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The Trump administration is planning to remove the name of an aircraft carrier meant to honor a pioneering Black military hero, a report from CNN revealed on Thursday. The USS Doris Miller is currently under construction, but Navy leadership is reportedly in discussions to remove the name and possibly use President Donald Trump’s name on the craft instead. Placing the name of a living…

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Trump’s airplane switcheroo proves he’s a selfish coward…

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President Donald Trump is letting fraudsters off the hook at the expense of their victims, according to a new report from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee Friday.

The 25-page report found that Trump’s sweeping pardons had relieved white-collar criminals of $1.7 billion worth of fines, forfeitures, and restitution, in a “massive redistribution of wealth in favor of convicted criminals.” Democrats accused Trump of sidelining the traditional clemency structure to implement a pay-to-play system.

The report emphasized Trump’s pardon of Trevor Milton, former CEO of Nikola Corporation, who was convicted of fraud in 2022 for misleading investors. Milton had been sentenced to four years in prison, and the judge was scheduled to rule on a recommendation that he pay $700 million in restitution. Then Milton opened his wallet. The convicted fraudster and his wife donated more than $1.8 million to committees supporting Trump’s reelection. Milton was pardoned in March 2025.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Trump pardoned Adriana and Andres Camberos, relieving them of their $50 million in restitution to victims and $30 million in forfeiture. Trump stepped in on behalf of private equity executive David Gentile, commuting his seven-year prison sentence and scrubbing a $15.5 million forfeiture obligation. The president pardoned four executives from BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange that violated anti-money laundering laws, and wiped away $130 million of the company’s federal fines. And many, many more.

Since reentering office, Trump has only made it harder for law enforcement to crack down on certain financial crimes. Last week, Trump’s Treasury Department announced it would destroy the government’s registry on shell-company ownership, a database law enforcement uses to investigate money laundering and corruption. In addition to pardoning dozens of white-collar criminals, the Trump administration has eliminated the task forces on kleptocrats, paused the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and gutted the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

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First lady Melania Trump showed her face at the White House on Thursday for the first time in weeks, as chatter about her husband’s relationship with 35-year-old aide Natalie Harp has exploded into public. “I heard you missed me,” Melania Trump said at an event in the tackily paved Rose Garden, the first time she appeared at the White House in more than a month. “Here I am.

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The U.S. Navy has been quietly considering renaming an aircraft carrier that was set to honor Doris Miller, a heroic Black sailor at Pearl Harbor, after President Donald Trump instead.

The effort to rename the planned USS Doris Miller began earlier this year, three sources told CNN Thursday. It’s not yet clear who the newest Gerald R. Ford–class aircraft carrier will be named for, but two of the sources revealed there have been conversations about naming the carrier to honor Trump.

The leaks come after Trump recently ordered redesigns that will waste billions of dollars to put old-fashioned steam catapult technology on board.

Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao and his office had started to look into updating the official guidance for how ships should be named, two of the sources told CNN. No aircraft carrier has ever been named after a sitting president, and naming the vessel after Trump would be a massive break with precedent.

The effort comes amid a wider trend of the Trump administration expunging Black history from American monuments and museums. The White House has also made a concerted effort to rename institutions after the president.

At the same time, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has launched a campaign to remake the U.S. military in his image. The secretary has repeatedly thwarted the advancements of Black and female Defense Department personnel.

One of the sources told CNN that the Navy is looking to name another warship after Miller, who was the first Black sailor to receive the Navy Cross of Valor. When the bombs started to fall at Pearl Harbor, Miller, a mess attendant, aided his wounded commanding officer, and despite having no training, took control of an anti-aircraft gun to defend the base.

Additionally, the Navy is moving to recommend him for a Medal of Honor. Thomas Bledsoe, Miller’s great-nephew, told CNN that the family had not been informed of the Navy’s plan to rename the ship, or its renewed effort to award Miller with the Medal of Honor, something the family had been working on “for years.”

A federal judge in Oregon ripped the Trump administration for placing political conditions on crucial, potentially life-saving disaster relief.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Michael McShane, an Obama appointee, issued a ruling regarding the city of Salem, Oregon’s July lawsuit against Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and FEMA leadership. In it, the city accused the Trump administration of dangling disaster aid above local leaders’ heads in exchange for a rejection of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Salem argued that the conditions were “unlawful,” especially given that the city was still recovering from storm damage from last winter. McShane agreed.

“As wildfires, severe storms, and floods routinely ravage through the State of Oregon, disaster relief has become a tool to advance unrelated executive policy … it is hard to imagine the connection between the use of preferred pronouns and the fires currently burning through central Oregon,” he wrote in his order.

McShane issued a preliminary injunction blocking the DHS restrictions on aid while the case continues.

Withholding basic disaster funds from American citizens just because they live in states that recognize trans people exist or talk about racism in school has become an obvious, spiteful trend for Trump. Last month, he denied FEMA disaster aid requests from four blue states after accepting the aid requests of six red states just two days before.

16 minutes agoWalter EinenkelTrump’s FCC says no to faster internet FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to slower technologiesFCC decides 1Gbps is too fast, standard must be "technologically neutral."arstechnica.comSurprising no one, chairman Brendan Carr sided with the telecom industry on lowering expectations of its services. Not the price, however. That never gets lowered…

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As sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is out here being trash. Right now, he’s really leaning into trying to drive Muslims out of the state, and one of the grossest ways he’s doing it is by attacking anything specific to Muslim religious practices. “Religious liberty for me but not for thee” is pretty much the core belief of people like…

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In just his first week in office, Todd Blanche has inflicted more damage on the norms and traditions of the Department of Justice than any attorney general in its history. I don’t say this casually, and I’m not ignoring the competition. John Mitchell ran Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks and went to federal prison for it. A. Mitchell Palmer used the DOJ to round up and deport thousands of people for their politics. Harry Daugherty turned it into a vehicle for graft, his cronies selling pardons and immunities like so many indulgences, earning the DOJ the nickname “the Department of easy virtue.”

These evil deeds damaged the department, but they were furtive and ended in disgrace. None of these men served up his conduct as a model for the DOJ to follow. Blanche, by contrast, has openly taken a blowtorch to standards that have been articles of faith at the department for 50 years. Puffed up with his Senate confirmation, President Trump’s former personal lawyer has taken on a renewed cockiness—arrogance, really—and proclaimed his and Trump’s perverted view of the attorney general as the new normal.

Consider these five separate betrayals of the department’s ideals.

1. Asked by Kristen Welker on Meet the Press whether he could pledge that the Justice Department would always act independently of the White House, Blanche was combative: “No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that.”

That gratuitous added sentence disparages the canonical approach of every attorney general for at least the last half-century. Most of them made the very pledge Blanche now declares inappropriate, and all of them lived by it.

Jeff Sessions, Trump’s very first attorney general, swore that the department’s actions “will not be improperly influenced by political considerations,” and that it “can never be used to retaliate politically against opponents.” Michael Mukasey, the conservative Republican AG brought in by President George W. Bush in 2007 to clean up the U.S. attorney firing scandals, told the Senate that staff who discussed cases with political actors would be fired. Merrick Garland put the principle most concisely at his own confirmation hearing in 2021: “I’m not the president’s lawyer. I am the United States’s lawyer.”

Blanche has now breezily declared that all of these predecessors in office were misguided in their fundamental approach to the job and justice.

2. Days after being sworn in, Blanche stood at the Nassau County Police Academy, flanked by uniformed officers, and warmed up a crowd for Bruce Blakeman, Trump’s endorsed candidate for governor of New York, praising him for doing “everything we need him to do.” No attorney general in at least 100 years has appeared at a political rally for a candidate; I suspect none would even have entertained the idea. The conduct can only undermine public confidence in the Department’s impartiality.

Blanche’s imprudence served to silence the senator whose vote secured his confirmation: Pressed by a reporter about the rally, Bill Cassidy went quiet, then meekly pleaded that he had “never heard anything about that rally until this very minute.”

3. On Thursday, August 13, Blanche delivered a cynical speech to DOJ staff in the Great Hall of Main Justice. He served up empty pieties, most remarkably his assurance that the department would uphold the law “without fear or favor”—the best capsule description of its mission as there is.

As the assembled staffers surely understood, Blanche’s tenure has been—and by every indication will continue to be—marked by justice meted out with both fear and favor. As deputy attorney general and then acting attorney general, Blanche has spent a year presiding over the unwarranted prosecution of political enemies; the sweetheart treatment of January 6 defendants and others who cozy up to Trump; and the firings of DOJ prosecutors for the political sin of doing their jobs by pursuing guilty defendants who now happen to enjoy the president’s favor. He has crowed about forcing out all the prosecutors and agents who worked on the January 6 cases, and he did the same to prosecutors who were assigned to work on cases against defendants who blocked women from entering reproductive service clinics.

4. On Fox News Sunday, after a district court and court of appeals both ordered a halt to construction of the president’s ballroom for failure to obtain congressional approval, Blanche waved away the ruling: “We don’t believe we have to go to Congress. We believe Congress has already given us the authority to do what we’re doing.” It’s not the attorney general’s role to dismiss binding court orders, on television no less.

5. Finally, there is the ludicrous load of crap Blanche served up in a Meet the Press appearance. Asked what he would do if the president directed him to cross an ethical or legal line, he dodged the one-word answer the moment called for. He offered instead a transparently silly claim: “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.”

What a whopper, from the lips of the chief federal law-enforcement officer in the land. Appearances at political rallies are unethical; reprisal prosecutions are illegal; and there’s plenty more Blanche has done in each category. Trump has insisted on bringing cases against his enemies, and Blanche has championed his supposed authority to do so.

Trump has forced out those who moved too slowly, including previous Attorney General Pam Bondi, for failing to deliver his enemies’ heads on a plate. On September 20, Trump posted on Truth Social that James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Leticia James were all “all guilty as hell” and that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” A hand-picked loyalist secured the Comey indictment days later, and in an open court the government’s own advocate conceded that if the president’s post “is not a direction to prosecute, I’d really be in a loss to say what is.” As would anyone.

Blanche’s blithe assurance is a classic authoritarian move, one we have seen from Trump himself repeatedly over the last 20 months: Don’t merely lie; proclaim the exact opposite of the truth, and stand your ground shamelessly.

A. Mitchell Palmer and Harry Daugherty damaged the DOJ by what they did, but none tried to change what it was. Blanche is attacking the institution at its foundations in broad daylight, sawing away at its core principles and rewriting its basic mission. That is why his first week belongs in a shameful category of its own.

Natalie Harp’s relationship with President Donald Trump is even more intimate than we thought.

The Daily Beast published two intimate letters Thursday from Trump’s assistant, courtesy of Michael Wolff, Trump’s biographer who maintained a disturbingly close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The letters were written in 2023, either during or after a business trip to Scotland.

Here’s the complete text of Harp’s first letter (emphasis added):

Dear Mr. President,

I’m sorry. I thought I was the only one left behind last night, and had no idea Margo’s car was also pulled over, and sent back to the Airport. Since I was alone in the van outside Customs without my passport, I panicked, and should have just called Secret Service instead of you. I also am sorry if I was an embarrassment walking the course in Scotland. The first day I was told there were no carts, and people walked, which is why I walked. The second day, I was specifically asked by, I forget who his name was, but one of the main people who worked there, if I could continue walking, and tell any other girls who would head out there to do the same to spare the Course any more Carts. If there is anything else I have done to cause you trouble, please forgive me. I know that some people have said I haven’t been texting them back, and there have been some International cell issues (John was having technical issues on the Plane too, so asked me to help him out).

I want things to always be right between us. I also know I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time). I haven’t been myself, dwelling on the Past, and the pain of losing my Dad, and I started letting the remarks of people who haven’t bothered me before, get to me—not because I care what others think, but because I see myself being lowered in your eyes and good opinion. That is the fear you see, because I never want to bring you anything but joy. I’m sorry I lost my focus. You are all that matters to me. I don’t want to ever let you down. Thank you for being my Guardian and Protector in this Life—That’s what I wanted to use this card for, when you saw me at the Cash Register, and once again did what you didn’t have to do, and gifted me with Mementos of this Trip of a Lifetime, a Coming of Age. I will return a better person. I have to sign off now, as the cars are leaving. See you soon.

Harp signed that message with “All my heart.” Very normal stuff to send to your boss.

Here is the complete text of the second letter (emphasis added):

Dear Mr. President

Now this is the Note I wanted to write (But the apology needed to come first.)

I have learned so much about myself on this Trip—I always knew coming home to my roots would be enlightening, but I had no idea how much. For the first time, in I don’t know how long, you forced me to “unplug.” We could be out on the Course, with no machines, and even forget what time it was! I didn’t have to be “Human Printer.” I could take time to enjoy good conversation, and still get all my work done at the end of the day. In fact, I even had time to take long morning and evening walks to enjoy each Sunrise and Sunset (though I did forget to eat and sleep!). With so much thinking time, I confess it did have a slightly negative effect at times, that I know you picked up on, but the end result, I believe, will be worth it. I had no idea how rapidly I was approaching burnout, and starting to envy those whose only “job” seems to be to talk with you, and look pretty. I want that job!! So many times, I’m just trying to stay afloat with all that’s coming in for you, I look like a hunchback who didn’t have time to freshen up (at least you know what I should look like)! Plus, I miss the days when you used to call, during my Talkshow days, and we’d talk about everything and nothing. I want to get back to that synergy. We shouldn’t have to talk about work all the time!! I’ve always felt like an in-betweener, somewhere between Staff and those you enjoy talking to on the Plane or at Dinner, because that’s who I used to be to you when I was a “Talkshow Host” (as much as I hated that actual job!). I wish I could hear every conversation, because that’s when you’re having a good time, getting away from it all, at least for a few moments.

But after going through all this self-analysis, my conclusion? I need to reunite my past self with my current into a better version who will make you proud. And please, when I fail, will you tell me? You have the absolute right to cuss me out, if need be, when I deserve it, because no one knows or cares about me more. Thank you for always being there for me—I’ll never forget when you made that promise to me after losing my Dad, and I know how happy he is right now that I did get to go to Scotland and Ireland, as he always wanted for me. To modify a classic, ‘I could not have parted with you, to anyone less worthy’—And, I will add, it is I who is unworthy.”

Harp signed her second letter with “Always.”

Within the span of the second letter, Harp vacillates from viewing Trump as a kind of spiritual adviser, a father figure, and a Mr. Darcy-type romantic lead. As for her request for more access, it seems Harp got her wish. White House staff and national security officials have expressed serious concerns about her unfettered access to the president—and all of his conversations.

Michael Cohen’s highly anticipated reunion radio interview with President Trump was a masterclass in brown-nosing. 

The president made a sleepy appearance on Cohen’s weekly talk radio program and podcast When You Know You Know on Thursday night and the two men spent most of the time relitigating what they see as their persecution and trading stale old stories. 

“So I wanna go back to 2016 if we can, because you and I have obviously traveled a pretty rocky road together,” Cohen said near the beginning of the interview after playing the song “Why Can’t We Be Friends” by War. “Do you remember, sir, when I went on CNN with Brianna Keilar and she told me that you were underwater in the polls and I responded with those famous two words, says who, which became some worldwide meme?”

“A good advocate, and then they weaponized you like nobody’s ever been weaponized, like few have been,” Trump responded. 

“Well, maybe just you and I, sir.”

“Yeah. Me too, but … mine was, mine was at a level that nobody’s ever seen before. But they weaponized you, they weaponized a lot of people. And, uh, I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said,” Trump continued. “And that’s a big, that’s a big thing that you did.”

The rest of the interview was effectively a stock speech for Trump, as he eventually devolved into ranting about polling, Iran, gas prices, and upcoming elections. 

“I think that we’re doing really well in the polls, the real polls. If I were running today, I think I’d win by 25 points. I think we’d win by a lot. The economy has never been stronger. We’re doing numbers that nobody’s ever seen before,” he said. (His approval rating fell to 33 percent this week, the lowest level of his presidency.)

“Venezuela was amazing. And now with Iran, they will never have a nuclear weapon, he continued. “We’re essentially controlling and soon controlling the straits. We’re doing very well with Iran. The press doesn’t like to say that, although a lot of the press does say it, you know, because the Navy’s gone, the Air Force is gone, the leadership is gone.... I had [gas] down to $1.85 a barrel. And then I said, ‘But we have to make a journey to the Middle East because we can’t let Iran have a nuclear weapon.’ And that’s what happened.... We’ve wiped them out, militarily wiped out.” 

What Cohen and Trump didn’t talk about was Cohen’s multiple politically advantageous  transformations. 

He was first Trump’s longtime attorney—before being sentenced to three years in federal prison on charges related to his role as the middleman in Trump’s hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Then he had a #Resistance liberal hero arc, lambasting Trump as “a cheat, a mobster, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man” in his book and testifying against him in court. And now that Trump is back in power, he’s returned to bending over backwards to appease him. 

Cohen ended the episode with Peaches & Herb’s “Reunited.” 

Michael Cohen, whose testimony helped get Trump convicted of felonies, just interviewed Donald Trump after “recanting” what he said under oath.

A podcast means nothing. This man is a liar as he always has been.

Here’s a clip: pic.twitter.com/zu8Y0ipBVU

— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) August 20, 2026

“For Lease” signs dot once-busy storefronts, where immigration raids led to a drop in foot traffic and fear among workers and shoppers. By Marisa Gerber for Capital & Main El seis, they call it. That day in June of last year when armed federal immigration officers descended on a garment shop in Los Angeles’ Fashion District, arresting and shackling more than a dozen employees…

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A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Mitch McConnell’s disappearing act hits 2-month milestone…

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

Dealing with seaweed is the bulk of Chris Bumpus’s job during the summer. As chief of conservation for Miami-Dade county’s parks, recreation and open spaces department, Bumpus is in charge of cleaning sargassum off 17 miles of county beaches. But some days, the odds are stacked against him and his team.

More and more sargassum, a kind of floating brown algae, has been washing up on the beaches of south Florida, west Africa, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.

Most mornings this time of year, a member of Bumpus’s seaweed crew walks on to South Beach around 7am to take pictures of piles of the stemmy, spicy-mustard-colored seaweed before a dozen tractors and specialized beachcombing vehicles are put to work trying to integrate the sargassum into the sand or rake it out to be hauled away. “Back in July, the beach looked clean for about an hour,” Bumpus said. That month alone, 9,000 tons of seaweed were removed from Miami-Dade county beaches, more than ever removed in a single month before.

“Hopefully, by October it will die down,” he said. “July is always the worst. It’s been a heavy season.”

Before the clenup begins, a crew has already marked any new sea turtle nests so they aren’t harmed by the sargassum removal. The county holds a permit with the Florida department of environmental protection for its employment of heavy equipment to corral the seaweed. The permit prohibits that equipment during turtle nesting hours, from 30 minutes before sunset until sunrise. So far this nesting season, about 700 sea turtles have built nests on county beaches.

Miami-Dade county spends $3 million per year on sargassum removal, more than any other county in Florida, Bumpus said. The Florida Keys, however, can see heavier accumulations of sargassum because of the inlet-like shape of their beaches, he said. For centuries, sargassum has grown in the Sargasso Sea, a region of the north Atlantic encircled by ocean currents that keep the seaweed concentrated there. But in 2011, scientists saw the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt form for the first time, stretching from west Africa to the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists say several factors contribute to the blooms, including nitrogen and phosphorus from rivers—such as the Amazon, Congo, and Mississippi—warmer water temperatures, and ocean circulation.

Since 2011, the amount of sargassum has doubled every five years, as a result, larger and denser mats of sargassum have been washing up in Mexico, Florida, and the Caribbean. This summer, satellite imagery showed the second highest amount of sargassum in the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt at a whopping 33.5 million tons, slightly behind 2025 when the seaweed biomass reached 38 million tons.

The climate crisis has also played a role in the proliferation of sargassum, said Brian LaPointe, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University Harbor Branch, who has been studying sargassum since 1982. “As we see more ocean warming, we get more evaporation and that drives these extreme rain events that essentially flush more nutrients from land into the ocean,” he said. “So that’s an indirect effect that can increase nutrient supply to sargassum.”

Miami-Dade county first began efforts to address its seaweed problem in 2019. The county’s annual seaweed removal budget is funded by tourist development taxes paid by visitors who stay at hotels and short-term rentals. In July, Miami-Dade county commissioners voted to petition the state to allow the county more flexibility to use beach raking equipment in more areas.

“I think this year has been kind of a gamechanger in that we’ve seen major inundations here in south Florida, more than we’ve ever really seen in past years, and comparable to what’s been happening in the Caribbean, Mexico and the Dominican Republic,” LaPointe said.

In Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum announced a $115 million national plan to combat sargassum, including employing ships that scoop the seaweed out of the water. But federal and state agencies in the US prohibit sargassum removal in open-water because of concerns for the sea life that lives in the floating seaweed mats. But LaPointe said that could eventually change, as research in his lab is showing that sargassum loses much of its marine life as it deteriorates and approaches the beach.

Sargassum serves as a critical habitat in the open ocean, but that changes as it gets close to and comes ashore. “What we’re seeing is that as this excessive amount of sargassum comes ashore it’s affecting coral reefs and seagrass beds and creating dead zones, which strips the oxygen out of the water,” LaPointe said. “That’s why we’re getting these odors of hydrogen sulfide, which presents a human health risk.”

More aggressive seaweed removal efforts might be necessary, but these measures won’t address the underlying causes of increasingly massive blooms in the ocean, LaPointe said. “People are realizing this isn’t going away. It’s getting worse. It’s the new normal. It’s not only treating the symptoms but doing more research on the land-based nutrient sources that we can do something about,” he said.

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

In Iowa, one of the key battleground states in November’s midterm elections, just about every political candidate agrees on one thing: Something must be done about the state’s rising rates of cancer.

The midwestern state has the second-highest rate of cancer nationwide and, together with Utah and West Virginia, is one of only three states where the incidence of the disease is rising, according to cancer rate monitoring from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

Promises to address the issue are now top of mind for candidates ahead of the 3 November elections, in which Iowa may play an important role in deciding control of Congress for the final two years of Donald Trump’s term.

“The road I live on, I think there’s only one family that has not dealt with some kind of cancer,.”

Republicans hoping to preserve their party’s dominance of the state and Democrats who believe conditions are right for them to win key races have pledged to make fighting the disease a priority. Where they differ is in their views over the degree to which the state’s powerhouse farm economy has contributed to making Iowans sick, and what to do about it.

“I think state leadership and industrial agriculture are very hesitant to have those conversations, but I think the Iowa public is calling and demanding action and conversation and answers in a way that both parties are needing to respond, and [that’s] why it has become the campaign issue of this upcoming election,” said Sarah Green, executive director of the Iowa Environmental Council, a non-partisan group whose research into the disease’s prevalence has helped fuel public awareness of the crisis.

Iowa’s cancer rates followed national trends until 2012, when they began climbing upwards for reasons that Green said remain unclear. Cancer includes a broad group of diseases, and many aspects of life, from stress to food to environment, can modify someone’s risk. What’s plain is the importance to voters – one survey has cancer ranked as the top issue facing the state, eclipsing even the cost of living.

In the race for the state’s open US Senate seat, Democrat Josh Turek whose spina bifida he attributes to his father’s exposure to Agent Orange during the Vietnam war, has brought up his sister’s struggle with breast cancer, while his opponent, the Republican congresswoman Ashley Hinson, has emphasized her attempts to reform health policy in Washington.

Candidates of both parties vying for the state’s four Republican-held House districts have battled over who would be better suited to channel federal resources to the state’s needs. In the race to replace the incumbent governor, Kim Reynolds, Zach Lahn won an upset victory in the Republican primary with the support of a PAC connected to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, and both he and his Democratic opponent, Rob Sand, have unveiled lengthy plans to curb rates of the disease.

“The road I live on, I think there’s only one family that has not dealt with some kind of cancer,” said Seth Watkins, a longtime farmer in southwest Iowa who sees the emphasis on fighting the disease—and potentially changing the state’s approach to agriculture—as long overdue.

“We have a farm policy that has resulted in less soil, less biodiversity in wild species, more cancer, fewer farmers and fewer opportunities. I mean, at some point, wouldn’t people just look at that data and say, you know, maybe we should do something different?”

Iowa is the top producer of corn and pork in the US and one of the largest growers of soy, and agriculture generates a third of the state’s economic output and a fifth of its jobs.

But that immense productivity comes at a cost: Iowa’s farmers use more fertilizer than those of any other state, and it also leads in the number of concentrated animal feeding operations, which are part of the meat processing supply chain and generate runoff.

Green pointed out that Iowa also had relatively few regulations intended to keep pesticides and farm runoff, which can be heavy with cancer-linked nitrates, away from people and out of water supplies.

“Too many politicians from Washington, DC, to Des Moines have had their heads stuck in the sand while Big Ag and Big Pharma printed money.”

In 2022, Iowa’s overall rate of cancer was approximately 506 cases per 100,000 people, higher than the national average of 442 per 100,000 people, according to National Institutes of Health data. It also has elevated rates of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and acute myeloid leukemia, two cancers that some studies have found may be linked to glyphosate, the herbicide marketed as Roundup that is the most used in the state.

Agriculture’s impact on Iowans has recently become pronounced, even for people that have nothing to do with farming.

Some Iowa waterways are among the most polluted by nitrates in the US, and last year the water utility serving Des Moines, the state’s capital and largest city, announced its first-ever lawn watering ban because levels of the compounds in the rivers from which it draws its water supply had hit near-record levels. The utility ordered water rationed again this summer.

When the Iowa Environmental Council last year dispatched researchers across the midwestern state to learn more about how cancer was affecting its residents, Green said talking about the link with agriculture was often regarded as a “taboo.”

“Iowans knew there were issues, but felt like they were not supported by their state and by elected officials in, one, hearing their stories, and then two, addressing and recognizing real challenges that Iowans are experiencing a health crisis,” said Green, whose group convened the 16 listening sessions together with the Iowa Farmers Union and Drake University’s Harkin Institute, a public policy thinktank.

There are other factors connected to cancer diagnoses in Iowa—its residents face a higher risk of exposure to naturally occurring radon, and this year the state legislature approved a law mandating that mitigation systems be installed in new homes. Under Reynolds, the state has also sought to curb alcohol and tobacco use, and in June the GOP-dominated legislature approved a $320 million investment in water quality. But Green said that measure offered relatively little new funding and “doesn’t address pollution at the source.”

The gubernatorial candidates Lahn and Sand came out against a June Supreme Court ruling making it more difficult for people who believe they contracted cancer from exposure to Roundup to sue its manufacturer.

The Republican Lahn’s campaign platform has largely focused on incentivizing farmers to change their ways to prevent water pollution, while accusing major chemical manufacturers of misleading Iowans about their products’ safety.

“We all know something is terribly wrong, but too many politicians from Washington, DC, to Des Moines have had their heads stuck in the sand while Big Ag and Big Pharma printed money. This will not go on when I’m governor,” Lahn said after winning the nomination in June.

His Democratic opponent, Sand, has called cancer “the top issue on everyone’s mind no matter what part of the state I’m in, and rightfully so,” and proposed measures to better manage farmers’ use of manure, test for radon and help farms enroll in conservation programs.

“I feel like we’re mining instead of practicing agriculture. “

Neither has as aggressive a platform as Chris Jones, the Democratic candidate for state agriculture secretary. A former University of Iowa researcher, he wrote a popular blog that explored the state’s water quality issues, but stopped writing it after, he told the Iowa Capital Dispatch, two Republican state senators threatened the university’s funding over his writings. One of the lawmakers denied the allegations, and Jones later left the school.

Jones is proposing a wholesale transformation of the state’s approach to farming to reduce its impact on water quality. His platform includes zoning changes to address the environmental effects of Cafos and a “strategic retreat” from growing corn for ethanol, a top cash crop for the state’s farmers.

“We know radon is a driver of lung cancer here. Well, guess what? We have policies to help reduce exposure to radon,” Jone said. “The same could be said for nitrate and drinking water. Let’s develop policies that reduce that risk.”

The incumbent agriculture secretary, Mike Naig, a Republican and former lobbyist for Monsanto, the manufacturer of Roundup that’s now part of Bayer, did not respond to an interview request sent to his campaign.

Some farmers aren’t waiting for the election results to change their agricultural practices.

Last March, three farmers in north-central Iowa announced themselves as “the Lobe Rangers,” unveiling a website complete with a logo of a masked man standing amid the corn in which they made their case for how it is possible to farm profitably without harming themselves or the environment.

“This has been boiling underneath the surface for me for 15 years, and the reason I think we launched is that we just kind of had enough. We saw the inaction of the political class and the ag lobbying leadership class of putting up the same nonsense,” said Zack Smith, a corn and soybean farmer who is one of the rangers.

The group—which took its name from a particularly fertile part of the state called the Des Moines lobe—follows the state’s nutrient-reduction strategy, a blueprint to keep nitrates out of the state’s waterways and the far-off Gulf of Mexico that’s only voluntary, but which the rangers insist works.

Watkins, who works land his great-grandfather first cultivated in 1848, has in recent years downsized what was once a 4,000-acre farm, helping younger farmers grow diversified crops on smaller plots of land.

The change in tack follows more than three decades of Watkins farming at scale and growing more disillusioned by an industry that depends heavily on federal subsidies while exacting a worsening toll on the environment. “I feel like we’re mining instead of practicing agriculture. And, you know, show me an area, whether it’s the oil industry or mining or any of that, where when the resources are gone, the people are better off,” Watkins said.

Watching the state’s political class focus on cancer, and by extension, water quality, had been a curious experience, since it had been a concern of theirs for more than a decade, said Smith.

While the group—which has not endorsed any candidates—doubt any single election can reverse Iowa’s frightening health trajectory, it can at least make a step in the right direction. “It’s definitely not gonna be solved by what’s gonna happen in the election in 2026,” said Smith. “We’ll maybe start making some steps in the right direction, but this is going to be something that is going to take a lot of change at a lot of different levels.”

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 21 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump, who’s very angry over the Iran war, just unleashed more crazed threats at a host of new targets. He vowed economic warfare against anyone that helps Iran, but news organizations are struggling to figure out what on earth this is supposed to accomplish. This comes as Marjorie Taylor Greene just issued a stark warning to Republicans, claiming that Trump’s coalition is imploding, portending a GOP disaster in the midterms.

These things are linked. Probably nothing is wrecking the MAGA coalition more than his inability to find a way out of the war. You can see other signs that MAGA media is completely lost on how to deal with Trump’s total impotence. None of this was supposed to happen. So we’re trying to parse where MAGA goes now with New Republic contributing editor Virginia Heffernan, who’s been writing really well on the MAGA crack-up. Virginia, thanks for coming on.

Virginia Heffernan: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So Marjorie Taylor Greene is almost like a MAGA oracle at this point, or maybe like MAGA’s Greek chorus or something. She posted this video on TikTok about the midterms. Listen to this.

Marjorie Taylor Greene (voiceover): Let me explain to you guys how this is actually going to work. ‘26 midterms and the ‘28 presidential race is not going to be anything like 2024, where there was so much support for MAGA. The coalition came in. You want to know why ‘26 and ‘28 is going to be different? Because Donald Trump broke his big, big campaign promise of no more foreign wars, and actually has got us embroiled in a war with Iran, a war that should not be happening, and he’s not backing off of it. And it will probably get worse. So that has fed the affordability crisis. That’s why people can’t afford gasoline. That’s why people’s bills keep going up. Food prices are still going up. Beef is at all-time high. It’s ridiculous. You know what you should have done? You should have stuck to your campaign promises, and you should have delivered for the people that put you in office, not the ones writing you the big fat checks.

Sargent: When Marjorie Taylor Greene says the coalition is falling apart, all these voters feel betrayed by you, Mr. President—she isn’t just making a prediction. She’s essentially saying to these voters, you know, you shouldn’t show up for this guy because he fucked you, right? That’s what she’s really saying. And it’s true. She’s right about it.

Heffernan: She is absolutely right. And I think she also mentioned a tweet of Trump’s, where he said, sometime around the Epstein files, when she and Thomas Massie were agitating for the release of them—Trump is quoted as saying he doesn’t care about his old voters. And she and lots of people took that very personally.

And the way she describes those earlier voters, so his, like, diehard supporters in both 2020 and 2024—she says that they are basically the people that she’s often standing with. Women who care about affordability, but these are the women who may have been anti-vax, who may have been open to RFK, who may have even supported QAnon, the Marjorie Taylor Greene stuff. But then, on the more sane side of things, also really don’t want war.

War is never very popular with women, going back to times when women were worried about their sons being killed. They don’t like this idea of a deployment. They don’t like the idea that we don’t really know the number of American casualties in Iran. And women are keeping that issue top of mind, and connecting it to the Epstein class’s exploitation of children.

And then the affordability piece, which brings together household management and kind of feeding my children and how much do groceries cost. And when Marjorie Taylor Greene points out, when he called affordability a quote, “Democrat hoax,” when he called Epstein a Democrat hoax, that really touched a nerve with this population that she believes—and I think maybe rightly—is crucial to keeping Trump in power.

Sargent: Yes, and on Iran, Trump is utterly stuck. He raged wildly on Truth Social. Here’s what he said: “Today I am announcing the most crushing economic operation ever taken against any country. This will be economic warfare and isolation on an unprecedented scale.” Trump then also said that any country that acts in any way to interact economically with Iran will itself face “tremendous” economic consequences.

Now, Virginia, The New York Times pointed out aptly that he isn’t specifying which countries he’s actually willing to punish, which could be countries like China. And it also pointed out that this is going to be a really complex and time-consuming thing to enforce on other countries, even if he goes through with it.

It just seems like Trump is desperate at this point to create the mere perception that he’s acting. We’re, like, well beyond him having any actual plan. It’s all about just looking as if he’s doing something. What do you make of all that?

Heffernan: Part of what made the neocons for a time so effective is that they really looked like they had the inside line. When they were selling us on the fact of WMDs, and it was Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld—these people, like the architects of the war in Vietnam, they sort of had some kind of aura around them, like they had some kind of genius to them, like a sort of Elon Musk aura. That would give them clout way beyond what they were actually doing, which was incredibly destructive and misguided.

But Trump doesn’t—there is no genius halo around either Trump or Hegseth, or really anyone who is bringing us into this disaster. They just don’t get that pass from us. Nobody is, like, trying to sell this to us. He just does not care what the American people think of what the Pentagon is doing. And that has become very clear, and Americans on the right and left don’t like that.

Sargent: Well, I think you’re putting your finger on a really important irony here, because remember, Donald Trump rose to power in 2016 by making the case that the Bushes and the Rumsfelds and the Colin Powells were part of this corrupt elite that said that it was going to organize the world in an effective way, but ultimately lied to the American people and ended up costing the lives of thousands of Americans abroad, in that awful extended quagmire.

And so I think maybe the rebellion against Donald Trump now is partly rooted in that, right? In the sense that MAGA actually bought this idea that Trump was a different kind of elite.

Heffernan: And I think he actually was against the Iraq War, sort of, at the time. I mean, I think on Howard Stern he says, reluctantly, he supported it, but he really was against it.

I don’t think he was against it because he’s a peacenik at heart. I think he was against it because he thought it was spending a lot of money, right? Money that probably he thinks should be his.

Sargent: And they weren’t taking the oil.

Heffernan: And they weren’t taking the oil, like in Venezuela. Right, they weren’t taking the oil. People were being boneheaded and stupid and just spending money abroad. So in a weird way, he started to create this kind of manly opposition to war that was more about, like, waste, more about just overspending, more about, like, the world not being grateful to us or not paying us enough, or NATO, not kissing our palms enough or whatever. And also, like, keeping the money here, keeping the money in America.

Sargent: And we’re not going to waste young men. We’re not going to pour young men down the tubes, right?

Heffernan: I mean, I’m not sure that he cared much about our soldiers, but yes, that definitely would appeal to people. The other thing is, there are a lot of veterans in his base, and veterans had come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, often multiple tours, with PTSD, strongly anti-war.

I mean, you think, on the other side of the aisle, Graham Platner, right? Like, came back just with absolute contempt for the war machine. And so they also had this manly opposition to war. And it worked well with the kind of more feminine—I’m putting that in quotes—opposition to the war that Marjorie Taylor Greene articulates, which is, like, fear for our children, fear for people, fear for soldiers, and strong support for the military. And that combination of things had some nice heft to it.

Sargent: Yeah. So he’s, like, repeating the elite folly, but just telling everybody to suck it up, in a way that, like, no other previous president would have done. So Matt Gertz of Media Matters caught something interesting as well. Fox News’ Sean Hannity, who’s probably Trump’s most devoted propagandist, has largely gone silent about the Iran war in recent weeks. He only just broke his silence to say that Trump isn’t getting enough credit for his successes in Iran.

I think this goes to what we were talking about before, Virginia, which is that a lot of these propagandists just don’t know what to do right now, because Trump is so visibly stuck, and it’s all so unpopular, and their own audiences are turning against them over their support for the war. And so can you talk about that dynamic? It seems like the propaganda now has hit this wall where there’s no audience for it anymore.

Heffernan: I think Giuliani today said you have to give up everything you believe to work at Fox News. And that’s absolutely right, because you have to sync with the audience. They only want to hear what they want to hear, right? You’re not a propagandist leading the way. You’re following ratings.

So I don’t know what Hannity thinks of the actual war in Iran. I assume he’s in favor, but whatever. But he will not talk about it if he thinks the audience doesn’t want to hear about it, which is what he’s been doing.

The only thing he can talk about is an old refrain of Trump’s, the sort of, like, Rodney Dangerfield, “I don’t get no respect”—the, like, that Trump doesn’t get enough credit, or Trump’s always persecuted. This is something that does appeal to the MAGA base, because they, I think, identify with being—he’s sometimes described them as forgotten, overlooked.

They too are not getting credit. They too have run into a system that doesn’t respect them. And if Trump is not getting credit for something, people might be able to find in him the, like, persecuted Trump that they like.

Sargent: Yeah. And I think a lot of these Fox and MAGA figures are bumping up against another problem. They don’t know how to talk about Trump and the Iran war, because in their minds, Trump’s might and power and ability to impose his will on his enemies was always unquestioned.

And of course, the funny thing is, they’re required to treat it as fact that Trump’s defeat over Iran has been absolute, that it’s been one of the greatest military triumphs in world history. They’re required to repeat that, because Trump has said it. So now, how do they explain the fact that Trump can’t impose his will on Iran?

Heffernan: I do, by the way, think that figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and maybe wiser people, are kind of reevaluating everything through a different lens. I mean, you know, I don’t know if you see some people testifying to basically falling out with MAGA, or deconstructing their experience with MAGA. And they’re in shambles.

Like, their brains feel like they’re in their component parts all around them. And they’re just going through, I believed this, I believed this, I can’t believe I believed this. I can’t believe I thought I should shoot bleach into my veins. Like, the whole thing. It’s like being lost all at once.

And if we undo things like some of the language, like hoax or fake news, and understand that they were strategies by this very increasingly powerful person—until he’s the most powerful person in the world—to subjugate people, then you start to be able to, I don’t know, to, like, imagine how we could rebuild, you know, this broken country.

Sargent: Well, just to bring this back to the Republicans in the midterms, we had Mike Johnson talking about the war in a surprisingly candid way. He had this to say.

Mike Johnson (voiceover): The Iran conflict has been a cause, of course, of gas prices going up. It’s drug on.

Sargent: That kind of strips away the spell in a way doesn’t it?

Heffernan: I mean Trump has at times said we have to get used to inflation, inflation is a small price to pay for whatever he’s doing in Iran. So they don’t exactly, they don’t just lie and say that inflation will come down, but it’s not down yet, or gas prices, I mean, will come down. Yeah, for some reason they are not able to call inflation a hoax.

We have to get used to inflation. Inflation’s a small price to pay for whatever he’s doing in Iran. I don’t know why that one is where the rubber hits the road for them. I mean, you’d think that they would say—they’d have their own polls. They’d have, like, a Rasmussen gas prices, and be like, look, it’s three dollars a gallon for Rasmussen. So they’re just citing fake polls.

They don’t do that. Inflation—there’s something about inflation that it’s just such a populist issue. It really gets to someone: the Fed, the war machine, the elites, whatever, are raising prices to make my life unaffordable. And you just don’t mess with it as an issue, partly because Trump ran on the idea that Biden had created all this inflation, and that he was going to bring inflation down, and it would be, you know, to record lows in two weeks or whatever it was. And here we are.

So I think it’s interesting to see Mike Johnson have to wrestle with that, because we are getting down to where his constituents live, which is on affordability.

Sargent: Just presuming for now that there’s a pretty decisive Democratic win—next year, Donald Trump is a lame duck. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s prediction about MAGA cracking up and scattering and splintering will have come true. I don’t think we’re prepared for how weak and disorganized MAGA might look at that point. Can you talk about that?

Heffernan: I mean, yeah, right. What are they going to do when he’s impeached every day, as Ted Cruz once said would happen? I don’t know.

Sargent: Yeah, when he faces, like, serious oversight, and he’s just, like, this, you know, raging figure who’s kind of tied down by Democrats in Congress, at least to some degree. Obviously, he’s going to abuse his powers in all sorts of horrible ways, but it will be trench warfare more than mighty Trump ruling over his domain, right? And so he’ll look weak, and he’ll look constrained, and he’ll look like he’s struggling, and people will be talking about JD Vance and what’s next. And I think MAGA will look really kind of disorganized and shattered at that point, is my prediction.

Heffernan: I think so too. I mean, we will see the Game of Thrones happening, with maybe Tucker Carlson or whoever else trying to consolidate the America First side of things. We’re not in the clear. I mean, Democrats—or the country—is not in the clear, if Democrats win the midterms, or if they even impeach Trump. Because the America First side of things is like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Just because they oppose the war, just because they talk about affordability, does not mean they don’t want a lot of toxic, toxic things.

Sargent: Yeah. And so, you know, we talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene as this oracle now, but maybe we’ll regret it later.

Heffernan: That’s right.

Sargent: Virginia Heffernan, awesome to talk to you. Thank you so much for all this.

Heffernan: Thank you.

Handling a U.S. president’s social-media voice is a magisterial job. The work involved ranges far and wide—from figuring out how to handle the president’s receipt of a Nobel Peace Prize to huddling with colleagues to pull just the right clip from a speech. Or, if you’re President Donald Trump’s aide and traveling companion Natalie Harp, you might use AI to portray the president as a fighter pilot dropping payloads of poop on No Kings demonstrators.

I know something about this particular job. I managed President Barack Obama’s partisan social media accounts over much of the first year of his presidency. It’s fair to say this was a more innocent age. The watchwords I took to the work were ones like “safeguards” and “restraint,” instead of “poop jet” and “what if we depicted the president as Jesus Christ.” A president’s statements, I knew, could move markets even if ventriloquized by twenty- and thirtysomethings working to channel the top guy’s voice. At every point, my colleagues and I took intentional steps to guard against loose words.

It hardly takes a genius to spot how the standards around Trump’s social media accounts have slipped, even against the low baseline of his first term. With The New York Times calling Harp, Trump’s omnipresent aide, the “sylphlike woman” who “supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter (like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes),” we have a good idea of why those standards have tumbled—and strong reason to wonder what else the woman who “texts with world leaders on the president’s behalf” and operates “entirely outside the usual chain of command” is doing with her prized, rare access.

I never boarded any presidential jets, never mind a catering cart. I came into the role of managing Obama’s political accounts by happenstance: I joined the communications team of the Democratic National Committee to handle what people now might call influencer outreach. Insiders who knew my reputation across a few social media personae—such as the DNC’s new digital director, and the person who managed social for Obama’s 2008 campaign—learned of my arrival … and voilà: I got the keys.

Or more accurately, I didn’t get the keys. That was at my insistence; I felt adamant that no one person, myself included, should both write for those accounts and post. We tapped a new digital hire I trusted—they’d worked with the woman who’s now my spouse—to hold the account credentials, and I built a process to put multiple sets of eyes on every word intended for Obama’s accounts before publication.

In hindsight, I may have gone overboard with the approval steps we put into place, but I didn’t want anything approaching sole ownership over the digital personae of a president of the United States. More to the point, I thought no responsible person should want such a thing. Putting figures from disparate parts of the president’s teams in the decision loop—my boss in DNC communications, the digital director, the White House communications office—kept me accountable and ensured that what went out matched Obama’s voice and careful demeanor.

Sure, that cost us nimbleness in quick-moving moments. Some of my successors in running the DNC’s accounts, which I ran for a bit longer after handing off Obama’s, have taken up a freewheeling style that lets them move at the speed of the digital conversation—with fantastic results. Still, speaking for the political operation of a president demanded precision, especially when the president measured his words as famously as Obama does. Managing those accounts demanded a process with multiple circuit breakers between any individual and the ‘publish’ button—rather than, say, a Grima Wormtongue-style solo operator with the president’s ear and his passwords.

What could I have done in an environment free of safeguards, like the one surrounding this president? Kalshi and Polymarket were but glimmers in some preteen future techbros’ eyes when I did this work, but if I had sure knowledge of what a president’s accounts would post—because I stayed up late with Trump, as Harp reportedly does, to draft each line—I could earn a pretty penny by trading on that information before tapping some market-shifting words into Truth Social.

Not that people should say this administration is known for rampant profiteering on insider info, mind you. Far from it — it’s more apt to call it notorious for that.

How has Harp handled her touchscreen access to Trump’s private communications with world leaders? I can’t say. More worryingly, government agencies can’t say either; MS NOW reports that for a year, Harp repeatedly declined to seek the security clearance that West Wing staffers usually obtain. I also had no clearance—at the DNC, that wasn’t required—but that’s precisely why my colleagues and I built a process where people with clearances had visibility and could step in.

Maybe she’s on the up-and-up with her access to the president and his accounts. Maybe she sees devotion to Trump as its own reward, even if that means squeezing herself behind an SUV’s seats like a stowaway. But that Harp fights so hard for both proximity to the president and a free hand to post on his behalf is why I don’t trust her at all—and neither should you.

Policymakers and economists have long treated climate change as a crisis whose costs would mainly accrue to future generations. Unfortunately, that future is here. As the world frets over the consequences of the Iran war on everything from the cost of goods to the food supply, a separate phenomenon is also choking maritime traffic—and will continue to snarl supply chains long after the Strait of Hormuz reopens.

Water levels in Germany’s Rhine River—one of Europe’s busiest shipping routes—have been at record lows amid weeks of drought, forcing cargo carriers to cut shipments to as little as one-fifth of normal capacity. Those problems didn’t start this summer, either. Rising temperatures caused by climate change have meant less snow in the Alps during the winter, and so less meltwater draining into the Rhine in warmer months. ING, the Dutch banking giant, estimates that the halt of traffic on the Rhine ​will lower Germany’s GDP by 0.3 percentage points this year, which is especially bad news considering the country was on track to grow by just 0.8 percentage points all year. German insurer Allianz likewise estimates that the brutal two-week heatwave in June will cut all of Europe’s GDP by 0.3 percentage points. In May, Allianz analysts had already projected that the countries most exposed to extreme heat—France, Japan, Italy, Germany, and Spain—will see economic output that’s 5 to 7 percent lower than it would have been otherwise by 2030.

It’s not just Europe. The cost of shipping goods through the busiest lanes in the Panama Canal have jumped to record highs amid falling water levels and increased traffic from vessels redirected from routes disrupted by the Iran war. The Financial Times reports that transit slots on the canal’s most commonly used locks are being auctioned off for 16 times the average price for the same period last year. The ongoing El Niño—on track to be the strongest such event in 76 years—has seen wet season rainfalls slip below previous levels. Climate change has already made rainfall there much less predictable, meaning extreme droughts and floods both threaten to “push canal infrastructure past its operational limits,” The New York Times reported.

Influential environmental economists, including Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus, have argued that spending heavily to respond to climate change in the present risks dinging economic growth down the line. The theory holds that by taking a more gradual approach—forgoing massive investments in adaptation and decarbonization, and continuing to reap the economic benefits of the fossil fuel economy for a while—continued robust growth will make our future selves rich enough to respond to climate change more easily (read: more cheaply) than we can today.

The problem is that our poorer, present selves are now paying for the ballooning costs of climate change in all sorts of nightmarish ways. Direct hits like hurricanes and wildfires dole out damages all at once, destroying homes, businesses, and infrastructure. Governments pay for emergency response, then to clean up damages and rebuild. Insurance companies pay out to policyholders, and then raise rates in ways that strain household budgets, making federally backed mortgages harder to get and pushing up rents as landlords pass those rising costs onto tenants. If major insurance companies opt not to offer coverage to riskier markets, as in Florida, states step in to create their own insurers of last resort and open the market up to smaller, sometimes sketchier firms that threaten to leave policyholders to foot the bill when disaster strikes again. Heat waves drain labor productivity and droughts push down agricultural yields as farmers harvest crops later. Wars, like Trump’s misadventure in Iran, exacerbate these costs in the Panama Canal and elsewhere; growers are paying more for fertilizers, or losing access to them, because maritime traffic has ground to a halt in the contested Strait of Hormuz.

Record-low water levels in the Danube have forced nuclear plants in Hungary and Romania to cut output and shut down without the river water needed to cool down reactors. Hungary’s MBH Bank reported a 0.1 percentage point hit to GDP for every week the country’s largest nuclear generator is offline. In France, three nuclear reactors were taken offline earlier this month as jellyfish—whose populations have been buoyed by warming waters, overfishing and plastic pollution—swarmed the seawater pumping stations used to cool them.

The models that experts use to assess the costs of climate change also have a tendency to understate risks and leave out things now proving to be extraordinarily costly. A study in Nature last year, Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer noted recently, found that “climate-driven smoke deaths” resulted in economic damages that “exceed existing estimates of climate-driven damages from all other causes combined in the U.S.A.”

It’d be unfair, of course, to blame governments’ failure to prepare for this moment on a handful of overly sanguine economic modelers; although their more prescient colleagues deserve credit for assessing climate risks more accurately, precious few economists have even bothered to consider the effects of rising temperatures. Climate change is a genuinely thorny problem to tackle given that our world still runs on the substances driving it, on fossil fuels in particular. In America, that fact has been ably exploited by Big Energy companies and the Republican politicians they fund, who’ve gone to great lengths to deny the problem and stop governments at every level from doing anything about it. Among the many hellish results of those efforts is that policymakers are essentially flying blind into a world that’s becoming increasingly expensive, and quite literally unnavigable.

By the time Chibuike was 24 years old, he had been kicked out of his family home multiple times, developed a drug addiction, attempted suicide, and scammed tens of thousands of dollars from unsuspecting victims overseas. For most of his career as a cybercriminal, Chibuike lived in one hotel after another in his native Ikotun—a bustling, impoverished neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria. He spent lavishly on nights out, knockoff designer wares, and an ever-expanding circle of friends. At night, buoyed by meth and crack, he logged hours on his phone, talking to women who thought they were talking to the American wrestler Cody Rhodes.

Chibuike is a “Yahoo Boy,” a moniker for online fraudsters based in West Africa, especially Nigeria, who con foreigners out of their life savings. Named for the Yahoo email addresses they once used, they build intimate, often romantic relationships with their victims based on fake personas. With enough time and ingenuity, they extract money from “clients” in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in the English-speaking world where digital manipulation, sextortion, or fake cryptocurrency investment opportunities can lure lucrative targets.

Chibuike is one of four young men at the center of Carlos Barragán’s riveting new book, The Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception, and the Real Lives of Nigeria’s Romance Scammers. Barragán, a reporter at The New York Times, was drawn into the subject when his own mother fell prey to a Nigerian scammer masquerading as a U.S. soldier. What began as a quest for her scammer became a more searching look into the real lives of Yahoo Boys, and how their crimes and aspirations offered a grim reflection of a modern world riddled with poverty, inequality, and transoceanic loneliness.

The “Nigerian prince” email is one of the best known online frauds: A deposed royal asks his unwitting recipients for help with a frozen bank account, promising a generous cut of his estate in exchange for a small advance payment. The fortune is, of course, nonexistent. The beguiling prince makes off with his ill-gotten gains, and the victim is left brooding over their depleted bank account and their naiveté.

Though “Nigerian prince” emails exploded in step with the expansion of the internet in the 2000s, versions of the scheme were prevalent long before the digital age, operating via the postal service and fax machines. 419 scams—named after Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code—have their roots in the colonial and early postcolonial periods, which created ideal conditions for legally questionable get-rich-quick schemes. As the historian Stephen Ellis has observed, the British practice of colonial governance through indigenous elites, known as indirect rule, incentivized charlatanry and corruption among local officials with unchecked power. One commissioner in southeastern Nigeria deceived locals into thinking he possessed supernatural powers, while another officer used a glass eye to create the impression that he was always watching his subordinates. At times, ordinary people masqueraded as colonial officials to demand fines from their victims. “Some Nigerians realized they could exploit the terrifying power and reputation of the white man and his symbols of authority to extort their fellow Nigerians,” the historian Max Siollun has explained. Later impersonation scammers cast a wider net, such as when “Prince Bil Morrison,” who was really a 14-year-old schoolboy, began soliciting funds from American and Canadian “pen pals” in the 1940s.

419 scams—named after Section 419 of the Nigerian Criminal Code—have their roots in the colonial and early postcolonial periods, which created ideal conditions for legally questionable get-rich-quick schemes.

Following the end of empire, economic opportunities abounded in Africa as the continent’s new political elites sought foreign capital to fund the costly work of nation-building. This created a class of well-connected intermediaries who profited off the position they straddled between foreign firms and domestic resources. One such middleman was Nigeria’s first Finance Minister Festus Okotie-Eboh, who, according to one American diplomat, “attracted much foreign investment to his country and was spurred to do so because he operated on a straight commission basis.”

The 1970s oil boom led to an influx of petrodollars even as it deepened economic inequality and corruption, leaving millions of educated youths in poverty. Eager to mimic the wealth flaunted by corrupt elites amid scarcity, many young people turned to fraud. The director of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Commission estimated in 2023 that seven out of 10 students were involved in cybercrimes, Barragán relates. A new generation of scammers would incorporate into their playbooks tales of payouts and windfalls that often drew inspiration from real headlines. Their fabricated offers to share funds embezzled from government accounts would gain credibility precisely because cases of embezzlement took place so regularly—such as when the former head of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation was arrested for fraud and money laundering in 2017.

This is the world Chibuike, Biggy, Richie, and Azeez grew up in. They are blessed with unbridled entrepreneurial spirit yet cursed with limited avenues along which to channel it. Throughout the book, Barragán makes clear the narrow horizon of choices on offer. The other jobs they hold at various points—Richie has worked as a cashier at a sports betting center and Azeez apprenticed at a neighborhood tailor—pay poorly and afford no real upward mobility. When Barragán asked Biggy where he saw himself in five years, he responded: “A rich-ass motherfucker.” In reality, Biggy was about to turn 30, still living at home, and perpetually on the verge of being broke. It was this disjuncture between their outsize economic ambitions and disappointing realities that fostered the allure of Yahooing. As Biggy explained, “I started doing it for a better life, because the country itself is fucked up.” A smartphone, which can be purchased for as little as five thousand naira (less than four dollars), becomes a golden ticket, promising at once deliverance and ruin.

Some see the wealth they scam out of foreigners as a form of reparations for slavery and colonialism. Others view successful scams as acts of empowerment.

The stories that Yahoo Boys tell themselves are varied. Some, like Biggy, see the wealth they scam out of foreigners as a form of reparations for slavery and colonialism. Others view successful scams as acts of empowerment. In a world in which negative stereotypes about African incompetence remain pervasive, they wear the ability to outcon unsuspecting white people as a badge of honor. At times, the reason for scamming is movingly simple: Azeez, the youngest scammer Barragán interviewed, turned to Yahooing just so he could dine at the local restaurant Foodcity again.

Many Yahoo Boys see themselves as Robin Hood characters, giving away significant portions of their earnings to schoolchildren, friends, and acquaintances. They’re also generous in sharing “formats,” pre-written documents with step-by-step instructions on how to approach romance scam victims. Neighborhood stores thrive on their earnings and spending habits. “We are brainers, not scammers,” one of them told Barragán proudly. “We’re bringing money to the country.” Miracle, a Yahoo Girl, has paintings of both Pablo Escobar and the Virgin Mary hanging in her room. Barragán observes that “when she needed money, she prayed to both.”

Richie, Azeez, and others may have embraced Yahooing for material reasons, but what keeps them in thrall to the hustle are the intangibles: dignity, status, purpose, community, a sense of self. Barragán shows how all four men had experienced the kind of invisibility that came with poverty. Chibuike, for instance, admitted to feeling “completely alone in the world for as long as he could remember, and spending money on people was his way of filling that void.” In Ikotun, a successful “cashout” could transform an anonymous teenager into a local celebrity, with new clothes, new friends, and a new place in the pecking order. In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah, one character reflects on his newly acquired status as a Big Man in Lagos: “People treat you differently … Suddenly you’re getting all of this sucking-up from people because they think you expect it, all this exaggerated politeness, exaggerated praise, even exaggerated respect that you haven’t earned at all, and it’s so fake and so garish, it’s like a bad overcolored painting, but sometimes you start believing a little bit of it yourself and sometimes you see yourself differently.”

The attempt to understand what, exactly, makes Yahoo Boys tick is the driving force of Barragán’s account. Unassuming and open-minded, Barragán has a knack for getting them to open up to him. Perhaps this is because Nigerian poverty and Western loneliness occupy two sides of the same coin. Both stem from the ravages of late-stage capitalism. The American or European retiree who spent decades working long hours while social bonds frayed, and the Nigerian teen whose wages fail to keep pace with inflation are both paying the price of upholding the global economic system, even as they remain on its margins.

Barragán’s story is set firmly in the late 2010s and early 2020s: the Covid-19 pandemic casts a long shadow, exacerbating economic volatility in the Global South and social isolation everywhere else. Lockdowns across the globe made surviving on honest wages in Lagos even harder, as many industries slowed, while “clients” in the West who were social distancing became all the more hungry for connection. The pathologies of our current moment—the yearning for genuine human connection, the ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots, and, in Chibuike’s case, a parasocial celebrity culture in the social media era—play out in living color.

Especially memorable is Barragán’s description of the inner workings of the scam economy, which illustrates both the wonders and pitfalls of internet-driven globalization: The American or European victim purchases a U.S. gift card for their Nigerian scammer, who sells it to Chinese contacts, who then unload it on netizens eager to circumvent the “Great Firewall.” The scam economy thus functions as an illicit subsector of the global economy with its own supply chains and digital networks. “We live in a world that commodifies human connection,” Barragán writes. The application of market logic to relationships recasts them as economic opportunities, leaving little room for alternative ethical frameworks.

Interestingly, Barragán draws the worlds of the Yahoo Boys more vividly than those of their victims, whose appearances in the book are episodic and anticlimactic. Towards the end of the book, Barragán explains his decision to shift the narrative focus from victims to perpetrators: “I wanted to understand how these boys saw us, how they made sense of our isolation, and how that shaped their lives and community.” This turned out to be the right call. Scam victims are usually less clear-eyed than their scammers about what happened. “Imagine if you’ve been single for ten years,” Biggy, for instance, reflects at one point. “Then, all of a sudden, someone starts showing you attention? Would you want to let go of it so soon? You won’t.”

The Yahoo Boys is, in form, a tragic coming of age story. As Chibuike, Biggy, Richie, and Azeez move from adolescence to early adulthood, they undergo the same patterns of experimentation and reinvention as their more fortunate counterparts in wealthier countries. Unlike teenagers from more privileged backgrounds, who often have the means to recover from mistakes, the young men of Ikotun rarely get second chances. When Azeez appeared on the cusp of a more promising life, I couldn’t help but root for him, which makes his uncertain end all the more devastating. By the end of Barragán’s story, he has renounced Yahooing in hopes of going back to school. Yet his family’s inability to come up with the registration fees leaves him in a no man’s land between his past and his future.

At once bold and empathetic, The Yahoo Boys is a rare account of the subterranean world of our digital age and those who inhabit it. The book bears an epigraph from James Baldwin: “What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you.” It’s an artful reminder that poverty and inequality in one place is poverty and inequality everywhere. Africa’s economic challenges—in part a legacy of colonialism—reverberate back to the West, a dark mirror of the insecure affluence and gamified isolation that define the lives of so many.