Political News

A Chinese hacking operation breached multiple sensitive U.S. government agencies, the Justice Department announced Wednesday.

The DOJ, Federal Reserve, Senate, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, NASA, and National Institutes ⁠of Health were among the targets of the operation. The cyber-espionage campaign also targeted defense contractors, hospitals, power companies, and telecommunications providers.

The China-based Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company was responsible for the hacks, according to the DOJ, which said its clients include China’s military, civilian intelligence agency, and its Ministry of State Security. According to an affidavit, the hacks have been taking place since at least 2018. Domains used by two hacking platforms, QScan and QTRouter, were seized by U.S. authorities this time around.

President Trump has not commented on the DOJ’s announcement, even though he has been posting on his Truth Social account all day. Chinese hackers have long targeted U.S. federal agencies and even went after now-Attorney General Todd Blanche in the run up to the 2024 presidential election.

Trump attacked China in a speech to the American people last month, claiming that they interfered in the 2020 election, but later backtracked and downplayed his own accusations. This latest news appears to be a more serious attack on the U.S. government and American interests. Will Trump give it the appropriate level of concern?

While the radical right-wing Supreme Court’s decision to side with the Trump administration’s plot to suppress mail-in voting leaves open the possibility of further legal challenges, Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News he will do whatever —er, “the American people” want. “This is what President Trump – -,” Blanche began before correcting himself. “This is what the American people…

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GOP Senate nominee Darline Graham accidentally shared a horrifying anecdotal indictment of the U.S. health care system while attacking “government-run health care,” describing how her parents were forced to work while sick until they died and left her orphaned at 12, along with her recently deceased older brother Lindsey.

“Gun control, government-run health care, abortion until the moment of birth—bad idea after bad idea. Annie Andrews backs them all,” Graham said in a primary victory speech Tuesday attacking her Democratic opponent. “I have a different background and vision for our state.... My parents worked long, hard hours just to make ends meet. We didn’t take vacations. If they were sick, they had to get up and go to work because if the doors weren’t open, we weren’t making money. My mother passed away when I was 11 and my father just over a year later.”

Darline Graham: Government run health care…. bad idea after bad idea. Annie Andrews backs it all. I have a different background. My parents worked long, hard hours. If that were sick, they had to get up and go to work. My mother passed away when I was 11 and my father just over… pic.twitter.com/fvFCrmudhi

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 26, 2026

Graham was immediately lambasted for her vivid depiction of exactly why universal health care is such a key issue for so many people. So many Americans—like Graham’s parents—can’t afford health care, can’t afford a day off, and can’t afford life-saving care when they inevitably get sick, among other issues.

Andrews, a pediatrician, responded.

“Mrs. Graham Nordone says her family suffered and died without health care and apparently thinks yours should too,” she wrote Wednesday morning on X. “Call me crazy, but as a doctor, I believe there are few responsibilities more fundamental to government than keeping its citizens healthy and safe. No family should have to suffer simply because generations before them did.”

This eye-opening confession comes less than a week after Graham made another major flub, admitting she knew virtually nothing about the conflict between China and Taiwan, or national security in general. Nonetheless, she won a close primary contest against Ralph Norman with President Trump’s backing. She’ll face off against Andrews in November, an election that polls already indicate will be close.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the preeminent leader of the nation’s anti-vax movement, is suddenly blaming the Covid-19 lockdowns for the current surge in measles-related deaths.

Two unvaccinated people died from measles in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, this month, spurring calls for Kennedy’s resignation. So far this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed 2,777 measles cases, far exceeding the tally for 2025 by hundreds of cases.

Yet despite having made a career out of pushing anti-vax falsehoods, Kennedy dodged any responsibility for the recent uptick, telling reporters at a conference on school nutrition Wednesday that the blame should be directed at the regional lockdowns that took place during Donald Trump’s first term in 2020. Kennedy suggested that lapses in vaccination records six years ago had deleterious effects on America’s current measles immunization rates.

“This is a worldwide epidemic, and it’s happening because of the lockdowns, because many kids did not get vaccinated during the lockdowns,” Kennedy said.

Sec. Kennedy on measles deaths in Pennsylvania: “We're doing a better job than any country in the world at controlling the measles outbreak. This is a worldwide epidemic, and it's happening because of the lockdowns, because many kids did not get vaccinated during the lockdowns.” pic.twitter.com/mU5Tk1Ta2K

— BulwarkClips (@BulwarkClips) August 26, 2026

Yet publicly available data published by the agencies Kennedy oversees proves him wrong. While it’s difficult to know exactly what percentage of the American population is actively inoculated against measles, the vaccination rates of children—who are most likely to contract the illness—are recorded by federal agencies.

According to CDC data, vaccination coverage for U.S. kindergartners fell by nearly three percentage points—from 95.2 percent to 92.4 percent—between the 2019–2020 school year and the 2025–2026 school year. The dip is more significant than it seems at face value: The lowered figures place the age groups below the threshold for herd immunity (95 percent), which would protect even unvaccinated members of a community.

Measles does not have a cure. The disease can cause a blotchy rash, pink eye, a high fever, white spots inside the mouth, full body aches, pneumonia, and severe dehydration. It can result in hospitalization or even death.

Fortunately, however, it is highly preventable thanks to a vaccine that was developed by a couple of American scientists in 1963. Less than a decade later in 1971, researchers created yet another vaccine capable of preventing measles as well as two other contagious illnesses—mumps and rubella—due to miraculous developments in modern medicine. The joint shot was named the MMR vaccine, an acronym for “measles, mumps, and rubella.” Kennedy has railed against the three-in-one shot, baselessly claiming that it was not “safely tested.”

The vaccine that Kennedy so loathes was so effective that measles was declared eradicated from the U.S. in 2000, a status determined by the lack of continuous transmission of the disease over a period of 12 months or more. That designation could be lost in November, when the U.S. is scheduled to undergo another review.

America’s diminishing herd immunity is due to a growing movement of anti-vax parents—whom Kennedy champions at the federal level—who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, linked autism to the jab.

During the deadly measles outbreak in Texas last year, Kennedy advised that state residents take extra vitamins rather than receive the vaccine, and justified a local religious community’s decision not to receive the vaccine by claiming that the measles vaccine contains “aborted fetus debris” as well as “DNA particles.” Fact check: It does not.

But the 72-year-old has a lot to gain from pushing disinformation about the jab: The more doubt and division that Kennedy sows, the more money he’ll make. Ahead of his appointment, Kennedy disclosed that he made roughly $10 million in 2024 from speaking fees and dividends from his anti-vaccine lawsuits. He’s also made cash from merchandising handled by his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, which bungled anti-vaxx messaging in Samoa so badly that it started a 2019 measles outbreak that resulted in the deaths of at least 83 people, the majority of whom were children under the age of five.

“No one needs to die from measles in 2026,” Republican Senator Bill Cassidy—a medical doctor who still voted to confirm Kennedy to lead HHS—wrote on X Wednesday. “Misinformation and misguided policies are leaving children unprotected against a disease we know how to prevent. The vaccine is safe and effective. Parents should talk to their doctor about protecting their children from this disease.”

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

In a move that is sure to make conservatives apoplectic, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has said what much of America is thinking: One day, we’re gonna blow up that atrocious White House ballroom. And he wants to keep a souvenir. “In about 10 to 15 years, we are all going to be sitting here with smiles on our faces,” he said Tuesday. “And I’m going to have a paper weight…

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President Trump’s renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is continuing to fail. 

Freelance photographer Joe Flood posted a video Wednesday of workers dealing with large chunks of sealant peeling off the dry concrete at the bottom of the pool, which was full of water before Trump turned his attention to it. 

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the pool was vandalized, with the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office filing charges in July against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn for allegedly ripping a large gash from the pool’s blue paint and lining. Those charges were baseless, as the pool’s paint was peeling off due to the application of hydrogen peroxide to kill algae. The U.S. Attorney’s Office was forced to drop the case against Hearn and all other so-called “vandals.”

The state of the pool Wednesday would seem to confirm that Trump was wrong all along, although he has yet to admit it. Last week, court filings revealed that the Trump administration knew the pool’s paint was peeling almost a month before bringing charges against Hearn and other defendants.

Trump gave the renovation project to a business owned by a longtime Republican donor, curiously named  Greenwater Services, through a no-bid process. The Justice Department has admitted that the damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by Greenwater’s “flawed” installation of the pool lining, not vandals, and it doesn’t appear to be over yet. 

Not only is the pool still in an awful state, but Trump could face legal action from Hearn over the false claims his administration made against him, and Democrats in Congress want to investigate why the administration pushed the made-up charges. This long, drawn-out, failed project that wasn’t even necessary in the first place is emblematic of Trump’s presidency. 

Nearly half of the states in the U.S. have filed a lawsuit to stop the United States Postal Service from imposing new restrictions on mail-in voting ahead of the midterms in November.

The 55-page complaint, filed by Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, Washington D.C., and 23 blue states, comes two days after the Supreme Court halted an injunction on President Trump’s executive order requiring changes to mail ballots.

Under the new U.S. Postal Service rules, states must submit mail-in voters’ information into a USPS portal, and meet strict requirements for their ballot envelope designs.

“We’re suing to block USPS’s rule restricting mail-in voting. This rule is an unlawful overreach that shows just how far President Trump will go to control elections—and we won’t stand for it,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Wednesday. “Your vote is your voice. We’re asking the court to ensure every person has the right to make theirs heard.”

“One need not look further than the White House to explain USPS’s unprecedented and unlawful conduct. President Trump has long opposed mail voting, expressing that it would ‘LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY,’” the lawsuit read. “Since reassuming office, the President has aimed to—in his words— ‘get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.’”

“I’m suing to block the Trump administration’s new rule that allows the USPS to intercept and reject lawful ballots, threatening millions of Americans’ right to vote,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James. “With the midterms less than three months away, this will create confusion and unacceptable risks for voters.”

This policy is voter suppression masquerading as fraud control, led by a president who can’t accept the will of the electorate. The Trump administration sees it as a major win.

“Radical Democrats continue to oppose commonsense measures that protect the security of mail-in ballots and ensure only Americans are electing American leaders,” White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said. “The Trump Administration will continue to lawfully enact the agenda President Trump was elected on—which includes the safety and security of our elections.”

Was she a saint? A goddess? An angel with a hairspray halo? Dolly Parton knew how people saw her, and embraced her role as pop culture fairy godmother. She had her wings onscreen at least, having worn them in no fewer than three roles over the years (two of them Christmas movies, naturally). When “What Would Dolly Do?” became a cliché, Parton used it for the name of a podcast. Divine or not, she never turned down a good branding opportunity.

Those who ascribe to Dolly Parton a supernatural strength got a sad reminder that she was all too human when she died at age 80 earlier this week. Especially in recent years, celebrity deaths tend to prompt a public rehashing of their work, personal life and any unsavory offenses. Not so with Parton; no caveats, no complications, no questions. Just adoration and sadness, much more often citing her philanthropic work and various good deeds than anything about her career as an artist and entertainer. Below the grief there’s a sense of losing something endangered, the idea that while we’ve got a fair number of great musicians, paragons of virtue and kindness feel harder and harder to come by.

The road to Saint Dolly, though, was a longer one than it might feel given how overwhelming Dolly-mania has been, especially over the past decade or two. Before that, especially during the period of her greatest artistic and commercial success, she was patronized and mocked—known better as a punchline than as the virtuoso she’s been all along. She owned the boob jokes from the beginning—who knows, maybe she even started them—but either way they were relentless, from all corners. She handled them and all the other patronizing comments and questions about her background and looks with grace and good humor, offering gentle retorts that would, decades later, become memes. If we like and share them enough maybe we can prove we’ve been Team Dolly from the start, pure and true rather than snarky and superficial. After all, Dolly was the same all along, from the apocryphal day she stepped off a Greyhound bus in Nashville to the very end. The rest of us just finally caught up.

Dolly was the same all along, from the apocryphal day she stepped off a Greyhound bus in Nashville to the very end. The rest of us just finally caught up.

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” It’s one of Parton’s most famous quotes, one recycled into something pat—but there’s no question that she lived that mantra. Her steadiness, certainty and self-assurance made all those around her, the would-be detractors and skeptics, seem weak and small. Everything she did was a choice: the devotion to music and songwriting, the country wit of her public persona, and of course, the style she cribbed, according to her, from a local sex worker. “When people would say, ‘She ain’t nothing but trash,’ I would always say, ‘Well, that’s what I’m gonna be when I grow up,’” Parton told The Guardian in 2023.

That last choice proved to be a mirror for American pop culture, one that reflected nothing good. By the late 1970s, Parton had more or less conquered Nashville on her own terms—including the sexy ones (“It does things to people,” read a 1965 ad for her second single, next to a picture of a sultry young Parton). She’d escaped the long shadow of Porter Wagoner, whose variety show served as her jumping off point—even then, women needed duets with men to get their start on the country charts—and gotten a string of country No. 1 hits that included the iconic “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” (she later distanced herself from the claim that they were written in the same day, a trivia tidbit beloved by those posting Dollybait). When she sought to raise her star higher with a pointed pop crossover, she almost instantly succeeded with “Here You Come Again,” which reached No. 3 on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 chart (a feat Parton would never match). Yet in the press, her looks were the beginning and end of the story; her music, talent and general beneficence landed somewhere in the middle.

To some degree, the fixation was to be expected. This was Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975)–era Nashville, and Parton supersized all the clichés about gaudy country glam. Still, it was the start of another perennial Dolly conundrum: the way people have projected their hopes, dreams and insecurities onto her. “A certain amount of fantasizing is impossible to avoid,” wrote Chet Flippo in the lede of a 1977 Rolling Stone profile of the singer, one of her biggest national media portraits to that point. He went on to describe imagining swimming naked with her in a river, spilling a few hundred words about his horniness before getting to anything about her career or art (the way she inspired “quasi-religious experiences” and “cleansings of the soul” did wind up making the story, though). She could flaunt her virtuosity on Johnny Carson but not until after he offered up some random innuendo; Barbara Walters, in an interview that is perennially, posthumously, getting dunked on online, asked her if she’d had such big boobs when she was “11, 12, 13.”

But she never wavered. The wigs stayed high, the rhinestones remained abundant, the backwoods Barbie attitude unequivocal. “I’ll save you the trouble of askin’,” Dolly Parton said in a 1978 interview with Playboy. “Why do I choose to look so outrageous?” (Yes, she posed in the classic bunny garb with all the critical bits covered; she also made good on a promise from that interview and reprised the look at 75). The answer, again, came back to that same hard-fought agency: “I have to look the way I choose to look, and this is what I’ve chose.”

She never wavered. The wigs stayed high, the rhinestones remained abundant, the backwoods Barbie attitude unequivocal.

Following that first peak of national visibility in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, however, Parton did slightly recede into her fanbase—mostly the Venn diagram of women and the LGBTQ community—with both musical pop crossover and the releases of 9 to 5 and The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas. A series of health issues forced her offstage for extended periods; her releases and the opening of Dollywood in 1986 were then framed as “comebacks” rather than the latest moments in the reign of an untouchable pop icon. They were covered mostly by women’s magazines, whose focus remained on her body via how much weight she had or hadn’t lost rather than how much the author wanted to touch it. Parton still responded with typical self-deprecation and candor, even sharing that she had been so deep in depression during her convalescence that she had contemplated suicide. “I got close once,” she told Ladies Home Journal in 1986. “I put the gun down. Then I prayed.”

The Dolly of the late ‘80s and ‘90s was a little quieter; perhaps, in her ever-abundant self awareness, Parton realized how little use American pop culture has historically had for women between the ages of 30 and 60 (Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, as they approach middle age, are both currently pushing against this grain). She was never a massive film star and no longer a fixture of country radio but she kept doing Dolly things, expanding her empire, embracing camp, launching the Imagination Library—her best-known philanthropic effort, sending free books to children under 5 to encourage the literacy her father never had—and most critically, writing and releasing music even through stretches of dormancy, never waiting for the tide to turn but, maybe, trusting that it would.

It ultimately did, right around her 60th birthday—the age when women either get forgotten completely or become beloved mascots (her fellow mononymous country star Reba has had a similar, albeit even more social media-driven late-era renaissance). She got back to touring arenas and amphitheatres, and composed a Broadway musical version of 9 to 5. Somewhere along the way, the boob jokes got a lot less funny while Dolly kept being Dolly; by the time she headlined Glastonbury in 2014, it seemed the consensus had come back around in her favor — even if it was one based more on her image, five biggest hits, and country-fried witticisms than remarkable musical talent and prolific output. She embraced the streamlining of her persona, the glitter and pink and blonde, always giving people what they came for.

Considering how much she gave, it is shocking how much she also kept to herself. Her marriage, chiefly, and other aspects of her personal life (whether or not her entire body is covered in tattoos has been subject of considerable debate). She was candid about putting on the costume of Dolly Parton, about the world knowing the one version of her that she was OK with sharing and only her intimates knowing all the rest. It is hard to fathom that with all she was for her fans and popular culture as a whole, there was still so much that she intentionally left a mystery—a mystique that only made her seem more superhuman. She left space for people to make her whatever they needed her to be, and they certainly used her that way up until the end. Two of the biggest recent Dolly books, Sarah Smarsh’s She Come By It Natural and Lynn Melnick’s I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive—are as much about what her fans got from witnessing her as the icon herself.

That projection is how we get over-the-top conceits like Dolly Parton’s America, and the idea that she’s our last “great unifier” or some kind of supernatural presence right here on earth—almost overcompensating for all those years of snide comments. “It took me probably years longer to be taken serious, but I wasn’t willing to change,” Parton said. She tried to diffuse some of the reverence—“There ain’t nobody that good. I’m not all that… I’m not even all there,” she said in the same interview—but it only grew, and probably will grow faster now that she’s gone.

The fact is, her only superpower (besides the ability to pick a banjo with acrylic nails) was her sheer humanity, her insistence over and over that she and the rest of us were the same. “The biggest freaks in the world for me are my favorite people, like you, like me,” she told Andy Warhol and Maura Moynihan in Interview magazine in 1984. She rejected Dolly exceptionalism and we should try to as well, as tempting as it might be—instead, may we all find our own larger-than-life characters, our biggest, brightest, most generous selves in her honor.

President Donald Trump called up right-wing pundit and conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck to brag about how great things are going. First, Beck asked Trump about his costly trade war with Canada. “They are one of the worst countries in the world to deal with,” Trump complained. “And you saw the Lake Ontario—you know, people thought I was kidding, but maybe I wasn’t—because the last one you…

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But states with and without such policies have seen street raids to round up immigrants. By Tim Henderson for Stateline As more states seek ways to limit immigration enforcement, a Stateline analysis shows one tactic has had an effect: making it more difficult for local law enforcement to hand over people they are holding in city or county jails to federal immigration authorities.

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | US and Canada fall deeper into a trade war with new tariffs as talks collapse and blame is spread…

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The Trump administration has declared a British pro-Palestine organization a terrorist group.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced Wednesday that the U.S. is sanctioning Palestine Action, accusing the organization of “having materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods and services to or in support of, an act of terrorism.”

“Far-left extremists, their fronts, and their enablers should be on notice: We will bring the full weight of our economic tools to bear,” Bessent said in a statement. “Political terrorism has no place in our society, and we will continue to cut the financial lifelines of these groups until they are eliminated.”

The designation is part of the administration’s global crusade against left-wing organizations and movements, specifically antifa, or anti-fascism. President Trump has signed several executive orders, including the troubling security memo NPSM-7, labelling the entire anti-fascist movement as “treasonous” to the U.S.

Palestine Action was designated as a terrorist organization by the British government last year over protests at military bases and against the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems. British lawmakers cited a specific instance in which activists broke into an airbase and sprayed military planes with red paint.

The group’s leaders are challenging the British government’s designation, appealing to the United Kingdom Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights after earlier court battles ruled in favor of the authorities. Hearings are scheduled for later this year.

None of that seems to matter for the Trump administration, which has been systematically criminalizing dissent and pro-Palestine activism in defiance of the First Amendment to the Constitution. If Palestine Action successfully overturns their terrorism designation in the U.K., U.S. protections for free speech and freedom of assembly will look worthless by comparison.

As the U.S. mourns Dolly Parton, the country idol’s charity, Imagination Library, has recommitted itself to providing free books to children under the age of five. But its future has become all the more uncertain due to the quiet machinations of Republicans that have sought to unravel public funding for the cause.

According to its website, more than three million children are registered to receive a free book every month from Imagination Library. So far, Parton’s nonprofit has doled out more than 332 million books to kids across the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, and the Republic of Ireland.

“The world grieves with us today. And yet we find ourselves just as certain about what comes next. For decades, Dolly & the team at The Dollywood Foundation—home of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library—worked to build something that would last for generations. So it will,” the organization wrote on social media Tuesday, shortly after Parton’s family announced the 80-year-old had died following a brief battle with cancer. “The work ahead has never felt more meaningful, and we will carry it forward as she lifts us all up.”

Yet children in the American Midwest may not find themselves so lucky. In Indiana, funding for the program was removed from the state budget in 2025. Republican Governor Mike Braun said the state plans to replace an annual $3 million allowance via private philanthropic donations, according to Newsweek.

Jeff Conyers, the vice chair and president of the Dollywood Foundation, implored Braun and the Republican-controlled state legislature to reconsider the cuts, telling Rolling Stone in February of that year that “the beauty of the Imagination Library is that it unites us all—regardless of politics—because every child deserves the chance to dream big and succeed.”

Missouri lawmakers similarly divested from the reading charity, slashing state funding for the upcoming fiscal year from $6 million to $2 million. The impact of that decision has already been felt, forcing the state to freeze enrollment in the book-a-month program on July 1. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education announced in June that it would distribute as many books as it could until funding for the program ran out.

“We are unsure of the future of the Dolly Parton Imagination Library in Missouri as a state-funded program,” said Lucas Bond, the department’s communications director, in a statement to St. Louis’s NBC affiliate KSDK in June. “Partnering with local programs could be a potential in the future with time, funding, and partnerships coordination.”

The change is a stark reversal for Missouri, which became the first state in the nation to fully fund the program in 2024. At the time, Parton was thrilled by the investment, sharing that “it makes me happy to think that I’m giving them a gift that matters to them, and it makes me happy to know that I’ve made them feel special.”

Last night, I watched Straight Talk, the 1992 Dolly vehicle in which the singer plays, yes, a straight-talker from Arkansas who, through a series of highly predictable accidents, becomes Chicago’s biggest radio talk-show host, dishing out salty Dollyisms to the city’s brokenhearted.

Giddy with her sudden fame and riches, her character wants to buy champagne for an entire restaurant. “Money’s meant to be spent, right?” she coos to a love interest (James Woods! Of all people.) “What good’s it going to do anybody in the bottom of my panty drawer!”

For the country superstar, who died yesterday at 80, the wisecrack could have been a creed for her own life, one defined by extraordinary generosity and a fierce loyalty to the underdog.

Vaccine hero

As Covid tore through America, Dolly gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, which worked with the drug company Moderna to develop its cutting-edge vaccine. “Dolly gets a dose of her own medicine,” she quipped in a tweet accompanying a video of her getting the jab, in which she urged others to follow suit and called those still resisting the shot “chicken squat.” She even sang a reworked version of her megahit “Jolene”: 

“Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, I’m begging of you please don’t hesitate.
Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, vaccine, ’cause once you’re dead then that’s a bit too late.”  

According to the New York Times, Dr. Mark Denison, who led the research, credited Parton’s donation with funding its critical early stages.

Paying her union dues

For nearly 60 years, Dolly Parton kept up her membership in the Nashville Association of Musicians (AFM Local 257)—a notable commitment in Tennessee, a right-to-work state with one of the nation’s lowest union participation rates.

In a statement posted to social media, the union hailed Parton “as a steadfast champion for working musicians” who filed union contracts “for gigs, sessions, and tours.” It added that “her extensive charitable work was never about public perception—she gave simply because she truly cared, always doing everything the right way to make sure that people were taken care of.”

The American Federation of Musicians, the major labor union representing professional musicians in North America, is paying tribute to Dolly Parton, who was a member of its Nashville Local 257 for 58 years.

AFM says that for decades, Dolly consistently filed union contracts for… pic.twitter.com/DhjhkU65nZ

— Yashar Ali (@yashar) August 25, 2026 Her greatest achievement: Books, books, books

Much has already been written about Parton’s celebrated Imagination Library, the literacy program she founded in East Tennessee in 1995 that would eventually send hundreds of millions of free books to enrolled children every month. It was inspired by her father, who Parton said could not read or write.

I learned about a lesser-known side of the charity when Dolly visited my home country, Australia, where Imagination Library runs a local partnership: Its strong focus on Indigenous authors and illustrators.

“We’re currently supporting 50,000 children and their families,” Dr. Lyndsey McKee, CEO of United Way, the local operator, told Australia’s ABC News Radio after Parton’s death. Ten percent of the books sent are First Nations titles, and 70 percent are Australian. Children on the program are nine times more likely to be interested in books, McKee said, citing the “absolute joy of reading books.” Adult literacy is improving too, she said, a ripple effect of helping families put reading at the heart of home life.

And Parton didn’t base the library in Sydney or Melbourne. She launched it in 2019 in the regional town of Tamworth—Australia’s country music mecca, our very own Nashville.

“Children are reading and they’re taking it in and the pictures are coming alive and it’s a lifelong skill.”

Lisa Rennie of the Tamworth Imagination Library celebrated Dolly’s impact on young Indigenous readers, a group for whom literacy remains a major challenge, in an interview with Australian broadcaster SBS. One Indigenous boy “pointed to the book and he said he never knew children of his color skin could fly a plane,” Rennie said. “So children are reading and they’re taking it in and the pictures are coming alive and it’s a lifelong skill.”

“That’s a wonderful gift that Dolly has given to us here in Tamworth,” Cheryl Brown, Tamworth Country Music Festival coordinator, told SBS. “And we will certainly endeavor to carry that on forever.”

The program also runs in the UK, Canada, and Ireland.

A strident LGBTQ ally

Dolly used to joke that if she was a man, she’d be a drag queen. In fact, she once entered a lookalike drag competition as herself—and lost. She was an indefatigable defender of her gay fans, guarding against hate and championing the underdog with her trademark compassion.

“They’ve made me the poster child, I think, only because I’m so outspoken as far as being accepting of people in general,” Parton told Larry King, who asked her in 2016 if her support attracted criticism from conservative groups. “I do not believe that we should criticize and judge other people. I think we should be accepting and loving. We are all God’s children. We are who we are, and we should be allowed to be who we are.”

“I got too much to do on my own to do God’s work too,” she added. “We are who we are. If you’re gay you’re gay, if you’re straight you’re straight.”

I’ll let Dolly speak for herself:

President Donald Trump wants to turn the midterm elections into a Trumpfest in what could be a massive gift to Democratic lawmakers.

The Atlantic reported Tuesday that Trump met with his top political advisers early this month to create a strategy for spending his super PAC’s $400 million war chest ahead of November. Trump’s solution in the face of apparent Democratic favorability? To buy advertisements focusing on his own record, according to three people familiar with the meeting.

House and Senate Democrats are planning to use the election as a referendum on the president, Trump told his advisers. He wanted to double down by highlighting his scant victories. “Go look at the clips,” the president instructed his staff, one person told The Atlantic. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”

It’s no secret that Trump is the Republicans’ best communicator (yikes), but the president’s so-called “Golden Age” isn’t going so well. His choice to turn November’s midterm elections into a Trumpfest comes as his approval ratings have hit a record low and his disastrous policies are threatening to alienate even his most staunch supporters.

Things have gotten so bad that Republican candidates are actively distancing themselves from the president and his lackeys. Trump is about to make that a lot harder.

President Donald Trump is claiming that the recently deceased country music legend Dolly Parton was a big fan of his, even though she made a point to support the LGBTQ community, proclaimed that Black lives mattered, and remained politically neutral throughout her life—never endorsing Trump.

“We all knew her so well. I knew her a little bit.... She really liked me,” Trump said on the Glenn Beck Program Wednesday morning, suggesting that Parton never came out publicly in support of him because she would lose “20 percent of the fans.”

Parton died on Tuesday at the age of 80.

Trump on Dolly Parton: "She really liked me, I will tell you" pic.twitter.com/Ha39wOXnlo

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 26, 2026

Trump is using the death of a universally beloved artist as an opportunity to talk about himself. It’s much easier to make claims about how someone felt or didn’t feel once they’re no longer here to make it known themselves.

And for what it’s worth, nothing about Parton suggested some secret support for Trump. She was an outspoken advocate for the queer community and spoke out against a transgender ban in Tennessee in 2023, saying she just wanted everyone “to be treated good.” In 2020, she stated that “of course Black lives matter. Do we think our white asses are the only ones that matter?” She was also vaccinated against Covid-19 and donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University, which helped fund the Moderna vaccine.

“I don’t do politics,” Parton once said on a podcast. “I have too many fans on both sides of the fence. Of course, I have my opinion about everything, but I learned years ago to keep your mouth shut about things.”

And yet we have Trump assigning her an ideology in death, getting in his last petty little points—something only a president as callous as him would do.

A clean energy group has quietly managed to derail several Republican races.

The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC has raised and spent millions of dollars to dethrone at least three conservative figureheads that have backtracked on their green energy promises. Its latest victim: South Carolina Senate candidate Ralph Norman.

The group’s third major political coup occurred Tuesday evening, when Norman lost to Darline Graham, sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham. The group, which is backed by solar executives and investors, told Politico that it had spent nearly $1 million to undermine the lawmaker’s odds.

Earlier this year, the group’s ad buys stymied Representative Chip Roy’s unsuccessful attempt to become Texas’s attorney general. The PAC also spent roughly $2 million to unseat Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles—an effort that came to fruition earlier this month, when the incumbent was defeated by a former state official.

The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition’s vendettas are nothing short of personal: Norman, Roy, and Ogles had pushed their caucus to nix clean energy incentives in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“The clean energy industry’s political muscle is only getting stronger and more intimidating,” Invest in Tomorrow Coalition co-founder Michael Brune told Politico. “Our hope here is that clean energy will go back to being a bipartisan issue, and maybe one of the few issues that all Americans can agree on. But before we get there, we’ve got to continue our retribution tour and take out a few more members who have voted the wrong way.”

Norman, for instance, effectively backstabbed the renewable energy industry when he tried to kill the Biden administration’s wind and solar tax credits, despite co-launching the Congressional Solar Caucus in 2018.

“Norman’s somewhat even traitorous to the clean energy industry and solar industry,” Tom Matzzie, chair of the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition and a solar CEO, told Politico. “It’s about stopping Norman, but it’s also about sending a message to other members of Congress that if they try to hurt the industry, we’re going to fight back.”

With wins under its belt and millions in the bank, the group could prove to be one of 2026’s most formidable election season foes. So far, the group has raised more than $6.8 million, according to data collected by the Federal Election Commission.

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Inside Washington

In the past few days, the Trump administration has handed Troy Jackson not just one political gift, but two. And it could prove critical to his campaign to unseat Republican Senator Susan Collins—a necessary result if the Democrats are to stand any chance of flipping the upper chamber in the November midterm elections.

Vice President JD Vance traveled to Maine on Monday to campaign for former Governor Paul LePage, who is running in the state’s 2nd congressional district, and made several rhetorical mistakes. One was his comment on a fatal Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting in the state last month. To Mainers who are “so worried about that situation,” Vance said about the killing of 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, they ought to “have a little bit of perspective.” 

Jackson was quick to respond in a video posted to X. “JD Vance is a dirtbag,” he said. “There’s a young man that had a Social Security number, he had a job, I mean, he had a life, he had a family. To come in here and say, ‘Have some perspective,’ you ought to have some damn perspective. You don’t even know what the hell is going on.”

Jackson senses, perhaps rightly, that defending immigrants and criticizing an unpopular White House is a winning strategy in the blue state. Even before Guerrero’s death, Collins had come under fire for her vote to fund ICE. And she was notably absent from Vance’s appearance on Monday, though he apparently missed the memo about her distancing herself from the administration. He praised her—”Let’s give a shout-out to Susan Collins, who’s doing a great job!”—and mentioned that she has been to his house about six times.

The other gift to Jackson’s campaign arrived over the weekend, when Trump announced a 50 percent tariff on $20 billion worth of Canadian imports, pushing Canada to strike back with retaliatory tariffs announced Tuesday. While Collins called the tariffs a “mistake,” Jackson is working to tie Collins to that policy. 

“Troy spent most of his life working along the Canadian border, so he knows how important this relationship is to Maine’s economy, and he sees Trump’s tariffs for what they are: a tax on Maine families and small businesses,” said Jackson campaign spokesperson Dan Gottlieb. “When Susan Collins was given the chance to stop Trump’s tariffs from raising the cost of groceries and everyday goods, she voted ‘no’—that’s why Mainers say she votes too much with Trump.”

Gottlieb was referring to a recent Fox News poll that found Mainers think Collins votes in line with Trump too often. That must be disheartening for the longtime senator, who has spent the past decade trying to thread the needle of garnering Republican support without associating too closely with Trump’s agenda. For example, she voted against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill last year. But this election could be different, given that Trump is more unpopular than he’s ever been; nearly 60 percent of Mainers disapprove of Trump.

“If she could snap her fingers and make the last ten years of American politics, especially Donald Trump, go away, I’m sure she would for a whole variety of reasons,” said Mark Brewer, a professor of political science at the University of Maine.

When Collins does have to comment on the Trump administration’s policies, Brewer said, “she tries to carefully point out how she’s different than Trump on these issues, how she’s tried to push back.” When speaking about ICE in recent months, she’s emphasized her push for agents to wear body cameras. But even talking about that can hurt her. “She has to do it carefully, because when she talks about those things, it reminds people that they exist,” Brewer noted.

That applies to tariffs, as well. The issue is of particular importance in Maine, which is literally connected to its northern neighbor: Some Mainers receive their electricity from the Canadian grid, and on Monday Ontario Premier Doug Ford suggested that Canada could cut off its electricity exports to the United States in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs. Beyond that, the new tariffs will simply make goods more expensive for consumers, at a time when prices are already high.

The race appears to be tight. The Cook Political Report lists it as a toss-up, and the most recent polls—if we can even trust state-level polls these days—show Jackson with a slight lead, though within the margin of error. We’ll see if the next polls show any bounce for Jackson in the wake of these in-kind gifts from the Trump administration.

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

Pennsylvania has its own “Trump czar.” Earlier this spring, Josh Shapiro, the state’s Democratic governor, quietly hired Jennifer Higgins, who had served as acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, during President Biden’s term, as a senior adviser with an unconventional role: to help him manage his relationship with the Trump administration.

Higgins has experience with Trump. She served as associate director of the Refugee, Asylum, and International Operations Directorate at USCIS during Trump’s first term—experience that has been “highlighted” by “some rights groups” in the state, per Spotlight PA, which dug into the unconventional role in an elucidating piece on Tuesday. If that role has led to some raised eyebrows, it’s worth noting that Higgins also served as chief of staff to Biden’s director of homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, and was made acting director of USCIS until February of last year, when she was replaced by Trump.

Although Higgins’s work in immigration policy and with the Trump administration in particular has led to some criticism—particularly her role overseeing the first Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy—you can see why it makes sense for Shapiro, especially given that Pennsylvania has sued the federal government several times over the last year and a half over immigration policy and loss of federal funding. As other blue states struggle to fight back—and as the administration attempts to fulfill a goal of one million deportations per year—”Trump czar” is a position you may see more and more.

—Alex Shephard

The Ideas Factory

Public school teachers are still woefully underpaid, earning about a quarter less than comparable college graduates working in other professions. So find the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the Economic Policy Institute in a review of 2025 federal data. The “teacher pay penalty,” as they call this income gap, was an estimated 25.2 percent last year. That’s actually an improvement from 2024, when it hit a record high of 26.9 percent—but a far cry from the early 1990s, when it hovered in the single digits before steadily plunging after the turn of the century. Teachers, being unionized, tend to receive better benefits packages than private-sector professionals, but even accounting for that, teachers’ “total compensation penalty” was 14.5 percent. The pay penalty varied from state to state, ranging from 10.4 percent in Rhode Island to a whopping 40.7 percent in Colorado. “It would be willful blindness to ignore the toll that the decades-long teacher pay penalty has had on the quality of public education,” writes Sylvia Allegretto, a senior economist at CEPR. “Regrettably, policymakers have failed to deliver sustained and effective interventions capable of mitigating—let alone substantially improving—the trends outlined in this long-running series.”

The pandemic-era expansion of the Child Tax Credit was even more important than we realized. The 2021 expansion increased the per-child credit for low- and middle-income families and helped bring poverty to a record-low 5.2 percent. But the expansion expired at year’s end, sending poverty soaring to 12.4 percent. Now a report from Brookings shows how the loss of the expansion deepened the public’s economic pessimism, which persists to this day. The University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment shows a notable mood decline in the first quarter of 2022 among families with incomes below $100,000—and that the more children people had, the more pessimistic they were. “The broader lesson extends beyond the CTC,” writes Jacob Bastian, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings. “The effects of temporary benefits may not end when payments do.… For policymakers, that means evaluating temporary programs should include not only what they provide while in place, but also what happens when they disappear.”

—Ryan Kearney

In Closing

Book of the Week: Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America, by Rozina Ali

THE GIST: Seasons of Fury examines the rise of persecution, bigotry, and hate in the wake of 9/11 and the rise of Donald Trump through four disparate families. Ali’s deeply personal approach illuminates how we got to this dire moment. It also means that Seasons of Fury doubles as a kind of history of Muslim life in the U.S. 

PRAISE: Jonathan Blitzer, the New Yorker writer and author of the excellent Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here, says that Seasons of Fury is “a book about immigration, race, and persecution, told in stellar reportorial detail. But it’s also a mirror that Rozina Ali skillfully holds up to force a reckoning about the kind of country we really are.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: Although most of the book is focused on the last three decades of Muslim life in America, it stretches back nearly a century in vivid, personal detail, telling the stories of how and why many Muslim immigrants came to America. It covers the rise of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security after September 11, and the emergence of several right-wing, openly Islamophobic think tanks in the twenty-first century, many of which pushed culture-war battles like the one over the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” to demonize Muslims. 

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: The rise of Islamophobia is one of the most troubling problems in the U.S. today, and Seasons of Fury captures it in all of its ugliness and danger. But it also points to a number of other trends that have helped create this poisonous moment, all of which are deftly captured by Ali: the rise of the security state, the post-9/11 mutation of America’s long-standing paranoia and racism, and the growing obsession with immigration on the right. These trends underlie the rise of Trump and predate him (at least politically). They will likely outlast him, continuing to play a pivotal role in shaping our politics.

—By Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

In honor of Dolly Parton, even if it’s admittedly something of a bank shot: You may remember that two Black members of the Tennessee legislature were expelled in 2023 because of protests they held on the floor over gun control—and won their seats back in special elections. What were their names? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in Thursday’s newsletter.)

When I learned yesterday that Dolly Parton had passed, I was in the car with my wife, and I was grateful that she was driving so that I could sob without creating a hazard on the road. But then we got to remember the joy of seeing her back in 2008, at Minnesota’s Northrup Auditorium, for the “Backwoods Barbie” tour. It’s one of my most singular concert memories, but sadly…

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Meta has agreed to pay $17 billion and add child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms to end a landmark trial over teen social media addiction and settle claims filed by 47 states, state attorneys general announced Wednesday. California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey were among 29 states that sued the tech giant in 2023, but the deal cuts short the trial…

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