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Gas prices could climb even higher in the coming months.

Industry officials have already warned the White House that the prices could spike yet again due to rapidly diminishing inventories, reported The Washington Post Thursday.

Since the beginning of the Iran war, commercial and government inventories have supplemented gas consumption across the U.S. The reserves have allowed prices to hover around $4.50 per gallon for the last four months—but that could change very quickly, according to oil and gas executives, who are often loath to make such alarming predictions.

“We’re sounding the alarm on these inventories going to record lows,” American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers told Fox Business. “We have to solve this problem in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Some inventories could be wiped out in a matter of weeks, according to the Post—just in time for summer holidays.

“I have absolutely no doubt the White House—from the president on down—is fully aware of the nearly universal alarm among oil companies and analysts about the direction of travel for oil prices this summer,” Bob McNally, a former Bush administration energy adviser, told the Post.

Yet Trump has been remarkably cavalier about the rising costs. With inflation at a three-year high, Trump stunned reporters, lawmakers, and voters alike on Wednesday with just four words: “I love the inflation,” he said.

“I love it,” he insisted, pledging that oil prices will drop “like a rock” when the war ends.

But the end of the war seems to be nowhere in sight. U.S. forces bombed Iran through two nights this week, part of the White House’s latest strategy to force Tehran to make a deal, despite the obvious risks of escalation.

“If we need to negotiate with bombs, we will negotiate with bombs,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday. “We will strike them hard tonight and hopefully Iran makes a good decision.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s allies aren’t so sure that their political movement will weather the brewing economic storm. The far-right populist rode the 2024 campaign on vehement promises of affordability; through his presidency, he swore that Americans would see lower utility bills, cheaper groceries, and more American-based jobs. But that hasn’t been the case.

Instead, as millions of Americans struggle with the rising cost of living and companies contend with rattled supply chains, the president’s inner circle fear that it might be too late to fix the problem for Trump’s midterm-dependent acolytes.

“Whether it’s peak inflation or not, it doesn’t matter,” one former Trump administration official told Politico. “The die has been cast in terms of how people are looking at the economy.”

The Pentagon had multiple floors locked down and evacuated Thursday over an air quality false alarm.

“Earlier this morning, Pentagon occupants were notified ‌of ⁠a potential air quality issue, prompting immediate precautionary safety measures and evaluation. Subsequent testing confirmed no hazard exists, and normal operations have ​resumed,” ​chief Pentagon ⁠spokesman Sean Parnell said. “We express our sincere appreciation to the first responders ​for their swift actions to ensure ​the ⁠safety of all personnel.”

Parnell had originally reported there was an “air quality issue necessitating precautionary measures.” Floors two through five in corridors four through seven were closed down, and the Arlington Fire Department’s hazmat team was also present.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration is reportedly investigating a critic of the Iran war, threatening to revoke his green card and deport him from the U.S.

Trita Parsi is reportedly being targeted by the White House for his frequent criticisms of the Iran war. Parsi, a Swedish citizen born in Iran who holds U.S. permanent residency, co-founded the National Iranian American Council and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a foreign policy think tank.

To some in the Trump administration, Parsi’s criticisms—and his push for diplomacy with the Iranian government—suggest more than a dissenting opinion. The administration has used immigration law against critics of its foreign policy, notably with college students who protest against U.S. support for Israel in its massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.

Parsi has for years been accused by some Iranian Americans of promoting the Iranian government’s interests, with many Republicans echoing those criticisms. Far-right influencer Laura Loomer, who has a lot of influence in the White House, called Parsi “a mouthpiece for the Iranian regime” who pushes “pro-Iranian regime talking points,” in an April X post. In May, Loomer wrote that Parsi’s “days in our country are numbered.”

Loomer may have been involved in getting two Iranian women detained earlier this year after she claimed they were related to deceased Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others may still be taking her advice.

The State Department under Trump has detained other critics, as well, including doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who wrote an op-ed column about Gaza, and Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate whom the administration is still trying to deport over his role in protests on campus against the war in Gaza.

The Quincy Institute is preparing to “cover the legal costs to prepare for—and if necessary—fight a deportation attack on Trita,” according to a memo obtained by The Free Press. If the administration pursues deportation against him, it would be a chilling attempt to disregard the First Amendment and send the message that anyone less than a full citizen of the U.S. does not have the right to free speech.

On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump called in to his allies at Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” and previewed his plans for the purported next phase of war against Iran, detailing ideas that many have described as war crimes. “My preference has always been take Kharg Island,” Trump said, referencing the Iranian island that is used for oil storage. “I don’t know that America has the…

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I can’t really say why I decided to cook, or otherwise procure, a dish representing every nation at the World Cup, except that I thought it might be kind of fun, and it seemed like the least I could do. If you have a family, or a roommate, or even a cat, and are planning to spend a significant percentage of your summer on the couch, watching the most important of the least important things, you ought to find some way to pull your weight around the house—or at least, to say in advance that you’re sorry. 

It was a good idea, though. And a doable one: I live in New York, a city where I can obtain just about any ingredient I could possibly need for any kind of cuisine (along with, for some reason, the worst onions you’ve ever imagined). And where, failing that, I can simply ride a few subway stops and procure a critically acclaimed meal representing first-time qualifiers Uzbekistan. Given enough time, I could have knocked this quest off slowly and gracefully.

So that was my first mistake. I neglected to plan for the fact that this men’s World Cup has—for the purposes of squeezing more money out of more people over more games—16 more countries than the last one did. That might have prompted a reconsideration of my mission, but it’s hard to walk away once you’ve announced your plan. People will just keep asking about it, and it becomes increasingly painful to force a smile and say “nope, still working on Curacao.” The burden of expectations, the sense of disappointment…You start to understand, in some small way, what it feels like to play for England.

Everyone has stewed chicken.

But I did it, starting in early March and finishing with one week to spare before Mexico kicks off against South Africa. Even with breaks for work trips, family visits, and emergency mac and cheese—or maybe because so much else kept getting in the way—the three-month odyssey was ultimately more of a burden than a heroic gesture. There were some bangers along the way: the aforementioned Uzbek; a Cape Verdean dish by way of Rhode Island; a West African meal my 3-year-old, somewhat problematically, began referring to as “dad’s chicken.” Spend enough time poking around for recipes—and even more time looking for ones that are vegetable-forward, or are not yet another national version of stewed chicken—and you start to learn a thing or two about tradition, migration, and common bonds. Maybe that was the point. 

So here’s how I made it to 48, by eating, more or less in order, through the 12 groups of four teams who will meet in the tournament’s opening rounds. I want to be clear: I was not attempting to create everyone’s national dish. I did not approach this with academic rigor. I took shortcuts. I made liberal substitutions. I used random blogs and Reddit and, in one instance, TikTok. I am not trying to start anything or offend anyone; I was just a soccer fan trying to make dinner.

Group A

I started inauspiciously with a Cape Malay curry from South Africa. The dish was brought to the area by Malaysians who were enslaved by the Dutch East India Company. My recipe came from The Today Show and called for 3 tablespoons of turmeric, which I should have immediately clocked as an editing error but—in the spirit of cultural exploration—dutifully followed anyway and paid a price. For South Korea I made kalbijim, from Eric Kim’s excellent Korean American: Food That Tastes Like Home, and won back a little credibility in my household; you, or at least I, simply cannot mess up braised short ribs and beef-fat croutons. Mexico was ably represented by a large order from Tacos El Bronco, and Czechia by a 1997 red-cabbage-and-apple salad recipe from the New York Times.

Group B

I split a big thing of fondue for Switzerland and wondered why I don’t eat fondue more often. Then I thought about what I had just done. The national dish of Qatar, and several other nearby states, is machboos—meat (in my case chicken) cooked with rice seasoned by an eponymous spice blend. I pulled it from an official government-sponsored cultural program’s website and it was pretty good. But what you come to realize in an eating project like this is that everyone has a national stewed chicken dish and if you aren’t being careful you could make nothing but stewed chicken for a month. For Canada, I made a New York Times recipe for coconut kale from a restaurant in Vancouver, and paired it with some maple-glazed salmon. Bosnia and Herzegovina knocked out Italy in the playoffs with a penalty from a guy who was born in Appleton, Wisconsin. I’m just sharing that so you know. I picked up three huge slices of meat, cheese, and spinach burek from a shop in south Brooklyn, and it kicked ass.

Group C

We used to have a children’s book by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt in which one of the characters refers to herself as “a tagine machine.” It’s stuck with me, long after all the pages were torn out—so I made a chicken tagine for 2022 semi-finalists Morocco and a green-pepper salad with preserved lemon to go with. It was probably too much preserved lemon for one meal, but both were nice on their own. Haiti, back for the first time since 1974, is one of the great stories of this World Cup, and the poul ak nwa I made (another stew-adjacent chicken dish, with cashews) was a worthy entry, for the first several days I ate it. Scotland showed out with rumbledethumps, which, even if you’ve never heard of it before, I feel like you intuitively know is a dish of cabbage, potatoes, and cheese. For Brazil, I baked pão de queijo, little balls of cheesy tapioca bread. They make incredible sliders.

Group D

One of the few major upsides of the Global War on Terror is that New York has a lot of people from Australia, which enabled me to get really tremendous sausage rolls from the NoMad outpost of Bourke Street Bakery in April. On balance, you would not say it was all worth it, but I would eat these every day. I should have just made chipa for Paraguay, but that felt too similar to the pão de queijo I’d just made, so I made chipa guazu instead—a sort of cheese-and-corn souffle (at least that’s how it turned out) that I take full responsibility for. At this point, a month into the project, I was starting to hear rumblings from the loved-ones I was feeding that more vegetables would be in order. Googling “Turkey” and “vegetable dish,” I found karnabahar mucveri, a baked cauliflower recipe from Ozlem Warren. The United States is also in this group; I got Tacos El Bronco again. 

Group E

I had never had döner kebab before, but our entry for Germany immediately slotted itself into the family sandwich rotation. I’ll admit to not having put too much thought into the choice—we have a local döner kebab shop, it has Berlin in its name, that’s good enough for me—but the kebab has become a symbol among members of JD Vance’s beloved German far-white for the kinds of people they don’t like. One of my rules for normal living is to live your life without being triggered by a sandwich. Less controversially, I made keshi yena—ground meat baked in gouda—for World Cup debutantes Curaçao, using a recipe from Oprah.com. It’s a little bit of Holland, a little bit Caribbean, but where it really shined for me was as leftovers, where you could easily repurpose the filling for chopped cheese. For Ecuador, who I rate as dark horses this year, I made llapingachos—potato patties with a bit of achiote—and a nice peanut sauce. But the real winner here might have been Côte d’Ivoire and its maafe, a stew with chicken and ground nuts that’s popular across West Africa. It was a standout in the highly competitive braised poultry category; naturally, I left it on the stovetop overnight and had to toss the rest.

Group F

Many of the Netherlands’ greatest players have roots in Suriname, which in turn has deep ties to Java, so I made goedangan, a cabbage salad with coconut dressing. Japan’s oyakodon, another saucy chicken dish, did a job when it needed to. My wife chipped in (or intervened) to make shakshuka for Tunisia; whenever I have shakshuka, I think: “I should have shakshuka more often.” And then there was Sweden. As a gift this year, I got a copy of The Nordic Cookbook, an absolute doorstop of a treatise by Magnus Nilsson that includes recipes for pilot whale and fermented Greenland shark (definitely read the instructions closely for that one). I opted for the book’s more straightforward weeknight dish of nikkaluokta soppa, a.k.a. cabbage and ground beef soup. Perfect January fare, but I made it in May.

Group G

They do eat Brussels sprouts in Brussels, it turns out. In search of roughage, I opted for “Flemish-style” sprouts, sauteed in lots of butter. I don’t like these as much as I like Belgium’s Tintin jerseys, but they’ll do right by you. For Egypt, I made dukkah, a nuts-and-spices mixture with various interpretations. Mine came from Claudia Roden’s The New Book of Middle Eastern Food: The Classic Cookbook, Expanded and Updated, with New Recipes and Contemporary Variations on Old Themes—an essential volume for Roden heads. I was unduly confident about making Samin Nosrat’s kuku sabzi for Iran because the process is similar to that of tortilla española. But there’s always a moment of hesitation, when you’re preparing to flip the puck, when you can envision the whole thing going horribly wrong, eggs and herbs ending up everywhere, a deep clean-up job, tears, apologies, a hasty search for delivery options. It turned out quite nicely, though. We spent a long time talking about making pavlova, because there was a recipe for it in the Bluey cookbook, and further research confirmed that it’s also eaten in New Zealand, but by this point, I was starting to grow wary of ambitious projects, and picked up fish and chips.

Group H

Uruguay has one food everyone talks about and it’s a sandwich called a chivito. I used to get it at a gas station in DC, but you can just make them. And then keep making them, for several days, because assembling the ingredients for even one means you end up with a ton of sliced steak, ham, bacon, and mozzarella. Most of what I know about Cape Verde is that there are lots of Cape Verdeans in southern New England, and lo if you search for the national dish—a hearty stew called cachupa—one of the first recipes comes from the University of Rhode Island. About 10,000 fans showed up to watch the national team play in Hartford in June and I think I made enough for all of them. Saudi Arabia was ably represented by chicken shawarma. For Spain, I made a tortilla española. (See above.) Versatile, filling, does what it says on the tin. 

Group I

If I had to put money on anyone to win this year—and I don’t, and won’t—I guess it would be France. And if I could only have one sandwich for the rest of my life…I’m not sure it would be a jambon-beurre, but I’d be hard-pressed to improve on it. Hot dogs in Norway are often wrapped in a potato flatbread called lefse, but I put them in flour tortillas and topped mine with potato salad, fried onions, and—in lieu of lingonberries—a black cherry jam. Senegal came through with coconut collard greens and butternut squash from Pierre Thiam’s Simply West African cookbook. FIFA may have expanded the tournament to make money, but Iraq’s participation, for the first time since 1986, does feel like one small point in favor of a 48-team tournament. I picked up some lahm bi ajeen—spiced meat and yogurt served on a doughy disc. It came in a pizza box. It’s always nice when something that isn’t pizza comes in a pizza box.

Group J

I made choripan for defending world champions Argentina. It’s a portmanteau of chorizo and pan. I don’t want to insult anyone by saying it “reminds me of what you get outside of Fenway,” because it’s very different—chimichurri, salsa criolla, etc.—but still: grilled sausage with peppers and onion in any variety will transport you to the sporting cathedral of your homeland. It just feels right. We needed vegetables again, so for Jordan, making its World Cup debut, I got fattoush from a Palestinian spot in my neighborhood, and for Algeria I made a nice cucumber salad with green bell peppers and mint. Austria was one of the stars of this gustatory competition, for the simple reason that we went to a restaurant called Werkstatt (fun to say) and got some schnitzel (also fun to say!) and rösti and a giant pretzel with an anchovy-infused cheese sauce. Very nice.

Group K

If the World Cup hadn’t expanded to 48 teams, I’d already have been done. But it did expand, and I was running out of time. So by this point in late May, I was cooking a lot less and getting a lot more takeout. Arguably this entire project was just a ploy to get food for Uzbekistan from Laghman Express, a Central Asian restaurant in south Brooklyn that also has a location in Atlanta. I have already made plans to get it again on Christmas. I picked up egg tarts for Portugal from a place in Brooklyn’s Chinatown, and they tasted like a sweet, eggy cloud. For Colombia I sourced an order of bandeja paisa—a platter with steak, chicharron, rice, and egg—and some papas criollas. The last time Democratic Republic of Congo was in the World Cup it was still called Zaire. I made poulet mayo, which is chicken cooked with mayonnaise, spices, peppers, and onions. It hit the spot.

Group L

I’ve always wanted to open a restaurant that only serves canapés, sort of like a Golden Corral for things you eat at weddings. We would not serve the exact mini empanadas I made for Panama, which were pulled from one of the first recipes that showed up when I searched “Panama + empanadas,” and looked vaguely like what a child might come back with if you asked them to draw the moon. But some other version might work. For Croatia we got burek again from the same place. Burek is shaping up to be a breakout star of this year’s World Cup; don’t mess with a good thing. For England, I got a bag of meat pies and pasties from Myers of Keswick in Greenwich Village. Is it coming home? Talk to me in July. But I’m definitely getting these again. For Ghana, I made kelewele—a dish of roasted plantains with an absolutely tremendous citrus, miso, and peanut butter marinade, topped with fried shallots for good measure. It was the last thing I made, with one day to spare before a family road trip that would take us out of pocket and away from our kitchen until the opening match. It might also have been the best.

The White House is corroding from the inside.

The president is reportedly “pissed” and “increasingly frustrated with everyone” surrounding him—though the drama seems to be a mess of his own creation.

The pressing issue started last week, when Donald Trump suddenly appointed Bill Pulte—a real estate developer serving as the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency—to run U.S. national intelligence in place of the outbound Tulsi Gabbard.

Democrats and some Republicans on the Hill immediately opposed Pulte’s appointment and were quick to point out that the PulteGroup heir would come to the job with zero national security experience, a direct violation of the law, which specifically requires a director of national intelligence to have “extensive” national security experience.

Lawmakers have accused Trump of nominating Pulte for his own personal benefit: “The apparent motivation for his elevation is the demonstrated willingness of Bill Pulte to search government databases for alleged dirt on President Trump’s chosen political enemies,” House Democratic leadership wrote in a statement Thursday.

At risk thanks to Pulte’s nomination is the imminent expiration of FISA Section 702, a statute that allows federal agencies such as the NSA and the CIA to surveil people without warrants. That statute is slated to expire Friday, but Democratic leadership has indicated it won’t vote to renew it “without meaningful reforms,” emphasizing Pulte’s recent promotion in its demands.

Senate Republicans expected Trump to find an off-ramp on the matter—House Speaker Mike Johnson even visited the White House Tuesday to discuss it. But they were wrong.

Trump was irate with “everyone, from his own team to the Senate,” a MAGA-world operative close to the White House told Politico Thursday, highlighting Senate Republicans’ opposition to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom, his $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, and the general disregard for Trump’s desire to fire Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough after she identified procedural problems in the SAVE Act.

“He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” the operative added. “He does not like being put in a box. When you put him in a box, then Trump’s going to blow the box up.”

The message was received loud and clear. One senior GOP staffer described Trump’s recent moves to Politico as “a middle finger to Congress.”

Trump is also furious that his preferred candidate for Iowa governor, Representative Randy Feenstra, lost his primary last week. “He’s really angry about this Iowa endorsement—like really, really angry,” a White House ally told Politico. “He’s really angry that his consultants and people pushed him to do that.”

In the wake of new reports detailing behind-the-scenes efforts by the White House to public outrage over the Epstein files, former MAGA acolyte Marjorie Taylor Greene was asked by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins for her reaction. According to excerpts from New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s forthcoming book, Vice President JD Vance suggested that right-wing broadcaster Tucker…

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60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega was fired while she was in the midst of a feature on Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories—perhaps the most prominent institutional voice against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

“Cecilia Vega and her team were indeed working on a report for CBS examining the impact of the U.S. sanctions on my work and personal life, including developments in the U.S. courts,” Albanese wrote on X Thursday morning, confirming reporting from Zeteo. “I am sorry they were punished.”

Vega was fired by CBS head Bari Weiss at the end of May, along with Sharyn Alfonsi—who lambasted Weiss’s decision to push back her report on the notoriously inhumane CECOT megaprison in El Salvador—executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.

The timing of Vega’s firing is extremely questionable given that Weiss and CBS owner David Ellison are staunch Zionists aligned with the Trump administration. Albanese has been sanctioned by the United States, has had multiple European countries call for her resignation, and has faced a wave of personal attacks online for her Palestinian advocacy.

On Thursday, President Donald Trump said that the US would strike Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT,” in a bid to “assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets.”

Trump made the statement in a Truth Social post, comparing the effort to the US military kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January and taking over the country’s multi-billion-dollar oil industry. 

The possible strikes come on the same day as the first two World Cup matches, the global soccer tournament organized by FIFA, a corrupt governing body, whose president awarded Trump the FIFA Peace Prize for his “unwavering commitment to advancing peace and unity.” Among the achievements FIFA cited: playing “a pivotal role” in establishing a ceasefire and promoting peace between Israel and Palestine.”

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As I wrote in May, Trump has used his supposed success in Venezuela as fuel for subsequent takeovers attempts of Iran and Cuba. If he sees his legacy on the line—with both his and Israel’s war in Iran and the World Cup—the possible consequences look dire.

According to data from Iran’s government ministries, nearly 3,500 people have been killed since February 28, and, per a Wednesday report from the New York Times, the US military may have already hit two water facilities serving thousands of people in Iran (which many international law experts label as a war crime).

President Donald Trump’s attempt to explain his sudden “love” for high inflation just made things so much worse.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office Wednesday, Trump brushed off a bleak inflation report finding that America’s annual inflation rate had reached its highest levels in three years.

“The numbers were great. You know what I really love? I love the inflation,” Trump said.

Speaking on the phone with the New York Post later that day, Trump claimed he’d been taken out of context. “I love the inflation numbers because of what I’m talking about,” he said.

“The numbers are going to be phenomenal because what’s showing is that despite the fact that we’re in a war, the numbers are much lower than anticipated, and when we’re out of that war, the numbers will be at lower numbers than they were even before it started,” Trump claimed.

Inflation is not any lower than anticipated. Last month, a group of economists surveyed by Bloomberg estimated the consumer price index would rise to 3.9 percent. The Organization for Economic Cooperation raised its prediction up from 3 to 4.2 percent. Per Wednesday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report, the current inflation rate is 4.2 percent.

Still, Trump attempted to repackage the fastest-growing inflation in three years as better than it could’ve been and a sign of good things to come. That’s not good enough for Americans who are struggling to pay for gas, rent, and groceries because of a reckless war with no end in sight.

Trump also dismissed Democrats who’d criticized his gushing over high inflation.

“They’re so bad,” Trump said. “I was talking about inflation numbers that will be so good as soon as the war ends. The numbers will come way down, that’s what I’m talking about.

“I’m always taken out of context,” the president continued. “My inflation numbers will be very low as soon as the war—they’re already very low, but they’ll be very low, because you know the energy brings them up a little bit, because we have to stop Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”

Of course, that doesn’t even begin to qualify as being taken out of context. It was Trump who elided the actual context of the question: the current inflation rate. Not future numbers, or predictions, but the painful reality that Americans are literally paying the price for Trump’s wildly unpopular war. Was he concerned? No, he was delighted.

If anything, the president’s baffling remarks have handed Democrats a winning message for the midterm elections: Trump loves inflation, and thinks that anyone whose struggle to make ends meet should thank him that things aren’t worse.

He never expected to become famous and certainly never admitted to wanting to be famous. He’d studied men like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, who had sought fame and described its strange, arbitrary workings. But by the time Matt Damon name-checked Gordon S. Wood on “the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization” in Good Will Hunting, Wood had long since become a lightning rod for his fellow historians and the much greater number of others who drafted the American Revolution into the culture wars.

The Brown University professor chuckled about that scene in the film, a story of a working-class Bostonian who mocks a Harvard graduate student as likely to take Wood’s interpretations as gospel only to drop them the very next year. After all, as a Harvard Ph.D. from working-class Concord, Massachusetts, Gordon Wood had been both of these types and more, while keeping a professorial distance from all. No one could say whether, when he repeated the story of how former House Speaker Newt Gingrich handed out copies of his Radicalism of the American Revolution to new members of the Republican caucus, he had been bragging, trolling, or just reading the room.

The prolific historian of early America burst onto the scene 60 years ago with an essay in the field’s flagship journal titled “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution.” Two schools of interpretation had been battling for some time: “neo-whigs,” who saw the patriots as motivated by “constitutional principles,” versus “progressives,” who saw them as motivated by profound socioeconomic change, for all their rhetoric about liberties. Wood, who had been reading up on social theory, brilliantly arbitrated that debate, maintaining that declining opportunities inspired men to fear what changing imperial politics could do to them and their status as provincial Britons. The Revolution had been conservative in its impulses, even if it had unanticipated radical results. Historians needed a “behaviorist” approach that saw revolutionary rhetoric as “psychological” reality.

Wood discovered a remarkable knack for explaining how ideas could be new and old, innovative and conservative, at the same time.

In his own way, Wood opened up the understanding of the Revolution to feelings as well as thoughts, to ideology as well as theory. Meanwhile, he was revising his Harvard doctoral thesis, which became The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. Published in 1969, this pointillist, essayistic yet comprehensive study tracked how understandings of political structure, including the very idea of constitutions, changed under the pressure of revolutionary war and the formation of state governments. An American revision of classical and seventeenth-century English republicanism informed the fledgling republics. In 1787, experience moderated the democratic spirit of ’76. Wood discovered a remarkable knack for explaining how ideas could be new and old, innovative and conservative, at the same time—and how creative political thinking advanced best under the sometimes self-deceiving cover of restoration.

Out of irrationality could come a higher rationality, though not without ironic results. For example, John Adams’s tough-minded insistence that constitutional structures had to reflect the existence of social classes, including aristocrats and plebes, in order to balance them, made him “irrelevant” when enough Americans agreed to disagree, or at least to stop talking about, whether such classes did or should exist.

Wood exaggerated Adams’s unpopularity, but in doing so drove home the sobering point that American republicanism, tending toward Herrenvolk democracy, would have a lot of trouble dealing with the relationship between economic inequality and political power. The course of the 1780s led toward a Madisonian “science of politics” that saved the nation from revolutionary excess yet sought to bury rather than reflect or address economic conflict in its schemes of federalism and representation, creating an American political tradition that couldn’t deal honestly with class or money.

With this flourish, the 35-year old assistant professor performed an acclaimed scholarly triple axel, fashioning a learned interpretation of American origins that seemed to have something for everyone, which was no easier in 1969 than today. At great length and sophistication, he’d offered something to those inclined to celebrate the Constitution, something to those who criticized it, and much to those looking for some way between. The republic, simply put, was moderate yet innovative, advanced and yet caught up in self-deception. Some of the founders were brilliant, yes, but maybe only slightly more so than Gordon S. Wood, who figured out what they knew, what they did, and what they had barely perceived.

Some of the founders were brilliant, yes, but maybe only slightly more so than Gordon S. Wood, who figured out what they knew, what they did, and what they had barely perceived.

Wood caught and rode a wave of sophistication about the workings of ideology. In his hands, disembodied “thought” became culture and politics and made history. One could see it happening in obscure and popular pamphlets, in the plays and newspapers, and in the letters of politicians of the late eighteenth century. Tracing ideological struggle was heady stuff, and the late 1960s and 1970s came to represent something of a golden age for American historians, especially intellectual historians who could claim to explain the motives and worldviews informing critical events. Wood continued to endear himself to scholars with essays that plumbed how understandings of conspiracy and “interests” and “disinterestedness” shaped the debate over the ratification of the Constitution. These turned out to be brilliant middle chapters of his 1991 Pulitzer-winning triptych, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, a work that expanded his interpretation of the emergent American ethos chronologically while keeping republicanism and its tribulations at the center.

“Monarchy” characterized a late colonial era that believed in hierarchy. Social changes undermined those hierarchies in a radically reformative cultural process—“republicanism”— that informed the break from England. Meanwhile, the rise of capitalism further undermined social structures that had never really take strong hold in colonies with more available land and less inherited wealth. Work came to be valued more than lineage; representation in formal, legislative politics mattered more with kings and their appointed governors thrown out. All this dwarfed putative differences between north and south, east and west. The result: The early republic was a society in which democracy and capitalism arose and reinforced each other, much to the disappointment of more rigorously republican politicians who had seen themselves as disinterested men of virtue.

To many readers, Wood had seemingly accounted, in beautiful, measured prose, for both what was radical about the Revolution and why many revolutionaries proceeded to fight for more—or less—of it. One could read Wood as a critic of emergent democracy or even, on the other hand, of capitalism.

Yet as Alfred F. Young, a careful critic, wrote at the time, Wood had not so much distilled the radicalism of the Revolution as magnified it to encompass all of early American history. That sheer interpretative ambition turned out to be an Achilles’ heel. War and violence dissolved in Wood’s egalitarian upsurge. So did settler colonialism and slavery. In the introduction, Wood insisted that it didn’t matter whether political revolution caused or just reflected the social or cultural revolution, and that because it didn’t matter, we should simply credit the radicalism of the revolution for “the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.” This “in fact” made for strange rhetorical alchemy as he continued to stress how exceedingly different late–eighteenth century people were from later Americans.

By the new century, Wood had already begun to complain publicly about a tendency to judge eighteenth-century Americans by what he deemed “presentist” standards. A tense divide over his sometimes enigmatic work and persona ensued, especially among liberals and leftists. Wood’s tendency to lump all Americans together greatly irked a generation of social historians who made regional, class, and urban-rural differences their bread and butter and who worried much less than he did about how to pull American diversity and conflict, not to mention imperial reach, into a common national story. (In a tone-perfect illustration of Wood’s changing reputation among academics, in the 1997 film, Will Hunting first baits the graduate student with the above précis of Wood on radicalism, only to interrupt his predictable response: the regurgitation of a social historian’s comment on how Wood “drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth.”)

Worse, there were very few women, Black people, or Indians in his expansive, transformative, century-long radical revolution. How radical could that be, then? Yet Wood stuck to his guns, even doubling down. It remained “anachronistic” to ask why the patriots didn’t end slavery even as they complained about their political enslavement. Slavery was never questioned until the revolutionaries began to question it, he argued. Those folks simply weren’t part of the American conversation then: The founders didn’t think or talk about them, didn’t consider them as a subject of politics. This explanation held less water when his own definition of revolutionary politics had expanded to include almost everything else besides race and sex.

Wood laid a foundation for a distinctive, genteel kind of “founders” history: one that keeps a quiet distance from uncritical flag-waving by emphasizing at every turn how different the eighteenth century was, still while insisting that everything good about the United States emanated from the founding, even if ironically and unintentionally. Too aware to ignore the threat that alternative histories posed to his mountain of scholarship, he slammed those that bid to take down founder worship, to add other groups to the pantheon of founders, or to dwell on the inegalitarian aspects of what the founders created. He issued a few occasional mild dissents against ahistorical constitutional originalism, but punched left a lot harder and more often than he punched right.

In books like Empire of Liberty, his 2009 entry in the Oxford History of the United States series, and his career-summing Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution (2021), Wood foregrounded the most optimistic and forward-looking revolutionaries, like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, whose understanding of the Revolution as a transformative event in world history seemed to prove his case. His admiration for “the revolutionary generation”—which had once been a minor, more implicit theme in his scholarship, mitigated by the vast distance he discerned between their world and ours—swelled when he confronted those who identified strongly against a past construed as backwards and racist. Republishing the many review essays he wrote for venues like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, he added afterwords that cast further aspersions on historians who forwarded their “preoccupation” with race, class, and gender, or failed to preserve the requisite balance and appreciation for the Revolution, where Americans go “to refresh and reaffirm our nationhood.”

Like a number of our best historians—and politicians—he insisted we hang on, for dear national life, to the rhetoric.

Yet after the brouhaha over The 1619 Project, in which he participated as an often-quoted critic, Wood good-naturedly admitted just how much that controversy demonstrated what had been missing from the histories his generation had written.

Americans remain stuck with a revolution we rightly perceive as both radical and conservative. For all his insistence on our revolution’s beneficence and singularity, Gordon Wood helped us see that revolutions are as confusing and contradictory as they are compelling in retrospect and prospect. Their true measure is the never-ending debate over how and whether they remade reality—or just rhetoric. Like a number of our best historians—and politicians—he insisted we hang on, for dear national life, to the rhetoric. “To be an American is not to be someone but to believe in something. And of that something most important is the belief that all men are created equal,” he wrote in a 2019 essay. As it was natural for him to suspect the Revolution’s critics, it’s somewhat tragic that his appreciation of revolutionary minds grappling with possibility could be appropriated for causes he did not fully endorse. No doubt, he appreciated the irony.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s 26-year-old son-in-law, Michael Alfonso, wants to get into politics just like his dear old father-in-law did. No, not by merit and hard work, silly: by parlaying a vaguely influencerish hard-right background into elected office. And Duffy is going all out to help make that happen. Alfonso has never held a political office of any sort…

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President Trump’s Freedom 250 birthday extravaganza is looking so bleak that entire states are pulling out.

NOTUS has reported that Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, and North Carolina—the last of which Trump won in 2024—have all declined to send a representative to the president’s 16-day fair on the National Mall. Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington remain undecided even as the fair begins just two weeks from now.

Each state is supposed to have a 600-square-foot themed booth with a representative or official sent by state leadership. With these states declining to send one, the administration has decided to pick their own. Multiple states said they had no knowledge as to who was chosen to represent their homes or why.

Other states noted the hefty price attached to the event. Michele Walker, the comms director of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, told NOTUS her state would have to spend a minimum of $100,000 on travel, hotels, and their themed booth all together.

“We decided early in the process that we do not have the capacity to participate,” Walker said. “Our limited resources are focused on America250 events across North Carolina.”

This news comes just a week after nearly all of the first wave of musical performers—from Young MC to the Commodores—dropped out as well. This lack of enthusiasm only reaffirms that this “Freedom 250” event, unlike the educational America250 commission, is just a birthday party for Trump.

President Trump is threatening a ground invasion of Iran.

On Truth Social Thursday morning, Trump posted that the U.S. military “will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT.

“At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” the post read.

Trump’s threats are an alarming escalation, especially considering he previously claimed the U.S. and Iran are close to a deal to end the war. Publicly announcing plans for such an attack also carries risks, as it puts U.S. troops in harm’s way and gives Iran time to prepare countermeasures. Trump could also be bluffing, thinking that the specter of a ground invasion of Iranian territory will force concessions.

That seems to be in line with what he told Fox & Friends Thursday morning. Trump was asked about the post, and complained about media coverage of Iran, claiming the country has been decimated but that news outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal say that it’s doing well.

“They’re dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly,” Trump said. “We dropped $250 million of bombs on them last night, the whole thing is crazy. And they’re really in submission, they just don’t know it yet.”

Trump on Fox & Friends: "They're dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly. We dropped $250 million of bombs on them last night. They're really in submission. They just don't know it yet." pic.twitter.com/XKW5CGc1CU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2026

Trump’s daily accounts of the war with Iran are increasingly incoherent, and it’s tough to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Anything could happen Thursday night, and in the meantime, the world will be watching with uncertainty as a man with visible cognitive decline has his finger on the trigger.

Nine years after the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down segregation, Black students Vivian Malone and James A. Hood, flanked by federalized Alabama National Guard troops, confronted racist Gov. George Wallace and entered the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and registered for classes. Wallace, who ran an openly racist campaign that included…

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President Donald Trump’s bizarre claim to have secretly moved more than 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz just got shut down by the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Trump announced Wednesday that he’d directed the military to conduct a “secret mission” to support the flow of energy through the essential trade passageway—as he struggled to justify the U.S. economy reaching its highest annual inflation rate in three years.

Speaking on CNN that night, Connecticut Representative Jim Himes, who serves as ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, dismissed the president’s claim.

“A lot of that is just flat-out untrue,” Himes said.

CNN: What do you know about what he's saying that Iran didn't until right now didn’t know that we're taking millions of barrels of oil. And this 100 million barrels that Trump says he's actually helped get through the strait.

Himes: A lot of that is just flat out untrue. Let's… pic.twitter.com/IamnOmqSfB

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 10, 2026

“And remember the record here, right. This war was going to be over in a couple of days. For the last three months the Iranians have been two or three days, or maybe a week or two weeks away from striking a deal,” Himes said. “So, let’s just agree that the president has precisely zero credibility on anything that he says about the Iran war.

“But look, you don’t need to be an intelligence expert to understand that in the Strait of Hormuz, you’re not moving anything in secret. With a good pair of binoculars on either coast you can see what’s happening.”

Himes isn’t the only one calling B.S. on the president’s claims: Energy Secretary Chris Wright appeared not to have a clue what Trump was talking about, either.

When asked about the 100 million barrels of oil during a House committee hearing Wednesday, Wright appeared confused and said he was “unaware” of the operation.

“I do not think the president is lying, I think the president is talking casually about our efforts to stop the flow of Iranian oil,” Wright claimed, though Trump was clearly talking about oil that had made it out of the strait, not oil that had been blocked.

Donald Trump’s health has hit a new milestone.

The president’s latest examination at Walter Reed Medical Center on May 26 reportedly involved 22 specialists, reported The Washington Post. That puts Trump at a dozen specialists beyond the previous record held by George W. Bush, who once saw 10 specialists in one go.

The White House has not elaborated on exactly why Trump needed so many doctors. Trump officials told the Post that the unconventionally large medical team allowed for a “complete and preventive evaluation” of the president. White House physician Sean Barbabella commented that the assessment found Trump in “excellent health.”

“The involvement of multiple specialists reflects a comprehensive, multidisciplinary evaluation consistent with best practices for executive-level medical care,” the White House said in a statement.

Nonetheless, the figure has contributed to yet more intrigue about Trump’s health as he nears his 80th birthday.

“It is an extraordinary number,” Jonathan Reiner, a longtime cardiologist for former Vice President Dick Cheney, told the Post. “What specialties do they represent? Why so many?”

Trump is the second-oldest man to ever serve as America’s commander in chief, and his increasingly erratic behavior has sparked global concern in recent weeks about his stability and judgment. The 79-year-old has spent hours at Walter Reed Medical Center on multiple occasions over the last nine months, fallen asleep during more than a dozen critical meetings, seemed lost and disoriented around foreign heads of state, frequently slurred his speech, and appeared with discolored and bruised skin on several occasions.

His behavior has also grown increasingly erratic, as he has thrown cheap and petty insults at members of the press, challenged long-standing U.S. alliances, and even taken jabs at the pope.

The American public is apparently wising up to Trump’s age: A Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll released last month found that 59 percent of Americans do not believe that Trump has the mental acuity to lead the country.

I grew up in a household of women who didn’t talk much about their reproductive health. Period talks were reserved for hushed tones, always behind closed doors. But over the years, stories began to emerge: A relative clocking into work despite her stomach being so swollen with fibroids she appeared pregnant; a childhood friend excelling in school while doctors dismissed her chronic pain and missing periods as “anxiety”; a family member’s miscarriage garnering little sympathy from nurses.

Black women have long been forced to grin and bear reproductive pain until it becomes unbearable—just like the data has been telling us: By age 50, 90 percent of Black people with uteruses in the United States report having fibroids and often have severe symptoms like anemia and intense pain. Black women are not only more likely to have uterine cancer, but twice as likely to die from it than non-Black women. Black women are also three to four times more likely to die in childbirth. It’s a crisis that transcends economic and education boundaries, with celebrities like Beyoncé and Serena Williams experiencing near-fatal pregnancy complications.

I spoke with Dr. Kemi Doll, author of the new book A Terrible Strength: The Hidden Crisis of the Black Womb and Your Survival Guide to Healing, about what Black women can do to educate ourselves about our reproductive health and how we can advocate for ourselves in our gyno offices and beyond. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

One of the main points you bring up is how breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and our ongoing maternal mortality crisis are reproductive issues that make headlines. But with uterine cancer, the disparity in Black women doesn’t receive that same attention from the public. Why is that? 

I have a lot of ideas about this. Part of it is that all of us, the public included, are so used to not talking about “down there.” So we don’t. We eliminate that world in a woman’s life unless she’s pregnant, unless we can tie it to something like bringing life into this world. But then we see this [lack of care] played out on a larger scale, where you have this cancer disparity.

Uterine cancer is the worst cancer disparity that we have that affects women. We’re getting more cases every year. But the level of dialogue and awareness doesn’t match the gravity of the crisis. It’s an example of what I’m talking about: the power of silencing. It’s why I’m so passionate about talking about the womb in the realm beyond giving birth and beyond being pregnant, because we all spend most of our time not pregnant, and we all deal with these conditions every day.  It’s beyond time to stop that silencing and suppression.

I think that it connects right back to how, when a girl has her first period, you teach her how to hide it. That a successful period is one that nobody knows is happening. That goes all the way up to a uterine cancer epidemic and a disparity among Black women that nobody knows is happening. Those things are connected.

Let’s talk about the misogynoir that Black women face: the expectation to be stoic, to be high achievers, and excellent. Can you talk about this and how that stereotype affects Black women and their reproductive health?

One hundred percent. I think we have to understand where we came from with this history. At the beginning of obstetrics and gynecology, physicians were giving insurance policies on enslaved Black women to say: This woman can reproduce. It was a field that was essentially looking at Black women’s bodies only through the lens of how well this body can reproduce.

After Emancipation, when Black bodies are no longer directly profitable, there is no interest in the continued health and well-being of that body. When this is the history of gynecology, these reproductive disparities make sense.

In this system, Black women’s wombs and our reproductive health are not a priority. What that means is that we have decades of research that haven’t focused on the conditions that most strongly affect Black women. It means that when we develop treatments, solutions, clinical protocols, and guidelines, we do not consider how they would impact or how they would work or not on Black women. That misogynoir is so deep, and it’s on so many levels that I understand the strength that Black women have to have. Your pain is not read. Your vulnerability is not legible. We literally can’t see it. So it means that Black women suffer in silence, and we call it endurance. I don’t think you tell the story of gynecology itself if you don’t tell the story of the suffering of the Black womb and this crisis.

“When a girl has her first period, you teach her how to hide it. That a successful period is one that nobody knows is happening. That goes all the way up to a uterine cancer epidemic and a disparity among Black women. “

One of my favorite aspects of the book was how you weaved in the more clinical and informative parts with the very human stories of Black women’s reproductive health. Can you talk about how you decided to add these women’s stories and what it was like interviewing them?

The Black tradition is a storytelling tradition. Ain’t nobody tell a story like Black people can tell a story. So, I’m harnessing all the tools in my toolbox to be able to communicate long-overdue information. I’ve recognized that there’s a huge gap to bridge between what my field of gynecology has done to Black women and the information that I need to impart.

I am a qualitative researcher, so I do interviews as part of my research work on the scientific side. I knew each of these women that I profiled. But what was really profound is that every time I left an interview session, I left with a completely different level of understanding because I asked them so specifically about their womb.

We have access to another layer of understanding each other, and Black women need each other in these times. We need bonds that are unshakable in these times. I felt like I learned about all of these women even more, and the respect and love for them that I had grown.

Let’s talk about that historical expectation of excellence and stoicism, and how it plays a role in the disproportionate rates of uterine cancer in Black women.

One of the reasons why all the women [profiled in the book] are so incredible and high-achieving is that it’s really important to change the face of what suffering looks like. I can tell you from the medicine side, we have a certain image in our head of what a woman in pain looks like. What does a woman suffering look like? And Black women don’t get to look like that. We can’t walk around with that kind of vulnerability.

When you can imagine the other things that are on a Black woman’s plate, and then when you imagine what the threshold is that we have to hit before we are really saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I need help,” we are unfortunately just managing and dealing with that symptom for months and years before being seen.  What that means is that Black women are showing up with stage three and four cancers, when it’s not curable.

What are some early signs of uterine cancer that people should watch out for?

The cardinal sign is postmenopausal bleeding. The formal definition is that if it’s been 12 months since your last cycle and you are of menopausal age, and then you start bleeding again, that is the number one most common sign of uterine cancer. It’s usually not a full period; it’s a few little spots. It doesn’t mean you have cancer, just like a lump in your breast does not mean you have breast cancer, but it does mean you need to go get it checked out. Another thing that we see is that, especially in Black women who are more likely to have irregular cycles, [potential signs of uterine cancer] are heavier cycles as they get older, instead of lighter.

Number three is fatigue. This is where I start talking in the book about whether Black women even know when we have fatigue. Do we even know when we’re tired? Because, again, the way that we can endure. Another sign is pelvic pressure. Bleeding after sex, in your fifties and sixties, is another sign. We also don’t talk about that. We act like older women don’t get it in. Meanwhile, I am like, “Girl, I don’t care what you’re doing, but if you’re bleeding after sex, I need to see you.”

Even before Trump’s second term, little funding went into women’s reproductive health, with less than 8 percent of funding for the National Institutes of Health going toward women’s health research in 2023. This, paired with the cuts to reproductive health research on top of the DEI initiatives by our current administration, seems ominous.

It does concern me because we’re not just missing out on these years of research right now. We’re missing out on a compound of research discoveries. A study that was canceled today would have had some output in two years, four years, and five years, and then that would have led to more discoveries. All of those things down the line are now delayed by potentially decades. It’s really sad. On the other hand, there are those of us in this field who are not going anywhere. I’m still running my research lab. We’re still figuring out funding. We’re still getting creative. Our devotion is to Black women and the Black womb, and we are going to continue to use science to improve things, period.

Can you talk about the historical background and current medical racism that has led to this generational distrust of the medical system among Black women specifically?

How much time do you have? I tell a lot more stories to educate people about just how much mistreatment there had been in gynecology specific to Black women’s bodies, and this idea that Black women were more appropriate to experiment on than white women, and all these things, so I do think it’s important to educate. But I don’t think as a Black woman you need to know that history to know that when you walk into a doctor’s office, especially when it’s about the womb, that you are on guard. You are on guard for being dismissed, being neglected, because it is such a vulnerable position to be in when you are seeking care in that way, right? These are the intimate parts of ourselves that we often don’t talk to other people about. We have to tell stories that might be difficult, in all of these ways. 

It’s so vulnerable, and yet you’re entering into a system that would happily just dismiss you, that you have probably been dismissed by, or you know somebody who has. Medical racism is very much alive. It’s with a great deal of responsibility and gravity that I say, Black women, you need to go to the gynecologist. I will tell you that as a gynecologic oncologist, as a cancer physician, I want you to live.

Held indefinitely, immigrants imprisoned in Eswatini lack medical attention, food and clothing, according to complaint. By Kate Morrissey for Capital & Main A military plane carrying five U.S. immigrants took off from Djibouti in July 2025. Its destination was Eswatini, a small country nestled on the border between South Africa and Mozambique. Ruled by a king…

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