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Vice President JD Vance would very much like you to know that he has been opposed to the war in Iran from the beginning.

In public he may act the loyal underling, repeating the administration’s lame talking points and insisting that the war is going great — or alternatively, that it isn’t a war at all (“I wouldn’t call it a war”) so what are we getting all hot and bothered about?

At the same time, Vance has been waging a not-so-subtle campaign to make it clear that when it comes to one of the worst decisions Donald Trump and his administration made, the vice president’s hands are clean.

But even if we grant that the reports Vance and his allies have fed to the news media about his misgivings are basically true — and there isn’t much reason to believe otherwise — it will not be so easy for him to evade the taint of this disaster when he runs for president in 2028. Which is what this is really all about.

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Opposed from the beginning — sort of

After the war began in February, behind-the-scenes reporting indicated that if nothing else, Vance had at least some glimmers of doubt about the adventure the administration was about to embark on.

According to one lengthy New York Times account with six bylines, Vance “appeared to personally lean against military attacks,” but helped convince Trump that if he was going to start a war, the amount of force deployed should be big and decisive from the outset. If that description of the deliberations is accurate, it shows that like everyone else in the administration, Vance underestimated the Iranian regime’s ability to absorb punishment with their resolve intact.

There’s also no indication that Vance understood that Iran would shut down the Strait of Hormuz, with dire consequences — which any expert in this area could have told him had he bothered to ask. Or at the very least, like Trump himself, Vance didn’t take the possibility seriously enough.

In sum, his slight misgivings were hardly evidence of a brilliant strategic mind at work.

But as the war dragged on, the regime steadfastly refused to surrender, the shutdown of Hormuz touched off a global energy crisis, American weapons stockpiles depleted, Trump’s insistence that victory had already been won grew more and more ridiculous, and it became clear that this war was spectacularly unpopular, Vance confronted a dilemma. The war was going to be neither a glorious triumph nor a quickly forgotten jaunt to the Middle East and back. So when he makes his inevitable run for the White House in 2028, what does he want voters to think about when they think about JD Vance and the Iran war?

The answer, it seems, is this: While he did his duty as vice president, Vance was always against the war, and did everything he could to keep it from getting worse.

So began a steady supply of stories fed to the press, especially the New York Times, the most influential news outlet in the country, with behind-the-scenes scoops about Vance’s private fretting and noble attempts to limit the damage. It’s a bit reminiscent of those stories from Trump’s first term about how Ivanka and Jared were secretly working to moderate the president’s worst impulses.

In March, we learned that Vance “pushed for moving quickly to minimize casualties, avert leaks to the news media, and prevent Iran from preemptively attacking troops in the Middle East.”

Wise counsel indeed!

In April, the Times told its readers, “Mr. Vance warned Mr. Trump that a war against Iran could cause regional chaos and untold numbers of casualties. It could also break apart Mr. Trump’s political coalition and would be seen as a betrayal by many voters who had bought into the promise of no new wars.”

So prescient.

When Vance was sent to Pakistan to negotiate an end to the war and left in a huff after one day, the Times wrote that “the man inside Mr. Trump’s inner circle most opposed to the war” sadly couldn’t find a way to end it, mostly because of the Iranians’ intransigence.

Then last week, the Times was given another scoop: a detailed account of how Vance has reached out to military commanders around the world, getting detailed information about the state of the conflict — just the kind of information-seeking that Trump can’t be bothered with.

“Mr. Vance came away from some of his conversations with deep concerns about the overall strategy and the prospects for success,” the paper reports.

Add it all up, and what becomes clear is that Vance has been assiduously painting a picture, through the news media in general but especially the Times, of an official who saw everything clearly before it happened, just the kind of strategic and insightful thinker we’d be blessed to have making decisions from the Oval Office.

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Doomed to fail

To be fair to Vance, he confronts the same problem faced by every vice president who aspires to take his boss’s place. The position of VP has almost no formal authority, and his job is to support and advocate for whatever the president does. He’ll be tainted by the president’s mistakes, but won’t be given credit for the president’s accomplishments.

The only vice president in the last half-century who didn’t subsequently run for president was Dick Cheney — and most of the others failed. The job just makes you look smaller, as you spend four or eight years standing in the shadow of the man making the decisions. The problem is so acute that in 2000, Al Gore felt the need to say in his convention speech, “I stand here tonight as my own man” in an attempt to counter the presumption that he was someone else’s.

At the time, Bill Clinton’s approval rating was a healthy 62 percent, yet Gore still lost. That points to another problem Vance will have. The only VPs who won election in the last hundred years had served highly popular presidents: Richard Nixon with Dwight Eisenhower, George HW Bush with Ronald Reagan, and Joe Biden with Barack Obama. JD Vance, on the other hand, is going to face an electorate that loathes the president he served.

But before he gets to the general election, he’ll have to navigate a tricky primary campaign. Trump will not only still be president, he’ll do everything in his power to ensure that the Republican candidates display their loyalty to him at every turn. Should they criticize him or his decisions, he’ll lash out at them — and he’ll still have a hold over the Republican base, even if that hold is not as firm as it once was. Vance will be competing for Trump’s endorsement with a boatload of other candidates, and he may withhold it as long as possible so they keep genuflecting before him.

Even if the Iran war is over by the time campaigning begins, it will still be seen by many in the base as not just an unmitigated disaster but a betrayal of Trump’s promise to stay out of foreign entanglements — something Vance himself cited as one of the key reasons he moved from Trump opponent to Trump superfan.

“My entire adult lifetime has been shaped by presidents who threw America into unwise wars and failed to win them,” he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed as a newly-minted senator in January 2023, but the brilliant Donald Trump had kept his promise to the MAGA base not to repeat that mistake. The op-ed was titled “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.”

While some MAGA voters (and some conservative media figures) are saying they feel betrayed by Trump’s reversal on whether going to war in the Middle East is a splendid idea, none of Vance’s potential primary opponents will have opposed the war, so they’ll all carry at least some taint. His bigger problem will be with the general electorate. Not only was the Iran war the least popular war in the history of polling at its outset, the proportion of the public now saying they approve of it stands at around 35 percent (and some polls show it even lower). Approval of the Iraq War, our contemporary model for military disasters the public turned against, never got that low.

Yet even if Vance can convince voters he was an Iran war skeptic from the beginning, that only means he was too weak and ineffectual to do anything about it. “Don’t blame me, I tried and failed” isn’t exactly a message that will portray him as a strong leader.

At last week’s midterm Republican convention, Vance made one of the keynote speeches, an address saturated with racist dogwhistles and nasty attacks on Democrats, whom he called “the party that despises America.”

Among the party elite, it apparently went over like gangbusters.

“I think if you polled that [convention] room, 90, 95 percent of the room is behind JD. He’s the heir apparent,” one conservative activist told Politico.

Maybe so. But have you ever seen one of those videos of a car that got booted, and the driver decides to just give it a shot to drive away anyway? Inevitably, the boot tears up their car as they lumber slowly down the road. That’s what the Iran war is going to do to JD Vance’s campaign in 2028.

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“If the Republicans win, you win with us and get $5,000,” Trump bloviated during his rally-pretending-to-be-a-convention in Dallas last Wednesday.

He concluded, inevitably, with a branding exercise. The checks, he said, would “be called the Trump Dividend.”

Trump sounds like a carny salesman, not a president. That’s because he is a carny salesman. He’s shilling hard because the Republican Party he is selling for the midterms is about as appetizing as his patented explosive diarrhea lettuce.

Republican polling is currently hitting impressive new lows. Trump’s approval is hovering around 36 percent in the FiftyPlusOne aggregate, and the same site’s Senate forecast just hit a new high of a 61 percent likelihood of a Democratic flip. Gas prices are skyrocketing, inflation is spiking, the Iran war is somehow going worse than ever, and so is the trade war with Canada.

Faced with a crisis of his own making, Trump does what he’s always done — he lies, then lies again, and then makes promises he has no intention of keeping. He will gladly pay you in January for a vote in November, even if he has no way to do so, and also may just change his mind anyway.

Other Republicans, the media, and the public have been more skeptical than usual of the latest claim; the Trump magic looks a bit less magic when the Iowa Senate race is tied and Republicans have a four percent chance of winning the House.

Still, more skeptical than usual is a depressingly low bar. Twelve years into our endless era of Trump, mainstream outlets remain reluctant to tell the public in stark terms that their president is an orange bag of gas and flimflam whose promises are as much of a hoax as his increasingly grotesque hair.

There will be no checks

In response to Trump’s promise, a number of outlets published credulous headlines which effectively served as free Republican propaganda.

“Trump promises $5,000 ‘dividend’ for US voters if Republicans win midterms,” the Financial Times gushed. “Trump promised $5,000 checks if Republicans win the midterms. How would that work?” PBS asked.

Stay tuned and they will also explain how Trump plans to coordinate the logistics of golden turds falling from his every orifice.

To be fair, when you actually read the articles in question, the writers do admit that the answer to “how would that work?” is that it would not.

A $5,000 check to every adult would cost about $1.3 trillion. That is a lot of money, even for the US government. JD Vance went on Fox News and lied that the funds would come from tariff revenue. But as Erica York, senior economist at the Tax Foundation, pointed out, the proposed payments are almost as much as the projected revenue from tariffs over the next decade.

Since magic tariff money won’t work, that leaves the dull old boring constitutional method of asking Congress to fund your ridiculous nonsense. Some legislators are predictably eager to debase themselves; Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno rushed to Elon Musk’s fash-site to declare himself ready to introduce a “Trump dividend” bill.

But others, even in Trump’s own party, are leery of massive inflationary spending at a time when prices are already out of control. Many Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune, think tanks, and advocacy groups were blindsided by the proposal.

Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy attacked the plan on the hyperbolic libertarian grounds that “Dependency is evil & soul-sucking in all its forms.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis expressed the more reasonable worry that Trump’s proposal would cause “more debt and more inflation.” Along the same lines, South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman argued that “we’re already more than $40 trillion in debt, and cannot support another massive spending package without a clear way to pay for it.” (Of course, taxing the wealthy or clawing back ICE funding is a no go for Republicans.)

Norman also worried that Trump’s offer sounded like “pay-to-play politics” — that is, a bribe. The offer probably is not illegal since Trump isn’t proposing paying only his own voters (at least not yet). But the way he talked about the “Trump dividend” makes it sound like he’s giving people a bonus for voting for him, personally. For Trump, the answer to every problem is always “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Then he puts a knife between your shoulder blades.

Of course, Trump also tries to knife you if you don’t go along with him. As he departed Texas late Thursday, ABC’s Rachel Scott asked him a smart question: “If your economic policies are working, why do you need an incentive for people to turn out to vote?” Trump babbled about how everything is Biden’s fault and then snapped at Scott that “your network … you’re the worst.”

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Stiffing people is his art form

Biden, as it happens, did send out stimulus checks in 2021. So did Trump in 2020. The money went out during the covid lockdown — a good policy during a global catastrophe which led to unprecedented economic contraction and left huge numbers of people unemployed.

But we are not in covid lockdown. And while Trump got congressional buy-in for stimulus in his first term, in his second he keeps promising checks and not even trying to deliver.

At the beginning of 2025, for example, Elon Musk promised to pay everyone in the US $5,000 with the projected $2 trillion in savings from DOGE. Trump said it was a “great idea.” But in the end it turned out that DOGE’s main accomplishment was not savings, but dead bodies; shuttering USAID is expected to kill a horrific 14 million people abroad by 2030. The supposed financial benefits of this monstrous policy, and of DOGE’s other ill-conceived cuts, were slim to nonexistent. Musk left government in May 2025 to spend his days promoting white nationalism, and the checks were never spoken of again.

In July 2025, though, Trump began talking up a different, newer, better dividend. This time he claimed that he would send $2,000 to every adult using tariff revenues. Alas, the tariff revenues weren’t enough to cover even this smaller amount, and when the Supreme Court struck down most of them this February, Trump was required to refund $166 billion to importers.

Once more, there were no checks.

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And that’s not all. In December 2025, Trump said he wanted to send $1,500 to every American based on the “savings” from cutting ACA subsidies.

”The people will get the money and they’re going to buy the health insurance that they want,” he said.

You are probably not surprised to hear that the checks did not materialize. Now, though, Trump has also proposed sending $500 checks to one million of the 19 million Obamacare enrollees. The payments would go to those not on premium assistance and using government exchanges, “meaning the payments would disproportionately benefit enrollees with higher incomes in red states,” according to Common Dreams. Trump says that the money will offset higher premiums. That’s probably a lie, even if he does send the checks, which no one should count on.

There is, then, a lot of precedent for President Trump telling Americans that he is going to send them checks only for him not to send them checks. And beyond that, there is even more precedent for Trump promising to pay people and then not paying them.

In 2016, while Trump was running for president, journalists uncovered 60 lawsuits by hundreds of vendors and businesspeople who said that Trump had stiffed them when they had contracted to work at his properties. Trump didn’t pay waiters. He didn’t pay bartenders. He didn’t pay lawyers who defended him in the suits by the waiters and bartenders. He illegally underpaid, or just didn’t pay, undocumented Polish workers who worked on building Trump Tower. He withheld a payment of $83,600 from a cabinetmaker who built desks and bars at Trump Plaza in the ‘80s, forcing the 40-year-old firm out of business.

Trump claimed that he withheld payment for inferior or substandard work. But he actually asked the cabinetmaker to do more work for him. That suggests that Trump was not carefully evaluating the value of cabinetry. Rather, Donald Trump simply feels Donald Trump is too important to have to pay people who work for him.

Along the same lines, Trump University, Trump’s real estate education swindle, was designed to “bilk money from people who dreamed of successful real estate careers,” according to the Center for American Progress. People who paid $1,500 for a course on the real estate industry were treated to an aggressive sales pitch designed to get them to pay even more money for worthless courses. One student commented, “requesting we raise our credit limits on our credit cards at lunch Friday seemed a little transparent.” Customers sued Trump; he settled the case for $25 million in 2018.

When Trump contracts for services, he doesn’t pay for them. When he contracts to provide services to others, he doesn’t provide them. Every business transaction is a con — the con being simply that Trump refuses to hold up his end of any bargain and leaves every and anybody else holding the bag.

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For Trump, everyone is a mark

Trump treats voters the way he treated vendors and customers. He promises them benefits he has no intention of delivering, congratulating himself on his super clever strategy of sadistically betraying the trust of people who have faith in him. The $5,000 checks are a gimmick just like every other gimmick. He has no plan to send people money and no real interest in doing so. As always, he wants people to give him what he wants for free, just because he’s Donald Trump and he’s entitled.

The public appears to have finally figured out Trump’s one weird trick. A YouGov poll conducted after Trump’s $5,000 promise found that only 18 percent of adults said they were more likely to vote for Trump because of the checks. Forty one percent said his promises made no difference, and 29 percent said they were less likely to vote for him. Those are the kind of numbers you get when people don’t believe you’re going to do what you say and are angry at you for trying to fool them.

It’s good that voters recognize that Trump is a liar. It’s good that mainstream media is writing articles about how the $5,000 checks aren’t going to work. But why on earth, at this late stage, are outlets writing headlines that frame Trump’s promises as news in themselves. Whey must we pretend to treat his slimy word vomit as good faith policy proposals?

The important thing to know about Trump, the thing that all Americans need to know, is not how much money he says he’ll give you. The important thing to know is that he is a liar, a skinflint, and a scammer, and that he will give you nothing, because he wants all the money, all the power, and all the country for himself.

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Mike Johnson, the theoretical speaker of the House, announced last Thursday he’s canceling votes for the last two weeks of September. This leaves just four days of legislative business before the midterms.

His spin is that House Republicans are now free to campaign in their districts, where they can boast to voters about how little they’ve done to address the harm President Trump has inflicted on the nation. This might seem a strange choice: Although Trump and his MAGA goons have openly tried to rig the upcoming midterms, particularly through racial gerrymanders, Democrats are still favored to win back the House. That means Johnson’s tenure as speaker is likely all over but the crying, and he’ll have little to show for it beyond a Wikipedia entry.

That reality hasn’t stopped Johnson from shamelessly lying about his record. He told Fox News last December, “We’ve had one of the most productive Congresses in the history of the institution.” He repeated this wish-casting nonsense in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, ludicrously claiming 2025 was “one of the most productive first years of any Congress in our lifetimes.”

But Johnson isn’t closing the store early for a legislative victory lap. He’s trying to avoid a vote on the Epstein Transparency Act II, which would permit Epstein’s victims, state attorneys general, and members of Congress to sue the Justice Department for failing to disclose documents as required under last year’s original Epstein Transparency Act.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie has started collecting signatures for a discharge petition that would bypass the speaker and force a vote on the floor. When Massie suggested Johnson might end the House session early to avoid the vote, Johnson mocked the accusation as “stupid” and “nonsensical.” Now, he’s running scared.

This latest showcase of the speaker’s fecklessness leads to an obvious conclusion: Johnson struggles at the basic blocking and tackling of his job.

He constantly loses votes he shouldn’t. Even a performative resolution denouncing socialism and supporting the SAVE America Act almost failed to get to the floor because of internal party squabbling. It was salvaged only because moderate Democratic Reps. Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez crossed party lines and voted with Republicans to pass the necessary procedural rule to start debate.

Johnson has a slim majority, yes, but he lacks former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s skill at keeping members in line. The recent defection of the Democratic moderates was a rare lapse for Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who mostly keeps his diverse caucus unified, whereas Johnson frequently endures public humiliation. He’s set a record for the number of rules vote failures, and he’s been forced to pull legislation from the floor once it was clear he lacked the votes. (Pelosi has mocked his apparent weak command of his members.)

There’s another unfortunate record that Johnson has set: Since 2023, the number of successful discharge petitions that brought bills to the floor over the speaker’s objections have matched those passed over the past four decades.

It’s said that the speaker’s job is “like herding cats,” but Johnson just lets the more feral members run wild. Meanwhile, he’s completely surrendered the House’s constitutional role as a co-equal branch of government, and when the pressures mount, his solution is usually to flee the premises.

The Article 1 crisis

Republicans have held a trifecta in government for nearly two years, yet they’ve accomplished little legislatively, aside from the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which is so unpopular that Democrats talk about it now more than Republicans do.

This do-nothing Congress is not a surprise, considering Trump is interested solely in enriching himself, maintaining power, pursuing personal vendettas, and transforming the White House into a gaudy designer imposter Taj Mahal. Last year, only 38 bills became law, compared to 76 in 2021 and 74 in 2017. It makes for an embarrassing contrast to what Pelosi achieved as speaker under President Biden with a similarly thin majority.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan often spoke about Trump as a means to an end, a knowing deal with the devil, to advance his own agenda, as former Senate leader Mitch McConnell did with the federal judiciary. Defending their working relationship during a 2018 interview, Ryan said, “[Trump] gave us the ability to get historic things in law that we’ve been trying to get for a generation.”

Conversely, Johnson doesn’t seem to have any specific agenda beyond serving Trump’s interests. Trump himself has boasted that he’s effectively “the speaker and the president.” If Todd Blanche has reduced the attorney general position to Trump’s personal lawyer, Johnson has transformed the speakership into Trump’s personal hype man and lap dog.

For instance, in January, Johnson echoed Trump’s complaints about not winning the Nobel Prize and laughably suggested this likely war criminal was “probably the most deserving individual in the history of the prize.” Sorry, Dr. King!

Then in March, weeks into Trump’s botched Iran war, Johnson presented Trump with an ego-soothing and entirely made up “America First” award at a National Republican Congressional Committee fundraiser. It was a golden eagle-styled participation trophy for a president with an underwater approval rating.

“The president has done so much for the American people and we want to honor him, in some small way [with] some token of our appreciation for his leadership,” Johnson said, while claiming America was in a “new golden era.”

This all makes Johnson seem less like speaker of the House and more like the mad king’s fool.

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“Your obedient servant”

There was a revealing moment last year when Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean confronted Johnson about Trump’s deranged speech to military officials where he vowed to deploy the armed forces against American cities.

"The president is mentally unwell,” Dean said. “He's not okay."

“A lot of folks on your side are too,” Johnson replied. “I don’t control him.”

The entire exchange was caught on a hot mic, which might explain the rare candor from Johnson. He doesn’t “control” Trump, but he doesn’t even try.

Ryan privately and on occasion publicly disagreed with Trump. He stated that Trump’s proposal to end birthright citizenship through executive order was “unconstitutional.” Johnson, on the other hand, has embraced Trump’s push to curtail birthright citizenship. Ryan dismissed Trump’s paranoid delusion that Obama had “spied” in his 2016 campaign, and he said that Trump “obviously shouldn’t” pardon himself. But Johnson refused to even “second-guess” Trump’s decision to pardon January 6 criminals.

Johnson is so slavishly devoted to Trump, you might as well call him “Igor.”

It’s become a sad running joke that Johnson feigns ignorance of common news events so he can avoid commenting on Trump’s latest offense. He usually claims he’s too busy and important to possess even a passing awareness of the president’s actions and public statements. His actual legislative record makes this defense especially absurd.

Well before Trump slithered back into the Oval Office, Johnson allowed the House of Representatives to become a vestigial appendage, submissive entirely to the will of a criminal defendant.

Johnson blocked a bipartisan immigration and border security bill so Trump could run against President Biden on the issue. Instead, he promoted MAGA-driven legislation to stop illegal immigrants from voting, which is already against the law. During Trump’s criminal hush money trial, Johnson — a constitutional lawyer — traveled to New York City to defend Trump as an innocent victim of Democratic “lawfare” and condemn the entire prosecution as an “atrocity” and a “travesty of justice.” When Trump was found guilty, Johnson “didn’t really need to be convinced” to use all the powers of his office to somehow help Trump overturn his conviction.

Johnson continues to use his speakership to protect Trump from accountability. He delayed swearing in Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva for seven weeks after she won her September 2025 special election. This was a transparent move to prevent Grijalva from providing the 218th signature needed on a discharge petition to force a House vote on releasing the Epstein files. Now, he’s about to send everyone home to avoid another Epstein vote, all on Trump’s behalf.

Even Johnson’s midterm elections pitch shows no interest in improving Americans’ lives. Instead, he’s dead set on shielding Trump and his cronies from justice. He told an audience of Christian conservatives at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in June that if Republicans lose the midterms, “Democrats will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors, friends, half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you.”

There have been placeholder speakers in the past who accomplished little and were quickly forgotten, but while serving as a smiling sock puppet for MAGA fascism, Johnson has ensured a permanent but disgraceful place in history.

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When it comes to 9/11, Donald Trump has always had a problem with the truth. Now that he’s increasingly detached from reality and completely surrounded by sycophants, his lies have gotten downright bizarre.

The absolute weirdest of these has to be Trump’s fantasy that he was literally pulled to safety by brave firefighters as he stood … Inside? Near? Under? … the US Steel Building, now One Liberty Plaza.

There was significant fear that the US Steel Building might collapse, fear that turned out to be wrong. But on both September 12, 2001, and September 14, 2001, rescue workers were evacuated and rushed from the building.

Which, apparently, is where Trump comes in:

“The United States Steel Building was creaking. Really creaking. And we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down. And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us. And two firemen, big strong guys, and I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, ‘Got to get out of here.’ And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, ‘Fellas, I can run myself.’ But they were amazing.”

To hear Trump tell it, he’s also some sort of air traffic savant, heavily implying that as he watched the second plane on 9/11, he knew it was going to hit the Twin Towers:

“I saw the second plane hit and you saw that come and you’re watching it and it’s because I watched the air patterns for years and you know where the planes are. They go up right up the Hudson River. This thing was coming right into the second building and I said, ‘Wow.” So I watched that happen and I said, “Wow, we are now in a different time.”

Wow. Wow, we are now in a different time. What soaring and stirring rhetoric, right?

There’s another big problem with this make-believe, which is that Trump Tower is some four miles away from Ground Zero, so the chance Trump was keenly watching the air patterns over the Twin Towers is pretty much zero.

With Trump, it’s always tempting to try to determine whether he knows he’s lying or believes his own lies. Before his second term, that approach still made some sort of sense, because his lies were at least reality-shaped, more about puffery than outright fantasy.

But you could see the outlines of full fabulism starting to ramp up.

“I spent a lot of time down there with you”

Two days after September 11, Trump did an interview with a German television station — because of course he was not going to pass up a media hit — saying, “We have over 100 and we have about 125 coming. So we’ll have a couple hundred people down here. And they are very brave and what they’re doing is amazing. And we will be involved in some form in helping to reconstruct.”

But by later that day, when talking to NBC, it was now “hundreds of men working inside right now” with more on the way, and “they’ve never seen bodies like this before, bodies all over.”

You are probably not going to be surprised to learn that no one can verify that Trump sent hundreds of workers to Ground Zero to help clean up.

By the 2016 election, Trump was saying he personally helped clear rubble at the site, a claim which is as easily disproved as it is ridiculous.

Does anyone really think that Donald Trump, of all people, would have lifted a finger without having a full camera crew document it all for posterity? And does anyone really think that Donald Trump, of all people, did the grim, grueling work of clearing away steel and cement, all the while breathing in toxins?

And by his first term, Trump wasn’t just at Ground Zero. He was there for a long time, as he explained with some absurd faux modesty: “Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers, and other first responders. And I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there. I spent a lot of time down there with you.”

There is, of course, no evidence showing Trump spent any meaningful amount of time at the site.

Trump has always inflated his role in 9/11, but these days, he’s living in a fantasyland, one that he makes and remakes daily, where he’s always the star of the show.

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Alert the media: the truth is knowable

The mainstream media is, unsurprisingly, not covering itself in glory as it struggles to avoid saying that either the president’s brain has completely left the station or that he’s a mendacious liar who knows no bounds, or both.

So the Washington Post went with saying that Trump was repeating his “disputed account of his role in recovery.” The New York Times went with calling this slop “a series of questionable and provocative statements to burnish his political brand.”

It is indeed provocative, though probably not in the way the New York Times meant, for the president of the United States to either be lying about his role responding to the deadliest attack on American soil or be so addled that he thinks he genuinely was down there pulling away chunks of cement and narrowly escaping death from a tumbling building which then never actually tumbled.

Also not covering themselves in glory? Trump sycophants. Here’s Ted Cruz making an absolute fool of himself:

“September 11th was 25 years ago. It was a horrific moment for our entire country. And you can doubt whatever you want about Donald Trump, but the man is a New Yorker, he loves New York, and I have every doubt that what he’s conveying there is what he experienced and it was a traumatic experience for all of us.”

So Cruz is saying, at the same time, that Trump can’t possibly remember what happened 25 years ago, but also he’s pretty sure it was traumatic. Yes, so traumatic was the experience for Trump that he called into a radio show the day of the attacks to brag about how one of his buildings, 40 Wall Street, was now the tallest in New York. Besides the fact that it was not actually the tallest, what a ghoulish thing to do.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle defended Trump by saying that he was just recounting his experiences and blamed “the failing legacy media” for attacking Trump.

Yes, how dare they mildly debunk the pack of lies Dear Leader can’t stop telling.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter what is going on inside Trump’s skull. The words coming out of his mouth are what matters, and they show a man completely deluded, characterologically unable to tell the truth, awash in fictions of his own making. And as long as he’s surrounded by people who will let him live in that world, we’re all stuck in here with him.

That’s it for now

We’ll be back this afternoon with a new episode of the PN Pod, then tomorrow with a special Saturday edition of Public Notice.

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“Bidenflation.”

Throughout the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump, his supporters, and the national punditry invoked that term to indict President Biden’s economic policies. Although Biden actually reduced covid-induced inflation in the United States from 7.2 percent in 2022 to 2.4 percent by 2024, Trump won a second presidential term by capitalizing on consumer angst about high prices.

Put me, a genius businessman, back into office and I will solve America’s inflation woes, he promised.

Trump’s problem now is all three of his major second-term policies are raising prices across a range of commodities, but especially housing, food, and gas. Reducing the immigrant labor pool, imposing tariffs on imports, and the Iran War are costing consumers billions in higher out-of-pocket costs.

Americans are finally starting to realize the great business “genius” is an economic imbecile.

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Clueless

Let’s start with Trump’s signature policy: xenophobic, ICE-led attacks on immigrants.

Nobody believes the United States should have open borders and zero restrictions for immigrants seeking either full citizenship or temporary work visas. But the ineluctable fact is that immigrant workers are good for the economy because their labor lowers domestic production costs and keeps inflation down.

That fact is especially true for the construction and food industries. Almost no commercial or residential work site operates without immigrant labor, and few agriculture products are harvested, picked, shipped, processed, cooked, or served without immigrant labor.

Immigrants comprise roughly 30 percent of the construction trade workers who build America’s commercial and residential properties. The construction industry confirms that 92 percent of member firms report production delays as a result of labor shortages caused by the “chilling effect” of Trump’s brutal ICE policies. An untold number of workers not already removed from the country by the government are no-showing for work. Trump has worsened America’s housing affordability crisis.

As for groceries — a term Trump, who has probably never food-shopped in his life, infamously marveled at — almost every calorie of food Americans consume that is not harvested from private gardens is cooked at home from fresh or processed foods purchased at markets, or are restaurant meals prepared from similar food sources.

According to the United Farm Workers, about 70 percent of farmworkers who process the crops to make those meals are immigrants, 45 percent of them undocumented. In addition to higher food prices, removing these workers creates supply chain and food safety issues. Whether prepared at home, ordered for take-out, or eaten at restaurants, meals are cheaper thanks to immigrant labor.

To complement his inflation-inducing immigration policy for domestic goods, Trump continues to prosecute a moronic, reckless, and unconstitutional tariff policy that effectively imposes a national sales tax on imports.

Based solely on trade imbalance rates, the administration’s original tariff policy was so “fake and incredibly stupid,” as that notoriously left-wing business rag Forbes described it, that Trump’s advisers created a phony mathematical formula with Greek letters to make the tariff rates calculated for each trading nation seem sophisticated.

Worse, Trump imposed or threatened to impose tariffs on specific goods or countries in wildly unpredictable ways. He continues to use tariffs as his primary trade war weapon despite the Supreme Court’s February ruling that his initial tariffs scheme was illegal (he is now citing different authorities to justify them).

But even if his policy was rational, consistent, and legal, Trump’s tariffs failed to bring foreign leaders and producers to their knees and beg him for relief.

Confused, disgruntled nations have responded by either imposing reciprocal tariffs on American exports, as Canada did this week, or by gradually marginalizing the United States within the global marketplace by inking better trade deals with good-faith nations led by sane politicians.

The result? Consumers so far have footed the bill for Trump’s reckless tariffs through higher retail prices for imports. The Tax Foundation estimates that Americans spent an average of $1,000 more in 2025, and will pay another $840 in 2026, in retail spending. Worse, the Foundation estimates that these tariffs reduce America’s long-term GDP growth rates by 0.4 percent.

If higher prices on both domestic and imported goods were not enough, Trump found yet another way to raise prices: He started an unnecessary war with Iran, which led to six months (so far) of bottle-necking the Strait of Hormuz, causing oil prices to soar.

Crude oil prices this week reached $100 a barrel, and the price of diesel fuel rose to record highs. Rising fuel costs are uniquely inflationary because, as those in the diesel-dependent trucking industry love to remind consumers, “if you bought it, a truck brought it.” When their fuel costs rise, trucking companies pass those costs along in the former of higher shipping bills for retailers, who promptly pass this added expense along to consumers in the form of higher prices.

B-level students in high school economics courses understand this. But not Trump!

What he and Vice President JD Vance do understand, however, is the practical and economic ignorance of their supporters, which is why they shamelessly lie about the causes of recent price hikes at the pump.

“The reason gas prices are so high now is because the Iranians are shooting at commercial shipping,” Vance said. “Gas, frankly, could have been much, much higher were it not for our efforts.”

Vance’s first claim is technically true, but the latter is a blatant lie; there would be no need for Iranians to shoot at oil tankers had Trump never started this needless war. Not to be outdone by obsequious sidekick, Trump recently told an even bigger fib: “We have the Strait of Hormuz in extremely good shape.”

In short, Trump’s immigration-induced higher prices for domestic goods and his tariff-induced higher prices for imported goods have for the past six months been compounded by higher fuel costs induced by his disastrous Iran war.

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Touching the stove (again)

Donald Trump is ruining a US economy he fundamentally misunderstands — beyond, of course, his impressive and insatiable facility for crudely extracting billions of dollars in graft for himself and his family.

Trump’s economic ignorance and history of business failures — which include serial casino bankruptcies and marketing belly-ups like Trump water, Trump jets, Trump steaks, and Trump University — would be funny were he not heading the world’s largest economy, with millions of Americans’ livelihoods at stake.

Why voters expected a self-proclaimed business “genius” who can’t compute basic percentages to understand global macroeconomics shall forever remain the central mystery of Trump’s rise and return to power. With short memories and a loose grip on economic theory, Americans fooled around and elected Trump to solve post-covid inflation that the United States under Biden’s leadership mitigated better than other Western democracies. Now those same voters are finding out the hard way that Trump’s three major policies — immigrant labor purges, tariff-based trade wars, and the Iran war — are inflationary and compounding in their effects.

Matters are getting worse. Food and housing prices continue to rise. Last week, fuel prices, especially for diesel, surged. And this week the price of a 10-year US Treasury note, upon which banks set their rates for car and home loans, is higher than at any point in Trump’s second term. The next 48 hours could be key: Later today the government will release the latest producer price index and tomorrow comes the latest consumer price index data. These indicators will bear significantly on the Federal Reserve’s decision whether to raise interest rates to curb inflation.

Almost as soon as he returned to the Oval Office in January 2025, Trump began moaning about high interest rates. He derided then-Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell — whom Trump appointed during this first term — as a slow-footed incompetent. When Trump finally got the chance this past May to replace Powell with Kevin Warsh, Trump expected Warsh to obediently cut interest rates.

But Warsh can see the same economic indicators that realtors, mortgage brokers, bond traders, car dealers, construction companies, importer-exporters, and smart American consumers do. Which is why the new Fed chair already hinted that the Fed is likely to raise interest rates this autumn. Warsh knows what his predecessor did: That the American economy is being crippled by the inflationary policies of the very person who appointed him.

In an alternate universe where Republicans were held to the same standard of governing competence as Democrats are, the Trump administration would already be saddled with the term “Trumpflation.” Predictably, Trump is trying to shift blame for inflation elsewhere: on Joe Biden, Canada, the Federal Reserve Board.

But Donald Trump owns this economy now — and he should, because his ignorant, short-sighted economic policies created it.

That’s it for today

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On Thursday, Fox News announced that longtime anchor Maria Bartiromo was leaving the network.

The press release took pains to signal that she’d been fired: “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 ½ years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.”

Oliver Darcy at Status was first to break the news that Bartiromo got axed for leaking confidential company information to the White House.

She made the mistake of thinking that the network and the administration were one and the same — an understandable error, since they operated as a seamless entity for almost a decade.

Bartiromo believed that her job was to support Trump and use her platform to let his agents spread their message. And for many years, it was. But now Trump is a lame duck whose disastrous policies are driving the country into a ditch, and Fox is trying to execute a delicate pivot.

Bartiromo doesn’t do delicate, and she’s not about to pivot. So now she’s out.

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Which one is the parasite?

Fox and its hosts have been intimately entwined with Trump since he came down the golden escalator in 2015.

“The phone calls between President Trump and Sean Hannity come early in the morning or late at night, after the Fox News host goes off the air,” the Washington Post reported in 2018.

In 2019, Jeanine Pirro was suspended after questioning whether Rep. Ilhan Omar’s hijab was "indicative of her adherence to Sharia law, which in itself is antithetical to the United States Constitution." She got her job back after Trump publicly demanded she be reinstated, warning the network not to go “politically correct” and hand its ratings lead to competitors.

Pirro is now the US attorney for DC, while another former Fox host, Pete Hegseth, serves as secretary of defense. And the exchange goes both ways: Trump’s former Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany has her own show, and Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah served for years as senior vice president.

And so Trump took it as a personal affront on election night 2020 when Fox’s decision desk correctly called Arizona for Joe Biden before any other network.

“Many great alternatives are forming & exist. Try @OANN & @newsmax, among others!” he ragetweeted.

Inside the network, this act of radical truth-telling was treated as a four-alarm fire, particularly as Newsmax experienced a temporary ratings spike.

"In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable,” Hannity whined to Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham in a group text released in later litigation.

“It’s vandalism,” Carlson agreed.

“Viewers going through the 5 stages of grief,” Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott told Lachlan Murdoch. “It’s a question of trust[.] [T]he AZ [call] was damaging but we will highlight our stars and plant flags letting the viewers know we hear them and respect them.”

And so, instead of pissing off their audience by reporting the actual news, Fox made the calculated decision to push Trump’s flagrant lies about a stolen election.

“The Wind tells me I’m a ghost”

On November 8, 2020, the day after the network finally conceded that Biden had won, Bartiromo hosted Sidney Powell, a notorious purveyor of election conspiracy theories.

“Sidney, we talked about the Dominion software,” Bartiromo warbled. “I know that there were voting irregularities. Tell me about that.”

Powell went on to accuse Dominion of gross electoral fraud, with the connivance of congressional Democrats and the Biden campaign.

Before putting her on the air, Bartiromo had seen Powell’s evidence, which included an email from a person who claimed that “The Wind tells me I'm a ghost” and ”it appears that I was shot in the back shortly after submitting a tip to the FBI two years ago.”

In deposition, Bartiromo conceded that the email was “kooky.” But on air, she never pushed back as Powell accused Dominion and its competitor Smartmatic of multiple felonies. Similarly the network itself never pushed back on Bartiromo, or on Pirro and Lou Dobbs as they continued to air flagrant, defamatory lies.

That was a business decision that wound up costing it dearly in 2023, when it handed over $787 million to Dominion after years of bruising, expensive litigation. And it cost Bartiromo as well.

For a long time, she’d been able to maintain the fiction that she was still the serious financial journalist she’d been in the 1990s when she reported live from floor of the New York Stock Exchange. That’s pretty much impossible to do after you’ve been caught platforming a crank while crying to Steve Bannon that you’re “scared and sad” and “told my team we are not allowed to say pres elect at sll (sic). Not in scripts or in banners on air.”

“Enough with the sad! We need u," Bannon replied, launching into a five-point plan that involved winning both Senate seats in Georgia and then having Bartiromo run against Sen. Chuck Schumer in 2022.

"This is your moment," he urged.

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The network remains

Bartiromo’s “moment” in politics came and went, and eventually Fox’s moment of panic passed as well. Newsmax and OAN did not steal away its audience. It remains the conservative behemoth, bundled into every basic cable package, whether viewers like it or not.

The network remembered that it was bigger than any star, firing Carlson in 2023. As Brian Stelter put it in his definitive book “Network of Lies,” "It wasn't one thing. It was everything."

When Kevin O'Leary appeared on Mornings with Maria this May and told viewers his "data scientists" had uncovered "two cells" of Chinese Communist Party operatives in Utah who were responsible for ginning up opposition to data centers, Fox quickly backed down.

Turns out, litigation isn’t so fun after all!

And while the network remains comically pro-Trump, it seems to have dawned on management that yoking itself to a president whose approval ratings are sinking like a stone is not a long-term growth strategy.

On July 16, Trump gave what he promised would be a blockbuster speech proving his electoral fraud claims once and for all. Fox dutifully aired it live during primetime, then instructed staff to give the fraud claims no further oxygen.

But while the network may have moved on from Trump’s boring tirades about 2020, Bartiromo has not.

She scheduled an interview with Trump’s aide Peter Navarro for the morning of July 17. Navarro is a conspiracy-addled economist who steers Trump into constant trade wars, and he and Bannon hatched the harebrained “Green Bay Sweep” plan to pressure more than a hundred members of Congress into blocking certification of the 2020 election. After refusing to testify to the January 6 Committee, Navarro and Bannon were both convicted of contempt of Congress.

When Bartiromo canceled on Navarro, she forwarded the internal text from management warning against covering Trump’s speech. Navarro then passed it to the White House as evidence of Fox’s perfidy, inadvertently sealing Bartiromo’s fate.

Bartiromo subordinated the needs of her employer to those of her real boss in the White House. And, as with Carlson, that was “one thing” too many.

The next act

Multiple outlets have reported that Bartiromo is in talks with CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss about a possible role at 60 Minutes.

Weiss already pulled a fully-vetted 60 Minutes segment on the CECOT torture allegations three hours before air, after asking producers to book Stephen Miller for “balance.” Adding a Fox reject who just got fired for putting the White House’s messaging needs first would be a choice.

Meanwhile, Bartiromo hired pugilistic media lawyer Bryan Freedman. Freedman’s clients include Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Don Lemon. He recently represented actor Justin Baldoni in his litigation against Blake Lively — litigation in which Baldoni was forced to pay out legal fees to both Lively and and the New York Times.

“The irresponsible reports that have been published stating that Maria Bartiromo was fired or is no longer an employee of Fox are absolutely and unequivocally false,” Freedman told The Hollywood Reporter. “Make no mistake, we have the receipts and witnesses and they will come out whether through the courthouse or otherwise. Those reporting her firing or the incredulous facts supporting that fiction have exhibited a complete and utter reckless disregard for the truth.”

This raises the tantalizing prospect of further nasty, public squabbling. Maybe Bartiromo will be forced to go under oath again!

That won’t help Fox, and it probably won’t be great for Bartiromo’s career. But it will definitely make for good television.

That’s it for today

We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth suffered a significant defeat last week as one of his signature policy initiatives was quietly shelved. Details are sketchy, but for whatever reason, the Pentagon has pulled back on Hegseth’s effort to make the United States military the most testosterone-blasted, masculinity-maxxed fighting force in the world.

In July, Hegseth announced in a bizarre video that service members were going to be screened to see if they needed to add some man-juice to their supplement stack in order to achieve maximum lethality, “ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best.” But Reuters now reports that “the Pentagon ​is temporarily rescinding recently published clinical guidance for a new, mandatory testosterone deficiency screening policy for service members aged 30 and ‌older.” Cue the sad trombone.

In a cabinet full of grifters and nincompoops, Hegseth stands out for his combination of belligerent buffoonishness and rampaging incompetence. As ill-advised as it is to make predictions in politics, we’ll offer this one: Hegseth will be the next Trump cabinet secretary to be fired or forced to resign, and it won’t be long.

Unfortunately, it also won’t be for the right reasons. Hegseth, formerly a weekend co-host on Fox & Friends, was the most unqualified defense secretary in history by a country mile, and he has surprised no one by becoming perhaps the most disastrous one we’ve ever seen.

But being bad at your job won’t get you the boot in Donald Trump’s government; for that, you have to become enough of a public embarrassment that he decides you’re reflecting poorly on him. And Hegseth is just about there.

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How many ways can you screw up the military?

Just three months into his tenure as secretary, things had gotten bad enough that the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Under Hegseth, Chaos Prevails at the Pentagon.”

They weren’t the only ones noticing; a former Trump Pentagon aide wrote in Politico that “the building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.” If anything, the madness has only increased since then.

Here’s a roundup of some stories coming out of the Pentagon just in the last few weeks:

• After a long-running feud with Hegseth, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned last week, but not before warning President Trump that Hegseth is “hurting the force and shrinking the pool of officers available for future senior commands,” as ABC News reported. Many fear that Driscoll will be replaced with Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell, a Hegseth ally and MAGA warrior who has never run an organization, let alone one with hundreds of thousands of employees.

• When Hegseth got the job, he set about to purge women and minorities from top positions, firing some and denying promotion to others. In the time since, the firings have become a regular occurrence. As The Economist noted, Hegseth “has ousted at least 24 flag or general officers. Many appear to have been dismissed for no reason beyond their race, sex or associations with officers Mr Hegseth disliked.” Most recently, Hegseth fired Army Chief of Staff Randy George and two other generals, and forced out other potential successors to George. The result, as the New York Times reports, is that the Army has half the number of four-star generals it did two years ago, “the fewest in decades,” and Hegseth’s feuds and firings have “left the Army essentially rudderless.”

• After Hegseth ordered deployments extended for units in the Middle East, a group of top leaders communicated their objections via a “non-concur” in a regular classified report to the secretary, “meaning they disagree with the secretary’s order to extend their forces but will execute it nevertheless.” In response to that story being made public by the Washington Post, “the Pentagon has pulled decades of classified documents from a secret computer system commonly used by defense officials and US troops.” In other words, the problem was apparently the leak.

• Hegseth’s paranoia about leaks has reached the point that the Department is subjecting dozens of members of the Joint Staff to polygraph tests to see if they’ve been talking to the media, the kind of move that always raises morale.

• Last month, Trump reportedly got angry with Hegseth at a Camp David meeting for not keeping him informed about the military’s depleted stockpile of munitions; Hegseth blamed his deputy.

• Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee charge that because the war has cost so much, the Pentagon is attempting to seize money appropriated to the National Institutes of Health for medical research, which would be illegal.

• A new battalion intended to improve the military’s ability to fight with drones and robots is being phased out, because hey, it’s not like that’s important to the future of warfare.

• Hegseth has installed a group of far-right social media influencers in civilian roles in the Pentagon.

• He set out to destroy Stars and Stripes, the venerable news outlet focused on service members, firing its top leadership and eliminating its editorial independence in order to make it more of a propaganda mouthpiece.

To repeat, those are only the stories that have come out over the last few weeks.

That’s on top of the likely war crimes, the purging of official acknowledgement of the heroism of Black troops, the time he made the flu vaccine optional and then had to retreat in the face of a flu outbreak, the ridiculous feud with Anthropic, the pathetic workout videos, the imposition of Christian nationalism on the armed forces, that time he summoned every general and flag officer to Quantico so he could lecture them about looking fat, the closing of the office charged with finding ways to limit civilian casualties, his loosening of rules of engagement, his banning officers from studying at top universities because they have “wicked ideologies,” or his attempt to demote and reduce the retirement pay of Navy veteran and astronaut Mark Kelly for telling troops they have no obligation to obey illegal orders, which they don’t.

Things have gotten so bad that even some Republicans are no longer willing to defend Hegseth. Sen. Thom Tillis, who is not running for reelection, has called on Trump to fire him, and some MAGA loyalists in Congress are calling out his never-ending purges.

“I’m tired of all the churn,” says Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee. “I want to see some stability over there.” Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota added, “We’ve had some very good generals that are no longer there that we respected.”

But Hegseth’s fate is in President Trump’s hands. And apart from the argument about whose fault it is that the military is running out of ammunition, there’s no reason to believe Trump is displeased with almost anything Hegseth has done.

But that doesn’t mean Hegseth is safe.

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Why Trump will give him the boot

Just look at the cabinet officials Trump has fired or forced to resign in the last year, including Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

All were terrible at their jobs, but that was hardly a surprise since none of them were particularly qualified in the first place. The only possible exception was Bondi, who had been attorney general in Florida, but she was a partisan hack who eagerly did Trump’s bidding to utterly corrupt the DOJ. What got her shown the door was her bungling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, though in her defense, she was given the almost impossible task of protecting Trump from scrutiny over his long association with Epstein. But in the end, she became an embarrassment. In Trump’s eyes, her key failure was one of public relations.

The same was true of Noem, Chavez-DeRemer, and Gabbard — all were cast off when their ineptitude and scandals got too much attention and began to hurt the administration’s image. The lesson is clear: Trump doesn’t care if you screw up your job, as long as you do it quietly; it’s when you make him look bad that your days are numbered.

Remember, Trump conceives of his presidency as a TV show. He wants people who are “right out of Central Casting” — the highest compliment he can pay, meaning they have the physical look he is after to play a particular part. But he is the protagonist, and everyone else is a supporting character. And not just supporting characters, but ones without their own goals, opinions, or impulses. If a supporting character threatens to take over the story, it had better be in a way that makes Trump look better, not worse.

How many more embarrassing stories will come out about Hegseth before Trump decides to cut him loose? There’s no way to know for sure, but if Trump is looking for a scapegoat on whom to blame the disaster of the Iran war, Hegseth will be the most convenient one. He was a strong advocate of the war from the beginning, and in all his public comments has insisted that it has been an enormous success in every way (the fact that Trump says the same thing is hardly relevant). If the midterm elections prove to be as much of a Republican defeat as most everyone expects, firing Hegseth could be just the kind of highly visible change members of his own party (and the news media) will be demanding to see.

For his part, the man known as “Whiskey Pete” may have his sights set higher. He recently traveled to Iowa to campaign for Republicans in his “personal capacity,” and is reportedly considering a run for president in 2028. In the meantime, he’ll keep running the Pentagon into the ground, until Trump decides enough is enough.

That’s it for today

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Last week, gas prices shot up to a Labor Day weekend record of $4.15 a gallon. Diesel prices also broke records, reaching $5.85 — 55 percent higher than in February, when Trump started his illegal war of aggression with Iran.

Higher diesel increases trucking costs, which will drive inflation for groceries, clothes, and any other shipped goods. Americans already ranked inflation and cost of living as their highest concern a month ago, before this latest surge. Now, as midterms loom, voters who rightly blame Trump’s war-mongering and indifference for high prices are only going to get angrier. Republican operatives are reportedly panicking.

Trump as usual pretended he had a solution. Ever since American forces kidnapped Venezuela’s dictator Nicholas Maduro in January, Trump had been trying to arrange for US seizure of the country’s oil. Last week the White House claimed Trump had succeeded and “secured the biggest oil deal in world history.” The US was to have “majority control of more than 65 billion of proven oil reserves.”

Trump of course said that the deal would address costs at the pump, boasting that “ultimately, prices are going to come down.” But even he admitted he couldn’t say for sure whether those benefits would be tangible before the election.

If he was not a liar, Trump would have admitted there is zero chance that Venezuela’s oil will help lower prices by the midterms. In fact, his lust for other countries’ oil is, like all his policies, almost completely divorced from any effort to help Americans.

This gross colonial resource grab is not for America at all. It is for Trump, because gross colonial power grabs give opportunities for self-dealing and, more importantly, make him feel powerful and presidential. His ego is the world’s largest gas guzzler, and what it belches out, in the US and worldwide, is corruption and misery.

Plunder

Trump has long made it clear that he loves the idea of invading other countries and stealing their stuff. All the way back in 2016 during his first run for president he blithered that Obama’s Middle East policy was insufficiently extractive.

“Take the oil. I’ve been saying it for years. Take the oil. They still haven’t taken the oil,” he said.

Maduro was a brutal authoritarian and some analysts cheered Trump when he kidnapped and imprisoned him, insisting the US was acting to establish freedom and democracy. The Wall Street Journal called Maduro’s seizure “an act of hemispheric hygiene against a dictator who spread mayhem far and wide.”

When Trump talked about his goals, though, democracy was not high up on the agenda.

He quickly said Venezuela would be handing 30 to 50 billion barrels of oil to the US supposedly to “benefit the people” of both countries — though he did not explain why anyone in the US had a right to Venezuela’s oil in the first place. When Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, now the country’s dictator, said she wasn’t going to play ball, Trump responded with his usual first resort: not at all veiled threats.

“If she doesn’t do what’s right,” he said, “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Trump’s threats were effective. Or maybe Rodriguez and Trump have simply made a mutually beneficial deal. She pays Trump with oil and he allows her to rule as a dictator without any pressure to hold elections.

Trump doesn’t want Venezuelan elections in any case; he hates all elections on principle. And Venezuelans across the political spectrum are not fans of being robbed.

“Left-wing Chavismos despise foreign exploitation, and the opposition resents the Chavismos’ corruption,” as Jonathan Chait succinctly explains. Allying with Trump may have made Rodriguez as unpopular in her own country as Trump is in his.

“You chose to use the power of the United States not to liberate Venezuelans, but to ally yourself with our oppressors,” Venezuelan economist Ricardo Hausman told Rodriguez on social media.

“To the victor belong the spoils”

More details about the Venezuelan oil deal will no doubt be released over the coming weeks and months. What we know so far, though, is that the agreement gives a company led by the US a century-long concession of 20 percent of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves. That’s 17 oilfields and 65 billion barrels of oil.

The US is partnering with North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), the largest private oil company in Venezuela after Chevron. The ‌Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital will have a 35 percent stake in the company. The State Department can buy 20 percent of the oil at cost and has preferred access to the rest. NABEP’s board is required to be majority American citizens, and the US government can veto the choice of any board member.

There are a host of ugly aspects of the agreement, which Elliott Abrams, Tump’s former special representative on Venezuela and Iran described as a “kind of fever dream of what colonialism looks like.”

Just for starters, the head of NABEQ, Alejandro Betancourt, has been investigated for wrongdoing by the US, Spain, and Switzerland. Earlier this year, federal prosecutors in Florida were building a possible case against him for embezzling money from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company; they believed he was laundering the funds through Miami real-estate. Reuters reports the prosecutors were pushed to stop the probe, and the US also discouraged the Swiss government from investigating Betancourt.

Trump has engaged in billions in graft and corruption already as president — he basically admitted to it on Truth Social yesterday.

So it’s not a surprise that he feels most comfortable dealing with a shady business partner. Nor will it be a surprise if we learn at some point in the future that the Venezuelan deal includes some undisclosed amount of side-payments for Trump, his cronies, Bettencourt, or all three.

Trump may or may not end up personally profiting. The benefits to the US consumer that he’s touted, though, are distant at best. Venezuela’s oil industry needs major investments in everything from pipelines to ports and roads before it can get back to anything like the 3.4 million barrels a day it was producing in the late 1990s. Experts estimate that a $100 billion investment is needed. Even then, it will take four to 10 years before there would be a significant boost in Venezuelan production.

That’s assuming the funds to move forward become available. But American oil is leery of making that kind of investment. They lost a great deal of money after Hugo Chavez nationalized the oil industry in 2007, and most companies other than Chevron have stayed out of the country since.

Trump has been trying to push for investment, and there’s been some interest. But everyone knows the framework Trump and Rodriguez are putting forward is extremely fragile. Whatever the two governments say, the fact is that the deal is hideously unpopular in Venezeula and has little public or bipartisan support in the US. The ranking Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services, Jack Reed, was blunt in his assessment: “President Trump’s effort to turn the US military into an investor in Venezuelan oil is a blatant abuse of power and taxpayer dollars.”

Midterm polls suggest Democrats are going to have real power in Washington in three months, and Trump’s all time low popularity looks ominous for Republicans in 2028 as well. Oil company executives are no doubt acutely aware that they are being asked to make a 10-year investment in a deal which is likely to be virulently rejected by whoever is the next government in either of the two countries involved.

Trump has also suggested that Venezuela’s oil might help refill the strategic petroleum reserve, which has been drawn down, most recently, by Trump’s failed war in Iran. But Venezuelan oil is too thick and tarry for the pumps in the strategic reserve. Venezuelan crude could perhaps be exchanged for lighter oil — but again that’s not going to happen without billions in investment and years of infrastructure repair.

Whether the goal is to lower prices or bolster security, in the near term the deal is useless and in the long term it’s so unpopular and partisan it can’t be counted on.

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This will not end well

Foreign policy is often immoral and crude. But there is a point at which immorality and crudeness becomes self-defeating.

Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran was so gratuitous, so obviously illegal, and so partisan that it alienated any potential allies, ensuring defeat as soon as Iran did not buckle immediately. Similarly, a naked heist of Venezuela’s resources practically dooms itself to failure because it destroys the trust, the stability, and the political buy-in from multiple constituencies required for an expensive, long-term industrial project.

If Trump wanted to actually achieve his stated aims — victory in Iran, more oil resources for the US — he would need to at least pretend to be motivated by something beyond self-aggrandizement and thuggish assholishness. But Trump is unwilling even to pretend. Indeed, the performance of thuggish assholishness is itself the point.

Trump loves to see himself as tough and cruel. He thinks power is a zero sum game, and that he makes himself look bigger and better by taking whatever he wants without regard to consequences or conscience.

With an eye on the midterms, Trump sort of vaguely wants to lower prices at the pump in an abstract way. But the only thing he really truly cares about is glorifying himself. That means building giant ugly arches in the center of the capital. It means bullying Apple and Google to rename “Lake Ontario” to “Lake America.” It means committing war crimes in Iran. And it means stealing Venezuela’s oil, maybe to enrich himself, but definitely because he thinks taking people’s stuff makes him cool.

If Trump has to choose between solving the nation’s problems and being an obnoxious bully, he’ll choose obnoxious bullying every time.

That’s it for today

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Back in the simpler days of 2022, Nina Jankowicz briefly became a household name to Fox News viewers due to her selection to head the newly formed DHS Disinformation Governance Board.

The position came with no actual power, but that didn’t stop right-wing bloviators like Tucker Carlson from characterizing Jankowicz as the “thought-cop-in-chief” for Biden’s “Ministry of Truth.” (Watch the clip below to get a sense for how over the top Fox’s wall-to-wall coverage was at the time.)

The disinformation campaign against the Disinformation Board resulted in it being paused just a month after it was announced and officially disbanded a few months later. It was a victory for the conspiracy-addled forces of MAGA who now are using the government to (once again) promote all sorts of nonsense about vaccines, immigrants, elections, and more.

We recently connected with Jankowicz, who’s currently the CEO of The American Sunlight Project, to get her expert insight on Trump’s golden age of disinformation, how social media fuels it, and what it will take to make rationality great again.

“Republicans understand that people aren’t going to read the documents behind their conspiracy theories,” she told us. “The truth is hard to understand and often involves complexity and nuance. They’re able to win the narrative war that way, and it’s having real consequences on people’s lives.”

“I’m not optimistic about us clawing back from this unless there’s serious rethinking of our systems, and frankly, regulation of these social media platforms that are making us such passive and uncurious consumers of information,” she added. “I always come back to first principles and say if we can educate people to make more deliberate decisions in this confusing information environment, to understand why certain information is showing up on their feed or being sent to them in a push notification, then they’ll be more empowered to seek out good information and able to suss it out for themselves.”

A full transcript of Jankowicz’s conversation with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows. If you’d like to read the full thing and aren’t already a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one. This newsletter (and my work in general) is entirely funded by readers, and paid subscribers are the only reason I’m able to keep everything we publish Monday through Friday free for everyone.

Without further ado, here’s the interview.

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Thor Benson

I’m sure you watched the recent Fauci hearing. It felt to me like the whole thing was driven by right-wing social media and Fox News. What did you think?

Nina Jankowicz

It was incredibly sad. I don’t think Fauci had a choice, legally, about how he presented himself there, but it was still such a communications win for the right wing. Very few Americans on either side of the aisle watched the hearing in its entirety, but we all saw clips plastered everywhere, and the right has been so good at the clipping economy for so long.

What they’re doing is essentially crafting clippable moments that then get shared across the right-wing ecosystem with a particular narrative. There’s not any context about why Fauci might take the fifth or what a congressional hearing is supposed to be. They aren’t meant for knockdown, drag-out communications fights. They’re meant to provide oversight.

Republicans are focusing on something that happened six years ago instead of the crimes being committed by the administration in office today. That kind of memory-holing is core to all of the narrative coups Republicans are achieving right now. It’s about the rewriting of history, including the recent past.

Reliably, the entire Republican bench in the Senate or the House sings from the same songbook, which is written by and large by political influencers with massive followings and networks like Fox News. I saw that Fauci was mentioned about 700 times over four days on Fox. There’s this vicious cycle where it’s all feeds off each other.

It was a hearing that will amount to nothing in Congress, because it wasn’t meant to change anything. It was just meant to create hysteria.

Thor Benson

The average American probably hadn’t thought about Fauci in years and doesn’t know about these conspiracy theories. But if you’re on Twitter, you’re seeing this stuff all the time. How much do you think social media explains Republican fixations?

Nina Jankowicz

There is so much that is happening right now that is dictated by political influencers, especially on the right. My personal experience speaks to that.

When my appointment was announced to the DHS Disinformation Governance Board — as poorly named as it was, and as poor a job as DHS did communicating about that board — nothing happened for a couple of hours until Jack Posobiec started tweeting about it and calling it a “ministry of truth.” By the next day, I was the top story on Fox News every hour on the hour. From there, they were bringing on members of Congress who also had started tweeting about me.

There were bills introduced. Members of Congress were fundraising off of it. They were clipping musical theater performances of mine from almost a decade earlier, stuff I had done in high school. It was insanity. And this is how they work, right? We know now there were some group chats where people were coordinating this messaging. But I think it’s also just that there are probably lists on Twitter where they follow each other and amplify and stick to the marching orders.

The White House can be lumped in with those influencers now too. That can be really dangerous. And it’s certainly gotten way worse since Musk bought Twitter because there’s almost nothing to counter it. We’ve all been so siloed in our own little social media fiefdoms while Musk is actively throttling content from the left and anything that’s truthful on Twitter. That’s incentivizing people to lie and make really salacious posts.

I think the fact we don’t see what the other side is talking about frequently, or pretty much ever, is detrimental to the way we think about each other and engage in political debate. I’m really worried about the way that these conversations are happening.

Thor Benson

And so much of the stuff that started on Twitter is coming back to bite us in real life. USAID was gutted, our public health infrastructure was dismantled, Laura Loomer decides who’s going to be fired. Now we have parasites in our lettuce and people across the globe have died due to funding cuts.

Nina Jankowicz

Oh, gosh, it’s absolutely real. I’ve got a book coming out next year about government by and for the trolls that looks at the way this pipeline works. There are a lot of different levels of pressure. One of them is this influencer-to-policy pipeline that you mentioned.

It’s not just folks like Loomer.

Read more

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For communities crushed by President Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown, there isn’t a world where people simply get over it.

During Operation Metro Surge, the federal government inflicted unprecedented violence on Minnesota, particularly on the state’s most vulnerable populations. There’s a temptation to try to forget what cannot be forgiven. But preserving the truth of what actually happened, the villainy and the heroism, the hatreds and the kindnesses, is the only way to move forward.

And any candidates and politicians who want to minimize what happened or sweep it under the rug should never be trusted with power ever again.

Minnesota Republican US Senate candidate Michele Tafoya’s pretend evenhandedness (“I’m not thrilled with the way Operation Metro Surge was rolled out here in Minnesota, but…”) has to be one of the most cowardly ways to face the aftermath of Metro Surge. It stands in contrast to the efforts by the Governor’s Council to Record the Truth of Operation Metro Surge to simply bear witness to the terror of what actually happened.

It’s a difficult and delicate thing to ask people to remember the hurt they suffered, even more so when the federal government that inflicted it remains in power. Speaking out against the administration has proven to be a dangerous, even deadly, affair, so the Truth Council (which was created by Gov. Walz after the occupation ended) partnered with The Advocates for Human Rights to create a process for collecting the stories of survivors and witnesses.

The organization has spent decades helping survivors of human rights violations to document what happened, from Cambodia to Sierra Leone to Liberia. For their work with the Truth Council, they trained over 250 people as “story collectors” and connected with over 200 partner organizations.

Everyone knows some of these stories. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are indelible, as is the memory of five-year-old Liam Ramos’s abduction. But thousands of Minnesotans suffered at the hands of ICE, in ways ranging from abject cruelty to outright violence. The Truth Council is charged with documenting “the harms and abuses” experienced by Minnesotans, and the first public meeting last week was full of these brief stories, tiny sharp remembrances of pain and humiliation:

• “An elder who needed new dentures was too scared to leave her home to access dental care. So she ate baba or kanji with little protein for months on end because she couldn’t chew her food without new dentures.”

• “The mother taken at her child’s bus stop has an anaphylactic peanut allergy and ICE denied her food for six days because the federal government could not be bothered to provide a meal free of the allergen.”

• “A convoy of SUVs filled with agents sped through an intersection where our kids were climbing on their buses to go home, raced towards the school and halted in front of the main entrance”

• “She taught her mother how to crawl up into the attic space and hide in case federal agents came to their door for questioning.”

The Council is also tasked with making findings about how to “prevent the recurrence of unlawful or harmful conduct by federal agents.” Sarah Lopez, the policy director of Unidos Minnesota, relayed a story — which actually did receive media coverage at the time — that stands out as emblematic of the petty, relentless viciousness of ICE agents:

“In Willmar, four agents sat down at lunch at El Tapatio,” she said. “And that evening, after the family closed early, agents followed them out and detained the owners of the restaurant and the dishwasher.”

Imagine being one of those agents. Imagine going to a small family restaurant and being fed and cared for, only to turn around and arrest those same people later that day. Imagine how warped and broken you have to be to behave that way.

Along with the accounts of victims, survivors, and witnesses, it’s also important to remember the ICE agents at the center of stories like this. The Truth Council doesn’t exist only to amplify those voices, but also to document the behavior of the federal agents who terrorized the state.

But for every story of humiliation and harm at the hands of ICE goons, there were stories about Minnesotans coming together, demonstrating solidarity and resilience and resistance. And that’s part of the charge of the Truth Council as well, to “document how Minnesotans came together, supported one another, and persevered.” And they really did. During the public meeting, people offered up stories of mutual care, of making spaces of joy even in terror:

• “Neighbors banded together to protect one another, deliver groceries, and pay bills. Parents patrolled their neighborhoods. Educators organized carpools and packed meals. Restaurants fed people at a loss. Minnesotans persevered and made their voices heard loudly and peacefully.”

• “On the day that kids returned from distance learning, our students had a brass band that played on the front steps of the school to welcome them back.”

These sorts of stories aren’t just here to document perseverance. They also relate to preventing the recurrence of violent conduct by ICE thugs.

What Minnesotans learned, what the world saw, was that the way to push back against Trump’s thugs was to meet them with solidarity and community. And the federal government had no real way to combat that. It’s pretty evident Trump and DHS thought that there would be more public support for their violence and were surprised to learn that everyday Minnesotans — people who couldn’t be written off as wild-eyed antifa progressives — refused to stand by and do nothing as their neighbors were abducted. Well, that and the fact that the notion of kindness, of care towards one’s community, is utterly foreign to this administration.

While the Advocates were responsible for gathering stories, the state provided analysts to review agency and external data and compile numbers and findings.

Sometimes, numbers can obscure the story, giving things an abstract quality that pales in comparison to the immediacy of individual accounts. But here, both the stories and the numbers provide a narrative showing how Metro Surge took over the state, how it deformed and taxed communities in smaller, persistent ways.

During the week of January 12, the Twin Cities United Way received 1,042 food requests. The 2025 amount? 351. HOME Line, a statewide tenant advocacy organization, reported that the number of people seeking help to pay rent in January 2026 was almost 85 percent higher than the previous January. From December 2025 to January 2026, calls to the Minnesota Department of Education’s Community Support Line jumped 615 perecnt.

So, in light of all this violence, all this resilience, all of these impacts, what do Minnesota GOP candidates have to say? Do they choose to uplift and defend all Minnesotans, or are they trash like Tafoya?

Guess what? They are trash like Tafoya.

Just last month, House Whip Tom Emmer, running for reelection in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District, declared that his constituents were begging him to “please thank Donald Trump for trying to keep us safe and trying to get these illegals out.”

In Minnesota’s Eighth Congressional District, Republican Pete Stauber is running to keep his seat, and he’s not shy about lying to his constituents about fraud and trying to blame Trump’s ICE goons on … Joe Biden?

After two Minnesotans were murdered in cold blood by ICE, GOP Rep. Michelle Fischbach, who represents Minnesota’s Seventh Congressional district, sang a paean to federal agents: “Our federal law enforcement officers deserve our respect and support as they work to uphold the law and keep our communities safe. We must reject rhetoric that limits cooperation with federal authorities and instead focus on the rule of law to ensure the safety of all Minnesotans.”

State House Rep. Lisa Demuth, who is the GOP’s nominee for the governor’s race, handwaved away the murders of Good and Pretti and blamed the victims.

“The death of two Minnesota residents — that’s the cost of it. But it was local decisions, high-level local decisions that inflamed the entire situation,” she said.

When ICE comes to town, communities band together, while conservatives celebrate their violence. That’s not just in Minnesota.

In Maine, the federal government launched Operation Catch of the Day shortly after the ICE murders in Minneapolis. As immigrants sheltered in place, as healthcare workers and public school students stayed home out of fear, Sen. Susan Collins did some of her patented brow-furrowing: ”There are people in Maine and elsewhere who have entered this country illegally and who have engaged in criminal activity. They could be subject to arrest and deportation pursuant to the laws of the United States, and people who are exercising the right to peacefully gather and protest their government should be careful not to interfere with law enforcement efforts while doing so.”

None of these people are fit to represent their constituents. They’ve made clear that given the choice between protecting ICE thugs and protecting their constituents, they’ll choose ICE every time.

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Why accountability is required

One thing that will eventually have to be grappled with is what to do with people like this — ICE agents and GOP politicians alike — once the Trump regime is finally toppled.

The consequence for those agents can’t be that they simply return to their hometowns and go about their business. There has to be some sort of reckoning with the harm they caused before they get a chance to even think about returning to polite society. You can’t live in community with people like that.

There might be a path forward for those four ICE agents, but it shouldn’t be an easy one.

Minnesota’s Truth Council is doing the heavy, hard work of documenting what happened, but Minnesotans and everyone else who was attacked and affected by ICE will one day have to take the next step: reconciliation.

That sounds … mushy, right? It sounds like the same path that former President Barack Obama took after succeeding George W. Bush, and that Joe Biden took after the first Trump term — that we just try to move on, live together, and return to some sort of bipartisan balance.

But that’s not what reconciliation means. It’s not a way of saying we all just need to get along. It’s a way of saying we need to hold people accountable and assess exactly what level of culpability they have and to shape a future that ensures this doesn’t happen again.

Minnesota no doubt partnered with The Advocates for Human Rights precisely because the state understands that truth is only the first step. That organization also works on transitional justice, which includes truth and reconciliation processes. It requires setting up a formal system — a new, or parallel justice system, basically — to determine who is most responsible for the violence that has gripped the United States and the level of punishment that is appropriate. We’ve learned from the unsuccessful attempts to hold Trump responsible for January 6 and from the unwillingness of the federal government to prosecute ICE agents that our existing judicial branch simply is not cut out to deal with that level of lawlessness. We need something dedicated explicitly, and only, to these efforts.

Truth and reconciliation also requires a commitment to institutional reforms and reparations. Whoever is in power on the other side of the Trump era can’t go back to business as usual, can’t leave something like ICE fully intact and hope that moderate reforms do the trick and get rid of the bad apples. The whole structure is rotten to the core.

Reparations will be necessary as well. Immigrant communities have been shattered. People have been deported, in violation of court orders, to countries they never lived in and have no connection to. The economic impact on Minneapolis, the epicenter of Metro Surge, ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Communities can’t simply pick themselves up by their bootstraps and move on. Money has to be redistributed from the bribe-fueled, corrupt government that Trump built, and given back to its victims.

We’re only in the most nascent stages of this sort of reform, the stage of gathering stories and data. But one day, Trump and his ilk will be out of office, and we’ll be ready to take the next steps.

There’s a reason that Billy Bragg’s “City of Heroes,” written for Minneapolis during Metro Surge, is not about revolution, nor is it about passivity. It’s about bearing witness to every bit of violence that was thrown at the city and being brave enough to stand still and stare it down. We’re going to have to be brave enough to do that, perhaps for quite a bit longer, and brave enough to think about what it looks like on the other side.

When they dragged people from their cars

I got in their face

When they took families from their homes

I got in their face

When they murdered our sister

I got in their face

And when they murdered our brother

I still got in their face

That’s it for today

We’ll be back with a special Saturday edition of the newsletter tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by signing up for a paid subscription.

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If you’d like to support the podcast and ask us live questions during future episodes, please become a paid subscriber to Public Notice if you aren’t one already.

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Though we recorded on Thursday this week due to the impending long weekend, we’ll be back next week at our normal time of around 2pm Eastern on Friday.

Until then, enjoy the show!

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MONTREAL: Last week I crossed into Canada from Maine and promptly turned on CBC Television in my Quebec City hotel to watch Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s press conference regarding the ongoing US-Canada trade war.

Standing on the banks of the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario, with America’s automaking capital in full view behind him, a stern but agitated Poilievre made his fourth public appearance in three days to discuss trade and tariff policy. After complaining about Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “transparency” during the recent negotiations with President Trump, Poilievre delicately tiptoed between mild criticism of his domestic liberal opponents and measured criticism of Trump, his conservative counterpart across the border.

Poilievre called for the Canadian parliament to hold an emergency session to negotiate the tariff deal that Carney had rejected. Desperately seeking any political opening, Poilievre demanded Carney release all the details — offers and counteroffers from both sides — during the failed negotiations. But Poilievre could do little more than whine about procedure because he knows Canadians, including many of his own Conservative Party supporters, are so furious with Trump that if he dared to praise him or side with the United States in any way he would be committing political suicide.

“Poilievre is screwed,” Dalhousie University political scientist Lori Turnbull told me. “He was anyway. Even in places where Poilievre and conservatives have a stronghold, Carney is eating into their support.”

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Everything Canadian Trump touches dies

Privately, Poilievre must despise Trump almost as much as roughly 60 percent of Americans who disapprove of him do.

After all, were it not for Trump’s erratic trade and tariff policies — not to mention his arrogant suggestion that Canada become America’s 51st state — Poilievre would almost certainly now be negotiating US-Canada trade policies as prime minister.

A mere two months before the April 2025 Canadian national elections, Poilievre was riding the same global wave of inflation-driven citizen disgust with incumbent parties; at one point, polls showed him leading Carney and the ruling Liberals by as much as 30 points. But Trump hatred among Canadian voters helped catapult Carney from likely defeat to solid victory.

That pattern of Canadians rejecting Conservative Party office-seekers to rebuke Trump continued this week when Liberals swept all three special elections to fill vacant parliamentary seats. Two of those seats had been occupied by Liberal members of parliament, but in the third contest the Liberal victor in a Quebec-based district replaced a Conservative MP in a seat Conservatives held since 2018.

“The Quebec result was the most dramatic shift,” noted the Associated Press of Toronto. “The region is home to aluminum producers, dairy farms and other industries caught in an escalating trade war with the US.”

Liberal MP Hedy Fry made plain what the results meant, telling the CBC: “The United States is getting a message tonight. [Carney] has the support of the Canadian people.”

The special election results came just days after US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubled down on Trump’s insulting rhetoric toward America’s northern neighbor.

“I don’t think you can be in a tit-for-tat with someone who’s 13 times larger than you are,” a smarmy Bessent said in response to the suggestion that Canada wielded sufficient economic power to win a trade war with the United States.

I asked McGill University political scientist Daniel Béland how much damage Trump has caused for the conservative opposition in Canada.

“Trump is highly unpopular in Canada so it would be very hard for Poilievre to side with him in any significant way. This is especially the case because Poilievre’s polling numbers do not look good, especially compared to Carney’s,” he said. “The Liberals probably want Poilievre to stick around as long as possible as his low favourability numbers benefit to them electorally.”

Béland is not exaggerating. By summer 2025, Canadians’ views of Trump and the United States had already tanked, according to Pew Research. A recent poll shows that Canadians’ hatred for Trump has widened the Liberal Party’s advantage.

Americans are also fed up with Trump’s treatment of Canada. A new Reuters/IPSOS poll this week showed that only 20 percent of Americans support Trump’s tariffs and just 14 percent approve of his spiteful move to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America. (But a new poll from YouGov America shows that Trump’s rhetoric is polarizing Republicans against Canada, with 38 percent of them now viewing our northern neighbor as “unfriendly or an enemy of the US.”)

Carney strikes back

Last week’s breakdown in negotiations is the latest skirmish in the ongoing tariff battle that began when Trump returned to the White House in January 2025.

PM Carney made it very clear that he no longer considers the United States a good faith negotiator and trade partner, and he’s actively encouraging Canadian businesses to search for alternative markets to sell Canadian exports.

“The prime minister was basically built for this type of thing,” says Turnbull, citing the PM’s business chops. (Carney holds master’s and doctoral degrees in business from Oxford University, and as governor of the Bank of Canada helped navigate his country through the 2008 financial crisis.) “He comes at this issue like an emergency, like a wartime PM. Canadians believe he has the skillset and experience to do this kind of work. They really support his decision to walk away from the table.”

So far, Carney’s firm stance and trade pivot seem to be working. Canada is the only nation to boast free trade agreements with all other G7 nations. According to International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu, in the past year alone Canada has inked 20 new trade agreements with countries other than the United States. In the next decade Canada intends to double, from 1.5 billion to 3 billion, the number of foreign consumers of Canadian products.

These changes put Carney in a strong position to reject the most absurd demand Trump made during the recent negotiations, namely, that the United States have the power to approve any trade agreement Canada entered with other nations. No American president would agree to such a restriction; believing Canada was so dependent on US trade that it would accept this provision was pure Trumpian arrogance.

Unlike the many American institutions that caved to Trump’s threats, from law firms to universities, Carney understands that standing up to bullies is always the best approach.

“Prime Minister Carney’s decision to reject the terms the Trump administration posed during last month’s trade talks between Canada and the United States proved very popular across Canada, with about three quarters of the population approving the decision according to one poll,” Béland wrote to me. “His decision was also celebrated by commentators in many other countries, who saw it as a template to how one should stand up to the Trump administration.”

US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is trying desperately to spin the failed trade negotiations as Canada disrespecting Trump, but until Carney calls for the United States become a new Canadian province those lame complaints will fall flat.

Indeed, two polls taken during the final weeks of August showed Carney’s Canadian public approval rating at 53 percent on August 17, before the tariff war began, then surging to 60 percent by August 31, after Carney rejected Trump’s counteroffers. Those are the kind of eye-popping levels of support that a self-deluding Trump boasts about, when in fact he suffers from his lowest approval ratings to date.

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A rift that will take decades to repair

Last weekend, I bellied up at a popular Montreal pub called Nyk’s Bistro Pub and ordered an Old Fashioned. I like my Old Fashioneds sweeter, made with bourbon rather than rye, and asked Max, the bartender, what my bourbon options were.

“We don’t have any American whiskeys,” he told me, citing the US-Canadian trade war. Silly me: I had forgotten about the implications of Trump’s foolish and self-destructive trade policies. (Max promptly recommended Bearface, a triple-oak barreled whisky made in rural Canada; I ordered it on the rocks instead — quite tasty.)

My disappointment is a minor casualty of Trump’s inane trade policies, which continue to cause serious economic pain for Canadians and Americans alike. As we explained here three months ago, the tariffs effectively imposed a retail sales tax on US consumers. We predicted the Supreme Court’s ruling that Trump’s tariffs were unconstitutional and would result in corporations recovering their losses while consumers never receive a dime they paid in higher retail prices. That’s exactly what is now happening.

The conservative Wall Street Journal pilloried Trump for his ruinous tariffs. At the G20 Summit this week, our allies complained about the damage caused by Trump’s economic policies. Even rural Americans — some of Trump’s most devout supporters — have finally realized the self-proclaimed business “genius” they voted for is causing them unnecessary economic pain.

The tariffs are bad, but our long-term relations with Canada are worse. Led by their defiant Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose election Trump effectively sealed, Canadians have seen and heard enough. They’ve turned their back on the United States and their eyes toward new markets and trading partners. The mutually beneficial economic partnership between America and its top trading partner is in tatters and will take years for future administrations to repair.

“I think that there’s an awareness here, which has developed over time, that even if there’s a Democratic president next that this is not a moment that will be reversed,” says Turnbull. “The trust relationship has been blown up so much that Canadians would want to see guarantees that this will not happen again. The irreversibility is in the loss of trust.”

That’s it for now

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The important thing to know here is that this is all John Roberts’s fault.

We’re on the precipice of complete chaos as Trump tries to seize control of the midterms. Multiple courts have ruled that this is wholly illegal. And yet, no one knows whether the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority will once again leap in to ensure the president is able to violate the law.

The result is a frenzied race by lower courts to render their own rulings as quickly as possible to mitigate the impact of the bomb that SCOTUS may or may not drop in the middle of the November election.

This is not how functioning democracies go. Or at least, not for long.

Steal big

On March 31, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Justice Department, Homeland Security, and the Postal Service to effectively seize control of state voter rolls.

The Constitution vests exactly zero authority in the executive branch to police local elections, explicitly reserving that power for Congress and the states. But Trump vaguely gestured in the direction of his “unavoidable duty under Article II of the Constitution of the United States to enforce Federal law, which includes preventing violations of Federal criminal law and maintaining public confidence in election outcomes” and forged ahead.

Under this spiffy plan, the secretary of Homeland Security will compile a list of citizens, collect state voter rolls, and tell registrars whom to delete. The Post Office will take the list of “legal” voters and refuse to deliver ballots to anyone not on it. And the attorney general will hold the whip, threatening to arrest anyone who stands in the way.

The plan stumbled at the first hurdle, when states declined to turn over the voter lists, and judges declined to make them. The government is currently 0-23 in its effort to coerce the states to hand over voter data. And so Trump turned to the Post Office in a final, desperate attempt to make it happen.

But there, too, he’s been stymied by the courts. Twenty-four states, the District of Columbia, and a coalition of civil rights groups led by the League of Women Voters sued in Massachusetts to block implementation of the order. On June 25, Judge Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, agreed that the mailman has no power to police state elections and enjoined the Post Office from operationalizing it in any fashion. Citing the imminent harm to states, which have already expended considerable time and effort preparing for the midterms, she refused to stay her order pending appeal. The First Circuit agreed on both counts.

Meanwhile in DC, a similar case brought by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the NAACP was percolating before Trump-appointee Judge Carl Nichols. He denied the requested injunction because the Post Office had not enacted a final rule, and thus any harm to the plaintiffs was “speculative.” And on August 24 the Supreme Court’s six conservatives adopted that same reasoning to undo Judge Talwani’s injunction.

But by then, the Post Office had finalized the rule, and the very harms warned of by the states were coming to pass.

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Stop the steal, but for real

The final rule propounded by the Post Office is every bit as invasive and infeasible as the plaintiffs warned.

It forces state officials to upload their voter rolls to the Post Office through a dedicated portal and purchase new envelopes with voter-specific bar codes for every piece of ballot mail. If a ballot is rejected, it won’t be delivered at all, and only the registrar can fix that — the voter won’t be told or given an opportunity to challenge her exclusion.

As multiple election officials attested, this cannot possibly be implemented in time for the November midterms.

Dyana Limon-Mercado, the county clerk for Travis County, Texas, wrote that even if she had the money, manpower, and time to redo every ballot envelope — a project which takes 35 people working full time five weeks to complete — her office has no scanners capable of reading the specific barcode mandated by the regulation. She went on:

The County Clerk has already purchased all our absentee ballot outbound carrier envelopes and return envelopes that we will use for the November 2026 election, at a cost of approximately $21,349. We do not have funds to repurchase new envelopes.

Moreover, because the absentee ballot envelopes are specialized products, as referenced above, ordering them requires months of lead time. Even if our budget could handle the additional expenditure, our supplier would not be able to provide that many new envelopes in time for us to meet the October 4, 2026, deadline to start sending out mail-in ballots for the upcoming November 3, 2026 election. We typically order such ballot envelopes three to nine months in advance.

Plaintiffs in the DC case note that, in jurisdictions that mail ballots to every voter, it would take the post office days or even months to scan millions of envelopes.

If it takes USPS one minute to scan each of the 2.6 million mailpieces, the Maricopa County Recorder will have to remain at the [Business Mail Entry Unit] continuously for nearly 5 years. If 30 seconds per mail piece, 2.5 years. If one second, 30 days. And if a tenth of a second, it would still take 72 hours.

And that’s if everything at the Post Office goes right. Which it will not according to a whistleblower report published today by Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

The “anonymous federal official with direct knowledge of potentially catastrophic problems in the development of the United States Postal Service’s new system for handling federal election ballot mail” describes a shambolic process to cobble together something in time for the midterms — a process the Post Office resumed in July, in direct contravention of Judge Talwani’s injunction.

The whistleblower warns that “an ordinary process for an effort of this complexity, magnitude, and importance could take nine months to a year or more,” but that all concerns were brushed aside by supervisors who declared “we cannot fail.”

Even worse, the government plans to reject thousands of ballots if the machine decides that even one in the pile is defective. Blumenthal writes:

Not only is this system astonishingly untested, USPS has simultaneously implemented an impracticable zero percent failure rate. When ballots are submitted to USPS in large-volume batches, if any one ballot in the batch cannot be verified against the Portal, all ballots in that batch will be rejected. For example, if a state election official brings a batch of 10,000 ballots to USPS and USPS is unable to match just one of those ballots against the Portal – because, for example, someone has recently changed their name after marriage or they’ve moved — then USPS would refuse to mail the remaining 9,999 ballots as well. As the whistleblower notes, “USPS expects the state to take back the entire batch to cure the issue with the single ballot…”

To root out the nonexistent scourge of voter fraud, the government will disenfranchise millions of American citizens!

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The only six votes that count

After the Supreme Court bigfooted in to stomp on Judge Talwani’s order, she invited the plaintiffs to amend their complaint to account for the fact that the rule has now been finalized. They took her up on it within hours, and by August 27, she had reimposed a temporary restraining order blocking the government from putting the rule into effect.

Temporary restraining orders are definitionally not appealable, since they last for a short time (typically 14 days) and are merely a placeholder to preserve the status quo while the judge makes a considered ruling. Here, Judge Talwani ordered the parties to appear on Thursday, September 3, for a hearing on a preliminary injunction, which is appealable. Despite this lightning-fast schedule, the government filed an immediate appeal to the First Circuit.

No other litigant would seek this kind of relief, much less get it. But the Trump administration routinely demands emergency relief from every adverse ruling, no matter how temporary. And in the main, it gets what it wants, thanks to the Supreme Court’s right-wing justices.

Time and again they leapt in to short-circuit the normal process to allow Trump to break the law, on the theory that saying no to the president is grave emergency. This is a power grab by the Court’s MAGA majority, who have kicked the legs out from under trial and appellate courts, at least when it comes to their golden-orange boy.

Lower court judges have contorted their jurisprudence and preemptively stayed their own orders against the government to avert the chaos of the Supreme Court’s six justices stomping in and doing it for them. In the case of Trump’s tariffs, lower courts allowed him to keep collecting billions of dollars in illegal levies because they anticipated — correctly! — that the Supreme Court would just make them do it anyway.

We watched this exact dynamic play out with respect to Trump’s illegal ballroom, which the Supreme Court just greenlit on Monday. That case had the added wrinkle of Chief Justice Roberts siding with the liberals in the minority to oppose the continued construction. But his righteous anger might ring more true if he hadn’t spend the past decade rewarding Trump for breaking the law and ignoring court orders.

And so the First Circuit sprinted to respond to the government’s demand that they stay Judge Talwani’s order and let the Trump administration enact this disastrous scheme immediately. The government points to special tracking requirements for shipping cremated pets as proof that it’s entitled to dummy up an entire ballot screening system and dump votes at scale.

The First Circuit raced to deal with the government’s emergency motion to set aside Judge Talwani’s order, instructing the parties to brief the case in less than 24 hours. As of this writing, they have not yet ruled — although if you asked me to bet, I’d wager that they’re likely to uphold the trial judge, as they did five weeks ago. But however they come down, we all understand that it will be a mere placeholder until the Supreme Court announces whether it will once again allow Trump to sow chaos and potentially steal the midterms.

Thanks, Chief Justice Roberts!

That’s it for today

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It’s election season. Cicadas are chorusing from the trees, the first ad buys are frolicking on the networks, and the thoughts of pundits turn lightly to “Dems in disarray” opining.

At the New York Times, opinion writer Michelle Cottle pressed the argument that the Trump administration was ushered into power by “the excesses of woke,” with the implication being that fascism is the left’s fault. The Hill sucked its thumb and opined that “Democrats’ progressive surge could complicate [Hakeem] Jeffries’s path to unity.” CBS’s Gayle King tried to get progressive Democratic Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon to disavow left-wing streamer Hasan Piker and was flummoxed when Nixon explained that she barely knew who he was. The New York Times (again) wondered breathlessly whether Democratic Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is too radical for the state and would cost the party a crucial seat.

And so on. If you follow centrist mainstream pundits and only centrist mainstream pundits, you’d get the impression that Democrats are locked in a damaging fight for the soul of their party, so focused on their circular firing squad that they can’t even lift their heads to confront the remorseless fascist Republican death machine which will inevitably crush them in the midterms.

But if you turn from the Cottles and Chaits and look instead at what Democratic candidates and voters are saying and doing, the picture looks very different.

The fact is that Democrats are ready to crawl across broken glass, through acid baths, and over fields swarming with velociraptors in order to defeat the bloated fascist oligarch and his corrupt minions. And Democratic politicians are responding to those very clear incentives by focusing their ire first and foremost on the crime boss president.

The result is a Democratic Party that, yes, includes a broad range of ideologies, but which is nonetheless remarkably unified — and which looks poised for a historic midterm win.

Maine

It wasn’t that long ago that pundits were certain that Maine, not Michigan, was the winnable seat that Democrats were going to lose through disunity and dysfunction.

This panic did for once have substance behind it. Graham Platner, the oyster farmer who dominated the Senate primary, was an extremely flawed candidate with a host of grotesque and disqualifying scandals. During the campaign, the press turned up evidence he had a Nazi tattoo on his chest, posted bigoted garbage on social media, and engaged in reckless sexting. His campaign was finally destroyed when women came forward credibly accusing him of domestic violence and sexual assault.

It was clear as Platner staggered from repulsive revelation to repulsive revelation that he was going to have serious trouble defeating perpetually concerned Republican incumbent Susan Collins. But even when Platner was finally forced out of the race, pundits continued to insist Democrats would not be able to unite around a replacement.

On the left, David Dayen at the American Prospect claimed that the 600-person nominating convention for Platner’s replacement was insufficiently representative and “could easily torch whatever remaining goodwill exists between the party and supporters brought into Platner’s campaign.” After progressive and former Maine Senate Majority Leader Troy Jackson looked on his way to win the nomination, The Hill’s right-wing opinion goons popped up to declare he was “a controversial populist with a checkered and divisive past rather than a moderate who could draw broad support.”

Maine Democrats had alienated the left; they had alienated the center. The party was doomed in Maine! Alas!

Or, you know, maybe that was all nonsense.

Jackson strolled to an easy win at the convention, and then basically every Democrat and labor union in the state lined up to endorse him. Former vice president and 2024 presidential candidate Kamala Harris endorsed him and left-wing Sen. Bernie Sanders praised him. It sure seems like both the left and the mainstream Democratic Party are happy to have jettisoned the mess that was Platner and are pleased with his replacement.

Voters are happy too. Jackson has never trailed in a poll against Collins since he became the candidate. FiftyPlusOne currently rates the race as Lean Democrat and gives Jackson a 69 percent chance to win. [Editor’s note: Polling numbers cited in this piece are current as of August 31.] The outcome is still far from certain and it’s worth remembering that Collins won in 2020 despite bad polling heading into Election Day. But the more likely outcome at the moment is the one you’d expect in a blueish state in a blue wave year.

After stepping in it with the Platner nomination, the Democratic Party found a better candidate and just quietly united behind him — because everyone wants to crush Susan Collins and win the Senate.

Michigan

Now that Maine is no longer providing juicy disarray for Dems, the punditocracy has moved on to Michigan.

The Senate primary there was bitter. One of the major divisions in the Democratic Party currently is over Israel. Abdul El-Sayed, a former Wayne County health director, has called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide (in line with the scholarly consensus) and has said he wants to end US military aid. His opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, is an enthusiastic Zionist and received $32 million from AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobbying group. There was much breathless speculation that whoever became the nominee, the party would struggle to unify for the general election.

But after El-Sayed narrowly won, Stevens immediately and enthusiastically endorsed him, pointing out that his Republican opponent, former congressman and current election denier Mike Rogers, “is going to continue to rubber-stamp Donald Trump’s chaotic agenda.”

Former president Barack Obama — one of the most popular figures in the Democratic party — reached out to El-Sayed to offer support. James Carville, a former Bill Clinton advisor associated with the party’s center-right, criticized El-Sayed during the campaign but swiftly endorsed him after his victory, calling Mike Rogers a “clown.” Kamala Harris endorsed El-Sayed too. So did Bernie Sanders and other left leaders. So did dozens of state electeds, along with the UAW, the Michigan AFL/CIO, and Planned Parenthood.

It’s true that pundits and to some extent pro-Israel Zionists have continued to argue that El-Sayed can’t win, and/or to try to undermine him in order to weaken him. Many have focused on Hasan Piker, a left-wing streamer who endorsed El-Sayed in the primary. Piker often says inflammatory things (as streamers do) and his critics also take him out of context. Most recently, a conversation in which he argued that Zionist propaganda can increase antisemitism has been presented (duplicitously) as an antisemitic diatribe, though this is a point also made made by many progressive Jews (including me).

El-Sayed is understandably not interested in parsing the ins and outs of the comments of a streamer without much of a national profile as part of his campaign, and he’s distanced himself from Piker. Other Democrats, like House leader Jeffries, have rebuked Piker as well.

But pundits like Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic have not been assuaged. Chait claims that El-Sayed’s association with Piker presents Democrats with a “grim choice” in November — as if Piker, who is notably not running for office, is as much of a threat to the country as Donald Trump, a raging authoritarian fascist who says grotesquely antisemitic garbage all the time. A small group of Jewish Democrats have declared their support for Mike Rogers — though the Israeli government is now so unpopular with the Michigan electorate that they have largely avoided explaining that Rogers’s support for military funding for Israel is the main reason they endorse him.

Given all of this smoke, you’d think that El-Sayed’s campaign was on fire. But it’s not. On the contrary, he, like Troy Jackson, is polling fine. FiftyPlusOne rates the race currently as Lean Democrat, giving El-Sayed a 65 percent chance of winning. A big part of the reason for El-Sayed’s lead is a factor that national media hardly ever mentions: Mike Rogers is a Trump lackey who is very unpopular. A recent poll puts his favorability at 11 points underwater, while El-Sayed’s favorability is at plus 1.

National media is trying to convince the public that El-Sayed is a scandalous unqualified candidate like Platner, and/or that his party is as divided about his candidacy as Democrats were about President Biden the month before he decided not to seek reelection in 2024. But neither of those things is true. El-Sayed has solid support among elected Democrats and Democratic-aligned groups in Michigan and beyond. Based on the polling, most voters do not care about Hasan Piker, probably because most of them don’t know who he is.

“This is about Donald Trump’s disastrous policies in Michigan. That’s what I’m focused on right now,” El-Sayed said recently. The vast majority of Democrats, and what looks like a majority of people in Michigan, agree with him. That doesn’t fit the disarray narrative. But it nevertheless appears to be true.

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And everywhere else

Other states aren’t getting as much attention, but that’s mostly because if you’re looking for Democratic disarray, there’s precious little of it around.

In Wisconsin, after a divisive and chaotic gubernatorial primary, mainstream Democrat David Crowley defeated left challenger Francesca Hong, who quickly endorsed him. Crowley has led in every poll since he got the nomination.

In Florida, Nixon scored a surprising electoral upset against establishment candidate Alex Vindman. Vindman immediately endorsed her and shared most of his massive campaign fundraising haul to help Democratic candidates in Florida and nationwide.

In Texas, Jasmine Crockett, who lost the nomination to James Talarico, has been an embarrassingly sore loser and has said she won’t campaign with him. But Kamala Harris, who initially supported Crockett, has endorsed him. Talarico is blowing the doors off in fundraising, tripling his Republican opponent Ken Paxton’s haul in the second quarter. He’s also polling better than even in perennially red Texas, with a 55 percent chance to win according to FiftyPlusOne.

Meanwhile, Republicans are a mess. The clearest example is in Texas, where Trump endorsed the stunningly corrupt Paxton over incumbent John Cornyn because he had a grudge against Cornyn for occasionally displaying a smidgen of independence. Because of petty grievances, Trump put the seat, and the Senate, within the reach of Democrats.

Meanwhile, in Ohio, Sen. Bernie Moreno has denounced Rep. Max Miller, his former son-in-law, who has been accused of abusing Moreno’s daughter and granddaughter. But Miller refused to drop out of the race in a red seat that it looks like he’s going to lose, and now Republicans across the state and country are being asked if they plan to keep his campaign donations.

By all rights, Jonathan Chait and Gayle King and Michelle Cottle should be writing about Republicans being in disarray. Again, though, the mainstream media loves to talk about Democratic division. In some cases that’s because they dislike Democrats and would prefer that Republicans win. More often it’s because they want to do both sides coverage, and “Dems in disarray” is an easy way to talk about something other than the horrors Republicans are inflicting on the country.

But just because the media has gotten a narrative in its craw doesn’t mean it has any relationship to reality. In Maine, in Michigan, in Texas, in Wisconsin, in Texas, in Florida, and across the country, Democrats are determined to hand Trump and fascism a massive defeat in November.

Winning is never guaranteed, and the election is not over till it’s over. But right now, Democrats are overwhelmingly favored to win the House. They have a better than even chance to win the Senate where victory seemed all but impossible only a year ago. Given all that, it sure doesn’t look like it’s Democrats who are in disarray.

That’s it for today

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Remember “Sharpiegate,” a relatively inconsequential but uncommonly stupid episode from Trump’s first term?

The Sharpie is back.

In the surrealist performance hall that is the Oval Office, Trump grabbed his pen, took out a map of the Great Lakes, crossed out “Lake Ontario” and wrote in “Lake America,” part of a pointless new trade war he has started with Canada.

“Lake Ontario, that’s gone. Lake America,” he said. “So now we have a lake and now we have a Gulf because we have the Gulf of America and now we have Lake America.”

Stirring words.

Like so much of what Trump does, this was meant to be a show of strength. Yet it actually demonstrated just the opposite: Trump is weak and getting weaker.

He can instruct the federal government to change its maps, as he did with an executive order late last week, and will even find that many people will submit to his desires.

As of this writing, Google Maps has changed Lake Ontario to Lake America for those searching in the US, while Apple Maps has yet to do so — though since Apple Maps did change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America on Trump’s instruction, it may fall in line soon. (MapQuest loudly refused to make the change, in what may be a bid to inform people that it still exists.)

But if there are any voters in America who are impressed by Trump’s lacustrine nomenclature revisionism, they will surely be hard to find.

Instead, the “Lake America” inanity will be slotted alongside Trump’s ballroom, his quest to keep his name on the Kennedy Center, his helipad, and his Reflecting Pool faceplant. These are the things a failing, frustrated president does in a desperate bid to look strong, because he hasn’t been able to accomplish much of anything that might improve Americans’ lives.

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A misbegotten trade war, on top of everything else

The attempted renaming of Lake Ontario was a petulant way to lash out at Canada over the latest episode in the trade war he started not long after taking office in 2025.

Despite a long and mutually fruitful trading relationship — including the US-Mexico-Canada-Agreement, a free trade pact Trump himself signed in his first term — he recently decided to impose yet another round of tariffs on Canadian goods. Among the demands the administration made to settle the dispute were that the US would get to dictate Canadian trade policy with third countries, so if the US imposed tariffs on another country’s goods, Canada would have been obligated to do the same.

Only an ignoramus of truly world-historical proportions would fail to anticipate that this kind of demand would produce tremendous resistance from Canada, a country where the determination to maintain a unique cultural identity and sovereignty as more than a vassal state of the US unites people across the political spectrum.

And so it did. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that the country would respond to American tariffs in kind, boosting his own popularity in what has become a test for Canadians of their mettle and independence.

Rather than find a mutually agreeable settlement to an idiotic dispute he started — one that will do economic damage to both countries — Trump decided to rename Lake Ontario.

What we are witnessing is that Trump’s personal pathologies are damaging not only the United States’ interests but his own goals.

He wants not just to be seen as powerful but to humiliate other countries and leaders; in his mind, you aren’t strong unless you dominate someone else and show the world that they’re weaker than you. But his demand for visible submission produces inevitable pushback as countries assert their sovereignty in the face of his threats. And the more grandiose his threats, the more important it is for leaders like Carney to very publicly oppose him in order to reinforce their own domestic political standing.

The result is that when Trump is trying hardest to look strong, he winds up producing political conflicts and policy outcomes that end up making him look weak. In this case, he not only wants Canada to be economically dependent on the US, which in many ways it already is, he wants Canada to essentially announce to the world that it has no choice but to do whatever Trump wants. That, the Canadians will not do.

As a bonus, China could be the big winner of a US-Canadian trade war, if Canada starts importing more goods from there as its economic relationship with America deteriorates. By challenging Canada’s sovereignty in such unnecessary ways (including continuing the “51st state” rhetoric that Canadians find unspeakably insulting), Trump forced Carney’s hand. And he doesn’t even seem to understand what a mistake he is making.

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How Trump misunderstands the limits of his power

Campaigning in 2024, Trump promised some things that he had in his power to deliver (including an immigration crackdown) and some that he couldn’t (including an immediate drop in consumer prices). But he is clearly unable to distinguish between the two.

It may be that he sees legal limits on his authority as his only real impediment, and one that can be circumvented, removed by friendly courts, or simply ignored. That has often proven to be the case, which has allowed him to amass more power than many presidents before him.

For instance, he set about firing members of commissions that have traditionally been insulated from such presidential spite, and eventually the Supreme Court, deploying its “Republican presidents get to do what they want” doctrine, ruled that he could do it. While the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 prevents the executive branch from refusing to spend money that Congress has appropriated, the administration has done so anyway. Likewise, it gutted or even shut down some agencies entirely (most famously the Agency for International Development), betting that even if it lost the inevitable court challenges, by the time the slow legal process reaches its end, the actions would be a fait accompli.

Should the Supreme Court one day rule that the administration broke the law by destroying USAID, it will be essentially a moot point, since the agency no longer exists. In an even more visible case, Trump had scant legal authority to tear down the East Wing of the White House to construct his hulking ballroom, but he just brought in the bulldozers, and now it’s gone. The deed is done.

What Trump didn’t seem to understand, however, is that he lacks the power to achieve some of his most important goals not because of an inconvenient statute or an obstinate judge who can be bullied into submission, but because his success would require the cooperation of people with their own goals, or entire systems that are difficult to simply order to change.

It’s why he has almost no meaningful legislative achievements outside of a tax cut for the wealthy (not exactly a heavy lift when Republicans run Congress) — legislating successfully requires understanding what other people want.

He couldn’t end the war in Ukraine, because the Ukrainians refuse to surrender to Russian aggression and Vladimir Putin won’t cut his losses. He can’t prevail in Iran because the regime is willing to endure enormous pain and now believes it is in a stronger position than ever. In all these cases, other people have agency; they do not exist merely as weaklings to be bullied in a performance whose inevitable end is Trump’s victory. When it came to Ukraine and Iran, Trump claimed his strength would be irresistible, and in almost no time at all; in both cases, America has emerged looking weaker.

Even more difficult is the economy, where Trump can’t simply order prices to go down or wages to rise. Worse, where he has exercised the government’s power, he has pushed prices up, with his erratic tariffs and a war that any fool could have seen would produce a spike in gas prices.

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No one asked for this

And where Trump is exercising power, he is doing it almost exclusively to serve goals that few Americans actually want.

His trade policy, like the Iran war, is highly unpopular. His immigration crackdown, which has been perhaps the purest expression of his violent nationalism, has likewise caused Americans to recoil. And the circus he creates around himself wins him no converts, no matter how much he puffs out his chest in a parody of strength. How many voters watch him changing the name of one of the Great Lakes, then posting a deranged AI slop video in which geese with Trumpian blonde bouffants carrying assault rifles march to take control of Lake Ontario, and say to themselves, “Wow, he’s so strong, I’m definitely voting Republican in the midterms”?

That kind of juvenile silliness was disturbing enough when Trump was in a better position politically; now it looks merely pathetic.

“He spends much of his time, according to those close to him, working on a growing list of construction projects, from the White House ballroom to a proposed triumphal arch, seeking to create physical reminders of his time in office,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Republicans privately worry that Trump’s focus on himself is backfiring with voters, complicating their efforts to keep control of Congress and giving Democrats plenty of ammunition for attack ads.”

No kidding. A president who spends all day choosing colors for the ballroom drapes in between tearing down alliances, lying about the state of the economy, and claiming the disastrous war he started is about to end in triumph is not one who projects strength. And if Republicans lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterms, Trump will be hamstrung and besieged, less able than ever to do whatever he wants.

Previous presidents who found themselves in that situation late in their terms reacted by focusing more on foreign policy, where they have a freer hand to act. Trump, on the other hand, will be likely to look for more surfaces on which he can slap his name and some gold leaf, to make himself feel strong while even much of his own party can’t wait to be rid of him. And every time he busts out his Sharpie — perhaps next time, as he threatened, against the Atlantic and the Pacific — he will only demonstrate how petty and insecure he is.

That’s it for today

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Thanks for reading, and for your support.

When you publish a politics-focused newsletter six times a week, news often causes the best laid plans to go up in smoke. In my case, that often means sliding back quality Q&As that have more staying power than coverage of breaking developments.

Such was the case with an interview we recently conducted with old friend of the newsletter Daniel Drezner, who in addition to being a distinguished professor of international politics at Tufts University is also an insightful commentator on international relations and what President Trump is doing to poison them.

So today, as a bonus for paid subscribers, I am publishing a transcript of that conversation, which delves into Trump’s self-destructive foreign policy and the efforts Canada and Europe are making to distance themselves from an America they rightfully regard as dangerously erratic.

“There was the whole Greenland mess, including the Danes having to mine runways and the French sending special forces to defend Greenland against America,” Drezner told us. “For all of his bluster, that was the moment when they really realized there was no real constraint on what Trump might do. And lastly, the war in Iran caused them to doubt US policy competence.”

Q&As of this sort are the only articles I ever paywall — all of our in-depth explanatory journalism is completely free for everyone. But it takes financial resources to make that coverage happen. And so as we gear up for a two-month sprint to November in a media ecosystem where trusted independent coverage is more vital than ever, I’m asking you to considering becoming a paid subscriber if you aren’t one already.

Supporting our work financially makes it possible for me to offer almost all of our work free of charge, and signing up is the best way to show how much you value Public Notice.

Without further ado, here’s our interview with Drezner.

Read more

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“Trusting the Republicans more on the economy at this point is like trusting Sean Combs to be your babysitter,” writes Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, in his recent piece headlined, “At Long Last, Americans Are Starting to See the Truth About the GOP.”

“For decades now, the Republican Party has built its electoral success on myths and lies,” Tomasky adds. “Ronald Reagan was the last Republican president who your average person would say left the country better off than he found it.”

One could quibble about the legacy of George H.W. Bush, but it’s hard to dispute that the last two Republican presidents easily rank among the worst in American history. Their successors have each been handed a flaming bag of economic and cultural ruin and did commendable jobs putting out the fire, only to hand the reins to the man who will unequivocally go down as our worst president of all time (so far!), Donald J. Trump — whose second term is shaping up to be even more disastrous than the one that ended with mass death amid a pandemic he badly mismanaged.

Tomasky argues Democrats are missing a golden opportunity by not campaigning more aggressively on the obvious truth that from the presidency on down, the Republican Party has a cataclysmic record when it has power, especially in the 21st century. But messaging aside, he says he’s heartened by recent polling showing voters may finally be seeing the light.

“Jobs are just one factor. The performance of the stock market under Democrats is much, much stronger than under Republicans. The increases in median household income and amount by which they’ve reduced the deficit are much greater,” Tomasky told Public Notice. “The comparisons aren’t close, but you never hear any Democrats talk about it.”

“Why this is changing now is really simple and straightforward: The economy is bad, and there’s a Republican president,” he added.

We connected with Tomasky to talk about why voters have harbored false illusions about Republicans for so long, how the wreckage of Trump 2.0 is causing voters to second guess them, the importance of Democrats becoming fluent with the economic data that shows how much more effective their policies are, and much more.

A full transcript of Tomasky’s conversation with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.

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Thor Benson

You point out that for the last few decades, voters have thought of Republicans as good stewards of the economy despite mountains of data showing exactly the opposite. What explains the disconnect?

Michael Tomasky

That perception exists for three reasons. The first is Republicans are just the party of business. They have been since the Industrial Revolution. Democrats were the party of labor. That’s pretty hardwired into people’s brains, and they see that most Wall Streeters and corporate honchos are Republicans and just take their cues from that.

The second reason is that Republicans talk a good game. They and their media allies say they’re pro-business and committed to free markets and all that stuff, and that sounds good to people.

The third reason, I think, is that Democrats do a terrible job of touting the kind of statistics that I talk about in my piece.

From 1989 to 2026, we’ve had Democratic presidents for 20 years and Republicans for 17.4 years. Care to hazard a guess as to the number of jobs created under Democrats vs. Republicans?

Answer: It’s 49.8 million versus 1.9 million. That isn’t a typo. Fifty million to two, basically. Democratic presidents have also done far better than Republicans on median household incomes, GDP rates, the Dow Jones index, and even deficit reduction. Dramatically so on deficit reduction.

I write in the column about speaking to a group of House Democrats a few years ago who seemed totally unfamiliar with these numbers. And jobs are just one factor.

The performance of the stock market under Democrats is much, much stronger than under Republicans. The increases in median household income and amount by which they’ve reduced the deficit are much greater. The comparisons aren’t close, but you never hear any Democrats talk about it.

Why this is changing now is really simple and straightforward: The economy is bad, and there’s a Republican president.

Thor Benson

But the economy was also bad at the end of Trump 1.0. Do you think voters are seeing this as a “fooled me once” situation?

Michael Tomasky

I think the perception that Republicans are the party of the economy is so ingrained in people’s brains that they just don’t connect the dots.

Look at the last three Republican presidents. One oversaw a double-dip recession with a savings and loans scandal that looted the Treasury. That was Bush I. Another oversaw the near meltdown of the whole global capitalist system. That was Bush II. And then the next presided over a pandemic-driven collapse. That was Trump I.

People just for whatever reason don’t see this pattern, or they think it’s a coincidence. But the problem is Democrats don’t point it out to them. I haven’t heard a Democrat say, “Look at this history.”

The last three Republican presidents have handed their Democratic successors an economic catastrophe, and the last three Democrats have had to do their best to clean it up. Why don’t Democrats ever say that? I think it would make a difference.

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Thor Benson

In addition to Trump’s economic mismanagement, he’s also making a mess of the military. Do you think it’s breaking through that the people who talk about supporting the troops are doing the opposite?

Michael Tomasky

The USS Abraham Lincoln story is definitely getting through to people, though it’s hard to say to what extent. But the facts are clear. When people are trying to jump overboard, that’s pretty alarming.

People saw that Hegseth is, to put it charitably, play-acting at being secretary of defense. And then came the war.

I’ll never forget my reaction that morning of February 28. It was a Saturday morning. What? War? I mean, even Bush 43 spent months preparing people for an attack on Baghdad. This was just completely out of nowhere.

I think most everyone turned on the news that day and said, why are we doing this? And now the goal is just to get the Strait of Hormuz reopened. It’s insane.

Thor Benson

It seems that across multiple issues — small government, rule of law — Trump 2.0 flies in the face of the principles Republicans say they value.

Michael Tomasky

Rule of law is a great example. Trump’s lawlessness should be glaringly obvious to most people, and I think that’s breaking through.

Even family values. They’re supporting Max Miller despite terrible abuse allegations, and it’s not just Trump — it’s the whole party. People got to know who he is over the last few weeks and it’s really ugly and shocking stuff.

And it’s even worse when Republicans defend someone like Miller because they’re the ones who prattle on about God and family.

Thor Benson

On economics, Trump is taking government stakes in companies, he’s putting tariffs — which are a tax — on everything. None of this feels like what people expect from a Republican.

Michael Tomasky

I think during the campaign most people kind of heard what they wanted to hear. They were mad at the Democrats and Biden for inflation, but also for refusing to drop out of the race.

I felt all that at various times myself. But the problem in people’s analysis, of course, was their very short, in some cases nonexistent memories.

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You do not, let us be clear, have to hand it to Greg Abbott.

After years of promoting his state as a terrific location for the tech industry to site its data centers, the Texas governor recently did an about-face of sorts, announcing a pause on permitting of new data centers until state regulators can conduct an audit to determine how they will affect the state’s electric grid, water supply, and local communities.

Abbott is nothing if not a shrewd politician, and he’s not the only one who has changed his position on data centers — and the tech industry in general — in response to a growing public backlash.

While the tech backlash isn’t the single most important issue in the midterm elections — the economy and affordability are still at the top of the agenda — it’s not far behind. States are already restricting the ability of the industry to place its facilities, and municipalities are facing a growing revolt against the license plate reading network built by Flock, which has been linked to a variety of abuses.

This may seem jarring to the oligarchs in Silicon Valley. They are probably asking themselves: Why aren’t people more appreciative of the glorious future their benevolent tech overlords are creating? Why are politicians pandering to all these ill-mannered luddites? Is all this unpleasantness going to produce real limitations on the ability of the tech industry to do whatever it wants as it pulls us toward an inevitable AI utopia?

The truth is that the tech industry never understood politics, but now it’s getting an education. As it finds itself under siege, it has no one to blame but itself.

The backlash is growing

Abbott is just one of the politicians who has changed their tune on data centers as anger among the population has begun to boil over.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who had previously hailed the siting of data centers in his state, just issued a similar executive order holding back on permits and tax exemptions; he attacked “predatory developers” he said were steamrolling over local officials in the rush to build their facilities.

In Wisconsin, Republican Tom Tiffany calls his gubernatorial opponent David Crowley “data center David,” while Crowley counters that “Congressman Tiffany loves data centers.” In Ohio, Democrat Sherrod Brown has been hammering incumbent Republican Sen. Jon Husted relentlessly on the issue:

In a memo recently obtained by news organizations, the National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote to AI companies begging them to “fix how Ohioans see” data centers.

“More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck,” the committee wrote. “If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one.”

That future is already here. In races all over the country, candidates are bashing their opponents as insufficiently antagonistic toward data centers, effectively competing to see who can be the most anti-tech-industry candidate.

It isn’t just a few NIMBY activists driving this development; the politicians are responding to a genuine groundswell.

As polling from the climate news site Heatmap shows, opposition to data centers has absolutely exploded. Just one year ago, 43 percent of people said they’d support a data center being built near where they live, while 42 percent were opposed. Today, 75 percent say they’d oppose it against just 15 percent support. Opposition runs across all demographic and political groups: “Data centers are 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 points underwater with independents, and 75 points underwater with Democrats.”

There is one politician, however, who continues to insist that data centers are terrific and every community should want one: Donald Trump.

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A series of terrible mistakes

A hundred years from now, students of history will still be shown photos of Trump’s second inauguration, at which he was accompanied by a phalanx of Silicon Valley’s top leaders: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook, and more.

In the ensuing months, Trump hosted dinners and press conferences at which those executives and others showered him with praise, and he in turn expressed his administration’s commitment to ensuring that nothing will stand in the way of the fastest possible development of artificial intelligence, unfettered by pesky regulation and government oversight.

For the executives, it was both a business decision and a matter of personal preference. Cozying up to the president would surely be good for the bottom line, and just as important, many of them had taken dramatic ideological turns in the previous few years. Silicon Valley may never have been the liberal place many believed it to be, but it was impossible to ignore the seemingly sincere transformations of figures like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Marc Andreessen, who became not just more conservative but visible, vocal advocates for MAGA-inflected ideology.

For no one is that more true than Musk, who has become an increasingly toxic presence in politics and culture around the world.

Not only did Musk unleash vast destruction on the federal government with his DOGE catastrophe, he turned X into a sewer of hate and non-consensual porn, and has become by almost any measure the world’s most influential white supremacist. Much as Republicans need Musk’s money, his unpopularity is an ongoing drag on their political fortunes.

As for the rest of the tech elite, even if their rightward turn was an expression of their true selves (and in a tale as old as taxes themselves, these ultra-rich oligarchs believe that having to pay taxes is the most brutal oppression imaginable), in the long run it was a strategic mistake. Yes, the industry gained itself a powerful ally both at home and abroad, where the administration has tried to bully other countries out of tech regulation. But they also failed to realize that becoming so closely aligned with one party and one president posed a serious danger — especially if the public was bound to resist what they’re selling.

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What is the tech industry giving us?

Data centers bring some particular problems, only some of which are solvable.

They use huge amounts of energy, which can tax the local grid and raise energy prices, so developers are trying to reduce resistance by promising that they will produce their own power (often with fossil fuels, which creates another set of problems). The vast amounts of water needed to cool the chips can likewise strain local systems. Then there’s the incessant, maddening hum many residents report that emanates from all the equipment.

All of which could create a simple NIMBY-type opposition, one that says the data centers are fine, so long as they’re placed far away from where I live. But the opposition to data centers runs deeper, because they have become a stand-in for broader anger at the tech companies and unease about the future.

Even before the eruption in data center construction of the last few years, disquiet about the tech industry and its billionaire leaders was already growing. This collection of weirdos was amassing wealth on a scale unprecedented in human history by tracking our movements, selling our data, and using all their smarts and skill to keep us and our kids addicted to apps that feed us an endless supply of rage-bait and set us at each other’s throats. At a minimum, a gap opened up between the industry’s rhetoric about the wonders of innovation and the sour, exploitative world they seemed determined to create.

Then came AI.

Many industry leaders seemed to believe that the way to promote the technology (and keep the investments coming) was to play up its dangers, that it could threaten all our livelihoods (Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that it could eliminate half of all white-collar jobs), or worse. The regular news releases in which companies like OpenAI announce that their systems did something terrifying and unexpected may serve the hype cycle, but they don’t exactly make people optimistic about the technology’s future.

That gets to the core of what people are feeling about AI: The industry keeps telling us how transformative the technology will be, but we haven’t gotten anything positive from it yet. It’s pillaging our cultural heritage, drowning us in slop, making things less human, turning students into generations of cheaters who can’t write a coherent paragraph on their own, and oh by the way, it might take your job. If a tech leader says “But one day it will cure cancer!”, the natural response is: You keep saying that, but it hasn’t happened.

As Garrett Graff puts it, “AI has arrived in American life and communities across the country as a giant turd mountain. No one wants it; it makes everything worse when it arrives; and it’s been pushed and backed and cheerled by the absolute worst people in modern American life.”

In the face of what seems like an impossibly powerful industry with almost infinite wealth and political power at its disposal, fighting a data center coming to your town is a way for people to reassert their efficacy, to not just say “No” but actually do something about it. And if you aren’t going to organize with your neighbors, or if there doesn’t happen to be a data center planned for your town, at the very least you can vote against the candidates that are in alliance with the tech industry.

This has put Republicans in an awkward position. Not only is their default stance that business should be unfettered, their party has become linked to the tech industry through Donald Trump. They know they won’t get the benefit of the doubt from voters when data centers become an issue. So one after another, they’re racing to match their Democratic counterparts and present themselves as firm opponents of data center proliferation. The Washington Post analyzed politicians’ social media posts and found that “in the past six months, Republicans’ public statements about data centers have turned sharply negative.”

Greg Abbott is a perfect case study: When he was on a glide path to reelection, data centers were just one of the many kinds of development he was happy to encourage in Texas. But he has seen the backlash building, and a recent Fox News poll showed him ahead of his Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa by just one point. So now, Abbott is leading the charge to slow the data center boom.

Appearing last Sunday on ABC’s This Week, Abbott argued that the facilities were proliferating too quickly and with too little oversight (not that he could have done anything about that; he’s just the governor).

“They basically dug their own grave,” he said, “and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”

To repeat, you don’t have to hand it to Abbott. But he certainly knows which way the wind is blowing.

That’s it for today

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Donald Trump spent the past week cozying up to North Korea and attacking Canada. Whatever claim the US had to be a beacon of free trade — not to mention moral leadership — has been demolished like the East Wing of the White House.

And so it was probably inevitable the president would dig the prototypical failed economic policy of the 20th century out of history’s dumpster and operationalize it against our closest ally.

Smoot-Hawley tariffs are back, baby! Sure, aggressive levies cutting off trade as a means of stimulating domestic industry never worked for those people. In fact, it effectively crashed the global economy and turned a recession into the Great Depression. But it may work for us!

It will not work for us. But it may make us so roundly despised that it galvanizes other countries to reimagine the world order so as to cut out the one, heretofore indispensable nation.

USMCA? Never heard of it!

Upon returning to office, Trump immediately took a Sharpie to “the most modern, up-to-date, and balanced trade agreement in the history of our country, with the most advanced protections for workers ever developed” — also known as the USMCA, which he himself negotiated in 2018 as a replacement for NAFTA

"We don't need anything that Canada has, we don't need anything that Mexico has, but they need everything that we have,” he blustered in June. “We don't need their cars, we don't need their lumber, we don't need their energy, we don't need anything that they have."

This is self-evidently ridiculous.

Canada supplies roughly 80 percent of the potash American farmers use as fertilizer. Midwest refineries are built to run on heavy Canadian sour crude, and the pipeline infrastructure simply doesn't exist to swap in lighter, American-produced oil from places like Texas. Canadian hydropower fuels a significant share of the electricity supply in New York and New England. And the auto and auto parts trade between the two countries, already strained by Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs, is about as integrated as two countries' economies get.

And yet Trump negotiated as if Canadians could never say no, even as he demanded crippling concessions and lobbed humiliating insults at our stalwart ally. Trade talks were at an impasse after 18 months of threats and taunts about annexing our northern neighbor. But in July the prospect of an additional 50 percent levy on a sprawling list of Canadian goods forced Canadians back to the negotiating table. And last week, with the major principles agreed, Trump congratulated both sides for striking “a very fair deal.”

"Our farmers are going to be thrilled; our manufacturers are going to be thrilled," he gushed. "And basically, we have no tariffs going into Canada anymore."

Instead talks collapsed Friday night, when Prime Minister Mark Carney announced he was suspending negotiations and recalling Canada’s negotiators to Ottawa.

By Saturday morning, the Trump administration had levied tariffs on roughly $20 billion worth of Canadian goods — hockey sticks, building materials, beer, cheese. Carney promises dollar-for-dollar retaliation, hitting US steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp, paper, and electronics starting September 8.

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Art of no deal

The New York Times and Washington Post confirm that the deal fell apart because the Trump administration attempted to extract a fresh round of concessions at the last minute.

After domestic companies aggressively lobbied Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the US backpedaled on reductions in steel and aluminum tariffs. Plus Lutnick insisted on excluding Ontario-built heavy trucks (the Ford F-350, F-450, and GM Silverado) in hopes of forcing carmakers to relocate production to the US.

And if you’ve got a problem, that crank Peter Navarro can make it worse.

“Navarro and Lutnick were both yelling at Greer saying: ‘What are you doing? This is stupid. You know, we’re not giving these things away,’” a source told the Post.

Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said the Canadians would never go for it, and he was right.

America’s last-minute demands included: dropping French language labeling and content requirements, an absolute non-starter for the country’s restive Québécois population; getting rid of “buy Canadian” government initiatives while leaving similar “buy American” measures in place; and restoring US-produced liquor to Canadian shelves. That last decision lies with each province, and Ontario Premier Doug Ford told Carney he wouldn’t go along with it.

Trump responded with a grotesque post comparing Ford to his dead brother, calling Carney “Governor,” and lying about Canada’s unemployment rate. (In reality, Canada has a higher labor force participation rate than the US.)

The president is currently shitposting about changing the name of Lake Ontario, “in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer.”

But what actually killed the deal was a demand that Canada subordinate its independent trade policy to the ever-changing whims of the United States — specifically, that Ottawa agree in advance to match tariffs imposed by Washington, even when it would override Canada’s existing trade agreements.

Per the New York Times:

The United States wanted Canada to apply US tariffs to other countries, particularly when it came to steel, now and in the future: If the United States changed policy and place higher tariffs on certain goods from a third country, Canada would need to do the same, even if it already had a trade agreement in place, a Canadian official said.

American negotiators characterize this as a measure to prevent Canada becoming a passthrough conduit for goods excluded by US tariffs. But no sovereign country could voluntarily surrender its trade policy, much less yoke itself to an erratic neighbor whose maniac leader imposes a new tariff scheme every week.

“Last spring, I warned that America is trying to break us so that they can own us. And I promised: ‘That will never, ever happen,’” Carney said Saturday. “We are keeping that promise. Canada is becoming stronger and less dependent on America. We are already giving ourselves more than they can take away.”

This echoes a major speech Carney gave in January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in which he exhorted middle powers to band together rather than rely on the United States to ensure their national and financial security.

“You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination,” he warned, adding that “hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.”

And Canada is putting its money where its mouth is. Only two nations imposed retaliatory tariffs in response to Trump’s two prior rounds of levies: Canada and China. In fact, that response is now being cited as justification for the latest tariffs.

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As America reverts to naked suzerainty, Canada hopes to lead the international resistance movement — yet another reason the Trump administration was so insistent on blocking the country’s power to enter into its own international trade deals.

But a funny thing happens when a world leader actually puts in the effort to explain his policy choices. Carney’s approval rating is at 60 percent, and polls show that 76 percent of Canadians support his decision to walk away from trade talks with the US.

The fallout from these tariffs will absolutely hit Canadians harder than Americans, with potential job losses in the tens of thousands. But Canadians are gearing up for the fight, and a movement to boycott US-made goods is picking up steam. In contrast, Americans feel no patriotic support for Trump’s capricious levies. And as Politico points out, swing state voters really don’t like these tariffs. That may have an impact in November, with the midterms serving as a referendum on Trump’s handling of the economy.

Naturally Susan Collins is concerned. And with Trump’s tariffs about to increase costs for farmers, builders, and autoworkers, she’s got a reason to be — as do her fellow Republicans in Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Iowa. Because Canada’s leaders have done the work to ensure that their citizens are prepared to absorb the pain from this trade war.

Carney spent the past nine months making the case that Canada must fight back against the United States to ensure its survival. Trump spent that time posting AI slop and pretending that the US has nothing to lose. One of these men has a 30 percent approval rating 70 days before an election.

Looks like it’s time for Tariff Man to test his theories … again.

That’s it for today

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Thanks for reading, and for your support.