Seventy-three percent of those polled said Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems, while 27% said he has the right priorities. Sixty-six percent agreed that Trump puts his own gain over the good of the country; 34% agreed that he does not. Only 43% of those polled thought Trump “has the stamina and sharpness to serve effectively as president,” while 57% did not agree with that statement.

As Edwards-Levy notes, Trump’s overall approval rating in the new CNN poll matches his rating just after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol—his lowest ever—at 34%. The number of those who strongly disapprove of him is 50%, a new high, while only 15% strongly support him, a record low.

Edwards-Levy points out that people polled aren’t keen on the way Trump’s handling the situation in Iran: 72% disapprove while only 28% approve. Sixty-seven percent think his actions there have hurt the U.S., while only 21% think those actions have helped the U.S. So, as she puts it: “Just 28% approve of his handling of the situation in Iran, 25% on inflation and 21% on gas prices, with significant pockets of disapproval even among his supporters.”

Americans unhappy with Trump’s war on Iran are unlikely to be cheered by the news from that conflict over the past few days.

Andrew Egger wrote in The Bulwark today about how the Trump administration seems stuck in a loop, “orbiting hopelessly around two demonstrably failed positions: If we bomb the hell out of them, they’ll give us what we want. If we stop bombing them, they’ll give us what we want.” Adina Renner of the New York Times today called this “The Whiplash War” and provided charts of attacks showing what this looping looks like on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Iranian negotiators have made their demands quite clear: sanctions removed, troops out, no more discussion of nuclear weapons, and Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.

Laura Wise, a scholar of peace and conflict resolution at the University of Edinburgh, told Renner that the process of ending the war has been complicated by the fact American negotiators seem focused on “getting a deal rather than making peace.”

Davis Winkie of CNN reported that on Saturday, the Pentagon changed the way it was accounting for military personnel injured in the Iran war. After the removal from Defense Casualty Analysis System of four service members killed by Iranian strikes in Jordan and Iraq last week created an outcry and brought renewed attention to accusations the Pentagon was not being transparent about the human toll of the war, on Saturday the Pentagon added more than 140 additional soldiers to the database and restored the four missing soldiers.

The numbers now show 18 troops dead and another 624 wounded since February 28, when Trump began strikes against Iran.

Over the weekend, military strikes in the region paused as Trump decided against an escalation. According to U.S. officials who spoke to Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times, that decision came in part because the U.S. military is running low on Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions necessary to shoot down Iranian missiles.

The journalists reported that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine had warned that further combat would “dangerously deplete” interceptors, a leak that suggests real dissent within the White House over the execution of the war. On Meet the Press on Sunday, U.N. Ambassador Mike Waltz told host Kristen Welker that any problems with munitions were former President Joe Biden’s fault but added that the U.S. has “everything that it needs to conduct this campaign…and…the people who are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”

Top advisors also expressed concern over a widening war and the economic crunch caused by the crisis.

But yesterday, U.S. Central Command posted that forces from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had launched missiles “in an attempted surprise attack on U.S. forces.” Jared Malsin and Suha Ma’ayeh of the Wall Street Journal noted that this surprise attack is the first in which the Iranians have gone on offense. Hamidreza Azizi, a visiting fellow specializing in Iran at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told the journalists that this shift indicates Iranian officials “see themselves as having the upper hand. It was a signal of a sort of calibrated escalation.”

They might have increased confidence because, as John Irish and Jonathan Saul of Reuters reported yesterday, they are expecting a shipment of up to 400 Chinese-made shoulder-fired air defense missile launchers within weeks.

U.S. Central Command said all of last night’s Iranian missiles were intercepted. Trump nonetheless took the attacks poorly, telling the Fox News Channel: “We are going to beat the f*cking sh*t out of them. We’ll be hitting them hard. They’re going to get a beating.” U.S. and Saudi Arabian forces struck against an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq.

Oil prices rose with the news of renewed strikes. Despite concerns about rising inflation, the Federal Open Market Committee voted 9 to 3 to hold interest rates steady; the three dissenting regional Fed bank presidents voted to raise interest rates. Concern over inflation and uncertainty about the economy sent the stock market plunging today in its worst day since April 2025, when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs.

And so, Republicans are devoting themselves to serving red meat to their MAGA base, ginning up sound bites for distribution on social media.

On the menu today was Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 85-year-old former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who, serving in that capacity for 38 years, advised seven different presidents of both parties. President George W. Bush awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in creating the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which has saved an estimated 26 million lives. Trump named Fauci to the President’s Coronavirus Task Force in January 2020.

But, as Savannah Behrmann and Jeanine Santucci of USA Today reported in October 2020, Trump turned on Fauci as he cautioned against Trump’s confident predictions that the disease would disappear quickly. By February 28, Trump insisted that Democrats were “politicizing” covid, and by April 26, news broke that Trump wanted to sideline Fauci, although Fauci was considered trustworthy and viewed favorably by a 3:1 margin.

By the summer, as Trump’s panic over how the economic crisis caused by the pandemic might hurt his reelection prospects, he turned on Fauci, who continued to support measures to stop the spread of the disease. Trump worked to undermine Fauci’s warnings, saying that the doctors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were “lying” about covid.

By July, he mused about why Fauci had a high approval rating and he didn’t. When Fauci testified to Congress that U.S. cases were spiking while European countries were seeing sharp drops in covid cases because European countries had shut down 95% of their economies while the U.S. had shut down only 50%, Trump posted: “Wrong! We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country…. If we tested less, there would be less cases.”

As Trump continued to criticize Fauci and yet ran a campaign ad suggesting Fauci endorsed his reelection, the doctor continued to emphasize that he was “not a political person.” He added: “And I have never—either directly or indirectly—endorsed a political candidate.” In October he dismissed Trump’s attacks, saying: “They don’t bother me. I know what my job is, and I’ve gotta do it and I’m going to do it. So that kind of—whatever you want to call it—is to me, I just, it’s noise.”

As Aaron Rupar reminded us today, Trump himself awarded a presidential commendation to Fauci “in recognition of [his] exceptional effort on Operation Warp Speed.”

But with the arrival of a vaccine that helped to put the worst of the pandemic behind us, MAGA Republicans began to demonize Dr. Fauci not only as the source of the mask mandates and school shutdowns they hated, but also as the source of the virus itself, alleging—without evidence—that the disease had escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, for which the U.S. National Institutes of Health provided funding.

After voters reelected Trump to the presidency in 2024, he and his loyalists vowed to prosecute Fauci. Trump ally Steve Bannon called for “rough Roman justice” for Fauci, as well as special counsel Jack Smith and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. Before he left office, former president Joe Biden issued a preemptive pardon for Fauci—and others—to protect them from political prosecution, saying: “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”

But Republicans have continued to demonize Fauci, ginning up anger against him in their base even as the rest of the country has moved on. Now, with the political tides running so strongly against the Republicans before the 2026 midterm elections, they are clearly trying to rekindle the fury of the last presidential election.

As the Associated Press reported today, for years, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has accused Fauci of lying about the origins of covid, an accusation Fauci has called “preposterous” in testimony before Congress. Paul has repeatedly called for Fauci’s arrest and imprisonment and, in 2023, published a book with Fauci on the cover, explicating what he called the “Great Covid Cover-Up.”

The Trump administration has fed Paul’s crusade, with Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. searching for eight months to find Fauci’s private diary on government computers, then handing the files over to Paul and to Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI). Neither Kennedy, Paul, nor Johnson told Fauci they had obtained his 1,000-page diary before they published it, in full, last week.

In July 2021, Fauci wrote in his diary that an analysis of the viruses used in the Wuhan lab “clearly indicate(s) that it is molecularly impossible for the viruses under the auspices of the NIH grant to have been manipulated into or evolved into” the covid virus.

Now chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Paul subpoenaed Fauci in June to appear before the committee. Unwillingly, as his lawyers noted Paul’s many statements calling for Fauci to be jailed, Fauci did so today.

In an opening statement, Fauci said that he believed “the sole reason [Paul] is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something—anything—that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, quote, behind bars, unquote.”

“Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion,” he said. “Therefore, although it pains me to do so because of the respect I have for the legislative branch of government and my decades-long record of cooperating with Congress, under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the 5th Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.”

More than 100 times he did exactly that as Republicans berated him, calling him “a narcissist and a megalomaniac and a liar,” mocking him, and asking him, “Do you feel like you’re in deep sh*t?” What Republicans did not do is introduce any evidence that the 85-year-old lifelong public servant had broken any laws.

More to the point was Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) yelling at Fauci about closings during the pandemic, blustering: “Who the f*ck do you think you were?” F-bombs are rare on the Senate floor, and the outburst has gotten significant media attention.

That attention has distracted from the other reason Moreno is in the news. As Abby Vesoulis of Mother Jones reported, Moreno has said nothing as his daughter’s ex-husband, Representative Max Miller (R-OH), has been credibly charged with the violent abuse of her and their 2-year-old daughter. As the Republicans struggle to hold on to their congressional majorities, Republican leaders have refused to call for Miller, who is running for a third term, to resign.

—

Notes:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28520039-cnn-july-poll-conducted-by-ssrs/

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/29/politics/cnn-poll-donald-trump-midterms-polls-iran-war

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/07/29/world/middleeast/iran-war-cease-fire-trump-timeline.html

The Bulwark

It’s Groundhog Day in Iran

Donald Trump’s legal apparatchiks at the Justice Department have insisted for months that the criminal indictment against former FBI Director James Comey—one of the personal enemies Trump most longs to see punished—goes beyond the “86 47” Instagram post they ludicrously insist constituted an imminent threat on the president’s life…

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a day ago · 591 likes · 156 comments · Andrew Egger, Brendan Hartnett, and Jim Swift

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/26/politics/iran-war-casualties

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/28/oil-price-today-wti-brent-us-iran-hormuz.html

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/29/nx-s1-5910558/federal-reserve-interest-rates-inflation

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/29/business/live-news/federal-reserve-interest-rate-07-29-26

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-gambles-on-escalation-with-surprise-attack-on-u-s-forces-72cfd422

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/29/world/live-news/iran-trump-news?post-id=cms5kixno00013b6sy4oovw6f

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/us/politics/trump-iran-military.html

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/iran-get-chinese-shoulder-launched-missile-systems-weeks-sources-say-2026-07-29/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/28/president-donald-trump-anthony-fauci-timeline-relationship-coronavirus-pandemic/3718797001/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/us/politics/biden-pardons-fauci-milley-cheney-jan-6.html

https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5183846/trump-presidency-retribution-enemies-threats

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/28/politics/anthony-fauci-diary-rand-paul

https://apnews.com/article/fauci-diaries-covid-origins-rand-paul-6b25da9f75a0becbaf2886ab22643e67

https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/latest-dr-fauci-invokes-amendment-republican-led-covid-135186465

https://apnews.com/article/fauci-covid19-pandemic-senate-rand-paul-a774a79e46824ebec9e8e270b9cb9825

https://tiffinohio.net/posts/max-miller-gun-hot-water-allegations-republicans-silent/

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/assault-misogyny-verbal-threats-records-detail-new-allegations-against-rep-max-miller-bernie-moreno/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/17/fed-interest-rate-decision-june-2026.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/29/anthony-fauci-pandemic-fifth-contempt-rand-paul-01015548

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/29/fauci-set-face-rand-paul-senate-gop-after-release-his-covid-diary/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-senate-panel-questions-fauci-on-diary-entries-about-covid-19-origins

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/29/us/politics/fauci-biden-pardon-covid-hearing.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/anthony-fauci-5th-amendment-testify-covid-hearing-rand-paul-rcna589793

https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/the-u-s-presidents-emergency-plan-for-aids-relief-pepfar/

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/27/nx-s1-5909531/rand-paul-anthony-fauci-coronavirus-diary-lab-leak-origin

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In place of that historic understanding, the administration argues that the United States was founded as a white nation whose citizens are defined by their European heritage and the land they inhabited, an echo of the “blood and soil” ideology of Germany in the 1930s.

Making that shift requires erasing not just our multicultural past but also our history. On July 4 the White House Domestic Policy Council released a report titled Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage. The report says that the National Museum of American History (NMAH) “fails in the basic task of illuminating our heritage.”

It continued: “Our central finding is not that the Museum has simply added overlooked stories, corrected perceived errors, or broadened its historical scope. Rather, it is that Museum leadership has explicitly adopted an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

Even more oddly, the report was a direct and personal attack on Dr. Anthea M. Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History, whom it accused of exercising “an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

The report claims that NMAH “purposely presents America as a problematic country irredeemably conceived, founded by deeply flawed men, and still operating today as an instrument of systemic racism and oppression. In the Museum’s current telling, the country is, above all, defined by white supremacy, slavery, conquest, exclusion, hierarchy, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and systemic injustice.” It claims that the Founders are minimized or excluded and that the story told of the nation is “one of regret, tragedy, and shame.”

It claims the museum has a “longtime staff reading group devoted to” a framework that treats museums as places of activism and that NMAH engages in “illegal alien activism” and “transgender activism.” It attributes to the museum guilt by association for organizations that have helped to fund exhibits, including the Mellon Foundation, which, an endnote explains, “allocated $72 million to ‘racial justice’ projects.” Indeed, the authors of the report appeared to be most exercised over racism, shown in their anger over the museum’s presentation of human enslavement.

They said the NMAH should “tell the story of how the colonies inherited slavery from both global and European slaving practices” and how “America’s Founders helped spark a worldwide movement that ultimately ended slavery.” They want the museum to emphasize how 750,000 Americans died in the Civil War—they did not appear to want mentioned that 258,000 of them died to protect enslavement—and how “Americans came to reject Jim Crow and segregation.” It should tell how “the United States…has done more to advance and secure fundamental rights than any other nation in the world.”

Part of that, the report says, should include “America’s contributions to global freedom, from saving Europe from multiple tyrannies, to illustrating the virtues of a market economy and a free people.”

The White House report is a nakedly political document, seeking to prove that “the museum profession has catechized and codified the ideological dogma of DEI to…an astonishing degree.” It builds on Trump’s belief that the Smithsonian has an “improper ideology” that Trump says is too focused on “how bad slavery was.”

That political purpose was clear on July 21, when Hartig and Yale University U.S. historian David Blight appeared before the House Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Testifying as well were two critics of the Smithsonian: Mike Gonzalez of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and Matthew Spalding, from Michigan’s Christian Hillsdale College. Another hearing the next day before the House Administration Committee continued the same themes.

Hartig told the committee that the report was inaccurate, saying “we unwaveringly attest that it does not accurately or fairly characterize the full range of work at the museum.” In fact, the report ignores large, long-term gallery exhibitions on subjects like the history of the U.S. military currently on display—that exhibit includes George Washington’s sword and the chairs Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee used at the Appomattox surrender—in favor of past, temporary, revolving wall exhibitions in display cases along a wall. The exhibit that infuriated the Republicans by mentioning transgender youth, called “Girlhood (It’s Complicated),” closed more than three years ago.

In her testimony, Hartig responded to the report’s accusation that the museum “fails to substantively present America’s Founders and Founding.” As Kelsey Ables of The Atlantic reported, Hartig pointed out: “We have a dozen exhibitions that include the founding era right now: 368 objects, 340 labels. George Washington is mentioned 54 times. You have to walk by a whole section on George Washington in the Kenneth Behring Hall of Military History to get to a 15-foot-tall reproduction of the Declaration of Independence.”

But, in fact, the goal of the report was demonstrably to create a straw man for MAGA supporters to hate. Ben Davis of artnet reported that Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC) claimed Hartig strives “to represent queer pedophiles, indoctrination, and grooming of kids at an American history museum,” and demanded: “Do you know how many kids get raped by adults every year in this country?” Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) repeatedly demanded of Hartig where the exhibitions honoring “50 million aborted babies” are. Representative Eric Burlison (R-MO) demanded: “Do you love America?”

“I love this country unconditionally,” Hartig replied. She would repeat that sentiment repeatedly over the course of the two days of hearings as representatives talked over her to get clips to put on social media.

In a response to the administration’s report, Representative Joe Morelle of New York, the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, pointed out that in February 2017, a month after his first inauguration, Trump praised the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and its founding director, Dr. Lonnie Bunch, for sharing “the great struggle for freedom and equality that prevailed against the sins of slavery and the injustice of discrimination.”

“Smithsonian museums did not change what they teach about slavery between 2017 and today,” Morelle writes; instead, “the President changed his position on whether they should be allowed to teach it.”

Morelle pointed out that the White House report demonized Hartig by taking her words out of context. For example, it made much of her statement, “Loving America is very complicated,” while omitting that she said that in a discussion with descendants of enslaved Americans.

It attacked her use of the common historical term “problematize,” which means to show that a simple idea is more complex than people realize, criticizing her statement that “the profession has ‘to figure out’ how ‘we’re going to’ ‘problematize’ the ‘250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.’”

Morelle points out that the disjointed fragments of this sentence show how deliberately the authors of the report butchered it. The full sentence was: “We have to figure out, all together, how we’re going to commemorate, problematize, remember, [and] celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 2026.” The report cut those words and then criticized her for insufficient celebration of the U.S.

The president doesn’t control the Smithsonian, so the only thing the report’s authors could recommend was “a label at every entrance that reads: ‘Warning: the exhibits in this museum were prepared by people who don’t want you to love your country.’” On July 24 the president issued Executive Order 14415, titled “Restoring Trust in the Smithsonian Institution.” It ordered the National Park Service to place temporary signage outside the Smithsonian “that corrects inaccurate information presented inside the Museum.”

As Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post noted, the attacks will take a toll on “the scholars, curators, volunteers, security guards and the rest of the loyal staff [who] will have to pass signs that demean the integrity of their work.” And it’s likely the MAGA ecosystem will pick up the harassment. Earlier this month, Bridget Gillespie, a former intern at Jefferson’s home, Monticello, detailed in The American Prospect how that harassment—accusations of “wokeness,” reviews calling tour guides “morons,” visitors in pairs with one asking something provocative about slavery or states’ rights while the other filmed—changed the way interpreters operated.

History is not just a set of facts and events. It is the study of how and why societies change. Why do people act in certain ways? Are there patterns in human behavior? What makes a society successful? What makes one fail?

Accuracy is imperative. Without it, we will learn the wrong answers—not just about the way Jim and Juan Crow worked, but also about whether our country’s foundation is about race and land or, as the Founders said, about principles and the rule of law.

*The original version of this post began with an anecdote that I hoped would call attention to the problems of teaching U.S. history in today’s atmosphere. Instead, it heightened those problems. I have cut the anecdote and apologize for adding to the distress of this moment.

—

Notes:

https://www.notus.org/national/america250-civics-competition

https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/07/saving-americas-story/

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/07/smithsonian-hearing-hartig/688031/

https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/in-pursuit

https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/facts.htm

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/anthea-hartig-hearing-smithsonian-2789825

https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/price-of-freedom

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/07/restoring-trust-in-the-smithsonian-institution-e061/

https://democrats-cha.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-cha.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2027-the-white-house-campaign-to-seize-control-of-the-smithsonian-and-rewrite-american-history-committee-report.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/07/26/ive-visited-smithsonian-hundreds-times-it-inspires-wonder-not-division/

https://prospect.org/2026/07/02/what-broke-monticello-thomas-jefferson-virginia-glenn-youngkin/

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That’s an important distinction. The former accepts the constitutional order by working within it to challenge it. The latter rejects the constitutional order entirely.

Their actions align with the strategy of Nazi political theorist Carl Schmitt, whose writings seem lately to have captivated leaders on the American right. Schmitt opposed liberal democracy, in which the state enables individuals to determine their own fate. Instead, he argued that true democracy erases individual self-determination by making the mass of people one with the state and exercising their will through state power. That uniformity requires getting rid of opposition. Schmitt theorized that politics is simply about dividing people into friends and enemies and using the power of the state to crush enemies. As J.D. Vance described Schmitt’s ideas in 2024: “There’s no law, there’s just power.”

Much of Schmitt’s philosophy centered around the idea that the power of a nation that is based in a constitution and the rule of law belongs to the man who can exploit emergencies that create exceptions to the constitutional order, enabling him to exercise power without regard to the law. Trump—who almost certainly has not read Schmitt himself—asserted this view in August 2025 to justify deploying troops to American cities. “I have the right to do anything I want to do,” he said. “I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country’s in danger—and it is in danger in the cities—I can do it.”

Although the Republicans have control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate—meaning Trump should be able to get his agenda passed according to the normal constitutional order—since retaking office he has operated under emergency powers. Back in April, Ben Diamond of Lawfare noted that Trump is on track to issue six and a half times more emergency orders in his second term than any other president this century issued during his entire term. That number, Diamond suggests, is probably an underestimate because many of Trump’s orders do not include the keyword “emergency” and so fly under the radar.

Trump’s imposition of a new round of tariffs on products from more than 60 countries, making up 99.4% of trade with the U.S., is a flashing red light.

In April 2025, the administration imposed high tariff rates on countries around the world, claiming legal authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which permits the president to respond quickly to economic threats during a national emergency. On the same day he announced the tariffs, Trump declared “that foreign trade and economic practices have created a national emergency.”

When the Supreme Court struck down those tariffs as unconstitutional, Trump immediately announced he would find “other alternatives…to replace the ones that the court incorrectly rejected. We have alternatives,” he said. “Great alternatives.” The administration turned to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to impose tariffs in the case of an international financial emergency.

Those tariffs are limited to 150 days. When that deadline hit on Friday, Trump announced he was imposing tariffs under section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which permits the president to impose tariffs on countries that are using forced labor. A senior administration official told reporters that the tariffs were not an attempt to recreate the previous system and that dealing with the issue of forced labor “is something that President Trump has been focused on…for many years.”

But law professor Barry Appleton, who co-directs New York Law School’s Center for International Law, said: “The 301s allow a permanent tariff without going to Congress to settle the dispute. That’s what all of this is about. The president doesn’t want to knock on the front door of Congress, so he’s trying every side door and every unlatched window to get in.”

Let’s be very clear here: tariffs are revenue measures, and the U.S. Constitution explicitly gives the power to raise revenue to Congress, not the president. Article 1, Section 8, reads: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposes and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.”

This clause was almost the whole game. Control over the nation’s money, sometimes called the power of the purse, was central to the Framers’ concept of republican government. The American Revolution took shape over the determination of colonists to have a say in how their government raised money, a right first articulated in the Magna Carta that in 1215 established the principle that the king did not enjoy absolute power. A key check on him was that he could not pass revenue measures without the consent of the governed.

And so the Framers put it in the Constitution.

But control over the revenue was not quite the whole game. The Framers were also crystal clear that the people must have control over the decision to go to war. They did not trust that much power in the hands of one man and wanted to make sure the American people would have robust debates about the value of the money and lives lost in combat. So determined were they for the American people to have those debates that they wrote into the Constitution that Congress had the sole power “[t]o declare War” and “[t]o raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”

Here, too, Trump has used the idea of an emergency to sidestep Congress’s authority by insisting the threat from Iran was “imminent” even though his own advisors testified that Iran did not, in fact, have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon in less than ten years. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, a president has the authority to respond to an “imminent threat” without congressional approval so long as he notifies Congress in writing within 48 hours. Then the president has 60 days either to withdraw U.S. forces from their engagement or to get Congress to authorize the military action.

Trump launched U.S. attacks on Iran on February 28. He notified Congress on March 2. Sixty days from March 2 was May 1. When that deadline arrived, Trump sent letters to House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate president pro tempore Chuck Grassley (R-IA), officially the leader of the Senate if the vice president is not present, to inform them that so far as the White House is concerned, “the hostilities that began on February 28…terminated” on April 7, when Trump ordered a two-week ceasefire.

Although hostilities and a U.S. blockade of Iran continued, the administration maintained the ceasefire was in place until July 10, when Trump notified Congress for a second time that the nation was engaging in military action in Iran. The administration maintains that this second notification is for a new military engagement and thus restarts the clock under the War Powers Act. Legal analysts say this interpretation has no basis in law, legislative history, or practice.

The Trump administration is claiming the powers of Congress both to tax and to declare war, key powers the Framers established the American people’s right, through their representatives, to control.

When Senator Angus King (I-ME) and five Democratic lawmakers who sit on committees responsible for national parks and resources wrote in June to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to oppose “in the strongest terms” Trump’s proposed triumphal arch, they pointed out that there are many different laws the construction would break. “Most fundamentally,” though, they wrote, the arch falls within an area called Area I that Congress established in the 1986 Commemorative Works Act.

In that law, Congress specified that any commemorative work within Area I requires Congress to pass a law authorizing the memorial. The lawmakers wrote to Burgum: “Because the site is in Area I, the Act requires a second, separate approval, under which Congress must enact a law ratifying the Area I location within 150 days of the Secretary’s notification, following a determination that the subject is of preeminent historical and lasting significance to the United States. Congress has enacted no such laws. Analysis we requested from the Congressional Research Service in January reached the same conclusion: absent these authorizations, construction of an arch in Memorial Circle would not comport with the Commemorative Works Act. Since 1986, every memorial placed on federal land in the capital under the Act, more than forty in all, has come to Congress first…. The Arch’s sponsor has sought no act at all.”

“If the Administration believes the semiquincentennial warrants a permanent commemorative work in the capital,” they wrote, “the path is open and well worn; it runs through Congress, as it has for every memorial since the Continental Congress approved the first, an equestrian statue of George Washington, in 1783.”

Back in October 2025, when officials first acknowledged to reporters that Trump was planning to build an arch, a reporter asked Trump about a model of an arch that was sitting on the desk in the Oval Office.

“It’s an Arc,” he said. “Take a look.”

When a reporter asked who the arch was for, Trump pointed at himself and said: “Me.”

—

Notes:

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/one-emergency-after-another

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/illinois-national-guard-general-president-trump-chicago-crime/

https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-forced-labor-8ea8114c6893a6062cf1addc3518660b

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-declares-national-emergency-to-increase-our-competitive-edge-protect-our-sovereignty-and-strengthen-our-national-and-economic-security/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/13/books/review/carl-schmitt-jd-vance.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/opinion/jd-vance-interview.html

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/25/nx-s1-5903183/trump-administration-employs-new-legal-paths-for-tariffs-after-supreme-court-defeat

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/trump-tariffs-lawsuit-301-ieepa.html

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trumps-tariffs-are-a-massive-money-grab-thats-why-they-are-in-trouble-cc88c1a1

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#1-8

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-deadline-for-congress-to-approve-iran-war-doesnt-apply-claiming-hostilities-have-terminated

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/13/trump-notifies-congress-of-new-war-against-iran-00995170

https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2026/07/the-60-day-clock-is-still-running-why-the-iran-ceasefire-cant-suspend-the-war-powers-resolution/

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11937

https://www.king.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/sen_king_letter_to_burgum_re_arch.pdf

https://abc30.com/post/president-trump-involved-planning-triumphal-arch-commemorate-countrys-250th-anniversary/18018590/

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But on Monday, deputy assistant to the president Heather Martin filed a declaration saying the White House Office of Administration was beginning preparations for the paint job. As Kennicott points out, the administration is using the case to give the president the ability to “erase the nation’s physical culture, its man-made, natural and cultural wonders.”

The administration is arguing that the General Services Administration (GSA), the agency that normally handles maintenance of federal buildings, has ceded control of the building to the White House Office of Administration. The GSA follows the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, laws that require extensive reviews and input from experts and the public.

Those laws do not apply to the White House Office of Administration. Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners, one of the organizations that sued to stop Trump from painting the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, told Kennicott: “The precedent is potentially devastating. Anytime the president takes a personal interest in a project, he can simply pluck it out of an agency that is subject to review and put it in his own shop.” That change would not be limited to buildings, Kennicott explains. It could be used, for example, to rush a pipeline through pristine wilderness.

A White House official told Kennicott that the White House conducts necessary reviews and that taking over for the GSA allows the White House “to more efficiently and economically manage the project.”

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool would like a word.

Kennicott also calls out the administration’s proposed major rule change in the National Historical Preservation Act (NHPA). Trump installed a loyalist as vice chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. On Friday, July 17, the chair proposed dramatic revisions to Section 106 of the NHPA. This is the section of the 60-year-old law that requires federal agencies to “take into account” what their actions will do to historic properties and places. This is the requirement that gives the public, as well as local, state, and tribal governments, a voice in the changes to historic and cultural sites.

Brent Leggs is the chief executive officer of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a privately funded, nonprofit organization founded by Congress in 1949 to support historic preservation. He warned that “[t]he ACHP’s proposed changes to Section 106 will eviscerate the preservation of our shared civic and cultural heritage in the United States. If [they are] implemented, federal agencies will no longer be required to avoid or minimize damage to our nation’s historic sites and landscapes, or seek public input on federal projects that would impact historic places.”

Yesterday the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, packed with 21 Trump appointees on a 24-member board, voted to move the revisions to Section 106 forward. Rachel Treisman of NPR noted that the National Register of Historic Places lists more than 100,000 properties with more than 1.8 million sites, structures, objects, and districts, all of which will lose protections if the new rule takes effect. Werkheiser told Treisman: “What it means is that the federal government, in its own discretion, can decide whether—if ever—to tell an American community that it’s about to do a major project that could harm or destroy a historic resource. The public will be completely cut out of any conversation around the future of places that matter to them in this country.”

According to Sara Bronin, who served as the Senate-confirmed chair of the advisory council under President Joe Biden—the current chair is an “acting” official—the rule changes would also remove from historical protection “significant cultural landscape features” like the Grand Canyon. Supporters of the change say it would help “agencies strike a more appropriate balance between evaluating effects on historic properties and advancing critical federal projects.” Highways, for example, which in the past have leveled entire neighborhoods as well as burial sites, would no longer require review.

Revising Section 106 would smooth two projects important to the administration.

The administration wants to open a ten-mile buffer zone barring mineral, oil, and gas extraction around Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, to development. The area “is a vibrant place of prayer, pilgrimage and core to the identity of many Southwest tribes, whose connection to this land stretches back thousands of years,” Representative Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat from New Mexico, told reporters on Wednesday. Deb Haaland, who served as Biden’s secretary of the interior and is a member of New Mexico’s Laguna Pueblo, notes that Chaco Canyon has been recognized by the UNESCO World Heritage Center as a site of universal importance and that the buffer land holds more than 4,700 known archeological sites.

Cochiti Pueblo governor Phillip Quintana called the area “one of the most important Indigenous cultural landscapes in North America, a place whose meaning reaches far beyond any single administration.”

Last November, Senators Martin Heinrich (D-NM), the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Representatives Vasquez, Teresa Leger Fernández (D-NM), and Melanie Stansbury (D-NM), a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, wrote to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum asking him to protect the cultural landscape around Chaco Canyon.

They noted that “under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), you are legally required to ensure that you consider how your actions will affect historic properties, which also requires consulting with each relevant Tribal government. These steps must be taken before pursuing your proposed action.”

The revisions to Section 106 would remove that requirement.

Bronin noted that the changes to Section 106 would also fast-track the triumphal arch Trump wants to build at Memorial Circle near Arlington National Cemetery.

On June 15, Senator Angus King (I-ME), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on National Parks; Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA), the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee on Natural Resources; Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM), the top-ranking member of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources; and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), the top-ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies and Representatives Maxine Dexter (D-OR) and Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) responded to a Section 106 assessment with a letter to Secretary Burgum.

The lawmakers noted that they were the ranking members in the House and Senate committees with jurisdiction over the construction of monuments in Washington, D.C. “We oppose this project in the strongest terms,” they wrote. They called out the Section 106 process as “fall[ing] short of the law.” Among other things, they noted that the comment process for the new project had been only ten days and that the proposed arch would “deface one of the most deliberate and historic sightlines in America.”

They wrote that proceeding with the project would break at least three laws, and warned that officials moving forward with it “would be answerable as individuals” and face penalties up to and including criminal fines and imprisonment.

“Every official who directs this work, and every firm that performs it,” they wrote, “proceeds at their own peril.” “This project is stone-cold illegal,” King told Luke Broadwater of the New York Times. “It is one of the clearest legal cases I’ve seen in more than 50 years of being a lawyer.”

But now, at least some of those legal concerns might go away. Treisman said the revision of Section 106 would mean that the near-constant noise from the arch’s construction would not be weighed as a consideration in its construction, and the arch’s destruction of the historic views built into the capital from its inception would not be considered either.

What is at stake is more than just buildings. It is the whitewashing and bulldozing of our history and culture, created over centuries by the many people who have built the United States, in service to the small vision of Trump and his enablers.

—

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2026/07/24/trumps-plan-paint-eisenhower-could-damage-stone-law/

https://savingplaces.org/stories/section-106-under-threat

https://nativenewsonline.net/environment/deb-haaland-criticizes-trump-administrations-effort-to-roll-back-chaco-canyon-protections/

https://www.energy.senate.gov/2025/11/new-mexico-delegation-urges-interior-secretary-burgum-to-reverse-course-protect-chaco-canyon

https://www.npr.org/2026/07/23/nx-s1-5904435/section-106-review-trump-historic-preservation-council

https://www.hcn.org/articles/pueblo-leaders-new-mexico-lawmakers-speak-out-to-protect-chaco-canyon/

https://www.king.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/sen_king_letter_to_burgum_re_arch.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/us/politics/trump-triumphal-arch-congress.html

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Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought announced the cuts by saying, “Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.” But, in fact, a government lawyer told the court that none of the cancellations were “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

In contrast, the administration funded grants for states that had backed Trump in 2024, even though the Energy Department had recommended they be cancelled.

The admission calls into question the administration’s claims that it is making cuts to combat “waste, fraud, and abuse,” especially as Vought is working to finalize rules that would make political appointees the final arbiters of how the government would award more than $1 trillion in annual grants. Rather than combatting waste, it appears Trump and his cronies are trying to take control of the United States government, using the power of the American people for their own ends.

Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker promptly pointed out that the cancelled grants included $583 million intended for Illinois “that would have gone toward lowering energy costs, strengthening grid reliability, and creating energy jobs.” He demanded the funds be restored. “Despite what he might think, Donald Trump is not the president of MAGA,” Pritzker said in a statement, but “the president of all America. He must release remaining federal grants to Illinois immediately.”

Pritzker can add the energy grants to Trump’s tab. After the Supreme Court declared Trump’s April 2025 tariffs unconstitutional in February 2026, Pritzker wrote a public letter billing Trump for an $8.68 billion refund to the people of Illinois. “Your tariff taxes wreaked havoc on farmers, enraged our allies, and sent grocery prices through the roof,” he wrote. “On behalf of the people of Illinois, I demand a refund of $1,700 for every family in Illinois. There are 5,105,448 households in my state, bringing the total damages you owe to $8,679,261,600.” Pritzker reiterated that demand on July 20.

But Trump is clinging to his determination to surround the United States with a tariff wall.

At 12:01 this morning, Trump levied tariffs from 10% to 12.5% on goods from more than 80 countries that make up 99.4% of U.S. trade, claiming the countries are producing goods with forced labor. More likely, this argument justifies tariffs under a different law than the one that led the Supreme Court to strike down his 2025 “Liberation Day” tariffs. It’s also a different law than the one he used to impose tariffs after the Supreme Court decision. The time limit permitted for new tariffs under that law expired today.

Kevin Breuninger of CNBC reported that within hours of the announcement of the new tariffs, two small businesses sued in the U.S. Court of International Trade, saying the new tariffs were just a way to reinstate the tariff levies the Supreme Court said were unconstitutional.

A senior administration official told reporters that the tariffs were not an attempt to recreate the previous system and that dealing with the issue of forced labor “is something that President Trump has been focused on…for many years.”

Annie Linskey and Josh Dawsey of the Wall Street Journal reported today that Trump is angry and frustrated over the Iran War, from which he cannot seem to find an exit. They wrote that some of Trump’s advisors are worried at what the war is doing to his popularity by causing higher prices as well as the deaths of 18 servicemembers.

That concern is likely behind the change in the number of U.S. military personnel listed on a Pentagon website as killed in the Iran conflict. Helene Cooper, Lara Jakes, and John Ismay of the New York Times reported yesterday that the Pentagon has dropped the names of the four Americans killed in Jordan and Iraq, reducing the number of U.S. personnel killed in the conflict to 14.

Three military officials told the reporters that the number was revised because the four were killed after Trump announced the ceasefire in April. The acting press secretary for the Pentagon, Joel Valdez, said the four were dropped owing to “temporary data disruptions.” But claiming the four died after a ceasefire bolsters the administration’s insistence that the president doesn’t need to get congressional approval for continuing operations against Iran because the April ceasefire declaration ended the first operation.

The record of the Trump administration on July 24, 2026, shows a White House focused on the goals of Trump alone. It’s a striking contrast to a Fireside Chat broadcast over the radio on July 24, 1933. In that talk, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took stock of what he had accomplished in his first 100 days in office.

He explained that his administration had stabilized the nation’s banks and raised taxes to pay for millions in borrowing. That federal money was feeding starving people, as well as employing 300,000 young men to work in the Civilian Conservation Corps planting trees to prevent soil erosion, building levees and dams for flood control, and maintaining forest roads and trails. It was also funding a public works program for highways and inland navigation, as well as state-based municipal improvements. The government had also raised farm income and wages by regulating agriculture and abolishing child labor.

FDR urged Americans to get behind a program of shorter hours and higher wages to create purchasing power that would restart the economy. He explained: “It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the Nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about.”

—

Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/business/trump-state-grants-canceled.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/business/economy/trump-tariffs.html

https://jbpritzker.com/latest/breaking-trump-withheld-funds-from-democratic-states-pritzker-demands-release/

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/pritzker-sends-bill-8-billion-refund-trump-supreme-court-tariffs-ruling/

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/trump-tariffs-lawsuit-301-ieepa.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/us/politics/iran-troop-deaths.html

https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-is-losing-patience-over-an-iran-war-with-no-clear-end-in-sight-c411d3cd

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/us/politics/iran-troop-deaths.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/pentagon-removed-four-official-iran-war-death-toll.html

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/fireside-chat-recovery-program

X:

GovPritzker/status/2079226043294969869

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“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said. “This world in arms is not spending money alone.

“It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

“The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”

“This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he said. “Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Eisenhower’s speech has been on my mind as the Trump administration slashes Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, foreign aid, scientific and medical research, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and yet is demanding more money for the Defense Department, bled out by Trump’s foreign adventures in Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, the Caribbean, Venezuela, and, of course, Iran.

Because Trump’s war on Iran has run through the already-expanded budget Congress provided, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was on Capitol Hill Tuesday asking Congress for an additional $67 billion to get the Defense Department through the end of September. But Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) picked up on the possibility that the administration was trying to use the supplemental funding request as a backdoor way to get around the constitutional and legal requirement for Congress to approve military action in Iran.

Emine Yücel explained in Talking Points Memo that Murkowski referred to the 1999 opinion of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel under President Bill Clinton that “the supplemental appropriation itself—passed without any authorizing language—satisfied the War Powers Resolution requirement.” Murkowski asked if Trump was intending to invoke the same reasoning, claiming that congressional funding for the war would, by itself, “substitute for explicit congressional authorization.”

Hegseth said he would “defer to our legal department” on that issue.

If you’re having trouble figuring out the funding for the Iran War and funding for the military in general, you’re in good company. The administration has obfuscated that funding so thoroughly, as Representative Joe Morelle (D-NY), who is the top ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee and a member of its defense subcommittee, told Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo, that the administration hasn’t even told Congress where the money is going.

“We had Hegseth in front of the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and he couldn’t give us an accounting and wouldn’t give us an accounting. They still haven’t given us an accounting,” Morelle told Walker. “It’s unfathomable.”

Morelle explained to Walker that the administration is turning to three separate buckets for war funding: standard congressional appropriations; budget reconciliation measures that don’t have to go through appropriations committees, can’t be filibustered ,and so can pass with simple majorities; and supplemental requests. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” Morelle said.

“The whole thing is alarming because, look…there’s finite resources. And the United States government needs to make decisions about where we’re gonna place our priorities, where we’re gonna invest our money,” Morelle explained. “If everything were just defense, we could argue about that number and that number alone, but every time you make a decision about increasing defense and security spending by $600 billion, which is a 60% increase virtually over last year, it means something else isn’t getting funded or alternatively, you’re borrowing more money.”

While Hegseth told Congress the war has cost $37.5 billion so far, Gordon Lubold, Mosheh Gains, and Courtney Kube of NBC News reported on July 14 that the internal Pentagon estimate of the cost is about $100 billion. Walker notes that when economists at Moody’s added higher gas prices to the cost of the war, they estimated that it has cost U.S. households about $1,100 each.

Yesterday Steve Rattner of MS NOW reported that “[u]nder Trump, the debt held by the federal government has surpassed 100% of GDP. By 2030, it’ll shoot past its all-time record from WWII.” Also yesterday, Megan Messerly of Politico reported that just over a third of MAGA voters think the Iran war has been worth the economic cost, down from about half of them in May.

A person close to the White House told Messerly that White House officials are “at a maximum level of frustration right now, and I was told by very senior people that the president is now fully aware that the only way to the victory that he wants is completely politically impossible. The American people just will not support the kind of escalation it would take at this point. We’ve got more dead Americans and a politically impossible situation.”

Although attacking civilian infrastructure for political purposes is a war crime, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio appear to be threatening it. “From this point forward, any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, whether it be by Missile, Rocket, Drone, or any other device or weapon, the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT, including those located next to, or in, the Capital City of Tehran,” Trump posted on social media yesterday morning.

Today Rubio said Iranian policy is “an eye for an eye” and added: “The president’s policy is a head for an eye. I mean, honestly, that’s what it’s going to be. I mean, they will pay a very heavy price for the things they do.”

The price of oil surged by 7% to more than $100 a barrel for Brent crude today after Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed to have attacked two Saudi Arabian oil tankers in the Red Sea. This raises concerns about the potential closure of the Bab el-Mandeb strait between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, through which about 12% to 15% of the world’s maritime trade passes every year.

The average price of gasoline in the United States rose to $4.09 a gallon today.

After twelve days of escalating strikes between the U.S. and Iran, the strikes against ships in the Red Sea are a new development in the war. This morning, Trump warned on social media that the U.S. would consider the Houthis’ “interference with commerce and trade, by shooting at ships,” as the responsibility of Iran. In response, he said, “major military punishment will be inflicted upon Iran.”

Yesterday Shelby Holliday, Lara Seligman, and Stephen Kalin of the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. has been surging troops, weaponry, and medics to the Middle East. These new forces add to the tens of thousands of troops already there. The U.S. Navy also has 17 ships in the region, including two aircraft-carrier strike groups, with eleven destroyers and a Marine Corps expeditionary unit. Retired general Joseph Votel, former commander of Central Command and of U.S. Special Operations Command, told the reporters the surge doesn’t necessarily mean the launch of new operations. They are designed to give the president and the Secretary of Defense options.

Barak Ravid of Axios, who often has inside information from the White House, reported today that Trump is “close to making a decision” about a “massive attack” on Iran. Ravid reported that Trump says the Iranians “want to negotiate” but “haven’t received enough pain yet.”

Today the House of Representatives passed a concurrent resolution to end the war in Iran by a vote of 214 to 208. Four Republicans—Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio, and Tom Barrett of Michigan—joined the Democrats.

A concurrent resolution expresses the sentiments of Congress. It is not a law and does not require a signature from the president.

Concurrent resolutions are often used for congressional business like setting the time of adjournment. House members have turned to them to oppose the Iran War because concurrent resolutions are “privileged” in the House, which means they can bypass standard scheduling requirements.

Representative Jason Crow (D-CO), a former paratrooper and Army Ranger who serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and House Armed Services Committee, told his colleagues that while Iran poses a threat to the U.S., so do North Korea and Russia, and there has been no move automatically to go to war with them.

The impulse to resort to war as the only answer to threats led to “twenty-plus years”of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, “trillions of dollars, and thousands of American lives lost for wars that ended poorly,” Crow said. “Americans are done with an endless cycle of conflict in the Middle East. When I was in Afghanistan, our adversaries, the enemies that we fought, would often say, ‘Americans have all the clocks, but we have all the time.’ They simply want to wait us out, knowing that we’ll just spend more money, have more combat deployments, and will just continue to do it, year after year, until we wear out.”

Crow said he could not answer his “constituents who are losing homes, losing their farms, losing their health care, who can’t answer the simple question: How is this making me safer? How is this improving my life?”

Later in the day, the Senate took up a measure backed by Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) to force the president to end the U.S. hostilities with Iran. That measure was different from the concurrent resolution in the House. It was a “joint resolution,” which is a law and which does go to the president for a signature. A joint resolution is usually used for something urgent and straightforward, like a declaration of war.

Senators have turned to joint resolutions to oppose the Iran War because joint resolutions are privileged in the Senate, although generally not in the House.

The Senate declined to advance Van Hollen’s S.J. Res. 180 [or Senate Joint Resolution 180] by a vote of 47 to 49. Four Republican senators did not vote.

—

Notes:

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/hegseth-sidesteps-murkowski-question-about-backdoor-war-authorization

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/markets/oil-prices-rise-red-sea-attacks-houthis-saudi-trump-iran-war-rcna588851

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/22/stock-market-today-live-updates.html

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-surges-forces-toward-middle-east-giving-trump-options-to-expand-iran-war-e5d627b1?mod=hp_trendingnow_article_pos1

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/23/trump-axios-iran-interview

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/iran-war-cost-much-100-billion-rcna587362

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/a-key-house-dem-breaks-down-the-white-houses-unfathomable-iran-war-funding-requests

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/22/poll-maga-souring-iran-war-costs-trump-01006976

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-chance-for-peace-delivered-before-the-american-society-newspaper-editors

https://www.cfr.org/articles/guide-trumps-second-term-military-strikes-and-actions

https://rollcall.com/2026/07/23/23warpowersvote/

Trumpstruth:

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“Really? Communists? Did we accidentally step into a time machine?”

“I get it,” he said. “They don’t want to talk about the real issues, the bread and butter issues. They don’t want to talk about affordability. I guess my question is, is Joe McCarthy back from the dead? Because it sounds like that’s who wrote all the garbage coming from Republicans, about communism. These guys, they dust off the same, tired, old talking points, every time they’re backed into a corner. Every time a new poll comes out saying that your economic agenda sucks, what they do is they change the subject. They try to divert attention. It is pathetic.

“But fine. They…want to play that game, let’s play that game. Let’s talk about the Republican Party. A party that worships one man above the Constitution in a cult of personality. A party that demonizes immigrants and says they poison the blood of our country. A party that calls the free press the enemy of the people and sics the Justice Department on journalists who they don’t like. A party that says their political opponents are internal enemies and calls them, quote, the enemy within. A party that is okay with invading our allies, including other democracies, a party that punishes their political opponents, that has deployed troops on our own streets, that wants to use the American military on the American people. A party that believes any unhinged lie, fantasy, and conspiracy theory as long as it comes from one man. A party that tries to lock up members of Congress for exercising their free speech rights. And a party that has tried to violently overthrow the results of a free and fair election in the United States of America. A party that, in fact, pardoned everyone who invaded this building on January 6, 2021, and tried to throw out the votes of millions of Americans because the president couldn’t accept that he lost.

“How dare that party lecture anyone? How dare they talk about communism when their own party has totally lost touch, not just with the founding ideals of this country, but lost touch with reality itself. So if we’re gonna start assigning political labels based on conduct, then let’s call things by their proper names. The Republican Party has become the party of fascism, full stop. You know, they have become a party of far right fascists who are hell-bent on destroying our country and our way of life. And every single time they call us communists, it is nothing more than a projection of their own… radicalization.

“They don’t want to talk about that, and they definitely don’t want to talk about their higher grocery prices, or skyrocketing gas prices, or higher inflation, or the cost of health care, or their new, endless, illegal war. It has now cost over $100 billion. So instead, they scream and they yell because they have nothing else left to offer.”

“Democrats are patriots who love this country enough to fight for it. We are fighting to make it easier for people to afford groceries. We’re fighting to try to make it easier for people to afford rent, prescription drugs, and health care. And we will not be lectured by a fascist Republican party that offers the American people nothing but lies, fear, endless culture wars, and tax breaks for billionaires.”

The political ideology called fascism grew out of World War I, when former socialist Benito Mussolini rejected the equality that defined democracy and came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These men must organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.

This theory drove the Axis powers during World War II, and in 1945, the United States War Department explained to U.S. Army personnel in the European theater of World War II what fascism was. The government focused less on the ideology of fascism than on its practical outcome.

Fascism, the pamphlet Army Talks explained, “is government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state.” “The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people.”

“The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires; hence—democracy must go! Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he’s told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law.” “Fascism treats women as mere breeders. ‘Children, kitchen, and the church,’ was the Nazi slogan for women,” the pamphlet said.

Fascists “make their own rules and change them when they choose…. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of ‘blood’ and ‘race,’ by skillful manipulation of fear and hate, and by false promise of security. The propaganda glorifies war and insists it is smart and ‘realistic’ to be pitiless and violent.”

After the war, scholars like Eric Hoffer studied the societal conditions necessary for fascism to take hold. In his 1951 The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Hoffer noted that demagogues needed a disaffected population whose members felt they had lost the power they previously held, that they had been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people were willing to follow a leader who promised to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again. But to cement their loyalty, the leader had to give them someone to hate. Who that was didn’t really matter: the group simply had to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters were suffering.

More recently, scholars are adding to our understanding of fascism by describing it as a form of political behavior. “It is,” Robert O. Paxton says in his 2005 The Anatomy of Fascism, “marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

McGovern’s condemnation of today’s Republicans fits these descriptions even without the parallels noted by Carrie Kaufman in her You’re Overthinking It with Carrie Kaufman between leading Republican officials and Nazi leaders. On July 19, Kaufman showed how recent speeches by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller at last Thursday’s State Department about “Left-wing terrorism” echoed Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Heinrich Himmler’s 1942 pamphlet Der Untermensch, or “The Subhuman.”

But McGovern left a key element of fascism out of his speech yesterday: the alignment between the government and favored businesses. Fascism subordinates business activity to the needs of the government. In exchange for supporting them, government officials award massive government contracts and subsidies to favored businesses, and protect them from regulation.

Earlier this year, the administration established a new “Economic Defense Unit” (EDU) at the Pentagon, charged with investing public money in defense industries. Ana Swanson of the New York Times reported in March that the Pentagon was recruiting Wall Street investment bankers to the team to spend up to $200 billion in government investment over the next three years. That access, recruiters told prospective employees, would give them “access to fund-raising channels that include royal families and foreign sovereign contacts” in case they ever wanted to raise money for their own investment firms.

And the U.S. government under Trump has taken ownership shares of private companies it considers important to national security, like Intel, for example, and U.S. Steel. In November of 2025, Swanson reported in the New York Times that the administration had already committed more than $10 billion in taxpayer funds to favored businesses. The lack of transparency in this interference in the private sector raised concerns about favoritism, corruption, and the distortion of the market.

Last night, Michael R. Gordon and Stephen Kalin of the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Trump has approved a landmark 30-year deal to provide Saudi Arabia with a civilian nuclear program. The deal gives U.S. companies a monopoly on developing a nuclear infrastructure for the Arab country, but it does not include monitoring and inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency to make sure nuclear fuel isn’t enriched for a nuclear weapon.

The idea of building nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia was central to Trump’s 2016 bid for office. Members of Trump’s inner circle, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner and disgraced national security advisor Michael Flynn, hatched a plan for a joint U.S.-Russian project to build nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia. In June 2016 they formed a company called IP3 International, short for International Peace, Power and Prosperity.

In Trump’s first term, White House ethics officials and members of the National Security Council warned that selling nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia could violate the Atomic Energy Act. Members of the administration continued to work on the project, nonetheless.

This week’s deal is worth billions of dollars in contracts for U.S. firms that work in nuclear technology, particularly Westinghouse, which filed for bankruptcy in 2017 when its nuclear technology took longer to build and was more expensive than the company estimated. In June, the Department of Energy announced it was investing $17.5 billion in loans to Westinghouse and local utility and energy companies to build 10 large-scale commercial nuclear reactors across the U.S.

The deal is “a big win for the U.S. commercially and geopolitically, enriching American firms and tying Saudi Arabia closer to the U.S.,” Kristin Diwan, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute, a research organization in Washington, D.C., told Vivian Nereim of the New York Times. It is also a win for Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who has vowed that he will build a nuclear weapon if Iran does, making the deal a blow to nuclear nonproliferation.

Fascism has always been a vehicle for frustration with a system that was failing the people. But it has never been a solution for fixing that system.

—

Notes:

https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up

You're Overthinking It with Carrie Kaufman

Miller and Rubio Go Full Mein Kampf in “Ministerial”

The news media has been busy over the last few days debunking the lies that Donald Trump told in his speech to the nation on Thursday…

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10 days ago · 72 likes · 7 comments · Carrie Kaufman

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-approves-landmark-nuclear-deal-with-saudi-arabia-in-big-win-for-kingdom-2ed77584?mod=hp_lead_pos2

https://www.energy.gov/articles/department-energy-announces-american-nuclear-supply-chain-loans

https://americanoversight.org/investigating-the-trump-administrations-efforts-to-sell-nuclear-technology-to-saudi-arabia/

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/how-two-cutting-edge-us-nuclear-projects-bankrupted-westinghouse-idUSKBN17Y0C7/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/16/political-violence-event-trump-marco-rubio

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/19/white-house-saudi-arabia-nuclear-technology-house-oversight-inquiry-report

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/us/politics/trump-intel-steel-minerals-china.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/us/politics/wall-street-access-pentagon.html

X:

RepMcGovern/status/2079619983114383421

Bluesky:

leftcoastreads.bsky.social/post/3mr6vptkpls2c

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