word Trump Won’t Say in Turkey… While Recep Erdoğan reaps the fruits of hosting a NATO summit, Turkish democracy pays the price, argues ERIC EDELMAN.

• Many Gen Zers Rooted Against Team USA. Here’s Why. Some of the reasons were personal, but some were strongly political, writes RACHEL JANFAZA.

• Desperate Trumpists Try to Stir Up a Panic Over ‘Communists’... But while the new Red Scare is a fakeout, parts of the left do pose a problem for Democrats, writes CATHY YOUNG.

• The NATO Defense Spending Canard… There’s nothing magical—or strategic—about the 5 percent number, observes MARK HERTLING.

Quick Hits

RAY OF CLARITY: Back in January, when Tulsi Gabbard was still director of national intelligence, she showed up in Fulton County, Georgia with a troop of FBI agents, who seized ballot records from the 2020 election—which, as you may recall, was decided by just 11,780 votes in the Peach State.

The Justice Department investigation into—well, uh, something—in Fulton County continues, but it hit a major roadblock yesterday as a federal judge blocked a grand jury subpoena for information on election workers in Georgia. In fact, “blocked” is an understatement. He nuked it from orbit. CNN has the story:

US District Judge William Ray called the breadth of the subpoena seeking information about Fulton County election workers “staggering.” . . .

“In this Court’s view, the DOJ does not possess a need to enforce the Subpoena greater than the burden of disclosure on Fulton County, and as such, the Court will not enforce it,” he said. . . .

“No evidence has been presented to the Court that the actual Grand Jury in the Northern District of Georgia seeks this information, as opposed to the out-of-district prosecutors who the DOJ has appointed to lead this inquiry who have served this Subpoena in the name of the Grand Jury,” the judge wrote.

It’s generally unseemly to point out what president nominated this or that judge any time there’s a noteworthy or politically fraught decision. But in many of these cases, it is germane, including this one: Ray was appointed by Donald Trump.

LE PEN AGAIN: Of the various foreign franchises of the Trump phenomenon, few are as noxious as France’s Marine Le Pen. Her political platform mostly focuses on immigration restrictions and the “de-Islamization” of France, though it also has room for complaints that Ukraine has been “subjugated” by the United States and calls for a special relationship with Russia. That last point shouldn’t be surprising, considering her party, the National Rally, took out a €6 million loan from a Russian bank, which it only paid back when the political embarrassment became too much.

In France’s last two presidential elections—2017 and 2022—Le Pen challenged Emmanuel Macron and lost.2 But in last year’s legislative elections, her party picked up 53 seats, bringing its total to 142. That made it the third-largest party in the National Assembly. And now Macron is term-limited.

Last year, Le Pen was convicted of corruption charges (shocking) and barred from running for office. But yesterday, a French court—while upholding her conviction—cleared the way for her to run for president again. “This evening, I am a candidate in the presidential election,” she announced without delay.

The next French presidential elections are next year. Bonne chance.

GET MITCH OR DIE TRYING: Sen. Mitch McConnell has been hospitalized since June 14, though the reason why isn’t public. Before his hospitalization, he was using a wheelchair to navigate the Capitol and his hands were increasingly bruised. Rumors that the 84-year-old former majority leader was on death’s door were rocketing around Trumpworld—mostly fed by Laura Loomer, who tweeted that McConnell was “brain dead” on Monday.

On Tuesday, things changed, though we’re not entirely clear if the situation has become more or less opaque. Majority Leader John Thune and Majority Whip John Barrasso said they had spoken to McConnell on the phone; so too did longtime McConnell ally Scott Jennings of CNN. Spokespeople for the two non-hospitalized senators were eager to emphasize how engaged and sharp McConnell was. Per Politico:

Thune and McConnell “had a lengthy and substantive conversation that covered a variety of topics, including national security,” a spokesperson for the majority leader said in a statement Tuesday.

Kate Noyes, a spokesperson for Barrasso, said the No. 2 leader and McConnell “had a lengthy conversation early this afternoon,” speaking by phone for roughly 20 minutes.

“They caught up about the latest news impacting Senate races, the Graham Platner scandal and the recent Supreme Court ruling on coordinated spending limits,” as well as the Senate agenda, she added. “Senator McConnell was fully engaged and is eager to get back to the Senate.”

There is something inherently odd about all this. It’s not just that McConnell could resolve a lot of confusion if he spoke publicly, even via a voice recording. It’s also the content of these calls. After McConnell was admitted to the hospital under alarming circumstances and remained there for several weeks, Thune and Barrasso spent their twenty minutes on the phone with him talking about Senate races and Supreme Court rulings on coordinated spending?

When someone eventually tackles the task of writing a biography of McConnell, this strange proof-of-life subtweet of Laura Loomer is going to be among the more difficult episodes to describe.3

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Platner and the Perils of Performative Populism

by Sam Stein

Having sparked his fair share of intrigue and passion, scandals and uncertainty, intraparty debates and bitter online feuding, Graham Platner finally delivered a universally shared sentiment: He will not end up in the United States Senate.

In a new, devastating report from Politico on Monday, a woman who once dated Platner said he sexually assaulted her nearly five years ago. The details are both disturbing and well-documented. Her substantiation alone—Facebook messages supporting her account and corroboration from another ex-boyfriend whom she told about it—gives her account credibility. That Platner denied the accusation is far from convincing. At a certain point, the pattern of behavior becomes impossible to dismiss, even if the details are obscured by the fog of memory.

He cannot win. The question now is not so much whether Platner goes, but how he goes. “We’re taking the time to reflect on the best path forward,” he said in a video posted right as the Politico article dropped.

People relatively close to the campaign expect Platner not to try and brave this out, but to leave the race before July 13, giving the Maine Democratic Party the opportunity to pick a replacement. There is less than a week between now and then. What happens in that period is high-stakes. It’s not just control of the Senate at risk, but the equilibrium of the Democratic party and the larger message sent to voters about how seriously the party takes accusations of sexual assault.

Serious reflection is in order. Platner unquestionably tapped into the Democratic party’s id in ways that other candidates for office have not. His burn-it-down populism resonated among an electorate desperate for confrontation, both with Donald Trump and their own establishment. He had a fluency on the trail and online that belied his inexperience in politics.

But what did it say that the red flags got so obscured in the process? Why did the idea of better vetting get so casually dismissed? And how was it that political neophytism was treated as an asset and not a liability? Maybe having been through the wringer of an election is a value-add. Maybe having a political résumé should not be considered an opprobrium.

These are questions Democrats are asking now, not just because they want explanations for the mess that the party is currently facing but because they are desperate to not blow these midterms.

“As politics revolve more and more around who is the most effective communicator and who can connect with voters online, we will need to think about what we’re willing to accept in order to win,” Christina Reynolds, a longtime Democratic operative and former top official at EMILY’s List told me. “Elections are choices, of course, but there are a lot of critical elections out there right now, many with far less attention than this race, with candidates who don’t have these same issues and could win with a fraction of the attention and money aimed at this one Senate race.”

Reynolds’s point is a retrospective one. Too much wish-casting was made for Platner. There was too little willingness to acknowledge that his flawed (now fatally flawed) candidacy was costing Democrats time, money and credibility. It was selfish of him to go on, knowing there were other stories out there, knowing that he was asking everyone invested in stamping out this type of behavior to swallow their pride.

But that’s just one half of the puzzle Democrats have to solve. The other half involves what to do next in Maine. Switching candidates at this juncture is not a simple task. A chunk of that state’s electorate will look at what’s happening and find a conspiracy behind it. Others will recoil at the mere perception that the media or Democratic leadership are pushing Platner from the race. They will read the Politico story and declare it a he-said-she-said proposition. They will respond with some variation of: “Well, Republicans rallied around Donald Trump.”

Can we get to a place where these people aren’t totally disillusioned? Frankly, who knows? That some of Platner’s biggest supporters have said he needs to drop out should provide some relief to Democrats. But not much. Hasan Piker may be fine with Platner leaving the race. He also may hate who ends up replacing him.

But what are the other options?

It was notable on Monday that just minutes after the Politico story was published, Sen. Susan Collins tweeted about how the Treasury Department, at her urging, would be reopening Taxpayer Assistance Centers in Augusta and Bangor. The most endangered Republican in the field was chugging along doing classically insider stuff—the type of politics so casually downplayed by those arguing that a wave would simply overwhelm the Republican party—while an epic, self-made clusterfuck engulfed her opponent.

That’s the irony that Democrats are now dealing with. They are forced to engage in the insider politics that Platner ran so successfully against in order to save themselves from Platner’s implosion. They put it off too long. And now, they can’t any longer.

“I have been on Team We Get Behind The Nominee Until It’s Too Much,” Rob Flaherty, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s top digital guru, told me. “And this is too much. He very transparently can’t win this election. He should get off the ballot.”

But, Flaherty added, reflecting on his own experience in the 2024 campaign, “changing candidates mid-stream is difficult. As we saw, it doesn’t guarantee success. But in the last election Kamala Harris being the nominee materially saved a bunch of Senate seats. There were upsides even in losing. But you have to get him off the ballot.”

“The situation is,” he observed, “unbelievably fucked.”

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AROUND THE BULWARK

• Graham Platner Crossed the Voters’ Red Line… There was one thing Maine women told us would keep them from supporting him—and it just became public. SARAH LONGWELL shares what she gleaned from her focus group.

• When Conscience Conflicts With Commission… An Air Force major’s recent protest in uniform provides an occasion to clarify the purpose and value of professional discipline in the military, observes MARK HERTLING.

• Why We Won’t Stay Silent About Christian Nationalists in Our Own Churches… The Nazi books didn’t appear out of the blue. They were the predictable destination of ideas that have been growing for years, write PHILIP D. BUNN, ELI McGOWAN and EMILY McGOWAN.

• Trump Wants All-out Kleptocracy… On the flagship pod, BILL KRISTOL joins TIM MILLER to talk about the Putin-grade corruption of Donald Trump.

Quick Hits

MUM DEPORTATIONS: The Trump administration has been of two minds about its mass deportation agenda over its first year and a half. Most of the time, the order of the day has been “shock and awe” with spectacular displays of militarized might, which culminated in the extra-judicial execution of two Americans in Minnesota. But sometimes the administration has urged caution, instructing congressional Republicans not to use the term “mass deportation” (at least until the midterms) and signalling that 2025-style ICE invasions of major American cities were at an end.

For now, apparently, cooler—though by no means more generous—heads have prevailed, Politico reports:

Three months into Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s tenure, he is succeeding in his pledge to get his department out of the headlines.

Mullin and his deputies have adopted a lower-profile approach to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, mothballing the flashy and aggressive tactics employed by his predecessor Kristi Noem. While the Department of Homeland Security continues to deport large numbers of unauthorized immigrants, it is making fewer arrests in public, holding back from deploying fresh waves of immigration agents to hotspots and has scrapped a plan to expand mega-warehouse detention facilities. . . .

Instead of arresting immigrants in their homes or on public streets, Mullin and other administration officials have promoted agreements that allow local and state law enforcement agencies to help identify and detain immigrants who are already in custody after being arrested for other crimes.

Just because ICE is maintaining a lower profile doesn’t mean that it’s less productive: So far the agency has reportedly been meeting its quota of 2,000 arrests per day. If they can keep up that pace, that’s 730,000 arrests per year—but that’s a big if.

DIE DEUTSCHE NATO: Donald Trump enjoys few pastimes more than alienating Europe—with derogatory comments about their defense spending and burden sharing, with tariffs and trade wars, with unseemly coquettishness whenever Vladimir Putin is in the room,1 and on and on. Now we’re starting to see the results. The Economist reports:

The strange creatures rumble out of the forest, their bodies clothed in moss, torn fabric and plastic grass; their heads veiled in black netting. The Leopard tanks and Puma infantry fighting vehicles of Germany’s 45th Panzer Brigade are in fancy dress to hide them from hostile drones. For a month the unit trained along Lithuania’s border with Belarus, a Russian satellite state, as part of a recently completed exercise called “Freedom Shield”. The goal: to be ready to “fight tonight” to defend Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, and hold the Suwalki corridor, which links the Baltic states to Poland.

To that end, the 45th Brigade is not going home. For the first time since the end of the cold war, Germany is permanently deploying military units abroad. These troops are the tip of the spear of an army that is expanding to become Europe’s largest. They will get the latest armour, artillery, drones and anti-aircraft systems as their unit grows from 1,600 soldiers to around 5,000 by the end of 2027.

American forces in the region, meanwhile, are dwindling. An American tank unit—the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment—trained for months in the same area. But it shipped out in June, along with the rest of its brigade in Poland. Nobody knows when or if another American unit will replace it.

This is a world-historical gamble. In the past, when Germany has been the dominant military power in Europe, things haven’t turned out so well. But, hey, maybe the third time’s the charm?

MEANWHILE, IN GAZA: Hamas announced that it was dissolving its administration of the Gaza Strip so that the technocratic administration created by Trump’s Board of Peace could take over. But believe it or not, it’s gotten kinda complicated, reports the Financial Times:

Hamas said on Monday that it has dissolved its governing arm in Gaza and was preparing to hand over governance to a committee of technocrats formed under the terms of a US-brokered ceasefire deal with Israel.

The Palestinian militant group said its Emergency Governing Committee had been disbanded and its head Mohamed Abdul Khaleq al-Farra had resigned, but that the Gaza civil service would continue to function.

Hamas made no mention of turning over its weapons, a prerequisite under the deal for reconstruction in Gaza to proceed. The militant group has so far refused to give up its arms, and Israeli forces continue to occupy more than half of the strip. . . .

The [Board of Peace], the body appointed by US President Donald Trump to oversee the ceasefire deal and plans for reconstruction, said its assessment of Hamas’s announcement “will be guided by actions, not promises”.

The National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, NCAG, the transitional body of Palestinian technocrats intended to take over governance in the strip, was formed in January but its members remain stuck in Cairo.

It’s hard to tell what Hamas’s message here is. It could be: We’re willing to give up control of the Gaza Strip to a Palestinian government but we won’t disarm—at least not while the Israelis are here. Or it could be: We officially renounce any responsibility for the welfare of the people we’ve systematically oppressed and abused for a generation, but we reserve the right to shoot at whomever we like. Unfortunately, that ambiguity counts as an improvement in the situation.

SHUT UP AND TAKE THE W: The key to understanding Trump may be that he wants the appearance of corruption. He embraces it because, at least in his own mind, it makes everyone think he’s the center of the universe.

This helps explain why he inserted himself into the Folarin Balogun red card controversy.

In case you’ve been living under a rock: Balogun is the U.S. Men’s National Team’s star striker; he was given a questionable red card following the misapplication of video replay. Under World Cup guidelines, a red card leads to a one-match ban, but Balogun’s ban was suspended by FIFA the day before America’s game against Belgium. Trump reportedly called the president of FIFA to—depending on who you ask—either ask him what the rule around the one game suspension was or to ask him to review the play that led to the red card.

FIFA insisted that they simply kicked the process to an independent review board, which determined that Balogun’s ban was not proper.2 But people were outraged, and rightly so: Trump has no role to play here, his self-regard notwithstanding. The United States had an airtight case for appeal and the rest of the world was likely to lose their minds when the Balogun ban was (correctly) overturned.

This sort of gloating is routinely self-defeating in a strategic sense. I couldn’t help but think back to the Jimmy Kimmel suspension in September of last year, following a tasteless crack about Charlie Kirk in the aftermath of his assassination. ABC suspended Kimmel out of fear of affiliate station backlash. After Trump and his FCC Chair Brendan Carr took victory laps celebrating their “win” over the late-night host, however, ABC not only reinstated Kimmel but when he made jokes about Melania Trump being a “happy widow,” the network rejected calls to punish him and boosted its case against the government effort to force an early license renewal.

This is a running theme of Trump’s going back at least to the Bowe Bergdahl case, in which Trump’s remarks may have led to the dishonorably discharged soldier having his conviction set aside. But Trump’s lack of self-control is a feature, not a bug—at least, if you happen to be a narcissistic president who believes the world revolves around himself.

—Sonny Bunch

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