In Ankara, Türkiye, for a NATO summit, President Donald J. Trump told reporters that Iranian leaders are “scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people, and they’re, they’re vicious, violent people,” Trump said in his comments earlier Wednesday. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them. They’re liars.… There’s something wrong with them. They’re cuckoo. As far as I’m concerned, [negotiations are] over.”

The U.S. then launched another round of strikes on Iran to “further degrade” its “ability to threaten freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.”

Oil prices spiked over the course of the day, and Trump appeared to walk back his earlier words, saying: “I think anything that happens is going to be over very quickly, and we’ll only make it safer, including for oil. Oil is going to be very free, very easy, and it’s going to happen very fast. We have the Hormuz Strait; the boats have pulled out. I mean there’s a gusher of oil right now, we have a lot of oil.”

As Tom Nichols noted in The Atlantic, the U.S. emphatically does not have the Strait of Hormuz. “Iran, Not Trump, Is in Control of This War,” the title of Nichols’s article reads. It goes on to say that the Iranians are calling the shots in the war and “are routinely humiliating the American president.” The so-called ceasefire was likely intended to calm oil markets, Nichols says; neither side ever stopped shooting.

Like many other observers, Nichols noted that Trump was “incoherent” in Ankara. He referred to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Japan” and referred to Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky as “President Putin.” In an off-with-their-heads! moment, he also announced he had ordered Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to cut off all trade with Spain.

According to Humeyra Pamuk and David Latona of Reuters, Trump repeatedly complained about Spain, whose leftist prime minister Pedro Sánchez refused to let the U.S. use its bases or airspace to attack Iran even though Spain has been dramatically increasing its NATO spending. Trump then told Bessent: “I don’t want to do any more trade with them, alright? Don’t even talk to them. They’re hopeless. They’re bad people.... They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less. I want no business with them.”

As economist Paul Krugman notes in his newsletter, cutting off trade with Spain is simply not going to happen. First of all, Trump does not have the authority to do any such thing. Second, the U.S. actually does a lot of business with Spain, and American businesses would not accept any such cuts. But even more, it is impossible because Spain is part of the European Union. As Krugman notes, this declaration is rather like Europe declaring it is going to cut off all trade with Florida.

Trump’s declaration is a “non-event,” Krugman notes. It is “not something that is real.”

What we should take from it, he says, is that the statement was “completely crazy.” “In any kind of normally functioning political system,” he said, “in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.”

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker agrees. He reposted Trump’s reference to the Islamic Republic of Japan with the comment: “Donald Trump is suffering from dementia. Someone needs to step in before it’s too late.”

Meanwhile, Jack Detsch and Paul McLeary of Politico reported that European officials at the NATO summit reacted to Trump’s announcement of new attacks on Iran just a day after he had praised Iranian leaders with the recognition that they can no longer rely on the United States.

A European official told the Politico reporters: “After seeing what’s happening in Iran and Ukraine, we first of all, have to build our own military might, and then everybody will respect us: Americans, Russians, Iranians or Chinese. The more muscles you have, the less political anger you show.”

A German official was more succinct: “Europeans don’t take Trump seriously any longer.”

Meanwhile, Steven Rattner of MS NOW noted today that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s sons have raised about $13 billion in investment capital from foreign governments, mostly in the Middle East, even as Kushner is working for Trump as special envoy to the region.

—

Notes:

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/08/g-s1-132460/us-iran-attacks

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-strikes-us-military-second-night/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/07/08/trump-declares-ceasefire-with-iran-has-ended/

https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-says-he-ordered-cutting-off-all-trade-with-spain-2026-07-08/

https://newrepublic.com/post/212832/trump-confuses-iran-japan-zelenskiy-putin

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/iran-controls-war-trump/687848/

Paul Krugman

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https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/08/europe-us-nato-iran-00990570

https://abcnews.com/International/trump-calls-us-cut-offtrade-spain-nato-funding/story?id=134578277

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Trump went on to claim his beef with NATO began over Greenland, which he wants “because Greenland doesn’t help Denmark…but it’s an important part for the United States. And it’s surrounded by China ships and Russian ships And that’s not going to happen. The ships is, it’s not going to happen. It was Greenland that, in my, and it continues to be, that should be controlled by the United States, not by Denmark. And when they wouldn’t go along with it and with all the money we spend to help them with Russia and we don’t have to spend any money, we could remove all of our soldiers out of Europe because as you probably noticed, Europe’s a very different place than it was 20 years ago. A lot different. Much different. It’s a much different and they better be careful with immigration and energy. If they’re not careful with those two things, you’re not going to have a Europe anymore. Okay. Thank you very much everybody.”

NATO is the most effective alliance in human history. It is also a defensive, not an offensive, alliance.

Representatives from the the United States and eleven other nations in North America and Europe came together to sign the original NATO declaration on April 4, 1949. The alliance guaranteed collective security because all of the member states agreed to defend each other against an attack by a third party. At the time, their main concern was resisting Soviet aggression, but as Trump noted, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Russian president Vladimir Putin, NATO resisted Russian aggression instead.

The alliance is effective because it calls for collective defense. Article 5 of the treaty requires every nation to come to the aid of any one of them if it is attacked militarily. That article has been invoked only once: in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, after which NATO-led troops went to Afghanistan.

On the day NATO went into effect, President Harry S. Truman said, “If there is anything inevitable in the future, it is the will of the people of the world for freedom and for peace.” In the years since 1949, his observation seems to have proven correct. NATO now has 32 member nations.

Crucially, NATO acts not only as a response to attack, but also as a deterrent, and its strength has always been backstopped by the military strength of the U.S., including its nuclear weapons. Trump has repeatedly attacked NATO and said he would take the U.S. out of it in a second term, alarming Congress enough that in 2023 it put into the National Defense Authorization Act a measure prohibiting any president from leaving NATO without the approval of two thirds of the Senate or a congressional law.

But as foreign policy specialist Anne Applebaum noted in The Atlantic in 2024, even though Trump might have trouble actually tossing out a long-standing treaty that has safeguarded national security for 75 years, the realization that the U.S. is abandoning its commitment to collective defense would make the treaty itself worthless.

In place of the powerful NATO alliance that has protected all nations’ sovereignty, Trump appears to want the sort of world called for by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, in which great powers carve up the globe into spheres of influence.

In January, Robert Kagan warned that Trump’s destruction of the order that has underpinned global security for the past 80 years was creating the most dangerous world since World War II. With the end of open access to global resources, markets, and strategic bases and without reliable friends or allies, the U.S. will need more military spending than ever.

“Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future,” Kagan warned. They are accustomed to the “basically peaceful, prosperous, and open world” and have come to think it is “the normal state of international affairs, likely to continue indefinitely. They can’t imagine it unraveling, much less what that unraveling will mean for them.”

Everything will be up for grabs, Kagan wrote, with myriad “flash points for potential conflict.” “If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive,” Kagan wrote, “wait until they start paying for what comes next.”

Kagan published his article just two weeks after Trump had sent troops to Venezuela to seize the nation’s president and his wife and take control of the country’s oil fields. Since then, as Simon Romero of the New York Times reported yesterday, the Trump administration has taken an estimated $8 billion in oil revenue out of the country, although it has refused to say how it is using the funds.

In the wake of the devastating earthquakes that hit Venezuela on June 24, Romero reports that the U.S. has so far pledged only $300 million in aid. U.S. officials destroyed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), through which it would have distributed aid in the past, so the assistance is being funneled through the Red Cross, the United Nations, and religious organizations. The top U.S. diplomat in Venezuela, John Barrett, told Romero the U.S. will continue to prioritize using Venezuela’s oil resources to rebuild the nation’s economy.

Less than six weeks after The Atlantic published Kagan’s article, Trump attacked Iran in strikes he appeared to think would mirror the strikes against Venezuela, enabling him to replace Iran’s leadership with men willing to work with the U.S. and perhaps enabling the U.S. to take a stake in Iran’s oil production.

Instead, Iran seized control of the Strait of Hormuz in the aftermath of the strikes, choking off about 27% of the world’s globally traded oil and about a third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer. Rather than a quick strike, Trump’s war on Iran is now stretching into its fifth month, and attempts to end it, even on terms worse than when it began, are faltering.

Tonight, at 5:15, as NATO leaders met in Türkiye, U.S. Central Command announced that U.S. forces had launched “a series of powerful strikes against Iran to impose heavy costs for targeting and attacking commercial shipping crewed by innocent civilians in an international waterway.” It said the strikes were a “response to Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels that were transiting the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s demonstrated aggression was unwarranted, dangerous, and a clear violation of the ceasefire.”

It later said it had hit more than 80 targets.

—

Notes:

https://apnews.com/live/trump-administration-nato-summit-updates-07-07-2026#0000019f-3ec0-d2a2-abbf-bfdbd4690000

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-2024-reelection-pull-out-of-nato-membership/676120/

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-occasion-the-signing-the-north-atlantic-treaty

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/death-toll-venezuela-quakes-rises-3535-thousands-remain-displaced-2026-07-06/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/world/americas/earthquake-venezuela-haiti-us-aid.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-preference-take-oil-iran-rcna265747

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-seizing-iran-oil-rcna262437

https://www.ifpri.org/blog/the-iran-wars-impacts-on-global-fertilizer-markets-and-food-production/

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/03/trump-national-security-greenland-spheres-of-interest/685673/

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Almost immediately, Sophia Cai of Politico reported that White House FIFA World Cup Task Force executive director Andrew Giuliani, the son of Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, told President Donald J. Trump about the suspension. As officials from the U.S. Soccer Federation prepared and submitted an appeal to FIFA, Giuliani and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick offered White House lawyers and dug into the professional history of the referee who had made the red card call. Then, on Thursday, Trump called FIFA president Gianni Infantino, with whom he has been friendly for eight years.

On Sunday, FIFA cleared Balogun to play on Monday. The last, and only, time a red card went unpunished before was in 1962.

The suspension of the suspension has created an international outcry although, as the Associated Press pointed out, this is only the latest step in a pattern in which Infantino appears to have been interfering with the independence of FIFA’s judicial and disciplinary bodies.

The Belgian soccer federation is challenging the ruling. “Regardless of the sporting outcome of the match,” it said, it was “deeply concerned by the way these events have unfolded and will continue, in the hours, days and months ahead, to pursue every available avenue to uphold the fundamental principles of ethics, sporting fairness and the interests of football as a whole.”

The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) has called the decision “incomprehensible and unjustifiable.” “When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined,” it said. “Football is the most loved sport in the world because it is a beautiful game and is trusted because it is played everywhere with the same laws.”

But a world in which playing fields are level is not the world Trump wants. He wants one in which people in power can ignore the rule of law for their own ends.

Today, at the White House, he told reporters: “So I saw the play. And I’m a person that loves sports and was a good athlete. And I understand sports really well. Really well. And that wasn’t a foul. That wasn’t even an infraction. That was two guys running full speed that happened to crash into each other…. No, these were two great athletes that got tangled up, and this referee, who— is a little bit suspect— if you check his, if you check his past.”

“[Balogun] didn’t do anything wrong, and he’s our best player or one of our best players, a very— vital player, and he gave him a red card. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t think it meant much. Then I started hearing that that means he can’t play in the next game, at least in the next game. I said, Boy, that’s a big— You know, if it happened to another player, it would have been unfair, but when they take your best player or just about, they have some great players, but, and they say, you can’t play. That’s very unfair. That’s, you know, it’s one thing to penalize somebody for the game. But how do you penalize them for a game that hasn’t been played yet? is very unfair. You can’t do that. So, yes, I asked for a review by FIFA.

“I spoke to a man who’s highly respected, and, by the way, whose level of respect has gone up tenfold, and he was good before this started. But, you know, he really pushed it in this country.” And then, Trump was back to his usual grievances. “I’m the one that got them to do it. It was not Biden. Biden was asleep. I got him to do it. In fact, it was very sad because I got him to do it. And if the progression was normal, I would have been retired. Now, the Democrats are saying, Man, we should have just let him have his way, he would have. We would have had him gone, but I said, you know, the saddest thing is, I got the Olympics, and I got the World Cup.”

The president of the United States pressuring the president of FIFA to change the rules for his favored player perfectly represents the way Trump thinks about the rule of law in the United States. And the rejection of a level playing field shows in the way Trump and the Republicans have skewed the U.S economy so only their team can win.

Almost exactly a year ago, on July 4, 2025, Trump signed into law what he called the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” It passed both the House and the Senate without a single Democratic vote, making it a signature piece of legislation for Trump and his party. As Shannon Pettypiece and Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News reported on July 1, there was a “seismic shift” at the heart of the new law: it extended about $4.5 trillion in tax cuts to corporations and wealthy Americans over ten years while cutting about $1.1 trillion from healthcare and food assistance programs that serve poor and working-class Americans. It also adds about $4.7 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years.

Public policy scholar Chris Howard noted that the law so dramatically rolls back the modern government constructed during and after the Depression and World War II, from 1933 to 1981, that it amounts to “Robin Hood in reverse.” “It deliberately targets some of the most vulnerable members of society,” he told Pettypiece and Hixenbaugh, “while providing huge windfalls to the richest individuals and to big business.”

After the economic free-for-all of the 1920s led to the Great Crash and the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats began the process of creating a modern state that established a level economic playing field. They created a government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, protected civil rights, and supported a rules-based international order. Then Republican president Dwight Eisenhower built on the foundation the Democrats built. Members of both parties supported such a system, recognizing that without a level economic playing field that made sure everyone had the ability to succeed, a few men would monopolize the nation’s wealth and power.

Their inspiration for creating a government that kept the economic playing field level came from those before them who had seen what happened when a few wealthy men controlled the government. In the early twentieth century, when corporations dominated the economy and their millionaire owners threw their weight into political contests, Republican president Theodore Roosevelt fulminated against that “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.”

He insisted that America must break up this class in order to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.” He called for government to regulate business, prohibit corporate funding of political campaigns,

and impose income and inheritance taxes. He demanded a “square deal” for the American people.

In late 1901, financier J.P. Morgan joined the nation’s main railroad interest into a giant new conglomerate designed to get around antitrust legislation. In February 1902, Roosevelt’s attorney general told reporters that the formation of the Northern Securities Company was illegal and that he would be suing it. Businessmen were aghast, not only because Roosevelt was going after a business combination but also because he had acted without consulting Wall Street. When J. P. Morgan complained that he had not been informed, Roosevelt told him that that was the whole point. “If we have done anything wrong,” said the astonished Morgan, “send your man [the attorney general] to my man [one of his lawyers] and they can fix it up.” The president declined.

“We don’t want to fix it up,” explained the attorney general. “We want to stop it.”

As the Boston Globe put it: “‘Justice for all alike—a square deal for every man, great or small, rich or poor,’ is the Roosevelt ideal to be attained by the framing and the administration of the law. And he would tell you that that means Mr Morgan and Mr Rockefeller [sic] as well as the poor fellow who cannot pay his rent.”

And yet in 2026, Trump has taken to saying that those Americans calling for the government to maintain the rule of law to make sure the economic playing field is level, rather than working for corporations and the wealthy, are “communists.”

So he is looking to put a thumb on the scale of the midterm elections as he did in the FIFA match and the economy. Trump is demanding that Congress pass the so-called SAVE America Act, a massive voter suppression bill. Yesterday House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told the Fox News Channel that he will try to get Congress to pass the measure by using the budget reconciliation process. Since such a process cannot be filibustered, Republicans might be able to pass it despite Democratic opposition.

Trump has repeatedly insisted that if the Republicans pass the measure, they won’t lose another election for a hundred years.

“The game tonight’s going to be amazing,” Trump said today about tonight’s match. “We’re going to have a full team and Belgium is going to have a full team. And you know what? If they beat us, then they can be really proud. The other way, if they beat us, we’ll say it was— I say it was rigged just like the election was rigged in 2020.”

Tonight, Belgium defeated the USA 4–1 in the World Cup match played in Seattle.

Notes:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/soccer/worldcup/2026/07/06/trump-fifa-infantino-balogun-red-card-belgium/90819571007/

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/08/andrew-giuliani-world-cup-00391602

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/07/06/world-cup-2026/inside-the-white-house-push-on-balogun-00987540

https://www.foxsports.com/stories/soccer/before-balogun-meet-only-other-player-have-world-cup-red-card-rescinded

https://www.uefa.com/news-media/news/02a7-2109c8e9ef81-de5a993db109-1000--uefa-statement-on-the-balogun-case/

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/06/g-s1-132108/world-cup-balogun-uefa-fifa-belgum-trump

https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/soccer/live-blog/fifa-world-cup-2026-july-6-usa-live-updates-rcna353164

https://apnews.com/article/balogun-red-card-uefa-us-belgium-d32fc2e13728cef9317feeb7b72c279b

https://www.nbcnews.com/specials/trump-big-beautiful-bill-act-tax-medicaid-snap-one-year/

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/mike-johnson-house-pass-donald-trump-voter-supression-save-america-act/

Boston Globe, August 27, 1902, p. 6.

Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time Shown in His Own Letters, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), pp. 182–184.

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There was the war on Iran. On Thursday, after U.S. Central Command said regional leaders in the Middle East were committed to the “free flow of commerce” in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s military command said that any ships trying to cross the strait on unapproved routes would be met with a “forceful response.” The U.S. has been urging ships to use a route close to Oman, but Iran’s warning caused ships to turn around.

Iran was part of the story of the economy. The choking off of the roughly 20% of the world’s oil that flowed through the Strait of Hormuz until Trump launched an attack on Iran has caused inflation to spike in the U.S. On Wednesday, July 1, Trump’s new hand-picked chair of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, told the European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking that “prices are too high.” With inflation over 4%, Warsh also reiterated that the Fed would continue to hold its goal of no more than 2% inflation, suggesting that the interest rate cuts Trump wants so badly are not going to happen any time soon. Currently there is talk of raising interest rates later this year.

In addition to concerns about stringency in the oil markets, Joe Hernandez of NPR reported on Friday that the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz also affected transport of about one third of the world’s fertilizer transported by sea. Shortages hurt farmers around the world, including in the U.S., where farmers were hit with skyrocketing fertilizer prices during planting season. An April survey from the American Farm Bureau Federation reported that 70% of respondents said they couldn’t afford all the fertilizer they needed for the season.

Hernandez reports that higher fertilizer prices are just one of the reasons that consumers will see higher food prices this fall.

And then there were the stories about corruption. On Tuesday, new financial disclosures showed that Trump has made an eye-popping $1.4 billion in his family’s cryptocurrency ventures since he took office. On Thursday, Trump appeared to feel the need to defend those profits, telling CNBC: “There’s nothing illegal. There’s nothing wrong with it I could know.” Julia Manchester of The Hill noted that Trump went on to say that the nature of the presidency means that his children “have inside information” about almost any business decision they make. He said: “Almost anything they do, if they want to buy a truck, if they buy an energy efficient truck, they have inside information.”

There are specific legal prohibitions against using insider information for benefit in stock trades and financial transactions.

And Trump appears to have fleeced his own followers. On Saturday, Eric Lipton and David Yaffe-Bellany of the New York Times reported that as of the end of June, nearly a million people who bought Trump’s memecoin lost a total of $3.81 billion while Trump walked away with $636 million. Trump took transaction fees up front, so he made money no matter what happened with the coin. For his followers, though, his advice that “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for: WINNING!” and to “Join my very special Trump community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW!” cost them dearly as the coin slid from trading at $75.35 to trading at $1.76, a drop of 97%.

On Thursday, Democrats on the House Committee on Natural Resources released a report accusing Trump of cheating the American people at large by diverting donations that donors intended to make to the nonpartisan America250 program to his own Freedom 250 organization. After failing to take over America250 entirely, the report charges, Trump’s people created Freedom 250 within the National Park Foundation. By using a known and popular public charity as cover, Freedom 250 could attract donations while operating outside the transparency and accountability rules Congress required for America250.

The report suggests that Trump officials gave donors intending to donate to the bipartisan America250 routing and account numbers for Trump’s Freedom 250. They also took most of the money Congress appropriated for the America 250 project; in June a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told Michael Scherer of The Atlantic: “Spending taxpayer money on frivolous, poorly attended events and D.C. consultants who are trying to get rich off America’s 250th is the exact opposite of what was intended. This administration will not light taxpayer money on fire. Full stop.”

But Trump officials routed that money to favored contractors, including the firm that helped to organize Trump’s rally at the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, before attendees stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, told reporters: “I’m a lawyer, and I know better than to pronounce that a crime has been committed. But I do know the elements of fraud, and there is evidence of all those elements here.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s Freedom 250 focused on promoting his 250-foot-tall triumphal arch at his Great American State Fair on the National Mall. Recurring problems with Trump’s renovations to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool marred that celebration as the pool turned green with algae and then pieces of the pool’s new coating began to break loose. Administration officials accused vandals of causing the damage. They put fencing around the pool and had National Guard troops patrol it.

The Great American State Fair opened on June 25 after a number of musical acts backed out, saying they had been misled into thinking the event was backed by the bipartisan America 250. Once open, the fair was plagued with electrical issues, sparse exhibits, and heat. A model of the proposed triumphal arch looked cheap and quickly began to come apart. Visitors were few and far between, and CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported that aerial images of the empty mall so enraged Trump that White House officials deleted them from official and personal social media accounts.

And on June 25, in response to a lawsuit by journalist Katie Phang, U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered acting attorney general Todd Blanche to produce key documents from the Epstein files by July 2 or show cause why the Department of Justice is refusing. On July 2 it refused to produce the material, saying its redactions and omissions were within the scope of the requirements of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

On July 3, Fifty Plus One, which tracks Trump’s job approval rating, reported that 59.1% of Americans disapprove of his performance while only 37.5% approve.

And so, on Friday night, the eve of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Trump flew to South Dakota to deliver a speech at Mt. Rushmore in which he claimed he and his supporters are at war against an enemy here at home: communists.

Before his trip to the state, Trump posted a video showing his own likeness on a golden sculpture of Mt. Rushmore, alongside the images of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, with the voiceover saying: “I will be the greatest president for many, many years to come.” The video opens with the text “Art of the vision” spelled out over an American flag, an encapsulation—although perhaps an unintentional one—of how Trump has maintained political power by selling a false image to his followers.

Trump began his speech with a series of feel-good platitudes: “These are very, very special times. And this is a very special place. You live in a very special place. Congratulations, everybody…. We are a nation of dreamers and believers, warriors and explorers, doers and fighters…. There has never been anything like us anywhere on earth.” And then he tied together MAGA’s white nationalism with the claim that Trump’s political opponents want to destroy the economy.

Trump clearly thinks there is political gain in convincing his followers that his political opponents are communists, although this is a lie made up out of whole cloth after the victory of Democratic Socialists in Democratic primaries and the popularity of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. Communists call for the end of private ownership of the means of production, giving the state control of private enterprises. In today’s America, it is actually Trump, himself, who is taking government stakes in private enterprises.

Democratic Socialists are not communists or socialists, who want to see the end of private property. Democratic Socialists call for a robust system of private enterprise, alongside government control of the aspects of society required for people to participate in the economy on a level playing field. While Democratic Socialists embrace a wide range of policies, they generally don’t think schools, or medical care, or roads, should be profit-making industries.

In that, they echo Americans from the 1860s, when the Republicans established public colleges, or the 1900s, when Theodore Roosevelt called for public health insurance. Indeed, what today’s Democratic Socialists call for is much more limited than what the Republicans under President Dwight D. Eisenhower wanted in 1956, when the top income tax bracket in the United States was 91%.

Nonetheless, on Friday Trump tried to convince Americans that “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.” “These are not mere political disagreements like differences over taxes or regulations,” he said. “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.”

He went on to say: “They don’t want good. They don’t love God and they don’t want God. They don’t love religion and they don’t want religion and they won’t have it.… They have no respect for law, justice, principle, tradition, or your God-given rights. It’s an ideology of mass theft, mass control, mass lies, and mass murder…. You can be a communist or you can be a patriot. You cannot be both.”

His false vision of the U.S. is aimed at the midterm elections. “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.” He went on to demand that the Senate end the filibuster and Congress pass the voter-suppression SAVE America Act. If they do, he said, “we will not lose an election for a hundred years.”

On July 4, hundreds of masked white supremacists in khakis and blue shirts, carrying Confederate flags and flags with the logo of the neofascist white supremacist group Patriot Front, marched in Washington, D.C., chanting “Reclaim America.” The White House did not respond to a query from Gloria Oladipo of The Guardian about whether Trump condemns the march.

Trump continued his attacks on “communists” in a late-night speech on the National Mall after thunderstorms temporarily shut down his planned rally. “[A]ll these talks from the communists, they haven’t got a chance,” he told the drenched audience members, “not even a chance. We don’t want communists in our country.”

Trump’s drop into an anticommunism that exaggerates even the excesses of the McCarthy era seems to indicate panic rather than confidence. Today, July 5, he began posting on social media at 1:21 AM and over the course of the day posted more than 100 times, attacking Democrats and boasting extravagantly of what he says are his own successes while demanding Congress pass the SAVE Act or lose the presidency forever.

Trump’s people appear to be trying to push Trump’s vision, but it doesn’t seem to be sticking.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows today, insisting that the problems with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool were the work of vandals who have gashed its surface in multiple cuts that equal the 350 feet Trump claims and that there is video evidence, although the administration, which is famous for spinning everything to its own advantage, is choosing not to show it.

When CNN’s Dana Bash asked whether they actually had photographs of people cutting a gash in the liner, Burgum danced away from the question after commenting, “I’m not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question whether or not…”

And so the 251st year of American democracy begins with reality reasserting itself.

—

Notes:

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/7/3/iran-warns-ships-against-using-unapproved-routes-in-strait-of-hormuz

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/05/iran-control-strait-of-hormuz-ali-khamenei-funeral

https://www.wsj.com/economy/central-banking/interest-rates-kevin-warsh-de137876

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/kevin-warsh-ecb-forum-live-updates.html

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/03/nx-s1-5877344/fertilizer-shortage-food-prices

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5952294-trump-crypto-profits/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/04/us/politics/trump-coin-crypto-investors-loss.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/02/donors-were-misled-by-trump-backed-freedom-250-house-democrats-allege/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/2cfa8a43-d56d-4133-92b0-6a14ed113db4.pdf?itid=lk_inline_manual_2

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/06/trump-250-great-american-state-fair/687456/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/11/politics/several-states-not-participating-trump-state-fair

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-arch-state-fair-substance-b3007515.html

https://fiftyplusone.news/polls/approval/president

https://taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-posts-gold-replica-of-himself-on-mount-rushmore-12157408

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/masked-men-with-confederate-flags-seen-chanting-marching-riding-metro-in-dc/4125936/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/04/neo-fascist-patriot-front-washington-dc

https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/agency-information/history/downloads/presidentcmsmilestones.pdf

https://www.the-independent.com/bulletin/news/trump-great-american-state-fair-july-4-crowds-b3007836.html

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5941665-doj-epstein-files-lawsuit/

https://abcnews.com/Politics/doj-declines-turn-additional-epstein-files-redactions/story?id=134430675

https://www.cfr.org/articles/washingtons-growing-portfolio-tracking-u-s-government-investments

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-unravels-with-100-plus-posting-spree-after-holiday-humiliation/

Trumpstruth:

statuses/39773

X:

Acyn/status/2072501274843713700?s=20

YouTube:

watch?v=aCKPegFs1CE

watch?v=PJHHNwn1L0o

Bluesky:

atrupar.com/post/3mpvq5so5qu2o

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America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.

What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to reshape America into a nation in which African Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Irish were locked into a lower status than white Americans. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.”

“Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal to include Black men, men of color, and eventually women.

But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against our founding principle as a few people seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.

The men who endorsed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle.

Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Words to live by in 2026.

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Also known as the “Lee Resolution,” after Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee, who had proposed it, the resolution was the final break between the king and the thirteen colonies on the North American continent that would later become the United States of America.

The path to independence had been neither obvious nor easy.

In 1763, at the end of what was known in the colonies as the French and Indian War, there was little indication that the colonies were about to start their own nation. The war had brought an economic boom to the colonies, and with the French giving up control of land to the west, Euro-American colonists were giddy at the prospect of moving across the Appalachian Mountains. Impressed that the king had been willing to expend such effort to protect the colonies, they were proud of their identity as members of the British empire.

That enthusiasm soon waned.

To guard against another expensive war between colonists and Indigenous Americans, the king’s ministers and Parliament prohibited colonists from crossing the Appalachians. Then, to replenish the treasury after the last war, they passed a number of revenue laws. In 1765 they enacted the Stamp Act, which placed a tax on printed material in the colonies, everything from legal documents and newspapers to playing cards.

The Stamp Act shocked colonists, who saw in it a central political struggle that had been going on in England for more than a century: could the king be checked by the people? Colonists were not directly represented in Parliament and believed they were losing their fundamental liberty as Englishmen to have a say in their government. They responded to the Stamp Act with widespread protests.

In 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act but linked that repeal to the Declaratory Act, which claimed for Parliament “full power and authority to make laws and statutes…to bind the colonies and people of America…in all cases whatsoever.” This act echoed the 1719 Irish Declaratory Act, which asserted that Ireland was subordinate to the British king and Parliament. It also imposed new taxes.

As soon as news of the Declaratory Act and the new taxes reached Boston in 1767, the

Massachusetts legislature circulated a letter to the other colonies standing firm on the right to equality in the British empire. Local groups boycotted taxed goods and broke into warehouses whose owners they thought were breaking the boycott. In 1768, British officials sent troops to Boston to restore order.

Events began to move faster and faster. In March 1770, British soldiers in Boston shot into a crowd of men and boys harassing them, killing five and wounding six others. Tensions calmed when Parliament in 1772 removed all but one of the new taxes—the tax on tea—but then, in May 1773, it tried to bail out the failing East India Company by giving it a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies. The result would be cheaper tea in the colonies, convincing people to buy it and thus establishing Parliament’s right to impose the tax.

Ships carrying the East India tea sailed for the colonies in fall 1773, but mass protests convinced the ships headed to every city but Boston to return to England. In Boston the royal governor was determined to land the cargo. On December 16, 1773, men dressed as Indigenous Americans boarded the Dartmouth, tied to a wharf in Boston Harbor, and tossed the tea overboard. Parliament promptly closed the port of Boston, strangling its economy.

In fall 1774, worried colonial delegates met as the First Continental Congress in Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia to figure out how to stand together against tyranny. In Massachusetts a provincial congress stockpiled weapons and supplies in Concord and called for towns to create companies of men who could be ready to fight on a minute’s notice.

British officials were determined to end the rebellion once and for all. They ordered General Thomas Gage to arrest Boston leaders Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were rumored to be in Lexington, and to seize the supplies in Concord. On the night of April 18, 1775, the soldiers set out. The next morning, on the Lexington town green, the British regulars found several dozen minutemen waiting for them. The locals began to disperse when ordered to, but then a shot cracked through the darkness. The regulars opened fire. Eight locals were killed, another dozen wounded.

The regulars marched on to Concord, where they found that most of the supplies had been removed. Then, when they turned to march back to Boston, they found their retreat cut off by minutemen firing from behind boulders, trees, and farmhouses. Seventy-three regular soldiers were killed, another 174 were wounded, and 26 were missing. There were 96 colonial casualties: 49 killed, 41 wounded, and 5 missing.

Before disbanding the year before, the First Continental Congress had agreed to meet again if circumstances seemed to require it. After the events at Lexington and Concord, the delegates regrouped in Philadelphia in late spring 1775, down the street from Carpenters’ Hall in the Pennsylvania State House, a building that we now know as Independence Hall.

The Second Continental Congress agreed to pull the military units around Boston into a Continental Army and put George Washington of Virginia in charge of it. But delegates also wrote directly to the king, emphasizing that they were “your Majesty’s faithful subjects.” They blamed the trouble between him and the colonies on “many of your Majesty’s Ministers,” who had “dealt out” “delusive presences, fruitless terrors, and unavailing severities” and forced the colonists to arm themselves in self-defense. They begged the king to use his power to restore harmony with the colonies. By the time the Olive Branch Petition made it to England in fall 1775, the king had already declared the colonies to be in rebellion.

In January 1776 a 47-page pamphlet, published in Philadelphia by newly-arrived immigrant Thomas Paine, provided the spark that inspired his new countrymen to make the leap from blaming the king’s ministers for their troubles to blaming the king himself. “In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Paine wrote.

Paine rejected the idea that any man could be born to rule others, and he ridiculed the idea that an island should try to govern a continent. “Where…is the King of America?” Paine asked in Common Sense. “I’ll tell you Friend…so far as we approve of monarchy…in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.

“A government of our own is our natural right: And when a man seriously reflects on the precariousness of human affairs, he will become convinced, that it is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power, than to trust such an interesting event to time and chance. If we omit it now, some [dictator] may hereafter arise, who laying hold of popular disquietudes, may collect together the desperate and the discontented, and by assuming to themselves the powers of government, may sweep away the liberties of the continent like a deluge.”

“We have it in our power,” Paine wrote, “to begin the world over again.”

As Common Sense swept the colonies, people echoed Paine’s call for American independence. By April 1776, states were writing their own declarations of independence, and a Virginia convention asked the Second Continental Congress to consider declaring “the United Colonies free and independent States, absolved from all allegiance to, or dependence upon, the Crown or Parliament of Great Britain.” On June 7, Lee put the resolution forward. Four days later, the Congress appointed a committee to draft such a declaration.

Congress left time for reluctant delegates to come around to the resolution, so it was not until July 2 that the measure passed. “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America,” Massachusetts delegate John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. While we celebrate Congress’s approval of the final form of the Declaration of Independence two days later, the adoption of the Lee Resolution marked the delegates’ ultimate conviction that a nation should rest not on the arbitrary rule of a single man and his hand-picked advisors, but on the rule of law.

—

Notes:

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/contcong_07-08-75.asp

John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2012).

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/lee-resolution

https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc

https://www.nps.gov/mima/learn/historyculture/april-19-1775.htm

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