Frontpage news and politics

President Donald Trump has recently taken to accusing his foes of being communists, so much so that social activist Ralph Nader described the Republican leader as "Senator Joe McCarthy on steroids, who in the 1950s smeared political opponents, activists, and others, falsely accusing them of being communists.”

Yet according to The Washington Post, a newspaper owned by Trump ally Jeff Bezos, the president himself is acting quite a bit like a communist — at least when it comes to the government taking charge of private businesses.

“President Donald Trump is warning of a ‘resurgence of the communist menace’ as the Democratic Party shifts to the left, invoking historical memories of terror, collectivization and poverty in a bid to regain voter support ahead of the November congressional elections,” wrote The Washington Post’s David J. Lynch on Sunday. From there, Lynch went into detail through the right-winger’s presidency to point out a contradiction in his argument.

“Trump’s aversion to the heavy hand of the state has not kept him from wielding it himself,” the reporter explained. “The president has had the federal government take partial ownership of nearly two dozen companies since he returned to the White House, including chipmaker Intel and MP Materials, a leading producer of rare earth minerals.”

He added, “Outside of war or financial crisis, Washington has never been so eager to buy stakes in private companies. Critics warn that state capitalism is a recipe for cronyism, waste and inefficiency. But some businesses are volunteering to partner with the government. OpenAI, which is eyeing an initial stock offering later this year, this month offered to give Washington a 5 percent stake when it lists.”

Lynch also quoted Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

“Far from being a bulwark against creeping American communism, Trump is laying the groundwork for more of this in the future,” Lincicome told Lynch. “The president himself has said that he thinks it’s very American to take these government equity stakes based on what the country needs. It’s almost comical how much that sounds like ‘seizing the means of production’ [or] ‘to each according to his needs.’”

As one example of Trump’s socializing private businesses, Lincicome wrote that the president “obtained a 10 percent share of chipmaker Intel after the president publicly criticized Lip-Bu Tan, the company’s CEO, and suggested he be fired. Tan emerged from a private White House meeting a few days later having agreed to surrender a minority stake to the government as the president crowed on social media: ‘I PAID ZERO FOR INTEL.’”

He added, “To critics, it looked as if the president had made the company an offer it couldn’t refuse. In March, Richard D. Paisner, an Intel shareholder, sued the company, its board of directors and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, alleging that the company had given the government ‘$11 billion worth of Intel stock for no meaningful consideration in response to extortionary threats by the government.’”

Speaking with AlterNet earlier this month, Ed Gresser, the Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the liberal-leaning think tank Progressive Policy Institute, also argued that there is an irony in Trump denouncing communists while meddling so much in private businesses.

“I don't think of it as communism, although the Trump administration is actually a very big-government presidency — taking stakes in big companies and trying to manage them in a fairly inappropriate way,” Gresser told AlterNet. “So it's a bit odd to see them drumming up fears of socialism, since that's very much in the background of a lot of what they've done."

A large number of President Donald Trump’s supporters began wearing masks in mid-2020 after their leader urged them to do so — and now, a scientific paper explains the psychology behind why they did so, per PsyPost.

“Political leaders play a potentially important role shaping behaviors and beliefs during crises. In the pandemic, a number of high-status politicians, notably leaders of populist parties, were seen to diminish compliance with institutional recommendations by casting doubt on COVID guidelines,” proclaimed the abstract of a recent study by Bartholomew A. Konechni, a sociologist at Sciences Po Paris, published in the journal American Sociological Review. “But what happens when such leaders change position and endorse previously discouraged behaviors?”

Konechni analyzed data of more than 5,000 patients from the Understanding Coronavirus in America panel to study how millions of Trump’s supporters switched from refusing to wear masks during the COVID-19 pandemic to embracing them, entirely because of Trump saying on July 1, 2020, that he started wearing them because he thought doing so made him look like the Lone Ranger. He learned that when Trump made his announcement that he would wear masks, it closed the gap between Republican and Democratic compliance by roughly 40 percent, particularly among individuals who were more exposed to the early-summer spikes in COVID-19. Yet this did not mean that they necessarily abandoned their original anti-mask views.

“In contrast to expectations from most dominant theoretical models of behavioral change, especially the health belief model, no corresponding shift in beliefs about facemasks can be detected,” Konechni wrote. “These results have important theoretical implications for understanding how pivots can shape behaviors during crises, the validity of existing models in public health, pandemic populism’s causes, and directions of future research.”

PsyPost’s Karina Petrova elaborated on what exactly happened.

“Such a disconnect might seem unusual, but sociologists have documented similar patterns in everyday life,” Petrova wrote. “College students often drink heavily in public to fit in with peers, even if they privately disapprove of binge drinking. Parents sometimes refuse childhood vaccinations based on suspicion, but they will accept a vaccine for themselves under intense workplace pressure. Social expectations frequently push people into actions they do not intellectually endorse.”

Konechni found that Trump’s “Lone Ranger” comment worked because many of Trump’s supporters were “living in states where the outbreak was spiking the hardest. This suggests that the severity of the crisis acted as a catalyst. When people are navigating immediate danger, they may look to their preferred leaders for survival cues. They might follow those cues for group solidarity or out of plain anxiety, bypassing the need to logically validate the underlying science.”

Petrova added, “There are limitations to this analysis that warrant attention. The study used self-reported data. Survey participants might have altered their answers simply to project loyalty to their political camp instead of accurately reporting their habits. The focus on a single political figure during a rare global disaster also restricts how broadly these lessons can be applied.”

Yet the science journalist continued, “Face masks were highly visible and novel, which might separate them from more private medical choices like taking a pill. Trump also commands a decidedly unique relationship with his base. The results from this specific historical moment may not translate seamlessly to a standard politician asking their constituents to eat less sugar or exercise more frequently. Future studies might explore how strong social networks shape these reactions, or how long such unanchored behaviors can be realistically maintained.”

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2021, Dr. Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago, said that “when we’re engaging [in] motivated reasoning, we tend to hold evidence to a lower threshold of quality before we believe it’s true. A person trying to justify a belief they have might ask themselves ‘can I’ believe this to be true, while a person trying to refute a belief they’d rather not have holds evidence to a higher standard, asking themselves ‘must I’ believe this to be true. Both are motivated approaches to evaluating evidence. The first can lead us to accept weak evidence in support of a belief, while the latter can lead us to be overly skeptical of good evidence.”

President Donald Trump’s big and controversial Supreme Court win in Trump v. Slaughter empowered the head of America’s executive branch to fire members of previously independent agencies in order to solidify his power and policy agenda. Now, a conservative publication is publishing an article on how opponents of this case can fight back.

“The death of independent agencies should not be considered a fait accompli,” wrote Todd Phillips, a consultant and former law professor at Georgia State University, in The Bulwark on Sunday. “The Court’s ruling in Trump v. Slaughter just turned a wonky bill focused on the structure of crypto markets into a live test case for whether Congress will let one party’s White House—present or future—singlehandedly control how every industry in the United States is regulated.”

Phillips added, “Slaughter need not be the last word on bipartisan policymaking. Although the Court has ruled that the president must be permitted to remove board members and commissioners at will, Congress is still permitted to structure agencies in ways that disincentivize firings.”

From there Phillips argued, citing a recent Stanford Law Review article he co-authored with University of Minnesota Law Professor Nicholas R. Bednar, that “one partial solution worth pursuing would be to emphasize and clarify independent agencies’ quorum rules, requiring that bipartisan slates of commissioners are seated before agencies take any actions.” This process might work because “commissions’ quorum requirements could be structured such that members from both the Democratic and Republican parties must be in office and must not be recused before the agency may advance any action. Such quorums would ensure that even if members of the minority party are not successful in persuading their colleagues of their policy proposals, they are at least in the room when decisions are being made.”

Indeed, “although the Supreme Court has made its decision, Congress need not let the six justices have the last word on whether agency independence is permitted to exist. Tightening quorum requirements for independent regulatory agencies is not a perfect solution. But it’s a step worth taking.”

He concluded, “Legislators who oppose volatile, episodic regulation driven by who happens to control an agency at any given moment should use the CLARITY Act as an opportunity to preserve, at least in a limited way, bipartisan, independent agencies while articulating a blueprint for reforming other commissions in the future.”

When the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the Slaughter case, dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor broke down in detail why she believed the case was poorly reasoned.

“There is little to suggest 'Executive Power,' as understood at the time of the founding, was as capacious as the Court today asserts,” Sotomayor explained. “The powers held by the English Crown and state governors before ratification did not include a removal power that the legislature could not modify. Instead, Parliament often restricted the Crown's ability to remove even high-level royal officers, and states with vesting clauses like the Constitution's similarly allowed for limits on gubernatorial removal powers."

She added, “Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong.”

President Donald Trump's Board of Peace initiative was hyped up to the stars upon its launch, with some suggesting it could possibly replace the United Nations, but as two legal scholars argued for The Hill this week, all it has really done is expose the "all hat, no cattle" trend that has summed up his entire presidency so far.

Initially pitched as an entity that would manage the reconstruction of the Gaza region, by the time it was officially launched in January at the World Economic Forum, Trump's Board of Peace had evolved into a more wide-ranging peacekeeping organization. Despite its ambitions, the board's invitations were turned down by most major Western democracies, with its starting line-up heavily comprised of countries led by dictators or which have a noted history of human rights abuses. Critics have alleged that the initiative — which requires a steep fee for entry and which Trump will lead as chairman even after leaving office — has been nothing more than another way to funnel money to the president.

In a Sunday piece for The Hill, David Wippman, the emeritus president of Hamilton College, and Glenn C. Altschuler, the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University, wrote that, in its five months of existence, the Board of Peace has "produced little beyond a charter and a few security personnel." This, they argued further, exposes a common theme across much of what Trump has done since returning to the White House: talk big, dominate headlines, deliver little.

"The gap between rhetoric and reality illustrates a key feature of Trump’s presidency," the duo explained. "Although he claimed he would 'govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept,' in his administration, a promise is often the achievement. It grabs headlines, dominates the news cycle, distracts from setbacks elsewhere, and allows Trump to promote himself. By the time it’s clear how little has changed, Trump, the media and most Americans have moved on."

Of the $17 billion promised for Gaza reconstruction at the inaugural board meeting, "only $23 million has materialized," the duo noted, "and no major reconstruction or security contracts have been awarded." Similarly, "a 20,000-strong International Stabilization Force" announced as a way to provide security during reconstruction efforts currently "consists of a commander and four Moroccan officers," with the original plans withering "in the face of concerns over the U.S.-Iran war, rules of engagement, legal authority and financing, as well as Trump’s insistence that no American troops would enter Gaza."

"The Board of Peace, then, is best understood as a paradigmatic example of a grandiose, self-serving, bait-and-switch public relations strategy that wastes time, energy and money, leaves urgent domestic problems unaddressed, and undermines America’s credibility abroad," Wippman and Altschuler concluded. "Let the buyer beware."

President Donald Trump’s supporters have long been accused of acting like they are in a cult and viciously turning on anyone who criticizes their leader. Now Corey Nathan,

“There is such a thing as Trump Derangement Syndrome, but it’s not what you think,” wrote Corey Nathan, who was born Jewish and subsequently converted to Christianity, in an editorial for a conservative publication called The Dispatch. Instead of using it to describe people who criticize Trump, Nathan argued that it refers to people “who look upon the words and actions of Donald Trump and cannot see them for what they are. On any given day, his conduct exhibits the very antithesis of what Scripture—or anyone with the most basic sense of decency—calls virtue.”

He mentioned that, whenever he cites Trump’s numerous actions that would be described as sins according to the tenets of Christianity, he receives “now entirely predictable, seemingly reflexive comebacks. ‘Oh, well what about Biden? What about Ka-MAH-la? What about Obama? Nobody was more arrogant than Barack Hussein Obama.’ Or something like, ‘Doesn’t the Bible tell you not to judge?’ Or maybe simply, and this was said to me just last week, ‘The TDS is strong in you, man.’”

Nathan continued that these arguments tend to be self-serving and one-way, made by people who are putting out whatever they hope might help them defend Trump rather than because there is any internal consistency or moral logic to what they are propounding. In this expedient and irrational mindset, Nathan compared Trump supporters to individuals struggling with addiction issues.

“The dynamic feels familiar: the denial, the defensiveness, the way confrontation closes doors that patience might eventually open,” Nathan wrote. “The problem I keep wrestling with isn’t political. It’s human. What do we do when people we love become morally and epistemically unavailable to us?”

He added, “By that I mean, why do people I care about seem not even to know about example after example (and the volume is part of the MAGA strategy) of what should be disqualifying statements and actions Trump has made through the years? By the time you’ve cataloged everything, you’ve already forgotten Helsinki. You’ve forgotten his sanitization and deflections for people chanting ‘the Jews will not replace us.’ You’ve forgotten ‘I like people who weren’t captured.’ Those moments now seem almost quaint.”

Describing this phenomenon as “a moral and epistemic disorder, a specific kind of blindness with a specific structure,” Nathan compared the attitudes of Trump supporters to those that facilitated the rise of fascists in the 20th century and were chronicled by writers of the time like George Orwell and Theodor Adorno.

“There are moments in history when one thing is happening that dwarfs everything else,” Nathan argued. “The people who miss it aren’t always wrong about their concerns; they’re just catastrophically misallocating their moral attention. My friend the pastor isn’t pro-Trump, exactly. He’s distracted. And distraction, at this historical moment, is its own form of complicity. But Trump promises to win the culture war this faith leader is losing. In exchange, he doesn’t have to look too hard at the man doing the winning.”

He continued, “There’s also the matter of incentives. Calling out Trump would cost him—empty pews, less tithing, the church across town gaining ground. Russell Moore was pressured out of his position with the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission within the Southern Baptist Convention for less. I’ve seen how that goes firsthand. I’ve been asked to leave Bible studies for insisting on what Scripture actually says when it cuts against the room’s political preferences. The people who showed me the door didn’t say they disagreed with my politics. They said I was ‘getting political.’ The politics were always there, of course. Just not the right kind.”

Overall, Nathan ended by saying that people who oppose Trump but are close to people who support him must continue showing up and conversing with them, in an understanding and non-confrontational tone, even though he does not know beyond that how to deprogram them.

“These are not stupid men,” Nathan said. “My good friend is sharp and informed. My old pastor is educated and theologically serious. That’s the syndrome. The real one. Not the inability to tolerate Trump. The inability to see him clearly.”

He concluded, “I don’t know what cures it. But I’m not ready to stop trying to find out.”

Nathan is far from alone in comparing Trumpers’ behavior to that of a cult. Speaking with the conservative website The Bulwark in March, former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair bluntly said that the Trump movement “is a cult. And what you have to understand is that in any abusive relationship, your access to other people is cut off. You're isolated. Your access to information is cut off. Your access to people who might have rational perspectives on what you're involved in — that's cut off too.”

She added, “These people are told it's all fake news. The only things you can trust are Twitter and Truth Social. And for better or worse, they actually believe that. They believe that established outlets are lying to them, that nothing those outlets publish can be true."

The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who unexpectedly died of a brief and sudden illness on Saturday, once took pride in standing up to extremism within the Republican Party — at least, before he decided to hitch his political cart to President Donald Trump’s wagon.

In a 2014 Politico article that the website recently began recirculating in light of Graham’s death, reporter Manu Raju wrote that “Graham’s deft maneuvering shows why he’s become the dominant political figure in this deeply red state and is skating to another six years even as he’s angered the base on immigration and other hot-button issues. Far from pandering to the party’s tea party wing in order to get reelected, he’s challenging it head-on: Graham warns that the GOP is caught in a ‘death spiral’ with minorities, says it needs to get real about climate change and defends his move to open debate on gun control legislation after a school massacre.”

On one occasion, as Politico reported at the time, Graham chastised many of his fellow Republicans for demanding ideological purity tests, saying that instead they should be open to a diverse range of opinions.

“What I want is a party that can grow,” Graham said at the time. “What’s my big sin: 1-in-10 [votes defecting from the party line]? If we’re going to build the party around universal agreement, we become a club.”

He also expressed pride in getting lambasted by his own party for supporting immigration reform, even though South Carolina’s Latino population in 2014 was only 5 percent, and warned that the GOP was in a “death spiral” with nonwhite voters that would not end unless they did more to advocate for policies that could help minority Americans. He also argued that a conservative message could sell well with racial minorities if the party would stop taking such a hard-line stance on issues like immigration.

Similarly, Graham expressed a willingness to advocate for issues that he believed involved Americans’ existential futures, even if doing so was unpopular with the GOP base.

“Graham, in the interview, was unapologetic about his unsuccessful attempt to cut a deal with Democrats on controlling climate change,” Politico reported in 2014. “Humans, he said, ‘to some extent, absolutely’ are contributing to global warming and the GOP needs a rational environmental policy, with a heavy emphasis on nuclear power.”

By the time Trump became president, however, Graham had flip-flopped on key issues like immigration, climate change and reaching out to minority voters, instead transitioning from a moderate Republican to a staunch MAGA adherent. In return for this evolution, Graham became an influence within the administration, most notably playing a key role in convincing Trump to wage his controversial ongoing war against Iran.

Despite describing Trump as a “jack---” during the 2016 presidential election (in which Graham ran against him in the GOP primaries), saying “if we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it” and describing him as "the most flawed nominee in the history of the Republican party,” Graham subsequently became a diehard backer of the president and his agenda. Yet after successfully pushing Trump to invade Iran, many in his own party’s base turned against him.

“Lindsey Graham needs to be removed from the Situation Room. I don’t want to hear one word from a guy with no kids, desperately sending our sons and daughters into war on the ground in Iran,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) recently wrote on social media regarding Graham’s ongoing support of the Iran war.

President Donald Trump is a desperate man. With the midterms on the horizon and his approval ratings under water, he doesn’t want to talk about affordability. Nor does he want to talk about his war with Iran. And he certainly doesn’t want to talk about Jeffrey Epstein.

What does he want to talk about? Communists.

Over the last two weeks, Trump has ratcheted up his overheated rhetoric in response to democratic socialists’ victories in primary elections in Colorado, New York, Washington, DC, and elsewhere.

During a speech to Christian conservatives at a Faith and Freedom Coalition convention in Washington on June 26, he called democratic socialists “animals” and said, “We have to stop this horrible threat of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism.” He went on to say that the “godless” communists in the Democratic Party pose a particular risk for Christians. “They will close your churches in this country,” he warned. “They will kill your people. And that’s what they’re about.”Heading into the 250th birthday celebration on the National Mall, Trump continued his tirade. Speaking at Mount Rushmore on July 3, he not only besmirched Democrats, but immigrants as well.

“There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said. “...You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.” He made no secret that he is trying to salvage Republican candidates’ chances in November. “America will never be a communist country,” he said. “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise.”

Trump was only slightly more restrained on July 4 at the National Mall. After introducing a handful of World War II veterans and lauding them for their heroism, Trump ahistorically declared: “Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen.” (In fact, American troops, along with troops from Great Britain and communist Soviet Union, defeated fascism in World War II.)

The GOP’s Red-Baiting Tradition

It’s not as if Trump and his fellow Republicans haven’t hurled the communist epithet before, but over the past six months they have upped the ante. According to a recent Washington Post analysis of statements, social media posts, and podcasts, from January to June, they applied the word “communist” or “communism” to Democrats an average of 626 times per week, 43% more than during the same time frame in 2025.

Right-wing pundits have entered the fray, too. Megan McArdle, a self-described “right-leaning libertarian” columnist at The Washington Post, recently wrote that democratic socialist victories represent “a heady moment for the left, because socialism’s tainted brand has recovered from the vivid failures of the Soviet Union.”

Likewise, historian Arthur Herman, writing for Fox News, disingenuously equated democratic socialists’ policy agenda with that of the Soviet Union in a July 3 column. “In June, Marxist radicals calling themselves democratic socialists swept the New York City primaries...” he wrote. “...Communist-style socialism has brought poverty, mass starvation, and subsistence misery to tens of millions worldwide.”

Such attacks are nothing new. Republicans denounced Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as “socialism” and even “communism.” In 1961, then General Electric spokesman Ronald Reagan warned that government health insurance would lead to socialism. Over the following decades, however, Republicans largely abandoned that mantra in favor of attacks on “big government” and the welfare state.

Trump is a throwback to an earlier time. In his 2020 State of the Union address, Trump attacked socialism, claiming it “destroys nations.” Like Reagan before him, he specifically denounced a “Medicare for All” proposal endorsed by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and 130 other members of Congress at the time, calling it a “socialist takeover of our healthcare system.”

During the last election, Trump often called Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris a “Marxist,” tying her to her father’s economic perspective on markets and inequality. More recently, he labeled New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, a “communist,” and dubbed Janeese Lewis George, a democratic socialist who won last month’s Washington, DC, Democratic mayoral primary, a “Communist adherent.”

Democratic socialists in the Democratic Party are not communists. If they are a member of any organization, it likely would be the Democratic Socialists of America, which does not function as a party. Communist organizations still exist in the United States, but they are politically marginal and have no representation in Congress or in any state legislature.

Americans Support Democratic Socialist Policies

Likewise, democratic socialism is not synonymous with Soviet communism, which fell apart 35 years ago. The countries that democratic socialists in America hold up as models can be found in Western Europe. They are multiparty democracies with market economies, strong unions, and robust social safety programs that include universal healthcare. Their economic models are nothing like the one-party command economy of the Soviet Union and, as I pointed out in detail in a December 2025 essay, they do a much better job of ensuring their citizens live long, healthy, and prosperous lives than the United States does.

While only about 17% of Americans have a favorable view of democratic socialist politicians, their policies are quite popular. For example:

• According to a new Economist-YouGov poll, 52% of Americans support eliminating private health insurance companies and replacing them with a national health plan. Only 30% oppose the idea.
• Public support for a higher federal minimum wage has remained strong for years. A 2021 Pew survey found that 62% of Americans supported raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, while a 2019 Pew survey found support at 67%.
• A February Pew survey found that 69% of Americans favor requiring employers to provide paid family leave. Even 59% of Republicans support it.
• Finally, 63% of Americans favor raising taxes on large corporations, according to a March 2025 Pew poll, and 58% favor raising taxes on households earning more than $400,000 annually.

Perhaps what is holding democratic socialists back is how they identify themselves. The term “socialist” just may have too much baggage. After all, many Americans still associate the word with the Soviet Union, whose official name was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, even though it was a communist dictatorship.

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, told The Washington Post earlier this week that political labels should not be an issue. “What matters is the legislation, your proposals, the ideas before us,” she said. “How a person identifies in their economic view of the world is less important to people than if we’re making their groceries more affordable.”

Maybe. But Trump and the GOP are betting that calling Democrats “communists” will matter to enough voters to overshadow their concerns about the cost of food, gasoline, housing and healthcare. November will reveal whether that Cold War strategy still works.

Democratic primary elections, in particular, are showing us America is both in the midst of a deep crisis and is on the verge of what could be transformational, positive, life-altering political and economic change comparable to FDR’s New Deal.

It became obvious, really, in the first minute of New Year’s Day this year, when two things happened at once vividly showing us all the contrast and the crises around where America stands right now.

In a long-abandoned subway station deep under lower Manhattan, progressive Democrat Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor of New York City, largely on the simple promise that New York could once again become “a city we can afford.”

And at that very same midnight — because Republicans refused to extend them — the enhanced Obamacare subsidies expired for more than twenty million Americans, jacking their health insurance prices overnight into stratospheric amounts that are now pushing families to skip pills, skip meals, and skip the doctor entirely.

One honest man took office swearing that he’d help ordinary people afford to live, and at that same moment, millions of working class people lost the ability to afford their insurance because Republican politicians consistently put their morbidly rich individual and corporate donors above all else.

Even Newsweek, no one’s idea of a radical rag, noticed the thing our media generally misses: the same cost-of-living fury that carried Donald Trump back into the White House in 2024 was the same fury Mamdani rode to City Hall a year later.

When Louise and I lived in a boat in a marina in Washington, DC back during the 2016 election year, we knew quite a few people retired from the Navy and Coast Guard who generally called themselves Republicans, but were split between Trump and Bernie for their vote. Why? Because both were promising real, meaningful change.

I’ve told you before about my dad. Carl came home from the Second World War, finally got a good union job in a tool-and-die shop in Lansing, and on that one paycheck he raised us four boys, bought a house, put a new car in the driveway every couple of years, sent us toward college, took my mom on vacation, and retired with a pension that let the two of them travel the world.

That wasn’t wealth: that was the ordinary American middle class, and in 1981 — the year Reagan decided to destroy our unions, cut those “socialist benefits,” and freeze the minimum wage — two-thirds of us Americans lived in that middle class on a single income. Today it’s closer to only 40 percent of us, and it takes two full paychecks to reach what one paycheck used to buy.

Particularly over the past few years, America has politically bifurcated: One side is characterized by a guy in a red hat who’s dead certain that brown-skinned immigrants took his job and he wants them gone. The other is a young organizer knocking on doors for Medicare for All and tuition-free college.

Every cable network, every consultant, every party fundraiser will tell you these two are the opposite poles of our politics, the “far right” and the “far left” of our political spectrum. But in reality, they’re both looking at the same problem.

They’re both grieving the very same dead dream, reaching up for what my father had when I was a kid: a middle-class life. The difference is that one of them — the MAGA true believer — has been handed a Black/Hispanic/queer/female scapegoat while the other — the progressive — understands that we need to stop America’s oligarchs from their pillage.

But the financial pain underneath, the force driving both to want change, is largely identical, and it’s real.

The whole economic case Republicans made for mass deportation was that clearing out the immigrants would hand American workers a raise. It ignored the Republican destruction of the American union movement, and amplified the exploitable, often-nascent racism many in the GOP’s base already carried.

Trump’s own Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, put it plainly, insisting that illegal immigration had for years “artificially suppressed wages” and gutted the prospects of working-class Americans, especially young white men. That was the promise: a blue-collar wage boom, with a dose of cruelty to speed it up.

Then the receipts came in.

A Brookings analysis found that ICE operations wiped out roughly 668,000 jobs, and that somewhere between 51,000 and 297,000 of those jobs had belonged to workers born right here in the United States. Construction, hospitality, and food service, the very industries where those anxious young men actually work, got hit the hardest.

University of Colorado economists Chloe East and Elizabeth Cox went looking for the promised windfall from Miller’s imprisonment and deportation campaign and couldn’t find it. There was no boost in jobs or wages for U.S.-born workers.

If anything, the crackdown hurt working-class men in immigrant-heavy trades like construction, because when you rip a non-citizen bricklayer off a job site you also idle the American electrician and project manager who needed that wall to go up.

So the red-hat guy’s pain is real. His paycheck really did shrink, his rent really is crushing him, his kid really can’t afford the college my dad could.

But the story he was sold about who did it to him is a lie, the same lie they sold his great grandfather in the 1920s when they swore it was Black people coming for his job, or his father in the 1980s when Limbaugh said it was the “Feminazis” who wanted to displace him, now just repackaged with browner faces, tradwives, fake Christianity, and a border.

The pain of being a working person in an America — where Republicans have all but destroyed the union movement and bipartisan neoliberalism has moved millions of jobs overseas — is genuine: but the villain is manufactured. And it’s manufactured by the same people quietly emptying working people’s wallets.

You can see the shared wound the moment you take the labels off and ask people about what actual policies they support instead of which political tribe they belong to.

The Century Foundation surveyed working-class Americans, including the ones who voted for Trump in droves, alongside their college-educated neighbors who lean Democratic. On the policies that actually shape their economic lives the two groups were highly aligned, both of them overwhelmingly backing populist economics and hard limits on billionaire and corporate power.

The rest of the polling tells the same story. A CNN survey this spring found 76 percent of Americans naming the cost of living as their single biggest economic problem, with about three-quarters saying the system is rigged for the powerful and three-quarters saying it’s harder to get ahead than it was a generation ago.

A January New York Times and Siena poll found 65 percent of voters say a middle-class life is simply out of reach, and 77 percent say it’s harder to reach now than it was for their parents. That isn’t a “left” or “right” number: that’s my dad’s vanished paycheck and benefits, expressed as despair, across the whole country.

Which is precisely why the morbidly rich oligarchs and their lickspittle politicians, and the billionaire-owned media, work so hard to keep us in these neat little categories and at each others’ throats.

The irony is that while progressives have properly identified who killed the middle class (the title of my new book), Republican voters believe something entirely different, a story America’s oligarchs have spent literally billions to instill in them.

One rightwing story is that the enemy of the middle class are the Democratic politicians who Republicans are now calling communists: this very week, as I wrote yesterday, Trump is out branding Democrats as dangerous “communists” while democratic-socialist candidates keep winning primaries on Medicare for All, free college, and good union jobs.

And in a coarser corner of the rightwing world where racism is as much an animator (or more) than economic pain, the enemy Republicans are pushing are brown- or Black-skinned immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country, eating your dogs and cats, and coming for your daughter and your job.

Both are aimed at the same exhausted, squeezed, frightened American who’s living in a rightwing bubble, trapped by Fox “News” as his information source or constantly spoon-fed rightwing outrage via the secret algorithms driving billionaire-owned social media.

And as long as those Americans are glaring sideways at a “democratic socialist” or an immigrant, they aren’t looking at the American oligarchs who actually ran off with all their money.

Because somebody did run off with it. The RAND Corporation added up the damage and found that roughly 50 trillion dollars was quietly shifted from the bottom 90 percent of us to the top 1 percent between 1975 and 2018. Since then it’s up to around $80 trillion.

If wages had simply kept pace with what American workers produce, the typical worker today would be pulling in well over a hundred thousand dollars a year instead of around fifty, and the economic force driving racism and bigotry would be much weaker.

That money didn’t evaporate. It didn’t get taken by a busboy or a barista or a bricklayer. It was hauled off, in broad daylight, by the architects of forty-five years of Reaganism and neoliberalism, the ones who broke the unions, shipped the factories overseas, and turned healthcare and college loans into profit centers.

That’s who took my father’s single paycheck: not the woman picking our lettuce. Not the kid who just wants to see a doctor or get an education without going bankrupt.

The entire con depends on voters on the right never turning around and realizing they’re mourning the same identical loss that progressive Democrats are trying so hard to repair.

The instant working people stop asking “who’s the enemy who looks, prays, or loves differently than I do” and start asking “who took my dad’s paycheck,” the whole game is over.

That’s the one conversation the billionaires and their bought-off lickspittle politicians are truly terrified of.

So have it. Have it at the summer picnic with your MAGA brother-in-law and your progressive niece sitting side by side, and watch what happens when you skip the slogans and ask them both what kind of country they actually want to live in.

You’ll find (outside of the unrepentant and largely unreachable racists) that they want the very same America back, the one where an honest week’s work bought a decent life.

Then stop grieving it and start organizing to take it back, because it was never lost. As I lay out in Who Killed The American Dream?, it was stolen, and stolen things can be recovered.

President Donald Trump may think he’s found a Trojan horse to seize the midterms, but security expert Miles Taylor says that horse isn’t riding off anytime soon.

Trump fired all three remaining members of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on Thursday, abruptly disabling the only federal agency devoted to election administration at a moment when the president is working to warp federal voting rules. And Taylor said a captured EAC could conceivably begin Trump’s dirty work under the direction of anti-democratic loyalists the White House plans to parachute into the commission.

“What’s more, they could rewrite state-specific instructions on the voter forms to create registration traps and onerous requirements, confusing instructions, translation issues, and on and on,” Taylor reasoned. “Surely, the sycophants in Trump’s orbit are thinking of other evil ways to manipulate the EAC’s powers to steer the elections in Trump’s favor.”

“[But] here’s where I get to tell you why their plan is doomed,” Taylor added. “And it isn’t because I’m a cock-eyed optimist. It’s because a lot of very good lawyers out there are prepared to tear Trump’s plan to shreds.”

Taylor, who worked in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security in his first administration before becoming a whistleblower to the administration abuse, said Trump must get the replacements confirmed by the Senate or install legally dubious “acting” appointments. And lawsuits are waiting for him as soon as he tries to circumvent requirements.

Furthermore, whatever changes Trump makes to the EAC doesn’t mean they can just start tampering with voter registration forms because the forms are protected by law. When former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach attempted to force citizenship documents onto the form a decade ago, Taylor said the Tenth Circuit shut him down, and the Supreme Court backed that decision up.

“Third, agencies can’t just flip on a dime,” said Taylor. “Under the Administrative Procedure Act, an abrupt reversal of decades of an agency’s position — especially with no clear evidence of the ‘voter fraud’ it purports to solve — is the textbook definition of ‘arbitrary and capricious. Courts have thrown out far less blatant reversals.”

Courts have already rejected Trump’s other bids to unilaterally implement new restrictions. A federal judge in Washington permanently blocked Trump’s 2025 executive order and its proof-of-citizenship mandate. And just two weeks ago, another federal court destroyed it in a suit brought by nineteen states. The judiciary, said Taylor, isn’t “rolling over to let Trump hijack voting in America.”

“Also, for what it’s worth, the plaintiffs are ready,” said Taylor. “I suspect lawsuits are being drafted as I write this. … groups … are probably preparing legal briefs this very morning. I know state attorneys general are gearing up, too. When I say that we’re better prepared for these types of anti-democratic shenanigans than we were the last time, this is what I mean.”

“Trump may think he found a Trojan horse. What he actually found is a trap of his own making. Every action he tries to take to abuse the EAC will be met with resistance and tie him up in litigation as the clock ticks to November,” Taylor added.

“Several days later and I can’t help it. It’s too funny,” said comedian John Fugelsang of white supremacist militia group, the "Patriot Front," marching through the streets of Capitol Hill on the 250th birthday of the United States. Videos showed that a few hundred men showed up with face coverings, waving Confederate flags along with American flags, including some that were inverted.

But Fugelsang couldn’t get over other aspects of their appearance, calling them the “Dockers Reich; aka March of the Masked Mediocrities; aka The League of Extraordinary Virgins.”

“Did you catch it? Day of the Living Incels?” asked Fugelsang on his substack. “A quarter-millennium after the US declared that all men are created equal, a few hundred masked white nationalists decided the best way to celebrate was to march through Washington, D.C., hiding their faces and waving Confederate flags. And what could be more MAGA than celebrating America’s birthday with participation trophies from the losing side of the Civil War, while dressing like you’re all headed to the same outlet mall. All of them in Khakis, all of them wearing masks.”

“These guys always say, ‘We’re defending Western civilization.’ Yeah, Skip? Then why do y’all always look like you’re trying to avoid being recognized by your manager at Best Buy?” Fugelsang demanded. “It’s hard to square ‘take our country back’ with ‘please don’t tag me in the photos.’”

The comedian acknowledged that he’s supposed to be shaking his head in anguish about the normalization of racism and the “big victory goose-step” after all the cultural erasure and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act. But the scenery was just too funny. “Instead, beautifully, it was more of a White Supremacy Cowardice flash mob; sponsored by Dockers and parental disappointment,” said the host of progressive talk show "Tell Me Everything.”

“Let’s briefly discuss the Klan Bake wardrobe choices: All khakis, all blue shirts. It’s the world’s most aggressively beige fascist movement,” he said. “Every single one of these tough guy patriots looked like they were headed to an assistant manager orientation at Kohl’s. I mean, I know they’re the Fourth Reich and all, but I kept expecting them to ask pedestrians if they’d ever considered opening a store credit card.”

"The John Fugelsang Podcast" host also blasted the absurdity of a group claiming to be “patriots” while carrying flags of the Confederacy, which literally tried to destroy America.

“The Confederacy only lasted four years, bros. Costco memberships last longer,” said Fugelsang. “You’re still the only team in history whose fans get more enthusiastic every century after losing.”

But that’s what you get from a group of folks dressed like they’re “robbing a Hobby Lobby” despite being proud of their beliefs.

“If your movement is destined to save America, it’s curious that nobody in it wants their boss to know they attended,” Fugelsang chided. “… Imagine believing you’re the superior race, while literally covering up your face more than Batman.”

Only Batman was worried about crooks hurting his loved ones,” he added. These guys are afraid of “an email” identifying them to their boss.

The movement calls itself “patriotic heritage enthusiasts,” but Fugelsang said they’re just “unmanly racist twits.”

“You’re Nazis; with better graphic designers and pleats in your chinos,” Fugelsang howled. “Patriot Front is a racist pyramid scheme, wrapped in Old Navy. But calling themselves ‘America’s Masked Chickens—— Ethnostate Appreciation Society’ apparently tested poorly with focus groups.”

Critics on social media had a meltdown over images of a contractor leaving Sen. Mitch McConnell’s house with carpet and tile samples.

“Our intrepid TMZ DC producer Charlie Cotton paid a visit to the Senator's home Friday to see if he could get any answers on Mitch's health ... and he saw something interesting leaving the house,” reported TMZ.

Mitch has been hospitalized since June 14 after paramedics responded to a report of an unconscious person in his Washington, D.C. home. Footage obtained by CNN shows paramedics piling the stricken Kentucky senator.

TMZ reports paramedics appeared to be “showing absolutely no sense of urgency” — suggesting the senator was about as stable as dead can get.

“Marjorie Taylor Greene told us Mitch is a vegetable and his "Communist Chinese spy" wife is meeting with Chinese leaders instead of rushing home to be by his bedside,” TMZ added. “Meanwhile, Scott Jennings says the 84-year-old politician was lucid enough to have a conversation for ‘just shy of 20 minutes’ about current events.

But critics on X exploded at the images of carpet samples.

“Ah yeah … you know when your husband is in hospital, it’s the perfect time to book that contractor to come sell carpet samples,” said professor Adam Cochran on X. “This is all so weird.”

“He’s so dead,” quipped another critic.

“Hollywood will make a movie about this someday,” announced another X heckler. “Just watch.

Other online comedians quickly hopped on the suggestion of post-mortem floor stains.

“Blood is hard to get out of carpets,” said one X user.

“Does he have burgundy?” asked another.

TMZ reports even President Trump has "no idea" how Sen. Mitch McConnell is doing, at least as of a couple of days ago.

“Whatever Mitch's status is, seems new flooring are a top priority,” TMZ reports.

President Donald Trump is a consummate liar, says Intelligencer writer Ed Kilgore, so you can tell how much something bothers him by the magnitude of lies he unloads to bury it.

Such is the case with the sheer magnitude of whoppers he’s been dumping on the internet to counter his hideous poll numbers.

“… [E]lection denialism isn’t an isolated vice in MAGA-land,” said Kilgore. “Trump has championed poll denialism, too. … Occasionally Trump is able to cherry-pick outlier polls that show wide public approbation of his performance as president. Here he is at a February 2025 CPAC conference bragging about his numbers”

“Our approval rating is now the highest ever across all demographics. Rasmussen just came out at 56 percent; InsiderAdvantage, 56; RMG Research, 57 percent. And we have many polls in the mid-60s. One at 71 percent—we like that, 71,” Trump told the crowd with a ghastly talent for denying historic unpopularity.

But the exaggeration was far more egregious in November 2025, when Trump made this claim at Truth Social:

“I HAVE JUST GOTTEN THE HIGHEST POLL NUMBERS OF MY “POLITICAL CAREER.” While my great work on the Economy has not yet been fully appreciated, it will be! Things are really Rockin’. Stopping WARS and Foreign Relations seems to be a strong suit. Also great, The Border and Stopping Crime. I predict that the Economy, with the already HIGHEST STOCK MARKET, EVER, and prices coming sharply down from the Biden disaster, will soon be at the top of the list. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump howled.

Of course, the president didn’t bother to offer any documentation, notes Kilgore, because that would’ve been problematic. His job-approval numbers were actually plunging at that point, wth Silver Bulletin reporting his disapproval at 55 percent. But the worse it gets the bigger lies keep coming.

“Highest Poll Numbers Ever. Even Higher than Election Day, November 5th. This despite the fact that, IRAN WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” Trump posted on June 29. But he was actually at 39.5 percent per Silver Bulletin.

However, Trump’s colossal lies are bigger than just a failing president desperately self-soothing his pain, said Kilgore. This is an act of paving the way for new election denialism.

“… [R]elentlessly misstating his popularity conditions his followers to believe any adverse election results must be fake,” said Kilgore. “How could a man this popular lose? How could his party lose? The Democrats — or ‘Dumocrats,’ as he’s taken to calling them — must be cheating again!”

But this is what you can expect from a guy who’s already engaged in heavy election denialism, said Kilgore.

“Trump [even] got into the habit of election denialism on behalf of other losing Republican candidates. By 2024, his obsessive focus on the evils of immigration led him to embrace the basics of the Great Replacement Theory, which claims Democrats deliberately herd millions of illegal immigrants to the polls to steal elections at every level. And so now Trump sees fraud behind every Republican defeat in states like California, and shows every indication that he likely won’t accept a Democratic victory in the 2026 midterms. The effect on rank-and-file Republicans’ faith in free and fair elections is predictably dire.”

Former governor and ex-Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) has given up on his brief dream of becoming president, acknowledging that his brain is shrinking.

The right-leaning Deseret News podcast spoke with Romney in an extensive interview that ended with a question about his 2028 intentions.

The site, owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which Romney is a member, spoke with the Donald Trump foe, as the Republican Party enters a kind of identity crisis about life after the MAGA founder.

McKay Coppins asked Romney about a possible campaign as a joke, promising, "just kidding," but it was something Romney wanted to talk about. The often reserved ex-politician issued quite the attack on Trump, without even mentioning his name.

"I'm glad you've raised that," Romney said with a wry smile. "I wanted to announce that I am running one more time."

After they both laughed, Romney explained, "The truth is the truth is, you know, I remember talking to my dad about this. And, you know, in his 80s, he said, 'Oh, I would love to do it again.' And the reality is, sure, I would love to do it again. And this time I might get it right, you know, third time's a charm."

Coppins cracked that "80 isn't what it used to be."

But Romney cited Bill Bryson's book The Body: "He points out that the human brain shrinks by 20 percent by the time you're 80 years of age. Twenty percent smaller, just the size of the brain itself. So I basically think people who are 80 and above really should not be running the world or running the country."

Coppins agreed it was "probably some good wisdom."

Trump, who just turned 80 years old, became the oldest person elected to the presidency in 2024. In the first year of his second term, his gaffes have prompted questions about his mental acuity, forgetfulness and exhaustion.

Despite the tumultuous time in politics and for the Republican Party, Romney confessed he's a pessimist by nature, but his optimism about the U.S. on its 250th birthday comes from his faith in the American people.

Trump's name wasn't mentioned, but he loomed as Romney addressed specific policies he has concerns about, like China, artificial intelligence, and the proliferation of wealth for those who now have the power to buy an election.

"The decay of many of our institutions — that's a challenge," Romney added. "I'm I'm concerned about the amount of money a few people are getting. I mean, the idea that Elon Musk is going to be a trillionaire. What does that mean? We're talking about a thousand billions. And that means, you know, he could drop a couple of billion in a political campaign to support someone who would give him even more power. Uh and he's not just the only one. I shouldn't just pick on him, but there are others are going to [have] hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth [who] they will influence our political system."

Romney also gave a list of some of his favorite recipes he has started cooking in his retirement, including turkey meatballs and ham and beans, a historic soup available in the Senate for the past 100 years.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

When Donald Trump launched his 2016 campaign, many of his critics predicted that it would go the way of his short-lived 2000 presidential run with the Reform Party — which he suspended in February of that year. But Trump not only won the 2016 GOP presidential nomination and defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the general election — he also became the dominant figure in the Republican Party, continuing to excite his hardcore MAGA base. According to liberal economist Robert Reich, however, that base isn't the true source of his power.

In a Friday opinion column for The Guardian, Reich argues that Trump's power comes not from millions of MAGA voters, but from his audacious nature.

"It's important to understand the source of Trump's power," writes Reich, who served as labor secretary in the Clinton administration. "His power doesn't come from his being president of the most powerful nation in the world[.] Nor does his power come from his MAGA base, which is now having second thoughts about supporting someone who got the U.S. involved in another Middle Eastern war, caused prices to rise, and whose administration still refuses to release the complete Epstein files. Nor does his power flow from any kind of strategic brilliance or cunning."

Reich continues, "Trump's power comes from his willingness to violate all the norms, rules and laws about how U.S. presidents are supposed to act — to do anything that helps him accumulate more wealth, power and glory, and wreak vengeance on anyone who has tried to get in the way."

That source of power, Reich says, was evident during the recent 2026 NATO Summit in Ankara, Turkey.

"The NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) presidents and prime ministers treated Trump with extraordinary deference because they're afraid of what he might do if he doesn't get what he wants," Reich explains. "Whether it's NATO, Iran, the World Cup, the 2020 election, making billions off his presidency — or anything else — he's unconstrained by norms, rules, treaties and laws…. Trump isn't unethical. He's non-ethical. He isn't immoral. He's amoral."

According to the Wall Street Journal, Israel turned over intelligence saying that there was a credible threat to President Donald Trump as he left the NATO summit in Turkey this week. And. according to an exclusive report from the New York Post, Trump had a guide he wanted the military to follow in the event they succeeded.

“I’ve been on their list for a long time. That’s what we’re dealing with,” Trump said. "... The only thing is, I’ve left instructions — if anything happens, to just literally bomb them at levels that they’ve never seen before.”

Despite reports of threats coming from Israeli intelligence, Trump denied it. Instead, he implied it was more of the same threats recently renewed as the war began. He told the Post that there was "no fresh plan" to kill him; rather, Trump explained, they've been after him for years, even as an ex-president.

“No, no. Israel came up with nothing. No, no,” he said. “I’ve been number one [on Iran’s kill list] for a long time, and it’s the way life is, you know.”

“I hope you’ll miss me,” he added.

The report said that calls against Trump have been "supercharged" as of late. There was a days-long funeral this week for Iran's late supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

Speaker Mohammad Rasouli said over Khamenei's body: “Why shouldn't we kill the one who killed my Imam and my Leader?”

“It is a disgrace for us if we do not kill your killer," Rasouli said.

Posters were seen all along the sidelines of the ceremony calling for an attack on the U.S. president, along with often-used phrases like "death to America" or “death to Israel."

Trump made it clear to his military leaders that if there was ever even an attempt to kill him, they were to “wipe [Iran] off the face of this Earth."

Trump has previously threatened on Truth Social, "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."

If Trump were killed, however, he would no longer be commander-in-chief; that job would fall to Vice President JD Vance. So, it's unclear whether those orders could be legally carried out without a new president's sign-off.

Politico reported on Friday that President Donald Trump is bragging that he won a battle with Spain over his military expenditure demands, but Spanish officials are very confused about how he got that idea in his head.

Trump was at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey this week, where he criticized Spain for refusing to agree to a 5 percent of GDP investment target for each member state over the next 10 years.

“Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore, by the way,” Trump said in his public meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.

“Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. They don’t participate. They don’t pay,” the president continued. “I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please, including visits."

"Watch them come running back. Oh they’ll come running back,” Trump added.

Trump also accused Madrid of treating Rutte “terribly,” telling the NATO chief he “shouldn’t carry” Spain.

“I mean, you sorta automatically carry them because you’re protecting an area,” the president continued in his rant. “So they probably figured ‘they have to protect us, right?’”

On Thursday, a U.S. official confirmed to Politico that the Treasury and Commerce Departments were crafting “a menu of Spanish products that may be embargoed in the coming days."

In Madrid, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s office told Reuters it just another Tuesday with Trump, describing it as "business as usual." They said that there was no intention of changing the "excellent" trade relations with the U.S.

Trump has been annoyed with Spain after the country refused to allow the U.S. to use the joint base as part of his war against Iran.

Upon his flight home, Trump completely reversed course. Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, he said, "I did have issues with Spain, and I still do, but Spain came back all the way today. Spain was very generous today, you know, I told them I was going to stop trading. They honored a request for lots of payment."

According to Politico, "Trump's statement generated considerable confusion in Madrid."

Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares told the national RTVE broadcast he didn't know what Trump was talking about.

When asked about the shift, a translation of Albares' remarks read: "Only he can answer that." He went on to add, "What matters is what Spain does as a NATO ally: We are a solid, reliable ally, absolutely indispensable for Euro-Atlantic security ... in all theaters," such as the Arctic, the Baltic and "leading the charge in Iraq."

"I wish everyone could say the same with their head held high," the minister said, according to the translation. He said that Spain has reached a level of spending "that other allies have not yet achieved."

"Spain is already at 2 percent of spending, and we have provided all our capabilities," he added.

On Friday, Spanish officials said that they're simply going to assume Trump was talking about the country reaching the 2 percent target. It has reached triple what the spending was in 2018. Spain is also the country with the "largest number of troops deployed on the alliance's eastern flank," clarified Politico. They have been one of the few NATO members leading missions, including one in Slovakia.

With the 2026 midterm elections less than four months away, Democrats got some good news when the Cook Political Report, on Friday morning, moved its analysis in four gubernatorial races in favor of Democratic candidates. Meanwhile, in the battle for control of Congress, the Graham Platner scandal has Democratic strategists worried about their chances of flipping the U.S. Senate — although Democrats are still feeling optimistic about the U.S. House of Representatives. But the Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial board, in a scathing Friday editorial, argues that President Donald Trump will try every dirty trick he can think of to keep Republicans in control of Congress.

"Let's begin with the obvious: Donald Trump is out to rig the midterm elections," the Inquirer's editorial board warns. "We know this because the president commits many of his illegal acts in broad daylight. For the past year, Trump has revved up his election-tampering efforts by throwing everything at the proverbial wall. He called for nationalizing elections, pushed to redraw election maps, slashed funding for election security, moved to restrict voting, targeted election workers, rewarded election deniers, and continued to repeat baseless claims that the 2020 presidential election was fixed. Trump even mused about canceling the November midterms."

The editorial lays out a variety of ways in which Trump is trying to increase Republicans' advantage in the midterms.

"If the Great Experiment in self-government that the Founders began 250 years ago is to continue, we need free and fair elections," the Inquirer's editorial board writes. "But Trump is working feverishly to tilt the playing field to ensure Republicans win. Last summer, he pushed GOP lawmakers in Texas to take the rare step of redrawing congressional maps in the middle of the decade to add more Republican seats. Lawmakers in other red states, including Florida, Ohio, and Missouri, followed Trump's blatant call for gerrymandering. Some blue states, like California, moved to do the same to offset the Republican scheme, sparking an undemocratic arms race."

The Inquirer editorial writers warn that Trump will only intensify his "all-out attack on the election system" as November draws closer.

"This week, Trump's Justice Department threatened criminal charges against Pennsylvania's top election officials if they let noncitizens vote," the Inquirer board explains. "Other states received a similar warning, even though the issue is exceedingly rare and already illegal. But Trump's baseless rhetoric helps to sow distrust in elections — something he has done throughout his tumultuous decade in politics. Trump has demonstrated he will cross any line…. So, how much further will Trump go to get his desired election results? With Trump, there is no bottom."

While speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the NATO summit earlier this week, President Donald Trump misspoke a number of times, referring to Iran as “the Islamic Republic of Japan” and Zelensky as “Putin.” According to psychologist and body language expert Dr. John Paul Garrison, not only do these “mental glitches” signal a serious health condition, but the reactions of Trump’s onlooking officials reveal much about their thoughts on the president.

According to Garrison — who provides his analysis while watching a play-by-play of the video of the president’s appearance — after Trump made his “Islamic Republic of Japan” slip, “there was absolutely and utterly no awareness that he had said the wrong country's name…You can even see him emphasizing this fact. He does that when he feels very strongly about something. You can see he's raising his eyebrows right here — he wants everybody to hear what he's saying. And there's no attempt to correct this. He has no idea based on everything I'm seeing that he just said the wrong country's name.”

Garrison then looked at the moment from another video’s angle, which showed the reactions of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

“Bessent,” notes Garrison, “you see him slowly look at President Trump because, I think, he's waiting for him to acknowledge and correct himself. But as we know, President Trump never does correct himself. But other people are catching that and they're looking at him waiting to know how to react because if he's going to laugh and correct himself, people want to laugh along with him. That doesn't happen here.”

Next, Trump referred to Zelensky as “Putin,” then continued speaking as if it were intentional. According to Garrison, “There is no acknowledgement that he said the wrong name. At this point, he has no idea that he did not say Zelensky’s name correctly.” It wasn’t until others in the room started laughing that he realized he’d misspoken.

Says Garrison, “I've watched President Trump speak for many, many years. What he's doing now seems a lot more like something we call ‘confabulation.’ Confabulation is something we see in patients with neurological problems. Dementia is an example of people who confabulate. Confabulation is basically distorting or fabricating information and believing what you're saying is true. So, for example, if you ask somebody with dementia what they had for lunch, they might tell you exactly what it was and go into great detail and they're totally wrong, but they actually think that's what it was. Based on his behavior, he seems to actually believe what he's saying right now. It's not just him trying to avoid embarrassment. He seems confused.”

And Rubio’s reaction to this is telling, says Garrison, explaining, “Rubio does not have strong reactions. He's very subtle, but he certainly noticed it.” Garrison notes that Rubio turns his head slightly, waiting for Trump to smile and admit the mistake, but the admission never comes, and Rubio turns away to mask his response. “He knows what absolute nonsense that just was. And there's really no good way to react to that. So, at this point, Marco Rubio, from what I can tell, just doesn't want to look at this anymore. So, he looks away.”

At the same time, Bessent “realizes that President Trump is doubling down and saying he meant to say Putin ... the smile leaves his face that second because he knows this is no longer a lighthearted moment where Trump is going to correct himself and they can laugh about it. Trump is trying to be serious here. He is now saying that he meant to say Putin in the first place, and that should be concerning to everybody listening to this.”

Finally, Garrison notes Trump’s own distress, pointing out how the president clicks his thumbnails and clenches his fingers: “I think there's real confusion here. He is fidgeting in a way that shows an intense amount of discomfort ... a significant amount of stress.”

“I think most people watching this are going to think that he was just lying and didn't want to look ridiculous,” concludes Garrison. “But I've seen him get through many, many situations like this, and I've never seen him do it like that. That was highly unusual for him. He appeared confused.”