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Israeli drones have killed at least eight people in Lebanon despite an announcement Monday by U.S. President Donald Trump that both Israel and Hezbollah had agreed to stop fighting. Trump’s intervention came as Israel threatened new strikes on the southern suburbs of Beirut, leading Iran to suspend indirect negotiations with the U.S. to protest Israel’s […]

The vibecession is back, or never really went away, or is now a “permacession.” Or so we’re told. But here’s a novel thought: What if it’s not just vibes? For years, economists and commentators have been trying to explain why American consumer sentiment and confidence in the economy have hit record lows while many objective measures of the economy remain solid. This alleged dissonance persisted throughout the Biden era, when the economy was recovering from the Covid pandemic, and has only gotten worse under President Trump. Still, commentators insist that public opinion is divorced from economic reality: Will Stancil, a University of Minnesota researcher and sometime political candidate, wages near-daily battles on Bluesky arguing that the available data belies the idea that the economy is bad, while others argue that the Democratic Party needs to determine why voters feel this way and propose ways to address it. “Democratic strategists loathe vibecession discourse, because positing that the public is factually wrong about what ails the country makes the job of pandering to voters ... much harder, no matter which party is in charge,” Brian Beutler wrote on Substack on Monday.The common takeaway is that voters are mad at price spikes in recent years of everyday goods like gas and groceries, and at the longer-term increase of housing and health care costs. It’s become the “affordability” crisis. But a new report from the Roosevelt Institute points to a simpler yet more profound explanation: Americans no longer feel that they can achieve a good life. Whatever the economy is doing, it isn’t delivering one. “If we are talking about the core goals of economic policy, yes, we want overall growth, but to what end?” said Elizabeth Wilkins, the president and CEO of Roosevelt. “To deliver the building blocks of a good life for people, right? We fundamentally believe that progress should be about people living better lives. So, what does it look like to actually deliver that for people?”The report, released Tuesday, digs deep into how people feel about what they can afford, what they want, and what they think the government should do about it. It’s a more complex picture than is often provided by simple surveys that ask how voters feel about their financial situation or the economy as a whole. Some of the biggest findings are that most voters feel like they have had to make trade-offs to afford what they needed over the past few years, don’t have enough to buy what they need and have a financial cushion left over, and that they would like to be free of debt. Just one in five said they were very secure in their income and confident they’d be able to retire comfortably. Almost 80 percent said they are worried about their finances now or in the future, and 35 percent have stopped putting money into savings in order to make ends meet.This points to two trends others have previously noted. For American households, there is no slack in the economy, and no feeling of security. The one or two breadwinners per household are already working all they can, and the number of people working multiple jobs to make ends meet is rising. The cost of necessities has risen, especially housing, electricity, transportation, and health care premiums, which people can’t easily cut out of their budgets. Sometimes when people pay more for these things it means they’ve moved into a bigger house or are receiving medical care they had put off and therefore improving their lives. But the base price of these necessities has gone up without people feeling like they’re moving up. Paying more for the same amount of goods doesn’t make people feel better, and sometimes people even end up downgrading or downsizing to try to balance their budget. The survey also showed that people feel the current political system is unfair. Confidence in the government is underwater by 41 points, and voters had more confidence in small businesses, their employers, and banks. That’s largely because people think the government is full of self-serving politicians working for billionaires and corporations. In the K-shaped economy—the term used to describe increasing inequality—most of the benefits of a “good” economy go to those at the top. While this trend has been growing for at least three decades, it has hit home in the second Trump term, as obscenely wealthy tech titans like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerburg, and Elon Musk gave up any pretense of caring about inequality and democratic ideals and have cozied up to the administration instead.“People’s expectations are shaped by what’s possible in a world where people can buy their third yacht, and you don’t have the time to spend with your child because of the number of jobs that you have to work, even if those jobs mean that you can buy groceries for the week,” Wilkins said. “We ought to be able to do better by people than the basics when so much is possible based on the resources that we have. So to my mind, what we are seeing is people extremely frustrated by real measures of economic insecurity in a world where they can tell, based on the wealth and power around them, that things could be different if we could change them to be so.”Wilkins argues that these feelings aren’t new, exactly: We’ve seen anger over the economy rising since the North American Free Trade Agreement, and it has found outlets on both the right (the Tea Party) and the left (Occupy Wall Street). The blatantly corrupt Trump administration and its coterie of billionaires have simply raised the pitch.While Americans don’t trust the government, they do want it to act. The Roosevelt survey found that large majorities at least somewhat support a public option for services including health care, public colleges, and childcare that would provide free or very affordable options in those markets, and expanding Social Security, the already existing public program for retirement benefits. The institute calls this the Good Life agenda. Enacting it will require politicians to resist the false allure of free-market solutions, and instead present a clear case for how the government can make people’s lives better. “I do think there is [an opportunity] to tap into people’s disgust and frustration with corruption in this moment,” Wilkins said, “but it needs to be paired with an affirmative vision for what life could look like if we did things differently.”

Let’s acknowledge this up front: It’s good to see that Senate Republicans have—for the time being, anyway—forced Donald Trump to back off plans for a $1.8 billion slush fund for allies and insurrectionists. Trump suspended the idea after Republicans made it clear that they won’t pass funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement without legislative language starkly limiting the fund or effectively nixing it entirely.So, yep: Shockingly, it turns out that some level of Trumpian corruption is too much for Republicans to stomach. That’s particularly so with Trump’s approval mired in the 30s and one corrupt imperial scheme after another—from the ballroom to the triumphal arch—polling horribly as the midterms approach.Yet we may be getting scammed here in another way, folks. That’s because Trump and Republicans have offered zero clarity about the future of the other part of his slush-fund scheme: the grant of immunity from IRS scrutiny for Trump, his businesses, and his family members. Incredibly, this would “forever” bar IRS audits of past tax claims by the Trump clan or the Trump Organization. Democrats can try to make Republicans vote on that towering act of corruption, which might prove politically even worse.As you’ll recall, both these moves—the slush fund and the IRS immunity caper—were included in a “settlement” that the Justice Department reached in Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the first-term leaking of his tax returns. The settlement itself is bogus: Donald Trump’s DOJ is “settling” by agreeing to allow Donald Trump’s government to hand a massively corrupt package of gifts to Donald Trump. That absurdity was enough to persuade Republicans to oppose the slush fund.But what about the IRS immunity piece? Well, we don’t know what’s going to happen with that. Which gives Democrats an opportunity.Democrats tell me they’re moving to force votes in Congress that would effectively nullify the IRS immunity piece, as well. That provision is potentially an incredibly lucrative giveaway for Trump: It could benefit him to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. So one approach would be for Democrats to use “reconciliation”—the process that Republicans are using to pass the ICE funding, which enables Senate passage by simple majority—to push amendments that would nix Trump’s IRS immunity scam.“We will do whatever we can to force a vote during the budget reconciliation process on this monarchical outrage and further plunder of the people,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, emails me. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, said on the Senate floor Tuesday that Democrats are set to push an amendment that will “revoke” Trump’s and his family’s “free rein to commit tax fraud.”Here a complication arises. Now that Trump seems to have put his slush fund on hold, Senate Republicans may drop any effort to nix it via legislation from the reconciliation process entirely. If so, that could procedurally preclude Democrats from offering any amendments involving the IRS settlement—including one nixing Trump’s IRS immunity scam.But Democrats can still move to legislate against that in the future, and Raskin tells me this is in the works. To be clear, many legal experts think this part of Trump’s settlement is already illegal, as federal law bars a president from interfering in the audit process (presumably including audits involving himself). And as Anna Bower and Eric Columbus note, a future administration might not be bound to respect this exemption of Trump and his associates from audits.But Democrats can still act. One way to do this, Raskin suggests, is by beefing up current law barring presidential interference into audits and broadening it to include many other government investigations, which Raskin says Democrats will pass next year if they win the House.“We will strengthen and expand this law to include any presidential effort to target or immunize any citizen from federal criminal, civil, or administrative investigation of any kind,” Raskin tells me. A Democratic leadership aide tells me that Senate Democrats will try to force floor votes killing the IRS immunity caper this year too.With this whole fiasco, Trump is basically screwing Republicans by demanding a level of self-abasement on his behalf that even they appear to be balking at. Trump’s slush fund is too toxic for Republicans to support, in part because it would likely be used to reward the January 6 insurrectionists for trying to steal an election on his behalf. But the IRS immunity caper should be even more toxic. After all, Trump’s unique fusion of corruption and megalomania is already a massive liability for the GOP. A recent Washington Post poll found that 56 percent of Americans oppose Trump’s act of tearing down the White House East Wing to build a ballroom. Fifty-two percent oppose his plan for a triumphal arch. And 68 percent oppose his plan to put his signature on paper money—and that was before we learned of the scheme to put his face on a $250 bill. Among independents, those numbers are even more eye-popping: 61 percent oppose the ballroom, 57 percent oppose the arch, and 72 percent oppose his signature on paper money. Ned Resnikoff suggests that Trump’s rule can be called “hyperfascist,” in that Trump is offering something like a “dramatic reenactment” of fascist domination. I think one can see this in all these corrupt public efforts by Trump to stamp his face all over the seat of federal power in Washington, D.C. Americans are being subjected to a veritable parade of efforts to supplant republican government with the trappings of imperial, personalist, even totalitarian rule, all undertaken—and here’s the important part—in a deliberately visible and risible way. And Americans are recoiling.Now imagine if the public broadly understood that Trump has ordered his Justice Department to reach a deal exempting himself—and his businesses and family members—from a good deal of IRS examination. This could personally and directly benefit Trump by saving him enormous sums of money while quite consciously placing him and his cronies above laws that the rest of us must live under. That’s another level of self-dealing entirely. And Trump is flaunting it with great relish. OK, then: Democrats should do everything they possibly can to ensure that vulnerable Republican incumbents own every last little bit of it.

Israeli soldiers went door to door in the border village of Ain Arab, forcing residents from their homes at gunpoint as part of a systematic campaign to empty large swathes of southern Lebanon.

Trump's choice for acting Director of National Intelligence is also the subject of an open federal watchdog inquiry.