Political News

The Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration Monday in a case over President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting, though it remains unclear how much can be implemented before the fast-approaching midterm elections. The decision appears to leave room for additional court challenges that could further slow Trump’s order, including in another similar case. The U.S.

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President Donald Trump’s administration has come up with a new scheme that will  gut due process for asylum applicants. 

Officers at the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate, or FDNS, have been reassigned to two other immigration projects, undermining training for the agency’s asylum program, The Guardian reported Monday. 

Immigration officers have been reassigned to two supposedly “high-priority” initiatives: screening South African refugees and “unlawful” voters, according to internal correspondence obtained by the publication. As a result, the FDNS will not be able to assign personnel to train the asylum officers of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

FDNS’s main functions are to investigate immigration-related fraud, establish guidance for vetting and adjudicating asylum cases, and implement screening policies and procedures. 

These new initiatives are clearly inspired by two Trump administration’s priorities that can best be described as seeking to fix something entirely non-existent: The first, cracking down on phantasmal voter fraud; the second, supporting the immigration of Afrikaners, the white descendants of Dutch colonizers in South Africa, who are fleeing an equally imaginary white genocide.

Any disruption in training asylum officers will further slow down the processing of asylum cases—which have already come to a screeching halt under the Trump administration. 

Last month, the USCIS proposed a new rule that would refer asylum applicants for deportation without offering them an interview or hearing. The move is part of a wider effort by the Trump administration to transform the agency into yet another arm of the president’s mass deportation machine. 

Vice President JD Vance has made two trips to Maine to stump for Republican Senator Susan Collins as her midterm election against Democrat Troy Jackson approaches. Yet Collins has been a no-show for each visit, leading to speculation that she is deliberately avoiding the vice president and the greater Trump administration.

In his latest visit to Maine on Monday, Vance heaped praise on Collins during a rally at defense technology manufacturer Compotech.

“Whenever I’m in the great state of Maine … I gotta give Susan a little bit of crap,” Vance said at the rally. “Susan is the most independent member of the United States Senate, and as the president of the United States Senate, she sometimes makes my job just a little bit harder. But she makes it harder because she is coming to work every single day and fighting not for a political party.... She fights for the great people of Maine.”

Vance also mentioned that Collins had been to his house about six times.

Vance: "The second shout out I gotta give is to my dear friend Susan Collins, the senator from Maine. Thank you!…She has been to my house probably a half dozen times, the Vice President's residence at the Naval Observatory." pic.twitter.com/JOipfRFFCA

— BulwarkClips (@BulwarkClips) August 24, 2026

It’s no surprise Collins didn’t show up to the rally. President Trump has a nearly 60 percent disapproval rating among Mainers as of last month, and nothing indicates any future improvement. The vast majority of Mainers don’t think their state is affordable, and Maine business has suffered significantly due to the most recent 50 percent tariff trade war the Trump administration started with Canada.

Collins has made a point to distance herself from Trump on his new tariffs threat against Canada, saying that they would be a “mistake.” She also drew a line in the sand against the administration’s attack on mail-in ballots, which she called “very important to the people of Maine,” particularly seniors.

Collins was called out by Jackson the morning of the rally.

“How ‘bout fuel prices going through the roof because of the war on Iran? How ‘bout ICE murdering people here in Biddeford? Let’s give a shoutout to Susan Collins about how poor of a job she’s doing for the state of Maine. I’m sure JD Vance loves her because she’s doing everything that he wants for her,” he said. “But she’s not doing it for Maine people.”

My message to Susan's pal @JDVance who’s coming to Maine today pic.twitter.com/mOMz4QqHFc

— Troy Jackson (@TroyJackson207) August 24, 2026

Jeanine Pirro, President Trump’s handpicked U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, messed up the prosecution of two accused MS-13 gang leaders earlier this year.

CNN reports that in April, Pirro, a former Fox News host, failed to get a jury to convict Moises Rivera-Luna, who is accused of ordering murders on U.S. soil from a Salvadoran jail cell more than 10 years ago, or his co-defendant Tokiro Rodas Ramirez, who was reportedly a local MS-13 leader in D.C.

And it wasn’t the first time she struggled to secure a conviction: A jury failed to reach a verdict on the two men less than five months earlier.

Trump celebrated bringing Rivera-Luna to American soil in March 2025, making the failed conviction all the more embarrassing. Under Pirro’s leadership, D.C. federal prosecutors keep running into problems with jury trials, securing convictions in only four of eight federal cases in 2026 prior to Rivera-Luna’s mistrial in April.

It didn’t get better for the Justice Department after that either. The D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office has tried close to a dozen more criminal cases in federal court, only to have four trials end with deadlocked juries and two other defendants acquitted. It’s a highly unusual pattern, according to several investigators, unnamed former former prosecutors, defense attorneys, and other legal experts who spoke to CNN. The conviction trial rate in federal criminal trials is around 90 percent.

One factor could be that Washington, D.C.’s jury pool doesn’t have a lot of confidence in the Trump administration or the DOJ, and that D.C. federal prosecutors, already stretched thin by firings and resignations, are stuck retrying cases weeks or months after their original verdicts.

“This is not a political case. I think this is a failure of proof and a stubbornness born of desperation on the part of the prosecutors’ office,” Robert Feitel, a defense attorney representing an MS-13 defendant, told CNN.

Pirro’s office got a lot of negative attention when they charged Olympic canoeist David Hearn with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool when the pool was clearly damaged by botched renovation efforts. That case quickly fell apart, and the charges were dropped despite President Trump’s anger and insistence that his efforts were sabotaged. But it seems that her office can’t even handle seemingly straightforward criminal cases.

Vice President JD Vance brought his trademark absence of charisma to a manufacturing facility in Brewer, Maine, on Monday, ostensibly campaigning for Republicans in the state, while trying to claim the administration’s policies are working wonders for Americans. In order to do that, Vance must lie about virtually everything. “I’d say common sense, it’s supply and demand,” Vance said…

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About half of U.S. adults say they can’t afford healthcare. California is among at least eight states that have set spending growth targets for the healthcare sector. It may soon impose enforcement penalties aimed at pushing hospitals and other providers to meet those goals. By Claudia Boyd-Barrett for KFF California is weighing stiff penalties for hospitals and other healthcare…

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On Monday afternoon, President Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the US would impose all-encompassing sanctions on countries and institutions that conduct business with Iran, in an apparent attempt to end the war after most viable military options have failed.

Scott Bessent described the plan, dubbed Operation Economic Outcast, as an “economic D-Day”, in reference to the Allied invasion of Normandy during World War II, with the Iranian regime replacing Nazi Germany. Bessent vowed to “sever every economic lifeline” that sustains Iran—including digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping—by enforcing a “zero-leakage approach” that will shut down “every facilitator and every network” that Iran has used to smuggle oil past existing sanctions.

But Bessent did not disclose how that process would work, or on what timeline.

When we don’t know what to do, we sanction Iran.

In fact, the Treasury secretary offered almost nothing in the way of details—perhaps because, over roughly 47 years of US sanctions on Iran, there is little that the United States hasn’t tried and even less indication that Iran has become more compliant. When we don’t know what to do, we sanction Iran.

The Trump administration has already nominally imposed secondary sanctions on many countries that trade with Iran for oil, but has not significantly enforced them on Iran’s major trading partners like China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Turkey, and Qatar. Some of those countries are key US allies; others are major trading partners; that leaves Russia, which is already under extensive American sanctions and has unmatched experience in evading them with regard to its global oil trade.

Trump, Bessent said, is holding an ongoing series of calls with world leaders—under threat of sanctions—about what he wants from them. After his announcement, reporters asked Bessent which leaders, and when secondary sanctions would be enforced over noncompliance. Bessent declined to say.

Last week, the United Arab Emirates, Iran’s largest trading partner in the Middle East and a US ally, said it would at least temporarily end all trade with Iran. Bessent reiterated on Monday that the move was due to US pressure—supposedly evidence that sanctions would work this time.

As Trump has claimed repeatedly during his second term, and as Bessent repeated on Monday, Iran has been “at war against America” and “much of the world” for 47 years, which is also when the US first imposed sanctions on the country. Over that time span, American economic sanctions on Iran, which have increased by roughly nine times over the past 20 years, have not led to a more democratic—or even simply US-friendly—Iranian government. Instead, it has largely strengthened Iranian regime leaders’ hold on the country at the price of civilian lives.

Meanwhile, according to 2025 data from the World Bank, about 35 percent of Iran’s 92 million residents live on less than $8.30 per day—the poverty line for its economic peers.

A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | ‘Here I am’: Melania Trump turns up amid Natalie Harp firestorm…

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Energy Secretary Chris Wright claimed last week that the United States helped move 15 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday. He also claimed that the average daily oil exports were more than eight million barrels over a seven-day period.

But a consistent gap has emerged between the Trump administration’s claims and industry firms’ findings, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Kpler, a ship-tracking firm, estimated that the U.S. moved a daily average of roughly 2.3 million barrels of crude and oil products in August. Huax, another tracker, placed average daily exports at between two million and five million barrels. For context, before the U.S. attacked Iran, an average of 20 million barrels of oil passed through the Strait of Hormuz every single day.

Vortexa, another tanker tracker, found that a seven-day average peaked at 9.2 million barrels—a number far closer to the administration’s claims. But its 28-day average was roughly six million barrels. Clearly, the number can vary greatly depending on what specific dates are selected.

Wright has claimed that private data firms are undercounting the number of ships passing covertly through the strait, but one expert explained why that’s not likely.

Rory Johnston, a founder of Commodity Context, an oil-market research firm, told The Wall Street Journal that the firms tracking tankers had all found similar numbers. “You’d expect someone to have figured out a way to validate the White House numbers if there was a way,” Johnston said. “As of yet, I haven’t seen anyone do it.”

Since the beginning of the war, industry firms have struggled to monitor the passage of ships that are forced to “go dark” and silence their marine radio tracking systems. Still, the numbers the Trump administration is presenting aren’t supported by any information from the companies that are actually loading the ships.

The London Stock Exchange Group estimated the amount of crude and oil being loaded onto ships in the Persian Gulf was about 1.9 million barrels a day—down from 4.4 million barrels a day in July.

Wright has also insisted that the United States has gained full control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Donald Trump made some eyebrow-raising changes to his stock portfolio in June.

The president reshuffled his investment accounts, rotating between stocks and bonds in exchanges that totaled between $78.1 million and $263.1 million, according to a financial disclosure released August 22.

The disclosure does not reveal the true value of Trump’s portfolio, as it does not list the rates at which Trump bought or sold stock, or the quantity that he owns. However, it does indicate that the president made numerous investments in multiple companies that are currently in business with his administration.

Trump made more than 1,000 stock trades in June, according to the filing. The single largest transaction was an offloading of shares of a Vanguard exchange traded fund, totaling between $5 million and $25 million in a June 22 sale.

The other major expenditures were related to financial institutions. Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million of Berkshire Hathaway, and similar amounts in credit card companies Visa and Mastercard, as well as Cintas, an Ohio-based business supply firm.

He bought between $15,001 and $50,000 worth of SpaceX some 11 days after its initial public offering, despite the fact that the Elon Musk–led company is teed up to make billions of dollars through government contracts for satellite production.

Trump spent between $250,000 and $500,000 on Boeing stock, the same day that the Navy awarded the aerospace manufacturer a multimillion-dollar government contract for its P-8A training system.

The president also invested in Palantir (which earlier this month won a $10 billion Army software contract), Meta (whose subsidiary Scale AI was awarded $500 million from the Pentagon in May), Broadcom (which received $970 million in March to support the military’s cloud services), and Nvidia (which is projected to make more than $1 trillion in revenue from its electronic chip trade this year after Trump green-lit its sale in the Chinese market in January).

The White House has repeatedly rebuked ethical concerns surrounding Trump’s expenditures. In May, spokesman Davis Ingle told CNBC plainly that there “are no conflicts of interest,” and that Trump’s assets are in a trust managed by his children.

“President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public—which is why they overwhelmingly reelected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media,” Ingle said at the time.

Deadly heatwaves in May smashed records in the UK, France, Spain, and parts of North Africa. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh saw April temperatures soar to 45-50 degrees Celsius. A late spring heat dome in the US marked the hottest March on record, and in a 1,000-year July storm, parts of Texas were left reeling after flash flooding killed multiple people. That same month, wildfires in Canada turned skies orange and exposed over 106 million North Americans to hazardous air quality. In the US alone, the catastrophic events of 2026 have killed approximately 17,377 people and cost over $3.2 trillion.

In terms of the sheer scope of heat and extreme weather, 2026 has been a year of climate disasters.

Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry—by far the greatest contributor to global climate change, accounting for approximately 68 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and almost 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions—is holding firm. In response to a growing tide of litigation seeking to hold it at least partly responsible for the climate crisis, oil and gas groups and their networks have accelerated their defenses, fighting with their all-too-familiar playbook of discrediting the science linking emissions to extreme weather events such as heatwaves, wildfires, flooding, heavy storms and hurricanes. With the help of the Trump administration and industry partners, oil and gas groups have lodged disinformation campaigns targeting specific studies and even individual climate scientists. 

“How can you show approximate causation in injury?” asked Michael Buschbacher, a partner at Boyden Gray PLLC  during an October 2025 Federalist Society panel on climate litigation. He has supported industry opposition to renewable energy mandates, state-level climate liability lawsuits, and SEC climate risk disclosure mandates. “Bad weather is of course not new. So how do you show that emissions from company X cause injury Y from a hurricane or whatever?” He then wondered about the consequences of the suits should they be successful. “Will they reduce global carbon emissions, or will it just be a payday for contingency fee lawyers and opportunity for virtue signaling from progressive politicians?”

“There is no level of emissions that does not contribute to changing climate impacts. Every ton matters.” 

A new peer-reviewed study published earlier this month in Earth’s Future suggests that it is possible to demonstrate that “emissions from company X cause injury Y.” It also could potentially provide evidence so industry could be forced to answer for climate impacts. The new methodological framework has, for the first time, drawn a straight line from single corporate emitters like Exxon or Chevron, or even whole countries like the United States, to specific heatwaves and areas of extreme rainfall. By running over 150 simulations across 8 different climate models, the study’s author, Christopher Callahan—an Earth systems scientist and assistant professor at Indiana University’s O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs—built a statistical model to figure out the relationship between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the odds of extreme heat or rain. He then used real emissions data to calculate the extent to which specific fossil fuel emitters increased the risk of extreme weather.

The study’s results are clear: “There is no level of emissions that does not contribute to changing climate impacts,” Callahan told me. “Every ton matters.” 

The implications of this for an industry struggling to contend with the potential consequences of its actions could be dire. “Climate attribution research seeks to connect greenhouse-gas emissions to specific climate impacts, and increasingly, to particular industries or companies,” wrote Kyle Kohli in Energy In Depth, a blog associated with the Independent Petroleum Association of America. “That makes it especially valuable to climate plaintiffs attempting to overcome one of their biggest legal obstacles: proving causation.”

These new findings are part of a growing field of climate science known as source attribution, which examines “whether we can link an individual extreme climate event to any individual emitter who contributed to that event,” Callahan said. By looking at global extreme heat and at specific events like the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave and Pakistan’s extreme rainfall in 2022, for instance, Callahan used climate models to determine what might have taken place without the carbon dioxide released by certain fossil fuel companies and countries. His conclusions were stark: fossil fuel firms increased the likelihood of the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave by 31 percent and extreme rainfall in Pakistan in 2022 by 7 percent.

In the past, source attribution studies linked several climate models that were, in Callahan’s words, “computationally difficult,” sometimes taking months to run and requiring vast amounts of computing capacity. “The approach here is attempting to be particularly simple and particularly lightweight,” Callahan explained. Now, by knowing the proportions between climate change and cumulative emissions, he said, researchers can calculate changes to extreme events based on historical emissions. “What this science tells us is that there is a direct relationship between how much an entity emits and…[the] extreme events that alter people’s lives.” 

Source attribution is a subset of the larger, well-established attribution science field, which has helped us understand how much climate change is shaping our world by comparing the climate conditions we face today to a hypothetical Earth devoid of human influence. In 2004, for example, a team of scientists found that human influence doubled the risk of the 2003 heatwave that had swept Europe. But source attribution helps answer more granular questions about what specific actions are having what specific effect. 

For over half a century, industry has known of and misled the public about its role in human-caused planetary warming, deliberately sowing doubt to undermine scientific evidence. Now oil and gas groups are facing a wave of lawsuits. Over 40 cases in the United States filed by states, municipalities, and tribal governments have been brought against Big Oil since 2017. At least five of these lawsuits have entered the discovery phase—marking a turning point that could force oil executives to hand over key documents and testify under oath on what they knew about climate change and when they knew it. Grist reported in July that the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil lobbying group, stated that one of its top priorities for 2026 was to “stop extreme climate liability policy.”

Callahan has no illusions about how his research fits into the current legal and political climate, describing it as “a pretty live question in conversations around climate liability lawsuits.” But how will attribution science play out in a legal context? Some experts argue that it will “‘[rock] the courtroom,” while others say key decisions will most likely hinge on legal issues rather than the science itself. “Our responsibility as scientists,” Callahan said, “is not to never do science that is relevant to the political conversation. We should follow the results of our questions wherever they lead and report them regardless of what they are.” 

In recent years, industry has cast doubt on plaintiffs’ use of attribution science in the courtroom. “They have an attribution theory, but that’s just a crude measure of how much oil and gas companies sold,” said Chevron lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., in a 2024 litigation webinar, “but that doesn’t tell you anything about anything.” A recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report has inflamed that debate. A June investigation by Politico revealed a secret opposition campaign waged by oil industry allies to discredit the report’s findings. The campaign came just months after Republican attorneys general successfully forced the removal of a NAS climate sciences chapter from a reference manual for federal judges, which the Academies officially pulled earlier this month. A NASA scientist who asked to remain anonymous called the academy’s decision to pull the chapter “pathetic. If they cannot stand up for science, then who is going to?” 

But the scientific consensus on the NAS extreme weather report is aligned. “I thought it was a great report,” said Michael Mann, a University of Pennsylvania climate scientist. “It didn’t pull any punches.” Others, like Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist and vice president for science at Climate Central, said the report was “a really excellent roundup of the state of the science.” 

Reports like the Academies’ extreme weather event attribution study and Callahan’s research on emitter impacts help illustrate how far the field has come. “We all live in a world that’s been shaped by a fossil fuel-based economy,” Dahl said, “so I think studies like this can shed light on why we are where we are, and why we have the range of choices available to us that we have, and can also give us a sense of how different the world would be.”

Kim Cobb, an expert in observational climate studies at Brown University, says we’re gaining something “extremely valuable” in Callahan’s study. “This would have been a pipe dream 10 years ago; it simply wouldn’t be possible.” For Jim Hurrell, the chair of the Academies’ NAS report and a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University, there’s lots of room for advancement in the field, and that’s what excites him most. “This science could be really useful to help communities plan for the future,” he said. 

Separating the future of attribution science from the politicization attached to it has proved to be impossible recently. The Trump administration’s cuts to funding for scientific programs, monitoring systems, and scientific personnel, alongside ongoing industry attacks, will continue to affect the field’s advancement. In the end, Yann Quilcaille, a climate scientist from ETH Zürich noted, “We need to act quickly, and we have the solutions.”

Two years after falsely linking reproductive rights to gender transition care for minors, GOP lawmakers have packaged the two issues into one amendment in an effort to strip away the right to abortion. By Jeremy Kohler for ProPublica Two years ago, abortion opponents in Missouri tried to defeat Amendment 3, a ballot initiative to enshrine reproductive rights in the state…

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The Washington Post has been ordered by an arbitrator to rehire opinion writer Karen Attiah, who was fired last year for comments about the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Posting on social media in September 2025, she lamented that politicians say that gun and political violence is an issue but do little to curb the availability of guns. “America…

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Gary, Indiana, has been without electricity for nearly two weeks after a powerful storm hit the area, closing businesses, closing schools, ruining food, stopping gas pumps, and causing food lines.

“We’re at day 12, and 12 days is too long for families to be without power,” said the city’s mayor Eddie Melton in a video message Sunday. He’s urging Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) to restore power to all of the city’s residents by the end of Tuesday, he told residents.

“Twelve days is too long for parents to worry about their children, and for businesses to lose revenue, and for families to wonder when the relief is finally going to come. Today, I want the people of Gary to know this. I want you to know that I share their frustration,” Melton said.

At one point, there were nearly 374,500 power outages in the area, The Guardian reports, with that number dropping to 14,500 by Sunday and 10,187 by Monday. Gary has a population estimated at 67,289, with its metro area estimated at 680,661 according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

While most schools reopened in the city Monday (Gary started school on August 6) after a nearly two-week break, they opened on a two-hour delay. Melton said that “NIPSCO has so much more work to do. We’ve pushed them to do more and do it faster.” Local residents have sued the utility provider, blaming it for failing to trim trees that disabled power lines.

“This situation was predictable. It was obvious and it was preventable,” Otto Shragal, an attorney with the Allen Law Group, told The Guardian. Indiana Governor Mike Braun also blamed NIPSCO, telling Inside INdiana Business that the utility “needs to pick up the pace, because we’ve given them national guard help, all of our agencies.”

One-third of Gary’s residents are under the poverty line, and have endured these conditions since August 11. The city is majority-Black in a state where Republicans control the legislature and governorship, and have long neglected the city by giving it meager state funding and blocking measures that would have expanded the municipality’s tax base.

Braun said on Friday that he “formally requested an expedited major disaster declaration for individual and public assistance for 54 counties from FEMA,” which, if granted, would “mean significantly more resources to accelerate Indiana’s recovery from the recent severe weather.” A state fund is reportedly providing emergency aid grants of up to $5,000, and last week, President Trump declared a state of emergency for Indiana counties affected by the severe storms.

Local celebrities Keith Lee, a food critic, and Indiana Pacers player Tyrese Haliburton are co-hosting an event to distribute relief supplies along with the Salvation Army, ACE Hardware, and Gary officials outside of the city’s Roosevelt Pavilion Monday, joining several other local aid efforts. Hopefully, all of those along with full restoration of power can ease residents’ difficulties in the short-term, as cleanup and repairs could take many months.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent struggled to explain how the Trump administration’s vague, toothless threat of more sanctions against Iran—which the president is calling an “economic D-Day”—was anything like the actual D-Day. 

Bessent held a Monday afternoon press conference to make himself known. 

“Beginning today … Treasury and other agencies will tighten the noose and block every potential source of revenue that funds the IRGC and the evil Iranian regime. We are enforcing a zero leakage approach; there will be no minimal breathing space for the regime to rebuild its capacity to inflict terror against America and the world,” he said.  

The secondary sanctions, which target countries that do trade with Iran, are aimed at digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. 

Yet Bessent wavered when asked about the details behind his aggressive claims, acknowledging that the “economic D-Day” was more of a warning than anything else.

When asked twice if his sanctions would target China or oft-mentioned Chinese banks accused of facilitating transactions for Iran, he had no direct answer, saying that the sanction recipients “know who they are.” 

Reporter: Chinese banks have often been talked about being targeted, but we don't see any of those institutions targeted here…

Bessent: No one is above the reach of the US sanctions…. When the hammer of US Treasury actions falls upon them, they will have no one to blame but… pic.twitter.com/KG7VMprcaZ

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 24, 2026

He avoided specifics entirely for the rest of the questioning period. 

“You said the president is calling world leaders with specific asks, and that there is a defined timeline,” a reporter from CBS asked. “Who is he calling, and what are the asks?”

“We’re not gonna name names. We’ve already seen some results.… As you all know, the president is quite persuasive, and we are following his calls up with calls from the State Department and from the U.S. Treasury … telling the leaders, and the countries, and the entities exactly what we expect. And the timelines,” he equivocated. “And I would expect that very quickly, if they do not respond, then you will see the ramifications of their actions.”

“You described this as an economic D-Day, but D-Day wasn’t a threat of an invasion, and the U.S. didn’t give a timeline to Germany,” another reporter followed up. “So why not impose the sanctions today?”

“We are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system? We believe that it is important to level set and give people a cure period, but they should know that that will move very quickly and that we are serious,” Bessent said, although it’s unclear how he plans on demonstrating that seriousness without any clear timeline for the sanctions. 

“Secondary sanctions are a very powerful tool.… The reason we are able to use secondary sanctions is because we do not take their use lightly,” he concluded. “So we believe that a warning shot and a level set of expectations is appropriate, and if people do not want to meet our expectations, then we expect, and they should expect, that they will leave the dollar system.” 

Reporter: You described this as an economic D-Day, but D-Day wasn't a threat of an invasion and the US didn't give a timeline to Germany. So why not impose the sanctions today?

Bessent: Why would I want to blow up the global financial system? pic.twitter.com/WRt4onNuIM

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 24, 2026

It seems like the Trump administration rolled out Bessent for tough talk and unspecified threats because they are running out of options. The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for nearly 200 days, and Iran has already dealt with U.S. sanctions for 47 years. Why would this empty show of economic force change anything? 

After all of the White House’s insistence that President Donald Trump’s ballroom would be a lid over the world’s most top-secret and most necessary military installation, so top secret that Trump has blabbed about it constantly, it turns out that there was already a secret White House bunker. Whoopsie. The Washington Post reports that in the wake of 9/11, federal officials built an…

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Donald Trump’s administration has a new plan to turn the U.S. immigration system into a moneymaking scheme, ensuring that legal pathways to citizenship are out of reach for low-income immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security proposed a new rule Monday that would establish a $103,265 fee for immigrants petitioning for a H-1B worker visa.

The proposed fee would be applied to all H-1B visa petitioners, including those already in the United States, according to Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

“This fee would serve as a dedicated revenue mechanism to help recover a portion of the federal government’s costs of administering the lawful immigration system,” according to a federal notice.

The money raised from the fee would be directed to DHS, the Department of Labor, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice. Clearly, the rule is designed as a deterrent as the fee is prohibitively expensive for all but the most affluent.

In June, a federal judge blocked Trump’s original $100,000 H-1B visa fee for employers, finding that the fee was an illegal tax on businesses. It’s not clear why this new proposal wouldn’t be subject to a similar adjudication, as only Congress has the authority to impose taxes—not the president.

Trump has continued to undermine America’s ability to attract and retain talent from other countries. The administration’s racist replacement theories are accomplishing little other than to make our nation poorer and sicker. Meanwhile, one study estimates that H-1B visa holders who arrived between 1990 and 2020 were responsible for 30 percent to 50 percent of all productivity growth in the U.S. economy during that period—as well as spurring wage growth for native workers.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has become so toxic that even embattled Republicans are shying away from its donations.

The pro-Israel lobbying group has spent millions on an ad campaign to assist Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Senate in Michigan, in a contentious midterm race against Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. But Rogers and his team are wavering on the proposed ad expenditure, concerned that any ties to the organization might hurt rather than help him come November, The New York Times reported Monday.

Rogers reportedly brought up his reservations during a meeting last week with the AIPAC board chair, Michael Tuchin. Rogers did not explicitly say that he did not want AIPAC involved in his race, but encouraged the United Democracy Project, the organization’s super PAC, to ease up on its media plan and “give more serious thought to whether the organization is the best messenger” against El-Sayed, according to a source that spoke with the Times.

Bobby Schostak, Rogers’s adviser and fundraising consultant, said in a statement that their campaign welcomes support from AIPAC’s community.

“We have support from the Jewish and pro-Israel community,” he told the Times. “We want that support and will continue to welcome and are proud to have any and all support from the pro-Israel community and AIPAC community.”

Rogers hasn’t completely resisted the organization’s call: On Sunday, the election denier attended three AIPAC-hosted fundraising events in Los Angeles, and has plans to attend another on Monday.

El-Sayed has been a vocal critic of Israel since he entered the race. The progressive firebrand has described the ethnostate’s war against Gaza as a genocide, referred to its government as “evil,” and has argued against providing U.S. military aid to Israel.

AIPAC spent tens of millions of dollars—approximately $32 million via the United Democracy Project—in an unsuccessful bid to defeat El-Sayed in the state’s primary, backing his rival, Haley Stevens. Now, in an extraordinary political shift, the organization is gearing to spend millions more on Republicans rather than Democrats in a hail-mary effort to keep the 41-year-old, Oxford-educated doctor out of Washington.

“Our members remain determined to ensure that voters reject Dr. El-Sayed and his radical anti-Israel agenda in November,” Deryn Sousa, a spokeswoman for AIPAC, told the Times in a statement earlier this month.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford doesn’t care about President Trump’s threat to increase tariffs on cars and trucks produced in Canada.

On Truth Social Monday morning, Trump wrote that “Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years. Their ridiculously high tariffs on our Farmers and farm products has made life impossible for these great American Patriots, and has long created a 60 Billion Dollar Deficit between our two Countries. Not sustainable, and NOT ANYMORE!

“On January First, 2027, Tariffs on all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel, will be increased to 50%. Build in the U.S. and there are ZERO TARIFFS. Canada will be treated like a State no longer! On Trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst Nations in the World to deal with,” Trump continued.

In response, Ford told an Ottawa radio show, “Well, he can kiss my ass as far as I’m concerned. We’re going to go at him full steam, and we buy 400 percent more cars than anyone in the world.”

Ford pointed out that Canada exports oil and gas to the U.S. and supplies some states with electricity, and suggested that “maybe what we should be doing is charging him triple on the oil, triple on the potash, on the uranium, on our metals, and our rare earth metals.”

The Canadian politician, a member of the country’s right-wing Conservative Party, invoked former President Ronald Reagan in his rejoinder to Trump.

“We need to throw everything in the kitchen sink at him. He’s arrogant, he’s cocky, and you know, as Ronald Reagan said, ‘If you come to a draw with a bully, what stops that bully from coming after you the next day and the next day? And that’s all Donald Trump is, is a bully. Well, he’s going to have a rude awakening,” Ford said. He also told the Associated Press that Reagan would be “throwing up” from a picture of him Trump keeps in the Oval Office.

“He’d be throwing up on [Trump] from the picture if he knew what was going on, spinning around in his grave right now,” Ford said. “He should maybe take that picture off the wall and move it somewhere else. Because right now, Ronald Reagan would be disgusted with President Trump.”

Ford has invoked Reagan before in taking shots at Trump, using an audio clip from Reagan in October last year in a TV ad where the former president said tariffs only serve to “hurt every American.” The ad enraged Trump enough to end trade talks with Canada at the time.

Over the weekend, Canada halted tariff negotiations with the U.S. over last-minute demands from Trump such as changing Quebec’s French-language protections and the calculation of tariff payments on Canadian cars, among other details. Ford’s comments, coupled with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to the Canadian people Monday, suggest that the country is not going to back down in this new trade war launched by Trump.

In the opening scene of American writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future,” a heat wave combined with a breakdown of the electrical grid in India kills 20 million people. The devastation causes the world’s nations to unite to combat climate change. Scientists have long warned that the world will experience more intense extreme weather events like heat waves, storms…

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