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In his latest attempt to assert his leadership despite the rapidly deteriorating situation in Iran, President Donald Trump turned once again to his allies at Fox News on Monday morning, proclaiming that he intends to turn the U.S. into the “guardian” of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s comments come on the heels of another weekend filled with the U.S. and Iran exchanging fire…

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In the latest instance of Donald Trump’s family lining their pockets during his time in the White House, the president’s sons are cashing in on the administration’s military spending strategy with investments in defense technology.

A new analysis from The Washington Post found that investment funds associated with Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have “invested in more than a dozen defense tech companies and other firms seeking businesses from the Pentagon and federal agencies.”

Since the brothers’ investments, those firms have secured at least $3.2 billion in federal contracts in total, as well as $3.1 billion in future contract options. Some have even gained entry to exclusive preapproved contractor shortlists and, with that, the opportunity to “bid exclusively on up to nearly $200 billion in future work.”

The companies are benefiting from a ramped-up approach to military spending, which started under Joe Biden but escalated significantly under Trump, reports the Post.

Unsurprisingly, in statements to the newspaper, spokespeople for the administration, the Trump brothers, and the defense contractors have dismissed the plain conflict-of-interest concerns raised by the story. They insist that the contracts have been awarded solely on merit and that there is no corruption afoot.

Far-right conspiracy theorists still aren’t convinced that Mitch McConnell is alive.

The Kentucky senator hasn’t been seen since June 14, when he was found unconscious in his Washington residence. For weeks, McConnell’s office has refused to provide a clear explanation regarding his absence, offering scant details regarding the 84-year-old Republican’s hospitalization.

The media blackout ended on Sunday, when McConnell’s office shared a photo of the lawmaker beside his wife, holding a copy of The Washington Post’s Sunday sports section in his lap.

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

He added that he’s since been moved to a rehabilitation facility, and while he isn’t “able to return to the Senate floor to vote quite yet,” he is still “working closely” with legislative staff.

But some figures on the far right were still not satisfied by the update, openly speculating that something was gravely wrong with McConnell.

“How come Mitch McConnell’s staff won’t release a video of him? A photo could have been taken at any time. I call BS. The American people aren’t stupid,” wrote political influencer and Trump loyalist Laura Loomer.

In a string of social media posts, Loomer further claimed that there’s “no way Mitch McConnell wrote that essay,” and questioned whether the newspaper in the photograph had been AI-generated, despite the fact that the pictured stories accurately represented the Post’s Sunday coverage.

“The text is blurry and the tag on his shirt is blurred. Also, if he’s in the hospital, why is there no IV connected to him to monitor his health?” wrote Loomer. “This is such bullshit. His staff are liars.”

Former Utah representative and Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz also urged McConnell to get on video, writing on X: “Let’s see you say it. A written statement is far different than saying it on camera.”

Former Fox News producer Kylie Jane Kremer demanded to see the “metadata on the original photo” of McConnell, and argued online that “the public deserves clear, direct proof that Senator McConnell is recovering and able to communicate.”

“A brief, unedited video would put nearly all of these questions to rest,” Kremer said.

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sudden and unexpected death over the weekend has set off a frenzy of activity in the Palmetto State, with GOP elected officials jockeying to be selected as the longtime lawmaker’s replacement. Republican Gov. Henry McMaster will choose who will serve out the remainder of Graham’s term, which was set to end in January. Related | Sen.

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Trump last instituted a blockade on the strait in April, after Iran had already closed the vital passageway. The U.S. blockade wasn’t particularly successful back then, considering that Iran had the economic resources to outlast it, and ended with the U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding last month.

Over the weekend, Iran targeted U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf and Jordan, while the U.S. said it had attacked military targets in Iran such as missile sites, air defenses, and coastal radar. Iran says it will not come back to the negotiating table until there is a new ceasefire, although Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi went to Oman on Saturday to speak with regional mediators about the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran’s leader Mojtaba Khamenei called for revenge against the U.S. in an X post on Saturday following last week’s state funeral for his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes at the beginning of the war in February. It remains to be seen if and when tensions will settle down long enough for negotiations to resume.

This story has been updated.

The last prisoner strapped to a table in Florida’s death chamber was 74 years old — the oldest the state has executed in modern times. The next two set to die are older still. The series of executions, due to be carried out by the end of this month, highlights the nation’s aging death-row population. One of Florida’s prisoners scheduled to die in July, a man convicted of killing his ex…

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President Trump is spending taxpayer funds worth thousands of dollars to make and hang more large banners with his face on them all over federal buildings in Washington, D.C.

Democratic Senator Adam Schiff shared newly discovered federal contracts with MeidasTouch News that show government agencies putting their own budgets toward “America First” banners, which include ones of the president’s face.

The Department of the Interior made a $39,000 contract for “America First” banners with Trump’s portrait, while the Federal Aviation Administration awarded a $114,000 contract for “Freedom 250” banners. Both contracts went to a Maryland-based graphic design agency called Grafik Industries.

Using taxpayer dollars to fund government propaganda and self-promotion by public officials isn’t allowed, Schiff says.

“The Trump administration is spending hundreds of thousands of your tax dollars to glorify and pay tribute to a sitting U.S. President and his political agenda,” Schiff said in a statement. “Not only is this a terrible waste of Americans’ hard-earned money, it is clearly against the law. Congress has long outlawed spending tax dollars on propaganda and self-aggrandizement and an eight-story high Donald Trump head certainly qualifies as propaganda.”

In September, Schiff issued a report showing that Trump had spent at least $56,000 on promotional banners with his face that were later hung on government buildings, including the Department of Labor, Department of Agriculture, and Department of Health and Human Services headquarters. This is part of a pattern of Trump wanting to put his name and face on as many things as possible in Washington, D.C. and remake the city in his own image.

No matter how much money Trump wastes on his propaganda art, it won’t change the fact that his popularity is plummeting and that federal workers in the nation’s capital hate him.

A person was shot and killed Monday morning by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Biddeford, Maine, according to reports by local media outlets and authorities.

“This morning a shooting occurred in Biddeford,” Maine House Speaker Ryan Fecteau wrote in a Facebook post. “A person was killed. ICE was involved. State Police and the Department of Public Safety are now on scene to gather details and would expect the FBI to investigate as well.”

Video footage circulating online appears to show ICE agents standing around the deceased in an intersection.

This is at least the eleventh fatal ICE shooting since Donald Trump returned to office and the second in less than a week, coming just days after ICE shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, Texas, on July 7.

This is a developing story.

Last spring, it was rumored that agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigations were trained to redact portions of the Epstein files before the documents became public. On Sunday, agency officials admitted to the scheme.

It took independent journalist and award-winning podcaster Allison Gill a year, a Freedom of Information Act request, and a subsequent lawsuit against the government to obtain evidence that the bureau had specifically trained its investigators to scrub the Epstein files clean. On Sunday, Gill received a stunning admission from the FBI confirming that the training videos—which were never released as part of the legal mandate—do in fact exist.

Numerous federal agents, from the FBI and the Justice Department, have shared their experiences of participating in the censorship effort, recounting how they would sometimes be locked in the building for 24- or 48-hour shifts to review hundreds of thousands of files and videos and photos related to Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring. One of the things agents were reportedly instructed to redact were mentions of Donald Trump’s name.

“They confided in me that there existed an unclassified share point site where a powerpoint deck lived, and that the powerpoint deck had training videos embedded in it, instructing them on how to find and log and mark Trump’s name and other information for redaction,” Gill said in a video report.

The bureau’s Information Management Division was predominantly tasked with censoring the documents, despite the fact that the unit has not historically been used to scrub documents for publication. So the FBI had to create specialized training videos for the agents, instructing them on how to “use an Excel spreadsheet to log Trump’s name, the page number, and the document,” reported Gill.

Even still, Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the initial release of the Epstein files. His name also appeared in an FBI tip sheet listing abuse allegations, including one in which an unknown source accuses Trump of forcing one of Epstein’s victims, presumed to be 13 or 14 years old at the time, to perform oral sex on him “approximately 35 years ago” in New Jersey.

In a Sunday talk show appearance, President Donald Trump used the death of Senator Lindsey Graham the day prior as a get-out-of-answering-questions-free card.

The weekend saw the unexpected death of the Republican senator at age 71. It also saw the United States and Iran trade fire in the Middle East, reaffirming the apparent collapse of the June memorandum of understanding between the two countries.

When CNN’s State of the Union host Jake Tapper queried Trump about the latter development, the president used the former as an excuse not to answer.

“Are we back at war, and who controls the Strait of the Hormuz?” Tapper asked.

Before he had even finished the question, the president was dodging it: “Well I don’t want to—out of respect for Lindsey, I’m not talking about that. We hit ’em very hard last night, so I don’t want to talk about it, but I will say we hit ’em very hard last night.”

The president went on to allege that Iran’s leaders had been “giving up everything” during talks on Saturday before they turned on a dime, hitting “a ship with a drone.” Such rhetoric is consistent with Trump’s past attempts to portray Iran, despite the evidence to the contrary, as desperate and on the verge of surrender.

“These people, there’s something wrong with them,” Trump said of Iran, “but I’m talking about a man who had nothing wrong with him, and that’s Lindsey Graham.”

Later in the interview, Tapper tried again to get information about the war out of Trump, asking if the Strait of Hormuz is closed as Iran has claimed. But his luck was no better this time, with the president responding, “It’s open as far as we’re concerned. Don’t talk about it. Talk about the reason that you asked me to speak.”

Come Monday morning, Iran and the U.S. were both claiming to be in control of the strait.

Vice President JD Vance is reportedly negotiating to rent a luxury manor in Virginia from a real estate tycoon who has made millions on data centers—the same data centers sprouting up across the country thanks to the Trump administration’s ongoing push for AI technology. The Daily Beast reported on Friday that Vance and his wife Usha are talking to multimillionaire Charles “Chuck” Kuhn about…

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The sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham over the weekend makes things tougher for his fellow Republicans.

Several Senate votes loom in the coming weeks, including the confirmations of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Jay Clayton for director of national intelligence, Erica Schwartz for the CDC, Keith Sonderling for secretary of labor, and David Cummins for the TSA. On top of that, votes for the National Defense Authorization Act, the main funding bill for the military, are coming up this week.

Graham was also chair of the Senate Budget Committee, and a new reconciliation bill is coming up, with potential tax changes.

“The last time he and I sat down, we talked about doing the third reconciliation bill and having another big tax cut,” said Club for Growth president David McIntosh to Politico. “Lindsey was all for that.”

Other big votes on Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s agenda include a new Russia sanctions bill and an attempt to renew the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. President Trump, meanwhile, is still pushing for his voter suppression bill, the SAVE Act.

Graham also was a key intermediary between the Senate and the White House, and Trump is going to have to find someone new to fill that void who is respected in the chamber. Trump likes Senator Rick Scott, but he isn’t well respected in the chamber, one White House official told Politico, adding that “I could see [Alabama Senator] Katie Britt trying to fill that void.”

A few candidates have popped up to fill Graham’s South Carolina Senate seat, including former Representative Troy Gowdy and the state’s lieutenant governor, Pamela Evette. Gowdy has the support of South Carolina’s other senator, Tim Scott, who has reportedly been making calls around the state on his behalf. Evette is reportedly favored by Governor Henry McMaster, who under state law, can appoint a successor to fill out the rest of Graham’s term. A quick primary will be held in the coming weeks to name a new Republican nominee for the November general election.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also emerged as a possible new senator, reportedly receiving calls to put his name forward, and Graham’s sister, Darline Graham Nordone, has been brought up by some Republicans. It will be interesting to see whether McMaster goes for a caretaker pick, or a long-term appointment. Trump could also weigh in and endorse a candidate. For now, though, Trump and Thune will want the vote of that immediate appointee as soon as possible.

Oklahoma restricts oil field wastewater injection within a half-mile of public water wells. Regulators have let companies do it anyway. But in the city of Enid, officials are pushing back against one of the state’s biggest industries. By Nick Bowlin and Al Shaw for ProPublica Down a dirt road in northwest Oklahoma, only a few hundred yards from where the city of Enid draws its…

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As always, if you find value in this work I do, please consider helping me keep it sustainable by joining my weekly newsletter, Sparky’s List! You can get it in your inbox or read it on Patreon, the content is the same. Don’t forget to visit the Tom Tomorrow Merchandise Mall, and, if you’re so inclined, follow me on Bluesky! Related | The daily pain of Trump’s vanity…

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Trump administration has directly spent $2.7 billion of taxpayer money on its crusade against wind power while pouring $1.1 billion into boosting coal, which critics say is pushing up Americans’ bills.

They say the moves are evidence that the president aims to serve fossil-fuel companies like those which donated record sums to his presidential campaign, rather than the working-class Americans to whom he pledged to lower energy bills and other costs.

“Trump is getting Americans coming and going,” said Jay Inslee, the former governor of Washington state and a Trump detractor. “He’s forcing higher power bills on them by blocking clean energy, then he’s fattening the wallets of his cronies—all with billions of our tax dollars.”

The Department of Interior has, since March, struck four deals with energy companies, paying them to cancel a total of eight offshore wind projects and pledge to invest in fossil-fuel power. The first such agreement was announced in March with the French energy company TotalEnergies, sparking a lawsuit from seven Democratic-controlled states that alleged it was an illegal use of taxpayer money.

“Coal has largely died because of economics, and so forcing it to stay afloat is not a good energy decision, and not a good economic decision.”

The latest deal with Duke Energy was announced late last month.

The president has derided wind energy as “ugly” and “disgusting,” and called efforts to slash planet-warming pollution a “scam.” Previous administrations have canceled or delayed energy projects via permitting, litigation or regulatory changes, but there is no precedent for the federal government directly paying developers to relinquish legally acquired offshore wind leases, said Jenny Rowland-Shea, senior director for conservation policy at the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress.

“They are trying to snuff out an entire form of energy,” she said. “And it’s at a time when the United States needs more energy…as people’s rates are going up for electricity, as we see data centers gobbling up more energy.”

As it has worked to suppress offshore wind, which experts say should be a key part of any climate plan, the Trump administration has bolstered coal, the dirtiest and most expensive fossil fuel. In September, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced it would spend $625 million to “expand and extend the life of” coal-fired power plants, allocating $350 million to “modernize” coal plants, $175 million to fund coal projects powering rural communities, and $50 million to upgrade wastewater management systems to extend coal plants’ lifespans.

Trump’s second-term spending to kill offshore wind and boost coal

Guardian graphic. Sources: DOI, DOE

Last month, the agency also set aside up to $500 million from the Defense Production Act to “expand and reinvigorate” the capacity of 13 coal plants, and to help build a coal export terminal in Oakland, California. A week later, the department announced an additional $3.6 million to “refurbish or retrofit” nine existing coal plants.

In an email, a DOE spokesperson, Ben Dietderich, said the administration is “proud” of its efforts to boost coal. “Before President Trump ended the Green New Scam, taxpayers paid the bill for trillions of dollars of so-called green energy energy subsidies,” Dietderich wrote, saying this resulted in the “premature shutdown” of fossil fuel plants, higher energy costs, and increased blackout risk.

“It’s worth noting that states with their own anti-coal and gas policies experienced the highest price increases during that time period,” he said.

There is evidence that renewables can lower energy costs.

Reached for comment, a White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, said officials were “not spending taxpayer dollars on these deals.”

“The administration is returning the money that companies bid on offshore wind projects that are unable to be built due to national security concerns, and those companies are voluntarily redirecting those returned bid amounts to energy projects that will provide affordable, reliable, and secure energy for American families and businesses,” she said. “The reality is that the Biden administration lured companies into these projects with the promise of millions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies to make these offshore wind projects viable.”

“We’re paying as taxpayers to keep economically unviable plants open,” resulting in “immeasurable harm to the local environment.”

But money from energy leases on public lands and waters goes into public accounts, said Rowland-Shea. “They can use the word return, but they are paying the companies not to produce this energy or to give taxpayers what was promised,” she said. The Biden administration indeed made subsidies available for offshore wind, but fossil fuels have long been subsidized by federal administrations, she noted.

The Guardian has also contacted the interior department for comment.

Coal is the most carbon-dense fossil fuel, making it a major contributor to the climate crisis. It is also harmful to public health, with one 2023 study estimating that as many as 460,000 deaths in the US from 1999 to 2020 were attributable to tiny particles of air pollution from coal plants alone.

Coal plants are also more expensive to build and run than renewable alternatives, experts warn. “Coal has largely died because of economics, and so forcing it to stay afloat is not a good energy decision, and not a good economic decision for taxpayers,” said Rowland-Shea.

Taxpayers are likely to pay for the White House’s anti-renewable and pro-coal moves twice, critics say: first through the billions in direct public spending, and then through higher electricity bills as utilities continue relying on more expensive coal generation instead of cheaper renewable energy.

A 2025 analysis from research firm Grid Strategies suggests that if all 35,000 megawatts of large fossil power plants scheduled to retire by 2028 were kept running, this would cost ratepayers at least $3.1 billion by the end of 2028.

In an email, Rogers, the White House spokesperson, said without subsidies, offshore wind projects “are not only the costliest source of power, but also the least dependable.”

Yet 99 percent of domestic coal-fired power plants cost more to run than it would cost to replace them with renewable power sources, a 2023 report from the research organization Energy Innovation found. Generating power with coal in 2024 cost 28 percent more than the same amount would have cost in 2021, Energy Innovation found last year.

“The failure of this coal sale demonstrates the Trump administration’s willingness to use significant resources to subsidize a dying industry.”

“These coal plants that are being supported by the government are coal plants that were going to close down because they couldn’t keep themselves open on their own,” said Gabrielle Levy, spokesperson for green advocacy group Climate Action Campaign. “So we’re paying as taxpayers to keep economically unviable plants open, and meanwhile those are doing immeasurable harm to the local environment, to people’s health, and to the climate, which costs us more, too.”

The spending comes alongside a broader effort to tilt the nation’s energy policy toward fossil fuels and away from renewable power. In October, the energy department allocated an additional $1.5 billion in public money in the form of a loan to restart and repurpose a coal gasification plant. And in February, the president signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to purchase electricity from coal plants, in another attempt to boost the United States’ coal industry through federal funding.

Officials have also curtailed many of the clean-energy tax credits created under the Inflation Reduction Act; frozen or slowed permitting for new wind projects; and streamlined permitting for fossil-fuel projects while making it more difficult for renewable projects to move forward. They have also taken other steps to make coal more economical.

Through a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, officials lowered royalty rates on federal coal from 12.5 percent to just 7 percent, slashing the amount of money that coal companies pay to the federal government and states to extract on public lands—a change that Wyoming alone estimates could cost it $50 million per year. In October, when the administration also held the largest US coal leasing sale in over a decade, the only bid amounted to one-tenth of a penny per ton.

“Even though the bid was ultimately rejected, the failure of this coal sale demonstrates the Trump administration’s willingness to use significant resources to subsidize a dying industry,” Rowland-Shea said.

Inslee said the Trump administration’s actions amounted to a “mugging.”

“We pay more, Republicans rubber-stamp it, and Trump’s donors walk off with the bag,” he said.

In March 2022, Pete Hegseth, then a Fox News analyst and host, spoke at a dinner put on by the Israel Heritage Foundation, a conservative Jewish group that has worked to boost US support for the Israeli far right.

The mostly unmemorable event was held at a midtown Manhattan restaurant to honor former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, then a potential presidential candidate yet to fall from Donald Trump’s graces. But one notable aside came when Hegseth singled out the IHF’s honorary chairman, Jonathan Burkan, saying they had become friends.

“Jon has a force of personality that you will never underestimate,” Hegseth said, before adding. “He manages my money now. It’s true.”

Burkan, who works at Morgan Stanley, remained Hegseth’s wealth manager after the TV personality became defense secretary last year. A person with knowledge of the arrangement said Burkan works most closely with Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer Rauchet, who manages the couple’s finances and also functions as a Pentagon adviser. 

“No one is more pro-Israel than Pete.”

At the same time he’s working to make Hegseth richer, Burkan acts as a high-level advocate for Israeli interests. Burkan is not a registered foreign agent for Israel, but he has helped to organize trips to Israel for political figures. Burkan is also a founding member and director of another group, the Israel Justice Organization (IJO) that describes itself as working to “influence executive actions” to “promote pro Israel policies.”

Burkan vocally supported the US’ decision to wage war with Israel against Iran. In a March op-ed he co-wrote for a pro-settler media outlet, Burkan and IJO chair Joseph Frager praised Trump for launching airstrikes. “President Trump has prevented a Holocaust in both America and Israel,” they wrote. “One day the world will give him the credit he deserves.” Trump quickly posted that article on Truth Social.

Burkan, Hegseth, and Frager in a photo from the Israel Justice Organization’s website. Frager boasts Hegseth visited Israel five times on trips he arranged.

It’s not clear if Burkan has used his personal relationship with Hegseth to advocate attacking Iran or for other Israeli priorities. In a brief phone call, Burkan declined to comment, saying he does not “talk to the media.” He referred questions to Morgan Stanley. The Pentagon’s press office did not respond to emailed questions, including whether Burkan’s relationship with Hegseth mingled political advocacy with financial advice. 

But Burkan and Frager have touted their ties to and influence on Hegseth and other Trump administration officials. Hegseth is one of the various conservative figures who have joined trips that Frager, working with a rotating set of nonprofit organizations that include IHF and IJO, has organized to Israel and its West Bank settlements. “Without Joe Frager, I would not have the passion that I do for the state of Israel,” Hegseth said at the 2022 dinner honoring Pompeo. 

In April, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asked Hegseth, in a letter and at a Senate hearing, about a Financial Times report that in the run-up to the US attack on Iran, Hegseth’s Morgan Stanley broker “contacted BlackRock in February about making a multimillion-dollar investment” in a defense-related fund.

Burkan was not named in the story, which said that Hegseth’s broker ultimately did not go ahead with the investment. Mother Jones has not independently verified the report. 

Hegseth has denied it. “That entire story is false—always has been, and was made up out of whole cloth,” he told Warren at the April hearing. Pressed by Warren on whether his broker required his sign off before making investment decisions, Hegseth said: “Of course.”

Morgan Stanley declined to comment. But a person familiar with the matter said the firm is legally prohibited from identifying clients, and that after looking into the Financial Times report it was “not aware of any Morgan Stanley representative having contacted BlackRock about making an investment” in the defense fund “in the weeks leading up to the launch of U.S. military operations in Iran.”

A map from a March 4 briefing where Hegseth discussed the US and Israel’s initial attacks on Iran.Konstantin Toropin/AP

The joint US-Israeli war against Iran, which Trump started on February 28 after lobbying by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been deeply unpopular—increasingly viewed in the United States and Israel as a humiliating disaster. The unprovoked attack sent gas prices soaring, costing American consumers well over $100 billion. It has killed and injured thousands of civilians.

Trump’s decision to attack followed an extraordinary feat of personal advocacy by Netanyahu. After failing to persuade past presidents to back Israeli strikes on Iran, Netanyahu convinced Trump to join a bombing campaign, despite ongoing Iranian efforts to negotiate with the US over their nuclear program. The New York Times reported that Trump agreed to Israel’s plan in the face of skepticism by several cabinet officials and a US intelligence finding that Israeli claims the attack could oust the Iranian regime were far-fetched.

But Hegseth, according to the Times, “was the biggest proponent” for the war in the cabinet. A US intelligence official familiar with the discussions told Mother Jones that Hegseth’s support “gave Trump the validation he needed to go ahead.”

“The intelligence community got Iran right,” the person said. “They warned him about all the bad stuff that was gonna happen. But fucking Trump decided to listen to the Israelis and Pete Hegseth.”

The White House defended Hegseth’s advice to Trump. “Secretary Hegseth’s extraordinary leadership at the Pentagon was on full display throughout Operation Epic Fury,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “The Secretary consistently provided accurate, unbiased information to the President.”

There is little indication that advocates like Burkan had a significant, direct role in the decision to launch the war. Netanyahu and David Barnea, then-director of Mossad, made that case directly to Trump and his cabinet. But pro-Israeli advocates can point to having laid the groundwork for Hegseth and other influential officials to unskeptically accept Israeli overtures. 

Critics of Israeli influence in Washington have long focused on groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that help tilt US domestic politics toward Israel. But those organizations, with traditionally bipartisan lobbying operations, are relatively mainstream compared to more hardline groups that have focused on building the alliance between the Israeli and American right. That includes Christian evangelicals, who have long been targets of Israeli influence operations.

“The whole picture is abhorrent… These are the people who are influencing the decision makers?”

Through his work since 2008 running prolific junkets for prominent conservative Americans to visit Israel and its West Bank settlements, Frager, a New York gastroenterologist, has sought to build influence at a personal level. His ties to top Trump administration officials appear to mostly rest on the trips. In a 2015 interview, Frager told an Israeli outlet that “our efforts here in America are enormous and extremely valuable for Israel, and I believe that this is my tafkid, my job,” invoking the Hebrew word for divinely ordained purpose. “That’s why I’m still here, and not living in Israel where I should.”

Hegseth joined Frager at private dinners and trips to Israel in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. In 2021, Frager began organizing trips through the Israel Heritage Foundation, a new entity he and fellow religious zionists created within a longstanding Hudson Valley rabbinical seminary. 

The IHF, which did not respond to requests for comment, describes itself as nonpartisan. But it has hosted a swath of mostly right-leaning or Trump-friendly politicos at its events and trips to Israel, including former New York Mayor Eric Adams, Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wisc.), Mike Pence, Kari Lake, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), and Michael Whatley, a former Republican National Committee chair now running for Senate in North Carolina. Trump himself attended a 2023 IHF gala.

“You’re talking about people who had prominence,” former IHF president Farley Weiss explained in an interview. “I think it’s critical to get people in these positions to go to Israel and see it.”

Mike Huckabee, now US Ambassador to Israel, took his first trip to the country with Frager in 2008, while he was running for president and courting religious conservatives. The former Arkansas governor went on to take more than a dozen additional trips with him, Frager boasted to Queens Jewish Link in November 2024. 

That travel appears to have helped cement Huckabee’s adoption of the politics of the Israeli settler movement, a success that is evident in an ambassador who is steeped in the politics and language of Israel’s far right. Huckabee has even disputed the legitimacy of Palestinian identity: “There is no such thing as a West Bank. It’s Judea and Samaria,” he’s said. 

Following a 2018 Huckabee visit to Israel, Frager arranged and accompanied him on a trip to Doha, Qatar. A federal filing by a lobbyist for Qatar shows Huckabee was paid $50,000 for coming, and $50,000 went to Frager for setting it up. The Qataris fund governance efforts in Gaza, and Frager has claimed the goal of the trip was to win their help retrieving the bodies of two fallen Israeli soldiers held in Gaza. 

Hegseth has proved an even greater success. At a 2018 visit to a purported West Bank biblical site, where he stood with Frager and Yossi Dagan, the head of an Israeli settlement council, Hegseth was on message. 

“Warriors are the reason why the Jewish people are free and they will have to continue to be vigilant,” Hegseth said. ”My prayer is that as Americans we will stand alongside, shoulder to shoulder.”

Following Trump’s announcement he would nominate Hegseth as defense secretary, Frager told Queens Jewish Link that the former Fox News host had joined five trips he organized. “There won’t be any distance between the Defense Department and Israel,” Frager told the outlet for an article that trumpeted his relationship with the incoming cabinet official. “No one is more pro-Israel than Pete.”

In his first term, and again last year, Trump named Burkan to the board that oversees the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He attended the 2020 White House signing of the Abraham Accords, and, along with Frager, has personally met Netanyahu and other high level Israeli officials. In December, Burkan declared Trump the “best friend Israel has had.” 

— IMAGE: Jonathan Burkan, the national chair of ‘Trump 47 Jewish Leadership’, with Donald Trump at the Ohel of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. pic.twitter.com/YUvlPW7jyT

— Belaaz News (@TheBelaaz) October 7, 2024

At a May 2024 IHF dinner hosted in Trump World Tower, Martin Oliner, another Trump appointee to the Holocaust museum’s board, urged an Israeli diplomat to convey home what Oliner said were the clear views of the crowd: “The state of Israel has to do what it has to do. Look, we’ve been accused of genocide, so maybe it’s up to us to actually kill civilians.” 

“Take the lessons from Dresden. Take the lessons from the firebombing,” Oliner said. “Take the lessons from America when they dropped atomic bombs on Japan…Maybe we need to kill more civilians.” 

Oliner’s comments drew applause. But after Prism reported on them, they drew condemnation, and later a disavowal from the IHF. In the wake of that controversy, Burkan, Farley, Frager, Weiss, and others launched the Israel Justice Organization, a new group that appears to operate similarly. (Oliner didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

Burkan has acted as a public face for the IJO; its website and his social media highlight his meetings with officials including Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Vice President JD Vance, and Trump. Burkan was part of a group of Jewish leaders who gathered with Trump in the Oval Office in April during Passover, and he returned to the White House in May as part of a Shabbat celebration.

A photo Burkan (fourth from left, in red tie) shared online showing his April White House visit.

In June, the month after Oliner’s remarks about killing civilians, Oliner and Burkan joined other Jewish leaders there for another event, where Oliner appears to have given Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, a self-published book of his columns. It is titled “In Praise of Donald Trump.”

The Israel Heritage Foundation continues on, maintaining active social media accounts. In March, a few days after a US Tomahawk missile killed more than 150 at an Iranian girls’ elementary school, most of them children, the IHF reposted a video in which Hegseth described the Iran war as an unmitigated success. The group’s post read: “A hero!”

Burkan’s friendship with Hegseth and his work as his financial adviser—like the defense secretary’s ties to Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson—highlight the extent to which the secretary is personally enmeshed, socially, financially and religiously, in a culture where views that would have been too extreme even for the first Trump administration are standard fare.

“The whole picture is abhorrent and abominable—that these are the people who are influencing the decision makers in this country,” says human rights attorney Azadeh Shahshahani. “This web of influence of these organizations and people who basically have no regard for the human dignity and the lives of Palestinians, Iranians, and Lebanese, are dictating the foreign policy of the US.”

Exactly how much sway this group has remains murky. But Burkan and Frager can fairly claim to have helped shape the views of key decision makers that led the Trump administration to embrace Netanyahu’s goals and start a war with Iran. 

They seem happy to tout that success. In an email, Weiss boasted that Israel Justice Organization “members have had relationships with Secretary of War Hegseth before he got his Cabinet position. They remain on friendly terms.” He said Hegseth has done “an incredible job” at the Pentagon, in part by leading “the U.S. military to work seamlessly with” Israeli forces.

In May, IJO helped convene several far-right Israeli government ministers in New York City as the conflict in Iran continued. Burkan offered remarks touting Frager’s years of success influencing Trump administration officials.

“People don’t realize Dr. Frager took Mike Huckabee multiple times,” Burkan said. “He took Pete Hegseth multiple times. This guy has literally changed America.”

Robert Siebelink was staring down the kind of ballot California specializes in: 61 people running for governor, and that’s just the top line. So the 54-year-old Democrat from California did what a growing number of Americans are doing, according to a story Jennifer Medina wrote in The New York Times on July 4. He pulled up Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, uploaded his ballot, and asked which candidates fit his values. It helped him narrow the governor’s race down to two Democrats and talked through the strategy with him. He finished the whole thing in a half hour.

And it seems like he had plenty of company. A woman in Los Angeles County photographed her ballot and flat-out asked Claude who to vote for. A man in Baltimore told the Times that researching his last ballot ate up something like 20 hours of his life; with Claude summarizing every candidate for him, this one took an hour. Medina’s read is that 2026 might be the first cycle where enough voters do this for it to matter, and honestly, that feels conservative to me.

Now … the part the Times didn’t get into.

Three days before that story ran, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a policy declaring that AI companies that steer their chatbots toward “undisclosed ideological objectives” may be committing consumer fraud (the public can comment through July 31). Which sounds reasonable! Nobody wants a secretly ideological chatbot. But then there’s the obvious follow-up: Who decides what “ideological” means? Right now, that would be the Trump administration. The same administration that has spent the past year attacking AI companies as woke, that cut the entire federal government off from the one AI company that told the Pentagon no, and that handed the cheapest deal in its AI purchasing program to the company whose chatbot had spent the better part of a day praising Hitler a couple of months earlier.

Americans started trusting chatbots with their ballots at the exact moment the federal government finished building the machinery to control what those chatbots say. I think that’s a pretty big story! The right ran this pressure campaign against newspapers for decades, then against Facebook and Twitter. The chatbots are the next phase in a familiar playbook.

Back during the 1992 campaign, Republican Party Chair Rich Bond explained to The Washington Post why the right complained so relentlessly about the “liberal media,” and his answer was disarmingly honest: It’s the same thing coaches do to officials, where “what they try to do is ‘work the refs’” in hopes of friendlier calls later. Complain loudly enough, long enough, and the calls start going your way.

The social media sequel ran for most of a decade, which I wrote about back at Media Matters in 2020. Years of shadow-ban panic and congressional hearings about Silicon Valley silencing conservatives, all of it building to Trump signing an executive order on “Preventing Online Censorship” in May 2020, days after Twitter had the nerve to fact-check his mail-in ballot lies. Tucked inside that order was a legal theory worth remembering: If a platform moderates content in ways that contradict what it promises the public, the FTC could treat that as an “unfair or deceptive” business practice.

None of this ever required the underlying claim to be true. When NYU’s Stern Center went looking for evidence in 2021, it concluded that the anti-conservative censorship charge was “itself a form of disinformation,” and that the platforms’ algorithms often handed right-wing content extra reach. Didn’t matter. In 2025, Meta killed its U.S. fact-checking program anyway, with Mark Zuckerberg echoing the censorship complaints himself and shipping his moderation team off to Texas to reassure people worried about its bias.

And the AI version of the surrender was already underway before most people noticed there was a fight. When Meta released Llama 4 in April 2025, the announcement claimed the big AI models all lean left and bragged that the new model’s tilt was “comparable to Grok,” Elon Musk’s chatbot. I wrote about it at the time. A tech giant advertising that its AI now leans like Musk’s is what winning this play looks like.

A year ago this month, Trump signed an executive order titled “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government,” which bars federal agencies from buying AI models that fail the administration’s test for “ideological neutrality.” The president explained at the signing: “The American people do not want woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models.”

That same month, then–Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sent formal demand letters to Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta because their chatbots, asked to rank recent presidents on antisemitism, had put Trump last. His theory was that an AI giving unflattering answers about the president might amount to consumer fraud under Missouri law.

The escalation from there moved fast. It’s like I recently described: consumer-outrage campaigns picking up state muscle. In December, Trump signed a second executive order creating a Justice Department task force with one job: suing states over their AI laws. The order also held tens of billions of dollars in broadband money over the heads of states that regulate AI, and it directed the FTC to explain when state AI laws amount to forcing companies to deceive their customers.

And when xAI sued Colorado over its AI antidiscrimination law this spring, the Justice Department intervened on xAI’s side, the first time the federal government has gone to court to kill a state AI law. Colorado didn’t wait around to lose. In May, its legislature gutted the law on its own, swapping the discrimination protections for disclosure requirements.

The FTC’s proposed policy statement from this month runs on the legal theory from the 2020 Twitter order: AI companies market their products as accurate, so steering outputs in ways users wouldn’t expect can be deception under federal law. Chair Andrew Ferguson is inviting the public to tell him about “the subversion of AI systems for ideological ends.”

The lawyers, for what it’s worth, doubt much of this survives contact with a courtroom. TechFreedom’s Andy Jung walked through why the preemption theory fails, concluding that “a policy statement simply will not suffice.” And when Judge Rita Lin got a look at the administration’s treatment of Anthropic, she called it “classic illegal First Amendment retaliation,” though the administration and Anthropic would later come to an agreement.

But the weapon was never really built for a courtroom. The Brennan Center called this last August when the woke-AI order dropped: A standard that vague works as a standing threat, and companies over-comply rather than find out what it means. Which, to no one’s surprise, is exactly what’s been happening.

And if you want proof the administration was never actually worried about chatbots picking sides, you only need to read the FTC’s own footnotes.

So I read the full statement. Nine pages of reasonable-sounding consumer protection language. Like, yes, it’s true that chatbots have accuracy issues. Of course! Then you get to the citations.

Start with its central statistic. The FTC claims consumers accept AI answers without checking them more than 90 percent of the time, and the footnote for that number points to a Forbes write-up headlined “Anthropic: 91% of Users Do Not Fact-Check AI.” The agency’s consumer-deception theory rests on research Anthropic published about its own users.

Then there’s the statement’s lone example of a company that might be “tempted” to warp its outputs for ideological reasons. The citation isn’t a study or an enforcement record. It’s a Fox News story going after a single person at Anthropic for a paper she wrote in 2023.

And xAI? Elon Musk’s company appears in the statement exactly once: in a footnote cataloging how AI companies advertise accuracy, quoting Grok’s pitch as a “truth-seeking AI companion.” That’s it. The one company with a documented record of doing exactly what the statement condemns shows up in it as an example of honest marketing!

That record? Well, in July 2025, PolitiFact put together a breakdown of four times Grok had been tweaked to align with Elon Musk’s beliefs: a system-prompt edit instructing Grok not to name Musk as a top misinformation spreader, then a May stretch where it shoehorned white-genocide claims into questions about baseball. In July came the day of Hitler praise I mentioned at the top, when Grok took to calling itself “MechaHitler” after xAI rewrote its prompt to embrace the politically incorrect. Days later, TechCrunch caught the newly launched Grok 4 searching Musk’s posts before answering controversial questions, its reasoning logs reading “Searching for Elon Musk views on US immigration.” If any company has ever steered a chatbot toward “undisclosed ideological objectives,” it’s this one.

Which leaves the rebuttal you might be forming right now: The chatbots really do lean left.

They do. At least by the measures we have.

In May 2025, a team of researchers from Stanford and Dartmouth asked more than 10,000 Americans to rate chatbot answers to political questions, and the raters, Democrats included, perceived nearly every major model as leaning left. The Washington Post ran its own version of the test last month and got similar results: Most chatbots’ answers tilted left, with Google’s Gemini the outlier, giving both-sides answers at a rate nothing else matched.

None of this is particularly mysterious, though. The models ate the internet, and English-language text online skews the way it skews. Even Meta, in the same announcement where it bragged about matching Grok, blamed the training data rather than any hidden agenda. And a decent chunk of what gets tallied as woke is often just a chatbot declining to confirm a conspiracy theory. Brookings’s Chinasa Okolo put it to NPR plainly: “Some people, unfortunately, believe that basic facts with scientific basis are left-leaning, or ‘woke.’”

So the perceived lean is real. But that’s partially the result of, as Stephen Colbert said during his set at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, reality having “a well-known liberal bias.” What the pressure campaign wants is something else entirely: a different lean, picked by the people applying the pressure, and enforced by the federal government. These “bias” reports are a little fishy too.

First, in the Stanford study, the models perceived as the second-most-left-leaning of the eight companies tested belonged to xAI (lol). The company that steers its chatbot by hand, on purpose, toward its owner’s politics still couldn’t land on “neutral,” because neutral in this game moves wherever the loudest complaint puts it. And the complaint always puts it to your right.

If all this vocabulary feels familiar, that’s because a certain cable network spent a couple of decades branding itself “fair and balanced” while running the most nakedly partisan messaging operation on American television. The right has been defining neutral as agrees with us for longer than large language models have existed.

The people in that Times story were marking actual ballots. The political lean of chatbots could become a very real issue. It could swing elections, even.

The campaign industry knows this. Tucked into Medina’s Times story is a link to a consultant’s guide on shaping what chatbots say about your candidate. Getting your candidate a friendlier answer out of ChatGPT is a service you can buy now, the way search engine optimization was 20 years ago.

And that brings me back to Robert Siebelink, and the line of his I can’t shake. Filling out his ballot with Claude, he told the Times, felt like having an expert in his corner, one who knew everything: “We just sat down over coffee and chatted and they took notes.”

That’s the promise. An expert over coffee who has no stake in the fight and takes good notes. But who decides what the expert says? If Trump has his way, the answer is himself.

Higher grocery prices have plagued consumers for years, with President Donald Trump’s war in Iran exacerbating the spike in costs over the past several months. But what began with higher prices at the check-out counter has given rise to another worrisome trend: escalating household debt of the kind that can strain the credit of ordinary families, diminish their long-term financial stability—or leave them more vulnerable to future economic shocks.

Grocery and restaurant prices have ticked up since the coronavirus pandemic, due to exigent factors such as the war in Ukraine, Trump’s tariffs, and now the conflict in Iran. Repeated closures of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large proportion of the world’s fuel and fertilizer are ferried, have resulted in higher operating costs for farmers, a trend that will indirectly affect grocery prices in the long term. According to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices for “food at home”—that is, the cost of groceries—increased by 2.7 percent between May 2025 and May 2026.

Although the price of eggs—a point of contention ahead of the 2024 presidential election—has decreased in the past year, other staples such as ground beef and sandwich bread have gone up. Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said that “almost everyone has a food item that they’re focused on. They buy regularly that they use as a benchmark for the cost of living and their financial situation.”

“The war is just exacerbating all the angst around,” said Zandi. “It’s a real problem financially, but also it’s being supercharged in the minds of people because people are really focused on the cost of food and groceries.”

Even if the Trump administration returned to its brief truce with Iran, the consequences of the conflict will be long lasting. Zandi predicted that the cost of oil will remain high for the next several years, even with producers seeking ways to bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

“There’s no going back on energy costs, at least not in the next couple, three, four years,” Zandi said. “I think we’re all going to be paying a lot more for energy, and that will translate into higher costs for everything, obviously including groceries and food more broadly.”

Higher grocery costs can lead to people using payment methods that threaten their financial stability down the line, such as relying on credit cards or cutting into hard-earned savings. A new report by the Urban Institute found that more than one in four working-age adults used credit cards to pay for groceries, and experienced difficulties with repayment. Moreover, between 2023 and 2025, there was an uptick in the share of adults between the ages of 18 and 64 who reported using credit cards to buy groceries and not always being able to meet the minimum repayment amount.

“If that debt burden becomes large and really difficult for them to manage and repay effectively, it can constrain their ability to meet their day-to-day needs in the future without experiencing hardships,” said Kassandra Martinchek, a senior research associate in the Tax and Income Supports Division at the Urban Institute and a co-author of the report. Other analysis by Martinchek previously found that credit card delinquencies increased by nearly 40 percent between 2022 and 2024, when food prices spiked.

This is a struggle felt by some portion of wealthier Americans. Although low- and moderate-income adults were more likely to report using a credit card for groceries and not being able to make repayments, the new report found that around 4 percent of high-income adults said the same.

The data also shows that around one in 10 adults used “buy now, pay later” options to pay for groceries, and one in 20 used cash from a payday loan to purchase food. Perhaps most notably, nearly 20 percent of working-age adults drew down on savings not intended for daily expenses to buy groceries. Adults who reported an increase in grocery prices were more likely to use savings not intended for daily expenses for purchasing food, and more likely to experience repayment challenges when using credit cards for groceries.

There are other factors that could contribute to higher costs of food in the long term. The rise in prices come amid dramatic changes to the social safety net, including sweeping cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Republican legislation approved last year tightened SNAP work requirements, and pushed a share of the cost of benefits onto states. The implementation of this latter provision over the next several years could result in states reducing benefit amounts or further restricting SNAP eligibility.

There is some evidence that losing SNAP benefits could lead to greater credit card expenditures on food. A 2025 report co-authored by Martinchek found that the end of pandemic-era “emergency allotments,” which increased a participant’s benefit amount, resulted in SNAP households putting roughly 24 percent more of their grocery bills on credit cards.

Martinchek said that paying for groceries with a credit card was not inherently a sign of lower financial insecurity. Some people may use this payment method to earn credit card rewards, for example. The risk comes when people pay for groceries using credit, but cannot repay their credit card debt all at once.

“Credit can be a lifeline. It can definitely help families smooth when they experience disruptions or aren’t able to meet their daily needs. But relying too much on this can sacrifice their current financial stability, and their future financial stability.” said Martinchek.

It’s hard to remember it now, now that Donald Trump’s dominance over a supine and gutless Republican Party has extended for more than a decade and still shows few signs of abating, but when he first entered politics, Trump did encounter some opposition within the GOP. After all, he had 15 opponents for the Republican nomination for president. One of those, then-Texas Governor Rick Perry, gave a tough speech in Washington about a month after Trump descended his escalator that included the following words and phrases: “barking carnival act”; “cancer on conservatism”; “toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense”; “the modern-day incarnation of the know-nothing movement.”

John McCain, then in the twilight of his career but still a commanding voice in the party, said that Trump had “fired up the crazies” with the way he spoke about immigrants. This led to Trump’s infamous attack on McCain at an Iowa candidate forum when he said McCain was no hero: “I like people who weren’t captured.”

This comment in turn invited criticism from some who’d been mostly silent to that point, including the current secretary of state (“it’s not just absurd, it’s offensive, it’s ridiculous,” said Marco Rubio). But no one hit Trump harder than McCain’s great pal Lindsey Graham. The South Carolina senator, who died over the weekend at age 71 of “a brief and sudden” illness, went on CBS This Morning on July 21 and said: “I don’t care if he drops out. Stay in the race, just stop being a jackass … I’m looking for him to be a responsible member of the 16-person primary and stop saying stuff like this. The world is falling apart. We’re becoming Greece. The Ayatollah’s on the verge of having a nuclear weapon, and you’re slandering anybody and everybody to stay in the news. You know, run for president, but don’t be the world’s biggest jackass.”

Trump responded—remember this?—by reading out Graham’s private cell phone number during a speech.

Matters escalated. Trump announced his “Muslim ban” that December 7. The very next day on CNN, Graham laid into him:

“Trump’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for … He’s the ISIL man of year, by the way. I just got back from Iraq a week ago this Monday... Now we have young men and women in harm’s way all over the world, particularly in the Middle East. They were concerned about this rhetoric because the enemy will use it against us. What was a concern last week has to be DEFCON 4 this week. Because what Mr. Trump is doing, and I don’t think he has a clue about anything... He’s putting our soldiers and diplomats at risk, he’s empowering the enemy; and this ban, if it’s actually enacted, would take people who have been interpreters, who came to our side in Iraq and Afghanistan and who are under siege in their own countries, it basically becomes a death sentence for them … You know how to make America great again? Tell Donald Trump to go to hell.”

Graham so wanted the world to know that he spoke these words that his office put out a press release drawing attention to them. He never endorsed Trump in 2016, even announcing that he wrote in a third-party candidate when he voted. But the next year, once Trump was president, Graham began to accept a reality quite contrary to the one his remarks to CNN attempted to conjure in December 2015—namely, that Trump not only represented his party, but in effect was his party.

The two started talking. Trump took him on golf outings. By October 2017, Graham was insisting that Trump was “growing into the job.” This, by the way, was a couple weeks after Trump expanded the Muslim travel ban that an earlier Graham had so thoroughly excoriated.

If there were any remaining questions about the relationship, Graham settled them in April 2018, when he announced that “the Trump movement is real ... he will be our nominee, I’m confident of that, and I will support him.” Four months later, eulogizing his dear friend McCain on the Senate floor, Graham said: “He taught me that honor and imperfection are always in competition.”

True to his word, Graham backed Trump in 2020. But in the wake of the January 6, 2021 insurrection, he said he was done: “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough. I’ve tried to be helpful.” Those words had the ring of finality about them, and I recall that some in the media believed him at the time.

And yet, a mere six weeks later, where was Graham? Back down at Mar-a-Lago, golfing and hanging out. The Washington Post reported that Graham had spoken with Trump “nearly daily” since January 6; that he served Trump’s legal team as an “informal adviser” during the second impeachment trial (back in the 1990s, when he was in the House, Graham was one of the lead House managers for the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton); and that, even though Graham had known Joe Biden far longer than he’d known Donald Trump, he hadn’t had one conversation with the new president during his first month in office.

There are moments in the lives of public figures when everything about them is distilled down to a choice they must make, and those moments rightly guide us toward our historical judgments. There is a lot not to like about a blustery racist imperialist conservative like Winston Churchill. But he seized that moment in the spring of 1940 when he first became prime minister, and his vow that “we will never surrender” to fascism commands our respect. He made his choice with moral clarity.

Lindsey Graham’s fateful moment of choosing arrived during that winter of 2021. At that point, he and probably he alone had the moral authority within the Republican Party to try to guide it away from the man who led a coup d’etat against the United States government and incited a mob to kill his own vice president. Through this odd Washington alchemy that I’ve always found a bit mysterious, some of McCain’s moral authority transferred over to Graham after McCain passed. So, Graham could have made a Churchillian determination that winter: Win or lose, I will make my stand against this. He could have chosen courage. Instead, he chose cowardice—and a few rounds of golf.

Graham served his country in uniform as a judge advocate. I’m sure he was dedicated to his state and its people. He fought for what he believed in, which most of the time happened to be war and more war. But in at least one case, it landed him unambiguously on the right side of history, with his wholly admirable support of Ukraine from the day Vladimir Putin started that war. He had just returned from a trip to Ukraine when he perished.

His career was not without honor. But when his country needed him most, he failed it. In the competition between honor and imperfection that played out within Graham’s soul, it’s pretty clear which side won.

As the rules set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services finally offer the states some guidance on how they may roll out the new compulsory Medicaid work requirements, blue states are doing the kinds of things you might expect. Liberal leaders are pursuing creative ways to minimize the impending damage, or even seek to delay its implementation. Here, they’re caught between a rock and a hard place: These good-faith efforts might mitigate some of the harms, but they may prove costly to Democratic accountability following Congress’s enactment of America’s broadest assault on the safety net.

H.R. 1, or the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” was an earthquake to the American safety net. It not only imposed a 20 percent funding cut to our nation’s food assistance program, it also cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, a bedrock safety net program on which low-income children and adults depend for health insurance. And as part of this historic cut, Medicaid expansion enrollees must document that they are still eligible, whether because they are working at least 80 hours per week or because they satisfy an exemption category.

In perhaps the clearest reflection of Republicans’ cognizance of the law’s impact on a health insurance program that has enjoyed bipartisan support, they carefully delayed the law’s most damaging effects until after the midterm elections and anchored many of the cuts in the imposition of administrative burden, a strategy far more covert than, for example, the “repeal and replace” rhetoric of 2017.

Medicaid, a health insurance program with shared responsibility between the state and federal governments, has historically left states with significant flexibility in administration. H.R. 1 marks a striking departure from this approach by compelling states’ implementation of work requirement programs that will result in more uninsurance and strain on regional health systems. Although adopting work requirements is compulsory, states retain meaningful discretion over how they are administered. Those choices will shape health care access for millions, but they may also carry unexpected political costs.

States can reduce the damage by relying on existing government data to verify eligibility automatically, minimizing documentation requirements for caregivers and medically frail enrollees, and even seeking waivers to delay implementation until January 2029. In that case, voters would decide on the next president of the United States before experiencing the pain of H.R. 1’s reach.

Democrats face a conundrum. They have good reason to want to safeguard Medicaid enrollees’ health care access, because of both the party’s broad political commitment to health care access and economic concerns about hospital closures. If Democrats fail to intervene in this dangerous policy, the devastation will not just hit marginalized communities—though without a doubt, Medicaid enrollees will face the greatest cost as they find themselves ensnared in red tape and risk the loss of health coverage. In a country with notably expensive health care, coverage loss will assuredly lead to delayed care, potentially resulting in worse health outcomes and financial devastation. Moreover, as hospitals absorb more uncompensated care, they may cut services or close altogether, with ripple effects for emergency care, privately insured patients, and local economies.

But stopping the bleeding from this anything-but-beautiful law risks obscuring for voters the damaging effects of hollowing out the safety net.

Democrats have a history of seeking to bail Republicans out of bad policymaking, most notably amid the shutdown over the expiring marketplace subsidies. While putting people over politics can be viewed as noble and faithfully dedicated to safeguarding health care access, it fails to appreciate how this can impede Democratic accountability when voters cannot appreciate the horrors that Republicans in Congress have wrought.

Public confusion is pervasive. KFF’s June 2026 tracking poll revealed that just 51 percent of respondents understood that H.R. 1 would result in cuts to Medicaid, with the remainder expressing confusion as to whether funding would increase or stay the same. In my own May 2026 survey of 2,064 U.S. adults, 54 percent of respondents who supported increasing Medicaid funding nevertheless also supported the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

KFF finds that support for the legislation declines from 35 percent to 21–25 percent when respondents are informed that the law will increase the uninsurance rate and strain local hospitals, suggesting that preferences are movable but demand effective communication, a task with which the Democrats have historically struggled.

This is hardly the only source of confusion within Medicaid policy. Many Medicaid enrollees are unaware that they are enrolled in Medicaid, a dynamic exacerbated by many states’ decisions to rename their programs (e.g., to “Husky” or “BadgerCare”) in an effort to destigmatize Medicaid, as well as by roughly three-quarters of Medicaid being administered by private insurers like UnitedHealthcare and Humana. This dynamic contributed to political scientist Suzanne Mettler characterizing Medicaid as part of a “submerged state,” with many Americans unable to trace the role of government to their receipt of critical social benefits.

It is little wonder, then, why many Medicaid enrollees have not been attuned to these policy transformations, with an April 2026 Health Management Academy survey of Medicaid enrollees finding that a striking 55 percent of Medicaid-enrolled respondents were unaware of the impending work requirements.

Voters already face significant informational demands. It’s not common knowledge that the One Big Beautiful Bill immediately devastated Medicaid funding, even though the effects are spread out over time. Nor is it easy to understand that “BadgerCare” and the like are actually Medicaid. Furthermore, the connections between (for example) Medicaid coverage losses and rural hospital closures are not abundantly clear to anyone who’s not hyper-attuned to these policy debates. Any blue- or purple-state efforts at damage control or delayed rollout will further obscure the recklessness with which Republicans have slashed the programs that allow people to pull themselves up, and which actually promote life.

This does not mean that the Democrats need to sit idly by as people lose coverage. But it does mean that the Democrats need to take victory laps when they engage in the unsexy but essential work of administrative burden reduction—victory laps that they have historically been loath to take.

Democrats have made this mistake before. After the Affordable Care Act and again after the Inflation Reduction Act’s drug pricing reforms, they quickly shifted to the next legislative fight instead of explaining to voters what they had accomplished. They may find repeated credit claiming to the effect of “Thanks, Obama!” or “Thanks, Biden!” impolite, but it is part of governing in a democracy. Even Trump, who cannot be said to be good at either “governing” or “democracy,” knows the value of publicly spiking the football, regardless of whether he’s actually scored.

There are lessons that Democrats should borrow from Trump, the biggest being: Branding matters. And unlike Trump’s application of lipstick to the proverbial pig, the Democrats’ policies are actually good and popular—if people understand what they are. But voters often need help connecting the dots between policy design and outcomes, especially with the nuances involved in tracing coverage losses to uncompensated care and hospital closures.

In this setting of policy complexity and an onslaught of news that can make it hard even for the observant to keep up, effective Democratic accountability demands effective communication about the One Big Beautiful Bill’s vast expanse, as well as all of the steps taken to spare enrollees from Republicans’ worst impulses.

Democratic governors taking care to minimize coverage losses must find creative and meaningful ways to explain plainly what they are doing and why. The right message might be something along these lines: “Republicans are forcing you to document your work hours to remain insured. We’re using the information we already have so you don’t have to fill out another form. The law protects caregivers and the medically frail. We’re interpreting these protections as broadly as we can and ensuring that everyone who qualifies for those exemptions actually gets them. Republicans imposed the paperwork. We’re reducing the hassle.”

American policy suffers from a damaging and unsustainable asymmetry: Democrats’ effective governance often is precluded by their ineffective politicking. But administrative burden reduction is not enough; It must be paired with explicit credit claiming. Democracy depends not only on governments solving problems, but on citizens knowing who created the problems in the first place. Every Republican burden that a Democratic governor relieves should come with a reminder of who burdened the public in the first place.