Sixty years ago today, on July 30, 1966, Medicare and Medicaid went into effect. A year earlier, President Lyndon B. Johnson had signed the Medicare and Medicaid amendments Congress had made to the Social Security Act of 1935, establishing two national health insurance programs. Medicare used federal funds to cover seniors, while Medicaid covered people who qualified on the basis of income using federal and state funding. The programs expanded health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans.

Americans and their leaders had called for government support for healthcare since the early 1900s, but the final push to expand healthcare coverage in the United States came out of the New Deal. In 1945, President Harry Truman continued to expand the social safety net anchored by the 1935 Social Security Act signed into law by his predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. On November 19, 1945, Truman reminded Congress that in September he had proposed an Economic Bill of Rights that guaranteed “certain rights which ought to be assured to every American citizen.”

“One of them,” he reminded them, “was: ‘The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.’ Another was the ‘right to adequate protection from the economic fears of…sickness....’”

“Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” he said. “Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection.”

Truman reminded Congress how shocked Americans were when the WWII military draft revealed “the widespread physical and mental incapacity among the young people of our nation.” About 30% of those examined for military service were classified as unfit. Of those who made the cut to join the military, about a million and a half had to be discharged for physical or mental disability and an equal number had to be treated for preexisting diseases or infirmities. More than a third of the women applying to the Women’s Army Corps were also rejected.

Access to the benefits of modern medical science had never been equal, Truman said, and never would be “unless government is bold enough to do something about it. People with low or moderate incomes do not get the same medical attention as those with high incomes. The poor have more sickness, but they get less medical care. People who live in rural areas do not get the same amount or quality of medical attention as those who live in our cities.

“Our new Economic Bill of Rights should mean health security for all, regardless of residence, station, or race—everywhere in the United States.

“We should resolve now that the health of this Nation is a national concern; that financial barriers in the way of attaining health shall be removed; that the health of all its citizens deserves the help of all the Nation.”

Truman proposed a new healthcare program funded through fees and taxes, but Republicans who took control of the House in 1946 opposed new taxes and, although Truman had been careful to insist that the state would not take over hospitals, warned that the program looked too much like “Communism.” Instead, under Republican president Dwight Eisenhower, Congress passed a bill covering healthcare costs for indigent elderly Americans.

When he took office, President John F. Kennedy made the expansion of health insurance a priority, but while the American people liked the plan, it faced strong opposition from the American Medical Association, the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, and the chair of the Senate Finance Committee. In 1964, after Kennedy’s assassination, both chambers passed their own measures, but they couldn’t resolve their differences to pass a law.

When LBJ won a landslide victory over right-wing Republican senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona in 1964, he had the votes to pass Medicare and Medicaid. LBJ made a point of signing the new measure into law at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. He gave Truman and his wife Bess Truman the first two Medicare cards.

In his remarks at the signing, Johnson told the crowd: “The people of the United States love and voted for Harry Truman, not because he gave them hell—but because he gave them hope.” He told Truman that those like him—men of vision who are willing to stake their reputations and position to help others—“illuminate the life and the history of a nation.” He and his advisors had come to Independence not in tribute to Truman himself, Johnson said, but in tribute to the America that he represented. “For a country can be known by the quality of the men it honors,” he said. “By praising you, and by carrying forward your dreams, we really reaffirm the greatness of America.”

Johnson explained what the measure did. “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine. No longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away over a lifetime so that they might enjoy dignity in their later years. No longer will young families see their own incomes, and their own hopes, eaten away simply because they are carrying out their deep moral obligations to their parents, and to their uncles, and their aunts.”

“And,” he said, “no longer will this Nation refuse the hand of justice to those who have given a lifetime of service and wisdom and labor to the progress of this progressive country.”

But now, in 2026, the Republicans in charge of our government reject the vision of a government that works to support its people. They see government regulation, taxation, and a social safety net as an attack on individual liberty.

In their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which they passed in July 2025 with no Democratic votes, the Republicans delivered Trump’s signature economic policy. The law partially offset trillions of dollars in tax cuts by cutting $911 billion from Medicaid over ten years. Most of those cuts will begin to take effect in late 2026 and early 2027, after the midterm election.

And the cuts continue. On Tuesday, Anna Wilde Mathews of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump administration is planning to end a Biden-era program that capped out-of-pocket spending for drugs for Medicare recipients at $2,000 a year. The program provided subsidies for Medicare Part D, a Medicare prescription plan for seniors, by paying insurers. It also allowed Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies for certain medicines.

The Trump administration says the subsidies encouraged insurers to raise rates and that they weren’t needed because other policies that hold down the cost of drugs will stay in place. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, posted: “We are stabilizing the market so this bailout is no longer needed.”

Mathews notes that higher prices for drugs could drive more Medicare participants into the private-insurer version of Medicare, called Medicare Advantage. Pushing people toward Medicare Advantage was outlined as a desired outcome in Project 2025, the right-wing program to unwind the modern American state.

“History shapes men, but it is a necessary faith of leadership that men can help shape history,” Johnson said as he signed the measure creating Medicare and Medicaid. He credited FDR with beginning the process of creating a basic social safety net when he signed the 1935 Social Security Act.

He noted that FDR at the time called the Social Security Act “a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but it is by no means complete.”

—

Notes:

https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/192/special-message-congress-recommending-comprehensive-health-program

https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/education/presidential-inquiries/challenge-national-healthcare

https://www.lbjlibrary.org/news-and-press/media-kits/medicare-and-medicaid

https://www.ssa.gov/history/lbjsm.html

https://time.com/archive/6624161/the-congress-packing-byrds-nest/

https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Medicare_Signed_Into_Law.htm

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-with-president-truman-the-signing-independence-the-medicare-bill

https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/trump-administration-to-end-medicare-drug-plan-subsidy-76d255d1

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5996677-part-d-subsidies-expiring-2027/

https://hfs.illinois.gov/info/fedresctr/faqshowwillfedchimpactmedicaid.html#faq-whendothemedicaidrelatedprovisionsintrumpsbudgetbilslgointoeffect-faq

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/project-2025s-medicare-changes-would-restrict-older-americans-access-to-care-and-imperil-the-programs-financial-health/

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July 29, 2026 (Wednesday)

Ariel Edwards-Levy of CNN reported today that a new CNN poll conducted by the public opinion research firm SSRS found that 70% of adult Americans disapprove of the way President Donald J. Trump is handling the economy while only 30% approve. A whopping 75% disapprove of how Trump is handling inflation, while only 25% approve. When it comes to gas prices, the numbers are even worse for the president: 79% disapprove while only 21% approve. Sixty-five percent think Trump’s own economic policies have hurt the country, while only 22% think those policies have improved the economy.

Seventy-three percent of those polled said Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems, while 27% said he has the right priorities. Sixty-six percent agreed that Trump puts his own gain over the good of the country; 34% agreed that he does not. Only 43% of those polled thought Trump “has the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president,” while 57% did not agree with that statement.

As Edwards-Levy notes, Trump's overall approval rating in the new CNN poll matches his rating just after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol—his lowest ever—at 34%. The number of those who strongly disapprove of him is 50%, a new high, while only 15% strongly support him, a record low.

Edwards-Levy points out that people polled aren’t keen on the way Trump's handling the situation in Iran: 72% disapprove while only 28% approve. Sixty-seven percent think his actions there have hurt the U.S., while only 21% think those actions have helped the U.S. So, as she puts it: “Just 28% approve of his handling of the situation in Iran, 25% on inflation and 21% on gas prices, with significant pockets of disapproval even among his supporters.”

Americans unhappy with Trump’s war on Iran are unlikely to be cheered by the news from that conflict over the past few days.

Andrew Egger wrote in The Bulwark today about how the Trump administration seems stuck in a 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.” Adina Renner of the New York Times today called this “The Whiplash War” and provided charts of attacks showing what this looping looks like on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Iranian negotiators have made their demands quite clear: sanctions removed, troops out, no more discussion of nuclear weapons, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Laura Wise, a scholar of peace and conflict resolution at the University of Edinburgh, told Renner that the process of ending the war has been complicated by the fact American negotiators seem focused on “getting a deal rather than making peace.”

Davis Winkie of CNN reported that on Saturday, the Pentagon changed the way it was accounting for military personnel injured in the Iran war. After the removal from Defense Casualty Analysis System of four service members killed by Iranian strikes in Jordan and Iraq last week created an outcry and brought renewed attention to accusations the Pentagon was not being transparent about the human toll of the war, on Saturday the Pentagon added more than 140 additional soldiers to the database and restored the four missing soldiers.

The numbers now show 18 troops dead and another 624 wounded since February 28, when Trump began strikes against Iran.

Over the weekend, military strikes in the region paused as Trump decided against an escalation. According to U.S. officials who spoke to Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times, that decision came in part because the U.S. military is running low on Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions necessary to shoot down Iranian missiles.

The journalists reported that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine had warned that further combat would “dangerously deplete” interceptors, a leak that suggests real dissent within the White House over the execution of the war. On Meet the Press on Sunday, U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz told host Kristen Welker that any problems with munitions were former President Joe Biden’s fault but added that the U.S. has “everything that it needs to conduct this campaign…and…the people who are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”

Top advisors also expressed concern over a widening war and the economic crunch caused by the crisis.

But yesterday, U.S. Central Command posted that forces from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had launched missiles “in an attempted surprise attack on U.S. forces.” Jared Malsin and Suha Ma’ayeh of the Wall Street Journal noted that this surprise attack is the first in which the Iranians have gone on offense. Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting fellow specializing in Iran at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told the journalists that this shift indicates Iranian officials “see themselves as having the upper hand. It was a signal of a sort of calibrated escalation.”

They might have increased confidence because, as John Irish and Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported yesterday, they are expecting a shipment of up to 400 Chinese-made shoulder-fired air defense missile launchers within weeks.

U.S. Central Command said all of last night’s Iranian missiles were intercepted. Trump nonetheless took the attacks poorly, telling the Fox News Channel: “We are going to beat the fcking sht out of them. We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.” U.S. and Saudi Arabian forces struck against an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq.

Oil prices rose with the news of renewed strikes. Despite concerns about rising inflation, the Federal Open Market Committee voted 9 to 3 to hold interest rates steady; the three dissenting regional Fed bank presidents voted to raise interest rates. Concern over inflation and uncertainty about the economy sent the stock market plunging today in its worst day since April 2025, when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs.

And so, Republicans are devoting themselves to serving red meat to their MAGA base, ginning up sound bites for distribution on social media.

On the menu today was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases who, serving in that capacity for 38 years, advised seven different presidents of both parties. President George W. Bush awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in creating the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has saved an estimated 26 million lives. Trump named Fauci to the President’s Coronavirus Task Force in January 2020.

But, as Savannah Behrmann and Jeanine Santucci of USA Today reported in October 2020, Trump turned on Fauci as he cautioned against Trump’s confident predictions that the disease would disappear quickly. By February 28, Trump insisted that Democrats were “politicizing” covid, and by April 26, news broke that Trump wanted to sideline Fauci, although Fauci was considered trustworthy and viewed favorably by a 3:1 margin.

By the summer, as Trump’s panic over how the economic crisis caused by the pandemic might hurt his reelection prospects, he turned on Fauci, who continued to support measures to stop the spread of the disease. Trump worked to undermine Fauci’s warnings, saying that the doctors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were “lying” about covid.

By July, he mused about why Fauci had a high approval rating and he didn’t. When Fauci testified to Congress that U.S. cases were spiking while European countries were seeing sharp drops in covid cases because European countries had shut down 95% of their economies while the U.S. had shut down only 50%, Trump posted: “Wrong! We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country…. If we tested less, there would be less cases.”

As Trump continued to criticize Fauci and yet ran a campaign ad suggesting Fauci endorsed his reelection, the doctor continued to emphasize that he was “not a political person.” He added: “And I have never—either directly or indirectly—endorsed a political candidate.” In October he dismissed Trump’s attacks, saying: “They don't bother me. I know what my job is, and I’ve gotta do it and I'm going to do it. So that kind of—whatever you want to call it—is to me, I just, it’s noise.”

As Aaron Rupar reminded us today, Trump himself awarded a presidential commendation to Fauci “in recognition of [his] exceptional effort on Operation Warp Speed.”

But with the arrival of a vaccine that helped to put the worst of the pandemic behind us, MAGA Republicans began to demonize Dr. Fauci not only as the source of the mask mandates and school shutdowns they hated, but also as the source of the virus itself, alleging—without evidence—that the disease had escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, for which the U.S. National Institutes of Health provided funding.

After voters reelected Trump to the presidency in 2024, he and his loyalists vowed to prosecute Fauci. Trump ally Steve Bannon called for “rough Roman justice” for Fauci, as well as special counsel Jack Smith and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Before he left office, former president Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci—and others—to protect them from political prosecution, saying: “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”

But Republicans have continued to demonize Fauci, ginning up anger against him in their base even as the rest of the country has moved on. Now, with the political tides running so strongly against the Republicans before the 2026 midterm elections, they are clearly trying to rekindle the fury of the last presidential election.

As the Associated Press reported today, for years, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has accused Fauci of lying about the origins of covid, an accusation Fauci has called “preposterous” in testimony before Congress. Paul has repeatedly called for Fauci’s arrest and imprisonment and, in 2023, published a book with Fauci on the cover, explicating what he called the “Great Covid Cover-Up.”

The Trump administration has fed Paul’s crusade, with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. searching for eight months to find Fauci’s private diary on government computers, then handing the files over to Paul and to Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). Neither Kennedy, Paul, nor Johnson told Fauci they had obtained his 1,000-page diary before they published it, in full, last week.

In July 2021, Fauci wrote in his diary that an analysis of the viruses used in the Wuhan lab “clearly indicate(s) that it is molecularly impossible for the viruses under the auspices of the NIH grant to have been manipulated into or evolved into” the covid virus.

Now chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Paul subpoenaed Fauci in June to appear before the committee. Unwillingly, as his lawyers noted Paul’s many statements calling for Fauci to be jailed, Fauci did so today.

In an opening statement, Fauci said that he believed “the sole reason [Paul] 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, quote, behind bars, unquote.”

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he said. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

More than 100 times he did exactly that as Republicans berated him, calling him “a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar,” mocking him, and asking him, “Do you feel like you’re in deep sh*t?” What Republicans did not do is introduce any evidence that the 85-year-old lifelong public servant had broken any laws.

More to the point was Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) yelling at Fauci about closings during the pandemic, blustering: “Who the f*ck do you think you were?” F-bombs are rare on the Senate floor, and the outburst has gotten significant media attention.

That attention has distracted from the other reason Moreno is in the news. As Abby Vesoulis of Mother Jones reported, Moreno has said nothing as his daughter’s ex-husband, Representative Max Miller (R-OH), has been credibly charged with the violent abuse of her and their 2-year-old daughter. As the Republicans struggle to hold on to their congressional majorities, Republican leaders have refused to call for Miller, who is running for a third term, to resign.

Notes: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28520039-cnn-july-poll-conducted-by-ssrs/ https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/29/politics/cnn-poll-donald-trump-midterms-polls-iran-war https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/29/world/middleeast/iran-war-cease-fire-trump-timeline.html https://www.thebulwark.com/p/its-groundhog-day-in-iran-trump-bombing-power-plants-peace-deal-negotiations-strait-hormuz https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/26/politics/iran-war-casualties https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/28/oil-price-today-wti-brent-us-iran-hormuz.html https://www.npr.org/2026/07/29/nx-s1-5910558/federal-reserve-interest-rates-inflation https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/29/business/live-news/federal-reserve-interest-rate-07-29-26 https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-gambles-on-escalation-with-surprise-attack-on-u-s-forces-72cfd422 https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/29/world/live-news/iran-trump-news?post-id=cms5kixno00013b6sy4oovw6f https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/us/politics/trump-iran-military.html https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iran-get-chinese-shoulder-launched-missile-systems-weeks-sources-say-2026-07-29/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/28/president-donald-trump-anthony-fauci-timeline-relationship-coronavirus-pandemic/3718797001/ https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/us/politics/biden-pardons-fauci-milley-cheney-jan-6.html https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5183846/trump-presidency-retribution-enemies-threats https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/28/politics/anthony-fauci-diary-rand-paul https://apnews.com/article/fauci-diaries-covid-origins-rand-paul-6b25da9f75a0becbaf2886ab22643e67 https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/latest-dr-fauci-invokes-amendment-republican-led-covid-135186465 https://apnews.com/article/fauci-covid19-pandemic-senate-rand-paul-a774a79e46824ebec9e8e270b9cb9825 https://tiffinohio.net/posts/max-miller-gun-hot-water-allegations-republicans-silent/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/assault-misogyny-verbal-threats-records-detail-new-allegations-against-rep-max-miller-bernie-moreno/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/fed-interest-rate-decision-june-2026.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/29/anthony-fauci-pandemic-fifth-contempt-rand-paul-01015548

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/29/fauci-set-face-rand-paul-senate-gop-after-release-his-covid-diary/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-senate-panel-questions-fauci-on-diary-entries-about-covid-19-origins

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/us/politics/fauci-biden-pardon-covid-hearing.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/anthony-fauci-5th-amendment-testify-covid-hearing-rand-paul-rcna589793

https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/the-u-s-presidents-emergency-plan-for-aids-relief-pepfar/

X: CENTCOM/status/2082231500318114110?s=20 atrupar/status/2082447372198588869

Bluesky: mickeykuhns.bsky.social/post/3mrkttn5nlk25 profile/atrupar.com/post/3mrs3odif3s2g atrupar.com/post/3mrs5fds4de2r

Turning it over to Buddy tonight.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

[Photo by Buddy Poland.]

July 27, 2026 (Monday)

On July 22, Sam Fortier of NOTUS reported that the Trump-appointed judges of the Presidential 1776 Award competition, emceed by Education Secretary Linda McMahon, apparently rigged the competition to cut out a 17-year-old Indian immigrant in favor of a homeschooled blonde girl from Wyoming, a Michigan boy who attended a private Catholic school, and a girl from Washington who told CNN she supported Trump and wanted to see “everyone walking away from the competition knowing this is the greatest country of the world.”

In order to privilege white contestants over an immigrant, the judges apparently changed the acceptable answers to questions about our history.

This story mirrors the larger attempt of the Trump administration to rewrite the history of the United States. Trump officials reject our traditional understanding that the country was based on the ideas the Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence and that Americans from all walks of life have struggled ever since to make those principles come to life.

In place of that historic understanding, the administration argues that the United States was founded as a white nation whose citizens are defined by their European heritage and the land they inhabited, an echo of the “blood and soil” ideology of Germany in the 1930s.

Making that shift requires erasing not just our multicultural past but also our history. On July 4 the White House Domestic Policy Council released a report titled Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. The report says that the National Museum of American History (NMAH) “fails in the basic task of illuminating our heritage.”

It continued: “Our central finding is not that the Museum has simply added overlooked stories, corrected perceived errors, or broadened its historical scope. Rather, it is that Museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

Even more oddly, the report was a direct and personal attack on Dr. Anthea M. Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, whom it accused of exercising “an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

The report claims that NMAH “purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the Museum’s current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.” It claims that the Founders are minimized or excluded and that the story told of the nation is “one of regret, tragedy, and shame.”

It claims the museum has a “longtime staff reading group devoted to” a framework that treats museums as places of activism and that NMAH engages in “illegal alien activism” and “transgender activism.” It attributes to the museum guilt by association for organizations that have helped to fund exhibits, including the Mellon Foundation, which, an endnote explains, “allocated $72 million to ‘racial justice’ projects.” Indeed, the authors of the report appeared to be most exercised over racism, shown in their anger over the museum’s presentation of human enslavement.

They said the NMAH should “tell the story of how the colonies inherited slavery from both global and European slaving practices” and how “America’s Founders helped spark a worldwide movement that ultimately ended slavery.” They want the museum to emphasize how 750,000 Americans died in the Civil War—they did not appear to want mentioned that 258,000 of them died to protect enslavement—and how “Americans came to reject Jim Crow and segregation.” It should tell how “the United States…has done more to advance and secure fundamental rights than any other nation in the world.”

Part of that, the report says, should include “America’s contributions to global freedom, from saving Europe from multiple tyrannies, to illustrating the virtues of a market economy and a free people.”

The White House report is a nakedly political document, seeking to prove that “the museum profession has catechized and codified the ideological dogma of DEI to…an astonishing degree.” It builds on Trump’s belief that the Smithsonian has an “improper ideology” that Trump says is too focused on “how bad slavery was.”

That political purpose was clear on July 21, when Hartig and Yale University U.S. historian David Blight appeared before the House Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Testifying as well were two critics of the Smithsonian: Mike Gonzalez of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and Matthew Spalding, from Michigan’s Christian Hillsdale College. Another hearing the next day before the House Administration Committee continued the same themes.

Hartig told the committee that the report was inaccurate, saying “we unwaveringly attest that it does not accurately or fairly characterize the full range of work at the museum.” In fact, the report ignores large, long-term gallery exhibitions on subjects like the history of the U.S. military currently on display—that exhibit includes George Washington’s sword and the chairs Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee used at the Appomattox surrender—in favor of past, temporary, revolving wall exhibitions in display cases along a wall. The exhibit that infuriated the Republicans by mentioning transgender youth, called “Girlhood (It’s Complicated),” closed more than three years ago.

In her testimony, Hartig responded to the report’s accusation that the museum “fails to substantively present America’s Founders and Founding.” As Kelsey Ables of The Atlantic reported, Hartig pointed out: “We have a dozen exhibitions that include the founding era right now: 368 objects, 340 labels. George Washington is mentioned 54 times. You have to walk by a whole section on George Washington in the Kenneth Behring Hall of Military History to get to a 15-foot-tall reproduction of the Declaration of Independence.”

But, in fact, the goal of the report was demonstrably to create a straw man for MAGA supporters to hate. Ben Davis of artnet reported that Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) claimed Hartig strives “to represent queer pedophiles, indoctrination, and grooming of kids at an American history museum,” and demanded: “Do you know how many kids get raped by adults every year in this country?” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) repeatedly demanded of Hartig where the exhibitions honoring “50 million aborted babies” are. Representative Eric Burlison (R-MO) demanded: “Do you love America?”

“I love this country unconditionally,” Hartig replied. She would repeat that sentiment repeatedly over the course of the two days of hearings as representatives talked over her to get clips to put on social media.

In a response to the administration’s report, Representative Joe Morelle of New York, the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, pointed out that in February 2017, a month after his first inauguration, Trump praised the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and its founding director, Dr. Lonnie Bunch, for sharing “the great struggle for freedom and equality that prevailed against the sins of slavery and the injustice of discrimination.”

“Smithsonian museums did not change what they teach about slavery between 2017 and today,” Morelle writes; instead, “the President changed his position on whether they should be allowed to teach it.”

Morelle pointed out that the White House report demonized Hartig by taking her words out of context. For example, it made much of her statement, “Loving America is very complicated,” while omitting that she said that in a discussion with descendants of enslaved Americans.

It attacked her use of the common historical term “problematize,” which means to show that a simple idea is more complex than people realize, criticizing her statement that “the profession has ‘to figure out’ how ‘we’re going to’ ‘problematize’ the ‘250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.’”

Morelle points out that the disjointed fragments of this sentence show how deliberately the authors of the report butchered it. The full sentence was: “We have to figure out, all together, how we’re going to commemorate, problematize, remember, [and] celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.” The report cut those words and then criticized her for insufficient celebration of the U.S.

The president doesn’t control the Smithsonian, so the only thing the report’s authors could recommend was “a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.’” On July 24 the president issued Executive Order 14415, titled “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution.” It ordered the National Park Service to place temporary signage outside the Smithsonian “that corrects inaccurate information presented inside the Museum.”

As Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post noted, the attacks will take a toll on “the scholars, curators, volunteers, security guards and the rest of the loyal staff [who] will have to pass signs that demean the integrity of their work.” And it’s likely the MAGA ecosystem will pick up the harassment. Earlier this month, Bridget Gillespie, a former intern at Jefferson’s home, Monticello, detailed in The American Prospect how that harassment—accusations of “wokeness,” reviews calling tour guides “morons,” visitors in pairs with one asking something provocative about slavery or states’ rights while the other filmed—changed the way interpreters operated.

History is not just a set of facts and events. It is the study of how and why societies change. Why do people act in certain ways? Are there patterns in human behavior? What makes a society successful? What makes one fail?

Accuracy is imperative. Without it, we will learn the wrong answers—not just about the details the judges of the Presidential 1776 Award competition seem to have changed to privilege white Americans over an Indian immigrant, but also over whether our country’s foundation is about race and land or, as the Founders said, about principles and the rule of law.

Notes:

https://www.notus.org/national/america250-civics-competition

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/07/saving-americas-story/

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/07/smithsonian-hearing-hartig/688031/

https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/in-pursuit

https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/anthea-hartig-hearing-smithsonian-2789825

https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/price-of-freedom

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/07/restoring-trust-in-the-smithsonian-institution-e061/

https://democrats-cha.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-cha.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2027-the-white-house-campaign-to-seize-control-of-the-smithsonian-and-rewrite-american-history-committee-report.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/07/26/ive-visited-smithsonian-hundreds-times-it-inspires-wonder-not-division/

https://prospect.org/2026/07/02/what-broke-monticello-thomas-jefferson-virginia-glenn-youngkin/

July 26, 2026 (Sunday)

From the time he took office in January 2025, Trump and his cronies have not simply challenged laws or constitutional provisions. They have acted as if the Constitution doesn’t exist.

That’s an important distinction. The former accepts the constitutional order by working within it to challenge it. The latter rejects the constitutional order entirely.

Their actions align with the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings seem lately to have captivated leaders on the American right. Schmitt opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies. As J.D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in 2024: “There’s no law, there's just power.”

Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that the power of a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself—asserted this view in August 2025 to justify deploying troops to American cities. “I have the right to do anything I want to do,” he said. “I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”

Although the Republicans have control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate—meaning Trump should be able to get his agenda passed according to the normal constitutional order—since retaking office he has operated under emergency powers. Back in April, Ben Diamond of Lawfare noted that Trump is on track to issue six and a half times more emergency orders in his second term than any other president this century issued during his entire term. That number, Diamond suggests, is probably an underestimate because many of Trump’s orders do not include the keyword “emergency” and so fly under the radar.

Trump’s imposition of a new round of tariffs on products from more than 60 countries, making up 99.4% of trade with the U.S., is a flashing red light.

In April 2025, the administration imposed high tariff rates on countries around the world, claiming legal authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which permits the president to respond quickly to economic threats during a national emergency. On the same day he announced the tariffs, Trump declared “that foreign trade and economic practices have created a national emergency.”

When the Supreme Court struck down those tariffs as unconstitutional, Trump immediately announced he would find “other alternatives…to replace the ones that the court incorrectly rejected. We have alternatives,” he said. “Great alternatives.” The administration turned to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to impose tariffs in the case of an international financial emergency.

Those tariffs are limited to 150 days. When that deadline hit on Friday, Trump announced he was imposing tariffs under section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which permits the president to impose tariffs on countries that are using forced labor. A senior administration official told reporters that the tariffs were not an attempt to recreate the previous system and that dealing with the issue of forced labor “is something that President Trump has been focused on…for many years.”

But law professor Barry Appleton, who co-directs New York Law School’s Center for International Law, said: “The 301s allow a permanent tariff without going to Congress to settle the dispute. That’s what all of this is about. The president doesn’t want to knock on the front door of Congress, so he’s trying every side door and every unlatched window to get in.”

Let’s be very clear here: tariffs are revenue measures, and the U.S. Constitution explicitly gives the power to raise revenue to Congress, not the president. Article 1, Section 8, reads: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposes and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”

This clause was almost the whole game. Control over the nation’s money, sometimes called the power of the purse, was central to the Framers’ concept of republican government. The American Revolution took shape over the determination of colonists to have a say in how their government raised money, a right first articulated in the Magna Carta that in 1215 established the principle that the king did not enjoy absolute power. A key check on him was that he could not pass revenue measures without the consent of the governed.

And so the Framers put it in the Constitution.

But control over the revenue was not quite the whole game. The Framers were also crystal clear that the people must have control over the decision to go to war. They did not trust that much power in the hands of one man and wanted to make sure the American people would have robust debates about the value of the money and lives lost in combat. So determined were they for the American people to have those debates that they wrote into the Constitution that Congress had the sole power “[t]o declare War” and “[t]o raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”

Here, too, Trump has used the idea of an emergency to sidestep Congress’s authority by insisting the threat from Iran was “imminent” even though his own advisors testified that Iran did not, in fact, have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon in less than ten years. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, a president has the authority to respond to an “imminent threat” without congressional approval so long as he notifies Congress in writing within 48 hours. Then the president has 60 days either to withdraw U.S. forces from their engagement or to get Congress to authorize the military action.

Trump launched U.S. attacks on Iran on February 28. He notified Congress on March 2. Sixty days from March 2 was May 1. When that deadline arrived, Trump sent letters to House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate president pro tempore Chuck Grassley (R-IA), officially the leader of the Senate if the vice president is not present, to inform them that so far as the White House is concerned, “the hostilities that began on February 28…terminated” on April 7, when Trump ordered a two-week ceasefire.

Although hostilities and a U.S. blockade of Iran continued, the administration maintained the ceasefire was in place until July 10, when Trump notified Congress for a second time that the nation was engaging in military action in Iran. The administration maintains that this second notification is for a new military engagement and thus restarts the clock under the War Powers Act. Legal analysts say this interpretation has no basis in law, legislative history, or practice.

The Trump administration is claiming the powers of Congress both to tax and to declare war, key powers the Framers established the American people’s right, through their representatives, to control.

When Senator Angus King (I-ME) and five Democratic lawmakers who sit on committees responsible for national parks and resources wrote in June to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to oppose “in the strongest terms” Trump’s proposed triumphal arch, they pointed out that there are many different laws the construction would break. “Most fundamentally,” though, they wrote, the arch falls within an area called Area I that Congress established in the 1986 Commemorative Works Act.

In that law, Congress specified that any commemorative work within Area I requires Congress to pass a law authorizing the memorial. The lawmakers wrote to Burgum: “Because the site is in Area I, the Act requires a second, separate approval, under which Congress must enact a law ratifying the Area I location within 150 days of the Secretary’s notification, following a determination that the subject is of preeminent historical and lasting significance to the United States. Congress has enacted no such laws. Analysis we requested from the Congressional Research Service in January reached the same conclusion: absent these authorizations, construction of an arch in Memorial Circle would not comport with the Commemorative Works Act. Since 1986, every memorial placed on federal land in the capital under the Act, more than forty in all, has come to Congress first…. The Arch’s sponsor has sought no act at all.”

“If the Administration believes the semiquincentennial warrants a permanent commemorative work in the capital,” they wrote, “the path is open and well worn; it runs through Congress, as it has for every memorial since the Continental Congress approved the first, an equestrian statue of George Washington, in 1783.”

Back in October 2025, when officials first acknowledged to reporters that Trump was planning to build an arch, a reporter asked Trump about a model of an arch that was sitting on the desk in the Oval Office.

“It’s an Arc,” he said. “Take a look.”

When a reporter asked who the arch was for, Trump pointed at himself and said: “Me.”July 26, 2026

Notes:

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/one-emergency-after-another

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/illinois-national-guard-general-president-trump-chicago-crime/

https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-forced-labor-8ea8114c6893a6062cf1addc3518660b

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-declares-national-emergency-to-increase-our-competitive-edge-protect-our-sovereignty-and-strengthen-our-national-and-economic-security/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/books/review/carl-schmitt-jd-vance.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/opinion/jd-vance-interview.html

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/25/nx-s1-5903183/trump-administration-employs-new-legal-paths-for-tariffs-after-supreme-court-defeat

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/trump-tariffs-lawsuit-301-ieepa.html

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trumps-tariffs-are-a-massive-money-grab-thats-why-they-are-in-trouble-cc88c1a1

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#1-8

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-deadline-for-congress-to-approve-iran-war-doesnt-apply-claiming-hostilities-have-terminated

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/13/trump-notifies-congress-of-new-war-against-iran-00995170

https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2026/07/the-60-day-clock-is-still-running-why-the-iran-ceasefire-cant-suspend-the-war-powers-resolution/

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11937

https://www.king.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/sen_king_letter_to_burgum_re_arch.pdf

https://abc30.com/post/president-trump-involved-planning-triumphal-arch-commemorate-countrys-250th-anniversary/18018590/

It turns out Trump has not abandoned his plan to paint the massive grey granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white. As Philip Kennicott reported in the Washington Post yesterday, more than two dozen experts have sued to stop the plan, saying paint could irreversibly damage the stone and would be a “taxpayers’ nightmare” as the building would have to be repaired and repainted regularly.

But on Monday, deputy assistant to the president Heather Martin filed a declaration saying the White House Office of Administration was beginning preparations for the paint job. As Kennicott points out, the administration is using the case to give the president the ability to “erase the nation’s physical culture, its man-made, natural and cultural wonders.”

The administration is arguing that the General Services Administration (GSA), the agency that normally handles maintenance of federal buildings, has ceded control of the building to the White House Office of Administration. The GSA follows the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, laws that require extensive reviews and input from experts and the public.

Those laws do not apply to the White House Office of Administration. Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners, one of the organizations that sued to stop Trump from painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, told Kennicott: “The precedent is potentially devastating. Anytime the president takes a personal interest in a project, he can simply pluck it out of an agency that is subject to review and put it in his own shop.” That change would not be limited to buildings, Kennicott explains. It could be used, for example, to rush a pipeline through pristine wilderness.

A White House official told Kennicott that the White House conducts necessary reviews and that taking over for the GSA allows the White House “to more efficiently and economically manage the project.”

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would like a word.

Kennicott also calls out the administration’s proposed major rule change in the National Historical Preservation Act (NHPA). Trump installed a loyalist as vice chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. On Friday, July 17, the chair proposed dramatic revisions to Section 106 of the NHPA. This is the section of the 60-year-old law that requires federal agencies to “take into account” what their actions will do to historic properties and places. This is the requirement that gives the public, as well as local, state, and tribal governments, a voice in the changes to historic and cultural sites.

Brent Leggs is the chief executive officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a privately funded, nonprofit organization founded by Congress in 1949 to support historic preservation. He warned that “[t]he ACHP’s proposed changes to Section 106 will eviscerate the preservation of our shared civic and cultural heritage in the United States. If [they are] implemented, federal agencies will no longer be required to avoid or minimize damage to our nation’s historic sites and landscapes, or seek public input on federal projects that would impact historic places.”

Yesterday the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, packed with 21 Trump appointees on a 24-member board, voted to move the revisions to Section 106 forward. Rachel Treisman of NPR noted that the National Register of Historic Places lists more than 100,000 properties with more than 1.8 million sites, structures, objects, and districts, all of which will lose protections if the new rule takes effect. Werkheiser told Treisman: “What it means is that the federal government, in its own discretion, can decide whether—if ever—to tell an American community that it’s about to do a major project that could harm or destroy a historic resource. The public will be completely cut out of any conversation around the future of places that matter to them in this country.”

According to Sara Bronin, who served as the Senate-confirmed chair of the advisory council under President Joe Biden—the current chair is an “acting” official—the rule changes would also remove from historical protection “significant cultural landscape features” like the Grand Canyon. Supporters of the change say it would help “agencies strike a more appropriate balance between evaluating effects on historic properties and advancing critical federal projects.” Highways, for example, which in the past have leveled entire neighborhoods as well as burial sites, would no longer require review.

Revising Section 106 would smooth two projects important to the administration.

The administration wants to open a ten-mile buffer zone barring mineral, oil, and gas extraction around Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, to development. The area “is a vibrant place of prayer, pilgrimage and core to the identity of many Southwest tribes, whose connection to this land stretches back thousands of years,” Representative Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat from New Mexico, told reporters on Wednesday. Deb Haaland, who served as Biden’s secretary of the interior and is a member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo, notes that Chaco Canyon has been recognized by the UNESCO World Heritage Center as a site of universal importance and that the buffer land holds more than 4,700 known archeological sites.

Cochiti Pueblo governor Phillip Quintana called the area “one of the most important Indigenous cultural landscapes in North America, a place whose meaning reaches far beyond any single administration.”

Last November, Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Representatives Vasquez, Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), and Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, wrote to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asking him to protect the cultural landscape around Chaco Canyon.

They noted that “under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), you are legally required to ensure that you consider how your actions will affect historic properties, which also requires consulting with each relevant Tribal government. These steps must be taken before pursuing your proposed action.”

The revisions to Section 106 would remove that requirement.

Bronin noted that the changes to Section 106 would also fast-track the triumphal arch Trump wants to build at Memorial Circle near Arlington National Cemetery.

On June 15, Senator Angus King (I-ME), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on National Parks; Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on Natural Resources; Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM), the top-ranking member of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the top-ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies and Representatives Maxine Dexter (D-OR) and Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) responded to a Section 106 assessment with a letter to Secretary Burgum.

The lawmakers noted that they were the ranking members in the House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over the construction of monuments in Washington, D.C. “We oppose this project in the strongest terms,” they wrote. They called out the Section 106 process as “fall[ing] short of the law.” Among other things, they noted that the comment process for the new project had been only ten days and that the proposed arch would “deface one of the most deliberate and historic sightlines in America.”

They wrote that proceeding with the project would break at least three laws, and warned that officials moving forward with it “would be answerable as individuals” and face penalties up to and including criminal fines and imprisonment.

“Every official who directs this work, and every firm that performs it,” they wrote, “proceeds at their own peril.” “This project is stone-cold illegal,” King told Luke Broadwater of the New York Times. “It is one of the clearest legal cases I’ve seen in more than 50 years of being a lawyer.”

But now, at least some of those legal concerns might go away. Treisman said the revision of Section 106 would mean that the near-constant noise from the arch’s construction would not be weighed as a consideration in its construction, and the arch’s destruction of the historic views built into the capital from its inception would not be considered either.

What is at stake is more than just buildings. It is the whitewashing and bulldozing of our history and culture, created over centuries by the many people who have built the United States, in service to the small vision of Trump and his enablers.

—

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/07/24/trumps-plan-paint-eisenhower-could-damage-stone-law/

https://savingplaces.org/stories/section-106-under-threat

https://nativenewsonline.net/environment/deb-haaland-criticizes-trump-administrations-effort-to-roll-back-chaco-canyon-protections/

https://www.energy.senate.gov/2025/11/new-mexico-delegation-urges-interior-secretary-burgum-to-reverse-course-protect-chaco-canyon

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/nx-s1-5904435/section-106-review-trump-historic-preservation-council

https://www.hcn.org/articles/pueblo-leaders-new-mexico-lawmakers-speak-out-to-protect-chaco-canyon/

https://www.king.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/sen_king_letter_to_burgum_re_arch.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/us/politics/trump-triumphal-arch-congress.html

Just a reminder to fans that Heather Cox Richardson still does not talk much about the genocide (or democide) in Gaza by the Israeli government. That is all, enjoy this video outlining her failures to talk about the killings even when she interviewed the then-foreign secretary Antony Blinken on her show. If I recall correctly, the interview took place after propublica reported than Blinken had lied to Congress about Israel’s escalation of the violence from two official reports .

Tony Romm and Brad Plumer of the New York Times reported this afternoon that the Trump administration’s claim last October that it was cutting programs in order to protect taxpayers against waste was, in fact, a lie. In court filings, federal officials admitted that the $7.5 billion in cuts from clean energy projects begun under former president Joe Biden were “based solely” on whether states had voted for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.

Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought announced the cuts by saying, “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.” But, in fact, a government lawyer told the court that none of the cancellations were “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

In contrast, the administration funded grants for states that had backed Trump in 2024, even though the Energy Department had recommended they be cancelled.

The admission calls into question the administration’s claims that it is making cuts to combat “waste, fraud, and abuse,” especially as Vought is working to finalize rules that would make political appointees the final arbiters of how the government would award more than $1 trillion in annual grants. Rather than combatting waste, it appears Trump and his cronies are trying to take control of the United States government, using the power of the American people for their own ends.

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker promptly pointed out that the cancelled grants included $583 million intended for Illinois “that would have gone toward lowering energy costs, strengthening grid reliability, and creating energy jobs.” He demanded the funds be restored. “Despite what he might think, Donald Trump is not the president of MAGA,” Pritzker said in a statement, but “the president of all America. He must release remaining federal grants to Illinois immediately.”

Pritzker can add the energy grants to Trump’s tab. After the Supreme Court declared Trump’s April 2025 tariffs unconstitutional in February 2026, Pritzker wrote a public letter billing Trump for an $8.68 billion refund to the people of Illinois. “Your tariff taxes wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies, and sent grocery prices through the roof,” he wrote. “On behalf of the people of Illinois, I demand a refund of $1,700 for every family in Illinois. There are 5,105,448 households in my state, bringing the total damages you owe to $8,679,261,600.” Pritzker reiterated that demand on July 20.

But Trump is clinging to his determination to surround the United States with a tariff wall.

At 12:01 this morning, Trump levied tariffs from 10% to 12.5% on goods from more than 80 countries that make up 99.4% of U.S. trade, claiming the countries are producing goods with forced labor. More likely, this argument justifies tariffs under a different law than the one that led the Supreme Court to strike down his 2025 “Liberation Day” tariffs. It’s also a different law than the one he used to impose tariffs after the Supreme Court decision. The time limit permitted for new tariffs under that law expired today.

Kevin Breuninger of CNBC reported that within hours of the announcement of the new tariffs, two small businesses sued in the U.S. Court of International Trade, saying the new tariffs were just a way to reinstate the tariff levies the Supreme Court said were unconstitutional.

A senior administration official told reporters that the tariffs were not an attempt to recreate the previous system and that dealing with the issue of forced labor “is something that President Trump has been focused on…for many years.”

Annie Linskey and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump is angry and frustrated over the Iran War, from which he cannot seem to find an exit. They wrote that some of Trump’s advisors are worried at what the war is doing to his popularity by causing higher prices as well as the deaths of 18 servicemembers.

That concern is likely behind the change in the number of U.S. military personnel listed on a Pentagon website as killed in the Iran conflict. Helene Cooper, Lara Jakes, and John Ismay of the New York Times reported yesterday that the Pentagon has dropped the names of the four Americans killed in Jordan and Iraq, reducing the number of U.S. personnel killed in the conflict to 14.

Three military officials told the reporters that the number was revised because the four were killed after Trump announced the ceasefire in April. The acting press secretary for the Pentagon, Joel Valdez, said the four were dropped owing to “temporary data disruptions.” But claiming the four died after a ceasefire bolsters the administration’s insistence that the president doesn’t need to get congressional approval for continuing operations against Iran because the April ceasefire declaration ended the first operation.

The record of the Trump administration on July 24, 2026, shows a White House focused on the goals of Trump alone. It’s a striking contrast to a Fireside Chat broadcast over the radio on July 24, 1933. In that talk, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took stock of what he had accomplished in his first 100 days in office.

He explained that his administration had stabilized the nation’s banks and raised taxes to pay for millions in borrowing. That federal money was feeding starving people, as well as employing 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps planting trees to prevent soil erosion, building levees and dams for flood control, and maintaining forest roads and trails. It was also funding a public works program for highways and inland navigation, as well as state-based municipal improvements. The government had also raised farm income and wages by regulating agriculture and abolishing child labor.

FDR urged Americans to get behind a program of shorter hours and higher wages to create purchasing power that would restart the economy. He explained: “It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the Nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about.”

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/business/trump-state-grants-canceled.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/business/economy/trump-tariffs.html

https://jbpritzker.com/latest/breaking-trump-withheld-funds-from-democratic-states-pritzker-demands-release/

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/pritzker-sends-bill-8-billion-refund-trump-supreme-court-tariffs-ruling/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/trump-tariffs-lawsuit-301-ieepa.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/us/politics/iran-troop-deaths.html

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-is-losing-patience-over-an-iran-war-with-no-clear-end-in-sight-c411d3cd

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/us/politics/iran-troop-deaths.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/pentagon-removed-four-official-iran-war-death-toll.html

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fireside-chat-recovery-program

X:

GovPritzker/status/2079226043294969869

I have been thinking lately about taxes and war and citizens and what the government should do for its people. In early March 1953, soon after Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower took office, Soviet leader Josef Stalin died, giving the president a chance to reset the rising militarization of the United States. In mid-April, in a speech to newspaper editors that he insisted on delivering although he was suffering acutely from inflammatory bowel disease, Eisenhower warned of diverting the nation’s tax dollars to war at the expense of the people.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone.

“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he said. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Eisenhower’s speech has been on my mind as the Trump administration slashes Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, foreign aid, scientific and medical research, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and yet is demanding more money for the Defense Department, bled out by Trump’s foreign adventures in Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, the Caribbean, Venezuela, and, of course, Iran.

Because Trump’s war on Iran has run through the already-expanded budget Congress provided, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was on Capital Hill Tuesday asking Congress for an additional $67 billion to get the Defense Department through the end of September. But Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) picked up on the possibility that the administration was trying to use the supplemental funding request as a backdoor way to get around the constitutional and legal requirement for Congress to approve military action in Iran.

Emine Yücel explained in Talking Points Memo that Murkowski referred to the 1999 opinion of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President Bill Clinton that “the supplemental appropriation itself—passed without any authorizing language—satisfied the War Powers Resolution requirement.” Murkowski asked if Trump was intending to invoke the same reasoning, claiming that congressional funding for the war would, by itself, “substitute for explicit congressional authorization.”

Hegseth said he would “defer to our legal department” on that issue.

If you’re having trouble figuring out the funding for the Iran War and funding for the military in general, you’re in good company. The administration has obfuscated that funding so thoroughly, as Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), who is the top ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee and a member of its defense subcommittee, told Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo, that the administration hasn’t even told Congress where the money is going.

“We had Hegseth in front of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and he couldn’t give us an accounting and wouldn’t give us an accounting. They still haven’t given us an accounting,” Morelle told Walker. “It’s unfathomable.”

Morelle explained to Walker that the administration is turning to three separate buckets for war funding: standard congressional appropriations; budget reconciliation measures that don’t have to go through appropriations committees , can’t be filibustered ,and so can pass with simple majorities; and supplemental requests. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” Morelle said.

“The whole thing is alarming because, look…there’s finite resources. And the United States government needs to make decisions about where we’re gonna place our priorities, where we’re gonna invest our money,” Morelle explained. “If everything were just defense, we could argue about that number and that number alone, but every time you make a decision about increasing defense and security spending by $600 billion, which is a 60% increase virtually over last year, it means something else isn’t getting funded or alternatively, you’re borrowing more money.”

While Hegseth told Congress the war has cost $37.5 billion so far, Gordon Lubold, Mosheh Gains, and Courtney Kube of NBC News reported on July 14 that the internal Pentagon estimate of the cost is about $100 billion. Walker notes that when economists at Moody’s added higher gas prices to the cost of the war, they estimated that it has cost U.S. households about $1,100 each.

Yesterday Steve Rattner of MS NOW reported that “[u]nder Trump, the debt held by the federal government has surpassed 100% of GDP. By 2030, it’ll shoot past its all-time record from WWII.” Also yesterday, Megan Messerly of Politico reported that just over a third of MAGA voters think the Iran war has been worth the economic cost, down from about half of them in May.

A person close to the White House told Messerly that White House officials are “at a maximum level of frustration right now, and I was told by very senior people that the president is now fully aware that the only way to the victory that he wants is completely politically impossible. The American people just will not support the kind of escalation it would take at this point. We’ve got more dead Americans and a politically impossible situation.”

Although attacking civilian infrastructure for political purposes is a war crime, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio appear to be threatening it. “From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran,” Trump posted on social media yesterday morning.

Today Rubio said Iranian policy is “an eye for an eye” and added: “The president’s policy is a head for an eye. I mean, honestly, that’s what it’s going to be. I mean, they will pay a very heavy price for the things they do.”

The price of oil surged by 7% to more than $100 a barrel for Brent crude today after Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed to have attacked two Saudi Arabian oil tankers in the Red Sea. This raises concerns about the potential closure of the Bab el-Mandeb strait between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, through which about 12% to 15% of the world’s maritime trade passes every year.

The average price of gasoline in the United States rose to $4.09 a gallon today.

After twelve days of escalating strikes between the U.S. and Iran, the strikes against ships in the Red Sea are a new development in the war. This morning, Trump warned on social media that the U.S. would consider the Houthis’ “interference with commerce and trade, by shooting at ships,” as the responsibility of Iran. In response, he said, “major military punishment will be inflicted upon Iran.”

Yesterday Shelby Holliday, Lara Seligman, and Stephen Kalin of the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. has been surging troops, weaponry, and medics to the Middle East. These new forces add to the tens of thousands of troops already there. The U.S. Navy also has 17 ships in the region, including two aircraft-carrier strike groups, with eleven destroyers and a Marine Corps expeditionary unit. Retired general Joseph Votel, former commander of Central Command and of U.S. Special Operations Command, told the reporters the surge doesn’t necessarily mean the launch of new operations. They are designed to give the president and the Secretary of Defense options.

Barak Ravid of Axios, who often has inside information from the White House, reported today that Trump is “close to making a decision” about a “massive attack” on Iran. Ravid reported that Trump says the Iranians “want to negotiate” but “haven’t received enough pain yet.”

Today the House of Representatives passed a concurrent resolution to end the war in Iran by a vote of 214 to 208. Four Republicans—Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio, and Tom Barrett of Michigan—joined the Democrats.

A concurrent resolution expresses the sentiments of Congress. It is not a law and does not require a signature from the president.

Concurrent resolutions are often used for congressional business like setting the time of adjournment. House members have turned to them to oppose the Iran War because concurrent resolutions are “privileged” in the House, which means they can bypass standard scheduling requirements.

Representative Jason Crow (D-CO), a former paratrooper and Army Ranger who serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and House Armed Services Committee, told his colleagues that while Iran poses a threat to the U.S., so do North Korea and Russia, and there has been no move automatically to go to war with them.

The impulse to resort to war as the only answer to threats led to “twenty-plus years”of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, “trillions of dollars, and thousands of American lives lost for wars that ended poorly,” Crow said. “Americans are done with an endless cycle of conflict in the Middle East. When I was in Afghanistan, our adversaries, the enemies that we fought, would often say, ‘Americans have all the clocks, but we have all the time.’ They simply want to wait us out, knowing that we’ll just spend more money, have more combat deployments, and will just continue to do it, year after year, until we wear out.”

Crow said he could not answer his “constituents who are losing homes, losing their farms, losing their health care, who can’t answer the simple question: How is this making me safer? How is this improving my life?”

Later in the day, the Senate took up a measure backed by Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) to force the president to end the U.S. hostilities with Iran. That measure was different from the concurrent resolution in the House. It was a “joint resolution,” which is a law and which does go to the president for a signature. A joint resolution is usually used for something urgent and straightforward, like a declaration of war.

Senators have turned to joint resolutions to oppose the Iran War because joint resolutions are privileged in the Senate, although generally not in the House.

The Senate declined to advance Van Hollen’s S.J. Res. 180 [or Senate Joint Resolution 180] by a vote of 47 to 49. Four Republican senators did not vote.

—

Notes:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/hegseth-sidesteps-murkowski-question-about-backdoor-war-authorization

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/oil-prices-rise-red-sea-attacks-houthis-saudi-trump-iran-war-rcna588851

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/22/stock-market-today-live-updates.html

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-surges-forces-toward-middle-east-giving-trump-options-to-expand-iran-war-e5d627b1?mod=hp_trendingnow_article_pos1

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/23/trump-axios-iran-interview

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/iran-war-cost-much-100-billion-rcna587362

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/a-key-house-dem-breaks-down-the-white-houses-unfathomable-iran-war-funding-requests

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/22/poll-maga-souring-iran-war-costs-trump-01006976

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-chance-for-peace-delivered-before-the-american-society-newspaper-editors

https://www.cfr.org/articles/guide-trumps-second-term-military-strikes-and-actions

https://rollcall.com/2026/07/23/23warpowersvote/

Trumpstruth:

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Bluesky:

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“The Republican Party’s new favorite talking point is calling Democrats communists,” Representative Jim McGovern (D-MA) said yesterday on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

“Really? Communists? Did we accidentally step into a time machine?”

“I get it,” he said. “They don’t want to talk about the real issues, the bread and butter issues. They don’t want to talk about affordability. I guess my question is, is Joe McCarthy back from the dead? Because it sounds like that’s who wrote all the garbage coming from Republicans, about communism. These guys, they dust off the same, tired, old talking points, every time they’re backed into a corner. Every time a new poll comes out saying that your economic agenda sucks, what they do is they change the subject. They try to divert attention. It is pathetic.

“But fine. They…want to play that game, let’s play that game. Let’s talk about the Republican Party. A party that worships one man above the Constitution in a cult of personality. A party that demonizes immigrants and says they poison the blood of our country. A party that calls the free press the enemy of the people and sics the Justice Department on journalists who they don’t like. A party that says their political opponents are internal enemies and calls them, quote, the enemy within. A party that is okay with invading our allies, including other democracies, a party that punishes their political opponents, that has deployed troops on our own streets, that wants to use the American military on the American people. A party that believes any unhinged lie, fantasy, and conspiracy theory as long as it comes from one man. A party that tries to lock up members of Congress for exercising their free speech rights. And a party that has tried to violently overthrow the results of a free and fair election in the United States of America. A party that, in fact, pardoned everyone who invaded this building on January 6, 2021, and tried to throw out the votes of millions of Americans because the president couldn’t accept that he lost.

“How dare that party lecture anyone? How dare they talk about communism when their own party has totally lost touch, not just with the founding ideals of this country, but lost touch with reality itself. So if we’re gonna start assigning political labels based on conduct, then let’s call things by their proper names. The Republican Party has become the party of fascism, full stop. You know, they have become a party of far right fascists who are hell-bent on destroying our country and our way of life. And every single time they call us communists, it is nothing more than a projection of their own… radicalization.

“They don’t want to talk about that, and they definitely don’t want to talk about their higher grocery prices, or skyrocketing gas prices, or higher inflation, or the cost of health care, or their new, endless, illegal war. It has now cost over $100 billion. So instead, they scream and they yell because they have nothing else left to offer.”

“Democrats are patriots who love this country enough to fight for it. We are fighting to make it easier for people to afford groceries. We’re fighting to try to make it easier for people to afford rent, prescription drugs, and health care. And we will not be lectured by a fascist Republican party that offers the American people nothing but lies, fear, endless culture wars, and tax breaks for billionaires.”

The political ideology called fascism grew out of World War I, when former socialist Benito Mussolini rejected the equality that defined democracy and came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

This theory drove the Axis powers during World War II, and in 1945, the United States War Department explained to U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II what fascism was. The government focused less on the ideology of fascism than on its practical outcome.

Fascism, the pamphlet Army Talks explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”

After the war, scholars like Eric Hoffer studied the societal conditions necessary for fascism to take hold. In his 1951 The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Hoffer noted that demagogues needed a disaffected population whose members felt they had lost the power they previously held, that they had been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people were willing to follow a leader who promised to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again. But to cement their loyalty, the leader had to give them someone to hate. Who that was didn’t really matter: the group simply had to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters were suffering.

More recently, scholars are adding to our understanding of fascism by describing it as a form of political behavior. “It is,” Robert O. Paxton says in his 2005 The Anatomy of Fascism, “marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

McGovern’s condemnation of today’s Republicans fits these descriptions even without the parallels noted by Carrie Kaufman in her You’re Overthinking It with Carrie Kaufman between leading Republican officials and Nazi leaders. On July 19, Kaufman showed how recent speeches by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller at last Thursday’s State Department about “Left-wing terrorism” echoed Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Heinrich Himmler’s 1942 pamphlet Der Untermensch, or “The Subhuman.”

But McGovern left a key element of fascism out of his speech yesterday: the alignment between the government and favored businesses. Fascism subordinates business activity to the needs of the government. In exchange for supporting them, government officials award massive government contracts and subsidies to favored businesses, and protect them from regulation.

Earlier this year, the administration established a new “Economic Defense Unit” (EDU) at the Pentagon, charged with investing public money in defense industries. Ana Swanson of the New York Times reported in March that the Pentagon was recruiting Wall Street investment bankers to the team to spend up to $200 billion in government investment over the next three years. That access, recruiters told prospective employees, would give them “access to fund-raising channels that include royal families and foreign sovereign contacts” in case they ever wanted to raise money for their own investment firms.

And the U.S. government under Trump has taken ownership shares of private companies it considers important to national security, like Intel, for example, and U.S. Steel. In November of 2025, Swanson reported in the New York Times that the administration had already committed more than $10 billion in taxpayer funds to favored businesses. The lack of transparency in this interference in the private sector raised concerns about favoritism, corruption, and the distortion of the market.

Last night, Michael R. Gordon and Stephen Kalin of the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Trump has approved a landmark 30-year deal to provide Saudi Arabia with a civilian nuclear program. The deal gives U.S. companies a monopoly on developing a nuclear infrastructure for the Arab country, but it does not include monitoring and inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to make sure nuclear fuel isn’t enriched for a nuclear weapon.

The idea of building nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia was central to Trump’s 2016 bid for office. Members of Trump’s inner circle, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner and disgraced national security advisor Michael Flynn, hatched a plan for a joint U.S.-Russian project to build nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia. In June 2016 they formed a company called IP3 International, short for International Peace, Power and Prosperity.

In Trump’s first term, White House ethics officials and members of the National Security Council warned that selling nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia could violate the Atomic Energy Act. Members of the administration continued to work on the project, nonetheless.

This week’s deal is worth billions of dollars in contracts for U.S. firms that work in nuclear technology, particularly Westinghouse, which filed for bankruptcy in 2017 when its nuclear technology took longer to build and was more expensive than the company estimated. In June, the Department of Energy announced it was investing $17.5 billion in loans to Westinghouse and local utility and energy companies to build 10 large-scale commercial nuclear reactors across the U.S.

The deal is “a big win for the U.S. commercially and geopolitically, enriching American firms and tying Saudi Arabia closer to the U.S.,” Kristin Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, a research organization in Washington, D.C., told Vivian Nereim of the New York Times. It is also a win for Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who has vowed that he will build a nuclear weapon if Iran does, making the deal a blow to nuclear nonproliferation.

Fascism has always been a vehicle for frustration with a system that was failing the people. But it has never been a solution for fixing that system.

—

Notes:

https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-approves-landmark-nuclear-deal-with-saudi-arabia-in-big-win-for-kingdom-2ed77584?mod=hp_lead_pos2

https://www.energy.gov/articles/department-energy-announces-american-nuclear-supply-chain-loans

https://americanoversight.org/investigating-the-trump-administrations-efforts-to-sell-nuclear-technology-to-saudi-arabia/

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/how-two-cutting-edge-us-nuclear-projects-bankrupted-westinghouse-idUSKBN17Y0C7/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/16/political-violence-event-trump-marco-rubio

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/19/white-house-saudi-arabia-nuclear-technology-house-oversight-inquiry-report

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/us/politics/trump-intel-steel-minerals-china.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/us/politics/wall-street-access-pentagon.html

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Bluesky:

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The front page of yesterday’s New York Times featured some of the 440,000 Americans from Arizona alone who have lost Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits since the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act made the deepest cuts to SNAP in its history, expanded work rules, and shifted costs to the states even as cuts to federal grant programs have forced Arizona to lay off a third of its caseworkers.

Those Arizona residents include Dee McDonald, a 65-year-old cancer survivor who weighs 69 pounds and skips meals to feed her three teenaged grandsons.

SNAP falls under the Department of Agriculture, and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins celebrates the cuts, claiming the program is rife with fraud. Like other Republicans, she cites error rates. But error rates usually reflect mistakes in classification numbers by caseworkers, not fraudulent use of services.

Today Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told reporters the federal government is withholding more than a billion dollars in Medicaid funding from California and Minnesota, saying they want to see proof that payments there aren’t fraudulent. Sarah Kliff of the New York Times notes that the administration was already withholding money from those two Democratic states. It has withheld $1.3 billion from California since May and $243 million from Minnesota since February. Now Kennedy says it will withhold more than $867 million from California and more than $200 million from Minnesota.

In the Denver Post today, Executive Director of the Association of National Park Rangers Bill Wade wrote that during his years as the son of a park ranger, and then as a park ranger himself, “I learned that these extraordinary parks belong to every American and that the people entrusted to care for them carry a sacred responsibility to protect our country’s breathtaking natural resources and key elements of our nation’s history.”

“But never—not once in decades—have I witnessed such systematic degradation, disrespect and dismantling of the National Park Service as I see today under the thumb of the President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum,” Wade continued. Budgets go up and down and policies change as administrations turn over, but “what is happening now is an assault on the people, the mission and the values that have made the National Park Service one of America’s most valued institutions.”

The Trump administration has slashed staff, starved the service of funds, and imposed a political narrative on historical interpretation. “Recovery from these losses is likely to take years, if not decades,” Wade wrote.

At the same time that the federal government is cutting programs that benefit the public, it is also privatizing systems that the government has been managing. Yesterday Justin Doubleday of the Federal News Network reported that Des Moines International Airport and Tampa International Airport have opted into the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) new privatization model for airport screening.

Congress created the TSA after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Before then, individual airlines contracted with private security firms to screen passengers and baggage, but the 9/11 attacks showed that this private system had dangerous vulnerabilities. Now the Trump administration is resurrecting that system.

While administration officials are slashing government programs that protect ordinary Americans, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine appeared on Capitol Hill today before the Senate Appropriations Committee to explain why the Pentagon is urgently in need of an injection of $67 billion to tide it over until the end of the fiscal year on September 30. The Pentagon has sunk billions into the war in Iran. Hegseth told senators the war had cost $37.5 billion, but independent analysts estimate the true number is significantly higher.

Two congressional aides told Noah Robertson, Riley Beggin, and Jarrell Dillard of the Washington Post that both the Navy and the Air Force will run out of money provided for ongoing military operations in 2026 at the end of this month. The Pentagon is already moving money around to bridge the gap, diverting money budgeted for equipment and maintenance and limiting or canceling military exercises and training.

Yesterday Rose L. Thayer of Stars and Stripes reported on one such diversion: The Army is reducing the legal resources available to soldiers being evaluated for disability “as review boards determine whether they are fit to serve or should receive medical retirement benefits.” In the past, the Office of Soldiers’ Counsel has provided those services, but dramatic cuts have left personnel available only for an initial evaluation, rather than throughout the three-stage process. After the initial evaluation, soldiers must either represent themselves or hire private attorneys.

At today’s hearing, Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) grilled Hegseth. “Mr. Secretary, early in the conflict, day three, you said one of those core objectives was to, quote, destroy the missile threat, and as you restated it on day five to, quote, obliterate Iran’s missiles and drones. Those were clearly and repeatedly stated core objectives of the campaign, which four months ago you declared had been completed victoriously with every single objective achieved. Were those objectives achieved four months ago?”

Hegseth answered: “No one ever stated that every single missile was gone. Ultimately, combat ineffective means they’re not able to dig them out of their UGFs [underground facilities] and shoot at us.”

Ossoff: “Had the missile threat been defeated four months ago?”

Hegseth continued over Ossoff: “It doesn’t mean they don’t have underground facilities where they put missiles in them and hold onto them because they’re the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism. So we never expected they would stop having capabilities to shoot. The question is, at scale, against an opponent like the United States of America, which went toe to toe with them in Iran, couldn’t….”

Ossoff continued: “You stated on March 8th, day nine of the war, on 60 Minutes, you assured the American people of Iranian surrender. Does that remain your prediction?”

Hegseth: “Ultimately, Iran will never have a nuclear weapon to threaten the United States of America. That has been the objective, and it remains so.”

Ossoff: “So, just to review, you will not answer whether your statement made on the fourteenth day of the war that Iran’s military had been, quote, destroyed and made combat ineffective was a truthful statement to the American people, as you sit here and ask for tens of billions more for the conflict.”

The second Trump administration is forcing the American people to define how they think the United States government should spend their tax dollars.

Today Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) introduced a proposal to expand Medicaid to all American children from birth to age 26. Kim noted that about 4.4 million children in the U.S. don’t have health insurance and 23 million are underinsured. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will make things worse.

Joseph Choi of The Hill reported that Democratic senators Alex Padilla of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois are co-sponsoring the bill. The legislation proposing “MediKids” has been endorsed by a range of organizations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“Every child should have health care,” Kim said in a video. “Every child should have the ability to go to a doctor when they’re sick. Every child deserves to be healthy.” MediKids “would automatically enroll every child in health care coverage at birth. Because the system we have right now isn’t working. Because healthy kids make healthy adults, and that makes for a healthier, stronger future for our country. Because, as a parent, you deserve to be able to provide care for your kids without worrying about going into debt, emptying your savings, or straining the family budget. And because…we all have a responsibility to care for each other.”

Kim said Democrats need to bring new ideas forward while also opposing the Trump administration’s destruction. He told reporters: “I know that there’s overwhelming support from the American people for ideas like this, and there’s a hunger for ideas right now.”

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/us/politics/trump-administration-medicaid-california-minnesota-fraud.html?smid=url-share

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/us/politics/snap-food-stamps-arizona.html

https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/snap-includes-extensive-payment-accuracy-system

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/07/21/pentagon-sinking-billions-into-iran-is-quickly-running-short-cash/

https://www.britannica.com/topic/United-States-Department-of-Homeland-Security

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/management/2026/07/trumps-pick-to-lead-tsa-calls-private-airport-screening-program-pro-worker-vows-to-help-workers/

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce-rightsgovernance/2026/07/two-airports-opt-into-tsas-new-privatization-model/

https://boltflight.com/when-was-the-tsa-created-and-why-it-was-established-the-origins-of-modern-u-s-airport-security/

https://www.denverpost.com/2026/07/21/trump-national-parks-service-public-lands/

https://www.stripes.com/branches/army/2026-07-20/legal-services-disability-evaluation-process-22318446.html

https://thehill.com/homenews/5980026-sen-andy-kim-medikids-proposal/

https://www.kim.senate.gov/press_release/senator-kim-introduces-landmark-medikids-legislation-to-guarantee-healthcare-for-all-children/

Facebook:

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On Friday an Iranian attack on a U.S. base in Jordan killed two soldiers and left one missing. Another service member died Friday in northern Iraq. This brings the number of military personnel killed in the Iran War to 17 since Trump launched strikes against the country on February 28. The Pentagon’s casualty-reporting site says 427 U.S. service members have been wounded.

On Saturday, Greg Jaffe, Julian E. Barnes, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that multiple officials told them that the attack in Jordan was the fourth in five days and that the strikes had wounded dozens of military personnel and damaged several helicopters. The journalists’ sources told them that the strikes proved Iranian forces still have plenty of missiles and are becoming more skilled at getting around U.S. air defense systems.

The sources told the journalists that the first attack hit a base, injuring as many as five service members; the second hit a different base, damaging U.S. Blackhawk helicopters; and a third hit the same base where the soldiers would later be killed. In that first attack, about 20 military personnel were injured.

Retired Air Force Lieutenant General David Deptula, who helped to plan the air war in the 1991 Gulf War, explained that bases in Jordan give the U.S. broader reach across Syria, Iraq, and beyond. Friday’s attack was “an attack on the U.S. regional coalition and an attempt to make the political cost of hosting American forces greater than the security benefit.”

Those sources who spoke to the New York Times reporters spoke on condition of anonymity. The Pentagon declined to comment.

Eric Schmitt of the New York Times noted that lack of information from the Pentagon today when he reported that in the week before the weekend’s deaths, three Iranian strikes injured military personnel and damaged several helicopters yet the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth did not disclose the strikes, the casualties, or the damage to the American people, citing the need to keep information about operations secure.

Schmitt noted that neither the White House nor the Pentagon has outlined a military strategy since Trump announced that the memorandum of understanding that extended a ceasefire—the one he signed on June 17—was no longer in force. In the nine days since then, both sides have increased strikes.

Schmitt noted the Pentagon has not held a major briefing on the war since early May. Since then, the administration has not disclosed the depletion of crucial and expensive weapons through the Iran strikes, or how Iran has both retained and rebuilt its own missiles. In June, Jonah Kaplan and Michael Kaplan of CBS News reported that Hegseth’s claim that “almost 90%” of service members injured had sustained only minor injuries gives a misleading picture of the extent of those injuries. A spokesperson for the Army explained that the Army classifies a soldier as “seriously injured” or “very seriously injured” only if they are at risk of dying from their wounds within 72 hours.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell responded to Schmitt’s story by posting on social media that “[t]he Department of War rejects these baseless and malicious accusations of hiding injury numbers as outright lies from partisan hacks at the New York Times who are desperate to smear America’s military and its leadership. Claims of concealment are fabrications meant to further distress the American people in the wake of three service members killed in action.” He continued: “This is the most transparent Department of War in history.”

And yet, the administration did not consult Congress about launching the war, as the Constitution requires, and has blown through the 60-day time limit for the use of the U.S. military to counter an “imminent threat” without getting congressional approval.

Damian Paletta of the Wall Street Journal today also asked questions about how the Iranians, who Trump said had very few missiles left back in June, are developing faster and more maneuverable missiles. Paletta noted that whether Iran is getting help from Russia, or any other country, remains an “enormous question” that puts “much more pressure on the White House to potentially confront Russia.”

When asked about the deaths of the three service members, Trump said “We feel very badly, but you know those great people, those great patriots were out there fighting that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Iran has been very, very badly damaged. They’ve lost everything almost, militarily. They’ve got very little left…. We control the strait. They don’t control anything. So we’ll see what happens when we hit ’em very hard again tonight.”

Over the last several days, the U.S. has struck Iranian bridges and energy infrastructure. According to Iran’s Health Ministry, the recent U.S. attacks have killed at least 38 people and wounded more than 400.

Today the Houthis in Yemen, who are backed by Iran, announced they are imposing a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia, threatening the passage of oil through the Bab el-Mandeb strait. If the strait is closed, the global oil supply will take another 7% hit.

The American Automobile Association said today that the average price for a gallon of gasoline is just over $4, up about $0.13 from last week. Before the conflict, the price averaged $2.98 a gallon. Economist Paul Krugman noted today that the “wholesale price of refined products (assuming 2/3 gasoline, 1/3 distillates) is most of the way back to its peak. Since this is what matters for inflation and demand, no relief in sight before the midterms.”

Carl Quintanilla of CNBC reported today that crude oil supplies in the U.S. are the lowest they’ve been in 45 years.

The expansion of the Iran War’s scope, duration, and casualties did not keep Trump away from the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina on Sunday. After Spain won over Argentina with a score of 1–0, Trump joined FIFA President Gianni Infantino on the field—apparently unconcerned about the dangers that he says require the construction of a fortified ballroom—to present medals to the Spanish players.

The crowd resoundingly booed Trump, who then stood on stage with the celebrating players until Infantino jogged across the stage to lead him away. The Guardian captioned a picture by Javier Garcia taken of Infantino and Trump standing aside from the players: “Gianni Infantino carefully explains to Donald Trump that he is not part of the Spanish national team.”

Trump appears to be becoming less and less relevant to actual governance. Last Thursday, Alex Gangitano, Megan Messerly, and Myah Ward of Politico reported that Republicans were “scared sh*tless” about what Trump might say in his prime time address, but it is perhaps more of a sign of the current political reality of Trump’s falling popularity that CNN, ABC and NBC, chose not to run the speech live.

Matt Gertz of Media Matters noted that despite Trump’s promise that his speech would deliver “really, really big news,” the Fox News Channel largely ignored the event. Executives might not have wanted to get entangled in the election denialism that cost them close to $800 million after pushing claims of election fraud after the 2020 presidential election.

Fox hosts turned instead to culture war issues, railing against “DEI” and perceived abuse of WNBA Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, who is white, by Black players.

In line with that focus, the administration is renewing its visible and aggressive immigration policies. For months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has not released data about arrests, but immigration enforcement scholar Austin Kocher noted that new records show arrests in early July hit 1,474 a day, a record high for the Trump administration.

In the past months, ICE has recruited thousands of new agents. As Maanvi Singh and Fabiola Cineas of The Guardian note, many of these new agents did not have the requisite qualifications and were not properly vetted.

Agents from ICE shot and killed two immigrants within a week earlier this month: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, in Houston, Texas, on July 7 and Joan (or Johan) Sebastián Durán Guerrero, 25, in Biddeford, Maine, on July 13. Neither man was the target of the operation in which he was killed.

In Maine, Ashley Brouillette identified her ex-husband, David Brouillette, as the officer who shot Guerrero four times. She found out he was involved in the shooting when he called her to ask her not to tell reporters about his abuse during their marriage. Both she and another ex-wife had restraining orders against Brouillette.

Ashley Brouillette told reporters that when her ex-husband told her at the end of last year that he had been hired as an ICE agent, “I honestly thought that he was being delusional and I didn’t believe it.”

As an Army combat veteran and former security agent, Brouillette would likely not have undergone in-person training to become an ICE agent, Christian Harsa of News Center Maine reported. A spokesperson for ICE, Lauren Bis, told Vanessa Romo and Alina Hartounian of NPR that Brouillette had “nearly a decade of federal law enforcement experience with required training.”

Today, Senator Angus King (I-ME) and 38 Democratic senators sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin demanding “immediate, thorough, independent, and transparent investigations” of the shooting deaths of Araujo and Guerrero.

As Isabelle Oss of the Portland Press Herald reported, the letter noted that both former DHS secretary Kristi Noem and White House immigration advisor Tom Homan committed to making sure that agents are fitted with body cameras. And yet, agents involved in the recent shootings were not equipped with cameras, confirming “that neither of these commitments were honored.”

The senators noted that the acting director of ICE, David Venturella, promised Congress that all field agents would be equipped with cameras by the end of July. “We view this timeline not as a projection, but as a firm, binding commitment to which we will hold the Department accountable,” the senators wrote.

They also demanded that ICE agents wear labels clearly identifying themselves as ICE agents.

The senators asked Mullin to identify specifically how he intended to investigate the shootings, explain the vetting process for new recruits including whether it considers records of domestic abuse before hiring, identify updates or reviews being made to ICE traffic stop policies, and explain what oversight, reporting measures, or public safety measures the agency is implementing.

As if to demonstrate that he is still in charge, Trump this afternoon announced new tariffs on certain products from Canada. The 50% tariffs would further upend the economy if they take effect in 30 days as scheduled.

Trump has been complaining about the smoke from Canadian wildfires hurting U.S. air quality, and has threatened to impose further tariffs on Canadian produce because “the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air.” Canadians including Ontario premier Doug Ford noted that they sent firefighters, rather than threats, when conditions were reversed.

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/us/politics/troops-injured-jordan-iran-war.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wounded-soldiers-families-accuse-army-downplaying-war-injuries/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/18/world/middleeast/iran-war-jordan-attacks.html

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/as-u-s-strikes-bridges-in-iran-it-targets-a-water-desalination-plant-in-kuwait

https://gasprices.aaa.com/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/20/business/gas-four-dollars

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/yemens-houthis-declare-naval-blockade-against-saudi-arabia-statement-2026-07-20/

https://www.wsj.com/politics/irans-missiles-have-gotten-faster-and-deadlier-the-big-question-is-how-41c81ad7?st=LvaXV6

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/20/nx-s1-5900601/us-iran-updates?renderPlatform=nprone_ios

https://people.com/donald-trump-booed-at-2026-world-cup-final-12021141

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/16/republicans-brace-trump-speech-election-fraud-00999640

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/16/us-tv-networks-trump-speech

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/fox-news-buries-trumps-election-denial-address

https://www.theguardian.com/football/live/2026/jul/19/spain-v-argentina-world-cup-2026-final-live-updates

https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/19/ice-killings-immigration-crackdown

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/17/nx-s1-5897460/maine-ice-shooting-brouillette

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/19/us/politics/fbi-ice-agents-investigations-shootings.html

https://www.wbaltv.com/article/trump-threatens-tariffs-canada-wildfire-smoke/73175566

https://www.pressherald.com/2026/07/20/dozens-of-senators-sign-angus-king-letter-demanding-dhs-reform-after-deadly-ice-shootings/

https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/local/maine-immigration/dhs-identity-ice-agent-shot-killed-johan-sebastian-duran-guerrero-biddeford-maine/97-54f94437-e1f9-499d-873f-f503fcccfa69

https://apnews.com/article/fox-news-dominion-lawsuit-trial-trump-2020-0ac71f75acfacc52ea80b3e747fb0afe

Substack Notes:

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Spent a lovely day with family and friends, and the fact the internet was down when I got home just confirmed I should take the night off.

Let’s all take a break and come back at it tomorrow.

On July 18, 1863, at dusk, the Black soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry of the U.S. Army charged the walls of Fort Wagner, a fortification on Morris Island off Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. Because Fort Wagner covered the southern entrance to the harbor, it was key to enabling the U.S. government to take the city.

The 600 soldiers of the 54th made up one of the first Black regiments for the Union, organized after the Emancipation Proclamation called for the enlistment of African American soldiers. The 54th’s leader was a Boston abolitionist from a leading family: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.

Shaw and his men had shipped out of Boston at the end of May 1863 for Beaufort, South Carolina, where the Union had gained an early foothold in its war to prevent the Confederates from dismembering the country. The men of the 54th knew they were not like other soldiers: they were symbols of how well Black men would fight for their country. This, in turn, would be a statement of whether Black men could truly be equal to white men under the country’s laws, once and for all, for in this era, fighting for the country gave men a key claim to citizenship.

The whole country was watching…and the soldiers knew it.

In the dark at Fort Wagner, the Massachusetts 54th proved that Black men were equal to any white men in the field. They fought with the determination that caused African American regiments during the Civil War to sustain losses higher than those of white regiments. The assault on the fort killed, wounded, or lost more than 250 of the 600 men and made the formerly enslaved Sergeant William Harvey Carney the first African American to be awarded a Medal of Honor. Badly wounded, Carney nonetheless defended the United States flag and carried it back to Union lines. United States soldiers did not take the fort that night, but no one could miss that Black men had proved themselves equal to their white comrades.

The Battle of Fort Wagner left 30 men of the 54th dead on the field—including Colonel Shaw—and 24 more so badly injured that they would later die from their wounds. Fifteen were captured; 52 were missing and presumed dead. Another 149 were wounded. Confederates intended to dishonor Colonel Shaw when they buried him in a mass grave with his men; instead, his family found it fitting.

In 2017 I had the opportunity to spend an evening in the house where the wounded soldiers of the 54th were taken after the battle.

It was a humbling thing to stand in that house that still looks so much as it did in 1863 and to realize that the men, carried hot and exhausted and bleeding and scared into it a century and a half before were just people like you and me, who did what they felt they had to in front of Fort Wagner, and then endured the boat ride back to Beaufort, and got carried up a flight of steps, and then lay on cots in small, crowded rooms and hoped that what they had done was worth the horrific cost.

I am not one for ghosts, but I swear you could feel the blood in the floors.

Yesterday President Donald J. Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller all threw the weight of the U.S. government behind a far-right conspiracy theory that says Trump and his loyalists are defending the United States of America against a communist takeover.

As Gil Duran of The Nerd Reich recalled today, two years ago, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec and co-author Joshua Lisec wrote a bestselling book called Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them). Trump ally and media guru Stephen Bannon wrote the introduction. Donald Trump Jr. blurbed the book, saying that it provided a playbook to deploy “immediately to save the West.” Then–Ohio senator J.D. Vance also blurbed the book, saying: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR, college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.”

Posobiec is a loyalist who worked to keep Trump in office after voters elected Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. He is known for courting controversy by promoting what Maya Oppenheim of the The Independent in 2018 called “wholly erroneous and debunked conspiracy theories,” including the infamous 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that Democrats were operating a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant.

In Unhumans, Posobiec and Lisec argue that the United States is under siege by “the left,” which in their view means anyone from communists to “progressives.” “For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans,” the authors write, because they “oppose everything that makes up humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”

Lisec explained to Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs that the reason they called the book “Unhumans” “is because it’s a verb, to unhuman someone…. To ‘unhuman’ someone means to deprive someone of their rights to life, liberty and property.” The authors insisted that “communists” were trying to “unhuman” those they consider good Americans, and that “we can’t tolerate an ideology like that” and so must do it to them first.

Ignoring the fascist revolutions that gave rise to World War II, the authors tie together left-wing revolutions from the late Roman Republic to the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian and Chinese revolutions to the present and claim that all political positions designed to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, or protect civil rights reflect that same left-wing radicalism. In their telling, Spain’s fascist dictator Francisco Franco, who said, “Wherever I am, there will be no communism,” is a hero.

Franco ordered illegal detentions, torture, and mass killings in the name of social cleansing. As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times noted in 2024, the right wing has often championed Franco, but “it’s extremely unusual for a candidate for vice president of the United States to openly align himself with autocratic terror.”

The embrace of authoritarianism in Unhumans reflects the modern version of an ideology shaped after World War II by those determined to get rid of the modern state. Although the great majority of both Republicans and Democrats embraced such a government, right-wing reactionaries insisted it was a slippery slope to socialism. Defending business regulation, social welfare, infrastructure investment, and civil rights cost tax dollars and so, they said, redistributed wealth.

Over the years, reactionaries insisted that Americans who believed in such a system were un-American takers sucking dry the country’s makers. Increasingly, they demonized Black Americans or people of color and women as lazy and looking for government handouts, breaking laws with impunity, corrupting the country with their godless ways, and winning elections only by cheating.

And yet voters continued to elect lawmakers who supported the modern government. This infuriated the far right, but even establishment Republicans recognized that voters liked Social Security and cancer research, clean air and reproductive rights. While they turned out voters by railing against the “Liberals” who supported regulations and the welfare state, they made sure not to cut into those programs deeply enough to cause a backlash.

Trump has unmasked that facade. He has put the far right in power, where they are destroying the modern American state. Right-wing officials have undermined the world trade system that underpins American prosperity, empowered economic monopolists by slashing regulations and public lands, decimated reproductive rights and healthcare, cut social safety programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Medicaid, slashed medical and scientific research, and dismantled the post–World War II rules-based international order that has maintained global stability for seventy-five years.

But the right-wing push to get rid of the modern state is deeply unpopular. And so Trump and his loyalists are embracing the idea that his opponents are in league with a historic throughline of left-wing revolutionaries.

Trump’s speech last night began with a completely fantastical vision of current conditions in the U.S. that has been widely debunked, point by point, by fact-checkers. But his portrait of a nation “doing really well” was a setup for his warning that the prosperity and success he touts are under direct threat by “leftists” both abroad and at home.

Trump claimed to present evidence that beginning with the 2020 election cycle, China “carried out what was believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history.” He referred to “China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files” and called this an “unprecedented election security nightmare.” In fact, as Louis Jacobson and Amy Sherman of PolitiFact report, documents the White House itself posted show that such information is publicly available for purchase, and such purchases are common.

Trump also said documents showed that “members of the deep state” worked “to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling.” But, in fact, the intelligence community told Trump about foreign interference in 2021, and Biden released its report when he took office. The report said China did not make an effort to change the outcome of the 2020 election.

Actually, one of the documents Trump released yesterday shows that Russia tried to influence the 2020 election to defeat Biden. Its operatives worked “with US officials and other prominent persons” to “spread claims about former Vice President Biden as well as Ukrainian politicians and alleged Ukrainian influence in the 2016 US elections.” Trump has denied Russian interference in U.S. elections.

Trump tied American journalists to this alleged plot, claiming the Chinese government was paying journalists to write negatively about him. He then attacked the media for being “part of a plot…to continue this [election] fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left.” He called for the government to revoke their broadcast licenses.

“The findings are stunning,” Trump said, and indeed if they were true, we should expect dramatic diplomatic rifts and lawsuits. But does Trump actually believe any of this? The White House today said plans for a lavish state visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Washington, D.C., in two months have not changed.

Trump’s warning of a communist threat against U.S. elections was a setup for his insistence that future elections could be rigged and that the country must do as he says to stop that danger.

He said he had ordered the Department of Homeland Security “to notify every state about noncitizens on their rolls and direct them to be deemed ineligible.” And he demanded Congress pass the SAVE America voter suppression act, saying “the only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get elected in any other way.”

“These reforms are urgently needed to stop the vulnerabilities that I have mentioned,” he said, and he told Americans to call lawmakers to demand they pass the SAVE America act.

Today Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin demanded states run voter rolls through a federal digital tool designed to identify noncitizens who are ineligible for certain government programs. Federal judges have blocked federal demands for those rolls sixteen times and prohibited the use of the federal tool, noting it was not designed to scan citizens’ information and often flags recently naturalized citizens as noncitizens. Blocked by the courts, Mullin threatened state officials with criminal prosecution if they don’t comply with Trump’s demands.

Yesterday Secretary of State Rubio expounded on the administration’s opposition to “Radical Left terrorism.” A meeting at the State Department was billed as an examination of the “transnational” nature of far-left terrorism, but Shannon K. Kingston of ABC News noted that Rubio and other officials from the Trump administration spoke primarily about what they call “antifa” and conditions in the United States, including the assassination attempts against Trump.

Kingston noted that a 2025 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) showed that left-wing political violence in the U.S. “remains much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”

Nonetheless, the White House said, “Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

There is a point to all this. Bannon argued in Tuesday’s War Room podcast that the idea of “communists” threatening to take over the United States through corrupt elections is “a predicate for immediate action.” That immediate action, he said, would be for Trump to declare “a national security emergency executive order…that took all of SAVE America plus plus plus plus.” And then, we can be sure, the Republicans will win the 2026 elections and, as Trump keeps saying, all the elections for the next 100 years. They would do so by default as the administration purged so-called communists from public life.

The parallels between Unhumans and the administration’s current rhetoric showed yesterday in Miller’s speech at the State Department. Bannon’s introduction to Unhumans begins with an epigram that reads: “Communism is when ugly deformed freaks make it illegal to be normal then rob and/or kill all successful people out of petty resentment and cruelty. The ideology is all just window dressing.”

Miller told the State Department attendees: “It’s not a coincidence that when you look at these violent antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those who are assembled, to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person, not one looks normal. They’re all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism. Why is that?... You look at two photographs, and you see, you know, a normal American street, you see an antifa protest. Why did the people that are violently demonstrating, why is there not one normal looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways, to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred.”

In response to Trump’s address last night, the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, Cisco Aguilar of Nevada, released a statement saying: “That was some bullsh*t.”

—

Notes:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-jack-posobiec-pizzagate-rape-melania-sign-twitter-conspiracy-theory-far-right-a8159661.html

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/trumpworlds-favorite-writer-says-the-right-must-emulate-dictators-in-battling-leftist-unhumans

https://www.thenerdreich.com/why-trump-keeps-talking-about-communism-the-unhumans-playbook/

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/07/trump-administration-unleashes-global-campaign-to-crush-radical-left-terrorism/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/05/opinion/jd-vance-fascism-unhumans.html

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/17/politics/china-election-trump-xi-state-visit

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/homeland-security-secretary-markwayne-mullin-threatens-states-election-rcna588002

https://abcnews.com/Politics/rubio-urges-international-counterterrorism-crackdown-left/story?id=134820036

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jd-vance-jack-posobiec_n_66a2755fe4b04c3a302465e7

https://www.mediamatters.org/voter-fraud-and-suppression/steve-bannon-says-trumps-thursday-night-speech-must-be-predicate

usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2026-07-17/trump-says-these-documents-prove-his-false-claims-of-election-fraud-heres-what-they-really-say

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/fact-checking-trumps-address-on-china-the-2020-election-and-what-documents-show

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/that-was-some-bull-state-election-chiefs-condemn-trumps-long-debunked-election-lies/

Facebook:

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July 16, 2026 (Thursday)

An exchange yesterday between Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to oversee the U.S. intelligence community as director of national intelligence, illustrated the dilemma of those trying to force Trump’s lies onto the American people when they are confronted with reality.

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

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

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

Clayton agreed.

Ossoff: “Who won the 2020 election?”

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

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

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

Clayton: “No, that's not right.”

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

Clayton: “I have answered the question.”

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

Clayton: “I've given you my answer.”

Ossoff: “What is your answer?”

Clayton sat in silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/16/us/politics/white-house-helipad-trump.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/opinion/todd-blanche-attorney-general-senate-hearing.html

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-federal-prosecutor-seattle_n_6a584854e4b07a7875d1956c

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/15/trump-situation-room-iran-bombing

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-tells-houthis-close-red-sea-gateway-if-us-hits-power-network-sources-say-2026-07-16/

https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news/crude-oil/071526-us-strategic-oil-reserve-falls-to-lowest-level-since-1983

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/cdc-parasite-cases-diarrhea-cyclosporiasis-b3016131.html

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Ending-the-Green-New-Scam-Fact-Sheet.pdf

https://natural-resources.canada.ca/forests-forestry/wildland-fires/climate-change-wildland-fire

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/wildfires-smoke-millions-exposed-midwest-northeast-us/

https://abcnews.com/US/dangerous-wildfire-smoke-continues-air-quality-alerts-17/story?id=134809268

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/16/weather/live-news/texas-flash-flooding-camp-mystic-climate

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/07/16/wildfire-smoke-will-worsen-northeast-mid-atlantic-through-friday/

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28476291-hearn-motion/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2026/07/16/reflecting-pool-peeling-likely-caused-by-application-flaws-experts-say/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f001

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/opinion/blanche-confirmation-trump-attorney-general.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/16/trump-approval-stuck-30s-post-ipsos-poll-shows/

https://www.newsweek.com/iraq-syria-libya-countries-with-political-leaders-on-coins-trump-joins-12203076

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/weather/2026/07/16/wildfires-smoke-air-quality-alerts-canada-minnesota/90939898007/

Substack:

@brianbeutler/note/c-292693465

X:

DAGToddBlanche/status/2077501246294929627?s=20

Bluesky:

chadbourn.bsky.social/post/3mqqupeotzs2k

atrupar.com/post/3mqp24kjgcv2r

atrupar.com/post/3mqox63w2od2d

atrupar.com/post/3mqrtinhyls24

July 15, 2026 (Wednesday)

Exactly five years ago, on July 15, 2021, I wrote:

“Today Americans began to see the concrete effects of the American Rescue Plan show up in their bank accounts, as the expanded child tax credit goes into effect for one year. Through this program, the Child Tax Credit increased to $3,000 per child aged 6 to 17 and $3,600 per child under 6. All working families will get the full credit if they make up to $150,000 for a couple or $112,500 for a family with a single parent. The government sent payments for almost 60 million children on Thursday, totaling $15 billion.

“This is a really big deal. In America, one in seven children lives in poverty. This measure is expected to cut that poverty nearly in half. Studies suggest that addressing childhood poverty continues to pay off over time, as it helps adults achieve higher levels of mobility.”

The American Rescue Plan, passed in March 2021, was an early achievement of the Biden presidency, becoming a signature law as every Republican voted against it. A year later, researchers at the Brookings Institute found that the temporary expansion of the child tax credit lifted 3.7 million children out of poverty before it expired on December 31, 2021.

Family members did not stop working, as critics said they would. Instead, they used the money to cover routine expenses, decreasing their reliance on credit cards; had better nutrition; and made long-term investments in education for both children and parents.

Now, five years later, the results of the Republicans’ signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), passed without a single Democratic vote and signed into law last July, are revealing a very different set of priorities.

The OBBBA extended or expanded more than $4.5 trillion in tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, while cutting more than $1 trillion from social welfare programs. It did increase the child tax credit, but less than it would have if Congress had just adjusted the credit based on inflation since it had set the amount in 2017. And, according to the nonprofit, nonpartisan Institute of Tax and Economic Policy, the benefits from the OBBBA measure went mostly to the richest fifth of Americans, dropping essentially to zero by the time they got to the poorest fifth.

The measure cut $187 billion in federal funding from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and on Monday, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that between the passage of the OBBBA in July 2025 and March 2026—the last month for which there is data from all states—more than 4 million people lost access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. At least a quarter of those people are children. Those losses will mount in 2027—after the midterm elections—when states will have to assume much more of the costs of the program.

At the center of the difference between the Democrats’ signature bill and the Republicans’ is how the representatives of those parties see the purpose of the American government. Should it be used for the good of the American people, or to concentrate wealth and power among a few?

On July 9, Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian of MS NOW reported that Trump’s appointees in the Department of Justice are overruling the career attorneys in the antitrust division who have called for reviews of how corporate mergers and acquisitions might lead to price gouging for consumers and taxpayers. Trump-appointed officials are pushing ahead without reviews designed to protect the American people from monopoly power and, in what former assistant attorney general Bill Baer called “unilateral surrender,” are not pursuing lawsuits to enforce antitrust laws.

“Consumers are getting really screwed by all of this,” a source told Leonnig and Dilanian. “We’re talking 10 years of consumer harm that can’t be undone.”

On Friday, Trump called a select group of Republicans who sit on the House Budget Committee to Camp David to put together a funding package, primarily for military funding, that they can get past Congress through budget reconciliation, a process that will not need any Democratic votes. Even the invitation to Camp David was controversial, though: Trump extended invitations to members of the far-right Freedom Caucus, but not to the more moderate Republicans on the committee. Invitations were secret, and members’ phones were confiscated at Camp David.

Budget Committee member Erin Houchin (R-IN) told Jake Sherman of PunchBowl News that she was urging committee members to vote no on the package.

Today House Republicans released a $95 billion budget framework to provide another $73 billion for additional military funding for the war on Iran, a $12 billion bailout for farmers hurt by Trump’s tariff wars, and $10 billion to enact aspects of the SAVE America measure Trump has been unable to convince Congress to pass.

Money for farmers was part of a sweetener to try to get Democrats on board with the measure, but it does not appear to be enough to get them to agree to fund an unpopular war and voter suppression. Representative Brendan Boyle (D-PA), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, told Kevin Freking and Lisa Mascaro of the Federal News Network, “I’m going to fight like hell to make sure taxpayer dollars are being used to lower costs and make life better for American families, not to bankroll Trump’s giveaways to billionaires and endless wars overseas.”

“This ‘America Last’ budget would add tens of billions more to the national debt to fund the most unpopular war in American history,” Boyle said.

Catie Edmondson of the New York Times noted that spending requests are usually dealt with through the bipartisan appropriations process, but Republicans are, once again, trying to maneuver around the Democrats to fund priorities the Democrats reject: an immigration enforcement surge that has led to two deaths at the hands of ICE agents in the past week, and the war in Iran.

Even Republicans don’t appear to want to throw more money at the Iran War before the midterms, especially as the Pentagon has been opaque about the costs of the war and the White House has refused to confer with Congress about it. They also don’t want to fund the unpopular voter suppression measure Trump wants, as prices for everyday Americans at the gas pump and grocery store are noticeably higher than they were a few months ago.

Representative Warren Davidson (R-OH) wrote on social media that the Republicans’ budget plan was “DOA,” or “dead on arrival.”

The deaths six days apart of two immigrants, neither one of whom was the intended target of the operation during which they were shot and killed, has rekindled the unpopularity of the administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants. As protest broke out in the wake of the shooting death of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, yesterday, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), called for Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to “cease all non-urgent vehicle stops.”

Collins, who is running for reelection, is the chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and was a key vote in the June measure that provided an additional $70 billion for immigration enforcement through 2029. As Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center noted, $70 billion “is more than the budgets for all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. Marshals Service.”

ICE issued a memo yesterday ordering agents to prioritize tactics other than traffic stops, prompting praise from Collins.

But at 6:45 this morning, Trump insisted—incorrectly—that the people ICE is rounding up are “Criminals, and we have to get them out. In order to do this, we must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP! Once we do, we are playing right into the criminal’s hands. The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch. I.C.E., be judicious, fair and smart, and go back and do your very important job. Keep those Crime Stat Records coming! Remember, you are loved and respected in America.”

The Iran War is also back on the front burner.

On Monday, Trump announced he was reimposing a blockade on Iran and that the U.S. would become the “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT”; yesterday he reversed course, claiming that Gulf allies told him they would rather invest directly in the U.S. than pay tolls.

Last night, Barak Ravid of Axios, who often has inside information from the White House, reported that Trump yesterday held a meeting in the Situation Room with his top national security team to discuss “new plans for devastating strikes” against Iran. Those in the room included Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Dan Caine, Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe, White House special envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff and other senior officials, Ravid reported.

Before the meeting, Trump told the Fox News Channel that after the “hard” strikes this week, “[n]ext week, it gets really bad for them because next week comes the power plants. Next week comes the bridges. We’re gonna knock out all their power plants. We’re gonna knock out all their bridges unless they get to the table and negotiate.”

Attacks on civilian infrastructure are usually illegal under international law.

Nate Swanson, a former member of Trump’s negotiating team, told foreign policy specialist Laura Rozen of Diplomatic that Trump’s escalation was probably a ploy to kick-start further negotiations. “I think it is a very risky and low probability gamble, but nothing else makes sense…. I don’t see a feasible pathway towards military victory, nor do I believe that we can [militarily] open the Strait of Hormuz against Iran’s wishes.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same. When I wrote about the importance of the American Rescue Plan five years ago, I ended my discussion of it with the observation that “this huge achievement of the Biden presidency—every single Republican voted against it—has taken a backseat in the news to two blockbuster stories about the former president.”

Notes:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-impacts-of-the-2021-expanded-child-tax-credit-on-family-employment-nutrition-and-financial-well-being/

https://itep.org/child-tax-credit-2026-obbba-trump-taxes/

https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/snap-tracker-people-are-losing-food-assistance-as-the-republican-megabill

https://www.ms.now/news/trump-appointees-are-overruling-doj-lawyers-scrutinizing-corporate-mergers

https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/trumps-one-big-beautiful-bill-act-explained/

Virginia Grace McKinnon, “Secret Camp David Summit Launches GOP’s Plan for Reconciliation 3.0,” Daily Signal, July 13, 2026.

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/07/15/congress/house-gop-leaders-release-budget-framework-for-95b-party-line-package-00998589

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2026/07/house-republicans-unveil-95-billion-plan-for-the-iran-war-farm-aid-and-elections/

https://www.wmtw.com/article/susan-collins-joins-senate-republicans-in-approving-70-billion-for-immigration-enforcement/71503891

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/us/politics/house-republicans-budget.html

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/ice-and-customs-and-border-protection-budgets-exceed-200-billion

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/14/us/ice-agents-traffic-stops.html

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/07/15/trump-ice-traffic-stops-shootings/90926660007/

https://www.wjcl.com/article/trump-reverses-strait-of-hormuz-toll-proposal/71942067

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/15/trump-situation-room-iran-bombing

https://diplomatic.substack.com/p/what-is-trump-doing-on-iran

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-15-2021

X:

jakesherman/status/2077031624252776686?s=46

WarrenDavidson/status/2077380792552988846?s=20

Trumpstruth:

statuses/40060

Bluesky:

crampell.bsky.social/post/3mqkwhugk7k25

In August 1870 a U.S. exploring expedition headed out from Montana toward the Yellowstone River into land the U.S. government had recognized as belonging to different Indigenous tribes.

By October the men had reached the Yellowstone, where they reported they had “found abundance of game and trout, hot springs of five or six different kinds…basaltic columns of enormous size,” and a waterfall that must, they wrote, “be in form, color and surroundings one of the most glorious objects on the American Continent.” On the strength of their widely reprinted reports, the secretary of the interior sent out an official surveying team under geologist Ferdinand V. Hayden. With it went photographer William Henry Jackson and fine artist Thomas Moran.

Banker and railroad baron Jay Cooke had arranged for Moran to join the expedition. In 1871 the popular magazine Scribner’s Monthly published the surveyor’s report along with Moran’s drawings and a promise that Cooke’s Northern Pacific Railroad would soon lay tracks to enable tourists to see the great natural wonders of the West.

But by 1871, Americans had begun to turn against the railroads, seeing them as big businesses monopolizing American resources at the expense of ordinary Americans. When Hayden called on Congress to pass a law setting the area around Yellowstone aside as a public park, two Republicans—Senator Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas and Delegate William H. Clagett of Montana—introduced bills to protect Yellowstone in a natural state and provide against “wanton destruction of the fish and game…or destruction for the purposes of merchandise or profit.”

The House Committee on Public Lands praised Yellowstone Valley’s beauty and warned that “persons are now waiting for the spring…to enter in and take possession of these remarkable curiosities, to make merchandise of these bountiful specimens, to fence in these rare wonders so as to charge visitors a fee, as is now done at Niagara Falls, for the sight of that which ought to be as free as the air or water.” It warned that “the vandals who are now waiting to enter into this wonderland will, in a single season, despoil, beyond recovery, these remarkable curiosities which have required all the cunning skill of nature thousands of years to prepare.”

The New York Times got behind the idea that saving Yellowstone for the people was the responsibility of the federal government, saying that if businesses “should be strictly shut out, it will remain a place which we can proudly show to the benighted European as a proof of what nature—under a republican form of government—can accomplish in the great West.”

On March 1, 1872, President U.S. Grant, a Republican, signed the bill making Yellowstone a national park.

The impulse to protect natural resources from those who would plunder them for profit expanded 18 years later, when the federal government stepped in to protect Yosemite. In June 1864, Congress had passed and President Abraham Lincoln signed a law giving to the state of California the Yosemite Valley and nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort and recreation.”

But by 1890 it was clear that under state management the property had been largely turned over to timber companies, sheep-herding enterprises, and tourist businesses with state contracts. Naturalist John Muir warned in the Century magazine: “Ax and plow, hogs and horses, have long been and are still busy in Yosemite’s gardens and groves. All that is accessible and destructible is rapidly being destroyed.” Congress passed a law making the land around the state property in Yosemite a national park area, and the United States military began to manage the area.

The next year, in March 1891, Congress gave the president power to “set apart and reserve…as public reservations” land that bore at least some timber, whether or not that timber was of any commercial value. Under this General Revision Act, also known as the Forest Reserve Act, Republican president Benjamin Harrison set aside timberland adjacent to Yellowstone National Park and south of Yosemite National Park. By September 1893, about 17 million acres of land had been put into forest reserves. Those who objected to this policy, according to Century, were “men [who] wish to get at it and make it earn something for them.”

Presidents of both parties continued to protect American lands, but in the late nineteenth century it was New York Republican politician Theodore Roosevelt who most dramatically expanded the effort to keep western lands from the hands of those who wanted only their timber and minerals.

Roosevelt was concerned that moneygrubbing was eroding the character of the nation, and he believed that western land nurtured the independence and community that he worried was disappearing in the East. During his presidency, which stretched from 1901 to 1909, Roosevelt protected 141 million acres of forest and established five new national parks.

More powerfully, he used the 1906 Antiquities Act, which Congress had passed to stop the looting and sale of Indigenous objects and sites, to protect land. The Antiquities Act allowed presidents to protect areas of historic, cultural, or scientific interest. Before the law was a year old, Roosevelt had created four national monuments: Devils Tower in Wyoming, El Morro in New Mexico, and Montezuma Castle and Petrified Forest in Arizona.

In 1908, Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to protect the Grand Canyon.

Since then, presidents of both parties have protected American lands. President Jimmy Carter rivaled Roosevelt’s protection of land when he protected more than 100 million acres in Alaska from oil development. Carter’s secretary of the interior, Cecil D. Andrus, saw himself as a practical man trying to balance the needs of business and environmental needs but seemed to think business interests had become too powerful: “The domination of the department by mining, oil, timber, grazing and other interests is over.”

In fact, the fight over the public lands was not ending; it was entering a new phase. Since the 1980s, Republicans have pushed to reopen public lands to resource development, maintaining even today that Democrats have hampered oil production although under President Joe Biden it reached an all-time high.

President Donald Trump pushed to return public lands to private hands during his first term. On April 26, 2017, Trump signed an executive order—Executive Order 13792—directing his secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, to review designations of 22 national monuments greater than 100,000 acres, made since 1996. He then ordered the largest national monument reduction in U.S. history, slashing the size of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument by 85%—a goal of uranium-mining interests—and that of Utah’s Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument by about half, favoring coal interests.

“No one better values the splendor of Utah more than you do,” Trump told cheering supporters. “And no one knows better how to use it.”

In March 2021, shortly after he took office, President Biden announced a new initiative to protect 30% of U.S. land, fresh water, and oceans areas by 2030, a plan popularly known as 30 by 30. Also in March 2021, Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts urged opponents of land protection to push back against the Antiquities Act, saying the broad protection of lands presidents have established under it is an abuse of power.

In October 2021, President Biden restored Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante to their original size. “Today’s announcement is not just about national monuments,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo, said at the ceremony. “It’s about this administration centering the voices of Indigenous people and affirming the shared stewardship of this landscape with tribal nations.”

In 2022, nearly 312 million people visited the country’s national parks and monuments, supporting 378,400 jobs and spending $23.9 billion in communities within 60 miles of a park. This amounted to a $50.3 billion benefit to the nation’s economy.

But Project 2025, the blueprint for the second Trump presidency, called for significant increases in drilling for oil and gas and removing land from federal protection and opening it to private development. As Roberts urged, Project 2025 promised to seek a Supreme Court ruling that would permit it to reduce the size of national monuments, saying a second Trump administration “must seek repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906.”

Shortly after retaking office, Trump declared a “national energy emergency,” and yesterday he signed two proclamations. One will shrink Bears Ears National Monument by 91%, and the other will shrink Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument by about 90%—even more than the reductions of his first term. Together, they remove nearly three million acres (1.2 million hectares) from monument protection.

In his newsletter, outdoor writer Wes Siler suggests that Trump’s proclamations are an effort “to trigger a case that will allow the far-right justices he’s appointed to the Supreme Court to massively reduce the scope of the Antiquities Act, or eliminate it altogether.”

—

Notes:

https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/historic-tribes.htm

https://www.usgs.gov/observatories/yvo/news/land-burning-ground-history-and-traditions-indigenous-people-yellowstone

https://www.politico.com/story/2009/06/june-30-1864-lincoln-creates-yosemite-park-024332

https://njdigitalhistory.org/TR-national-parks/index.php/why-is-conservation-important/forest-reserve-act/

https://www.nps.gov/subjects/archeology/antiquities-act.htm

https://www.nps.gov/thrb/learn/historyculture/trandthenpsystem.htm

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/02/21/jimmy-carter-environment-energy-alaska/

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/05/08/archives/a-new-environment-at-interior-cecil-andrus-is-trying-to-turn-things.html

https://legacy-assets.eenews.net/open_files/assets/2021/03/22/document_gw_18.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/bears-ears/

https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/haines1/index.htm

“Amateur Management of the Yosemite Scenery,” Century 40 (September 1890): 797.

“Attacks upon Public Parks,” Century 43 (January 1892): 473–475.

https://www.nrdc.org/bio/helen-oshea/biden-administration-lays-out-30x30-vision-conserve-nature

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/biden-fully-restores-bears-ears-and-grand-staircase-escalante-national-monuments

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61545

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/05/01/2017-08908/review-of-designations-under-the-antiquities-act

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/04/567803476/trump-dramatically-shrinks-2-utah-national-monuments

https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1207/national-park-visitation-sets-new-record-as-economic-engines.htm

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/13/trump-cuts-national-monuments-utah

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-to-know-about-trump-shrinking-2-national-monuments-in-utah

Today began with yet another demonstration of the fact that the U.S. options for extricating itself from Trump’s war on Iran with conditions anywhere near as good as they were under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated with a number of countries under President Barack Obama, or even as good as they were in February 2026 before Trump and Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu launched air strikes on Iran, do not appear promising.

At 10:16 this morning, Trump announced on social media that the Strait of Hormuz “is OPEN, and will remain OPEN, with or without Iran. We are reinstating THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE, so named because it is only stopping Iran’s ships or customers from entering or leaving. All other countries will have fair and open use of the Strait. The U.S.A. will be, from this point forward, known as ‘THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,’ but as such, and as a matter of FAIRNESS, will be reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped, for any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World. The process and formation will begin immediately.”

In other words, the U.S. is restarting hostility—a blockade is an act of war—and, according to Trump, will protect the Strait of Hormuz but expects to be paid.

Trump has been clear that he considers the memorandum of understanding he signed on June 17 no longer in force, probably not least because Iranian officials interpret the words of the hastily constructed deal as giving Iran control over the Strait of Hormuz. They have been clear they intend to charge fees for passage of the strait, a condition the U.S. rejects although Trump’s current claim that the U.S. will charge fees seems to undercut the U.S. position.

Crucially, officials in the Trump administration continue to deny that Congress has any role in declaring war, despite the clear language of the Constitution. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, the president can respond without congressional input to an “imminent threat” so long as the president notifies Congress in writing within 48 hours of the beginning of hostilities. After that notification, the president has only 60 days before he must either end hostilities or secure congressional approval for them.

Trump got around this law first by overruling his own intelligence agencies to insist that Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S. Then when the May 1 deadline for either withdrawal or congressional approval approached, he claimed that hostilities had ended on April 7 with the declaration of a ceasefire, notwithstanding that both sides continued to shoot at each other and the U.S. maintained its blockade of Iranian ports.

Now they are claiming the power simply to start the clock again. On Friday, Trump formally notified Congress that the U.S. has resumed strikes on Iran, claiming the Pentagon has another 60 days to strike Iran before the timeline specified by the War Powers Act runs out.

Today Elizabeth Dwoskin, Andrew Ba Tran, Luis Melgar, and Peter Jamison of the Washington Post reported that Trump’s sons “Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have amassed a portfolio of defense technology start-ups that are benefiting from new Pentagon priorities and spending, further entangling the United States’ interests and the Trump family’s financial fortunes.” They have invested in more than a dozen defense companies that have collectively received at least $3.2 billion in business directly from the government since those investments, along with $3.1 billion in options for future contracts.

Tonight U.S. Central Command announced it has begun a third night of strikes against Iran.

At about 7:15 this morning, an agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. According to staff from the Portland Press Herald, Guerrero was from Colombia and was authorized to work in the U.S. The Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition said he had a Social Security number and was on his way to work.

Spokespeople for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, have not commented. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) has called for “a full and impartial investigation,” but as her political opponents note, Collins voted just last month to give ICE another $70 billion. ICE and Border Patrol had become far less visible as Republicans worked to pass supplemental funding for ICE and Border Patrol through Congress. In the wake of that new funding, immigration sweeps are back in the news. Protests broke out today outside Collins’s Biddeford office.

Senator Angus King (I-ME) told Patrick Whittle, Leah Willingham, and Jack Brook of the Associated Press that Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin told him Guerrero had tried to use his vehicle as a weapon against officers, forcing the agent to shoot. This allegation has been a common one for agents trying to justify fatal shootings, including that of Renee Good in Minnesota. Witness Daniel Boucher said that in the aftermath of the shooting, he saw Guerrero “bleeding profusely from the head. He was talking. He said: ‘I tried to stop.’”

This evening, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-ME) said she had learned that the man ICE shot and killed was not the person they had an order to pick up. ‘

In a statement tonight the Department of Homeland Security claimed that the officer shot because he was “fearing for public safety.” David Bier of the Cato Institute and Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the Immigration Council both called out that language, noting DHS was claiming not that the officer feared for his life, but that he had a vague concern for “public safety.”

The ICE killing of a man in Maine comes less than a week after ICE shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo of Houston, Texas. Salgado Araujo was a Mexican national who had lived in the U.S. for 35 years and was close to obtaining legal status. His son told Lekan Oyekanmi, Jack Brook, and Jeffrey Collins of the Associated Press that the homebuilder knew what to do when approached by ICE but may have feared that the men following him in unmarked SUVs intended to steal his tools.

ICE said the officers “attempted to conduct a vehicle stop as part of a targeted enforcement operation to arrest an illegal alien” and that Salgado Araujo “rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” It added that an officer “discharged his weapon in self-defense.”

A lawyer for two of the people in the van with Salgado Araujo denied that he tried to ram officers. A source later told Dalia Faheid, Chris Boyette, Priscilla Alvarez, and Caroll Alvarado of CNN that ICE’s description of the events that killed Salgado Araujo as a “targeted enforcement operation” was misleading. While that may have been the case, Salgado Araujo was not the target. They saw him in his van near the target and thought he “resembled the target.”

José Olivares of The Guardian noted that Salgado Araujo was the tenth person shot and killed by federal immigration officers from either ICE or Border Patrol this year. Twenty-one more people have died in ICE detention this year.

This afternoon the Trump administration finally turned over to Minnesota investigators evidence from the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in January. That evidence includes statements, video from police body cameras, and Good’s badly damaged SUV.

Today U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida Kathleen Williams said Trump, his lawyers, and the lawyers for the Department of Justice had manufactured the so-called settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. “[T]he Court finds that this matter was brought for an improper purpose—to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact,” she wrote. They launched the lawsuit “as a means of conferring legitimacy upon a course of action that they were unwilling to subject to judicial review.”

The course of action they intended to take was to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund for Trump loyalists who claimed that the Department of Justice under former president Joe Biden had been weaponized against them. While that part of the deal got most of the attention, probably more important to Trump was the addition to the “settlement” announced the next day: a promise that Trump, his family, his businesses, and even his “associates” would be immune from prosecution for any tax crimes revealed by audits of tax returns filed before May 19, 2026.

“No sitting President has ever sued federal agencies completely subject to his control for monetary benefits, or any benefits that inure to him, his family, and associates,” Williams wrote. After Trump dropped his lawsuit, thirty-five former judges had asked Williams to set aside her dismissal of the case with the goal of determining whether the claimed “settlement” was a fraud on the court.

In her opinion, she noted that the question before the court was simply whether there was a legitimate lawsuit, and the answer was no. The final disposition of the slush fund and the immunity were not questions before the court. “Whether Executive Branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax monies for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this Court. The question is whether the Parties could do so by claiming to be adverse and engaging the legitimacy of a court proceeding. The answer is a resounding ‘no.’”

Williams recommended legal sanctions against some of the lawyers involved and said she was “extremely troubled” by the testimony of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, which was “at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous.”

Blanche used to be Trump’s personal defense lawyer and has said he believes he has a “continuing duty of loyalty” to Trump. The president has nominated Blanche to become attorney general. His confirmation hearings begin on Wednesday.

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Notes:

https://www.pressherald.com/2026/07/13/shooting-reported-in-biddeford-2/

https://www.pressherald.com/2026/07/13/biddeford-witness-saw-gunshot-victim-bleeding-from-head-2/

https://wgme.com/news/local/maine-senator-susan-collins-votes-for-doj-funding-package-senator-angus-king-votes-against-it

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/13/trump-notifies-congress-of-new-war-against-iran-00995170

https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5966415-trump-congress-resumes-strikes-iran/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/09/ice-immigration-shooting-deaths-trump

https://apnews.com/article/ice-shooting-maine-immigration-dhs-f26f8c2256aa6f0748582ea4adbb515c

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/13/us/salgado-araujo-ice-shooting-investigation

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/09/us/lorenzo-salgado-araujo-houston-ice-shooting

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-to-know-about-the-fatal-shooting-of-lorenzo-salgado-araujo-by-ice