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One of the stories the White House cited to justify its ban on Politico, MS NOW, and CNN had Vice President JD Vance as its main source.

The Washington Post reports that during a press call in June, the Trump administration invited news outlets to a briefing where a White House aide told participants, “The contents of this call are on background, attributable to a senior administration official. By remaining on the line, you agree to those terms. There is no embargo for the contents of the call.”

That senior administration official was none other than Vance, who told the media outlets on the call that a peace agreement with Iran was “80, 85 percent” done. Politico published an article with the quote attributed to a senior administration official—only for the White House to later claim in court, “Publication of sensitive security information, and misinformation about national security information, diverts White House resources and those of the national security team in particular.”

“The spread of misinformation, especially relating to national security, is a threat that undermines the President’s ability to safeguard the national security,” the White House wrote in a letter submitted to the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

Status News reports that multiple news agencies were on that call and they all granted Vance anonymity in exchange for the information. Vance said on Monday that he supported banning Politico and other outlets, calling President Trump’s decision “totally appropriate.”

“If you actually look at the objective analysis, Politico is as anti-Trump as Breitbart was anti-Obama or anti-Biden,” Vance said. “They can still report on the Trump White House. They can still get the public reports. They can still, of course, talk to people in the administration and outside the administration.”

But the administration’s complaint about anonymously sourced news reports compromising national security rings hollow with this revelation. It’s overwhelmingly likely that Vance isn’t the only “senior administration official” who has delivered information to the press in this way. A judge lifted the ban late Wednesday night, but the White House still barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico reporters from White House grounds Thursday morning. That, plus the news about Vance, is likely to further undermine the administration’s legal defense for its attack on the free press.

This post is updated throughout the day to reflect the latest incidents. It was last updated at 7:01 a.m..

Here’s what’s happening on the roads this morning…

▼︎ new incidents

Road incidents as of 7 a.m. on September 24

• South Highway 1 at Park Avenue in Capitola / Soquel is facing closures for paving work. The closure is expected to end at 7:01 a.m. on Nov. 19.
   
• Highway 9 at Pool Drive in San Lorenzo Valley will have alternating lane closures because of bridge work. This will continue until April 30, 2027, at 6:59 a.m.
   

Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.

The post Thursday morning traffic: Hwy 1 closed at Park Ave.; Hwy 9 lane closures for bridge work appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

The [n]ever-present Melania Trump has a new tagline. As she rang the New York Stock Exchange’s opening bell Wednesday, the first lady formally announced IMPERIA, a program supposedly aimed at highlighting the “global economic power of women.” Now, don’t look too closely at the similarities between “Imperia” and the concept of imperialism, because there is plenty else to unpack here.

Source

Google has jumped on the AI-defense-for-critical-systems train with its Scan for Good initiative, and says that its threat-hunting models have already autonomously uncovered critical security issues at hospitals, a municipality, a public rail operator, and major technology providers. So don't fear these bots. The initiative, announced on Thursday, uses Google’s Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, a version of the model tuned for software bug hunting and remediation, and Wiz’s Red Agent - this is the Google-owned cloud security shop’s pentesting AI agent. The AI systems will uncover public exposures and attack paths across public services, critical infrastructure, and nonprofits, and then hand these off for verification and remediation to human security researchers. “The program has been active over the past several months, and with this official launch, we are scaling it globally,” Gal Nagli, head of offensive security at Wiz, told The Register. “There is no set end date.” It's similar to OpenAI’s Daybreak for Frontline Defenders initiative, announced earlier this month. This program will distribute $1 billion in credits to subsidize access to OpenAI services and training for resource-strapped cyber defenders, including those protecting water and energy systems, community banks, local governments, nonprofits, and open-source projects. And like OpenAI’s new program, the Wiz and Google DeepMind partnership follows disclosures that Google’s AI agents also escaped their sandboxes and hacked other companies’ websites - as did agents developed by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta, and those are just the ones we know about. It also comes as existential dread about AI killing all of humanity reaches a fever pitch. AI for good (not evil) Scan for Good aims to put offensive security agents and Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber to good, not evil, use. When authorized, either explicitly by organizations that apply for an assessment or under applicable bug bounty programs and vulnerability disclosure policies, the AIs will examine publicly facing websites, APIs, and applications for exposures, and then work with organizations to find and fix these. Every potential finding will be reviewed and validated by a human, and Wiz assures that “humans will remain responsible for confirming impact and making disclosure decisions.” When the bots and humans do identify a serious issue, the humans will contact the affected organization and work with them to remediate the security holes. Google’s AI systems have already helped critical organizations and tech providers find serious, internet-facing risks, including a critical GitHub Actions workflow vulnerability in one of Snowflake’s public repositories. In this bug-hunting expedition, conducted through Snowflake’s HackerOne vulnerability disclosure program, Wiz’s Red Agent autonomously identified a script injection vulnerability in snowflakedb/snowflake-connector-net. The flaw allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary commands within a GitHub Actions runner by opening a GitHub issue with a specially crafted title. Wiz disclosed the issue on June 23, and Snowflake fixed it on the same day, rotated the affected credential, and verified through detailed audit logs that Wiz was the only actor during the exposure window. Real-world examples The Google-owned biz provided several other examples of its AI for good, and said all of these were autonomously discovered by the models before Wiz validated them, but “only far enough to confirm real-world impact.” At that point, they privately notified the affected organization about the issue and helped it remediate the vulnerability. Some of these include: An exposed administrator key enabled read, write, and delete access to 8.8 million files in a “nationally significant archive” belonging to an unnamed Middle Eastern country. Assigning the correct set of permissions fixed the flaw. A public hospital with missing access controls exposed staff contact information and gave anyone online control of a hospital-wide mobile alert channel. A private hospital’s public appointment-booking site used an unsafe upload method that would have allowed attackers to take control of a hospital server and obtain patient identifiers, clinical information, and consent signatures. A municipality’s public data service exposed sensitive personal, health, and financial information belonging to about 5,000 elderly residents. Wiz confirmed the risk without collecting a bulk dataset. A public rail operator had a leaky production database that exposed active administrator sessions. This could have allowed criminals to take control of routes, schedules, service announcements, and administrator accounts - essentially disrupting the entire transportation system. Wiz helped the operator secure the system. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also gave Scan for Good its stamp of approval, and Wiz told us the American cyber-defense agency provided guidance on the initiative. “At a time of evolving threats, defensive vulnerability discovery helps strengthen the nation’s digital infrastructure,” CISA acting director Nick Andersen said in a statement. ®

The incident is the first known breach to affect a government agency, and Australia's prime minister has vowed to hold OpenAI accountable.

Europe's largest local authority will go at least one more financial year without auditors being able to vouch for its accounts despite finally reimplementing Oracle Fusion. Grant Thornton expects Birmingham City Council to receive "disclaimer opinions" for 2025/26, 2026/27, and 2027/28 due to problems with historic data. A disclaimer opinion means the auditor cannot obtain enough evidence to express an opinion on the financial statements. It does not mean the council failed to produce accounts, but it leaves stakeholders without independent assurance that those accounts are reliable. A report from the auditor said the council's transition to a rebuilt Oracle Fusion-based HR and finance system in August had been largely successful. It added that the "reimplementation appears to have been better managed than the original 2022 implementation." Council taxpayers might hope so. The first implementation of Oracle Fusion left the council unable to reconcile its bank accounts or reliably understand its cash position, and contributed to the crisis that preceded its effective bankruptcy. The total project, including the reimplementation, is set to cost around £144.4 million against an initial estimate of £20 million. Including forgone efficiency savings, researchers have estimated the cost could reach £216 million. Its early performance contrasts sharply with that of the original system, known as 1B, which went live in April 2022. "There are no outstanding business-critical or priority level 1 or 2 tickets or issues. For context, relating to the old 1B Oracle system in September 2025 there were 311 open tickets and 2 major incidents," the report said. Nonetheless, the council is not expected to regain a clean audit opinion before 2028/29 – roughly a decade after the Oracle program began. The council picked Oracle Fusion to replace its legacy R/3 SAP system and initially planned to go live in December 2020 for finance and procurement, and in February 2021 for HR and payroll. A 2021 business case subsequently moved both launches to April 2022. Although the council had planned to implement Oracle "out of the box," it introduced several customizations, including a bank-reconciliation design that failed to function properly. The council struggled to understand its cash position and could not provide auditors with sufficient evidence to verify its accounts. It has spent more than £5 million on manual workarounds. ®

Trump-appointed District Court Judge Timothy Kelly struck down the president’s sweeping media access ban late Wednesday night.

Kelly’s temporary restraining order gives access back to Politico, MS NOW, and CNN after they filed a lawsuit on Monday against the Trump administration. While the administration’s lawyers tried to justify the ban on national security grounds, Kelly wasn’t buying it.

“The Court is skeptical—at least on this record—that Defendants’ interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation for, or is even advanced by, the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes.... Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns,” he wrote in his decision. “Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ Plaintiffs from the White House—instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting.”

Trump apparently saw this decision coming, opining about Kelly’s commitment to judicial ethics on Truth Social and promising to appeal the decision the day the lawsuit was filed.

“As expected, Fake News CNN, Politico… and MSNOW (formerly known as MSDNC!), have brought suit to gain access to the White House, and your President, ME! They have drawn a great Judge, for them… The Judge’s name is Tim Kelly, and he was, sadly, appointed by ‘TRUMP,’” the president wrote. “In other words, almost without question and, as usual, we’ll go for appeal because Fake News people and publications that only write negatively, and who violate our National Security by writing false and defamatory stories with unknown ‘sources,’ shouldn’t be allowed access to the most important Office anywhere in the World.”

Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US IN THE INNER HIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week’s Tom the Dancing Bug comic – before it’s published anywhere. * Sign up for the free weekly newsletter, The Tom the Dancing Bug Review! Not nearly as good as joining the…

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In this week’s episode, Juan Reyes and John Devine will recap a much tighter Week 4 of the prep and college football season, and chime in on the situation at Hollister High.

Then they’ll jump into a conversation with Monte Vista Christian head football coach Joe Sturdivant to check in on the undefeated Mustangs. 

And finally, the guys will cap off the show with some updates on girls volleyball and a sneak preview of Week 5. 

We’ll have all this and more on… the Cover 3 Sports Podcast.

*Editor’s note: A portion of this episode was recorded Sept. 21 prior to the announcement of Hollister High’s football season being canceled.

Cover 3 Sports Podcast’s High School Football Top 10 rankings. (image generated by AI)

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

Two divergent worldviews emerged from the first two national addresses on the opening day of the United Nations General Assembly’s 81st session in New York. 

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, called for decarbonizing economies, protecting forests and supporting the energy transition through technology transfer. President Donald Trump followed with a rejection of global climate and artificial intelligence regulations, dismissing warnings about global warming while presenting fossil fuel abundance and technological supremacy as foundations of national power.

This year’s General Assembly session is taking place against a slew of global challenges supercharged by geopolitical rivalries and rising planetary warming. June was the second-warmest on record globally and the hottest Western Europe ever measured. A potentially record-breaking El Niño is expected to peak around December, raising fears of drought, crop failures and global food-price shocks. 

Trump mocked those who warned about global warming as “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years.”

In the US, surging AI data center growth is triggering expensive fossil-fuel generation and grid upgrades, raising electricity bills. Meanwhile, the US-Iran conflict has spread through the region, with clashes between Houthi and Saudi forces further roiling global oil markets already constrained by disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. 

Lula framed climate policy, forest protection and technology regulation as necessary parts of a rule‑based, multilateral effort to reduce emissions and manage systemic risks. He said the planet is facing a shared, urgent climate emergency that demands decarbonization and environmental protection—not delay or denial. He called for nations to “resume the offensive and inflict a defeat on denialism,” and warned that “the glaciers in the Himalayas are melting” and “torrential rains and forest fires” are already here. The impacts, Lula said, “will hit the most vulnerable the hardest.” 

He presented Brazil as proof that countries can “combine economic value with reduced emissions,” and pledged to “move forward by the roadmap for the decarbonization of the Brazilian economy.”

In his view, forests and ecosystems are climate assets worth protecting and technology, including AI, must be governed and restrained, calling it an “unprecedented technological revolution with great risks and opportunities.” Lula insisted it would be an “unforgivable historical mission not to address the challenge of regulating the big techs and artificial intelligence” and criticized “technical oligarchies without rules or transparency” that bypass the UN and scientific oversight.

Trump presented an almost opposite worldview by downplaying climate change, celebrating fossil fuel expansion, and attacking global climate regulation. He mocked those who warned about global warming as “the very same people who said we’ll all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead.” 

Trump claimed his administration had stopped what he called an international “global carbon tax” on shipping, insisting “there is no global government, and while I’m president, there will be no global taxes.” Rather than talking about emissions or a just energy transition, he boasted that American energy is fueling the planet and claimed that the U.S. and Venezuela together hold “more than 60 percent of the oil in the world.” This alone, he said, will drive down energy costs. 

On technology, he rejected any “globalist scheme to control” AI, rebranding it as “super-intelligence” and pledged his administration will “only encourage superintelligence.” On the whole, Trump’s roughly 35-minute speech treated carbon taxes, climate regulations and global tech governance as threats to sovereignty and growth, and presented fossil fuels and technological dominance as core tenets of national strength.

Environmental advocates, climate scientists and experts reacted sharply to those remarks and challenged Trump’s assertions on climate change and high energy costs. 

“The American people are experiencing first-hand the harsh and deadly realities of climate change, from extreme heatwaves to catastrophic wildfires and flooding,” said Rachel Cleetus, senior policy director with the Climate and Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. In a statement, she said climate disasters are damaging and destroying homes and critical infrastructure, inflating insurance premiums and increasing costs for communities. 

“We know [Trump] is a climate denialist. He has made it clear that he will continue drilling and buying fossil fuels. “

“The science is clear: fossil fuel-driven climate change is already causing significant harm and these harms will only grow if we fail to sharply curtail heat-trapping emissions and invest in resilience,” Cleetus said.

David Victor, a distinguished professor of innovation and public policy at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego said Trump’s climate denial and disengagement can frustrate meaningful progress on commitments made at the recent Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, where member nations negotiate how to cut emissions, adapt to climate impacts and fund those initiatives. 

“America’s energy power has little to do with the Trump administration or its ‘energy dominance’ strategy. And all the harm that the prolonged war in Iran has done on the Persian Gulf infrastructure has, plausibly, been the largest single setback in the global energy system since the 1970s.” he wrote in emailed comments, adding that staking a claim on Venezuelan oil doesn’t greatly affect how the global oil markets operate.

Victor noted that Trump largely sidestepped climate change in his speech, giving more attention to artificial intelligence, noting that the administration’s hostility to regulating AI is perhaps the most consequential of his statements.

“We know [Trump] is a climate denialist. He has made it clear that he will continue drilling and buying fossil fuels. He has also acted on dismantling every science-based institution in the US. However, what we want to hear from other heads of state, especially from rich nations, is what they plan to do,” said a statement from Tasneem Essop, executive director of the Climate Action Network International. 

She asked world leaders if they will step up to the challenge climate change poses or “hide behind Trump and shy away from their responsibilities to urgently transition away from fossil fuels.” 

In a separate statement, the advocacy group Oil Change International said: “Donald Trump used his platform at the UN General Assembly to brag about the US’s fossil fueled imperialism. From Iran, to Venezuela, to Greenland, Trump’s actions follow a familiar path: use military force to dominate sovereign nations, let Big Oil cash in, and leave ordinary people to bear the costs through war, pollution, rising energy bills, and worsening climate disasters.”

The statement said that governments can either follow Trump into a future of conflict and economic volatility, or build a stable and prosperous future by investing in energy independence and political stability through clean, renewable energy. “On the road to COP31, governments must reject Trump’s attempt to build a fossil fuel empire and show that his agenda will not dictate our shared future,” it added. 

This year’s gathering is the last for Secretary-General António Guterres, who will step down at the end of this year. Experts say his successor will inherit an even bigger challenge of keeping the global leadership invested in the common cause of rallying around efforts to fight climate change, resolve conflicts and empower fragile economies in Africa and the developing world more generally. 

Poland's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT Polska) has disrupted an Android toll fraud campaign that used paid Meta ads to steer Polish users toward malicious apps on Google Play. Its investigation documented 1,235 Meta ads, 852 of which promoted 17 apps tied to the operation. Six contained confirmed toll fraud components or direct links to them; the other 11 shared malicious loaders, although researchers could not recover their final payloads. Toll fraud uses malware to enroll mobile subscribers in paid services without their informed consent. Depending on the provider, the malware may send a premium-rate SMS or automate a carrier billing flow, including intercepting the verification code needed to approve a subscription. The charges then appear on the victim's phone bill or are deducted from their prepaid balance. In one observed route, the malware sent generated keywords to premium-rate SMS short codes – abbreviated numbers used for paid services – to request or confirm a purchase. CERT checked three such numbers against the Polish telecom regulator UKE's public register and found that all were active premium services. The campaign supported two billing routes. The three registered short codes charged 30.75 PLN ($7.97) per message, while a separate direct-carrier billing offer operated by Teleaudio advertised a recurring charge of 17 PLN ($4.41) every seven days. Kacper Ratajczak, senior security engineer at CERT Polska, did not disclose how many people were affected or their total losses. The three short codes were registered for use across Poland's four major mobile operators: Orange, T-Mobile, Play, and Polkomtel. The investigation began with two Facebook ads falsely warning Polish users that their PDF application had expired. Clicking either ad opened the Google Play listing for Messenger Pro, an unrelated SMS app containing the malicious loader. CERT later found nine TikTok ads promoting another app from the same advertising campaign, although its hidden code followed a different path and was not attributed to the same malware implementation. "The operation relied on both platforms at once," said Ratajczak. "Meta supplied paid acquisition aimed at Polish users: advertisements placed inside a familiar feed carry the credibility of the advertising platform itself, so the false PDF warnings looked like ordinary product promotion. Google Play supplied the installation path that users treat as reviewed and trustworthy." Messenger Pro functioned as an SMS app and could legitimately ask to become the device's default message handler. Behind that cover, its base APK reconstructed an encrypted DEX file at runtime. The loader checked the package name and the device's mobile country code, contacted a policy server, and decrypted another DEX responsible for selecting and downloading the final fraud payload from Alibaba Cloud Object Storage Service. Once running, the final payload contacted its command-and-control server, which assigned premium SMS or browser-based carrier billing jobs according to the victim's country and mobile operator. CERT reported Messenger Pro to Google on September 15 and subsequently reported every app uncovered during the investigation. Google removed the identified apps from Play, while Meta took down the ads reported by the researchers. Removing the Play listings stopped new installations through those pages but did nothing to copies already installed. CERT said the command-and-control infrastructure remained operational during its analysis and continued issuing jobs to controlled Polish registrations. Nor did the takedowns end distribution: CERT saw new packages appear after Google removed the apps it had reported. Anyone who installed one of the malicious apps therefore needs to remove it from their device. ®

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

After we recorded, a federal court issued a temporary restraining order halting the ban.

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

Donald Trump’s press ban is already running into legal trouble. The White House offered a response to the lawsuit against the ban brought by news organizations, and legal experts quickly poked some pretty big holes in it.

This comes as Trump seems to have fixated, for some reason, on CNN as his main target. He exploded in fury at reporter Kaitlan Collins this week and also tried to publicly humiliate her. Amusingly, he’s only uniting the media against him, Fox News included. And we think this is a harbinger for the deeper institutional resistance he’s set to face as his power diminishes.

So we’re talking about all of it with New Republic staff writer Timothy Noah, who’s been writing well on Trump’s shrinking influence. Tim, thanks for coming on.

Timothy Noah: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So Trump banned CNN, Politico, and MS Now from the White House grounds. The three organizations sued. The White House just filed its response in court and claims the ban is pursuant to national security and some other stuff. Tim, what is the White House arguing here exactly?

Noah: The White House is making several arguments, all of them so ridiculous that I wonder whether the White House even wants to win this lawsuit. First of all, they emphasize that this is the president’s house. And as we all know, that is not the president’s house. That is the people’s house. He happens to be living in it at the moment.

Surely somebody who’s in the real estate business ought to understand who owns that building.

Sargent: Trump is unable to recognize that the White House and the presidency is a public thing.

Noah: Right, right. Which echoes Mussolini. Mussolini had a famous statement that everything is encompassed by the state. And so his claim that this is his house is ridiculous. He also says that it is a privilege, not a right, for the press to have access to the White House. And that’s quite wrong. It is a right for the press.

It is not necessarily a right for every member of the press, but it is a right, collectively, for the press to have reasonable procedures for admitting members of the press. And such admissions can’t be based on displeasure with what a particular reporter is writing.

Sargent: There has to be consistency in the way the media is treated, and clearly this is all just arbitrary and rooted in Trump’s theory. Trump’s also been making this other weird argument.

He’s been pointing out that initially the press pool was suspended in solidarity with the banned outlets, but now he says, hey, news organizations did cover me during my UN speech. And he’s flaunting this fact as if it’s supposed to show his dominance over them. Tim, the juvenile nature of this is hard to avoid, isn’t it?

Noah: It’s quite juvenile and childish. But to me, the most important thing is that it’s self-damaging. The actual value of what a reporter is going to pick up by sitting in the White House press warren, the actual value was never great, and it is probably smaller now than it’s ever been in human history. The real business of gathering news about what’s happening in the White House is never going to happen in the White House press room.

It is handy just as a way to handle kind of routine information. But almost all of that routine information—possibly a hundred percent of it—is all stuff that Trump wants to get out. It’s because it’s the place where the White House–controlled information feed takes place.

So he’s essentially cutting off his own propaganda channel, and he’s also denying himself distribution of his propaganda through a much larger network—i.e., CNN, MS Now, and Politico—than he possesses himself.

Sargent: Well, his whole argument that, OK, you said you were cutting me off, but now you showed up at the UN—this is at the center of his explosion of fury at Kaitlan Collins. Trump posted this:

“All of the SLEAZEBAGS, like third-rate reporter Kaitlan Collins of Fake News CNN, a truly unhappy person, said they weren’t going to be covering me. Then why were they ranting and raving like lunatics at the United Nations? Why was she there? She’s got a TRUMP addiction, and so does CNN and MSDNC. They’re all sick, treasonous, and demented!”

Tim, as we said before, this whole line is dumb, but what do you make of the obsession with Kaitlan Collins there?

Noah: Castration complex. No, it’s straight up. I mean—I’m not even joking. We’ve seen his behavior around women who challenge him. He lashes out at them in ways that he never does to male reporters.

I find myself wondering sometimes whether that’s why the networks make a special effort to send women his way—because they always know he’s going to respond with some crazy outburst, in a way he’s less likely to even from someone he hates, like Jim Acosta.

Sargent: Well, we should point out, Tim, that women of color particularly set him off.

Noah: Yes, yes. And so, you know, we know this about Trump. He calls them pigs, he calls them stupid. It’s—he’s not a subtle guy.

Sargent: I want to point out also that at the UN, Trump went out of his way to confront Kaitlan Collins, saying something like, you said you wouldn’t be covering me, but here you are covering me.

And then Trump posted this idiotic video that was entitled “Day in the Life of a CNN Reporter.” It showed some schlubby guy lying around in bed, and then he got out of bed and talked about how he was going to spend his day lying about Trump. Like, wow, you really owned CNN there, Mr. President.

Tim, since you’re going down the psychological road, I want to excavate another bit of psychology here. Trump actually thinks he’s winning as long as he’s the center of attention. He’s owning CNN because they’re still treating him as newsworthy, right? I think that’s interesting.

Noah: Right. It’s, you know, it’s like the eight-year-old boy who sort of pulls the ponytail of the girl in front of him because he’s got a crush on her, and she doesn’t like it, but at least she’s paying him attention.

He’s infantile. And I wrote another piece this week that said, you know, I think that his cognitive decline is accelerating, and this is just further evidence of that. His judgment is really impaired. It was never great to begin with, and now it’s worse.

Sargent: Well, absolutely. Let’s go back to the White House’s legal argument for a second, because it’s so preposterous. As evidence against the organizations, the White House identified particular stories that supposedly spread falsehoods or threatened national security.

But as NYU professor Ryan Goodman pointed out, the examples they cited included protected First Amendment activity, very clearly so. One was a political story on how the GOP midterm convention was a disaster. Like, what?

Noah: Yeah, there were at least two or three examples about the White House ballroom.

Sargent: That literally confirms the whole point that the news organizations are making, that this is all about the content of their reporting.

Noah: And of course, even if they were revealing national security secrets—which reporters do on a fairly regular basis—that is their job.

Sargent: Right. And another one the White House cited was an MS NOW story on our depleted weapons stockpiles that relied on a public document to make that case. It wasn’t like out of left field or anything. A third was a political story that simply quoted something from Bari Weiss’s CBS News. I don’t know, Tim, that doesn’t seem like a strong argument.

Noah: No. And what they’re doing is they’re echoing the arguments that were made at the Pentagon. I mean, the dry run for this was when the Pentagon expelled reporters through three orders over the course of 2025 and 2026. And there is a legal challenge there. I’m not quite sure what the status of it is.

But if the Pentagon is a test case, it seems to me that since the expulsion of national security reporters from the Pentagon, we have seen, if anything, an improvement in the quality of Pentagon coverage—particularly a stunning series of articles in the beleaguered Washington Post. And so it truly is a childish and futile gesture on the part of Pete Hegseth, and now on the part of President Trump.

Sargent: Well, we should probably clarify for people that by the time you all listen to this, the judge may have ruled in this case, but that would probably be just preliminary anyway. This is going to continue, right?

Like, even if a judge rules, we’re going to get an appeal. Since Trump has decided that this is his cause of the moment, White House lawyers have got to pursue it, right?

Noah: I guess. I have a hard time—I mean, the pattern in the past has been that Trump figures he gets his best shot with the Supreme Court. And he does. But I think even the Supreme Court in this instance would side with the news organizations.

Who knows? He may be on to something else in two days. It’s—you know, trying to predict the behavior of a senile person is difficult.

Sargent: Well, let’s go big picture here. I really think that what we’re seeing in miniature here is sort of a bit of a hint of what’s to come. And you kind of got at this in your piece about Trump’s diminishment, which is just a thing that the whole world is witnessing. It’s an extraordinary spectacle, really, like the shriveling public figure of Donald Trump, right?

In this case, a bunch of news organizations signed on to an amicus brief, siding with the ones that have sued and have been barred from the White House grounds. And one of the news organizations that signed on was Fox News.

Now, I don’t want to go and say that Fox is suddenly getting religion about Donald Trump or anything, but the dynamic here seems to be that Trump is becoming such a ludicrous public figure that you’re seeing a level of institutional resistance almost collectively develop here that we haven’t seen before. And I think that’s a harbinger of what’s to come. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Noah: Yeah, in the case of Fox News, I would say that even a supplicant like Fox News has—just as a pure business matter—no choice but to sign on to that, because they need their access to the White House. And you know somebody on Fox might say something that would anger Trump.

He’s going to lose this fight. And I’m not even sure he wants to win this fight. If he does, it’s because his judgment is impaired. I’m guessing that his aides don’t want him to win this fight, because it makes it harder for the White House to put out its message.

It does nothing to prevent the stories they don’t like. The main thing it does is it prevents the flow of self-interested information that emanates from the White House press warren.

Sargent: Let’s talk about the bigger picture. You wrote that he’s kind of this diminishing political figure, and I do think that’s the story of the moment. I think that we’re not prepared for what that could look like after a decisive midterm victory, which is really starting to look more plausible by the day with the polling we’re seeing.

A big victory against Donald Trump, and all of a sudden he starts to look like a really, really diminished figure. And I don’t know what happens then, Tim. What do you think it could look like?

Noah: Well, I just look at the trend lines. And one of the trend lines is Trump’s cognitive decline. And we know that is not going to stop. That just never stops. And another trend line is that his approval rating has been declining since the day he entered office. The reason that didn’t get more attention before was because it was a very gradual decline. But it has gone down.

My guess is that it will accelerate after the election, if it’s a blowout election for the Democrats. And right now he is supported by the Republican caucus in Congress—not because they have any regard for him, except for maybe a handful of people, but because they’re scared of him. And the smaller his approval rating, the less scared they will be.

And at some point, to rescue their party or rescue their own skins, they will turn against him, I believe, and either pressure him to resign or sign on to impeachment. I mean, you know, I wrote this, and several people wrote back to me and said, they won’t have the courage. And my answer is, courage has nothing to do with it. Self-preservation has to do with it.

Sargent: Yeah, I think it’s absolutely plausible. We should point out, by the way, that in the FiftyPlusOne polling averages, Trump is now below 35 percent. He’s at 34.6 percent. I think that’s the first time polling averages have shown him below 35.

Noah: Right. And the lowest ever recorded was Harry Truman, in ‘51 or something, when he hit 22 percent. And I think that record could well be broken in the coming months. The other thing that’s going on, if you want to sort of look at surveys, is that people are asked whether he’s mentally fit to be president. And the number of people who say no has been going up, because, again, as you say, this is happening in public.

As I said in my piece, it’s very much like—imagine if Woodrow Wilson’s physical and mental decline after his stroke in 1919, instead of being hushed up, had happened in view of all Americans. That’s kind of like what you’re seeing with Trump, except in Trump’s case, it’s not a stroke. It is mental decline.

It is growing confusion. It’s falling asleep in meetings. It’s more and more statements that make no sense. It’s more and more actions that reflect what doctors call poor executive function. We’re all seeing it.

There were a number of experts who expressed concern about this during the 2024 election. And then 18 months later, another set of experts, this time both Democrats and Republicans, said, you know what, over the last 18 months, we have seen his condition worsen a lot. It’s the subtext of almost every story about anything Trump does.

Sargent: I think we’re in a weird moment with the discourse as well, where half of the story is everything you just said, this very visible decline, this very obvious deterioration. But the other half of the story—people’s heads are still in another place, where they say, every time Trump tweets that he’s going to do this or that, everybody freaks out and says, he’s got us again, he’s going to steal this election and there’s nothing we can do about it. You know what I mean?

There’s almost like a weird dichotomy, where he’s both clearly diminishing, but on some level he must still be so powerful that we’ll never be able to get out of this. And I wish people would just lose that latter thing already.

Noah: Well, to defend them a little bit, he has a lot of sycophants around him, some of whom possess some competency—I think especially of Russell Vought, who is not a dumb person. And so, he is trying in various ways to rig things.

Sargent: I think we need to get to a place where we’re wary of what Trump can possibly do, and we’ve got to be as vigilant as possible at all times, but we also should stop seeing him as this all-powerful, deviously formidable figure.

Noah: As a master tactician, right?

Sargent: As a master tactician, and a profoundly formidable figure who ultimately always wins and, Houdini-like, escapes from every single situation he’s in, no matter what.

Noah: He is not a master tactician. He never was. Neither was George W. Bush when he was president, and people were always saying that about W as well. And to tell you the truth, neither was Ronald Reagan when he was president. And people were always attributing all sorts of deep wisdom to Ronald Reagan.

I remember a memorable Saturday Night Live skit where you’d see the amiable Reagan sort of nodding and saying vacuous things in public, and then he’d close the door and he’d sound like a genius strategist with his aides. And it was a very funny conceit, but it was not the truth.

Sargent: That’s all very wise stuff, Tim Noah. Thank you so much for coming on. Hopefully we can get through this without too much more damage.

Noah: All right. Thank you, Greg.

Earlier this month, the Securities and Exchange Commission quietly published a proposal to rescind a long-standing anti-corruption measure that prevents private equity firms and other investment advisers from buying access to billions of dollars in pension funds that belong to public employees like teachers, police, firefighters, and more.

The regulation, which has come to be known as the “pay-to-play” rule, was passed nearly two decades ago, on the heels of scandals where Wall Street firms made huge donations (and even secret payments) to state and local officials in return for work managing multibillion-dollar public pension funds—an enormous and lucrative source of business. Some of the pension fund investments made by these firms later tanked, hurting thousands of retirements accounts. The SEC’s rule now prevents asset managers from getting paid to manage money for government entities—from pensions to public school funding—for two years after they donate to the elected officials who oversee those pools of cash.

“The rule was intended to, and does, ‘combat pay-to-play arrangements in which advisers are chosen based on their campaign contributions to political officials rather than on merit.'”

The SEC’s chairman, Paul Atkins, said in a statement that one rationale for rescinding pay-to-play is that the way many investment firms avoid dealing with its complexities is to prohibit staff from making any campaign contributions—even though the rule does carve out a limited allowance for employee donations, from $150 to $350 per election. The rule, he said, has “needlessly” burdened these firms and led to serious penalties for “small, often impulsive” donations, and has “resulted in the suppression of political speech.”

“Not so. It has resulted in the suppression of corruption,” said Benjamin Schiffrin, the director of securities at think tank Better Markets, in a written statement. “The rule was intended to, and does, ‘combat pay-to-play arrangements in which advisers are chosen based on their campaign contributions to political officials rather than on merit,’” he added, quoting the SEC’s own words from the 2010 release of the original rule.

Across the United States, pensions present an enormous opportunity for investment managers: Public pensions alone contain roughly $9 trillion. Public and private pension funds already make up more than 40 percent of the assets invested with private equity firms, paying them large fees in exchange for promises of greater returns.

In the early 2000s, several firms set up huge pay-to-play schemes to secure a slice of this pension pie. In 2009, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System uncovered that one of its former board members had accepted more than $40 million from Apollo Management, the private equity giant run by billionaire Leon Black. In return, the board member helped Apollo get a major win: about $3 billion of CalPERS pensions invested with the firm. That board member funneled at least $250,000 worth of gifts to the CalPERS CEO to secure investments for Apollo, as well as paying for meals, travel, and a big portion of his wedding.

Without any restrictions in place, investment firms would be free to once again buy access to Americans’ retirement savings—which could ultimately lead to significant losses.

That same year, another private equity giant, Carlyle, agreed to a $20 million settlement for making more than $13 million in payments to a top aide for the New York state comptroller in order to secure about $730 million in investments from New York state pension funds. Yet another private equity firm, Quadrangle, settled with the SEC over claims that one of its executives paid more than $1 million to the same aide for the New York state comptroller in order to get $100 million invested from New York pension funds. (The executive also allegedly paid nearly $89,000 to purchase the distribution rights for a low-budget film called Chooch, produced by New York’s chief investment officer and his brothers, according to the SEC’s complaint.)

By the end of 2009, yet another pay-to-play scheme came to light: Elliott Broidy, the founder of private equity firm Markstone Capital, pleaded guilty to paying nearly $1 million in gifts to the Office of the New York comptrollers’ office to secure a $250 million investment from New York pension funds. (Broidy later became a top Trump fundraiser.)

If the SEC succeeds in throwing out “pay-to-play,” it could transform the landscape of pension investments. Without any restrictions in place, investment firms would be free to once again buy access to Americans’ retirement savings—which could ultimately lead to significant losses. That was evident during the heyday of such schemes: According to CalPERS own 2009 accounting, their pension funds lost at least $475 million while being managed by Apollo.

Some investment firms may decide to enact their own policies or ethical guidelines. But these appear to be substituting a strict, clear rule that for a series of soft guidelines that may be hard to enforce.

Private equity returns have lagged behind that of the stock market for the past several years. A McKinsey report found that private equity funds underperformed the stock market from 2023 through 2025, returning about 7 percent compared to the S&P 500’s 18 percent.

The SEC’s proposal notes that some investment firms may decide to enact their own policies or ethical guidelines to prevent pay-to-play, and the agency is considering the possibility of issuing advice on what those should look like. But all of these appear to be substituting a strict, clear rule that has protected the finances of retirees for a series of soft guidelines that may be hard to enforce.

In its proposal, the SEC also gives the public 60 days to comment on the rule. The agency claims that existing rules under the federal Investment Advisers Act are likely enough to prevent pay-to-play schemes. This despite the fact that this law, passed after the Great Depression, did little to prevent the schemes that played out in the early 2000s.

What’s more, even with the current pay-to-play rule in place, pension fund scandals have not gone away: In February, a judge found that two board members of Ohio’s teacher pension fund had been acting as agents for an investment firm that was vying for business from the $103 billion plan, in “a high-stakes scheme that jeopardized the financial security of half a million teachers and retirees.” This spring, two executives of Iowa’s largest pension fund lost their jobs following misconduct allegations. All while the SEC published data about its enforcement work that showed a steep decline in prosecutions of cases involving abuse of public finance, like pension funds: While the SEC brought 97 such cases in 2016, it brought just seven in 2025.

UC Santa Cruz welcomes about 6,300 new undergraduate and graduate students this week as the university begins another academic year with total enrollment expected to remain around 20,000. The new school year also brings expanding student housing, including a new two-year housing guarantee for incoming undergraduates.

HSBC has blocked its Android app from running inside Samsung Secure Folder and Android Private Space without warning, leaving some customers unable to access online banking. The Register asked HSBC to explain the change. It said the block was "a proportionate security control designed to mitigate a foreseeable security risk. It does not prevent customers from accessing the HSBC UK Mobile Banking app – customers simply need to access our app outside of the virtual space environment." When we asked why, HSBC said: "For security reasons, our mobile banking app cannot be used within certain protected private space and virtual space tools, which could prevent or limit the identification of certain threats, or from sending timely fraud notifications." One reader who installed the app in Samsung Secure Folder said they received no advance warning and felt "held hostage from my own account." The app now displays a generic message about a security problem with the device and offers only the option to quit. Samsung Secure Folder uses the company's Knox platform to isolate and encrypt apps and data behind separate authentication. Android's Private Space, introduced with Android 15, similarly places selected apps in a separate profile that can be hidden and locked. Our tipster said the block also prevented them from using web banking because HSBC required the app for multifactor authentication. They said no alternative access method had been arranged before the change. Reviews on Google Play describe similar experiences. One Android user said the app had stopped launching from Samsung Secure Folder because HSBC deemed it "an unsecured virtual environment." The reviewer called the decision particularly baffling because they had put the banking app there for additional protection. Another reviewer said they had been cut off from their account after the app stopped opening in Secure Folder. They claimed they could not activate another installation outside it because doing so required a code from the inaccessible copy. Responding on the Google Play reviews page, HSBC asked both reviewers to contact it privately. Customers acknowledged that the bank may be trying to mitigate a security risk, but questioned why it did not warn them before removing support. One argued on Reddit that the lack of warning may conflict with HSBC's obligations under the FCA's Consumer Duty. FCA guidance says banks should help customers understand changes through communications sent in advance and have processes for technical problems that prevent account access. They added that the "change was introduced without warning. A setup that had been working simply stopped working, leaving me unable to use the personal banking app." The poster said HSBC's app team told them Secure Folder could limit the app's ability to detect threats and interfere with fraud notifications. They countered that blocking the app entirely also deprives affected customers of those notifications and the ability to respond through the app. Another said: "I called to complain and was told this is an intentional policy change and I need to store it in the regular part of my phone as they consider this to be more secure. "No advance communication of the change, and the policy seems mad to me. Downside for me is that if I refuse to install in the regular part of my phone I cannot access my online banking via a desktop for 5-10 working days whilst they send me an authentication token. So essentially I'm locked out of banking for 5-10 days." Our tipster said HSBC's help pages and chatbots contained no information about the change, while branch staff could not explain it and telephone support repeated that the device had a security problem. When we asked HSBC about how it planned to notify customers, an UK spokesperson told us: "Customers who try to access our app with private space and virtual space tools are informed that to help protect their accounts, they will not be able to access the HSBC UK mobile banking app within private space and virtual space tools." This is not the first time HSBC's mobile security checks have locked out customers. Earlier this year, the app flagged sideloaded installations of Bitwarden as a potential risk. F-Droid board member Neil Brown said HSBC locked him out of its app after it detected a copy of Bitwarden installed from the open source app catalog rather than Google Play. HSBC said at the time: "Protecting our customers' accounts and personal information is our priority. Our app performs checks to identify potential malware risks and can require users to take additional steps to keep their accounts safe." In that case, the user was told access would be restored if they removed the sideloaded app. Customers affected by the latest block say their choices are to install HSBC's app in the main phone profile, which isn't possible for some customers without an authentication code from the old one, or wait five to ten working days for another authentication method to access desktop/web banking. It is possible to use a Physical Secure Key, or PSK, to access desktop banking, but if the customer does not already have this, it could take several days to reach them. When we asked about this, an HSBC UK spokesperson told us: "Customers simply need to open the HSBC UK Mobile Banking app outside of the Samsung Secure Folder. Customers that are unable to use the app can use a PSK to access desktop Online Banking." Samsung describes Secure Folder as an encrypted, Knox-protected space, while Google says Private Space isolates selected apps in a separate Android profile. That isolation may also restrict the security information available to apps running inside them. The Register has contacted Google and Samsung for comment. ®

Santa Cruz’s first Porchfest will bring 50 bands to 14 porches and other downtown locations on Saturday, Oct. 3. The free festival aims to showcase local musicians while creating new opportunities for neighbors to gather and enjoy live music.

The centrist strategists in Washington have had one message for Democrats trying to win back seats in this year’s midterm elections: Appeal to Trump voters. Don’t make them angry. Moderate on cultural issues. And don’t be a socialist.

Whatever moral or political objections anyone has to that advice, there’s another big reason candidates can feel free to ignore it: There’s good evidence it doesn’t work.

Way to Win, a left-leaning “strategic donor collaborative and strategy hub” founded after the 2016 election, has been working with Lake Research Partners to investigate why Democrats lost in 2024. In a report last year, they found that many voters weren’t necessarily more conservative and switched to Trump, but instead stayed home instead of voting for Vice President Kamala Harris. On Thursday, the two groups released the second phase of their research, revealing which messages resonate enough with uncommitted voters to convince them to vote for Democrats in the midterms this November.

The research surveyed persuadable voters in the middle: low-motivation Democrats and independents, voters who picked Trump in 2024 but feel negatively about the economy, and those who hold unfavorable views of both parties. It focused on voters in Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nevada, and Texas because these states have growing populations that are younger and more diverse than the nation as a whole, which means they could hold the key to future victories, as well as one this fall. The survey dial-tested messages to see which ones won these key voters over for Democrats.

The research found that populist economic messages and anti-fraud messages that named specific harms from corruption won across all of these groups. Some of the most popular messages included statements like, “Our leaders should be fighting to make all of our lives better,” and, “We need leaders willing to stand up to right-wing corporate interests that hold influence in both political parties.” Other popular messages named no-bid contracts, donor favors, ballrooms, monuments, and corporate price gouging as some of the consequences of government corruption. These messages worked better than the more conservative options, and also worked better than simply bashing Trump, which might feel too partisan for voters.

In the beginning of the survey, the generic ballot was nearly evenly split, with Democrats losing to Republicans 43–44. After the messages were tested, Democrats pulled ahead 48–39. “We’ve tested the conservative message, and we trounced it,” said Celinda Lake of Lake Research Partners.

What that means overall is that trying to aim for the center might only yield a narrow slice of the voters whom Democrats need to win, but a more robust populist message could also work for those voters and win over many more who are all necessary for a Democratic win. That’s especially important in the midterms, when turnout rates drop from the sixtieth percentile, where it is in presidential years, to below 50 percent. Who votes and who stays home becomes critical.

A lot of the voters already liked the sound of some Democratic messaging but didn’t necessarily believe the Democratic candidates in their elections were going to make a real difference, said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a co-founder and vice president of Way to Win. “There is an issue on whether they feel like Democrats are fighting for them,” she said. That may be changing as we near November, she said. More respondents seem to have faith in messages that promised a “government that works” or “prioritizes people.” “In other polls or research studies we’ve done before, when we try to say Democrats are fighting for this, people really don’t believe it,” she said. “But in this moment, it feels like there is actually an opening, and that could be because of what people have seen over the past year.”

Even still, voters don’t just want to hear about everything terrible Trump has done since returning to the White House, but what Democrats can actually do to improve these problems. With politicians like Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York City working to deliver on their promises, voters are more persuaded than ever that these problems are solvable. “People are seeing more Democrats fighting and winning, and so that is also kind of part of the new moment,” Fernandez Ancona said.

It’s been two years since Donald Trump fell in love with the word groceries. He seemed to believe the word alone would convey his compassion for the common man. “The beautiful but simple word ‘groceries,’” he rhapsodized. “I won on that word.”

Now we have a word Trump is losing on: diesel.

The fuel used in heavy-duty trucks is named for the German engineer Rudolf Diesel. In 1894, Diesel invented a spark plug–free engine that requires a form of crude oil that’s thicker than gasoline. These engines are used in farm machinery, tactical vehicles, container ships, and, above all, heavy-duty trucks.

Diesel prices have surged since Trump took office, and especially since February 28, when he started the war in Iran. When Joe Biden left at the start of 2025, diesel cost an average $3.63 per gallon. Just this month, that price blew past an average of $5.85 to a record high of more than $6.50. Disruptions to oil shipments, notably in the Strait of Hormuz, are pushing up crude oil prices, while reduced diesel supplies have left fuel markets tight all over the world.

On Monday, Tom Kloza, the chief oil analyst at Gulf Oil, was not reassuring. “Monday morning price average for US diesel is $6.51/gal,” he posted to X. “Looks like plenty of panic liquidation in futures and spot markets, so these highs may prevail for a while.” Evidently, even Trump woke up long enough to express a hazy interest in diesel, talking up a possible ban on U.S. diesel exports. “Let’s not send out the diesel,” he said Tuesday. “That could have a little bit of an effect on regular automobile gasoline because when you do that, you know, it’s a sort of a flow.” This Hail Mary bafflegab has exactly zero chance of creating policy change before the midterms, much less reducing diesel prices.

Inflation on groceries and gas hits everyone. But skyrocketing diesel prices aim a missile squarely at the voters Trump can least afford to alienate. Only a highly specific demographic at the pump, after all, knows its way around the diesel nozzles. Fully 90 percent of diesel truck buyers are men. More than 84 percent identify as white. Most strikingly of all, truckers have a ram-tough party ID. According to one analysis, Republicans purchase eight heavy-duty trucks for every one purchased by a Democrat.

And while Trump and his party have entirely failed to calm public fears about gas prices—“I love the inflation!” Trump said in June—they’ve done far, far worse with diesel, where prices are spiking even more steeply.

About one in five Trump voters now regrets their 2024 vote, according to one opinion-research organization. No wonder social media is filled with the diesel demographic, onetime Trump voters, raging at the president. “Hey, Donald Trump, man, it just cost me $179 to fill up my diesel!” shouts a shirtless trucker at the top of his lungs. “Six-dollar diesel is killing truck drivers!” shouts another. (Reports spread of an imminent strike by truck drivers, but this seems so far to be rumor only.)

“This is Trump’s fault,” said populist firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene in a video on X last week. She blamed Trump’s war in Iran and the ensuing global fuel crunch. “It’s $8.49 for diesel in California,” she said. “It’s $6.59 in Georgia. I don’t care if it’s Georgia or California. It’s way too high.”

With a new poll showing Trump’s approval rating at an anemic 29 percent, Greene incurs few political costs for lashing out at him. But Greene is also an intuitive grandmaster of the diesel class. She has an especially keen eye for their issues: data centers, the Iran war, the Epstein files, and now diesel fuel. These are the issues Trump is dying on.

On diesel, Trump has repeatedly claimed that all fuel inflation is a “small price to pay” for thwarting Iran’s nuclear program. When he talks about diesel at all, he deflects to his favorite whipping boy: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. “Mr. Zelenskiy has to do one thing,” Trump said from the Trump International Golf Links in Ireland this month. “He has to stop knocking out diesel fuel in Russia.”

Does he, though? If so, good luck getting Americans to believe it. Blaming the American president for price inflation is a way of life here. Live by it; die by it. Trump did nothing but savage Joe Biden for high prices born of the Covid pandemic. Now he expects a pass for inflation he’s actively helped create.

The top three heavy-duty trucks in the U.S. are American: the Ford F-Series Super Duty, the Ram Heavy Duty, and the Chevrolet Silverado 2500HD. These model names lean hard on the word “duty.” Veterans disproportionately buy them. After all, military vehicles also use diesel, including Humvees, five-ton cargo trucks, and tanks. Trump’s dalliance with a shiny red all-electric Tesla last year did not impress this crowd.

Others in Trump’s administration have tried to frame big-rig trucking as patriotic in itself. In July, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the “Freedom Hauler” campaign, which is designed to get veterans to haul freight for a living.

“There’s never been a better time for America’s former service members to get behind the wheel of a big rig. Trucking requires the precision, independence, and discipline that they forged in the military—there’s no one better to tackle the challenge.”

In Iowa, Democratic Senate candidate Josh Turek is well aware of the diesel class, and the fast-approaching Iowa harvest season, which runs on diesel. In his campaign, he has called for a pause on diesel exports, a suspension of federal gas taxes, and an opening of strategic oil reserves. Recently, none other than the Hawkeye State’s Republican Senate lion Chuck Grassley, 93, who is not up for reelection, seconded Turek’s efforts in what amounted to an ad for the Democrat. Turek’s opponent, Republican Representative Ashley Hinson, was forced to join in but looked like a straggler.

By alienating the diesel class, Trump may have bitten the final hand that feeds him. Diesel is certainly the word to watch in these final weeks before the polls. If nothing else, it’s excellent shorthand for the rambunctious MAGA coalition that political scientists have been trying to understand for a decade.

The administration of many public benefits that faced cuts after Congress passed Trump’s budget bill last year will become more complicated in October, even as state governments are already struggling to meet the stringent new requirements congressional Republicans approved.

Several provisions from President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act relating to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, will go into effect on October 1. This will include pushing more of the cost of SNAP administration onto states, and limiting Medicaid eligibility for legal immigrants.

“If you want to actually be administering the program well, you should be investing more in the administration. Instead, we’re seeing the opposite,” said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, about SNAP.

Historically, states and the federal government have shared SNAP administrative expenses equally. But with the start of the new fiscal year at the beginning of October, states will need to shoulder 75 percent of SNAP administration costs, while the federal government will lower its reimbursement to 25 percent. This change is expected to push nearly $17 billion onto states over five years.

This will come as states are already working to implement tightened work requirements established by the Republican law, and are preparing for a pending shift in the cost of benefits based on their error rate—that is, the amount of overpayments or underpayments of SNAP benefits in a fiscal year. Beginning in 2027, states will have to shoulder up to 15 percent of benefit costs depending on their error rate. The lower the error rate, the lower the share of state costs. But achieving that goal requires investment in SNAP administration on the state level, and that’s about to become even more expensive.

“Retraining staff, paying staff better, having more oversight over quality assurance, intensifying how you do quality control, making sure you’re doing everything in a timely manner—all of that requires staff resources, and staff resources require money,” said Bauer, who is also the associate director of the Hamilton Project.

The Republican law already ended SNAP eligibility for certain lawful immigrants, a provision that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates would result in an average of 90,000 people losing access to SNAP each month. Beginning on October 1, eligibility for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, will be similarly restricted.

The law limits eligibility for these programs to green card holders; entrants from Cuba and Haiti; people from the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau residing in the U.S. under the Compacts of Free Association; and lawfully residing children and pregnant parents in states that offer coverage. Groups such as refugees, asylees, humanitarian parolees, survivors of domestic violence, and victims of human trafficking—who may have already lost access to SNAP—will no longer be eligible. These new limits will result in 100,000 individuals losing health coverage by 2034, according to estimates by the CBO.

“The current law of the land says the state must provide coverage to these individuals, like refugees and people granted asylum. Starting October 1, states no longer have access to funding for those programs,” said Shelby Gonzales, an expert on immigrant access to benefit programs at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The tools that are utilized by states to verify eligibility based off of immigration status are challenging, and they’re imperfect.”

Verifying a person’s eligibility is an extremely complicated and lengthy process. States first need to identify “potentially affected” enrollees, then undertake new eligibility determinations beginning on October 1. They must reverify the status of those potentially affected, and contact those immigrants whose status was unable to be satisfactorily verified electronically. The state must provide these enrollees with 90 days to provide documents necessary to verify their status, then offer at least 10 days of notice before terminating or reducing benefits. On top of that, states will need to update their eligibility systems, as well as enrollment data and financial claim reporting, to fulfill the new federal requirements. Because of the complexity of this process, people who remain eligible for Medicaid and CHIP could still lose their benefits.

“They may experience procedural disenrollments or coverage disruptions due to fear, confusion, or challenges completing the verification requirements, because they may have difficulty understanding the new eligibility rules,” said Drishti Pillai, the associate director of the Racial Equity and Health Policy Program and director of Immigrant Health Policy at KFF, a nonprofit health policy research, polling, and news organization.

Immigrants who are concerned about being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement may also choose to disenroll from Medicaid out of fear for their ability to stay in the country.

“They’re afraid to have their information provided to the government at all. They’re afraid to respond to new notices when they come in the mail. They’re afraid to challenge if it appears that they lost coverage inappropriately,” said Gonzales. Medicaid participants are less likely to work in occupations that offer health care coverage, meaning that there is little recourse if they lose Medicaid.

The law also limits federal matching payments for emergency Medicaid, which allows hospitals to be reimbursed for care provided to individuals who would qualify for Medicaid except for their immigration status. Beginning on October 1, the cost of reimbursing that care will functionally be pushed onto states that have expanded Medicaid. This will not only affect undocumented immigrants, but also legal residents who do not qualify for Medicaid.

Aside from the burden on states, many legal residents are now finding themselves without food assistance or health care. Saba Berhane, vice president for programs at the refugee resettlement organization Global Refuge, said that nonprofits can help fill the gaps for individuals who have lost nutrition benefits. Health care is another matter.

“When a family loses coverage, there is no reliable equivalent to a food bank,” Berhane said in a press call. “That means people will likely go without—rationing medications, skipping a specialist, and putting off care—until a manageable problem becomes an emergency room visit.”

In the year since the approval of the law, Medicaid, CHIP, and SNAP have seen a significant decline in participants. Overall, five million fewer people were enrolled in Medicaid and CHIP in May 2026 as compared to May 2025. SNAP enrollment declined from around 41.6 million in July 2025, when the law was passed, to roughly 36.3 million in June 2026.

As the burden of administering these programs increases, states may be forced to respond to these funding pressures by reducing SNAP benefits or further limiting eligibility. An overview of state budgets for fiscal year 2027 by the National Association for State Budget Officers showed states already bracing for changes to SNAP and Medicaid. As they face a “constrained fiscal environment,” the report says, “states are likely to remain cautious about new ongoing commitments, protect core services, make targeted spending adjustments, and use other strategies to address fiscal pressure and maintain structural balance.”

In a recent survey of 39 states by the American Public Human Services Association and the Urban Institute, 29 percent of states said the impending benefit cost shift could result in reducing eligibility for SNAP, and 11 percent identified withdrawing or pausing SNAP as a potential risk.

“It is absolutely critical for states to continue to participate in the program and to provide the funding that is needed for the administrative costs. That being said, state budgets are squeezed,” said Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research and Action Center. “If they’re going to increase the amount of funding that they’re providing to SNAP through administrative costs or benefit costs, then they’re going to have to start making some tough choices.”

Climate lawsuits are increasingly common these days. Republicans have made national efforts to combat climate change effectively impossible in both the legislative and executive branches. Now a growing number of private and public litigants are taking the fossil-fuel industry to court for the harms they have caused.

One such case will be the first one heard by the Supreme Court in its upcoming term. It pits a Colorado town that has faced wildfires and droughts against two oil and gas companies that it claims are responsible for these harms. If the lawsuit succeeds, it will be a momentous step in holding the industry accountable for climate-related problems. All they have to do is persuade a Supreme Court that has reliably sided with the fossil-fuel industry to abide by longstanding rules and practices.

The case, Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder, began in 2018. The city of Boulder, Colorado, and its county sued two oil companies in state court for traditional claims of nuisance, civil conspiracy, unjust enrichment, and so on. They alleged that Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil had harmed the city and its residents in two ways.

One was by “knowingly” altering the climate through “producing, promoting, refining, marketing and selling fossil fuels” at high enough levels to contribute to climate change. The other was by “intentionally” misleading the public about climate change’s impact and their role in causing it.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that burning fossil fuels has contributed to climate change by releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere. Oil companies have spent decades disputing that science and promoting climate denialism to undermine political support for regulation and reform. Recent research has shown, however, that companies like Exxon were not only aware that their products would contribute to climate change, but even accurately modeled how much damage their businesses would inflict.

In some ways, this case resembles the lawsuits filed against tobacco companies and asbestos manufacturers for the long-tail harms caused by their products. But the Boulder lawsuit is more humble than the multi-state litigation campaigns against those industries. The city only seeks damages for the harms caused to residents, not a broader restructuring of the oil industry or any sort of regulatory caps on emissions.

“In an interconnected society, conduct in one or more states can cause injury throughout the nation,” they told the justices in their brief for the court. “The Constitution generally permits states to use their traditional authority to address harms arising within their own borders. Whether those harms are better addressed at the federal level is a decision the Constitution almost always assigns to Congress, which is uniquely structured to weigh state and national interests.”

As you might imagine, Suncor and Exxon have no desire to pay damages to a single person or municipality that claims to have been harmed by climate change. They vigorously contested the lawsuit in Colorado’s courts, arguing—among other things not relevant in this particular appeal—that Boulder’s claims were preempted by federal law. A state district court rejected that argument, as did the Colorado Supreme Court in a ruling last year.

Why would federal law block such a lawsuit? The Constitution’s Supremacy Clause holds that the Constitution, as well all laws and treaties made under it, are the “supreme law of the land.” In other words, federal law supersedes state law if there is any conflict or overlap between them. Exxon argued that the Clean Air Act, or CAA, of all things, should prevent Boulder from holding it accountable for climate-related harms in state courts.

The Colorado Supreme Court rejected that argument for three reasons. First, Congress did not explicitly declare that it was preempting the kinds of claims being brought against Exxon in this case. Nor has Congress implicitly preempted the states by “completely occup[ying] the field of emissions regulations” since the CAA allows states to maintain their own emissions-regulation regimes. Finally, the court found no conflict between the state-level claims and federal law. Suncor and Exxon, the judges concluded, could comply with the former without breaking the latter.

The companies asked the Supreme Court to intervene, and it agreed to hear the case last term. The justices will decide two questions: First, does the Supreme Court have jurisdiction to review the lower court’s ruling at this stage? Second, does federal law prevent plaintiffs from suing energy companies for the harms caused by greenhouse-gas climate change?

Resolving the first question may decide whether the court reaches the second one at all. Boulder took issue with how the companies brought this case before the Supreme Court. They argued that it was inappropriate for the justices to weigh in at the current stage of the case. Technically, the Colorado Supreme Court only ruled on the companies’ motion to dismiss. Suncor and Exxon may yet prevail at a later stage in the case, the city acknowledged, and they have not exhausted their defenses in court.

The companies also argued against the lawsuit on what can be charitably described as partly constitutional grounds and partly policy grounds. The companies claimed that the lawsuit violated the “equal sovereignty” of the states by punishing them for out-of-state conduct. Boulder countered that states have heard claims for in-state injuries by out-of-state harms since the Founding, and that to rule otherwise would unsettle a significant area of the court’s precedents.

“Asbestos, defective medical products, defamatory articles, and internet fraud may originate in one or several states, or even from abroad, and cause injury across the nation,” the city noted. “Such cases may prompt calls for a uniform federal rule,” they acknowledged, but it is Congress’s responsibility to fashion one, not the Supreme Court’s.

One sign that the companies face an uphill battle is the sheer terror emanating from their briefs, where they urge the justices to save them on what amount to policy-driven grounds, not legal ones. “Giving even a single jury the power to impose ruinous liability on selected members of the energy industry is a recipe for chaos,” they claimed in their brief for the justices. “Unleashing juries nationwide is a recipe for disaster. This misuse of the legal system cannot stand. State tort law is not the solution to global climate change.”

The oil companies’ overarching argument is fairly audacious. Climate change, they argued, “results from the accumulation of greenhouse gases emitted from every state in the nation and every nation in the world—emissions that cannot be unmixed and traced to their individual sources.” They effectively argue that because they and their products have caused damage everywhere, they cannot be held liable for it anywhere. The companies repeatedly emphasized that the problem is “inherently interstate and international.”

As a result, the lawsuit is a near-existential threat to the industry. “If claims such as Boulder’s are allowed to proceed, every political jurisdiction in the nation could bring a similar suit against any subset of the world’s fossil-fuel producers,” the companies told the justices in their brief. They warned that potential damages “in any one case could reach into the billions” and urged the justices to reject the risk of “potentially crushing monetary liability” if they lose in state court. (The companies avoided the word “existential” itself, perhaps because it would evoke the harms that climate change will cause without societal intervention.)

Suncor and Exxon also expressed concern that Boulder’s lawsuit would upset the United States’ ability to confront climate change on the international stage. “Allowing state and local governments to seek liability for greenhouse-gas emissions released abroad would directly undermine the federal government’s efforts to handle this quintessentially global challenge,” they told the justices.

After reading that sentence, I had to backtrack to make sure I hadn’t downloaded a brief from before 2025. The second Trump administration is not “carefully balancing mitigating the risks of climate change with satisfying domestic and global energy needs,” contrary to the companies’ claims to the justices. It is destroying any hope of curbing carbon emissions, either regulating polluters directly or by shifting consumers away from fossil fuels through investment.

To that end, the Trump administration has withdrawn the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, opened up public lands to new oil and gas exploration, illegally slashed funding for solar and wind projects, paid off wind-power companies to not pursue existing ones, and intervened in climate-related litigation by state and local governments. Trump’s EPA has even worked to repeal the EPA’s endangerment finding, which allowed the agency to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act. As one legal scholar noted earlier this week, that repeal may have seriously undermined the companies’ claims that the CAA preempts these lawsuits.

In another age, this may be an insurmountable battle for the companies at the high court. But the court’s conservative majority tends to view climate regulations with skepticism. Four years ago, the justices went out of their way to strike down a moribund Obama-era EPA policy so that they could rule the agency had no power to set carbon caps on fossil-fuel power plants.

Indeed, the Supreme Court’s shadow docket traces its origins to the court’s extraordinary decision to block that EPA policy from going into effect in the first place. If Suncor Energy and Exxon Mobil hope to prevail, they will need a similarly adventurous and unprecedented approach from the justices on their behalf. Oral arguments on October 5 will give Americans their first chance to see if the high court is feeling bold enough to try it.