The New Republic

Here’s a bit of poetic justice for you: The Democratic bid for control of Congress just might end up running right through the very heart of Trump country. We’re talking about parts of the Midwest that helped drive Donald Trump’s two successful presidential bids—states like Iowa and Ohio, which he drove deeper into the red column, and states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, which Trump flipped outright twice.

That reality explains why Trump’s extended eruption of fury at Canada—he has now redoubled trade hostilities with our longtime ally—is very bad news for the GOP. Trump’s new trade war with Canada threatens fresh harms to local economies in the Midwest—and it’s handing Democrats a weapon in the homestretch of these contests to win over rural Americans and others who are experiencing all this endless derangement in very concrete ways.

“It’s a really dangerous time to be a farmer in the Midwest,” Josh Turek, the Democrat who is challenging Representative Ashley Hinson for the open Senate seat in Iowa, told me.

On Monday, Trump exploded wildly at Canada over the implosion of trade negotiations between the two countries. That collapse in talks over the weekend unleashed 50 percent tariffs by the United States on a large range of Canadian goods, and Canada will now retaliate with tariffs on targeted American exports. Talks are reportedly suspended until after the midterms.

What triggered Trump is that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had refused to be cowed by the American threat of tariffs. So Trump threatened yet more tariffs on still more Canadian goods next year, raging: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!”

Whether we “need” Canada or not, the fact remains that a lot of trade currently takes place between the two countries. You know who actually can’t afford for all this to be upended right now? Republican incumbents and candidates in the Midwest, that’s who. So “we” may not “need” Canada, but Republicans in the region really “need” Trump to not rupture trade relations with our ally for the next two months.

Here’s why: Control of the House will turn in no small part on three very competitive House races in Iowa, one in Wisconsin, and three or four in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Turek is locked in a dead heat in the Iowa Senate race, and winning there could be pivotal to a Democratic Senate takeover. So could a win by Sherrod Brown, who leads slightly in Ohio. And anything that helps Abdul El-Sayed keep the highly contested Michigan Senate seat blue will also be critical.

These areas will very likely feel the political impact of Trump’s new trade war. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs are expected to hit American exports of agricultural machinery, and that could hit Iowa manufacturers. The state’s very competitive second congressional district, for instance, includes facilities run by John Deere, Altorfer (which deals in Caterpillar products), and other farm equipment concerns.

“Tariffs don’t just hurt our farmers, they hurt our manufacturers as well,” Lindsay James, the Democratic candidate in that district, told me. She added that her GOP opponent, businessman Joe Mitchell, will be a “rubberstamp” for Trump’s trade wars, which she labeled “impulsive.”

Such messages could land disproportionately in Iowa because Trump’s trade wars have already given the state’s agricultural economy a thorough pounding.

Turek, meanwhile, also singled out the coming impact of trade hostilities on farm equipment manufacturers. He noted that tariffs are contributing to a perfect storm in Iowa, which also includes Trump’s war on Iran, which is driving up fertilizer and diesel prices, and his effort to reduce beef prices by importing huge amounts of it, which will undercut American producers.

“You talk to farmers, and they’ll tell you it’s one gut punch after another,” Turek told me, adding that he constantly hears Iowans tell him: “This is betrayal.”

Or take Wisconsin’s third congressional district, where Rebecca Cooke, who grew up on a dairy farm, is challenging GOP incumbent Derrick Van Orden. In Wisconsin, local press coverage of Trump’s latest trade-warring is already forecasting that the state’s exports of dairy goods and farm equipment to Canada could be hit by retaliatory tariffs.

“It’s going to impact the district in a huge way,” Cooke told me. This could resonate in Wisconsin because the state, like Iowa, already has gotten badly hurt by previous Trump trade-warring, Cooke said: “Farmers are already feeling the squeeze, and this will hurt agricultural communities even more.”

All this gives Dems a potent line of attack on incumbent Republicans: that they’ve done nothing to resist the tariffs, even though the levies constitute a huge usurpation of their own power—that is, of Congress’s power to tax.

“Derrick Van Orden has gone right along with whatever Trump says,” Cooke told me. “He’s a lackey for this administration.”

In fact, the trade-warring may be providing a back-door way to make Trump a liability for GOP candidates even in places that backed Trump by large margins. Voters there appear prepared to agree that policies coming out of Washington are hurting them. So some Democrats are making their races about GOP incumbents’ failure to protect voters from those policies, without too much specific talk about Trump that might trigger negative partisanship.

This dynamic may prove particularly pronounced in the Midwest. Some experts on the region point out that it’s already been disproportionately hurt by Trump’s trade wars, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee tells me it plans to make the latest round a liability for “every Midwestern Republican.”

Note that Trump’s latest eruption vows 50 percent tariffs on a whole slew of Canadian cars, trucks, and automotive parts. How do you think rupturing the auto industry’s complex cross-border supply chains—which are so deeply interconnected that they’ve been called the “Great Lakes supercluster”—will go over in Michigan and Ohio?

There’s still more. Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, points out that Canada is the state’s number one trading partner, with agricultural crops and equipment constituting a “huge industry” in all its competitive House districts. Speaking about Trump’s new trade-warring, Bonder said: “You can’t overstate how much this hurts Pennsylvania’s economy.”

Ron Brownstein recently identified a paradox embedded in Trumpism. Trump’s political successes have been particularly transformative in Midwestern states with large percentages of blue-collar whites in them. Yet in these midterms, his profound unpopularity is now pushing even states he’s turned deep red—like Iowa and Ohio—to revert to competitive swing states.

There’s another layer of irony here, however. The shock of Trump’s 2024 victory led many commentators to conclude that his right-wing populist nationalism had touched a deep, authentic wellspring of sentiment in the American electorate. Yet his mass deportations have unleashed ferocious national opposition. His “America First” unshackling of the U.S. military from international commitments and alliances is absolutely tanking his public standing. And now, if his tariffs and trade-warring help produce a massive electoral backlash—right in the region long mythologized as the heartland of Trumpian populism—it would represent a fitting and highly satisfying outcome indeed.

The other day, Donald Trump unveiled a new “plan” to curb beef prices by suspending tariffs on huge amounts of beef imports, while claiming the beef will be sold to the U.S. at a big discount. But he wouldn’t say which countries will be importing the beef or how he secured that commitment. In this, Trump accidentally revealed that his tariffs actually do raise consumer prices, debunking his own claim that other countries pay the tariffs. This, even as he just escalated his tariffs on another front by expanding his trade war with Canada, which will hit Trump country hard. We think all this shows new levels of contempt for his own voters. So we talked to Paul Krugman, whose Substack is excellent at demystifying such matters. He explains why Trump’s beef plan is a scam, what it reveals about Trump’s disdain for MAGA, and why this trade war with Canada is such a terrible idea. Krugman also discusses how it all discredits MAGA economics and whether liberals can use Trump’s world-historical failures to shift the economic argument more fundamentally. Listen to this episode here.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson slammed the Supreme Court’s Monday shadow-docket decision to greenlight Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting ahead of this year’s midterm elections. While the decision does not necessarily mean mail-in voting will be overhauled, it nevertheless removes a block that the judiciary had placed in the administration’s way.

In an unsigned order Monday, the Supreme Court lifted a lower court stay on an executive order requiring the U.S. Postal Service to bar any person not included on a massive federal voter list from receiving a mail-in or absentee ballot.

All three of the high court’s liberal justices dissented from the unsigned order.

“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” wrote Jackson. “It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”

After the executive order was signed in March, Democratic officials in 23 states and the District of Columbia sued to block the order. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani blocked the plan in Massachusetts, and later issued a nationwide injunction. Last month, Trump’s DOJ asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue, calling the challenge “premature” and “hypothetical” because the order had not been implemented by the Department of Homeland Security or the U.S. Postal Service.

It’s unclear how this order might be implemented in the time that remains between now and the fast-approaching midterm elections. The high court’s decision is also far from the final judicial challenge the administration faces in its efforts to juke the upcoming elections. Today’s ruling left open the possibility for future legal challenges.

Trump’s order has been described by Democratic leaders as a “desperate, illegal power grab” and “laughably unconstitutional.”

Despite the obvious chaos Trump’s order would cause, the U.S. Postal Service has moved ahead with issuing new requirements for mail-in ballots. If implemented, Trump’s executive order could potentially disenfranchise thousands of Americans who vote by mail ahead of the high-stakes midterm elections.

Darline Graham’s latest bid to solidify Donald Trump’s support involves a fraught empty gesture.

The 62-year-old younger sister and current holder of the late Lindsey Graham’s South Carolina Senate seat dodged questions on Monday as to whether she would have certified the results of the 2020 presidential election, as her brother had six years prior.

“Senator, you just mentioned that you agree with your brother on everything except for one matter, that being illegal immigration; you’d go farther than him on that,” said MS NOW’s Mychael Schnell during a press conference. “That being said, I’m curious, do you agree with him about the 2020 election, that Joe Biden was certified the winner of that election, was lawfully elected, and that you would’ve voted to certify the election, as your brother did?”

Graham responded that she believed that the “election system is broken,” attempting to redirect the question toward her support for the White House’s SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that has divided Congress for most of the year.

“You won’t commit to having certified the results of the 2020 election?” Schnell pressed in a follow-up question.

Graham refused to elaborate.

Trump has fervently championed Graham’s candidacy, despite the fact that she brings zero legislative experience to the job. She also seems to have little awareness of current events and pressing matters: Last week, Graham flopped on a softball debate question regarding Taiwan, shrugging that “national security is not my thing.” Nevertheless, her actual policy positions may not matter at all with the local electorate, depending on voters’ attitudes toward the president.

“If a voter’s decision is all about Trump, then they don’t care what she knows about foreign policy or anything else,” Scott Huffmon, a professor of political science at Winthrop University, told Newsweek Monday. “The question is will they ‘believe in’ this endorsement and be as, or more, motivated as the people who showed up at county meetings over the years to censure Lindsey Graham.”

Graham’s popularity—as well as Trump’s—will be put to the test Tuesday, when South Carolina Republicans head to the polls to officially decide whether she or five-term Representative Ralph Norman will replace the deceased lawmaker on the general election ballot.

For years, election denialism was one of the minimal litmus tests for MAGA allegiance, requiring wannabe Trumpians to publicly question the security of America’s democracy in order to invite the president’s political favor. But that may be changing: In recent months, Trump’s magic touch hasn’t been quite so effective. So far, 10 of Trump’s candidates have crumbled in this primary cycle—as many as lost in 2018, 2020, and 2024 combined.

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.

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.

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? 

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.

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.

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.

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.