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The United States is expanding its attacks on Iran after three U.S. soldiers were killed over the weekend, the first U.S. fatalities in the conflict since March. Two U.S. service members were killed in an Iranian attack on a base in Jordan, and a third soldier was killed in northern Iraq during a “controlled detonation” of a downed Iranian drone. The United States has now bombed Iran for nine consecutive nights, and Iran has retaliated by striking U.S. allies across the Persian Gulf. The war, which has led to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has squeezed global supplies of oil and gas. “The United States has considerable violence at its disposal, but it has limited political capacity to dictate terms,” says Toby Jones, associate professor of Middle East history at Rutgers University. Jones says that while the United States has tried to “inflict pain” on Iranian civilians in order to weaken the government, “it’s hard to say that it’s working.”

U.S. Continues Strikes Against Iran After Three U.S. Service Members Killed, Israeli Strikes in Gaza Kill Several Palestinians Over the Weekend, Dozens of Israeli Settlers Storm Palestinian Village in Occupied West Bank, Israel Strips Crocodiles of Protected Status to Pave Way for Crocodile-Infested Moat, Russia Launches Heavy Ballistic Missile Attack on Kyiv, Killing Six People, Colorado Prison Guard Faces Multiple Charges After Shooting Protesters Outside ICE Jail, ICE Agent Responsible for Fatal Shooting of Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero Once Told Court of Head Injury, “Manosphere” Influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate Arrested, Face U.K. Rape and Sex Assault Charges, Andy Burnham Succeeds Keir Starmer as U.K. Prime Minister, Trump Threatens Canada with Tariffs as Millions Suffer from Hazardous Wildfire Smoke, Troy Jackson Emerges as Front-Runner to Replace Platner as Democrat in Maine Senate Race, NYC Mayor Mamdani Seeks to Arrest Israel’s Netanyahu: “He’s a War Criminal”

He will be the UK’s seventh prime minister in a decade, facing the same economic and political challenges that undermined his predecessors.

The manosphere influencers, arrested in Florida on serious UK charges, including rape, treat the first family and top Republicans as friends. Plus: it looks like Maine has a successor to Platner.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.The signs are mounting that Donald Trump is preparing a serious effort to steal the midterm elections outright. A key tell came during his rambling speech about our election infrastructure a few days ago, in which he raged at news organizations for not carrying him live. In doing this, Trump accidentally revealed that he fully expects the media to help him sow distrust in our elections. That’s an essential precursor to his rigging plot. And remarkably enough, even Fox News balked at participating in this, another sign of how deranged his scheming has become.Harvard political scientist Ryan Enos is arguing that the right way to think about this is to face forward. If we’re going to avert the worst, we need to prepare for it right now. So we’re getting into all of it. Ryan, good to have you back on.Ryan Enos: Yeah, thanks. I’m glad to be here.Sargent: So let’s look forward. In his speech, Trump made wildly deranged claims about intelligence documents supposedly showing that our elections are deeply vulnerable. He also insisted that China had compromised our election data, and said the deep state is covering it all up. Numerous media outlets fact-checked and debunked all of it. But that aside, Ryan, what do you think Trump is signaling about his future intentions here?Enos: We can’t overstate how dangerous this is. Democracy doesn’t work if people don’t have faith in the legitimacy of elections, because things can go wrong. And all signs are that Republicans are going to lose at least the House in the upcoming election, and maybe the Senate. And obviously Trump wants to avoid that. So it looks like he’s trying to sow doubt in these elections, either to take actions as the president, to use the government to try to undo the result of the elections in which he loses, or to encourage his supporters to undo them through violence, like he tried to do in 2020.Sargent: And we’re going to get into the specifics of all that in a second, but let’s first listen to a couple things. Here’s Trump during the speech, raging at news organizations for refusing to carry him live.Donald Trump (voiceover): There’s no third world country that has elections like we have—in a rare move, NBC and ABC fake news have both said that they would not cover this speech. They knew what it was about. Because of the fact that they don’t like the topic, because they know how corrupt our system is and they don’t want to reveal it. They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason. They want to keep it going. They want to protect the radical left. They can’t have a great country—and that’s true, you can’t have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.Sargent: And here’s Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin echoing Trump’s anger at a news conference the next day.Markwayne Mullin (voiceover): The major networks not willing to carry the President of the United States’s address to the nation on election security. How shameful is that? What are they trying to cover up?Sargent: So the fact that Markwayne Mullin felt obliged to keep pushing this nonsense shows Trump continued to rage over it, because that’s the only reason these guys ever say anything. It’s to minister to the audience of one. But Ryan, I think something’s getting lost about this. Trump isn’t merely angry because the networks refused to give him attention. He’s angry because he needs the media to broadcast his lies about our election system precisely in order to help him spread distrust in the outcome, right?Enos: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think there’s two ways to look at his anger at the media. On the one hand, it shows the media is doing the right thing. They figured out what Trump’s up to. They know he’s going to lie. And they’re, in many ways, taking a stand for democracy. They’re saying, we are not going to broadcast the thing that everybody knows is a lie, and the media has learned not to broadcast Trump’s lies. That’s the independence of the media, a bedrock of our democracy.But on the other hand, what we’re seeing is just how dangerous it is when a president goes full authoritarian like this. Because it’s not just about him up there ranting on television. He can use the federal government to coerce media firms like these—like CBS and NBC and everybody else—into doing his bidding, because they could very well be punished. The fact that we have the secretary of DHS up there pushing this—what does the Department of Homeland Security have to do with compelling media organizations to carry the president’s lies? It just shows you all the levers that the president can pull in order to get his authoritarian agenda going. And it’s really, really dangerous.Sargent: I want to underscore your point by reminding everybody that in the clip we played, Donald Trump actually said that these news organizations should lose their licenses for failing to carry his speech live. And Markwayne Mullin accused them of refusing to share vital, essential information with the American people. It’s more convoluted than Donald Trump says—it’s the subsidiaries and the affiliates that have the licenses. But the basic point stands here, that now these news organizations may hesitate the next time Trump says, “I’m going to be giving some remarks on the corruption of our election system.” They may say to themselves, he threatened us last time, we don’t want to have the headache of protecting our licenses, and so we’re going to carry it this time. And then Trump’s plot of using the news organizations to spread distrust in our elections could work. What do you think of all that?Enos: Yeah, one hundred percent. That’s exactly correct. And it’s important to emphasize just how unprecedented this is, right? I mean, this is a clearly authoritarian move, and there’s never been a president in American history that’s done this—has said, if you don’t broadcast what I want, I’m going to essentially put you out of business. And that’s the reason we have things like an independent licensing commission—at least we did until Trump came along and the Supreme Court sided with his unilateral authority to take away its independence.But even if you take away all those grander things about democracy, this is just essentially schoolyard extortion, right? Like, it’d be really bad if you didn’t do what I want. Maybe you’ll have an accident next time you’re walking home, or something like that. Everybody knows what he’s implying in that case. It’s very clear. And so yeah, ultimately these media firms, they care about their bottom line. And if they’re worried about losing the broadcast license—which it seems to be now that there’s some evidence Trump could at least try to exercise that authority—then they might comply with what he does next.Now, it could go to the courts, and hopefully the courts would ultimately side with these organizations, because the First Amendment protections are very powerful. But they don’t want that headache. And this is why so many organizations in civil society that know they could ultimately prevail in the courts would take the easy way out, essentially. And that’s the problem, how we end up in these situations.Sargent: Donald Trump is essentially saying, look, the next time I give remarks that are designed to sow distrust in our elections, you damn well better carry it, otherwise the full weight of the federal government is going to bear down on you.Enos: Yeah, a hundred percent. And look, it’s really worth emphasizing this thing about the DHS, right? The DHS was supposedly set up essentially to protect Americans against terrorism. And of course, critics at the time pointed out that this was something that could end up having overreach, but it never really realized that until Trump took it over and turned it into essentially his private secret police force, right? And so here you have an agency where it’s threatening news organizations, it’s threatening the independence of elections—if you listen to more of what was said in that news conference about how they’re going to examine the voter rolls and things like that. And people have this real fear, which is probably still low probability, but there’s a real fear that you’re going to have things like ICE agents and these other sort of shock troops of Donald Trump showing up at polling places trying to intimidate people from casting their ballots.And once you get DHS involved in things they have no place in—like the administration of elections—that becomes a real, real concern and a real threat to our democracy.Sargent: Just to underscore what you were getting at there—during the press conference at which Markwayne Mullin sided with Trump’s theory against the news organizations, he also made a whole bunch of outlandish claims about what DHS is going to require from state officials in terms of election administration, even going so far as to say that if they don’t protect our elections, they may face prosecution. I just want to make one more point about what you’re saying there, which is that it gets even more vile when you consider how Markwayne Mullin talked about this. He had the goddamn gall to say with a straight face that he’s essentially trying to protect the national security of the United States by pressuring news organizations to carry this stuff. He accused the news organizations of selling out the country and its national security by refusing to share vital information with them. It’s exactly backwards. What they did do was actually, in a way, a patriotic gesture—refusing to participate in this Trump-Markwayne Mullin effort to gaslight the country.Enos: Yeah, and look, you’re exactly right. And it fits a really disturbing pattern. Because this is sort of the refuge of bullshit that every authoritarian turns to, right? You’ve heard these same things in Turkey, you heard them in Russia, you heard them in Hungary. Authoritarian leaders, they always claim it’s about national security, right? Somebody is threatening our national security, in this sort of convoluted logic. And that’s hard for people to argue against, because they don’t want to be on the wrong side of endangering our citizens, right? But look, if we’re willing to turn over the legitimacy of our elections because somebody waves this flag of threats to national security, if the media is not willing to do its job, then that’s how we lose our democracy. And that’s what’s being attempted here. It’s something that we really have to be aware of, and we have to—to use this word again—we have to call this bullshit when we see it. And that’s clearly what’s going on.Sargent: One hundred percent. Now, here’s where this takes a weirdly, darkly comic turn. Even Fox News hesitated to validate all this. Fox stated explicitly, right after the speech or during it, that it wasn’t in a position to evaluate some of Trump’s most incendiary claims. And according to both Aaron Rupar and Media Matters, who monitor Fox pretty relentlessly, Fox declined to carry Markwayne Mullin’s presser rehashing Trump’s claims. And it gets even better. CNN’s Brian Stelter reports that many at Fox just didn’t want to hear Trump talk about the 2020 election anymore, and thought it was bad politics for the GOP. And of course, some at Fox thought, oh my God, we better be careful here, because they had a major settlement against them to the tune of, I guess, $700 million, in a lawsuit brought by Dominion over their false election claims. Ryan, what do you make of that?Enos: Well, there are two things I’d say about this. First is, I know sometimes things like civil lawsuits get a bad rap—people going around suing each other. But we actually see the purpose of these in a well-functioning country, right? Because Fox very clearly said things after the 2020 election that were defamatory toward some of these election administrators. And they were punished for it through the civil suits. And they want to avoid that. That’s our court system working.Now, the other thing I would say about it is this fact that Fox thought it was just bad politics. And you see a lot of Republican politicians saying this too. There’s a lot of signs that members of Congress want Trump to move on. And they all know what he’s saying is not true, but they unfortunately feel obligated—they can’t cross him on this issue, right? And what that signals is that the American people aren’t buying this, right? Trump thinks that the American people are a lot dumber than they actually are, which is sort of one of the tragedies of his whole administration, is how stupid he actually thinks the American people are. But the American people aren’t buying this. You can see this in the polls. Like, only about half of Republicans actually say they believe this, right? And I’m not sure even that half actually believes what they’re saying they believe.So people really aren’t buying this, but Trump keeps trying to sell it. And what’s unfortunate about that, though, is what it signals is that Trump very well could want to move beyond politics in order to try to make this happen. He can’t convince Americans that the other party is crooked. And so that’s when we start worrying that, in order to satisfy these delusions that he’s having, he’s going to do things like—which was reported he considered in 2020—like have the National Guard seize ballot boxes, or have, as I suggested and other people suggested, ICE officers show up at the polling stations, purportedly to try to stop illegal voting or something like that. And so at that point you’re interfering with an election that you can’t win legitimately, and in which the American people have rejected you, in order to impose your will essentially on the country. And at that point, we’re not living in a democracy.Sargent: Right. Well, let’s talk about the specifics of the threat. There’s a lot of chatter about how Trump might use his security services like DHS to maybe seize ballot boxes and try to interrupt the count of votes. And the way they would do that is focus it in states where control of the House and Senate will be decided. And that, I think, is why seeing Markwayne Mullin talking this way is so alarming. And we should focus on the context as well. The FBI has already seized ballot boxes in Georgia. Trump himself has already said he wants Republicans and the federal government to take over elections.Now, there’s also the talk about ICE showing up at polling places. I don’t take that as seriously. It’d be hard for them to cover all the polling places that they would need to—although it’s possible they could maybe stage showdowns in select places to create atmospheres of crisis and terror in certain precincts or whatever. But is seizure of ballot boxes something you take seriously? And if so, what can be done about it right now? How do we prepare?Enos: Yeah, I mean, look, I think we have to take everything seriously. And it could be that these things are all low-probability events—and in many ways, I believe they are. But the fact that we’re talking about them seriously, and the fact that these are direct threats to our democracy, means that we have to take them seriously. We take low-probability events like airplane crashes seriously because they’re so catastrophic, right? And they can actually happen.And so we also have to consider what we know Trump wants. And he signaled this very clearly in 2020, when he tried to overthrow an election in which he had legitimately lost. There is no doubt that that’s what he did—the historical record is clear. And we know that essentially what stopped him was members of his own administration, to their credit, people like Mike Pence and Bill Barr, who eventually said, “We’re not going to go on with this. We aren’t going to do his bidding.”And then members of Congress, that actually ended up in his own party, that didn’t side with him as well, right? But a lot of those people are gone. There’s none of those people in his administration anymore. They’re all loyalists. They’re all people that essentially are there because they will do whatever Donald Trump wants. And so there’s none of those roadblocks in the way.Because of that, if Trump decides he wants to order people to do extraordinary things, like seize ballot boxes or something like that, it’s hard to imagine that people are going to say no. You know, we’ve already seen, for example, something that was hard to imagine even a few years ago—we have essentially a masked secret police going around terrorizing American citizens, terrorizing Democratic cities on the flimsiest of pretexts. It’s simply political terror, right? And that’s operating in the United States right now. So there’s obviously people that are willing to do those types of things. And if he told people—I don’t know if everybody would do it, but there are certainly people that, if he told them, “Go seize these ballots, these ballots are illegal, you go seize them,” they would go do that.And so we can imagine that happening. It’s not hard to know who they’d target. They would target Democratic cities that were in, for example, contested Senate races, where they knew they would take out a bunch of Democratic ballots. And the math on it is not hard to figure out. Now, the advantage we have against such things is the constitutional system—it means that we have this big, dispersed electoral system. And this is part of what you’re alluding to with ICE. The numbers in many ways just don’t add up, right? Fortunately, this is where having a small federal government becomes fortunate in a really big country—there’s not enough people to go steal every ballot box in every dispersed election. You could come up with ways it could happen if you federalize a National Guard and things like that, but then things like that are slow-moving. So it’s hard logistically to make happen.But I think we have to treat it as reality, and one way we guard against that right now, is exactly what we’re doing—we’re talking about it. And we have to make people like governors in these states aware that this is a real reality and let them plan for it, right? We need to put them on the record to say, “If somebody illegally tries to interfere with an election in your state, what will you do?”And in 2020, to their credit, a lot of governors, even in red states—I’m thinking about Georgia, for example—stood firm, because they believed in democracy more than they believed in Donald Trump’s lies. And so we need to have people go on the record now that they believe in democracy and they believe in the local administration of elections, which has been a cornerstone of the way elections have been administered in the United States for its entire history. And in many ways, we see the wisdom of that now. And we have to ensure that that process will have integrity moving forward.Sargent: Right. You could see the media putting pressure on Republicans in places like Ohio and Texas, which have critical Senate races that’ll decide Senate control, pressuring Republicans to say whether they will stand up against any effort to seize ballot boxes.Enos: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s very well said. Because nobody should agree to that. And you would hope somebody’d be very willing to say right now that we are going to stand up to that, right? And we need elected officials, whether Democrats or Republicans, to be going on the record right now to say, we are going to protect the integrity of our elections. We believe in the integrity of our elections. That’s how we all got here, right? They are elected under that system that Donald Trump is attacking, and we’re going to protect it moving forward, because that is our constitutional duty.Sargent: Well, Ryan, speaking of that—do we need to hear Democrats, maybe all the governors, all the senators, all the House members, and all the secretaries of state stand up in unison, maybe even hold a joint press conference and say, “This is an emergency”? Do we need to hear them say, “Republicans, now you must say where you stand on all this”? Do we need to hear them say, “The president just signaled an effort to steal the midterms, and we are in an urgent situation right now”? Do we need to hear that?Enos: Yeah, I think we do. Look, I think they all need to stand up. One thing we understand very clearly from decades of political science research is that people take signals from these politicians to understand what is going on, right? And if they’re only hearing one side, if they’re only hearing the lies from Donald Trump—first of all, some people might not realize those aren’t true, which is a little shocking to us, but if you hear a lie often enough, it kind of seeps into your consciousness. But moreover, not everybody’s going to realize what a threat to democracy this is. And how much people need to stand up against it.Because frankly, if Donald Trump tries anything like this—if he tries to steal the election through taking ballot boxes, through interfering with voters casting their ballots, if he tries to do anything—then people frankly need to take to the streets, right? I mean, this is our democracy under threat. And in November, if that happens, then people need to be prepared to stand up against it, using the power of citizens, but also the power of our elected officials. And so that starts with awareness. People need to be aware that this is a threat, and start standing up for democracy now, not later, after something has happened.Sargent: Well, I think the upshot here is that we all have a lot of work to do to get ready for what might be coming. Ryan Enos, thank you so much for all that. It was really bracing stuff.Enos: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure to be here.

When I build a building, I let various builders and architects compete for the contract. Why? Because it sharpens their game, makes them bid competitively on price, and encourages them to give me the best quality product possible.—Donald Trump, Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, 2011As a real estate developer, Donald Trump would routinely put contracts out to bid to get the highest possible quality at the lowest possible price. This is, of course, a common practice in business. You send out a request for proposal, contractors submit bids, then you choose whichever bid looks most attractive. Alas, Trump’s next step was often to ignore contractor invoices, leaving these poor saps no way to recover their costs except by filing an expensive lawsuit. Roy Cohn taught Trump that rich-jerk bullying technique. In 2016, USA Today identified at least 60 such contractor lawsuits, including a few brought by the same law firms Trump had earlier hired to fend off stiffed painters, stiffed carpet companies, stiffed real estate brokers, et cetera. Trump’s attitude was that his contractors should work free of charge. “Do you know how much publicity these people get for having me as a client?” Trump would say, according to Maggie Haberman’s 2022 Trump biography, Confidence Man.The president’s past abuse of contractors does not discredit his past preference for competitive bidding. It’s a sound, sensible way to get value for your money. If you’re a homeowner, you’ve probably done some version of it yourself before undertaking some pricey renovation like replacing a roof or furnace. Competitive bidding is even more common in government. That’s because when the money to buy goods or services doesn’t come out of the buyer’s pocket, it creates what economists call moral hazard. Competitive bids help overcome moral hazard by making the contracting process more objective and transparent. By one estimate, 97 percent of government contracts are put out to open bid. On those rare occasions when exceptions are made, it’s usually because either speed is of the essence or some extremely rare expertise is required.Regrettably, to about the same degree Trump favored competitive bidding as a real estate tycoon, he disfavors it as president of the United States. That’s partly because Trump lacks the necessary patience, but mostly it’s because he lacks the necessary honesty. The man never met a moral hazard he didn’t like. Donald Trump will be remembered as (among other things) America’s No-Bid President. Look under any rock in Washington these days, and you’ll find a no-bid contract. The Interior Department awarded one $1.7 million no-bid contract to Green Water Solutions to clean up the water in the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall and a second $14.7 million no-bid contract to Atlantic Industrial Coatings to attach blue waterproofing to the Reflecting Pool’s concrete bottom. Customs and Border Protection awarded a $1.6 billion no-bid contract to Barnard Construction Company to build 112.5 miles of “secondary” border wall in New Mexico. Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded a $4.2 million-per-month no-bid contract to Core Civic to detain immigrants at its shuttered prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, then later replaced that with a $60 million annual contract, according to the Kansas Reflector and the Lawrence Times. The Homeland Security Department awarded $220 million in no-bid contracts for a public relations campaign. To build an East Wing ballroom, the White House awarded a $500 million no-bid contract to Clark Construction, which in turn awarded subcontractors 11 no-bid contracts for demolition, excavation, fencing, and other services, according to Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O’Connell in The Washington Post. The National Park Service awarded Clark Construction a second no-bid 17.4 million contract to repair two ornamental fountains in Lafayette Park, according to David Fahrenthold, Luke Broadwater, and Andrea Fuller of The New York Times. The Navy and the Treasury Department awarded five contracts worth $13 million to Event Strategies, a public relations firm, to organize celebrations of the Navy’s 250th anniversary and publicize the administration’s “Trump accounts” for children, according to Fahrenthold and Fuller. Trump tried to add his name to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, only to be foiled by a federal judge. Right now, a better name might be the Donald J. Trump Center for No-Bid Contracts. The Kennedy Center, of which Trump became board chairman after he fired the previous board and replaced it with loyalists, declared itself in November to be exempt from the Federal Acquisition Regulation that governs federal contracting. The regulation stipulates that “contracting officers shall promote and provide for full and open competition in soliciting offers and awarding Government contracts.” Ditching it was handy because the Trump regime had already started awarding no-bid contracts. According to a July 13 Washington Post report by Jonathan Edwards, and some whistleblower disclosures that Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, published with supporting documents, the Kennedy Center awarded an $8 million no-bid contract to Low Country Flooring to replace and maintain wood floors and a $4.4 no-bid contract to Washington Office Interiors, which in turn subcontracted to Cypress Painting Systems to paint the exterior’s gold columns white, to sand and repaint a reflecting pool on the Kennedy Center’s east plaza, and to retile the bathroom floors and gild the ceilings of the Kennedy Center’s presidential boxes. It shouldn’t surprise you that many of these no-bid dollars end up inside the capacious pockets of Trump donors and cronies. Green Water Solutions, the Reflecting Pool contractor, is owned by a trust led by John J. Cafaro, a Palm Beach neighbor of Trump’s who (per Fahrenthold) has given more than $300,000 to political committees connected to Trump. Cafaro is a two-time felon. In 2001, Cafaro pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe the outrageously crooked Representative James Traficant, Democrat of Ohio. He paid a $15,000 fine but avoided jail time by testifying against Traficant. In 2010, Cafaro pleaded guilty to violating campaign law by not reporting a $10,000 illegal campaign contribution to his daughter’s unsuccessful 2004 congressional bid.Some of Homeland Security’s $220 million P.R. spending spree found its way to a consulting firm with what Pro Publica called “longstanding personal and business ties” to then–Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Trump fired Noem after she said at a congressional hearing that Trump approved the expenditure. Event Strategies, the P.R. firm hired by the Navy and Treasury, is closely tied to Trump, having collected more than $67 million over the years from political committees connected to him, per Fahrenthold and Fuller. On January 6, 2021, Event Strategies organized the fateful Ellipse rally at which Trump urged supporters to march on the Capitol (“If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore”).The owner of Barnard Construction, which is building that border fence in New Mexico, contributed more than $1 million to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. CoreCivic, which owns Leavenworth, gave $500,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee.The poor-quality work products that Trump’s no-bid contracts tend to produce speak for themselves. Here is what the Reflecting Pool looks like today. Here is a sampling from DHS’s no-bid public relations campaign (more a commercial for Noem than for immigration control). The White House ballroom that Clark Construction was hired to build may, for all we know, end up being constructed perfectly—but nobody except Trump wants even a perfectly crafted ballroom because it will be so big that the executive mansion will end up looking like a dollhouse. Cypress Painting Systems’s work on the Kennedy Center reflecting pool, meanwhile, is not encouraging. The pool is rusting, according to Whitehouse’s whistleblower, along with Cypress Painting Systems’s whitewashed Kennedy Center columns.* We already know that the Kennedy Center’s presidential boxes will be vulgarized because we’re all well acquainted with the president’s bordello baroque aesthetic. The most poignant of Trump’s delusions is that he possesses good taste.The semiquincentennial celebration, which thus far has been a fiasco, is a no-bid affair. Before Trump’s first presidential term, Congress created a Semiquincentennial Commission, which in turn created a nonprofit called America 250. But as Toni Aguilar Rosenthal of the Revolving Door Project and Alan Zibel of Public Citizen pointed out last month, after Trump tried and failed to gain control over the nonpartisan America 250, he created a MAGA-friendly alternative nonprofit called Freedom 250 that took charge of $103 million in no-bid federal grants, representing about 80 percent of all federal funds allocated for the semiquincentennial since October. This included about $68 million awarded by the Interior Department to Freedom 250’s parent, the congressionally chartered National Park Foundation, plus another $10 million transferred from America 250 by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a government agency of which I was previously unaware. More than $7 million in grants (here, here, here, and here) went to the January 6 impresarios Event Strategies. When Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose agency is on record authorizing most of these grants, was asked to account for Freedom 250’s finances, he said it was run out of the White House. The most conspicuous Freedom 250 failure was the Great American State Fair, which took over the National Mall from June 25 through July 10. It too was a no-bid production. I didn’t go, but it doesn’t appear to have been much fun. “There wasn’t any line to get in,” TNR’s Malcolm Ferguson reported on June 29. (I observed the same one week later.) Ferguson witnessed a child rolling in the grass, crying and screaming, “I. WANT. TO. GO. HOME!!!” In The Washington Post, Philip Kennicott wrote that “everything is stuffed into a fake agora with Doric columns and arched niches painted onto cheap theatrical flats, which look like someone scaled up the photo murals found in a tatty Greek diner that sells gyros, moussaka and heart-bomb platters of pastitsio.”On July 4, Trump gave a speech at the fair that didn’t start until 11 p.m. because of heavy rain (which at least brought relief from summer temperatures so high that weekend that visitors were twice sent home). The fireworks Washingtonians typically enjoy on July Fourth didn’t start until it was July 5. After the show, the District of Columbia government issued a Code Red declaring outdoor air quality to be “unhealthy for seniors, kids, people with medical conditions.”Naturally, competitive bidding wouldn’t have moderated the July Fourth weekend weather. But it might have prevented the National Mall from looking that week, from the outside anyway, like Manzanar. As it was, you had to be a hard-core Trump supporter to even want to go. On top of everything else, having a No-Bid President is No Fun.* This article originally misidentified the name of the contractor responsible for the work on the Kennedy Center and the Reflecting Pool.

The war in Iran—so recently “ended” to the back-slapping acclaim of the administration that started it—is definitely back on. Iran attacked an air base in Jordan and other sites over the weekend, killing a total of three American soldiers (another service member was missing as of Sunday). The United States retaliated; Iran retaliated back. The New York Times described the countries as having “edged closer to a wider war.”Donald Trump actually makes a fair point when he reminds people that Vietnam lasted a decade and cost 58,000 American lives (and two million Vietnamese ones, which he doesn’t mention as often). Iran isn’t close to being a “quagmire” just yet—not even a Dubya-style one. People can get a little overwrought when discussing these things.Having said that, though, the future looks pretty grim. I mean, we’ve got Trump doing the one thing he said he’d never do: running a war. Knowing what we know about his attention span, his decision-making process, his willed ignorance of history, his refusal to read briefing papers, and his habit of responding to the last thing he saw on Fox News or Newsmax, we have plenty of reason to be worried here—and by “we,” I don’t mean liberals or Democrats or even Americans. I mean the world.Let’s sort through the possible scenarios. Granted, they are extremely unlikely to involve 58,000 American deaths. But Vietnam was probably the largest military tragedy in the history of this country. There are other, less costly ways to lose a war. The United States lost around 4,400 service members in Iraq. That’s minuscule compared to Vietnam, but it’s still a war we largely lost (the military objective of toppling Saddam Hussein was achieved, but at a huge and off-the-books financial cost, and Iraq today is at best a kinda-sorta democracy). So, some possible scenarios, from least bad to worst:Trump bombs some civilian installations like power stations, commits a few war crimes but nothing that deeply shocks and appalls world opinion (bombing Pickaxe Mountain, for example); Iran finds a way to exert fuller control over the Strait of Hormuz; gas prices go up again, and Wall Street gets jittery; and Trump finds an exit ramp. In other words, we just rerun the conflict we’ve already watched transpire.Or, Trump may decide to do a massive bombing raid on Kharg Island, the distribution point for 90 percent of Iran’s oil and natural gas. He bombed Kharg back in March, but that raid deliberately did not involve attacks on the island’s oil and gas infrastructure. Would Trump simply repeat that—an attack that had little discernible impact on events—or would he raise the stakes and hit the oil and gas installations this time? There has also been talk of a full-scale invasion of the island by U.S. troops. Doctor Testosterone over at the Pentagon probably can’t wait. Trump is surely holding off on both of these options because he knows full well that either would likely send gas prices soaring to the heavens and have other negative effects on the global economy. But Iran could do something that makes Trump change his mind, makes him feel he needs to do something dramatic, give Fox and Newsmax some A1 footage of things going boom.An even worse scenario would see both sides escalating until some utterly predictable “unpredictable” thing happens. A U.S. bomb hits another school, or a town square, and a few hundred civilians die. Iran kills some critical mass of American soldiers—a couple hundred, say. Slowly, or maybe not so slowly, this becomes a real shooting war, the kind of conflict that leads the news every night and has no plausible end in sight.Finally, there is the possibility that Trump gets impatient over a war he thought he was going to win in two weeks, and he takes drastic action that truly does shock world opinion. The wholesale bombing of civilian infrastructure. Bombing of civilian targets resulting in heavy casualties. The metaphorical “nuclear option” in this scenario would be quite literally nuclear. When people think of nuclear war, they think of the planet being blown to smithereens. But in fact, the United States has many small, tactical, variable-yield nuclear weapons in its arsenal, much smaller than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima (15 kilotons). I know—no one thinks this will happen, no one takes it remotely seriously. And they’re probably right. I’m just saying—with Donald Trump (and Pete Hegseth), never say never. I’m sure if you’d told the experts two years ago that the United States of America would start downing small watercraft in the Caribbean without apparent justification, going so far in at least one case as to strike a vessel a second time to kill the survivors, you’d have been greeted with condescending laughter.I don’t think conscience would constrain Trump from dropping a message-sending little nuke on Qom. I mean, come on. I do however think there is one force that would constrain him: the stock market. That’s what he cares about at the end of the day. He has to know, all his ridiculous and offensive bluster aside, that he really screwed the pooch here. His war didn’t end in two weeks. Incredible as it must have seemed to him, the Iranian people did not rise up as one in gratitude to Trump and overthrow the mullahs. (Those who thought that was a possibility seemed to have missed the part where the ruling regime brutally put down—that is to say, slaughtered—the protest movement that for a time gained worldwide attention.) Now he has to find a way out of this without causing a global depression.So that’s probably what he’ll do. Trump Always Chickens Out. He has more important things on his mind, at least more important to him: money to steal, lucre to rake in while still in office, a ballroom to build, a Reflecting Pool to fix (after re-ruining it), an election to rig, tens of thousands of brown people to harass and detain and, when deemed necessary, kill.But as this war restarts, we would do well to remember two things. First, war is always unpredictable; things happen that the experts said would never happen, and before you know it, the casualties are mounting, and the warmakers are screaming about patriotism. Second, Trump is Trump—a vain man-child who rarely thinks more than an hour or so ahead. At any given moment, he’ll do what he thinks he needs to do to get out of whatever immediate jam he’s put himself in. That’s why we’re in this war in the first place. And that’s why Donald Trump running a real-live war is the world’s worst nightmare.   

Aaron Judge, the star hitter for the New York Yankees, has been out of the lineup since the first week of June as he recovers from a stress fracture to one of his ribs. His timeline for return has major implications for the Yankees’ postseason hopes this year, so it is naturally the subject of endless scrutiny from sports media in New York City and beyond.If only we knew as much about the medical status of our elected officials. Judge, despite his name, does not wield any official power on the American people’s behalf. Those who do are increasingly aged, infirm, and secretive about their health. Congress has been greatly weakened as an institution and a branch of government over the past few decades. Now it is increasingly diminished in a physical sense, as well.Five lawmakers have now died in office in this current Congress, with the latest being South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who suffered from an aortic dissection earlier this month. A handful of others have gone missing for extended periods of time as they deal with serious medical events. Even more of them are visibly declining, with multiple lawmakers stepping down or retiring after their physical and mental impairments became impossible to ignore.There is no shortage of reforms that Congress could enact to strengthen itself. Perhaps the most useful one for the public would be to take a page from professional sports and create a congressional injury report. Baseball, basketball, and football teams are required by their leagues to publicly list when and why players are unable to compete at regular intervals. The nation’s legislature should do the same thing.The U.S. government is no stranger to covering up serious illnesses and incapacities. After suffering a stroke during his second term, President Woodrow Wilson was increasingly reliant on his wife, Edith, to carry out basic tasks for the last two years of his presidency. For a time, she even served as the sole conduit of communications between Wilson and his Cabinet. Congress and the states later ratified the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to provide mechanisms to remedy the possibility of presidential incapacity.There is no mechanism to remove a Supreme Court justice other than impeachment. On at least one occasion, however, the justices have effectively stripped a colleague of power. Justice William O. Douglas suffered a major stroke on New Year’s Eve in 1974 that seriously damaged his memory and cognitive abilities. He refused to resign, however, because he held out hope that his replacement would be appointed by a Democratic president after the 1976 election.While the public knew of the stroke and newspapers reported rumors about his mental condition, Douglas publicly insisted that he was capable of staying on the court. Only in 1979, with the publication of Bob Woodward’s book The Brethren, did Americans learn the extent of his incapacity at the time. Douglas’s condition was so severe, Woodward reported, that the other justices secretly agreed to punt cases in which he cast the deciding vote to the following term—an ad hoc way of stripping him of his power until he finally announced his retirement in November 1975.But what was once a rare occurrence among public officials is now an increasingly visible problem. Both President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Joe Biden, have faced considerable scrutiny over their declining mental faculties and overall health. Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race that summer after a disastrous presidential debate where the once-eloquent statesman struggled to speak clearly. Trump’s own decline speaks for itself.The federal courts have wrestled with it, as well: Earlier this month, the Supreme Court turned down an appeal from Judge Pauline Newman, a 99-year-old jurist who has been suspended from her duties since 2023 by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals over her alleged mental deterioration. Newman vociferously denies the allegations and produced testimony from physicians that asserted her faculties are still intact.But it is Congress where this problem is most apparent—and most easily remedied. Members of Congress are more visible than any other public official save for the president, with reporters able to observe and interact with them often in the halls of the Capitol. The grueling schedule of public events and fundraisers, especially in an election year, also theoretically makes it harder for them to hide for extended periods of time.That does not stop members of Congress from trying their best to escape public scrutiny. Last week, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell posted a photo with a copy of that day’s newspaper after six weeks of absence from the public eye while he was hospitalized for an undisclosed medical condition after a fall. (McConnell said in a statement that it was pneumonia.) His absence, as well as the silence surrounding it, led to intense speculation on social media about whether he was even alive and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear taking the unusual step of publicly requesting an update on his health. (This week, Beshear told Katie Couric that he’d received credible intelligence that McConnell had, in fact, passed away.)One can hardly blame the public for its interest in the lives and livelihoods of its elected public servants. The former Senate majority leader has been increasingly frail over the last few years, including two troubling episodes where he stopped speaking mid–press conference and began staring into the middle distance before aides escorted him away. His health status also had electoral implications—the deadline to appoint a replacement is next month—and political ones with a narrowly divided Senate.In recent years, members of Congress also have been part of a growing trend in which they simply go missing for long periods of time. In 2024, Texas Representative Kay Granger quietly stopped showing up to Capitol Hill and cast her final vote in July of that year. Shortly thereafter, the 81-year-old legislator moved into an assisted-living facility in Fort Worth for the final six months of her term because she was suffering from dementia. Granger’s constituents did not know her fate until The Dallas Morning News tracked her down that December.Earlier this year, New Jersey Representative Tom Kean Jr. also vanished from Congress in March without a public explanation. Unlike Granger at the time, Kean is running for reelection, making his absence from both the House floor and campaign events even more noticeable. After intense public scrutiny and multiple efforts to locate him, the 57-year-old Republican returned to Capitol Hill in June and revealed that he had been hospitalized for depression.“When I first informed the public that I was dealing with a medical issue, I was still trying to understand what was happening myself,” Kean said in a speech on the House floor. “When I said I hoped to return in a matter of weeks, I believed it. Those were the best estimates the doctors could provide. But, as the over 48 million of my fellow Americans being treated for this illness have come to discover, there is no timeline for healing. There is no timeline for recovery. Only the work of getting better one day at a time.”It is rare to hear public figures, and especially elected officials, discuss their struggles with depression and similar mental illnesses. Kean deserves credit for his honesty about his condition. At the same time, it is democratically untenable for the people’s elected representatives to vanish without a trace from their jobs without explanation or consequence. In no other profession or vocation in the country would it be allowed.This problem won’t be going away on its own. The 119th Congress was the third-oldest in the legislative branch’s history when it was sworn in in 2025, according to an NBC News analysis, behind only the Congresses that began in 2017 and 2021. Part of this stems from increases in American life expectancy over the last 250 years. The average age of the First Congress in 1789 was a mere 42 years old. But it also reflects the unwillingness of longtime lawmakers to step aside when they are no longer completely able to carry out the job to which they were elected.Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, whose physical and mental decline was apparent in recent years, announced in January she would retire at the end of her current term after intense public pressure. She had originally planned to run for reelection this year at the age of 88. California Senator Dianne Feinstein was once a formidable presence on the Senate’s Judiciary and Intelligence committees. In her final years, however, she became wheelchair-bound and increasingly confused about where she was and what she was doing, only retiring in 2023.The Constitution sets the qualifications for members of Congress. It grants life tenure to federal judges and has set a two-term limit for presidents. But there is no legal or constitutional restriction on how many times a lawmaker may serve in that position. Michigan’s John Dingell, who served for six decades, holds the record for longest-tenured lawmaker. Imposing term limits or age limits on federal lawmakers is a perennial issue, but there is no viable pathway to enacting either reform. In 1995, the Supreme Court struck down more than two dozen state laws that restricted candidates from appearing on the ballot if they had already served a certain number of terms. States, the high court reasoned, could not impose additional restrictions on federal election candidates beyond what the Constitution required.Congress, unsurprisingly, has shown little interest in ratifying a constitutional amendment that would limit its power. As a result, Americans are left with legislators who are increasingly aged and infirm. For now, the best that we can hope for is regular updates on their health status, the reason for any extended absence, and the expected timeline for their return to duty—though the fact that so many high-profile lawmakers have essentially flouted their obligation to keep their constituents informed about whether they’re medically fit for duty suggests that those hopes should not be high.Fortunately, Congress already has something akin to an in-house doctor. In 1928, the House formally requested that the Navy provide a medical officer to Congress and created the Office of the Attending Physician, or OAP. Lawmakers and Supreme Court justices can receive primary care from the attending physician’s medical staff on a regular basis at a heavily discounted price. The OAP also provides members with vaccinations, first aid, and other urgent-care needs.Medical privacy laws like HIPAA prevent hospitals, doctors, and other health care providers from simply telling reporters what is wrong with public officials. A lawmaker’s own staff also has no independent duty to provide updates on its boss’s medical condition, and plenty of reasons to keep it quiet on their behalf—or even its own. Rumors have long haunted certain elderly former lawmakers about the influence of top staffers over their decision-making.Fortunately, our nation’s sports leagues have already provided us with a blueprint for what should be done. Congress could pass a law that allows the OAP to independently verify a lawmaker’s medical status once per week and report it to the public on a regular basis. In professional sports, injury lists do not require full disclosure of every medical condition that an athlete suffers from. But it does require teams to explain why an athlete isn’t playing, what the injury is, and when they will be expected to return.This can be a relatively modest reform on lawmakers’ part if they wish. I doubt members of Congress would wish to submit to regular cognitive screenings, for example, even though the president of the United States seems to enjoy taking them as often as he can. They should also not be required to disclose every aspect of their medical history to the public as a condition of taking office. Lawmakers need not give up medical privacy altogether.Nor should the attending physician have the power to suspend or remove a lawmaker in any way. Congress itself does have the power to remove lawmakers if they are permanently incapacitated. In 1981, the House declared Maryland Representative Gladys Spellman’s seat vacant after she fell into an irreversible coma from a heart attack. Thankfully, her tragic situation has been a unique occurrence in modern American history. But with an increasingly aged legislature, it may only be a matter of time before it happens again. And in our increasingly distrustful and conspiratorial age, it would be helpful to have an independent physician who can provide a brief, frank assessment of an impaired lawmaker’s condition if and when it does.When a member of Congress doesn’t show up to work for at least a week or disappears for undisclosed medical reasons, the public—and their constituents in particular—should receive some kind of mandatory explanation about what’s happening. If our legislative branch is going to strengthen itself as an institution once more, it should start with a modified version of that ancient maxim: Congress, heal thyself.

The endorsement capped days of chaos ahead of the August Democratic primary.