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A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Trump says struggling sailors haven’t been at sea ‘nearly long enough’…

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National Guard members are speaking out about their feelings of humiliation and frustration being involved in Donald Trump’s year-long federal takeover of Washington D.C.

National Public Radio spoke with three National Guard members who were deployed for many months as part of the so-called “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force”—and surprise, surprise, they hated it.

“I will say very frankly that the bad taste that this mission left in my mouth, it actually embarrasses me to be involved in any way,” one guard member told NPR.

“I don’t want to think about the National Guard. I don’t want to necessarily discuss my affiliation with the National Guard. I don’t want to fulfill my normal National Guard duties just because of the abuses of the National Guard in this D.C. mission,” the guard member added.

After being summoned to address a so-called “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital, the National Guard was quickly looped in on trash pickup and other landscaping duties on the National Mall. So it shouldn’t come as a shock that all three National Guard members expressed skepticism about the reason they were deployed.

“Now, with it being a year, it’s hard to feel like that justification holds any water,” said another guard member. “It feels like the guard is being exploited in a sense.”

One of the guard members criticized Trump’s federal takeover as feeling like a “very authoritarian move.”

Another one of the Guardsmen said that their deployment felt like a political stunt, and pointed to the organization’s insertion in Trump’s false narratives about the city. Last month, the National Guard was ordered to patrol the perimeter of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after the president falsely claimed that it had been targeted by vandals.

“I hope that there will be some accounting someday—probably after President Trump is gone—about why we were there, and was it worth it? But none of that is gonna happen right now,” that member said.

The Trump administration has continued to lie about lowering the crime rates in the District of Columbia. Last month, the White House claimed that Washington D.C. had seen one of the steepest homicide drops of any city nationwide in the first six months of the year—but multiple reports have found that’s not true at all.

Last month, the Center for American Progress found that Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to American cities has cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion and failed to reduce the rate of violent crime. The Trump administration has responded by suing the organization for defamation.

A federal judge filed a temporary restraining order requiring an informant’s immediate return to the United States after he was deported three times—even after he willingly advised the Justice Department on Mexican cartel activity.

The informant, referred to as John Doe, provided “substantial assistance to the Department of Justice … against defendants affiliated with Mexican drug cartels” in 2024, placing his own life on the line for the U.S. government, U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher wrote. And yet last month, with no prior notice, the Department of Homeland Security deported him to Guatemala before turning him over to Mexican officials—even though a judge ruled over two years ago that he was “more likely than not to be tortured by the government or by individuals acting with the acquiescence of the government if he were returned to Mexico.”

Guatemala refused to accept him as he wasn’t a Guatemalan official, and Mexican officials at the embassy there refused to accept him after learning he had received protection under the Convention Against Torture. Doe was sent back to Texas and shuffled between different holding facilities until DHS tried to send him directly to Mexico around July 15. Mexico again refused. Finally, on August 1, DHS successfully deported Doe back to Mexico, where he has been since—hiding for his life out of fear that “the cartels that he provided information against will find him and torture or kill him before he can return to the United States,” Gallagher noted.

To deport a man risking deadly retribution after helping the U.S. government fight cartels—something the Trump administration claims is a massive priority—is absolutely cruel and unusual.

“A man put himself at enormous risk to turn on the cartels and testify against them, making him a target for a hideous death if they ever got their hands on him. As a result, he got protection under the Convention Against Torture,” American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote on X. “The Trump admin deported him to Mexico anyway.”

Gallagher, a Trump appointee, expressed a similar sentiment in her TRO.

“The record clearly demonstrates that there is an imminent danger of irreparable harm, in the form of potential torture or even death, if Doe is not immediately returned to the United States.... Doe was sent [to] a region of Mexico where there is active cartel activity, without any of his money or personal belongings, reliant on the help of strangers while attempting to remain in hiding,” she wrote. “The Court thus finds that the irreparable harm factor overwhelmingly supports the immediate necessity of ordering Doe’s return to the United States.”

Actor Mark Ruffalo fired back Sunday against accusations of antisemitism over his criticisms of Paramount Skydance’s planned merger with Warner Bros., calling the attacks “appalling and fundamentally dishonest.”

In a statement posted to social media, Ruffalo referenced Paramount CEO David Ellison and his father, Larry, the co-founder of the tech company Oracle.

“This merger has real consequences for real people, and for the entire country. Scrutinizing the Ellisons, including Oracle’s business built on data, surveillance technology and government contracts, and the serious threat to editorial freedom and the loss of a livelihood for thousands of families, is fair and necessary,” Ruffalo warned.

Ruffalo made the statement after he shared an Instagram post on Friday from the BDS Movement, which advocates boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel and any companies that profit from its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The post showed former Oracle CEO Safra Catz explaining that the Israeli military runs its occupation with the help of “really profoundly scary technology at Oracle.”

According to NBC News, Ruffalo’s story post said, “These ‘really profoundly scary technologies’ will most likely be merged into one of the largest media conglomerates in the world and one day used on you. Look how [Catz] revels in what we now have come to see as a genocide, which was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle.”

Ruffalo also made a call to action for his followers to oppose the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger because it would increase cable costs and reduce competition, which would be “catastrophic for our film industry.”

On Friday evening, a Paramount spokesperson said in a statement that the company is “troubled when antisemitic tropes are invoked in purported service of a business dispute,” adding that “words like ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid,’ applied to a corporate transaction, aren’t just wrong—they’re a bridge too far, and they cheapen the very real suffering those words are meant to describe.”

Ruffalo rejected those attacks, saying, “Criticizing the actions of the Israeli prime minister, a military technology contract, or the executives who supply it is not the same as criticizing Jewish people. This critical and necessary dialogue is then dishonestly framed as being anti-Israel.

“To be clear, my views come from my own political convictions and should never be interpreted as hostility toward Jewish people, for whom I have deep love and respect. Everything I know about acting, activism, and humanism has been profoundly shaped by the Jewish friends, colleagues, and loved ones who have been integral and family throughout every point of my life,” Ruffalo added.

Ruffalo has a history of political activism, supporting environmental causes including opposing fossil fuel extraction, supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia, protesting against President Trump, and standing up for Palestine, which he said in an interview last year has cost him friends.

“I can’t talk to them anymore. They’re either trying to convince me that the Palestinian people are all terrorists and they all deserve to die, or, in the same breath, will tell me that they’re actually human shields and they deserve to die because they’re human shields,” Ruffalo said to Mehdi Hasan in November.

A service member aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln returning from a widely criticized extended deployment is now contending with a family crisis after ICE agents arrested his father. The USS Lincoln was stuck in the Middle East for a record-breaking 270 continuous days at sea as part of President Donald Trump’s decision to wage war against Iran. Family members of service members serving on the…

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Trade talks with Canada collapsed over the weekend after the Trump administration demanded the country curtail its culture. But one interesting wrinkle is that the Trump administration’s intransigence has potentially, if only temporarily, healed a rift between the French-speaking Québécois and their English-speaking neighbors.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suspended the talks on Friday, triggering President Trump’s 50 percent tariff rate on roughly $28 billion in Canadian exports. Carney has promised to match the tariffs “dollar for dollar.”

In a powerful speech delivered the following day, Carney referred to the U.S. as untrustworthy and unreliable, informing the Canadian public that the country would need to forge a more independent future without the U.S.

“We cannot control the storm blowing in from Washington,” Carney said. “We can chart a new course by building Canada strong at home and diversifying our trading relationships abroad.”

The “new U.S. tariffs are designed to hurt us and divide us,” Carney continued. “They’re a miscalculation.”

Canada’s reciprocal tariffs against goods and services from the U.S. are expected to begin September 8.

The two nations had spent months drafting a suitable trade agreement—talks that, according to Trump, were fruitful. Last Tuesday, Trump told reporters that the countries had reached a deal and were fine-tuning some details. On Friday, hours before the midnight deadline, Trump still insisted that he believed a deal could be reached.

Canadian officials did not paint the same picture. Premier Christine Fréchette told reporters Saturday that the U.S. had demanded last-minute concessions relating to Quebec’s French-language protections. “A red line,” she noted.

“Our culture, our language, is central to our identity, and it is important to exclude that from the negotiating table,” Fréchette said, according to The Montreal Gazette. “Even though we are threatened with different tariffs, it won’t change. We will stay the way we are.”

Carney similarly said that the U.S. had “asked too much.”

The Trump administration has singled out two Canadian laws as pressure points in the negotiations: Bill 96, an act that identifies French as the official language of Quebec, as well as Bill 109, which affirms the cultural sovereignty of the region and grants it the ability to set French-language quotas for French-language content (which it has not yet done). The two laws were passed in 2022 and 2025, respectively.

American officials have claimed that the laws have placed an undue burden on U.S. manufacturers, requiring them to produce packaging, controls, and instruction manuals in French in order to sell products in Quebec. Some of America’s biggest streaming companies—including Netflix, YouTube, Apple, and Spotify—have also argued against the laws, contending that there are practical issues relating to the theoretical implementation of language quotas in their databases.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said in a statement that “this is a missed opportunity for Canada to partner with the United States,” adding that the offer would have given Canada “the best treatment of any major exporter to our market.”

In response to this weekend’s trade talks, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, the leader of the currently out-of-power Parti Québécois, said that any future referendum on Quebec’s independence would be delayed until Trump leaves the White House. “This unpredictability of the American administration will harm our process as well as the quality of the debate on our future as a nation,” he said.

There are currently no scheduled meetings to continue talks between the two countries, according to a senior Trump official.

The United States and Canada, historic allies along an undefended border, fell deeper into a trade war Saturday marked by angry recriminations and new tariffs that are expected to raise prices for products in both countries. Each side blamed the other for the collapse of negotiations in Washington late Friday, leading the U.S. to impose 50% tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods and…

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47 minutes agoWalter EinenkelTrump starts new tariff fight on social media. Copy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 5 minutes agoWalter EinenkelFox Business embarrasses itself—and Trump’s top NASA stoogeCopy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 25 minutes agoWalter EinenkelInline comment threads are live!Copy linkShare on FacebookShare on XShare via email 33 minutes…

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A Florida father was arrested by U.S. Border Patrol while his son serves on the now infamous USS Lincoln in the Persian Gulf.

Luis Manuel Aviles, a 19-year U.S. resident with a work permit, was detained by Border Patrol agents outside of his Key West home on Saturday. Originally from Nicaragua, Aviles was working as a handyman when he was detained.

“Having a family member in the military is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement, claiming that it “does not pick and choose which laws to enforce.”

Aviles’s son Joshua expressed devastation and “heartbreak” as he heard the news aboard the Lincoln.

“I’ve been deployed for over nine months, out at sea in the Middle East aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, fighting for a country that has given me everything. I just got a call that my dad was taken by ICE,” he wrote in a Facebook post on Saturday. “My dad has his driver’s license, Social Security card, and work permit. We have done everything through immigration to get his green card approved, and we are just waiting.”

“This is heartbreaking for me. I don’t know how I can mentally continue working 12+ hour days knowing that my dad is somewhere, possibly being treated like a criminal,” he continued. “My dad’s only ‘crime’ was coming to this country to give my siblings and me a better life.”

The USS Lincoln—which has been out at sea for over 270 days, a record—has reportedly suffered from food shortages and sanitation issues. There have also been multiple instances in which sailors tried to jump overboard. On top of all of that, Aviles is now forced to spend the remainder of his time on the ship tortured by the thought of his father’s detainment and potential deportation—as he may not even get to see him after hundreds of days in the Persian Gulf.

Yet another Dan Sullivan has entered the chat.

In the Alaska Senate race, which has managed to give everyone a headache, former Anchorage Mayor Dan A. Sullivan has endorsed Republican Senator Dan S. Sullivan for reelection over retired teacher Dan J. Sullivan, NBC News reported Sunday.

“As the OG Dan Sullivan, I urge Alaskans to vote for Sen. Dan S. Sullivan. He’s been great for Alaska,” the former mayor wrote in a post on Facebook last week.

For those keeping score at home, in last week’s all-party primary elections, Dan S. Sullivan advanced to the general election, against a tough Democratic challenge from former Representative Mary Peltola. Despite Alaska’s typical GOP lean, Sullivan secured roughly 43 percent of the vote, while Peltola won 48 percent.

Dan J. Sullivan, who is also running as a Republican, secured only 2.4 percent of the vote but was still more successful than the other 13 challengers not named “Dan Sullivan.” The primary is decided by ranked-choice voting, and the top four finishers advance—meaning that this Senate race could still be a state-wide Sullivan-off.

After initially blocking Danny J from running, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled in June that the Alaska Division of Elections did not have the authority to create new requirements for candidates—like, that they have different names.

Our summer merch series is back with its next drop—and this one says exactly what we’ve been doing for more than two decades. RAISING HELL. SINCE 2002. The new Raising Hell T-shirt features the slogan front and center, with Daily Kos underneath—a nod to 24 years of fighting back, speaking out, organizing, and refusing to sit quietly while the right tries to drag this country backward.

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Vice President JD Vance has taken a page out of President Donald Trump’s playbook, blatantly lying at an event in Ohio this past Friday when he said that he and Trump are putting homeownership in reach for many Americans. “We’re finally seeing that American dream of homeownership become accessible again to our young people,” Vance said, in a remark so absurd that the people the White House…

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President Trump may have undermined his own legal argument to build a new White House ballroom.

Trump is claiming that ballroom is necessary because it will also provide a secure underground facility in case of a national emergency, an argument his lawyers have used in court. But former White House officials told The Washington Post that the building already has a fortified bunker deep underground that was built more than a decade ago to shelter the president and White House staffers.

The facility, located over 60 feet underneath the White House, was secretly built during the Obama administration and can house dozens of people for multiple weeks, the officials told the Post. It can withstand a nuclear bomb and was designed to give the president a secure command center if such a disastrous scenario takes place.

Trump and his lawyers have argued in court that the White House ballroom is necessary for national security because secure underground facilities are part of the plans. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle repeated those arguments when contacted by the Post.

“The East Wing Modernization Project is inextricably tied to the security of the President, the White House grounds and the certain security infrastructure assets,” Ingle said in a statement. “Recent events such as the foiled attack on the historic UFC Freedom 250 event at the White House proves exactly why the East Wing Modernization Project is severely needed for large scale events, which include drone proof structures and drone ports among other critical security enhancements.”

Last week, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts stayed a lower court ruling and allowed the Trump administration to continue construction on the ballroom while the high court considers the White House’s arguments. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia had ruled that the ballroom was illegal because Trump didn’t have congressional approval.

Administration officials such as White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller have used national security arguments to defend the ballroom. Miller wrote in a court filing that the construction “serves continuity-of-government interests by ensuring that the President and senior national security staff are able to operate from a protected facility during any attack on the nation’s capital.”

In an August 13 filing to the Supreme Court, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll wrote, “Securing this reinforced subterranean node guarantees uninterrupted command and control in place.”

The White House ballroom and underground facilities are “a nondiscretionary prerequisite to ensure the President can maintain continuity of government, uninterrupted operations, and effectively exercise National Command Authority during an attack or global crisis,” Driscoll wrote.

But the Post’s report shows that all of those arguments don’t hold up when there’s already a secure, underground bunker at the White House that is just over a decade old. Trump is expending government resources to defend a vanity project that has no real justification besides his own love of luxury buildings.

A private arbitrator has ordered The Washington Post to rehire opinion columnist Karen Attiah—who was fired from the paper last September after she criticized gun violence and posted a racist quote from right-wing activist Charlie Kirk after his death.  

“After the Washington Post fired me last year for speaking the truth in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, I fought back. And I’m happy to announce: I won my case against the Washington Post,” Attiah—the Post’s only Black opinion columnist at the time of her firing—wrote Monday on Bluesky. “They have been ordered to reinstate me immediately.”

“This decision confirms what we’ve said from the start: I was doing my job as an opinion writer, and this was wrongful termination,” she said in another statement. 

An independent arbitrator found the Post “violated” its labor agreement and “did not have good and sufficient cause” to fire Attiah, according to a copy of the order reviewed by The New York Times.

Attiah made a string of posts on Bluesky in the aftermath of Kirk’s shooting in Utah, which followed a school shooting in Colorado, with only one of her posts actually mentioning Kirk by name. 

“I wish I had hope for gun control and that I could believe ‘political violence has no place in this country.’ But we live in a country that accepts white children being massacred by gun violence,” she wrote first. “Not just accepts, but worships violence.”

“Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence,” she then wrote, referring to Kirk, who spent much of his career trying to justify racism and bigotry. “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” she said later.

The one post Attiah made that actually had Kirk’s name in it was a slightly paraphrased quote. 

“‘Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot’—Charlie Kirk,” she wrote. (Kirk’s original quote was “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously,” in reference to former First Lady Michelle Obama, news host Joy Reid, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and former Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, although his ire was certainly directed at any successful Black woman.) 

Attiah said the Post found her Bluesky posts to be “unacceptable,” “gross misconduct,” and “endangering the physical safety” of her co-workers. She added that she was fired “without conversation,” and called it a “violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.” The arbitrator felt similarly, and the decision to reinstate Attiah was widely celebrated. 

“Journalists can’t work at an organization where they must live in fear of being arbitrarily fired for doing their jobs—which, in Karen’s case, was writing her opinion,” Washington Post Guild Chair Natalie Vineberg wrote in a statement. “This decision is a victory for all Guild members who benefit from and fought for the just cause protections in our contract, and a tribute to every Guild member who took action in solidarity with Karen.”

By Arthur Allen for KFF Northwestern University economist Chuck Manski studies decision-making amid uncertainty. That prepared him better than many other cancer patients to decide whether to stay on an immunotherapy treatment that was making him very ill. For six months in 2022, Manski received monthly infusions of nivolumab to fight advanced melanoma. The drug ruined his thyroid…

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

The Trump administration’s push to expand oil and gas extraction across the US is set to bring drilling near cherished natural and cultural sites, raising alarm among conservationists and prompting questions from the UN’s heritage body.

UNESCO said it had received information on the administration’s plan to scrap a drilling-free buffer zone around the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico, a world heritage site and one of the most important cultural areas in the US. A UNESCO spokesperson said it had procedures regarding “potential threats” to a world heritage property and was awaiting a response from the federal government as to its impact.

“The world heritage committee has consistently considered extractive activities to be incompatible with world heritage status,” a UNESCO spokesperson said.

As well as warning about the consequences of drilling within the boundaries of world heritage sites, the spokesperson said the committee had also “emphasized that projects proposed outside world heritage properties should not adversely affect their outstanding universal value—which are the features of the site that justify its inscription, and should be subject to appropriate impact assessments before decisions are taken”.

The US has 27 world heritage sites, places protected by international treaty for their cultural, historical or scientific significance, including parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite and landmarks such as the Statue of Liberty.

Several of them, however, have nearby drilling or mining projects, with Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” approach leading to a sweeping opening up of the US’s forests, oceans and protected landscapes to the extraction of the fossil fuels that are dangerously overheating the planet.

“We will be a rich nation again and it is the liquid gold under our feet that will help us do it,” the president has said. “We have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth—and we are going to use it.”

One US world heritage site, the Everglades, is listed as being “in danger” due to the impact of development and pollution. Others could join this imperiled list if nearby industrialization is deemed harmful. “UNESCO follows developments that may have implications for world heritage properties and their outstanding universal value,” said the spokesperson, who added that nearby industrial projects should be “carefully assessed” before proceeding.

Some Republicans have lobbied the US president to remove a ban on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon, a world heritage site, while the administration has leased thousands of acres for oil and gas drilling near the fragile underground cave systems in another listed site, the Carlsbad Caverns national park in New Mexico.

It is at Chaco, however, where the threat of oil and gas drilling looms largest. The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has proposed eradicating a 10-mile buffer zone shielding the protected area from industrial activity including fossil fuel drilling and uranium mining, a move that a broad coalition of opponents, including tribal leaders, archeologists and green groups, warns could cause major environmental harm to the area.

The plan to begin drilling into the 336,400-acre zone next to Chaco attracted 100,000 mostly hostile submissions in an unusually short 14-day public comment period that closed in July.

Deb Haaland, the former interior secretary who oversaw the creation of the buffer zone in 2023, said its removal would cause “irreversible damage.” She added of Trump and Steve Pearce, director of the BLM: “Their attempt to profit off this sacred place shows a clear lack of consideration and disrespect for the lives that New Mexicans live.”

The 53-sq-mile historic park in northwestern New Mexico contains a trove of key cultural sites, including the ruins of pueblos, settlements of the Indigenous Pueblo peoples. The site is also internationally recognized by astronomers as being a dark skies area, ideal for viewing the stars.

“This park offers an incredible transportive experience where you essentially go back in time 1,000 years to experience what the ancient Pueblo people saw,” said Maude Dinan, New Mexico program manager at the National Parks Conservation Association. “The buffer zone is incredibly important and removing it would completely change this experience.”

Allowing oil and gas development near Chaco would introduce a toxic haze of air pollution that would cut visitor numbers, opponents contend, as well as spoil views, risk water pollution from fracking activities, and result in bright lights and gas flaring that would ruin the pristine dark skies once treasured by the Pueblo people, who were keen astronomers, as well as today’s stargazers.

Daniel Tso, a community leader in the region’s Navajo community where he served as a Navajo Nation council delegate, said there were allotments of land outside the buffer zone where the oil and gas industry had shown “total disregard for the community and total disrespect for the landholders.” He fears the same situation closer to Chaco should the buffer zone be eradicated.

“I have allotments inside the buffer zone where the land is untouched, the aquifers are pristine,” he said. “If the oil and gas companies go in there the sacredness of that land is gone. Outside this zone, some of these oil and gas wells are within 100 feet of Navajo people’s homes, causing tremendous health impacts.”

Dinan said she was pessimistic the outcry over the BLM’s plan would be heeded, pointing to recent administration decisions to shrink the protected areas of two prized national monuments in Utah and to ditch a rule that safeguarded swathes of untouched forests.

“It makes me wonder where the line in the sand is; it feels that no matter how valuable or sacred a place is, the administration is willing to trade it all in,” she said.

“Almost all of the federal land around places like Chaco and Carlsbad is already leased for oil and gas drilling, so the idea there’s an urgent new demand for this is an illusion. There doesn’t seem like a good coexistence going on at the moment.”

The Department of Interior, which oversees the BLM, and the National Parks Service did not respond to a request for comment.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 24 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

The furor around Donald Trump’s very devoted young aide, Natalie Harp, isn’t abating in the least, and new reporting indicates that anger inside the White House over this story—all driven by the fury of one person in particular—might have backfired, making the story even worse for him. This comes as new leaks also suggest Harp’s role is even more unnerving than we thought.

The whole saga indicates something important about Donald Trump’s political weakness right now, and how Dems can exploit it in today’s information environment. We’re talking about it all with Democratic strategist Greg Greene, who held the job of managing social media accounts under President Obama and wrote about this experience for The New Republic. Greg, good to have you on.

Greg Greene: Glad to be here.

Sargent: OK, so last week Senator Jon Ossoff pointed out that Trump doesn’t like doing the job as president, and instead likes to spend his time traveling with Natalie on the presidential plane. The White House and MAGA went absolutely haywire, resulting in a story that continues right now. Greg, can you bring us up to speed on all this?

Greene: Yes. Jon Ossoff really set off a furor by bringing Natalie into the conversation, and the story has spun out of control almost since then for the White House. What I would say is that I really got interested in this thinking about how Natalie Harp has access not only to the president himself, but also to his phone and to his social media accounts, which really raises questions, in my view, based on my experience, about the appropriateness of her role without supervision in the content that goes out.

Sargent: Yeah, and we’re going to get to that in a second. But we’re now getting new reporting from The Atlantic that reports that the White House freak-out over Harp was really a self-own. The White House publicly tried to humiliate journalists who wrote or asked about Harp, but that only persuaded more outlets that had ignored her role to write about her.

And then The Atlantic reports that aides inside the White House grew angrier because, according to sources, they were, quote, “taking their cues from a furious president.”

Greene: I agree with the White House staffers who believe that this approach to the conversation has really backfired on the White House. Natalie Harp is someone who people have covered since at least 2024.

Maggie Haberman has written about her role in the White House operation and the campaign operation before, but she managed to fly under the radar before now—when, thanks to the escapade in Ankara, Turkey, with the catering cart, she became a live wire in news coverage, in a heated story, and has been since then talked about in a way that really hasn’t served her interests or the president’s, in a time when the president’s approval ratings are already in the tank.

Sargent: Absolutely. And Greg, we know how Trump operates. It goes all the way back to Roy Cohn. It’s never concede error, always attack, always try to humiliate at all costs. What’s the difference between the way Natalie Harp and Trump are doing this versus the way you did it under Obama?

Greene: Well, the biggest difference is that there were many layers between myself and the president. As I say in the piece for The New Republic, I never wrote on a plane, never mind a catering cart. I spent my time at the Democratic National Committee working with colleagues there and consulting with the digital director, the communications director, and people inside the White House communications office to figure out what priorities we had for getting messages out, and to shape our posts around those agenda items.

So it was never an instance of one staffer—never mind myself—getting into the president’s ear and proposing material, because really it was an operation designed to support the presidency, rather than one person just whispering into another person’s ear.

Sargent: And you also didn’t decide what the president saw and what he doesn’t see. If the White House had said nothing, most reporters would have moved on very quickly. But then the vehemence of the reaction kind of stirs the interest of the reporters, because it starts to look like there’s some reason the White House doesn’t want this relationship with this young aide talked about. And boom, there’s the ingredient to really make it blow up.

You’ve been doing this stuff a long time. What does this tell us about how Washington works?

Greene: Well, I would say the first thing is that Washington loves a scandal. When I was at the University of Virginia as a student many, many years ago, I studied in a seminar with political scientist Larry Sabato about campaigns and elections. He wrote the book Feeding Frenzy, about how scandals develop and gain a momentum of their own. And what we’re seeing, perhaps for one of the first times in the Trump presidency, especially in his second term, is an example of that playing out in real life.

He has usually been able to escape this sort of cyclical scrutiny that amplifies as news cycles go on, one after the next. But this time people are really interested in Natalie Harp. And I have to say, they have reason to be, because the relationship between her and the president, and the fashion in which she manages the president’s communications—helping him text with world leaders, helping him craft his social media posts, his Truth Social—without having a gatekeeper in between her and the send button, is highly unusual.

Sargent: It sure is. Well, The New York Times talked to a bunch of advisors around Trump, and they were pretty happy to leak about Natalie Harp. They talked about how she’s really this information gatekeeper for Trump, and his advisors think that because of her, some of the information he gets is, quote, “poisonous and counterproductive,” as the Times put it.

And listen to this from the Times: “She supplies him with content she fishes out of the social media gutter, like the video he posted depicting the Obamas as apes.” Greg, I don’t get why that little nugget didn’t get more attention. It’s a big deal that she was behind him posting that, isn’t it?

Greene: It is a massive revelation. I was personally not shocked, but taken aback by that confirmation. And I would say that, just as a professional who’s been in the shoes of people who post to these accounts that are widely watched, there is a serious lack of editorial judgment that is spoken to by the idea of depicting any public figure in this country, especially a former president of the United States, as an ape. I don’t understand how that had not been a bigger story up to now.

Sargent: I mean, under a conventional presidency, something like that would be a firing offense. I get that Donald Trump has completely revamped the rules for everything and turned the whole idea of a firing offense and scandal into something completely different than it ever was before.

But I would think that if anything close to that happened under a Democratic president, and we knew from the pages of The New York Times that this particular aide fished out this image and got it put on social media under the president’s handle, you’d think that person would get fired instantly, wouldn’t you?

Greene: Yes, I absolutely do think someone would get fired instantly. And more than that, I can think of any number of people who you and I both know, from my time working at the Democratic National Committee, at whose hands I might not even be alive right now had I been so irresponsible with the privilege I had of administering those accounts. It is not only a firing offense, in my view, but it’s unspeakable.

Sargent: And so if she’s got this control over his social media feed—we’ve seen posts with him depicted as Jesus Christ and all these other types of posts that really deify him, that really go to the core of this kind of personalist-dictator vibe that he wants out there about himself. She’s clearly the key figure.

And you can kind of see something even more unnerving in all this, because we’ve now learned from reporting that she really deifies Donald Trump. And so from her letters and stuff like that, we’ve—she essentially dotes over him to the degree that she doesn’t want him to ever suffer any negative feelings of any kind. She wants to bring him joy and so forth and so on.

So you can kind of see where these posts depicting him as Jesus Christ are actually coming from. And I think that given that the whole world is seeing the American president depict himself as the Almighty, we want to know who’s behind that, I think.

Greene: Yes, absolutely. And there is a lack of perspective that is revealed in the letters that were reported yesterday in another publication, that she had written to the president—calling herself unworthy, asking for his approval and forgiveness. Things that I would never have contemplated doing, because, frankly, I was working for the betterment of the president and the presidency, and deliberately kept myself out of public view in my role writing that content, because my profile was not the point. The point was the president’s agenda, and the agenda of the people who helped to bring him to the White House.

Sargent: I think you really put your finger on an important distinction there, which is that under previous presidents—maybe somewhat less so under George W. Bush, but certainly under Democratic presidents—a lot of the senior staff that work with the president and shape his message and so forth understand the presidency as a public thing.

It’s not about one person. It’s about something that the country possesses. It’s an institution that is preserved from one administration to the next. It isn’t about the deification of one person. And under Donald Trump, tons have been written about how his presidency is functionally like a personalist one. But there you really see it very clearly.

The people around Trump do not see the presidency as a public thing, as something that he is stewarding and shepherding on behalf of the American people. They solely understand it as being only about him. And I think this story really reveals that very clearly. What do you think of that?

Greene: It’s really degrading and sordid to be governed in this way—to have the highest office in the land used as a vehicle for glorification of someone who would post material depicting a former president as an ape. Who would post material depicting himself as a fighter pilot dropping poop on No Kings protesters, who are his fellow Americans, on whose behalf he’s supposed to be governing.

It is a day-in and day-out sordid spectacle. And for me personally, I find this—I don’t take it as a personal embarrassment, because I’m not in the White House, I have long since been away from the role of posting social media for people in high office. But I do find this incredibly disappointing and concerning, because the access that she has, both to his information flow and to his accounts, really creates problems for people who are concerned about misuse of that access for various purposes, whether insider trading or worse.

Sargent: And we haven’t even probed yet—no reporters have really gotten to the core of whether she’s instrumental in his tweets that seem to undermine his own negotiators with Iran, for instance.

Greene: Exactly.

Sargent: There’s a paradox at the core of this I want to try to identify as well. Trump and MAGA really think that they have this boundless power to humiliate anyone who dares to criticize them, or really anyone who dares to tell the truth about them. They have this limitless ability to control the information space, they think. And so to them, they can just simply demolish anyone who talks about Harp and leave them in kind of smoking ruins or whatever.

But the problem for them is that the Natalie Harp story does reveal highly unnerving truths about this man’s temperament and total unfitness to be president. And once the story gets onto that topic, their power shrivels and disappears. That’s what we’re seeing here. What do you think of all that, Greg?

Greene: Yes, I do think their power to control and dictate the agenda does dissipate in moments like this. And what we’re seeing here with Natalie Harp is a picture of a White House run poorly, of a president with no self-restraint, with terrible instincts about what’s in the best interest of the country to publish.

And it’s being displayed in a visceral way, because we have also seen Natalie Harp being rescued from what the president considered to be an Air Force One at possible risk—over the head of the secretary of state and other Cabinet officers who are in the presidential line of succession. It is an incredible story about judgment and misjudgment, and it almost tells itself, but I’m glad to help tell part of it.

Sargent: Well, you certainly did. And one last thought on all this, to close. I think a lot of people, you know, in the media look at this and they say, OK, well, did Jon Ossoff err by, you know, making this personal? Did Jon Ossoff make a mistake by attacking a professional woman? Did Jon Ossoff open himself to attacks from the White House by appearing to insinuate things about Trump’s sexual habits or whatever?

And I just think that mindset that looks at it that way is wrong. And it’s actually an insider-D.C. mindset that just misses what I think you got at earlier, which is the degree to which this kind of stuff—seeing this president do this—is just degrading and terrible for us all to live under.

And I think the American people look at a story like this and they see it the way we’re describing it, not the way those D.C. insider types describe it. They see a story of someone who’s just wiping his ass with a public thing, which is the presidency. And they hate that. They hate the ballroom, they hate the Reflecting Pool nonsense.

I think this stuff really works against Trump and Republicans, and underscores that the Republican Party has just let this madman run amok with our stuff, right? And I think that’s the way the story is perceived. What do you think, Greg?

Greene: I think that’s right. It’s certainly how I perceive it. It’s certainly my feeling about how the presidency and the White House have been treated over the last year and a half–plus. I would also say this. Natalie Harp is a grown woman. Just like I was a grown man when I was running those accounts and when I was working at the DNC, there were times when I came under attack for things that I wrote in my personal capacity—not in a public capacity, but that were visible to the public and the press, which followed me at the time.

And there were times when people gave me grief over wordings of social media posts I made on behalf of the Democrats. There are people who today go after the woman who runs the Democrats’ official account now, as in the time when she went after Stephen Miller, rightly so, in my opinion.

So if you are holding a position of public trust—whether that’s even just public-facing, like mine at the Democratic National Committee, or if you are on the federal salary paid by the American people, like Natalie Harp—you have to be able to accept criticism and scrutiny. And the idea that she is a damsel who needs defending from the eyes of the public who pay her salary is pathetic, frankly. I would hope she gets her big-girl pants on and faces the scrutiny that is rightly coming to her, head-on.

Sargent: Very well said. Greg Greene, thanks so much for coming on, man. We really appreciate it.

Greene: I appreciate it. Thanks.

In June, during the first of the record heat waves to scorch Europe this summer, “the London Ambulance Service fielded over 53,000 calls, surpassing the number received when the Covid-19 pandemic was at its height in March 2020,” Bloomberg Green reported this week. And conditions inside U.K. hospitals were “far worse” than during Covid, Fiona Brennan, an anesthetist in Cardiff, Wales, told Bloomberg. It was so hot inside surgery rooms for cancer patients that basic procedures faltered, Brennan said, adding that some patients were so sweaty that she had to constantly check that intravenous drips were not “slipping out” of their bodies.

Also, as with Covid, early mortality figures dramatically understated the death tolls to come. The U.K. Health Security Agency initially estimated that 2,877 people died from heat-related ailments in May and June. France estimated 5,700 excess deaths took place between June 17 and July 2. Other analyses, benefiting from more complete data and advanced methodology, blamed the heat for as many as 20,000 deaths across Europe. And that was before the June heat wave was followed by an additional four heat waves that surely boosted the number of sick and dying.

Europe is not the only hot spot. In India, temperatures in the capital, Delhi, soared to 54 degrees Celsius (129 degrees Fahrenheit), pushing the limits of human survival, especially for the city’s poor, and again illustrating a core injustice of the climate emergency: The people who did the least to cause it are the ones who tend to suffer the most.

But despite such parallels, there are critical differences between the Covid and climate emergencies. In the opening weeks of the pandemic, scientists weren’t sure how the virus spread, or how to treat it. By contrast, science is unequivocal that today’s extreme heat waves—and the drought and fires they’ve kindled—would be “all but impossible” without human-caused global warming driven primarily by burning oil, gas, and coal. “Summer of 2026 is another step in the escalation of our world into a sort of hotter, more dangerous planet that climate scientists have been telling us about for decades,” Jeff Goodell, the author of The Heat Will Kill You First, said on CBS News.

Another difference: When Covid emerged in early 2020, much of the news media rose to the challenge, providing science-based reporting that helped both the public and policymakers make informed decisions about how to respond. Journalists also held governments to account, puncturing claims of miracle cures and explaining the value of physical distancing and getting vaccinated.

But, with notable exceptions like those cited in this article, news coverage of this summer’s extreme weather has fallen well short of the Covid standard. Two-thirds of the articles that major U.K. newspapers published about the summer’s fires did not even mention climate change, much less explain how record heat makes fires more likely and more deadly. In the U.S., the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC between July 13 and 19 lavished airtime on the extreme weather but did not utter the words “climate change.”

The Guardian, as usual, has kept the climate connection front and center, and on August 8, it published an opinion piece by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, who urged government leaders in Britain and around the world to treat climate change as the emergency that scientists say it is—something Khan began doing as mayor in 2018. Khan’s call for leaders to “reduce our reliance on oil and gas” did not name names, but commentators interpreted it as pressing the new British prime minister, Andy Burnham, to rule out more North Sea oil drilling, a question Burnham has studiously avoided since taking office on July 20. Meanwhile, a petition demanding that the government present a televised emergency briefing on the climate crisis has attracted 100,000 signatures, the threshold for getting it debated in Parliament, whose next session begins September 1.

Khan was only half right, however, when he opined that “the climate emergency is here, and no one can say they didn’t see it coming.” Yes, the emergency is here, and “coming faster and harder” than even scientists expected, economist Matthew Agarwala of the University of Sussex said on Britain’s Channel 4. But as Khan’s own article goes on to lament, a small but noisy chorus of climate deniers still deny that climate change is happening at all.

Khan cites Donald Trump’s dismissal of climate change as “a con job” and calls out unnamed “opposition politicians and right-wing populists” in the U.K. He does not point out that these obstructionists represent only a small fraction of public opinion. More than eight out of 10 Britons (83 percent), as well as three out of four Americans (74 percent), want their governments to take stronger climate action, according to Gallup polling that informs Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project. But the deniers appear to be more numerous than they actually are, both because they have access to far-reaching megaphones and because most news coverage does not point out how wildly their claims are contradicted by science.

Again, the contrast with media coverage of Covid is striking. On April 23, 2020, as Covid’s death toll was mounting, Trump suggested at a White House press briefing that injecting disinfectant into the body might kill the virus. News outlets responded with a flurry of stories quoting incredulous experts lambasting Trump’s idea as dangerous nonsense. Trump quickly retreated, claiming that he’d been speaking sarcastically (though video of his remarks showed he was serious).

Now, as the summer of 2026 brings record heat to much of the world, as thousands die and many thousands more endure various degrees of misery, White House reporters do not even ask Trump about climate change, much less challenge his scientifically disproven assertion that it’s a hoax. In the U.K., press coverage largely ignores the climate argument against more North Sea oil drilling, instead framing Burnham’s upcoming decision as the latest battle in the culture wars.

Most journalists did better than this during Covid, and the public needs us to do better now.

This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

The situation is dire. Millions of people in the United States are months away from losing their health care. On January 1, dramatic changes to Medicaid outlined in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, or OBBA, will take effect, impacting who is eligible for Medicaid. The new law excludes some groups completely (like most immigrants), introduces “community engagement” requirements (defined as 80 hours a month of work, volunteering, or school) for most people (apart from the elderly, children, and pregnant women), and requires renewals twice a year (as opposed to yearly). Some people have been impacted already (Nebraska implemented its changes on May 1 and began disenrolling people this month), and some will be kicked off their health care in October, when some previously qualified immigrants are made ineligible for Medicaid.

Though 92 percent of people should remain eligible for Medicaid coverage (through either a qualifying exemption or meeting the community engagement requirements), millions will still end up losing care. This is because of the substantial bureaucratic hurdles the OBBA introduces. In addition to increasing the intervals during which people must reverify their eligibility, the government has introduced an onerous process for documenting exemptions to the “community engagement” (i.e., work) requirements.

The process has become a maze of bureaucratic imposition. According to the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, you can get an exemption if you have a diagnosis that meets the criteria for being “medically frail.” However, the government has decided to go even further, potentially requiring attestation from a medical provider that an individual’s condition is sufficiently debilitating to keep them from working. The government cites “cancer” and “HIV/AIDS” as examples of conditions that need such a doctor’s note. A number of states have sued the federal government, arguing that this process differs from the law Congress wrote.

If just reading about this sounds confusing, that’s the point. Bureaucratic hurdles are designed with the intent to narrow the number of people who get Medicaid and therefore reduce how much the federal government spends on care. Instead, state governments will spend millions of dollars on administrative costs; data, software, consultants, and workers needed to process extra forms. When Georgia implemented work requirements for Medicaid in 2023, it cost $40 million to implement, and 80 percent of that cost was administrative. The OBBA changes will also have a profound economic cost: Some estimates suggest a loss of 1.2 million jobs and a decrease in gross domestic product by $154 billion when the law is fully implemented in 2029.

The counter to this chaos is simple—and it’s something we’re starting to hear about on the stump from Democratic candidates. As Vox’s Rachel Cohen reports, the health care reform debate has shifted in the direction of improving on the status quo and an openness to bigger ideas. And while candidates like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who Cohen notes is flexible on how the system might be improved, on the stump he keeps mentioning a more familiar idea: We could have a national health insurance program, better known as “Medicare for All.” Given the wreckage of the Trump era, Medicare for All has a lot to recommend.

In places such as Canada and the United Kingdom, you don’t worry about having to pay for lifesaving procedures, knowing that the government will pay for it. Getting procedures preapproved by an insurance bureaucrat is not part of the equation, and being buried in thousands of dollars of medical debt is not a concept that exists. These systems may not be perfect, but it is clear on key metrics that the United States does worse on health care than our industrialized counterparts. As just one example, the U.S. has worse life expectancy than most other high-income countries, yet we spend far more per capita than any other nation on health care.

The American health care system is no stranger to complexity. Even for those on private insurance, people are used to having to spend hours on the phone to get their care covered, doctors argue with insurance representatives on prior authorizations, and people have to navigate a labyrinth of numbers and lists—who is in network, what is the deductible, and what are the out-of-pocket maximums. If you buy health care on the Obamacare marketplace, it means having to decide what sort of trade-offs between coverage and cost you need to make when picking a plan. Americans hate dealing with insurance so much that one in four people will stay in a job they do not like in order to keep their commercial health insurance.

For the past few decades in the U.S., academics and politicians alike have treated Medicare for All as a “pie in the sky” idea. Despite studies showing that it would save billions of dollars and thousands of lives, this avenue has largely been unpursued, and instead, incremental steps have been taken to expand health care access. The Affordable Care Act, or ACA, was a monumental step in the right direction—among other things, it expanded Medicaid eligibility greatly.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the federal government chose to continuously enroll people in Medicaid, keeping millions on health care (by avoiding needless bureaucracy), and Congress passed tax credits for the ACA marketplace (via the American Rescue Plan) and later extended them via the Inflation Reduction Act, bringing down the cost of monthly premiums dramatically. But in many cases, these wins turned out to be temporary. In 2023, continuous enrollment ended and millions were disenrolled from Medicaid. After Congress and the Trump administration let ACA subsidies lapse at the end of 2025, three million fewer people got their health care from the ACA marketplace.

Even though the ACA faced legal and legislative challenges, it has mostly survived. Now Medicaid is facing dramatic cuts. Medicare for All will similarly be an uphill battle, but the lesson we should garner from past experiences is that those who seek the complete privatization of health care in the United States will continue to be relentless at rolling back progress. Any attempt to expand health care or protect gains will be met with organized political resistance; so why not go for the moon? After all, polls show that Medicare for All is increasingly popular and, depending on the poll, has a majority or plurality support.

Medicare for All would not just be an easier experience for patients and doctors; it would also make dealing with a litany of American social problems a whole lot easier. Take treatment for substance use disorder, which is mostly funded through Medicaid. Currently, under the proposed “medical frailty rules,” someone who receives treatment for substance use disorder would be eligible for an exemption to the community engagement requirements, unless they have been in recovery for more than five years. Never mind the fact that recovery is a unique experience and challenging to define, this arbitrary policy could be disruptive and further complicate recovery and addiction treatment. It’s why treatment providers are so worried: having to focus on bureaucracy and paperwork to keep people covered, rather than spending time on care itself.

Contrast that with Medicare for All: A patient gets referred to treatment, the government pays for it with fewer bureaucratic steps, and there are no worries about jumping through hoops to continue to qualify for care. It would be a similar story across the health care system.

The next few years will be rough for the health care industry and patients alike. Hospitals will face enormous budgetary strains as they provide emergency care to people without insurance. Despite the best efforts of many states to keep people enrolled, millions will still likely lose care. Millions more will spend needless hours on bureaucracy and paperwork. While we may be a few years away from being able to implement a real universal health care plan, now is the time to start following the lead of El-Sayed and others to build the groundwork and start pitching it as a serious path forward. Academics, policymakers, professional societies, unions, and others should be relentless in their demand for Medicare for All.

Imagine a world where health insurance wasn’t tied to your job. Where employers didn’t have to negotiate with health insurance companies; where your monthly premium went toward taxes for an all-encompassing plan. A world where you don’t have to worry about making “too much money,” so that you lose your comprehensive health care (most people who work and receive Medicaid are in jobs that don’t provide insurance). That’s a world with Medicare for All.

Life is unaffordable for so many Americans, and managing your health can be difficult—but health care shouldn’t be a luxury that only the rich can afford. It really is that simple.