The New Republic

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 19 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.

MAGA and the White House are in a fury at Jon Ossoff. That’s because the Georgia senator dared to point out that Donald Trump has a bizarrely close relationship with his young aide, Natalie Harp. Yet it’s now being reported that this relationship actually does unnerve some inside the White House. And the truth is, Ossoff succeeded. There’s now a national debate underway about the ways Harp controls Trump’s access to information, which is a debate we really need to have.

This whole saga captures a lot about how Dems should be fighting the information wars right now. So we’re talking to Paul Waldman, who made a good argument along these lines at his Substack, The Cross Section. Paul, good to have you on.

Paul Waldman: Thanks.

Sargent: So here’s what Senator Jon Ossoff said about Natalie Harp, the very loyal aide to Trump. Listen.

Jon Ossoff (voiceover): While he fruitlessly drains our munitions and oil reserves, the president sleeps through his meetings. He golfs and trades stocks. See, he doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the Emir of Qatar.

Sargent: Note that Ossoff said, kind of out of nowhere, that Trump wants to “travel with Natalie” on the plane that Qatar gifted to him. Paul, who is Natalie?

Waldman: Well, she is a young aide in the White House, and there is probably no one who spends as much time with the president of the United States as she does, which is, I think, an important reason why she is certainly worthy of some examination. She started off as a figure on the One America News Network, a small but perhaps somewhat influential far-right news network.

And she caught Trump’s attention and has now taken on this role as what is sometimes referred to as the human printer, because Trump likes to look at things on paper rather than on a phone or a computer. She follows him around with a battery-powered printer, printing out tweets that compliment him, articles that make him look good.

So she kind of constantly feeds him a steady diet of complimentary news and information. And she is always at his side wherever he goes, whether that’s in the Oval Office, at one of his clubs, foreign travel.

Sargent: Natalie Harp controls the information that Donald Trump gets. And it kind of matters what information the president of the United States gets, especially one who’s not curious about the world, or about pretty much anything other than himself, right?

Waldman: Yeah, and I think that is important, because a lot of his decision-making is driven by how he perceives the world as perceiving him. And you know, when he’s out there always saying, like, everybody loves what I’m doing, you know, my polls are through the roof, and things like that—you can look at it as just his sort of ham-handed attempts at propaganda, but I think it also does reflect some of the bubble in which he is existing.

And for somebody as kind of mercurial and emotionally needy as he is, that is going to affect the decisions that he makes. And I think that’s maybe the real function that she serves. You know, there’s all this speculation about, you know, is there something untoward about the relationship? Who knows? But the truth is that she is serving a kind of emotional need for him.

One of the things I say in that piece I wrote at The Cross Section—you know, we’ve all seen those Cabinet meetings where they go around the table and everybody has to say the most kind of over-the-top, embarrassingly complimentary thing to Trump. But you know, those don’t happen every day. He needs that kind of emotional sustenance constantly. And that’s what Natalie Harp provides him.

Sargent: Natalie Harp has a tremendous amount of influence over global affairs. That’s what I think I hear you saying. And so the White House is in a rage over what Jon Ossoff did. Steven Cheung, assistant to the president, called him “Jon Jackoff” and the “biggest cuck loser in politics.” White House spokesman Davis Ingle called Ossoff cringeworthy and feminine and a lightweight loser. Richard Grenell, one of the most slavishly devoted propagandists Trump has ever had, called Ossoff a “fraud,” “scripted,” and “inauthentic.”

So, Paul, this is all childish garbage. But what’s interesting is that they all knew they needed to rush out there and be seen as fighting on behalf of the audience of one, which all but certainly means that it directly triggered Trump, because that’s how this works. If Trump gets angry about something, everybody’s got to go out there and fight for him, right?

Waldman: Yeah. And you immediately saw this wave of conservative commentators, Republicans, White House figures, all taking to social media to condemn this and say they’re so angry. And a lot of it was in this kind of fake feminist ally thing, like, how dare you talk this way about a professional woman and denigrate her accomplishments.

And, the funny thing about that is that if you look at what Ossoff said, all it was is that rather than doing the work that he’s supposed to be doing, Trump is, you know, traveling with Natalie. Those are the only words that referenced her. And immediately all of the Republicans say, well, you’re obviously saying they’re having an affair. Is he, though? Why is it that they are all jumping to that conclusion?

And it’s not as though Ossoff is ignoring her important substantive contributions to American policymaking. You know, her whole role there is to basically be his kind of security blanket. And I think that’s how Ossoff referred to her in a subsequent interview, when he was asked to sort of elaborate on this—that that really is what she is. She’s there to provide him kind of some emotional reassurance.

But all of these Republicans are immediately going straight to the idea that she’s being accused of having an affair with the president. And all of that rhetoric about how Ossoff is a cuck and he’s feminine—this whole movement, but especially the people in the White House, like, their entire worldview is colored by this kind of desperate sexual insecurity.

And every time they have a disagreement with somebody, especially a man, they have to do this kind of, like, you know, seventh-grade insults that are all about, you know, really reflecting more, I think, on themselves than on Jon Ossoff, who, if you have looked at him lately, is looking pretty jacked. So I don’t think that stuff is going to land.

Sargent: Yeah, I would think not. I want to flag another thing that some of these MAGA figures did here, to your point about their bad-faith umbrage. People like Katie Pavlich and Laura Loomer cited the fact that Natalie Harp survived bone cancer to paint Ossoff’s broadside as a cheap shot.

Now, yes, Natalie Harp suffered through some very challenging personal travails. No one would take that away from her. But why this makes bringing up Harp off-limits remains kind of unexplained.

As far as I can tell, Ossoff’s entire point, as you said, was to highlight the fact that he spends a great amount of time with this person who has a great amount of influence over the president, and that this is completely ludicrous and terrible for our country. Ossoff, in the subsequent interview that you’re talking about, essentially said, this woman is part of the information bubble around the president. That’s a hundred percent correct. I mean, of course we’re going to talk about that, right?

Waldman: Yeah, and it’s absolutely legitimate. You know, the people who have the ear of the most powerful person in the world are important to know about. This is one of the most important people in the United States government. So we’ve got to know what the nature of her influence is.

Sargent: Right. And it’s being reported by Semafor that Trump’s proximity to Harp, or Harp’s proximity to Trump, has actually unnerved some of his aides. The people around Trump himself understand that there’s something wrong here.

And again, it doesn’t have to do with sexual stuff or anything like that. It has to do with the fact that the president of the United States has someone who’s controlling information in a way that is actually bad for the country and leading Trump to make some very bad decisions.

Waldman: Yeah, and there have been some reports about that kind of unease among other Trump aides, not just about their closeness, but about what it is that she’s feeding him, whether or not it’s stuff that he should be seeing. Apparently she gets a lot of information from Gateway Pundit, which is this conspiratorial website. And if she’s giving Trump, kind of crazy stuff from the depths of the right-wing internet, then that’s a real problem. But he obviously is very devoted to her.

There’s a passage in Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s book, Regime Change, where he says to some other aides something like, you all are going to go and try to make money, but Natalie’s never going to leave me. And there was a report in The New York Times in 2024 about some letters that the Times got, that Natalie Harp wrote to Trump, that really—I call this a kind of romantic, not necessarily sexual, but just, it’s a kind of ecstatic devotion that she has to him. She writes in these letters, you’re all that matters to me, I want to bring you joy—like, stuff that, I don’t know, I’ve never said to any of my bosses.

So there is something, you know, so worshipful, obviously, in that relationship that she has with him. And it’s OK, maybe, that she’s not going to say no to him, because that’s not her job. But if she’s feeding him just kind of the craziest stuff that she comes across on the internet, and that is then influencing the decisions that he makes, then that makes the things that are already problematic even worse.

Sargent: Well, and then there’s the negative flip side to that as well. If she just wants to bring him joy at every turn, she’s obviously not going to allow criticism of Donald Trump to get to him. And we’re talking about criticism here that might be coming from members of his own party, or maybe leaks from inside the administration from people who are trying to alert the president to a policy thing that’s going really wrong.

Like, right now, we’re in the middle of a major fiasco, a global fiasco in Iran, and you do see leaks coming out of the administration from people saying things like, we’ve really lost this thing, and Donald Trump isn’t kind of getting that message, and that’s a real problem, and we’ve got to do something different here.

And so I don’t really know exactly what the nature of their informational relationship is, but if she wants to bring him ecstatic joy all the time—we all know that Trump doesn’t take criticism well, and you know, she doesn’t brook dissent at all. So she’s not going to let any of that information get to him. And that’s a problem for us.

Waldman: And I do wonder if people even within the conservative movement, within the administration itself, are trying to figure out what her daily media diet is, so they can channel their own views through her to him. We’ve heard about that before with Trump. We heard about it in his first term, how people even in his administration would try to get his ear, and they couldn’t do it through kind of regular channels of going through the White House chief of staff. And so they would book themselves on Fox News to make an argument about, whatever policy it was, because they knew that he’s watching Fox News for hour after hour every day.

And that’s the way they could get in front of the president, rather than, like, an Oval Office briefing. And it does make you wonder if people are now trying to determine, you know, exactly what is Natalie looking at every day? What websites is she visiting? Can I try to seed something and get it to him through her? And that’s the way I’ll make my case for, you know, whatever I think the next policy ought to be. It’s a whole new kind of backroom machination that we haven’t had to think about before.

Sargent: Yeah. And I suspect that this has forced the discussion of what we’re talking about here, and that’s really why MAGA squealed so loud, which brings us to the question of what Democrats can learn from this. Jon Ossoff said three words, poked the bear, and as a result, he’s getting viciously abused across the internet and across the airwaves, but he forced a conversation over what we’re talking about. And that strikes me as something Democrats should learn from.

I have this sort of formula in my head where Democrats spend a little too much time denying the false things that are said about them, and not enough time kind of forcing Trump and Republicans to deny true things about themselves. Does that make sense, Paul?

In other words, what we see here is what happens when a Democrat speaks plain truths about the president. It forces the discussion in a direction that puts Trump on the defensive and reveals things about Trump and the MAGA movement. I think Democrats can learn from that.

Waldman: The fact that there is that gossipy aspect to it no doubt made a lot of people want to retweet the story and things like that, because people just like that kind of stuff. If it has that kind of juicy element to it, it’s going to get more news coverage. Everybody likes gossip, right?

So Democrats can certainly think about that as a way to frame even substantive things that they want to talk about. And too often Democrats think that their 10-point plan for Medicaid reform is going to grab people’s attention when it won’t, even if it’s great. And also, as you say, all too often they are defending themselves rather than going on the attack in ways that have some spice to them. And you can do that at the same time as you’re bringing up legitimate issues.

But I think that it was incredibly revealing, the way that the White House and basically the entire conservative movement just kind of exploded in anger at this. That really shows that you’ve struck a nerve. And so I think Democrats should think about, you know, what other nerves they want to strike.

Republicans have always been really good at forcing issues onto the news agenda. And part of that is because they have this structural advantage. They have all these tools that Democrats don’t really have—a whole network of media organizations with big reach that can all sing in harmony and immediately get other mainstream news organizations to pick up on the stories that they’re trying to push. They have that apparatus that Democrats don’t really have in the same kind of way. But they also just have a real instinct for the jugular that Democrats don’t have. And maybe this is an example of how you can kind of cultivate that.

Sargent: The other big context to this is the debate among Democrats over how hard to go at Donald Trump, over whether to talk about Donald Trump or not, over whether talking about Donald Trump is somehow a distraction from talking about costs. I just want to point out that Jon Ossoff goes after Trump constantly with really, really barbed rhetoric. And he really goes hard at Trump’s pathologies and his essentially scoundrel-like nature, the degree to which he’s just a piece of shit, really, right? Morally.

And I think we should note here that Jon Ossoff is running for reelection in a very difficult state, Georgia, and he’s significantly up. So I wouldn’t want to say that the fact that Jon Ossoff goes after Trump so aggressively is the reason he’s leading. But I do think that it’s getting the base very energized, and it’s getting the base to pay attention to him, which is something that he’s going to need to win reelection. And there’s no sense in which constantly going after Donald Trump is holding him back politically. Can you talk about that, Paul? I think we can learn from that too.

Waldman: Yeah, Ossoff talks a lot about corruption. He has a broad critique that is not just about Trump, but is always incorporating Trump. And as you say, he is really aggressive in making these arguments, is not afraid to speak the truth about who Trump is. And you know, oftentimes Democrats really, really overthink things. You know, they’re always talking about, we need to, like, figure out how to just put the focus on kitchen-table issues. You have a president who, in a couple of polls I’ve seen just recently, is at, like, 33 percent. The country is so angry at him—and they think, well, we have to offer a positive vision. Like, here’s the truth: you actually don’t.

This is a midterm election. It’s about the president of the United States. Republicans didn’t have a positive vision when they were running against Bill Clinton in 1994, or Barack Obama in 2010, or any of the years where they had big, huge victories. You don’t actually need that. People are pissed off at the president.

And if you just keep reminding them that they don’t like him, that’s going to be enough to win a midterm election. Now, it may not be enough to govern once you have power again, as Democrats hope to in 2029. But for now, you know, they don’t actually need anything but to sort of really zero in on what’s wrong with this president, why people are mad at him and should be mad at him.

That is more than enough to get themselves over the finish line this year. And I think that someone like Ossoff actually does a really good job of telling a story that makes people understand what’s happening and why. And that’s why I think his focus on corruption is really something that a lot of Democrats should be talking about, because it really gets to the heart of what has people so angry about the whole system, not just what’s going on right at this moment. And this stuff is often not as complicated as it seems.

Sargent: You know, they can also go after Republicans for essentially being a rubber stamp for this widely despised president as well. So it doesn’t just have to be about Trump. It’s about Trump and the fact that Republicans have completely rolled over and allowed him to gut our country.

Paul Waldman, it’s always great to talk to you. By the way, I should point out, folks, that when Paul said that Democrats don’t have to have a positive vision in the midterms and that they can just go after Trump, that is pure heresy in Democratic circles. But on The Daily Blast, you get the real dope, man. Paul, thanks for coming on.

Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.

It’s time to familiarize yourselves with the names “Operation Puppet Master” and “Operation Keyhole.” If those nefarious phrases evoke to you the U.S. government’s domestic spying on leftist groups in the 1960s and 1970s, it’s for good reason. The terms are coinages of today’s Department of Homeland Security, and they’re associated with a massive, covert surveillance effort that DHS unleashed earlier this year to track anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, where Donald Trump’s violent paramilitary invasion triggered months of intense civil conflict.

We just learned about the broad outlines of this domestic surveillance from newly released court papers related to the ongoing prosecution of a handful of protesters. As The New York Times reported, the papers show that DHS began surveilling left-leaning groups—including a union, a climate-change group, and others—after ICE killed Alex Pretti in January. This has entailed seeking financial records and infiltrating protest meetings that are protected by the First Amendment.

But you can get a far more vivid picture of these undercover surveillance operations—and how brazenly they were conducted against American citizens—if you read deep into the court papers. The documents—which are attached as exhibits to a motion filed by lawyers for one of the protesters facing prosecution—include investigative reports that were transmitted by the undercover agents themselves about meetings they infiltrated.

It’s jarring, revealing stuff. The reports show that covert agents surreptitiously attended well over a dozen protest meetings organized by groups like the Sunrise Movement and various small socialist organizations. In some cases the agents secretly recorded the gatherings.

What’s more, in at least one case, an undercover agent may have tried to influence the conduct of meeting organizers. One report from an agent describes a meeting in late January of the Sunrise Movement at a Minneapolis public library. While spying on the proceedings, the agent seems to have learned that the organization’s intention was nonviolent: As the agent notes in his own investigative report, “it was made clear” at the meeting that the organization is “focused on peaceful protests.”

Yet after this discovery, the agent then approached a meeting organizer and made a surprising proposition. The agent told the organizer “he works in construction” and is willing to build things to assist “with more direct action protests,” the report reads, adding that the agent stressed “that going to jail did not bother him.”

That sounds like the agent may have signaled a willingness to engage in something illegal, to bait the group into moving in that direction, argues Kevin Riach, the lawyer for one of the protesters who is being prosecuted, Isaac Sant.

“This is an effort to entice someone who’s shown no inclination to commit a crime into committing one,” Riach told me. “What this tells us is that there wasn’t actual criminal activity to be investigated. They had to invent it. That’s not how this is supposed to work—not in this country, anyway.”

In other cases, undercover agents infiltrated these meetings only to find that the protesters turned out to be awfully innocuous. One agent covertly attended a meeting in February and found that it “was more of a panel discussion,” where there was “no discussion, or call for, violence toward law enforcement.”

Similarly, another agent’s report described infiltrating a meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of organizers who said they sympathized with the Minneapolis anti-ICE resistance. (The papers show that DHS’s surveillance reached into other states beyond Minnesota.) This agent reported initiating a conversation with a married churchgoing couple, and the woman told the agent she’d traveled to Uganda to assist “in the construction of a hospital.”

In short, we’re not exactly talking about the Weather Underground bombers here.

Indeed, as Substacker Brian Kaylor notes, a number of these undercover operations were even conducted in churches where protesters had organized. Several of the pastors were kept entirely in the dark about law enforcement’s infiltration of their houses of worship.

The absurdity of all this is overwhelming. In some cases, the Keystone Kops vibe is strong: One agent attended a May meeting in Minneapolis, only to report that his “concealed body-worn audio recorder erroneously fell to the floor of the gymnasium.” The agent left without the device and had to return later to retrieve it.

Interestingly, the investigative reports also offer a glimpse of culture clashes between protesters and the agents who spied on them. One agent attended a Minneapolis meeting in February and reported, perhaps with distaste, on a female protester “with they/them pronouns” and “bright green short hair” and a “nose ring.”

As writer John Ganz has noted, Trump’s secret police force is made up of the MAGA “demimonde” and the “Trumpenproletarian mob.” And indeed, Trump’s political project has long been all about turning loose “his” people—law enforcement, biker gangs, coal miners, Ultimate Fighting enthusiasts—against the leftist enemy that inhabits blue America. The centrality of violence to all this is not disguised in the least. ICE recruitment targets MAGA-adjacent UFC fanbases and people who show an interest in paramilitary tactical equipment or military recruitment. ICE messaging openly glorifies military-style operations in urban areas—that is, in blue America’s diverse, cosmopolitan strongholds. Trump talks about Minneapolis as akin to an enemy country populated with undesirables who must be purged by MAGA patriots.

Now we’re learning that this war on blue America also includes extensive undercover surveillance. Many of these agents appear to have been drawn largely from Homeland Security Investigations, the arm of ICE that’s supposed to be focused on serious, complex, transnational crimes. They’ve now been reduced to standing around in parking lots writing down protesters’ license plate numbers and using sleazy deception tactics to spy on fellow Americans whose only crime is sympathy with immigrants.

Violence is precisely what spawned this undercover spying operation, but the real culprit was the violence of the government, not of the protesters. As Lisa Needham writes at Public Notice, we shouldn’t lose sight of how quickly ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis devolved into lethal state violence against Americans. It was just after ICE’s arrival in the city that an agent gunned down Renee Good in her car, with Pretti’s killing by federal agents following around two weeks later.

The outpouring of public protest in the face of this invasion apparently helped prompt DHS to launch its massive undercover surveillance operation directed at Americans, on the theory that the protests were being organized by larger, more sinister forces. The government dubbed this “Operation Puppet Master.”

But it’s unclear what all this surreptitious spying is even turning up. The Times notes that none of the groups targeted by it have been charged. And while the surveillance supposedly helped produce that aforementioned indictment of a handful of protesters, in reality the spying has swept far, far beyond those targets. The main result has been a discovery process that has now exposed the depth and breadth of the government’s massive spying operation for all to see.

There’s one other big unknown here. The document declaring the opening of Operation Puppet Master contains another vague reference: It says this effort has also been sanctioned under something called “Operation Keyhole.” Yet it’s unclear what this even is. As Kevin Riach, the lawyer, told me: “This suggests there’s some broader surveillance operation underway that we have yet to learn about.”

When I asked DHS what the phrase Operation Keyhole describes, the agency declined to comment.

Trump’s mass deportations have become akin to a Forever War. The expansion of ICE has poured tens of billions of dollars into the growth of Trump’s very own paramilitary army. This has included the stockpiling of enormous amounts of heavy military-style tactical equipment and weaponry, furnished by private contractors who resemble war profiteers.

And so, just as we saw under George W. Bush’s Forever Wars, we’re witnessing the growth of a massive public-private bureaucracy that’s metastasizing in unnerving new directions. It now appears to entail extensive domestic surveillance operations as well. We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of it all. As always seems to happen with Forever Wars, we may never even learn all that much about many of the darkest atrocities perpetrated in its name.

It’s odd, when you think about it, that there is no major, comprehensive museum devoted to American music. One can after all make a very strong case that music is the form of creative expression that has been America’s greatest gift to the world. American cinema, literature, and visual art are all of course formidable. But the music! Folk, blues, jazz, spirituals, country and western, Broadway, on up to hip-hop … utterly endless variety, ingenuity, passion.

And yet, there exists in the United States no single great temple to all this rumbustious genius. Genres have their halls of fame, as with country music. And speaking of Nashville, there does exist in that city a Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum, which expands its purview beyond country music and seemed to me outstanding on my visit there a few years ago. But still, it doesn’t claim to be exhaustive. And, obviously, there’s the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, but it is, of necessity, international in scope.

The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music is not that great temple, as executive director Bob Santelli will readily acknowledge. With exhibition space totaling roughly 8,600 square feet, it couldn’t possibly be. But what the center lacks in comprehension, it more than makes up for in—well, the word, as The Beatles put it, is love. The center, which opened its doors on June 13 on the campus of Monmouth University in the Boss’s lifelong Jersey stomping grounds—he wrote the lyrics to “Born to Run” at a coffee house that used to be just up the street—is a down-to-earth and heartfelt bear hug of every imaginable genre, and of the country that produced it; of the “old, weird America,” in Greil Marcus’s indelible phrase; the America where everything didn’t have a price and where ample room was made for the iconoclasts and misfits and insubordinates who wove us this glorious aural tapestry.

The museum is the product of Santelli’s deft execution, but it reflects Springsteen’s heart and vision. Santelli, along with architect Rick Cook and director Eileen Chapman, who spearheaded the job of collecting the Springsteen archives that are such an important part of the museum, showed me around the center on a late July Friday. Santelli was a longtime Rolling Stone rock critic until he turned toward museum curation in the 1990s, first in Cleveland, and then hither and yon. He has known Springsteen since they were teenagers. He first saw Bruce play in around 1968 (“He was so good, and so far ahead of everyone else”). When Woodstock came around, they both skipped it, because Led Zeppelin was playing the Asbury Park Convention Hall that weekend, and they went to that instead.

Nine years ago, Santelli went to Jon Landau, Springsteen’s famed producer, with an idea for a museum and archives built around Springsteen’s life and corpus. Landau agreed and said, sure, go to the man himself. “I brought it to Bruce,” Santelli said. “And he listened, like he does, paying attention. And he finally said, ‘You know, Bob, I am honored, humbled that you would think this.’ But he says, ‘I’m just a chapter in the ongoing story of rock and roll. I’m a link of a long chain. And if you would make it bigger, the story bigger, and I’m a part of it, then I’d be interested.’ And that’s how basically we became the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music.”

With that blessing, Santelli went out and raised the $53 million needed for the project. He didn’t ask Springsteen for a dime because “I didn’t want him to think, or anyone to think, this was in any way a vanity project.”

Santelli and team enlisted architect Rick Cook of CookFox Architects of New York and Minneapolis in 2019. Cook first saw Springsteen live at Albany’s Palace Theater in 1977, but he wasn’t one of those Boss concertgoers screaming out every word of “Backstreets.” Music, Cook told me, “just wasn’t my thing.” He admitted to having been a little intimidated at first: “I thought, my goodness, how do you find a physical way to express the story of American music and Bruce’s place in it? We make things in space, and music is this magic act that happens in time.”

For someone who wasn’t immersed in the Springsteen legend, Cook certainly offered up a design that captured the man’s aesthetic well. The exterior of the long, low-slung two-story building consists of rows of what are called “weathering steel rainscreen panels”; they’re as rusted as the mills where some of Springsteen’s protagonists used to work. As Cook walked me through the place, he explained the care that was taken to reinforce the proletarian ethos: the “end-grain block flooring” in the 240-seat Powell Soundstage that “recalls the old factory floors, the nineteenth-century factory floors”; the seats themselves, clad in workingman’s denim.

It’s in the Powell theater where the visitor’s journey begins (a general admission ticket is $22), with a 25-minute film by Thom Zimny, the director who has worked with Springsteen on many projects over the years. It’s a bracing 25-minute tour d’horizon of American music, with some mind-blowing footage (a teenage Aretha Franklin belting one out in a church) and narration from Springsteen himself, who alternates between talking about some of the legendary figures we see in the film and his own relentless youthful hunger for success. “I wanted to hear all that screaming again,” he said of watching The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. “But I wanted it to be for me.”

The whole place is just a joyous visual (and very virtual) celebration of American music. There’s a wall of album covers of all sorts: Nat King Cole, Chet Atkins, the Bye Bye Birdie Soundtrack, The Beastie Boys, Connie Francis (“I had kids pick out album covers that they thought were cool,” Santelli told me).

The exhibition halls aren’t large, so the amount of ground covered is all the more impressive. The gallery surveying the history of American music is a mere 2,200 square feet, but it packs in sections devoted to 11 different music genres (American classics, pop, soul, jazz, Native American, etc.) and six themes (race, gender, technology, geography, and more). There are display cases housing some of the earliest electric guitars, from the 1920s and 30s. A suit of Frank Sinatra’s. Louis Armstrong’s and Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpets. A Chuck Berry guitar. An Elvis Presley jacket. Odetta’s guitar from the 1963 March on Washington. A Michael Jackson glove. Lady Gaga’s space helmet.

The ground floor also holds a space for temporary exhibitions. When I visited, the installation was “Chimes of Freedom: Protest, Patriotism, and the Power of Song.” It briskly tells the story of American political songs from “Yankee Doodle Dandy” to Springsteen’s own “The Streets of Minneapolis,” which he wrote in the wake of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. There was a Woody Guthrie guitar, and a handwritten set of lyrics to “This Land Is Your Land.” My heart jumped for a moment because I thought I was going to see, in Guthrie’s own hand, the famous samizdat lyrics, the verses about the relief office and the “No Trespassing” sign—but lo and behold, they were a completely different set of lyrics.

You go upstairs, and it’s all about Bruce. Well, not all: The E Street Band is given its due here, as are Bruce’s pre-fame bands (The Castiles, Child, Steel Mill). It’s interesting to be reminded of what a racially diverse assemblage The E Street Band was in its early days. There was Clarence Clemons, obviously; but at different times the band included David Sancious, the brilliant keyboard player whose stamp is so clear on 1973’s The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; Vini Lopez, who played drums on that record; and Ernest “Boom” Carter, who laid down the drum track on “Born to Run” before leaving with Sancious to form a jazz fusion group. But it’s a testament to Springsteen’s unpretentious decency and Jersey guy-ness that they all remained friends over the years. The last time I saw him live, he even played a song he’d written as a tribute to George Theiss, The Castiles’s founder, who had been diagnosed with cancer at the time, and to whom Springsteen remained close until he died in 2025.

There’s a little “recording studio” where you can listen to Max Weinberg or Gary Tallent explain a drum or bass guitar part. There’s a partial recreation of Springsteen’s old home library in Rumson, where the autodidact college dropout devoured volumes like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

And there’s the archives room, which is Chapman’s domain. Springsteen wrote his lyrics in Walgreens spiral-bound notebooks, many of which he held onto. Visitors can’t handle those directly, but many have been scanned so that you can see the composer’s scribblings. Chapman estimates the center has 45,000 to 50,000 documents. “His mom had scrapbooks,” Chapman says. “So we were gifted his mom’s scrapbooks, about six of them, plus other newspapers and correspondence.” You can sit at computers and browse through them—lyrics, old posters—while listening to Steel Mill play live from 1970.

But the Mona Lisa of this Louvre, so to speak, is The Guitar. You know the one. The Fender Telecaster, natural finish with black pickguard, that was strapped across Springsteen’s back in the famous Born to Run cover shot by Eric Meola. It’s badly gashed in at least two places, and as you look at it, you can practically smell the flat beer spilled on it and the tobacco smoke blown in its direction over the years. I, and nearly every other visitor I observed the morning of my visit, lingered over it. “That’s probably worth about $12 million,” Santelli said. “That was the last thing we put in.”

Someday, the mandarins of the Smithsonian will decide that American music needs its proper home somewhere on the National Mall, assuming Donald Trump hasn’t gobbled up all the remaining space with monuments to himself. But until that day, we have this—this modest, but big-hearted and imaginative and meticulously curated, tribute to the America that has earned our love. Within these walls you might believe that our America will win, and that the old, weird America is the America that matters. You might believe, for an hour or two, in the promised land.

On July 28, Democracy Forward, on behalf of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for attacking Title X funding applications. It comes as the Department for Health and Human Services, or HHS, announced that as of 2027, Title X funding would favor fertility tracking over contraceptives, counsel patients about “marriage prior to childbearing,” respect “biological reality” around sex and gender, and a slew of other funding considerations that undermine Title X’s science-backed mandate to provide accessible reproductive healthcare.

The language deployed by the HHS reflects a new wave of anti-abortion rhetoric that converges with the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, camp to increasingly demonize hormonal birth control and reproductive healthcare as “unnatural” and a symbol of moral bankruptcy. As Planned Parenthood is in its fifth year of Title X’s five-year funding cycle, the funding shift puts millions of Americans at risk.

Trump’s MAGA administration has repeatedly attempted to undermine and defund reproductive healthcare, with roughly 200 Planned Parenthood Centers at risk of closure amid abortion bans and widespread funding cuts. The lawsuit alleges the administration is “misusing the Title X program for an overtly political and ideological agenda,” and that reproductive healthcare organizations that continue to offer full-service reproductive healthcare (like Planned Parenthood) will be unjustly penalized. Now, the 1.3 million low-income, uninsured, and underinsured Americans who receive Planned Parenthood care through Title X funding every year—with contraceptive counseling, STD screenings and treatment, and cancer screenings being some of the most popular services—are at risk of losing access to vital healthcare. However, if successful, the lawsuit would force the Trump administration to walk back the politicization of Title X for all reproductive healthcare providers across America.

“[This announcement] is a piece of a long string of attacks on Planned Parenthood and providers of reproductive healthcare generally,” says Carrie Flaxman, a senior legal advisor at Democracy Forward. The current administration has reinstated an abortion ban for veterans across the country, blocked Planned Parenthood clinics from receiving Medicaid, and defunded the Teenage Pregnancy Prevention Program. (Much of what conservatives refer to as a “fertility crisis” is driven by historic lows in teenage pregnancy, which one might imagine is a good thing, not an emergency.) The lawsuit notes that the shifts in funding criteria puts Planned Parenthood Associations at a “competitive disadvantage,” with the “inability to compete on a fair footing.”

Title X came into effect as a bipartisan program in 1970 with the purpose of “making comprehensive voluntary family planning services readily available to all persons desiring such services.” Republican President Richard Nixon, in his 1969 speech, stated that “no American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition.” Flaxman notes that several of the proposed changes are contrary to existing regulations that bind HHS to Title X. “Those are things that the agency can’t do and they can’t change the law through a funding announcement.

“That’s the basis for the lawsuit—that they can’t make these changes.” Existing regulations instruct HHS to consider things like health equity, client-centered and inclusive care (that includes transgender patients), and a “broad range of medically-approved services,” including contraceptives, fertility tracking, and STI testing. It is unclear to experts like Flaxman how Planned Parenthood Associations and other reproductive healthcare providers are meant to comply with HHS’s shifted values, while still providing evidence-backed care, as outlined in existing Title X regulations.

Shortly after Trump’s second election, the administration faced stark pushback from the anti-abortion movement for allowing Planned Parenthood and other reproductive healthcare providers to remain funded through Title X. White House spokesman Kush Desai told The Daily Wire in March of this year that HHS would be “realigning the Title X program with the President’s pro-life and pro-family agenda going forward.” The July Notice of Funding Opportunity appears to be a concrete step in a far-reaching attack against Planned Parenthood.

Utah is one of the many states that have already been used as a testing ground for a defunded Planned Parenthood. In March 2025, nine state affiliates of Planned Parenthood—including Utah, where Planned Parenthood is the sole recipient of Title X funding in the state—were informed that their Title X funding would be “temporarily withheld” due to “possible violations” of civil rights laws and Trump’s 2025 executive order that sought to end all federally-funded programming related to the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, and to end the “taxpayer subsidization of open borders.” In the notice, Politico reported that the Administration cited Planned Parenthood’s “commitment to black communities” as evidence of a “DEI” effort that failed to comply with executive orders.

Over the course of nine months without Title X funding, Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, or PPAU, was forced to close two clinics, both of which were situated in “healthcare deprivation areas,” servicing over 30,000 people annually. PPAU also reduced clinical and education staff and had to increase their sliding-fee scale for patients paying out of pocket. In the first few months of losing funding “a few people just turned around and walked out,” Shireen Ghorbani, president of PPAU, says. In January of this year, PPAU’s Title X funding was restored. However, the devastation of nine months without Title X was merely a glimpse at the broader aim of the Trump administration: to restrict accessible reproductive healthcare across the country.

Shireen Ghorbani, the president and CEO of PPAU, is no stranger to Title X. Raised without health insurance in North Dakota, her mother helped her find a Title X-funded clinic shortly after high school to get on birth control in 1999. “That set the trajectory of my life, to be able to control when and how I wanted to have a family,” she says. Currently, 240 Planned Parenthood clinics participate in Title X, servicing over 1,300,000 patients every year.

For reproductive healthcare providers and advocates like Ghorbani, the MAHA movement has created a false dichotomy between “natural” family planning methods and comprehensive reproductive healthcare. “To be crystal clear, we are very happy to counsel people on natural family planning or whatever form of birth control they believe is right for them,” says Ghorbani, reiterating that Planned Parenthood clinics across the country “meet patients where they’re at,” regularly providing information on cycle tracking and treatments for STDs that might otherwise cause infertility and limit the ability of Americans to have large families, if they choose to. For Ghorbani, the funding shifts undermine the principle of choice at the heart of reproductive care: “It feels like a disrespect to our patients. Our patients know what circumstances are best for them to bring children into this world.”

The attempts to defund Planned Parenthood aren’t just a matter of cutting off resources: It’s a potential redirection of Title X funds to anti-choice, unregulated organizations. “We want to make sure patients have fact-based information, they have medically-accurate information from medical providers, and that these dollars are not just being syphoned over to unregulated pregnancy centers where they don’t have the same healthcare standards, requirements, or healthcare professionals that are giving people fact-based science-based, best practice-based information.”

What Ghorbani is referring to are the over 2600 anti-abortion and anti-contraception organizations in the United States that position themselves as “crisis pregnancy centers” and redirect pregnant patients away from abortion and family planning through misinformation around the dangers of abortion and risks of infertility, religious rhetoric and value-laden language around “preborn babies,” and flat-out fearmongering.

“There’s a fundamental ground shift happening in how this administration thinks about the role of women in this country, the way that they think about reproduction in this country,” says Ghorbani. “They would prefer that people have lower access to information and lower access to high quality care. That’s the only way I can interpret what they’re doing around the cuts to healthcare.”

The lawsuit also alleges that the Trump administration did not follow the Administrative Procedures Act, which requires that the federal government post a public notice of new rule changes, allowing for a feedback period, and must take this feedback into account before moving forward with a rule change. For Planned Parenthood workers, like Ghorbani, the lawsuit represents both a challenge to anti-choice rhetoric, and to the twisting of democratic procedure to appease anti-choice voters. “Process still matters,” says Ghorbani.

This lawsuit is underpinned by an understanding that Title X-funded programs, for millions of Americans, are the last point-of-access to equitable and evidence-based reproductive care at clinics like Planned Parenthood. As Ghorbani puts it, the recent attacks reflect the growing “pro-birth, pro-natalist agenda that in no way takes into account the realities of working families in this country”—along with a pompous bypassing of due process. The victims of this ideological warfare are millions of working-class Americans. The politicization of Title X funding and the targeting of Planned Parenthood threatens this access, potentially isolating low-income, uninsured, and under-insured Americans from evidence-backed reproductive and sexual healthcare.

Last month I wrote about the tug-of-war between the Trump administration and the states over prediction markets. Kalshi, one of the largest U.S. prediction market companies, had just won a favorable ruling from a federal court in Minnesota with the help of a key federal financial regulator. Since then, things have escalated dramatically for the prediction-market industry on multiple fronts.

Nevada, which has extensive experience with gambling regulation, had appeared to strike a bargain with Kalshi earlier this year by getting it to agree to a geofencing restriction. In exchange for blocking people within the Silver State from accessing its markets, the state agreed to drop its ongoing case against the company. That agreement fell apart last week after investigators for the Nevada Gaming Control Board were able to circumvent the geofencing services used by Kalshi.

Under the terms of the agreement, Kalshi agreed to pay the state $120,000 per day if it failed to implement a geofence by August 12. The company instead lashed out at Nevada regulators by accusing them of providing “falsified information (breaking federal law) to hunt for a loophole and manufacture another legal grievance” against Kalshi. “This is not the behavior of a regulator trying to protect consumers—it is a vindictive waste of taxpayer dollars at the bidding of casinos,” Rick Heaslip, Kalshi’s general counsel, claimed on Twitter last week.

The Nevada Gaming Control Board was unamused, to say the least. “Kalshi’s accusations are baseless, and they cannot obscure the fact that Kalshi missed its agreed-upon deadline to comply with Nevada law,” the board said in a statement. “Kalshi’s consistent failures to comply with the court orders left the board with no other choice but to advise the court of Kalshi’s noncompliance.” That could open the door to more punitive sanctions against the company.

An even greater legal threat emerged in New York after state officials filed a lawsuit against Kalshi on July 31 for allegedly violating the state’s gambling laws. State law requires sports-betting companies to obtain a license from the state gaming commission and pay taxes on their winnings. New York also alleged that Kalshi violated the state’s age limit for sports betting by allowing 18, 19, and 20-year-olds to place bets on its marketplaces.

“No matter what they call themselves, prediction markets like Kalshi are gambling platforms, plain and simple,” New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “By ignoring our laws, Kalshi is running an illegal operation and harming New Yorkers in the process. We are taking them to court to uphold our laws and protect New Yorkers.”

Kalshi first announced that it would take bets on sports events in January 2025, the New York lawsuit noted, and advertised its product as allowing users to “view live sports (and bet).” In practical terms, a Kalshi “sports contract” is functionally no different than a bet to the average consumer. A customer places a wager in the form of purchasing sports contracts on a binary outcome, ranging from whether the Los Angeles Dodgers will win the 2026 World Series to whether Shohei Ohtani will hit a home run during a specific game. If the wager is correct, the bettor receives a larger sum payment.

The principal difference between a prediction market and a traditional sportsbook is that the counterparty for the wager isn’t the company itself, but other bettors who are buying and selling “event contracts.” While sportsbooks derive their profit from losing bets by their customers, Kalshi and other prediction markets instead get their revenue from transaction fees for each wager placed.

New York state officials first instructed Kalshi to cease and desist its unlicensed sports gambling operation in October 2025. Three days later, Kalshi sued the state to obtain a preliminary injunction that would block New York from enforcing its demands. A federal district court in Manhattan denied those motions last month. On July 31, the state escalated its war by filing its own lawsuit that seeks to recoup all profits from the allegedly unlawful sports-betting operation as well as damages, for a total of $36 billion in penalties, which would exceed Kalshi’s current market capitalization.

Leaping to the rescue of Kalshi, Polymarket, and similar enterprises is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency charged with overseeing the nation’s derivatives markets. Under its commissioner Michael Selig, the CFTC has argued that it has the exclusive authority to regulate prediction markets via federal law. It filed a separate lawsuit against New York in April that also sought to stop the state from punishing Kalshi and other prediction markets for offering sports-related bets. Earlier lawsuits sought to stop gambling regulators in Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois from enforcing their own laws against sports prediction markets.

How can the CFTC intervene on behalf of prediction markets? Federal law exclusively allows the agency to regulate derivatives contracts and the markets where they can be bought and sold. Prediction-market companies have argued that their sports-related products are equivalent to derivatives, even though their functional practice is to facilitate sports betting. Traditional sportsbooks have to operate on a state-by-state basis, obtaining licenses and complying with intensive gambling regulatory regimes. Prediction markets can instead seek refuge under the friendly auspices of the CFTC and operate nationwide with limited oversight.

In addition to lawsuits like the one in Minnesota earlier this year, the agency can intervene on behalf of prediction markets is by invoking Section 8a(9) of the Commodity Exchange Act. That provision, which was designed to address a “market emergency,” allows the CFTC to “direct” a commodity or derivatives market to “take such action as in the Commission’s judgment is necessary to maintain or restore orderly trading in or liquidation of any futures contract.” This power is rarely invoked, with only four previous instances between the years of 1976 and 1980.

After laying moribund for the last 46 years, the CFTC has invoked those powers three times in 2026 to direct prediction markets to ignore state regulators and even the courts. Earlier this month, it issued an order instructing Kalshi to continue normal operations in New York—that is, to keep offering sports-betting products on its markets—despite the legal actions taken by New York gambling regulators.

“If New York can ban event contracts, it logically could ban any derivatives product that the Commission regulates, including basic futures contracts, on the erroneous basis that trading in these products contravenes New York’s gambling laws,” the agency claimed. “In that case, New York would wield existential control over every entity that offers derivatives products and is headquartered in New York—the financial capital of the world.”

A federal district court in Connecticut, for example, ruled earlier this month that Kalshi’s sports-betting contracts do not fall under the CEA, meaning that the CFTC can’t override state gambling regulators. When Kalshi notified the court of the CFTC’s order to keep operating in New York, Judge Vernon Oliver found it to be “not compelling” because the court had already ruled that such contracts are outside the CFTC’s jurisdiction—a conclusion also reached by a federal trial judge in New York.

“The Court ‘must exercise independent judgment in determining the meaning of statutory provisions,’” Oliver wrote, quoting from the Supreme Court’s landmark decision that overturned Chevron deference two years ago. “It has done so here in finding that Connecticut’s gambling laws do not conflict with the CEA. Nothing in the CEA takes away statutory interpretation from the Courts, and as an administrative agency, the CFTC lacks the authority to dictate an order that conflicts with this Court’s decision.”

This legal battle is existential for the prediction-market industry. While prediction markets offer a wide range of event contracts, taking wagers on major sports events is an integral part of their business strategy. By one estimate, sports betting accounted for between 85 and 90 percent of trading volume on U.S. prediction markets. Bloomberg reported last week that more than 1 in 4 Gen Z investors consider sports betting to be part of their long-term financial strategy—a disturbing finding on its own terms. Prediction markets hope to siphon off as much of that potential revenue as possible from traditional sportsbooks.

Selig, the CFTC chair, has touted his agency’s role in protecting and nurturing prediction markets, which he says can “produce a lot of useful information” by “forecasting” future events. “We are making sure that we don’t let these markets languish or that we don’t push them offshore,” he said at an industry event earlier this month, “but we develop the right rules and regulations to develop investor protections and make sure that the markets are flourishing here in the United States.”

According to one litigation tracker, the CFTC alone has sued nine states over their efforts to regulate prediction markets, while legal battles between states and prediction markets themselves over sports betting in some form are underway in roughly half of the Union. At stake is a vast market that seeks to extract billions of dollars from younger Americans under the guise of gamified investments. Its ultimate fate—and the scope of the CFTC’s authority over sports-event contracts—will likely be decided by the institution that kicked off the sports-betting craze eight years ago: the Supreme Court of the United States.

The White House and MAGA exploded in fury after Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff pointed out during a speech that Donald Trump loves to “travel with Natalie” on the presidential jet. “Natalie,” of course, is Natalie Harp, the young aide whom Trump relies on heavily for emotional support and basically controls information flows to him. Yet despite all the fake MAGA outrage, Semafor reports that in fact, Trump’s own aides are “unnerved” by their closeness. That shows Ossoff is forcing a much-needed conversation over Trump’s sunsetting and the informational bubble he resides in daily. We talked to Paul Waldman, who wrote about this saga on his Substack, The Cross Section. We discuss how Ossoff stripped bare the realities of Trump’s sunsetting, why this is what actually got MAGA so furious, why this shows Democrats should make the midterms about Trump, and what it all says about how Democrats should fight the information wars. Listen to this episode here.

A group of religious extremists are planning a “Christian Crusader March” in  Dearborn, Michigan, Tuesday evening, and Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, whose district includes Dearborn, called out the lack of response to the demonstration, noting the relentless Islamophobic attacks on the city.

“Islamophobia is a problem among both Democrats and Republicans,” Tlaib posted on X Monday night. “The silence in Michigan among state leaders while one of the largest cities in the state is being terrorized by Islamophobes is shameful.”

The march is being led by extremist and provocateur Jake Lang, a January 6 rioter pardoned by President Trump who keeps returning to the city to harass its large Muslim and Arab community. In November, he tried to lead another march and got punched in the face. He was also arrested in June for “terroristic threats” in Texas and in February in Minnesota for destroying an anti-ICE ice sculpture. 

Senator Elissa Slotkin stepped up following Tlaib’s post, saying Tuesday morning that “The people of Dearborn are once again under attack from an out-of-state influencer looking for controversy.

“The Mayor [Abdullah Hammoud], the Police Chief, and religious leaders of all faiths are again showing leadership and demonstrating that Michigan is united against hate and Islamophobia,” Slotkin posted. “Dearborn is as Michigan as it gets, and as Police Chief Issa Shahin said, these individuals are coming for one reason and one reason alone: To provoke a reaction. The most powerful thing this community can do is give them an audience. Don’t give them the satisfaction.” 

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who is the Democratic nominee for governor, also spoke up for Dearborn, saying Tuesday afternoon that “It’s a city full of hardworking, proud, patriotic Michiganders — and hard as they might try, these out-of-state agitators cannot change that. And we will not let their hate drive us apart.”

Whitmer issued a statement Tuesday calling Lang and his supporters “a group of agitators” who are “traveling to Dearborn for the sole purpose of intimidating that community and provoking a reaction,” urging local residents not to engage with them.   

Attorney General Dana Nessel hasn’t issued a statement over the march. On Monday, Hammoud responded to a reporter’s question by calling on Nessel to consider hate crimes charges against Lang. 

“I would take that question and actually channel it towards our attorney general to see what she may do with her hate crimes unit to see if there’s anything that can be levied against these agitators and provocateurs that come to Dearborn time and time again,” Hammoud said.

Outside of Michigan, national Democratic figures such as House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are silent. Meanwhile, Dearborn’s Christian and Muslim faith leaders are uniting against the hatred directed at their city. 

Just a reminder: No, President Donald Trump did not save Natalie Harp’s life.

As the president’s close relationship with his female aide has come under scrutiny, a litany of MAGA social media accounts have jumped to her defense. Notably, numerous accounts have claimed their relationship is nothing if not honorable—after all, Harp credits Trump’s 2018 Right to Try Act with saving her life.

In an emotional address at the 2020 Republican National Convention, Harp claimed that after she was diagnosed with stage 2 bone cancer, she was a beneficiary of Trump’s policy intended to give patients access to experimental medical treatments.

“When I failed the chemotherapies that were on the market, no one wanted me in their clinical trials,” Harp said. “They didn’t give me the right to try experimental treatments, Mr. President. You did, and without you, I’d have died waiting for them to be approved.”

But experts have long cast doubt on Harp’s supposedly heartwrenching story.

Harp claimed she received “an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug for an unapproved use,” but Trump’s Right to Try law only applies to drugs that have not been approved by the FDA. Healthcare providers were already allowed to prescribe FDA-approved drugs for off-label uses long before Trump ever entered office.

In reality, Trump’s Right to Try was a massive failure—a repackaging of the expanded access that patients already had with decreased federal oversight. The president’s claims that the program has saved thousands of lives couldn’t be further from the truth. The most recent report shows the policy supported access to only six drugs in 2025.

Years after helping him sell his lame duck policy, Harp is still glued to Trump’s side. After the president tapped his “human binkie” to join him on his secret flight out of Turkey last month, people are starting to suggest there may be more to the story—and the White House’s wild reaction did little to ease concerns.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used an anti-LGBTQ slur completely unprompted at an Iowa State Fair on Monday, referring to transgender people as “trannies.”

“At the Department of War, we do training, not trannies,” he said at a Salute to the Troops military fundraiser at the fair, the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported. The event was initially supposed to be in March, but was delayed when two Iowa servicemembers were killed in an Iranian airstrike that Hegseth downplayed at the time

“It is a day and night difference,” he continued. “Training, lethality, accountability, discipline, readiness—the bedrock of what it means to be an American warrior—is the only focus of our department. Colorblind, gender-neutral, merit-based. That’s it.”

Transgender people have become a constant target of the right’s outrage machine. The Trump administration has made them the focus of much of their cultural attacks in the war on “woke,” casting trans people as an imminent threat to Western values even as they make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. adult population. That political disdain is embodied in perhaps no one more than Hegseth, who casually tosses out slurs and recently introduced mandatory testosterone screening for older soldiers.

Last year, President Trump signed an executive order banning transgender and nonbinary people from the military, calling them purveyors of “radical gender” ideologies that were “not honorable,” “truthful,” or “disciplined.” The Supreme Court upheld the order in May, though legal challenges continue in the lower courts.

“A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member,” the order read—equating gender dysphoria with mental illness and moral deficiency, and assuming that your assigned gender at birth has something to do with how well you can fight a war.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is suing Texas Governor Greg Abbott to compel the extradition of ICE agent Christian Castro, who faces charges of assault and falsely reporting a crime during the Trump administration’s crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year. 

Castro was arrested in Cameron County, Texas, in May for his involvement in the January 14 shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis. Minneapolis prosecutors allege that Castro shot at the front door of a home, hitting Sosa-Celis in the leg and lodging a bullet in a child’s bedroom wall, before giving false information to an officer about it. 

Castro was arrested in Texas in May, but under Texas law, he could be released next week as he can only be held for 90 days. He could then potentially leave the U.S. since he’s being held near the Mexican border.  

“Christian Castro has been charged with breaking the law in Minnesota,” Ellison said at a news conference Tuesday. “He must face justice in Minnesota. Gov. Abbott should have granted Gov. Walz’s extradition request long ago and is required to do so now.”

“Christian Castro is not above the law and Greg Abbott isn’t either,” Ellison added. “We have to take the position that they are refusing to honor the extradition request.”

This “should be a completely unnecessary lawsuit,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said at the press conference, noting that local prosecutors and officials at the jail were “very cooperative” and that Texas has extradited three unrelated criminal defendants to Minnesota at the state’s request.

Abbott, a Republican, is a staunch supporter of President Trump and the administration’s mass deportation agenda. He could very well be holding off on the extradition because the White House doesn’t want ICE agents to face prosecution, no matter what crimes they commit. 

A federal judge has allowed President Trump to end Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopians, placing 5,000 people who immigrated to the United States at risk of deportation. 

Ethiopians first received TPS designation in 2022—in the midst of a war between the Ethiopian government and the people of the northern Tigray region. Any Ethiopians under TPS must now leave the country in 60 days or risk being deported. 

The decision follows a 6-3 June Supreme Court decision that federal courts do not have the ability to review TPS decisions made by the Department of Homeland Security.

U.S. District Court Judge Brian E. Murphy lifted the last remaining block on the Trump administration’s termination of TPS for Ethiopians. The case is expected to continue, however, as defendants try to prove DHS’s decision was motivated by racial or nation of origin animus.  

This is yet another attack on Black and African immigrants, as the Trump administration ended TPS for Haitians earlier this month, placing over 300,000 people at risk of being deported back to an untenable situation in Haiti. 

These people have been in the U.S. for years, have established lives, and have worked in their communities. Now they are being forced to return to a region the U.S. still advises its own citizens to “reconsider” traveling to.

People from Ethiopia, Haiti, South Sudan, Burma, Somalia, Cameroon, Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Nepal, and Honduras have now all had their TPS protections revoked.

Last weekend The Washington Post published an article reporting that Donald Trump wants the Navy to redesign the Gerald R. Ford-class of aircraft carriers to better meet his sense of aesthetics by moving the island control tower closer amidships. The reason is reportedly that it would make the carriers look more like the WWII-era Essex-class carriers that were the standard in the early years of the Cold War when Trump was growing up.

This follows close on the heels of his order to replace the Ford-class’s Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System, or EMALS, catapults with older, outdated steam-powered catapults on future carriers of the class. He has been obsessed with this since 2017 when he heard a sailor gripe about the new EMALS. This change will require a massive redesign of the class, increasing costs by billions and delaying the launch of the USS Doris Miller, scheduled for 2034.

It will also make future carriers significantly more expensive to operate and will reduce the effectiveness of their catapults. EMALS has the advantages of greater launch precision, lighter system weight, less space required, faster recharge times, and reduced manpower and maintenance needs compared to older steam catapults.

In doing so, Trump has fallen into the folly of dictators throughout modern history of meddling in the technical details of new weapons systems, delaying their introduction, and damaging their own country’s military capabilities in the process.

Joseph Stalin heavily micromanaged Soviet military technology, personally tracking foreign hardware specs, greenlighting unorthodox experimental weapons, and directing massive defense industrialization while simultaneously purging key military theorists and engineers under the threat of terror. He was a politician and not an engineer. The bigger the project, the better.

Stalin championed a grand-fleet naval program focused on massive, traditional heavy surface ships that became white elephants. Rejecting the rising importance of aircraft carriers and modern fleet integration, he insisted on building obsolete Sovetsky Soyuz-class super-battleships and large gun-heavy cruisers that mismatched Soviet industrial capacity and strategic needs. When he died in 1953, the incomplete hulls of these ships were quietly sent to the breakers.

Adolf Hitler similarly meddled and micromanaged, but without even Stalin’s organizational skills and systematic approach. His mercurial obsessions led to delaying practical production of advanced weapons like the Me 262 jet fighter by insisting it be used as a bomber, canceling effective small arms programs, and demanding slow, resource-heavy “wonder weapons” (wunderwaffen) instead of prioritizing mass logistics and standardized production. In particular, he was obsessed with building super-heavy tanks that were effectively useless. He also had distinct opinions on how weapons systems should look, and an insistence on neoclassical mega-projects.

Which leads to the discussion of Trump’s other naval project: resurrecting the battleship, but this time with nuclear propulsion and lots and lots of missiles. Virtually every independent military expert I know, including conservative ones, regards the 34,000 ton Trump-class as a phenomenally bad idea. Among the numerous issues are a lack of funding, unprecedented design, high development costs, survivability, role, and poor fit with the current naval doctrine of distributing firepower and sensors across smaller platforms. The fact that it was drawn up to satisfy the egotistical whims of a president intent on naming a mega-ship after himself without going through the usual study of requirements and industrial capacity is often lost in the broader debate of why this is a bad idea.

All of this meddling only serves to make the Navy’s existing problems worse. The Navy has not managed to produce a successful new surface combatant class of ships (e.g. frigates, destroyers, cruisers) since the introduction of the Arleigh Burke–class guided missile destroyers (DDGs) in 1991. Since then, the Navy has attempted to build but then cancelled the Zumwalt-class of destroyers (3 built), Constellation-class frigates (two under construction), CG(X) program (none built), and the Independence and Freedom-class Littoral Combat Ships (LCS).

The LCS program was a complete fiasco, its ships derisively referred to as “Little Crappy Ships.” They were not capable enough in a modern combat environment, and their propulsion systems proved so unreliable that they are being retired after less than a decade or two in service, when most Navy ships are now expected to last 35-50 years.

To make matters worse, the oldest Arleigh Burke–class destroyers are coming up on retirement, and it is widely recognized that the class is insufficient to meet future needs of the Navy. The Burkes simply don’t have the hull space and electrical power necessary to support the next generation of weapons and sensors. Similarly, the last of the Ticonderoga-class cruisers will be retired by 2029, leaving the Navy with no anti-aircraft cruisers left in the fleet. The DDG(X) program was supposed to provide a replacement for both the Burke and Ticonderoga-classes. The design was well underway, but then Trump interfered.

The Trump-class battleship (BBG(X)) effectively sidelines the next-generation DDG(X) destroyer program. The Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan frames the massive battleship as a superior alternative that avoids the capability compromises of a smaller destroyer hull, forcing a pivot away from DDG(X). The Senate Armed Services Committee recognizes this isn’t a great idea and is trying to keep the DDG(X) development program funded. However, the senators aren’t willing to say no to Trump either, and $17 billion is slated for the white elephant in the 2028 budget to develop a ship that will almost certainly barely make it past the Power Point and conceptual art stage of development, much less touch water or be commissioned.

Similarly, some of the troubles with U.S. carriers in the war in Iran can be traced to the Navy drawing down its carrier fleet from 15 to 11 over the years since the Persian Gulf War. When Trump delays the procurement of the Doris Miller based on a poorly thought-out whim, it means that an older, more expensive, less capable, less deployable carrier (in this case, a Nimitz-class carrier, possibly the Eisenhower or Vinson) will have to remain in service past its planned decommissioning date to meet the congressionally mandated 11-carrier requirement. The Nimitz-class is nuclear powered, which means that refueling her and extending her life is not economically feasible.

A lot of people have asked when you can safely say that Trump is a dictator. The fact that his party is willing to spend $17 billion to fund a white elephant wunderwaffen that everyone knows is a boondoggle just to humor him and avoid his wrath, even as the country is losing a war, seems like all the proof we needed.

Charlie Kirk’s former allies can’t stop fighting amongst themselves.

An analysis by Media Matters found that a debate between Candace Owens and Andrew Wilson that was moderated by Patrick Bet-David and that focused on conspiracy theories about Kirk’s murder earned at least 7.2 million views combined across those creators’ livestreams as of Monday.

Media Matters also found at least 58 other YouTube and Rumble channels that either aired or reacted live to the debate earned at least 3.9 million views.

Creators are able to make money through partnerships with platforms that grant them a cut of advertising revenue. On platforms like YouTube, viewers are able to send cash tips to creators during a livestream.

Owens’s YouTube stream received more than 4.7 million views, the most of any stream. For months, the right-wing podcaster has cashed in on pushing conspiracy theories about Kirk’s assassination. She was able to grow her platform by 80 percent between January 2025 and March 2026.

Wilson, a comparatively small-time conservative commentator, reportedly offered Owens $300,000 just to participate in the debate. By tying himself to Owens, the center of the conspiracy theory universe, Wilson is able to boost his still-growing platform.

Who won the debate? They both did. Who lost? Everyone else.

Mike Caruso, appointed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as the Palm Beach County clerk of courts, was arrested Tuesday morning for child sexual abuse charges.

The alleged victim was one of his grandchildren, a boy under 12 years old. According to a probable cause affidavit, the alleged abuse began in 2024 and went on until at least 2025. Caruso is charged with five felonies: kidnapping, lewd or lascivious molestation, lewd or lascivious exhibition, luring or enticing a child, and child abuse (mental injury).

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier issued a statement announcing the arrest, with DeSantis suspending Caruso from public office shortly thereafter. Caruso is being held without bail in the Orange County Jail pending an appearance before a judge.

“Early this morning, with substantial assistance from FDLE and local law enforcement, Palm Beach County Clerk of Court Michael Caruso was arrested on charges related to child sexual abuse,” Uthmeier said. “The investigation is ongoing, and we will provide more information to the public at the appropriate time.”

Caruso’s son became aware of the abuse in October last year when he saw his son engaging in sexual activity with his younger brother, the affidavit states. After the father stopped the activity, the boy told him that his grandfather had showered with him on a cruise and performed a sex act. The child later told investigators that Caruso had molested him days before Thanksgiving the previous year.

Upon being confronted by his son, Caruso said he had showered with all of his own children, but not the alleged victim. Caruso asked his son if he had spoken with Caruso’s former wife, whom he called “evil” and said she could have “fabricated the allegations in an effort to poison the child against him,” according to the affidavit.

Caruso was appointed to his position by DeSantis in August last year, and was running for reelection in November before his arrest. He did not have any Republican challengers, and was running uncontested in Tuesday’s primary election. It’s not clear if he’ll be on the general election ballot in three months. DeSantis’s allies and supporters have a history of using the “groomer” slur against their opponents, accusing them of pedophilia. Now, one of his own appointees is facing criminal charges.

President Trump, who has staunchly opposed mail-in voting as part of his delusions of mass voter fraud, voted by mail in Florida’s Republican primary elections Tuesday, according to The New York Times.

Trump has repeatedly claimed that mail-in voting is not secure. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” the president said in March. This is at least the third time Trump has voted by mail since he began railing against the practice.

In March, Trump voted by mail-in ballot during a special election in Palm Beach. When pressed on his decision to engage in the supposedly fraudulent act of mail-in voting, Trump claimed that it was important for him to stay in Washington D.C.—but the president had journeyed back to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach earlier that month. He’d also previously voted by mail in 2020.

Terrified of Republican losses in November’s midterm elections, Trump has spent months unsuccessfully lobbying his allies to pass the draconian SAVE Act, which promises to ban mail-in voting.

Last week, Trump mulled the possibility of declaring a national security emergency in order to place limits on mail-in ballots and impose a slate of other voting restrictions.

Earlier this year, Trump signed 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. Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the Democratic lawsuit challenging the order was premature.

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Inside Washington

Florida’s Senate primary isn’t what it seems

On the surface, Angie Nixon’s and Alex Vindman’s contest in Florida on Tuesday might look like another progressive-versus-moderate primary, as we’ve seen in other Democratic primaries this cycle. But neither candidate is eager to portray it that way. Instead, both seem focused on whether Dems might have a chance in this once-purple, increasingly-red state. Whichever one wins the primary will be facing an uphill battle against a Republican incumbent that few outside Florida have even heard of: Ashley Moody, who Governor Ron DeSantis appointed to fill the seat vacated when Marco Rubio became Secretary of State.

Angie Nixon, a member of the Florida House of Representatives since 2020, who recently joined the Democratic Socialists of America (the organization hasn’t endorsed her), is running on Medicare for All, a tax on billionaires, and free childcare. Alex Vindman—known for his role as a whistleblower during President Trump’s first term, as well as for being Representative Eugene Vindman of Virginia’s identical twin brother—has emphasized cost of living, corruption, and his military service. His testimony in 2019 ultimately helped lead to Trump’s first impeachment charge.

Though Vindman is the more moderate of the two candidates, he’s also framing himself as the anti-establishment choice, a different dynamic than other elections this cycle like the primary between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens in Michigan.

“If you want an outsider who is ready to take on the establishment and has the grassroots support to defeat Ashley Moody in November, I’m your guy,” Vindman said in a statement to The New Republic, touting his first-time run and rejection of corporate PAC money. He added that he wants to “lower costs for working Floridians and fight corruption in D.C., starting with lowering the cost of homeowners’ insurance, gas, and housing and banning Congressional stock trading.”

Nixon likewise rejects the framing of progressive versus moderate: “I think too much of politics today is about labels. People in Washington want to put candidates and voters into neat little boxes, but Florida is not that simple,” she wrote in a statement to The New Republic. “What I hear from people across this state is that they are worried about the things that actually affect their lives: Can I afford my groceries? Can I afford a home? Can I afford childcare? Can I keep a roof over my family’s head?” Like Vindman, she also cited the high cost of insurance in the state.

Polling so far is sparse, but a July poll of likely voters found Vindman ahead of Nixon by 15 points, though 36 percent of voters were undecided. A different poll from the University of North Florida found Moody ahead of both candidates in a general election matchup. In the poll, Moody has a 10-point lead on Vindman and an eight-point lead on Nixon. A survey of likely voters in mid-June had Moody and Vindman tied with 46 percent of the vote.

Since primary polling has been so limited, experts were careful not to make any predictions for Tuesday night. But in an expensive state like Florida, fundraising matters, said Kevin Wagner, a professor at Florida Atlantic University. So far, Vindman has massively outraised both Nixon and Moody. At the end of June, Vindman had raised over $14 million, compared to Moody’s nearly $11 million and Nixon’s $625,000. The Vindman campaign also noted that 13 percent of its donations have come from No Party Affiliation, or NPA, voters and seven percent from Republicans, which it hopes bodes well for a general election that will require the Democrat to win over a large chunk of NPA voters.

If Nixon pulls off a victory in the primary, said Aubrey Jewett, a professor at the University of Central Florida, it would likely be because of Black Floridians, who make up over 16 percent of the state’s population and are a crucial voting bloc for Democrats in the state. Nixon held a sit-in at the Governor’s office this year to protest against gerrymandering; four years ago, she joined other Black lawmakers in a similar sit-in on the floor of the state House to protest redistricting that they say disenfranchised Black voters.

The perennial question about leftist candidates in the U.S. is whether anyone tied to an organization with the word “socialist” in it can win in a general election. That question has a particular edge in Florida, though, where many voters or their family members have fled socialist countries like Cuba. Moody has already been campaigning against socialism, and is likely to peg whoever her Democratic opponent is with the label, even though Vindman himself fled the USSR as a child, a story he’s used to make inroads with Cuban voters.

No matter who wins tonight, the math will remain incredibly difficult for the Democratic contender: Florida Republicans hold a 1.5 million voter registration lead over Democrats. Even in traditionally Democratic parts of the state, like Miami-Dade County, voters have increasingly been voting for Republicans. The last time a Democrat won statewide in Florida was in 2018, in a race for Commissioner of Agriculture. Granted, Trump’s favorability in 2018 was +2, and now sits at -6, which Democrats think could give them an opening to pick up NPAs and some moderate Republicans.

Hispanic voters will also be crucial for a Democratic win in November, said Jewett. He pointed to Miami-Dade and Osceola counties, both of which have a large Hispanic population. Like other voters in Florida, Hispanic voters have leaned more Republican in recent years, but Jewett thinks there could be a pendulum swing back toward Democrats now that these voters have seen (and sometimes directly felt) the impacts of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda in his second term.

“They have to basically get everything right to have a fighting chance,” Wagner said of Democrats on the ballot. That means turning out the Democratic base in South Florida, picking up NPA voters in the center of the state, and peeling away some Republicans in the state’s more rural northern region.

That said, “the way you can tell whether a Democrat has a chance in Florida is by the volume of the vote coming out of South Florida, because they have to overcome vote totals in other places,” Wagner said. He suggested comparing Democratic and Republican turnout numbers on Tuesday to get a sneak peek of what the general election might look like.

Outside Washington

Arkansas’s Medicaid expansion program covering over 200,000 people under the Affordable Care Act is set to expire at the end of this year, and it’s still unclear whether the Trump administration will approve a two-year extension request, after declining a similar request to renew through 2031. On Monday, the Arkansas Advocate published the somewhat discouraging results of its attempt to ask each of the 2026 gubernatorial candidates “how they would tackle this issue.” Libertarian Colt Shelby “said the governor should take a lead role in ensuring Arkansas’s version of Medicaid expansion is extended indefinitely,” but also “reform” the entire system and match people with full-time employment to avoid relying on Medicaid. Democratic State Senator Fred Love condemned Republicans for proposing “no serious alternative” to Medicaid expansion, and noted that Medicaid disruptions could shutter rural hospitals, but was pretty short on details about what he would do if elected. And current Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t even offer a direct quote, but instead “referred the Advocate to a letter Department of Human Services Secretary Janet Mann sent to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services earlier this month,” which called the extension a “prudent step” and said that “helping capable individuals transition off the sidelines so we can focus resources on those truly in need remains a top priority.” There isn’t much polling on this race, but Sanders is heavily favored to win, having beaten Democrat Chris Jones in 2022 by almost 28 points.

The Guardian has published a useful report from Eric Berger on the current state of the increasingly strong right-to-repair movement—shorthand for a variety of policies to reduce corporations’ monopoly-like control over the repair of their products, so that it’s easier and cheaper for people to fix things like cell phones or tractors. The tractor tie-in has made right-to-repair a particularly hot issue in Iowa; Iowa’s House passed a right-to-repair bill this spring that went nowhere in the state Senate. Not mentioned, but worth noting: Both candidates in this year’s surprisingly tight gubernatorial race have claimed right-to-repair as a key component of their platforms, with Democrat Rob Sand calling right-to-repair a “no-brainer” and Republican Zach Lahn highlighting his running mate’s spearheading of the right-to-repair legislation in the House.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

On Wednesday at 10 a.m., Brookings will host an in-person and virtual event on “early assessment and open questions” regarding Donald Trump’s planned “Golden Dome for America,” a whole-country missile-defense system that he directed the Defense Department to start exploring in January 2025. Melanie W. Sisson will moderate a panel with Michael E. O’Hanlon, David Mosher, and Steve Fetter.

The Revolving Door Project issued a statement “condemn[ing]” Trump’s cryptocurrency and prediction markets roundtable this week. “On Wednesday, he’ll turn the White House into a hub for his crypto and prediction markets cronies to lean on independent agencies and a gridlocked Congress for a more permissive regulatory environment for these predatory corporations,” the organization’s Henry Burke said in the statement.

Data for Progress released a new poll finding that “voters think they are more likely to become homeless than a millionaire or billionaire, and reject the idea that billionaires obtain their wealth through innovation and hard work, instead seeing them as exploitative and a sign of a dysfunctional, anti-working-class economy.” There’s impressive cross-party agreement on that: Not just 67 percent of Democrats, but 65 percent of Republicans say they’re more likely to become homeless than become a billionaire—interestingly, only 54 percent of independents or third-party respondents agree with that. They’re more likely than either Democrats or Republicans to say they “don’t know” or are “more likely to become a billionaire.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Four Questions For: Jacob Rubashkin, Deputy Editor of Inside Elections

Interview by Grace Segers

Q: Who are you, and what are you working on right now?

A: At Inside Elections, I cover and analyze races for House, Senate, governor and president. Right now we’re ramping up our midterm coverage, so we’ve rolled out a new website, hired a new reporter, and are working hard to update the most competitive 100 or so races every issue.

Q: What is the most difficult thing about your line of work?

A: When Inside Elections (previously known as the Rothenberg Political Report) and the Cook Political Report got going in the 1980s, they were stepping into an information vacuum. Since then, there’s been a real democratization in the data and information available to cover races—and that’s largely a great thing! I use lots of tools that were simply not available back then, and it helps voters be much better informed. But it’s a double-edged sword, because not all data is created equal, and even good data can be used improperly. So a big part of my job these days is not only assessing the races on the merits, but also helping explain to the public why some pieces of information (prediction markets, certain polls, etc.) aren’t as valuable.

Q: What is a race that you believe isn’t getting enough attention this year?

A: I’ve got two on the opposite ends of the country. In Alaska, the open gubernatorial race is an unpredictable melee in a state known for its unorthodox politics. There are over a dozen credible Democratic, Republican, and independent candidates competing in Tuesday’s primary for four spots on the general election ballot and you really can’t rule out any outcome at this point. In Florida’s 12th District, which is north of Tampa, the GOP state legislature redrew longtime Representative Gus Bilirakis’s seat to be significantly less Republican. Bilirakis hasn’t had a tough race since his first election to Congress two decades ago and he’s got a real opponent in Air National Guard Col. Darren McAuley. The partisan lean is in Bilirakis’s favor but he can’t be caught sleeping if a wave develops.

Q: What keeps you going in these stressful times?

A: Family and loved ones, this summer’s abundance of fresh basil, John le Carré novels, and friends with a high tolerance for my kvetching.

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Florida holds its primaries today. Who was the Democratic Florida governor of the 1970s who pursued transparency and public disclosures, passed the state’s first corporate tax, and championed civil rights in the formerly segregated state?

(Sign up for The Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced the recall of a nationally sold granola brand due to concerns over potential salmonella contamination.

Hampton Grocer has recalled its popular Lacnola Lactation Granola, after one of the ingredients, moringa powder, tested positive for the bacteria. It is primarily sold on Amazon, and any bag bought between October 21, 2025, and August 12, 2026—nearly one year—is at risk of being contaminated.

Salmonella poisoning can cause diarrhea, nausea and vomiting, and severe cramping. No cases have been confirmed yet.

This potential outbreak presents yet another food safety issue for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Health Department, just weeks after a parasitic cyclospora outbreak caused two deaths and national anxiety over getting explosive diarrhea from lettuce. Even if this latest outbreak is kept under control, public trust in food safety has been deeply damaged, even if RFK Jr. hasn’t made any sweeping, blockbuster changes to food regulations.

“I’d like to reiterate how difficult it is to have granola infected with salmonella. It’s even more difficult than chili peppers, and no, it’s not ‘foreign producers’ that are the problem,” Chef Joe Gera wrote on X. “It’s quality control and standards not being enforced.”

Aside from salmonella in granola, the FDA has also reported salmonella contamination in eggs and jalapeño this month.

President Donald Trump took to Truth Social Tuesday to deliver an update on negotiations with Iran—or lack thereof.

“There are no talks or conversations going on, or scheduled, with the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Trump wrote. “The Naval Blockade remains in full force and effect. The Hormuz Strait is open and operating. All water mines have been removed or detonated.”

NewsNation’s Kellie Meyer pointed out that Trump had suggested the day before that his administration was still in talks with Iran. “This is what makes it difficult to convey to the American people / our viewers what’s going on here,” she wrote on X.

On Monday, Trump urged Iran to wave the “white flag of surrender,” and threatened to “bomb the shit out of” Oman if it got in the way. Later, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that Iran was “not going to make the kind of a deal that I feel is necessary.”

Earlier this month, Trump told reporters that he was in talks to reopen the Strait of Hormuz “literally by tomorrow.” Meanwhile, Iran denied speaking to the United States.

Trump’s wildly conflicting statements come after the end of the 60-day ceasefire deadline established in the memorandum of understanding that was signed in June—which Trump scrapped less than a month later. Recently, Trump’s own Cabinet members haven’t been willing to back up his claims that the U.S. has total control of the strait. Trump’s claims have been so erratic that they have spurred speculation about  a mirage for market manipulation. Or maybe he’s just losing it.

Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 civil lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell is going to be unsealed.

A federal court in Manhattan last week ordered the public release of the files from Giuffre’s defamation lawsuit against the accomplice and partner of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein following eight years of litigation from the Miami Herald, reported Julie Brown, the investigative journalist for the newspaper best known for covering Epstein’s crimes.

Maxwell had been fighting to keep the lawsuit details under wraps, but her arguments were not enough to convince U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska, who ruled that the Epstein Files Transparency Act supersedes the grand jury arguments Maxwell cited to keep the records sealed.

Giuffre brought the lawsuit more than a decade ago after Maxwell accused her of lying about being abused by Epstein, Maxwell, Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz, and other powerful figures. The lawsuit’s discovery process yielded thousands of pages of documents, including depositions of Maxwell, Giuffre, and many others, and Brown was told that it contains more evidence against Epstein, Maxwell, and their accomplices.

The judge in the initial case, Robert Sweet, took the unusual step of sealing all of the documents because they contained “sensitive” and “private” information. He put a protective order on hearings and decisions made in the case as well as volumes of evidence reportedly proving that Epstein and Maxwell were running an underage sex trafficking ring.

Before any of this could come out in a trial, Maxwell settled the case in 2017, paying Giuffre somewhere between $3 million to $5 million. But now, much of the information that could implicate powerful people will soon be made public, and there could be fallout in Washington, New York, and beyond.

The USS Benfold, a guided-missile destroyer, lost power for days while it was sailing with the George Washington carrier strike group through the South China Sea.

On July 24, the Benfold experienced an “engineering casualty involving its generator,” Commander Matthew Comer, spokesperson for the 7th Fleet told USNI News. Sailors went days without galley services, toilets and air conditioning, and their potable water was also affected. Four days later, the ship was towed into port, and power was restored on July 30.

These reports come amid mounting scrutiny over the toll of Trump’s extended reliance on the Navy to execute his aggressive national security priorities in Latin America and the Middle East.

Family members of sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have reported food shortages, and sanitation issues. During the Lincoln’s more than 200 days without a port call, there have been multiple instances where sailors have tried to jump overboard. Trump has repeatedly denied that sailors have experienced problems onboard the Lincoln. (The USS George Washington, deployed to replace the ship, appears to have its own mold problem.)

Now, other family members of sailors are coming forward. Sailors onboard the USS Carl Vinson, an aircraft carrier, also experienced a lack of water, with no warm water to shower and the water fountains were turned off, according to a series of texts a military spouse shared with Meidas Touch.